Starfist: Wings of Hell (28 page)

“Weave!” Doremus shouted into his radio as he began a wide turn to his right. Baumler began swinging wide to his left; the Skink took an instant to decide which to follow and went after Baumler. Doremus quickly switched his right turn into the arc of a circle to his left and Baumler did the same to his right. In seconds they passed each other, each having drawn half a circle. They immediately turned in the opposite direction, describing the opposite sides of another circle. But Doremus throttled back slightly so that Baumler and the Skink on his tail would both pass in front of him. Doremus got a lock on the Skink and fired a burst from his plasma cannon. The Skink ran right into it and exploded. Doremus flipped his Raptor’s nose up and bounced to get over the flame and debris from the disintegrating enemy aircraft.

Baumler quickly followed, shouting, “You got him, you got him!”

A few kilometers away, Sandell and Haynes executed the same maneuver, with Haynes getting the kill.

But there were still four Skinks, and the Skinks were now behind the Marines, maneuvering to line up their guns on them.

This time the Marines executed Cobra turns, whipping up and twisting around to dive on their opponents. They all fired, hoping the Skinks would fly through the streams of plasma their cannons spat out. Baumler got a kill but the others missed.

Then it was a scramble, with the seven aircraft all flying solo, trying as hard to avoid colliding with one another as they were to line up on targets.

Walleye Four was so intent on closing on a Skink’s tail, ready to hit him with a stream of plasma, that he didn’t see that another Skink, intently twisting to get a line on one of the other Raptors, was closing on him at a combined speed of close to Mach 2. Both pilots were so intent on the kills they thought they were about to score that neither noticed the other. Both were shocked when their wings clipped each other and their aircraft were thrown into uncontrollable spins.

Suddenly it was over, with another Skink shot down and the lone survivor fleeing at top speed. Doremus took a last shot at him but the Skink jinked and the burst missed. Then three Marine Raptors turned back to where the main battle was ending.

Even though the Essays had continued to fall planetward after releasing the Raptors they carried, past the altitude at which the Skink aircraft waited to ambush them, and before they managed to stop their drops and began to return to orbit, none of them were lost. The Skinks had been too busy fighting the Raptors to molest their intended victims.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

The Grand Master sat on his low chair on his dais, glowering at the three in front of him. The four Large Ones flanking him also looked sternly at the trio. One of the three was the High Master commanding the air forces; he knelt, sitting on his heels. A long, sharp knife lay on the matting before his knees. To one side of him was the Over Master who had commanded the force that struck the Earthman air base. He was also kneeling, but his forehead was lowered to the matting before him. To the High Master’s other side was the Over Master commanding the high air force charged with downing the Earthmen’s orbit-to-surface shuttles when they made their next planetfall. He was likewise semi-prostrate. A Large One, sword drawn and held across his body, stood behind the High Master.

The Grand Master did not have a cup of steaming beverage at his side; the low table there was unadorned even by a single, perfect bloom. That lack of beverage and beauty clearly demonstrated his displeasure with the three officers before him.

The three commanders had already delivered their reports to the Grand Master, and now he demanded answers to questions.

First he demanded to know how
one
Earthman with
one
piece of heavy equipment could raise berms that protected Earthmen from the rail guns of the second wave, and then raise more berms that protected buildings from the rail guns of the third wave.

The High Master lowered himself to touch his forehead to the matting, then raised himself to support his upper body on his outstretched arms. He had no answer for the Grand Master.

Then the Grand Master demanded to know how
one—one
!—Earthman killer craft could be responsible for the deaths of fourteen killer craft of the People before being killed himself.

The High Master pounded his forehead three times on the matting before again raising himself halfway up. Once more he had no answer.

In a rasping bark, the Grand Master demanded answers to the same kinds of questions from the Over Master commanding the strike force. That Over Master raised his head far enough that the matting wouldn’t muffle his voice. He had no more of an answer than had the High Master.

Then the Grand Master demanded to know how it was that the high force had not suspected that the Earthmen might be sending a responding strike force of killer craft to attack the high force when it was obvious from the way their shuttles plunged planetward that they were doing something unexpected.

This time, when the High Master raised his head from pounding it on the matting, it was marked with blood from the force of his pounding. He had no more answers than before.

Even surprised and outnumbered, the Grand Master demanded to know, how could the excellent pilots of the Emperor, in their nimble killer craft and with their superior weapons, have lost more than half their number while killing fewer than half that number of Earthmen?

The High Master pounded his forehead on the matting until most of his face was streaked by the blood that flowed from his brow. But he still had no answer for the Grand Master.

Neither did the Over Master in command of the high force when the Grand Master raspingly barked the same questions at him.

The Grand Master glowered silently at the three for long moments before finally giving a harsh command.

The High Master swallowed, then sat full up on his heels and picked up the long, sharp knife before his knees. He loosened his robes, baring his stomach. With a quick, sure stroke, he sliced his belly open so that his entrails tumbled out. The Large One behind him shifted his grip on his sword and gave it a powerful swing at the High Master’s neck. The High Master’s head flew off and bounced at the foot of the Grand Master’s dais. The Large One then beheaded the two Over Masters without according them the honor of first disemboweling themselves.

The Grand Master snapped his fingers, and his chief of staff glided from where he’d been hidden behind one of the draperies covering the walls of the hall. Using few words, the Grand Master instructed his chief of staff on appointments to fill the now-vacant leadership positions in the air force. He used even fewer words to direct that the mess before him be cleaned up.

He began to plan his next move.

It takes time for 308 aircraft to land on two airfields—Beach Spaceport’s airfield was commandeered to assist in accepting the Confederation Raptors—especially when both runways still had damage suffered in the Skink air assaults. So much time, in fact, that the Essays on the gator starships carrying Thirteenth and Twenty-sixth FISTs, which hadn’t launched until the air battle had been decided, made planetfall before all the Raptors were down. The Essays off the carriers didn’t return home but went to the gator starships carrying the army divisions of XXX Corps to help ferry them planetside. The first of them were loaded and launched by the time the last Raptor from the Ninth Air Wing landed at NAS Gay.

With the Earthman navy and its circle of sky-eyes in orbit, the Grand Master knew that moving large numbers of his Fighters by aircraft was too great a risk. But his sky-gazers had plotted the positions of the satellites in the circle of sky-eyes, along with their likely fields of view. Those likely fields of view included, not unexpectedly, all of the bases in which the Emperor’s army lay waiting for battle. But the Grand Master knew something the Earthmen didn’t know: The Emperor’s army had made good use of the lengthy time they had been on this world and had excavated extensive tunnels that extended far beyond the bases. All the way to within a few kilometers of the Earthman center at Sky City—and the Earthman air base and the bivouac area growing near the city and airfields.

With that in mind, the Grand Master dispatched two divisions into the long tunnels to attack the Earthman bivouac while it was still in the chaos of getting organized. Then he sat back and folded his hands over his belly to wait for reports from what was about to become the front lines.

“Move it! Move, move, movemove,
move
!” the sergeants shouted in the age-old cry of sergeants attempting to bring order to the chaos of large numbers of men attempting to get in formation, board vehicles, prepare camp, or advance to fire.

“You got lead in your pants, soldier? I said
move
it!”

“Your prom date ain’t waiting up for you, sonny. You don’t move any faster than that, Jodie’s gonna get in her pants!”

“Your feeble old grannie can erect a mod faster than that, soldier! Move like you mean it!”

There was no scientific proof that yelling ever inspired soldiers to make camp any quicker or more efficiently. But it did keep them from thinking about what came next, or wherever else they’d prefer being, or whatever else they’d rather be doing. And using their voices gave the sergeants the feeling that they were actually doing something. Whether the yelling had a positive effect or not, the soldiers of the Second of the 502nd, Twenty-fifth Mobile Infantry Division had their bivouac, some eight kilometers northwest of Sky City and NAS Gay, up with all the mods properly aligned and streets laid out in less than three-quarters of an hour. The battalion commander was happy, which made the company commanders and platoon commanders happy, and gave the sergeants that warm and fuzzy feeling; their yelling had actually accomplished something. As for the troops, they were just glad that nobody was yelling at them for the moment and they could pause for a breather.

Then an order came down that set the troops to grumbling: “Weapons and ammo inspection in twenty minutes.”

Nineteen minutes after the inspection order was passed, Sergeant First Class Rov Jaworski stood in front of his platoon, which had assembled in formation in front of its row of two-man modules, and gave them a quick eyeballing. He knew what the inspection would find; maybe not everybody’s weapon was sparkly enough to pass a garrison-world inspection, but every weapon was clean and functional, and every needle tin filled and in its carrying harness pouch.

“Stand easy until the officers get here,” he told his men. It was an admittedly feeble joke for the platoon sergeant of first platoon, Easy Company, but he always said it. It got the expected polite chuckles and mild groans.

Jaworski was a bit less confident about the blasters a quarter of his men carried. Major General Vermeil, the Twenty-fifth’s division commander, was mightily impressed with the supposed one-shot-one-kill capability of the Marines’ primary infantry weapon. Jaworski knew the Marines were crack troops but he’d been around long enough to know better than to believe everything they said about their combat prowess. Regardless of what a mere platoon sergeant thought might be the case, Vermeil had prevailed upon General Aguinaldo to issue him enough blasters for one man in every fire team to have one, and for every third machine gun to be replaced by a Marine assault gun, the automatic-fire plasma gun.

There was a sound of gunfire off to the left, in the direction of Howe Company, and Jaworski, fists jammed into his hips, turned to look toward it.

“What is it, Sarge?” somebody called out.

“Who’s shooting, Sarge?” another asked.

“How the hell do I know?” Jaworski snapped. They were in a combat zone, and nobody had told him about any scheduled familiarity firing. As far as he was concerned, that only meant one thing.

“Lock and load!” he commanded, drawing his own sidearm to make sure it was loaded and its safety on. “Look alert while I try to find out what’s happening.” He got out his comm and tried to raise Lieutenant Murray, the platoon commander. Murray didn’t respond, so Jaworski tried the company HQ, where he got a clerk. Dumbass clerk didn’t know what was going on, only that the first sergeant and all the officers had gone to the battalion HQ as soon as the shooting started.

“So what the hell am I supposed to do?” Jaworski asked himself after signing off.

He figured it out in a hurry.

“Shit, Sarge!” a man in the platoon’s front rank shouted, looking beyond Jaworski. The soldier raised his blaster to his shoulder and fired a plasma bolt that passed so close to Jaworski that the platoon sergeant clearly felt the heat from the passing star stuff.