First to Fight (2 page)

Chway ordered the two assault teams into action. In seconds their oversized weapons were throwing out bolts that could melt a meter of ferrocrete. The three flankers added lighter, disciplined fire.

Procescu ordered the assault team with him to blast the far end of the slope. He ordered Kruzhilov to add his gun’s fire to that of the assaultmen. The gun on the left slope began spewing out bolts so close to each other they seemed almost a steady stream. Its aiming focus twisted side to side on the slope as it burned through the far end of the ambush.

The bandits weren’t sitting passively while the Marines poured fire into the two ends of their ambush. A hundred of them concentrated their fire on Chway, his assault guns, and the three flankers with them, and two platoons returned fire at Kruzhilov’s gun and fighters on the left flank. The rest of the bandits kept the Marines in the open pinned down and out of the fight. Only the command group was, for the moment, unscathed. The bandits couldn’t see those Marines because of their chameleons, and they didn’t have infra goggles to spot their heat signatures. But they could see the glowing muzzles of the overheated weapons and began to concentrate their fire on them. A scream on the right flank was cut short when several weapons converged on one Marine. Another didn’t have time to scream before seven weapons overwhelmed his shield and turned him into carbon vapor.

Through Bass’s goggles, the first fifty meters or more of the right slope was a solid sheet of red from the fire Chway’s Marines had put onto it before moving onward. Nobody could be alive in that area. But bandits were strung out over another three hundred meters before the slag that was being created at the far end of the ambush by the fire from the Marines’ left flank. From the slackened fire to the left, Bass could tell that Kruzhilov’s section had also taken casualties.

“Bass, to me!” Procescu’s voice said in his helmet. Bass scuttled to the Bravo commander. “There’s too damn many of them,” the lieutenant said when Bass reached him. “We need help, and we need it now. Take LeFarge back and find a high place you can climb to. See if you can raise anybody.” He looked into the intended kill zone of the ambush. “If I can get those men under cover back here, that’ll help.”

“Good idea,” Bass responded. “Try to move them one at a time.” He turned to LeFarge. “Let’s go.”

The volume of outgoing fire from the Marines’ right flank slackened abruptly as one of the assault gunners was crisped and his weapon stopped firing.

Bass remembered a place 150 meters back down the gorge where a rock wall had left a slope of scree less steep than the gorge sides. If it wasn’t too loose, he and LeFarge might be able to climb high enough to contact the rest of the company via line-of-sight transmission.

The rock wasn’t too loose to climb, but it stopped at a cliff face they couldn’t scale. Fifty meters to their left, however, the cliff ended in a cut or a gentler slope—Bass couldn’t tell from where they were. “Think you can make it across there?”

“No problem, Gunny.” LeFarge put his words into action and led the way across the steep slope.

The shallow roots of the bushes were spread wide enough to hold the weight of the two men as they stepped on their stems and grabbed hold of the branches. It took only a few minutes for them to negotiate the slope. They found a gentle rise to a notch in the ridge side another hundred meters up and clambered into it, breathing heavily from the exertion.

“See if you can raise anybody,” Bass said. When he left the platoon, he had turned off the all-hands channel so he could concentrate on finding a way up the ridge. Now he flipped it back on while LeFarge set up the UPUD and started talking into it. But the steep-sided valley wound from side to side, and they had taken a couple of turns following it—there was too much rock between him and the platoon for clear communications. Bass heard enough to know that two or three more Marines were down and that only a few of the men in the open had managed to get back and join the fight. Most of the others, including the gun team, were still pinned in the open, unable to engage the bandits. He cursed silently as he fought his rising anger and frustration.

“I’ve got Battalion!” LeFarge exclaimed.

Bass shook his head. Battalion headquarters was more than a hundred kilometers away. How could they raise them but not get the company command unit, which was just a ridge or two away? “Let me talk to them.”

LeFarge said something into the UPUD and handed it to him.

“Red Roof, this is Purple Rover Bravo Five,” Bass said into the UPUD, giving the battalion call sign and identifying himself as the senior enlisted man of a group split off from Company I. “We are at,” he rattled off their map coordinates, “in contact with more than two-zero-zero bandits. Bandits are wearing chameleons and have blasters. We are taking heavy casualties. We need air support. Over.”

“Purple Rover Bravo Five, that is not where your UPUD says you are.”

“Red Roof, UPUD malfunctioning. Visual confirms our location. Over.”

“Ay, Pancho, you think you’re smart, don’t you?” the battalion communications man said, and laughed. “You’re not going to lure us into a trap that easily.”

Bass’s jaws clenched. The battalion comm man thought he was a bandit who’d managed to break into the net and was trying to get a mission launched to lead some of the FIST’s aircraft into an antiaircraft missile ambush. “Negative on that shit, Red Roof!” Bass shouted.

There was a slight pause and the battalion communications man said, “Hey, Pancho, use proper radio procedure.”

Bass drew in his breath sharply and cut off a withering response. “Red Roof, this is Purple Rover Bravo Five. I say again, this is Purple Rover Bravo Five. Purple Rover Bravo is at coordinates given and needs help now. Please provide. Over.”

“I’ll pass it up, Pancho. Red Roof out.”

“Use the voice identifier, Red Roof. That’ll confirm my ID,” Bass said, but there was no response. The battalion comm man wasn’t listening anymore.

LeFarge swallowed. If they didn’t get help soon, the Bravo unit could be wiped out. “It’s routine to use the voice-recognition identifier on all suspect calls,” Bass said in a reassuring voice. “Let’s go back and hold on until the air gets here.” But he didn’t feel as confident as he sounded.

“We’ll hold out, that’s all,” Procescu said when Bass reported his contact with battalion. “We’re hitting them harder than they’re hitting us. Pancho’ll probably cut and run before air can get here anyway.”

Bass flipped down his goggles and scanned the slope. Working from the ends toward the middle, the Marines had slagged nearly half of it. But bandits in the unslagged rock had re-formed onto a line facing the Marines, and the line’s lower end was on the bottom of the gorge, not higher on the slope where the Marines were concentrating their fire. He also saw that the far end of the ambush hadn’t been thoroughly slagged; many targets were still fighting back. He wasn’t as sure as Procescu that the bandits would run. There were probably more than 150 of them still in the fight, maybe closer to two hundred.

Bass raised his goggles to study the terrain and the eerie modem infantry battle with his naked eyes. Around him, effectively invisible men howled insults and tiny bits of star-stuff at each other, and he heard the snap of superconducting capacitors discharging, the louder cracks of ancient rock being split at sun-heat, the hiss of solid stone turning briefly liquid from the plasma bolts. But most of his mind was occupied with the tactical aspects of what he was looking at.

If the bandits extended their line across the gorge, they would be in position to assault the Marines; the Marines would have too many individual targets and they could be overwhelmed by sheer numbers. While Bass examined the ground the bandits would have to cross if they did assault, he saw gray flicker against the darker rock in the distance, moving to the left—the bandits
were
getting on line for an assault! He scuttled over to Procescu.

“Do you see what they’re doing?”

The lieutenant nodded. ‘They’re brave men, if they’re going to stand up and charge,” he said. “Or maybe they don’t realize we can see them,” Procescu added.

The bandits’ fire changed its focus suddenly. Instead of shooting into the trees, or keeping the Marines still in the open pinned down, they started firing randomly at the rocks between themselves and the Marines. “They know.” Bass swore. “They’re sparking so many heat signatures that even with our goggles we won’t be able to tell what’s hot rock and what’s them.” Not only did these guys know what they were up against, Bass thought, they must have a pretty good communications net of their own, to coordinate their fire and maneuver so quickly.

“An assault force usually has to outnumber the defenders by three to one to succeed,” Bass said. “They’ve got us outnumbered five or six to one.”

“We’ve got assaulters and machine guns. They don’t.” Procescu’s voice was neither as steady nor as confident as he wanted it to be.

“Fix bayonets, Lieutenant?” Bass gave the officer a skull-like grin. Procescu stared at the company gunny. “Numbers can count for a lot,” Bass added.

“We’re Marines. That counts for a lot too.”

Bass grunted. On the side of his right thigh, he patted the pocket where he kept a four-hundred-year-old Marine K-Bar as a talisman. The ancient knife couldn’t help now, but it somehow reassured him.

Six of the Marines in the open had made it back into the trees by the time Bass and LeFarge rejoined the unit. Two more had died trying. One of the six brought the gun with him and added its fire to that being put out by the others. But the Marines’ fire was no heavier than it had been—five of the Marines in the trees were down, and one of the assault weapons was being fired by someone who wasn’t very familiar with it. The last three crawled back into the trees while Bass and Procescu discussed the bandits’ next move. Procescu sent one of them to each flanking position and kept the third in the middle.

Procescu looked at his handgun, shrugged. “I think we should all have blasters,” he murmured.

Bass looked around. Up on the left flank three Marines had been killed. Their weapons looked usable. “Be right back,” he said, and scrambled away. He was back in a moment and handed weapons to Procescu and LeFarge. Quickly, he checked his own. Out in the open he saw a swath of flesh color over a barely seen flicker and aimed at a spot just below it. He squeezed the trigger. The swath of flesh dropped out of sight. One less bandit to worry about.

Whistles shrilled suddenly through the cacophony of battle. A barely visible ripple of movement crept across the gorge. The assault began. In the middle and on the left flank the bandits had closed to little more than fifty meters before rising up to run at the trees. On the right flank the continued slagging of the rock face kept the bandits over a hundred meters away. However far they had to go, they screamed and fired as they charged.

Along their pitifully thin line, Marine officers and NCOs calmly ordered their men to pick their targets carefully, look for flesh and weapons, make every shot count, to kill, and kill, and kill before the bandits could reach them. But there were too many targets, and the Marines couldn’t see all of them.

“Lieutenant! I’ve got Air,” LeFarge shouted as he put down his weapon and spoke into the UPUD. “Call sign Flamer.” He handed the unit to Procescu.

“Flamer, this is Purple Rover Bravo Actual,” Procescu said into the UPUD. “What kept you?”

“Wrong address, Purple Rover,” said the pilot of the lead A5G Raptor circling high above. “Looks like there’s a lot of you down there. Who am I supposed to incinerate?”

“Do you see the open area, Flamer?”

“Affirmative.”

“That’s where Pancho is. Do him before he mingles with my positions in the trees.”

“Too late for that, Purple Rover. Either you’ve got him so badly outnumbered you don’t need us, or he’s already in your position.”

The bandits were indeed among them. The thud of a running foot hit the ground near where Bass lay. He looked up into a wild-eyed face above an out-of-focus area of green and brown. A blaster in the unclear area was pointing at him. He rolled toward the bandit as the heat of a plasma bolt passed over him. He rolled into the bandit’s legs, knocking him over, then groped with one hand for the enemy soldier while his other reached for his combat knife. The two struggled briefly—the bandit tried to bring his weapon to bear, but Bass’s knife proved to be better for infighting, and red spread freely over the bandit’s chameleons. Bass rolled away to retrieve his blaster as the dead man’s entire uniform turned red, as it mimicked the color of his blood.

“How close to the trees can you flame without scorching us?” Procescu said into the UPUD. Bass realized the lieutenant hadn’t been aware of the hand-to-hand fight he’d just concluded only a few meters away. “That’s too far away to do any good,” Procescu said after a pause. “Bring it in closer.” He listened, then said, “The only people standing are Panchos. With any luck the heat’ll pass over us and hit them. Do it now.”

A squad of bandits was directly in front of them. Bass gritted his teeth as he fired at the enemy.

“Bring it in closer!” Procescu shouted into the UPUD. Bass knew what that meant—they were going to be crisped by their own fire. Either way, from bandit fire or from their own Raptors, they were dead. At least it’d be fast, and they’d take most of the bandits with them.

Suddenly the screams of diving turbojets smothered all other sounds and briefly stunned the combatants. Bass flicked on the all-hands channel. “Everybody
down, now
!” he ordered.