Starfist: A World of Hurt (27 page)

But he couldn't see anything other than vegetation.

Then he let out a silent sigh; he knew what was wrong. There was no buzzing of flying insectoids flitting or bumbling about, looking for skin to light on, flesh to pierce, blood to suck. He didn't recall hearing anything unusual about local insectoids in any of the briefings 34th FIST had on board the
Grandar Bay
or seeing anything about them in the reports he'd read.

So where were the flying, buzzing, salt-licking, blood suckers? Their absence only added to the eeriness of the forest.

"Third platoon, move out," Bass said on the all-hands circuit. "Maintain interval, maintain contact. Don't get too close to the Marines to your sides, don't get ahead of them or fall behind. And
don't lose contact
with them!"

Three meters apart in the predawn dark of the forest. Most of the Marines had been in places where even with their vision-enhancing shields they couldn't see that far in a forest at night. Some of them had been in places where they couldn't see that far during the
day.
But the forest around them was thin enough to allow vision farther than three meters. When Claypoole looked left with his infra, he saw MacIlargie and the gunners beyond him. When he looked to his right, he didn't see
anybody
beyond Schultz--Schultz was on the extreme right of the company's line.

Claypoole shuddered. There was only one Marine between him and whoever or whatever might be on his right flank. But if he could have only one Marine there, Schultz was the one he wanted--the big man seemed to have a supernatural sense for where danger lurked.

And he reminded himself to look to his rear too. He remembered too well what happened to Mike Company in the Swamp of Perdition during 34th FIST's first operation on Kingdom.

Mike Company's second platoon, bringing up the company rear, didn't pay enough attention to its own rear. When the Skinks rose from the water behind the platoon and opened fire with acid guns, most of second platoon's Marines were killed or wounded.

Claypoole walked backward a few paces, watching his rear as he maintained his advance with the company line.

"Watch your six," he said on the fire team circuit when he faced front again.

"Roger," MacIlargie responded; he sounded as if he didn't need the reminder.

Schultz made a small noise that might have been a soft grunt, the kind of response he made when someone else might say, "What, do you think, I'm too stupid to do something that basic?" Yeah, Schultz didn't need to be told to watch his rear. He was probably spending more time looking to his right and his rear than to his front.

Something moved under Claypoole's foot and he hopped away from it, leveling his blaster toward whatever it was.

All he saw was a vine, twisting as it slowly rebounded from being trod on.

Twisting? The vine was slowly
writhing.
The longer he looked at it, the more it looked like a sluggish snake.

He backed away from the freakish vine, then looked for Schultz and MacIlargie and quickly made up the couple of meters he needed to put himself back in his place between them.

"What was that about?" MacIlargie softly asked over the fire team circuit.

"Weird-ass vine, that's what."

"How weird?"

"It moved after I stepped on it."

"I saw one," Schultz said. Schultz never wasted words but he sometimes didn't use enough to make what he had to say perfectly clear. But Claypoole was used to him and knew that he meant he'd seen a vine that moved, not that he'd seen a Skink--if he'd seen a Skink, he would have let his blaster do his talking.

Claypoole shivered. He'd stepped on a vine that moved more than a vine should move, and Schultz had seen a moving vine too. What else did this forest have to surprise them with? If he and Schultz had seen moving vines, other Marines must have seen them as well.

And that was a surprise, because if he was correct, everyone had good enough fire discipline that nobody shot at a vine. He looked toward Schultz again before checking his route, then turned to walk backward a few paces.

Claypoole had been wrong about Schultz spending more time watching his right flank and rear than watching his front--he was watching equally in all directions, including his left.

There was something very wrong in this forest; Schultz felt danger from everywhere. The danger was diffuse, no more concentrated in one direction than in any other. He put a hand over his lower face and raised his screen far enough to get a good sniff of the air; the chameleoned glove on his hand kept the bottom of his face invisible from the front.

He didn't know what the forest was supposed to smell like, so he couldn't tell if any of the scents that reached him were out of place--except for the faint smell that reached him from Claypoole's direction. There was fear in that smell. Schultz nodded internally. It was good that Claypoole was frightened--that meant he'd be extra alert. The scent wasn't strong; Claypoole wasn't so afraid that he'd do something stupid. Schultz couldn't have told how he knew how much fear-scent meant "too frightened"; he just did.

There, off to his right rear, another of those vines moved when it wasn't stepped on. It didn't move much, nothing that seemed deliberate, more like it had been twisted and was unwinding. But even that was strange. What would have wound it in the first place?

Schultz looked up and saw sunlight in the treetops, even though it was still night on the ground. The line was moving east; the light would reach the Marines shortly. Direct rays from the sun would probably even reach all the way to the ground in some of those strange open spots in the forest.

Schultz used his infra for a moment of looking around. A faint haze showed on the ground; decaying vegetation, he decided. Still, his skin crawled with the feeling of danger.

Where are you?
He tried to project his thoughts at the unseen foe.
Give me a hint, so I
can kill you.

The company command group was between and a little behind first and third platoons. It consisted of Captain Conorado, the company's executive officer; Lieutenant Humphrey; Gunny Thatcher; Lieutenant Rokmonov of the assault platoon; Staff Sergeant DaCruz and his assault section; two communications men; and the four medical corpsmen assigned to the company. Second platoon trailed them with the other assault section attached to it.

Conorado was concerned. The forest was far too quiet. It was dawn, sunlight rapidly climbing its way down the trees. The forest should be alive with the screeches of avians.

Every forest he'd ever been in had raucously greeted the dawn--unless there was a good reason for silence. His Marines were moving stealthily enough that they shouldn't be disturbing the treetop dwellers. But there weren't any fliers singing welcoming hosannas to the local Apollo. He'd have to wait until dawn reached the ground to see for himself, but he didn't imagine he'd see any animal tracks where the recon team that came into this valley had not.

And he remembered what Sergeant Steffan had said about no flashes of flaring Skinks when his team had to fight its way out. And what Steffan had said about maybe acid guns being more common in the galaxy than the Marines had imagined.

He looked at his Universal Positionator Up-Downlink. The string-of-pearls had a good fix on his company; the UPUD's real-time download showed first and third platoons moving in good order. He shrank the scale to show a larger area of the forest. The hundred and more dots that represented his Marines shrank and consolidated into a smaller area toward the left of the screen. No matter how he adjusted the UPUD's contrast and brightness, it didn't show any dots or even smudges that would indicate a warm-blooded animal or anything large and exothermic.

Maybe the Skinks--or whoever it was that attacked the recon team--had left the valley. But if they did, why hadn't the string-of-pearls spotted them leaving? Had they gone to ground in tunnels? The string-of-pearls maps weren't good enough yet to show underground spaces in the heavily wooded valleys. Damn, tunnels. The Skinks had made good use of tunnels and natural caves on Kingdom. And the Skinks that third platoon had encountered on Society 437 also had a tunnel system. He hoped they weren't underground again; the Marines had had some hairy fights in the tunnels and caves.

But if they were above ground, where were they?

He was changing the scale on his UPUD again to check on Mike Company's progress from the south when the
crack-sizzle
of distant blaster fire came to him.

Before he could give an order to his battalion-net comm man to relay Mike Company's reports to him, he heard a sharp yell from someone to his rear, the direction of second platoon, and the
crack-sizzle
of a blaster from the same place. Then all of second platoon opened fire.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

"Everybody
down!
" Captain Conorado snapped into the all-hands circuit, then switched to the command circuit. Everyone in the company except second platoon, which was already down and fighting, went to ground and took defensive positions, ready to open fire. He looked back and saw the dawn dimness of the forest to his rear brilliant with the strobing of blaster fire in time with the repeated
crack-sizzle.

"Two, Six. Report. Second platoon, this is the company commander. What's happening?"

"Six, Two. The Skinks are behind us!" came Ensign Molina's excited reply. "We're holding them."

"Two, how many are there?"

"Six, I can't tell. At least a squad, maybe a platoon. They're close, well inside their range."

The Skink acid guns had a range of about fifty meters. How could the Skinks have come up from behind to closer than fifty meters without any of the company's UPUDs picking up their motion?

"Casualty report."

"No casualties, Skipper, our chameleons are working."

Conorado spared neither time nor energy for a sigh of relief that the impregnated chameleons were proof against the acid. "Enemy casualties?" he asked.

"We don't seem to have hit any." Molina sounded surprised. "No flares, anyway."

Conorado remembered the recon briefing; Recon hadn't seen any flares either. He looked at his UPUD's screen. Every Marine in second platoon showed up, but there were no dots indicating the locations of the enemy shooting at them.

"I see you on my UPUD. Where are they relative?"

There was a brief pause before Molina said, "They don't show on my UPUD!" There was another brief pause, then he added, "I see the acid streamers. Some seem to be coming from within ten meters. The farthest are forty meters away. Scattered formation," he added unnecessarily.

"How wide is their front?" Conorado wanted to send a squad on a flanking maneuver to catch the Skinks in a cross fire, but needed to know where their flanks were.

"Wait one." Molina was back quickly after checking with his squad leaders. "Their flanks seem to be fifteen to twenty meters beyond ours."

"Volley fire, clear them out. I'll have first platoon send a squad to hit them on your right flank."

"Aye aye, Six." The
crack-sizzle
of blaster fire from second platoon's position changed from a din to measured, loud reports as the Marines shifted from firing independently at targets of opportunity to firing simultaneously in disciplined volleys that struck on line.

"One, did you hear that?"

"Roger, Skipper," replied Ensign Antoni. "My first squad is ready to move."

"Send a gun team with them. Volley fire. Go."

"One squad with gun team. Aye aye, Six."

But before first platoon's first squad had time to get to its feet to move onto the attacking enemy's flank, the
crack-sizzle
of blaster fire broke out all around the company and first and third platoons reported in:

"Fire coming from our rear!" they both said.

Then Molina reported Skink fire coming from his flanks.

"Up and at 'em!" Corporal Joe Dean relayed Sergeant Ratliff's orders to his fire team to begin the flanking maneuver. He was halfway to his feet, turning around to face the rear, when a streamer of greenish fluid shot out of the forest to his rear and slapped him in the leg hard enough to sting. Without thinking, he continued his turn, making it a downward spin, pointed his blaster in the direction the acid streamer had come from and pressed the firing lever before he hit the ground.

"Down!" he shouted over his fire team circuit as his back thudded onto the ground.

"Down!" he croaked again, not sure if his first command had gotten out before his landing jarred the air from his lungs.

The
crack-sizzles
to his sides told him his men, Lance Corporal Godenov, and PFC

Quick were down and firing to the rear.

It was still dark at ground level, but the viscous arcs of acid were visible as snaky shadows moving through the night. Dean snapped his aim to where one came from and fired a bolt, then swore when there wasn't an answering flare. He fired several more bolts at the same place, moving them about to cover the entire area, before deciding the Skink must have moved as soon as it fired. He saw another shadow-arc and fired four or five bolts at its source, again without the reward of a flaring Skink.

Vaguely, he was aware of fire coming from all of Company L's platoons, but the only fire he was immediately interested in was his own fire team's. "They're shooting and maneuvering," he said into his fire team circuit. "Watch my spot, then saturate the area where I hit."

Without waiting for a response, he shot another plasma bolt at the source of another acid shot, and fired again and again. Godenov and Quick followed his example, and an area nearly five meters in radius was strobed with little bits of star-stuff.

No flaring Skink answered the deluge of plasma, but neither did more acid fly from that area. A small fire started from the concentration of plasma bolts.

Corporal Rachman Claypoole of third platoon's second squad also had his men firing on his spotting shots, with the same maddening lack of flaring Skinks.