Starfist: A World of Hurt (39 page)

He waited, and watched the deceleration process. When the
Grandar Bay's
relative speed was low enough he ordered, "Thrusters off in two minutes. Sound the alert."

The assistant officer of the deck reached out a heavy hand and touched his console.

Immediately, a whistle sounded throughout the starship, and the female voice intoned, "Now hear this. Now hear this. Main thrusting will terminate in two minutes, followed by null-g." The voice repeated the alert at thirty second intervals until ten seconds remained to the cutting off of the thrusters, then gave a countdown.

Abruptly, the shuddering of the starship ceased and the background of engine roar vanished. Acceleration couches throughout the
Grandar Bay
swiveled back.

"Gravity on," Boreland ordered.

The AOD carefully reached for his console. The whistle sounded again; the voice ordered all hands to secure themselves for the return of ship's gravity. Seconds later normal weight returned to everyone and everything.

"Damage report," Boreland said. The bridge officers and crew were already talking into their comms, getting reports from around the ship.

"Sir, no damage or injuries reported," the OOD said when the last report came in.

Boreland then spoke more formally into his own comm: "Commander, Landing Force, this is the commander, Amphibious Task Force." Some task force, he thought--just one amphibious starship. When Brigadier Sturgeon answered his call just as formally, he continued, "Ready the landing force, Code Gamma. Launch will commence in sixty-one minutes." Code Gamma; the
Grandar Bay
would not come to rest relative to the planet, but would keep moving throughout the launch--which would make the launch more difficult than usual. Command of the launch would remain with the CATF and not pass to the CLF, as it would under a normal launch. Boreland put his comm aside when Sturgeon acknowledged the order. And they still didn't know what the situation was planetside.

"Notify weapons," he ordered the OOD. "Ready all defensive shields and missile countermeasures. Ready lasers to take out the Omaha's weapons and engines."

"Ready defensive shields and missile countermeasures. Ready lasers to take out weapons and engines, aye," the OOD repeated, then gave the order into his comm to the weapons division.

The
Grandar Bay
continued her plunge toward Maugham's Station. The Omaha-class light cruiser continued on her course, to a position where her weapons would have their best chance of damaging the
Grandar Bay.

Five minutes after Commodore Boreland gave the order to ready the landing force, the Marines of 34th FIST lined up in passageways outside their berthing compartments. There, the squad leaders and then the platoon sergeants inspected them to make sure each man bore his full combat load, had on his body armor, and that everything was attached securely.

The men shifted about, uncomfortable with the unaccustomed weight of the body armor.

Elsewhere, the officers of the infantry battalion and artillery battery were given a final briefing by a staff that had little idea of what they were heading into. The pilots, crew chiefs, and controllers of the composite squadron's Raptor and hopper sections were in ready rooms, receiving final mission orders from staff officers who had no more idea about the situation planetside than the ground combat element staff. With so little information to impart, the briefings were short and the officers and air crews were quickly dismissed to head for their assigned positions.

"Attention on deck!" Staff Sergeant Hyakowa ordered when Ensign Charlie Bass entered the passageway.

Bass, like his men, was dressed in body armor covered with reinforced chameleon fabric.

Like them, he carried his helmet in his hand, so his head was fully visible. Had he not been so accustomed to it, the sight that presented itself would have unnerved him--twenty-nine disembodied heads floating in midair. Ungloved hands fluttered about between the heads and the deck. But Bass was a salty old Marine, and bodiless heads and hands were exactly the sight he expected to see.

"At ease!" he snapped. He gave his men a couple of seconds to relax from attention, and quickly swept his gaze about to see everybody looking intently at him. "Here's the situation.

Nobody knows
what
the situation is planetside. We're going in blind. So we had best be ready for anything. Even then, 'anything' is liable to jump up and bite us on the ass. But if we don't let things turn into a cluster fuck down there, we'll make it through all right.

"One more thing." He smiled grimly. "We aren't going to cross the beach on Dragons, we're going in on hoppers. We'll swing in around the fighting and set up as a blocking force.

I know few of you have crossed the beach in hoppers recently, but we're Marines, we do what we're told, and we do it right the first time.

"Questions?"

"Yessir," Corporal Dean asked. "Who are we fighting?"

The lights dimmed before Bass had a chance to answer. Their lumination rose and fell for several seconds before returning to normal.

"If anybody doesn't know," Bass said to the platoon when the lights returned to normal,

"that was the
Grandar Bay's
defensive shields blocking energy weapons being fired at us."

He paused for a few seconds to let that sink in, then went on, "To answer your question, Corporal Dean, offhand I'd say we're going to be fighting the ground forces of whoever it was that just took a shot at our ship. Seeing as how we don't know who they are to begin with, we'll just take on whoever wants to fight us when we get planetside." He looked about once more, then said, "Squad leaders, with me," and turned to lead Hyakowa and the squad leaders to where he could brief them.

"I've never crossed the beach on a hopper," Corporal Claypoole muttered nervously when Bass and the senior NCOs had gone.

Corporal Chan heard him. "I have," he said. "It's just like on a Dragon, except we exit the Essays at a thousand meters instead of on the deck."

"It's that thousand meters that bothers me," Claypoole muttered.

Corporal Kerr, third platoon's most experienced fire team leader, overheard the exchange. He was one of the few members of the platoon who had crossed the beach in a hopper, and he knew from their looks that most of the Marines were nervous about the prospect of riding into combat in a way they'd never rehearsed. Since nervousness could develop into fear, he decided to deal with it immediately.

"We've all made combat assaults on hoppers," he said to Claypoole, loud enough for everyone to hear. "What we're doing here is called an 'envelopment.' That means we don't go in hot, we go to someplace where the enemy will come to us. I've done it before--believe me, it's safer than riding the Dragons across the beach."

Lance Corporal MacIlargie, voicing Claypoole's concern, said, "Don't the hoppers leave the Essays at a thousand meters? Is that
safe?
" He ignored the look Lance Corporal Schultz gave him.

"Sure it is," Kerr answered calmly. "It's been done thousands of times; the navy knows how to drop hoppers without breaking them. And if anything does go wrong, the hopper's got a thousand meters to recover in. I've done it, and I'm still here." His visible hands patted his invisible chest and hips.

"I've done it too," Corporal Pasquin growled. "Not only is it safe, riding in a hopper is more comfortable than in a Dragon pounding across the water."

Quickly, Corporals Dornhofer, Barber, and Taylor spoke up, reassuring the other Marines that they'd made planetfall on hoppers and everything would be copacetic. Most of the Marines began to feel a little better. Of course, had they known what the corporals really thought about launching hoppers from Essays...

It wasn't long before the Marines were headed for the welldeck. They began filing in by company, where the FIST's Dragons, hoppers, and Raptors awaited them, already in Essays. The Marines lined up at the Essays' ramps and awaited the order to board.

When the order to embark came, third platoon and Company L's assault platoon boarded one Essay and filed into the three hoppers that waited inside to receive them.

Corporal Claypoole looked at the webbing cocoons stretched across the interior of the hopper and felt like backing out and finding an Essay with a Dragon that had an open slot for him to slip into. He was accustomed to the web couches Marines rested in during assault landings in Dragons. The cocoons in the hoppers didn't look strong enough to take the violent shaking the Essays experienced during their descent down the rocky road of the atmosphere. Intellectually, he knew hoppers made landings all the time. Emotionally, he had trouble believing hoppers could stay in the air at all, much less be flung out of Essays at altitude and not injure or kill the Marines riding in them.

And the cocoons...Straps attached them to the overhead, straps attached them to the side walls, and more straps anchored them to the deck. Nothing held them from moving fore and aft. They looked like they'd make a very unstable ride. He looked, but didn't see the cupped tubes Dragons carried for Marines to regurgitate into if their stomachs got too queasy to hold their contents down.

"Secure your men, Corporal," Sergeant Linsman said harshly into Claypoole's ear.

Claypoole jumped. "Aye aye, Sergeant."

Lance Corporal Schultz had paused to help Lance Corporal MacIlargie into his cocoon before casually climbing into his own. With their weight in place, upchuck tubes dropped from the overhead and settled on their shoulders. But they were supine, and Claypoole knew that if someone threw up in that position, he could choke to death on his vomitus. He swallowed to keep his own gorge from rising.

He checked the webbing and saw that both of his men were properly strapped in. At least, he thought they were. He'd been oriented on hopper webbing, but had only used the webbing on ground-to-ground hops. Then he climbed into his own cocoon and found the straps easier to lock in place than they appeared. Sergeant Linsman came around to check everybody in his squad.

"See, it's not so hard," he said when he reached Claypoole.

Claypoole didn't respond; he didn't believe the worst was past.

Shortly, the alert came to stand by for null-g. The atmosphere was sucked out of the welldeck, then the great doors slid open, exposing the Essays to space. On signal, the Essays were plunged out of the welldeck. They maneuvered away from their still-moving home to group in formation, then began their straight-down descent to the surface of Maugham's Station. The "rough ride on a rocky road" had begun.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

The ride down through the layers of the atmosphere wasn't as bad as Corporal Claypoole had feared, it was merely as rough as the ride was for the Marines in the Dragons inside other Essays--until the Essays dropped to an altitude of five thousand meters. Then they flared into a wide breaking spiral, slowing their descent as well as their airspeed, and flipped about so their front-facing ramps were pointed to the rear. The Essays' engines fired in short bursts,
tap-tap-tap,
slowing them more, and the small attitude thrusters on their bottoms fired, further slowing their descent. When the Essays passed two thousand meters, they lowered their ramps, their cargo holds filled with the roar of air rushing past, and, sucking the air out of the holds, the hoppers strained against their tie-downs. At fifteen hundred meters the attitude thrusters changed their pattern of fire and the main engines cut off. The Essays tipped nose downward. At a thousand meters the Essays fired their forward attitude thrusters to increase their airspeed, and the tie-downs holding the hoppers in place released their grips.

The hoppers rolled out of the Essays and began to plummet uncontrolled toward the ground. As soon as they dropped the hoppers, the Essays spun about, fired their main engines, and headed back to the
Grandar Bay.

The hoppers didn't drop for long. Every aircraft commander had performed that maneuver many times in the past, as had the copilots. Before the hoppers dropped a hundred meters, their engines were firing and the pilots were bringing them under control. They worked their way into formation by the time they reached five hundred meters. The flight commander ran a comm check with the other hoppers and with the Dragons, which were already speeding westward across the ocean to the shore, which was over their horizon. The land was visible from the altitude of the hoppers.

Assured that everything was in order, the flight commander turned his ten-hopper formation to the north and sped off. Fifty kilometers on, the hopper flight swung through a ninety degree turn and sped west another two hundred kilometers before swinging through another ninety degree turn south. Not much more than half an hour after being flung from the Essays, the hoppers touched down, well inland from the fighting forces that were being approached by the rest of the battalion from the coast.

"Say again?" Commodore Boreland said incredulously.

"She's the
Goin'on,
sir," McPherson repeated, "of the We're Here! navy. We're Here! is--"

"I know what We're Here! is, Mr. McPherson," Boreland interrupted. "That's why I'm surprised. We're Here! is one of the least aggressive worlds in the Confederation. Why in the cosmos would they be making war on Maugham's Station?"

McPherson was equally baffled, so he said nothing.

"Does she show any sign of coming back for another pass?"

"Negative, sir. After her first salvo, she changed course to planetary south and followed the transports. She's still receding. Looks like she's running away."

"A wise move," Boreland murmured. An Omaha-class light cruiser had neither the fire power nor the armor to stand up to an unmodified Mandalay, much less to the weaponry the
Grandar Bay's
engineers had modified to fight the Skink starships at Society 419 at the end of the Kingdom campaign. "What about the starships coming behind us?"

"Sir, we've resolved them well enough to know the class of most of them."