Starfist: Wings of Hell (35 page)

Company L was in positions covering the mouth of the tunnel where they’d ambushed the Skinks. If the Skinks tried to come back out, they would be met by the full firepower of a Marine company. None of the Marines thought the Skinks stood a chance if they tried it.

The command came down, and the Marines boarded Dragons and Battle Cars. The three stronger, heavily armed Dragons entered the tunnel, followed by the Battle Cars. The Dragons carried third platoon, one section of the assault platoon, and the company command element.

The column was three kilometers in when an order came from Battalion to halt. Commander van Winkle spoke to all of his company commanders on his comm.

“Recon reports that all tunnels are flooded,” van Winkle said, “beginning about eleven kilometers in. The flooding is nothing that the Dragons can’t handle, but the water’s too deep for the Battle Cars. So Corps has scrapped the idea of a Marine assault at the northern termini of the tunnels. But we still need to know where they go. So here are your new orders.

“Return all Battle Cars to the surface immediately. I say again: return all Battle Cars to the surface immediately. The Dragons will proceed to where the tunnels are flooded. Once they reach the water, two Dragons will return to the surface. One, I say again,
one
Dragon will pick up the recon element it will meet at the water’s edge and proceed at top speed to the terminus of the tunnel. Recon will drop comm repeaters at appropriate intervals so that contact can be maintained. Upon reaching the tunnel terminus, the Dragon will report what it finds. The Dragon and the Marines it carries are not, I say again, are
not
to initiate contact with the enemy. Do you understand?”

One by one, the company commanders replied that they understood their orders.

“One more thing,” van Winkle said. “Company commanders are not to go with the Dragon heading deeper. You will remain with the bulk of your company outside the tunnel mouth. Understood?”

Again the company commanders replied that they understood—but there was a certain reluctance in their voices.

“All right, then, do it.” Van Winkle signed off.

Captain Conorado, from his position in the second Dragon, gnawed over the orders. He didn’t like them, neither the part about sending twenty of his Marines a thousand klicks into unknown territory, nor the part about not going with them. He was their company commander. If he was sending them into harm’s way, he should go with them! But his orders were clear, and he had acknowledged them; he had no choice but to obey them. He got onto the company command circuit and spoke to the company’s officers and senior NCOs.

“Listen up. The tunnel is flooded up ahead. The Dragons can handle the water, but the Battle Cars can’t. When I give the order, everybody but the lead Dragon will reverse and head for the surface. The lead Dragon will continue on to the water, where it will pick up the recon element, and continue to whatever is there and report back. That one Dragon and its Marines are
not
to initiate contact with the enemy. Questions?”

“Sir,” Lieutenant Bass, whose men were in the lead Dragon, said, “do you realize that if the tunnel goes all the way to the enemy complexes that we know about, it’ll take almost eleven hours for us to get there?”

Conorado nodded. He hadn’t made the calculation himself, but he’d understood from the time he’d gotten the original orders to enter the tunnel that it would be a long ride if they went all the way north. “I know that, Lieutenant. I also know that these orders came from Corps. And when a lieutenant general gives orders—”

“Captains and lieutenants obey,” Bass completed. “I understand our orders, sir. Will do upon your command.”

“All right, then,” Conorado said. “Let’s do these things.”

Before he departed, Conorado had one last thing to say to Bass—on the private circuit. “Good hunting, Charlie.”

“Thanks, Skipper.”

The Battle Cars and the Dragons leaving the tunnel reversed and headed for sunlight. A lone Dragon moved out.

Before they headed onward, Bass had shifted people around to put himself, second squad, and one gun team in the Dragon heading deeper into the tunnel. He picked second squad over first partly because first squad had an inexperienced fire team leader, Lance Corporal Longfellow, who was leading a thrown-together fire team that couldn’t be expected to function as well as one that had trained together. And second squad had Lance Corporal Schultz. Going to an unknown location, into an unknown situation, the one Marine whom Bass wanted at his side more than any other was Hammer Schultz. Four Marines from the FIST’s recon squad were waiting for them at the water’s edge. Bass got out to examine the area. There was no light; the Dragon had to turn on its floodlights for him to see by.

Bass also let his Marines out to stretch their legs for the last time in what might be many hours. The tunnel widened slightly here. Its floor started sloping downward a few meters before it met the water, and the water met the floor across the entire width of the tunnel.

“How deep is it?” Bass asked Sergeant Steffan, the recon ream leader.

“The ramp continues to slope at the same angle until the water’s a bit more than a meter and a half deep.” He shrugged. “We don’t have any underwater gear, so I couldn’t check it any farther than that.”

Bass grunted; a sheen on Steffan’s chameleons showed that he’d recently gone into the water to shoulder depth. “Deep enough to float a boat.”

Steffan nodded.

“Where’s your minnie?”

“I sent it ahead. Minnies don’t swim well. We lost contact with it after a hundred meters or so. It probably drowned.”

Bass peered down the tunnel; he could see a few hundred meters. It was water all the way, and no ripples. He looked at the overhead and felt the faint breeze on his face. The susurration of ventilators provided a background noise.

“What have you found out about the ventilation?” he asked.

“There’s large fans in the overhead every quarter klick. One blows up, the next down. None of them are at high speed, just enough to keep fresh air flowing. They’re concealed from topside somehow. At any rate we couldn’t see through them to the surface.”

“All right. Let’s go. Marines, saddle up!”

In seconds they were on the way again, leaving a rooster tail that rose high enough to splash against the overhead.

It was crowded in the Dragon. Even though the Dragon could carry twenty fully outfitted Marine blastermen and it only had eighteen, it also had a gun, which took up one space. And they were going a very long way; there was little room to stretch muscles that, after several hours, would threaten to cramp.

Every few hundred meters, Sergeant Steffan dropped another comm relay in a flotation device so they could maintain contact with the rest of the company where it waited outside the tunnel. A hundred kilometers into the tunnel, Steffan told Bass he was out of relays. Bass ordered a halt and contacted Captain Conorado to ask for instructions. It only took a couple of minutes for Conorado to come back with “Continue the mission.”

So they continued on, unable to contact anybody on the surface, going an unknown distance, into an unknown situation.

Six hours in, Bass called a halt and had Corporal Duguid, the Dragon’s crew chief, lower the ramp so the Marines could stretch the kinks out of their muscles and void their bladders into the water. After ten minutes they moved on.

They reached the end of the tunnel. It emptied into a cavern, large enough that the Dragon’s lamps couldn’t fill it with light. A gravel beach bordered the cavern, and hundreds of boats were pulled onto the beach or lashed to pilings sticking out of the water. The ceiling of the cavern was high enough that they had to be under the mountains—which jibed with the inertial positioning shown on the platoon’s UPUD.

Bass ordered Corporal Duguid to drive onto the beach and turn parallel to the wall. The ramp dropped and the Marines piled out, automatically setting a defensive perimeter around the Dragon. They paid little overt attention to the boats that had been crushed by the Dragon passing over them to gain the beach.

“Where the hell’s the door?” Bass asked over the platoon circuit, into which he’d patched the recon team. The only egress he could see from the cavern was the tunnel by which they’d entered. Nobody else could see one, either. The exit was very skillfully hidden or it was underwater.

“By fire teams, piss break,” Bass ordered.

Bass took his break with the Dragon team. Most of the Marines used uncrushed boats as the receptacles for their bodily wastes. While he pondered what to do next, Bass gave his Marines a fifteen-minute meal break. Then he huddled with Sergeant Kerr, Sergeant Steffan, and Corporal Duguid to discuss what he wanted to do next.

“Did anybody find entrances or exits that I don’t know about?” Bass asked.

The three NCOs exchanged glances and shook their heads.

Bass looked at the quiet, boat-filled pool. “Must be underwater,” he said. “Remember Society 437?” he asked Kerr.

Kerr nodded. “Yeah, they had a tunnel that led from the lake into their caves. Probably the same thing here.”

Bass looked at the boats again. “I’m not going to look for any tunnels here, but we can’t leave the boats for the Skinks to use to come after us. We’ll burn them, then get back in our Dragon and take off.”

“Aye aye,” the NCOs agreed, grinning at the prospect.

“Let’s do this thing.”

Finished with the leaders’ meeting, Bass had the boats set afire. Then the Marines reboarded the Dragon and headed back the way they’d come. A growing fire blazed behind them.

Good,
Bass thought.
Now they won’t be able to follow us.

Fifty kilometers down the tunnel, the Dragon stopped under an up-drawing fan set. Lieutenant Bass and Sergeant Steffan climbed on top of the Dragon and examined the fans. The overhead was low, and even when they kneeled their helmet tops brushed stone. The fan was large, its blades more than two meters in diameter, and it moved slowly, but the strong breeze being drawn implied there were more fans above it. Bass shined a light between the blades and saw another fan the same size two meters higher, which was also moving slowly. He was pretty sure he could make out another fan above that.

“Do you think you can climb between the blades?” Bass asked the recon team leader.

“It’d be a lot easier if I could stop them,” Steffan answered as he examined the fan’s mechanism.

Suddenly a disembodied hand shot upward and plunged a metal rod into the hub of the fan. The blades screamed to a stop.

Bass looked where the hand came from and saw Lance Corporal Schultz through his raised helmet screens. Schultz looked a question at Bass. Bass considered, and nodded.

Schultz stood between two now-immobile fan blades and reached up to jam another metal rod into its workings. The fan shrieked as it came to a halt. He climbed up, standing on the bases of two blades, then pulled himself up onto the next fan. Bass heard the screech of another fan. And then another. That was followed by the sounds of a body moving away from them, and then silence for a few minutes. Then they heard the moving body again, and a moment later Schultz dropped back onto the top of the Dragon.