David Sherman - Starfist 01 - First To Fight

PROLOGUE

"Mark One?" Gunnery Sergeant Charlie Bass asked. He gave the Terminal Dynamics techrep a hard

look. "Are you sure we can catch the bandits we're hunting with a Mark One?" He gestured toward the

small black box on the table.

"The Mark One, as you call it, Sergeant, is the Universal Positionator Up-Downlink, Mark One," Daryl

George answered. He wore an expression of superiority. It was clear to Bass that the techrep was

explaining his toy to the NCOs gathered around the table only because he thought the men were too

dumb to understand without his explanation.

"Where was it field-tested?" Gunny Bass asked. Sergeant Major Tanglefoot gave him a dangerous look.

"I'm glad you asked that," George said to the assembled first sergeants and company gunnery sergeants

of 31st FIST. He smoothed his pencil-line mustache with a chubby forefinger before proceeding. "You

have the right to know everything necessary about the testing of the equipment that your lives and the

lives of your men might depend on. The final field-testing of the UPUD"—he pronounced it

"you-pud"—"was at Aberdeen. It passed every phase with flying colors." George smiled broadly, as if

announcing they'd just won the lottery.

"Aberdeen—a testing range. What you're telling us is that this Mark One hasn't seen action yet." Bass

carefully avoided looking at the sergeant major.

"As I said, Sergeant," George drew himself up to his full, soft, six feet of height and thrust his jaw

aggressively toward his interrogator, "it passed every phase of its testing with flying colors."

Bass's jaw locked at constantly being called "Sergeant," as if he were some damn army noncom. He

wasn't in the army, he was a gunnery sergeant in the Confederation Marine Corps.

"Are there any other questions?" Sergeant Major Tanglefoot broke in.

Bass spoke up again. "Sergeant Major, you know, I know, and so does every other NCO in this room,

that there's a world of difference between controlled tests and tests under fire. We're on a combat

operation here. This is no place to be testing unproven equipment."

"Everything in the Corps' inventory had a first time under fire," Sergeant Major Tanglefoot replied. His

voice said his patience was running out. "This is the first time for the UPUD."

Bass winced. "Right, Sergeant Major." He swallowed, knowing he was on thin ice arguing with

Tanglefoot. "It's just I think we shouldn't use the Mark One without taking along the radios and locators

that we know work. Just in case this thing doesn't."

In a voice that brooked no further discussion, the sergeant major said, "Headquarters has directed we

turn in all platoon and company radios, geo position locators, and vector computers. Each company and

platoon will be issued a UPUD to replace them. That's one piece of equipment to take the place of three.

Company gunnery sergeants, you will turn in the old and be issued the new, personally. First sergeants,

you will see to it that they do. That is all. Do it."

The twenty senior noncommissioned officers of the 31st Fleet Initial Strike Team's operational units rose

and started filing out of the room.

Charlie Bass knew when to shut up. This was one of those times. But Daryl George didn't know when

to stop. He said to Bass, "Sarge, don't worry. I personally guarantee you the you-pud, Mark One, will

perform as advertised."

Bass turned back and glared at George. "AndI personally guarantee you, if we lose one man because

this thing doesn't work as advertised, you, personally, will pay for it."

"As you were, Bass!" Sergeant Major Tanglefoot snapped. "You will knock off this nonsense, Gunnery

Sergeant."

"Aye aye, Sergeant Major. Sorry, sir." He gave George a look that said he was anything but sorry. Then

he followed his company first sergeant out of the room.

"Careful, Bass," his first sergeant whispered.

The "bandits" the Marines were chasing on Fiesta de Santiago seemed to melt into the mountains even

more easily than they had into the population in the lowland cities. By mid-afternoon of the third day,

after the Marines dismounted from their Dragons to start negotiating terrain too rugged for the

air-cushioned assault vehicles, they still hadn't seen anything more of their quarry than an occasional

footprint.

"Where's that Mark One say we are?" Bass asked PFC LeFarge, the communications man, when the

Bravo unit stopped to plan its next step.

LeFarge said, "Position mine," to the black box he carried. The UPUD was twelve inches high, eight

wide, and two deep. One face lifted to expose a view screen. The screen flickered at LeFarge's voice,

then showed a string of coordinates and a schematic map with their position marked on it.

"Any word from the Skipper?" Bass asked as he plotted the UPUD's coordinates on his paper map.

In the middle of the second day on foot, the company commander had divided his unit into two

elements. He and the first sergeant took two platoons and half the assault platoon along one trail, while

his executive officer and Bass followed a second trail with the remaining platoon and the other half of the

assault platoon. Now communications were lost.

"Not since 0830 hours," LeFarge responded. He looked up at the boulder-strewn, wooded slopes

surrounding them and casually brushed a rivulet of perspiration away from his eyes. It was over a

hundred degrees in the shade. "Must be the mountains are blocking the transmissions."

Bass shook his head. This is a bad place, he thought. Real good place for an ambush. "It's supposed to

be string-of-pearls communications, not line of sight. There's always a satellite up." He used a compass to

shoot azimuths from three landmarks around the narrow, steep-sided gorge they were in, then marked

the position he calculated on the overlay and wrote down the coordinates. In a pinch, old-style

compass-and-map, land-navigation technics still worked.

"Check with third platoon's comm man, see if he's getting the same readings you are."

LeFarge started murmuring into his helmet mike, to the comm man with the third platoon command

element a hundred meters to the rear.

Bass got to his feet to show the Bravo commander his map overlay. The positions and sets of

coordinates given by both the UPUD and his compass were marked on it. According to the UPUD

reading, they were in the next valley over from the position Bass had worked out.

"How sure are you?" Lieutenant Procescu asked.

Bass pointed out the landmarks he'd used to plot their positions. The valley the UPUD said they were in

didn't have similar features.

"Gunny," LeFarge said, "third platoon gets almost exactly the same location I do."

"Can we find our way home?" Procescu asked.

Bass nodded. "By using compass and map, if that's all we've got that works."

"Where are we supposed to be?"

Bass shrugged. "Chasing Pancho." Maybe one of the bandits the Marines were following was named

Pancho, and maybe not. It didn't matter. Anytime the Marines went up against guerrillas who were called

bandits, they labeled them all "Pancho."

"Then if we've got no problem with finding our way home," Procescu said, "let's chase Pancho." To

LeFarge he added, "Keep trying to raise the Skipper."

"If we need air support and the squadron tries to vector in on us using the Mark One, we may as well

not even ask," Bass said to Procescu as he shouldered his pack and checked his hand weapon. "Saddle

up!" he called to the squad ahead of the Bravo command element. He held up his right arm, let his

chameleon sleeve slide down so his arm would be visible, then gave the hand signal that meant "Get up

and move out." The resting, nearly invisible Marines of the lead squad briefly flickered into visibility as

their chameleons adjusted to changing surroundings. They rose to their feet and resumed moving up the

narrow gorge bottom. The men on the valley floor were easy enough to spot by anyone who knew what

he was looking at—their chameleons never quite matched their surroundings; instead, they flickered

through the color scale as they changed color to match the stones and earth they were closest to. The

flankers in the shadows up on the slopes were impossible to see unless an observer happened to spot

their faces, hands, or the uncovered V's of their upper chests.

"We're only chasing about twenty Pancho's," Procescu said to Bass, "and there's forty-six of us. We

won't need air support when we catch them."

A quarter hour after Bass made his location check, the reinforced platoon that was the Bravo unit

reached an area where a recent temblor had tumbled many large boulders to the valley floor and

uprooted most of the trees on the steep slopes. Birds from Earth and native fliers twittered and sang as

they fed on the buzzers that hummed and flitted through the torpid air of the valley bottom. The barren

slopes appeared empty, and it looked as if bad footing was the only problem the Marines would have

until they reached the next wooded area, somewhere past the next bend more than half a klick ahead.

The lead squad and one gun team were flickering through the open and the Bravo command group was

at the edge of the denuded area when a flanker on the left slope shouted "Pancho!" His shout was almost

drowned out by the ozone-crack of his weapon as it vaporized the partly exposed boot of a bandit.

Instantly, the other two Marines on the left slope opened fire; the cracks of their weapons, the even

louder cracks of the rocks that split when the bolts hit them, and the sizzle of vaporizing flesh, nearly

masked the screams of wounded bandits or those burned by flying globules of molten rock.

"Take cover!" Bass bellowed as he dove behind a nearby boulder. All across the valley-side came a

scattering of cracks as the bandits began to return fire. On the valley floor, the Marines tried to return fire

from cover while the gun team set up, but the shields that protected them from the bandits' energy

weapons did nothing to protect them from the molten rock thrown when incoming fire melted stone. The

Marines caught in the killing zone could only huddle behind the boulders, out of the way of the sizzling

bolts and flying magma.

Procescu assayed the situation quickly and calmly gave orders into his communicator. "Three Actual, get

the rest of second squad and the other gun on that slope to help your flankers. Send your platoon

sergeant with two assault teams to the flankers on the opposite slope to lay down some suppressing fire.

Remaining assault team and assault squad leader, to me."

Bass opened the switch that allowed him to listen in on all of the communicator talk in the unit down to

fire team leader. He heard the third platoon commander give his orders, the platoon sergeant pull

together the rest of the assault squad, the squad leader, assault squad leader, and the fire, gun, and

assault team leaders urging their men into motion. The fire and gun team leaders pinned down in the open

reported that they had no casualties.

Bass flicked down his infra goggles to scan the slope where the fire was coming from. He picked up only

a couple of dozen man-size heat signatures. What's going on here? he asked himself. There's got to be

more bandits than that. They wouldn't set up an ambush unless they knew they had us outnumbered.

Abruptly, heavier fire broke out on the left slope as Lieutenant Kruzhilov and his reinforcements reached

the flank and added their power to that of the three Marines shooting at the bandits there. Over the

command net Bass heard the platoon commander coolly issue orders to coordinate the fire of his ten

Marines. In seconds, instead of firing at random targets, they were hosing out plasma bolts in line,

slagging a broad swath of slope beginning twenty meters to their front.

The third assault team reached Procescu, and the Bravo commander added its fire to the advancing

maelstrom.

Forty meters in front of the Marines on the flank, a screaming bandit leaped to his feet. One of his arms

was missing, a cauterized hole was burned through his thigh, and a ball of half-melted rock had set his

uniform ablaze. A Marine in the open rose up from cover and took him out with a clean head shot. The

remaining bandits broke and ran.

At least they don't have shields, Bass thought.

"Cease fire, cease fire!" Procescu ordered. "Three Actual, maneuver to check that slope, make sure it's

cleared. Check the bodies, see if there's any we can keep alive to question."

Bass frowned. He couldn't believe such a small force would set an ambush for a reinforced Marine

platoon. He twisted around to scan the opposite slope. He saw, through his goggles, that its entire length

was blotched with red—that's where the main effort of the ambush was! The bandits hadn't known the

Marines had flankers on the slopes, so the flankers were able to trip the ambush early. The bandits on the

left must have been a blocking force that was supposed to stop the Marines from withdrawing after they

were caught in the open by the larger force on the right flank.

To Bass's right, through the trees, a line of red spots was approaching the bandit-held slope—the

platoon sergeant with the other two assault teams. On the valley floor the Marines who had been pinned

down were rising to their feet.

"Everybody down!" he shouted into the all-hands circuit. "They're on the right slope. Three Bravo, stop

in place. Use your goggles." Bass's pulse was racing wildly. A second later he heard Platoon Sergeant

Chway murmur, "Jesus Muhammad," then issue the commands to set up the assault guns to rake the right

slope.

Several of the Marines in the open jumped up and zigzagged for the cover of the trees where the

command unit was. The bandits' main effort opened fire and plasma bolts engulfed two of the runners.

When his shield was overwhelmed, one man simply vanished with a flash, then the other dropped, a

charred husk. The rest of the Marines were forced to drop behind cover before reaching the tree line.

The stench of seared flesh wafted up to where Bass lay.

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 modern 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.

jvianne:

"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.

"Get as flat as you can," Procescu added, "get behind a ridge or a rock. This is going to be close."

The double-mach-plus Marine Raptors screamed almost straight down from the heavens. When the lead

aircraft was still little more than a rapidly growing, shiny speck in the sky, it was stitching a line of plasma

bolts from the bottom of the gorge to halfway up the left slope, barely fifty meters from the trees. Just

when it looked as if it was going to follow its bolts into the holocaust in the gorge, its forward vernier jets

flamed, bouncing it back skyward. Before the lead aircraft finished its maneuver, its wingman twisted to

stitch bolts up the right side of the gorge.

The bolts from the Raptors' cannons were to the bolts of the assaulters what the assaulters were to

hand-blasters. Each bolt vaporized whatever it struck, leaving a steaming hole nearly five meters in

diameter. Molten rock pooled at the bottom of each crater. Gouts of lava flew everywhere; some landed

harmlessly on rock and quickly solidified, some charred trees or set them ablaze, some killed men.

The wave of heat expelled by the explosions washed across the open and incinerated anyone in its path.

The foliage on the nearer trees flashed vapor and the outermost line of trees burst into flame. For

twenty-five meters into the trees, anyone standing was hit by a wall of superheated air that seared lungs

and peeled off skin. Most of the bandits were in the open or standing in the first twenty-five meters of the

tree line. Not all of the Marines were behind something that could deflect the heat wave.

The stunned survivors picked themselves up and took stock. The few bandits who survived were in full

flight. But Procescu was dead, as were Lieutenant Kruzhilov and Staff Sergeant Chway and everybody

who had been on the right flank with the platoon sergeant and the assaulters. LeFarge was

gone—instantly vaporized—and the UPUD lay on the ground, now a thoroughly useless, half-melted

chunk of slag. Half the Marines who began the day with the Bravo unit were dead. A quick survey told

Bass ten times as many bandits had died in the fight.

"That's too damn many good Marines died today," Bass said to himself.

Third platoon's comm man had hidden behind a good-size boulder during the air attack, so both he and

his UPUD survived. Bass used it to report the results of their fire mission to Flamer and to request

David Sherman - Starfist 01 - First To Fight

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