Starfist: Kingdom's Swords Read online

  When he did notice, he started adjusting the comm’s controls, thinking something had slipped. He ran a routine ping and got it back—the comm seemed to be working right. Raptor Flight 1 was still coming through on its comm. He flipped frequencies on the two comms. Flight 1 came through loud and clear on 2’s comm. Flight 2 didn’t come in on 1’s. He called 2 but got no response.

  Strataslavic punched his own comm and called for the duty officer. He had the comms switched back to their proper frequencies by the time Ensign N!amce entered.

  “What’cha got, Strat?” N!amce asked.

  “Flight Two’s off comm, sir.”

  “Gimme.” N!amce held out a hand, Strataslavic slapped the comm’s mike into it.

  “Raptor Flight Two, this is Nest. Come in. Over.” When he didn’t get an immediate reply, he said, “There’s a time and a place for fun and games, kiddies. This ain’t them. Come in.” N!amce had been a grizzled master sergeant when he finally decided to take what he called an early retirement by accepting a commission. He knew too well how Raptor drivers sometimes got lazy, or decided to relieve their boredom by “losing comm” and getting the troops at base all lit up.

  “This is N!amce, Raptor Two. Come back or you’re mine when you come in.” That was no idle threat. Even though every pilot in the squadron held a higher rank than he did, only the squadron commander and sergeant major had more time in the Corps. N!amce had spent decades keeping junior enlisted men in line, and he wasn’t shy about applying the same tactics to company-grade officers who messed up. He was also experienced enough not to let the concern show on his face or in his voice when Flight 2 still didn’t reply.

  “Play it back for me, Strat.”

  Corporal Strataslavic diddled the controls to replay the last two minutes before comm died.

  “So what the hell was it?” N!amce muttered as he pulled out his own comm and hit the button for the squadron commander’s office. “N!amce,” he said when the CO’s aide answered. “Raptor Flight Two is missing, over—” He glanced at the data flow. “—the Swamp of Perdition.”

  Ten minutes later Raptor Flight 1 was orbiting over the swamp where Flight 2 had vanished, and a hopper was on its way to FIST headquarters to pick up the recon squad.

  It wasn’t the largest swamp on Kingdom, but it might have been the most awful. Its animate and its vegetative life were voracious eaters of flesh, and fully omniverous in their tastes. It was almost totally unexplored and, unlike other swamps, no humans—or other creatures of Earth—lived in it. They called it the Swamp of Perdition.

  Staff Sergeant Wu, the FIST recon squad leader, stepped softly into the murky water of a sluggish stream. He didn’t flinch when the cold water reached his crotch. He eased forward, sliding his feet across the muck of the stream bottom, toward the other bank. This was the most dangerous time, where the water passed his hips, it swirled, making his position visible. Lance Corporal Donat, the recon squad’s comm man, stayed behind, covering him until he reached the other side. Then the two continued on opposite sides, stepping on their toes so their heels wouldn’t squelch in the mud. With the chameleon shields on their helmets in place, the only sign of their passage was their footprints; they stepped too slowly and cautiously to mark their movement with noise. In the darkness under the swamp’s dense canopy, their footprints were visible to only the very sharpest eyes, and the prints rapidly filled in.

  Wu hated going in blind like this. The only information he had was that two Raptors from Flight 2 had vanished over a particular spot in this swamp. Cause unknown. Enemy force unknown. Hell, enemy presence unknown, except that two Raptors couldn’t spontaneously explode from mechanical failure like the string-of-pearls—the ring of intelligence satellites the navy strung around Kingdom—showed happened to Raptor Flight 2. Well, going in to find out was Recon’s job. More often than not Recon went in blind, sometimes even this blind. But no matter how often he had to go in blind, Staff Sergeant Wu still hated it.

  The four Marines of recon team one followed another stream a couple of hundred meters to the right of Wu and Donat. Team two was three kilometers to their left. Team three was a third of the way around the swamp in the other direction. Wu allocated three hours for them to go the two kilometers to where they would rendevous, a kilometer from where the two Raptors had vanished. He hoped they weren’t rushing so fast that any of them would run into an ambush.

  Foliage seemed to drip, and fall lankly from the treelike endemic plants. Mossy growths crawled about trunks. The vegetative life of the swamp looked like it was dead and rotting; it smelled that way too. Fliers cawed in the canopy, insectoids buzzed and flitted about, landed on the men, tasted, found them unpalatable, flitted and buzzed off to find better dining. Crawling things with no legs or short legs slithered over the mud; longer legged creatures squelched through it. Something big splashed into the stream around a bend. Things that lived in the water rippled the surface. Wu saw a carnivorous plant slam its petals shut on a nectar-seeking creature, saw an animal the size of a young child rotting in the snares of another kind of carnivorous plant. He murmured an alert on the all-hands band—there might be larger carnivorous plants. He’d really hate to have a man injured or lost to an ambitious daffodil.

  Wu transmitted a situation report every fifteen minutes. The report was always the same: “Situation as before. Continuing.” His location was automatically embedded in the transmission. The three team leaders made the same reports to him.

  The recon Marines moved slowly, deliberately, deeper into the swamp. They probed every shadow with their infras, light gatherers, and magnifiers, sought to find and examine every place a man could hide. They gauged each step before taking it, never put their full weight on the forward foot until they were sure of it. They sidestepped growth when they could; gently, slowly, moved it aside, and delicately replaced it when they couldn’t. They frequently passed within a meter of swamp creatures without disturbing them.

  Two hours of that manner of movement will exhaust a normal human being; it will even tire an experienced combat Marine. But the recon Marines had trained for it and were still a long way from needing a second wind.

  Two hours in, Staff Sergeant Wu finally found an anomaly. There was a beaten area where a sheen of surface water showed the ground had recently been dry. He toggled the all-hands circuit and told his teams, then switched to the command circuit and reported to FIST headquarters what he’d found and what he was doing about it. He left the command circuit open—if anything happened to him, FIST would need to know immediately. Donat joined Wu while he studied the area with his various vision-enhancing shields and scent detectors. Ten minutes’ observation of everything he could see in any format failed to show the presence of any life-form he hadn’t already seen in the swamp.

  “What does the UPUD show?” he asked Donat.

  “Nothing,” Donat murmured back.

  “Cover me.” Wu rose to a crouch and slowly padded in a circle a dozen meters outside the beaten area. His vision shields and scent detectors still didn’t pick up anything that didn’t belong. Donat didn’t warn him of anything from the UPUD. Satisfied that no enemy lurked near, observing the beaten area, he gave the scent detector to Donat and entered it.

  Broken swamp growth was mashed into the ground in patches that matched the pattern of growth elsewhere under the trees. It was hard to see surface details through the skim of water in the dimness under the trees, but his shields helped. Up close, the infra showed that an irregularly flattened patch of ground of about three square meters was a degree or two warmer than the surrounding ground, as though a piece of heat-producing machinery had been removed a few hours earlier. Here and there were other, unidentifiable marks on the ground—holes, scrapes, and gouges. He found a few footprints, some shod, some not. Most of them were smaller than his. Two of them didn’t quite match, making him think they were made by different individuals; they were more than twice the size of the others. He recorded his observations and burst-t
ransmitted the data to FIST HQ.

  Finished, he reported in, “Continuing,” then sent the same message on the all-hands circuit. He and Donat moved out as cautiously as before. Maybe more cautiously—now they knew someone else was or had been there.

  Brigadier Sturgeon was close to letting his anger show. As if it wasn’t bad enough that the images Archbishop General Lambsblood claimed proved the rebels weren’t human couldn’t be found anywhere, neither Ambassador Spears nor his chief-of-station knew anything about them. A Raptor flight had abruptly exploded without evident cause or threat. And now the FIST recon squad that went in to try to locate whatever might have shot the Raptors down had only found one mystery spot, about which his F2 could tell him nothing more than what the recon squad leader had said in his report from the spot. Sturgeon had the best people and equipment available to the Confederation military, yet he was blind—not to mention that he’d lost people—and he didn’t like that one little bit.

  Well, Marines don’t sit back and pout when things don’t go the way they want, they take action, he thought. M Company from the infantry battalion was already in position near the Swamp of Perdition. Sturgeon shook his head at the name, then ignored it.

  On the FIST commander’s order, the 127 Marines and four navy medical corpsmen of M Company boarded eight Dragons and entered the swamp. Two of the air-cushioned, amphibious Dragons followed each of four streams, headed toward the beaten-down area where the entire recon squad now waited.

  From inside the company commander’s Dragon, the company’s two unmanned aerial vehicle controllers flew their “birds.” There was no way to hide the roar of the Dragons’ fans, but the birds were camouflaged as large, primitive flying animals indigenous to the swamp so they might not be noticed by any foe who saw them. They flew about a half kilometer ahead of the Dragons, zigging and zagging to cover the front of all four Dragon teams.

  Each UAV controller wore a helmet that showed him three views of what the birds could see—normal vision, infra, and amplified light. He could increase or decrease magnification on any of the views he wanted. Sensors on the birds recorded information on chemicals in the air and sent them back, the smells of the swamp—olfactory signals of life-forms. The two Marines filtered the audio pickup to mute the usual insectoid and avian sounds and listened for anything that sounded like voices. Everyone else in the Dragons sat stoically waiting; only the drivers and gunners could see outside; the passengers were blind.

  Little more than halfway to the destination, Dragon 3 erupted in a fireball that vaporized parts of it and sent the rest of it spinning out in chunks of metal and flesh. Dragon 4, 3’s teammate, jerked forward and to the side in an evasive maneuver that would have thrown its passengers about like dice in a cup if they hadn’t been strapped in against just that possibility.

  “Evasive action, everybody,” Captain Boonstra, the M Company commander, ordered, and followed with, “Report!” He didn’t ask who had been on Dragon 3. He knew it was one blaster squad and the assault squad from second platoon. Later he’d have to write letters to the families of those men, but he didn’t have the time to think about that now, when he had to give all his concern to his live Marines.

  The remaining Dragons transmitted their locations and dispositions, which Boonstra scanned on his heads-up display as he asked for threat data.

  “There wasn’t any threat warning,” reported Corporal Lieuwe, the Dragon 4 commander. “Three just went up!”

  “We don’t see a damn thing, sir,” said Sergeant Kitching, the company’s UAV chief. He could see the data coming in from bird two as well as from his own.

  The other Dragons also reported no threat warnings or indication of people nearby.

  “Dragon Four, withdraw two hundred meters,” Boonstra ordered as he reviewed the locations of his Marines and checked that the data was automatically being relayed to the battalion and FIST headquarters. “All dismount. Converge on second platoon. Second platoon, hold your position until the rest of the company arrives.” By the time the company assembled around the remains of second platoon, either he’d have a plan of action or higher command would come up with one for him.

  Both Brigadier Sturgeon and the infantry battalion commander, Commander van Winkle, were smart enough to let the man on the scene run the show. Sturgeon only asked, “What do you need from me?”

  Sturgeon and van Winkle conferred briefly. They were in full agreement that the enemy forces in the swamp must be found and dealt with. Sturgeon ordered van Winkle to get the rest of his battalion in position to sweep through the swamp and the squadron to get all its Raptors into the sky in case the Marines in the mud needed support. He held off on artillery prep fire.

  Twenty-three minutes after Dragon 3 inexplicably exploded, M Company began moving in a wave formation through the swamp. First platoon, reinforced by a section from the assault platoon, advanced on a ragged line half a kilometer wide toward the area where Dragon 3 was killed. The company command element, the survivors of second platoon, and the rest of the assault platoon formed the second wave. Third platoon brought up the rear.

  First platoon’s PFC Gerlach was on the extreme right of the lead wave. He wasn’t greatly experienced, had only been with 34th FIST for a few months and had no deployments under his belt. His inexperience and the shock of losing half a platoon all at once made him hyperalert. Had he not been so alert, he might not have looked so carefully through that break in the dripping foliage where he saw a shadow some thirty meters distant. The shadow had a shape and size he hadn’t yet seen in the swamp. He stopped and methodically examined it. All his naked eyes showed was a dark blob that might or might not be something. His magnifier shield did nothing more than make the blob bigger. His infras showed a mass the size of a small person, but with a temperature a few degrees below human norm. It was his light gatherer that showed it most clearly.

  The shadow resolved into a man-shaped creature lying prone in the mud, facing parallel to the company’s movement. The creature was naked and had yellowish skin. It appeared to have slits in its side. The most ominous thing about it was the artifact on its back, tanks of some sort. A hose ran from the tanks to a nozzle it held in its hands.

  “I have contact,” Gerlach murmured into the squad circuit on his helmet comm. Slowly, cautiously, deliberately, he began to turn around to withdraw. He froze before turning very far. He saw another one. Swiveling only his eyes, he probed the surrounding shadows and saw more. His skin prickled. “They’re all around,” he murmured into the circuit. They didn’t seem to be aware of him yet; he thought he should be able to slip out of the formation fairly easily. Few people who weren’t Marines knew how to see a Marine wearing his chameleons and with his chameleon shield in place.

  But they were aware of him, they were merely waiting for more Marines to enter the killing zone of the ambush. When the ambush commander realized they had been spotted, he gave the command to open fire. Four of the ambushers aimed the nozzles of their weapons at Gerlach and sprayed a greenish fluid. Two of the streams hit his helmet and melted away the electronics of his comm so that even if he had been able to scream, his voice wouldn’t transmit; some of the fluid from the two streams that hit his helmet struck his face and got sucked into his throat when he tried to scream from the pain.

  Four other Marines also went down, screaming in agony as the greenish fluid ate into their flesh and dissolved their bones.

  “Echelon right!” Captain Boonstra bellowed into the all-hands circuit. “Volley fire by squads!”

  First platoon’s second squad leader, Sergeant Janackova, with Gerlach and two other men from his squad already down, dove into the mud and was shouting commands at his remaining men before he heard Captain Boonstra’s order for squad volley fire.

  “Five meters beyond Gerlach!” Janackova called, and seven plasma bolts from as many blasters struck in an irregular line beyond the dead Marine. “Tighten ’em up. Fire!” Seven more bolts bloomed fire that sizzled in the mud
and raised a cloud of steam. “Up ten!” The Marines adjusted their aim to hit the ground ten meters beyond the previous shots. “Right five!” The seven Marines fired again, five meters to the right of their previous shots. “Left ten!” They adjusted and fired again. “Up ten, fire for effect.” The seven blasters shifted again and rained fire into the area. If anybody was there, they’d be parboiled by the steam if they weren’t hit by bolts. The squad would continue the fire until the platoon commander ordered them to shift aim or to cease fire.

  More plasma bolts crackled to third squad’s flanks, raising shocked clouds of steam from the mud and dank foliage. To their right, blaster bolts were joined by the ripping crackle of an assault gun.

  Janackova checked his HUD; the first squad of his own platoon was on his left; a squad from second platoon and a gun from the assault platoon were on the right. He didn’t know how the enemy knew to set off their ambush, but they hit so accurately he thought they must have infras. Well, the roiling steam was hot enough to conceal the Marines from infrared vision. Now the enemy would be firing as blindly as they were.

  More commands came over the all-hands circuit. The squad from second platoon and the assault gun with it shifted their fire farther to the right. First platoon’s assault squad moved up between the two blaster squads, and two squads from the assault platoon moved up behind them.

  “First platoon, up and advance briskly,” came the voice of Ensign Chinsamy, the platoon commander.

  Janackova repeated the command to his men, looked left and right through his infras to make sure they obeyed him and he hadn’t lost anybody else, then stepped out at a fast walk into the steam cloud.

  The steam a few meters beyond Gerlach’s corpse was already dissipated, and the second cloud ten meters past that was also nearly gone. The third cloud, where the fire had been concentrated, was still dense and hot. The ground, so suddenly dried out, crackled and crunched underfoot. The Marines burst through it, almost trotting to get out of the heat. One man in each fire team had his infra screen in place, one his magnifier, and the third used his light gatherer. When they were twenty meters beyond the stream, Sergeant Janackova caught sight of a form running through the trees. He snapped his blaster to his shoulder and fired at it.