Starfist: Kingdom's Swords Read online

  He stared in shock when the running form flashed into flame. He’d never heard of such a thing.

  The rest of the reinforced platoon opened fire when Janackova shot at the fleeing figure. No unseen bodies flashed into flame.

  CHAPTER

  * * *

  ELEVEN

  Kilo Company moved into the swamp to the left of M Company. Company L took position to Kilo’s right. Three companies abreast, they advanced deeper. The FIST’s Raptors orbited a few kilometers away, ready to rain support when needed. Brigadier Sturgeon still held off on the artillery.

  Company L advanced in a line of platoons, the platoons in lines of squads. Second squad, third platoon, was the squad on battalion’s farthest right. Lance Corporal Schultz had second squad’s point. To Schultz’s thinking, the extreme right front corner of the battalion advance was the most vulnerable position, the position that required the sharpest, most alert man in the battalion. He believed that he was the sharpest and most alert Marine in the entire FIST. He wanted that position. Nobody was about to say no to Hammer Schultz when he said he wanted the most dangerous position.

  Before they started out, Schultz stood motionless for a long moment listening to the sounds of the swamp, then another long moment absorbing its scents. He squatted and listened and smelled. Noises and aromas are marginally different at higher and lower elevations. He wanted to get a range. Satisfied that he had a basic grasp of the sounds and smells of the swamp, enough to allow him to filter out the most mundane of them, he softly said “Ready” into his helmet comm.

  A moment later Corporal Kerr’s voice came back to him: “Move out.”

  Schultz stepped through the brush and across a rivulet. Thirty-fourth FIST’s infantry battalion began moving deeper into the trackless waste of the Swamp of Perdition.

  Light filtered dimly through the thin canopy, creating dark shadows and darkening colors. The dominant tones were the deepest greens of wet foliage and the heavy browns and blacks of water-sodden dirt. Shapes, unless seen up close, were muddled and indistinct, and tended to blend together. Here and there spots of brilliant color signaled “come hither” to pollinating insectoids, or to prey. The air, when it moved, was sluggish, as though too dispirited by its surroundings to waft. The water of the numerous rivulets and streams was more sluggish, seemed too tired to do more than just lay there. It was humid, and the air felt almost thick enough to drink. Fallen foliage slowly rotted on the ground. Mud oozed and slipped underfoot and threatened to tumble the men. Everything emitted aromas, the scents of rot and decay and excretion, a miasma that felt viscous, as though it could be seen and touched, and would cling to flesh, clothing, and equipment. The dank foliage, wet air, and thick mud sopped up sounds, muddied them.

  One skilled man can move wraithlike through a swamp, unseen and unheard by its denizens, even his scent lost in the general miasma. One man alone can seep through until he is close enough to an unsuspecting animal to kill it. A few skilled men, three or four or half a dozen, can creep close enough for one of them to kill their prey before it can get away. Four hundred men, no matter how stealthy each one is, cannot move undetected through a swamp. The animals heard them coming. Prey animals fled to the safety of their burrows, or to distance themselves from the threat. Predators realized something bigger and stronger and meaner was coming and got out of its way. Even the carnivorous plant life seemed to sense that it was not dinner time, and furled leaves, closed flowers, withdrew tendrils.

  The going for everyone was uncertain. Slip, slide, squish in mud. Tufts of turf tried to trip the unwary. Tangles of tendrils and trailing vines lay in wait to entrap careless feet. Droopy leaves, twigs, and mossy growths hung in lank sheets to block vision. Streams that moved sluggishly were everywhere, so murky with decaying and decayed matter that the sinkholes on their bottoms couldn’t be seen or even felt until stepped into. Small water-dwelling parasites struggled to get through the material of the Marines’ uniforms. And there were all those damn insectoids that hadn’t yet gotten the word.

  Only the flying insectoids thought “banquet” and buzzed and flitted in to dine. It wasn’t long before nearly every Marine in the battalion had multiple itching bites from beasties that had managed to get inside his chameleon uniform.

  On the right front corner, Schultz ignored the three bites he sustained. He’d been inoculated against all known pathogens, and some itching was simply part of being in the field. His attention remained firmly fixed on his surroundings. Two men back, Corporal Kerr also ignored the itching. Miscellaneous bites were nothing to be concerned with, not unless they infected, and he’d had the same inoculations Schultz had. He was as alert as Schultz, but not all his attention was on his surroundings. As a fire team leader, he had to be fully aware of his men. Normally he would have positioned himself between them, but not this time. He knew Schultz could handle himself and not make mistakes; Corporal Doyle was another matter. Kerr knew he needed to give him close supervision. He used his infra shield more often than he usually would so he could maintain visual contact with Doyle. His eyes constantly flicked to the HUD display he had tacked in the corner of the shield so he could see where Doyle was when he wasn’t using his infra.

  A lone flitterer wended its way under the chin of Corporal Doyle’s helmet and inside the neck of his chameleon shirt to his collarbone, where it settled down to drill a well into the succulent juices of this odd flesh. The juices it siphoned up were just as odd as the flesh, much odder than the flitterer had suspected, and it promptly withdrew its proboscis. Disoriented by the alien nutrients, which were anything but nutritious for it, it wandered about aimlessly for a bit, unable to find its way back out until Doyle slapped his chest and squished it.

  Several minutes afterward, between the excruciating itch on his collarbone and horrible thoughts of what that alien insectal ichor must be doing to his tender and all-too-human flesh, Doyle was half driven to distraction and felt himself headed for madness. He forgot to watch where he was stepping and slid, almost fell, when something slipped under his foot.

  “Watch your step, Doyle,” Kerr’s soft voice came to him. “Use your light shield.”

  “Uh, right,” Doyle replied as he regained his balance. He stopped using his infra shield and stayed with the light-gatherer shield so he could see where he was going. He held his blaster by the forestock with his left hand while he scratched at his collarbone and scrubbed at his chest with his right; between his shirt and glove, it was an ineffectual scratching.

  The battalion advanced slowly. Some of the slowness was due to the difficulty of movement. Some was in order to maintain formation. The part of the Marines’ minds that was aware of the slowness thought it was because of the caution the pointmen and the men on the flanks needed to maintain. The pace was less than a kilometer in a local hour. Such a pace over difficult terrain was exhausting. In the battalion’s right front corner, after two hours, Corporal Kerr was running with sweat. He was tired and found his attention wandering. He focused on Doyle and forced himself back to alertness. Doyle was drenched and nearly out of it altogether. He was vaguely aware that he was losing body fluids far faster than he was taking in water. It took everything he had merely to maintain contact with Schultz and find his footing. Schultz was covered with a sheen of perspiration, but his attention and alertness hadn’t varied from the sharpness he started out with.

  A little more than two kilometers from their starting point, Schultz stopped and lowered himself to one knee. In waves from him, the battalion racheted to a stop.

  “What do you have, Hammer?” Kerr asked.

  Schultz grunted. What he had was a feeling, an impression. There wasn’t a single thing to which he could point and say, “Danger.” Not a dimly seen form, not a print in the mud or a newly snapped twig. Not even a fleeting scent or an unexplained sound.

  A moment later Gunnery Sergeant Charlie Bass came forward to check out the situation.

  “What?” he asked.

  Schul
tz was silent for a few seconds as he continued to study the landscape to his front and his right, wondering how—or whether—to answer the question.

  “Skinks,” he finally said.

  “Where?”

  Invisible under his chameleons, Schultz shook his head. “Out there,” he murmured.

  “Did you see anything? Hear anything?”

  Schultz grunted a negative.

  “UPUD doesn’t show anything, Gunny,” Lance Corporal Dupont said.

  Bass snarled at him. He didn’t want to hear what the UPUD did or did not show. He considered what to say. All reports he’d heard or read said they were up against human rebels. There were no indications they were faced by the fierce, alien beings third platoon had encountered on Waygone. Of course, there were those unexplainable weapons. But the Skinks hadn’t used anything like them. Still . . .

  “If they aren’t here, let’s move out and find them,” Bass finally said. There, he hadn’t reprimanded Schultz for invoking a boogeyman nobody else believed in, nor had he even acknowledged the man’s belief. In his infra, Schultz rose to his feet and moved forward.

  As Bass waited for his position in the platoon column to reach him, he toggled his comm to the company command circuit and reported to Lieutenant Humphrey. Humphrey agreed that he’d done the right thing, and then made his own report to Battalion. Commander van Winkle told him to make sure everybody was alert, then reported to FIST. Brigadier Sturgeon knew about Schultz’s belief that they were up against the Skinks. He was able to follow Schultz’s thinking to that conclusion without having to agree with it. On the other hand, the weapon that had killed two of his Raptors and a Dragon wasn’t in any human armory he’d ever heard of. So maybe they were up against aliens. Elements of his command had encountered nonhuman sentiences twice over the past couple of years, so hostile aliens were possible. And any belief that helped his Marines stay alert and alive was all right with him.

  When Bass talked with Schultz, he used the circuit that allowed the entire platoon to listen without anyone else being able to break in. Corporal Doyle listened closely. His fatigue vanished, his sweat dried up, his sphincters tightened, and so much adrenaline pumped into his system that a touch would have made him twang like a guitar string. Marines from a war centuries past might have described it as “His pucker factor pegged the meter.”

  Skinks? Doyle would have said the word out loud if his throat wasn’t so tight it wouldn’t even let a squeak through. He hadn’t been on the mission to Society 437, the planet commonly called Waygone, but once the secret was out, he’d certainly heard about it. Skinks! He’d heard about them. Lots. If he were more imaginative, they would have haunted his dreams. Skinks! Such a mild name for ferocious creatures. In his imagination they were more than two and a half meters tall, weighed 250 kilos, spat fire, exhaled corrosion, ate living flesh, breathed water as well as air, and could see chameleoned Marines.

  He was partly right. Some of the Skinks were more than two meters tall and weighed more than two hundred kilos. They did breathe water as well as air. They didn’t exhale corrosion, though—but they used weapons that shot corrosive acid. As for the rest of it? Doyle’s imagination was rich enough to have brought on nightmares.

  Suddenly the swamp looked different to Corporal Doyle. Suddenly every shadow held a gigantic, fire-breathing, corrosion exhaling, human-flesh-eating monster that not only could see him, but wanted to kill him. Every cry from a swamp creature was the death rattle of a Marine dying horribly from an encounter with a Skink. Every ripple on the surface of a stream became the trail of a water breather coming to roast him and dissolve his charred remains. Every movement seen in the corner of his eyes was a charging Skink bent on his oblivion.

  Doyle’s blood pressure rose to forehead-tightening level. His throat constricted until breath couldn’t get through to his lungs.

  “Get a grip, Doyle,” Kerr’s voice came over the helmet comm.

  Doyle jumped, and his sphincter gave critical ground. “Ah, shit!” he croaked through a throat that also eased.

  “Smells like it,” Kerr agreed. “Next stream we cross, clean yourself.”

  Partly disrobe in a stream where Skinks swarmed at him? Was Corporal Kerr crazy?

  Unlike Doyle, Kerr had been on Waygone and he had fought the Skinks. He knew firsthand how ferocious they were. He also knew their weapons were short-range. A lone Marine with a blaster could take out a lot of Skinks before they got close enough to use their acid-shooting weapons. Unfortunately, the sight lines in the swamp were short enough that the Skinks would be within range before the Marines could see them. Fortunately, the Marines weren’t looking for Skinks, they were hunting rebels. There was no evidence of any alien sentience on Kingdom. Except for whatever it was that killed two Raptors and a Dragon—and Schultz’s conviction that the Skinks were here.

  Schultz, almost preternaturally alert to begin with, became more so, if such a thing was possible. Against a human foe he was imperturbable. He understood humans and the way humans fought. He was a Marine, and he knew the Confederation Marines were the best warriors in the history of mankind. More, he knew that he was among the very best fighters the Marine Corps had. But the Skinks . . .

  He thought the Skinks were alien. They didn’t live and fight with the same imperatives humans did. Their base, genetic motives were somehow different. He didn’t know in what way they were different, or why they were different. But he remembered the fanaticism with which they’d fought on Waygone, and their fanaticism had combined with their overconfidence and small numbers to allow a lone Marine platoon to defeat them.

  The Skinks were on Kingdom in such large numbers that the local armed forces were being slaughtered, along with large numbers of civilians—Schultz lifted his shields and spat; only the most vile soldiers slaughter civilians—and the Confederation had to intervene. To Schultz, the only way to deal with Skinks was to nuke the entire planet, make it uninhabitable. One Marine FIST wasn’t enough to defeat them.

  Schultz repressed a shiver. He’d been in tight situations before, fights in which many Marines had died. There had even been a few battles he hadn’t expected to survive. But he didn’t believe he’d ever been in as deadly a position as he was in just then. He thought they were all going to die.

  CHAPTER

  * * *

  TWELVE

  “Amen,” pronounced Increase Harmony, the obligatory benediction completed. He raised his head to the others gathered about the conference table. “The City of God shall prevail,” he added.

  “God’s will,” the six men intoned as one.

  “We are as merry as men bound for heaven.” Harmony smiled.

  “That we are, Brother Harmony,” Chajim Nishmath agreed, stroking his long white beard thoughtfully. “Brothers,” he said, addressing the others, “we have important business to discuss this day and time is perilously short.”

  The seven men gathered in conference were the leading ministers of the City of God sect. A neo-Puritan movement, the City of God rejected a formal church structure. Each individual congregation or “meeting” was totally independent of the others that loosely composed the sect. Each meeting had its minister, who provided the congregation with spiritual guidance and leadership in formal gatherings for worship, but his tenure was subject to the approval of the congregation and he could be removed by a vote.

  The career of a successful minister in a City of God meeting had to be highly political as well as theologically sound—the City of God based its creed strictly upon the literal interpretation of the Authorized Version of the Bible, widely known as the King James Version. Each congregant knew his Bible well from an early age, and any deviation from its teachings on the part of any minister or other congregant was fuel for scandal.

  The members of the City of God sect were dour, hardworking, no-nonsense people. They observed no church holidays, dressed plainly always, and, aside from singing psalms, eschewed churchly music of any kind. The City of God was
only a minor sect among the many sectarian movements that made up the political life on the Kingdom of Yahweh and His Saints and Their Apostles, but in times of crisis its members were capable of incredible sacrifice and solidarity, and therefore it had survived from the earliest days of settlement on Kingdom.

  The seven men around the table were the ministers of large congregations, and they had been leading their flocks successfully for years. As long as they lived and preached, their church would continue to thrive. They would allow nothing to interfere with that. They were survivors. And it was a time for surviving.

  “When the Convocation meets tomorrow, we shall remain silent,” Jacob Zebulon reminded them. “We shall sit and listen and bide our time, and in the fullness of time the will of the Lord shall be apparent to the Ecumenical Leaders.”

  The Ecumenical Leaders of Kingdom’s sects were meeting the next day in Convocation at Mount Temple to consider the present crisis. The seven ministers would represent the City of God at the Convocation. Mount Temple was a holy place to all the sects on Kingdom, a neutral spot where they could put aside their differences and meet to solve common problems.

  “They consider Mount Temple a place free of Satan,” Canon Barjona sneered, “but when the sects gather there it is nothing but a temple of the devil!” The others murmured their assent. “I feel unclean even thinking about the apostates who’ll be gathered there tomorrow.”

  “We must be there, brothers,” Harmony sighed. “I have discussed with you before my Particular Faith, brothers, that this Convocation will be most significant to the future of our church.” A Particular Faith, a carryover from the early days of Puritanism, was a divinely inspired intimation sent to men by God’s angels to show them the Way.