Starfist: Kingdom's Fury Read online

  A high-pitched whine, like that of a buzz saw, came from beyond the right end of the Marine line. Seven of the dozen Marines who had already reached their feet were knocked off them: one had an arm torn off just above the elbow; two fell with most of their torsos blown away; one, sideways to the line, stared down in horror at where his abdomen had been before he fell dead; another tried to take a step and collapsed when one leg detached itself at the hip; the Marine closest to the whine flopped legless to the ground, his feet up to mid-calf still standing. Ensign Cainey’s head erupted in a mist of pulverized blood, bone, and brain.

  The skull-splitting whine continued. Dirt gouted, rocks shattered, and saplings splintered as the weapon’s projectiles hit, but the Marines were safe below its trajectory.

  “First squad, maneuver right!” ordered Staff Sergeant Groap, the platoon sergeant. “Stay behind cover! Second squad, use your infras. Return fire but make sure who you’re shooting at.” Damn! He realized that most of the casualties were from second squad and its attached gun team. “Second squad, report.”

  Before all the fire teams of second squad could report, they were hit from the marsh. Small, dun-colored figures with tanks on their backs and hose nozzles in their hands rose from the water and sprayed streams of viscous, greenish fluid at the Marines who were trying to return fire at the weapon that had just killed half of them. Two of the seven Marines remaining in second squad and its gun team shrieked in agony as the acid hit exposed skin and began eating flesh and bone. The other five were either well enough protected by rocks or trees or the topography, or the acid only hit their chameleons.

  Ransfield dropped the UPUD and pulled his blaster into his shoulder. He brought it to bear on one of the Skinks in the water and fired. Even though the Marines of 26th FIST had been briefed on the phenomenon, he was still startled when the Skink vaporized in a brilliant gout of flame. Quickly, he shifted aim and flashed another Skink, and a third. Staff Sergeant Groap, only a few meters away, was also firing and flaming Skinks in the water. The high-pitched whine continued from the right but didn’t seem to be hitting anyone.

  The Skinks in the water became aware of the two Marines firing at them. Their Leader barked out shrill commands, and they leaped out of the water and charged, wildly spraying green acid as they closed into range. Five more of them went up in flame as they ran.

  “Move!” Groap ordered Ransfield. The two scuttled backward, firing at the more than a dozen Skinks that were still charging and spraying acid.

  The crack-sizzle of a blaster came from their right. The Skinks had come in sight of one of the survivors of second squad, and another Skink flashed brightly into vapor. At a shrilled order, three attackers veered toward him. One of them got close enough to drop a flow of acid across that Marine’s back. His uniform saved him.

  Suddenly, so many crack-sizzles came from farther right they almost blurred into one, and the whine of the shredding weapon shuddered to a stop.

  A shrill voice barked out commands, and the remaining Skinks spun about and raced for the water. Groap and Ransfield snapped off more plasma bolts at them, and only three Skinks managed to reach the water and disappear under the surface.

  The blaster fire from the extreme right stopped.

  “Squad leaders, report!” Groap snapped into the all-hands circuit.

  A moment later the first squad leader reported in—no casualties, enemy on the flank defeated, no enemy wounded or prisoners. Second squad’s report came in piecemeal. Five of the thirteen Marines were uninjured, five were wounded, three were dead.

  Groap organized a defensive position and saw to the care of the wounded while Ransfield called in a report. Minutes later the Alfa Company headquarters ordered them to hold tight while Marines came out to help them collect the bodies of the dead and escort them back in.

  As near as could be determined from the debriefings, first platoon had killed between twenty-five and thirty Skinks. The Marines had lost three dead and five severely wounded, and held the ground at the end of the firefight. By any conventional measure, it was a victory. But the way the Marines of first platoon, Alfa Company, 26th FIST saw it, they’d just gotten their asses kicked.

  CHAPTER

  TWO

  “Father? Shall we ever be able to go home?”

  Zechariah Brattle shook his head sadly. “Not as long as evil lurks out there on our land, Samuel.” He nodded toward the hills above the Achor Marshes on the shores of the sea of Gerizim. “New Salem anymore, son, is as far away as—as Earth.”

  None of the families that had somehow survived the massacre of their camp above the sea wanted to think about the horror of that night. Only two weeks in the past, it was too fresh in their minds. They were concerned now with simple survival.

  “Why did God allow this to happen to us, Father?” The question was not an accusation, just a young boy asking someone he respected for an explanation of something monstrous: Why had a decent and righteous people been destroyed?

  Zechariah massaged the back of his neck for a moment. “It is not given to us always to understand why the Lord does things, Sam. This is not the first time our people have suffered woe. I believe God is punishing us now for allowing our ministers to lead us into sin.” He sighed and gazed silently at the far-distant bluish smudge for a brief instant, remembering that dreadful night. He shook his head to clear it of those memories. “But Sam, instead of dwelling endlessly upon what happened back there,” he nodded toward the distant blue line on the horizon, “we should ask what lesson is in all this for us. We have been spared for a reason. We must be brave now and face the future.”

  But Zechariah was ashamed of himself, ashamed of the way he and the other survivors had fled the scene of the massacre pell-mell, stumbling through the darkness that night, concerned only for their own survival. Neither he nor any of the other men among the survivors had mustered the courage since to go back to the site and search for survivors.

  The Brattles, Hannah Flood and her children, and five other families—forty souls in all—had made it to some caves on the south end of the Achor Marshes and had remained hidden there for a week now. During the day, they could barely make out the dark line on the horizon that was the hills above the sea, the place where the City of God sect had been wiped out by . . . None among the survivors was sure who had slaughtered their friends and neighbors, but they all agreed that the killers could not be of this world.

  The Brattles and Hanna Flood’s family were among the several that departed the City of God camp the night it was revealed how the sect had commissioned an act of terrorism—the destruction of the deep-space starship Cambria, its crew, passengers, and cargo—to focus attention on the sect’s persecution by the rulers of Kingdom and, they believed, the Confederation of Worlds. The terrorists called themselves the “Army of Zion,” which to Zechariah and other faithful communicants smelled of blasphemy. Murder was not a tenet in the beliefs of the neo-Puritan sect that called itself the City of God. In fact, as the survivors now knew, the removal of the sect to the Sea of Gerizim had been a preventive measure, engineered by their leaders to avoid retaliation when their sponsorship of the deed became known. The only good thing to come out of the attack was that, presumably, Minister Increase Harmony and his cronies perished along with the thousands of innocents.

  The Brattle family had only proceeded a few kilometers along the road back to their home in New Salem when the attack took place. None of them would ever forget it. An earth-shaking roar had suddenly descended upon them from the night sky, a tidal wave of noise so powerful that their clothing and the flesh beneath it vibrated from the concussions. At first Zechariah thought the Angel of Death had come to punish the sect for transgressing the Word, but he soon realized that a fleet of aircraft was passing directly over where they stood. The machines swooped down on the encampment, trailing blinding streams of flame, and then, abruptly, all went dark and unnaturally quiet.

  Instinctively, Zechariah reached for his wife C
onsort’s hand, and in the dark he put his free arm around his son and daughter and drew them close to his side. It was so quiet they could hear one another’s breathing. After a few moments Zechariah’s hair stood on end as a low groaning sound reached the group over the several kilometers that separated it from the plateau where the body of the sect had taken refuge. The sound came in undulating waves, not loud but distinct—the unmistakable expression of thousands of voices raised in a merging scream of primal fear. It reminded Zechariah of some old paintings he had seen illustrating the tortures of the damned in Hell. That terrible moaning would have been the perfect audio accompaniment to those frightening scenes.

  In a short while the sound died away completely and total silence and darkness enveloped the small group.

  For what seemed a long time—but was no more than ten minutes—the group stood there silently, waiting for the machines to come for them. But nothing happened. Zechariah glanced to the south. In the bright starlight he could easily make out the narrow outline of the road leading back to New Salem and their homes and fields.

  “We must get out of here,” he whispered to Consort. His words seemed to break the trance the others had fallen into.

  “Back to New Salem!” a man standing nearby with his family whispered.

  “No!” Zechariah whispered vehemently. None of them dared talk above a whisper lest whatever had attacked the camp hear them and come their way. “No,” he repeated. “For all we know, the fliers came from there and will go back there. Aren’t there caverns in the hills a few kilometers to the southwest of here? I say we leave the vehicles here, load up with what supplies we can carry, and strike out on foot for the caverns.”

  There was a brief whispered conference, but it did not take much convincing for everyone to agree that Zechariah was right. “What of, what of . . . ?” a woman asked, nodding her head back toward the plateau.

  “When they leave, we will come back and search for our brethren, but now we must save ourselves,” Zechariah answered. “Let us gather our things and depart this place. Everyone, maintain the utmost silence until we are far away from here.”

  The “few kilometers” to the caves turned out to be closer to a hundred, and the trek took them four days. They covered the distance at night and hid in the brush during the daytime. Meanwhile, nobody came after them, and the aircraft were not seen again until they had reached the precarious safety of the caves.

  “Keep watch, son,” Zechariah told Samuel. He patted the boy on the shoulder and left him sitting just inside the cave entrance, scanning the far horizon for any sign of life or activity. Two days earlier aircraft had been spotted. From so great a distance the refugees could not tell whose they were, but the machines moved so fast, Zechariah was convinced they were not Kingdomite or Confederation craft. It had been some years since the City of God had been involved in any of the sectarian wars that plagued life on Kingdom, but Zechariah was familiar with the standard military fighter-bomber aircraft in use by the armed forces, and what they had seen were not of those types.

  The sight of the machines struck animal fear into the survivors, and most of them rushed far back into the interior of the caves and covered their heads, crying out to the Lord for mercy. But Zechariah had remained steadfastly on watch, following the craft as they disappeared rapidly to the south, toward New Salem. But he had quaked as he crouched there, perspiring, limbs weak with fear.

  That had been two days ago. Now, Zechariah arose and walked back into the cave. “Rise up!” he shouted at the people crouching about their cook fires. “Let us seek Divine guidance.” Slowly the others gathered around him. When they were assembled, he began, “I am reminded, friends, of the 119th Psalm of David, Verse Ninety-two, ‘Unless thy Law had been my Delights, then had I perished in my Affliction.’ We have been sorely afflicted, friends.” Murmurs of agreement arose from the others. “We have been afflicted because we strayed from the Law and allowed vain and foolish men to lead us into evil.

  “But friends, we must have a clear and strong persuasion of a future state. We must be heartily willing to wait for the fulfillment of all the promises of the Covenant of God until our arrival at that world, where we shall have all the spiritual blessings of the heavenly places bestowed upon us. We should be content and patiently and cheerfully allow of it that we are willing to let our crucifixion go on with a perpetual succession of pains without any prospect of any relief, but at and by the hour of our death.”

  Zechariah looked at the faces around him in the flickering firelight. There were tears in some eyes. “Let us pray.” He bowed his head. Silently and earnestly, he begged God to favor him with a Particular Faith, a sign of prophecy granted to the faithful, an intimation perhaps transmitted by an angel, that a particular prayer would be answered. He begged the Lord to give him some sign of what they should do.

  After a full two minutes of silent prayer, Zechariah raised his head and looked around the cave. “Well?” he asked, looking into the assembled faces to see if the Lord might have favored someone else with a Faith. Some smiled, some nodded their heads, but there was no Faith there today.

  “That was a fine sermon, Zechariah,” one of the men said.

  Zechariah felt better. Prayer, even prayer that was not answered immediately, was good for him. The small cooking fires glowed dimly. The survivors had managed to salvage much of the personal belongings they’d taken with them after the schism on the night of the disaster, so they were not without some food and clothing and tools. To reduce the volume of smoke from the fires, they used a native plant whose roots burned slowly and generated little smoke. Their meager food supply was supplemented with the small lizardlike creatures that abounded in the caves.

  Silently, Consort ladled Zechariah a small bowl of thin stew, which he sampled halfheartedly. But he finished the stew quickly, more hungry than he had thought, and set the empty bowl down. “We need some salt to cover up the taste of this grit.”

  “And running water,” Consort added. Since they did not have a running water supply in the caves, their eating utensils had to be cleaned with sand from the floor, so all the food was gritty. The water they drank came from a tiny, intermittent trickle far back in the depths of the cave. The flow was precarious, and the spring water had had to be rationed. No one had bathed in a week. “Zach,” she continued contemplatively, “I never knew how ‘rich’ we were, back in New Salem. We had good food, a roof over our heads, running water . . .” her voice trailed off.

  “And the Lord was with us,” Zechariah added automatically. Then he started and a strange expression came over his face.

  “Zach! What is it?” Consort reached out a hand and laid it on her husband’s shoulder.

  Zechariah stood. “Connie, it is time for us to go back to the camp.” He turned from his fire and strode to the center of the cave. “Listen, everyone! Come to me. I am going back to the camp. Who will go with me?”

  The others shuffled into a rough semicircle around where Zechariah stood. All remained silent for a moment, the firelight casting huge shadows upon the cavern walls and flickering over their impassive faces. “The Lord will go with us, as He always has,” Zechariah added quietly.

  They were all afraid, he could see it in their eyes. Then: “I will,” Hannah Flood announced loudly. She looked at the others.

  “As will I,” Amen Judah volunteered, nodding at his wife Abigail, who involuntarily held out a restraining hand but then took it back immediately. She bit her lip to hold back her tears.

  “And I too, Father,” said Comfort Brattle, Zechariah’s daughter.

  Zechariah started involuntarily. “You are too young,” he protested.

  “I am twenty, Father, and strong and not afraid . . . well, not afraid to go with you,” she added.

  Zechariah hesitated. It would not be fair to the others if he rejected his own blood for what would appear to be the sake of saving it. He had always advocated a person’s responsibility to the community. If Comfort had th
e courage to volunteer, then he would take her. “That’s it, then. The four of us will go,” he announced. “There are enough elders to remain behind to take care of the children, if we don’t . . . don’t . . .” his voice trailed off. It seemed the other members breathed a sigh of relief as they came forward individually to wish the party well.

  “Zach,” Amen said, “I suggest we leave tonight.”

  “Yes,” Hannah added. “Let us go as we came, in easy stages, moving in the darkness. We can get water on the second day, at the pond we passed coming up here. We won’t need much food.”

  Zechariah put his arm around his daughter and drew her close as he talked to the other two. “Good. Let us take with us whatever tools we can use as weapons. We have some knives among us.” He knew perfectly well that the few knives they had would be useless if whoever had attacked the camp returned, but knives were all they had, and the possession of even those useless tools might give them some slight confidence.

  “Father! Let me come too!” Samuel shouted. He had come back from his post at the cavern’s mouth, attracted by the sound of the meeting his father had called.

  “No!” Amen Judah shouted. He looked at Zechariah. “No,” he continued more softly, “you must stay with the rest. We cannot spare all our manpower on this venture.”

  “You have left your post, Samuel. Get back to it at once,” Zechariah said. When Samuel made no move to return to the cavern entrance, his father stepped up to where he stood, seized him by the arm and dragged him back. “Boy, you are a watcher! You watch. You observe. You report what you see out there. You do not leave this spot until relieved by another watcher. The next time I give you an order, dammit, you will obey it, understand?” Zechariah breathed heavily as he spoke.

  Samuel looked up at his father in astonishment and with a twinge of fear. He had never heard him speak that way before. The tone of command was a dimension to his father’s personality he did not know. “We are like soldiers now, son,” Zechariah continued in a gentler voice. “Like those Confederation Marines you admire so much, we obey our orders.”