Starfist: Kingdom's Swords Read online

  Top Myer waited until Gunny Thatcher dogged the hatch behind the departing officers, then bowed his head, clasped his hands behind his back, and began pacing to and fro. He hadn’t spoken a word to anyone about it, but he believed the Marines should not be sent in to put down a peasant revolt on Kingdom. He’d never been there himself, but he’d undertaken as deep a study of the world as possible since the FIST got its orders. What he learned fleshed out everything he’d heard during his long career from other Marines who had been deployed to Kingdom. Fleshed it out and underscored it. Personally, he believed the Confederation should simply stand back and let the peasants overthrow the government.

  But they were Marines. They went where they were sent and did their jobs. Nobody said they had to like the mission, much less agree with it. His job just then was to tune up the Marines so they’d go in alert and ready for anything. The sharper they were, the less likely any of them were to get wounded or killed. No matter how much he disliked the mission, he liked having Marines wounded or killed even less.

  He stopped pacing and faced the Marines of Company L.

  “Peasant revolt,” he began in a booming voice. “Most of you probably think this is going to be a cakewalk. You imagine we’re going to face a bunch of poorly armed, ill-trained, badly led farmers.

  “Maybe we will meet unprepared peasants. Probably not, though. You may not be aware of Confederation policy regarding peasant revolts. No military intervention until Confederation lives and property are threatened.” He carefully neglected to say that policy applied only to Kingdom. “Confederation officials and Confederation property are at threat on Kingdom. That’s why Earth saw a need to deploy Marines. Not only are Confederation lives and property being threatened, the revolt must be very widespread. Otherwise we wouldn’t have an entire FIST deployed to deal with it. If it was the Mickey Mouse rebellion many of you may be thinking, the Confederation would send in a couple of companies from an army engineering outfit, or send in military police to deal with it. But they aren’t sending the army, they’re sending Marines. That means someone high up thinks this revolt is a very serious matter, and that the ‘revolting peasants’ present a clear and present danger.

  “Now, just how dangerous can peasants be, you wonder? A millennium and a half ago, China was the most powerful nation on Earth. It had been united under one emperor for centuries, it was the most populous and geographically the largest nation-state on Earth. China secured its borders against potentially hostile nation-states by conquering and administering its immediate neighbors.

  “One of those neighbors was a small country that occupied not much more than a river’s valley and its delta. The country was called Nam Viet. Ah, I see some glimmers of recognition. Yes, the old United States Marines fought in Vietnam, but that was a much later version of the country after it had done its own expansion and was considerably bigger. But the Nam Viet I’m talking about was much smaller, and the Chinese thought it was weak.

  “Two young women, the Tranh sisters, raised a peasant army and threw the Chinese out of Nam Viet.

  “You heard me right. A peasant army, led by two young women, threw the most powerful nation on Earth out of their country. And they did it without outside assistance.

  “In the fifteenth century England was clearly the most powerful nation in Europe. During the Hundred Years War, England conquered France, arguably the most powerful nation on the European continent. A peasant woman by the name of Joan raised an army and threw the English out of France.

  “The American colonies’ revolution against England in the eighteenth century qualifies as a peasant revolt, as does the French Revolution a few years later.

  “The history of the first two-thirds of the twentieth century is the story of peasant army after peasant army in far-flung places rising up and throwing out colonial powers or overpowering despots: Kenya. Tanzania. Congo. The Dominican Republic. Cuba. Algeria. Vietnam. Iran.

  “In the twenty-first century, United Central and Southern Africa was ruled by a despot who controlled one of Earth’s largest and best equipped armies. Two hunters, N’Gamma Uhuru and Freedom Mbawali, raised an army of illiterate villagers—peasants—and defeated that army.

  “Many of you were with 34th FIST when we went to Wanderjahr. The rebellion we dealt with there falls under the heading of ‘peasant revolt.’

  “Are you getting the idea that peasant rebellions aren’t necessarily easy to put down? History is full of examples of peasant armies that rose up and defeated the professional armies of powerful nations. We cannot, we will not, join the ranks of professional armies that were defeated by a peasant army. Be aware, people! We are headed for something that could be far worse than anybody imagines.”

  He was through. It didn’t matter that every one of the “peasant revolts” he’d just enumerated was righteous, just as he thought the one on Kingdom probably was. The right or wrong of the mission was irrelevant; the important thing was to save the lives of his Marines.

  “That is all.” Top Myer began to head for the exit, but a loud voice stopped him.

  “It’s not peasants!”

  He turned to the speaker; Lance Corporal Schultz.

  “What do you mean?” he asked in an ominously soft voice.

  “Study it. No justification for a FIST.”

  Myer gestured for Schultz to continue.

  “History, few interventions. No full FIST deployed to Kingdom in past eighty years. Peasant rebellions aren’t strong enough for a FIST.”

  “So what makes you think this one isn’t an exception?”

  Schultz had to chew on his answer for a moment. He didn’t like to use words, but he had to now. He had figured out something that nobody else had—they had been misinformed about what their mission really was. He had no idea why they were given a false reason, but he knew there was no peasant revolt waiting for 34th FIST to put down. How could he put that in words that would convince the others, especially Top Myer?

  “Only one rebellion was big enough to need a FIST. It had a messiah. Took years to build up. There were many reports before it began. This time, no reports, no news. Everything was quiet until the orders came.” He took a deep breath. The next thing he had to say was a mouthful for him.

  “A spontaneous, widespread rebellion is a major nuisance, but not a major threat. If this is a widespread, spontaneous revolt, it needs time and local forces. Not a FIST. If it is small and aimed at Interstellar City, it will be over before we get there. Don’t need a FIST for a peasant revolt.”

  He took another deep breath to calm himself after that speech, and looked at Myer for confirmation or argument about why he was wrong.

  The first sergeant returned the look for a long moment. Schultz’s reasoning was sound. There wasn’t any military necessity he could see for deploying an entire FIST to put down a peasant rebellion on Kingdom. Kingdom’s rebellions simply weren’t that big.

  “If it’s not a peasant revolt, what do you think it is?”

  Schultz swallowed and slowly blinked. In his entire life he’d only encountered one thing that frightened him, and he thought it was waiting for them on Kingdom.

  Still, his voice was strong and clear when he said, “Skinks.”

  The reply startled Myer so much he didn’t cut off the sudden cacophony of surprise from the Marines. He regained his composure quickly, though.

  “As you were, people!” he bellowed.

  The uproar cut off. Some of the Marines looked at Schultz, wondering how he came up with Skinks. Others looked at Myer, wondering how he would respond. A few, all in third platoon, closed their eyes and shook their heads.

  “I read the dispatches, Hammer. There is no indication of Skinks or of any nonhuman sentience being present on Kingdom. You’re wrong. It’s peasants.” He shook his head. “What I’m going to say now doesn’t leave this room.” He looked around for agreement and waited until it appeared that everyone agreed.

  “I’ll give you benefit of my vast e
xperience in this man’s Marine Corps. Sometimes the Confederation decides to make an example. There have been a lot of rebellions on Kingdom. What I suspect is, the Confederation decided to make an example, to hit the rebels so hard it’ll be generations before they even think of another rebellion. So we’re going in with a lot more force than we need to put down a simple peasant revolt. I think we’re going in to cause enough damage to stop it from happening again for a long time to come.”

  He looked at the faces in the classroom as the Marines absorbed what he said. It was obvious that none of them liked the idea, but they were Marines, they’d do their job.

  “One more thing, people. Just because I think we’re going in with massive overkill doesn’t mean we won’t be facing a serious threat. We are professionals. Amateurs can hurt professionals very badly because sometimes they do things that no professional would ever think of. And remember all those times peasant armies have beaten professional armies.”

  He turned around and left the classroom. Behind him he heard a few men utter the word “Skinks.”

  In the company office the officers looked at each other uneasily. Gunnery Sergeant Charlie Bass was the only one who had encountered the Skinks. The others had secondhand knowledge. Skinks were a bad prospect, but their presence on Kingdom was so unlikely it was nearly impossible, and therefore beyond consideration. What made them uneasy was hearing the first sergeant say out loud what they all privately thought—that they were being sent in to punish as well as put down.

  Bass broke the disquiet. “You know, the Top tends to put his own spin on things in his unofficial briefings. But he’s usually more accurate with his historical facts.”

  CHAPTER

  * * *

  SEVEN

  “High speed on a bad road” was how the Marines described their planetfall maneuver.

  They trooped into the Dragons that were already aboard the Essays in the Grandar Bay welldeck and strapped themselves in. The shuttles were attached to launch-plungers in the welldeck’s overhead. On command to land the landing force, the suction and clamps that held the shuttles to the launch-plunger released their grip, and the tops of the shuttles were slugged with a 100 psi blast of air that ejected them straight away from the ship with a four-g force.

  In one second the Essays were three hundred meters away from the ship, and their coxswains fired their main engines. The sudden surge of horizontal power added three g’s to the four already in effect. The roar of the engines drowned out the yells the Marines made to equalize pressure on their eardrums. Small rockets on the bottom of the Essays blasted to cancel the downward motion of the entry vehicles; the aft retros fired more strongly than the forward ones to angle them for the main rockets to give them a slight downward thrust. Less than ten seconds after launch, the Essays were already past the 1.5-kilometer-long ship. Only the downward thrust from their main engines kept them from being flung into a higher orbit.

  “The shuttle is clear of the ship,” the Essays’ coxswains reported. “Request permission to commence atmospheric entry.”

  When permission was granted, each coxswain punched the button that controlled the topside attitude rockets. The Essays’ computers got confirmation from the ship’s launch control computer and executed the command. Small vernier rockets above the Essays’ noses gave brief thrusts to angle the shuttles downward sharply and convert their orbital velocity of more than 32,000 kilometers per hour into downward speed. Five seconds later the main engines shut off and the Essays went into an unpowered plunge. If their path had been straight down, the Essays would catastrophically impact the planetary surface in less than two minutes. But the glide angle was calculated to take five minutes to reach 50,000 meters above the surface, where wings deployed and the forward thrusters fired to drop speed to something that could be controlled by powered flight.

  “High speed on a bad road” was an apt description for the fall from the top of the atmosphere to the beginning of powered flight fifty kilometers above the surface. The fall through the middle thermosphere felt like the Dragon was driving at top speed on a coarsely graveled road, the gravel getting coarser the farther they went. The lower thermosphere eroded the roadway with potholes and bumps; some of the potholes seemed deep enough to swallow the Dragon whole, some of the bumps should have flipped it over. By the time the breaking rockets fired and the wings began to deploy, the shaking and rattling was so hard that the Dragons inside the Essays felt like they were coming apart.

  Breaking rockets and deploying wings quickly cut the angle of the dive, and slashed its speed in half by the time the Essays reached the top of the troposphere. When the wings were fully extended, huge flaps extended from them to further decrease the Essays’ speed. When the wings finally bit into the thickening air hard enough for controlled flight, the coxswains turned off the breaking rockets, fired up the jets, and maneuvered the craft into a velocity-eating spiral that slowed both their descent and forward motion. At one thousand meters altitude, the coxswains pulled out of the spiral and popped drogue chutes. At two hundred they angled the jets’ vernier nozzles downward. Seconds later the shuttles rested on the surface of the ocean, a hundred kilometers off shore.

  The coxswains checked that the Dragons were ready, then opened their landing hatches. The Dragons—air-cushioned, light-armored, amphibious vehicles—rose on their cushions and splashed onto the water. They lined up abreast and headed for the horizon and the shore beyond.

  That was a combat assault planetfall. The Confederation Army used it when they expected to meet resistance. The Marines used it every time they made planetfall, even on peaceful missions. Everybody else thought only crazy people would ever make a combat assault planetfall when it wasn’t necessary.

  The Leader could barely restrain his excitement when he was ushered into the presence of the Great Master commanding the operations on the Earthman world. It would be the first time he’d spoken directly to a Great Master, and the honor was much.

  The Great Master sat cross-legged on a low chair set on a dais high enough that he could look down on even the tallest of the Large Ones. Five Large Ones were arrayed around the Great Master; one to either side facing front, another behind each of them facing to the side, and a fifth behind him facing the wall to the Great Master’s rear. The sheathed sword that lay across the Great Master’s thighs had an ornately carved hilt, but the Leader had no doubt its blade was sharp and strong enough to slice through flesh and bone easily.

  The Leader approached the dais as he had been instructed, back bowed, eyes on the matting that covered the floor. When he saw the discreet mark woven into the matting’s pattern he stopped and lowered himself to his knees. He didn’t need a nudge from the chamberlain to tell him he was there. Hands just under his shoulders, he touched his forehead to the matting and waited.

  “Lord,” the chamberlain barked, “this worthless Leader wishes permission to make a report.”

  There was a pause before the Great Master growled, “Report.”

  “Lord Great Master!” In that posture, doubled over and forehead on the mat, it was difficult to speak loudly enough to be heard clearly, but the Leader was happy that he managed so well. “The Earthman Marines have landed!”

  “You know this as fact?”

  “Yes, Lord Great Master!”

  “Raise your face.”

  The Leader craned his neck to look up at the Great Master, but kept his shoulders low, just above his hands, flat on the matting.

  “How do you know the Earthman Marines have landed?”

  Speaking in that posture was no easier, but the Leader found it was easier to project his voice. “Lord Great Master, with my own eyes I saw the streaks of their shuttles plummeting from orbit to beyond the horizon. I waited until I saw their amphibious craft speeding toward the beach, then I came directly here.”

  “How did you come that their surveillance satellites could not track you?”

  A thin smile creased the Leader’s face. “Lord
Great Master, the Earthmen were in too great a hurry to land their Marines. They made planetfall before the surveillance satellites were deployed.”

  The Great Master barked out a laugh. The Earthman Marines were ashore without knowledge of who they were up against or where they were. He looked at the chamberlain. “You have the coordinates?”

  The chamberlain bowed. “Yes, Lord Great Master. They are on their way to Haven.”

  “Launch Dawn Bird.” The Great Master returned his attention to the Leader. “Perhaps you are not worthless. Leave me.”

  Perhaps not worthless. The Leader exalted at the high praise! He pushed himself to his feet and backed away, back bowed, eyes on the matting.

  Haven, capital city of Kingdom, though less than two centuries old, looked like something out of a history vid about Old Earth’s Middle Ages. The entire city seemed to be constructed from native stone and wood—even the avenue that led up to the city was paved with flat stones. Horses—horses!—pulled clattering wagons in and out of the gate in the stone curtain wall. That wall was a false front; a palisade wall of tree trunks circled the rest of the city. Most of the buildings visible above the wall appeared to be houses of worship. The tallest was a minaret, though the unfinished bell tower on a Gothic cathedral aspired to top it.

  The Marines, unbaptized heathens that they were, weren’t granted entrance to Haven. Instead, a troop of Guardian Angels met the lead Dragons and directed them to a large field on the other side of Interstellar City from Haven’s walls, where Ambassador Jay Benjamin Spears and Chief-of-Station Prentiss Carlisle met them.

  As unfamiliar with the military as Prentiss was, even he realized immediately that the distinguished-looking Marine who was the first man to leave the lead Dragon must be the commander. But not Spears. His face broke into a wide grin as he stepped forward and offered his hand. “Ted, you old rascal, you!” he shouted.