First to Fight (28 page)

“I don’t think they’re ours, sir,” Hyakowa said. “They don’t have Marine markings on them.”

The two Raptors flashed low overhead, the sonic shock of their engines at such close range shaking buildings in the village and sending dirt devils spinning. The Marines all ducked to cover their faces.

Eagle’s Cry shouted, “They don’t have navy markings either.”

“Now this is absurd,” Baccacio called out. “If they aren’t Marines and they aren’t navy, they don’t exist. So they have to be ours. Everybody, eyes front.”

Hyakowa was one of the few who faced him. “Sir, they exist and they aren’t ours. What are we going to do?”

To the southeast the Raptors were beginning a turn that would bring them all the way back around to the northwest for another overflight.

Hyakowa counted to two. When the young officer didn’t give any orders, he did. “Everybody, to your positions.” The Marines sprinted to their fighting positions outside Tulak Yar as though their lives depended on it. In seconds Baccacio stood with jaw gaping, alone in front of the Dragon—its crew had already mounted and was starting it up for action.

The two Raptors completed their turn and came in again from the northwest. This time four lines of plasma burned through the village. Baccacio had seen firepower demonstrations before, but nothing like this, not this close up, and certainly never as a target. He felt the intensity of the heat on his face as structures burst into flame, and smelled the sharp, tangy odor of mortar and rock liquefying under the plasma bolts.

For an instant the villagers were stunned, frozen in place, the attack was so sudden and overpowering. One old man stood gaping at a plasma bolt as it sizzled along the street and vaporized him in a bright flash. The horrified ensign thought he heard a loud
poof!
as the man disappeared. Then everything dissolved into chaos. Men cried out in terror, grabbed their women and children, and ran for whatever protection they could find. Other men ran about, searching for wives and children who weren’t near them. Women screamed, for their children, their husbands, their lives. Children screamed and cried for their mothers, for the protection of their fathers. Many of them flashed into ash as the spitting streams of Raptor fire lanced through them. Houses exploded in the line of the Raptors, those made of wattle and reeds erupting into flames so hot they were vaporized. A conflagration sprang up in the path of the Raptors, and more people were caught in the flames and incinerated. The Raptors passed the village and turned again, more tightly than before. This time they swooped over the village from due north. The sonic boom of their passage knocked over structures weakened in the first pass and by the strafing. The air displaced by their passage sent burning debris flying about, spreading the fire already consuming a swath through Tulak Yar.

But the Raptors didn’t fire this time; their gun batteries held only enough power for one strafing run. Shabeli had thought that would be enough to terrorize the people and panic the Marines, to pave the way for his horsemen. The Raptors made another, tighter turn and ripped over the village again from the southeast, the turbulence of their passage spreading the fire even farther.

Then four hundred horsemen came screaming over the top of the bluff.

As the Raptors made their strafing run, Baccacio dove over the Dragon’s ramp as it closed. Inside, he tried to shout commands to its crew, but Corporal Manakshi, the crew chief, was already calmly giving Lance Corporal Bwantu directions to move the vehicle out into the open where it would have maneuvering room. The Dragon lurched into motion and Baccacio had to grab hold of whatever he could to keep from being thrown about its interior. The Dragon had passed the outermost buildings of Tulak Yar when the Raptors made their run from the north. Rodriguez, the gunner, was ready for them when they made their final pass from the southeast, and he fired the assault gun; but the Dragon’s fire-control computer wasn’t designed to track targets moving that fast and that close.

Kerr and McNeal reached their fighting position and dove into it while the Raptors were making their approach from due north. The concussion wave from the Raptors’ low passage knocked them down and left them stunned and disoriented for a moment. Dirt and sand blasted in through the openings in the shelter, scouring their exposed skin. Pebbles pelted them like hail, and fist-size rocks clattered off the low walls of the position. But the dirt they’d so carefully slagged into firm walls when they built the position held firm.

Kerr flopped on his belly as soon as he recovered and looked back through the entrance toward Tulak Yar.

McNeal knelt over him and looked past his head. Flames were spreading through the village, the screams of the dying horrible to hear, even at a distance. The saliva seemed to freeze in McNeal’s mouth.

“Here they come again,” Kerr shouted, and flattened himself even lower than he already was.

McNeal ducked down to where he could see the Raptors through the entrance.

Then the Raptors swooped low over Tulak Yar from the southeast. The sonic concussion flattened the flames and put out parts of the fire. It also threw about burning debris, and fire ignited in parts of the village that hadn’t yet been touched by the conflagration.

“Why aren’t they shooting?’ McNeal asked.

“They don’t need to, that’s why,” Kerr answered, awed by the way the wind from the Raptors spread destruction.

The sound of the Raptors’ engines changed from a full-throttled roar to a low, receding drone that moved toward the north. More screams, some of them louder than any they’d heard before, came from Tulak Yar. McNeal twisted around and looked out a firing slit. He saw the Raptors climbing to the north.

“They’re going away,” he said. Anger fought with confusion on his face. “Who are they? Why did they do that? Those people weren’t hurting anybody.” He pushed at Kerr to move him through the entrance. “Let’s go, we’ve got to help those people.”

“Watch the other way,” Kerr snapped back. “An air strike usually means a ground attack is coming. Or didn’t they teach you that?’

“Who—”

“Here they come.”

McNeal looked over Kerr’s shoulder. A mass of screaming men with painted faces, wearing furs and feathers, suddenly swarmed through Tulak Yar on horseback.

“Spears?” McNeal croaked. “They’re using spears?”

Kerr put his blaster to his shoulder and sighted in on one of the horsemen. “Those aren’t spears, they’re rifles with bayonets,” he said as he pressed the firing lever. The Siad warrior he fired at suddenly flashed, then tumbled off his horse, a blackened shell.

“They’re using what?” McNeal was shocked.

“Put on your body armor,” Kerr ordered.

McNeal did as he was told, struggling fiercely and awkwardly into the unfamiliar equipment. “Okay,” he said, finished, “I’ve got it on. Trade places and you can put on yours.”

“I’m busy,” Kerr snapped as he shot another horseman. “You watch our rear. They’re probably coming from more than one direction.”

“But we would have seen them,” McNeal objected.

“Do it, Marine!” Kerr snapped. Even if McNeal was right, which he might be, the fighting position was designed to defend from an assault from out there, not one from the village—there wasn’t room for both of them to fire to the rear of the position. McNeal watching the rear did nothing, but it kept him out of Kerr’s way as the corporal fired and fired again. The Siad weren’t coming from the front of the Marine positions; instead they fought in a primitive manner—a full charge from one direction until they were inside their enemy’s position, followed by an every-man-for-himself melee.

Other Marines around the village began firing into the mass of Siad and more of the horsemen fell, blackened cinders. So did many of their mounts—horses’ screams added to the cacophony from the village. But the Marine fire was sporadic; too many villagers were caught in the melee, and the Marines didn’t want to risk hitting them.

McNeal split his attention between watching the front, as Kerr told him to, and looking at the village over his fire team leader’s head. The fire continued to spread. A gasp escaped him when he saw, at the place where he’d befriended young Mhumar soon after the Marines arrived, a mother running with a small child clutched to her breast. The building she was running past was ablaze. A Siad horseman raced his horse up behind her, his bayoneted rifle extended to impale her. A rock rolled under the horse’s flying hooves and caused it to stumble, the Siad’s thrust missing the woman, but the flank of the off-balance horse slammed into her as it passed and knocked her out of sight through a collapsed wall into the burning building. The Siad looked back in time to see her disappear into the building and screamed in triumph, but it was a short-lived victory; before he could straighten around in his saddle, blasts from at least three Marines slammed into him and turned him and his horse into a pyre.

McNeal thought he could hear the woman’s scream, and her child’s thinner wail. Seconds later she came staggering out, her clothes blazing, carrying a second, smaller fire in her arms. She danced in the flames for a long moment until they sucked the last of the life out of her and she collapsed on the ground to join her child in death.

“No more,” McNeal growled, and clawed his way past Kerr into the open. He stepped aside so he wouldn’t block the other’s field of fire, dropped into a kneeling position, and began shooting past the villagers still fleeing the flames and the Siad, into the attackers. With his first bolt he had the satisfaction of seeing a rider lifted off his horse and thrown away. Then he turned to another target.

The spreading flames, lack of victims, and increasing casualties inflicted by the Marines, who were able to fire more freely as the villagers either escaped or were killed, forced the Siad out of Tulak Yar. Some of them raced after the easy targets of fleeing villagers. Many of them didn’t live long enough to complete their charges. The others, singly, in pairs, and in small groups, charged the eight Marine positions, shooting their rifles as they came.

Now that the Siad were in the open and no longer surrounded by villagers, the Dragon was able to open fire with its big gun. Its first blast incinerated a half-dozen Siad who were charging one position. Manakshi ordered Bwantu into motion, and the heavy vehicle slammed into a trio of horsemen, pulping them.

McNeal wasn’t the only Marine who’d left the protection of his fighting position to be able to fire on the attackers. More of them were in the open than were protected inside their fighting positions—but unlike McNeal, they were behind their positions and had some cover during the Siad charge. Nearly half of the original four hundred horsemen were either dead or still chasing the fleeing villagers. The Marines had a Dragon and blasters against the horsemen’s rifles and bayonets, and many of the Marines had struggled into their body armor. But the Siad horsemen had the speed of their mounts and still outnumbered the Marines by at least ten to one. Even so, the Marines were steadily evening the odds as more and more of the Siad were crisped.

Manakshi kept a cool head in the Dragon and had Bwantu run over horseman after horseman, while Rodriguez flamed others with the vehicle’s big gun. But there were too many horsemen. The Dragon had to stop shooting when the Siad reached the Marine positions or it would hit its own men.

Corporal Ratliff stayed cool, behind his position, calmly crisping the Siad charging at him. He never saw the horseman who galloped up behind him and speared him with his bayonet. As the horse leaped over the position, Chan crisped the victorious rider, who fell screaming and writhing in flaming agony. But, swathed in flames, the Siad staggered to his feet and charged, a long dagger clasped unsteadily in one hand. A second bolt disintegrated the man’s dagger arm, but he still came on, howling and burning, collapsing only a few feet from the Marine, the flesh sloughed off cheekbones, nose, ears, lips, his eyelids burned away, his teeth clenched in a dying rictus. The image of the man’s hair burning in a bright blue flame stayed with Chan for a long time after the fight was over.

A few yards away Lance Corporal Lanning sighted on a rider at the very moment the heavy slug fired from a Siad leaning under his running horse’s belly crashed through his brain.

Lance Corporal Goudanis, behind a different position, heard several horsemen galloping at him from the rear and spun about to meet the threat. He took out three of the five while their bullets ricocheted off his armor, before a bullet found his unprotected shoulder, mangling flesh and shattering bone, spinning him around.

McNeal heard thudding hooves from the side in time to twist around and avoid a bayonet thrust. The horse that followed trampled over him. The third man in that group reined in and fired his rifle into the position’s entrance. Kerr shot back and killed the Siad, but not before two bullets thudded into Kerr’s torso and took him out of action. Two other horsemen milled about the front of the position for a moment, then galloped toward Tulak Yar. Manakshi spotted the two Siad, who appeared to be carrying a wounded warrior out of the fight, and ordered Rodriguez to fire at them, but the gun couldn’t swivel fast enough to bring to bear on them.

Suddenly, an ululating cry sounded over the battlefield and the surviving Siad broke off the fight to race to the north, into the nearby hills. The Marines and their Dragon poured fire after them and took down many before they reached the shelter of a fold of land.