The Fires of Coventry Read online

  “We’re going in blind, without any idea what the hell we might find,” David Spencer told the noncoms of H&S company. “We’ve got two and a half hours of training time left, with no idea what to train for. We might not have our assignments until we’re in the boats heading down.”

  “So what do we do, teach the lads to knit?” Alfie asked.

  “Might as well, for all the good we can do in a couple of hours,” Tory Kepner said.

  “Run a drill on field skins. That sort of thing, basic drills. Hand-to-hand combat. Remind them about urban tactics. We may have to root the Feddies out building by building, if they don’t burn them all down first.”

  “I really don’t get that, Sarge,” Alfie said. “What the hell’s the point of taking a world just to burn the buildings?”

  “We don’t know that that’s what they’re doing,” Spencer said. “We can’t even guess yet why they’re doing widespread burning. They might be burning selectively to makea point and keep the locals docile. We’ll know when we get there.”

  “Hell of a way to run a war, if you ask me,” Alfie said.

  “I don’t recall anyone asking you. Now, back to your men and back to work. I want squad leaders to inspect all combat gear, especially helmets and field skins. Make sure we don’t jump in with defective equipment.”

  Everyone in H&S Company drilled for combat, even the cooks and clerks, who routinely griped whenever they were called upon to do any training outside of their specialties. Since Spencer had become company lead sergeant, that training had been more frequent and more intense. “Maybe I can’t turn you all into I&R lads, but we’re going to do our damnedest,” he had told them on the day he received his promotion. “Every Marine is a rifleman first. Everything else comes second, a distant second.” For the first several months, he had personally overseen the training of the “other” platoons in the company, all but I&R. Even now, he gave those others more of his attention than he did I&R. He had trained Tory Kepner and trusted him to keep that platoon in top shape. Tory pushed the men as far as they needed to be pushed, and often close to as far as they could be pushed without diminishing returns. Spencer was certain that the I&R platoon still met the standards he had set when he was its platoon sergeant.

  David took a few minutes in the gymnasium to see that the platoons all got into their last training session before Coventry, then went looking for Captain McAuliffe.

  “This looks dicey as hell, sir,” he said when he found the captain. “Not knowing what to expect and all that.”

  “I know.” McAuliffe sighed. “Sit down, David. Take a load off. Nobody’s happy about this all the way up to Colonel Laplace and the admiral—probably all the way up to the War Cabinet. We’ve simply got no choice. We can’t let the Feddies set up shop so close to Buckingham without challenging them fast and hard. Let them get a toehold on Coventry and they could be on Buckingham next, or Lorenzo, or Hanau, or Jersey, or any other world in the Commonwealthcore. If we let them hold Coventry, the entire Commonwealth could unravel almost overnight.”

  “If it’s so bloody vital, why wasn’t it protected better?”

  McAuliffe shook his head slowly. It was a question he had asked himself a number of times. And others. Not even Colonel Laplace had found a satisfactory answer. “I guess what it boils down to is that nobody saw this coming. A minimal invasion force, in before anybody suspected that anything was up. It’s easy to second-guess now. But we’re all still learning how to deal with a real war. After the war is over and the skull-jockeys have had a few years to pick at everything, then maybe we’ll know how to fight this war.”

  “After it’s too late to do us any good,” Spencer said.

  “I guess that’s the way it’s always been.”

  “As long as the Feddies are in the same shape, I suppose it evens out.” There was no conviction in David’s voice.

  “The aggressor always has the edge going in. We’re still playing catch-up. When we were supposed to be going over to the offensive.” He frowned. The officers of the regiment had been given a much more thorough briefing on the disaster on Reunion than the noncoms and other ranks had—more detailed information than had been made public on Buckingham.

  Spencer got to his feet. “When does it all end, sir?”

  All McAuliffe could do was shake his head again. “When one side hasn’t the strength or the money to keep fighting. Or when one side beats the other so badly that they lose the will to keep going. The news about Field Marshal Manchester’s army being destroyed with one blow could have done it to us. If we come a cropper on Coventry on top of that …”

  “You get face-to-face with an enemy, if you hesitate, you die. It’s that simple.” Tory had the platoon sitting on the gym floor. They had gone through one long workout. As soon as this break ended, he intended to put them through another.

  “The only rule is ‘There are no rules.’ No referee is goingto blow a whistle for a foul. No linesman is going to raise his flag to say you’re offside. You kill as fast as you can, any way you can. If you get a chance to put him down by kicking him in the balls, do it. Stomp on his windpipe. Break his bleeding neck. Gouge out his eyes. Do anything you have to. I repeat, anything.” He paused for just a beat. “Of course, the preferred method is not to let it get face-to-face, and if it does, you’ll have a bayonet on the end of your rifle. Just hope it isn’t smeared sticky with marmalade.

  “We’re going to break down into fire teams. I want each man in the team to fight each of his mates, one right after the other. The only way you get a rest is to beat your man before the other two finish their fight. Let’s go. On your feet.”

  As I&R platoon sergeant, Kepner was also first squad’s leader and head of that squad’s first fire team. The three privates in the first fire team were all new to the platoon since the battalion’s first combat.

  Ramsey Duncan had been the first assigned. “The Ram” was an extremely methodical Marine on duty, and an absolute mess away from it. “When I let go, I let go,” he had explained, over and over, until his mates tired of ragging him about his habits.

  Patrick Baker managed to be eternally adequate to any situation—but never rose above mere adequacy. He did what was required, but only by the minimal margin to make certain that his superiors could never fault his work. It wasn’t that he enjoyed the frustration he caused those superiors. He never seemed to notice that. It was just the way he was.

  Geoffrey Dayle was a hard worker. I&R skills did not come easily to him, but he was determined, and he had always managed to rise above mediocre talent with exceptional diligence. Earnest and intense, he had picked up the nickname “the Thinker” within a week of reporting to the platoon. Dayle had one other mark of distinction that no one had noted before. He had been born and raised on Coventry. His family still lived there. Since hearing that his homeworld had been invaded, and that the regiment was movingthere to contest the invasion, the Thinker had not said one word that was not absolutely required.

  “Come on, Dayle. I’ll take you on first,” Kepner said, facing the private directly. “Give it all you’ve got.” Tory moved into a ready stance, balancing his weight equally on both feet, crouching slightly, arms out and a little to each side.

  Tory had fought every man in the platoon in training, and he had spent more time watching the men in action. He knew how each man fought, what to expect. Dayle was always careful about his opening moves, anxious not to make an early mistake, when it could be most dangerous. Always. But this time, Dayle dropped into his ready stance, then lunged quickly, putting his head into Kepner’s stomach as he tipped the sergeant over onto his back, hard. Before Tory could react, Dayle had twisted around and dropped a knee across Kepner’s throat, with just enough pressure to show that he could finish the job in a real fight.

  “Okay, you caught me,” Tory said. My own damn fault, he thought as Dayle released the pressure and let him up. Looking for what I expect instead of looking for anything. That can get you dead
in combat.

  “You caught me for fair,” he said, rubbing at his throat. Dayle nodded and looked at the continuing fight between Duncan and Baker. They had scarcely made contact yet.

  “It’s not a dance,” Kepner said. “Get at it!” Yelling at the others made his own quick defeat slightly easier to bear.

  HMS Hull was the newest Cardiff-class battlecruiser in the fleet. As a result of incremental improvements made over the twenty years since the first had been designed, no two Cardiff-class ships were identical. Any naval officer who had been in service in those two decades would know the basics of the type, but protocol in the Royal Navy required extensive formal study, and testing, before a senior officer could be posted to a new ship—except under emergency conditions.

  Captain Ian Shrikes had taken command of the Hull while it was still in the construction docks, after a nine-month touras skipper of a frigate, and two months of training for the new battlecruiser. He had welcomed the formal training. The Cardiffs were the largest and most powerful weapons platforms in the Commonwealth arsenal. Only the Federation’s Empire-class dreadnoughts were larger. The step up from frigate to battlecruiser was more than just a matter of degree. A frigate had only its own weapons. A battlecruiser also carried a fighter squadron—sixteen Spacehawks—and a full company of Marines. There were more weapons and a more complex infrastructure.

  Coventry would be the first time that Ian had taken Hull into a combat situation. He was nervous about that. Four hours before the scheduled time for the fleet’s last Q-space transit going in to Coventry, Ian woke, and made his way to the bridge.

  “The ship is in normal space,” the officer of the deck reported. He gave the x, y, and z coordinates to three decimal places—figures that meant little to Ian without reference to a chart. “The time remaining until scheduled insertion into Q-space is three hours, fifty-seven minutes. All stations report nominal readiness. There have been no action dispatches from the flagship.”

  “Very good, Lieutenant Zileski. Carry on.” The forms had to be maintained, even though had anything out of strict routine happened, Ian would have been wakened. He spent another ten minutes on the bridge checking things that did not need checking, and finding nothing amiss.

  “I’ll be in the wardroom having breakfast,” he told Zileski. “Be sure to have the next watch wakened in time for them to have breakfast before we go to action stations.”

  “Aye, aye, sir.”

  In the privacy of an empty passageway leading away from the bridge, Ian permitted himself a thin, brief smile. I handled that fairly well, he thought. Admiral Truscott couldn’t have looked or sounded any calmer. Nothing to give the watch anything to talk about. Ian had served as Admiral Truscott’s aide before getting his captain’s stripes and a ship of his own. The admiral was quite the consummate show-man, inordinately calm in front of subordinates even during the most trying of circumstances.

  Captain Shrikes lingered over his breakfast longer than he normally did, chatting with the mess stewards, going back into the galley for a third cup of tea after he finally finished eating, continuing to put on a show of assurance, knowing that rumors would quickly spread that “the old man” was not at all worried about the coming action. Once he left the wardroom, Ian made his way back to the secondary control center, nearly a mile aft of the bridge, to make certain that all was well there. 2CC was always manned, ready to take over control of the ship should disaster strike the bridge. By the time Ian returned to the bridge, only two hours remained until the scheduled Q-space transit to Coventry.

  “Admiral Greene has requested a conference with all ships’ captains in twenty-seven minutes,” Lieutenant Zileski informed the captain as soon as he had gone through the routine report.

  “I’ll be in my day cabin,” Ian said. That was just off of the bridge. Until the end of the Coventry operation, Ian expected to spend more time in that cabin—a two-room suite—than in his other quarters, a deck below and forty yards aft of the bridge. “Ask the steward to bring a tea cart around, will you?”

  Rear Admiral Paul Greene had commanded HMS Sheffield’s battle group for two years. Hull and the two frigates of her escort had been seconded to Greene’s command for this operation. Hence, the Hull had no flag officer aboard, as she would have if her battle group were operating independently.

  Greene had spent thirty years in the Royal Navy before the outbreak of war. That past, and the politics of the peacetime Combined Space Forces, had made him methodical and thorough. He had served in varied capacities, mostly administrative. His first wartime campaign had been as second-in-command to Stasys Truscott, the architect of the Navy’s new tactical operations manual. This would be Greene’s first time in combat as commander of a task force.

  “I wish I could say that we know exactly what the situation is on Coventry, and that we have detailed plans on how to execute our mission,” he said once the meeting started. The conference was holographic. Only Greene and the skipper of Sheffield were actually in the same room, although it appeared that the other captains were also gathered around the admiral’s chart table.

  “The truth is otherwise. We don’t know a lick more than we did twelve hours ago, and won’t until we emerge over Coventry. We will stick to the initial deployment I outlined before. Tell Captain Naughton that I want her to have Victoria’s Marines in their boats ready to launch before we make the transit. I also want all of the Spacehawks of both Sheffield and Hull in their cockpits ready for launch.

  “The first minutes, the first hours, after we emerge from Q-space over Coventry are going to be dicey, and our greatest enemy might prove to be confusion. We’ll have to gather and analyze what information we can immediately upon our arrival, and be ready to meet any quick response from the Federation fleet. Since we can’t be certain how we will find them deployed, battle might come on us literally within seconds. In circumstances like that, confusion would be doubly dangerous. You’ll have to rely on your division chiefs to keep it from getting out of hand.”

  Speakers in every troop bay aboard Victoria sounded the three-note signal that the Marines had been waiting for. It was time to move to their shuttles, to wait—for an unknown length of time—for orders to head down to Coventry. The ship was in normal space. The final Q-space transit, in and out, had not yet been made. For the first time ever, the Marines would make that transit already in their landing craft.

  There was no disorder. The regiment had drilled at this maneuver as they drilled at everything. There was little congestion in the passageways leading to the shuttle hangars. The hangars were widely dispersed, and there were sufficient routes. By battalion and company, the Second Regimentmoved to its landing craft, with weapons and field packs. The guns of the heavy weapons units and the machinery of the engineering battalion remained in their larger shuttles during the voyage, ready for deployment as soon as the men to operate them took their places.

  David Spencer stood next to the ramp leading into the shuttle that service and I&R platoons would ride to the surface, doing a quick inspection of the men as they trotted past him, up the ramp and into the lander. He had his visor up so that everyone filing into the shuttle would be able to see his face clearly. There was no dawdling, no idle chat. The idle chat might come later, while they were waiting, locked up in the shuttle, perhaps with the hangar partially depressurized in case they had to be ejected immediately upon arrival over Coventry. The chat would come only if the wait were prolonged beyond the point where human nerves could tolerate continued silence.

  It was unnecessary, but David also maintained a silent count, making certain that every man in the two platoons boarded the shuttle. The possibility that someone might try to avoid going into combat at this point never entered David’s mind, but nevertheless he did the count, as he did even on routine movements during training maneuvers.

  H&S Company boarded its three shuttles in little more than a minute. For a moment, only three men remained on the hangar floor, one at the ramp of
each shuttle—Spencer, Captain McAuliffe, and Lieutenant Ezra Franklyn, headquarters platoon leader and assistant battalion operations officer. Lieutenant Frank Nuchol, company executive officer and I&R platoon leader, waited for Spencer at the top of their shuttle’s ramp. Nuchol had come into H&S Company after a longish stint as a company commander and I&R tactics instructor in the Marine Training Brigade on Buckingham. His assignment to a combat unit now was to make him eligible for promotion to captain. If he survived.

  The three men on the floor looked at each other in turn. Spencer and Franklyn nodded to the captain, who nodded back, then made a gesture up the ramp of his shuttle. All three boarded their craft at the same time.

  David looked around from the top of the ramp before he moved to his seat. A navy petty officer, the shuttle crew chief, hit the control to close the ramp and seal the lander. As David strapped himself into position, he felt a slight change in the air pressure on his eardrums. The shuttle was using its own air now, cut off from the hangar and Victoria’s life-support systems.

  He took in a deep breath and let it out slowly. Now we wait, he told himself. For all of the practice he had had at waiting in his career, waiting to go into combat still did not come easily.

  6

  The word confusion lingered in Ian Shrikes’s mind, repeating itself as if it were his personal mantra, while the countdown toward Q-space insertion ticked through its final minutes. He sat at the command console, slightly elevated over the rest of the bridge, scanning the half dozen monitors and the ranks of lights that showed the readiness of weapons and power systems throughout the vast ship. Ian had spoken privately with his division chiefs and a few key junior officers, impressing on them the need to remain calm and professional, no matter what they stumbled into when they entered Coventry’s system. He had done what he could. The rest would depend on how well everyone had been trained—including himself.