Free Starfist: Kingdom's Fury by David Sherman & Dan Cragg Page A

for his blaster.
    Miraculously, no Skinks came through on the far right side of the thin Marine line.
    Corporal Kerr saw peripheral movement and looked to his left. His throat went dry when he saw Skinks closing on the Marines there. For an instant he flashed back to the Siad horsemen who had swarmed into Tulak Yar, the village on Elneal where he was almost killed. He shook himself angrily. This isn't Tulak Yar, he thought. Those aren't the Siad. "Fire left," he ordered, and put action to words.
    Lance Corporal Schultz looked and his skin crawled. He'd fought the Skinks several times, but never in such numbers. The sight of so many so close for the second time in fifteen minutes made him feel like maggots and other tiny beasties were crawling over him, burrowing into his flesh. He rose to a kneel and started picking them off.
    Corporal Doyle held the extreme right side of the line. Ever since the Marine advance stopped, he'd been terrified that the Skinks would flank them, that all the Skinks on Kingdom would attack the Marines through his position. His first reaction to seeing a frontal assault that didn't come directly at him was profound relief. The relief didn't last. As soon as he tried to aim his blaster, he realized that in order to have a field of fire clear of Marines, he'd have to move forward, closer to the larger mass of Skinks he'd been shooting at. In that instant every fiber in his body screamed Run away! Run away! But he knew he couldn't. He was a Marine corporal in the middle of a firefight. No one would ever talk to him again if he ran away.
    Everybody else might die if he ran away. He'd live in disgrace for the rest of his life if he ran away. He crawled forward, closer, so he could blast at the Skinks charging the Marine line. He didn't notice the wet and foulness that abruptly filled the crotch of his trousers.
    All along the line, Skinks closed for hand-to-hand combat. With the infantrymen grappling with their attackers, only the Dragons still fired at the oncoming Skinks.
    Marines began to fall before the overwhelming numbers.
    The crew of one of the Dragons had been killed when Skinks converged on it, sprayed enough acid onto the vehicle's ramp to eat through the thin armor, and broke in. The other Dragons were maneuvering to prevent the Skinks from doing the same to them; the effectiveness of their fire was reduced. The flashing of dying Skinks no longer dazzled the killing ground. Skinks were making it across the killing zone in larger numbers.
    Claypoole and MacIlargie stood back-to-back. Each had his combat knife in one hand and a long-bladed knife wrested from a Skink in the other. Skink body armor was designed to stop projectiles but was less effective against bladed weapons. Half a dozen Skinks lay around them, bleeding from wounds—a couple of them were no longer moving. But others, too many others, were circling the two, wielding knives of their own, tightening their circle. And more were rushing toward them. The scene was repeated all up and down the line.
    Then several of the circling Skinks flared up from plasma hits. An instant later, Marines bowled into the Skinks.
    "Kilo Company to the rescue!" shouted one of the newly arrived Marines. He lifted his blaster and flamed another Skink.
    The loud crack-sizzle of Dragon guns behind the line increased, and Skinks in the killing zone flared into vapor. More cracks of blasters and the louder sizzles of Dragons came from the left front.
    When Brigadier Sturgeon asked who else was able to move and said he wanted more Marines in the attack against the high ground, each FIST in his command ordered an infantry company out of its defensive positions. When the new, stronger counterattack struck, the Skinks broke and ran. Once more the Kingdomite artillery regiments fired on the flat below the heights.

CHAPTER FIVE
    The blood-flecked thing that had once been a woman screamed horribly as an almost fatal surge of electrical current coursed through her