First to Fight Read Online Free

He listened, then said, “The only people standing are Panchos. With any luck the heat’ll pass over us and hit them. Do it now.”
    A squad of bandits was directly in front of them. Bass gritted his teeth as he fired at the enemy.
    “Bring it in closer!” Procescu shouted into the UPUD. Bass knew what that meant—they were going to be crisped by their own fire. Either way, from bandit fire or from their own Raptors, they were dead. At least it’d be fast, and they’d take most of the bandits with them.
    Suddenly the screams of diving turbojets smothered all other sounds and briefly stunned the combatants. Bass flicked on the all-hands channel. “Everybody down, now !” he ordered.
    “Get as flat as you can,” Procescu added, “get behind a ridge or a rock. This is going to be close.”
    The double-mach-plus Marine Raptors screamed almost straight down from the heavens. When the lead aircraft was still little more than a rapidly growing, shiny speck in the sky, it was stitching a line of plasma bolts from the bottom of the gorge to halfway up the left slope, barely fifty meters from the trees. Just when it looked as if it was going to follow its bolts into the holocaust in the gorge, its forward vernier jets flamed, bouncing it back skyward. Before the lead aircraft finished its maneuver, its wingman twisted to stitch bolts up the right side of the gorge.
    The bolts from the Raptors’ cannons were to the bolts of the assaulters what the assaulters were to hand-blasters. Each bolt vaporized whatever it struck, leaving a steaming hole nearly five meters in diameter. Molten rock pooled at the bottom of each crater. Gouts of lava flew everywhere; some landed harmlessly on rock and quickly solidified, some charred trees or set them ablaze, some killed men.
    The wave of heat expelled by the explosions washed across the open and incinerated anyone in its path. The foliage on the nearer trees flashed vapor and the outermost line of trees burst into flame. For twenty-five meters into the trees, anyone standing was hit by a wall of superheated air that seared lungs and peeled off skin. Most of the bandits were in the open or standing in the first twenty-five meters of the tree line. Not all of the Marines were behind something that could deflect the heat wave.
    The stunned survivors picked themselves up and took stock. The few bandits who survived were in full flight. But Procescu was dead, as were Lieutenant Kruzhilov and Staff Sergeant Chway and everybody who had been on the right flank with the platoon sergeant and the assaulters. LeFarge was gone—instantly vaporized—and the UPUD lay on the ground, now a thoroughly useless, half-melted chunk of slag. Half the Marines who began the day with the Bravo unit were dead. A quick survey told Bass ten times as many bandits had died in the fight.
    ‘That’s too damn many good Marines died today,” Bass said to himself.
    Third platoon’s comm man had hidden behind a good—size boulder during the air attack, so both he and his UPUD survived. Bass used it to report the results of their fire mission to Flamer and to request pickup. While awaiting it, he looked at the black box with disgust. If the damn thing had worked right, they would have had air support before the bandits made their assault, and not so many Marines would have died.
    Half an hour later the survivors of Purple Rover Bravo and the corpses of their dead—as much as could be found of them—were aboard hoppers, flying back to Battalion.
     
    “You what ?” Daryl George exclaimed in amazement. “No, no, no-no-no, you can’t blame me for your incompetence! No wonder the you-pud didn’t operate the way you expected it to. You aren’t supposed to separate the satellite units from the company you-pud.”
    “Say again?” Bass demanded. His fists clenched and he took a step toward the manufacturer’s rep.
    George spoke quickly. “Only the company command unit Universal Positionator Up-Downlink uplinks to