Starfist: Kingdom's Fury Read Free

realities of combat.
    Myer shrugged. "Who the hell knows? The retardant was tested against acid the chemists at Aberdeen cooked up, but nobody knows if that acid is the exact same as the Skinks'. We aren't going to know until a Marine wearing impregnated chameleons gets hit by the real thing."
    "What effect does it have on the chameleon effect?" one of the other platoon sergeants asked.
    Myer glared at him. He didn't like being asked questions he didn't have answers for. "What'd I just say? The damn things haven't seen combat yet. But they claim it has no effect, the chameleon effect still works." He shook his head. "Not that chameleons seem to give a hell of a lot of protection against the Skinks. Maybe they can see in the infrared like those bird-creatures on Avionia. Maybe they have some other sense that allows them to sense us some other way."
    "Whatever." Myer sat back and slapped a palm on his desktop to end the discussion. "Twenty-sixth FIST brought an extra thousand sets of chameleons, enough for everybody left in 34th FIST to get one, with some extras." He shook his head sadly; he hated losing Marines. "We had more casualties than they realized.
    Anyway, send people to Supply this afternoon, Sergeant Souavi will have them in stock. Your people can pick up one for each of your Marines. The new men already have theirs. Speaking of which—" He picked up a few slips of paper from his desktop and handed them out. "—these are your new men. Don't spend them all in one place, it's liable to be a long time before we get any more."
    He took them outside to where the new men waited and called them out to join their new platoon sergeants. Rokmonov was waiting for Hyakowa. As long as he'd been with Company L, he was a new man too, with third platoon now.
    The general mood in 34th FIST was, if not jubilant, at least relieved. After months of combating an implacable enemy who was hellishly difficult to find, and suffering the heaviest casualties most of them had ever experienced, they were finally reinforced and had replacements for their losses. Not that the new men could fully replace their dead. Close friendships had ended with the lost lives. Although new friendships can grow just as close as old ones, the new friends can never truly replace those lost.
    The mood in Company L of 34th FIST's infantry battalion was perhaps higher than anywhere else. Captain Conorado was back. Lieutenant Humphrey, the company's executive officer, was well-liked and had filled in admirably during Conorado's absence, but nearly everyone in the company had been through multiple operations and deployments with Conorado. Nearly every man in Company L
    trusted their company commander to a degree they trusted no other officer.
    So it was a jocular third platoon that greeted its newcomers when they assembled in the shell of a building that had been nearly demolished by the Skinks' antiarmor weapon. The shell was a couple hundred meters inside the perimeter. Even though they were surrounded by evidence of how far the Skink weapons could reach, just being off the defensive line made them feel they were out of danger, at least for the moment.
    The men of third platoon took the assignment of Lieutenant Rokmonov as their new commander with equanimity. If lost friends could never be fully replaced, neither could their late platoon commander, Gunnery Sergeant Charlie Bass. But they all knew Rokmonov. The grizzled officer had been a gunnery sergeant before he was commissioned. If they didn't think he was going to be as good a platoon commander as Charlie Bass had been, well, nobody was that good, but Rokmonov was probably as good as they came. Like Charlie Bass, he'd been filling a platoon commander's billet on a semipermanent basis. Rokmonov finally broke down and accepted an ensign's silver orbs when 411th FIST, which he was then in, had a sudden influx of company grade officers, one of whom got his platoon. He didn't want to ever again lose his job to a man