Starfist: Firestorm by David Sherman & Dan Cragg

as close to the dirt as a prone man.
    “Left five, fire !” Bass ordered, and all the weapons fired again, each Marine aiming along the same line but five meters to the left of his previous shot. “Left five, fire !” Again, the aiming point shifted to the left. “Right ten, fire !” The Marines fired again, close to their original aiming points. “Right five, fire !” Once more, the plasma bolts shifted their strikes to the right.
    The two companies of Coalition soldiers had to be suffering such heavy casualties that it was only a matter of time before the survivors would have to surrender. But where were the vehicles the Marines had heard deeper in the forest?
             
    Sergeant Flett and Corporal MacLeash wasted no time getting their unmanned aerial vehicles aloft, even though Flett grimaced at not camouflaging them before launch. All living planets had fliers; giant insectoids, avians, reptilians, mammalian, something . The Marine UAVs could be disguised as almost any flier of the right size—and almost always were. The camouflage mimicked not only the outer appearance of the selected fliers, but aped their movements as well, and even their infrared signatures. Flett didn’t know why Company L’s UAV team hadn’t been issued camouflage kits for the raid, possibly because higher-higher didn’t think the FISTs on the raid would be on location long enough to need them. Whatever the reason, the kits hadn’t been issued. So he and MacLeash launched their UAVs without camouflage.
    The UAVs were battle cruiser gray, about half a meter nose to tail, with slightly mobile wings a few centimeters longer than their fuselages. The two UAVs lifted on command and headed toward the forest along divergent paths until they were a hundred meters apart. When they reached the trees, UAV 2, guided by MacLeash, flew a hundred meters above the canopy, high enough to look down into the trees in both visual and infrared, to see through all breaks in the overhead. Flett flew UAV 1 low over the canopy. The UAV team leader watched not only his own monitors, but those for UAV 2 as well, looking for places where UAV 1 could duck beneath the canopy to investigate more closely and then come back up. Less than a minute after launch, the two UAVs were over the forest, moving in the direction of the vehicle noise. Seen from above, the canopy was dense, but spottily broken. Flett ordered MacLeash into a search pattern to the right of the midline of the sounds and raised his own altitude by fifty meters to run a search pattern left of the center line.
    Half a kilometer in, they began to see fleeting images of camouflaged vehicles moving toward the fields. Flett sent MacLeash to orbit his dive area, then dipped below the canopy. UAV 1 had to go lower than Flett anticipated; seen from the top, the canopy looked like it spread horizontally with plenty of air between the leaves and the ground. But that wasn’t the case below; the foliage was thick and bushy halfway to the ground, so Flett had to drop his UAV down to less than ten-meters’ altitude to see more than directly below the airborne vehicle.
    And had to dart right back up bare seconds later when fire from multiple crew-served weapons began to converge on the UAV. Flett had to maneuver the UAV violently to avoid crashing into branches, and to keep from being hit by the streams of fléchettes that pursued it.
    UAV 1 might have been below the canopy only seconds, but it was long enough for the bird to scan an arc of almost 120 degrees of the land under the trees in visible light and transmit its findings. Flett made sure the data stream was saved as he climbed to five hundred meters and ordered MacLeash to do the same. As soon as the two UAVs were at that altitude and circling with their infrared detectors trained on the forest below, Flett transmitted his brief view of what was on the forest floor to Captain Conorado. He took a few seconds to scan the images himself, then went