by Rick Shelley
Stossen smiled for the first time since Roo Vernon had made his proposal. “Don’t sell the chief short, Bal. If Vernon says they’ll work, two’ll get you five they do.”
“I hope so.”
“Anything new from General Dacik?”
“Not a thing, for nearly an hour now. Nothing anyone can make sense of. The general’s mixer was hit. They’ve got headquarters back up and running, after a fashion, but no one seems to know what’s going on. They’ve got it even more hectic than we do.”
“Small comfort in knowing other folks got worse problems than we do,” Stossen said. “What about our Havocs?”
“We’ve lost three of the ones we kept within the perimeter. The ones roaming free seem to be intact so far.”
“I more than half wish I’d turned ‘em all loose,” Stossen muttered, more to himself than to Kenneck. “Should have. Too late to do anything about that. Keep them moving around as much as possible.”
“Yes, sir. They’re doing that already. The ones outside. Basset is engaging this latest batch of Novas now.”
* * *
“Right twenty degrees!” Eustace Ponks shouted. “Turn us right!”
“I am!” Simon shouted back.
For the last five minutes, the crew of the Fat Turtle had been moving so fast that they were all getting a little confused. Simon had started to turn left instead of right, but he was already correcting his error before Eustace shouted.
“Karl, you got those coordinates punched up?”
“Ready.” Karl sounded relatively calm.
“Keep laying it in. We’re not likely to get any updates for several minutes. The Wasps all had to land.”
“Doesn’t make a hell of a lot of sense shooting at old ghosts,” Karl said. “Be a lot better off to save it for when we know where they are.”
“We’re coming upon the firing vector now. Soon as you can get us aimed, get another AP off. Then we put some distance between here and the next place.”
The turret slid two degrees to the right. Karl hit the firing switch, and the sound of the shot was the only thing audible in the Havoc for a moment. Before Simon could hear the order, he had already swerved the Fat Turtle another 20 degrees right and he had the throttles all of the way to the spots. Although it was speedy enough once it got moving, a Havoc didn’t accelerate with any particular haste.
“Five minutes,” Eustace told him. “Three Wasps are just now taking off.”
“Three? We lost another?” Simon asked.
“I guess, one way or another.”
* * *
Zel Paitcher wandered around the center of the 13th in a daze. A medic had treated the minor injuries Zel had received when his Wasp was overturned by a near miss. The plane was wrecked beyond any hope of repair in the field. Zel had been lucky. He had lost consciousness for only a few seconds after striking his head against the side of his canopy. There were a couple of muscle strains. His right wrist was sprained–not severely. The medic had needed no more than five minutes to treat the obvious injuries.
“You gonna be okay?” he asked Zel, watching the pilot’s eyes closely. “Get yourself back to the field hospital, over by the colonel’s bunker. I’ll tell the doc to expect you.”
Zel had nodded, and had even managed to repeat the instructions before the medic left to treat another casualty, one hurt worse than Zel. For several minutes then, Zel had merely sat on the ground where he had been scarcely aware of anything going on around him. No one else paid any attention to him. They were busy, or looking for deeper holes to crawl into to escape any additional shelling.
Finally, Zel stood up. He held himself erect, as if he were at attention on the drill field. He turned through a complete circle, in slow steps, stopping after every one to survey the area. It was dark and he didn’t have an infantry helmet on. At the moment, he didn’t have any helmet at all. His vision was severely compromised by that. But not as much as it might have been. The sky was clear. There were plenty of stars in the sky. And there were a number of minor fires around. There was some light, certainly enough to let Zel find his way to the field hospital.
For a time, though, he completely forgot about that. He was hardly aware of where he was, what had happened. He started walking around, casually, hands in his pockets, with no thought of the fighting that was going on. Every once in a while, he stopped and called out.
“Slee?” He would wait for an answer. When none came, he shouted again, “Slee, where are you? Enough is enough. The game is over.” And, just once, he sang out, “Come out, come out, wherever you are.”
He had been wandering in circles for thirty minutes before he noticed the flash of intense white light in front of him. But he didn’t hear the explosion of the shell that went off some forty meters from him, didn’t feel the shrapnel that hit.
There was light, and then there was darkness as he lost consciousness, bleeding from a dozen small wounds.
* * *
So far, there had been no wild charges. The Schlinal troops had been content to work themselves as close as they could with reasonable safety, exchanging wire with the 13th while they gradually tightened the ring around the Freebies. Here and there, a Heggie squad or platoon would find an avenue that let them sneak close enough to do real damage for a few minutes. There were plenty of trees to give cover. The 13th hadn’t been able to pick the best defensive terrain ever seen. And there had been no time to prepare extensive artificial enhances out beyond the lines of foxholes.
Sometimes, the lines of bugs did give early warning, but not always. The sensors could not cover every meter of the perimeter. The same could be said for the lines of mines laid closer in. Some exploded when a Heggie tripped a wire. Others were spotted and disarmed. And still others weren’t meant to be tripped in that manner. They were controlled by men of the 13th, to be triggered when the infantrymen had good reason to think that there might be Heggies in the kill zone.
Echo’s second platoon got back to their foxholes just ahead of one of the fiercest of the exchanges. The Heggies had started advancing toward Echo’s section of the perimeter while 2nd platoon was on its patrol. Only luck had kept them apart.
The dead had been noted. The wounded received treatment. Those who could still function were back in their foxholes. There could be no “excused duty” for a wounded man who could still pull the trigger on an Armanoc.
“Take it easy on wire,” Joe reminded the platoon. It was an almost unconscious litany. There was no immediate worry of running out of wire for the zippers, but the experience of Porter had made Joe’s personal habit of being stingy with wire something of a mania that he tried to enforce on the entire platoon.
Although there was no way for human eyes to see the tiny snippets of wire coming, it was sometimes possible to estimate where a flow of wire was coming from, particularly when it was cutting greenery. And, sometimes, a Heggie got close enough, and exposed enough, to show up as a clear image on night-vision gear. Joe saved his wire for those occasions. Behind him, the splat guns on the APCs were putting out more than enough to hold the enemy down. The mudders in their holes could wait for better targets.
Some of them could.
Pit Tymphe was using a lot of wire. He felt no pain from the wound he had received. A soaker had taken care of that. But he remembered the pain. The guy who shot me might be somewhere out there, he told himself. Twice, Ezra told him to slack off, then gave up. His shouting never held Pit back for more than a couple of minutes.
Olly Wytten, the other new man left in first squad, was very stingy of his wire. He waited with cold determination for targets, then squeezed off only the shortest effective bursts. If he had thought it possible, he would have tried to zap each enemy with a single cut of wire. When he did shoot, his fire was accurate. Even at distances up to 150 meters, he would aim for the weak spots in a mudder’s defenses–neck, hands, an
d wrists–and at places where net armor tended to weaken due to flexing, such as the elbows and knees. Most of those sites were unlikely to produce fatal wounds, but anything that cut down on the number of Heggies shooting back was worthwhile.
It was an hour short of midnight when the fighting on Echo’s front suddenly increased in fury. A half dozen tank shells burst in front of the lines, a couple of them within twenty meters, causing some casualties in third and fourth platoons. Several Schlinal splat guns opened up, the first time in this fight that the Heggies had used the heavier crew-served weapons on Echo. Several rockets came in, targeted against the APCs, destroying one and putting another out of commission.
At the same time, the volume of rifle fire increased dramatically. To Joe it seemed as if there were suddenly four times as many rifles firing, and firing longer bursts.
“Watch out,” he warned the platoon. “Sounds like they’re getting ready to move on us.”
RPGs came in next, poorly aimed but close enough to make men duck deeper into their foxholes to avoid shrapnel. Almost simultaneously, two of the mines that second platoon had planted went off.
“Eighty meters out,” Joe reminded his men. “Time to use some wire.”
A distance, a line. Enemies close enough for wire to do real damage. And movement. The Heggies were coming forward now, squad by squad.
Another mine went off. This time, Joe saw one of the bodies being hurled away from the explosion. Accord grenades went out, hand- and rocket-propelled. And wire from every rifle on the line. Another salvo of 135mm shells landed, these behind the lines. Three Heyers were hit, though one of them kept firing.
Joe ducked down for a moment and looked back toward the center of the 13th’s ground. There were more than a dozen fires that he could see. Two of them were fierce, as if fuel tanks had been ruptured. Those fires burned down quickly though, even as they spread to damp grass and brush.
It seemed forever before friendly artillery rounds started landing out beyond the Accord lines, as the Havocs got targeting data. The 200mm shells came in in volleys of three. That had to be apparent to almost anyone. The suspended plasma HE rounds chopped the forest apart. To a radius of fifteen meters from impact, all but the thickest of trees would be felled by the blast. Trees fell, some taking smaller neighbors down with them. Branches were quicker to fall. Fires started, hot enough to incinerate even wet wood and leaves. Or human flesh.
For a moment, the Schlinal wire stopped coming in at Echo. The heat of fires gave the Heggies better camouflage than the night and their uniforms, blotting out half of the night-vision gear of the Accord soldiers. Behind the fires, men could advance or retreat.
“Hold off,” Joe ordered, shouting over the radio, against the noise of another volley of Havoc rounds. “Let’s see if that’s taken the fight out of them.”
The Havoc fire moved off to the right, from Echo’s front to Fox’s, still coming in three rounds at a time, eighty to a hundred meters out. To the left, somewhat more distant, Joe noticed more rounds exploding out beyond the perimeter. He couldn’t be certain because of the distance, but he thought that those were coming in pairs.
I wonder how many Havocs we have left? He blinked several times. There was no way he could know, and speculation was wasted energy. He looked back out directly in front of him. There was still no enemy wire coming from beyond where the barrage had fallen. The enemy, if they hadn’t fled, at least hadn’t regrouped enough to resume the attack.
“Lieutenant?” Joe asked over his private channel to Keye. He waited, and when there was no reply, he repeated the call. When there was still no answer, he switched channels.
“Izzy, Baerclau. Where’s the lieutenant?”
“Out of action,” Walker replied. “Had his helmet blown clear off.”
“Dead?”
“Naw. Medic’s still working on him but says he’ll be okay. Concussion most like.”
“We have no enemy activity at all in front of us right now,” Joe reported.
“Yeah, those Havocs gave ‘em something to think about. Keep your eyes open and your heads down. No sign that they’re pulling out.”
* * *
Dem Nimz and the survivors of two recon platoons had abandoned their commandeered truck an hour before, as soon as they saw the flashes of the battle going on northeast of them. As a parting thought, Fredo Gariston had wired an explosive charge so that anyone opening either of the truck’s doors would be greeted by two kilograms of explosives and white phosphorus.
“Long as it’s not us,” Dem whispered. He had his visor up. The other men were around him, waiting for orders.
“While we’re out here, we might as well do some good. We’ll split into two squads. I’ll take one and Fredo the other. Circle round, left and right. We’re reccers, so let’s do some reconnoitering. Find out how many Heggies there are, where they’re at, and locate any armor they’ve got with them. You all know the drill. We’ve got about four hours till first light. Use that time. We’ll try to meet on the far side by dawn.”
“Who goes which way?” Fredo asked.
“You go north, then east, round on the river side. We’ll take the south,” Dem said.
With no more than that, the two men separated, each gesturing to those he would be leading. They moved apart without a look back. No one complained about the orders. They were reccers. They would do the job as long as one of them was left alive.
* * *
Bal Kenneck had blood on his neck. An eardrum had been damaged by concussion on one of his periodic trips out of the command bunker. Blood had flowed out of the ear for several minutes before he came back inside and someone else saw it and called a medic.
“We’ve got a fight in the air now too,” Bal reported while the medic was still working on him. Kenneck shouted because he couldn’t hear himself speak. “Six, maybe eight, Boems came in and engaged our Wasps.”
“Results?” Van Stossen asked.
“Not good,” Kenneck shouted, “but not as bad as it might have been. I think we’ve lost the last of our Wasps, but they accounted for four, maybe five, Boems first. The rest tore out as quick as they could then.”
Stossen turned away. The last of the Wasps. No air cover at all left. But he quickly turned back to Kenneck. “What about the pilots? Did any of them make it out safely?”
“I don’t . . .” Kenneck didn’t finish the sentence. He passed out.
Stossen moved closer. He could see that Kenneck was still breathing, and he waited while the medic went through a flurry of activity before he asked, “How is he?”
“Pretty rough, sir,” the medic said. “He should be okay, but I’m going to have to keep him out to let the nanobugs do their work.”
“How long?”
“Four hours minimum, sir. I won’t know beyond that until then. If it still matters four hours from now.”
Once more, Stossen turned away, this time from the medic’s brief glance. If it still matters four hours from now. There was that. Almost anything could happen in four hours. Not quite to sunrise.
“Just take care of him the best you can, lad,” Stossen said. “If we’re still here in the morning, we’ll need him.”
“Yes, sir.” The medic’s voice was blank. He didn’t even bother to show resentment that the colonel might think he would do any less than his best for anyone.
* * *
The first serious attempt to breach the 13th’s lines came at the junction between Echo and Fox companies. There was another flurry of RPGs–but no tank rounds–followed immediately by the assault. A full company of Schlinal infantry made the advance, laying down considerable wire as they moved.
At first, the action was too far away for Joe’s platoon to have any real part in it. The angle across the front, and the Heggies’ distance from the line, put them out of reach of any of the platoon’s weapons except for the Dup
uy cough guns. The snipers armed with those were able to contribute in a minor way, but even though the rocket-assisted guns were accurate to ranges over four-and-a-half kilometers, it was difficult to hit a moving target at even a tenth of that distance.
“Stay put,” the first sergeant told Baerclau. “Keep your men watching their own front in case this broadens.”
Joe leaned the barrel of his rifle against the mound of dirt in front of him. Just for a second, he took both hands from the zipper and flexed his fingers. They were stiff.
“We’re watching,” he told Walker. “The Heggies are too far away for us to do much good anyway.”
A protracted blink helped Joe clear his mind of anything but what was right in front of him, his men and the section of forest they were responsible for. He had wanted to ask about Lieutenant Keye again, but this wasn’t the time. Izzy would be too busy for anything but the immediately essential.
Joe looked at the power indicator on his rifle. It was down to 50 percent–still an hour of firing time left. Too soon to replace it. Once more he checked the location of all of the things he had stowed on the ledges of his foxhole–wire spools, canteens, rations. Everything was where it belonged, ready for him whenever he might reach for it.
Let’s get it on, he thought. The sudden burst of impatience surprised him. Too much waiting. The earlier skirmish hadn’t been enough.
Joe pulled back into his hole. Am I getting to like it? he wondered. The possibility was frightening. He had seen men who thrived on combat before, men who only seemed to be happy in the middle of a fight, the bigger and bloodier the better. Men like that scared him.