by Rick Shelley
He glanced toward Olly’s hole. Wytten was next to Ezra, some meters away. Only the back of the new man’s helmet was visible. Olly was good at all of the skills of a soldier. Maybe he was too intense. Combat hadn’t changed him noticeably. He went about his business with quiet efficiency.
Maybe he likes it too much, Joe thought, unconsciously adding another too.
Too much thinking. Joe took a new grip on his rifle, consciously keeping his hands loose on the stock and pistol grip. One hand at a time, he pulled loose again, flexing, trying to keep the fingers limber. It was too easy to tighten up.
Waiting.
“I LIKE IT,” Eustace Ponks said. He was grinning in satisfaction. “This is the way we were meant to fight.” He transferred another series of coordinates to Karl’s targeting computer, straight from the reccers who were out in the middle of the Heggies. They weren’t even going through CIC or the 13th’s headquarters now. This information was accurate right up to the second that the Fat Turtle received it, without any delays at all. What made it even better was that there was no sign of Novas or Heggie infantry close enough to be a threat.
“Locked on,” Karl said from the rear compartment.
“Fire,” Eustace said, already concentrating on the next set of numbers.
The big gun shuddered in its suspension. Simon started moving the vehicle again. Jimmy ejected the spent shell casing and slid the next one into place. By the time Simon had eased onto the new target vector, Karl was ready to shoot again . . . and Eustace had three more targets for them.
“That last one was right on target,” Eustace reported to his crew. Actually, he was talking two shots back, but it didn’t matter. With accurate, and current, sightings, they were doing pinpoint shooting–all of the Havocs operating outside the 13th’s perimeter.
Forty minutes earlier, the Fat Turtle had rendezvoused with its support van to replenish the Havoc’s supply of ammunition. That transfer had taken fifteen minutes, with most of both crews out in a perimeter of their own, just in case. There weren’t many Novas left to the opposition, for all appearances. Those that were seemed to be operating on the far end of the engagement, out of range. But there was no way to be certain that there were no Heggie mudders around.
The big worry for the gun crews was that the enemy might send in more Boems.
“This rate, we’ll have to stock up on ammo again before long,” Simon said.
“Already laid on, my boy,” Eustace replied, in rare good spirits. “Another forty minutes.”
“Cutting it close, aren’t we?” Simon asked. “The way we’re pumping it out, we could run dry long before that.”
“We’ll be taking a break in a minute. Two more sets of targets. The reccers are on the move again, looking for more targets. We’ve already done for the ones they’ve seen so far.”
The silence that followed after the last shell was out left a hollow ringing in the ears of all four crewmen. Working artillery was like that. Between campaigns, they would all have to take time out for medical treatment of their hearing. If they made it off of Jordan.
* * *
Dem Nimz wasn’t grinning. He had watched the systematic destruction of an enemy infantry battalion with considerable satisfaction, but it wasn’t something he could smile about. A few words of praise for the accuracy of the Havoc fire, a promise to get back on the line with the three Havocs he was personally directing as soon as he had new targets for them.
Then it was back on the move, gliding through the night, absolutely silent. Reccers liked to boast that they could move within fifty meters of any enemy even during the day without giving any evidence of their passage. Dem and the three men with him were doing everything they could to stay farther away than fifty meters. The forest area wasn’t dense enough to give them any real feeling of security. And although Accord battle dress provided some thermal concealment, it wasn’t enough. They would be visible to infrared snoopers, a lot farther out than fifty meters. The enemy might have a picket line out on this side, even though they had to think that virtually all Accord strength was on the other side, penned up neatly by four Heggie regiments.
Dem would have had posts out on the back side, even if he were absolutely convinced that there was nothing to worry about there. He was surprised that they hadn’t found any Heggie sentries yet. And a little worried.
Although Dem communicated by radio with the Havocs, he still limited himself to hand signs with the men right with him. The habit of silence was strong, to be broken only at absolute need.
The four men moved in line. As far as possible, each man stepped precisely in the same places as the man before. If this was done right, and reccers on campaign almost always did it right, the enemy would be unable to guess how many of them had passed. One man or fifty.
Dem took the point himself. Although he trusted the other reccers with him-that was essential in any recon grouping since survival too often depended on reccers being confident of the abilities of their companions–he trusted his own senses more. Eyes and ears, and, as much as anything else, intuition. He prided himself on being able to know when a place, a situation, just didn’t feel right, and his hunches had been correct often enough to support that confidence.
Shadows. Dem watched them, used them, moved from one to the next. Shadows would provide no defense against observation by anyone with infrared gear, but against available-light multipliers, shadows did help. A toss of the coin. Where Accord night-vision gear used both systems, most standard-issue Schlinal gear used only available light. But they did have IR scanners and sights as well.
As long as most Schlinal eyes were facing the other way, the odds favored the shadows.
In the silence, the reccers heard the tank several minutes before they saw it. One tank: the interval between shots was proof enough of that. It was firing and moving, of course, but it seemed to be maneuvering in a remarkably small area. Dem motioned to his companions. They didn’t have any anti-tank weapons with them, so all they could do was locate the tank and call in Havoc support.
“Basset two, this is 1st recon,” Dem whispered into his radio once he could see the tank. “I have a fire mission for you–one Nova, on the move.” He had his mapboard out, held low and only half-open so that the soft glare of its screen wouldn’t give him away. He read off the position of the tank and used his helmet’s ranging capacity to provide a speed and course for the Nova.
“On the way,” Eustace Ponks replied after feeding the data to Karl and the targeting computer.
Dem counted the seconds while he continued to watch the Nova. If the tank took a sudden turn, it could defeat the incoming shell. Time. The flight time for the 200mm shell would be at least thirty-five seconds. Dem wasn’t absolutely certain where Basset two was.
He had reached thirty-eight in his count before the shell exploded. It wasn’t a turret hit, but the shell did impact on the cover of the Nova’s engine compartment. It was enough to destroy the tank. There was an instant of intense light in the night. Dem didn’t get turned away quickly enough to miss all of that. He squeezed his eyes shut, hugging the ground, waiting for the aftereffects to fade from his vision
“Bull’s-eye,” he reported when he could see again. “Good shooting. Be back to you when we’ve got something else.”
* * *
The tip of the Schlinal wedge was still being blocked at the intersection of Echo and Fox companies, but the attack was still being pressed, and broadening gradually as additional Schlinal companies moved forward on either side of the initial point.
Echo’s 2nd platoon was finally directly involved. They had Heggies on their front. The Schlinal advance remained deliberate, cautious, but it was determined. At eighty meters, the Heggies were stopped by the sudden flurry of Accord wire, but the pause was brief. The advance continued, with the Schlinal infantry moving by squads and staying low, moving in, trying to get close en
ough to do damage of their own.
“There on the right,” Joe said, wasting a moment with the unnecessary warning. Sauv Degtree had already seen the men moving there. His entire squad shifted their fire, stopping the Heggie attempt to sneak closer.
A second line of Schlinal soldiers started to move up behind the first, and then a third.
“Izzy, this is Baerclau. It looks like we’ve got a whole battalion looking to walk over us.”
“Three battalions hitting us and Fox. Hang on. Colonel’s sending some sort of secret weapon up.”
“What?” Joe asked, but Walker had already switched to a different channel.
* * *
Roo Vernon was used to carrying heavy objects, but he wasn’t used to running with them, certainly not over any distance. But he was running now, and carrying more than a hundred kilos of cannon–more weight than he would have dreamed that he could possibly carry for more than a step or two. A hundred-plus kilos was his share of the load. One of his mechanics was under the gun assembly with him, and others were carrying the makeshift tripod and several canisters of the gun’s 25mm ammunition. With every step, Roo thought that he couldn’t possibly go one more without dropping his end of the gun, or just dropping. But the colonel had said that the gun was needed to stop a Heggie breakthrough, and the gun was needed a half kilometer from where Roo had assembled the mount.
In the 13th, mechanics and crew chiefs got just as much physical conditioning as any of the line soldiers, but they rode most of the time when the infantry walked. Roo had had more than a decade in the military, all of it doing maintenance work. He wasn’t in the best shape of his life. Still, somehow, he kept going, though not at anything vaguely approaching breakneck speed.
Until he tripped over something and fell. Roo did twist aside so that the cannon assembly didn’t fall on top of him, but the gun went down and so did the man who was helping to carry it. The rest of the team came to a stop as well, trying to see what had happened.
For a moment, Roo could do nothing. The breath had been knocked out of him, and he needed time to get it going again, and to make sure that he hadn’t hurt anything seriously.
“You okay, Chief?” the other man who had been toting the weapon asked.
“Yeah. You?”
“Damn near put this thing through my gut. What happened?”
“Tripped.” Roo felt around for what he had tripped over. His hand closed over a leg. “What?” He scrambled over onto his hands and knees. A leg. A body. He got up to the head. “Lieutenant Paitcher!”
Roo bent closer. Paitcher was still breathing, but he was unconscious: “Medic!” Roo shouted, switching to a radio channel that–he hoped–someone would be monitoring. He flipped on an emergency locator as well, which set off a flashing yellow blip on mapboards and visor displays.
“You guys get that gun in place. I’ll be along as soon as a medic shows up. Leave a couple of cans of ammo. I’ll bring them.”
As the others started to pick up the cannon assembly, Roo said, “Be sure there’s no dirt in any of the barrels. That gun’d blow sky high.”
He turned his attention to Zel again. Roo had never served as a medic, but he did know enough to look for injuries without moving the lieutenant. Heartbeat and respiration: both were low and weak, but steady. No bones were obviously broken. Paitcher had clearly done a lot of bleeding, but there were no gushers, and the trickles that remained looked minor. Nearly five minutes passed before a medic arrived and did his own examination.
“You just found him here?”
“Tripped over him. Haven’t seen him in a couple of hours, so I don’t know how long he’s been here. He gonna be okay?”
“Looks like,” the medic allowed. “I’ll take care of him, Chief.”
“Thanks. I got work to do.”
Running was a lot easier without the weight of a cannon to carry.
* * *
The civilians in the buried Heyer were all showing the strain. Twice in the last hour, Dr. Corey had asked what was going on. Gene Abru had answered her, as well as he could, each time, honestly. Mostly that meant saying that things were a mess and there was no way to tell yet how it would end.
Gene was more than a little nervous himself, but he didn’t show it. He remained almost as motionless as a corpse the whole time. There were no twitching muscles, no nervous mannerisms of any sort. His throat was dry. Four enemy regiments. The 13th is completely encircled. There was good news–few enemy tanks left, no new attacks by Boems, but it still didn’t look to even out the disparity in numbers. Four to one. Maybe even five to one. And the rest of the Accord in no position to help. By morning, they might be lost as well.
A conscious blink. I hope the colonel makes it long enough to tell me when it’s time, Abru thought. If I lose touch with headquarters, I’ll have to go ahead and act.
He would do what he had been told to do, but he would hate for it to be a mistake caused by faulty communications.
* * *
Joe Baerclau had lost count of the number of spools of wire he had used. That was unusual. There was no time, or real need, to count them, but it bothered him that he had lost count. He had just tossed the empties, some out over the side of his foxhole, the rest into the sump at the bottom of it. All that really mattered was that he still had a comforting stack of fresh spools to slip into the Armanoc. The power pack was down below a quarter full. He took the extra couple of seconds needed to replace that. When it went absolutely dry, he might not have those seconds to spare.
No Heggies had actually reached the line of foxholes, but some had come uncomfortably close. There were Schlinal bodies within twenty meters of 2nd platoon’s first squad. Just bodies, no wounded. If any of those soldiers had only been wounded when they fell, the continuing fire past them–in both directions–had finished the work. Once in a while Joe would see a body jerked around as it was hit by misdirected wire. Once upon a time, that would have bothered him. Had bothered him. But he had seen it happen too many times for it to continue to have any effect.
The only bodies that bothered Joe anymore were those of his own men. There were more of those now, in their foxholes. The platoon was down to nineteen effectives, with two wounded men still returning Heggie fire. They weren’t in any immediate danger from their wounds. There was no need, yet, for Al or any of the other squad medics to get out of their own foxholes to treat anyone.
The Heggies started another line of men forward out of the forest. That was something else that Joe had nearly lost count of–the number of times that a new company of Heggies had advanced into the killing zone. No sooner was one assault wave stopped than the next formed up and came on behind them.
“What have they got against us?” Ezra had asked Joe during one all-too-brief respite, some twenty minutes earlier. “Why don’t they pick on somebody else for a while? There’s enough of us to go around.”
Joe hadn’t answered. Ezra wouldn’t have spoken like that if he had had fresh dead or seriously wounded men in his squad. But Joe had an entire platoon to think of, and the platoon had both dead and wounded.
Again, Joe thought as he spotted the newest skirmish line beginning to pick its way closer. This time, there seemed to be more of them, and they were moving cautiously again, doing more crawling than anything else, even back while they were still beyond the effective range of the Arrnanocs and the splat guns. With all of the bodies in front of them, these Heggies had plenty of cover as long as they stayed low.
Joe lifted his head a few millimeters, just enough to give him a slightly broader view of the new attack.
A lot more of them, he decided.
“Izzy?”
“Yeah?”
“Baerclau. Looks like they’re doubling up this time. I think they mean to get through here whatever it takes.”
There was a pause before the first sergeant replied. “I see w
hat you mean. We’re getting hit hard all around the perimeter now.”
“Where’s that secret weapon you promised?”
“They’re setting it up now. A Wasp cannon module on a tripod.”
“Will it work?” Joe asked.
“I hope so,” Walker said. Then he clicked off.
The Schlinal infantry continued to move forward, very slowly.
Some died. Replacements moved up to take their places.
“Get ready, they’re going to be on us in a minute,” Joe warned his platoon. “Get fresh wire in now, while you can.”
He took his own advice. Unless something happened very quickly, the platoon was going to be in for hand-to-hand combat within the next few minutes, and the Armanoc wasn’t equipped for a bayonet. Bayonet fighting was obsolete in the view of the movers and shakers who decided on army weapons and tactics, “a relic of the Stone Age.” “In close combat, should the occasion actually arise,” the manual said, “the soldier should be prepared to use a quick burst of wire as the modern equivalent of the bayonet. It is, of course, preferable to use that equivalent before the enemy actually closes.”
“The last few meters they’ll have to stand up and charge,” Joe said over the platoon frequency. “Be ready for that.” There was only one APC-mounted splat gun still in operation behind the platoon. The rest had been knocked out. “You’ll only have a few seconds. Make them count.”
Joe revised his estimate of the number of Heggies moving forward this time. It looked more like an entire battalion–maybe six or seven hundred men–moving forward in waves, one right behind the other, just in front of 2nd platoon and the platoons on either side of them.