Until Relieved

by Rick Shelley

  "Nobody's seen any yet, but that could change at any second. Five minutes," Maycroft added before he pulled his visor back down into place. He got up and moved back along the line.

  "Put your shovels away," Joe said over the squad frequency once his visor was down again. "We're moving in five."

  "Just when I was getting comfortable," Kam Goff whispered at his side, lifting his visor so that the microphone would not pick up his words.

  Joe growled softly, then said, "Get that visor down and pay attention, rookie. Unless you want to die a rookie." Goff blanched noticeably at that, but he did pull his visor down quickly.

  The order to move out came over the command frequency. Joe got his men up and moving as before, one fire team at a time. "Just like a drill," he whispered. He hoped, fervently, that it would remain that calm. They had worked hard enough at the training drills in the weeks before boarding the ships for the voyage to Porter. In training, even the new men who had never seen real combat had the moves down pat. If only they remembered that training once hostile wire started zipping past their ears.

  The platoon had scarcely started moving when Joe and his men heard shooting off to their left for the first time. This was relatively close, but it still did not seem particularly threatening.

  Less than two minutes later, the fight did reach them. A rocket-propelled grenade exploded ten meters in front of Joe. The timing was lucky for him. Joe and his fire team had just dropped to the dirt, and Ezra Frain's team had not got to their feet yet. Shrapnel from the RPG whizzed overhead and thunked into tree trunks. Close. Dirt and debris showered the soldiers.

  Joe swallowed hard to clear his ears after the noise of the blast. Too close, he thought. We would have been in the kill zone on that one. He waited until the last of the debris had fallen before he lifted his head enough to look over the tree cone just in front of him. The visor on the Accord battle helmet was alleged to be able to stop anything short of a full burst from a splat gun at close range, but Joe Baerclau had not survived two previous campaigns by taking any unnecessary risks.

  The forest floor was only a blur in infrared now. Joe switched off that part of his helmet sensors.

  "Anyone get a look at where that came from?" he asked, knowing that it was a futile question. There were no replies from the squad. His men knew better than to clutter up the channel with unnecessary negatives.

  Joe looked to either side. The rest of the platoon was to his right. Third platoon, the one squad of it that Joe could see, was also down, waiting to see if there would be more than the single grenade.

  "Okay, Ez," Joe said after three minutes had passed without more incoming fire. "Move 'em out. Carefully."

  There was little need for that warning. Ezra and his fire team moved forward in a crouch, keeping their heads down and their rifles up, ready for instant use. Joe's fire team was ready to lay down covering fire if they got any clue as to where the enemy was. Ezra's fire team was just passing the line of Joe's team when two more RPGs came in. These both exploded behind the lines, back near where Ezra's team had been just seconds before. The men went flat and brought their unprotected hands in under their bodies as the grenades exploded. The blasts were far enough away that their net armor and helmets were able to absorb the force of the shrapnel without difficulty. But two men had the wind momentarily knocked out of them by the impact.

  "Crap!" an anonymous voice said over the squad frequency.

  Before Joe could call for silence, the squad was under direct fire. Bursts of wire whizzed by, too close to be ignored. Joe turned his head to the side, hoping to see some clue as to the direction the fire was coming from.

  "Stay put," Sergeant Maycroft told Joe over the radio. "Delta is moving around behind. They have a fix on the Heggies who have us under fire."

  It's good to have someone else do the work for a change, Joe thought. "Don't shoot unless you have a clear target," he warned his men. "We're going to have friendlies moving in behind them. I don't want us to ace any of our own people."

  There was one short flurry of fire from third squad, accurate enough to slow down the incoming for a few seconds. Still, nearly five minutes passed before Joe heard heavy fire from Mark VI zippers out in front and the unseen enemy soldiers turned their fire away from 2nd platoon.

  "Okay, let's go," Joe told the squad after he had his orders from Maycroft.

  This time they moved with their carbines firing, scattering short bursts ahead of them, aiming deliberately low. The men of Delta Company showed up as blue blips on visor displays. The men called those blips DSUs, for "Don't shoot us!"

  Joe finally saw his first enemy of the campaign. There was movement eighty meters out, just slightly to Joe's left. At first, he only noticed the movement, camouflage that shifted quickly enough that it could not be natural. Joe directed his fire that way and the figure went down. Joe did not assume that that meant a kill. At eighty meters, the wire rounds of his zipper might have penetrated battle armor. Or they might not. As quickly as Joe had shot, there was even a chance that he had missed his target completely.

  "Down!" Joe ordered, leading by example. "Keep moving, but down." Forward movement slowed considerably when it varied between crawling on hands and knees and slithering flat from cone to cone. Joe worked to keep as many of the soil buttresses between him and the spot where he had seen the enemy battle uniform go down.

  There was a sudden explosion of gunfire from that area, from both Accord and Schlinal weapons, perhaps forty seconds of confusion. There was little, if any, truly aimed fire, but a lot of spools of wire were emptied. Then there was silence. Joe got his men up and rushing forward as soon as they had time to load new spools of collapsed uranium wire in their carbines, even before Maycroft passed the word that Delta Company had cleared the enemy position.

  The squad stopped when they reached the four bodies—three of the enemy, and one soldier from Delta. Delta had also taken two Schlinal prisoners, both wounded. They stood back-to-back, helmets off, hands on the tops of their heads. Two soldiers from Delta were watching them, zippers at the ready. Joe walked past the dead Heggies without a glance, but he gave the captured enemy soldiers a close look as he went past them. They were young men, not unlike the men in his own squad. They looked sullen. One of them appeared to be in considerable pain. There was a large blot of wet blood on the left leg of his fatigues.

  Kam Goff stopped and stared at the bodies on the ground. He had never seen a dead human before. One of these was in a particularly gruesome condition. His head had been completely severed from his body. A burst of wire had totally chewed away the neck, just below the bottom of the man's helmet.

  After a moment Kam lifted his visor hurriedly and vomited.

  "Keep moving, kid," Joe said, moving to get between the rookie and the corpse.

  "Joe." He recognized Maycroft's voice.

  "Yeah, Max," he responded over the noncoms' channel.

  "You're getting close to the edge of the trees. Find good spots for your men. We may actually be staying put for a bit this time. We seem to be a little ahead of schedule. Time to let the rest of the regiment catch up."

  "Okay by me." Joe switched channels and started positioning his men.

  "You come with me, Goff," Joe said after everyone was in place. "I want to take a look out front."

  Kam simply nodded. If he suspected that Joe had chosen him just to give him something to think about besides the corpses, he said nothing about it.

  They moved away from the rest of the squad, darting quickly from tree to tree, weapons ready. Joe led the way. Kam stayed just behind him and off to the side, far enough away that a single burst of wire would be unlikely to nail both of them. They stopped frequently to look and listen, getting down on their bellies behind whatever cover was handy. The background noise of gunfire had moved well off again. It seemed to be coming from the far side of the LZs now, perhaps as much as four kilometers away.

  The end of the wooded area was only thirty meters
in front of the squad's positions. As Joe and Kam neared the border, they moved forward on hands and knees. Finally, they took up positions behind a cone at the very edge. Out in front of them was a grassy area at least two kilometers across, with grass that appeared to be waist high, and with only a few isolated trees—of a different variety than those they were under.

  There were no enemy troops visible. But then, Joe had scarcely expected to see any. That would have been too easy. An entire regiment could hide in that tall grass.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Blue three and four landed in the same tight formation they had held while flying, making their vertical landings within a few meters of their ground crew. Neither Slee nor Zel bothered to get out of their Wasps or even open their canopies. They communicated with their crew chief by radio, assuring him that both fighters were running smoothly. While that conversation was going on, batteries and ammunition were being replaced in both Wasps. The ground crew worked as much by feel as by sight. The matte-black color and the gently flowing contours of the Wasps made them look more like shadows over the ground than physical objects. The canopies reflected no light. The interior of the cockpits and the flight suits and helmets of the pilots were also a dull black. Staring at a Wasp gave some people headaches as they tried to derive reality from the optical illusion that the plane's designers had worked so hard to achieve.

  As soon as the hatches were replaced on the battery compartments, the two fighters were back in the air. They had been on the ground for less than seven minutes. While Slee and Zel were climbing away from the LZ, the next pair of Wasps was coming in for servicing. The plan, as long as it worked and was needed, was to have no more than two of the fighters on the ground at one time.

  Slee and Zel headed southwest this time, moving low and fast, scarcely above the treetops. Zel was thankful that flying his Wasp and watching for any hint that he was being targeted by enemy radar kept him too busy to pay much attention to how close the ground was. He preferred to have plenty of sky below him. When he followed Slee over the escarpment at the edge of the plateau, he felt more comfortable. The floor of the rift valley was three-hundred meters below the level of the plateau. Slee climbed for even more altitude. There was a trade-off. The lower the fighters flew, the less time any enemy on the ground would have to target them—but the more air there was between the Wasps and enemy fire, the more time their electronic countermeasures (ECM) would have to defeat incoming rockets.

  "Targets of opportunity," Slee said with something approaching joy. Later missions would undoubtedly be laid out in greater detail, once the combat planners could identify proper targets, but in the meantime, the Wasps could still be put to good use.

  "Preferably targets that don't give back more than they get," Zel said. They spoke over a tight light beam, a form of plane-to-plane communication that was virtually impossible for any enemy to intercept.

  The two pilots divided their attention between the displays inside their cockpits and eyeballing the terrain. Neither man was particularly impressed at being in the sky over a world they had never seen before. Human-inhabited worlds did offer a certain measure of variety, but the essentials were generally rather similar or humans would not have settled them in the first place. Habitable worlds were far too plentiful for anyone to bother colonizing one that was marginal, or too far from human norms. Slee concentrated on the left and Zel on the right. Flying at eight-hundred meters, the ground seemed to race past beneath them. There were no roads visible. Even with a population of 750,000 before the Schlinal invasion, the people of Porter had not required a very extensive road net. The ground effect machines they used for most transportation did not need paved surfaces, just vaguely level or gently sloping land. According to the briefing the pilots had received aboard ship, the only real roads were to be found within Porter's towns.

  "Dust at two o'clock," Zel announced when they were 280 kilometers from the escarpment. "Looks like several vehicles."

  "Two, anyway," Slee said after he took a look. "Let's get closer."

  "Roger." Even though the Wasp's sensors would almost certainly detect hostile air traffic sooner, Zel looked around to make sure that there were no enemies in the air. Once he was satisfied, he flipped the weapon selector switch to rockets. The rules of engagement for the Wasps were clear. If it was moving toward the 13th and there was no positive identification that it was friendly, destroy it. In any case, it was much too soon for help to come from the residents of Porter City.

  Two vehicles. Slee lined up on the one farthest away. Zel took the other.

  "I'm picking up active electronics," Slee announced as they closed to within six kilometers of the floater trucks. "Looks like soldiers. Let's take 'em out."

  Zel's answer was a short whistle, a near duplicate of the sound made when his target acquisition system announced that it had a lock on a target.

  "On lock," Zel announced.

  "Ditto," Slee replied. "Hit it."

  Two missiles raced forward. The Wasps banked left and moved lower before turning back to the right so that they could watch their rockets hit. Thin trails of smoke dissipated slowly. On the ground, the truck drivers spotted the rockets. In the few seconds they had, one turned left and the other turned right. Both vehicles accelerated violently as their drivers tried to evade the missiles. But even supersonic aircraft had difficulty doing that. Ground vehicles with a maximum speed of one-hundred kilometers per hour had no chance whatsoever.

  Zel couldn't keep his eyes off of the rocket trails even after he could no longer pick out the missiles at the far end. His rocket hit almost simultaneously with Slee's, and both trucks erupted in boiling flame and smoke. There was no chance that any of the occupants might have escaped.

  "That's a few Heggies who won't be killing our lads up on the hill," Slee said.

  Zel did not answer. Where the blazes is their air power? he wondered. They must have fighters of their own. But he had seen nothing but Accord Wasps so far.

  —|—

  Headquarters for the 13th Spaceborne Assault Team was wherever Colonel Van Stossen happened to be at the moment. At the moment, he was within fifty meters of the front line, and he was not happy.

  "Why in blazes are you sitting here with your thumb up your butt, Lieutenant?" he demanded, leaning forward right into the junior officer's face. "You're holding up the entire operation."

  "I can't help it, sir," Lieutenant Jacobi replied, barely getting the words out without stammering. "We're taking casualties. Every time we start to move forward, the Heggies zero in on us. I've had three killed and a half dozen wounded already, and we haven't been on the ground thirty minutes." Jacobi was not yet thinking of a career that might be shattered. He had seen combat before, but this was his first time as a company commander, and all he could think about were the men he had lost.

  "You've had half the Wasp wing strafing in front of you. If you could pinpoint targets, you'd have Havoc backup. But you're not showing me anything."

  Colonel Stossen, the only commander the 13th had ever had, was more frustrated than angry, but that made little difference to the lieutenant commanding Bravo Company. Jacobi merely had the misfortune of being assigned to the sector with the heaviest enemy resistance—and not being equal to the challenge.

  "Third platoon is ready to go now," Jacobi said. He gave an order over his helmet radio and thirty men started forward by squads and fire teams while the rest of the company laid down covering fire.

  Stossen turned to watch. The first relay of men had not gone ten meters before the sound of Schlinal wire rifles opened up. Third platoon hit the dirt. For several minutes, the firefight raged. The gunfire was continuous but largely ineffective. Stossen and Jacobi both eventually took cover. Some of the enemy fire had started coming uncomfortably close.

  "That's what I've been telling you, Colonel," Jacobi said, forgetting the old army wisdom of not saying "I told you so" to a superior officer. "Every damn time. We've even tried crawling forward. Sa
me result. 'Cept then they used grenades too."

  Stossen turned away from the lieutenant and spoke into his helmet microphone, on a channel that Jacobi's helmet did not receive.

  "Sit tight," Stossen said when he had finished. "Be ready to advance in five minutes—your whole company. You're going to get what they used to call a walking barrage."

  Jacobi was uncertain what a walking barrage might be, but he suspected that it would be massive. He ordered his people to get as down as they could manage.

  Helluva waste of ordnance, Stossen thought while he waited for the artillery. It was not the normal sort of fire mission that the Havoc crews trained for. Usually, the self-propelled howitzers were set against enemy armor and strongpoints, using ammunition sparingly, one shell to a target. With pinpoint targeting, that was commonly all that was needed. This was something more primal, primitive. The 200mm rounds came in volleys over the front, the first salvo exploding sixty meters north of Bravo Company. Each subsequent volley landed another twenty meters out. The suspended plasma explosives erupted with devastating force, felling trees to a radius of fifteen meters and scorching the ground even farther away.

  "Get moving, Lieutenant," Stossen ordered. "Nothing's going to stand up to that."

  "Yes, sir," Jacobi replied, stunned by the din and by the visual impact of the barrage. Jacobi's men were well within the area where the first blasts had hit before they noticed that the bombardment had stopped. Dozens of small fires remained burning. Had the trees and grass been drier, the explosions would have set off a wildfire of considerable proportions.

  —|—

  Joe Baerclau closed his eyes, just for a moment, after the start of the artillery barrage. Neither the guns nor their targets were particularly close, but the Havocs made a terrific din even at a distance. There was the explosion of propellent and the high-pitched whine of shells being hurtled from the guns, followed by the broader sound of the exploding round.

  I'll never get used to that racket, Joe thought, not for the first time. Back at base, when the 13th's howitzer battalion was on the firing range, the noise could be that intense. He took a deep breath, then opened his eyes in surprise.