Until Relieved

by Rick Shelley

  Blue three and four came in low, below fifty meters at the bottom of their strafing run. Then they pulled out and turned through a wide climbing loop to the right to come in again from a different angle. They could see the enemy, and the cockpit of the downed Wasp was there to remind them where the friendlies were.

  The cannons of the two Wasps shredded the tall grass more efficiently than a scythe. Under concentrated fire, the Schlinal soldiers caught in the bursts were shredded almost as thoroughly. Body armor could not stand up to the deadly darts.

  On the ground, Joe and his men instinctively ducked when the Wasps opened fire. The sound of the 25mm cannons was almost deafening, even under battle helmets. But Joe could not stay down. He lifted his head to watch as the strafing mowed a corridor thirty meters wide through the grass... and riddled the enemy soldiers.

  "If there's anyone left alive out there, maybe we can get some prisoners," Joe told Lieutenant Keye after the second pass. "Interested?"

  "Only if you can get to them in a hurry, after the Wasps pull out."

  "Tell them it looks like they've done the job, sir."

  Joe went around the capsule as the two Wasps climbed higher above the field. The downed pilot was lying on his back, still unconscious—but still alive. Al Bergon was kneeling over him, putting pressure sealers over several open wounds.

  "He needs more help than I can give him, Sarge," Al said when he saw Baerclau standing over him. "Don't know though. Even carrying him back to the lines might be more than he can take."

  "We've got to try. Do what you can for him. I'm going out to see if anyone survived in that lot out there." He nodded toward the grass that had been mowed down. "Mort, you and Kam come with me. The rest of you, start back to the lines with the pilot as soon as possible, even if we're not back."

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The three soldiers moved fast now. In full combat gear, none of them were likely to come anywhere near the standards of athletic competition for the two-hundred meter race, even without the tall, clinging grass, but they ran as fast as they could. Joe didn't want to give any surviving Hegemony soldiers time to recover their wits after the Wasp attack.

  I'm getting too old for this, Joe thought. He couldn't have spoken the words out loud on a bet. Running through that grass in full gear took all of his air, and begged for more.

  The two Wasps remained overhead, circling now, as the pilots watched over Joe and his companions. Kam Goff was the only one on the ground who really noticed the Wasps though. He was young, and considerably larger than his sergeant. He felt the effort of running with so much extra weight, but he was further from his limits than Joe Baerclau was.

  If they spot anyone, I hope they let us know, Kam thought. That was better than occupying his mind with fear. He already had more than enough of that. Except while the shooting was going on. Kam had not realized that yet. While he was shooting, or being shot at, there had been no fear at all. He had simply done his job the way he had been trained.

  The three men kept as much space between them as they could until they converged on the area where the enemy shooters had been. Goff, moving just a little faster than the others, was the first to spot bodies. He stopped short, still ten meters from the nearest. The body was barely recognizable as human. It had been mutilated badly, with both legs severed—one leg simply did not exist any longer. Only the man's head appeared untouched. His battle helmet had been blown off, but it had protected the head. The dead soldier's eyes were wide open. Kam fancied he saw a look of utter horror on the dead face.

  That was when he started to vomit.

  "Turn around and get down on your knees," Joe Baerclau said in his "command" voice. By this time he was standing right at Goff's side. He hauled in a difficult breath. "Don't present a target."

  Joe and Mort Jaiffer conducted a quick search of the area around the section of grass that had been chopped apart by the strafing, looking for signs that any of the enemy had escaped—and might be lurking, waiting for a chance to ambush them. There were no obvious signs that anyone had crawled away from the carnage though, at least not far.

  One Schlinal soldier had apparently survived for a minute or two. He had pulled himself nearly three meters from where he had been struck. But he was dead by the time Joe checked on him. There were twelve bodies. No survivors.

  Joe reported that news to Lieutenant Keye. "We're heading back now," he added. "The rest of the men are already on the way in with the flyguy. Couple of my men may have some minor injuries too."

  "The doc's already on link to your medic," Keye said. "Get back in here as quickly as you can. I'll get someone else to plant those bugs."

  One small favor, Joe thought as he started back toward the lines with Kam and Mort.

  —|—

  Even with the sophisticated radio links available to everyone in the 13th, there were inevitable delays in communications. Colonel Stossen could hardly function if he received reports directly from each platoon or squad that did something, or did not do something. Only company commanders and the Wasp and Havoc squadron commanders reported directly to the colonel, except under extraordinary conditions. Even then there were often times when there was simply too much for the colonel to hear it all immediately. That was the purpose of having staff officers, to gather the reports and decide which the colonel needed to hear immediately.

  The early stages of an invasion were like that. Too much happened too quickly for the commander to stay instantly on top of everything. Once combat was joined, even on a piecemeal basis, priorities could shift, again and again. Sometimes, even a top-notch officer simply had to sit down and try to figure out just what was going on.

  Colonel Stossen was sitting with his back against one of the conelike mounds of dirt that surrounded every tree in the forest to the north and west of the LZs. He had his mapboard on his lap, and his executive and operations officers were kneeling across from him.

  "Okay, just where the hell are we?" Stossen asked. The question was not completely rhetorical. It was only an hour and fifteen minutes after the first shuttle had touched down, and the colonel's voice was already hoarse. Like many officers in senior field commands, Stossen had already learned that he no longer really fought his battles, he talked them.

  "Well, we finally got George Company back to the perimeter," Dezo Parks, the ops officer, said.

  "What?" Stossen looked up. "Where were they?"

  Parks shook his head. "I'm not quite sure. I don't think they know. Somehow, they got out of their landers and started out in the wrong direction—double time. They were nearly two klicks from the section of perimeter they were supposed to establish before Vickers figured out that something was screwy." Like nearly a quarter of the men in the 13th, Dezo was from Bancroft. He had recruited a good percentage of the men from his homeworld, and had transferred to the Accord Defense Force with them.

  "Vickers, the new man." That was no question. Stossen might not know every enlisted man in the 13th, but he did know all of the officers, well enough to conjure up an image and a rough idea of their background.

  "New to the 13th," Lieutenant Colonel Terrence Banyon, the executive officer, said. "He's had nearly five years of service, four-plus with his homeworld defense force and six months with the ADF training regiments before he came to us." Banyon was from Ceej, Tau Ceti IV, as were Stossen and about thirty other members of the 13th.

  "Five years and still a lieutenant?" Stossen asked.

  "He was a captain in his HDF," Banyon said quickly. "He took a voluntary reduction to escape a waiting list when he transferred to us. He's good, just a bit overanxious for his first action."

  "We'll get back to him later," Stossen said. It would not do to get completely sidetracked with something nonessential just now. They had already wasted too much time, particularly since no harm had been done by the mistake.

  "What about that flyer? He going to make it?"

  "Too close to call," Banyon said. "They got him into a trauma tube in
one piece, but it was a near thing. Doc thinks he'll pull through, but no guarantees."

  Stossen nodded slowly. A trauma tube and its medical nanotech devices could work wonders, but there were still limits.

  "What else is going on?"

  Dezo Parks leaned closer to the mapboard. "We've consolidated our initial perimeter, more or less on schedule. Only scattered resistance, nothing very concerted. You know as much about that as I do." They had hoped for an unopposed landing, and had come closer to it than they had any right to expect. "Apparently, the Schlinal forces on-world don't maintain any combat aircraft on anything approaching ready alert. As of five minutes ago, there hadn't been a single report of enemy air activity—from our people down here or from the monitors back in CIC. That's a definite plus for us. We're a considerable distance from any Schlinal garrison, as we hoped we'd be. As far as we've been able to determine, the Hegemony has strictly an occupation force on Porter, and they stick close to the centers of population. Those we've come across must be part of the force used to control the people around Maison, the only real town here on the plateau."

  "Our objective for tomorrow," Stossen commented. "Any word on enemy strength there yet?"

  "Nothing substantive," Banyon said. "The latest estimate is that the maximum size of the garrison in and around Maison must be below two thousand."

  "In other words, intelligence wants us to think that we at least outnumber the Heggies stationed up here on the plateau," Parks said.

  "As if that matters," Banyon replied. "We came into this assuming a total enemy garrison of at least ten thousand on Porter, nearly five times what we have. They may have a lot more than that. Even if they were all stationed in Porter City, five-hundred klicks from us, they could probably move the whole circus to the plateau by midnight."

  "They may not go that far, but there is enemy movement," Parks said. "Two convoys have started out from Porter City. They've got too much active anti-air with them for the Wasps to take them on, in daylight anyway. I ordered our planes out of range after a couple of preliminary strikes against the advance party for one of the columns. They'll continue to monitor the movement. The Wasps and CIC."

  Stossen nodded. That was something that had been decided well in advance. It would be foolish to waste the Wasps in a daylight attempt to stop a major troop movement when the fighters made such easy targets. If it did become necessary to expose the Wasps to that level of danger, it had better be for a more critical advantage.

  "If they're moving on the ground instead of in the air, it may mean that they don't have the transport. Or it might mean nothing more than a lack of any intelligence on our numbers yet," Stossen said. "As soon as we can tell which route up the escarpment they'll take, we'll dispatch a few Wasps and Havocs to contest the climb. Soon as it's full dark, we can sneak a couple of Wasps in for hit-and-run strikes as well."

  "There aren't many decent routes up, for vehicles, at least," Parks observed. "We can pretty much deny them those without too much danger to our people."

  "Only temporarily," Stossen said. "We'll slow them down, of course, maybe force them to use air transport instead of ground, but we want engagement, remember." Limited engagement, if possible. "And we want to be able to cover their approach without spreading ourselves all over ten thousand square kilometers of this plateau. If they decide we're isolated up here, their warlords might pull some of them off to back up the defense on Devon."

  "We do need to be able to get down into the valley ourselves," Banyon added.

  "We're not here to liberate Porter, Terry," Stossen said. "Just to give them some hope." But how will they feel knowing that we've come and gone, abandoning them to the enemy again? He didn't share that thought with the others.

  —|—

  "Tighten your straps, lads," Gunnery Sergeant Eustace Ponks told his crew. "We're finally going to get moving." As usual, Ponks spoke louder than he needed to. His hearing had been moderately affected by his years of work in Havocs. Broad across the shoulders, and with a bulky torso, Ponks had found a home in the Havoc self-propelled artillery. With short, bowlegged legs, he looked taller sitting down than he did standing up.

  " 'Bout time," Simon Kilgore, his driver, said. "Hair's been standing on the back o' my neck since we landed."

  "Course is zero-two-seven, Sy," Ponks said. "It looks like we'll get to see that patch we blasted the hell out of."

  At a range of ten kilometers, the 200mm howitzer of a Havoc could drop a round within a shell's length of its aiming point, even if the Havoc was moving at its sixty-kilometer-per-hour maximum speed. Extend the range to twenty kilometers, and it could still be accurate to within three meters—ninety percent of the time. Since the suspended plasma of its munitions had a primary blast radius of ten meters, that was usually more than sufficient.

  The Havoc was self-propelled artillery, not a tank. The barrel could be elevated or depressed, but the entire machine had to be pointed roughly at the target. To minimize the vehicle's height, the gun barrel could only be rotated six and one half degrees to either side of the center line. The Havoc was nine meters long, three wide, and (except for the muzzle of the barrel at full elevation) no more than two meters high. Its treads were powered by separate engines. The engines and the tanks and converters for the hydrogen fuel occupied most of the front half of the carriage. The gun commander and driver sat almost precisely at the midpoint of the vehicle's length, one on either side of the barrel, at the front of the low turret. The other two members of the crew, gunner and loader, had positions much closer to the rear, and lower. Above and behind them was the ammunition bay.

  "When do we get something real to shoot at?" Karl Mennem, the gunner, asked. "I'd feel better knowing."

  "I think we're just going out to plow a few hectares of prairie this time. Just be glad there's nothing close enough to shoot back," Ponks said as the Havoc rolled away from its support van. "We get this baby shot out from under us and we're mudders for the rest of the campaign, and if you were good enough to hit anything with a rifle, they wouldn't have you ridin' around on your ass."

  Karl grumbled at the flagrant canard. He was a sharpshooter. It did not matter if he was firing a 200mm cannon or a slingshot. He quickly achieved deadly accuracy with any aimed weapon that he picked up.

  It was not at all true that a ride in a Havoc could scramble an egg that the hen hadn't laid yet. The suspension in the gun carriage was almost perfect, especially for the gun itself, which was gyroscopically stabilized. To hit a target at a distance while the gun was moving at speed, that was essential. While the men did not rate the same level of accommodation, they were not jostled about so much that they could not do their jobs efficiently—and for long periods. There was even a certain amount of sound insulation between the men and the engines. A 200mm cannon could not be muffled, but the constant engine noise would have been harder on ears. The men still had to communicate through helmet radios, and after a time, more than two thirds of all men assigned to the big guns suffered some hearing loss, at least in certain frequencies.

  The men who rode the guns preferred to be moving when there was any chance that an enemy might be shooting. Counterbattery fire would be at least as accurate as the fire the Havocs loosed. The guns had to keep on the move or become wasted hulks, like clamshells lying open on the sand.

  Five other Havocs moved away from the staging area with Ponks's "Fat Turtle"—the name written on the side of the turret next to the commander's hatch. Within the defensive perimeter that the 13th had established, the six guns moved in single file, but as soon as they passed through the infantry line, the Havocs fanned out, giving themselves as much maneuvering room as possible. The six gun commanders worked hard to avoid showing any sort of regular formation, any pattern to their spacing or movement. Pattern was the most deadly trap of all. Once they were well out from the rest of the 13th, the six Havocs put as much as a kilometer between themselves and their closest neighbors. There was no need for the guns of a battery
to stay close together for fire missions.

  "Talk to me, Control," Ponks muttered once they were beyond the perimeter. The Havoc was just a gun. Its targets were always out of sight of the crew. They needed others to provide target data, spotters on the ground or in Wasps, or information provided directly from the Combat Information Center on the flagship in orbit.

  "You're doing fine, Basset two," the voice in his headset replied. The Havoc batteries all had the names of dog breeds, a pun that went back nearly three and a half millennia: "Cry Havoc and let slip the dogs of war."

  "Nobody ever tells us nothin'," Ponks complained after switching off his transmitter link to CIC for a moment. When he got back on the channel, he asked, "Is there any sign at all of enemy artillery or armor on this plateau?"

  "That's a negative, Basset two, no tube artillery or tanks. If they're around, they're staying under cover." He didn't need to add that a Havoc could fall victim to any infantryman with an antitank rocket. The Havoc carriages were only armored enough to stop small-arms fire. To try and put enough armor on them to stop anything more powerful, the Havocs' speed would have been compromised. They used speed as their first line of defense.

  With luck, it would take time for the Schlinal garrison to draw antitank weapons from their armories. Rockets probably would not be in much demand in their normal routines as occupation force.

  —|—

  Joe Baerclau sucked on a peppermint-flavored stimtab and marveled at the smiling face of luck. None of his men had been injured badly enough to take them out of action, even temporarily. Ezra's wounds had been the most serious, and even he had nothing more than badly flayed skin on the back of his left hand and a dozen small, though admittedly painful, bruises and tiny cuts. The medics had even ruled out the possibility of cracked ribs, though they had feared initially that there might be several. Ezra had been dosed with a systemic analgesic and the bruises and abrasions had been smeared with a salve larded with medical nanobots to hurry along the healing process.