Until Relieved

by Rick Shelley

  The pilot they had rescued was another matter, but he would live. Joe and his men had hung around the first aid station long enough to hear that. Now, the flyer was being evacuated to the hospital ward in one of the troop ships in orbit. The campaign was over for him—and perhaps his flying days as well.

  Might be a bit of luck at that, Joe thought. He was under no delusion that this campaign would be easy. While it had not been bruited about that they were merely a diversion, Joe—and most of the other senior noncoms (and even some junior officers)—had guessed that they were considered expendable to assist the main action on some other world.

  Joe sat hunched up on the ground, arms clasped around his knees. His helmet was on the ground at his side, upended so he would hear any call on the radio. He had stripped off his web belt and backpack. The loss of all of that weight made him feel almost as if he would float away. He had eaten a meal pack and drunk half a canteen of water. He felt rested now, at ease. He sat with his eyes closed, but he did not sleep. He already felt the exhaustion that combat always brought, but it was not an exhaustion that brought sleep. Not for Joe. Soon enough, it would be back to the lines and whatever might come next, but Lieutenant Keye had okayed a short break. Joe's squad had gone through some of the morning's heaviest action, and there was no immediate need for them to hurry back to the grind. For the moment, nearly the entire perimeter was quiet. The 13th had faced nothing but small unit actions so far, no enemy units larger than platoon strength.

  "Sarge?"

  Joe opened his eyes slowly and lifted his head. Kam Goff stood a meter away, helmet in hand, waiting to see if he would respond.

  "What is it, kid?"

  Kam squatted next to Joe before he spoke. "I was scared before."

  "We were all scared. That's what combat is all about. The drill is to do your job anyhow. Don't freeze up and don't go berserk." Joe hardly had to think to spout a full load of cliches. Each phrase had become trite because it was accurate. And cliches were easier for a stressed-out mind to accept than novel ways of saying the same thing.

  "I never saw anybody dead before today, and sure not all chopped to shit like that. I just ain't used to it."

  "You ever do get used to it, it ever gets to where it don't bother you, you don't belong in my squad."

  That seemed to stump Goff for a moment. His mouth opened, but he didn't speak for a moment. Then, slowly, he nodded. "I see. I get to like it, I wouldn't want me around either."

  "Just keep on, keep up on yourself. It may get worse—probably will. This morning wasn't nothing. But the first time, well, you don't know what to expect. Now you do. More of the same. Maybe a lot more of the same, now and then."

  Once more, Goff hesitated for a long time before he spoke. "I don't know if any of that makes me feel better or not, Sarge."

  There was no humor in Joe's laugh. "Just don't think it to death. Come on. It's about time to be getting back. Maycroft will be lookin' for us."

  When Joe put his helmet on, the other members of the squad, all sitting around the grove, got the message. They stood and put their gear back on. It was time to go back to the war.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The new spy satellites that the Accord fleet had deployed gave the Havoc gun commanders real-time video of their target, along with the hard data they needed to lay their rounds where they wanted them. The intelligence analysts of CIC had decided that they had identified the main barracks of the Hegemony troops in the town of Maison. The six guns of Basset Battery were scattered through heavy forest between eleven and sixteen kilometers from those buildings. Their support vehicles stayed farther away, but close enough to the guns to replenish ammunition stocks, just in case the battery should get that busy.

  In Basset two, Eustace Ponks could see only one of the other guns, and it was a kilometer away, across one of the clearings that dotted the forest.

  "Okay, Karl, give me an extra fifty meters this time," Ponks said after watching their first shot strike well short of the wall surrounding the target buildings.

  "Jimmy says he'll goose it personal," Mennem replied. Jimmy was Jimmy Ysinde, the crew's loader.

  "Jimmy'd goose anything that stood still for him," Ponks said. "Just get the round over that wall. You shot this bad on the range, the lieutenant would have you scrubbing latrines for a month."

  "Must be the atmosphere, Sarge, or maybe the go-juice." Karl was cursing inwardly. He had never missed any target that badly. The Havoc's fire-control computers took everything into account, including atmospheric pressure and humidity, anything that might affect the flight of a round. And with exact positions being calculated through the assistance of target acquisition satellites, missing a target by fifty meters was inexcusable.

  Before Ponks could answer, the second round had been fired. In the crew compartment, there was incredible noise, but little noticeable recoil. The gun's gyroscopic stabilizing system absorbed virtually all of the shock of firing.

  With no enemy counterbattery fire to worry about yet, the Havocs were shooting from a halt. Still, the guns moved after every shot. It was that random movement that had brought Basset two within sight of another howitzer.

  Simon Kilgore had Two moving almost before the round cleared the muzzle. He backed the Havoc away from its firing position and turned around a large tree, then started off at a 60-degree angle from the line of flight of the last round. Simon could drive his gun with the best. "Give me a millimeter clearance on either side, and I'll take it anywhere," he liked to brag. On better days, he got more extravagant. "I can make her dance around a dozen eggs without cracking a shell."

  Ponks reserved one eye for his periscopes, the other for the damage assessment monitor. There was no way to actually see the shell coming down toward its target. The view that Ponks was watching was relayed from a satellite cruising three-hundred kilometers overhead. While he might be able to identify an object as a basket of corn, he would never be able to distinguish the individual ears.

  This time it was impossible for Ponks to be absolutely certain that their shell had hit the exact point he wanted because three shells exploded almost simultaneously—apparently within a three-meter diameter. The stone wall along the near side of the barracks compound was gone when the smoke of the blasts settled, and so was the nearest of the buildings inside.

  "On the money," Ponks announced. "New aiming point is thirty meters from the last, relative bearing three-zero-two." The actual calculations for the ranging were done by computer. The gun crew did not have to worry about calculating their own position and movement or coordinating that with the position of their target.

  The gun had only moved four-hundred meters by the time Ysinde announced that he had the new round in the chamber.

  "Simon, bring the gun around to the firing vector. Karl, put five quick ones in the same area. Work a twenty-meter grid on the aim," Ponks said. With the rest of the battery doing likewise, that would saturate the compound. Anyone not in a deep hole would have little chance of surviving a bombardment like that. There was not a man in the Havoc squadron who would want to attempt it, in any case.

  "We get the last round out, start moving us south-southwest, Simon," Ponks said.

  "Roger. Okay if I move us farther out from town at the same time?"

  "You getting nervous?"

  "I was born nervous."

  "Okay, but don't put us too far out. You'll give Karl fits if you make him work at maximum range."

  The quirks of six gun commanders maneuvering their vehicles at random brought three of them within an area little more than a half kilometer in diameter for a moment. The three howitzers were moving in different directions, and Ponks saw that neither of the others would come within a hundred meters of Basset two, but that was still too close for comfort.

  It did mean that there were friendly witnesses to what happened to Basset five.

  Basset five was the closer Havoc to Ponks's gun. Obviously, there was no warning. Five suddenly erupted in a ball
of flame and shrapnel. Until the fire and smoke cleared, the other gunners could not tell for certain whether Five had exploded internally, perhaps from an accident with a shell, or had been hit by enemy fire. When the smoke cleared, though, it was obvious that the explosion had come from outside. The front end of Five had been crushed inward.

  The mission became something much more than a drive through the countryside then.

  —|—

  The Hegemony's first coordinated counterstrike against the landing came from the air, and despite all of the spyeyes and pilots watching, it came virtually without warning. Two dozen Boem fighter-bombers converged on the Accord LZs. Another pair of enemy planes attacked the Havocs that were bombarding the Schlinal barracks compound in Maison. The enemy fighters proved to be as radar-neutral as the Wasp, and they appeared to match the Accord's premier fighter in speed and maneuverability as well. The Wasps were caught by surprise. The first hint that some of them had of enemy aircraft was when they found that their planes were on the wrong end of a target lock.

  The aircraft fought at distances as great as eight kilometers. Still, the maneuvering as pilots sought to line up on an enemy—or tried to get free of a hostile target lock—was as frantic as any dogfight fought in the infancy of atmospheric flight, but at much greater speeds. Those Accord pilots who were running low on power for their antigrav drives had to move fast or risk being destroyed when they landed to replace batteries.

  Two Wasps were dispatched to provide cover for the battery of Havocs that had come under attack. Four Schlinal Boem fighters pursued them. That spread the aerial battle over a lot more of Porter's sky.

  Though the brunt of the initial Hegemony counterattack fell on the Havocs and Wasps, the infantry was not spared. Enemy fighters made strafing and bombing runs, cycling from one target to another. But the 13th fought back. The heavy weapons squads brought their Vrerch missiles into play almost instantly. The television-guided Vrerch could be used surface to surface, or surface to air. On the ground, the missiles were fitted with armor-piercing warheads to penetrate enemy armor. But there were also explosive warheads that were more than sufficient to blow a fighter out of the air.

  This first air engagement did not last long. It was over, for all practical purposes, in less than five minutes. After making their strikes, the Schlinal fighters veered away. Accord Wasps followed in pursuit, for a time, then returned to the landing zones to replenish power and munitions while they could. Four Hegemony Boems were downed, either by Wasps or by ground-fired Vrerchs. But three Wasps were also lost in the encounter, bringing the 13th's total losses for the first three hours to four—out of twenty-four.

  On the ground...

  —|—

  Joe Baerclau and his men had not reached their positions on the perimeter by the time the Schlinal air attack started. The squad's first warning of the enemy attack came over their helmet radios, an anonymously screamed alert over the "all-hands" channel, while they were crossing the densest part of the forest. The canopy overhead was so thick that they could see little more than an occasional hint of sky.

  Even though they could neither see nor hear any approaching enemy planes, the seven men went down immediately, each of them sheltering next to the ground cone of a large tree. The basic problem with that tactic was that they had no sure way to know which side of the tree to hide behind, which direction the enemy might come from.

  —Until they saw a pattern of bullets erupt through the trees and throw up spatters of moss and dirt. The sound of gunfire followed the bullets. There was no engine noise, not from an antigravity drive airplane. Leaves and small branches fell as the slugs raced from west to east. Those men who had taken cover on the wrong side of the cones scurried to correct their mistake. Several of them raised their rifles, looking for something to shoot at, but the forest canopy was too heavy. A zipper would not have brought down a fighter in any case, save by the wildest luck, and none of the men in Joe's squad were armed with Vrerch missile launchers.

  What the hell do we do now? Joe asked himself. If they could not fight back, and hiding didn't look like much of an option, what could they do?

  "Lieutenant?" he asked on his link to Keye.

  "Where are you and what's your condition?" Keye replied.

  "About two-hundred meters from you, I think. So far, nobody's been hit, but something strafed right on past us a few seconds ago."

  "Get back as best you can. The Heggies finally came out."

  "Mudders too?" Joe asked.

  "Not yet."

  Joe switched to his squad channel. "The good news is, the enemy knows we're here." He paused, but not long enough to give his men time to reply. "The bad news is, the enemy knows we're here." He wasn't looking for a laugh, and he didn't get one, but perhaps it did stop the others from wishing they were moles or other deep-burrowing animals for a moment.

  "Okay, now," Joe said when he had everyone's attention. "We've got to get back to the rest of the platoon. They're lonely without us. But let's be careful. Don't figure 'cause that one plane came in from the west that the next one will as well. No traffic signs up there." He jerked a thumb skyward.

  Joe was the first man on his feet. He stayed hunched over though, as if that might make him a significantly smaller target, or help him get to the ground faster if they had to dive for cover again. Joe looked around to make sure that all of his men got up, and he kept glancing up into the tree canopy, wondering if they would have enough warning the next time an enemy plane took a blind strafing pass.

  Or was it blind? Joe asked himself. He had no idea what sensors the enemy pilots might have available.

  Baerclau's squad raced along behind their own lines as if they were leading a charge into the heart of a fortified enemy position. Though no one in the squad had been hit by the strafing run, or even had bullets come within three meters of them, any illusion of safety under the trees was gone. They could still hear planes strafing, but they were no longer close. The sound was different, Dopplered, heading even farther away. Several of the men wondered what sort of ammunition the airborne automatic weapons had been spitting out—was it wire, fragmenting slugs similar to those used by their own Wasps, or something entirely different, perhaps large-caliber bullets that would bore deep and wide holes through them, body armor and all. No one was anxious to find out the hard way.

  It hardly seemed to matter where the squad was. When the men returned to the platoon, the rest were doing no more than hunkering down behind the best cover they could find or manufacture. Those men who had been on the line the longest, while Joe's squad was off on its mission and getting the wounded taken care of afterward, had excavated decent slit trenches for themselves. Those holes could not stop a bullet coming out of the sky, but they made their residents a trifle less uncomfortable about the danger.

  "Nice of you to drop by for a visit," Sergeant Maycroft told Joe, face-to-face. The platoon sergeant came to show Joe where he wanted his squad. Maycroft had been platoon sergeant since Joe first came to the company as a corporal. Maycroft had recommended Joe for his third stripe almost immediately.

  "Well, we had nothing better to do, Max," Joe replied. "Thought we might keep you company." The two sergeants came from the same town on Bancroft, but they hadn't met until Joe came to the 13th. Max had been one of the first 'Crofters to join the Accord military. Now, their families back home had become friends, just as Max and Joe had.

  "I heard that flyguy's gonna be okay," Max said.

  "That's what the medic told me. Pretty soon, he'll be in a cushy hospital bed." There was just a hint of wistfulness in Joe's voice.

  "Want to bet he'd trade places with you in a second?"

  "You think he'd give all that up for a hole in the ground?"

  —|—

  "We've finally got 'em on the move, Van," Terrence Banyon told his boss. "The air strike was just to get our attention, I guess."

  "And to cover their ground movements," Dezo Parks added.

  Ban
yon shrugged. "There's one group coming our way from Maison, as expected. The looks our Wasps have gotten seem to indicate that the garrison there was considerably larger than we anticipated, perhaps as many as three thousand, maybe even thirty-five hundred."

  "Hell, the population of Maison wasn't supposed to be more than eight thousand," Stossen said.

  "Maybe not," Banyon said, "but the Heggies are coming, and they've got enough anti-air with them to keep our Wasps standing well off. And that armor they didn't have, they do have—tanks, if not SPs. There are still those two other columns working this way from Porter City. Major numbers. Can't pinpoint them yet. Also anti-air and armor with them."

  Stossen nodded. "I never did trust the numbers. Anyway, they know we're here and they're coming after us. That was, more or less, the point. Can we keep their air cap away from us?"

  "Now that we know they're around, yes," Parks said. "The men have Vrerchs out and ready. And we only lost three Wasps in this attack."

  "Don't say 'only,'" Stossen said harshly. "That's an eighth of our total. Twelve and a half percent is not 'only.'"

  Parks didn't respond to the reprimand.

  "We'll send 1st recon and Charley Company out to harass the troops heading our way from Maison," Stossen said, going right on with business. He had made his point. There was no need to dwell on it. "If Basset Battery can stay free of air attacks, we'll use them for whatever cover they can provide."

  Parks made a couple of quick notes on his pocket compsole.

  "We'll move George Company southeast, as if they might be headed for the number two route down off the plateau. We'll move Alpha just a little south, toward the number one route, but I don't want either company getting too close for now. We don't want to leave major gaps in the perimeter for this."

  He stopped and looked around, and more importantly listened. For the moment there were no sounds of strafing planes, or of rockets. There was even very little rifle fire. Stossen nodded absently, to himself.