by Rick Shelley
"What about using shuttles to take one company," Banyon suggested. "Not all the way to Porter City, but close enough that they can make it the rest of the way on foot. Give the shuttles plenty of air cover. We can bring the men back the same way then, if we have to get ready to leave in a hurry."
Stossen turned the idea over in his mind for a moment. "Tempting," he admitted, "but we can't risk a company. They might be outnumbered a hundred to one, and if they got into trouble, we'd have to risk the rest of the regiment on a rescue. That could lead to disaster. There might not be time to pull it off before pickup."
"We are accomplishing our primary objective," Parks pointed out. "There won't be any reinforcements leaving Porter to mess up the main invasion on Devon." He laughed. "They wouldn't dare leave with three thousand of their men in the bag."
"We hope," Stossen said. "Don't make the mistake of thinking that the Hegemony will consider those men the way we would. They might just write them off."
—|—
Joe Baerclau stood within a meter of the scarp, looking across the rift valley with power binoculars. The nearest portions of the valley were littered with rockfall that had accumulated over millennia. Out to a distance of ten or twelve kilometers, there appeared to be very little greenery, just those grasses and scrub brushes that could find niches among the rocks. Even beyond that limit, the valley seemed to green only gradually, as if much of the flora of Porter had given up trying to establish itself near the sheer rock wall, or the detritus that had collected at its base.
There were now three companies of the 13th at or near the scarp, ready to cover the two nearest access routes from the valley floor. The sun was low in the west—it looked as if it were below the level of the plateau. Joe forced himself to look straight down, and wished he had not. Where he was standing, the drop was almost sheer all of the way to the bottom, three hundred meters down. Instinctively, he moved back a step and took the binoculars from his eyes. Looking down through the glasses had strengthened the feeling of vertigo. He looked around to see if any of his men had noticed what he had done. As far as Joe could tell, though, no one had. The men who were close enough to have noticed were looking out over the valley, the same as he had been. Too far away to be seen directly, Porter City sat, guarded by its thousands of Schlinal soldiers.
They can't get at us, and we can't get at them, Joe thought. That did not make him feel as good as he thought it should. Hundreds of kilometers.
"What good are we doing here?" Joe whispered. His visor was tilted up to let him use the binoculars. That put his microphone far enough away that his words did not carry to his men. "We came here to fight, not to stand around with our thumbs up it."
"Hey, Sarge."
Joe took another step back from the escarpment before he turned to see what Mort Jaiffer wanted. Mort hadn't bothered with his helmet radio. The platoon was, more or less, off duty now. The only attack they had to fear in this location was from the air, and there had been virtually no enemy air during the daylight hours since the first day of the campaign.
"What is it?" Joe asked.
"How come they didn't let us stay in Maison? It would have been nice to sleep with a roof over our heads."
"We want to keep the locals on our side," Joe said, grinning. Mort worked hard to make the rest of the men in the platoon forget that he had been an egghead in civilian life, a professor. "Captain said we had to keep the likes of you away from the pretty girls, 'specially now that their papas have all those Heggie rifles." The rumor within the platoon was that Jaiffer's decision to leave the university and join the ADF had something to do with the daughter of a chancellor, or dean, or department chairperson. The details varied from telling to telling. The story was, however, totally unconfirmed.
"Hell, I'd need a bath and twelve hours sleep before I could even think about the ladies," Mort said. "They would have been safe."
"You'd have found a way." Joe shook his head. "You couldn't have got your mind off 'em anyway. This way, maybe we can get you to give the job at least some thought."
"Why? Nothing's going to happen now. This time tomorrow, we'll be back on ship, heading for home and a chance to feel human again before the next time. Besides, it's not me I'm concerned about. It's Tod. He got the big eyes over somebody he saw when we went through Maison."
"All the more reason to stay clear. How d'ya figure those folks are gonna feel about us when we pack up and leave, with all those Heggies still down in the valley?"
That took the smile off of Mort's face. "Why are we doing that, Sarge? Why not bring in enough men to finish the job while we're here?"
"Because we don't have enough men to finish the job on all of the worlds we're hitting. We're just here to let 'em take Devon back for good. Porter's just a diversion, remember?"
Mort's "I remember" was a mumble too soft for Joe to really hear it, but he did understand what Mort said.
"Maybe next time it'll be Porter's turn," Joe suggested. "We've got a lot of worlds to take back from the Heggies."
"I got no argument with that," Mort conceded. "We've let them get away with crap too long as it is." That's why I'm here.
"Two, three years from now, maybe we'll have enough ships and trained men to get the job done right. For now, it's do what we can. Keep 'em off guard. Keep 'em too busy to even think about taking more of the Free Worlds." It was never just repeated propaganda for Joe. He believed every word of it.
"Besides," he added, "you're no conscript. You volunteered for this just like the rest of us."
Mort shrugged and walked back to where his gear was piled, next to the latest of his slit trenches. He had lost count. He was no longer sure if this was the fourth or fifth hole he had dug since coming to Porter. When he was digging, he sometimes thought that that was all he did in the army. But digging couldn't shut off his mind, or his addiction to second-guessing the way the war was being waged.
Joe turned his attention back to the expanse of the rift valley. He had seen many kinds of terrain before, on more than a half-dozen worlds, but he had never seen anything quite like this. He could see what he thought was a line of peaks in the distance, far beyond the ranging capability of the binoculars, but even so, those peaks were just bumps on the horizon. Across most of the valley, he could see no proper end to it at all. The valley extended on beyond the horizon. He knew that, off to his left, almost two hundred kilometers beyond Porter City, there was an ocean that extended over more than two thirds of the surface of the world, interrupted only by a few score large islands until it lapped the western shore of the world's only true continent. To his right, the rift continued for another thousand kilometers or more. At the end of it, the mountain range he thought he could see in the distance actually met the plateau, and climbed to peaks as high as nine thousand meters. He would have liked to see those high mountains.
"Wonder how long it's been since they had a proper quake 'round here?" he asked himself as he looked at the scarp again. That was enough to move him farther from the edge. The escarpment on a rift valley, the edge of a tectonic plate. Maybe the zone was inactive now. Joe seemed to recall that it was—had been for perhaps a million years. Someone had asked during one of the mission briefings. But still...
"That's really all we'd need."
—|—
The efficiency of the huge tarpaulins had never really been tested under actual combat conditions. According to the data from the acceptance trials, the thermal shields would block the heat of Havoc engines, and even the heat of a barrel that had been used intensively for three hours. But heat signature was not the only way that a Havoc could be spotted from the air at night or in conditions of reduced visibility. That much ferrous metal (even though sophisticated composites were used extensively in the Havoc, there was still a considerable amount of steel and steel alloys in it) made for a strong magnetic signature, one that could be localized, if not always positively identified by sensitive instruments.
It was because of their
uncertainty about the quality of their shielding that Eustace Ponks and his crew didn't set up their bedrolls on the engine deck of Basset two, under the thermal shield. The night would have been a little warmer, and the metal deck of the gun carriage would have been only marginally harder than the ground they did sleep on. The crew was tired enough that they would have been able to sleep soundly strapped into their seats inside the Havoc. But a Havoc would always be a prime target for any enemy, so they set up their bedrolls under the trees, some twenty meters from the gun.
"What the hell," Karl Mennem said as he lowered himself to his blanket. "I can put up with this one more night."
"Yeah," Jimmy Ysinde pitched in quickly. "Tomorrow night we should be back on the ship, showered and between fresh sheets." The sigh he let loose might almost have signaled sexual gratification.
"I wonder how much time we'll have in camp before they ship us out again," Simon Kilgore said. He was already wrapped up in his blanket, eyes closed. He did not worry about chatter. Soon, he would be asleep. Used to the sounds of a 200mm cannon going off next to him, a little subdued talk would never matter.
"Don't sniff the sheets till you see 'em," Eustace advised. That was a typical comment from him. He made a habit of it.
—|—
The quiet lasted almost until dawn.
The Schlinal Hegemony's Nova tank was not in the same league as the Accord's Havoc self-propelled howitzer. Though more heavily armored, the Nova's main weapon was a 135mm cannon, with a range only half of the Havoc's 200mm gun. The Nova was also smaller and carried only a two-man crew. In top speed, however, they were about equal.
The two weapons platforms served different functions, a distinction as old as the earliest examples of the two types of weapon. The Havoc carried a long-range howitzer, intended to stand back from the front lines and bombard the enemy from a distance. With less than half the maximum range of the Havoc's gun, the Nova was an in-your-face weapon, meant to lead infantry into battle, or to seek out and destroy enemy heavy weapons and strongpoints. The Nova also carried three machine guns, two that fired wire, and one supplied with 20mm ammunition of a variety of types. The Nova also found use as an instrument of civil control, and not just on worlds that had been newly conquered by the Hegemony. The Nova, now in its fourteenth variant, had been designed and was built primarily on Schline, the capital world of the empire. It had even found use there, and on other Schlinal worlds, often enough. The populace of the Hegemony was not always placid.
In the last minutes before dawn, six Novas came out of the east in a broad wedge, driving straight into the Accord perimeter. Infantry came behind the tanks, and alongside them. In a separate foray, Schlinal foot soldiers attacked the Accord line farther to the north, without armored assistance. The Novas opened up with all of their guns, cannon and machine guns. Until that moment, they had not been spotted, or even heard. For the first time in the war, Accord soldiers learned just how silently the Nova could move. In that, the Hegemony was far ahead of the Accord.
Howard Company was spread thin, covering what had been considered a "low risk" section of the perimeter. Almost before the men of Howard knew what had happened, the spearhead of the Schlinal attack was through their line. The six Novas broke through and kept going, speeding up once they had passed the initial line of resistance. Their target was the group of Wasps on the ground near the center of the Accord's position, and their support services. Getting rid of the support vans, with their spare batteries, chargers, as well as maintenance and ammunition stores, would be nearly as crushing a blow as destroying the fighters themselves. Without that support gear, the fighters would quickly become useless.
Perhaps the fact that all of the Schlinal satellites above Porter had been destroyed in the first hour of the Accord incursion made the difference. If the Nova crews had known precisely where those Wasps and support vans were, the destruction might have been nearly complete. Only two Wasps were in the air when the attack started, but all but one of the 13th's remaining fighters managed to get airborne before the Novas came within range. The last of the Wasps, Red four, was destroyed by a single shot from the lead Nova. Its pilot and crew chief were both killed.
The Nova formation broke up. With enemy fighters in the air, each of the tank drivers headed for cover, and separation. The Nova's weapons were poorly suited for anti-aircraft use.
The men assigned to the 13th's headquarters detachment found themselves fighting for the first time on Porter. Mostly, they took cover, simply trying to stay alive until men from the line companies could come to their aid. Headquarters detachment had no Vrerch missiles, and their wire carbines had no chance of even worrying tank crews.
Terry Banyon made a valiant attempt to stop one of the Novas. Staying in his slit trench until the tank rolled next to it, he jumped up onto the rear deck with nothing but his carbine and a smoke grenade. He emptied his zipper on the driver's porthole, hoping to smash that so he could lob his smoke grenade inside. That, he figured, would make the crew open up, and once a hatch was open, someone else could do the honors with a fragmentation grenade—or even a carbine, if he had no time to reload his own.
It was a futile attempt. The "glass" of the Nova viewports was nanofactured diamond, and the uranium wire spit out by an Armanoc zipper could hardly scratch it. The crew of the Nova would have ignored their unwanted passenger, knowing that he could do them no harm, but when the tank's left tread ran over a large rock, Banyon was thrown from the rear deck. As soon as the tank commander saw that, he threw both treads into reverse. He could not miss a "gift" of that sort.
Terry Banyon had no chance to escape.
—|—
"Saddle up," Joe told his men, breaking into the sleep of half of them. His was the second call. Max Maycroft had already broadcast to the entire platoon. The noise of the fighting was too far away to wake heavily sleeping soldiers, but once they started to come awake, they could hear the commotion in the distance. The cannon fire of the Novas had subsided, to be replaced by the occasional blast of a rocket from a Wasp, or from soldiers on the ground. But the small-arms fire was heavy—too heavy, Joe thought, for anything less than full-scale involvement by several companies.
The rest of the perimeter was not abandoned to meet the raid. Though Echo Company moved out of the line, there were still enough others nearby to fill the gap. There was almost no chance that an attack would come along the escarpment. There was no way that the enemy could approach unseen.
Morning twilight was moving toward sunrise as Echo Company started moving toward the center of the 13th's foothold on Porter. That was where the tanks had headed following their breakthrough. Before Echo got that far, they were redirected toward the line to help there. Howard Company was keeping the Schlinal infantry busy, even though it had been unable to slow down the tanks.
By the time Echo reached the fighting, the situation had stabilized. There was still shooting going on, on both sides, and the line was no longer solid. Some of the enemy infantry had broken through. Joe's platoon was put to work trying to ferret out all of the enemy who had gotten behind the lines while the rest of Echo reinforced Howard to keep more from penetrating.
The men of 2nd platoon were spread out, five to ten meters apart, close enough to cover each other and make certain that no one slipped through this net. They moved slowly. Each man kept his head and eyes moving, looking for any hint of movement in the long shadows of early morning. There was no good cover, no place to hide. That worked more for 2nd platoon than against it. The Heggies were the ones looking for places to hide. Tree trunks without any stands of bushes or tall grass would give them little help. Visibility was too good. Those Heggies cut off inside the lines had few choices after their tanks deserted them for the other hunt. Some dropped their weapons, raised their arms, and surrendered. Others decided to obey their orders and went down fighting. There were not many of the latter.
Chal Tomer in third squad was killed by one of the Heggies who would not surr
ender. Two men in second squad were wounded by a grenade. None of the Heggies involved in those incidents survived.
—|—
The breakthrough on Howard Company's front and the subsequent death of Terry Banyon was not the worst news of the morning for Colonel Stossen. Only minutes after the death of his executive officer, Stossen had a call from CIC on the flagship. The 13th's relief was not in-system. Only a message drone had come.
"Hold until relieved or recalled. Covering force for your evacuation has been delayed."
CHAPTER NINE
Van Stossen refused to let himself feel grief, even though he had served with Terry Banyon for years. Their association, their friendship, went back long before the founding of the Accord's fifteen Spaceborne Assault Teams. They had been close, professionally and personally. They were friends and their wives were friends. Their children had played together since infancy. But Van and Terry were both professional soldiers, and death was part of their profession.
"We'll have to get a burial detail," Stossen told Dezo Parks when they stood together next to Banyon's mangled body. The last of the Schlinal tanks had been accounted for, finally. Van turned away. He could not look at his dead friend past that first glance.
"I'll take care of it," Parks said. He called for men to help.
Stossen moved away, back toward the command post. He had more urgent worries now. His two thousand men depended on him for leadership. Later, when the campaign was over and the 13th was back in garrison, or perhaps just in transit to the next battle, there would be time for reflection. If the 13th went back to garrison—as they would almost certainly do, at least long enough to replenish supplies and train replacements—Van would raise a toast to his friend. He would take the news to Terry's widow personally. There could be no thought of just making a compsole call or sending the official letter of notification. That his own wife would accompany him would not make it easier, but he would never even think of evading that final obligation to his friend.