by Rick Shelley
"Just tell me this isn't as crazy as it sounds," Mort said over his private channel to Joe.
"Colonel's always been pretty savvy, Mort," Joe replied. It was the most positive comment he could come up with at the moment.
Most of the men tried to get what rest they could during the short hop in the landers. Soldiers got like that. Sleep when you can, even if only for a few seconds. It might be days before you get anything longer. Joe looked around. He saw closed eyes. Perhaps not many of the men were actually sleeping, but they looked the part. Of the privates in his squad, only Kam Goff had his eyes open—wide open, staring blankly ahead of him.
Gonna have to watch him closer than ever, Joe thought. Goff looked as if he had gone beyond fear, and Joe couldn't guess which way the rookie would tumble. He might come out of it on his own, but he also might freeze up or become foolhardy. In any case, there was no way that Joe could cut Goff out of the action now. He might still work out, with a little luck, and the right nudge at the right time, but Joe hoped that he wouldn't have to bet his life on it. Still, that was why Joe had taken both new men into his own fire team, so he could give them as much personal attention as possible. At least Al Bergon was cool. He had shown from the start that he could handle whatever combat threw at him. That was far from unusual among men who volunteered for additional duties as medics. Joe shook his head, an almost-invisible gesture within his helmet. Where do they come from?
"Thirty seconds," the pilot warned, and time for reflection was gone. Eyes opened. Men looked around, as if they might see something new within the troop bay. The monitors on the bulkheads showed an infrared image of the ground they were approaching, overlaid on a photographic map. The shuttle was flying low, so the cameras didn't show much, and the view moved by too rapidly for the men to see any detail. But there were no telltale hot spots showing up, nothing too bright to be natural in IR.
The dim red lights that had been the only illumination in the troop bay were extinguished before the shuttle landed. Equally dim green lights came on over the exits. Shielded inside long cylinders, and hitting only nonreflective surfaces, the lights would not show through to anyone on the outside. The men all had their visors down and night-sight gear activated. They didn't need additional lights. Before the four doors were fully open, the men were all on their feet moving toward their assigned exits, safeties off on their rifles, ready for action the instant they went through the doorway and had a field of fire open in front of them.
"Stay close to me, kid," Joe whispered to Goff as they went through the doorway. "I mean close."
"Yes, Sarge," Kam replied. His voice sounded distant, as if he were not truly inside his head.
The terrain where the shuttles landed was much different from up on the plateau. Around the main LZs, the ground had been flat, except for the cones of dirt around the trunks of that one species of tree. Only up near Maison had the land been at all uneven, and there it was a matter of a few small hills. In this part of the rift valley though, the ground was extremely broken up, uneven and rocky. There were thickets and small stands of trees, narrow valleys with thin, shallow streams running through them, large stone protrusions and occasional dry clefts in the ground, ravines, or gullies. It was topological confusion, an excellent arena for soldiers who preferred not to have their presence detected.
The shuttles had been forced to separate to find spaces to land. There was no single flat area around where all five of them could have landed together. There was scarcely a place where two would fit, even with exceptionally talented pilots.
That meant that a certain amount of time was wasted after debarkation as the separated units joined up and commanders made sure that no one had been lost in the initial confusion. By the time the strike force had reorganized itself for the march toward Porter City, the shuttles had lifted off and disappeared into the night, flying farther west before lifting toward orbit and a rendezvous with their mother ships. It was too dangerous to hold the shuttles on-world where they would be tempting targets for the enemy. If the 13th had to make a hasty exit from Porter, under fire, they would need every shuttle the fleet carried.
"I knew we had a long march ahead of us," Mort told Joe once the force had started moving, "but I didn't realize it was mountain goat country."
"Good cover," Joe said. He kept his head turning. The platoon was in two columns, one on either side of a creek running along the bottom of the gully they were in.
"Good cover for the enemy too," Mort replied.
"I know, so cut the chatter and keep your eyes open." Men got too used to the privacy of communicating over their helmet radios. Sound discipline was an enduring problem.
The enemy has no business being close enough to set up an ambush. Joe repeated that to himself. The strike force had landed in the most deserted sector to be found within fifty kilometers of Porter City. There weren't even any farms within twenty kilometers, no sign at all of human habitation. It might be just the sort of area a military commander would choose for field exercises, but the Heggies were unlikely to be out on training maneuvers with the 13th sitting on the plateau. At a time like this, everything would be for real, not training.
But Joe remained nervous. That was the only way to go into combat.
—|—
Eustace Ponks had his hatch open as Basset two raced across the rift valley. Every few minutes—when the ride seemed smooth enough—he would reach up, grab the rim of the hatchway, and lift his head out into the open air. The Havoc was making a steady sixty kilometers per hour, very close to its top speed. Eustace was unaware of the discussions that had taken place between the 13th's commanding and operations officers. All he knew was what was in the final orders that had come down. Basset Battery was to race full tilt toward Porter City. They had to cover five-hundred kilometers in less than ten hours in order to be in position to support the infantry raid against the city. The sooner they could get within range of the strike force, the sooner they would be able to bring their guns to bear, in case Echo and George companies and the two recon platoons were discovered and attacked before they reached their target.
The Havoc was far from a racer, but there was the same sort of feel to it. Eustace loved racing, of any sort. He didn't even need to have a bet down on the outcome. People, animals, wheeled or winged vehicles, boats—anything that could be pitted one against the other in a contest of speed and talent—Eustace loved to watch, loved to cheer on a personal favorite.
His favorite in this race was his all-time personal favorite, himself. With fewer responsibilities, he might have chosen to boost himself up to keep his head out in the wind constantly, but he couldn't permit himself that foolish indulgence. His controls and warning systems were all inside the turret. He had the vehicle's radar and IR screens to watch as well as the real-time relay of data being sent down from the spyeye satellites and the ships of the fleet. There weren't enough men in a Havoc crew to let the commander dope off.
"Put antigrav drives on this baby and she'd really fly," Simon said, looking across the gun barrel at Ponks. Simon Kilgore knew how much his sergeant enjoyed racing, both as participant and spectator.
"Be a mean mother, all right," Ponks conceded with a grin. It was an old topic. The possibility of an antigrav gun platform was a perennial in the artillery. But the size power plant that would be needed would make the platform much too easy a target.
Maybe someday.
According to the latest satellite intelligence, updated since the battery of Havocs had descended to the floor of the valley, there was no enemy armor anywhere between the escarpment and the capital. There were also no known concentrations of enemy foot soldiers, though that information was far less certain than the other. There were enough spyeyes overhead to cover the entire area between the scarp and Porter City every twenty minutes, at the best resolution of the imaging computers. It took about three additional minutes for CIC to process the data and transmit the necessary information and coded map overlays to the fo
rces on the surface. Worst case, the information Ponks and the other Havoc commanders were looking at should never be more than twenty-three minutes old, generally less than half of that. That was still long enough for a lot to happen.
"This mission strike you as just a little bit crazy?" Simon asked a few minutes later.
Eustace laughed, loud and long. "Just a little," he conceded. "That's what makes it so exciting."
"Brother, you and I have different ideas about excitement," Kilgore said. "Ranging off five-hundred klicks from the rest of the team, heading straight for maybe twenty or thirty thousand enemy soldiers and God only knows how much armor and air, and how many thousands of rockets. And not knowing how much longer we're even going to be here before we get some help, or a ticket off."
"You want certainty, you're in the wrong business," Ponks said. "You should have been a preacher or something."
"We don't have preachers, we have rabbis," Kilgore said. "And they don't have all that much certainty either. I know. My father is one."
"No kiddin'? Hey, I didn't know that, and how long we been together?"
"Too long, I think. You keepin' your eyes on our TA?"
Ponks took a quick look at the target acquisition monitor, then nodded. "I'm keeping my eyes where they belong. Just don't run us into something we can't get out of."
CHAPTER TEN
Captain Teu Ingels of Echo Company was in overall tactical command of the strike force. Lieutenant Vic Vickers, the commanding officer of George, was second in command even though there were two lieutenants in Echo who were senior to him in rank. Ingels was the senior company commander within the 13th. Within six to nine months, perhaps sooner, he would be promoted to major and a job on Colonel Stossen's staff. With the death of Lieutenant Colonel Banyon, that promotion and reassignment were perhaps more imminent, though it would not come until after the 13th finished its job on Porter—if the 13th ever got off-planet.
The recon platoons ranged out ahead and to either side of Echo and George. It was their job to find a quick, safe route to the objective as well as to scout for any enemy positions or telltales that might lie across that route. The men who made it into the recon platoons were chosen specifically for their abilities. The fifteen Spaceborne Assault Teams were seen as an elite within the Accord Defense Forces, and the recon platoons were an elite within the SATs.
There was little chat among the men on the march this night. The pace that the companies had to maintain made spare wind for even whispered asides scarce. Joe Baerclau smiled at the thought. It took a lot to drive any comment at all from his men. At least, if they didn't talk, he didn't have to waste his own breath telling them not to.
Joe stepped out of the line for a moment and turned to watch as his men filed past. At the moment, 2nd platoon was in the middle of the line of march, in the left-hand column. George Company was a couple of hundred meters to the right, following the next indentation in the landscape.
Hardly a level spot around, Joe thought. He shook his head. He had paid little attention before to the description of this valley as a rift valley. The word simply had slid past without sinking in. Joe had heard the term before, but had never given it much thought. Mort had filled him in during their time along the escarpment, giving him a quick briefing on tectonics, an explanation of why the ground was so uneven, so rocky. "It's not old enough for erosion to have smoothed it all out yet," Mort had concluded, but it had taken this closer experience for Joe to really feel the meaning of that explanation.
This night march was little longer than the one Echo had made to Maison, but it was much more draining because of the terrain. Good boots eased the load on feet, but there was still the constant pull at leg muscles strained first one way and then the other. After five hours, Joe wondered if he could possibly keep going. The calves of his legs felt as if they had been bound in piano wire, and the wire was contracting, cutting into skin and muscle.
He was walking on a modest side slope, a layer of shale tilted by less than twenty degrees and strewn with igneous rocks that had fallen from another stratum, when his left foot slid out from under him. Joe's right foot caught against a rock for an instant, and he nearly tumbled headfirst down a three-meter embankment. His right ankle twisted as that foot came free, and he went down on his hip. After sliding halfway to the bottom of the gully, he managed to stop himself. For a moment, he could do no more than that. He let his head drop back against the rock and sucked in air.
His foot. No, not the foot. The ankle.
"You hurt, Sarge?" Al Bergon asked, sliding more carefully down the slope to come to a stop next to Joe.
"Right ankle," Joe replied. "I don't think it's sprained. I just twisted it."
"Better let me have a look."
"No time."
"No time is what it'll take," Al said. "You aggravate it and it's more than you think, then we have trouble."
Bergon didn't wait for his sergeant to agree. In his function as squad medic, he did have a certain amount of authority, authority that Platoon Sergeant Maycroft and Lieutenant Keye would support in an instant. While Al talked, he started taking off Joe's boot and sock. His hands moved around the ankle and along the muscles above it.
"Just a little swelling," Al said. "That may be just from the walk, not from the twist. I'll wrap a soaker around it and you should be fine."
He was already peeling the wrapper from the medicated bandage, and he got it secured around Baerclau's ankle in seconds. The analgesic in the soak started to work instantly, though the nanobots that would do any real repair work would take somewhat longer to do their job. Joe could feel the hot tingle of the bandage. He closed his eyes for a moment. The ankle had pained him more than he had really been aware, judging from the relief he felt as the pain started to abate. By the time his sock and boot were back on, the ache was scarcely a dull throb—bearable.
"I'll be able to walk on that," Joe said. He flexed the ankle several times. Despite an initial stab of renewed pain, that actually seemed to make the ankle feel better.
"And the soak will take care of any muscle pulls or such," Al said. "But be careful the next hour or so. If there's more wrong there than I think you'll know that soon." Probably within the first ten minutes, Al thought. In the field like this, he was limited to what he could see and feel for his diagnosis.
"You okay down there?"
Joe looked up, even though the voice had come over his radio. Max Maycroft was standing at the top of the gully, looking down at him. Joe clicked his transmitter over to the noncoms' channel.
"I will be, Max. Slight twist. My own damn fault. Careless. But it's all taken care of now."
To demonstrate that, Joe got to his feet and started to scramble up the slope. Before he could object, Al Bergon was at his side, one hand half supporting him. Joe felt an irrational flush of anger, but squelched it before it could show in his face, or in the way he moved.
"Thanks, Al," he said when they were both off of the slope.
"Don't feel bad," Maycroft said, standing with his feet braced wide even though he was on nearly level ground. "We've had twenty people do that, that I know of. Some of them were hurt worse than you are. Best boot treads in the galaxy, and they're still not secure on a slippery bit of shale."
"I just got too careless, Max," Joe said, feeling more embarrassed than hurt at the moment. "Five, six hours of this shit. It was just getting to me, and it shouldn't have."
"I know what you mean. But now that you're back on your feet, you might as well get off them again. Fifteen minutes, maybe twenty. Captain's decided that we all need a breather. Our orders have been changed, in any case. Once we get to our positions, the idea now is we sit doggo until sunset, unless we're discovered. Hide. Recon lads will do a little work of their own. And the Havocs, but not us. Now, grab a quick bite, a little water." He paused a second before he added, "Maybe a stimtab as well. That'll help clear your mind."
Joe nodded slowly. "I should have thought of that myself, M
ax. Gotta watch it. I get a little tired, and I'm getting careless. That can get people killed, and not just me."
"Don't read anything into what I said but what I said," Max told him. "That wasn't a chewing out. It was just a suggestion."
Joe shrugged. "Whatever you say, Max." He didn't see the humor in his words. When Maycroft laughed, Joe looked up quickly, caught completely unaware.
"That's the spirit," Max said. "Now, on your butt. Give that soaker a chance to do its work."
—|—
Zel Paitcher stood behind his Wasp and watched Tech Sergeant Roo Vernon work. Zel was cold, despite the flight suit that was supposed to be adequate protection against any temperature down to minus twenty degrees Celsius. There was a decidedly chilly breeze blowing across the plateau, close to 25 kilometers per hour, but the temperature was closer to 20 above than 20 below.
All in your head, Zel told himself. The breeze could only touch his face and hands. He wouldn't feel so irrationally cold if he were in the cockpit, where he belonged. He wouldn't feel so cold if he weren't worrying that there might be something seriously wrong with Blue four, something that might keep him out of the air. As tiring as the long hours in the sky were getting to be, Zel knew that he preferred that to sitting on the ground and being nothing more than a spectator.
Zel had his arms folded tightly against his chest. He moved around a lot, stamping first one foot and then the other. The sense of cold was no less real merely because he knew that it was an illusion, a trick of his mind.
Roo worked in silence, his head up in the portside drive compartment of Blue four. Warnings had flashed on every monitor in the cockpit when Zel tried to power on. The Wasp's self-diagnostic routines were thorough, but they were almost instantaneous. Each of the computers that minded the circuits in the aircraft was dedicated to servicing just a small portion of the works. The system had shut itself down before Zel could get his hand to the switch.