Until Relieved

by Rick Shelley

  "Get to the wall," Keye ordered. "That'll give us some cover."

  Joe's instinct was to run as fast as he could for the partial shelter of the building's wall, and the rubble—most of that from the neighboring barracks—that was scattered in front of it, but he checked his speed enough to look around to see how the men of his squad, and the rest of the platoon, were faring. There was little sense of interval now. Everyone was anxious to get out of the open as fast as humanly possible. Speed was more of an ally than spacing now.

  The chaos was less complete than it appeared. Second platoon was not simply running blindly into enemy fire. They were getting covering fire from behind them, and even from across the compound, from those troops of George Company who could bring their weapons to bear. And 2nd platoon did move by squads, if with less precision than in other circumstances.

  Getting inside one building of the compound appeared to be the key to clearing up the entire kaserne. They could work from one building to another, limiting their exposure to outside fire. Of course, that kind of fighting—a room-by-room hunt for the enemy—could be the most deadly sort. There was a moment of truth entering each room, a moment of total exposure to whoever or whatever might be inside, an instant of vulnerability that could be minimized, but never eliminated. The platoon's grenades would not last forever, and even the explosion of a grenade or two inside a room did not always guarantee the elimination of all enemies within.

  Lieutenant Keye kept his pace even slower than Joe's. He let nearly all of the platoon move past him while he kept his head up and turning to watch for any threat to them. Keye also kept his rifle up, and he fired short bursts, trying to do as much good as he could with the weapon. He was an expert marksman when he took the time to aim, but there were still few visible targets. Hilo Keye was not fearless. He had written his will long ago, and before every battle, he gave his soul over to the God he prayed to regularly. When his time came, he believed that he would be prepared. In the meantime, he had sworn an oath, and he meant to keep it as honestly as he could.

  The panes had long since been shattered or blown out of all of the windows in the barracks buildings. When Joe reached the wall, he tossed a grenade through the nearest opening, then ducked to the side. As soon as the grenade exploded, he twisted around with his carbine's muzzle moving into the opening. He did not fire though. Even through the blue-gray smoke, he could see that there were no living enemies in the room.

  "Inside," he ordered first squad. "Lieutenant!"

  "Go for it," Keye ordered over their circuit. "Cover the hallway inside and I'll funnel the rest of the platoon through to you."

  Joe backed off two steps, then ran forward and went through the window headfirst, grabbing the sill with one hand in an attempt to right himself. It was a far from perfect stunt. He landed off balance and went forward onto his knees with considerably more force than he had intended. The first fire team came in the window behind him, quickly but with more care. While the men were coming in, Joe did a quick check of the three bodies in the room to make certain that they were out of action. Then he went to the interior doorway. The door was missing. He pressed himself against the wall next to the opening, carefully edging around the doorpost to look down the hallway. Once he was certain that there were no Heggies in sight, he got ready to jump to the other side of the doorway, to look back in the other direction, but Mort Jaiffer moved into position there first.

  "I'll do it, Sarge," Mort said.

  Mort was as careful as Joe had been, but there were no enemy soldiers visible in that direction either.

  "Secure the corridor," Joe said, waving the rest of the squad through. "See if you can find an outside door, or a bigger hole than that window. Should be down to the left," he told Ezra as the second fire team got ready to move out into the corridor. "It'll take all night to get the platoon in through one window."

  He heard the shrill yipping of wire guns being fired somewhere inside the building, off to the left, he thought, where he expected the outside door to be. He took a quick look that way. Mort and Al were at the end of the corridor, their rifles aimed upward, apparently at something or someone up a flight of stairs.

  The platoon's second squad was coming through the window finally, so Joe moved down the hall toward Mort and Al. They noted his approach but kept their eyes on the highest steps they could see from their positions. There was a landing, nine steps up, and the men at the bottom couldn't see around the corner.

  "I saw someone, going up," Mort said. "Didn't get him."

  "He shoot back?" Joe asked.

  "He shot, but nothing came near us," Al said. "I don't think he was expecting us."

  Joe called the rest of first squad to him. "We'll do this right," he told the two who were there already.

  "We got to go up there?" Al asked.

  "Yes," Joe said. Be easier to just blow the building up, but I guess we can't do that now, he thought.

  "Mort, Kam. You're up first." Switching to a private channel, Joe added, "Just like a drill, Kam, except this is for real. Be careful. I'll stay close."

  Goff looked at him and nodded. Joe couldn't see the rookie's eyes through his visor, but he pictured them wide open, halfway between shock and wonder.

  Mort moved up the stairs first. Kam stayed two steps below him, his rifle pointed at the highest point he could find. If an enemy gun showed at the landing, Kam would have only a fraction of a second, with luck, to get his own zipper into action first. If a grenade came bouncing down the steps, there would be little either of them could do but go flat and hope for a miracle.

  Joe waited for Mort and Kam to get to the landing and look around the corner. Then he and Al followed them up, keeping the interval. They waited at the landing until the first pair got to the top of the stairs. Ezra and the second fire team waited at the bottom of the stairs until Joe and Al reached the landing, then they hurried up to that point. Joe and Al went halfway up the second section of the stairway.

  Just like a drill. An enemy might get one or two men on the point, but there would always be someone else close enough to return the compliment, and then some.

  By the time the rest of the squad got into position, Mort and Kam were at the top of the stairwell, at the door leading out into the main corridor on that level. There was still a door in place. Behind the two men, part of the exterior wall was missing. The stairwell was right at the edge of an area that had been opened up by an RPG.

  "This is the tough part," Mort whispered over the link to Joe.

  "Wait up," Joe said. "Wait till we're all in position."

  Mort and Kam were both lying on the top stairs, only their heads and shoulders and rifles above the level of the second-story floor. Mort was on the left. The muzzle of his rifle was within a couple of centimeters of the closed door.

  The second we open that door, all hell is going to break loose, Joe thought, knowing that there was still no other way. Closed door. It looked to be a fire door, heavy—almost as if there were a layer of tank armor there. Joe guessed that the door would stop anything short of a Vrerch rocket. The door opened outward, toward the stairs. Joe went up onto the landing and stood behind the door, his back against the wall at its side.

  Trusting more to hand signs than even the secure radio links they shared, Joe showed the others what he wanted to do.

  "No use waiting for sunrise," Joe muttered finally. He sucked in a deep breath. "Now!"

  Joe yanked the door open and used it to shelter his body, hoping that he was right about the strength of its construction. As soon as there was an opening, Mort started shooting out into the corridor, Kam tossed out a grenade, aiming it in the other direction, then pulled back. Joe pushed against the door, putting his weight against the power of the hydraulic rod that was intended to close the door slowly.

  When the grenade exploded, the shock pushed the door back against Joe, but not with enough force to do any harm. He yanked on the knob again, opening it wide this time. Mort moved forward,
dropping to his hands and knees as he threw himself out into the corridor. He dropped and rolled across the floor and came into a prone firing position as if that were the most natural maneuver in the galaxy.

  Kam was more awkward going out to cover the corridor in the other direction. He slipped and fell forward hard, but he caught himself on his forearms and hands and was only a fraction of a second slower than Mort in getting his rifle up into firing position. Both men sprayed short bursts toward their respective ends of the hallway, and while they were firing, Joe and Al moved out into the corridor with them, going only to their knees. Joe was behind Kam, and Al was behind Mort. With four rifles, they could hope to meet any weapon that might come out of any of the doorways that lined the hall in both directions.

  Ezra brought his men up and out then. Joe assigned one fire team to move in each direction. There were eight doorways, other than the one that led to the stairs, on that level. They had to check every room, clear every room.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Eustace Ponks was beginning to feel almost comfortable slithering along on his belly. He was nearly able to forget that this was a deadly serious affair. Almost. Nearly. A continuing pressure against his temples and the hollow ringing in his ears helped to isolate his thoughts. Childhood memories touched at the edge of his awareness, games played with his two brothers and with the other children who lived in the neighborhood—neighborhood: an area perhaps as much as three kilometers in radius; homesteads had been somewhat isolated where Eustace grew up. Eustace and his friends and brothers had played at soldier quite frequently. Both brothers were also in the Accord Defense Forces. Ellis was a navigator aboard a transport. Ekko was an electronics technician, maintaining computers at one of the home ports of the fleet. Playing soldier as kids, the greatest triumph of all had been to sneak up on one of his mates and "count coup," get close enough to be able to claim a "kill," or just to scare the daylights out of the victim. Everyone—everyone else—would get a tremendous laugh out of that.

  Now, he couldn't just yell "Boo!" or go "Zap! Zap! You're dead." This was real. The winner would live. The loser would die.

  It must be just one Heggie, Ponks told himself. It made no sense, but he hoped there was only one, some luckless sap who somehow had managed to get separated from his unit. A man who could do that might get careless at the wrong time, like now. Although Eustace was looking for reassurance, he didn't take his own thoughts too seriously. He would not close off options, would not assume that it had to be merely one man. There might be a dozen of them. But no matter how farfetched it sounded, or how many times he warned himself to expect the worse, he came back to thinking that there must only be one man—two at the most. If there were more Heggies, they would be bolder, he thought. They would be on the prowl, looking to finish the job they had started when they disabled Basset two.

  Eustace stopped moving and lay in what was as close to absolute silence as he could get. He held his breath for as long as he could, and even closed his eyes for a moment, as if that might sharpen his hearing. The ringing in his ears was no longer a strident blanket over all other sound, but there was still... almost a hollowness, a void that might conceal the minimal sounds he might need in order to find the enemy—before they found him. Eustace had no night-vision visor to his helmet. Seeing: that advantage would belong to the Heggie. Eustace had to look for his edge with the other extended sense, hearing... and his hearing remained questionable. Eustace's hearing was far from perfect under the best of conditions. In certain frequencies, he was more than half deaf from his years in the artillery. Background noise would blank those frequencies out completely. Against silence, it was never that bad. Still, after that explosion... he couldn't be sure yet what additional damage his hearing had suffered. The sounds he was listening for might be there, and he might not be able to hear them.

  He strained against the moment when he would finally have to suck in air, hoping to get some clue to the position of his enemy first. Now that he had had some time to think, Eustace did have some idea where his own crewmen had to be. Though he had no helmet display to draw on, he thought that he had worked out approximately where they would be found. He could see the outline of the Fat Turtle in his mind. He knew where the other hatches were, and the most likely angle for each man to run as he got down. They had done quite a few evacuation drills in training, and everyone got into habits, patterns.

  Finally, Eustace could hold his breath no longer. It was almost impossible to take a breath quietly after holding it for so long, but he did the best he could. Then he took two more breaths, less frantic. Then he held it again. Maybe this time he would hear something. With every minute that passed, his hearing should be improving, recovering from the transitory effects of the blast.

  At first, he still heard nothing that was not obviously natural. Then, almost at the point when he would have to take another breath, there was just the lightest rustle. If he had been concentrating any less, Eustace might not even have noticed it, or might have written it off without thought as a normal background noise. But there was that slight rustle, not of grass or leaves in the wind, but more of cloth against cloth.

  And he had the direction, or thought he did. The sound had come from farther away from the Havoc, far from where any of his own men might be.

  I guess I've got some hearing left after all, Eustace thought.

  He started crawling again, more slowly than ever. He stopped to listen after each twenty or thirty centimeters, waiting for a repeat of the sound. After creeping a total of about three meters, he went absolutely still again, looking in the direction of the slight noise he had heard—perhaps ten minutes before.

  This time, the wait was shorter. Again, he heard no more than the slightest noise—a breath this time, too much air sucked in at once, close enough that Eustace was able to tell almost precisely where it had come from, distance as well as direction. There was a lump on the low horizon, just in front of him. The soldier lying there—not five meters away—was looking off toward Eustace's right, at an angle.

  Now, is it an enemy or one of my own men? Eustace asked himself. Though he thought that the figure had to be a Heggie, the question was inescapable. A mistake was unthinkable.

  The helmet? Eustace stared, trying to determine if the figure on the ground in front of him wore an Accord gunner's helmet or an infantry helmet. The only sure way to tell that in the dark would be to spot a visor—which artillery helmets did not have in the ADF—and that would be difficult if Schlinal helmets were as nonreflective as those the Accord infantry used.

  Move, you bastard! Eustace thought, trying to force the figure to move by sheer willpower. But the figure on the ground did not lift his head or turn it enough to give Eustace a better view of the front of the helmet.

  Eustace was too near to risk calling his crew over his helmet radio. This near a potential enemy, even a whisper would give him away. A millimeter at a time, he brought his pistol into position, ready for a shot the instant he was certain of his target. The matte-black finish of the gun would not reflect anything. There would be no way anyone would see the gun until the flash of a shot.

  How's your patience? Eustace only thought the question he directed toward the figure lying on the ground in front of him. I bet I can outwait you.

  He had to.

  It might have taken another ten minutes. Eustace could not check the time and he did not trust the estimates his mind waffled over. Something just short of eternity. There was simply no way to be objective about that under the circumstances.

  But the head did move eventually. It raised up, no more than five centimeters. That was enough. The silhouette Eustace saw was a helmet with a face visor, and that meant that it was not Simon, Karl, or Jimmy. Anyone else had to be an enemy.

  Eustace fired once, at the line where the helmet met the body. The noise of the shot startled Eustace, even though he was expecting it. But the shot was accurate. The figure in the dark jerked back and up as the RA project
ile hit bone and exploded. Eustace had already fired again by then. The figure jerked once more, twisting halfway to its left. The entire head seemed to fly off of the shoulders. Then the body fell flat again and was still.

  "Eustace?"

  "Yeah, Simon," Ponks replied. "I got one. I think that's all there is, but there's no way to be sure. Karl? Jimmy? You both there?"

  He was relieved to hear both men reply.

  "You see the gun flash?" Eustace asked next. "Move toward it. Be careful though, just in case there's more of 'em. I'll double-check the Heggie I got and make sure he's really done for." There was little question about that. Without a head, the man had to be dead.

  —|—

  Kam Goff was in a corner of the room, puking again. He had started retching so hard that he was unable to stay on his feet even. He was down on his knees, the top of his head pressed against the corner. There was no longer anything to come out, but he couldn't control the heaving spasms. Joe Baerclau stood by the door, not looking at Goff, but staying close. The rest of the squad was elsewhere on the second floor of the building, away from this scene. The room Joe and Kam were in was on the far side of the building from the continuing action. Joe was not particularly concerned with stray fire. That would have a lot of concrete and stone to go through to get to them.

  I don't think you're gonna last in this business, kid, Joe thought. The shake of his head was almost unnoticeable. He could picture a variety of sequels. Goff might make a foolish move and get himself killed. He might simply go to pieces and have to be invalided out for mental problems. Or he might swallow his zipper—kill himself.

  Until Goff could be moved back up to the ships, Joe knew that he would have to continue to pay special attention to the rookie, just to keep him alive until he could get help. The therapists that the ADF had were supposed to be good.

  The building was secure. The rest of the buildings in the kaserne would soon be taken or destroyed. The heavy weapons squads of the two companies were pouring rocket and grenade fire into the three remaining buildings now. There would be no more room-to-room hunts. Twenty prisoners had been taken in this one building, and another thirty Heggies killed, in a barracks that appeared to have been home to more than three hundred. Prisoners were a problem on a mission like this one. They could not simply be killed out of hand, but they would be an impossible handicap once the strike force left the city and tried to remain undercover, intact, in the broken country west of town.