Until Relieved

by Rick Shelley

  The vacancies at the bottom were filled from outside, afterward. Sometimes by people like Kam Goff. Joe was saved from dwelling on that as the reports on ammunition started to filter back from the squad leaders.

  —|—

  "Shuttle's coming in now," Lieutenant Keye told Joe. "It'll be in range of enemy ground fire in two minutes, if they've got anyone in position. Get everybody on the line, ready. They may attack again when they see the shuttle."

  "Yes, sir." Joe clicked over to the platoon frequency and passed the order along. Then he moved back up to the ridge himself, fairly near—but not next to—Lieutenant Keye. This was no time to take a management position behind the lines. Every man with a rifle would be needed up front if an attack came. But it would never do to have the platoon leader and platoon sergeant close enough together that they might be taken out by one rocket or grenade. Having two links disappear from the chain of command at once might disrupt the platoon too much at a critical moment.

  Joe lifted his visor and rubbed at his face with both hands, vigorously. His cheeks were rough from three days growth of beard and a layer of dirt that washing with a cup of cold water could never hope to remove. When he moved his visor back into position, he actually felt a little better—if not rested, then at least ready to stay alert for a time.

  Two rifles. Joe set his Armanoc a little to the side, within easy reach, loaded and ready for action. He had a Schlinal rifle at his shoulder though. "Use the enemy weapons as long as you've got ammo for them," he told the platoon. "Throw it away when the Heggie wire is gone. Then you've still got your own zipper." Repeat everything important, as often as necessary. It wasn't absentmindedness, it was intentional. After a week of too little sleep and too much danger, no one's mind was at its sharpest.

  Joe had one full spool of wire in his Heggie rifle, and another six spools for it in a pouch on his hip. But there was only one power pack for the rifle, the one already in the receiver. He was uncertain how long the Schlinal power packs were good for, but the tiny gauge next to the selector switch showed that it still retained eighty percent of its juice. Should be enough, he thought. Hoped.

  This time, the Schlinal assault was presaged by the arrival of a half-dozen artillery shells—tank rounds. They carried smoke and feathery bits of metallic chaff. The smoke would cut down on visibility. The hot bits of metal foil would confuse infrared vision systems that could peer through the smoke. A moment later there was a volley of rocket grenades, dozens of them, scattered across the valley and up on the slope below the ridge where the Accord forces waited. Some of the grenades were shrapnel. Others were smoke or white phosphorous, more attempts to limit the visibility of the defenders.

  "Hold your fire," Joe said over the platoon circuit. "They won't be coming until the barrage lifts. We've got the ground. Wait for the order."

  The tanks came back, Joe thought. If they had ever actually left. But they were still keeping their distance. The rounds were falling down in the valley, or near the bottom of the slope. They were not reaching the defenders behind the ridge. It brought a grim smile to Joe's face. He tried to judge how many tanks were firing into the valley. It had to be at least four—maybe six, he decided. After another couple of minutes, Joe heard rifle fire coming from farther off to the right, out beyond the shoulder of the ridge, where one of the recon platoons was operating.

  "That's not here," Joe reported over the platoon link. "Don't let it worry you." He looked to make sure that Goff was close to him, and not falling apart.

  Kam's entire body was shaking, but he was at his post, rifle muzzle and eyes looking over the lip of rock into the valley below.

  Hang tough, rookie, Joe thought. Then: You're really not a rookie anymore. You've seen all the shit. For as long as he dared, Joe stared at Goff, willing him to hold out through this fight, the way he had held out through the others. And then he had to look away. He was platoon sergeant now; he was responsible for a lot of other men.

  The Schlinal infantry entered the valley. The shooting began.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  It was devilishly hot working under the thermal tarp, but the tarp was essential. Basset two had gone to ground before dawn, accompanied by the support van and its detachment of mechanics and security troops. The vehicles were twenty meters apart in a grove of stunted trees with sparse foliage. The trees provided little protection against even visual detection. They could not begin to mask the thermal signature of the gun carriage with its twin engines.

  The Havoc had been unable to risk anything near its rated top speed as it worked its way back toward the plateau. The rear drive wheel on the right tread had been repaired, but not to the satisfaction of Eustace Ponks or Rosey Bianco.

  "That axle's too badly damaged for field repairs," Rosey had said after the earlier work had been completed. "All we can hope for is it gets you back to camp. We should be able to salvage a part from one of the guns that went belly up." At least five Havocs had been knocked out of action by enemy fire. Some would have parts that could be cannibalized. "If not, maybe we can get a part down from the ships. I think there are a few spares."

  "I've got to have good tread under us tonight," Eustace said. "Listen at this. Can we switch axles?"

  "What d'ya mean?" Bianco asked.

  "Say we take the axle from one of the sleepers and put that on the drive wheel, reverse them. The sleeper, even if it goes, won't cripple us. We'll still be able to move. Worst that might happen is we might throw the tread a few times."

  Rosey leaned back and stared at Ponks as if the gunnery sergeant were out of his mind. Then, after a long moment, Rosey nodded. "It might work," he allowed. "Not according to the book, it won't," he added, "but since you got me here to make the switch, it just might work."

  It scarcely mattered to him that the axles were not even the same diameter. The sleeper axle was a centimeter thinner than the rod that held the drive wheel, but with a little work, a little imagination, and a few pieces of scrap metal, they just might be able to do it.

  "Take us most of the day, I think," Rosey said. Without the equipment of a full motor pool, it would be rough work indeed.

  —|—

  "Mark your targets, damn it!" Joe roared over the platoon frequency. A shout insured that everyone would at least hear him. "Don't waste your wire. We've got to stretch it a long ways yet."

  He tried to follow his own advice, but it wasn't easy. There were hundreds of Heggies advancing into the killing zone of the valley, moving forward with their heads lowered and their backs hunched, as if they were more afraid of what was behind them than what was in front of them.

  Maybe they are, Joe told himself. Maybe the stories he had heard about life in the Schlinal military were true, that the men were literally driven at gunpoint into combat, that anyone who hesitated or tried to retreat was summarily shot.

  Joe had heard too many tales about life in the Hegemony, most told by people who had absolutely no way to know if what they said was even vaguely true, for him to accept any of the stories at face value. Even before the war, the Hegemons were The Enemy, and little good was published about them in any of the data banks that Joe had had access to on his homeworld of Bancroft. Now that hostilities were well under way, the Accord Defenses Forces certainly did not go out of their way to tell soldiers anything favorable about the Hegemons or their "minions."

  Joe shook his head to clear his mind of the distractions. He didn't want to waste thought on anything about the enemy but what he could see through his gunsight. Don't think of the Heggies as human. Don't do anything to personalize them. They're just targets you have to knock down in order to move on to the next task. If you think of them as people, just like you and your men, you can get as messed up as Goff.

  The Schlinal rifle, though heavier and longer than the Armanoc, seemed to lack nothing in workmanship. It didn't boast the laser sights of the Accord zipper, but those sights were rarely as valuable as the ADF's brass hats seemed to think. Using the laser
to mark a target too often made the shooter a target as well.

  This was not like shooting on the firing range in garrison. Despite his admonitions, Joe could never lose sight of the fact that the targets he was aiming at were live men, soldiers fighting for their worlds, or for the Hegemony, following orders—perhaps not entirely of their own volition. At the sort of range they were at when they entered the valley, body armor was moderately effective. It took a concentration of wire, and a little luck, to bring down a soldier at anything beyond two-hundred meters. Even at half that distance, good body armor could deflect quite a bit. But no body armor covered every square millimeter of a soldier. There were gaps at the neck, between helmet and jacket, at the hands and wrists, and where boots met trousers. There were also weak points in the battle dress sometimes, places where repeated flexing had weakened the layers of net armor. Men died in combat, even when the texts said that they shouldn't.

  There was little return fire reaching the men on the ridge. The Heggies were too far away for accurate fire at the angle they had to shoot at, much too far away for men who were themselves being shot at. Whatever tanks the Heggies had backing them up, or forcing them on, even that fire was less than devastating. Most of the rounds continued to hit well down on the slope, doing little but showering the men above with secondary debris from the blasts.

  "Blind men could shoot better'n that!" Joe mumbled to himself at one point.

  But there was some accurate fire, even if that looked as if it might be pure luck. Over toward 4th platoon, Joe saw one tank round explode almost precisely on the ridge line, blowing a small gap in the rock. Fourth was too far away for Joe to get any sense of casualties, but there was a sudden hollow feeling in his solar plexus: men must have died in that blast.

  Fortunately, that was the last tank round that came in. Joe could hear heavier artillery rounds exploding farther off, beyond the shoulder of the hill. It sounded like heavy artillery, and that meant that at least some of the Havocs had taken the Novas under fire again.

  "Hit 'em hard," Joe whispered. His heart was beating faster than normal, but that was always the case in combat. Even at a time like this, when there was only minimal danger, there was always that edge of fear. All it takes is one lucky shot, and I can die as easily as anyone else. Will I know it's coming?

  For Joe, fear had never been a serious obstacle. The fear was always there, on one level or another, but he trained hard to do the best, safest job he could. The results were beyond his control then. All he could do was work as smart as he knew how, make it as hard as possible for any enemy fire to hit him.

  He ducked below the ridge line and turned to look up toward the top of the hill. Though he could neither see nor hear it, he knew that the shuttle must be on the LZ above by now. Maybe it had already taken the wounded aboard and lifted off again. There were no enemy fighters visible, and that was perhaps the best news of the day. A lander would be no match for a fighter. A shuttle was no match for one soldier with a shoulder-operated rocket launcher even. The four-kilo warhead on an infantry rocket could bring down a shuttle with ease.

  Joe fed the last spool of wire into his Schlinal rifle before he moved back up to look down into the valley. A few more seconds of fire there, and then he would have to switch to his own carbine. He didn't have all that much wire left for it, either, maybe eight spools total, adding together the partials. That wouldn't last long if the enemy kept coming.

  "Sir," Joe said on his link to Lieutenant Keye.

  "What?" was all Keye said in return.

  "We need to start cutting back hard on wire. Until the enemy gets a lot closer, I think we should have half the men hold their fire."

  "Hang on." The pause was long enough for Keye to check with the captain. "Right. Go with it," Keye told Joe. Within a minute, the entire strike force had the same orders. The volume of fire coming off of the ridge was cut in half.

  The sudden decrease in gunfire sounded painfully obvious to Joe, but there was no response from the Heggies coming toward the slope. They did keep coming. Fewer of them fell. But they showed no sign that they recognized that decreased fire was the reason.

  "Goff, you holding up?" Joe asked over a private channel. At the moment, the squad's first fire team was the one back off of the ridge not engaged in the shooting. Kam turned to look toward his sergeant before he answered.

  "So far, Sarge. So far." He went no further than that. He was holding up because he was almost totally disengaged from the fighting. Most of the time up on the line, he had kept his eyes closed. Only rarely had he pulled the trigger on his zipper, and even then it was without aiming, without looking at the enemy below.

  Joe nodded, exaggerating the gesture to make sure that Kam saw it. "You're doing good, kid. Just keep at it."

  "I'll try."

  Joe reminded himself to have a talk with Ezra as soon as there was a break in the fighting. Ezra had to know about Goff, had to be prepared to work with him, and to watch him, now that Joe had the entire platoon to worry about.

  The leading elements of the Schlinal attack were getting close to the base of the hill below the Accord line. To Joe's eye, it looked as if fully two thirds of the attackers had fallen crossing the valley. The ones who had made it to the base of the hill were the ones who were both lucky and smart, the ones who knew how to take advantage of what little cover the approach offered. With the enemy right below them, the men on the ridge had to expose themselves to bring their weapons to bear.

  That gave the enemy better targets.

  More as an experiment than anything else, Joe took his next-to-last grenade, pulled the safety pin, and hurled it out in a high arc. He watched as it bounced once, thirty meters down and twenty out, then sailed over four Heggies. They scattered, going down against the rock, drawing in limbs and heads, but the grenade went off in the air, above them, scattering the shrapnel over a twenty-meter diameter.

  Three of the men got back up, and Joe could see blood on two of them. One went back down almost immediately, rolling until his body was stopped by a rock. Joe closed his eyes for an instant—more than a simple blink. He couldn't see the faces of the men below. Those were concealed by the visors on their battle helmets. But in his mind, he could see faces twisted by shock and pain, and death's blank stare in the eyes of the one who had not gotten up. And he felt himself falling and rolling, the way the second man had done, falling in death.

  It was a new feeling for Joe. When he opened his eyes again, Joe looked toward Kam Goff. He saw that look on Goff's face as well, though it too was hidden by a visor.

  Can that crap! Joe told himself, trying to work up anger to shove aside the twinge of fear. He blinked several times, rapidly. Don't go metaphysical. It'll screw your mind as bad as his.

  Joe had switched over to his own rifle a moment before. Now, he switched on the laser sights—for the first time in ages, except on the practice range—using the infrared beam. He lined up targets carefully, giving each just the shortest possible burst of wire, moving back and forth across his fire lane methodically. The Schlinal soldiers were close enough now that wire could do damage even through body armor, and careful sighting could give Joe a better than average chance of finding the gaps in that position.

  A second wave of Schlinal infantry entered the valley. This detachment was much larger than the first, perhaps two full companies. They took the ridge under fire immediately, close to two-hundred weapons firing on full automatic. Not all of these guns were wire-throwers. There were some slug-pushers as well. Along with the renewed rifle fire, there was also a new flurry of rocket-propelled grenades, some of which reached the hollow behind the ridge.

  "This looks like the real thing," Lieutenant Keye told Joe. "Good thing we had half the men saving their ammo."

  "I'd suggest holding back a little longer," Joe said. "Get the men back in position, sure, switch fire teams so we don't run half the men dry, but wait until the Heggies get close enough for every centimeter of wire to count before we
pull all the guns into action."

  "That's what I was about to tell you, Joe. The captain's already given orders to switch teams on the line. He repeated the order to conserve wire," Keye added. "To make sure we've got targets in the sights."

  Joe slid back from the edge of the rock, issuing the orders over the platoon channel and watching while they were carried out. Perhaps if he had not been down out of the line of fire, he might not have noticed the new fire coming from above. The troops who had been sent up to guard the LZ on top of the hill were lined up along the crest now, getting their piece of the action.

  I guess that means the shuttle's been and gone, Joe thought. Protecting the lander had been the primary mission for the troops sent up to the crest. Too bad we couldn't all get on it. Joe's stomach tightened up suddenly. He pressed his left hand against his gut, taking a slow, almost painful breath as he did.

  Don't tell me it's getting to me now, he thought with some alarm. Though the rational part of his mind insisted that it wasn't so, deep inside, Joe harbored the belief that Goff's problems might be contagious, that they might infect everyone who came in contact with him.

  Joe closed his eyes for an instant, longer than the last time. He took a deep breath, then opened his eyes and looked up at the sky. The morning was less than half over, and unless the captain changed his mind, they were going to stay where they were until dark.

  If we last that long. The thought startled Joe. Echo and George companies, with their attendant recon platoons, remained in good shape, so long as they did not run out of ammunition or face a massive air attack. Ammunition might be a problem, but there was still no sign of enemy air activity. The Boems had not come after the shuttle. It seemed unlikely that they would come after a couple of companies of infantry after the shuttle had escaped. Where they were, the strike force could easily hold off heavy odds, as long as the enemy had nothing but infantry, or tanks that would not get close enough to do really extensive damage.