Jump Pay

by Rick Shelley

  "I don't see any sign of Heggies on the roof," he said over the platoon channel. "No ground fire coming up at us."

  After that he had to devote nearly all of his attention to manipulating his belt controls. He was rather too near the western side of the roof. He reached down and twisted the thruster on the left side of his belt to move him a meter or so farther in, then slowed his descent to come in for a smooth landing.

  Baerclau was the first man on that roof. The rest of his platoon was no more than two seconds behind him, though, landing with rifles at the ready.

  "First squad to the door," he ordered. As on the buildings at Site Alpha, there was a small kiosk with a door leading to interior stairs. "Second squad behind them. Fourth, spread out around the perimeter until we go in." The men were already moving when he gave the orders. The prejump briefing had covered this much of the operation. After that, it would be a little more ad lib. Get inside. Get down the stairs. Deal with whatever you come across. Link up with the units covering the outside.

  Even though it was two hours past sunset and there was a breeze off of the ocean, the air on the rooftop was stiflingly hot. The stone-and-concrete roof radiated heat. After one deep breath, Joe started to breathe more shallowly, as if that might minimize the discomfort. Got to be close to 40 degrees even now, he thought. That gave new urgency to the order that they had to finish their work before first light.

  Joe went over to first squad. Sauv Degtree had already tried the door. "It's not locked," he reported.

  Joe looked around. All of the rifles of first and second squad were pointed at the door. The men were down on one knee or flat on their stomachs in an arc facing the door.

  "Yank it," Joe said, getting down himself.

  Sauv pulled the door open and moved to the side, out of the way. There was no one on the landing inside. No gunfire came out. Joe waved second squad through, onto the stairway. One fire team stayed on the landing at the top. The other went down far enough to see into the interior of the building.

  It was empty.

  "All the way to the bottom," Joe ordered. "Second squad, then first. Cover the exits. Look for anything leading underground especially."

  Second squad moved down the steel metal stairs as quickly as they could. First squad was no more than ten steps behind. Before Joe followed first squad in, he called fourth squad over to follow them. There was no need to leave men to guard the roof behind them.

  Primed for a fight, Joe worried at the lack of any opposition at all. The muscles in his forearms were knotted tight. He had to consciously hold himself back on the stairs. He kept trying to speed up. The press of men in front of him made that impossible. But the greatest danger at the moment seemed to be of falling.

  There were two doorways leading outside at ground level. One had been blown in by a rocket. The other hadn't been touched. At first, Joe had trouble spotting the door leading to the suspected underground tunnel system. It was in a corner of the building, a doorway next to a pair of doors leading to rest rooms in a small cubical protrusion.

  The door leading underground was markedly different from the doors leading outside. It was solid metal, set in a frame that looked as if the door had been designed to resist being forced—a smaller version of the vaultlike doors that had led to the underground complex near Site Alpha.

  "Check those crates. See what's in them," Joe ordered fourth squad. "Look for anything we can use." Then he switched channels to talk to Captain Keye. "We've secured this building and located the door leading below, sir."

  "Hold tight for a few minutes, Joe," Keye replied. "I haven't heard from everybody yet."

  "Any resistance at all, sir?"

  "George Company's had a little shooting. That's all I've heard of. Now let me deal with the other platoons. I'll get back to you."

  "First squad, I want every eye on that door leading down. Second, you watch the ground-level doors." Joe looked around to make sure that he wasn't missing anything obvious. The warehouse was nearly empty. None of the stacks of crates were more than head-high, and there was a lot of empty room between them.

  Joe moved to one of the stacks. One crate had been dragged off and the lid pried open. A coil of fence wire. He moved to the next stack. Bedding.

  "Anybody find any munitions?" he asked on fourth squad's channel. He received a chorus of negatives. "Keep looking. Weapons, ammunition, medical supplies, anything like that."

  Within five minutes, he knew that there were none of any of those items in this particular building. There wasn't even any food.

  Joe went over to the door that had been blasted open by the Wasps. There seemed to be no activity anywhere near it. After listening for a moment and hearing nothing but a few distant zipper sounds, Joe moved into the doorway. The wall looked to be nearly a meter-and-a-half thick. The passage was two meters wide, wide enough for a work vehicle to get in and out.

  Careful to expose as little of himself as possible, Joe looked each way. There were Accord troops at either end of the warehouse, covering the intersections. Neither group had encountered any Heggies, civilian or military. Neither had come under fire.

  "They must all be underground," Joe said over his noncoms' circuit when he moved back inside.

  "Oh, no," Mort whispered. He sounded as if he were in pain. "Not again."

  I know what you mean, Joe thought, but he couldn't say that. "I don't think it'll be the same" was what he did say, on a private link to Jaiffer. "This time, we'll have to go down and get them." That might be a bloody mess, but it would be easier to take than the other—what had happened at the end of the operation at Site Alpha. Joe didn't have time to get any further in his musing. Captain Keye was back on the line.

  "We're going to try to break into the tunnel system at two points. Alpha and Fox companies have the honors. The rest of us are just to keep the other exits guarded, stop any Heggies who try to break from them."

  "Stop them in the doorway or let them come out and surrender?" Joe asked.

  "If they want to surrender, let them."

  Glad to hear that, Joe thought. "Yes, sir," he said.

  Joe passed the news to his platoon and arranged everyone so that they were all watching the door leading below ground.

  "They come out shooting, I want a half dozen grenades and a kilometer of wire in the doorway in the first second," Joe instructed. "If they don't shoot, we don't. That's straight from the captain. We're just supposed to contain them. Somebody else got the short end of the stick this time."

  After that, it was simply a matter of waiting. Very rarely, Captain Keye or First Sergeant Walker would provide a few words about the progress of the fight. Two entrances to the tunnel system were blown open. The 13th fought its way underground. The Heggies fought back.

  For a time.

  Then, for no discernible reason, they couldn't surrender fast enough. The rest of the exits were opened and Heggies came out, hands raised. There were far fewer of them than CIC and intelligence had suspected, no more than six hundred altogether, and two-thirds of them were civilians.

  "Get rid of their helmets," Joe instructed his platoon. Forty Heggie soldiers had come out of the door 2nd platoon was watching. "Frisk 'em to make sure nobody's carrying any weapons or spare communication gear. We've got to march them to the LZ, ship 'em up the fleet. The rest of this is up to SI and the reccers."

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  The Schlinal base designated Site Charley by the Accord was located on the northernmost point of land on Tamkailo. It was situated near the far end of an eighteen-kilometer-long peninsula that was ten kilometers wide at the base, tapering to four kilometers at its northern end. Over their decades of occupation, the Heggies had blasted a canal through the rock, turning the peninsula into an island. The channel was twenty meters wide, with sides from six to nearly fifteen meters above water level, and steep. The cut was deep enough to put more than five meters of water through. The canal was crossed in two places by truss bridges constructed of st
eel and composite beams and paved with concrete and stone slabs. The northern ends of each bridge were fortified with gates and guard posts. The gun emplacements were aimed north, though. Their purpose was to keep people in, not to keep invaders out. The southernmost kilometer of each side of the peninsula was also equipped with barriers and guard posts. Site Charley was still, at heart, a prison, like the other two bases on the world. Lengths of razor wire and other obstacles lined both sides of the canal, though that was hardly necessary. A man in the water could scarcely hope to climb the steep southern wall of the canal, even if there were any place to run to, any place where survival was even remotely possible.

  The terrain around Site Charley, and on south of the peninsula, was considerably different from that around the other two Heggies bases on the planet. Site Bravo had appeared to be devoid of any macroscopic native life forms. In the short time the 13th had been there, no one had seen any sort of plant life, and not even a single insect. Site Alpha had displayed a number of varieties of ground-hugging moss and a considerable selection of tiny insects. The biggest animals seen around Site Charley were also insects, but some of the species were rather larger—comparable to a common housefly in size if not in appearance. But the real difference was in plant life. Besides mosses, there were several distinctive types of fungus, including at least three species of giant mushrooms or toadstools. The largest grew to be as much as three meters high and spread canopies up to four meters in diameter. There was even, in a few places, ground cover that looked—at a distance—like grass but which was actually another sort of "hairy" moss with blades up to ten centimeters high.

  The peninsula was rocky and uneven, offering considerable cover for infantry and vehicles. There were rocky ridges and stretches that looked as if a mountain had been broken up and its pieces strewn around at random, boulders from a meter in diameter to chunks that were larger than an artillery shuttle. There were several roads leading from one end of the peninsula to the other—not paved roads, but lanes that had been cleared of smaller obstacles, with detours around the larger ones.

  South of the peninsula, which was primarily rock, there were considerable areas of soil, mostly clay. The terrain was gently rolling, with long valleys running northwest to southeast. Some of those valleys showed evidence that—occasionally at least—they held running water. Gradually, the land became higher to the south, reaching eventually to mountains that peaked at slightly more than two thousand meters.

  Coming in by shuttle, the 5th SAT and the 34th LIR had been forced to land south of the canal. The Schlinal garrison, and the troops that had been gathered for the next offensive, were prepared, waiting for the Freebies to show. The Heggies had fiercely defended the line of the canal. The Schlinal warlord responsible for all of the troops that had been gathered on Tamkailo had his headquarters at Site Charley, and when the orbiting satellites were knocked out simultaneously, he had immediately ordered his troops on alert. Men and tanks were being rushed south from the northern end of the peninsula within minutes. Boem fighters were in the air even faster. At Site Charley the aircraft were not caught on the ground.

  When General Dacik and his staff finally landed behind the Accord positions south of Site Charley, the 5th and 34th still had not managed to cross the canal in force. Two patrols by recon platoons and SI teams had been forced to retreat with heavy casualties, recrossing the canal by rope, under fire. Three attempts to cross the bridges had been repulsed, with casualties heavy on both sides. The duels in the air and between armor and artillery on the ground had been battles of attrition. The 5th's Havocs had been forced to withdraw beyond the range of Nova main guns—and that put the main Schlinal base at the north end of the peninsula far out of range for them.

  "They're just sitting there, and there hasn't been a thing we could do about it," Colonel Jesiah Kane, commander of the 5th, reported when he met the general's shuttle. Kane had been in tactical command of the forces at Site Charley. "Before 17th Air got here, we couldn't even contain their Boems. With the 17th, we managed to keep at least parity in the air, but we still haven't been able to use our Wasps to significant advantage. Those stone buildings will take anything we can throw at them from the air. It's like trying to knock down the pyramids back on Earth." Kane, alone of the senior officers under Dacik's command, was from Earth. Less than one percent of the Accord military came from the mother world.

  "I know," Dacik said. He looked at the situation as shown on Kane's mapboard. "The 8th and 97th will be moving into position with the next few minutes, and the 13th will be here in six or seven hours—with a little luck." At that point, Site Bravo had not yet been secured. Dacik had headed north immediately after the 13th's shuttles had dropped toward Site Bravo. By the time his shuttle landed, he knew that the 13th was not running into significant opposition and had cleared the 8th and 97th for the final operation.

  "I don't know yet how much armor the Heggies have here, but it must be at least two full regiments, perhaps a lot more," Kane said. "We've destroyed at least forty Novas, but they keep bringing more into play."

  "They never used their tanks at Site Alpha," Dacik said, a bit absently. He was listening to an intelligence report over his helmet radio at the same time.

  Around the two commanders, Dacik's headquarters staff was setting up shop. For the moment, Dacik planned to operate out of his shuttle, but duplicate operations were set up outside it, and two hundred meters away. A shuttle on the ground would be too inviting a target if any enemy aircraft got through the Wasp shield. If and when he moved away from the landing zone, General Dacik had an armored personnel carrier to serve as a mobile command post.

  Kane started to say something, but Dacik held up a hand to stop him. He wanted to hear the end of the report he was getting over the radio. When it was finished, he let out a long breath and looked at Kane.

  "The 13th is closing things up at Site Bravo. No opposition at all, to speak of. It appears that the Heggies moved most of what they had out of there before we got to them. Here?"

  Kane nodded. "There was considerable activity the first night, shuttles landing right out toward the end of the peninsula, out of reach of our Havocs." He shrugged. "The Wasps didn't have any luck getting to them either. That was before the 17th arrived. Since then, they haven't been able to get any shuttles into the air." His laugh was sour. "Maybe I should say that they haven't been able to keep them in the air."

  "We'll try the same thing with the 13th that we did at Site Bravo," Dacik said. "Drop them right on top of the enemy. We'll stage the rest of our forces here. No matter what the cost, we're going to have to force a crossing over the canal to get up the peninsula in a hurry once the 13th lands. They won't be able to hold out forever up there, especially since we'll have to bring their Havocs and support elements out here."

  "General, the Heggies have at least six thousand men on that peninsula. That's SI's estimate. My own guess is that the number might be twice that, mostly military. This is the easiest climate on the world. It's where they staged the bulk of the invasion force they were gathering. The 13th, even if they were at full strength..." Kane stopped and shook his head. "They won't be able to hold out very long at all."

  "Then it's up to us to make sure that they don't have to. We'll start our push an hour before sunset, hit the Schlinal defensive line with everything we've got, and keep at it. The 13th will drop on the Heggie base ninety minutes after sunset. By that time, I hope that the Heggies will have moved the overwhelming bulk of their forces south to face us. I'll have the 13th's Wasps come in from the north as well, just ahead of the infantry. Hit 'em from behind. Work to get as much confusion going as possible."

  "And hope we confuse them more than we do ourselves?" Kane asked.

  —|—

  The 13th stayed on the ground at Site Bravo until very nearly dawn. The artillery and the support units were lifted first. The Wasps were fitted with the auxiliary modules that would give them enough power to boost to orbit and rendezvous w
ith their carrier. There they would be given fresh batteries and have their munitions topped off for another descent, this one at Site Charley. The pilots would have a few spare minutes aboard ship, while it moved into position for their third attack descent of the campaign.

  By the time the 13th's infantry boarded the shuttles at Site Bravo, half a world away from their next destination, there was a faint line of light on the eastern horizon, the first hint of a new day. They had already taken time for a meal and a couple of hours of rest. Not many men had actually managed to get any sleep.

  "We're not going back to the ship this time, are we?" Wiz Mackey asked as he filed past Joe Baerclau, boarding the shuttle.

  "No, we're going straight to Site Charley," Joe replied. His visor was up, but he spoke loudly enough that most of the platoon heard him. "We're going to hit them there the same way we did here." Captain Keye had relayed that news just minutes before.

  "I just hope it turns out as simple," Mort said, giving Wiz a nudge. Mackey had stopped in the doorway.

  "Don't count on it, Professor," Joe said. "From what I hear, the Heggies have been putting up a real fight up north. That's why they need us to finish 'em off."

  "Yeah, any manure detail comes along, send for the 13th," Jaiffer said as he followed Wiz into the shuttle.

  —|—

  So far, there had been time for only the most preliminary of briefings. Colonel Stossen had given the company commanders the first instructions he had received from General Dacik. More detailed plans had to wait until they were formulated. That was what Colonel Stossen and his staff were trying to do at the moment. The conference was being held in the open, between two shuttles, with the entire command staff physically present. They would split up between the two landers, as usual, for the ride north and the coming combat jump. Colonel Ruman, Dacik's operations officer, was on link, trying to follow what was being said.

  "It won't be as simple as it was here," Stossen admitted. "Too many buildings, for one thing, and too spread out." His mapboard was open and on the ground in the middle of the group. The view was a three-dimensional representation of the northern base. "And the Heggies have shown every intention of fully defending Site Charley. There's been no sign of mutiny or revolt, no indication that surrender is a realistic expectation."