Jump Pay

by Rick Shelley

  "That'll do until something better comes along," Sauv Degtree said before Mort could speak. Jaiffer looked from one sergeant to the other, then shrugged.

  "Reason enough," he said.

  By that time the welders had finished sealing the door to the tunnels. They had their gear collected, and the corporal in charge of the group came over toward Baerclau.

  "We're ready for the next one, Sarge," the corporal said.

  Joe nodded, then lowered his visor. "Grab that stuff and lets go," he said over the platoon channel. "We've still got three more doors to plug." There were only five welding rigs available. Joe's platoon was shepherding one of the welding teams.

  —|—

  The confusion on the peninsula escalated, on both sides. The 8th pushed north as quickly as its infantrymen could walk or, in some cases, run. The 97th LIR came behind them, spread out to try to drive any remaining Heggies north ahead of them. To the east, the 5th had finally broken through the Heggie line that had been containing them and they were moving north also, several kilometers behind the 8th. The 34th was trying to regroup on the move, trying to get its battalions back together and complete the line across the peninsula. At the same time, the Heggie units that were retreating continued to fight, and they were obviously trying to regroup on the move as well.

  General Dacik met his self-imposed deadline for getting his command across the canal. His headquarters wasn't the last unit to cross, but it came very near the end. Once he got to the north side of the water, he waited while engineers planted explosive charges on both bridges and blew them—decks, trusses, and piers. Only after the dust had settled and he could see for himself that both bridges had been destroyed completely did he get back in his APC and head north, in a hurry now to catch up to the bulk of his army.

  "We've got less than an hour before the fight starts up there," Dacik told his aide, Hof Lorenz. "Maybe less than another hour before we've got more Heggies down here with us." He shook his head. "Not much time to secure this peninsula, is it?"

  Captain Lorenz knew better than to attempt any answer to that.

  —|—

  For a moment, Zel wondered if Blue Flight was even going to have a place to land. All of the 13th's support vans were on the move, north of the canal... somewhere. And Blue Flight needed to land within the next few minutes. The three remaining Wasps were low on munitions and—more critically—low on juice in their batteries. If the squadron's ground support didn't find a place very soon, the Wasps would just have to land wherever they could and wait for their vans to find them—not the most ideal of alternatives.

  Zel had lost track of how many hours he had been in the air, how many kills he had scored—Boems and Novas—and how many thousands of rounds he had used strafing infantry. Since coming north to Site Charley, the 13th's Wasps had been in the air almost continuously, landing only to take on recharged batteries and fresh loads of rockets and 25mm ammunition.

  It was Roo Vernon who came on the radio to tell Zel where to set his flight down, even though Roo was no longer Zel's crew chief.

  "You keeping busy, Roo?" Zel asked, after passing the landing information on to Gerry Easton and Will Tarkel.

  "Busy and then some," Roo said, still new enough as an officer that he had to bite off the automatic "sir" at the end. Technically, he now outranked Zel, since his commission as Captain predated Zel's promotion to that rank.

  "Your guns still working on the ground?" Zel asked. He was homing in on the vans. In another forty-five seconds he would be on the ground.

  "Fair enough," Roo said with justifiable pride. "We've used 'em tonight. Next step's to figure a way to mount 'em on APCs. Maybe on Havocs too, give the big guns something to defend themselves with."

  "You keep doin' all this fancy thinking, you'll get yourself a cushy job back in some R and D thinktank," Zel said. He hardly heard Roo's horrified disclaimer. It was time to set Blue One on the ground.

  Ground crews ran to service the three Wasps. Zel didn't bother to get out, or even to open the canopy on his fighter. It was too much trouble. As soon as new batteries were installed and the rocket racks and cannon magazines refilled, Blue Flight would be back in the air. The pilots all knew what was coming—the new Schlinal fleet and, perhaps, more Boems. The Heggies on the ground had to be taken care of first, as far as possible. Sleep? Zel yawned. Just thinking the word made him sleepy. He blinked several times, then lifted his visor to rub his eyes. They had started to water. Again.

  Blue Flight had been on the ground for less than ninety seconds—the gun magazines were open, the battery hatches as well, and the old batteries were being lifted down out of the sockets, the new ones at hand, ready to snap in—when the first incoming shells exploded. During the first ten or fifteen seconds of the barrage, Zel was hardly aware of what was happening. The noise and the flashes startled him so badly that his sleep-starved brain needed time to catch up. Not that there was anything he could have done, without fresh batteries in place and the hatches sealed over them, he couldn't even take off.

  Smoke and flame and noise. The ground shook. Blue one was rocked violently, almost tipped on its nose... by a near miss. The Wasp was not hit directly. Still, Zel's head was snapped forward and to the side. His helmet whacked against the side of the cockpit. He blinked again, several times, The light of the blast had hurt his eyes. The crack on the head put "stars" in front of them. Zel shook his head to clear his vision. Roo Vernon had been walking toward Zel's Wasp just before the barrage hit. When the shells stopped coming in, there were still several fires burning—two of the maintenance vans were ablaze. Zel didn't see anyone standing, anywhere around him.

  He popped the canopy open and slapped the emergency release to free the straps of his safety harness. If nothing else, he needed to get away from the plane before the next round of shells came in. The Heggies obviously had them perfectly targeted.

  Zel pulled himself up out of the cockpit. He permitted himself only a second to look around before he jumped to the ground and ran—staggered—around his Wasp toward where he had seen Roo just a moment before. The sounds of the shells exploding were still ringing in his ears, but there seemed to be nothing new coming in.

  Roo Vernon was unconscious, sprawled out at least ten meters from where he had been standing. He had so many shrapnel wounds that Zel didn't even try to count them. He screamed into his helmet radio for medics, not knowing if there were any around. He didn't hear any response.

  He looked up, then around. His Wasp appeared to be the only one that hadn't been directly hit. Though neither of the others had burned, there was major damage to both. There was no movement in the cockpits of either.

  Zel was unable to get the canopy open on Blue two. Gerry Easton was slumped inside, showing no signs of life. After more than a minute of futile effort, Zel got down from that Wasp and went to the other. By the time he popped the canopy on Blue eight and cranked it open manually, Will Tarkel was starting to move—a little. His head fell from one side to the other. He groaned.

  "Hang on, Will. I'll have you out in a second," Zel promised.

  It took thirty seconds for Zel to get Will's safety harness unfastened. Then he lifted the wounded pilot—who outweighed him by fifteen kilograms—out of the cockpit and carried him out on the "wing." He laid Will down, jumped to the ground, then picked Tarkel up again and carried him over to where Roo was lying. Once more, Zel screamed for a medic over his radio. There was still no response.

  Zel switched to the channel that connected him with Goose Tarkel, Will's uncle. "Major, we got hit hard after we landed. I've got badly wounded men here, including Will. We need medical help and we need it right now."

  "A van from Yellow Flight is already on the way, Paitcher. Two minutes or less. Do what you can until they arrive."

  Zel went back to the two wounded men he knew about. Will needed a tourniquet on his arm to stop the bleeding. Zel used his belt to take care of that. Roo seemed to have a profusion of small cuts. All we
re seeping badly, but there seemed to be no way to stop them other than with medpatches.

  Medpatches. Zel looked at the three vans that had come to service the planes. There would be—or would have been—first aid kits in each of them. All of the trucks had been hit. Two had caught fire. One was still burning. Zel wasn't particularly optimistic, but he went looking.

  He couldn't get into the one van that was still burning, but the first aid kits in the other two trucks had both survived—though the case of one was smoking when Zel got to it. He carried both cases over to where the wounded men were lying and started cutting away uniforms and slapping medpatches over the worst concentrations of cuts. When he had done what he could for Roo and Will, he got up and started looking around to see if there was anyone else left alive.

  He found one mechanic who had been blown more than twenty meters from where he had been standing before the attack. The man was unconscious but wasn't bleeding. His heartbeat was weak and thready. Zel didn't try to move him, suspecting broken bones—perhaps even the spine.

  After finding no one else from the ground crews alive, Zel went back to the Wasp he had been unable to get into. Gerry Easton still hadn't moved, but Zel couldn't tell if the man was dead or alive unless he could get to him. Once more he tried to pop the canopy manually. Without success. He was still trying when the new van arrived.

  "Somebody give me a hand here!" Zel shouted. The crew chief and one of his men went to work on the wounded men after Zel pointed out all three of them. The other mechanic brought a tool over to Blue two.

  "He alive in there?" the mechanic asked as he poked the business end of the meter-long tool in a notch at the rear left of the canopy.

  "Can't tell," Zel said.

  "I'll have it in a second, sir." The mechanic leaned on the tool, a pry bar with a specialized attachment intended for just this operation. There was a loud popping noise and the canopy came up out of its lock. Together, the two men got it all of the way off. Then Zel reached in to put fingers against the side of Easton's neck, feeling for a pulse.

  There was none. Gerry Easton was dead.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  There were only minor differences between the Wasp airplane and the Accord's Bat spaceplane, and for the most part, those differences were stylistic rather than functional. The primary exception was in weapons systems. The Bat was never equipped with the 25mm cannons that were a staple of Wasp armament. Partly in place of that, the Bat was normally furnished with a rack of small antimissile missiles, a more important defensive weapon in space.

  The power plant of the two fighters was identical, two battery-powered antigravity drives. The cockpit/escape module was also identical. But the designers of the Bat took extensive liberties with the exterior design of the fighter. Since neither the Wasp nor the Bat depended on aeronautical efficiency to fly, that was a "minor stylistic" difference. The Bat did not even have the appearance of a wing. The cockpit sat atop and between two rounded rectangular solids—rather like something baked in a loaf pan—that housed the drives, batteries, and controls. The space below the cockpit, between the two sections of fuselage, was equipped with the necessary fittings and control linkages for the variety of weapons that the Bat used.

  While the Wasp could operate in space as easily as the Bat, the Bat was never deployed less than 180 kilometers above a human-habitable world, high enough to "fall" around that world if it should happen to lose power. Suddenly deprived of its engines, the Bat's glide characteristics—in an atmosphere, that is—would be even more rocklike than the Wasp's. The Bat also, according to the most sophisticated simulations, would have a tendency to tumble in an atmosphere without working power plants.

  Although the Bat's batteries provided it with no more than the approximately ninety minutes of power that the Wasp's batteries provided, without the drag of atmosphere and the greater gravity close to the surface of a world, that ninety minutes of power could—under the proper circumstances—allow the Bat to operate for as much as twelve hours—and conceivably much longer—before it had to return to its carrier for fresh batteries. The Bat carried enough air to see a pilot through eighteen hours.

  In outward appearance, the Schlinal spaceplane was identical to its airplane. Provision for more air and different armaments were the only real differences between the two versions of the fighter. And, of course, the model designation number. The airplane was the Boem A3. The spaceplane was the Boem S3. In practice, the two were interchangeable.

  As the two fleets drew nearer to each other, the relative angle between their vectors was 27 degrees. There were no precise "rendezvous" coordinates at the apex. They would never actually pass through the same point in space. At their nearest approach, providing both fleets remained on their same courses, they would be eighty-seven kilometers apart. The battle would be carried to the enemy by the fighters each fleet carried.

  Aboard the Accord's ships, the fighter pilots had been sent to their Bats as soon as the van of the Heggie fleet came within three hundred kilometers, still "above" the Accord fleet and moving at a slightly greater speed on their almost converging course. Flight control computers tracked a variety of potential enemy sorties, travel time, trajectory, and how soon the Bats would have to be launched to meet each possible scenario. Each TIC (threat intercept computer) could handle all of the variables connected with more than a thousand targets simultaneously. With the Bat pilots already in their fighters and the hangars already partially depressurized, the Bats could be launched within thirty seconds of the order, giving them plenty of time to accelerate away from the fleet on a course to intercept Boem S3s as far off as possible.

  On the Accord flagship, the Constellation class Capricorn, Admiral Kitchener had already moved to CIC, which served as his flag bridge. A dozen officers and ratings manned the intelligence-gathering equipment and compsoles. Kitchener was in constant communication with the skippers of each of his ships and with their launch control officers. He also kept a link open to General Dacik on the ground. Unless the Schlinal fleet acted first, Kitchener had decided that he would launch the first defensive element of his fighters when the two fleets approached to within 200 kilometers of each other. He would wait until the fleets were no more than 150 kilometers apart before he sent out his attackers—unless the Heggies struck first.

  "We'll hold back one-third of our Bats to strike against Schlinal shuttles and their escorts in any case," Kitchener informed the captains and launch officers. "No matter what happens to us, we have to do what we can to cut down on the number of Heggies who reach the ground intact."

  He looked at a bank of monitors that relayed the view of the enemy fleet from each of his ships. In his more wistful moments—safe in a friendly port with a few drinks under his belt—Kitchener sometimes regretted the impersonal silence and distance of war in space. A student of military and naval history, he wished at times that he had been alive back on Earth sometime in the last century of men-of-war powered by sails, by the movements of air. It was a wish he had never shared with anyone, in or out of service, not even his wife.

  Kitchener smiled at a chance memory. He was almost certain that his wife at least suspected. Both of his sons had been given toy sailing ships and models, at the earliest possible ages, and introduced to computer games set in that milieu. They became interested because their father had made certain that they had every opportunity to become interested. Both of those sons were now in the space navy, though neither had ever served under their father's command.

  Kitchener hid his impatience well. That was more than simply the habit of command. After more than forty years of service, he knew firsthand the inexorable nature of space. There was nothing to do but wait. Either speeding up or slowing down could only delay the eventual confrontation. Changing course would have the same effect now. It would take the expenditure of prodigious amounts of energy to hurry the battle by even seconds—to little effect. There could be no tactical surprise.

  But the battle would
begin soon. Kitchener glanced at a clock, then at a readout of distances. The gap between the fleets had almost narrowed to two hundred kilometers. The Schlinal fleet had not launched any fighters yet, neither an attack formation nor a defensive screen.

  "Ready the shield patrols," he said, the order going over the radio to the necessary commanders. "Commence launch... now!"

  Then, for just an instant, he allowed himself to relax. The next move would belong to his opposite number, two hundred kilometers away.

  —|—

  "Baerclau!"

  "Yes, Captain?" Joe replied.

  "The fleet battle is about to begin, sometime in the next fifteen minutes or so, according to Major Ingels."

  "I tell the men now, sir?"

  "Go ahead. Our fleet is larger. The numbers are about three to two in our favor."

  "Glad to hear that," Joe said. "Maybe our ships will save us the bother of facing any of those Heggies down here."

  "Don't count on it."

  "Just hoping out loud, sir."

  "We've still got plenty of work to do. We're going to spread a line all the way across the peninsula, just south of this base. George and Howard will mount patrols behind us, north of the line, to make certain that none of the Heggies sneak out behind us. The rest of us will take the best defensive line we can find and hold it until the rest of the army gets to us."

  "We're the anvil?" Joe asked. Hammer and anvil: it was an age-old tactic. Keep part of your people stationary, waiting. Use the rest of your army to drive the enemy against your prepared positions. Put the enemy in a cross fire and keep up the pressure until they surrender—or cease to exist.

  "We're the anvil," Keye agreed. "I hope you had your people stock up on some of these Heggie munitions."

  "All we could carry, sir. I thought it wise to, under the circumstances."

  "Very wise, Joe. Colonel's given orders for everybody to stock up on rockets and grenades. Heggies bump into us, they might still have a few Novas in working condition." The Heggies would still outnumber the 13th, possibly by more than two to one. The 13th would need whatever edge it could find to keep from being overrun.