L13TH 03 Jump Pay

by Rick Shelley

  Parks nodded. “We’ve got a briefing to attend in about twelve minutes.”

  “Dacik?” Stossen asked as he sat up–slowly, cautiously.

  Parks nodded again. “HQ’ s in the next building north of here.”

  “Any idea what we’re going to hear?” Stossen was relieved that he didn’t feel dizzy or light-headed, and the pain didn’t return. Standing was the next procedure to attempt, but he did plan on taking his time about it. Despite what he had told the chief regimental surgeon, he did know that he was still shaky. The medical nanobots of a trauma tube might repair damage in a hurry, but there was always a little left to get through afterward.

  “Other than that we’re more than ten hours behind schedule, no,” Parks said. “I imagine we’ll get a new schedule, maybe find out what’s happening with the 5th and 34th on the other continent.”

  “Give me a hand, Dezo. I don’t want to fall on my ass again.”

  He really didn’t need much help. He used Parks more for balance than real support, and he let go as soon as he was on his feet and confident that he could stay there.

  “’How badly were we hurt?” Stossen asked as he experimented with easy movements. He had to look fit moving, at least until he was away from the hospital and the watchful eyes of the surgeon.

  “Pretty bad,” Parks admitted. As they walked across the warehouse to the door, he told him just how badly.

  * * *

  It was an unusually large meeting for a combat zone, even if there seemed to be little immediate prospect of continued fighting. It would have been much more normal for only the most essential of people to gather in one place for the conference. The rest would participate by radio, with linked mapboards. But Major General KIeffer Dacik preferred to be able to have eye contact. He and his staff were all present for this meeting, along with the commanders, and the executive and operations officers for the 8th and 13th SATs, the 97th LIR, and the 17th Independent Air Wing. The subsidiary air and artillery commanders for the two SATs were also in attendance. Van Stossen and Dezo Parks were the last to arrive.

  “Good to see you back on your feet, Van,” Dacik said as he gestured the two men to seats. The seats were packing crates. The conference table was a collection of crates that had been covered with a tarp.

  “I feel kind of foolish about it all, General,” Stossen replied. “Hell of a way to get injured.”

  “There aren’t any good ways,” Dacik said. “I assume your exec’s brought you up to date on the basics?”

  “Yes, sir, as much as there was time for on the walk over from the hospital.”

  Dacik leaned back and let his gaze drift around at the faces that had gathered for this briefing. All were career military men, but until the start of the war with the Schlinal Hegemony, none of them had had actual combat experience. There were privates who had seen as much or more battle than these men. But they were the best that the Accord had, and the past few years had made them all experts. The hard way.

  “I’ve been on the line with CIC for the better part of a half hour, running our options through the computers,” Dacik said when he had finished his visual survey. “There’s no mistaking the fact that our timetable for Tamkailo has been shot full of holes.” He shrugged. “We more or less knew that it would be DOA, one way or another. The 13th’s problems on those rocks. . . well, that’s something we couldn’t possibly have planned for. SI has been collecting samples. A shuttle’s already taken those up to the flagship. There’s a chance the lab people might make something useful of it.”

  “I’d settle for a way to counter it,” Stossen said. The Iaughs that came from the men around the “table” told him that everyone knew exactly how he had suffered his injury.

  “I’d rather have a way to deal with the heat,” Napier Foss, the commander of the 8th SAT, said. “We know about the moss now. Some of us better than others.” He didn’t bother to wait for the laughs. “We can avoid the moss or run Wasps across again if we come up against it. What we can’t avoid is the heat if we’re going to operate on a world like this.”

  Colonel Luro Bones, C.O. of the 97th, snorted. “Unless someone’s got air-conditioned skivvies, we’re out of luck on that.”

  “As a matter of fact, sir,” Captain Lorenz, Dacik’s aide, said, “that has been tried. Not here, and not skivvies, but air-conditioned battle fatigues. The idea was discarded as totally impractical, something we weren’t likely enough to need to spend the necessary money.”

  “Skimping on Corders. That figures,” Bones said. He snorted again. It was a trait he was rather noted for, especially among his own officers. Some claimed that they could distinguish among at least a dozen different snorts that the colonel used regularly. And decipher them.

  “We’re not here to discuss the failings of the Quartermaster Corps,” Dacik said pointedly. “We make do with what we have, as always.”

  There were no apologies. That would have upset Dacik even more than the digression, and everyone at the conference knew that.

  “The immediate problem remaining at Site Alpha is that we still have two regiments of Heggies unaccounted for.”

  “Two?” Stossen asked.

  “One regiment of armor, Nova tanks, and one regiment of armored infantry and their APCs.”

  “Hasn’t Intelligence managed to find out where they are from the prisoners?” Bones asked.

  “Only in the most general fashion,” Major Jorgen Olsen, Dacik’s Intelligence chief, said. “Within twenty-five kilometers of here, in some sort of underground complex drilled out of the bedrock. There was no sign of that sort of thing on any of our surveys from space, and we haven’t been able to pick up anything even now that we’re looking for it. We hope to avoid active seismic mapping. We’d have to bring gear down from the fleet for that, and it would mean more delay. There are no piles of debris or anything else, to give us a clue. Apparently, the rock quarried in the construction of the underground complex was used in building this base. It’s been here since the beginning, according to our sources at least.”

  “And we didn’t have a glimmer as to its existence until we started looking for the missing Schlinal armor,” Dacik interjected. When Olsen looked at the general, Dacik made an impatient gesture for him to resume.

  “Our guesses this morning that the Heggies had realized that they couldn’t use their armor during the day appear to be accurate. But that’s still conjectural. On all three bases, the Heggies have apparently done most work at night, leaving the daylight hours for sleep. More to the point,” he said, with a quick glance at Dacik’ s impatient look, “the soldiers who manned this base had virtually no contact with the armor and mounted infantry regiments in this underground base we’re looking for. All they could say for certain was that they had never seen Novas during the day, except when they were brought off of the shuttles. The chain of command connected only at the very top on Tamkailo, and the separation was enforced with the usual Heggie rigor.”

  “An elite corps?” Foss, asked.

  “We’re not sure,” Olsen said. “It might be nothing more than the usual Schlinal paranoia of keeping absolute separation between units so that they can’t conspire to overthrow their leaders.

  “We’ve had Wasps looking, and the reccers are out as well. We will find the entrances to this underground complex, possibly any second now. It is a matter of some importance that we find the armor before dark, and sunset is now”–he looked at his watch–“two hours and thirteen minutes away.”

  “Listening gear?” Stossen suggested. “They start an engine, we ought to be able to hear it, even if they’ve got thirty meters of solid rock on top of them.”

  “We’ve got gear on the ground and the most sensitive laser mapping eyes in orbit scanning the area around here,” Dacik confirmed. “Just nothing sophisticated enough to do anything more active. Either the Heggies are too deep for either sort
of equipment to detect them, or they’re being cagey as hell. We assume the latter. The second we locate entrances, we’ll move our forces to cover them, artillery standing off, infantry in close, Wasps staging overhead. Everything we’ve got at Site Alpha. There’s no way that those Heggie troops and vehicles can break out and do serious damage if we keep our eyes and ears open. At most, they’ll have two or three exits. Even if each one can handle three vehicles abreast and they come out racing at full speed, we should be able to stop them almost instantly, block the entrances with their own wreckage. It wouldn’t matter if they outnumbered us a hundred to one as long as they’ve got tight bottlenecks to come through to get at us.”

  “Wouldn’t it be, ah, safer to simply plug the entrances as soon as they’re found?” Bones asked. “We’ve got engineers and a lot of explosives around, don’t we?”

  “We won’t know if that’s even feasible until the engineers get a chance to look at the entrances,” Olsen said. “The type of rock around here, we simply might not have the capacity to plug all of the exits thoroughly enough to solve the . . . problem.”

  “And we have to account for all of those Heggies, one way or another?” Van Stossen made it a question only for form’s sake.

  “Affirmative,” Dacik said. “Destroy or disable. We can’t leave those two regiments, men or equipment, behind after we leave in any condition where they might be used by the enemy.”

  “What does it do to the timetable?” Stossen asked. “I know we’re already behind schedule. And how are the 5th and 34th managing?”

  “The 5th and 34th are doing their job, holding,” Dacik said. “The Heggie defense at Site Charley is active and unified.” It sounded like a press release, saying very little, and the general’s tones made certain that there were no follow-up questions on the subject. When he wanted them to know more, he would tell them.

  “We were supposed to be embarking for our second landing this evening, by now or before,” Bones pointed out. “Have you decided what we’re going to do about that part of our mission, sir?”

  “It has to wait until we finish up this operation,” Dacik said. “Since we don’t dare try to operate at Site Bravo during daylight hours, it looks as if we’Il have to move that forward until tomorrow night.” He paused before he added, “And hope that we can get the job done in one night, before daybreak.” It was more than just the impossibility of operating during the day there. A one-day delay in the operation was bad enough. He didn’t want to contemplate losing a second day. The 5th and 34th might not be able to hold on that long.

  “We are getting more intelligence on Site Bravo,” Major Olsen said. “More passes with the spyeyes. That’s the one advantage to the delay. We’ll have a better idea what we’re getting into there than we did here.” Olsen glanced at the general, then started to say something else, but he stopped before the first word was entirely out.

  “The enemy tanks,” he said after a moment, holding up a hand to stop any questions while he listened to more of the report over his helmet radio. “The 13th’s reccers and SI have found two entrances and think they know where there’s a third.” Another silence. “The two places they’ve seen are nearly three kilometers apart, and more than twenty klicks from here, northeast, closer to the shore.”

  Dacik stood while Bones said, “Three klicks? That’s one hell of a big hole in the ground.”

  “Gentlemen, we have work to do,” the general said. “Get back to your units as fast as you can. By the time you’ve got your people assembled, we should have your orders ready. Jorgen, get enough shuttles down here right now to move everyone into position.”

  “Shuttles, for twenty kilometers?” Olsen asked.

  “I want everyone in position around that complex before dark,” Dacik said. “There’s not enough time for us to walk that far. Let’s get this business finished as quickly as we can.”

  * * *

  Dem Nimz and his recon platoon had been joined by the Special Intelligence team headed by Sergeant Gene Abru for this hunt. Nimz and Abru didn’t waste time congratulating each other when they spotted the first of the entrances to the underground facility. They confirmed their discovery less than thirty seconds before one of the other search teams found a second opening. The ramp leading out was sculpted so carefully that a Wasp flying an overhead search pattern at only a hundred meters had missed it completely. The line of the ramp leading down to the entrance pointed almost directly at the late-afternoon sun, which meant that there was only the narrowest strip of shadow along one side of the ramp. The walls were angled and smooth.

  “A savvy piece of work,” Abru commented, studying it through binoculars at a distance of no more than fifty meters from the upper end of the ramp.

  “Better than I would have expected from Heggies,” Dem said.

  Gene nodded. “A hell of a lot of thought and work went into that. They didn’t build this in a day, or in a year–if it’s all one piece from here to the other exit.”

  “Makes you wonder, don’t it?”

  ‘’I’d sure like to sneak a look inside,” Gene said. “This has got to be more than just a parking garage, that’s for certain. There must be more to it than that.”

  “Want to try to get in for a look-see?” Nimz suggested. “Your guys and a couple of us?”

  Abru wanted nothing more. If his mouth hadn’t been so dry from operating out in the heat all day, he would have salivated at the prospect. But after a moment, he took the binoculars away from his eyes and shook his head. This was no time for heat dreams.

  “Even I don’t think that’s possible, and that’s saying something,” he said, turning to look at Nimz. “They’ve got to have those entrances covered with enough firepower to wipe out a battalion, and probably electronic alarms as well. A mosquito couldn’t get in unobserved.”

  “Just a thought,” Dem said. “There probably won’t be much left afterwards, if we stick around long enough to look then.”

  We will, Abru thought. No way we can go home without finding out what the Heggies have been up to down there. With or without General Dacik’s approval, Special Intelligence was going to have a look around.

  “We will have to get a little closer, in any case,” he said. “Try to see what kind of fortifications they’ve got at the bottom of that ramp. The more we can learn now, the easier a time the rest of the force will have.”

  “You’re the boss here,” Dem said easily. Theoretically, he and Abru were the same rank, both platoon sergeants. But rank meant something entirely different in SI. Even Colonel Stossen treated SI sergeants as equals.

  Abru made his dispositions quickly. The SI team and one squad of reccers would go forward for the look. The rest of the recon platoon would spread out to provide cover for them, just in case they stirred up something.

  “Keep a sharp eye for mines and bugs,” Abru warned everyone before they started out. “Not just to keep ourselves together. The general’s sending out a welcome party for these gophers.”

  The reccers and Sl men were all experts at this sort of drill, detecting even the slightest hint of a mine or booby trap. But all of the expertise in the galaxy wasn’t enough this time. The lead team had gone no closer than thirty meters from the side of the ramp’s end when a perfectly camouflaged mine popped up a meter off of the ground and exploded in front of half of the reccer squad.

  SIMON KILGORE maneuvered Basset two into position. It was still extremely hot inside the turret. He couldn’t touch the ceiling without burning his fingertips. He had found that out by accident. Sunset was a few minutes away. There had been some very minor easing in the outside temperature, but the Havoc’s air conditioning had not yet caught up with the demand. Three air conditioners now. The extra had been installed in the rear compartment, but close to the one open connection between the back and the front, near the barrel of the howitzer. Jimmy and Karl, the two men in back, said that th
ey could feel the difference that the third unit made.

  “I’ve got a nasty itch about this,” Simon said on the crew’s radio channel. “Lining us up like ducks in a shooting arcade.”

  “You and me both,” Eustace agreed, the statement almost a growl. “But unless the Heggies have armor stashed somewhere besides the holes the reccers found, we should be okay. Even if they come popping out of those holes, we’re outside the range of a Nova right now.” Not by much. The Nova’s smaller main gun had an effective range of about ten kilometers, half that of a Havoc, and Basset Battery was positioned eleven kilometers from the nearest of the exits from the underground complex.

  The 13th’s Afghan Battery was slightly closer, and directly in line with one of the ramps. All but one gun of Afghan Battery had been destroyed in the 13th’s last campaign, so the colonel had given them the “honor” of having the most direct shot at any Heggie vehicles that came out of that exit. If the Heggies didn’t try to come out, Afghan was positioned so that its guns could zero in on the doors at the bottom end of the ramp.

  Eustace was more than willing to concede that honor to Afghan, or to anyone other than his Fat Turtle–the name painted on the side of Basset two’s turret. Eustace was much happier being a little to the side. A Nova would have to traverse fifty meters of the ramp from the underground door to get high enough to rotate its turret to get a shot at the Fat Turtle. Long before that could happen, Basset two could have a shell on its way–and be moving fast, in any direction.

  Captain Ritchie, Basset Battery’s commander, doubted that any Nova could get far enough up the ramp to be any threat at all. “There’s mudders out there too, with Vrerchs. We might not even get a chance to fire a shot.”

  Eustace hadn’t argued the point, but he didn’t accept the captain’s optimism either. We don’t ever get off that easy, he had thought.