L13TH 02 Side Show

by Rick Shelley

  Teu Ingels and Dezo Parks were also busy on the radio, Dezo trying to get updated intelligence from CIC, Teu contacting the various companies and recon platoons, trying to determine just where the new Heggie fire was coming from. Even with all three staff officers working, it took nearly five minutes before anyone had an answer.

  “The tank fire came from here.” Parks pointed to a spot on the mapboard off the right rear quarter of the 13th. “About three klicks out past 4th recon. CIC monitored the muzzle flashes but needed time to get an eye trained on the area. It looks like another column about equal to the one we’re engaging on the other side.”

  “Who’s closest to them, Bravo?” Stossen asked.

  “Besides 4th recon, yes,” Teu said. “And Fox has the point on that side of the diamond. They’re not too much farther off.”

  “Get Digby and Jacobi.” Captain Digby commanded Fox. Captain Jacobi, the newest captain in the 13th, had Bravo. “Tell them to move to intercept, pincer these Heggies. And get the Havocs busy.”

  Ingels got busy on the radio. Stossen turned to the other two. “If there are two columns that close, there might be a third, the rest of two battalions, infantry and armor. Or more. If so, I want them found before they start hitting us as well. Get patrols out, Dezo. Bal, get back to CIC. Tell them what we’re looking for. If there are Novas on the move, CIC should be able to pick them up.” The Combat Information Center on the flagship was the only outside help the 13th could count on. With orbiting spyeyes and the long-range sensors on the ships, CIC could provide a lot of information . . . on anything they could see. The problem on Jordan was the limited number of spyeyes the Accord had been able to maintain in orbit.

  * * *

  The seven remaining Wasps of the 13th’s Blue Flight headed northwest. They were only halfway to their targets when a half dozen Schlinal Boem fighters intercepted them.

  “Straight into them,” Slee Reston ordered. “We’ve got to get past as fast as we can.” Most times, he might almost have enjoyed a good mix-up. Like most fighter pilots, Slee was supremely confident of his own ability, and equally confident that his plane was at least on a par with anything the enemy could throw at him. But now they had a vital ground support mission. The rest of the 13th was out in the middle of nowhere, “surrounded” by Heggies. That the 13th still had, apparently, a considerable edge in numbers made no difference to Slee. His flight had a mission to perform, and this fight was just slowing them down.

  Blue Flight had the edge in altitude, though that was no longer as major an advantage as it had been before fighters were powered by antigrav engines. The Heggie interceptors rose quickly, aimed directly for the Wasps. At a distance of six kilometers, the two sides exchanged their first missiles . . . then went into violent evasive maneuvers while they launched their spectrum of countermeasures. Both sides used fire-and-forget missiles. Once they had been shown their target, they needed no further guidance from the launching aircraft.

  In Blue two, Zel Paitcher dropped decoys and started his Wasp moving up, straight up. After two seconds, he reversed both drives and the Wasp sank: like a stone, the gee-load forcing blood to his head. He held the power dive as long as he could stand the strain, then flipped the Wasp end for end and went back to level flight–toward the Boems. Going into a slight climb, he launched two more missiles toward Boems that were still struggling to evade the first volley.

  “Close to cannon range,” Slee ordered. “We’ve got to save missiles for the tanks.”

  The Wasps converged on the enemy planes as best they could. Almost miraculously, none of the planes on either side had been hit during the exchange of missiles.

  Zel picked his target and flipped his weapon selector over to the 25mm cannon in the nose of his plane. The Schlinal fighters also carried cannons, but they were single-barreled and fired solid 40mm rounds, either explosive or armor piercing–somewhat better suited to this kind of fight.

  But the Boems did not engage. They turned off and worked to stay just beyond the effective range of the Wasp guns. Their course was perpendicular to the vector the Wasps had been on before interception, taking them away from the 13th on the ground.

  “Decoys,” Slee said. “They’re just here to keep us from helping the mudders. Break off.”

  When Blue Flight turned, so did the Boems.

  “Full throttle,” Slee said. “Let’s see how far they chase us. Watch out for missiles.”

  SMOKE GRENADES, white phosphorus grenades, fragmentation grenades . . . and wire by the meter. Since neither side had been dug in, it was a bloody little fight. Once Echo Company closed to within eighty meters of the Heggies infantry, both sides started taking significant casualties.

  Forward movement had to be measured in centimeters. One fire team of a squad would cover the other while it crawled forward just a little bit. Then movement slowed even more. One fire team moved while three provided covering fire. More RPGs were shot into the section of tall grass that hid the enemy. The grass itself was being rapidly pruned by all of the metal ripping through it.

  Vision was limited. The burning white phosphorus even obscured the infrared sensors of helmet visors. At least the helmets provided better protection against enemy wire than the net armor in fatigues did.

  “Keep your fire low,” Joe Baerclau warned his platoon. “Third recon is somewhere on the other side of the Heggies, and Delta somewhere to our right.”

  Joe was in the middle of first squad, where he might have been if he were still only squad leader instead of platoon sergeant. The difference now was that he usually moved with the squad’s second fire team rather than the first. The first team was to his left–Ezra Frain, Al Bergon, Pit Tymphe, and Olly Wytten. The second team was to his right–Mort Jaiffer, Wiz Mackey, and Carl Eames. The new men were spaced between veterans.

  There was less room between men than Joe would have liked, but there was no easy remedy for that just now.

  “Ez, you got any room on your left to spread us out?” Joe asked over a private channel.

  “Negative,” Ezra replied. “Second squad’s even closer.”

  “Mort, how about . . . ” Joe started. There was a loud rattle of wire hitting his helmet, and before that ended, he felt a burning pain in his left shoulder. The combined impacts left him too stunned to talk. For an instant, they also left him too stunned to feel the pain of the wound in his shoulder.

  The universe closed in on Joe. The sounds of wire impacting on the helmet had produced an almost deafening noise inside the helmet. The almost simultaneous shoulder wound brought a moment of numbness. When the pain followed, Joe gritted his teeth so hard to keep from screaming that he thought several must break. He sucked in a deep, involuntary breath. His eyes teared up and his vision clouded over. All, almost, in the blink of an eye. Then, through still-clenched teeth, Joe said, “Al, I’m hit.”

  “That you, Sarge?” Al Bergon asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Hang on. I’ll get to you as quick as I can.”

  Joe switched channels. “Sauv, you’ve got the platoon. I’m hit.” There was a slight pause before Degtree, the next senior sergeant in the platoon, replied, “How bad?”

  “Don’t know. My shoulder. Tell the lieutenant.”

  “I heard,” Lieutenant Keye said. “Just stay low till the medic gets to you. This is almost over.”

  Almost over, Joe thought. Then, for several seconds, he hovered near the edge of unconsciousness. But he didn’t fall, and he was brought back from the brink by a hand on his right arm and Al Bergon’s voice.

  “I’m here, Sarge. Hang tough. This doesn’t look too bad.”

  * * *

  Zel had ceased to have any awareness of his body. He was simply part of his Wasp, a command and control nodule acting and reacting. His hands and feet on the controls were merely cogs in the intricate machinery. They were no more or less part of him tha
n the 25mm cannons, the batteries, or the antigrav drives. Eyes and ears collected data. His brain processed it and produced responses.

  Although the controls of a Wasp appeared quite similar to those of a conventional aircraft, there were important differences. The pedals were throttles in a Wasp. The farther they were depressed, the faster the Wasp went. Switches on the control yoke could reverse the direction of thrust. Movements of the wheel, forward and back as well as clockwise or the reverse, controlled climb and dive, and “wing” angle. The proper combination of movements could flip a Wasp end for end, a dangerous maneuver at high speeds because of the gee-load it could subject the pilot to.

  The flight of Boems had continued to dog Blue Flight all of the way to the air over the 13th. Only at the end had they closed enough to force another confrontation.

  As much as possible, Zel saved his rockets for the ground support mission. He used his cannons to keep the enemy fighters away. The new Wasp tailgun helped immeasurably. The Boems had to stand off and use rockets, and the Wasps’ countermeasures had kept any of those from finding Blue two. So far. Not everyone had been so lucky. The numbers in the air were more nearly equal now; six Wasps and five Boems. And both sides were getting low on rockets.

  Zel tipped his Wasp over to the right, standing it on edge, then pushed through a quick roll. That gave him a shot at a Nova on the ground while it turned him back toward the Boem that had been dogging him for the past minute. The Boem came almost to a stop before it flipped and dove, away and to the left. Zel thought that the Boem must be out of rockets.

  Give me a shot, Zel thought. He glanced at his “remaining munitions” display. Two rockets and twenty seconds of ammo for the forward cannon.

  “One rocket for you, one for another tank;” Zel whispered. He armed a rocket while his target acquisition system tried to get a lock on the Boem.

  “Closer.” Zel pushed both throttles to the floor. He was closing on the Boem. The Schlinal pilot’s braking maneuver before he flipped had cost him precious fractions of a second.

  “Closer.” Zel heard the twin clicks as his TA system established its lock. He saw the decoy that the Boem launched and heard the “translated” chatter of its electronic countermeasures. “A couple seconds of that and you’re finished,” Zel said, unaware of the death’s-head grin that had taken possession of his face. With enough time to analyze the enemy’s ECM, the Wasp’s rocket would be able to adjust for them.

  “Now!” Zel shouted the word, but it came out after he punched the trigger on his rocket. He eased back on his throttles and made a shallow turn to line up on another tank. He armed his last missile, reminding himself to switch the selector back to cannon as soon as the rocket was away.

  By the time the first missile hit the Boem, a solid hit just behind the cockpit, Zel had already locked his last missile onto one of three tanks remaining below.

  That tank exploded before Zel’s rocket reached it, hit by a shell from a Havoc ten kilometers away.

  “Damn! I could have saved that.” Zel had already forgotten about the Boem, whose pieces were still falling out of the sky.

  * * *

  The skirmish was over less than an hour after the first shots had been fired. The first Heggie column had been hit hardest. Those who had not been killed were captured. Few, if any, managed to escape. In the other two columns, the results were mixed. A few tanks, and perhaps two-thirds of the infantry, were able to disengage, though the infantry was now all on foot.

  Lieutenant Keye was still trying to get his breathing back to normal. He could feel that his face was flushed. His lungs were pumping hard. He stood looking at the forty prisoners that Echo had captured.

  The Heggies had been herded together, stripped of weapons, ammunition, helmets, uniforms, and boots. The weapons and ammunition were being loaded aboard several of the Heyer APCs. An extra reserve, just in case: that was one lesson the 13th had learned on Porter. The helmets were taken and (except for two that Intelligence wanted) destroyed to keep these Heggies out of communication with their army. The boots and uniforms were also destroyed, to make the Heggie mudders too vulnerable to have any real thoughts of following and making more difficulty. No uniforms meant no body armor. No boots meant a slower, and more uncomfortable, trip back to their lines. The 13th was not equipped to carry enemy prisoners with it.

  The Schlinal wounded were treated alongside the 13th’s own casualties. There were a couple of Schlinal medics in the group of prisoners. They were able to cope with their own.

  “I’ve got our count, Lieutenant,” Sauv Degtree reported.

  Keye blinked and sucked in a deep breath before he said, “Let me have it.”

  “Three dead.” He listed the names. Two were from fourth squad, the other from his own, third. Keye closed his eyes while he listened to the roster. “Six wounded, only one bad enough to need time in a trauma tube. Doc Eddles is taking care of him now.” Again, Degtree listed the names. Again, Keye closed his eyes.

  “Where’s the Bear?” Keye asked.

  Degtree pointed. “They’ve already taken him back. He’s probably sitting in the Heyer by now.”

  “His shoulder?”

  “Bergan said it wasn’t near as bad as it might have been. Bone chips but no fracture. Fair amount of bleeding. Doc may have to dig out the chips if a soaker doesn’t work them out.” That depended mostly on how large the fragments were. If they were too big, the medical nanobots wouldn’ t be able to transport the fragments to the surface quickly enough and minor surgery would be required

  “The reccers will guard the prisoners until we move out,” Keye said, relaying word he was just getting from Major Parks. “Let’s get everybody back. Time to hit the trail again.”

  * * *

  AI Bergon had tried to get Joe Baerclau to lie still and let himself be carried to the APC, but the Bear had refused. Once there was a soaker on his wounded shoulder and the analgesic had started to work, he insisted on walking.

  “Save the litter for someone who needs it,” he said.

  “You’ve lost blood, Sarge,” Al protested. “There’s always shock with this kind of wound. Give the soaker time to do its job.”

  “I’m not crippled. I’ve been hurt worse than this before. And don’t go trying to hit me with a knockout patch either. That’s an order.”

  Al bit back a reply. The order was not valid. As medic, he could slap the patch on anyway. But he would also have to put up with an angry sergeant after it wore off. AI looked closely at Baerclau’s face, checking pupil dilation and how well the Bear’s’ eyes tracked his finger.

  “Okay, we’ll chance it,” he said after stalling for as long as he dared. “But, so help me, Sarge, one hint of swaying or anything else, and down you go, regardless.”

  Baerclau glowered at Al but didn’t speak. He simply put his helmet back on, picked up his rifle, and gestured in the direction of the APCs. Al and the rest of first squad started moving off with him.

  I have been hurt worse than this, Joe told himself. But that one time, he hadn’t walked away under his own power. It had been thirty-six hours before he had done any walking. This was the first time in months that Joe had even thought about that earlier wound. There weren’t even any scars to remind him. Medical nanobots left no evidence of wounds or their repair work.

  Joe hadn’t walked ten steps before he started to question the wisdom of his decision. He was sweating profusely, and he felt light-headed. There was no pain left, though. The soaker had his shoulder so numb that he would scarcely have felt anything if the arm fell off.

  He walked slowly, unwilling to give Al the slightest excuse for putting him on a stretcher. Now that he had made his choice, Joe was not about to reverse it. As long as he was conscious and able to stay on his feet, he would walk. After all, it wasn’t all that far back to the APCs, less than a kilometer.

  I could do a klick with
both legs blown off at the knee, Joe told himself. He saw nothing ludicrous in the image, didn’t recognize that it showed a dangerous loss of alertness. He did stop for a moment. He looked up into the sky. Moving with exaggerated care, he turned twice so that he could see all of the sky around him.

  “Those Heggie fighters are gone,” he said, still on the channel that Al Bergon was monitoring.

  “Yes, Sarge, they’re gone. You ready to ride for a bit?”

  Baerclau turned to glare at Al again. “I’m getting better every second. I didn’t need a ride before. I don’t need it now.”

  It took twenty-five minutes to cover the kilometer. Joe did sit then, in the rear hatch of the APC.

  “I’m going to have Doc Eddies look at that shoulder,” Al said, lifting the edge of the soaker to look himself. “If the bone chips are too big, he’ll have to go in.”

  Joe didn’t reply. After the walk, he was having serious difficulty just staying conscious. Al seemed to swim around in front of him. For a time, Joe felt as if the entire world were spinning around him.

  “Even if he doesn’t, I’m going to be right next to you in there when we start up again.” Al again looked into the sergeant’s eyes with a tiny flashlight, then shook his head and threw the light down. “Damn it! I never should have let you walk. I’m going to have to start a drip to replace the fluid you left on the grass.”

  He didn’t wait for the Bear to say anything but got the plastic pouch out and connected it. The bag containing the intravenous solution had separate compartments within it. The largest held a simple saline solution. The other held specialized medical nanobots and the other components they would need to turn the salt water into blood that would match Joe’s own perfectly. Al taped the bag in place over Joe’s arm. There was no need to put it higher; the nanobots would pump the solution in, even against twice the surface gravity of Jordan.