by Rick Shelley
To use the energy his edginess gave him, Joe worked at improving his foxhole. It was just large enough for two men, side by side. Even though Joe was alone in the hole, he made it large enough for two, just in case. But no larger. That would just make the hole a better target for anyone trying to toss a grenade in. With the extra time, he put a grenade sump hole in at the bottom, a cavity slanting off to the side. With a little luck, a grenade would roll all of the way down there before it exploded, shielding Joe from the shrapnel. Lacking a grenade, the sump would also take care of water should it start raining again.
It was an extra touch there wasn’t often time to incorporate.
Joe had built up a low dirt berm around the hole and packed it. He prepared firing positions on every side. Even though Echo was facing one side of the elliptical area the 13th was camped in, Joe wanted to be ready no matter which direction the enemy might attack from.
When the hole was finally done to his satisfaction, Joe sat down and pulled out a meal pack. He had a narrow ledge to sit on that kept his eyes above ground level, just enough. In any case, any threat was still–almost certainly–hours away. They hadn’t seen any evidence all day that anyone had ever been over the ground they were marching across.
* * *
“How could the general issue an order like that?” Teu Ingels asked. The colonel and his staff were inside the APC that served as the 13th’s command post. “I mean, we’re supposed to kill women to keep them from the Heggies?”
The women in question, all of the researchers and their assistants, were camped at some distance from the command post, still under the watchful eyes of Sergeant Abru’s SI team and the 13th’s headquarters security detail.
“Maybe the general didn’t know there were women,” Dezo Parks suggested.
“Men or women, what’s the difference?” Bal Kenneck asked. “It’s too important that they don’t fall into enemy hands with what they know. If we can’t prevent capture, we have no alternative.”
“That, gentlemen, is the bottom line,” Stossen said. He had been listening to the debate with growing impatience for ten minutes. He didn’t like the possibility any more than Ingels or the others, but he also knew that, somehow, the order had to be obeyed. “Dr. Corey herself emphasized the importance of making certain that she and her people are not taken by the Hegemony. If you have no stomach for the one option, find a way to make sure that it never comes down to that and quit this pointless arguing.”
Stossen took a deep breath and leaned back when he realized that he had started shouting. When he resumed, he was doing little more than whispering.
“I don’t like the idea either, but the 13th will obey its orders. If I have to carry them out personally.” He let his gaze travel around the circle of officers. Because of the limited room available in a Heyer, they were close. “It’s a rotten position to be in, but we have no choice.”
“The 13th gets stuck with the crapola again,” Kenneck said.
“We get the tough assignments because the brass knows that the 13th does what it has to. We get results. We do the job. That’s not going to change simply because we’ve been given an order we . . . don’t . . . like.” The last three words were widely spaced and spoken through clenched teeth.
“We’re a long way from final options,” Dezo said. “Bal, what’s the latest from CIC?”
Kenneck shrugged. “That reinforced regiment, what’s left of it, is still chasing our Heyers, but they’re too far back to pose any immediate threat. “Another ten or fifteen minutes and our two Havoc batteries will be in position for the ambush. Red Flight’s due in for fresh power cells at about the same time. Blue Flight is up to cover that operation. Then they’ll land and take on fresh batteries of their own. Unless something unforeseen happens, the ambush should be sprung about twenty minutes past midnight.”
The others all looked at either their watches or at the time line on their helmet visor displays.
“Less than a half hour from now,” Ingels noted.
“What happens after that depends on what happens then,” Kenneck said. “We can’t hope to take out much of the Heggie infantry in the dark. Not if they play it smart. What we hope to do is destroy the rest of their armor and the trucks they have left now. It might be dawn before we know whether or not they’re still coming after us.” He let a smile slide briefly across his face. “At least they’ll be on foot, and without much armor by then.”
“Don’t count on that until we can see it,” Stossen said. “The last thing we can afford is overconfidence. We’ve already had their trucks reported destroyed once only to find out that they were still traveling forty klicks every hour.”
“Even if we do take out this regiment as an effective fighting force, there’s no way to say that’s the end of it for us,” Teu said, speaking as softly as the colonel had earlier. “It just might make the Heggies decide that we’re worth an even greater effort. And we’re a long way from any kind of safety.”
* * *
The eight Wasps staged at twenty thousand meters over the Heggie column. Climbing that far was a drain on their batteries. It would cut their air time considerably. In the dark, they were invisible to any enemy detection gear. With the Wasps’ stealth technology and with the antigrav engines running at low throttle, they were less than ghosts. They could cruise unheard, unseen, at two hundred meters in the night. But the fighters were waiting, high enough that they wouldn’t even be stumbled on by enemy Boems. Until the Havocs opened the attack, and the Heggies had identified the incoming fire as artillery, the planes would stay out of the fight, completely. Once the Schlinal force was concentrating on countering a ground attack, the Wasps would dive in, aiming for tanks and trucks. And if Boems arrived, the Wasps would be there to keep them occupied, away from the Havocs.
“Just stay cool,” Zel told Irv and Jase. “Remember, at night, mudders have about as much chance of hitting us as I do of becoming Prime Minister of the Accord.”
“Unless they’ve got Boems to back ‘em up,” Jase said.
“There could be a hundred Boems right here with us and we wouldn’t know it until they turned on their TA systems,” lrv added. TA: target acquisition. The Wasps’ sensors would pick up any enemy TA radar as soon as it brushed them. And vice versa.
“If there were even half that many, one of us would have stumbled onto them, the hard way, by now,” Zel said. He wasn’t trying to be funny, and no one laughed. “Just watch for the shooting to start down below.”
They would see the flashes of shells being fired as clearly as they might see lightning streaking across the sky. Once they were alerted by those flashes, they would be watching for the explosions at the other end. The navigation monitors in all of the Wasp cockpits showed the positions of the Havocs as blue crosses. Transponders in the guns would keep the aircraft apprised of their locations no matter how wildly guns or planes moved once the fighting started. And the targeting systems would not allow a Wasp pilot to mistakenly lock on to a Havoc. That would take a specific override, with two fallback safeties.
Zel thumbed off his microphone just long enough to whisper; “Slee, this time’s for you. We’ll do what we’re supposed to do.”
Then he saw the first flashes as the howitzers opened up. SilentIy, he counted three seconds until the first explosions appeared on the other end of their ballistic trajectories.
“Get ready,” he warned the other pilots of his own flight. “Red is going in first, from in front of the column. We’ll come in from the far side.” The side away from the Havocs.
Less than thirty seconds passed before he saw muzzle flashes from the Heggie column as Novas started to return fire. A quick glance at the scale on his navigating monitor assured Zel that the Novas were too far away to hit the Havocs. They were firing blind.
Wait, he told himself. Then he opened his link to the commander of Red Flight to make sure that h
e knew that the Heggies didn’t have any certain targets yet.
“I know, ZeI. We’ll wait . . . a few seconds, at least.”
The tanks were moving, racing, using the vector of the incoming rounds to guide them. It wouldn’t take them long to get close enough to make their return fire count.
The blue crosses were moving, jumping to new firing positions.
“Okay, Zel,” the Red Flight leader said. “Here we go. See you later.”
“Yeah, later,” Zel replied absently. He switched channels to pass the word to the other pilots of his own flight.
“Time to go. Give ‘em hell.” He pushed his control yoke forward and advanced the throttles.
THERE WERE many differences between the Accord Havoc and the Schlinal Nova. The most basic was that the Havoc was a self-propelled howitzer and the Nova was a tank. Though they might look similar to an observer, their basic missions were quite different. Artillery stood off and lobbed its shells in from as far as twenty kilometers from the target. The maximum range of the 135mm main gun on a Nova was slightly under ten kilometers, and even with that it was used primarily for line-of-sight attack as a direct infantry support vehicle or to attack enemy strong points and armor or artillery. The Havoc was lightly armored and depended exclusively on speed and mobility for defense. Its armor was only thick enough to stop small arms fire. The Nova was much more heavily armored. The Havoc carried a crew of four. The Nova relied on two men and more extensive automation. In the Nova, the gun commander minded everything but the driving. The main gun was loaded automatically. The two splat guns could also be operated remotely by the gun commander. In the Havoc, three men did the work that one did in a Nova. A loader ran the machinery that moved the heavy shells from magazine to breech and locked the barrel when it was loaded. The shell casing was, however, ejected automatically through a port that sent the spent brass out of the turret. A gunner oversaw the computerized targeting and could, at need, override the automatics. In a Nova, the gun commander had no choice but to accept what the TA system told him, except on line-of-sight shots.
Not surprisingly, perhaps, the Havoc could maintain a higher rate of accurate fire for much longer than the Nova. And as long as the Havoc could maintain its distance, it was out of reach of those tanks.
It wasn’t always possible to keep away. But this was one time when the gunners of Basset and Dingo batteries certainly intended to stay more than ten kilometers from the enemy.
Karl Mennem and Jimmy Ysinde were one of the best loader-gunner combinations in the 13th, fast and accurate. Their positions low in the rear of the gun’s long turret kept them well separated from the others, at the front of the turret. The howitzer’s breech was between Karl and Jimmy. Karl’s seat at the targeting controls was a little higher than Jimmy’s. They did their work without talking. When the Fat Turtle was speaking, they couldn’t have heard each other–not even over helmet radios–anyway.
In the front compartment, Eustace took care of navigation. He gave Simon a course and gave Karl his target priorities. All four men kept busy. Eustace also kept track of the number of shots that went out, a silent roll call, a habit he had never been able–(or really tried)–to break.
This wasn’t a perfect mission. There weren’t enough Accord spyeyes available to give them pinpoint targeting data for each shot. With adequate data, it would have been one target, one round, with a high degree of certainty that each target would be destroyed in turn. Now all they knew was the location of the enemy column, along with rough corrections from the Wasps that were also hitting it. The data was good, but not precise enough to give the guns their best accuracy.
“We’ll make do,” Eustace muttered, not really caring whether or not any of the others managed to hear.
Shoot and move. The Havoc commanders were netted in with the two Wasp flight leaders. That gave the howitzers some data, voice and telemetry, but not nearly enough. When one of the flyers reported a hit, there was no way to be certain which of the guns on the ground had scored. Everyone was firing almost as quickly as their guns could be loaded and targeted.
“It’s like we’ve gone back three thousand years,” Karl Mennem complained. “More than that. We might as well be firing scrap metal from muzzle-loaders.”
“You want we should go nose to nose with Novas?” Eustace asked. “You want that, we could do it . . . for about eight seconds.”
“You want that,” Simon said before Karl could answer, “you can find yourself another driver. I’ll get out and walk back.”
All of them had the amplifiers in their headsets cranked to maximum. Even with that, they shouted into their microphones. Artillerymen always suffered hearing damage. That was a given. Once they were out of the guns, the damage could be repaired, given time. Short of that, treatment was reserved for cases where the damage was severe enough to interfere with job performance.
“Okay, you’ve both made your points,” Eustace said. “Let’s concentrate on doing what we can with what we’ve got.” There was no mistaking the annoyance in his voice. With more than a year of working together as a team, the others knew that it was indeed time to shut up.
* * *
Rockets and cannon. Blue Flight expended everything but the rounds in their rear-facing 25mm cannons, then hurried back to the temporary bases their support vans had established. They were only on the ground long enough to get new munitions and fresh batteries, then they hurried back to the fight at full throttle so that part of Red Flight could replenish. Once the rotation was established, the eight Wasps could keep up the attack as long as their pilots could remain alert enough to fly. Or until they were shot out of the air.
Once more, Zel fell into the illusion of being part of his Wasp. Eyes, hands, brain–all became nearly automatic subsystems of the fighter. He took absolutely no thought for the death and destruction he was bringing to the enemy. This was game playing at its most intense, with little more thought given to the possible outcome for himself and his companions. As long as the gameboard was lit up, he would play.
Reflex. Training. Deadly carnage.
The Schlinal tanks continued to maneuver, both in an attempt to evade Accord fire and in a continuing hunt for the Havoc howitzers that were bombarding their regiment with continuing effect. Most of the trucks that had been carrying the infantry had been abandoned in the first seconds. The squads in their backs jumped to get clear of the larger targets. Drivers dove for cover as well. A lone human being presented a much smaller target to any enemy. In the night, he could almost hope to achieve effective invisibility from any long-range attack. And even if he were visible in infrared, he would be just one man among many hundreds. The more distance between him and his companions, the better his odds were.
Although Zel paid no attention to the figures, his targeting system recorded the number of vehicles hit, even though it could not always distinguish between tank and truck. By the time Blue Flight was ready to go back to rearm for the second time, that number stood at twenty-seven total for the eight Wasps. Slightly more than half of those hits were trucks, but the tank battalion had been hit hard throughout the series of engagements. No more than a half dozen, the equivalent of a single tank company, were still operational.
Blue Flight was on the ground when the first enemy Boems reached the battle. Red Flight had no warning until the Heggie squadron was right in the middle of them. The initial numbers were, as close as anyone in Red Flight could tell, sixteen to five.
Two Wasps went down before their pilots could react to the sudden attack. A few seconds later, a Wasp and a Boem took each other out in a head-on collision at speeds too high for their collision-avoidance systems to overcome.
“Hurry it, Chief,” Zel told Roo Vernon. “They need us back there right now.”
There were just two Wasps there to face fifteen–then thirteen–Boems. Zel bit at his lower lip. They’d never make it back in time to help.
The ground crews were just buttoning up the panels over the battery wells when the next call came from Red Flight.
“We’re getting out of here, just plain running, out of ammo, low on juice as well.”
“Blue Flight, this is Major Parks. You’re to go back just far enough to cover Red Flight’s withdrawal and landing. Repeat, just far enough to cover Red Flight.”
Zel hesitated, for just a second, before he acknowledged the order. If the Boems give chase, maybe we can turn the tables yet, he thought.
* * *
The Havoc 200mm self-propelled howitzer was a well-designed machine. The planners had accounted for every cubic centimeter of space. The allowances for the four crewmen had been carefully evaluated to give a man exactly the amount of room he needed, and not a bit extra. As a result, the spaces actually fit very few men, most not conforming strictly to the average data that had been used to compute the allocation. The composite bucket seats were a particular source of complaints. Any type of padding eased the situation, but only men who were rather below average size could find space to install such a comfort. Small containers near each station held other essential personal equipment, such as meal packs and water. The one “extravagance” that the planners had designed into the Havoc was provision for cool water. Cool, not cold. The argument was that gun crews needed the water because of the temperatures that could occur inside the gun turrets–routinely in excess of 40 degrees Celsius in even moderately warm weather if the gun were being fired with any regularity. Two coolers, each large enough to hold four 1-liter canteens, would keep the contents at a modest 12 degrees Celsius.
The Havocs of Basset and Dingo batteries had gone silent. The crews had all parked their guns and draped their thermal tarps more effectively. Many of the crews, like that of Basset two, had chosen their havens earlier, marked locations, and then carefully avoided using them as firing positions. Not one Havoc of the two batteries had been hit by the enemy counterfire. The Novas hadn’t come close enough to be effective, and the Boems had concentrated on the Wasps.
