L13TH 02 Side Show

by Rick Shelley

  It was the arrival of enemy fighters that had brought the Havocs’ part in the ambush to an end, just as the Boems had chased the Wasps from overhead.

  The crew of Basset two was hiding in bushes twenty meters from the Fat Turtle. With tree branches overhead and thick underbrush around them, they felt as safe as they could possibly feel under the circumstances. They weren’t crowded together, but they were closer than infantrymen would have been in similar circumstances. And the gunners hadn’t bothered to excavate foxholes or slit trenches. It was something they weren’t apt to consider unless they came under direct fire . . . or had reason to believe that they were likely to in the immediate future–say, within the next five minutes.

  Each man did have a canteen of water with him. He also had night-vision goggles. Those weren’t built into gunners’ helmets the way they were in the infantry version, but numerous complaints from gunners who had been forced out into the night, away from the optics of their Havocs, had led the quartermaster corps to issue the extra equipment. Finding room for the gear in a Havoc had been rather more difficult.

  Eustace was enjoying the new goggles more than the cool water at the moment. He could actually see. In the Porter campaign, the lack of portable night-vision gear had been very nearly disastrous for him and his crew. If the army hadn’t provided the goggles, he had been ready to purchase his own before going into combat again. “I don’t want to end up blind in the wrong circumstances again,” he had told the 13th’s chief gunner after Porter. “A man could get killed that way, an’ there’s more’n enough ways for a gunner to get dead now.”

  With night goggles over his eyes and his pistol in hand, Eustace felt ready to take on anything that the Heggies might throw at them. He spent more than twenty minutes just scanning the limited horizon he could see after he and his crew went to ground.

  “We might as well try to get a little sleep,” he said then. “Two and two. Simon, Jimmy, you take the first hour.” Eustace couldn’t have slept yet in any case. After the action of the last hour, he would need time to come down from his battle high, to let the adrenaline–and two stimtabs–work their way out of his system. Although he was as short of sleep as any of the Accord soldiers on Jordan, just now he couldn’t have felt more wide awake if he had just slept for a week straight.

  Eustace smiled, enjoying a private memory. Sleep for a week. He had tried that once, taken a furlough to do nothing but sleep after a long field exercise. He had checked into the Galaxy, the best hotel on Albion, the world where the 13th was based. He had spent the first afternoon and evening eating and drinking, but only in the hotel. For a change, he hadn’t made the rounds of the bars that hosted most military traffic, and he didn’t associate with any other soldiers. After that first eight hours, he had returned to his room ready to spend the next seven days there, eating, sleeping, and–in between–relaxing.

  Two days of that had been all he was able to stand. He couldn’t sleep and got far too nervous to relax. After several hours of pacing around his room–Eustace Ponks was a very stubborn man–he had given up. He had taken a taxi across town and started making the rounds of bars and theaters on what was known as the Strip, looking for people he knew from the 13th. He had broken a lot of personal rules during the binge that followed, mostly by buying drinks for people he didn’t owe favors to. There had been two brawls, that he could remember afterward, and several brief encounters with the other sort of professional who frequented the Strip.

  I could use a little action of that sort now, Eustace thought, grinning widely. He had been married once. That had proven less satisfactory than simply renting companionship when he felt the need. And when he was somewhere where the urge could be satisfied.

  There was a little chatter on the radio now. The battery commanders kept in touch with all of their guns. In the field like this, each crew operated semi-autonomously. The men’s primary sense of identification was with their own guns, not with the battery as a whole. Guns moved independently, if usually within well-defined areas. Each gun commander was responsible for movement and concealment. But there was always the battery channel on the radio, and always some contact. At the moment, Lieutenant Ritchey, the Basset Battery C.O., was trying to provide a running account of the air action. Ritchey had taken over Basset five after losing his own gun. The trouble was, his information always seemed to be several minutes out of date. Ponks paid little attention to it. His private thoughts were more . . . entertaining.

  “Sarge, how long you figure they’ll leave us sitting here?” Karl asked, breaking into Eustace’s reverie.

  “Either too long or not long enough,” he replied, blinking several times to get his mind back to the business at hand. It’s not like fairy tales; they never get it “just right,” he thought.

  “The Wasps are really taking a licking again, ain’t they?”

  Eustace didn’t answer. He had heard about the three planes of Red Flight going down, and that Blue Flight was back getting more rockets. That was the latest information he had.

  * * *

  The two remaining Wasps of Red Flight were low, hugging the terrain as they tried to escape from the pursuing Boems. Blue Flight waited, higher, across the course that the other planes were taking, but a thousand meters above the Boems. Waiting, idling, running silent. Blue Flight’s Wasps didn’t even have their TA systems running. They used a radio relay of data from Red Flight. That added a couple of seconds to the process of acquiring a target, but it did maintain the element of surprise for Blue Flight–until their missiles were armed and pointed at the targets.

  Six missiles went out. Four of them found targets. There was a moment of confusion for the Boem flight, time enough for Zel and his wingmen to put out six more rockets. Only one of those found a target.

  “Into them,” Zel said, nosing his Wasp directly toward the heaviest concentration of Boems. “Give Red time to get away.”

  In the dark, it was a duel of ghosts. The fighters on both sides used their TA systems sparingly, switching them off as soon as targets were acquired and locked into missiles, trying for that essential invisibility. No pilot on either side ever actually saw the enemy, only electronic signatures on cockpit monitors or on the heads-up display.

  It was a brief battle, no more than three minutes for Blue Flight. “We’re clear,” the new Red one told Zel.

  “Break contact,” Zel told his own pilots.

  That was much easier at night than during the day. The pilots simply switched off everything that might put out a visible signature. They swung out on diverging courses and went low, reversing course once they were below fifty meters, and cutting back their speed. Zel went so far as to hover for nearly a full minute, his Wasp almost completely silent. The only audible noise in the cockpit was his own breathing.

  That hover might have saved him. At least some of the Boem pilots were also crafty. One of them flashed by Zel’s Wasp, not more than twenty meters away. Even then, Zel didn’t actually see the other plane, but it did register on the Wasp’s instruments. It came close enough that even a passive scan detected the magnetic field generated by the Boem’s antigrav drives.

  The Boem didn’t have a chance to turn to get its missiles aimed at Zel. Zel armed two rockets and got them off while the Boem was still within a hundred meters of him. There wasn’t enough time for the Schlinal pilot to do anything but die.

  FOR A MOMENT, Dem Nimz had mistaken the flashes on the horizon for lightning, even though the sky was clear. There had certainly been enough rain in the time that the Accord had been on Jordan for that to come to mind. But Dem was exhausted. Had his mind been functioning normally, he would have known instantly that what he was seeing was the flash of artillery strikes.

  “The fight’s still going on,” Fredo whispered at Dem’s side.

  Dem nodded slowly. “At least it gives us a marker,” he said, taking a fix on the direction. “They’ve shifted
course a little, I think.”

  The few men remaining from the 1st and 3rd recon platoons were no longer even thinking about engaging the Heggies. Following the enemy was simply a convenience now, a way to make sure that they were on the best route back to their own people. Unless the Heggies turned around and followed their own path back.

  Dem and his rump command had made use of the enemy’s leavings. Coming on one of the places where the Schlinal regiment had been hit, each of the men had appropriated a Schlinal rifle, all of the wire for it he could carry, and a few grenades, either hand or rocket propelled. Schlinal wire spools, would not fit in Accord weapons, so rifles and ammunition both had to be taken. And the reccers had also taken what food they could find. They had eaten well a couple of hours back, each man forcing down two or three of the Schlinal field ration packs.

  “Almost makes you appreciate our stuff,” Fredo had commented at the time.

  Most of them ate again now, while they rested and watched the distant duel. It was too far off for them to hear anything of it, and they weren’t even seeing all of the flashes over the horizon. But it was enough to know that someone was still carrying on the fight, now that the reccers were out of it.

  “When you gonna call the colonel, Dem?” Fredo asked. “By now, they must figure none of us made it.”

  Dem didn’t answer right away. He was always reluctant to use the radio when he was exposed, but this time he had to admit that there was more to it than that. He didn’t want to confirm the bad news.

  “Soon,” he said. “Soon.”

  “We don’t let ‘em know there’s still a few of us kickin’, they might take off just about anywhere and really leave us stranded,” Fredo pressed. Earlier, while Dem had been sleeping, Fredo had been sorely tempted to make the call himself. Only his strong sense of discipline had stopped him. He still wasn’t certain that he had made the right choice.

  There is that, Dem admitted to himself. He sucked in a deep breath, held it, then let it out slowly. “Okay, I’ll call the CP now.”

  The exec, Dezo Parks, took the call. “We’d just about written all of you off.”

  “Close enough, sir,” Dem replied. “Only ten of us left, and we’re too far away from the Heggies to do any more good.”

  “Just get back to us the best you can, Nimz,” Parks said. “Avoid all contact with the enemy. That should be easy for a bunch of reccers.”

  “We’ll try,” Dem said. “Where do we head?”

  “It’s going to be a long chase for you.” Parks laid out the current plans for the 13th. “Figure out what you can do and decide on your own rendezvous.”

  “Like to take us a few days, sir,” Dem said after a quick look at his mapboard. “Sure wish there was one of those Heyers still around.”

  “We’d heard from you even six hours ago, we might have been able to fix that. But it’s too late now.”

  Fredo had been listening in on the call, but he knew better than to say “I told you so” to Dem Nimz. “I think we’d best take the rest of the night to get some sleep,” he said instead. “Start off fresh in the morning. We’ll make better time that way.”

  * * *

  Eleven hours in one location. That gave the men of the 13th plenty of time to catch up on at least some of the sleep they were behind, and it gave the research team from the lab inside Telchuk Mountain time to recover from their first day’s hike, but it was a dangerous respite. In that much time, they were certain to have been spotted by the Schlinal spyeyes. A concentration of eighteen hundred men was almost impossible to hide if the enemy were looking hard enough.

  “It’s a chance we have to take,” Colonel Stossen told his staff when they met two hours before dawn. “We’re here until the APCs arrive and we can all ride.”

  “Those drivers are going to be too beat to do anything,” Dezo pointed out. “Most of them have been on the go constantly for thirty-six hours or more. They can’t keep going.”

  “Then we’ll have to improvise,” Stossen said. “There are more than enough others who know how to pilot a Heyer. The regular drivers will have to get their rest however they can, even if the medics have to sleep patch the lot of them.”

  “They will,” Teu said. “If you expect anyone to get any real sleep in a Heyer on the move, it will take sleep patches.”

  Stossen nodded. “I wasn’t making a joke. Pass the word to the companies. We’ll get those drivers at least four hours of sleep whether they want it or not.”

  “We’ve had one break,” Bal said. “Those drivers did their job. The Heggies never got a chance to see that the APCs were a diversion until it was too late.”

  “By now, they must have found out their mistake,” Parks said, “but it doesn’t matter any longer. We got in and out of that valley with the . . . cargo we were sent for.”

  “At a price,” Stossen said. “Twenty percent of our air wing, nearly a quarter of our artillery, almost half our reccers. Plus the Heyers and drivers we lost. I don’t even have any idea how many of them were tagged. And we’re not out of this yet. We’re not half into it if we’re going to have any shot of getting back to friendly lines.”

  “There’s one more decision we have to face before long,” Teu said. “What do we do with the Wasps we still have? Do we keep them with us or send them back? We’re going to have to choose before we get much farther from our people.”

  “What do you mean?” Kenneck asked.

  “Right now, we can stick new batteries in the Wasps and they’ll have the juice to get all the way back. Depending on what kind of speed we make heading east, they’ll be out of range of our lines either late today or early tomorrow. If we keep them with us, they’ll be stuck with us until we get close enough to our lines again for them to fly back. If we do.”

  “And if we turn them loose,” Parks said, “once we get past that line we won’t be able to get them back.”

  “How are we on support for them?” Stossen asked.

  “Fine,” Ingels said. “We brought along enough to keep half the wing flying, and we’ve never had two full flights out here. We have good stores of munitions, and there’s no problem with batteries or anything else. We have enough ground crews to give each Wasp its own and still have a couple of spares.”

  “The problem with keeping the planes with us is that we have to be able to stop to put new batteries in them every seventy-five or eighty minutes,” Kenneck said.

  “Not really a problem, unless we’re under attack at the time,” Ingels replied. “And if we are under attack, we want the support over us. The problem is that if a Wasp is actually running dry and we can’t provide cover for it to land. That’s always a possibility, here or anywhere else.”

  “We’ll keep them with us if we can,” Stossen said. “At least, we’ll plan on it. Five Wasps could make a big difference. Dezo, bring it up again when we get close to the limit for sending them back.”

  * * *

  Olly Wytten stared at the meal pack in front of him. He ate slowly, chewing each mouthful as if the food were resisting being eaten. The rest of the squad was nearby, each man in his own foxhole, relatively close. The 13th was occupying a fairly small area. There was no need to stretch out the lines. Most of the men were eating. A couple of them were on their second breakfast. Food wasn’t in short supply. Even the most conservative estimates indicated that they had a solid fifteen days of full rations left. Fifteen days. Few of the men in the 13th could think that far ahead on any campaign.

  “Damn it! We’re not doing any good out here.”

  Those who were close enough to hear Olly’s vehement exclamation turned to look. It was the longest speech anyone in the squad had ever heard him make. And no one could recall ever hearing him sound so intense about anything. They waited to see if more would follow.

  Wytten looked around, as if he had just realized that he had spoken aloud. But the
re was no embarrassment on his face. “We’re wasted out here. Back in the lines, we’d at least be killing a few Heggies.”

  “We’re not wasted,” Mort said. Though the two were in different fire teams, their foxholes were next to each other.

  “How do you see that?” Olly demanded.

  “I can’t give you hard proof, but we might be doing far more good sitting out here than if we were back there killing off Heggies by the regiment. Those people we picked up. Whatever they were doing is so important to the Accord that the general figured that it was worth the entire 13th to save them, or even just to keep the Heggies from getting them. Whatever they were doing in that mountain, it was big. It had to be.”

  “But what?” Olly asked.

  Mort shrugged. “My fields are history and political science, not military technology. I can’t even guess beyond suggesting that it might be a new weapons system, something so radically beyond anything either side has now as to spell victory or defeat for the side that manages to get it through development into production. And even that might be wrong. It could be communications, or even an improvement to jump space technology.” He hesitated before he added, “Or something I haven’t even got the background to imagine.”

  Olly looked down at his meal pack. “Maybe it’s a food replicator light enough for a mudder to carry along. Drop in a shovel of dirt and get lunch.”

  Mort stared at Wytten, amazed that he had put so many words together. Then he shook his head. “That’s as good a guess as anything I could come up with.”