Jump Pay

by Rick Shelley

  "So we improvise," Stossen said as the computer representations of landing craft started to descend into the atmosphere of the planet. "That's why we've been over all of this so many times, so we'll recognize where the trouble is and have a leg up on meeting whatever happens."

  Whatever happens. Stossen closed his eyes for a moment. He held few illusions. It wouldn't be pretty. Twice in the past eighteen months he had led his men back from the brink of total destruction. He couldn't help thinking that it was too much to hope for to be able to do it a third time.

  —|—

  The dawn line was approaching the eastern shore of Tamkailo's southern continent when the invasion fleet disgorged the first landers and the Wasp fighters of the three SATs. The separate Wasp wing (the 17th Independent Air Wing) was held back for the moment. The SAT Wasps would have a vulnerable period. They might have to ground before their support vans could land to provide them with fresh batteries and replenish their munitions. During that critical phase, the rest of the Wasps would have to provide all of the air cover, over two continents.

  On the far side of Tamkailo, the simultaneous landings on the other continent would take place as night was falling. Roughly a third of the invasion force would fight for a foothold there while the rest attempted to quickly overpower the defenses of the main Schlinal base on the southern continent.

  Navy chaplains stood by in the passageways leading to the shuttle hangars. There had been services just minutes before, during breakfast, but there were always last-minute words of comfort to give. Once inside the landers, the men had only their own thoughts, and few found comfort there.

  The shuttles carrying the 13th's infantry companies were the first to leave the transports. The 13th's mudders would be first down. Their immediate job would be to secure landing zones for the rest of the initial drop team at Site Alpha—the 8th SAT, the 97th Light Infantry Regiment, the 17th Independent Air Wing, the Wasp support vans, and the Havoc artillery and their support units. The 5th SAT and the 34th LIR would be attacking on the other side of the world.

  "Remember who you're supposed to key on," Joe Baerclau said over his platoon channel. Once in the shuttles, the men had all pulled down the visors of their combat helmets. The helmets' radio links were more dependable than any other sort of communication, even with the squads all bunched together on the lander's benches.

  It wasn't just because of the crowded conditions that no one moved much. Weighted down with forty kilograms of gear, no one wanted to move. Any movement took energy while the shuttles were attached to the transport—still within its artificial gravity field. Once the shuttles separated and the men were treated to near-zero gravity, they still wouldn't move around much. Each man had private thoughts to think.

  Joe took several deep breaths and closed his eyes as the lander moved away from the ship. The seat belt pulled at his middle as the shuttle accelerated toward Tamkailo and the drop zone. Joe could feel his nerves tightening up. His stomach cramped. He had to struggle to keep from clenching his teeth. Nerves, not fear: it never got easy. His arms rested on his knees; he clutched his Armanoc wire carbine—too tightly—in both hands.

  Just like a drill, he told himself. Sometimes that worked. This wasn't one of those times. Joe and his men had made three practice drops using the new antigrav belts. They had attended classes and watched demonstrations first. Proper use of the controls had been drilled into everyone as fully as everything else was. The belts were just another piece of equipment. Joe was still nervous about them. As was Mort and, probably, every other man about to drop into combat on nothing but a web belt, leg straps, shoulder straps, two small AG motors, and two equally small batteries. If the motors, batteries, or gyroscopic stabilizers failed... No one had been killed on any of the practice jumps, but there had been plenty of minor injuries, ankles or knees strained or sprained, a couple of broken bones.

  And there had been no enemy fire to complicate the practice jumps.

  Joe opened his eyes and looked around. Most of the men were looking at the deck between their feet. Joe wasn't monitoring any of the squad channels, but he could imagine squad leaders talking to their men. He had given enough of those talks himself in the past. Pep talks.

  Platoon sergeants weren't supposed to need pep talks, but Joe wouldn't have minded one at the moment, anything to keep him from thinking about what the next minutes and hours might bring. He had seen more than his share of combat, he thought. So far, he had been lucky. He had never been seriously injured—nothing that couldn't be repaired quickly, in the field, without a long stint in a trauma tube.

  But he had seen too many comrades killed.

  "Five minutes until drop," Joe announced over his platoon channel, relaying the information that First Sergeant Izzy Walker had just given him. "Check the gauges on your drop belts." Joe looked around, mostly to the squad leaders, making certain that they were checking themselves as well as their men. Then he checked his own gear.

  "Three minutes. Check weapons." For most of the platoon, that meant an Armanoc wire carbine that fired small lengths of collapsed uranium wire from a twenty-meter spool. A spool of wire was good for twenty seconds of continuous fire—a meter per second in centimeter-long snips. The rifle's power pack would last for two hours of use. Against body armor, the zipper was reliably lethal only at ranges up to about 80 meters, sufficient for most combat requirements. At ranges greater than that, up to about 150 meters, wire could only be effective if it hit the places where soldiers weren't armored, or where the net armor had become weakened by use. Beyond 150 meters, the Armanoc was no more useful than an office stapler. One man each in second and fourth squads had sniper rifles, Dupuy rocket-assisted slug throwers. The Dupuy was known as the cough gun from the sound it made. The RA rifle had a flat trajectory and an accurate range of seven kilometers—for what little use that was in any practical circumstances.

  Joe glanced around the troop bay again. In every previous combat landing, the shuttles had grounded. This time they wouldn't. The assault plan called for the landers to go no lower than three hundred meters. At that height, the four doors would be opened and the men would jump. The 13th's infantry was jumping in on antigrav belts. The rest of the invasion force would ride their shuttles all of the way in.

  "On your feet!" the jumpmaster called. "Stand in the doors."

  Each squad knew which door it would jump from. Joe moved with first squad. He would be the first man out the rear left exit of the shuttle.

  "Forty-five seconds," the jumpmaster warned. The shuttle was braking rapidly. The men braced against one another and hung on to rails placed head-high along the aisles.

  "Thirty seconds." To men carrying forty kilos of gear the extra gee-load of braking was almost intolerable. Joe's legs felt as if they had suddenly swollen to the size of elephant legs, and as if the muscles had turned to slack rubber bands. He blinked as his vision started to dim.

  Then the load was gone. The shuttle eased off and the gee-load dropped to no more than 1.5. Joe took a deep breath.

  "Ten seconds... nine..."

  Joe's attention shifted to the hatch in front of him, the droning countdown fading from his hearing. For those few seconds, Joe forgot all about the other men in the shuttle with him. He felt encapsulated in a pocket universe that consisted only of himself and that gray door no more than twenty centimeters in front of his eyes.

  As the hatch sprang open and the wind passing by created a partial vacuum, Joe leapt outward before the jumpmaster's final word—"Jump!"—was fully spoken. The wind caught Joe and pulled him away from the shuttle and the other men hurtling through the hatch.

  Tamkailo lay below.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Captain Zel Paitcher was more than a little nervous about this combat mission as commander of the 13th's Blue Flight. It was his third campaign, but he was going in with nothing but rookies behind him, seven pilots who had never seen combat, none with more than thirteen months in uniform or two hundred hours in the c
ockpit of a Wasp. The other three pilots of Blue Flight who had survived the liberation of Jordan had all been transferred to serve as part of the cadre for a new fighter wing—still in training.

  Gerry Easton was Zel's wingman, Blue two. Ewell "Pitcher" Marmon and Tod Corbel were Blue three and four. Frank Verannen and "Halfmoon" Sawyer were five and six. The flight's final pairing consisted of Ilsen Kwillen and Will Tarkel—Kwill and Will to the rest of the squadron. Tarkel was the nephew of the 13th's air wing commander, Goz Tarkel. The Goose made no demands, showed no undue preference for his brother's son. Will had to get by on his own talents. There was no real alternative for a fighter pilot. The enemy would give no latitude to nepotism.

  "Just keep your heads," Zel said over the flight's radio channel. "Keep the formation tight and don't panic." Command had made Zel feel at least a decade older than his twenty-one years. Combat had ended his youth. Command had seemingly propelled him to a premature middle age. The promotion to captain that had followed the Jordan campaign (and the death of Slee Reston, his best friend and the former commander of Blue Flight) had been a hollow achievement. Zel would have turned it down if he could have. He couldn't look at the silver insignia without remembering Slee and the way his Wasp had exploded.

  Blue Flight was in a power dive, accelerating toward the ground. They had been launched from their transports 180 kilometers up. But they were in air now. The Schlinal satellite network had been knocked out minutes before in a coordinated attack around Tamkailo. The inevitable confusion to the enemy's command, control, and intelligence gave the invaders a slight edge during the early minutes—or even hours—of an attack.

  Zel's eyes flicked across his heads-up display and the two monitors below it. There were no enemy fighters in the air yet, and the Wasp's target acquisition systems had detected no enemy radar. That meant that there were no major defensive systems tracking the fighters. Yet. The Wasps were virtually invisible to any radar. And in the dark they were invisible to almost anything that might be looking at them, even highly trained human eyes.

  The Wasps were too high for them to see pilots racing toward their Boem fighters on the ground. The sudden loss of communications with all of their orbiting satellites would demand a Schlinal fighter scramble, if only until some non-malignant reason could be found for the sudden silence. Arsenal. The Schlinal warlords knew that they had to defend the stockpiles of munitions and the regiments of troops being marshaled there. Even though it was—relatively—far from any Accord or Dogel system.

  The airfield was Blue Flight's initial target. The 13th's other two flights, and the 8th's air wing, had other tactical targets in and around the initial drop zone. The more enemy fighters Blue Flight could destroy on the ground, the fewer they would have to worry about in the air.

  The Wasps were diving at 3.5 gees, their antigrav engines adding to rather than subtracting from Tamkailo's own gravity. The flight suits of the pilots had inflated to offset the effects of the gee-load, restricting movement. But the Wasp had been designed to need only slight movements by its pilot. A high gee dive, or climb, was unlikely to greatly inconvenience a pilot—as long as he kept his head. The planes could achieve greater acceleration than a human body could take.

  "Start marking your targets," Zel said, flipping on his own TA systems.

  They should have infantrymen guarding the airfield, Zel thought. Maybe other antiaircraft defenses. Infantrymen would have shoulder-operated missiles available. Those could be as deadly to a Wasp—or a shuttle—as a Boem's rockets. And there would likely be no warning of a TA system locking on first. Infantry rocket launchers depended on the eyesight of the man firing them for initial target acquisition. Then the rocket's television guidance system would take over, once it had been "shown" the target.

  This should be the easiest run of the campaign, Zel reminded himself as his TA system locked on to its first two targets. The audible double click came just as the red lights on the heads-up display went from blinking to solid. Later, there would never be this level of surprise. The enemy would know that the Accord was on the planet. They would be waiting.

  He launched his first two rockets, and the TA system immediately locked on to two more Boems. Near the bottom of his dive, Zel could finally see men running around below, heading for their planes, or for cover. He launched the second pair of rockets and reversed the thrust on his antigrav drives, pulling up, the Wasp straining his ability to handle the gee-load.

  "Start listening to your own warnings," he muttered through clenched teeth as he came close to graying out.

  "Watch your damn controls."

  He tilted the Wasp on its side and accelerated "up," parallel to the ground. Gerry Easton struggled to keep station on his wing. Blue Two had only launched one pair of missiles. He was still new to this business.

  "You're doing fine, Gerry," Zel said over a private link. "Take a deep breath and let it out slowly."

  There was a startled "Huh?" over the radio, and then the sounds of that deep breath. "What are you, psychic?" Easton asked after he had exhaled.

  "I remember my own first time," Zel said. While he talked, he kept his eyes moving, watching his displays and what he could see on the ground. The routine was easy now, but the first time Zel had tried so hard to keep track of everything going on around him that there was no time to do anything.

  On their first pass, Blue Flight had accounted for a dozen enemy fighters. It was a good tally, but Zel could see at least twice that number of undamaged fighters on the ground. And pilots had reached most of those.

  Zel switched to the channel that linked him to his entire flight. "One more quick pass before they get those buzzards in the air," he said as he flipped his own Wasp around. "Then it's cat-and-mouse time."

  Once a pilot got into his Boem, he would need only twenty seconds to strap in and another ten seconds to get his fighter in the air. They would bypass preflight checklists. It would be systems on and lift off, without waiting for the engines to warm up. In theory, computerized control systems should spot any problem in less than a second after the switches were thrown, far more rapidly than any human pilot could start to lift the plane off of the ground. The automatics would override the pilot, cutting power.

  Zel saw no indication that any of these Boems were being switched back off. But then, he didn't have time to waste on fantasy. The Boems might still outnumber his Wasps three to one if this last ground attack didn't seriously cut into their numbers. Once the Boems were active, even before they got off of the ground, they were no longer totally defenseless. Most of the Schlinal pilots immediately activated electronic countermeasures.

  The airfield was still a dangerous place for the Boems. The incoming missiles were fired from too near to go wandering off into the sky because ECM measures confused their targeting computers. All of the rockets hit something—planes, buildings, or the ground. Antigrav fighters neither needed nor used a runway. The only level surface they needed was enough for their landing skids to sit on, and they had a lot of tolerance. Craters in the airfield weren't even a nuisance. Nor were wrecked planes or other debris.

  "Here they come," Zel warned as he saw the first Boem grow a shadow as it lifted off. That fighter spun on its vertical axis, ready to directly challenge the invaders.

  Zel was more than happy to take the challenge. He was too close to risk a missile so he switched to his forward cannons, a gatling gun arrangement of five 25-mm barrels, each capable of spewing sixty hypersonic slugs per second, fragmentation or—a new addition—armor-piercing rounds for air-to-air combat. The older fragmentation projectiles each separated into five heavy metal slivers in flight. Though those rounds were murderous against ground troops, they had proved less than lethal in a dogfight, and combat in the air still did get very close sometimes. For this flight, both the forward and rear cannons were loaded with a 60-40 mix, AP to frag. The range was less than 120 meters when Zel hit the trigger. A four-second burst exploded the Boem. Shrapnel dinged off of Zel's W
asp as he flew through the blast.

  That was the last easy kill of the fight. The surviving Boems were all in the air, their pilots ready to fight back.

  Blue five was hit by two missiles. The rockets exploded simultaneously, engulfing the Wasp in a dirty fireball. Remarkably, Verannen's escape pod shot clear of the maelstrom. There was no response from Frank to Zel's call, but the pod's parachute deployed and it settled toward the ground, drifting clear of the air battle and the Schlinal airfield below it.

  Zel reported the loss and the possibility that the pilot might have survived. If there was a chance, a rescue mission would be attempted as soon as there were Accord forces on the ground who could do the job.

  The air fight went on.

  —|—

  It was not at all like a parachute jump. A chute provided both visible comfort and cause for concern. When you saw the sheet open above you, you knew that there was something up there slowing your descent, making it possible to drop several hundred meters and survive. But, in combat, it also provided an immense target for enemy gunners, an arrival announcement that could be seen for kilometers around.

  Antigrav belts provided no additional target, but there was no sense of reassurance either. To the eye, you were simply falling, with nothing to prevent you from ending up crushed on the surface. The silence added to the eeriness. There was little sense of anything but the whisper of air. Despite the training, the assurances of experts, and practice jumps, Joe could not escape the sensation of falling out of control.

  Joe looked around at the hundreds of men "falling" with him. The Corey belts had gyroscopic stabilizers, so the men were all falling feet first toward the ground. The formation wasn't nearly as precise as that of a drill team on the parade ground, but the men weren't nearly as scattered as they might have been. No one was plummeting out of control. That meant that there were no defective units—and that no one had panicked so much that they couldn't control their descent.