by Rick Shelley
Kwillen's escape pod slammed into the rock wall of the canal's south bank at more than four hundred kilometers per hour.
—|—
There were two roads leading from the hangars and landing strip to the main Heggie base at the north end of the peninsula. Although they had not been paved, the routes did show that tracked vehicles had moved along them. In a couple of places, irregularities in the ground had been leveled out.
Echo Company was given the road at the south end of the hangars. Howard Company had the other road. Fox and George were in the middle, spread out in a loose skirmish line to make certain that no Heggies were missed, left to take them from behind. On the north, Howard could keep a watch on its flank all of the way to the water. Echo could not be nearly as certain of its exposed flank. The rough terrain ran all the way south to the canal. Entire battalions of Heggies might be hidden there.
"Nothing we can do about it," Izzy Walker told Joe Baerclau. "Keep an eye on what you can see. We've got to get to the base as quickly as we can. We know there are Heggies there, and our reccers need help fast."
One Boem had tried to land at the airfield before the 13th left the hangars. It had been hit by three Vrerchs when it was no more than twenty meters off of the ground. There had been no need to look for the pilot.
Joe's platoon was moving forward in a column on the left side of the road. First platoon was forty meters ahead of them. Fourth platoon was level with second, on the other side of the road. Third platoon was in front of them. The rest of the company, fifth and sixth platoons, came farther back.
Echo was under half strength now. Joe had already reorganized again: two squads instead of four, or the three that the platoon had been functioning with since the end of the first battle on Tamkailo. Sauv Degtree still had first squad. Low Gerrent had second, the squad he had led for more than a year. The survivors of fourth squad had been divided up between them.
"Let the guys up ahead worry about what's in front of us," Joe told his men. "I'm more worried about our left flank. The rest of our people are nearly twenty kilometers away." Then he switched channels to speak privately with Mort, who had the point for the platoon, as usual. "You worry about what's in front of you, Professor. Don't take it for granted that first platoon will spot any mines or booby traps. You heard about those bouncers that the reccers couldn't spot in daylight on bare rock."
"I heard. I'm watching," Mort replied.
Despite his own advice, Joe couldn't completely ignore what was in front of Echo—far in front. The signs of fighting at the main Heggie base were all too evident. Wire at a distance produced a sound almost like that of a mosquito whizzing close by. But there were the explosions of grenades to punctuate that, easily audible over the couple of kilometers of open ground that separated Echo from the fighting. And the buildings of the main base were on higher ground.
Despite the need for haste, the pace of the 13th's advance was relatively slow. The companies on the roads might easily have moved faster, but they held back even with the companies moving cross-country in the center. And, occasionally, the line encountered a pocket of Heggie riflemen.
Although the temperature was still above 34 degrees Celsius, it felt... almost cool. Every now and then Joe lifted his visor for a moment to get a touch of the breeze coming from the northwest. That dried sweat quickly. The slow pace of the advance helped as well. Carrying full combat kit was hard work regardless of the temperature.
The four companies had only covered two-thirds of a kilometer before they ran into more determined opposition. There was a flurry of gunfire from wire rifles and slug-throwing machine guns, and the blasts of several grenades.
"Hit the dirt!" Joe shouted over his platoon channel—a needless order since most of the men had already dropped.
"Roadblock," Captain Keye announced over the noncoms' channel. Then he switched channels. "Joe, take your platoon around to the left. The Heggies are two hundred meters in front of you—two machine guns, maybe a dozen zippers. Fourth platoon will be moving up on the right so be careful where your people are shooting."
"On the way," Joe replied. He used his platoon channel to pass along the orders. "Sauv, Low, we'll do an el. Take a forty-five-degree heading from the road. We'll go out a hundred and twenty meters, then make the right angle. Column on the first leg. Skirmish line when we make the turn."
Second platoon started forward, running low, the men crouched over to minimize their exposure. They might be too far from the enemy for wire to do much damage, but the bullets fired by Schlinal crew-served automatic weapons could take a man out at a lot more than two hundred meters.
Joe maintained his position between the squads. Mort was still on point. Sauv Degtree had needed no lessons on the Professor's value at the front. Once away from the road, the platoon was able to take some advantage of terrain. For most of the first leg of their flanking maneuver, they were able to keep a low ridge between them and the enemy roadblock.
There was no thought of heat or cooling breeze now. Joe's mind was entirely on the problem of getting around into position on the enemy's flank, and keeping his men as safe as possible in the process.
"Don't assume that the one batch is all of the Heggies waiting," he reminded Mort on a private link. "They have to know that we'll try to flank them."
"You think you can handle this better than I can, you're welcome to it," Mort replied—an uncharacteristically testy response.
Mort took five minutes to cover the first leg, moving enough beyond the 120-meter mark to center 2nd platoon on that distance. Joe took a second to confirm the bearing on the enemy guns before he signaled for the platoon to start heading directly for it. Then he called 4th's platoon sergeant.
"We gonna hit 'em together?" Joe asked.
"Sounds good to me," Dieter Franzo replied. Franzo had been a squad leader when the 13th first dropped on Tamkailo, and not even the senior squad leader in his platoon. He had become 4th platoon's third platoon sergeant in three days. "Just say when. We're about one hundred twenty meters out from them now, and maybe fifty meters north of the road."
"We're a little closer to them and farther from the road," Joe said. "They haven't spotted us. At least, they haven't started shooting at us. Hang on a second." He changed channels long enough to get his men down. Just over a hundred meters from the enemy, they were close enough to be vulnerable even to wire if the enemy spotted them.
"Let me know when you get within a hundred meters," Joe said when he returned to the link with Dieter. "We'll go in together then. I'll let the captain know what we're up to."
"I heard it, Joe," Captain Keye said, demonstrating that he had been monitoring the channel. "As soon as you two start firing, we'll move forward on the road as well, hit them with everything we've got."
"Everything" included three Vrerchs targeted against the two Schlinal machine guns as well as a dozen RPGs, and rifle fire from the half of Echo Company that could bring their weapons to bear.
The firefight ended quickly. Echo started moving forward again.
"Joe, you stay out there on the flank," Captain Keye said. But he had to bring 4th platoon back to the road. They were in front of the rest of the skirmish line.
—|—
The 5th and 8th SATs moved across the bridges. Despite all of the supporting fire on the ground and in the air, the toll was still expensive. The Heggies defending the canal line fought as if they were long-term professionals rather than conscripts. The Accord's dead were left where they fell on the bridges. Bodies could be recovered later, when—if—it was safe. Medics worked on the wounded. Other men worked to carry those wounded back to the south side of the canal, to the relative safety of the fixed positions there.
But the two SATs did make it to the north end of the bridges. Hundreds of men rushed into the narrow bridgeheads and fought to expand them. The Schlinal force continued to resist. More Novas came close enough to bring their main guns to bear on the bridgeheads. From the south, Havocs contin
ued to duel with the Schlinal armor.
Both bridges took hits from the Novas, but the bridges had been built too well to collapse without massive damage. Holes were blown in the decks. Sections of the low ramparts along the sides were knocked into the canal. Truss sections were bent and warped. More men were killed making the crossing.
"Start moving the 34th and 97th across," Dacik ordered as soon as all of the SAT infantry companies had made it to the north side. "We've got to free up the SATs to move north. Start moving the Havocs into position in case we need to move them across the canal." Theoretically, the Havocs could cover the entire peninsula from positions near the south bank of the canal, but in combat, their accuracy did increase as ranges decreased.
—|—
The recon platoons on the rooftops noticed when the enemy fire directed their way fell off to almost nothing. Those few reccers who were left alive on the roofs. After more than thirty minutes of heavy fire the enemy had, apparently, decided to abandon them, at least for the moment.
"I think they're moving away," Nimz reported. "They've just left enough marksmen to keep us pinned down."
Dezo Parks took the report. "Probably moving to intercept the line companies," he told Dem. "We've got men advancing from both directions. The companies coming from the airfield should be within about five hundred meters of your position by now. If you get a chance, give them a hand, but don't take extreme chances. We'll get to you soon enough."
"We're in pretty good shape for now," Dem replied. "As long as the heat stays off. But if the Heggies want us bad enough, they could take us in two minutes. I don't have many men left here, and the other platoons are at least as bad off as we are."
Parks started to say something else, but a quick gesture from Bal Kenneck stopped him. "Hold on a second," Parks told Nimz. Then he lifted his visor.
"I just had a call from Olsen," Kenneck said. "CIC has detected a new fleet coming in-system full blast. They're not ours."
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The physics of interstellar travel are complex. A full development of the Loughlin-Runninghorse equations—the theoretical breakthrough that had made possible both antigravity (or projected artificial gravity fields) and hyperspace drives—can take days to run even on a network of the fastest molecular supercomputers in the galaxy. As Einstein developed upon Newton, with relativity becoming important only under extreme conditions, the Loughlin-Runninghorse expansion becomes necessary only where the equations of relativity and quantum mechanics start yielding infinities. The earlier systems remain valid, of course, within their proper domains.
It is not, however, essential to understand the mathematics of hyperspace to notice some of its practical results. Of military importance is the fact that a ship, or a fleet of ships, entering or exiting hyperspace, must do so at a certain minimal speed and at a certain minimum distance from any large concentration of matter... such as a star or a planet. Below the minimum speed (which also depends on the mass of the ship), there is simply no transition from space to hyperspace. The distortions inflicted by extraneous collections of matter can lead to more chaotic results—in both the scientific and mundane meanings of the phrase. The precise safety margin remains uncertain. In the course of the Accord-Schlinal War, that margin had been shrunk, in practice. Where once a ship would not have dared emerge from hyperspace within less than eight hours' normal space travel time from a planetary mass, four hours was now considered standard.
A daring skipper might shrink that to three-and-a-half hours.
—|—
Admiral Benjamin H. Kitchener had been sleeping when the Schlinal fleet emerged from hyperspace. "Suddenly emerged" would have been a melodramatic redundancy. The transition between normal space and hyperspace was always abrupt, in either direction. An object was either in normal space or it was in hyperspace. There was no gradual appearance as it moved from one to the other, no "ghostly" transformation. To the limits of measurability, the transition was instantaneous as the drives realigned from one medium to the other.
The admiral had been sleeping after more than sixty hours of being awake with no more than a handful of ten-minute naps. If the campaign had gone according to schedule, the troops would already have been back aboard the ships of the fleet and the fleet would have been on its way out of the system already. If.
A call from the bridge woke Kitchener. He had, at least, been sleeping in his clothes. He had done no more than peel off his shoes before collapsing across his bunk, only forty-five minutes earlier. His feet had been aching from all of the standing he had been doing. He didn't bother to put his shoes back on before hurrying to the bridge.
"Talk to me," Kitchener commanded as he entered the bridge.
Capricorn's captain, Marley Quince, pointed at the largest monitor in the chamber. "Twelve vessels, all large," he said. "Coming on fast. They'll reach us in three hours and forty-one minutes and be in position to launch shuttles within minutes after that."
"If they're carrying troops," Kitchener said. "They might just be transport for the troops already there, ready to take them on for whatever the Heggies staged them here for."
"No, sir," Quince said. "Neither empty troop ships nor commercial freighters would have come out of hyperspace that close, that fast."
The admiral nodded his agreement. "Well, in any case, they couldn't have received word of our attack until they came out. That means they've had no more than a couple of minutes to start making their plans." He moved to a compsole and started keying in demands for data. "A scheduled arrival," he added.
"They'll still have their complement of space fighters and heavy weapons," Quince pointed out. "They're a threat to us."
Kitchener called CIC. "Give me a plot to intercept the incoming vessels as far out as possible. The object is to slow down any reinforcement for the Schlinal forces on planet without taking unnecessary chances with our ships."
He turned to face Quince again. "Has Dacik been notified?"
"I called him immediately after I paged you, Admiral, but I didn't have many details for him."
Kitchener studied the screen of data on the monitor in front of him. "All capital ships. We could be talking about four regiments."
Quince whistled softly. He had been following the news from the surface closely enough to know what that would do to the Accord's land forces.
"I think I'd better talk to Dacik myself," Kitchener said. "I'll do it from my cabin." He glanced down at his feet. "I seem to find myself out of uniform."
—|—
Kleffer Dacik turned away from his staff and walked a dozen paces. The general had felt blood draining from his face at the first sentence out of Captain Quince's mouth. Kitchener's confirmation and the extra details didn't make Dacik feel any better. He listened without comment to the admiral's recital. It didn't take long. Afterward, Dacik remained silent for nearly thirty seconds before he responded.
"I hope you can handle the majority of them before they get to us, Ben. Three or four regiments hit the ground, we're in big trouble. I mean big!" That, he thought, is understatement, not hyperbole.
"We'll do what we can, Kleff, but you know what it's like," Kitchener said. "We're unlikely to do major damage to the enemy fleet. They're unlikely to do major damage to us." The thorn and the rose. Battle in space was difficult and, at least in Accord experience, rarely decisive.
Kitchener paused for so long that Dacik felt compelled to stick an "I know" into the silence.
"There is one option I think you should consider, Kleff," the admiral said then. "We've got three-and-a-half hours before the Schlinal fleet reaches us. Three-and-a-half safe hours. Can you evacuate before then?"
Dacik closed his eyes, squeezed them shut. Evacuate. Withdraw. Retreat. He took a deep breath and let it out. He could make a case for it. They had already destroyed considerable enemy war materiel, inflicted thousands of casualties, taken nearly two thousand prisoners. They had already done enough damage to cripple whatever plans the S
chlinal warlords might have had for the people and supplies they had been caching on Tamkailo.
"We'd have to get the last of our people off of the ground in, what, two-and-a-half hours?" he asked.
"About that," Kitchener said. "Takes about fifty minutes to get a shuttle up and docked, especially with traffic. If the last of your people are off the ground in two-and-a-half hours, that will give us perhaps twenty minutes to start boosting out to a jump point before the Heggie fleet can get to us. With that kind of a lead, we'll be home free."
Tempting, Dacik thought. But... "I don't think it's possible. Two hours ago, yes; maybe even ninety minutes ago. But I've got men inside the Heggie base, trapped. And the rest of the 13th is right around the base at the north end of this peninsula, too close to the enemy to get shuttles in and out safely, and there's not much chance of either ending opposition on the ground or withdrawing in two-and-a-half hours. Especially the reccers pinned down inside the enemy base."
"I still think you should consider evacuating what you can, Kleff," Kitchener said. "You have to balance the loss of a few men against the possible loss of your entire command. And my fleet."
Behind Dacik, the members of his staff stood and stared. They couldn't hear either side of the conversation. From its length, though, they could easily deduce that it wasn't good news. The general had mentioned the enemy fleet as soon as Captain Quince passed along the first report.
"No," Dacik said after more than a minute. "We don't withdraw."
"Kleff—" Kitchener started, but Dacik cut him off.
"It's not just that I don't want to abandon men to the Heggies, though that is part of it. The Heggies don't take prisoners. They kill anyone they capture, as far as we've ever seen. No POWs have ever come home in this war. But, still, that's only part of my reasoning." This time, he paused only very briefly. The admiral waited him out.
