Side Show (6 page)

"Get us moving," Eustace ordered before he had even climbed into his seat on the right side of the turret. Simon slipped the treads into gear, and Eustace held on for a moment, looking around before sliding into his place. Another shell burst, off near where Basset four had been until ten seconds before. Four had already moved far enough to escape damage from the blast.

"Which way?" Simon asked.

"Straight ahead for now." Eustace clipped his safety harness in place. "Then we'll worry about putting distance between us and the others. Just move this bucket."

They heard several more explosions, close together, back where the battery had been parked.

At least their intelligence is a
little
behind the time,
Eustace thought. He swallowed heavily and got on the radio, looking for orders and information. Where to go and what to shoot.

—|—

"Where are they?" Colonel Stossen demanded.

Bal Kenneck was busy on his radio links, looking for the answer. They were under the tarp of the colonel's makeshift command post again. Around them, the rain was starting to get a little heavier, but it was no cloudburst. Reports from the companies farther west, near the point, said that it was getting very heavy there.

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 sunk 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."

CHAPTER FIVE

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 than 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."