Side Show (7 page)

"Three dead." He listed the names. Two were from fourth squad, the other from his own, third. Keye closed his eyes while he listened to the roster. "Six wounded, only one bad enough to need time in a trauma tube. Doc Eddies is taking care of him now." Again, Degtree listed the names. Again, Keye closed his eyes.

"Where's the Bear?" Keye asked.

Degtree pointed. "They've already taken him back. He's probably sitting in the Heyer by now."

"His shoulder?"

"Bergon said it wasn't near as bad as it might have been. Bone chips but no fracture. Fair amount of bleeding. Doc may have to dig out the chips if a soaker doesn't work them out." That depended, mostly, on how large the fragments were. If they were too big, the medical nanobots wouldn't be able to transport the fragments to the surface quickly enough and minor surgery would be required.

"The reccers will guard the prisoners until we move out," Keye said, relaying word he was just getting from Major Parks. "Let's get everybody back. Time to hit the trail again."

—|—

Al Bergon had tried to get Joe Baerclau to lie still and let himself be carried to the APC, but the Bear had refused. Once there was a soaker on his wounded shoulder and the analgesic had started to work, he insisted on walking.

"Save the litter for someone who needs it," he said.

"You've lost blood, Sarge," Al protested. "There's always shock with this kind of wound. Give the soaker time to do its job."

"I'm not crippled. I've been hurt worse than this before. And don't go trying to hit me with a knockout patch either. That's an order."

Al bit back a reply. The order was not valid. As medic, he could slap the patch on anyway. But he would also have to put up with an angry sergeant after it wore off. Al looked closely at Baerclau's face, checking pupil dilation and how well the Bear's eyes tracked his finger.

"Okay, we'll chance it," he said after stalling for as long as he dared. "But, so help me, Sarge, one hint of swaying or anything else, and down you go, regardless."

Baerclau glowered at Al but didn't speak. He simply put his helmet back on, picked up his rifle, and gestured in the direction of the APCs. Al and the rest of first squad started moving off with him.

I have been hurt worse than this,
Joe told himself. But that one time, he hadn't walked away under his own power. It had been thirty-six hours before he had done
any
walking. This was the first time in months that Joe had even thought about that earlier wound. There weren't even any scars to remind him. Medical nanobots left no evidence of wounds or their repair work.

Joe hadn't walked ten steps before he started to question the wisdom of his decision. He was sweating profusely, and he felt light-headed. There was no pain left, though. The soaker had his shoulder so numb that he would scarcely have felt anything if the arm fell off.

He walked slowly, unwilling to give Al the slightest excuse for putting him on a stretcher. Now that he had made his choice, Joe was not about to reverse it. As long as he was conscious and able to stay on his feet, he would walk. After all, it wasn't all
that
far back to the APCs, less than a kilometer.

I could do a klick with both legs blown off at the knee,
Joe told himself. He saw nothing ludicrous in the image, didn't recognize that it showed a dangerous loss of alertness. He did stop for a moment. He looked up into the sky. Moving with exaggerated care, he turned twice so that he could see all of the sky around him.

"Those Heggie fighters are gone," he said, still on the channel that Al Bergon was monitoring.

"Yes, Sarge, they're gone. You ready to ride for a bit?"

Baerclau turned to glare at Al again. "I'm getting better every second. I didn't need a ride before. I don't need it now."

It took twenty-five minutes to cover the kilometer. Joe did sit then, in the rear hatch of the APC.

"I'm going to have Doc Eddies look at that shoulder," Al said, lifting the edge of the soaker to look himself. "If the bone chips are too big, he'll have to go in."

Joe didn't reply. After the walk, he was having serious difficulty just staying conscious. Al seemed to swim around in front of him. For a time, Joe felt as if the entire world were spinning around him.

"Even if he doesn't, I'm going to be right next to you in there when we start up again." Al again looked into the sergeant's eyes with a tiny flashlight, then shook his head and threw the light down. "Damn it! I never should have let you walk. I'm going to have to start a drip to replace the fluid you left on the grass."

He didn't wait for the Bear to say anything but got the plastic pouch out and connected it. The bag containing the intravenous solution had separate compartments within it. The largest held a simple saline solution. The other held specialized medical nanobots and the other components they would need to turn the salt water into blood that would match Joe's own perfectly. Al taped the bag in place over Joe's arm. There was no need to put it higher; the nanobots would pump the solution in, even against twice the surface gravity of Jordan.

Joe Baerclau passed out when the needle went into his arm. Al used the opportunity to slap a four-hour sleep patch on his neck.

CHAPTER SIX

The 13th buried its dead, marking the location so that the bodies could be retrieved later, if that were possible. The wounded were patched up. Four of the Heyers were used as ambulances. A Heyer could hold only three men on stretchers or in portable trauma tubes. The healthy soldiers displaced from those APCs were crowded into other vehicles.

The rains that had reached the battlefield strengthened and followed the 13th once it started off to the northwest again. The treads on Heyers and Havocs chewed up wet ground and grass, leaving a clear trail for anyone to follow.

Once the 13th was moving, Colonel Stossen and his staff continued conferring over the radio. The communications net was as nearly secure as possible. The various channels were not assigned to specific frequencies. Instead, each channel was switched among as many as a dozen different frequencies according to computer programming. With frequencies being automatically changed as often as three times a second, there was little chance that an eavesdropper would hear enough of any conversation to make sense of it. Even a captured helmet would do little good. Any officer or noncom could disable its communications links by code. Keeping track of helmets was one of the routine duties of squad leaders and their assistants.

"They know we're out here," Stossen said shortly after the 13th started moving again. "It's just luck that our reccers spotted them before they got to us this time. Next time, we might not be so lucky. What can we do to improve our odds?"

"The fleet can't keep enough spyeyes in orbit to do much better," Bal Kenneck said. "Last I heard from CIC, the eyes last an average of six hours before the Heggies shoot them down. That leaves a lot of gaps. When one eye goes out, it takes time to get another into position. Of course," he added, "we're shooting down their spyeyes just as quickly, maybe a little more so."

"How do we make up the slack?" Stossen asked.

"The best way would be to get more Wasp flights out here," Kenneck said. "We can put our recon platoons out a little farther, but there's not a hell of a lot more they can do from inside Heyers, and we're traveling too fast to put them on foot."

"We can't use the Wasps for recon, not on a regular basis," Teu Ingels said. "We're going to have trouble getting them for combat support even. There's simply too much work and too few Wasps. The ones that came out this time were chased all of the way out by Boems. We can't afford the losses for recon."

"You're telling me there's nothing we can do?" Stossen asked.

"Not much," Ingels said. "We're pretty much limited to what we get from CIC."

"And that's what the trouble was before," Dezo Parks said, his first contribution to the conversation.

"Unless and until we get out and walk," Ingels said. "I, uh, presume that's out of the question until we get a lot closer to our objective?"

"Absolutely," Stossen agreed. "All we can do, then, is push on as fast as these mixers will go."

"Unfortunately," Kenneck said.

"Give the order, Dezo," Stossen said. "Full out. Spread the reccers out a little more, and farther out from the main body."

"Too far's no good either," Kenneck interrupted. "Too much chance for the Heggies to slip in between, like they almost did this time."

"Looks like all we can do is go like hell until dark, make our course change, and hope the Heggies don't have anything close enough to pick us up until it's too late for an intercept," Ingels said.

"And we've still got to find time to rest the men for a few hours," Parks added. "Soon as they come down from this fight, they're going to be more beat than ever. They can't go forever on stimtabs."

Stossen closed his eyes for a moment. Sleep... what's that?

"If we're going to get any at all," he said finally, "it won't be much. After we make our turn, we'll go to ground, get the thermal tarps spread. Maybe that'll help throw the Heggies off."

But he couldn't help thinking,
Or give them a chance to catch us.

—|—

It was difficult making a proper examination while the APC pounded along at forty-five kilometers per hour, but the sleep patch on Joe Baerclau would run out soon, and Al Bergon wanted to get what he had to do done before the Bear woke. As soon as the sergeant realized that he had been out for four hours, he was going to be mad, no matter how necessary the knockout had been.

Al pulled the soaker off of Baerclau's shoulder. The wound was almost completely healed over. The new skin was an angry pink, but the cuts had healed. What Al was interested in were the three tiny pimples that had formed near the exit wound on the back of the shoulder. He swabbed them with antiseptic, then used a pair of tweezers to pop them and extract the tiny bone chips that the nanobots had deposited there. After another antiseptic swab, he put a small soaker over the area of the exit wound. The entrance wound no longer needed a dressing.

"Well, how is he?" Ezra Frain asked.

"Okay," Al said. "By the time he wakes up, even his blood should be replaced."

"Good as new and mad as hell," Mort Jaiffer observed. "He's not going to like the way you zapped him."

"I didn't zap him, he passed out," Al said.

"If you think he'll buy that, let me sell you my return-trip pass, good for any shuttle up to the fleet," Wiz Mackey said with a sour laugh.

The squad's three new men just sat and listened. None of them felt confident enough around the veterans yet to get into that sort of discussion without an obvious invitation. It didn't matter that all of the new men had already seen combat with the squad, that they were no longer "raw" rookies. In a fight, each of them was paired with one of the veterans, but when they weren't in a fight, they were—mostly—on their own.

"You did the right thing, Bergon," Lieutenant Keye said from his position at the front splat gun. "The Bear gives you any grief, I'll take care of it."

"Thank you, sir."

Al looked at the time line on his visor, then looked at Baerclau again. Al hadn't checked the exact time when he slapped on the sleep patch, but it couldn't be good for more than another five minutes. Of course, there was nothing that said that Baerclau
had
to wake up precisely when the medication expired. He had been tired enough to sleep longer than that without help.

Just then the Heyer took a particularly hard jounce and Bergon grinned through gritted teeth. If the Bear could sleep through
this
ride, he could sleep through anything.

A soft groan did escape Joe's lips, though his eyes didn't open right away. Another two minutes passed before that happened. His gaze was vacant, uncomprehending, not as it would have been if he were waking normally. Joe was a veteran mudder. On campaign, he came awake instantly alert if there were the slightest possibility of enemy activity anywhere near.

After a time, Joe blinked—once slowly and then, after a short pause, several times in quick succession.

"What?" he managed. But his throat was dry. His voice cracked. Al put a canteen to the Bear's lips.

"We're back under way," Al explained while Joe took a short sip of water.

Joe took a deep breath and closed his eyes again for a moment while his mind tried to close the gap between his last memories and the present.

"How long?" he asked finally.

"Four hours, right on the button," Al said. "The bone chips are out of your shoulder, the wounds are almost healed, and you're fit for duty again."

Joe moved his left arm, experimentally at first, then with more vigor. There was no pain or restriction. Then he turned his head to look.

"Sure tore hell out of my fatigues." There was more, but now, with his head clearing, there was little chance that he would complain about being zapped for four hours. That had been the injury speaking.

"Don't sweat it," Ezra said. "I'll slap a weaver patch over it and you'll look good as new in an hour."

Lieutenant Keye turned and pointed at his helmet. Joe put his on to hear what the lieutenant had to say.

"You really feeling fit?"

Joe took time to think it over before he answered. "Yes, sir, especially with the nap. Anyone else have a chance to sleep?"

"Only what little they could get in here."

"Little is right," Joe said. "We're not going to be much good in a fight if the men don't get some downtime first."

"Can't be helped. We're trying to avoid another fight. After dark, we might get a couple of hours."

"What's the situation now, sir?"

"We've got that second river crossing coming up soon. That's likely to be our most vulnerable time until we get near where we're going. Recon's already at the river and beyond. Last word I had was that there's no sign of Heggies."

"We didn't get much advance word the last time," Joe commented. "The Heggies were almost on top of us before we knew they were there."