Jump Pay (17 page)

"Home," Joe whispered. Home was Bancroft, but Joe hadn't been there in four years—with no prospect that he might get back anytime in the foreseeable future. Bancroft was an abstraction, a place of vague memories. His family still lived there, but even they seemed part more of a dream than of any reality. If Joe did have a place called home now, it was more the 13th Spaceborne Assault Team, or Albion, the world that the 13th called home.

"You just gonna stand there buck naked all day?" Frank Symes, fourth squad leader, asked.

Joe blinked and turned. Symes, Gerrent, and Degtree were all looking at him.

"You just been standing there for five minutes," Degtree said. The squad leaders had all dropped their gear and started to strip for the trip to the showers. Joe hadn't even heard them file in behind him. They had seen to their squads first.

"Just thinking," Joe said softly.

No one asked what he had been thinking about.

—|—

Out in the main section of the troop bay, there were a lot of men thinking. The Accord Defense Force had no place for mindless automatons. No one had been on the ground long enough to settle into the battle numbness that might have muted intelligence—and imagination. It might have been better if they had. The mind's ability to suppress long, harsh conditions might have made it easier to deal with the denouement of the battle. But most of the men did not let dark thoughts distract them from the prospect of getting clean, and then getting fed. Routine maintenance. Keep as clean as possible. Eat, give your body fuel for the next time. Those were drilled into recruits as forcefully as any other lessons.

Mort Jaiffer just sat on his bunk, though. He had dropped his pack and web belt, tossed his rifle to the mattress, and then plopped down next to it. He didn't ever bother to start undressing. As a corporal, he had rated a lower bunk. Back—ages ago, it seemed—he had stated loudly and often that the guarantee of a lower berth on the transports was the only thing of real value in his promotion from private to corporal.

Mostly, what Mort felt now was an exhaustion so complete that he couldn't even wonder at it, a depletion more of mind and soul than body. It was, perhaps, the same sort of numbness he had felt on other, longer campaigns after many days of fighting and walking, of danger and boredom, of too little sleep. But, if he had had the energy to think about it, he would have been the first to doubt that explanation.

Mort sat with his eyes open, staring straight ahead without blinking. What he
saw
was a play in his mind, a memory, perhaps constructed in the moment rather than real. He was back in the university, teaching the second semester of his freshman course in political science. Words and phrases tripped over each other but scarcely made an impression.
Realpolitik. "The continuation of diplomacy by other means."
Back then, in that other life, those words had come trippingly off his tongue, part of the currency of his profession, concepts studied with intellectual rigor, as sterile as words in a dictionary.

The faces in Mort's memory were anonymous. Perhaps he was recalling actual students. More likely, his mind was projecting stereotypes, amalgams drawn from imperfect memory. There were probably no more than a half dozen of the students he had taught in his years at the university who might stand out enough in his memory to be present as themselves. The students had come to him eager for learning, trusting what he said, young men and women—scarcely more than boys and girls—seventeen or eighteen years old for the most part. But every semester there would be one, or a few, who were older. Some had even come back to the university after a term in the defense forces, back in the days before open warfare between Accord and Hegemony had meant that few enlistees were getting out when their term of service expired. Mort had stood in front of them and lectured. Three-dimensional video cameras had captured every word and nuance, every gesture and facial expression, to be transmitted to satellite classrooms in other towns, and to private homes. At the beginning of each lecture session, Mort had always set aside ten minutes for questions, particularly for the students viewing him by remote.

Hesitant questions, self-assured answers.

Mort had taught political science in the morning, history in the afternoon. There was always some overlap in the student body between courses, even though Mort wasn't the only professor teaching either course. Aspiring young politicians, academics, and lawyers took the courses. A few came simply to satisfy their own interests. Others took the classes to fulfill humanities requirements while they pursued technical degrees.

Some students left to go into the Accord Defense Force. It had been clear that war with the Schlinal Hegemony, perhaps also with the Dogel Worlds, was coming. More than once, Mort had had a student drop out to join the military. Toward the end, he had even found it possible to predict when such defections were likely, simply from watching the morning news. By that time, it was no longer an intellectual game, even for him.

Mort had waited until the end of the spring term at the completion of his third year on faculty before he told the department chairman that he was taking an extended sabbatical for government service. A new law guaranteed the jobs of people who left other occupations for government, especially military, service. The Accord and its member worlds were gearing up.

For this?

A hard, stinging slap on his shoulder brought Mort out of his trance. He blinked rapidly, several times. Joe Baerclau was standing in front of him, a wet towel wrapped around his middle.

"You'd better hurry and get cleaned up, Professor," Joe said, speaking softly. "Chow in fifteen minutes."

Mort looked around, then sucked in a deep breath. "I guess I'm just about zonked," he said, unwilling to share what he had been thinking.

"Shower, eat, then sleep," Joe said, squinting at Mort. "Save the thinking for the ride home to Albion." The look he saw in the Professor's face wasn't sleepiness, but something more troublesome.

—|—

Roo Vernon was not yet comfortable being an officer. If pressed, he would state flatly that he didn't like it much at all, that he would be much happier going back to the ranks. He had been supremely satisfied as a Wasp crew chief, a technical sergeant with the reputation of being the best mechanic in the 13th. But a good idea, and hard and heroic work at a difficult point in the 13th's campaign on Jordan, had brought him to the notice of Colonel Stossen and, through the colonel, General Dacik. After his battlefield improvisation turned the tide of battle, Roo could not escape his reward, the Accord's two highest medals (one for his idea, the other for managing to put it into successful operation under severe battlefield conditions) and a field commission. Stossen and Dacik had not been content to make Vernon a mere lieutenant. His commission was as a captain, arbitrarily placed two-thirds of the way up the list for promotion to major. Roo did find himself occupying a major's slot in the table of organization, senior maintenance officer for the 13th—not just over the Wasp wing, but over all of the vehicles in the regiment. The major who had occupied that slot previously had been transferred to the 7th SAT. What Major General Dacik had not told Colonel Stossen or the new Captain Vernon was that when Roo did make major, the general intended to move him to his own headquarters staff as senior aircraft maintenance officer.

Captain Roo Vernon found management frustrating. He liked working with his hands, and he claimed—with more than a little justification—that he knew the workings of the Wasp better than the people who had designed and built it. After returning to the fleet from the first phase of the campaign to neutralize Tamkailo, Roo wanted very much to get inside one of "his" Wasps, to see what the extreme temperature conditions had done to the birds. Only thirteen of the wing's twenty-four Wasps had survived the day's fighting. Thirteen planes, sixteen pilots. That was a better ratio than usual, but it didn't ease Roo's concerns.

"How can we make the Wasps safer for the lads?" he asked his mechanics as they prepared to do quick maintenance inspections back aboard ship. "Any time a pilot dies because we haven't done everything possible to protect him, it's as bad as if we shot the lad ourselves."

It was not the most tactful thing to say to the crew chiefs and mechanics, even if most of them had known Roo for ages. Most "ground" crews developed close relationships with their pilots. Those who had lost pilots—in the last twenty-four hours or in earlier campaigns—felt bad enough about their losses without having Roo harp on it.

"We've never run our birds in a place like Tamkailo," Roo said. He pronounced the world's name Tam-ky-lo rather than the proper Tam-kay-lo. "We don't know what that kind of heat can do to a Wasp, despite what the computers say. The programmers who wrote that program never experienced a world like this either. Don't just
look
at parts when you do your inspection, touch 'em,
smell
'em. That'll give you a better idea than looking or even electronic scanning, I'm thinking. You know what the cables and connections are supposed to feel like. Anything feels not one hundred percent, or you get any kind of burnt smell, pull the part and replace it. Myself, I'm going to be working with two crews to completely disassemble Yellow Three. It's not going back into action. It received too much battle damage."

There were a half dozen spare Wasps aboard the fleet carrier, and enough repair parts to—conceivably—build another six fighters. Although the technical manuals made a point of saying that a maintenance crew could not, repeat
not
, build a functional fighter from repair parts without the specialized construction facilities of a factory, Roo knew better. He had already done it once, in a maintenance hangar on Albion—mostly out of boredom.

"Let's get to work," Roo said, softening his voice. "If we can get the birds ready to fly again in six hours, that'll give us another three hours to catch some sleep before we go dirtside again." Obviously, the planes had to come first.

—|—

Zel Paitcher's Blue Flight had been cut in half by the day's fighting. Two of his pilots were dead. Ewell Marmon had gone early. Ewell's wingman, Tod Corbel, had gone in the final assault on the main base. Frank Verannen and Will Tarkel had both had their Wasps shot out from under them. Verannen had been trapped in his escape pod for hours before he had been rescued and taken to the field hospital. It was uncertain whether or not he would be ready to fly again when Blue Flight returned to the surface. There were new planes ready for both Frank and Will. Besides the direct battle casualties, Ilsen Kwillen had nearly put himself out of action by pushing his Wasp at too high a gee-load. He had needed two hours in a trauma tube to repair internal injuries and might not be certified for duty in time for the second phase of the campaign.

Zel might have consoled himself by thinking that of the three pilots in the 13th who had survived the destruction of their Wasps, two had come from his flight. But he didn't. It wouldn't have helped.

"Decimated means you've lost ten percent," he muttered to himself as he walked back to his quarters from the mess hall. "
I
lost fifty percent. In one day." Marmon and Corbel had worked well together. "Almost like Reston and Paitcher," Zel whispered. He had flown as wingman to Slee Reston for more than a year before Slee was killed on Jordan.

It still hurt to think about Slee.

—|—

Kleffer Dacik refused to let himself think about the men he had lost taking Site Alpha on Tamkailo, or the men still being lost at Site Charley half a world away. He knew the numbers. But he would not let himself dwell on them, not now. If he did...

"The first operation was a fiasco, gentlemen," Dacik said, addressing his staff and subordinate commanders from the three ground units that had taken part. "It started with low comedy and ended with too much tragedy." He shrugged. "A lot of it we couldn't help. Some we should have."

He did not waste much time rehashing the mistakes of the first day. Brief mention of a couple of the worst preventable errors sufficed.

"We can't afford any screw-ups at Site Bravo," he said after he had finished his recapitulation. "There is absolutely no allowance for error. We'll have only the one night to complete that operation. In just after local sunset, we absolutely
must
be off the ground by dawn tomorrow morning. We can't protect our men against the daytime heat at Site Bravo. Jorgen, you have the latest intelligence update?"

This conference was taking place in the Combat Intelligence Center on
Capricorn
, the flagship. All of the commanders were physically present—to the annoyance of those quartered on other ships in the fleet. The transit time came out of what little time they would have had for sleep.

"It looks better than it did twenty-four hours ago," Olsen started. "Sure, the Heggies have had extra time to prepare for us, but that preparation does not seem to have been designed to strengthen the defenses at Site Bravo. Quite the opposite. Our estimate is that nearly half of the forces that were there have been transferred to Site Charley on the northern continent. Site Bravo was always the smallest of the three Schlinal facilities on Tamkailo. Conditions there are... simply impossible for large numbers of men. Our current estimate is that there might be seven hundred civilians there—prisoners, penal exiles, and their descendants, individuals of no military value to the Hegemony—and quite possibly a security threat to them. As far as
military
assets, no more than one very short regiment, light infantry, perhaps fewer than one thousand men. Those soldiers are, moreover—as far as we can deduce—strictly garrison troops, not part of the force that the Hegemony was marshaling on Tamkailo for its next offensive against the Accord. Garrison troops who were, according to every intelligence estimate I've seen, chosen for this duty either as a result of, or in lieu of, disciplinary action. But they
are
acclimated to local conditions, insofar as that is possible." Jorgen looked up from his monitor and glanced around at the others. All of them were watching him.