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The grenades exploded together. "At 'em," Dem said over his patrol's channel. The reccers got to their feet, rifles blasting before they could know whether or not any of the Heggies had survived the grenades.

Two men were still moving, wounded but alive, in the trench that had held the machine gun. One of the reccers ended the movement with a very short burst of wire.

Dem looked around quickly, wondering how close together the Heggie positions were on this side of the line. There was no fire coming in at them. After a moment, he climbed out of the trench on the south side.

"Let's go," he said. He hadn't given a second thought to the way that the Heggie wounded had been killed. After all, the Heggies never took prisoners. And the reccers were in no position to take prisoners now, especially not wounded ones.

Ten minutes later the reccers could see the main Heggie line, six hundred meters in front of them. Dem took a moment to confer with the leaders of the other three patrols.

"We'll all hit them at the same time," he said. "Let's try to cut the distance at least in half. Give 'em a volley of rockets then and move forward until we're close enough for RPGs and the sniper rifles." His own test rifle would score effectively from three hundred meters. The Dupuy cough guns could reach a lot farther. "Another quick burst from there and then we'll try to get close enough for zippers."

If necessary. Dem hoped that before they could get that far the 5th and 8th would be on the move again, coming through—over—the Heggie line. That way a few of the reccers might actually survive the night.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Orion
had finally launched its Bats. The hangars were spaced around the hull at 120-degree intervals. Indigo Flight emerged from the "bottom" of
Orion
, facing Tamkailo. It wasn't until the Indigo Bats were clear of their own ship that they could see the Schlinal ships—now almost as close as they were likely to get to the Accord fleet, little more than ninety kilometers away. Two of the Schlinal ships had clearly fallen out of formation. One was broken in half, an extremely rare degree of damage. The other did not show any obvious major wounds, but it was obviously out of action.

Faro Malmeed did not concern himself with the possible fate of the—perhaps—fifteen hundred or two thousand Heggies who might have been on those ships. Even on the vessel that had broken in half there might still be considerable numbers of survivors in gastight compartments that had not been compromised. And if there weren't... Faro still wouldn't worry about them, even though he had not heard yet that his brother had been killed in action. The Heggies were, after all, the Enemy.

"We're going buggy hunting," Osa Ximba told his flight. "And any fighters they send along to protect them. Landers are our first priority."

In Indigo three, Faro nodded. It made obvious sense to go after the largest number of
them
, the enemy, that you could.

"They haven't launched yet," Osa continued, "but they're going to have to start within the next few minutes if they're going for a landing anywhere near Site Charley." If they were going for a direct landing anyway, without letting the shuttles ride through a complete orbit on the way down, and
that
was unlikely. It would leave the shuttles vulnerable for far too long.

Ximba gave his pilots their vector and acceleration orders. The initial speed and course were neutral, allowing a variety of responses, depending on what the Heggies did in the next few minutes. Minimal power usage. If the Bats had to go low in pursuit of the shuttles, they would need every bit of juice they could save in order to boost back to a rendezvous orbit for
Orion
... or one of the other ships in the fleet.

Faro looked around his Bat. There were no nearby threats, nothing on his heads-up display or monitors. His look outside was only partly to confirm that there were no Heggies or incoming rockets anywhere in his vicinity. The Bat's "eyes" were far more reliable than his own. Bats were flown on instrument, almost never by anything so primitive as a pilot looking out and making judgments based on what he saw. Mostly, he was just trying to see what kind of damage had been done so far in the battle. He had noticed the two Heggie ships that were out of action. As his Bat moved farther away from
Orion
, he could see some of the other ships in the Accord fleet.

The Accord ships were in three columns with the center column, the one that
Orion
led, sticking out in front of the other two. The three columns were "stacked" above Tamkailo, each farther out than the one "below" it. The two fleets were close enough now that the angle between their courses was finally apparent to the naked eye.

At first, Faro could see only the nearest few Accord ships. Those were between him and the rear ends of the columns. Indigo had been out for nearly five minutes before he could finally see the last ships in the two outer columns. One of those, the ship at the tail of the "highest" column, seemed to be dropping behind, falling out of station. The fleet, even that last ship, was still accelerating, but the one ship was not, apparently, accelerating as rapidly as the rest.

"Shuttle launches from nine ships," Ximba announced. Faro checked his navigating monitor. The Heggie fleet was shown on that. The two crippled ships had not launched any shuttles. The third ship that was not spitting out landers was the second one from the front of the formation. The shuttles came out, spent no more than two minutes moving into their own formations, and then started away from the ships, heading for the ground. They were running "hot," accelerating toward Tamkailo—a standard assault descent.

It only took another five seconds before the computers gave Indigo Flight their intercept instructions. Around them, the rest of
Orion's
Bats, and the Bats from
Capricorn
, swivelled onto their intercept course and pushed throttles forward, boosting toward an empty point in space—a point that the Schlinal shuttles should reach a fraction of a second ahead of the Bats.

Both groups would need approximately twelve minutes to reach that point. For at least half of that time, the Bat pilots would have virtually nothing to do. They wouldn't be able to strike at the Heggies, and there were no Heggies in position where they would be able to strike at the Bats.

There were a lot of other blips around both fleets: the cordons of fighters on attack and defense, electronic decoys, and mines that could be controlled remotely and detonated if an enemy vessel came close enough for the blast to do damage. But Indigo Flight could ignore all of those other fighters with impunity unless they showed significant changes in course and speed. It was only the Boems accompanying the shuttles that might be a major threat to Indigo.

"Any word on escort for those shuttles yet?" Faro asked.

"Just that there are at least some Boems with them," Osa replied. "CIC hasn't got them all sorted out yet. There are at least sixty-eight small blips out there. Figure that at least half of them are fighters, maybe two-thirds."

Just before
Orion's
Bats reached the halfway point on their intercept course, Faro happened to look back toward the Accord fleet and see another group of Bats heading off on what appeared to be an intercept course. He mentioned that to Ximba.

"Affirmative," Osa replied. "We hit 'em first. Anything left, that lot can worry about them. About three minutes after we make our pass."

Faro Malmeed was not normally given to levity, particularly on duty, but he could not help himself this time. "Are we
supposed
to leave a few for them?" he asked.

"The one thing I
don't
need just now is someone trying on a new pair of shoes," Ximba said on a private link to Malmeed. "You get my meaning?"

"Aye, sir," Faro replied, quickly. "It just slipped out."

"I want my pilots loose, but not so loose that they start losing parts," Ximba continued. To him, death was nothing to joke about, not even enemy deaths.

Forty-five seconds later, the Bats made a very minor correction to their heading.

This fight would not be the confused melee that atmospheric air battles still could be. The planes and shuttles had too much speed behind them for the acrobatic maneuvers of a dogfight. The Bats would have once through the formation of shuttles and Boems. As soon as they were beyond their Schlinal targets, the Bats would flip end for end—only a change in attitude, not in course—to get more time to launch missiles. They would, however, increase their speed as rapidly as they could, to carry them out of range of any Boems that survived their attack.

Indigo Flight started getting target locks for its missiles a full minute before they were near enough to launch and give the missiles good odds of getting through without being intercepted or decoyed away from their targets. Each pilot armed six rockets for the first strike. On the far side, they would try to get six more off. That would leave each Bat with four strike missiles to use for defense—as a backup to the smaller, faster antimissile missiles they also carried—or for targets of opportunity, in the unlikely event that any of those might arise.

"Just like a drill," Osa Ximba told his men as they approached the release point. "Just like a drill." He kept his voice soft, easy, giving every appearance of being totally relaxed with his job.

"Steady...
now!
"

Indigo's missiles raced forward just a second ahead of the missiles launched from the other Bat flights accompanying them. Their velocity relative to the Bats was deceptive. The missiles were not starting out from zero—or from only a few hundred kilometers per hour as they would have been if they had been launched by Wasps deep in a planet's gravity well and atmosphere. Rather they added their acceleration to the velocity carried by the Bats, more than 20,000 kph. Even without warheads, those missiles would be able to penetrate the hulls of a landing shuttle on both sides. Opening a shuttle to vacuum would be as fatal to the people inside as a thermonuclear device—had such things remained in use.

Explosives merely insured that the hulks would not be salvageable afterward.

The Boem S3s with the shuttles also launched missiles, theirs aimed at the Bats or at the missiles that the Bats had fired. Most of the shuttles activated their electronic countermeasures. At the distances and speeds involved, those would likely be of little use, but pilots took every measure they could.

Missiles hit and exploded. Brief flares of light presaged the spewing of debris. That debris could, and in some cases did, hit other shuttles or fighters, causing terminal damage. Shuttles, Bats, and Boems were lost. And the men inside. The survivors continued on. The Bats flipped their fighters end for end and fired off more missiles at the shuttles and Boems. Racing away from the Schlinal vessels now, away from enemy rockets and fighters, the Bats adjusted course for an eventual rendezvous with
Orion
and
Capricorn
—at the end of an eighty-seven-minute orbit of Tamkailo. Their batteries would not have enough power to kill their current speed and allow them to boost directly back to their ships. The Boems and the shuttles they were escorting—and the debris from those that had been destroyed—continued on their way to an earlier rendezvous, a landing on the northern section of Tamkailo's northern continent. There were fewer shuttles and Boems than before. The wrecks would, mostly, burn up in the atmosphere, a man-made meteor shower.

—|—

Kleffer Dacik had moved his command post as close to the front as he could reasonably get—too close, to the minds of his staff and the headquarters security detachment. The general did abandon his APC. That would have been too inviting a target to offer to Heggie gunners. The vehicle was more than a kilometer behind the MLR, the main line of resistance, behind a large rock outcropping that might shield it from enemy attention. Dacik had gone forward on foot from there, to less than three hundred meters from the front. He found a decent vantage and watched the battle with power binoculars. He couldn't see the entire line. Whatever fighting was going on at either end of the line, near the sea, was out of sight. But he could see enough. He scanned constantly, sometimes jumping to look toward a spectacular explosion, or in response to something heard over the radio.

"We're running out of time," he told his staff when he received word from CIC that the Schlinal fleet had launched shuttles. "They've got enough boats coming down to hold four thousand men."

"Intercepts?" Colonel Ruman asked.

"On the way," Major Olsen said. He had been on link to CIC constantly. "But the Bats won't get all of them."
They never do,
he thought. "The best we can hope for is a fifty-percent kill on the way down. Worst case, maybe ninety percent get through."

"And we'd better be ready to see something a lot closer to ninety than fifty percent land," Dacik said. "It looks as if they're heading directly for this peninsula. Unless they make a big change in course once they're in air. Ru, get the Wasps ready to go. Any that are up now, pull them down for fresh batteries and full racks. Then get them up to intercept as high as they can."

"Already in the works, General," Ruman said. "The first flight should pick up Heggies at twenty thousand meters. We'll keep hitting them as they come in." Those first Wasps to hit the Heggies would have trouble getting back down safely. The intercept point would be two hundred kilometers southwest of the peninsula. They would have to time the interception perfectly, and even then they would have little more than thirty seconds in which to do their damage and start back down for a landing on the peninsula with enough juice left in their batteries to see them softly on the ground.

"Look!" Dacik shouted. The others around him turned to look where he was pointing—at a series of small explosions. "Behind the Heggie lines. That's got to be Stossen's reccers."

Dacik watched the evidence of fighting behind the MLR for a minute. Then, without discussing it with his staff first, he got on the link to the four regimental commanders whose men were pushing north. "Hit them with everything you've got, right now. We've got the 13th's reccers in behind them. Hit them before they figure out what's going on."