Until Relieved (11 page)

Although they moved steadily, each step felt as if it took minutes. Joe would look at the ground where he intended to put his foot, then slide it forward, only slowly transferring his weight, ready to pull back if he felt anything brittle under his boot. Then he would wait, straining for any hint of noise or movement in the area that Mort had indicated. Then it was time for another wary step forward. It seemed more protracted than it actually was. There
was
some urgency about this. A few meters away, Mort was moving just as cautiously. He might have moved a little faster on his own—not impatiently, but with somewhat less patience than Joe. He held back though, knowing that he had to stay even with his sergeant.

Ten steps. Then Joe's foot came down on something that was
too
smooth to be natural. Though he realized that something was wrong almost instantly, he felt as if considerable time passed before he was able to react—before he was forced to react.

He stopped and brought the muzzle of his rifle down quickly, just as his foot was jerked out from under him. Joe's movements were instinctive, but that instinct came from years of training. Subconsciously, he realized that he had stepped on a blanket or tarpaulin, and that there was someone under it, someone who had jerked on the fabric, coming out from underneath, coming to his feet.

Joe fell but managed to land on his ass without tumbling. The figure who emerged from under the tarp had a long knife in his hand. Joe had no time to get his rifle pointed at his attacker. He could do nothing more than swing the barrel toward the knife, using his zipper as a club while he got back to his feet.

The Heggie jerked his knife to the side, out of the way, and dove at Joe's middle. Joe dropped his rifle as the two men went to the ground together. Joe had to have both hands free, had to get to the Heggie's knife. Net armor might stop a bullet or wire, but it would do little to stop a knife thrust.

Neither man spoke, or did more than grunt from effort or impact. But the disturbance was an outrageous din compared to the total silence that had preceded it. Joe did manage to say "Mort" into his microphone.

Joe's assailant was considerably larger than him, perhaps by as much as ten centimeters in height and fifteen kilos in weight. Joe let the Heggie's momentum carry them backward and over, and he put his knees into the man, sending him over his head. But the Heggie kept his grip. Together, the two men rolled in the dirt, with the Schlinal trooper's weight and size beginning to tell.

Joe did not see the end of the fight coming. He heard a dull thud and then a sharp crack as his foe's neck snapped, and then he felt the Heggie shudder in his grasp and go limp.

"You okay, Sarge?" Mort asked.

Joe took a moment to consider that while he hauled in deep breaths. "Yeah. I'm okay."

"He had something like a splat gun hidden under that tarp with him," Mort explained. "I tripped over it trying to get to you."

Joe got to his feet slowly, helped up by Mort, and then he bent over again to retrieve his rifle. As well as he could in the dark, he checked to make sure that nothing had fouled the barrel.

"That tarp," Joe said, after signaling the rest of the platoon to start moving again. Ezra's team would take over the point now—with even greater caution than before, in case this man was just part of a larger force.
What would one man be doing out here alone with a splat gun?
Joe asked himself. "Check it out, will you?"

"Must be some sort of thermal shield," Mort said after a quick look. "That's why we couldn't see any IR signature."

"Bring it along. Intelligence might like a look at it," Joe said.

The other fire team moved on by. Joe and Mort fell in behind, with the rest of their team. No one paid any attention to the dead Heggie. He no longer mattered.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Four men lay under cover of a thicket that blanketed the side of a hill overlooking the town of Maison. Members of the special intelligence detachment assigned to the 13th SAT, they had been on Porter for ten days, one of two teams that had been infiltrated ahead of the invasion. Their shuttle had never landed. The teams had jumped at twenty five hundred meters, free-falling most of that distance before deploying black parasails. Those chutes were jettisoned before they reached the ground. The men released their harnesses and landed on personal antigrav packs. That technology was so new that it had never before been used in combat.

One man from the team targeted against the Schlinal forces in Maison had died in the landing. He had misjudged his timing, releasing his chute too soon. The personal antigrav packs were only good for thirty seconds of power before their batteries failed. He had fallen the last thirty meters and died on impact. His companions had buried him, leaving not a trace of the grave visible. The parasails had been equipped with nanotech systems to self-destruct once released. Not so much as a clasp survived of them.

Ten days. The teams had jumped and landed separately, hundreds of kilometers apart. The Maison team—it had no other identifier—had hiked sixty kilometers before their first dawn on Porter, then spent two days hiding, well away from Maison or any other settlement. Seventy-two hours after landing, the Maison team had come out of hiding to move toward their target, slowly and carefully. Stealth was a way of life for these men. Their passage was scarcely noted even by the animals of the plateau. They wanted no contact at all with the world's humans, certainly not the Hegemony's occupying force, but not even with the longtime residents. They were prepared to go to the most extreme lengths to avoid capture, and if that appeared to be insufficient, each was prepared to commit suicide—with a chemical that would insure the rapid destruction of brain cells, so that even dead they could not be milked of their secrets.

The hundred-hectare thicket on the slope above Maison made a perfect refuge. The slope was gentle. The Accord observers crawled under and through the maze. In all that expanse, there was no place where a man could stand upright. The thicket was like a stunted forest, dense but short. Wrist-thick trunks supported the bushes. Their canopy of glossy leaves, with thorns only on the upper branches, was thoroughly interlaced and much too thick to allow any passage to walking men or large animals. But beneath that canopy, the four men had little difficulty moving around. Like ants in a crystal-sided ant farm, they had scores of meter-high passages available to them, concealment without the sense of complete enclosure that tunnels might have engendered.

Gene Abru was the leader of the Maison team. Stocky and a little below average height, Gene had made a fetish out of physical fitness. His interests ranged from lifting weights to the most arcane of martial arts. The discipline he had forced on himself was mental as well. He had entered the army of his native world, Ceej—Tau Ceti IV—at the age of seventeen, and he had served there long enough to qualify for minimal retirement. But when he retired from that army, it was only to enlist in the Accord Defense Force. He had been invited into military intelligence, and had proven himself over and over in that capacity.

Alone of the more than two thousand men in the 13th, Gene Abru had been on one of the core worlds of the Schlinal Hegemony since the start of the new Schlinal drive into Accord space. Past forty years of age, he was the oldest man attached to the 13th, save for a few of the senior headquarters officers and the regimental sergeant major. Nominally only a platoon sergeant, there was no company-grade officer in the 13th (outside of Special Intelligence, that is: Abru was of a type, not unique) who would have dared try to enforce their orders on him. Like the other senior noncoms in Special Intelligence, he had entree to the highest command levels in the assault team. Even Colonel Stossen found himself fascinated by Abru... and perhaps, though he would never admit it, even a little frightened of him.

A week of idleness, doing nothing but watching Maison, was starting to tell on the entire team, but they maintained their silence. They had uttered scarcely a word in all of the time they had lain in wait in the thicket, and then only in the softest whispers, face-to-face. Though they had helmets, and helmet radios, they had not used the radios, not wanting to take the slightest chance of giving away their presence on the world. In a week, not a man of them had even been able to stand and stretch. But that was over now, or would be soon. In radio contact with the CIC aboard the flagship, Gene and his men knew that the 13th was on the ground, and that they had started to move on Maison. The team had witnessed the artillery barrage that had leveled the Hegemony compound at the edge of town. They had seen the column of enemy troops move out toward the Accord LZs.

"I guess we'll find out now if our legs still work," Gene told his companions as they prepared to move out. They had marked the route they would take their first day in the thicket, and each man had studied it at length. Gene was certain that he could find his way along it blind. There was a long draw leading down and at an angle to the right. Even after they left the cover of the tangled thicket, they would be out of the line of sight of anyone in Maison until they were nearly down to the level of the town's streets and no more than a kilometer from the outlying houses.

They were armed no differently from line infantrymen. Each man carried an Armanoc zipper and a belt knife. They carried no explosives or incendiary devices. But they did carry small transmitters—radio beacons that could be placed to mark important targets for Wasp or Havoc attention.

Single file, the four men worked their way down off of the hill, through the angled draw past a formation of rocks that blocked the bottom of the cut. Despite the fact that all four men were as fit as rigorous daily training regimens could make them, the week's forced inactivity told on them. Legs were stiff and knees ached. They pressed on without complaint. At the bottom of the draw, they paused for a rest. Gene got back on the radio to CIC for a final confirmation that the attack was on time, that the forces were moving on schedule.

"It's a go," Gene told the others. Each of them nodded at him. "We've all got our work to do. See you in the morning."

—|—

Though no one in Echo Company knew it, the hill they moved around in the last hour of their night march was the one that had sheltered the intelligence team. No one outside Colonel Stossen's headquarters even knew that those teams had been dropped onto Porter well before the invasion. When Captain Ingels received the radio call on his command channel, he was surprised... and suspicious.

"Captain Ingels, this is Gene Abru, of Special Intelligence. We met three months ago at the Accord Day ceremony. You remember?"

For a moment Ingels was completely at a loss. The last thing on his mind was some garrison doings months back. It was difficult to take his mind away from where he was now. But, finally, he nodded to himself, and said, "I remember. Major Parks introduced us."

"There was a reason for that, sir," Abru said. "It was so's you'd know me now."

I didn't even know there was going to be this now then,
Ingels thought.

"All dressed up and nowhere to go," Abru said next. That phrase startled the captain. Abru had used it twice during the few minutes they had talked at the Accord Day party in the officers' mess.

"I take it that that's some sort of password?" Ingels said.

"You could call it that, sir. Now, my men and I are inside Maison. The town is wide open, not a Heggie in it. Not alive, anyway. They took all but a few guards with them. The guards didn't get a chance to call for help before we got 'em."

"You're certain that there are none of them left?"

"Certain as I can be without searching every building in town. Most there could be is a few isolated individuals, and they wouldn't be good for much 'cept snipin'. We've made contact with the locals. They're plum delighted that the Accord's finally come for them."

Until we leave again,
Ingels thought, but there was no need to mention that. He assumed that Abru knew about that as well. Special Intelligence: they would damn well know, even if they weren't supposed to.

"Ingels, this is Stossen."

The captain was also unprepared for the sudden addition to the radio conference. "Yes, sir," he managed, not quite stuttering.

"Don't knock the free ride," the colonel said. "Get your men into Maison and set up your positions on the west and south to keep the Schlinal forces from getting back inside."

"Yes, sir." Ingels did not waste time with excuses about not knowing that SI had people on the ground inside Maison, or about not having
proper
authentification procedures. It
was
possible for the enemy to tap into what were supposed to be secure channels—highly improbable, but possible.

Despite Abru's assurances, and the fact that Colonel Stossen had confirmed the man's identity, Ingels still did not simply march his company into Maison. The recon platoon was sent ahead, to take up positions around the town and to set up listening posts on the approaches. Then Echo went in as cautiously as if they
knew
that every building concealed an enemy sniper. The men had been warned that Maison was apparently empty of enemies, but to be on the alert anyway.

Although there was still an hour left before dawn, more than half the people of Maison came out to greet their liberators, or simply to watch from windows and doorways, making sure that they were clearly visible—and seen as no threat. There were a few cheers, but most of the people were content simply to wave or say a few words to whichever troops came nearest them.

Maison was the second largest town on Porter, but it was no metropolis. There was not one building in town more than two stories high, and most were only a single story, particularly the residences. Porter clung to a common colonial style—large, rambling single-story homes, most commonly built around a central courtyard, completely enclosed on every side. In some cases, the original homes had been expanded one or more times, spreading to include two or three courtyards. On a primitive world, such designs were often literally a matter of life and death. And, on many worlds, such as Porter, later generations never quite escaped this sort of architectural common memory.