Until Relieved (3 page)

The Wasp squadron had dropped ahead of the troop shuttles, but the pilots watched the landers accelerate past them. The Wasps could not be so profligate with energy. Until their ground support was established, the Wasps would be unable to land to get fresh batteries for their antigrav units. At best, they had only a little more than an hour's flight time before they needed to land to recharge or replace depleted batteries. If the landing failed or was aborted after the Wasps were deep in Porter's gravity well, the pilots would have no choice but to land and abandon their fighters. The Wasps would be unable to boost back to orbit without the jet-assisted takeoff rockets that their ground crews would provide for them.

But the Wasps were there, close, ready to defend the shuttles from any ground fire or enemy air response. When the troop shuttles finally started to land, Zel and the rest of the Wasp squadron's Blue flight were orbiting the LZs at an altitude of three thousand meters. The infantry was most vulnerable during the first few minutes of an operation. The Wasps could easily mean the difference between a successful landing and a catastrophe.

The Yellow and Red flights were higher, and farther away laterally, posted to intercept any enemy air attack, and when none appeared, Yellow flight landed for fresh batteries and then was vectored off to strike at the power stations ringing the planet's capital and primary city. Destroying the city's power system was secondary. The main reason for the raid was simply to give the enemy something more immediate to consider than the infantry landing on the plateau.

"Blue three, Blue four, ground support mission," the controller aboard the flagship radioed. "Your vector is zero-two-seven, 120 meters beyond the Alpha-Romeo beacon."

Zel waited until Blue three rogered the mission, then echoed it. He cleared his heads-up display of extraneous clutter and keyed in a transponder display to show the microwave AR beacon.

"Stay close, Zel," Slee Reston, Blue three, said. He was the veteran in this duo. He had seen combat twice before.

"I'm here, Slee. Let's do it."

The Wasps did not depend on aerodynamic design to keep them in the air, merely to minimize the power required to push them through it. If a Wasp lost power in atmosphere, the pilot's only option was to eject. The Wasp had roughly the glide characteristics of a sixteen-ton lead ball. Powered solely by antigrav engines, the shape of the fighter-bombers was dictated by mission... and by the whims of their designers. Radar neutral at any frequency, the Wasp was roughly kidney-shaped. The pilot sat in a confined cockpit at the center of the leading edge. In an emergency, the entire cockpit module could be jettisoned and brought to ground by parasail. The antigrav engines and batteries were outboard on either side of the Wasp, in bulging pods. The space between the propulsion units, except for the tiny cubicle that contained the pilot and controls, was given over to payload—with a wide variety of options. At present, the Wasps of Blue flight were each loaded with rockets and five high-speed cannons.

Zel thumbed his weapons selector to the cannons as his target acquisition system locked on, balancing beacon and offset. The 25mm depleted uranium rounds would each separate into five projectiles in flight. With each cannon firing sixty rounds a second, one Wasp could put fifteen hundred hypersonic projectiles—slivers fifteen millimeters long—into an oval five meters by three at a distance of five hundred meters in just five seconds. Not even the best personal armor could withstand that sort of onslaught.

Even as the two Wasps dove toward their initial run, they received additional targets. Above and behind Zel, another pair of Wasps were diving to follow them across the front.

Zel pressed the trigger for his first burst just before the targets were centered on his targeting display. The fraction of a second of reaction time meant that his first shots were precisely on target. When Slee pulled up and rolled left after the run, Zel followed automatically. It was his job to stay right on Slee's wing, and Zel was
good
at that. He had no chance to see what damage their cannon had done though. They were traveling too rapidly, and never came within 350 meters of their targets. There was no going back to make their own damage assessment either. They were already moving toward their next objective.

—|—

"I don't want any itchy trigger fingers," Joe warned his men as they moved into the trees. "Just because you hear shooting doesn't mean that you have to join in."

Joe felt the itch himself. In the four minutes since they had jogged away from their shuttle, they had heard gunfire around the LZ almost constantly, first from one area and then from another, almost as if by turns. A couple of times, Joe had heard the telltale sound of wire rounds cutting into the trees overhead, from behind, but there was still no sign of hostiles in front of them. The difference in sound between Accord and Hegemony weapons was obvious to anyone who had heard both. And the sound made by the cannons that the Wasps carried was far removed from any of the infantry rifles—deeper, louder, and far more intense—a metal tornado.

"Keep your heads down," Joe reminded his men. He was not particularly worried about spent rounds passing overhead. They were no real threat to net armor or battle helmets.

Once under the cover of the trees on the western flank of the LZ, the platoon's advance slowed dramatically. Each squad moved as a semi-independent unit, with one fire team advancing cautiously while the other was on the ground in firing position, ready to provide covering fire if necessary. One team would move forward five to eight meters, then take defensive positions while the other team leapfrogged them. It was up to the squad leaders to make sure that they did not stray too far from the squads on either side of them.

Dawn started to race past. The shadows under the trees lightened. There was little underbrush or ground cover in this forest. There seemed to be no true grass, just the detritus of leaves that had fallen through the years, with moss beneath that. As boots disturbed the surface, a musty smell rose, not especially unpleasant. These trees were native to Porter, different from any that Joe had seen before, but still generically
trees
, woody trunks and branches, green leaves—in this case seven-lobed leaves larger than a spread human hand. The lowest branches were more than three meters above the ground. The only distinguishing feature that Joe had noticed so far was that each tree seemed to rise from the peak of a cone of ochre dirt. Those cones varied from forty centimeters to more than a meter in height, and somewhat more in diameter. They did provide good cover for a prone infantryman. And the copse was dense enough that there always seemed to be one of those cones within two meters—diving distance.

"Okay, Joe, get your men down. This is our line for now," Maycroft said over Echo Company's noncoms' radio circuit.

"Find good spots," Joe told his men. "This is where we stop."

One of the larger tree cones, eighty centimeters high and a meter and a quarter wide, was right in front of Joe. He knelt behind it and looked to either side to watch while the men of his squad found their own locations. His fire team was on the right, with Kam Goff sharing his tree cone. Corporal Frain and his fire team were to the left.

"Get settled in," Joe said once he was satisfied with where his men were.

Joe took a long scan of the squad's front, moving his eyes—and the sensors in his helmet—from side to side, looking farther out with each pass. Although sunrise had already come, there were still deep shadows under the forest canopy. As the air warmed up, the infrared sensors in the battle helmets became less effective. It was summer in the northern hemisphere on Porter, and the plateau was well down in the temperate latitudes. The temperature was already 25 Celsius. By midafternoon, it would probably top 30. Hot. Joe looked more for hints of movement in the distance than for human forms. He still did not spot anything that looked even remotely threatening.

"Where the hell are they?" Ezra Frain asked over the squad frequency.

"Close enough, I imagine," Joe replied. "Cut the chat."

Joe looked around at the positions his men had taken again. Even without specific orders, each of the men was working at improving his cover. They dug in with entrenching tools, piling dirt around the holes as they provided themselves with shallow slit trenches. The longer they stayed in one place, the more care they would take with their defenses, using their idle moments to dig. After one more long look into the forest in front of them, Joe started scraping away ground cover and dirt himself. He worked more slowly than his men though because every few seconds he stopped to look out into the forest, anticipating the arrival of enemy troops.

He had scarcely excavated five centimeters into the ground before Sergeant Maycroft came down the line and flopped to the ground at Joe's side. Maycroft lifted his helmet visor.

"Saddle up," the platoon sergeant said in a voice that sounded infinitely tired. Maycroft always sounded that way in the field, whether or not he actually was tired. "We're moving up another hundred meters, and sliding over to the right to link up with Delta Company."

"Right, Max," Joe replied after he lifted his own visor, getting the microphone away from his mouth. "Any bogeys at all on this side?"

"Nobody's seen any yet, but that could change at any second. Five minutes," Maycroft added before he pulled his visor back down into place. He got up and moved back along the line.

"Put your shovels away," Joe said over the squad frequency once his visor was down again. "We're moving in five."

"Just when I was getting comfortable," Kam Goff whispered at his side, lifting his visor so that the microphone would not pick up his words.

Joe growled softly, then said, "Get that visor down and pay attention, rookie. Unless you want to die a rookie." Goff blanched noticeably at that, but he did pull his visor down quickly.

The order to move out came over the command frequency. Joe got his men up and moving as before, one fire team at a time. "Just like a drill," he whispered. He hoped, fervently, that it would remain that calm. They had worked hard enough at the training drills in the weeks before boarding the ships for the voyage to Porter. In training, even the new men who had never seen real combat had the moves down pat. If only they remembered that training once hostile wire started zipping past their ears.

The platoon had scarcely started moving when Joe and his men heard shooting off to their left for the first time. This was relatively close, but it still did not seem particularly threatening.

Less than two minutes later, the fight did reach them. A rocket-propelled grenade exploded ten meters in front of Joe. The timing was lucky for him. Joe and his fire team had just dropped to the dirt, and Ezra Frain's team had not got to their feet yet. Shrapnel from the RPG whizzed overhead and thunked into tree trunks. Close. Dirt and debris showered the soldiers.

Joe swallowed hard to clear his ears after the noise of the blast.
Too close,
he thought.
We would have been in the kill zone on that one.
He waited until the last of the debris had fallen before he lifted his head enough to look over the tree cone just in front of him. The visor on the Accord battle helmet was alleged to be able to stop anything short of a full burst from a splat gun at close range, but Joe Baerclau had not survived two previous campaigns by taking
any
unnecessary risks.

The forest floor was only a blur in infrared now. Joe switched off that part of his helmet sensors.

"Anyone get a look at where that came from?" he asked, knowing that it was a futile question. There were no replies from the squad. His men knew better than to clutter up the channel with unnecessary negatives.

Joe looked to either side. The rest of the platoon was to his right. Third platoon, the one squad of it that Joe could see, was also down, waiting to see if there would be more than the single grenade.

"Okay, Ez," Joe said after three minutes had passed without more incoming fire. "Move 'em out. Carefully."

There was little need for that warning. Ezra and his fire team moved forward in a crouch, keeping their heads down and their rifles up, ready for instant use. Joe's fire team was ready to lay down covering fire if they got any clue as to where the enemy was. Ezra's fire team was just passing the line of Joe's team when two more RPGs came in. These both exploded behind the lines, back near where Ezra's team had been just seconds before. The men went flat and brought their unprotected hands in under their bodies as the grenades exploded. The blasts were far enough away that their net armor and helmets were able to absorb the force of the shrapnel without difficulty. But two men had the wind momentarily knocked out of them by the impact.

"Crap!" an anonymous voice said over the squad frequency.

Before Joe could call for silence, the squad was under direct fire. Bursts of wire whizzed by, too close to be ignored. Joe turned his head to the side, hoping to see some clue as to the direction the fire was coming from.

"Stay put," Sergeant Maycroft told Joe over the radio. "Delta is moving around behind. They have a fix on the Heggies who have us under fire."

It's good to have someone else do the work for a change,
Joe thought. "Don't shoot unless you have a clear target," he warned his men. "We're going to have friendlies moving in behind them. I don't want us to ace any of our own people."

There was one short flurry of fire from third squad, accurate enough to slow down the incoming for a few seconds. Still, nearly five minutes passed before Joe heard heavy fire from Mark VI zippers out in front and the unseen enemy soldiers turned their fire away from 2nd platoon.

"Okay, let's go," Joe told the squad after he had his orders from Maycroft.

This time they moved with their carbines firing, scattering short bursts ahead of them, aiming deliberately low. The men of Delta Company showed up as blue blips on visor displays. The men called those blips DSUs, for "Don't shoot us!"