Until Relieved (6 page)

"What about you?"

"I've felt better, but I'm not bleeding, and I don't think anything's broke."

"Can you get to Ezra?"

"I'll get him," Al volunteered.

"Check on that pilot first, Bergon," Joe said. "Wiz?"

"I'm already moving toward him."

"Stay put," Ezra said. "I'll come to you. I'm not dead."

While he talked on his helmet radio, Joe had reloaded his zipper, shucking the empty wire coil and inserting another twenty meter spool. The carbine's power cell was good for two hours of continuous firing, but twenty meters of wire lasted no more than ten seconds on automatic fire.

Al Bergon crawled around the Wasp pod, snaking on his belly to get to the canopy on the far side.

"Can't tell if he's alive or not," Bergon said after he got his first look inside the cockpit. "He's unconscious at least. How do you open these things?"

"Front end of the canopy, about twenty centimeters down, there's a panel that lifts out, and a handle underneath," Joe said. "Either side of the cockpit. If you can't reach the one on the low side, you'll have to try the one on top. Let us know. If you have to go for the exposed handle, we'll lay down covering fire."

A moment later the others heard a grunt over the radio. "Damn, it's going to be close," Bergon said. "I think..." There was a pause, and then, "I got the panel up. Now, if I can get my hand under there."

Joe waited, almost holding his breath. He heard the sound of the latch releasing before Bergon confirmed that he had it open.

"The whole canopy slides backward, if it isn't too badly damaged," Joe said.

"It's moving," Bergon said. Then, another "Damn!"

"Now what?" Joe demanded.

"Stuck. I don't know if I can wiggle in enough to... Yeah. I've got my head and arms in. Jeez, there's blood all over in here."

"Is he?" There was no need for Joe to finish the question.

"There's a pulse," Bergon said. "It's weak, but it's there."

"Can you get him out by yourself or do you need help?"

"I could use a hand," Al admitted.

"Hang tight. Mort, see if you can get around there without getting your ass shot off."

"I'll get there. I'm very attached to my ass. Never go anywhere without it."

Joe raised up and started spraying wire over the top of the capsule, more interested in suppressing enemy fire than in finding any targets. There would be time for that later, once the pilot—and his own casualties—had been recovered and treated.

Mort scooted around the capsule.

"See if you can drag the canopy back a little more," Al told him. "Maybe both of us together."

After a few grunts and curses, Al said, "There, I think that's enough. I'll open his harness. Be careful when we pull him out. He survived the rocket, I don't want to lose him to the rescue."

"Oh, crap." That was Mort. "He can't have much blood left inside him."

"Enough to raise a pulse," Bergon replied. "That's all we can ask for right now. Careful there. Let's slide him around... Hold on, his foot's caught on something. I'll have to get in there again."

"Hurry it up," Joe told them. "We've got company coming." He switched channels. "Lieutenant, we have hostiles moving our way, two hundred meters out on a bearing of 325 degrees from the capsule, at least ten men."

"You'll have help," Keye promised. "Hold one." When he returned to the channel, he said, "Two Wasps coming in right now."

Ezra's fire team moved closer to the rear end of the escape pod. Ezra was moving with difficulty, but he was moving on his own. Neither Tod Chorbek nor Wiz Mackey showed any lingering effects from being shot. The wire had come from too far away to penetrate, though the side of Tod's helmet was badly cracked.

—|—

Slee and Zel came in fast, wingtip to wingtip. They triggered their cannons as soon as they saw their targets, riding their guns harder than the shooting instructors recommended. Rules went out the canopy when Wasp pilots were protecting one of their own who had been shot down—or the mudders who were trying to save him.

"Come on, you bastards," Zel muttered under his breath. Out in the tall grass, the enemy soldiers were clearly visible. Even though they had dropped to the ground, they had nowhere to hide. The open patches where they had flattened the grass or pushed it aside marked them as clearly as spaceport beacons.

Blue three and four came in low, below fifty meters at the bottom of their strafing run. Then they pulled out and turned through a wide climbing loop to the right to come in again from a different angle. They could see the enemy, and the cockpit of the downed Wasp was there to remind them where the friendlies were.

The cannons of the two Wasps shredded the tall grass more efficiently than a scythe. Under concentrated fire, the Schlinal soldiers caught in the bursts were shredded almost as thoroughly. Body armor could not stand up to the deadly darts.

On the ground, Joe and his men instinctively ducked when the Wasps opened fire. The sound of the 25mm cannons was almost deafening, even under battle helmets. But Joe could not stay down. He lifted his head to watch as the strafing mowed a corridor thirty meters wide through the grass... and riddled the enemy soldiers.

"If there's anyone left alive out there, maybe we can get some prisoners," Joe told Lieutenant Keye after the second pass. "Interested?"

"Only if you can get to them in a hurry, after the Wasps pull out."

"Tell them it looks like they've done the job, sir."

Joe went around the capsule as the two Wasps climbed higher above the field. The downed pilot was lying on his back, still unconscious—but still alive. Al Bergon was kneeling over him, putting pressure sealers over several open wounds.

"He needs more help than I can give him, Sarge," Al said when he saw Baerclau standing over him. "Don't know though. Even carrying him back to the lines might be more than he can take."

"We've got to try. Do what you can for him. I'm going out to see if anyone survived in that lot out there." He nodded toward the grass that had been mowed down. "Mort, you and Kam come with me. The rest of you, start back to the lines with the pilot as soon as possible, even if we're not back."

CHAPTER FOUR

The three soldiers moved fast now. In full combat gear, none of them were likely to come anywhere near the standards of athletic competition for the two-hundred meter race, even without the tall, clinging grass, but they ran as fast as they could. Joe didn't want to give any surviving Hegemony soldiers time to recover their wits after the Wasp attack.

I'm getting too old for this,
Joe thought. He couldn't have spoken the words out loud on a bet. Running through that grass in full gear took all of his air, and begged for more.

The two Wasps remained overhead, circling now, as the pilots watched over Joe and his companions. Kam Goff was the only one on the ground who really noticed the Wasps though. He was young, and considerably larger than his sergeant. He felt the effort of running with so much extra weight, but he was further from his limits than Joe Baerclau was.

If they spot anyone, I hope they let us know,
Kam thought. That was better than occupying his mind with fear. He already had more than enough of that. Except while the shooting was going on. Kam had not realized that yet. While he was shooting, or being shot at, there had been no fear at all. He had simply done his job the way he had been trained.

The three men kept as much space between them as they could until they converged on the area where the enemy shooters had been. Goff, moving just a little faster than the others, was the first to spot bodies. He stopped short, still ten meters from the nearest. The body was barely recognizable as human. It had been mutilated badly, with both legs severed—one leg simply did not exist any longer. Only the man's head appeared untouched. His battle helmet had been blown off, but it
had
protected the head. The dead soldier's eyes were wide open. Kam fancied he saw a look of utter horror on the dead face.

That was when he started to vomit.

"Turn around and get down on your knees," Joe Baerclau said in his "command" voice. By this time he was standing right at Goff's side. He hauled in a difficult breath. "Don't present a target."

Joe and Mort Jaiffer conducted a quick search of the area around the section of grass that had been chopped apart by the strafing, looking for signs that any of the enemy had escaped—and might be lurking, waiting for a chance to ambush them. There were no obvious signs that anyone had crawled away from the carnage though, at least not far.

One Schlinal soldier had apparently survived for a minute or two. He had pulled himself nearly three meters from where he had been struck. But he was dead by the time Joe checked on him. There were twelve bodies. No survivors.

Joe reported that news to Lieutenant Keye. "We're heading back now," he added. "The rest of the men are already on the way in with the flyguy. Couple of my men may have some minor injuries too."

"The doc's already on link to your medic," Keye said. "Get back in here as quickly as you can. I'll get someone else to plant those bugs."

One small favor,
Joe thought as he started back toward the lines with Kam and Mort.

—|—

Even with the sophisticated radio links available to everyone in the 13th, there were inevitable delays in communications. Colonel Stossen could hardly function if he received reports directly from each platoon or squad that did something, or did not do something. Only company commanders and the Wasp and Havoc squadron commanders reported directly to the colonel, except under extraordinary conditions. Even then there were often times when there was simply too much for the colonel to hear it all immediately. That was the purpose of having staff officers, to gather the reports and decide which the colonel needed to hear immediately.

The early stages of an invasion were like that. Too much happened too quickly for the commander to stay instantly on top of everything. Once combat was joined, even on a piecemeal basis, priorities could shift, again and again. Sometimes, even a top-notch officer simply had to sit down and try to figure out just what was going on.

Colonel Stossen was sitting with his back against one of the conelike mounds of dirt that surrounded every tree in the forest to the north and west of the LZs. He had his mapboard on his lap, and his executive and operations officers were kneeling across from him.

"Okay, just where the hell are we?" Stossen asked. The question was not completely rhetorical. It was only an hour and fifteen minutes after the first shuttle had touched down, and the colonel's voice was already hoarse. Like many officers in senior field commands, Stossen had already learned that he no longer really fought his battles, he
talked
them.

"Well, we finally got George Company back to the perimeter," Dezo Parks, the ops officer, said.

"What?" Stossen looked up. "Where were they?"

Parks shook his head. "I'm not quite sure. I don't think
they
know. Somehow, they got out of their landers and started out in the wrong direction—double time. They were nearly two klicks from the section of perimeter they were supposed to establish before Vickers figured out that something was screwy." Like nearly a quarter of the men in the 13th, Dezo was from Bancroft. He had recruited a good percentage of the men from his homeworld, and had transferred to the Accord Defense Force with them.

"Vickers, the new man." That was no question. Stossen might not know every enlisted man in the 13th, but he did know all of the officers, well enough to conjure up an image and a rough idea of their background.

"New to the 13th," Lieutenant Colonel Terrence Banyon, the executive officer, said. "He's had nearly five years of service, four-plus with his homeworld defense force and six months with the ADF training regiments before he came to us." Banyon was from Ceej, Tau Ceti IV, as were Stossen and about thirty other members of the 13th.

"Five years and still a lieutenant?" Stossen asked.

"He was a captain in his HDF," Banyon said quickly. "He took a voluntary reduction to escape a waiting list when he transferred to us. He's good, just a bit overanxious for his first action."

"We'll get back to him later," Stossen said. It would not do to get completely sidetracked with something nonessential just now. They had already wasted too much time, particularly since no harm had been done by the mistake.

"What about that flyer? He going to make it?"

"Too close to call," Banyon said. "They got him into a trauma tube in one piece, but it was a near thing. Doc
thinks
he'll pull through, but no guarantees."

Stossen nodded slowly. A trauma tube and its medical nanotech devices could work wonders, but there were still limits.

"What else is going on?"

Dezo Parks leaned closer to the mapboard. "We've consolidated our initial perimeter, more or less on schedule. Only scattered resistance, nothing very concerted. You know as much about that as I do." They had hoped for an unopposed landing, and had come closer to it than they had any right to expect. "Apparently, the Schlinal forces on-world don't maintain any combat aircraft on anything approaching ready alert. As of five minutes ago, there hadn't been a single report of enemy air activity—from our people down here or from the monitors back in CIC. That's a definite plus for us. We're a considerable distance from any Schlinal garrison, as we hoped we'd be. As far as we've been able to determine, the Hegemony has strictly an occupation force on Porter, and they stick close to the centers of population. Those we've come across must be part of the force used to control the people around Maison, the only real town here on the plateau."

"Our objective for tomorrow," Stossen commented. "Any word on enemy strength there yet?"

"Nothing substantive," Banyon said. "The latest estimate is that the maximum size of the garrison in and around Maison must be below two thousand."