Jump Pay (3 page)

"Just keep your heads," Zel said over the flight's radio channel. "Keep the formation tight and don't panic." Command had made Zel feel at least a decade older than his twenty-one years. Combat had ended his youth. Command had seemingly propelled him to a premature middle age. The promotion to captain that had followed the Jordan campaign (and the death of Slee Reston, his best friend and the former commander of Blue Flight) had been a hollow achievement. Zel would have turned it down if he could have. He couldn't look at the silver insignia without remembering Slee and the way his Wasp had exploded.

Blue Flight was in a power dive, accelerating toward the ground. They had been launched from their transports 180 kilometers up. But they were in air now. The Schlinal satellite network had been knocked out minutes before in a coordinated attack around Tamkailo. The inevitable confusion to the enemy's command, control, and intelligence gave the invaders a slight edge during the early minutes—or even hours—of an attack.

Zel's eyes flicked across his heads-up display and the two monitors below it. There were no enemy fighters in the air yet, and the Wasp's target acquisition systems had detected no enemy radar. That meant that there were no major defensive systems tracking the fighters. Yet. The Wasps were virtually invisible to any radar. And in the dark they were invisible to almost anything that might be looking at them, even highly trained human eyes.

The Wasps were too high for them to see pilots racing toward their Boem fighters on the ground. The sudden loss of communications with all of their orbiting satellites would demand a Schlinal fighter scramble, if only until some non-malignant reason could be found for the sudden silence. Arsenal. The Schlinal warlords knew that they had to defend the stockpiles of munitions and the regiments of troops being marshaled there. Even though it was—relatively—far from any Accord or Dogel system.

The airfield was Blue Flight's initial target. The 13th's other two flights, and the 8th's air wing, had other tactical targets in and around the initial drop zone. The more enemy fighters Blue Flight could destroy on the ground, the fewer they would have to worry about in the air.

The Wasps were diving at 3.5 gees, their antigrav engines adding to rather than subtracting from Tamkailo's own gravity. The flight suits of the pilots had inflated to offset the effects of the gee-load, restricting movement. But the Wasp had been designed to need only slight movements by its pilot. A high gee dive, or climb, was unlikely to greatly inconvenience a pilot—as long as he kept his head. The planes
could
achieve greater acceleration than a human body could take.

"Start marking your targets," Zel said, flipping on his own TA systems.

They should have infantrymen guarding the airfield, Zel thought. Maybe other antiaircraft defenses. Infantrymen would have shoulder-operated missiles available. Those could be as deadly to a Wasp—or a shuttle—as a Boem's rockets. And there would likely be no warning of a TA system locking on first. Infantry rocket launchers depended on the eyesight of the man firing them for initial target acquisition. Then the rocket's television guidance system would take over, once it had been "shown" the target.

This should be the easiest run of the campaign, Zel reminded himself as his TA system locked on to its first two targets. The audible double click came just as the red lights on the heads-up display went from blinking to solid. Later, there would never be this level of surprise. The enemy would know that the Accord was on the planet. They would be waiting.

He launched his first two rockets, and the TA system immediately locked on to two more Boems. Near the bottom of his dive, Zel could finally see men running around below, heading for their planes, or for cover. He launched the second pair of rockets and reversed the thrust on his antigrav drives, pulling up, the Wasp straining his ability to handle the gee-load.

"Start listening to your own warnings," he muttered through clenched teeth as he came close to graying out.

"Watch your damn controls."

He tilted the Wasp on its side and accelerated "up," parallel to the ground. Gerry Easton struggled to keep station on his wing. Blue Two had only launched one pair of missiles. He was still new to this business.

"You're doing fine, Gerry," Zel said over a private link. "Take a deep breath and let it out slowly."

There was a startled "Huh?" over the radio, and then the sounds of that deep breath. "What are you, psychic?" Easton asked after he had exhaled.

"I remember my own first time," Zel said. While he talked, he kept his eyes moving, watching his displays and what he could see on the ground. The routine was easy now, but the first time Zel had tried so hard to keep track of everything going on around him that there was no time to
do
anything.

On their first pass, Blue Flight had accounted for a dozen enemy fighters. It was a good tally, but Zel could see at least twice that number of undamaged fighters on the ground. And pilots had reached most of those.

Zel switched to the channel that linked him to his entire flight. "One more quick pass before they get those buzzards in the air," he said as he flipped his own Wasp around. "Then it's cat-and-mouse time."

Once a pilot got into his Boem, he would need only twenty seconds to strap in and another ten seconds to get his fighter in the air. They would bypass preflight checklists. It would be systems on and lift off, without waiting for the engines to warm up. In theory, computerized control systems should spot any problem in less than a second after the switches were thrown, far more rapidly than any human pilot could start to lift the plane off of the ground. The automatics would override the pilot, cutting power.

Zel saw no indication that any of these Boems were being switched back off. But then, he didn't have time to waste on fantasy. The Boems might still outnumber his Wasps three to one if this last ground attack didn't seriously cut into their numbers. Once the Boems were active, even before they got off of the ground, they were no longer totally defenseless. Most of the Schlinal pilots immediately activated electronic countermeasures.

The airfield was still a dangerous place for the Boems. The incoming missiles were fired from too near to go wandering off into the sky because ECM measures confused their targeting computers. All of the rockets hit something—planes, buildings, or the ground. Antigrav fighters neither needed nor used a runway. The only level surface they needed was enough for their landing skids to sit on, and they had a lot of tolerance. Craters in the airfield weren't even a nuisance. Nor were wrecked planes or other debris.

"Here they come," Zel warned as he saw the first Boem grow a shadow as it lifted off. That fighter spun on its vertical axis, ready to directly challenge the invaders.

Zel was more than happy to take the challenge. He was too close to risk a missile so he switched to his forward cannons, a gatling gun arrangement of five 25-mm barrels, each capable of spewing sixty hypersonic slugs per second, fragmentation or—a new addition—armor-piercing rounds for air-to-air combat. The older fragmentation projectiles each separated into five heavy metal slivers in flight. Though those rounds were murderous against ground troops, they had proved less than lethal in a dogfight, and combat in the air still did get very close sometimes. For this flight, both the forward and rear cannons were loaded with a 60-40 mix, AP to frag. The range was less than 120 meters when Zel hit the trigger. A four-second burst exploded the Boem. Shrapnel dinged off of Zel's Wasp as he flew through the blast.

That was the last easy kill of the fight. The surviving Boems were all in the air, their pilots ready to fight back.

Blue five was hit by two missiles. The rockets exploded simultaneously, engulfing the Wasp in a dirty fireball. Remarkably, Verannen's escape pod shot clear of the maelstrom. There was no response from Frank to Zel's call, but the pod's parachute deployed and it settled toward the ground, drifting clear of the air battle and the Schlinal airfield below it.

Zel reported the loss and the possibility that the pilot might have survived. If there was a chance, a rescue mission would be attempted as soon as there were Accord forces on the ground who could do the job.

The air fight went on.

—|—

It was not at all like a parachute jump. A chute provided both visible comfort and cause for concern. When you saw the sheet open above you, you knew that there was
something
up there slowing your descent, making it possible to drop several hundred meters and survive. But, in combat, it also provided an immense target for enemy gunners, an arrival announcement that could be seen for kilometers around.

Antigrav belts provided no additional target, but there was no sense of reassurance either. To the eye, you were simply falling, with nothing to prevent you from ending up crushed on the surface. The silence added to the eeriness. There was little sense of anything but the whisper of air. Despite the training, the assurances of experts, and practice jumps, Joe could not escape the sensation of falling out of control.

Joe looked around at the hundreds of men "falling" with him. The Corey belts had gyroscopic stabilizers, so the men were all falling feet first toward the ground. The formation wasn't nearly as precise as that of a drill team on the parade ground, but the men weren't nearly as scattered as they might have been. No one was plummeting out of control. That meant that there were no defective units—and that no one had panicked so much that they couldn't control their descent.

Left hand on belt controls. Right hand on weapon. A lanyard made certain that no one would lose his weapon on the jump. At worst, it might dangle a few centimeters out of reach.

The jump plan was, relatively, simple. The men of the 13th were to free-fall until they reached 150 meters, with their belts on the lowest setting, partially to keep the speed of descent from getting too high but mostly to keep heads up and feet down. A buzzer in the helmet warned the wearer when it was time to increase power to the antigrav units, one click at a time. Save most of the deceleration for the last three or four seconds of the drop. If you worked it properly, you would hit the ground with hardly any jolt at all, ready to move forward, or to drop to the ground for cover—unless you misjudged your descent badly enough to run the batteries dry before you reached the ground. That had been a significant danger with the Desperes belts. That was why they had never been used in large-scale operations. But the greater power of the batteries in the new Corey model was expected to—almost—totally eliminate that hazard.

Once on the ground, the infantry of the 13th was to secure a landing zone for their heavy equipment and for the other units, the ones who were riding all of the way in on shuttles.

Echo Company's section of the drop zone was in a rocky waste area five kilometers west of the edge of the Schlinal base designated Site Alpha in the attack plans, one hundred kilometers north of the southernmost tip of Tamkailo's southern continent, near the east coast.

Joe Baerclau searched the ground around the drop zone as carefully as he could during the descent, looking for enemy soldiers or emplacements. Anything he could spot from the air might save him, and his men, when they landed. Although there were no firm numbers on how many Schlinal troops were stationed on Tamkailo, the estimates had ranged from twenty-five thousand to four times that. Even in a best case scenario, the Accord was going to be outnumbered five to two. Joe had never accepted best case scenarios. Reality always seemed to favor the opposite.

The best he could say for the drop zone was that it looked too rough for enemy armor to operate in it. From above, it looked as if coarse stone had been laid in a bed of cement. Using the ranging sights in his visor, Joe estimated that the rocks ran from forty centimeters to two meters in diameter, mostly with half to two-thirds embedded below the surface. The rocks covered an area perhaps twenty kilometers in diameter.

In the last hundred meters, Joe started adjusting the angle of his drop to set down on a low, relatively flat, space he had spotted. The belt was not infinitely adjustable. The direction of thrust could only be altered by five degrees from vertical. For a second, Joe tried spreading his arms to present more surface to the light breeze, working to get more lateral distance than he could with the belt alone. Not enough work had been done with the belts for there to be any "official" doctrine on that.

It worked well enough that Joe almost overshot the target he had set for himself. For the last second, he pulled himself almost into a ball, drawing up his legs and holding his arms close to his body. He worked the thrust of his belt, feathering in to a perfectly gentle landing. Hitting the ground was softer than stepping from one stair down to the next.

Joe's perfect landing was spoiled when his feet slid out from under him and he fell—heavily—on his ass. The rocks were covered by a thin mossy growth that was more slippery than water-covered ice. The fall knocked the breath from Joe's lungs. He banged the back of his helmet on the rock. The padding in his helmet was enough to prevent injury, but there were still a few seconds of confusion, enough time for virtually all of the first drop team to hit the ground. Nearly everyone fell, some with more force than Joe had.

"Watch it," he said, belatedly. "This moss is murder."

Joe didn't try to get to his feet. Standing up was the wrong posture for an infantryman in most cases anyway. He slid a little more as he rolled over onto his stomach, all of the way to the bottom of the slight depression. This stuff is going to be a real pain, he thought. At least there was no incoming fire yet, no apparent reaction to the landing.

"Talk to me," Joe said over his link to his squad leaders. He tried crawling on all fours, looking to get to the top of the depression. It was slow going. It was almost impossible to get any traction on the moss.

"Who greased the ground?" Ezra Frain asked. "How the hell we supposed to move on this?"