Side Show (17 page)

Coming in the next time with cannon instead of missiles, Zel was right at ground level. To the Schlinal troops he was aimed at, it had to appear as if he had come out from behind a stand of trees, no more than a hundred meters from the nearest truck and less than five meters off the ground. While his 25mm cannons were firing, with the needle-like projectiles spreading out, there was nothing any mudder could do but hug dirt and hope that he wasn't in the direct path of any of those splinters. Two trucks erupted as fuel tanks were sieved.

Zel would have jumped, had he been able to, when he saw the muzzle flash on a Nova almost directly in front of him.

"Too low!" he said, unaware that he was screaming. The Wasps had evaded any enemy missiles with the tactic, but that had put them low enough for the enemy tankers to take a few shots.

Zel flipped his Wasp to the left, going through three complete rolls no more than ten meters off of the ground, before he turned and fled.

"I counted five shots," Jase called over the radio. He was shouting too.

"Let's get out of here before they start up again," Zel said.
I don't want to try that again.

—|—

Basset and Dingo batteries were heading west, traveling back over ground they had traversed only hours before. For what little good it might do them, the Havocs were all running with thermal tarps tied in place over them.

"It's nuts," Simon Kilgore said in Basset two. "We're putting out an exhaust plume fifty meters long in infrared. What possible good can that tarp do except partially blind
us
?"

"It saves us the trouble of putting it up every time we stop," Eustace replied. He wasn't happy with the tarp either, but as long as Simon was complaining, he wouldn't. "And we can see just fine. I made sure none of the lenses were covered when we strapped it on. Don't use that as an excuse for your driving."

That
shut Simon up, for a time at least. A slur against his driving ability was almost guaranteed to provide at least fifteen minutes of silence from him—save for the demands of the work.

An ambush. Eustace was rather intrigued by the possibilities. Havocs weren't normally used that way, stuck in camouflaged positions to wait for an enemy to come within certain killing range. It was dangerous, but it would also give them a chance to inflict heavy damage. Once the shooting started, the Havocs would be moving again, no doubt about that. And then it would be the same old chase. But the initial ambush might give them a decent advantage, even if the Heggies still had the numbers, and the tanks.

Eustace paid more attention than usual to the map console in front of him. It was scaled back to show a two-hundred kilometer square now. In most actions, Eustace kept the scale much tighter, worrying only about the twenty to thirty kilometers right around the Fat Turtle. The danger zone. But now he was watching two other groups—the Heggie column and the retreating Heyer APCs. If either of them changed course, the Havocs might also have to make adjustments.

Haul 'em right past us,
Eustace thought, a silent message to the Heyers.
We'll be waiting.
He grinned. Basset and Dingo could get in a little payback for what these Heggies and their air support had done to Afghan Battery.

"When we make our final turn to the right, we'll drag down on the throttles, do what we can to minimize the exhaust," Eustace said. That was as far as he would go toward soothing Simon's hurt feelings. They
were
part of the same team. The men of a gun crew lived and, all too often, died together. They were cooped up with each other all of the time in the Fat Turtle. It wouldn't do to let conditions get
too
strained.

Simon didn't respond. As long as the engines were running, it wouldn't make much difference if they rode along at an idle. There would still be that plume of heat behind them.

—|—

"I want good holes," Joe Baerclau told his squad leaders. "It looks as if we'll be here at least eight hours, maybe longer. Colonel said we're waiting for the APCs. If they can't shake the Heggies chasing them before they get here, we could have our hands full."

"They're
leading
the Heggies to us?" Ezra asked.

"No, they're leading their tanks, maybe all of 'em, into an ambush, a good 250 klicks or more from here. Air and artillery both gonna blast the Heggies. Colonel says maximum effort."

"Three Wasps?" Sauv Degtree said; it wasn't really a question. The third squad's leader was blunt under the best of circumstances, and these weren't the best.

"Red Flight's coming out to get in on this one," Joe said. "That's another five or six Wasps. I don't know how many they've got left. That still works out to about half the entire wing. And two batteries of Havocs."

"We'd still better get our sleep while we can," Degtree said. "Heggies will be on us soon enough."

"We'll do our job," Joe said. "Now, see to your men. One man from each squad on watch. Rotate them enough so's everybody gets as much sleep as possible. We all need that after the last couple of days. And one squad leader up at all times. I'll share that round with the four of you, and take the first watch. I hear anything more, I'll let you know."

Joe had to work to keep from snapping. Thanks to that sleep patch he'd been hit with—yesterday?—he was still several hours ahead of the other noncoms in the platoon on sleep. Even he was edgy. They had more excuse.

To use the energy his edginess gave him, Joe worked at improving his foxhole. It was just large enough for two men, side by side. Even though Joe was alone in the hole, he made it large enough for two, just in case. But no larger. That would just make the hole a better target for anyone trying to toss a grenade in. With the extra time, he put a grenade sump hole in at the bottom, a cavity slanting off to the side. With a little luck, a grenade would roll all of the way down there before it exploded, shielding Joe from the shrapnel. Lacking a grenade, the sump would also take care of water should it start raining again.

It was an extra touch there wasn't often time to incorporate.

Joe had built up a low dirt berm around the hole and packed it. He prepared firing positions on every side. Even though Echo was facing one side of the elliptical area the 13th was camped in, Joe wanted to be ready no matter which direction the enemy might attack from.

When the hole was finally done to his satisfaction, Joe sat down and pulled out a meal pack. He had a narrow ledge to sit on that kept his eyes above ground level, just enough. In any case, any threat was still—
almost certainly
—hours away. They hadn't seen any evidence all day that anyone had ever been over the ground they were marching across.

—|—

"How could the general issue an order like that?" Teu Ingels asked. The colonel and his staff were inside the APC that served as the 13th's command post. "I mean, we're supposed to kill
women
to keep them from the Heggies?"

The women in question, all of the researchers and their assistants, were camped at some distance from the command post, still under the watchful eyes of Sergeant Abru's SI team and the 13th's headquarters security detail.

"Maybe the general didn't know there were women," Dezo Parks suggested.

"Men or women, what's the difference?" Bal Kenneck asked. "It's too important that they don't fall into enemy hands with what they know. If we can't prevent capture, we have no alternative."

"
That
, gentlemen, is the bottom line," Stossen said. He had been listening to the debate with growing impatience for ten minutes. He didn't like the possibility any more than Ingels or the others, but he also knew that, somehow, the order had to be obeyed. "Dr. Corey herself emphasized the importance of making certain that she and her people are not taken by the Hegemony. If you have no stomach for the one option, find a way to make sure that it never comes down to that and quit this pointless arguing."

Stossen took a deep breath and leaned back when he realized that he had started shouting. When he resumed, he was doing little more than whispering.

"I don't like the idea either, but the 13th
will
obey its orders. If I have to carry them out personally." He let his gaze travel around the circle of officers. Because of the limited room available in a Heyer, they were
close
. "It's a rotten position to be in, but we have no choice."

"The 13th gets stuck with the crapola again," Kenneck said.

"We get the tough assignments because the brass knows that the 13th does what it has to. We get results. We do the job. That's not going to change simply because we've been given an order we... don't... like." The last three words were widely spaced and spoken through clenched teeth.

"We're a long way from final options," Dezo said. "Bal, what's the latest from CIC?"

Kenneck shrugged. "That reinforced regiment, what's left of it, is still chasing our Heyers, but they're too far back to pose any immediate threat. Another ten or fifteen minutes and our two Havoc batteries will be in position for the ambush. Red Flight's due in for fresh power cells at about the same time. Blue Flight is up to cover that operation. Then they'll land and take on fresh batteries of their own. Unless something unforeseen happens, the ambush should be sprung about twenty minutes past midnight."

The others all looked at either their watches or at the time line on their helmet visor displays.

"Less than a half hour from now," Ingels noted.

"What happens after that depends on what happens then," Kenneck said. "We can't hope to take out much of the Heggie infantry in the dark. Not if they play it smart. What we hope to do is destroy the rest of their armor and the trucks they have left now. It might be dawn before we know whether or not they're still coming after us." He let a smile slide briefly across his face. "At least they'll be on foot, and without much armor by then."

"Don't count on that until we can see it," Stossen said. "The last thing we can afford is overconfidence. We've already had their trucks reported destroyed once only to find out that they were still traveling forty klicks every hour."

"Even if we do take out this regiment as an effective fighting force, there's no way to say that's the end of it for us," Teu said, speaking as softly as the colonel had earlier. "It just might make the Heggies decide that we're worth an even greater effort. And we're a long way from any kind of safety."

—|—

The eight Wasps staged at twenty thousand meters over the Heggie column. Climbing that far was a drain on their batteries. It would cut their air time considerably. In the dark, they were invisible to any enemy detection gear. With the Wasps' stealth technology and with the antigrav engines running at low throttle, they were less than ghosts. They could cruise unheard, unseen, at two hundred meters in the night. But the fighters were waiting, high enough that they wouldn't even be stumbled on by enemy Boems. Until the Havocs opened the attack, and the Heggies had identified the incoming fire as artillery, the planes would stay out of the fight, completely. Once the Schlinal force was concentrating on countering a ground attack, the Wasps would dive in, aiming for tanks and trucks. And if Boems arrived, the Wasps would be there to keep them occupied, away from the Havocs.

"Just stay cool," Zel told Irv and Jase. "Remember, at night, mudders have about as much chance of hitting us as I do of becoming Prime Minister of the Accord."

"Unless they've got Boems to back 'em up," Jase said.

"There could be a hundred Boems right here with us and we wouldn't know it until they turned on their TA systems," Irv added. TA: target acquisition. The Wasps' sensors would pick up any enemy TA radar as soon as it brushed them. And vice versa.

"If there were even half that many, one of us would have stumbled onto them, the hard way, by now," Zel said. He wasn't trying to be funny, and no one laughed. "Just watch for the shooting to start down below."

They would see the flashes of shells being fired as clearly as they might see lightning streaking across the sky. Once they were alerted by those flashes, they would be watching for the explosions at the other end. The navigation monitors in all of the Wasp cockpits showed the positions of the Havocs as blue crosses. Transponders in the guns would keep the aircraft apprised of their locations no matter how wildly guns or planes moved once the fighting started. And the targeting systems would not allow a Wasp pilot to mistakenly lock on to a Havoc. That would take a specific override, with two fallback safeties.

Zel thumbed off his microphone just long enough to whisper, "Slee, this time's for you. We'll do what we're supposed to do."

Then he saw the first flashes as the howitzers opened up. Silently, he counted the seconds until the first explosions appeared on the other end of their ballistic trajectories.

"Get ready," he warned the other pilots of his own flight. "Red is going in first, from in front of the column. We'll come in from the far side." The side away from the Havocs.

Less than thirty seconds passed before he saw muzzle flashes from the Heggie column as Novas started to return fire. A quick glance at the scale on his navigating monitor assured Zel that the Novas were too far away to hit the Havocs. They were firing blind.

Wait,
he told himself. Then he opened his link to the commander of Red Flight to make sure that he knew that the Heggies didn't have any certain targets yet.

"I know, Zel. We'll wait... a few seconds, at least."

The tanks were moving, racing, using the vector of the incoming rounds to guide them. It wouldn't take them long to get close enough to make their return fire count.

The blue crosses were moving, jumping to new firing positions.

"Okay, Zel," the Red Flight leader said. "Here we go. See you later."

"Yeah, later," Zel replied absently. He switched channels to pass the word to the other pilots of his own flight.