Side Show (2 page)

"If we've stopped an invasion somewhere else," Stossen offered, "then we've managed
something
."

"Yes." The word was almost a sigh. Dacik looked off toward the wall for a moment. When he returned his gaze to Stossen, the vagueness was gone from his manner. It was time for business. "I'm afraid I am going to drop a major bomb on you, Van. No way around it."

"Yes, sir."

"The 13th is in the best condition of the three SATs I have here. That's why you've drawn the short straw. You and your men have until sunset tomorrow. Rest the men. Get a few extra meals into everybody. Replenish your stores, munitions, food, the works. You'll have top priority."

"And then?" Stossen asked when the general paused.

Dacik stood. "Come over here." He moved to a large mapboard hung on the wall. He flipped the map on, showing all of the only significantly inhabited continent on Jordan.

Stossen let his eyes travel quickly over the sixty-centimeter board, a dedicated mainframe linked to a central mapping mainframe on one of the ships in orbit, just as his own, smaller, mapboard was. Both Accord and Hegemony positions were marked, as far as they were known. The Accord had landed on the eastern seaboard, just south of the capital, and they had managed to flesh out a significant foothold, a rough semicircle with a depth of seventy kilometers and the ocean at the rear. It had taken only four days to manage that... and then some. On the fifth day, the expansion had been stopped cold, and in some areas, reversed.

Dacik stabbed a finger at a point well beyond the Accord perimeter, a third of the way across the continent.

"Telchuk Mountain," he said. "There's a secret laboratory there, inside the mountain. The people there have managed to stay undiscovered the entire time that the Heggies have been here."

"Two years?"

"Roughly," Dacik agreed. "And, yes, we know they're still there. We've had communications with them since we landed."

"Important research, I take it," Stossen said. The fact that the lab had been hidden was enough to make the deduction inescapable. Hidden
before
the invasion, which meant before the war started, since the invasions of Jordan and Porter had been the
casus belli
.

"Yes, but don't ask me what. The immediate concern is that we have to reach them. There's undoubtedly a limit to how long their luck can last, and the facility wasn't designed to provide cover against an occupying enemy. And we don't dare let the Heggies get those scientists."

"Which is where the 13th fits in?" Stossen was already trying to estimate the distance involved. Too far for comfort.

"Yes. We might be forced to evacuate Jordan. If we do, we can't leave those people behind. Three of them. I'll let you scan bios, but you'll have to make do with what you can remember of them. No notes or photos leave this building. Until you get there, only your exec and ops officers are to be told what this is all about."

"Yes, sir."

"The entire landing force will stage an attack tomorrow at sunset. All out, as if we're trying to break out of our foothold and go back on the offensive. The 13th will marshal behind the lines and pop through whatever hole we can open in the Heggie lines. Once you're through that gap, you head straight for Telchuk Mountain. Well, not
straight
for it. Don't give the Heggies a vector they can use to get there before you do. You're to make every effort to rescue the scientists and their staff. If it proves impossible to get them back to us, the vital thing is that they're not to fall into enemy hands,
no matter what
." The stress on those last words was unmistakable. "Is that clear?"

"Perfectly clear, sir. We don't let the Heggies have them, whatever else happens. No matter what we have to do to make certain of that."

"I wish we could bring down landers to drop you closer to Telchuk. It's a thousand kilometers away, across some fairly difficult terrain, but we can't.
Can't.
" Dacik pressed his eyes closed, then opened them again.

"We
are
going to try to collect enough armored personnel carriers for you. Make the job of getting
to
Telchuk a little easier. You'll have your Havocs and their support vans. Take half of the ground crews for your Wasps and leave the rest. As long as possible, your Wasps will give you cover from here. When you get to the end of their effective range... maybe we'll be able to move them out to you, operating from wherever you can get them to their support crews. Beyond that, once you get through our lines tomorrow night, you'll be completely on your own, and I do mean
completely
. We won't even be able to bring in landers to evacuate your wounded. We're managing local air parity, over the ground we control. There's not a chance we could support landing operations beyond the perimeter."

"I understand, sir."

Dacik nodded. "My staff is set up to give you a complete briefing."

"One question." Stossen waited for the general's nod before he asked it. "How much time do we have?"

Dacik looked away from the colonel. "I can't even guarantee that you'll have enough time to reach Telchuk Mountain, Van, even if you go flat out and meet no opposition. If worse comes to worst here, we'll have to leave you behind if you're... somewhere out there. All I can say is, do the job as quickly as you can, but
do
it, no matter what. You are to consider the 13th completely expendable. Just do the job." By the end, Dacik's voice had faded almost to a whisper.

—|—

"Hey, Sarge! Who fouled up and gave us time off?" Al Bergon asked. Al was the medic for first squad.

"Don't ask questions," Joe Baerclau replied. "They'll find their mistake soon enough. You check your whole squad?"

Bergon nodded. "Everybody's up to par, medically speaking."

"Get your rifle cleaned, and then yourself," Joe said. "This lark won't last long." Bergon nodded and strolled off, back to his mates in first squad.

Joe was almost finished cleaning his own wire carbine, the Mark VI Armanoc. The zipper fired short lengths of collapsed uranium wire from twenty-meter spools. Joe could take the rifle apart and put it back together in the dark, or asleep, in fifteen seconds. He had had a lot of practice. Right now, he was scarcely aware of what he was doing. He was already thinking ahead to a hot shower, a fresh uniform, and as much sleep as he could fit in while he had a chance. He had no illusions. Whatever the reason why the entire 13th had been pulled out of the lines, it wasn't for a vacation. Not with the invasion locked in a bloody stalemate. The 13th was being prepped for something new, and most likely deadly.

Showers had been jury-rigged some thirty meters off. Outside the entrance were stacks of fresh fatigues with the built-in net armor and the camouflage pattern that had been designed specifically for this campaign. On another field table were stacks of towels and small bars of soap.

While he showered, Joe kept his battle helmet close, upended so that he would hear any calls that came in. Even naked and lathered up, he could scarcely consider himself off duty. He anticipated some sort of briefing, as soon as there was anything to say. Word that the colonel had been summoned to headquarters had spread through the 13th in minutes. And as soon as the colonel got back...

A smell of cooking food found its way into the shower tent, strong enough to overpower the smell of disinfectant soap. Joe sniffed deeply and hurried through the finish of his shower.

Field kitchens had been set up, and that was even more unusual than being pulled out of the lines. The promise of something better than the self-heating field rations that were a soldier's normal lot on campaign almost made whatever might come afterward seem worthwhile.

Joe was just tightening the closures on his boots when he got the call from Lieutenant Keye on the noncoms' circuit. "Chow time. Get everybody in for lunch."

Joe donned his battle helmet and relayed the call over the platoon channel. "Let's not have a riot getting there," he added.

Most of the men of the 13th got only the good news that evening, that they had another twenty-five hours (the day on Jordan was ninety minutes longer than Earth-standard) to do nothing but eat, sleep, and take care of their gear. Colonel Stossen only briefed his own staff and the company commanders, and even they got only the minimal information they would need before the 13th reached its target. The rest of the officers and the senior noncoms got the news the next morning, just after their third consecutive hot field-kitchen meal.

Joe Baerclau had his men clean their weapons again before lunch.

CHAPTER TWO

The Accord's 15 Spaceborne Assault Teams were the fundamental building blocks of its combined arms organization. Each of the SATs was capable of extended service without support from other units. Besides eight line companies of infantry and four 60-man recon platoons, the team also included a squadron of twenty-four Wasp fighter planes and a battalion of thirty-six Havoc 200mm self-propelled howitzers, with the necessary support personnel. Authorized strength for an SAT was slightly over two thousand officers and enlisted men. None of the SATs on Jordan was at full strength. They hadn't been at the time of the landing, and all had lost men since.

The Accord of Free Worlds had committed more than thirty-five thousand combat troops to the campaign to liberate Jordan. In addition to the three SATs, there were a half dozen regimental combat teams plus supporting artillery and fighters. With the fleet support in orbit over Jordan, the total commitment topped forty-five thousand.

The 13th's Wasp Air Group and its Havoc battalion were the only segments involved in the covering attack for the breakout.

There was always enough work involved in an artillery fight to keep all four men of a Havoc's crew busy. The driver and gun commander sat on either side of the gun barrel, at the front of the turret, about in the middle of the ten-meter length of the gun carriage. The gunner and loader sat farther back, and lower. Right now, the rear compartments of the 13th's Havocs were more congested than usual. Each gun had taken on a half dozen rounds more than its ammo racks could hold. Those six shells were to be the first expended, in this initial assault.

Gunnery Sergeant Eustace Ponks was the gun commander for Basset two, also known as "the Fat Turtle" after the artwork that decorated the side of the turret next to the commander's hatch. The Havoc batteries were all named after dog breeds, an ancient pun... "Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war."

"Okay, Simon, start moving us into position," Ponks said after the fourth round was out.

Simon Kilgore, Basset two's driver, nodded. Even with radios for intra-crew communication, a nod was a better answer.

Eustace saw the gesture, but he was already relaying the gun's next target to Karl Mennem, the gunner. Jimmy Ysinde, the loader, already had the round locked in.

A Havoc could fire standing still or moving at sixty kilometers per hour with equal accuracy, but the entire gun carriage had to be pointed roughly toward the target. With a low turret, the gun itself could only be rotated six-and-a-half degrees to either side of the vehicle's center line. At a range of ten kilometers, a Havoc could drop a shell within its own length from the aim point. Even at twenty kilometers, it seldom hit more than three meters from the point targeted. Since the suspended plasma shells had an effective radius of destruction of twenty meters, that was sufficient.

The Havoc was ten meters long, armored only heavily enough to stop small arms fire. To escape heavier counterbattery fire, it depended on speed and maneuverability. It also depended on infantry to keep enemy ground troops far enough off that they couldn't use shoulder-operated rockets, and on the Wasps to keep enemy air power out of range.

The 13th's thirty-two remaining Havocs (four had been lost in the first two weeks of fighting) maneuvered near the center of the Accord lines, far enough behind the front for relative safety, close enough to be able to move forward quickly when a hole opened up. After firing six rounds apiece, the 13th's Havocs fell silent. In the continuing bombardment, it was unlikely that the enemy would notice that so many guns had quit participating.

"I hope somebody opens something up soon," Eustace muttered. "I don't like stooging around in one place." The thirty-two guns were far too close together for the comfort of any of their crews. Massed artillery made for nothing more than a large, irresistible target.

"We might be safer getting hit here," Simon said. "I don't think much of this chase."

"Hell, once we put a hundred klicks between us and the lines, there shouldn't be many Heggies around," Eustace replied. He held up a hand to stop Simon's rejoinder. "I'm getting something on the command net."

—|—

At a dozen points along the Accord perimeter, infantry and armor units were making forays in strength, probing for weak points in the Heggie positions. Between those probes, smaller patrols were also looking for potential avenues out. Beyond the lines, recon patrols had infiltrated to create diversions and plant mines to disrupt Heggie attempts to move troops. Artillery barrages and consolidated attacks by Wasps worked to create gaps. Unless a usable path through the encircling Schlinal lines could be found or made, the entire plan would fail. Worse, it might expose the Accord to a devastating counterattack, and that might be fatal to the liberation of Jordan.

—|—

"Mount up!" Joe Baerclau said over his platoon channel. The men of the 13th had not waited inside the APCs that would carry them. The armored vehicles might be tempting to enemy artillery or aircraft. The battle had been in full swing for nearly an hour and a half before the movement order arrived. A gap—marginal, perhaps—had finally been opened up in the Hegemony's line. Now, all the 13th had to do was get through that hole before someone plugged it.

The Heyer armored personnel carrier was designed for a crew of three and seven passengers, one squad. The Heyers gathered for the 13th were more crowded than that. Some carried twelve men, others as many as fourteen. Crewmen from other units had been replaced by men from the 13th, put into service as operators for the two splat guns each APC sported. Only the original drivers remained. Piloting a Heyer was a little more complicated than driving a skimmer.