Side Show (22 page)

Suddenly Zel became aware of himself. He was standing rigidly still—had been for some unfathomable time. His fists were clenched at his sides, so tightly that he could feel stubby fingernails digging into his palms. At first, he was unable to release the pressure. He brought his hands up slowly, until the balled fists were close to the face. Even in the dim starlight, he could see what had to be blood running toward his wrists. Finally, by staring at the fists and willing movement, he opened the hands and saw the gouges on each palm.

His hands started shaking violently. Arms, shoulders. It took—subjectively, at least—an eternity for Zel to realize that he was crying, sobbing loudly.

Too loudly. He did force himself quiet, but not before a figure got up and ran toward him.

"You all right, sir?" Roo Vernon asked, anxiety plain in his voice.

Zel needed another eternity before he managed, "I'm okay, Chief."

"What's wrong with your hands?" Zel still had both hands in front of his face, staring at them.

"I think I need a couple of small patches, Chief." Zel's voice sounded dreamy, distant, to him. Roo came a step closer, grabbed Zel's hands, and lowered them enough so he could see the cuts.

"Yes, sir, I think you do," Roo said.
An' then some,
he thought, wondering who he could talk to. Lieutenant Paitcher obviously needed more help than a couple of small soaker patches to stop up the cuts on his hands, and the 13th's flight surgeon was back with the rest of the Accord troops, more than seventeen hundred kilometers away. "Come over here, sir, to the truck. I'll see what I can find." He tried to find a better solution, but in the end, all Roo could think to do was to leave Zel with one of the mechanics while he went to get another pilot to talk to him.

—|—

Zel wasn't the only member of the 13th who spent a mostly sleepless night. Van Stossen found himself unable to sleep for long either. Self-discipline and a lot of years in the military gave the colonel a few extra tricks. He did take several catnaps, but he rarely managed to stay asleep as much as thirty minutes at a time.

Every time he woke, he unfolded his mapboard and stared. The scene was always the same, or nearly so. The display was zoomed out to show a wide stretch of the continent, from the position of the Heggie unit trailing them to the ocean, and south to the main battle lines. The positions of friendly units were shown, as were the positions of Schlinal units, when known. There was no way to tell, simply by looking at the display, how out of date the data was, particularly for the Heggie units that were on the move. The unit coming up from behind, in trucks again, was gaining. From the various sightings made by the spyeyes, it looked as if that convoy hadn't stopped. Certainly, they had never been seen stopped. Always moving, closer.

A couple of times, Van got up and looked out into the night through his helmet visor, staring off in the direction of the river and the last practical crossing for vehicles—broad and shallow with a rocky bottom and decent grades on either side.

North or south?

He had quickly dismissed a third option, splitting the 13th, sending part north with the researchers while the rest stayed on the south side of the river to accept—seek—combat with the Heggie forces moving toward them. He had split off part of his command once already in this campaign, with disastrous results. He wasn't ready to try it again.

If the 13th moved north, they would—most likely—escape any fighting. In the near term. If the Accord should manage to prevail, the 13th might not have to do any more fighting at all. Only if the Accord lost could the 13th anticipate that the Schlinal garrison would come looking for them, and they would have all of the odds on their side then, an overwhelming advantage in numbers, undisputed control of the air, and leisure.

I have the authority to make that choice,
Stossen thought. No one would fault him. General Dacik had left the decision to him. He would be carrying out his primary orders—to keep the civilian researchers out of the hands of the Heggies.

It was well past three in the morning before Stossen asked himself the important question,
Can I live with that choice?

When he had the answer to that, he had the answer to which direction the 13th would take. He called the exec on their private channel, waking Parks.

"We stay on this side of the river, Dezo. East, then south... if we can manage it."

He did not sleep better after making his decision. He didn't even try. He went back to his mapboard, looking for ways to maximize the 13th's chances.

—|—

Reveille came ninety minutes before dawn. The men were given thirty minutes to prepare for the day's march—ride.

"We're staying on this side of the river," Joe said when Lieutenant Keye gave him the orders.

"How do you figure that?"

"That thirty minutes, sir. If we were crossing, we'd wait till a lot closer to dawn, have at least
some
light while we're in the water. Colonel wouldn't try that in the dark unless the enemy was right on our butts. We wouldn't have thirty minutes then. It'd be up and move right this second."

Joe couldn't see the lieutenant nod. They were thirty meters apart and not even looking at each other.

"You must be right," Keye said, though there had been nothing about the direction in his orders. "You keep making deductions like that, somebody's liable to tap you for Intelligence, maybe bending over a compsole up in CIC."

"I would purely hate that, Lieutenant," Joe said. The shiver was entirely in his mind. "I'd go crazy in a week."

Keye chuckled. "I'll keep that in mind."

Joe switched channels to talk to the platoon's noncoms. Then, once he was certain that there were enough people moving to get the platoon ready, he sat down with a meal pack. Breakfast took less than five minutes. The packaged field rations did not invite lingering.

There were still eight minutes left on the thirty when Joe started moving 2nd platoon into their Heyers. He was the last man in, pulling the hatch shut after him. Lieutenant Keye was at the forward splat gun again.

"Everybody accounted for, sir," Joe reported. "We're ready to roll."

They waited. It had gotten chilly during the night, so in the first minutes crowded in the Heyer, before it started moving, nobody complained about the crowding. The warmth was welcome. Accord battle dress was supposed to be designed to keep a man cool in the heat and warm in the cold. It did, but only within very narrow limits. Nature never seemed to hold to those limits.

Finally, the APC started moving forward, late. The earlier vehicles needed time to get started. The 13th would attempt to maintain strict intervals now, sacrificing a little speed to make sure that every unit was just where Colonel Stossen wanted it.

"Coulda slept another twenty minutes," Wiz Mackey groused. "Hurry up and wait. Same old bull."

"Nobody's keeping you awake," Mort Jaiffer told him. "You're still tired, sleep. And give us a rest."

"Only way I'd sleep in this mixer was if you started givin' one o' your history lectures. That'd put us all out better'n sleep patches."

Joe lowered his head and grinned. He had his visor down, so no one would have seen him smile anyway, but the movement was instinctive. The men were feeling better if they were up to bitching at one another. Let them enjoy it while it lasted. The ride would wear them out soon enough.

—|—

It was, according to the time line on Joe's visor display, exactly thirty-eight minutes after the APC started rolling that it lurched to a sudden stop and the men inside heard the first explosions. The 13th had rolled into an ambush.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

The surprise was complete. The five Wasps had taken off just as the 13th started to roll. They had moved high and away, scattering to do some reconnaissance work, looking for the current positions of the Schlinal units that were known to be heading for the 13th. From as far away as possible. The pilots' eyes and instruments were focused away from the 13th. They weren't concerned with a near ground search.

The two remaining recon platoons had rolled right past the ambush without challenge or warning. In their Heyers, the reccers hadn't spotted possible trouble. Intelligence said that there were no Schlinal forces within two hundred kilometers except for the one unit that was chasing from dead behind. The 13th was racing east again. There was no time to stop and let reccers move through the terrain on foot ahead of the rest. Moving that slow, all of the Schlinal regiments the 13th knew about would have had more than enough time to catch them.

When the shooting started, the recon platoons were eight kilometers east of the fight.

George Company was the first unit of the 13th hit by the initial assault. It was the forward line company on the march this morning. A full salvo from a battalion of Novas hit among the fourteen Heyers that were carrying George. Three were hit. Two more were disabled by near misses that ripped treads. One was flipped on its side by another near miss.

In the initial confusion, the remaining Heyers of George Company scattered. Some simply stopped while their drivers shouted for orders. Others sped up, what little extra speed they could manage, while the rest veered to one side or the other, looking for cover.

Lieutenant Vic Vickers, George's commander, was in one of the lead Heyers. His wasn't damaged by the initial salvo. He had a flurry of calls from platoon leaders and noncoms, pleas for help and orders, reports of losses. After twenty seconds, he simply cut off the channels for his company while he tried to get information from Colonel Stossen.

Stossen was almost as busy as Vickers. The rest of the convoy was also coming under attack. The Novas switched their aim. They had stopped the point company. After that, their guns raked the convoy, each company of tanks targeting a different portion. Their fire was rapid but not overly accurate.

Closer in, there were rockets and RPGs hitting as well. The grenades could do little harm even to a Heyer, but the shoulder-operated rockets could bring down a Wasp or stop a Havoc. And the Heyers were less well armored than the howitzers.

—|—

The five Wasps were recalled at once. "Attack on the deck," Zel told the others. He
was
flying again. There had been no choice. All that the medic had been able to do was give him a sedative—not even a sleep patch. There hadn't been enough of the night left. If there had been a spare pilot along, Zel would have been grounded, but he either flew his plane or the plane would have to be abandoned. And Colonel Stossen had made the decision. "If he can fly at all, he flies. We need that Wasp in the air."

Back in the cockpit, Zel no longer felt troubled. He was where he was most comfortable, doing what he had trained to do, busy enough to keep extraneous thoughts away.

The Wasps had been at ten thousand meters. Coming in, they spotted a number of flashes from the attacking Novas, loosely clustered in three different areas, all along the right flank of the 13th.

The Novas weren't alone, though. As the Wasps dove in to attack them, surface-to-air rockets came up from the Novas' infantry cover.

Launch and evade. Zel held his course steady for the extra seconds it took to get good target locks on two Novas. As soon as his missiles were on the way, he swerved hard right, then up, putting the throttles all of the way forward as he started his electronic countermeasures against the SAMs.

For an instant, he came close to blacking out as the gee-load hit him. His vision dimmed, and he felt himself sliding toward unconsciousness. Just before the load could become too much, he dragged back on the throttles, only enough to clear his vision.

He took a deep breath, hurried, while he tracked the SAMs on his heads-up display. One had already veered off, heading harmlessly to the south. The other had lost its lock but was close enough to regain it. Zel continued climbing, trying to maintain his margin on the missile. He dropped a decoy, then flipped left, twisting the Wasp around 90 degrees.

When he dove again, the SAM kept climbing, closing in on the decoy.

Zel turned his attention to the tanks again. Two of the Wasps from Red Flight were already into their second attack. Another flurry of rockets came up from the ground, toward those two planes.

Two more tanks lined up in Zel's TA system. He locked them in, showed them to his next two rockets, and launched. One of the Red Flight Wasps, trying to escape a Schlinal rocket, twisted into the path of one of Zel's missiles. Zel hit the projectile's destruct button, but too late. It struck the Wasp, outboard, taking off the last drive nacelle.

The pilot managed to eject. The cockpit/escape module shot upward thirty meters before the parachute deployed.

—|—

As soon as the APCs stopped and men started to pour out of them, the 13th came under fire from rifles and splat guns as well. But the infantry could respond quickly. They didn't need directives or fancy target acquisition systems.

"Hit it!" Joe shouted, slapping open the latch on the hatch. He jumped out, ran three steps, and dove to the ground. With more than 150 ground vehicles scattered around, there was little chance of being hit by rifle fire. Echo had been in the center column, just in front of the colonel's headquarters detachment and the bulk of the support vehicles.

Most of the Heyers turned outward, so that both of the splat guns each carried could be brought to bear on the flanks. Lieutenant Keye was still at the forward gun in the Heyer that Joe had just jumped out of. The driver took over the turret gun, sending Olly Wytten out, the last of first squad to emerge from a vehicle.

"Get out a defensive perimeter" had been all the order necessary to put the eight line companies of the 13th into action. From that, company grade officers and their noncoms could figure out what to do.

Only the recon platoons and the rear guard had avoided coming under attack so far. The tail received a few tank shells, but there was apparently no Schlinal infantry that far west. The companies on either side of the formation consolidated the perimeter at that end and sent out heavy patrols to try to identify just where the Heggies were.