Until Relieved (15 page)

"No, they're not going to leave us here," Joe replied. It had not taken long for word to spread that they were not going to be picked up on schedule, and that there was no definite new rendezvous time. Whatever was going on, it did not sound good. But Joe had to believe that the Accord would not abandon an entire assault team. That would be—if nothing else—a public relations disaster.

Joe was uncertain how to feel about this new mission. It did seem unfair that Echo Company would get chosen again. Most of the companies in the 13th had done nothing but lay around along the established perimeter since the first day of the fight. Echo had been in on everything.

The mission briefing had been pitifully short on details, and the whole idea seemed a little less than sane to Joe. In one breath the first sergeant had told them that they would have to start conserving food and ammunition, especially ammunition. With the next breath he had told them that they were going on a long-distance raid against the Heggie forces in the capital, with the possibility that they would face odds of more than fifty to one. Perhaps a lot more. And that they were expected to keep all of those Heggies busy, possibly for several days.

"How the hell can we conserve ammo and do that?" Joe had asked the first sergeant, face-to-face, not over the radio.

"I know how it sounds. Just tell your men not to get trigger-happy on this lark," First Sergeant Iz Walker replied, very softly. "We do what we can, Joe. I don't make the orders."

"Yeah, well." Joe just shook his head and walked away. He had made his point. All he could do then was obey those orders, the best he could.

Now, he was shepherding his men back into one of the shuttles, but not to return to the ship for a ride home. Realizing that made Joe feel uncomfortable.
Home.
Maybe home was nothing more than a private room in a barracks full of soldiers, but it was a definite place to Joe Baerclau.

"Just going to be a nuisance to the enemy, buzz around and keep them busy," Joe told the squad when they were in their seats in the shuttle. "In and out, back and forth. Play keep away if we have to. We did so good up at Maison, the colonel thinks we can lick the whole Heggie garrison."

No one responded to Joe's light assessment of the mission. The platoon had already lost three men killed and two more seriously wounded and evacuated to the hospital ship. The fight had gotten personal. Everyone had lost buddies, but more than that, the news that the exec had been crushed by a tank had really sobered the men.
Brass
never got killed. They stayed back where it was safe. Most of the men continued to think that, despite evidence to the contrary.

As soon as he strapped himself in, Joe leaned back and closed his eyes. It was no surprise that he was two days short on sleep and ready to go another night not only without sleep but marching across hostile territory toward a morning attack. Joe did not sleep in the shuttle, not really. He was not certain whether or not he even dozed. Afterward, he figured that he might have napped for three or four minutes. It could not have been longer than that. As soon as the shuttle lifted off, Joe was awake, eyes open, looking around.

How long will my luck run?
he asked himself. That was especially disturbing. He had never gone into combat asking himself that question before.

—|—

Originally considered to be "merely" a refinement to the latest reconciliation of general relativity and quantum mechanics, the Loughlin-Runninghorse equations were first sketched out in the twenty-first century AD. Even then, full expansion of the basic system of seventeen equations required nearly fifty hours of concentrated attention from a network of the six most powerful academic supercomputers on Earth. Understanding the equations and their most "obvious" implications took physicists and mathematicians most of the next century. It was recognized that if correct, the theories implicit in the equations required the objective reality of a paradimensional aspect to space—
hyperspace
(though the scientific community struggled heroically for years to find an acceptable alternative to that term, the general public, conditioned by two centuries of the term's use in fiction, refused every offering)—and the potential for the development of what was immediately (though somewhat imprecisely) dubbed antigravity because that was the use most readily imagined for the promised technology. More properly termed a protectable artificial gravity generator, it becomes
anti
gravity only when its field is used to nullify local natural gravity. The field can also be projected so that its effect is
added
to local natural gravity, or directed at any angle to the natural field. For a time, considerable amounts of research money and thought were devoted to exploring the possibility of using projectable artificial gravity generators as offensive weapons, but eventually those efforts limped into oblivion.

The Loughlin-Runninghorse equations also pointed the way to the development of the first hyperspace drive, a technology that proved to be surprisingly close to that for artificial gravity—a superset of the artificial gravity technology. In the words of one less-than-original contemporary academic wag, "You can't have one without the other."

Perhaps the greatest measure of the significance of the theoretical work can be gauged from the fact that the year of the original publication of the Loughlin-Runninghorse equations was chosen as Year One, SA.

—|—

The five shuttles lifted off from the LZ together, then quickly moved apart. The only noise made by the drives that powered them was an almost subsonic whine, more felt than heard. Within the shuttles, there was the inevitable slight vibration, a product more of being in an atmosphere than just of being under AG drive. The shuttles headed west-southwest, barely clearing the highest treetops on the plateau. As soon as they passed the escarpment, the pilots of all five shuttles reduced power long enough to drop them nearly to the level of the rift valley below. The effect, for their passengers, was rather like being in an out-of-control lift cage as it hurtled three-hundred meters downward. Near the end of the drop, as the throttles were edged forward to provide more power, apparent gravity within the shuttles increased briefly to more than two and a half times normal. Once the descent had been checked, the feeling of weight returned to normal.

"Another hot landing drill," Joe cautioned his men once he had recovered from the sensation of falling three-hundred meters. "We go out as if the entire Heggie army might be waiting for us."
They might be,
he warned himself. Supposedly, the Heggies were unable to spot and track the shuttles in the kind of maneuvers they were making. Perhaps they had spotted the landers coming in over the LZ earlier. It had still been daylight then, and the black craft would have been visible to the naked eye. But, according to Captain Ingels, the Heggies had no spyeyes in orbit over Porter any longer. Those had all been wiped out the morning of the initial landing, and there were no Schlinal ships around to replace them.

But who really knows?
Joe asked himself.

"Get out in proper order and find a good piece of ground to hug," he continued, speaking slowly over the squad frequency. "According to CIC there won't be any Heggies right there, but assume they're wrong. It wouldn't be the first time." That was more for effect than accurate. CIC might occasionally miss something, but rarely by much. They were good. The 13th could not survive without good eyes, and better brains, watching over them. That meant, at present, that even if there were Heggies around where they landed, the force would probably be no larger than—perhaps—platoon size. A patrol that large might slip past the spyeyes.

"Just tell me this isn't as crazy as it sounds," Mort said over his private channel to Joe.

"Colonel's always been pretty savvy, Mort," Joe replied. It was the most positive comment he could come up with at the moment.

Most of the men tried to get what rest they could during the short hop in the landers. Soldiers got like that. Sleep when you can, even if only for a few seconds. It might be days before you get anything longer. Joe looked around. He saw closed eyes. Perhaps not many of the men were actually sleeping, but they looked the part. Of the privates in his squad, only Kam Goff had his eyes open—wide open, staring blankly ahead of him.

Gonna have to watch him closer than ever,
Joe thought. Goff looked as if he had gone beyond fear, and Joe couldn't guess which way the rookie would tumble. He might come out of it on his own, but he also might freeze up or become foolhardy. In any case, there was no way that Joe could cut Goff out of the action now. He might still work out, with a little luck, and the right nudge at the right time, but Joe hoped that he wouldn't have to bet his life on it. Still, that was why Joe had taken both new men into his own fire team, so he could give them as much personal attention as possible. At least Al Bergon was cool. He had shown from the start that he could handle whatever combat threw at him. That was far from unusual among men who volunteered for additional duties as medics. Joe shook his head, an almost-invisible gesture within his helmet.
Where do they come from?

"Thirty seconds," the pilot warned, and time for reflection was gone. Eyes opened. Men looked around, as if they might see something new within the troop bay. The monitors on the bulkheads showed an infrared image of the ground they were approaching, overlaid on a photographic map. The shuttle was flying low, so the cameras didn't show much, and the view moved by too rapidly for the men to see any detail. But there were no telltale hot spots showing up, nothing too bright to be natural in IR.

The dim red lights that had been the only illumination in the troop bay were extinguished before the shuttle landed. Equally dim green lights came on over the exits. Shielded inside long cylinders, and hitting only nonreflective surfaces, the lights would not show through to anyone on the outside. The men all had their visors down and night-sight gear activated. They didn't need additional lights. Before the four doors were fully open, the men were all on their feet moving toward their assigned exits, safeties off on their rifles, ready for action the instant they went through the doorway and had a field of fire open in front of them.

"Stay close to me, kid," Joe whispered to Goff as they went through the doorway. "I mean
close
."

"Yes, Sarge," Kam replied. His voice sounded distant, as if he were not truly inside his head.

The terrain where the shuttles landed was much different from up on the plateau. Around the main LZs, the ground had been flat, except for the cones of dirt around the trunks of that one species of tree. Only up near Maison had the land been at all uneven, and there it was a matter of a few small hills. In this part of the rift valley though, the ground was extremely broken up, uneven and rocky. There were thickets and small stands of trees, narrow valleys with thin, shallow streams running through them, large stone protrusions and occasional dry clefts in the ground, ravines, or gullies. It was topological confusion, an excellent arena for soldiers who preferred not to have their presence detected.

The shuttles had been forced to separate to find spaces to land. There was no single flat area around where all five of them could have landed together. There was scarcely a place where two would fit, even with exceptionally talented pilots.

That meant that a certain amount of time was wasted after debarkation as the separated units joined up and commanders made sure that no one had been lost in the initial confusion. By the time the strike force had reorganized itself for the march toward Porter City, the shuttles had lifted off and disappeared into the night, flying farther west before lifting toward orbit and a rendezvous with their mother ships. It was too dangerous to hold the shuttles on-world where they would be tempting targets for the enemy. If the 13th had to make a hasty exit from Porter, under fire, they would need every shuttle the fleet carried.

"I knew we had a long march ahead of us," Mort told Joe once the force had started moving, "but I didn't realize it was mountain goat country."

"Good cover," Joe said. He kept his head turning. The platoon was in two columns, one on either side of a creek running along the bottom of the gully they were in.

"Good cover for the enemy too," Mort replied.

"I know, so cut the chatter and keep your eyes open." Men got too used to the privacy of communicating over their helmet radios. Sound discipline was an enduring problem.

The enemy has no business being close enough to set up an ambush.
Joe repeated that to himself. The strike force had landed in the most deserted sector to be found within fifty kilometers of Porter City. There weren't even any farms within twenty kilometers, no sign at all of human habitation. It
might
be just the sort of area a military commander would choose for field exercises, but the Heggies were unlikely to be out on training maneuvers with the 13th sitting on the plateau. At a time like this, everything would be for real, not training.

But Joe remained nervous. That was the only way to go into combat.

—|—

Eustace Ponks had his hatch open as Basset two raced across the rift valley. Every few minutes—when the ride seemed smooth enough—he would reach up, grab the rim of the hatchway, and lift his head out into the open air. The Havoc was making a steady sixty kilometers per hour, very close to its top speed. Eustace was unaware of the discussions that had taken place between the 13th's commanding and operations officers. All he knew was what was in the final orders that had come down. Basset Battery was to race full tilt toward Porter City. They had to cover five-hundred kilometers in less than ten hours in order to be in position to support the infantry raid against the city. The sooner they could get within range of the strike force, the sooner they would be able to bring their guns to bear, in case Echo and George companies and the two recon platoons were discovered and attacked before they reached their target.