Until Relieved (2 page)

The fleet of landers accelerated toward the northern hemisphere of Porter, aiming toward the plateau northeast of the rift valley that held the bulk of the world's population, and the bulk of the occupying Schlinal Hegemony forces. Monitors spaced high on the curved bulkheads of the troop bay gave the soldiers a chance to see where they were going.

A "hot" landing raised havoc with the senses, destroying natural orientations. At its peak, acceleration made "up" toward the ground, and "down" toward open space. With the bench seats in the troop bay facing fore and aft, some men felt as if they were being hurtled face first at the world, while the rest felt as if they were "falling" backward. It would not be until the last minute that "down" would be beneath the feet of the soldiers and pointed toward the ground, when the shuttles went to full power on their antigravity drives to land their passengers softly. For a time, the men would be subjected to more than three gees.

Joe Baerclau felt a familiar sour taste in his mouth and throat as the approach upset his stomach. That happened every time he went through one of these hot landings. He wanted to close his eyes but did not dare. If he did, the sensation of falling would be even stronger, and he doubted that he could control his nausea then. He could already hear some of the men in the bay retching into motion sickness bags, and a faint smell of vomit started to overpower the more familiar odor of lubricants. Even a veteran was susceptible. The human body had never been designed for such rough conveyance.

To keep his mind occupied, Joe went over his squad's initial movements once they disembarked. Again. Each squad had its own assignment in those first seconds and minutes. There might not be time to think through alternatives if the landing was heavily opposed, and they would not know the strength of the opposition until they reached the ground. Attacking across interstellar space meant that they had no up-to-the-minute intelligence on enemy strength and deployment. With luck, they would have that information shortly after they landed. Each of the shuttles was scanning constantly, and the transports and escort vessels would also be launching probes.

Breathe deeply,
Joe told himself as he felt nausea rise again. It did not seem to matter how many times he took rides like this, or whether or not he ate before. His stomach always objected. The lander stopped accelerating toward the ground and switched the direction of its antigrav drives to brake. That reversal almost made the difference. Joe's hand started to slide toward the rack on the front of his seat that held the airsick bags.

The shuttle started to vibrate from the surge of power and from the buffeting of Porter's atmosphere. The landing craft were built too sturdily for there to be the slightest danger of it breaking up in flight just from shaking. Shuttles had even been known to remain recognizable after three-gee crashes—though the same could not be said for their occupants.

Joe noticed that the palms of his hands were sweating. He wiped them against the net armor of his combat fatigues, one hand at a time, using the other hand to hold his zipper, a Mark VI Armanoc wire carbine.

Over the platoon channel on his helmet radio, Joe heard the "lock and load" command from Platoon Sergeant Maycroft. Joe clicked back to his squad frequency and repeated the order while he charged his own rifle.

"Mind your safeties," he added.

Less than two minutes left,
he thought. He took several deep breaths, making them as long and slow as he could while the feeling of weight built up. The monitors on the bulkheads showed a variety of views now. They were finally close enough to get a decent look at the terrain.

"It could be worse," Joe muttered softly after scanning several of the screens. There was enough open ground for the fleet of landers, with cover close enough for the men once they got away from the boats. Most importantly, there were no rocket trails visible, no sign of anything that might knock a shuttle out of the sky. The landers were vulnerable once they were seen. If an anti-air missile was launched at them, there was little the crew could do but drop chaff and decoys, and try to jam the missile's electronics. The shuttles could scarcely maneuver out of their own shadow coming in for a hot landing.

"Thirty seconds," the pilot warned as apparent gravity within the lander reached its maximum. Joe counted those seconds in his head. He looked around at his men again, then braced himself. Sometimes, landings were rougher than they were supposed to be.

This one, however, had a barely noticeable jolt. Before it had ended, Joe hit the quick release on his safety belt and jumped to his feet.

"Let's go," he said over the squad frequency. "Safeties off." He held his rifle in front of him as he ostentatiously switched off the zipper's safety.

The men of the 13th rehearsed combat debarkations with some regularity between campaigns. The goal was to get ninety men out of a shuttle and moving toward their initial positions in less than thirty seconds. The four large doors in the troop bay popped open as soon as the shuttle came to rest. Double lines of soldiers moved quickly to each exit. Each man knew which door he was to head for. There was no lagging, no stopping to chat. They were on the ground on a hostile world, with unknown opposition. Outside, away from the shuttle, the men would present smaller targets to the enemy, and they would be in a position to defend themselves.

Echo Company's 2nd platoon exited through the rear of the crescent-shaped lander, carrying all of their combat gear with them. Joe checked to make sure that his squad was with him and followed Sergeant Maycroft and Lieutenant Keye, the platoon leader. Joe's first thought as he left the shuttle was that they had set down precisely at the dawn line. To the east, everything was bright and sunny, but there were still deep shadows to the west.

"We're heading for the tree line," Maycroft said over the platoon frequency. He also pointed. West.

Joe nodded from reflex, although Maycroft was already five meters in front of him and twenty meters to the right. Joe also repeated the directions over his squad frequency. A touch of a control put a target acquisition overlay against the visor of his helmet. His sensors showed no targets in infrared or through electronic emissions anywhere in the 120-degree arc in front of him.

The last shuttles of the first wave were already landing. The landers that had touched down first were lifting off again. They would return to the ships in orbit, some to load up with supplies and return, the rest just to get out of the way of possible enemy fire. The vertical takeoff and landing capabilities of the shuttles made it possible to land them in close proximity, both physically and chronologically.

The 13th Assault was spread over three landing areas, but they were not all that far apart. The first order of business once the landing was secure would be to link up the three LZs. As soon as the recon platoons and the eight infantry companies were down, equipment shuttles would start landing the Havoc mobile artillery, the ground support for the squadron of Wasp fighter-bombers, and the rest of the 13th's support personnel and supplies. Under field exercise conditions, it was possible to have the entire regiment in position and ready to operate within twenty-five minutes of the first touchdown.

Under combat conditions, that time could be anywhere between fifteen minutes and never.

From somewhere toward the far side of the landing zones, perhaps fifteen hundred meters away, there were several short bursts of automatic fire from wire carbines. Joe heard two distinct sounds, the first—recognizable as the standard Hegemony wire rifle—pitched somewhat lower than the second, the Mark VI Armanoc.

"Keep your heads down," Joe warned his men. "They know we're here."

But there were still no targets apparent in the trees ahead of them.

CHAPTER TWO

A good soldier always knows who the good guys and bad guys are. "We" are the good guys. "They" are the bad guys, whoever "they" are. The soldier has to believe that,
know
it so firmly that he never questions the right of what he is doing.

Sometimes knowing is easier than explaining. The "Why We Fight" lectures in garrison assume a lot, but they also include a lot that is not really necessary for the audience. For the outsider, well, the basics do not take long.

More than three thousand years have passed since the first men left Earth for worlds that orbit other stars. One history turned into hundreds of diverging histories as colonies were planted on more and more worlds. Inevitably, some of those colonies failed or lost contact with the rest of mankind. Individual worlds and groups of worlds have faced their distinct crises and triumphs. Civilizations have risen and fallen. Ages golden and dark have dawned and set. Empires and federations have supplanted and been supplanted by independent world states. During the first millennium of the stellar frontier, the human population went through an unprecedented explosion. From a peak population of 7.3 billion on Earth, mankind's numbers swelled to more than 800 billion at the time of the last relatively complete enumeration, 2000 years ago.

In the twenty-seventh century SA (Stellar Age), interstellar travel became rare in the Terran Cluster—generally, those worlds that had been colonized first, about seventy-five planets relatively close to Earth. A great plague traveled from world to world. The mortality rate reached as high as twenty-one percent on some planets. Even after the plague was conquered and immunity bred into the survivors, people in the Terran Cluster were slow to return to interstellar commerce, afraid of the possibility of other plagues.

But in the twenty-eighth century SA, the peoples of the Terran Cluster
did
return to that commerce, in ever-increasing numbers. The fact that no new plagues emerged gradually laid to rest the residual fears. New generations did not have the terrors of their parents and grandparents. But when the peoples of those worlds did venture back into interstellar space, they found changes. The great plague had not stopped travel in
all
of the settled regions of the galaxy.

From roughly 2700 to 2950 SA, the worlds of the Terran Cluster lived independent and peaceful existences. Commerce grew. There were no attempts to unify those worlds by force. When trouble finally came, it came from outside the cluster, from worlds that had not retreated from interstellar travel for a century.

Two empires had grown in the area beyond the Terran Cluster, on the side farther in along the spiral arm, bordering each other as well as the Terran Cluster.

The Schlinal Hegemony had spread across some fifty worlds, densely populated and heavily industrialized, with an average distance of little more than three light-years between inhabited worlds. The Hegemony was a tight dictatorship run from the world of Schline, fairly close to the border between the Hegemony and the Terran Cluster.

The Dogel Worlds were more feudal in nature. In theory, they were a loose confederation of about one hundred worlds, but in actuality, they were tightly controlled by a half-dozen extended families who worked in very close conceit. The leaders of these aristocratic clans, the Doges, controlled—
owned
—everything on their worlds. Those worlds were, on average, less industrialized and less heavily populated than the worlds of the Schlinal Hegemony, but there were twice as many worlds, giving the two empires a rough parity.

Beginning in the middle of the thirtieth century SA, both the Doges and the Hegemons started trying to upset that parity.

During the first years of war, the worlds of the Terran Cluster paid little attention to the fighting between their neighbors. It did not affect them, and as long as those neighbors were fully occupied with each other, they were not bothering the independent worlds of the Terran Cluster. Stalemate along the frontier between the two empires changed the situation though. Both sides looked for allies... or additional subjects. Most of the worlds of the Terran Cluster were heavily populated and nearly as industrialized as the core worlds of the Schlinal Hegemony. And the easiest routes for either the Hegemons or Doges to outflank their enemy ran though the Terran Cluster.

In the next several decades, the Doges and Hegemons expended as much effort on the independent worlds of the Terran Cluster as they did on each other. A dozen worlds fell to one side or the other—to military force if not to diplomatic suasion—and the diplomats of both empires made their rounds of the remaining free worlds, using whatever threats or cajolery they could to try to line those worlds up with their respective masters.

The threat was enough to drive the remaining independent worlds of the Terran Cluster to unite in the Accord of Free Worlds, a military and economic alliance that remained something less than a full union of the planets. For twenty years, the power of the Accord was enough to keep both the Hegemony and the Dogel Worlds away. But in 3002 SA, the Hegemons started a military drive into Accord space. Two lightly populated Accord worlds, Jordan and Porter, were conquered and occupied. There were several other skirmishes, and Accord forces repelled invasions on three other worlds.

Six months later, the Accord was ready to counterattack, to start taking back the worlds that had been lost to the Hegemons.

—|—

Lieutenant Zel Paitcher tried to watch everything at once, and it was already giving him a headache. This was his first combat drop as a Wasp pilot, and he had not learned how to partition his attention most efficiently yet. Coming down, he had projected all of his available sensor data on the heads-up display on the canopy—the ships of the fleet in orbit, the rest of his squadron, the landers, and the nearest of the Hegemony satellites. It made for a cluttered screen, and he also tried to keep a constant watch on the various electronic readouts provided on two monitors below the canopy, on the board in front of him.

It left him very little time to actually fly his fighter, but then, until things started happening, the Wasp scarcely required a pilot at all. Still, Zel flew his Wasp as if he were hardwired to it, the machine no more than an immense prosthesis. In the cockpit, it did not matter that Zel was only 150 centimeters tall, or that he weighed less than 50 kilograms soaking wet. Most Wasp pilots were below average in height and weight. A big man would find the control module of a Wasp much too confining for comfort.