Until Relieved (24 page)

The Schlinal rifle, though heavier and longer than the Armanoc, seemed to lack nothing in workmanship. It didn't boast the laser sights of the Accord zipper, but those sights were rarely as valuable as the ADF's brass hats seemed to think. Using the laser to mark a target too often made the
shooter
a target as well.

This was not like shooting on the firing range in garrison. Despite his admonitions, Joe could never lose sight of the fact that the targets he was aiming at were live men, soldiers fighting for their worlds, or for the Hegemony, following orders—perhaps not entirely of their own volition. At the sort of range they were at when they entered the valley, body armor was moderately effective. It took a concentration of wire, and a little luck, to bring down a soldier at anything beyond two-hundred meters. Even at half that distance, good body armor could deflect quite a bit. But no body armor covered every square millimeter of a soldier. There were gaps at the neck, between helmet and jacket, at the hands and wrists, and where boots met trousers. There were also weak points in the battle dress sometimes, places where repeated flexing had weakened the layers of net armor. Men died in combat, even when the texts said that they shouldn't.

There was little return fire reaching the men on the ridge. The Heggies were too far away for accurate fire at the angle they had to shoot at, much too far away for men who were themselves being shot at. Whatever tanks the Heggies had backing them up, or forcing them on, even that fire was less than devastating. Most of the rounds continued to hit well down on the slope, doing little but showering the men above with secondary debris from the blasts.

"Blind men could shoot better'n that!" Joe mumbled to himself at one point.

But there was
some
accurate fire, even if that looked as if it might be pure luck. Over toward 4th platoon, Joe saw one tank round explode almost precisely on the ridge line, blowing a small gap in the rock. Fourth was too far away for Joe to get any sense of casualties, but there was a sudden hollow feeling in his solar plexus: men
must
have died in that blast.

Fortunately, that was the last tank round that came in. Joe could hear heavier artillery rounds exploding farther off, beyond the shoulder of the hill. It sounded like heavy artillery, and that meant that at least some of the Havocs had taken the Novas under fire again.

"Hit 'em hard," Joe whispered. His heart was beating faster than normal, but that was always the case in combat. Even at a time like this, when there was only minimal danger, there was always that edge of fear.
All it takes is one lucky shot, and I can die as easily as anyone else. Will I know it's coming?

For Joe, fear had never been a serious obstacle. The fear was always there, on one level or another, but he trained hard to do the best, safest job he could. The results were beyond his control then. All he could do was work as smart as he knew how, make it as hard as possible for any enemy fire to hit him.

He ducked below the ridge line and turned to look up toward the top of the hill. Though he could neither see nor hear it, he knew that the shuttle must be on the LZ above by now. Maybe it had already taken the wounded aboard and lifted off again. There were no enemy fighters visible, and that was perhaps the best news of the day. A lander would be no match for a fighter. A shuttle was no match for one soldier with a shoulder-operated rocket launcher even. The four-kilo warhead on an infantry rocket could bring down a shuttle with ease.

Joe fed the last spool of wire into his Schlinal rifle before he moved back up to look down into the valley. A few more seconds of fire there, and then he would have to switch to his own carbine. He didn't have all that much wire left for it, either, maybe eight spools total, adding together the partials. That wouldn't last long if the enemy kept coming.

"Sir," Joe said on his link to Lieutenant Keye.

"What?" was all Keye said in return.

"We need to start cutting back hard on wire. Until the enemy gets a lot closer, I think we should have half the men hold their fire."

"Hang on." The pause was long enough for Keye to check with the captain. "Right. Go with it," Keye told Joe. Within a minute, the entire strike force had the same orders. The volume of fire coming off of the ridge was cut in half.

The sudden decrease in gunfire sounded painfully obvious to Joe, but there was no response from the Heggies coming toward the slope. They did keep coming. Fewer of them fell. But they showed no sign that they recognized that decreased fire was the reason.

"Goff, you holding up?" Joe asked over a private channel. At the moment, the squad's first fire team was the one back off of the ridge not engaged in the shooting. Kam turned to look toward his sergeant before he answered.

"So far, Sarge. So far." He went no further than that. He was holding up because he was almost totally disengaged from the fighting. Most of the time up on the line, he had kept his eyes closed. Only rarely had he pulled the trigger on his zipper, and even then it was without aiming, without
looking
at the enemy below.

Joe nodded, exaggerating the gesture to make sure that Kam saw it. "You're doing good, kid. Just keep at it."

"I'll try."

Joe reminded himself to have a talk with Ezra as soon as there was a break in the fighting. Ezra had to know about Goff, had to be prepared to work with him, and to watch him, now that Joe had the entire platoon to worry about.

The leading elements of the Schlinal attack were getting close to the base of the hill below the Accord line. To Joe's eye, it looked as if fully two thirds of the attackers had fallen crossing the valley. The ones who had made it to the base of the hill were the ones who were both lucky and smart, the ones who knew how to take advantage of what little cover the approach offered. With the enemy right below them, the men on the ridge had to expose themselves to bring their weapons to bear.

That gave the enemy better targets.

More as an experiment than anything else, Joe took his next-to-last grenade, pulled the safety pin, and hurled it out in a high arc. He watched as it bounced once, thirty meters down and twenty out, then sailed over four Heggies. They scattered, going down against the rock, drawing in limbs and heads, but the grenade went off in the air, above them, scattering the shrapnel over a twenty-meter diameter.

Three of the men got back up, and Joe could see blood on two of them. One went back down almost immediately, rolling until his body was stopped by a rock. Joe closed his eyes for an instant—more than a simple blink. He couldn't see the faces of the men below. Those were concealed by the visors on their battle helmets. But in his mind, he
could
see faces twisted by shock and pain, and death's blank stare in the eyes of the one who had not gotten up. And he felt himself falling and rolling, the way the second man had done, falling in death.

It was a new feeling for Joe. When he opened his eyes again, Joe looked toward Kam Goff. He saw that look on Goff's face as well, though it too was hidden by a visor.

Can that crap!
Joe told himself, trying to work up anger to shove aside the twinge of fear. He blinked several times, rapidly.
Don't go metaphysical. It'll screw your mind as bad as his.

Joe had switched over to his own rifle a moment before. Now, he switched on the laser sights—for the first time in ages, except on the practice range—using the infrared beam. He lined up targets carefully, giving each just the shortest possible burst of wire, moving back and forth across his fire lane methodically. The Schlinal soldiers were close enough now that wire could do damage even through body armor, and careful sighting could give Joe a better than average chance of finding the gaps in that position.

A second wave of Schlinal infantry entered the valley. This detachment was much larger than the first, perhaps two full companies. They took the ridge under fire immediately, close to two-hundred weapons firing on full automatic. Not all of these guns were wire-throwers. There were some slug-pushers as well. Along with the renewed rifle fire, there was also a new flurry of rocket-propelled grenades, some of which reached the hollow behind the ridge.

"This looks like the real thing," Lieutenant Keye told Joe. "Good thing we had half the men saving their ammo."

"I'd suggest holding back a little longer," Joe said. "Get the men back in position, sure, switch fire teams so we don't run half the men dry, but wait until the Heggies get close enough for every centimeter of wire to count before we pull all the guns into action."

"That's what I was about to tell you, Joe. The captain's already given orders to switch teams on the line. He repeated the order to conserve wire," Keye added. "To make sure we've got targets in the sights."

Joe slid back from the edge of the rock, issuing the orders over the platoon channel and watching while they were carried out. Perhaps if he had not been down out of the line of fire, he might not have noticed the new fire coming from above. The troops who had been sent up to guard the LZ on top of the hill were lined up along the crest now, getting their piece of the action.

I guess that means the shuttle's been and gone,
Joe thought. Protecting the lander had been the primary mission for the troops sent up to the crest.
Too bad we couldn't all get on it.
Joe's stomach tightened up suddenly. He pressed his left hand against his gut, taking a slow, almost painful breath as he did.

Don't tell me it's getting to me now,
he thought with some alarm. Though the rational part of his mind insisted that it wasn't so, deep inside, Joe harbored the belief that Goff's problems might be contagious, that they might infect everyone who came in contact with him.

Joe closed his eyes for an instant, longer than the last time. He took a deep breath, then opened his eyes and looked up at the sky. The morning was less than half over, and unless the captain changed his mind, they were going to stay where they were until dark.

If we last that long.
The thought startled Joe. Echo and George companies, with their attendant recon platoons, remained in good shape, so long as they did not run out of ammunition or face a massive air attack. Ammunition might be a problem, but there was still no sign of enemy air activity. The Boems had not come after the shuttle. It seemed unlikely that they would come after a couple of companies of infantry after the shuttle had escaped. Where they were, the strike force could easily hold off heavy odds, as long as the enemy had nothing but infantry, or tanks that would not get close enough to do really extensive damage.

Until we run out of wire.
Joe's mind came back to that limit. He knew how short of wire his men were, how short they had been before this latest firefight erupted. Fairly soon, many of them might start running dry.

"Lieutenant, if we don't break off this fight pretty damn soon, all we're going to have left is expensive clubs, no matter how tight we are with wire."

—|—

On the plateau, some of the men of the 13th had already been reduced to using their wire carbines as clubs, not because they were out of ammunition, but because the enemy had closed to the point where much of the fighting was hand-to-hand. The Armanoc was not equipped for bayonets. In Accord military doctrine, bayonet fighting was out of the question.
That sort of situation simply does not occur often enough to warrant the training and equipment expense.

Bravo and Charley companies were the hardest pressed. Around the rest of the perimeter, the morning attacks were being beaten back, in heavy fighting, but at a distance. One Schlinal commander, however, had managed to get a full battalion (or what was left of it after the early stages of the assault) right into the Accord lines. If they had received even modest reinforcements, another company or two of infantry, or even a handful of Nova tanks, there would have been no stopping them. The Accord positions could have been split, and each segment mopped up at leisure. A decisive defeat was that close for the 13th.

But reinforcements did not come for the Schlinal force, and slowly, Van Stossen managed to draw in units from other portions of the perimeter—a platoon here, a squad there, to reinforce Bravo and Charley. At the point of the breakthrough, the Schlinal battalion could not retreat. They had to stand and fight. And they
did
fight, even when the flow of battle had clearly turned against them. The battalion did not surrender the way the garrison of Maison had. It fought as long as the companies had enough men to retain a sense of unit cohesion. Only in the last stages did significant numbers of Schlinal soldiers start to throw down their weapons and surrender.

—|—

Van Stossen was drained. He slumped slowly to the ground and could do nothing for several minutes but lean back against the cone of dirt around the base of a tree and suck in one labored, painful breath after another. He could not have lifted a hand to defend himself. The left side of his shirt had been sliced open from armpit to waist. A thin line of blood showed how close the colonel had come to dying. He scarcely recalled that duel, or the way he had driven rigid fingers into his assailant's throat, hitting the gap below the Schlinal helmet to crush the man's windpipe. He had followed up perfectly on that move, getting closer to get one arm behind the man's neck while his other hand shoved the head up and back, snapping the spinal cord and finishing the job.

Now, all he could think about was finding air to breathe.

"It's just about over, Colonel," Dezo Parks said. He was also breathing heavily, but he could still get the words out. He had a couple of advantages over Stossen. Parks was five years younger, ten kilos lighter, and he had stayed more active as ops officer than Stossen had as C.O. He tilted the visor up on his helmet and leaned forward, using his carbine almost as a crutch. "There are still a few pockets of resistance, but we broke the attack."