Jump Pay (31 page)

Zel lifted a hand to his head and touched it experimentally several times. "I don't feel any pain," he said after a moment. "My mind seems to be working, after a fashion."

"We'll have you and the others to a medtech in just a couple of minutes, sir, soon as we find where they are. Things are pretty confused. Last I heard, the Heggies had stopped retreating."

—|—

"What happened?" General Dacik asked on a link that included the commanders of the four regiments moving north along the peninsula, as well as his own staff.

"It's like we hit a brick wall with a rubber band, General," Colonel Foss of the 8th said. "They had prepared fallback positions ten klicks north of the canal—mines, trenches, gun emplacements. I think the line was already manned as well, at least with a skeleton force. Their troops hit that line, and we had organized fire coming at us much too soon for anything else."

"When did they have time for that?" Dacik demanded, turning to look at his Intelligence officer.

Olsen shook his head, then shrugged his shoulders. "We never saw any of it, sir."

"Our experience was exactly the same on the east side," the 5th's commander, Colonel Kane, added as soon as the others left him an opening. "Prepared positions. Troops waiting for us. It's going to take time to break through this new line, time we don't have."

"What about the 13th?" Foss asked. "Can Stossen move south to nip the Heggies from behind?"

"You men put out reccers to see if this line extends all of the way across the peninsula?" Dacik asked.

Foss and Kane said, "Yes, sir," in unison.

Dacik continued to stare at Major Olsen, who was standing right next to him, about four hundred meters south of the line where the Heggies had stopped to fight. "What's the gap between our line and the 13th, Jorgen?"

Olsen looked down at his mapboard, used a cursor to draw the line, than hit a key along the side of the screen to get the distance. "Just short of seven kilometers, General. The 13th reports enemy activity close to them as well, tanks moving in, presumably infantry as well."

"Nape, Jesiah, we've already targeted the Havocs against the enemy line, and I'm working to bring the Wasps back in." He
had
been saving the Wasps to meet the new Heggies who could be arriving in little more than an hour, but this had to come first. "The 13th has its own problems. I'll talk to Van and see what he can do, but we're going to have to break this line the way we broke the line at the canal. Head-on, straight up. We can't give the Heggies seven kilometers of this peninsula to let them land their reinforcements. Remember, we've cut the bridges behind us."

Neither of the SAT commanders replied immediately. It was Foss who finally broke the silence. "Frankly, General, I'm not at all certain that we
can
break through this time, not and have anyone left to meet the newcomers when they get here. I'm down to less than forty percent effectives as of fifteen minutes ago, and Jesiah's been hurt even worse. We might not have the strength to break through this line in less than an hour. Or in a week."

"Find weak points and punch through," Dacik said. "We don't have any choice. We've got to move, and we've got to move fast."

There was another pause before the commanders conceded their assents.

—|—

Overhead, more or less, the Boem S3s of the Schlinal defensive screen had to kill speed to intercept
Cetus's
Purple Flight, to keep the Bats from sliding behind them and getting a straight shot at two of their capital ships. Purple Flight went to full thrust again as it closed to within missile range of the Boems.

"I want two missiles targeted against each of them," Purple one said. "We'll boost straight through the flight. By the time they get turned around—any that our missiles leave—we should have the distance and speed to outrun anything they shoot after us."

It was the rockets that the Heggies would shoot off while the two groups were racing toward each other that Purple Flight had to worry about. Those would cover the gap in a hurry.

Vign got his targets lined up and waited for the command. First pass: the entire flight would fire its missiles at once. In theory, at least, that would overload the Boems' ECM and missile-intercept capabilities and make it much more difficult for the Heggies to evade destruction.

Both sides fired at once. There was scarcely time for the pilots of either flight to switch their weapons selectors over to the smaller, high-speed, anti-missile missiles that were their only active defense. Tiny electronic decoys were jettisoned almost as quickly to try to deflect targeting systems.

There were a total of twenty-seven unspectacular explosions. Twelve of those resulted from missiles hitting missiles and scattering debris. Nine were exploding Boems. The rest were Bats.

Vign Malmeed did not see them. He had less than a second to realize that Purple six was going to be part of the show.

—|—

"Nimz, I've got to send you and your men out again," Colonel Stossen said. "The rest of the army's got themselves stuck, seven klicks south of us. The Heggies had prepared positions."

"I was beginning to suspect something like that, Colonel," Dem said. "We'da had more Heggies hitting us than the few who did get this far otherwise. What do you want us to do?"

"Get down behind the Heggie line and make them think you're the whole regiment. Raise a little Hell. Distract them enough to let the 8th and 5th punch through."

"Yes, sir."

"And, Nimz... we don't have much time. We could be seeing shuttles and fighters from this new fleet in less than an hour. We need to secure the peninsula first, or at least get our whole force linked up. If you've got enough juice built up on your belts, use them to get south fast."

"We'll do what we can, sir," Nimz promised.

No more than three minutes later, the fifty-four men remaining from the 13th's four recon platoons slipped over the ridge, breaking into two groups and moving apart. Behind them, the line companies on either side adjusted their positions to cover the gap. The reccers moved in two groups, Dem leading one, Fredo the other. Fredo's left arm was in a sling. A medic had treated his wounds, but he needed time in a trauma tube to complete the repairs. But he would not stay behind.

At first the reccers crawled, doing everything they could to avoid showing a silhouette. Schlinal night-vision gear was inferior to the double system that the Accord used, but it was not totally useless. Slow movements, low to the ground, were the best way to trick the Schlinal gear. Having ground that was almost body temperature helped confuse infrared night-vision systems. The contrast was too low.

Once away from the 13th's line, the reccers made their way to the lowest area of ground around before getting to their feet and hurrying south, jogging. It was too soon yet to switch over to antigrav belts. They were too close to the line. Dem wanted to get at least a kilometer south first. That would, he hoped, put them behind any Schlinal mudders posted to watch the 13th.

The reccers saw several Heggie patrols and observations posts. But reccers were trained in movement that won't be seen. The Heggies weren't. In one case, Dem and his men passed within twenty-five meters of a squad of Heggies without being seen or heard. A couple of minutes later, they walked past a Nova, not more than six meters from the tank. There was no sign that either of the Nova's crewmen spotted them, even though the Nova carried better night-vision gear than Schlinal infantrymen wore.

Dem waited until his men were a hundred meters south of the tank before he decided that it was time to hurry along. "Don't get carried away just 'cause we're on belts," he cautioned. "Stay low. I'd rather hear toes scraping the rocks than see heads sticking way up in the sky. We fly south until the first belts start showing a low power warning, then we all land and go on from there."

With luck, he thought, they might cover half of the remaining distance to the new Schlinal line before low-power lights started to come on. If they got within four kilometers, they could cover the rest of the distance on the ground in little more than a half hour, if they pushed themselves. And reccers knew how to push themselves.

That still wouldn't leave much time. By then there could be Heggie shuttles and new Boems on their way down from the Schlinal fleet.

"Push it," Dem said as he switched on his own belt.

Manipulating a Corey antigravity belt for horizontal travel required the use of both hands and considerable coordination. The gyro stabilizers fought it all of the way. They were only designed to permit a 5-degree deviation from vertical. The men had to hold the drive units and twist them so that they thought "up" was at an angle in front of them, and then manipulate the power settings almost constantly to keep from rising too high above the ground. A third hand would have made the operation considerably easier. There was certainly no way to keep a weapon at the ready during the process. Rifles were slung, with the slings clipped to one of the straps on each man's pack harness so that it wouldn't be lost in transit. Remarkably, Fredo Gariston, with only one usable hand, still managed to keep his place with the patrol. Even Dem Nimz had trouble believing that.

Dem had been sweating before—it seemed to him that he had been sweating continuously since landing on Tamkailo, hundreds of liters of the stuff—but there was a new outpouring now as he worried at his controls. Right now, Dem and his reccers needed luck more than anything else. If their course chanced to take them right over a concentration of Heggies, they would have little opportunity to defend themselves. Before they could land and get their weapons into play, they might lose half of their already seriously depleted force.

The need constantly to adjust speed and angle took deep concentration. It kept the reccers from building up any great speed. It also seriously compromised the distance they would be able to travel before running out of power for the miniature AG drives. Before his men had traveled a single kilometer on belts, Dem was worrying that he had seriously overestimated how far they might get before batteries started to get dangerously low.

At least they wouldn't be high enough for a fall to do much damage. "Push till we start running dry," Dem told his men. That might give them an extra hundred meters over stopping when the first low-power indicator came on.

Dem kept glancing at his power gauge, glaring at it as if he thought he could make it hold power a little longer by force of will. Whenever his feet brushed a slightly higher piece of ground, he would push off of it or take a couple of running steps. Although Dem didn't waste time thinking about it, he would have assumed that most of his men would likewise be doing everything they could think of to extend the distance they could travel on the belts, even for a few extra meters. It took a certain kind of soldier to volunteer for recon duty, and reccer training took care of the rest.

When one of the reccers announced that his low-power indicator had come on, Dem figured that they had already moved to within three-and-a-half kilometers of the main enemy line—closer than he had hoped. "Give a shout when you run dry," he told the man. "We're doin' good. Let's do better. I figure this is our last time on belts here." One way or another.

Still, there wasn't much time left in the air for the reccers. Within twenty seconds, every low-power indicator was on, and ten seconds after that, belts started running dry.

"Ground and form up," Dem ordered. He glanced at the time line on his visor. It would be four hours before the belts would have a full charge again, if they did need them again. Four hours.
We should live so long,
Dem thought.

Although the two groups of reccers were spread out over rather large areas after their "flight" south, it took no more than a minute for them to form up again. Once the groups started to coalesce, the men communicated with hand signs, the way reccers preferred. Having split the team in half before, Dem and Fredo now split each of those groups in half. Finally, Dem got on the radio just long enough to give rather broad instructions. Reccers didn't need a detailed blueprint. Even if a man got separated from the rest of his team, he would continue to fight on alone until he could get back to the others—or until he could no longer fight or move.

"We get as close as possible and raise as much hell as possible," Dem said. "Remember, our guys are on the other side of the Heggies, so don't get
too
rambunctious with the RPGs and rockets. They make their breakthrough, we'll tag along with them, back to the rest of the 13th."

The patrols moved forward, and farther apart from one another. The sounds of battle were clearly audible now. The reccers were less than three kilometers from the front line.

Dem moved his patrol more to the west. The farther apart his reccers were, the more confusion they ought to be able to sow among the enemy once they made their presence known. The Heggies wouldn't be certain just how many Freebies had come up behind them—and they would have to worry that the entire 13th had moved south. That was exactly what Colonel Stossen wanted them to think.

We'll sure find out what these guys are made of,
Dem thought with a grim smile. He was walking point on his patrol. That was no place for a squad leader, let alone the 13th's ranking reccer, but it was where Dem wanted to be. He trusted his own senses and talents more than he trusted anyone else's, especially at a time like this.

The patrol had gone just over a kilometer on foot when Dem spotted a Heggie machine gun emplacement. The gun did not start firing, which meant—almost certainly—that the reccers hadn't been spotted.

"Down!" he whispered over the channel his patrol was on. He waved up the two men nearest to him and showed them the enemy position. He pulled out a grenade and indicated that the other two should do the same.

"Together," he whispered when all three of them were up on their knees in position to hurl the grenades. The others aped his movements exactly, pulling the pins from their grenades, then throwing them and dropping forward onto the ground. The Heggie post was less than forty meters away. Shrapnel could reach that far and do damage.