Jump Pay (6 page)

Joe rolled half on his side so that he could look toward Al and his patient. Something dug painfully into Joe's side. He raised himself enough to move the obstruction and then started cursing, softly but with great intensity, under his breath. He called the captain again.

"Sir, I've got it. The belts."

"What?" Keye asked.

"We've been on the ground four hours now, an' then some. The antigrav belts should be recharged. We tie one healthy man with two casualties—hell, let them
fly
back to where they can get treatment. One man ought to be able to manage three sets of controls like that."

Captain Keye hesitated for a moment, thinking through the idea, before he answered. "It should work," he admitted. "Somebody should have thought of that before we landed here. Hang tight. I'll have Izzy set it up. We've got to wait a couple of minutes, though. Here come those Wasps."

At the moment, the Wasps were merely a distraction to Joe. He shouted the news over the radio to Al Bergon and the other squad medics. He scarcely noticed the lines of destruction that the Wasp cannons cut through the moss in front of the 13th's line. Fifteen hundred slivers of metal a second hit from each of three Wasps. Three clear avenues opened up through the moss, parallel lines leading directly toward the Heggie base.

—|—

Colonel Stossen heard the suggestion about using antigrav belts to move casualties from Dezo Parks, but the news did not really register. His headache had worsened and his vision remained blurred. Annoyingly, his left eye would tear up every few minutes, further limiting his vision. An analgesic soaker stuck to his neck had not significantly reduced the pain or helped his eyesight.

I need to check with a medic,
Stossen had told himself at least a dozen times, but he had not done it. There were simply too many other things that seemed more urgent. The 13th was falling far behind schedule, not because of enemy resistance but merely because of the difficulty of the terrain. Now men were falling from heatstroke. He knew that more would fall victim in the next few hours, when the day reached its hottest.

"Get them back, and see if we have enough belts to..."

The colonel didn't realize that he had stopped speaking in the middle of a sentence...
let the healthy men swap out and get back to their units
was how he meant to finish it. In his mind, he heard the completion. But the world simply seemed to fade out around him while he was talking. There was a sudden hollowness to his hearing, much as if he were holding a seashell to his ear. The sky and his surroundings seemed to take on a rosy tinge. For a moment, he even thought that he could hear waves crashing on a sandy beach, with a hint of some ethereal music in the background.

Dezo Parks saw his boss's eyes roll back, but he couldn't react quickly enough to catch the colonel before he fell forward and hit the ground hard face first. Van Stossen was unconscious before he fell.

CHAPTER FOUR

A field hospital had been set up at the far western end of the drop and landing zones, at the farthest point from the Schlinal base. An infantry company from the 97th LIR provided security. The surgeons and other medical personnel of the 13th and 8th SATs and the 97th had been busy for hours. In the early hours of the invasion, few casualties were inflicted by enemy action. More were from drop injuries or other accidents. But the overwhelming majority were heat exhaustion and heatstroke cases. Shock, dehydration, and—in some cases—delirium. The drop injuries had mostly been returned to duty before noon. Only a handful of men had hurt themselves badly enough that four hours of rest and soaker patches couldn't cure the problem.

Colonel Stossen was carried into the hospital tent just as the first of the men from the front line were being brought back on antigrav belts. Sergeant Vin Cumminhow brought the colonel in, helped by one of the privates in the headquarters security detachment.

"I think he hurt himself when we landed," Cumminhow told the medtech who was performing triage. "He fell. After that, he had a headache and complained that his vision was blurred. He didn't seem to feel too good all morning. Then, a few minutes ago, he just keeled over."

The medtech looked up from his examination just briefly. "Sounds like concussion, possibly even a skull fracture. He hit his head when he fell?"

"Naw, his feet went out from under him and he landed on his butt. The first time, at least."

The medtech shrugged and went back to his examination. "It could still be concussion. The second fall didn't help any." The colonel's helmet was off. The fall had snapped off the visor, which had been in the raised position. There were a number of cuts on the colonel's face. A nosebleed had already stopped, but it was obvious that the nose was broken.

"He'll be okay, won't he?" Cumminhow asked, his voice rising. Like most of the men in the 13th, the sergeant idolized his commander.

"Should be," the medtech said. "Now, get out of the way." He called for an orderly to help move the colonel.

Cumminhow stood where he was for a moment, watching. Then, with nothing better to do, he left. He reported to the executive officer by radio. When he left the hospital tent, he was shaking his head. He had never heard of anyone getting a concussion by falling on his butt.

—|—

"Nothing but farmers," Zel Paitcher complained as he led Blue Flight into another pass in front of the infantrymen. The initial passes had been so efficient at clearing avenues that headquarters had ordered several more runs, to clear a wider path. "Plowing the ground."

"Could be worse," Gerry Easton said. "We could be down there and somebody could be plowing us under."

"Only good thing about this is, the sooner the mudders get through, the sooner they'll be able to get to Frank." Verannen had quit answering calls. Zel didn't know if Frank was dead, unconscious, or simply had his radio out of commission. Blue Flight had already had another casualty. The Pitcher, Ewell Marmon, had gone down. Though no one had reached the wreckage yet, there was little chance that Marmon had survived. He had not managed to eject and the Wasp had gone in hard.

But, for the moment at least, there was no enemy air activity in the area. If the local Schlinal garrison had any Boems left in flying condition, they were on the ground, in bunkers.

—|—

Bravo, Echo, and Fox companies were on the move again, with the recon platoons out on their flanks, moving ahead to contact the units that were supposed to attack from the north and south. The Wasps had cleared five good paths through the slick moss. But as the infantrymen drew within a kilometer of the Heggie lines, they started taking more casualties from machine guns and sniper rifles. The bare rocks were too hot to keep crawling across, and it was dangerous to get up and run. Schlinal snipers were having a field day picking off men at leisure. They were too far away for the 13th's mudders to suppress fire with their own wire rifles, and the Accord snipers had more trouble finding targets than the Heggie snipers did.

Then the Wasps returned. This time they weren't opening paths. Each Wasp made its pass along the Schlinal perimeter, spraying cannon fire and laying an occasional rocket into a building that might harbor snipers.

The three-company skirmish line started moving forward again. Men scurried forward in a crouch, going down every few seconds. They stayed down only briefly, because lying on those rocks without the insulating layer of moss could be compared without much exaggeration to lying in a frying pan.

Schlinal machine guns homed in on the line of advancing Accord soldiers. The Wasps could not eliminate all of those weapons, and their range was enough to start causing casualties, even through net armor, at more than a kilometer. Unlike the Accord with its splat guns, the Hegemony used slugs rather than wire in their heavy automatic weapons.

Ezra Frain dropped into the lowest depression within reach and rolled over onto his back so that his pack and canteens kept most of his body off of the scalding-hot rocks. Boots and helmet helped. The position was uncomfortable, but better than any of the alternatives he could think of.

Sweat rolling into his eyes had nearly blinded him, and the exertion of running had him gasping for air. Ezra needed a moment before he could even look around to see that his men were down and safe.

"Joe, there's got to be a better way," he said over his link to Baerclau. He was panting heavily, as if he had run several kilometers rather than only a few dozen meters since his last short "rest."

"You come up with it, you'll get a medal," Joe replied, equally out of breath. "Short of dropping gear to lighten the load, I can't think of anything, and you know we can't leave any gear behind."

"You thought of using the belts to get our casualties back to hospital," Ezra said.

"My idea for the year. Somebody else's turn now."

"If we could just use the AG belts to neutralize the weight of our gear, it'd help."

Joe hesitated for a second before he answered. The idea was tempting, but he quickly came up with a number of arguments against it. The one he mentioned was the gyro stabilizers. "Be hell trying to go flat in a hurry," he said. "Staying vertical in combat is a fast way to get dead."

The break was needed, desperately by many of the men. While most of them rested, keeping as much of their bodies off of the hot rocks as possible, those men with Vrerch rocket launchers or Dupuy RA rifles kept up the pressure on the Schlinal defenders in front of them. Those were still the only weapons the Accord infantry carried that could effectively reach the enemy. Their splat guns, heavy automatic wire throwers, had an effective range of no more than two hundred meters.

Joe switched to the channel that connected him with all of his squad leaders and assistants. "Get a good check on all of your men," he said. "Talk to everybody, make sure they're okay. I don't want anyone going woozy at a bad time."

The reports he got back were not heartening. While no one seemed to be in immediate trouble, everyone was feeling the effects of the heat and the "oppressive" nature of the air. Joe passed that on to the captain.

"Tell me something I don't know, Joe," Keye replied, sounding exhausted himself. "We just have to cope with it. Another five minutes and we make the big push. You might tell the men that it'll be a few degrees cooler in the shade of those warehouses up there. Maybe that'll help sustain them."

Joe glanced at the buildings. There were three visible from his position, and he knew from the briefings that there were a lot more—warehouses, barracks, a couple of small factories, hangars, and repair facilities—beyond the few he could see. And there were at least two regiments of Heggie infantry to guard them, men who had been on Tamkailo for weeks or months.

"I hope it gets easier once we get used to the heat," Joe said. "It ever rain here?"

"Who knows?"

Joe took a long drink of water. He had already emptied one canteen and started on the second. Then he checked his rifle: full power pack, full wire spool. The barrel was too hot to touch, even though he hadn't fired it since landing. Even the composite stock was getting uncomfortably hot to the touch.

He warned his squad leaders how much time they had left, then took another, shorter sip of water. The water no longer simply tasted warm; it was
hot
. "Hot enough for coffee," Joe mumbled as he screwed the lid back on. He considered dropping an instant coffee packet into the canteen. That might make the water more palatable. But then he shook his head. He could always put coffee into the water, but once it was in, he couldn't take it back out.

Joe looked up. What appeared to be two full flights of Wasps were approaching, ready to hit the Schlinal lines while the infantry advanced. Joe heard, but did not see, the Havocs as they opened up again. For the last hour or more, there had been very little action from the artillery. Now they were starting to hit the nearest line of buildings again.

Hit 'em good,
Joe thought.
Make it easy for us.

Time was running out. The five minutes were gone. First Sergeant Walker relayed the order for the attack.

—|—

Colonel Stossen was in a trauma tube suffering from concussion, dehydration, and fractures of the nose and skull—the latter injuries from his second fall. The medical nanobots did their work, replacing fluids, transferring heat, reducing swelling, and starting to knit the fractures. In the 13th's command post, Dezo Parks was in command.

"We'll move Alpha and Charley companies forward on belts," he told Teu Ingels. "Get them up to where the Wasps have cleared the way, then push forward so that they're just behind Bravo, Echo, and Fox. Put the other two recon units out on the flanks. Second, on the north, should be able to skirt the moss. First will have to use their belts to get as far as possible before they run dry. I want them in the gaps between us and the other regiments. Make sure that 3rd and 4th recon are getting where they're supposed to be. I want them on the east side of the base, ready to cause whatever confusion they can. Get them all moving now."

He waited while Ingels passed along those orders. "The 97th should be in position on the south now," Parks said then. "They'll attack when we do."

"They're in position. Bal just confirmed it," Ingels said. "And the 8th is almost ready on the north."

Dezo nodded. "Send George Company up as well, on their feet as long as possible. I want them close enough to bring them in wherever they might be needed. They might need their belts then." He shook his head. "And they thought those belts would only be good for landings." He was too drained by the heat to laugh.

—|—

The Wasps and Havocs did hold down the amount of Schlinal fire directed at the lead companies of the Accord attack, but no amount of fire could have stopped
all
of it for any length of time. The vast majority of Schlinal soldiers might be unwilling conscripts, but when faced with a combat situation, most did respond as their training had told them they should. Some individuals went beyond what even the most militant of their officers might demand. For the rest, officers and noncoms were there behind their men, demanding, threatening. Discipline in the Heggie armed forces was brutal, and quick. Every Schlinal soldier learned that lesson in the first days of boot camp. The lesson was always applied with a vivid thoroughness that insured that no one who witnessed punishment would ever forget the price of disobedience. Or failure. In combat, any infraction was liable to be met with instant execution. It was far safer for a Heggie soldier to take his chances with the enemy than to fail his superiors. That was as true for officers of every grade as it was for the rawest private.