Jump Pay (7 page)

As the men of the 13th moved nearer to the Schlinal lines, they thought less about the heat of air and rocks and more about cover and maneuver. Adrenaline dimmed the complaints of "heavy" air and burned hands and knees, even though some of the burns were severe. Company grade officers and noncoms cajoled and instructed, a constant presence in the earphones of all of their men. More importantly, they did their commanding from right in the advancing line, leading by example when necessary.

For one of the few times in his career, Joe Baerclau found himself wishing that he had one of the longer-range Dupuy sniper rifles, or that the Armanoc zippers hadn't been designed so thoroughly for up-close fighting—anything that would allow him to shoot back sooner without obviously wasting ammunition. It raised his hackles to be under fire and unable to return it. He could have fired his zipper, but that would have been a futile gesture, and much worse, it would have showed his men that he was not as cool and composed under fire as he tried to appear. That was perhaps all that kept him from emptying a spool or two of wire at several times its maximum effective range.

This advance was no mad charge. There was no running, not for more than two or three meters at a time. It would have been difficult in any case. Although the strafing that the Wasps had done had opened good paths, there were still slippery spots. Men needed to watch their footing. Even without the remaining bits of moss, the intense heat would have made running any distance impossible. Long before the 13th could have closed with the enemy, most of the men would have been incapacitated.

Up and down. Move forward a few meters and take cover to rest, sometimes for no more than ten seconds, just long enough to take in one deep, burning breath, and to lift a faceplate to wipe stinging sweat from bloodshot eyes and to try to get the slightest hint of an almost imaginary breeze.

"When we said we'd follow the colonel to Hell and back, I never thought he'd take us up on it," Mort Jaiffer complained during one of the longer breaks. Echo had closed to within three hundred meters of the nearest enemy positions.

I know what you mean,
Joe Baerclau thought, but what he said was "Save your air. We get up this next time, it's going to start getting even hotter."

"I'd feel a lot better if we had the tropical forest to go with this tropical heat," Mort said. "A little shade would be welcome, and trees would give us better cover."

This time Joe didn't say anything, didn't bother to voice his thought:
This isn't the tropics; it's damn near polar.
He didn't have to voice the thought. It occurred to Mort as well. Mort was too educated to miss something that obvious. He had also paid attention to the prejump briefings.

What happens when we
do
go closer to the tropics? Mort asked himself. If it's this miserable here...

He wiped sweat from his face and lowered his visor. He had taken a drink before talking. He was thirsty again, or still, but decided not to use any more water at the moment. He had little enough left, and there was no telling how long it would be before there might be a chance to refill canteens. Being left without water for any significant time would be suicide in this heat. Literally. He shifted his position just enough to let him look over the crest of the rock he was behind. He tried to remember just what path he had chosen for himself before going down this time. He didn't want to have to think about where he was stepping when they started out again. He would be looking farther ahead then, mostly at the enemy lines.

At least we don't have to worry about mines or booby traps,
he thought. The moss was surety for that, along with the strafing runs that the 13th's Wasps had done. If there had been any explosives planted, the cannon fragments would have detonated them. As long as they stayed on the stretches of rock that had been cleared of moss, they would be fine—that would keep them clear of the slick growth without worrying about explosives.

We just have to worry about cover, and not hitting a patch of that moss and breaking our butts.

"Check your weapons," Joe said over the platoon channel. "Wire and juice."

Mort automatically complied, even though he was absolutely certain that his Armanoc was ready to go. He had already looked several times. That too was automatic. Mort spoke to Wiz Mackey, the only man left in his fire team since Mal Underwood had been evacuated. Wiz confirmed that he had a full spool of wire and one hundred percent showing for his rifle's power pack. Then Mort switched channels to report to the squad leader.

"Wiz and I are set, Ez," he said.

"Take it easy then," Ezra Frain replied. "I just got the word. We're going to have another ten or fifteen minutes here. We're waiting for the other units to get in position before the attack. We're all going in at once. When we start this time, we keep going until we get there."
Or until we can't go any farther
was the unspoken qualifier.

—|—

Blue eight, Will Tarkel's fighter, lost power without warning as Blue Flight was heading east for another strike against the Schlinal defensive positions. Both antigrav drives quit at once. There was no time to attempt diagnostics, scarcely time for one try at restarting the engines. The Wasp had the glide characteristics of a six-ton rock without power. There was no possibility of landing one safely without the drives. Will managed to eject behind the 13th's line. His fighter's momentum carried it almost to the first warehouse in its path. It crashed about twenty meters short.

A squad from Echo's 4th platoon picked up Will Tarkel within two minutes after the escape pod landed.

Zel Paitcher watched the pod float down, in constant contact with Will until he was certain that Will was safe and unhurt. Then he turned his attention back to the Heggies. The fight for Tamkailo was barely six hours old, and he had already lost three-eighths of his flight.

—|—

Ezra Frain was barely twenty-one years old. At that, he missed being the youngest sergeant in the 13th SAT by nearly a full year. He had been in the military since his eighteenth birthday, first in his homeworld defense force, on Highland, and then in the 13th. He had been Joe Baerclau's assistant squad leader, then moved up a slot when Joe took over the platoon. Ezra did not feel twenty-one. Combat and responsibility had made him feel ancient. Every step he took toward the Schlinal defenders at Site Alpha added a year to the way he felt.

"Keep marking possible cover," he warned his men. "Know where you're going to dive before you have to." Advancing across open ground, even when it was as uneven as this rocky stretch, made him feel particularly vulnerable. It seemed to be something out of military ancient history, a style of combat that had been impractical—and excessively bloody—hundreds of years before men first left Earth to settle other worlds. The fact that standard-issue weapons were not intended for this sort of combat made the feeling of exposure even worse. Ezra no longer thought about the heat that made each breath difficult and uncomfortable, or about the sun-heated rocks that had burned his hands, arms, and legs. Those pains had faded long before, even though his hands were blistered. The enemy was only 150 meters away now.

Wire could be a hazard on unprotected areas of the body at this distance. Ezra crouched a little lower and kept moving forward. Olly Wytten and Pit Tymphe flanked their squad leader, Olly to the left, Pit to the right. The men were spaced no more than four meters apart. The entire line was like that, but that line did remain fairly straight, as near as the terrain permitted.

Olly advanced in his usual intense manner. Anything he did, he gave it his all. Of the replacements who had come to first squad since its first time in combat, Olly was the best. He had all of the tools and knew how, and when, to use them. Pit had to hold himself back. He was well below average in size, almost as short and thin as Joe Baerclau. He tried harder, as if he constantly felt the need to prove himself. Recklessness was never far from the surface for Pit Tymphe. But this was his second campaign. He was getting better.

Al Bergon was to Pit's right. In the SATs, a medic was just a rifleman with additional duties. In combat, being a medic took precedence when there were casualties to treat. At other times, the medic was expected to pull his weight as a combatant. Al kept his place between the two fire teams of first squad. None of "his" men had been hit. So far, the only casualty of the day had been Mal. The last time Al had checked, Underwood was recovering from his heatstroke, but was not ready yet to rejoin his comrades.

Wiz Mackey was to Al's right. Wiz had once been a hothead like Pit, but combat and the loss of his best friend had tempered his recklessness. In close combat, he was still the most ferocious man in the squad, but he no longer took unnecessary chances. His anger had tempered him, made him coldly methodical, even in fury.

Mort anchored the squad on the right. He was his usual steady, reliable self. He had always approached his work methodically, as if being a combat infantryman was no more exceptional than being an associate professor teaching introductory courses in history and political science. He had been good at that. He was better at this.

Joe Baerclau was no more than two steps behind the line now, sometimes closer, between first and fourth squads.

Heggie wire started ricocheting off of the rocks around the men of first squad with some regularity. They were still somewhat more than a hundred meters away from the Schlinal rifles, so the wire no longer carried enough momentum to penetrate net armor, and the ricochets would do no more than scratch exposed skin. A direct hit on unprotected skin would be different though.

"Cover!" Joe shouted over his platoon channel, repeating a command that had come over the company channel from Captain Keye.

On the noncoms' net, Keye had additional instructions. "When we start up again, it'll be fire and maneuver, by squads. Keep the jumps short."

Joe gave his orders quickly. The squads would move odd and even. "Start using wire when we go," he added. "Even if we're not close enough for it to do much damage, it'll give them something to think about."

This was no long rest break. Joe had scarcely finished his instructions before the order came to start moving again. He got off a three-second burst of wire as he got back to his feet. His wire had a lot of company. In both directions.

The fight was finally going to be joined at close quarters.

CHAPTER FIVE

All of the buildings in the Schlinal compound had been constructed of native rock quarried near the base. For the most part, it appeared that the builders had used very large square-cut blocks. Even in the buildings that appeared to be barracks, windows were few and small. The only breaks in the walls of the warehouses and other buildings appeared to be doors.

The rusty color of the stone testified to its high iron content. That there were other metals and minerals present was of little interest to anyone on either side at the moment. A foundry and mill had been built on the site. Steel girders and trusses had been fashioned to frame the stone buildings. Stone cut into sheets as much as fifty centimeters thick had been used for roofing. The Accord intelligence estimate was simple: "Left to themselves, those buildings might last as long as the Egyptian pyramids back on Earth. The slightly lower oxygen content of the atmosphere (and low average humidity) suggests that even the interior steel framing might last almost indefinitely." Schlinal construction was not routinely designed to be that permanent. But the use of prison labor and the lack of more ephemeral building materials on Tamkailo had made these exceptions possible, almost mandatory.

It certainly made for unusually solid construction. Those buildings could stand up to a lot of abuse, even the abuse of rocket warheads and artillery shells. Missiles exploded and punched holes, scattering stony shrapnel (more outside than in), but it would take a great many such hits to inflict serious structural damage.

The Schlinal designers of the compound had given little thought to providing a solid defensive perimeter around the base. The installation had originally been built as merely a depot on an otherwise uninviting world, not a base for an occupying force. The mesh fencing had been intended to contain garrison and prisoners, not to keep out an enemy or to provide more secure firing posts. There
were
automatic weapons positions at the corners, and spaced at wide intervals in between. And small pavilions had been spaced inside the fence to give sentries a place to get out of the heat of Tamkailo's sun. On this world, the pavilions were no luxury, but necessity. But those defensive measures were pro forma, to give soldiers something to do. The Schlinal overlords had no real concern about escaping prisoners. The only escape from penal servitude on Tamkailo was death.

Long before the leading units of the 13th got close to the base perimeter, there were extensive gaps in the fence. Most of the pavilions had been destroyed, as well as those machine gun positions on the three sides of the base that the Accord was attacking.

One unavoidable result of the air attacks was that there were plenty of shallow craters to give cover to the Schlinal defenders, and they were quick to take advantage of them. More were sheltered within and between the nearest rank of buildings. Again, shell damage had provided a few gun ports, holes in the sides of buildings. Other troops were on the roofs now, behind low parapets, many of them armed with rocket launchers to take their toll on any aircraft that returned.

The 13th's Red Flight lost two Wasps within seconds of each other, leaving the flight with only five planes. Yellow Flight lost its third plane of the day. At the moment, Blue Flight was away from the action, heading back to land and replenish munitions and get fresh batteries. The air wing of the 8th SAT and two squadrons of the 17th Independent Air Wing were coming in as well now, attacking the northern and southern sections of the perimeter and striking at targets in the middle of the base. The 97th LIR was attacking on the ground from the south. The 8th SAT was moving against the north side of the base.