Side Show (28 page)

Keye shook his head. "The ones who've been playing tag with us can't be far. The rest... just take a look at your mapboard. One regiment could be here in less than an hour, the other two not long after that. Within two hours, we're going to be ass-deep in them, maybe four or five to one against us."

"We're gonna stay right here and slug it out?"

"Far as I know," Keye said. "That's the current plan, anyway."

"How 'bout we haul some of the reserves up to the line, ammo and food?" Joe suggested. "I'll feel a lot better if I'm not worried about running short of wire again."

The lieutenant's hesitation was minimal. "Get your working parties out." He turned to the first sergeant. "Pass the word to the other platoons, Izzy."

Joe gave the lieutenant a casual salute, lowered his visor, and headed back to his men. On his way, he paused to look at the three Heyers. All were dug in so that their front splat guns were just barely above the earthen berms in front of them. That fire wouldn't be far above the heads of men in foxholes on the line. The turret guns would be less of a hazard. Except to approaching Heggies.

"While they last," Joe whispered. He had no illusions. The Heyers would draw heavy fire from the start. They were unlikely to survive for long, even dug partially in.

—|—

Zel Paitcher almost hyperventilated. He was back in his Wasp for the first time since being relieved. It felt so good that he started breathing, deeply and quickly, until he started to get light-headed. By that time, he had trouble slowing his breathing again. A slight pain developed in his forehead over the left eye.

He took his hands off of the control yoke one at a time and flexed them. He had also been gripping the yoke too tightly.

I am nervous,
he thought. He scanned his heads-up display and the monitors below it. They told him everything he needed to know about the Wasp, and everything that was known about its surroundings. Irv Albans was flying off his right wing. Jase Wilmer and Roy Carney were flying together, some distance away. The latest data on enemy locations was on the map monitor, some of the information hard, most of it guesses based on outdated intelligence.

The Wasps were looking for the enemy now, not just to update the data.

"That one vehicle moving by itself, that must be those reccers they told us about," Irv said when the single infrared blip showed on his TA system.

"I'll go down for a closer look," Zel said. "You stay up here to make sure I don't find more than I expect."

He hardly waited for a response before easing back on the throttles. The Wasp started down like an express elevator. Zel turned the nose to come up on the truck from behind. He wasn't worried about being spotted from the ground. It was dark enough for invisibility, and with the engines throttled back, he couldn't possibly be heard over the sounds of a truck engine.

Zel came down below fifty meters, an equal distance behind the truck. At that range he could distinguish the individual heat signatures of seven men in the rear of the truck—at that range, clearly a Schlinal half-track. The truck was moving too fast for foot soldiers to keep up, and there were no other vehicles anywhere close.

A smile played over Zel's face as he thought,
I could almost get close enough to make sure those are Accord helmets.
But he wouldn't. At
that
range, his Wasp would occult enough of the sky to be noticeable, and he didn't want to spook the reccers into firing at him. Instead, he eased the throttles forward and started to climb.

"It's them," he told Irv. "Now, let's find the Heggies who're chasing them. They can't be far."

Twenty kilometers.

"In and out," Zel reminded his wingman. "We're just here to slow them down."

"And pare them down," Irv replied. "The more we zap, the fewer there'll be to hit our mudders."

In the dark, the Wasps had every advantage. There was nothing visible of them until they fired their first rockets at the lead trucks. Then, before anyone in the half-tracks could respond, they allowed themselves a four-second strafing run before they split, one to either side, and climbed as rapidly as they could without blacking out from the gee-load.

Three Schlinal SAM rockets came up into the night sky, blind shots. None achieved target lock. They rose harmlessly, then fell back after they exhausted their fuel and momentum.

For their second run, Zel and Irv came in from straight behind, almost at ground level, too low for their Wasps even to show up by occulting stars. Missiles and cannon. Once more the two fighters split, left and right, and climbed away from the enemy column.

"Now let's see if we can find the next batch of 'em," Zel said. The other pair of Wasps was already looking for that next collection of Heggies.

—|—

The crew of Basset two was out of their gun. They were hiding under bushes some twenty meters from it. They had stretched a thermal tarp over the Fat Turtle. Now all they could do was wait.

"I feel like my butt's hangin' out the window," Simon muttered after they had been in position for fifteen or twenty minutes. "Out here all alone, nothing but a pistol in my hand."

"Shut up," Eustace said, mildly. "It could be worse. The guns shut up inside the perimeter got no room to maneuver. Not enough, leastwise. The shooting starts, they won't last long if the Heggies bring up Novas or Boems. Out here, we got a chance."

"Chance for what?" Simon asked. "To be the last ones bagged by the Heggies?"

Eustace growled. "If it comes to that. Even that's somethin'."
We'll give 'em what-for even then,
Eustace promised himself. As long as they had the Fat Turtle and rounds to fire, they would keep fighting. And after that, they still had their pistols.

Eustace grinned.
Bloodthirsty bastard I've become.

He cleared his throat. "If the dope we got was good, we've got an hour, hour and a half, before we have to worry too much. Unless the Heggies have more Novas lying doggo in close."

"Like we're doing," Simon said.

"Yeah."
They ambush us, we ambush them. Helluva way to run a war.

"Peekaboo, I see you," Karl Mennem said in a falsetto.

"We didn't play it with 200mm howitzers when I was a kid," Simon said.

"Enough," Eustace said. "You guys try to get a few minutes' shut-eye. It might be a long time before we get another chance."

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

The noises in the night might almost have been nothing more than distant thunderstorms. More rare than the muted crump-thump of explosions were the brief flares of light that the infantrymen manning the 13th's perimeter saw. More rarely yet, a man might hear an artillery shell whizzing overhead, outbound. There was fighting going on, but it wasn't close. Not yet. In fact, the obvious distance of the enemy—marked by the muted sounds of Havoc shells and Wasp rockets exploding—had a calming effect on many of the infantrymen waiting in their newly dug foxholes.

A lullaby was how Joe Baerclau thought of it. One man per fire team was left on watch. The rest tried to get some sleep. Nearly everyone was exhausted enough to sleep now, if only fitfully. Joe might have wakened a half dozen times in the hour he permitted himself to sleep, curled up in his foxhole. Sometimes it was one of the distant noises that woke him. At other times, it was a brief message over the radio, or someone moving close by. But each time he woke, he would listen for a moment to satisfy himself that the danger wasn't imminent, and then slide back into sleep for another minute or five. Until the next time.

It was a little more than an hour before Ezra Frain called and told him that his time was up. Joe took several deep breaths and went through a stretching routine. He stood and looked around. The flashes were no longer quite so far away.

"They'll be here before long," he told Ezra over a private channel.

"Last word from the lieutenant was that we might have another hour. The Heggies that have been chasing us have been slowed down quite a bit. All we've seen lately is a few sniping incidents from the Heggies right around us. I guess the rest of them are waiting for reinforcements."

"They might wait until all of them rendezvous," Joe said. "Now that we've gone to ground to wait for them. They don't have to slow
us
down any more."

"Sounds logical to me," Ezra said. Then, after a pause, "Joe?"

"Yeah?"

"This is gonna be worse than Porter, isn't it?"

"Could be, Ez. Nobody's going to come in-system to rescue us this time."

"This last hour, just sitting here waiting—there's been too much time to think. I'm scared, Joe, more scared than I've ever been before." When Joe didn't say anything, Ezra continued. "I mean, there really hasn't been time to get deep scared before. All that crazy riding in the mixers. No time to think there. Even back on Porter, we were too busy for fear most of the time."

Most of us,
Joe thought. "Don't let it eat at you, Ez. Nothing we can do about it now. Try to get a little sleep. I'll look after the squad."

"I managed to catch some sleep in the mixer earlier. Don't know how, but I did. It would take a patch to put me to sleep now, and we don't have
that
much time."

"Probably not. When's the last time you talked to the lieutenant?"

"About twenty minutes. I think he's trying to sleep now. I was over there. He looked like he'd aged ten years the last coupla days."

"I'm going to take a short walkabout, and get something to eat," Joe said. "Call me if you see anything."

He checked his rifle, then climbed out of the foxhole, careful not to damage the berm he had piled around it. After taking a minute to do more stretching—his knees had gotten stiff curled up in the foxhole—Joe walked along behind the platoon's section of the line, warning each squad that he was coming as he neared it. He talked to the men who were awake, looked over the defensive emplacements again, and stared out into the night quite a lot. He went to one end of the platoon, then back to the other, and finally he dropped behind the line to the APCs. There was only one man in each of those, the assigned driver. They would also operate the splat guns. The mixers were too vulnerable in the kind of battle that was almost certain to develop to put two men in each.

The first sergeant was manning the company's CP while Lieutenant Keye slept nearby.

"Anything new?" Joe asked.

Iz Walker shook his head. "Not really. Still no sign of enemy aircraft. That's the only real good news we've had. They don't seem to have too many tanks left either, far as we can tell. The bad news is that it looks as if we're going to be facing four regiments of Heggie mudders in an hour or two." His chuckle was mirthless. "None of them are anywhere near full strength anymore." He paused before he added, "They probably still outnumber us by four to one."

"What about the rest of our people?" Joe asked.

"Can't make much sense from what we're hearing about that," Walker said. "They're up to their earholes in trouble. A real set-to, no lines left. Heggies attack in one place. We attack in another. They've broken in and we've broken out, different places. Trying to turn each other's flanks. A real nightmare."

"Who's winning?"

"No idea. I don't think anybody has any idea. Maybe in the morning we'll know. One way or the other."

"You think it'll end that fast?"

"Maybe, maybe not. No damn way to tell."

"What about the civilians?"

Walker stared at Joe for a minute or more before he answered. "All I've got there is scuttlebutt. Last I heard, they're stuck in a hole, a bunker, with an SI team. Abru—you know him?"

"We've met."

"If it looks as if there's any danger of the Heggies getting the scientists, Abru's got orders to give them the whack."

"He'll do it, too, if he has to," Joe said.

Walker nodded. "Those SI guys are all loons, and he's one of the worst."

"Or best, I guess, depending how you look at it," Joe countered.

"There's
women
in that research team," Walker said.

—|—

It
does
make a difference,
Joe thought as he walked back toward his foxhole. But, right at the moment, he could not tell himself exactly
why
it made a difference that there were women in the research team. Why was it more repugnant to kill them than their male counterparts? They were all civilians, highly trained professionals making an important contribution to the defense of the Accord of Free Worlds. At least, they
would
make an important contribution if they, or their research data, ever made it to a safe Accord world.

Joe doubted that any of them signed up for their project thinking,
I may have to be killed if we do good work and the Heggies come along.
He doubted that any of them
wanted
to die.
Any more than
I
do,
he thought. But he had accepted military duty willingly. He had always known that there was a chance it would kill him, and he had seen too many other soldiers die to have any illusions left. But those deaths had always come as a result of a free choice those men had made, knowing that death was a risk.

I wonder what they're thinking now?
It was a question Joe couldn't answer, and he decided, without too much difficulty, that he really didn't want to know the answer to that question.

—|—

Dr. Philippa Corey, her team, and their SI guardians were already in what was nearly a tomb. A Heyer had been buried. One of the backhoes had been used to excavate a trench deep enough, and after the APC was driven into it, the dirt had been backfilled. The only exit left uncovered was the top hatch. Two air vents in that provided circulation. Above the hatch—propped open just a few centimeters to provide additional air until the fighting started—there was a circular hole surrounded by a low dirt rampart. From outside, that hole looked like any other foxhole, except up close. The Heyer was safe from just about anything short of a direct hit by a large rocket or a Nova shell right in the hole.