Until Relieved

PROLOGUE

The wall, ceiling, and floor of the circular room were a uniform pearl-gray. The ceiling was domed, and there was recessed lighting around the top of the wall, but at the moment, those lights were off. The only illumination within the chamber came from the spherical starfield projection that appeared to hover above a five-meter-diameter circular table in the precise center of the room, and from the monitors of compsoles. Those lights, though faint, reflected well from their surroundings. The room scarcely needed more light.

Each of the eight men (there were no women in this subcommittee, though there was approximate parity in the numbers of men and women in the Council from which they were drawn) seated around the table had a compsole screen embedded in the table in front of him. None of these men could be described as young. The youngest was nearly sixty years old, and the average was well over seventy-five, approaching middle age. Each man also had a personal compsole, for taking or reading notes, sitting either on his lap or on the table next to the built-in terminal. Each man also had one or two aides standing behind them, ready to run errands or to provide information that their principles had not thought to look for in his notepad.

Even the name of the planet on which this room could be found was classified information. There were at least a dozen identical rooms located on separate worlds. Meetings were sited at the whim of the chairman. The men sitting around the table had come from a half-dozen different worlds scattered throughout the Accord of Free Worlds of the Terran Cluster, often by circuitous routes. Once this conference ended, they would disperse just as widely, some to return to their own worlds, others to oversee the operation that this meeting would authorize.

There was little doubt of what would come out of this session. Hundreds of ships and more than twenty-five thousand soldiers were already traveling to their final staging areas, waiting only confirmation of their orders before moving into action. Only catastrophic news might cancel the Accord's first major counterstrike against the invaders from the Schlinal Hegemony. There would be no such news.

"We're going to put full assault teams on the ground on four planets," Encho Mizatle, the Accord's minister for Defense, announced without rising from his chair. He spoke softly, but a microphone in his compsole picked up his words, and speakers in the others' compsoles relayed them to his colleagues.

Those others looked at the starfield projection or at their compsole screens, which displayed three-dimensional video of the speaker. Three of them could not have seen the minister if they had wanted to. The star globe hid him from direct view. They did not need to see him, however. They really had no need to even
hear
him—not unless Mizatle managed to say something novel, something not on the agenda. Otherwise, this session was merely pro forma, a matter of putting already-reached decisions on the—highly classified—record.

"The 9th Spaceborne Assault Team will land on Devon as the spearhead of our primary offensive. The 2nd and 12th SAT, as well as the 19th and 21st Mobile Infantry Divisions and the 31st Light Infantry Regiment, will also be committed to the fight on Devon, with the schedule of air and artillery units agreed upon in the General Staff meeting of eleven-seventeen. The reserve units also remain unchanged." The minister simply did not recall the rest of the combat units going into Devon offhand, and he did not want to waste time reading it from his compsole. "The 6th SAT will land on Kulik, the 8th on Hobart, and the 13th on Porter. The 6th, 8th, and 13th are intended to provide diversions to keep the Hegemony from reinforcing their troops on Devon from other garrisons in the sector. Some of these diversionary forces might take heavy casualties, but overall, we expect that their activities will lower the cost in lives to recover Devon. We expect to save more lives than the diversions lose." That was a touchy point. Even after the details of this operation were eventually made public, the Defense minister's assessment would remain classified. He was, after all, a politician.

"The units providing these essential backup missions will be told to expect pickup within four or five days, but their orders are to hold until relieved or recalled." The minister shrugged. "Again, a necessary evil. Evacuation under fire without reinforcement might be suicidal. They really have little choice but to hold until we come for them. That is why we're sending the best we have. They will have to hold until we can free up sufficient forces from Devon to relieve them."

"A question, Minister," Thomas Tompkins, the Accord Council member from Earth, said. Tompkins was the only one present who would have had the audacity to interrupt the minister. Though Earth was no longer the most powerful or most important of humanity's worlds, Terrans still tended to regard their world as the center, the progenitor.

"Yes, Councillor?" Mizatle asked, keeping his voice impeccably polite.

"At need, just how long are these teams provisioned for? How long
can
they hold out, assuming, of course, that they aren't overwhelmed by the Hegemony garrisons on these worlds?"

Mizatle hesitated only briefly before replying although he would have preferred to avoid the question completely. "Nominally, each assault team carries all of the supplies it needs for unsupported action in the field for seven days—ammunition, food, medical supplies, and everything else. That is a conservative estimate, of course. We can gauge the food demands fairly closely. Expenditure of munitions is rather more difficult to predict with assurance. It depends most significantly on the level of enemy opposition. In the present instances, the three teams that will be operating solo ought to be able to stretch all of their supplies to last ten to twelve days, in a pinch."

"And what is the
soonest
we'll be able to relieve them, assuming that the invasion of Devon comes off precisely according to the mission timetable?" Tompkins asked.

Almost inaudibly, the minister replied, "Eight days."

CHAPTER ONE

The only lights on in the troop bay of the landing shuttle were red and dim. The lander had already separated from its mother ship and was waiting for the rest of the assault boats to form up. Ninety soldiers, half of Echo Company, 13th Spaceborne Assault Team, had been crowded into the lander for nearly two hours already. With the visors of their combat helmets down, the men appeared faceless and might almost have been robots save for the small, random movements generated by nerves. Two thirds of these men had faced combat before, but that did not make the veterans any less nervous than the men who were going into battle for the first time. In some cases, knowledge was worse than imagination. The veterans
knew
what they might face.

Each man had his own personal reasons for fighting, weighty or trivial. There were no conscripts in any of the elite assault teams of the Accord of Free Worlds. Every man had volunteered for military service, and then volunteered for this duty—after he had been in uniform long enough to make an informed decision. Some fought because their homeworld asked. Others fought because they felt a personal call to the career, or to the crusade against the Schlinal Hegemony. And, naturally, there were some who never discussed their motives, some who might have had no real idea why they had enlisted.

Strategists rarely think of an army as a collection of individuals. Teamwork is much easier to attain than the spark of personal initiative, and generally more valued in an army. After all, a unit must function smoothly in combat to have any real chance of success, weapons and numbers notwithstanding. And soldiers have to be drilled until the instant obedience of any order becomes such a deeply ingrained habit that the order is not questioned until after it has been obeyed, if then. But any army is made up of the men—and occasionally women—who wear its uniform.

The first squad, 2nd platoon, Echo Company, was perhaps typical of the 13th SAT. On the regiment's Table of Organization, the squad was merely one sergeant, one corporal, and five privates. But the squad was more than just a collection of slots on a manning chart.

Sergeant Joe Baerclau was a veteran. Twenty-four years old, Joe had been a soldier for five of those years, first in a defense regiment on his native world of Bancroft, then in the Accord's Defense Force, the last two of those years in the 13th SAT. The landing on Porter would be his third campaign in less than a year. He was physically smaller than most of the men in the platoon, but he was a tough opponent in any sort of fighting, whether in actual combat or in training. An extremely private man, he rarely showed any outward emotion. At times though, one or another of the men in his squad would say that he could always tell when the Bear was upset; his gray eyes "smoldered." While the shuttle waited for the word to begin its descent, Joe was on his feet surveying the men of his squad, looking for any hint that any of his men might be less than ready for the assault. It was a redundant inspection. For the last two days there had been one equipment and weapons check after another. But concentrating on his men helped Joe suppress his own anxieties about the coming fight.

Corporal Ezra Frain, assistant squad leader, was still a month short of his twentieth birthday. Tall and thin with flaming red hair and green eyes, he came from a farming region on Highland, one of the worlds where Accord and local forces had defeated an invasion by the Schlinal Hegemony. At the conclusion of that fight, Ezra had transferred into the 13th. He doubled as the squad's electronics fix-it man.

The five privates in the squad ranged in age from nineteen to twenty-seven. Four of them were between nineteen and twenty-two.

Mort Jaiffer was the "old man" of the squad. He was also the intellectual, though no one would guess that to look at him, or to see him in action. He was large and burly, with rough hands. Although only twenty-seven years old, his hair was already thinning, with a bald spot like a priest's tonsure. Since he normally wore his hair cut almost to the scalp, he didn't bother to get the bald spot cured. He had taken to the military with as much dedication as he had taken to the study of history and political science. One fine spring morning at the end of the school term, he had resigned his associate professorship to join the Accord military. He had turned down the chance to become an officer and would have preferred to stay a private for as long as he wore the uniform. Despite his wishes though, he had already been tagged for promotion to corporal in the near future.

Tod Chorbek and Wiz Mackey had joined the Accord Defense Force together and had managed to draw assignment together after training, and even when they transferred to the 13th. They were both twenty years old, or would be as soon as Tod celebrated his birthday in two weeks. Both were tall, big-boned, and fair-haired. They had grown up living less than three kilometers apart, on farms, and both had opted for the military as being preferable to what they knew. They had been friends for as long as either of them could remember. Most of the time, the two seemed interchangeable. Even the men who knew them best sometimes confused their names.

Al Bergon and Kam Goff were the only two men in the squad who had never faced combat before, but each of them had at least a year in uniform. One or the other was required for assignment to any of the Accord's fifteen assault teams. Al was twenty-two, tall, thin, and dark. He doubled as the squad's medic. Kam was the youngest member of the squad, just barely past his nineteenth birthday. Blond and with a fair complexion that was almost albino, Kam looked as if he should still be in school, perhaps even several years from graduation.

Finally satisfied with the preparation of his men, Joe sat down and fastened his safety belt.

"Keep it loose," he whispered over the squad's radio frequency. Each man's battle helmet had several radio links. Though there were distinct channels, they were not assigned to constant frequencies. To avoid enemy interception, each channel was switched among a number of different frequencies. Computer chips in the helmet circuitry were synchronized to ensure that each helmet had the current frequency combination correct.

Two minutes later, the lander's pilot announced, "Everybody strap in. Here we go." The shuttle's artificial gravity was switched off as the craft changed attitude and accelerated, aimed almost directly at the sunrise line moving west across Porter.

—|—

Although detection at any significant distance from the planet was unlikely, the transports and escort ships had used Porter's sun to help camouflage their approach. Holding the ships directly between Porter's sun and the occupied portions of the world, the electromagnetic signatures of the ships—inherently difficult to detect because of the construction materials and methods used—were thoroughly blanketed. The landers would also be difficult for an enemy to discover before they got within easy visual range. By that time, the Schlinal communications satellites strung around Porter would be under attack. That was a matter of timing. It would never do to warn the enemy of invasion by going after their communications network too soon.