Side Show (24 page)

"Ezra, take your squad out and see if you can get around them," Joe said. "It doesn't sound like there's too many of them. Only a squad, or less. There's no way to tell yet."

Joe reported back to Lieutenant Keye and First Sergeant Walker that they had made contact and that a firefight was in progress.

"Push on as best you can," Keye replied. "We're a little busy here ourselves right now." He hadn't even stopped firing his splat gun during the short conversation. The 13th's advance into the ambushing Schlinal troops was turning into a real melee, confused small actions moving around one another.

"Trying to flank them now," Joe said before he switched channels. "Frank, take your squad around to the right. Try to cut them off there." Sergeant Frank Symes was fourth squad leader. "You run into any more of them, get down until we have some idea what we're up against."

"On our way," Symes replied.

Staying low—on hands and knees when he thought he had decent cover, slithering along on his belly when he didn't—Joe started to move toward where third squad was engaged. It still sounded as if there might be no more than a half dozen Schlinal wire rifles firing. The standard Schlinal weapon made a different sound than the Accord Armanoc. After very little exposure to both, a soldier could tell which was which.

Joe was still twenty meters from Sauv Degtree's position when new firing started, on the right, where fourth squad was moving.

"What is it, Frank?" Joe asked.

"Don't know yet. One of my men thought he saw something. No return fire yet. We're checking it out."

Joe waited for several seconds before he resumed his own movement. He was staying very low now. There was wire whizzing by overhead—not far enough overhead for comfort.

"They're pulling back," Degtree said when he noticed Joe. "That way." He pointed southeast.

"Frank, moving across your front from the left. The Heggies who've been doing the shooting," Joe said, relaying the information before he said anything to Degtree.

"I see them," Symes said. "We're taking them under fire."

The Schlinal soldiers went down. Although there was no immediate return fire from them, no one assumed that they had all been killed—or even wounded.

"Move in carefully," Joe told both squad leaders. "Second squad, move around up here. Don't let first get too far away."

Joe waited until second squad was moving before he made his next call. "Ezra, you found anything yet?"

"Not a sniff. You want us to bend around behind those Heggies you've got?"

"No. Wait until you link up with second. Then both of you echelon around. Unless something else happens first."

"Roger." There was a pause before Ezra said, "We're down and waiting. Where's second?"

"Low" Gerrent, second squad's leader, broke in to say, "I've already got you in sight. Ten seconds and we'll be ready."

That was when the shooting started on the left, from beyond the north end of first squad's line.

—|—

Mort felt wire pelting his helmet as he dove for cover. It wasn't the first time he had been dinged that way. The first time, after that fight was over, he had described it in almost whimsical terms. "Like getting hit with rice at a wedding," he told the rookies who joined the squad when the 13th got back to base. "Rice with a bad attitude."

He didn't waste energy on thoughts like that while he was being pelted with wire. He went flat, head toward the incoming fire. He waited for pain to come, the pain that would tell him that he had other hits, wire that had penetrated his net armor or found one of the gaps. When no pain came, he brought his rifle into position and fired off a couple of short bursts. He knew there was little chance that he would hit anyone. What he wanted now was either to draw more fire or suppress it. Either would help. If more wire came in, he might get a better idea where to aim. If no more came, that carried its own, more obvious reward.

"Anybody see where that came from?" Ezra asked.

There were no affirmative answers, and the squad was too well trained to waste air on negatives.

Joe redirected his attention to the left, where the heavier Schlinal fire was. First squad had gone to cover seventy or eighty meters from where Joe was. He heard the news that third and fourth squad had zeroed in on the lone squad that had started the firefight. There was another heavy burst of Armanoc fire over there, and then Sauv reported that the enemy squad had all been accounted for.

"Looks like we're facing at least a platoon," Ezra told Joe a minute later. "I think they were moving, trying to get around on the river side."

"You have any casualties?" Joe asked.

"Negative. The Professor may need a new bonnet, but he's okay."

"Keep 'em busy. I'll get help to you as quick as possible."

Joe pulled third squad back to go with him, around the left to get in front of the new Heggie contact. He sent fourth squad the other way, to try to get behind them.

The squads moved as quickly as reasonable, by fire team. Joe moved with third squad's second fire team. The groups leapfrogged one another. During the first several cycles, they didn't draw any Heggie fire. When wire did start coming their way, it was light, perhaps no more than two or three rifles aimed at them, and too far away for the wire to be especially dangerous.

Joe turned the squad more to the northwest, trying to keep the enemy far enough away to let them move quickly without taking serious hits. Then they bent back toward the east. As they closed in on where the enemy seemed to be, the fire team that was moving let loose with suppressing fire while they ran.

And drew more enemy fire in return.

Time seemed to speed up for Joe. Up and run, down and cover. Even the slight breeze seemed to double its velocity. Joe recognized the feeling of being pumped up as he moved toward danger. The sound of enemy wire flying past made the hair on his arms stand on end. First and second squads were firing into the enemy from cover to Joe's right. Somewhere beyond, fourth squad was still trying to get around to cover the third side of the enemy force.

Second platoon started to take casualties. Joe heard calls for medics from both first and second squad. He saw a man in third squad go down and called for that squad's medic himself.

But the enemy fire was diminishing at the same time.

"They're on the run!" Ezra reported.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

"It's like trying to catch rain in a net," Dezo Parks complained. "I've never seen Heggies play this game, breaking into small units and turning guerrilla."

There was little enemy armor still firing, but Parks was certain that no more than half of the Novas had been destroyed. At least a dozen were racing away from the 13th at the best speed they could make. Perhaps a few more were hiding, close, shut down, under thermal tarps. The Wasps all needed to land to rearm. None had any rockets left; only one or two had rounds for their forward cannons.

"No help for it," Van Stossen replied. "Let's make as much of a mark as we can in the next fifteen or twenty minutes. We'll try to disengage then, get the men mounted again."

"We haven't seen any trucks to haul these troops," Dezo admitted. "With their armor on the run, we might have a chance to put some real distance between us. Until the tanks come back."

"Start the Wasp support units moving now, with their security detachment. We've got to get them clear first. Those planes haven't got more than another twenty or thirty minutes of juice left."

"I've already alerted them. All of the support vans, Wasp and Havoc."

"What line company can we mount up fastest to cover them?"

"Howard. We've kept them close to their mixers and the trucks."

"Okay, they go along. Start them now. They'll need to get a good ten klicks to give them time to get the Wasps down and back up."

—|—

Echo's second platoon moved forward again, a little faster now with an enemy in retreat, but still not carelessly. They knew that there were still a lot of Heggies, somewhere close, and no one wanted to dash headlong into something too big for them to handle.

"Turn the corner," Joe ordered after five minutes. "We've gone too far east now." Their job wasn't pursuit of one small enemy unit. They needed to get behind whatever enemy was engaged with the rest of the 13th. If they could.

They didn't make much progress south before new orders came. Joe whistled over the platoon frequency. "Hold up. We've got to get back to our mixers." He had already given directions for the Heyers, through Lieutenant Keye. All the platoon had to do now was make it to the rendezvous.

"Back right over the path we took coming out," Joe told the squad leaders. "Don't let your men dope off just because they've seen it before."

Going out, Joe had stayed close to the point squad. On the way back, he lingered just in front of the rear guard. Where trouble was most likely. The conscious part of the decision was to avoid getting
too
close. As platoon sergeant, he wasn't supposed to be the first one involved in any fighting. He had broader duties.

Joe didn't walk backward, but he spent so much time looking over his shoulder that his neck started to ache. He had a nasty itch in his mind, an itch that worried that the Heggies would ambush them one more time before they could get to their Heyers.

This time, the itch was wrong.

—|—

It was a bumpy ride for beat-up reccers in the Schlinal halftrack they had salvaged. Dem kept the accelerator all of the way to the floor. The vehicle lurched and bumped over uneven ground. At least Dem had the steering wheel to hold on to. On the other side of the bench seat in the cab, Fredo used both arms and legs to brace himself in position, and even that was sometimes insufficient to keep him from sliding, or bumping his head. In the back of the truck, where the rest of the men were, it was much worse.

"We've got a lot of ground to make up," Dem shouted one time Fredo complained.

"What good will it do if we're not fit to fight when we get there?" Fredo asked.

"If you can't handle a ride in the park, maybe you should transfer to C and B school," Dem suggested. C and B: cooks and bakers—the ultimate insult among reccers.

They
had
been making excellent time considering that there was nothing even vaguely resembling a road within a thousand kilometers. Dem's calculation, with a wide margin of error, showed that they had closed to within four hundred kilometers of the 13th. He hadn't stopped the truck for more than five minutes at a time, and that only twice since they started.

"Time we catch 'em, we might all of us be unfit for anything but C and B," Fredo suggested.

"Quit bitchin'," Dem said. "We coulda had to walk. Might yet, if our repairs give out. Don't know how good these Heggie buckets are anyway."

At the moment, the prospect of walking was not all that unappealing to Fredo.

Dem had been piloting more by guess than by map. He had headed east, then south, then east again. They were already past the point where the mudders had rendezvoused with their armor and support vans. A lot of traffic had passed. Even from a truck cab at fifty kilometers per hour, Dem could see how badly the terrain had been chewed up by so many tracked vehicles passing over the same sod. Farmer set up shop here, he thought, an' he wouldn't have to plow the first year. Straight furrows, heading east.

"Maybe we ought to move off this line," Fredo suggested. "A little to one side or the other anyway, just to avoid running into company we don't want. We do know there are Heggies between us and our people."

"Let's give ourselves another forty-five minutes," Dem said after considering it. "We must still be at least that far behind them, and this way, we don't have to worry about missing our people."

Fredo glanced at the time line on his visor. Forty-five minutes. He would try to hold Dem to that.

Only twenty of those minutes had elapsed before they saw a lone Schlinal half-track, the same type as the one they were riding in, sitting with its hood up and two men looking into the engine compartment. Another half dozen men were sitting in the bed of the truck, with several more standing by the side. One of them moved a couple of steps away and started waving with both hands, trying to get Dem to stop.

"Action on the left!" Dem pulled his visor down to talk to the men in the back. "Rake 'em as we go by. Any of them left, we'll stop to mop up."

"Dem!" Fredo protested.

"No choice. We don't get rid of them, they'll radio ahead and we'll have more to deal with later. Get your zipper ready."

Dem pulled his foot off of the accelerator. Slowing down served two purposes. It would make the Heggies think they were stopping—comrades ready to help them fix their truck or pick them up—and it made it possible for the reccers to get their weapons ready for action. It would have been impossible for the reccers to do any good at full speed. Even if they had been able to bring their rifles to firing positions, they would have been unable to hit anything smaller than the sky or the planet.

Even slowing down, Dem had to keep both hands on the wheel. There would be no drive and shoot for him, though he considered it.

"Watch it," he whispered into his radio. He was watching for the moment of recognition, when the Heggies realized that it wasn't help arriving but grief, when they noticed that the helmets and camouflage were wrong.

At fifty meters, the Heggies still seemed to think that the truck was carrying men from their own army.

"They must be wondering why we don't answer their calls by now," Dem muttered. Without a Heggie helmet handy, he couldn't know, but he suspected that they would be trying as many different channels as possible to explain their problem and what they needed.

"Get ready," Dem said, a little louder. Forty meters. He had the truck's speed down to 25 kph. His foot was back on the pedal, holding that speed, ready to increase it at need. If any of those Heggies had a rocket launcher handy, it wouldn't take long for him to get it into position.