Side Show (3 page)

The splat gun was a crew-served automatic weapon. It fired the same collapsed uranium wire that the Armanoc zippers did, but at greater speed and from two-hundred-meter reels, rather than the twenty-meter spools the carbines used. On the Heyer, one gun was mounted in front, next to the driver's position. The other was in a turret, top rear, able to swivel through a complete 360 degrees.

Lieutenant Hilo Keye, Joe Baerclau, and 2nd platoon's first squad all crammed into one Heyer with two of the enlisted men from headquarters squad. The lieutenant took the front gunner's position—"So I can see what the hell's going on," he mumbled to Joe, who moved to a spot near the hatch at the rear of the vehicle, close to the turret.

Hilo Keye was old for a company-grade officer. He was a mustang, commissioned from the ranks, and he had not even joined the ADF until after his thirtieth birthday. As company commander, he was filling a captain's slot. His predecessor, Captain Teu Ingels, had been promoted to major and the colonel's staff, as operations officer. It was common knowledge that Keye's own promotion was due "any day now." He had the rare combination of talent, ambition, and family connections to assure him the fast track upward. As long as he survived.

There were four veterans in the first squad of 2nd platoon, Echo Company. Sergeant Ezra Frain was twenty years old, tall and thin with bright red hair and green eyes. His home world, Highland, was one of the places where Accord and local forces had defeated an invasion by the Schlinal Hegemony. Ezra had been serving in his planetary defense force. After that fight, he had transferred to the ADF, and to the 13th SAT.

Corporal Mort Jaiffer was the assistant squad leader, which meant that he ran the squad's second fire team. At twenty-eight, he was the old man of the squad. He was also the intellectual. A large, hulking man with a growing bald spot on the top of his head, he had been an associate professor of history and political science before joining the ADF. He had turned down the opportunity to become an officer and had resisted promotion to corporal for as long as he could.

Al Bergon and Wiz Mackey were still privates. The SATs did not promote men simply because of longevity. Al was twenty-three, tall, thin, and dark. He doubled as the squad's medic. Wiz was two years younger, tall, big-boned, and fair-haired. Both of them had been critically wounded during their last campaign, on Porter. They had been given the option of transferring out of the 13th. Neither had taken it.

The three rookies had come to the squad together, straight out of the SAT training camp. Of the three, only Olly Wytten would have qualified for assignment to an SAT under the old guidelines—combat experience or a year in the ADF. He had been in uniform for a year before volunteering for the elite assault teams. Of average height and weight, Olly Wytten looked hard and angular, and much older than his twenty-one years. Black hair and eyes and a dark complexion made him look even more menacing than he was. In training, he had proved adept at everything demanded of him. He picked up combat skills more rapidly than most. Joe Baerclau and Ezra Frain had tabbed him as the most promising of the replacements.

Carl Eames was from Bancroft, Joe Baerclau's homeworld, but not from the same region. Not yet twenty, Carl seemed rather awkward at everything he did, but—somehow—he did it. Even his speech was awkward, hesitant. As a result, he said very little. He had grown up on an isolated farm. He was tall and heavy, with the muscles of a man who had known nothing but hard manual labor for a lot of years.

Phil "Pit" Tymphe was from Ceej, Tau Ceti IV, one of the very first worlds settled directly from Earth. The nickname came from his initials. He was another quiet one, with nondescript brown hair and eyes, and a vague smoothness to his face. He did have his moments, especially in any sort of competition, whether training or real combat. Almost as short as Sergeant Baerclau, he was ten kilograms heavier, and none of it was fat.

The APC started moving forward almost before Joe got the hatch secured at the rear. Joe tapped Wiz Mackey on the shoulder. Wiz was at the rear splat gun, his head up in the turret. He leaned down to see what the sergeant wanted.

"Make sure that gun's ready to fire," Joe said over a private radio channel. "And keep your eyes peeled. These things are magnets for trouble."

"Don't worry," Wiz said, his voice cold. "I ain't paid off my debt to the Heggies yet." His best friend had been killed in the fighting on Porter.

"Don't let it get personal," Joe told him, his voice almost as hard as Wiz's. "That blinds you worse'n booze."

Wiz didn't reply. He just moved his head back up into the turret and traversed it through ninety degrees, then back to its original position.

Joe squeezed onto the bench seat on the right side of the APC. There was no way this ride could be comfortable, but it would go better on his butt than on his feet.

—|—

Turnaround time was under ten minutes. The ground crews replaced the batteries in the Wasp fighters and replenished munitions. For this fight, the weapons were cannons and rockets.

Lieutenant Zel Paitcher had not moved in the cockpit of Blue two after landing. He hadn't even taken his hands off of the control yoke except to hit the power-down switch. Outside, the ground crew had worked with its usual expertise, as polished as any racing pit crew.

Zel did blink several times. He breathed deeply and slowly, working to keep his nerves under control. It was difficult to move back and forth between the adrenaline rush of combat and the dead time on the ground. Getting back "up" could be a problem, and that was the sort of problem that could prove fatal. The Heggies had plenty of fighters of their own around, and pilots who knew how to work them. For just an instant, Zel considered popping a stimtab. That would perk him up again, but he decided against it. Too much, too soon.

"All buttoned up, sir," Roo Vernon, crew chief for Blue one and Blue two, said. "You're ready to go."

"Thanks, Chief," Zel replied. He switched radio frequencies. "Slee?"

"Let's go." Slee Reston had just made captain, leader of the eight Wasps of Blue Flight.

The two Wasps lifted silently into the growing dark. In the night, the kidney-shaped fighters were almost perfectly invisible, to optics or electronics. The pilot sat in an ejectable cockpit near the center of the leading edge. The twin antigrav engines and their batteries were in bulging pods at either side. Between power pods and cockpit, the rest of the Wasp was given over to payload, in a number of possible configurations. The new Wasps, the Mark IVs, had a couple of refinements to previous models. Two batteries serviced each motor, extending the plane's maximum air time by nearly 50 percent, to just over ninety minutes. And a rear-firing five-barrel cannon had been installed, behind and below the cockpit, a permanent addition to discourage enemy fighters coming up from behind.

The Wasps of Blue Flight each carried two of those five-barreled cannons, one facing rear and, in the current configuration, another facing forward, in a pod just below the cockpit. Their 25mm depleted uranium rounds separated into 15mm-long slivers after being fired. With each barrel firing sixty rounds a second, one Wasp could put a lot of metal on a very small target. Not even the best personal armor could withstand that sort of onslaught, and an enemy fighter
might
be brought down that way... with a little luck.

Zel blinked once more, consciously, right before he pulled back on the yoke and took his Wasp into the air, just meters from Slee's. Even this close, the other Wasp was already virtually invisible. In a few more minutes, as evening dusk settled into night, the planes would be invisible to each other even in tight formation. They would rely exclusively on instruments. The final line was an automatic crash avoidance override that would cause the Wasps to veer apart if they came within fifty centimeters of each other. That system was as nearly foolproof as any.

"Our course is two-nine-five," Slee said as the two Wasps cleared the trees surrounding the landing zone. Two more Wasps of Blue Flight landed. As long as possible, each of the three flights would try to keep all but two planes in the air, to cover the breakout and keep the rest of the Heggies in the area occupied.

"Two-nine-five," Zel repeated. Keeping station on Slee, he was already on course, which would take them directly over the 13th, where the SAT was rushing through the lines. One of the other pilots of Blue Flight had been the one to spot the opening. A little help from air and artillery had widened the gap. Now they had to keep the Heggies from closing it too quickly.

"Red Flight still has the high cap," Slee reminded Zel. It wasn't that Slee thought his wingman's memory deficient. Repetition simply made errors slightly less likely. The high cap was responsible for intercepting enemy aircraft. That left the ground support mission to Blue and Yellow flights.

Zel kept his eyes on the heads-up display on his canopy. That would tell him anything he needed to know sooner than he could learn it any other way. The Hegemony's Boem fighters were as nearly invisible as the Wasps. It was unlikely that either side would pick up an enemy fighter until it caught its radar emissions. At night, two fighters might be less than a hundred meters apart before they became aware of each other. That made for tense encounters.

The antigrav engines were silent. Only at full throttle did they make an audible whine. Apart from that, the loudest sound in the cockpit was normally the breathing of the pilot, or his radio transmissions.

"Hang on, Zel, we've got a mission," Slee said. They had only been in the air a little more than a minute. "Looks like a full battalion of Heggie tanks moving to intercept our mudders. Change course to two-eight-six, distance thirty-two hundred meters."

As soon as Zel changed course, the target blips appeared on the heads-up display, twenty of them, moving across his course.

"We'll work from the front," Slee said. "Seven and eight are coming in from the southwest. They'll work up from the tail."

Zel simply clicked a reply. He flipped his weapons selector to rockets and pointed his target acquisition system at the lead Nova tanks. Though he could not actually
see
any of the tanks, Zel could picture them adequately. It wasn't just the photographs he had studied. He had seen Novas on the ground—disabled, but relatively intact. The Nova was heavily armored and carried a 135mm main gun. It only required a crew of two.

The TA system clicked twice, indicating target locks. Two of the blips on the screen were highlighted. Zel hit the trigger twice, and two missiles raced out from under his Wasp. At the same time, Slee fired two of his rockets. Four missiles, four Novas. The two Wasps were almost directly over the tanks when the missiles hit. They flew on and flipped their Wasps around in a high-gee turn, climbing as they did.

For the second run, they came in from high, targeting four more tanks, then peeling to the left as two enemy surface-to-air missiles climbed after them.

Zel dropped decoys and pushed his throttles wide open, climbing straight up. Slee angled off to one side, also dropping decoys. The new Wasps were just a trifle more sluggish than the old models, but the limiting factor in the Wasp's performance was still, generally, the gee-load that its pilot could take. Zel and Slee had plenty of warning of the incoming enemy fire. Their lead was enough to let them outrace the limited fuel supply of the Heggie missiles. Those arced over and started to fall. Zel and Slee turned to make another run at the enemy tanks. Twelve had already been destroyed or damaged, but only seven of them seemed to be completely out of commission.

"Boems coming in!" a voice shouted over the radio. Zel scanned his display. The voice hadn't been any of the pilots in Blue Flight, and he didn't recognize it. It had to be one of the pilots in the high cap. "At least eight passed us."

"Keep climbing, Zel," Slee said.

"I don't have them, Slee," Zel replied.

"Low, clipping trees, due north of the tank formation."

"We're not attacking?"

"Yellow flight has them," Slee said. "We'll go north and down, come in behind, try the Novas again if the Boems are accounted for before we catch up."

At twelve thousand meters, Slee and Zel leveled off and moved north. They were just turning back toward the targets when there were three explosions below them, in the air, followed within seconds by two more.

Nearly thirty seconds passed before Slee said, "Rais got it, and one of the planes from Yellow Flight." Rais was Rais Sivvens, Blue seven.

"They get out?" Zel asked.

There was only the slightest pause before Slee said, "No."

CHAPTER THREE

There had not been a single word in the design specifications for the Heyer armored personnel carrier about passenger comfort, and the builders had not gone beyond the requirements. The only real advantage a Heyer provided was speed. Its thin armor might provide marginally better protection than the net armor woven into battle fatigues, but that was more than offset by the fact that an APC was a much more attractive target for enemy gunners. Still, even on broken terrain, a Heyer could make better than fifty kilometers per hour. The night's race in Heyers was mind-numbing but physically almost painful for the infantrymen of the 13th. Riding in a Heyer at speed was as draining as marching with full gear through almost impassable terrain. Sleep was virtually impossible. All anyone could do was hang on and try not to get bounced around
too
badly.

It was nearly midnight before the 13th stopped for a break. That wasn't so much for the comfort of the men as to allow the hydrogen converters to process water into fuel for the engines. Running after dark, the process was less efficient than during daylight, when solar batteries could speed the conversion along.

The 13th had dispersed after clearing the Schlinal lines. The four recon platoons were out front and on the flanks. The eight infantry companies moved in a loose diamond pattern, with the artillery and various support vehicles in the center. The distance from one flank to the other was fifteen kilometers. The distance from point to rear guard was only slightly less. Echo Company was in the rear left section of the diamond.