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  Echo Company's 2nd platoon exited through the rear of the crescent-shaped lander, carrying all of their combat gear with them. Joe checked to make sure that his squad was with him and followed Sergeant Maycroft and Lieutenant Keye, the platoon leader. Joe's first thought as he left the shuttle was that they had set down precisely at the dawn line. To the east, everything was bright and sunny, but there were still deep shadows to the west.

  "We're heading for the tree line," Maycroft said over the platoon frequency. He also pointed. West.

  Joe nodded from reflex, although Maycroft was already five meters in front of him and twenty meters to the right. Joe also repeated the directions over his squad frequency. A touch of a control put a target acquisition overlay against the visor of his helmet. His sensors showed no targets in infrared or through electronic emissions anywhere in the 120-degree arc in front of him.

  The last shuttles of the first wave were already landing. The landers that had touched down first were lifting off again. They would return to the ships in orbit, some to load up with supplies and return, the rest just to get out of the way of possible enemy fire. The vertical takeoff and landing capabilities of the shuttles made it possible to land them in close proximity, both physically and chronologically.

  The 13th Assault was spread over three landing areas, but they were not all that far apart. The first order of business once the landing was secure would be to link up the three LZs. As soon as the recon platoons and the eight infantry companies were down, equipment shuttles would start landing the Havoc mobile artillery, the ground support for the squadron of Wasp fighter-bombers, and the rest of the 13th's support personnel and supplies. Under field exercise conditions, it was possible to have the entire regiment in position and ready to operate within twenty-five minutes of the first touchdown.

  Under combat conditions, that time could be anywhere between fifteen minutes and never.

  From somewhere toward the far side of the landing zones, perhaps fifteen hundred meters away, there were several short bursts of automatic fire from wire carbines. Joe heard two distinct sounds, the first—recognizable as the standard Hegemony wire rifle—pitched somewhat lower than the second, the Mark VI Armanoc.

  "Keep your heads down," Joe warned his men. "They know we're here."

  But there were still no targets apparent in the trees ahead of them.

  CHAPTER TWO

  A good soldier always knows who the good guys and bad guys are. "We" are the good guys. "They" are the bad guys, whoever "they" are. The soldier has to believe that, know it so firmly that he never questions the right of what he is doing.

  Sometimes knowing is easier than explaining. The "Why We Fight" lectures in garrison assume a lot, but they also include a lot that is not really necessary for the audience. For the outsider, well, the basics do not take long.

  More than three thousand years have passed since the first men left Earth for worlds that orbit other stars. One history turned into hundreds of diverging histories as colonies were planted on more and more worlds. Inevitably, some of those colonies failed or lost contact with the rest of mankind. Individual worlds and groups of worlds have faced their distinct crises and triumphs. Civilizations have risen and fallen. Ages golden and dark have dawned and set. Empires and federations have supplanted and been supplanted by independent world states. During the first millennium of the stellar frontier, the human population went through an unprecedented explosion. From a peak population of 7.3 billion on Earth, mankind's numbers swelled to more than 800 billion at the time of the last relatively complete enumeration, 2000 years ago.

  In the twenty-seventh century SA (Stellar Age), interstellar travel became rare in the Terran Cluster—generally, those worlds that had been colonized first, about seventy-five planets relatively close to Earth. A great plague traveled from world to world. The mortality rate reached as high as twenty-one percent on some planets. Even after the plague was conquered and immunity bred into the survivors, people in the Terran Cluster were slow to return to interstellar commerce, afraid of the possibility of other plagues.

  But in the twenty-eighth century SA, the peoples of the Terran Cluster did return to that commerce, in ever-increasing numbers. The fact that no new plagues emerged gradually laid to rest the residual fears. New generations did not have the terrors of their parents and grandparents. But when the peoples of those worlds did venture back into interstellar space, they found changes. The great plague had not stopped travel in all of the settled regions of the galaxy.

  From roughly 2700 to 2950 SA, the worlds of the Terran Cluster lived independent and peaceful existences. Commerce grew. There were no attempts to unify those worlds by force. When trouble finally came, it came from outside the cluster, from worlds that had not retreated from interstellar travel for a century.

  Two empires had grown in the area beyond the Terran Cluster, on the side farther in along the spiral arm, bordering each other as well as the Terran Cluster.

  The Schlinal Hegemony had spread across some fifty worlds, densely populated and heavily industrialized, with an average distance of little more than three light-years between inhabited worlds. The Hegemony was a tight dictatorship run from the world of Schline, fairly close to the border between the Hegemony and the Terran Cluster.

  The Dogel Worlds were more feudal in nature. In theory, they were a loose confederation of about one hundred worlds, but in actuality, they were tightly controlled by a half-dozen extended families who worked in very close conceit. The leaders of these aristocratic clans, the Doges, controlled—owned—everything on their worlds. Those worlds were, on average, less industrialized and less heavily populated than the worlds of the Schlinal Hegemony, but there were twice as many worlds, giving the two empires a rough parity.

  Beginning in the middle of the thirtieth century SA, both the Doges and the Hegemons started trying to upset that parity.

  During the first years of war, the worlds of the Terran Cluster paid little attention to the fighting between their neighbors. It did not affect them, and as long as those neighbors were fully occupied with each other, they were not bothering the independent worlds of the Terran Cluster. Stalemate along the frontier between the two empires changed the situation though. Both sides looked for allies... or additional subjects. Most of the worlds of the Terran Cluster were heavily populated and nearly as industrialized as the core worlds of the Schlinal Hegemony. And the easiest routes for either the Hegemons or Doges to outflank their enemy ran though the Terran Cluster.

  In the next several decades, the Doges and Hegemons expended as much effort on the independent worlds of the Terran Cluster as they did on each other. A dozen worlds fell to one side or the other—to military force if not to diplomatic suasion—and the diplomats of both empires made their rounds of the remaining free worlds, using whatever threats or cajolery they could to try to line those worlds up with their respective masters.

  The threat was enough to drive the remaining independent worlds of the Terran Cluster to unite in the Accord of Free Worlds, a military and economic alliance that remained something less than a full union of the planets. For twenty years, the power of the Accord was enough to keep both the Hegemony and the Dogel Worlds away. But in 3002 SA, the Hegemons started a military drive into Accord space. Two lightly populated Accord worlds, Jordan and Porter, were conquered and occupied. There were several other skirmishes, and Accord forces repelled invasions on three other worlds.

  Six months later, the Accord was ready to counterattack, to start taking back the worlds that had been lost to the Hegemons.

  —|—

  Lieutenant Zel Paitcher tried to watch everything at once, and it was already giving him a headache. This was his first combat drop as a Wasp pilot, and he had not learned how to partition his attention most efficiently yet. Coming down, he had projected all of his available sensor data on the heads-up display on the canopy—the ships of the fleet in orbit, the rest of his squadron, the landers, and the nearest of th
e Hegemony satellites. It made for a cluttered screen, and he also tried to keep a constant watch on the various electronic readouts provided on two monitors below the canopy, on the board in front of him.

  It left him very little time to actually fly his fighter, but then, until things started happening, the Wasp scarcely required a pilot at all. Still, Zel flew his Wasp as if he were hardwired to it, the machine no more than an immense prosthesis. In the cockpit, it did not matter that Zel was only 150 centimeters tall, or that he weighed less than 50 kilograms soaking wet. Most Wasp pilots were below average in height and weight. A big man would find the control module of a Wasp much too confining for comfort.

  The Wasp squadron had dropped ahead of the troop shuttles, but the pilots watched the landers accelerate past them. The Wasps could not be so profligate with energy. Until their ground support was established, the Wasps would be unable to land to get fresh batteries for their antigrav units. At best, they had only a little more than an hour's flight time before they needed to land to recharge or replace depleted batteries. If the landing failed or was aborted after the Wasps were deep in Porter's gravity well, the pilots would have no choice but to land and abandon their fighters. The Wasps would be unable to boost back to orbit without the jet-assisted takeoff rockets that their ground crews would provide for them.

  But the Wasps were there, close, ready to defend the shuttles from any ground fire or enemy air response. When the troop shuttles finally started to land, Zel and the rest of the Wasp squadron's Blue flight were orbiting the LZs at an altitude of three thousand meters. The infantry was most vulnerable during the first few minutes of an operation. The Wasps could easily mean the difference between a successful landing and a catastrophe.

  The Yellow and Red flights were higher, and farther away laterally, posted to intercept any enemy air attack, and when none appeared, Yellow flight landed for fresh batteries and then was vectored off to strike at the power stations ringing the planet's capital and primary city. Destroying the city's power system was secondary. The main reason for the raid was simply to give the enemy something more immediate to consider than the infantry landing on the plateau.

  "Blue three, Blue four, ground support mission," the controller aboard the flagship radioed. "Your vector is zero-two-seven, 120 meters beyond the Alpha-Romeo beacon."

  Zel waited until Blue three rogered the mission, then echoed it. He cleared his heads-up display of extraneous clutter and keyed in a transponder display to show the microwave AR beacon.

  "Stay close, Zel," Slee Reston, Blue three, said. He was the veteran in this duo. He had seen combat twice before.

  "I'm here, Slee. Let's do it."

  The Wasps did not depend on aerodynamic design to keep them in the air, merely to minimize the power required to push them through it. If a Wasp lost power in atmosphere, the pilot's only option was to eject. The Wasp had roughly the glide characteristics of a sixteen-ton lead ball. Powered solely by antigrav engines, the shape of the fighter-bombers was dictated by mission... and by the whims of their designers. Radar neutral at any frequency, the Wasp was roughly kidney-shaped. The pilot sat in a confined cockpit at the center of the leading edge. In an emergency, the entire cockpit module could be jettisoned and brought to ground by parasail. The antigrav engines and batteries were outboard on either side of the Wasp, in bulging pods. The space between the propulsion units, except for the tiny cubicle that contained the pilot and controls, was given over to payload—with a wide variety of options. At present, the Wasps of Blue flight were each loaded with rockets and five high-speed cannons.

  Zel thumbed his weapons selector to the cannons as his target acquisition system locked on, balancing beacon and offset. The 25mm depleted uranium rounds would each separate into five projectiles in flight. With each cannon firing sixty rounds a second, one Wasp could put fifteen hundred hypersonic projectiles—slivers fifteen millimeters long—into an oval five meters by three at a distance of five hundred meters in just five seconds. Not even the best personal armor could withstand that sort of onslaught.

  Even as the two Wasps dove toward their initial run, they received additional targets. Above and behind Zel, another pair of Wasps were diving to follow them across the front.

  Zel pressed the trigger for his first burst just before the targets were centered on his targeting display. The fraction of a second of reaction time meant that his first shots were precisely on target. When Slee pulled up and rolled left after the run, Zel followed automatically. It was his job to stay right on Slee's wing, and Zel was good at that. He had no chance to see what damage their cannon had done though. They were traveling too rapidly, and never came within 350 meters of their targets. There was no going back to make their own damage assessment either. They were already moving toward their next objective.

  —|—

  "I don't want any itchy trigger fingers," Joe warned his men as they moved into the trees. "Just because you hear shooting doesn't mean that you have to join in."

  Joe felt the itch himself. In the four minutes since they had jogged away from their shuttle, they had heard gunfire around the LZ almost constantly, first from one area and then from another, almost as if by turns. A couple of times, Joe had heard the telltale sound of wire rounds cutting into the trees overhead, from behind, but there was still no sign of hostiles in front of them. The difference in sound between Accord and Hegemony weapons was obvious to anyone who had heard both. And the sound made by the cannons that the Wasps carried was far removed from any of the infantry rifles—deeper, louder, and far more intense—a metal tornado.

  "Keep your heads down," Joe reminded his men. He was not particularly worried about spent rounds passing overhead. They were no real threat to net armor or battle helmets.

  Once under the cover of the trees on the western flank of the LZ, the platoon's advance slowed dramatically. Each squad moved as a semi-independent unit, with one fire team advancing cautiously while the other was on the ground in firing position, ready to provide covering fire if necessary. One team would move forward five to eight meters, then take defensive positions while the other team leapfrogged them. It was up to the squad leaders to make sure that they did not stray too far from the squads on either side of them.

  Dawn started to race past. The shadows under the trees lightened. There was little underbrush or ground cover in this forest. There seemed to be no true grass, just the detritus of leaves that had fallen through the years, with moss beneath that. As boots disturbed the surface, a musty smell rose, not especially unpleasant. These trees were native to Porter, different from any that Joe had seen before, but still generically trees, woody trunks and branches, green leaves—in this case seven-lobed leaves larger than a spread human hand. The lowest branches were more than three meters above the ground. The only distinguishing feature that Joe had noticed so far was that each tree seemed to rise from the peak of a cone of ochre dirt. Those cones varied from forty centimeters to more than a meter in height, and somewhat more in diameter. They did provide good cover for a prone infantryman. And the copse was dense enough that there always seemed to be one of those cones within two meters—diving distance.

  "Okay, Joe, get your men down. This is our line for now," Maycroft said over Echo Company's noncoms' radio circuit.

  "Find good spots," Joe told his men. "This is where we stop."

  One of the larger tree cones, eighty centimeters high and a meter and a quarter wide, was right in front of Joe. He knelt behind it and looked to either side to watch while the men of his squad found their own locations. His fire team was on the right, with Kam Goff sharing his tree cone. Corporal Frain and his fire team were to the left.

  "Get settled in," Joe said once he was satisfied with where his men were.

  Joe took a long scan of the squad's front, moving his eyes—and the sensors in his helmet—from side to side, looking farther out with each pass. Although sunrise had already come, there were still deep shadows under the forest canopy. As the ai
r warmed up, the infrared sensors in the battle helmets became less effective. It was summer in the northern hemisphere on Porter, and the plateau was well down in the temperate latitudes. The temperature was already 25 Celsius. By midafternoon, it would probably top 30. Hot. Joe looked more for hints of movement in the distance than for human forms. He still did not spot anything that looked even remotely threatening.

  "Where the hell are they?" Ezra Frain asked over the squad frequency.

  "Close enough, I imagine," Joe replied. "Cut the chat."

  Joe looked around at the positions his men had taken again. Even without specific orders, each of the men was working at improving his cover. They dug in with entrenching tools, piling dirt around the holes as they provided themselves with shallow slit trenches. The longer they stayed in one place, the more care they would take with their defenses, using their idle moments to dig. After one more long look into the forest in front of them, Joe started scraping away ground cover and dirt himself. He worked more slowly than his men though because every few seconds he stopped to look out into the forest, anticipating the arrival of enemy troops.

  He had scarcely excavated five centimeters into the ground before Sergeant Maycroft came down the line and flopped to the ground at Joe's side. Maycroft lifted his helmet visor.

  "Saddle up," the platoon sergeant said in a voice that sounded infinitely tired. Maycroft always sounded that way in the field, whether or not he actually was tired. "We're moving up another hundred meters, and sliding over to the right to link up with Delta Company."

  "Right, Max," Joe replied after he lifted his own visor, getting the microphone away from his mouth. "Any bogeys at all on this side?"