L13TH 03 Jump Pay Page 5

  “Get them back, and see if we have enough belts to . . .”

  The colonel didn’t realize that he had stopped speaking in, the middle of a sentence. . . . let the healthy men swap out and get back to their units was how he meant to finish it. In his mind, he heard the completion. But the world simply seemed to fade out around him while he was talking. There was a sudden hollowness to his hearing, much as if he were holding a seashell to his ear. The sky and his surroundings seemed to take on a rosy tinge. For a moment, he even thought that he could hear waves crashing on a sandy beach, with a hint of some ethereal music in the background.

  Dezo Parks saw his boss’s eyes roll back, but he couldn’t react quickly enough to catch the colonel before he fell forward and hit the ground hard face first. Van Stossen was unconscious before he fell.

  A FIELD HOSPITAL had been set up at the far western end of the drop and landing zones, at the farthest point from the Schlinal base. An infantry company from the 97th LIR provided security. The surgeons and other medical personnel of the 13th and 8th SATs and the 97th had been busy for hours. In the early hours of the invasion, few casualties were inflicted by enemy action. More were from drop injuries or other accidents. But the overwhelming majority were heat exhaustion and heatstroke cases, Shock, dehydration, and–in some cases–delirium. The drop injuries had mostly been returned to duty before noon. Only a handfull of men had hurt themselves badly enough that four hours of rest and soaker patches couldn’t cure the problem.

  Colonel Stossen was carried into the hospital tent just as the first.of the men from the front line were being brought back on antigrav belts. Sergeant Vin Cumminhow brought the colonel in helped by one of the privates in the headquarters security detachment.

  “I think he hurt himself when we landed,” Cumminhow told the medtech who was performing triage. “He fell. After that, he had a headache and complained that his vision was blurred. He didn’t seem to feel too good all morning. Then, a few minutes ago, he just keeled over.”

  The medtech looked up from his examination just briefly. “Sounds like concussion, possibly even a skull fracture. He hit his head when he fell?”

  “Naw, his feet went out from under him and he landed on his butt. The first time, at least.”

  The medtech shrugged and went back to his examination. “It could still be concussion. The second fall didn’t help any.” The colonel’s helmet was off. The fall had snapped off the visor, which had been in the raised position. There were a number of cuts on the colonel’s face. A nosebleed had already stopped, but it was obvious that the nose was broken.

  “He’ll be okay, won’t he?” Cumminhow asked, his voice rising. Like most of the men in the 13th, the sergeant idolized his commander.

  “Should be,” the medtech said. “Now, get out of the way.” He called for an orderly to help move the colonel.

  Cumminhow stood where he was for a moment, watching. Then, with nothing better to do, he left. He reported to the executive officer by radio. When he left the hospital tent, he was shaking his head. He had never heard of anyone getting a concussion by falling on his butt.

  * * *

  ‘’’Nothing but farmers,” Zel Paitcher complained as he led Blue Flight into another pass in front of the infantrymen. The initial passes had been so efficient at clearing avenues that headquarters had ordered several more runs, to clear a wider path. “Plowing the ground.”

  “Could be worse,” Gerry Easton said. “We could be down there and somebody could be plowing us under.”

  “Only good thing about this is, the sooner the mudders get through, the sooner they’ll be able to get to Frank.” Verannen had quit answering calls. Zel didn’t know if Frank was dead, unconscious, or simply had his radio out of commission. Blue Flight had already had another casualty. The Pitcher, Ewell Marmon, had gone down. Though no one had reached the wreckage yet, there was little chance that Marmon had survived. He had not managed to eject and the Wasp had gone in hard.

  But, for the moment at least, there was no enemy air activity in the area. If the local Schlinal garrison had any Boems left in flying condition, they were on the ground, in bunkers.

  * * *

  Bravo, Echo, and Fox companies were on the move again, with the recon platoons out on their flanks, moving ahead to contact the units that were supposed to attack from the north and south. The Wasps had cleared five good paths through the slick moss. But as the infantrymen drew within a kilometer of the Heggie lines, they started taking more casualties from machine guns and sniper rifles. The bare rocks were too hot to keep crawling across, and it was dangerous to get up and run. Schlinal snipers were having a field day picking off men at leisure. They were too far away for the 13th’s mudders to suppress fire with their own wire rifles, and the Accord snipers had more trouble finding targets than the Heggie snipers did.

  Then the Wasps returned. This time they weren’t opening paths. Each Wasp made its pass along the Schlinal perimeter, spraying cannon fire and laying an occasional rocket into a building that might harbor snipers.

  The three-company skirmish line started moving forward again. Men scurried forward in a crouch, going down every few seconds. They stayed down only briefly, because lying on those rocks without the insulating layer of moss could be compared without much exaggeration to lying in a frying pan.

  Schlinal machine guns homed in on the line of advancing Accord soldiers. The Wasps could not eliminate all of those weapons, and their range was enough to start causing casualties even through net armor at more than a kilometer. Unlike the Accord with its splat guns, the Hegemony used slugs rather than wire in their heavy automatic weapons.

  Ezra Frain dropped into the lowest depression within reach and rolled over onto his back so that his pack and canteens kept most of his body off of the scalding-hot rocks. Boots and helmet helped. The position was uncomfortable, but better than any of the alternatives he could think of.

  Sweat rolling into his eyes had nearly blinded him, and the exertion of running had him gasping for air. Ezra needed a moment before he could even look around to see that his men were down and safe.

  “Joe, there’s got to be a better way,” he said over his link to Baerclau. He was panting heavily, as if he had run several kilometers rather than only a few dozen meters since his last short “rest.”

  “You come up with it, you’ll get a medal,” Joe replied, equally out of breath. “Short of dropping gear to lighten the load, I can’t think of anything, and you know we can’t leave any gear behind.”

  “You thought of using the belts to get our casualties back to hospital,” Ezra said.

  “My idea for the year. Somebody else’s turn now.”

  “If we could just use the AG belts to neutralize the weight of our gear, it’d help.”

  Joe hesitated for a second before he answered. The idea was tempting, but he quickly came up with a number of arguments against it. The one he mentioned was the gyro stabilizers. “Be hell trying to go flat in a hurry,” he said. “Staying vertical in combat is a fast way to get dead.”

  The break was needed, desperately by many of the men. While most of them rested, keeping as much of their bodies off of the hot rocks as possible, those men with Vrerch rocket launchers or Dupuy RA rifles kept up the pressure on the Schlinal defenders in front of them. Those were still the only weapons the Accord infantry carried that could effectively reach the enemy. Their splat guns, heavy automatic wire throwers, had an effective range of no more than two hundred meters.

  Joe switched to the channel that connected him with all of his squad leaders and assistants. “Get a good check on all of your men,” he said. “Talk to everybody, make sure they’re okay. I don’t want anyone going woozy at a bad time.”

  The reports he got back were not heartening. While no one seemed to be in immediate trouble, everyone was feeling the effects of the heat and the “oppressive” nature of the a
ir. He passed that on to the captain.

  “Tell me something I don’t know, Joe,” Keye replied, sounding exhausted himself. “We just have to cope with it. Another five minutes and we make the big push. You might tell the men that it’ll be a few degrees cooler in the shade of those warehouses up there. Maybe that’ll help sustain them.”

  Joe glanced at the buildings. There were three visible from his position, and he knew from the briefings that there were a lot more–warehouses, barracks, a couple of small factories, hangars, and repair facilities–beyond the few he could see. And there were at least two regiments of Heggie infantry to guard them, men who had been on Tamkailo for weeks or months.

  “I hope it gets easier once we get used to the heat,” Joe said. “It ever rain here?”

  “Who knows?”

  Joe took a long drink of water. He had already emptied one canteen and started on the second. Then he checked his rifle: full power pack, full wire spool. The barrel was too hot to touch, even though he hadn’t fired it since landing. Even the composite stock was getting uncomfortably hot to the touch.

  He warned his squad leaders how much time they had left, then took another, shorter sip of water. The water no longer simply tasted warm; it was hot. “Hot enough for coffee,” Joe mumbled as he screwed the lid back on. He considered dropping an instant coffee packet into the canteen. That might make the water more palatable. But then he shook his head. He could always put coffee into the water, but once it was in, he couldn’t take it back out.

  Joe looked up. What appeared to be two full flights of Wasps were approaching, ready to hit the Schlinal Iines while the infantry advanced. Joe heard, but did not see, the Havocs as they opened up again. For the last hour or more, there had been very little action from the artillery. Now they were starting to hit the nearest line of buildings again.

  Hit ’em good, Joe thought. Make it easy for us.

  Time was running out. The five minutes were gone. First Sergeant Walker relayed the order for the attack.

  * * *

  Colonel Stossen was in a trauma tube suffering from concussion, dehydration, and fractures of the nose and skull–the latter injuries from his second fall. The medical nanobots did their work, replacing fluids, transferring heat, reducing swelling, and starting to knit the fractures. In the 13th’s command post, Dezo Parks was in command.

  “We’ll move Alpha and Charley companies forward on belts,” he told Teu Ingels. “Get them up to where the Wasps have cleared the way, then push forward so that they’re just behind Bravo, Echo, and Fox. Put the other two recon units out on the flanks. Second, on the north, should be able to skirt the moss, First will have to use their belts to get as far as possible before they run dry. I want them in the gaps between us and the other regiments. Make sure that 3rd and 4th recon are getting where they’re supposed to be. I want them on the east side of the base, ready to cause whatever confusion they can. Get them all moving now.”

  He waited while Ingels passed along those orders. “The 97th should be in position on the south now,” Parks said then. “They’ll attack when we do.”

  “They’re in position. Bal just confirmed it,” Ingels said. “And the 8th is almost ready on the north.”

  Dezo nodded. “Send George Company up as well, on their feet as long as possible. I want them close enough to bring them in wherever they might be needed. They might need their belts then.” He shook his head. “And they thought those belts would only be good for landings.” He was too drained by the heat to laugh.

  * * *

  The Wasps and Havocs did hold down the amount of Schlinal fire directed at the lead companies of the Accord attack but no amount of fire could have stopped all of it for any length of time. The vast majority of Schlinal soldiers might be unwilling conscripts, but when faced with a combat situation, most did respond as their training had told them they should. Some individuals went beyond what even the most militant of their officers might demand. For the rest, officers and noncoms were there behind their men, demanding, threatening. Discipline in the Heggie armed forces was brutal and quick. Every Schlinal soldier learned that lesson in the first days of boot camp. The lesson was always applied with a vivid thoroughness that insured that no one who witnessed punishment would ever forget the price of disobedience. Or failure. In combat, any infraction was liable to be met with instant execution. It was far safer for a Heggie soldier to take his chances with the enemy than to fail his superiors. That was as true for officers of every grade as it was for the rawest private.

  As the men of the 13th moved nearer to the Schlinal lines, they thought less about the heat of air and rocks and more about cover and maneuver. Adrenaline dimmed the complaints of “heavy” air and burned hands and knees, even though some of the burns were severe. Company grade officers and noncoms cajoled and instructed, a constant presence in the earphones of all of their men. More importantly, they did their commanding from right in the advancing line, leading by example when necessary.

  For one of the few times in his career Joe Baerclau found himself wishing that he had one of the longer-range Dupuy sniper rifles, or that the Armanoc zippers hadn’t been designed so thoroughly for up-close fighting–anything that would allow him to shoot back sooner without obviously wasting ammunition. It raised his hackles to be under fire and unable to return it. He could have fired his zipper, but that would have been a futile gesture, and much worse, it would have showed his men that he was not as cool and composed under fire as he tried to appear. That was perhaps all that kept him from emptying a spool or two of wire at several times its maximum effective range.

  This advance was no mad charge. There was no running, not for more than two or three meters at a time. It would have been difficult in any case. Although the strafing that the Wasps had done had opened good paths, there were still slippery spots. Men needed to watch their footing. Even without the remaining bits of moss, the intense heat would have made running any distance impossible. Long before the 13th could have closed with the enemy, most of the men would have been incapacitated.

  Up and down. Move forward a few meters and take cover to rest, sometimes for no more than ten seconds, just long, enough to take in one deep, burning breath, and to lift a faceplate to wipe stinging sweat from bloodshot eyes, and to try to get the slightest hint of an almost imaginary breeze.

  “When we said we’d follow the colonel to Hell and back, I never thought he’d take us up on it,” Mort Jaiffer complained during one of the longer breaks. Echo had closed to within three hundred meters of the nearest enemy positions.

  I know what you mean, Joe Baerclau thought, but what he said was “Save your air. We get up this next time, it’s going to start getting even hotter.”

  “I’d feel a lot better if we had the tropical forest to go with this tropical heat,” Mort said. “A little shade would be welcome, and trees would give us better cover.”

  This time Joe didn’t say anything, didn’t bother to voice his thought: This isn’t the tropics; it’s damn near polar. He didn’t have to voice the thought. It occurred to Mort as well. Mort was too educated to miss something that obvious. He had also paid attention to the prejump briefings.

  What happens when we do go closer to the tropics? Mort asked himself. If it’s this miserable here . . .

  He wiped sweat from his face and lowered his visor. He had taken a drink before talking. He was thirsty again, or still, but decided not to use any more water at the moment. He had little enough left, and there was no telling how long it would be before there might be a chance to refill canteens. Being left without water for any significant time would be suicide in this heat. Literally. He shifted his position just enough to let him look over the crest of the rock he was behind. He tried to remember just what path he had chosen for himself before going down this time. He didn’t want to have to think about where he was stepping when they started out again. He would be looking farther
ahead then, mostly at the enemy lines.

  At least we don’t have to worry about mines or booby traps, he thought. The moss was surety for that, along with the strafing runs that the 13th’s Wasps had done. If there had been any explosives planted, the cannon fragments would have detonated them. As long as they stayed on the stretches of rock that had been cleared of moss, they would be fine–that would keep them clear of the slick growth without worrying about explosives.

  We just have to worry about cover, and not hitting a patch of that moss and breaking our butts.

  “Check your weapons,” Joe said over the platoon channel. “Wire and juice.”

  Mort automatically complied, even though he was absolutely certain that his Armanoc was ready to go. He had already looked several times. That too was automatic. Mort spoke to Wiz Mackey, the only man left in his fire team since Mal Underwood had been evacuated. Wiz confirmed that he had a full spool of wire and one hundred percent showing for his rifle’s power pack. Then Mort switched channels to report to the squad leader.

  “Wiz and I are set, Ez,” he said.

  “Take it easy then,” Ezra Frain replied. “I just got the word. We’re going to have another ten or fifteen minutes here. We’re waiting for the other units to get in position before the attack. We’re all going in at once. When we start this time, we keep going until we get there.” Or until we can’t go any farther was the unspoken qualifier.

  * * *