CAPTAIN ZEL PAITCHER was more than a little nervous about this combat mission as commander of the 13th’s Blue Flight. It was his third campaign, but he was going in with nothing but rookies behind him, seven pilots who had never seen combat, none with more than thirteen months in uniform or two hundred hours in the cockpit of a Wasp. The other three pilots of Blue Flight who had survived the liberation of Jordan had all been transferred to serve as part of the cadre for a new fighter wing still in training.
Gerry Easton was Zel’s wingman, Blue two. Ewell “Pitcher” Marmon and Tod Corbel were Blue three and four. Frank Verannen and “Halfmoon” Sawyer were five and six. The flight’s final pairing consisted of Ilsen Kwillen and Will Tarkel–Kwill and Will to the rest of the squadron. Tarkel was the nephew of the 13th’s air wing commarider, Goz Tarkel. The Goose made no demands, showed no undue preference for his brother’s son. Will had to get by on his own talents. There was no real alternative for a fighter pilot. The enemy would give no latitude to nepotism.
“Just keep your heads,” Zel said over the flight’s radio channel. “Keep the formation tight and don’t panic.” Command had made Zel feel at least a decade older than his twenty-one years. Combat had ended his youth. Command had seemingly propelled him to a premature middle age. The promotion to captain that had followed the Jordan campaign (and the death of Slee Reston, his best friend and the former commander of Blue Flight) had been a hollow achievement. Zel would have turned it down if he could have. He couldn’t look at the silver insignia without remembering Slee and the way his Wasp had exploded.
Blue Flight was in a power dive, accelerating toward the ground. They had been launched from their transports 180 kilometers up. But they were in air now. The Schlinal satellite network had been knocked out minutes before in a coordinated attack around Tamkailo. The inevitable confusion to the enemy’s command, control, and intelligence gave the invaders a slight edge during the early minutes–or even hours–of an attack.
Zel’s eyes flicked across his head-up display and the two monitors below it. There were no enemy fighters in the air yet, and the Wasp’s target acquisition systems had detected no enemy radar. That meant that there were no major defensive systems tracking the fighters. Yet. The Wasps were virtually invisible to any radar. And in the dark they were invisible to almost anything that might be looking at them, even highly trained human eyes.
The Wasps were too high for them to see pilots racing toward their Boem fighters on the ground. The sudden loss of communications with all of their orbiting satellites would demand a SchlinaI fighter scramble if only until some non malignant reason could be found for the sudden silence. Arsenal. The Schlinal warlords knew that they had to defend the stockpiles of munitions and the regiments of troops being marshaled there. Even though it was–relatively–far from any Accord or Dogel system.
The airfield was Blue Flight’s initial target. The 13th’s other two flights, and the 8th’s air wing, had other tactical targets in and around the initial drop zone. The more enemy fighters Blue Flight could destroy on the ground, the fewer they would have to worry about in the air.
The Wasps were diving at 3.5 gees, their antigrav engines adding to rather than subtracting from Tamkailo’s own gravity. The flight suits of the pilots had inflated to offset the effects of the gee-load, restricting movement. But the Wasp had been designed to need only slight movements by its pilot. A high gee dive, or climb, was unlikely to greatly inconvenience a pilot–as long as he kept his head. The planes could achieve greater acceleration than a human body could take.
“Start marking your targets,” Zel said, flipping on his own TA systems.
They should have infantrymen guarding the airfield, Zel thought. Maybe other antiaircraft defenses. Infantrymen would have shoulder-operated missiles available. Those could be as deadly to a Wasp–or a shuttle–as a Boem’s rockets. And there would likely be no warning of a TA system locking on first. Infantry rocket launchers depended on the eyesight of the man firing them for initial target acquisition. Then the rocket’s television guidance system would take over, once it had been “shown” the target.
This should be the easiest run of the campaign, Zel reminded himself as his TA system locked on to its first two targets. The audible double click came just as the red lights on the head-up display went from blinking to solid. Later, there would never be this level of surprise. The enemy would know that the Accord was on the planet. They would be waiting.
He launched his first two rockets, and the TA system immediately locked on to two more Boems. Near the bottom of his dive, Zel could finally see men running around below, heading for their planes, or for cover. He launched the second pair of rockets and reversed the thrust on his antigrav drives, pulling up, the Wasp straining his ability to handle the gee-load.
“Start listening to your own warnings,” he muttered through clenched teeth as he came close to graying out. “Watch your damn controls.”
He tilted the Wasp on its side and accelerated “up,” parallel to the ground. Gerry Easton struggled to keep station on his wing. Blue Two had only launched one pair of missiles. He was still new to this business.
“You’re doing fine, Gerry,” Zel said. over a private link. “Take a deep breath and let it out slowly.”
There was a startled “Huh?” over the radio, and then the sounds of that deep breath. “What are you, psychic?” Easton asked after he had exhaled.
“I remember my own first time,” Zel said. While he talked, he kept his eyes moving, watching his displays and what he could see on the ground. The routine was easy now, but the first time Zel had tried so hard to keep track of everything going on around him that there was no time to do anything.
On their first pass, Blue Flight had accounted for a dozen enemy fighters. It was a good tally, but Zel could see at least twice that number of undamaged fighters on the ground. And pilots had reached most of those.
Zel switched to the channel that linked him to his entire flight. “One more quick pass before they get those buzzards in the air,” he said as he flipped his own Wasp around. “Then it’s cat-and-mouse time.”
Once a pilot got into his Boem, he would need only twenty seconds to strap in and another ten seconds to get his fighter in the air. They would bypass preflight check-lists. It would be systems on and lift, off, without waiting for the engines to warm up. In theory, computerized control systems should spot any problem in less than a second after the switches were thrown, far more rapidly than any human pilot could start to lift the plane off of the ground. The automatics would override the pilot, cutting power.
Zel saw no indication that any of these Boems were being switched back off. But then, he didn’t have time to waste on fantasy. The Boems might still outnumber his Wasps three to one if this last ground attack didn’t seriously cut into their numbers. Once the Boems were active, even before they got off of the ground, they were no longer totally defenseless. Most of the Schlinal pilots immediately activated electronic countermeasures.
The airfield was still a dangerous place for the Boems. The incoming missiles were fired from too near to go wandering off into the sky because ECM measures confused their targeting computers. All of the rockets hit something–planes, buildings, or the ground. Antigrav fighters neither needed nor used a runway. The only level surface they needed was enough for their landing skids to sit on, and they had a lot of tolerance. Craters in the airfield weren’t even a nuisance. Nor were wrecked planes or other debris.
“Here they come,” Zel warned as he saw the first Boem grow a shadow as it lifted off. That fighter spun on its vertical axis, ready to directly challenge the invaders.
Zel was more than happy to take the challenge. He was too close to risk a missile so he switched to his forward cannons, a gatling gun arrangement of five 25-mm barrels, each capable of spewing sixty hypersonic slugs per second, fragmentation or–a new addition–armor-piercing rounds for air-to-air combat. The older fragmentation projectiles each separated into five heavy metal slivers in flight. Though those rounds were murderous against ground troops, they had proved less than lethal in a dogfight, and combat in the air still did get very close sometimes. For this flight, both the forward and rear cannons were loaded with a 60-40 mix, AP to frag. The range was less than 120 meters when Zel hit the trigger. A four-second burst exploded the Boem. Shrapnel dinged off of Zel’s Wasp as he flew through the blast.
That was the last easy kill of the fight. The surviving Boems were all in the air, their pilots ready to fight back.
Blue five was hit by two missiles. The rockets exploded simultaneously, engulfing the Wasp in a dirty fireball. Remarkably, Verannen’s escape pod shot clear of the maelstrom. There was no response from Frank to Zel’ s call, but the pod’s parachute deployed and it settled toward the ground, drifting clear of the air battle and the Schlinal airfield below it.
Zel reported the loss and the possibility that the pilot might have survived. If there was a chance, a rescue mission would be attempted as soon as there were Accord forces on the ground who could do the job.
The air fight went on.
* * *
It was not at all like a parachute jump. A chute provided both visible comfort and cause for concern. When you saw the sheet open above you, you knew that there was something up there slowing your descent, making it possible to drop several hundred meters and survive. But, in combat, it also provided an immense target for enemy gunners, an arrival announcement that could be seen for kilometers around.
Antigrav belts provided no additional target, but there was no sense of reassurance either. To the eye, you were simply falling, with nothing to prevent you from ending up crushed on the surface. The silence added to the eeriness. There was little sense of anything but the whisper of air. Despite the training, the assurances of experts, and practice jumps, Joe could not escape the sensation of falling out of control.
Joe looked around at the hundreds of men “falling” with him. The Corey belts had gyroscopic stabilizers, so the men were all falling feet first toward the ground. The formation wasn’t nearly as precise as that of a drill team on the parade ground, but the men weren’t nearly as scattered as they might have been. No one was plummeting out of control. That meant that there were no defective units–and that no one had panicked so much that they couldn’t control their descent.
Left hand on belt controls. Right hand on weapon. A lanyard made certain that no one would lose his weapon on the jump. At worst, it might dangle a few centimeters out of reach.
The jump plan was, relatively, simple. The men of the 13th were to free-fall until they reached 150 meters, with their belts on the lowest setting, partially to keep the speed of descent from getting too high but mostly to keep heads up and feet down. A buzzer in the helmet warned the wearer when it was time to increase power to the antigrav units, one click at a time. Save most of the deceleration for the last three or four seconds of the drop. If you worked it properly, you would hit the ground with hardly any jolt at all, ready to move forward, or to drop to the ground for cover–unless you misjudged your descent badly enough to run the batteries dry before you reached the ground. That had been a significant danger with the Desperes belts. That was why they had never been used in large-scale operations. But the greater power of the batteries in the new Corey model was expected to–almost–totally eliminate that hazard.
Once on the ground the infantry of the 13th was to secure a landing zone for their heavy equipment and for the other units, the ones who were riding all of the way in on shuttles.
Echo Company’s section of the drop zone was in a rocky waste area five kilometers west of the edge of the Schlinal base designated Site Alpha, in the attack plans, one hundred kilometers north of the southernmost tip of Tamkailo’s southern continent, near the east coast.
Joe Baerclau searched the ground around the drop zone, as carefully as he could, during the descent, looking for enemy soldiers or emplacements. Anything he could spot from the air might save him, and his men, when they landed. Although there were no firm numbers on how many Schlinal troops were stationed on Tamkailo, the estimates had ranged from twenty-five thousand to four times that. Even in a best case scenario, the Accord was going to be outnumbered five to two. Joe had never accepted best case scenarios. Reality always seemed to favor the opposite.
The best he could say for the drop zone was that it looked too rough for enemy armor to operate in it. From above, it looked as if coarse stone had been laid in a bed of cement. Using the ranging sights in his visor, Joe estimated that the rocks ran from forty centimeters to two meters in diameter, mostly with half to two-thirds embedded below the surface. The rocks covered an area perhaps twenty kilometers in diameter.
In the last hundred meters, Joe started adjusting the angle of his drop to set down on a low, relatively flat, space he had spotted. The belt was not infinitely adjustable. The direction of thrust could only be altered by five degrees from vertical. For a second, Joe tried spreading his arms to present more surface to the light breeze, working to get more lateral distance than he could with the belt alone. Not enough work had been done with the belts for there to be any “official” doctrine on that.
It worked well enough that Joe almost overshot the target he had set for himself. For the last second, he pulled himself almost into a ball, drawing up his legs and holding his arms close to his body. He worked the thrust of his belt, feathering in to a perfectly gentle landing. Hitting the ground was softer than stepping from one stair down to the next.
Joe’s perfect landing was spoiled when his feet slid out from, under him and he fell–heavily–on his ass. The rocks were covered by a thin mossy growth that was more slippery than water-covered ice. The fall knocked the breath from Joe’s lungs. He banged the back of his helmet on the rock. The padding in his helmet was enough to prevent injury, but there were still a few seconds of confusion, enough time for virtually all of the first drop team to hit the ground. Nearly everyone fell, some with more force than Joe had.
“Watch it,” he said, belatedly. “This moss is murder.”
Joe didn’ t try to get to his feet. Standing up was the wrong posture for an infantryman in most cases anyway. He slid a little more as he rolled over onto his stomach, all of the way to the bottom of the slight depression. This stuff is going to be a real pain, he thought. At least there was no incoming fire yet, no apparent reaction to the landing.
“Talk to me,” Joe said over his link to his squad leaders. He tried crawling on all fours, looking to get to the top of the depression. It was slow going. It was almost impossible to get any traction on the moss.
“Who greased the ground?” Ezra Frain asked. “How the hell we supposed to move on this?”
“Carefully,” Joe replied. “You have any jump casualties?”
“There was only a short pause before Ezra said, “Nothing that’ll slow anybody down. We’ve all got bruises, though.”
“I’ve got one man with a badly twisted ankle,” Sergeant Low Gerrent of second squad reported. “Medic’s patching him now.”
“Third squad’s okay,” Sauv Degtree said.
“So’s fourth,” Frank Symes added. “Nothing serious, anyway.”
“Pull the men in around me,” Joe said. “Try to find an efficient way to move over this moss.” Then he switched channels.
“Second platoon’s mostly okay,” he reported to the first sergeant.
“Mostly?” Izzy Walker asked.
“One twisted ankle, being attended, to. Other than that, nothing but minor stuff from slipping on this carpet. Didn’t anybody know about that?”
“Guess not,” Walker said. “I’m hearing about it, now, though, from all over.”
“What next?” Joe asked.”
“Just get your men together until we sort things out. Nobody’s shooting at us yet. I’Il be back to you in a couple of minutes.”
Joe pulled out his belt knife then and started scraping at the moss. It was no more than a centimeter thick, with bare rock beneath it. Before First Sergeant Walker called back, Joe had cleared enough moss to get to the top of the depression so that he could look out toward the enemy buildings to the east. He didn’t see any signs of Heggies coming out.
“Still following the plan,” Walker said. “We’re to move east and establish a perimeter, hold until the rest of the force lands. Take your platoon due east about a kilometer and take up positions. First platoon to your right, third to the left.”
“Where are they bringing in the heavy stuff?” Joe asked.
“Farther west.”
“I hope they’ve got something besides this moss to set down on.’”
Walker didn’t bother to reply.
Joe relayed the orders to squad leaders and deployed the platoon. The footing remained treacherous. The slick moss seemed to cover every square centimeter of the rocks.
It’ll make everyone keep their heads down anyway, Joe thought. The troopers scuttled along on hands and knees. Where there was any significant slope, they had to move on bellies, scraping away moss to get at the rock below in the worst places. It didn’t take long for men to discover that the rock below the moss was extremely hot to the touch, almost scorching, even so soon after dawn. The moss itself did not feel particularly hot. Somehow, it absorbed sunlight and passed the heat on to the rock layer without holding much of it.
Joe stayed close to first squad, the squad he had led before he got the entire platoon. Even after more than a year as platoon sergeant, Joe still thought of first squad as “his.” He knew the men in the other three squads better now, but that had not yet completely broken old habits. The men of first squad viewed it as a mixed blessing.
All eight infantry companies were on the ground now, spread over the western section of the rocky area and beyond. Shuttles were beginning to bring in the Havocs and support vans for the 13th’s Wasps and Havocs. Other shuttles were bringing in the engineers and their equipment. The 8th SAT and one of the light infantry regiments were landing at separate locations to assist in taking Site Alpha.
Everybody rides but us, Joe thought.
The men of Echo Company had no chance to set up a defensive perimeter once they had covered the first kilometer of rock. New orders came through. They were to move another four kilometers east, closer to the enemy.
Crossing five kilometers of the slippery rocks was painfully slow. Long before Joe had covered the first kilometer, his knees were scraped raw beneath his battle fatigues. His elbows and hands were also cut and scraped. Every muscle in his body ached. The forty kilos of gear he carried felt like a ton.
Echo was too far from the Schlinal depot to be in range of most small arms fire. Wire couldn’t begin to reach. But there were clearly a few snipers with rifles that could strike at more than five kilometers.
“Keep down,” Joe warned. “Those aren’t mosquitoes whizzing around.”
Second platoon suffered no casualties from the light sniper fire, but one man in third platoon was hit below his visor. The neck wound ripped the man’s carotid artery. Before a medic could get to him the man was dead.
After consulting with the first sergeant, Joe called a break for his men. Then he just flopped, cheek against the moss, while he dragged in several deep breaths.
Can’t get enough air, he thought, uncertain whether the slight difference between Tamkailo’s atmosphere and those he was familiar with could be that noticeable. All in my head maybe, he acknowledged.
After a moment, he rolled onto his side, almost on his back (his pack prevented him from getting fully supine). He lifted his helmet visor just long enough to wipe sweat from his face. The perspiration had been pouring into his eyes almost from the start of this crawl, stinging, burning.
Off in the distance, he could see aircraft fighting, more than a dozen planes. I hope our guys keep ‘em busy, he thought. We’d be easy pickings here. The rocks might give decent cover against enemy rifle fire, but a strafing airplane would mow through them.
“Let’s get moving again,” he said over his link to the platoon’s squad leaders. “We’re too exposed here.”
* * *
Zel sent three of his men to get fresh batteries and munitions as soon as he received word that their support vans were on the ground. He didn’t want to take a chance that the entire flight would have to land at once. For ten or fifteen minutes, they would be shorthanded, but they would never have to concede the air to the enemy. The dogfight had been going on for twenty minutes–an eternity. Zel knew that Blue Flight had been lucky to have lost only one plane so far, though even one loss hurt. Finally, he had received a call from Frank Verannen. He was alive but had broken both legs. The bottom of the escape pod had been crushed by the explosion that destroyed his Wasp. Frank was still in the pod, on the ground, unable to move. At least no Heggies had come hunting for him yet.
In order to conserve ammunition, Zel had adopted a new tactic. He would approach a Boem as close as possible, then flip his Wasp end for end in order to use his rear-mounted cannons. Those were loaded strictly with armor-piercing rounds, meant solely for air-to-air use. They were intended as a deterrent, something to protect the previously vulnerable tail of the Wasp, but Zel’s maneuver turned the cannons into an offensive weapon. The other pilots of Blue Flight quickly copied the tactic. The Hegemony’s Boems had no rear guns.
Blue Flight was still outnumbered, more than ever once Zel sent planes in for servicing, but the Schlinal pilots never exploited their advantage. Most kept breaking away from the dogfight, apparently obeying orders to try to contest the infantry landings. Blue Flight didn’t bother chasing them. There were other Wasp flights waiting, and after the first few minutes there would be mudders with shoulder-operated rockets waiting for Boems to appear. Not one of the Schlinal pilots managed to strike against the landings.
Twenty-seven minutes after launching his first pair of rockets, Zel scored his ninth kill of the battle with his last missile. With no more than ten seconds of 25mm ammunition left, he started looking for the three Wasps he had sent in for servicing. The rookies left with him had to be even closer to empty than he was. It took a pilot time–combat time–to learn how to stretch his ammunition. Zel finally used the radio and heard that the three were on their way back, throttles to the stops.
Zel didn’t wait. He ordered the flyers still with him to break contact and head in for servicing.
* * *
The 13th’s four batteries of Havoc 205mm self-propelled artillery had as many new men as the air wing. Afghan Battery had lost five of its six guns in its last campaign, and the other three had all suffered at least 50 percent casualties. Afghan, Basset, Corgi, and Dingo: the dog names for the batteries were a play on words deriving from a line penned by William Shakespeare thousands of years before, “Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war.”
The crew of Basset two had remained the same for more than two years. They had had one Havoc destroyed under them without any of them suffering a serious injury. The commander was Gunnery Sergeant Eustace Ponks. The other three men–driver Simon Kilgore, gunner Karl Mennem, and loader Jimmy Ysinde–were all privates. They considered themselves to be the best gun crew in the 13th–and the 13th’s artillery unit the best in the ADF. After all of the time they had worked together their claim was not totally without merit.
Contrary to standing orders, they had landed on Tamkailo with their first round loaded, and Karl had the engines running before the shuttle pilot announced that they were on the ground and opened the cargo hatch.
Although the slick moss that covered the rocky area where most of the 13th’s infantry had landed would not have bothered tracked artillery pieces and support vans, that area was too rough for other vehicles to operate. Landing just to the west, the artillery had more level ground. The nearer half of the Schlinal depot and camp was just within the range of the Havocs’ guns, and there were avenues to the north and south that would permit them to get close enough to bring the entire enemy base under fire.
“Get us out and bear off to the left,” Eustace ordered as soon as the cargo ramp was down. “Let’s not waste any time.”
Under the best of circumstances, a Havoc did not accelerate with any great dispatch, but Karl gave the twin engines as much throttle as the treads could handle. If the deck of the cargo shuttle suffered minor damage from the speed of the departing howitzer, it wouldn’t be the first time.
“Basset two ready for action,” Eustace reported to the battery commander as soon as he saw that Basset one was also out of its shuttle.
“Ponks, I’ve got a personal message for you from the colonel,” Captain Ritchey said.
“Sir?” Ponks asked.”
“He wants me to thank you and your crew for volunteering to stay behind if we come up short one shuttle because some careless crew damaged it on landing.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, sir,” Ponks managed. “We’re strictly by the manual here.”
Ritchey sighed over the radio. “I ought to at least make you take the round out of the can you stuck in there while we were still in the air.”
“We would never violate SOP like that, sir,” Ponks said, beginning to wonder if the Havocs had been modified to allow the battery commander to snoop.
“Never mind, Ponks.” Ritchey paused for no more than two seconds before he said, “We’re still following the original plan. We go north, then east. And we wait for all of the dogs to get out before we start firing. Unless we come under hostile fire first.”
“Yes, sir.” After closing his link to Ritchey, Ponks switched to the crew channel and whispered, “I think he’s got us bugged.”
“You’re gonna have to quit calling the old man names, I guess,” Simon said with a short laugh. “You’ll never get that extra rocker for your stripes.”
“Who wants another rocker?” Ponks said, as if he didn’t. “The headaches ain’t worth another twenty Corders a month.”