“Owensford here. What’s the story, George?”
“A bit of a dog’s breakfast, I’m afraid,” the commander of the northern column said; Peter Owensford could hear a dull crump . . . crump in the background, and small-arms fire.
Dog’s breakfast, he thought. One of Major Jeremy Savage’s expressions. And I wish he and Christian Johnny were in charge here instead of twenty light years away.
“My central element ran into an infantry screen,” Slater said. “Well placed; we had to deploy and put in a full attack, couldn’t just brush them aside. Gave us a stiff fight and then moved back sharpish. We cut them up nicely, but then I went forward to try and keep them from breaking contact and we got caught by a mortar and bombardment rocket attack.”
“Rockets?”
“One-twenty-seven mm’s, the same type the Royals use.” A six-tube launcher, in batteries of three. “Four batteries, widely spaced. Proximity fused, time-on-target with the mortars, and cursed well placed. Then the ones we’d been chasing came back at us, right on the heels of it, grenade and bayonet work for a while.”
Owensford winced; that was a bad sign, that the enemy had troops willing to take casualties from their own artillery to push in an assault while the fire kept the defenders’ heads down.
“Pretty much the same thing happened to the Forty-First Brotherhood.” The militia unit on the far left flank of Task Force Wingate.
“They pursued until they were out of reach of the battalion on their right, with more enthusiasm than sense”—Owensford nodded; you wanted aggression, but only experience could temper it with caution—”and now they’re leaguered and under attack from all sides. The enemy is trying to infiltrate squad-sized units and recoilless teams down the wooded vales between my units, and it’s sopping up my riflemen to stop them, turning into a bloody dog-fight down there. Plus constant harassing fire from eighty-two mm’s”—platoon level mortars—”and snipers behind every bush. I’m moving the Seventeenth Brotherhood up from reserve to help pull the Forty-first out of its hole and back to the main body, and putting the Tenth”—the unit on his immediate right—”into the low ground to work their way around the flank of the people ahead of me, while the Seventh drops back and covers us both on the right.”
“Appraisal of the enemy?”
“Too damned good for comfort; not up to Legion standards, but good. Their equipment’s about the same as the Royals, except their radar and radar countermeasures, which are better, probably as good as ours. Off-planet stuff. Chaff and jamming, so I’m returning the favor; they’ve got more visual observation right now, I’m working on it.”
A gatling six-barrel went off somewhere near to the mike, a savage brrrrrrrt-brrrrrrt sound, a hail of bullets that would saw through trees.
“They know how to use their weapons, they’ve got discipline and good small-unit tactics,” Slater continued. A wounded man screamed, a high endless sound suddenly cut off as if with a knife. “Not bothered by armor, either; they’ve got plenty of light recoilless stuff and unguided antitank rockets, and they’re not afraid to get in close and try to use it. I’ve taken damned few unwounded prisoners.”
A pause. “The Brotherhood people don’t seem to have taken any prisoners at all, by the way.”
Damn, damn, don’t they understand it’ll make the enemy fight harder? Owensford thought. He would have to do something about that.
“And whoever’s in charge knows his hand from a hacksaw too. I’d swear there’s a CoDominium Academy mind behind that fire mission.”
“How many of them?”
“Difficult to say; they keep shooting down my spyeye balloons as fast as I put them up. At least a thousand, no more than two.” Task Force Wingate would outnumber them by at least fifteen hundred men, possibly by twice that.
“I could fight through what’s facing me,” Slater continued, echoing Owensford’s thoughts. “Why don’t I think this is a good idea?”
“It’s what they want you to do, of course. Bugger that. We’re better set for a battle of attrition than they are. The one thing I haven’t noticed in all this is logistics troops. They may be able to make infantrymen out of those street gangs, but they seem to be a bit short on supply clerks.
“Consolidate as soon as you’ve pulled the Forty-first out of its hole, and dig in. The mission’s changed, George. To hell with moving across ground. The objective is to kill their cadres. Troops as good as those can’t be all that plentiful, not to terrorists, so dig in and break their teeth. Before we’re finished they’ll have their battalion commanders out fighting like riflemen. And make them use up their munitions. This has just become a logistics war.”
“Suppose they won’t come at us?”
“They will. ‘Enemy advance, we retreat. Enemy halt, we harass.’ They’ll think you’re slowing down because you’re beaten just like the Brotherhood troops,” Peter said. “Let’s encourage that thought. They’ve got some kind of complicated battle plan, and just for the moment I’d as soon they thought it was working. I particularly don’t want them to think that either you or the Brotherhoods can mount an attack. And they’ll think they have to attack before they run out of supplies. Or just to get ours.”
“Gotcha.”
“You’re an anvil. Be a good one. When I’ve got recon I’ll put some mobility back in this battle. For now they expect you to advance, so digging in will be a surprise. But be ready to advance again when I need you.”
“Understood.”
“Godspeed. Out.”
* * *
“There, Senior Group Leader,” the platoon leader of the guerilla advance element said, making a tiny hand motion through the improvised blind of thorny brush. “The rest of them are a thousand meters back, digging in.”
Niles slipped up his nightsight goggles and used the glasses instead, switched to x10 magnification and light-enhancement. The hundred-meter gap between the minefield and the steeper slope down to the valley was an expanse of snow stippled with the dry yellow stalks of summer’s grass. A few small trees were scattered across it, and the odd bush. Nothing moved but the wind, scudding a thin mist of ice crystals along the surface of the ground. Then a man rose to one knee, motionless with a white-painted rifle across his chest. A full minute’s silence, then he made a hand signal; half a dozen others rose out of concealment and moved forward twenty paces, sank to the earth again. Another six rose from behind the lead element’s position and passed through, went to ground ten or twenty meters in advance.
Good fieldcraft, Niles thought. Aloud: “Open fire!”
Muzzle-flashes lit the night, twinkling like malignant orange fireflies. Men flopped, screamed, were still; a stitch of tracers curved out toward the Helot positions, and the Royalist riflemen opened return fire as well. Bullets went by over Niles’s head with an ugly flat whack sound, and bark fell on his helmet and the backs of his gloves. He raised his own rifle and settled the translucent pointer of the optical sight on a suspicious gray rock that jutted up out of the snow.
A head and arms snaked around it, a long finned oval on the muzzle of the weapon they carried; rifle grenade. Niles stroked the trigger gently. Crack. The recoil was a surprise, sign of a good shot. The head dropped back and the rifle slipped back into view and landed in the snow.
God, Niles thought as a surge of excitement flowed from throat to gut. He touched the side of his helmet.
“Status of element Icepick.”
“Moving out,” his adjutant said.
“Execute fire mission Alpha,” Niles ordered. “I’ll join Icepick with the Headquarters squad. Switch to local band relay.” They were moving now. Communications weren’t so good. So what? No commanding from the rear! Get out where the troops could know you weren’t afraid.
“On your own, platoon leader,” Niles continued, beginning to worm his way backward. Then the sky overhead glared a violet almost as bright as day.
* * *
“Incoming. Able Company position.” Owensford watched the battle screen change again.
“Lysander’s scouts,” Captain Lahr said.
In the background Captain Sastri, the artillery chief, spoke in a monotone. “Multiple incoming. Tracking.” Light flickered across the northern horizon. “Computing positions. Preparing for counterbattery shoot . . . countermeasures. Chaff and broad-frequency jamming, decoys.”
Peter nodded in satisfaction. “Andy, be sure we record all this for analysis.”
“Roger,” the adjutant said. “The bad guys are expending a hell of a lot of ordnance, Colonel.”
“Yeah. Sort of makes you wonder who paid for it all. Andy, what do you make of this?”
“Well, they had a hell of a lot more gear than we expected. It hasn’t been used all that effectively.”
“Not too surprising. Most of their training had to be map exercises. Dry fire.”
“Yes, sir. Just as well.”
“They jumped the gun, too,” Peter mused. “They should have waited until we got in deeper.”