Free Until Relieved by Rick Shelley

stabilizing system absorbed virtually all of the shock of firing.
    With no enemy counterbattery fire to worry about yet, the Havocs were shooting from a halt. Still, the guns moved after every shot. It was that random movement that had brought Basset two within sight of another howitzer.
    Simon Kilgore had Two moving almost before the round cleared the muzzle. He backed the Havoc away from its firing position and turned around a large tree, then started off at a 60-degree angle from the line of flight of the last round. Simon could drive his gun with the best. "Give me a millimeter clearance on either side, and I'll take it anywhere," he liked to brag. On better days, he got more extravagant. "I can make her dance around a dozen eggs without cracking a shell."
    Ponks reserved one eye for his periscopes, the other for the damage assessment monitor. There was no way to actually see the shell coming down toward its target. The view that Ponks was watching was relayed from a satellite cruising three-hundred kilometers overhead. While he might be able to identify an object as a basket of corn, he would never be able to distinguish the individual ears.
    This time it was impossible for Ponks to be absolutely certain that their shell had hit the exact point he wanted because three shells exploded almost simultaneously—apparently within a three-meter diameter. The stone wall along the near side of the barracks compound was gone when the smoke of the blasts settled, and so was the nearest of the buildings inside.
    "On the money," Ponks announced. "New aiming point is thirty meters from the last, relative bearing three-zero-two." The actual calculations for the ranging were done by computer. The gun crew did not have to worry about calculating their own position and movement or coordinating that with the position of their target.
    The gun had only moved four-hundred meters by the time Ysinde announced that he had the new round in the chamber.
    "Simon, bring the gun around to the firing vector. Karl, put five quick ones in the same area. Work a twenty-meter grid on the aim," Ponks said. With the rest of the battery doing likewise, that would saturate the compound. Anyone not in a deep hole would have little chance of surviving a bombardment like that. There was not a man in the Havoc squadron who would want to attempt it, in any case.
    "We get the last round out, start moving us south-southwest, Simon," Ponks said.
    "Roger. Okay if I move us farther out from town at the same time?"
    "You getting nervous?"
    "I was born nervous."
    "Okay, but don't put us too far out. You'll give Karl fits if you make him work at maximum range."
    The quirks of six gun commanders maneuvering their vehicles at random brought three of them within an area little more than a half kilometer in diameter for a moment. The three howitzers were moving in different directions, and Ponks saw that neither of the others would come within a hundred meters of Basset two, but that was still too close for comfort.
    It did mean that there were friendly witnesses to what happened to Basset five.
    Basset five was the closer Havoc to Ponks's gun. Obviously, there was no warning. Five suddenly erupted in a ball of flame and shrapnel. Until the fire and smoke cleared, the other gunners could not tell for certain whether Five had exploded internally, perhaps from an accident with a shell, or had been hit by enemy fire. When the smoke cleared, though, it was obvious that the explosion had come from outside. The front end of Five had been crushed inward.
    The mission became something much more than a drive through the countryside then.
    —|—
    The Hegemony's first coordinated counterstrike against the landing came from the air, and despite all of the spyeyes and pilots watching, it came virtually without warning. Two dozen Boem fighter-bombers converged on the Accord LZs. Another pair of enemy planes attacked the Havocs that were bombarding the Schlinal barracks compound in