Free Until Relieved by Rick Shelley Page B

his squad channel. "The good news is, the enemy knows we're here." He paused, but not long enough to give his men time to reply. "The bad news is, the enemy knows we're here." He wasn't looking for a laugh, and he didn't get one, but perhaps it did stop the others from wishing they were moles or other deep-burrowing animals for a moment.
    "Okay, now," Joe said when he had everyone's attention. "We've got to get back to the rest of the platoon. They're lonely without us. But let's be careful. Don't figure 'cause that one plane came in from the west that the next one will as well. No traffic signs up there." He jerked a thumb skyward.
    Joe was the first man on his feet. He stayed hunched over though, as if that might make him a significantly smaller target, or help him get to the ground faster if they had to dive for cover again. Joe looked around to make sure that all of his men got up, and he kept glancing up into the tree canopy, wondering if they would have enough warning the next time an enemy plane took a blind strafing pass.
    Or was it blind? Joe asked himself. He had no idea what sensors the enemy pilots might have available.
    Baerclau's squad raced along behind their own lines as if they were leading a charge into the heart of a fortified enemy position. Though no one in the squad had been hit by the strafing run, or even had bullets come within three meters of them, any illusion of safety under the trees was gone. They could still hear planes strafing, but they were no longer close. The sound was different, Dopplered, heading even farther away. Several of the men wondered what sort of ammunition the airborne automatic weapons had been spitting out—was it wire, fragmenting slugs similar to those used by their own Wasps, or something entirely different, perhaps large-caliber bullets that would bore deep and wide holes through them, body armor and all. No one was anxious to find out the hard way.
    It hardly seemed to matter where the squad was. When the men returned to the platoon, the rest were doing no more than hunkering down behind the best cover they could find or manufacture. Those men who had been on the line the longest, while Joe's squad was off on its mission and getting the wounded taken care of afterward, had excavated decent slit trenches for themselves. Those holes could not stop a bullet coming out of the sky, but they made their residents a trifle less uncomfortable about the danger.
    "Nice of you to drop by for a visit," Sergeant Maycroft told Joe, face-to-face. The platoon sergeant came to show Joe where he wanted his squad. Maycroft had been platoon sergeant since Joe first came to the company as a corporal. Maycroft had recommended Joe for his third stripe almost immediately.
    "Well, we had nothing better to do, Max," Joe replied. "Thought we might keep you company." The two sergeants came from the same town on Bancroft, but they hadn't met until Joe came to the 13th. Max had been one of the first 'Crofters to join the Accord military. Now, their families back home had become friends, just as Max and Joe had.
    "I heard that flyguy's gonna be okay," Max said.
    "That's what the medic told me. Pretty soon, he'll be in a cushy hospital bed." There was just a hint of wistfulness in Joe's voice.
    "Want to bet he'd trade places with you in a second?"
    "You think he'd give all that up for a hole in the ground?"
    —|—
    "We've finally got 'em on the move, Van," Terrence Banyon told his boss. "The air strike was just to get our attention, I guess."
    "And to cover their ground movements," Dezo Parks added.
    Banyon shrugged. "There's one group coming our way from Maison, as expected. The looks our Wasps have gotten seem to indicate that the garrison there was considerably larger than we anticipated, perhaps as many as three thousand, maybe even thirty-five hundred."
    "Hell, the population of Maison wasn't supposed to be more than eight thousand," Stossen said.
    "Maybe not," Banyon said, "but the Heggies are