Free Side Show by Rick Shelley

maybe we'd all be rested." While he talked, Joe ran his helmet's diagnostics program. The helmet had taken quite a few wire hits. Then he checked his rifle.
    "If I was sure we had the time, I'd do it now," Al said, knowing that the Bear wasn't serious. "Leave you on watch while the rest of us catch up."
    —|—
    There were only four Wasps of Blue Flight in the air. Two had been destroyed. Two were being held back to help in the defense of the main Accord foothold on Jordan. The fighting back there had been raging for more than twenty-one hours. A joke so old that its origins could no longer be traced was being repeated with distressing frequency. "The situation here is quite fluid." "What's that mean?" "It means we're up the creek."
    Zel wasn't certain that he really understood what was going on, but he had spent more than half of the past twenty-one hours in the air. He decided that he was ahead of the game if he even remembered his name. Along much of the Accord perimeter, there was no clearly definable front left. In some places, the Accord had made advances. Elsewhere, they had been forced to retreat. Units were out of contact with their flanking units. Several times, Wasps had been asked to do flybys just to locate friendly units.
    Zel yawned, then blinked and took a careful scan of his heads-up display and the two monitors on the panel below it. With a little luck, they'd get out and back this time without any fighting. Cover the river crossing for the mudders. Look for any sign of another Heggie force moving toward them. Do what you have to do. Simple, if vague, instructions. But recon work was something of a break.
    As long as no Boems showed up to contest the operation.
    "There's the river," Slee said. "To the right, angled about ten degrees right of your centerline."
    Zel looked at the mapboard monitor rather than out the canopy. The monitor gave a clearer view.
    "How far are we from the ford?" Zel asked.
    "Shouldn't be more than twenty klicks."
    "How far out do we stooge around?" was Zel's next question.
    "We'll do a grid search out to thirty klicks around the ford," Slee said. He and Zel would take the near side of the river, the other two Wasps the far side.
    "We've already got a few Heyers across," Slee reminded the others. "Reccers there to guard the crossing point."
    "How many Heyers?" Zel asked.
    There was a pause before Slee had the answer. "Eleven. Two full recon platoons, spread out in a semicircle."
    "There," Zel said. "Picking up those blips now." He counted carefully. Eleven—no more, and no less. Now let's see if they've got any company, he thought as he turned Blue two onto the next leg of its search pattern.
    —|—
    Colonel Stossen made certain that his APC crossed the river early, with the infantry companies that followed the first two Havoc batteries. The word from the Wasps overhead was encouraging. They hadn't spotted anything anywhere near.
    "Get across as fast as possible," Stossen told the commanders of the remaining companies and support units. "Every minute we're sitting here, the more danger we're in."
    The first men across were out of their Heyers now, in a two-tiered defensive line. There might not be Heggies close... or again, there might be.
    On another channel, Stossen told his exec. "I want to know the instant we've got half of the Team across."
    Switching channels again, Stossen talked with the leader of Blue Right. "You're sure there's no enemy activity around us?"
    "As sure as we can be, Colonel," Slee Reston replied. "They haven't even sent Boems to challenge us, and we've been drawing them the way a rotting carcass draws maggots."
    Stossen wrinkled his nose at the image. "How far out have you searched?"
    "A fifty-klick radius around your position, Colonel. Not a glimmer of Heggies. Of course, there could be a regiment of infantry and we might miss them, but there are sure as hell no tanks or trucks. Even with heat tarps, we've been low enough to pick up a magnetic