15   

“Roy?” Lon waited five seconds. When Bantor did not reply, Lon started to move toward him. He was snaking across the ground as he reported the downed man to Lieutenant Taiters. There was no need to give their position. The blips of their helmet electronics would show on the lieutenant’s head-up display.

“Just a single gunshot so far,” Lon said, not thinking that Taiters and the rest of the platoon would have heard that much. They were not that far away. He stayed flat on his stomach, his head just up enough to let him watch where he was going.

“Stay where you are, Nolan,” Taiters said after Lon had moved about ten feet. “Bantor’s dead. I just lost his vital signs. Don’t let them get you too.”

“Maybe it’s just his electronics that went bad, Lieutenant,” Lon said. He had stopped at the order, but …

“I’ve still got everything else from the helmet, just no vitals,” Taiters said. “Don’t expose yourself any further. Do you have cover where you’re at?”

“No, sir. I’m about ten feet from the nearest cover, behind me. I got out this far before you told me to stop.”

“Try to edge back. Were you able to see anything?”

“Not a thing. I didn’t even see the muzzle flash. I can’t say if there’s just one rebel or that whole rebel force.”

“Start trying to get to the best cover you can. I’m going to move first squad halfway to your position. As soon as they get set, I want you to work your way back to them. Stay down and be careful, but come on back in.”

“Yes, sir.” There was no other possible reply.

Staying flat and crawling backward was far more difficult than crawling forward, but safer than trying to turn around. Everything seemed to catch as Lon pushed himself with his hands and forearms, and stretched out to pull himself along with his toes. He was unable to see where he was going, and he did not know when he neared the tree that had sheltered him before until he jammed a foot into it. Then he had to risk lifting up a few inches to be able to look, to see which way he had to shift to get around behind the trunk.

“I’m back to cover, Lieutenant,” Lon said. “A fairly good-sized tree.”

“Wait two minutes, then start working your way due east,” Taiters said. “First squad will be waiting for you, ready to give covering fire if necessary.”

I hope it’s not necessary, Lon thought, checking the timeline on his visor so he would make no mistake about when to start back. He was still on his stomach, but shifted around so he could look toward the east. He did not have to guess the direction. His head-up display gave him a compass reading. He tried to pick out a route, looking to go from cover to cover—as near as possible. The shortest possible distance without exposing myself too much.

“You can start now, Nolan.” Lon recognized the voice of Corporal Nace, the squad leader.

“On my way, Wil,” Lon whispered.

Turning his back to the unseen and uncounted enemy was difficult. It made Lon feel too exposed, too juicy a target. But he did not want to take any longer than absolutely necessary getting back among comrades. He scuttled along as quickly as he could manage without getting his butt too high for safety, ignoring the growing ache in his knees and elbows as he scrabbled along the ground. I’d need less than ten seconds to get up and sprint the distance, he thought. Maybe three minutes to crawl it like this. But Lon was not frightened enough to let himself be panicked into such a foolish attempt.

After he had covered half of the distance, Lon stopped to catch his breath and look both ways. He had not even realized that he had started to hold his breath until he had to gasp to fill his lungs. He did not see anyone from first squad, but he did not raise up more than a few inches to look. They would be there, right where they were supposed to be. Lon never doubted that. He took another deep breath, then resumed his crawl.

“I see you, Nolan,” Nace said ten seconds later. “Just keep coming, nice and easy. There’s no one in sight behind you.”

Despite the admonition and reassurance, Lon tried to crawl faster. He started panting for air but did not stop moving. He finally spotted a little of a DMC battle helmet’s camouflage pattern, no more than five feet away. I made it! Lon thought, resisting the urge to get up and lunge forward to join first squad. It was just then that the gunfire started behind him.

There was no question of it being a lone sniper this time. Dozens of rifles opened fire almost simultaneously in a ragged volley. Lon got up to his hands and knees and plunged forward, scurrying on until hands caught him from one side and pulled him down. For perhaps ten seconds then, Lon lay motionless, dragging air into aching lungs, before he could turn to face the new threat. First squad had already started to return fire.

Lon got his rifle up, but took a few seconds to scan the front before he bent to the sights and started shooting. The enemy gunfire was coming from along a fairly broad front, at least fifty yards across, and no more than 150 yards away. That might mean thirty men or sixty, and there could be many more nearby.

“We’re moving up to you,” Lieutenant Taiters said over the squad leaders’ channel. “The shuttles are on their landing run now. We’ve got to keep these bastards busy for ten minutes.”

At first, Lon had trouble holding his rifle steady, even in what should have been a rock-solid prone firing position. His hands and arms were still trembling from all of the crawling. But gradually his muscles steadied, and he moved quickly from target to target—from from one muzzle flash to the next, firing his short bursts. The routine helped to steady him, helped Lon forget the aches.

The number of enemy rifles taking part in the firefight rose. The increase was more audible than visible, but unmistakable. He heard one bullet smack into a tree trunk no more than six inches above his head and just off to the side. The bullet ripped loose bark and dropped it on his helmet. Lon shook his head and continued shooting. After seeing Dean’s creased and cracked helmet earlier, this did not even count as a near miss.

At a distance, even over the sounds of gunfire, Lon heard the two shuttles coming in for their landing—very close together. Load the wounded up fast, Lon projected. Get them up and out of the way.

Ten minutes seemed like a very long time, even though the rebels showed no hint of trying to close in on the squad, or run over them. We’re facing at least company strength opposition, Lon thought, guessed. Maybe quite a bit more. Most of the rebels were firing single shots, but not all of them. The military rifles that had been found earlier were capable of fully automatic fire. But none of the rebels seemed to have mastered the short burst. They always seemed to rattle off ten or twelve shots each time they pulled the trigger—a waste of ammunition to any professional.

“I had a man spending ammo that way without good reason, I’d make him pay for his own bullets,” Corporal Nace mumbled over a channel to Lieutenant Taiters.

“Maybe there’s a reason they’re not afraid of running out,” Taiters replied. “The loyalists have learned not to waste. They haven’t had anything to waste.”

“Sir, those weapons we captured, the military ones, do we know where they came from?” Lon asked.

“They were made on Hanau, but that’s not necessarily where the rebels got them. Don’t worry about that, Nolan. It can’t make any difference to us.”

The volume of enemy fire increased again. There appeared to be at least a doubling of the number of weapons engaged. “They know about the shuttles,” Nace said. “Looks like they want to get close enough to get a piece of them.”

He had scarcely stopped talking when the rebels started moving in against the lone Dirigenter platoon. The Norbankers did show some basic knowledge of fire-and-maneuver tactics—using half of their men to cover the other half as they got up and moved a few steps closer before dropping to cover, one group leapfrogging the other—but their local manpower advantage was so large that it was scarcely important.

The mercenary platoon kept the enemy advance slow—and costly. Four dozen men with automatic rifles, beamers, and grenade launchers took a fierce toll on the frontal attack. Each time a group of Norbanker rebels got up to advance, there were fewer than the time before. But the rebels had started out with a lot more men than one platoon could pit against them, and despite heavy losses, they kept coming. Lon Nolan had no way to be certain, but after the shuttles landed and the rebels appeared to put all of their resources into the attack, he guessed that the platoon was facing at least six hundred men—the equivalent of three DMC companies. That meant twelve-to-one odds.

We can’t stop them all Some of them are going to reach us unless they quit trying, Lon thought—and he could think of nothing that was liable to make them quit soon enough. He emptied one forty-round magazine, then a second. The leading elements of the rebel attack were within sixty yards of the platoon, and the Dirigenters had started taking casualties.

Lon was only vaguely aware of the talk going on among the noncoms. He did not keep track of the numbers—seven dead and twelve wounded so far, more than a third of the platoon. There was no time for bookkeeping. He had little time for anything but shooting, and one tortured thought: How much longer are those shuttles going to be on the ground?

“Fix bayonets!” Taiters ordered. The shouted command startled Lon enough to throw off his aim. He reached for the bayonet on his belt with his left hand, attempting to line up his next target and shoot one-handed at the same time. The rebels were close enough that they were hard to miss, even like that. The Dirigenters who were still able to got their bayonets—eight-inch-long, double-edged blades—mounted on their rifles, and got ready for the face-to-face fight.

Lon heard the roar of attack shuttles taking off, accelerating quickly into a steep climb. But the Norbanker rebels did not suddenly give up their advance. They might not get a chance to shoot down the landers, but they still had one small group of outlanders they could overrun and destroy.

I guess we’ve had it, Lon thought. There was no emotion to the realization. Death might be imminent, but until it came, he still had work to do. Right next to him, Wil Nace’s head was thrown back, and then the corporal collapsed over onto his right side, hit. Lon spared him only the briefest glance, uncertain whether the squad leader was dead or wounded. Very soon, it would probably make no difference.

Another forty-round magazine was empty. Lon scarcely had time to get another magazine loaded, the first round slammed into the chamber. But he did not resume firing the rifle. Instead, he pulled his pistol and used that. The rebels were within forty yards, close enough for the pistol. Lon squeezed off the fourteen rounds the semiautomatic pistol held, coolly aiming each shot, then dropped that weapon to take up the rifle again.

There was no longer any great advantage to firing the rifle on full automatic. Lon moved the selector to single shots. The enemy was close enough that he could have thrown the bullets and been sure of hitting an enemy with each one. The faces of the rebels were clearly visible, most distorted by intense emotion—anger, fear, or some fey humor. Lon was up off of his stomach, kneeling behind a skinny tree trunk. He heard bullets smack into the wood more than once, felt heated air as one round whizzed past him with less than an inch to spare.

But those barely impinged on Lon’s awareness. He was caught up in what he had already subconsciously accepted as his own Götterdämmerung. The universe had closed in like a Q-Space bubble to encompass only the area enclosing Lon and the men who would likely kill him. And time had ceased to maintain its orderly progression from present to future.

Like a machine programmed to kill and unaware of its own mortality, Lon went about his work with cold precision. He noted a searing flash through his left shoulder but not the ensuing pain. He did not realize that he had been struck by a bullet, or that he was bleeding. His concentration was too intense, his focus too narrow. He continued to fire his rifle, hardly noticing that his left hand could no longer grip the weapon, that the arm had dropped to his side, useless.

No more than twenty men of the fourth platoon were still able to fire. The enemy—less numerous than earlier—was moving in slowly. At close range, it would not take them long to finish the job.

Then a new sound entered Lon Nolan’s universe—the metallic, grating noise of shuttle Gatlings being fired. He was not certain whether he dove for cover or was knocked to the ground by a bullet. There was no pain, but by the time he hit the dirt, there was no awareness either.