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Roo Vernon was unconscious, sprawled out at least ten meters from where he had been standing. He had so many shrapnel wounds that Zel didn't even try to count them. He screamed into his helmet radio for medics, not knowing if there were any around. He didn't hear any response.

He looked up, then around. His Wasp appeared to be the only one that hadn't been directly hit. Though neither of the others had burned, there was major damage to both. There was no movement in the cockpits of either.

Zel was unable to get the canopy open on Blue two. Gerry Easton was slumped inside, showing no signs of life. After more than a minute of futile effort, Zel got down from that Wasp and went to the other. By the time he popped the canopy on Blue eight and cranked it open manually, Will Tarkel was starting to move—a little. His head fell from one side to the other. He groaned.

"Hang on, Will. I'll have you out in a second," Zel promised.

It took thirty seconds for Zel to get Will's safety harness unfastened. Then he lifted the wounded pilot—who outweighed him by fifteen kilograms—out of the cockpit and carried him out on the "wing." He laid Will down, jumped to the ground, then picked Tarkel up again and carried him over to where Roo was lying. Once more, Zel screamed for a medic over his radio. There was still no response.

Zel switched to the channel that connected him with Goose Tarkel, Will's uncle. "Major, we got hit hard after we landed. I've got badly wounded men here, including Will. We need medical help and we need it right now."

"A van from Yellow Flight is already on the way, Paitcher. Two minutes or less. Do what you can until they arrive."

Zel went back to the two wounded men he knew about. Will needed a tourniquet on his arm to stop the bleeding. Zel used his belt to take care of that. Roo seemed to have a profusion of small cuts. All were seeping badly, but there seemed to be no way to stop them other than with medpatches.

Medpatches. Zel looked at the three vans that had come to service the planes. There would be—or would have been—first aid kits in each of them. All of the trucks had been hit. Two had caught fire. One was still burning. Zel wasn't particularly optimistic, but he went looking.

He couldn't get into the one van that was still burning, but the first aid kits in the other two trucks had both survived—though the case of one was smoking when Zel got to it. He carried both cases over to where the wounded men were lying and started cutting away uniforms and slapping medpatches over the worst concentrations of cuts. When he had done what he could for Roo and Will, he got up and started looking around to see if there was anyone else left alive.

He found one mechanic who had been blown more than twenty meters from where he had been standing before the attack. The man was unconscious but wasn't bleeding. His heartbeat was weak and thready. Zel didn't try to move him, suspecting broken bones—perhaps even the spine.

After finding no one else from the ground crews alive, Zel went back to the Wasp he had been unable to get into. Gerry Easton still hadn't moved, but Zel couldn't tell if the man was dead or alive unless he could get to him. Once more he tried to pop the canopy manually. Without success. He was still trying when the new van arrived.

"Somebody give me a hand here!" Zel shouted. The crew chief and one of his men went to work on the wounded men after Zel pointed out all three of them. The other mechanic brought a tool over to Blue two.

"He alive in there?" the mechanic asked as he poked the business end of the meter-long tool in a notch at the rear left of the canopy.

"Can't tell," Zel said.

"I'll have it in a second, sir." The mechanic leaned on the tool, a pry bar with a specialized attachment intended for just this operation. There was a loud popping noise and the canopy came up out of its lock. Together, the two men got it all of the way off. Then Zel reached in to put fingers against the side of Easton's neck, feeling for a pulse.

There was none. Gerry Easton was dead.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

There were only minor differences between the Wasp airplane and the Accord's Bat spaceplane, and for the most part, those differences were stylistic rather than functional. The primary exception was in weapons systems. The Bat was never equipped with the 25mm cannons that were a staple of Wasp armament. Partly in place of that, the Bat was normally furnished with a rack of small antimissile missiles, a more important defensive weapon in space.

The power plant of the two fighters was identical, two battery-powered antigravity drives. The cockpit/escape module was also identical. But the designers of the Bat took extensive liberties with the exterior design of the fighter. Since neither the Wasp nor the Bat depended on aeronautical efficiency to fly, that was a "minor stylistic" difference. The Bat did not even have the appearance of a wing. The cockpit sat atop and between two rounded rectangular solids—rather like something baked in a loaf pan—that housed the drives, batteries, and controls. The space below the cockpit, between the two sections of fuselage, was equipped with the necessary fittings and control linkages for the variety of weapons that the Bat used.

While the Wasp could operate in space as easily as the Bat, the Bat was never deployed less than 180 kilometers above a human-habitable world, high enough to "fall" around that world if it should happen to lose power. Suddenly deprived of its engines, the Bat's glide characteristics—in an atmosphere, that is—would be even more rocklike than the Wasp's. The Bat also, according to the most sophisticated simulations, would have a tendency to tumble in an atmosphere without working power plants.

Although the Bat's batteries provided it with no more than the approximately ninety minutes of power that the Wasp's batteries provided, without the drag of atmosphere and the greater gravity close to the surface of a world, that ninety minutes of power could—under the proper circumstances—allow the Bat to operate for as much as twelve hours—and conceivably much longer—before it had to return to its carrier for fresh batteries. The Bat carried enough air to see a pilot through eighteen hours.

In outward appearance, the Schlinal spaceplane was identical to its airplane. Provision for more air and different armaments were the only real differences between the two versions of the fighter. And, of course, the model designation number. The
air
plane was the Boem A3. The
space
plane was the Boem S3. In practice, the two were interchangeable.

As the two fleets drew nearer to each other, the relative angle between their vectors was 27 degrees. There were no precise "rendezvous" coordinates at the apex. They would never actually pass through the same point in space. At their nearest approach, providing both fleets remained on their same courses, they would be eighty-seven kilometers apart. The battle would be carried to the enemy by the fighters each fleet carried.

Aboard the Accord's ships, the fighter pilots had been sent to their Bats as soon as the van of the Heggie fleet came within three hundred kilometers, still "above" the Accord fleet and moving at a slightly greater speed on their almost converging course. Flight control computers tracked a variety of potential enemy sorties, travel time, trajectory, and how soon the Bats would have to be launched to meet each possible scenario. Each TIC (threat intercept computer) could handle all of the variables connected with more than a thousand targets simultaneously. With the Bat pilots already in their fighters and the hangars already partially depressurized, the Bats could be launched within thirty seconds of the order, giving them plenty of time to accelerate away from the fleet on a course to intercept Boem S3s as far off as possible.

On the Accord flagship, the Constellation class
Capricorn
, Admiral Kitchener had already moved to CIC, which served as his flag bridge. A dozen officers and ratings manned the intelligence-gathering equipment and compsoles. Kitchener was in constant communication with the skippers of each of his ships and with their launch control officers. He also kept a link open to General Dacik on the ground. Unless the Schlinal fleet acted first, Kitchener had decided that he would launch the first defensive element of his fighters when the two fleets approached to within 200 kilometers of each other. He would wait until the fleets were no more than 150 kilometers apart before he sent out his attackers—unless the Heggies struck first.

"We'll hold back one-third of our Bats to strike against Schlinal shuttles and their escorts in any case," Kitchener informed the captains and launch officers. "No matter what happens to us, we have to do what we can to cut down on the number of Heggies who reach the ground intact."

He looked at a bank of monitors that relayed the view of the enemy fleet from each of his ships. In his more wistful moments—safe in a friendly port with a few drinks under his belt—Kitchener sometimes regretted the impersonal silence and distance of war in space. A student of military and naval history, he wished at times that he had been alive back on Earth sometime in the last century of men-of-war powered by sails, by the movements of air. It was a wish he had never shared with anyone, in or out of service, not even his wife.

Kitchener smiled at a chance memory. He was almost certain that his wife at least suspected. Both of his sons had been given toy sailing ships and models, at the earliest possible ages, and introduced to computer games set in that milieu. They became interested because their father had made certain that they had every opportunity to become interested. Both of those sons were now in the space navy, though neither had ever served under their father's command.

Kitchener hid his impatience well. That was more than simply the habit of command. After more than forty years of service, he knew firsthand the inexorable nature of space. There was nothing to do but wait. Either speeding up or slowing down could only delay the eventual confrontation. Changing course would have the same effect now. It would take the expenditure of prodigious amounts of energy to hurry the battle by even seconds—to little effect. There could be no tactical surprise.

But the battle
would
begin soon. Kitchener glanced at a clock, then at a readout of distances. The gap between the fleets had almost narrowed to two hundred kilometers. The Schlinal fleet had not launched any fighters yet, neither an attack formation nor a defensive screen.

"Ready the shield patrols," he said, the order going over the radio to the necessary commanders. "Commence launch... now!"

Then, for just an instant, he allowed himself to relax. The next move would belong to his opposite number, two hundred kilometers away.

—|—

"Baerclau!"

"Yes, Captain?" Joe replied.

"The fleet battle is about to begin, sometime in the next fifteen minutes or so, according to Major Ingels."

"I tell the men now, sir?"

"Go ahead. Our fleet is larger. The numbers are about three to two in our favor."

"Glad to hear that," Joe said. "Maybe our ships will save us the bother of facing any of those Heggies down here."

"Don't count on it."

"Just hoping out loud, sir."

"We've still got plenty of work to do. We're going to spread a line all the way across the peninsula, just south of this base. George and Howard will mount patrols behind us, north of the line, to make certain that none of the Heggies sneak out behind us. The rest of us will take the best defensive line we can find and hold it until the rest of the army gets to us."

"We're the anvil?" Joe asked. Hammer and anvil: it was an age-old tactic. Keep part of your people stationary, waiting. Use the rest of your army to drive the enemy against your prepared positions. Put the enemy in a cross fire and keep up the pressure until they surrender—or cease to exist.

"We're the anvil," Keye agreed. "I hope you had your people stock up on some of these Heggie munitions."

"All we could carry, sir. I thought it wise to, under the circumstances."

"Very wise, Joe. Colonel's given orders for everybody to stock up on rockets and grenades. Heggies bump into us, they might still have a few Novas in working condition." The Heggies would still outnumber the 13th, possibly by more than two to one. The 13th would need whatever edge it could find to keep from being overrun.

"If they know they've got reinforcements on the way in, they won't surrender," Joe said after a short pause. "They'll be more afraid of their own warlords than they are of us."

"That's the way I read it too, Joe," Keye said. "They're going to be in a panic, and fighting might seem less dangerous than surrendering. Panicky men are capable of just about anything."

"Yes, sir."

Keye gave Joe specific orders for 2nd platoon. Joe passed those orders on, giving his men the rest of the bad news as well.

"We're up shit creek," Wiz Mackey said, disgust in his voice.

"All we've got to do right now is take care of the Heggies coming north toward us," Joe said. "That might not be as hard as the big shots think."

"What do you mean?" Mort Jaiffer asked.

"They've been fighting for quite a while out there already," Joe said. "Facing four regiments. And
we
are sitting between them and their supplies. The only ammunition they're going to have left is what they haven't used yet, what they've got with them."

"You think they're going to run dry," Mort said. "Like we did on Porter."

"It's possible," Joe said. "Depends on how much they were carrying, when the last time was that they got supplies before we jumped in, and how much shooting they've been doing. And they've been doing a lot of shooting, according to the captain. It took our guys a long time to break across the canal and start the Heggies running our way. Heggies aren't superhuman. They can't carry much more than we do. It had to run out sooner or later, and it might already be later."

"Sounds like you're trying for a slot in Intelligence," Mort said. "I just hope you're right."

"Me too," Baerclau admitted. "But if we can take care of the Heggies on the ground before the reinforcements start trying to land, we might still come out of this okay." Joe felt a little disgusted with himself, acting like a cheerleader when he wasn't certain that he believed a word he was saying.