Our First Regiment had already relieved a Vth Div. regiment ahead of us, with a “brick wall” overlap which placed them on my corner as well as ahead. “Ahead” and “rear,” “right flank” and “left,” referred to orientation set up in dead-reckoning tracers in each command suit to match the grid of the Battle Plan. We had no true front, simply an area, and the only fighting at the moment was going on several hundred miles away, to our arbitrary right and rear.
Somewhere off that way, probably two hundred miles, should be 2nd platoon, G Co, 2nd Batt, 3rd Reg — commonly known as “The Roughnecks.”
Or the Roughnecks might be forty light-years away. Tactical organization never matches the Table of Organization; all I knew from Plan was that something called the “2nd Batt” was on our right flank beyond the boys from the Normandy Beach. But that battalion could have been borrowed from another division. The Sky Marshal plays his chess without consulting the pieces.
Anyhow, I should not be thinking about the Roughnecks; I had all I could do as a Blackguard. My platoon was okay for the moment — safe as you can be on a hostile planet — but I had plenty to do before Cunha’s first squad reached the far corner. I needed to:
1. Locate the platoon leader who had been holding my area.
2. Establish corners and identify them to section and squad leaders.
3. Make contact liaison with eight platoon leaders on my sides and corners, five of whom should already be in position (those from Fifth and First Regiments) and three (Khoroshen of the Blackguards and Bayonne and Sukarno of the Wolverines) who were now moving into position.
4. Get my own boys spread out to their initial points as fast as possible by shortest routes.
The last had to be set up first, as the open column in which we disembarked would not do it. Brumby’s last squad needed to deploy to the left flank; Cunha’s leading squad needed to spread from dead ahead to left oblique; the other four squads must fan out in between.
This is a standard square deployment and we had simulated how to reach it quickly in the drop room; I called out: “Cunha! Brumby! Time to spread ’em out,” using the non-com circuit.
“Roger sec one!”—“Roger sec two!”
“Section leaders take charge … and caution each recruit. You’ll be passing a lot of Cherubs. I don’t want ’em shot at by mistake!” I bit down for my private circuit and said, “Sarge, you got contact on the left?”
“Yes, sir. They see me, they see you.”
“Good. I don’t see a beacon on our anchor corner—”
“Missing.”
“—so you coach Cunha by D.R. Same for the lead scout — that’s Hughes — and have Hughes set a new beacon.” I wondered why the Third or Fifth hadn’t replaced that anchor beacon — my forward left corner where three regiments came together.
No use talking. I went on: “D.R. check. You bear two seven five, miles twelve.”
“Sir, reverse is nine six, miles twelve scant.”
“Close enough. I haven’t found my opposite number yet, so I’m cutting out forward at max. Mind the shop.”
“Got ’em, Mr. Rico.”
I advanced at max speed while clicking over to officers’ circuit: “Square Black One, answer. Black One, Chang’s Cherubs — do you read me? Answer.” I wanted to talk with the leader of the platoon we were relieving — and not for any perfunctory I-relieve-you-sir: I wanted the ungarnished word.
I didn’t like what I had seen.
Either the top brass had been optimistic in believing that we had mounted overwhelming force against a small, not fully developed Bug base — or the Blackguards had been awarded the spot where the roof fell in. In the few moments I had been out of the boat I had spotted half a dozen armored suits on the ground — empty I hoped, dead men possibly, but ’way too many any way you looked at it.
Besides that, my tactical radar display showed a full platoon (my own) moving into position but only a scattering moving back toward retrieval or still on station. Nor could I see any system to their movements.
I was responsible for 680 square miles of hostile terrain and I wanted very badly to find out all I could before my own squads were deep into it. Battle Plan had ordered a new tactical doctrine which I found dismaying: Do not close the Bugs’ tunnels. Blackie had explained this as if it had been his own happy thought, but I doubt if he liked it.
The strategy was simple, and, I guess, logical … if we could afford the losses. Let the Bugs come up. Meet them and kill them on the surface. Let them keep on coming up. Don’t bomb their holes, don’t gas their holes — let them out. After a while — a day, two days, a week — if we really did have overwhelming force, they would stop coming up. Planning Staff estimated (don’t ask me how!) that the Bugs would expend 70 per cent to 90 per cent of their warriors before they stopped trying to drive us off the surface.
Then we would start the unpeeling, killing surviving warriors as we went down and trying to capture “royalty” alive. We knew what the brain caste looked like; we had seen them dead (in photographs) and we knew they could not run — barely functional legs, bloated bodies that were mostly nervous system. Queens no human had ever seen, but Bio War Corps had prepared sketches of what they should look like — obscene monsters larger than a horse and utterly immobile.
Besides brains and queens there might be other “royalty” castes. As might be — encourage their warriors to come out and die, then capture alive anything but warriors and workers.
A necessary plan and very pretty, on paper. What it meant to me was that I had an area 17 × 40 miles which might be riddled with unstopped Bug holes. I wanted co-ordinates on each one.
If there were too many … well, I might accidentally plug a few and let my boys concentrate on watching the rest. A private in a marauder suit can cover a lot of terrain, but he can look at only one thing at a time; he is not superhuman.
I bounced several miles ahead of the first squad, still calling the Cherub platoon leader, varying it by calling any Cherub officer and describing the pattern of my transponder beacon (dah-di-dah-dah).
No answer—
At last I got a reply from my boss: “Johnnie! Knock off the noise. Answer me on conference circuit.”
So I did, and Blackie told me crisply to quit trying to find the Cherub leader for Square Black One; there wasn’t one. Oh, there might be a non-com alive somewhere but the chain of command had broken.
By the book, somebody always moves up. But it does happen if too many links are knocked out. As Colonel Nielssen had once warned me, in the dim past … almost a month ago.
Captain Chang had gone into action with three officers besides himself; there was one left now (my classmate, Abe Moise) and Blackie was trying to find out from him the situation. Abe wasn’t much help. When I joined the conference and identified myself, Abe thought I was his battalion commander and made a report almost heartbreakingly precise, especially as it made no sense at all.
Blackie interrupted and told me to carry on. “Forget about a relief briefing. The situation is whatever you see that it is — so stir around and see.”
“Right, Boss!” I slashed across my own area toward the far corner, the anchor corner, as fast as I could move, switching circuits on my first bounce. “Sarge! How about that beacon?”
“No place on that corner to put it, sir. A fresh crater there, about scale six.”
I whistled to myself. You could drop the Tours into a size six crater. One of the dodges the Bugs used on us when we were sparring, ourselves on the surface, Bugs underground, was land mines. (They never seemed to use missiles, except from ships in space.) If you were near the spot, the ground shock got you; if you were in the air when one went off, the concussion wave could tumble your gyros and throw your suit out of control.