Until Relieved by Rick Shelley Page B

cautiously. He might have moved a little faster on his own—not impatiently, but with somewhat less patience than Joe. He held back though, knowing that he had to stay even with his sergeant.
    Ten steps. Then Joe's foot came down on something that was too smooth to be natural. Though he realized that something was wrong almost instantly, he felt as if considerable time passed before he was able to react—before he was forced to react.
    He stopped and brought the muzzle of his rifle down quickly, just as his foot was jerked out from under him. Joe's movements were instinctive, but that instinct came from years of training. Subconsciously, he realized that he had stepped on a blanket or tarpaulin, and that there was someone under it, someone who had jerked on the fabric, coming out from underneath, coming to his feet.
    Joe fell but managed to land on his ass without tumbling. The figure who emerged from under the tarp had a long knife in his hand. Joe had no time to get his rifle pointed at his attacker. He could do nothing more than swing the barrel toward the knife, using his zipper as a club while he got back to his feet.
    The Heggie jerked his knife to the side, out of the way, and dove at Joe's middle. Joe dropped his rifle as the two men went to the ground together. Joe had to have both hands free, had to get to the Heggie's knife. Net armor might stop a bullet or wire, but it would do little to stop a knife thrust.
    Neither man spoke, or did more than grunt from effort or impact. But the disturbance was an outrageous din compared to the total silence that had preceded it. Joe did manage to say "Mort" into his microphone.
    Joe's assailant was considerably larger than him, perhaps by as much as ten centimeters in height and fifteen kilos in weight. Joe let the Heggie's momentum carry them backward and over, and he put his knees into the man, sending him over his head. But the Heggie kept his grip. Together, the two men rolled in the dirt, with the Schlinal trooper's weight and size beginning to tell.
    Joe did not see the end of the fight coming. He heard a dull thud and then a sharp crack as his foe's neck snapped, and then he felt the Heggie shudder in his grasp and go limp.
    "You okay, Sarge?" Mort asked.
    Joe took a moment to consider that while he hauled in deep breaths. "Yeah. I'm okay."
    "He had something like a splat gun hidden under that tarp with him," Mort explained. "I tripped over it trying to get to you."
    Joe got to his feet slowly, helped up by Mort, and then he bent over again to retrieve his rifle. As well as he could in the dark, he checked to make sure that nothing had fouled the barrel.
    "That tarp," Joe said, after signaling the rest of the platoon to start moving again. Ezra's team would take over the point now—with even greater caution than before, in case this man was just part of a larger force. What would one man be doing out here alone with a splat gun? Joe asked himself. "Check it out, will you?"
    "Must be some sort of thermal shield," Mort said after a quick look. "That's why we couldn't see any IR signature."
    "Bring it along. Intelligence might like a look at it," Joe said.
    The other fire team moved on by. Joe and Mort fell in behind, with the rest of their team. No one paid any attention to the dead Heggie. He no longer mattered.

CHAPTER SEVEN
    Four men lay under cover of a thicket that blanketed the side of a hill overlooking the town of Maison. Members of the special intelligence detachment assigned to the 13th SAT, they had been on Porter for ten days, one of two teams that had been infiltrated ahead of the invasion. Their shuttle had never landed. The teams had jumped at twenty five hundred meters, free-falling most of that distance before deploying black parasails. Those chutes were jettisoned before they reached the ground. The men released their harnesses and landed on personal antigrav packs. That technology was so new that it had never before been used in combat.
    One man from