Until Relieved by Rick Shelley Page B

just now. They had already wasted too much time, particularly since no harm had been done by the mistake.
    "What about that flyer? He going to make it?"
    "Too close to call," Banyon said. "They got him into a trauma tube in one piece, but it was a near thing. Doc thinks he'll pull through, but no guarantees."
    Stossen nodded slowly. A trauma tube and its medical nanotech devices could work wonders, but there were still limits.
    "What else is going on?"
    Dezo Parks leaned closer to the mapboard. "We've consolidated our initial perimeter, more or less on schedule. Only scattered resistance, nothing very concerted. You know as much about that as I do." They had hoped for an unopposed landing, and had come closer to it than they had any right to expect. "Apparently, the Schlinal forces on-world don't maintain any combat aircraft on anything approaching ready alert. As of five minutes ago, there hadn't been a single report of enemy air activity—from our people down here or from the monitors back in CIC. That's a definite plus for us. We're a considerable distance from any Schlinal garrison, as we hoped we'd be. As far as we've been able to determine, the Hegemony has strictly an occupation force on Porter, and they stick close to the centers of population. Those we've come across must be part of the force used to control the people around Maison, the only real town here on the plateau."
    "Our objective for tomorrow," Stossen commented. "Any word on enemy strength there yet?"
    "Nothing substantive," Banyon said. "The latest estimate is that the maximum size of the garrison in and around Maison must be below two thousand."
    "In other words, intelligence wants us to think that we at least outnumber the Heggies stationed up here on the plateau," Parks said.
    "As if that matters," Banyon replied. "We came into this assuming a total enemy garrison of at least ten thousand on Porter, nearly five times what we have. They may have a lot more than that. Even if they were all stationed in Porter City, five-hundred klicks from us, they could probably move the whole circus to the plateau by midnight."
    "They may not go that far, but there is enemy movement," Parks said. "Two convoys have started out from Porter City. They've got too much active anti-air with them for the Wasps to take them on, in daylight anyway. I ordered our planes out of range after a couple of preliminary strikes against the advance party for one of the columns. They'll continue to monitor the movement. The Wasps and CIC."
    Stossen nodded. That was something that had been decided well in advance. It would be foolish to waste the Wasps in a daylight attempt to stop a major troop movement when the fighters made such easy targets. If it did become necessary to expose the Wasps to that level of danger, it had better be for a more critical advantage.
    "If they're moving on the ground instead of in the air, it may mean that they don't have the transport. Or it might mean nothing more than a lack of any intelligence on our numbers yet," Stossen said. "As soon as we can tell which route up the escarpment they'll take, we'll dispatch a few Wasps and Havocs to contest the climb. Soon as it's full dark, we can sneak a couple of Wasps in for hit-and-run strikes as well."
    "There aren't many decent routes up, for vehicles, at least," Parks observed. "We can pretty much deny them those without too much danger to our people."
    "Only temporarily," Stossen said. "We'll slow them down, of course, maybe force them to use air transport instead of ground, but we want engagement, remember." Limited engagement, if possible. "And we want to be able to cover their approach without spreading ourselves all over ten thousand square kilometers of this plateau. If they decide we're isolated up here, their warlords might pull some of them off to back up the defense on Devon."
    "We do need to be able to get down into the valley ourselves," Banyon added.
    "We're not here to liberate Porter, Terry,"