Most numerous were the approximate locations where he'd lost recon floaters and their escorts to enemy action. The humans responded quickly to invasion of their airspace. Obviously their buoys picked up and monitored his own aircraft as soon as they emerged, and had interceptors up promptly. As if their duty crews waited in their aircraft.
They seemed willing to lose aircraft, certainly over their own territory, as long as they shot down his. And his scouts were at a disadvantage; their missions required more-or-less predictable flight behavior. He couldn't continue losing aircraft at the rate he had been, and he had no way of knowing what the enemy had left.
His Intelligence chief had pointed out that the humans seemed more interested in shooting down the escorting fighters than they did the scouts-in bleeding his fighting strength than in denying him information. Though they were doing a good job of that too.
Seemingly the human commander was leaving the initiative to him. But they were planning something. They hadn't invaded just to lie around.
He scowled, big jaws chewing on nothing. Back in the forest, his expensive aerial scouting showed a poorly defined "blind area" of something between twelve and twenty square miles. Probably circular. His Tech chief believed the humans had some kind of concealment screen, unlikely as it seemed. At any rate the "blind area" showed nothing at all in the way of humans, or of any mobile life-forms large enough-or in large enough groups-to register. But they were there. Something had to be. Large mobile objects could be detected outside of it, some of it wildlife, some clearly military. And the humans were thinning areas of forest, possibly preparing defensive positions of some sort.
Jilchuk shook his head. He'd have to settle for a ground reconnaissance in force. Meanwhile, one thing seemed definite: the humans had landed in inferior numbers. Perhaps to be supplied from space, for a war of harassment and attrition.
Attrition. He could play that game, he told himself, information or not.
B Company, 2nd Regiment, had set out on foot through the forest. B Company plus a platoon from C Company, because the mission required five platoons. One augmented infantry company to take out a tank battalion. Sergeant Esau Wesley felt proud that B Company had been chosen. He thought of it as the best in the division.
His wife looked at it differently: someone had to get the mission, and B Company was it.
To carry out their mission, they needed to penetrate twelve miles into what the Jerries were calling Wyz Country. Twelve miles through open country with nearly flat terrain. Twelve straight-line miles from the wilderness edge, but by the meandering Mickle's River, it was more like twenty.
The tank battalion was parked in the narrow band of floodplain woods that stretched along the Mickle's banks. Actually at a place where the woods were wider than anywhere else for miles. There, according to the buoys, they'd find not only the battalion's tanks, but its headquarters, trucks, repair and overhaul facilities… all of it.
At each corner of the encampment stood a newly-erected flak tower. The Indi assault pilots knew all they wanted to about those. Enough to guess the specifics: a swivel-based, multi-barreled, look-and-fire trasher on each tower, powerful enough to bring down an armored attack floater with a single burst. Or one pulse suitably placed.
Though B Company didn't know it, surveillance buoys had observed the tower construction in progress, but hadn't reported it. Regionwide, the buoys saw far more than humans could hope to deal with, so back on Terra, programmers had designed perception sets to notify Intelligence of opportunities and dangers. But inevitably the programs overlooked some things.
Thus when four thick concrete slabs were poured in a nondescript stand of trees on a minor river, no relevance was perceived. Then four assembly floaters began assembling four tripod towers on the slabs. The buoys registered and tagged this internally, while awaiting further observations. Then some unrecognizable equipment was installed on the towers, and a pseudo-organic data processor, 360 miles out, notified Division that something was going on.
But it was an Indi scout pilot who said, "Huh! Those are weapons! Gotta be." So he reported it, then left his planned flight path for a closer look. But the Wyzhnyny didn't respond; there was nothing else peculiar about the place, and whatever might be perched atop the towers was concealed in a cab.
And there was nothing else on the site but trees. And only hours later, Intelligence had their attention on something else: a Wyzhnyny tank battalion, with its attendant ground transport, had appeared beside a limestone ridge deep within Wyz Country. Almost certainly it had been concealed in a cave. And they were promptly joined by a floater escort, which along with the antiaircraft armament of the tanks demanded caution.
So Operations decided to let be for the moment. They'd wait and see where the tanks were going. In less than two hours they knew. As for why… for one thing they were a lot closer to prospective battle sites.
General Pak wondered if they were simply bait, because by then he suspected what those towers were. Though he'd never heard of flak towers.
Then he learned how good the Wyzhnyny ordnance was. He sent two flights of armored attack floaters to rip up the tank park-and lost six of the eight aircraft! Next he sent a flight of rocket-armed standoff floaters, and discovered the potency of Wyzhnyny electronic countermeasures.
So he turned to infantry and inflatable boats.
B Company reached Mickle's River by twilight, in the forest three miles outside Wyz Country. The Mickle's was not very large there: forty to fifty feet wide and four to eight feet deep in the main channel. What made the mission feasible was, even in Wyz Country the Mickel's floodplain was wooded. That was one similarity between Jerrie and Wyzhnyny land-use practices: neither culture farmed floodplains, even along rivers that didn't often flood during the growing season. Here and there the buoys showed a break in the woods, where convergence between some meander and the bordering terrace pinched out the floodplain on one side or the other. But except for those infrequent breaks, the buoys showed woods along both banks for all twenty meandering miles through Wyz Country.
The troops unloaded their boats, demolitions, etc. on the river bank, then Captain Mulvaney ordered the grav sleds back to Division with their Burger crews. He watched the squads inflate their boats and put them in the water. Then troopers held them by the handlines while their gear was loaded. The current would carry them along, and the eight paddles with each boat would speed them. They'd had two training sessions with rubber boats back at Camp Stenders. Not much. But the three wilderness miles before they reached Wyz Country would give them the feel of boats, paddles and river.
The number one boat was smaller, the scout, with only five paddlers and a bow lookout. Mulvaney strode to the number two boat, where seven staff noncoms, including the medics, sat waiting with paddles. Corporal Jensen stood in water over his knees, steadying the boat. Crouching, Mulvaney boarded, settled on his seat in the bow, and looked back while his troopers boarded the other boats. Lieutenant Bremer had settled in the stern, holding the steering oar. Mulvaney raised an arm and gestured. "Let's go, men!" he called. With that, Jensen clambered aboard, took the eighth paddle, and they were on their way.
They suspected what this night might hold for them, but they didn't dwell on it. It wasn't real to them yet.