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worked so hard to achieve.
    As soon as the hatches were replaced on the battery compartments, the two fighters were back in the air. They had been on the ground for less than seven minutes. While Slee and Zel were climbing away from the LZ, the next pair of Wasps was coming in for servicing. The plan, as long as it worked and was needed, was to have no more than two of the fighters on the ground at one time.
    Slee and Zel headed southwest this time, moving low and fast, scarcely above the treetops. Zel was thankful that flying his Wasp and watching for any hint that he was being targeted by enemy radar kept him too busy to pay much attention to how close the ground was. He preferred to have plenty of sky below him. When he followed Slee over the escarpment at the edge of the plateau, he felt more comfortable. The floor of the rift valley was three-hundred meters below the level of the plateau. Slee climbed for even more altitude. There was a trade-off. The lower the fighters flew, the less time any enemy on the ground would have to target them—but the more air there was between the Wasps and enemy fire, the more time their electronic countermeasures (ECM) would have to defeat incoming rockets.
    "Targets of opportunity," Slee said with something approaching joy. Later missions would undoubtedly be laid out in greater detail, once the combat planners could identify proper targets, but in the meantime, the Wasps could still be put to good use.
    "Preferably targets that don't give back more than they get," Zel said. They spoke over a tight light beam, a form of plane-to-plane communication that was virtually impossible for any enemy to intercept.
    The two pilots divided their attention between the displays inside their cockpits and eyeballing the terrain. Neither man was particularly impressed at being in the sky over a world they had never seen before. Human-inhabited worlds did offer a certain measure of variety, but the essentials were generally rather similar or humans would not have settled them in the first place. Habitable worlds were far too plentiful for anyone to bother colonizing one that was marginal, or too far from human norms. Slee concentrated on the left and Zel on the right. Flying at eight-hundred meters, the ground seemed to race past beneath them. There were no roads visible. Even with a population of 750,000 before the Schlinal invasion, the people of Porter had not required a very extensive road net. The ground effect machines they used for most transportation did not need paved surfaces, just vaguely level or gently sloping land. According to the briefing the pilots had received aboard ship, the only real roads were to be found within Porter's towns.
    "Dust at two o'clock," Zel announced when they were 280 kilometers from the escarpment. "Looks like several vehicles."
    "Two, anyway," Slee said after he took a look. "Let's get closer."
    "Roger." Even though the Wasp's sensors would almost certainly detect hostile air traffic sooner, Zel looked around to make sure that there were no enemies in the air. Once he was satisfied, he flipped the weapon selector switch to rockets. The rules of engagement for the Wasps were clear. If it was moving toward the 13th and there was no positive identification that it was friendly, destroy it. In any case, it was much too soon for help to come from the residents of Porter City.
    Two vehicles. Slee lined up on the one farthest away. Zel took the other.
    "I'm picking up active electronics," Slee announced as they closed to within six kilometers of the floater trucks. "Looks like soldiers. Let's take 'em out."
    Zel's answer was a short whistle, a near duplicate of the sound made when his target acquisition system announced that it had a lock on a target.
    "On lock," Zel announced.
    "Ditto," Slee replied. "Hit it."
    Two missiles raced forward. The Wasps banked left and moved lower before turning back to the right so that they could watch their rockets hit. Thin trails of