The Forlorn Hope

by David Drake

  Praise Allah! thought Lieutenant ben Mehdi. He had done all that any of them could expect. Now he could lie flat until the fighting was done, and no one could think him a coward.

  But his right hand had already drawn his grenade launcher, and his left arm was tensing to raise him again over the lip of his trench.

  * * * *

  Trooper Dolan sat up in her trench, throwing back the cover sheet. A cannon shell hit her squarely in the chest. That was bad luck—the burst continued to climb the hillside, blasting rock and brush far above any of the mercenary positions. For Max-ine Dolan it would have been the worst of luck anyway, whether or not the round had been aimed at her deliberately. Her arm separated from the offal that squelched back into her trench. Twenty meters away there were speckles of blood on the gun Jo Hummel had leveled at the Rube column.

  The Company's weapons and gunsights made three hundred meters a clout shot for a steady hand. Sergeant Hummel had been there too often already to think that her hands would be steady at the start of a firefight. After the first magazine, after instinct took over and her gun slammed the shoulder of an equally-mechanical gunner, then Hummel could equal her firing range accuracy on the battlefield. For now she kept her sights open to the point that the nine meters of a personnel carrier just fitted the field. The orange bead jumped against the taupe background as she opened fire.

  Every trooper in the Company had a number and warning of a field court—a bullet behind the ear, mercenary companies had no time to waste on frills—if they were caught engaging the enemy in any other order. White Section was emplaced north of the stream, Hummel's Black Section had the south. Each trooper was to divide his section number by the number of vehicles in the column, then fire at the one whose number resulted. That would put a multiple cross-fire on all the Rube armor, rattling the tank gunners—God help us! —and shattering the APCs.

  If you were unwilling to violate orders, you had no business leading a section of Fasolini's Company. Jo Hummel blasted away at the second armored personnel carrier, not the first. She could not hope to hit the taupe-clad soldiers who had dismounted from the leading APC. The buttoned-up second one was a big target, its alert gunner had begun raking the hill before most of the Rubes had responded to the explosion, and besides ... it had been Dolan's assigned target, so one of the bastards was going to be shorted whatever Hummel did.

  The veteran sergeant jerked the trigger, angry as always at her clumsy technique as she tried to keep the sight bead centered. The armored vehicle was quivering. Smoke and muzzle flashes continued to burst from its automatic cannon while rifle fire sparkled on its flanks. The punishing recoil of her weapon drove from Sergeant Hummel's mind the awareness of the blood spattering her gun's barrel. Almost, she could forget the warmth of Trooper Iris Powers, kneeling in the trench beside her and firing at targets which could pulp her as surely as they had Dolan.

  * * * *

  The gunner of the second Rube tank saw no need to pulse his laser for the present targets. The weapon drew a line of slag and brush exploding into fire across the northern slope. The sparks of projectiles flickering against the tank's armor may have endangered troops in the personnel carriers and dismounted. They constituted no danger at all to the vehicle from which they bounced—but Cooper continued to fire.

  The tank was fifty meters further from him than the nearest of the APCs, but Dave Cooper was too good a shot for that to matter. Cooper had started firing with the hope that he could pierce the tank's armor. He had a downward angle on the vehicle's back deck where its plating was thinnest. The fusion bottle was separately enclosed, no chance of harming that in any case. But a fighting vehicle is such a dense assemblage of hydraulics and wiring, of ammunition and black boxes, that a round which penetrates anywhere has a real chance of doing disabling damage. Designers' instinct crowds equipment together so that the armor need not be spread thin to cover the volume. That ensures disaster on those occasions when the armor is nonetheless thin enough.

  Henschel of Terra had won their gamble this time. A chance image as Cooper's gunsight rose in recoil proved his failure. The tank was turning but its deck and turret were still partially aligned with the mercenary. He caught the flash on each as a single round ricochetted from deck to turret and off again skyward. It left little more than a scar on the paint at either impact.

  The tank was sliding forward, perhaps to shield the line of lighter vehicles from the shots tearing at their right flanks. The mercenaries' slit trenches were raggedly aligned, wherever overhanging scrub gave shelter and a field of fire low among the stems. The line of geometric exactitude which the laser drew across the slope could not directly threaten more than a few positions. The gunner was firing blind in an attempt to cow the ambush-ers with volume in place of precision.

  The attempt was working very well. Even Cooper, focused on his own business, could tell that the shots coming from the northern slope had slackened abruptly. A trooper leaped up screaming as the beam passed by. The brush behind him and his own uniform were both afire, though the laser had not struck him squarely. Slag and ash exploded around the mercenary as a score of Republican riflemen finally found a target. The trooper dropped again, sawn apart by multiple hits. The blood soaking his fatigues quenched the fire the raving beam had lighted.

  There were the sensor pick-ups, Cooper thought; redundant but at least vulnerable to his shots as the hull and turret proper were not. He was swinging his weapon, following the tank's motion and aligning with the cupola vision blocks when Pav-lovich screamed in frustration, "Goddamn that laser!"

  Without really thinking about it, Cooper shifted his sight picture a meter further down range and fired. It was a good shot. The release broke cleanly and the recoil was a surprise as it always is when the shooter concentrates on his sights and lets his muscles act on instinct. It was the last round in the magazine, though, and Cooper rolled sideways to hook out a fresh one without bothering to see what the effect had been. He and his fellows had bounced so many shots from the tank with no effect that his mind retained only duty in the place of hope.

  The massive vehicle slid on past the fourth, then the third personnel carrier. The squat tube of its laser continued to traverse the hill slope. But there was a tiny, glowing dot where the tube and its mantle joined, and no beam issued from the weapon.

  * * * *

  Trooper Powers shifted aim and fired twice more. Those were her ninth and tenth rounds. She had just run out of the targets she had chosen with the tacit agreement of Sergeant Hummel.

  The only automatic cannon still firing was the bow gun of the lead tank. The turrets of the five armored personnel carriers each had a pair of holes in them. The holes were centered in whichever surface happened to have been facing Powers at the time she fired. She did not bother to check her results. It was conceivable that a projectile or two would be turned by the armor. It was even possible that the white-hot osmium needles would fail to destroy anything vital in the gun mechanism or gunner as they lanced through the compartment. The chances of either were vanishingly small, and there was plenty more ammunition in Powers' bandolier to deal with them if the need arose.

  Beads of sweat quivered on the Trooper's upper lip when recoil shook her body. Her blond elf-lock was darkened and glued to her forehead. Blinking, she increased the field of her gunsight and swept it over the brush near the leading personnel carrier. A swath of darkness among the twisted stems was not shadow but taupe fabric. Powers dialed up the magnification again, concentrating wide-eyed on the holographic display.

  The boots were obvious, and the dark blur lying foreshortened in front of them had to be the soldier's torso. Body shots were uncertain with the Company's weapons, though. All the theories about velocity effects and hydrostatic shock could not change the fact that sometimes an osmium projectile would drill straight through a man without discernible result. Better to—

  A hard line, the front rim of a helmet, twitched beyond the foliage. The soldier's eyes were c
losed but his lips trembled in silent repetition. Powers squeezed off.

  The helmet sprang out of her sight picture as the gun recoiled. She traded magnification for field again. Not to check the results; that would have been a waste of time.

  To find another target.

  The lead tank was planted for good. Its bow gun streamed shells across the valley floor, endangering no one but the dismounted Rubes who might have survived the shaped charge. Albrecht Wald-stejn was crumpled near the lead personnel carrier, where the explosion had thrown him. The officer whose attention he had held through the last seconds was sprawled face-upward on his turret. His hips and legs dangled down through the hatch at an angle which would have been impossible if the shock had not broken his spine. The laser was silent, either damaged or without a conscious gunner at the moment.

  None of which put Sookie Foyle nearer to ac complishing her own task, but the chance was coming.

  Three of the APCs had lifted, but the rear tank was the only vehicle actually in motion. The whole valley floor was a killing ground. None of the APC commanders seemed willing to choose a route out of it when all routes were bad; and the Commanding Officer of the unit lay dead on his turret.

  Ten meters—but the tank was accelerating. "Now!" Foyle screamed. "Guns, now!"

  Only the disdain with which it shrugged off osmium projectiles made the mass of the tank credible. Gracefully, accelerating at a rate which must have rocked the men inside her, the tank approached the daisy-chain of high explosives. Dirt loosely mounded over a mine now squirted to either side, driven beneath the skirts by the fans.

  Then it was past. The uncovered case of explosives gleamed in the sunlight behind the Republican tank.

  * * * *

  "Guns, now" Communicator Foyle was shouting as Sergeant-Gunner Jensen reached out of his trench and crimped the grenade fuze. No Republican saw the motion, an arm thrusting full length, then withdrawing beneath the sheet which had covered it until then.

  The five further seconds which Jensen waited were as long as any block of time he could remember. He held his shoulder weapon tightly by its grip and barrel shroud. Jensen was not very good with the individual weapon, not like he was with the splendid automatic cannon he had abandoned. At this range, it would serve very well, though, if no stray round or ricochet—

  The grenade went off ninety centimeters from Jensen's head. Then the world exploded.

  * * * *

  The field expedient the Company had chosen to set off the daisy-chain was simple and effective. An ordinary mini-grenade would be set off next to a blasting cap, which would in turn be crimped into the first link of det cord. Concussion of the grenade would set off the lead azide primer in the cap, and the initiation cycle would proceed in normal milli-second course.

  The problem was that the grenade itself had a five-second fuze. The tank, the target which had to be in the killing zone, had dialed on full power by the time it reached the daisy-chain—and passed it.

  The ring of explosives went off like a read-out dial around the streak the shaped charge had already burned across the landscape. The individual blasts were squat and black and so huge that they completely hid the train of det cord that spurted between them at almost ten kilometers per second. To the mercenaries posted higher in the valley, there was a perceptible delay between the first case to detonate at the northern tangent of the ring and the last on the south toward which the blasts raced in mirror image from either side. The delay was in no sense significant.

  Most of the explosives were wasted. Only three of the cases had any real effect on the Republican column. The remainder blew the ground into a gigantic funerary wreath, strewing brush and pulverized soil harmlessly over a square kilometer. There had been no assurance of where the Republicans would come from; and there would have been three cases, ninety kilos of plastic explosive, adjacent to any column which approached the bait.

  The third armored personnel carrier blew straight upward, flattening and opening like a steel flower. Its self-sealing fuel tanks ruptured and were wrung like sponges by the blast. The sprayed fuel ignited in a great orange banner. It drifted north and started to settle before it burned out. Plating and the heavier contents of the vehicle tumbled over the black tendrils. The gun turret, squarely above the case of explosives, hung thirty meters in the air for the fraction of a second while inertia struggled with gravity. Then it fell back into the crater which gaped to receive it.

  The fourth APC flipped over on its right side under the impact of blasts in front and to either flank. The angle it had taken in the hedgehog formation determined the details of its fate. Its fans shrieked. They were spinning at full throttle without the brake of an air cushion now that the plenum chamber was sideways. Several mercenaries on the south slope found the hubs irresistible bull's-eyes. The fan motors began to dissolve in cascades of blue sparks.

  By contrast, the second personnel carrier was skidded twenty meters forward. Its nose grounded, then bucked upward when the rear drive fans lost all power. Heavy screens prevented trash from being sucked into their ducts, but the cubic meters of dirt excavated by the daisy-chain flooded the rear intakes and cut off the air flow completely. The vehicle began to wallow. Its driver and most of its infantry complement—those still alive—had been battered unconscious by the see-saw impacts. Like its overturned sister or the windows of an abandoned house, its defenselessness drew redoubled fire.

  If the Republican tank had been directly over a charge the way the third APC had been, the tank would have been surely disabled and very possibly destroyed. Its mass and five meters grace saved it from either occurrence. Gimmicks had failed. Only stark courage remained.

  * * * *

  Shock waves travel faster through ground than through air. When the daisy-chain went off, the little creek froze in a pattern of tiny white-caps at the intersections of the profusion of ripples. The floor of Lieutenant ben Mehdi's shallow trench bounced him up as he had not quite chosen to do willingly. Twenty meters away, the front elevation of the second tank was back-lit by the explosives it had just cleared.

  The red flash was momentary, but not even the huge mass of the tank could ignore the blast entirely. The looming bow nosed down. Its skirt plowed a furrow four meters wide in the soil and brush. The grate-covered intakes along the upper deck sneered at ben Mehdi for an instant. All the anti-personnel charges ringing the hull went off together.

  The crackling discharge was inaudible, but a diagonal line sawed off flanking foliage like wind sheer over a sand dune. The dirt rolling in front of the low skirt spewed higher, shot through the blue-white light like static electricity. Then the stern slammed down, the tank slewed, and tonnes of choking grit swept across it and ben Mehdi.

  The Lieutenant fought upright in grim terror. His face-shield trapped air for his lungs, but the mass that blanketed him was lethal and blinding. The weight slipped away as ben Mehdi rose. The heat and grimy prickling remained. The first thing that the mercenary saw as soil cascaded off his face-shield was the tank, bucking and howling and broadside, less than three meters away.

  The tank's skirt was crumpled. That increased the difficulties posed by the choked intakes. The driver was expert, however. First he had deliberately grounded his vehicle. He was clearing his fan ducts with short bursts where full power would have burned out the drive motors.

  "Come on!" roared somebody else. Beside Lieutenant ben Mehdi loomed Gunner Jensen. He had lost his helmet again. His face and bare torso were gray with dust.

  They ran toward the bellowing vehicle together. Jensen's left hand was on the Lieutenant's shoulder, but ben Mehdi was being guided rather than pulled. His own mind had disconnected itself in the maelstrom. Its hopes and prayers were void.

  Jensen used his companion's shoulder as a post when he leaped to the deck of the tank. Ben Mehdi staggered. The vehicle was rocking from side to side. Shrieking, the turret began to rotate though the laser itself was silent. Beside the Lieutenant, the armor rang and
a crater the size of a demi-tasse splashed out of the steel. The inner face of the crater gleamed with its new osmium plating. That was a molecular film of the projectile. It had vaporized with the steel as kinetic energy became heat in a microsecond.

  The Sergeant fired down into a fan duct. His body recoiled upward as if he were riding a jack hammer, once, twice, and there was a shower of blue sparks from the intake as. the laser tube brushed Jensen off in a flurry of limbs.

  Lieutenant ben Mehdi acted with the passionless intellection of a computer. It was all he had, now that Jensen had stirred him into motion. Ben Mehdi ducked, craning his right arm and his grenade launcher up over the tank's deck. The pocked armor burned where his chest pressed against it. As the steel surged and air pumped down the intake past his weapon, ben Mehdi fired. The contact-fuzed grenade burst on the grating, lifting the mercenary's weapon but not tearing it out of his grasp. The tank's own armor protected his flesh, and the centimeter or so belled from the muzzle of the launcher tube did not impair its effectiveness. The Lieutenant thrust the weapon back and fired again. This time the blast was on the drive motor itself. The searing crackle of a short circuit extended the explosion.

  When a second red light winked from his control panel, the Republican driver plunged into the panic he had resisted until then. He rammed the throttle forward and held it there, though the four rear intakes were still clogged. Even with the damage of its plenum chamber, the tank managed to skid sideways in a triumph of over-engineering. Ben Mehdi was knocked down. Jensen scrambled away from the steel Juggernaut. Then three fans failed explosively. The tank ground to a halt. It was alive, but it would be immobile until it could be hauled to a dock capable of repairing something built more massively than a starliner.