The Forlorn Hope

by David Drake

  The gunfire outside silenced her as surely as if every round were fired through her brain. Brionca dropped the phone and stumbled for the door without bothering to slide up her boot fasteners."

  "What is this, Ensign?" shrieked Chaplain Bittman as he threw open the door of his room. It had been the Sergeant-Major's office. "What is this?"

  The outer office was pitch dark, but Brionca had learned there was no safety in that. She hit the door with her shoulder, then rolled on the ground outside as she had not done since training exercises five years before. One boot flew off. She ignored it and ignored also the thunkl as Bittman too plunged through the doorway. She had gotten out just in time to see the signals building destroyed.

  The Katyn Forest was sliding toward them along the pylons one hundred meters away. The belly of the ship's dark bulk glowed with vaporized sabots as shots gnawed through the commo building.

  The balloon supporting the directional antenna was starting to sink, but it had already served to mark the commo center for the mere gunners. The facade exploded inward, then the roof collapsed under the concentrated fire. Anyone inside was as surely dead as the electronic equipment shorting and sputtering in the rubble.

  An anti-tank rocket burst and lighted twenty meters of the vessel's port side. Brionca tugged out her own pistol. "The antenna on the front!" she screamed uselessly as she aimed. "Shoot off the power receptor!"

  The Katyn Forest was broadside to the HQ building now, and the mercenaries' fire shifted to the new target. The muzzle blasts were not as loud as the crashing shock waves of the projectiles themselves as they ripped overhead. The pistol that Brionca had meant to fire remained frozen in her hand as she sprawled in the dirt.

  The night the Company had broken out, a single distant marksman had raked the building. This time, the fire of twenty guns wrecked it with a vengeful thoroughness. Lime dust and sand spurted from the structure like smoke from a smudge pot, hiding the ex-captain and saving her life when she had given up on it herself.

  A grenade went off with a distinct bang. Then the starship was past, dragging the pall of dust into fanciful shapes in its slip stream. There was a fire burning somehow in one of the perimeter bunkers. It winked like a distant reflection of the blaze starting where the signals building had been.

  The dust was choking. Ensign Brionca stood up, stumbled, and kicked her remaining boot off into the night somewhere. Maybe the laser in Gun Pit East would stop them.

  Bullshit. Maybe the ground would open and they would all fall into it.

  Chaplain Bittman staggered toward her. He was hacking and wheezing so badly that he had to shake his fist to assert his fury. The slim man's uniform was limed white. His eyes stared as if inset on a skull. The sound of gunfire was a rasping background for him when he finally found his voice. "You're a traitor, whore of Satan!" Bittman wheezed. "False not to Man but to your Lord, all of you! And as the Lord shall burn you in everlasting hellfire, so shall I—"

  Rosa Brionca shot him. The Chaplain looked surprised. There was a tiny, dark fleck on the front of his dusty uniform. He raised a hand as if to touch it.

  Brionca's pistol had been buried in dust and grit. She thought it would jam after the first shot. To her surprise, the gun instead functioned perfectly nine more times.

  The warhead sent a sizzling white line across the interior of Hold One. The shaped charge had penetrated the hundred millimeters of hull plating and sent the metal spurting as an ionized stream to gouge the far bulkhead. Molten steel splashed back over most of the dozen mercenaries in the compartment.

  High-velocity shrapnel would have done more real damage, but the dazzling spray caused momentary havoc. "Shoot or by Christ you will burn!" roared Sergeant Jensen. He fired twice into the night without a specific target, just to drive home the order. A thumb-sized welt was rising on his own cheek, but he knew that the Company's only chance was to keep the garrison down by sheer volume of fire.

  Jensen found his target in the fluid shimmering that characterized light enhancement. The curving berm, the lattice-strengthened tube, visible from the angle he overlooked it. He fired, his sights a useless blur beyond the intervening face-shield. When he flipped the shield out of the way, the holographic reproduction still quivered too badly from the unsteady drive effects for Jensen to make the difficult shot.

  The blond man howled a curse. He was furious now that Waldstejn had not allowed him time to set up the automatic cannon. Its dampers could have kept it steady despite the vibration, accepting input only from the controls. Sure, it might have taken an hour longer to weld the outriggers to the deck since there was no dirt for the spades to bite in. But an hour would be cheap if the choice was—

  Jensen fired a three-shot burst. Strong as he was, the recoil punished him. The gun barrel jumped as the stock hammered Jensen's shoulder back and down. Riflemen were firing from the bunkers toward which the ship hurtled. The mercenaries around the Sergeant-Gunner were angling forward to blast away at those active targets. The worst someone with an assault rifle could do was to kill a few of the troopers lining the holds. The laser cannon, if it were still operable when the Katyn Forest cleared it, would burn them to slag as surely as it had the decoying trucks four nights before.

  Jensen ripped out another burst. He tried desperately to anchor the fore-end but failed because the problem was not with the barrel but with the shoulder supporting the stock. They were hissing by the gun pit, now, eighty meters away and ignored in its stillness. Jensen's gun slammed and ejected its empty clip. He might have hit the laser . . . but he was sure he had not. Bullets spanged on the hull and the copper breastworks. Mercenaries ducked, as if that mattered a damn if the laser were not destroyed.

  Jensen turned. His normally-pale face was suffused with rage and frustration. His big hands were fumbling with a fresh magazine, but this shoulder-bobbing toy was not a real gun, was not his gun. "Lieutenant!" the Sergeant-Gunner screamed to the third man down the firing line from him, "for God's sake, the laser!"

  Hussein ben Mehdi turned momentarily toward the cry. His face was that of a reflective balloon. A face-shield was no handicap to a man who shot by instinct and not through his sights. The Lieutenant wheeled. His right hand was on the pistol grip, his left on the barrel which he lifted with the precision of an aiming screw. The grenade launcher jumped three times. The slap of its gas discharges were inaudible against the background of high-velocity fire ringing through the hold.

  The Katyn Forest lurched as it took the line that would speed it out the west end of the valley. Gunfire ceased abruptly. They were out of the bunkered compound, and the mercenaries' guns no longer had targets they could bear on.

  Roland Jensen's hands suddenly remembered the pattern. They reloaded his gun while the big man blurted, "Did—did you hit it, sir?"

  Hussein ben Mehdi raised his face-shield. He could not remember the last time a Company non-com had called him 'sir' and sounded as if he meant it. "Well, we'll know in a few seconds, won't we, Guns?" he said with a deliberate cruelty of which he was at once ashamed. His own fear was personal. Roland Jensen's fear was for his section and the Company, not for himself. "As Allah wills, Sergeant," ben Mehdi added in an apologetic voice, "but—yes, I think it pleased Him to guide my arm.

  * * * *

  In Smiricky #4, some survivors were blasting useless rounds after the ground-hugging starship. Few of the bullets would hit as the range continued to open. None would do more than fleck the hull.

  Other Cecach soldiers were tending the wounded or staring in shock at their dead. In Gun Pit West, there were moans, but no one remained to give aid. The crew, huddled behind their berm, had been saved from the carnage to the very last. Then, as the ship pulled past and heads lifted in relief, three grenades had turned the laser above them into deadly shrapnel.

  The Katyn Forest's bulk blotted the last visible pylon. Then the pylon reappeared and the starship vanished forever from Smiricky #4.

  Chapter Thirteen

 
"I don't care whose fault it is," Colonel Kadar snarled to his Communications Officer. "I need to get through to Headquarters. If the Smiricky link isn't working, find another one!"

  Except for the road, the plain had been a single giant wheatfield stretching as far as the eye could see. The wheat still remained, its stalks green and the heads just beginning to be tinged with gold. It was no longer part of a farm, though. Farms, even latifundia, are human things. There was no longer human interest in the plain as a place where food grew.

  The road remained important, and it grew death and wreckage.

  The vehicles of Tank Regiment Seven lay in a defensive star. The tanks and personnel carriers faced outward like the segments of a watch face while the support vehicles clustered together at the hub. There should have been twice Kadar's present total of fighting vehicles, six APCs and a pair of tanks. The second element had left Budweis only twelve hours behind the first and should have joined Kadar by now. Instead, only the support vehicles had caught up with him. All the Captain in charge of them could say was that the armor had been diverted two days earlier on secret orders.

  And now, however he fiddled with the triple-braced antenna, the Communications Officer could not make the tight-beam contact with Sector Command.

  Dismounted soldiers chewed on wheat stems as they waited. The swathes the vehicles had cut across the wheat were a green darker than their tawny surroundings. Kadar's eyes wandered from one blank stare to the next. The most powerful unit in the Lord's Host—except that half of it was missing and the rest was stalled while its commander tried to find out what in the Lord's name Headquarters was thinking of! Kadar slammed his fist against the turret of his tank.

  The command frequency snarled back at him so suddenly that Kadar froze. Subconsciously he feared that the blow had set something off. The dished antenna on the commo van was finally receiving signals, routed to the huge Henschel tank by a scrambled transponder. An aircraft was replacing the balloon relay at the captured mining complex . . . but the content of General Yorck's furious message gave Kadar no time to wonder why.

  The Colonel signaled an acknowledgment. The transmission snapped off as curtly as it had begun. Its message was stored in the tank's memory, available either on screen or as hard copy if the commander required it.

  Kadar did not need a repetition. The orders were as simple as their accomplishment should be.

  A ripple of interest was running through the troops who a moment before had been waiting in bored lethargy. They knew a signal had been received, but only Colonel Kadar knew what the message was. Exulting in the power of secret knowledge, Kadar himself swung the turret of his tank. His gunner peered up at him, as much at a loss as were the infantrymen outside.

  The laser had been in ready position, zero deflection, zero elevation. Instead of aiming, Kadar kept his foot down on the traversing pedal as he squeezed the hand switch. The weapon drew a pale line across the daylight. The beam merely hissed until the turret rotated it through the nearest broadcast pylon. Steel latticework vaporized with a roar and a coruscant white glare. Larger, fluid gobbets spit from the supports and sparkled as they rained into the dust and stunted vegetation below.

  The Republican soldiers were on their feet now. Heads twisted even from the commo van to watch the fireworks. The power-broadcasting antennas waved madly as their support toppled, taking them out of the circuit. Kadar continued to traverse his blade of pure energy. A pylon of the east-bound roadway collapsed as the beam slashed it also. There was now a one-kilometer gap in the Praha-Smiricky truck route. Both halves of the lines were still energized, but the receptor antenna of a vehicle could not align across the gap and leap it.

  MERCENARY IDOLATORS IN CAPTURED STARSHIP PROCEEDING WEST ON ROADWAY FROM SMIRICKY the message had read. WEAPONS CAPABLE OF DEFEATING LIGHT ARMOR. IMMOBILIZE AND DESTROY VESSEL BETWEEN SEVERED PYLONS.

  There had been a further direction. It had struck Colonel Kadar as an unnecessary one, given the bubbling Hell into which his lasers would convert the starship after they sliced through the outer hull. Still, General Yorck was known for spelling out requirements precisely. It was to be expected that he would close with TAKE NO PRISONERS.

  * * * *

  The truck cartwheeled off the line. It was an empty ore-carrier returning from the battle area to the temporary road-head at the Smiricky Complex. The Katyn Forest had swung out slightly to bring her port side to bear on the unsuspecting vehicle on the other line. A three-shot burst from the automatic cannon had ripped low through the truck, demolishing half the drive fans and letting the vehicle scrape down at its full forward speed.

  The effect was spectacular. Troopers cheered. Some of them, however, and all the command group, knew that it was going to be different if and when they met real fighting vehicles.

  Jensen nodded to Pavlovich. The crewmen had been in the gunner's seat for what was, after all, no more than a training exercise. "Good," the section leader said. "Damned good. I couldn't have done better myself." And if a target on a fixed course two hundred meters away was not a great test of skill, then the statement was still perfectly true, and it was made by a man whose praise counted. Pavlovich flushed with pleasure.

  The Katyn Forest continued to plow forward at a sluggish fifty KPH. Her lift engines were designed for maneuvering at maximum loads, not for high speed transit. Still, the Company was separated from safety by something more tangible than mere distance. Since the engines acted by direct impulse, there was no air cushion to smooth irregularities in the drive. The buzz and tiny lurchings were disquieting at any time and were quite impossible to deal with when multiplied by undamped gun-sights.

  Albrecht Waldstejn rang a knuckle on the inner face of the hull. "How long if a laser hits it, Vladimir?" he asked soberly.

  Captain Ortschugin was sitting on one of the carboys of mercury which shared Hold One with the mercenaries' stores and the automatic cannon. He shrugged and said, "Who knows?" But spacefaring was not a profession that encouraged question dodging. "Ten seconds?" the Swobodan amplified. "Perhaps fifteen, perhaps more if their guns don't hold a target perfectly. I doubt that. . . . And a few seconds more still before something vital is hit and we go like—that." He waved a morose hand sternward, where the wreckage of the shot-up truck had presumably strewed itself.

  "Fine, the hull," said Sergeant Mboko, "and if we have any chance we got the doors open, right? So we can shoot back." He gestured. The hatches and breastworks were still up as they had been during the break-out. "What happens when a laser slides across that?" The black sergeant snapped his fingers with a power and a suddenness which startled even his listeners. "Not ten seconds, I tell you. Not one. I say we dismount now. We're just a target here."

  "Maybe Stack's right," said Sergeant Jensen. He glanced at his cannon with sad affection. They had welded it solidly to the deck of Hold One. The barrel had a 360° traverse and a practical arc of fire of almost 90° to either broadside now. "Lasers aren't a good way to punch through armor, I don't care what they say. Not when the metal itself fogs the beam when it burns away. But sure, they'll aim first at the openings. And I can't claim that the old girl has much chance to knock out a tank from the front."

  Captain Waldstejn's face had gone blank in the midst of the Gunner's assessment. Sergeant Hummel, ignoring whatever the officer might have found of interest, snapped, "If we walk, we're dead for sure, Guns. You think they're going to roll into another ambush? Look, if we ground the ship as soon as we make contact we can try and shoot out the lasers again. I know, they're going to sweep the holds and a lot of us aren't going to be lucky, but at least—"

  "Vladimir, how much will the pumps that evacuate the holds handle?" Albrecht Waldstejn interrupted. He rapped one of the deck gratings with his boot.

  Ortschugin shrugged again. "We can empty the holds of water three hundred meters down in a one-g equivalent," the spaceman said. "Bulk cargos, grain, we discharge that way too. There are atmospheres that dense, some places we dock, y
ou know."

  The mercenary leaders looked in confusion from Waldstejn to the bearded, passive face of the ship's officer. "I think," said Waldstejn, "that we just might have an answer."

  Chapter Fourteen

  The idiom of the bridge displays differed from that of normal human optic nerves. If one knew what to look for, however, the displays gave a very clear picture of the world—including the drone which had been following the Katyn Forest for the past ten kilometers.

  Vladimir Ortschugin pointed. "See, Albrecht," he said, "just above the horizon. Your friends could shoot it down, perhaps?"

  To Waldstejn, the pip coasting through the shadows of the holographic analog was whatever the space captain said it was. He shrugged. "I suppose. If they've got one, they've got others, though." The Cecach officer swallowed. "No sign of—other vehicles?"

  The spacer grinned like a demon at the euphemism for 'tanks'. He gestured toward the analog display. "We can't see through rocks, after all, and we've never had ionospheric radar fitted. Who can say? In—" the calculation process was natural to him, but the figures, surface speeds and distances, gave Ortschugin a pause— "one hundred and twelve seconds, then we should have a good view of the plain beyond."

  The bright, metallic echoes of the pylons stretched at spaced intervals behind them on the shadowed landscape. There was still one sharp peak ahead, before the holographic display faded off into a land unknown to its radar primaries.

  "They'll be waiting," Waldstejn said with the detached certainty of a man about to become part of an air crash. "Start the pumps. I want the starting load on the broadcast grid, not the APU."

  Captain Ortschugin nodded. He threw a pair of yoked switches. Then he slid another control up through the gate, into the red zone on its face. "Full power from the auxilliary," he explained. He grinned again. "Seventeen seconds," he said.

  * * * *