The Forlorn Hope Read online

  "Sarge, I'm ready," said the trainee in a voice raised two octaves by the sonic boom a moment before.

  Jensen locked the last can in place and leaped to the gun. Leaning across Herzenberg to get a sight line, he rotated the cannon mount 10° to the right to eyeball it in line with the track down which the starship had disappeared. The gun had electronic sights that would spike a gnat at a kilometer, but at this instant there was neither time nor a hard target for them.

  With his right hand, Jensen threw the Continuous Fire toggle. His left hand grasped Trooper Herzenberg by the collar, and he lunged for the shelter. The muzzle blasts of the cannon were so loud that the rain of bombs was a flickering white light, not a sound, to the cowering gun crew.

  * * * *

  Warned by the flash, Trooper Iris Powers grabbed her boots and jumped into her shelter. Lieutenant Hussein ben Mehdi was right behind her.

  The shelters were half-cylinders, each grown from a single crystal of beryllium. The shelters would not stop a shell or even a bullet at any normal range, but they were generally proof against the tiny splinters spraying from overhead bursts. That was the threat against which foot-soldiers since the Napoleonic Wars had been least able to protect themselves.

  Shelters were light, but they did not fold up like the canvas tents for which they substituted. The rigid bulk of thirty curved plates, three meters long by two across, required as much transport as the Company's ammunition did. Like self-camouflaging uniforms and a considerable allowance for target practice during stand-downs, the expense and administrative hassle of the shelters was simply a matter of plant maintenance. Fasolini's plant was not hardware but the Company itself, the trained, effective troops who could command top dollar and could be expected to survive for another lucrative contract.

  Turning the curved roof of a shelter imo real living quarters required considerable effort. The ground had to be ditched out at least deep enough that its occupants could lie flat below the shrapnel ol nearby ground bursts. In addition, those who failed to raise coamings around their shelters could expect to be swimming the next time it rained. At Smiricky #4, most of the troopers had paid civilian miners to dig them in. Powers and Sergeant Hummel had chosen to do the job themselves. The walls of their dug-out were as deep and plumb as those of Colonel Fasolini's Operations Center.

  That did not make the shelter spacious, a fact which suited ben Mehdi very well indeed at the moment. The Lieutenant was of middle height with a wrestler's build and a smooth, dark complexion. He was the only other 'officer' in Fasolini's Company, but he was not really the Colonel's second in command. His rank was due neither to his military prowess nor to his administrative ability. Fasolini had an accountant's brain under his coarse exterior, but that exterior itself could be a handicap in negotiations. The Colonel used ben Mehdi, his 'Executive Officer', as a suave front in conference rooms where polish and a raised eyebrow were worth more money than all the bluster in the world.

  Hussein ben Mehdi had no general distaste for garrison duty, but Smiricky #4 was three hundred kilometers from even a decent brothel. The Lieutenant was bored, and the attack seemed to have been arranged precisely to help with the project by which he hoped to improve his time. He moved fast enough to be inside Powers' shelter when the sonic boom rattled it, but he was careful not to brush dirt on his uniform either.

  "Oh!" said Trooper Powers. She had just taken off her left sock. Her toe-nails were varnished a deep scarlet. In confusion, the blonde trooper twisted the bare foot under her and picked up one of her boots.

  "Any port in a storm, hey Powers?" said Lieutenant ben Mehdi with a warm smile. "Hope you don't mind the intrusion." He reached out to grip between his thumb and forefinger the boot which Powers held. Ben Mehdi's fingers were long, their nails perfectly shaped. There was enough strength in them to pluck "the boot away from someone much huskier than the petite blonde who faced him now.

  The shelter roof was translucent. It filtered light heavily toward the blue end of the spectrum. That alien tinge heightened Powers' look of tension as she huddled toward the corner of the dug-out. The two bed-rolls, hers and Sergeant Hummel's, were parallel with a narrow aisle between them. They were on wooden frames which kept them off the floor. The frames were low enough, however, that the dug-out's occupants could sit up without risking their heads to shrapnel through the unprotected ends of the shelter. Hussein ben Mehdi leaned forward as he sat on the bunk beside Powers. She gasped as the Lieutenant dropped the boot he had taken from her and hooked her right sock with an index finger. "Lieutenant?" the Trooper said. His left arm slid behind her shoulders despite her efforts to press herself tighter against the wall of the dug-out.

  The anti-personnel bombs lashed down like the wind-driven edge of a hail storm. Each bomblet was about the size of a man's thumb, a tiny segment of a cylinder, more or less the same as the tens of thousands of others released from the same cluster. They armed on impact and detonated a half second later, generally when they had bounced a meter or two back into the air. They spread a sleet of tiny shrapnel which stripped trees and killed all unprotected animals in the target area. After an attack, hundreds of bomblets which had failed to go off the first time lay in the grass, ready to shatter the leg of anyone walking carelessly.

  Inside the shelter, the flashes lighted the mussed bedrolls with savage brilliance. The crackling detonations merged into a single prolonged roar. One large fragment sailed through both plastic end-sheets with a buzz that vibrated on the back of ben Mehdi's neck rather than in his ears.

  "They'll be making another couple passes, of course," the Lieutenant said as he reached for the zipper at the throat of Powers' tunic. The vicious crack of the automatic cannon a kilometer away was an irritation now that the bomblets were only occasional thumps delayed by a freak of chemistry. "It won't be safe for anyone to leave their shelters for, well, plenty of time," ben Mehdi went on. He brushed aside the hand Powers raised to block his. He began to unzip her. "You know," he said, "you're a very attractive woman, Iris."

  The little blond whipped her left fist around at Hussein's face. The blade of her spring knife was no longer than a finger, but that would have taken it to the Lieutenant's brain if he had not been expecting the attack.

  Ben Mehdi caught Powers' wrist with his right hand while his left still clamped her other arm to her body. She tried to twist the knife to cut the sinews across the back of the officer's hand, but her weapon was a spike with no real edge. Hussein ben Mehdi increased the pressure of his grip until his thumb stood out in a pool of white skin on the woman's wrist. Then he gave a quick snap as if casting with a fly rod. The knife skittered out of her numb fingers.

  "Now that's a friendly way to treat a guest, is it?" the Lieutenant said. His face still smiled, but his lips were drawn as hard as his teeth. "Now, Hummel's in the OC, so we're going to be alone till the All Clear sounds. And I know you like men, baby, because I saw you last night with one of the zoomies from the Katyn Forest. That's what light amplifiers are for, right? Now, I'm a man, and just to prove it—"

  Ben Mehdi lowered Powers' hand toward his fly with the same ease with which he had disarmed her. The little blonde spit in his eye.

  The bombing had both blown trash onto the shelter roof and studded the beryllium mesh with needles of glass shrapnel which conducted light. Within, the effect turned the blue ambience into mottled shadows and points as bright as jewels by contrast. Iris Powers' upturned face was bestial and hideous as a result. The Lieutenant's face, as he slapped the woman with the full strength of his open hand, was as horrible with no lighting to augment it.

  Power's head bounced against the dug-out wall. She lolled back, stunned. Her eyes were glassy. The outline of long, strong fingers was already swelling up in red on her cheek. The light flickered again from the east as the starship rolled out for its second pass.

  "I tell you, bitch!" the Lieutenant shouted. "I'm going to do you a favor. I'm going to show you just how good it can be with a man so you
won't have to—"

  The end flaps shook with the sonic boom and the entrance of Sergeant Johanna Hummel.

  The Lieutenant jumped as if the non-com were one of the second stick of bombs herself. In some ways, he might have preferred that to what he got. Jo Hummel hit the floor feet first, but she let her momentum carry her onto the occupied bunk. The point of her left shoulder took ben Mehdi in the middle of the back. He slammed forward again, pinned against the earthen wall as easily as he had pinned Powers an instant before. The blonde trooper flopped sideways when the Lieutenant released her.

  It sounded as if the sky were tearing apart. A sun-bright streak glared through the filter of the roof.

  "Close quarters, Lieutenant," said Sergeant Hummel. She was wheezing with rage and the distance she had run, but her words were loud enough to be distinct even against the background. "Fucking close quarters, hey?"

  Hummel was as tall as the Lieutenant, with the same blocky, powerful torso. She had felled men larger than herself with sucker punches, but in any simple test of strength, ben Mehdi could have bested her. They were both in excellent physical condition. However, all other things being equal, a male's greater percentage of muscle to total weight would have told.

  All other things were not equal. Hummel s gun was socketed in the Lieutenant's right ear.

  "Sergeant," snapped ben Mehdi, "watch what you're doing! I won't tell you twice!"

  "Real cramped in here, ain't it?" Sergeant Hummel said. She twisted her weapon to force ben Mehdi's head back against the dirt. The steel barrel shroud had been dented. The corner of it tore a ragged gash in the officer's ear. His mouth, open to shout another order, instead passed a high-pitched whimper.

  In a voice as close to gentle as the surrounding noise permitted, Sergeant Hummel said, "Bunny? Are you all right?"

  Trooper Powers sat up again, levering herself with a hand on the back wall. Hussein ben Mehdi's weight still anchored her thigh to the bunk. She braced her free foot to tug herself away. The handprint on her cheek was a flag.

  Hummel made a sound at the back of her throat like millstones rubbing. She stood, gripping the unresisting lieutenant by the shoulder and raising him with her. She held her gun by the pistol grip, the butt cradled in the crook of her right elbow. Her index finger was on the trigger. The muzzle moved with ben Mehdi's head, anticipating each of the man's cautious attempts to duck away. Outside, the bombs were sailing in with calliope shrieks. This run, there were no high-altitude pops as clusters separated.

  "What's the matter, Lieutenant?" Hummel rasped. "Worried maybe my gun's pointing a little close to you, what with all of us shoe-horned into this little dug-out? Don't you worry, sir. I've killed lots of people, but I never killed one when,I didn't mean to." She spun ben Mehdi and gave him a hard shove.

  The Lieutenant sagged against the dirt coaming. His breath made the end flap tremble. He turned his head fearfully. Hummel's gun was no longer touching his ear, but the tiny hole in its muzzle was aimed to take out his left pupil without touching the surrounding sclera.

  The earth shuddered and a bomb went off with a muffled roar.

  "Since the accommodations don't suit you, Lieutenant," the Sergeant said, "maybe you'd better leave, don't you think? You'd be best off at the Operations Center. And I think you ought to start now."

  Three more bombs detonated. Two were below ground. The third hit something heavy and metallic. It rang like a bell even before the shattering explosion.

  "Jo, Allah!" the Lieutenant pleaded. "Not now— not during incoming!"

  Debris from the first bomb, pebbles and the heavier clods, pattered on the shelter roof. Hummel smiled and gripped the shroud of her weapon to emphasize rather than to steady it. "This stick's armor piercing," she said. "Just keep your head down and you'll be fine. Oh—and don't step on anything left over from the first pass, hey? But that's the sort of chance we gotta take when there's someplace we need to go."

  Ben Mehdi tensed. Behind the Sergeant, Powers was pulling on her boots with apparently total concentration. The ground shook under the impact of more bombs.

  "Your choice," said Hummel. Her index finger tightened.

  Hussein ben Mehdi bolted from the dug-out, into the haze of dust and combustion gases. His car had dripped a bright streak of blood onto his shoulder.

  Sergeant Hummel waited only until she was sure that the Lieutenant would not burst back in behind the muzzle of his grenade launcher. Then she whirled, tossing the gun onto her own bunk to free both hands. She clasped Powers. The blonde woman began to sob in a mixture of relief and fury. "There, there, Bunny," the Sergeant said, stroking the other woman's silky hair. "There, there."

  * * * *

  When the fusillade of fragmentation bombs sputtered away, Lieutenant Waldstejn rose and started to climb out of the shelter. Colonel Fasolini grabbed him by the ankle and pulled him back down. "What the hell's your hurry?" the mercenary asked. "We've got a long afternoon ahead of us. They aren't done, not by a long shot."

  The Lieutenant settled back on his haunches uncertainly.

  Albrecht Waldstejn had a commission as a result of the two years of law school he had completed before being conscripted. His posting as a supply officer of a garrison battalion resulted from negative attributes rather than a demonstrated genius for administration, however. Waldstejn's parents had been forceful enough in opposing Federal war policies that the couple was taken into preventative detention. Their deaths were almost certainly the transport accident the government claimed—but the government still thought it wise to put the son under military discipline. After the four-week curriculum to which officer training had been reduced, the young man had been shunted into a slot where he was unlikely to cause trouble.

  Waldstejn's initial mistake with the 522nd was to reorganize the mess his predecessor had left. The young officer broke for fraud all three of his underlings, including the quartermaster sergeant who had run the section while previous supply officers drank themselves insensible.

  That left Waldstejn with no non-commissioned officers, two privates dumped on his need because nobody else in the battalion wanted them, and the smouldering hatred of his commanding officer. Major Lichtenstein had been receiving his rake-off on goods sold illegally from the battalion stores in the past.

  Waldstejn got along rather better with Colonel Fasolini. The mercenary leader had a tendency to look for the easiest way to get the job done, but at least his notion of what the job was had similarities to Waldstejn's conception. Major Lichtenstein commanded a battalion of screw-ups and criminals, with no promotion to be expected this side of the grave. Lichtenstein's priorities were not those of the government in Praha, and they were shared by most of the officers and men in his command.

  "Why are you so sure the bomber won't be shot down?" Lieutenant Waldstejn asked. He craned his neck out of the shelter but kept Fasolini in the corner of his eye. The whole floor of the valley swirled like mist from a lake at sunrise. Bomblets which had been flung wide left ragged clots of dust up to the ridge lines and beyond. The explosions had started a few grass fires, now blurred in with the dust pall but sure soon to replace it. "Matter of fact, I'm surprised I don't hear the lasers firing by now."

  Fasolini settled himself against a wall. The shelter was unassigned. It had been set up between the Colonel's Operations Center on the compound perimeter and the building of the Complex which housed the 522nd's HQ. The Colonel was a cautious man. He had provided for just the sort of eventuality which had occurred—an attack sudden enough to catch people between the headquarters. Hunching his shoulders to keep the X of his crossbelt from biting him, the mercenary said, "They aren't firing because they don't have a target. And the bomber won't be shot down because it's not a bomber, it's a starship. Only time they need to worry's when they're out of their hyperspace envelope to fire—" he snapped a thumb and finger for emphasis, loud as a pistol shot— "or when somebody goes after them in another spacer. You know how long it takes to get a starship
programmed to operate this close to a planet. They must've spent weeks, and it'll be weeks before your side puts anything up to stop them." The older man frowned. "Not that I think they'll hang around that long," he concluded.

  "But why here?" Waldstejn said, aloud but more to himself than to his companion. They were speaking in English, the tongue of convenience throughout the human universe. Fasolini had a smattering of a score of languages. He could ask for directions or a woman on most planets. Waldstejn, however, had only his native Czech and business-course English. A month as acting liaison with the mercenaries had sharpened his English into a fluency equalled only by the multi-lingual curses he had picked up in the same school.

  "Why the hell's that gun firing?" the Colonel said, frowning toward the northeast corner of the compound. Waldstejn knew the automatic cannon was emplaced there, toward the most probable channel for armor but almost a kilometer away from the nearest mercenary position. The plan in Praha had been to seed pairs of mercenaries every four hundred meters or so along the perimeter. Fasolini had agreed to man observation posts on both ridge lines—the mercenaries' electronics were an order of magnitude better than Cecach manufactures. Further, Fasolini had agreed to put the cannon at least temporarily where it was most potentially useful. But after taking a good look at the 522nd Garrison Battalion, the Colonel had told Major Lichtenstein that he had no intention of putting his whole force out in packets which would be left with their asses swinging as soon as something popped. You cannot stiffen gelatine with B-Bs; and you could not keep cannon fodder from running just because there was one team still firing within earshot. Most of the Company was therefore bivouacked on a short segment of the northern perimeter.

  That meant the cannon was far enough away that Lieutenant Waldstejn had forgotten it. The distance had also thickened the sharp muzzle blasts into something quite different from what he had heard—painfully—during a demonstration firing when the Company first arrived. Waldstejn's lips pursed in speculation.