The Forlorn Hope Read online

  Ortschugin bellowed with delight. He embraced the slighter man. "But of course you can come out with us," he said. "This base, this Smiricky Complex—in days it will be in Republican hands. Who will know?"

  The tall Supply Officer snorted bitterly. "I don't think you give the Morale Section all the credit it deserves," he said. "They've saved the Rubes a lot of trouble by shooting people they decide are deserters."

  "You are afraid of that?" the spaceman exclaimed. He stepped back and handed Waldstejn the liquor. "No problem. We'll hide you aboard and take you off-planet when we're repaired."

  Waldstejn drank, choked, and gave Ortschugin a wry smile. When he could speak again, he said, "Seems to be my night for making speeches. Look, Vladimir, I'm no hero . . . but I took this job, and I guess I'll stick with everybody else." He shook his head. "Hell, I don't know . . . ," he added, but he did not make his subject clear.

  Business-like again, the Lieutenant continued, "I'm doing this for one simple reason, my friend. I want your cargo to be shipped from Praha, not Budweis. And I'm not giving you an antenna, I don't have any authority to alienate government property."

  Ortschugin frowned, but he waited for the rest of the explanation.

  "I do have authority," the Supply Officer went on with a grin, "to hire transport in an emergency. I think we can justify the emergency—" he waved at what was left of the roof above them— "and so I'm hiring you to transport one power-beam antenna, surplus to local needs, back to Central Stores in Praha. Now, get your crew here with a wagon. I'd as soon it happened while it's still dark and the folks who might ask questions are in Headquarters."

  Ortschugin whooped again. He went out the door, bawling snatches of a song which sounded bawdy even in a language Waldstejn could not guess at.

  Someone cleared his throat at the inner doorway. The Lieutenant looked up. Both his subordinates stood there. Hodicky held a long coil of twenty-centimeter computer tape. "Oh," Albrecht Waldstejn said. "He'll be back—the crew of the freighter— to pick up the truck power antenna in a few minutes. Here, I'll okay it right now." He found a request form and began to fill it out, checking the unit number from the terminal display.

  "We'll take care of it, sir," Hodicky said. "I've got the figures—" He waved the tape so that it rustled. "Want me to feed it to Headquarters?"

  Waldstejn gave the request to Quade and took the tape. "Four bottles, Private," he said after a glance at the print-out. "And a morning off if I can swing it." He looked up. "No, I'll carry it over as hard copy. They didn't splice the land-lines cut by the bombs yet, just ran commo wire point to point. Their terminal isn't connected—" the young officer glanced around to see that no one outside was listening— "not that anybody there could be trusted to push the right button for a print-out anyway. Hold the fort, boys," he added as he walked out of the warehouse.

  Waldstejn sobered as he walked toward the concrete Headquarters building. Dimly on the eastern horizon were the flickers and rumbling of others trying to hold forts in grim truth.

  And failing.

  * * * *

  "Ouch, you butcher!" cried Churchie Dwyer. "Did you learn to use that in a stockyard?"

  "You'd bitch if they hanged you with a new rope," Bertinelli replied calmly. Bertinelli was a Corpsman. He carried a gun like everybody else, but he ranked with the sergeants for pay division. He was secure both in the light touch he knew he had and in the fact that nobody else in the Company could handle the medical tasks as well. "It's just like I told you, I learned in a morgue on Banares, putting accident victims back in shape for open cremation. Now, lie back—" he gestured with the debriding glove with which he was clean ing Dwyer's burns— "or I don't answer for what it's going to feel like."

  "They sure are doing a lot of talking," said Del Hoybrin. Bertinelli had recleaned the big man's sores first. Now Del knelt with his triceps on the lip of the bunker, staring up at the transponder. The communications gear hung from a balloon tethered a hundred meters over the 522nd's radio shack. Through the night visor of his helmet, the minuscule heating of the transponder's circuits as it broadcast was a yellow glow. Satellite communications had died in showers of space junk at the beginning of the war, but there were other ways to boost tight-beam communications over useful distances.

  "Well, you might at least give me something for the pain," Churchie grumbled. He lowered himself again onto the cot that doubled as an operating table.

  "I'm going to give you something," Bertinelli said. "I'm going to give you a square meter less skin if you don't shut up and lie still." He touched the deep burn over Dwyer's right shoulder blade. The mesh of sensors and tiny hooks in the glove's pad began to purr. Under the control of a microprocessor in the wristlet, the glove was lifting off dead tissue to prepare the area for antiseptic and a covering of spray skin. In the same mild voice, the Corpsman added, "I can see the bombs starting fires and blowing the trash into your shelter. But I'm damned if I see why you thought you had to lie in it. And I'd like to know what you found to bathe in that had such a pong, too."

  "Do you suppose we'll get paid again before we move, Churchie?" Del asked. "I'd like to—for the girls again, you know. Usually there aren't girls where we go." There was a troupe of prostitutes at Smiricky #4, intended for the contract miners but available to the garrison as well.

  "Think we'll be pulling back soon, then?" Bertinelli asked with just a hint of tension. He lifted the glove and began to spray the debrided area.

  "Sometimes," Del said in a neutral voice. "They're doing a lot of talking."

  Churchie snorted. He continued to lie flat with his eyes closed. "Happen to notice which direction the transponder dish was pointed, baby?" he asked.

  Del turned to his companions. The featureless visor was a stage beyond even the big man's usual moon-faced innocence. "East, Churchie," he said.

  "Right, my dear," Churchie agreed. "And does that tell you anything?"

  The Corpsman had stiffened, but after a moment he went on with his work in silence.

  "No, Churchie," said Del.

  "Right again, sweetheart," Churchie bantered with his eyes closed. "Well, it might mean that they're talking to the Federal commander at the Front, that's true . . . but they haven't any business doing that, we're not under Second Army control, we're handled by Central from Praha. . . . And Praha's west of here, unless they moved it since last night. So, and seeing how high they lifted that balloon before they started to jaw ... I'd put pretty good money that our local friends have opened negotiations with the other side."

  Bertinelli began to curse under his breath. He moved the glove to his patient's left shoulder.

  Del resumed his observation of the transponder balloon. "What does that mean, Churchie?" he asked.

  His friend snorted again. All the humor was gone from his voice as he replied, "Wish to hell I knew, darling. Wish to hell. What I'm afraid it means is that Fasolini's Company is deep in shit."

  * * * *

  The only light in the Operations Center was the green glow of the phosphor screen. It emphasized the wrinkled anger of Colonel Fasolini's face as he said, "Gibberish! Goddam gibberish!"

  Sookie Foyle snapped her fingers in frustration. "Look, Colonel," she said, "I'm a Communicator, not a magician. You get me a copy of the code pad the indigs are using, and I'll let you know what they've got to say. Otherwise it's garbage—" she waved at the groups of meaningless letters which continued to crawl across the screen—"and it's going to stay garbage."

  The three sergeants—Mboko, Hummel, and Jensen—stirred restively in the darkness. They were the tacticians of the Company, but the present situation was too amorphous for their skills to be of any use. Lieutenant ben Mehdi bent forward and said, "We don't have to read the transmissions to know what they're saying, do we, Guido? The only thing we don't know is the exact terms the Major's holding out for—and that doesn't matter to us, because we ought to be making terms with the Republicans for ourselves, right now, before it all hits th
e fan. Otherwise, we wind up taking whatever we're offered."

  There was silence again in the OC. The Communicator looked at Fasolini. The skin at the corners of her eyes was tracked with sudden crow's feet. She did not speak.

  "If it's the contract you're worried about," ben Mehdi went on, "the force majeure provision clearly—"

  "Shut up!" the Colonel snapped. His subordinates froze. "Sorry, Hussein," Fasolini went on in a tired voice. He rubbed his face with his palms. "You see, I tried that before I called you in, bounced a signal to the Rube CinC, Yorck, on his internal push." The stocky man managed a smile and squeezed Foyle's shoulder. The Communicator beamed.

  "They won't deal," Fasolini went on, "not on any terms we can take. They don't like meres, they don't use them themselves . . . and they like us even less than most."

  "They wouldn't deal on any terms?" ben Mehdi pressed with a frown.

  Colonel Fasolini looked up. After a moment, he said, "No terms we can take. They're real unhappy about their starship this morning." The only sound in the OC was the sigh of the fan in the communications terminal. "They know it was us that did it. They want the whole gun crew—" Fasolini neither raised his voice nor looked at Sergeant Jensen— "and every tenth man at random from the rest of the Company. The others they'll give passage off-planet without guns or equipment." He shrugged. "I told Yorck if he showed himself within a klick of the compound, I'd personally blow him a new asshole."

  "O-kay," said Sergeant Hummel. She appeared to be looking at nothing in particular, certainly not the Sergeant-Gunner beside her. "Let's don't wait around. Two trucks'll hold the personnel, the equipment we ditch and put in a claim for it at Praha."

  "Lichtenstein's got a guard on the trucks," objected Sergeant Mboko. The sheen of his smooth, black face stood out above the absorptive cloth of his uniform.

  "So he's got a bloody guard!" Hummel snapped. "They're the least of our problems. We grease them quiet, load the trucks, and bam! we're out of the compound and heading west before the indigs know what hit them. They can't shut off the power, because the pylons are energized from both ends of the line."

  "The guards may not be a problem," retorted Sergeant Mboko, "but the bunkers on the perimeter are. There's a straight line of sight right down the pylons for what—three kilometers? Every bunker's got anti-tank rockets. Do you really think even the indigs are going to miss straight no-deflection shots with wire-guided missiles?"

  Sergeant Jensen cleared his throat and spoke for the first time since Fasolini had dropped his bombshell. "It was not the crew who shot down their ship, Colonel," said the big blond. "It was me alone. Perhaps if you offer me, General Yorck will— will be. . . ." Jensen's voice caught.

  "Shut the hell up, Roland," Lieutenant ben Mehdi muttered.

  "Well, all this may be a lot of fuss over nothing," said Colonel Fasolini. "It's just a matter of dealing with Lichtenstein when he gets the bottom line himself. And Lichtenstein will deal, no trouble there. I just thought you all had better know how the land lies in case we need to move fast."

  * * * *

  The Colonel stood up. He was by a decade the oldest person in the shelter. Just now, as he shrugged his crossbelts out of the creases their weight drew over his collar bones, he felt his age. "Wish to all the saints that we knew how the real land lies," he said bleakly. "Waldstejn, their Supply Officer, he was complaining the other day that one of his convoys had managed to route itself to some old working thirty klicks from here. They had one truck go off when they were turning around and they just left it there. Now, if we could find that and get it on track again. . . . But we've got jack-shit for a bearing, and I don't see wandering around Cecach till the Rubes find time to round us up and shoot us. I guess we wait."

  "Colonel," said Communicator Foyle. She pointed toward the terminal. "Distant input—must be Yorck."

  Garbled characters were crawling across the bottom of the screen again, leaving phosphor ghosts of themselves as each line shifted up to make room for the next.

  "Better get to my section," Sergeant Hummel said. She picked up her weapon, carrying it at the balance instead of slinging it.

  "Yeah," said Colonel Fasolini. "Maybe we don't wait too long."

  The doors and curtains of the Headquarters building were closed, but the bombing had stripped the black-out shutters from one of the front windows. Waldstejn had not bothered to pick up night goggles when he left the warehouse. Enough light still shone through the curtains within to show him the squad on guard. There were two non-coms present, Sergeants Breisach and Ondru, though presumably only one of them had the duty officially. They had approached him with an offer shortly after he took over as Supply Officer. Waldstejn was not sure whether the pair of them were genuinely dim-witted, or, more likely, that they were so crooked that they made the rest of the 522nd look good. Under that assumption, the Sergeants thought that Waldstejn had cleaned house on his subordinates in order to have all the graft for himself.

  Albrecht Waldstejn had disabused them in a tirade which he believed had impressed even that pair.

  At the moment, Sergeant Ondru was having a loud argument with one of the Signals staff. Rather, Ondru and his men were grinning as a signalman shouted and waved the envelope he carried. "Sorry," the non-com said, "I've got orders not to pass anybody. Major wouldn't like it. Now, maybe if you'd give me this important message you're so hot to deliver, I could decide if it's really important enough to disturb the brass."

  "Why don't you start doing your job, Ondru," the tall officer said as he joined the group, "and stop poking your nose into things that are none of your business."

  The infantry squad stiffened. One man even stood up. Sullenly, Sergeant Ondru said, "I've got my orders."

  "I've got my orders, sir!" Waldstejn snapped back.

  "I've got my orders sir," the non-com parroted. He stepped aside. Either he had been told to pass the Supply Officer, or he had decided not to make an issue of it. At best, there were too many ways that the young officer could make life unpleasant for the soldiers who drew their supplies from him. At worst—well, nobody really thought that Waldstejn would be trying to crash a staff meeting to which he had not been summoned.

  The signalman plucked at Lieutenant Waldstejn's sleeve. The officer recognized him by sight, but the only name he could think of was 'Porky', the pudgy man's nickname. "Sir," the signalman pleaded, prodding Waldstejn with the envelope he carried, "the land-line's out, somebody must've tripped over it, and I've got to get this message to Major Lichtenstein. Can . . . ?"

  It did not sound like something a Supply Officer should be getting involved with. Waldstejn did not touch the envelope. "Put it on the air, then," he suggested. "Somebody in there surely has a working receiver."

  Porky nodded like a man trying to duck his head out of a noose. "Lieutenant," he said, "they do, but the meres have them too. I don't dare put this on the air in clear." He swallowed. Despite the rapt silence of the squad on guard, he added, "It's from the . . . it's from east of here."

  Waldstejn took the envelope in the hand that held his own print-out. "All right," he said, "I'll deliver it to the Major."

  His face was still as he opened the door into the building. Maybe it was something that a Supply Officer got involved in. At least, if the Supply Officer had friends among a group of mercenaries that might be set for a long fall.

  * * * *

  "Look," Captain Tetour said abruptly, "what if they won't take any offer? We'd be better off fighting than surrendering. You know the stories that all Federal officers are executed in the field."

  Brionca, the Operations Officer, sneezed out her snuff and slapped the table for emphasis. "We've been through that, dammit, we can't fight, the armored regiment they'll send will plow us under. What we need to think about is how we'll sweeten the pot so they've got to deal."

  "Well, I've been thinking some more about that," said Captain Strojnowski. He watched the point of his stylus click on the table instead of looking
around at the others. Strojnowski's Third Company was perhaps closer to being a military unit than was Tetour's First, and the Captain himself had shown promise in line service before discrepancies had shown up in his pay vouchers. "We've been talking as if they'll just swarm down the valley with tanks and troop carriers. But they won't risk that against Fasolini's men; and besides, we've got the two laser cannon—"

  "Which gave us so much air defense," Brionca thundered, "that they weren't even switched on until after the ship had blown up. Want to bet your life it'll be any better when it's tanks ripping us apart?"

  "Now wait a goddam minute," said Stoessel, the young lieutenant in charge of the lasers. He had been included in the council of war even though he was not a member of the 522nd Garrison Battalion. The guns were detached from Central to Smiricky #4, but their chain of command still ran directly to Praha. "You guys give me a target," the lieutenant continued in a high voice, "and I'll hit it. But there's no acquisition system in the universe that'll hit a starship that's in normal space only a—" He broke off, suddenly aware of the disdain on all the faces watching him. "Not that I want to engage tanks," he concluded lamely. "I mean, they mount lasers too, and they're armored. . . ."

  "Then don't worry about it until somebody tells you to," snapped Captain Khlesl, the Intelligence officer who cradled a handset between his shoulder and ear. He turned to the Battalion Commander on the chair beside him. "Major," he said, tapping the handset without taking it away from his ear, "I think the damned thing's broken again. Maybe we'd better send one of the guards over to Signals and see—"

  Someone knocked on the door to the outer office. An officer swore. Major Lichtenstein himself began to rise from his seat with an expression of fury. His face smoothed into mere sourness when a voice, muffled by the door panel, announced, "Sir, Lieutenant Waldstejn with the figures you requested. Also a message from the Signals Section— they say the line's gone down again."