The Forlorn Hope Read online

  Lieutenant Dyk was cowering under the table with the rest of the officers in Lichtenstein's office. The young man leaped up with a cry and slapped at the light switch. Then he stumbled over a chair, scrambled to his feet again, and reached the panel in the outer office just as another volley of projectiles ripped through the building. The overhead lights flickered out as a gush of blue sparks exploded from the shorted wiring. Dyk spun, screaming. An osmium projectile punched a neat hole in the partition wall behind him, having shattered bone on its path the length of the Lieutenant's outstretched arm.

  Lime dust from pulverized concrete roiled in the air within the building. Papers were burning on a secretarial desk. Shorted equipment or a spray of. metal ignited by friction had started the fire, the only illumination remaining in the Headquarters building. The Federal soldier's return fire had ceased also. Either the damned fool had emptied his rifle or he had realized that he did not have a snowball's chance in Hell of hitting anything at the range.

  The good lord knew why the meres had stopped shooting, though.

  "Ondru, report," the company commander growled.

  "We got him," Sergeant Breisach's voice responded from the darkness. With his goggles on, Strojnowski could just make out the forms of the guards hugging the ground as he was doing himself. Radios within the building were sizzling with unanswered questions from the perimeter bunkers. "Then, blooie!" Breisach went on. "Look, we can't handle them at the range. You gotta bring in arty or something, Captain."

  As if summoned, the artillery lieutenant scurried through the door in a low crouch. "What happened?" he blurted. "Did you get—" The young officer tripped over Strojnowski's outstretched feet. He pitched forward and screamed. The hand he had thrown forward to break his fall had splashed in what was left of Colonel Fasolini's thorax. The mercenary had worn body armor that might have saved him at a hundred meters. When the muzzle flashes were close enough to burn his uniform, the high velocity sprays had turned fragments of the backplate into missiles themselves. The air stank with the effluvium of ripped intestines.

  From inside, Captain Brionca rasped orders slightly out of synch with her words over Strojnow-ski's belt radio. "All Boxer units!" she was saying. "All Boxer units! Fire at will at any off-planet troops you see. Do not leave your positions. Repeat, do not—"

  An assault rifle stuttered briefly, pointlessly, near the eastern interface between Federal and mercenary positions. The Bunkers were too widely spaced for the Federal weapons to be really effective. White flashes from the bunker, two guns and then a third, continued for several seconds. The shooting ended in a momentary orange ball in the midst of the muzzle flashes. The thump of the tube-launched mercenary grenade provided a coda to the chattering gunfire.

  The artilleryman was trying to wipe his hand in the dirt. "Mortars," he was saying, "high explosives. We'll blast them out from a distance!"

  Strojnowski punched his company push. "Ranger Six," he said, identifying himself to his troops, "to max Ranger units. Cease fire! Repeat, cease fire. Unless you've got a target in range and coming at you." The infantry captain paused to let that sink in. Then he added, "If you're fired at by meres, reply with anti-tank rockets. Don't use your rifles, use rockets and wait till you've got something to aim at."

  Screw Brionca and her stupid orders. The 522nd did not have to worry about a job they were not equipped for. All they had to do was to keep the meres pinned down for the day or less until the Rube tanks arrived. Strojnowski did not like the deal, but he liked it better than he liked having his ass shot away.

  "Come on, Breisach," the officer ordered. "We'll crawl to my bunker and I'll use your squad as a reserve." The rest of the battalion officers could stay inside a targeted building if they wanted. Strojnowski only wished that he could intercept the mercenary communications as they almost certainly were intercepting those of the 522nd.

  To the surprise of the infantry captain, the young lieutenant was crawling along beside him. It was probably a lack of any other direction. "But why aren't we shelling?" the artilleryman demanded. "Why?"

  "Because we aren't soldiers, we're goddam prison guards!" the older man snapped back. "We're here to keep the contract laborers from breaking out, not to fight a war. The 522nd doesn't have a Heavy Weapons Company. No mortars, no heavy machine guns . . . Hell, the meres were supposed to be our heavy weapons!"

  The whole area was studded with bits of smelter slag. It passed unnoticed in the coarse grass, but it gouged at the knees and bare palms of a man trying to crawl across three hundred meters of it. Grunting, balancing discomfort against the risk of a bullet if he stood, Strojnowski said, "I felt sorry for them, getting the shaft that way. But if the Rubes need help executing them now, I'll shoot every off-planet SOB myself!"

  Chapter Five

  Two more mercenaries in battle dress scurried to the Operations Center from the east. They were hunched over with caution and the weight of their equipment. Lieutenant ben Mehdi leaned from the shelter to observe them in helmeted neutrality. "Team?" he called in a low voice.

  "Black Twelve," one of them panted back. Both troopers knelt, keeping the hump of the OC between them and the distant Complex.

  Ben Mehdi nodded agreement. "Right. We're forming up fifty meters north—" he pointed— "in a defile. Mboko's in charge there." He touched his helmet and ordered, "Black One, leapfrog your odd teams. Twelve is in." From the west, the Lieutenant could see two troopers from White Section already scuttling toward the OC.

  Ben Mehdi's words echoed within the shelter because the external speaker of the console was live. Albrecht Waldstejn was not on the Company net. He could no more listen to the necessary crosstalk as the escape plan went forward than could any other member of the 522nd.

  And the escape plan was his, almost in its entirety.

  "That's forty-two ready to jump," Waldstejn said, "plus us."

  "Motion around the truck park," Trooper Dwyer reported from the back arch. "Somebody ought to spray them, one of the shelters do it when the team leap-frogs out."

  "White Two," crackled the speaker, "leap-frog your odd teams. Twelve is in."

  "That's it," said Sergeant Jensen. "Just the section leaders left. Time for the old girl to keep some heads down."

  "Good luck, Sergeant," the Cecach officer said. "Ah, Communicator?" he went on.

  Jensen was crawling out of the back arch of the shelter. Churchie Dwyer was there, watching the Complex with his huge partner. He nodded to the Gunner. It was a nasty job. Jensen could have told off one of his crewmen to do it. But by the White Christ of his ancestors, he was the Gunner in Fasolini's Company.

  Communicator Foyle looked at Waldstejn with a flashing smile. "Sookie, sir," she said.

  Waldstejn smiled back, tight as an E-string inside and furious with himself to be thinking what he was thinking about the plump brunette. Not now, Mother of God! "Right, Sookie. Time for you to leave too." Switching to Czech as the Communicator rose, the Lieutenant added, "Hodicky, you and Quade follow her. I'll be along in a minute or two."

  "We better stay with you, sir," said Hodicky. He looked like a wren caught in a thunderstorm, huddled and miserable. "Not knowing the language and all, you know, sir."

  Hodicky did actually have more than a smattering of English, but his friend did not. Private Quade had just finished stuffing a pair of mercenary cross-belt bandoliers with ammunition he and Hodicky had dragged from the warehouse. Ammunition for the assault rifles was packed in the form of loaded plastic magazines. When emptied, the clips were simply discarded like ration envelopes. The pockets of the cross-belts comfortably held pairs of Cecach magazines in place of the individual chargers of the mercenaries' own heavier ammunition. "There you go, Pavel," the black-haired private said. He proudly held out a bandolier to his friend.

  A mercenary slid into the Operation Center past Lieutenant ben Mehdi. She flipped up her visor. Waldstejn had not met her before, so far as he knew, but he recognized the Sergeant's voice when she rasped, "I
'm Hummel, Black One. You're in charge now?"

  "Yeah, I guess I am, Sergeant," the young lieutenant agreed. His muscles were tensing involuntarily. Hussein ben Mehdi cleared his throat and shifted as if moving out of the line of fire. "And until we get our butts out of here, this isn't a democracy." Mother of God! how he wished that Sergeant Jensen were still in the shelter.

  "Democracy?" Hummel repeated. "It's about to be a bloody morgue, isn't it? What's going to happen when we're half-way up the ridge—" she gestured; Hussein ben Mehdi flinched back— "and they start popping rockets at us? Think they won't? We need a diversion so they're not searching the north ridge till we're over it and gone!"

  "Quade, cool it!" Waldstejn snapped. The little man had set down the bandolier and was watching Sergeant Hummel with a fixed expression. "Let's us cool it too," Waldstejn said to Hummel in a voice that was mild but which trembled. "We're all tight."

  The mercenary non-com eyed Quade. Hodicky was gripping his friend's arm and whispering into his ear. Hummel grinned wryly. "I got enough Czech to manage," she said. "It'll keep the pins in if everybody understands."

  Waldstejn swallowed. "Right," he said. "We've got a diversion. Sergeant Jensen's going to set his gun to sweep the Complex on continuous fire."

  Hummel shrugged. "Won't work," she said. Another trooper stooped at the arch behind her, anonymous behind a lowered visor. Ben Mehdi edged even further away. "They'll volley rockets at the muzzle flashes—some-body will. Take all of ten seconds—all right, maybe a minute. How far do we get in a minute?"

  "Gun ready," said the console.

  "Column ready," it immediately echoed itself in Sergeant Mboko's voice.

  Del Hoybrin turned. With his partner and Jensen, he was the rear guard. "You're going now?" the big man said, making a little shoving gesture With his left hand.

  "Shut up, Del," Trooper Dwyer muttered. He was veteran enough to guess his chances of coming through the next minutes alive. Despite that, he wanted to get it over with.

  Dwyer also wanted to piss; and that, at least, he could do something about. Unsealing his fly, the gangling man began to urinate loudly on a trunk of Fasolini's in the corner of the shelter.

  "Lieutenant?" said Private Hodicky. His voice caught in his throat. He cleared it and said, "Q and me've got the uniforms. We could get in and get a couple trucks moving." He nodded back in the general direction of the truck park, north of the Complex proper. "They'd think we were going out that way in—" he swallowed— "instead of like we are."

  "That won't work either," interjected Lieutenant ben Mehdi. The console spoke again, but no one in the Operations Center paid attention to it. "The uniform might work if they got close before they were seen, but they'll be tracked all the way from here. Once they're in range, all hell breaks loose."

  "Flares!" Lieutenant Waldstejn whooped in sudden delight. Everyone else in the shelter jumped. "Our night goggles! They get overloaded. We set off a ton of flares, all at once, and everybody watching is blinded. By the time they've got their sight back, we're in the truck park!"

  "We don't carry flares," Hummel pointed out. "Don't need them with—"

  "God damn it!" Waldstejn snapped, as suddenly furious as he had been elated. He poked at the communications console, looking for the Send button. "Guns?" he demanded. "Guns? Do you read me?"

  "Guns to Red One, ' Sergeant Jensen replied. "I read you. I'm ready to crank up. Aren't you ready?"

  "You'll be given your orders when it's time, Sergeant!" Waldstejn responded in a tone that surprised him more than it did the others around him. Hodicky smiled wanly. "Ah, Guns," the Lieutenant went on, "do you have any illuminating rounds? Flares, you know? We can blind anybody watching through goggles if we can get a light bright enough."

  There was a moment's pause on the other end of the connection. Then Sergeant Jensen said thoughtfully, "Flares, no sir. But light, now ... I can make the whole compound bright as day if that's what you need."

  "On the command, then," Waldstejn said. "Pointer Two-One, out." He had used his Cecach callsign without realizing it. It served as well as another.

  Waldstejn swallowed. He turned to face the others in the shelter as well as he might and said. "All right. Privates Dwyer and Hoybrin—" he remembered the names; Del Hoybrin had resumed his search of the night and did not acknowledge the compliment, however— "you will act as the rear guard. Lieutenant, Sergeant Hummel—" nodding to them crisply— "you will proceed to the defile. Be ready to move as soon as the shooting starts, just make sure you've left a guide for the rest of us. My men and I will set out now for the truck park. I'll tell Sergeant Jensen to give us light as soon as the—as someone opens fire on us."

  "Bullshit," said Jo Hummel.

  Everyone looked at her. The non-com gave a lopsided smile and went on, "I speak Czech, remember? Trooper Powers and me'll cover your boys." She glanced at the Federal privates with more appraisal than affection. "You'll go take charge of the Company. Like we all decided," Hummel added. She gave a snort.

  "Your uniforms won't pass," Waldstejn objected sharply.

  "I said cover, didn't I?" the Sergeant replied. "If it works, two's plenty to get a few trucks rolling. We got Gun's push—" she tapped her helmet— "and we got something that'll do some good when the shooting starts." She gestured in disdain at Waldstejn's slung assault rifle. "Which you sure as hell don't."

  "Talk's cheap, lady," said Private Quade. His right hand was caressing the grip of his own rifle. Hummel turned to him. "Then let's get a goddam move on, trooper!" she said. "Come on, Bunny." Sergeant Hummel began to stride toward the back arch, as squat and as powerful as the weapon she cradled.

  Waldstejn caught her by the shoulder. "It's my place," he said quietly.

  Hummel's anger was fueled by fear of the task she had just undertaken. "Do / know the way to this abandoned truck?" she demanded. "Your place, Lieutenant, is with your troops. And they're out there goddam waiting for you!"

  Waldstejn released her. Del and Churchie backed away to let the three volunteers out to join Trooper Powers. The night covered them from bare eyes in seconds.

  "Right," Albrecht Waldstejn said to no one in particular. "We'd better get out to the others, hadn't we?

  Lieutenant Stoessel sprinted the last twenty meters to the tunnel entrance of Gun Pit East. Since the lasers were sited at opposite ends of the compound while battalion headquarters was in the middle, it had been a toss-up which of his guns Stoessel made for when the meeting broke up in slaughter. The camouflage pattern of his tunic front was smeared with sweat and real dirt. The right sleeve was dark also, with the blood and wastes of the murdered Colonel.

  The gun pit was a figure-eight, partly dug down and partly raised by a berm of the soil lifted from the interior. The back lobe of the pit was the fusion bottle itself. It was connected to the gun platform in the larger front lobe by cables which were virtually bus bars in their construction. At rest, as now, the laser cannon lay flat beneath the lip of the berm. Because the energy beam was recoilless, the tube could be quickly raised and rotated at any angle through a 360° arc.

  The whole crew was present when Stoessel burst in on them, but none of the gunners showed signs of wanting to aim the weapon anywhere it did not point already.

  "Abel!" the Lieutenant said to his crouching gun captain. "I radioed you to open fire on the e-enemy cannon. You haven't even unlatched the tube!"

  Yeoman Abel looked at his commanding officer sullenly. "We've got power up," he said. The other five enlisted men stopped talking and eyed each other or the ground between their boots. That way they could ignore the laser. "They did a bug-out before you called us, sir," Able went on. "Besides, I figure three seconds after that tube—" he gestured with a jerk of his bearded chin— "lifts over the berm, it takes a round. If she's charged when that happens, there's gonna be shit flying all over here."

  "I gave you a direct—" Stoessel began. He paused, then said, "What do you mean, they did a bug-out? They abandoned their
cannon?"

  "Naw, drove off with it," put in one of the crewmen who was glad of the change of subject. "We heard it."

  "You can see for yourself, sir," the Yeoman agreed. "But I think I'd want to keep my head down. We're pretty well off, here— if we don't stir things up," he finished pointedly.

  The Lieutenant scowled, first at his men and then at the laser in their midst. The automatic cannon had been emplaced only two hundred meters from Gun Pit East. He could take a look and perhaps have something to report to the Major.

  Lieutenant Stoessel stepped again to the tunnel which sloped up through the berm. Distant sounds crackled. As Stoessel reached the outer tunnel mouth, he could see muzzle flashes winking near the Complex center. "There's shooting at the truck park," he remarked idly. "I wonder what's happening there?"

  He might have chosen his words more carefully if he had known they were going to be his last.

  * * * *

  Pavel Hodicky was desperately afraid that he was going to have to kill somebody in the next few minutes.

  A little animal peeped and sprang away between the Private's feet. That frightened him back to immediacy. The four-man commando—properly a unit and not an individual designation—was spread in a line fifty meters across. The two Federal privates were in the middle. The mercenaries provided the end posts, checking the alignment and giving brief, angry whistles when one of the indigs straggled.

  Face it; when Hodicky straggled, Q seemed to keep station instinctively, since his formal training had been as cursory as Hodicky's own.

  They walked in a crouch, almost waddling. None of the four of them was up to crawling four hundred meters, but nature made them hunch over in anticipation of the shots that were certain to come. Hummel had been nonchalant in her brief instructions. The guards would shoot while their targets were well out of range, she had said. Hodicky's brief squint through his night goggles had shown him that the mercenaries were as bent over as the locals they escorted, however.