The Forlorn Hope Page 9

  For the most part, Quade and Hodicky advanced with their goggles up over their foreheads. The promised illumination would otherwise blind them as well as the Federal guards. Afterwards, the deserters could dash forward, mingling with the guard detachment and getting among the trucks in the confusion.

  The buildings of the Complex looked a single mass of geological proportions. Only the mercenaries' signals proved to the Private that he was really heading for the truck park. At its fence, he knew, were his comrades of a few hours before— watching his advance in rosy detail through the lenses of goggles he might have issued them himself.

  Well, Hodicky couldn't complain. It had been his own idea, hadn't it?

  Only Mary and the Saints, let him not have to kill—

  The muzzle flashes ahead of him could have been the courting dance of a firefly. The bullets that snapped about his head had nothing of the same innocence. Pavel Hodicky threw himself down, knowing that at least one of his former comrades lacked his own unwillingness to kill.

  * * * *

  The shots were Sergeant Jensen's signal. Hum-mel's call for "Light!" blatted over the radio as the blond man was already swinging onto the gunner's seat.

  He had lain beside the automatic cannon lest premature motion bring a volley of fire on him before the commando was in position. The indigs had been willing to let a sleeping dog lie; now they would feel its teeth despite their forbearance.

  Right and left pedals controlled the gun's traverse and elevation. Jensen worked them simultaneously while his left thumb flipped the sighting screen to its wide-field, acquisition mode.

  The electric motors training the gun whined a friendly, familiar note to the Gunner. The slim barrel dipped only a degree under the lightest of left toe pressure, but the signal from Jensen's right heel aimed it back toward its previous position at the east face of the compound.

  Toward, not to. The traversing pedal braked the muzzle to a halt as the mounded berm of Gun Pit East slewed across the sights.

  Someone in the mass of buildings to Jensen's right had noted movement at the automatic cannon. An assault rifle began to spit at him from a window of the Complex. At this range, the gunfire was pointless; but the first anti-tank rocket could be only seconds away.

  Sergeant Jensen had taken a professional interest in the laser cannon when his own weapon had been sited near it. Now he was betting a number of lives, his own included, that he remembered the lay-out correctly. The protective berm around the gun pit was a full two meters thick at its base. The earth comprising it was loose, however, heaped up by the digging blade and only cursorily stabilized. That would stop fragments and even normal shell fire; but what Jensen had in mind was something else again—or Saint Ultruda save them!

  The sight screen zoomed to battle magnification, a three-meter field at this range. The central orange dot was at the base of the rear lobe of the pit. Hoybrin and someone else were now shooting from the Operations Center nearby. Hoybrin for certain, because the weapon was firing bursts. They were trying to suppress Federal gunmen from the Complex who were slashing at Jensen's life.

  That did not matter now. All that mattered to the Gunner were the traverse pedal and the red switch under his right thumb. He pressed them together.

  * * * *

  The blip of a rocket's sighting flare arched from the Complex toward the mercenaries' lines. Lieutenant Stoessel had just enough time to wonder what had set off the firefight when the sheaf of osmium projectiles plowed the dirt to his left.

  The automatic cannon had neither tracers nor need for them. As with the laser itself, what you saw in the sights was what you got. Jensen's burst gouged the berm at a flat angle and at velocities that made the earth itself a fluid. Jets of dirt were spurting skyward even as the rounds clanged against the fusion bottle which the berm had been intended to protect.

  The casing was heavy, even in comparison to the sudden blows it received; but a hairline fracture caused a ripple in the magnetic flux within. The astronomical pressures did the rest.

  The blast was in theory not a nuclear explosion, only a jet of plasma from a relatively small fusion chamber. The matter of the bottle, the inner surface of the berm, and everything else within either lobe of Gun Pit East were stripped to ions. They shot upward like a minor solar flare. Ravaged atoms gushed up the access tunnel. Lieutenant Stoessel's body did not so much burn as sublime at their impact.

  Bright as day, Roland Jensen had promised the new lieutenant. The Gunner was grinning like a skull as he threw the drive in gear. He cramped the wheel hard, then jumped out of the saddle. The self-propelled gun lurched noisily into what had been the medical station. It crumpled the shelter roof as it passed. Jensen felt that he had to at least jerk the old girl away from where she had been targeted, even though he would abandon her then.

  Bright as bloody day!

  * * * *

  Jirik Quade was up and running while the ground still rocked from the explosion. Hodicky scrambled up to follow, pulling his goggles down with his right hand. He was cursing his friend because the curses were a normal thing, a frequent thing to hear, and everything else around him was out of the Hell of his Grandmother's lectures.

  The plume of charged vapor still hung over Gun Pit East, far to the left, but it was no longer a blinding flare. Night breezes were cooling and dispersing the pink glow. It was at once the pyre of seven soldiers and the only tombstone they would ever have.

  Most of the platoon guarding the park was at the main gate on the west side. There were a number of troops on the north face of the woven-wire enclosure, however, much closer to the mercenary positions. These were the men who had been firing at the commando. One of them continued to do so. His blinded companions huddled at the base of the fence, where even amplified light could not separate them from the humps of earth and rank grass. A single soldier stood erect, screaming and spraying his personal darkness with an assault rifle. The muzzle was pointed up at almost a 45° angle.

  The two mercenaries had stayed flat when Quade and Hodicky rose for the final dash. Now their guns cracked in unison. The limbs of the man at the fence splayed as if he had been electrocuted. There was a tiny fleck of light behind him as a projectile clipped a fence wire which was also in its path. The figure crumpled. There was no further sound or movement at the fence.

  Quade reached the truck park before his friend did. Hodicky's body had moved at its best pace despite the terror filling his mind, but his lungs burned with exertion. The loaded bandolier was an anchor across both collarbones.

  There was more to the operation, however, than the strength and stamina in which Quade excelled most of the other men in the compound regardless of size. He had the cutting bar out when he reached the fence. Instead of using it to slash an opening in the wire, the black-haired deserter waved it in his left hand like a saber. His right hand prodded the night with the rifle he held by its pistol grip, while his eyes searched for someone to kill. The moonless sky provided Quade's goggles with only a blur of pinks and shadows. It had no targets for his frustration.

  The goggles affected depth perception seriously. Hodicky bounced against the webbing of the fence an instant before he had expected to reach it. "It's me, Q—Pavel!" he shouted instinctively as he saw his friend spin to face the sound. Someone atop the main powerplant was volleying rockets. The flare pots left pinkish trails across the sky over the truck park. Pulverized concrete spewed across the launching site as a mercenary replied.

  Hodicky deliberately dropped his rifle in order to unsling his own cutting bar. Like much of the mercenaries' equipment, the principle behind the tool was very simple. It was a light, narrow saw with a blade fifty centimeters long. It cut on the draw stroke, and its teeth coarsened gradually from the hilt to the tip. The fact that the teeth were razor thin and almost permanently sharp made the bar effective whether one needed to cut tissue or tank armor. The ten-gauge wire of the fence was more a pressure against the blade than a real obstacle to it.


  The little private slashed down, then across and down again in an arc. Wires quivered discordantly as a section of fence fell inward. "Come on, Q!" Hodicky said as he hunched through the opening.

  His sleeve snagged and tore unnoticed on a sharp end.

  Quade threw down his cutting bar and reached for his partner's weapon. "You forgot—" he said.

  From the darkness, someone whispered, "Janos? Is that—?"

  The black-haired deserter turned and fired in a single motion. There was a horrible scream, above even the muzzle blasts. As if in echo of the initial burst, a soldier fifty meters away began shooting at Quade's back.

  Reflex snatched Pavel Hodicky's hand to his rifle. Instinct froze it there while bullets cracked and sang in parting wires. The Federal soldier was flat on his belly along the fence line, an almost impossible target for Hummel and Powers. They were also prone and two hundred meters away. The mercenaries tried anyway. Truck bodies boomed as they were hit by projectiles that had passed over their intended target.

  The Federal gunman was shooting high as well. It was the flash of one of his bullets hitting a post above Quade that snapped the deserter from his revery of slaughter. He whirled away from the screams which a second burst had not silenced. Still firing from the hip, Quade walked his shots into the opposing muzzle flashes. Again he fired until his rifle spat out its empty magazine.

  "Come on, Q!" Hodicky cried. He ran to the cab of the nearest truck, still clutching his rifle. His trousers were slimed with feces.

  * * * *

  "Forty-one," whispered the trooper as she reached Lieutenant Waldstejn. His slap on the shoulder sent her out to join the others who had preceded her, snaking single file behind Sergeant Mboko. This much was easy, though every step chanced a rocket or the fury of the remaining laser. At the ridge line, the risk of fire from the compound ceased, but a false step would shatter both legs on an air-sewn mine.

  There were two cleared tracks through the mine belt surrounding the valley: west along the pylons, to permit the trucks to enter and leave the compound; and this one which Colonel Fasolini had decided to clear in case he needed a bolt-hole. The Colonel had not expected the 522nd to turn on his men; but neither had he expected the battalion to hold against a Republican attack. The truck route would become a killing ground for the locals rushing into it—and that, with luck, would have permitted the Company to slip out the side door and regroup.

  It is impossible to foresee everything, especially during a war. Troops whose commanders try to provide for the dangers they do foresee, however, often are around afterwards to bury the less fortunate.

  "That's the last," whispered Lieutenant ben Mehdi. The officer followed the trooper Waldstejn had just clapped forward by rote. "I'll stay and pick up the rear guard."

  A rocket corkscrewed overhead, then plunged into the ground a hundred meters away. The white ball of the explosion was momentary but so intense that the shock wave a third of a second later seemed to be an echo. The near impact was chance. The federal soldier who launched the missile had lost control of it either through lack of training or because one of the mercenary rear guard had put a round close enough to the rocketeer to make him drop his controls.

  Muzzle flashes lighted the face of the Complex and most of the Garrison Battalion's bunkers. Occasionally a soldier threw the switch on each assault rifle magazine which ignited the bullet jackets in a stream of blue-green tracers from the muzzle. That was rare, however, because it was certain to draw fire from one or a score of his ill-trained comrades. It was impossible to be sure what was going on at the truck park almost a kilometer away.

  "Waldstejn?" ben Mehdi said, trying to prompt a response from the Cecach lieutenant.

  Albrecht Waldstejn blinked beneath his goggles. Grit scooped from the ground by the near miss was drifting across the men. "Right," Waldstejn said. "Keep your head down." He scrambled off to join the last of the troopers following Sergeant Mboko.

  Hussein ben Mehdi watched the firefight, trying to detach his mind from what was going on within the compound. When a stray bullet brred overhead, his hand tightened on the sweaty grip of his own grenade launcher. In general, the Lieutenant could pretend that it was a game, a light show.

  He risked a quick glance up the way the other had gone. By daylight, they should all be clear, thanks be to Allah . . . and to the path that Fasolini's instincts had provided. "Allah receive you, Guido." the mercenary muttered. "If you were not a saint, then at least at the end you gave as much for your people as the Christ did for his."

  * * * *

  Hodicky reached for the truck. Something cracked like a heart breaking on the side of it. That was surely a stray round, but the little private hunched over and ran to the next vehicle anyway.

  Although the cargo bay of the ore hauler loomed high and wide behind it, the cab was only a step from the ground while the vehicle rested on its skirts. Visibility from the cab was not a factor since most of the time the vehicle tracked automatically across a line of pylons. For maneuvering in close quarters like the truck park, there were TV cameras at each corner of the cargo bay.

  The cab lay-out was simple. Hodicky flipped on the battery switch to energize the controls and instruments. He did not turn on the lights. His goggles and the instrument glow let him see what he was doing well enough without drawing fire. Hodicky had driven induction-powered trucks before—never this big, and never in a lot so tight. But no one was going to complain about scraped metal tonight, the Virgin knew.

  The little private twisted the joy stick to align the receiving antenna with the broadcast pylon at the gate. The cab door sprang open. Hodicky screamed and lurched around with his arms thrown up.

  "You all right, Pavel?" asked Private Quade. His nose wrinkled. "Jesus Christ, what is it stinks in here?"

  Hodicky licked his lips. "Go start the next one, Q," he said. "I'll have this moving in a bit." He could worry about clean trousers some other time.

  "Hell, I never drove anything, Pavel," Quade admitted. He turned his head away. "I just came because . . . you could of got hurt."

  "I—" Hodicky said. "Keep an eye out." He turned back to the antenna control, making a final adjustment and then pressing the switch that should transfer the vehicle to external power. There was a lurch as the drive fans beneath the bay came on line automatically. The blades began to sing as they ran up to idle speed. "Watch it now, Q," Hodicky warned. He twisted the knob which should increase the power and bite angle of the fans.

  The air cushion which the fans built under the skirts lifted the huge vehicle a few millimeters off the ground. It skidded forward, not yet in perfect balance. The left side almost at once scraped down the next vehicle over. Metal screamed.

  The would-be driver swore and twisted at the wheel while he fed in more power. He over-corrected and Quade, on the ground, had barely enough time to throw himself out of the way as the right side dragged.

  If the wheel were released, the truck would swing itself onto the pylon corridor. It would ignore obstacles in doing so, however, and it would have locked itself against the adjacent vehicles. Hodicky twisted savagely at the wheel again, wondering if the auto-pilot could possibly have done a worse job than he was managing himself.

  Part of the distant rear of the cargo bay tore free. The truck lurched ahead. Hodicky released the wheel and felt the vehicle swing with glassy smoothness. The windshield was fogged by acid grime from the smelter, but through it he could see the closed gate a hundred meters away. The rifle of one of the guards there flashed. The entire panel of the truck window disintegrated, spraying the cab with fragments of pin-head size and smaller.

  Hodicky threw himself out the cab door. His toe caught on the coaming. The Private tripped and rolled with a skill he could not have managed deliberately. The fans of the truck blasted dust in his face as it slid past. Weeping, Hodicky scrambled to his feet and ran for the shelter of the remaining vehicles. His rifle and bandolier pounded at the bruises they had left when he hit
the ground.

  No one shot at him as he ran. Quade was hosing the gate guards with bright cyan streaks of tracer, knowing that would keep their heads down—and that it would concentrate what interest remained on him instead of his friend.

  A rocket from the Complex hit the rear of the careening truck. There was a white flash that silhouetted the vehicle. The jet of gas and gaseous metal spurted across the empty cargo bay and out the other side in a dazzling spike. The ore hauler shuddered, but its drive units were untouched. The gyro stabilizer had brought the truck back on an even keel when the cab plowed through the gate.

  Even empty, the big ore carrier weighed over twenty tonnes. The chain-link fencing was intended to keep humans out, not vehicles in. The guards were caught between Quade's snapping tracers and the onrushing truck. Some of those who thought they had scrambled clear at the last instant were killed by the gate itself. The hinges gave before the locking chain on the other side. The whole construct of steel wires and stiffening bars sprang away from the cab like a huge flail.

  The truck staggered, but it surged on through. The right skirt was trailing and a drive fan screamed as it wrapped itself in wire.

  Quade fumbled for a third magazine. He paused with his hand in an empty pouch of his bandolier. He looked around for his friend as he resumed the process of reloading, this time consciously. The door of the next truck in the line was open.

  The black-haired man ran to the open cab. The truck bay was creased where Hodicky's first decoy had scraped along it. Soldiers in bunkers over a kilometer away were firing rockets into the truck park, acting more from instinct than awareness. Those which were aimed well enough to hit the broad target detonated with hollow booms. That drew additional fire.

  "Pavel, come on, for God's sake!" Quade shouted into the truck cab. His left palm rested on the door jamb. He could feel the vehicle quiver as its fans came on. "One was enough! Come on, they're shelling us!"