The Forlorn Hope (13 page)

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 overcorrected 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!”

“Get out of the way!” Hodicky cried. The truck slid forward as he spoke. The gap in the line beside him let the truck swing even as its drive nudged it into motion. Hodicky could not see for his tears, and his mind was filled with the intake roar of the fans.

The side of the ore hauler slapped Quade as he tried to jump away from it. Its pitted surface of steel and paint flakes bit and spun the little man, dropping him in the vehicle's wake. Hodicky, oblivious to that as he was to almost everything else, threw himself out of the cab as the truck picked up speed. As he did so, a pair of rockets from the gate slammed head-on into the cab. Both doors sailed away like bats startled from a cave. The sheet-metal front of the cab ripped upward, tangling the power antenna in shreds.

Only the back-up human controls had been destroyed. The vehicle did not stop. The detuned antenna dropped its power beneath the setting and the vehicle slowed to a trot. As it glided through the gap torn by the first truck, the sides of the ore hauler sparkled like a display. Federal soldiers were firing their assault rifles point-blank into the cargo bay. The disintegrating bullets blasted holes in the sides as they hit.

Hodicky picked himself up. He had scraped his left palm badly on the ground. That pain seemed to be all he could focus on as he staggered back to the remaining trucks.

Jirik Quade lay crumpled on the gravel in front of him. The right sleeve of his uniform had been shredded from shoulder to wrist along with the skin beneath. Quade's hand was still locked on the grip of his rifle.

Hodicky's scrapes and dizziness washed away in a rush of glacial fear. All external sounds sank to a murmur as blood roared in the little man's eardrums. He knelt and gripped his friend's shoulders in order to turn him face up. “Mother of God, Q,” he whispered. “Mother of God!”

“Goddam, that truck hit me,” Quade muttered back. He opened his eyes with a start. “Christ, Pavel,” he said, trying to raise his torso and finding that his right arm did not work. “How long've I been—
Christ watch it!
”

A Federal soldier had run toward them from the wreckage at the gate. He had lost his helmet of ceramic-impregnated thermoplastic, but his rifle waved at arm's length as he strode. “Hansel!” he cried, “are you all right?”

Hodicky twisted as he knelt, unslinging his own weapon. The chill had returned. The Federal soldier was within ten meters. “
Hans!
” the man called again, skidding to a halt.

Hodicky raised his rifle. He froze. Behind him, Quade was trying to reach his rifle with his left hand. The sling was caught under Hodicky's knee.

“You bastard, you killed him!” shrieked the Federal. The muzzle flash of his rifle flared magenta in Hodicky's goggles. An impact sledged the little private backward over Quade.

The Federal's cheeks and eyes bulged momentarily. There was a tiny hole in the bridge of his nose and another, perfectly matching, in the back as he pitched forward.

“You sons of bitches coming or you going to wait for a private car?” roared Jo Hummel as she jerked Quade to his feet. Firing was still general now, but it seemed to be concentrated on the moving vehicles rather than on the truck park itself. Trooper Powers hunched in the angle of a truck body and cab. Her weapon was shouldered and ready for another target.

“Christ, Pavel,” the black-haired man cried.

Sergeant Hummel knew that the three of them were in the open. Shots could rip lethally from the darkness before Bunny had a prayer of reacting to the gunners. But Hummel knew also that the deserters had saved the necks of troops they did not know when they started the truck careening westward. The Sergeant reached past Quade to lay her palm on Hodicky's chest. “Hell,” she said, “the pump's fine and I don't see any blood. Gimme a hand and I'll carry him.”

Quade was too battered to protest as the Sergeant raised his friend for a packstrap carry. Hodicky's left cross-belt flapped around his knees. Powers stepped to them. She slashed the whole bandolier away with a knife she slid from Hummel's boot sheath. A bullet had struck the bandolier over the deserter's left shoulder. It had disintegrated on and with the two loaded magazines in the pouch. The loaded ammunition was electrically primed. It was as little affected by heat or shock as so much clay. The impact had ripped the tough fabric of the bandolier, however, and it had stunned the man wearing it.

“Well, we bought them some time,” Hummel muttered as she handed her burden through the fence to Private Quade. Hodicky was beginning to drool, but he had not yet regained consciousness. “I only hope they know how to use it up there.”

The three soldiers looked instinctively toward the northern ridgeline. Its dark silence was the best proof they had that their mission had succeeded.

*   *   *

“The Lieutenant says the lead team's through the mines, sir,” Sergeant Mboko reported to Albrecht Waldstejn.

The Cecach officer gave a bleak smile. They were all accepting his leadership as if he had a real rank among them; and as if he knew what the hell he was doing. But one thing the tall officer had learned even before he was conscripted was that crises were best handled by people who were willing to make decisions. Fasolini's mercenaries might have gained only a day of life; but they did have that day over what staying in their shelters would have given them.

Sergeant Mboko was thinking along the same lines. Aloud he said, “I wanted to take a truck. The Colonel said it'd be suicide. He was right a lot of the time.”

After a moment, the mercenary said, “The background on Cecach looked pretty clean. Stalemate at the Front, that's not so bad. Real wackos on the other side, but the Federals who wanted to hire us about as decent as anybody in the middle of a war.”

“Old data,” said Waldstejn softly.

“Yeah,” Mboko agreed, “about a year old. The Rubes got heavy armor, the Front went to hell. And the folks running things in Praha seem to have figured that if they're crazier bastards than the Rubes, then they'll
beat
the Rubes. Wrong both times, I guess.…”

From the modest height of the ridge, the two men had an excellent view of what was happening in the valley. There were a few riflemen firing uselessly from the Complex and outlying bunkers. Most of the garrison seemed to be concentrating on lobbing rockets into the two trucks. Both vehicles were beyond the westernmost bunkers of the compound, but only the first was still moving. The damaged second ore hauler had skidded and overturned when a rocket destroyed all the drive fans on its right side. Rounds continued to crash into it one or two a minute, now that it was immobilized. The white flashes reached the watchers in false synchronous with the booming of earlier warheads.

No one could have survived in the riddled cargo bay of the first truck, but Waldstejn thought for a moment that the vehicle itself might drift out of sight along the diminishing pylons. Then there was a hiss unlike anything else that had savaged the valley that night. The laser cannon had lifted from Gun Pit West, and its tube was cherry red.

Mboko cursed and shouldered his weapon. It was a long shot, but a large target and a fragile one.

The Cecach deserter touched Mboko's arm. “Let them,” he said. “We're all dead, remember?”

“You know,” said the Sergeant, “most times you get a really nasty war, it's planets that a couple different nations colonized together, different planets. You people here— one foundation, everybody Czech.… But you managed the job pretty well, didn't you?”

The laser drew a pale line across the night. The beam was pulsed so that metal subliming from the target would not scatter it in a reflecting fog, but the modulations were at too high a rate for human retinas to respond to them. Twenty-five square centimeters of the truck's plating flashed from red to white to black as the metal vaporized and the apparatus within the plenum chamber took the beam directly. Steel burned when severed cables shorted input from the receiving antenna into the hull. The gun continued to play on the glowing wreckage.

“You better go, sir,” Mboko said without looking away from the spectacle. “I'll bring in the rear guard, never fear.”

As Waldstejn started to move off, he heard the Sergeant say, “Colonel was right a lot of the time. But he still hired us out to these Federal sons of bitches.”

CHAPTER SIX

The radioed summons had been to Ensign Brionca's office at the 522nd Headquarters building. Vladimir Ortschugin noticed immediately, however, that the real power there lay with the Republican chaplain. The holes punched during the fighting thirty-six hours before had been patched with plastic sheeting, but the building still smelled of burnt insulation.

For that matter, the Swobodan spaceman caught a whiff of Major Lichtenstein's body also. It hung as an object lesson from the boom of a crane parked just outside. The Major's neck had stretched so that his right boot drew little circles in the dust as his body twisted. Formally, the Republicans had executed Lichtenstein for failing to prevent the loss of much of the mercenaries' valuable equipment. Personally, Ortschugin wondered whether the Republicans would have deemed the offense punishable by death if they had been able to imagine any other use for the fat, drunken Major.

Ortschugin strolled into what had been the Major's office. He bowed and said, “Excellency, I am Acting Captain Vladimir Ortschugin, a free citizen of Novaya Swoboda. I am at your service.”

Ortschugin had gained a few hours observation of the men who had conquered Smiricky #4. The Swobodan was aware now that his assumption of ‘business as usual' had been seriously in error. Perhaps the very highest officers thought in terms of political and economic realities. Most Rubes, however, were on a mission for their Lord.

The slim, dark Republican officer did not speak. He rose from his chair instead and walked over to the spacer. The Republican uniform was taupe colored, a shade too dull even to be called black. Perhaps at base it was a yellow of infinite drabness, like a mole's hide. The Republican wore no insignia of rank, but Ortschugin did not need Captain Brionca's obvious terror to recognize the man's authority.

The Republican touched the chain which was barely visible at the throat of the Swobodan's tunic. He tugged out the small crucifix attached to it, still without speaking. With a single jerk of his hand, the Republican broke the chain and dropped the little icon on the floor. As his boot ground the silver against the tile, the Republican said, “On Cecach we no longer worship a dead god, Captain. We worship the One Who is Risen. This will be your only warning.” He returned to his chair.