The Forlorn Hope (14 page)

The back of Ortschugin's neck was stinging, but he was not sure whether the drops crawling down his vertebrae were sweat or blood. He swallowed to be able to say, “Yes, Excellency, I understand.”

“You know your ship has been confiscated for trading with idolators,” the Republican said as if he really did assume that would be obvious to the Swobodan. “What will be required to fly it back to Budweis?”

“Well, Excellency—” Ortschugin began.

“I am not an ‘Excellency', foreigner!” the Republican officer broke in. “Only our Lord is excellent. You may refer to me as Chaplain Bittman, if you desire.”

Ortschugin nodded obsequiously. What he
desired.…
But if he were to survive the next minutes, much less lift again from this
damnable
planet.… “Yes, Chaplain Bittman,” he said aloud. “The hull damage will not prevent us from operating in an atmosphere, though of course we could not, ah, go off-planet under such circumstances.” That was a lie—they could work ship in pressure suits if they ever got a powerplant. The discomfort would be a damned cheap price for a return to Swoboda. “But we still need a main fusion bottle. We can't lift on the auxilliary power unit, and we couldn't stay up for more than a few minutes on it alone if we did lift.” And that was almost the truth, more was the pity, or the
Katyn Forest
would have been long gone.

“What about the broadcast antenna you rigged?” asked Captain—Ensign, now—Brionca unexpectedly.

The two men looked at her—Bittman in cool surprise, Ortschugin with an expression he prayed did not reflect his horror at the question. “Yes, tell us about that,” prodded the Chaplain. “You have fitted an antenna to take you to Praha along the truck pylons?”

“We had, ah, considered, doing that, yes,” the spaceman answered carefully. He decided that only the simple truth was going to work. That bitch Brionca was staring at him sullenly. Her uniform looked as if she had slept in it. Her eyes looked as if she had not slept for a week. “The power hook-up proved possible—” they could check the ship and see that— “but there are delays in the alignment controls. The program is simple compared to our ordinary navigational work, of course, but it's very different.…” Ortschugin let his voice trail off. Sweat from his forehead made his eyes sting, but he was afraid to raise his hand to wipe them. Saint Nicolas be with us now!

Bittman stood again. He was showing the first signs of real interest since his eyes had stopped measuring Ortschugin for a rope. No one had suggested that the spaceman sit down. His knees were beginning to quiver with the unaccustomed brace in which tension was holding him. “You mean that your whole huge starship can run on broadcast power in good truth?” the Chaplain demanded.

“We, ah, thought perhaps so,” the Swobodan agreed. “We didn't test it before the Complex, ah—”

“Yes, was liberated,” Chaplain Bittman finished for Ortschugin. He added, in a voice which had no more expression or mercy than the clack of a trap closing, “I advise you not to ‘test' the system now, either, Captain. The idolators are attempting to make a stand along the line between here and Praha—they know how important it will be to the future of the Return to God. Elements of the three armored regiments are pushing them back. Major elements.” Bittman permitted himself a smile at something he probably thought was funny. “What do you suppose the concentrated fire of, say, four Terra-built tanks would do to the hull even of your starship, Captain?”

“We're at your service, E-Chaplain Bittman,” the spacer said through dry lips, “but the pylons do lead only west from here.”

“For the moment!” the Chaplain retorted with a zeal that shone across his slim, swarthy face. “Do you know why this line is crucial to the Lord's work, Captain?” he demanded rhetorically. “Because the fusion plant here, for the mining and smelting operations, was more than big enough to energize a broadcast system as well. That means that when we complete a temporary link from our own system east of Bradova, we have a channel for the heaviest, bulkiest supplies straight to the idolators' capital! Our armor is the head of the spear plunging into the heart of schism and idolatry!”

For the moment, Ortschugin's mind made of him an engineer again and not merely a victim. He understood the situation perfectly. Pylons were easy enough to raise and align. They were, after all, little more than lattices with two pairs of antennas. The lower alignments beamed power to whatever vehicle was equipped to receive it, while the upper alignments charged the system itself. Cutting a pylon would prevent vehicles from proceeding until the gap was repaired, but the other parts of the system would continue to function.

If
it were energized from both sides of the gap.

Republicans and Federalists both had crisscrossed their sides of the Front with branch lines to supply their troops. The power and load capacity of the branches was limited, however. The working, full-scale fusion plant of Smiricky #4 could very well tip the scales. The next Republican thrust would not outrun its supplies and so be contained, the way previous victories had been.

Ensign Brionca understood also. She was looking at her hands, interlaced on the desk in front of her. Her fingers were not moving, but each nail left a bloodless white halo on the back of the hand where it rested. For the first time, Captain Ortschugin felt a twinge of sympathy for her.

“Well, that's good news—that we'll be able to repair your vessel,” the Republican chaplain was continuing briskly. “But that was only one of the things we needed to discuss with you.” He sat down. His voice was cool again, his face composed. Bittman had become a human being who no longer wore the mantle of the Lord. “I am informed that you had personal contact with the mercenaries who were stationed here and with the—” He paused, with his mouth quirked in irritation.

“The Supply Officer,” Ensign Brionca said. She did not look up. “Lieutenant Waldstejn. Albrecht Waldstejn.”

“Yes, the Supply Officer,” the Republican agreed with a sharp glance at Brionca. He turned his attention to the spaceman. “What do you know about their intentions, where they planned to go?”

Ortschugin's face went blank in surprise. “Go?” he repeated. “Well, Praha, I suppose.… But good Christ, you don't mean that—”

“Never curse again on the soil of Cecach!” Bittman said.

Ortschugin nodded and swallowed. “Yes, Ex-C-Chaplain. I, ah, I was very surprised that any of the—of them had survived. We watched the trucks being blasted on our screens, you see.”

“There was no one in the wreckage,” the Ensign said dully. “No sign of anything human, not even a driver. They all walked out while we were shooting at empty trucks.”

“Yes,” said the Chaplain with another look of appraisal, “we may have executed Major Lichtenstein more painlessly than his actions deserved. But as for you, Captain Ortschugin—” the voice was the voice of a computer, balancing accounts for the Lord— “I would not have you think that this is a minor matter, a few heretics. We
will
find these—persons, with the Lord's help. Even now we are searching their most likely hiding place. If you can help us, well and good.”

Like a yo-yo, Ortschugin thought as the Chaplain rose again, but there was no humor on the spacer's face or even on the surface of his mind.

“If you know something of their intentions and you do not tell us,” Bittman continued, his face like wood and his voice like steel, “then be assured that the prisoners we take will speak, will tell us everything they know before they die. If you have hidden anything from us, you will join those you tried to protect.”

“I know nothing of their plans,” the Swobodan said. He cleared his throat. “I didn't know they
had
plans, and I thought they were all dead.” He paused. Then he added, “I suppose that was right, wasn't it? They are dead, Waldstejn and the rest. They just don't know it yet.”

*   *   *

“
Christ,
what a place to be buried,” muttered Churchie Dwyer.

“I didn't think there'd be whores,” Del Hoybrin agreed sadly. Even his long-time comrade had to turn to be sure that the big man was serious.

Before the outbreak of fighting, ore from Pit 4B had been rich enough to employ eighty to a hundred miners. A branch line connected the pit with the truck route between Praha and Smiricky #4. A line directly to the smelter complex would have been shorter, but there were two severe ridges in the way. Loaded trucks did not like hills. Neither did Churchie, but nobody was asking him.… The muscles of the veteran's shins burned with climbing as badly as if they and not his back had been broiled two days before.

The pylons leading south-west toward the main line flared their bract-like antennas not far above the scrub which had recovered most of the area. “The old man was really pissed when they dumped the truck here,” Pavel Hodicky remarked shyly. “I can see why, now. Even if everybody in the convoy was asleep, they should've heard the branches hitting the trucks, shouldn't they?”

Dwyer grunted as the trooper ahead of him released one of those branches. “Hell,” he said, “Lichtenstein was always pissed. Pissed on brandy.” His voice changed, taking on a reverential note which was blasphemous when applied to the images Churchie polished in his mind. “I know just how to sweat that brandy out of him, too. Sweat the marrow right out of his bones, for what he did to us.”

“Ah, I meant the Lieutenant,” Hodicky explained. “
He
was our boss.” He squeezed Quade's shoulder, trying to bring the black-haired man into the conversation.

The four of them, two veterans and two deserters, had been together since the escape. By the time Sergeant Hummel's commando had stumbled back to the Operations Center, the 522nd's aimed fire was concentrated on the truck line westward. All a rear guard could do then would be to draw the indigs' attention to the real escape route. Del and Churchie had joined their section leader unharmed. A rocket had sailed over them to demolish the front of the shelter, however. The Company's cone-bore weapons had no true muzzle flash because the propellant was fully consumed in the barrel. After continuous fire, though, a miasma of faintly-glowing sabot material had drifted in front of their position. It was that which had marked them for a Federal rocketeer who was a damned sight better than belonged in the 522nd.

Well, so were Quade and Hodicky in their ways, though that black-haired runt gave Churchie the creeps when their eyes met.

The company was straggling down to the overturned truck. It loomed out of the brush like a fish cast up with other flotsam by a high tide. Troopers were clambering over the vehicle. At its side stood the new command group. Sergeant Jensen was already leading his small section toward the buildings at the pit head. The Federal lieutenant was obvious for his sand-mottled fatigues among the woody blurs of the mercenaries around him. A bloody supply officer. Well, Mrs. Dwyer hadn't raised her sons to get their heads blown off like generally happened to leaders in this business. Churchie didn't give a hoot in Hell who was in charge, as long as they knew what they were doing. Officers who put men and bullets in the same category of fungible goods did not last long in mercenary units.

One of them had not lasted through his first firefight when he commanded Churchie Dwyer.

“Suppose there's anything worth having in the buildings?” the veteran asked, nodding through a gap in the brush.

“Doubt it,” Hodicky said, glancing to the side also. He was enough shorter than Dwyer that he could not see the pit head at the moment. From the hilltop, six grueling hours before, however, they had all gotten a glimpse of the shaft cover and the paired barracks. While the mine was in use, the valley was defoliated periodically just like that in which Smiricky #4 lay. Now from an angle, a sea of brush lapped the roofs. The regrowth of the brush was taller though still less dense than some of what the Company had just marched through miserably.

Between lyceum English and the blend of Slavic languages Dwyer had picked up during a life of slaughter and chicanery, the two men could communicate fairly well. Hodicky was pathetically grateful for the attention. The chance to actually give the veteran useful information was a delight. “The place was abandoned two, three years ago,” he explained. “There was still ore, but they couldn't keep workers. They'd bug out over the next ridge where there's a big farm, ride back to Praha in produce trucks. Or if they were Rubes, and a lot of them are sentenced to the mines instead of—well, sentenced to the mines … some of them would try to slip across the Front.”

The little man grimaced. He had known a few Reformed Brethren in school, though his home neighborhood had been almost solidly Catholic. The Rubes were all crazy, besides going to Hell for sure when they died. “They stationed troops around the Complex,” Hodicky continued, “that's what we were doing there. But it wasn't worth it for the outlying pits, it'd take too many guards for how much they were getting out of them.”

Waldstejn had often lectured his two subordinates in the warehouse for lack of anyone else in the 522nd for him to talk to. Hodicky, nearly as lonely himself, had listened to his present benefit.

They were close enough to the truck now that the press of troops standing around it hid more of the vehicle than the foliage did. The stream down the middle of the valley could be heard just beyond. “Well,” said Churchie Dwyer, “there might at least be some booze in there, right? Only fair, after this goddam hike that we ride back—”

And then, with reflexes that not even the thought of liquor had dulled, Dwyer was clearing his weapon.

*   *   *

“Well, nothing structurally wrong,” Lieutenant Waldstejn said. The drive fans rotated freely under the impulse of Sergeant Mboko's hand.