The Forlorn Hope (15 page)

The convoy had been reversing manually in the dark, and one of the vehicles had managed to slip its skirt over the skirt of the next ahead. Because the branch to 4B had less than half the available power of the main line, the fans had not responded as the driver had expected when he tried to correct the tilt. The whole business had demonstrated an ineptitude striking even for the Transport Service.

Now, though, as dusk blurred the far slope to gray suede, there was a chance that the accident would save everybody in the Smiricky garrison who deserved saving.

“What's it loaded with?” asked Lieutenant ben Mehdi. The voices of troopers echoed from the back of the vehicle.

“Hey, everybody out!” ben Mehdi added. “I don't want people screwing around when it may be stuff we need. Bastien—” he waved to a Leading Trooper in Mboko's section— “get your team together and start off-loading the cargo.”

“It was all supplies for the Complex, so I wasn't really concerned,” said Waldstejn, walking toward the back himself. Sergeant Jensen had gone off to find a cable to right the truck. The other three mercenary leaders appeared to drift with him. “From the codes on the manifest, it wasn't food, dammit. Probably drill bits for—”

“Jesus Christ,
watch that!
” screamed Sergeant Hummel as two soldiers swung a case from the truck to the ground. “That's explosives!”

The packing case was banded with gray plastic. It hung from the fingertips of the men who had just released it. All their efforts could do was to drag them after the case. It hit the ground with a thump and a spurt of dust. There was dead silence around the vehicle.

“Well,” said Lieutenant Waldstejn testily, “I don't know what the problem is. They weren't going to pack detonators in with the explosives, after all.” Tense faces loosened as the Cecach officer stepped to the case and rubbed grit from its warning label with his open palm.

Johanna Hummel looked a little embarrassed also. Without hesitation, however, she said, “Lieutenant, I've been places where they tried to stabilize nitrogylcerin with mica. When I saw the red star—” she nodded at the label—“I didn't wait around.”

“Well, on Cecach we use plastic explosives,” Waldstejn retorted defensively. “We're civilized, even if we don't have all the high tech electronics—” He stopped and turned back to Hummel. “Forgive me, Sergeant,” he said. “You were obviously right. And if we're civilized, then the way we've treated you and the Company gives little enough proof of it.”

“Well, we still need to get it the hell out of the truck, don't we?” remarked Sergeant Mboko. “It's going to be a bitch to right anyway.” In a louder voice he ordered, “Carry on, Bastien, but make a chain, will you? Don't just toss the stuff around like so many sand bags.”

“Ah, Sergeant Hummel,” Waldstejn said, “start your troops cutting brush on the far side of the truck.” The Cecach officer forced himself to face Hummel. He felt awkward about giving orders to any of the mercenaries, but it had to be done—for all their sakes. Hussein ben Mehdi and the two male sergeants made it easy with an acceptance that met him more than half way.

Jo Hummel made nothing easy. Her attitude was a challenge, while her sex—and her apparent sexual preference—aggravated Waldstejn's discomfort. Now she said, “Look, Lieutenant, I hope to God you don't think you can turn this low crap—” she waved a hand— “into levers to help pry the truck up with. My section's tired. Since there's no straight branches as long as your dick, I don't see—”

“I believe, Sergeant,” Waldstejn interrupted, grasping the nettle, “that we can wedge a mat of brush under the side as soon as we get it off the ground. That way if the cable slips, we don't start over from the beginning. Now, if you'll give that order, I want to talk with you in private.” He jerked a thumb to the side, away from the vehicle and the troops around it.

Hummel pursed her lips. Beside her, Trooper Powers squatted on the ground. She had taken off her helmet and was kneading her temples wearily through her bright blond hair. “Yes sir,” Hummel said. She raised a finger to key the radio.

The reconnaissance drone, jinking around brush scarcely three meters above the ground, sailed over them like the first of the shells it surely presaged.

*   *   *

Trooper Herzenberg's light-wand trembled, throwing the shadow of the mine elevator over the far wall in a quivering circle. She was exhausted with the long march. Sight of the cable they had been sent for brought no elation, only a shudder at the new job it presented. “Guns,” she called, “here's one that's still up. Want me to climb out and cut loose the cage?”

There were three shafts at the pit head for reasons which no one in Jensen's section could fathom. All three were covered by a single high, sheet-metal building over fifty meters long. Two of the elevator cages were at or near the bottom of their shafts. The third, which Herzenberg had been sent to check, had a winding drum full of cable. The newly-recruited trooper still found the difficulties attending the mass of braided steel to be insoluble.

Guiterez strolled over to her before Sergeant Jensen himself arrived. The big building was unlighted except for what entered through rust holes and the pairs of windows high in either roof gable. To eyes adapted to the daylight outside, the small patches of brightness were more dazzling than useful. Guiterez took the dim light as an invitation to lay his hand on Herzenberg's solid hip. The gesture was more of a caress than a pat. The female trooper was almost too tired to bat him away, but she twisted and the butt of her slung weapon cracked Guiterez across the knuckles.

“Hell, honey,” said the veteran, ignoring the rebuff, “you don't need to risk that sweet little ass of yours.” He knelt, resting his gun barrel on the shaft railing.

“Hold up, Tilly,” Jensen replied on the radio. “I'll take a look at it.” The whisper of his words followed their radio shadow through the air of the big room.

Guiterez flipped the holographic sight picture up to full magnification. The braided elevator cable shimmered at an apparent fifteen centimeters from his right pupil. Four orange lines rayed from the center. The greatest advantage of the electronic sight over an optical one was that there was no tube for heavy recoil to slam against the shooter's brow ridge.

The cable quivered across the field of view despite Guiterez' attempts to steady it. The picture slowed as he took a deep breath.

“Look,” Herzenberg said, “Guns says—”

The shot blasted. There was a momentary fluorescent tremble of sabot material and a flash from the cable. The needle-slim projectile was far too small to sever a one-centimeter cable. Instead, it drilled a neat hole which made no significant difference in the strength of the multiple, redundant strands.

“God
damn
it, Dog,” one of the approaching crewmen shouted, “will you stop clowning around?”

“Well, I thought—” Guiterez said, standing up sheepishly. He lowered his weapon and massaged his shoulder.

“If you'd thought,” said Sergeant Jensen harshly, “you'd have known we could do without the last—” he eyed the angle of cable from the take-up drum, through the support pulley, and down again to the elevator itself— “four meters with what there is on the drum.” The tall section leader reached up with his cutting bar. He positioned it carefully on the highest part of the cable he could reach with his hip supported by the guard rail. Then he slashed downward and parted the cable with a single stroke. The short end of the cable flew up with a twang of released tension. The cage dropped a centimeter or so before its automatic braking system locked it to the guide rails with a horrible scrunch.

“That,” said the Sergeant-Gunner, “is what you'd have done if you'd thought.” He was taking quick breaths which belied the apparent ease of what he had just done. Almost anyone else in the unit would have needed several strokes to cut the braided steel. “Now,” Jensen continued, “you and Herzenberg cut through the axle on both sides.” He tapped the drum. It rocked a little now that its ratchet no longer supported the weight of the elevator. “We'll roll the bastard down the hill and save ourselves the trouble of dragging the cable.”

There was a shot, then a crackling volley from outside the shed. The veterans slipped their weapons into their hands. Herzenberg followed suit a moment later.

“Guns to White One,” Jensen called on the command push. “Give me a sitrep.”

Instead of the requested situation report, there was an crackle of static and a few words in what might have been Sergeant Mboko's voice.

The Gunner looked around at the sheet metal and dim tracery of girders surrounding them. “We've got to get outside to hear anything,” he said. “You two—” he pointed to Guiterez and the newbie— “get cracking. We may need the truck ready yesterday if somebody's caught us.” With the other two members of the gun crew at his heels, Jensen began sprinting for the distant door.

Herzenberg and Guiterez looked at one another. Swallowing, they laid down their guns and unclipped their cutting bars. As their blades rasped against the axle in distinct rhythms, the firing beyond the walls ceased.

*   *   *

The first trooper to fire at the reconnaissance drone missed by a country mile. The drone had a three-meter wingspan and a speed of less than a hundred kph—but it was as unexpected as a bomb in a flower basket. Satellite recce was impossible amidst laser cannon and stratosphere-launched penetrators. Satellites became orbital junk within minutes of starting their first pass over hostile territory. High altitude aircraft were in an even worse plight.

But a vehicle which whirred along near the ground, tacking often and randomly as it ran its programmed course, was preserved by terrain irregularities from the weapons that wrecked its higher-flying brethren.

The drone was powered by an almost silent high-bypass turbofan. The intake cowling looked large above the slim, armored cigar carrying the fuel and instrument package, but the engine had been deliberatedly understressed in the expectation that it would pick up trash and bullets in the normal course of its existence. Still, the drone was slow enough that almost anyone in the Company could have demolished it, despite its twitching changes of direction, if there had been a clear field of view. The trooper who glanced up to see the rotor sailing toward his face at a hundred klicks went straight over on his back. For navigational purposes, the drone treated the soldiers as if they were bushes. The drone lifted to clear the truck behind him as it would have cleared the man himself—by a meter. His shot was scarcely into the same sector of sky as the fog-gray wings that flashed above him.

“Maria!” Waldstejn blurted as the drone flicked overhead. Around him more experienced troopers were snatching at weapons whose slings were entangled with the straps of cast-off packs. Shots thrashed the brush as the drone skipped away downstream. Then somebody planted a boot in the small of Waldstejn's back and thrust him out of the way without ceremony.

Private Quade, fifty meters away with the last of the Company, had more warning than the soldiers around the truck, and his assault rifle could spray rounds toward what seemed a hopeless target for aimed fire. The right wing lifted as the drone banked left, its body out of sight below mounds of coarse scrub. The gray-brown camouflage mottling of the upper surface was suddenly puckered by three bright specks—holes punched by Quade's offhand burst. The right wingtip dropped and the left one rose, further away as the drone threaded its way out of the shot-spitting pocket. It was effectively undamaged, and no further shots could be expected to—

A gun went off directly above Albrecht Waldstejn's head. He twisted on the ground to curse the shooter who was both wasting ammunition and threatening to deafen him. Out of the corner of his eye, Waldstejn saw the drone again. It was flipping skyward, end over end, in a spray of sparks and fuel which then ignited in an orange flash. A projectile had coursed the cylindrical body the long way, taking no more account of the armor than it had the brush through which it had drilled to reach its target. The drone spun, shedding its wings as it did so. Open-mouthed, the Cecach lieutenant watched Iris Powers put a needless second round through the center of the fireball. The drone blew up on the ground, another flash above the scrub and a pillar of black smoke.

Powers began to switch magazines. She had braced her trim buttocks against the top of the truck's plenum chamber when she shot. By leaning forward at the waist, she had avoided having her shoulder broken between the recoil and the immobile mass of the truck.

“How in the hell did you do that?” Waldstejn demanded as he got to his feet. “It was out of
sight
—the body of it, I mean.”

The section leaders were still shouting into their radios to stop troopers from firing toward the smoke.

Powers blushed. A wisp of blond hair curled from beneath her helmet and across her cheek. “From where the wing was, the body had to be—where I aimed,” she said. She spoke so quietly that Waldstejn had almost to read her lips since the shooting had partly deafened him.

“Goddam good work, Bunny,” said Sergeant Hummel as she hugged her friend. Powers was slipping two loose rounds into the magazine she had just taken from her weapon. “I think we're clear, Lieutenant,” Hummel continued. Her tone was businesslike but no longer hostile. “We're low enough here—” she gestured in the direction of the stream and the fuming remains of the drone—“that it can't have been in radio contact with its base when Bu—Trooper Powers hit it.” Hummel and Waldstejn exchanged tight smiles. “So they don't know we're here.”

“Well, we may not be so lucky the next time,” Waldstejn said. “Pick the six best shots in the Company and put them on look-out until we get moving.” He smiled again, his lips as taut as his guts. “And Private Quade, he should be among them. Mboko, let's get moving on this truck. We need—”