The Forlorn Hope (2 page)

“If you say so, Churchie,” the big man said after further consideration. He stared up the slope behind them. Del had done most of the heavy work involved in the project, digging the trench and manhandling the fuel tank into position. Churchie alone had chosen the path through the belt of air-sown mines that ringed the ridge, though. “I just…,” Del said. “Well, aren't we a long way from the shelter if somebody attacks?”

“Attacks!” his companion repeated incredulously. “Attacks?” He waved his long, dirty fingers in an arc across the horizon of brush, grass, and silence. “Do you see an attack? Do you see anything? You've been listening to the radio, haven't you?” Dwyer pointed accusingly at Del's chest. “Seven years in this business and you don't know that what
any
government says is a lie? Look, when there's going to be an attack,
I'll
tell—”

High overhead to the west, they caught the flash of the starship starting its bombing run.

Del Hoybrin was dumb as a post, but he was experienced and his reflexes had kept him alive before. The big man jumped up, heading for their shelter, and Churchie Dwyer tackled him before those reflexes could get his friend killed.

Del came down on his face with a thump and a squawk. “Not there!” Churchie screamed, “here!” He began to slap madly at the coals with the butt of his gun. Some of them scattered into the brush. The rest stirred into bright orange life.

“Huh?” said Del.

The big man might just have been able to bound three hundred meters uphill in the time available, Churchie knew. What Del could not have done, no way in hell, was to run full-tilt up the crooked path without stumbling into a mine. That left one choice, a bad one, but better than no shelter at all when the shrapnel sleeted in. Furiously, Churchie Dwyer tried to brush the coals out of the trench. After a moment, Del began to help. He was used to doing things which he did not understand.

They were veterans. They ignored the sonic boom, ignored also the siren that panicked the indigenous troops in the compound. When the clusters began to separate in the sky overhead, however, Del paused and looked at his companion. “Churchie?” he said.

Dwyer reversed his gun again and jerked its charging handle with his left hand. The stabilized plastic stock was now mottled with gray blisters. It was hot enough to singe cloth. Churchie spaced five fast shots down the length of the makeshift reactor. Mash and half-fermented beer sprayed from each entrance and exit hole, sizzling on the coals beneath.

Fasolini's troopers carried cone-bore weapons. They squeezed down their projectiles at pressures which only barrels of synthetic diamond, grown as a single molecular unit, could withstand. At the muzzle, an osmium needle was expelled at over three thousand meters per second. The fluorocarbon sabot which had acted as a gas check in the bore was gaseous itself by the time it spurted out behind the needle. The weapons were specialized; but it benefitted mercenary soldiers, like whores, to be able to provide specialized services for their customers. The gun was meant to bust armor and brick walls. It opened the fuel tank like one of Jack the Ripper's girlfriends.

Churchie flung the weapon aside. “Come on!” he shrieked at his companion. He rolled into the trench. Del blinked, then obeyed.

The edge of the cloud of bomblets swept over the brew vessel in its fury. The two mercenaries were already screaming.

*   *   *

Sergeant-Gunner Roland Jensen clacked down the loading gate of the automatic cannon which was both his duty and his darling. “There, Herzenberg,” he said to the plump trainee,
“that's
how you insert a fresh can. Now, I want you to line up five more cans for continuous feeding.”

Trooper Tilly Herzenberg looked doubtful, but there was nothing in the section leader's blond arrogance to suggest that he was not serious. Putting her back in it, she slid a second drum of ammunition across the base plate to align with the drum Jensen had just loaded. Cooper, Pavlovich, and Guiterez, the veteran crewmen, watched and stuck knives in the dirt.

The automatic cannon was the only crew-served weapon in Fasolini's Company. It was the apotheosis of the shoulder weapons which most of the troopers carried. What the individual guns could do to light armor, Jensen's cannon could do to most tanks.

The cannon had a single barrel which was a trifle over three meters long. The bore at the muzzle was seven millimeters. Through it blasted a five-hundred gram osmium pencil which had with its sabot a diameter of twenty millimeters when it was slammed into the breech.

The relationship of projectile to recoil impulse was a constant before an ape man threw a rock and fell backwards off his branch. Nothing armorers have done in succeeding ages has changed that relationship in the least. The diamond bore and modern propellants made it possible to push the cannon shot to literally astronomical velocities, but the base and receiver had to be massive to slow the recoil to the point its pounding did not shatter the gun. The cannon mount had its own treads and motor. It served as well to draw a caisson of ammunition. Sergeant Jensen drove from the little saddle forward; and the rest of the crew hoofed it or found their own transport on a move.

Guiterez jumped up. “Sarge,” he said, “what was that in the sky?”

Cooper and Pavlovich had been on Sedalia when Imperial spacers had free run above them. They dived for the shelter. Guiterez recognized an answer even when it was not verbal. He threw himself in with his buddies.

Roland Jensen glanced up at the thin, icteric track the starship had drawn across the heavens. His eyes were as pale as the sky. “Right, Herzenberg,” he said in a mild voice, “I'll take over now. I want you to raise the muzzle to 45°.” Ammo drums weighed sixty kilos loaded; Jensen slid one of them into position with either hand. “Use the gauge like I showed you.”

“S-sarge,” the trainee said, looking at the shelter opening. When she had enlisted three months before on Beauty, she was unaware that Fasolini had already contracted with the Federalists on Cecach, thirty-seven light years from her home. In fact, the Company had enrolled her—without any particular qualification of strength or skill—solely to make up the contract Table of Organization in a hurry.

She dropped into the gunner's seat and punched the gun live. Then she heeled up the rocker switch to elevate the muzzle as directed.

Sergeant Jensen was snapping the feed lips of each ammunition drum into the female connector of the drum ahead of it. Rigging them this way increased the chance of malfunction, but neither he nor any of his crew were going to pop up to feed a fresh can in normal fashion.

“Sarge, I'm ready,” said the trainee in a voice raised two octaves by the sonic boom a moment before.

Jensen locked the last can in place and leaped to the gun. Leaning across Herzenberg to get a sight line, he rotated the cannon mount 10° to the right to eyeball it in line with the track down which the starship had disappeared. The gun had electronic sights that would spike a gnat at a kilometer, but at this instant there was neither time nor a hard target for them.

With his right hand, Jensen threw the Continuous Fire toggle. His left hand grasped Trooper Herzenberg by the collar, and he lunged for the shelter. The muzzle blasts of the cannon were so loud that the rain of bombs was a flickering white light, not a sound, to the cowering gun crew.

*   *   *

Warned by the flash, Trooper Iris Powers grabbed her boots and jumped into her shelter. Lieutenant Hussein ben Mehdi was right behind her.

The shelters were half-cylinders, each grown from a single crystal of beryllium. The shelters would not stop a shell or even a bullet at any normal range, but they were generally proof against the tiny splinters spraying from overhead bursts. That was the threat against which foot-soldiers since the Napoleonic Wars had been least able to protect themselves.

Shelters were light, but they did not fold up like the canvas tents for which they substituted. The rigid bulk of thirty curved plates, three meters long by two across, required as much transport as the Company's ammunition did. Like self-camouflaging uniforms and a considerable allowance for target practice during stand-downs, the expense and administrative hassle of the shelters was simply a matter of plant maintenance. Fasolini's plant was not hardware but the Company itself, the trained, effective troops who could command top dollar and could be expected to survive for another lucrative contract.

Turning the curved roof of a shelter into real living quarters required considerable effort. The ground had to be ditched out at least deep enough that its occupants could lie flat below the shrapnel of nearby ground bursts. In addition, those who failed to raise coamings around their shelters could expect to be swimming the next time it rained. At Smiricky #4, most of the troopers had paid civilian miners to dig them in. Powers and Sergeant Hummel had chosen to do the job themselves. The walls of their dug-out were as deep and plumb as those of Colonel Fasolini's Operations Center.

That did not make the shelter spacious, a fact which suited ben Mehdi very well indeed at the moment. The Lieutenant was of middle height with a wrestler's build and a smooth, dark complexion. He was the only other ‘officer' in Fasolini's Company, but he was not really the Colonel's second in command. His rank was due neither to his military prowess nor to his administrative ability. Fasolini had an accountant's brain under his coarse exterior, but that exterior itself could be a handicap in negotiations. The Colonel used ben Mehdi, his ‘Executive Officer', as a suave front in conference rooms where polish and a raised eyebrow were worth more money than all the bluster in the world.

Hussein ben Mehdi had no general distaste for garrison duty, but Smiricky #4 was three hundred kilometers from even a decent brothel. The Lieutenant was bored, and the attack seemed to have been arranged precisely to help with the project by which he hoped to improve his time. He moved fast enough to be inside Powers' shelter when the sonic boom rattled it, but he was careful not to brush dirt on his uniform either.

“Oh!” said Trooper Powers. She had just taken off her left sock. Her toe-nails were varnished a deep scarlet. In confusion, the blonde trooper twisted the bare foot under her and picked up one of her boots.

“Any port in a storm, hey Powers?” said Lieutenant ben Mehdi with a warm smile. “Hope you don't mind the intrusion.” He reached out to grip between his thumb and forefinger the boot which Powers held. Ben Mehdi's fingers were long, their nails perfectly shaped. There was enough strength in them to pluck the boot away from someone much huskier than the petite blonde who faced him now.

The shelter roof was translucent. It filtered light heavily toward the blue end of the spectrum. That alien tinge heightened Powers' look of tension as she huddled toward the corner of the dug-out. The two bed-rolls, hers and Sergeant Hummel's, were parallel with a narrow aisle between them. They were on wooden frames which kept them off the floor. The frames were low enough, however, that the dug-out's occupants could sit up without risking their heads to shrapnel through the unprotected ends of the shelter. Hussein ben Mehdi leaned forward as he sat on the bunk beside Powers. She gasped as the Lieutenant dropped the boot he had taken from her and hooked her right sock with an index finger. “Lieutenant?” the Trooper said. His left arm slid behind her shoulders despite her efforts to press herself tighter against the wall of the dug-out.

The anti-personnel bombs lashed down like the wind-driven edge of a hail storm. Each bomblet was about the size of a man's thumb, a tiny segment of a cylinder, more or less the same as the tens of thousands of others released from the same cluster. They armed on impact and detonated a half second later, generally when they had bounced a meter or two back into the air. They spread a sleet of tiny shrapnel which stripped trees and killed all unprotected animals in the target area. After an attack, hundreds of bomblets which had failed to go off the first time lay in the grass, ready to shatter the leg of anyone walking carelessly.

Inside the shelter, the flashes lighted the mussed bedrolls with savage brilliance. The crackling detonations merged into a single prolonged roar. One large fragment sailed through both plastic end-sheets with a buzz that vibrated on the back of ben Mehdi's neck rather than in his ears.

“They'll be making another couple passes, of course,” the Lieutenant said as he reached for the zipper at the throat of Powers' tunic. The vicious crack of the automatic cannon a kilometer away was an irritation now that the bomblets were only occasional thumps delayed by a freak of chemistry. “It won't be safe for anyone to leave their shelters for, well, plenty of time,” ben Mehdi went on. He brushed aside the hand Powers raised to block his. He began to unzip her. “You know,” he said, “you're a very attractive woman, Iris.”

The little blond whipped her left fist around at Hussein's face. The blade of her spring knife was no longer than a finger, but that would have taken it to the Lieutenant's brain if he had not been expecting the attack.

Ben Mehdi caught Powers' wrist with his right hand while his left still clamped her other arm to her body. She tried to twist the knife to cut the sinews across the back of the officer's hand, but her weapon was a spike with no real edge. Hussein ben Mehdi increased the pressure of his grip until his thumb stood out in a pool of white skin on the woman's wrist. Then he gave a quick snap as if casting with a fly rod. The knife skittered out of her numb fingers.

“Now that's a friendly way to treat a guest, is it?” the Lieutenant said. His face still smiled, but his lips were drawn as hard as his teeth. “Now, Hummel's in the OC, so we're going to be alone till the All Clear sounds. And I
know
you like men, baby, because I
saw
you last night with one of the zoomies from the
Katyn Forest.
That's what light amplifiers are for, right? Now, I'm a man, and just to prove it—”