The Forlorn Hope (7 page)

Bertinelli began to curse under his breath. He moved the glove to his patient's left shoulder.

Del resumed his observation of the transponder balloon. “What does that mean, Churchie?” he asked.

His friend snorted again. All the humor was gone from his voice as he replied, “Wish to hell I knew, darling. Wish to hell. What I'm afraid it means is that Fasolini's Company is deep in shit.”

*   *   *

The only light in the Operations Center was the green glow of the phosphor screen. It emphasized the wrinkled anger of Colonel Fasolini's face as he said, “Gibberish! Goddam
gibberish!
”

Sookie Foyle snapped her fingers in frustration. “Look, Colonel,” she said, “I'm a Communicator, not a magician. You get me a copy of the code pad the indigs are using, and I'll let you know what they've got to say. Otherwise it's garbage—” she waved at the groups of meaningless letters which continued to crawl across the screen—“and it's going to stay garbage.”

The three sergeants—Mboko, Hummel, and Jensen—stirred restively in the darkness. They were the tacticians of the Company, but the present situation was too amorphous for their skills to be of any use. Lieutenant ben Mehdi bent forward and said, “We don't have to read the transmissions to know what they're saying, do we, Guido? The only thing we don't know is the exact terms the Major's holding out for—and that doesn't matter to us, because we ought to be making terms with the Republicans for ourselves, right now, before it all hits the fan. Otherwise, we wind up taking whatever we're offered.”

There was silence again in the OC. The Communicator looked at Fasolini. The skin at the corners of her eyes was tracked with sudden crow's feet. She did not speak.

“If it's the contract you're worried about,” ben Mehdi went on, “the
force majeure
provision clearly—”

“Shut up!”
the Colonel snapped. His subordinates froze. “Sorry, Hussein,” Fasolini went on in a tired voice. He rubbed his face with his palms. “You see, I tried that before I called you in, bounced a signal to the Rube CinC, Yorck, on his internal push.” The stocky man managed a smile and squeezed Foyle's shoulder. The Communicator beamed.

“They won't deal,” Fasolini went on, “not on any terms we can take. They don't like mercs, they don't use them themselves … and they like us even less than most.”

“They wouldn't deal on
any
terms?” ben Mehdi pressed with a frown.

Colonel Fasolini looked up. After a moment, he said, “No terms we can take. They're real unhappy about their starship this morning.” The only sound in the OC was the sigh of the fan in the communications terminal. “They know it was us that did it. They want the whole gun crew—” Fasolini neither raised his voice nor looked at Sergeant Jensen—“and every tenth man at random from the rest of the Company. The others they'll give passage off-planet without guns or equipment.” He shrugged. “I told Yorck if he showed himself within a klick of the compound, I'd personally blow him a new asshole.”

“
O
-kay,” said Sergeant Hummel. She appeared to be looking at nothing in particular, certainly not the Sergeant-Gunner beside her. “Let's don't wait around. Two trucks'll hold the personnel, the equipment we ditch and put in a claim for it at Praha.”

“Lichtenstein's got a guard on the trucks,” objected Sergeant Mboko. The sheen of his smooth, black face stood out above the absorptive cloth of his uniform.

“So he's got a bloody guard!” Hummel snapped. “They're the least of our problems. We grease them quiet, load the trucks, and
bam!
we're out of the compound and heading west before the indigs know what hit them. They can't shut off the power, because the pylons are energized from both ends of the line.”

“The
guards
may not be a problem,” retorted Sergeant Mboko, “but the bunkers on the perimeter are. There's a straight line of sight right down the pylons for what—three kilometers? Every bunker's got anti-tank rockets. Do you really think even the indigs are going to miss straight no-deflection shots with wire-guided missiles?”

Sergeant Jensen cleared his throat and spoke for the first time since Fasolini had dropped his bombshell. “It was not the crew who shot down their ship, Colonel,” said the big blond. “It was me alone. Perhaps if you offer me, General Yorck will—will be.…” Jensen's voice caught.

“Shut the hell up, Roland,” Lieutenant ben Mehdi muttered.

“Well, all this may be a lot of fuss over nothing,” said Colonel Fasolini. “It's just a matter of dealing with Lichtenstein when he gets the bottom line himself. And Lichtenstein will deal, no trouble there. I just thought you all had better know how the land lies in case we need to move fast.”

The Colonel stood up. He was by a decade the oldest person in the shelter. Just now, as he shrugged his crossbelts out of the creases their weight drew over his collar bones, he felt his age. “Wish to all the saints that we knew how the
real
land lies,” he said bleakly. “Waldstejn, their Supply Officer, he was complaining the other day that one of his convoys had managed to route itself to some old working thirty klicks from here. They had one truck go off when they were turning around and they just left it there. Now, if we could find
that
and get it on track again.… But we've got jack-shit for a bearing, and I don't see wandering around Cecach till the Rubes find time to round us up and shoot us. I guess we wait.”

“Colonel,” said Communicator Foyle. She pointed toward the terminal. “Distant input—must be Yorck.”

Garbled characters were crawling across the bottom of the screen again, leaving phosphor ghosts of themselves as each line shifted up to make room for the next.

“Better get to my section,” Sergeant Hummel said. She picked up her weapon, carrying it at the balance instead of slinging it.

“Yeah,” said Colonel Fasolini. “Maybe we don't wait too long.”

*   *   *

The doors and curtains of the Headquarters building were closed, but the bombing had stripped the black-out shutters from one of the front windows. Waldstejn had not bothered to pick up night goggles when he left the warehouse. Enough light still shone through the curtains within to show him the squad on guard. There were two non-coms present, Sergeants Breisach and Ondru, though presumably only one of them had the duty officially. They had approached him with an offer shortly after he took over as Supply Officer. Waldstejn was not sure whether the pair of them were genuinely dimwitted, or, more likely, that they were so crooked that they made the rest of the 522nd look good. Under that assumption, the Sergeants thought that Waldstejn had cleaned house on his subordinates in order to have all the graft for himself.

Albrecht Waldstejn had disabused them in a tirade which he believed had impressed even that pair.

At the moment, Sergeant Ondru was having a loud argument with one of the Signals staff. Rather, Ondru and his men were grinning as a signalman shouted and waved the envelope he carried. “Sorry,” the non-com said, “I've got orders not to pass anybody. Major wouldn't like it. Now, maybe if you'd give
me
this important message you're so hot to deliver, I could decide if it's really important enough to disturb the brass.”

“Why don't you start doing your job, Ondru,” the tall officer said as he joined the group, “and stop poking your nose into things that are none of your business.”

The infantry squad stiffened. One man even stood up. Sullenly, Sergeant Ondru said, “I've got my orders.”

“I've got my orders,
sir!
” Waldstejn snapped back.

“I've got my orders sir,” the non-com parroted. He stepped aside. Either he had been told to pass the Supply Officer, or he had decided not to make an issue of it. At best, there were too many ways that the young officer could make life unpleasant for the soldiers who drew their supplies from him. At worst—well, nobody really thought that Waldstejn would be trying to crash a staff meeting to which he had not been summoned.

The signalman plucked at Lieutenant Waldstejn's sleeve. The officer recognized him by sight, but the only name he could think of was ‘Porky', the pudgy man's nickname. “Sir,” the signalman pleaded, prodding Waldstejn with the envelope he carried, “the land-line's out, somebody must've tripped over it, and I've
got
to get this message to Major Lichtenstein. Can…?”

It did not sound like something a Supply Officer should be getting involved with. Waldstejn did not touch the envelope. “Put it on the air, then,” he suggested. “Somebody in there surely has a working receiver.”

Porky nodded like a man trying to duck his head out of a noose. “Lieutenant,” he said, “they do, but the mercs have them too. I don't
dare
put this on the air in clear.” He swallowed. Despite the rapt silence of the squad on guard, he added, “It's from the … it's from east of here.”

Waldstejn took the envelope in the hand that held his own print-out. “All right,” he said, “I'll deliver it to the Major.”

His face was still as he opened the door into the building. Maybe it
was
something that a Supply Officer got involved in. At least, if the Supply Officer had friends among a group of mercenaries that might be set for a long fall.

*   *   *

“Look,” Captain Tetour said abruptly, “what if they won't take any offer? We'd be better off fighting than surrendering. You know the stories that all Federal officers are executed in the field.”

Brionca, the Operations Officer, sneezed out her snuff and slapped the table for emphasis. “We've been through that, dammit, we can't fight, the armored regiment they'll send will plow us under. What we need to think about is how we'll sweeten the pot so they've
got
to deal.”

“Well, I've been thinking some more about that,” said Captain Strojnowski. He watched the point of his stylus click on the table instead of looking around at the others. Strojnowski's Third Company was perhaps closer to being a military unit than was Tetour's First, and the Captain himself had shown promise in line service before discrepancies had shown up in his pay vouchers. “We've been talking as if they'll just swarm down the valley with tanks and troop carriers. But they won't risk that against Fasolini's men; and besides, we've got the two laser cannon—”

“Which gave us so much air defense,” Brionca thundered, “that they weren't even switched
on
until after the ship had blown up. Want to bet
your
life it'll be any better when it's tanks ripping us apart?”

“Now wait a goddam minute,” said Stoessel, the young lieutenant in charge of the lasers. He had been included in the council of war even though he was not a member of the 522nd Garrison Battalion. The guns were detached from Central to Smiricky #4, but their chain of command still ran directly to Praha. “You guys give me a target,” the lieutenant continued in a high voice, “and I'll hit it. But there's no acquisition system in the universe that'll hit a starship that's in normal space only a—” He broke off, suddenly aware of the disdain on all the faces watching him. “Not that I
want
to engage tanks,” he concluded lamely. “I mean, they mount lasers too, and they're armored.…”

“Then don't worry about it until somebody tells you to,” snapped Captain Khlesl, the Intelligence officer who cradled a handset between his shoulder and ear. He turned to the Battalion Commander on the chair beside him. “Major,” he said, tapping the handset without taking it away from his ear, “I think the damned thing's broken again. Maybe we'd better send one of the guards over to Signals and see—”

Someone knocked on the door to the outer office. An officer swore. Major Lichtenstein himself began to rise from his seat with an expression of fury. His face smoothed into mere sourness when a voice, muffled by the door panel, announced, “Sir, Lieutenant Waldstejn with the figures you requested. Also a message from the Signals Section—they say the line's gone down again.”

Captain Brionca was closest to the door. She pulled it open without any need to be asked. Smoke and warm air swirled from the meeting room. The draft from the outer office felt cooler because that within had been heated for hours by eight bodies. “Give me that,” she said, reaching for the papers the Supply Officer held. Other staff officers were getting up.

“Sit down, Brionca,” rumbled Major Lichtenstein. “Bring them here, Waldstejn.”

The Lieutenant stepped briskly to the head of the table and attempted to salute his commanding officer. Lichtenstein ignored that and snatched the sheaf of papers from the other's hand. “Not this crap,” he muttered as he slid aside the supply print-outs. His staff was tense. “Here we are, Mary love us,” the Major went on in a caressing voice. He ripped open the envelope from Signals.

Major Wolfgang Lichtenstein was much of an age and build with Colonel Fasolini, his mercenary counterpart. Liquor had broken the veins of his face and brought him to the command of the 522nd. He had been drinking this night as well, but it was tension and not alcohol which had kept the Major in a state of nearly comatose silence during most of the staff meeting. His fingers trembled. He had to lay the sheet of message paper on the table to unfold it after he had teased it from the envelope.

“For
God's
sake, what is it?” blurted the artillery lieutenant.

“Mary and the blessed saints!” the Major wheezed. He slumped back in his chair as if relief had severed his spine. “They've made an offer we can live with. Mary, Mother of God!”

The Intelligence Officer snatched up the document before Captain Brionca could reach it from the other side. “Why,” he said, “they'll accept the battalion as a unit and integrate it into their own forces! We've won! Officers may be reassigned, but no prison or executions!”