The Forlorn Hope (21 page)

The ground rippled. The air went orange as the charge detonated. The shrub nearest the mercenary bowed away from the shock. His cover sheet lifted, then was jerked back by the implosion that echoed the blast. The whole valley rang with the savage crash of the tank skirt hammered and dissolved by superheated gas.

The Lieutenant sprang to his feet. He generally wore body armor in action, but he had known he could not pack it out on his feet. Ben Mehdi's clamshell was somewhere back at Smiricky #4. Colonel Fasolini's set was there too, shattered uselessly into his body in all likelihood … but Lieutenant ben Mehdi wished that he had his anyway.

The sunlight undimmed by the cover sheet had drawn him up. Now ben Mehdi's whole focus was on the bright sky. His mind tried to close off everything his peripheral vision showed. The reconnaissance drones were still in their tight, fluttering orbits. Ben Mehdi raised the air defense bundle. Its telescoping staff gave a meter of stand-off between his face and the five tiny rocket motors. The bracing strap was looped around his right shoulder, and the wire sighting ring was clicked into place.

Please Allah!

The lead tank squatted in a sea of fire only thirty meters away. Closer yet to the Lieutenant's right were the nearest of the dark APCs. Three of the five gun turrets pointed more toward him than away, and the flanks of all the vehicles could mow the scrub clean with whips of automatic fire.

The drones were both within the sighting ring. Screw them all! Ben Mehdi jerked the release cord with his left hand.

The sky to the mercenary's rear was fouled by trash from the explosion, bits of the truck roof and a plume of the light soil sucked upward in the following seconds. It would not affect the missiles' infra-red homing, but it gave ben Mehdi the unnecessary feeling that Death lowered at his shoulder. The five plastic tubes at the end of the staff chugged in rotation. Felt recoil was mild, comparable to a large-bore pistol rather than to one of the Company's armor-piercing shoulder weapons. The first four missiles each left the launcher with a hiss and a puff of black smoke. The last tube ruptured at the base. The missile sizzled skyward, a bright spark, but the backblast scorched ben Mehdi's hands and the skin of his throat beneath his face shield.

The Lieutenant threw down the empty launcher and flopped back in his shallow trench. The valley rang with bullets striking armor and the startled, enormous, return fire of the Republican vehicles. No one had shot at ben Mehdi. None of the enemy had even seen him through the brush in his self-camouflaging uniform. Surprise and the concentration of fire from higher up the slopes had saved the Lieutenant where a hard suit could not have.

There was a bright flash overhead. The drones' turbofans were mounted high and they had a low infra-red signature besides. There was nothing else in the sky to confuse the missiles' homing systems, however. The maneuvers built into the drones' stacking programs might have helped them against a human gunner, but they were useless against the air defense cluster. The tiny missiles were short-range and not particularly fast, but for targets within their capabilities they were hell on wheels.

The drone closest to the flash continued to fly, but it trailed a white mist. The second flash and the report of the first, lost in the gunfire, were almost simultaneous. The wings of the other drone folded abruptly like those of a hawk preparing to swoop. The third flash was followed by the red glare of atomized fuel igniting in the wake of the drone damaged by the first warhead. It drew the last two sparks as well, decoyed but decoyed without harm because there were no proper targets for them.

Praise Allah! thought Lieutenant ben Mehdi. He had done all that any of them could expect. Now he could lie flat until the fighting was done, and no one could think him a coward.

But his right hand had already drawn his grenade launcher, and his left arm was tensing to raise him again over the lip of his trench.

*   *   *

Trooper Dolan sat up in her trench, throwing back the cover sheet. A cannon shell hit her squarely in the chest. That was bad luck—the burst continued to climb the hillside, blasting rock and brush far above any of the mercenary positions. For Maxine Dolan it would have been the worst of luck anyway, whether or not the round had been aimed at her deliberately. Her arm separated from the offal that squelched back into her trench. Twenty meters away there were speckles of blood on the gun Jo Hummel had leveled at the Rube column.

The Company's weapons and gunsights made three hundred meters a clout shot for a steady hand. Sergeant Hummel had been there too often already to think that her hands would be steady at the start of a firefight. After the first magazine, after instinct took over and her gun slammed the shoulder of an equally-mechanical gunner, then Hummel could equal her firing range accuracy on the battlefield. For now she kept her sights open to the point that the nine meters of a personnel carrier just fitted the field. The orange bead jumped against the taupe background as she opened fire.

Every trooper in the Company had a number and warning of a field court—a bullet behind the ear, mercenary companies had no time to waste on frills—if they were caught engaging the enemy in any other order. White Section was emplaced north of the stream, Hummel's Black Section had the south. Each trooper was to divide his section number by the number of vehicles in the column, then fire at the one whose number resulted. That would put a multiple cross-fire on all the Rube armor, rattling the tank gunners—God help us!—and shattering the APCs.

If you were unwilling to violate orders, you had no business leading a section of Fasolini's Company. Jo Hummel blasted away at the second armored personnel carrier, not the first. She could not hope to hit the taupe-clad soldiers who had dismounted from the leading APC. The buttoned-up second one was a big target, its alert gunner had begun raking the hill before most of the Rubes had responded to the explosion, and besides … it had been Dolan's assigned target, so one of the bastards was going to be shorted whatever Hummel did.

The veteran sergeant jerked the trigger, angry as always at her clumsy technique as she tried to keep the sight bead centered. The armored vehicle was quivering. Smoke and muzzle flashes continued to burst from its automatic cannon while rifle fire sparkled on its flanks. The punishing recoil of her weapon drove from Sergeant Hummel's mind the awareness of the blood spattering her gun's barrel. Almost, she could forget the warmth of Trooper Iris Powers, kneeling in the trench beside her and firing at targets which could pulp her as surely as they had Dolan.

*   *   *

The gunner of the second Rube tank saw no need to pulse his laser for the present targets. The weapon drew a line of slag and brush exploding into fire across the northern slope. The sparks of projectiles flickering against the tank's armor may have endangered troops in the personnel carriers and dismounted. They constituted no danger at all to the vehicle from which they bounced—but Cooper continued to fire.

The tank was fifty meters further from him than the nearest of the APCs, but Dave Cooper was too good a shot for that to matter. Cooper had started firing with the hope that he
could
pierce the tank's armor. He had a downward angle on the vehicle's back deck where its plating was thinnest. The fusion bottle was separately enclosed, no chance of harming that in any case. But a fighting vehicle is such a dense assemblage of hydraulics and wiring, of ammunition and black boxes, that a round which penetrates anywhere has a real chance of doing disabling damage. Designers' instinct crowds equipment together so that the armor need not be spread thin to cover the volume. That ensures disaster on those occasions when the armor is nonetheless thin enough.

Henschel of Terra had won their gamble this time. A chance image as Cooper's gunsight rose in recoil proved his failure. The tank was turning but its deck and turret were still partially aligned with the mercenary. He caught the flash on each as a single round ricochetted from deck to turret and off again skyward. It left little more than a scar on the paint at either impact.

The tank was sliding forward, perhaps to shield the line of lighter vehicles from the shots tearing at their right flanks. The mercenaries' slit trenches were raggedly aligned, wherever overhanging scrub gave shelter and a field of fire low among the stems. The line of geometric exactitude which the laser drew across the slope could not directly threaten more than a few positions. The gunner was firing blind in an attempt to cow the ambushers with volume in place of precision.

The attempt was working very well. Even Cooper, focused on his own business, could tell that the shots coming from the northern slope had slackened abruptly. A trooper leaped up screaming as the beam passed by. The brush behind him and his own uniform were both afire, though the laser had not struck him squarely. Slag and ash exploded around the mercenary as a score of Republican riflemen finally found a target. The trooper dropped again, sawn apart by multiple hits. The blood soaking his fatigues quenched the fire the raving beam had lighted.

There were the sensor pick-ups, Cooper thought; redundant but at least vulnerable to his shots as the hull and turret proper were not. He was swinging his weapon, following the tank's motion and aligning with the cupola vision blocks when Pavlovich screamed in frustration, “God
damn
that laser!”

Without really thinking about it, Cooper shifted his sight picture a meter further down range and fired. It was a good shot. The release broke cleanly and the recoil was a surprise as it always is when the shooter concentrates on his sights and lets his muscles act on instinct. It was the last round in the magazine, though, and Cooper rolled sideways to hook out a fresh one without bothering to see what the effect had been. He and his fellows had bounced so many shots from the tank with no effect that his mind retained only duty in the place of hope.

The massive vehicle slid on past the fourth, then the third personnel carrier. The squat tube of its laser continued to traverse the hill slope. But there was a tiny, glowing dot where the tube and its mantle joined, and no beam issued from the weapon.

*   *   *

Trooper Powers shifted aim and fired twice more. Those were her ninth and tenth rounds. She had just run out of the targets she had chosen with the tacit agreement of Sergeant Hummel.

The only automatic cannon still firing was the bow gun of the lead tank. The turrets of the five armored personnel carriers each had a pair of holes in them. The holes were centered in whichever surface happened to have been facing Powers at the time she fired. She did not bother to check her results. It was conceivable that a projectile or two would be turned by the armor. It was even possible that the white-hot osmium needles would fail to destroy anything vital in the gun mechanism or gunner as they lanced through the compartment. The chances of either were vanishingly small, and there was plenty more ammunition in Powers' bandolier to deal with them if the need arose.

Beads of sweat quivered on the Trooper's upper lip when recoil shook her body. Her blond elf-lock was darkened and glued to her forehead. Blinking, she increased the field of her gunsight and swept it over the brush near the leading personnel carrier. A swath of darkness among the twisted stems was not shadow but taupe fabric. Powers dialed up the magnification again, concentrating wide-eyed on the holographic display.

The boots were obvious, and the dark blur lying foreshortened in front of them had to be the soldier's torso. Body shots were uncertain with the Company's weapons, though. All the theories about velocity effects and hydrostatic shock could not change the fact that sometimes an osmium projectile would drill straight through a man without discernible result. Better to—

A hard line, the front rim of a helmet, twitched beyond the foliage. The soldier's eyes were closed but his lips trembled in silent repetition. Powers squeezed off.

The helmet sprang out of her sight picture as the gun recoiled. She traded magnification for field again. Not to check the results; that would have been a waste of time.

To find another target.

*   *   *

The lead tank was planted for good. Its bow gun streamed shells across the valley floor, endangering no one but the dismounted Rubes who might have survived the shaped charge. Albrecht Waldstejn was crumpled near the lead personnel carrier, where the explosion had thrown him. The officer whose attention he had held through the last seconds was sprawled face-upward on his turret. His hips and legs dangled down through the hatch at an angle which would have been impossible if the shock had not broken his spine. The laser was silent, either damaged or without a conscious gunner at the moment.

None of which put Sookie Foyle nearer to accomplishing her own task, but the chance was coming.

Three of the APCs had lifted, but the rear tank was the only vehicle actually in motion. The whole valley floor was a killing ground. None of the APC commanders seemed willing to choose a route out of it when all routes were bad; and the Commanding Officer of the unit lay dead on his turret.

Ten meters—but the tank was accelerating. “Now!” Foyle screamed. “Guns,
now!
”

Only the disdain with which it shrugged off osmium projectiles made the mass of the tank credible. Gracefully, accelerating at a rate which must have rocked the men inside her, the tank approached the daisy-chain of high explosives. Dirt loosely mounded over a mine now squirted to either side, driven beneath the skirts by the fans.

Then it was past. The uncovered case of explosives gleamed in the sunlight behind the Republican tank.

*   *   *

“Guns,
now!
” Communicator Foyle was shouting as Sergeant-Gunner Jensen reached out of his trench and crimped the grenade fuze. No Republican saw the motion, an arm thrusting full length, then withdrawing beneath the sheet which had covered it until then.