David Drake - The Forlorn Hope

All the mercenaries stiffened as their helmets popped on the command channel. There were no words over the radio. The night suddenly flashed and crackled with gunfire in front of the battalion headquarters. Troopers spun up the electronic magnification of their gunsights and strained to see why half a dozen assault rifles had fired.

Del Hoybrin had been watching Headquarters even before the shooting. He flipped his face shield up and out of the way to keep it from interfering with his cheek-weld on his gun stock.

"Del!" Churchie shouted beside him.

The open door of the building five hundred meters away was a perfect aiming point. Hoybrin fired a three-round burst. His big body rocked back. Leaning into the weapon, he fired again. The yellow rectangle of light down-range smeared ragged as poured concrete shattered under the impact of the osmium missiles. One of the Federal riflemen began spraying the night in nervous flickers. His chances of hitting anything at the range were next to nothing.

Del Hoybrin fired a third burst before Dwyer wrestled up the muzzle of the gun. None of the other mercenaries had tried to interfere. They had gone flat on their bellies, watching the big man with a caution born of experience. "Del!" Churchie screamed, "don'tshoot now!"

Albrecht Waldstejn and his men had dropped to the ground a moment after the mercenaries had done so. "God help us," the Cecach officer said to ben Mehdi. "Let's get to yourOperationsCenter and try to sort this out fast."

"But Churchie," Del Hoybrin was saying in surprise. "I was watching them. They just killed the Colonel."

"The lights!" shouted Captain Brionca. "Turn out the lights!"

Strojnowski might have been soldier enough to risk it, but he was more interested in rolling outside to learn what was going on. The squad on guard was from his own Third Company.

Lieutenant Dyk was cowering under the table with the rest of the officers in Lichtenstein's office. The young man leaped up with a cry and slapped at the light switch. Then he stumbled over a chair, scrambled to his feet again, and reached the panel in the outer office just as another volley of projectiles ripped through the building. The overhead lights flickered out as a gush of blue sparks exploded from the shorted wiring. Dyk spun, screaming. An osmium projectile punched a neat hole in the partition wall behind him, having shattered bone on its path the length of the Lieutenant's outstretched arm.

Lime dust from pulverized concrete roiled in the air within the building. Papers were burning on a secretarial desk. Shorted equipment or a spray of. metal ignited by friction had started the fire, the only illumination remaining in the Headquarters building. The Federal soldier's return fire had ceased also. Either the damned fool had emptied his rifle or he had realized that he did not have a snowball's chance in Hell of hitting anything at the range.

The good lord knew why the meres had stopped shooting, though.

"Ondru, report," the company commander growled.

"We got him," Sergeant Breisach's voice responded from the darkness. With his goggles on, Strojnowski could just make out the forms of the guards hugging the ground as he was doing himself. Radios within the building were sizzling with unanswered questions from the perimeter bunkers."Then, blooie!" Breisach went on. "Look, we can't handle them at the range. You gotta bring in arty or something, Captain."

As if summoned, the artillery lieutenant scurried through the door in a low crouch. "What happened?" he blurted. "Did you get-" The young officer tripped over Strojnowski's outstretched feet. He pitched forward and screamed. The hand he had thrown forward to break his fall had splashed in what was left of Colonel Fasolini's thorax. The mercenary had worn body armor that might have saved him at a hundred meters. When the muzzle flashes were close enough to burn his uniform, the high velocity sprays had turned fragments of the backplate into missiles themselves. The air stank with the effluvium of ripped intestines.

From inside, Captain Brionca rasped orders slightly out of synch with her words over Strojnow-ski's belt radio. "All Boxer units!" she was saying."All Boxer units! Fire at will at any off-planet troops you see. Do not leave your positions. Repeat, do not-"

An assault rifle stuttered briefly, pointlessly, near the eastern interface between Federal and mercenary positions. The Bunkers were too widely spaced for the Federal weapons to be really effective. White flashes from the bunker, two guns and then a third, continued for several seconds. The shooting ended in a momentary orange ball in the midst of the muzzle flashes. The thump of the tube-launched mercenary grenade provided a coda to the chattering gunfire.

The artilleryman was trying to wipe his hand in the dirt. "Mortars," he was saying, "high explosives. We'll blast them out from a distance!"

Strojnowski punched his company push. "Ranger Six," he said, identifying himself to his troops, "to max Ranger units. Cease fire! Repeat, cease fire. Unless you've got a target in range and coming at you." The infantry captain paused to let that sink in. Then he added, "If you're fired at by meres, reply with anti-tank rockets. Don't use your rifles, use rockets and wait till you've got something to aim at."

Screw Brionca and her stupid orders. The 522nd did not have to worry about a job they were not equipped for. All they had to do was to keep the meres pinned down for the day or less until the Rube tanks arrived. Strojnowski did not like the deal, but he liked it better than he liked having his ass shot away.

"Come on, Breisach," the officer ordered. "We'll crawl to my bunker and I'll use your squad as a reserve." The rest of the battalion officers could stay inside a targeted building if they wanted. Strojnowski only wished that he could intercept the mercenary communications as they almost certainly were intercepting those of the 522nd.

To the surprise of the infantry captain, the young lieutenant was crawling along beside him. It was probably a lack of any other direction. "But why aren't we shelling?" the artilleryman demanded. "Why?"

"Because we aren't soldiers, we're goddam prison guards!" the older man snapped back. "We're here to keep the contract laborers from breaking out, not to fight a war. The 522nd doesn't have a Heavy Weapons Company. No mortars, no heavy machine guns… Hell, themeres were supposed to be our heavy weapons!"

The whole area was studded with bits of smelter slag. It passed unnoticed in the coarse grass, but it gouged at the knees and bare palms of a man trying to crawl across three hundred meters of it. Grunting, balancing discomfort against the risk of a bullet if he stood, Strojnowski said, "I felt sorry for them, getting the shaft that way. But if the Rubes need help executing them now, I'll shoot every off-planet SOB myself!"

Two more mercenaries in battle dress scurried to theOperationsCenter from the east. They were hunched over with caution and the weight of their equipment. Lieutenant ben Mehdi leaned from the shelter to observe them in helmeted neutrality. "Team?" he called in a low voice.

"Black Twelve," one of them panted back. Both troopers knelt, keeping the hump of the OC between them and the distant Complex.

Ben Mehdi nodded agreement."Right. We're forming up fifty meters north-" he pointed- "in a defile. Mboko's in charge there." He touched his helmet and ordered, "Black One, leapfrog your odd teams. Twelve is in." From the west, the Lieutenant could see two troopers from White Section already scuttling toward the OC.

Ben Mehdi's words echoed within the shelter because the external speaker of the console was live. Albrecht Waldstejn was not on the Company net. He could no more listen to the necessary crosstalk as the escape plan went forward than could any other member of the 522nd.