David Drake - The Forlorn Hope

"Talk's cheap, lady," said Private Quade. His right hand was caressing the grip of his own rifle. Hummel turned to him. "Then let's get a goddam move on, trooper!" she said. "Come on, Bunny." Sergeant Hummel began to stride toward the back arch, as squat and as powerful as the weapon she cradled.

Waldstejn caught her by the shoulder. "It'smy place," he said quietly.

Hummel's anger was fueled by fear of the task she had just undertaken. "Do / know the way to this abandoned truck?" she demanded. "Yourplace, Lieutenant, is with your troops. And they're out there goddam waiting for you!"

Waldstejn released her. Del and Churchie backed away to let the three volunteers out to join Trooper Powers. The night covered them from bare eyes in seconds.

"Right," Albrecht Waldstejn said to no one in particular. "We'd better get out to the others, hadn't we?

Lieutenant Stoessel sprinted the last twenty meters to the tunnel entrance of Gun Pit East. Since the lasers were sited at opposite ends of the compound while battalion headquarters was in the middle, it had been a toss-up which of his guns Stoessel made for when the meeting broke up in slaughter. The camouflage pattern of his tunic front was smeared with sweat and real dirt. The right sleeve was dark also, with the blood and wastes of the murdered Colonel.

The gun pit was a figure-eight, partly dug down and partly raised by a berm of the soil lifted from the interior. The back lobe of the pit was the fusion bottle itself. It was connected to the gun platform in the larger front lobe by cables which were virtually bus bars in their construction. At rest, as now, the laser cannon lay flat beneath the lip of the berm. Because the energy beam was recoilless, the tube could be quickly raised and rotated at any angle through a 360° arc.

The whole crew was present when Stoessel burst in on them, but none of the gunners showed signs of wanting to aim the weapon anywhere it did not point already.

"Abel!" the Lieutenant said to his crouching gun captain. "I radioed you to open fire on the e-enemy cannon. You haven't even unlatched the tube!"

Yeoman Abel looked at his commanding officer sullenly. "We've got power up," he said. The other five enlisted men stopped talking and eyed each other or the ground between their boots. That way they could ignore the laser. "They did a bug-out before you called us, sir," Able went on. "Besides, I figure three seconds after that tube-" he gestured with a jerk of his bearded chin- "lifts over the berm, it takes a round. If she's charged when that happens, there's gonna be shit flying all over here."

"I gave you a direct-" Stoessel began. He paused, then said, "What do you mean, they did a bug-out? They abandoned their cannon?"

"Naw, drove off with it," put in one of the crewmen who was glad of the change of subject. "We heard it."

"You can see for yourself, sir," the Yeoman agreed. "But I think I'd want to keep my head down. We're pretty well off, here- if we don't stir things up," he finished pointedly.

The Lieutenant scowled, first at his men and then at the laser in their midst. The automatic cannon had been emplaced only two hundred meters from Gun Pit East. Hecould take a look and perhaps have something to report to the Major.

Lieutenant Stoessel stepped again to the tunnel which sloped up through the berm. Distant sounds crackled. As Stoessel reached the outer tunnel mouth, he could see muzzle flashes winking near the Complex center. "There's shooting at the truck park," he remarked idly. "I wonder what's happeningthere? "

He might have chosen his words more carefully if he had known they were going to be his last.

Pavel Hodicky was desperately afraid that he was going to have to kill somebody in the next few minutes.

A little animal peeped and sprang away between the Private's feet. That frightened him back to immediacy. The four-man commando-properly a unit and not an individual designation-was spread in a line fifty meters across. The two Federal privates were in the middle. The mercenaries provided the end posts, checking the alignment and giving brief, angry whistles when one of the indigs straggled.

Face it; when Hodicky straggled, Q seemed to keep station instinctively, since his formal training had been as cursory as Hodicky's own.

They walked in a crouch, almost waddling. None of the four of them was up to crawling four hundred meters, but nature made them hunch over in anticipation of the shots that were certain to come. Hummel had been nonchalant in her brief instructions. The guards would shoot while their targets were well out of range, she had said. Hodicky's brief squint through his night goggles had shown him that the mercenaries were as bent over as the locals they escorted, however.

For the most part, Quade and Hodicky advanced with their goggles up over their foreheads. The promised illumination would otherwise blind them as well as the Federal guards. Afterwards, the deserters could dash forward, mingling with the guard detachment and getting among the trucks in the confusion.

The buildings of the Complex looked a single mass of geological proportions. Only the mercenaries' signals proved to the Private that he was really heading for the truck park. At its fence, he knew, were his comrades of a few hours before- watching his advance in rosy detail through the lenses of goggles he might have issued them himself.

Well, Hodicky couldn't complain. It had beenhis own idea, hadn't it?

Only Mary and theSaints, let him not have to kill The muzzle flashes ahead of him could have been the courting dance of a firefly. The bullets that snapped about his head had nothing of the same innocence. Pavel Hodicky threw himself down, knowing that at least one of his former comrades lacked his own unwillingness to kill.

The shots were Sergeant Jensen's signal. Hum-mel's call for "Light!" blatted over the radio as the blond man was already swinging onto the gunner's seat.

He had lain beside the automatic cannon lest premature motion bring a volley of fire on him before the commando was in position. The indigs had been willing to let a sleeping dog lie; now they would feel its teeth despite their forbearance.

Right and left pedals controlled the gun's traverse and elevation. Jensen worked them simultaneously while his left thumb flipped the sighting screen to its wide-field, acquisition mode.

The electric motors training the gun whined a friendly, familiar note to the Gunner. The slim barrel dipped only a degree under the lightest of left toe pressure, but the signal from Jensen's right heel aimed it back toward its previous position at the east face of the compound.

Toward, not to. The traversing pedalbraked the muzzle to a halt as the mounded berm of Gun Pit East slewed across the sights.

Someone in the mass of buildings to Jensen's right had noted movement at the automatic cannon. An assault rifle began to spit at him from a window of the Complex. At this range, the gunfire was pointless; but the first anti-tank rocket could be only seconds away.

Sergeant Jensen had taken a professional interest in the laser cannon when his own weapon had been sited near it. Now he was betting a number of lives, his own included, that he remembered the lay-out correctly. The protective berm around the gun pit was a full two meters thick at its base. The earth comprising it was loose, however, heaped up by the digging blade and only cursorily stabilized. That would stop fragments and even normal shell fire; but what Jensen had in mind was something else again-or Saint Ultrudasave them!

The sight screen zoomed to battle magnification, a three-meter field at this range. The central orange dot was at the base of the rear lobe of the pit. Hoybrin and someone else were now shooting from theOperationsCenter nearby. Hoybrin for certain, because the weapon was firing bursts. They were trying to suppress Federal gunmen from the Complex who were slashing at Jensen's life.