David Drake - The Forlorn Hope

The side of the ore hauler slapped Quade as he tried to jump away from it. Its pitted surface of steel and paint flakes bit and spun the little man, dropping him in the vehicle's wake. Hodicky, oblivious to that as he was to almost everything else, threw himself out of the cab as the truck picked up speed. As he did so, a pair of rockets from the gate slammed head-on into the cab. Both doors sailed away like bats startled from a cave. The sheet-metal front of the cab ripped upward, tangling the power antenna in shreds.

Only the back-up human controls had been destroyed. The vehicle did not stop. The detuned antenna dropped its power beneath the setting and the vehicle slowed to a trot. As it glided through the gap torn by the first truck, the sides of the ore hauler sparkled like a display. Federal soldiers were firing their assault rifles point-blank into the cargo bay. The disintegrating bullets blasted holes in the sides as they hit.

Hodicky picked himself up. He had scraped his left palm badly on the ground. That pain seemed to be all he could focus on as he staggered back to the remaining trucks.

Jirik Quade lay crumpled on the gravel in front of him. The right sleeve of his uniform had been shredded from shoulder to wrist along with the skin beneath. Quade's hand was still locked on the grip of his rifle.

Hodicky's scrapes and dizziness washed away in a rush of glacial fear. All external sounds sank to a murmur as blood roared in the little man's eardrums. He knelt and gripped his friend's shoulders in order to turn him face up. "Mother of God, Q," he whispered."Mother of God!"

"Goddam, that truck hit me," Quade muttered back. He opened his eyes with a start. "Christ, Pavel," he said, trying to raise his torso and finding that his right arm did not work. "How long've I been-Christwatch it!"

A Federal soldier had run toward them from the wreckage at the gate. He had lost his helmet of ceramic-impregnated thermoplastic, but his rifle waved at arm's length as he strode. "Hansel!" he cried, "areyou all right?"

Hodicky twisted as he knelt, unslinging his own weapon. The chill had returned. The Federal soldier was within ten meters."Hans\" the man called again, skidding to a halt.

Hodicky raised his rifle. He froze. Behind him, Quade was trying to reach his rifle with his left hand. The sling was caught under Hodicky's knee.

"You bastard, you killed him!" shrieked the Federal. The muzzle flash of his rifle flared magenta in Hodicky's goggles. An impact sledged the little private backward over Quade.

The Federal's cheeks and eyes bulged momentarily. There was a tiny hole in the bridge of his nose and another, perfectly matching, in the back as he pitched forward.

"You sons ofbitches coming or you going to wait for a private car?" roared Jo Hummel as she jerked Quade to his feet. Firing was still general now, but it seemed to be concentrated on the moving vehicles rather than on the truck parkitself. Trooper Powers hunched in the angle of a truck body and cab. Her weapon was shouldered and ready for another target.

"Christ, Pavel," the black-haired man cried.

Sergeant Hummel knew that the three of them were in the open. Shots could rip lethally from the darkness before Bunny had a prayer of reacting to the gunners. But Hummel knew also that the deserters had saved the necks of troops they did not know when they started the truck careening westward. The Sergeant reached past Quade to lay her palm on Hodicky's chest. "Hell," she said, "the pump's fine and I don't see any blood. Gimme a hand and I'll carry him."

Quade was too battered to protest as the Sergeant raised his friend for a packstrap carry. Hodicky's left cross-belt flapped around his knees. Powers stepped to them. She slashed the whole bandolier away with a knife she slid from Hummel's boot sheath. A bullet had struck the bandolier over the deserter's left shoulder. It had disintegrated on and with the two loaded magazines in the pouch. The loaded ammunition was electrically primed. It was as little affected by heat or shock as so much clay. The impact had ripped the tough fabric of the bandolier, however, and it had stunned the man wearing it.

"Well, we bought them some time," Hummel muttered as she handed her burden through the fence to Private Quade. Hodicky was beginning to drool, but he had not yet regained consciousness. "I only hope they know how to use it up there."

The three soldiers looked instinctively toward the northern ridgeline. Its dark silence was the best proof they had that their mission had succeeded.

"The Lieutenant says the lead team's through the mines, sir," Sergeant Mboko reported to Albrecht Waldstejn.

The Cecach officer gave a bleak smile. They were all accepting" his leadership as if he had a real rank among them; and as if he knew what the hell he was doing. But one thing the tall officer had learned even before he was conscripted was that crises were best handled by people who were willing to make decisions. Fasolini's mercenaries might have gained only a day of life; but they did have that day over what staying in their shelters would have given them.

Sergeant Mboko was thinking along the same lines. Aloud he said, "I wanted to take a truck. The

Colonel said it'd be suicide. He was right a lot of the time."

After a moment, the mercenary said, "The background on Cecach looked pretty clean. Stalemate at the Front, that's not so bad. Real wackos on the other side, but the Federals who wanted to hire us about as decent as anybody in the middle of a war."

"Old data," said Waldstejn softly.

"Yeah," Mboko agreed, "about a year old. The Rubes got heavy armor, the Front went to hell. And the folks running things in Praha seem to have figured that if they're crazier bastards than the Rubes, then they'llbeat the Rubes. Wrong both times, I guess…"

From the modest height of the ridge, the two men had an excellent view of what was happening in the valley. There were a few riflemen firing uselessly from the Complex and outlying bunkers. Most of the garrison seemed to be concentrating on lobbing rockets into the two trucks. Both vehicles were beyond the westernmost bunkers of the compound, but only the first was still moving. The damaged second ore hauler had skidded and overturned when a rocket destroyed all the drive fans on its right side. Rounds continued to crash into it one or two a minute, now that it was immobilized. The white flashes reached the watchers in false synchronous with the booming of earlier warheads.

No one could have survived in the riddled cargo bay of the first truck, but Waldstejn thought for a moment that the vehicle itself might drift out of sight along the diminishing pylons. Then there was a hiss unlike anything else that had savaged the valley that night. The laser cannon had lifted from Gun Pit West, and its tube was cherry red.

Mboko cursed and shouldered his weapon. It was a long shot, but a large target and a fragile one.

The Cecach deserter touched Mboko's arm. "Let them," he said. "We're all dead, remember?"

"You know," said the Sergeant, "most times you get a really nasty war, it's planets that a couple different nations colonized together, different planets. You people here- one foundation, everybody Czech.. .. But you managed the job pretty well, didn't you?"

The laser drew a pale line across the night. The beam was pulsed so that metal subliming from the target would not scatter it in a reflecting fog, but the modulations were at too high a rate for human retinas to respond to them. Twenty-five square centimeters of the truck's plating flashed from red to white to black as the metal vaporized and the apparatus within the plenum chamber took the beam directly. Steel burned when severed cables shorted input from the receiving antenna into the hull. The gun continued to play on the glowing wreckage.