David Drake - The Forlorn Hope

Horobin had not bothered to read the glassine-covered Special Procedures sheets when he took over the watch. Normally the trailer housing the monitors was the quietest, most private place in General Yorck's headquarters. Now the Technician fumbled for the sheet marked Monitor 7, feeling as if he were about to melt away and wishing to the crucified Lord that he could. He turned to his superior. "Itsay -" he began.

"Don't tellme, you idiot!" Piccolomini cried. "Do it! Do it!"

The handset slipped from Horobin's fingers when he picked it up, but on the second try he managed to punch the correct combination into the key pad. Reading the data through the glassine and the blur of perspiration clouding his eyes, the Technician said, "Echo to Landseer."

"Go ahead, Echo," replied the artillery controller through a burst of intervening static.

"One of our drones has failed to report in segment Apache," Horobin continued. "That is, ah- yeah, Apache. Execute Apache soonest."

"Roger, execute Fire Order Apache," buzzed the controller's voice in apparent disinterest."Landseer to Echo, out." The speaker clicked and went dead.

"Well, aren't you going to log it in, Technician Horobin?" Piccolomini asked. "One of your drones has disappeared while flying a high-riskpattern, hasn't it? Do I have to tell youall your duties, man?"

Dear God, if you'll only get him out of here, the Technician thought, I'll make it up to you. Iswear it. And he slid out the log book, having forgotten completely what he had hidden beneath it only seconds before. The photographs flopped to the floor, glossy side up. The blonde woman of the top one appeared to be smiling, though it was difficult to tell since most of her mouth was hidden by the labiae of her brunette companion.

Piccolomini looked from Horobin to the photographs. The Director's face momentarily relaxed from anger to puzzlement. His mind was struggling to find a present referent for the picture, as if it were an enlargement of the internal structure of a molecule.

The expression that replaced puzzlement would have been suitable for someone who had stumbled upon a pack of dogs devouring an infant.

Technician Horobin felt faint. He was holding himself in a tight brace and vainly willing an end to his vital functions. The trailer shuddered under the hoarse blasts of the alarm the Director had pressed to summon a squad of the interior guard. "Is this how you serve your Lord?" Director Piccolomini shouted. "Swilling the foulest poisons of the adversary while the enemies of the Lord's Church sweep clear of his vengeance? Do you know what this means, Horobin? It means death! Death!"

The tape from Monitor 7 was still flat. A series of peaks sprang up on the other working monitor, however. It was keyed to a drone with the column advancing toward Praha. It had picked up the first salvo of the battery executing Fire Order Apache. Six twenty-centimeter shells were in flight toward what Republican analysts had determined to be the most probable hiding place along the segment of its path where the drone had disappeared.

"Death!"Piccolomini repeated.

The bars sang against the axle. It was awkward cutting up from the bottom, but otherwise the weight of the reel bound the notches against even the ultra-slick sides of the bars. Between strokes, Guiterez panted, "I don't know where you get off on this high and mighty crap. Don't Ihelped you? Girl, you don't know shit when you came here. Me and the boys, we save your ass a lotta times, a lotta times. So what's the harm you give us the time, huh? You give us the time, we give you the time."

Herzenberg had closed her eyes, as if that would somehow lessen the effort of sawing. Her breath burned her throat, and her voice caught the first time she tried to speak. "The only time I want from you," she said, "is time tomyself. Goddammit, Dog, if I was looking for a dick I'd have-"

"Christ Jesus, get clear!" blasted Sergeant Jensen's voice from their radios.

Both troopers dropped their cutting bars and turned. The tall section leader stood in the doorway, silhouetted by the outside light. Jensen's face was hidden. His voice held the horror of his realization that Guiterez and Herzenberg would not have been able to hear the sound of incoming shells as those outside could.

A rosette opened in the roof of the great shed. For a microsecond, the interior blazed with six clean shafts of sunlight. Then the salvo detonated.

Without specific reconnaissance-the data the drone would have broadcast if Trooper Powers had not shot it down-Republican intelligence units had no way of knowing about the overturned truck and the troops clustered around it. They did have pre-war maps and imagery from the last minutes before the satellites spilled down in gouts of fire, however. From these materials, spurred by the chill, righteous fury of General Yorck, they had plotted likely escape routes for the mercenaries; suitable search patterns for the drones whichwould track them down like the beasts they were; and probable shelters from which the pursued might ambush a drone before it could report them.

Pit 4B had been one of those shelters.

The shell that went off in an air burst on the ridge girder perversely saved Trooper Herzenberg's life. The high-capacity shell ripped its casing intoa sleet of fragments that seemed hideously dense; but the pattern was spherical and Herzenberg, fifteen meters beneath its heart, was missed by any shrapnel large enough to be lethal. The shock wave flung her down in a red blur-the flash of high explosive and the blood surging in the capillaries of her eyes.

The shell that lanced into the ground beside the mine shaft did not, as a result, cut the trooper in half on its way.

Earth and steel gouted across the huge mine shed, red flashes and the reeking black smoke of combustion products swaddling the fires that gave them birth. The shell that knocked Herzenberg to safety rolled back the roof in a thirty-meter ulcer. Bare girders sagged with the ends of the ridge pole, saved from collapse by the fact that their burden had been stripped away from them.

Someone was screaming. After an instant of disorientation, Herzenberg became sure it was not herself. She opened her eyes.

The cavity in the roof was no bar to the sunlight, but smoke and dust swirled surreally over the skeletal girders. It blurred and scattered the twisted scene below. The elevator cage was warped. The shaft on which it stood had lost all definition on two sides to a shell crater, but the tubular frame of the cage had not offered much purchase to the blast. The flat, heavy ends of the cable reel had caught the force squarely, however.

When the shock wave hit it, the reel had torqued and snapped the axle where the troopers' cuts had weakened it. It now lay up-ended across both of Guiterez' legs.

Herzenberg wobbled to her screaming companion. She was obscurely troubled to find herself five meters from where she had been during the last moment she could remember. Nothing was clear in her mind or her vision. Grit and long-chain molecules racked her lungs even more than the sawing had.

Upright, the drum was as tall as the stocky woman. It was tilted by the flesh it crushed beneath it. Herzenberg strained to tip it clear, bloodying her hands on frayed strands of the cable. The reel shuddered. Guiterez' mouth closed and his eyeballs rolled up as he fainted. Weeping with frustration, Herzenberg looked for a lever. She found her companion's weapon. She thrust the barrel under the drum and pried with the stock. The light barrel shroud crumpled onto the diamond core.

"Get out of here!" someone shouted. "Christ Jesus, get out!"

Herzenberg did not look around. Tears of rage and effort blinded her. Her brain was not capable at the moment of processing further information anyway. Sergeant Jensen surged around her. He gripped the gun butt with one hand. With the other, he plucked the woman away for all her hysterical determination could do to hold her to the lever.