David Drake: The Forlorn Hope

Sergeant Jensen was snapping the feed lips of each ammunition drum into the female connector of the drum ahead of it. Rigging them this way increased the chance of malfunction, but neither he nor any of his crewwere going to pop up to feed a fresh can in normal fashion.

"Sarge, I'm ready," said the trainee in a voice raised two octaves by the sonic boom a moment before.

Jensen locked the last can in place and leaped to the gun. Leaning across Herzenberg to get a sight line, he rotated the cannon mount 10° to the right to eyeball it in line with the track down which the starship had disappeared. The gun had electronic sights that would spike a gnat at a kilometer, but at this instant there was neither time nor a hard target for them.

With his right hand, Jensen threw the Continuous Fire toggle. His left hand grasped Trooper Herzenberg by the collar, and he lunged for the shelter. The muzzle blasts of the cannon were so loud that the rain of bombs was a flickering white light, not a sound, to the cowering gun crew.

Warned by the flash, Trooper Iris Powers grabbed her boots and jumped into her shelter. Lieutenant Hussein ben Mehdi was right behind her.

The shelters were half-cylinders, each grown from a single crystal of beryllium. The shelters would not stop a shell or even a bullet at any normal range, but they were generally proof against the tiny splinters spraying from overhead bursts. That was the threat against which foot-soldiers since the Napoleonic Wars had been least able to protect themselves.

Shelters were light, but they did not fold up like the canvas tents for which they substituted. The rigid bulk of thirty curved plates, three meters long by two across, required as much transport as the Company's ammunition did. Like self-camouflaging uniforms and a considerable allowance for target practice during stand-downs, the expense and administrative hassle of the shelters was simply a matter of plant maintenance. Fasolini's plant was not hardware but the Company itself, the trained, effective troops who could command top dollar and could be expected to survive for another lucrative contract.

Turning the curved roof of a shelter imo real living quarters required considerable effort. The ground had to be ditched out at least deep enough that its occupants could lie flat below the shrapnel ol nearby ground bursts. In addition, those who failed to raise coamings around their shelters could expect to be swimming the next time it rained. At Smiricky #4, most of the troopers had paid civilian miners to dig them in. Powers and Sergeant Hummel had chosen to do the job themselves. The walls of their dug-out were as deep and plumb as those of Colonel Fasolini'sOperationsCenter.

That did not make the shelter spacious, a fact which suited ben Mehdi very well indeed at the moment. The Lieutenant was of middle height with a wrestler's build and a smooth, dark complexion. He was the only other 'officer' in Fasolini's Company, but he was not really the Colonel's second in command. His rank was due neither to his military prowess nor to his administrative ability. Fasolini had an accountant's brain under his coarse exterior, but that exterior itself could be a handicap in negotiations. The Colonel used ben Mehdi, his 'Executive Officer', as a suave front in conference rooms where polish and a raised eyebrow were worth more money than all the bluster in the world.

Hussein ben Mehdi had no general distaste for garrison duty, but Smiricky #4 was three hundred kilometers from even a decent brothel. The Lieutenant was bored, and the attack seemed to have been arranged precisely to help with the project by which he hoped to improve his time. He moved fast enough to be inside Powers' shelter when the sonic boom rattled it, but he was careful not to brush dirt on his uniform either.

"Oh!" said Trooper Powers. She had just taken off her left sock. Her toe-nails were varnished a deep scarlet. In confusion, the blonde trooper twisted the bare foot under her and picked up one of her boots.

"Any port in a storm, hey Powers?" said Lieutenantben Mehdi with a warm smile. "Hope you don't mind the intrusion." He reached out to grip between his thumb and forefinger the boot which Powers held. Ben Mehdi's fingers were long, their nails perfectly shaped. There was enough strength in them to pluck "the boot away from someone much huskier than the petite blonde who faced him now.

The shelter roof was translucent. It filtered light heavily toward the blue end of the spectrum. That alien tinge heightened Powers' look of tension as she huddled toward the corner of the dug-out. The two bed-rolls, hers and Sergeant Hummel's, were parallel with a narrow aisle between them. They were on wooden frames which kept them off the floor. The frames were lowenough, however, that the dug-out's occupants could sit up without risking their heads to shrapnel through the unprotected ends of the shelter. Hussein ben Mehdi leaned forward as he sat on the bunk beside Powers. She gasped as the Lieutenant dropped the boot he had taken from her and hooked her right sock with an index finger. "Lieutenant?" the Trooper said. His left arm slid behind her shoulders despite her efforts to press herself tighter against the wall of the dug-out.

The anti-personnel bombs lashed down like the wind-driven edge of a hail storm. Each bomblet was about the size of a man's thumb, a tiny segment of a cylinder, more or less the same as the tens of thousands of others released from the same cluster. They armed on impact and detonated a half second later, generally when they had bounced a meter or two back into the air. They spreada sleet of tiny shrapnel which stripped trees and killed all unprotected animals in the target area. After an attack, hundreds of bomblets which had failed to go off the first time lay in the grass, ready to shatter the leg of anyone walking carelessly.

Inside the shelter, the flashes lighted the mussed bedrolls with savage brilliance. The crackling detonations merged into a single prolonged roar. One large fragment sailed through both plastic end-sheets with a buzz that vibrated on the back of ben Mehdi's neck rather than in his ears.

"They'll be making another couple passes, of course," the Lieutenant said as he reached for the zipper at the throat of Powers' tunic. The vicious crack of the automatic cannon a kilometer away was an irritation now that the bomblets were only occasional thumps delayed by a freak of chemistry. "It won't be safe for anyone to leave their shelters for, well, plenty of time," ben Mehdi went on. He brushed aside the hand Powersraised to block his. He began to unzip her. "You know," he said, "you're a very attractive woman, Iris."

The little blond whipped her left fist around at Hussein's face. The blade of her spring knife was no longer than a finger, but that would have taken it to the Lieutenant's brain if he had not been expecting the attack.

Ben Mehdi caught Powers' wrist with his right hand while his left still clamped her other arm to her body. She tried to twist the knife to cut the sinews across the back of the officer's hand, but her weapon was a spike with no real edge. Hussein ben Mehdi increased the pressure of his grip until his thumb stood out in a pool of white skin on the woman's wrist. Then he gave a quick snap as if casting with a fly rod. The knife skittered out of her numb fingers.

"Now that's a friendly way to treat a guest, is it?" the Lieutenant said. His face still smiled, but his lips were drawn as hard as his teeth. "Now, Hummel's in the OC, so we're going to be alone till the All Clear sounds. And Iknow you like men, baby, because Isaw you last night with one of the zoomies from theKatynForest. That's what light amplifiers are for, right? Now, I'm a man, and just to prove it-"

Ben Mehdi lowered Powers' hand toward his fly with the same ease with which he had disarmed her. The little blonde spit in his eye.