David Drake - The Forlorn Hope

With what was rumbling down the hill now, though, that put them in the place of the frog that swallowed the bumblebee.

"Whooie," Cooper said. He was able to look over the lip of his trench at the armor because of the distance intervening. "I tell you, buddy, if that's indig manufacture, then you and me hired onto the wrong side in this one."

"Naw," Pavlovich explained, "they were built by Henschel on Terra. The Rubes bought tanks, the Feds bought men. Us." He turned his head to spit tobacco juice over the side of the trench without raising his head further. "I still think we hired on the wrong side."

"Hell, there's two of them," his companion whispered. The tense half-humor was gone, leaving his voice flat. The grip of Cooper's weapon felt sweaty and very frail beneath his palm.

The tank wallowing through brush at the head of the column was painted taupe to match Rube uniforms and their outlook on life. It gave an impression of enormous solidity, but it did not look particularly large-certainly not at six hundred meters, not even through the magnification of Cooper's gunsight. As a matter of fact, the tank was only about nine meters long and four wide. The height was almost greater than thewidth, because the plenum chamber and drive fans had to underlie the entire vehicle.

There was a stubby muzzle on the bow slope flanked by lights, sensors, and vision blocks. It would be an automatic weapon of some kind, probably a light cannon. The ball mounting would limit it to 90° of arc or less, but the tank itself could spin like a top on its air cushion. The gun thus hadall the traverse that a turret mounting could have offered.

Whatwas mounted in the turret was a reflector-beam laser as powerful as the pair which had been emplaced at Smiricky #4 for air defense. For the heaviest anti-armor applications, a cannon firing shot of high kinetic energy was still superior to a laser of the same bulk. The great advantage of a laser-when it was coupled with the fusion plant which a tank required for mobility anyway-was that the laser never ran out of ammunition. Instead of being left defenseless after twenty, forty, even a hundred discharges in a hot battle, a laser-armed tank could continue ripping so long as an opponent shared the field with it. Especially for tanks built for export to worlds which might lack the materials or technology to produce osmium or tungsten-carbide penetrators, a laser main gun made sense.

But the most lethal weapon in the world was useless if it could be knocked out before it was used. To the mercenaries lying in ambush, the most frightening thing about the tanks was that their armor made them virtually invulnerable to any weapons the Company had available. Indeed, the tanks were very possibly invulnerable even to hits by the automatic cannon that Cooper and Pavlovich had crewed before bugging out of the Smiricky compound.

The tank was faceted with blocks of sandwich armor. The hull and turret had no curves, but neither did they have any shot traps or plates vertical to a probable angle of attack. The sandwich was faced with sloped, density-enhanced steel, up to ten centimeters thick on the turret and bow slope. The central layer was a mat of monomolecu-lar sapphire, its interstices filled with a high-temperature gum which acted to equalize mechanical stress. The sapphire filling was far inferior to steel in terms of stopping high-velocity projectiles, but under battlefield conditions it was impenetrable by lasers or shaped-charge warheads.

Behind the sapphire was a second layer of steel as thick as the first; and the first layer alone would shrug off rounds from the Company's shoulder weapons like so many drops of rain. Two tanks. Krishna.

One of the armored personnel carriers swung out on the column. It doubled back around the tank at the end, returning to squat at a point on the ridge overlooking the valley. The other seven vehicles continued to rumble down toward the truck. They kept a ten-meter separation and probed the brush with nervous twitches of their weapons.

The APCs were designed to carry a half-platoon of troops apiece. They were as large as the tanks and mountedan automatic cannon in a small turret forward. They were not significant threats as vehicles-their light armor would stop shell fragments and rounds from indig assault rifles, but the mercenaries' guns could penetrate them the long way. The danger of the APCs lay in the fact that they carried twice the number of troops as lay awaiting them. Nobody had to tell the Company's veterans how lethal a short-range burst from an assault rifle could be.

"Well, I'll tell you one good thing," Cooper said to his partner. "It isn't us up there with that APC, waiting for somebody to step out and take a leak down our necks… And it isn't us downthere, either."

The motion of Cooper's eyebrows sufficed for a gesture toward the stationary supply truck. The three figures in camouflage fatigues looked very small atop it. And against the bow and the pointing weapons of the lead tank, they looked hopelessly vulnerable.

"Fine, there's two of them," the radio said in the attentuated voice of Albrecht Waldstejn. "Ignore the APCs. Your only target is the farther tank. Ah, farther from the truck, the second tank."

There was a whisper of heterodyne in Sookie Foyle's ears as her command set rebroadcast the message. The radios woven into the helmets of the Company were short range. Under ideal circumstances, they were good for a kilometer. The fact that everyone's head was stuck below ground level made the present circumstances far short of ideal, and there was no damned room for error. One channel of the command set was dedicated to Waldstejn's helmet. Anything he said over the radio was banged out to the whole Company on a separate frequency.

Sookie was alone in a slit trench on a knoll to the northwest of the ambush. It was the direction from which it had seemed least likely that the Rubes would approach. That was not because Foyle was a woman or the Communicatorper se. There were seven other women in the Company; and like those others, Sookie Foyle carried a gun and was expected to use it goddam well. At the moment, however, her duty was more important than that simply of a gunman. She had to set off the ambush itself.

The armored vehicles were dark blotches against the yellow-green ofSpring foliage. From a slight elevation, the armor was as obvious in its approach as ticks crawling across a sheet. The few troopers huddled low in the notch of the valley had a view of only a few meters through the scrub. It was one of them who would have to detonate the make-shift mines on which the Company's prayers had to rest.

One of the figures below on the truck brushed his head in what could have been a wave toward the oncoming tank. "Don't think I'll dare key this again," whispered Albrecht Waldstejn. "It's all in your hands, Sookie. For God's sake, don't give the word until a tank is in range. Whateverhappens. "

She could not see the Cecach officer's fixed smile as he greeted the hostile armor. His back was to her, and the distance was long for that sort of detail, even through the gunsight. Waldstejn's transmission had clicked off at the last half vocable, suggesting more than reason permitted Foyle to believe.

Sookie tried to wet her lips with a tongue that was almost equally dry. Let him live, she prayed silently. Dear God, let the others both die but let him live.

Her hips moved in the narrow trench, pressing her groin tighter against the soil in an instinctive search for relief.

Sergeant-Gunner Roland Jensen could see nothing but the dirt just in front of his eyes. Enough light seeped through the cover sheet for that. Even without the cover, there was nothing to see above his shelter except brush, and he had seen enough of that during the march from the compound. Like much Cecach vegetation, the scrub that had retaken this valley dangled roots at intervals from the tips of branches. That had made the Company's flight an obstacle course, but at least it meant now that their pursuers were unlikely to notice the hiding places before they were intended to…