David Drake - The Forlorn Hope

Republican APCs had five firing ports in each side panel. The troops within could spray their surroundings through the ports without dismounting. When the shooting started, however, none of the soldiers had inserted his rifle in a port. Hoybrin's burst gave them no opportunity to correct that error.

The big mercenary walked his fire from the rear hinge forward. He leaned into the first shot so that his gun muzzle almost touched the armor. At the end of an eight-round burst, the recoil had pounded him erect and lifted his point of aim from waist height to shoulder height. Del slid his bracing right foot against the back wall of the trench. The vehicle was still up on its fans, but the gyros which balanced it could not prevent it from beginning to slide down-hill. It would have required a living hand at the controls to stop that drift. The thin armor echoed with screams and curses as soldiers tried to clear weapons while their dying comrades thrashed in the same cramped quarters. Aimed shots from Churchie's weapon punctuated the human sounds with high-velocity cracks. Breathing deeply with the exertion of absorbing recoil, Del Hoybrin ripped the remainder of his twenty-round box through the front portion of the troop compartment.

At such short range, most of the osmium projectiles punched neat exit holes in the far sidewall of the vehicle. One of the wounded or dying men inside clamped on the trigger of his assault rifle. That burst multiplied casualties inside in a way that a dropped grenade could not have equalled. The light bullets spalled fragments from the armor. Everything sailed around the riddled crew compartment, flaying and burning where the osmium bullets had only punctured.

The APC was nine meters long and weighed over fifteen tonnes. The murderous delight of having so huge an opponent at his mercy blinded Churchie Dwyer to the significance of its uncontrolled drift. Del was kneeling to insert a loaded magazine in his weapon, but Churchie was fully erect. The personnel carrier was four or five meters away, still broadside to them. The mercenary had just fired at the rear compartment, trying to smash the turbine, when the automatic cannon in the turret opened up on him.

Parallax and the breadth of a finger saved Dwyer's life. He had forgotten about the cannon because the shooting started when the big gun was too close to bear on the troopers. The range had opened almost enough when the gunner squeezed the trigger. Churchie was still so close that the electronic sight failed to compensate perfectly for the angle between the gun muzzle and the fiber-optics sensor beneath the tube. The shells which should have taken off the mercenary's head instead blew up on the brush fifty meters beyond him.

The sheaf of twenty-five millimeter cannon shells did not crack like the lighter, faster projectiles of the infantry weapons. Their shock waves slapped Churchie across the forehead, lifting off his helmet. The gout of propellant gases from the muzzle stung like a spray of hot sand. Screaming, the tall mercenary threw himself flat again. The recoil of his weapon was dangerously liable to break the collarbone of anyone firing from a prone position. Eyes stinging, deafened by his own shots even before the cannon blasted in his face, Churchie began shooting at the turret he had previously ignored. At his second round, a white spark beneath the gun tube marked his hit momentarily. The hot metal was quenched by a spray of vaporized oil as the cannon's recoil compensator blew up.

The gun jammed at once. Churchie continued to fire at it until his own weapon spat out a plastic clip to announce that it needed to be reloaded.

There was a moment's silence. Cannon recoil had speeded the vehicle's drift and had swung its bow away from the mercenaries. Gray smoke was leaking from the ports and bullet holes in the troop compartment. Hydraulic fluid which had splashed on the turret face was sustaining a sluggish fire. As the APC crackled into unbroken scrub, Del Hoybrin fired a long burst into its engine compartment. Fuel exploded. It blew off an access plate and sent flames rocketing twenty meters into the sky.

"Churchie, what do we do now?" the big man asked.

Not all of them were dead. You could feel the screams as a high component of the roaring fire. No one seemed to be healthy enough to release the side panels, though.

Nothing grated in Dwyer's right shoulder as he locked home a fresh magazine. "Now," he said, "we move to where we can see what's going on down there." He nodded curtly. The Rube vehicle was fully involved now, a blotch of flame and black smoke. It warmed bare skin and blocked all view of the valley. "Could be the beggars need us," Churchie added. A level of hearing was returning, as it always did; and always less than the level he had had before battle. "Just could be."

Mingled with the shots and grenade bursts in the valley was the unmistakable hiss of a laser. At least one of the Republican tanks was still in business.

The shots mean all three of the indigs are dead, thought Hussein ben Mehdi, please Allah, may it mean that they are all dead and I don't have to The ground rippled. The air went orange as the charge detonated. The shrub nearest the mercenary bowed away from the shock. His cover sheet lifted, then was jerked back by the implosion that echoed the blast. The whole valley rang with the savage crash of the tank skirt hammered and dissolved by superheated gas.

The Lieutenant sprang to his feet. He generally wore body armor in action, but he had known he could not pack it out on his feet. Ben Mehdi's clamshell was somewhereback at Smiricky #4. Colonel Fasolini's set was there too, shattered uselessly into his body in all likelihood

… but Lieutenantben Mehdi wished that he had his anyway.

The sunlight undimmed by the cover sheet had drawn him up. Now ben Mehdi's whole focus was on the bright sky. His mind tried to close off everything his peripheral vision showed. The reconnaissance drones were still in their tight, fluttering orbits. Ben Mehdi raised the air defense bundle. Its telescoping staff gave a meter of stand-off between his face and the five tiny rocket motors. The bracing strap was looped around his right shoulder, and the wire sighting ring was clicked into place.

Please Allah!

The lead tank squatted in a sea of fire only thirty meters away. Closer yet to the Lieutenant's right were the nearest of the dark APCs. Three of the five gun turrets pointed more toward him than away, and the flanks of all the vehicles could mow the scrub clean with whips of automatic fire.

The drones were both within the sighting ring. Screw them all! Ben Mehdi jerked the release cord with his left hand.

The sky to the mercenary's rear was fouled by trash from the explosion, bits of the truck roof and a plume of the light soil sucked upward in the following seconds. It would not affect the missiles' infra-red homing, but it gave ben Mehdi the unnecessary feeling that Death lowered at his shoulder. The five plastic tubes at the end of the staff chugged in rotation. Felt recoil was mild, comparable to a large-bore pistol rather than to one of the Company's armor-piercing shoulder weapons. The first four missiles each left the launcher with a hiss and a puff of black smoke. The last tube ruptured at the base. The missile sizzled skyward, a bright spark, but the backblast scorched ben Mehdi's hands and the skin of his throat beneath his face shield.

The Lieutenant threw down the empty launcher and flopped back in his shallow trench. The valley rang with bullets striking armor and the startled, enormous, return fire of the Republican vehicles. No one had shot at ben Mehdi. None of the enemy had even seen him through the brush in his self-camouflaging uniform. Surprise and the concentration of fire from higher up the slopes had saved the Lieutenant where a hard suit could not have.