David Drake - The Forlorn Hope

The only automatic cannon still firing was the bow gun of the lead tank. The turrets of the five armored personnel carriers each had a pair of holes in them. The holes were centered in whichever surface happened to have been facing Powers at the time she fired. She did not bother to check her results. It was conceivable that a projectile or two would be turned by the armor. It was even possible that the white-hot osmium needles would fail to destroy anything vital in the gun mechanism or gunner as they lanced through the compartment. The chances of either were vanishingly small, and there was plenty more ammunition in Powers' bandolier to deal with them if the need arose.

Beads of sweat quivered on the Trooper's upper lip when recoil shook her body. Her blond elf-lock was darkened and glued to her forehead. Blinking, she increased the field of her gunsight and swept it over the brush near the leading personnel carrier. A swath of darkness among the twisted stems was not shadow but taupe fabric. Powers dialed up the magnification again, concentrating wide-eyed on the holographic display.

The boots were obvious, and the dark blur lying foreshortened in front of them had to be the soldier's torso. Body shots were uncertain with the Company's weapons, though. All the theories about velocity effects and hydrostatic shock could not change the fact that sometimes an osmium projectile would drill straight through a man without discernible result. Better to A hard line, the front rim of a helmet, twitched beyond the foliage. The soldier's eyes were closed but his lips trembled in silent repetition. Powers squeezed off.

The helmet sprang out of her sight picture as the gun recoiled. She traded magnification for field again. Not to check the results; that would have been a waste of time.

To find another target.

The lead tank was planted for good. Its bow gun streamed shells across the valley floor, endangering no one but the dismounted Rubes who might have survived the shaped charge. Albrecht Wald-stejn was crumpled near the lead personnel carrier, where the explosion had thrown him. The officer whose attention he had held through the last seconds was sprawled face-upward on his turret. His hips and legs dangled down through the hatch at an angle which would have been impossible if the shock had not broken his spine. The laser was silent, either damaged or without a conscious gunner at the moment.

None of which put Sookie Foyle nearer to ac complishing her own task, but the chance was coming.

Three of the APCs had lifted, but the rear tank was the only vehicle actually in motion. The whole valley floor was a killing ground. None of the APC commanders seemed willing to choose a route out of it when all routes were bad; and the Commanding Officer of the unit lay dead on his turret.

Ten meters-but the tank was accelerating."Now!" Foyle screamed."Guns, now!"

Only the disdain with which it shrugged off osmium projectiles made the mass of the tank credible. Gracefully, accelerating at a rate which must have rocked the men inside her, the tank approached the daisy-chain of high explosives. Dirt loosely mounded over a mine now squirted to either side, driven beneath the skirts by the fans.

Then it was past. The uncovered case of explosives gleamed in the sunlight behind the Republican tank.

"Guns, now\" Communicator Foyle was shouting as Sergeant-Gunner Jensen reached out of his trench and crimped the grenade fuze. No Republican saw the motion, an arm thrusting full length, then withdrawing beneath the sheet which had covered it until then.

The five further secondswhich Jensen waited were as long as any block of time he could remember. He held his shoulder weapon tightly by its grip and barrel shroud. Jensen was not very good with the individual weapon, not like he was with the splendid automatic cannon he had abandoned. At this range, it would serve very well, though, if no stray round or ricochet The grenade went off ninety centimeters from Jensen's head. Then the world exploded.

The field expedient the Company had chosen to set off the daisy-chain was simple and effective. An ordinary mini-grenade would be set off next to a blasting cap, which would in turn be crimped into the first link of det cord. Concussion of the grenade would set off the lead azide primer in the cap, and the initiation cycle would proceed in normal milli-second course.

The problem was that the grenade itself had a five-second fuze. The tank, the target whichhad to be in the killing zone, had dialed on full power by the time it reached the daisy-chain-and passed it.

The ring of explosives went off like a read-out dial around the streak the shaped charge had already burned across the landscape. The individual blasts were squat and black and so huge that they completely hid the train of det cord that spurted between them at almost ten kilometers per second. To the mercenaries posted higher in the valley, there was a perceptible delay between the first case to detonate at the northern tangent of the ring and the last on the south toward which the blasts raced in mirror image from either side. The delay was in no sense significant.

Most of the explosives were wasted. Only three of the cases had any real effect on the Republican column. The remainder blew the ground into a gigantic funerary wreath, strewing brush and pulverized soil harmlessly over a square kilometer. There had been no assurance of where the Republicans would come from; and there would have been three cases, ninety kilos of plastic explosive, adjacent to any column which approached the bait.

The third armored personnel carrier blew straight upward, flattening and opening like a steel flower. Its self-sealing fuel tanks ruptured and were wrung like sponges by the blast. The sprayed fuel ignited in a great orange banner. It drifted north and started to settle before it burned out. Plating and the heavier contents of the vehicle tumbled over the black tendrils. The gun turret, squarely above the case of explosives, hung thirty meters in the air for the fraction of a second while inertia struggled with gravity. Then it fell back into the crater which gaped to receive it.

The fourth APC flipped over on its right side under the impact of blasts in front and to either flank. The angle it had taken in the hedgehog formation determined the details of its fate. Its fans shrieked. They were spinning at full throttle without the brake of an air cushion now that the plenum chamber was sideways. Several mercenaries on the south slope found the hubs irresistible bull's-eyes. The fan motors began to dissolve in cascades of blue sparks.

By contrast, the second personnel carrier was skidded twenty meters forward. Its nose grounded, then bucked upward when the rear drive fans lost all power. Heavy screens prevented trash from being sucked into their ducts, but the cubic meters of dirt excavated by the daisy-chain flooded the rear intakes and cut off the air flow completely. The vehicle began to wallow. Its driver and most of its infantry complement-those still alive-had been battered unconscious by the see-saw impacts. Like its overturned sister or the windows of an abandoned house, its defenselessness drew redoubled fire.

If the Republican tank had been directly over a charge the way the third APC had been, the tank would have been surely disabled and very possibly destroyed. Its mass and five meters grace saved it from either occurrence. Gimmicks had failed. Only stark courage remained.

Shock waves travel faster through ground than through air. When the daisy-chain went off, the little creek froze in a pattern of tiny white-caps at the intersections of the profusion of ripples. The floor of Lieutenantben Mehdi's shallow trench bounced him up as he had not quite chosen to do willingly. Twenty meters away, the front elevation of the second tank was back-lit by the explosives it had just cleared.