David Drake - The Forlorn Hope

"Look, sweetheart," said Churchie Dwyer. He had carried around a three-legged cat for a year until a quarantine official on Rereway had killed it. "Del's dumb, right? You tell him to stick his arm in a drive fan to jam it and he'd likely try. But he's not going to go out of hisway to kill himself. Now, there's times you're going to go West no matter what you do. But even in this business, you can die in bed if you don't spend too much time looking for someplace else to do it. I don't have a word to say against your friend Q… but baby, he was going to buy it before he was much older. In a bar or a barracks-or hell, in the kitchen when his old lady put a knife in him. I'm sorry, but he was the kind who finds a way."

They marched along without speaking further for several minutes. Hodicky had made sure that his issue boots fit when he was assigned to the supply room, but the unaccustomed marching had raised a blister on his right heel anyway. "Churchie?" he said at last."Umm?"

"What would you do if somebody orderedyou to stick your arm in a drive fan?"

The gangling trooper laughed. "Well, kid," he said. "I've knocked around a bit. One of the reasons I've stuck with the Company is it's not the sort of outfit you hear orders like that very often." After a pause, he added in a somewhat lower voice, "I don't guess you'll ever hear an order like that twice from the same guy."

The brush whispered against their uniforms as they continued to march toward the objective Albrecht Waldstejn had set for them.

"Stupid bastards," muttered Sergeant Mboko toward the distant gleam of light. Pressing the bulge on his helmet to key the command channel, he said, "White One. I'm on the last ridge. The outpost's manned, I can see light there."

"-got to rest here," Hussein ben Mehdi babbled, his words stumbling over the last of Mboko's. "We're all beat, we're wasted. There's no way we can-"

The voice cut off. Either someone had physically removed the Lieutenant's finger from the transmit switch, or Communicator Foyle had cut him out of the circuit. Damned right, the chickenshit… though the Lieutenant had earned his pay with that tank, so you never could tell.

Brush crackled. Mboko had ordered a general halt, but Dubose had decided to squirm up beside his section leader. "That it?" the Leading Trooper asked. His voice was muffled by his face shield. Minuscule leakage from the shelter two klicks away made it a beacon under the shield's enhancement.

"Why-" the Sergeant began. His radio interrupted him.

"Top to White One," said Albrecht Waldstejn's voice. It was thinner than radio propagation alone could explain. "Will the brush where you are cover us in daylight?"

The black sergeant looked around him. Light enhancement, no matter how effective, robbed you of real depth perception. Still, Mboko had been using a night visor long enough to make more than an educated guess about the present surroundings. "Yeah," he said, "it's no different from the rest of what we've been hiking through. Stay low, stay twenty meters back from where the ridge drops away, and I don't see any problem. If they send a drone over, we've got problems irregardless."

"If they think there's a reason to search for us here," Waldstejn agreed, "then we've got problems." There was a pause and a crackle of static. The Captain's voice resumed with a difference in timbre which marked the general push, "Top to max units. We'll bivouac on this ridge. White One will give assignments left to his section, Guns will assign his people and the wounded center, Red Two will assign Black Section right until Black One rejoins. We'll be here all day with no smoke and no movement."

There was a pause, but it was for Captain Waldstejn to dear his throat. "Get your rest now, soldiers. Tomorrow night we come down to it. Over and out."

"So that's really it, huh?" Dubose said, waving again toward the light on the far ridge.

"Why the hell ask me, trooper?" replied Sergeant Mboko testily. "Didn't you spend just as much time as I did at Smiricky #4?"

The five of them did not need to look at one another while they hashed things out. The command channel would have worked, would have permitted the non-coms and the two officers to lie with their separate units while they made the final dispositions.

Human nature beat technology in straight sets, as it usually does. The command group lay on its individual bellies, facing inward like a dry-land version of an Esther Williams routine. They were as tired as any of the troopers they commanded, and the sun that spiked down through the bush above them was just as hot as it was elsewhere on the ridge. When Gunner Jensen saw someone crawling toward them, making the shrub shiver, he snarled, "What thehell do you think you're doing, trooper? Get back where you belong, and if you disobey orders again Iguarantee you won't move a third time." Jensen's hand was tight on his gun-stock, but the real threat was in his hard blue eyes.

Sergeant Hummel looked back over her shoulder. The strain made her squint. "It's Dwyer," she said to the command group. More sharply, she called, "Spit it out, soldier, and get your ass back where it belongs." The section leader did not care for Trooper Dwyer. She knew a good deal about him, and she guessed more. But Dwyer was not the sort to need hand-holding or to call his superiors' attention to himself without reason.

"Look," Churchie said. He was speaking toward the soil rather than to the command group. If there had been a way to hand this to somebody else, he would have done so; butDel could never do it, and nobody but the pair of them knew. "There's another goddam route through the mines."

Hummel rolled on her side so that she could look at Dwyer more easily. Alone of the five listeners, she understood the veteran's self-directed anger. Dwyer was in the process of volunteering for a particularly nasty job. He must have figured his chances of survival were even worse if he remained silent. Perhaps Del Hoybrin's life also had a place in Churchie's calculations. Hummel was quite convinced that the survival of the rest of the Company had not been a major factor.

Lieutenant ben Mehdi craned his neck to see past a branch and say the wrong thing. "What do you mean 'another route', trooper?" he demanded in a voice that cracked for dryness.

Trooper Hoybrin carried four extra canteens. Churchie's response had all the sneering range that he would not, save for anger, have lavished on a superior. "Hey," he snapped, "we march in by the way we came out, that's the plan? Right over the fucking mines even a dickhead'd have sense enough to lay there after we did a bug-out? Or maybe you were figuring to waltz in along the pylons, where there's still a working laser and a half dozen bunkers with a clear field of fire?"

"Calm down, soldier," said Albrecht Waldstejn hoarsely. "Tell us about the better way."

The gangling veteran was right. Hummel and Mboko had insisted-with a parochial contempt for indig forces-that the Company's escape route would not have been sealed, not in three days. Waldstejn, with the mild agreement of Sergeant Jensen, thought that even Lichtenstein would have mined the corridor before the surrender. That way, the Major would have hadsomething to offer his new masters in place of inertia in the face of failure. The real problem was that there was no way to determine who was correct. The corridor would only be scouted in the dark, when whoever was making the reconnaissance was likely to detonate a mine if there were any.

The casualty was acceptable, under the circumstances. The warning the blast would give to the garrison was not.

"There's an old fuel tank on the slope," Churchie said. He was mumbling again, and the others had to strain to hear him. "It's still there, I checked before I broke in on you guys. There's a cleared path, narrow but they didn't know about it, so I figure it's still there. I can flag it. Other end's the OP."