David Drake - The Forlorn Hope

The vibration botheredDel because it kept him from aiming steadily. They were supposed to open fire as soon as anyone shot at them, though not before. The way the ship was bucking, however, Hoybrin was afraid that he would not be able to hit much. He hoped nobody would shout at him if he messed up.

TheKatynForest accelerated too slowly on its lift engines for the effect to be felt. Now that static inertia had been overcome, however, the buildings of the Complex had begun to slide by at a fast walk. None of them were lighted. The vibration damped itself to an acceptable level, andDel began to study things through the holographic gun-sight.

The ship was passing the truck park. The hole cut in the chain-link fencing had been sutured with a web of steel tape. A pair of soldiers in mottled fatigues leaped to their feet. As the starship passed twenty meters away, one of the guards threw his rifle to his shoulder.

Delkilled both of them with a short burst. The Cecach soldiers flopped back against the fence as all the guns on the port side slammed into action. Trucks beyond the dead men lighted with pinpoint flashes as projectiles ripped along them.

TheKatynForest was swinging around the west corner of the park. There was a hesitation as Captain Ortschugin attempted the unfamiliar business of locking their jury-rigged antenna onto the broadcast power system. There were more guards at the gate. It was closed now by an ore carrier parked across the ragged opening. Del fired the rest of his magazine into the men. Because of the angle, dust sprang up ten meters beyond the soldiers like a line of surf on a strand. An instant after the big trooper had squeezed off, the parked truck and the men falling beside it caught the full force of the twenty port-side gunners. Grenades burst amid gravel fountains which the high-velocity projectiles had already sprayed up.

Del Hoybrin reloaded with the perfect economy with which he did everything that had become instinctive. He was worried. He wished desperately that he could talk to Churchie beside him. There was no time now, and it was too noisy to be heard over the gunfire anyway. The troopers on the starboard side of the ship were engaging the bunkers while those on the port ripped the buildings of the Complex proper.

Delhad not waited for the Rubes to shoot first. Instead, he had squeezed off reflexively just because a guard was aiming a rifle at him.

He was afraid he was in trouble again.

Rosa Brionca was as nervous as the watch officer in the communications building. The phone only burped her call sign once before her hand stabbed from the blanket roll to snatch it. "Mole One to Victor," she said, not yet awake. "Go ahead."

The Council of Deacons did not enlist women into armed formations, even into rear echelon units the way the Federals did. General Yorck had honored his agreement to enroll the 522nd, however, men and women alike. It may have been that from Yorck's strait viewpoint, the males of the turncoat battalion were already degraded to the level of females.

The Republicans had given a choice to the officers of the 522nd. They could be reduced to the rank of Private and assigned to rifle companies, or they could keep their commands as provisional officers, Ensigns, in the Lord's Host… under the tutelage of the Chaplain who would be assigned to direct the moral welfare of the unit. Rank hath its privileges, Captain Brionca assumed as she took the latter option and the command that went with it.

The main privilege rank brought to those who had defected to the Lord's Host was the privilege of failing while Chaplain Ladislas Bittman watched. Brionca had realized what that meant even before two platoon leaders were hanged beside Major Lichtenstein. Their units had not been transferring mercenary stores to theKatynForest with the alacrity which the Chaplain expected.

"Three of the bunkers are reporting noise from the starship," the watch officer said. Brionca could not remember who had the duty tonight, her mind was too fuzzy. "Ah, I heard it too."

"Right," the nominal commanding officer mumbled. She thrust her feet into her boots. Brionca had begun sleeping in her uniform on the floor of her office. That way, whatever happened she could at least make a show of dealing with it before Bittman arrived. The night before, two soldiers had drunk glycol coolant and gone off their heads.

Brionca had orderedthem shot.

"Get on the horn," she decided abruptly. "Get their captain over here to my-no, get themall over to my office, fast." She hooked her equipment belt, juggling the handset between shoulder and jaw. "And-"

The gunfire outside silenced her as surely as if every round were fired through her brain. Brionca dropped the phone and stumbled for the door without bothering to slide up her boot fasteners."

"Whatis this, Ensign?" shrieked Chaplain Bittman as he threw open the door of his room. It had been the Sergeant-Major's office."What is this?"

The outer office waspitch dark, but Brionca had learned there was no safety in that. She hit the door with her shoulder, then rolled on the ground outside as she had not done since training exercises five years before. One boot flew off. She ignored it and ignored also thethunkl as Bittman too plunged through the doorway. She had gotten out just in time to see the signals building destroyed.

TheKatynForest was sliding toward them along the pylons one hundred meters away. The belly of the ship's dark bulk glowed with vaporized sabots as shots gnawed through the commo building.

The balloon supporting the directional antenna was starting to sink, but it had already served to mark the commo center for the mere gunners. The facade exploded inward, then the roof collapsed under the concentrated fire. Anyone inside was as surely dead as the electronic equipment shorting and sputtering in the rubble.

An anti-tank rocket burst and lighted twenty meters of the vessel's port side. Brionca tugged out her own pistol. "The antenna on the front!" she screamed uselessly as she aimed. "Shoot off the power receptor!"

TheKatynForest was broadside to the HQ building now, and the mercenaries' fire shifted to the new target. The muzzle blasts were not as loud as the crashing shock waves of the projectiles themselves as they ripped overhead. The pistol that Brionca had meant to fire remained frozen in her hand as she sprawled in the dirt.

The night the Company had brokenout, a single distant marksman had raked the building. This time, the fire of twenty guns wrecked it with a vengeful thoroughness. Lime dust and sand spurted from the structure like smoke from a smudge pot, hiding the ex-captain and saving her life when she had given up on it herself.

A grenade went off with a distinct bang. Then the starship was past, dragging the pall of dust into fanciful shapes in its slip stream. There was a fire burning somehow in one of the perimeter bunkers. It winked like a distant reflection of the blaze starting where the signals building had been.

The dust was choking. Ensign Brionca stood up, stumbled, and kicked her remaining boot off into the night somewhere. Maybe the laser in Gun Pit East would stop them.

Bullshit. Maybe the ground would open and they would all fall into it.

Chaplain Bittman staggered toward her. He was hacking and wheezing so badly that he had to shake his fist to assert his fury. The slim man's uniform was limed white. His eyes stared as if inset on a skull. The sound of gunfire was a rasping background for him when he finally found his voice. "You're a traitor, whore of Satan!" Bittman wheezed."False not to Man but to your Lord, all of you! And as the Lord shall burn you in everlasting hellfire, so shall I-"

Rosa Brionca shot him. The Chaplain looked surprised. There was a tiny, dark fleck on the front of his dusty uniform. He raised a hand as if to touch it.