David Drake - The Forlorn Hope

"Well, I only asked," Dwyer protested mildly. He wriggled his shoulders against the copper bulkhead. The corner of an ingot scratched where his fingers could not reach. He began to flip the deck over one at a time in a game of privy solitaire.

Sometimes you could get people to play when their minds were on something else. They made dumb bets, took cards they didn't need, and forgot the rules in useful ways. Way deep down, the troopers in Hold Three were sure they were all going to die.

The hatches were closed. All of Black Section sat with the wall of copper between them and the coming fire besides. If the starship hit the ground hard, those same ingots were going to pulp everything human that shared the compartment.

The thing was, if you wentWest, it didn't hurt you to have a pocketful of other people's money. And if just maybe you came through

… well, hell, Praha was quite a town for a bright fellow with the ready. Why stare at your gun when there wasn't a damn thing you or it could do to change the odds?

"Vector two-two-zero!" the intercom blared.

Churchie's cards spewed over his lap as he too snatched up his weapon.

Their targets were four kilometers away as theKatynForest bellied over the rise, and Roland Jensen could not see them yet. He sat where he belonged, in the gunner's seat. Pavlovich and Cooper were flat on the deck, waiting to take over when the section leader was killed-if they did not all die together. Like Jensen, the gun crewmen wore suits from the vessel's stores, meant for operation in corrosive atmospheres. The suits could not deflect a direct hit from a tank laser for more than a few microseconds.

The automatic cannonwas angled forward and to the right, at 390 mils-the sharpest angle possible that would clear the bulkhead. The ship swung as it slid forward on the slope. Gravity was urging theKatyn Forest to a greater speed than the lift thrusters themselves could drive her. Jensen could see wheat through the firing slit instead of the indigenous scrub of moments before. All the landscape was cloaked in a silvery mist as the pumps rammed mercury out of the vent above the hatch.

"Three hundred!"Captain Waldstejn's voice reported, "three-fifty-"

There was a black speck in the gunsight. It sprang into a tank, distorted into a lowering blur by the spray of liquid metal. The pale beam of the laser was only a quiver as it sheared the power antenna behind the starship.

"Got her!" roared Sergeant Jensen. With one gloved hand he squeezed the lock which would keep the muzzle aligned with its present target. As his other hand squeezed the trigger) theKatynForest took off.

The starship's lift engines did not need to hug the ground the way an air cushion vehicle did. The auxilliary power unit of theKatyn Forest did not have enough juice to raise her to high altitude or even simultaneously to maintain forward motion and climb. By straining the APU, however, and by trading velocity for climb, Captain Ortschugin managed to slant his lurching command some ten meters in the air. Kadar's target was not where his computers had put it on the basis of data fed in at leisure. As the two Republican gunners snatched in panic at manual overrides which they had not expected to need, Jensen's projectiles sleeted in on the right-hand tank.

The mercury fog blurred the gunsight, but it had no real effect on the osmium penetrators themselves. The hull and turret face of Kadar's tank rippled in a silver spray as eight rounds a second struck them. The projectiles did not hole the armor. Ten or a dozen hits at the same point might have blasted a gap in the frontal slope of even one of those Terran monsters; but the range, plus the vibration and maneuvering of the weapons platform, spread the hose of bullets instead across the whole bow of the tank. The laser tube disintegrated. Dispersion and the big gun's cyclic rate accomplished what accuracy could not have managed under the circumstances.

"Rotate!" screamed Gunner Jensen, but Ortschugin had never ceased to spin his vessel on her vertical axis. TheKatynForest had lost the momentum of her forward plunge and with it the capacity to stay aloft on auxilliary power. Now she settled between the two cleared roadways in an explosion of dust. The yellow-gray doughnut billowed up about the ship. The remaining laser stabbed her regardless like Polonius through the curtain.

All the tankers knew was that they had cut their target away from the broadcast grid but that she was still moving. The vast bulk of the starship was a reality which overwhelmed concepts such as armor and weapons effectiveness. The preset program had gone to hell when theKatynForest lifted. Now the tank gunner spun his sight picture across the scarred hugeness of the vessel's plating. He was not trying to lock on and pierce a single point, but rather to catch and destroy the gun which had just devoured his consort.

In Hold One, Sergeant Jensen felt a mild vertigo which was lost among the other chaotic sensory inputs. The section leader was trying to traverse the automatic cannon faster than the ship itself spun so that his muzzle would be waiting when the second target slid in view. The two axes of rotation differed, and the blur in his electronic sight would have been disorienting anyway.

The laser beam was a clapper, ringing on the hull of theKatynForest. The tank weapon cut a whorl of geometric roundness through the roiling dust. The tough hull surface scaled off in sparks and vapor, even though the beam was only glancing across it while it searched for its real victim.

"Vector three-fifty!" cried the intercom, and" Jensen's world exploded.

Cooper saw the gun and his section leader in relief against a glare brighter than the heart of an arc light. The beam's fusion-powered spike struck the fog of mercury droplets and scattered cata-clysmically. To the tankers and the infantry still more distant in their APCs, the raging blue scintil-lance meant the guts of the starship had vaporized. In fact, the actinic glare was almost entirely beyond Hold One, not within it.

'Almost entirely', when power like that of the tank laser was involved, meant that the hold was a blue-lit Hell.

The beam slid down the length of the open hatchway with a roar of heavy-element ionization. The tankers had no target but the firing slit itself. They raked it as the starship continued to lurch forward, wheeling like a dying shark. Despite the scattering effect, ingots in the breastwork welded together. Sergeant-Gunner Jensen was slumping out of his seat.

Cooper's mouth was open behind his face shield. Even he could not have said for sure whether he was screaming in the noise and stink and light. He dragged his section leader down behind the copper and took over the gun himself.

The atmosphere suit made the controls unfamiliar, and Cooper had no idea where his target might be anyway. He had been belly-down until the instant he took charge, with no more picture of the action outside than the stacked copper ingots could give him. Now the plain gaped and the tank was only a speck at four kilometers distance. The laser beam itself gave Cooper his target. It lanced back to its source from the coruscant far end of the hold.

With a calm he had never felt in training, the mercenary pedaled in right traverse. The gun mechanism performed flawlessly despite the flash of Hell-light that had taken out its gunner. The tank was a sudden blur in the funhouse mirror of the sights. Its turret was rotating to draw the beam back across the hatchway. The ionizing discharge began to encroach on a sight picture already fogged by the last of the mercury being sprayed from the vents. "Got her!" cried David Cooper. The hammering recoil of the automatic cannon drove a bass note through the snarl of the laser.