David Drake - The Forlorn Hope

Down range, the second tank began to come apart under the osmium hail.

As before, the Henschel compound armor adequately withstood the battering. The crew within did not. The laser tube and the tank's outer surface shattered like a sand-blasted ice carving. Though the armor did not give way, it flexed and rang like the head of a tympany. The tank captain, a veteran of APCs but new to his present Terrabuilt command, panicked. He threw open his hatch and tried to bail out.

Projectiles from the automatic cannon did not ricochet from the armor. Their velocity was far too great for that. Instead, they splashed like meteors on stone. Each round coated and vaporized a col-lop of density-enhanced steel. The wave-fronts sprayed the Republican officer and ripped him apart like so many white-hot razors. His body dripped back down the hatchway through which he had jumped. Screaming with the contagion of madness, the two crewmen followed their commander up and to the same end.

When the second can of ammunition had run through the chamber, Pavlovich shook his partner. "You can stop, now, Dave," he said. "You can stop."

"Yeah, Bertinelli says it'll be a day or two before the bandages come off, but he ought to be OK," said Sergeant Mboko. "It was shock, mostly. He's wrapped in a heating blanket and that turtle of his is being as much nurse as she can with her ownbreaks."

The ship rocked with another short burst. In Hold One, troopers cheered as Cooper and Pavlovich took turns in the gun seat.

"Gun Section s been taking it on the chin," Lieutenantben Mehdi remarked. He flashed a grim smile around the group crowded into the bridge. "Glad they got a chance to get a little of their own back."

The starship's visual sensors did not magnify their images, but fresh mushrooms of flame were clearly visible against the background of wheat. The field was marked by more than a score of fires, now. Some of them had burned down to smudges of rubber and lubricants and flesh. The lighter Republican vehicles had been laagered far enough from the tanks that they would not be damaged while the starship was being destroyed. When the gun crew had time to turn to them, they were dark blotches against the grain and still easy targets. While theKatyn Forest crawled under auxilliary power across the gap in the pylons, the automatic cannon smashed the thin-skinned vehicles one after another. The few which still survived were stopped. Their crews had abandoned them to the projectiles which would probe inexorably for their fuel tanks in any event.

"Got it," Captain Ortschugin muttered. The starship shookherself as her lift thrusters began winding out on broadcast power again.

Sergeant Hummel was staring at the analog display with a look of glum disapproval. To the radar, an armored personnel carrier was much the same whether or not it was a burned-out wreck. The unchanging hologram suited Hummel's mood better than did the cheers echoing from Hold One. "Fine, we chew up a reserve squadron," she said. "We're twenty klicks from the new Front, still, aren't we? What's going to be waiting there?"

"Jack shit unless our luck's a lot worse than it's been so far," said Albrecht Waldstejn. The question had surprised him until he realized how little the Company knew about the general situation on Cecach. On some worlds, no doubt, the conversion of an armored battalion to scrap metal would be a minor datum on the weekly Intelligence Summaries. Here, though "Look," the young captain explained, "you knew those tanks were imported-but did you know there weren't fifty of them on Cecach? And thatthey were what changed the whole face of the war in the past year, year and a half? People, what you've done here and back at 4B-you may have stalled the whole Rube drive. Those were the reinforcements they needed to put them through. I don't think they'll risk more tanks, even if they could shift them into position in time. And the rest we can pretty well take, so long as we keep moving so they can't drop the heaviest high-angle stuff on us."

There was a startled silence on the bridge. "Ibe damned," said Jo Hummel. "You mean we've got a chance after all?"

Thirteen hours later, battered and with two more troopers dead from a well-directed anti-tank rocket, theKatyn Forest set down again. She was in the spaceport around which Praha had developed during its centuries of human colonization.

TheKatynForest was reduced to scale in the closed repair dock. Even a small starship so dwarfed the norms of human habitation that the vessel had taken down cables and a few balconies during the last kilometers of its passage. Ortschugin, cursing in Russian, had let his bows overhang the escorting troop carrier when it slowed for crowds of amazed spectators. The spacer would not feel safe again until he had rung his command into stardrive once more. That was at least days in the future, even with only minimal repairs to the vessel… but Captain Ortschugin had no desire to add even a minute where it was unnecessary.

"Point that thing somewhere else," Sergeant Hummel said to a disembarking Federal soldier, "or I'll feed it to you." With her finger, she gestured away the assault rifle the man carried awkwardly.

Ten kilometers beyond the current Front, they had paused to load a Federal platoon. The Praha authorities had been at best confused by the reports Lieutenant Albrecht Waldstejn had been sending in clear through attempted Rube jamming. The authorities were not so confused that they would permit a TrojanHorse into the heart of their supply system, however. The platoon had verified that the starship was what her passengers had claimed… but thelook of the mercenaries had bothered the Cecach troops very much. It was not so much that the men and women of the Company looked murderous. It was more that they looked as if they did notcare how many more they killed.

If there was any truth to half the stories they told, mostly to one another, the mercenaries really did not care.

HoldThree was open. A cat-walk had been run out to disembark first the indigs, then the Company. The last of the Cecach soldiers marched off in a column of fours past the platoon already drawn up within the dock. Some of them glanced back nervously.

"Waldstejn, Albrecht W E," shouted the leader of the waiting unit. His voice echoed in the enclosed dock without losing any of its sneering arrogance.' 'Number W-nine-three-nine-five-one-''

"That's me," said Albrecht Waldstejn. He was third in the sluggish file of mercenaries. Stepping past Hummel and Powers, the Cecach officer walked toward the speaker.

"-five-two-eight," the speaker concluded loudly. Two of the soldiers with him dropped their gun muzzles to cover the returned lieutenant. Their commander looked up from the long print-out in his hand. "Waldstejn?" he demanded. "What kind of uniform is that?"

Albrecht Waldstejn did not need the brassards or the strack uniforms to identify the unit arrayed to greet them as part of Morale Section. The chain-dogs had always frightened him, even before he was conscripted. Their brief was limited in theory to members of the armed services, but many of them shared with their Republican opponents the belief that righteousness took precedence to human distinctions.

They seemed less frightening now, to a man who in the past week had learned that death took precedence even to righteousness.

"It's what there was available," the Lieutenant said mildly. He fingered the off-planet synthetic. It was already losing its coppery tone to take on the shadows of the dock interior. "Christ knows, it looks better than the one I was blown through the bushes in."

The Morale Section officer was a colonel, though his name tag was too dim to be read. He slapped Waldstejn across the face. "Watch your tongue, soldier!" he said. "You're in enough trouble already!"