David Drake: The Forlorn Hope

"Goddamn, Stieshl," muttered the Sergeant as he stood up. "Does your mommie got to hold your cock when you pee?" He strode toward the booth. "They got "a pass for 1430, they get in. It says 1530 like we was told, then they cool their heels in the steet for an hour, right?" He bent over his subordinate's shoulder to see the paperwork the blonde driver of the van was holding to the receiver.

Churchie Dwyer got up and stretched. He could see the monitor past the two Federal guards. "Well, Del," he said, stepping casually toward the booth himself, "I guess it's about that time."

"Now, what the hell," Sergeant Bles muttered toward the screen. He turned and saw the knife slide out of Dwyer's sleeve.

The mercenary punched him in the solar plexus as hard as his ropy muscles could drive a short blow. The Sergeant'sbreath whuffed out with a sound too muted to call attention to itself. The fifteen-centimeter knife blade had split all four chambers of his heart. The dead man could not really be said to have felt its passage.

Dwyer cleared his knife with a sucking sound but little blood. The guard sergeant was collapsing in the half-flinch, half-crouch to which the punch would have driven him even without steel on the end of it. Churchie did not have to worry about the men behind him, not with Del Hoybrin in the room. There was a bleat from one of the card players, then a loud crunch. The deck scattered. Some of the cards flicked Churchie's back as he leaned toward the man in the booth.

On the left monitor, the truck driver was saying urgently, "Wait a minute, buddy, I've got it right-"

As the puzzled guard started to look back again for his sergeant, Churchie's left hand gripped his hair to position his head. He stabbed through the base of the guard's skull. The Federal soldier squawked. His torso began to draw itself backward into an arch. The mercenary swore. His knife hilt was clamped against the victim's spine by the convulsion. The blade was sunk for half its length through bone and up into the cortex. Churchie yanked sideways in a panic. Even the density-enhanced blade had its structural limits. It flexed, then snapped off in the skull. The guard's limbs flailed, knocking over his chair and hammering against the wall of the booth.

Dwyer reached over the body and threw the gate switches, outer and then inner. He was breathing very hard. "Bastard!" he panted."Bastard!" He flung his broken knife against the wall in a clatter.

The van pulled up outside the booth. Two men in Federal fatigues jumped out of the closed back, Leading Trooper Gratz and Hussein ben Mehdi wearing sergeant's pips as the best Czech speaker available for the guard post.

Churchie looked behind him. Del was standing by the overturned table, more or less as he had been when he crushed the skulls of the two card players against one another. One of the sprawled men was breathing stertorously. Neither of them moved.

"-ing door!" ben Mehdi snarled as he rattled the panel beside the booth. The van whined off toward the euphemistically-titled Transit Block, accelerating.

Churchie stepped to unlock the door he had forgotten. Before he did so, he paused to pry the wad of money from Sergeant Bles' dead hand.

"Hey Lieutenant," the young jailer called as he led the way down the corridor, "they're here for you early." There were a number of ways to des with the knowledge that most of the people with whom you worked would be dead in a few days. This jailer handled it by ignoring the fact anc treating his charges as if he were an enthusiastic hotel manager.

Albrecht Waldstejn thought that brutality might have been preferable. But then, it was hard to be sure.

Waldstejn stepped back from the shower. The spray continued to swirl down the cell's sole drain. "They can damned well wait, then," he shouted to the steel door. "Or they can carry me out like this. God knows it doesn't matter to me."

"Get your clothes on and do it fast!" snarled another voice through the observation gate. "I'm not spending any time here that I don't have to. You, get the door open!"

"Sir," the jailer objected, "there'sno need-"

"Do it!" There was a click as someone laid a magnetic key against the lock plate.

Waldstejn was not sure until the door swung outward. A company of meres who could not be assigned forward till a contract dispute was settled, well… But Private Pavel Hodicky was back in Federal uniform, this time with captain's insignia and a sneer on his face to match the false commission. The little deserter was the only man or woman aboard theKatynForest who could carry on an extended conversation without being branded an outlander. If Hodicky looked young for his rank, then the casualties of the past year had meant sudden promotion for more men than him.

No one spent much time in chit-chat with members of a death squad, anyway.

"Snap it up," snarled Hodicky in a voice like that of an angry lap dog. Beside him stood the jailer in a gray service uniform. He carried a shock rod, the only variety of weapon permitted within the unit. Two of the three other soldiers waiting in Federal fatigues were mercenaries whom Waldstejn knew by sight but not name. The third was Sergeant Johanna Hummel with a set of Cecach handcuffs instead of the molecular springs which Waldstejn knew the Company stocked for its own use. The condemned officer felt a fleeting surprise that he did not see Iris Powers-but Powers spoke no Czech and might have endangered them all by ignoring a chance direction.

Waldstejn slipped on his boots. As he straightened from fastening them, Pavel Hodicky seized his wrist. The deserter's fingers trembled with suppressed hysteria. "Lock them," he said to Hummel, "and let'sget this over." The Sergeant obeyed with a clumsiness which could have been explained by embarrassment. The Cecach officer caught the light in her eyes, though, and he knew that she was wired for battle, fearful and exultant together. Waldstejn's own expression of shock was real enough, Maria; and it was yet to be proven that death did not lie just beyond the cell, as he had assumed when they gave him word that morning that his appeal had been denied.

"Ah, Lieutenant?" the jailer said. "There's your cap and-"

"Forget it," interrupted Private Hodicky. He gave Waldstejn a push in the middle of the back."Mary and the Saints! How long is he going to need it, anyway? Now move, sweetheart, movel"

The condemned man stumbled as he marched down the corridor in the middle of four soldiers as grim as any the jailer had ever seen. The man in gray shook his head sadly as he stepped back into the cell.

He had to get the room ready for the next, ah, customer.

"Hey!" said the clerk behind the counter,"everybody signs. Don't you know that?"

"Hey?" Hodicky snapped back. "Who the hell do you think youare, soldier?" He glared through the reinforced glass at the arms-room attendant. "All / know is they rotated us back for a rest and gave usthis crap! Now, if you've got any more bloody forms, hand them through so we can get our guns and get out of this place."

The little private turned from the counter with an ostentatious flare of his nostrils. It had been easy once he had learned to think of them all as images on a computer screen. Just like nights in the lyceum office, inputting data that the system, the System, thought was true.

Of course, a mis-key here and they really would go out as garbage.

Lieutenant Waldstejn was bent over as if he were muttering a prayer to his boots. "Names…," Hodicky heard him whisper.

"Lichtenstein," Hodicky said, pointing at Sergeant Hummel, "you sign first." God the Savior, what would have happened if all three mercenaries had filled out the forms in non-Cecach names? Thank the Lord, thank the Lieutenant. "Then Breisach, then you, Ondru," he continued aloud. If he sounded like an obsessive-compulsive with a burr up his ass, then that was reasonably in keeping with his present persona. Three soldiers who did not know their own names were more of a problem.