David Drake: The Forlorn Hope

The door guard was watching them instead of his screen. "Wouldn't be surprised to get a little rain," he remarked with a wave toward his monitors. There was not enough sky visible on them to make the comment more than a hope for conversation. In the alley dividing Transit Section from the next unit over stood the van they had stolen and restenciled for the purpose. Churchie Dwyer had claimed that was easy. The harder trick had been to get two more rifles and a pistol for the 'Captain', but there were too many troops quartered around the capital for even that to look like an epidemic of theft.

"All right," the clerk said. He laid the three rifles and the sidearm in the drawer and slid them through to the anteroom proper.

"You boysbe careful," said the guard as he pressed the latch button. He was trying a joke since the previous ploy had been ignored. The bolts in the outer door snicked back into their housings. "Yes sir, this one looks real dangerous-for a no-guts deserter!"

Nobody spoke this time either. The high-voiced officer paused a moment before he thrust his stooped prisoner toward the doorway. The guard did not like the look in the Captain's eyes. And he did not like the muttered reference to a Delete key.

"There's a van," Lieutenantben Mehdi called tensely. He was hunched forward, feeling horribly exposed in the glass booth. If he leaned back, however, he stuck to whatever had spurted onto the chair cushion. There were things ben Mehdi had seen often enough, now, to know that he would never get used to them. The interior of the guard post was one such thing. "Allah be praised, it's them!" He stood up, waving toward the van which was high-balling out of the compound interior.

Another horn squealed angrily. There was a truck outside the gate as well. It looked exactly like the one in which the mercenaries were about to escape.

"Bloody hell," muttered Churchie Dwyer as he peered past the Lieutenant. The close-up screen showed clearly the gate pass the driver was holding up to it. "Fifteen minutes early… Say they got to wait, that's what Bles would've done."

The four bodies were stacked in a corner where they could not be seen through the booth's glazing. Ben Mehdi could have done without a reference to the man he had replaced, however. "Are you crazy?" he demanded. He threw a switch and the outer gate slid back. The van pulled up to the inner one. "You think they're just going to watch when we all get in a truck and drive away?" The Lieutenant closed the gate behind the incoming vehicle and opened the one in front of it. The van with Trooper Powers driving and the Cecach private beside her in the cab waited. Its turbine whined on more throttle than idling required.

"Del," ordered Churchie Dwyer.

The incoming van pulled through the gate and stopped in front of the identical vehicle waiting to exit. An officer stepped out of the cab. He ignored the gate guards. Instead he shouted to Trooper Powers, "You! Soldier! What do you think you're doing in one of our trucks?"

Hussein ben Mehdi fumbled to find the door latch. It was not really a 212th Service Company truck, just one repainted to look like it, but that would not help matters. A member of the real firing squad was leaning out of the back of their enclosed van. The officer reached for Powers' door.

Allah help The Federalofficer jerked open the door. Powers' weapon was across her lap. Its off-planet design was a dead giveaway. She thrust the muzzle into the officer's belly and blew him back into the road. The projectile itself would have left only a punch-mark on entrance and exit, but the man's flesh had to absorb also the spurt of propellant gases and the vaporized sabot. The combination eviscerated him, leaving his spine bare and his soft parts from ribs to pelvis a spray across the truck he had stepped from.

"Now, Del!"Dwyer shouted. He fired through the glass of the booth. Lieutenant ben Mehdi shrank down to the floor, bawling with pain from the blasts as Trooper Hoybrin promptly emptied his own weapon into the van in two long bursts.

The booth windows blewoutward, crazed by the projectiles but showered onto the road by the muzzle blasts themselves. A Federal soldier flopped out of his van and lay howling on the pavement with no visible wound. Powers drove across him. Her back tires splashed the puddle of burning fuel that dripped from the other vehicle.

"Come on come on come on!" Churchie Dwyer was screaming as he vaulted the emptied window frame. Hoybrin followed with Gratz, who had not as yet fired a shot in the operation.

It was Hussein ben Mehdi who remembered to open both gates before he too stumbled out of the booth.

"It's started," said Sookie Foyle. Her fingers trembled, but they were precise enough to throw the toggle switch which would do the rest.

The ship's radioman watched the brunette approvingly from the bridge proper. TheCommunicationsBay of theKatynForest was little more than a one-man alcove off the bridge. With additional equipment welded to its bulkheads, even someone as short as Communicator Foyle had to watch her head as she stood up. The crewman smiled through the tangle. "Come have a drink with me, hey?" he said. "Relax."

"Are you out of your mind?" Foyle retorted. "Go on, I'm busy."

Pavlovich tapped the crewman on the shoulder. He murmured something in low-voiced Russian. The two men walked down the corridor together while the Communicator strained to listen through the welter of recorded orders and dialogues she had just set theKatynForest to broadcast.

There were demands to police and security forces, directing them to deal with riots, bombings, and commando raids in various parts of the city. There were reports from firemen and patrol vehicles of wrecks, robberies, and tenement blazes. There was even an order, tight-beam and scrambled, to Spaceport Control, that all vessels lift off at once to avoid rebel attack. All the signals were broadcast from the starship. Its transmitter hopped frequencies automatically with the abruptness of a scanning receiver. And all of the messages were recorded, because nobody aboard now was competent to carry on a live dialogue inCzech. It could not be expected that the blurted demands would be obeyed, but at worst they would increase the confusion and cause real orders to be discounted as well.

Between each flurry of signals there was a five-second pause. During these pauses, the transmitter of theKatynForest was not blanking her own receivers. It was then that Sookie Foyle strained to hear a message on the Company's emergency push.

Not, of course, that therewas a great deal those remaining on the starship could do, except listen to their comrades die.

The back of the van had eight passengers for six seats, and one of the eight was Del Hoybrin. Albrecht Waldstejn was not complaining. The choice was more room and the sullen faces of a real firing party watching him. Still, when Sergeant Hummel said, "Hell, forgot the cuffs!" she poked him in the eye with the key.

The rescued officer cursed by reflex, then took the key and said in apology, "Youpeople shouldn't have done it. I… I mean-"

"Yeah, well," said the non-com, "save the congratulations for about ten blocks, huh?"

The only view from the back of the van was through the small communication window into the cab and through the windshield. Dwyer and Gratz were standing bent over, trying to peer out. Trooper Hoybrin braced his partner against the jolting vehicle, while Gratz tried to grip the side panel with one hand and Dwyer with the other. A third trooper was slitting the sheet metal with his knife. His eyes would not have time to react to the blur through so small an opening, but Waldstejn could not see that it would do any harm to try.