David Drake - The Forlorn Hope

The squeal of the brakes was no adequate warning. Deceleration slammed everyone against the back of the cab.

"Roadblock!" said Churchie Dwyer as he struggled to clear his weapon from ben Mehdi's legs.

Waldstejn could hear Private Hodicky shouting, "Out of the way, fast! We've got orders to arrest saboteurs at the Port immediately!"

"Blue berets, "Gratz whispered. Sergeant Hummel had elbowed her way to the glass to look for herself. "Two trucks across the steet."

"Defense Police," the Cecach lieutenant said. He realized as he spoke that the identification was valueless at this juncture. It had been spewed out by a mind that wanted to avoid the realities of the moment by focusing on trivia.

"Sorry, sir," said a Czech speaker who did not sound in the least sorry. "My orders say nobody, so nobody gets through. You want to take it up with my Colonel, fine."

"All right," murmured Sergeant Hummel. "Dwy-er, Hoybrin, Gratz, and Diesson-out the back on three, turn rigjit, and kill it if it breathes." She touched the door latch with her left hand. In her right she held the assault rifle which had been part of her disguise. It was better for this job anyway. "Rest of you bastards, follow me to the left. Same drill."

"I need a gun," said Albrecht Waldstejn.

Hummel looked back at him through the tangle of soldiers sorting themselves to her instructions. There was no anger in her expression, only grim appraisal. "ForGod's sake," the non-com said, "will you keep your head the hell down?"

The young officer could see himself in the veteran's glance, even after she had faced back and started the count."One."Pasty and soft from ten days in a narrow cell. "Two." Unarmed and hopeless with a gun if there had been one available. "Three!" and Hummel took her troops onto the street like blue-fish into a school of herring.

Albrecht Waldstejn followed them out anyway.

The officer in charge of the roadblock died before he could glance toward what was happening at the back of the van. Dwyer's shot snapped through both his temples and splashed the colloid of his brain in ripples from the interior of his skull. Simultaneously, Sergeant Hummel sprayed three soldiers who were still on the open back of their ground-effect truck. After that, it was a shooting gallery; but the ducks shot back.

Two air cushion trucks had been swung across the street with a platoon of Defense Police aboard. The road behind the mercenaries had already jammed solidly, but their van was the first westbound vehicle to have been stopped. Ten seconds earlier and they would have gotten through unchallenged. As it was, the blue-capped troops were still deploying and were more concerned with setting up the roadblock than with the vehicles they had begun to stop with it. The Federals wilted under the unexpected fire.

The eight mercenaries rushed the trucks. The Defense Police who had not died in the first blast flopped to cover behind their vehicles. Trooper Gratz fired through the door of one of the truckcabs, then jerked it open. The driver was hunched down on the seat. He shot Gratz in the face with his assault rifle. The mercenary stumbled backward to the street. Waldstejn snatched at the dead man's gun and fought his rigid muscles for it. He twisted back with the weapon to receive the shot which he knew must be coming.

The police driver was dead. Gratz' preliminary round had drilled through the Federal's body from neck to pelvis. The tiny, directionally-stable projectile had killed the man quite surely, but the massive internal haemorrhage had not been fatal in time to prevent the victim from revenging himself.

Waldstejn jumped into the cab and locked the far door.

The truck clanged as mercenaries fired through its skirts to get at the Federals on the other side. Somebody had crawled onto the bed of the vehicle, but a burst of rifle fire had stopped or killed him. The Cecach officer dropped the weapon he had appropriated in order to drag the driver's body aside with both hands. The corpse slid out from under the wheel, and Waldstejn took its place.

The power was on. Waldstejn found it hard to see the controls while he bent over because his nose was almost on the dashboard. A Federal was tugging at the locked left-side door, shouting questions at him. Waldstejn let the turbine rev to full power for several seconds. Then he reached for the attitude control.

Someone fired an assault rifle point-blank into the door.

The light bullets disintegrated on the outer panel. They hit the inner panel as a spray of steel and glass. The portion that burned through into the cab proper flicked across the tall officer like a line of boils. He screamed. His fist slammed the control forward so abruptly that only the immense torque of the electric drive motors kept the fans from stalling. The truck lurched, then buried itself in the shop window across the sidewalk.

There was another ripping burst from an assault rifle. Waldstejn rose and twisted to look out the back window. His left arm and side were alive with cold fire. Jo Hummel was reloading her captured weapon by the cab of the second truck. When Waldstejn slid the lead truck forward, the Sergeant had the shot she had been waiting for. Her burst raked the line of Federals whose cover had just driven away from them. A dozen Defense Police sprawled on the pavement now. Trooper Powers sent the van through the gap between the trucks. She made a tire-squealing left turn as she cleared the cab of the vehicle which was still in position. Blue-bereted soldiers leaped away from her bumper.

The mercenaries stood and shot them down like driven deer.

"Come on, come on!" Powers was shouting. She reversed to clear the line of east-bound vehicles which the roadblock had stopped also. Most of them were already abandoned. One of the mercenaries began firing into them deliberately until a fuel tank blew up.

Waldstejn staggered out of the shop into which he had driven. He was dragging Gratz' weapon by the sling. His body was not working as it should have. All his mind could hold was his determination to reach the van before it drove away. He stepped blindly into Del Hoybrin and recoiled, nearly falling.

"Churchie's hit!" the big man wailed. He had just slid his comrade's form off the back of the truck. Dwyer was as limp in his arms as a grain sack. The front of his tunic was bloody from shoulder to waist.

"We'll get him back," wheezed the Cecach officer. He pointed to the van. Sergeant Hummel was poised beside the vehicle. She fired into a clot of Federal bodies where movement had suggested volition.

Trooper Hoybrin swept his left arm around Waldstejn's chest. He began trotting for the van, ignoring the weight of the two men and three weapons which he carried. Albrecht Waldstejn began to lose consciousness.

Blackness was a welcome relief from pain.

There was a check-point at Gate 2, a tunnel under the blast wall of the spaceport. The checkpoint was unmanned, and that was a very bad sign.

Hussein ben Mehdi got out of the van awkwardly. The two sprawled casualties made a close fit closer, though Hummel had ridden off in the cab and Gratz was not taking up any room at all.

"Well, I can drive in," the petite blonde was saying.

Sergeant Hummel stood beside her open door, peering across the boulevard. There was no traffic on it, presumably as a result of roadblocks elsewhere in the city. "Hodicky," the non-com asked, "did you ever know them not to have gate attendants here?"

The Praha native shook his head. "Let me check the Lieutenant, huh?" he said. He squeezed past Hummel as ben Mehdi walked forward.

The three-story buildings around the port were all sixty years old or less. That was the date that the fusion bottle of a freighter too large for the docking pits had failed. The first construction that had taken place afterwards was the encirclement of the whole port with a berm instead of trusting pits to deflect catastrophe from the city. An arched ramp with broadcast pylons led the largest vehicles up the vertical eight-meter outer face of the berm and down the inner slope. Radial tunnels ducked below ground level to serve lesser traffic. But there were always movement controls, especially now in wartime. And with multiple emergencies, real and imagined, crackling over the airwaves… the booth should not have been empty.