The Forlorn Hope (16 page)

Waldstejn fell silent. Soldiers were throwing themselves down. And after surviving the bombs that had hit Smiricky #4, even an ex-Supply Officer could guess the meaning of the howling from the western sky.

*   *   *

Horobin had time to slip the glossy pornography under a stack of log books when Director Piccolomini opened the door. He did not, however, have time to scan his instruments before his superior could do so. “Everything normal, sir,” said the Reconnaissance Technician, taking a chance that would have paid off nineteen times out of twenty. His blood in his ears roared against the purr of the score of monitors in the room with the two men.

Director Piccolomini's face darkened to a shade in ugly contrast with his taupe uniform. He pointed at the inked tape curling from one of the top row of monitors. Peaks jabbed at five minutes intervals against the pre-printed time scale along the edge. There was no peak during the latest six minutes. As the Director of Reconnaissance and his subordinate watched, the tape continued to crawl out of the monitor with only the flat line that indicated no signal had been received from the drone keyed to that machine. “What do you mean
normal,
Technician Horobin?” Piccolomini demanded.

“I—” Horobin stammered. His skin prickled with sweat, as if Piccolomini were a furnace and not a short, balding man.

“Well, do your
job,
you fool!” Piccolomini shouted. “You only have two drones out. Surely you know what to do if there's an anomaly on one of them!”

Horobin had not bothered to read the glassine-covered Special Procedures sheets when he took over the watch. Normally the trailer housing the monitors was the quietest, most private place in General Yorck's headquarters. Now the Technician fumbled for the sheet marked Monitor 7, feeling as if he were about to melt away and wishing to the crucified Lord that he could. He turned to his superior. “It say—” he began

“Don't tell
me,
you idiot!” Piccolomini cried. “Do it!
Do it!
”

The handset slipped from Horobin's fingers when he picked it up, but on the second try he managed to punch the correct combination into the key pad. Reading the data through the glassine and the blur of perspiration clouding his eyes, the Technician said, “Echo to Landseer.”

“Go ahead, Echo,” replied the artillery controller through a burst of intervening static.

“One of our drones has failed to report in segment Apache,” Horobin continued. “That is, ah—yeah, Apache. Execute Apache soonest.”

“Roger, execute Fire Order Apache,” buzzed the controller's voice in apparent disinterest. “Landseer to Echo, out.” The speaker clicked and went dead.

“Well, aren't you going to log it in, Technician Horobin?” Piccolomini asked. “One of your drones has disappeared while flying a high-risk pattern, hasn't it? Do I have to tell you
all
your duties, man?”

Dear God, if you'll only get him out of here, the Technician thought, I'll make it up to you. I
swear
it. And he slid out the log book, having forgotten completely what he had hidden beneath it only seconds before. The photographs flopped to the floor, glossy side up. The blonde woman of the top one appeared to be smiling, though it was difficult to tell since most of her mouth was hidden by the labiae of her brunette companion.

Piccolomini looked from Horobin to the photographs. The Director's face momentarily relaxed from anger to puzzlement. His mind was struggling to find a present referent for the picture, as if it were an enlargement of the internal structure of a molecule.

The expression that replaced puzzlement would have been suitable for someone who had stumbled upon a pack of dogs devouring an infant.

Technician Horobin felt faint. He was holding himself in a tight brace and vainly willing an end to his vital functions. The trailer shuddered under the hoarse blasts of the alarm the Director had pressed to summon a squad of the interior guard. “Is this how you serve your Lord?” Director Piccolomini shouted. “Swilling the foulest poisons of the adversary while the enemies of the Lord's Church sweep clear of his vengeance? Do you know what this means, Horobin? It means death! Death!”

The tape from Monitor 7 was still flat. A series of peaks sprang up on the other working monitor, however. It was keyed to a drone with the column advancing toward Praha. It had picked up the first salvo of the battery executing Fire Order Apache. Six twenty-centimeter shells were in flight toward what Republican analysts had determined to be the most probable hiding place along the segment of its path where the drone had disappeared.

“Death!” Piccolomini repeated.

*   *   *

The bars sang against the axle. It was awkward cutting up from the bottom, but otherwise the weight of the reel bound the notches against even the ultra-slick sides of the bars. Between strokes, Guiterez panted, “I don't know where you get off on this high and mighty crap. Don't I helped you? Girl, you don't know shit when you came here. Me and the boys, we save your ass a lotta times, a lotta times. So what's the harm you give us the time, huh? You give us the time, we give you the time.”

Herzenberg had closed her eyes, as if that would somehow lessen the effort of sawing. Her breath burned her throat, and her voice caught the first time she tried to speak. “The only time I want from you,” she said, “is time to myself. Goddammit, Dog, if I was looking for a dick I'd have—”

“Christ Jesus, get clear!” blasted Sergeant Jensen's voice from their radios.

Both troopers dropped their cutting bars and turned. The tall section leader stood in the doorway, silhouetted by the outside light. Jensen's face was hidden. His voice held the horror of his realization that Guiterez and Herzenberg would not have been able to hear the sound of incoming shells as those outside could.

A rosette opened in the roof of the great shed. For a microsecond, the interior blazed with six clean shafts of sunlight. Then the salvo detonated.

Without specific reconnaissance—the data the drone would have broadcast if Trooper Powers had not shot it down—Republican intelligence units had no way of knowing about the overturned truck and the troops clustered around it. They did have pre-war maps and imagery from the last minutes before the satellites spilled down in gouts of fire, however. From these materials, spurred by the chill, righteous fury of General Yorck, they had plotted likely escape routes for the mercenaries; suitable search patterns for the drones which would track them down like the beasts they were; and probable shelters from which the pursued might ambush a drone before it could report them.

Pit 4B had been one of those shelters.

The shell that went off in an air burst on the ridge girder perversely saved Trooper Herzenberg's life. The high-capacity shell ripped its casing into a sleet of fragments that seemed hideously dense; but the pattern was spherical and Herzenberg, fifteen meters beneath its heart, was missed by any shrapnel large enough to be lethal. The shock wave flung her down in a red blur—the flash of high explosive and the blood surging in the capillaries of her eyes.

The shell that lanced into the ground beside the mine shaft did not, as a result, cut the trooper in half on its way.

Earth and steel gouted across the huge mine shed, red flashes and the reeking black smoke of combustion products swaddling the fires that gave them birth. The shell that knocked Herzenberg to safety rolled back the roof in a thirty-meter ulcer. Bare girders sagged with the ends of the ridge pole, saved from collapse by the fact that their burden had been stripped away from them.

Someone was screaming. After an instant of disorientation, Herzenberg became sure it was not herself. She opened her eyes.

The cavity in the roof was no bar to the sunlight, but smoke and dust swirled surreally over the skeletal girders. It blurred and scattered the twisted scene below. The elevator cage was warped. The shaft on which it stood had lost all definition on two sides to a shell crater, but the tubular frame of the cage had not offered much purchase to the blast. The flat, heavy ends of the cable reel had caught the force squarely, however.

When the shock wave hit it, the reel had torqued and snapped the axle where the troopers' cuts had weakened it. It now lay up-ended across both of Guiterez' legs.

Herzenberg wobbled to her screaming companion. She was obscurely troubled to find herself five meters from where she had been during the last moment she could remember. Nothing was clear in her mind or her vision. Grit and long-chain molecules racked her lungs even more than the sawing had.

Upright, the drum was as tall as the stocky woman. It was tilted by the flesh it crushed beneath it. Herzenberg strained to tip it clear, bloodying her hands on frayed strands of the cable. The reel shuddered. Guiterez' mouth closed and his eyeballs rolled up as he fainted. Weeping with frustration, Herzenberg looked for a lever. She found her companion's weapon. She thrust the barrel under the drum and pried with the stock. The light barrel shroud crumpled onto the diamond core.

“Get out of here!” someone shouted. “Christ Jesus, get out!”

Herzenberg did not look around. Tears of rage and effort blinded her. Her brain was not capable at the moment of processing further information anyway. Sergeant Jensen surged around her. He gripped the gun butt with one hand. With the other, he plucked the woman away for all her hysterical determination could do to hold her to the lever.

The trooper fell backward as her sergeant straightened. His hair was a sun-struck halo rimming the gray metal of his helmet. The dense plastic gunstock sheared with a crack like nearby lightning. The reel began to topple away from the man it imprisoned.

The roaring in Herzenberg's ears was not blood but the second incoming salvo.

The last image that Herzenberg's eyes carried with her into blackness was that of flame fountaining from a shell burst. At the apex of one red tendril, silhouetted against the sky, was a ball which had recently been a human head.

*   *   *

“Fucking A,” muttered Marco Bertinelli as he started to run up-slope. The pit head buildings were in tatters. The end of one barracks was ablaze, and a sooty pall rippled turgidly over the shed covering the shafts. Someone in the gun crew was screaming over the radio for a medic, though.

“Team One to me,” Sergeant Mboko ordered, jumping up as well. “We're going to get them out and get our own butts out of there too.” He began to stride after the Corpsman. His gun was in his hand instead of being slung.

“Black Section, off and on,” said Jo Hummel. The high points of her bandolier had been frayed and dirt-smeared by the speed with which she had hit the ground moments before. “We'll take up a cover position on the next ridge and wait for White. Move it!”

Fire Order Apache had been a simple Battery Three—three shells from each tube of the battery, with no delays or follow-up shellings scheduled. But no one in the Company knew that. Every move had to be made in the gut-crawling awareness that Rube artillery had the area targeted.

“Wait, dammit!” said Albrecht Waldstejn desperately. “Mboko! Cancel that, we need the truck clear now!”

The black sergeant ignored the call. Half his section was beginning to follow him as ordered. The troopers glanced at one another and the smouldering impact zone.

“Forget it, Lieutenant,” Sergeant Hummel said off-handedly. She was checking the response of her own troops and not bothering to look at Waldstejn. “It was a good idea, but if the Rubes've got us taped, there'll be a ground patrol along any time. That thing—” she turned to wave at the truck—“can't outrun a tank, and we can't fight a goddam tank either, not with what we got on our backs. Come
on,
Black Section!”

“Hold up, I said!” shouted Waldstejn. The troops nearest him looked back in concern, but they continued to file off after the section leaders familiar to them. The Cecach officer's voice was only a murmur without authority in the brush a few meters away.

Sookie Foyle's helmet was flexed to a five-kilogram backpack. The plump-looking Communicator unclipped the microphone from that pack and threw its red toggle switch. At once, the sending units of every commo helmet in the Company were locked out, keeping all channels clear for the command set. In a clear, dispassionate voice Foyle announced, “Max units, freeze in place for orders from C-captain Waldstejn.” She handed the mike to the startled officer. Through a half-smile she whispered, “Should I have made you a colonel?”

“All right, people,” said Albrecht Waldstejn with the appearance of calm. “Those shells came from the west of us. We're already surrounded, so we're not going to run after all.”

He paused. Troopers had halted in place, startled by the command but too unsure of the situation not to obey. Their uniforms shimmered in shades of gray and brown as the fabric picked up nuances of its immediate vicinity.

“You goddamned stupid hunkie!” roared Sergeant Hummel, furious most of all at the realization that only Waldstejn had access to the radio net now. She strode back toward the officer, holding her weapon muzzle-high as if a banner fluttered from it. “We're not going to surrender now, they'll feed us our
balls
if we do!”

The young Cecach officer had the disorienting feeling that he was standing on a chess board and that a giant version of his own hand was reaching for him. His face was as still as chiseled steel. Into the microphone he said, “We're going to fight our way out, people. We're going to give the immediate pursuit a bloody nose to buy us some time, and then we're going to ride home in style. I swear by the blessed Virgin!”

Hummel had stopped in her tracks. She sucked in on her lips as part of an expression which was not wholly a frown.

As Waldstejn paused the second time, he caught the eye of one of the mercenaries—Dwyer, the gangling fellow who appeared to have taken Hodicky and Quade under his wing, thank God. The trooper grinned knowingly and shook his head in mock exasperation.