The Forlorn Hope (26 page)

“Your cannon?” Waldstejn translated uncertainly. He glanced at Ortschugin. “What's the cannon doing here?”

The Swobodan nodded. “All your gear,” he said. “Their gear, I mean, the mercs. Next week, when the pylons are laid to here, we carry it back to Budweis with ourselves and the copper—all spoils, useless here but of value to the Return, you see.”

Thorn turned from his controls. He said something to his captain which Waldstejn thought was a report that they were ready to go.

Ortschugin confirmed that. “Whenever you want,” he said to the Cecach officer in English. “Thorn says the board's green.”

Albrecht Waldstejn stood. “I'll check with the others,” he said. “There's still three hours to dawn, no need to lift before everything's locked down tight.” He grinned at Cooper, the mercenary who had brought the report, then looked back at Captain Ortschugin. “Hell, Vladimir,” he said, “I know it doesn't matter a damn whether their gear's aboard or not, not for getting to Praha. But doesn't it make you think that—well, keep a crucifix handy, hey?”

The young officer was laughing as he strode off down the echoing corridor. He had changed in a very few days, thought Vladimir Ortschugin. An impressive man, now. A pity that he was going to die so young.

*   *   *

“Hold Three, ready,” said the intercom in Sergeant Mboko's voice.

“Hold Two ready,” it immediately added as Sergeant Hummel.

Sergeant-Gunner Jensen nodded to Albrecht Waldstejn across the dim interior of Hold One. “Hold One ready, sir,” the blond man said.

“Waldstejn to bridge,” the Cecach officer said to the intercom on the bulkhead beside him. “Raise the hatches.”

When the mercenaries first filed aboard the
Katyn Forest,
there had been no copper stored in Hold One. Now the length of the hatches on both sides were lined with a waist-high breastwork of ingots shifted from the other two holds. The mercenaries who knelt along the breastworks stiffened as machinery began to squeal. The metal-to-metal seals of the six great doors broke. The Company had boarded by the narrow bridge scuttle because of the noise entailed in opening one of the holds. Now there was no choice. Gray light spread in Hold One as the top-hinged hatches swung up along the full length of both sides. All lights within the holds proper had been doused, though in One and Three there was a slight scatter from the bow and stern compartments. The noise of the hatches rising might not itself provoke a reaction from the garrison, but it would certainly awaken everyone in Smiricky #4 and focus a fair number of eyes on the starship. Ideally, they would have waited until they were under way, but the auxilliary power unit could not winch up the hatches and raise the ship simultaneously.

One after another, the hatches squealed to a halt. Their lower edges hung a meter above the hold's decking. Every member of the Company able-bodied enough to shoot now knelt behind the inner barriers of copper. The four seriously-wounded troopers were in the crew's quarters, while all the personnel of the freighter itself were at their stations.

Albrecht Waldstejn squinted into the night. His hands trembled violently on the assault rifle he had never before fired. Any time now, he thought. Any time.

The intercom crackled in Russian. A moment later, Captain Ortschugin repeated his laconic statement in English: “Lifting ship.”

Its lift engines driven by the full power of the overloaded auxilliary power unit, the
Katyn Forest
began to lurch toward the lines of pylons and the havoc sure to come.

*   *   *

A twenty-kilo ingot of copper clanged to the deck before the drive steadied. Alone of the troopers in Hold One, Del Hoybrin did not wonder what would happen if the whole bulwark shifted in on them.

The vibration bothered Del because it kept him from aiming steadily. They were supposed to open fire as soon as anyone shot at them, though not before. The way the ship was bucking, however, Hoybrin was afraid that he would not be able to hit much. He hoped nobody would shout at him if he messed up.

The
Katyn Forest
accelerated too slowly on its lift engines for the effect to be felt. Now that static inertia had been overcome, however, the buildings of the Complex had begun to slide by at a fast walk. None of them were lighted. The vibration damped itself to an acceptable level, and Del began to study things through the holographic gun-sight.

The ship was passing the truck park. The hole cut in the chain-link fencing had been sutured with a web of steel tape. A pair of soldiers in mottled fatigues leaped to their feet. As the starship passed twenty meters away, one of the guards threw his rifle to his shoulder.

Del killed both of them with a short burst. The Cecach soldiers flopped back against the fence as all the guns on the port side slammed into action. Trucks beyond the dead men lighted with pinpoint flashes as projectiles ripped along them.

The
Katyn Forest
was swinging around the west corner of the park. There was a hesitation as Captain Ortschugin attempted the unfamiliar business of locking their jury-rigged antenna onto the broadcast power system. There were more guards at the gate. It was closed now by an ore carrier parked across the ragged opening. Del fired the rest of his magazine into the men. Because of the angle, dust sprang up ten meters beyond the soldiers like a line of surf on a strand. An instant after the big trooper had squeezed off, the parked truck and the men falling beside it caught the full force of the twenty port-side gunners. Grenades burst amid gravel fountains which the high-velocity projectiles had already sprayed up.

Del Hoybrin reloaded with the perfect economy with which he did everything that had become instinctive. He was worried. He wished desperately that he could talk to Churchie beside him. There was no time now, and it was too noisy to be heard over the gunfire anyway. The troopers on the starboard side of the ship were engaging the bunkers while those on the port ripped the buildings of the Complex proper.

Del had not waited for the Rubes to shoot first. Instead, he had squeezed off reflexively just because a guard was aiming a rifle at him.

He was afraid he was in trouble again.

*   *   *

Rosa Brionca was as nervous as the watch officer in the communications building. The phone only burped her call sign once before her hand stabbed from the blanket roll to snatch it. “Mole One to Victor,” she said, not yet awake. “Go ahead.”

The Council of Deacons did not enlist women into armed formations, even into rear echelon units the way the Federals did. General Yorck had honored his agreement to enroll the 522nd, however, men and women alike. It may have been that from Yorck's strait viewpoint, the males of the turncoat battalion were already degraded to the level of females.

The Republicans had given a choice to the officers of the 522nd. They could be reduced to the rank of Private and assigned to rifle companies, or they could keep their commands as provisional officers, Ensigns, in the Lord's Host … under the tutelage of the Chaplain who would be assigned to direct the moral welfare of the unit. Rank hath its privileges, Captain Brionca assumed as she took the latter option and the command that went with it.

The main privilege rank brought to those who had defected to the Lord's Host was the privilege of failing while Chaplain Ladislas Bittman watched. Brionca had realized what that meant even before two platoon leaders were hanged beside Major Lichtenstein. Their units had not been transferring mercenary stores to the
Katyn Forest
with the alacrity which the Chaplain expected.

“Three of the bunkers are reporting noise from the starship,” the watch officer said. Brionca could not remember who had the duty tonight, her mind was too fuzzy. “Ah, I heard it too.”

“Right,” the nominal commanding officer mumbled. She thrust her feet into her boots. Brionca had begun sleeping in her uniform on the floor of her office. That way, whatever happened she could at least make a show of dealing with it before Bittman arrived. The night before, two soldiers had drunk glycol coolant and gone off their heads.

Brionca had ordered them shot.

“Get on the horn,” she decided abruptly. “Get their captain over here to my—no, get them
all
over to my office, fast.” She hooked her equipment belt, juggling the handset between shoulder and jaw. “And—”

The gunfire outside silenced her as surely as if every round were fired through her brain. Brionca dropped the phone and stumbled for the door without bothering to slide up her boot fasteners.”

“What
is
this, Ensign?” shrieked Chaplain Bittman as he threw open the door of his room. It had been the Sergeant-Major's office.
“What is this?”

The outer office was pitch dark, but Brionca had learned there was no safety in that. She hit the door with her shoulder, then rolled on the ground outside as she had not done since training exercises five years before. One boot flew off. She ignored it and ignored also the
thunk
! as Bittman too plunged through the doorway. She had gotten out just in time to see the signals building destroyed.

The
Katyn Forest
was sliding toward them along the pylons one hundred meters away. The belly of the ship's dark bulk glowed with vaporized sabots as shots gnawed through the commo building.

The balloon supporting the directional antenna was starting to sink, but it had already served to mark the commo center for the merc gunners. The facade exploded inward, then the roof collapsed under the concentrated fire. Anyone inside was as surely dead as the electronic equipment shorting and sputtering in the rubble.

An anti-tank rocket burst and lighted twenty meters of the vessel's port side. Brionca tugged out her own pistol. “The antenna on the front!” she screamed uselessly as she aimed. “Shoot off the power receptor!”

The
Katyn Forest
was broadside to the HQ building now, and the mercenaries' fire shifted to the new target. The muzzle blasts were not as loud as the crashing shock waves of the projectiles themselves as they ripped overhead. The pistol that Brionca had meant to fire remained frozen in her hand as she sprawled in the dirt.

The night the Company had broken out, a single distant marksman had raked the building. This time, the fire of twenty guns wrecked it with a vengeful thoroughness. Lime dust and sand spurted from the structure like smoke from a smudge pot, hiding the ex-captain and saving her life when she had given up on it herself.

A grenade went off with a distinct bang. Then the starship was past, dragging the pall of dust into fanciful shapes in its slip stream. There was a fire burning somehow in one of the perimeter bunkers. It winked like a distant reflection of the blaze starting where the signals building had been.

The dust was choking. Ensign Brionca stood up, stumbled, and kicked her remaining boot off into the night somewhere. Maybe the laser in Gun Pit East would stop them.

Bullshit. Maybe the ground would open and they would all fall into it.

Chaplain Bittman staggered toward her. He was hacking and wheezing so badly that he had to shake his fist to assert his fury. The slim man's uniform was limed white. His eyes stared as if inset on a skull. The sound of gunfire was a rasping background for him when he finally found his voice. “You're a traitor, whore of Satan!” Bittman wheezed. “False not to Man but to your Lord, all of you! And as the Lord shall burn you in everlasting hellfire, so shall I—”

Rosa Brionca shot him. The Chaplain looked surprised. There was a tiny, dark fleck on the front of his dusty uniform. He raised a hand as if to touch it.

Brionca's pistol had been buried in dust and grit. She thought it would jam after the first shot. To her surprise, the gun instead functioned perfectly nine more times.

*   *   *

The warhead sent a sizzling white line across the interior of Hold One. The shaped charge had penetrated the hundred millimeters of hull plating and sent the metal spurting as an ionized stream to gouge the far bulkhead. Molten steel splashed back over most of the dozen mercenaries in the compartment.

High-velocity shrapnel would have done more real damage, but the dazzling spray caused momentary havoc. “Shoot or by Christ you
will
burn!” roared Sergeant Jensen. He fired twice into the night without a specific target, just to drive home the order. A thumb-sized welt was rising on his own cheek, but he knew that the Company's only chance was to keep the garrison down by sheer volume of fire.

Jensen found his target in the fluid shimmering that characterized light enhancement. The curving berm, the lattice-strengthened tube, visible from the angle he overlooked it. He fired, his sights a useless blur beyond the intervening face-shield. When he flipped the shield out of the way, the holographic reproduction still quivered too badly from the unsteady drive effects for Jensen to make the difficult shot.

The blond man howled a curse. He was furious now that Waldstejn had not allowed him time to set up the automatic cannon. Its dampers could have kept it steady despite the vibration, accepting input only from the controls. Sure, it might have taken an hour longer to weld the outriggers to the deck since there was no dirt for the spades to bite in. But an hour would be cheap if the choice was—

Jensen fired a three-shot burst. Strong as he was, the recoil punished him. The gun barrel jumped as the stock hammered Jensen's shoulder back and down. Riflemen were firing from the bunkers toward which the ship hurtled. The mercenaries around the Sergeant-Gunner were angling forward to blast away at those active targets. The worst someone with an assault rifle could do was to kill a few of the troopers lining the holds. The laser cannon, if it were still operable when the
Katyn Forest
cleared it, would burn them to slag as surely as it had the decoying trucks four nights before.