The Forlorn Hope (3 page)

Ben Mehdi lowered Powers' hand toward his fly with the same ease with which he had disarmed her. The little blonde spit in his eye.

The bombing had both blown trash onto the shelter roof and studded the beryllium mesh with needles of glass shrapnel which conducted light. Within, the effect turned the blue ambience into mottled shadows and points as bright as jewels by contrast. Iris Powers' upturned face was bestial and hideous as a result. The Lieutenant's face, as he slapped the woman with the full strength of his open hand, was as horrible with no lighting to augment it.

Power's head bounced against the dug-out wall. She lolled back, stunned. Her eyes were glassy. The outline of long, strong fingers was already swelling up in red on her cheek. The light flickered again from the east as the starship rolled out for its second pass.

“I tell you, bitch!” the Lieutenant shouted. “I'm going to do you a favor. I'm going to show you just how good it can be with a man so you won't have to—”

The end flaps shook with the sonic boom and the entrance of Sergeant Johanna Hummel.

The Lieutenant jumped as if the non-com were one of the second stick of bombs herself. In some ways, he might have preferred that to what he got. Jo Hummel hit the floor feet first, but she let her momentum carry her onto the occupied bunk. The point of her left shoulder took ben Mehdi in the middle of the back. He slammed forward again, pinned against the earthen wall as easily as he had pinned Powers an instant before. The blonde trooper flopped sideways when the Lieutenant released her.

It sounded as if the sky were tearing apart. A sun-bright streak glared through the filter of the roof.

“Close quarters, Lieutenant,” said Sergeant Hummel. She was wheezing with rage and the distance she had run, but her words were loud enough to be distinct even against the background. “
Fucking
close quarters, hey?”

Hummel was as tall as the Lieutenant, with the same blocky, powerful torso. She had felled men larger than herself with sucker punches, but in any simple test of strength, ben Mehdi could have bested her. They were both in excellent physical condition. However, all other things being equal, a male's greater percentage of muscle to total weight would have told.

All other things were not equal. Hummel's gun was socketed in the Lieutenant's right ear.

“Sergeant,” snapped ben Mehdi, “watch what you're doing! I won't tell you twice!”

“Real cramped in here, ain't it?” Sergeant Hummel said. She twisted her weapon to force ben Mehdi's head back against the dirt. The steel barrel shroud had been dented. The corner of it tore a ragged gash in the officer's ear. His mouth, open to shout another order, instead passed a high-pitched whimper.

In a voice as close to gentle as the surrounding noise permitted, Sergeant Hummel said, “Bunny? Are you all right?”

Trooper Powers sat up again, levering herself with a hand on the back wall. Hussein ben Mehdi's weight still anchored her thigh to the bunk. She braced her free foot to tug herself away. The handprint on her cheek was a flag.

Hummel made a sound at the back of her throat like millstones rubbing. She stood, gripping the unresisting lieutenant by the shoulder and raising him with her. She held her gun by the pistol grip, the butt cradled in the crook of her right elbow. Her index finger was on the trigger. The muzzle moved with ben Mehdi's head, anticipating each of the man's cautious attempts to duck away. Outside, the bombs were sailing in with calliope shrieks. This run, there were no high-altitude pops as clusters separated.

“What's the matter, Lieutenant?” Hummel rasped. “Worried maybe my gun's pointing a little close to you, what with all of us shoe-horned into this little dug-out? Don't you worry,
sir.
I've killed lots of people, but I never killed one when I didn't mean to.” She spun ben Mehdi and gave him a hard shove.

The Lieutenant sagged against the dirt coaming. His breath made the end flap tremble. He turned his head fearfully. Hummel's gun was no longer touching his ear, but the tiny hole in its muzzle was aimed to take out his left pupil without touching the surrounding sclera.

The earth shuddered and a bomb went off with a muffled roar.

“Since the accommodations don't suit you, Lieutenant,” the Sergeant said, “maybe you'd better leave, don't you think? You'd be best off at the Operations Center. And I think you ought to start now.”

Three more bombs detonated. Two were below ground. The third hit something heavy and metallic. It rang like a bell even before the shattering explosion.

“Jo,
Allah!
” the Lieutenant pleaded. “Not
now—
not during incoming!”

Debris from the first bomb, pebbles and the heavier clods, pattered on the shelter roof. Hummel smiled and gripped the shroud of her weapon to emphasize rather than to steady it. “This stick's armor piercing,” she said. “Just keep your head down and you'll be fine. Oh—and don't step on anything left over from the first pass, hey? But that's the sort of chance we gotta take when there's someplace we need to go.”

Ben Mehdi tensed. Behind the Sergeant, Powers was pulling on her boots with apparently total concentration. The ground shook under the impact of more bombs.

“Your choice,” said Hummel. Her index finger tightened.

Hussein ben Mehdi bolted from the dug-out, into the haze of dust and combustion gases. His ear had dripped a bright streak of blood onto his shoulder.

Sergeant Hummel waited only until she was sure that the Lieutenant would not burst back in behind the muzzle of his grenade launcher. Then she whirled, tossing the gun onto her own bunk to free both hands. She clasped Powers. The blonde woman began to sob in a mixture of relief and fury. “There, there, Bunny,” the Sergeant said, stroking the other woman's silky hair. “There, there.”

*   *   *

When the fusillade of fragmentation bombs sputtered away, Lieutenant Waldstejn rose and started to climb out of the shelter. Colonel Fasolini grabbed him by the ankle and pulled him back down. “What the hell's your hurry?” the mercenary asked. “We've got a long afternoon ahead of us. They aren't done, not by a long shot.”

The Lieutenant settled back on his haunches uncertainly.

Albrecht Waldstejn had a commission as a result of the two years of law school he had completed before being conscripted. His posting as a supply officer of a garrison battalion resulted from negative attributes rather than a demonstrated genius for administration, however. Waldstejn's parents had been forceful enough in opposing Federal war policies that the couple was taken into preventative detention. Their deaths were almost certainly the transport accident the government claimed—but the government still thought it wise to put the son under military discipline. After the four-week curriculum to which officer training had been reduced, the young man had been shunted into a slot where he was unlikely to cause trouble.

Waldstejn's initial mistake with the 522nd was to reorganize the mess his predecessor had left. The young officer broke for fraud all three of his underlings, including the quartermaster sergeant who had run the section while previous supply officers drank themselves insensible.

That left Waldstejn with no non-commissioned officers, two privates dumped on his need because nobody else in the battalion wanted them, and the smouldering hatred of his commanding officer. Major Lichtenstein had been receiving his rake-off on goods sold illegally from the battalion stores in the past.

Waldstejn got along rather better with Colonel Fasolini. The mercenary leader had a tendency to look for the easiest way to get the job done, but at least his notion of what the job
was
had similarities to Waldstejn's conception. Major Lichtenstein commanded a battalion of screw-ups and criminals, with no promotion to be expected this side of the grave. Lichtenstein's priorities were not those of the government in Praha, and they were shared by most of the officers and men in his command.

“Why are you so sure the bomber won't be shot down?” Lieutenant Waldstejn asked. He craned his neck out of the shelter but kept Fasolini in the corner of his eye. The whole floor of the valley swirled like mist from a lake at sunrise. Bomblets which had been flung wide left ragged clots of dust up to the ridge lines and beyond. The explosions had started a few grass fires, now blurred in with the dust pall but sure soon to replace it. “Matter of fact, I'm surprised I don't hear the lasers firing by now.”

Fasolini settled himself against a wall. The shelter was unassigned. It had been set up between the Colonel's Operations Center on the compound perimeter and the building of the Complex which housed the 522nd's HQ. The Colonel was a cautious man. He had provided for just the sort of eventuality which had occurred—an attack sudden enough to catch people between the headquarters. Hunching his shoulders to keep the X of his crossbelt from biting him, the mercenary said, “They aren't firing because they don't have a target. And the bomber won't be shot down because it's not a bomber, it's a starship. Only time they need to worry's when they're out of their hyperspace envelope to fire—” he snapped a thumb and finger for emphasis, loud as a pistol shot—“or when somebody goes after them in another spacer.
You
know how long it takes to get a starship programmed to operate this close to a planet. They must've spent weeks, and it'll be weeks before your side puts anything up to stop them.” The older man frowned. “Not that I think they'll hang around
that
long,” he concluded.

“But why here?” Waldstejn said, aloud but more to himself than to his companion. They were speaking in English, the tongue of convenience throughout the human universe. Fasolini had a smattering of a score of languages. He could ask for directions or a woman on most planets. Waldstejn, however, had only his native Czech and business-course English. A month as acting liaison with the mercenaries had sharpened his English into a fluency equalled only by the multi-lingual curses he had picked up in the same school.

“Why the hell's that gun firing?” the Colonel said, frowning toward the northeast corner of the compound. Waldstejn knew the automatic cannon was emplaced there, toward the most probable channel for armor but almost a kilometer away from the nearest mercenary position. The plan in Praha had been to seed pairs of mercenaries every four hundred meters or so along the perimeter. Fasolini had agreed to man observation posts on both ridge lines—the mercenaries' electronics were an order of magnitude better than Cecach manufactures. Further, Fasolini had agreed to put the cannon at least temporarily where it was most potentially useful. But after taking a good look at the 522nd Garrison Battalion, the Colonel had told Major Lichtenstein that he had no intention of putting his whole force out in packets which would be left with their asses swinging as soon as something popped. You cannot stiffen gelatine with B-Bs; and you could not keep cannon fodder from running just because there was one team still firing within earshot. Most of the Company was therefore bivouacked on a short segment of the northern perimeter.

That meant the cannon was far enough away that Lieutenant Waldstejn had forgotten it. The distance had also thickened the sharp muzzle blasts into something quite different from what he had heard—painfully—during a demonstration firing when the Company first arrived. Waldstejn's lips pursed in speculation.

Fasolini touched the wear-polished spot on his helmet that keyed the radio. He said, “Top to Guns. What the
hell
do you think you're up to, Roland? Shut her down before our whole fee goes up the spout!”

The mercenary listened a moment. To Waldstejn, out of the net, the reply was only a tinny burr like that of a distant cicada. The gun continued to fire its eight shots a second, regular as a chronometer.

“Listen, I was on bloody Sedalia too,” the Colonel shouted suddenly. “I don't
care
what you figured, I'm not having ammo
I
buy pissed down a—”

Waldstejn touched the older man on the shoulder. “I'll clear it, Guido,” he said. “I'll get an acquisition request off today.”

“Hold on!” Fasolini snapped. He took his fingertip from the communicator control. “What do you mean, you'll clear it?” he demanded. “
You
don't have authority to supply one of those mothers—there isn't a unit like it in the whole bloody Federal army.”

“And by the time somebody in Military Accounts has figured that out,” the local man said reasonably, “we'll both have long white beards. Look, the noise'll make a few of them—” he waved. The breeze carried a burden of faint moans, people too slow or too ignorant to get under cover before the bombs hit—“think they're in a battle, not an abattoir. Requests from independent commands have an automatic clearance up to fifteen thousand crowns—and believe me, the Major knows better than to flag a chit
I've
approved.” The pride in Waldstejn's voice was as obvious as it was justified.

Fasolini squinted at the younger man. Instead of replying directly, the mercenary keyed his communicator again. “Top to Guns,” he said. “All right, you've got clearance, Roland. But it's still a bloody waste.” To Waldstejn alone he added, “Damned fool thinks they'll be programmed to whip-saw back and forth on the same track, so if he keeps enough crap in the air they'll fly right into—”

The sky flashed a yellow that went white and terrible in the same instant. Fasolini's mouth froze in shocked surmise. Both men leaped up to stare skyward, even though they knew the bombs were soon to follow.

*   *   *

Sergeants Breisach and Ondru were shrieking in the bare lobby of the warehouse where the wave of anti-personnel bombs had caught them. The sheet-metal roof was in scraps and tatters that writhed with by-products of the explosions. Sunlight poured through the dozen meter-diameter holes and the myriads of pinheads stabbed by fragments. The metal had stopped most of the glass-fiber shrapnel itself, but blast-melted droplets of the roof had sprayed down on the lobby.