The Forlorn Hope

by David Drake

  There was a shout and a shot. All the world moved in a gunsight as the Private turned. His mouth and eyes were open and his mind was searching for a target. In the air hung the crackl of a high-velocity bullet exploding on metal, sharper than the muzzle blast that spawned it.

  "Hey, it's overl" Pavel blurted, white-faced in the cab.

  Quade grunted with relief. The Rube nearest him had stepped back in shock as the little private turned. Now the guard, too, relaxed; but he did not lower the rifle he had aimed at Quade when the Federal spun like a breech closing.

  The Rube who had fired pointed his rifle in the air and turned half away from the vehicle. He looked embarrassed. Two of his companions pushed past him to the truck. "Hey, out of there," one of them demanded. A taupe-clad tanker was now leaning from the tank and shouting toward men hidden by the tank's own bulk.

  Hodicky had rotated the supply truck around an axis just in front of its cab. He was only three meters from where he had started, but the truck was closer by its full length to the tank. A Rube reached into the cab and caught Hodicky's ankle. The dark-clad soldier slanted his rifle up in his free hand, a threat in fact if not by deliberation.

  Everything was according to plan, except that the Lieutenant was squarely in the line of fire.

  "Listen, you idolator!" said the Rube holding Hodicky, "I said to get outl" He jerked at the ankle he held. Pavel gripped the door jamb and the steering wheel. The gun muzzle jabbed at his ribs.

  "Lieutenant]" the Private cried, "they're dragging me—"

  "Go ahead!"

  "I'm coming," Hodicky gasped to the soldier who held him. The other's finger twitched toward the trigger of his rifle. Quade, two jumps away, was a weapon himself now, but the guard nearest him was watching the drama at the truck instead.

  Hodicky released the steering wheel and let himself be pulled down from the driver's seat. Hi§ right hand reached under the dashboard as the guard hauled him forward. Only Quade understood what his friend had just done.

  They had twenty seconds.

  Pavel cried out as he bounced on the pressed-metal step. The soldier holding him dragged the little man a pace further from the truck, then kicked him. "Does that help you listen?" the Rube demanded. "Does that?"

  Sergeant Mboko had improvised the delay switch with sand and a ration can. When the can was flipped over, the sand ran out until it no longer had enough weight to depress the switch which had originally flashed the headlights while it was held down. Now the switch waited to send current to an electrically-primed blasting cap in the back of a thirty-kilogram shaped charge.

  The Republican soldier spat and turned from Hodicky. He faced Quade, half his size and as bedraggled as a cat caught in a rainstorm.

  "G-go, Pavel," Quade said. Blood droplets jeweled the cracked scabs on his taut right arm.

  "You want some of this?" the Rube shouted. He waved the butt of his rifle in the smaller man's face.

  Quade ignored the weapon. He leaped for the Republican, gripping him by both biceps. The man screamed. Quade's fingers compressed his muscles as if they were clay in a potter's hands.

  Pavel Hodicky was dizzy with pain. He had not felt the boot hit him. It had been lost in the hot rush of his lower spine hitting the cab step. Even as Quade spoke, Hodicky was rolling through a red blur. He was not rational enough to be scrambling toward the trench—or even scrambling away from the imminent blast. He was simply moving because his last conscious awareness had been of the need to move. The ground dropped away beneath him.

  Another of the guards cried out. The man Quade held was gasping and staggering backwards. Dark-clad soldiers were leaping to their feet with curses. The two nearest men were battering at Quade with their gun butts.

  Quade wrenched his head back with a gurgle of triumph. His opponent fell away as if propelled by the blood jetting from his throat. A Republican screamed again and fired with his rifle almost touching Quade's back.

  The soldier trying to hold Quade from the other side gaped down at his left arm. A bullet had struck the elbow and disintegrated, amputating the limb within the sleeve. Quade turned toward the man who had killed him. Shock has no effect on a berserker. The black-haired Federal had ceased to be human seconds before the shots ripped his heart and lungs to pulp.

  Quade gripped the gun muzzle with his left hand. He reached for his killer with his right. His snarl was silent because he had no diaphragm to drive the sounds. The blood on his teeth was not his own. The Republican shrieked and turned away just as the world dissolved in a red flash.

  * * * *

  For all its simplicity, the shaped-charge principle was discovered by accident. An engineer tested a small block of explosive by detonating it against the side of a safe. The safe was not structurally injured. In its steel side, however, was stamped in mirror-writing the logo of the explosives manufacturer. The logo had been impressed in the block, and on detonation the gases propagating along the sides of that shallow impression were focused at their mid-point. They struck the safe with greatly-multiplied force, stamping themselves into plating which would have resisted the impact of much larger unfocused blasts.

  Shaped charges were gleefully adopted by the military as soon as armor became a commonplace of war again in the Twentieth Century. If the face of the explosive were hollowed into a long, conical throat, the blast could be focused in a pencil-thin jet of unimaginable intensity. A thirteen-kilogram charge could blast a hole through fifty centimeters of hardened steel. Sergeant Mboko, with practically unlimited quantities of explosives to work with, had molded his charge from a full thirty-kilogram case. Even with the imprecisions involved in such a field expedient, Mboko's weapon could have ripped through any practical thickness of steel armor.

  Unfortunately for the mercenaries, the sapphire core of the Terran armor would shrug off a jet of white-hot gas that vaporized metallic armor.

  Unfortunately for the Republicans, Albrecht Waldstejn had allowed for that when he made his plans.

  The supply truck blew up with a deep red flash. Quite apart from its focus, the thirty kilograms of explosive were comparable to the bursting charge of a large shell. The rear half of the vehicle disintegrated. The cab and some shredded remnants of the body lurched forward, crumpling with the acceleration. The trench that sheltered Private Hodicky was two meters deep. Despite that, the shock wave slammed him from one end to the other. The men struggling at ground level were killed instantly by the unimpeded blast, even before the shrapnel tore their hurtling corpses. The face of Jirik Quade was smiling with perhaps as much happiness as it had ever shown in life.

  Instead of the tank's invulnerable frontal armor, Mboko's shaped charge was directed toward the skirts around the plenum chamber. The drive fans were buried in the floor of the vehicle, out of the way of possible assault. They had enough extra power to keep the tank floating on its air cushion even if there were some holes in the heavy steel skirts that focused the cushion downward. What happened this time was not merely a few holes.

  Centimeter-thick steel vaporized like ice in a gas flame. A ragged twenty-centimeter circle was gone from the bow skirt. Almost the entire rear skirt ballooned away. The jet, spreading but still powerful, had punched the metal there after traversing the hollow length of the plenum chamber. Brush flared at the touch of white-hot gases. The tank driver had started to lift his vehicle immediately before the explosion. Now the tank lurched to the ground again. Though its drive units were undamaged, they could not pressurize a plenum chamber that gaped like a barn in a whirlwind. The fans roared, whipping the nearby brush into a sea of orange flames.

  The armored personnel carriers were protected by the tank from any serious effects the blast might have had on them. Inside the APCs, men were bounced against equipment and each other; but both the vehicles and their complements remained combat ready.

  Waldstejn and his companions had done their part. The rest was up to the Company.

  Chapter Eight

  Churchie Dwyer
knew the APC was close. They had heard it returning as a lookout from the direction the column had taken. He had been cursing as he recovered from the pounding the tanks had given him, and this too was reason to curse. But it was also reason to lie still and pray that their cover remained adequate.

  The look-out vehicle had approached at a leisurely pace. That might, of course, have meant that it was taking its time to get into a perfect firing position from which to rake the trench. The pair of mercenaries could not even bump up the lip of their cover sheet to watch. They lay on their bellies with their heads toward the approach to the valley. If they tried to turn around now, they would be seen unless the Rube driver was blind. All they could do was to listen to the fans and feel their sheet quiver above them from air spilled from the plenum chamber.

  Even so, when the huge blast in the valley signaled them to action, Churchie was shocked to find that the side of the personnel carrier was within arm's length of him. That meant that if somebody dropped the sides, the two mercenaries would be knocked silly without anybody knowing they were there.

  The APC was starting to lift from an idle. Dwyer fired. He was trying to angle his shot forward toward where he thought the driver must sit. The muzzle blast rebounded from the flat side with stunning force. The steel puckered inward where his projectile had struck it. The hole in the center was rimmed with lips of metal white-hot from the impact. The APC started to rise. Churchie fired again, letting the vehicle's incipient turn change the angle for him. Then his partner began to rake the personnel carrier with fully-automatic fire.

  Republican APCs had five firing ports in each side panel. The troops within could spray their surroundings through the ports without dismounting. When the shooting started, however, none of the soldiers had inserted his rifle in a port. Hoybrin's burst gave them no opportunity to correct that error.

  The big mercenary walked his fire from the rear hinge forward. He leaned into the first shot so that his gun muzzle almost touched the armor. At the end of an eight-round burst, the recoil had pounded him erect and lifted his point of aim from waist height to shoulder height. Del slid his bracing right foot against the back wall of the trench. The vehicle was still up on its fans, but the gyros which balanced it could not prevent it from beginning to slide down-hill. It would have required a living hand at the controls to stop that drift. The thin armor echoed with screams and curses as soldiers tried to clear weapons while their dying comrades thrashed in the same cramped quarters. Aimed shots from Churchie's weapon punctuated the human sounds with high-velocity cracks. Breathing deeply with the exertion of absorbing recoil, Del Hoybrin ripped the remainder of his twenty-round box through the front portion of the troop compartment.

  At such short range, most of the osmium projectiles punched neat exit holes in the far sidewall of the vehicle. One of the wounded or dying men inside clamped on the trigger of his assault rifle. That burst multiplied casualties inside in a way that a dropped grenade could not have equalled. The light bullets spalled fragments from the armor. Everything sailed around the riddled crew compartment, flaying and burning where the osmium bullets had only punctured.

  The APC was nine meters long and weighed over fifteen tonnes. The murderous delight of having so huge an opponent at his mercy blinded Churchie Dwyer to the significance of its uncontrolled drift. Del was kneeling to insert a loaded magazine in his weapon, but Churchie was fully erect. The personnel carrier was four or five meters away, still broadside to them. The mercenary had just fired at the rear compartment, trying to smash the turbine, when the automatic cannon in the turret opened up on him.

  Parallax and the breadth of a finger saved Dwyer's life. He had forgotten about the cannon because the shooting started when the big gun was too close to bear on the troopers. The range had opened almost enough when the gunner squeezed the trigger. Churchie was still so close that the electronic sight failed to compensate perfectly for the angle between the gun muzzle and the fiber-optics sensor beneath the tube. The shells which should have taken off the mercenary's head instead blew up on the brush fifty meters beyond him.

  The sheaf of twenty-five millimeter cannon shells did not crack like the lighter, faster projectiles of the infantry weapons. Their shock waves slapped Churchie across the forehead, lifting off his helmet. The gout of propellant gases from the muzzle stung like a spray of hot sand. Screaming, the tall mercenary threw himself flat again. The recoil of his weapon was dangerously liable to break the collarbone of anyone firing from a prone position. Eyes stinging, deafened by his own shots even before the cannon blasted in his face, Churchie began shooting at the turret he had previously ignored. At his second round, a white spark beneath the gun tube marked his hit momentarily. The hot metal was quenched by a spray of vaporized oil as the cannon's recoil compensator blew up.

  The gun jammed at once. Churchie continued to fire at it until his own weapon spat out a plastic clip to announce that it needed to be reloaded.

  There was a moment's silence. Cannon recoil had speeded the vehicle's drift and had swung its bow away from the mercenaries. Gray smoke was leaking from the ports and bullet holes in the troop compartment. Hydraulic fluid which had splashed on the turret face was sustaining a sluggish fire. As the APC crackled into unbroken scrub, Del Hoybrin fired a long burst into its engine compartment. Fuel exploded. It blew off an access plate and sent flames rocketing twenty meters into the sky.

  "Churchie, what do we do now?" the big man asked.

  Not all of them were dead. You could feel the screams as a high component of the roaring fire. No one seemed to be healthy enough to release the side panels, though.

  Nothing grated in Dwyer's right shoulder as he locked home a fresh magazine. "Now," he said, "we move to where we can see what's going on down there." He nodded curtly. The Rube vehicle was fully involved now, a blotch of flame and black smoke. It warmed bare skin and blocked all view of the valley. "Could be the beggars need us," Churchie added. A level of hearing was returning, as it always did; and always less than the level he had had before battle. "Just could be."

  Mingled with the shots and grenade bursts in the valley was the unmistakable hiss of a laser. At least one of the Republican tanks was still in business.

  * * * *

  The shots mean all three of the indigs are dead, thought Hussein ben Mehdi, please Allah, may it mean that they are all dead and I don't have to—

  The ground rippled. The air went orange as the charge detonated. The shrub nearest the mercenary bowed away from the shock. His cover sheet lifted, then was jerked back by the implosion that echoed the blast. The whole valley rang with the savage crash of the tank skirt hammered and dissolved by superheated gas.

  The Lieutenant sprang to his feet. He generally wore body armor in action, but he had known he could not pack it out on his feet. Ben Mehdi's clamshell was somewhere back at Smiricky #4. Colonel Fasolini's set was there too, shattered uselessly into his body in all likelihood . . . but Lieutenant ben Mehdi wished that he had his anyway.

  The sunlight undimmed by the cover sheet had drawn him up. Now ben Mehdi's whole focus was on the bright sky. His mind tried to close off everything his peripheral vision showed. The reconnaissance drones were still in their tight, fluttering orbits. Ben Mehdi raised the air defense bundle. Its telescoping staff gave a meter of stand-off between his face and the five tiny rocket motors. The bracing strap was looped around his right shoulder, and the wire sighting ring was clicked into place.

  Please Allah!

  The lead tank squatted in a sea of fire only thirty meters away. Closer yet to the Lieutenant's right were the nearest of the dark APCs. Three of the five gun turrets pointed more toward him than away, and the flanks of all the vehicles could mow the scrub clean with whips of automatic fire.

  The drones were both within the sighting ring. Screw them all! Ben Mehdi jerked the release cord with his left hand.

  The sky to the mercenary's rear was fouled by trash from the explosion, bits of the truck roof and
a plume of the light soil sucked upward in the following seconds. It would not affect the missiles' infra-red homing, but it gave ben Mehdi the unnecessary feeling that Death lowered at his shoulder. The five plastic tubes at the end of the staff chugged in rotation. Felt recoil was mild, comparable to a large-bore pistol rather than to one of the Company's armor-piercing shoulder weapons. The first four missiles each left the launcher with a hiss and a puff of black smoke. The last tube ruptured at the base. The missile sizzled skyward, a bright spark, but the backblast scorched ben Mehdi's hands and the skin of his throat beneath his face shield.

  The Lieutenant threw down the empty launcher and flopped back in his shallow trench. The valley rang with bullets striking armor and the startled, enormous, return fire of the Republican vehicles. No one had shot at ben Mehdi. None of the enemy had even seen him through the brush in his self-camouflaging uniform. Surprise and the concentration of fire from higher up the slopes had saved the Lieutenant where a hard suit could not have.

  There was a bright flash overhead. The drones' turbofans were mounted high and they had a low infra-red signature besides. There was nothing else in the sky to confuse the missiles' homing systems, however. The maneuvers built into the drones' stacking programs might have helped them against a human gunner, but they were useless against the air defense cluster. The tiny missiles were short-range and not particularly fast, but for targets within their capabilities they were hell on wheels.

  The drone closest to the flash continued to fly, but it trailed a white mist. The second flash and the report of the first, lost in the gunfire, were almost simultaneous. The wings of the other drone folded abruptly like those of a hawk preparing to swoop. The third flash was followed by the red glare of atomized fuel igniting in the wake of the drone damaged by the first warhead. It drew the last two sparks as well, decoyed but decoyed without harm because there were no proper targets for them.