by David Drake
"Who'll join me in a game of twenty-one?" asked Churchie Dwyer. He riffled his cards.
"Shut the hell up!" snapped Sookie Foyle. No one else in Hold Three spoke. Some of the soldiers did not even look up from the weapons which they held in front of them like flags at a service of honor.
"Well, I only asked," Dwyer protested mildly. He wriggled his shoulders against the copper bulkhead. The corner of an ingot scratched where his fingers could not reach. He began to flip the deck over one at a time in a game of privy solitaire.
Sometimes you could get people to play when their minds were on something else. They made dumb bets, took cards they didn't need, and forgot the rules in useful ways. Way deep down, the troopers in Hold Three were sure they were all going to die.
The hatches were closed. All of Black Section sat with the wall of copper between them and the coming fire besides. If the starship hit the ground hard, those same ingots were going to pulp everything human that shared the compartment.
The thing was, if you went West, it didn't hurt you to have a pocketful of other people's money. And if just maybe you came through . . . well, hell, Praha was quite a town for a bright fellow with the ready. Why stare at your gun when there wasn't a damn thing you or it could do to change the odds?
"Vector two-two-zero!" the intercom blared.
Churchie's cards spewed over his lap as he too snatched up his weapon.
* * * *
Their targets were four kilometers away as the Katyn Forest bellied over the rise, and Roland Jensen could not see them yet. He sat where he belonged, in the gunner's seat. Pavlovich and Cooper were flat on the deck, waiting to take over when the section leader was killed—if they did not all die together. Like Jensen, the gun crewmen wore suits from the vessel's stores, meant for operation in corrosive atmospheres. The suits could not deflect a direct hit from a tank laser for more than a few microseconds.
The automatic cannon was angled forward and to the right, at 390 mils—the sharpest angle possible that would clear the bulkhead. The ship swung as it slid forward on the slope. Gravity was urging the Katyn Forest to a greater speed than the lift thrusters themselves could drive her. Jensen could see wheat through the firing slit instead of the indigenous scrub of moments before. All the landscape was cloaked in a silvery mist as the pumps rammed mercury out of the vent above the hatch.
"Three hundred!" Captain Waldstejn's voice reported, "three-fifty—"
There was a black speck in the gunsight. It sprang into a tank, distorted into a lowering blur by the spray of liquid metal. The pale beam of the laser was only a quiver as it sheared the power antenna behind the starship.
"Got her!" roared Sergeant Jensen. With one gloved hand he squeezed the lock which would keep the muzzle aligned with its present target. As his other hand squeezed the trigger) the Katyn Forest took off.
The starship's lift engines did not need to hug the ground the way an air cushion vehicle did. The auxilliary power unit of the Katyn Forest did not have enough juice to raise her to high altitude or even simultaneously to maintain forward motion and climb. By straining the APU, however, and by trading velocity for climb, Captain Ortschugin managed to slant his lurching command some ten meters in the air. Kadar's target was not where his computers had put it on the basis of data fed in at leisure. As the two Republican gunners snatched in panic at manual overrides which they had not expected to need, Jensen's projectiles sleeted in on the right-hand tank.
The mercury fog blurred the gunsight, but it had no real effect on the osmium penetrators themselves. The hull and turret face of Kadar's tank rippled in a silver spray as eight rounds a second struck them. The projectiles did not hole the armor. Ten or a dozen hits at the same point might have blasted a gap in the frontal slope of even one of those Terran monsters; but the range, plus the vibration and maneuvering of the weapons platform, spread the hose of bullets instead across the whole bow of the tank. The laser tube disintegrated. Dispersion and the big gun's cyclic rate accomplished what accuracy could not have managed under the circumstances.
"Rotate!" screamed Gunner Jensen, but Ortschugin had never ceased to spin his vessel on her vertical axis. The Katyn Forest had lost the momentum of her forward plunge and with it the capacity to stay aloft on auxilliary power. Now she settled between the two cleared roadways in an explosion of dust. The yellow-gray doughnut billowed up about the ship. The remaining laser stabbed her regardless like Polonius through the curtain.
All the tankers knew was that they had cut their target away from the broadcast grid but that she was still moving. The vast bulk of the starship was a reality which overwhelmed concepts such as armor and weapons effectiveness. The preset program had gone to hell when the Katyn Forest lifted. Now the tank gunner spun his sight picture across the scarred hugeness of the vessel's plating. He was not trying to lock on and pierce a single point, but rather to catch and destroy the gun which had just devoured his consort.
In Hold One, Sergeant Jensen felt a mild vertigo which was lost among the other chaotic sensory inputs. The section leader was trying to traverse the automatic cannon faster than the ship itself spun so that his muzzle would be waiting when the second target slid in view. The two axes of rotation differed, and the blur in his electronic sight would have been disorienting anyway.
The laser beam was a clapper, ringing on the hull of the Katyn Forest. The tank weapon cut a whorl of geometric roundness through the roiling dust. The tough hull surface scaled off in sparks and vapor, even though the beam was only glancing across it while it searched for its real victim.
"Vector three-fifty!" cried the intercom, and" Jensen's world exploded.
* * * *
Cooper saw the gun and his section leader in relief against a glare brighter than the heart of an arc light. The beam's fusion-powered spike struck the fog of mercury droplets and scattered cata-clysmically. To the tankers and the infantry still more distant in their APCs, the raging blue scintil-lance meant the guts of the starship had vaporized. In fact, the actinic glare was almost entirely beyond Hold One, not within it.
'Almost entirely', when power like that of the tank laser was involved, meant that the hold was a blue-lit Hell.
The beam slid down the length of the open hatchway with a roar of heavy-element ionization. The tankers had no target but the firing slit itself. They raked it as the starship continued to lurch forward, wheeling like a dying shark. Despite the scattering effect, ingots in the breastwork welded together. Sergeant-Gunner Jensen was slumping out of his seat.
Cooper's mouth was open behind his face shield. Even he could not have said for sure whether he was screaming in the noise and stink and light. He dragged his section leader down behind the copper and took over the gun himself.
The atmosphere suit made the controls unfamiliar, and Cooper had no idea where his target might be anyway. He had been belly-down until the instant he took charge, with no more picture of the action outside than the stacked copper ingots could give him. Now the plain gaped and the tank was only a speck at four kilometers distance. The laser beam itself gave Cooper his target. It lanced back to its source from the coruscant far end of the hold.
With a calm he had never felt in training, the mercenary pedaled in right traverse. The gun mechanism performed flawlessly despite the flash of Hell-light that had taken out its gunner. The tank was a sudden blur in the funhouse mirror of the sights. Its turret was rotating to draw the beam back across the hatchway. The ionizing discharge began to encroach on a sight picture already fogged by the last of the mercury being sprayed from the vents. "Got her!" cried David Cooper. The hammering recoil of the automatic cannon drove a bass note through the snarl of the laser.
Down range, the second tank began to come apart under the osmium hail.
As before, the Henschel compound armor adequately withstood the battering. The crew within did not. The laser tube and the tank's outer surface shattered like a sand-blasted ice carving. Though the armor did not give way, it flexe
d and rang like the head of a tympany. The tank captain, a veteran of APCs but new to his present Terra- built command, panicked. He threw open his hatch and tried to bail out.
Projectiles from the automatic cannon did not ricochet from the armor. Their velocity was far too great for that. Instead, they splashed like meteors on stone. Each round coated and vaporized a col-lop of density-enhanced steel. The wave-fronts sprayed the Republican officer and ripped him apart like so many white-hot razors. His body dripped back down the hatchway through which he had jumped. Screaming with the contagion of madness, the two crewmen followed their commander up and to the same end.
When the second can of ammunition had run through the chamber, Pavlovich shook his partner. "You can stop, now, Dave," he said. "You can stop."
* * * *
"Yeah, Bertinelli says it'll be a day or two before the bandages come off, but he ought to be OK," said Sergeant Mboko. "It was shock, mostly. He's wrapped in a heating blanket and that turtle of his is being as much nurse as she can with her own breaks."
The ship rocked with another short burst. In Hold One, troopers cheered as Cooper and Pavlovich took turns in the gun seat.
"Gun Section s been taking it on the chin," Lieutenant ben Mehdi remarked. He flashed a grim smile around the group crowded into the bridge. "Glad they got a chance to get a little of their own back."
The starship's visual sensors did not magnify their images, but fresh mushrooms of flame were clearly visible against the background of wheat. The field was marked by more than a score of fires, now. Some of them had burned down to smudges of rubber and lubricants and flesh. The lighter Republican vehicles had been laagered far enough from the tanks that they would not be damaged while the starship was being destroyed. When the gun crew had time to turn to them, they were dark blotches against the grain and still easy targets. While the Katyn Forest crawled under auxilliary power across the gap in the pylons, the automatic cannon smashed the thin-skinned vehicles one after another. The few which still survived were stopped. Their crews had abandoned them to the projectiles which would probe inexorably for their fuel tanks in any event.
"Got it," Captain Ortschugin muttered. The starship shook herself as her lift thrusters began winding out on broadcast power again.
Sergeant Hummel was staring at the analog display with a look of glum disapproval. To the radar, an armored personnel carrier was much the same whether or not it was a burned-out wreck. The unchanging hologram suited Hummel's mood better than did the cheers echoing from Hold One. "Fine, we chew up a reserve squadron," she said. "We're twenty klicks from the new Front, still, aren't we? What's going to be waiting there?"
"Jack shit unless our luck's a lot worse than it's been so far," said Albrecht Waldstejn. The question had surprised him until he realized how little the Company knew about the general situation on Cecach. On some worlds, no doubt, the conversion of an armored battalion to scrap metal would be a minor datum on the weekly Intelligence Summaries. Here, though—
"Look," the young captain explained, "you knew those tanks were imported—but did you know there weren't fifty of them on Cecach? And that they were what changed the whole face of the war in the past year, year and a half? People, what you've done here and back at 4B—you may have stalled the whole Rube drive. Those were the reinforcements they needed to put them through. I don't think they'll risk more tanks, even if they could shift them into position in time. And the rest we can pretty well take, so long as we keep moving so they can't drop the heaviest high-angle stuff on us."
There was a startled silence on the bridge. "I be damned," said Jo Hummel. "You mean we've got a chance after all?"
Thirteen hours later, battered and with two more troopers dead from a well-directed anti-tank rocket, the Katyn Forest set down again. She was in the spaceport around which Praha had developed during its centuries of human colonization.
Chapter Fifteen
The Katyn Forest was reduced to scale in the closed repair dock. Even a small starship so dwarfed the norms of human habitation that the vessel had taken down cables and a few balconies during the last kilometers of its passage. Ortschugin, cursing in Russian, had let his bows overhang the escorting troop carrier when it slowed for crowds of amazed spectators. The spacer would not feel safe again until he had rung his command into stardrive once more. That was at least days in the future, even with only minimal repairs to the vessel . . . but Captain Ortschugin had no desire to add even a minute where it was unnecessary.
"Point that thing somewhere else," Sergeant Hummel said to a disembarking Federal soldier, "or I'll feed it to you." With her finger, she gestured away the assault rifle the man carried awkwardly.
Ten kilometers beyond the current Front, they had paused to load a Federal platoon. The Praha authorities had been at best confused by the reports Lieutenant Albrecht Waldstejn had been sending in clear through attempted Rube jamming. The authorities were not so confused that they would permit a Trojan Horse into the heart of their supply system, however. The platoon had verified that the starship was what her passengers had claimed . . . but the look of the mercenaries had bothered the Cecach troops very much. It was not so much that the men and women of the Company looked murderous. It was more that they looked as if they did not care how many more they killed.
If there was any truth to half the stories they told, mostly to one another, the mercenaries really did not care.
Hold Three was open. A cat-walk had been run out to disembark first the indigs, then the Company. The last of the Cecach soldiers marched off in a column of fours past the platoon already drawn up within the dock. Some of them glanced back nervously.
"Waldstejn, Albrecht W E," shouted the leader of the waiting unit. His voice echoed in the enclosed dock without losing any of its sneering arrogance.' 'Number W-nine-three-nine-five-one—''
"That's me," said Albrecht Waldstejn. He was third in the sluggish file of mercenaries. Stepping past Hummel and Powers, the Cecach officer walked toward the speaker.
"—five-two-eight," the speaker concluded loudly. Two of the soldiers with him dropped their gun muzzles to cover the returned lieutenant. Their commander looked up from the long print-out in his hand. "Waldstejn?" he demanded. "What kind of uniform is that?"
Albrecht Waldstejn did not need the brassards or the strack uniforms to identify the unit arrayed to greet them as part of Morale Section. The chain-dogs had always frightened him, even before he was conscripted. Their brief was limited in theory to members of the armed services, but many of them shared with their Republican opponents the belief that righteousness took precedence to human distinctions.
They seemed less frightening now, to a man who in the past week had learned that death took precedence even to righteousness.
"It's what there was available," the Lieutenant said mildly. He fingered the off-planet synthetic. It was already losing its coppery tone to take on the shadows of the dock interior. "Christ knows, it looks better than the one I was blown through the bushes in."
The Morale Section officer was a colonel, though his name tag was too dim to be read. He slapped Waldstejn across the face. "Watch your tongue, soldier!" he said. "You're in enough trouble already!"
There was a pause in the shuffling of boots behind Waldstejn, a restive silence like that of a cat tensing to spring. The Cecach lieutenant turned. "Stand easy" he shouted. He managed not to add the curse that would have brought another blow— and what he was praying he could avoid. Wald-stejn's cheek burned. His body trembled with the lightness he had never thought to feel after they reached safety, reached Praha. "Stand easy, I say!"
The mercenaries' weapons were closer to use than the crisply-uniformed chain-dogs realized. None of the hands Waldstejn glanced across were thumbing guns to safe again, but there was a slight relaxation. The line began to move again.
The Colonel blinked. He had been startled by the incident, but he did not understand it. He glanced back at his print-out—names and ranks, Waldstejn could
see now, and enough of them to be the entire complement of the 522nd Garrison Battalion. "All right," the Colonel said, "all members of the Cecach garrison of Smiricky #4, front and center! Cecach Armed Forces only!"
Pavel Hodicky was just crossing the catwalk between Troopers Hoybrin and Dwyer. Like his lieutenant, Hodicky had been issued a uniform from the Company stores aboard the Katyn Forest. Before the Private could speak, Churchie Dwyer's palm swung across his mouth. Albrecht Waldstejn was saying loudly, "Sir, I was the only member of the battalion not to turn traitor. The rest of these troops are off-planet volunteers, under contract to the government."
The Morale Section officer looked from Waldstejn to the soldiers who had broken out of Smiricky #4 with him. More of the men than not had shaved when they got the opportunity, and all the troopers wore fresh uniforms. They were still a savage, alien presence eying the Colonel and the crisplooking platoon with him. "Right," the Colonel said. He found he had to clear his throat before he could add, "Who's in charge of you lot, then?"
There was a pause too brief to be called hesitation. Hussein ben Mehdi strolled forward. His left thumb was hooked in his equipment belt. It seemed natural enough that his right palm would rest on the grip of his holstered grenade launcher. "I am," he said in a drawl which emphasized disdain instead of volume. "Since the native battalion we were supposed to be supporting decided to turn coat and murder our Colonel. What seems to be the problem?"
The chain-dog commander blinked again. Ben Mehdi's moustache was its precise line again despite the thin welt of pink scar tissue angling across his face. His tone of suave superiority, coupled with the implications of the words themselves, shook an officer who was used to deference from even generals with line commands. "Ah," he said, "your men will accompany Captain Kolovrat here to the Transit Barracks for reassignment. Stack your weapons. They'll be returned to you when required."
Someone in the Company rank cursed audibly. Lieutenant ben Mehdi gave a chuckle which sounded more natural to others than it seemed to be to him. His mind was quivering with memories of the tank that howled and shuddered as he fired down its intake duct. "I'm afraid that won't be possible—" he gestured as if he could not recall Federal rank insignia and saw no reason that he should— "Captain. We'll continue to billet ourselves on the starship here. I'll be obliged if you'll make arrangements for our commissary—" he paused—"and for proper bedding, yes."
