My hands shook as I stuffed black-powder-cored fuse lengths into dynamite sticks. I had to take off my long coat and mittens to scramble down the rock face below the narrow ledge, wedge the old dynamite into cracks and joints in the granite, then pay out fuse to the place from which I would light it.
If I had done it right, a fifty-foot section of the ledge should shear away, so no infantry could either slip behind or get an angle to fire down on Aud’s unlikely Spartans.
By the time I finished, I couldn’t feel my fingertips.
I sat rubbing back the circulation while I stared toward the horizon, where the train’s glow had shone in the early-morning darkness. I focused on the quivering image of a tiny black worm against a white sea. The troop train was perhaps an hour away. I shouted a warning down to the defenders.
If it were spring, or even winter, there might be enough snow on the rock above the canyon for my shout to trigger an avalanche. That happens in the holos, not in real life.
I inched south along the ledge, cringing from the edge, until I found a notched boulder from behind which I had a clear field of vision and of fire over the train track and adjacent avenue of approach.
I had promised Aud-technically, I had avoided promising, but that was semantic crap-that I would return to camp, not to the canyon floor. I didn’t promise him when.
I loaded the rifle, a bolt-action Tressen standard, with a telescopic sight that was little more than lenses fitted in a tube bolted above the receiver that was as long and slender as a walking stick. Then I laid out ammunition on the rock ledge in front of me.
The train showed clear now. It streamed oily smoke that scudded above the flat whiteness, and it slithered closer minute by minute.
Sound echoed up crystalline from the canyon floor. Rifle bolts snicked, a dropped cartridge case jingled over rock. Voices whispered and prayed.
From my vantage, I could see the train. But an observer on the train wouldn’t be high enough to peer into the canyon’s shadows and see the blocked path. Minutes crawled by before the troop train visibly slowed.
When the train finally stopped, I estimated the range to the engine, an iron hedgehog with its great spiked wheels, at two thousand yards. If our attackers had bothered to bring artillery, they could have stood off and simply shelled the canyon. Our first tactical victory had been won for us by our opponent’s disdain.
A single patrol emerged from the first coach behind the engine’s oil tender and advanced along both sides of the ice trail.
I sighted the rifle not on the patrol, which was well out of range, but on the trench that we had dug to block the ice road to the canyon. An army could fill a trench fast, but not so fast if the trench was covered with aimed fire. Four hundred clear-shot yards away from and below me, the enemy wouldn’t be able to repair the trench as long as I kept sniping his repair crews. But our main purpose was not to kill repairmen but to prevent our enemy from using the train as an armored approach vehicle, or worse, as a battering ram.
We needn’t have worried. The train was Forty-fifth Division’s ride home. Their commander wasn’t about to put it in harm’s way. I swore to myself and wished for artillery, for a smart bomb, even for enough explosives to have improvised a train mine out there on the plain.
The patrol didn’t come within my rifle range before it spotted the trench ahead of it, then turned and double-timed back to report.
Deliberate the Forty-fifth’s commander proved to be, as Aud predicted. I smiled. Deliberate was fine by our side. If the Forty-fifth sat back and sized up the situation for a week, until Jude, Celline, and their pickers gathered all their meteorites, great.
Twenty minutes passed. Then the engine’s spiked wheels flailed, gained traction on the ice, and the ice train crept forward eight hundred yards. The commander didn’t know how well equipped we might be. He was willing to gamble that we had no artillery, but he stayed beyond the range of a Tressen mortar, just in case we had one.
A half hour passed, then a battalion fell out from the train into the snow, formed a skirmish line on both sides of the ice track, and advanced on line along the track’s axis.
I focused the rifle sight on individual soldiers. Lean, grim, and purposeful, they and their gear outclassed our shopkeepers and the junk we had scrounged from the prison guards.
The skirmish line drew close enough that I could have plinked a GI. But at best that would have revealed my position and highlighted the flanking route if the attackers were unaware of it. And it would only have cut the odds against us down to 7,999 against 301.
Once the skirmish line closed to where it disappeared below my line of sight, I inched back along the trail until I could see down to the canyon floor.
The Tressen troops on point zigzagged or low-crawled as they made their way up the canyon. Aud’s shopkeepers had removed every rock or snowdrift that offered so much as a shred of cover. They held fire.
When the nearest attacker had low-crawled within one hundred yards of Aud’s iron parapets, the shootout started.
When the infantry advanced, they were cut down. When they retreated, they were cut down. When they lay as still as turtles, shopkeepers’ bullets eventually found them.
The attackers finally scrambled and stumbled back down the canyon, leaving behind fifty-four motionless bodies.
I panned the scope’s tiny view field across the caps, crooked helmets, and shoulders of the defenders but saw no evidence that any of them had suffered a scratch.
Screams of relief and disbelief echoed up to me from the mouths of the shopkeepers. A quarter mile below me, the men pumped their rifles up and down and slapped one another on the back.
I inched back on the ledge, sat with my back to the rock wall, and sighed to nobody, “Seven thousand nine hundred forty-six to go, fellas.”
SIXTY
AUD PLANCK KNEW HIS ENEMY. Over the next four hours, the Tressen commander squeezed two more futile frontal assaults into the canyon meat grinder.
After each withdrawl, Aud sent a half-dozen shopkeepers forward to drag left-behind bodies back behind the parapet, rather than leave them on the killing ground. Nothing sentimental. The corpses would have provided the attackers cover in subsequent assaults.
One of the recovery team, a delicate, red-moustached sort, whose wife remained back at the camp, had, along with another man, dragged a body until they were within twenty yards of the boxcar parapet when the red-moustached man spun like a dervish, then collapsed, bleeding from the throat.
The crack of the sniper’s bullet snapped down the canyon in the same instant. The red-moustached man was the first casualty among the three hundred. The remaining two hundred ninety-nine kept their heads down after that.
After dark, which came early in the canyon’s shadows, the attackers tried to work scouts and sappers up the canyon. One scout made it to the parapet, slit the throat of a man dozing on guard, then was shot.
Darkness blinded the Tressen snipers, too. Aud sifted men forward, dragging tins of the remaining oil from the overturned locomotive’s tender. Aud’s men set fires down the canyon to deprive the infiltrators of the cover of darkness. Cinders that cracked from the fires lit the dead’s uniforms, and the smoke and stench of burned cloth and flesh roiled up the canyon walls like a crematory’s chimney.
I haven’t seen hell. Yet. But I’ll bet my agnostic’s pass to heaven that a battlefield at night comes close.
Dawn brought light but not heat. I had slept in the crevasse bent, and it took minutes before I could straighten my original-equipment arm. The prosthetic, which was actually younger tissue, woke sooner and more supple. I crawled back to the notched boulder overlooking the plain to the south, dragging my rifle, then peeked below. “Crap.”
Eight hundred yards from me, on both sides of the track, clustered six groups of three soldiers each. A disc of snow twenty feet wide had been tramped down around each group.
I raised my rifle and squinted through the scope. Each group of three men b
usied itself around a black metal tripod. Each tripod’s rearward leg tilted toward the canyon and was as thick as a stovepipe. The Tressens had left their artillery at home, but mortars broke down into loads a couple of crew members could backpack.
As I watched, the leftmost crew scurried around their tube, then all three ducked away as the mortar platoon lobbed its first shot toward the canyon.
If you ever want a demonstration that whatever goes up must come down, watch a mortar. The trajectory is steeper than a roller coaster, both up and down. Smooth-bore mortar rounds travel slower than bullets, even at the moment they exit skyward from the mortar tube. If you look closely, you can follow the round as it ascends, finned like a backyard science-project rocket, and scarcely bigger.
Thok.
The round dropped toward me, and I curled into a fetal position behind the rocks. “Crap, crap, crap!”
Blam.
The round impacted fifty yards above me, on the canyon’s opposite wall, and exploded shrapnel and shattered granite chips that clattered down onto the shopkeepers eight hundred feet below. I cocked my head, nodded. Not a bad-ranging round. From the gunners’ standpoint.
Once all the tubes were similarly laid, the rain would become unbearable for Aud’s troops.
I crawled back into the boulder’s notch and peered through my rifle’s scope. The mortar crew members’ tight-wrapped scarves scarcely rippled. There was little wind to correct for, here or near the target. The scope on my rifle would never be mistaken for even the last-generation optics in an Eternad armor helmet, but it was good enough.
There had been no time to zero the rifle, and my first round puffed snow, unnoticed and yards wide of my target. When the sound reached the mortar crews, some flinched, but they kept beavering away, heads down, around their tubes.
Mortars have been the same for centuries and across light-years, one of those unbroke things that nobody screwed up by fixing. A Tressen mortar is little more than a steel pipe on legs, open at the top, with a sharp vertical pin at its closed bottom. A finned artillery shell, with a percussion-fired explosive cap in its tail and an explosive charge in its nose, is dropped down the mortar bore. Cap strikes pin, driven down by the shell’s weight. Boom. Round out. Do it again.
My second shot struck a mortar crewman in his torso as he hung a round above the tube. The round didn’t drop cleanly and hung inside the tube. A hung round puckers mortar men anywhere, and Tressen explosives were, as mentioned, unstable.
One of the unwounded crewmen knelt, laid the tube on its side, then tilted the tube mouth toward the snow, to coax the live round out. My third shot struck him between the shoulder blades, and the round detonated. Not only was the first mortar destroyed, it looked like crewmen in adjacent crews took shrapnel, also.
I kept firing, as fast as I could mark targets and work the rifle’s bolt. Consternation ensued below, followed by a rapid retreat out beyond rifle range, dragging wounded and mortar tubes.
It was past noon before the mortars resumed, from out on the north forty, where I couldn’t get at them. Of course, they couldn’t so easily get at us, either. Trying to hit a target with a mortar is like trying to pitch a penny so it drops down a stovepipe. The farther you stand back, the flatter your trajectory, and the harder to drop the penny in without rattling it off the inside of the stovepipe.
Therefore, the Forty-fifth Division cooled its heels-above the Tressen Arctic Circle, not a figure of speech-for the rest of the available daylight while its mortar men tried to pitch pennies down a distant stovepipe. The closest round penetrated to four hundred feet above the canyon floor before it detonated against the rock wall. Shrapnel and cobbles showered harmlessly down on the shopkeepers. Otherwise, the mortar crews merely rearranged the mountain scenery with explosives and kept their off-duty comrades awake.
At dusk, I slipped back down to the ledge and glanced over the side. Far below, the shopkeepers had gone to school on the mortar attack and had improved their overhead cover, roofing over their little fortress with boulder-reinforced boxcar doors.
But eventually, pennies would drop to the bottom of the stovepipe, and the boxcar doors wouldn’t be umbrella enough.
In the second half of the twenty-first century, Earthlings beat one another’s brains out largely at night. But without night-vision technology, wireless communication, and remote sensors, war keeps bankers’ hours.
The night raced past in silence. The most likely reason for that was that Forty-fifth Division’s commander intended to rest his troops, in order to make full use of the upcoming daylight hours.
SIXTY-ONE
T HOK . THOK. THOK. THOK. THOK.
I opened my eyes staring into dawn-lit frozen granite, in the crevasse that had become my home. The mortar men were up early.
Blam. Blam. Blam. Blam. Blam.
Early, but still inaccurate. Evidently, the Forty-fifth’s commander had a trainload of mortar ammunition that he didn’t care to haul home as “deteriorating stores.” I shrugged. He wouldn’t be the first commander who failed to win a battle because he stood off and shelled an enemy to avoid the unpleasantness of digging them out of their holes. Of course, the Forty-fifth’s commander didn’t know that in his case failing to win-and win quickly-was to lose.
I crept back to my vantage at the notched boulder and swore. The Forty-fifth’s commander had awakened on a more aggressive side of his Pullman berth.
Across the twilit snow a scout company, their torsos cross-slung with ropes, jogged not toward the canyon mouth but toward, well, me.
Through my scope, their faces looked grumpy and purposeful. In the pantheon of military nobility, snipers like I had become occupy an unfavored niche. Also, I suspected, the slaughter of the last couple days had persuaded Forty-fifth’s commander to seek a way around the canyon. Which the scouts would soon locate and secure if I didn’t do something about it.
I set to work with my rifle and left too many scouts facedown in the snow.
The survivors, also too many, finally disappeared beneath me, under the mountain’s curve, invisible and no longer shootable by me.
I shook my head and shrugged into my pack. “Checkout time.”
It was no longer a question of whether my position would become indefensible, but when. I had no way of estimating how long it would take the scouts to scale their side of the mountain, and I dared not cut my primary responsibility, to deny the enemy the flanking ledge behind me, too fine.
Meanwhile, out on the plain, troops formed up in black phalanxes against the snow. There had to be four thousand troops out there. I swallowed. The theory was that an inferior force could hold perfect terrain indefinitely. “Indefinitely” was about to become a precise term.
My panting smothered by the incessant, percussive rain of mortar rounds, I crabbed back across the narrowest fifty feet of the ledge, above the explosives-packed string of joints and crevasses that crisscrossed below the ledge.
From there, I could see down into the canyon, where lead elements of the Forty-fifth and the defenders had already engaged, rifle crackle intertwining with the constant crump of the mortars. I still had fifty rounds for the rifle, and I put forty to good use.
After an hour, a mortar round whistled clean between the canyon walls and burst in the center of the defender’s position. I counted thirty motionless bodies and heard more wounded than I could count. One silent, bleeding figure who remained defiant on the parapet was Aud Planck.
The attack wave crested, then receded. But the defense was wearing ever more rapidly. If it were outflanked, or grenaded from above, the end would come too soon.
I tugged out a box of wooden kitchen matches and crept to the bunched fuses. I had test-burned some back at the camp and figured these would burn through in ninety seconds.
Two hundred yards away, down the ledge, the first scout’s helmet peeked above the ledge.
I struck my match, but it broke in my numbed fingers. I grabbed for it and spilled the rest of the box, t
he tiny sticks floating down the eight hundred feet to the canyon floor like dandelion seed.
Spang. A scout’s bullet exploded granite six feet above my head, then sang away into the distance.
I peered into the matchbox. One left.
My unpracticed fingers shook as I struck the match once, twice without result. I cursed my smoke-free lifestyle, then tried again. The match burst into yellow flame, and I cupped it with my other hand around it, then lit the fuses.
They spat and crackled as they burned toward the dynamite.
Another scout bullet struck the ledge, in front of me.
I spent a remaining round to keep the scouts’ heads down while I begged the fuses to burn faster.
The count in my head reached ninety seconds.
Nothing.
I counted ten seconds more, then peeked out to see whether the fuses were burning.
Spang.
I earned a near-miss and a stone chip through my cheek for my curiosity.
Boom!
Boom! Boom! Booomm!
The explosions lifted me off the ledge, then belly-flopped me on the stone.
Granite flew.
Acrid smoke billowed.
The noise level returned to the background sizzle of small arms and the drum of mortars.
As I got to my feet, head lowered, and turned to pick my way north away from the battle, I muttered, “You cut that too close.”
I glanced back.
The smoke cleared. Jagged gaps had been torn in the granite.
But the ledge was still there.
SIXTY-TWO
“CRAP! CRAP, CRAP, CRAP.”
I swayed there on the ledge. I had no more dynamite, five more bullets, and no plan. The rational thing to do was escape before the scouts noticed. And leave Aud Planck’s shopkeepers hung out to dry.
I ran to the narrow ledge span, smoke still curling from its crevasses, up between my boots. I jumped up and down on the ledge but it remained as immovable as, well, granite.
Orphan's Triumph Page 21
