"The Forlorn Hope" - читать интересную книгу автора (Drake David)

Chapter Seven

"You got a rummy team checking you out, Captain," whispered what had been Guiterez' radio helmet. "Smile for the camera."

The warning meant that therewere a pair of drones this time: low-ball on the deck, high-ball a kilometer behind and three hundred meters in the air. Instead of transmitting its information in bursts when it lifted higher into the air, the low-ball drone had a constant link with its companion. The higher bird transmitted the data to Army HQ for processing. It was safe from small arms because of the distance it trailed the lead unit. It was still cold meat for more sophisticated air defenses, but the system was a good one for pin-pointing hot spots in a generally cool environment.

"All right, it's working," said Albrecht Waldstejn to the two privates who had escaped with him.

They stood carefully on top of the truck box, resisting the impulse to leap up in an access of nervous energy. Waldstejn began to wave. From their vantage point, four meters plus their own height, the trio of Cecach soldiers had a good view over the top of the scrub. There was a ragged path down which the reel of cable had been rolled. At the other end of the path, the pit head oozed a thick smudge. The dust lifted by the shellbursts had settled out of suspension, but fires still burned there and among the brush piles ignited by the mercenaries.

The cable lay in tangled sections beside the upright truck. Some lengths were still reeved through holes punched in the side. By looping the cable around braces and putting men on both ends to pull, the Company had managed to right the truck with a concerted heave. Waldstejn had supposed that they would need to double-loop the cables, using sturdy vegetation for mechanical advantage in lieu of proper blocks and tackle. Fifty strong, disciplined humans had proved to be all the advantage required.

There were no obvious signs of what had been the truck's cargo.

The low-ball snapped past the three of them, close enough that a puff of exhaust from its engine dried the corneas of Waldstejn's eyes. It was moving much faster than the ordinary survey drone which Trooper Powers had brought down. Even from his height, Waldstejn could follow its course with his eyes for only a second or two before it was gone. He lowered his arms, but it was a moment before he remembered to relax the rictus into which his face had formed itself when he tried to smile.

"Goddam," muttered Jirik Quade. He was knuckling the muscles of his own taut belly with his head bent over. Quade's pain was real enough, but it had nothing to do with physical fear. The black-haired soldier had to become an actor in a few minutes. He was out of his depth, part of a complex scheme at which all of his instincts rebelled. He did not understand the whole plan, and he was desperately afraid that he would not be able to handle his role. But the stakes were clear: the certainty that Pavel and the Lieutenant would die if he did not carry out the act.

Pavel Hodicky had been waving also. "They'll make another pass," he said in a fast, detached voice. "The drone approached from the east, so the ground units will come from the east too. Even if the drones have infra-red, they won't pick up anyone but us, because Lieutenantben Mehdi says Cecach technology isn't up to-"

Waldstejn put a gentle hand on the little private's shoulder. The younger man was shivering. "That's right, Pavel." the officer said. "See, the high one's orbiting already-" he pointed. "In a few-sure, here it comes."

Water sloshed against both narrow banks of the stream. The drone angled back up the valley so low and tight that its wing-tips trailed twigs. Its nose cap was flat black, uncamouflaged and permeable to the full assortment of sensors which might be included in its instrument package. For an instant, the drone pointed directly at the truck. Waldstejn saw a blurred flash of the terrain behind the aircraft through the cowling of the turbofan. Then the drone pitched and was gone, whipping soots and smoke from the fires high enough to make the men cough.

Then there was silence in the valley, and nothing moved except by pressure of the wind.

Private Hodicky took a deep breath. "You know, sir?" he said in a normal voice. "I thought they'd shell us when they found us. Shell us first, I mean. I know they'd send somebody by to pick up the pieces later…" He gave Waldstejn a wan grin.

The young officer laughed. He thumped the heels of his hands together in an instinctive attempt to loosen his muscles. "Tell you what, soldier," he admitted, "I was guessing fifty-fifty myself on that. Eagles, a patrol checks us out, crowns they target the next salvo on this truck instead of up there at the mine." He waved.

"Hell, shells or no shells, what's it matter?" asked Private Quade off-handedly. "We're sitting on a bomb, ain't we?"

It was an honest comment, not a gush of pessimism forced into words by fear. Jirik Quade's fears had little to do with the lethal hardware they were juggling. But his words tightened the insides of his two companions.

Churchie Dwyer had expected the induction roar and the higher-pitched howl of the fans themselves as they pumped air into the plenum chamber at pressures so high that steel floated on it. He had not expected the oncoming tank to shake the ground beneath it without any direct contact.

"Black Three," he said, touching his key. He was not sure the tiny transmitter in his helmet would carry down to the Lieutenant, not with him flat on his belly in a slit trench like he was. "Vehicles approaching, estimate thirty kph-" that was slow, must have backed off the throttle when they got close- "estimate several vehicles."

Beside Dwyer, Del Hoybrin stretched out his arms to grasp the forward corners of their cover sheet. Churchie had carefully strewn the top of the microns-thick fabric with loam and foliage before they crawled beneath it into the cramped trench. The sheet would blur to match its surroundings more slowly but with even greater delicacy than their uniforms did; but the veteran figured that in a pinch, nothing looked more like dirt than dirt did. Now gusts eddying beneath the skirts of the approaching vehicle swept across the light soil and caused the sheet itself to flutter.

Tanks were hideously expensive and in short supply for exploiting the main breakthrough. Therefore, Waldstejn's quick appraisal had left the Company in reasonable hope that the pursuit _would be limited to light, indigenously-produced armor, vulnerable to their shoulder weapons. But they could handle a tank also, so long as "Lead vehicle is a tank," Churchie reported, but he was unable to hear his own voice. The muddy daylight through bare patches of the cover sheet was blotted out. The roar was palpable as the huge armored vehicle slid across the trench on its cushion of air. The cover sheet molded itself to the mercenaries like a coat of body paint. It rammed them down with a pressure which though uniform forced a wordless scream from Dwyer's throat..

Then it was past. Brush whanged and popped against the skirts of the next vehicle, an armored personnel carrier which slipped along at a respectful distance from the tank. Equally large, the APC lacked the tank's massive armor and weaponry. Its crew and infantry complement scanned the brush through vision blocks, uneasily aware that because the tank was proof against most weaponry, a band of cornered fugitives might hit the APC first in hopes of dying with their teeth in a throat.

The personnel carrier slid over the trench. Its fans were powered by gas turbines and not by a fusion bottle like that of the tank. Its passage was a caress by comparison with that of the heavier vehicle. With the hatches buttoned up, it was difficult to see the ground even at a distance from the vehicle. If anyone aboard tried, whirling dust hid the outlines of the mercenaries.

It did not occur to Del Hoybrin to try to report. Churchie handled that sort of thing. Dwyer was only half conscious. Blood drooled from his left nostril.

There were five more armored personnel carriers ripping stolidly through scrub already bulldozed by the lead tank. Then, closing the column with the scarred, brutal assurance of the townbully, came the one they could not count on dealing with.

The Rubes must really want them bad, Dwyer thought muzzily, to sendtwo tanks after the Company.

"Ooh, Daddy Krishna, that's a big mother," murmured Trooper David Cooper.

"Tell me about it," agreed his shelter-mate, Grigor Pavlovich. "You know, if we hadn't left the gun behind, they'd be expecting us to do something about that bitch ourselves. And goddam if I know what we'd do except get eat up."

The troopers who had been actually overrun by the Republican armor had a worse view of the vehicles than many others in the Company. As the Cecach lieutenant-was he a captain?-had said, there were Rubes any way they moved, so it was a toss-up where a patrol would be vectored in from. The Company was strung in one and two-man shelters no deeper than body thickness, in a circuit three hundred meters' radius from the truck. Twenty-odd shelters in a kilometer or so made the bunkers around Smiricky #4look as dense as a phalanx… but the guns would carry, and the chances of the entire Rube unit being in range of somebody were very good.

With what was rumbling down the hill now, though, that put them in the place of the frog that swallowed the bumblebee.

"Whooie," Cooper said. He was able to look over the lip of his trench at the armor because of the distance intervening. "I tell you, buddy, if that's indig manufacture, then you and me hired onto the wrong side in this one."

"Naw," Pavlovich explained, "they were built by Henschel on Terra. The Rubes bought tanks, the Feds bought men. Us." He turned his head to spit tobacco juice over the side of the trench without raising his head further. "I still think we hired on the wrong side."

"Hell, there's two of them," his companion whispered. The tense half-humor was gone, leaving his voice flat. The grip of Cooper's weapon felt sweaty and very frail beneath his palm.

The tank wallowing through brush at the head of the column was painted taupe to match Rube uniforms and their outlook on life. It gave an impression of enormous solidity, but it did not look particularly large-certainly not at six hundred meters, not even through the magnification of Cooper's gunsight. As a matter of fact, the tank was only about nine meters long and four wide. The height was almost greater than thewidth, because the plenum chamber and drive fans had to underlie the entire vehicle.

There was a stubby muzzle on the bow slope flanked by lights, sensors, and vision blocks. It would be an automatic weapon of some kind, probably a light cannon. The ball mounting would limit it to 90° of arc or less, but the tank itself could spin like a top on its air cushion. The gun thus hadall the traverse that a turret mounting could have offered.

Whatwas mounted in the turret was a reflector-beam laser as powerful as the pair which had been emplaced at Smiricky #4 for air defense. For the heaviest anti-armor applications, a cannon firing shot of high kinetic energy was still superior to a laser of the same bulk. The great advantage of a laser-when it was coupled with the fusion plant which a tank required for mobility anyway-was that the laser never ran out of ammunition. Instead of being left defenseless after twenty, forty, even a hundred discharges in a hot battle, a laser-armed tank could continue ripping so long as an opponent shared the field with it. Especially for tanks built for export to worlds which might lack the materials or technology to produce osmium or tungsten-carbide penetrators, a laser main gun made sense.

But the most lethal weapon in the world was useless if it could be knocked out before it was used. To the mercenaries lying in ambush, the most frightening thing about the tanks was that their armor made them virtually invulnerable to any weapons the Company had available. Indeed, the tanks were very possibly invulnerable even to hits by the automatic cannon that Cooper and Pavlovich had crewed before bugging out of the Smiricky compound.

The tank was faceted with blocks of sandwich armor. The hull and turret had no curves, but neither did they have any shot traps or plates vertical to a probable angle of attack. The sandwich was faced with sloped, density-enhanced steel, up to ten centimeters thick on the turret and bow slope. The central layer was a mat of monomolecu-lar sapphire, its interstices filled with a high-temperature gum which acted to equalize mechanical stress. The sapphire filling was far inferior to steel in terms of stopping high-velocity projectiles, but under battlefield conditions it was impenetrable by lasers or shaped-charge warheads.

Behind the sapphire was a second layer of steel as thick as the first; and the first layer alone would shrug off rounds from the Company's shoulder weapons like so many drops of rain. Two tanks. Krishna.

One of the armored personnel carriers swung out on the column. It doubled back around the tank at the end, returning to squat at a point on the ridge overlooking the valley. The other seven vehicles continued to rumble down toward the truck. They kept a ten-meter separation and probed the brush with nervous twitches of their weapons.

The APCs were designed to carry a half-platoon of troops apiece. They were as large as the tanks and mountedan automatic cannon in a small turret forward. They were not significant threats as vehicles-their light armor would stop shell fragments and rounds from indig assault rifles, but the mercenaries' guns could penetrate them the long way. The danger of the APCs lay in the fact that they carried twice the number of troops as lay awaiting them. Nobody had to tell the Company's veterans how lethal a short-range burst from an assault rifle could be.

"Well, I'll tell you one good thing," Cooper said to his partner. "It isn't us up there with that APC, waiting for somebody to step out and take a leak down our necks… And it isn't us downthere, either."

The motion of Cooper's eyebrows sufficed for a gesture toward the stationary supply truck. The three figures in camouflage fatigues looked very small atop it. And against the bow and the pointing weapons of the lead tank, they looked hopelessly vulnerable.

"Fine, there's two of them," the radio said in the attentuated voice of Albrecht Waldstejn. "Ignore the APCs. Your only target is the farther tank. Ah, farther from the truck, the second tank."

There was a whisper of heterodyne in Sookie Foyle's ears as her command set rebroadcast the message. The radios woven into the helmets of the Company were short range. Under ideal circumstances, they were good for a kilometer. The fact that everyone's head was stuck below ground level made the present circumstances far short of ideal, and there was no damned room for error. One channel of the command set was dedicated to Waldstejn's helmet. Anything he said over the radio was banged out to the whole Company on a separate frequency.

Sookie was alone in a slit trench on a knoll to the northwest of the ambush. It was the direction from which it had seemed least likely that the Rubes would approach. That was not because Foyle was a woman or the Communicatorper se. There were seven other women in the Company; and like those others, Sookie Foyle carried a gun and was expected to use it goddam well. At the moment, however, her duty was more important than that simply of a gunman. She had to set off the ambush itself.

The armored vehicles were dark blotches against the yellow-green ofSpring foliage. From a slight elevation, the armor was as obvious in its approach as ticks crawling across a sheet. The few troopers huddled low in the notch of the valley had a view of only a few meters through the scrub. It was one of them who would have to detonate the make-shift mines on which the Company's prayers had to rest.

One of the figures below on the truck brushed his head in what could have been a wave toward the oncoming tank. "Don't think I'll dare key this again," whispered Albrecht Waldstejn. "It's all in your hands, Sookie. For God's sake, don't give the word until a tank is in range. Whateverhappens. "

She could not see the Cecach officer's fixed smile as he greeted the hostile armor. His back was to her, and the distance was long for that sort of detail, even through the gunsight. Waldstejn's transmission had clicked off at the last half vocable, suggesting more than reason permitted Foyle to believe.

Sookie tried to wet her lips with a tongue that was almost equally dry. Let him live, she prayed silently. Dear God, let the others both die but let him live.

Her hips moved in the narrow trench, pressing her groin tighter against the soil in an instinctive search for relief.

Sergeant-Gunner Roland Jensen could see nothing but the dirt just in front of his eyes. Enough light seeped through the cover sheet for that. Even without the cover, there was nothing to see above his shelter except brush, and he had seen enough of that during the march from the compound. Like much Cecach vegetation, the scrub that had retaken this valley dangled roots at intervals from the tips of branches. That had made the Company's flight an obstacle course, but at least it meant now that their pursuers were unlikely to notice the hiding places before they were intended to…

Jensen was singing to himself, mouthing the words soundlessly as he always did to pass time. It was a habit to disconnect his brain until it was needed again. The blond man had a reputation for patience, for perfect stolidity.

"If in the field your grave you find," he sang, starting the fourth stanza.

He was not at all patient, not with the ox-like torpidity of a Del Hoybrin, at least. But Jensen had learned to wait. The supply truck had contained caps, detonating cord, and the explosives themselves; but there had been no provision for initiating the explosion except electrically. It was a load of fungibles, after all. The Smiricky Complex had no need of the ignition hardware itself.

"That is not cause for crying…" The ground was trembling. Part of Jensen's mind could hear the snap of branches springing up against armor plating. His helmet's commo worked. He had heard without difficulty Waldstejn's final relayed instructions. That meant Jensen would be able to hear the Communicator's own instructions as well, and there was no reason in the world to tiy to see anything forhimself.

"In the green, green grass, just rest your ass…" It had been easy to fuze the truck, easy enough, but the daisy-chain had to be initiated separately for the plan to have a prayer of success. The device chosen to set off the daisy-chain was Sergeant-Gunner Roland Jensen.

"And watch the clouds go flying!"

It was his own fault, but Allah save him from the fruits of his stupidity!

Lieutenant Hussein ben Mehdi pressed his knuckles against his brows as if he could somehow force out the awareness of what he had to do. He had hung the bundle from his pack only seconds before leaving theOperationsCenter for the last time. It only weighed two or three kilos, after all, and it might be useful. Use- ful! Allah save him from the Hell he had earned, it was that indeed. And who but Lieutenantben Mehdi, the foresightful officer who had brought the bundle-who but he should be trustedwith its use?

There might have been no reconnaissance drones accompanying the patrol… but not even ben Mehdi had been able to think that it was probable that the ground forces would not have that support. He alone of the Company-save for the Cecach trio, might Allah requite them!-was placed within the daisy chain. If there were drones at all, they were most likely to orbit the center of affairs, and even a few meters could make a crucial difference.

Ben Mehdi had no overhead shelter except his cover sheet and the acrid smoke. They had lighted a brush fire a few meters away from where he lay. It should confuse vision and the possible heat sensors on the Republican vehicles. Whether or not it hid the mercenary, the smoke certainly punished him with its smouldering lethality. His gas filters made each breath agony, but they did nothing to prevent smoke tendrils from making his eyes burn.

As Allah willed, but might he not will so terrible a thing! prayed Hussein ben Mehdi. Beside him in the trench lay the bundle of five, broomstick-slim anti-aircraft missiles. To fire them accurately, he would have to stand with the bundle extended on its launching staff. He would be as obvious as if he were waving a Federation flag. Ben Mehdi had both the experience and the imagination to picture how the Republican gunners would react.

Allahpreserve him!

The lead tank came to a quivering halt twenty meters from the waiting truck. Behind the tank, the six vehicles which had followed it down from the ridge formed a hedgehog. Each armored personnel carrier pulled close to the vehicle ahead of it, then rotated 30° to one side or the other. That way the heavier bow armor and the turret weapon faced attacks from the flank, but the troops within the rear compartment could still use their weapons through the firing ports provided for them. The tank at the rear did a slow 180° turn on its axis so that its heavy laser covered the track the vehicles had just ripped through the scrub.

"Too far," muttered Quade, kneading his thighs with hands that left sweaty patches on the fabric. "Goddam, won't get neither of them."

"We'll work something out," said Albrecht Waldstejn. Moving sideways so that he continued to face the armored vehicles, the Cecach officer stepped down to the roof of the cab. He used the edge of the microwave dish as a handhold. It was warm with use. The truck had a live feel though it was motionless in any gross sense. Hodicky had run the fans up to speed and then locked them flat while the trio mounted the truck. That way they could be seen. The fans were still spinning without load, ready to boost the vehicle on its air cushion as soon as someone dialed up their angle of attack.

There was presumably a radio discussion going on among the officers of the Republican patrol. No sign of it reached Waldstejn as he clambered down. He stepped on the driver's seat, then to the ground.

The armored vehicles had no external loudspeakers, and it was quite obvious that their crews were not anxious to unbutton until they better understood the situation. The tank's main gun followed Waldstejn on silent gimbals with the same precision that it would have tracked a target worthy of its ravening power. The automatic weapon on the bow slope occasionally moved. It was clearly ready to sluice the truck body with a stream of explosive bullets.

The patrol was halted, but all the vehicles stillhovered a finger's width above the ground. A fire that had smouldered near to death now quickened with a gush of sparks. The draft beneath the skirts of the lead tank bathed the Federal troops with smoke and dust blown across the stubble of cut brush. The fans roared as they sucked air through protective gratings to replace leakage around the skirts. Because it was omnipresent, Waldstejn did not realize how loud the noise was until Hodicky tried to speak over it. The little private had followed Waldstejn to the ground, but he still had to shout to ask, "How close, sir? You see it now. How close?"

Staring at the dark bow of the tank did not put Waldstejn any nearer to being able to judge how thick its armor was. Too damned thick, almost surely.

The mass of the tank was an aura about it, and its three-meter height was no longer a statistic but a lowering presence. It was not the armor that mattered now, just the angle, and that number was not changed by Waldstejn's fear of the reality whose laser glared at him like the path to Hell."Half this," he said to his subordinate, "or a little less if you can, but-don't startle them whatever." The tall officer began to walk toward the tank. His hands were in plain sight and his body was so tense that he was near to fainting.

Hodicky yelped at the change in plans, but it had taken Waldstejn's action to break the silent deadlock. There was a swish and a clang as a side-panel of the lead personnel carrier hinged down. The section of troops which the vehicle held moved nervously onto the ground. They blinked in the sunlight with their rifles pointed in various directions.

The real value of armored personnel carriers lies in the troops they carry. From their inception, however, there has been a tendency to use them as fighting vehicles rather than as infantry transporters. Even brave men hesitate to leave their dark cocoon for natural terrain searched by an enemy's fire. Rationally they may know that the metal box encasing them is more a magnet for fire than a protection in a hot engagement; but reason dies when the first bullets rake the field.

Republican designers had developed a simple solution for the problem. The troop commanders could throw switches and drop either or both side panels of their APCs. The thin armor-plating became a ramp which neither hindered the troops' deployment nor encouraged them to stay with their vehicle. Most of the present unit knelt, coughing at the smoke in the air. Six of the soldiers trotted toward Waldstejn. One of them was an officer marked by a pistol and a belt-slung radio. "Hold it right there!" he ordered Waldstejn.

Someone came to a decision. There was a change in the medley of the drive fans. Republican infantrymen turned in alarm. Waldstejn's own heart leaped in fear of the unexpected modification. Then the background noise died away as all the vehicles settled to the ground. Their fans slowed to idle on descending notes. The difference was as abrupt as that of walking out of a stadium where amplified music was being performed.

"Thank God you've found us, sir!" Lieutenant Waldstejn cried to forestall the Republican officer. The troops in dark uniforms clustered about their captive. Others from the group still near their vehicle moved uncertainly toward the two Federal privates. "My men and I were kidnapped from Smiricky #4 by a band of bloodthirsty cut-throats-off-planet dregs, every man of them and their whores too! Now that you're hot on their trail, we have a chance to get revenge. Why, you cansee how the beasts used us."

Waldstejn waved back toward the Privates. Quade and Hodicky certainly looked the hang-dog remnants of brutal torture. Quade's uniform had one sleeve. The scabs on his arm had opened again when he climbed from the truck. Red cracks seamed the dried blood. They looked to be one stage removed from amputation, though the scrapes were trivial compared to the bruising Quade had received at the same time.

For his part, Hodicky had washed his trousers at the first spring they came to. He had then marched in them wet. Dust had fused to mud that seeped into the fabric as indelibly as the original dye. That, together with gares ripped in the cloth by the brush and an expression of stark terror, made Pavel Hodicky look as battered a victim as his black-haired friend.

"But where-" the Republican officer began. His radio broke in on him. Its demand was a buzzing snarl, audible in full only through his earpiece but easy enough for Waldstejn to reconstruct from his own experience with anxious superiors. "Sir, they say they were capture-" the Republican tried to explain.

"Is your commanding officer in the tank, Major?" asked Lieutenant Waldstejn pleasantly. He could not identify Republican rank tabs. If he could have, he would have bumped the harried officer two grades for certain rather than by estimate. "Here, it'll be simpler to do this directly, won't it? I understand, I'll keep my hands where everyone can see them." As he spoke, the Federal officer began to walk forward at an easy pace. He was striking for the right side of the tank that faced him squarely. He held his hands at shoulder height, their bare palms forward.

"No!" shouted the Republican officer as his radio buzzed again. "No sir, I didn't-"

"That's all right, boys, keep me covered and we'll all be safer," said Waldstejn to the two infantrymen who seemed ready to block him without direct orders. Retaining his calm smile, Waldstejn nodded in the direction he was moving. The tank laser and the automatic cannon of the nearest APC were both trained on him-and on the Republican troops around him. One of them leaped back with a look of horror and an oath.

From what Waldstejn had heard, swearing like that in the Rube forces was good for six months solitary-or death, if your Unit chaplain was hard-nosed. Even so, the Federal officer thought the oath was a reasonable response to the imminent likelihood of being blasted by friendly weapons.

And Albrecht Waldstejn was well able to empathize with that concern at the moment.

"Ah, none of you guys'd have some water, would you?" asked Private Hodicky. He gave the Republican soldiers a nervous smile. The Federal private had learned years before that bullies found his smile a good reason to kick him. That was fine. These troops could like him or despise him, it was all the same. What they had betternot do wasfear him and watch him closely.

"Ah, back in the can," one of the Republicans muttered with a gesture toward the personnel carrier. There was the usual tendency of troops being moved by vehicle to strip gear fromthemselves. Packs and web gear prodded uncomfortably when you were one of eighteen or twenty men being jounced in a cramped troop compartment. Of course, that meant that when something happened, your gear was in a tangle out of reach. None of the six men clustered around the Federal captives carried a canteen. Only two of them had slung belts of ammunition before spilling out of the vehicle.

Not that that mattered. Two shots would be quite enough for Hodicky and Q. Their hands were as bare as Waldstejn's.

"This yourtruck?" one of the Rubes asked. He nodded. The taupe-clad men were uncertain. Their covert glances toward the rear showed it was not action by their prisoners that they particularly feared. The 522nd Garrison Battalion had been typical of second-line Federal units in having little or no discipline. Its officers were for the most part despicable; certainly they were despised by the troops they nominally commanded.

The situation in the Republican forces was wholly different. Rigid control was exerted downward from all levels. Breaches of discipline were corrected with a rigor which seemed harsh even by comparison with the standards set for civilians by the theocrats of Budweis. There was a basic flaw, howler, inFrederick the Great's dictum that soldiers should fear their officers more than they feared the enemy. That stifles initiative and causes men to look up the chain of command instead ofthemselves taking even the simplest measures.

Measures like deciding what to do with a pair of Federal privates they had been told to watch.

"We fixed it," croaked Jirik Quade. He gave the skirt of the supply truck a thump with his hand. The contact felt good. He hit the metal again. "When, when we got away from the, yeah, the guys who, ah.

…" Quade thumped the vehicle a third time and watched it carefully. He had not made eye contact with any of the Rubes since they approached the truck. He was going to screw up, he was going to get Pavel and the Lieutenant killed, and he did not even have a gun!

"Right," said Hodicky with enthusiasm. Lieutenant Waldstejn was walking toward the tank, now. He seemed to be drawing with him a cluster of Rubes including the protesting infantry officer. "We fixed it up, but then we waited for you guys. You know, we tried to j-join the Lord's forcesbe -"

Waldstejn turned. He looked worn and lonely amidst the taupe uniforms. "Private Hodicky," he called in a clear voice, "showthe Major how the truck works. Just back it up a little."

"Butsir]" the little private cried.

Waldstejn ignored him. The tall, slim officer stepped around the bow of the tank, out of Hodicky's sight.

"One of you guyswant to get in with me?" asked Hodicky. His mind was neatly calculating, chosing words that clicked out engagingly through his fixed smile. He climbed the step, then slid into the cab through the door that they had left open. "Not that we could run anywhere," the Private's mouth pattered on, "jeez no, think what that-waving at the armored bow, thirty steps away- "would do!"

"Hey, hold on," said a dark-clad soldier. "I don't think…" His assault rifle was of a pattern different from those issued to Federal troops, but it had the same sort of hole in the muzzle end. More or less without thinking, the Republican began to point the weapon for emphasis.

Private Quade undid his fly.

The dark-haired private was supposed to call attention away from Hodicky by counterfeiting an epileptic fit. Hecouldn't do that, could not act any better than he could have flown a starship. But there had been no one else to use, because Quade could not drive the truck, either…

"Hey, watch that!" a soldier cried as he leaped away.

Quade's urine splashed audibly from the skirt of the truck, gouging away at the grime on the steel. As Hodicky boosted the power, air squirted out beneath the skirts. The side-draft caught the urine and atomized it across Quade's boots and those of the Republicans on the ground with him. "Whoops, should've looked for the lee rail," the little man cried happily over the intake whine. The others cursed.

The truck slid away at a slow, non-threatening pace. Hodicky was backing and turning simultaneously so that the open tail-gate of the truck swung toward the bow of the tank.

"Hey!" shouted a Republican. He fired for emphasis. His bullet cratered the door of the cab.

Hodicky chopped the fans, grounding the truck. "Hey, guys!"he cried, raising both hands to his startled face. "Hey, it'sover!"

He was going to have to wash out his trousers again, he thought sickly. If he survived.

From the foreshortening of her sights, it looked to Sookie Foyle as if the supply truck had been swung into direct contact with the lead tank. Despite the optical exaggeration, that meant that the deserters from the 522nd had done their job well.

That left Foyle with her own problem.

There had been almost four tonnes of explosive aboard the overturned truck. The mercenaries had buried it in a rough hundred-meter circle about the truck. That meant there were five meters or more between each thirty-kilogram case and the cases toeither side of it… and the second tank was still outside the daisy-chain entirely.

"Control to Guns," Foyle whispered into the mike. "They're halted out of position. Don't do anything-" God, she shouldn't have started this, Jensen didn't need to be told by a Communicator to follow the plan set down ahead of time-"when the truck goes off. C-control out."

There was no reply. Well, Guns would tear a strip off her when it was all over, and she deserved that or worse.

The daisy-chain was for the moment only a construct of Foyle's memory. The individual mines had not been marked. They were merely covered with friable soil from the holes in which they were laid. Excess dirt had been scattered in the brush where the breeze picked it up and mingled it with dust from kilometers away. There was little chance that the Republicans would notice the explosives, even if they dismounted. More possibly, someone might stumble over the chain of det cord which connected the cases of plastique, but the thin cord blended well with the yellow-gray soil.

Sookie Foyle had to read the daisy-chain like the dial of an invisible clock. It was flattering that the Company's command team-ben Mehdi and the sergeants with whom she had worked for years-had assigned her the task without hesitation. That flattery was small recompense for the horror into which a screw-up would plunge her.

Foyle had spread her sight picture to survey the whole Republican column. Now she tightened the magnification again, focusing on Albrecht Wald-stejn. His head was visible above the fender of the lead tank. Nothing would happen for some seconds, at least. The trench which would protect the Cecach soldiers was twenty meters from where the Captain now stood. It had been hidden beneath the cab of the supply truck until the vehicle moved. The charge would surely not be fired before Wald-stejn too could reach a place of safety.

The Federal officer turned from the Republican tanker to whom he had been speaking. Waldstejn's face had in the past days lost a garrison softness that could never have been called fat. He had deliberately lefta stubble of whiskers which suggested privation. Now he was shouting something back toward the truck. His face smiled as he stood waiting, but his blue eyes were closed.

Republican soldiers began running. They were crying things unheard as Foyle furiously traded magnification for field of view.

Then the blast blotted out everything in the center of her sight picture.

A hatch, invisible beyond the facets of armor, opened on top of the turret. A furious Republican officer looked out. He had to bend forward to see Waldstejn. "Ensign Farrago," the tanker shouted to the officer from the APC, "areyou a complete idiot? And what is thattruck doing?"

"Sir, I-" the infantry officer said yet again.

There was a shot. Waldstejn's heart leapt but he did not turn. From where he stood, close to the side of the tank, the truck and his two companions were hidden by the massive armor.

"Hey, it'soverl" Hodicky cried.

He was alive, thank God, and Waldstejn's smile never slipped as he said to the tanker, "Sir, it was only an earnest of our good intentions, I assure you."

"Lieutenantl"Hodicky cried, "they'redragging me-"

"Go. ahead!" Waldstejn shouted over the steel and sapphire barrier between him and his men, between him and the trench that was to have been his shelter from the blast.

Men were shouting. He rested his left hand on the armored flank. Waldstejn was in the dead zone, so close to the Republican tank that its laser could not be depressed enough to hit him. The builders had cured that problem very simply by embedding a line of anti-personnel charges in the armor at waist height. By throwing a switch, the tank crew could spray the ground outside their vehicle with shrapnel that a mouse could not hope to hop through.

Ensign Farrago gripped Waldstejn by the shoulder, bellowing something unintelligible. There was a burst of shots nearby.

Waldstejn's eyes were closed. "Dies irae," he whispered through smiling lips. Not the hymn for itself but as a return to childhood and the problems of a choirboy. "Dies illa-"

And perhaps as a prophecy.

"Solvet saeclum in favilla-"

Day of wrath, this day that rips the ages into ash.

He did not hear the explosion. The shock wave had already stunned him before his brain could have perceived it as noise.

Their eyes had followed Pavel and the moving truck. For the moment, at least, none of the Republican infantrymen seemed interested in the deep trench which had just been revealed beside Jirik Quade. The black-haired private closed his fly. For the first time since he had heard the Lieutenant's plan, Quade was at peace. His duties were complete. He was too pleased with the success of his own improvisation to notice anything else which might be occurring.

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 thecrackl of a high-velocity bullet exploding on metal, sharper than the muzzle blast that spawned it.

"Hey, it'soverl" 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 getoutl" 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 lethimself 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, stampingthemselves 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 timewas 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.