Orphan's Triumph

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 busied 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.