Cohort of the Damned Page 2

  Hauser would have to make do with what he had. Neubeck nodded curtly to Stoph. “Do it,” he said. He undid the safety harness that held him close to the control chair and stood up carefully in the low gravity, then dropped the faceplate on his vacuum armor and checked the seals. “Let’s get this over with and get the hell out of here.”

  * * *

  Sersan Radiah Suartana pushed back his uniform cap to wipe the sweat from his forehead, then stared down at his hand. The gesture was an uncomfortable reminder of how ill-equipped the Sky Guards were. The soldiers were still clad in their Class One uniforms, designed for smart, parade-ground looks rather than combat use, while the three civilians who had attached themselves to the unit were wearing technicians’ coveralls. At the very least Suartana wished they had been wearing duraweave battle-dress, with combat helmets and plates of chest and back armor. Or, better yet, fully armored vacuum gear …

  But the fighting on Telok had erupted without warning, and none of the soldiers on duty in the military spaceport complex had been ready for it. They’d lost a lot of men already today to wounds even ordinary combat fatigues would have prevented. Now the men of Leutnant Hauser’s ad hoc unit were sure to lose more. Against Ubrenfar commandos in full armor the humans were seriously overmatched.

  The sersan darted a glance at Hauser. The Uro officer was gripping a cargo net with one hand, while the other clung tight to his laser pistol. He had a grim, determined look on his face and seemed completely oblivious to the rest of the men, Indomays all, crouching behind the improvised cargomod barricades or perched high on the catwalk watching the entry, waiting for the Ubrenfars to come.

  Suartana frowned. Hauser had paid little attention to the defensive preparations. He seemed totally withdrawn into himself, a man already defeated. The men could sense his mood, too. They knew he had no faith in them, and now they had precious little faith left in themselves either.

  He had known Hauser since the young aristocrat was a baby. The family was one of the best known on Java Baru, Laut Besar’s smaller continent, and it had been his honor to serve three generations of the clan. Hauser’s grandfather had been a member of the Chamber of Delegates; his father and uncle had both staked out promising political careers. Now young Wolfgang Hauser had struck out on his own, the first of his prominent line to join the military. The Leutnant’s sharp, fox-faced features reminded Suartana of Karl Hauser, Wolfgang’s father. He would have been proud of his son. Too bad that hunting accident had carried him away.

  Too bad in more ways than one. Since Karl Hauser’s death his older brother, the Graff von Semenanjung Burat, had tightened his grasp on the family holdings. A firm proponent of Laut Besar’s Aristo-Conservative Party, Rupert Hauser had resisted every move toward political reform the government had undertaken. Despite his faction’s resistance, the Indomays were starting to make progress toward equality, but it was slow going. Suartana had watched the Graff’s nephew grow up believing in the superiority of Uros over Indomays. That was something the boy’s father wouldn’t have been proud of, he thought. The young officer’s stubborn arrogance seemed stronger than ever now that he had earned his Sky Guards commission. And with that exalted feeling of Uro superiority came an equal tendency to denigrate the Indomay class.

  And when Hauser, a Uro, was almost paralyzed with fear, he couldn’t believe his inferiors capable of anything.…

  * * *

  “I hear them,” one of the koprals—Suartana thought his name was Lubis—said in Terranglic. “They’re coming. Get ready, men.” He looked nervous, but determined.

  The man had every right to be nervous. “Selamat, saudara.” Suartana said in Indomay. “Good fortune, brother.” The Uros used mostly German when speaking among themselves, while the lower classes preferred the traditional tongue from the early days of the colony. Everyone spoke Terranglic, though, and it was largely replacing Indomay as the primary language of Laut Besar. Sometimes Suartana regretted that, but most of the books and technical chips that the Indomays needed to better themselves were in Terranglic.

  The kopral’s grip on his weapon tightened. “Kembali,” he said. “I return it.”

  He looked at Hauser. “The men are ready, Titan,” he said. As ready as they’ll ever be, he added to himself.

  Then the doors erupted in a storm of fire and smoke.

  * * *

  Half-seen figures loomed through the swirling smoke around the doors, hulking dinosaur shapes encased in full vacuum armor. Hauser fired his pistol, and an instant later the rest of the defenders joined in with a ragged volley of fire from their ill-assorted collection of weapons. Laser beams and the needle-thin rounds from FE-FEK/24 combat rifles chopped through the billowing cloud, but only one of the massive, two-meter tall Ubrenfars fell. Their armor protected them from most of the damage the human defenders could mete out.

  The Ubrenfars fanned out, moving fast in the low gravity despite their bulk and their clumsy, forward-leaning postures. They were highly trained assault troops, specialists in space combat situations. More than a match for the Indomay defenders, most of whom had never heard a shot fired in anger before today.

  He forced the thought from his mind. The men in his command weren’t the best, but they were still men. They should be more than a match for mere ales, no matter how well trained or well equipped. He’d grown up believing in the natural order of things, the inherent superiority of Uro over Indomay, human over alien. All he had to do was rally his men to put up a solid defense. The Ubrenfars would surely give way.…

  “Pour it on!” he shouted. “Fire!”

  The defenders kept up a steady stream of fire, and another of the Ubrenfars went down with the faceplate of its vacc helmet smashed, the face beyond a bloody pulp. Someone gave a hoarse cheer in Indomay. “Ure!”

  Then one of the Ubrenfars raised a rocket launcher, a twin to the massive weapon Suartana had scavenged earlier. A rocket streaked from the tube, trailing flame, tearing into a stack of cargomods near the center of the warehouse. The warhead tore through the improvised barricade, and a gout of fire and whirling debris erupted from the other side. The three men using the cargomods for cover spun away, hurled bodily across the chamber by the force of the explosion in the weak gravity field. Hauser saw the body of the senior kopral hit the far wall and bounce. The man’s face had been burned away. One of the other soldiers was dead, too. The third was gaping at the stump of his forearm, eyes wide with shock. Then a laser shot bored straight through his chest, and the eyes glazed over. The man hadn’t screamed, had hardly seemed to understand what was happening to him.

  Swallowing sour bile, Hauser tried hard to stay in control.

  “Got one!” a rifleman on the catwalk above Hauser’s position shouted. He was waving his FEK in triumph. “Got one of the scaly bastards!”

  Then a whole barrage of laser fire from the assault troops probed the human positions. Four rapid pulses of raw energy sliced into the soldier on the catwalk, nearly cutting his torso in half. Unlike the other men, he had time to scream.

  Wolfgang Hauser knew he’d hear those screams for the rest of his life.

  Something whooshed from the doorway. The rocket struck the wall near Hauser’s position and exploded in a fury of light and sound. Smoke billowed and fragments careened off the walls like bullets. Pain stabbed through Hauser’s leg, and he looked down to see blood oozing from a gash in his thigh. Someone was moaning nearby.

  He scrambled for fresh cover, with Sersan Suartana close behind him. As the smoke cleared, Hauser could see the shattered bodies of four more of his men sprawled nearby. The rest of the defenders were wavering, their fire slacking off as they hunkered down behind the cargomods.

  Eight dead in seconds, out of a scant twenty. And they’d taken only three of the enemy with them.…

  Hauser grabbed Suartana’s massive shoulder. “We can’t hold them! We’ve got to pull back! If we can seal the corridor behind us … get to the frigate…!”

  “What abou
t our orders, Tuan?” Suartana asked. “Major Neubeck said—”

  “Damn what Neubeck said!” Hauser exploded. The major had promised him more men, then let him down.…

  He fought down the waves of fear and anger, trying to regain at least a semblance of composure. Suartana was right. He couldn’t just abandon this position without checking in with Neubeck first. But if the major didn’t send help right away the defenders in the warehouse would be overwhelmed, and Hauser’s first responsibility had to be to the men in his outnumbered unit.

  Hunkering down behind the cover of stacked cargomods, Hauser activated the communications function of his wristpiece computer. As the screen began to glow he raised his arm to speak into the sound pickup.

  A laser bolt sizzled through the air less than a meter to his left, and he flinched from the crackling, the stench of ozone in the air. With or without support from Neubeck, he wasn’t sure how much longer he could face the Ubrenfar attack.

  * * *

  “Just hang on for a few more minutes, Hauser,” Erich Neubeck said, frowning at the wall screen. “We’re almost finished up here.”

  The young leutnant hesitated, and opened his mouth to speak. An explosion went off nearby, and the picture on Neubeck’s screen jumped wildly as Hauser moved, the vision pickup following the motion of his arms. Against a backdrop of whining FEK fire and crackling flames, someone was screaming.

  Hauser’s voice cracked as he shouted orders. “Kopral! Have somebody see to that man!” There was a short pause. “Damn it, Suartana, too many of the scalies are leaking through! Can’t you do something?”

  The edge in that voice worried Neubeck more than anything else. The kid was cracking under the pressure.…

  “Major, my men can’t hold this position without immediate reinforcement,” Hauser went on, speaking into his wristpiece again. “Where are the men you said you were sending me?”

  “I need them here,” Neubeck shot back. “For God’s sake, man, we’re all shorthanded! You’ve got to try to tough it out with the men you’ve got!”

  More combat sounds filtered through the commlink. “What I’ve got is a handful of men who can’t hold any longer,” Hauser said tightly. “We can’t do it! We just can’t!”

  “Hauser, I’m ordering you to—”

  But the leutnant wasn’t listening. “Pull back!” he shouted. “Pull back now, Suartana! Regroup at the corridor head!”

  The channel went dead without warning.

  If those men in the warehouse fell back now, Neubeck’s troops in the Fire Direction Center would be cut off. They’d have to act fast if they wanted to retrieve the situation.

  “Stoph!” he shouted. “Tell one section to open up a retreat route through the warehouse! If you can get there in time to keep that bastard Hauser from falling back we might still get out of this!”

  The oberleutnant saluted and hurried off, shouting orders and checking the charge level on his laser pistol as he trotted toward the door. Other men joined him, trading demo packs for rifles.

  When the airtight door slid open, Neubeck thought he could hear the distant echoes of combat drifting up the corridor from the warehouse.

  Sending Stoph and his men would slow the demolitions work, and any delay now could be fatal. But they had to try to win through the Ubrenfar lines.

  Deep down, though, Neubeck knew it was probably too late to try.…

  Chapter Two

  Hope no longer existed. Still, no one thought of surrender.

  —Corporal Louis Maine,

  Report on the Battle of Camerone,

  French Foreign Legion, 1863

  “Pull back!” Hauser shouted. “Pull back now, Suartana! Regroup at the corridor head!” He cut power to the wristpiece commlink function. “Now, damn it!”

  Neubeck had promised men to stiffen his meager defense force, but he had been lying all along. There never had been any reinforcements. The major had no right to expect Hauser to sacrifice his entire command to carry out impossible orders.…

  And he wasn’t about to listen to any more screaming casualties on Neubeck’s behalf.

  Suartana hesitated a moment, staring deep into Hauser’s eyes. Then the big sersan gave a single curt nod. “Ujo! Yahia!” he called. “Maintain fire but keep your heads down! The rest of you fall back!”

  It didn’t take much encouragement to get the troops moving toward the door at the far end of the chamber. The two soldiers the sersan had singled out kept firing, covering the retreat. The others were leaping for the safety of the corridor that led to the docking bay. The Ubrenfars picked off several men as they broke cover.

  Hauser checked the charge of his laser pistol and rolled to the edge of the debris they’d taken shelter behind, ignoring the throbbing pain in his leg. He clenched his teeth, determined not to give in to fear, to hold here until all his men were safe. Leveling the CAR-22, he squeezed off a shot.

  Suartana pulled him back. The sersan crouched beside him, clutching the captured rocket launcher. “Get clear, Tuan!” he said. “I’ll hold the bastards … for as long as I can.” He fired as if to emphasize the words, and an explosion erupted in the doorway, smashing into the mass of Ubrenfars still pouring into the warehouse.

  Hauser hesitated, unwilling to abandon the Indomay, but knowing there was little enough he could do to help him, either. Finally, he nodded tightly. “I’m … I’m sorry, Suartana.…”

  “Go, Tuan! Go!”

  Ignoring his wounded leg, Hauser pushed off, leaping toward the rear doors. Suartana’s rocket attack had forced the Ubrenfars to keep their heads down, and the trio of shots fired in his direction all went wide.

  As he used his good leg to absorb the shock of the jump against the wall beside the door, Serdadu Yahia joined him, his FEK trailing behind him as he leapt with the receiver empty. The soldier slapped the pressure plate to open the doors just as an Ubrenfar rapid-pulse laser punched a half dozen neat holes through his lower torso. Hauser shoved the body away in horror and dived through the doors. A hundred meters further on, the five surviving men from his shattered command were clustered around the airlock that led into the docking bay.

  He looked back into the warehouse. Despite Suartana’s rocket fire, more Ubrenfars were pouring into the chamber now that the volume of defensive fire had slackened. Some of the assault troops were already breaking off to bound toward the corridor that led off toward the Fire Direction Center. That would be their principal objective, of course. Control of the linnax railguns would ensure control of any ship traffic trying to move to or from orbit.…

  And Neubeck’s men were up there, cut off now. Hauser swallowed, realizing for the first time the wider implications of what he had done by ordering the retreat. More than just his own little command had been riding on what happened here, but he had focused entirely on his own men instead of seeing the wider picture. But it was too late now. He didn’t have enough men to counterattack successfully even if he could have found it in himself to give the orders for what was sure to be a suicide attack.

  Hauser swiveled his head in response to another explosion. Suartana was maintaining his lonely defense, but now the sersan had only two more rockets. After that, there would be nothing left to hold back the enemy tide.…

  * * *

  “That’s the last of them, Tuan. All charges in place and ready to detonate.”

  Erich Neubeck accepted the detonator from the Indomay sersan and verified the program entered into its chip memory. One coded sequence to arm the mechanism, then a single touch of the activator stud would be enough to trigger all the charges in a set sequence.

  He nodded, satisfied, and clipped the device to the belt of his vacuum suit. At least they had carried out their mission. There wouldn’t be much left of the Fire Direction Center once the explosives were set off. It wasn’t only the controls that had been mined. Soldiers in vacuum suits had also used the access shaft that led from the FDC alongside the number one railgun and out to the surface of Telo
k to plant charges that would disable the linnax system itself. Even if the Ubrenfars managed to jury-rig a new control system, at least this gun would be unusable … more if the other sabotage teams had carried out their jobs.

  The difficult job was finally done. All that remained now was to find a way out.…

  A muffled explosion rumbled in the corridor outside the airtight door. Neubeck leapt across the room, shouting to the other soldiers to join him. Stoph and his men hadn’t been out there for very long, and it sounded like they’d run into resistance already.

  Damn Hauser for letting the invaders through!

  He hit the control button and the door slid open, letting in a tumult of combat sounds. A laser beam crackled past the door, and somewhere down the corridor there were hoarse shouts and an inhuman cry that must have been a wounded Ubrenfar.

  Neubeck hesitated before plunging out into the corridor, and in that moment he heard Stoph’s voice calling out. “Retreat! Retreat back to Fire Control! We can’t do anything else here!”

  The major gestured to a pair of Indomays armed with RG-12 grenade launchers. The men dived through the door to take up positions on either side of the corridor. One of them fired a rocket-propelled projectile, aiming high, and it leapt from the barrel with a whoosh of burning propellants.

  Soldiers hurried up the corridor, taking full advantage of the light gravity to cover the distance quickly. One stopped at the door and turned to fire his FEK back down the passage, but it only chattered uselessly on an empty magazine. The Indomay cursed luridly and ejected the clip as he rolled into the Fire Direction Center. Then he threw the weapon violently against the far wall as he realized he was out of ammunition.

  A trio of men landed together, awkwardly, two Indomays with slung rifles supporting Stoph between them. The oberleutnant was bleeding from half a dozen wounds, and one arm dangled uselessly. Pale and wild-eyed, Stoph stumbled through the door. Neubeck caught him and guided him to one of the control chairs.