FIFTY-NINE
WITHOUT NIGHT-VISION EQUIPMENT, I had to wait for dawn to begin my work. I was in no hurry. Among the things that had terrified me since childhood were heights and explosives.
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.”