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.
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.