The round dropped toward me, and I curled into a fetal position behind the rocks. “Crap, crap, crap!”
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.
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.
The attack wave crested, then receded. But the defense was wearing ever more rapidly. If it were outflanked, or grenaded from above, the end would come too soon.
I tugged out a box of wooden kitchen matches and crept to the bunched fuses. I had test-burned some back at the camp and figured these would burn through in ninety seconds.
Two hundred yards away, down the ledge, the first scout’s helmet peeked above the ledge.
I struck my match, but it broke in my numbed fingers. I grabbed for it and spilled the rest of the box, the tiny sticks floating down the eight hundred feet to the canyon floor like dandelion seed.
I peered into the matchbox. One left.
My unpracticed fingers shook as I struck the match once, twice without result. I cursed my smoke-free lifestyle, then tried again. The match burst into yellow flame, and I cupped it with my other hand around it, then lit the fuses.
