A thread of Blossom’s attention remains latched to the standard of the Fifth. Eugenia can’t use all of Blossom’s awareness, but all they can use is there. The attempted distraction fails.
Bars of light form in the sky. Nothing strikes out from the Fifth’s bubble; the bars of light arise between the stars, drawing lines through whatever killed Captain Hank. Someone trying to make strange snowflakes from twelve-dimensional-knitting needles might do something like this. The scream across the Power stops, stutters, and ends.
Spot hurtles widdershins, snapping at demons that would flee. Sufficiently desperate demons trying to dodge past Spot get devoured. Most stick to an increasingly tight clump, out of which the sublimating fragments of one of the sent things are falling faster than the clump as a whole is sinking away from the harsh bright light of destruction.
The other sent thing strikes in what it hopes is a moment of inattention. It misses, and acquires its own twelve-dimensional knitting needle, then another and another, each half of the shadows entirely lacking in a bar of light. Eugenia would have needed another dozen needles to kill it; Blossom’s wrath can take these three and twist the thing apart. Its several fragments fall swifter than its screaming fades.
Eugenia shifts into an offensive capacity seldom used; the expected demon is too free of movement to compress. These have been hounded into a small volume, and fall as hot stones. The stones have cracked into gravel or burst into sand by the time they’re five metres down in the broad cool water of Armoury Pond.
Joyeuse chivies out the last demon, wise and desperate, that was hiding between ward layers of the battalion bubble. Two demon-specific pointy sticks strike it. The Fifth’s Colour Party shouts their revised count of dead demons, feet stamping.
Ochre, Fifth Battalion. Well done.
Up over the pond, you might as well say the Goddess of Destruction is ruffling Spot’s ears.
Attention to orders. All teams, on the bubble. Eugenia waits while the Morning teams shift their focus to supporting the bubble, and the bubble steadies again. Fifteen, twenty seconds. End battalion focus evolution. Ochre has the bubble. Morning on the bubble. Scarlet has the periphery. Squeak has Morning on the periphery. Scarlet’s Gunner has the Colour Party and the close watch. Ochre’s Gunner has front. Scarlet and Ochre Evening teams latch your tubes. SWITCH.
The focus of the Fifth Battalion re-arranges itself. The battalion consensus leaves it sophont, leaves Captain Eugenia as they were, exalted. The hymn to victory rolls on, a slower, solemn thing of deeper voices below the keen.
Goddess and attendant eldritch creature move, to a place of air directly above the Fifth’s specific tower. Low slanting light from the just-risen sun does not reach below the shore-cliffs of Armoury Pond. The hell-white light shining down throws the walls of the Creeks armoury into stygian darkness. Armoury Pond glitters strange and silver as would fluid other than water.
Ochre, Battalion. Resume fire support.
D-Day, H-Hour Plus 1.21
Year of Peace 547, Messidor, Twelfth Day (Early Summer)
Duckling
Blink-blink-blink.
The standard unpacks it. Fifth. Second. Request targets. The Fifth’s showing ‘impaired’.
Meek borrows my eyes for half-a-second. Checking on Slow, over to my left at the head of the First’s Colour Party.
Observer, pass what we’ve got.
Sir. Flinch’s tranced out entire. Their feet are moving in step and their mind’s in the standard. It works for observing. Ninny pats the sword-side of their helmet at me, elbow-points at Flinch. I nod. Ninny’s got a couple files assigned to keep trouble off Flinch. Wibble’s keeping Flinch from stepping in a hole. Wib’ll need help for trouble.
Not much to pass up to the Fifth. Forty kilometres to where the main Sea People landing was feeding troops northwards to the Edge. Our bow-wave off the bubble doesn’t have a clear upper edge. The burning trees burn in air with a lot of mud and guck and former rock in it. Looking down ain’t getting much.
(Nest, Kittens), have the Sea People shifted a rearguard?
Kittens’ team looks straight ahead. You don’t have to put the little portals the standard peeks through high up. Bounce the light-grabber around at people-level enough and you can get an idea.
Nest’s file’s got closer to the Edge. They both feed it through Flinch, proper, and Flinch gets the abstract to me timely.
All the mobile Sea People by the river are moving north; there’s a line forming about twenty kilometres inland. Moving quick; some kind of enhanced march. We’re a couple hours out; they’ll be at their defensive line in a couple hours. Grab the raw images, flip through for motion. Looks like there’s doctrine they don’t practice much. Attacks from the rear would be attacks from the sea.
Nothing formed up on the River of Mists. Won’t all quick-march north, some of it’s supplies and clerks and stevedores. Five-red destroyed a lot of it, but not all of it. Effective place to hide sorcerers. Line doctrine says we should shift to the hypotenuse, attack their flank before the defensive line’s fully established.
We’ve got six hours total. Usual problem with this sort of situation is the smart one. A smart sorcerer don’t start a fight they can’t win. They wait, and they hide. In five or six hours when the bubble drops because you’re dead tired from killing everybody you knew about there they are. Even if you get the bubble back up and win, the effort will kill most of you.
Quarter-million troops ashore, the general quality of the survivors at the anchorage; there’s at least one pre-eminent in there. Could be five, wouldn’t bet against ten. Shape-shifted into a rock at the edge of the river, something durable and quiet, and waiting.
I stick a grid on the map, tap it at Slow. Slow taps it back. Just enough time that Slow did look.
Second, Fifth. Three-red soonest and the grid.
The standard blinks it across.
D-Day, H-Hour Plus 1.25
Year of Peace 547, Messidor, Twelfth Day (Early Summer)
Standard of the Fifth
Coherent light leaves and returns above the Fifth and its patron goddess. Shot moves to the tubes. The hymn to victory rolls on in ancient words and vast regular music.
Shoot. Joyeuse’s firm clear voice.
Twelve shot rise and reach southward, again and again and again and again as the elevation of the tubes decreases. Battery five with three-red shot.
There are Sea People alive on land in the Commonweal’s keeping; no formation of the Wapentake is yet done with murdering them.
Surely not the Fifth.
D-Day, H-Hour Plus 1.25
Year of Peace 547, Messidor, Twelfth Day (Early Summer)
Duckling
A time blinks back.
Signals, Movement. Alter line of march. The standard’s figured out that Meek and Brisket are both Movement. I tap a track that puts us well inland of the defensive line. ‘Attack them’ and ‘kill them’ are different. There’s still an expletive lot of them. I don’t think they know where we are, not in a cohesive control-of-movement exercise-of-command way.
Duckling, Meek. We being brave?
(Meek, Brisket), Duckling. Anybody five kilometres away is a red-shot problem. Toss Meek and Brisket time/effort curves. It’s tight to get them all while they’re yet below.
Brisket taps me a track; it’s not straight, it sticks to as much dead ground as there is, and it’s not going to be appreciable slower. Wiggles versus ridge-crossings. There’s an easy hole away from the River of Mists coming up. Big piles of trees at the edge of the blast from the five-reds, not many gaps.
(Meek, Brisket), Duckling. Good track.
Signals, (Battalion, Movement). Track change. Meek and Brisket push the new track, and the whole formation turns. We’re still preferring speed over defence. Pipers still playing. The music’s still going out there. Not much point in pushing it out, not enough push anyone’s going to hear it over the forest fires. A minute is four-hundred-and-twenty metres. Five mi
nutes is twenty-one hundred.
Signals, Bubble. Shot.
Signals, (Front, Periph). Tap the locus over for the shot grid. Sorcerers may manifest.
I can just about see Lolly raising both eyebrows when the three-red come down off our left front. Not over the horizon yet. A ten-kilometre stretch of river-bank gets twenty, a little buried, the line a little offset; the other forty are over the Sea People’s landing area, four rows of ten on the vertices of a kilometre grid, nine hundred metres in the air. Time-on-target’s perfect.
Line doctrine says you send two brigades in and hold one back. The reserve fights the smart one. Rain red shot and it’s a lot simpler. They go active or they burn.
Three. Figure a few rocks are gravel.
Knives gets to work. Nothing gets through for Lolly.
Sixty in one stack; both batteries intact for tubes.
D-Day, H-Hour Plus 2.37
Year of Peace 547, Messidor, Twelfth Day (Early Summer)
Duckling
Far enough from the river some things aren’t burning.
Track’s low, can’t call it a valley; lower than the surrounds.
Feed shows a concentration trying to force the Edge. Set up for it, planned, picking up their pace.
There’s a big swing toward us, that blocking line, most of what was moving. It funnels into an establishing formation where we’re headed to cross their line of advance. There’s another mass pulling back and clumping up southward, closer to the river than our line of march will hit the Sea People advance. That mass is small; two brigades, maybe, twelve thousand.
About now, Slow says, they will stop trying to win and start trying to kill us.
Personal. Focus has it personal, Slow, not the standard-captain.
Sometimes you want them coming up the hill. Sometimes what can be seen is a target.
No hills. Want hard ground, this side of a ridge. Couple-five kilometres short of their establishing formation, they’re mostly walking.
Walking quick, but walking.
Signals, (Battalion, Movement). Track change. Push the destination. Signals, Bubble. Once at — tap the stop location — anchor the bubble.
I don’t think they know where we are. They have an idea of the track. They’re an hour to our position and nothing coming in, their movement’s staying broad. Signals, Battalion. Food and water, odds and evens. Puddle’s got the bubble crunched down solid on a made flat. Substrate’s sedimentary, closer to slate than mudstone. Spoil’s out in a big fan, filling holes.
Chew your food. Meek, to everybody. No “rotted”, no “expletive”. Focus loses some rushing, settles. Faint whiff of abstract death; water tanks filling up. Ain’t required. Quick discussion, sergeants deciding that a full fill’s fine, all the armour’s on people, worth weight to remove the twitching unease from low water.
Sea People still piling into that formation. Might not move it forward. Might-maybe be coming in above sustained to get there.
Signals, Periph. Confuse our presence, multiple localities.
Alternative’s one big blur.
Flinch will eat if you put a cracker in their hand. Flinch drinks reflexively. Wibble’s got slick at filching Flinch’s canteen for filling. Between me and Wibble and Cackles, Flinch gets fed.
Sea People have more time than we do. Might have a lot more, if they had rations forward. We’ve got time to finish eating. Can’t let them decide they don’t want contact.
Everybody packs up in an expectation of movement. Meek and Brisket grin at each other inside the focus-channel for battalion sergeant-majors.
Blink-blink-blink.
Four five-red at that withdrawn clump.
None come down.
Figured out the bad stuff comes from the sky, Meek says to me and Slow and Brisket.
Signals, (Bubble, Periph). Trench our perimeter deep.
Wet rock, high water table. Trenching’s loud and messy.
Signals, Left Front. Redesignate Close Front. Hold until the Sea People advance.
Sir back from Knives with a sensation of rolling shoulders. Might be a hundred thousand in that formation.
Signals, Right Front. Redesignate Distant Front. Tap the pulled-back clump. Priority active workings, Power concentrations, groupings.
Dancer’s request for random-time, somewhere-over-the-clump three-red gets queued simultaneous with Sir. Send it on.
Signals, Battalion. Prep sustained engagement.
Everything on the bubble ain’t a demon Brisket says. About like “Got your hat?” Whole battalion hears it. There’s a rattle, sticks getting shifted, shields going on arms.
Knives’ getting One-Fierce and One-Robust rearranged. Focus gets labelled arcs for throwing. Lolly and Knives sort out where the breath-sucker goes, and how deep. Hundred-forty metres.
Lolly mists it thick, quarter-kilometre. We get lucky, they’ll see thicker mist and run harder to get through it. Don’t want the corpses showing.
First three-red don’t get through. Dancer reaches into the clump somewhere and causes three-and-a-half-red of explosion. Same trick, more work through the standard. Whoever’s running the clump might think they missed one. Might think they need to kill us quick.
Dancer gets someone to fight. Sea People formation’s moving forward.
Ain’t even. Don’t look like an attempt to flank.
Signals, Battalion. Flash, spinner, and punch have material effects. Prefer keeping Sea People outside the bubble.
Everybody forgets spinner’s material. Don’t look it, the spell ain’t, but force is force.
Sun’s up. Moving north improved visibility less than I expected. Light’s bad; dust and smoke sources mostly south and east, moving north-west as the regular wind comes back in. Light’s north-east, still low. Trenching made a roar and a rumble. Sea People are trying to find us, forward to contact.
Probably target us for the clump.
Dancer’s not getting a firm grip on the clump. Whoever they’ve got’s losing.
Signals, Periph. Provide an appearance of multiple visual targets. More than this one expanse of fog.
Dancer’s opponent’s fighting to lose as slow as they can.
Lolly makes us the northernmost of four clumps of fog.
Signals, Close Front. Maximize value-per-stick.
Knives acknowledges; Knives drops range bands into the focus. Thousand-metre closing, twelve-hundred-metre retreating.
Sea People formation’s moving. Decent brisk for the terrain, couple metres per second. Tap it to Knives and Lolly.
Signals, (Close Front, Periph). Close Front’s on closing troops. Periph’s on anything else. Standing orders division of responsibility. Can’t hurt to say it.
Inhuman, abrupt, entirely lacking feet. Between One-Thorn and the bubble. Sticks go in demon, punch, punch, and it dies. There’s a corpse.
Summoned in, not through the bubble.
Only one.
“Timing’s off.” There’ll be more, Slow means.
I ought to pick up the Colour Party direct.
Second, All. My Colour Party.
Slow’s fist taps my shoulder. Tap back, light and quick, Slow’s moving away. Ain’t nohow the manual.
Wibble brings Flinch to where Slow was standing. Colour Party’s boxing up. Ninny’s got a side, Squish’s got a side, Tact’s got a side, Pie has a side. Wheelbarrows back of the sides for stick-racks. Observers inside, ring of clumps of four. Accoutrements wheelbarrows inside the observers. The pipers are by the each with banners. Didn’t notice. The Piper’s here.
Meek’s got north, Brisket’s got south. Slow’s got the whole thing.
Signals, Battalion. Expect Sea People troop charge simultaneous with more summons into the bubble. Inside the bubble, prefer the focus to sticks.
General acknowledgement.
If it’s coming in, Close Front. If it’s already in, Periph.
Knives says Sir. Lolly taps acknowledged.
Figure the Sea People think
there’s one sorcerer in here. Get them distracted, get them busy, come in and kill them material.
Sea People formation’s picking up their pace.
Individual banners rattle down the ranks. Everyone’s making sure their helmet’s on snug and the dressing’s right, gauntlet into pauldron.
Close Front, throw! Knives. Close Front’s throwing spinner on four-metre spacing; complete overlap. Vanishing whorls through mist and smoke. Direct light, the target end’d be sparkly and pinkish. Mist muffles the sheared-metal pinging.
The piper picks up Hasty Morning. All the pipers come in to a chuckle in the focus.
Dancer does for whoever they were fighting. Another one pops up. Same trick doesn’t work. Dancer gets growly, goes profligate. Second one comes apart.
Close Front’s throwing steady rate. Sea People’re bending away from the angle being covered by sticks. Can’t speed up, already moving their max rate of advance. Close Front spreads their angle.
Right about now.
Critters in the bubble.
Periph, your closest to your furthest. Lolly got four critters come in direct overhead. Same as the first one, toothy faces, six wings, no feet.
Independents’ll tell you charge is easy to block. There’s a clap-your-hands, move-them-out, get-an-arc trick in the focus; arc distance comes from hand angle. Not official specific useful. One-Uniform’s Colour Party likes it. A critter explodes. All come down in pieces.
Focus’ wibbly as individuals grab push to kill things. Scattered ain’t a steady draw.
Puddle puts two platoons on keeping falling bits off helmets.
It goes quick. Flinch mists something coming down from the peak of the bubble, might have had eight wings. Must have been blocking their view.
Sea People troops are sprinting into the breath-sucker and falling in heaps.
Signals, Battalion. Prefer sticks for demons.
Rotted CHECK. A file closer in the First.
Next wave. These have eight wings, or twelve, and arms. Start a timer.
A Mist of Grit and Splinters Page 28