Against the Tide of Years

by S. M. Stirling

  “Here they come,” he said aloud, and his staff nodded soberly.

  The Walkerites were deploying, going from column into a two-line formation, well spread out, swinging in to envelop the little Islander position.

  “Right, about six hundred up, say three hundred in reserve,” he said.

  Through the binoculars he could see men manhandling weapons forward. They were on field-gun carriages with shields, like the Islander Gatlings but not quite the same. Fairly light, or they couldn’t be brought forward that fast—keeping up well with the infantry. A battery of six real field guns galloped forward and then deployed, the teams turning and then being unhitched and led to the rear, crews leaping down and running the ammunition limbers forward, ready to form a chain to hand rounds up to the loading teams.

  Budumm. A sound like a heavy door closing and a long puff of smoke from one of the enemy cannon; it ran back under the recoil. No surprise; the Republic couldn’t make a mobile gun with a recoil-absorbing carriage yet either. Then a savage snapping crack of red fire in the air not far behind Paddy’s position, and a wide oval of dust as the casing fragments and lead balls hit the ground.

  Muzzle-loaders, twelve-pounder smoothbores, he thought, watching the swab-ram-fire loading drill. Firing shrapnel, time-fused shells. They were getting off more then two rounds a minute. Good practice.

  Somewhere his soul winced; he’d put Paddy’s unit out there as bait, and they were going to pay again, the way they had this morning. The rifle fire dropped off as the Scouts hugged the bottoms of their holes; the area around their position was turning into a haze of dust and smoke as the enemy fell into a regular rhythm of load-run-up-swab-ram-fire, rounds coming forward from the limbers like a bucket chain at a blaze.

  Price of doing business, he told himself, as the cry of “corpsman!” went up and the stretcher teams went forward. He’d authorized enlisting local volunteers to carry wounded, to free his own troops for the fighting, and they were going in as bravely as men could be asked to do.

  “Captain Lautens,” he said into the radio. He wished Chong were here—he knew the man’s work—but Lautens hadn’t screwed up so far. The artillery commander’s voice replied crisply:

  “When you unmask, go for those whatever-they-ares brought forward with the infantry; they’re your first priority.”

  “Sir, yessir. We’re ready.”

  “Good man.”

  Closer, closer . . . One of the mystery weapons stopped, turned. The shield hid whatever it was the crew did at the breech, but he could see rifle rounds sparking off it in snapping white flicks of light, leaving lead smears across the metal. Has to be steel for that, he thought; a wrought-iron shield would be too soft. Then the muzzle flashes, and a distant braaaaapp of sound. The bullets struck sparks all around the Scout company’s mortar position, off rocks and the barrel of the weapon. The crew had gone to earth in their slit trench, as he’d ordered in advance—they were there to lure the enemy, not hurt him.

  “Take a note of that shield,” he said to the lieutenant who was in charge of Intel. “Multiple barrels, I’d say.” Hadn’t there been some French weapon? “Rate of fire’s not as high as a Gatling, but it’s definitely useful.”

  Fairly close now, the long line of men jogging forward, their artillery firing over their heads. Those heads went up, an apprehensive movement—valuable clue to the reliability of their fuses. Now they went down on one knee, bringing their rifles to their shoulders . . .

  “Paddy, your people are out of it—have them cease fire and take cover. All company commanders,” he said into the radio. “ Now!”

  Canvas covers flew off, and the whole of the Islander position erupted in smoke and red strobing flashes. The Marine riflemen were firing at maximum speed, mad-minute snatch-and-shoot; the Gatling gunners turning the cranks and grinding out a storm of lead like water from a high-pressure hose. An endless string of firecrackers might have sounded something like that, if they’d been thrown by the hundreds. The steady, heavy thuds of the artillery came through it, and he saw one of the enemy rapid-fire weapons disintegrate, wheel and barrel and shield flying in separate directions . . . probably with pieces of the crew mixed in.

  “Clamp! Clamp and tie off.”

  Clemens hated spouting wounds. Azzu-ena’s hand came down into the cavity with the long scissorslike instrument; the blunt tips found the vein and pinched it closed. An assistant slid her fingers in with the loop of catgut ready. They stayed out of his way with practiced skill.

  “ Number four!” he called, and someone put it into his hand. It was a small silvered mirror on the end of a thin curved handle. He slid it in carefully . . .

  “Got it! Extractor.”

  The number four went into his left hand, and he used the tiny smeared picture to guide the needle-nosed instrument in his right. Ease it closed, and the feel of metal under the heads. Jiggle. Yes! A surge of triumph as he eased it out, brought the bent, distorted lump of metal up before his eyes. Good. Didn’t break up. He examined the track of the wound again, checking for bits of cloth and killed tissue that would rot if left in.

  “ Irrigate and swab,” he said when he was sure. “Close him up.”

  The final running stitch, the assistants painting with disinfectant and bandaging. He checked the blood pressure; no real need for a transfusion, although he’d have ordered one back on the Island, just in case. Here there were too many who really needed it, and no refrigerated whole blood on hand—you had to do it live.

  “ Next!”

  “ That’s it, Doctor,” the orderly said.

  Clemens staggered slightly, like a man who’d run down stairs in the dark and expected a few more at the bottom than there were. He looked around; four of the other surgeons were busy, but no fresh cases were coming in—nothing but routine bandaging, at least.

  “ Take a break,” he said, then walked out of the tent and into an area shaded by an awning, scrubbed and dried off, and collapsed onto a bench and pulled down his mask. Azzu-ena sat beside him and handed him an enameled mug of water. He took it, relishing the slightly chlorine-tasting lukewarmness of it.

  “ You’re getting good,” he said.

  She blushed slightly and rubbed at her big hooked nose. “ I’ve had a good teacher.”

  He hesitated and opened his mouth to speak. Instead he froze, looking up. There was a screaming in the air, and an arching trail of smoke from the north, where the burble of small-arms fire continued. The screaming grew louder, and he found himself acting without making a decision at all, sweeping the Babylonian into his arms and diving for the ground, his body covering hers.

  “Damn,” Kenneth Hollard said mildly. “Moral courage.”

  “Sir?” one of the staff officers said. She had a slight Fiernan accent, so he amplifed.

  “ The enemy commander has moral courage. He’s not afraid to admit he got suckered and cut his losses and retreat.”

  The smoke obscured his view, but through the gaps the wind made he could see the enemy infantry pulling back—one line lying prone and firing, the other turning and dashing to the rear for fifty yards, then falling to the earth and giving covering fire while their comrades did the same, or dragged back the not-too-badly wounded. The rapid-fire weapons did the same, the three that were left; the field guns were still firing, the crews snatching up the trails as they recoiled and running them back with the momentum, stopping and firing again, repeating the process. And the enemy commander had uncommitted reserves.

  “Order our people forward, sir?” the staffer asked. Hollard shook his head again.

  “We’d take a heavy butcher’s bill doing that,” he said. “And they can move backward just as fast as we can move forward.” He looked up; it was well past noon. “ They’d break contact in the dark; we don’t have the numbers to overrun them.”

  He looked over to his left, to the range of rocky hills. A little further away than he’d like, but ground was ground—you couldn’t rearrange it to suit. He might
not have the numbers required to simply overwhelm the enemy, but he did have a card up his sleeve.

  That was your one really bad mistake, he thought at the enemy commander. Too eager. Too convinced that he had to move forward with maximum speed to snap up the tempting target of an isolated Nantucketer force. You should have scouted the whole area thoroughly—used your Hittites for it.

  Kenneth Hollard reached for the radio; the Babylonian New Troops had only one, their commander’s. Just then a moaning whistle brought his head up sharply. A trail of fire and smoke rose up from the rear of the enemy position. It moaned across the sky; he turned to watch it overshoot his command post, heading for the rear area.

  I’m not the only one who had a surprise up his sleeve, he knew with angry self-reproach.

  “All units, go to ground and take cover,” he barked into the handset. “Rocket bombardment incoming!”

  The staff and runners jumped for the slit trenches. Hollard vaulted into one too, but braced himself forward on one knee to observe. The rocket launchers had looked like wagons with their canvas covers on. Those were back, the boxy frames that held the six tubes elevated by a crank. As he watched, a man snapped a lighter under a dangling fuse and then turned and ran, diving to the ground a hundred feet away. The rockets lit with a dragon’s hiss, firing one by one in no particular order as the combined fuse split into individual ones and reached the powder but fast.

  He dropped into the bottom of the narrow trench and brought knees to chin, letting his flared helmet cover as much of him as possible. Now it was simply luck. The sky overhead shrieked as if in torment, and then the multiple CrackCrackCrackCrack and surf-roar of impact began.

  “ First Kar-Duniash!” he shouted into the receiver.

  “Here.” Kathryn Hollard’s voice, calm but with an underlying tension.

  “Go for it, Sis. Those things can reload fast—he can punish us and pull out behind it.”

  “ Will do.”

  The doctor and the asu came to their feet, brushing themselves off. Justin Clemens looked around; there was a crater in the empty land two hundred yards away, but nobody seemed to be hurt. Not here; up north the sky was woven with a web of smoke trails and a continuous rippling roar of explosions.

  They would be very busy soon. Justin Clemens felt his hands begin to tremble and his breath grow short. Elevated blood pressure and stress, he told himself, which helped very little.

  “Ms. Azzu-ena,” he croaked.

  She looked at him, dark eyes alert; she knew that meant formality, in English.

  “ Wwww . . . Would you please marry me? ”

  Her eyes flared wide; whatever she’d been expecting, it wasn’t that. Then they filled with tears, and she opened her mouth to reply.

  “Here they come!”

  The cry brought their heads up. Horse-drawn ambulances were jouncing down the rough ground from the north, toward the laagered wagons and the tents. They turned and dashed back into the operating theater, heading for the vats of disinfectant.

  “I have no dowry!” she hissed, as they ran their arms under the stream.

  “ I wouldn’t say that,” he said. “ I wouldn’t say that at all.”

  We’re nearly behind them, Kathryn Hollard thought.

  The enemy advance had swept past the hiding place of her force. But they had three-quarters of a mile to cover before they reached the position where rocket launchers were vomiting fire back at the Islanders. One had blown up in a spectacular globe of red-gold flame as it was being reloaded, but that left five. The wind swept smoke toward them, smelling of burnt sulfur and death.

  “Men of the First Kar-Duniash!” she said, looking down the line.

  Eight hundred of them, crouching with their bearded faces turned first toward the sounds of battle and then toward her. God knows, there are times when I wanted you all dropped into hell and the door locked and the key in Dr. Hong’s pocket, she thought. She had hung four in Babylon for rape and looting during the street fighting, and then she’d had to pistol the brother of one of the convicted when he tried to murder her.

  “ For your king and your salt and given oaths,” she said. “ The battle cry is Kashtiliash! Now follow me!”

  She scrambled forward, and there was a multiple clatter and scrape of hobnails on rock; they were following. Kathryn felt her breath release; after Babylon she’d been fairly sure—but there they were under the eye of their prince. On either side the line shook itself out, two-deep and spread out—nothing fancy, but it wound over the irregularities of the ground like a living serpent tipped with a glittering line of steel points. The months in the desert hadn’t been wasted, then.

  They were down onto the flat, and all she could see was the smoke and distant figures, all she could hear was the crackle of rifles, the thudding bark of artillery, the hiss of the rockets like an angry cat larger than worlds.

  “Trumpeter, sound Double time,” she said. The notes rang out, brassy and sweet in the hot, dry air. We’re coming, big brother.

  A gun suddenly swiveled around and turned toward her; despite the distance, the muzzle looked big enough to swallow her head. A flash of flame-shot smoke, the rising whistle sound, and it burst over the ranks to her left. Men tumbled and fell, still or writhing like broken-backed lizards in a cat’s jaws.

  “ Trumpeter, sound Fire and advance.”

  The first rank went to one knee, and their rifles came up. A staccato ripple of fire and smoke ran down the line as four hundred rifles fired, and then their wielders were going through their loading drill. She trotted through the rotten-egg-smelling fogbank of their discharge and saw the second rank dash through the first and run ten yards ahead, going to one knee in their turn. Men were turning their way in the enemy ahead, pulling back like a door swinging. The enemy commander was refusing his flank, turning his formation into an L as he pulled back, with the short end facing her. Facing her, the men in it prone and shooting back.

  A weapon like a fat cannon pointed at the First Kar-Duniash and a whole file of men went down, bullets slapping into flesh, sparking and raising puffs of dust around their feet, going tinnnnk into helmets like a smith’s punch.

  “ Trumpeter, sound Charge! Kashtiliash! Kashtiliash!”

  “KASHTILIASH!”

  She swept out her Python pistol and cocked it with her thumb.

  “Charge! Charge!”

  Kenneth Hollard looked down as the stretcher was carried up the rear ramp of the Emancipator. He recognized Sergeant Smith, despite the mass of bandages that covered her torso, and bent over her. Her eyes were wandering with morphine, but they recognized him . . . or at least focused on his face.

  “Good work,” he said, and then switched to the Sun People tongue of Alba. “ You fought well, warrior.”

  “ Pithair,” she murmured, smiling faintly. That meant “father,” and he didn’t think she was invoking her god. He was certain when she went on, “ Is it well, at last, Father? ”

  “Dahig’tair,” he began. Guess she’s seeing someone else, he thought, laying a hand on the clammy coldness of her forehead. “Daughter, it is very well.”

  She sighed and closed her eyes, and the bearers carried her up the ramp and into the long gondola, fitting her stretcher into the racks and transferring her IV to the holder. Lieutenant Vicki Cofflin came back from the control stations in the bow, turning sideways to pass a corpsman doing something to one of the wounded. A sharp smell drifted backward under the exhaust fumes of the idling engines; it was the odor of disinfectant, and somehow of pain.

  God, I hate visiting the wounded. You had to, of course; men and women in pain needed to know that they were valued for what they’d done.

  “ We’re ready to go, sir,” the commander of the Emancipator said, saluting. “ We’ll have them in the hospital at Ur Base in a few hours, and then we’ll be back with the loads you specified.”

  She nodded down and forward; water wagons were on either side of the gondola’s underbelly, with hoses running f
rom the dirigible’s keel ballast tanks. “Thought we could spare the water, seeing as we’re heavily laden and heading right back into home base,” she said.

  He returned the salute and shook her hand. “This thing is damned useful,” he said. “ I might want you to do some high-level reconnaissance when you get back. In the meantime, I need a temporary lift and the use of your radio—need to talk to your uncle.”

  The Emancipator’s powerful generator and altitude gave its shortwave set as much range as the one at Ur Base, or Republic Home at Nantucket Airport, for that matter.

  “Aye, aye, sir. Welcome aboard.”

  He climbed the ramp behind her, squeezed past the corpsmen, and held on to a stanchion as the mooring ropes were released. The Emancipator turned and circled upward swiftly, swaying a little, and he saw the huge orca-shaped shadow dwindle as the mooring crews went stumbling backward from the blizzard of dust and grit.

  Hollard’s ears popped; he looked northwest, straining his eyes for a sight of the retreating enemy. All he saw was smoke from the grass fires the battle had started. Vicki Cofflin broke his concentration.

  “Sir.”

  He started a little.

  “Sir, we’re neutral at thirty-five hundred. That’s as high as I’d care to go, with the wounded aboard.”

  Hollard nodded and turned back, sliding into the communications officer’s chair and slipping the earphones onto his head. She was turning dials for him, and a crackle of static foretold success.

  “ That should do it, sir, if you want to try.”

  “Hollard here,” he said. “Hollard here. Over.”

  “Republic Home here, receiving loud and clear. Just a moment, Brigadier Hollard . . .”