by David Drake
Raj blinked. The audience was still attentive; it had only been a few seconds, and men were used to Raj Whitehall’s peculiar moments of introspection. Night had fallen, and glittering six-winged insects flew in through the opened windows to batter themselves against the coal-oil lanterns along the pilastered wall.
“—so we have two problems, tactical and operational.” I get the strategic worries.
“Tactically, we’re going to have to make use of our strong points. Artillery, and we’ve twice the guns a force this size usually does. The Armory rifle’s higher rate of fire and, even more important, the fact that it can be loaded lying down. Field entrenchments wherever possible; you’ll note the number of shovels which have been issued. You’ll also note that the cavalry have been ordered to hang their sabers from the saddle, not their belts. The cult of cold steel is strictly for the barbs, messers—I want nobody to forget that.
“Our true advantage is our discipline and maneuverability, and that applies to tactics and operations. I intend to move fast, keep the enemy off balance, and never fight except at a time and place of my own choosing. I need to know—must know that my orders will be obeyed with speed and precision and common sense, at all times. Against an enemy with respectable weapons and reasonable organization who outnumbers us eight or more to one, we cannot afford to lose a battle, we cannot afford to lose even a major skirmish . . . and since we can’t possibly win a war of attrition, we can’t be excessively cautious, either. Is that clear?”
Nods, and a few uncomfortably thoughtful faces. “Good.” Because it’s all right if the men think I’m invincible, but the Spirit help us if you do.
With Center whispering in his mind’s ear, he was unlikely to fall victim to that illusion himself. Occasional doubts about his own sanity were another matter. Night sweats when he thought about the Spirit having a direct link to his own grimy soul were part of it, too—although come to think of it, everyone had a Personal Computer, according to orthodox doctrine.
“Which brings us,” he went on, balancing the pointer with an end in each palm, “to Stern Isle. I regard this as in the nature of a training exercise—assuming that the negotiations with the Brigade leaders fail and we have to conquer the mainland. Because, gentlemen, if we can’t take this island from the Brigade with dispatch, then we’d cursed well better blow our own brains out and send the troops home before we do real damage to the Civil Government.
“According to the Ministry of Barbarians’ files and Colonel Menyez’s scouting reports”—collated and interpreted by Center—”there are about twelve thousand Brigaderos males of military age on the island. No more than three thousand are actual professional fighting men, including those in the service of individual nobles. We’ll snap the rural nobles and their retainers up with mobile columns. I want you messers to pay particular attention to perfecting movement from battalion to company columns and from column into line-of-battle in any particular direction. The enemy are fairly slow at that, and we’ll need any advantage we can get.
“We’ll then move the main body of the army south”—he traced the route across the center of the island—“to the provincial capital at Wager Bay. The city itself shouldn’t be much of a problem; the enemy doesn’t have enough men to hold the walls.”
He flipped the map, revealing another of Wager Bay itself. Over it Center painted a holographic diagram, rotating it to show different angles. Raj blinked back to the flat paper his officers would see. The city was a C with the open end pointing south at the ocean, around a harbor that was three-quarters of a circle.
“Wager Bay; most of the island’s trade goes through here. About forty thousand people, virtually none of them Brigaderos. So, no problem . . . except for the fortress.”
His pointer tapped the irregular polygon which topped the hill closing the east flank of the harbor. Raj had memorized schematic drawings of all the major fortresses within the Civil Government, and quite a few without. Center amplified that knowledge with three-dimensional precision. Deep stone-lined moats all around and a steep drop to the shingled beaches on the water side where an arc of cliffs fronted the sea. Low-set modern walls of thick stone and earthwork behind the moats, built to withstand siege guns. They mounted scores of heavy built-up smoothbore guns, able to sweep the bay. Bastions and ravelins, outworks giving murderous crossfire all along the landward side, a smooth sloping approach with neither cover nor dead ground.
“We’re certainly not going to take that with a rush. But take it we must, and soon.”
observe, Center said.
—and ships sailed into Wager Bay, their blunt wooden bows casting back plumes of white spray from blue ocean; whitecaps glittered across the broad reach of the harbor. There was a stiff breeze, enough to belly out the brown canvas of the sails and snap the double lightning flash flag of the Brigade from every masthead. The decks were black with troops, dozens of ships, thousands of men.
A Civil Government steam ram came butting through the waves, water flinging back in wings from the steel beak just below the surface at its bows, frothing away from the midships paddle-boxes. Black coal smoke streamed from its funnel, and five more rams followed behind. Behind them the city rose from the waterside in whitewashed and pastel-colored tiers, its tile roofs glowing in the sun. The fortress on its headland was built of dun-colored rock, squatting like a coiled dragon on the heights. No cannon fired from the water could reach that high, and the walls were broad and squat and sunken behind their ditch, built to resist fire from guns far heavier than the converted fieldpieces the rams carried on their decks.
Guns as heavy as the ones mounted in the fort’s casements. The first of them boomed like distant thunder, a long rolling sound that echoed from the cliffs and the facing buildings across the bay. The sound of the shell passing was like thick sailcloth ripping, tearing the sky. A long plume of smoke with a red spark at its heart blossomed from the bay-side wall of the fortification. The forty-kilogram cast-iron cannonball was a trace of blur in the air, and then a fountain of spray near one of the rams. The ships ignored the shot—the ranging shot, it must be—and kept on toward the Brigade transports a kilometer away. Their formation began to open out, as each steamship picked a target and fell out of line behind the leading vessel. A whistle screeched a signal, and the flat huffchuff of their engines blatted louder as they went to ramming speed.
Staccato thunder rolled across Wager Bay. BOOM-BOOM-BOOM-BOOM as the cannon fired one after another at two-second intervals, then bambambambambambambmmmm—as the echoes slapped back and forth across the water. The whistling shriek of the projectiles was a diminuendo under the coarser sounds of the discharge. Suddenly the warships were moving amid a forest of waterspouts, dozens of them . . . except for the two ships that were struck.
The heavy cannonballs had been fired from mounts over a hundred meters above sea level. They were plunging almost vertically downward when they struck the plank decks of the ships. They went through the inch-thick decking without slowing perceptibly, sending lethal foot-long splinters of wood spinning like shrapnel across both flush decks.
One ship was struck near the stern. Some of the splinters flicked through the vision slit of the sheet-iron binnacle that was raised and bolted about the wheel and slashed the face off the steersman there. His convulsing body spun the wheel, but the ship was already turning so rapidly that it heeled one paddle almost out of the water; the cannonball had snapped and jammed the underdeck chains that connected wheel to rudder. The captain clinging to the bridge that crossed the hull between the paddle boxes could only watch in horrified fascination as the vessel’s ram drove at full speed into the hull of the warship next to it—aimed with an accuracy no deliberate skill could have equaled. He was flung high by the impact, an instant before the steel tip of the ram gashed open the steamer’s boiler. Beams, bodies and pieces of machinery fountained skyward.
The other ship hit by plunging fire had been struck amidships; its paddles froze in their boxes as the
boiler rang and flexed and cracked along a rivet-line. Superheated steam flooded the tween-decks spaces, scalding men like lobsters in a pot. Water from the boiler shell cascaded down onto the glowing-hot coal fires in the brick furnaces beneath. It exploded into steam. That and the sudden flexing as ceramic shed heat into the water ripped the iron frames of the firebrick ovens apart like the bursting charge of a howitzer shell, sending them into the backs of the screaming black gang as they ran for the ladders. It also ripped ten meters of hull planking loose from the composite teak-and-iron frame of the warship; the vessel stopped dead in the water, heeled, and began to sink level as seawater gurgled into the engine room.
The cannon began to fire again, more slowly this time, and a little raggedly with the different reloading speeds of their crews. Another ship was struck, this time twice by rounds that crashed straight through the decking and deflected off major timbers to punch out through the hull below the waterline.
One of the warships turned back; the captain reversed one paddle-wheel and kept the other at full ahead, and the vessel spun about in almost its own length. The lead ram plunged forward into the midst of the Brigade ships. They were backing their sails to try and steer clear of it, but the Civil Government warship pirouetted with the same swift-turning grace that its sister had shown in fleeing. Cannon spoke from the bow as it lunged for the flank of a transport, and canister chopped the Brigaderos warriors along the near rail into a thrashing chaos. Then the whole transport surged away as the steel beak slammed home below the waterline.
Just before it struck, the Civil Government ram had backed its paddles, trying to pull the beak free. This time the heavy sailing transport rocked back down too quickly, and its weight gripped the steel of the underwater ram, pushing the warship’s bow down until water swirled across its decks. Brigade marksmen picked themselves up and crowded to the rail, or swarmed into the rigging to sweep the steamer’s decks.
Beyond, the rest of the relief force sailed forward to anchor under the fort’s walls, protected by its guns, and men and supplies began to swarm ashore.
observe, Center said, and the scene changed:
—to night. Dark, with both moons down and only the stars lighting the advancing men. They moved silently up the long slope toward the landward defences of Fort Wager, carrying dozens of long scaling ladders and knotted ropes with iron grapnel hooks. Silent save for the click of equipment and breathing, and the crunch of hobnailed boots on the coarse gravel soil beneath them.
Arc lights lit along the parapet with a popping crackle and showers of sparks. Mirrors behind them reflected the light into stabbing blue-white beams that paralyzed the thousands of advancing troops as thoroughly as the carbide lanterns hunters might use to jacklight a hadrosauroid. Less than a second later, nearly a hundred cannon fired at once, from the main fort wall, from the bastions at the angles and from the triangular ravelins flung out before the works. Many of the guns were of eight-inch bore, and they were firing case-shot, thin tin sheets full of lead musket balls. Multiple overlapping bursts covered every centimeter of the approaches, and most of the Civil Government troops vanished like hay struck by a scythe-blade. . . .
“We’ll deal with the fortress when we come to it,” Raj concluded. Acid churned in his stomach. “In the meantime, it’s an early day tomorrow. Gerrin, you’ll take half the 5th Descott and the 2nd Cruisers—”
“You think too much, my darling,” Suzette whispered in the dark.
“Well, Starless Dark take it, somebody has to,” he mumbled, with an arm thrown over his eyes. The bedroom was dark anyway, and the arm could not block out the visions Center sent; nor the images his own mind manufactured.
They’ve got artesian water and supplies for a year in there, he thought. How—
“I can’t tell you how to take the fort,” Suzette said. “But you’ll think of a way, my heart. Right now you need your sleep, and you can’t sleep until you stop thinking for a while,” Suzette’s voice said, her voice warm and husky in the darkness, her fingers cool and unbearably delicate, like lascivious butterflies. “That I can do.”
And for a while, thought ceased.
CHAPTER FIVE
“Surely ’tis brave to be a king, And ride in triumph through Persepolis,” Bartin Foley quoted to himself.
“Ser?” his Master Sergeant said.
“Nothing,” the young officer replied; it was unlikely that the NCO would be interested in classical Old Namerique drama.
He bowed left and right and waved to the cheering citizens of Perino. Sprays of orange-blossom and roses flew through the air, making the dogs of the 5th Descott troopers behind him bridle and curvette; two hundred men and a pair of field-guns followed at his heels, less those fanning out to secure the gates and the warehouses. Perino was a pleasant little town of flat-roofed pastel-colored houses sloping down to a small but snug harbor behind a breakwater, and backed by lush vineyards and sulphur-mines in the hills. The walls were old-fashioned, high narrow stone curtains, but the inhabitants hadn’t shown any particular desire to hold them against the Civil Government anyway—even the few resident Brigaderos had mostly been incoherent with joy when they realized the terms allowed them to retain their lives, personal liberty, and some of their property.
The town councilors had been waiting at the open gates, barefoot and with ceremonial rope nooses around their necks in symbol of surrender. The clergy had been out in force, too, spraying holy water and incense—orthodox clergy, of course, not the Spirit of Man of This Earth priests of the heretical Brigade cult, who were staying prudently out of sight—and a chorus of children of prominent families singing a hymn of welcome. One of them was riding on his saddlebow at the moment, in point of fact, held by the crook of his left arm. She was about eight, flushed with joy and waving energetically to friends and relatives; the wreath of flowers in her hair had come awry.
“Stop wriggling,” he mock-growled under his breath. “That’s an order, soldier.”
The girl giggled, then looked at his hook. “Can I touch it?” she said.
“Careful, it’s sharp,” he warned. Children weren’t so bad, after all. For that matter, he was the father of two himself, or at least had a fifty-fifty chance of being their father. It wasn’t something he had expected so soon, not being a man much given to women. He grinned to himself; you couldn’t exactly say he’d saved Fatima from a bunch of troopers bent on gang-rape and revenge for a foot in the testicles and an eye nearly gouged out, back at the sack of El Djem. More in the nature of the Arab girl insisting on being rescued, when she came running out ahead of the soldiers and swung him around bodily by the equipment-belt. It had been Gerrin who talked the blood-mad trooper with the bayonet in his hand into going elsewhere, with the aid of a couple of bottles of slyowtz; he’d wanted Bartin to get used to women, since he’d have to marry and beget for the family honor, someday.
Somehow the girl had kept up with them during the nightmare retreat from El Djem after Tewfik mousetrapped the 5th Descott and wiped out the other battalion with them; and she helped him nurse the wounded Staenbridge back to health in winter-quarters outside Sandoral. She’d been pregnant, and Gerrin—whose wife back home in Descott was still childless, despite twice-yearly duty-inspired visits—had freed her and adopted the child. Both children, now.
“Did you kill him with your sword?” the awestruck child went on with blood-thirsty enthusiasm, after touching the hook with one finger. They were nearly to the town plaza. “The one who cut off your hand.”
“Possibly,” Bartin said severely.
Actually, it had been a pom-pom shell, one of the last the enemy fired in the battle outside Sandoral. That had been right after he led the counterattack out of the command bunker, past the burning Colonist armored cars. Probably the enemy gun-crew had been slaughtered as they tried to get back to the pontoon bridge across the Drangosh.
Who can tell? he thought. There had been so many bodies that day; dead ragheads, all sizes and shapes, all dead;
dead Civil Government soldiers too, piled in the trenches. Bartin Foley had been on a stretcher travelling back to the aid station in town.
“Right, we’ll—” he began to the NCO beside him.
Crack. The bullet went overhead, far too close. Crack. Crack. Crack. More shots from the building to his left—the heretic Brigaderos church, it must be fanatics, holdouts.
Someone was screaming; a lot of people were, as the crowd scattered back into the arcades. The child whimpered and grabbed at him. Foley kicked his left leg over the saddle and vaulted to the ground.
“Take cover!” he shouted. “Return fire! Lieutenant Torridez, around and take them from the rear.”
Armory rifles crackled, their sounds crisper than the Brigaderos’ muskets. Foley dashed to the arcade opposite, his dog following in well-trained obedience; the officer shoved the girl into the arms of a matron with a lace mantilla who was standing quietly behind a pillar—unlike most of the civilians, who were running and shrieking and exposing themselves to the ricochets that whined off the cobblestones and the stucco of the buildings around the square. Without pausing he ran around the other side of the pillar and back into the square, pulling free the cut-down shotgun he wore in a holster over his right shoulder.
“Stay!” he ordered the animal. Then: “Follow me, dog-brothers!” A fat lead slug from an enemy musket plucked at the sleeve of his jacket as he ran, opening it as neatly as a tailor’s scissors, and then he was in the shadow of the church portico.