by David Drake
BOOM. BOOM. BOOM. BOOM. BOOM. BOOM.
A wall of smoke along the gunports of the fort where the wall faced them.
Inside, the gunners would be leaping through their intricately choreographed dance. Swabbers to push sponge-tipped poles down the barrels to quench the sparks. Gunner standing by with his leather-sheathed thumb over the touch-hole to keep air out. Linen bags of gunpowder rammed down the muzzle next. The gunner lifting his thumb and jabbing the wire pricker down the hole to split the fabric. A wad going in, a heavy circle of woven hemp rope. Then the ball—four men with a scissor-grip clamp, on guns this heavy. Ram another wad on the ball, as the gunner pushed home the friction fuse and clipped his lanyard to it. Men heaving at ropes and the block-and-tackle squealing as the long black pebbled surface of the cast-iron barrel came back to bear, and the gunner standing on the platform at the rear to aim as the officer called the bearing and men spun the screws.
Fire, as the crew sprang back from the path of recoil, mouths open and hands over their ears. Noise and choking smoke, and the whole thing to do again and again. . . .
BOOM. BOOM. BOOM. BOOM. BOOM. BOOM. BOOM. BOOM.
“Turn right. Hard right, for the beach,” Raj said.
He shook his head as the visions faded, and had to grab the captain and scream the directions into his ear; the man turned eyes gone almost black as the pupil swallowed the iris, but he shouted in his turn—then cuffed the helmsman aside and spun the wheel himself, ropy muscle bulging on his bare arms. This time the ripping-cloth noise was much louder, almost shrill, and water splashed across the deck as spouts half as high as the masts collapsed onto them. Instinct made him cover his revolver with his hand as the salt water drenched him.
Dinnalsyn was looking aft. “Damnation to the Starless Dark,” he said. “They got the Ispirto dil Hom.”
The next ship in line was turning around the pivot of the toppled mainmast, a tangled mass of wood and canvas leaning over the side into the waves. As he watched two more balls struck. One into the deck, but the next was a very lucky accident. It hit the mortar tube square-on, and the piled ammunition went up in a ball of orange fire. When it cleared the whole front of the ship was missing; the stern slid forward on the same course. Men climbed frantically as the rudder flapped into view; then the merchantman slid out of sight. The water was scattered with flotsam, some of which screamed for help to the next vessel through.
Smooth flukes tossed water upward as the downdraggers came, the only help those men would receive today. Tentacles lashed around a floating spar and the men clinging to it. Their shrieks carried a long way over the water.
Raj turned, stomach knotting. Lodoviko was screaming to the sailors in the rigging to drop sail; the bow rose and fell in a choppy motion as the spars came down in a controlled disaster of crashing weight.
“We have to get in,” Raj said, grabbing the man by the shoulder.
“We will, you lubber of a soldier! Double-moon tide and an onshore breeze: if we come in too fast, the masts’ll come down on your precious popgun when she grounds her belly.”
Lodoviko seemed to be an intelligent savage. If that mortar didn’t work, they would all be joining the crew of the Spirit of Man very soon.
BOOM. BOOM. BOOM. BOOM. BOOM. BOOM. BOOM. BOOM.
“Over,” Dinnalsyn said, tracing the trajectories. “Over, over, over . . . over . . . over, over! Overshot, by the Spirit! Their guns can’t depress this far.”
Raj cast a look back. The next ship, the Rover’s Bane, was coming through the gauntlet of waterspouts. Crack. Not undamaged; the top of the middle mast—mainmast, he reminded himself—went over the side, and broken staylines snapped across the deck like the whips of a malignant god. They were turning, now, turning straight in for the beach. City of Wager right behind.
BOOM. BOOM. BOOM. BOOM. BOOM. BOOM. BOOM. BOOM.
“Hit, she’s hit,” Raj said, peering through distance and spray.
“Took out her wheel and the second one smashed her rudder,” Dinnalsyn said grimly. Then: “She’s still steering, Spirit bugger me blind!”
Lodoviko showed teeth like an ox’s, yellow and strong. “Florez. That he-whore is a seaman, by Glim. He takes her in with the sails alone—onshore wind, it can be done. He has balls, that one.”
The Stalwart drew two of his axes and turned, clashing them together over his head at the fortress. He brayed out a long war-cry, the overhanging yellow fuzz of his mustache standing out from his lip in food-stained glory with the volume.
“Come out and fight, you Brigade heroes! You pussy-whipped suckers of priest’s cocks! Come out of that stone barn and fight—everyone grab a line.”
The final rush to the cliff was shocking; a pitching glide, and the rough stone rising to blot out the sky above. The keel caught and grated, then caught again in a chorus of groans and snaps and rending noises. Rigging gave way with sounds like gigantic lute-strings, but none of the masts went over. The impact seemed slow and gentle, but Raj felt his feet jerked out from under him by inertia, and only the iron grip of his sword-hand on the tarred cordage by his side kept him from falling forward. One seaman still in the rigging screamed as he described a long arc shorewards, ending in abrupt silence as he impacted on the cliff and fell limply to the narrow strip of stony beach.
Silence fell for an instant, and then the ship quivered as it settled. The hulls of all four—all three—were U-shaped in section with edge-keels rather than a single deep keelson-mounted fin. The Chakra ground her way down into the loose rocks of the shore and settled almost level. The comparative absence of noise seemed unnatural, like a ringing in the ears. Off to the left the other two ships were grounded rather further out; there was twenty meters of water between the Chakra and dry land, twice that for each of the others.
Dinnalysn picked himself up. “We made it,” he said. “They can’t touch us now.”
“Professional tunnel-vision, Grammeck,” Raj said with a grim smile. He checked the loads in his pistol and wiped the surfaces dry with the tail of his uniform jacket. “You mean their artillery can’t touch us,” he went on, and pointed to their left. The rock bulged out and then curved away; most of Port Wager was hidden by it.
“Nothing to prevent them coming down the stairways around that corner of the cliff and trying their best to beat us to death. Nothing at all.”
* * *
“No, up two more turns with the same charge,” Raj said.
The mortarman looked at him with awe and spun the elevating screw. The four loaders lifted the heavy shell with its sausage-rings of gunpowder at the base and eased it into the muzzle. Everyone else in the sandbagged emplacement on the forecastle bent away, closing their eyes and opening their mouths, jamming thumbs against their ears.
“Fire in the hole!”
Fffumph. The twenty-cenimeters tube belched a blade of fire taller than a man; everyone was coughing and waving to clear the dense cloud of smoke. The projectile was visible as a dark blur through the air, then a dot that hesitated high above, and then a blur again.
crump. Muted, because it was exploding within the walls of Fort Wager, but still loud. The shells had a ten-kilogram bursting charge, and their target—the land-facing guns of the fort—had no overhead protection. Only thin partitions between each of the guns on the firing deck, as well. The seaward-facing guns might as well be in Carson Barracks for all the good they were doing the Brigade now.
The problem was that there was no way to observe the fall of shot from the ships; the target was not only half a kilometer north, it was three hundred meters higher up and behind a thick stone wall. The main Civil Government force, massed just out of cannon-shot of the fort walls on the other side, could observe roughly where the shells landed. The signals were rough as well, color-coded rockets; green for “too far,” red for “short,” white and black for “left” and “right.” Even with Center to help with the calculations it was taking time to walk the shells of each gun onto the target. Time they might not h
ave.
“Ser! Here t’barbs come agin!”
Raj vaulted over the sandbags, pivoting on his left hand, and landed in a crouch on the deck. That put him below the level of the built-up railings, which were turning out to be a very good idea. The cluster of boulders at the bulge of the cliff was four hundred meters away. The Brigaderos had gotten set up in there, and proved to be deadly accurate. Not very fast, but there were a lot of them, and they tended to hit what they aimed at. Tinneran, the recruit with the big hands, had found out the hard way when he stood up to get a better shot; he was lying wrapped in canvas and out of the way, with a round blue hole in his forehead and the back blown out of his head. The lieutenant was dead, too. Exactly according to the odds. The two most dangerous positions in a cavalry platoon were junior officer and raw recruit.
Two other fatals, and two too badly hurt to shoot even kneeling and through a loophole. That left him thirty rifles. The loopholes had saved their butts. It was a good thing there was no way to hide coming down the cliff directly overhead, and a man rapelling down on a rope had proved to be a very good target.
He duckwalked to the side of the ship and squinted through a narrow slit in the wooden barricade. Bullets made their flat crack overhead, or thocked into the ship’s timbers, or peened as they struck metal. Puffs of smoke rose from the rocks as the marksmen increased their covering fire; at a guess, each was a picked man with two or three others passing him loaded rifle-muskets. The 5th troopers kept hunched down behind the bulletproof sheath of planking that Center had added to Raj’s plan. It wasn’t worth the risk to stick their rifles out the firing slits until they had better targets.
Which would be shortly. None of the bodies from the last attack was floating; the downdraggers had gotten them all. They’d even gone for the ones on the narrow strip of beach, until both sides shot half a dozen of the repulsive beasts while they dragged themselves half-out of the water to seize their prey.
“Here t’ bastids come,” called the NCO.
“Pick your targets,” Raj said, loud but calm. “Fire low.”
A first wave came pelting up the beach beneath the cliffs. They wore green-gray jackets and black pants, lobster-tail steel helmets with nasals and cheek-flaps. General’s Dragoons, part of the Brigade’s regular army. Their rifles were slung, and they carried short ladders.
“Now!”
The Armory rifles began to speak, a steady beat. Men fell, others picked up their ladders and came forward again. Another hundred and another, and the third had no ladders but waded out into the water directly towards the Chakra. The bow was thigh-deep, but there was another four meters or so of sheer hull to climb if they made it that far. The midships railing was half a deck lower than the forecastle, but the water there was waist to chest deep.
Damn, but those are brave men, he thought.
The downdraggers were out there; the men had to come in a dense phalanx and prod with their bayonets. Even so some went down in the tentacles at the edge or rear of the formation, and more stayed to stab and hack at the smooth gray flesh of the predators. For a moment, because the water was being whipped to froth by fire from the Chakra and the other two ships. They were too far out to be attacked, but they could support their sister.
A slapping sound and a grunt. Just down from him a trooper slumped backwards twitching and coughing out sheets of blood from a soft-lead slug through the upper chest. Bullets were cracking into the planking like hail, and if enough came your way one was going to get through the loophole. He switched positions. The hundred men in the first wave were more like thirty now; one turned and tried to run back the way he’d come, and an officer shot him at point-blank range with his pistol. Now they were level with the Chakra’s bow and curving out into the water with their ladders, knees coming up high as if in unconscious reluctance to let their feet touch the surface.
“First squad, follow me!” he called, and led them to the bows.
Past the mortar, where another shot came, and another—they were firing for effect, how had he missed the signal they were on target? Up to the bows, and the rough pole ends of an improvised ladder slapping against the boards. He stuck his revolver over the edge and squeezed off three shots; somebody screamed, and a dozen bullets hammered the edge of the planking as he snatched the hand back. Good. Decoyed, by the Spirit. There might be something in the world more futile than trying to reload a musket while standing in a meter of monster-haunted water, but he couldn’t think of it offhand.
A Brigadero head came over the rail. He shot, and the bullet keened off the lobster-tail helmet; the man’s head jerked around as if he’d been kicked by a riding dog, and he vanished to splash below. One more shot; it missed, but the trooper beside him didn’t. The Brigade warrior folded around his belly and jackknifed, flopping across the rail. Raj holstered his revolver and swept out his saber.
“Come on!” he said, and set the point against the ladder.
The trooper did likewise, putting the tip of his long bayonet against the other upright. They pushed—sideways, not straight back. The ladder slid out of sight, and the timbre of the screams below changed from fury to terror. Raj risked a look; something like a mass of animated worms around a serrated beak the length of an arm had the man who’d held the ladder at the base. It was pulling him seaward and biting chunks out of him at the same time; three of his comrades were hacking at it with their swords although the victim was obviously dead; even following it. Which he wouldn’t have believed, if he hadn’t seen some of the things men would do in combat . . . The squad with him fired point-blank at the next set of men with a ladder.
“Ser.”
He whipped around. A Brigadero had gotten to the deck, twenty feet away where the sailors were holding a section with cutlass and boarding axe. Down in the waist of the ship, the ones who’d come without ladders must be climbing over each other’s shoulders to get on board. The first man on jerked two revolvers from crossdraw holsters. Raj and the trooper beside him ran back toward him. The Brigade warrior took a careful stance and shot the trooper. The man went over with a yell, clutching his thigh as if to squeeze out the pain and rolling into a tangle of sailcloth and rope hanging to the deck. Raj dove forward over the edge of the forecastle half-deck, kept hold of his saber but landed with his ribs on something hard, and came up wheezing.
Not ten feet from the Brigadero. The man was grinning, or snarling, impossible to say. He aimed with care, as much outside the range of Raj’s saber as if he’d been on Maxiluna or lost Earth itself—
Something bright flashed by, rotating into a blur. It stopped at the pistoleer, turning into one of Lodoviko’s axes. The bit took the Brigadero at a flat angle between neck and shoulder. Blood jutted through the cut cloth and flesh, spurting; shock convulsed both the mans hands, and the pistols fired. By luck, good or bad, one barked into the deck-planking by Raj’s foot, turning a thumb-sized patch into a miniature crater.
He hurdled the dying man’s body and turned the next stride into a full-sweep kick at the next man coming over the low rail. The steel-reinforced toe of Raj’s riding boot thudded into his chest with an impact that brought a twinge of pain to Raj’s lower back. The Brigadero toppled backward and splashed into the water. He came up bent over and gasping with his mouth barely above the surface, wading back towards shore with empty hands. Raj leaned over the rail.
He met the eyes of the man there, the one who had been standing chest deep so his comrades could climb up him and onto the ship. The bearded snarling face showed only an intense concentration; his right hand went back for the sword slung over his shoulder. Raj could see something else; a smooth upwelling in the water, a track heading straight for the enemy soldier’s back. He leaned and thrust; the point punched into the standing man’s neck. His eyes were turning up as he slid off the point.
A mercy, Raj thought.
Fdump. Much louder than the previous mortar-shells. A column of black smoke atop a dome of fire rose over the edge of the cliff, over
the barely-visible wall of the fort beyond. Red dots trailing smoke and sparks shot skyward, and heavier debris tumbled briefly into sight.
secondary explosion, Center said. gun bay three, frontal sector to the right of the main gates.
Then something much heavier went off. Shards of rock as big as dogs quivered loose from the cliff, and the noise thumped at his face.
Raj nodded, wheezing back his breath. A fragment of red-hot iron slicing into a bagged charge . . . ripple effect. Massive guns flipping out into the air, and pieces of the crews with them. Chunks of rock and concrete blasting in all directions.
A yell went up from the sandbagged mortar enclosure. Nobody noticed along the sides of the ship for an instant. There was a final snarling fury of shots fired with the muzzles touching flesh and bayonet clashing on swords. The enemy fell back, realizing by instinct that there were too few of them to push home their attack. They saw the pillar of fire as they retreated, and ran.
Then the crew and soldiers were cheering too; another trio of mortar shells puffed upwards, and the sound of their firing slapped back from the cliffs like the applause of giants.
“Cease fire, riflemen,” Raj croaked, keeping well down—the marksmen among the tumbled boulders could shoot again now, with their own men dead or out of the way. Lodoviko looked up from bandaging a gash in his hairy thigh and hooted laughter; Raj nodded.
“Ser?” the platoon sergeant said. “We could git sommat more of ’em—”
“No,” Raj said. He remembered the man standing in the water, waiting while others climbed to safety over him. Or at least out of reach of the tentacles. “I need men like that. All I can get.”
as do i, raj whitehall, Center said. as do i.
Colonel Courtet had probably been a fine figure of a man, back before twenty years of inactivity and Sala brandy took their toll; the vast bush of beard that hid his face was probably a mercy. He hadn’t been drinking recently, but that probably only worsened the trembling of his liver-spotted hands. His body was large and soft, straining against the silvered armor he wore, and his dog shifted as if sensing its rider’s unease.