by David Drake
POUMF. POUMF. POUMF. POUMF.
“Limber up!” the lieutenant shouted.
This time the team caught the trail before the gun quite finished recoiling—risking crushed feet and hands, but it was a lot easier than hauling the gun by muscle force alone. Faster, too, which was the point right now. They kept the momentum going and the trail up, the muzzle of the gun pointing slightly down, and ran it right back to the limber. That was a two-wheeled cart holding the ready-stored ammunition and the hitch for the team. The steel loop at the end of the trail dropped on the lockbar at the rear of the limber with an iron clung.
Terraza ignored it; slapping the lockpin through the bar was somebody else’s job. His little brother Halvaro’s, in point of fact. It was the lieutenant’s job to tell him where to go, and Captain Harritch’s to decide where that was, and Messer Raj to look after everything. Rihardo’s job was to get this mother where it was supposed to be. He sprinted forward to the head of the six-dog hitch and straddled the saddle of the left-hand lead. The right-hand lead—right-one—wurfled and surged to her feet at the same instant.
“Hadelande, Pochita!” he shouted to her. Pochita was a good bitch, he’d raised her from a pup and trained her to harness himself. She knew how to take direction from the lieutenant’s sword as well as he did, and took off at a gallop. The team rocked into unison.
The lieutenant was pointing directions with his saber; off to the right as well as moving rearward, to knock back a flanking party of barbs that were getting too close and frisky. Off they went, a bump and thunder over the roadside ditch, and then up the rocky hillside in a panting wheeze. As soon as they’d moved out of the way the second battery opened up from a thousand meters back; the Skinners saddled up too, moving along with them. All four guns and the two spare caissons with extra ammunition. Which they would need before they saw Old Residence again.
Something hit a rock to his right with a monstrous crack and an undertone of metal ringing. Cast-iron roundshot from one of the barb guns, and dead lucky to be this close to a moving target. Fractions of a second later the whole team lurched, and he nearly went over the pommel of his saddle.
Pochita was down. With both her hind legs off at the hocks; the roundshot had trundled through, spinning along the ground and ignoring everything else. She whimpered and floundered; shock was blocking most of the pain, but she couldn’t understand why her legs didn’t work. She was a Newfoundland-Alsatian cross, a mule-dog, with big amber-colored eyes. The huge soft tongue licked at him frantically as he hauled on his reins with his left hand and scrabbled for the release-catch of her harness with his right.
It gave, but he had to draw his saber and slash her free from the right-number-two dog. He clapped his heels to his mount and the team moved forward again, only to lurch to a halt once more.
“Pull up, pull up!” his brother Halvaro shouted.
Rihardo looked back over his shoulder. Pochita had tried to follow the team—she was the best dog he’d ever trained, and the most willing. Even with blood spurting from both her severed rear legs she’d tried, and fouled the limber; the last pair of dogs were almost dancing sideways in their efforts not to trample her. Pochita writhed, her body bent into a bow of agony.
“Fuck it!” Rihardo screamed. Rain flicked into his face, like tears. “I wouldn’t pull up if it was you either, mi bro.”
He hammered his heels into the ribs of left-one. The ironshod wheel of the limber rolled over Pochita’s neck, and the gun-wheel over her skull. The team jerked, and something broke with a noise like crackling timber. Halvaro was standing in his position on the limber, looking back in horror, when the shell exploded. It crumped into the earth right of the moving battery, and a hand-sized fragment of the casing sledged the young gunner forward, tearing open his back to show the bulging pink surface of the lungs through the broken rib.
Halvaro landed in front of the limber’s wheels, falling down between the last two dogs of the hitch. Rihardo turned his face forward with a grunt; he ignored the second set of crackling noises as the wheels went over his brother’s back and chest.
“Into battery, rapid fire!” the lieutenant said.
“Right, let’s get out of here,” Raj said. “They’re holding back now they’ve lost their field-guns.”
He cased his binoculars; it was two hours past noon, good time for a fighting retreat begun early in the morning. The Brigaderos were scattered over a couple of thousand meters of front to the westward. The ones trying to work through the fields would be slower than Raj’s guns trotting home down the road. For the first time that day he noticed the damp chill of soaked clothing; he uncorked an insulated flask and sipped lukewarm kave, sweet and slightly spiked with brandy. Bless you, my love, he thought: Suzette had insisted on him taking it, even though he’d planned to be back in Old Residence by noon. He offered the last of it to the artillery captain.
“Grahzias, mi heneral,” the young man said. He finished it and wiped his eyes, peering westward. “Those brass guns of theirs aren’t much,” he went on.
The two batteries had limbered up, replacing a few lost dogs from the overstocked teams on the spare caissons. They rumbled into a fast trot. The Skinners lounging about rose, fired a few parting shots and mounted, all except for one who’d decided the roadway was a good spot to empty his bowels.
“True, Captain Harritch,” Raj said, as the officers reined about and followed the guns. The dogs broke into a ground-eating lope. “The problem is their determination.”
Poplanich’s Own seemed to be still bunched around the railway gate into the city.
What can Ehwardo be thinking of? Raj thought irritably.
“Open the bloody gate, you fools!” Ehwardo Poplanich screamed upward at the wall above him.
Rain spouted out of the gutters on the parapet above, falling down on the troops. He could feel the dogs getting restless behind them, and the men too—retreating was the harshest test of discipline.
A militiaman peered through a tiny iron-grilled opening in the gates at head height. “Go around to the north gate,” he said, with an edge of hysteria in his voice. “We heard the fighting. We’re not going to let the Brigade into our city just to save your asses, easterner.”
Rifles bristled from the top of the gate. Captured weapons distributed to the city militia, but deadly enough for all that. The rain gutters could pour boiling olive oil and burning naptha, as well . . . and there was no telling what a mob of terrified civilians would do. They’d put militia on watch in the daytime, when nothing was expected to happen, so that real soldiers could put their time to some use. Another calculated risk because they were shorthanded . . .
Raj pulled up. “What is going on here?” he barked. Horace barked literally, a deep angry belling.
Ehwardo made a single, tightly controlled gesture toward the peephole. Raj removed his helmet.
“This is General Whitehall,” he said, slowly and distinctly. “Open—the—gate—immediately.”
“Whitehall is dead,” the man quavered. “We heard it from the fugitives. Dead, wiped out with both battalions, dead.”
That with Raj, a complete cavalry battalion and eight guns waiting in the roadway. All because one or two cowards had bugged out from the retreat, and these street-bred militia had chosen to believe them. Ehwardo was swearing quietly beside him. The whole thing had cost time. If Poplanich’s Own had been inside he could have rolled the guns and Skinners in with a fair margin of safety. Even if the gates opened right now, it would be chancy; the pursuit was coming in hell-for-leather at a gallop. Bells were ringing in there behind the city walls; the alarm had been given, but it might be fifteen minutes or more until the word got to a real officer.
“Get a runner to headquarters,” Raj snapped at the peephole. No time to think about that. No time to think about what he was going to do to the men responsible for this ratfuck.
“Ehwardo, we’ll have to see off the ones snapping at our heels before anything else. Deploy int
o line crossing the axis of the road, with center refused. Captain Harritch, both batteries in support, if you please; two guns in the center and the rest on the flanks. Juluk—”
The rain had died away to a fine drizzle. The land close to the city was mostly flat, and Raj had ordered every scrap of cover cut or demolished out to two kilometers from the walls. He was facing east, down the railway and its flanking road, paved this close to the city. Off to his left was the river, narrowing and turning north about here, with a high bluff in its bend about two kilometers away. Trumpet-calls were spreading out the men of Poplanich’s Own, smooth as oil spreading on glass.
Good training, Raj thought. Only a fool wouldn’t be nervous in this situation, but the motion was as calm and quick as drill. The column reversed, each dog turning in its own length. Each company slanted out into the fields like the arms of a V, with the platoons doing likewise, then pivoted out into line. Less than eight minutes later the six hundred men of Poplanich’s Own were trotting back east in extended open order, a double rank nearly a kilometer long.
A clump of lancers led the Brigaderos’ pursuit, about a thousand strong, cantering down the roadway on dogs winded from the uphill chase. The forest of upright lanceheads stirred like a reedbed in a breeze as the thin blue line of Civil Government troopers came toward them at a round trot. Beside Raj, Ehwardo nodded to himself.
“Wait for it,” he said quietly to himself.
The distance closed, and the lancers spurred their tired dogs into a lumbering canter forward, charging in a clump.
“Now!”
The trumpet sounded five notes. Company buglers repeated it, and the dogs sank on their haunches to halt, then to the ground. The men ran forward half a dozen paces and sank likewise, front rank prone and second kneeling.
“Fire!”
The range was no more than two hundred meters now, close enough to see men’s faces if their visors were up. Close enough to hear the bullets striking armor. The flung-forward wings of the Civil Government formation meant that every man could bring his rifle to bear. The two field-guns in the center next to the commanders began firing as well, with their barrels level with the ground, firing case shot. The hundreds of lead balls sounded like all the wasps in the world, until they struck the mass of men and dogs. That was more like hailstones on tile. After the third volley the survivors turned to run, but their dogs were tired and fouled by the kicking masses of the dead and dying. Units were coming up the road behind them, dragoons and lancers mixed, rushing to be in at the kill the renewed firing indicated.
The killing went on. From behind a hillock, the Skinners rode out. Some dismounted to shoot; others swooped in, firing their giant rifles point-blank from the saddle and jumping down with knives in either hand, darting out again with choice bits of loot. The Brigaderos at the rear of the pileup began to halt and seep out sideways into the fields again. The Skinners followed, fanning out into the fields. Men ran from the menace of their fire.
“The Brigaderos really need to work on their unit articulation,” Raj said coldly. “Those regiments of theirs are too big to react quickly. They get caught up in their own feet when something unexpected happens fast.”
Shells went by overhead and burst over the roadway. Shrapnel sleeted down into the mass of enemy troopers caught between the windrows of dead in front of the battalion line and the clumps of riders dribbling in from the rear.
“We can . . . oh, shit,” Ehwardo said.
A black beetling shape loomed up out of the rain, casting mounted men aside from either edge of its hull like the coulter of a plow. It was about eight meters long and three wide, and as tall as a tall man in the center of its rounded sheet-iron hull. Smoke and steam billowed from the stack toward the rear; the rain hissed when it struck that metal. More steam jetted from under the rear wheels, a steady chuff-chuff-chuff. A light cannon nosed out from the bow, through a letterbox-type slit. Small ports for rifles and pistols showed along its sides.
“Scramento,” Raj echoed.
Someone back at the bridge had had the car manhandled across the gap they’d torn in the track, then sent it zipping up the undamaged section. A few minutes back behind the last hill to bolt the road wheels over the flanged ones, and it was ready. Now it rattled and wheezed its way forward, and Brigaderos troops followed as if pulled by the twin black lightning bolts in the red circle on its bow slope.
Only the gun on this side of the railway embankment could bear. The crew were already working on the elevation and traverse wheels of their weapon. It bucked and slid backward; the shell kicked up a gout of dirt from the embankment beside the armored car. The vehicle slewed sideways, skidded, and came back onto the pavement, picking up speed.
“Nothing left but cannister!” the gun-sergeant screamed, as he dashed back to the caisson.
Men were switching their aim to the car. Sparks flew as bullets spanged and flashed off the surface, but even the brass-tipped hardpoints wouldn’t punch through. The hatch on top clanged down, leaving the commander only the slots around it. The armored car didn’t have the firepower to actually kill all that many troopers. It could break their position, and their cohesion, and that would be all she wrote. The fifteen-millimeter rounds from the Skinners’ sauroid rifles probably would penetrate, but they were out on the flanks . . . and they’d probably consider this his business, even if they were looking this way.
It was his business. “Follow me!” he shouted, and slapped his heels into Horace’s flanks.
Men followed him—no time to check who—and the hound raced forward at a long gallop, belly to the earth. The iron juggernaut grew with frightening swiftness; it must be travelling at top-dog speed. His shift moved Horace aside, into the ditch. The cannon slewed around, trying to bear on him, then flashed red. Cannister whistled past his left ear, and Horace leaped as if a fly had stung him. A ball had nicked the dog’s rump, and then they were inside the shot cone. Behind him a dog bleated in shock, and then he was hauling on the reins. Horace scrabbled, dropping his hindquarters almost to the ground to shed momentum, and whirled. Raj judged distance and launched himself—onto the hull of the armored car, his right hand slapping onto a U-bracket riveted to the hull. It closed like a mechanical grab, and he felt the arm nearly wrenched from its socket as his eighty kilos of mass was jerked out of the saddle and slapped flat against the upper front hull of the armored car.
Rivet-heads hammered into his chest, and the air went out of him with an agonized wheeze. His waist was at the edge of the turtleback, and his legs dangled perilously near the spinning spokes of the front wheel.
And any second the commander would stick his head out of the hatch and shoot him like a trussed sheep, or one of the bullets that were clanging off the hull would hit him.
His left arm came up and clamped onto the next U-bracket. The wool of his cloak tore as his shoulders bunched and hauled him higher. The bucking, heaving passage of the hard-sprung car over the rough roadway flung him up and down on the boilerplate surface of the hull. He scrabbled with his right foot, and got it over the edge of the upper curve of the hull and braced against a handhold. Now he could free a hand. The revolver stripped free of the holster with a pop as the restraining strap snapped across.
M’lewis was riding alongside the other side of the car—Spirit knew how—leaning far over with his rifle thrust out one-handed into the driver’s slit. The sound of the shot was almost lost in the groaning, grating noise of the car’s passage. He could feel it lurch under him suddenly, then he was almost flung free as it banged over the roadside ditch and into the field. The cannon slewed, trying to bear on M’lewis as hands inside hauled the body of the driver away from the controls.
That gave Raj a space. Hanging three-quarters on the forward hull, he jammed his revolver through beside the barrel of the cannon and squeezed off all five rounds as fast as his finger could pull the trigger. The minute the hammer clicked on a spent chamber he threw himself back, curling in mid-air as he would have i
f he’d lost the saddle while jumping a hedge.
Rocky ground pounded at him, ripping and bruising. Something whanged against his helmet hard enough to make the last series of rolls completely limp. He could still see the armored car lurching forward, out of control now as the bullets ricocheted inside its fighting chamber. The prow hit a wall of fieldstone and crumpled, the heavy vehicle bucking up at the back and crashing down again.
What followed seemed quite slow, although it must have taken no more than fifteen seconds in all. The rear third of the car blew apart, the seams of the hull tearing loose in a convulsive puff of escaping steam as the boiler ruptured. That must have sent the fuel tank’s kerosene spraying forward into the fighting compartment, because flame gouted yellow through every slit and joint in it. The stored ammunition went off, and probably the last vaporized contents of the fuel tank at the same instant. The car exploded in a ball of white flame. Bits and pieces of iron plating and machinery rose and pattered down all around him.
Something cold and wet thrust into the back of his neck. Horace’s nose; Raj grabbed at the stirrup and hauled himself erect, feeling his knees trembling and clutching at his midriff. Skin seemed to be missing from a fair section of his face, but none of the major bones were broken. The Brigaderos were in full retreat. Streaming back east, dog, foot and guns with the Skinners whooping in pursuit. Trumpets played; from his left a battalion of Civil Government cavalry came around the city wall at a gallop and began to deploy into line. He shook his head to clear it—a mistake—and managed to make out the banner of the 5th Descott.
“Ser.”
Raj looked up; it was Antin M’lewis, still in the saddle. “Ser, yer all roight, then?”
“I’ll live,” Raj said, spitting out blood from a cut lip and feeling his teeth with his tongue.