by David Weber
The only answer he'd been able to think of was to make the Boman think the defenders had done their level best to destroy the bridge entirely. The theory had been that the barbarians would figure that they wouldn't have tried to destroy the bridge, unless they'd been afraid of being pursued. From which it followed that this was the ideal time to pursue them. And so Corporal Aburia had worked with exquisite care to prepare a black powder "demolition charge" which would look spectacular as hell, do a fair amount of superficial damage, but leave the bridge structurally intact. He'd been a bit anxious about asking the corporal to tailor that precise a charge with something as crude as black powder, but she'd come through with flying colors.
Now he watched the bridge filling once again with close-packed Boman, and keyed his communicator.
"Here they come, Eva," he announced over the dedicated channel to the sergeant major. "Don't let anyone get too eager."
* * *
Honal stood peering through the firing slit in the wall of what once had been a shop of some sort. He had no idea what sort of goods it had sold, nor were there any clues to give him a hint. All that was left was a large, square, empty room with heavily reinforced stone walls. Well, that and the swivels, mounted on heavy timbers, driven into the ground, which the K'Vaernian Navy had contributed to the campaign.
The Sheffan nobleman rested one proprietary false-hand on the swivel beside him. For all intents and purposes, it was a small muzzle-loading cannon with a shot weight of no more than a single human kilo which took its name from the way it was mounted aboard K'Vaernian warships, which had a habit of mounting a dozen or so of them along each rail as antipersonnel weapons. Julian had taken one look at them and pronounced that they were the galaxy's biggest muzzle-loading "shotguns"—whatever a "shotgun" was. Honal didn't really know about that. All he knew was that this particular swivel was going to help him extract his long awaited vengeance for murdered Sheffan, and he showed his teeth in a snarl any human might have envied.
* * *
Bistem Kar watched from atop the gatehouse bastion as the unending tide of Boman swept towards him down the bridge. It scarcely even hesitated when it reached the area Aburia's charge had damaged, and the general's growl of satisfaction rumbled deep in his throat as the barbarians kept right on coming.
"Lieutenant Fain!"
"Yes, Sir?"
"Lieutenant, those bastards may get suspicious if we just welcome them into our parlor, but I don't want to put down enough fire to discourage them, either. I think one company of really good shots ought to be just about right. Would you happen to know where I might find one which would be interested in the job?"
"As a matter of fact, General," the Diaspran lieutenant told him with a slow smile, "I do. Company! Action front!"
* * *
Tar Tin snarled as the first shit-sitter arquebus fire began to crackle from the bastions to either side of the broken gatehouse. So, some of the rearguard had had the presence of mind to position themselves there in an effort to delay the host's pursuit of their fleeing fellows! It was a courageous decision, he conceded, since they could not have an unlimited supply of ammunition and whatever happened to the rest of their army they were certain to be dug out of their positions eventually and killed. But it was obvious that there weren't enough of them to stop the Boman. Dozens of warriors fell, or plunged over the side of the bridge into the Tam, as bullets struck them down, but even as dozens fell, hundreds continued to charge forward at a run, and already the host's fleetest warriors were passing through the broken gatehouse.
The bridge was theirs! The bridge was theirs—and soon all the rest of the city, and their families, and their stolen booty would be theirs once more and K'Vaern's Cove would be doomed!
* * *
Eva Kosutic watched the barbarians spilling into the enlarged plaza like a dark, living tide pouring into a dry lake bed from a sluice gate. They came onward, waving their axes, screaming their war cries, and she felt her gunners stirring uneasily. Not nervously, really—more . . . impatiently. They wanted to open fire now, but she only stood there, hands clasped behind her, and waited for the lake to fill.
* * *
Sna Hulf of the Ternolt Clan of the Boman charged through the ruined gate tunnel, howling his war cry. The exultation of battle carried him forward like a man possessed, eager to prove his courage and punish all shit-sitter treachery. He'd never experienced anything quite like the charge across the bridge, never been part of such a focused, unstoppable surge. It was as if the bridge were a narrow streambed, and the host a mighty tide driving through it, gaining speed as its bed narrowed until it erupted from the far end of the channel with a force nothing could resist! The weight of all his fellow warriors, of all the clans, thrust him forward with the massive momentum of literally kilotons of bone and blood and muscle.
Yet even in his exalted mood, he realized there was something strange and different about the square at this end of the bridge. It was larger than it had been the last time he was here, and all of the streets leading off of it seemed to have disappeared. And there were holes in the walls of all the buildings. And what were those shit-sitters doing on the platform atop the wall where the main boulevard had been?
He stared at the shit-sitters—the only ones he could see—while the momentum of his fellows propelled him forward into the square. They stood behind some sort of strange, two-wheeled carts which supported metal tubes of what looked like dark bronze. The tubes were long, and slender, unlike anything he'd ever seen before, yet there was something about them . . . something familiar, if only he could place it . . .
* * *
"I've never seen so many Boman in such a small space in my entire life," Honal remarked to Rastar and Chim Pri.
"Like a stock pen full of turom at branding time," Pri agreed, rechecking the priming caps on one of his revolvers.
"And one big pocking target," Turkol Bes added. The commander of the Carnan Battalion had borrowed one of the Marines' repeating rifles and had at least forty magazines piled up in front of him. The weapon was ridiculously small for him, but that was all right with Bes.
"And one big pocking target," Rastar agreed grimly.
* * *
"They're starting to slow down, General," Krindi Fain remarked, and Kar nodded in agreement. The general had Dell Mir's telescope back out, and was peering towards the northern end of the bridge.
"I imagine the square is beginning to fill up, Lieutenant," he said almost absently. "Even with all the pressure coming from behind them, they can only cram so many bodies into so much space." He chuckled evilly. "Of course, we're about ready to begin making room for more of them, aren't we?"
"General, Colonel Ni reports that some of the Boman are beginning to try to force the gates into the bastion," one of Kar's staffers announced, and the general shrugged.
"I suggest you tell him not to let them do that," he said in mild tones, still peering through his telescope. "Although," he added dryly, "I imagine they'll have something else to distract them very shortly."
* * *
"Armand, we're just about full here."
Pahner grinned at Kosutic's pointed tone. The sergeant major would never come out and admit that she was feeling antsy, but her use of his first name in front of the troops, even over the dedicated command circuit, was a dead giveaway. And looking at the congested horde of red icons packing tighter and tighter together in the square, he could hardly blame her. The remote imagery from her helmet showed him a vast sea of Boman, surging this way and that while those closest to the edges of the huge mob began to hack at the barricades with their battle axes. They weren't going to get through that stone any time soon, but he didn't want them to get any ideas about helping one another swarm over their tops, either.
"How many do you figure are still on our side of the river or the bridge, Julian?" he asked.
"Call it ten or twelve thousand on the bridge, and another ten or so on the approaches," Julian replied after a
moment.
Pahner frowned slightly. He'd calculated that the Boman could fit a maximum of about forty or forty-five thousand into the square beyond the gatehouse, but he didn't really think there were that many already in it. Call it thirty thousand, he decided. If Julian's estimate was correct—and Pahner rather thought it was—then the Boman were down to no more than fifty-two thousand, little more than half the size of their host before the campaign began. If things went according to plan, those on the bridge and already in the square were toast, but there was no way the limited number of suits of powered armor available to him was going to be able to simultaneously seal the bridge and round up anyone who wasn't already on it. Which meant that at least ten thousand of the barbarians were going to escape, and he hated that.
His frown turned into a grimace and a snort as he realized he was actually upset by the idea of inflicting "only" ninety percent casualties on his enemy. Hubris, he decided, wasn't something a Marine needed to go around encouraging, and a mere ninety percent casualty rate ought to be enough to encourage even Boman to behave themselves in the future.
"All right, Eva," he said soothingly. "If it will make you feel any better, go ahead and get started."
"Gee, thanks," she said sarcastically, then turned to the gunners on the platform with her, and the captain heard her over the still-open com-link.
"Open fire!"
* * *
Sna Hulf had been shoved almost directly up against one of the stone walls fronting the square by the unendurable pressure of the warriors behind him. One or two of his fellows had already lost their footing and disappeared under the shrieking, ax-waving ocean of warriors. He had no doubt that they'd been trampled into paste, and the pressure around him was becoming distinctly unpleasant, but he couldn't take his mind off those bronze tubes.
If they'd been fatter and ringed with reinforcing hoops or bands of metal, he would have been tempted to think they were bombards. But no one had ever mounted a bombard on a carriage like that, and no one had ever cast a bombard that skinny for its length. It was ridiculous. And yet . . . and yet . . .
He was still pondering the conundrum when Eva Kosutic's order reached her gunners.
* * *
The gun platforms had been very carefully designed. Aside from the twelve guns in the sandbagged barriers built to close the two avenues by which the retreating K'Vaernians had cleared the square, each battery was at least six meters above ground level, and the gun platforms themselves sloped upward towards the rear, so that the guns' point of aim, at maximum depression, was well below the level of the batteries on the opposite side of the square. After all, no one wanted any friendly fire casualties.
But if no one wanted friendly casualties, there were going to be plenty of unfriendly ones. Each round of grapeshot consisted of nine individual shot, each fifty millimeters in diameter, and there were a hundred and eighty-two guns. Just over sixteen hundred iron balls, each seventy percent the size of a pre-space baseball, ripped into the packed Boman. Anyone who got in the way of one of them simply exploded in a spray of crimson and shredded flesh, and each of them blasted its way well over four hundred meters into the stunned mass of warriors.
No one ever knew how many thousands of Boman died in that first salvo, and it didn't really matter. Even as the artillery opened fire, riflemen and revolver-armed cavalry rose atop the walls around the square, or stepped up to the loopholes, and the six hundred Navy swivels mounted behind other loopholes belched fire and smoke. The swivels were loaded with canister, not grape, and each of them sent one hundred and thirty-five musket balls screaming into the Boman.
* * *
Honal shouted with delight as he touched off the swivel. The concussion as hundreds of field guns and swivels and thousands of rifles and revolvers simultaneously opened fire was like the blow from some mighty hammer. The deafening waves of sound and overpressure seemed to squeeze the air out of his lungs, and the brimstone stench was shot through with lurid tongues of flame, like some demon's paradise turned loose on mortal beings.
To either side of him, Rastar, Chim Pri, and Turkol Bes stood at their own loopholes, blazing away with the same manic grins. Honal's assistants stepped forward and began reloading the swivel, and the cavalryman drew two of his own revolvers and emptied them through the swivel's firing slit while they worked.
Shrieks and screams of terrified agony came from the slaughter pen into which the Boman had been herded, and hell-spawned night enveloped the scene of horror as choking clouds of smoke devoured the light.
* * *
Tar Tin was halfway across the bridge when the terrible explosions began on the far side of the gatehouse. The mighty stone structure of the Great Bridge itself seemed to quiver and pulse underfoot with the fury of the shit-sitters' fire, yet even through the dreadful thunder he could hear the despairing shrieks of the warriors trapped and dying under it.
Horrified understanding smote him as the choking pall of powder smoke rose above the far end of the bridge, and a fist seemed to close about his heart as he realized Kny Camsan had been right all along. To charge headlong against the shit-sitters' new weapons was to die, and he had been fooled—duped by shit-sitter cunning into doing just that! He still couldn't see what was happening in the square ahead, but he didn't need to see to know that the disaster to which he had led the clans was complete.
All about him, other warriors heard the sounds of slaughter and realized, as he, that the shit-sitters wanted them to continue their charge forward to their deaths. For a few moments, the pressure of those behind kept them moving forward anyway, but then even those at the very rear of the column realized, however imperfectly, what was happening. The pressure eased, and the flow of movement across the bridge began to reverse itself.
* * *
"Okay, troops," Pahner said to the armored members of Julian's squad. "Time to push the little dogies along."
* * *
The true purpose of the armor was far less to wipe the Boman out of existence than to break the back of the remnant's morale.
It worked.
The armored Marines, concealed by the sophisticated chameleon systems of their armor, had actually passed through the rearmost stragglers of the Boman host without being detected. They'd split up, spreading out to cover as many as possible of the streets, alleys, and avenues leading into the square on the north bank of the Tam with at least one Marine, and now they advanced, firing as they came.
A tidal wave of flechettes, cannon beads, and plasma bolts erupted out of nowhere, tearing lethal holes through the Boman who had just begun to retreat from the holocaust on the other side of the river, and it was too much. Not even Boman battle frenzy could support them in the midst of such supernatural devastation and horror, and the warriors began throwing down their weapons and groveling on the ground, anything to get out of the hail of terrible, terrible death from the invisible demons.
* * *
Honal sent yet another charge of canister blazing through the loophole, and reached for another pair of revolvers. He stepped up to the opening and opened fire, watching still more of the trapped, screaming Boman fly back from his fire in splashes of red, and he laughed with an edge of hysteria. It was like killing basik. He could probably have wandered in with a club and killed the Boman—they were that broken.
His revolvers clicked empty, and he snarled in frustration at the interruption of the terrible frenzy of slaughter. He swung out the cylinders and began stuffing fresh cartridges into the chambers. He recapped them, closed them, and began firing yet again.
"Cease fire, Honal," someone said in his ear.
"What?" he asked, picking another target and squeezing the trigger. The Boman blew sideways, disappearing into the heaped and piled corpses of his fellows, and someone hit Honal on the shoulder.
"Cease fire!" Rastar shouted in his ear.
Honal gave his cousin an incredulous glance, unable to believe what he was hearing, then looked back out the firing slit. The
terrifying warriors of the Boman were a pitiful sight, most of them trying desperately to cower behind and under the piles of their own dead, and Rastar shook him by the shoulder.
"Cease fire," he said in a more nearly normal voice. "Despreaux says to cease fire. It's all over."
"But—" Honal began, and Rastar shook his head.
"She's right, cousin," the last prince of Therdan said. "Look at them, Honal. Look at them, and remember them as they were when they came over our walls . . . and as they will never, ever be again." He shook his head again, slowly. "The League is avenged, cousin. The League is avenged."
* * *
Tar Tin stood trapped in the center of the bridge, watching the destruction of his people's soul. The pride of the warrior people who had always triumphed, for whom defeat had never been more than a temporary setback and a spur to still greater triumph, died that day before his very eyes, and he knew it. Whatever might become of the pitiful survivors of the clans, they would never forget this disaster, never again find the courage to take the shit-sitters by the throat and teach them fear. They were the ones who would cower in terror from this day forth, hiding in the shadows lest the terrible shit-sitters come upon them and complete their destruction.
And it was he, Tar Tin, who had led them to this.
He knew what the clans would require of him—if they still possessed the spirit to demand a war leader's death. And he knew what they would expect of him, yet try as he might, he could not force a way through the defeated warriors about him to attack the shit-sitters and force them to kill him. He could not even sing his death song, for there was no enemy to give him death with honor. There was only shame, and the knowledge that the warrior people, terror of the North, would be warriors no more forever.
He looked down at the ceremonial ax in his true-hands—the ax which had been borne by the war leaders of the clans for fifteen generations, and which had finally known defeat and humiliation. His hands tightened on the shaft as he pictured the shit-sitters' gloating pleasure at claiming that emblem of Boman pride as a trophy to hang upon a palace wall in some stinking city, far from the free winds of the hills of the North.