The Colonials were closer than he expected, four hundred meters but wavering under the unexpected hail of fire. Yes, about two thousand of them still, Raj thought; and their artillery was coming over the hill, pompoms and field guns both.
As he watched, blocks of mounted Colonials veered to left and right, moving to flank the Civil Government blocking force. Without prompting, each battery ceased fire for an instant and heaved its guns around to deal with the new threat; the flanking forces moved farther out, but the Colonials in front seemed to disappear. Raj read their trumpet signals: Dismount and At the Double. The line shrank as the dogs crouched, then turned into a long double rank of men on foot coming forward at a uniform jog-trot.
"In a moment, Major Caztro," Raj said.
The Major-he was a cousin on his mother's side of the late Ehwardo Poplanich-nodded.
"The gunners aren't happy about it," he said.
"Better grieving than dead," Raj said dryly, taking a drink from his canteen; the day was already very hot.
"And. . now!" he said. The major relayed the order to his buglemen.
The gunners fired a last round from their weapons. He could hear one sergeant cursing as he wrenched the breechblock free and tossed it to one of his men. Then he jammed a shell backwards into the opening, stuck a length of slowmatch into the hole where the fuse would normally go, and lit it with the last of the stogie clamped between his lips.
"Fire in the hole!" the noncom shouted. It was echoed down the gun line. "Ten seconds!"
The troopers were already double-timing back to their dogs and swinging out the rear of the cypress grove around the mosque.
"Retreat by platoon columns, at the gallop!" Major Caztro shouted.
Raj looked to either side as he touched his heels to Horace's ribs. The flanking parties were still well back, and the main Colonial force were just remounting and kicking their beasts into a gallop-which must be rather frustrating for them.
The noon sun was blinding-bright. The white dust of the road reflected its heat, and sweat rolled down his forehead out of the sodden sponge-and-cork lining of his helmet. Horace was panting, his black coat splotched with dust. Raj uncorked his canteen and rubbed a little of the water into the dog's neck; if it went down with heat prostration, he was deeply out of luck. Another check behind: the Colonials were coming on fast, but they were staying in line and bringing up their guns with them.
Cautious, but smart, Raj decided.
Barreling in hell-for-leather might have caught him quicker, but he'd already given them the back of his hand twice. There was nothing to show that he didn't have the battalions who'd retreated from the meeting engagement waiting at intervals to mousetrap an unwary pursuit.
Which is our margin, he knew. The Colonials would have won a flat-out gallop.
"How far, mi heneral?" the major asked, swerving his dog over to Raj's side.
"Just under seven kilometers," he said. The nearest Colonials were half a klick back, now. "Twenty minutes at this rate."
Caztro looked back as well. "Just long enough for them to get convinced we're going to run all the way to Sandoral?"
"Exactly, Major."
If everyone hasn't bugged out when Kaltin's men came in hell-for-leather.
* * *
"Halto!"
Raj pulled Horace to a stop, then let him crouch to the ground. His wheezing pant sounded half-desperate, and he was a strong-winded dog. Some of the others were collapsing outright; men brought buckets of water and sloshed them across the moaning, gasping animals. Raj pulled off his sweat-damp neckerchief and turned to trot for the command group below the crest of the hill.
"They're right on my heels," he said.
And everything looks klim-bim, he thought, with a wave of relief so enormous that he felt slightly dizzy. The ground was good-he'd picked it himself-and Gerrin hadn't been wasting his time. The men were spread out along the ridge, well back from the crest and invisible from the other side. Officers lay prone at the top, with their flags furled and laid flat among the scattered olives; inconspicuous rock and earth sangars had been prepared for the guns and splatguns. Back north behind him there was an aid station waiting for field surgery, and relays of men were bringing up buckets of water from the irrigation canal. Kaltin's battalions had watered their dogs and moved up into the firing line, all but Poplanich's Own; two more were on the far right flank, waiting still mounted. Farther north, a small force trotted away dragging brush on the end of their lariats to simulate the dust of a much larger body retreating towards Sandoral.
"And they're coming on like there was no tomorrow," Staenbridge said.
Raj knelt beside him and looked south. The Colonials were advancing at a round trot, deployed for action in two double-file lines with their guns and command group between.
"Message to Colonel Dinnalsyn," Staenbridge went on. A runner bent near. "My compliments, and the first stonk should be directed at the enemy artillery, before it has a chance to deploy."
Raj looked up and down the long curving line. "Guns?" he said.
"Splatguns forward, and the bulk of the field guns to either side." Staenbridge pointed downslope, to a clump of greenery around a small manor house. "Masked battery there."
Raj's breathing slowed. "Good work keeping everything calm when Kaltin's men came galloping in," he said.
"He had them well in hand, and Suzette and her helpers were there with bandages and water," Staenbridge said judiciously. "I doubt anyone in this army would dare panic while she was looking."
Raj nodded. Still good work, Gerrin. He leveled his binoculars and took another swig from the canteen, remembering to follow it with a salt tablet; the last thing he needed was heat prostration.
leading elements at 2300 meters, Center said helpfully. closing rapidly. A set of numbers appeared in the upper right corner of his vision, scrolling down as the enemy trotted nearer.
"Wait until their scouts stumble over us?" Staenbridge said.
"Agreed."
Damned if I'm needed here at all, he thought ruefully. I could go take a nap.
you are the source of overall direction, Center reproved. you have chosen and trained competent subordinates.
I'm not the only one, Raj thought.
"Keep the initial reception low-key," he added aloud.
A screen of scouts preceded the Colonial main body. A dozen of them came loping up the roadway toward the crest, eyes restless. Raj saw their officer half-check as he neared, looking to right and left. What spooked him-
it is too quiet. no birds or pterosauroids except the scavengers.
Raj looked up. Huge wings circled at the limit of vision, supporting long-beaked heads and patient, hungry eyes. Slightly lower were the true birds men had brought with them from lost Earth, crows and naked-necked vultures.
Damn. "I wonder what they do when there's no war?" he said.
Staenbridge looked up too for an instant. "When isn't there war?"
The Colonial scouts came closer. Their leader spurred over the crest of the rise not a hundred meters from Raj, and froze in horrified shock, his bearded mouth dropping open into an O of surprise.
Braaaap. A splatgun fired point-blank, and the scouts went down into a tangle of kicking, howling dogs and wounded men. Troopers swarmed over them in a flurry of shots and bayonet thrusts. Several broke for the rear. Picked marksmen were stationed along the crest; they fired with slow care. One Colonial went down, another. . and then the third, already crouched wounded over his saddle.
Raj turned his binoculars to the Colonial banner; it was his first glimpse of the enemy commander. A square middle-aged face beneath the spired helmet, dark and hawk-nosed, with a gray-shot forked beard. Not Tewfik, but a junior product of the same hard school. Come on, be a good wog, Raj thought urgently.
He'd done it by the book twice now, stopped and deployed when meeting a rearguard. Both times it had cost him time, time for the enemy force which had ravaged his country to escape with their
plunder. And there were those dust plumes. If he did it again, the Civil Government troops might escape altogether. Overruning a small rearguard without putting in an attack on foot would force him to spend lives, but that was a cost of doing business.
Yes. The Colonial trumpets brayed and the enemy force rocked into a slow gallop, the front rank drawing scimitars and officers their pistols.
"He's going to try and roll right over us," Staenbridge said with a cruel smile. "But this pitcher will find himself catching, nonetheless."
Raj nodded tersely. He looked to the right. "You kept the. ."
"1/591st as strike reserve-they're at full strength, their dogs are fresh, and they're fond of the sword," Staenbridge said. He turned back to the front. "Not long now."
750 meters. 700 meters. 650 meters.
Raj nodded. Staenbridge jerked a hand at the signalman, who bent to touch his cigarette to the blue paper of the rocket. It arched skyward and went pop.
The banners of eleven battalions rose over the crest of the ridge in a single rippling jerk. Four thousand men rose and took six paces forward, the front rank dropping to one knee and the rear standing. Gunners heaved at the tall wheels of their weapons until the muzzles showed over the ridge. Splatgun crews pulled the concealing bushes away from their dug-in weapons.
The Colonial formations halted as if they had run into a brick wall. They were all veteran troops, and they realized instantly and gut-deep what the sight before their eyes meant; it meant they had all just been sentenced to death.
The battalions opened fire independently, but within a few seconds of each other. All the enemy were on the long gentle upslope, which meant that even if a bullet was over head-height when it reached the enemy formation-high trajectories were inescapable with black-powder weapons-there would probably be someone in front of it before it struck the earth. The platoon volleys rippled up and down the Civil Government line in an instant fogbank of dirty-gray gunsmoke, an endless BAMbambambambambam of sound. Brass sparkled in the bright sunlight as the troopers worked their levers and ejected the spent rounds. A steady, metronomic round every six seconds; forty thousand rounds in a minute. The four splatguns per battalion added half as many again.
The masked battery down on the flat opened fire simultaneously with the riflemen above, since they didn't have to manhandle their guns into position. The range was nearly point-blank; eight shells fired at minimum elevation whistled down the corridor between the first and second waves of the Colonial force. Two burst early, slashing shrapnel into the backs of the men and dogs of the first wave. One arched over and burrowed into the soft alluvial soil, sending up a nearly harmless plume of black dirt that collapsed and drifted on the wind. Five airburst within a hundred meters of the enemy command group amidst the limbered-up guns. Five black puffballs, each with a momentary snap of red fire at its heart. The green banner went down, and there was a circle of wounded dogs snapping at their hurts around the place where it lay in the dust.
Ten seconds later, the forty-eight guns of the massed artillery reserve fired from either end of the ridge. Their fire wasn't nearly as accurate as the masked battery; the range was longer, and the gunners had less time to estimate the range and adjust their pieces. The shells were contact fused. Many gouged the earth short, or fell long; both did damage enough. The score or so that fell on target hammered into the Colonial artillery train, still tied to limbers and teams. Dogs died or were wounded into howling agony-and a half-tonne of berserk carnivore was much more hindrance than a dead beast. Ammunition limbers exploded in globes of red fire, flipping wheels and barrels and bits of men dozens of meters into the air. Even then the crews of the surviving guns tried to unhitch them and swing the muzzles around to bear on the enemy who were slaughtering them.
Futile. The crews were within easy small-arms range of the ridge; dozens went down in the few seconds he watched. More shells burst among them, and overhead as the Civil Government artillery switched to time-fused shells that flailed them with shrapnel from above. More ammunition limbers exploded. He saw Colonial artillerymen cut dogs loose from their surviving teams and spur to the rear; officers who tried to stop them were ridden down. The whole crimson-uniformed mass was in full flight, those who could still move. The men on the fastest dogs were first, with the dismounted running or limping or dragging themselves afterwards.
Smoke drifted across the Civil Government line, thick even though a stiff breeze was blowing. Crewmen crawled forward from the splatguns, staying low and calling targets and distances back to their fellows. Officers directed the troopers' volleys with their swords.
Gerrin Staenbridge raised an eyebrow at Raj, who nodded. Another signal rocket hissed skyward, and this time the starburst puff of smoke was blue. A trumpet snarled six notes out on the right flank of the Civil Government force, and the cry of cease firing ran down the battalions on that end of the line. The 1/591st trotted their dogs over the ridge and down the slope, speed building. The swords came out in a single ripple of sun-struck silver as the speed of the charge built. Slowly at first-those were big men on heavy dogs, huge-pawed Newfoundlands and Alsatians sixteen hands at the shoulder. They growled as they charged, a sound like massed millstones grinding away in a cave, and the men shouted:
"UPYARZ! UPYARZ!"
"Nicely done," Raj said. "Oh, nicely done."
The charge swept down the hill and crashed through the flank of the disintegrating Colonial formation. The ex-Brigaderos held their ranks with fluid precision, stabbing and hacking and shooting with the revolvers most of them wielded in their left hands; the dogs were well enough trained to need no guidance but knees and voice and their place in ranks. The lighter Arab cavalry would have had trouble meeting a charge like that mounted at the best of times. With half their men down and unit cohesion gone, they reacted the way a glass jar did dropped on a flagstone floor. Men spattered in every direction; the 1/591st rode through their line, rallied to the trumpet call, dressed ranks and charged through again in the opposite direction. Hundreds of dismounted Colonials were holding up reversed weapons or helmets, asking quarter.
The barbarians in Civil Government service were whooping like boys as they cantered up the slopes again, despite a few empty saddles; shaking bloodied swords in the air and chanting their guttural Namerique war cries.
"Damn, but that's frightening," Raj said, shaking his head and scanning the enemy.
"Frightening?"
"One mistake, and two thousand disciplined troops with an able commander get creamed."
"Their mistake, fortunately."
Raj nodded grimly. "Unfortunately, Tewfik has enough men that he can afford to make a mistake-and he won't make this one again. If we make one mistake like this, the campaign is lost and so is Sandoral and the war. We'd lose everything south of the Oxheads as far west as Komar."
Staenbridge blinked. "It must hurt, thinking ahead like that all the time," he said. "General pursuit, mi heneral? I think we can take the lot of them, here."
Raj nodded. "That would be best. I hate to see so many good soldiers wasted like this, though."
wait. listen.
"Wait," Raj said automatically. Then: "Sound Cease Fire and Silence in the Ranks."
Staenbridge looked at him oddly, then signed to the trumpeters. The call rang out, and silence fell-silent enough so that the sounds of wounded men and dogs were the loudest things on the battlefield.
And off to the northeast, a muffled thudding sound, very faint.
"Guns," Staenbridge said. "You've got good ears, mi heneral."
distance 18 kilometers.
An hour or two at forced-march speed. "All a matter of knowing what to listen for," Raj said. Center had to use his ears, but it could pay attention to everything they detected, however faintly. "We went looking for Tewfik, and we've bloody well found him, haven't we?"
"You think that's him?" Staenbridge said.
"It's another battle group of Colonial cavalry meeting one of the raiding parties I
called in," Raj said. "And where there's two, there'll be more. Tewfik's here, and if he's got less than twenty thousand men with him, I'm a christo. He's probing to find out where we are, and once he knows he'll pile on."
He tapped one fist into the palm of the other hand. "Messenger, ride to the sound of the guns; that's probably Major Zahpata's group. Tell him to withdraw as quickly as possible and rejoin on the route north. Gerrin, let's get ready to move out of here, and do it now. Hostile-territory drill."
* * *
"We have to move anyway," Raj said, preparing to rein Horace around.
The doctor's shoulders slumped. Suzette moved over two steps and laid her blood-spattered hand on Raj's knee. The dog bent its head around and snuffled at her. She shoved it gently away as she looked up at her husband.
"We'll do what's necessary," she said. He nodded wordlessly and pulled on the reins with needless force.
Suzette moved back to the line of wounded. Not this one, the Renunciate's eyes said.
Suzette looked down at the soldier sweating on the litter. His olive face was gray with shock, his eyes squeezed tightly shut. There was a tourniquet around the upper thigh of his right leg, and a pressure bandage over a wound below the ribs. He might have survived the leg wound, although he'd have lost the limb-there were fragments of bone sticking out of the mass of red-and-gray flesh below the tight-wound cloth. There was a faint sewer smell from the stomach wound, though.
"Here, soldier," she said in Namerique-from his coloring the man was MilGov. "Take this, it'll help with the pain."
The blue eyes fluttered open, wandering, the pupils dilated. She lifted a shot-glass sized dose of liquid opium to his lips; enough to knock a war-dog out, and fatal for a man.
Better than leaving them for the Colonials, she thought. It was bleak comfort.
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