River of Bones

by Taylor Anderson

  Jash bolted back down the slope, waiting until the guns loosed another ear-numbing blast toward the enormous ship now clearly bearing down on them. Racing forward, he was enveloped in their smoke. “Senior First Naxa!” he called, coughing, almost falling in the invisible trench his warriors were scooping from the hard red earth.

  “What?” Naxa replied sullenly.

  “You can’t see it, but the enemy greatship approaches, and Second General Ign is convinced it will disgorge a landing force. Prepare the troops!”

  “What do I care what anyone destined for the cookpots says?” Naxa replied insolently. Jash’s young crest flared through the top of his helmet. “Second General Ign is back in command—as I told you he would be—and ordered me to kill anyone who defies his orders. Now, do you still doubt or did you merely misunderstand? Must I repeat myself?” Jash bared his teeth in a feral snarl Naxa had never seen from him.

  Naxa’s own crest lay flat. “No, Ker-noll.” He spun toward the staring troops. “Dig!” he howled. “For your lives!”

  * * *

  * * *

  Commodore Tassanna-Ay-Arracca grimaced, sharp teeth bared, ears laid back, as she conned her ship—her Home—in the tightest arc it was capable of to bring its flooding, battered, smoldering hulk back opposite the battery on the south bank of the river. And USNRS Arracca gave its all for this last dash, somehow achieving eight knots while exchanging a furious fire with three Grik cruisers whose initial expectation must’ve been that Tassanna meant to plug their last gap with her ship. In truth, she’d been tempted to do just that, but such an act, so far from a feasible landing, would not only doom her immobile ship to rockets, bombing, fire ships—who knew what?—but would doom all her people as well. And for what? If First Fleet, in all its might, couldn’t stop the leakers, even the full Swarm now, they were all doomed, anyway. Instead, Tassanna completed her turn, with Arracca thundering and booming, spitting, and taking heavy shot, while she calculated known water depths and angles of approach, and tried to imagine the depth and density of the silt. Her heart wilted when she first felt the bottom through the deck beneath her feet, and it almost stopped when Arracca’s nearly 14,700 tons, loaded with all the inertia she’d achieved, drove deep into the soft, mucky silt. But it wasn’t all silt. Beneath it protruded the same stone skeleton that dominated the bend in the river, and the jagged, rocky bones tore at Arracca’s hull as it pounded across them to within two hundred yards of shore. That’s when her single huge screw tried to beat itself apart and the massive ship finally shuddered to a stop.

  Tassanna took a long breath in the sudden silence of the pilothouse. Homes were designed for gentle groundings, even flooding down for various purposes, but few had any illusions Arracca would ever move from here again. And she wasn’t as perfectly parallel to the shore as Tassanna had hoped to take her, lying about thirty degrees off, but all her starboard guns would bear on the enemy position, and her portside guns could still engage the cruisers on the river. She’d have to be satisfied with that. She shook herself and broke the funereal silence with a harsh command loaded with all her grief and a terrible rage at this Ancient Enemy that had cost her so much. “All personnel who haaven’t already done so—including this bridge crew—will report to the aarmories and take whaatever small aarms are left. Staand ready to join the laanding force.” She looked at the people around her, all Lemurians, all family—some literally so—and her voice softened slightly. “I will remain here, comm-aanding the gun’s crews and aammunition haandlers,” she said, and no one even contemplated arguing. She turned to her talker. “Paass the word to Mr. Sil-vaa: aaway all boats!”

  * * *

  * * *

  Twenty motor launches, each packed far beyond capacity with thirty-five, even forty troops, began surging out of Arracca’s portside gri-kakka boat bay as fast as they could—and the plan went straight in the crapper. They were supposed to circle until all were out, then speed around the hulk toward shore together. The trouble was, three Grik cruisers were closing fast, firing faster, and whether they saw the small boats or not, their shot was falling all around them.

  “Shit!” Silva roared. “Okay, let’s go straight around. Send to all boats,” he shouted at the comm-’Cat and his battery bearers, crowded among the heavily armed and loaded troops. “Everybody goes straight in, no stoppin’. The smoke’s thick as hell, with Arracca blastin’ the shore—an’ the shore shootin’ back. Use the smoke. Even thick as it is, nobody can get lost if they steer for the shell blasts an’ gun flashes.” He hesitated. “Once they get around the goddamn ship!” he added as a precaution. He was used to the small groups he surrounded himself with in situations like this knowing what he meant, regardless of what he sometimes actually said, but this was a whole new world for him. Better to overexplain than just assume nobody’s stupid enough to go chargin’ ass straight out at a Grik cruiser instead o’ the beach! he thought. The Lemurian coxswain beside him spun the wheel and the launch sped east amid the shot splashes along Arracca’s looming side. Silva turned to see several boats already following and hoped everyone got the word. Suddenly, Arracca wasn’t beside them anymore and the coxswain immediately turned south.

  Gun flashes and shell blasts weren’t all that lit the riverbank. Silva could barely hear their motors over the cannonade, but Arracca’s remaining planes—and who knew who else’s—were swooping low through the smoky darkness, their target obvious, dumping a gratifying number of firebombs on the enemy gun line. Long, roiling mushrooms of flame seared the night and there were numerous secondary detonations as ammunition limbers and caissons went up. “Get those flyboys on the horn!” Silva shouted at the comm-’Cat.

  “Ay, ay.” A moment later the ’Cat said, “I got COFO Leedom!”

  “Good. First thing, ask him what it looks like from above. What can he see?”

  “He see okaay. Thick smoke, lots, but is low lyin’ an’ the brush fires is dyin’ down. They see fightin’ pretty good. Fightin’s makin’ most’a the smoke now.”

  “Swell.” Silva wiped sweaty goo from his eye. “Ask him what it looks like around Santy Cat.”

  A moment later, the Lemurian shook his head. “Looks all done. Saanty Caat’s burnin’. Lots of gaalleys is burnin’ too, but more is just millin’ aroun’. All the croosers is move awaay from her.”

  Silva frowned, not sure what to make of that, but out of time for questions. “Okay. Tell Leedom to burn as many lizards onshore as he can, fast as he can, but we’ll be on that beach in about three minutes. He burns any o’ us, I’ll shoot his sorry ass down myself. We probably can’t mark targets with smoke until daylight, but we’ll try to describe what we want him to hit. See if he gets that.”

  “He gets it,” the comm-’Cat said a moment later.

  Silva nodded and fished out his tobacco pouch, cramming a huge wad of yellowish leaves in his left cheek. He’d brought his Doom Stomper, slung on his back—one never knew when the huge weapon might come in handy—but he couldn’t shoot it with a chaw on the right without risking a hell of a bruise. Petey was too scared to complain about the sling or the heavy barrel that mashed him when Silva moved. He was too scared to do anything at all but hang on the back of Silva’s neck and make himself as small as he could. Silva wondered why he didn’t just stay on Arracca—and that started bothering him in a vaguely superstitious way. Little shit always seems to just know the safest direction to scram. But this ain’t a safe direction a’tall. He’s probably too addled to know anything right now.

  As an arguably superstitious gesture of his own, Silva had taken the wooden case with Captain Reddy’s Colt out of his duffel, dumped the box, and stuffed the long-barreled pistol in his belt. Forty-four of the fifty cartridges bulged his pockets, and six were in the cylinder. The Colt replaced the even longer barreled flintlock pistol he’d carried for a very long time, for no good reason he could think of just then. He’d started to simply pitch it over the s
ide, but, to his surprise, Lawrence grabbed it from him. Fine, he’d thought. Who cares? Now he wondered if Lawrence was wearing the fancy but battered old flinter like he always had, and that led to another uncomfortable thought: except for Petey, who couldn’t possibly count, he was all alone.

  He wasn’t literally alone, of course; almost forty ’Cats, Khonashis, Imperials, and probably even a few Maroons and Shee-Ree were crammed onto the boat. But for the first time he could remember—almost since he’d faced his abusive uncle with a grubbing hoe—Dennis Silva had embarked on a major undertaking without anyone he knew to . . . well, talk to. Anyone to show, by his manner and banter, that he wasn’t afraid. He didn’t know why that was important, because he wasn’t afraid of the fight to come, or even to die, but suddenly, amazingly, he felt a growing, undefinable dread. Only one thing ever really scared him before, and that was the . . . weakness Pam put in him. So maybe he was just a show-off like she always said. Or maybe what scared him about Pam was the responsibility he felt toward her? To protect her and keep her safe, even from himself.

  That could mean only that the unfamiliar culprit now was responsibility itself, and, boy, did he have it in spades this time! That had to be it. All his pals were in other boats, commanding what amounted to regiments, and he was in charge of them all. To top that off, Pam and Risa and Tassanna, not to mention all their wounded, were trapped on Arracca—which Petey had fled for this stunt he was leading. At that moment, Dennis Silva was suddenly so terrified of screwing up that he was absolutely sure he would. He had no idea how to cope with that. He’d seen plenty of terror—it was all around him now—but he’d never, ever felt it! What the hell was he going to do?

  A huge splash erupted in the water alongside, and the nasty, putrid, Grik-filth water of the Zambezi gushed across him. Another roundshot from the shore battery nearly hit another boat close by. A young (human) Khonashi sitting by his feet jerked and looked around, wide-eyed, his helmet loose enough that it moved independently. Who knew what he’d been through already? Everyone on this boat was a veteran of hard fighting, but the youth looked just as scared as Silva felt—and confidence welled within Silva that he’d found his “cure.” He brusquely patted the boy on the shoulder. “Hey, kid. What’s your name?”

  The young Khonashi looked up, startled, eyes even wider, if possible. “You . . . you talk I?” he asked, voice cracking, incredulous. Human and Grik-like Khonashi spoke the same language, of course, so none used words with Ms, Ps, or anything requiring lips. The human members of the tribe could do it; they just didn’t.

  “Yeah, I’m talkin’ to you.”

  The kid blinked as if to ask why, but finally answered, “Uda.”

  “Uda, huh? You got the jitters?” Uda had no idea what jitters were but seemed to understand. “Me too,” Silva confessed. “But only ’cause I thought I was doin’ somethin’ new. Fact is, ain’t none o’ this really new. We’re goin’ over there to kill a buncha Griks—same as we been doin’ for weeks, months—hell, years for some of us. They’re gonna try to kill us,” he confessed. “But we’re better’n them, see?” Silva noticed more and more were listening now, even as the incoming fire intensified. He raised his voice. “Sure, they’re ugly an’ scary,” he continued. “No offense,” he added to a pair of watching Grik-like Khonashi, “but they ain’t hard. They ain’t been through what we have. All this time on Santy Cat, the fight on Zanzibar . . . Hell, me an’ Gunny Horn had a en-tire ship drop on us in North Borno!” He nodded at Uda. “I bet you was there.” He searched the faces staring back. “An’ don’t none o’ you think all that—all we been through—was for nothin’. It was for this! It was to make this easy, stacked against the rest, an’ them nasty Grik boogers ain’t ready for us a’tall.” He shook his head and grinned in that . . . disconcerting way he had, watching the cannon flash. “I still can’t see shore through the gunsmoke, so they damn sure can’t see us. They’re just blastin’ away at Arracca, shootin’ bad enough to come close to us from time to time. So when we hit that beach right in their laps, they’re gonna squirt.” His eye narrowed. “An’ then we’re gonna kill the absolute hell outa them lizardy sons of goats!”

  He was right, to a degree. The battle-weary Marines and Raiders in his first wave were much harder than even Ign and Jash’s New Army warriors. But nothing about the coming day was going to be easy for anyone.

  CHAPTER 28

  ////// South Bank of the Zambezi

  Amazingly, nineteen of Arracca’s twenty launches roared up on the beach, and more than six hundred wildly mixed Marines and Raiders poured into the knee-high water around the boats and surged ashore. Immediately, the launches, refloated with their burdens gone, reversed their engines and backed away. Only one boat had been destroyed by the hasty, startled artillery directed at them as they emerged from the smoke, hit right on the cutwater by a sixteen-pounder solid shot that scattered it and its occupants like toothpicks less than thirty yards out. Almost half its complement actually managed to flail their way in through the neck-deep water they’d found themselves in. River monsters might’ve gotten some, but most of those had probably fled the pounding pressure of the artillery duel between ship and shore. With a growing roar and the seemingly magical appearance of the various units’ battle flags whipping among them, Silva’s assault force swept forward like an incoming tide.

  All at once, Dennis Silva discovered several things: First, Arracca’s counterbattery fire and the air attacks had hammered the gun line harder than he’d really expected. Less than twenty guns were still in action, and all they seemed to have was solid shot and exploding case. Both were hell on massed infantry in the open—which was what he had at the moment. Solid shot simply blew through as many troops as were gathered in front of it in a straight line, and killed or maimed others to the side with secondary projectiles, pieces of equipment, even bone. Case shot, with fuses cut to zero, exploded at the muzzle and fanned its fragments out in a killing swath. It was less effective than canister or grape, but still deadly. But these guns, apparently supplied for a long-range bombardment, didn’t seem to have any canister or grape, and that was one blessing, at least.

  What Dennis also hadn’t expected, so focused on the enemy guns, was the two or three thousand Grik infantry shallowly entrenched in front of them. They’d clearly been just as surprised as the artillery, and their first pattering fire was rushed and relatively ineffective. Some of it stayed that way as the assault thundered up the beach, closing the short distance, spraying bullets from Blitzerbugs and Allin-Silvas. The regiment directly in front of them, in the center of the line, started bleeding warriors as they closed, many tossing away their weapons and bolting for the rear. Grik Rout! Dennis exulted. But the two flanking regiments—and the one on the right, in particular—managed stunning, point-blank volleys that staggered Silva’s own force, chopping down men, ’Cats, and Grik-like Khonashi in murderous waves. It was too little, too late. Grenades booming, bayonets flashing, and Blitzers yammering, the heart of the charge slammed into and through the trench, pounding up the gentle grade toward the waiting guns. More Raiders and Marines poured through the gap, pushing up the trenches on either side and slaughtering the steadier Grik from the flank.

  The most important thing Silva learned was that at the moment, he wasn’t really in charge of anything. These Marines and Raiders, mixed as they were, had all received the same training and knew exactly what to do. He had only to set the example and maybe shout the occasional reminder to refocus their attention. “Keep rollin’ ’em up!” he roared, his order echoed by the ’Cats and quickly spreading to the entire force. “An’ get those damn guns!” That said, even burdened with his various weapons (and an utterly terrified Petey, who accomplished only occasional squeaks but grimly hung on), Silva emerged from the final lingering effects of his funk and became the killing machine he truly was. He slung his empty Thompson and pulled his cutlass and 1911, hacking and shooting anything that came in re
ach.

  * * *

  * * *

  “Pull them back!” Ign roared. “Pull the guns back before we lose them all!” He spun to Jash, jaws clenching, teeth grinding. “I must pull back as well, and you must give me time.”

  Jash was overcome with shame. “My defense . . . I never imagined it would collapse so quickly!”

  “It wasn’t your defense that failed, Ker-noll. I never gave you the chance to develop it! Then I arbitrarily simply threw my Personal Guard forward, to the right of the Uul you suggested I withdraw to the guns! The same Uul that immediately broke!”

  “They were surprised,” Jash halfheartedly defended.

  “So were the rest, but I’m sure your Slashers and my Guards could have held them better and longer alone. Recall what remains. Form them to stop the pursuit of the guns, if you can. I should have allowed you to dig the fallback trench you yapped about when you arrived after all,” Ign added ruefully.

  “You can still do it,” Jash shouted over the rising roar of battle. “Look.” He pointed. “Even our Uul-turned-prey are not as craven as they once were. Many have rallied around the guns. Set them to digging trenches when you have retired a safe distance! If I can rally what is left of my Slashers and your Guard, we may slow the enemy’s advance long enough for you to place the guns there as well, and it will serve as a position to gather the reinforcements First General Esshk must send!”