Empire of Man

by David Weber

  It was deadly simple: there was no way for the Boman to make their way through the thicket of pikes. The weapons were layers deep, jutting through every interstice. Stakes could be pulled up or knocked down, even if that meant stopping long enough for the shit-sitters to try to kill one, but those pikeheads were another thing entirely. Pushing one of them aside was no more than a temporary solution . . . and only left another to drive into an attacker’s vitals, anyway. That became horribly obvious very quickly, yet some of the barbarian horde tried anyway. Some even succeeded . . . for a time.

  Fain wasn’t sure who’d started the chant. It wasn’t he, but it was a good chant, as such things went, and it was simple—which was even better. “Ro-Ger!” with a poke of the spear on the “Ger!”

  “Ro-Ger! Ro-Ger!”

  The whole force, or at least the regiment he was a tiny part of, was chanting the prince’s name. And it seemed to be working. The ferocious Boman, who’d been a source of such terror before the battle, weren’t so terrible, after all. What was terrible was killing them.

  Fain’s regiment was one of the ones guarding the openings deliberately left in the hedge of stakes. Had he considered it, he might have realized that their position was a form of backhanded compliment, a decision based on the fact that their commanders considered his regiment steady enough to be entrusted with responsibility for holding such an exposed and critical position. At the moment, however, the squad leader wasn’t thinking about compliments; he was thinking about how the absence of any stakes in front of them seemed to have drawn the attention of every demon-cursed Boman in creation . . . all of whom were running straight at him.

  Which meant that the only way for him to live was for them to die.

  When the barbarians had first charged forward, that hadn’t been a problem. Given his place in the front ranks of his pike company, Fain had been too busy getting his own pike into fighting position and keeping an eye on the rest of his squad to worry about throwing any javelins. That had been the job of the ranks behind them, and of General Bogess’ regulars. Despite his own hatred for and fear of the Boman, it had been ghastly to watch the savage storm of javelins rip into them, but at least he hadn’t had to throw one. And those of the barbarians who’d survived and kept coming had balked when they first confronted the leveled wall of pikeheads. Clearly, they hadn’t had the least notion of how to proceed, but the pressure from behind them had been too great for them to stop and figure out what to do next. That pressure had driven them forward . . . and Fain had been forced to kill them.

  The experience had been far worse than the simulation. The first Boman who’d been spitted on his pike had been young, barely old enough to sire sons. He’d clearly been trying to claw his way to the rear, anything to avoid the wall of pikes. But the young barbarian had lacked the strength to force his way through the seething mass behind him, and that mass had driven him remorselessly onto Fain’s spear.

  The Mardukan noncom’s true-hands had tightened on his pike shaft like talons, yet they’d seemed weak, so weak, as if the frantic contortions of the shrieking Boman transfixed on the wicked head of his pike must wrench the quivering shaft from them. In that unique, private instant of hell, Krindi Fain was all alone with the young warrior, who dropped his weapons and seized the steel-headed wooden shaft driving into his guts with all four hands and tried desperately to wrench himself off of its agonizing sharpness.

  But then the training came to the fore. Fain put a wall of disbelief up around his senses. The shrieking on the other end of his pike became a teammate, playacting in the background. The frantic shudders transmitted up the spear were just two of his friends, pulling on the ropes that suspended the training dummy. With the spear well and truly stuck in, the squad leader could turn aside and not see the bulging eyes or the lolling tongue as the barely scarred young barbarian gasped out his life on the end of the wickedly sharp spear.

  Then, for the first time in his life, he blessed Julian and all the other Marine bastards who’d trained him. And as he looked around at the other members of his squad, he knew that they all had to do the same, or his own killing would be for nothing.

  “Stick it in!” he shouted. “You just have to get it stuck in!”

  Pahner flipped up his visor and nodded.

  “Pikes are like bayonets. They’re terror weapons. The Boman can’t force themselves onto the pikes to drive forward far enough to reach the pikemen. We’re not really killing that many of them, but we have them well and truly stopped.”

  “But we will kill many of them if the ones behind keep pushing the ones in front forward,” Bogess demurred. “They don’t have anywhere else to go, and in time, they’ll push the spears down by the sheer weight of dead bodies. And when that happens, they’ll walk over the corpses and kill us all.”

  “And not everyone can stand it from our side, either,” Pahner agreed harshly.

  “No!” a private in the front rank cried. “No, no!”

  The Diaspran was shuddering as he dropped his pike and turned to the rear. The dropped weapon, coupled with the way his flight knocked the men to either side of him out of their own positions, opened a momentary gap into which a Boman inserted himself. The warrior was well-nigh crazed with fear, surrounded by a wall of sharp steel and the smell of death, but the only escape from his own terror seemed to be up the suddenly opened path before him.

  The path that led straight to Bail Crom.

  The private blocked the first hack of the Boman’s ax with his shield, but the second frantic slash licked over the shield’s upper edge. It bit into his lower shoulder, severing the muscles that lifted the lifesaving piece of plywood, and after that, it was all over. Half a dozen pikes stabbed forward to fill the gap, thrusting at the crazed Boman, impaling him even as he hacked and hacked at the body of the private, but the fact that the barbarian joined him in death was lost on the happy-go-lucky Crom.

  “Bail?” Pol called hesitantly. The simpleminded private tried to look around the intervening squad members. “Bail?”

  “Stand your ground, Erkum!” Fain shouted. The humans had a mechanism for sadness and grief. They “cried.” The liquid of the God Himself flowed from their eyes in moments like this. Strange that people who did not worship the God should be given such a gift.

  “Stand your ground and get it stuck in, Erkum Pol!”

  But not everyone was a Krindi Fain, and not everyone could stand.

  “Captain, we’ve got ourselves a situation here!” Kosutic called.

  Pahner spotted the sergeant major’s icon on his HUD and looked off to the left. Some of the brighter Boman had realized that their best chance was to go around the hedge of pikes, since they couldn’t get through it. Most of their flanking efforts had been defeated by Bogess’ regulars, wielding their assegais with deadly effect. Whether Crassus or Shaka would have approved more strongly of them was difficult to say, but any barbarian who had expected it to be “easy” to get past their shorter weapons quickly discovered that he’d been dead wrong.

  Yet for all their skill, the regulars lacked the standoff reach of the conscripted pikemen. The Boman were paying at three or four to one for each spearman they managed to hack down, but here and there they managed to batter their way through, however extortionate the cost. An isolated squad of regulars suddenly found itself under overwhelming assault and went down under a blizzard of throwing axes and the thundering blows of battle-axes. Its fall opened a brief but deadly hole in the line, and dozens of howling barbarians lunged through it and flung themselves onto the flank of a pike regiment.

  The pikemen, already dazed and bewildered, despite their training, by the howling holocaust of battle, were taken at a deadly disadvantage. It was impossible for them to swing their long, heavy weapons around to confront their attackers in time, and the sudden onslaught was too much for them.

  They broke.

  The sergeant major’s radioed warning turned Pahner’s attention to the regiment just as it shattered li
ke crystal under a hammer. The ground was suddenly scattered with the pikemen’s shields and weapons. And bodies. As was always the case before the advent of artillery, the majority of casualties were inflicted when one side finally turned its back and tried to run.

  Bogess followed the direction of Pahner’s gaze, and then looked at the captain.

  “Cavalry?”

  “Not yet.” The laconic Marine shook his head. “Let the armor handle it.” He keyed his communicator. “Sergeant Julian, left wing, please.”

  The four fully functional suits of armor were already moving when the command came in. As they swung past the bastion, it was clear that the Boman were well and truly into the rear areas, and Julian couldn’t understand why Pahner was so calm about it.

  The Marines to either side of the breach were down, although it looked like they were only wounded, not dead, and the pike regiments to either side of the breakthrough, stiffened by a reserve of Bogess’ regulars, had re-formed to protect their own flanks. But all they could do was hold their ground and cling to their own positions, and the flood of barbarians pouring through the seventy-meter-wide hole swept past the formed units and threatened to fan out and take still other regiments from the rear. And if that happened . . .

  Clearly, it was time to show the locals what “peace through superior firepower” meant.

  The four armored Marines spaced themselves across the salient with the two plasma cannon in the center, since they had the worst secondary effects, and opened fire.

  The ten-millimeter bead cannon were loaded with flechette rounds. Each shot pumped out a half dozen narrow darts with moly-blade edges instead of a single normal bead, and the darts cut through the packed barbarians facing the four armored suits like horizontal buzz saws. Their molecule-wide edges would have cut through chain mail and steel plate, and they shredded the totally unarmored natives effortlessly into so much constituent offal . . . which the plasma cannon flash fried.

  The fire wasn’t widespread enough to stop all of the barbarians, but it ripped straight down the center of the breakthrough, and the hammer of it was a shock that sent the majority of those to either side—those who survived—into screaming, terrified flight. They turned and clawed and fought, not to advance, but to run from the Hell-spawned demons who had appeared in their very midst. The few warriors who’d been forward of the main damage, and out of the zone of effect of the plasma rounds, continued their charge, because there was nothing else they could do, only to find that iron was no match at all for ChromSten.

  Julian casually backhanded a barbarian half again his own height who was obscuring his vision, crushing the unfortunate native’s skull like an eggshell, and shifted the team’s fire.

  “Captain, we have the hole closed again, but we can’t really keep it plugged. Can we get some cavalry over here to handle the leakers?”

  “Will do,” Pahner responded as he prepared to call Rastar on another channel. “Good job, Julian.”

  “Just another glorious day in the Corps,” the squad leader replied stonily, tracking his flechettes back across the shrieking barbarians. “Every day’s a holiday.”

  “Yes,” said the captain sadly. “Welcome to the Widow’s Party.”

  “Still a stalemate,” Bogess said. “We hold, and they do not quit. We could be here day after day.”

  “Oh, I think not,” Pahner said dryly. “Roger obviously doesn’t have the patience today for us to squat here in a game of chicken.” He glanced at his pad, nodded, and keyed his communicator once again.

  “Okay, Despreaux. It’s about time.”

  The team had crept past the lightly defended encampment and down the reverse slope of the ridge. If anyone had looked hard for them, they would have been obvious, but none of the Boman were watching their own rear. Why should they? All of their enemies were in front of them, and so the Marines were overlooked, just a few more odd bits of flotsam left by the passing horde.

  Until, that was, they calmly stood up at Pahner’s command, took off their camouflage, and opened fire into the backs of the entire Boman force.

  At first, their efforts were almost unnoticed. But then, as more and more of the barbarians pushing towards the front fell under their fire, some of the Mardukans looked over their shoulders . . . especially when the grenades began to land.

  “Yes,” Pahner whispered as the rear of the enemy formation started to peel away.

  “They’re running?” Bogess asked. “Why?”

  “They aren’t running from their perspective,” Pahner replied. “Not that of their rear ranks, at any rate. They’re chasing the Marines behind them. But from the point of view of the ones in the front rank, they are running, and we’re not going to disabuse them of that notion.” He turned to the drummer. “Order a general advance of pike units. First, we drive them out of position, then we harry them into the ground.

  “But they haven’t broken,” Bogess protested.

  “No? Just watch them,” Pahner said. “‘And then along comes the Regiment, and shoves the heathen out.’”

  Fain heard the drum command with disbelief, but he passed it on verbally, as he had been trained to do, to ensure that the punch-drunk soldiers had the orders.

  “Prepare to advance!” he bawled wearily.

  His arms felt like stones from holding the pike for what seemed like all day, poking it into the screaming, twitching dummies—or so his mind told him. And now the command to advance. Madness. The enemy was as thick as a wall; there was nowhere to advance to.

  The New Model Army’s losses had been incredibly light. The front rank of his company had only lost a handful, the next rank less. Of his own squad, only Bail Crom had fallen, but to advance on the enemy, who’d stood their ground the entire day, was impossible.

  He knew that, and nonetheless he took his pike firmly in hand and prepared to step forward to the beat. It was all that was left in his world—the Pavlovian training the human sadists had put them all through.

  “You know, Boss,” Kileti gasped, slithering down the slope toward the distant canal, “I used to wonder why we were always running in training.”

  “Yeah? Well, as long as we don’t twist an ankle in our court shoes,” Despreaux managed to chuckle grimly.

  It seemed that all the hounds of Hell were on their trail as they approached the canal. But the rope bridge—the blessed, blessed rope bridge—was in place as promised, with a grinning Poertena already starting across to the other side. Denat was there, too, and saluted Marine-style as they approached.

  “Permission to get the hell out of here, Sir?” the Mardukan called as the Marines thundered towards him.

  “Just don’t get in my fucking way,” St. John (J.) yelled, leaping for the ropes as the rest of the team clambered on behind him.

  “Not a problem,” Denat said, inserting himself into the midst of the team. The team had split into two groups and taken opposite sides of the two-rope bridge, each group leaning out to balance the other side. The much more massive Mardukan was a bit of a hassle, but not too terribly so.

  “What’s to keep them from crossing the canal?” Kileti asked. “I mean, we cut the rope once we’re on the other side, sure. But, hell, it’s not that wide. You can swim the damn thing.”

  “Well, Yutang and his little plasma cannon, for one thing,” Denat said with a grunt. “Heavy bastard, too. But he promised me I could try to fire it ‘off-hand’ if I agreed to carry it for him. And, of course, Tratan brought Berntsen’s bead cannon.”

  “You’re kidding,” Despreaux said. “Right?”

  “About Tratan carrying the bead cannon? Why should I kid? He’s not all that weak,” the Mardukan said with another grunt of laughter. “Seriously, I’ve wanted to try it for some time. And what time could be better?”

  “This is gonna be fun,” Macek said.

  “Are we having fun yet?” Julian asked. The rear of the Boman force might have run off in pursuit of the recon team, but a solid core of the front ranks had stoo
d against the advance of the pikes so far. He was fairly sure what Pahner would use to break the stalemate.

  “Julian,” his communicator crackled. “Get in there and convince them that they don’t want to stand there.”

  The four armored figures advanced through the open salient toward the Boman force to their front. That area already had a slice cut out of it, a line written in blood on the ground, beyond which only the most stupid and aggressive barbarian passed. Briefly.

  Now the Marines opened that hole wider, firing their weapons in careful, ammunition-conserving bursts. The dreadful fusillade cleared a zone deep enough for them to actually pass the front of their own forces and step onto ground held by the Boman.

  The friable soil was greasy with body fluids blasted from the Marines’ previous targets, and their path was choked with the results. But the powered armor made little of such minor nuisances, crunching through the hideous carnage until the four turned the corner and pivoted to face the flank of the Boman still massed before the Diaspran pikes.

  Once again, the armor burped plasma and darts, soaking the ground in blood and turning the churned field of the watershed into an abattoir.

  “You know,” Pahner mused as the cavalry sallied out in pursuit of the Boman force, “if that pike regiment hadn’t broken, it would’ve been a lot harder to get the armor into the middle of the Boman. That’s a case of the fog of war working for you.”

  “So now what?” Bogess asked.

  “The force that took off after the recon team will be pinned against the canal. Detail about half the pikes to keep them pinned in place, and we’ll pound them with plasma from the far side of the canal until they surrender. As for the rest—”