Hope Renewed

by S. M. Stirling

  “I’ll see to that myself, if it’s all the same to you, mi heneral,” Hwadeloupe said, taking the extended hand in his own. “And thank you, sir.”

  Raj returned to his cushion beside Suzette. “That’s about two hundred in all,” he said.

  “Separating the sheep from the goats,” Staenbridge replied. “Or those too stupid to live from the remainder.”

  Foley frowned. “Some of them are staying over there to follow orders,” he pointed out.

  “My dear,” Gerrin said, “what’s that saying—from the Old Namerique codexes—”

  Foley was something of a scholar. “ ‘Against Fate even the gods do not fight,’ “ he quoted.

  “Exactly.”

  Raj nodded and leaned back, his head not quite in Suzette’s lap. Both moons were out and very bright, bright enough to interrupt the frosted arch of stars. Her fingers wandered over the strings.

  “It’s twenty-five marches to Payso

  It’s forty-five more to Ayaire

  And the end may be death in the heather

  Or life on the Governor’s Chair

  But whether the Army obeys us,

  Or we serve as some sauroid’s fare

  I’d rather be Lola’s lover

  Than sit on the Governor’s Chair!”

  Cut-nose Marhtinez lay in the dark and breathed quietly. He was ten meters from the walls of Ain el-Hilwa, outside the north gate. An overturned two-wheel cart hid him; the bodies of the two dogs who’d been drawing it until they met a cannonball were fairly ripe after a day in the hot sun, and so was the driver: black, swollen, the skin split and dripping in places, like a windfallen plum. He’d had about seven FedCreds in assorted silver in his pouch, though.

  The night was fairly dark, only one moon in the sky and that near the horizon. The starlight was enough for him to see men moving on the walls—and they were moving without torches. He could even hear some wog curse when he ran into something and barked his chin. A whistling and dull thudding followed, about the sound you’d expect one of those nine-barbed whips the wog officers used to make. The yelp of pain that followed was strangled, and the next slash brought no sound at all.

  Quiet’s a whorehouse on payday, he thought scornfully. It was a good thing there weren’t any Bedouin scouts with the Ain el-Hilwa garrison. Those sand-humpers were too good for comfort.

  Cut-nose moved his head slightly. The star he was using was still a fingerbreadth above the horizon. An hour and a bit short of dawn, call it an hour and twenty minutes.

  He moved backward out of the wrecked cart, keeping it between him and the wall. Nothing on his body clinked or reflected light, and his hands and face were blacked; Mother Marhtinez might not have known exactly who his father was, but she hadn’t raised any fools. Pause, move, pause, until he was behind a snag of ruined wall, still hot enough from the fire to feel on his skin. He picked up his rifle—nothing but a hindrance and a temptation in the blind where he’d spent the night—and eeled cautiously back to his dog.

  Captain M’lewis was waiting there. Cut-nose grinned ingratiatingly. He didn’t have much use for officers, and still less for a promoted ranker who might be a kinsman. He did have the liveliest respect for Antin M’lewis’s wits, his wire garrote, and the skinning-knife he wore across the small of his back beneath the tails of his uniform jacket. All the Forty Thieves—the Scouts—had a standing invitation to go out behind the stables and settle things with knives if they felt they couldn’t obey someone who wasn’t Messer-born.

  So far only one fool had taken M’lewis up on it; he was on the rolls as a deserter. Nobody had found the body. Good riddance, Cut-nose thought. The Scouts beat regular duty all to hell. Less boring, more plunder—a lot more in some cases—and no more dangerous. M’lewis wasn’t the charge-the-barricade type.

  “They’re movin’, ser. Gittin’ ready, loike,” he said in a soft whisper, directed at the ground—nothing to carry far.

  M’lewis nodded. “Messer Raj was expectin’ it, an’ t’scouts at t’other gate says th’ same,” he observed. “Here, git this t’him fast.”

  “Sir.”

  Kaltin Gruder’s voice. Raj rolled out of his blankets; Suzette was already reaching for her carbine. He fastened his weapons belt. His boots were already on; if the men had to sleep in them, so could he.

  “Message from M’lewis just got in.”

  A Scout was behind the battalion commander. “Ser. Noise in t’wog town. I weren’t more ‘n ten meters off, an’ heard it plain. North gates.”

  The ones nearest Colonel Osterville’s camp. Raj took the message and read it. “Boots and saddles, please. Quietly. We’ll deploy as arranged.”

  “Line of march?”

  “Scout troop has pickets along it. They’ll signal with shuttered lanterns.”

  Raj could hear the noise spreading; not very loud, no shouting, but a long-drawn out clatter as men rousted out of uneasy sleep and saw to their equipment. The Companions arrived, and the other battalion commanders. Shapes in the night, dimly lit by the embers of the fire, a feeling of controlled anxiety. He grinned into the dark. A night march. Difficult. An invitation to disaster, with any but very experienced troops. The handbooks were full of bungled night attacks, men firing on their comrades, whole battalions wandering off lost, irretrievable disaster.

  “Barton,” he said. “What’s that toast again?”

  “ ‘He fears his fate too much, and his deserts are small, who will not put it to the touch—to win or lose it all.’ “

  “Exactly. Messers, to your units. Waymanos!”

  An orderly brought up Horace; he put a foot in the stirrup and swung into the saddle. The headquarters party fell in around him, bannermen and buglers and gallopers. Men blinked and dogs yawned cavernously; the wet clomp-clomp sound of jaws snapping closed rippled through the dark streets. Iron-shod wheels rattled on dirt as the 75s and splatguns moved. He cantered down the east-west notional laneway of the camp, the wia erente, keeping to the side. Men and dogs were moving the same way, the lead element of the 5th, followed by the 1st and 2nd Cruisers. The other gates were all open as well, flanked by lantern-bearing pathfinders. Thousands of heavy paws thumped the earth, an endless rumbling sound.

  Flat terrain, mostly. Nothing between him and Osterville’s camp but four kilometers of fields, with the occasional orchard or shallow ditch. The objective was on the same side of the Ghor Canal, thank the Spirit, even Osterville wasn’t stupid enough to put an obstacle that needed bridging between him and the only supports available. Keep in column, he decided. In column they could move down the laneways, at a fast walk. Once deployed into line their speed would drop by four-fifths.

  The night was still quiet, almost chilly in the last moments of predawn; overhead the arch of stars was a frosted road leading to infinity. The command group rode silently, no need for talk unless something went very wrong. The palms that lined the roadway were black silhouettes against the sky. He looked over his shoulder to the west and caught the faintest rim of peach-pink there.

  He reined Horace sideways into the fields, a hunching scramble through the ditch, then stood in the stirrups to look. Nothing but a few watchfires from Osterville’s camp. The north gates of the city were hidden by the western wall. Flags rippled behind him, his personal banner and the Star. Over his shoulder he could see the other gates of the camp, now; the spiked-log barricades were pulled aside, and a steady stream of men and dogs and guns was pouring out. Not a single jam-up, not a voice raised . . . damn, but these are good troops.

  Three columns, each about half a kilometer apart, each a little over two thousand strong. And—

  “ ‘The gates flew back, and the din of onset sounded,’ “ Bartin murmured.

  “More Old Namerique?” Raj said.

  “From the Fall Codexes,” the young man replied.

  When the Fall began, books had died with the machines that recorded them—the Church called it the Great Simplification. In the first generation the s
urvivors wrote down as much as they could, most of it in Old Namerique, the official language of the Federation. Bits and pieces survived, even a thousand years later.

  The gates of Ain el-Hilwa had certainly flown back with a vengeance.

  “One hell of a din, too,” Raj said; even at more than three kilometers, it was louder than the noise his own men were making.

  Then light winked from the parapet of the low-set city wall, and a deep whirring sound crossed the sky. A dull booming echoed, and under it the sharper sound of the exploding shells. The winking lights, scores of meters apart, rippled from east to west across the north face of the city. Heavy rifles, aimed at Osterville’s camp. The shells seemed to be contact-fused rather than airburst, but it would still be an unpleasant way to wake up, and there were a lot of those guns.

  The white dust of the road stretched out ahead of him. The dawn was just touching the western horizon behind him, but there was a sudden flare of white light stabbing north toward Osterville’s position, arc-searchlights from the city wall. My, all the modern refinements, Raj thought. Intended to light up the Civil Government position for the attackers and blind any defenders looking toward the city.

  Dun and off-white, men were running up the long gentle slope toward the smaller Civil Government camp. On foot, mostly, with gun teams among them, pulling the light five-shot pom-poms the Colonials favored for close support. They were shouting, too, high wailing shrieks. Raj unclipped his binoculars and brought them to his eyes, body adapting to the swing of his dog’s trot with the unconscious skill of a lifetime.

  Only half a kilometer from the walls. And they didn’t dig in at all. Osterville had been very careless.

  A stutter of gunfire broke out from Osterville’s camp, building rapidly. Raj could imagine the chaos, men rushing half-dressed from their blanket rolls, grabbing up the rifles stacked by their campfires. Red light winked from the hilltop, muzzle flashes like fireflies in the dark; the sun was just edging over the horizon.

  The Colonials were making some effort to deploy, spreading out in an irregular mass—more a thick skirmish order than a real firing line. The pom-poms wheeled about and opened up, firing uphill. The CRACK-CRACK-CRACK-CRACK-CRACK of the clip-loaded weapons sounded through the dawn, and their little one-kilo shells burst upslope in petals of fire. The return fire was building fast, panicked, with no ordered crash of volleys. Smoke began to shroud the hilltop, from the defensive fire and the incoming Colonial shells, and—

  “Bugging out already,” he said. In the long-shadowed light of dawn he could see a trickle of mounted men heading north from Osterville’s encampment. “Ludwig, how many of the Colonials would you say?”

  “Seven or eight thousand at least, mi heneral.”

  Raj nodded thoughtfully. The whole garrison of Ain el-Hilwa, or near enough. Attacking Osterville’s position was actually not a bad idea—he would have tried it, in their position—but sending everyone haring out of the gates like this? No more sense than a bull carnosauroid in breeding season, he decided.

  “Captain Foley, the signal.”

  Barton swung down out of the saddle and stuck the launching-stick of a small rocket in the dirt.

  Fisssssth. The little rocket soared into the paling sky and burst with an undramatic pop. Red and blue sparks shot out in a perfect round puffball. Behind Raj trumpets sang in harsh antiphonal chorus. The long column dissolved as units spurred out left and right, like a huge fan snapping open. It was lighter now, light enough to tell a dark thread from a white, the traditional dividing line between night and day. Light enough for the men to move across the fields without much trouble, at least.

  The other columns were following suit. Ten minutes, and there was a continuous two-deep line moving northeastwards with his banner at the center. Not parade-ground neat—the line twisted and curled a little around obstacles, with fifty meters or so of gap between each battalion. The guns pulled through, heading east and a little south, setting up by groups of batteries on prechosen hillocks. The Colonials were fully occupied, their front ranks within two hundred meters of Osterville’s position and moving in fast. Close enough to use their carbines, and a huge snapping crackle went up from their front ranks; not only from their front ranks, either—they were losing men to friendly fire, if he was any judge.

  “Sound Prepare for Dismounted Action,” he said.

  The bugles sang again, taken up and relayed down the line. Men pulled the rifles from the scabbards before their right knees, resting the butts on their thighs.

  “Are they bloody blind?” Staenbridge asked in amazement, looking at the Colonials.

  “No, just very preoccupied, and extremely badly led,” Raj said.

  There were probably individual men in the Colonial force who could see what was happening, but it was a scratch put-together and whoever had done the putting hadn’t arranged for signals and gallopers. A penalty of taking all your best troops along in a single expeditionary force; what was left to defend against a counterstroke wasn’t up to much.

  Six hundred meters, Raj thought.

  five hundred eight-eight and decreasing to nearest enemy element. five hundred eighty. five seventy-six. Center provided a numbered scale on the whole Colonial formation; their right wing was just out of extreme rifle-shot.

  More of Osterville’s men were bugging out, but that wouldn’t be visible to the wogs. A slamming close-range firefight ran in a C all around the front of the hill, as the larger Colonial force overlapped the Civil Government forces upslope. Most of the pom-pom shells were flying right over the hill, dangerous only to the deserters streaming northward—who deserved whatever they got. The Colonial rifle fire was uneven; their men were pumping out their seven-shell magazines and then pausing to reload. That had to be done by pushing one round at a time through the loading gate in the side of the weapon, which evened things out a little, but Osterville’s fire was dropping off noticeably, as the Colonials beat down his men by sheer weight of numbers.

  Five hundred meters. “Sound Dismounted Advance.”

  The buglers sent the message down the lines: a four-note preparation, twice repeated, then a single sustained note taken up by the signalers in unit after unit. Six thousand dogs crouched. Not quite in unison, but nearly so within battalions. The men stepped free of the stirrups without pausing, and the dogs rose and walked behind, still in ranks as regular as the men’s. A good cavalry battalion drilled six hours a day, six days a week for this moment, until the signals played directly on the nervous systems of men and mounts. Raj turned his binoculars to the far right of his line: Hwadeloupe’s men were badly under strength, but they were carrying it off quite well.

  A long clatter as the men loaded. Raj’s head went back and forth; the troops were advancing at a steady walk, the splatguns trundling forward with the soldiers, two per battalion. They were light enough for the crews to manhandle them like that; they looked much like field guns, but each was actually thirty-five double-length rifle barrels clamped in a tube. He watched as one crew let the trail thump to the ground and loaded. One man swung the lever down, another inserted an iron plate with thirty-five rifle cartridges, the lever went back up with a thump. Waiting for the order—but they were artillerymen and very good at estimating ranges. He chopped out his palm. The buglers took it up. All up and down the line men checked a half-pace. And . . .

  “Halto!”

  Officers ducked ahead and spread arm and drawn saber to mark the firing line. Another bugle call and the front rank dropped to the ground and the men behind them went to one knee, right elbow resting on it. The platoon commanders and senior noncoms walked quickly between the two ranks for a moment, checking that the sights were adjusted for the range. The muzzles quivered as each trooper picked a target. The dogs crouched; only the mounted officers, Company-grade and above, marked the line. Company pennants and battalion banners too, of course; the men took their dressing from the flags.

  Raj took a deep breath. It was a peculiar exultation,
like handling a fine sword with perfect balance; the pleasure that came only from a difficult task performed exactly as it should be.

  Some of the enemy were turning now, firing frantically. Far too late. The trumpets spoke again, preparing men for the order:

  “Fwego!”

  BAMMMbambambambabam . . . Six thousand rifles fired within a few seconds of each other. A discordant medley of battalion trumpeters sounded the Fire by Platoon Volleys. BAM. BAM. BAM. Rippling down the formation. Front line prone, second rank kneeling. Front rank fire-and-reload, second rank fire-and-reload, a steady pounding crackle. The dawn wind was from the east, blowing the new fogbank of powder smoke backward in tatters. The smell was overwhelming in the fresh morning air: a sharp unpleasant reek of burnt sulfur and stinging saltpeter. The smell of death.

  The splatgun crew spun the crank at one side of the breechblock. Brraaaap. A long splat of sound as the thirty-five rounds snapped out. K-chung as the lever went back and the plate was lifted out by the loop on its top, a rattle as another was slapped home and the lever worked. Brraaaap. Brraaaap. Three hundred rounds a minute. An ancient design, ancient before the Fall, from man’s first rise; primitive enough that men in these days could build it. The priests said that Man had been perfect, before the Fall. Raj had always been a believer; it was obscurely disturbing that part of that perfection was better and better mechanisms of slaughter.

  He threw the thought aside, with a touch to the amulet blessed by Saint Wu; there was the work of the day to be done. Raj turned and cantered down the line. The Civil Government formation was at right angles to the Colonial formation, like the crossbar on a “T.” The whole weight of its fire was crashing into the end of the Arab line. And most of the Civil Government cavalrymen could hit a man-sized target at three hundred meters, many of them at twice that range. Even if they missed, their 11mm bullets would run the entire length of the enemy line, with good odds of hitting something. The Colonials were melting away, men smashed to the ground by the heavy hollowpoint bullets with massive exit wounds that bled them out in seconds, or tore limbs from bodies.