There were hundreds of the assault trenches worming their way toward the walls, but this one was his section’s particular tribulation.
The enemy guns boomed again. One bolt struck right beneath him, and his rifle quivered against the stone it rested on with a harsh tooth-gritting vibration. It would be difficult for them to make a breach; Sandoral’s walls were twenty meters thick counting the earth backing, and sunk well behind the moat so that only a lip showed . . . but it would happen in time.
Shells screeched by overhead, exploding behind him among the empty houses. The ragheads didn’t seem to be worrying about ammunition supplies. He’d helped defend the walls of Old Residence against a hundred thousand Brigaderos, twice the number that the wogs had, but this felt worse. Back then they’d had Messer Raj, and the MilGov barbs had wandered around with their thumbs up their bums while the Civil Government force wore them down. The towel-heads weren’t that kind of stupid.
He hopped down and walked along the space of wall his section held, and the platoon of garrison infantry they were supporting. One of those was stretched out on the walkway, most of the top of his head missing and brains spattered all over his firing niche.
“Fuck it!” Minatelli screamed. “You—y’fuckhead—didn’t y’tell him?”
The dead man’s corporal looked up. “Couldn’t make ‘im listen.”
The wogs had big bipod-mounted sniper rifles working from their forward lines, single-shot weapons as heavy as the sauroid-killers the Skinner nomads used. They had telescopic sights, too.
“Well, git t’body out of t’way,” Minatelli said angrily. Two of the man’s squadmates dragged it away as it dribbled. Bad for morale to have corpses lying around if you didn’t have to. It was a pity you couldn’t remove the smell; it was hot and close here, and the blood began rotting almost at once.
Everyone else was keeping their head away from the firing slit until told. Rifles were lying in the flat stone bottoms of the slits, with their levers open to keep the chambers as cool as could be. Each niche had a couple of wooden strips set into troughs in the stone, with rows of holes drilled in the wood. Each hole held a cartridge, base-up and ready to hand. Two thousand-round ammunition crates rested on ledges between firing positions, their tops loosened and the protective tinfoil curled back to show the ten-round bundles, one hundred bundles per box. Buckets of water and dippers hung from iron hooks; there was a wooden box of hand bombs by every man’s firing position, round cast-iron balls the size of an orange, with a ring on top to arm the friction fuse. There were even some spare rifles in a rack, for the men disarmed by the jams that would be inevitable once firing got heavy and the weapons heated up.
The only thing missing was enough men to fill all the firing niches, plus the reserve that doctrine called for. What they had was one rifleman for every three slots, one man for nine meters of front. The Colonials had enough troops to attack anywhere along four kilometers of wall, without warning.
The lieutenant blew his whistle. Men tensed, thumbing rounds into their rifles and working the levers to shut the actions. Minatelli sprang back into his niche and licked his thumb to wet the foresight. Enemy pom-poms raked the line of firing slits. The infantryman jerked his head down and squeezed his eyes shut as grit blasted through his, then blinked them open.
“Make ’em count, boys!” he shouted. “Thems cavalry you’re shootin’.”
Men were swarming out of the forward Colonial works, men in djellabas and spiked helmets. Their carbines were slung; most carried long ladders, and some lugged small mortars with folding grappling hooks and reels of cord attached. Others pushed wheeled bridging equipment to get them across the moat. Pairs carried little cohorn mortars, adapted to hurl grappling hooks at the end of a reel of iron cable.
Spirit, there’s a lot of them. His narrow slit showed thousands, and more pouring out of the trenches like ants out of a kicked-over burrow.
White-painted iron stakes marked the ranges outside. The ramp sight on the rear of Minatelli’s rifle was set for four hundred meters. He steadied the forestock against the stone and curled his finger around the trigger, taking a deep breath. The first enemy crossed by the four-hundred-meter-mark, two files holding a ladder between them. He dropped the sight onto the front-right man, let it down to the man’s knees, and stroked the trigger. A soft click sounded as the offset, the first slack, took up.
Gentle, like it was a tit, he told himself, and squeezed.
Bam. The wog stopped as if he’d run into a stone wall and dropped, the ladder sagging and swinging broadside onto the city defenses as his teammates staggered and tripped. Last one I know for certain, Minatelli thought. Rifles barked in a stuttering crash all along the wall, smoke erupting from the slits. Men in the attacking force fell, and other men replaced them. Minatelli worked the lever of his rifle and thumbed in rounds. Spent brass tinkled around his feet.
BOOOOMMM. The big cannon a few meters down took him by surprise this time; he’d been too involved in his personal war to notice the master gunner’s orders. He did see the result, as the malignant wasp-whine of the canister round spewed out its hundreds of ten-gram lead balls. It caught the mouth of the assault trench with a fresh wave of ragheads just clambering over the gabions. They vanished, swept away in the storm of hundreds of marble-sized shot. Dust and fragments of wicker spurted up all over the face of the trench. When the dust cleared, the dirt was covered with a carpet of men pulped into an amorphous mass, a mass that still heaved and moaned in places.
“Reload, canister!”
Minatelli himself reloaded, pausing to snap the ramp under his rear sight down to two hundred meters. The rifle was foul after more than two dozen shots, and the metal scorched his callused thumb as he shoved home the next round. The recoil was worse now too, and his shoulder would be sporting a fine bruise tomorrow, assuming he was here to feel it. Massed carbine fire pecked at the rock outside, some of it uncomfortably close. A round whined through the firing slit, the flattened lead going whip-whip-whip as the miniature metal pancake sliced air. It could slice him as easily. He bounced back up, picked a target, fired, ducked back down to reload.
Spirit. He was glad he was in here and not out there. There were as many wogs down as moving.
“Hold ’em, boys, or we’re all hareem guards!” he called, and fired again.
Again. The cannon fired a third time, or was it the tenth? No way to tell. Smoke hung dense and choking, turning the ground outside the walls into a fog-shrouded mystery where crimson shapes dashed and bunched. The Colonials were nearly to the edge of the outer works, kicking their way through the caltrops—triangles of welded nails scattered through grass deliberately left to grow knee-high. Some distant part of Minatelli was amazed that men would slow down in the face of rifle fire to avoid getting a nail in the foot, but many did.
Then the cannon from the projecting bastions cut loose. Each V-shaped protrusion took hundreds of meters of wall in enfilade, dozens of cannon sweeping the ground with loads of heavy canister. Most of them were carronades, short big-bore weapons like gigantic shotguns. Not much range, but they didn’t need it.
Minatelli paused to let his rifle cool a bit with the lever open, gulped water from a bucket down a throat as raw as if it had been reamed out with a steel brush. Drops fell on the metal of the breechblock and sizzled. When the smoke cleared enough for him to see again, he reloaded and aimed at one of a pair of Arabs dragging a wounded comrade back with them. He shot, reloaded . . .
“Cease fire! Cease fire!”
The bugles reached him where the shouted command did not. His finger froze on the trigger, and he worked the lever and caught the ejected shell. His fingers were black with powder residue, and it coated his lips, tasting of sulfur when he licked them. There were more dead wogs outside than he could count, coating the ground in sprays and swaths back toward the enemy works, bobbing in the moat below amid the wreckage of wooden bridging equipment and ladders. More up and down the foot of the wall. I
n places the carpet of bodies stirred and moaned; there were so many he could smell the blood-and-shit stink of ripped-open bodies all the way up here.
He took another drink of water and left his rifle lying on the stone firing slot, lever open. “Sound off!” he called. Then he trotted over to the platoon commander’s station.
“Sor! Two dead, three wounded serious.” That included the two sections of garrison infantry his eight men were overseeing. “Ev’ryone else ready for duty.”
The lieutenant was a good enough sort, a bit young. He looked out through the slit next to him and returned his unused revolver to its holster. Perhaps because he was young, he spoke aloud:
“They thought they could rush us. No respect.”
“Plenty now, sor.”
The young officer nodded, unconsciously smoothing down a wispy mustache. “Yes. Now they’ll try starving us out.”
Spirit, Minatelli thought.
There hadn’t been much but men, dogs, weapons, and ammunition in the trains that brought them east. Sandoral had been full of hungry refugees for a week before they got here, and the invasion had disrupted the harvest.
“Messers, to fallen comrades.”
As youngest of the senior officers present, Bartin Foley gave the toast in the three-quarters diluted wine. They all drank.
“Messers, the Governor.” Raj gave that, and they tossed aside the clay cups.
As if to remind them of the fallen, a man screamed from the tent nearby where the wounded were being tended. Casualties had been light by every reasonable standard except that of the men whose own personal flesh had been torn and bones been shattered. Suzette was present, but her sleeves were rolled to the elbows and there was still blood spattered down the front of her jacket.
“I gather we won’t be trying to take Ain el-Hilwa, mi heneral,” Staenbridge said.
“Of course not; what would we do with it?” Raj said. He tapped the map on the table before them. “Messers, we’ll split up into the same three raiding parties—Major Swarez, you’ll accompany the center group with me” —Osterville’s ex-follower nodded—”and Major Hwadeloupe, you’ll be attached to Major Gruder’s command.
“We’ll head south by southeast along this axis.” He traced it on the map. “Keeping west of the Ghor Canal.”
“Our objective is the railway?” Staenbridge said, tracing it with one finger.
The scouts had given them a definite bearing; it came straight west from the main Colonial line along the Gederosian foothills.
observe, Center said.
A train screeched to a halt, sparks fountaining out from the tall driving wheel of the locomotive. It was a new machine, painted in black and silver, with Arabic calligraphy along the sides in gilt paint and up the tall slender smokestack. Behind it were a dozen cars, the last an armored box with a pom-pom mounted on a turntable behind a shield; thirty or so riflemen poked their weapons out of slits in the boilerplate that sheathed it. The other cars held sections of track, already spiked to cross-ties, piled up in stacks and secured by chains. Another train halted behind the first. This one had boxcars full of men and tools.
They boiled out, their officers waving the ceremonial lash and shouting; there was more noise than a comparable group of Civil Government soldiers would have made, but no more confusion. Teams jogged forward and undogged the chains holding the first train’s cargo. They set up a light folding crane and lowered the sections of preformed track to the ground; other teams lifted them with iron hooks and trotted forward, keeping step with a wailing chant.
Ahead of the two trains was a section of wrecked track a quarter-kilometer long. Engineers gave the roadbed a quick check with levels and transit; gangs of workers shoved the burnt, twisted ties and rails to one side. The prefabricated sections were dropped in place and the hookmen went back for another load at the same steady trot. Another team slewed the tracks into alignment with long poles like gunners’ handspikes and bolted them together.
Raj shook his head. “There aren’t enough of us, and we don’t have enough time,” he said. “The Colonial sappers can repair track faster than we can tear it up—until Tewfik can get back here. The major bridges will be heavily guarded. But we want him to think we’re a threat to the railway line, and by all means tear up any stretch you reach.”
“What news from Sandoral?” Staenbridge said.
“Ali put in a quick attack when he arrived in force, and when that didn’t work he tried a full assault with engineering and artillery support. Total losses of four to five thousand, including wounded too badly hurt to return to duty soon. Our casualties were very light.”
“My, my. I wouldn’t like to be on Ali’s staff right now,”
Visions crawled beneath the surface of Raj’s vision; beheadings, impalements. Ali was quite mad.
“Gerrin,” he said, “neither would I. He’s still got forty thousand effectives, not counting his infantry garrisons.” They had seven thousand cavalry, and three thousand infantry in all.
“More goblets than bottles at this banquet,” Staenbridge agreed.
If there wasn’t enough wine to fill all the glasses at table, beyond a certain point juggling the liquid from one glass to another wouldn’t help.
“We might take their supply dump at the railhead,” Dinnalsyn said thoughtfully. “That would embarrass them considerably.”
“It’s fortified, and there are ten thousand men in there,” Raj said. “Not first-rate troops, but they’re expecting trouble and they’ve got considerable artillery.”
They all nodded. You might be able to take a position like that by a sudden unexpected coup de main, or if it was held by barbarians too dim to take the proper precautions. Not otherwise, not with a larger enemy field force free to operate against your rear.
“If that’s all, gentlemen, we’d better see to business. Tewfik’s banner hasn’t been reported back at Sandoral either.”
The main column trotted down a roadway through the early morning cool. It was twenty feet broad, well-graded dirt surfaced with gravel, winding down through terraced barley fields from a low ridge planted with a mix of olives and almond trees. Gullies running down toward the flat were full of reddish-green native scrub; a flock of sheep-sized bipedal grazing sauroids fled honking and gobbling into the bush as the troops passed. Dew still laid the dust on the rolling hillside. Beyond were flat fields, irrigated and intensively cultivated. The villages were deserted, ghostly, not a human or a domestic animal in sight. The peasantry had had warning enough to flee by now, driving their herds before them.
Raj finished a pear and tossed the core aside, squinting ahead. Then he stiffened and flung up one hand.
“Halto. Silence in the ranks.”
The bugles snarled, and the column came to a dead stop in less than three strides. Silence fell, broken only by the occasional jingle of harness as a dog shifted.
There. A dull thudding sound, like a large door being slammed far away. It echoed, and was repeated. Again. Again.
“Artillery, by the Spirit,” Staenbridge said softly.
Raj nodded, closing his eyes to concentrate.
civil government field guns, Center said. two batteries, approximately 8.7 kilometers south-southeast of your present position.
“Well, that’s something serious,” Bartin Foley observed flatly.
Ain el-Hilwa had been the only action hot enough to need artillery support so far. The officers around Raj exchanged glances, and so did the men in the long ranks zigzagging back up the hill. The military picnic was over.
“Kaltin,” Raj said. That was where Kaltin Gruder’s kampfgruppe was operating.
He called up the maps of the area. A low ridge on either side, running east-west, more flat ground to the south.
“Sound Reverse Front,” he said. “Then Trot.”
The bugle screamed again, and the dogs turned in place. They waited the thirty seconds necessary to turn the gun-teams and broke into a rocking trot back up the slope.
>
“Messengers to the raiding parties, immediate concentration here,” Raj began. “Colonel Staenbridge, establish your banner there” —he pointed to the notch where the road crossed the hill— “with a firing line on the reverse slope, ready to move up. Major Bellamy, that’ll be your 1st and 2nd, and the 1/591st. Gerrin, anchor your left there” —he pointed to a reservoir— “and re-fuse your right with the raiding parties as they come in. Grammek, get your guns on the reverse crest too, but keep the teams close.”
The artilleryman nodded. That was dangerous—risking immobilizing the weapons if the teams were injured—but gave essential seconds of extra time if you had to pull out fast.
“No fieldworks, but put up some quick sangars for the splatguns. Suzette, have those Church people ready to triage the wounded and move them back immediately; we won’t be staying. Captains M’lewis, Foley, I’ll be taking a company of the 5th and the Scouts forward with me. And one splatgun. Questions?”
Heads shook. “Good. To your positions, please. Gerrin.” Staenbridge reined in. “I’ve got an unpleasant feeling we’ll be coming back faster than we go. Be ready to stop them hard.” Even veteran troops could turn unsteady if it looked like a rout.
Staenbridge nodded; they leaned toward each other and slapped fists, inside of the wrist and then back. “We’ll be here, mi heneral.”
Raj met Suzette’s eyes for a moment. No words were necessary.
“Waymanos!”
They trotted through a land silent and deserted, warming towards the crippling heat of a Drangosh Valley summer morning. Raj’s little force rode in column, with a spray of pickets out ahead. The dogs kept up a steady canter-trot-walk-trot-canter, eating the kilometers. Their tongues lolled, but their ears were pricked forward, all but Horace’s, which were a hound’s floppy style. The guns sounded much closer now, thudding bangs. The terrain hereabouts was mixed, fingers of high doab running from the clay bluffs along the Drangosh into the lower, flatter country to the east that extended past the Ghor Canal to the foothills of the Gederosian Mountains. From the sound, the guns were firing on the next ridge south.
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