by David Drake
“We saw them blown to pieces,” Abel said. “They’re not to be counted on.”
“Ah, yes,” Landry replied. “I have a couple of ideas about that. It’s the seams that split. That’s what I’ve been doing here—checking out the way they’ve rolled this metal together.”
The very statement of the process brought the feeling of revulsion, of contact with nishterlaub, into Abel’s mind. Even after all these years of knowing better, the Thursday school lessons of childhood still had an emotional grip on him down deep. But he ignored the feeling.
I’ve also had Center in my mind for twenty-two years to tell me it’s all nonsense.
“See how they used other metal to form the seam? Now, I know a few priestsmiths, and they tell me one rifle barrel isn’t always as good as another.”
“They’re not supposed to tell you anything, on pain of death,” Abel mused.
“There’s ways, and then there’s ways, to talk to a priest, if you know what I mean,” Landry said. “And I expect you do, since you’ve done you’re share of talking to them. If you ask the right questions, there’s lots a man can tinker around with in his mind and figure out for himself.”
“Right.”
Landry nodded with a wry smile. “What it comes down to is that you can overheat a weld. I reckon the same applies to these cannons. There’s ways to tell what’s sound and what’s not. Now, I looked at a couple of barrel pieces of the one that exploded up here, and sure enough, the seams were deformed.”
Landry picked up a heavy piece of metal from the floor with a grunt. If he had ever had any nishterlaub aversion, he was long over it. Landry also was a lot stronger than he looked. Underneath that perpetual pudge lay some muscle.
The metal piece was smooth and curved, with a seam of rougher looking material running along it in a line.
“See how that line isn’t quite true?” Landry asked. He held the barrel piece in one hand and drew a finger along the seam to illustrate.
“Yes,” Abel said. “But it’s fairly straight.”
“Not straight enough. Somebody overheated the bronze when he was forming the weld, and it left the seam too wide and out of true in places. One of those places, probably where it was too wide and out of whack, decided to give and: boom!” Landry spread his hands wide to show an explosion. “That little spot out of true is the difference between whether it’ll blow up in your face or not.”
“Good to know.”
“Sure is.” Landry dropped the piece. It fell on the rocky floor with a clang. He turned to the cannon. “Now, I had a look at the seams on these two. That one over there”—he pointed down the rampart wall to the second cannon—“is an accident waiting to happen.” He patted the cannon near him as he might a pet donderdak. “This one, she’s sound.”
“She?”
“Why not?” Landry said. “And look at the size of her. Half an elb bore! She can fling a quarter-stone ball out of that maw of hers.”
“And you’re sure you trust it?”
“I guess I’m sure enough to bet my life on it,” Landry replied.
* * *
It was the work of twenty big men and a half a watch to get the cannon out the gateway. The movers alternated between pushing it and putting rounded poles taken from the wagon stays beneath the cannon to let it roll farther. Another twenty ferried powder and balls outside.
Abel ordered an intermittant fire of muskets, kept up to avoid alerting the fort on the other end of the ridge that their sister fort was taken.
The hardest part was hefting the behemoth cannon onto a wagon bed. Landry’s solution was to have the men lift, fill in the gap with smaller stones, and slowly build a support pile under the cannon. When this pile grew even with the wagon bed, ten men pushing and pulling slid the big gun into the cart. The wood creaked, but Landry had ordered the strongest cart they had brought up, and the riveroak bed held. He secured the cannon with stout ropes so it wouldn’t slide out once the trek up the opposite slope became steep.
The wagon was hitched to a four-dak team. Landry and his newly assembled team climbed on board, and the skinner touched his whip to the daks and they moved forward. It was not fast, but the daks’ strength was enough to pull the wagon. Behind the gun wagon came another one loaded with powder and shot.
* * *
The daks grunted up the slope, and the men proceeded at the same pace, Wednesday Company ahead, and the other six companies to the rear of the wagon.
Soon his skirmishers reported in to Abel. There were guards on the wall over the gateway. At least fifty men.
“I’m pretty sure they know we’re coming, sir,” said Tanner in a broad Cascadian accent. Yet another reservist. He was an older man with a wide scar running diagonally across his face. Abel had known him now for years and didn’t think he’d ever seen Tanner smile.
They trundled along as the path wound through the scattered gravestones. There seemed to be even more of them on this slope of the saddle than the other side.
They are bunched toward the south to be closer to Zentrum.
So we have no surprise, Abel thought. Well, maybe one.
They halted out of musket range, and Wednesday Company deployed in a rough line along the flanks of the slope. They were led by Fowlett, the black-skinned commander from Abel’s vision of Chambers Pass.
I’ve been inside his head, Abel thought. Center’s interpolations were very precise.
This very real Fowlett was on familiar ground now, and extremely competent. On both sides, the ridgeline quickly gave way to cliffs. There was no way to maneuver around and attack another point on the fortress. It was the gateway or nothing.
Behind the front lines, Landry led the dak team drawing the wagon around in a circle, and now the back end of the wagon—and the muzzle of the cannon—pointed upslope.
Abel gathered his captains to the wagon.
“Tell them how it works, Captain Hoster,” he said to Landry.
When Landry was finished, the officers looked skeptical. By appearances, they were already feeling very uneasy around such a piece of nishterlaub technology.
On the other hand, their brother Goldies were fighting and dying below in the valley, and this fort was raking their flanks and pinning them forward.
The fort had to go.
“We line it up with the gateway and blow a hole in the wall with it.”
“But the wall’s made of stone!” one of the captains objected. Landry snickered—he had a boyish habit of laughing at the wrong moments, a habit that had annoyed the hell out of some of the other cadets at the Guardian Academy, and that clearly annoyed this captain as well. “A cannon ball will punch a hole twelve feet deep through that stone. It’s merely stacked and not mortared, if it’s anything like the one at Tamarak.”
“But what good will a hole the size of a ball be to us? A man can’t fit through it.”
“That wall is a pile of rocks. Look at it!” Landry pointed. “And I think all of you gentlemen know what happens when you take a stone out of the bottom of a rock pile.” Once again Landry illustrated with exaggerated hand motions. “It falls! A couple of shots, and I expect a gap to open up you can fit your company through at one go.”
Even Abel was skeptical it would come off this well. He had little choice but to try. Abel issued his instructions for attack if—when—the walls came down. Landry and his team busied themselves working to prime and fuse the behemoth cannon. Then the ball was dropped in and stuffed down the barrel.
Abel turned back to look at the Sentinel fort. Could this possibly work?
Center and Raj were notably quiet on the matter. Were they, too, in quantum computer fashion, holding their breath?
From this distance, two musket-shot lengths away, he could see that the fort was well-designed and strong. From the number of sentries and the rain of fire off the other side, he reasoned that it had to house a far greater number of men than had Tamarak.
The level of manpower now evident indicates
that this fort is built on a pre-Collapse structure, Center said, breaking the silence. There are warrens of tunnels carved into the mountain rock to house them. There is no way such extensive earth-moving could be accomplished with present technology.
So it was made by…the nanotechnology you’ve told me about?
Evidently some protective process kept it safe from the nano-plague virus that was the signature of the Collapse, Center answered. If not, the structure would have immediately decomposed and collapsed, as did the great dams that now form the three Cataracts of the River.
Is there any nano still there? Abel thought.
Not active. Standard retaining nano required periodic recharging from a separate power source. These nuclear and antimatter generators were destroyed in the Collapse.
Then how is it still holding the tunnels you predict to be there in place?
It is designed to freeze in place. Remember, the molecular bonds of the structures of pre-Collapse civilization were destroyed by an active nanovirus. The viral nano machinery did not lose its charge until its work was entirely done. There would be a great many more ruins remaining, even three thousand years later, were that not so.
Now what do you make of that thing sitting up there at the high point? Looks to be on stilts, doesn’t it? Raj put in.
Abel considered the structure, which he’d been looking at or otherwise Raj wouldn’t have observed it.
It definitely had a strange silhouette against the clear sky. Something on poles, with the poles supporting a large barrel-shaped structure atop themselves.
A water tank, said Center. This will be the method they use to crank their catapults.
How do you know that?
Such stands to reason. The reported water-powered methods with flues and wheels is the heresy the Guardian Corps has ostensibly been sent north to stamp out.
So that thing is full of water, like a giant barrel?
Yes.
Abel stepped down from his vantage point on the wagon seatboard and turned to Landry. “Captain Hoster?”
“Yes, sir?”
“I have a target for your first shot.”
7
Standing this close, the roar of the cannon going off was as loud as anything Abel had ever heard. Fire shot from the muzzle, smoke puffed out, and the wagon rattled as if shaken by an earthquake.
The first ball completely missed the water tower.
Landry let out a curse, but immediately ordered his men to reset the cannon’s elevation.
He and a sergeant swabbed the inside residue from the barrel with a stick they’d found near the cannons at the other fort. Landry had immediately grasped its purpose.
Then something odd: Landry was trying to spark the fuse with a flint and steel. Abel strode over to his engineer.
“That looks difficult, Captain,” he said.
Landry smiled sheepishly. “That shot threw me on my ass,” he said. “Wouldn’t you know it, I lost my cursed punk stick when I fell.” Landry pointed to the rest of his team. “None of these other fools thought to bring one, either. Of course, who is the greater fool not to have ordered it? Me.”
Abel reached into his inner pocket and pulled out his box of lucifers.
“I assume you know how to use these Scout sticks?” he asked Landry, handing him the box.
The engineer smiled with boyish glee. “Oh, yes, I do.”
* * *
The second shot burst into the water tower container, practically in the center.
The tank exploded in an burst of water and wood. One moment it was sitting atop its support pilings, the next it had disintegrated.
I would have thought a nice big hole, but that I didn’t expect.
Water is essentially incompressible under normal conditions. The entire kinetic force of the cannon ball was transferred to the liquid, which caused the tank to quickly and completely rupture, said Center. This is basic physics.
And impressive physics, at that, put in Raj.
A third shot went through the scaffolding legs and brought down the remainder of the structure.
Meanwhile, the guards on the ramparts kept up a sporadic fire to remind the Guardian front line of their range.
“Should we try for the gate?” Abel asked Landry.
Landry took a look, thought for a moment. “Frankly sir, now that we’ve shot her off, I think I’d like to be closer,” the engineer replied.
“Closer and we’ll be in range of their guns.” Abel cocked his head, considered. “We need to make you less of a target.”
“Not much chance of camouflage or fooling them. What trees there are up here are scraggly affairs, and we’d be advancing over a clear field of fire. Couldn’t find any thick enough to stand in for a cannon, either, if we wanted to try some trickery and make them think we have more such guns.”
“I was thinking of something more radical,” Abel replied. He turned to call Timon, but found his friend waiting patiently by his side. Abel started at the sight of him so close.
Had he himself been that anonymous, yet present, when he was von Hoff’s exec? Must’ve given the colonel a fright now and then.
“Major Athanaskew, here’s what I want the men in the rear to do.” Abel detailed his plan. “Now get those orders out immediately.”
* * *
It took almost a watch to ready the attack. The men were strong, and the platoons had a scattering of entrenching tools, mostly maplewood shovels, but the gravestones were very reluctant to be uprooted.
“It’s almost like the dead are hanging on to them stones down below,” Abel heard one soldier say.
But the stones were thin—as thin as a hand held sideways. In the end, most of the men resorted to giving the tops of the gravestones a running kick. This was usually all it took to break them off near the base. Toward the end, it had become a competition to see who could snap them off faster.
The next step was to lift the stones up to carry to the front lines. Most were light enough for a single man to carry. But quite a few were much heavier. These were usually the headstones of First Family members. They were carved with names and the symbol of a Progar first: an octagon shape with a diagonal stripe through it. Some of these First symbols were elaborately decorated, but they always remained recognizable. The First stones required two or three men.
The ranks gathered with their stones a few paces behind Wednesday Company on the front line. They were roughly ordered in lines four deep with a gap between them, opened up. Each man had his hands on a gravestone, his muskets slung behind his back.
Abel stepped in front of the front company and raised his saber. He looked up and down the line. Wednesday was nervous, ready. Behind them, the lines of men were grinning. Some were laughing. After Tamarak, they were in a good mood.
Bones and Blood, they’re relishing this, he thought. They’re looking forward to it even though they’ll be moving forward without being able to fire a shot.
He noticed that most of the rifles slung over the backs of the men had bayonets fixed.
Abel brought down his saber, and the front line surged around him. Wednesday, at least, was going into the charge with their rifles ready. Their orders were simple. Lay down enough fire to keep the men on the walls distracted from the unarmed targets coming up behind.
When they were a fieldmarch away, the peppering from the parapet abruptly ceased.
They’re close enough for the fort to see the gravestones, Abel thought. They know what they are now. We’ve flabbergasted them to silence.
It was as if a collective shock had passed through the Progarmen. After what they were observing had sunk it, they returned to firing with a fury.
Slowly, and remaining well behind the advancing men with stones, Abel and Landry turned the daks around and followed with the cannon wagon.
The fire from the fort began to take its toll. Men crumbled, their headstones falling with them. Some may even have had their skulls crushed as they dropped, even if they were on
ly wounded when they started the fall.
The cannon wagon was soon well within range of the fort’s muskets, yet only a few stray shots came their way. One of those hit a dak in the team pulling the wagon. Abel rushed forward and cut it loose from the leather harness with his saber.
Abel called on Landry’s detail, and they and the command staff moved the dead dak to the side with several great heaves. The other three daks strained. For a moment, Abel believed he was going to have bring up one of the spare daks which were following at some distance behind them. But then the wagon moved forward. The daks plodded on, more slowly than before, but elb by elb, the wagon rolled closer.
Abel glanced up at the parapets. The men were not only shooting down at those carrying headstones, they were shouting at them. He couldn’t quite make out what they were saying, but he was pretty sure they were cursing the Goldies to cold hell for sacrilege.
“Here is good,” Landry called out. He jumped from the wagon and grabbed the bridle of the lead dak himself, walking the animals around in a half circle. The cannon now faced the walls of the fort.
* * *
The first cannon shot struck partway down the walls. Shards flew, and the wall seemed to tremble.
A second shot struck, below and a few elbs to the right of the first.
At that, a large chunk of the upper ramparts crumbled, just as Landry had predicted it would. The wall simply collapsed. It looked like fat in a cook pot, melting over a flame.
Building stone and man fell together. Those not killed in the tumble were soon cut down by the muskets of Wednesday Company.
Landry and his team swabbed and carefully repacked the cannon. This time Landry took longer to aim. He fussed at the elevation of the base, putting in a small stone on one side of the base, trying to put its match in size on the other.
“Thrice-damn it!” Landry said. “I have the height, but I can’t find leveling stones to get rid of the tilt.
Landry looked around in frustration. Nearby were the shattered remains of one of the headstones. Abel saw the engineer consider for a moment, then picked up two pieces. While his men levered the cannon up, he pushed the gravestone chunks under the base, flat side down.