by Джеффри Лорд
«That will be the Principal Technician of War himself,» said Silora. «On days of battle he dresses in his most elegant uniform and equipment, including a wide belt studded with jewels. You see the sun sparkling on the jewels, I think.»
The technician might be a fop, but he also seemed to know his business. The great hollow square gave equal firepower on all sides. Even with only one man every ten feet, the automatic pellet rifles could slaughter anyone trying to close within a hundred yards. The grenade launchers that every tenth man carried could finish the job. Against a barbarian enemy able only to charge in wildly, the battle would have been won the moment the square was formed. But the people had done Mazda’s bidding in training and arming themselves, and they were no longer that kind of barbarian enemy.
Blade watched from the rear platform of his machine as the people deployed, spreading out until they completely surrounded the square. The catapults were unloaded from their chariots and assembled. Then their crews carried them to just inside accurate range of the Looters and opened fire.
Just inside accurate range for the catapults was well beyond accurate range for the Looter’s rifles. On full automatic they could hit anything within a hundred yards with enough pellets to rip it to pieces. Beyond that range things got more difficult. At two hundred yards they were doing well to hit a man, at three hundred yards it was almost hopeless unless they simply sprayed away on full automatic. The catapults were firing from a carefully calculated three hundred and twenty-five yards’ range.
Even there they had pellets buzzing about their ears soon enough. But at long range the light pellets lost much of their speed and striking power. They could hardly kill or disable unless they hit a vital spot. All the catapult crews were encased from topknot to toe in teksin, iron, and boiled leather armor. Most of the pellets bounced off harmlessly, and those that didn’t seldom did more harm than a wasp sting.
Meanwhile the catapult crews were shooting back, alternating three-foot arrows with expanding heads and explosive bombs. When the arrows hit a mercenary they tore through his armored vest as though it were made of paper. When a bomb landed on a mercenary there wasn’t enough of him left to put on a stretcher, while the men on either side of him were likely to be out of action for at least the rest of the day.
Many of the arrows missed, many of the bombs didn’t explode. But all of them kept the mercenaries shooting with one eye on their target and one eye on what might be coming down on them. Their shooting was enthusiastic-the rattle of their rifles soon became almost continuous. But its accuracy left a good deal to be desired.
After each few shots the catapult crews picked up their weapons and ammunition and ran fifty yards or so. They lost men, but each time they lost someone the gap was filled in a moment.
On and on went the duel as the sun rose higher in the sky and began to bake the plain with all its usual fury. Eventually the mercenaries got tired of standing under the shower of bombs and arrows and blazing away almost impotently at their distant enemies. A portion of one side of the square surged forward at a dead run, firing from the hip as they ran, trying to close to effective range.
Instantly a score of chariots and ten times that many horsemen swept forward. The chariots swung around between the mercenaries and the catapults, shielding them. The catapult crews threw their weapons into the chariots and scrambled on the backs of the chariot horses, while the archers in the chariots rained arrows on the approaching mercenaries. Then the chariots rolled away across the plain, rapidly drawing out of range. The cavalry swept across between them and the mercenaries, and a blizzard of arrows answered the enemy’s massed rifle fire. A good many horses went down and a good many saddles were suddenly empty. But out of more than a hundred mercenaries, no more than forty were left on their feet. All of those forty ran-the sensible ones back toward the square, the brave or foolish ones on toward the people. None of the second group got very far or lived very long. Then cavalry and chariots and catapults were all drawing rapidly out of range of even the longest and wildest shots from the square.
In any land, in any age, in any dimension, the man who rides a horse can still move faster than the man who walks on his own feet. At least he can when the land is flat, and the plain where Blade had chosen to give battle was as flat as a tabletop.
The mercenaries were tough, well-trained soldiers. Their courage was undoubted, their weapons were on the whole well-chosen and effective. But they had not fought a well-disciplined enemy of any sort for more than twenty years.
They had never fought a disciplined army of horsemen, neither in Konis nor in any of the dimensions they had looted.
This was a gap in their military education that Blade was determined to fill. In fact, he was determined to fill it so thoroughly that most of the mercenaries would not survive the lesson.
The duel of catapult and bow against rifle sputtered on around the square, occasionally flaring up savagely. The next time the mercenaries tried to charge the catapults on foot, the people’s cavalry got a little out of hand. Instead of retreating, they charged the flanks of the advancing mercenary line. If they had tried to charge it from the front, they would have been butchered. As it was they hit it on either end, where only four or five mercenaries could fire accurately, and that wasn’t enough. The butchery was mutual. The mercenaries chopped the people out of their saddles at point-blank range moments before pain-maddened horses trampled them into the ground. Then in full sight of hundreds of their comrades and the technician himself, the surviving mercenaries all turned and ran. All their discipline and courage could not hold them in place against the ancient terror of a wall of advancing horsemen.
For a moment it looked as though the whole battle would explode into a mutual butchery. The three war machines of the Looters surged forward to the threatened side of the square and hung in the air just above the line of infantry. Blade’s hands tightened on the railing of his own machine. If the technician panicked and unleashed the purple rays-But the technician’s nerve or commonsense held firm. The three war machines slipped back inside the square. Two of them began ferrying reinforcements and ammunition out to the weakened side of the square. The technician’s own machine rose into its usual place, to hang grim and gleaming in the sky above the center of the square.
By noon Blade felt as if the battle had been going on for a week. In the three hours since the first shot had been fired, the people had lost more than two hundred men and women and slightly more horses, as well as half a dozen chariots and two catapults. But the mercenaries had lost between three and four hundred men dead or out of action for the day. They had also fired off an astounding quantity of ammunition.
That was the Looters’ vital spot, their ammunition supply. A good part of their supply must have gone up with the machines destroyed in the atomic-bomb explosion. Now they could have no more than they carried on their backs and was stored in the remaining machines. When this supply was exhausted, there was no more ammunition closer than the other side of the dimension door.
Now it was time to offer the Principal Technician of War what would look like a chance to score a solid victory against the enemy. It would look like a victory cheap in ammunition, a victory solid enough to restore the spirits of men who must be losing heart from their casualties and the broiling sun. To win such a victory the technician would almost certainly be willing to weaken his square, confident that at least the enemy would not charge home against an unbroken line of mercenaries.
That confidence would be misplaced.
Fifty or a hundred at a time, most of the people’s cavalry drifted around to one side of the square and massed there. Before long two-thirds of the people’s mounted fighters were there, under the command of King Rikard himself and Anyara. Under the eyes of their king, son of Mazda, they would maintain the discipline that had been hammered into them. Meanwhile Blade would be free to be wherever his understanding of the Looters’ machines was most needed.
The massed cavalry gallo
ped forward, pulled to a stop within bowshot, fired their arrows, took heavy fire and heavy casualties in return, then retreated. But they did not retreat at a gallop. They retreated at a walk, a slow pace not beyond the reach of a man on foot. They seemed to be flaunting themselves in the faces of the mercenaries, flaunting a willingness to meet them at close quarters, man to man, throwing caution and even commonsense to the hot winds blowing over the battlefield.
It looked like folly. It looked like such folly that the Principal Technician of War swallowed the bait dangled before him even faster than Blade had expected. The war machines began shuttling ammunition out to the side of the square facing the people’s cavalry. Mercenaries from the other three sides began walking across the square to join their comrades in the great attack. The vision of a smashing blow at the enemy was obviously dancing in front of every man in that square.
Blade looked down from the platform of his machine to the opposite side of the square, where some two hundred horsemen and all the surviving chariots were assembled. Then he shouted an order to Chara at the machine’s controls. Silora clung to him as the machine turned and headed toward the chariots.
Chara landed the machine and Blade and Silora both leaped out and scrambled into the four-horse chariot reserved for them. All of the other chariots were drawn by three horses instead of the usual two, and carried three fighters instead of the usual two. Each fighter was heavily protected and carried a bow and a sword. In each chariot was a box of grenades and in the chariots of the third line each man had a bomb and a captured Looter rifle or pistol. The fighters in the third line were the ones most likely to get all the way to the center of the square and need the extra firepower. Blade hadn’t expected to have so many Looter weapons, but he wasn’t going to turn down an unexpected stroke of good luck.
Blade’s own chariot was in the center of the second line. Quickly he pulled on his gear. When he was finished, he carried a bow, a sword, two knives, a Looter rifle, a pistol, and a grenade launcher. He wore an iron helmet, a teksin vest, and leather boots and breeches. He looked like a pacifist’s nightmare and would have felt ridiculous if he had not been so keyed-up.
Blade gave Silora another minute to finish putting on her gear. Then he took out the signal baton, extended it, and waved it three times over his head. Trumpets and drums sounded from both the chariots and the cavalry, and the whole mass began to move forward.
Five hundred yards from the square the screen of cavalry in front of the chariots parted to either side and Blade had a clear view ahead. The enemy line was still there, but it was perilously thin. There was at most one man for every thirty yards. The technician had not contracted the square to save men. He was making the fatal mistake of trying to hold all his ground.
The first line of chariots came within range and the mercenaries opened fire. A chariot and horses made an enormous target. Horses began to go down, sending chariots bouncing wildly into the air, hurling their fighters free. But there were too many chariots coming too fast, and too few mercenaries with too little ammunition. Some of them simply turned and ran as arrows from the surviving chariots whistled about their ears. Others turned tail when they ran out of ammunition. Some stayed and died, changing magazines or still firing. But over a space of five hundred yards there were suddenly no more mercenaries at all. The seventy surviving chariots and the whole two hundred cavalry swept through that gap, trampling the corpses of both sides into bloody paste, thundering onward toward the heart of the mercenaries’ square.
Around Blade the thunder of hooves and the shrill war cries from four hundred throats drowned out the roar of gunfire from the far side of the square. Beside him Silora was screaming like a banshee, beside herself with excitement. He knew she was screaming, for her mouth was wide open, but he could not hear a sound she was making.
The people raced toward the center of the square. Its three machines loomed higher and higher as they drew closer. Looking ahead through the dust, Blade saw the mercenary guards scrambling into a small square around the three machines and the mass of Peace Lords. Their rifles began spitting pellets at the oncoming people. The first line took the full blast of their fire. Blade saw one chariot flip over at a full gallop, bouncing fifty feet into the air. Its three fighters sailed out and crashed to the ground. Two lay still, the third was still moving feebly when a chariot of the second line ran right over him, its driver unable to swing it clear in time. Hooves and wheels and the slashing knives in the hubs of the wheels all did their work, and the bloody thing left behind did not move again.
To press home a cavalry charge against automatic weapons is impossible in theory and always costly in practice. But when there are a lot of cavalry and not very many automatic weapons it becomes possible. The first line of chariots was almost gone now, and the second line was beginning to show ragged holes as the Looters shifted their fire. A chariot in the third line disintegrated in a blast of flame and smoke, and flying fragments mowed down two other chariots. Blade saw the Looter square disintegrating in its turn as the mercenaries on the disengaged sides ran around to reinforce their comrades who were facing the oncoming people.
Then suddenly the whole mass of Peace Lords standing beyond the winking guns of the mercenaries exploded into action. They had seen the mercenaries too distracted to keep watch on them. They took advantage of that distraction to strike, most of them unarmed but all of them burning with rage and a desire for vengeance.
It was another scene of butchery on both sides. Mercenaries shot down half a dozen Peace Lords, then died under stamping feet and clawing hands and flashing knives. Others kept their faces toward the oncoming people and died with arrows in their throats as they shot their attackers out of their chariots. None of the mercenaries could look in two directions at once and so all of them died in not much more than a minute.
By frantically waving the signal baton, Blade was able to keep the people’s charge from crashing straight into the Peace Lords. Blade’s driver pulled the chariot to a stop just beyond the Peace Lords, between them and the three machines. Seen close up, the command machine looked identical to the one Blade had fought in Miros. The cargo machine was still a great featureless box. The machine carrying the dimension door was so highly polished that the sunlight reflected from it was almost blinding.
Several men scrambled out of the chariots of the third line, carrying sacks of bombs under their arms. They ran toward the door machine, zigzagging to make themselves harder targets. They were running to place their bombs beside the machine and destroy the Looters’ road home.
No one fired at them. But twenty feet from the door machine they seemed to run into a solid wall. They staggered and began to crumple, sparks flashing around them. As they fell their bombs exploded with tremendous crashes. Black smoke rolled up, concealing the door machine for a moment, and fragments of iron, armor, and bodies flew in all directions.
Blade turned to Silora and grabbed her by the shoulder with one hand, pointing at the Peace Lords with the other. «Quick. Get over to them, tell them that we are friends. Also ask if anyone can help us break through the electrical field into the dimension door machine. Everybody else should arm themselves from the cargo machine or the bodies and then run for it.»
Silora nodded and leaped to the ground. As she began to run, a shadow swept over Blade. A moment later he heard the rattle of a Looter rifle. Silora stopped dead, then staggered and turned around to face Blade as she went down on her knees. From belly to throat she was nothing but chewed and bloody flesh. A final bullet had smashed her jaw, and as she tried to speak it sagged downward in a ruin of bone and blood. Her eyes met Blade’s for a final second, then she collapsed face-down in the dust.
An icy coldness filled Blade. He looked upward, to see a Looter war machine sailing over the Peace Lords. On the rear platform knelt the Principal Technician of War, his jeweled belt flashing in the sun, other flashes coming from the muzzle of his rifle as he fired into the Peace Lords.
With dea
dly precision Blade loaded his captured grenade launcher, raised it to his shoulder, sighted on the war machine’s hatch, and fired. The grenade arched through the air and vanished exactly where Blade had aimed it.
The technician could think quickly enough when his own skin was in danger. He plunged head-first off the platform, turned a somersault in midair, and landed on hands and knees halfway between Blade and the Peace Lords. His rifle landed beside him. He was reaching for it when Blade snatched a throwing spear from under the seat of the chariot and hurled it with the same deadly accuracy as the grenade. The technician was just rising to his feet when the spear took him in the neck, driving clear through from one side to the other and bursting out on the other side. He finished rising, stood erect for a moment, then went over backward. He made a neater corpse than Silora once he had stopped thrashing around, but he was just as dead.
Meanwhile the grenade went off inside the war machine. The hatch flew off its hinges, smoke and flame shot out of the turret, and the machine wobbled and lurched in the air. Then it nosed down and plunged toward the door machine. It struck the electrical field in an explosion of sparks, then drove through the last twenty feet to crash into the metal with a terrible clang. It bounced like a stone-skipping on a pond, sailed on a hundred feet farther, and thudded to the ground in a cloud of smoke.
Blade shook his head. The glistening metal of the door machine showed no sign of damage from the impact of the falling war machine, not a dent or a scratch. If it was that strong the people’s explosives wouldn’t do it much harm even if they could be dropped close enough to it.