“I think del Verme’s going to hold in the West Channel,” Rick continued, “but we’ve lost control of Lido and Cannaregio completely, and the other side seems to have most of San Lazzaro. We believe the fortress is still holding out—largely because of your Lieutenant Cargill, I suspect—but they’re starting to press hard on the bridges between San Lazzaro and San Mateo. So far, San Mateo itself seems solid, though. So does Santa Cecilia and most of San Giorgio. Over.”
“And Admiral Stigliano? Over.”
“He’s dead,” Rick said harshly. “What’s left of his crews and marines were falling back on San Lazzaro, last we heard. Over.”
“The Roman squadron? Over.”
“No damned idea,” Rick said even more harshly. “Haven’t heard a word from Warner or anyone else since we ordered them to attack the transports. Over.”
Baker was silent for a moment, and Rick heard more musket volleys. They weren’t firing into the killing ground where so many bodies washed in the bloody water, so they had to be engaging galleys which had peeled off to either side.
“Colonel,” the major said finally, “I don’t think they have another frontal assault on the wagon fort left in them, and we’ve retaken the two palaces they seized on the southeast side of the square. All of the flanking attacks I know about were launched by single galleys, without support, and we have all of them pinned down. I expect there are some we don’t know about, but the Nikeisian militia are covering the eastern side of the island and I’m pulling together a reserve of musketeers and halberdiers under your Clavell to serve as a fire brigade. If it isn’t needed for that, it will be available to begin pinching out their lodgments one at a time. In my opinion, I can hold San Marco as long as they aren’t able to bring a significant force of fresh troops into the fight against us. Over.”
Rick nodded and closed his eyes for a moment, listening to the fury of the storm mingling with the fury of combat. San Marco, San Giorgio, and Santa Cecilia were the three largest islands of Nikeis, with the largest populations. If they managed to hold there, they could retake the smaller islands one at a time. But only if they held there.
And they won’t hold if the bad guys clear a way through that mess in the North Channel. Last we heard from Cargill, those last transports were still managing to stand off. If they get inside the lagoon, work their way around Baker, hit him with that “significant force of fresh troops,” it’s over. Hell, it may be over anyway!
“Understood,” he said again, finally. “Galloway, out.”
He handed the microphone back to Mason.
“It’s time, Art,” he said.
“Sir, there’s probably still friendlies out there in the channel.”
“I know!” Rick snapped, then shook his head. “Sorry, Art,” he said wearily, “but I do know. And it doesn’t matter. We can’t see what the hell is going on out there, we’ve lost touch with Cargill, and there’s no way we’re holding that raft in the end. For all we know, they’re already cutting a way through it for those damned transports! But at least if they are, they’re also concentrated in one spot, and that’s what we need. So we hit them now and hope they take the hint, or we’re done.”
Mason looked at him, and Rick wondered if he looked as used up as he felt.
I wasn’t this exhausted at the Ottarn or Vis, he thought, and I haven’t fired a single shot. Does Art realize that I’m done, whatever else happens? And maybe I feel so exhausted because I am so sick and tired of all this. The killing, the dying, the playing God! I’m done. Whatever happens tonight, I’m done. I can’t do this anymore.
“Pass the word to Walbrook,” he said.
“Yes, Sir.”
* * *
Sergeant Chester Walbrook’s radio chirped, and he snatched it from his webbing and pressed the transmit button.
“Backstop, over,” he said.
“The Colonel says to do it,” Art Mason said. “Over.”
“About damned time!” Walbrook growled. He and his crews had stood by uselessly for hours, waiting for a moment that might never come while other men fought and died without them. “North Channel? Over.”
“North Channel,” Mason confirmed. “Over.”
“Understood. Backstop, out.”
Walbrook replaced the radio and turned to his gun chiefs.
“Our turn now,” he said with grim satisfaction.
* * *
Rick stood looking to the north. The rain, the dark, and the wind-shredded smoke were too dense now for him to see any gun flashes even if Cargill’s squad was still alive. Were they? And was the fort still holding? Maybe it was. Maybe the men in it would even live now, he thought distantly. Of course, they might not, too. Probably wouldn’t. Nobody lived once the great Captain General Rick came along. Besides—
Something flashed on the northern tip of the Isola di Sant’Andrea, the island between San Mateo and Santa Cecilia. And then, a second later, a blazing white sun seared its way across the night.
* * *
“Yatar!”
Captain Agesilaus staggered back as the terrible light blasted into his eyes, blinding him. It came at the worst possible moment, just as he was preparing to lay Summer Dawn alongside that grinding, twisting mass of wreckage.
It was the last thing he wanted to do. He loved his ship, one of the biggest navibus onerārius of the entire Five Kingdoms, and now he was going to murder her. The waves would beat her to death against the rafted mass of galleys as surely as against any rocky coast, but it didn’t matter. He’d fought wind and sea with every skill, every trick, learned in thirty years afloat, but he was out of tricks and the sea always won in the end. He’d even tried anchoring, only to have the anchor drag. He either put her alongside that reef of broken galleys and got the two thousand miserable, seasick troops packed into her hold onto it—if he could—or else she went down anyway and took all of them with her.
But this!
It had to be another star weapon, but what was it supposed to do?!
* * *
The magnesium candle swung wildly across the night as the wind drove its parachute back towards the center of the inner lagoon. The heavy rain reduced its effectiveness, but its light still poured down across the stormy water like some sudden dawn, and the storm-battered raft of ships across the North Channel appeared out of the darkness.
Rick had his binoculars up, waiting, and his nostrils flared as he saw the tangle of galleys aswarm with men. They were cutting a way through the western end of the raft, he realized, and there had to be several thousand of them, either on the raft itself or on the galleys and transports waiting to pour into the inner lagoon as soon the way was clear.
Good luck with that, you bastards, he thought bitterly, and bared his teeth as something plunged into the water short of the raft and exploded.
Of all the weapons on Tran, the ones whose ammunition he’d hoarded most fanatically were Chester Walbrook’s three mortars. He’d even managed to convince the Shalnuksis to replenish his ammunition supply, although like everything else, they’d provided nowhere near as much of it as he’d asked for. That was one reason he hadn’t used them yet today.
Of course, there was another reason, as well.
* * *
“Short!” Walbrook said, peering through his binoculars. “Up fifty!”
CHONK!
Another mortar bomb wailed its way through the storm. It plunged into the water and exploded. It was short of the galleys, too . . . but not by as much.
* * *
“Oh, shit!” Larry Warner shouted as the flare blazed overhead. He knew exactly what it meant, and the Colonel couldn’t have a clue that Warner and the Romans were still on the ship raft.
They were still a hundred yards, at least, from the fortress at the eastern end of the line, working their way steadily towards it and there were far too many Fivers and Riccigionans between them and safety. But it was also the only place to go . . . and they’d just run out of time for steady, methodical ad
vances.
He tossed his empty rifle to an astonished Roman sailor, who caught it despite his surprise. Then he drew his fighting knife with his left hand and his .45 with his right and shoved up beside Martins.
“All right, you bastards!” he bellowed to the surviving mercs and Romans. “Follow me!”
* * *
“Up twenty!” Sergeant Walbrook snapped, and tapped his toe impatiently while Private Jeff Balaika, the gunner on the number one tube adjusted the elevation wheel again. The gunners on the other two tubes followed suit, putting all three pieces on the same elevation. Once they found the range—
“Set!” Balaika announced.
“Fire!” Walbrook barked, and Balaika’s assistant gunner—one of the Colonel’s Chelm volunteers who Walbrook had personally trained—dropped another round down the tube.
CHONK!
Walbrook peered through his binoculars, cursing the rain and the wind as they drove his illuminating round across the night. Technically, it was supposed to give him seventy-five seconds of light, but that number hadn’t been calculated for conditions like this. They didn’t have many of them, though, and—
“Yes!”
* * *
Captain Agesilaus was still trying to grasp what was happening when Walbrook’s fourth 81-millimeter high-explosive round landed on Summer Dawn’s quarterdeck.
* * *
The explosion flashed with the brightness of a direct hit, and Walbrook snarled in satisfaction.
“All right, lay it to them!” he snapped, and his number-two tube coughed.
Then the number three.
* * *
Rick watched as the mortar bombs came storming down the heavens. They might have run out of white phosphorus for the Carl Gustav, but not for the mortars. Two of Walbrook’s mortars dropped HE onto the ship raft; the third fired WP, and the savage, inextinguishable incendiary blazed despite the rain and the waves and the spray while the high-explosive shattered timbers and men with equal abandon.
Their ammunition supply might be limited, but their enemies had obligingly packed several thousand men into a concentrated target in the middle of the water with nowhere to go, and the mortar bombs ripped into them mercilessly. Walbrook walked his fire along the raft, maiming and killing, burning men alive, and Rick Galloway lowered his binoculars and looked away.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
“ONE MORE SUCH VICTORY
AND WE ARE UNDONE.”
Bart Saxon sat beside the bed, gazing out the window, and tried to come to grips with it all.
It wasn’t easy.
God, I’m a teacher, not a soldier. Wonder how many times I’m going to have to think that over the next few years? Please, God. If You’re listening—if You exist—don’t let me ever see anything like this again. Please.
He wouldn’t have made it without Cal, he thought. He’d been so far out of his depth, so lost . . .
Never had a friend like him before, he thought. Never had a brother, either. Now I’ve got both. So I guess some good comes out of just about anything.
He looked down from the window on a harbor clogged with floating bodies. So many bodies. Tran’s aquatic predators and scavengers had penetrated the inner lagoon, and every so often one of those bodies—or a part of one of them—disappeared in a swirl of water.
It was low tide, and burned out galleys lay beached in Palazzo San Marco, surrounded by still more bodies, heaped in windrows where wave and tide had piled them. Working parties of prisoners, guarded by Nikeisian militia, many of them walking wounded, worked to collect the dead men. There were far too many of them to treat with anything like decorum or respect, nor was there anywhere to bury so many. Nikeis normally cremated its dead, but there was neither wood nor time for that, either. The working parties simply loaded them onto barges to be towed out beyond the outer lagoon and dumped over the side in weighted nets.
Some of Nikeis had burned, as well, despite its stone construction and the driving rain. At least the storm had blown itself out, leaving beautiful blue skies and white clouds, a gentle breeze, that only made the ghastly carnage even worse by contrast.
He couldn’t see the North Channel from here. Even if he could have, distance would have blurred the details, and he was just as happy about that. The murderous mortar barrage had broken the attack’s back, but at the cost of enormous casualties. Not all of them had been pirates or Riccigionans or Fivers, either. No one really knew how many men had died out there. Saxon doubted anyone ever would know. But it had to be in the thousands. Just thinking about it was enough to make him shiver, but the timing had been brilliant. The terror and, above all, the suddenness, of the savage onslaught when the battle had seemed all but won, had been utterly decisive. The fight had run out of the attackers like water, and they’d surrendered in droves as soon as they were promised their lives by the victors.
Thousands of them had been killed and more thousands wounded, and Nikeis and Colonel Galloway’s men and allies didn’t begin to have enough medical capacity to deal with that many casualties. Even if they’d had the manpower, a lot of men who might have made it back on Earth wouldn’t make it here. That much was obvious. And all the medics and the priests could do was drug those men into merciful unconsciousness and keep them there.
And while you’re feeling sorry for them, what about all the Nikeisians they killed, Bart?
His mouth tightened. Civilian casualties had actually been amazingly low, given the intensity of the carnage. It helped that there’d never been any fighting on Isola di Sant’Andrea or Isola di Santa Cecilia and very little on Isola di San Marco, beyond the Palazzo itself and the flanking palaces. Something like seventy-five percent of Nikeis’ people had lived on those three islands—and San Giorgio—and as many civilians as possible had been evacuated to the upper town before the attack, as well. North Channel had always been the most likely point of attack. That was how Galloway had known where to position his mortars.
But however light civilian casualties had been, the militia and the city’s ship crews had paid a savage price . . . and even “amazingly low” was cold comfort to the families who had lost loved ones. Or who’d almost lost them, even if they hadn’t known they were “loved ones.”
He turned back from the window at that thought. A part of him thought he ought to be out there, helping to cope with the carnage. But he didn’t have the skills they needed. He would have been just one more strong back, and he had—
The girl—no, the young woman—in the bed beside the window stirred. Her eyes opened, a bit unfocused and confused. She blinked, and a hand rose to her forehead. Then she turned her head on the pillow.
“Lord Bart?” she murmured.
“Yeah.” He smiled. “It’s me.”
“What—?” She blinked again.
“You have a concussion—what your people call a nebbia mentale.” He hoped he’d pronounced that correctly. “Lord McCleve says you’ll be fine.” Actually McCleve had said she ought to be fine, but damned if he was going to tell her that. “You’re just going to have to rest. You may have to take it easy for a long time, but you’ll be fine, Lucia.”
She started to stir, then stopped with a mouth-twisting gasp of pain. The hand from her forehead flew to her side, and her eyes widened.
“Oh, yeah. That, too.” He quirked a smile at her and touched the side of her face with his own hand. “You got your fool self shot with a crossbow saving my hide.”
She lay very still, and not just because of the pain, staring at him, and he stroked her face.
“Things are different here from the way they are back on Earth,” he told her, picking his way through the conclusion he’d wrestled his way to while she lay unconscious. “Someday I’ll tell you about some of the ways that’s true. But back on Earth, someone your age would still be considered a child.”
“I am ten years old . . . almost!” she said. “I am of marrying age! I’ve had my courses for—”
She broke off, face colo
ring, and he laughed softly.
“Trust me, Lucia. No one who saw you going for an armored soldier twice your size armed with only a dagger will ever think of you as ‘a child’ again. I certainly won’t.”
She looked at him, rebellious eyes trying to focus, then reached up to the hand on her face.
“Do you mean—?”
“I don’t know exactly what I mean,” he told her. “I only know the two of us have to figure out what we feel.” Her expression tightened, and he shook his head quickly. “I know what I think I feel, Lucia, and I think I know what you think you feel.” God, what a lot of “thinks” to cram into one sentence! She’s going to think I’m an idiot. “But we’ve only known each other for a few weeks, and I’m from an entirely different world. We need to be sure you aren’t, well—”
“Infatuato?” she suggested, and laughed, despite the pain in her head and side, and his expression. “Oh, Lord Bart! I have seen much of that already in my life. Much of it directed at me! It is not what I feel when I look at you.”
“Well, maybe it isn’t.” He smiled wryly, reminding himself that Lucia Michaeli had been training as a courtesan long before he crossed her horizon. “But it’s important for me to be sure of that, Lucia. And to go slowly with this. It’s important to me in a lot of ways and for a lot of reasons. Do you understand?”
“No,” she told him, but she smiled as she said it. “I do not understand. I do not want to understand. But I am, of course, far too dutiful to argue with my future husband about it.”
“Dutiful?” It was his turn to laugh out loud. “Signorina Michaeli, I suspect that you are neither dutiful nor very truthful, unless it suits your purposes!”
“No,” she said again. “But I pretend very well, Lord Bart.”
* * *
“No, Heir of Caesar,” the young Tamaerthan said firmly. “I regret that Lord Rick is not yet available.”
Haerther met Publius’ eyes levelly, with all of a Tamaerthan’s refusal to kowtow to Rome. But there was more than reflex defiance in those eyes this morning, Publius saw. There was worry and a fierce protectiveness.
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