by Leo Champion
* * *
The nomads around the fort hadn’t done anything during the rest of a very tense day, but as night fell they’d started sniping. The effective range – they’d learned from a few wild shots, which had apparently been aimed at the blockhouse – of the shoulder-mounted missiles some of them carried was definitely less than a mile.
The nomads maybe hadn’t known that themselves, or perhaps had expected the one that did hit the blockhouse, and the three presumably-missed shots that had hit the fort’s walls, to achieve more. Aside from a bit of minor concussion – everyone fine an hour later – and some blasted stone, they hadn’t.
The sniping was a different story. The Qings had robes the exact color of the desert sands, and they began creeping forth across those sands on their stomachs. With the patience of hunters they’d inched forwards to the effective range of their jezzails, about four hundred yards, and take their shot.
The fact that the shot gave a muzzle-flash that gave the firer away, and got an answering shitstorm of fire back from the fort – until Croft had put the word out that the waste of ammo was to be stopped and the snipers were to be dealt with by aimed single-shots only – hadn’t kept more of them from coming, inching forwards invisibly through the night.
There were – how many? Twelve to fifteen thousand, by his best guess – nomads. He had less than two hundred men, half of them Black Gangers functionally unarmed aside from picks, sharpened spades and a handful of personal sidearms that individual men had donated.
Thanks to the sniping he had seven fewer effectives than he’d had. Two of the Gangers – on sentry duty – were dead, two critically hurt. Their uniforms didn’t have kevlar.
The combat engineers’ did, but it hadn’t helped the corporal who’d taken a musket ball through the face.
So did the sand-filthy blue shirts and white trousers of the regular Legion troops, but kevlar stopped some bullets from penetrating. It didn’t do a thing about kinetic impact, which was why an MPRL crewman named Chen from Weapons platoon was now laid up – thanks to the Air Force medical crew, whose doctor was absent but who were quite capable themselves at emergency trauma care – with a shattered left humerus, and another man had four broken ribs.
It made the defenders antsy, and wary of looking past the battlements. And from Croft’s perspective, every time a sniper fired – whether they hit or missed – even with fully-automatic fusiliades banned, twenty-plus irreplaceable M-25 rounds would be wasted getting him.
Dunwell had gone to bed before her corporal had been hit, an instant kill. He wasn’t looking forwards to her reaction when she found about it.
The first time he’d lost men in action, it had hit him pretty hard. It still hit him, even though the combat-engineer corporal hadn’t really been one of his. He was in charge, right?
But Dunwell had been leading this platoon for months and probably knew the woman well. Even in the gender-integrated Army, you didn’t find much of a percentage of women in combat roles like the engineers.
She was going to have a bad time with it, and Croft would need her to snap out and do her job.
Another boom came from a nomad’s jezzail. It was answered predictably by the crack, crack, crack-crack-crack of M-25 fire on the wall, then a sharper crk as one of the combat engineers with M-31 railguns – some did, the rest had M-25s – joined in.
Croft couldn’t hear any screams, or shouts of dismay, so the sniper had probably missed. At this range, with blackpowder weapons and everyone awake knowing now to keep a low profile, most of them did. Four of the seven casualties had happened in the first thirty minutes of the tactic.
4:07, said his watch. Time to lie down if he was going to be effective tomorrow; seven minutes past the lie-down time he’d set himself, in fact.
It had been a long night, but he’d need to be effective tomorrow. He had a feeling the nomads were going to do more than snipe then.
Chapter Seventeen
Dmitri Bogdanov struggled through the dawn, staggering now. He’d been walking all night through the desert, his throat parched and dry and utterly unsatisfied. The last of the water in his canteen had been gone yesterday. Now he’d have killed for a drop.
In his hand he clutched the snub-nosed revolver desperately, afraid to drop it. He’d have liked to put it in his belt, but experience had shown that that both chafed a bit, and slipped down to eventually fall out every so-often.
After the last instance of that, Bogdanov had decided it was safer to carry it; with the weapon he had a slight chance if he ran into the inevitable trouble. Without the heavy little pistol he was doomed.
Jessica Cantrell, went through his head as he stumped one foot ahead of the other.
West Palm Beach.
Stumbling forwards.
James Bellis.
Always loved you.
And he’s sorry.
He’d get his friend’s message to the girl. It had become a mission. Live, so that he could get his friend’s message to the girl.
Make it to safety.
He was not going to die out here.
* * *
Mullins lay in a crowded tent, one of the ones originally owned by the Black Gang that Hill and the Indians had been guarding. As befit anything issued to Black Gangers it was filthy from the sides to the groundsheets and the thin styrofoam pads the convicts slept on.
The sun beat down above, the filthy desert-camouflage material of the tent keeping it off. But it was hot; Mullins estimated it as a hundred and ten inside the tent, where half a dozen exhausted people snored. It was around midday.
Exhausted, tired, he tried to get back to sleep. It was somewhere around midday and he was exhausted.
* * *
The sun beat down on Sanzin son of Anhar as he followed his scout’s pointed finger. Yes, there they were! The ones a wide-ranging herder had spotted in the night and followed until they made camp.
The camp was at the bottom of a low dip, sandblasted-white tents lying around what when it rained would briefly be a riverbed. Several tents, four large communal ones and six individual ones that looked about big enough for two men, were pitched there, packs and two carts lying around.
The invaders had only one sentry, a man standing on the highest nearby ground, the top of a rise nearly fifty feet from their camp. Every so often he turned around, looking in different directions around the empty wastelands.
Sanzin and his forty-strong main band had arrived on zak-back, of course, but they’d come the last couple of hundred yards up another riverbed to about half a mile away from their prey. The ground here was rolling, the sand held together by thin patches of grass. Here and there were low bushes.
This was fine grazing land by Sanzin’s standards, and he would exterminate those who would occupy it. Since when had it been the place of weaklings to enter the hard lands, except as slaves? Let alone to claim them!
But for all the intruders were weaklings – who slept in the day, like snakes and biter rats! – they had powerful weapons and the sentry had a good line of sight. The band could get closer, but only to the back of a crest about three hundred yards from the camp, overlooking them.
That would have to be close enough. Three hundred yards was well within range of the band’s jezzails, which would kill the sentry and, fired into the tents, hopefully kill or wound a few of the sleeping invaders.
Then the nomads would charge with blades and lances, cut down the tents and the men inside them.
“You,” Sanzin gestured at a group of eight warriors, all of whom carried long jezzails. Not all of his band did own the weapons, and some were better than others with them. The line of Zahnzor the Marksman were his best. “You and your three sons, kill the sentry. The rest of you, fire into the tents. Be on your mounts, because then we charge!”
* * *
Private Simon Reuter checked his watch: 1:43 pm, an hour and seventeen minutes until he could wake Corporal Hill and sleep. At least two hours wasn’t a long guard shif
t – they had twelve capables, after all, plus the doctor, the colonel and MP Corporal Alvarez – but he was tired and thirsty and did want to get off his feet.
Yeah, well, if he sat down then he might not see trouble coming, and there was bound to be some out here. That there hadn’t been any didn’t mean there wouldn’t be.
He turned around again, scanning across the empty land. Why these nomads lived out here, why they thought ground this worthless was worth protecting… was beyond him.
An engineer, a former mechanical engineer in South Africa in the past life before a romance had gone bad and he’d enlisted in the Legion, Reuter was a logical man. This Central Territories Improvement program was going to green the desert and make the nomads wealthy. He understood that they opposed it, but not why they did. It wasn’t an invasion, it was an improvement!
Another pointless war for the Legion to spend lives on, he thought. This kind of thing had seemed romantic when he’d enlisted, but on the ground it was stupid. Helping people who didn’t want to be helped, who hated help so much that they’d try to kill you.
He’d signed up. He didn’t recall anything in the recruitment oath about having to like it. Stupid nomads, stupid Legion, stupid American foreign policy, but nobody who counted had asked for his opinion on any of that, so…
He shifted on his feet, looking east across the camp now, and the ground beyond the dry riverbed it was in. Looking up the slope at the nearest skyline, where—
Movement. Something caught his eye.
He was raising his scope to investigate, his M-10 submachinegun still slung from his arm, when the start of a shot rang out.
Four musket balls slammed into him and the world went black.
* * *
Legion doctrine said to, when manpower permitted and in this case it did, have two sentries on shift, one visible and one well-hidden. As the muskets bloomed and his loader fell, PFC Armand Theron whirled in his foxhole to see nomads appearing – four hundred yards away and uphill, and a lot of them!
They fired their jezzails and muskets into the camp tents as they charged.
The machine-gunner was equipped with both his M-10, and the primary weapon he wasn’t going anywhere without in the field. The gun was set up on the other side of the foxhole to the rise, for no other reason than that the ground had felt a little firmer there.
But it was a few moments’ work – moments in which he shouted “Wake! Camp wake!” and the charging nomads got appreciably closer, their blades and lances gleaming in the fierce sun – to move the gun to where it faced uphill.
He set the bipod onto the ground, drew back the bolt with a practiced hand, checked the belt – there was only a single 5.56mm belt in the gun, unlinked to any of the others strung across his lean body or in their pack; he had just fifty rounds to work with right now – and aimed the squad gun at the line of nomads.
No time to miss, and he didn’t.
The gun stammered a long burst, chewing through fifteen or eighteen rounds of Theron’s one belt. Not all of them hit; there were at least a few puffs of dirt ahead of the charging-downhill nomads. But others were knocked out of their saddle, or had their zaks shot out. Aliens tumbled in the dirt; he’d gotten at least a half-dozen of them.
“Camp wake!” Theron shouted. The gunshots would do more than his shouts to alert people, of course.
Looking down the sights of the bulky machine-gun, Armand Theron fired another burst, cutting down a few more of the charging nomads. Some turned to go after him. Zak-hooves stomped as the rest of them, with their blades and lances, swept down on the camp.
* * *
“Forwards! He won’t fire into his own camp!” Sanzin son of Anhar shouted, waving a blade as more warriors fell around him. Others were diverting themselves, charging off to kill the machine-gunner.
Another sentry… an old trick, and he must have lost a quarter of his band to underestimating the weakling invaders.
The gun chattered and someone screamed, but with lances lowered the charging nomads on their zaks were nearing the camp.
* * *
Gunfire shattered Mullins’ sleep and he jolted up, reaching instinctively for the M-25 by his side. Jorgenson and the others in the tent were doing the same, Jorg going instead for his pistol.
More gunfire, machine-gun fire came, and the sound of thundering hooves.
Mullins was the man closest to the flaps of this tent and he rolled out just as a pair of nomads on zaks appeared above him, swinging long thin blades down—
At the tent’s poles and strings, not him, as they came by. He ducked away and their scything blades missed him, cutting the tent down over the others.
He fired at another nomad who came by, a lance aimed squarely at one of the figures trapped under the collapsed tent. The nomad caught Mullins’ burst square in the chest and fell forwards but his zak kept going and the lancepoint ripped through the top of the fallen tent.
Thundering hooves and swinging blades were everywhere. Mullins dodged another lance coming at him and fired, as the world became a murderous brawl.
* * *
Janja cut his way out of the tent and immediately brought his rifle up, not to fire but to block the swing of a nomad’s blade. The weapon caught it with a shock that almost knocked it out of Janja’s hand.
Dashratha was at his back, rising. In the shock of the gunshots he’d reached not for his issue M-25 but for his personal weapon, which in the case of the huge dark-skinned Rajput was a twelve-gauge automatic shotgun. It boomed, deafeningly, BLAM-BLAM-BLAM as Dashratha fired from the hip, knocking down two nomads as they dismounted to better hack at the Black Gangers in one of their collapsed tents.
“On your left!” Mandvi shouted, and Janja turned, bringing up his rifle – its bayonet unfixed – to block another swinging blade, managing to deflect it; it whicked past upwards, inches from Janja’s helmetless head.
“Fuck you!” Hill was shouting as he got to his feet and shot a nomad with his big silvery .50 handgun. It boomed in the short but muscular sergeant’s double-handed grip, and the nomad – already leaning sideways – was blown tumbling out of his saddle.
Janja reached down to his belt, which he’d worn even while asleep – although he was acutely aware of his socked, bootless feet – and drew his bayonet. In a single swift and practiced move he swing it onto the mount at the end of the gun, which had stopped two sword-blows with its barrel and which he therefore wasn’t going to risk firing until he’d given it a good inspection. Not in this kind of a fight, when he had other means—
A shouting nomad was coming at him, two bright pennants hanging from that one’s lance just before the tip. But the shouting had warned Janja, who duck-dodged the blow and then rose, stabbing up at the nomad.
“Mullins!” he called over as, amidst the tents, a nomad on foot came running up at his friend. “Behind you!”
The RTO turned and shot the nomad. Gunfire echoed all around the camp, as men fought the nomads with pistols and hand weapons amidst the cut-down tents.
* * *
Breathing hard, a crouched Mullins looked around for more nomads. There were none about to attack him; there were none at all in the wreckage that remained of the camp. Just corpses, and hurt men.
Shit. Shit.
He reached to his belt, took his half-empty bottle and swigged from it, lowering his M-25.
Shit and god damn, that had been intense. Jorgenson, at Mullins’ back, was fine, but bright red human blood covered the other part of the tent, where the two chopper pilots had been. Warrant Officer Two Senechal was up, but his co-pilot had almost been decapitated, and very definitely killed, by a nomad blade; he lay messily dead not far from Mullins’ socked feet.
Boots. Yes, boots.
He reached down, found them amidst the wreckage, and sat down to pull them on, lacing them up tightly. Someone not far was moaning in pain.
“You good, Mullins?” Lennon asked, coming over. In one hand was a pistol, in his other a b
ayonet that dripped with Qing ichor.
“Fine,” said Mullins, getting up. A gesture at the slashed-up WO1 Kennedy. “He’s not.”
“He’s beyond help,” said Jorgenson needlessly, reaching down for his own boots.
“Shit,” said Senechal, looking down at his friend. “Shit shit shit.”
“He’s beyond help,” Jorgenson repeated.
“Get the doctor,” said Senechal, holding his pistol dumbly. “If she’s alive.”
* * *
Cramer had survived the most terrifying few minutes of her life with only a cut – more like a scratch – on her shoulder. The gunfire had woken her and, wisely but for the wrong reasons, she’d hit the deck anticipating incoming fire.
There hadn’t been, but flattening herself on the ground had served her well when the nomads had come slashing in, cutting her tent down. Blades that could reach a grown figure hadn’t been able to get at one lying prone on the ground, aside from the cut that had probably come from a lance.
That cut had bled enough that the nomads must have felt they’d already killed whoever was in that tent – she had her own one, Janja and Dashratha giving theirs up and moving with Hill and Mandvi into a big one that had belonged to the deceased Gangers – and left its wreckage alone.
Now, having given her shoulder a good swab of antiseptic – God it hurt, but she’d sucked it up because she had work to do and other people were far worse off – and tied a bandage around it, she looked over the helicopter co-pilot. Yes, thoroughly dead; he’d been almost decapitated. No need to even feel for a pulse.