by David Weber
Which doesn’t mean it can’t still end up costing like Shan-wei, he reflected grimly.
At least those same spy reports confirmed that Rychtyr hadn’t received any of the new Temple Boy rockets. Apparently, every rocket Dohlar could produce was earmarked for the kingdom’s coastal defenses while Temple Lands rocket production was all going to the Mighty Host of God and the Archangels. That wasn’t going to make things any easier for Baron Green Valley and Duke Eastshare—or for Earl Sharpfield and Baron Sarmouth, for that matter—but Hanth couldn’t pretend he wasn’t happy his boys weren’t going to be facing them.
He gazed at the map for another few minutes, then pulled out his watch, opened it, and checked the time.
“Why don’t we take this outside, gentlemen?” he said with a wintry smile as he snapped the case shut again. He took another sip of cherrybean, and nodded at the tent fly open on the Dohlaran night. “I expect the light show to be pretty spectacular.”
* * *
It was a beautiful night, for certain values of the word “beautiful.” If one was an admirer of moonlight and clear, starry skies, then that would not have been the word one would have chosen. If, on the other hand, one was a combat engineer charged with clearing a path through a field of footstools—what a denizen of Old Terra would have called landmines—it was gorgeous. Not that it didn’t have certain drawbacks even from that perspective.
Lieutenant Klymynt Hahrlys crawled forward on his belly, inching through the warm, humid darkness and coated in sweat that owed nothing to the overcast night’s closeness. Well, perhaps a little bit, he reflected as he paused to lay down his prodding tool, swipe at the sweat glazing his carefully blackened face, and blot his palm dry on the leg of his trousers. Then he picked the probe back up and began edging forward again, prodding gently and cautiously at the ground before him in a carefully planned and practiced arc.
He really ought to be leaving this to his noncoms and enlisted personnel while he stayed back and supervised, and he knew it. He also knew Captain Maizak was going to rip a strip off his hide when he found out how 2nd Platoon’s CO had spent the evening. It had been drummed into him that an officer’s true duties were managerial. He was supposed to run his platoon efficiently, make sure its training was up to snuff, that its men were healthy and well fed, and that they understood—and accomplished—whatever tasks they were assigned. That had damn-all to do with things like gallantry, and—as Captain Maizak had pointed out a bit acidly after the Zhonesberg attack—the inspirational value of leading his men from the front wouldn’t be especially useful if he managed to get himself blown up in the process.
On the other hand, he also knew Maizak’s heart wouldn’t really be in it. For that matter, if he was truly lucky, Maizak was out doing exactly the same thing he was on this fine, cloudy night.
The Imperial Charisian Army had determined that the Royal Dohlaran Army’s version of its own footstools were both larger than its own and made of wood. Their wooden construction made them more susceptible to leaks and rot, so it was unlikely they’d last as long as the Charisian versions once they’d been emplaced. Probably a quarter of the footstools out here were already inoperable, thanks to the last five-day’s rain, and their larger size made each of them a larger target for detection, too.
Neither of which things made him feel one bit better at the moment.
Somebody’s got to do it, Klymynt, he reflected. And in the Army, “somebody” is usually the poor bloody engineers.
He would vastly have preferred to be doing this in daylight … if not for the minor drawback that a Dohlaran sniper would almost certainly have blown his brains out. As it was, the clouds along the eastern horizon had begun to show the very faintest hint of gray behind him, which made the darkness in front of him even blacker. That didn’t make his present task any easier, but in another twenty or thirty minutes that eastern sky was going to be far brighter. That would make it far easier to spot any footstools. Unfortunately, it would also make it far easier for that Dohlaran sniper to spot him.
Actually, the odds were substantially in his favor at the moment, despite—or perhaps because of—the darkness. He knew that, but he also knew at least some of his men were going to crap out. Sooner or later—and probably sooner—one of them was going to detonate a footstool rather than detect it with the curved tip of his five-foot probe. Hahrlys didn’t like that, and he knew Colonel Sylvstyr, the 19th Combat Engineer Battalion’s CO, didn’t like it, either. That didn’t change the fact that somebody had to do it or that one of the unpleasant truths about armies was that they suffered casualties. The object of a good army was to suffer as few of them as possible, and Hahrlys and his highly trained, veteran engineers were going to take a hell of a lot fewer than a couple of infantry battalions attacking across an uncleared field of footstools would.
Yeah, but those casualties wouldn’t be my people, he thought grimly. And, for that matter—
He swung his probe to the right once more, a precisely metered eighteen inches and brought its curved tip down again.
Thunk.
He froze as he heard the unmistakable sound of steel on wood.
“Got one,” he whispered very, very quietly, and a hand pressed his right bootheel in acknowledgment.
Corporal Fhranklyn Sygzbee, 2nd Platoon’s runner—known, more or less affectionately, to his platoon mates as “Clumsy”—had kept his mouth shut when he learned his lieutenant intended to crawl around in the dark along with the rest of the platoon and had nominated him as his partner, but his expression had been eloquent. Hahrlys couldn’t quite decide whether Sygzbee’s … limited enthusiasm had more to do with the possibility of being blown up or the possibility of seeing Hahrlys blown up and then returning to face Platoon Sergeant Tyllytsyn.
The lieutenant chuckled softly at the thought. Then he pressed himself as closely as possible to the ground and moved the probe again, very gently, trying to find the dimensions of the damned thing. After several seconds of careful probing, he was reasonably confident he had the footstool located, and he drove the probe firmly through the soil covering it and into the wood of its case, anchoring the curved, sharply pointed steel tip.
He crawled towards it very carefully, following the shaft of his probe, using it to position himself. When he was within arm’s reach of the probe’s tip, he ran his hand forward along the shaft and felt for the footstool’s case—or detonator or tripwire—with gentle fingertips.
Funny. The night hadn’t gotten any warmer, but he was absolutely saturated with sweat as those fingertips found the telltale mounded earth. Fortunately, the Dohlarans’ doctrine for footstool use was still in the developmental stage. They weren’t as careful about leveling the ground when they emplaced them as they ought to be—not that Klymynt Hahrlys had any intention of complaining!
He and his men had spent hours playing with inert copies of the Dohlaran footstools which had been brought back by the Army of Thesmar’s scout sniper patrols. There were two main versions, and Hahrlys’ fingertips quickly identified this one as a Type I: a wooden case approximately fourteen inches wide, ten inches from front to back, and six inches deep, filled with black powder under a layer of old-style musket balls. The Type II was nastier, in a lot of ways: a wooden case topped with a built-up dome formed out of pitch as a matrix to hold sixty-five musket balls. It was designed to throw them in a hemispherical pattern, almost like one of the ICA’s “sweepers,” and its lethal zone was considerably wider than the straight-up cone of a Type I even though its directional pattern was more limited than a sweeper’s.
If it was a Type I, then the detonator ought to be … right about.…
There! His fingertips found the raised bridge of the pressure switch. The Type I used an internal percussion lock for detonation, but the trigger was a rectangular plate that was pulled up and turned through ninety degrees to arm it. And that meant.…
“Type I,” he told Sygzbee softly. “Got the bridge. Pass me a wedge.”
> He reached back with his left hand, never taking his right off of the pressure switch. The last thing he needed now was to lose the damned thing in the dark and have to find it all over again.
Something pressed his left hand, and he closed his fingers on one of the precisely shaped wooden wedges from Corporal Sygzbee’s backpack. It was awkward to squirm around on his belly to get both hands on the footstool, but he managed and held his breath as he very, very gently slid the wedge under the raised bridge. He pushed it firmly home, careful to exert steady pressure rather than jam it into place, then exhaled the breath he hadn’t realized he was holding.
“Flag,” he murmured, and Sygzbee passed him the four-inch-long orange pennant fastened to the thin eighteen-inch steel pin. He pushed the sharp end of the pin into the ground right next to the footstool, then rolled onto his side, leaning on one elbow to look back at the corporal, only dimly visible even to his darkness accustomed eyes, despite his proximity.
“Charge,” he said, and Sygzbee handed across the modified hand grenade for Hahrlys to nestle into the dirt covering the footstool.
The corporal had attached the grenade to the strong length of quick match which had been unreeling from the spool clipped to his web gear. There were already fourteen grenades spaced out behind them, all connected by the same quick match, and Hahrlys made sure the match was spiked firmly to the ground between the fifteenth grenade and the length still unreeling behind Sygzbee. In theory, when the time came, the quick match would be lit and each of the grenades strung along it would detonate, taking its footstool with it. Assuming that failed, the flag should alert any advancing Charisian infantryman to the footstool’s presence. And assuming that failed, the wedge should prevent the bridge from being depressed and setting the damn thing off even if some poor sod stepped right on top of it.
Now if there’s just not a tripwire backup that I missed finding, we’re golden, Hahrlys thought.
“All right, I guess we’ve rested long enough,” he whispered.
“Seems that way to me, anyway, Sir,” another voice observed softly, barely audible above the quiet sigh of the wind, from the darkness to their left where Corporal Ahlvyn Ahdahmski and Private Zhon Vyrnyn were assigned to clear the northern flank of their lane. “Don’t want to sound like I’m complaining,” Ahdahmski continued, “but you and Clumsy’re making an awful lot of racket.”
“That’s because some of us are actually finding the Shan-wei-damned things,” Hahrlys whispered back a bit pointedly, and Sygzbee chuckled sourly. “Don’t tell me you’re going to let an officer find more of them than you do!”
“Does seem unnatural, doesn’t it?” Ahdahmski acknowledged.
“Damned right it does. And I think we’re getting close enough it’d probably be a good idea to keep your mouth shut, Ahlvyn.”
“Good point, Sir.” Ahdahmski’s whispered response was the next best thing to impossible to hear, even from a distance of less than twenty feet, and Hahrlys grunted in soft approval as he began crawling slowly ahead once more. The admonition probably hadn’t been truly necessary … yet, at least. By his calculations, they were still at least two hundred yards from the Dohlarans’ most advanced listening posts. But it was always possible his estimate was wrong … or that they’d decided to move their pickets forward, just to be difficult. It was the sort of thing the irritatingly competent bastards were likely to do, although they wouldn’t want to get too far out into their own footstools.
Well, if the gun dogs are on schedule, they’ll have something else to be listening to any minute now, wherever the hell they are, he reflected. And when that happens—
His probe touched something, and Lieutenant Klymynt Hahrlys had just under two seconds to realize he’d found another footstool before the tripwire he’d snagged detonated the Type II and a storm front of musket balls killed him instantly.
* * *
“Somebody in the Kau-yungs!” Private Yaisu Rahdryghyz shouted as the brilliant explosion flared in the darkness.
The private was part of a three-man picket from 2nd Platoon of Captain Ahbaht Mahrtynez’ company of Colonel Efrahm Acairverah’s infantry regiment. It was the third night in a row he’d had the duty, and he’d been looking forward to going off watch in another couple of hours. He could think of very few things which simultaneously produced so much nervous tension and boredom as sitting here in the dark, staring out into more dark, for five-days on end with absolutely nothing happening. If not for the heretics’ nasty habit of sneaking their damn scout snipers all the way across the defensive zone to cut some poor damned sentry’s throat, boring was all it would have been.
Frankly, Rahdryghyz would have been simply delighted to be bored.
Not happening tonight, he thought, straining his eyes as the explosive crack of the detonating Kau-yung rolled over him and he peered towards the afterimage of its blinding flash.
There’d been a few of those detonations over the last couple of five-days. A lot of them had been stray livestock or local wildlife, but three of the heretic scout snipers had been killed in 1st Platoon’s area night before last. So this could be something a lot more important than another unlucky grass lizard or prong buck. He was still blinking his eyes against the flash, trying to decide exactly where it had been, when someone slid into his lizard hull with him.
“Where was it?” Corporal Ahndru Nohceeda asked.
“Hard to say,” Rahdryghyz replied. “Wasn’t looking right at it when it went off, but it looked like it was maybe a hundred, a hundred and fifty yards out.”
“Think it was another prong buck?”
“Now, how in Shan-wei am I supposed to know that?” Rahdryghyz demanded. “It’s blacker’n Shan-wei’s boots out there! If it was a prong buck, though, it got through a hell of a lot of other Kau-yungs before it set one off!”
“Got a point,” Nohceeda conceded. He put two fingers into his mouth and whistled. “Raidahndo!”
“Yo!” Private Ahbsahlahn Raidahndo acknowledged from his own lizardhole, fifteen yards behind Rahdryghyz’ position.
“Get back to the CP. Tell Lieutenant Ulysees we just saw—”
Dawn came early in a rolling crescendo of thunder.
* * *
The single rocket burst in crimson splendor against the moonless sky two miles behind the Army of Thesmar’s front lines. It blazed there for long seconds, floating slowly down under its parachute. The night seemed to hold its breath as the fuming red eye slid down it, and then the massed artillery which had awaited its presence spoke.
The heavy angle-guns had been in place for almost a month, preparing for this moment. Each battery had been allowed to range in one gun, determining deflection and elevation for each of its assigned targets. There’d been no heavy bombardments to warn the Dohlarans of what those targets were, and the ranging shots had been hidden as “random” harassing fire. Now that carefully prepared artillery—deployed in a gun line almost ten miles long—opened fire. The eruption began in the center, running out towards either end, and hundreds of heavy shells painted streaks of fire across the night.
Fifteen seconds later, the mortar companies just behind the Charisian frontline positions joined the holocaust. Airburst antipersonnel mortar bombs exploded like brief, hateful suns, sending their deadly showers of shrapnel down to search every fold and hollow.
The torrent of fire arced across the ground between the armies’ front lines, a canopy of thunderous flame above the engineers still picking their careful way through the defensive fields of footstools.
Beneath that canopy, Platoon Sergeant Gyffry Tyllytsyn gently closed his lieutenant’s eyes. He looked down at the dead young man he’d followed so far, looked after so long, for fifteen or twenty seconds, his face carved out of stone in the reflected fury of the bombardment. Then he drew a deep breath and patted Hahrlys once on the chest.
“All right!” He had to clear his throat twice to get it out, but that was all right. His voice could barely be heard over the s
teadily swelling bellow of the guns, anyway. “We’ve got a job to finish for the Lieutenant, so let’s get to it!”
* * *
“Get your heads down! Get your heads down!” Lieutenant Ulysees shouted, and heard Platoon Sergeant Gyairmoh Sahlazhar repeating the order.
Here and there, someone cried out in alarm as the shower of heretic angle-gun shells grew from a thunderstorm’s first, scattered raindrops into the catastrophic downpour of a fiery typhoon. For the most part, though, his men responded with almost instant, wordless discipline. They were veterans, every one of them, and they went deep in their individual lizardholes or rolled into one of the deep, heavily sandbagged bunkers.
His pride in them swelled fiercely, but there was an arsenic-bitter edge to that pride. They’d fought so hard, so tenaciously. Taken so much pride in their long, fighting retreat—in knowing they were the one army the heretics had fully engaged which had survived the experience. The Army of the Sylmahn, the Army of Glacierheart, the Army of Shiloh … the heretics had utterly destroyed each of them. But the Army of the Seridahn had fought them every step of the way, over seven hundred miles from Cheryk to the Tyzwail Line, without ever once breaking. It had been close a time or two, perhaps, but the men had always remembered who they were, rallied again and again.
And now, at last, that spirit, the tenacity which had carried them so far, was beginning to erode. Ulysees wasn’t supposed to know about the whispers, the quiet discussions where no inquisitor’s ears were likely to hear. Wasn’t supposed to know some of them had come to refer to this as “Clyntahn’s War,” and not the Jihad. Wasn’t supposed to know how his men had reacted to the news about Earl Thirsk’s family. And he wasn’t supposed to know about the steady, ominous corrosion of his men’s confidence as one disaster after another rolled in from the Gulf of Dohlar—disasters made ever so much worse in the wake of the RDN’s victory in the Kaudzhu Narrows.