They were well out on the steppe, two hundred klicks northeast of Angband. The land rolled away from them, never quite flat. There was not much snow, the steppe had too little moisture for that. A dusting, in the lee of hillocks or the twisted black-reddish native scrub that grew in declivities. Half a T-day’s journey to the north was a black line, volcanic caprock eroded into badlands long ago, when the climate was wetter and summers warmer. Further eroded in duststorms since, a maze of blind canyons and cul-de-sacs. The haBandari must have hidden there, intending to take the Soldier’s tribute-collecting party by surprise and drive twice-stolen stock back into the maze.
Mumak snarled silently and increased the pace. In range, he decided, and fired from the hip, the barking of the rifle lost in the banshee shrieking of the storm. His troopers opened up as well, and even at extreme range horses went down. Men too, some staying that way, others rolling erect. Riders turned back briefly to swing some up behind them, then galloped back north. Mumak did not bother firing at the ones left behind; in this muck a human-norm would be blind anyway. Perhaps they could take a prisoner.
That thought made him happy, and not only for the approval it would bring from his superiors.
The Soldiers ran nearer, faster than horses, lighter on their feet than leopards, even in this howling darkness. Two Bandari stood at bay ... or rather, one stood and another lay tumbled beside a dead horse, and another horse ran three-legged and shrilled its agony. The standing figure was muffled from head to toe in layer upon layer of wool and fleece and quilting; sensible enough, this weather was enough to kill a human norm in minutes without such protection. It flourished a saber, defiance at the darkness, and shouted an unfamiliar warcry:
“Am Bandari Hai!” in a voice only enhanced ears could have heard.
Mumak closed in, slightly cautious. Some of the enemy had Frystaat blood, the briefings said, which could make them dangerous, even hand-to-hand . . . although a Frystaater would freeze solid like an icicle in this weather.
The saber came down at him; he slapped it out of the other’s hand with contemptuous ease. The pistol in the other hand was hidden by the sleeve of the coat, and only reflex saved him when he heard the scritch of flint striking steel. His counter to that was a fist into the short ribs, and the figure dropped like a loose sack of wet sand. Dead, he knew; he had been careless. The other Bandari was dying too. His leg had been broken by the fall, but the death-wound was self-inflicted. Breath remained for a mumble:
“. . . rael; the Lord our God, the Lord--”
Then a rattle and twitch, and stillness; Mumak could see the bodyheat fade quickly into the leaching wind, ghost-fingers of red fading out into the black chill. As if the soul left to ride the storm . . .
Superstition, he thought. His fingers snapped off the arrowhead and pulled the shaft back through his arms.
“Get their equipment,” he said. HaBandari gear was low-tech but generally well made, and on Haven you wasted nothing. “Count the herds.”
“No losses?” Mumak said.
“Not that can’t be accounted for, Assault Leader,” the Soldier said. “Some of the animals broke their necks or froze to death while we were fighting and driving them back and forth, but we’ve accounted for nearly all of them. If anything,” he went on jocularly, “there’s more stock than we started out with!”
Then this enemy raid was a complete failure, Mumak thought with satisfaction. Or as much satisfaction as you could feel when the weather seemed to be settling down to a twenty-cycle midwinter snow-and-dust storm; it was blacker than a Cyborg’s soul now that Cat’s Eye was down, and the temperature was falling rapidly.
“We’ll stop them over the ridge,” Mumak decided.
There were old stone pens there; no telling who built them, this had been ranchland since Haven was first settled by the CoDominium, back in the twenty-first century. Nearly six hundred years ago. Huddled close together with walls to break the wind, the tribute stock should come through the storm well enough. Herding was not Soldier’s work, but the Race was nothing if not adaptable.
The stock did survive, and the Soldiers huddled among them; they returned in triumph to Angband base with extra animals that would be food for the winter and extra breeding stock for the distant spring. The levied herds were driven into the valley’s communal pens, where there was no shortage of hay, at least. Then Soldier and subject alike battened down for the long scores of cycles of storm and utter cold that could be expected, while Cat’s Eye and Haven made their long slow circuit around Byers’ Sun.
The footrot and paranthrax went unnoticed until far too late. By midwinter three-quarters of the new stock and half the old were dead, and most of the meat inedible.
The ice burned Hans Gimbutas’ mouth; he spat it out and used a precious swig of hot milk and brandy from the ancient vacuum flask to warm his tongue.
“C02!” he whispered. “Pass it on!”
His lips had gone a little numb in the moment taken to speak; he rubbed them frantically with one mittened hand, as soon as the thick facemask was back in place.
At that, he was lucky they were at a broad point on the ledge, where he could use his hands without fearing the wind would pluck him off into the thousand-meter drop below.
Acknowledgments came slowly down the rope-line of climbers; now everyone knew that the crusted ice around them was carbon dioxide. He had suspected it, this well up into the Hollow Hills mountains, overlooking Tallinn Valley. Two thousand meters up, in air gray as despair, and thin, thin . . . He shook his head, slapped himself; high-altitude anoxia took your attention-span first. Then gravity would kill you, in these mountains. Swinging the ice-axe back up into his right hand, he edged another step forward, stomach pressed to the rock. That left the pack on his back well out over the abyss; ten kilos of fulgurite, much of the Pale’s remaining stock of high-intensity explosive. To his left the iron crampons of Spargo’s boots grated on rock and ice as the engineer followed him, likewise burdened.
The cave was just where the map said it would be. Praise Yeweh, from whom all goodness flows, Hans thought. And the luck of Piet. Whatever the rabbi said, there were forces of the spirit in the world; maybe Haven was too far away for the High God to notice much. Piet and Tantie Ruth were much closer, and they couldn’t be just ordinary folk, not with what they’d done and made.
Brigid was wheezing almost as loud as the pump before the little oil stove lit. Not much risk here behind a half-wall of rock, but you never knew with Saurons and their accursed IR vision. Hot eggbush tea thick with beet-sugar revived them all as they sat shoulder to shoulder about the low flame and ate, sweets and fat-rich dried stew, bodies aching for the calories lost keeping life going.
“Spargo?” Hans said at last.
“We’re here,” his younger brother rasped, unfolding the map; they were all hoarse, their throats air-burned despite every precaution. He leaned over, troll-bulky in his furs. The flickering light threw rough shadows dancing on the wall, against ancient volcanic redder than blood, over slick black patches of ice that had never melted, not since the cooling planet froze it half a billion years ago.
This must be what it’s like to be old, Hans thought, as his joints groaned and crackled with protest at his motion. He leaned over the paper . . . no, plastic. More work of the Old Ones.
His father had trained him well on contour-maps; mapmaking was a Gimbutas skill.
“Another half-day to the springs?” he said.
“More like a day, way we’re moving,” Spargo croaked.
“Yeweh and Perkunaz, I hope this works. Hate to come all this way for nothing.”
The others were slumping; he kicked feet and shook shoulders. Iron clinked on stone, the steel drills and sledgehammers ringing like a precursor of the work to come.
“Rig the windscreen,” he barked.
“It’ll work,” Spargo said, as they all huddled in the chilly darkness beneath the cloth. This was the only halfway-safe way to sleep, in a place l
ike this. Madness to come here in summer, triple madness this time of year, except that the People’s life demanded it. Air pressure dropped in winter, as gasses went solid.
“It’ll work. The rock sea’s unstable, where the hot springs come out. We’ll bring twenty thousand tonnes down on it.”
Hans grinned in the darkness, tasting salt warmth as his lips split.
“I accept full responsibility,” Base First Rank Shagrut said, bracing to attention.
The commander’s office was sealed from the outside, now; only a little warmer than it had been before the windows and shutters went in, though. The outside temperature had dropped that low, and fuel was very short.
It was dim as well, one shielded bulb, just enough for Soldier night-vision.
“Acknowledged,” Cyborg Marin said. “In any case, the damage is repairable.”
At a cost, they both knew. Thousands of tonnes of rock would have to be moved, or the Tallinn Valley’s supply of summer irrigation water would be fatally reduced, diverted underwater by the explosion and rockslide. Left unrepaired for more than a Haven year--1.63 T-years-- and the new flow would undermine the impermeable layer of basalt and wear a pathway through the soluble limestone beneath. Then without power-driven pumps it would be inaccessible forever. Most of the work would have to be done at high altitude--have to be done by Soldiers, who would then be unable to fulfill their military duties until the project was completed. There would be casualties, as well, from rockslides and accidents.
Shagrut fought an impulse to bare his teeth. He had three hundred--no, two hundred eighty-nine, now--Soldiers. More than enough to hold the entrance to Tallinn Valley, with the fort nearly done. Enough to prevent the Valley’s cattle from rising against the Race. Not enough to guard the whole perimeter of the valley and the steppe grazing lands dependent on it, not without the cooperation of the Tallinnayska.
“Two hundred more of the cattle have left the valley,” Shagrut pointed out. With the haBandari offering well-fed asylum, that was no surprise. Left unspoken was the truth that there was little point in stopping them; there was simply not enough left to feed them through the winter. Particularly when the Soldiers must patrol actively in cold weather, increasing still more their calorie intake. When summer came, their labor would be badly missed. Farming was labor-intensive work.
“Correct,” the Cyborg said; almost absently.
“Fucking loonies,” the rider beside Andries van Reenan said.
“Shut up,” he hissed back at his sister.
It was eerie. The Edenite farmers who formed the square around them were singing as they made ready to fight, a deep rolling male chorus--
“--in the blood the Lamb has shed for us
We’ll take our sacred bath:
‘Till those unrighteous sinners feel
His scalding, cleansing wrath--”
Beyond was the aching dark-blue cleanliness of a winter’s day. Only Byers’ Sun was up, and two of the companion moons, so stars were visible at the edge of sight around the horizon where the high steppe met the sky. Frozen dirt and snow creaked beneath feet, hooves, wheels. Breath fogged upwards, in a huge silence where man’s works vanished as small as toys.
The nomad winter station was about a kilometer distant; Andries pushed back his bone snow goggles and brought up the binoculars. Just lenses and wood and metal, none of the half-living Imperial technology, but they served. Low domed shapes leaped out at him, patchwork of plastic and wood and bone covered with thick felt and thicker layers of earth. Trenches where slaughter-stock were buried in permafrost in the autumn, for dwellers who kept to the high plains year-round could keep only their breeding-stock over winter. There would be grain traded or extorted from farmers, and skin sacks of frozen yoghurt, dried milk, cheese, the yield of rich summer pasture. Everything the herdsmen needed to see them through the long cycles of cold, until the chill summer awoke the screwgrass and mutated alfalfa of the pastures.
Andries shivered a little, at more than the fingers of cold stealing beneath his jacket and boiled-leather breastplate. His father had seen that he read among the few books the Band had been able to preserve--more had been kept on computers, but those were scrap now-- and he knew as few others did that the camp might have been one on Terra itself, three thousand years ago, or ten thousand. Piet had often said how amazed he was at how much the plains-dwellers had reinvented in a single generation, often guided by no more than bits of folklore. The small minority that survived the Wasting, of course.
The survivors were tough. They showed that now, boiling out of their buildings and saddling ponies from the mud-walled pens, riding howling out to meet the invaders. The horses stretched like a dun clot across the brown-white winter steppe, the others who had been shadowing the fighters from the Pale looping in to join them. There would have been more, except that nobody had believed a raid was possible in deep winter, certainly not one by farmers. They milled for a few minutes, then shook themselves out into a loose crescent behind the banners of their leaders and trotted forward. There were nearly a thousand of them, and the earth shook a little beneath the unshod hooves. He turned the focusing screw of his binoculars and scanned. Faces leapt out at him, broad and dark, some longer and hook-nosed. Crude helmets hammered from kitchenware on some, or armor of bits and pieces of metal and synthetic laced onto muskeylope hide. Their arms were bows, spears, knives, the odd saber. Most of them were descended from Central Asian nationalist deportees or even purists, who had chosen to come here to preserve the ways of their ancestors. Many of those ways, such as mounted archery, had been kept alive as sports.
“No firearms,” he said to his sister.
“Nice of the Saurons,” she replied with a feral grin. The soldati cared little if cattle fought among themselves--they even encouraged it, to improve the genetic fitness of the tribute maidens they levied for breeding purposes--but they confiscated all modem weapons in every area they controlled, and these tribes were subject to Angband Base for several years.
“I estimate about eleven hundred riders.”
Better odds than it sounded, although the fighters of the Pale were only five hundred in all. The horses of the Bandari riders in the center of the formation snorted out puffs of breath-fog and stamped at the scents of the nomad mounts, too well-trained to do more than shift uneasily. There were a hundred cavalry around the half-dozen wagons drawn by muskeylopes; equipped alike with steel bucket-helmets with a cutout for the face, body-armor of laminated leather, sabers, lances and bows. Four hundred men on foot surrounded them. Tall men of Americ blood, mostly, farmers. The first two ranks of them carried long fifteen-foot pikes; behind them were another two lines with crossbows. Their commander looked to Andries; the van Reenan nodded and swung his arm up. Vehicles and riders halted; so did the footmen. The steel cross on a long pole that was the infantry’s standard dipped.
“Pikepoints--down,” the Edenite officer called.
As if they were puppets with cut strings, the first rank of pikemen squatted, grounding the butts of their weapons and slanting them out, oval shields resting on their shoulders and the ground. The next rank knelt behind them, weapons making a bristling hedge of foot-long steel points all around the formation; it was as if a giant animal had curled in on itself, in defensive reflex. The nomads were much closer now, the sound of their yelping cries almost as loud as the hooves. They checked slightly as the spears leveled, then spurred their horses the harder, howling and bending their stiff horn-backed bows. The first shower of arrows rattled off the overlapping shields, and here and there a man reeled back clutching at the iron that pierced his flesh, screaming or slumping. Blood was very bright against the dun colors of winter soil. Muskeylopes fretted in harness at the scent, and their drivers walked along the lines, patting and soothing.
The nomad wings were encircling the Pale formation, and the Edenite looked back at Andries, eyes worried beneath his iron-strapped leather helmet. The younger man forced himself to impassiveness as he r
aised one arm. He had fought before, often enough--everyone in the Pale had, save for children and some Edenite women, it was necessary--but this was his first time in independent command of so large a force.
“Now!” His arm chopped down, and beside him Miriam sounded a blatting cry on the ram’s horn.
The first rank of crossbowmen fired, a deep thrumming sound from their powerful steel-bowed weapons. Horses and men screamed amid the onrushing nomads, as the short heavy quarrels with their four-edged points slammed home through leather and wood and metal.
The first rank stepped back, dropping the front ends of their crossbows to the ground and pinning them with one foot while they cranked at the windlasses that rewound them. The second rank stepped into their places, aimed. The ram’s horn sounded again, and the bolts snapped out almost too fast to see as they sleeted into the horsemen, behind Andries, the Band horse-archers were loosing as well from the saddle, arching shots over the infantry and into the rear ranks of the herdsmen. The haBandari pulley-bow had almost as much power as a steel crossbow, and more range.
Pa trained us well, Andries thought, looking at the mounds of dead and wounded around three sides of the square. Then the horsemen were at the line of pikes. Weapons stabbed out, jabbing into bellies and chests; horses reared, screaming like women in childbirth. Men from the reserve darted forward, Edenites with long axes, chopping blades on one side and hooks on the other; others swung sledgehammers. He saw nomads pulled from the saddle and beaten down under the iron. Then there was a multiple ratcheting click as the crossbowmen finished reloading and levelled their weapons. The nomads were scattering away before the second volley came.
“Open!” Andries shouted. His glove was a legacy from his father, with a never-failing clock woven into the surface. Only five minutes since the first crossbow bolt.
War World IV: Invasion Page 30
