With growing determination, Greg pulled the slide back on the Colt and released it, letting it chamber a round. Calmly, he pushed the magazine release button and caught the two-tone device. Fishing in his pocket, he thumbed a copper-nosed cartridge in on top of the others, then shoved the magazine back into the well until it latched.
“About two hundred yards, Skipper,” Saaran-Gaani shouted, barely audibly.
“Very well,” Garrett replied. “Let’s go to canister,” he recommended. “Lieutenant Bekiaa, commence firing at your discretion.”
General Halik had never seen anything like it. He was accustomed to small-scale combat, one-on-one, in the sport-fighting arena. Even before, when he’d been part of larger actions against other Grik, “his” battles had been narrowly viewed from his own perspective without thought for the larger issue. Now he watched from a distance, not so different from those who once viewed his fights so many times in the past, but he’d designed this attack, he and Niwa, based on fundamental principles he’d learned in the arena. Feint, slash, parry; the unexpected blow from the side, the demonstration to gain an opponent’s attention while preparing a blow from a neglected quarter—all were appropriate here, writ large, and yet . . .
“The enemy fights well,” he admitted grudgingly. “They react much quicker, I think, than we would in similar circumstances.” The “amphibious” attack across the river mouth was disintegrating, each barge full of Grik savaged in turn, with no opportunity to reply, by typhoons of small projectiles—“canister and grape,” fired by those three heavy guns. The heavier thrust at the center had been decimated as well, by canister, arrows, and musket fire, but at least it could respond, and it hit the enemy defenses with an awesome crash clearly audible over the other thunders of battle. He saw nothing of the attack from the sea, but the back mast on the stranded ship had fallen.
“They’re all ‘Hij,’ General Halik,” said Niwa. He’d rejoined the Grik leader after watching the waterborne assault depart. The confusion and chaos he’d witnessed, even among their “better” troops, appalled him. “That’s something even First General Esshk has difficulty comprehending. The lowliest warrior in their ranks can recognize the ebbs and flows of battle, or call attention to perceived threats. Of course they react more quickly.” He paused. “The barges are a waste of Uul. If that attack had begun in darkness, it would have fared better.”
“Probably, but it still serves a purpose. It is the blunted jab that holds a portion of the opponent’s attention. When he is forced to forget it by the battering sword, it might yet become the fatal thrust.” He snorted apologetically. “I am new at this. I have never even faced this enemy before.” He hissed a sigh. “I do not expect the ‘prisoners’ we’d hoped for, but I am learning from them.”
“Remember, these are castaways, stranded warriors with no support,” Niwa warned. “The larger force will be more difficult.”
“I understand, but still I learn how the enemy thinks and fights. I see for myself the value of prepared defenses, these ‘breastworks’! Once our armies learn to use such things, at need, do you believe they could be dislodged?”
“No,” Niwa said.
The tumult of battle reached a crescendo, and the enemy line began to falter in the center.
“Look! Oh, look, General Niwa!” Halik cried. “We have broken through!” He looked at Niwa. “Let us send a company of our ‘special troops’ to join this exercise!”
Greg Garrett inserted his last magazine and racked the slide. Grik were in the trench behind the breastworks! The line had been holding well enough and with his limited view, he’d begun to feel a sense of optimism. Then, with a suddenness that left his thoughts reeling, the shield wall at the barricade simply disintegrated under the unexpected weight of a solid block of Grik reinforcements. He saw Graana-Fas thrust upward with a spear from the bottom of the trench, impaling a squalling Grik, and sling it among the wavering troops behind him. While he was thus occupied, more enemies leaped down upon him, and he fell beneath their hacking swords and gnashing teeth and claws. Greg fired at them, but one shot was spoiled when Bekiaa, covered in blood, dragged him out of the trench to the rear, where another shield wall was trying to form.
“Where’s Saaran?” he yelled, but Bekiaa didn’t respond. Grik were milling in the trench below, their wickedly barbed crossbow bolts flying past in thrumming sheets. Garrett fired down into the momentarily stalled Grik, joining a volley of muskets and arrows that piled them deep in the damp sand. His slide locked back.
“Here!” Bekiaa screeched, handing him a musket, a bloody, blackened bayonet fastened to the muzzle. “Find ammunition!” Bekiaa had a musket now as well. Greg scooped a black cartridge box out of the sand and glanced inside. Empty. He saw another and opened the flap, discovering three paperlike cartridges, each containing a .60-caliber ball and a trio of “buckshot” atop a load of powder. He had some caps in his shirt pocket already—just in case. Loading as he’d been trained, he joined the fusillade firing into the trench, yelling as savagely and incoherently as any of the ’Cats forming alongside him. Shields protected him now, placed there by Lemurians joining them from other parts of the line. A bolt grazed his inner forearm as he rammed down his final charge, and he looked up for a moment. Uncountable Grik had assembled beyond the trench, pausing for an instant across what had become a river of corpses they could almost walk across.
“Form square!” Bekiaa thundered.
Square? But that must mean . . . They were surrounded. Somehow, the line at the breastworks had fallen apart across a broad front. Only a few of the great guns spoke now, those facing the river, and maybe a couple on the extreme right, near the ship. Donaghey’s guns still thundered furiously, but none was directed at the Grik infantry anymore, and Greg smelled wood smoke in the air.
He’d seen Lemurian Marines form a square only once before, and that had also been at the Battle of Aryaal—when everything fell apart. They’d saved themselves, managing to retreat in good order while embracing troops from other broken regiments. They did the same now, creating a temporary shield-studded barricade that sailors and other Marines could join, but this time, they had nowhere to go. The Grik were streaming across the trench now, and he poked at them with his bayonet as they came snarling toward him, battering at the shields with their sickle-shaped swords and their own bodies, slashing and gnawing with their teeth.
“I need ammunition!” he cried.
“There is no more,” Jamie Miller shouted. Somehow, the young surgeon had joined him in the press, a spear in his hands. The kid looked wounded, wearing so much blood, but didn’t act like it.
“We have to make it to the ship,” Greg roared. “Bekiaa? Can we move the square to the ship?”
“What good will that do?”
Greg wasn’t sure. He assumed Pruit still had something there, and if they could get more people aboard her, they might still ply Donaghey’s landward guns. But he couldn’t see the ship anymore, over the mass of furry-feathery, reptilian shapes, and the wood smoke was growing thicker. Bekiaa probably thought Donaghey was afire. If she was . . . But trying to fight their way to Chapelle was impossible. It was twice as far, and there wasn’t even the chance of more ammunition in that direction. “Just do it, damn it! It’s our only choice!”
Slowly, the square moved like a vast turtle festooned with thousands of crossbow bolts jutting from shields like porcupine quills. The Grik seemed to divine their intent, and fought even more furiously to hold them in place and finish them. Wounded ’Cats fell and were left for the enemy to shred. Grik waved body parts, arms and legs, and even battered at the shields with the macabre clubs.
“Don’t stop!” Bekiaa shrilled, her voice beginning to go. Greg had always been amazed by the volume Lemurians could achieve, but Bekiaa’s voice was nearly finished.
“Don’t stop!” he repeated, over and over. “We can’t help the wounded. Stay on your feet, whatever you do. If you fall, you’re dead!”
As if
his words had summoned the bolt, Jamie Miller fell to the sand, black fletching on a dark shaft protruding from his side, his boyish face already pale and slack.
“No!”
“Leave me!” gurgled the former pharmacist’s mate, blood erupting from his mouth to pour down his beardless chin. Greg didn’t even stop to consider the hypocrisy. He grabbed the boy’s arm and tried to drag him, but Jamie pitched forward, face in the sand, and became a deadweight.
“No!”
“You must leave him,” Bekiaa croaked, moving beside him now. “He’s dead,” she pronounced gently. With tears welling in his sweat- and grime-crusted eyes, Garrett released the boy’s arm, feeling the lifeless fingers pass through his. Someone else had taken up his cry in Lemurian: “Don’t stop! Don’t stop!”
The shields were falling apart under the constant drumming of bolts, and more and more sailors and Marines fell in the painfully bright sand, staining it dark and red. Through it all, they continued to kill, and the enemy losses were disproportionately high, but Garrett had concluded that didn’t matter; the Grik reserves seemed infinite, and the square was all he knew anymore. He lost the musket, wrenched from his hands, and with none of the reservations he’d felt before, the cutlass came from its scabbard. Soon it was notched and black with blood.
He heard the surf, and thirst and exhaustion threatened to overwhelm him. The sun was high overhead, the sweltering heat a torment as harsh as death. He knew he couldn’t drink seawater, but he thought if they reached the ocean, he might take a moment to sip from his canteen. His personal war became one of reaching water, if only for the momentary relief it might bring. Smoke dried his throat even worse. It had reached a point where it stung his eyes and made it nearly impossible to breathe. Donaghey must be burning . . . yet her guns still fired. In his muddled mind, he couldn’t reconcile that.
Through the gasping, panting, trilling, and screaming of his comrades, he heard a different sound; shouts of encouragement, congratulation, relief. Still the chant “Don’t stop!” continued, but in a stronger, persuasive tone. A nearby crash of an eighteen-pounder stunned him, but it brought him out of the metronomic, cutlass-swinging zone he’d entered, and he glanced to his right, through the pink smear of sweat and blood clouding his vision.
At the water’s edge, a new, hasty breastworks had been added to the old, and two guns barked again, geysering sand into the air and sweeping down a mass of Grik rushing to get between Bekiaa’s square and the haven the works represented. The avenue momentarily clear, the square shattered and raced for the trench.
“Hurry, hurry!” came the shouts now. “Get your tails clear!” Almost before the last survivors staggered over the barricade, a stunning volley of arrows and “buck and ball” slammed the pursuing Grik to a juddering halt.
“Lay it on!” came Pruit Barry’s voice. “Hammer ’em! Fire at will!” For a few moments, the faster-firing arrows took up the slack, but soon the first muskets began crackling again. Greg stumbled toward Barry.
“My God, Greg,” Pruit said, “you look awful!”
“I feel awful,” Greg croaked, opening his canteen at last and taking a long gulp. He looked at Donaghey a short distance away, surrounded by swirling foam. She looked worse than he felt, but there were no flames. “I thought she was burning,” he said. “Where’s all the smoke coming from?”
Pruit shook his head. “Of the three sailing frigates we built, she’s always been charmed. Faster, tougher, prettier . . . She’s destroyed six gun-armed Grik ships while beached, for cryin’ out loud! All the smoke’s from one of the last three, half-sunk, aground, and burning a couple hundred yards to seaward. The other two were dismasted coming in. I bet they wind up near the one from last night.”
“Not charmed,” Garrett said. “Just damn good gunnery. Smitty deserves a medal when we finally get around to making some. So do you.”
To punctuate the statement, one of Donaghey’s landward guns sent a roundshot churning through the momentarily checked Grik horde, spewing weapons and body parts in all directions. The Grik reacted little, beyond waving their weapons and hissing louder.
“I guess she’s out of canister,” Greg observed. “Roundshot’s okay with them bunched up like that, but canister would be better.” He pointed at Pruit’s magazine pouches, and Barry handed over a couple.
“I wonder why they stopped?” Bekiaa asked, referring to the Grik as she joined them. Her once-white leather armor no longer showed any white at all. She gasped her thanks when Pruit handed her his canteen.
“I don’t know. Orders, I guess. Imagine that. We stopped ’em, sure, but normally they’d’ve come on again by now.” He gestured around. “And we’ll stop ’em again. After that? I bet we’re down to three hundred effectives. God knows if Chapelle’s even alive.” He snorted. “Eventually, they can just walk across us and stomp us to death.”
“Cap-i-taan!” someone shouted. “Something happens!” Barry and Garrett both trotted to the breastworks. Resentful-looking Grik were making a lane for something coming through their ranks.
“What the hell?”
Oddly attired—uniformed—Grik trotted through the gap and formed two ranks facing the barricade. For a moment, the shooting stopped while the allies, amazed, watched this very un-Grik-like behavior.
“What are they carrying?” Bekiaa asked. They look like . . .” She hefted her weapon. “Kind of like muskets!”
“God almighty! I think they are!” Garrett said, recognizing the shape, if not the function. They were long, fish-tail-looking things, with levers underneath instead of trigger guards, and an odd arrangement on the side held what looked like a piece of smoldering match. “Shoot them!” he commanded.
‘What’s the matter with you, you bunch of fuzzy goofs?” Barry yelled. “Fire!”
Immediately, muskets resumed crackling and arrows swooshed. The uniformed Grik began to fall, and those behind them recoiled a bit from the renewed fusillade, bellowing their rage and frustration. But the front ranks of the Grik, even while taking casualties and blocking the replying bolts of those behind them, stood impassive, enduring the beating without apparent notice. One of the strange Grik horns brayed in the distance—a new note—and the enemy raised awkward-looking guns with all the appearance of taking deliberate aim.
“I’ll be da . . .” Pruit began, but the Grik volley silenced him forever. A ball—it had to be a ball—struck him above the left eye and the side of his head erupted pink, flinging him backward into the trench. He wasn’t alone, and there were cries of confusion and pain.
“Kill them!” Garrett roared, and the ’Cats around him roared as well, in anguish and anger. The horn squawked again, joined by many more, making a dreadful, familiar sound. The rest of the Grik charged.
“Now, at last I see what we face,” Halik remarked grimly, watching the final, remorseless assault. There’d be no stopping it this time; the numbers were too overwhelming for the pitifully few enemy survivors to resist. “That . . . formation . . . the enemy assumed, to join those others by the sea . . . masterful! How can they achieve such a thing, even in the face of certain defeat?”
Niwa recognized what could only be admiration in the Grik general’s voice. “It is called courage, General Halik,” he said, oddly sick at heart. “Grik Uul are capable of fantastic discipline; they fling themselves forward with no regard for themselves—usually—but they’re driven by instinct, urges they don’t understand. Much of that ‘instinct’ is conditioned, but it serves the same purpose. The vast difference is that they obey commands to do what they’re conditioned and instinctively inclined to do. Our enemies, the human Americans and Lemurians, ‘tree folk,’ each recognize the danger and challenge as well as any Hij, as I said. They stand and fight with their hearts and minds while retaining the ability to think and plan, even until the very end.” He gestured toward the distant ship and the rapidly shrinking semicircle around it in the surf. “They know they’re doomed, General, but still most do not ‘fall prey.
’”
“Our ‘special troops’ performed well in their initial trial,” Halik pointed out.
Niwa nodded. “Yes. I saw none flee. The survivors will make excellent trainers and ‘firsts of twenty’ or more, but was it courage that made them stand, or merely more intense conditioning? That’s the key question. How can we build true courage among ‘our’ warriors?”
Halik was at a loss. “I honestly do not know. How exactly is this ‘courage’ formed?”
“Think. You managed it on your own. It must be built atop a foundation few Uul survive to lay: character . . . and a cause.”
Halik’s crest suddenly rose. Distant from the fighting, he’d been holding his helmet under his arm. “What is that annoying sound?”
Niwa heard nothing over the climactic roar that heralded the final moments of the battle. Soon it would be over, and all the defenders slain. “I don’t know,” he said, surprisingly glum, but then he did.
Suddenly, six very peculiar-looking craft—aircraft!—lumbered over the trailing mass of Grik warriors, jostling to get in the fight. They were clearly seaplanes, strangely reminiscent of the American PBY Niwa had seen. American insignias were distinct on their blue-and-white wings and forward fuselage. Over the horde, barrels detached and plummeted down, cracking open and spilling their contents in the sand. A few warriors were crushed, but Niwa was too stunned to suspect what was to come. The first flight pulled up and away, banking east over the water, their motors audible now over the hush that had fallen over the horde. Another flight came in, a little higher. Small objects fell, apparently thrown or dropped by someone in the back part of each plane. Realization dawned and despite their distance, Niwa pulled Halik to the ground as the beach erupted in a long, orange fireball that roiled with greasy black smoke.
Firestorm : Destroyermen (9781101544556) Page 20
