by David Weber
“What—?” Urthank started, but Marhn cut him off with a savage wave.
“Somehow the demon-worshipers got ’round behind us. They’ve taken the bridges, and they’re advancing fast.” Urthank paled, and Marhn shook his head. “Get back there. Send in the Ninth and Eighteenth Pikes. You won’t be able to hold, but slow them up enough to buy me some time!”
“Yes, Sir!” Urthank saluted and disappeared, and Marhn began bellowing orders to a flock of messengers.
* * *
The Ninth Pikes thudded through the mud towards the clamor in their rear, and their eyes were wild. There’d been no time for their officers to explain fully, but the Ninth were veterans. They knew what would happen if the heretics weren’t stopped.
The Eighteenth turned up on their left, and whistles shrilled as their officers brought them to a slithering, panting halt. A forest of five-meter pikes snapped into fighting position, and eight thousand men settled into formation as the wailing Malagoran pipes swept down upon them.
Folmak reined in so violently his branahlk skidded on its haunches as the Guard phalanx materialized out of the rain. Lord Sean had warned him the surprise wouldn’t last, and he’d managed—somehow—to keep his men together as they swept across the Guard’s rear areas. The clutter of tents and wagons and lean-tos had made it hard, yet he’d kept his brigade in hand, and he felt a stab of thankfulness that he had.
But he was also well out in front, and half his third regiment had been left behind to hold the bridges. He had little more than fifteen hundred men, barely a sixth of the numbers suddenly drawn up across his front, and not a single pike among them.
That phalanx wouldn’t stop the regiments coming up behind him, but he couldn’t let them stop him, either. If the Guard realized how outnumbered its attackers were and won time to recover, it had more than enough power to crush Lord Sean’s entire force.
“First Battalion—action front!” he screamed, and whistles shrilled.
His men responded instantly. First Battalion of Second Regiment, his leading formation, deployed into firing line on the run, and the officer commanding the Guard pikes hesitated. All he knew was that his position was under attack, and the visibility was so bad he couldn’t begin to estimate Folmak’s numbers. Rather than charge forward in ignorance, he paused, trying to get some idea of what he was up against, and that hesitation gave First Battalion time to deploy in a two-deep firing line and the rest of Folmak’s men time to tighten their own formation behind them. It was still looser than it should have been, but Folmak sensed the firming resolution of his opponents. There was no time for further adjustment.
“Fire!” he bellowed.
Almost a third of the First’s rifles misfired, but there were three hundred of them. Two hundred-plus rifles blazed at less than a hundred meters’ range, and the Guardsmen recoiled in shock as, for the first time in Pardalian history, men with fixed bayonets poured fire into their opponents.
“At ’em, Malagorans!” Folmak howled. “Chaaaarge!”
* * *
The Guard formation wavered as the bullets slammed home. At such short range, a rifled joharn would penetrate five inches of solid wood, and a single shot could kill or maim two or even three men. The shock of receiving that fire was made even worse by the fact that it came from bayoneted weapons, and then, against every rule of warfare, musketeers actually charged pikemen!
The Guardsmen couldn’t believe it. Musketeers ran away from pikes—everyone knew that! But these musketeers were different. The column behind exploded through the firing line and hit the Eighteenth Pikes like a tidal bore. Dozens, scores of them, died on the bitter pikeheads, but while the Guardsmen were killing them, their companions hurled themselves in among the pikes, and the Guard discovered a lethal truth. Once a phalanx’s front was broken, once the Malagorans could get inside the pikes’ longer reach, bayoneted rifles were deadly melee weapons. They were shorter, lighter, faster, and these men knew how to use them to terrible effect.
* * *
“Drive ’em!” Folmak shrieked. “Drive ’em!” and First Brigade drove them. The Malagoran yell and the howl of their pipes carried them onward, and once they’d closed, they were more than a match for any pikemen.
Bayonets stabbed, men screamed and cursed and died, and mud-caked boots trod them into the mire. Folmak’s men stormed forward with a determination that had to be killed to be stopped, and the Guardsmen—shaken, confused, stunned by the impossibility of what was happening—were no match for them.
The Eighteenth broke. Those of its men who tried to stand paid for their discipline, for they couldn’t break free, couldn’t get far enough away to use their longer weapons effectively, and First Brigade swarmed them under like seldahks. Six minutes after that first volley had exploded in their faces, the Eighteenth Pikes were a shattered, fleeing wreck, and Folmak swung in on the flank of the Ninth.
Even now, he was outnumbered by better than two-to-one, and the melee with the Eighteenth had disordered his ranks. Worse, the Ninth was made of sterner stuff, and its commander had managed to change front while the Eighteenth was dying. His men were still off balance, but they howled their own war cries and lunged forward, slamming into Folmak’s brigade like a hammer, and this time they hadn’t been shaken by a pointblank volley.
Folmak’s lead battalion had already been more than decimated. Now it reeled back, fighting stubbornly but driven by the longer, heavier weapons of its foes, and the officers of both sides lost control. It was one howling vortex, sucking in men and spitting out corpses, and then, suddenly, Sean’s Sixth Brigade slammed into the Ninth from the other side.
It was too much, and the Guardsmen came apart. Unit organization disintegrated. Half the Ninth simply disappeared, killed or routed, and the other half found itself surrounded by twice its own number of Malagorans. They tried to fight their way out, then tried to form a defensive hedgehog, but it was useless. Despite the rain, scores of riflemen still managed to reload and fire into them, and even as they died, more Malagoran regiments rushed past. They weren’t even slowing the enemy down, and their surviving officers ordered them to throw down their weapons to save as many of their men as they could.
* * *
High-Captain Marhn’s face was iron as more and more reports of disaster came in. The heretics had swept over the entire bivouac area, then paused to reorganize and fanned out in half a dozen columns, each storming forward towards the rear of the entrenchments. A third of his men had already been broken, and the panicky wreckage of shattered formations boiled in confusion, hampering their fellows far more than their enemies. The last light was going, and the Host’s entire encampment had disintegrated into a rain-soaked, mud-caked madness no man could control.
He had no idea how many men the heretics had. From the terrified reports, they might have had a million. Worse, the units they were hitting were his worst-armed, weakest ones, the men who’d been reformed out of the ruin of Yortown. They’d been placed in reserve because their officers were still trying to rebuild them into effective fighting forces, and the demon-worshipers were cutting through them like an ax, not a knife.
He clenched his jaw and turned his back, shutting out the confused reports while he tried to find an answer. But there was only one, and it might already be too late for it to work.
“Start pulling men out of the redoubts,” he grated. Someone gasped, and he stabbed a finger at a map. “Form a new line here!” he snapped, jabbing a line across the map less than four thousand paces behind the earthworks.
“But, Sir—” someone else began.
“Do it!” Marhn snarled, and tried to pretend he didn’t know that even if he succeeded, it could stave off disaster for no more than a few more hours.
* * *
“They’re moving men from the trenches, Sean!” Sandy shouted over the com.
“Good—I think!” Even with Sandy’s reports and his own implant link to her sensors, Sean had only the vaguest notion what was happe
ning. This was nothing like Yortown. It was an insane explosion of violence, skidding like a ground car on ice. His men were moving towards their objectives in what looked like a carefully controlled maneuver, but it was nothing of the sort. No one could control it; it was all up to his junior officers and their men, and he could hardly believe how well they were carrying out their mission.
Even in the madness and confusion, he felt a deep, vaulting pride in his army—his army!—as his outnumbered men cut through their enemies. He was losing people—hundreds of them, probably more—and he knew how sick and empty he’d feel when he counted the dead, but he had no time for that now. A desperate counterattack by the broken remnants of several Guard pike units had taken his HQ group by surprise and smashed deep into it before a reserve battalion could deal with it, and only Sean’s enhancement had kept him alive. His armor had turned two pikeheads, and his enhanced reactions had been enough to save his eye, but a dripping sword cut had opened his right cheek from chin to temple, and Tibold limped heavily from a gash in his left thigh.
Now he waved his battered aides to a halt, and the reserve battalion—whose commander had made himself Sean’s chief bodyguard without orders—fanned out in a wary perimeter.
“How much movement?” he asked Sandy in English, speaking aloud and ignoring the looks his men gave him.
“A lot, all up and down the center of his lines.”
“Tam?”
“I see it, Sean. We’re moving now.”
“Give ’em time to pull back! Don’t let them catch you in the open!”
“Suck eggs! You just keep pushing ’em hard.”
“Hard, the man says!” Sean rolled his eyes heavenward and turned to Tibold. “They’re pulling men out of the trenches to stop us, and Tamman and Ithun are moving up to hit them in the rear.”
“Then we have to push them even harder,” Tibold said decisively.
“If we can!” Sean shook his head, then grabbed an aide. “Find Captain Folmak. If he’s still alive, tell him to bear right. You!” he jabbed a finger at another messenger. “Find Fourth Brigade. It’s over that way, to the right. Tell Captain Herth to curl in to the left to meet Folmak. I want both of them to hammer straight for their reserve artillery park.”
The aides repeated their orders and ran off into the maelstrom, and Sean grimaced at Tibold.
“If this is a successful battle, God save me from an unsuccessful one!”
* * *
“Sir!” Marhn looked up as a gasping, mud-spattered messenger lurched into his command post. “High-Captain! The heretics are coming from the west, as well!” The messenger swayed, and Marhn realized the young officer was wounded. “Captain Rukhan needs more men. Can’t … can’t hold without them, Sir!”
Marhn stared at the young man for one terrible, endless moment. Then his shoulders slumped, and his watching staff saw hope run out of his eyes like water.
“Sound parley,” he said. Urthank stared at him, and Marhn snarled at him. “Sound parley, damn you!”
“But … but, Sir, the Circle! High Priest Vroxhan! We can’t—”
“We aren’t; I am!” Marhn spat. His hand bit into Urthank’s biceps like a claw. “We’ve lost, Urthank. That attack from the rear blew the guts out of us, and now they’ve broken our front as well. How many more of our men have to die for a position we can’t hold?”
“But if you surrender, the Circle will—” Urthank began in a quieter, more anxious voice, and Marhn shook his head again.
“I’ve served the Temple since I was a boy. If the Circle wants my life for saving the lives of my men, they can have it. Now, sound parley!”
“Yes, Sir.” Urthank looked into Marhn’s face for a moment, then turned away. “You heard the High-Captain! Sound parley!” he barked, and another officer fled to pass the order.
“Here, boy!” Marhn said gruffly, catching Rukhan’s wounded messenger as he began to collapse. He took the young man’s weight in his arms and eased him down into a camp chair, then looked back up at Urthank. “Call the healers and have this man seen to,” he said.
Chapter Thirty-Four
Lieutenant Carl Bergren was grateful for his bio-enhancement. Without it, he’d have been sweating so hard the security pukes would have arrested him the moment he reported for duty tonight.
His adrenaline tried to spike again, but he pushed it back down and told himself (again) the risk was acceptable. If it all blew up on him, he could find himself facing charges for willful destruction of private property and end up dishonorably discharged with five or ten years in prison, which was hardly an attractive proposition. On the other hand, it wasn’t as if anyone were going to be hurt—in fact, he was going to have to separate any passengers from the freight—and it wasn’t every night a mere Battle Fleet lieutenant earned eight million credits. That payoff was sufficient compensation for any risks which might come his way. He told himself that firmly enough to manage a natural smile as he walked into the control room and nodded to Lieutenant Deng.
“You’re early tonight, Carl.” Deng had learned his English before he was enhanced, and its stubbornly persistent British accent always seemed odd to Bergren coming from a Chinese.
“Only a couple of minutes,” he replied. “Commander Jackson’s on Birhat, and I stole her parking spot.”
“A court-martial offense if ever I heard one.” Deng chuckled, and rose to stretch. “Very well, Leftenant, your throne awaits.”
“Some throne!” Bergren snorted. He dropped into the control chair and flipped his feed into the computers, scanning the evening’s traffic. “Not much business tonight.”
“Not yet, but there’s something special coming through from Narhan.”
“Special? Special how?” Bergren’s tone was a bit too casual, but Deng failed to notice.
“Some sort of high-priority freight for the Palace.” He shrugged. “I don’t know what, but the mass readings are quite high, so you might want to watch the gamma bank capacitors. We’re getting a drop at peak loads, and Maintenance hasn’t found the problem yet.”
“No?” Bergren checked the files in case Deng was watching, but he already knew all about the power fluctuation. He didn’t know how it had been arranged, but he knew why, and he damped another adrenaline surge at the thought. “You’re right,” he observed aloud. “Thanks. I’ll keep an eye on them.”
“Good.” Deng gathered up his personal gear and cocked his head. “Everything else green?”
“Looks that way,” Bergren agreed. “You’re relieved.”
“Thanks. See you tomorrow!”
Deng wandered out, and Bergren leaned back in his chair. He was alone now, and he allowed a small smile to hover on his lips. He had no idea who his mysterious patron was, nor had he cared … until tonight. Whoever it was paid well enough to support his taste for fast flyers and faster women, and that had been enough for him. But the services he’d performed so far had all been small potatoes beside tonight, and his smile became a thoughtful frown.
He hadn’t realized, until he received his latest orders, how powerful his unknown employer must be, but pulling this off required more than mere wealth. No, whoever could arrange something like this had to have access not simply to highly restricted technology but to Shepard Center’s security at the very highest levels. There couldn’t be many people who had both those things, and the lieutenant had already opened a mental file of possible candidates. After all, if whoever it was had paid so well for relatively minor services in the past, he’d pay still better in the future for Bergren’s silence.
A soft tone sounded, and he shrugged his thoughts aside to concentrate on his duties. He plugged into the computer net and checked the passenger manifest against the people actually boarding the mat-trans. Two of them were technically overweight for their baggage, but it was well within the system’s max load parameters, and he decided to let it pass. He made the necessary adjustments to field strength and checked his figures twice, then sent the hypercom tran
sit warning to Birhat. An answering hypercom pulse told him Birhat was up and ready, awaiting reception of the controlled hyper-space anomaly he was about to create, and he sent the transit computer the release code. The control room’s soundproofing was excellent, but he still heard the whine of the charging capacitors, and then his readouts peaked as the transmitter kicked over. Another clutch of bureaucrats, temporarily converted into something they were no doubt just as happy they couldn’t understand, disappeared into a massive, artificially induced “fold” in hyper-space. The waiting Birhat station couldn’t “see” them coming, but, alerted by Bergren’s hypercom signal, its receivers formed a vast, funnel-shaped trap in hyper-space. At eight hundred-plus light-years, even the vastest funnel was an impossibly tiny target, but Bergren’s calculations flicked the disembodied bureaucrats expertly into its bell-shaped mouth. In his mind’s eye, the lieutenant always pictured his passengers rattling and bouncing as they zinged down the funnel and then—instantaneously, as far as they could tell, but 8.5 seconds later by the clocks of the rest of the universe—blinked back into existence on distant Birhat.
Now he sat waiting, then nodded to himself as Birhat’s hypercommed receipt tone sounded seventeen seconds later. He noted the routine transit in his log and checked the schedule. Traffic really was light tonight, and it was getting lighter as the hour got later. Shepard Center Station was only one of six mat-trans stations Earth now boasted, and it handled mostly North American traffic, though it also caught a heavier percentage of the through-traffic from Narhan to Birhat and vice versa. The receiving platforms were far busier than the outbound stations, but, then, it was midmorning in Phoenix on Birhat and only early evening in Andhurkahn on Narhan. He had a good five minutes before his next scheduled transmission, and he returned once more to his speculations.
