Rogue Emperor (The Chronoplane Wars Book 3)

by Crawford Kilian

  Twenty-two

  Six hundred Crucifers and Praetorians marched in step through the night streets of Rome behind Martellus and the Praetorian general Drusus, who rode horses. Every tenth man carried a battery lantern, illuminating the pavement of the Via Lata. Pierce, walking with Maria not far behind Martellus, looked up and saw pale faces gazing down at them from tenement windows and balconies: They looked frightened, and no one cheered.

  The marchers passed through the Flaminian Gate, where the guards clashed spears against shields in salute, and continued about a kilometer north before turning east on a side road. Within a hundred meters they came to a walled estate and halted in a field beside it. The sky was just turning gray. Pierce saw dark figures push open tall twin gates in the wall, and a moment later truck engines roared to life.

  The Praetorians, standing nervously in the trampled field, shouted in surprise at the noise. Headlights flared beyond the gates, and the first truck rolled out.

  Maria squeezed his arm in the darkness. “These are wagons that go by themselves,” she said. “Don’t be afraid of them, Alaricus.”

  “Not with you beside me, my lady.” He allowed himself a moment’s regret: If he had known of this knothole’s location, he could have risked a return uptime after the mugging. And if the Agency had known it, Rome might now be ruled by a Cuban comandante of Agency infantry.

  The trucks, he saw, were standard Italian Army Fiat troop carriers, with camouflage paint and rolled-back canvas tops — the kind of vehicles soldiers had been calling cattle trucks since World War II. Pierce wondered how much of a bribe it had taken to get such vehicles; whoever had taken the bribe would regret it.

  Martellus dismounted from his horse and climbed onto the running board of the first truck. Two Praetorians held their lanterns beside him, so everyone could see the emperor and Drusus at his side. Willard Powell, rubbing his beard, stood close-by; he handed Martel a bullhorn.

  “Romans!” Martel shouted. “Today we ride faster than the wind, and we strike more terribly than the thunderbolt. No charioteer has ever traveled the Via Flaminia as we shall. Be brave and steadfast. By noon we shall win the greatest victory Roman arms have ever gained. For the glory of Jesus, let us go forward!”

  A ragged cheer answered him, and then a louder one. Martel and Drusus got into the cab of the truck, while Willard hopped in behind the wheel. Crucifers began helping the Praetorians into the trucks and getting them settled. Pierce and Maria clambered into the second truck, standing just behind the cab while Crucifers and Praetorians crowded companionably in on the benches running the length of the truck bed.

  As the loading was going on, four men on motorcycles roared out through the gate and disappeared into the darkness: a vanguard, Pierce supposed, to clear the highway of peasant carts and foot traffic. Martel had thought of everything.

  With a blast of airhorns the convoy got under way. The trucks lurched back to the Via Flaminia and swung north, each filling most of the roadway. The Praetorians shouted and swore as they saw how fast they were going, and then began to enjoy it.

  Pierce, standing beside Maria, enjoyed it much less: The wind and dust stung his eyes, and the exhaust from the lead truck made him cough. The uneven road surface jolted the trucks and forced everyone to cling to a handhold. Maria bumped into him from time to time, or steadied herself with a hand on his shoulder. He moved a little farther away; he did not want Crucifers gossiping about Maria Donovan’s interest in her endo bodyguard.

  The trucks were soon going seventy kilometers per hour — not much compared to an uptime superstrada, but dizzyingly fast for the Praetorians. Occasionally the lead truck braked to avoid hitting some stupefied peasant and his sheep, or a team of slaves manhauling a wagonload of bricks. But the motorcyclists had done a good job of clearing the road.

  Mist rose with the sun, and the air was colder than usual. Where the road ran close to the Tiber the fog was thick, but the hilltops stood above it like islands under a clear June sky. Pierce saw that many peasants were standing beside the road, or off in the fields, watching the convoy pass. He wondered what they made of it — whether they even connected it with the advent of Martellus, or saw it as just another mysterious portent.

  The Via Flaminia was growing familiar to Pierce by now, but Maria was fascinated by everything; evidently she had seen little outside Rome since her arrival on Ahania. Looking at the dirty-faced peasant children who watched the convoy pass, she said to Pierce, “Soon they will all be in school, learning Christianity, learning how to read and write.”

  “Even they?” Pierce said.

  “Give us the children, and we’ll never lose them when they grow up.”

  He nodded. That was, after all, very much the policy of the Agency for Intertemporal Development.

  Whenever the convoy reached a town or village, each truck slowed to a crawl. Twice they had to leave the road because it ran through a narrow gate, and detour around the walls of the town along some mule track. When they could drive through the streets, the people crammed onto balconies and rooftops to watch them pass, or ran before the lead truck — like young men in Pamplona, thought Pierce, running before the bulls. The bystanders sometimes cheered, but most simply watched in amazement.

  The convoy stopped only twice that morning, each time to let the soldiers get off to eat from their backpacks and to relieve themselves. They did not stop at a mansio — Martel must have sensibly expected the Praetorians to get drunk if they got the chance — but in empty, misty fields where the only people were shepherd boys. Hearing the animated chatter of the Praetorians, and the quieter talk of the Crucifers, Pierce noted their growing seriousness: They were nearing Lake Trasimenus, where this outing would become a battle to the death.

  The countryside grew drier and more rugged, the villages poorer. Hillsides were covered with pine stumps and scrub, and the occasional small herd of goats wandered across them. In the valley bottoms, mist clung despite the heat of the sun on the hilltops.

  At the crest of the hill, the motorcyclists were waiting. Martel’s truck, traveling some distance ahead of the convoy, braked to a halt. Pierce saw Martel, his blond hair gleaming in the sun, descend from his truck and speak with one of the motorcyclists. Then he climbed gracefully to the top of the truck cab and lifted the bullhorn to his face.

  “Romans! Christians! Our scouts report that Trajan’s army lies not far ahead, marching toward us along the shores of Lake Trasimenus. We shall smash into their vanguard, and then turn aside, off the road to the left, so that the invaders are trapped between ourselves and the lake. Obey your officers! Use your tormenta carefully, and only on the enemy. Remember that in the sign of the cross you shall conquer. I bless you all in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit.”

  The soldiers set up a cheer; Martel’s truck moved forward again.

  They were descending into the valley of the lake, which lay wrapped in mist. Trasimenus was broad and shallow, its shores a muddy tangle of reeds and drowned trees. To the left, rocky, barren hills rose steeply. Pierce studied the terrain carefully. The land just beside the road was fairly level; it would not be hard for the convoy to leave the pavement, parallel the marching column of Trajan’s soldiers, and then drive them into the lake.

  Now they were alongside the lake and rolling through a thick fog; the sun’s disc glowed in the grayness overhead, but Pierce could scarcely see the trucks ahead and behind. The lake was invisible on the right, and the hills on the left.

  Maria, beside him, tightened the chin strap of her helmet — an uptime model, recently declared obsolete by the Yugoslavs. She checked her Ruger and patted her ammunition belt, slung over one shoulder. Pierce could smell her fear, but a glitter of anticipation brightened her eyes. He felt a sour sympathy for her: She was a killer like himself, a guardian of her people. She had chosen the wrong people to guard.

  The convoy crawled along for several kilometers, each driver watching for the truck ahead to swing suddenly of
f the road. The mist was still thick, though occasionally it cleared enough to provide a glimpse of the gray surface of the lake, or of the bare brown hillsides rising less than a hundred meters to the left of the road.

  Suddenly Martel’s truck sounded its airhorn, shifted gears, and accelerated into the mist. As it disappeared, Pierce heard shouts and the popping of rifles. He drew his Mallory.

  The taillights of the lead truck glared close ahead, too close, and Pierce heard brakes screaming as he and Maria were flung against the cab. Farther back in the convoy came the crunch of collisions. Through the mist, Pierce saw Crucifers pouring out the back of Martel’s truck.

  “Not yet!” Maria screamed in English to them. “Get back in!”

  A pilum struck the top of the cab, only an arm’s length from Pierce; the barbed, meter-long iron head, set in a wooden shaft almost as long, caromed off the truck and clattered on the pavement.

  “Get down!” Pierce growled to Maria, pressing down on her shoulder. “They’ve outflanked us.”

  Arrows whirred into the trucks, many falling among the unshielded soldiers. Uzis rattled, the noise sounding distorted by echoes from the unseen hillside nearby.

  “What’s happened?” Maria demanded as they crouched behind the cab.

  “They must have seen the scouts. They knew we must be coming, and they’ve set up an insidia — an ambush. Now it’s we who are caught between them and the lake.”

  Maria grimaced. “It doesn’t matter. We’ll still beat them.”

  Another spear struck, this one pinning a Praetorian through his leg to the bench he sat on. His eyes wide with surprise, the soldier tried to stand up but toppled over. The weight of his body pulled the spear out of the bench. He writhed, gasping, on the truck bed while his comrades hoisted shields over their heads.

  Pierce thumbed his Mallory to maximum impact, stood up, and found a target in the mist — and another. The flechettes struck through armor with the sound of hammered nails. Pierce ducked down again. Other soldiers were firing into the mist, screaming and swearing.

  Martel’s amplified voice rose above the noise: “Christians! Get down and form ranks. Prepare to attack!”

  Pierce almost swore in English. Martel’s command would only encourage the ambushers: They had the range of the convoy, and now the soldiers would be exposed to more spears and arrows.

  Still, the men obeyed. Pierce fell in between Maria and Brother Kelly, the Militants’ armorer. Arrows and sling-stones fell all along the line, dropping men where they stood. The Crucifers, in standard uptime camouflage battledress, were terribly vulnerable. The Praetorians, at least, had brought their shields and now formed “turtles” — close-packed groups with shields fitted together above their heads.

  Pierce snapped off a few flechettes whenever the mist cleared enough for him to see an ambusher, but Trajan’s men had chosen their spot well: The hillside here was steep, with plenty of rocky outcrops to give cover. Visibility was no more than twenty meters, and most of the ambushers were well beyond.

  Pierce’s respect for Trajan rose. The general had not planned on a battle here, but he had improvised brilliantly. Martel’s motorcyclists, spotted at a distance, must have warned him that he was dealing with Hesperians or someone like them; perhaps he had already heard something of Martel’s coup. Knowing that the mist would offer concealment until noon or later, he had moved his legions off the road and onto the hillsides — laying the same ambush that Hannibal had used to destroy fifteen thousand Romans under Flaminius not far from here. He had doubtless left a decoy force on the road, with a barricade of some kind to block the attackers’ progress.

  Trajan’s men might have panicked at the trucks if they had seen them, but they had only heard a strange roaring noise in the mist. The pop and chatter of small-arms fire might unnerve some, especially those who saw their comrades fall beside them, but Pierce was sure most of Trajan’s men would keep their discipline. If Trajan actually had two legions, Martel’s eight hundred soldiers were charging against ten to eleven thousand veterans. This would be a real battle, not a massacre.

  Martel roared out again, almost singing: “Parate! Prepare! Oppugnate! Attack!”

  Maria’s voice, a powerful alto, rose in Martel’s hymn “I Bring Not Peace But a Sword,” and other Crucifers took it up. Then the line trotted forward off the road, scrambling through brush and up the slope.

  In a leather helmet and breastplate, his arms and legs exposed, Pierce felt hideously vulnerable. Maria beside him wore a lightweight bulletproof vest as well as her helmet, but she, too, would be easy to bring down.

  More slingstones fell around them. Pierce strode up the hillside, looking as far ahead as he could. A veles, one of the legionaries’ light auxiliaries, popped up from behind a bush, not thirty meters away. Pierce could see his face clearly under the iron skullcap; the red leather of the boy’s studded jazerant tunic made him a good target as he whirled his sling. Pierce shot him and he fell, blood gushing from his mouth.

  As they climbed, the emperor’s troops saw Trajan’s men more clearly, and few ambushers survived. Crucifers and Praetorians began cheering and quickened their pace up the hillside. The mist was brightening, thinning. Bodies of legionaries and velites, ripped by bullets and flechettes, lay everywhere. Pierce saw a dead Praetorian and took the man’s shield.

  “We’re winning!” Maria shouted in his ear. “Praise Jesus, Alaricus, we’re winning!”

  “The worst is still to come,” he said. “We’ve been fighting no more than a few hundred men. The main force is somewhere up there.”

  Her smile vanished. With her fist to her lips, she barked into her ringmike: “Willard! We may be getting into a trap. Where’s Trajan’s main force?”

  Pierce didn’t hear the answer, or need to. Martel’s forces were emerging from the mist onto the brown, treeless upper slopes. Less than a hundred meters ahead was the ridge of the hill. Something like a dark cloud suddenly rose above it into the bright blue sky. Pierce grabbed Maria and pulled her toward him as he raised his heavy shield over their heads.

  The cloud was a volley of arrows. One struck Pierce’s shield, with enough force to stagger him. Crucifers dropped all along the line. Uzis and AK-74s answered the arrows, but found no targets; Trajan’s archers were shooting from behind the ridge.

  “Oppugnate!” Martel’s voice boomed.

  “I don’t know who’s holding our right flank!” Maria yelled into her ringmike.

  A stone the size of a man’s head dropped into the line a few meters to their left and bounced crazily down the slope into the mist. Then another fell, crushing two Praetorians under their shields. Trajan must have a couple of onagers in action: simple but effective wheeled catapults.

  “We’ve got to fall back and regroup,” Maria said. Pierce shook his head.

  “They’ll drive us right into the lake. We must go forward and take the ridge before they come over it and down upon us. If we can kill enough of them, perhaps we can drive them off. It’s our only chance.”

  She nodded, and fire burned in her eyes. “Oh, Alaricus, I love you.”

  He said nothing, but began walking quickly up the hill as arrows snapped through the air. Maria kept pace under his shield, shouting to the others to advance. The Praetorians, understanding their predicament better than the Crucifers, hurried forward, firing almost at random.

  Trajan’s first cohorts made it to the ridge just before Martel’s men: a solid line of hundreds of shields, blazing in the noon sun. From the rear ranks came a hail of spears, while those in the front rank held theirs leveled. A pilum glanced off the curved face of Pierce’s shield, knocking him off balance. Maria steadied him, then lifted her Ruger and began firing steadily and carefully.

  Others were shooting, too, and holes appeared in Trajan’s line. Someone fired off a T-60; it killed scores further down the line. Pierce brought up his Mallory and squeezed the trigger.

  With adrenaline acting on tripled sensory input synthesis, he
fought in a slow-motion dream. The shields of Trajan’s legionaries fell, regrouped, and advanced again. Just over that hill, Pierce knew, were ten thousand men pushing forward, frightened no doubt by the terrible noise beyond the ridge but moving anyway through sheer discipline. A wall of dead men began to block Trajan’s attack, and it was easy to pick off targets as men broke ranks to clamber over their dead comrades.

  But the legionaries could not advance far. More T-60s smashed into them, sending oily clouds of black smoke into the air that must have looked as terrifying as they sounded to the rear ranks of Trajan’s forces. The roar of small-arms fire was constant. Dust thickened in the still air as men crashed to the ground and rolled dead down the hillside toward their slayers. The air had smelled of dust and sweat; now it stank of excrement.

  Pierce and Maria, crouched behind their shield, fired and advanced. Gradually they found themselves among the dead and dying of Trajan’s front ranks, while other Crucifers and Praetorians advanced also. A slingstone or two still fell, but the legionaries’ organization was crumbling: Those still standing in the front ranks could not pull back into the solid mass of men.

  Kneeling on a legionary’s bloody corpse, Pierce realized that they had taken the ridge. The far side of the hill was a dusty, crowded mass of men, a forest of spears with here and there a clearing for an onager or a squad of velites.

  Maria pulled a grenade from her vest, yanked the pin, and hurled it. It exploded well behind the front ranks, who seemed to implode back into the vacuum she had created. A Crucifer off to the right opened up with a flamethrower. The screams of burning men, shrill and desperate, sent a visible tremor through Trajan’s forces. The rear ranks could now see what was happening, and began to break and run.

  “We must move to the right — to the emperor,” Pierce shouted. Maria nodded and gestured to a squad of Crucifers to follow them.

  Pierce knew that Trajan had one hope left: to turn Martel’s right flank, take pressure off the center, and then, perhaps, drive the Crucifers and Praetorians back down into the mist and the lake. The right flank must be strong enough to blunt any such attempt.