Conqueror g-2

by S. M. Stirling

  The current was fast here in midstream, the banks just lines in the darkness to left and right. Somebody had to steer, though; otherwise the raft might swirl in towards the banks. He worked the oar carefully, never letting the end break free of the water. From a distance, in the dark, the raft would look like just another piece of river trash caught in the current. The fuse hissed.

  There. Lights on the east bank, to his left. The wog camp. A scattering to his right: the ruins of Gurnyca. He bared his teeth. He'd had kin there, before the press-gang enlisted him in the Army. That was why he'd volunteered for this-though the thousand gold FedCreds and the land and the tax exemption for him and his family didn't hurt. But you had to live to enjoy those; revenge was a dish you could eat in advance.

  And that Messer Raj. The priest is right. The Spirit was with him, you could see it in his eyes. For the Spirit, all men were the tools of Mankind.

  A string of lights across the water: sentinel-lanterns along the wog pontoon bridge. Much bigger barges than the ones they'd used to build their own bridge up at Sandoral, with real prows and neat planking. The torches were oil-soaked bundles of rag on the ends of long sticks of ironwood, fastened to the railing of the roadway every fifteen meters or so. He crouched lower, tasting sour bile at the back of his mouth. There was a sheathed knife through the back of his loincloth, but that was for himself if he looked like being captured.

  Closer, and he could see the spiked helmets and turbans of the soldiers pacing along the bridge. Cables swooped up out of the water to anchor the upstream prows of the pontoons, dark curves against dark water. Firelight glittered on patches of wave. He braced one foot against a timber, bare callused toes gripping, and threw the weight of back and shoulders against the tiller. The raft moved across the current, slowly, always slowly. His breath tried to sob out past tight-clenched teeth.

  One of the wogs was singing, sounding like a man biting down on a cat's tail. It was hard dark outside the circles of firelight the torches cast, both moons down, only the arch of stars above. Yes. The raft was heading right between two pontoons. It might have gone right through without him aboard.

  He waited until the shadow of the timbered deck above cut off the sky; there was reflected light enough from the torch on one of the pontoons. Then he raised a pole whose other end was set into the deck of the raft. The ironshod point sank deeply into the timber balk above as the weight of the raft and the force of the current drove it. Weight and current pushed the raft sideways, pivoting around the anchor driven deep into the hardwood above. The hooks along the side grated into the hull of the pontoon; he winced at the noise, but there was thick timber and three feet of earth on the roadway above. The raft heeled a little beneath him as they set fast and held against the long slow push of the water.

  The boatman dove overside into the water and let the current take him out the south side of the pontoon bridge and a hundred meters downstream. Then he began to stroke in a fast overarm crawl, and the Starless Dark take secrecy. He had less than a minute to get out of killing range.

  "Change off," Ensign Minatelli said.

  The next platoon came up and took the escalade ladder off his men's shoulders. The shuttered bull's-eye lantern in his hand provided just enough light, although there were whispered curses and cries of pain in the tight confines of the dry wash.

  "Let's get moving."

  In a way it was fortunate that the wash was so narrow; there wasn't any way to get lost. He moved at a quick walk, stumbling occasionally over a clod or a rock. Men waited at junctions, directing the traffic along the proper path. A few minutes later he ran into the heels of the men ahead.

  "Halto!" he hissed back.

  Captain Pinya came down the line, identifying himself with a quick flick of his own lantern under his face. "We're there," he said. "Halt in place, prepare for action. Wait for the signal, then we go out in column, deploy into line on the move, and keep moving. There's a little more light out in the open."

  I hope so.

  He was starting to get some idea of how complicated it was to get hundreds of men moving in the same direction and have them arrive when you wanted them to. It was a lot more difficult than it looked when all you had to do was march when someone said, "By the left, forward."

  All an ensign had to do in a field action was relay the orders, though. He was very glad of that.

  "Fix bayonets. Load. Keep the muzzles up."

  The last thing they needed was somebody getting stuck or shot because they fell over their feet. It was up to him to see that didn't happen.

  Spirit.

  * * *

  1018. Raj shut his watch with a snap.

  Can't wait much longer. With their outposts gone, the enemy camp would be waking up soon. A last iron clank came from the artillery position to his left, about twenty meters away; it was dark enough that he could only see vague traces of movement there. The gunners moved with exaggerated care, setting the fuses behind a screen of blankets that would conceal the brief flashes of light from the enemy. They'd be firing blind, essentially, except for the directions he'd given-Center had given-although the wogs were displaying a pleasant abundance of lamps and watchfires.

  Another messenger trotted up.

  "Major Gruder reports right wing in position, ser." He handed over a note.

  Raj flicked a match between thumb and forefinger. This herd of handless cows is ready to stampede, he read. Kaltin was not happy at having five battalions of second-rate garrison infantry under his direction besides the 7th.

  "Tsk."

  Kaltin wouldn't expect to get the best out of a force of Descotter cavalry with that attitude; why did he think infantry would respond any better? A good tactician and very loyal, but there were some jobs you just wouldn't give him. Raj grinned mirthlessly. The chances were he wouldn't be giving anyone any jobs, after this.

  He turned to look to the right, toward the river. The tiny dots of the torches along the pontoon bridge glittered like stars in the darkness. I would have left it farther south, he thought. Better roads here, and what was left of Gurnyca gave a secure anchorage for the western end, but putting a point-failure source closer to your enemy was a terrible risk. Ali's doing. He tends to arrogance. He began a gesture to the messenger beside him; there wasn't any more time.

  Smaller torches were running along the center section of the pontoon bridge. He pulled the binoculars from their case on Horace's saddlebow and focused them. Men leaned over the edge of the roadway, looking at the water below and pointing.

  Raj turned his head aside. Even looking away, the flash of the explosion was bright; it lit the earthen walls of the Colonial fort the way a flash of lightning might, but for much longer. When he looked back a huge section of the pontoon bridge was gone, gone as if a vast mouth had bitten it away. There was a crater in the water, foaming as the river rushed back to fill the hole the blast had momentarily forced into it. Pieces of burning, shattered timber were describing parabolas through the night for thousands of meters all around. The sound hit like a giant rumbling thud, felt on the skin of the face and in the chest cavity as well as through the ears.

  An alarm siren began to wail in the fort. More men were running out of it, heading through the west gate and onto the pontoon bridge, or what was left of it-large sections on either side of the gap had torn away their anchoring cables and were beginning to drift southward with the current. That threw more and more stress on the undamaged sections, cable and timber creaking and yielding as the two unconnected segments bent back. He could hear the gunshot cracks of materials yielding as they were pushed past their breaking strain. Parts of it were on fire, too; the sections above water would be tinder-dry, in this climate.

  The officer in command of the base was probably an engineering specialist. His first thought would be to save the bridge. As if to confirm the thought, a fire engine pulled by six hitch of dogs thundered out onto the pontoon, dropped a hose overside and began spurting steam-driven water at the fires
. Men dropped overside with ropes, swimming out for the anchor points. Others set up winches on the decking.

  Raj chopped his hand downward. An aide put his cigarette to the touchpaper of a signal rocket and stepped back. The paper sizzled and the little rocket went skyward with a woosh, popping into a blue starburst high overhead.

  POUMPF. POUMPF. POUMPF. POUMPF. Over and over again.

  Tongues of fire shot into the blackness. Fifty-five guns, massed in two grand batteries of twenty-eight and twenty-seven pieces. Warm pillows of air slapped at his face from the nearby position. The night filled with the whirring ripple of shell fire, and seconds later the snapping crack of bursting charges and the red firefly wink over the bastions at each corner of the fortress walls. At three rounds a minute the shellbursts came at more than one per second over each target, an endless ripple of fire. The second stonk contained a proportion of contact-fused shells. The guns were firing at maximum elevation and nearly maximum range, their shells dropping down out of the sky at high angles. Dirt fountained up, and then a mammoth secondary explosion from the eastern bastion.

  Somebody left his ready reserve ammunition exposed, he thought. He could imagine the scene in the redoubts, men running half-dressed from their bombproofs into the storm of razor-edged, high-velocity metal as they tried to crew their pieces.

  "Dinnalsyn's on time and target," Raj said to himself, gathering the reins. "Hadelande."

  He clapped heels to Horace's side and swung into a loping gallop down the slope. The flags crackled behind him, harness creaked, a bugle clanked rhythmically against the webbing buckles on a signaler's chest. Rock and dust spurted up under the dogs' paws, with a scent of bruised native scrub like bergamot. Trumpets sounded ahead of him-no point in keeping quiet after this-as the battalions poured over the ridgeline and down the last slope toward the flat fields. The routes he'd picked left them widely spaced, to minimize collisions in the dark, and the flaming chaos at each end of the north face of the Colonial base would help with the alignment.

  The dense columns of men flowed forward onto the open ground, double-timing in battalion columns. Starlight glittered on a forest of bayonet points, sheened on the silver Starbursts at the top of the flagstaffs of their colors. He leaned back slightly, and Horace shifted to a swinging trot; they were coming up on the 5th Descott's position. The men gave a short roaring cheer as his flag went by to swing into position near the battalion commander's, a harsh male undertone to the crash and flicker of the guns.

  He looked at his watch. 1040 hours. Nearly on time. Amazing. A memory prickled at him; nothing he'd ever experienced, but one of the holographic scenarios from Earth's long history of war that Center showed him. Not Hannibal this time, but someone else, and the battle had also been against Arabs. .

  lieutenant-general garnet wolseley, Center said. tel el-kebir. twenty-five hundred years ago. A pause. the similarities are disquieting.

  Why? Raj thought. This fellow Wolseley won, didn't he? A night march and an attack on earthwork fortifications, as he remembered.

  i was programmed to believe that a progressive improvement of human capacities is a priority, Center said. the fact that two such similar engagements have occurred at this distance in time might support a cyclical rather than linear explanation of human history.

  Some things never change.

  that, raj whitehall, is precisely the problem-and what we are attempting to change.

  The 5th's buglers blew a six-note call and repeated it. Raj turned in the saddle to watch; the fires on the pontoon bridge were out of control, and the easternmost Colonial bastion was a column of flame, giving enough light to turn the night to dusk. The solid column of troops suddenly opened, like a man's outstretched hand when he flared his fingers. Each of the four companies of the 5th turned at an angle to the axis of advance and double-timed outward, following the pennant of the company commander. Thirty seconds later the bugle sounded again, and the company columns spread likewise into platoons, and the platoons flared out like opening fans. In less than four minutes what had been a dense column of men was a double line, rippling as the veterans dressed their ranks on the move with unconscious skill.

  This was what the endless parade-ground drill was for: the movements had to be unconscious. So instinctive that they could be done exhausted, or under killing fire-or here, in darkness so bad you could barely see another man at twice arm's length. A line of men couldn't advance at speed for long, not on anything but absolutely flat table-top terrain. A column could maneuver, but it was a hideously vulnerable target with no offensive capacity to speak of.

  Gerrin Staenbridge reined in beside him. "After that march, I'm never going to make a joke about the blind leading the blind again, mi heneral. If it hadn't been impossible to get lost, we would have."

  There was strain in his voice. The possibilities for confusion were enough to turn a man's hair gray. . which reminded Raj of the silver dusting he saw in his own every time he shaved.

  The splatguns had been bouncing along behind the infantry. Now they trotted forward, drawing ahead. One hundred meters, two, three, then the teams wheeled. The crews leapt down and spun the elevating screws to maximum.

  "About now," Raj said.

  The cannonade lifted for an instant, and starshells burst over the ramparts of the fort. Raj stood in the stirrups and looked right and left, halfway between dread and hope under the wavering blue-white light. All honor and glory to the Spirit of Man of the Stars, he thought sincerely. No major units seemed to be missing, as far as he could see-although the right flank was mostly hidden, and that was the one he was most worried about. A long, wavering double line of men stretched across the plain, with gaps of several hundred meters between battalions. Several of the battalions were severely out of alignment with their target, marching at angles that would have tangled them with their neighbors eventually. As he watched they started to correct.

  "Signaler," he said. The man dropped out of the saddle and set two rockets. They hissed aloft and burst.

  Staenbridge drew his sword. "Battalion-"

  "Company-" Manifold, down the line.

  "Charge!"

  The trumpets sounded and kept up their shrilling, a long brass screaming in antiphonal chorus as all the signalers caught up the note. A long swelling shout rose from one end of the field to the other. Flags slanted forward as the whole formation broke into a steady uniform trot.

  Braaaaap. The splatguns fired, shot arching down at extreme range to spray the parapet. They kept firing over helmets as the troopers swept by. A pom-pom opened up from the wall ahead, and the flicker of muzzle flashes showed there were some wogs on the parapet, at least. The little quick-firer's shells went overhead with a nasty whack-whack-whack as it emptied its clip, and burst on the soil behind. Raj drew his revolver, tossed it to his left hand and drew his sword, letting the reins fall to Horace's neck. The dog stepped up the pace to a slow canter, keeping level with the men. The berm ahead loomed up with shocking speed, and the skeletal shapes of the watchtowers on either side. Company A of the 5th kept pace with them on either side, their boots crunching on the gravel of the roadway that ran into the gate.

  A carbide searchlight flickered alight from one tower, stabbing into his eyes with hurting brilliance. Seconds later it disintegrated in a shower of fragments as five or six splatguns turned their attention to it. The observation platform at the top of the wooden tower came apart in a shower of splinters and began to burn. The trumpets shrilled on, and the men started to run.

  They reached the edge of the ditch. Fire stabbed down at them and some tumbled into it, to lie still or shrieking on the spiked timbers there. More slid down into the ditch on their backsides, clambered carefully through the obstacles and the mud, and began climbing the steep slope on the other side. They scrambled in the heavy clay, chopping their rifle butts into the dirt. Others brought up the escalade ladders, setting their triangle-braced bases at the edge of the ditch and letting them topple forward. The sp
ikes at the upper end hammered into the dirt and men ran up the crossbars, climbing one-handed with their rifles in the other.

  "Not much fire!" Raj said exultantly. We caught them with their pantaloons down, and now it's too late! Surprise was the best force multiplier there was, and it was working in his favor.

  Staenbridge nodded. He turned to Bartin Foley and laid a hand on his shoulder. "Now."

  The younger man grinned and leaned out of the saddle, extending his hook. One of his platoon commanders dropped the loop of a leather satchel over it. Then he lit a length of fuse-match that extended from under the buckled cover.

  "Ha!"

  Foley clapped his heels into his dog's flanks, heading for the timber gate that barred the northern entrance to the Colonial fort. Men were fighting hand-to-hand on the wall to either side, shooting and stabbing and swinging clubbed rifles; there had to have been Colonials on duty at the gate, at least, if not all around the walls. Bodies tumbled down the steep slope of the berm, dead or wounded. Troopers in Civil Government uniform shot through the stubby planks of the palisade at the top, or joined to pull the wood aside, or boosted their comrades over the pointed tops. Probably the towers on either side of the gate had held swivel guns as well as searchlights, but they were both blazing torches now, burning hard enough to make the heat noticeable at a hundred meters.

  Foley covered the distance to the gate in a few seconds. A mounted man drew attention, even in the melee above him. Bullets kicked the gravel roadbed around him; once he swayed in the saddle and Staenbridge stiffened beside Raj. The satchel arched through the air and thumped into the dirt at the base of the gate, its momentum wedging it under the palm-log timbers where they swung at ankle height above the roadway. At the same instant he pulled the dog's head around; the beast whirled so quickly that it reared almost upright on its hind legs, with Foley hanging on like a jockey. It landed facing the way it had come, and running. The rider's display of skill would have been worthy of attention in itself, in any other context.