Empire of Man

by David Weber

  Yet for all his satisfaction, something still felt wrong. He couldn’t quite lay hold of what it was that concerned him, but it was there.

  And then, as the light gathered, it became clear what it was.

  A small host emerged from the forest on the D’Sley Road—small, but obviously much larger than any force the shit-sitters should possibly have been able to assemble. Block after block of infantry marched forward, moving in regular lines more precise than even those K’Vaern’s Cove Guard bastards. He was too old to see what sort of weapons they carried at this range, but there were at least two shit-sitters for every warrior he still had in Sindi, and he had no doubt that they carried scaling ladders in plenty.

  “Where did they come from?” one of his warriors gasped.

  “K’Vaern’s Cove,” the chieftain answered. “I guess they must have put a sword into the hand of every shit-sitter who could see lightning or hear thunder and just brought them out.” He grunted in laughter at the thought of the enemy’s obligingness at bringing the soft, gutless—and untrained—city slugs into the sweep of his own ax. Still, it looked as if there were an awful lot of them.

  “We should be able to pile them on the wall like bales of barleyrice,” he said, “but it will be a fight to tell the grands about.”

  More and more of his fellow tribesmen gathered on the parapet as the regular ranks of shit-sitters assembled just out of bombard range. The groups walked in step, their odd march broken only when they crossed the small bridge over the Stell, and formed in neat blocks on the city’s side of the stream.

  “I’ve never seen spears that long,” someone said. “You don’t suppose those gutless Wespar were telling the truth when they said . . .”

  The voice trailed off, and Trag grunted a deeper, harsher laugh at the edge of nervousness which had sharpened the remark.

  “I’ve never put much faith in the lies Wespar pussies who got their asses kicked by a bunch of shit-sitters tell to cover the way they must’ve fucked up,” the chieftain said. “And even if they were telling the truth, how would the same spears have gotten clear to K’Vaern’s Cove this quickly?”

  “You’re probably right,” one of his own tribesmen said, “but those really are awfully long pagee-stickers out there, Mnb.”

  “Maybe someone from the water boys told them how to scare the Wespar off,” Trag scoffed, “but we aren’t Wespar, are we? We’re the Tranol’te! And even if we were Wespar, do you really think there’s any way they could get something as long as those damned things up scaling ladders?” He laughed more loudly than ever.

  “No, I don’t,” the tribesman said.

  “Of course you don’t,” Trag said, and waved dismissively at the small army which had now taken up position in front of the gates on the northern side of the river, close enough that even Trag could see them clearly. “And I don’t see any battering rams over there,” he went on, “so there isn’t really much they can do to us as long as we’re not stupid enough to go out and meet them head-on, now is there?”

  “I don’t know, Mnb,” the tribesman said. “We don’t have enough warriors to man the walls. Not the way we ought to, anyway.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Trag said confidently. “They don’t have enough scaling ladders to swamp us, either. We’ve got more than enough to hold this part of the walls until the end of the world, and they don’t have enough time for anything like a proper siege. Kny Camsan is out there behind them, and it won’t take him long to realize why the iron heads wanted to lure us out of the city. When he does, he’ll come right over them, and that will be the end of K’Vaern’s Cove! All we have to do is keep them right where they are until he gets here. So get your warriors moving—we need them here on the walls!”

  Messengers dashed off to summon the warriors of the clan to battle, and Trag leaned on the battlements, watching the shit-sitters. His confidence was genuine, but he was honest enough to admit that he didn’t have a clue what the shit-sitters were up to as scores of them began pushing some sort of wagons up behind the blocks of infantry.

  No doubt it was some new fancy trick the K’Vaernians had devised, but no trick was going to get them magically through the massive stone walls of Sindi.

  “Move, move, move!”

  Rus From and General Bogess were an eye of calm in a hurricane of effort as the specially trained companies manhandled the wagons into position. Those positions had been very carefully selected and surveyed by the Marine LURPs who’d kept Sindi under constant surveillance while the K’Vaernian army was equipped and trained. As well as both Diasprans had come to know their remarkable human allies, they’d been astonished by the routine, matter-of-fact way in which the Marines had roamed Sindi’s environs under cover of night. Everyone knew the Boman barbarians could hear the whine of an insect’s wings at seventy paces, yet the humans had penetrated effortlessly to the city’s very walls, and their unobtrusively placed stakes had guided each wagon to its preselected position under the Diasprans’ watchful eyes.

  “Do we really think this is going to work?” Bogess asked the cleric under his breath, and From chuckled.

  “Oh, I’m certain it will work,” he said. “Once, at least, that is, given our gunpowder situation. Whether or not the Boman will cooperate by being where we want them to when it does work isn’t my province, however, thank the God!”

  “You’re always so reassuring,” Bogess muttered.

  “Of course I am, that’s my job!” From said cheerfully, then frowned thoughtfully. “It looks like we’re just about ready,” he observed. “Time for our last inspection.”

  “Let’s get started then,” Bogess replied, and the two of them separated and headed in opposite directions along the arc of wagons arranged before the northern walls of fallen Sindi.

  “The bastards are up to something,” one of Mnb Trag’s subchiefs muttered.

  “Of course they are,” Trag shot back. “What? You thought they’d marched all this way just to stand there and scratch their asses at us?”

  “Of course I didn’t,” the subchief retorted. “But I don’t hear you telling us what it is they are up to, either!”

  “Because I don’t know,” Trag conceded. “On the other hand, what does it matter what they’re up to as long as they’re out there and we’re in here?”

  He stamped a foot on the massive, solid stone of the parapet, and the subchief joined him in grunting laughter.

  “The carts are laid in, Armand,” Bogess said as he and From trotted up to Pahner and Bistem Kar. “The LURPs’ stakes were exactly where they were supposed to be, and we’re ready whenever you give the word.”

  “Good,” Pahner replied, but his tone was a bit absent. Kar stood beside him, studying the city’s walls through Dell Mir’s telescope, but the Marine had the magnification of his helmet visor cranked up to give him a far clearer view than any primitive telescope could hope to match.

  “They’re a bit more spread out than I could wish,” Kar said after a moment.

  “Well, we can’t expect the other side to do everything we want it to,” Pahner pointed out. “And it probably doesn’t matter all that much in the long run—these aren’t exactly precision weapons, so there’s going to be enough spread in the impact zone to cover a good bit of target dispersal. I’m more concerned about how many may still be under hard cover in the bombard and arquebus galleys. We’re going to get good coverage, but we don’t have anywhere near as much overhead penetration as I wish we did.”

  “According to Jin’s count, there can’t be very many arquebusiers left in the city, Sir,” Julian pointed out over his powered armor’s radio. “And if they aren’t blind, then they must’ve seen all our nice scaling ladders. Which means they have to have moved just about everybody they’ve got left up onto the battlements to repel boarders.”

  “Nice and logical, Sergeant,” Pahner agreed with a sour grin. “Unfortunately, logic is still a really good way to be wrong with confidence.”

  “Yet
I think he’s right,” Kar said, closing his telescope with a click.

  “If he isn’t, we’ll find out soon enough.” Pahner sighed, and turned to From. “All right, Rus. They were your babies in production, so I guess it’s only fitting to let you be the one to send them on their way. Light ‘em up.”

  “What are those stupid shit-sitters up to?” Mnb Trag groused. “I’m not as young as I used to be, damn it, and these old legs are getting tired!”

  “Sure they are,” the subchief laughed. “You’re a Boman, ‘old man,’ so don’t think you can fool us into thinking you need a rest! No sitting down until you’ve killed your quota!”

  “If I must, I must,” Trag agreed with a theatrical sigh, and tested the edge of his ax with a thumb. “Still, I wish the basik would go ahead and poke their heads up here where I can cleave them!”

  “Oh, they’ll be along, I’m sure,” the subchief told him. “Either that, or they’ll slink back downriver like the cowards they are.”

  Trag grunted agreement, but his attention was on those odd wagons the shit-sitters had pushed into position with such care. Now crews were stripping the canvas covers off of them, and the old chieftain rubbed at a horn in puzzlement as the pewter-gray, late-morning light gleamed dully on strange, stubby cylindrical shapes. He couldn’t tell what they were made of, but there were scores of them in each wagon, arranged in some sort of wooden frames that held them upright. Each of them was perhaps a handspan in diameter, but at least as long as a warrior’s forearm, and the work crews seemed to be fussing over them with a ridiculous attention to detail.

  Whatever they were doing, it didn’t seem to take them long—this time, at least—and the crews scampered back to their positions. In fact, Trag realized, the wagons were widely separated from the waiting shit-sitter army. The closest of them was at least a hundred paces from the nearest block of infantry, and he suddenly wondered why that was.

  Rus From made himself wait until the last wagon crew had completed its work and confirmed that they were safely back behind the danger lines. Then he glanced at Pahner one more time, turned to the K’Vaernian artillerist standing beside him with a lit torch, and nodded.

  “Light it,” he said flatly, and the K’Vaernian touched his torch to the waiting quick match.

  A small, bright, hissing demon flashed along the lengths of fuse, racing across the damp ground in a stink of sulfur, and throughout the ranks of the army, men covered their eyes or ears, depending on their individual inclinations. And then the hissing demon reached the first wagon.

  Mardukan societies of all types and stripes boasted enormous and detailed bestiaries of demons and devils—not surprisingly, probably, given the nightmare creatures which truly did walk the planet’s jungles. Yet not one of the collections of monsters the humans had yet encountered had included anything remotely like the Terran dragons of myth.

  Until today.

  The wagons seemed to explode, but that wasn’t quite what had happened. Each wagon contained a wooden frame, and nested into each frame were two hundred and forty twenty-centimeter rockets. Two thirds of those rockets were fitted with time-fused fragmentation/shrapnel warheads—a bursting charge of black powder surrounded by a shaped matrix of musket balls which turned each missile into what was, effectively, a huge, self-propelled shotgun shell. The other third were pure blast weapons, with simple contact fuses designed courtesy of Nimashet Despreaux and warheads charged with two kilos of black powder each.

  There were fifty wagons outside Sindi, for a total of twelve thousand rockets, and the blast warheads alone carried eight metric tons of gunpowder, exclusive of the propellant charges. The projectiles roared heavenward in an incredible, choking column of brimstone-flavored smoke and flame, then arced over and came screaming down. The fragmentation warheads burst in midair, and although the jury-rigged time fuses were crude, to say the very least, the vast majority functioned approximately as designed. A deluge of almost two million musket balls hammered the battlements and a zone fifty meters deep on either side of the walls, like the flail of some outraged war god that turned every exposed Boman into so much torn and shredded meat. No one on Marduk had ever so much as contemplated such a weapon, and so none of the barbarians had even considered taking cover. Instead, they’d crowded together, almost literally shoulder-to-shoulder, to await the anticipated assault, and they couldn’t have offered a better target if they’d tried to. Here and there a small group or an isolated individual happened to have had sufficient overhead protection to avoid annihilation, but they represented only a minute proportion of Mnb Trag’s tribe and its allies. When that dreadful broom of fire and fury swept across the walls of Sindi, almost ten thousand Boman warriors perished in a single screaming moment of devastation.

  And on the heels of the fragmentation warheads, came the blast weapons. Compared to modern human weapons, the quaint, crude black powder rockets were mere children’s toys, but the earth trembled underfoot like a terrified animal as those “toys” came crunching down on the walls and the buildings behind them. A terrifying drumroll of explosions threw fire and smoke, bits and pieces of barbarian warriors, roofing tiles, building stone, and shattered wood higher than the walls themselves, and the soldiers of K’Vaern’s Cove looked at one another in shock and awe at the sheer havoc of the humans’ weapons.

  Mnb Trag never had the opportunity to share their shock and awe. Along with virtually every warrior of his tribe, he was wiped out of existence before he had time to grasp, even dimly, what horror lurked within the despised shit-sitters’ wagons.

  “Damn,” Julian said almost mildly. “Think we used enough dynamite, there, Gronningen?”

  “We can hope,” the big Asgardian replied stolidly, watching the incredible pall of smoke and dust rising like some loathsome beast above the broken stoneyard which had once been the northernmost portion of the city of Sindi.

  “Guess we find out now,” Julian said as his HUD flashed. “Time to saddle up, troops.”

  Mnb Trag was dead, but by some fluke of ballistics and fate, the subchief who’d stood barely ten paces from the old chieftain still breathed. That wouldn’t be true very much longer, and the subchief knew it, for he felt his strength fleeing with the blood pulsing from his savagely mangled legs. But the anesthesia of shock kept him from truly feeling the pain, and he pushed himself up onto his elbows with his fading strength and stared about him in total disbelief.

  The wall itself still stood, virtually intact and gruesomely decorated with the torn and dismembered bodies of his fellow clansmen, but the neat houses and streets behind the walls had been threshed and shattered under a club of fire. Flames roared from the broken structures, bellowing and capering like demons above a broken wasteland of rubble, and the dying subchief felt an icy stab of terror as he surveyed the wreckage. Not for himself, for a man who knew he was dying had very little else to fear, but for the host following Kny Camsan in his pursuit of the League cavalry. If this dreadful devil weapon could unleash such devastation upon solid stone and masonry, what would happen if it caught the host in the open, completely without protection?

  That thought shuddered in the back of his fading brain, and he turned away from the vista of ruin. He found himself facing the massively bastioned main gate of the city, instead . . . just in time to see magic.

  Before the Mardukan’s dying eyes, four demons appeared out of nowhere in a ripple of distortion, like the wavering of heat above a flame. They were mottled gray and yellow, with only two arms and bulbous heads and bodies, and their skins looked like wood or metal. As the subchief watched in amazement, one of them made a sword appear from nothing and struck it deep into the gate. Into the gap between the leaves of the gate, actually, and metal screamed as the demon sliced downward. Massive locking bars of bronze and iron parted like thread, and then the demon made his sword disappear, reached out to grip one huge bronze-sheathed panel in each hand, and pulled them apart.

  The subchief watched in horror as a second supern
atural apparition began to assist the first. Those gates were incredibly heavy, and slightly warped from the Boman’s own assault on the city and the iron heads’ bags of gunpowder. Dozens of stout warriors were required to open or close either one of their panels . . . slowly. But those two powerful demons, all by themselves, were—

  And then, he died.

  There were still a few Boman survivors, and some of them were actually on their feet as Julian threw the full weight of his armor against the gate and it came fully open. The huge hinges were twisted top and bottom, but the soft iron couldn’t resist the powered “muscles” of the suits. Only the fact that, massive as they were, the suits were much lighter than the gate panels had prevented the armored Marines from flinging them open instantly, but instantly wasn’t really required.