by David Weber
In the end, even the Boman were forced to admit that they could not overwhelm their enemies, and the triumphant relief force broke free of the sea of barbarians and began to funnel back through the gates while a steadily contracting shield of pikes, covered by rifles on the ground and on the walls alike, held off the barbarians’ last, despairing charges.
Throughout the endless, exhausting day, Krindi Fain had stood at the edge of the command group and watched the general work. Kar had stood still and calm, hands clasped behind his back, and only occasionally snapped out an order. But whenever he did give an order, aides and messengers scurried to obey.
Fain didn’t have to worry about that, though. He’d deployed his company around the general, and that was that. The new company commander realized that his own blundering into the group around the general was at least partially to blame for the change in his command’s assignment, since it had pointed out a certain weakness in Kar’s security arrangements. There was no way he should have been able to, more or less, sleepwalk past the command group’s previous guards, and he was determined that no one else would sleepwalk past him. Not that it required a great deal of personal effort from him. Delta Company’s skirmishers, their rifles held muzzle-down and to the left, like some of the Marines, glared balefully at anyone who approached the general. Nobody was going to sleepwalk past these guards.
That eager alertness had left Fain free to watch the progress of the battle, and he’d recognized that in Bistem Kar he saw someone operating on a level of competence he could recognize and appreciate but never hope to approach himself. Now he watched the Boman attacks trickle off as darkness finally fell and the last of the relief force, including the command group, withdrew behind the walls of Sindi.
Kny Camsan stood in the evening rain and stared in disbelief at the walls of Sindi.
It couldn’t be true. It was impossible! Yet the evidence was there before his eyes, impossible to deny.
He had trusted Mnb Trag to hold Sindi in his absence, and he wanted to blame the old chieftain for failing him. But no one could look at those walls and blame Trag. Even all that the shit-sitters had done to the host throughout this long and terrible day paled beside what they’d done to Sindi. Camsan could not imagine what had torn and ripped the massive walls that way, but there were dozens of breaches through them—huge wounds through which the shit-sitters must have stormed to wrest the city from Trag and his warriors.
“What do we do now?” one of the other chieftains demanded harshly.
“We gather our numbers throughout the night,” Camsan replied, never taking his eyes from the ravaged walls of the city which was to have been his capital.
“And what then?” the chieftain pressed, and Camsan turned to face him.
Tar Tin was of the Gestai, one of the larger Boman clans, and the Gestai had been among the most restless under Camsan’s leadership. Tar Tin himself was a chieftain of the old school, one who believed in the exalted power of the battle frenzy to carry warriors to victory over insurmountable odds, and that made him dangerous. Worse, he’d been one of the stronger supporters of the war leader Camsan had replaced after the debacle at Therdan, and his resentment at being pushed aside by those who’d supported Camsan ran deep.
“And then we pin the shit-sitters and starve them,” Camsan said sharply.
“And starve our women and children right along with them?” Tar Tin more than half-sneered. “Truly a plan of rare genius!”
“It’s the only way!” Camsan shot back forcefully. “The losses we’ve taken charging into their guns again and again today are proof of that!”
“I say that it is not the only way,” Tin spat. “The shit-sitters themselves have broken and torn the walls which might have held us out, and they hold our women and children hostage against us. Do you think that they’ll hesitate for a moment to kill those women and children—the women and children you gathered together here that they might be ‘safe’—once they realize they themselves are doomed? We must attack—now! We must storm through the gaps they made for us in their own foolishness and overwhelm them before they destroy the entire future of the Boman!”
“That is madness!” Camsan protested. “Didn’t you see what their new weapons did to us in the forest? Don’t you realize that if they can tear such rents in walls of stone and mortar, they can do far worse to our warriors if we allow them to catch us in the open? No, we must find another way!”
“We must attack!” Tin snarled, even more loudly. “That’s what true Boman do—they charge, and they die. And then other Boman charge over their bodies, and still others, until a charge strikes home and we triumph!”
“We’ve lost thousands this day!” Camsan snarled back. “And if we assault those walls, today’s losses will seem as nothing. It will be Therdan all over again, only many times worse. What good will we do our women and children by charging to their rescue only to be destroyed ourselves? Do you think the shit-sitters will hesitate to kill them once they’ve destroyed the host, and the threat of our vengeance no longer hangs over them?”
The war leader clapped his hands in a gesture of violent negation.
“To charge a prepared enemy with the weapons these shit-sitters possess would be as stupid as it would be pointless! We must find a better way!”
“It is your ‘better ways’ and your clever stratagems which have killed more of us than anything else,” Tar Tin said in a flat, deadly voice. “I think you have lost the respect of the clans. This disaster is your doing, even more than the shit-sitters’.”
The Gestai chieftain stepped back and raised his hands.
“Who is the origin of our grief? The walls of the city lie broken and open! Our warriors lie dead on the field for nothing! Whose hesitation and refusal to overwhelm K’Vaern’s Cove gave the shit-sitters the time to prepare these ‘new weapons,’ and who led our warriors out to face them while our women and children were stolen from us?” Tin glared savagely at Camsan, and his voice dropped to deadly softness as he repeated, “Who is the origin of our grief?”
The other chieftains gathered around the argument. Most of them were far older than Kny Camsan, and more than a few had resented his relative youthfulness when he was named war leader. They’d supported his ascension after Therdan because the horrible casualties suffered trying to storm that city’s walls had been enough to frighten even Boman. But now, with casualties almost as heavily piled on the field and scattered through the jungle, and with the bulk of the clans’ women and children in the hands of shit-sitters, they were willing to consider another change.
“What do you think they’re doing over there?” Roger asked wearily.
His mobile force had reached Sindi shortly after nightfall. Even many of the infantry had learned how to doze in the saddle now, for utter exhaustion was an excellent teacher, yet Chim Pri and his cavalry had somehow managed to dress ranks and trot jauntily through the southern gates under their snarling basik standard. Now the prince stood on the battlements, most of his weight propped on a merlon while he and Pahner gazed out across the fields.
“Jin has a LURP team keeping an eye on them,” the captain said now. “We can’t get close enough to tell exactly what’s going on, even with the directional mikes, but it sure sounds like they’re having some sort of deep and meaningful discussion, complete with lots of threats. I imagine they’re discussing a possible change in the chain of command, and, frankly, nothing would please me better. This Camsan character is much too flexible and innovative a barbarian to make me happy.”
“You really think they’ll come at us again in the morning?” Roger waved at the heaps of Boman bodies, clearly visible to both of them thanks to the magnification of their light-gathering helmet visors. “After we did that to them in the open field?”
“I’ve done everything I can think of to encourage them to, at any rate,” Pahner replied. “We used up almost a dozen charges for the plasma cannon blowing those nice, wide breaches in the wall, and I’ll be
extremely disappointed if it doesn’t occur to any of them that they’ve got all sorts of ways into the city now. And the fact that all their women and children are in here should suggest to them that it would be a good idea for them to come and rescue them.”
“And if they don’t?” Roger asked. “What do we do then?”
“If they won’t come to us, then we go to them—in a manner of speaking. I’ll blow the Great Bridge behind us to maroon them on the other bank of the river, then head south with their women and children in the middle of a pike square, if I have to. They’ll probably find a way across the river eventually—I’m sure they’ll build rafts, if nothing else—but I figure we can make it almost all the way to D’Sley before they can get onto this side in any strength. There’s enough left of the walls there, especially with the repairs Tor Flain, Fullea, and their people have been making, to hold easily with the rifles and the new artillery, and we’ll still have their women and children as bargaining counters.
“In some ways, I’d have preferred to do that from the beginning, because whatever happens, it’s going to be ugly if they come at us tomorrow. If we could get their dependents back to D’Sley and make them talk to us, and if it were handled right, by someone like Eleanora, it would probably offer the best way to settle this whole thing without huge additional casualties for somebody. Unfortunately, I didn’t think we’d have time to hang around and handle the negotiations ourselves, which would have meant leaving it all up to the K’Vaernians, and much as I’ve come to like and respect most of them, I don’t think that would’ve been a good idea. Even the best of them are still a bit too prone to simply slaughter their enemies and be done with it for me to feel comfortable about leaving so many thousands of noncombatants in their hands. Now that Dobrescu’s come through with his coll liver oil extract, we could probably take the slower route . . . except that everything is already dug in and ready here, and there’s too good a chance the bastards would manage to get across and swarm us in the open on the way back to D’Sley.”
Roger turned his head and gazed at the captain’s profile. Armand Pahner, he had discovered, was as complex a human being as he’d ever met. The captain was one of the most deadly people the prince could imagine, with a complete willingness to destroy anything or anyone he had to in order to complete his mission and deliver Roger alive to Earth once more. Yet for all his ruthlessness, the Marine was equally determined not to destroy anything he could avoid destroying. The prince had discovered enough about his own dark side, here on Marduk, to know how easy it would have been for someone in Pahner’s place to become callous and uncaring. The Boman were only barbarians, after all. Why should their fate matter to a civilized man whose entire objective was to get off their planet in the first place?
Yet it did matter to him. As he stood there on the battlements beside Roger, Pahner had all the pieces in place to trap and destroy the Boman host. Not simply defeat it, but destroy it, in a massacre which would make today’s casualties look like a children’s pillow fight. The captain had worked for weeks to plan this operation, driven his Marines and his allies mercilessly to prepare and execute it, and he was determined to drive it through to a conclusion. No doubt many people would have believed that his determination sprang from a desire to stamp out the Boman once and for all, but Roger knew better. That determination sprang, in fact, from a desire to spare all the Boman that he possibly could. It was a recognition that the Boman would never concede defeat until they were made to do so, and that the only way to make them was to crush them militarily, with all the casualties and carnage that entailed. But the only way to prevent Pahner’s allies from truly destroying the Boman by massacring the women and children who represented the continuation of the clans, was to force the warriors to admit defeat.
And so, in a way, the only way to save the warriors’ families was to kill the warriors themselves, and that was precisely what Armand Pahner was prepared to do.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
Kny Camsan turned his face to the North as the gray light of a rainy Mardukan dawn filled the skies. Somewhere up there, young warriors were being born. In the far hills, shamans were placing their infant false-hands on the hilts of knives and slicing the palms of their true-hands to introduce them to the pleasure and the pain of battle. Somewhere, young hunters were tracking atul for their first kill.
Somewhere, life went on.
The ax didn’t quite sever his head from his shoulders. That was a bad omen, but it wasn’t allowed to delay the ceremony of investment of the new war leader, and Tar Tin, the new paramount war leader of the clans of the Boman, was anointed in the blood of his fallen predecessor, as tradition demanded.
Tar Tin lifted the blood-smeared ceremonial ax over his head and waved it at the far battlements.
“We will destroy the shit-sitters who befoul this land! We will retake the city, retake our women and our children, retake all that booty they would plunder from us! We will destroy this shit-sitter army to the last soul and level K’Vaern’s Cove to the very earth and sow it with salt! We shall cleanse these lands so that treacherous shit-sitters across the world tremble at the very name of the Boman and know that treachery against us is the way of death!”
The chieftains and subchiefs assembled around him cheered and brandished their battle axes, and he pointed once more at the battered walls of Sindi.
“Kill the shit-sitters!”
“They seem upset,” Pahner observed.
The captain, Roger, and Julian’s entire surviving squad stood in the cellar of a large, demolished house in the northern portion of Sindi. The hurricane of the rocket bombardment had turned this entire part of the city into uneven mounds and hills of rubble, and the flourishes which Rus From’s engineers had inflicted, with artful assistance from touches of Gronningen’s plasma cannon, only completed the air of devastation. There was absolutely nothing in the area to attract the attention of any Boman warrior, which, of course, was the entire object.
“I think you might say ‘upset’ was just a bit of an understatement,” Roger said judiciously, striving to match the Marine’s clinical tone.
“You’re probably right,” Pahner conceded, “but what really matters is that they seem to have themselves a new commander, and, as Poertena would say, he’s a ‘pocking idiot.’”
This time, Roger only grunted in agreement. There wasn’t much of anything else to say, as the two of them watched their pads display the torrent of red hostile icons streaming towards the breaches left so invitingly in Sindi’s walls.
Roger watched them for a few more moments, but his eyes were drawn inexorably towards the clusters of blue icons waiting for them. Those icons represented the rifle and pike battalions who had the hardest job of all, and he wondered what was going through their minds as they hunkered down in their rough fieldworks and waited for the onslaught.
Krindi Fain was quite certain that it was an enormous honor to be selected as the commander of Bistem Kar’s personal bodyguard. With a whole three hours of sleep behind him, he almost felt alive enough to appreciate the honor, as a matter of fact. Unfortunately, there was a downside to his new assignment, as the echoing war cries and the thunder of the Boman’s drums brought forcibly to mind.
The general wasn’t quite in the most advanced position his troops occupied, but his dugout of rubble and sandbags came close enough to make Fain very, very nervous. Of course, the lieutenant—his “acting” rank had been confirmed before he turned in last night—understood why Kar had to be where he was. After yesterday, the Guard commander enjoyed the total trust—one might almost say adulation—of his troops, and their confidence in their commander had to be absolute for this to work. Which meant they had to know that “the Kren” was there, sticking his own neck into the noose right along with them.
This leadership crap, Fain thought, for far from the first time, was an excellent way to get killed.
“They’re coming through about where we figured, General,” Gunnery Sergeant
Jin announced. The gunny and his LURP teams had been called in during the night and redistributed to put at least one Marine with helmet, pad, and communicator with each regimental commander and Kar. Now the noncom pointed to the pad open on the rickety table at the center of the dugout, and Fain managed—somehow—not to crane his neck in an effort to see the display himself. Not that it would have helped much if he’d been able to see it; unlike Kar and his staff, Fain hadn’t learned to read the display icons the others were now peering at so intently.
“They seem to be throwing more of their weight on the west side than we’d anticipated, General,” one of Kar’s aides pointed out, and the huge K’Vaernian grunted in agreement.
“Doesn’t matter in the long run,” he said, after a moment. “They still have to come to the bridge if they want to get to the other side. Still, we’d better warn Colonel Tarm to expect more pressure sooner than he anticipated.”
“On it,” Jin said laconically, and Fain watched his lips move soundlessly as he passed the message to the Marine attached to Colonel Tarm’s regimental CP.
“Looks like they’re slowing up a little,” someone else observed, and the entire command group grunted with laughter which held a certain undeniable edge of tension.
“No doubt they’re confused about why no one’s shooting at them,” Kar said after a moment. “What a pity. Still, they should be running into the expected resistance just about . . . now.”
A distant crackle of rifle fire broke out with perfect timing, as if the general’s comment had been the cue both sides awaited.
