by David Weber
Which had been the entire reason Pahner had constructed the elaborate trap called Sindi.
The Marton Regiment passed the midpoint of the Great Bridge. From its central span to the northern bank, the bridge was a solid mass of Boman, pushing and shoving at one another in their determination to reach the hated shit-sitters. It was a terrifying sight, viewed from the south side of the river, and Bogess and Rus From stood watching it with a sort of awed disbelief.
The bridge was clear between the retreating K’Vaernians and the south bank, and the reinforced regiment was a minuscule force opposed to the thousands upon thousands of barbarian warriors struggling to reach and kill it. The fact that it was exactly what they had planned for and wanted to see didn’t make the sight one bit less frightening, and the two Diaspran leaders turned their backs upon it by unspoken mutual consent.
Instead of watching the grim, steady retreat, they let their eyes sweep over the surprise awaiting the Boman on this side of the river.
The original architects of Sindi had built a massive, separate gatehouse and bastioned keep to cover the Great Bridge’s southern end. Beyond the gatehouse was another square, even larger than the one at the northern end, and beyond that were the first rows of houses and shops. The city’s street net was as tangled and convoluted as that of any other Mardukan city, and even the broader boulevards were scarcely anything which might have been called wide open, but the designers had seen no reason to build massive curtain walls along the southern bank of the Tam. The only way an attacker could reach that part of the city was across the Great Bridge itself, so the powerful gatehouse blocking access to and from the bridge was really all the protection the city had required against assault from that direction.
The current landlords had made a few changes, however. Rus From’s engineers had used old fashioned sledgehammers and charges of the black powder liberated from Sindi’s own magazines to demolish whole blocks of buildings on the southern side of the square, effectively extending the plaza almost another full kilometer to the south. But if they’d given it more space to the south, they’d compensated by using the rubble produced by their demolition exercises to build stone walls, six meters high and three meters deep across every street and alleyway giving access to the square. Then they’d loopholed the inward-facing wall of every building still standing around the entire perimeter of the square and reinforced most of those walls from the inside with sandbags, for good measure. They’d left two of the main boulevards unblocked on the square’s south side to permit the retreat of their own troops, and aside from the Marton Regiment, the entire army had now disappeared through those openings.
Through those previous openings, to be more precise. No sooner had the last “fleeing” infantryman passed through than the engineers had sprung into action once more. The walls of sandbags they’d assembled across the boulevards weren’t quite as tall as the stone walls blocking the other streets, but they were just as thick . . . and each of them had embrasures for six of the new “Napoleons” from the cannon foundries of K’Vaern’s Cove.
The general and the cleric regarded those grim preparations one last time, and, almost despite themselves, felt a moment of something very like pity for their enemies.
Krindi Fain heaved a sigh of relief as General Kar and his command group climbed the steep stairs to the top of the bastion and joined Bishop From and General Bogess. He would have been even more relieved if the gates and gate tunnel hadn’t taken their own share of damage from the humans’ plasma cannon. Although he understood why it was just as important for the defenses on this side of the river to have been “wrecked,” it still would have been nice to be able to close a good, sturdy gate of bronze-sheathed ironwood against the shrieking hordes of Boman warriors, especially with the security of both senior Mardukan generals and their chief engineer to worry about.
He made a quick inspection of his troops’ positions and felt a surge of pride. His men had to be at least as nervous as he was, given that they’d been less thoroughly briefed on the plan than he, but every one of them was exactly where he was supposed to be, already laying out his cartridge box. If everything went the way it was supposed to, the rest of the regiment would retreat into the gatehouse bastions along with Fain’s own company, and if the main gateway had been blasted to bits, the gates and firing slits protecting the bastions were completely intact. They certainly ought to be able to hold out against anything the Boman could do for hours, at the very least, and that should be ample time . . . assuming the plan worked the way it was supposed to.
“Now! Drive them now!”
Tar Tin’s shout was as hoarse as the scream of a newly branded sorn, but he was hardly alone in that. Every chieftain and subchief was shrieking the same message, goading their warriors on, and the war leader laughed in savage triumph as the host’s leading warriors drew closer and closer to the southern gatehouse. Even from his own position on the north bank, the damage that gatehouse had suffered when the shit-sitters seized the city was clearly evident. What should have been an all but impenetrable barrier had been opened like a gutted basik. All they had to do was to drive these last, stubborn shit-sitters through the shattered tunnel and the city would be theirs.
“About now, I think,” Captain Armand Pahner murmured as the blue icons of the Marton Regiment crossed the green safety line projected onto his HUD, and his toot transmitted the detonation code over his armor’s com.
The micromolecular detonator had been designed to handle anything from highly sophisticated chemical explosives to small thermonuclear devices. The design team which had produced it had never even considered the possibility that it might be used for something as crude as black powder weapons, and they might have been offended by such a plebeian misuse of their ultrasophisticated brainchild.
Pahner could not have cared less about that. All he cared about was that it did precisely what he wanted it to do and ignited the quick match fuse running to the five hundred black powder claymore mines emplaced along the west side of the bridge.
The mines didn’t detonate simultaneously. Instead, a rolling wall of fire and smoke raced clear across the bridge from just beyond its midpoint all the way to the northern bank of the river.
“Now!”
Colonel Ni’s deep-voiced shout rang out, and every one of his pikemen squatted as if simultaneously stricken by diarrhea. The six hundred or so Boman who’d been outside the claymores’ kill zone were too stunned by the cataclysm behind them to react, although there was very little they could have done, anyway. As the squatting pikemen cleared their line of fire, four hundred riflemen and three hundred revolver-armed cavalrymen opened fire at point-blank range. The bridge was so narrow that the K’Vaernians’ and Northerners’ ranks could be only twenty men across, but they could fire three ranks deep, and as each group of sixty fired, it squatted in turn to clear the fire of the group behind it. The firing sequence began with the cavalrymen; by the time it reached the second group of riflemen, there was not a single living, unwounded Boman on the entire length of the Great Bridge.
Sergeant Major Eva Kosutic paced back and forth along the gun line atop the rubble-built wall on the western side of the square. She hadn’t been happy about being stuck here in the city while the troops were actually engaged in the field, especially when Roger and his Mobile Force had been fighting for their lives. But she was about to make up for her recent inactivity, she thought, listening to the crashing thunder of the Marton Regiment’s volleys with a cold, thin smile.
“Load with grape,” she told the gunners she and her initial cadre of naval artillerists had trained, and her smile turned even colder and thinner as she considered the surprise present they had for the Boman.
“Beware of Armaghans,” she told the distant barbarians softly. “Especially when they bear gifts.”
Tar Tin stared in horror at the Great Bridge.
Half a kilometer of Boman warriors—almost six thousand of them—had been ripped apart and strewn in b
loody wreckage all along the northern half of the bridge. No doubt the host had lost many more than that during the fighting across the city, but not in such an eyeblink of time. Not so . . . horrifically. One moment they’d been living warriors, fierce and proud, screaming their war cries as they surged forward to close with their shit-sitter enemies; the next, they were so much shredded meat and blood, blown and splattered across the paved roadway. Blood ran from the bridge’s storm drains, not in trickles but in streams that splashed into the river below and dyed it until it looked as if the Tam itself were bleeding to death.
And even as he stared at the carnage and destruction, even as the shit-sitter rearguard turned and jogged into the shadows of the broken gate tunnel, yet another huge explosion roared through the humid air. He watched the cloud of smoke and dust billowing up from the middle of the center span and hammered the edge of his ceremonial ax on the heaped stone upon which he stood, screaming his fury. The accursed shit-sitters had blown up the bridge behind themselves! Despite the panicked rout of almost their entire army, they were going to escape him because some demon among them had planned even for this contingency!
Curses and howls of baffled rage rose from thousands of other throats as the rest of the host realized the same thing. Warriors shrieked promises of dire vengeance, promised the gods the slow, lingering death of whatever shit-sitter had planned that ambush and that escape from their wrath.
But then the dust and smoke began to dissipate, and all of the curses, all of the shouts, faded into a breathless silence as the Great Bridge emerged slowly from the haze once more.
Tar Tin realized that he was holding his own breath, leaning forward, staring with hungry eyes as the bridge reemerged, pace by pace. Perhaps, if the gap wasn’t too wide they would still be able to get across. Perhaps a temporary span, or—
A shout of triumph arose—first from one throat, then from a dozen, and finally from thousands. The bridge stood! The shit-sitter explosion had blasted away the raised stone guard walls on both sides, and taken a ragged bite out of the eastern side of the roadbed, but that was all. All!
“Now you will all die, shit-sitters!” Tar Tin screamed jubilantly. “So clever you were—so brilliant! But nothing stands between you and our axes now!” The paramount war leader of the clans raised his ax of office overhead in both true-hands, and his voice rang out like the trumpet of the war god.
“Forward the clans! Kill the shit-sitters!”
Armand Pahner inhaled in deep satisfaction as a fresh wave of Boman began thundering out onto the gore-splashed roadway of the bridge. His greatest fear had been that the barbarians would refuse to thrust their heads into the trap awaiting them on the south bank of the river. He’d had no choice but to set up the claymore ambush, because it had been imperative that there be a clean break between the K’Vaernian rearguard and the first ranks of barbarians to cross the bridge. The rearguard had to have time to file through the bastions’ gates and bar those openings behind them, because he’d dared not let them into the killing ground with the enemy still in contact. Any force small enough to fit onto the bridge would have been easily outflanked and destroyed once the Boman had room to deploy around them, and the rest of the waiting troops couldn’t have fired on the Boman without killing their own rearguard. Not to mention the fact that any premature firing might warn the barbarians of what was coming in time for them to refuse to cooperate. Yet even though he’d had no option but to place the claymores, he’d been more than half afraid that if the ambush worked, the Boman would recoil, refusing to continue their advance lest they run into additional, similar ambushes.
The only answer he’d been able to think of was to make the Boman think the defenders had done their level best to destroy the bridge entirely. The theory had been that the barbarians would figure that they wouldn’t have tried to destroy the bridge, unless they’d been afraid of being pursued. From which it followed that this was the ideal time to pursue them. And so Corporal Aburia had worked with exquisite care to prepare a black powder “demolition charge” which would look spectacular as hell, do a fair amount of superficial damage, but leave the bridge structurally intact. He’d been a bit anxious about asking the corporal to tailor that precise a charge with something as crude as black powder, but she’d come through with flying colors.
Now he watched the bridge filling once again with close-packed Boman, and keyed his communicator.
“Here they come, Eva,” he announced over the dedicated channel to the sergeant major. “Don’t let anyone get too eager.”
Honal stood peering through the firing slit in the wall of what once had been a shop of some sort. He had no idea what sort of goods it had sold, nor were there any clues to give him a hint. All that was left was a large, square, empty room with heavily reinforced stone walls. Well, that and the swivels, mounted on heavy timbers, driven into the ground, which the K’Vaernian Navy had contributed to the campaign.
The Sheffan nobleman rested one proprietary false-hand on the swivel beside him. For all intents and purposes, it was a small muzzle-loading cannon with a shot weight of no more than a single human kilo which took its name from the way it was mounted aboard K’Vaernian warships, which had a habit of mounting a dozen or so of them along each rail as antipersonnel weapons. Julian had taken one look at them and pronounced that they were the galaxy’s biggest muzzle-loading “shotguns”—whatever a “shotgun” was. Honal didn’t really know about that. All he knew was that this particular swivel was going to help him extract his long awaited vengeance for murdered Sheffan, and he showed his teeth in a snarl any human might have envied.
Bistem Kar watched from atop the gatehouse bastion as the unending tide of Boman swept towards him down the bridge. It scarcely even hesitated when it reached the area Aburia’s charge had damaged, and the general’s growl of satisfaction rumbled deep in his throat as the barbarians kept right on coming.
“Lieutenant Fain!”
“Yes, Sir?”
“Lieutenant, those bastards may get suspicious if we just welcome them into our parlor, but I don’t want to put down enough fire to discourage them, either. I think one company of really good shots ought to be just about right. Would you happen to know where I might find one which would be interested in the job?”
“As a matter of fact, General,” the Diaspran lieutenant told him with a slow smile, “I do. Company! Action front!”
Tar Tin snarled as the first shit-sitter arquebus fire began to crackle from the bastions to either side of the broken gatehouse. So, some of the rearguard had had the presence of mind to position themselves there in an effort to delay the host’s pursuit of their fleeing fellows! It was a courageous decision, he conceded, since they could not have an unlimited supply of ammunition and whatever happened to the rest of their army they were certain to be dug out of their positions eventually and killed. But it was obvious that there weren’t enough of them to stop the Boman. Dozens of warriors fell, or plunged over the side of the bridge into the Tam, as bullets struck them down, but even as dozens fell, hundreds continued to charge forward at a run, and already the host’s fleetest warriors were passing through the broken gatehouse.
The bridge was theirs! The bridge was theirs—and soon all the rest of the city, and their families, and their stolen booty would be theirs once more and K’Vaern’s Cove would be doomed!
Eva Kosutic watched the barbarians spilling into the enlarged plaza like a dark, living tide pouring into a dry lake bed from a sluice gate. They came onward, waving their axes, screaming their war cries, and she felt her gunners stirring uneasily. Not nervously, really—more . . . impatiently. They wanted to open fire now, but she only stood there, hands clasped behind her, and waited for the lake to fill.
Sna Hulf of the Ternolt Clan of the Boman charged through the ruined gate tunnel, howling his war cry. The exultation of battle carried him forward like a man possessed, eager to prove his courage and punish all shit-sitter treachery. He’d never experienced anythin
g quite like the charge across the bridge, never been part of such a focused, unstoppable surge. It was as if the bridge were a narrow streambed, and the host a mighty tide driving through it, gaining speed as its bed narrowed until it erupted from the far end of the channel with a force nothing could resist! The weight of all his fellow warriors, of all the clans, thrust him forward with the massive momentum of literally kilotons of bone and blood and muscle.
Yet even in his exalted mood, he realized there was something strange and different about the square at this end of the bridge. It was larger than it had been the last time he was here, and all of the streets leading off of it seemed to have disappeared. And there were holes in the walls of all the buildings. And what were those shit-sitters doing on the platform atop the wall where the main boulevard had been?
He stared at the shit-sitters—the only ones he could see—while the momentum of his fellows propelled him forward into the square. They stood behind some sort of strange, two-wheeled carts which supported metal tubes of what looked like dark bronze. The tubes were long, and slender, unlike anything he’d ever seen before, yet there was something about them . . . something familiar, if only he could place it . . .
“I’ve never seen so many Boman in such a small space in my entire life,” Honal remarked to Rastar and Chim Pri.
“Like a stock pen full of turom at branding time,” Pri agreed, rechecking the priming caps on one of his revolvers.
“And one big pocking target,” Turkol Bes added. The commander of the Carnan Battalion had borrowed one of the Marines’ repeating rifles and had at least forty magazines piled up in front of him. The weapon was ridiculously small for him, but that was all right with Bes.
