Empire of Man

by David Weber

  “And one big pocking target,” Rastar agreed grimly.

  “They’re starting to slow down, General,” Krindi Fain remarked, and Kar nodded in agreement. The general had Dell Mir’s telescope back out, and was peering towards the northern end of the bridge.

  “I imagine the square is beginning to fill up, Lieutenant,” he said almost absently. “Even with all the pressure coming from behind them, they can only cram so many bodies into so much space.” He chuckled evilly. “Of course, we’re about ready to begin making room for more of them, aren’t we?”

  “General, Colonel Ni reports that some of the Boman are beginning to try to force the gates into the bastion,” one of Kar’s staffers announced, and the general shrugged.

  “I suggest you tell him not to let them do that,” he said in mild tones, still peering through his telescope. “Although,” he added dryly, “I imagine they’ll have something else to distract them very shortly.”

  “Armand, we’re just about full here.”

  Pahner grinned at Kosutic’s pointed tone. The sergeant major would never come out and admit that she was feeling antsy, but her use of his first name in front of the troops, even over the dedicated command circuit, was a dead giveaway. And looking at the congested horde of red icons packing tighter and tighter together in the square, he could hardly blame her. The remote imagery from her helmet showed him a vast sea of Boman, surging this way and that while those closest to the edges of the huge mob began to hack at the barricades with their battle axes. They weren’t going to get through that stone any time soon, but he didn’t want them to get any ideas about helping one another swarm over their tops, either.

  “How many do you figure are still on our side of the river or the bridge, Julian?” he asked.

  “Call it ten or twelve thousand on the bridge, and another ten or so on the approaches,” Julian replied after a moment.

  Pahner frowned slightly. He’d calculated that the Boman could fit a maximum of about forty or forty-five thousand into the square beyond the gatehouse, but he didn’t really think there were that many already in it. Call it thirty thousand, he decided. If Julian’s estimate was correct—and Pahner rather thought it was—then the Boman were down to no more than fifty-two thousand, little more than half the size of their host before the campaign began. If things went according to plan, those on the bridge and already in the square were toast, but there was no way the limited number of suits of powered armor available to him was going to be able to simultaneously seal the bridge and round up anyone who wasn’t already on it. Which meant that at least ten thousand of the barbarians were going to escape, and he hated that.

  His frown turned into a grimace and a snort as he realized he was actually upset by the idea of inflicting “only” ninety percent casualties on his enemy. Hubris, he decided, wasn’t something a Marine needed to go around encouraging, and a mere ninety percent casualty rate ought to be enough to encourage even Boman to behave themselves in the future.

  “All right, Eva,” he said soothingly. “If it will make you feel any better, go ahead and get started.”

  “Gee, thanks,” she said sarcastically, then turned to the gunners on the platform with her, and the captain heard her over the still-open com-link.

  “Open fire!”

  Sna Hulf had been shoved almost directly up against one of the stone walls fronting the square by the unendurable pressure of the warriors behind him. One or two of his fellows had already lost their footing and disappeared under the shrieking, ax-waving ocean of warriors. He had no doubt that they’d been trampled into paste, and the pressure around him was becoming distinctly unpleasant, but he couldn’t take his mind off those bronze tubes.

  If they’d been fatter and ringed with reinforcing hoops or bands of metal, he would have been tempted to think they were bombards. But no one had ever mounted a bombard on a carriage like that, and no one had ever cast a bombard that skinny for its length. It was ridiculous. And yet . . . and yet . . .

  He was still pondering the conundrum when Eva Kosutic’s order reached her gunners.

  The gun platforms had been very carefully designed. Aside from the twelve guns in the sandbagged barriers built to close the two avenues by which the retreating K’Vaernians had cleared the square, each battery was at least six meters above ground level, and the gun platforms themselves sloped upward towards the rear, so that the guns’ point of aim, at maximum depression, was well below the level of the batteries on the opposite side of the square. After all, no one wanted any friendly fire casualties.

  But if no one wanted friendly casualties, there were going to be plenty of unfriendly ones. Each round of grapeshot consisted of nine individual shot, each fifty millimeters in diameter, and there were a hundred and eighty-two guns. Just over sixteen hundred iron balls, each seventy percent the size of a pre-space baseball, ripped into the packed Boman. Anyone who got in the way of one of them simply exploded in a spray of crimson and shredded flesh, and each of them blasted its way well over four hundred meters into the stunned mass of warriors.

  No one ever knew how many thousands of Boman died in that first salvo, and it didn’t really matter. Even as the artillery opened fire, riflemen and revolver-armed cavalry rose atop the walls around the square, or stepped up to the loopholes, and the six hundred Navy swivels mounted behind other loopholes belched fire and smoke. The swivels were loaded with canister, not grape, and each of them sent one hundred and thirty-five musket balls screaming into the Boman.

  Honal shouted with delight as he touched off the swivel. The concussion as hundreds of field guns and swivels and thousands of rifles and revolvers simultaneously opened fire was like the blow from some mighty hammer. The deafening waves of sound and overpressure seemed to squeeze the air out of his lungs, and the brimstone stench was shot through with lurid tongues of flame, like some demon’s paradise turned loose on mortal beings.

  To either side of him, Rastar, Chim Pri, and Turkol Bes stood at their own loopholes, blazing away with the same manic grins. Honal’s assistants stepped forward and began reloading the swivel, and the cavalryman drew two of his own revolvers and emptied them through the swivel’s firing slit while they worked.

  Shrieks and screams of terrified agony came from the slaughter pen into which the Boman had been herded, and hell-spawned night enveloped the scene of horror as choking clouds of smoke devoured the light.

  Tar Tin was halfway across the bridge when the terrible explosions began on the far side of the gatehouse. The mighty stone structure of the Great Bridge itself seemed to quiver and pulse underfoot with the fury of the shit-sitters’ fire, yet even through the dreadful thunder he could hear the despairing shrieks of the warriors trapped and dying under it.

  Horrified understanding smote him as the choking pall of powder smoke rose above the far end of the bridge, and a fist seemed to close about his heart as he realized Kny Camsan had been right all along. To charge headlong against the shit-sitters’ new weapons was to die, and he had been fooled—duped by shit-sitter cunning into doing just that! He still couldn’t see what was happening in the square ahead, but he didn’t need to see to know that the disaster to which he had led the clans was complete.

  All about him, other warriors heard the sounds of slaughter and realized, as he, that the shit-sitters wanted them to continue their charge forward to their deaths. For a few moments, the pressure of those behind kept them moving forward anyway, but then even those at the very rear of the column realized, however imperfectly, what was happening. The pressure eased, and the flow of movement across the bridge began to reverse itself.

  “Okay, troops,” Pahner said to the armored members of Julian’s squad. “Time to push the little dogies along.”

  The true purpose of the armor was far less to wipe the Boman out of existence than to break the back of the remnant’s morale.

  It worked.

  The armored Marines, concealed by the sophisticated chameleon systems of their armor, had act
ually passed through the rearmost stragglers of the Boman host without being detected. They’d split up, spreading out to cover as many as possible of the streets, alleys, and avenues leading into the square on the north bank of the Tam with at least one Marine, and now they advanced, firing as they came.

  A tidal wave of flechettes, cannon beads, and plasma bolts erupted out of nowhere, tearing lethal holes through the Boman who had just begun to retreat from the holocaust on the other side of the river, and it was too much. Not even Boman battle frenzy could support them in the midst of such supernatural devastation and horror, and the warriors began throwing down their weapons and groveling on the ground, anything to get out of the hail of terrible, terrible death from the invisible demons.

  Honal sent yet another charge of canister blazing through the loophole, and reached for another pair of revolvers. He stepped up to the opening and opened fire, watching still more of the trapped, screaming Boman fly back from his fire in splashes of red, and he laughed with an edge of hysteria. It was like killing basik. He could probably have wandered in with a club and killed the Boman—they were that broken.

  His revolvers clicked empty, and he snarled in frustration at the interruption of the terrible frenzy of slaughter. He swung out the cylinders and began stuffing fresh cartridges into the chambers. He recapped them, closed them, and began firing yet again.

  “Cease fire, Honal,” someone said in his ear.

  “What?” he asked, picking another target and squeezing the trigger. The Boman blew sideways, disappearing into the heaped and piled corpses of his fellows, and someone hit Honal on the shoulder.

  “Cease fire!” Rastar shouted in his ear.

  Honal gave his cousin an incredulous glance, unable to believe what he was hearing, then looked back out the firing slit. The terrifying warriors of the Boman were a pitiful sight, most of them trying desperately to cower behind and under the piles of their own dead, and Rastar shook him by the shoulder.

  “Cease fire,” he said in a more nearly normal voice. “Despreaux says to cease fire. It’s all over.”

  “But—” Honal began, and Rastar shook his head.

  “She’s right, cousin,” the last prince of Therdan said. “Look at them, Honal. Look at them, and remember them as they were when they came over our walls . . . and as they will never, ever be again.” He shook his head again, slowly. “The League is avenged, cousin. The League is avenged.”

  Tar Tin stood trapped in the center of the bridge, watching the destruction of his people’s soul. The pride of the warrior people who had always triumphed, for whom defeat had never been more than a temporary setback and a spur to still greater triumph, died that day before his very eyes, and he knew it. Whatever might become of the pitiful survivors of the clans, they would never forget this disaster, never again find the courage to take the shit-sitters by the throat and teach them fear. They were the ones who would cower in terror from this day forth, hiding in the shadows lest the terrible shit-sitters come upon them and complete their destruction.

  And it was he, Tar Tin, who had led them to this.

  He knew what the clans would require of him—if they still possessed the spirit to demand a war leader’s death. And he knew what they would expect of him, yet try as he might, he could not force a way through the defeated warriors about him to attack the shit-sitters and force them to kill him. He could not even sing his death song, for there was no enemy to give him death with honor. There was only shame, and the knowledge that the warrior people, terror of the North, would be warriors no more forever.

  He looked down at the ceremonial ax in his true-hands—the ax which had been borne by the war leaders of the clans for fifteen generations, and which had finally known defeat and humiliation. His hands tightened on the shaft as he pictured the shit-sitters’ gloating pleasure at claiming that emblem of Boman pride as a trophy to hang upon a palace wall in some stinking city, far from the free winds of the hills of the North.

  No! That much, at least, he would prevent. In this, if in nothing else, he would prove himself worthy of his war leader’s title.

  Tar Tin, last paramount war leader of the clans of the Boman, clutched his ax of office to his chest with all four hands and climbed upon the parapet of the Great Bridge of Sindi. The water of the Tam ran red with the blood of his people below him, and he closed his eyes as he gave himself to the river.

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  Poertena tossed down a single card.

  “Gimme.”

  “Never draw to an inside straight,” Fain said, flipping a card across the table. “It just won’t work.”

  “A week,” Tratan said. “A week he’s been playing, and already he’s an expert.”

  “It won’t,” the company commander said.

  “We’ve got the masts almost finished,” Tratan said, changing the subject, “and the last of the spars will be ready next week. Now if you hull pussies would ever get finished . . .”

  “Real woodwork takes time,” Trel Pis said. The old K’Vaernian shipbuilder scratched his right horn as he contemplated his cards. “You can’t rush perfection.”

  “We gots tee last load o’ planking from tee mills yestiday,” Poertena said. “Tomorrow we starts putting it up. Every swingin’ . . . whatever gets to put up planks til we done. T’en we parties.”

  “So next week the Prince has his yacht?” Fain asked. “Call. Pair of twos.”

  “Or tee week after,” Poertena said. “We gots to set up tee rigging, an’ t’at takes time. An’ tee new canvas ain’t ready yet, neither. Four eights. Gimme.”

  “If he was a Diaspran, I’d never believe it,” Tratan said, throwing down his hand.

  “Natural four?” Fain said in disbelieving tones.

  “Hey,” Poertena said. “If you gots tee cards, you don’t have to draw to a straight. It’s only when you pocked you gots to do t’at.”

  “Sergeant, could you take a look at this?”

  The humans hadn’t tried to explain the nature of the listening post to their hosts. The Mardukans had remarkable facility with gross manufacture, but the minute the word “electronics” was used, it became supernatural. So instead of trying to explain, Pahner had just asked for a high, open spot on the western wall, and left it at that.

  Julian walked over from the open tower where the rest of the squad was lounging in the shade and checked the reading on the pad.

  “Shit,” he said quietly.

  “What’s it mean?” Cathcart asked, tapping a querying finger on the flashing icon.

  “Encrypted voice transmission,” Julian said, crouching down to run expertly through the analysis.

  “From a recon flight?”

  There was an unmistakable nervous note in the corporal’s voice, and Julian didn’t blame him. The entire company had known since the day they left Marshad that someone from the port had discovered the abandoned assault shuttles in which they’d reached the planet. The scrap of com traffic they’d picked up from the pinnace which had spotted them had been in the clear, which hadn’t left much room for doubts. But it had also been only a scrap, and what no one knew was what whoever was in control of the port had done about that discovery since. It was unlikely that anyone would believe a single company of Marines could survive to get this far, but it certainly wasn’t impossible.

  “Don’t know if it’s a recon flight,” he told Cathcart after a moment, “but whatever it is, we’re close enough to pick it up. Which means they’re close enough to see us . . . if they look. Or hear us, if we’re careless with our radio traffic. “

  “Saint?” the corporal asked, glancing at the sky.

  “Civilian,” Julian replied. “Standard program you can download off any planet’s Infonet.”

  “That’s good, right?” Cathcart said. “That means the Saint blockade might have been lifted. It might be a freighter or something.”

  “Yeah,” Julian said. “Maybe.” He tapped the icon, and it flashed red and yellow. “On the ot
her hand, pirates use the same program.”

  Cord had considered himself a scholar in his day. And a poet. So when O’Casey set her toot to the task of accurately translating the long-ago log of the only ship known ever to have crossed the ocean, it was as a scholar that Cord had offered his assistance.

  But it was with the mind of a shaman that he finally read the words which had been written on the crumbling leather leaves of the ancient log.

  “Upon the forty-sixth day of the voyage, in the first quarter after light, there was a vast boiling upon the sea, as of a giant swell of water. All who were not employed upon the oars gathered on the starboard side to observe as another boil came up, and still another, each closer to the ship and apparently approaching rapidly.

  “Just as the fourth boil of water was observed near alongside the starboard beam, there was a great shudder from below, as if the ship had struck a hidden reef.

  “Master Kindar called to back all oars, but before any action could be taken, a vast mouth, as wide as the ship was long, opened up, and the bow of the vessel dropped into its maw.

  “The jaws closed upon the ship, tearing it asunder and taking away many who had run forward to see the apparition. Many others, especially those along the sides, were thrown from the shattered remnants.

  “I stood my post upon the rudder deck as the ship began to roll to the side. There was more screaming forward, as the ship shuddered again, and it was apparent that the beast had taken another bite, but it was out of my view.

  “I clung to the rudder as the ship rolled, and then lashed myself to the starboard bulwark as the fragment continued to float. Forward, I could hear the screams of others caught in the water, and again and again the creature crashed against the remnant of the ship, until it became either sated or disgusted with the fare. Perhaps it was the latter, for it has been ten days now, and it has not returned.