by E. E. Knight
A few chuckles lightened the mood.
"Save it for the mess hall. There's no shooting to the north, is there?" Valentine said.
Tiddle ignored the byplay and Valentine heard the blat of the motorbike starting up.
"I'm heading for the OP," Bloom said, slipping a pack of playing cards into the webbing on her helmet. According to mess hall gossip, her father, a soldier himself, had given her the pack to aid passing the time, but she'd never broken the box's seal. Her eyes looked luminous in the shadow of the brim.
He barked at the communications team to set up a backup for communicating with the camp observation post, and then turned to Gamecock.
"Form your Bears into two-man hunter-killer groups. Give them explosives—a couple of sticks of dynamite will do. Have them keep to cover until a legworm comes near. Try to get the bang under the things. They're sensitive there."
"I've heard that. The middle, right?"
"The nerve ganglia's there. But if they can't get near enough to be precise, just under the thing will do. They'll reverse themselves."
Valentine braced the camp for impact. He relocated headquarters to the old graveyard behind the church, where there was a good wall and tree cover.
Artillery shells began to fall, hitting the motor and camp stores and the camp's former headquarters with deadly accuracy.
Of course the Coonskins wouldn't turn on their own—they'd coordinated it with the Moondaggers. Someone in the Coonskins had giving the Moondagger spotters a nice little map of camp. Valentine wondered how the brand rank and file felt about the switch in allegiance. Sure, the leadership might decide to bet on the winning team, but what threats would have to be used on the men to turn their guns against erstwhile comrades?
Valentine climbed to the church steeple, so narrow it used a ladder instead of stairs. Bats had taken up residence in the bottom half, hawks higher up.
He felt a little like the proverbial candlestick maker trying to wedge into a shower stall with the butcher and baker. Bloom and her communications tech had a tight enough squeeze in the tiny cupola.
"Valentine, if a shell hits here now, it'll be a triple grave."
"Had to take a quick glimpse," Valentine said.
Bloom slapped him hard on the shoulder. "Moondagger troops are advancing behind the legworm screen."
Valentine watched the lines of crisscrossing legworms. The Kentuckians fought their worms differently than the Grogs of Missouri, who hurried to close from behind shields. He'd seen a Kentucky leg-worm battle before. The riflemen and gunners hooked themselves to one side of their worms and protected the beasts with old mattresses and sacks full of chopped-up tires on the other. Legworms were notoriously resistant to bullets, but machine-gun fire had been known to travel right through a worm and hit the man on the other side.
A new wrinkle had been added this time—classical siege warfare. The legworms zigzagged forward, acting like the old gabions and fascines that sheltered approaching troops and guns. Valentine could see companies of Moondaggers behind the worms, following the mobile walls as they moved down the night-blue slope toward the camp.
Muzzle flashes sparked on the worms' backs. The legworm riders were shooting, sure enough, but the fire wasn't what Valentine would call intense. More like casual target practice.
"Put some air-fused shells on the other side of those worms," Bloom said. "Slow those troops."
"South line wants permission to fire," the communications tech said.
"No," Valentine said. "Hold fire. Hold fire. Wait for the Moondaggers, sir. There's no artillery on our defensive line, sir. If the riders have spotted it, they're not telling the Moondaggers," Valentine said. "I think a lot of those riders are just play-shooting."
"If that's how you want to play it," Bloom said. "Don't fire till we see the whites of their eyes, eh?"
"They're almost on top of the Bear teams," the communications tech reported.
"And here comes the Alliance," Valentine said, looking north. The Bulletproof worms looked like fingers wearing thick green rings thanks to the tenting banding them.
"Pass the word not to shoot at legworms with the bands. They're Alliance," Bloom said. The communications officer complied.
"Go to the south wall, there, Valentine. Get a hit on 'em," Bloom said.
"Yes, sir."
"Where are those mortars?" Bloom barked.
Valentine hurried back down the patched-up ladder. He went forward, Bee gamboling like an excited dog. He checked his gun and magazines.
Mortar shells whistled overhead. Valentine hurried toward the flashes.
Bee ooked at a sentry and Valentine identified himself to the nervous chain of command to the forward posts. Rifle fire crackled overhead.
"They're on top of us. Are we pulling back, or what?" an understandably nervous captain asked.
"The legworms are just cover for the Moondaggers," Valentine said. "They're making the real assault. Don't let your positions show themselves until you can do some real damage."
Gunfire erupted off to the right. Someone wasn't listening to orders or had been knocked out of the communications loop.
Valentine crept up to a stream cut that sheltered the captain's headquarters and took a look at the southern line. The men were sheltered behind low mounds of old legworm trails, patterns crisscrossing as though braided by a drunk, creating little gaps like very shallow foxholes. Atop hummocks of fertilized soil, brush grew like an irregular hedge. The other side had a good view of gently sloped pasture ground and the oncoming parallels of legworms.
A yellow explosion flared under one of the legworms. Gamecock's Bears struck.
Valentine looked to the east. The Alliance seemed to inch forward across the hillside, turning yellow in the rising light of the dawn, still kilometers away but coming hard. This was about to get messy.
Valentine heard another bang! of dynamite going off. A legworm, cut in two, hunched off in opposite directions.
"This is it. They're coming!" the captain said.
The lines of Coonskin legworms parted, crackling rifle fire still popping away atop the mounts, but the bullets were flying off toward the church and camp, not at the line of men pressed flat behind the bushy legworm trail.
Valentine took in the loose wall of men coming forward, more tightly packed than Southern Command would ever group an assault. Were they being herded forward? Valentine's night-sharp eyes made out a few anguished faces.
The Coonskin legworms angled off to the sides, retreating. The Moondaggers were revealed.
"Let 'em have it, Captain," Valentine said. "This is it."
"Open fire. Open fire!" the captain called. "Defensive grenades."
Gunfire broke out all along the line, sounding like a sudden heavy rain striking a tin roof. Screams sounded from the ranks of the Moondagger assaulting column.
Valentine saw a field pack radio antenna, an officer crouching next to it on the slope.
"Bee," Valentine said, pointing. "That one."
Bee swung her hockey stick of a rifle around and dropped him. Good shooting, that. Uphill fire took a good eye.
Rand reported in. Bloom had sent Valentine's old company up to support the line with Glass' machine guns.
Valentine issued orders for them to create a fallback line at the stream cut as though on autopilot. His mind was on the assault. The first lines fell under withering fire, hardly shooting back, and a second wave, better dispersed and disciplined, came forward.
Grenades exploded, deeper thuds that transmitted faintly through the ground.
The Moondaggers broke through and it was rifle butts and pistols along the line. Valentine realized he'd put his gun to his shoulder without thinking about it and fired burst after burst into the second wave, knocking them back like target cans. He ducked and slid along the stream cut as he reloaded.
Bee grunted and the hair atop her head parted. Valentine saw white skull. She ignored it and kept shooting.
"Medi
c," Valentine called.
Bear teams at the assault's flanks, like tiny tornadoes at the sidelines, bit off pieces of the Moondaggers that Valentine's line chewed up.
The Moondaggers fell back, tripping over their own dead as they backed away, shooting and reloading.
"Keep the heat on!" the captain called.
"Send back to Bloom: Repulsed. For now," Valentine ordered.
A medic was wrapping up Bee's head. He gave Valentine a thumbs-up. "Good thing this old girl doesn't set much store by hairstyle. She's gonna have a funny part."
"You all right, Bee?" Valentine asked.
In response she handed him four shell casings. Her tally, evidently. The ever-observant Bee was picking up habits from Duvalier.
Valentine sent Rand's company forward to fill the gaps in the line, just in case. He went up, keeping at a crouch behind the brush as he moved along the line. Snipers were trading shots across the battlefield as what was left of the Moondaggers' second and third waves retreated back across the south hill.
"We killed enough of'em," a soldier said, looking at the carpet of dead from the first wave; the second wave wounded were still being hunted up from the brush.
"Yes," Valentine said. "Old men. Kids. Women even. The Moondaggers put some cannon fodder up front, and when the gamble didn't pay they kept the rest of their chips back. Those two don't even have guns. They gave them baseball bats with a railroad spike through the top."
"Those shits," a Southern Command soldier said. Another picked up one of the bats and examined it.
"Let's get a couple of their chips. To the ridgeline, men. Send back to Bloom: Have her put everything she's got on the other side of that ridge—that's where their real strength is."
Valentine felt a Reaper up on the ridgeline. It was probably assigning blame for the failure even now.
New gunfire erupted in the distance to the east as the Moondaggers and Coonskins attacked. The lines of legworms looked like fighting snakes, spread out on the hillside.
He sent word back to Bloom, asking for permission to attack. She gave it, enthusiastically. It was good to have Cleo Bloom in charge. She'd recovered some of her old spirit.
"We've busted up their face. Let's kick 'em in the ass," a sergeant called as the orders passed to advance.
Southern Command's soldiers went forward with their yips and barks like foxhounds on a hot scent. Gamecock saw what was happening and sent his Bears forward, flushing the snipers like rabbits.
Mortars fell on the other side of the hill, their flashes dimmer in the growing light. Valentine saw wild worms running off to the east, and the Bulletproof harrying the Coonskins. Hard luck for the Coonskins. Their halfhearted cover for the assault had aided in the repulse as much as the Southern Command's grenades and mortar shells.
Valentine looked behind. Bloom had better than half the camp moving up the hill.
They met strong fire on the ridge as the sun appeared, but the Bulletproof turned from their rout of the Coonskins to the east and put a fleshy curtain of gunfire against the Moondagger flank.
Valentine's assault expended the last of their grenades, pitching them over the hilltop. They captured two big 155mm guns which were being brought forward to complete the camp's destruction, complete with communications gear and a substantial reserve of ammunition.
Southern Command's forces secured the crest line, guns, and few prisoners who didn't blow themselves up with grenades and planted themselves. On that glorious reverse slope where the Coonskins had been camped, picked out for its suitable field of fire, they found the Moondaggers in disarray and falling back.
Valentine watched machine-gun tracer prod their retreat, leaving bodies like heaps of dropped laundry on the slope. Moondagger trucks, crammed with men hanging off the side, pulled off to the south.
If only they'd had real cannon instead of light mortars. The Moondaggers would have been destroyed instead of just bloodied. Valentine did what he could with what he had, sending shells chasing after the retreat, dropping them at choke points in the road.
Moytana's Wolves would give them a nip or two to remind them that they were beaten and running.
It wasn't a catastrophe for the Moondaggers. But it was enough. Valentine felt the odd, light, post-battle aura. He'd survived again, and better, won.
Seng's expeditionary brigade had fought its first real battle and emerged victorious.
They buried their dead, slung their wounded in yolk hammocks hanging off the side of the legworms, and pressed on. This time with lighter step and more aggressive patrols, half-empty bellies or no. It was still a retreat, but a retreat from victory, with honor restored.
Chapter Eleven
Crisis, August: Javelin's support slowly dribbles away as it passes through east-central Kaitucky. The Alliance clans shift their families and herds away from the area of Southern Command's column as though they carry bubonic plague. The Mammoth depart to settle a private score with the Coonskins.
Only the Gunslingers and the attenuated Bulletproof remain at a reasonable level of strength, the Gunslingers grudging the Kurians the loss of their dispatcher at the ambush in Utrecht, and the Bulletproof through the force of Tikka's personality and a twinkling affinity for Valentine as a member of Southern Command.
The Moondaggers reappear, reinforced after their successful destruction of the Green Mountain expedition in Pennsylvania, this time in motorized column, hovering just at the edge of the column's last rear guard's vision.
* * * *
Valentine asked for, and received, permission to spend the day with the Wolves following the Moondaggers on their flanking march. Bloom had granted it halfheartedly, all the usual humor drained from her voice. Valentine wondered whether it was the strain of command—or was the strange lassitude that infected Jolla consuming Javelin's new commander?
It felt like old times, with the odd addition of Bee's constant, protective shadow and a couple of legworms carrying the Wolves' spare gear, provisions, and camping equipment. Moving hard from point to point, one platoon resting and eating while a second went ahead, the tiny company headquarters shifted according to the terrain and movements of the enemy, small groups of wary scouts disappearing like careful deer into stands of timber and ravines.
All that had changed was the strain Valentine felt trying to keep up with them. He considered himself in decent enough shape, but a day with the Wolves made him feel like a recruit fresh out of Labor Regiment fell-running again.
Moytana himself was watching over the enemy whenever possible, a careful woodsman observing a family of grizzlies, knowing that if he made a mistake at the wrong moment, he'd be killed, partitioned, and digested within an hour by the beasts.
The Moondagger column resembled a great black snake winding through the valley. Or floodwaters from a burst dam, moving sluggishly but implacably forward. He could just hear high wailing cries answered by guttural shouts, so precise a responsorial chorus that it resembled some piece of industrial machinery, stamping away staccato.
Flocks of crows circled above. Valentine wondered if they were trained in some way, or just used to battlefield feasts.
The performance did its job. Valentine felt intimidated.
Valentine tried to make out the "scales" of the snake. All he could think was that the army was marching holding old riot shields over their heads.
"Umbrellas," Moytana said. "Or parasols. Whatever you want to call them. They've got a little fitting in their backpack frame for the handle."
"What's that they're—I don't want to call it singing—chanting?"
"That one's got some highfalutin name like the 'Hour of the Divine Unleashing.' Means they're going to chop us into stewing sized pieces, in so many words."
Valentine saw some scouts on motorbikes pull to the top of a hill flanking the column. They pointed binoculars and spotting scopes at Valentine's hilltop. Valentine waited for a few companies to break off from the column to chase them off, but the Moondagers stayed
in step and song.
"They don't seem to mind our presence."
"They want us impressed. That's part of why they're chanting."
"You've heard that tune before."
"Yes. A small city called Ripening, in Kansas. Old maps call it Olathe."
"What went wrong in Kansas?"
"Everything. The operation made sense in theory. As we approached, the resistance was supposed to rise up and cause trouble. Cut communication lines, take the local higher-ups prisoner, blow up trucks and jeeps and all that.
"Problem was, it was kind of like Southern Command and the resistance set up a line of dominoes. Once the first couple tipped, it started a chain reaction. Sounds of fighting in Farming Collective Six gets the guys in Farming Collective Five next door all excited, and they dig up their guns and start shooting, which gets the guys at Four who've been sharpening their set of knives the idea that relief is just over the hill. So they start cutting throats. And so on and so on.
"Early on, seemed like we were succeeding beyond anyone's hopes. Wolves were tearing through Kansas knocking the hell out of the Kansas formations trying to get organized to meet us. Kurians were abandoning their towers in panic, leaving stacks of dead retainers behind.
"The way I understand it, the Kurians launched a counterattack out of the north, just a few Nebraska and Kansas and Iowa regulars. Typical Kurian ordering, from what I hear, futile attacks or defenses with rounds of executions in exchange for failure. Reapers started popping up along our line of advance, picking off the odd courier and signals post. That was enough to put the scare into a couple of our generals and they turned north or froze and right-wheeled, trying to establish a line with the poor Kansans under the impression that we were still coming hard west.
"Well, the Kurians must have got wind of our operation ahead of time. Maybe they even had, whaddya call 'em, agents o' provocation riling the Kansans up to get the resistence out in the open. They had these Moondagger fellows all ready to go in Nebraska, two full divisions plus assorted support troops like armored cars and artillery trains. Kansans started calling them the Black Death."
