At the Sign of Triumph

by David Weber

  “Any orders, Sir?” Lynyrd asked.

  “There aren’t any orders to give, Sergeant,” Ahdymsyn retorted. “Our job’s to hold this position, and that’s what we’re frigging well going to do! But we can’t put the boys out into the trenches while this is coming down on them.” He jabbed a finger at the smoke and dust swirling in through the view slit. “They know what to do when the artillery lifts, and I’m not about to send you or anybody else out into that kind of fire—” he smiled briefly but warmly at the corporal who’d had the guts to send himself out into it to tell him he’d inherited command “—to tell them anything else!”

  “Can’t say I disagree with that, Sir.” Lynyrd managed his own smile. “But I’m thinking we’ll need reinforcements. We’re gonna be a lot shorter handed than anyone thought when the Colonel was handing out responsibilities.”

  “If we are, we are,” Ahdymsyn said flatly. “I doubt we could even get a wyvern off to tell him we need help—or that the poor thing would live to get there through this frigging fire. On the other hand,” he surprised himself with an actual chuckle, “the heretics’re making enough noise I expect he’ll figure it out!”

  * * *

  “Up another hundred yards,” Sergeant Hahskyn said crisply, watching the crest line on the far side of the valley vanish under a forest of explosions.

  “Up a hundred,” Ahlgood repeated, making certain of the correction.

  “Yes,” Hahskyn confirmed. “They’re almost exactly on for deflection.”

  “Got it,” Ahlgood said, scribbling the information onto the message form, then leaned over the gondola rail to hook the message capsule to the taut wire between it and the winch-wagon. He released it, it went flashing down the wire with a shrill, metallic whine, and he picked up his own, lighter double-glass to look over Hahskyn’s shoulder.

  The reorganized angle-gun batteries contained only half as many pieces as their field artillery counterparts, but Sahmantha was spotting for an entire battalion of 8-inch angles. Those guns had reduced their sector of the Temple Boy fortifications to threshed and smoking ruin, even firing from positions three miles west of their balloon, although neither of them were foolish enough to think the destruction was as complete as it looked.

  Like the rest of the Balloon Corps’ observers, they’d been given firsthand experience of the effects of heavy angle-gunfire. They’d trained here in the Republic, at Camp Raif Mahgail, the huge base the ICA had built on a stretch of Tanshar Bay coast in Transhar Province. Camp Mahgail was isolated enough, with sufficiently ruthless security, for them to exercise with their balloon without worrying about reports reaching the Temple, and it also housed a major artillery training ground. The balloon crews had been able to walk the fortifications Charisian engineers had produced to give the gun dogs realistic targets. As a result, they knew the AOG’s defensive positions were almost certainly far more intact than they appeared to be. On the other hand, they were one hell of a lot less intact than they’d been when the sun rose, and the 6-inch angles currently finishing the abatises’ demolition would shift to what remained of the dugouts and rifle pits when the engineers started forward to clear the footstool fields.

  At the moment, the 8-inchers had a different job.

  The Temple Boy planners had obviously counted on concealment to protect their rocket launchers, parking them on the far side of hills to take advantage of their high-angle trajectories. Some of them had been separated from one another by earthen berms, but Hahskyn doubted that had been to protect them from Allied artillery. It was much more likely those berms were intended to keep an accident in one launcher battery from taking out its neighbors. God knew the ICA’s rocket launchers—which their spy reports said were much more reliable than anything the Temple had—could be sufficiently … exciting to fire, so accidental explosions were probably a very real possibility.

  Whoever was in command of this part of the Temple’s front was no dummy, though. He must have realized almost immediately what the Balloon Corps implied, because for the last day or two Ahlgood had spotted—and reported—frenetic efforts to give those launchers better protection. Obviously, they’d still have to come out into the open to actually fire, but like their Charisian counterparts, they’d been adapted from freight wagons. So enormous labor parties had been throwing together redoubts in which the wagons could be parked under thick, heavily sandbagged overhead protection until needed and then rolled out when it was time to fire.

  Unfortunately for them, it was hard to produce overhead protection that could stop a 200-pound shell when it came howling down at fourteen hundred feet per second. It could be done—Hahskyn had seen examples of that during his artillery familiarization training, too—but not without a lot more depth than they could throw up in the time they had. A little concrete and some of the Delthak Works’ new flange-beams wouldn’t have hurt, either. With the materials and tools they had, there simply wasn’t enough time, and he waited, watching through cold, merciless eyes, as the gun dogs of the 23rd Medium Artillery Battalion, Imperial Charisian Army, adjusted their elevation and fired.

  Twenty-three seconds after that, sixteen 8-inch shells exploded in a tightly grouped pattern on the far side of the crest line which had been supposed to hide the Holy Martyrs Division’s rocket launchers from its enemies.

  “Yesssssss!” Hahskyn hissed triumphantly as at least two of those launchers disintegrated in stupendous fireballs.

  Some of the rockets actually launched, shrieking up out of the devastation like damned souls with no guidance, no direction. Three of them came down again almost on top of the bunkers and trenches being pounded by the lighter angle-guns. Two of them, though, headed directly towards Talmar. They lacked the range to reach the deserted town … but they had enough to hit the paddocks in which Holy Martyrs’ draft animals were being held.

  The resulting carnage was far worse, in a way, than what was happening to those dragons’ and mules’ human masters, because no one could explain it to them. They shrieked in terror as devastation crashed down on them. Already spooked by the savage, unending concussions of the Charisian bombardment, they panicked and tried to stampede. Many of the paddock fences went down; some of them didn’t, and scores more of the animals were trampled to death by their frantic fellows as windrows of bodies formed along the obstruction.

  “Tell them they’re right on!” Hahskyn said. “When they correct again, they’ll want to move their point of impact about three hundred yards north. Tell them we’ll notify them when the current target’s neutralized.”

  “Maintain fire on the current elevation and deflection. Prepare to adjust north three hundred yards,” Ahlgood repeated.

  “Exactly.”

  Hahskyn heard the message go shrilling down the wire, but he never looked away from his double-glass. He did shift his focus briefly, however, and his smile was colder and thinner than ever as he studied the Temple Boys dug in artillery. He doubted their gunners were as good as the ICA’s at the best of time, but that didn’t matter right now, since their weapons were clearly shorter ranged. They’d attempted to counter battery the Army of Westmarch’s artillery, but the few rounds they’d fired—blindly; without Sahmantha, they couldn’t even see the Charisian gun flashes—had fallen far short of the Charisian gun pits. Hahskyn never doubted that right now they were hunkered down in the deepest protection they could find, riding out the holocaust until the inevitable Charisian attack came into their reach.

  Unfortunately, their guns were well inside the range of the medium and heavy Charisian angles. The airborne Charisian spotters and observers were working their methodical way from the closest targets to those farthest away, and as soon as the 23rd Medium Artillery finished with the rocket launchers, it would be the Temple gun line’s turn.

  * * *

  “Just about time, Sir,” Colonel Sailys Trahskhat said.

  Brigadier Byrk Raimahn looked up from the map he’d been contemplating while he stuffed the bowl of his pipe. The briga
dier couldn’t have said why he was studying it, really. It was far too late to change any of his plans, much less the orders he’d already issued. It was just part of the way he was put together, this need to stand here, looking at the map, wondering what he could’ve done differently … better. He snorted at his own perversity and wondered again—briefly—how in God’s name he’d ended up here.

  When he shaved every morning, the face in his mirror wasn’t so very different from the man—the boy, really, in a lot of ways—he’d seen in that same mirror before the Sword of Schueler swept over Siddar City’s Charisian Quarter in a tide of blood, fire, and rapine. But that had been two and a half years—and about three lifetimes—ago, and the eyes … The eyes were different, and he wondered if they’d ever lose that darkness? That memory of what their owner had seen and done in those lifetimes?

  He finished filling the pipe, drew a fire striker from his pocket to fire up the tobacco, and suddenly found himself chuckling with genuine humor. Someone—he suspected Sailys—had informed his grandmother that he’d taken up the vile Glacierheart custom of smoking. She’d apparently missed the fact that Charisians in plenty had smoked long before the Raimahns moved to Siddarmark to escape the heresy, which was odd, since his grandfather had smoked for several decades before he gave up the “unholy weed,” as Sahmantha Raimahn was prone to call it.

  She and Claitahn Raimahn had returned to their homeland after the Siddar City riots. It hadn’t been easy for them—especially for Claitahn, whose principles and faith were just a little more rugged than the Mountains of Light—to admit the validity of the Church of Charis’ charges against the Group of Four. But the same principles and faith which had made him a Temple Loyalist had left him no choice when Zhaspahr Clyntahn’s fiery sermons actually praised the Sword of Schueler’s barbarity. When he and his wife arrived home in Tellesberg with Sailys Trahskhat’s children and sixty other Charisian and Siddarmarkian orphans in tow, he’d gone directly to Tellesberg Cathedral to tell Maikel Staynair, the man he’d blamed for so long for so much, that he’d been wrong.

  Two-thirds of the fortune he’d spent a lifetime building had been lost between the Charisian investments he’d liquidated when he moved to the Republic and the carnage the Republic had suffered afterward. But he’d pledged a full half of everything he had left to aid Charisian and Siddarmarkian refugees from the mainland. Today, he was chief administrator not just for the Church of Charis’ enormous orphanages but for all of the Church’s war-related charities, and his wife was as deeply immersed in that effort as he was.

  None of which had prevented her from finding time to send the grandson she’d raised a scathing appraisal of men who smoked. She’d even included half a dozen Pasqualate tracts about the health hazards of tobacco.

  Well, if kicking the smoking habit is the only thing she’s going to demand when I finally get home, Byrk thought, savoring the aromatic smoke, I imagine she’ll get it. She usually does get what she wants, after all.

  “I suppose that if it’s time, we should probably head out,” he said through a wreath of smoke in a casual tone which he knew fooled neither of them.

  “S’pose so, Sir,” Trahskhat agreed with equally false nonchalance, and Byrk reached out to pat him on the shoulder with a broad smile.

  The two of them had been through a lot in those three lifetimes since the Sword of Schueler, he thought. Sailys was still the stocky, powerfully built first baseman he’d once been, but strands of silver threaded through his brown hair now. His face carried the scars of frostbite from their first brutal winter in Glacierheart, and he walked with ever so slight a limp, courtesy of a Temple Boy bayonet at the storm of Fort Tairys. And the changes inside him were as profound as those inside Byrk Raimahn. The brigadier knew Sailys Trahskhat could never, in his wildest imagination, have pictured himself as a colonel, and especially not a colonel in the Siddarmarkian Army! Yet here he was. And here, for that matter, was Byrk Raimahn, who’d celebrated his twenty-third birthday just last five-day, which made him the youngest brigadier in the entire Republic of Siddarmark Army. For that matter, he was younger than any brigadier in the Charisian Army.

  This is crazy, he thought for no more than the six-thousandth time. I write songs, I don’t command brigades! God must have an even stranger sense of humor than I ever imagined.

  Perhaps He did, but Glacierhearters didn’t. They were as pragmatic, as stubborn, and as tough as their mountains, and they’d decided the over-civilized young sprout who’d commanded the riflemen escorting their beloved archbishop back to them and then fought for months to hold the Green Cove Trace was one of their own. Just as they’d decided they owed a debt to Charis when Brigadier Mahrtyn Taisynand his Marines died to the man protecting their families from the atrocities Cahnyr Kaitswyrth’s oncoming army had strewn in its wake. Their province had been more sparsely populated than most of the Republic even before the Sword of Schueler ‘s “Starving Winter,” but they’d raised an entire fourth regiment of militia and sent it off to fight at Charis’ side. Not only that, they’d specifically petitioned the Lord Protector to allow their regiment to fight under Charisian command until the end.

  Greyghor Stohnar had granted their request, and the four regiments had been organized into a single brigade. But that brigade had needed a commander … and militia units’ officers were appointed by the provincial government of the province which raised them. Which was how a Charisian boy whose first love had always been music had become the youngest brigadier in the history of the world.

  It still bemused him, but perhaps it was fitting that he wasn’t exactly the standard version of a brigadier, because his command was far from “standard” itself.

  The RSA had retained its long-standing unit structure when it reorganized around the new-model weapons, but it had formalized the practice of consolidating the thirty-man sections of its pike companies into sixty-man platoons. They’d always tended to operate the doubled sections as single tactical units, anyway, except under very special circumstances, and many of the Army’s officers had felt the rationalization was overdue even before the new weapons were added to the mix. So now there were seven platoons in each company, although Byrk had never really understood why the Siddarmarkians didn’t just go ahead and call the companies “battalions,” like anyone else would have. Tradition, he supposed. But by permanently combining the sections, they’d cut the number of lieutenants in each company in half. Well, almost in half. The single section of the headquarters group remained only thirty men strong but was still a lieutenant’s command.

  The Glacierheart Brigade had operated so long and so intimately with its Charisian allies that it was fully equipped with Charisian equipment—including the M96 rifle and Mahldyn .45 revolvers—and had adopted Charisian doctrine and tactics. But it followed the Siddarmarkian pattern as far as unit organization was concerned—which made it slightly larger than a standard, two-regiment Charisian brigade—and its men came almost equally from the ranks of the trappers and hunters who roamed the Gray Walls’ majestic, snowcapped summits and the hard-as-rock miners who wrested the coal from those mountains’ stubborn bones. It would have been difficult to say which group was tougher, despite many a knuckle-and-skull “empirical experiment” to find out. But that orientation—the self-reliance, woodcraft, and hunting skills of the trappers, coupled with the engineering background, teamwork, and explosive expertise of the miners—made them uniquely suited to combine the functions of the ICA’s scout snipers and combat engineers.

  And that explained their present assignment.

  The Mighty Host’s fortifications were a battlefield challenge—in degree, if not actually in kind—no one had yet faced. But the Allies had known it was coming … and spent a great deal of thought, time, and effort on ways to meet it. The Balloon Corps and new artillery were part of that answer, yet the ICA’s gunners had realized that heavy artillery’s pulverizing effect could actually hinder an attack as much as it helped. As Baron Green Valley had poi
nted out, artillery’s function was to open a path for the infantry, not to simply churn a battlefield with ton after ton of shells. That was entirely too likely to create conditions in which the infantry floundered forward through muck and mire at a snail’s pace while defending riflemen picked them off like roosting wyverns.

  Given the current dry, sunny weather, seas of mud weren’t very likely, but the army still needed a way to carry heavily fortified positions without simply relying on artillery to shatter them. So doctrine had been modified yet again. ICA tactics had always emphasized—and depended upon—the initiative of company and platoon commanders. They were told what to do, then figured out how to do it with a degree of flexibility no other army could match. Not even the RSA, which had spent the last two years absorbing what its Allies had to teach it and who came closer than anyone else, could fully equal that responsive adaptability or the mindset that made it work.

  Byrk Raimahn’s Glacierhearters could, however, and Duke Eastshare, who’d seen them at work in the Fort Tairys campaign, had specifically chosen them as the core and test bed for the Army of Westmarch’s new assault brigades. They’d worked closely with the ICA’s combat engineers, artillerists, and scout snipers, to formulate the new doctrine, and they’d suggested dozens of pragmatic improvements along the way. Three of Eastshare’s other brigades had drawn the same equipment, undergone the same training, but the Glacierheart Brigade had established the training syllabus for them all. Now it was up to its officers and men to see how well all that planning, all that equipment, actually worked. Byrk’s men were proud to have been chosen … and Byrk was only too well aware of how many of them might be about to die if it turned out the new doctrine didn’t work.

  “Morning, Sir,” another voice said, and he looked up with a smile.

  “Morning, Wahlys,” he replied, and clasped forearms with Colonel Wahlys Mahkhom, who’d inherited command of the 1st Glacierheart Volunteers following Byrk’s promotion.