The dead man became a brief barrier in the fight until one of the faces planted his sword on it to recharge his battery. Moses own battery floated in a balance, now high, now low, now cut and hold the blade between their shields and watch the battery refill as the face cut the javelins before he swung and once again the battery began to drain.
The enemy gun machines appeared at the peak of the trench and lances of light dropped down amidst the melee, dancing and converging as they’d done before. Moses wondered where their own heavy gunners had gone, gritting his teeth against the wash of light he felt sure would soon engulf him. Aircraft swooped low overhead before it did and flashes of light outlined the ridge followed by the boom of thunder and the six legged automata tumbled down hill as the cliff face crumbled beneath the barrage.
They were giving ground, not intentionally, but with every attacking body that rushed them Moses had to take another step back, another bit of ground surrendered. He watched beams of plasma wash over the man beside him, the infernal fluid seeking out the gaps in the man’s shield and darting in to turn his armor to molten steel and blackened ceramic. The man flung himself to the ground screaming as the plasma burnt out. A face rammed into Moses and he stumbled backwards, tripping over someone else. The enemy in front of him exploded as a medium gunner put a round through his turret porthole then three men threw themselves in front of Moses,one of them shouting “Marain! Marain!”
Moses clambered to his feet and saw, all around, the line beginning to turn. There, at the center, his center, the line had held, not quite held, but kept the enemy from overrunning them, but all around, to right and left he could see where they had begun to cut and run, a swarm of black soldiers pushing past the silver to turn their line, more than the handful of medium gunners behind rocks and in craters could keep back. Some of them had even turned to flee ahead of the mass of soldiers that were beginning to flee behind them.
Moses raised his sword again. “To me!” He shouted. “Marain to me!” The AI projected his voice in a booming roar across the battlefield, a voice which Moses directed first north, then south. “Marain to me!” And some of the breaking ranks, turned, not to run backwards, but to run towards him. One man dropping as another medium gunner put a round through his shield at his shoulder, the bullet passing through his collarbone and out his armpit with a burst of gore. “Marain!” Moses shouted, and he heard others take up the cry as a ring of fighting formed around him.
He battled backwards after that. They stopped trying to hold ground as the tide of the enemy pushed against them and retreated back up the slope formed by the bombardment, sometimes stopping, now at a boulder, now at a crater or a long trench of loose soil, positions that forced the enemy to stand above them where their swords and guns could not be deployed without exposing them to the defenders shoulder turrets. They slaughtered the enemy there, a few men each time. A thin line of defenders that Moses ordered to hold back while the rest pushed on. The medium squire stayed with the rear guard each time that they were left to defend the retreat, where he kept up a barrage of wickedly deadly fire on the enemy knights. Each shot punched through the smallest gaps in an enemies’ shields, disarming them for the knights to reap their killers harvest, recharging their batteries as they killed.
At some points Moses wondered why the whole group of them did not turn and run, but then a snarling man would leap at him and he would have to dance his hand away from weapons fire and throw his weight into a shoulder or a hip to knock the enemy back with his shield. He wondered if the line had held anywhere else but then the medium squire would yell that they were coming from behind and a few would turn to knock them back so that the whole group could retreat to the next spot. “You, you, and you, hold them here, thirty seconds, no more!” He’d yell, then he’d lead the retreat and call them to turn so that the men they’d left would have a chance to catch up. The first few times they did that some of the men didn’t stay, and Moses couldn’t blame the, but he’d ordered men to hold behind them and promised he would wait. Those who stayed with him afterwards stayed for some of the same reasons. They were his team now, and he would get them out alive.
Sometimes he was among those that stayed behind, more of the others stayed when he did, and those were always the most dangerous times. He never knew if those that retreated ahead of them would turn to defend him when his turn came to run or leave Moses and the rest to die while they made their own escape. A fury came on him in those desperate times, and he cut and bulled and kicked at three or four of the enemy at a time while his battery lost bar after bar of charge before he could turn and run. Men died, who stayed behind, always one, half a dozen at other times, sometimes all. By the time he made it back to their line his charge was usually below half. It took battling with a group against the thin front runners of the Kamele army slowly encircling them for the charge to float back up to the half mark.
They were fighting from the base of a crater, getting ready to retreat when Maxwell showed up. A beam of lightning blue fire shot across the crater, washing against the glaring face who was trying to leap over the lip to assault them. The plasma found the enemy’s shield generator and the shield burst as he was falling. Red fire gouted from his armor as his flesh was turned to flame and his suit of a dozen faces was transformed to a tumbling pile of half molten slag. Even melted, the snarling face on his mask was visible, but drooping now into a frozen horrified scream. A burnt out hole in the top of his head gave off smoke to indicate what was left of the man inside.
“I heard you yelling!” Maxwell shouted down to Moses as he worked the gun across the rim of the crater. Shot crackled from the vortex cone of shield that extended from his gun’s porthole but he paid it no mind, as though it were little more than rain. More faces appeared as Moses and his small band of knights clambered up the reverse face of the crater to join Maxwell on the other side and he chased them back with the hose of plasma.
“You got your gun working.” Moses said.
“Nobody told me, it had a safety switch.” Maxwell grumbled. “Would have been firing a long time ago.” He hoisted the gun and turned with Moses to sprint with them away from the fighting while the medium harried their pursuers. Shot from the enemy shoulder turrets chased after them, splashing against their shields and they ducked into another crater. This crater ran like a low ditch along the battlefield and they crouched as they sprinted down it.
“Where’s the rest of the heavies?” Moses asked.
“All dead.” The big man grunted. “A Lot of the lights too and alot of the knights. You didn’t want to have your shield open when that barrage hit. I got lucky.”
“How many?” Moses asked, his heart sinking at the thought. Had he failed his men already? He couldn’t have known though. He should have guessed, that blinding light.
“No idea.” Maxwell replied. “I saw some fighting to the south. A few flags, but mostly all I saw was the black.” They came to a depression in the trench and leaped down into it. This was a good spot to hold, out of the line of fire. It would make for a brief distraction while the medium retreated. Moses turned and the men tumbling after him gathered around the flags. He could see the camp, a glimmering bubble not even half a mile away now, across the last ragged edge of the scar in the pampas. So close, and yet;
“Oh, bugger.” Someone in the circle muttered.
Even as he watched, a black tide eclipsed the base of the camp and cut off their last hope of escape.
“Oh Momma, fuck me.”
The medium gunner slid into the trench with them. Moses thought he could hear the enemy approaching behind him.
“We’ll never get out of here.” Someone wailed.
“Enough!” Moses shouted. They turned to him as one. His responsibility, their lives, to hold together until the last, whether it be soon or late, to prepare for the final moment. His mind raced as they looked at him, but he could see no way to get them out of this alive, leaving only what each one of them had fought for in the dueli
ng pits when their hands were disabled. A notable end.
“Are you so afraid to die!” He shook his sword at them. “This is what we signed up for! To do our duty! So we do it! To the last man, to the last breath, to the last drop of blood! We hold this ground!” He swung the blade over the crater. “We hold this ground and we make them bleed for it!” It was good ground, a steep incline on all sides that would give their weapons a good angle for as long as they could keep the enemy out of the crater. “Make them bleed!” He shouted.
“Make them bleed!” Others roared. “Marain!” Moses recognized Pete Small for the first time in the back of the group bellowing incoherently as he waved a broken sword over his head.
“Form a line!” Moses shouted, and the men turned outwards. The medium squire and Maxwell moved to the center beside a light gunner they’d picked up somewhere and Moses drew a pistol to take up a position next to them. His blood was racing as it did when he held the rear. It was a tolerable place to meet death, a tolerable group to do it with. His last thought was of Ephesus and the responsibility he hadn’t been able to fulfill. “Let it be for him.” Moses prayed. Then the enemy to their front was on them.
They poured over the edge of the crater as the Marain knights let out a roar and hammered them with everything they had. Three swords skewered the first man to leap and he blew into a cloud of electrified gore as more followed behind him. The lip of the crater became a killing field as Maxwell, Moses, the medium and light gunner all hosed it with their weapons. The enemy didn’t linger at it, they hurled themselves over the ledge to pummel his men with their shields in an attempt to make space for the knights that followed them. They fell in an avalanche of faces, carved or tattooed into silver armor gone almost black. Grotesque faces, snarling faces, gawping, weeping, and angry faces. For a few minutes the fight went the defenders’ way. Knights blew into chunks of blood and armor or melted under Maxwell’s screaming hose of fire, staining the crater walls black and red, but for every three men they killed the enemy managed to kill one of theirs.
A plasma grenade burst at the edge of the defenders line and the brief cloud of plasma engulfed three knights incapacitating one of them. Another’s shield fell in a storm of lightning as his battery gave out to an enemy’s shield. A third screamed as a sword cut off his hands at the wrists and he fell writhing and bleeding in the dirt. Moses sprayed flechettes across a leaping man’s shield then turned briefly to look for the encircling wave that should be coming from their rear. They were closer now, much closer, close enough that he could make out their shapes. They were all wrong, with far too many limbs, and moving far too fast.
Sudden joy shot through him. “They’re coming!” Moses shouted. “They’re coming!”
“I see them!” Maxwell shouted. He hosed the oncoming faces while the light squire followed up the plasma stream with a hammering of slugs.
“No. Our side, they’re coming!” To the right and left, for as far as a mile, the line expanded as the automata made their advance. Aircraft swooped towards them in long strafing runs, chewing up the earth with bursts of fire. They were pursued by others,bright winged automata that fired their own guns to chase them off. “They’re coming!” He shouted again.
An enemy machine appeared above the lip of the crater and plunged down into Moses’ soldiers. It pressed them backwards by its sheer weight, all six legs churning the dirt as it pushed into them. Moses yelled and threw himself at the machine, screaming“Marain! Marain!” As though it were some battle cry. He thought of Kyra then, her scream as she ran towards the enemy that scream now very possibly dead, buried in the dirt. “For Kyra!” He screamed, and he slammed into the automata.
He ricocheted off of the six legged machine and tumbled through the thin group of Marain soldiers that still held what was left of their line in the crater. Moses hacked at the passing feet of enemy soldiers and rolled as a sword skated over the shell of his shield. He tried to rise only to feel explosives ram into his back, knocking him off balance to sprawl once more in the dirt. Other men screamed around him, battle cries and death cries, and Pete Small bellowing as he battered at the kamele with a blade broken just above the hilt, his knife still taped to his chest but now covered in red gore.
“Pete! Pete!” Moses screamed. The man bellowed as another Kamele soldier jumped at him and he delivered a kick to the shield that sent him spinning. A sword penetrated the arm hole of Pete’s shield and in a flash he brought the hilt of his shimmering broken blade down over the flat of the enemy’s blade snapping it the way his own was snapped. Before the tattooed soldier could react, Pete yanked his arm deeper into the bubble of his shield and ripped the broken blade across his wrists. Pete delivered a kick and came away with the other man’s severed hand like a bloody trophy. He laughed and threw the hand into the other mans face while other many faced soldiers threw themselves at him from above.
“Get up Moses!” Pete bellowed. He rammed himself into his attackers and battered at them with his broken sword.
Moses didn’t get up, he crawled. Behind Pete he could see the enemy automata being assaulted from all sides by men with swords. Dozens of javelins swarmed around the chrome machine like long tentacles as the automata sought to fight back in the close proximity. Turret fire played across the bubble of its shields as other men in black armor pushed past the gaps in the Marain line to attack the men assaulting their machine. Across the crater he saw another crab legged automata bull through the line, building another gap for the swarm of black snarling men to pour down into the melee. Moses reached Pete’s side and pushed himself to his feet, swinging his sword in a long arch to make some space. A sword tip snapped in as he swung and Moses twisted with a scream to parry the cut aimed at his hands. Automatically the parry turned into a return lunge and he felt more than saw the opponent that had almost killed him turn into a spray of blood as his sword performed one of the tricks he’d learned in the dueling pits. More came at him from every side and he pushed his back up against Pete as he fought. In another corner of the crater he could see Maxwell surrounded by a wall of smoking statues and half melted men. He saw a headless suit of silver armor swinging wildly with a sword as bullets chewed chunks from its chest. He stumbled on chunks of shrapnel and broken armor slick with half cooked gore as he fought to stay alive.
There was a sudden roar from the east. Plasma and solid shot pummelled the crater’s edge and then the black wave was suddenly upon them. Marain rumbled under Moses’ feet as the hounds hurtled over the lip of the crater, dozens of them. They hit the wall of kamele soldiers around the crater like a hammer in a bowl of eggs. Men flew everywhere, few hurt, but none capable of halting the charge. The hounds that hurled themselves into the crater didn’t try to kill the enemy still battling with the Marain knights there, they simply scooped them up and hurled them bodily out of their hole in the ground or rammed into them hard enough to send them flying.
One of the enemy war machines tried to fire on the hounds as they charged, but two of them converged on it in a blaze of light and noise and then there were pieces of the porqine machine flying across the crater while another hound dove underneath the second machine to hurl it end over end over the lip of the crater for the rest of its pack to finish off.
“Moses!”
Moses turned from the carnage around him and saw his brother milling about in the middle of the battle on his hound. Bolts of energy and solid shot ricocheted from the boy’s shield as he returned fire with the long rifle slung from his shoulder and the pack master beneath him unleashed howling storms of mortar fire on some unseen enemy. Moses had never been so happy to see him.
“Ephesus!” Moses shouted. “I thought you were going to clean up this mess for us!”
“Well, you know.” Ephesus let off a volley of shots from his mount, chasing some exposed target. “I got distracted. Thought I’d leave some for you.” A beam from one of the enemy’s automata lanced across the crater mouth to splash over the packmaster’s shields and the mo
unt shimmied backwards while Ephesus held on. The mount’s cannons fired again, a loud bark and a streak of bulbous light back in the direction the beam had come from and Ephesus kicked the back of the machine to send it down the hill, spraying dirt as it came, tentacles scrabbling for balance as it caught itself on the slide to the bottom of the crater.
“It’s a general retreat.” Ephesus said when he pulled up in front of Moses. “We’ve been sent to get you out. Almost the entire assault group’s squires have been wiped out.”
Moses felt his heart fall at that. He’d been hoping for… for what? To make a charge as the rest of the Marain army came up behind them? It was better than getting engulfed. He shook his head.
“We just got here.”
“And now it’s time to go.” Ephesus patted the side of his automata’s central neck in affection. “Me and my boys are good, but we aren’t going to beat those guys. We’ll play as your guns while you get back to camp. Orders are to reconnect with the rest of the army.”
Moses looked around at his men. He had maybe thirty or fifty men all told. One of the knights was missing a hand and shaking violently, another had a blackened turret that no longer fired, and a third had a sword who’s fluorescent light flickered. All of them bore knicks and scars from explosives and plasma bolts and shrapnel that had found its way through their shield. Maxwell pushed out of the small circle of smoking corpses he’d frozen around him and hefted his gun up in one hand. Pete, who had at some point attached a severed hand to the knife taped to his chest, tossed aside his broken blade and stooped to pickup one dropped by a dead Marain knights, a blade with letters carved into it, invisible once it had been ignited.They were all looking to him, the man with the flags on his back. Every faceless head was turned to him for leadership. He felt filled up, for the first time in his life, like he was exactly where he needed to be.
Space Knights- Last on the Line Page 28
