on.
The bright yellow coats of Dom infantry made fine targets, and many were shot as they fled. Chack’s ’Cats and Imperials ran after them, shouting, shooting, stabbing at the fallen, and the woods grew dense with smoke even as the trees began to thin. The regiment had orders to halt at the clearing and regroup. Some, caught in the moment, continued chasing the enemy. Chack-still mounted and exhilarated by the experience of charging on horseback, despite having spent more time just holding on than slashing about with his Navy cutlass-shouted for the drummers to recall the overexuberant troops. The Doms were running away as fast as they could, oddly interspersed with monkeys of every size, blizzards of colorful parrots and other birds, and some other strange creatures Chack had never seen. The thundering drums were joined by Imperial horns, and slowly, most who’d continued their pursuit stopped, looked about, and realized how exposed they were. Quickly, they trotted back to the waiting raneven as a battery of six-pounders rattled down the road, drawn by gasping paalkas, and deployed in front of the infantry. Soon, exploding case shot pursued the fleeing enemy, reinforcing their terror.
“Beautiful!” shouted Major Jindal, galloping up to join Chack. “Stunning! Yet another famous victory, Major Chack!” he gushed.
“It was exciting,” Chack confessed, “but only the beginning. Look.”
A wide plain, checkerboarded with ripening grain and other crops, lay between them and the New Ireland village of Waterford. It was a quaint, spread-out place, reminiscent of the economical architecture Chack associated with Imperials; but interspersed with the occasional classical planters or Company mansion Imperial aristocracy seemed to favor. Beyond the town, in the distance, the large amoebic shape of Lake Shannon sprawled around the settlement, and spread nearly to the water’s edge was a sea of canvas tents that probably outnumbered Chack’s and Jindal’s force. Figure at least two men to a tent…
“Anything from Major Blair?”
“Not yet. I’ve sent scouts farther upslope. Perhaps they’ve made contact by now. But the enemy stands between us.” He paused. “I’m not sure we drew much of his attention away from Major Blair.”
“We will,” Chack promised. “Quickly, I want half your regiment and all your artillery up here. Leave two companies in the rear, guarding the approach from the north, and send the rest to the right and prepare to hit the enemy facing Blair on his right flank… Blair’s left.” Chack blinked, annoyed with himself for lecturing, but clarity was important. “Send a steady officer who will force his way to Blair if he must, and push hard when we advance!”
“I should go myself,” Jindal said.
“No, if something happens to me, you must be here. We’ll bombard the enemy before us, then advance across the entire front. That move should be unmistakable, and the enemy blocking Blair will have no choice but to defend his lines of communication and supply. I trust Major Blair to sense the proper moment and attack downhill, toward the town. Hopefully, your officer will have communicated this intent by then, but Blair should know what to do regardless. With luck, he may even catch them redeploying and add to the confusion. Ultimately, we should drive the enemy through the town and enclose him between us and the lake.”
Jindal shook his head. “Marvelous,” he confessed. “The scope of your planning…” He chuckled nervously. “The scope of this war is beyond anything I ever trained for!”
Chack blinked a sentiment Jindal hadn’t seen before-not that he remotely grasped any of the Lemurian blinking yet. “For all your naval power, your people have little more experience at this kind of war than mine did not long ago,” he said. “You’ll learn, as I was forced to; as Major Blair has done. I was lucky to have good teachers, but the lessons have been… hard.” He blinked something else. “Pray you never face a lesson such as Major Blair first endured; his might have destroyed a lesser person.” He paused, then gestured around. “This fight is a skirmish compared to what this war has become in the west; compared to what it’ll likely become here before all is done. Learn it well-however it turns out-because the most important points are these: plan for the best, but prepare for the worst, and every battle is won or lost in the planning, in the mind, before the first sword is ever drawn.”
Jindal gulped and felt a chill. A srmish? He was thoughtful a moment. “But this fight, your plan… will leave the enemy no avenue of escape. The rebels might surrender, but the Doms will fight ferociously if they can’t withdraw!”
“Very good! You think ahead. What you say is more than likely true,” Chack said. “It is in fact a… consequence of the ‘best case’ part of the plan. As a certain large… strange… man once told me, ‘Any we don’t kill today, we’ll have to kill tomorrow.’ You have your orders.”
The first battery to arrive had long since ceased firing, but within an hour, twenty-four guns had wheeled into place at the edge of the forest. Most were Allied six-pounders, but four were Imperial eight-pounders-their standard fieldpiece-and six were the new twelve-pounders. A hundred of the highly effective three-inch mortars came forward as well, each weapon with a crew of two, and each section with a squad of animal holders, ammunition bearers, crew replacements, and its own paalka, heavily laden with ammunition for the tubes. The enemy was throwing up a new defensive line on the outskirts of the town and emplacing a battery of their own guns there. That would be the first target.
“The division artillery is ready in all respects, Major,” Blas reported. To punctuate her words, the first Dominion piece fired and a cannonball struck the damp ground short of the Allied line, spraying dark earth in the air and sending the shot bounding into the trees.
“Commence firing,” Chack said, and Blas wheeled her horse and raced off. Moments later, amid shouted and repeated commands, the mortars erupted with a staccato pa-fwoomp! and twenty-four guns belched fire and smoke one after the other from the left, and recoiled backward as the case and roundshot soared downrange. The Imperials didn’t have case shot yet, and with their “nonstandard” bores, the allies couldn’t share. The eight-pound solid shot got there first, retaining its velocity better, and geysered earth and fragments of the breastworks around the enemy guns. The case shot was lighter for its diameter and bucked more wind for the weight, but there was only the slightest hesitation before white puffs detonated above the enemy line, spraying shards of iron and copper down on the defenders. Then the mortars fell.
Some of the bombs landed short. The range had been only a good estimate before, and some of the late arrivals had little time to make the crude elevation adjustments on the simple tubes. Despite their simplicity, however, the mortars were amazingly reliable, largely due to careful weighing of propulsive charges back in Baalkpan and Maa-ni-la, and the steadily improving quality control on the projectiles themselves. Bigger mortars were in the works that would reach a mile or more, but even though nine hundred yards was stretching the limit of the current model, seventy or more of the bombs fell right among the enemy.
The rippling detonation of the bursting charges sprayed dozens of prescored fragments from each bomb, decimating the Dominion defenders with the effect of a point-blank musket volley. None of the fragments were aimed, of course, so there were fewer real casualties, but the very… impersonal, utterly random nature of the projectiles unnerved the enemy like no volley could. And more were on the way. Section chiefs called range corrections, and the second barrage was more precise. The delayed, rippling blasts reached them long moments after the weapons blanketed the enemy position with white smoke once again. A third hail of mortars left their tubes even as the fieldpieces erupted with an earsplitting, rolling roar. So far, there’d been only that one cannon shot by the enemy.
“It is practically murder,
“There was a time when I would’ve agreed with you,” Chack said softly in the brief quiet imposed on the division artillery by the necessity of reloading. “My people long believed that to kill anyone was tantamount to murder, aside from the very rare duel. But Grik are not people; they’re brutal animals-and no one would call killing them murder. In self-defense, we killed some of the Jaaps that aided them, and I admit I felt… unhappy about that. But still, it wasn’t murder.” Another stream of mortars thumped into the sky, and he looked at the lieutenant. “And the Doms started this war with as clear a case of murder as I’ve ever seen one species commit against itself. Perhaps war distorts perceptions-I’m rather new at it myself, you know-but is it murder to kill a murderer? I think not. It has more the feel of justice to me.”
The lieutenant watched the mortars erupt among the enemy again. “But those are only soldiers, men like me. They follow orders. Their leaders are the murderers.”
“Do you really think so? Would you have obeyed orders to kill civilians? Innocent, noncombatant females and their younglings?”
“Of course not!”
“Then there you have the difference, Lieuten-aant. Those we kill are ‘only soldiers,’ but they protect and do the bidding of their murderous masters. While the masters may be chiefly to blame, their soldiers-their tools-must
