March To The Sea

full weight of his armor against the gate and it came fully open. The huge hinges were twisted top and bottom, but the soft iron couldn't resist the powered 'muscles' of the suits. Only the fact that, massive as they were, the suits were much lighter than the gate panels had prevented the armored Marines from flinging them open instantly, but instantly wasn't really required.

The first barbarians were already charging forward to regain the gateway, and Julian wondered whether it was courage or stupidity—or if there was a difference between them—that kept the barbarians on their feet. Or perhaps it was only the battle fury for which the Boman were famed. Not that it made any practical difference what kept the survivors coming.

The army behind him was also charging for the gates, and his HUD showed a tide of blue icons racing to support him. But the K'Vaernians had kept well clear of the impact zone, which meant they had considerably farther to go, and it was clear that the surviving barbs were going to get there first.

Not that it was going to do them a bit of good.

Julian didn't even bother to unlimber his bead cannon. He and Moseyev were still busy opening the gates, anyway, but that was all right. The only way the scummies could reach the gate was down the long, narrow gate tunnel, and anything his stutter gun could have added to the carnage of Gronningen's plasma cannon in such confined quarters would have been superfluous.

The phlegmatic Asgardian squeezed off a single shot that filled the tunnel's bore from wall to wall with a sliver of a star's heart. Half the tunnel roof disappeared as the upward angled plasma bolt slammed into it and sliced a huge wedge out of the back face of the city wall. For a few moments, the rest of the tunnel roof looked as if it might hold, but then it, too, collapsed downward, taking half of one of the gate bastions with it. The avalanche of plunging masonry looked as if it might be going to bury the Marines, but it fell clear . . . and Gronningen's second shot blew straight down the gaping, roofless cut through the curtain wall which had once been a tunnel.

The bolt of nuclear fire hit the new-made rubble before it even had a chance to settle properly, and the broken walls and falling stones simply lifted back into the air. Some of their mass was converted to slightly cooler plasma, but most of it simply added its weight to the shrapnel flying from the explosion, as if the city itself was rising up against its invaders.

The same actinic fire, mixed with bits of half-molten stone, washed over the surviving Boman . . . who promptly stopped surviving.

'Krin,' Bistem Kar half-whispered as the first battalion of K'Vaernian infantry slid to a skidding halt behind the armored figures it had intended to relieve. No unarmored individual was going to be able to survive in the blast- furnace fury of that shattered gate tunnel for some hours to come, and the Cove's senior guardsman shook his head in slow disbelief. The humans had never demonstrated any of their energy weapons for the K'Vaernians, who'd had only the reports from Diaspra to go on, and despite himself, Kar had never really quite believed those reports. Oh, he hadn't doubted them intellectually, but what Bogess and Rus From and other veterans of the New Model Army had described to him had been so far beyond the limits of his experience that he'd simply been unable to grasp the reality.

Now, he'd seen it . . . and he still wasn't certain he believed it. The power of the plasma cannon was even more shocking, in an odd sort of way, because it came on the heels of the rocket bombardment. The dreadful, overwhelming hiss and roar and crackle and thunder of the rockets had been the most cataclysmic thing he'd ever experienced. In the instant that those howling missiles slammed home, he'd felt, however fleetingly, as if the very lightnings of the gods had been placed in his true-hands. Yet that single shot from Gronningen's weapon had sliced effortlessly through the massive stonework even the concussive thunder of the rockets had left virtually untouched, and the tough, confident guardsman felt something tremble inside him as he realized that every single word the Diasprans had told him was true.

He turned to Pahner and shook his head.

'Why don't you use them to clear the whole city?' he asked, jerking his head in the direction of the armored Marines, still standing unconcernedly in the inferno of the gutted gate tunnel. 'We're going to take casualties in those warrens, prying the Boman holdouts out one by one.'

'Power,' Pahner said. 'Not enough of it, that is.'

'Ah,' the K'Vaernian commander said with a gesture of puzzlement. 'I'm just a simple old soldier, of course, but—'

'Ha!' the Marine laughed. 'Some 'simple old soldier'!'

'I stand by that description,' Kar said with a dignity which was only slightly flawed by the twinkle in his eye. 'But, simple old soldier or not, that—' he waved at the gaping wound which had once been a gate tunnel '—seems ample power to deal with anything these barbarians might bring to bear.'

'Not that kind of power,' Pahner said. 'Or, not directly, that is.' The K'Vaernian regarded him with obvious confusion, and the Marine shrugged. 'You know how some of the hammer mills in K'Vaern's Cove use wind power, and others use water power from your storage cisterns?'

'Yes,' Kar said, his expressions suddenly thoughtful. 'Are you saying those things—' he nodded at the quartet of armored Marines once more '—don't have enough rainwater stored in their cisterns?'

'In a way,' Pahner agreed, trying to figure out how to explain 'potential energy.' 'The suits run on very powerful energy storage devices. We don't have many of them, and we need those we have for later use. And the weapons themselves only have so many charges, so we can't afford to use them unless we really need them. And we are going to need both them and all the power we've got left soon enough; there's a real battle waiting for us down the road.'

'I can see that you wouldn't consider this a battle,' Bogess said, glancing at the carnage of the gate. 'But that's because we pulled the main force away from the city, and because the Boman were considerate enough to assemble right in the middle of our kill zone, exactly as we'd hoped. Unfortunately, we've used up the rockets now, so we won't be able to blast them this way again. Although,' he added thoughtfully, 'I still don't know how useful the rocket wagons would be in a real mobile battle. We knew where the city was, so we could plan exact trajectories. And better yet,' he chuckled grimly, 'Sindi couldn't exactly dodge.'

'That's true enough,' Kar acknowledged, 'and it's also the reason I agreed that we should use them all now—there's not any point in holding back weapons which might not work later if their use now helps to assure a victory we have to have.'

'Agreed,' Bogess nodded. 'But it still looks like there were at least ten thousand warriors still in the city, and that's only a small fraction of what's out tramping around chasing Rastar and Honal. Sooner or later, we're going to have to face up to the rest of the horde, after all, and I suppose that would qualify as a battle in almost anyone's eyes.'

'I wasn't talking about the rest of the Boman,' Pahner said, pulling out a slice of bisti root. 'We haven't been totally up-front with you guys. Oh, we haven't lied to you, or anything like that, but we've . . . neglected to mention a couple of things. Like the fact that the port we keep saying that we have to reach on the other side of the ocean happens to be held by our enemies.'

'Your enemies?' Bistem Kar said carefully. 'With similar weapons, I assume?'

'Yes.'

'God of Water preserve us,' Bogess said faintly.

'Anyway, there won't be many holdouts to find in there,' the Marine observed. 'As you said, Bogess, most of them were right where we wanted them, waiting for us on the walls. Most of the ones we missed there got themselves killed in the gate tunnel, and the ones who didn't are probably still running . . . and will be, for a while. So keep the troops in hand and fight them through the city, but you shouldn't have that much trouble punching through. Just remember we have to get in before everybody else refugees out. And while you two get that moving, it's time for Rus to bring up the labor teams so we can get down to the real work.'

'Well,' Bogess said, 'now I understand why you Marines don't look upon a battle with the Boman with dread. This isn't much of a battle to you, is it?'

'In a way,' Pahner said, 'but it's not just a matter of scale, you know. That—' he gestured with his chin at the huge pall of smoke and flame still billowing above the rocket strike '—is just as destructive, in its way, as any