March Upcountry

“Move,” Roger said coldly.

The Mardukan guard seemed disinclined to obey, but he stepped aside at a head gesture from the king, and Roger walked forward to the parapet and looked down. The balcony was located at one of the highest points in the hilltop castle and permitted a breathtaking view of the town laid out below. He could see the company moving through the local forces gathered around the gate and heading for the bridge.

Radj Hoomas stood a short distance down the balcony’s low, stone wall, watching the same deployment. There were only a few guards between him and the humans, but at least fifty lined the back of the balcony, ready to fill the hostages full of javelins at his command.

The king looked over at Roger and grunted.

“I believe you and Oget Sar came to an understanding?”

“If you mean your new guard commander, yes,” Roger said without a smile. “He’ll use up my troops, and I’ll try my best to kill him. We understand each other perfectly.”

“Such a way to talk to your host,” the king said crossly, clapping his cross hands in displeasure. “You need to learn better manners before someone gets hurt.”

“I always have had that problem,” Roger admitted as the company deployed across the fields along the river. “I guess it’s my short temper.”

“Everybody stay cool,” Moseyev said. “We’re almost at the deploy point.”

In traveling configuration, the Marine plasma cannon was a meter and a half long, a half meter square, and nearly seventy kilos in weight, which made it marginally portable for one unarmored human. Fortunately, it also had a pair of handy carrying handles at either end, so two Marines could lug it for short distances without any problems. Except, of course, for the inevitable bitching.

“God,” Macek said. “This is one heavy mother.”

“You’ll be glad to have this heavy mother along in a few minutes,” Gronningen chuckled.

“Yeah,” Macek admitted. “But that don’t make it any lighter.”

“Okay,” Moseyev said, eyeing the bridge guardhouses. “This is a good angle. Set ’er up.”

The two Marines dropped the featureless oblong in the half-grown flaxsilk, and Gronningen hit an inconspicuous button. A door opened, and he flipped the key switch within and stood back as the M-109 cannon deployed like a butterfly from a chrysalis.

The surrounding matrix was a set of memory plastic parts. The first part to open was the tripod, which pushed down a small pre-tripod to hold the weapon off the ground, then deployed the main supports. Once the main tripod legs had reached their maximum extent and done a pre-level, they deployed spikes into the ground with a susurrant hiss-thump. Then the tripod elevated the gun to its full extension, and the blast shield deployed.

The shield was, arguably, the most important feature of the support module. The thermal bloom when the cannon fired was immense, and without the shield, the firer would incinerate himself. That would have been enough to endear it to any gunner, but it also acted as armor against frontal fire. Now it opened like the ruff of a basilisk lizard or a flar-ta’s head shield, deploying in a rectangle to either side. It offered ample vertical coverage above and below the weapon, but most of it spread to the sides in a shape largely governed by the expansion pattern of the plasma shot.

Gronningen tapped a control on top of the weapon and sat down cross-legged behind it. He looked at the bridge where the Mardukan soldiers in both guardhouses were watching the company deploy. None of them appeared to have noticed the team’s preparations.

“We’re up,” he announced.

“Plasma cannon’s up,” Moseyev relayed over the com.

“Copy,” Kosutic replied. “We’re in position. Take the shot.”

“Why haven’t they jumped yet?” Kidard Pla snarled. The Pasulian watched the wings of the fearsome weapon deploy and fingered the stone rail of the bridge nervously.

“Maybe they weren’t told?” his companion suggested.

The Pasulian guards had been specially detailed to the bridge because all of them could swim. They’d been informed of the plan just before they went on duty, and now they watched their Marshad counterparts, waiting for them to abandon their posts. The plasma weapons were supposed to sweep the Pasule defenders off the bridge, but they would kill or severely wound the Marshad guards as well, unless they got themselves safely out of the way. But none of them were moving. Either they hadn’t been informed that their “allies’ ” weapons were dangerous to them, as well, or else they were playing a game of basik. Whichever it was, Kidard Pla wasn’t playing along.

“I’m going to start yelling and pointing,” he said. “Then we jump.”

“Sounds good to me. Hurry.”

“Look!” the guard leader called. “The human lightning weapons! Everyone off the bridge!”

He took his own advice without further ado and launched himself over the low wall of the bridge and into the water. He was not sticking around to see what happened next.

Gronningen had already started to depress the firing stud when he saw the Pasule contingent start pointing. He paused for only a moment, all the time it took the keyed-up guards to hit the water, and then fired.

The plasma charge traveled at nearly the speed of light and smote the nearer Pasule guardhouse in a flash of actinic light and a bellowing explosion. The Marshadan guards were swept effortlessly from the bridge by the thermal bloom, vanishing like gnats in a candle flame, and the plasma bolt carved a ruler-straight line of blazing vegetation across the fields between the cannon and the bridge. The center of that line was bare black to the soil, which steamed and smoked in the blazing gray light.

The Marines broke into a trot, heading straight for the bridge with bead rifles and grenade launchers at port arms, and the rest of the Marshad forces poured out of the city gates behind them.

Gronningen flipped the safety back on and hit the collapse key, and the fire team waited while the cannon reabsorbed itself, then looked at their leader.

“Mutabi,” Moseyev said, slinging his bead rifle and taking one of the handles. “Let’s go.”

The team hefted their weapons and followed the rest of their company. Walking through the fire.

“Glorious! Glorious!” Radj Hoomas clapped all four hands in glee. “The bridge is clear! Pity their guards got away, though.”

“You didn’t inform your own guards?” Roger’s tone was wooden.

“Why should I? If they’d panicked early, it might have given away our attack.” The king looked towards the distant city. “Look, they still haven’t even begun to issue forth. We’ve caught them completely by surprise. Glorious!”

“Yes,” Roger agreed, as Pahner stepped up beside him, obviously to get a better view of Pasule. “It’s going well so far.”

Eleanora O’Casey nodded at the group of guards around the king, who waved for them to move aside. It was well known that the chief of staff was an academic, not a fighter, and so tiny a person hardly posed a threat to Radj Hoomas.

“What do you intend to do with them when you capture their city?” she asked, stepping up on the far side of the king from the prince and captain and gesturing at the other city.

“Well, the market for dianda is fully satisfied at the moment,” the Mardukan said, rubbing his horns. “So after stripping the Houses, I will probably permit them to raise barleyrice. Well, that and use them to support my combined army as it conquers the rest of the city-states.”

“And, of course,” O’Casey said, “we’ll be free to pass on our way.”

“Of course. I will have no further need for you. With the combined force of Marshad and Pasule, I’ll control the plains.”

“Ah,” the academic said. “Excellent.”