The Kranolta packed the ground before the wall as they reached its base and the ladders started coming up again. They were more tangled than in the first assault, but a little thing like that was nothing in the chaos at the wall’s foot. Thousands of them were packed dozens deep, each and every one of them determined to be the very first over the battlements.
“Grenades, Gunny?” Roger heard his own voice over the radio and was surprised by how calm he sounded. He triggered another burst into the back of the mass; leaning out over the wall to fire directly down at its base was hazardous to health.
“Yes, Sir,” Jin approved and called the order. A dozen grenades sailed into the close-packed Kranolta, exploding with deadly effectiveness, but the close press of bodies actually lessened their effect by absorbing blast and fragments, and the holes they opened closed rapidly as the feet of fresh waves of tribesmen pounded their less fortunate fellows into paste.
Roger charged forward as the first ladder came up in his sector. He and PFC Stickles managed to heave it back over the side with a descending scream from the scummies on it, but three more came up in the time it took to push one off. The Kranolta were pushing forward again through sheer weight of numbers and there were nowhere near enough humans to cover the full length of the wall.
“
Roger ripped one of the hundred-gram cylinders off his belt with his left hand, thumbed the activator, and tossed it over the wall just as the first scummy appeared at the top of a ladder. The prince put two rifle beads into the attacker one-handed even as he threw two more grenades, but by then the Kranolta were over the wall.
His magazine clicked suddenly empty, and he tossed the rifle into “his” bunker and waded in with the katana as he had before. This battle was a complete madhouse, with dozens of screaming barbarians clambering over the parapets, their false-hands holding the ladders and both true-hands filled with weapons. Trading parries with a scummy who was better than usual, Roger found himself back-to-back with Cord and realized they were practically alone. Most of the Marines had retreated into the bastions, but there were a few human bodies scattered along the wall.
“Cord!” Roger ducked a swing and opened the attacking Kranolta from thigh to breastbone. “We have to get off the wall!”
“No doubt!” the shaman shouted back, and speared another attacker. The barbarian dropped, but Cord suddenly found himself facing three replacements, and they did not appear to be taking turns. “How?”
Roger was about to reply, when his eyes widened and he spun and lunged at Cord. He tackled the much larger shaman hard enough to drive both of them into his mini-bunker . . . just as the flight of grenades from Third Platoon’s bastion landed.
The grenades temporarily cleared the wall, turning the Kranolta who’d scaled it into hamburger. Most of the Marines’ chameleon-suited wounded were unaffected by the air-burst grenades, but the unarmored barbarians were slaughtered.
Fragments also tore into Cord’s legs. Roger had thrown himself across the shaman’s torso, preventing instant death, but the native was horribly injured, and Roger himself was considerably the worse for wear.
He was stumbling to his feet, ears ringing, vision doubled, and more than half stunned, when he felt himself lifted and thrown across a shoulder.
“Okay,” Despreaux snapped. She seemed, he noticed, to be upside-down. “Are you done playing hero, Hero?”
“Get Cord,” he croaked. It had to be either St. John or Mutabi carrying him, he decided; nobody else was big enough.
“Already done,” she said, taking one corner of the shaman’s stretcher. Wounded Marines were being dragged off all along the wall while others recovered their weapons.
The last thing Roger remembered was an upside-down scummy coming over the parapet, with his ax raised over Despreaux’s head.
Pahner listened to the reports and nodded.
“One more time on the walls. But make sure everyone makes it back to the bastions this time.”
He looked out at the sea of scummies and shook his head. The jam-packed mob looked as if it hadn’t been reduced at all, but that was an illusion. They’d already lost almost a fifth of their force to the wall assaults and the grenades. Now it was time to start the real killing.
“Blow the gate.”
The timber barrier replacing the ruined gates had been carefully constructed. The original purpose of the emplaced demolition charges had been to permit a sally by the armored suits, but the explosives designed to let Marines out worked just as well to let Mardukans in.
The loss of their ram had reduced the Kranolta at the gate to clawing and hacking at the timbers. Their howls of frustration had been clearly audible even through the din of battle . . . and so were their shrieks of agony as the demo charges’ explosions mangled them and blew them backwards. The warriors behind them paid them no heed, however, except to stream forward over their writhing bodies, screaming exultant war cries as they fanned out across the bailey. The gate was down; the fortress was theirs!
“Oh, Captain, that was mean,” Julian whispered as he peered through the firing slit at the open gateway. He watched the tide of scummies split, some charging for the keep, and others for the inner stairs to the bastions, and then he poked his bead cannon through the slit.
There were a number of available munitions for the weapon. Besides the standard ten-millimeter ceramic- cored, steel-coated beads, there were both armor piercing and “special actions” munitions. The armor piercing beads were designed to be effective against any known suit armor, and against most armored vehicles, as well. The “special actions” munitions were mixed. Some were crowd-control devices: sticky balls to coat rioters in glue, knockout gas, or puke gas. And some of them were for close quarter conditions where the object was pure, unmitigated slaughter. The company didn’t have many of those with them, but this was just about the perfect time to use the one magazine he had.
He stroked the stock of the bead cannon with a feral grin.
“Come to Poppa,” he crooned.
Pahner gazed down into the courtyard from the gatehouse’s upper story, calmly masticating his gum and waiting. He blew a bubble when First Platoon reported that spears were being thrust into the ground floor slits of its bastion. He nodded when the keep reported that the Mardukans were chopping at its door, and he steepled his fingers when the sound of ax blows started beneath his own feet. Then he nodded again.
“Fire,” he said, and stepped back from the spear slit.
Julian had already programmed his visor HUD to show the round’s footprint, and he aimed his first shot carefully. The ten-millimeter cylinder was fired at very low velocity, relatively speaking, but the instant it exited the barrel, it blossomed like some hideous flower to deploy its twenty-five depleted uranium beads in a beautiful geometric pattern like a high-tech spider’s web.
Strung with monomolecular wire.
The advanced adaptation of the ancient concept of chainshot was lethal almost beyond belief, yet it never made it across the courtyard. Its designers wouldn’t have believed that was possible, for the wire sliced through weapons, limbs, and bodies almost effortlessly. But only
This wire did, but not before it had torn over a third of the way across the bailey and sliced every native in its path into neatly severed gobbets of flesh. The destruction sprayed blood and bits of Mardukan in every direction, and so did the second shot in Julian’s magazine. And the third. And the fourth.
The paved courtyard was an abattoir, filled with Kranolta who’d finally seen sufficient concentrated slaughter to stem even their frenzied advance for just a moment. The survivors were frozen in momentary shock and disbelief, like lifesize sculptures coated in the blood of their hideously dismembered fellows.
Sculptures which were cooked an instant later by plasma cannon.
