'Cannon,' Raj said absently, frowning over the map in his hand. They were nearly to where Staenbridge had planned to set up. Whatever had happened, it was not the slow retreat they anticipated. 'Field guns and volley fire.' There was a burbling chorus of dull pops behind the crisp sound of the Armory rifles;
Ehwardo Poplanich lowered his binoculars. 'I'd say rifle fire from about four, five companies,' he said. 'Not in any great hurry, either.'
A whistle sounded from ahead, and a Scout came pounding back along the rutted, potholed gravel road. Sunlight flicked across him in bars between the roadside trees as he pulled up.
'Barbs, dead, ser,' he said, raising a gloved hand to his helmet-brim. 'Looks like some action.'
The road rose slightly to an almost imperceptible ridge, marked in the fields to either side by a low fieldstone wall. Metal glinted amid the stubble along the near side of it, thin brass cartridge cases for the Civil Government breechloaders. The column topped the rise, and Raj flung up his hand. Behind him the trumpet sang,
'Walked right into it,' Poplanich said absently.
'That they-' Raj began; he was interrupted by Bellamy, who had spurred closer to the main clump of bodies with a handkerchief held to his face.
'
'That's Conner-Conner Auburn, the Admiral's brother, the Grand Captain of Port Murchison. He's
Ehwardo's mouth shaped a silent whistle. 'Very,' he said.
Raj rapped his knuckles on the pommel of the saddle; Suzette met his eyes with a quirk of raised eyebrow.
'We may find that convenient,' he said, and turned to the Scout trooper. 'Arnez-take the head and bag it.'
* * *
'They ran,' Ludwig Bellamy said, with something halfway between anger and shame in his voice. 'They all ran.'
He looked depressed. The Squadron bodies littering the road merely looked dead, as if they had been caught and time-frozen in a dozen different postures. Most were lying facedown here, where the pursuit had caught them as they galloped their dogs back down toward Port Murchison much faster than they had marched south. Few of the bodies were of dogs; it had been saber-work here, and the barbarian bodies lay tumbled with great black sprays of blood where the blades had left them. Cuts across the neck were most common; half-severed limbs, and multiple slash-wounds to the shoulders and arms where they had tried to turn in the saddle and defend themselves.
'Not all of them,' Raj said, rising in his stirrups.
They passed through a stretch of fig trees, and on the other side there was a windrow of bodies a hundred meters or so out into the open ground-several hundred of them, some deployed out into the fields. Dactosauroids and gulls were busy crawling over the bodies and squabbling for dainties, and packs of little knee-high carnosauroids burrowing their fanged heads into the soft parts of the bodies. There were plenty of dogs here, caught by case-shot and shrapnel by the tattered look of them.
'Well, Spirit eat their eyes,' Ehwardo said. 'You thinking what I am?' The road stretched twisting ahead of them, sparsely lined with trees and rising and falling over hills and small valleys. The noise and smoke were closer, now.
'I can hardly believe it,' Raj murmured. 'They came down the road straggling any old way-hardly two or three hundred of them together in a single bunch. Conner right out ahead like a point-man. Gerrin just deployed, shot them to ribbons, stayed in line abreast across the axis of the road as he advanced. Chased the survivors into the next lot, then repeated the process. Is repeating it.'
'Ser!'
Two of the Scouts were waving from fifty meters farther down the road. The officers spurred over, to find a wounded Descotter propped up against a roadside gumtree with his dog standing at stiff-hackled guard. The man had the shoulder-flashes of the 5th, his rifle by his side and a wadded red-soaked bandage around one thigh; a stocky young man of medium height, face gray-brown and sweating, but grinning at the Scouts.
'
'Trooper Hesus M'Kallum, isn't it?' Raj said, drawing up.
'
'Report, soldier.'
The man seemed a little light-headed with pain, and he laughed until the jiggling moved his leg.
'
Suzette touched her toe to Harbie's foreleg and the dog crouched; she walked over to the wounded man carrying a pouch from the saddle and knelt at his side.
'Brandy isn't what you need, soldier,' she said. The man stiffened and closed his eyes as she slit the field- dressing with a small razor-edged knife and examined the torn flesh carefully, maintaining pressure with a pad of gauze. 'Did you use the blessed powder?'
'Yis, m'lady,' he gritted. 'Hurt summat.' Iodine did that.
'It will probably save your leg,' she said; the man slumped slightly in relief. 'The bone's broken, but it's a clean fracture and the hamstring's not cut. I can feel the ball-close to the surface, right here.' She taped a new cover over a fresh bandage. 'There'll be an ambulance cart along to take you to the Sisters soon enough, and you'll be fit for duty in six months. Take some of this. Not too much; we don't want you passing out.'
'Ye're an angel, m'lady,' the man said fervently. 'Spirit bless ye an' Messer Raj too!'
The officers looked at each other. 'Doesn't really seem to be much for us to do here,' Poplanich said mildly, then broke into a broad grin. His hand shooed away some of the swarming flies; the cries of the scavengers, hissing and shrieking, were raucous in the background.
Raj smiled back, for the first time since he returned to camp. 'And we're likely to be needed back south,' he said.
Chapter Ten
'Sixty thousand if it's one, Major, Spirit be with us,' the Slasher captain said in his singsong borderland accent. '