Warlord

'Right face, wheel-halt!'

The dogs stopped, sinking their haunches toward the ground and bracing their column-thick forelegs, then whipped around to the right in half their own body lengths. Or tried to; some of the troopers had been a little late or early with the crucial rein signals. There were collisions, the heavy thud sounds of thousand-pound wardogs meeting unexpectedly. Raj had his watch out, the second hand sweeping inexorably as the men jumped from the saddle with barely time enough for the mounts to stop. Many tumbled, shouts of pain and clatter of falling rifles; a shot cracked out, and Master Sergeant da Cruz's lips tightened. Raj did not envy the luckless trooper who had been riding with a round up the spout and, worse, the safety off.

'Ragged, ragged,' the noncom cursed as the units formed in a staggered line along nearly a thousand meters of roadway; like two lines of dashes, the rear covering the empty spots in the front. The dogs dropped to their bellies, lying flat while their riders aimed over their backs. 'Three minutes, that's ragged, try that with Colonials and we're fucking dead. Ser.' The Master Sergeant had less of the nasal twang of Descott in his voice than most of the other ranks; a surprisingly well educated man, if you could get him to talk.

'Well, we're here to give them some polish, aren't we?' Raj said mildly. The exercise was supposed to be a response to a charge from the treeline. The crucial thing was to make the zone of beaten ground as wide as possible, to break the momentum of shock action before the enemy could get home with cold steel. Such a charge was more likely with the western barbarians of the Military Governments, who had what amounted to a religious reverence for edged weapons, but Colonial dragoons would jump you fast enough if they could.

The platoons were sounding off as they came ready; Staenbridge was noting the times on his noteboard. Raj waited until the last hailed in, before he pressed the stem of his watch.

'Call it five minutes,' he said. 'Down by half from where we were first day out, but not good enough. . volley fire on the treeline; by platoons, four rounds.' He raised his field glasses to his eyes and focused on the edge of the trees, where bushes grew thick between the trunks.

'Battalion, treeline target-' the Master Sergeant's voice carried easily, raised two octaves to pierce the ambient noise and propelled by his deep highlander's chest. The trumpeter duplicated it between phrases, and the noncoms down the battalion front were like multiple echoes.

'Volley fire, four rounds. Load.'

A giant rattling click, that lasted far too long. Raj turned his head aside for a moment. The field gun with the 5th was setting up on the crown of the road behind the troops, a few meters to the left of where the command group sat their mounts about the banner. A 75mm rifle, standard issue, with a six-dog team and caisson, a breechloader with chest-high wheels. The crew were in uniforms of a darker blue; they were Area Command troops, detached for this duty. They moved smartly, swinging the long barrel of the cast-steel piece toward the putative target, letting the steel pole trail thump to the dirt. The gunner squatted over the trail and sighted through the opened breech and down the barrel, standard for point-blank work. The shell clanked home just as the riflemen were ready.

'Volley fire-fire!'

There should have been a rolling crash down the line, a separate BAM from each platoon. Instead there was a staccato stuttering kkt-kkkt-kkkt, overlapping bangs. He watched the treeline carefully; the bushes were thrashing as if caught in a high wind, but far too many branches were pattering down from as high as four meters up. Raj's teeth showed beneath the binoculars. Some people were not adjusting their sights properly. Some people were going to be sorry and sore.

PUMPF. The field gun cut loose, adding its long plume of dirty-white smoke to the clouds puffing up along the firing line. The shell burst neatly at the edge of the forest, and a medium-sized pine quivered, swayed and fell outward with slowly gathering momentum.

'Reload.' The process was quicker this time. 'Volley fire, fire.'

The platoons opened up again and this time the sound was more like the BAM-BAM-BAM that it should have been.

Reload. . fire. Reload. . fire. The fourth volley was almost acceptably crisp, except that a lone shot rang out several seconds after the rest.

The Master Sergeant made a sound that would have done credit to an angry wardog. 'Get me that man's name,' da Cruz shouted into the ringing silence. There were muffled coughs as the slight breeze carried the cloud of powder smoke back across the road; for a few moments it was dense enough to hide the prone men and dogs from the mounted officers.

'We'll have to do better than this,' Raj said neutrally.

'Fire in the hole!' called the gunner; his team had rolled the gun back into batter after its recoil. Raj glanced over to him: 'Give me an airburst just short of the treeline,' he said; that was a real test of skill.

The gunner swung the crank that opened the breech and removed the round; taking a small wrenchlike tool from his belt, he fastened it to the point of the shell and twisted three careful turns. The fuse was dual-purpose. It would explode on contact, or when a perforated brass tube of powder burned past an outlet into the body of the bursting charge. The tool rolled the tube up or down to vary the length of time that took. . but the speed of combustion was not entirely uniform.

The gunner rammed the shell home and cranked the breach closed, stepped aside and jerked the lanyard. The gun recoiled, rolling almost across the road to the ditch; there was an instant of ripping canvas sound, and a burst of black and off-white ten meters short of the trees. An irregular circle of alfalfa beneath the airburst flattened, ripped by the shredded iron of the shell casing. Raj nodded; some of the troopers winced. Air-burst shrapnel was something you could not guard against, it killed with the impersonal arbitrariness of lightning.

'Hey!' someone shouted. 'Sicklefeet!'

Surprised, Raj brought his glasses up again. Yes, sicklefeet, a pack of about twenty breaking out of the trees and halting for a moment, bobbing and tense on their long legs. They were native carnosauroids, about twice the size of a large man, bipeds whose snaky two-meter bodies were balanced by an equal length of tapering tail. They held themselves almost horizontal to the ground, the slender forearms with the grasping claws tucked into their chests. The heads were slender as well, with forward looking vertical-slit eyes, and mouths that split three quarters of the length of the skull to reveal back-curving teeth.

Those were for tearing flesh; the killing tools were on the feet, half-meter rear claws that folded up along the shank of the birdlike leg. When muscle and tendon swung them down they were ready to slice and tear; in the wild steppe country a pack of sicklefeet could bring down a giant grazing sauroid, leaping twice their own height to kick slash wounds man-height and arm-deep. The carnivores milled, opening their mouths to hiss-roar at each other, sounding like a locomotive about to explode. Their mouths were shocking pink, holding only teeth and a tongue fixed all along its underside to the floor of the mouth; it was a mechanism for ramming large chunks of meat down the throat, since the creatures could not chew. The mouth was a striking contrast to the mottled reddish-green and dull blue of their pebbled hides, a color that faded to dull cream on their bellies.

'Sicklefeet, all right,' Raj said, spitting on the road. The things were still quite common in Descott County, which was mostly rocky pasture or open mountain forest with scattered pockets of arable land; men had killed off the big grazers that were their natural prey, but sicklefeet were thoroughly opportunistic feeders, and had found human livestock a perfectly acceptable substitute. Or humans; Raj remembered watching one bounding up a near vertical cliff with a crofter's toddler clamped in its jaws and still screaming. They were one reason no male and few women in their native hills went beyond hailing distance of their hearths without a gun.

'Gerrin.' Senior Lieutenant Staenbridge looked up. 'Which platoon scored best, today?'

'First of the Second,' he said. That was Kaltin Grader's Company; his younger brother Evrard was the lieutenant.

'Kaltin, my compliments to Lieutenant Gruder, and his men are to take those things out. See to it.'

'I'm surprised there are any of the filth in close-settled country like this,' Gerrin said.

'So am I,' Raj said. 'But this pack is leaving soon.'

The beasts were milling around, moving in darting-swift bounds; some of them were pointing their bodies at the road and flaring the single broad nostril on the ends of their snouts. One of those was a male, and it lifted the crimson skin ruff around its neck and bugled a challenge. No pack back in the County would do that; they had learned to be afraid of men, although they had a disconcertingly sharp notion of how far a rifle could shoot.