Conqueror

BAM.

Braaaaaaaap.

The lieutenant looked up and down the line, where variations on the same scene were happening. Most of the enemy in front of him were still loading.

'Charge!' he shouted.

One of the Brigaderos fired from the hip, his ramrod still in his rifle. By a chance someone who'd never seen a battlefield wouldn't have believed it speared through the chest of the Descotter charging him. Both men wore identical expressions of surprise, until the Civil Government trooper went to his knees and then his face, the iron rod standing out behind his back. The Brigadero was still gaping when the trooper's squadmate fired with his muzzle not two feet away. The barbarian flew backward, punched away as much by gasses that had no chance to dissipate as by the bullet, his leather jacket smouldering in a circle a foot wide over his belly.

The rest clubbed their muskets or drew swords; the Brigaderos carried bayonets but evidently didn't much like to use them. The troopers fired again at point-blank range and then there was a brief flurry of butt and bayonet, the ugly butcher's-cleaver sound of steel parting flesh.

More rifle fire from ahead, from behind a boulder. Two or three men. .

'Prone!' the lieutenant snapped; he stayed on one knee, as did Raj and his HQ group. 'Somebody get-'

Braaaaaaaap. The surface of the boulder sparked and spalled under the impact of another thirty-five rounds. Something hit; a rifle-barrel jerked up over the squarish boulder and stayed there.

'Forward,' Raj said, and then to his trumpeter: 'Sound maintain advance.'

Behind them he could hear the ground crunching as the splatgun's crew manhandled it up at a trot. That solves that problem, he thought; he'd been wondering if the new weapon was more like close-range artillery or small arms. They were best deployed well forward, probably in the gaps between units, to shoot men onto their objectives. Maybe an iron shield on either side of the barrel?

'Mi heneral?' the lieutenant asked, hopping a step to keep up with Raj's longer stride.

The men were moving forward again, the line of bayonets glittering. . or in some cases, dull. Nothing ahead for the moment, but the burbling echoes of the firefight in the crater were getting closer. So far they'd seen the ones the enemy had stationed here, or the quickest-witted and fastest on their feet. A serious attempt to force the gap could come any moment.

'Yes?' Raj asked, startled out of a world of lines and distances, alternatives and choices.

'Why are we attacking the enemy, sir? Not that I mind-but wouldn't it be tactically sound to make them come to us? We're across their line of retreat.'

Raj looked at the painfully earnest young face. He nodded in recognition; he'd always wanted to know how to do his job better too.

'Son, if we had four or five companies, yes. As it is, we can't hold this width of front, even with those little beauties.' He gestured back at the splatguns with his revolver. 'There are probably still enough of them to pin us down while a lot of the rest get through and scatter into the hills.

'But. We're not really attacking them, we're hustling them, they're bouncing around like bees in a bucket and we're not going to give them time to sit down and organize a breakout attack. Defeat takes place in the mind of the enemy.' The puppy awe in the young man's face was embarrassing. 'We'll hold a bit further forward, where the chokepoint narrows.'

'Watch it!'

They crouched slightly, instinctively, and ran forward. There had only been one Brigadero behind the boulder, and a girl loading for him. The man lay dead, slumped back against the stone with his brains leaking down the rough surface. The girl was lying curled on her side, a dagger with a gold-braid hilt and gold pommel sunk to the guard under her ribs. Her mouth was a soundless O, her eyes round and dark as her body shuddered.

Missed the kidney, Raj knew. It might take her some time to bleed out, blood leaking into her stomach cavity like water around a badly packed valve.

'Kicked t'rifle outta her hands, but t'cunt cut belly affore I could stop her, ser,' the corporal said apologetically.

The girl made a small sound; the lieutenant looked at her and swallowed. The older man knew it was because he'd suddenly seen her as a person, not a target, not another barb; perhaps because she'd done pretty much what a Descotter woman would have in her place. Raj moved forward and put his revolver to the back of her neck, squeezing the trigger carefully; even touching was far enough away to miss, if you jerked. The body bucked once, but the sound of the shot was almost lost in the noise of battle.

He looked up. The entrance to the crater was narrowing here, and there was less in the way of large boulders for cover.

'All right,' he said to his runners. 'My compliments to Captains Fleyez and Morrisyn, and we'll hold here-men to take cover. Get that splatgun up here, this is a good position for it.'

The trumpet sounded, and the long line of blue-coated men sank into the ground; hands shifted rocks to give good firing rests and make improvised sangars. The splatgun came bounding up under the hands of its enthusiastic crew, one wheel crunching over the Brigadero woman's legs before the weapon settled into the depression behind the boulder. That put its muzzle at waist height above the ground.

'Ah, good,' the artillery corporal in charge of it said. He noticed the gold-chased dagger and pulled it out, wiping the blade on the girl's stockinged leg and checking the metal of the blade by flicking it with a thumbnail before sticking the knife into his boot-top.

Raj moved a few meters to another boulder, sat and uncorked his canteen. 'The 7th and the Skinners will drive them to us,' he said, half to himself. From the volume of fire, within a few minutes.

'Drive them to us, sir?' the lieutenant said. 'The 7th is finally doing the 5th a favor?' His color was returning, a little.

Raj looked over at the boulder, where the gunners were piling head-sized stones in front of their weapon. They'd tossed the bodies out to have more room; the girl's long black hair hid what was left of her face.

'Nobody's doing anybody any favors here today, Lieutenant,' he said. 'Nobody.'

'Here theyuns come, tall's storks n' thick as grass!'

* * *

Kaltin Gruder had a girl on the saddlebow before him when he rode up to the command-station at the exit to the crater. That might have been expected-although it was a bit early for an officer as conscientious as Gruder to be looting, with the odd shot still going off behind him. Except that she was about eight years old, a huge-eyed creature with braided tow-colored hair in a bloodied shift.

'Took her away from a Skinner,' he said, at Raj's raised eyebrows, his voice slightly defensive.

Embarrassed at impulse of compassion, something as out of place here as a nun in a knockshop, Raj supposed. Feelings were odd things. Antin M'lewis had adopted a three-legged alley cat that spring and lugged it all the way from East Residence.

Gruder shrugged: 'Well, Mitchi'-the slave-mistress Reggiri had given him last year-'can use a maidservant, or whatever. There, ah, weren't many prisoners. Most of the Brigaderos civilians killed themselves before we broke through, when they could tell nobody was getting out.'

Raj nodded. That simplified things for him. . and for them, come to that, if they felt like that about it. He could understand that, too.

Gruder was looking around at the number of bodies lying in the five hundred meters before the final stop-line the 5th's two companies had established. A D-shape of corpses, two or three deep in spots, a thick scattering elsewhere.

'Hot work,' he said.

'The splatguns,' Raj said. 'We put them on the flanks and had the Brigaderos in a crossfire; they were worth about another company each, in sheer firepower on the defensive.'

Kaltin frowned, stroking the whimpering girl's head absently. She clung to the cloth of his uniform jacket, although the right-hand sleeve was sodden and streaking her bright hair with blood.

'This was certainly more like a battle than most of what we've seen this campaign, Messer,' he said. 'I've got twenty dead, and as many again badly hurt.'

'Ten from the 5th,' Raj confirmed. Spirit dump Barholm's cores into the Starless Dark, I told him to give me