Conqueror

'Platoon-'

'Front rank, volley fire, fire.'

BAM. Two hundred men in a single shot, the red muzzle-flashes spearing out into the rain like a horizontal comb.

The rear rank walked through the first. Before the echoes of the initial shout of fwego had died, the next rank fired-by half-platoons, eighteen men at a time, in a rapid stuttering crash.

BAM. BAM. BAM. BAM.

The field-guns came up between the units. 'If they break-' Ehwardo said. The troopers advanced and fired, advanced and fired. The commanders followed them, leading their dogs.

'If,' Raj replied.

The guns fired case-shot, the loads spreading to maximum effect in the confined space. Merciful smoke hid the result for an instant, and then the rain drummed it out of the air. For fifty meters back from the head of the column the Brigaderos and their dogs were a carpet of flesh that heaved and screamed. A man with no face staggered toward the Civil Government line, ululating in a wordless trill of agony. The next volley smashed him backward to rest in the tangled pink-gray intestines of a dog. The animal still whimpered and twitched.

Men have a lot of life in them, Raj thought. Men and dogs. Sometimes they just died, and sometimes they got cut in half and hung on for minutes, even hours.

The advancing force had gotten far enough downslope that the reserve platoon and the second battery of guns could fire over their heads. Shock-waves from the shells passing overhead slapped at the back of their helmets like pillows of displaced air. Most of the head of the Brigaderos column was trying to run away, but the railroad right-of-way was too narrow and the press behind them too massive. Men spilled upslope toward the forested hills. Just then the Skinners opened up themselves with their two-meter sauroid-killing rifles. Driving downhill on a level slope, their 15mm bullets went through three or four men at a time. A huge sound came from the locked crowd of enemy troops, half wail and half roar. Some were getting out their rifles and trying to return fire, standing or taking cover behind mounds of dead. Lead slugs went by overhead, and not two paces from him a trooper went unh! as if belly-punched, then to his knees and then flat.

The rest of his unit walked past, reloading. Spent brass tinkled down around the body lying on the railroad tracks, bouncing from the black iron strapping on the wooden stringers.

Raj whistled sharply, and Horace came forward and crouched. Got to see what's going on, he thought, straddling the saddle and levelling his binoculars as the hound rose.

Then: damn.

Hard to see through smoke and mist, but there was activity down by the fort. Men with banners galloping out amid a great whirring of kettledrums. The enemy column had been bulging naturally, where advancing ranks met retreating. The party from the fort was getting them into order, groups of riding dogs being led back and men in dragoon uniforms jogging left and right into the woods. A trio of shells from the second battery ploughed into the knot of Brigaderos, raising plumes of dirt and rock, rail-iron and body-parts. When those cleared the movement continued, and the Welf banner still stood. Raj focused his glasses on the fort's ramparts; Center put a square across his vision and magnified, filling in data from estimation. A man in inlaid lancer armor with a high commander's plumes. Another with a halter around his neck and two men standing behind him, the points of their broadswords hovering near his kidneys. Clo Reicht, pointing. .

Pointing at me. A man might not be recognized at this distance by unaided eyes, but Horace could.

The press on the bridge behind the fort had halted. Two low turtle-shaped vehicles were coming over it, slowly, men and animals rippling aside to let them pass. Steam and smoke vomited from low smokestacks; the Brigade wasn't up to even the asthmatic gas engines the Colony and Civil Government used for armored cars, but steam would do at a pinch. Another curse drifted through his mind. Someone had had a rush of intelligence to the head. The cars were running on flanged wheels that fitted the tracks. Sections of broader tire were lashed to their decks. A few minutes work to bolt them onto the iron hubs, and they'd be road-capable. Now that was clever.

'Ehwardo!' Raj shouted.

'No joy?' the Companion said.

'No. They began to stampede, but whoever's in charge down there is starting to get them sorted out.'

A lancer regiment was extracting itself from the tangle and forming up. Guns went thump from the fort, and a roundshot came whirrr-crash, bouncing up into the air again halfway between the lead spray of enemy dead and the Civil Government's line. More and more riflemen were returning fire, some of them in organized units. The Brigaderos troops were brave men, and mostly trained soldiers. They didn't want to panic, and they knew the real slaughter started when one side or the other bugged out. Once somebody started giving orders, they must have been relieved beyond words.

'If that's Teodore Welf, Ingreid Manfrond had better look to his Seat later,' Ehwardo said.

'And we'd better look to our collective arse right now,' Raj said.

He glanced at the sky, and called up memories of what the terrain was like. More bullets cracked by, and a cannonball hit a tree upslope from him and nearly abreast. The long slender trunk of the whipstick tree exploded in splinters at breast height, then sagged slowly away from the track, held up by its neighbors.

'He's got enough brains to reverse their standard tactic,' Raj said. 'Those dragoons will try and work around our flanks, and the lancers will charge or threaten to to keep us pinned.'

'Rearguard?' Ehwardo asked.

It was obviously impossible to stay. There had been a chance of rushing the bridge if the enemy ran, but if they didn't the brutal arithmetic of combat took over. There were just too many of the other side in this broken ground. Their flanks weren't impassible to men on foot, and the ground there provided plenty of cover.

'I'll do it, with the guns and the Skinners.' He held up a hand. 'That's an order, major. Take them back at a trot, no more, and a company or so saddled up just inside the gate. We'll see what happens. M'lewis, get your dog-robbers together. Courier to Juluk-' the Skinner chieftain '-and tell him I need him now. Captain Harritch!'

The artilleryman in charge of the two batteries heeled his dog over.

'Captain Harritch, put a couple of rounds into the railbed now, if you please'-because he did not want those armored cars zipping up at railroad speeds on smooth track-'and then prepare to limber up. Here's what we'll do. .'

Everyone here looked relieved to hear orders, as well. Now, if only there was someone to tell him what to do.

* * *

'Now!' the battery-lieutenant said.

Sergeant-Driver Rihardo Terraza-his job was riding the left-hand lead dog in the gun's team-heaved at the trail of the gun. The rest of the crew pushed likewise, or strained against the spokes of the wheels. The field-gun bounced forward over the little rise in the road.

spiritmercifulavatarssaveus, but the barbs were close this time. Not four hundred meters away, dragoons and lancers and a couple of their miserable muzzle-loading field-guns pounding up the road in the rain, which was getting worse. They had just time enough to check a little as the black muzzles of the guns rose over the ridge, appearing out of nowhere. There were other Brigaderos crossing the rolling fields, but they were much further back, held up by stone walls and vineyards tripping at their dogs.

The breechblocks clanged. Everyone leapt out of the path of the recoil, opening their mouths to spare their ears.

POUMF. POUMF. POUMF. POUMF.

Instantaneous-fused shells burst in front of the Brigaderos. Juicy, Terraza thought with vindictive satisfaction. He'd been with this battery for five years, since the El Djem campaign, when they only brought one gun of four out of the desert. He knew what cannister did to a massed target like that.

'Keep your distance, fastardos,' he muttered under his breath as he threw himself at the gun again.