Conqueror

sheets, hot meals, running water, women. As long as the food holds out, of course.'

Muzzaf Kerpatik nodded. 'Two ships came in last night under tow,' he said. 'Eight hundred tons of provisions, and another two hundred thousand rounds of 11mm from Lion City.'

Raj glanced up at the black-uniformed naval commander. The sailor cleared his throat:

'Their batteries on the south shore aren't much, at night,' he said. 'The channel's fairly deep on the north side, we just steam up and they try to hit the sound of our engines. Which is difficult enough if you're used to dealing with sound on water.'

Tonhio Lopeyz, Raj reminded himself.

'Good work, Messer Commodore Lopeyz,' he said, nodding.

Provisions aren't tight yet, he thought. Plenty of beans and bullets, but he needed men. What he could do with another five or six thousand veteran cavalry. .

'What sort of rate of fire do you think they can get with those siege pieces, Grammeck?' he asked.

Dinnalsyn looked up from his plotting table. 'Oh, not more than one shot per half hour per gun, mi heneral,' he said. 'Their crews look like amateurs, mostly-I think they keep those guns in storage between wars. Probably only a few real gunners per tube. Still, a day or so and six guns firing those forty-kilo round-shot would bring any hundred meters of wall down, even with the earthwork backing we've put in. Curtain walls like this-' he stamped a foot '-just can't take the racking stress.' Which was why they'd been replaced with low earth-backed walls sunk behind moats, in the Civil Government and Colony. The western Midworld was considerably behind the times.

There was a rattling bang from the rear of the tower. The Y-beams creaked as the platform came level with the parapet, and the crew manhandled a 75mm field gun forward onto the flagstones. A gunner waved a flag from beside it, and the platform sank as oxen on the ground below heaved at their traces and compensated for the pull of the counterweights. The timber platform bumped rhythmically against the stones of the tower's inner wall as it went down. The gun-crew trundled the weapon into position on the wooden disk that waited for it. Behind the wheels were long curving ramps; ahead of them rope-buffered blocks. The gunners slid marlinspikes through iron brackets sunk into the circular wooden disk and heaved experimentally. There was a grating sound from the 'lubricating' sand beneath the planks, and the weapon pivoted, the muzzle just clearing the crenellations of the parapet.

'Will the structure take it?' Raj asked.

'I think so,' Dinnalsyn said cautiously. 'We've got the floors below this braced with heavy timbers.' He looked at the Brigaderos. 'Amateurs. Hasn't it occurred to them to check trajectories? Height is distance.'

No, Raj thought. But then, it wouldn't have occurred to me unless Center had pointed it out.

The second gun slid into position. Dinnalsyn looked to the towers left and right of his position; the guns there were ready too.

He touched off a smoke rocket. The little firework sizzled off northward, its plume drifting through the cold morning air. Center looked out through Raj's eyes at the smoke. Glowing lines traced vectors across his vision.

'Colonel,' Raj said quietly. 'Bring that gun around another two degrees, and you'll make better practice, I think.'

Dinnalsyn relayed the order. 'We lost a great cannon-cocker when you were born to the nobility, mi heneral,' he said cheerfully, bending his eyes to the binoculars. Then: 'Fwego!'

The gunner jerked his lanyard. The gun slammed backwards, rising up the tracks behind its wheels, paused for a second as mass fought momentum, then slid downward with a rush to clang against the chocks. Bitter smoke drifted with the wind into the eyes of the officers at the side of the tower. They blinked, and a spot of red fire flashed for an instant in the center of a blot of black smoke over the Brigadero redoubt. A second later one of the enemy siege cannon fired, a longer duller booom and cloud of smoke. Almost at the same instant there was a splintering crash from far below, and the stone of the tower trembled beneath their feet.

A brass shell casing clanged dully on timber as the crew of the field gun levered open the breech of their weapon.

None of the men on the tower commented on the enemy hit. Dinnalsyn turned to the battery commander at the plotting table. 'Triangulate,' he said.

The captain moved his parallel setsteels across the paper, consulted a printed table and worked his sliderule. The solution was simple, time-to-target over set ranges to a fixed location. Center could have solved the problem to the limit of the accuracy of the Civil Government guns in a fraction of a second-but that would start looking excessively odd. Besides, he didn't want men who needed a crutch. Come to that, neither did Center.

The captain called out elevations and bearing for each gun in the ten tasked with this mission. A heliograph signaller clicked it out in both directions, sunlight on a mirror behind a slotted cover.

'Ranging fire, in succession,' Dinnalsyn said.

From east to west along the wall guns spoke, each allowing just enough time to observe the fall of shot. Raj trained his own field glasses. Oxen were bellowing and running in the open center of the Brigadero redoubt, some of them with trails of pink intestine tangling their hooves. Men staggered to the rear, or were dragged by their comrades. More were still heaving at the massive siege guns, hauling in gangs of two dozen or more at the block- and-tackle rigs that moved them into and out of position.

'Five round stonk,' Dinnalsyn's voice said, cool and dispassionate. 'Shrapnel, fire for effect, rapid fire. Fire.'

This time the four towers erupted in smoke and flame, each gun firing as soon as its mate had run back into battery and was being loaded. The rate of fire was much higher than the guns could have achieved firing from level ground; in less than a minute forty shells burst over the enemy position, a continuous rolling flicker. Smoke drifted back from the towers, and covered the target. A rending clap and ball of yellow flame marked a secondary explosion as one of the siege-gun caissons went up. Four more explosions followed at half- second intervals, and the huge barrel of one of the siege guns flipped up out of the dust and smoke. When the debris cleared the Brigaderos position looked like a freshly-spaded garden mixed with a wrecker's yard.

Raj bent to the binoculars. Nothing moved in the field of vision for a few long seconds. Then dirt stirred, and a man rose to his feet. He had his hands pressed over his ears, and from the gape of his mouth he was probably screaming. Tears ran down his dirt-caked cheeks, and he blundered out over the mound of earth and into the zone between the bastion-the former bastion-and the city. Still screaming and sobbing as he lurched forward, until a rifle spoke from the wall. Raj could see the puff of dust from the front of his jacket as the bullet struck.

'Five round stonk, contact-fused HE,' Dinnalsyn said. 'Standard fire, fire.'

The guns opened up again, the steady three rounds a minute that preserved barrels and broke armies. Most of the shells tossed up dirt already chewed by the explosion of the stacked ammunition. Several knocked aside the heavy siege guns themselves, ripping them off their iron-framed fortress mounts. Whoops and cheers rang out from the Old Residence wall as troops and militiamen jeered and laughed at every hit. The noise continued until Raj turned his head and bit out an order that sent a courier running down the interior stairs to the wall.

'Nothing to cheer in brave men being butchered by an imbecile's orders,' he said.

'Better theirs than ours, mi heneral,' Kaltin said.

Silence fell. The gunners took the opportunity to swab out the bores of their weapons, clearing the fouling before it bound tightly to the metal. A mounted man with a white pennant on his lance rode out from the central Brigaderos camp. That would be a herald asking permission to remove the dead and wounded, formal admission of defeat in this. . he couldn't quite decide what to call it. 'Battle' was completely inappropriate.

'True, Kaltin,' Raj said. 'However, remember that every time you fight someone, you teach them something, if they're willing to learn. Somebody over there will be willing to learn. Play chess long enough with good players and you get good.'

Somebody over there had read Obregon's Siege Operations, at least. Not the supreme commander, or they wouldn't have committed this fiasco.

'Our army is already pretty good. We have to work hard to improve. All the enemy has to do is learn a few basics and it would double their combat power.'

It would be a race between his abilities and the enemy's learning curve.