A Meeting at Corvallis (46 page)

“Why shouldn't I say it, when we both know it's true?” Signe snapped. “Dammit, Mike, this business is dangerous enough without—”

“That wasn't showing off,” he said, and at her glare added: “All right, it wasn't
just
showing off. I knew whoever it was, it was probably some dick-with-legs first-timer type I could take without breaking a sweat.”

“And if it had been Stavarov sending out his best lancer to mousetrap
you
?” she hissed, when they were close enough for the remark to be less than totally public. “You know, I'd like my children to have a living father—and not grow up hiding from the Protector in a cave in California, either!”

I'd have beaten his best lancer, too,
Mike didn't say aloud. Instead he went on reasonably: “But he didn't. It was like stealing candy from a baby. We won some time, our troops' peck—ah, tails are up, and the enemy's men are feeling half beaten already. Stavarov must be chewing on the rim of his shield. I wouldn't like to be Sir Jeff when the lord baron gets around to him!”

Signe snorted, but changed the subject. “I wonder how Dad's doing over at the bridges?” she said. “At least he's old enough not to try the Achilles-before-the-walls-of-Troy stuff.”

“That's geek to me,” Havel replied, grinning like a wolf.

And yeah, I
am
feeling pretty pleased with myself,
he added silently.
So it's atavistic. Whoopee-shit.

Then he looked south again, and worry returned with a rush, like cold water trickling up his spine. That was the problem with losing yourself in action; like booze, the oblivion was temporary and the troubles came right back, often worse than before.

And where are the rest of my troops, goddammit?
He tried not to wonder if they'd be enough when they
did
get here.

Snap. Snap. Snap.

Ken Larsson ducked involuntarily as the metal bolts from the war-boat flicked towards him, mere blurred streaks at better than four hundred feet a second. They struck the row of heavy sheet-metal-and-timber shields his crew had rigged along the northern edge of the railway bridge. The sloping surface shed the impact with a tooth-gritting sound halfway between a bang and a squeal; the bolts flickered and tumbled upward, still moving so quickly they were barely visible, leaving an elongated, dimpled dent in the quarter-inch steel.

Ouch,
Larsson thought.
Glad I thought of the shields and didn't just rely on the ones on the engines themselves.

The nearest of the turtle boats was well under a thousand yards away now; they were coming on in a blunt wedge, slowly, no more than walking pace—probably because they'd diverted the power of the pedals to the weapons rather than the propellers. The open hatch snapped down again as he watched, and he turned to one of the engines mounted on the railway cars.

“They're probably too far away for our bolts to penetrate yet,” he said. “Let's see how good their sealing is. Number Three, let 'em have it.”

The catapult crew nodded, and two of them used a scissors-like clamp to raise a big ceramic sphere into the metal throwing cup. Its coarse clay surface had an oily, glistening sheen to it, and the sharp petroleum stink of the gooey stuff oozing through the thick pottery was pungent enough to carry several yards. Firebombs of this size were kept empty, and filled from steel barrels only a few minutes before action. Ken repressed an impulse to step back; there were fifteen gallons of the stuff in there, and sometimes—not often, but every once in a while—the container shattered when the machine cut loose, with very nasty consequences. If you made the pottery thick enough that that never happened, you cut down on the payload too much and sometimes it didn't break at all when it struck at the other end, if it hit a soft target like dirt or brush.

The aimer sat in a chair behind the sloping shield of the war-engine, peering through a telescopic sight and working traverse and elevation wheels with her hands. The aimer's chair and the throwing-groove and arms rose and turned smoothly, with a sound of oiled metal moving on metal.

“Range five hundred,” she said crisply. “Ready—”

One of the crew lit a wad of tow on the end of a stick and touched it to the napalm bomb. Blue-and-yellow flames licked over the surface of the porous clay, and wisps of black smoke began to rise. The rest jumped down, and a hose team stood by.

“Ready!”

“Shoot!”

The aimer squeezed a trigger. The machine's throwing arms snapped forward with a hard, flat
brack!
sound and thudded into the rubber-padded stop plates. The clay globe snapped out, trailing more smoke as the wind of its passage fanned the flames. Ken leveled his binoculars eagerly; the shot had the indefinable sweet feeling of a mechanism working perfectly….

Crack!

The sound came sharp and clear despite the distance; a gout of flame enveloped the turtle-boat, the tulip-shaped orange blossom rising from its curved steel deck. A cheer went up from the crews on the railroad bridge. It died to a grumbling, cursing mutter as the war-boat slid forward through the smoke, the fire running down its sloping carapace to burn on the surface of the water, hurried along by water gushing from a valve near the view-slits of the bridge.

Ken tried again to imagine what it had been like inside, in the dim hot sweat-and-oil stench of the interior, the slamming impact making the frame groan, the sudden roaring through the thin plates, the heat and the sharp acrid stink sucked in through the ventilators—and all the while having nothing to see but the back of the man ahead of you, knowing you could burn and drown at the same time at any instant.

Serves 'em right,
he thought grimly.
If they want to be safe, let them stay home.

Which wasn't quite fair—probably most of them had no say in the matter, unless they wanted to face the Lord Protector's men who wore black hoods, or provide the tiger-and-bear-feeding halftime spectacle at the next tournament.

On the other hand, I'm not feeling like being fair right now.
Aloud: “Three, Five, Seven—rapid fire, and concentrate on the lead boat! Fry the fascist sons of bitches!”

As a student rebel in the sixties, he'd made Molotov cocktails.

“OK, now we get serious,” Havel said, as the Protectorate's host began its advance.

Lessee. Spearmen on the far west wing, call it three hundred of 'em, opposite our A-listers; then crossbows, more spears, more crossbows, and so forth, until they end up with spearmen again on the far east end next to the river. The heavy horse behind the center, but not far enough behind. They'll overlap us on the west unless we do something. So…

“Signal,
artillery open fire, priority target enemy cavalry,
” Havel said. It was long range, but when you hit someone, you hit them where it hurt.

The trumpets called. Seconds later a ripple of
tunngg…tunnggg…tunnggg
repeated four times over sounded from his left as the batteries fired. The basic principles were those of Roman or Greek ballistae, but the throwing arms of the catapults were carefully shaped steel forgings rather than wood, and the power was provided by the suspensions of eighteen-wheeler trucks, not twisted skeins of ox sinew. The javelin-sized arrows they threw were visible, but only just—they traveled at half the speed of a musket ball. The six-pound spheres of cast iron that followed were almost as swift.

Havel tracked them with his field glasses. One ball struck short, bounced and slammed rolling into a file of spearmen. The first three went down in a whiplash tangle as the high-velocity iron snapped their legs out from beneath them; then it bounced high again and came down on an upraised shield. He couldn't hear the shield's frame and the arm beneath it crack, but he could imagine it. The screaming mouths were just open circles through the binoculars, but he could imagine that as well. Two more struck at waist height; a broken spear flipped fifteen feet into the air, pinwheeling and flashing sunlight as the edges twirled.

The big darts lofted entirely over the block of infantry—heads twisted to follow them as they flashed by about ten feet up. The cavalry formation behind them exploded outward as four of the heavy javelins came slanting in, punching through armor as if it were cloth, pinning men to horses and horses to the ground.

“Good work, Sarducci!” Havel called, and waved at the man. At the enemy he muttered the names of the engines as they fired:

“
Hi there,
you bastards!
Knock-knock, guess who!
you sons of bitches!
Eat this!
motherfuckers! And
Many Happy Returns,
Alexi!” he said, pounding his right fist into the palm of his left hand with every greeting.

He got a thumbs up from Sarducci; seconds later the
tunnngg…tunnngg…
began again. The teams behind the fieldpieces were pumping like madmen, sending water through the armored hoses to the cylinders under the firing grooves—compressed gases didn't work the way they had before the Change, but hydraulics still functioned the way the textbooks said they should. Water filled the cylinders and pushed out the pistons; the piston rods rammed at the steel cables that linked the throwing arms, bending them back against the ton-weights of resistance in the springs until they engaged the trigger mechanisms. The crew chiefs snapped their lanyards to the release levers, and the aimers on seats on the left trail spun the elevation and traverse wheels, while the loaders slapped fresh darts and roundshot home, ready for launching.

Havel turned the field glasses back to the enemy lancers. They were trotting back out of range, some of them shaking their fists at him as they went. He laughed aloud, and Signe gave him a quizzical look.

“I can tell what they're saying,” he said. “Something like
no fair throwing things!
And then
why don't you fight like a gentleman, you peasant!
”

His laughter grew louder, and her corn-colored eyebrows rose farther over the sky blue eyes as the troops took it up and it spread down the line, a torrent of jeering mockery directed at the backs of the Protectorate's lancers. He shook his head and went on: “What's
really
funny is that some of them actually
mean
it!”

After a moment she chuckled as well. Then: “Oh-oh,” she said. “Here comes
their
artillery.”

Havel nodded. “Yup, right on schedule. That's heavy stuff for mobile field use—looks like light siege pieces, really. Six horse teams; six, eight, ten of them all up. Tsk—they should have more and it should be as easy to move as ours. They've certainly got the engineers and the materials. Arminger's a…what did the Society people call guys who had a hair up their ass about getting historical details just right instead of mixing and matching?”

“Period Nazi,” Signe supplied.

“Yeah, his fixations are getting the better of him again. William the Conqueror of Normandy didn't use field artillery, so Norman the Magnifolent of Portland doesn't like doing it either. Signaler—
cavalry engage enemy engines with firing circle.
”

Off to the west, he saw Eric Larsson nod and wave acknowledgment. Ahead the enemy formation parted to let the heavy throwing engines through, and then the infantry lay down in their formations; which was sensible of Stavarov, though not as sensible as pulling back out of catapult range and waiting for his engines to silence their opposite numbers.

Of course, that would take all day,
Havel thought.
And without infantry support…well, what a frustrating dilemma for Alexi Stavarov, you Slavo-Sicilian wannabe, you!

The A-listers were moving, but their lances stayed in the rests, and their shields stayed slung. Instead, two hundred horn-and-sinew recurve bows were pulled from the saddle-scabbards by their left knees, and two hundred hands went over their shoulders for an arrow. The long column of horse-archers moved in a staggered two-deep row, rocking forward from a canter into a gallop. The thunder of hooves built, until it was a drumroll over the half-mile distance. Near as loud came the crashing bark:

“
Hakkaa Paalle!
Hakkaa Paalle!” And from the watching Bearkiller foot:
“Hakkaa Paalle!”

“This is where it pays off,” Havel muttered as he adjusted the focus of his field glasses. “Hack them down!”

Bearkiller A-listers could play armored lancer just as well as the Protectorate's knights…but they could also shoot as well as Mackenzies, and do it from a fast-moving horse, twelve times a minute, and actually
hit
what they were aiming at half the time—more, if it was a big target. Six heavy horses pulling a large-ish catapult with a twenty-man crew running beside the team qualified as a very big target indeed, and there were ten of them moving out into the open beyond the Protector's infantry. They'd just begun to turn, swinging the business-ends of their massive weapons towards the Bearkiller fieldpieces, when the charge of the A-listers brought them into range. Havel's cavalry masked the fire of their own catapults now, but they didn't need it.