Steam Legion (30 page)

His archers’ arrows had barely been loosed from their bows when the Centurion ordered the Cavalry charge and rallied his Legionnaires to the attack. Dyna’s attack tore through the enemy’s flank, utterly devastating entire portions of their formation and leaving gaping holes in their defenses.

The northern Cavalry charged into gaps as the Zealots struggled to recover enough to seal those holes, their arrows flashing in under the shields that were, even then, still held upward to defend against arrows and bolts from the skies. They had little room to maneuver as they normally would, however, and the return fire from the Zealot archers inflicted higher than normal casualties on the normally nimble and evasive mounted warriors.

Dozens of the mounted soldiers went down, feathered with Zealot arrows, but in the time the enemy had focused on them, Cassius had swung his Centuries into place, and they formed a blockade that completely barred the enemy’s path. The only way forward for the Zealot forces was through Cassius’s Centuries and their perfectly locked full-body scutem shields.

The front line began slowly rapping their shields with the swords, clearly stating the challenge in case the Commander of the Zealot force was too stupid to breathe under his own will, while those men behind readied their pylum for the first strike of the real battle. With only a few dozen meters between the two lines, Cassius bared his teeth in a truly satisfied snarl.

He had succeeded in forcing the enemy into action, as there was no way they could retreat now without exposing far too much of their forces to his assault. To retreat now would leave them with nothing that constituted a significant threat to the region, not with his full force mobile and ready to defend it.

He was concerned that he could lose the coming action, of course. His force was somewhat less than the Zealots, so despite his superior position, they could certainly emerge from his fight victorious in name. But he was determined to ensure that they could not claim victory in any other measure.

He and his forces would bleed them until they were no threat to the region, and he would meet his Gods knowing that he’d bought his Diocese all the time he could in the hopes that the Legion would return to their defense.

“Pylums! Throw!” he called, signaling the start of the battle.

Men roared, flinging spears into the air as they charged into the face of the enemy, who, in turn, brought their shields forward and charged in response to the horns of their own command.

****

The Commander swore even as he rallied his forces, recognizing too late the tactics and strategy the enemy had used. They’d known what his options were, what he was most likely to do, and had planned their own deployment specifically to counter him. He could see that his force was enough to destroy the defending formations, but he’d be bled damned near dry in the process.

A victory that leaves me no forces to press this campaign is no victory at all, but these damned-to-hell Romans have left me no other options.

His only acceptable course was clear to him, so he decided that when the battle was finished, there would be no Roman force left in Alexandria. If it cost him his force, then so be it; he could levy another to replace it, but for the Romans, here the war would end now.

“Archers! Loose!”

Raining arrows on the Roman formation was more a distraction tactic than an effective killing technique, as the Romans were already locked into their bedamned phalanx, the scutem body shields now in the turtle formation to provide near-perfect defense against lighter projectiles. He didn’t call off the archers, however, if for no other reason than that the Romans would no longer be able to throw their pylum while they were so determinedly defending each other from the slings and arrows fate had in store for them.

The Roman gladii pounded on their shields as the soldiers marched on his line, and he swiftly ordered his own lines into action in response.

Roman Heavy Infantry, their infamous Legions, were a terrifying enemy in the situation he was now faced with. Head to head, they were just short of invincible, but here, in the narrow field of battle, the advantage they had against his Light Infantry was almost as large as the disadvantage as they held against his own Heavy Cavalry.

“Open a path for the horses,” he ordered. “Send forth the Cavalry.”

As his order was being followed, he risked a look over to the far bank of the river. The annoying weapons used by the enemy so effectively at the bridge were now apparently neutralized, though he wasn’t certain how.

It appears they overturned the carts. Odd.

With them out of the game, however, he turned his full focus to the force ahead of him. His task, as set by his temple, was to destroy the Romans’ ability to levy significant forces in the Egypt Diocese and to slit the throat of Roman supply lines at Alexandria. The enemy here had crippled his ability to do the second, but he could at least make a good start at accomplishing the first.

The Cavalry charged through the gap in the lines at the sound of the signal horn, bearing down on the Roman line with thunderous speed and force. The heavy swords and spears of the Cavalry slammed into the Roman line with earth-shaking force, and he had the satisfaction of seeing something few men living could lay claim to.

The Roman line was shattered, men and scutem shields thrown as if to the winds themselves. The horses trampled many before a goodly number were cut down by the disciplined reactions of the soldiers and were forced to pull back, but their job had been done and done well.

He ordered the Light Infantry into the breach opened by the Cavalry, and the real fight began.

****

Cassius swore as the enemy moved more nimbly than he’d given them credit for, allowing the cavalry between them to assault his front line. His men were a match for any Infantry force in the world, and he’d back them against such at the wrong side of three to one odds all day, every day, but they hadn’t been ready for the thunderous strike of the Cavalry.

Granted, the enemy lost a lot of their horses in exchange as the horses became bogged down in a sea of men, but they’d opened up a hole in the phalanx in exchange for their sacrifice. Now the enemy Infantry was charging in, and Cassius could see his qualitative superiority evaporating as quickly as the water in Dyna’s steam cannons.

“If today we die,” he called out to those around him, “then let us meet death eye to eye and make Pluto himself flinch for fear of our courage! Charge!”

The Legion roared in response, surging into the fight with swords flashing in the burning Egyptian sun, while from behind them, the lighter Infantry of the Diocese’s militia pushed forward to fill the gaps as they, too, joined the battle.

The conflict quickly became a free-for-all, where every man fought for himself and his brother-in-arms at his side and not for the unit.

Cassius pushed his way to the front, leading his men as they rallied in the wake of the Cavalry charge. He swung his shield as a weapon, slamming men from their very feet with the power of his blows, and both stabbed and slashed with his gladius. More than once, he felt attacks glance off his Lorica Laminata armor, even the heaviest of swords having a hard time penetrating the steel, iron, and leather combination that was the mark of the Legion.

In the insanity of the battle, he gave up on the normal Legion tactic of short and efficient stabs of his sword when the enemy started to appear on as many as three sides at the same time. That was when Cassius entered his element, spinning with the shield sweeping the road for him as he slashed, stabbed, and hacked through the enemy.

This was what he was trained for, leading men into battle from the front, not the planning and strategizing he’d been a part of since the riots broke out so many weeks previously. He could
feel
his men around him, fighting at his side as the two lines interpenetrated and the fighting became even more chaotic and unpredictable.

Over his head, arrows flew, crossing both lines from either side to fall on the rear lines like a lethal rain, but where Cassius stood, neither side was willing to risk killing more of its own side than the enemy. For Cassius and his immediate brothers-in-arms, there was no fear of death from the skies. If they came to face Pluto, they would meet the eyes of the man who sent them on.

Men were dying all around him, from both sides, of course. Cassius found himself stepping on scutem shields and Laminata-armored corpses as he began to want for stable ground to plant his feet during the dance of battle. He and his line were slowly being forced back, despite inflicting a nearly two-to-one casualty rate, numbers which he personally considered insulting against their current foes, but such were the wages of war.

The Zealots could see their victory waiting in the wings for them to claim it, and the force with which their redoubled press struck was enough to make it clear to Cassius that he no longer counted his time on the Earth in years, but rather in minutes or even seconds. It didn’t seem to matter, though, as he could also see that he and his would soon accomplish their sole consuming goal as well.

The Zealots might walk away from this battle, but they would do so with their force crippled almost beyond recuperation by Legion swords.

Poor compensation for our lives, perhaps, but we will take it with pride,
Cassius thought fiercely as he gutted another Zealot and roared his bestial fury above the sound of the battle, sword and shield extended as if in challenge to any who might dare approach.

****

Victory tasked like ashes, but at least he would be left alive to taste them.

The Commander of the Zealot forces snarled as he directed more of his forces to the front, having long past give up on any real attempt at coordinating them. The line of battle was a chaotic mess, impossible to tell the combatants apart save for those few of the Legion who still remained standing.

The only way he knew that he was winning was the fact that the line was being pushed back steadily, and while he was still paranoid after the bridge, he didn’t see any of the weapons he’d encountered then hidden about.

If they had them here, they would have used them by now.

His mission was all but destroyed, but there was a golden opportunity for him still left. Destroy the forces in front of him, ford the river to where the chariots had been toppled, and perhaps he could yet claim at least one of the enemy weapons for the temple and the state. If nothing else, it would provide for an incredibly increased defensive strength when the time came to keep the Legions from retaking Judea for Rome.

The Lord works in many strange and unknown ways. Perhaps this is His path for me.

He grabbed his Adjutant by the armor on his shoulder, pulling the man closer so he could be heard over the din of the battle. “Go rally the fourth skirmisher unit and flank the Romans to the east!”

The man saluted and headed off to the eastern flank of the battle, leaving the Commander standing in the middle of the little slice of chaos. The fight was turning into a brutal drag-out brawl in which practically all military discipline on his side was gone, and even the Romans were in little better state now that most of the Legionnaires were dead.

Both sides were down to their militia forces now, for the most part, and that meant that his Light Infantry was no longer outclassed by the more dangerous Legionnaires. That also meant, however, that he’d lost control of the battle for most practical purposes. The front line of the battle was totally undefined, with men fighting for both sides spread all across as much as a swath of land nearly a hundred feet across.

Without a defined line of battle, the fighting had devolved into men hacking and slashing at one another with less and less control, to the point that he suspected more than a few of the casualties now were caused by accident from supposedly friendly hands. He pushed closer to the center of the fighting, trying to take control as much as possible and rally his forces to his standard.

One of the few remaining Legionnaires still standing bellowed then, attracting a great deal of attention and more than a little fear from the surrounding men. Just at a glance, the Commander could see the Roman line firming up as they rallied under the strength of the clear leader on the field, and he knew then that this Roman had to die.

****

The roar of battle, both in the physical sense and in the rush of blood that coursed through Cassius’s veins with the power of a breaking storm, never failed to sweep him up in its hot embrace. For Cassius, battle had never been something he sought out, unlike many of his comrades, but when he heard its siren call, he understood the addiction his fellows held for military action.

His shield was slashed, deep gouges torn into the heavy wood where Zealot swords had been stopped just short of cleaving
him
, but it was still effective and he had no doubt that it had taken as many of the enemy out of the fight as his sword. The gladius wasn’t designed as well for the fight he was now waging, but it was still an effective all-purpose weapon. If it wasn’t as good at slashing as it was at stabbing, that just meant it was so very good at stabbing that it was an impossible metric to match.

Arrayed around him were the bodies of men who’d learned that as their last lesson on this Earth, so now he found that the enemy had fallen back from his position and were even giving him breathing room. Cassius took that time to evaluate the situation as best he could and was both satisfied and saddened by the situation he read in the battle around him.

He could see that they’d killed better than a third of the enemy forces already, and unless things went far worse in the last part of the battle, he was confident that they would complete the primary objective of the engagement. That is, they’d cripple the enemy force and leave them unable to effectively threaten the region.

Unfortunately, he could only see maybe half a Century of Legion armor still standing, and the losses among their militia support were easily worse.