Steam Legion (5 page)

Scorpions don’t run the chance of blowing up in our own faces, after all.

“Bring them around, Pedes,” she ordered one man as she stopped to gauge the disposition of his weapon. “Four…make that five degrees southward, and elevate three.”

“Yes, my Lady.”

Setting up the prototype weapons was a chore. They had not been designed for field use, but merely as proof of concept test bed devices. She knew they worked, but she doubted any would survive more than a day or two in the rough and rowdy hands of even well-trained Legion Immunes.

This will be the first practicable field test for these,
she mused.
It will be interesting to see how they perform against live targets.

Chapter 4

Weapon design and testing had been the section of Library research Dyna had spent most of her time with since she’d been working with Master Heron. The man himself was a genius beyond measure, but he did tend to be flighty when it came to focus, unable to work on anything specific beyond the time it held his interest. He could be utterly dedicated to a project, night and day, for years and then abruptly drop it in favor of his next passing fancy with no warning.

She had spent the past few years keeping his projects for the Empire in order, as well as learning at his side. As the Master’s health declined, Dyna spent more and more of her time shouldering his burdens. She felt inadequate to the task, but there was no one else and Master Heron deserved to be remembered for the genius he was.

She was finishing the light briefing when a runner arrived, shaking her from her thoughts.

“My Lady!” The runner slapped a fist over his heart. “Word from Cassius. The enemy has rallied finally and are approaching from the east.”

Dyna nodded. “As expected. Return, inform him to keep his archers and soldiers back. We will open the battle with the cannons. After the first volley, he is to press the assault.”

“Yes, my Lady!” The runner saluted again before heading back to Centurion Cassius.

“Stand to!” she called, marching down the line of cannons. “Pedes, put air to the bellows!”

“But, my Lady,” one objected, “that will damage the pots!”

She stabbed him with a piercing glare. “Put air to the bellows!”

“A…as you say, my Lady.”

The water was pushed into the top pot via Master Heron’s fire pumps, something designed for an entirely different purpose but that Dyna herself had quickly adapted for use in the weapons they were currently preparing.

“Men to the firing levers,” she ordered. “Stand ready.”

“Yes, my Lady,” the senior Pedes replied. “We stand ready.”

In the dark of the streets, they heard the approaching Zealots long before they saw them, the oil lamps that lit the streets vanishing one by one as the approaching forces took out what light they could to hide their precise location from archers. Dyna was privately surprised that they had the discipline to follow even so rudimentary a strategy, but it mattered little, as her plans did not include raining arrows down on them from a distance.

She didn’t have enough archers at her command, for one, and she was looking to make a more…telling impression.

The lights continued to wink out until the closest set of lamps vanished, which caused Dyna to edge closer to the cannons as she looked past them for the moment she was awaiting. The silence fell across the entire area, an unnatural experience that caused chills to run along her spine. She’d never been this close to real battle before, despite everything she knew and everything she believed; the moment of her first battle was upon her.

The shadowed figures emerged, fleeting glimpses at first and then more solid forms serving as the forerunners of the Zealot mass behind. She let them pass closer and closer, not concerned with the scouts. Cassius and his men could deal with them after the initial exchange, of that there was little doubt. While he had few enough men, those he did have were professional soldiers and these Zealots were rabble roused by the temple in Jerusalem. The foe they faced would have to be far more dangerous indeed to give her cause to worry with Cassius guarding her flanks, so she kept her attention on the task she had at hand.

When the first ranks of the Zealot forces emerged, Dyna failed to feel the coy smile that appeared on her lips, the blood rushing through her making them red against her flushed face. She did, however, feel her heart hammering in her chest as she realized that she was truly about to engage in her first real battle; it was a heady feeling indeed.

“Hold,” she ordered softly, the command quickly repeated down the line.

The enemy emerged into the open area cautiously, obviously expecting something, but she didn’t concern herself with that. Whatever they thought was coming, she was certain they were so far from the mark as to be laughable.

They have no clue what is about to rain down on them.

“Fire on my mark,” she said, raising her hand.

The order was again repeated down the line, men grabbing the valve level linked to the top pot in each double boiler.

“Loose!” she called, dropping her arm sharply.

Five men echoed her actions, pulling lever handles to open the large valves in the top pot. Water rushed down into the extremely hot and dry lower pot. The water flash-boiled, turning to steam in a split second, filling the large brass pots. Sealed, the pressure mounted quickly until it pushed against the ball plug in the barrel with increasing force. The steam continued to push harder and harder on the stone ball, which caused the ball to push against the bolts, which caused the bolts to push on the wooden bar across the barrel.

This continued for just over half a second before the bar snapped, the pressure having reached its breaking point, and the steam exploded out of the barrel with a huge roar of sound, flinging the ten-pound stone and five heavy bolts out with remarkable force.

Four of the five steam cannons fired as expected, which pleased Dyna, as she had half expected a considerably higher failure rate, and the fifth didn’t explode so a victory was a victory.

That left twenty heavy bolts designed for use by siege ballista slamming into the enemy ranks with enough power to punch through stone walls. Men were flung back with two-inch-thick shafts of wood perforating their chests, and one unarmed man just dropped in his tracks as one of the thick bolts blew through his belly and killed the man behind him.

The ten-pound carved-granite plugs also tore their way through the ranks, sheering limbs when they hit and going straight through as many as two or three people in their path.

The combined effect of the sudden slaughter unleashed on their ranks and the roar of the expanding steam from the cannons froze the remaining men in place, sealing the fate of a goodly number as Centurion Cassius Increcius gave the order for his archers to loose their arrows.

The dark shafts were all but invisible against the night sky as they volleyed upward, arching high before curving down into the stunned ranks of the Zealots. So completely destroyed was their awareness after the decimation rained on them by the cannons that almost none thought to raise their wicker shields before the arrows plunged down in their midst.

Cassius rose as the screams of the battlefield filled the air, lifting his gladius skyward. “Forward!”

The men who marched out from the barricaded gates were massively outnumbered, even after the horrors unleashed upon their enemies by steam and sinew, but they marched in lock step as they moved. Shield to shield, shoulder to shoulder, the few members of the Legion Cassius had managed to scrape together from the people who responded to the call marched constantly forward without pause or hesitation.

Barely ten men across, and only three deep in places, the men nonetheless marched into the teeth of more than five times their number, who were still standing. Ten paces from the enemy line, Cassius called out the order to charge, and the line of the phalanx broke into a paced jog as they rushed the last distance and slammed their shields into the disoriented line of Zealot warriors. Men were thrown down, bones broken and senses stunned by the impact of the scutem.

Before they could react, the order to engage was given, and the front line slid their gladius blades out between the shields and began to slash and stab into the enemy. Blood flowed as men screamed and fell, turning the dust they trod in to a hellish muck that clung to their sandaled feet. Few of the enemy appeared capable of digging up the desire or fortitude to strike back, and of those, fewer still were in a position to do so effectively. Swords swung against scutem, only to be deflected easily away for the most part. Here one blade glanced through, taking a Legionnaire’s arm just below the shoulder with enough force to ensure his soldiering days were finished, there a dagger was thrust through a small gap and into the belly of another.

By and large, however, the line held fast against the more numerous enemy and pushed them back step by step. They broke, finally, the Zealot horns blowing for retreat, and Cassius had to fight his own men to keep them from pursuing. A bolt from a scorpion ended that desire, pinning a man’s shield to his arm when he got too far out ahead, and Cassius was able to regain control of the men and pull them back.

He understood the desire to give chase, but they were still outnumbered five to one in the city, and any small unit flanked by enemy forces would quickly find itself unable to effectively use its shields and training forms when beset by a more numerous foe.

Cassius and his makeshift squad drew back to the Library gates, where Dyna was waiting for them. She nodded to him, her expression approving, and then waved to some people he didn’t recognize.

“See to the wounded,” she ordered. “Take them back to the hospital buildings and do not fail them, for they did not fail you.”

The wounded were quickly moved onto carts and pulled back into the campus while Dyna approached Cassius.

“They are the best doctors in the entire southern half of the Empire,” she promised him. “They will have the best care.”

“Thank you, my Lady,” he said, and he wasn’t kidding. Most often, troops made do with the Legion doctors, and while they were competent, Cassius knew that the conditions they often had to work in were far from ideal.

“If one must fight a battle,” Dyna said with some amusement, “one could find worse places to wage it than outside the most advanced place of learning in the Empire.”

“Given the choice, there’s a rather nice bathhouse I know just a few mile markers from here that I wouldn’t mind fortifying for a nice long siege,” Cassius replied, winking at her.

Dyna rolled her eyes, being well aware of his personal preferences when it came to recreational time. Pleasure houses and semi-private baths existed in every city between Alexandria and Rome to serve just those desires, but for herself, she preferred to take her pleasures in more secure places. Memories of her brothers and what they did in bathhouses made those places somewhat less attractive in her mind.

They were worthy of a good laugh, however.

Both the memories and the bathhouses,
she thought with some notable amusement. “Gather those of your men who have some experience and retrieve maps of the city from the library. Wake the caretakers if they’re not up already. We need to decide on our next course of action.”

Cassius nodded. “I’ll get them.”

“Have them meet me in Master Heron’s building,” she decided. “He has the room there to manage this.”

Cassius agreed and jogged off, leaving her standing on of the edge of the killing field she had initiated. Dyna had never really expected to be a warrior, no matter what she had trained in. Spartan women were far from the chattel other Grecian women might expect to be in their lives, but as a Spartan lady she was expected to run the house and care for the family holdings while the men trained in war. The maintenance of the house finances, lands, slaves, and helots, as well as the defense of the home should the enemy invade, those were the duties she had been brought up to uphold.

Standing here, on the edge of a victorious battle, Dyna felt a deep calling in her blood. Like drums beating unto war, her heart filled the chorus deep inside her as she looked over the carnage.

Is this what my ancestors felt? What drove my people to become warriors?
she wondered, licking her lips slowly and nearly sensually.
The calling of the blood.

The moment passed and she turned away from the dead and the dying, the enemy wounded having been left where they’d fallen if they hadn’t been finished off by men scrounging weapons and valuables. They were of no concern to her, however, so Dyna pointed herself to the large building that was the home of Heron and made her way directly there.

Chapter 5

Master Heron was still awake, perhaps unsurprisingly, and greeted her before she reached the door.

“You yet live, I see,” he told her as he opened the door.

She smiled at him. “For another few hours.”

He lost his smile, shaking his head. “It is bad for someone to joke so easily about their own mortality, take it from an old man about to meet his.”

“Take your own advice, Master Heron. But first, would you mind if we make use of your shop for a time?”

Heron nodded slowly, giving no indication as to what part of her words he was agreeing to. Finally, he stepped back and waved casually. “Enter as you wish.”

She stepped into the familiar shop and gestured to the large table set up in the far side of the cavernous interior. “We’ll need your planning table, likely for no more than a few candlemarks.”

“You are defending my home of the last twelve years, child,” he said with a sad smile. “I can spare you my table and my roof. Do not worry about the time. What little I have left is as well spent like this as in any other way I can imagine.”

“That,” she returned, “is the first blatant lie you’ve ever told to me, Master. Of all the crimes these Zealot fools have committed, disturbing your rest and wasting your time is surely the greatest.”