Warworld: The Lidless Eye (9 page)

One of the sergeants came up to him and pointed at his Gauss gun.

“Better leave that behind, Marshal. No damned good in a close-range firefight. They’ll be all over ya faster’n shit before you can aim.”

He handed John an Ekaterinagrad Arsenal 7mm assault rifle, or at least a clone of one, with a fifty-round magazine.”

“I thought bayonets were strictly for ceremony,” John said.

“They’re good for riot work, too. That’s what we’re going to be facin’ out there, ‘long as those friggin’ rockets land on their heads, not on ours. Don’t be afraid to use your sword, either.”

John raised his rifle and shook his head.
I should have thought of that myself
. It was only now sinking in that this was a real battle with real people killing and dying, not some solido show he could turn off when he got bored.

It had better damn well sink in fast
, he told himself,
or I’ll be lucky to survive this battle, never mind the next. And there would be a next one
.

Light brighter than any sunlight Haven ever saw flooded the courtyard. John closed his eyes and opened his mouth, but the blast wave still made his ears ache. He opened his eyes to see dust and small pebbles flying over the battlements. The banner on top of the tower stood out stiff from its pole, until the pole itself snapped off. The ground quivered like a drumhead, and Hamilton needed the sergeant’s grip on his upper arm to stay on his feet.

Before the first blast had died away, the whole sequence came again, shaking the ground. This time part of the wood firesteps on the east wall collapsed. Nobody was on them, though, and only one man was close enough to be hit by flying lumber.

King David Steele, who was seated in the last surviving armored car, on the top of the ridge facing Whitehall, cursed loudly as the second blast’s roar died down. “That conniving bastard Cummings! What does he think he’s doing, crossing me like this?”

Newly-minted General Keene shrugged. He’d been under Steele’s thumb long enough to know there was no arguing with the King. As for rational explanations, if they didn’t fit Steele’s worldview, they were dismissed out of hand. Frankly, to his mind the black cloud of smoke that covered the battlefield was a grisly reminder of just how bad things had become.
And so quickly!

“Well, Cummings just made a grave error by supporting the losing side,” Steele continued in full rant.

Keene only nodded. From what he could see of their positions, through the broiling smoke and debris, the battle appeared to be just about over.
Just don’t send me down there to rally the troops
, he prayed. While it was true that he’d had military training as a major in the Imperial Marines, it was also true that he’d been stuck with garrison duty on some
forgotten planet and never seen any real action. Today he’d already seen more first-hand killing than he’d ever wanted to. And, as far as he could tell, other than the three scouts they had captured and tortured, they hadn’t killed any of Hamilton’s regulars.

I wouldn’t be surprised if half of the Haven Royal Army soldiers are on the casualty list. Another hit, and even Steele’s bodyguards, the Iron Curtain as he calls them, won’t be able to stop the rest of the army from running off the field of battle.

General Keene knew he didn’t dare disobey orders or leave; his wife and children were hostages back in Castell City.

Steele was still on his rant about Brigadier Cummings’ illegitimate and non-human progenitors. “Is it true that Cummings has a secret nuclear stockpile?” the King asked.

The General shrugged. “All nuclear ordnance was to be removed by Imperial Law when the Seventy-seventh Imperial Marines evacuated Haven. However, the Brigadier was given almost blanket authorization from the Imperial High Command, so it’s possible he may have squirreled away some bombs which then conveniently never showed up on the final Ordnance Lists. I don’t know. I do know that if he does have them, we’ll never get them away from him.

Steele pointed to the stone fortress that faced them across the divide. “If we can crush this stone outhouse, we can deal with Cummings at our leisure.”

It was all General Keene could do to keep from shaking his head in disgust. He didn’t even want to think of how quickly and decisively the Brigadier could deal with this ragtag Royal Army of Steele’s. A moment later, his attention was jerked from his own woes as he saw a sight that had never been seen on Haven before, a charging mass of armored knights right out of the storybooks of Earthly legend.

As the blast of the second salvo died away, the man lurched to his feet. John Hamilton heard the whine of the electric winch opening the gates. The gate crept open halfway, then jammed.

That was enough to show Hamilton a scene from Dante’s Inferno. Walls and columns of greasy black smoke, patches of red-orange flame, dead men and, even worse, the ones running around like human torches.

Before Hamilton could be sick, he was helped up onto his horse and swept through the gate. After that he was too busy keeping up and staying upright in his saddle, with all the jostling of horses, to think of much else. He was an officer, after all, and not just any officer but the Baron’s grandson and heir. If he just behaved like a feudal warrior often enough, maybe everyone would believe he
was
one.

John nearly lost both his nerve and his lunch as they began to squish across bodies and pieces of bodies, not to mention a few that
moved
when his horse stepped on them. Before he could react, though, he found himself facing a living man, on his feet and running at him pistol in hand. The assault rifle rose almost as if it had a will of its own and the man went down.

A wall of thick gray smoke ribbed with black loomed ahead; John held his breath and charged through, hoping he wasn’t riding into a fire set by one of the incendiary warheads. He burst out the other side to see a solid mass of shaken and trembling men holding up their hands. Twenty armored figures faced them, weapons leveled. One began firing into the crowd before Hamilton ran up and knocked him down with the butt of his own rifle. Something had to be done, and quickly, or there would be a massacre that would taint everyone here today.

“Surround the prisoners. Disarm them, and shoot anyone who tries to escape.” His voice seemed to carry the conviction that he knew what he was doing; the Whitehall men started herding the prisoners into a circle. Another score of armored men rode out of the smoke; Hamilton sent them off to secure any useable vehicles.

By the time he heard engines coming to life he’d made a rough count of the prisoners. Between those in sight and those reported by other messengers, they ran well over two thousand. That was a problem he hadn’t expected.
What are we going to with a mob like this?
They didn’t have any place to house them, or enough food to feed them.

Five more defenders tramped up; to Hamilton’s relief one of them was Master-at-Arms Cromwell. Now he understood one of the reasons for sergeants, to keep officers from having to stand around obviously not knowing what to do next. He gave Cromwell orders for getting the prisoners to whatever safety this battlefield offered, then went back through the gates to find his grandfather.

The Baron was standing in the middle of the courtyard when John came through the gates. The next moment he was at his grandson’s side.

“Are you all right, John?”

“I’m fine, Grandfather. But I’ve got some bad news.”

“Were our casualties heavy?”

“Just a handful, and only two dead I’ve heard of. The missiles took most of the fight out of them, that is, those who knew how or what to fight. I never saw such a pathetic bunch of townies and down-and-outers. It would take years to turn that rabble into a real army. According
to one of the prisoners, the only reason they didn’t hightail it after the first bombardment was their fear of getting shot in the back by Steele’s bodyguard.”

The Baron nodded. “I didn’t expect much more than a rabble. Next time they’ll be better trained and prepared.”

John winced, hoping this loss would take the fight out of them. He wasn’t looking forward to a rematch, especially one where they didn’t have surprise on their side.

“The problem is we’ve got two thousand prisoners out there!”

The Baron rubbed his hands together. “Good, good. That’s even better than I’d hoped for.”

“What do you mean better? Where are we going to keep them? How are we going to feed them? If we can’t—”

“Slow down, John. We need those men as badly as they need us, only they don’t know it yet.”

“What?!”

“John, how many able-bodied men do we have at Whitehall?”

“Maybe three hundred, minus the casualties.” On one side of the courtyard he saw his sister bandaging some of the men-at-arms.

“Right. Most of them are soldiers; they will be our knights. Where do you think we’ll get our peasants? Remember, a lord has to be self-sufficient. That means a labor force to turn this place back into a working farm. The estates of our friends and allies, too.”

John laughed. “I should have known you’d have it all figured out, Grandfather. But there’s going to be more fighting before we can put crops in the ground.”

“I know. I’m going to offer the prisoners an opportunity to take an oath. After putting in a few weeks building the new outer wall, I don’t think many will turn us down. It’s a long walk back to Castell, through hostile territory. All those farmers and villagers Steele terrorized on the ride here will be wanting payback. Those who do leave won’t be able to go along on the raid. They’ll miss the chance for women and booty—”

“What raid? Women? Where?”

“The cars and trucks that still run are going right back to Castell, carrying our soldiers. I think those clowns in the city need a few lessons on how to conduct a raid.”

It made sense once John thought it over. A few raids on the outskirts of Castell City, and David Steele would be too busy defending his capital city to think of stealing anybody’s gold and silver. Either that or he’d be booted off his gimcrack “throne” for failing to defend his people. And since he’d probably lost a good percentage of his trustworthy officers in the attempt on Whitehall…

“Grandfather, I almost feel sorry for David Steele. He should have remembered something when he decided to fight you.”

“What, John?”

“‘Don’t start anything you can’t finish.’”

HAVEN 2640 A.D.

At the point in the Byers System where the physics of Albert Einstein ended and the physics of revisionist Dan Alderson began, a tramline existed, along which ships with the Alderson Drive could leap with very little effort from star to star.

That Point now shifted, its substance altered slightly, and the near emptiness of space was filled with several hundred thousand cubic tons displacement of starship.

Strapped into an acceleration couch on the bridge was Vessel First Rank Galen Diettinger of the Sauron Fleet heavy cruiser
Fomoria
. He stirred slightly in the command seat, waiting for the lag effect of the latest Alderson Jump to wear off. As his vision cleared, Diettinger realized he could make out some of the details of the bridge surrounding him. Fire had blackened much of the room, while smoke still drifted lazily in the red glow of the combat lights.