Conqueror (122 page)

Cookfires lit the interior of the fortlet, and the glare of burning Sandoral across the river. Men in crimson djellabas streamed back from the gun line that faced the water, firing as they came. Ludwig gave a quick glance to either side; the berm's broad top was solid with his men. Company commanders were planting their pennants, platoon officers taking three steps forward and turning to face their men with outstretched arm and sword as a bar to give their commands the dressing.

"Sound
Kneel and Stand,
" he snapped.

The front rank dropped to one knee and leveled their rifles. The men behind them stood and aimed. Here and there a trooper dropped as the Colonial fire began to thicken a little, falling forward to tumble loose-limbed to the foot of the berm. He waited an instant, until the target had time to thicken.

"
Fwego!
" Ludwig shouted. Then: "
Charge!
"

BAM. One long sound, like a single impossibly long shot. A bright comb of fire reached out towards the dim shapes of the Colonials, five hundred threads of it. On the heels of the volley the troopers ran forward through the thick curls of smoke, their steel glinting red in the reflected light. The Colonials wavered, then ran back the way they'd come, screaming their panic. A few stood and fought, emptying their carbines and drawing their scimitars, but they died quickly—spitted on dozens of points, beaten down with the butt, simply trampled.

Ludwig slashed at a man crawling out of a pup tent, hurdled another. Up the slope to the gunline that was this fortlet's main purpose, set here to command the river and prevent the rebuilding of the pontoon bridge. The guns had been dug in, set in revetments with V-shaped notches forward for their barrels. One group of Colonials, braver or better-led than the rest, was trying frantically to manhandle a pom-pom around to face the menace from the rear. He stopped, braced his legs and began to fire.
Crack. Crack. Crack. Crack. Crack.
Two men down in the confusion around the light gun, and then his troopers were past. Steel clashed on steel for a moment, replaced by the butcher's-cleaver sound of metal slamming into flesh.

Silence fell. 1st Cruiser troopers were standing on top of the fortlet's western wall, firing down—firing at the backs of the fleeing survivors of the post's garrison.

"Sound
Rally
," Ludwig said. "Benter," he went on to his younger brother. "To Captain Marthinez, and his Company A is to man the parapet. Get me a count of the casualties. Hederbert, find those militiamen and put them on the guns, right now. Mauric, see that those dead wogs are all really dead."

He walked as he spoke, over to the flagstaff before the Colonial commander's tent. The dead man lying by the flagstaff was probably the tent's owner, by the scrollwork on his djellaba; he'd been hit by three or four Armory 11mm rounds, and was very thoroughly dead. The smell of death was spreading on the cool night air, like raw sewage and a butcher's shop combined. Ludwig slashed the cord of the flagpole with his saber. The green banner of Islam fluttered to the ground; he used it to clean the sword before sliding it back into its scabbard.

His bannerman needed no prompting. Seconds later, the blue-and-silver Starburst of Holy Federation fluttered up the rough staff and streamed out, almost invisible in the darkness.

Let Ali take a look at that, when he gets tired of shelling an empty city, Ludwig thought, grinning.

The Cruisers cheered at the sight of the flag, man after man taking it up, shaking their rifles in the air or putting up their helmets on the points of their bayonets:

"Hail! Hail! Hail! Hail! HAIL! HAIL!"

Ludwig felt a rush of pride: less than six minutes from the moment he'd given the order to charge. Then he looked up at the flag.
The banner of the Gubernio Civil,
he thought. Four years ago most of these men had fought against the army that Messer Raj led under that banner. There were perhaps half a dozen Sponglish-speaking natives of the Civil Government in the 1st Mounted Cruisers; the rest were MilGov and heretic to a man.

And here they were, crying the banner hail as if . . .
well, it
is
their own. Now.
Messer Raj had given them that.

Mustafa al-Kerouani jerked himself awake and checked his watch. Good, it was still a few minutes until the next status check. He bent to the eyepiece of the telescope and waited. Nothing from the relay to the north, the second from the siege lines around Sandoral. He frowned. They should give him three flashes from their carbide lantern; that was regular procedure. Allah might be merciful if they were all asleep, but neither their
tabor
commander nor Tewfik would. Besides, there was the honor of the engineering corps to consider. What were they, real soldiers or the
fellaheen
conscripts of infantry, who couldn't be trusted to remember to wipe their arses with their left hands unless an officer reminded them every time they shat?

He reached out and squeezed the handgrip of his own lantern. The slotted shutters over the front clacked open, revealing the brilliant chemical light amplified by the hemisphere of mirror behind it. Three long, two short—
acknowledge.
 

Nothing. He swore again, looking around the little hilltop camp. A dozen men, eight of them sleeping, around a low-coal campfire with a brass
kave
-pot standing over it on an iron stand. Their riding- and pack-dogs, picketed out on a line. Two sentries, the telescope, heliograph, lanterns for night work, and their personal baggage. One of dozens strung between the bridgehead at Gurnyca and the Settler's headquarters outside the
kaphar
city. Paralyzingly boring duty; there weren't even any of the infidel
fellaheen
left around here, which meant no fresh provender except for some sauroid meat, and no women.

Three long, two short. Still no acknowledgment.
Ibrahim ibn'Habib is a lazy, wine-swilling son of a pig, but he isn't
that
negligent.
Best send someone over to take a look.

Mustafa blinked out into the darkness where the sentry paced. The bright light killed his night vision, but he could see the outline.

"Moshin?" he said. The other man was Qahtan ash-Shabaai, and much taller. "Moshin, take your dog and check those bastards on Post Three. They must be asleep, or dead."

"Dead," Moshin said—but it was not Moshin's voice, and the word was so thickly accented that he could barely understand it.

Mustafa al-Kerounai reached for his sidearm. He felt the bayonet that punched through his jaw, tongue and palate only as a white flash of cold. Then the point grated through brain and blood vessels within his skull, and the world ended in a blaze of light.

Antin M'lewis withdrew the blade with a jerk. Around him there was a flurry of movement; bayonets and rifle butts struck, and the pick end of an entrenching tool went into the back of a sleeping man's skull with the sound an axe made striking home in hard oak. Talker stamped on a neck with an unpleasant crunching sound, like a bundle of green branches snapping. Dogs wuffled and snarled, dragging at their picket chain as they smelled death. He ignored them and swiveled telescope and signal lantern around on their mountings. The alignment was marked in chalk on the fixed baseplate of the equipment, and he had the code for
acknowledge 0100 hours all is well
on his pad. He clacked it out carefully and waited for the return signal.

Good. There it was. They
still
didn't suspect anything. He used one tail of his uniform jacket to shield his hand and picked up the pot of
kave
, pouring a cup into his messtin.

"Throw summat more wood on t'fire," he said. It might arouse suspicion if the sentinel fire went out during the night. He tossed aside the spiked Colonial helmet. " 'N git back ter yer dogs. We'ns'll see how many more of t' wogs is overconfident."

"Fwego!" 

BAM. The single massive volley turned the supply convoy's night encampment into a mass of screaming men and howling dogs, with the oxen's frantic bawling as accompaniment. Major Peydro Belagez smiled, a cruel closed upturn of the lips. He could see the scene quite well, with the watchfires as background.

BAM. Men rose from their blankets and slapped backward instantly, punched down by the heavy Armory bullets. BAM. Maddened by pain and the smell of blood, an ox-team pulled over the wagon to which they'd been tethered and ran off into the night. The wagon's tilt fell across a fire and the dry canvas flared up brightly.

"Forward,
compaydres
," he said.

The two companies of the 1st Rogor Slashers moved forward in line, with a crackle of platoon volleys. Less than thirty Colonial troops had guarded the convoy, and they were infantry—support troops, hardly fighting men at all. The few who lived ran into the night, or knelt and raised their hands in surrender.

As Belagez watched, the platoon commanders called the cease-fire. Two surviving Colonials bolted when they saw the Civil Government troops more clearly; their dark complexions and the shoulder-flashes made it clear they were Borderers, men whose feud with the Colony was old and bitter. A bet was called, and two troopers stepped forward and knelt, adjusting the sights of their rifles. The running Colonials jinked and swerved as they fled; the two Slashers fired carefully. On the third shot one of the Arabs flopped forward, shot through the base of the spine. His face plowed into the dirt, mercifully hiding the exit wound. The other went down and then rose again, hobbling and clutching his thigh as if to squeeze out the pain of his wounds.

"Hingada thes Ihorantes!"
the first rifleman said. Death to the Infidel, the Slashers' unit motto. "You should do better than that, Huan!"

"Malash. The Spirit appoints our rising and our going down," the other man grunted. He breathed out and squeezed the trigger.
Crack.
Measurable fractions of a second later, dust spurted from the back of the Arab's djellaba. He went down and sprawled in the dirt.

Meanwhile the others had been rounded up. They sat, hands behind their heads, staring at their captors with the wide-eyed look of men who wanted very badly to wake from an evil dream and couldn't. The toppled wagon was burning fiercely now, with a thick flame that stank like overdone fish three days dead to begin with—
advocati
, no mistaking the stench. Sun-dried, they were oily enough to burn like naphtha.

Belagez pointed with his saber. "Get moving—push the other wagons over and tip them into the fire. Break open those crates, that'll be hardtack." The Colonial version came in thin sheets about the size of a man's hand; it would burn too, in a hot fire.

He switched to Arabic, accented but fluent enough. "You, you unbelieving sons of whores. Get to work."

The teamsters and surviving guards joined his men in heaving more of the supplies onto the growing blaze. Another wagon toppled onto it, and the smell of frying apricots joined the stink, enough to make his stomach knot a little. The blaze would be visible for kilometers, but there was nobody alive to witness it—not unless a survivor or two from the last convoy they'd hit had run very fast. The twenty-wagon parties had been spaced quite evenly at four-kilometer intervals along the road, commendable march-discipline and very convenient for the battalions the
heneralissimo
had landed on the west bank. He looked at his watch; it was bright as day now, and hot enough to make him step back.

0300. This would be their last, they'd have to ride hard to make the rendezvous with the river flotilla by dawn. He certainly didn't want to miss the end of this campaign. The fire grew swiftly; his men were in a hurry too, and the prisoners worked very hard.

Idly, he wondered if they knew they were building their own funeral pyres. Probably. Still, it was the Spirit's blessing that men were reluctant to abandon hope while they still breathed.

"
Oh night that was my guide
Oh night more loving than the rising sun
Oh night that joined the lover
To the beloved one,
Transforming each of them into the other."
 

 

Raj opened his eyes, then started awake. Suzette laid aside her
gittar
and smiled at him, handing over a cup of
kave
.

"This yacht has all the conveniences, my love," she said.

"What—"

"Absolutely nothing has happened except what you said would. Belagez and the other landing parties made rendezvous. The Colonials have no idea what's going on—we're moving faster than the news. It's noon."