Hope Renewed (25 page)

The cast-iron bombs clattered on the stone flags; he ducked back down as they burst with rending
crang
sounds, and bits of casing peened off the outside of the observation point. He rose again and threw the last of them; wogs were shooting at him from the outer edge, pausing at the top of their scaling ladders.

He dropped back down. Case shot hammered the boilerplate outside as a swivel gun tried to sweep the ramparts clear.

“Hingada tho!”
he cursed at the unseen gunner in the tower, and dropped back to the gun. He could feel the heat of it through the soles of his hobnailed boots.

“Follow me!” He jumped down to the decking with a clash and spark of nails on the concrete.

The militia gunners ran behind him as he dashed back. A wog with his carbine slung and a long curved knife between his teeth swung down from the lip of the overhead, hung by both hands and jacknifed himself in to land on the very edge of the platform, with a fifteen-meter drop behind him. Minatelli shouted and lunged; he had just time enough to meet the Colonial’s eyes, black and unafraid. The man was trying to draw the revolver tucked through his sash when the point of Minatelli’s bayonet thumped into his chest. The steel didn’t penetrate the breastbone, but it was enough to send the man backward over the edge, snarling in frustration.

Another landed beside him. A militiaman fired his shotgun from behind Minatelli, powder scorching his side. The spreading buckshot caught the wog in the gut, blasting him over the edge with his limbs flailing like a jointed doll. Another was hanging from the lip of the roof—it was deliberately made with an overhang beyond the fighting platform below, to make this sort of thing difficult. Minatelli lunged again, this time between the dangling legs. The wog let go with a scream and plunged downward. His drop revealed another kneeling above, aiming a carbine. Minatelli fired from the hip; the Colonial threw himself backward out of the line of fire.

The infantryman pivoted. Two of the militiamen were down, and a pair of wogs he hadn’t even noticed stood on the deck. Two more were fighting another; one blocked his scimitar with the barrel of his shotgun, then reeled away wailing over fingers hanging by threads of flesh. That gave his comrade time enough to draw a revolver and fire five times with the muzzle almost pressed against the Arab swordsman’s back.

The body hit the ground with a thump. The survivors of Minatelli’s squad were at their firing slits, shooting and throwing hand bombs. No, one was stabbing outward with his bayonet. The corporal started towards that slit, hands reloading his rifle of their own volition. The last militiaman shouted from behind him, warning in the tone.

Minatelli turned. Another wog was coming at him, carbine clubbed. He caught it on the bayonet, pivoted the rifle and buttstroked the wog in the face; turned with frantic speed and caught another through the throat with the point. The militiaman was at his side, but more and more wogs were dropping down to the firing platform, some coming through the observation hatch over the gun. His men turned from the firing slits. He shouted to them to rally.

Something flashed very brightly, and there was a soft floating sensation. A heavy pressure. Blackness.

Raj drew up beside Menyez at the western end of the pontoon bridge. The infantry commander grabbed at his stirrup-iron. “Wogs over the wall,” he said. “Everything’s committed—no more reserve!”

“I’ll handle it,” Raj replied. “Organize this end and get the remainder and the artillery concentrated in the plaza.
Waymanos!
”

The lead cavalry were coming over the bridge at a round trot, the fastest safe pace.

“Bugler,” Raj snapped. “Sound
Charge
!”

The man obeyed instantly, but his eyes went wide. The troops responded as if the call were playing directly on their nervous systems, clapping their heels to their dogs and plunging forward. The floating bridge rocked and shuddered under the sudden impact of thousands of half-tonne dogs accelerating to their running pace. Howls and shouts rose over the massive thudding and creaking; Raj ignored them, drew his sword and spurred Horace across the Maidan, the empty space by the riverside, to the main water gate. It was broad, thank the Spirit; more than broad enough for cavalry to take in four-abreast column, and there was a wide straight avenue from there to the
Plaza Real
.

He looked westward, squinting into the sun and straining to hear the sounds of combat from the city walls. Green arrowed vectors painted themselves over his vision.

major penetrations at these locations.

“There!” he yelled, pointing with his sword.

Gerrin Staenbridge went by with the banner of the 5th Descott; his reply was a flourish of his own saber, and the men followed his abrupt curve with fluid precision.

“There!” Raj directed the next battalion. “There! There!”

A fourth. “Follow me!”

Not only over the wall, they’re into the bloody city,
Staenbridge thought, as the column of the 5th Descott burst out of the street into the harsh light of the open ground just inside the city wall. Broad stairways angled up from the roadway to the fighting platform; right now they were swarming with Colonials, their crimson djellabas a solid blotch of color in the dark shade, an occasional helmet-spike or officer’s plume glinting. More were milling about on the ground at its foot, the survivors of the first wave. They were disorganized—not many in any unit would have made it this far—but that wouldn’t last. Men who’d made it through the killing ground outside and over the wall in the first wave would be too aggressive to sit around waiting for orders.

“Deploy in line of companies!” he roared. Buglers relayed the order every man half-expected.

The column of mounted troopers pouring out of the mouth of the street split on either side of him, fanning out like the arms of an outstretched capital Y with his banner as the dividing point. In thirty seconds they were in a line facing the wall, and moving forward three hundred strong.

“Dismount! Fix bayonets!”

The dogs crouched and the men stepped free, drawing their rifles from the scabbards. Steel glinted as the long blades snapped home.

“Advance with fire, volley fire by platoon ranks!”

BAM. The men moved forward at the double. Colonial officers were hustling the wogs at the foot of the wall into makeshift firing lines, moving them forward in turn.
Can’t give them room to deploy.
He’d be outnumbered too badly if he did. Unless more troops arrived up from the river, and he couldn’t count on that.

BAM. BAM. BAM. The 5th could double forward and volley-fire at the same time, something possible only with endless practice. There weren’t many Colonials at the foot of the wall . . . yet . . . and more of them were reloading than firing, pulling rounds out of the loops across their chests and thumbing them through the loading gates of their carbines. Men fell on both sides, stumbling out of his line, flopping backward when the heavy 11mm Armory rounds punched them in the Colonials ahead.

A sound of iron wheels on flagstones. A splatgun crew wheeled their weapon around and ran it forward. Staenbridge pulled his dog aside.

“The stairway!” he barked.

The master gunner nodded and spun the elevating screw down to maximum. The honeycombed muzzle of the weapon rose like the nose of a hunting dog sniffing the wind. Two more crewmen moved the trail to his direction as he crouched over the breech. He snarled satisfaction and spun the crank.

Braaaaap.
Thirty-five rounds punched into the mass of Colonials on the stairway. A bubble of dead and dying sprang into existence in the thick crowd, instantly filled as more pressed down from above.
Braaaap.

Staenbridge spurred back to his banner, dismounted. The rest of the command group followed. He drew his revolver, tossed it into his left hand, then drew his saber and filled his lungs. Bartin was beside him, hook ready, his double-barreled coach gun in his good hand. Their eyes met for an instant.

“
Charge!
” he shouted, and broke into a run forward.

With a bellow, the 5th Descott threw themselves after their Colonel.

“Charge!” Raj barked.

The trumpeter sounded it; the brassy clamor echoed back from the silent walls of the houses on either side.

“UPYARZ! UPYARZ!” the men bellowed in reply.

Raj snarled silently and leaned forward, point outstretched beyond Horace’s neck. The 1/591st filled the street from wall to wall; some of them were riding down the sidewalks, inside the line of plane trees and gaslights that separated the brick walkway from the granite paving blocks of the street. The heavy paws of the big Newfoundlands made a drumming muffled thunder, and the column filled the road for better than two hundred meters back. Even at a slow gallop it was insanely risky; he gritted his teeth against the memory of what men looked like after a hundred war-dogs trampled over them.

Just have to be careful.

Horace was a little ahead of the pack, beside Raj’s personal bannerman; the battalion standard and Teodore Welf were to one side. Ahead was a thin scattering of Colonials, running down the road; except for the ones turning to run away when they saw that juggernaut of huge black dogs and white fangs, bared swords and shouting barbarian faces. One officer—a high-ranking one, from the spray of plumes at the front of his helmet—had managed to find a dog, in Civil Government–issue harness. It was highly restive under its new rider. Dogs were like that; you had to train with them a good long while before they accepted you, if they had any spirit. He was keeping the reins and the cheek-levers they controlled tight, and slapping at men’s shoulders with the flat of his scimitar as he hustled them into a semblance of a firing line.

His eyes grew wide as he saw Raj’s banner. He turned to meet the onrush, drawing an ornate silver-inlaid revolver with his other hand. He clapped spurred heels to the dog’s flanks; it bounded forward and a little to one side, crabbing against the ruthless skill of the rider as he forced it forward.

“Whitehall!” he cried in Arabic. “Shaitan waits for thee, Whitehall—and God is great!”

Crack.
The bullet scorched past Raj’s face.
Going to have a coal miner’s tattoo from that one,
a distant corner of his mind recorded. The Arab had bleeding wounds across his face in a nine-line pattern, but his eyes were utterly intent. One well-placed shot or slash, and the heart would be out of the Civil Government force.

All the rest of his attention was on the point of his saber. Luck as well as skill saved the Colonial; his restive dog jibed at the last instant, and the swords crossed in a unmelodious skirring of steel on steel. Nimble, the Colonial’s dog pivoted in its own length and started back to avoid the trampling rush of the Brigaderos. The dismounted men ahead had no such option. They managed one volley, an eruption of smoke and red fire. The whole front of the attacking line seethed as men and dogs went down across the fifteen-meter front. Men arched through the air to smash with bone-shattering force against the hard stuccoed stone of the house walls or crumple on the pavement; one landed with gruesome accidental accuracy on the crossbar of a gaslight and hung impaled and twitching like a shrike’s prey on a thorn.

But there was too much momentum behind the charge for a single volley to halt, and many of the wounded dogs kept their feet. The light 10mm bullets of the Colonial carbines were deadly to men, but it took a lucky hit to kill a twelve-hundred-pound dog with one shot. Riderless dogs were almost as dangerous as the ones with swordsmen on their backs; one seized a Colonial by the head in its half-meter mouth and flipped him over its tail with one flex of its massive neck. The rear files squeezed by the thrashing chaos of the front rank, and the thin Colonial line went down in a flurry of swordstrokes and two-inch fangs.

The Colonial officer was very much alive. He took aim again; Raj threw himself down on the right side of his dog, holding on to the pommel with one heel. A trick a Skinner nomad had taught him, and it paid off . . . the pistol bullet went snapping through the air where his body had been an instant before. He drew his pistol and shot underneath Horace’s belly, into the stomach of the Colonial’s dog. The animal hunched itself up in an astonishing leap that made the Arab release the gun and grab for the reins; then two 1/591st troopers were on him. The scimitar flashed against the heavy MilGov broadswords for one stroke, two, three; he slashed one trooper across the face even as the other slammed his heavy blade through the Arab’s stomach.

Raj heaved himself upright. That had been
close.
For a moment there were no wogs in sight except the ones running away—and running away from a dog in a straight line was a losing proposition. Then they were out into the cleared zone just inside the wall. The main city gate—the one with the railway entrance—was just to his right; it was wreathed in smoke, but the Civil Government’s banners were still flying above it, and the cannon mounted there were a constant rolling
booom
of thunder. Ahead of him a thin line of Civil Government troopers—the three companies of the 5th he’d left as the main reserve—were holding against a growing tide of wogs pouring down from their foothold on the wall. Just barely holding, and not for long; the Colonials had lost all unit cohesion coming over the wall, but they were forming up again like crystals accreting in a saturated solution, and more every minute.

The 5th’s volleys rang out, crisp and unhurried, but as he watched, they were losing men like a sugar lump under a stream of hot tea.

Teodore Welf drew rein beside him as the 1/591st fanned out into line. “Dismount?” he asked.

Raj shook his head. “Not enough time. We’ve got to hit them before they get organized.”

These MilGov knights liked cold steel, and this was the situation for it. The whole scene in front came in glimpses, flashing through gaps in the drifting clouds of sulfurous smoke. More every second, as cannon and rifle fire pumped it out. Bullets went by with an ugly
crack
sound. Five men down the line a trooper gave a grunt and toppled slowly out of the saddle.