On the Oceans of Eternity (92 page)

The crew of the car popped various hatches and came out, enjoying the fresh air and space; someone produced one of the foraged local hams and cut slabs of it to hand ’round. Marian took one and put it on a piece of dog biscuit, gnawing and taking an occasional swig from her canteen as she studied the map and waited. The earthy, salty taste of the acorn-fed and smoke-cured ham was so good that you forgot how vile hardtack was.

The rest of the Mechanized Battalion came up behind at last. The name was only partly ironic. After all, bicycles were mechanical transport ... and about four times faster than foot infantry, on these fine roads the Tartessians had been kind enough to build. Watching seven hundred helmets bobbing along with rifles over their shoulders still brought a narrowing of the eyes that someone familiar with Marian knew for a smile. Another scatter of Cherokees and Hondas drew a brace of rifled siege cannon, heavy mortars, and trailers of fuel and supplies.

She fought down fierce envy for the two genuine Humvees she’d attached to Brigadier McClintock’s HQ.
Fair is fair.
There were only three of those left in all the world.

“Major Stavrand,” she said to the officer in charge.

“Commodore,” he replied. “This is it, eh?”

He grinned enthusiastically. His white-blond hair, long narrow face and elongated build made him look like something out of one of the gloomier Ingmar Bergman films. The Nordic Death effect was spoiled only by his glasses, and the elastic cord he wore to keep them on.

“Right over that ridge. and I think we’ve outpaced the news of ouah arrival,” Alston said. “Ride with me.”

The troops put their bicycles on the kickstands and fanned out, skirmishers moving forward until the thick bar of human figures became a scattering across the rolling land. Stavrand fastened his ten-speed to the rear deck of the car with a bungee cord and perched on the turret, holding on to one of the welded brackets and looking like a Stockholm-gargoyle rendering of Alfred Nobel, or possibly the patron saint of demolitions.

The ultralights went by overhead with an insectile drone, keeping an eye on the target and the countryside round about. Marian waited until a signal flare went up before waving the armored car forward. They crested the rise and halted.

Mmmm-hmmmm,
she thought, as they halted in a vineyard whose gnarled branches rose up from the earth like arthritic black fingers. Yellow mustard flowers starred the grass between the vines.

The town lay in a valley that ran back up into the low mountains beyond; patches of woods thickened into outright forest not far north of it. An earth-fill dam held back a considerable lake north of the town, glinting blue with dead trees sticking out of the water in spots. There were about three or four thousand people living inside the walls, she thought. It was all rawly new, a gridwork of dusty streets and whitewashed adobe, save where tall brick smokestacks marked smelters and forges. This was a major center by Tartessian standards, their equivalent of Irondale, working the minerals of the mountains behind and forwarding the products to their capital.

“Major, I don’t suppose ... ?”

“I’m afraid not, Commodore,” Stavrand said regretfully. “See how the river runs? The flood’ll go right past the town when we blow it. Of course, that’ll cut off their water ... mostly for waterpower, see how they ran the canal along the contour to preserve the head? Quite well done.”

An ultralight went by overhead, then turned into the wind that blew out of the north and came in to land on the roadway. Offhand skill flared the wing up to shed speed, and it came to a rolling halt only ten yards from touchdown. The pilot vaulted out and came running over, pushing back the goggles that kept eyes from freezing or drying out and pulling off her helmet, She was small and slight—there was a 120-pound weight limit for pilots—and brown-skinned, with a broad face and a dense cap of raven hair so dark it had blue highlights.

Mmmmm-hmmmn,
Alston remembered.
Lekkansu-born.
From one of the bands virtually annihilated by some uptime virus back in the Year 1; a few children had been bereft of even distant relatives to take them in, and ended up adopted on-Island.

“Ma’am, sir,” she said, vaulting lightly up despite the heavy sheepskin flying suit and joining them on the deck of the turret. A glance at the map, and:

“Yeah, they’ve got fallback earthworks going up inside the gates, and they’ve just started putting up a berm to back the wall. Looks real crowded in there—lots of refugees, tents, and brushwood shelters in the streets and open spaces, ma’am.”

“Thank you, Ensign Walters,” Marian said.

“Ah, youth,” Swindapa observed as the flyer bounded back to her little craft and vaulted one-handed into her seat; a couple of Marines swung it ’round into the wind.

Marian snorted.
This from someone who occasionally turns cartwheels in the street just for the fun of it?

“Wait ‘till you hit forty, ’dapa.” She scanned the defenses. “Let’s see ...”

Those were metal-tipped punji-sticks, a nasty low-tech version of barbed wire. It would be expensive to assault, but it was designed to keep out hillbilly raiders with clubs and bronze-headed spears. Nothing like the massive works around Tartessos City or some of their forts elsewhere; Isketerol had had too much to do to put that sort of thing around every town. Absurdly, there were still ducks swimming about the ring-ditch, occasionally dipping their heads and leaving twitching tails in the air as they fed.

“Right, let’s give them a demonstration,” Marian said.

The siege guns and mortars were ready within minutes, crews swarming antlike around them. The rocket launchers took a little longer, but the two-wheeled mounts were light enough to be towed by bicycle and manhandled around. The operators loaded six long, finned cylinders in each launcher’s bundle of tubes and backed away, unreeling wire behind them.

“Driver, take us in to a thousand yards,” she said.

The diesel pig-grunted in a cloud of black coal-oil fumes, and the car rolled forward again. The works that had been easy to dismiss through the binoculars grew larger as they neared. A cannon fired from the low square tower next to the gates, visible only by the flash and smoke.

Six-pounder,
she estimated automatically
—brass smoothbore.
The light iron ball kicked up a plume of black dirt and dug a furrow through a cornfield not far to the left of the road.

“Pop the gate,” she said quietly. “Then rake the parapet.”

“Right, ma’am,” the gunner said. “Ready—”

She slitted her eyes. The violent flash still made her throw up a palm in reflex, and everyone coughed at the bitter burned-zinc fumes. The rocket took off with a sound like a cat the size of a mountain vomiting, and drew a spreading cone of gray smoke toward the gate. At its head was a red spark. That turned into a globe of fire as it struck the ironbound gates of the town, and a vast hollow
whuddummmp
echoed back. A second later the turret Gatling cut loose with a long
braaaaaaapp.

Motors whined, turning the turret and driving the machine gun; it blasted out ten rounds a second as the barrels vanished in a whirling blur, a continuous knife of red flame cutting through the fogbank that surrounded the war-car. Through it Marian could see the mud-brick parapets of the tower and wall disintegrating into powdered clay.

As if the car firing had been a signal, which it was, the two siege guns fired. They had no need to approach the wall; from a mile behind her the heavy shells went overhead with a grumbling rumble that rose in pitch as they passed. They were aimed for the town’s metalworks, and she caught a glimpse of columns of dark smoke and pulverized building rising like instant poplars.

The crews leaped into action, running the muzzle-loading cannon forward again from the chocks behind the wheels, swabbing out the barrels, ramming down powder bags and shells. Before they were half-finished, the rocket-launcher operators spun the cranks of their field generators and pushed down the toggles that sent a brief pulse of current through the percussion caps.

Backblast scorched the hillside behind them in a sudden huge cloud that left crackling, blackened grass and crops behind it in a great wedge spreading out from the emplacement. Sixty trails of smoke and fire lifted from the katyushas in a rippling chorus of demon-screams-except for two that blew up not far from the launch tubes, and one that corkscrewed and landed uncomfortably close to the armored car, spattering its side with bits of metal and rock and dirt. Something rapped her helmet unpleasantly hard.

The rest slammed down on the wall to the left of the gate. It disappeared, in a boiling wall of rubble and dust and smoke that seemed to bear down on her like an avalanche. Enough of it reached them to set them coughing anew; Marian drank from her canteen and passed it to Swindapa, as the gunner and loader shared theirs in the turret and hull below. When the dust and smoke lifted, she shaped a soundless whistle. The sharp definite outlines of wall and mound and ditch had vanished. What was left was a lumpy ramp, leading from the open ground outside the town to a height about half what the defenses had been.

“Let’s put up the parsley and see what happens,” Marian said as a stunning silence fell leaving their ears ringing with the ceasing of the world-shattering noise.

Swindapa bent one of the whip aerials down and fastened a wreath of olive to it, and a white pennant beneath—local and Islander symbolism combined. The car rolled forward with a whine and crunch, stopping about ten yards short of the bridge that spanned the moat before the gate. Marion took up the microphone of a powered megaphone mounted on the turret—more psychological warfare—and spoke the phrases she’d memorized:

The harsh amplified sound echoed back from the surviving sections of wall, giving a blurring edge to it.

The gunner and loader worked the action of the rocket launcher-it opened inward, like a shotgun mounted sideways—and slipped home another of the heavy rounds. Then they waited; occasionally the turret tracked along the walls and the barrels of the Gatling whirled by way of warning and intimidation. Two ultralights buzzed overhead, circling the town and its vicinity.

Twenty minutes later Marian sighed and reached for the microphone to order another round of bombardment. Then Swindapa pointed:

“Look!”

Four Tartessians came climbing over the rubble of the gate and wall, waving green branches of their own. They had a white shield and a white flag on a pole as well. taking no chances. Two were youngish men in the green tunic and trousers and brown leather jerkin of Tartessian uniform; one of those was limping, and the other had a bandaged arm. The civilians were older, in shoulder-baring tunics, and sweating with fear from the way they wiped at their brows.

“Garrison commanders and mayor.” she murmured. “All right, ’dapa, give them the word.”

A harsh gabble of ancient Iberian; the wounded soldier spat in the roadway.

“He says King Isketerol will come with a great army and destroy your little band,” Swindapa relayed.

Marian met the man’s eyes and lifted a slow brow. Then she pointed to the ultralights.

“With those, we destroy your relay towers as we please. The highlanders and the bands of freed slaves are ambushing couriers on the roads. King Isketerol doesn’t even know you’ve been attacked, and won’t for days. By the time any force he sends could get here, we’ll be gone ... and your town will be destroyed.”

“You will destroy it anyway!” the mayor burst out.

“But if you surrender, your people will live. Apart from your own lives, your King won’t thank you for losing all those skilled men, as well as all the machinery and goods.”

Marian climbed down from the turret, jumping to the ground and drawing her katana.
Hell of a way to treat good steel,
she thought, as she scratched a circle around the feet of the enemy leaders. The Tartessians flinched back from her. A reputation
was
useful now and then.

“Decide before you step out of that circle—life or death,” she said, drawing her sword through a cleaning cloth and sheathing it over her shoulder in a single quick snapping movement.

A habit of reading history was useful too....

The Tartessians went into a huddle, waving arms and yelling at each other; Swindapa came to stand by her side, translating bits into her ear now and then. At last they faced her, drawing themselves up and then going to their knees with bitter dignity.

“What are your terms?” they asked.

She kept an expression of distaste off her face; it was just the local custom, but she still didn’t like seeing people kneel.

“All free citizens and their families to leave within two hours, taking only what they can carry. I’ll allow carts for small children, nursing mothers. and the sick and old, but don’t try my patience. Soldiers to be paroled on promise of staying out of the rest of this war.”

So far (sketerol was sticking strictly to that, although the slash of indelible ink the Islanders put on each surrendered soldier’s forehead—with a promise to shoot them out of hand if taken in arms again—might have something to do with it. The arrangement rested on solid mutual interest. Tartessos got to keep the men, who could work for now and fight again later, and the Islanders were spared the trouble of guarding and feeding prisoners. Since the alternative in cases like this where they
couldn’t
take them back was killing them or cutting off their trigger fingers, she was profoundly glad Isketerol had gone along with it.