Steam Legion (19 page)

When the third horse was killed outright by the spearmen, a horn blew and the riders broke off the assault, pulling out of the camp near as fast as they’d ridden in. The still-stunned enemy watched them go, but only for a moment, when the two ranks of mounted archers swept back in and began sending more flights of arrows into their positions.

“Archers!” the Commander called out, swearing at the mess he was in.

On the one hand, the enemy only appeared to have Cavalry. They were dangerous, certainly, but like most military units, they could only inflict so much trouble on their own. Now that he knew they were out there, he could effectively neutralize the effectiveness of the heavy Cavalry charges with his spearmen.

The mounted archers, however, were a bit more of a problem.

While they were lighter, they were also quicker and quite nimble. A troop of mounted archers could slash in, inflict some minor damage, and be gone before any of his soldiers could react, save perhaps his archers. Unfortunately, his archers were trained to handle siege warfare. Long-range flights of arrows in massed volleys, not the fast and furious close-in fighting of near point-blank exchanges with extremely fast moving targets.

The damage they could inflict would be limited, but it would be more than he could inflict in return.

I do not
need
this!

The Commander of the Zealot forces continued to rally his men, eyes on the horses as the Cavalry group rallied and regrouped out of archer range.

“We’re going to have to eliminate them,” he determined through ground teeth, knowing even as he said it that he was failing in his assigned mission.

His men had no chance of catching the Cavalry as it stood; they were fast and clearly skilled on their mounts. His units were Infantry and siege engineers, far from fleet of foot at the best of times, let alone after a fight like this.

He had little choice, however, but to give chase. It was either that or abandon his mission entirely, because there was simply no way he could maintain the siege of the town with those mounted archers picking off his men in a slow war of attrition. If he packed it up and returned to regroup with the main army, he’d be fighting the Cavalry the whole way and would most likely lose even more men than if he remained in place. Neither option was palatable, which left pursuing the Cavalry.

He was no fool; he was quite aware that that was almost certainly what they wanted. That would force him to break off the assault on the town and tie up his men in a likely futile pursuit. Quite possibly, they even had some other forces out there waiting to ambush him.

He almost hoped that were the case, because if it were, he would have his best chance to eliminate the Cavalry entirely. He was well aware of the remaining forces the Romans had in the area and was surprised they’d managed to scrounge up as much Cavalry, in all honestly.

Someone must have scraped the bottom of the aqueduct reservoir to find this many Auxiliaries. The Tenth and the Twenty-Second Legions already took practically all of the most reliable ones far east of here.

No, at most he was certain he was facing the Cavalry he was seeing and possibly a Century or two of the Legion. Of a more interesting note, there was only one place they could have been drawn from.

I need to confirm first.

“Form ranks!” he ordered at the top of his lungs. “Prepare to march!”

****

“They’re preparing to move out.”

“In pursuit, or are they leaving?” Dyna asked, not looking up from where she was making calculations.

“Pursuit.”

That caused her to lay down her stylus and look up. It was the news she had been waiting to hear. She’d been half afraid that they might retreat, fall back to wherever their main force was located. It would have cost them men, as she’d have kept her Cavalry harassing them the whole way, but it would have let them avoid contact with her Legionnaires and cannons.

“Tell the cannons to fire the boilers.”

“Yes, my Lady.”

The sun was rising in the sky by the time the enemy formation marched out, having taken time to get formed up while under the continued harassing attacks from the mounted archers. The horsemen stayed out of range as the unit moved, continuing to fire arrows into the marching men, but now the enemy formation had their shields in place and the damage was greatly reduced.

Nonetheless, the northern horsemen continued with their harassing maneuvers as they led the Zealot forces away from the town and toward the hill upon which Dyna and her siege engineers were emplaced.

“There’s more of them than the scouts reported,” she said tonelessly, oddly unaffected by the knowledge.

Now that she had committed her people to contact, there was little she could do about the numbers, and so she found herself curiously distant from the emotional impact of the knowledge.

“Yes, my Lady,” her Adjutant answered. “Best count at the moment is at least four Centuries’ worth, but more likely six or a little more.”

She nodded. “A full Cohort then.”

“Of Auxiliaries, yes, my Lady.”

A full Cohort of Infantry. Roughly four hundred eighty fighting men were now pursuing her Cavalry, and she had a mere two Centuries, or a hundred sixty men, with which to stop them. She certainly could have wished for better odds, though as her Adjutant had pointed out, they were Auxiliaries, not Legion.

That meant it was the enemies’ Light Infantry against her Heavy, and she had both Cavalry and siege engine support.

It would still be closer than she would prefer, but since it was also far,
far
closer than the enemy Commander was sure to realize, she would accept that.

She would have to.

****

Cassius looked up when he saw the horsemen coming, pounding along the fields in their direction, one in three of them practically turned around in the saddle so they could fire backwards. He hefted his pylum to catch the attention of those around him.

“Split ranks!”

The marching men split their formation without slowing, moving forward with determination as the horses thundered down on them. The Cavalry didn’t turn or break, they just galloped right through the Legion’s lines without pause as the soldiers continued on.

“Square ranks!” Cassius called when the horses were past, bringing his men back together in an interlocked phalanx of shields.

They could see the enemy now, a moderately disciplined mass topping the hill the Cavalry had just raced over.

“That’s a Pluto-damned flood of them, isn’t it, Centurion?”

Cassius just shrugged. “One or one thousand, they are just men. We ARE…”

“LEGION!” the men called in response as the phalanx surged forward, each man in lock step with his neighbor.

The men at the crest of the hill hesitated a moment when they saw the Legion, but it only lasted a moment. The leader of the Zealot forces quickly roused their ire and in seconds the Zealots were roaring back and they, too, charged. The two forces were set to come head to head, two short Centuries of Legionnaires against a full Cohort of Israelite Light Infantry.

In his years of service to the Empire, Cassius had occasionally been in worse situations, but only rarely and never without suffering losses so as to cripple his forces.

Lucky that we’re already crippled this time, I suppose,
he thought as he led his two Centuries forward.
My Lady, if you are going to do something, now would be the time…before we’re in contact with the enemy and you can’t hit them without hitting
us
.

With a hundred yards remaining before contact, he got his wish as a roar of sound erupted from the hilltop. He and his men had been expecting it, and the sound barely caused them to falter as they glanced up to see the huge plumes of white steam rising from the hill. The enemy formation, however, was almost torn apart just from the chaos of some men stopping to stare while others continued marching.

“Charge!” Cassius ordered, hoping that he wasn’t about to drive his men right into the teeth of their own weapons.

****

“Open the valves!” Dyna called.

Her orders were quickly obeyed, and in each of the double boilers mounted on the steam cannons, a small conical stopper was pulled out by a long draw cord. Water in the top boiler was sucked down the siphon valve and sprayed into the bottom boiler, which had already been heated to near-critical temperatures by the carefully stoked flames beneath. It boiled almost instantly, filling the lower boiler with rapidly increasing steam until the pressure was enough to counteract the water pouring in, and a second conical stopper was pushed into place to stop the flow and seal the lower tank.

The pressure increased quickly, unable to escape through the siphon valve to the top boiler or through the cannon itself due to the large stone ball held in place by the five short bolts jammed between it and the closed brass cover on the maw of the large weapons. The pressure inside the boiler continued to build as the rest of the water turned to steam, and the steam within heated more and more until, finally, the pressure reached a critical level.

When they broke free, swinging down and away under the force from within, the stone ball blasted forward and drove the five bolts out ahead of it, even as a veritable eruption of steam obscured all sight. The roar of released pressure was a living thing; not a blast or the distinctive
thwack
sound of a torsion device firing, but rather like the exhaled breath of a giant who was so very angry. The ten cannons did not fire simultaneously, so the sound went on and on for a time until all ten stone balls and fifty heavy-tipped bolts were launched down the range at their target.

Only then did Dyna speak again, as the sound died down.

“Immunes!” she called. “Make your weapons ready!”

Men rushed in to refill and rearm the cannon as Dyna remained focused on the battlefield below them, eyes sharp as she looked for where her weapons would fall.

“Have the horses draw the onagers down,” she ordered softly.

“Yes, my Lady.”

The onagers were torsion catapults, weapons that derived their impulse force from the hundreds of twisted ropes that bound the base of the firing lever. They could not be left in firing position, both for safety and in order to preserve the elastic force of the ropes, so on Dyna’s order, the horse and mule teams drew down the pulley linking to the cantilever arm until it was flush against the base of the weapon and linked into place.

Men then quickly hefted large stones they’d scrounged out of the hill nearby into place and waited for the order to loose the weapons.

Dyna was only peripherally paying attention to them, however, as her eyes scoured the ground below to see where her first shots would land.

****

The steam cannons had been fired at a shallow angle, the bolts and balls arcing out low off the hilltop. The heavy stone balls quickly outpaced the wood and iron bolts, dropping from the sky along the right rear flank of the enemy positions. Six of the balls struck wide, missing the enemy positions from a few meters to a few dozen, but four came down hard into one of the thicker packed sections of the enemy formation with devastating results.

The heavy carved-stone balls tore through shields, flesh, and bone with similar ease as they crashed down, ricocheted, and generally wreaked all possible havoc as they passed. Stone couldn’t and didn’t have the power to punch through armor, but where it struck a limb or a helm, bones were broken at the very least and in some cases parts were sheared right off.

The men who fell mostly didn’t die, however, and the area was quickly turned from at least partially disciplined formation to screaming, flailing masses who didn’t really know what had struck them.

The fifty bolts fired by the ten cannons were a little slower than the balls that preceded them, but the arc of their travel was just as predictable, so they came down on the front to mid-right rank of the formation. The men under them had enough warning that some threw up shields automatically, though most didn’t recognize the threat they were under. It made no difference, however, as the wicker and wood shields presented effectively no defense against the heavy iron-tipped bolts that rained down from the skies.

Heavier than the bolts fired even by larger ballista, the bolts launched from the cannons punched through shields as though they were paper, slamming into the bodies beneath. Where they encountered armor, the bolts came to a rapid stop, normally having penetrated six inches at least, and where there was no defense but flesh and bone, the heavy iron tips simply drove the unfortunate owner down and literally pinned him to the ground below.

The Commander of the Zealot forces was stymied for a single horrible moment as he realized that he was facing two full Centuries of Roman Heavy Infantry and that they apparently had significant support Auxiliaries with them as well. A bare couple Centuries of the Legion were within his forces’ ability to destroy, albeit with losses; add in the Cavalry and he’d probably be able to force a stalemate and cripple them in the process, but not without similarly crippling himself.

However, they had siege engineers skilled and insane enough to fire their weapons close to the closing Infantry. That sort of support fire was near to impossible, or so he had thought, save outside of carefully mapped battlefields.

He grabbed his Adjutant as the two lines of Infantry prepared to clash and knew that he’d been trapped.

The Legionnaires flung their pylum with a roar, the short javelins slamming into his shield wall and sticking into whatever they struck as the iron-jointed tips bent. These didn’t do much harm to his men, but he knew well that wasn’t the aim. Shields struck by the pylum were rendered useless as the awkward weight of the weapon was slung off them, forcing many of his front line to drop their shields just before the battle was joined.

“Find every runner we have,” he snarled in the man’s face. “They have to get to the main body of our forces!”