“Listen, boyo,” Brahdryk Clahrksyn, 4th Platoon’s senior noncom, had the deep, rolling accent to go with his kilt, “I’m a man of my word. Remember when you saved my life last five-day? Well, I swore I’d pay you back, didn’t I?”
“Yeah, you did.” Mahkgyl loosened the retaining clip on one of the kettles, lifted the lid, and inhaled deeply. “Oh, Sondheim, that smells good!” He replaced the lid as carefully as he’d loosened it and looked back at Clahrksyn. “Sarge, you’ve done a hell of a lot more’n just pay me back! Not quite ready to take a bullet fer you, but I might take a chance on throwing back a hand-bomb for you!”
Clahrksyn grinned.
“Hah! I expect this gratitude’ll last just about until the next time I need someone to dig latrines.”
“Maybe even four or five minutes longer,” Mahkgyl said solemnly.
“I’m deeply touched,” Clahrksyn told him, then nodded to the members of his detail, who were still breathing heavily after their climb. “Take it on to the CP and start organizing a chow line,” he told them. “I’ll be along in a minute.”
“Gotcha, Sarge,” a corporal Mahkgyl and Mylyndyz didn’t know, with a quartermaster’s armband, replied. “And don’t forget, I need these kettles back!” He chuckled. “If I don’t get them back, it’s gonna take a lot more’n one bottle of booze to make Lieutenant Tuhtyl happy with us!”
“Complaints, complaints!” Clahrksyn shook his head. “First, it was good booze. And, second, I promised we’d get your kettles back. What’s the matter, you don’t trust m—”
The 4.5” mortar bomb which burst almost directly above Clahrksyn’s head had a lethal zone ninety feet in diameter. Mylyndyz and two of the quartermaster detail actually survived it.
* * *
Captain Hovsep Zohannsyn slid his watch back into his pocket and cocked the flare pistol’s hammer. Fourth Company’s platoons had been briefed to follow the short, savage mortar bombardment as closely as possible, but he’d commanded the company for almost two years now. None of his men were going to charge into that holocaust until Hovsep Zohannsyn was certain it was over. If the support companies were their usual, efficient selves, the bombardment would end exactly when it was supposed to. That didn’t always happen, though, and the captain watched the explosions walking back and forth across the hilltop.
The last light in the western sky was fading quickly, and he grimaced in mingled satisfaction and unhappiness. Night attacks were a perfect recipe for confusion, chaos, and loss of tactical control, which accounted for his unhappiness. That was true for the defender, as well as the attacker, however, and the Imperial Charisian Army—and, especially, the Army of Thesmar—had made night attacks a specialty, with a tactical doctrine far better suited to that sort of chaotic encounter than almost anyone else’s. Fourth Company’s attempt to take the hill in daylight had failed painfully, but the Dohlarans dug in along its military crest hadn’t yet had time to do the sort of thorough job the Army of Thesmar had come to dread, and Zhohannsyn was fully in favor of not giving them that time. If this worked half as well as Major Edmyndsyn expected it to—or said he expected it to, anyway—then—
The torrent of explosions and air bursts stopped abruptly. Not instantly, of course. A half-dozen tardy antipersonnel bombs burst in midair, pounding the hilltop with a final downpour of shrapnel. But then there was silence while the vast pall of dust and smoke spilled upwards to blot away the newborn stars.
Zhohannsyn counted slowly to ten, waiting to see if any additional laggards would happen along. Then he squeezed the trigger.
* * *
“Where the hell is Clahrksyn?!” Lieutenant Ahmbrohs Tyrnyr shouted, trying to make himself heard through the rolling thunder as he crouched in his command post trench.
His CP was on the hill’s reverse slope, the far side of its crest, and most of the heretic angle-gun bombs were landing on its eastern slopes. Despite that, dirt and debris pelted down all around him, and deeper, angrier explosions thundered behind him as the heretics far heavier angle-guns laid the lash of their fire across the Dohlaran angles which had been harassing the woods in 4th Platoon’s front. He felt some of the airborne trash bouncing from his steel helmet, and he coughed harshly as the dust and smoke caught at the back of his throat.
“What?!” Sergeant Ahntohnyo Bahndairo shouted back, leaning closer until his mouth was barely a foot from Tyrnyr’s ear.
“I said, where the hell is—” Tyrnyr bawled, using his cupped hands as a megaphone. And then, almost as abruptly as it had begun, the bombardment stopped.
“—Clahrksyn?!” he finished.
Bahndairo flinched a bit from the shout in his ear, and the sudden quiet was almost more frightening than the explosions had been. It wasn’t a silence, however. Bits and pieces of debris continued to patter down for a good five seconds, and the screams of wounded men could be heard only too clearly. Most of those screaming men were Tyrnyr’s, and a pain that had nothing to do with physical hurt went through the youthful lieutenant. But there were other screams, as well, fainter, perhaps, but just as shrill and coming from the flanks of the hill, where the company’s other platoons had been hammered almost as brutally.
“Dunno where he is, Sir,” Bahndairo said against that backdrop of wailing anguish. The sergeant was 4th Platoon’s standard bearer, its second ranking noncom. He and Brahdryk Clahrksyn were extremely close, and his voice was harsh as he pulled back the hammer on his rifle and capped the lock. “Said he was going to arrange some hot chow for the boys. Last I saw of him, he was headed off to discuss that with Lieutenant Tuthyl.” Despite his tension, Bahndairo actually twitched a smile. “Took my last bottle of rotgut with him when he went. Told me to tell you he’d be back in time for supper. I think he figured if you didn’t know what he was up to, you’d be able to tell the Captain you didn’t know a thing about any quartermaster bribes if it happened as how he asked.”
Tyrnyr snorted harshly. That sounded like the platoon sergeant. Clahrksyn was the one who’d taught an ignorant young lieutenant how important hot food really was, especially for men facing the energy-devouring terror of combat. And, in many ways, those “little comforts” civilians took for granted meant even more between bouts of combat for the same reason food was a traditional part of wakes and funerals. The simple act of eating was a sort of promise that life went on.
But now a much older and bitterly wiser lieutenant’s face was stone as he listened to those screams and wondered how many more of his men had just discovered the falsity of that promise under the savage pounding of the heretics’ portable angle-guns.
“Go find Captain Ahndairsyn,” he told Bahndairo. “Tell him we got hit hard and we’re damned well going to need reinforcement if the heretics follow up.”
“You go, Sir,” Bahndairo disagreed. “I’ll take Hainz and go sort out—”
“You’ll damned well go where I told you to go, Sergeant!” Tyrnyr snapped. “I need somebody I can count on to get it straight. And someone the Captain’ll know knows what he’s talking about! Besides, they may not even—”
A crimson flare burst in solitary splendor above the scrub woods on the far side of the road and Tyrnyr punched the sergeant savagely on the shoulder.
“Go, damn it!” he shouted.
Bahndairo looked back at him for a moment. The lieutenant could scarcely see him—the darkness was all but complete now, and the smoke and dust didn’t help—but he knew what he’d have seen in the standard bearer’s eyes if the light had been better. Bahndairo hesitated for one anguished second longer, listening to the pain sounds of the men of Tyrnyr’s platoon. Then he nodded viciously.