His thoughts paused, and his brow furrowed. What the hell was that?
* * *
“All right, Lieutenant,” Corporal Meekyn said. “Ready whenever you are.”
“Fine.” Lieutenant Mahkdahnyld looked first to his left, then to his right. His platoon crouched or lay prone behind downed trees or in muddy shell holes. Farther behind them, hopefully still invisible from the far side of the river, all three of 2nd Company’s other platoons waited to follow them across.
Assuming they got across this time, of course.
He looked back at the weapons Meekyn’s squad had positioned. They certainly looked outlandish enough. Each consisted of a tripod—like a shortened surveyor’s tripod, only much, much heavier—with a long piece of six-inch pipe on it. The “pipe” was fitted with a laddered peep sight, adjustable for range, and mounted in a sturdy pivot with outsized wing nuts to lock it in elevation and deflection once it was properly aligned. A length of quick match trailed from the rear of each pipe to meet a single, heavier fuse that ran back to the wooden box at the corporal’s knee where Meekyn crouched beside him.
The noncom’s squad had set up six of them, two targeted on each of the dug-in positions Mahkdahnyld had pointed out. Now the lieutenant nodded.
“Anytime, Corporal.”
“In that case.… Fire in the hole!”
Meekyn yanked the ring on the wooden box. The friction fuse ignited the lengths of quick match and the glaring eyes of combustion flashed along them.
* * *
Despite the sunlight in his eyes, Corporal Baozhi saw the bright flare of the fuses clearly against the riverbank’s shadowed dimness. He didn’t realize what he was seeing, though. Then the fuses reached their destinations, and Jwaohyn Baozhi realized—briefly—what those tripods were.
The rockets designed by Major Sykahrelli streaked out of the launch tubes in a belch of flame that was awesome to behold. That back blast was the problem Sykahrelli had been unable to overcome in his quest for a shoulder-launched weapon. But it was no problem fired from a remote platform, so he’d designed a somewhat heavier version of his original model.
The six rockets roared across the Taigyn River like fiery comets, and Baozhi dropped to the floor of his improvised bunker.
“Down! Down!” he shouted, and the men of his squad were veterans. They didn’t ask why; they simply flung themselves down.
Three seconds later, the rockets reached their targets. One of them, aimed at the bunker on the southern end of the line, wandered off course and missed its mark by at least thirty yards. The other five flew straight and level, accelerating the entire way, drawing fiery lines across the river. Then they impacted, and each of them carried a twelve-pound charge of Lywysite. That was the equivalent of thirty pounds of black powder, twelve percent more than the charge in an 8-inch high explosive shell, and the walls of the bunkers—and of Baozhi’s improvised position—were far, far thinner than their roofs.
All three strongpoints disintegrated in a rolling peal of thunder, and Mahkdahnyld raised his flare pistol. The crimson flare was pale in the brightening light, but it was visible to the support squads waiting for the signal. The mortars began coughing a moment later and smoke rounds thumped down on the farther bank, between the river’s edge and the surviving trench lines. Heavy angle-gun shells rumbled across the sky, as well, impacting on confirmed—and suspected—artillery and mortar positions farther back from the western bank, and Mahkdahnyld smacked the engineering corporal on the shoulder.
“Outstanding!” he said with a huge grin, reaching for his whistle as the far side of the river disappeared beyond the rolling banks of smoke. “Drop by once we pull back from the line, Corporal! I know forty or fifty people who’re going to buy you lots of beer!”
* * *
“I hate those accursed things, Sir!” Lord of Foot Shyaing Pauzhyn snarled as another salvo of heretic shells—the big ones this time, from the super-heavy angle-guns no one had seen coming—rumbled overhead and crunched down on the 23rd Division’s rear area. He wasn’t talking about the shells, however, and Lord of Horse Myngzho Hyntai knew it. He was talking about the other thing no one had seen coming—the Shan-wei-damned balloon floating serenely in the cloudless sky and directing those shells with such fiendish accuracy.
“Unfortunately,” Hyntai said, “there seems to be little we can do about them—yet, at least. I understand the gunners are trying to construct carriages which will let us elevate Fultyn Rifles high enough to engage them.”
He put as much optimism into his tone as he could. That wasn’t a great deal, although the look Pauzhyn gave him suggested he’d still sounded rather more optimistic than the lord of foot, who commanded his 95th Brigade felt the statement deserved.
Well, it was hard to blame young Shyaing, Hyntai admitted. Although, he supposed that at thirty-seven, Pauzhyn might have resented the adjective “young.” From Hyntai’s seventy-two-year-old perspective, however, it was certainly apt, even if Pauzhyn was much less young than he’d been a month or two ago.
Another salvo of heavy shells growled their way across the heavens. The sound they made was like nothing anyone had ever heard before. At least it was less terrifying than the shrieking, howling, tumult of a mass rocket launch, but the thunder as those massive projectiles struck got into a man’s bone and blood. Each of them was its own private volcano, erupting in fire and death, and only the deepest bunker could hope to resist a direct hit.
The good news was that for all their fury, all the carnage they could wreak, accomplishing the sort of pinpoint accuracy to produce direct hits upon demand was beyond even the heretics’ artillerists. So far, at least. Hyntai didn’t like adding that qualifier, and he’d been careful not to say anything of the sort in front of his subordinates, but the heretics had a most unpleasant habit of sprinting ahead just whenever it seemed Mother Church’s defenders might be closing the gap between their relative capabilities. The balloons which taunted the Mighty Host from their inviolable height were an excellent case in point.
“I know you’re anxious to get back to your command, Shyaing,” the lord of horse continued, “so I won’t keep you long.” He showed his teeth in a brief, humorless smile. “I was always taught that bad news is best delivered briefly.”
“Bad news, Sir?” Pauzhyn sounded wary but scarcely surprised. There’d been very little good news since the heretics’ offensive began.
“I fear we’ve been ordered to retreat,” the division commander said much more heavily.
“Retreat?” Pauzhyn repeated sharply.
“Yes.” Hyntai tapped the map on the boulder between them. “To here.”
Pauzhyn peered down at the map and his mouth tightened. In the five-day and a half since the heretics had forced the line of the Tairyn, 95th Brigade had been pushed back another twenty-five miles. It was actually rather remarkable they hadn’t been pushed even farther, he thought, given the paucity of prepared positions in their immediate rear. Hastily dug trenches and lines of lizardholes tended to come apart quickly when the heretic artillery got to work.
On the other hand, there was something to be said for hastily constructed fieldworks, too. The heretics’ new assault tactics turned bunkers into deathtraps once they’d broken into the trench line. Sometimes they paid a stiff price to do that, but once they had—once they were in among the bunkers, close enough to find targets for those accursed, rapid-fire shotguns, throw their damnable satchel charges, or use their horrific flamethrowers—very few defenders got out alive.