That was the real reason Earl Hanth had assigned this attack to the 3rd Alyksberg Volunteers, and they were eager to be about it.
* * *
“Second rocket now,” Sedryk Maiyrs said almost gently, and an amber signal rocket streaked into the heavens. It exploded, and the mortars stopped firing HE and shrapnel rounds instantly. Star shells continued to erupt above the smoking, half-shattered Switch, but no more explosives rained down upon it.
* * *
“Yes!” Hytchkahk hissed and raised his Charisian-designed flare pistol. He squeezed the trigger, and a brilliant red flare arced into the night.
* * *
Captain Tyrnyr looked up from the dressing the healer was tying around his badly lacerated left thigh as the first red flare popped into the night. Even as he watched, another one blazed to life. Then a third … a fourth, raging like rainy curses in an arc around the Switch’s left flank.
Of course there are four of them, he thought past the pain flaring in his wounded leg. One for each of the lanes the bastards blew through the abatises. And if they turn our left, get between us and Zhonesberg.…
He pushed himself to his feet.
“Sir, I’m not done!” the healer snapped.
“Yes, you are,” Tyrnyr said distantly.
“Captain, you could lose that leg—assuming you don’t just bleed out first!”
“Later,” Tyrnyr said.
He took a step, his leg folded, and he started to fall, but a powerful arm caught him. He turned his head and saw Company Sergeant Stahdmaiyr.
“Healer’s right, Sir.” Stahdmaiyr’s voice was pitched low, although it was clearly audible now that the portable angle-guns fire had stopped pounding them. “Let him finish, fer God’s sake!”
“I know he’s right.” Tyrnyr smiled crookedly. “Unfortunately, I don’t think we’ve got time right now, Wylsynn.” He wrapped his left arm around the sergeant’s shoulders. “Get me the rest of the way to the command post—now.”
For an instant, Stahdmaiyr looked as if he was going to protest. But then he clamped his jaw and nodded, instead.
“Come with us,” he told the Pasqualate lay brother as his CO started hopping towards the CP. “Might be you can finish tidying up once we get there.”
* * *
The last flare blazed to furious crimson life, spilling tendrils of flame down the rainy night, and the Siddarmarkian drums rolled. Then the rifle-armed Volunteers started forward, bayonets gleaming in the star shells’ light, throwing back the bloody reflections of the flares, and the high, shivering war cry they’d adopted from their Charisian allies rose fierce and hungry into the downpour.
The 3rd Alyksberg Volunteers stormed forward into the sporadic riflefire of the stunned and shocked defenders behind a wave front of hand grenades.
* * *
“Stand your ground! Stand and give ’em hell!” Lieutenant Kartyr Clymyns shouted. “Stand, boys—stand!”
Clymyns’ 2nd Platoon held the line of trenches covering the Switch’s left flank. The company hadn’t been on its positions long enough to build the dugouts they really wanted, but the trenches—almost knee-deep with water in the rain—were chest-high and he’d laid out his firing lines with care. But no one had seen a single damned thing before the first star shell burst overhead, and then Shan-wei’s own fury had ripped a gap straight through the obstacles in front of his lines. How the hell had they gotten that frigging close? And what had happened to the men he’d had out there to prevent them from doing anything of the sort?
A spasm of grief tore through him at the thought, sharp as a slash lizard’s claw even through his desperate focus on the men around him, because he knew what had happened to those sentries.
“There, Sir!” Corporal Zhaikyb Sairaynoh, one of his runners shouted, pointing to the right. “Over there!”
“Shit!” Clymyns punched the muddy side of his trench as the assault came out of the dark into the glaring brilliance of the heretic star shells. That was no Charisian attack—it came forward in an almost solid mass, not in the individual waves the Charisians favored. That meant it was the Siddarmarkians, and—
“Alyksberg!” The deep-throated bellow sounded even through the rattle of drums and the crackle of the defenders’ rifles, as if confirming his thoughts. “Remember Alyksberg!”
“Get back to the Captain, Zhaikyb!” he shouted in the corporal’s ear. “Tell him they’re hitting the junction between us and Captain Yairdyn’s company!”
“Aye, Sir!” Sairaynoh slapped his breastplate in salute and vanished.
* * *
“At a run, boys! Take ’em at a run!” Captain Hytchkahk shouted. “Take ’em at a run—don’t stop!”
There was a time and a place for the Charisians’ finely developed assault tactics, and he and his men had learned a great deal from their allies. But there were still times and places for the traditional, unstoppable charge of the Siddarmarkian pikes, too … even if it was made with bayonets and grenades instead of pikes these days.
Third Section stormed forward—four hundred men, roaring their fury, driving straight into the rippling flashes of the Dohlaran rifles. He was losing people, he knew, but not nearly so many as he might have under other conditions. The heavy rain wasn’t doing the defenders’ rifles any favors, and he knew were having their share of misfires. There weren’t many of them, though, and shock and confusion were his men’s strongest allies.
“Go!” he shrieked. “Go for the fuckers’ throats!”
* * *
“Look out, Sir!”
Clymyns’ looked up as Adulf Wyznynt, his platoon bugler shouted the warning, and his eyes widened.
“Alyksberg! Alykskberg!”
A second Siddarmarkian column came storming in from the left on the wings of that shout, riding a tidal wave of exploding grenades. He heard the screams of wounded men—his men—as those grenades arced into their trenches and exploded among them. The front ranks of the column reached the outer trench line and its leading squads leapt down into the trenches, bayonets stabbing, while the ranks behind them simply hurdled the gap and kept right on coming in an obviously preplanned maneuver.
The lieutenant snatched at his double-barreled pistol with one hand and drew his sword with the other.
The 3rd Alyksberg Volunteers swept onward, each unstoppable column driving straight for its assigned objective, and the sudden violence and utter surprise was too much even for veteran troops. Dohlarans began to break from cover, started to fall back from the fury of grenades, the deadly gleam of bayonets gilded in the star shells’ spiteful brilliance, and the terrible threat of that battle cry. Only by ones and twos, at first, but Clymyns could feel the fight going out of his men, and his eyes were wild with fury and grief as he vaulted up out of his trench.
“Sound the charge, Adulf!” he shouted, then glared at the two squads of his reserve, staring up at him from the trench he’d left.
“Come on, boys!” He stabbed his sword at that oncoming wave of death as the bugle took up the urgent call. “With me!”