"Reload, canister!"
Minatelli himself reloaded, pausing to snap the ramp under his rear sight down to two hundred meters. The rifle was foul after more than two dozen shots, and the metal scorched his callused thumb as he shoved home the next round. The recoil was worse now too, and his shoulder would be sporting a fine bruise tomorrow, assuming he was here to feel it. Massed carbine fire pecked at the rock outside, some of it uncomfortably close. A round whined through the firing slit, the flattened lead going whip-whip-whip as the miniature metal pancake sliced air. It could slice him as easily. He bounced back up, picked a target, fired, ducked back down to reload.
Spirit. He was glad he was in here and not out there. There were as many wogs down as moving.
"Hold 'em, boys, or we're all hareem guards!" he called, and fired again.
Again. The cannon fired a third time, or was it the tenth? No way to tell. Smoke hung dense and choking, turning the ground outside the walls into a fog-shrouded mystery where crimson shapes dashed and bunched. The Colonials were nearly to the edge of the outer works, kicking their way through the caltrops-triangles of welded nails scattered through grass deliberately left to grow knee-high. Some distant part of Minatelli was amazed that men would slow down in the face of rifle fire to avoid getting a nail in the foot, but many did.
Then the cannon from the projecting bastions cut loose. Each V-shaped protrusion took hundreds of meters of wall in enfilade, dozens of cannon sweeping the ground with loads of heavy canister. Most of them were carronades, short big-bore weapons like gigantic shotguns. Not much range, but they didn't need it.
Minatelli paused to let his rifle cool a bit with the lever open, gulped water from a bucket down a throat as raw as if it had been reamed out with a steel brush. Drops fell on the metal of the breechblock and sizzled. When the smoke cleared enough for him to see again, he reloaded and aimed at one of a pair of Arabs dragging a wounded comrade back with them. He shot, reloaded. .
"Cease fire! Cease fire!"
The bugles reached him where the shouted command did not. His finger froze on the trigger, and he worked the lever and caught the ejected shell. His fingers were black with powder residue, and it coated his lips, tasting of sulfur when he licked them. There were more dead wogs outside than he could count, coating the ground in sprays and swaths back toward the enemy works, bobbing in the moat below amid the wreckage of wooden bridging equipment and ladders. More up and down the foot of the wall. In places the carpet of bodies stirred and moaned; there were so many he could smell the blood-and-shit stink of ripped-open bodies all the way up here.
He took another drink of water and left his rifle lying on the stone firing slot, lever open. "Sound off!" he called. Then he trotted over to the platoon commander's station.
"Sor! Two dead, three wounded serious." That included the two sections of garrison infantry his eight men were overseeing. "Ev'ryone else ready for duty."
The lieutenant was a good enough sort, a bit young. He looked out through the slit next to him and returned his unused revolver to its holster. Perhaps because he was young, he spoke aloud:
"They thought they could rush us. No respect."
"Plenty now, sor."
The young officer nodded, unconsciously smoothing down a wispy mustache. "Yes. Now they'll try starving us out."
Spirit, Minatelli thought.
There hadn't been much but men, dogs, weapons, and ammunition in the trains that brought them east. Sandoral had been full of hungry refugees for a week before they got here, and the invasion had disrupted the harvest.
* * *
"Messers, to fallen comrades."
As youngest of the senior officers present, Bartin Foley gave the toast in the three-quarters diluted wine. They all drank.
"Messers, the Governor." Raj gave that, and they tossed aside the clay cups.
As if to remind them of the fallen, a man screamed from the tent nearby where the wounded were being tended. Casualties had been light by every reasonable standard except that of the men whose own personal flesh had been torn and bones been shattered. Suzette was present, but her sleeves were rolled to the elbows and there was still blood spattered down the front of her jacket.
"I gather we won't be trying to take Ain el-Hilwa, mi heneral," Staenbridge said.
"Of course not; what would we do with it?" Raj said. He tapped the map on the table before them. "Messers, we'll split up into the same three raiding parties-Major Swarez, you'll accompany the center group with me" — Osterville's ex-follower nodded-"and Major Hwadeloupe, you'll be attached to Major Gruder's command.
"We'll head south by southeast along this axis." He traced it on the map. "Keeping west of the Ghor Canal."
"Our objective is the railway?" Staenbridge said, tracing it with one finger.
The scouts had given them a definite bearing; it came straight west from the main Colonial line along the Gederosian foothills.
observe, Center said.
* * *
A train screeched to a halt, sparks fountaining out from the tall driving wheel of the locomotive. It was a new machine, painted in black and silver, with Arabic calligraphy along the sides in gilt paint and up the tall slender smokestack. Behind it were a dozen cars, the last an armored box with a pom-pom mounted on a turntable behind a shield; thirty or so riflemen poked their weapons out of slits in the boilerplate that sheathed it. The other cars held sections of track, already spiked to cross-ties, piled up in stacks and secured by chains. Another train halted behind the first. This one had boxcars full of men and tools.
They boiled out, their officers waving the ceremonial lash and shouting; there was more noise than a comparable group of Civil Government soldiers would have made, but no more confusion. Teams jogged forward and undogged the chains holding the first train's cargo. They set up a light folding crane and lowered the sections of preformed track to the ground; other teams lifted them with iron hooks and trotted forward, keeping step with a wailing chant.
Ahead of the two trains was a section of wrecked track a quarter-kilometer long. Engineers gave the roadbed a quick check with levels and transit; gangs of workers shoved the burnt, twisted ties and rails to one side. The prefabricated sections were dropped in place and the hookmen went back for another load at the same steady trot. Another team slewed the tracks into alignment with long poles like gunners' handspikes and bolted them together.
Raj shook his head. "There aren't enough of us, and we don't have enough time," he said. "The Colonial sappers can repair track faster than we can tear it up-until Tewfik can get back here. The major bridges will be heavily guarded. But we want him to think we're a threat to the railway line, and by all means tear up any stretch you reach."
"What news from Sandoral?" Staenbridge said.
"Ali put in a quick attack when he arrived in force, and when that didn't work he tried a full assault with engineering and artillery support. Total losses of four to five thousand, including wounded too badly hurt to return to duty soon. Our casualties were very light."
"My, my. I wouldn't like to be on Ali's staff right now,"
Visions crawled beneath the surface of Raj's vision; beheadings, impalements. Ali was quite mad.
"Gerrin," he said, "neither would I. He's still got forty thousand effectives, not counting his infantry garrisons." They had seven thousand cavalry, and three thousand infantry in all.
"More goblets than bottles at this banquet," Staenbridge agreed.
If there wasn't enough wine to fill all the glasses at table, beyond a certain point juggling the liquid from one glass to another wouldn't help.