The enemy infantry were further back yet, kneeling in ranks that stretched down along the road toward the tent-city of their camp. An occasional shell cleared the rise and exploded among the closer of them; men opened out like flowers around the blast-centers, but there was no motion except for the wounded and the stretcher-teams. Every few minutes a trumpet would sound, flags dip, and a new battalion column would surge to its feet and trot toward the hill and over it, more men being fed into the Colonist attack on the left flank of Raj's position. Infantry now, not the dismounted elite whose dogs waited with their reins spiked to the ground.
"We're waiting until the ragheads are bent over concentrating," Kaltin continued. "All their attention nicely fixed. Raj will tell us when." He grinned, conscious of the slight pain of the scars that made his face ugly when his muscles pulled, but for once he did not mind; his mind was rerunning over and over again the sight of Evrard falling with half his torso gone. "And then we just run right up behind and buttfuck them."
* * *
Thud.
Howitzer shell, Raj thought; they had a tendency to bury themselves deep before they exploded. Much louder up here on the roof of the redoubt, surrounded only by the sandbags and boiler-plate of the observation post, but at least you did not have to hug the ground and cough in the dust it shook down from the timbers above you. . One plunging shell had opened a crater in the trenchline a half-kilometer to his left; through the binoculars he saw panicked infantry pouring out of the shattered fortification, running toward the rear and throwing down their rifles. The next volley from the bunker of the cavalry battalion behind them tore into their ranks; one more, and they turned and ran back to the trench before a fear greater and more certain than the shells or the attack rolling down the long slope towards them.
The cavalry positions were still volleying, crisp and neatly spaced. Far too many of the infantry positions in the front rank were showing a wild crackle of rapid individual fire through the thickening clouds of smoke, and far too many of the guns there had fallen silent under the hammer from the ridge. He hesitated for a long moment, looking to his right; the infantry there were silent, out of range or blocked by the bulk of the redoubt from bearing on the attack hitting the left of the position. The guns were throwing shot and smoke toward the Colonist positions, but only in long-distance counterbattery fire. He swallowed past a raw throat and thrust head and shoulders through the trapdoor, down into the gun-platform of the redoubt.
WHUMMP. WHUUMP. WHUUMP. The massive fortress guns fired; this time the crews threw buckets of water on the barrels before they spunged, and the metallic steam that sizzled off the glowing metal gave a swamp-sauna tang to air already superheated from the muzzle blasts. The crews were stripped to the waist now, their colorful jackets thrown down and trampled underfoot, bodies striped, powder-black, showing the natural brown where sweat had cut through the clinging grim, splotches of red where boiling droplets had rained back from the guns.
"Dinnalsyn!" Raj shouted. "Gerrin!"
The gunner arrived before the cavalryman; a page full of scribbled calculations was clutched in one hand, and a ranging instrument in the other.
"Sir!"
"We need more fire support on the left flank," Raj yelled. "It's not going to hold. Have the guns switch to cannister at three hundred meters, send a runner-" Dinnalsyn nodded "-and then go yourself, limber up all the mobile guns on the right flank-" the 75's, the breechloading field guns "-and run them over to the left; prepare to receive armored vehicles."
A hesitation; the communications road behind the flanks of the Civil Government position was protected by heaped spoil from the fieldworks, but it had no overhead protection, and the guns would be hammered mercilessly by the Colonist firing line. The counterbattery exchange had gone against the enemy so far despite their numbers, but that was largely because of the superior protection of his guns. In the open, hitched to dogs driven frantic by the noise and smell of death. .
"Do it, do it now," Raj said. Dinnalsyn nodded and left at a run, calling to his staff.
"Raj?" Gerrin's face.
"Take a look." The other man swarmed up the ladder and looked left.
The Colonist attack was sweeping down the slope toward them. A line would bob erect and dash forward, five seconds, six; then they dove for the earth, their carbines snapping; the men behind leapfrogged them, and the maneuver would be repeated. There was no cover to speak of on the bare scraggly silt of the hill; even the occasional scrub bush had been uprooted while the Army of the Upper Drangosh dug in. Shellfire plowed through the ranks, shrapnel whined and lashed dust from the ground in pocked circles; wounded men rolled into shell craters and were blasted out again in gobbets as fresh explosive fell from the sky. A kilometer to cover under artillery fire, and then another to advance through the killzone of six thousand rifles, and still they came. .
Raj focused on the crest. More banners marching over in a continuous stream, deploying and surging forward; infantry now, the second wave. One unit wavered when it saw what waited below, the drifts and tumbled windrows of bodies, still or screaming and moving feebly, half-hidden by the patchy cloud of gunsmoke that covered the whole length of ground from dry stream bed to crest. The officers' whips glittered as they whirled, and a pompom slewed to blast a string of craters at their heels; the men hunched their shoulders as if walking into a storm of sleet, and plodded forward.
"Spirit of Man, but those are good troops," Gerrin said, watching the front rank of Colonists dash forward another ten meters.
"No," Suzette said loudly behind them. "I don't want them to be brave. Kill them all." They gave her a glance; the slanted green eyes were fixed, not seeing da Cruz nod agreement beside her.
"Gerrin, the infantry's wavering. Take da Cruz, get down there, get them volleying again." If they did not, half the rifles would overheat and jam, dippers of water or no. Perhaps I should shift Jorg from the right-No, Jamal had enough reserves to launch an attack there, too, he needed someone rock-steady to hold that flank with half their guns pulled out. "Tell them I have absolute confidence in them."
Fifteen minutes, Raj thought as Gerrin and the Master Sergeant dropped through the trapdoors. Kaltin would need that, to get his men into place through that brush.
"Rockets," he barked. The trooper on the other side of the pillbox had a cigar clenched between his teeth; he removed it, blew on the end until the ember glowed and thrust it through the firing slit, touching the wicks of the three signal rockets outside. They shot skyward with a hooosh that was lost in the cannonade, but the crimson bursts would be visible as far as Sandoral and the Colonist encampment behind the ridge.
"Well, that's it, he muttered to himself. All that could be done, had been done. .
The beetling shapes of the Colonist armored cars lurched over the crest of the ridge, grinding and sliding down toward him; their engines threw a haze of black fumes above the riveted iron hulls. They were moving to the left, all the enemy formations had done that. If nothing else, it got them out of the path of fire from the Skinners to the right of the redoubt faster. .
"En boon, mes garz!"
His head turned right, and his helmet clanked on the boiler plate around the slit as he scrambled to see. The right-wing Skinners were on the move, boiling out of their trenches and climbing the roof of the redoubt. Some continued all the way across it, whooping and laughing as they ran to join the band of their fellows to the left of the fort. Others were unwilling to wait that long, or perhaps to fight beside men of hostile clans; they stopped at the edge of the redoubt, standing to brace their long guns on the crossed shooting sticks, or kneeling. One of the armored cars lurched, pinpricks of light flashing from the soft iron armor as the 15mm bullets skidded over its surface or punched through. It stopped, slewing; orange tongues belched out of the firing slits and the pintle mount of the pompom in its bows, and then it blew apart in a globe of orange fire as the fuel from its ruptured tanks sprayed into the flames of the fighting compartment.