Men were falling, too, but the other armored cars continued; a dozen of them rattling down the slope toward him. Wounded Colonists crawled aside, or vanished under the tall metal wheels. The pompoms of the fighting vehicles were beginning to snap out single shots at the Civil Government artillery in the firing line; the guns had shifted to cannister, plowing wedges of lead shot through the Colonist ranks, but no menace to the men behind armor. The front ranks of the enemy advance were more ragged now, remnants of a dozen battalions mixed among those closing to within three hundred meters. Their carbine fire was more effective now, men gaining confidence as they sensed an end to their ordeal. At close range their numbers and magazine rifles would slaughter the Civil Government soldiers, and the trench that protected them now would only serve to hold them in place as targets. Behind them banners slanted as the follow-up waves rose to their feet and ran forward, lines like waves beating toward a storm-locked shore, waves that screamed like files on stone.
The Colonist artillery began to fall silent, as their own men masked the Civil Government line.
* * *
"Fire." Kaltin shouted, slashing downward with his sword. Getting the men up here had taken less time than he had expected, but it would not be long before the wogs noticed, even with their attention locked on the other side of the ridge. The Colonist army had a fair assortment of uniforms, but none of their units wore round helmets, blue jackets, maroon pants. . or carried a banner with a Starburst topping the pole.
BAM-BAM-BAM-BAM-BAM-BAM. The 7th Rangers rose from the edge of the scrub and caught the flank of the column surging up toward the ridge.
BAM-BAM-BAM-BAM-BAM-BAM. Men running cheering to victory shuddered to a halt, even though safety now lay ahead of them. Shouts turned to screams; the impact of unexpected danger is always greater than that of one a man has steeled himself to face. And they sent in the best troops on this flank first, Kaltin thought coldly, as the rifles barked again. These are the ones they kept back to feed in and give weight to a successful push. Got to keep moving, don't let them realize what's happening.
BAM-BAM-BAM-BAM-BAM-BAM. A gun on the ridge ahead turned and fired toward the Civil Government force which had appeared, impossibly, where no enemy could be.
"Mount!" Kaltin shouted. The 7th scrambled into the saddles of their crouching dogs, slinging the rifles over their shoulders for want of time to scabbard them. Steel hissed free, flashing all along the line.
"Trumpeter, sound charge." Dogs howled, thunder-loud, over the shouts of their riders. "Hell or plunder, dog-brothers-now!"
"UP AND AT 'EM."
* * *
"Now! Commander says now!"
Barton Foley started violently at the hand on his shoulder; he had been standing just behind the forward line as they stepped up onto the parapet and volley-fired to the left. The forward section of the redoubt could rake the whole first rank of the Colonist advance now, they were so close to the Civil Government trenches; shots from the Skinners on the roof were killing three and four men at a time.
He pulled his eyes from the hypnotizing clamor; the other platoon-commanders and noncoms could handle it as well. Barton stepped back with the front rank; the second pushed past him, leveling their rifles as they braced to the firing slits. Foley turned; the two troopers assigned to it were already pumping at the arms of the portable generator with a grinding of iron gears and a rising whine from the clumsy hand-wound armatures. Three scissor-switches were tacked to an improvised board, each of them running back to three copper wires. The wires fanned out, disappearing between sandbags and into the meter depth of dirt that covered each of them.
The young man braced his hand against the wooden handle of the first switch. I hope nothing cut the lines, he thought. I really, really do.
His palm slapped down, and a fat blue spark snapped.
* * *
The explosion from the Colonist gun line was loud enough to carry even over the noise of the battle; a pale sphere of fire rose behind the silent guns and flung things that might have been human into the air. That's an ammunition dump going off, Raj thought, with sudden wild relief. Kaltin. Running figures appeared among the guns, and others among them, on dogback, swords glittering as they cut.
A pompom round from one of the armored cars slapped into the sandbags of the observation post, with enough force to toll against the iron core below. Raj felt something well up from his chest past his neck, white and cold; it cleared his grit-filled eyes, and made the world go sharply clear. He walked to the barred door at the rear of the pillbox and kicked it open.
"Signaller, standard-bearer, follow me," he said, stepping out over the body of a dead Skinner. Live ones raised a whoop to see him, their fire raking the Colonist line. It had reached the edge of the Civil Government's left flank now, and the foremost men in jellabas were sticking the muzzles of their carbines up into the firing slits from the dead ground immediately below, working the levers and firing blind into the trenches. Bayonets probed back for them, and vanished again as the armored cars came forward to pound point-blank. The Colonial attack might yet succeed, simply because the first wave were too busy to notice what was happening.
"Look back, you stupid wog bastards," Raj roared, as he strode to the edge of the blockhouse. Bullets went by with a continuous crack-crack, and the standard bearer fell to his knees with a coughing grunt. Another of the color-party snatched the pole before it could fall and followed. A woman's voice behind him, "Raj, no-"
That didn't matter now. "Behind you, you raghead idiots! Behind you!" His sword chopped toward the Settler's banner on the hill to the south. "Look south, they're behind you."
A few men actually looked up. It was the explosion of the first armored car that really caught their attention, however; it shattered noisily, spattering hot metal and burning fuel along a hundred meters of the trenchline to either side, catching the men it had been supporting. Raj looked north, and saw the second and third of the 75's galloping out from behind the mounds that sheltered the communications road, slowing and wheeling into firing positions level with the cavalry bunkers a few score meters behind the trenchline. One went over from a too-sharp turn, bouncing and flipping end-over-end as the crew flew off in screaming arcs and the dogs twisted in their harness under the inertia of a tonne of moving metal. But the others were firing, belching knives of orange flame over open sights as they came to bear on the Colonial armor. Another armored car blew up, and then another.
A fougasse fired, far to the left. The bursting charge was not large, only ten kilos of powder, but it was enough to spray a huge fan of burning oil and naphtha across the hillside into the faces of the Colonist second wave. The sound was a loud diffuse fffumph, as men ran screaming and burning across the barren earth. Ffumph, as the next went, then fifteen more, spaced at intervals all across the left flank, two hundred meters out. Not many men were actually caught in the flames, but the sight of human torches running back towards them was the last unbearable thing for the follow-up waves; they turned and ran, screaming, shooting or hacking down the officers who tried to stop them. Even then, the Colonials who had made it beyond the line of flame-weapons hesitated. Another armored car went up in a crash, sending a pillar of smoke like nothing else on the battlefield into the sky; the rest began to pull back as.rapidly as they could, and the soldiers followed, throwing down their rifles and running.