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"Captain, we have the hole closed again, but we can't really keep it plugged. Can we get some cavalry over here to handle the leakers?"
"Will do," Pahner responded as he prepared to call Rastar on another cha
"Just another glorious day in the Corps," the squad leader replied stonily, tracking his flechettes back across the shrieking barbarians. "Every day's a holiday."
"Yes," said the captain sadly. "Welcome to the Widow's Party."
"Still a stalemate," Bogess said. "We hold, and they do not quit. We could be here day after day."
"Oh, I think not," Pahner said dryly. "Roger obviously doesn't have the patience today for us to squat here in a game of chicken." He glanced at his pad, nodded, and keyed his communicator once again.
"Okay, Despreaux. It's about time."
The team had crept past the lightly defended encampment and down the reverse slope of the ridge. If anyone had looked hard for them, they would have been obvious, but none of the Boman were watching their own rear. Why should they? All of their enemies were in front of them, and so the Marines were overlooked, just a few more odd bits of flotsam left by the passing horde.
Until, that was, they calmly stood up at Pahner's command, took off their camouflage, and opened fire into the backs of the entire Boman force.
At first, their efforts were almost u
"Yes," Pahner whispered as the rear of the enemy formation started to peel away.
"They're ru
"They aren't ru
"But they haven't broken," Bogess protested.
"No? Just watch them," Pahner said. " 'And then along comes the Regiment, and shoves the heathen out.' "
Fain heard the drum command with disbelief, but he passed it on verbally, as he had been trained to do, to ensure that the punch-drunk soldiers had the orders.
"Prepare to advance!" he bawled wearily.
His arms felt like stones from holding the pike for what seemed like all day, poking it into the screaming, twitching dummies-or so his mind told him. And now the command to advance. Madness. The enemy was as thick as a wall; there was nowhere to advance to.
The New Model Army's losses had been incredibly light. The front rank of his company had only lost a handful, the next rank less. Of his own squad, only Bail Crom had fallen, but to advance on the enemy, who'd stood their ground the entire day, was impossible.
He knew that, and nonetheless he took his pike firmly in hand and prepared to step forward to the beat. It was all that was left in his world-the Pavlovian training the human sadists had put them all through.
"You know, Boss," Kileti gasped, slithering down the slope toward the distant canal, "I used to wonder why we were always ru
"Yeah? Well, as long as we don't twist an ankle in our court shoes," Despreaux managed to chuckle grimly.
It seemed that all the hounds of Hell were on their trail as they approached the canal. But the rope bridge-the blessed, blessed rope bridge-was in place as promised, with a gri
"Permission to get the hell out of here, Sir?" the Mardukan called as the Marines thundered towards him.
"Just don't get in my fucking way," St. John (J.) yelled, leaping for the ropes as the rest of the team clambered on behind him.
"Not a problem," Denat said, inserting himself into the midst of the team. The team had split into two groups and taken opposite sides of the two-rope bridge, each group leaning out to balance the other side. The much more massive Mardukan was a bit of a hassle, but not too terribly so.
"What's to keep them from crossing the canal?" Kileti asked. "I mean, we cut the rope once we're on the other side, sure. But, hell, it's not that wide. You can swim the damn thing."
"Well, Yutang and his little plasma ca
"You're kidding," Despreaux said. "Right?"
"About Tratan carrying the bead ca
"This is go
"Are we having fun yet?" Julian asked. The rear of the Boman force might have run off in pursuit of the recon team, but a solid core of the front ranks had stood against the advance of the pikes so far. He was fairly sure what Pahner would use to break the stalemate.
"Julian," his communicator crackled. "Get in there and convince them that they don't want to stand there."
The four armored figures advanced through the open salient toward the Boman force to their front. That area already had a slice cut out of it, a line written in blood on the ground, beyond which only the most stupid and aggressive barbarian passed. Briefly.
Now the Marines opened that hole wider, firing their weapons in careful, ammunition-conserving bursts. The dreadful fusillade cleared a zone deep enough for them to actually pass the front of their own forces and step onto ground held by the Boman.
The friable soil was greasy with body fluids blasted from the Marines' previous targets, and their path was choked with the results. But the powered armor made little of such minor nuisances, crunching through the hideous carnage until the four turned the corner and pivoted to face the flank of the Boman still massed before the Diaspran pikes.
Once again, the armor burped plasma and darts, soaking the ground in blood and turning the churned field of the watershed into an abattoir.
"You know," Pahner mused as the cavalry sallied out in pursuit of the Boman force, "if that pike regiment hadn't broken, it would've been a lot harder to get the armor into the middle of the Boman. That's a case of the fog of war working for you."
"So now what?" Bogess asked.
"The force that took off after the recon team will be pi
He gestured in the direction of the pursuing cavalry.
"We'll put in a pursuit. They'll break up in the face of the civan forces; they don't have polearms of their own, so they'll have to. We'll follow up with the rest of the pikes, and any groups the cavalry can't hammer into feck-shit, we'll hit with the pikes and armor. Next week, the Wespar Boman will be a memory."
Bogess looked out over the field strewn with corpses. There was an obscenely straight line of them where the two forces had grappled throughout the long day. They were piled in blood-oozing windrows, yet there weren't really that many bodies for a fight which had lasted so many hours. But the field beyond that line more than compensated. The ground there was littered with them where the Northern cavalry had ruthlessly cut down the fleeing barbarians.
"Why don't I feel happy about that?" he asked.
"Because you're still human," Pahner replied, and the native general turned to him with a quizzical expression.
"You mean Mardukan, don't you?"
"Yeah," Pahner said, watching the prince's flar-ta disappear over the crest of the far ridge with the Northerners. "Whatever."