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Left to himself, he was almost certain, he would have called off the attack. Even now, he was far from convinced that continuing the attack was the proper decision. But there was really only one way to find out, and the two thousand had the intestinal fortitude to do just that.
He's right about the defensive advantages of this particular chokepoint, too ... if we manage to pull it off after all, Toralk thought.
"All right, Sir," he said. "Let me go get with my staff for a few minutes and I'll be able to tell you what we've got to try again with."
"—then tell Master-Armsman chan Garath to get some more men on that fire," Regiment-Captain chan Skrithik said, pointing at the flames and thick, dense smoke pouring from the southeastern tower. The interior of the structure was burning now, although there wasn't actually that much in it that was flammable. He wasn't that concerned over the possibility that the fire might spread, but the gap all those roaring flames and dense smoke left in their defenses worried him quite a lot, considering that their limited infantry and field artillery strength was all concentrated west of the fort.
"Yes, Sir!" The ru
The Crown Prince had scarcely moved. Even during the aerial assault on the fort itself, he'd stood there, motionless, gray eyes unfocused on anything of the physical world about him. Not even the falcon on his shoulder had stirred, despite all the sound, fury and confusion swirling about them. The peregrine had been as still as a bird carved from stone, as if its human companion's total, focused concentration had reached out and enveloped it, as well.
Chan Skrithik felt awed by the realization that he was seeing something very few people had ever witnessed: the legendary Talent of the Caliraths in action. Yet there was more than just awe inside the regiment-captain. There was desperate worry, concern for the safety of the young man who would one day wear the Winged Crown.
For all his years of service, all his hard-won experience and competence, Rof chan Skrithik's military service had been peacetime service, and he'd never seen anything like the last hour of chaos and destruction. In less than ten minutes, those diving monstrosities had killed more men than chan Skrithik had seen die in his entire previous military career, and they'd been his men. In the process, he'd discovered that it was something no man could truly prepare himself for ahead of time. The sense that he had somehow failed his men by not keeping them alive, that he would have lost fewer of them if only he'd been smarter, better, rolled around somewhere in the depths of his soul. His intellect knew better, knew no Sharonian had ever even imagined the possibility of facing this sort of attack, that no one could have prepared better. But this was a subject where intellect and emotions were scarcely even on speaking terms, and he knew it was going to take him a long, long time to resolve those feelings ... assuming he ever could resolve them.
That, however, was something the future was going to have to take care of in its own good time. For the present, more pressing worries and responsibilities pushed that concern out of the forefront of his mind.
And one of those worries was the way Crown Prince Janaki had insisted upon standing in this exposed position high atop the fortress wall.
He stepped towards the prince, reaching out one hand to urge him to at least climb down from the gun platform, but someone else's hand touched his own shoulder first.
The regiment-captain twitched in surprise. Then he turned his head, and Chief-Armsman Lorash chan Braikal shook his head with a small, sad smile.
"No, Sir," the Marine said softly. "Begging your pardon, but it wouldn't do any good."
"Chief," chan Skrithik told Janaki's senior noncom quietly, "I can't just leave him up here. Not after seeing all of this!" He jerked his head at the smoke, the fires, the corpsmen and their volunteer civilian assistants carrying broken and savagely burned bodies to Company-Captain Krilar's infirmary. "We've got to get him under cover."
"No, Sir." Chan Braikal's voice was respectful, but he shook his head again.
If he'd thought about it, chan Skrithik might have been surprised. No Ternathian officer with more brains than a rock ever doubted that while officers might command, it was the tough, experienced core of longservice noncoms who actually ran the Empire's military. Yet it was unusual, to say the very least, for one of those noncoms to argue with a full regiment-captain at a time like this ... or about something like this.
As if any of us had ever experienced "something" like this in the first place!
The thought flickered somewhere down inside, and chan Skrithik cocked his head questioningly.
"That's not how Glimpses work, Sir." Chan Braikal's expression, chan Skrithik realized, was just as worried as his own, and the chief-armsman's voice was rough-edged. "I got a sort of crash course about his family's Talent before he took over the Platoon," the noncom continued. "What he's doing now—it's called 'fugue state,' Sir. And for it to work, he has to be at what they call the 'nexus.'"thinspace""
""thinspace"'Nexus,'"thinspace"" chan Skrithik repeated carefully.
"Yes, Sir." Chan Braikal took off his helmet and tucked it under his left arm so that he could run the fingers of his right hand through his short, sweat-soaked hair in a gesture which shouted the depth of his worry more eloquently than any words. "The nexus is the place where whatever it is that makes his Talent work ... flows together most strongly."
It seemed to the regiment-captain that chan Braikal was trying to find the exact words to express something that didn't really lend itself well to explanations.
"Sir," the chief-armsman said earnestly, "I never expected to see this. Gods! I never wanted to see it, because they told me that if I did, the shit would be neck-deep and rising fast, begging your pardon. But the thing is, for him to go into fugue state at all, he has to be in exactly the right place. No one else can tell where that 'right place' is. Triad—he couldn't've told you ahead of time, most likely. And that place could change, even in the middle of a Glimpse. But until it does, it's where he has to stay, and you won't be able to move him."
"I've never heard anything like that, Chief." It could have sounded accusatory, but it didn't. "According to all the legends—"
"Sir," chan Braikal gri
Chan Skrithik heard the desperate unhappiness in the Marine's voice. Chan Braikal didn't want his Crown Prince—and a young man to whom he was obviously and deeply devoted—standing on this wall any more than Rof chan Skrithik did.
"I see, Chief." Chan Skrithik laid a hand on chan Braikal's shoulder. "I wish he'd explained that to me earlier."
"With all due respect, Sir, I think he probably figured that if he had, you'd've kicked us out before the bastards attacked."
"Maybe I would have," chan Skrithik admitted, and chan Braikal shrugged again.
"Maybe I wish you had, too, Sir. Gods know I wanted to argue with him about it. But he told me he has to be here, and somehow, when he says that, you just can't ..."
Chan Braikal's voice trailed off and he shook his head in a helpless, bemused gesture chan Skrithik understood perfectly. He hadn't been prepared for the sheer force of Janaki's presence, either. Nor was he any more confident than chan Braikal of his ability to argue with the crown prince's decisions, and so he only smiled sadly and squeezed the chief-armsman's shoulder.
"Well, in that case, Chief, we'll just have to see to it that we keep him in one piece, won't we?"
"All right, Sir," Klayrman Toralk said. "Here's what we've got left."
He copied the files in his own crystal to Two Thousand Harshu's and waited while Harshu's quick, fierce eyes darted over the information. The two thousand digested it with his customary speed, then looked back up at Toralk.
"I remember your saying the gryphon-handlers were worried about their control spells."
"Yes, Sir. And they still are—worried, I mean. But they still don't have anything concrete to point to, either. I didn't want to use them before because, on the basis of our previous experience, neither Five Hundred Myr nor I thought we'd need them. Obviously, we were wrong."
"So was I," Harshu reminded him. The two thousand's tone was slightly absent as he looked back over Toralk's hastily recorded notes.
"Are you sure about bringing Urlan's transports in this close?" he asked after a moment.
"According to the maps, both of the designated LZs should be dead ground from their observed positions."
"Agreed. But don't forget that their artillery isn't like ours, Klayrman. They don't necessarily need direct lines of sight to their targets."
"Yes, Sir. I tried to allow for that by placing them far enough from their main position to be out of their range."
"I understand. Unfortunately, we've already encountered at least one weapon—those big, rotating things on the walls—that we'd never seen before. I'm not inclined to assume they don't have other, longerranged weapons we also haven't met up with before."
"Well," Toralk brought up his own copy of the information and paged through to a map generated from the Sharonian charts captured at Fort Ghartoun. "We could put them here or here, instead," he said, using his stylus to drop a pair of crosshairs onto the map. "Both spots are further from the fort, so Urlan's cavalry would have further to go, but there's a steep, solid mountain slope between both of them and the fort. From what we've seen tinkering around with those captured 'mortars' of theirs, I don't think even their weapons could drop something in that close on a reverse slope that steep."