Against the Tide of Years

He looked over to his left, to the range of rocky hills. A little further away than he'd like, but ground was ground-you couldn't rearrange it to suit. He might not have the numbers required to simply overwhelm the enemy, but he did have a card up his sleeve.

That was your one really bad mistake, he thought at the enemy commander. Too eager. Too convinced that he had to move forward with maximum speed to snap up the tempting target of an isolated Nantucketer force. You should have scouted the whole area thoroughly- used your Hittites for it.

Ke

I'm not the only one who had a surprise up his sleeve, he knew with angry self-reproach.

"All units, go to ground and take cover," he barked into the handset. "Rocket bombardment incoming!"

The staff and ru

He dropped into the bottom of the narrow trench and brought knees to chin, letting his flared helmet cover as much of him as possible. Now it was simply luck. The sky overhead shrieked as if in torment, and then the multiple CrackCrackCrackCrack and surf-roar of impact began.

"First Kar-Duniash!" he shouted into the receiver.

"Here." Kathryn Hollard's voice, calm but with an underlying tension.

"Go for it, Sis. Those things can reload fast-he can punish us and pull out behind it."

"Will do."

The doctor and the asu came to their feet, brushing themselves off. Justin Clemens looked around; there was a crater in the empty land two hundred yards away, but nobody seemed to be hurt. Not here; up north the sky was woven with a web of smoke trails and a continuous rippling roar of explosions.

They would be very busy soon. Justin Clemens felt his hands begin to tremble and his breath grow short. Elevated blood pressure and stress, he told himself, which helped very little.

"Ms. Azzu-ena," he croaked.

She looked at him, dark eyes alert; she knew that meant formality, in English.

"Wwww… Would you please marry me?"

Her eyes flared wide; whatever she'd been expecting, it wasn't that. Then they filled with tears, and she opened her mouth to reply.

"Here they come! "

The cry brought their heads up. Horse-drawn ambulances were jouncing down the rough ground from the north, toward the laagered wagons and the tents. They turned and dashed back into the operating theater, heading for the vats of disinfectant.

"I have no dowry!" she hissed, as they ran their arms under the stream.

"I wouldn't say that," he said. "I wouldn't say that at all."

We're nearly behind them, Kathryn Hollard thought.

The enemy advance had swept past the hiding place of her force. But they had three-quarters of a mile to cover before they reached the position where rocket launchers were vomiting fire back at the Islanders. One had blown up in a spectacular globe of red-gold flame as it was being reloaded, but that left five. The wind swept smoke toward them, smelling of burnt sulfur and death.

"Men of the First Kar-Duniash!" she said, looking down the line.

Eight hundred of them, crouching with their bearded faces turned first toward the sounds of battle and then toward her. God knows, there are times when I wanted you all dropped into hell and the door locked and the key in Dr. Hong's pocket, she thought. She had hung four in Babylon for rape and looting during the street fighting, and then she'd had to pistol the brother of one of the convicted when he tried to murder her.

"For your king and your salt and given oaths," she said. "The battle cry is Kashtiliash! Now follow me!"

She scrambled forward, and there was a multiple clatter and scrape of hobnails on rock; they were following. Kathryn felt her breath release; after Babylon she'd been fairly sure-but there they were under the eye of their prince. On either side the line shook itself out, two-deep and spread out-nothing fancy, but it wound over the irregularities of the ground like a living serpent tipped with a glittering line of steel points. The months in the desert hadn't been wasted, then.

They were down onto the flat, and all she could see was the smoke and distant figures, all she could hear was the crackle of rifles, the thudding bark of artillery, the hiss of the rockets like an angry cat larger than worlds.

"Trumpeter, sound Double time," she said. The notes rang out, brassy and sweet in the hot, dry air. We're coming, big brother.

A gun suddenly swiveled around and turned toward her; despite the distance, the muzzle looked big enough to swallow her head. A flash of flame-shot smoke, the rising whistle sound, and it burst over the ranks to her left. Men tumbled and fell, still or writhing like broken-backed lizards in a cat's jaws.

"Trumpeter, sound Fire and advance."

The first rank went to one knee, and their rifles came up. A staccato ripple of fire and smoke ran down the line as four hundred rifles fired, and then their wielders were going through their loading drill. She trotted through the rotten-egg-smelling fogbank of their discharge and saw the second rank dash through the first and run ten yards ahead, going to one knee in their turn. Men were turning their way in the enemy ahead, pulling back like a door swinging. The enemy commander was refusing his flank, turning his formation into an L as he pulled back, with the short end facing her. Facing her, the men in it prone and shooting back.

A weapon like a fat ca

"Trumpeter, sound Charge'. Kashtiliash! Kashtiliash!" "KASHTILIASH!"

She swept out her Python pistol and cocked it with her thumb.

"Charge! Charge!"

Ke

"Good work," he said, and then switched to the Sun People tongue of Alba. "You fought well, warrior."

"Pithair," she murmured, smiling faintly. That meant "father," and he didn't think she was invoking her god. He was certain when she went on, "Is it well, at last, Father? "

"Dahig 'tair, " he began. Guess she's seeing someone else, he thought, laying a hand on the clammy coldness of her forehead. "Daughter, it is very well."

She sighed and closed her eyes, and the bearers carried her up the ramp and into the long gondola, fitting her stretcher into the racks and transferring her IV to the holder. Lieutenant Vicki Cofflin came back from the control stations in the bow, turning sideways to pass a corps-man doing something to one of the wounded. A sharp smell drifted backward under the exhaust fumes of the idling engines; it was the odor of disinfectant, and somehow of pain.

God, I hate visiting the wounded. You had to, of course; men and women in pain needed to know that they were valued for what they'd done.