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"Casualties," he rasped, reaching for the canteen at his saddlebow.

"Eighty dead or as good as," Signe said. "One hundred thirty too badly wounded to fight. Let me see your arm."

"Well, shit," Havel said.

Christ Jesus, we lost over a fifth of our effectives in fifteen minutes – He checked his watch; it had actually been more like an hour. All right, an hour. It's barely noon. And we barely killed more of them than they did of us; we lost a lot of crossbows when they made that breakthrough. I can't afford to trade at that ratio.

"Messengers," he said. "To company commanders: consolidate to the right."

Which would leave a great big gap between the far left of his line and the artillery and the A-listers, but they had to do it; one in five of the people he'd had standing in the line to begin with were gone now. The line had to be shorter if it wasn't to be thi

"To Lord Eric, close in on the infantry's left. Prisoners-I want prisoners, the men-at-arms as well as the knights. And to Dr. Rothman, get all the wounded who can be moved onto the railway and out of here."

Because we may not have time later, he thought grimly.

Squads ran out onto the field, checking for living enemies. Where they found them, they began dragging them back, in a few cases subduing those still showing fight with a flurry of well-placed kicks first.

"See that they get care," he said, looking back at the aid station.

"What's next?" Signe said, as they watched the formation shift rightward.

Havel pulled his binoculars out of their leather-lined steel case. Left, two of the catapults were out of commission, smashed, smoldering wreckage in their pits. Three of the enemy's were destroyed likewise, which meant they'd suffered proportionately more, and their unprotected crews had taken heavy losses. And Alexi Stavarov's ba

"To Captain Sarducci, concentrate on the infantry as they advance-raking fire from the center of the enemy formation to the left. To Lord Eric, don't charge until you get the signal. Their cavalry is still in the game."

"What next?" Signe said, her horse stepping sideways as an auxiliary leading a mule loaded with pa

Havel kept his voice soft. "Next they send in their foot, and we see how good we are at a fighting retreat. We can't take another attack like that, and we didn't kill enough of them to rock them back on their heels. We'd have done better if they hadn't pulled back in time, but Alexi was too smart to keep them face-first in the meat grinder after we didn't break."

Signe nodded soberly, her eyes worried. Her voice was calm as she went on: "Report from the bridge-"

"They're burning!" Ken Larsson shouted.





"Keep down," his wife screamed in his ear.

She grabbed him by the collar of his hauberk and hauled him bodily from the box he'd been standing on for a better view. He staggered, windmilling his arms and trying to keep erect on the rough footing of the railroad track, then went to one knee. Bolts went snap-snap-snap through the air above. They might have missed, but then again, they might not. And hurled by the flywheel-powered throwers of the turtle boats:

As if to underline the point, a bolt flashing through the space above an engine on one of the railroad cars didn't miss. Larsson swallowed thickly as a loader's head disappeared in a spray of red mist, and the body toppled backward to land bonelessly limp. The helmet he'd been wearing spun away with a painful bwa

But that one is burning, he thought, ducking for a better look through the slit between two of the metal shields.

The lead boat that had taken three of the napalm canisters at once had smoke pouring out of the ventilators and the eye-slits of the bridge. Suddenly hatches popped open and smoke billowed up in earnest, along with yellow-orange flames. A half-dozen men jumped out and threw themselves into the blue-gray water of the Willamette. The last two were burning; one more tried to crawl out and then fell back, and the boat drifted away northward in a fog of sooty smoke.

The war-engine crews along the railroad bridge gave a brief, savage cheer. A replacement for the luckless loader stepped up and grabbed the forged-steel bolt he had dropped. She slapped the giant metal arrow into the machine's trough; it was four feet of hard alloy, tipped with copper and with metal vanes like a real arrow's fletchings at the rear, as much like a tank's long-rod penetra-tor as he'd been able to manufacture with the machine tools he could salvage and rig to run by waterpower.

The engine traversed a little on its turntable, and then shot with a huge, almost musical crinkling. The bolt flashed out and struck almost before the thud of the throwing arms hitting rubber-sheathed metal sounded; the range was close now, no more than thirty yards. The ptink of its impact was so much like a BB hitting a soda can that it made him feel a little nostalgic, until he remembered what it must be like inside, with that fragment of high-velocity metal bouncing around in the dark. Two more struck, and one skidded off the curved plates but the other punched through as well. The turtle boat lost way and began to slip back northward, downstream, turning slowly as it drifted. When it came back under control it continued to retreat, moving slowly to avoid taking on water; those holes would let liquid fire in as easily as the river.

That left the rest. "Pour it on!" Ken shouted. "Let them have it!"

"Easier said than done," Pam noted grimly.

The boats were closer now. The snap-snap-snap of their dart throwers sounded again and again, and the dents they made in the shields were deeper; then one punched through in a shower of sparks and went kti

Then the three remaining warcraft were too close to shoot at; the engines on the railcars could not depress far enough to bear on them. Ken and his escorts jumped up on the railcars themselves. A moment later a three-round volley of the darts came up from below, one of them smashing its way through the railway ties. The crews of the engines looked at each other:

"OK," Pamela shouted. "You two pump!"

She picked up what looked like a gun, co

Ken bit back: What do you think you're doing? His wife knew exactly what she was doing, and she was far more of a warrior than he.

His teeth were still on edge when she hopped casually off the railcar and looked down through the ties and the open framework of the railway bridge at the boats maneuvering below. Another snap-snap-snap came loud; Ken felt something hard smash into the floor of the car beneath his feet. Pamela's teeth showed in her lean face as she jammed the muzzle of the weapon down through the decking of the bridge and pulled the triggers set into the handgrips. One opened the valve, and a stream of amber-colored fluid as thick as a man's thumb began to jet down into the girders and open space below, scattering into a mist of droplets. A second later the other worked a spark-wheel set at the end of the long metal tube.