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* * *
"The bastards are up to something," one of Mnb Trag's subchiefs muttered.
"Of course they are," Trag shot back. "What? You thought they'd marched all this way just to stand there and scratch their asses at us?"
"Of course I didn't," the subchief retorted. "But I don't hear you telling us what it is they are up to, either!"
"Because I don't know," Trag conceded. "On the other hand, what does it matter what they're up to as long as they're out there and we're in here?"
He stamped a foot on the massive, solid stone of the parapet, and the subchief joined him in grunting laughter.
* * *
"The carts are laid in, Armand," Bogess said as he and From trotted up to Pahner and Bistem Kar. "The LURPs' stakes were exactly where they were supposed to be, and we're ready whenever you give the word."
"Good," Pahner replied, but his tone was a bit absent. Kar stood beside him, studying the city's walls through Dell Mir's telescope, but the Marine had the magnification of his helmet visor cranked up to give him a far clearer view than any primitive telescope could hope to match.
"They're a bit more spread out than I could wish," Kar said after a moment.
"Well, we can't expect the other side to do everything we want it to," Pahner pointed out. "And it probably doesn't matter all that much in the long run—these aren't exactly precision weapons, so there's going to be enough spread in the impact zone to cover a good bit of target dispersal. I'm more concerned about how many may still be under hard cover in the bombard and arquebus galleys. We're going to get good coverage, but we don't have anywhere near as much overhead penetration as I wish we did."
"According to Jin's count, there can't be very many arquebusiers left in the city, Sir," Julian pointed out over his powered armor's radio. "And if they aren't blind, then they must've seen all our nice scaling ladders. Which means they have to have moved just about everybody they've got left up onto the battlements to repel boarders."
"Nice and logical, Sergeant," Pahner agreed with a sour grin. "Unfortunately, logic is still a really good way to be wrong with confidence."
"Yet I think he's right," Kar said, closing his telescope with a click.
"If he isn't, we'll find out soon enough." Pahner sighed, and turned to From. "All right, Rus. They were your babies in production, so I guess it's only fitting to let you be the one to send them on their way. Light 'em up."
* * *
"What are those stupid shit-sitters up to?" Mnb Trag groused. "I'm not as young as I used to be, damn it, and these old legs are getting tired!"
"Sure they are," the subchief laughed. "You're a Boman, 'old man,' so don't think you can fool us into thinking you need a rest! No sitting down until you've killed your quota!"
"If I must, I must," Trag agreed with a theatrical sigh, and tested the edge of his ax with a thumb. "Still, I wish the basik would go ahead and poke their heads up here where I can cleave them!"
"Oh, they'll be along, I'm sure," the subchief told him. "Either that, or they'll slink back downriver like the cowards they are."
Trag grunted agreement, but his attention was on those odd wagons the shit-sitters had pushed into position with such care. Now crews were stripping the canvas covers off of them, and the old chieftain rubbed at a horn in puzzlement as the pewter-gray, late-morning light gleamed dully on strange, stubby cylindrical shapes. He couldn't tell what they were made of, but there were scores of them in each wagon, arranged in some sort of wooden frames that held them upright. Each of them was perhaps a handspan in diameter, but at least as long as a warrior's forearm, and the work crews seemed to be fussing over them with a ridiculous attention to detail.
Whatever they were doing, it didn't seem to take them long—this time, at least—and the crews scampered back to their positions. In fact, Trag realized, the wagons were widely separated from the waiting shit-sitter army. The closest of them was at least a hundred paces from the nearest block of infantry, and he suddenly wondered why that was.
* * *
Rus From made himself wait until the last wagon crew had completed its work and confirmed that they were safely back behind the danger lines. Then he glanced at Pahner one more time, turned to the K'Vaernian artillerist standing beside him with a lit torch, and nodded.
"Light it," he said flatly, and the K'Vaernian touched his torch to the waiting quick match.
A small, bright, hissing demon flashed along the lengths of fuse, racing across the damp ground in a stink of sulfur, and throughout the ranks of the army, men covered their eyes or ears, depending on their individual inclinations. And then the hissing demon reached the first wagon.
Mardukan societies of all types and stripes boasted enormous and detailed bestiaries of demons and devils—not surprisingly, probably, given the nightmare creatures which truly did walk the planet's jungles. Yet not one of the collections of monsters the humans had yet encountered had included anything remotely like the Terran dragons of myth.
Until today.
The wagons seemed to explode, but that wasn't quite what had happened. Each wagon contained a wooden frame, and nested into each frame were two hundred and forty twenty-centimeter rockets. Two thirds of those rockets were fitted with time-fused fragmentation/shrapnel warheads—a bursting charge of black powder surrounded by a shaped matrix of musket balls which turned each missile into what was, effectively, a huge, self-propelled shotgun shell. The other third were pure blast weapons, with simple contact fuses designed courtesy of Nimashet Despreaux and warheads charged with two kilos of black powder each.
There were fifty wagons outside Sindi, for a total of twelve thousand rockets, and the blast warheads alone carried eight metric tons of gunpowder, exclusive of the propellant charges. The projectiles roared heavenward in an incredible, choking column of brimstone-flavored smoke and flame, then arced over and came screaming down. The fragmentation warheads burst in midair, and although the jury-rigged time fuses were crude, to say the very least, the vast majority functioned approximately as designed. A deluge of almost two million musket balls hammered the battlements and a zone fifty meters deep on either side of the walls, like the flail of some outraged war god that turned every exposed Boman into so much torn and shredded meat. No one on Marduk had ever so much as contemplated such a weapon, and so none of the barbarians had even considered taking cover. Instead, they'd crowded together, almost literally shoulder-to-shoulder, to await the anticipated assault, and they couldn't have offered a better target if they'd tried to. Here and there a small group or an isolated individual happened to have had sufficient overhead protection to avoid a
And on the heels of the fragmentation warheads, came the blast weapons. Compared to modern human weapons, the quaint, crude black powder rockets were mere children's toys, but the earth trembled underfoot like a terrified animal as those "toys" came crunching down on the walls and the buildings behind them. A terrifying drumroll of explosions threw fire and smoke, bits and pieces of barbarian warriors, roofing tiles, building stone, and shattered wood higher than the walls themselves, and the soldiers of K'Vaern's Cove looked at one another in shock and awe at the sheer havoc of the humans' weapons.
Mnb Trag never had the opportunity to share their shock and awe. Along with virtually every warrior of his tribe, he was wiped out of existence before he had time to grasp, even dimly, what horror lurked within the despised shit-sitters' wagons.