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 ktinnng off a wheel of one of the railroad cars. Smoke-trails cut through the air north of the bridge, drifting backward along with the fumes from napalm burning on the water to make the air hot and acridly choking. Ken turned angrily when one of his engines paused overlong before firing. His mouth closed when it did fire, the canister catching a turtle boat just as the hatch was raised for a volley of bolts, cracking on the edge and sending its load of burning jellied gasoline shooting through the entrance with hideous perfection. Something inside caught as well, and in an instant flame shot out of every opening in the hull in white-hot jets.
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, connected to a metal tank by a hose. Two of the crew sprang to a plunger-pump and began to rock it back and forth.
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.
Whooosh!
The liquid stream turned into a banner of fire; smoke and hot air shot upward around the woman's feet. Ken blinked and rubbed his single eye, then peered over the edge of the car. One of the remaining turtle boats was burning itself, held by the current against a bridge pier. The others turned and started northward, white foam showing at their sterns where the propellers churned at maximum power.
"Many good-byes, you sons of bitches!" he roared after them.
Exultation brought a flush to his face as Pamela carefully raised the flamethrower and plunged the muzzle into a big metal tub of water lashed to the side of the railcar. The crews broke into cheering as well, hopping up and down and hammering each other on the back.
"Well, what are you waiting for?" Ken said. "You going to let them get away?"
They dove back to the throwing engines. Ken hopped back to the deck of the bridge. Two of Pamela's A-lister guards saluted him; he eyed them with some surprise. Not that the Outfit's elite had ever treated him with anything but respect; he was the bossman's father-in-law, and Eric's father, and Pamela's husband, for that matter. He'd been there from the beginning, when Mike Havel's Piper Chieftain crashed into a river in Idaho's Selway-Bitterroot National Wilderness, and the long trek back to Oregon started. That was myth and legend now, and equivalent to having relatives on the Mayflower.
But those salutes were a little different:
"What?" he said to them. "It was Pamela who toasted that boat."
They grinned back at him; both were young men. "But you designed the stuff and built it and commanded this action, Lord Ken," one of them said.
"So: " the other continued, and they both saluted again.
He shook his head in wonderment, then looked up sharply at a hammer of hooves on the westward end of the bridge. A military apprentice was there; the youngster's horse didn't want to come onto the bridge, with its uncertain footing and stink of chemicals and hot metal and burning, for which he didn't blame it. Instead Larsson walked over, noticing that the hauberk was starting to get seriously unpleasant.
"Yes?" he said. Uh-oh. That's a serious-news face, if I've ever seen one.
"My lord, the Lord Bear's compliments, and get your teams hitched."
"We lost?" Ken said sharply, looking over to his right. The battlefield wasn't visible from here, but they'd heard some noise.
"No, my lord. We beat off their attack and sent them running. Lord Bear says that you should remember the words of: " She hesitated, frowning over the unfamiliar syllables. "Phyross of Ipi-something?"
"Pyrrhos of Epiros," he said. "Thank you: message acknowledged, will prepare for departure."
He turned, thinking through the orders necessary to get his railcars headed south once more; he might not be a soldier, but scheduling was something he was good at.
One of the A-listers who'd saluted him said: "Pyrrhos? Who's that, Lord Ken?"
"A Greek general who fought the Romans," he said, which apparently satisfied the man's curiosity.
And who's most famous for beating a Roman army at hideous cost and then exclaiming: "Another victory like this, and we're ruined!"
His eyes went east over the river. His daughter Astrid was there, and good friends, and they were fighting the Protector's men too.
There are just too damned many of them! Damn Corvallis anyway. Can't they see that if we go down, they're next?
Chapter Fifteen
Near Mount Angel, Willamette Valley, Oregon
March 6th, 2008/Change Year 9
S ir Nigel Loring whistled silently to himself as he looked up at the walls of Mount Angel through the binoculars. Even with his slightly damaged eyes and by moonlight, even to someone who'd seen castles throughout Europe and helped rebuild more than one in England, they looked daunting. And in this light it seemed otherworldly as well, the pale whitewash shining as if carved from a single opal and lit by some internal glow.
The hill that held the monastery rose steeply half a mile northward from this patch of woods, nearly five hundred feet at its ridgelike top above the flat farmland that surrounded it; the whole mass of earth and rock was shaped like an almond, running from northwest to southeast, about a mile and a half long and half a mile wide at its widest point. The greatly shrunken town stood at its northern end, surrounded by a wall much like that he'd seen around Dun Juniper or Larsdalen. A road zigzagged up the north slope through a series of sentry towers; trying to fight your way up it would be a nightmare. But what awaited at the top: