"Forward," Alston said. Then she switched frequencies. "Major McClintock, come in. Commodore Alston here."
The headphones clicked. "McClintock here, over."
"Major, the enemy have some form of portable rocket launcher. We just ran into an ambush party using them."
"So did we, ma'am, just now," McClintock said grimly. "They're pushing us hard, Commodore."
"I'm moving forward to take some of the pressure off, Major," she said. Something cold struck the back of her hand-a raindrop. Her smile was equally cold. "And I think the Gray Lady is giving us some help at last."
"Fallback!"
Crack.
Garrett Hopkins ignored the rifle butt striking his bruised shoulder. The Tartessians were close now.
"And they're not stopping for shit," he said aloud. His voice sounded a little tinny and faint in his ears after the battering they'd taken.
The enemy went to ground again; the one-time field of oats was all trampled now, sodden to the point of being muck with the blood that had poured out on it. He'd never realized how much blood a human body had in it before.
"Fallback!"
This time the words penetrated the fog of methodical purpose that filled Hopkins's brain. He loaded once more and looked around. Off to his right Evelyn fired a last shot, reloaded, braced her shoulders against the rear of her foxhole, and began walking her feet up the side in front of her so that she could wiggle out on her back and then roll over to crawl until the ridge slope protected her.
Now that's smart, Hopkins thought. You don't have to wave your ass in the air crawling out that way. He began to do likewise but then heard a distant shooonk sound, repeated over and over again.
"Oh, sweet Jesus," he whimpered and collapsed into the hole, hands holding his helmet down. He'd learned what that meant today.
The first mortar shell landed ten yards away. Someone screamed on a single high note for a few seconds, then stopped as if the sound had been cut off by a knife. He heard the whistle of the next coming, coming right for his foxhole.
"Oh, shi-"
Blackness.
When he awoke, the pain was there, strong but somehow distant. He blinked for a moment before he realized that it was rain that was striking his face and that he was lying half out of the collapsed foxhole, his legs buried to the knee. A few seconds later he realized that what was soaking him below the waist was blood-his own.
I'm dying, he thought, looking down at what was left of himself. Somewhere he knew he should be screaming, or fainting, but at that instant it just seemed another fact. It's raining. I'm dying. He knew, in the same abstracted way, that he was very lucky that the shock had hit him this way, and that it wasn't likely to last.
There was a noise to his right. He rolled his head; that took considerable effort, but he was curious.
Three Tartessians-one had a bandage around his head-were pulling Evelyn Grant out of her foxhole. She was alive, but her face was bloodied and her eyes were wandering with concussion from the near miss. One of the mercenaries raised his head and looked around, then said something in a fast-sounding language.
If Hopkins had been able to understand that remote ancestor of the Berber tongue, he would have heard the mercenary say, "No officers here-the Tartessian swine is dead."
The enemy soldiers pulled curved knives out of their belts and began cutting off the Islander's clothes. I should do something, Hopkins thought and moved a hand around. His rifle was gone.
Of course, he thought. They overran our position. They took the rifles. Evelyn had waked up enough to struggle a little, and a Tartessian hit her on the side of the head. Then two of them grabbed her legs and pulled them back until her knees were nearly by her shoulders. The other laughed, kneeling and lifting the hem of his tunic.
"Ah," Hopkins muttered. "Got this."
The grenade seemed very heavy, and getting the pin out was difficult. He couldn't throw it.
He could let it roll out of his hand, onto the canvas bandolier of grenades the sergeant had given him this morning. There were still six of them left…
Blackness.
Alston leveled her binoculars, scanning the Tartessian position and then out to sea. Eight warships, she decided; visibility had closed in a little, gray sky over gray ocean. One was out of commission, masts down and firefighters abandoning the ship as she watched. The rest were keeping station, wearing into the strengthening north wind; they'd have to drop anchor or move off, if it got any stronger. There were twenty-five or so transports, some beached. The rest were anchored, and making heavy weather of it as the wind picked up.
Ashore… hundreds of men, on the beach or moving inland; some tents set up, probably headquarters, stores, and hospital, and a couple of temporary plank roads laid over the sand and up into Sconset itself, with traffic heavy. An artillery park, swarming with effort now, trying to bring some of the guns there to bear on her.
"Here," she said, and the gun-jeeps ahead of her fanned out, jouncing up the low slope to her right until a line of them commanded the ground between the ocean and Sesachacha Pond with interlocking fields of fire. Behind them the mortar haulers and unmodified models pulling tire-wheeled carts full of ammunition halted as well.
Their commander-commander of this whole force now that Sanders was toast-trotted up to the side of Alston's vehicle. Marian offered him a hand, and Captain Stavrand climbed up to stand beside her-a pale young man with large post-Event glasses in wire frames secured by a strap behind his close-cropped white-blond head.
"What a target, ma'am!" he said.
"Well, that's why we're here," Alston said with cold satisfaction. "Your heavy mortars outrange anything they've got on shore, and the Gatlings should be able to keep their infantry off. They can't beat up northward in this wind, so you're safe from their warships; and unless they can walk on water, they can't get over Sesachacha Pond. If they try to embark men in launches and row up to flank you… well, the mortars will work in that direction too."
"We can handle it from here, ma'am," he said confidently.
Alston might have smiled at the unspoken subtext: So will you go away and let me do my job? Under other circumstances, of course. Right now she simply nodded and looked over the Tartessian ships once more.
"Nothing heavier than five, six hundred tons," she murmured. "Heavy crews, though. Say a hundred, hundred and fifteen guns on seven keels, and some of the transports, add in another twenty… fairly light guns, but… Whatever that god-awful explosion out on the water was, it didn't sink too many of them."
Alston cased the binoculars and looked behind her. The thick tubes of the six-inch mortars were going up on their support bipods; the loaders were setting up on the beds of the towing vehicles. That would put them high enough to drop the sixty-pound finned bombs down the waiting muzzles.
"With your permission?"
Marina nodded, and Stavrand vaulted over the side of her gun-jeep, back toward his weapons. The motion would have looked more impressive if his katana hadn't caught on the armored coaming, nearly tripping him.
"I hope the Tartessians give up now,'" Swindapa said thoughtfully.
Her eyes had narrowed, watching the buzzing confusion of the enemy base area shake itself out; several hundred men were forming lines and trotting toward them.
"It's going to be very… a'HiguinaYA'nazka if they try to come at us here."
Marian recognized the term; it was untranslatable, meaning something between "repugnant" and "perverted." That was true enough; the only way the Tartessians could storm the gun-jeeps was head-on into automatic weapons fire.