"Captain Chong!"
The artillery officer came up at a trot. "Captain, I want you to get ready to move two of your field guns forward onto the causeway."
"Yessir." The face of the artillery officer was calmly intent as he pulled out his binoculars, studied the causeway, then trotted over to walk the ground. "I think it'll take it, sir," he said when he came back. "Better to manhandle the pieces and limbers forward separately. I'll need a couple of platoons to help." The guns weighed two tons apiece and were usually drawn by six-horse teams.
"By all means."
"The mortars?"
"Not yet. We can't observe the fall of shot well enough."
Hollard forced himself to take a swig of water, although his stomach was suddenly sour. Christ, the last time I went through this I was a grunt. The Marines had been out on punitive expeditions since, teaching Olmec priest-kings and restive Sun People chiefs to mind their manners, but that didn't really count beside pitched battles.
Arnstein's informants-and King Shuriash's-said that mysterious envoys from the north had been seen in Asshur. Rumor made them sorcerers… envoys from the Hittites? If they're from Walker, they could have shown the Assyrians guns.
The radio at his waist beeped, rescuing him from the gnawing anxiety of speculation without facts.
"Hollard here."
"Sir." That was O'Rourke. "Enemy advancing from the riverbank; two to three thousand. Light troops, archers and slingers. Over."
"Keep them under observation as long as you can, Captain. Out."
All at once the strain fell away; he reined himself in. Light-headed overconfidence was as bad as worrying yourself into paralysis.
Aloud: "Get the locals out! Everyone else, stand to your arms! Set sights for two hundred yards; rapid fire on the word of command."
Messengers went out, and the naked mud-spattered peasants poured through the Nantucketer ranks, heading back to where their arms-cum-farming-tools were piled. The Islanders who'd been working with them climbed up onto the causeway, scraping off mud and snatching up their rifles, weapons, and webbing harness-that went rather oddly with the nudity and wet dirt, but neatness bought no yams when you were in a hurry. A dense bristle of rifle barrels pointed into the swamp now, and the more usual line of the rest of the battalion two-deep along the edge of the reeds.
"Sir." O'Rourke again. "Sir, they're sending men into the swamp, daggers and spears."
"Pull out to the flanks and keep me informed," Hollard replied. "Over."
"Sir. Withdraw to flanks, keep enemy under observation. Over."
Fairly soon now… More locals came by, these carrying bundles of reed mats up to the causeway, behind the massed Islanders. There was a crackle of fire from inside the swamp itself, yells, the crump of a grenade. Hollard strained to see what was happening, but nothing could be seen, only swaying reeds and a few drifting puffs of powder smoke.
"Sir! The enemy are massing along the edge of the swamp! Numbers around twenty-five hundred. We've disengaged and have them under observation."
"Thank you, Captain." A hundred and fifty yards away, or a little less… Hollard drew the katana slung over his shoulder and raised the blade. Platoon commanders turned to face him, their own swords raised, eyes on the curved sliver of bright steel in his hand.
There was a massed snapping hum, like thousands of out-of-tune guitar strings being plucked, then a long whistling rush. Light sparkled on the bronze arrowheads rising in a flock over the tall reeds, winking as they reached the top of their arcs and began to descend.
"Fire!" The sword slashed down.
BAAAAAMMM. Eight hundred rifles fired in less than a second, the cannon adding their long plumes of off-white smoke and thudding detonations to the mix. They recoiled and were run back with enthusiastic hands while the infantry were busy with breech-lever, cartridge, and priming horn.
The humming swish of the arrows turned to a whistling as they fell. Mostly short; one of the gunners dropped kicking with a shaft through his throat, and here and there a Marine was dragged back wounded. There were shouts of "Corpsman!" and stretcher bearers ran forward, then back with their burdens, heading for the horse-drawn ambulances.
The return fire was a continuous crackling roar, like a mixture of Event Day firecrackers and heavy surf; the massive fist-blows of the cannon were punctuation. Smoke rose in a heavy bank, drifting back slowly with the light breeze; Hollard coughed and waved a hand before his face in futile effort to see better. What he could see was enough. The Marines of the First Expeditionary Regiment could all fire six rounds a minute-more here, since all they needed to aim at was a waist-high point in the general direction the arrow storm was coming from.
At this range, every bullet would be traveling at gut height and a thousand feet per second when it reached the enemy archers. At those velocities, projectiles cut through the giant grass with the neatness of a straight razor, but each semicircular cut glowed for an instant, precisely like a piece of tissue paper touched with a soldering iron. Even through the dense fogbank of powder smoke Hollard could see to the other side of the reed marsh now; it was patchy, as if some enormous animal had been grazing on it. What was left thinned as he watched. On the other side were the massed archers the enemy had put forward to harass the construction of the causeway.
Or what was left of them. Hundreds were down, still or kicking or writhing. Hundreds more were fleeing, despite the efforts of sword-armed officers to keep them to their duty-often by a quick thrust to the kidneys of a man who seemed inclined to turn. Less than half of them were still shooting, and the arrows were now more of a dangerous nuisance than a threat.
Poor bastards, Hollard thought. They'd done about as well as men could, facing weapons entirely outside their experience; that so many of them were still trying to fight was a miracle of courage and discipline, in its way. The sympathy was real but distant; right now he could be nothing but a will that thought The commodore will give us a "well done "for this.
Hollard clicked his handset to the company commander's frequency. "Aimed fire!" he called.
With most of the reeds out of the way, the Marine infantry had targets. So did the guns, and the rest of the battery that began firing over their heads with shrapnel shell, and the three-unit battery of rocket launchers. They weren't very accurate, despite all Seahaven could do with machined venturi units and carefully aligned fins. They did land in the general area they were pointed or, more often, exploded above it, scattering their loads of heavy buckshot like a chain flail in the hands of a giant. Their trails of smoke arched over the battlefield like monochromatic rainbows, twisting as they drifted away, sending men into fresh panic with the moaning scream of their passage.
Pack mules trotted up bearing panniers full of ammunition. Their drivers handed out ten-round cases or cylindrical packets of fine-ground priming powder. Here and there a rifleman swore and stopped for an instant to insert a spare flint in the hammer jaws of his weapon.
Four minutes later Hollard swung his sword down in another arc and called out, "Cease fire!"
Silence fell, broken by a single shot and the scathing curses of a noncom directed at the luckless private who'd been too lost in his loading routine to hear the order relayed down the ranks. The Republic's commander lowered his binoculars and winced slightly; the only Assyrian archers surviving were the ones who had run first or who had been very lucky. He was suddenly conscious of the thin whine of a mosquito near his ear-and that it was fainter than it had been earlier in the day. This much noise probably wasn't good for your hearing, long term. If the long term mattered much, in the circumstances.
"Major Hollard," he said, as he walked out onto the causeway.