As if to punctuate his thought, a volley crashed out from the enemy, BAM-BAM-BAM-BAM as the platoons fired in unison. Greasy off-white smoke curled up from their positions, then drifted away in the scudding breeze. Something went whirrr-brack past his ear. Dogs and men screamed in pain and shock, mostly among those still mounted, but a few in the firing-line as well.
"Fire!"
An unnecessary order, and a ragged stutter sent demon-scented fog back into his face. His men had barely grounded their muskets and reached for a paper cartridge when the next enemy volley came. Another after they'd bitten open the cartridges and poured powder and minie bullet down the barrels; a third as they pulled out their ramrods. Just then a dull POUMPF came from the enemy field-gun, fifteen hundred meters back and well out of small-arms range. A tearing whistle and a crack of dirty smoke in mid-air, not twenty meters ahead of his riflemen; half a dozen were scythed down by the shrapnel. Then the Brigade warriors were capping their weapons and firing again-he ground his teeth as he saw a few ramrods go flying out toward the enemy-and beginning the cumbersome task of loading once more. Three more enemy volleys cut into his makeshift command; he could see men looking nervously backward out of the corners of his eyes.
He wasn't particularly worried about that, though. Raw courage was not the quality in short supply here today, and he'd also loudly ordered his lancers to ride down any man who fled without permission.
"Remember it's your families we protect," he called, keeping his voice calm. "One more volley and we'll-"
POUMPF. This time the tearing-canvas sound went right overhead, and the shell went crack sixty meters behind him. Dogs reared, then whimpered as their riders sawed on reins that connected to levers on the bridles, pressing steel bars against the animals' heads.
One under, one over, and I know what comes next, Carstens thought. His head whipped from side to side; the dust-columns weren't closing in as fast as he'd feared, and neither was the one behind the enemy vanguard. That heartened him, since it was the first mistake the civvies had made.
"— one more volley and we'll give them the steel."
He touched toes to Jo's forelegs, signaling her to stock-stillness, and fired his own rifled carbine. More as a gesture than anything else, but it made him feel better. A little.
"Everybody mount up," he called, riding out in front again. Enemy bullets pocked the earth around him.
POUMPF-crack. This time the shell burst right over the position he'd been in a few minutes before. Shrapnel skeened off body armor and tore into flesh; pistol-shots followed as injured dogs were put down. The wounded men probably wished they rated the same mercy, but needs must. Jo hunched her back slightly and laid her ears down at the sounds of pain.
"Easy, girl, easy," he said. He drew a revolver in one hand and his basket-hiked broadsword in the other. No sense in getting too subtle, just get out in front and wave them forward. "Charge!" he shouted, and the ancient Brigade warcry: "Upyarz!"
His legs clamped on the barrel of his dog. Jo howled and leaped forward off her hindquarters, building to a flexing gallop. From the chorus of shrieks behind him, human and canine, most of the scratch force were following. The grisuh dragoons rose and fired a volley standing; then half of them turned and trotted back to their dogs. Another volley, and they were all mounted and wheeling away. Behind them the gunners were adjusting their weapon, and a shell raced by to throw up a poplar-tall column of black dirt with a spark at the center. Men and dogs and parts of both pinwheeled away from it. The gun crew fired a final round of canister that cut a wedge out of the Brigade line as cleanly as a knife. The Civil Government troops were trotting to the rear now, heeling their mounts into a canter and then a gallop with the same fluid unison that had disturbed him before. The gunners snatched up the trail of their fieldpiece as it recoiled, running it back onto the caisson and jumping aboard as the team-master switched his mount into motion.
"Shit," Carstens said again. Lanceheads were bristling down on either side of him, but the enemy had had plenty of warning, and their dogs were fresher and less heavily burdened. The distance closed to a hundred meters, still beyond mounted pistol shot-and several of the blue-coated, dark-faced troopers turned in their saddles to pump fists at the Brigade troops with an unmistakable single finger raised. Then the gap began to grow again, with increasing speed. The fieldgun was a little slower, but it had had an extra half-kilometer of distance to start with.
He looked left and right, standing in the stirrups. Yes. Those tell-tale dust-clouds were closing in, moving fast past him on either side. He could catch the first winks of sunlight on metal from both directions. Plus the men he was chasing were retreating toward a force of unknown size.
"Halt, halt!" he shouted. The fan Morton house-troopers halted as the family pennant did, beside Carstens. . but big chunks of the motley host kept right on pursuing.
"Tommins, Smut, Villard," Carstens snapped to his under-officers. "Stop 'em, and fast."
He spurred his dog out ahead of the closest pack, curving in front of them and waving his sword in their faces. That made some of them pull up, at least.
"Ni, ni!" a Squadron refugee-mercenary shouted in their thick guttural dialect of Namerique. "No! The cowards flee!"
The man was literally frothing into his beard; Carstens wasted no time. The point of his broadsword punched into the man's stomach through the stiff leather and doubled him over with an ooff of surprise. His dog started to snap in defense of its master, but Jo already had her jaws around its muzzle; it whined and licked hers in surrender as the Squadrone fell to the ground vomiting blood.
Carstens felt no regret; you had to stop a rout before it got started, and a rout forward was just as bad as one going to the rear. No wonder they lost, he thought of the Squadron. Although the mindset was not unknown among the Brigade, either. He'd just had too much experience to keep up that sort of illusion.
"How many have we?" he asked his second-in-command, when they had the band mostly turned around and trotting to the rear.
"Seven hundred, maybe fifty more," the man said. "Fifty dead 'r down, and two hundred kept after the civvies."
Carstens grunted, grunted again when rifle fire broke out anew over the rise a kilometer to their rear where the pursuit had gone. What the incurably reckless had thought was a pursuit, at least. More rifle fire than before, much more, twice as many guns. "We won't be seeing them again," he said.
"Nohow," the other man agreed. "But the civvies will be up our ass again in half an hour."
Carsten pushed back his visor and looked northeast and southwest. Then he blinked dust out of his eyes and unlimbered the telescope again, on one flanking force and then the other.
"Suckered, by the Spirit!" he said.
At a soundless question, he went on: "Fucking grisuh were dragging bush to make more dust-look, there's troops there, but not anything like what they seemed. Eh bi gawdammit! Now they've dropped it and they're making speed, see the difference in the dust-plume? I thought they were co-ordinating too slow."