They trotted on, taking reports from the officers of various units as they went; and from the noncoms who counted off the individuals-in a few cases the dog tags of bodies-as they returned, then waiting by the boat for the final word. Once again she blessed Swindapa's faultless memory; keeping exact count of everything and everybody in a battalion-sized night raid was trivial to someone who'd been through the Grandmothers' course. They made a good team… although she doubted the Fiernan system would last more than another generation. When you could write things down, it was just too much damned trouble to spend a decade learning to retrieve all the data yourself.
Very damned useful right now, though. Too God-damned easy for someone to get missed in this confusion and darkness.
Marian stood with her hands behind her back on the edge of the dock; Swindapa beside her, looking out over the river because that put her body between the baby and the most likely source of high-velocity metal. There was enough light from burning supply dumps and buildings to make Alston feel horribly exposed; she relaxed stomach muscles that were drawing themselves up in anticipation of a bullet or mortar shell, forced her breath to come slow and deep and shoulders to ease. One of her elbows was aching a little, fruit of overextension past…
She remembered a joke current in a dojo she'd attended, long before the Event-back in her late 'teens, when she was first getting seriously interested in the Way of the Empty Hand, the real jujutsu variety and not the de-rated sport schools that were mostly safe:
"By the time I'm forty, I'll be the most dangerous cripple in the whole wide world," she quoted softly to herself.
But I'm a little nearer fifty than forty now, and all those years of pushing the body to ten-tenths of capacity begin to take their toll. I hurt when I've got to do things like this, and experience only compensates to a certain point.
"Uh… ma'am?" the head of the Marine detail said.
She looked over at him; rain-streaked soot and speckled blood ran down his face with trails of sweat. Painfully young; there was something of a gap in the age profile on the Island, a good many young adults had been on the mainland at college when the Event occurred.
He did very well indeed, there at the commandatura, she thought. Wasn't afraid to backtalk me, either. Aggressive, but not crazy.
"Ma'am, the brigadier will keelhaul me if I don't bring you back in one piece. As a matter of fact, he told me that if I stuck him with your job, he'd be really, really upset. Would you mind stepping into the boat now, ma'am? Lieutenant^ Commander?"
And let me do my job, she finished for him.
"When we're through," she said aloud. "Remember Frozen Chosin. We're taking everyone back, Lieutenant."
"Yes ma'am," he said.
A few murmurs came from the darkened figures at the oars;
"Hard Corps."
"fuckin' A."
Did I do the right thing, to let the Marine Corps vets who started our ground-troop training program put so much emphasis on their own traditions? Probably. Almost certainly. Fighting was an emotional thing. They'd used what they knew would work because it had worked on their own younger selves. "A rational army would run away," and Montinesque was right about that. Do Jesus, I surely do feel like running away. Could have been worse, though I could have had to work with Foreign Legion types. "You have joined the Legion to die, and now I will send you where men die." There's a certain bracing honesty to it, but in the long run, this is better.
A runner came panting up. "We found them, ma'am-they got pinned when a door collapsed," he said.
"That's the last," Swindapa said crisply. "All accounted for."
"Lieutenant, you get your wish," Alston said, hopping down into the boat. Swindapa handed her down the child, and she cuddled it to her as her partner swung expertly in beside her at the prow of the launch. The formless baby face looked up at Alston dubiously, still alarmed but tired of crying for his mother, and then stuck his hand in his mouth and began to gum it in a worried fashion.
"Hell of a way to come back from a raid," she grumbled to herself. "You do need to be changed, little'un."
Then she looked at the river as the crew began to pull away into the central current, bright-lit through the rain by the wavery blurs of huge fires on both banks. The barge-trains were ahead of her, with the raiding force's boats around them like sculling centipedes. Safer to have burned the barges in place, she thought. But better for morale to take them; the troops were mostly from cultures that thought "victory" and "plunder" were the same thing. It wouldn't hurt the whole expedition's logistics if there was useful stuff in them, too.
Alston put the handset to her face with her free hand: "Commander Ortiz."
"Here, ma'am. No trouble so far."
"None on this end either," Alston said. A warbling went through the sky, and a muffled whuddump raised a plume of shocked white water a hundred yards behind. Spray fell across her, and the baby began to cry again, a thin reedy wailing.
"Ah… ma'am?" Ortiz said, bewilderment in his tone at the sound. Not at all the sort of cry you expected with a rear guard on a fire-lashed shore.
"Don't ask, Commander." She cleared her throat. "They're lobbing mortar shells into the river, but they're firing blind. I doubt they'll get any observers forward before we're out of range."
"Now all we have to do is run the guns of the fort, ma'am," Ortiz said, cheerfully deadpan.
Kenneth Hollard listened and swore. God-damn fighting in a snowstorm. Hell of a way to spend the week before Christmas.
Something was going wrong out here on the northern flank of the allied host. The firing was still heavy, but it was dying down, which meant that the Achaeans were pushing through the narrow defile and around the edge of his command.
The snow, however, wasn't dying down, and he strained his eyes through it and cursed, and cursed the falling light.
But I shouldn't, he thought. We've held them most of the day. If we can hold them until night, they'll feel it more, out in the open.
The horse beneath him stumbled again, on a rock that turned beneath its hoof under the concealing white. He reined in and swung out of the saddle. The thunder ahead was louder than that to the south now; fewer cannon, but closer, and echoing back from the sharp cliff faces and steep rocky slopes.
"O'Rourke!" he shouted.
"Sir?"
"Officers on foot, except for couriers," he said. "Chargers to the gun carriages as spares. And the troops to the double-quick."
"Sir," the other man said, looking back at the column.
It was only thirty feet away, but still a dark indistinct mass through snow and shadow, stumbling forward into the wind with helmets bent to take the bite. The thudding clatter of boots and hooves on stone and wet earth came muffled, as if they watched an army of ghosts condemned to march forever.
"Sir," O'Rourke went on. "They're tired. We pulled them right out of the line for this. Another mile and at the double, and they won't have much left."
Robbing Peter to pay Paul and calling it a reserve, Ken agreed, behind the mask of his face.
"If we don't get there in time, there won't be anything-at all left," he said. "That's the choke point. Anywhere else and they can flank us and get by."
"Sir," O'Rourke said, grinning despite the crusted snow on his eyebrows. Individual hairs peeked out, like fire through cloud. "Since you put it that way-
Hollard walked over to the head of the column; it wound back into the rocky hills, broken here and there by the higher shape of a gun team pulling cannon or Gatlings.