"Ma'am, sir," she said, vaulting lightly up despite the heavy sheepskin flying suit and joining them on the deck of the turret. A glance at the map, and:
"Yeah, they've got fallback earthworks going up inside the gates, and they've just started putting up a berm to back the wall. Looks real crowded in there-lots of refugees, tents, and brushwood shelters in the streets and open spaces, ma'am."
"Thank you, Ensign Walters," Marian said.
"Ah, youth," Swindapa observed as the flyer bounded back to her little craft and vaulted one-handed into her seat; a couple of Marines swung it 'round into the wind.
Marian snorted. This from someone who occasionally turns cartwheels in the street just for the fun of it?
"Wait 'till you hit forty, 'dapa." She scanned the defenses. "Let's see…"
Curtain-wall of mud brick on a mound, wet moat, field of lilies.
Those were metal-tipped punji-sticks, a nasty low-tech version of barbed wire. It would be expensive to assault, but it was designed to keep out hillbilly raiders with clubs and bronze-headed spears. Nothing like the massive works around Tartessos City or some of their forts elsewhere; Isketerol had had too much to do to put that sort of thing around every town. Absurdly, there were still ducks swimming about the ring-ditch, occasionally dipping their heads and leaving twitching tails in the air as they fed.
"Right, let's give them a demonstration," Marian said.
The siege guns and mortars were ready within minutes, crews swarming antlike around them. The rocket launchers took a little longer, but the two-wheeled mounts were light enough to be towed by bicycle and manhandled around. The operators loaded six long, finned cylinders in each launcher's bundle of tubes and backed away, unreeling wire behind them.
"Driver, take us in to a thousand yards," she said.
The diesel pig-grunted in a cloud of black coal-oil fumes, and
I the car rolled forward again. The works that had been easy to dismiss through the binoculars grew larger as they neared. A cannon fired from the low square tower next to the gates, visible only by the flash and smoke.
Six-pounder, she estimated automatically-brass smoothbore. The light iron ball kicked up a plume of black dirt and dug a furrow through a cornfield not far to the left of the road.
Top the gate," she said quietly. "Then rake the parapet."
"Right, ma'am," the gunner said. "Ready-"
She slitted her eyes. The violent flash still made her throw up a palm in reflex, and everyone coughed at the bitter burned-zinc fumes. The rocket took off with a sound like a cat the size of a mountain vomiting, and drew a spreading cone of gray smoke toward the gate. At its head was a red spark. That turned into a globe of fire as it struck the ironbound gates of the town, and a vast hollow whuddummmp echoed back. A second later the turret Gatling cut loose with a long braaaaaaapp.
Motors whined, turning the turret and driving the machine gun; it blasted out ten rounds a second as the barrels vanished in a whirling blur, a continuous knife of red flame cutting through the fogbank that surrounded the war-car. Through it Marian could see the mud-brick parapets of the tower and wall disintegrating into powdered clay.
As if the car firing had been a signal, which it was, the two siege guns fired. They had no need to approach the wall; from a mile behind her the heavy shells went overhead with a grumbling rumble that rose in pitch as they passed. They were aimed for the town's metalworks, and she caught a glimpse of columns of dark smoke and pulverized building rising like instant poplars.
The crews leaped into action, running the muzzle-loading cannon forward again from the chocks behind the wheels, swabbing out the barrels, ramming down powder bags and shells. Before they were half-finished, the rocket-launcher operators spun the cranks of their field generators and pushed down the toggles that sent a brief pulse of current through the percussion caps.
Backblast scorched the hillside behind them in a sudden huge cloud that left crackling, blackened grass and crops behind it in a great wedge spreading out from the emplacement. Sixty trails of smoke and fire lifted from the katyushas in a rippling chorus of demon-screams-except for two that blew up not far from the launch tubes, and one that corkscrewed and landed uncomfortably close to the armored car, spattering its side with bits of metal and rock and dirt. Something rapped her helmet unpleasantly hard.
Memo to Leaton: "greatly improved reliability" doesn't mean "really reliable" yet, does it, now, Ron?
The rest slammed down on the wall to the left of the gate. It disappeared, in a boiling wall of rubble and dust and smoke that seemed to bear down on her like an avalanche. Enough of it reached them to set them coughing anew; Marian drank from her canteen and passed it to Swindapa, as the gunner and loader shared theirs in the turret and hull below. When the dust and smoke lifted, she shaped a soundless whistle. The sharp definite outlines of wall and mound and ditch had vanished. What was left was a lumpy ramp, leading from the open ground outside the town to a height about half what the defenses had been.
"Let's put up the parsley and see what happens," Marian said as a stunning silence fell leaving their ears ringing with the ceasing of the world-shattering noise.
Swindapa bent one of the whip aerials down and fastened a wreath of olive to it, and a white pennant beneath-local and Islander symbolism combined. The car rolled forward with a whine and crunch, stopping about ten yards short of the bridge that spanned the moat before the gate. Marion took up the microphone of a powered megaphone mounted on the turret-more psychological warfare-and spoke the phrases she'd memorized:
"SEND OUT YOUR LEADERS TO PARLEY! SEND OUT YOUR LEADERS OR BE DESTROYED!"
The harsh amplified sound echoed back from the surviving sections of wall, giving a blurring edge to it.
The gunner and loader worked the action of the rocket launcher-it opened inward, like a shotgun mounted sideways-and slipped home another of the heavy rounds. Then they waited; occasionally the turret tracked along the walls and the barrels of the Gatling whirled by way of warning and intimidation. Two ultralights buzzed overhead, circling the town and its vicinity.
Twenty minutes later Marian sighed and reached for the microphone to order another round of bombardment. Then Swindapa pointed:
"Look!"
Four Tartessians came climbing over the rubble of the gate and wall, waving green branches of their own. They had a white shield and a white flag on a pole as well, taking no chances. Two were youngish men in the green tunic and trousers and brown leather jerkin of Tartessian uniform; one of those was limping, and the other had a bandaged arm. The civilians were older, in shoulder-baring tunics, and sweating with fear from the way they wiped at their brows.
"Garrison commanders and mayor," she murmured. "All right, 'dapa, give them the word."
A harsh gabble of ancient Iberian; the wounded soldier spat in the roadway.
"He says King Isketerol will come with a great army and destroy your little band," Swindapa relayed.
Marian met the man's eyes and lifted a slow brow. Then she pointed to the ultralights.
"With those, we destroy your relay towers as we please. The highlanders and the bands of freed slaves are ambushing couriers on the roads. King Isketerol doesn't even know you've been attacked, and won't for days. By the time any force he sends could get here, we'll be gone… and your town will be destroyed."
"You will destroy it anyway!" the mayor burst out.
"But if you surrender, your people will live. Apart from your own lives, your King won't thank you for losing all those skilled men, as well as all the machinery and goods."