"Deploy into line," he said. "Heavy weapons forward as best they can-and be goddamned careful, I don't want any friendly-fire accidents here."
"Sir!"
O'Rourke gave orders; the thick column of marching Islanders dissolved, Marines running out to either side. Steel glinted bright gray through the soft dove-gray-white of the snow as bayonets rattled home, and multiple click-clacks sounded as the rifles were loaded. The heavy weapons deployed as well, as best they could, scattered among the infantry wherever the ground looked level enough for hooves and wheels to go forward. He had more confidence in the rocket launchers; this terrain was scattered with little gullies and washes that would stop a cannon cold.
He drew a deep breath of air cold and damp and full of the scent of wet wool and unwashed soldier and gun oil and powder. Light flickered through the snow ahead… muzzle flashes.
"Charge!" he shouted, and ran forward.
Otto Verger came to full alertness when the sounds began to the northward, upriver. Very faint at first, a crackling of small arms. Then several huge soft thuds, like very large doors slamming shut. He turned his head, raised it slightly, strained his eyes to see through the murky dimness.
Was that a hint of fire, the red war-hawks of the mirutha beating their wings on a Tartessian foeman's thatch? He could hear a whispered chant from his left; it raised his hackles a little, for Rueteklo was invoking Moon Woman-or Her sister of the Barrow, who he suspected was the same as the Blood Hag of Battles. You didn't want to attract Her attention, and the Moon goddess was an unchancy thing… though to be sure, she'd be on his side this time, and wasn't that an odd happenstance? The noise from the north grew louder, and there was definitely a hint of light there…
"Oh, you sorry bastards are fucked the now," he chuckled again. "The Midnight Mare will leave hoofprints on your grave-mounds-not that you'll get graves, you'll rot unresting, your ghosts wailing in the wind…"
"Why don't I report you for using something else but English on duty?" Rueteklo said, equally soft, a chuckle in her voice as well.
"Oh, shut up and get ready," Verger said, switching to that language with a trace of resentment. She spoke it with less accent than he, for all his studying until he thought his head would crack.
"I wasn't talking, I was cursing the foe," he went on. It was a breach of regulations to talk anything but the Islander tongue when you were working-a fine of four days' pay and four days' KP. Most of the time he even thought in English, but it just wasn't as satisfying for some things, like threatening or cursing. "I'll want, mmmm, one more incendiary after the first. Then HE and frag."
"You ask, I deliver."
Gathering tension, silence save for an occasional buzz of insects-thank the Gods it wasn't summer, or they'd be eaten alive. He could feel the spirits of his fathers and their fathers gathering around him, to witness his honor or his shame; his oath-brothers were here, too, and they would see.
His training whispered at the back of his mind, cooling him. It had a voice very much like Gunnery Sergeant Timothy Welder's savage rasp: Any dumb shit can get dead in a hurry! You're not waving a fucking brass tomahawk now, horse-boy. Vie don't go off half-cocked in the Corps. By the numbers, on the bounce…
The light around the gunports of the fort had faded Jte the night grew old. The briefings had warned that Tartessians sometimes slept in the afternoon and worked late, but even these had gone to bed by now. Then a bugle blew; not any notes he recognized, but from the voices and shouts the foemen had gotten the word about their camp upstream. Their burning, devastated, plundered camp. Now the whole force would be passing back this way, and they'd need him and his brothers of the war band to shield them against a blow that could kill- him and A Company, the finest unit in the Third Marines, who were the finest warriors in the Corps-nobody outside the
Corps even counted for comparison's sake, as these Tartessian swine would find out soon enough.
He forced the quivering eagerness out of his muscles and lay in the muck, eyes pinned to the gunport. Light flared brighter around it, then faded-they were getting ready to open the port, screens rigged behind it to preserve the gunner's night sight and to stop stray sparks that might fall among ammunition.
"Just about-
Whistles sounded in the swamp to his rear at the same instant as the rumbling squeal of iron and timber on stone. The gun-ports flipped up, and the long muzzles of the cannon came out.
"… now!"
Behind him poles had been fitted together and supporting stakes driven deep into the muck. Now strong hands pushed and pulled the poles upright and lashed them swiftly to the frames that would hold them so. Atop each was a magnesium flare ready to burn, and a hemisphere of focusing mirror right behind it. Cords pulled, primers went pop, and the light speared out hell-bright across the row of gunports in the low squat bulk of the fortress wall ahead of them, painting every detail in stark relief and blinding the gunners as if they stared into the naked sun. Eyes slitted, squinting at the ground for a second to let them adjust, Otto Verger laughed aloud.
Then he pushed himself up to his knees, wide-spraddled to keep him stable. "Clear!" he shouted. The crosshairs in the sight dropped over the dark square where the cannon's muzzle showed. He squeezed the trigger, heard and felt the catch release and the striker drive down on the percussion cap. Flame spurted into the hollow core of the rocket's propellant rod, and flame spurted to the rear out the venturi…
"Eat this!" he screamed, under the SSSSSRAAAAWACK!
For some things, English was satisfying.
A dozen rockets vomited out of the wrack of brush and felled timber at the edge of the swamp. Despite the damp, reeds caught and burned behind him. He ignored them, and the harsher stink of rocket smoke. His rocket lanced out, rose, descended in a graceful arc. There! It struck the corner of the gunport and exploded, fire belching back out into the night, paled by the light of the flares. And doubtless belching in, washing in a cataract of fire over the wedge-shaped gun position and the men serving the cannon, leaving them wailing and dancing in the agony of burning hair and flesh. Rushing back to spread chaos and terror in the gallery behind the guns…
"Feed me!" he screamed, exultant.
"Up, up!"
"Clear!"
SSSSSRAAAA WA CK!
The second rocket followed the first to his target. He ignored the others that were lancing through the air, some through the gunports, others slamming into the wall and blasting craters or dribbling fire down it. Several of the massive guns fired, but they were unaimed, mere bellows of agony like a stricken aurochs when it plunged into a deadfall or met a line of sharp spears. Behind him came a rapid schoonk… schoonk… schoonk as mortars lofted shells into the courtyards of the fortress, keeping heads down there, keeping the Tartessians away from their own high-angle weapons. It was an attack that could never have succeeded in daylight, or if the enemy had had any inkling of what was being prepared for them…
Another explosion, this one racking back around the barrel of the cannon. The ammunition stacked ready behind it gang-fired, throwing it forward to crash against the stone and iron of the embrasure and point harmlessly down. Like a limp dick, Verger thought triumphantly.
"Feed me!"
"Up!"
"Clear!"
One more cat-scream of victory from the rocket launcher, and he smashed at another gunport that might threaten his sworn brothers and chief.