‘Rear rank, get some shot into them!’ she rasped, because the Scorpions’ backs were broad targets. Then: ‘Gerethwy, if you wanted to test your toy, now’s your chance.’
Her people were ramming bolts into the approaching Wasps with a desperation that was fraying the edges of their speed, making them fumble with their ammunition and shake their aim. Castre Gorenn, the one-woman Commonweal Retaliatory Army, sent shaft after shaft at the enemy, each a sure hit, but it was just spitting into the tide. A brief glance told Straessa that her left flank was still secure, but if her maniple fell or fled, there would be a great open road leading to the innards of the Collegiate army.
Gerethwy levelled the heavy weapon, a long-barrelled snap-bow with a great mess of clockworks half-exposed, about no fewer than four air batteries. A long strip of tape tailed away into the hands of another soldier, bearing a long rank of bolts. A third soldier rested the barrel on her shoulder, loosing her own snapbow one-handed as she took the weight, while Gerethwy hunched himself against the weapon’s stock and pulled the trigger.
There was the brief clatter of tens of gears all working at once, and then the Foundry-pattern mechanized snapbow began its Apt magic. A dozen tightly wound new-metal springs — a quarter of the entire weight of the piece — drove the recharging of each battery as soon as it was emptied, the first ready to loose the moment the fourth was emptied. The tape was dragged through the teeth with a sound like cloth tearing — bolts rattling into the slot on one side, then cast into the enemy at the rate of a handful a second, with the empty strip trailing away, relieved of its burden as abruptly as a conjuror’s trick. Gerethwy’s job then was to conquer the rebellious shaking and yammering of the machine and keep it aimed, pivoting it on his comrade’s shoulder, as she tried to hold the barrel in place.
It would have been useless at long range, for the famous accuracy of the regular snapbows was something this ungainly weapon could never aspire to. This close, though, and with a great mass of men available to bring it to bear on, it was indeed like magic. Even as the individual shots of the rest of the maniple lanced and stung and downed their single targets, so Gerethwy became a maniple to himself. In the twenty seconds of constant metal hammering that he managed, he cored the Wasp charge like an apple, leaving the combatants on both sides appalled by the sight, as though some invisible reaping engine had run through the Wasp lines.
‘Out of spring?’ Straessa called to him, watching the Imperial formation as it wavered and tried to reform.
‘Jammed,’ came his terse reply, and she looked round to see Gerethwy already kneeling to prise open the weapon’s casing.
A moment later the Scorpions and their leader ploughed back through the gap towards the Wasp lines and safety, the rearmost of them still fighting. Straessa saw a flurry of savage exchanges there, the huge Scorpions turning to fend off their smaller, fleeter antagonists, the Mantis-kinden. Those sons and daughters of the Felyal who had not signed up for the Companies were not to be denied their war and their revenge. Little warbands of them — no more than six or eight in each — were running riot all over the Collegiate front, meeting the enemy skirmishers and taking them on, driving them away and thus giving the battered squares a chance to reform and step up to the line. Straessa saw at least three of the savage Felyen Mantids fall beneath the Scorpions’ blades, but soon the enemy had been driven away, and left a handful of their own in the dust behind as well.
The Wasp infantry were falling back now, on seeing that. She heard two long blasts of the whistle from somewhere behind: Stand and fight. The advance had now stalled, some would-be tactician weighing the odds and seeing the enemy forces too strong to push against. Which scares me because, if we’re not pushing them, they can push us back. Straessa wanted to find someone to argue the point with. She wanted to counter the order with her own whistle. Instead she just hovered over Gerethwy as he worked at the mechanism of the Foundry snapbow, and watched the Wasp infantry blocks reform.
Onrushing plumes of dust showed the Sentinels tearing along the flanks of the Collegiate army, shrugging off shot and shell as they followed up the tracks of their automotive rivals.
Amnon stared at them bleakly as the Collegiate train wheeled about him, still exchanging light artillery barrages with the few batteries that the Imperial engineers had set up.
He heard shouting, as someone tried to get a message across over the mutinous thunder of the engines, something too complex for the whistles to communicate. Then one of the big boxy Sarnesh automotives had pulled up, the hatch on top open for a crewman to lean out.
‘We’ll go after them!’ the Ant bellowed. ‘You get yours stuck in! We’re taking some of yours and going after them!’ His jabbing finger made the Sentinels his plain target.
Amnon had no idea of the odds involved, but the Sarnesh machines were designed for war, tracked and armour-plated and mounted with an artillery piece little short of a full leadshotter. The Sarnesh drove on, shouting his message hoarsely to everyone it could reach, and meanwhile the other four Ant-kinden machines formed up with a half-dozen Collegiate automotives, ready to meet the Sentinels, charge for charge.
‘You heard him!’ Amnon bellowed at his driver. ‘Get us moving!’ He wished this was a chariot, where he could whip at the beasts himself as need be.
The driver directed an ashen glance at him, and then at the Sarnesh and their allies, who were just moving off, even as the Sentinels’ dust rolled fast towards them. For a moment Amnon thought the man’s nerve had gone, but their artillerist yelled, ‘Come on!’ and at last the man turned their machine back towards the Wasp host, and the balance of their machines were following.
Amnon raised his sword high, just as when commanding chariots or cavalry, and the ramshackle wedge of war-adapted machines drove towards the Wasp lines, gaining speed as they went.
The Imperial artillery found them first — larger pieces with a longer range than those the Collegiates had been able to mount — and the machine to the right of Amnon exploded without warning, a leadshot landing directly on it and almost folding it in two. Ballista bolts arced overhead, exploding where they struck, leaving charred craters in the ground but striking nothing. Another automotive towards the back took a leadshot hard on one wheel and spun out of control.
There was some attempt at an infantry line ahead, a wavering wall, but they were clearing out of the way early now, orders or not. Snapbow bolts began to fall amongst the automotives, rattling off metal or driving deep into wooden panels. Behind Amnon, the artillerist woman gave a single bark of surprise, and then she was gone, pitched over the side by the force of the shot that killed her.
Amnon swung himself grimly into her place, behind the weapon, something magical and terrible by his peoples’ standards, but simple by the lights of Praeda’s instruction. His dead mistress had done her best to equip him for the world he now found himself in, and she had known he would be going to war.
He swung the weapon round to seek out enemy artillery, finding a leadshotter whose three-man crew was already tilting it to drop a shot towards the back of the automotive column. With sure hands he aimed, and absorbed the thunderous kick of the compact little killer with the great strength of his arms and shoulders. He saw one of the Wasp engineers simply explode as the ball passed through him to punch the artillery piece in the rear, spinning its barrel round to catch at least one of the other crewmen as it did so.
He fumbled with reloading, shoving another fist-sized ball down the barrel and wadding it tight, before prising out the spent firepowder cartridge and replacing it with a new one. Then he spared a glance for the battle with the Sentinels.