"Reload." The process was quicker this time. "Volley fire, fire."
The platoons opened up again and this time the sound was more like the BAM-BAM-BAM that it should have been.
Reload. . fire. Reload. . fire. The fourth volley was almost acceptably crisp, except that a lone shot rang out several seconds after the rest.
The Master Sergeant made a sound that would have done credit to an angry wardog. "Get me that man's name," da Cruz shouted into the ringing silence. There were muffled coughs as the slight breeze carried the cloud of powder smoke back across the road; for a few moments it was dense enough to hide the prone men and dogs from the mounted officers.
"We'll have to do better than this," Raj said neutrally.
"Fire in the hole!" called the gunner; his team had rolled the gun back into batter after its recoil. Raj glanced over to him: "Give me an airburst just short of the treeline," he said; that was a real test of skill.
The gunner swung the crank that opened the breech and removed the round; taking a small wrenchlike tool from his belt, he fastened it to the point of the shell and twisted three careful turns. The fuse was dual-purpose. It would explode on contact, or when a perforated brass tube of powder burned past an outlet into the body of the bursting charge. The tool rolled the tube up or down to vary the length of time that took. . but the speed of combustion was not entirely uniform.
The gunner rammed the shell home and cranked the breach closed, stepped aside and jerked the lanyard. The gun recoiled, rolling almost across the road to the ditch; there was an instant of ripping canvas sound, and a burst of black and off-white ten meters short of the trees. An irregular circle of alfalfa beneath the airburst flattened, ripped by the shredded iron of the shell casing. Raj nodded; some of the troopers winced. Air-burst shrapnel was something you could not guard against, it killed with the impersonal arbitrariness of lightning.
"Hey!" someone shouted. "Sicklefeet!"
Surprised, Raj brought his glasses up again. Yes, sicklefeet, a pack of about twenty breaking out of the trees and halting for a moment, bobbing and tense on their long legs. They were native carnosauroids, about twice the size of a large man, bipeds whose snaky two-meter bodies were balanced by an equal length of tapering tail. They held themselves almost horizontal to the ground, the slender forearms with the grasping claws tucked into their chests. The heads were slender as well, with forward looking vertical-slit eyes, and mouths that split three quarters of the length of the skull to reveal back-curving teeth.
Those were for tearing flesh; the killing tools were on the feet, half-meter rear claws that folded up along the shank of the birdlike leg. When muscle and tendon swung them down they were ready to slice and tear; in the wild steppe country a pack of sicklefeet could bring down a giant grazing sauroid, leaping twice their own height to kick slash wounds man-height and arm-deep. The carnivores milled, opening their mouths to hiss-roar at each other, sounding like a locomotive about to explode. Their mouths were shocking pink, holding only teeth and a tongue fixed all along its underside to the floor of the mouth; it was a mechanism for ramming large chunks of meat down the throat, since the creatures could not chew. The mouth was a striking contrast to the mottled reddish-green and dull blue of their pebbled hides, a color that faded to dull cream on their bellies.
"Sicklefeet, all right," Raj said, spitting on the road. The things were still quite common in Descott County, which was mostly rocky pasture or open mountain forest with scattered pockets of arable land; men had killed off the big grazers that were their natural prey, but sicklefeet were thoroughly opportunistic feeders, and had found human livestock a perfectly acceptable substitute. Or humans; Raj remembered watching one bounding up a near vertical cliff with a crofter's toddler clamped in its jaws and still screaming. They were one reason no male and few women in their native hills went beyond hailing distance of their hearths without a gun.
"Gerrin." Senior Lieutenant Staenbridge looked up. "Which platoon scored best, today?"
"First of the Second," he said. That was Kaltin Grader's Company; his younger brother Evrard was the lieutenant.
"Kaltin, my compliments to Lieutenant Gruder, and his men are to take those things out. See to it."
"I'm surprised there are any of the filth in close-settled country like this," Gerrin said.
"So am I," Raj said. "But this pack is leaving soon."
The beasts were milling around, moving in darting-swift bounds; some of them were pointing their bodies at the road and flaring the single broad nostril on the ends of their snouts. One of those was a male, and it lifted the crimson skin ruff around its neck and bugled a challenge. No pack back in the County would do that; they had learned to be afraid of men, although they had a disconcertingly sharp notion of how far a rifle could shoot.
Crack. The pack male leaped straight up, an astonishing fifteen-meter jump, landed spinning and snapping at its flank. Crack-crack-crack, thirty rifles on independent fire, in the hands of men whose livelihoods had depended on guarot. The heavy hollow point bullets hammered at the sauroids, punching fist-sized exit holes that gouted blood a darkish brick color. The pack scattered like glass exploding away from a sledge hammer, but none escaped; sicklefeet were open-country creatures, and their instinct was to run rather than shelter in the bush behind them.
Raj looked up at the sun, westering; the Battalion had made more time on the side roads in the course of its training exercises than the transport column would have all day. They would cut back north and west to intersect it.
"Skin them," he said. Sicklefeet heart and liver were quite tasty, and the tail made acceptable stew. The dogs would be glad of the rest. "Then mount up, and we'll head back."
* * *
"Sir-"
Raj looked around; it was young Lieutenant Gruder, looking much like a model of his older brother Kaltin in nine-tenths scale, without the self-assurance.
"Just a second, Lieutenant," Raj said, and turned back to the local landowner who had ridden up to the head of the column just as they were about to pull out. "Excuse me, Messer. ."
"Minh, Messer Captain," the noble replied. A wave to indicate the estate. "Stevin Trahn Minh, Guardian of Twinford."
"Raj Ammenda Halgern da Luis Whitehall," Raj said, using the older long form common at home.
Trahn's mount was a cream-colored wolfhound, worth half a year of Raj's pay; there was an equivalent amount in the jeweled clasp that held a spray of peacock feathers to the side of his beret, and the buckle on his gun belt. His clothes were almost offensively fashionable, long-sleeved tunic and white-silk roll-necked shirt, baggy trousers, tooled boots. The half-dozen guests behind him were similar, and there was a positive train of attendants.
"I must protest, Messer," Minh was continuing, "over this high-handed violation of the game laws."
"Game laws?" Raj rocked back in his saddle, surprise striking like a physical blow. He had been expecting a complaint of damage to the timber, and a demand for compensation. No problem with that, write out a chit and let this big frog learn what size puddle the Ministry of Finance was. Game laws, though?
"Messer, I grant that the forces of the Civil Government have the right to conduct exercises on my land, but this wanton slaughter of my carnosauroids is inexcusable! The Law clearly states that sport hunting on any Messer's land is his and his alone; these sauroids have been preserved at enormous expense and trouble for the sport of my guests." He waved a hand over his shoulder to indicate the bright-clothed assembly. "Those were the last pack between here and the coast range."