"Who gets the first rip-and-run at the Admiral's beard?" Gruder asked.
"Well—" Raj began, and froze. The others turned at his expression, to see the heliograph on the topmost tower of the Vice Governor's palace clicking out its sun-bright flickers.
"
Confirm please,
" Gerrin read. As one, they all pivoted to watch the eastern horizon; the hill was nearly as high as the tower, and they could all see the reply from the warship stationed at the edge of visibility.
"Multiple—sails—stop—estimate +40—stop—approaching—northwest—stop—Squadron—galleys—and—transports—stop—am—heading—in—stop—estimate enemy will arrive two hours minimum four maximum. End."
Four voices whispered it aloud. Seconds later the women and child were alone on the hill, staring after the soldiers.
Barton Staenbridge began to cry.
"Bloody hell, bloody
hell,
" Raj said, squinting up the dockside street.
Port Murchison rose on low rolling ground from the water it enclosed on three sides. Like most cities originally laid out in the Civil Government, it was built on a partial grid plan; most of the waterfront was cut off by three- and four-story warehouses, there were tangles of alleys in parts, but the major streets ran more-or-less straight up from the water.
And on one of them, a barricade of wagons was visible. "Runner!" Raj said. "Message to whoever's in command up there,
get those wagons into a side street and keep them there until the word's given.
"You," he went on, jabbing a finger at the harbormaster as the messenger clapped heels to his dog. "You've got the tugs ready?"
"
Say, Messenor,
" he replied in nervous Spanjol: Yes, my lord.
They were tubby little vessels, with ten two-man oars to a side and a raised catwalk; a tiny lazaretto stood under the wheel at the stern. Two more just like them were towing the final Civil Government steam ram into the inner military harbor; the bosuns danced down the catwalk swinging their ropes' ends, and the oars splashed with haste. Low smoke showed over the stone forts, as the remaining six warships made steam in there; no help for that . . . He turned to the Captain of the 5th standing at his elbow.
"The men have been thoroughly briefed?" he said.
Tejan M'brust stroked his long black hair. "Yes, sir," he said cheerfully. "No sound unless the barbs catch on. Then they toss a grenade into the rower's pit and swim for it."
Risky duty . . . but the best way to keep the oarsmen honest, and
they'd
been told the orders too. M'brust would be going on one of them himself.
"Go to it, son," he said.
"Move, move,
move,
" Menyez shouted.
The drum beat in a long continuous roll:
to arms, to arms.
Men poured out of the houses down the long narrow street, some hopping as they jammed their feet into boots, others buttoning tunics loosened for the
siesta
. Hobnails clattered as they fell in by platoons, then dashed off with rifles at the trail; at the intersection outside, traffic directors in
guardia
armbands were grabbing file-closers and pushing them in the direction they should go, then halting everyone in a chorus of bone whistles as a battery of guns went by, the iron wheels rumbling on the cobblestones.
"Look," Menyez went on, turning to the assembled company commanders. Not his own 17th Foot—they didn't need a pep talk, although he'd be with them when it started—this was the 10th Melaga, an ordinary line outfit.
"You showed the dogboys what you could do at the Slaughterhouse"—that was the nickname for the first engagement with the Admiral—"and now you're going to do it again. It's all quite simple; you stand in reserve at the assigned locations,
keeping out of sight from the harbor.
No noise, no movement—the longer it takes until they realize we're here, the better. Then when the signal comes, get the stuff across the street, lie down behind it and shoot. In the unlikely event they get as far as your positions, give them the bayonet. Understood, gentlemen?"
"Sir yes sir!"
"I make it thirty-zero-and-one meters," the sentinel sang out from the rooftop above.
"Keep it peeled and be ready to call it," the commander of the mortar battery said, before he turned back to Grammeck Dinnalsyn.
"Should be ready to go in less than twenty minutes, sir," he said.
The mortars were massive weapons; most of the weight was in the big circular baseplate of welded wrought iron and cast steel. Those had clanged to the pavement minutes ago, and the wheels on their cranked axles had been dragged away. Now the crews were pounding long iron spikes through its slots into the ground and shoveling dirt from the little plaza's garden into the trough that ran around the edge. The barrel was a stubby tube of cast steel with a 100mm bore, mounted on a ball joint in the center. As he watched, the men finished rigging a knock-down lifting tripod over it and ran a cable through an eyebolt at the muzzle. The aiming frame waited to take the barrel, a thing of rods and screw-wheels. Others were unloading crates of shells from a wagon.
"Good," Dinnalsyn said. "Remember, I want those things dropped right on the decks if I call for them."
"You'll get it, Major," the lieutenant said. "Glad to have someone in charge who knows a gun isn't fought from the same end as a dog," he went on.
"You'll find Messer Raj fully aware of that," the artillery specialist replied.
"Well, of course,
him,
sir!" The tone strongly implied Messer Raj used ships only because walking on water was tiring.
"Carry on." He mounted and heeled his dog, cantering until he came to the Captain at the head of a two-battery train of field guns.
"Got your position?" he said. The man looked up from a map he was holding across his pommel against the wind of passage.
"Checked it yesterday, sir," he replied. "The road goes over a lip there, no sight-line to the harbor. We can set up and then just manhandle the guns forward, and we'll cover the outer harbor mouth nicely.
And
the road down to the docks."
The forts at the outer entrance were useless for this work; they had been intended to keep ships
out
of the port, and were ruinous anyway.
"I'll go along to see you get that infantry support company," Dinnalsyn said.
The iron racket of the gunwheels echoed back from shuttered houses amid the whining panting of the dog-teams. No civilians were in sight: War had come to Port Murchison with a vengeance . . . and most of them would be indoors, imagining a vengeful Squadron force turned loose on the city that had betrayed their Admiral and their families.
"Do
not
break the windows out, you fools!" Barton Foley snapped. The trooper froze with his rifle butt poised. "
Open
them."
"Yisser," the soldier said, flushing.
Like children,
Foley thought.
They just love to break things.
It seemed to be an ineradicable enlisted-man trait, like pyromania . . .
Good men, though. Steady.
None of them showing any nerves at being rousted out of a comfortable billet for a surprise battle.
There were a dozen men of A Company, 1st Platoon of the 5th Descott setting up in here; a fire team and a set of 500-round ammunition boxes back by the door. The room had been some merchant's salon until a few moments ago, when the Descotters broke in and threw the protesting family out to find their way uptown against the massive flow of military traffic. He stepped to the tall narrow windows and looked out over the balcony; the slanting road below made a dogleg here, giving a clear field of fire right down to the main docks. Across the way more troopers were settling in along the roofline with only their eyes showing, and he saw movement at the windows; at ground level there was a pounding of feet and tap of drums as company columns pounded past doing the double quickstep.
"Where's Lieutenant Ahlvayrez?"
"Up t' roof, Cap'n."
"All right, men," Foley said; acutely conscious of his own youth for a moment. He made a sweeping gesture with his hook. "Remember, don't let them
see
you—just like a sauroid hunt. This is a blind over a game-trail . . . memorize your firing positions and the terrain, then get well back and wait for your corporal to give you the word. Understood?"
Nods and grins, even on this unfamiliar urban terrain. None of them were townsmen by birth, and none of them had fought in a built-up area before either. That was rare enough that even the handbooks didn't deal with it, much.
"Carry on."
Gerrin was coming upstairs outside the room, slightly out of breath; they had time for a quick hug.
"Everything in place?" the older man said.
"More or less. They'll be settled in in about fifteen, twenty minutes." They both looked at their watches; an hour and a half since the heliograph message. "It's those cow-handed peon infantry I'm worried about—they take a week to chew the cud of an unfamiliar idea."
"Raj thought of that," Gerrin said, taking a deep breath. He squeezed the younger man's shoulder. "I'm off to the command post. Be careful, my dear."
Foley grinned and flourished the hook where his left hand had been. "Always," he said.
"Bloody odd way to run a battle," Raj said, leaning back in the deck chair and raising the binoculars.
The overall command post had been set up on a rooftop patio with a good view down to the harbor and a crenellated wall; that was meant to be ornamental, but the stone was thick and the gaps for riflemen quite functional. There was a map table set up, and a rank of messengers waiting; a portable heliograph stood with the operator's hands on the levers. The soldiers seemed incongruous among the potted rosebushes and bougainvillea. . . . The city had fallen very quiet; perhaps quiet enough to be suspicious, but there was not much he could do about that.
Not much I can do about anything, he thought, swallowing acid.
does it distress you to have to give orders and trust others to carry them out?
Center commented drily.
Raj laughed, drawing awed looks from some of the troopers.
It's easy for you,
he thought.
is it?
Raj blinked in surprise, then turned to Suzette. "How's our mutual friend Berg?" he said, raising the glasses again.
The first transport was being towed between the ends of the breakwater; he could see the long blue swells creaming into surf on the rough line of interlocked stone that guarded the harbor. A substantial ship, bluff-bowed and three-masted; sailors were standing on the bare spars, at their ease—and away from the rowdy mass of Squadron warriors crowding the rails.
Getting ready for the knocking-shops if they're from the country, and home to the wife and kiddies if they're not,
he thought
"Nervous," Suzette said quietly. "He's . . . not a fighting man, after all."
"Well, I hope he doesn't bugger off for the bundu—the Admiral's out there somewhere," Raj said.
Two more ships were coming into the harbor mouth; there was a crowd of them dotted across kilometers of calm ocean, rising and falling with the long swells, bows to the wind under jibsails as they waited for their tows. Forty or more sail, and beyond them the long snaky shapes of war-galleys, their beaks flashing as the crews dipped the oars just enough to keep them head to the waves and holding station. They made a brave sight, familiar from the visions Center had sent him; from what he'd been told, they could be smelled a kilometer or better downwind. The Squadron navy used chained slaves and convicts as rowers, ten men to an oar and single-banked. The slave-barracks over on the military harbor had provided thousands of extremely enthusiastic volunteer laborers for the Civil Government forces, even though they were three-quarters empty with the decline of the Squadron's naval power.
"Feel that trembling in the ground?" Raj asked.
"What?" Suzette replied.
Raj gave a harsh laugh. "That's old 'Geyser' Ricks trying to burrow back from Starless Hell and strangle his descendants for ineptitude," he said.
Suzette sat beside him and took his hand; he squeezed back gratefully, feeling a little of the tension go out of his back. "What's going to happen?" she said softly.
"I don't know," he replied honestly. "As far
as I can tell, I've got everything covered . . . but this isn't like a normal battle where you can sit on a hill and
see
everything." Most battlefields were less than a kilometer on a side, and in open country. "Even the reserve is decentralized—and I've got to keep enough men on the walls, just in case. I've told the front-line people to use their initiative."
The first transport was nearly to the docks, and a dozen more were inching in as the tug crews bent to their oars. It would be the men first, the dogs second, and then the warships following through to the inner harbor; tradition, for the Squadron. Convenient for him . . .
"Spirit knows what'll happen when they do
that.
"
Hereditary Sector Commander Henrik Martyn leaped down the gangplank and fell full-length to kiss the grimy concrete of the dock.
"Home!" he howled, between smacks. "Eats! Booze! Pussy! No more hardtack, no more hairy hardcases!"
The men behind him on the ship yelled good-naturedly and poured down after him, slinging their weapons; servants and slaves would follow with their baggage.
"Fuckin' waste of a campaign," one of them said.
Martyn nodded, rising and dusting himself off; he was a tall young man, full-bearded and with shoulders like a bear. "Damn straight, Willi," he said. "Go to Sadler Island, sit in front of the city walls, scratch our butts, come back because somebody's seen a Civvie boogieman behind a peach tree."
"Too much peach brandy, maybe," one of his friends laughed. "Hey, come back to my place for dinner? Try out your lies on Marylou."