By Heresies Distressed (37 page)

“Now that you've done your job so well, Sergeant, I suppose it's up to the rest of us to do ours.”

Gahrvai was too far behind his advancing regiments to see what had happened. He'd seen the sudden white puffballs springing up out of the wheat fields like loathsome toadstools, and he'd realized instinctively that his troops had just encountered a screen of dispersed skirmishers. What he didn't realize was that there'd been over four hundred of them, and that they'd just inflicted shattering damage on the command structure of altogether too many of his leading battalions.

He was a little slower than Myllyr to realize the skirmishers in question must have been rifle-armed, as well. Mostly because his position so far to the rear made it hard to judge the range at which the shots had been fired . . . and even more so because he had no idea how devastatingly accurate they'd been.

His mouth tightened as his entire formation halted, even if only briefly, to dress its ranks and try to reorganize around the loss of so many of its key cadre. Without any way of realizing how many officers and noncoms had just been eliminated, he didn't understand the pause. Surely a scattering of musket balls shouldn't have caused a battle line over
two miles
wide to stop in its tracks!

It was a brief pause, but even small things could accumulate into an avalanche on a field of battle. He felt himself leaning forward, willing the solid lines and blocks of infantry to resume their movement. Priceless seconds dragged away into even more irreplaceable minutes, and still the lines stood in place. It looked as if his left wing was waiting for his right, and he gritted his teeth.

Sir Zher Sumyrs, the Baron of Barcor, was in command of his left. He was also the oldest of Gahrvai's senior officers. He'd been a soldier for the better part of thirty years, but he'd seen precious little serious action in those three decades. His campaigning had been mostly against brigands, aside from a couple of forays against rebellious Zebediahans, not against trained soldiers, and he had a pronounced tendency to go by The Book. Worse, he was still attached to the
old
Book. He'd had more trouble than most getting his mind wrapped around the new concepts Gahrvai and his father had been introducing, yet his firmly entrenched position in the army command structure (and in the political structure of Corisande) had prevented Gahrvai from easing him out to pasture.

At the moment, Gahrvai would cheerfully have shot him on the spot, and hang the political consequences. All of his own prebattle orders had stressed the necessity of getting to grips with the Charisians as rapidly as possible. Coordination was good, and confusion was to be avoided at all costs, but speed of execution was most important of all, and Barcor's right was firmly covered by Doyal's massive artillery battery. He didn't need to maintain perfect alignment with the Earl of Mancora, on Gahrvai's right. And someone with all the experience Barcor was fond of mentioning damned well ought to be aware of the potential consequences of allowing a line of battle to lose momentum. Hektor Bahnyr, Earl Mancora, was half Barcor's age, with a military career
less
than half as long, but Mancora would never have made the mistake Barcor was busy making.

But it's still only a
pause,
Koryn
, he reminded himself.
And each wing has five thousand men in it. That's got to be more than the Charisians' total strength, so even if Barcor screws up, Mancora should still be able to do the job
.

He told himself that with as much assurance as he could. Then his head snapped to the right as artillery began to thunder.

Langhorne! I hadn't counted on their stopping
that
far out!

Sir Charlz Doyal winced in dismay as the Charisian artillerists abruptly stopped and began unlimbering their pieces.

He was reasonably comfortably ensconced in the branches of a nearoak tree, and he'd been watching their approach through his spyglass. He'd also been experiencing a deep sense of envy as he watched. Their gun carriages were significantly different from his own—proportionately more lightly constructed, and with larger wheels. Nor had it occurred to anyone in Corisande to incorporate what looked like a private ammunition wagon into each individual gun's equipment. Each gun appeared to be paired with a much larger ammunition wagon, as well, but the bigger vehicles had been stopped well back, out of harm's way, while the guns continued to advance.

The draft dragons weren't actually harnessed to the guns themselves, at all. Instead, they were harnessed to the smaller, two-wheeled ammunition cart, and the gun was hooked in turn to the cart. Both vehicles together were little larger and more cumbersome than a single one of Doyal's own guns, and it reduced the number of draft animals the Charisians required to actually move the gun in and out of action by almost fifty percent. Not to mention the fact that everywhere the gun went, its own ammunition cart obviously went with it.

If only Alyk and his blasted cavalrymen had realized what they were seeing, this wouldn't have come as such a damned surprise!

Doyal had been scribbling notes to himself in pencil from the moment he first saw the Charisian equipment with his own eyes. Between notes, he'd concentrated on reminding himself that neither Windshare nor his troopers had any experience with true field artillery. Of course they hadn't realized what they were seeing—why should they have?

And it wouldn't have made that much difference, anyway. There wouldn't have been anything you could have done about it in the last fifty-two hours, even if they'd described every last detail to you!

That thought chased itself through the back corridors of his brain as the Charisians brought their pieces to battery. They went about the task with a polished efficiency, and the peculiar cart-and-carriage arrangement clearly speeded the evolution. Despite the fact that their guns' six-foot barrels were almost twice as long as those of his own weapons, they had the guns fully deployed in little more than two-thirds of the time his own crews would have required.

His jaw tightened as he contemplated the range at which they were doing that deploying. Without his glass, he would have been hard put to pick out individual limbs, but belts and packs were still visible, and the division between the Charisians' upper and lower bodies remained relatively clear. That put the range at more than five hundred yards but less than seven. In fact, it looked to be at least six hundred, although he might be being at least a little pessimistic. He hoped he was, at any rate, because six hundred yards was right on the very limit of his stubby twenty-six-pounders' effective range. In fact, it was outside that range. His gunners might just be able to reach them at maximum elevation, especially given his height advantage, but he wouldn't have cared to bet any substantial sums on the probability. And even if they could
reach
the Charisians, “inaccurate” would be a grossly inadequate description of their ability to actually
hit
them.

The question, of course, was whether or not that would be true for the Charisians, as well.

Well out in the wheat field, invisible to Doyal among the three-foot stalks, were the thirty men of Lieutenant Alyn Hathym's specialized sniper platoon. The marksmen of that platoon were the elite shots of an elite outfit, and they knew it. Most platoons consisted of only twenty men, but the sniper platoon was divided into fifteen two-man teams. Every man was a trained and deadly marksman, but normally only one of them was assigned the shooter's role while his partner used a spyglass to identify and pick out targets.

Which was precisely what they had been doing for the last quarter of an hour or so.

Doyal never heard the shots. Nor was he looking in the right place to spot the rifle smoke. The snipers were actually
beyond
and to either side of the deploying Charisian artillery, which—by definition—meant they were far out of any range at which small arms fire could possibly threaten Doyal's guns.

His gunners knew that as well as he did, and many of them had climbed up out of their gun pits, craning their necks to get a better view of what was going on to either side of them. Which meant they were totally exposed when fifteen rifles with fifty-eight-inch barrels, loaded with what an inhabitant of Old Earth would have called spitzer-pointed bullets, specially formed in compression dies, fired practically as one.

Doyal's eyes flared in astonishment as eleven of his men went down virtually simultaneously. Two of them had obviously been hit at least twice, and his brain seemed to freeze for just an instant as it registered the fact that both of them had been officers, with the distinctive sashes and hats which indicated their rank. In fact, all but two of the casualties were officers, which meant that somehow musketeers he couldn't even see were picking individual targets with deadly precision.

It took an instant or two for the unwounded gunners to realize death had just come striding through them. Then, as if a single hand had reached up and grabbed them by the ankles, they disappeared back into the protection of their gun pits, leaving eight dead men and three wounded ones grotesquely sprawled behind them.