Steam Legion (26 page)

“Commander, beyond the men, I see scutem.”

Ah…
The Commander glared at the bridge and finally spotted what his Adjutant had seen. Scutem in a turtle defensive formation, albeit low and hidden behind the hoplite forces.
Interesting.

That made the odd hoplite-armed men a blatant attempt to intimidate his men and himself. A wasted effort, the Commander decided finally. His men were too ignorant of history to recognize the statement being made, and honestly, he would have been more intimidated by the scutem-defended Legionnaires rather than some antiquated reference to a battle lost five centuries past.

“Signal the archers forward, prepare two skirmishing groups,” he ordered.

The man at his side acknowledged the order and blew out two quick signals, setting the army in motion. His archers moved to the front as the skirmisher groups prepared themselves. The Commander guided his force over to where the leader of the archers was getting the unit organized.

A signal was passed, silently this time, and confirmed with a wave so that the archers were instantly given the order to notch and draw. They angled their aim up, experience and skill permitting them to judge the range correctly as they waited for the order to loose.

The sound of bows springing back from the draw filled the air as the order was given, and the first flight of arrows went up. Before it was even one quarter to the target, however, the archers had re-notched their bows and launched a second flight. Then a third, a fourth, and a fifth.

The first flight rained down on the bridge, pelting the figures standing there with a lethal rain, but they didn’t even bother to raise their shields. The second through fifth flights followed, arrows snapping against armor and bouncing off stone, but through it all, the eight figures stood as if at attention in a mild rain.

The Commander frowned, guiding his horse back to the column as his archers ceased firing to conserve their arrows.

“Are they made of steel?” his Adjutant asked in a whisper when he arrived. “Surely some of the arrows would have found flesh? They didn’t even lift their shields!”

The Commander nodded, considering. “Send forward the skirmishers.”

The order was passed quickly, and men began marching forward, swords clattering against shields as they marched.

“Likely, those are statues,” he said, softly. “The real men are behind them, hoping we’ll turn away in fear because of those rumors started in Jerusalem a few weeks past.”

“You believe so, Commander?”

“I believe it is a possibility,” he corrected. “We’ll see shortly.”

The men were marching to the bridge as they spoke, forming into ranks of men eight across as they reached the first stone of the span. As they got closer, they started to realize that it wasn’t men standing on the bridge, but rather armor held up by what looked like wooden frames. The men at the front lines began to laugh as they continued to march, but those laughs ended the moment the first foot stepped onto the bridge.

The eight figures moved abruptly and with high speed. They brought their shields up in front as they took a step forward and leaned heavily into that leg. The four with spears dropped their weapons level with the men, while those with swords began to slowly hammer them against the polished bronze shields.

There was something wrong in the motions, however, something distinctly inhuman. The men at the front could see it and attempted to stop, but by this point, they were on the bridge with dozens and dozens of men marching behind them. It was continue on, jump off the side of the bridge, or be trampled by their fellows.

Given those choices, they steeled their nerves and brought their swords to the ready as they swallowed the fear and marched on.

They had just a moment’s warning by the flash of red and gold beyond the figures, enough time to tense but not to do anything else as the march pressed forward. The pylum were flung from behind the eight hoplites, not entirely unexpected but unwelcome all the same.

“Shields!”

They threw up their shields in time, the heavy javelins punching through them like the heavy wicker and wood shields were made of paper, but the points were mostly stopped short of hitting the men behind. Here and there a man went down, iron point in his chest, arm, or throat, but mostly they were just faced with the twisted metal jammed into their shields as they continued forward.

Sticking to their training, the Zealots didn’t throw aside the clumsily weighted shields. They knew that they may yet need them to protect from further pylum assault, to say nothing of the spear and swords of a close-in battle. The fallen hit the stonework of the bridge and were walked over by those behind them, in some cases finishing the job that the Roman javelins began.

The second flight of the heavy javelins came a few moments later, and again the shields went up. More men fell, but the formation didn’t falter as they closed to only a few tens of feet from the powerful figures standing before them. It was when they got a good look at the eyes behind the helm that the front line of the formation finally started to falter as men tried seriously to stop.

They could see flames flickering in the eyes of the eight figures standing there and the hard evil lines of human skulls filling out the faces hidden by the helms.

The line of battle would not be denied, however. The men behind couldn’t see what their fellows up front did, and they did as they were trained. They kept on marching, no matter what. Men stumbled, men were pushed, some just tried so hard to stop that their fellows behind literally walked right up their backs. The results were the same: Almost half the front line was trampled by the men behind them as the line of battle closed on the armored figures.

The signal horn sounded the charge as they closed, and they began to jog, swords upraised as the silent figures stood waiting. The first line reached the figures, starting to bring their swords down in a hacking motion, when the four spear wielders moved with an economy of motion so perfect that only the men suddenly impaled on the twelve-foot spears even realized that it had happened.

That was the signal, apparently, and the other four closed ranks with perfect unison of motion, leaning into the shields as they stabbed forward with their swords. A clash of metal on metal erupted, steel and iron meeting bronze and brass, and then suddenly all of it was drowned out by a roar that seemed like it could only have come from a living beast.

The Commander of the Zealot forces pulled his horse back in shock as the entire bridge was suddenly obscured by smoke or mist, similar clouds forming along the far banks of the river on both sides of the bridge. He stared, confused and deeply concerned by the sudden change of events.

“What was that?” his Adjutant asked from beside him.

“I have no idea. Some sort of fire weapon?” he answered quietly, keeping his voice down so as not to spread his ignorance and have it turn to fear in the men.

****

Dyna grinned wildly from behind the scutem she was using for cover. Rising to look over the edge of the shield at the sheer devastation caused by the twenty cannons firing into such a tightly packed space was frankly exhilarating.

The steam cleared quickly in the breeze blowing along the river, revealing that one hundred heavy bolts and twenty stone balls could really ruin an army’s day if encountered in the right, or perhaps that was wrong, place.

“Sensus, hammer the shields,” she ordered as she signaled the Immunes to reload the cannon barrels.

The men facing them were standing in the center of the stone bridge. Those few still able to stand seemed shocked into complete immobility by the utter carnage that had obliterated their force in that single horrific instant.

That horror was magnified as the eight figures they had been facing now began to jerkily move, hammering their hoplite shields with their swords and spears in a slow and mocking cadence. The first man broke and ran just seconds after, triggering the flood as the survivors of the assault retreated off the bridge, leaving well over half their number dead and dying behind them.

“Now we wait and see,” Dyna said as her grin faded to be replaced by the grim realization that if the enemy came back, it would be with massively reinforced numbers and even stronger determination.

****

“That was unexpected.”

The Commander of the Zealot forces had pulled his army back to ensure that they were out of range of any siege weapons the enemy might have. He hadn’t seen any, but whatever had caused that smoke was something to be treated with caution, at the very least.

They’d lost over a hundred men in that single clash and, as far as he could tell, hadn’t inflicted a single casualty in return. That was an absolutely insane exchange rate, and he couldn’t help but feel a twinge of fear at the idea that the Legion had new weapons he was entirely unaware of.

We know they don’t have much of a force in this area.
He pondered the situation. With weapons the like of which they’d used on the bridge, he would have moved to follow up on the victory if he had the forces. The fact that they were still waiting there told him that the scouts’ reports were correct. The Legion didn’t have much strength in the region, which explained their choice of a place to lay their little ambush.

In fact, the more he considered it, the more it seemed to him that he was looking at an extremely small force. They were obviously disguising their numbers, not by attempting to appear stronger but by clearly hiding so that he couldn’t see all that there was, but that just strengthened his determination that there were less numbers facing him and his force than he had feared originally.

Those unknown smoke weapons, however, were a concern. There was something new here, though not spectacularly so. The carnage looked like it was caused by ranks and ranks of scorpions, though obviously he would have seen that number of siege weapons dotting the far side of the river had they been there. There simply was not enough cover to hide a hundred scorpion torsion launchers, ignoring for a moment the fact that scorpions didn’t generate massive plumes of smoke and roar like living beasts.

“We could shift to the north…”

“What?” the Commander asked, looking up from his thoughts.

“I was saying, Commander, we could shift to the north and cross the river upstream…”

“No.” He shook his head. “No, not unless we’re forced to.”

“But, Commander, they annihilated our scouting force!”

“And we learned what we needed to,” he growled. “Now we know that there is a reason to cross here.”

“What possible reason?”

“Those weapons. I want one.”

****

Dyna let out a deep sigh when she saw the formations coming back together, obviously preparing to march forward again.

“Well, that’s that,” a Legionnaire muttered.

She nodded, looking over at him. “Indeed. It would appear that we’ll need to show them the error of their ways.”

“Thy will be done, my Lady,” the man chuckled, drawing similar laughter from the others.

“Let the automatons take the brunt of the first charge,” she said. “Sensus, this will be your last chance to back out.”

“Let them come, my Lady.” The craftsman bared his teeth from where he was sitting on the steam-powered chariot that controlled the automatons. “I want to see how well these monsters we’ve forged fare under real heat.”

Dyna sighed, knowing that they were about to be put to the forge’s own test. “Alright. when they strike, put power to the chariot, Sensus. We’ll push them back as we can. Legionnaires, anyone who slips through the gaps is yours to eliminate. Protect Sensus!”

The men roared their agreement, but Sensus hesitantly tapped her shoulder and leaned closer.

“What is it?” she asked.

“We didn’t really have time to design the system to move.”

Dyna cast a look over the connections that ran from the backs of the automatons to the chariot and shrugged. “The shafts look strong enough, Sensus. Run it until it breaks, then run it over.”

He grimaced, eyes falling on the eight figures that he, Master Heron, and many others had spent weeks building. “Run them over?”

“They’re only there to keep us from dying, Sensus,” she told him with an amused scowl. “We can rebuild them; rebuilding you may pose a somewhat trickier problem, no?”

“Understood,” he conceded unhappily.

“Here’s the important part: Don’t push them back until
after
the cannons have fired,” she stressed, looking around at everyone. “Does everyone understand?”

They all saluted automatically and enthusiastically, though whether they understood or not wasn’t clear.

Dyna decided to explain anyway. “We need to protect the Immunes on the bridge and give them, as well as those on the banks, time to reload the weapons. We push when they’re reloading and fall back to allow them to fire again. Do not, I tell you,
not
, chase the enemy off the bridge! If they trap us in the open beyond the bridge, we’re dead.”

When they all nodded, she left the group and walked over to the Immunes at the cannons.

“When you fire, it will be our signal to charge,” she said. “When we retreat, it will be your signal to fire. Do not wait for my order. Fire as soon as our men are clear and the enemy is in your range. Clear?”

“Clear, my Lady.”

She took a breath, steeling herself for what was to come. “This will be the first time we try this dance, but the lives of my men and myself will be on the line. And need I remind you that if we die, you cross the Styx on the next ferry?”

“We understand, my Lady.” The Immune nodded fervently. “I’ll speak with the others.”

“Do so,” she said, turning her eyes to the formations of the enemy forces that were still preparing to advance.

Dyna called for a mirror and took a moment to send off a message to Aelia on the nearby hilltop, knowing that she was possibly sending off her last orders as she did.

“My Lady.” A voice caused her to turn around as she handed off the mirror. “Here they come.”

“Positions!” she called, unlimbering her blade from her belt. “Prepare your blades, men. Our dear friends out there would seem to need another lesson in Roman fighting!”