Warlord (12 page)

"Battalion—"

The 5th Descott was trotting in column of twos down the little farmlane. There was an orchard to their left; to the right, an open flat pasture stretching a hundred and fifty meters. It had been mown for hay recently, and the smell was heady-sweet in the afternoon sun. The field was bordered by a rise, a terrace of the alluvial plain marking an old shoreline of the Hemmar in some age long before men came to Bellevue. It was in heavy forest, oak and wild cherry and pine and native thongtree, tall reddish-ochre things with smooth bark and a cluster of thin whippy branches on top, big sword-shaped leaves set like feathers along the edges of each.

"—to the right, fire mission,
wheel-halt
."

"Company—" the unit commanders relayed it; the men kept their pace. There was an imperceptible slowing in the manifold thudding of dogs' pads on the dusty dark-brown earth of the lane. Cavalry mounts were bred for intelligence, and most knew the drillbook nearly as well as their riders. The trumpeter called it out as well, brassy and cheerful in the slanting sunlight. Two weeks travel from the Capital had tightened drill considerably.

"Platoon—"

"Right face, wheel-halt!"

The dogs stopped, sinking their haunches toward the ground and bracing their column-thick forelegs, then whipped around to the right in half their own body lengths. Or tried to; some of the troopers had been a little late or early with the crucial rein signals. There were collisions, the heavy
thud
sounds of thousand-pound wardogs meeting unexpectedly. Raj had his watch out, the second hand sweeping inexorably as the men jumped from the saddle with barely time enough for the mounts to stop. Many tumbled, shouts of pain and clatter of falling rifles; a shot cracked out, and Master Sergeant da Cruz's lips tightened. Raj did not envy the luckless trooper who had been riding with a round up the spout and, worse, the safety off.

"Ragged, ragged," the noncom cursed as the units formed in a staggered line along nearly a thousand meters of roadway; like two lines of dashes, the rear covering the empty spots in the front. The dogs dropped to their bellies, lying flat while their riders aimed over their backs. "Three minutes, that's
ragged
,
try that with Colonials and we're fucking
dead
.
Ser." The Master Sergeant had less of the nasal twang of Descott in his voice than most of the other ranks; a surprisingly well educated man, if you could get him to talk.

"Well, we're here to give them some polish, aren't we?" Raj said mildly. The exercise was supposed to be a response to a charge from the treeline. The crucial thing was to make the zone of beaten ground as wide as possible, to break the momentum of shock action before the enemy could get home with cold steel. Such a charge was more likely with the western barbarians of the Military Governments, who had what amounted to a religious reverence for edged weapons, but Colonial dragoons would jump you fast enough if they could.

The platoons were sounding off as they came ready; Staenbridge was noting the times on his noteboard. Raj waited until the last hailed in, before he pressed the stem of his watch.

"Call it five minutes," he said. "Down by half from where we were first day out, but not good enough . . . volley fire on the treeline; by platoons, four rounds." He raised his field glasses to his eyes and focused on the edge of the trees, where bushes grew thick between the trunks.

"Battalion, treeline target—" the Master Sergeant's voice carried easily, raised two octaves to pierce the ambient noise and propelled by his deep highlander's chest. The trumpeter duplicated it between phrases, and the noncoms down the battalion front were like multiple echoes.

"Volley fire, four rounds.
Load
."

A giant rattling click, that lasted far too long. Raj turned his head aside for a moment. The field gun with the 5th was setting up on the crown of the road behind the troops, a few meters to the left of where the command group sat their mounts about the banner. A 75mm rifle, standard issue, with a six-dog team and caisson, a breechloader with chest-high wheels. The crew were in uniforms of a darker blue; they were Area Command troops, detached for this duty. They moved smartly, swinging the long barrel of the cast-steel piece toward the putative target, letting the steel pole trail thump to the dirt. The gunner squatted over the trail and sighted through the opened breech and down the barrel, standard for point-blank work. The shell clanked home just as the riflemen were ready.

"Volley fire
—fire
!"

There should have been a rolling
crash
down the line, a separate BAM from each platoon. Instead there was a staccato stuttering
kkt-kkkt-kkkt
,
overlapping bangs. He watched the treeline carefully; the bushes were thrashing as if caught in a high wind, but far too many branches were pattering down from as high as four meters up. Raj's teeth showed beneath the binoculars. Some people were not adjusting their sights properly. Some people were going to be sorry and sore.

PUMPF
.
The field gun cut loose, adding its long plume of dirty-white smoke to the clouds puffing up along the firing line. The shell burst neatly at the edge of the forest, and a medium-sized pine quivered, swayed and fell outward with slowly gathering momentum.

"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."

"
Slaughter
?"
Raj asked. "Of
sicklefeet
?
Messer, you mean you were keeping those vermin around
deliberately
?"
Raj looked at him, a tall slender man with a narrow face and eyes so black that the pupil merged with the iris; thirty, and in good hard condition, the way you'd expect an enthusiastic hunter to be. "In Descott County, there's a
bounty
on them."

"Ah. Descott." There was a freight of meaning in the single syllable, in the hard-edged accent of the Home Counties. "Well,
Messer
Captain,"—he stressed the honorific as if Raj was a member of the gentry class only by courtesy "—this is
Harzon
County, don't you know."

A slight tension at his back, as the other officers heard the implied insult to their birth County.
Is
this man insane
?
Raj wondered, forcing back the pounding at his temples. No, he decided, watching the eyes that held no trace of fear or doubt; it was the face of someone who could not
imagine
contradiction or opposition on his own territory. No doubt this Trahn could drop the purchase price of Hillchapel across a gaming table and laugh at the loss, but it required an arrogance of truly interesting proportions to act this way with three hundred killers at Raj's back. A Descott squire could be stiff-necked enough behind the ramparts of his manor . . . but the biggest landowner in the hills wouldn't have
this
sort of gall.