S. Stirling - Dies The Fire

Well, Ken was right. Throwing incendiaries at the surface wouldn't work, even if we could get within range. But:

The mound the tower stood on was narrow and steep, sloping right down into a dry moat filled with barbed wire; a staircase went down the inner side to the bailey. Eastward a raised walkway connected the tower with the fighting platform behind the outer palisade; to the right that ran right to the gatehouse.

Not too many men on the wall.

No point; if the Protector's CO here had them well drilled, they could turn out of their barracks and pack it full in far less time than an assault force would need to get going.

But:

His ears caught a flutter of cloven air. He turned, back against the crenellations, mouth firmed to a thin line. Signe was scheduled to come in next. She was also supposed to be a better hang glider than he was; that might be true, but he was certain she hadn't had as much time in the air: or experience at judging distances in the dark, with life for a forfeit if you were wrong. He pulled out one more piece of equipment; a Ping-Pong paddle with one side painted luminescent white.

His heart tried to hammer as he waved it back and forth with the bright side westward, but he seized control by forcing his breath into regularity-slow, steady and deep. Tension unlocked, and he waited with his hands ready, knees bent and weight forward on the balls of his feet. His eyes were dazzled by looking at the fire, and the torches below; the black wing and black-clad flier were invisible until the last moment:

"Too high!" he barked, throwing out his hands and waving the paddle downward. "Too high, damnit, Christ Jesus, girl, too high!"

The wing cut across the stars overhead, a wedge of deeper blackness. Signe seemed to realize her mistake at the last moment, and did what Havel had done: flared the nose upright to let the wing brake itself against the air. She'd cut it far too close, though: it was above him-and the eastern edge of the tower-when it jerked to a near-halt against the air and started to slide downward.

Havel hopped backward, onto the top of one of the crenellations, one foot braced on the arm of the cargo crane. His hand caught something, clamped hard on a guy wire; it would have cut his hand to the bone, like piano wire through a cheese, save for the tough leather of his glove. The weight tried to snatch him forward off the wall, would have if he hadn't had the crane under his foot for leverage. He threw himself backward instead, and it pivoted inward like a weight on the end of a rope. The half-seen length of Signe's body came down half on and half off the wall, with a startled oofff as the edge drove the wind out of her.

Havel released the wingtip, and she started to slide backward; he leapt and grabbed, a black blur in the darkness, and his hands slapped down on the control bar. He heaved again, feeling the muscles of his shoulders crackle with the grunting strain, heedless of the way she knocked against the parapet; the alternative was falling sixty feet straight down into a moat full of sharp angle iron and barbed wire.

"You all right?" he asked.

"No," she wheezed, one hand on her stomach and the other rubbing her knee. "But I'll do."

"That you will," he said, grinning relief, and helped her out of her harness, stripping her section of rope loose from the frame.

By then it was time; after they saw his signal from the tower top the others were supposed to launch at four-minute intervals. He and Signe spread out to the eastern corners of the tower, waving their paddles with the light side westward. This time it was Aylward, and he flared his wing neatly right in the middle of the flat space. He shed his equipment with businesslike speed, then pulled out his longbow and snapped the halves together; the bottom half of the riser was a metal-lined hollow, and the top its mirror image.

"Next," Havel muttered, as the Englishman strung his weapon.

That was Pamela; she came in so low that for a heart-stopping instant he thought she was going to ram the tower's western wall.

"Not quite!" Signe said beside him, with a gasp of relief.

Instead she skimmed it, so close that a corner of the control bar tapped against the corner of a crenellation; the wing went pinwheeling across the surface of the tower, while she threw her hands in front of her face. Despite that there was a bleeding graze across cheek and nose when she rose.

Havel gave her a nod as she came to her feet and collapsed the wing, hauling it aside to clear the landing area.

"One more and we're safe: on top of the tower of an enemy castle," she said.

"Yeah," he replied dryly.

He did a quick check; they all had their tools ready, and a bandolier of rope over a shoulder. The speaking-tube whistled again. Havel pulled out the plug.

"Dinkerman, why the hell have you locked the trapdoor?" Sergeant Harvey barked. "Get it open, now!"

"Can't do that, sergeant," Havel said regretfully. "The enemy paratroopers are landing more men."

"You make me look bad in front of the baron and I'll have your fucking balls for this, Dinkerman!" Harvey shrieked. "And that's a goddamned promise!"

Ooops, Havel thought, replacing the plug in midtirade. Surprise inspection coming. Well, unless I misread the Protector's little toy army completely, Sergeant Harvey is going to do everything he can to get that hatch open before he pushes it up the chain of command – probably afraid of ol' Blacksnake himself.

He grinned like a shark. That was the problem with a zero-fault policy; people got desperate to cover their asses, rather than get the job done. The Protector was just the type to assume warriors could only be disciplined by terror, too.

But what, O Protector, do you call men who can be easily controlled by fear? he asked sardonically.

Signe's shout of alarm brought him wheeling around. Eric's hang glider was coming in:

"Too high!" someone shouted.

This time it was really too high; fifteen or twenty feet too high, even with the steep dive he'd started when he realized the mistake.

"Wave him on!" Havel said.

They did, with blasphemous additions from Havel and Aylward; the glider was still at least ten feet above the level of the crenellations when it crossed the eastern side of the tower. Havel caught a glimpse of Eric's face, wide-eyed and teeth bared.

"No, no, just pass on and clear the wall!" Havel shouted, knowing exactly what was going through that adrenaline-saturated teenage-male mind.

The shout was probably futile and possibly dangerous, if Sergeant Harvey was listening at one of the arrow slits below. Eric tried to bank and turn instead, and for that he was too low. Any turn loose enough not to stall would bring him around below the level of the tower's top; he saw that, and tried to turn more tightly instead-more tightly than the hang glider's speed and lift could take. For a long instant the black shape hung with its left wingpoint down; then it fell off and fluttered groundward like a huge leaf falling in autumn. Then it struck, vanishing in the blackness to the left of the bridge that spanned the motte's protective ditch.

Signe stifled a scream as she watched her brother fall. Havel nodded respect as she choked it back, and again as Eric augured in silently.

"That's torn it," he said grimly. "Let's go-get that cable down!"

A heave and a kick sent the piled firewood toppling; it was mostly pine, and nicely dry. With the tip of his sword he flicked at the release catch on the fire basket, skipping backward as a torrent of ash and embers and burning wood came flooding out.

Stay warm, Sergeant Harvey, he thought.

Behind him he could hear a chunk sound, then a whirr as the cable on the crane paid*out and down. As he turned, Aylward had swung the crane out-that put the cable six feet out from the wall-and taken stance beside it, one foot up on a crenellation, an arrow nocked, his quiver over his shoulder with the cap open, and the spare bundle of arrows leaning against the parapet ready to his hand.