S. Stirling - Against the Tide of Years

The staff and runners jumped for the slit trenches. Hollard vaulted into one too, but braced himself forward on one knee to observe. The rocket launchers had looked like wagons with their canvas covers on. Those were back, the boxy frames that held the six tubes elevated by a crank. As he watched, a man snapped a lighter under a dangling fuse and then turned and ran, diving to the ground a hundred feet away. The rockets lit with a dragon's hiss, firing one by one in no particular order as the combined fuse split into individual ones and reached the powder but fast.

He dropped into the bottom of the narrow trench and brought knees to chin, letting his flared helmet cover as much of him as possible. Now it was simply luck. The sky overhead shrieked as if in torment, and then the multiple CrackCrackCrackCrack and surf-roar of impact began.

"First Kar-Duniash!" he shouted into the receiver.

"Here." Kathryn Hollard's voice, calm but with an underlying tension.

"Go for it, Sis. Those things can reload fast-he can punish us and pull out behind it."

"Will do."

The doctor and the asu came to their feet, brushing themselves off. Justin Clemens looked around; there was a crater in the empty land two hundred yards away, but nobody seemed to be hurt. Not here; up north the sky was woven with a web of smoke trails and a continuous rippling roar of explosions.

They would be very busy soon. Justin Clemens felt his hands begin to tremble and his breath grow short. Elevated blood pressure and stress, he told himself, which helped very little.

"Ms. Azzu-ena," he croaked.

She looked at him, dark eyes alert; she knew that meant formality, in English.

"Wwww… Would you please marry me?"

Her eyes flared wide; whatever she'd been expecting, it wasn't that. Then they filled with tears, and she opened her mouth to reply.

"Here they come! "

The cry brought their heads up. Horse-drawn ambulances were jouncing down the rough ground from the north, toward the laagered wagons and the tents. They turned and dashed back into the operating theater, heading for the vats of disinfectant.

"I have no dowry!" she hissed, as they ran their arms under the stream.

"I wouldn't say that," he said. "I wouldn't say that at all."

We're nearly behind them, Kathryn Hollard thought.

The enemy advance had swept past the hiding place of her force. But they had three-quarters of a mile to cover before they reached the position where rocket launchers were vomiting fire back at the Islanders. One had blown up in a spectacular globe of red-gold flame as it was being reloaded, but that left five. The wind swept smoke toward them, smelling of burnt sulfur and death.

"Men of the First Kar-Duniash!" she said, looking down the line.

Eight hundred of them, crouching with their bearded faces turned first toward the sounds of battle and then toward her. God knows, there are times when I wanted you all dropped into hell and the door locked and the key in Dr. Hong's pocket, she thought. She had hung four in Babylon for rape and looting during the street fighting, and then she'd had to pistol the brother of one of the convicted when he tried to murder her.

"For your king and your salt and given oaths," she said. "The battle cry is Kashtiliash! Now follow me!"

She scrambled forward, and there was a multiple clatter and scrape of hobnails on rock; they were following. Kathryn felt her breath release; after Babylon she'd been fairly sure-but there they were under the eye of their prince. On either side the line shook itself out, two-deep and spread out-nothing fancy, but it wound over the irregularities of the ground like a living serpent tipped with a glittering line of steel points. The months in the desert hadn't been wasted, then.

They were down onto the flat, and all she could see was the smoke and distant figures, all she could hear was the crackle of rifles, the thudding bark of artillery, the hiss of the rockets like an angry cat larger than worlds.

"Trumpeter, sound Double time," she said. The notes rang out, brassy and sweet in the hot, dry air. We're coming, big brother.

A gun suddenly swiveled around and turned toward her; despite the distance, the muzzle looked big enough to swallow her head. A flash of flame-shot smoke, the rising whistle sound, and it burst over the ranks to her left. Men tumbled and fell, still or writhing like broken-backed lizards in a cat's jaws.

"Trumpeter, sound Fire and advance."

The first rank went to one knee, and their rifles came up. A staccato ripple of fire and smoke ran down the line as four hundred rifles fired, and then their wielders were going through their loading drill. She trotted through the rotten-egg-smelling fogbank of their discharge and saw the second rank dash through the first and run ten yards ahead, going to one knee in their turn. Men were turning their way in the enemy ahead, pulling back like a door swinging. The enemy commander was refusing his flank, turning his formation into an L as he pulled back, with the short end facing her. Facing her, the men in it prone and shooting back.

A weapon like a fat cannon pointed at the First Kar-Duniash and a whole file of men went down, bullets slapping into flesh, sparking and raising puffs of dust around their feet, going tinnnnk into helmets like a smith's punch.

"Trumpeter, sound Charge'. Kashtiliash! Kashtiliash!" "KASHTILIASH!"

She swept out her Python pistol and cocked it with her thumb.

"Charge! Charge!"

Kenneth Hollard looked down as the stretcher was carried up the rear ramp of the Emancipator. He recognized Sergeant Smith, despite the mass of bandages that covered her torso, and bent over her. Her eyes were wandering with morphine, but they recognized him… or at least focused on his face.

"Good work," he said, and then switched to the Sun People tongue of Alba. "You fought well, warrior."

"Pithair," she murmured, smiling faintly. That meant "father," and he didn't think she was invoking her god. He was certain when she went on, "Is it well, at last, Father? "

"Dahig 'tair, " he began. Guess she's seeing someone else, he thought, laying a hand on the clammy coldness of her forehead. "Daughter, it is very well."

She sighed and closed her eyes, and the bearers carried her up the ramp and into the long gondola, fitting her stretcher into the racks and transferring her IV to the holder. Lieutenant Vicki Cofflin came back from the control stations in the bow, turning sideways to pass a corps-man doing something to one of the wounded. A sharp smell drifted backward under the exhaust fumes of the idling engines; it was the odor of disinfectant, and somehow of pain.

God, I hate visiting the wounded. You had to, of course; men and women in pain needed to know that they were valued for what they'd done.

"We're ready to go, sir," the commander of the Emancipator said, saluting. "We'll have them in the hospital at Ur Base in a few hours, and then we'll be back with the loads you specified."

She nodded down and forward; water wagons were on either side of the gondola's underbelly, with hoses running from the dirigible's keel ballast tanks. "Thought we could spare the water, seeing as we're heavily laden and heading right back into home base," she said.

He returned the salute and shook her hand. "This thing is damned useful," he said. "I might want you to do some high-level reconnaissance when you get back. In the meantime, I need a temporary lift and the use of your radio-need to talk to your uncle."

The Emancipator's powerful generator and altitude gave its shortwave set as much range as the one at Ur Base, or Republic Home at Nantucket Airport, for that matter.

"Aye, aye, sir. Welcome aboard."

He climbed the ramp behind her, squeezed past the corpsmen, and held on to a stanchion as the mooring ropes were released. The Emancipator turned and circled upward swiftly, swaying a little, and he saw the huge orca-shaped shadow dwindle as the mooring crews went stumbling backward from the blizzard of dust and grit.