David Weber - The Excalibur Alternative

At least the constant round of resurrections had put the men's last, lingering fears of the Lazaruses in their midst to rest! And the other thing it had done was to permit Sir George's men to amass a degree of combat experience he very much doubted any other humans in history could have matched. Perhaps they'd spent only eleven years awake in the time away from Earth, but they'd also spent an enormous percentage of those eleven years actually in battle on world after world. They had become accustomed to changes in the air they breathed, to learning what Computer had meant by the word "gravity" and how it affected them and their weapons as it changed from world to world. They'd developed tricks and stratagems to use those changes, and they'd acquired a smooth, economical precision in the field. Death was an excellent teacher, particularly when he was not allowed to keep his students after their lesson.

The Physician's medical marvels, combined with the constant warfare demanded by the demon-jester, had allowed Sir George's men to pack the experience of a soldier's entire lifetime into bodies which remained physically at the peak of their performance. Even without the impressive, steadily improved upon armor the demon-jester's industrial modules provided, his men-at-arms and archers had become the most lethally effective field force on a man-for-man basis the baron had ever seen or imagined commanding.

Which brought him back to the task at hand.

Many of the men behind him had once been sailors, but that had been before they found themselves with precisely the same choices, or lack of them, as Sir George's soldiers. By now there was no real way to distinguish them from any of the professional troops who'd once been their passengers. After all, they were professionals now, and their experience showed in their expressions—not relaxed, but calm and almost thoughtful as they recalled their prebattle briefings and waited to put them into effect. The mounted men-at-arms and handful of knights sat their mounts closest to him, forming a protective barrier between the still closed wall of metal and the more vulnerable archers. All of his men were much better armored than they had ever been on Earth. That had been true from the very beginning, of course, but the difference was even greater now. Sir George, Tom Westman, and Computer had spent many long hours refining the designs of his troopers' armor. It had been an almost intoxicating experience to be completely unhampered by financial or manufacturing constraints. For all his other faults, the demon-jester had never placed a price on the equipment he supplied to his captive soldiers. Given the creature's sensitivity to profits and losses, that suggested that the industrial modules could produce whatever was required at little expense. But it also meant that he'd raised no objection to completely scrapping existing armor in order to provide Sir George's men with newer, improved equipment, and in many ways the marvelously light alloys available to them had seemed almost more miraculous to the baron than any of the other wonders which had enveloped them.

All of his knights and men-at-arms were now in full plate, yet that armor, although far tougher and more resistant to damage than even the best steels Earth could have offered, was unbelievably light. Sir George had grown to manhood accustomed to the weight of chain and steel plate. By comparison, his new armor was but little more cumbersome than the one-piece garments the demon-jester had provided all of them for normal wear. Even his archers now wore finely articulated plate armor, which was something that would never have happened in the army of Edward III. Protection had always been welcome to Earthly archers, but they'd always known that their true protection lay in mobility, the devastating fire of the longbow, and the wardship of the more heavily armored knights and men-at-arms who protected them from the enemy's axes and swords.

Now Sir George's bowmen enjoyed almost the same degree of armored protection as his men-at-arms, and all of them were far better protected than they had ever been on Earth. Of course, none of that changed the fact that archers were still trained for archery, not for hand blows, or that they still relied upon men-at-arms to hold the enemy far enough away for them to use their bows effectively rather than becoming embroiled in the melee. Armor or no armor, Sir George's entire small army could have been swarmed under by sheer force of numbers by almost any of the native forces they'd faced over the years if not for the long-range killing power of the longbow and the iron discipline of the foot and horse which formed the armored wall that held the enemy while the clothyard shafts decimated him. Over the years of constant warfare, the company had acquired a well-honed ability to combine the effectiveness of its components well beyond anything any of them had ever seen on Earth. In the process, every one of them had learned to rely upon and trust all of the others as totally as they had come to trust Sir George. So they stood now, their faces showing grim confidence, not uncertainty, and returned Sir George's regard with level eyes.

"All right, lads." He kept his voice even-pitched and calm, disdaining histrionics and relying upon Computer to carry his words clearly into each man's private ear. "You know the plan... and Saint Michael knows we've done it often enough!" His ironic tone won a mutter of laughter, and he gave them a tight grin in reply. "Mind yourselves, keep to the plan, and we'll be done in time for dinner!"

A rumble of agreement came back, and then there was the very tiniest of lurches, the metal wall before Sir George hissed like a viper and vanished upward, and he looked out upon yet another of the endless alien worlds he and his men were doomed to conquer.

The sky was almost the right shade, but as always, there was something odd about it. This time it was a darker, deeper hue than the blue he remembered (and Sweet Mary, but did he remember? or did he simply think he did?) from home, and the sun was too large by half. Once again, the gravity had changed, as well, although it was less noticeable because of the way Computer had adjusted the gravity aboard ship to accustom the English to it before they were committed to battle. The "trees" rising in scraggily, scattered clumps were spidery interweavings of too-fine branches covered with long, hairy streamers for leaves, and leaves and grass alike were a strange, rust-red color like nothing anyone had ever seen in any world meant for men.

Not that there were any men in this world. Not born of it, at any rate. Yet another army of not-men, too tall, too thin, and with too many limbs, had drawn up in a ragged line well beyond bowshot of the ship. This variety of not-man possessed three arms and three legs each, and although they clearly knew how to work iron, they were but little better armed or armored than the natives of Shaakun who had been the English's very first victims in the demon-jester's service. True, they carried large wicker shields and spears, and most wore leather helmets, but aside from that, they were unarmored, and only a very few bore any weapon other than their spears or quivers of javelins. He saw maces and a handful of swords, but no decent pikes or other true polearms, and none of them were mounted. Square placards on poles rose above them at ragged intervals—banners, he realized—and he wondered how long they'd been gathered.

He knew rather less about this world and these opponents than he had become accustomed to knowing. For some reason, the demon-jester had chosen to exercise a much more direct and total control over the planning of this conquest. Computer had briefed Sir George upon the types of weaponry he would face, discussed the basics of the local clan structures, and, as always, allowed him to actually share their crude, direct tactics through the still-daunting office of the "neural interface." But for all of that, the baron was singularly uninformed about what the demon-jester's guild wanted of this world or how the battle he was about to fight would help obtain its goal.