Eric Flint: The tide of victory

Belisarius had wanted a more advanced type of machine gun, preferably something based on the Gatling gun design which Aide had shown him and which he had detailed for John of Rhodes. But all the experiments of John's artificers with rotating barrels-much less belt-designed weapons like the Maxim gun-had foundered on a single problem.

Roman technology was good enough to make the weapons. Not many, perhaps, but enough. The problem was the ammunition. Rotating barrel and belt-fed designs all depended on uniform and sturdy brass cartridges. John's artificers could make such cartridges, but not in sufficient quantity. As had proven so often the case, designs which could be transformed into material reality in small numbers simply couldn't be done on a mass production scale.

The sixth-century Roman technical base was just too narrow. They lacked the tools to make the tools to make the tools, just as they lacked the artisans who could have used them properly even if they existed. That was a reality which could not be overcome in a few years, regardless of Aide's encyclopedic knowledge.

Since there was no point in having a "machine gun" which ran out of ammunition within minutes on a battlefield, Belisarius had opted for the Montigny design. The small number of brass cartridges which could be produced would be reserved for the special use of the Puckle guns mounted on river boats. The mitrailleuse, because it used a plate where all thirty-seven cartridges were fixed in position, did not require drawn brass for the cartridges. Rome did have plenty of cheap labor, especially in teeming Alexandria. The simple plate-and-papier-mache units could be mass produced easily enough, providing the mitrailleuse with the large quantities of ammunition which were necessary for major field battles.

It was a somewhat cumbersome weapon, but, as he watched it in operation, Belisarius was satisfied that it would serve the purpose. The two mitrailleuse which were raking the Malwa along the curtain wall-one firing from each opposed retired flank of two adjacent bastions-were wreaking havoc in the closely packed and unprotected troops. Combined with the grenades being lobbed by soldiers on the curtain wall, and the grapeshot being fired by field guns positioned in the sharply raked angle of the bastions themselves, the water in the ditch where hundreds of Malwa soldiers were already lying dead or wounded had become a moat of blood.

Satisfied by that aspect of the battle, Belisarius began studying the sharpshooters at work. There were a dozen such men positioned in each bastion, whose principal responsibility was to target those Malwa soldiers carrying grenades or satchel charges. Or, possibly-although Belisarius had so far seen no indication of such a weapon in use-attempting to use a Malwa version of the flamethrower which John of Rhodes had designed for the Victrix.

He didn't envy the sharpshooters their task. The crude design of the breech-loading rifles-again, a result of the severe shortage of brass cartridges, which required a rifle which could fire a linen cartridge-produced a certain amount of leakage blowing upward around the breech block. Every sharpshooter soon acquired a blackened face and a few powderburns on his forehead.

The other drawback to being a sharpshooter, naturally, was that the man was singled out by the enemy for special attention. As Belisarius watched, one of the sharpshooters on the bastion wall was suddenly slammed backward, sprawling dead on the bastion's fighting surface. His face was a pulped mass of flesh and blood, with brains leaking from a shattered skull. The horrible wounds looked to have been inflicted by several musket balls striking at once.

Felix cursed bitterly. "Those damned organ guns! I hadn't counted on those. Not so many of them, at any rate."

Ignoring the murmured protests of his bodyguards Isaac and Priscus, Belisarius crawled over to the inner side of the bastion and propped his periscope over the wall. Within seconds, he was able to spot what he was looking for.

The Malwa, sensibly enough given their numerical advantage over the Romans, had opted for organ guns rather than mitrailleuse. The organ guns were even cruder in design-about the most primitive conceivable quick-firing gunpowder weapon-but they had the great advantage of being easy to produce in quantity, using the skills and material available. The Malwa had an even narrower technical base than the Romans.

An organ gun looked like a wheelbarrow more than anything else, with a dozen barrels laid side by side in a row across the equivalent of the bucket. Except that it used two wheels instead of one, like a rickshaw Aide had shown him. They were muzzle-loaders, and so required some time to reload. But they could be easily moved into position manually, with only a two-man crew, and were surprisingly easy to aim. The recoil was small enough that an experienced organ gun handler could aim simply by using the two wooden handles-even adjust the elevation of the weapon by the simple expedient of rolling it up or down on the big wheels which held up the barrels.

And the Malwa had a lot of them. Just in the area Belisarius could sweep easily with his periscope, he counted no fewer than seventeen. The organ guns were positioned about a hundred yards away from the bastions, providing covering fire for the troops trying to storm the walls.

He glanced again through the gun ports in the retired flanks of the bastion. Then, satisfied that the mitrailleuse and grenades were enough to hold off the Malwa soldiers trying to scale the curtain walls, he turned to Gregory and ordered:

"Tell all the three-pounder crews to start firing on the organ guns instead of providing extra coverage for the curtain wall. With grape shot, at this close range, they ought to pulverize them soon enough. The one big disadvantage of those weapons is that they pretty much have to be aimed and fired by men standing in the open."

Gregory nodded. A moment later, he was clambering down the ladder which provided access to the bastion's fighting platform. Below, in a shielded bunker, a telegraph operator was waiting to transmit orders to every part of the outlying fortifications. And to the inner fortifications, for that matter, since one of the first things Belisarius had had his combat engineers do was lay telegraph wire to every key location in the triangle.

One of those locations was not more than half a mile away: the nearest of the fortified camps where Sittas and his thousands of cataphracts lay waiting for the order to sally. Belisarius had seen enough of the battle from the vantage point of the bastion. It was time he returned to his communication center. The sun was beginning to set in any event.

As he made his way to the ladder, he ignored the sighs of relief loudly-even histrionically-issued by his bodyguards. He also ignored the crystalline equivalent which Aide was rattling around in his brain. He even managed to ignore Maurice's first few words when he entered the telegraph bunker.

"Finally decided to stop playing junior scout, did we?" To Isaac and Priscus, shouldering their way behind him through the narrow entrance to the bunker: "You did manage to keep the damn fool from actually dancing on the wall, didn't you?"

The essentials having been taken care of, Maurice moved immediately to the necessities. "It's just about time to order Sittas out," he growled. "At daybreak, tomorrow. Every fortress is now reporting the same thing: the Malwa have been beaten off the walls, and are starting to trickle through the gaps. You could call it a 'flanking maneuver,' if you wanted. Except that I doubt any high-ranked officer ordered it."

Belisarius shook his head. "I saw the butcher's bill they've been paying at the walls, Maurice. Those soldiers have had enough. They're just trying to get out of the line of fire without actually retreating."