David Drake: Conqueror

He turned to look to the right, toward the river. The tiny dots of the torches along the pontoon bridge glittered like stars in the darkness. I would have left it farther south, he thought. Better roads here, and what was left of Gurnyca gave a secure anchorage for the western end, but putting a point-failure source closer to your enemy was a terrible risk. Ali's doing. He tends to arrogance. He began a gesture to the messenger beside him; there wasn't any more time.

Smaller torches were running along the center section of the pontoon bridge. He pulled the binoculars from their case on Horace's saddlebow and focused them. Men leaned over the edge of the roadway, looking at the water below and pointing.

Raj turned his head aside. Even looking away, the flash of the explosion was bright; it lit the earthen walls of the Colonial fort the way a flash of lightning might, but for much longer. When he looked back a huge section of the pontoon bridge was gone , gone as if a vast mouth had bitten it away. There was a crater in the water, foaming as the river rushed back to fill the hole the blast had momentarily forced into it. Pieces of burning, shattered timber were describing parabolas through the night for thousands of meters all around. The sound hit like a giant rumbling thud, felt on the skin of the face and in the chest cavity as well as through the ears.

An alarm siren began to wail in the fort. More men were running out of it, heading through the west gate and onto the pontoon bridge, or what was left of it — large sections on either side of the gap had torn away their anchoring cables and were beginning to drift southward with the current. That threw more and more stress on the undamaged sections, cable and timber creaking and yielding as the two unconnected segments bent back. He could hear the gunshot cracks of materials yielding as they were pushed past their breaking strain. Parts of it were on fire, too; the sections above water would be tinder-dry, in this climate.

The officer in command of the base was probably an engineering specialist. His first thought would be to save the bridge. As if to confirm the thought, a fire engine pulled by six hitch of dogs thundered out onto the pontoon, dropped a hose overside and began spurting steam-driven water at the fires. Men dropped overside with ropes, swimming out for the anchor points. Others set up winches on the decking.

Raj chopped his hand downward. An aide put his cigarette to the touchpaper of a signal rocket and stepped back. The paper sizzled and the little rocket went skyward with a woosh , popping into a blue starburst high overhead.

POUMPF. POUMPF. POUMPF. POUMPF. Over and over again.

Tongues of fire shot into the blackness. Fifty-five guns, massed in two grand batteries of twenty-eight and twenty-seven pieces. Warm pillows of air slapped at his face from the nearby position. The night filled with the whirring ripple of shell fire, and seconds later the snapping crack of bursting charges and the red firefly wink over the bastions at each corner of the fortress walls. At three rounds a minute the shellbursts came at more than one per second over each target, an endless ripple of fire. The second stonk contained a proportion of contact-fused shells. The guns were firing at maximum elevation and nearly maximum range, their shells dropping down out of the sky at high angles. Dirt fountained up, and then a mammoth secondary explosion from the eastern bastion.

Somebody left his ready reserve ammunition exposed, he thought. He could imagine the scene in the redoubts, men running half-dressed from their bombproofs into the storm of razor-edged, high-velocity metal as they tried to crew their pieces.

"Dinnalsyn's on time and target," Raj said to himself, gathering the reins. "Hadelande."

He clapped heels to Horace's side and swung into a loping gallop down the slope. The flags crackled behind him, harness creaked, a bugle clanked rhythmically against the webbing buckles on a signaler's chest. Rock and dust spurted up under the dogs' paws, with a scent of bruised native scrub like bergamot. Trumpets sounded ahead of him — no point in keeping quiet after this — as the battalions poured over the ridgeline and down the last slope toward the flat fields. The routes he'd picked left them widely spaced, to minimize collisions in the dark, and the flaming chaos at each end of the north face of the Colonial base would help with the alignment.

The dense columns of men flowed forward onto the open ground, double-timing in battalion columns. Starlight glittered on a forest of bayonet points, sheened on the silver Starbursts at the top of the flagstaffs of their colors. He leaned back slightly, and Horace shifted to a swinging trot; they were coming up on the 5th Descott's position. The men gave a short roaring cheer as his flag went by to swing into position near the battalion commander's, a harsh male undertone to the crash and flicker of the guns.

He looked at his watch. 1040 hours. Nearly on time. Amazing. A memory prickled at him; nothing he'd ever experienced, but one of the holographic scenarios from Earth's long history of war that Center showed him. Not Hannibal this time, but someone else, and the battle had also been against Arabs. .

lieutenant-general garnet wolseley,Center said. tel el-kebir. twenty-five hundred years ago.A pause. the similarities are disquieting.

Why? Raj thought. This fellow Wolseley won, didn't he? A night march and an attack on earthwork fortifications, as he remembered.

i was programmed to believe that a progressive improvement of human capacities is a priority,Center said. the fact that two such similar engagements have occurred at this distance in time might support a cyclical rather than linear explanation of human history.

Some things never change.

that, raj whitehall, is precisely the problem — and what we are attempting to change.

The 5th's buglers blew a six-note call and repeated it. Raj turned in the saddle to watch; the fires on the pontoon bridge were out of control, and the easternmost Colonial bastion was a column of flame, giving enough light to turn the night to dusk. The solid column of troops suddenly opened, like a man's outstretched hand when he flared his fingers. Each of the four companies of the 5th turned at an angle to the axis of advance and double-timed outward, following the pennant of the company commander. Thirty seconds later the bugle sounded again, and the company columns spread likewise into platoons, and the platoons flared out like opening fans. In less than four minutes what had been a dense column of men was a double line, rippling as the veterans dressed their ranks on the move with unconscious skill.

This was what the endless parade-ground drill was for: the movements had to be unconscious. So instinctive that they could be done exhausted, or under killing fire — or here, in darkness so bad you could barely see another man at twice arm's length. A line of men couldn't advance at speed for long, not on anything but absolutely flat table-top terrain. A column could maneuver, but it was a hideously vulnerable target with no offensive capacity to speak of.

Gerrin Staenbridge reined in beside him. "After that march, I'm never going to make a joke about the blind leading the blind again, mi heneral. If it hadn't been impossible to get lost, we would have."

There was strain in his voice. The possibilities for confusion were enough to turn a man's hair gray. . which reminded Raj of the silver dusting he saw in his own every time he shaved.

The splatguns had been bouncing along behind the infantry. Now they trotted forward, drawing ahead. One hundred meters, two, three, then the teams wheeled. The crews leapt down and spun the elevating screws to maximum.