Брайан Макклеллан - Sins of Empire

She lowered her rifle and turned her attention toward the point of the bay. “They don’t have anywhere to run,” she said.

“No shit,” Buden replied, thrusting one finger forward in a frustrated motion. “But a beach landing is the pit for anyone. Some of them should be running back into the water out of panic. Do you see a single soul turning around?”

Vlora watched as a longboat disgorged all but a handful of rowers, who immediately began heading back to the distant ships. The soldiers splashed through the shallows, muskets held over their heads, ignoring the continuous fire of Olem’s soldiers with their hold on the beach. They reached dry sand and immediately fell to their knees, producing short, steel shovels from their packs and heaping up fortification in moments.

“They’re not panicking,” Vlora said.

“Yeah, that’s what I’m trying to tell you.”

Vlora turned her head toward the ocean, reaching out tentatively with her senses. The Else felt… confused. There were traces of sorcery everywhere from the attacking Privileged, not unlike streamers left behind by rockets. She could also feel the protective sorcery of the fort and… something else. It was subtle, like the barest hint of a foreign spice on a familiar meal.

She didn’t know what it was, and that lack of knowledge terrified her.

There was a sudden clamor in the muster yard below, and a few moments later a familiar form appeared on the top of the wall, shaking off the two privates trying to tell him to keep his head down. Vlora didn’t think anything could have made her smile in the middle of this, but somehow the sight of Vallencian did.

“Good afternoon, Lady Flint!” the Ice Baron boomed above the cannon fire.

“Vallencian, I don’t think this is a good time.”

He pulled himself up, standing well above the protection of the fort’s walls, eyes a little wild from the cannon fire but too proud to admit it. “Nonsense! Lady Flint, I wanted to personally tell you that I’ve forgiven you for what you did to Mama Palo.”

Vlora closed her eyes, resisting the urge to order her men to drag him bodily down into the safety of the fort. “Thank you, Vallencian,” she said through gritted teeth. “I truly appreciate it. We are, however, fighting a battle here.”

“It doesn’t look too bad,” Vallencian said, flinching as a cannonball smashed into the base of the fort a few dozen yards away and sent shattered bits of iron flying. A rifleman dropped his weapon, clutching his throat as he tried to scream through a mouthful of blood.

“It’s bad, Vallencian,” Vlora said firmly. “And it’s not safe. You should leave. Now .”

Vallencian suddenly lurched toward her, grabbing her by the shoulders. “I have misjudged you, Lady Flint. I was evacuating my people from the city when I saw the uniforms of your men down here, manning the guns, and I could not leave you behind. Tell me what I can do to help with the defense.”

“Nothing,” Vlora said, waving him off desperately. She didn’t have time for this. “Get out of here. Get your people to safety. I think we can hold the beaches, but I don’t know how persistent the Dynize are going to be.”

“The tide is going out,” Vallencian noted.

“So?”

“So, that means that the longboats will have a harder time reaching shore.”

“Small gifts,” Vlora responded. Tide or no, the Dynize were still gaining ground.

“They have a beachhead,” Buden said, garbling the last word so badly she almost didn’t understand him.

“Vallencian, you are a good man. The best thing you can do is help evacuate your people and get safely out of the city. Get him out of here!” Vlora ordered her soldiers, who pulled Vallencian forcefully from the wall amid a torrent of protests. She couldn’t spare Vallencian another thought. Buden was right. The point of the bay was covered in corpses floating in the shallows, more than she could count, but the Dynize seemed impervious to the deaths of their friends. They continued to leap from their longboats and now had a short fortification of sand a hundred yards long from which to return fire on Olem’s troops.

“Buden,” she said, “take one of the guns. Give Olem some support.” She looked over her shoulder, eyes searching the smoldering wreckage on the eastern face of the plateau. “Where are our reinforcements?” she murmured. “Where are Lindet’s Blackhats? We need everything we can get down here.”

She continued to shoot at the Dynize Privileged, forced to get more creative with each shot as they formed hardened barriers of air to protect themselves. She overshot one Privileged, then angled the bullet down with the force of her mind, giving herself a headache in the process. Another she strengthened with half a kit’s worth of powder, using brute strength to punch through the sorcerous shield, the Privileged, and four men behind him.

The roar of a cannon, much louder than normal, snapped her head around. Buden stood beside one of the big fort guns, steadying himself against one of the gunner crew, eyes narrowed and focused on the point of the bay. Vlora tracked the curve of the cannonball with her advanced senses, feeling the power that Buden had put behind it, and watched as it curved violently around the Dynize sand fortifications and then skipped along the ground, bowling through at least fifty men crouched just out of the waterline.

The Dynize scrambled to search for the source of the cannon fire, but even that didn’t seem to deter them. More men landed and charged forward to take the places of their dead comrades.

“They should have run forever ago!” a nearby major shouted above the din, his looking glass focused on the point of the bay. “I’ve never seen anything like it. Why won’t they break?”

Vlora shook her head and reloaded her rifle as a messenger reached the top of the fort wall and sprinted straight toward her.

“What news from Olem?” Vlora asked.

The messenger was pale, and for a moment Vlora feared the worst. But he gasped for breath and then said quickly, “I’m not sure about the colonel, ma’am. I just came from the capitol building!”

“Good! Where’s our damned supplies and reinforcements?”

“I don’t know.”

“What the pit is that supposed to mean?” Vlora asked, snatching him by the collar of his jacket. “Where’s the Blackhats Lindet promised me?”

“There’s no one!”

Vlora released her grip, staggering back, and the messenger continued. “I’ve looked everywhere. The capitol building is all but abandoned, and I haven’t seen a single Blackhat except from a distance. It’s like they were never even there.”

Vlora blinked in disbelief, feeling shell-shocked. Cannons roared around her, sorcery sputtering above the fort, her nostrils so thick with powder smoke that she thought the trance might overwhelm her. But none of that affected her like this news. Lindet had run. She’d sent Vlora down here to fight the Dynize, and she’d fled without so much as a warning.

“We’ve been betrayed,” she whispered.

“What was that, ma’am?”

She grabbed the messenger by the shirt again, pulling him close to shout in his ear. “Colonel Olem is on the point of the bay. Tell him Lindet has betrayed us and the Blackhats won’t be providing relief.” She looked over the wall, seeing longboats rounding the breakers just a few hundred yards away. They’d reach the fort within minutes, or land and flank Olem.

“What do we do?” the messenger asked, a note of panic in his voice.

Vlora pushed him back, hating herself for fighting the urge to order a retreat. This wasn’t her fight. These weren’t her people or her city. “We do what we’ve been paid to do. We protect the city. Tell Olem… Tell him to hold the point of the bay.”