By Heresies Distressed (36 page)

A large grass lizard, at least a foot and a half long, ran directly into Wystahn's chest as the sergeant knelt in the wheat. The impact was enough to make the Marine grunt as the lizard bounced off him, and the already terrified creature gave a high-pitched squeak of panic. It landed with all six feet already churning and disappeared somewhere beyond him.

Well
, that
hurt
, the sergeant reflected.
Not to mention almost making my heart stop. And I'm glad I took a leak before I settled in
.

The thought made him snort, and he glanced back at the oncoming enemy. The lead Corisandians were almost up to the farmer's scarecrow he'd moved last night to serve as a range marker.

At an overall length of sixty-four inches, the scout-snipers' weapons were a half-foot shorter than the standard rifled musket of the line formations, although their barrels were only about two inches shorter, thanks to what someone from Old Earth would have called the rifle's “bull pup” design. The shorter barrel's rifling also had a tighter twist, and the weapon was equipped with a peep sight graduated out to five hundred yards. In theory, a man should be able to shoot accurately out to a thousand yards, but what with bullet drop, the difficulty in judging the range in the first place, and the sheer difficulty of picking out a target at such extended distances, it wasn't really a practical option for the majority of people. A single platoon of elite marksmen in each scout-sniper company was equipped with rifles that were actually sixteen inches
longer
than the standard infantry weapon, with flip-up aperture sights graduated all the way out to twelve hundred yards. In the proper hands, that rifle could register a headshot at five hundred yards and reliably hit man-sized targets at twice that range, assuming of course that the target cooperated by holding still. At the moment, however, those marksmen were all concentrated elsewhere, probably where the Corisandian artillery had been emplaced.

Wherever they were, they, too, were waiting for
him
. Now, as he watched one of the junior officers leading the Corisandian battle line walk past the scarecrow, he slowly and carefully cocked his rifle. The front rank of musketeers reached the scarecrow and shouldered it aside, and Edvarhd Wystahn raised his weapon, captured his sight picture, and squeezed the trigger.

Captain Illian heard the first shot.

His head snapped up in astonishment. The closest Charisian was still at least three hundred yards away!

That thought flashed through his brain, but then he saw the powder smoke in the wheat field. It was to his left, and far closer than the main Charisian formations.

But it's still a hundred and fifty yards away from
—

Ahntahn Illian stopped thinking abruptly as another Charisian scout-sniper squeezed
his
trigger and a fifty-caliber bullet punched straight through his breastplate.

Sir Phylyp Myllyr stiffened as the “pop-pop-pop” of musket fire rippled across the front of his advancing regiment.

Like Captain Illian, he couldn't quite believe his own ears for the first heartbeat or so. The enemy was much too far away for either side to be shooting at the other! But then he, too, saw the smoke blossoming out among the tall wheat. There were dozens—scores—of the sudden, white puffs, and his jaw muscles ridged as he realized what they were shooting at.

Wystahn felt a wave of mingled satisfaction and something like guilt as he watched his target collapse like a broken toy. Other scout-snipers were firing, taking their cue from him, and all along the Corisandian front, officers and standard bearers were going down.

The company commanders who'd been acting as living guidons for their men were the primary targets, and the deadly accurate rifle fire went through them like a reaper. As far as Wystahn could tell, every single one of them was hit at least once, and behind them, unit standards toppled as other riflemen targeted their bearers.

The entire enemy formation wavered in shock, but Wystahn was no longer looking. He was too close to the Corisandians to waste time admiring his own marksmanship, or even that of his men. Even with paper cartridges instead of a powder horn, reloading a single-shot rifle took time. Especially if a man was trying to do that while hiding in three-foot wheat. Which was why none of the scout-snipers were even trying to do anything so foolish. Instead, they were busily scuttling towards the rear—much like the grass lizard, a corner of Wystahn's brain reflected—while doing their dead level best to stay completely concealed.

Myllyr swore viciously as he realized the Charisians had just picked off at least half of his regiment's company commanders.

He'd known every one of those officers personally, and most of them had been young enough to be his sons. Despite that, the rage he felt at seeing them deliberately shot down would have astonished him if he'd had time to really think about it. Officers had always been high-priority targets, after all. The only difference this time was that the Charisians had done it in a carefully coordinated, preplanned ambush. The range was so great, and the accuracy of the executions—and that was what they had really been: cold-blooded, carefully planned executions—was so high, that the men who'd carried them out must have been armed with rifles. And that meant the Charisians were fielding specially trained and equipped marksmen for the express purpose of ambushes just like this one.

They couldn't have a great many of them, given rifles' slow rate of fire. No weapon whose tightly fitting ball had to be hammered down the barrel to force it into the rifling could possibly be fired as rapidly as a smoothbore. That was the reason no field commander could sacrifice that much firepower from his regular line units, no matter how accurate rifles might be. Unfortunately, that didn't mean the tactic couldn't be hellishly effective, and his jaw clenched as his immediate flash of fury receded just a bit and he recognized what the loss of so many officers was going to mean for unit cohesion and morale. The steadiness of an infantry company, its ability to stand the pounding of combat without crumbling, was hugely dependent on its officers. On their knowledge of their human material, their awareness of who would be towers of strength and who would have to be watched carefully when the pressure came on. And, perhaps even more, on the confidence of the men in their leadership. They knew their own officers. They listened for their voices in combat, read their own fate and the course of the battle in the tone in which orders were given.

Now what should have been a source of strength had been transformed into a source of weakness, and the men those dead and wounded officers had commanded would recognize as well as Myllyr that what had happened had been a deliberate, well-planned, brilliantly executed tactic . . . designed to do exactly what it had.

Colonel Zhanstyn's mouth stretched in a tight, teeth-baring grin as the scout-snipers decimated the other side's junior officers. Had he known the thoughts passing through Phylyp Myllyr's mind at that moment, he couldn't have disagreed with a single one of them. It
had
been a deliberate assassination, and while Zhanstyn was no more eager to kill people than the next man, he would have done it again in an instant.

The Corisandians' meticulously dressed lines were no longer as neat as they had been. Here and there—especially where some company commander had been miraculously missed—individual subunits had continued advancing at the same steady pace. Other units had stumbled to a halt as their commanding officers went down. Others had continued to move forward, but more slowly, almost hesitantly, as the men in the ranks waited for one of the company's platoon commanders to take over the unit. Unfortunately, quite a few of those platoon commanders had also become casualties.

The portions of the line which had continued advancing halted abruptly when they realized so many of their compatriots had fallen behind. They stood where they were, waiting for the disorganized units to get themselves fully back under control, which happened, among other things, to give the scout-snipers the time they needed to make good their withdrawal to their own lines.

The camouflage-clad marksmen came filtering through the line companies' ranks, sliding adroitly through the openings without impeding their comrades' steady advance. Here and there, someone took a hand from his own rifle to slap the returning snipers on the back, and Zhanstyn himself nodded in greeting when Sergeant Major Sahlmyn led Sergeant Wystahn up to the command group.

“Good work, Sergeant. I'm glad to see you made it back in one piece.” The colonel gave Wystahn's shoulder a congratulatory squeeze. “And I believe you timed that just about perfectly, too.”

“I hope so, Sir.” The scout-sniper sergeant shook his head, his expression grim. “Begging your pardon, but I'd just as soon not be doing that again anytime soon. Shooting rabbits and mountain lizards is one thing. This, though . . .”

“We can hope, Sergeant.” Zhanstyn squeezed his shoulder again. “We can hope.”

Their eyes met for a moment, and then Zhanstyn looked back at the steadily narrowing gap between the two forces and shook his head.