Distant Thunders (46 page)

“I agree,” Matt said, “it’s time.” He grinned. “Not that it matters what I think! This is your show, Pete!”

“If it was completely my show, you’d be watching from
Donaghey
right now!” Pete answered harshly. “Promise me you won’t wander off? We haven’t really been engaged yet, but the pickets I threw out on the flanks report quite a few rambunctious Grik hunting parties, or the like. We expected that and our bowmen and a few of the NCOs with Krags are dealing with them, but I’d sure hate to have to tell Lieutenant Tucker I let you get conked from behind.”

Chief Gray pointedly racked the bolt on the Thompson he carried. Gunner’s Mate Paul Stites followed suit with a BAR. “Mind your own chickens,” Gray grumbled. Besides Stites, there were four Lemurian Marines in the Captain’s Guard detail, and Jenks had a pair of his own polished muskets on their shoulders.

Matt just smiled and shrugged. Harvey Jenks chuckled beside him.

“A magnificent show, Captain Reddy,” Jenks said. “I, at least, fully understand your desire to view it firsthand!” He looked at his own distant
Achilles
, whose guns had remained silent thus far. “I almost regret not committing myself entirely to your support—not that it seems you need it!”

“I understand your reasons. It’s hard to engage in offensive operations against somebody you’re not at war with. I doubt the Grik will notice any distinction, however. Besides, your Marines are on the far left with General Maraan. They’re yet another blocking force, but it could be bloody work.”

“There, if they must fight, it will be a defensive engagement,” Jenks said. “Defending oneself from attack is hardly offensive in nature.”

Matt looked at the Imperial. “Again, the Grik will make no distinction. I doubt your own superiors will.”

“You wanted us in this war,” Jenks said more quietly, seriously. “I’ve come to believe we belong in it, though God knows we have problems of our own. We may need
your
help someday. How could we possibly ask it of you if we did not make this small gesture?”

Matt grunted. “Your gesture could cost a lot of Imperial lives. Safir says your Marine lieutenant Blair isn’t particularly open to her tactical suggestions.”

Jenks nodded. “Well, there is little I can do about that. I command my ship and I command the Marines to perform their duties. How they perform those duties is up to Blair, I’m afraid. At best, if the Grik do strike there, our people may learn from one another. At worst . . .” He blinked. “Our people may learn a costly lesson from one another.”

Matt shook his head, somewhat surprised Gray had held his tongue. He surveyed the disposition of the troops and all seemed to be shaping up nicely. All but the weather. Ahead, in the west, the general overcast seemed darker as the day progressed. When he spoke, he sounded slightly distracted. He was watching the sky. “I’d hoped your Marines might bolster our lines, like spearmen behind the shields. I’m telling you that a thin pair of ranks, even armed with muskets,
can’t
stand against the Grik.”

Jenks’s smile was brittle. “We’ll see.” He nodded forward. “Your army will leave us behind while we discuss this, I fear, and General Alden will scold us again.”

 

 

Chack sensed a change in the Grik host before him. Another attack had been repulsed, but for a long time now, nearly half an hour, there’d been no assault. Leaving O’Casey with his staff, he trotted to where General Rolak directed his end of the line from the roof of a crude warehouse. Scrambling up the ladder, Chack saluted the old Aryaalan warrior.

“Quite a difference between this and our last meeting with these creatures!” Rolak enthused, returning Chack’s salute. “Your Marines fight splendidly!”

“As do your troops, Lord. Any sign of Mr. Braad-furd’s Grik Rout?” Chack asked.

Rolak frowned and his tail twitched with agitation. “Not yet. They do seem to have their shit in their sock, as General Alden so colorfully put it. This Hij general of theirs expends many lives, but he avoids allowing them to bunch up too deeply. If any panic, the panic spreads less far.”

“True,” Chack agreed. “But he has sacrificed mass to accomplish this. Twice they might have broken our line if they had supported their assault with greater numbers.”

“They are hesitant, I think. Few of these warriors could have been at Baalkpan. All they know is that they lost there, badly. I believe they test new tactics here, within the constraints of their warriors’ . . . capabilities.”

“Do you really?” Chack asked absently, thinking. “Perhaps. There are no defensive works, other than gun emplacements for their limited artillery. They do not defend as we do, behind breastworks or terrain, or with careful discipline. They defend by attacking.” He took a drink from his water bottle. “Do you think that is new? That they make ‘spoiling’ attacks hoping to slow our advance?”

“How can we truly know what is ‘new’ to them? Anything they do besides a mass attack is ‘new’ to us, but it is possible. It may also be that they think they have succeeded. We have achieved our objective, but perhaps they do not know that. Consider: would the Grik do as we have done? Land, attack, secure a defensive perimeter, then stop?” Rolak shook his head. “I doubt they can even comprehend such a strategy.”

“You may be right, lord,” Chack replied, eyeing the mass of enemies before them. Their numbers continued to swell, but they’d been badly bloodied and corpses were heaped along the length of the perimeter. “We seem to have affixed the enemy’s attention entirely upon us. As best we can tell, they have no notion of the main force bearing down upon their left.” Chack glanced at one of the Manilo couriers who’d arrived shortly before, mounted on one of the swift “meanies,” as Silva called them. The beasts still gave him the “creeps.” They looked like larger, more reptilian versions of their enemies, that happened to go about on all fours. The courier had reported only desultory fighting in front of the main force.

Rolak glanced at the darkening sky. “We are liable to have a storm today. A Strakka comes at last, I suspect. It is fortunate that we have secured a safe harbor for our fleet.”

Chack had been looking often at the sky himself. “I wish our luck with the weather might have held a few more days. If the gust front hits during the battle, it will confuse things.”

“More for them than us, I expect.” Rolak grinned. “We have a plan and they do not. At least, what they have of a plan seems to depend upon what we do for a change.”

Chack nodded noncommittally. He’d had some experience with plans now, and he knew how fragile they could be. So did Rolak, for that matter. Chack suspected the old warrior of practicing his dry wit upon him. “For myself, I would hope the Strakka holds off a bit longer so our plan might unfold unimpeded,” he said.

“You are of the sea folk.” Rolak waved his hand. “You would know that better than I.” He gestured back to the front. “Perhaps you should return to your Marines. The enemy stirs. Does it appear to you, amidst that mob, that he is shifting his front?” Rolak’s teeth appeared in a feral grin. “Perhaps he is preparing to attack in a different direction!”

 

 

“Good Lord!” Jenks exclaimed. “Do they always come on like that?”

“Yep,” said Gray. The Bosun spat.

“Pretty much every time,” Matt confirmed.

The closer Alden’s army had approached what they’d identified as the Grik main force, fixed in front of Rolak and Chack, the more crazed attackers had charged headlong against Alden’s overwhelming force. At first, they’d come in groups of a dozen or less, shrieking defiantly and waving their weapons. Arrows cut down most of those before they ever came in range of a spear. Then, more Grik charged them from the jungle that bordered the clearing they’d started across. Matt had been secretly amazed they’d made it that far before being noticed, but Manilo couriers or cavalry—or whatever they were—had assured them Chack and Rolak had grabbed plenty of the enemy’s attention.

They’d heard the cannonade grow louder as they neared and saw the warships in the bay jockey for more advantageous firing positions. Broadside after broadside sent roiling clouds of billowing smoke across the water. The new mortars were still silent for now, waiting for the Grik to wholly focus on the new threat. Then, shortly before, the dense peninsula of jungle ahead that stood between Alden’s and Rolak’s converging forces suddenly teemed with thousands of Grik shapes.

“They’ve finally turned to meet us,” Matt had announced aloud, as much for Jenks as Alden. A number of horns blew together, their different tones jumbled and discordant, but they’d seemed a suitable accompaniment to the shrill, growling shrieks of the horde that had erupted from the trees.

Now Jenks could only stare in horror at the elemental force bearing down on them. It was a mob, to be sure, but a huge one, and this first look at a Grik berserker charge was most disconcerting. He wondered how Captain Reddy could just stand there like that, watching them come. Either the man was utterly fearless or his trust in his commanders and troops was truly that profound. Jenks realized that Captain Reddy and his guards had faced this before, but he couldn’t imagine anyone ever becoming so inured to it. He stood as well. He was an officer, a gentleman, and possessed a significant measure of personal courage. He admitted to himself that he was terrified, though. Standing in the face of that seething, swarming mass of teeth, claws, swords, and crossbows couldn’t possibly be done without some fear. And yet, glancing sidelong at the American officer, this Supreme Commander, he saw no sign of any emotion other than . . . anticipation.

“ ’Bout . . . now!” Matt said.

As if reading his commander’s thoughts, Pete Alden bellowed at the top of his lungs, the order he gave repeated down the ranks and punctuated with whistle blasts.

“Commence firing!”

Twelve pieces of light artillery bucked and spewed dense clouds of smoke and double loads of canister. Arrows whickered into the darkening sky with a terrible, collective “swoosh.” Untold hundreds of Grik warriors were swept away with as little apparent effort as the command had taken to give. Others screamed in agony and writhed on the ground, clutching wounds or festooned with arrows.

“Independent, fire at will!” Alden shouted, his voice already a little hoarse after the last command and the choking smoke that followed it.

There were a number of distinct thumping, popping sounds beyond the trees from the direction of the initial landing force. Whistling sounds, dozens, scores, like Jenks had never heard, were punctuated by fearsome but smallish blasts that sent gouts of earth into the sky right among the rear of the enemy host. A few of the “mortar bombs,” Reddy had called them, though Jenks had never seen their like, erupted in the trees themselves and sent swarms of splinters into the Grik. The agonized screeching took on a desperate, terrified air.

Then, above it all, there came a roar. It wasn’t like the roar of thunder or the marching surf; it was higher pitched, excited, almost gleeful. Despite its tone, it had a profound, unstoppable, elemental urgency that stirred his most primitive thoughts. In contrast to the increasingly agonized and terrified cacophony of the Grik horde, the roar from beyond the trees was confident, eager, remorseless. It was the sound of doom.

“That’ll be Rolak and Chack!” Gray boomed happily. “They were the anvil. Probably got mighty sick of it too. Now they’re the hammer!”

A large percentage of the Grik, where the mortars still fell, had been transformed from an unstoppable juggernaut into a wild, panic-stricken mass. Jenks looked on in amazement while thousands of Grik scrambled in all directions, slaying
one another
with wild abandon. Some ran back the way they’d come, smashing into the howling Lemurian troops and Marines that suddenly erupted from the trees. Others raced north or south, toward the jungle or the sea. Some crashed into the rear of the forward element, still charging the Allied line. Battle erupted there, among the
Grik
, even as the foremost berserkers slammed into the Allied shield wall.

The slaughter was incredible. The mortars stopped falling and the field guns were pulled back to avoid inflicting casualties on the Allied forces now closing on the still-larger Grik army caught between them. The relative sizes of the armies lost all meaning, however, since growing numbers of Grik were now murdering one another. It was insane. The fighting at the shield wall was still wildly intense; the Grik that struck there as a relatively cohesive force still outnumbered Alden’s entire command, but that was when the qualitative difference between the combatants was most plainly demonstrated. Nowhere did the shield wall break. It stood like a monolithic cliff in the face of disorganized breakers, and the killing was remarkably one-sided.

Spears thrust and jabbed over, under, and around the front-rank shields, whose bearers pushed with all their might against the battering Grik. Inexorably, General Rolak’s force swept through the chaos of the Grik rear, killing any who stood even momentarily. Those who fled from between the closing pincers were mostly ignored, but few seemed to realize this and even fewer had the wherewithal or initiative to take advantage of the fact. Within an hour of the first mortar blasts, the jaws of the pincers clamped shut and all that remained of the battle was a prolonged, remorseless butchery.

Captain Reddy must have noticed Jenks’s expression. Perhaps his face was pale?

“Maybe you’re wondering why I don’t put a stop to it?” Matt’s words came in a fierce monotone. “On some level, maybe I still wish I could. But those down there”—he gestured at the dwindling Grik—“won’t quit fighting. Hell, half of them are still killing each other!” He shook his head. “I don’t know how or why they act the way they do, and frankly, that’s not my concern right now. Maybe we’ll know someday. Maybe the prisoners we took at Aryaal will help with that. But right now, we’ll use this clear weakness of theirs against them as often and mercilessly as we can. There may come a time when they get wise and it won’t work anymore.” He looked at Jenks again. “Or maybe you’re wondering
if
I could stop it?”