Winners! Page 10

  Captain Hulse galloped close. Sand spurted when he checked his horse. “Patrol report, sir.”

  “Well?” Mackenzie realized he had almost shouted. “Go ahead.”

  “Considerable activity observed about five miles northeast Looks like a troop headed our way.”

  Mackenzie stiffened. “Haven’t you anything more definite than that?”

  “Not so far, with the ground so broken.”

  “Get some aerial reconnaissance there, for Pete’s sake!”

  “Yes, sir. I’ll throw out more scouts, too.”

  “Carry on here, Phil.” Mackenzie headed toward the radio truck. He carried a minicom in his saddlebag, of course, but San Francisco had been continuously jamming on all bands and you needed a powerful set to punch a signal even a few miles. Patrols must communicate by messenger.

  He noticed that the firing inland had slaked off. There were decent roads in the interior Peninsula a ways further north, where some resettlement had taken place. The enemy, still in possession of that area, could use them to effect rapid movements.

  If they withdrew their center and hit our flanks, where we’re weakest—

  A voice from field HQ, barely audible through the squeals and buzzes, took his report and gave back what had been seen elsewhere. Large maneuvers right and left, yes, it did seem as if the Fallonites were going to try a breakthrough. Could be a feint, though. The main body of the Sierrans must remain where it was until the situation became clearer. The Rolling Stones must hold out a while on their own.

  “Will do.” Mackenzie returned to the head of his columns. Speyer nodded grimly at the word.

  “Better get prepared, hadn’t we?”

  “Uh-huh.” Mackenzie lost himself in a welter of commands, as officer after officer rode to him. The outlying sections were to be pulled in. The beach was to be defended, with the high ground immediately above.

  Men scurried, horses neighed, guns trundled about. The scout plane returned, flying low enough to get a transmission through: yes, definitely an attack on the way; hard to tell how big a force, through the damned tree cover and down in the damned arroyos, but it might well be at brigade strength.

  Mackenzie established himself on a hilltop with his staff and runners. A line of artillery stretched beneath him, across the strand. Cavalry waited behind them, lances agleam, an infantry company for support. Otherwise the foot soldiers had faded into the landscape. The sea boomed its own cannonade, and gulls began to gather as if they knew there would be meat before long.

  “Think we can hold them?” Speyer asked.

  “Sure,” Mackenzie said. “If they come down the beach, we’ll enfilade them, as well as shooting up their front. If they come higher, well, that’s a textbook example of defensible terrain. ’Course, if another troop punches through the lines further inland, we’ll be cut off, but that isn’t our worry right now.”

  “They must hope to get around our army and attack our rear.”

  “Guess so. Not too smart of them, though. We can approach Frisco just as easily fighting backwards as forwards.”

  “Unless the city garrison makes a sally.”

  “Even then. Total numerical strengths are about equal, and we’ve got more ammo and alky. Also a lot of bossman militia for auxiliaries, who’re used to disorganized warfare in hilly ground.”

  “If we do whip them—” Speyer shut his lips together.

  “Go on,” Mackenzie-said.

  “Nothing.”

  “The hell it is. You were about to remind me of the next step: how do we take the city without too high a cost to both sides? Well, I happen to know we’ve got a hole card to play there, which might help.”

  Speyer turned pitying eyes away from Mackenzie. Silence fell on the hilltop.

  It was an unconscionably long time before the enemy came in view, first a few outriders far down the dunes, then the body of him, pouring from the ridges and gullies and woods. Reports flickered about Mackenzie—a powerful force, nearly twice as big as ours, but with little artillery; by now badly short of fuel, they must depend far more than we on animals to move their equipment. They were evidently going to change, accept losses in order to get sabers and bayonets among the Rolling Stones’ cannon. Mackenzie issued his directions accordingly.

  The hostiles formed up, a mile or so distant. Through his field glasses Mackenzie recognized them, red sashes of the Madera Horse, green and gold pennon of the Dagos, fluttering in the iodine wind. He’d campaigned with both outfits in the past. It was treacherous to remember that Ives favored a blunt wedge formation and use the fact against him.

  . . . One enemy armored car and some fieldpieces, light horse-drawn ones, gleamed wickedly in the sunlight.

  Bugles blew shrill. The Fallonite cavalry laid lance in rest and started trotting. They gathered speed as they went, a canter, a gallop, until the earth trembled with them. Then their infantry got going, flanked by its guns. The car rolled along between the first and second line of foot. Oddly, it had no rocket launcher on top or repeater barrels thrust from the fire slits. Those were good troops, Mackenzie thought, advancing in close order with that ripple down the ranks which bespoke veterans. He hated what must happen.

  His defense waited immobile on the sand. Fire crackled from the hillsides, where mortar squads and riflemen crouched. A rider toppled, a dogface clutched his belly and went to his knees, their companions behind moved forward to close the lines again. Mackenzie looked to his howitzers. Men stood tensed at sights and lanyards. Let the foe get well in range—There! Yamaguchi, mounted just rearward of the gunners, drew his saber and flashed the blade downward. Cannon bellowed. Fire spurted through smoke, sand gouted up, shrapnel sleeted over the charging force. At once the gun crews fell into the rhythm of reloading, relaying, refiring, the steady three rounds per minute which conserved barrels and broke armies. Horses screamed in their own tangled red guts. But not many had been hit. The Madera cavalry continued in full gallop. Their lead was so close now that Mackenzie’s glasses picked out a face, red, freckled, a ranch boy turned trooper, his mouth stretched out of shape as he yeiled.

  The archers behind the defending cannon let go. Arrows whistled skyward, flight after flight, curved past the gulls and down again. Flame and smoke ran ragged in the wiry hill grass, out of the ragged-leaved live oak copses. Men pitched to the sand, many still hideously astir, like insects that had been stepped on. The fieldpieces on the enemy left flank halted, swiveled about, and spat return fire. Futile . . . but God, their officer had courage! Mackenzie saw the advancing lines waver. An attack by his own horse and foot, down the beach, ought to crumple them. “Get ready to move,” he said into his minicom. He saw his men poise. The cannon belched anew.

  The oncoming armored car slowed to a halt. Something within it chattered, loud enough to hear through the explosions. A blue-white sheet ran over the nearest hill. Mackenzie shut half-blinded eyes. When he opened them again, he saw a grass fire through the crazy patterns of after-image. A Rolling Stone burst from cover, howling, his clothes ablaze. The man hit the sand and rolled over. That part of the beach lifted in one monster wave, crested twenty feet high, and smashed across the hill. The burning soldier vanished in the avalanche that buried his comrades.

  “Psi blast!” someone screamed, thin and horrible, through chaos and ground-shudder. “The Espers—”

  Unbelievably, a bugle sounded and the Sierran cavalry lunged forward. Past their own guns, on against the scattering opposition . . . and horses and riders rose into the air, tumbled in a giant’s invisible whirligig, crashed bone-breakingly to earth again. The second rank of lancers broke. Mounts reared, pawed the air, wheeled and fled in every direction.

  A terrible deep hum filled the sky. Mackenzie saw the world as if through a haze, as if his brain were being dashed back and forth between the walls of his skull. Another glare ran across the hills, higher this time, burning men alive.

  “They’ll wipe us out,” Speyer called, a dim voice that rose and f
ell on the air tides. “They’ll re-form as we stampede—”

  “No!” Mackenzie shouted. “The adepts must be in that car. Come on!”

  Most of his horse had recoiled on their own artillery, one squealing, trampling wreck. The infantry stood rigid, but about to bolt A glance thrown to his right showed Mackenzie how the enemy themselves were in confusion, this had been a terrifying surprise to them too, but as soon as they got over the shock they’d advance and there’d be nothing left to stop them . . . It was as if another man spurred his mount. The animal fought, foam-flecked with panic. He slugged its head around, brutally, and dug in spurs. They rushed down the hill toward the guns.

  He needed all his strength to halt the gelding before the cannon mouths. A man slumped dead by his piece, though there was no mark on him. Mackenzie jumped to the ground. His steed bolted.

  He hadn’t time to worry about that. Where was help? “Come here!” His yell was lost in the riot. But suddenly another man was beside him, Speyer, snatching up a shell and slamming it into the breach. Mackenzie squinted through the telescope, took a bearing by guess and feel. He could see the Esper car where it squatted among dead and hurt. At this distance it looked too small to have blackened acres.

  Speyer helped him lay the howitzer. He jerked the lanyard. The gun roared and sprang. The shell burst a few yards short of target, sand spurted and metal fragments whined.

  Speyer had the next one loaded. Mackenzie aimed and fired. Overshot this time, but not by much. The car rocked. Concussion might have hurt the Espers inside; at least, the psi blasts had stopped. But it was necessary to strike before the foe got organized again.

  He ran toward his own regimental car. The door gaped, the crew had fled. He threw himself into the driver’s seat. Speyer clanged the door shut and stuck his face in the hood of the rocket-launcher periscope. Mackenzie raced the machine forward. The banner on its rooftop snapped in the wind.

  Speyer aimed the launcher and pressed the firing button. The missile burned across intervening yards and exploded. The other car lurched on its wheels. A hole opened in its side.

  If the boys will only rally and advance—Well, if they don’t, I’m done for anyway. Mackenzie squealed to a stop, flung open the door and leaped out. Curled, blackened metal framed his entry. He wriggled through, into murk and stenches.

  Two Espers lay there. The driver was dead, a chunk of steel through his breast. The other one, the adept, whimpered among his unhuman instruments. His face was hidden by blood. Mackenzie pitched the corpse on its side and pulled off the robe. He snatched a curving tube of metal and tumbled back out.

  Speyer was still in the undamaged car, firing repeaters at those hostiles who ventured near. Mackenzie jumped onto the ladder of the disabled machine, climbed to its roof and stood erect. He waved the blue robe in one hand and the weapon he did not understand in the other. “Come on, you sons!” he shouted, tiny against the sea wind. “We’ve knocked ’em out for you! Want your breakfast in bed too?”

  One bullet buzzed past his ear. Nothing else. Most of the enemy, horse and foot, stayed frozen. In that immense stillness he could not tell if he heard surf or the blood in his own veins.

  Then a bugle called. The hex corps whistled triumphantly; their tomtoms thuttered. A ragged line of his infantry began to move toward him. More followed. The cavalry joined them, man by man and unit by unit, on their flanks. Soldiers ran down the smoking hillsides.

  Mackenzie sprang to sand again and into his car. “Let’s get back,” he told Speyer. “We got a battle to finish.”

  “Shut up!” Tom Danielis said.

  Philosopher Woodworth stared at him. Fog swirled and dripped in the forest, hiding the land and the brigade, gray nothingness through which came a muffled noise of men and horses and wheels, an isolated and infinitely weary sound. The air was cold, and clothing hung heavy on the skin.

  “Sir,” protested Major Lescarbault. The eyes were wide and shocked in his gaunted face.

  “I dare tell a ranking Esper to stop quacking about a subject of which he’s totally ignorant?” Danielis answered. “Well, it’s past time that somebody did.

  Woodworth recovered his poise. “All I said, son, was that we should consolidate our adepts and strike the Brodskyite center,” he reproved. “What’s wrong with that?”

  Danielis clenched his fists. “Nothing,” he said, “except it invites a worse disaster than you’ve brought on us yet.”

  “A setback or two,” Lescarbault argued. “They did rout us on the west, but we turned their flank here by the Bay.”

  “With the net result that their main body pivoted, attacked, and split us in half,” Danielis snapped. “The Espers have been scant use since then . . . now the rebels know they need vehicles to transport their weapons, and can be killed. Artillery zeroes in on their positions, or bands of woodsmen hit and run, leaving them dead, or the enemy simply goes around any spot where they’re known to be. We haven’t got enough adepts!”

  “That’s why I proposed gettin’ them in one group, too big to withstand,” Woodworth said.

  “And too cumbersome to be of any value,” Danielis replied.

  He felt more than a little sickened, knowing how the Order had cheated him his whole life; yes, he thought, that was the real bitterness, not the fact that the adepts had failed to defeat the rebels—by failing, essentially, to break their spirit—but the fact that the adepts were only someone else’s cat’s paws and every gentle, earnest soul in every Esper community was only someone’s dupe.

  Wildly he wanted to return to Laura—there’d been no chance thus far to see her—Laura and the kid, the last honest reality this fog-world had left him. He mastered himself and went on more evenly:

  “The adepts, what few of them survive, will of course be helpful in defending San Francisco. An army free to move around in the field can deal with them, one way or another, but your . . . your weapons can repel an assault on the city walls. So that’s where I’m going to take them.”

  Probably the best he could do. There was no word from the northern half of the loyalist army. Doubtless they’d withdrawn to the capital, suffering heavy losses en route. Radio jamming continued, hampering friendly and hostile communications alike. He had to take action, either retreat southward or fight his way through to the city. The latter course seemed wisest. He didn’t believe that Laura had much to do with his choice.

  “I’m no adept myself,” Woodworth said. “I can’t call them mind to mind.”

  “You mean you can’t use their equivalent of radio,” Danielis said brutally. “Well, you’ve got an adept in attendance. Have him pass the word.”

  Woodworth flinched. “I hope,” he said, “I hope you understand this came as a surprise to me too.”

  “Oh, yes, certainly, Philosopher,” Lescarbault said unbidden.

  Woodworth swallowed. “I still hold with the Way and the Order,” he said harshly. “There’s nothin’ else I can do. Is there? The Grand Seeker has promised a full explanation when this is over.” He shook his head. “Okay, son, I’ll do what I can.”

  A certain compassion touched Danielis as the blue robe disappeared into the fog. He rapped his orders the more severely.

  Slowly his command got going. He was with the Second Brigade; the rest were strewn over the Peninsula in the fragments into which the rebels had knocked them. He hoped the equally scattered adepts, joining him on his march through the San Bruno range, would guide some of those units to him. But most, wandering demoralized, were sure to surrender to the first rebels they came upon.

  He rode near the front, on a muddy road that snaked over the highlands. His helmet was a monstrous weight. The horse stumbled beneath him, exhausted by—how many days?—of march, countermarch, battle, skirmish, thin rations or none, heat and cold and fear, in an empty land. Poor beast, he’d see that it got proper treatment when they reached the city. That all those poor beasts behind him did, after trudging and fighting and trudging again until their eyes were f
ilmed with fatigue.

  There’ll be chance enough for rest in San Francisco. We’re impregnable there, walls and cannon and the Esper machines to landward, the sea that feeds us at our backs. We can recover our strength, regroup our forces, bring fresh troops down from Washington and up from the south by water. The war isn’t decided yet . . . God help us.

  I wonder if it will ever be.

  And then, will Jimbo Mackenzie come to see us, sit by the fire and swap yarns about what we did? Or talk about something else, anything else? If not, that’s too high a price for victory.

  Maybe not too high a price for what we’ve learned, though. Strangers on this planet . . . what else could have forged those weapons? The adepts will talk if I myself have to torture them till they do. But Danielis remembered tales muttered in the fisher huts of his boyhood, after dark, when ghosts walked in old men’s minds. Before the holocaust there had been legends about the stars, and the legends lived on. He didn’t know if he would be able to look again at the night sky without a shiver.

  This damned fog—

  Hoofs thudded. Danielis half drew his sidearm. But the rider was a scout of his own, who raised a drenched sleeve in salute. “Colonel, an enemy force about ten miles ahead by road. Big.”

  So we’ll have to fight now. “Do they seem aware of us?”

  “No, sir. They’re proceeding east along the ridge there.”

  “Probably figure to occupy the Candlestick Park ruins,” Danielis murmured. His body was too tired for excitement. “Good stronghold, that. Very well, Corporal.” He turned to Lescarbault and issued instructions.

  The brigade formed itself in the formlessness. Patrols went out. Information began to flow back, and Danielis sketched a plan that ought to work. He didn’t want to try for a decisive engagement, only brush the enemy aside and discourage them from pursuit. His meto must be spared, as many as possible, for the city defense and the eventual counteroffensive. Lescarbault came back. “Sir! The radio jamming’s ended!”

  “What?” Danielis blinked, not quite comprehending.