Chapter Forty-five

The corral fences were of strong posts on masonry foundations a meter high. They were meant to hold aurochs and, in a pinch, herds of half-tamed mammoths. The barriers weren't proof against men whose battlesuits could shatter rock and sheer through any weight of wood. Even so, the rubble and flaming debris would be some protection for the outnumbered defenders.

Better than nothing.

"Battalion!" Hansen said. He lumbered through a gate left open. Stockmen had driven their herds to yards near the port, safer when the Confederate army arrived. "Hold up here and form close order!"

Five men in close order. Well, you did what you could.

Horsemen bolted past the gate. Hansen's men had been overborne by imperial riders backed by the section of battlesuited warriors. A few scouts carried crossbows that they weren't delaying to reload.

Blood paused at the entrance to the corral. His weapon licked out to its maximum length and touched a lancer wearing a quilted jack. The shock threw the man off his mount. His linen armor was aflame. The arc didn't have the amperage at five meters' range to detonate the victim's own body fluids, but he was certainly dead for his presumption in coming too close to a warrior.

Hansen wasn't absolutely sure that the rider was one of Venkatna's troops. What the hell, he wouldn't be the last man to die this day.

"Ever'body take it easy," Blood said calmly. "The boss, he's the left end and I'm the right. You other three, you just stay in the middle 'n back us the best ye can."

"How many of 'em are there?" gasped al-Hauk. Jogging in a poor-quality battlesuit left the user feeling like he'd run the gauntlet. Hansen knew that very well.

"Don't ye worry about it," Blood said. "When they see the whole army eat up behind them they'll run like lizard slavers're on their tails."

Did Blood believe that? Did he even care?

The images echoed from North's battlesuit were a-dance with the light of arc weapons. Three imperial warriors braced themselves to stop 'the Simplain prince.'

Hansen had never measured himself against North in a battlesuit. Captain North had seen his share of hard places before he came to this world and to godhead. His battlesuit was the template from which smiths forged other armor in the Matrix, and North was an artist in its use.

The center man of the imperial trio thrust. North stopped dead. Instead of crossing his arc with the threatening one, he slashed left-handed at a sideman and cut off the fellow's feet at the ankles.

The leading imperial glanced reflexively toward the toppling victim. Then North thrust home, striking at the junction of helmet and plastron. The remaining sideman bellowed in rage and stepped into the sparks streaming in ropes from his leader's short-circuited armor. North's backhand cut was almost contemptuous in the way it ripped the third victim's arm off at the shoulder.

Three men were dead in dazzle and fury, and North was through Venkatna's front line. The defensive screen of his battlesuit had not been required to block a single hostile arc.

"They're coming by the gate," Brownow noted in a high-pitched voice.

He must be using an order-of-battle display like the 30% mask across Hansen's own field of view. That was more initiative than Hansen would have expected from somebody wearing a piece of junk like Brownow's suit. If he survived this fight, Hansen would see to it that Brownow went into the next one better equipped; but there wasn't a chance in hell of that happening so fuck it. . . .

"They're coming to the gate," Hansen said aloud. "Back me, boys, I'm going to handle this one myself."

Imperial warriors had swept around the corral in both directions. Nobody'd cut a path through the fence; a facet of Hansen's mind realized that they must still think there were fifty hostiles within the 500-meter stone and timber circuit.

The gate was wide enough to pass two bull aurochs side by side, but the beasts would be rubbing against one another. The four armored warriors who burst through together were cramped as well, to a slight but fatal degree.

Hansen stepped forward. He thrust high at the cerulean-armored man on the left of the line. The fellow wore a royal suit, and his nearest companion was nearly as well equipped.

Cerulean blocked Hansen's arc expertly. His companion's nervous slash flicked Cerulean's helmet in a hasty attempt to strike Hansen. Cerulean's armor failed under the double load. His voice screamed through a last blast of static on his external speaker.

Hansen used the upright dead man as a shield to block the imperial warriors pressing from behind. He stabbed Cerulean's companion in the groin, toppling him against the men bound by the right gatepost. Hansen's arc extended across their plastrons.

The armor of the last pair was of only moderate quality. It failed with two quick cracks and a gout of orange sparks.

Hansen stepped back. High-density arcs had burned air to ozone. His lungs throbbed as though he had been breathing vitriol. His gauntlets were hot, both of them. He hadn't been conscious that he was striking the last pair with his left hand until after they died. Something unplanned, something instinct had suggested and reflex had put to lethal effect. . . .

"Mine," said Blood. He lunged forward to meet an imperial warrior trying to clear the sudden windrow of bodies with a desperate leap.

Hansen swung to back his man, but Blood didn't need the help. His arc crossed the imperial's while the latter had both feet in the air. The power draining to the arc weapon froze the imperial's knee joints. He crashed down on his face with his limbs splayed.

Blood hacked off his head. The three other members of the Ambush Battalion ripped the legs and belly armor. The victim didn't need it, but perhaps Hansen's men did.

"They're breaking through the sides of the corral," wheezed Brownow.

"Right," said Hansen with the exalted calm he always got at the killing times, as he ought to know by now.

Venkatna's men bunched outside the open gateway. Cerulean had probably been the section leader. Dust swirled over the scene like a stripper's last veil, drawing attention to the bloody tangle that it did not conceal. "Not yet, when I tell you to move."

The Order of Battle display showed a blue wedge cutting into a red block, and a smaller red block shifting from the reserve to meet the point of the wedge. On the visuals relayed from Captain North's suit, twenty imperial troops double-timed to stop the Simplain charge—

And Krita was one of the imperials.

Arcs sawed into the corral fence at a dozen locations around the circumference. Blue-white electrical flux flickered viciously through the orange flames springing from the wood. Where imperial weapons touched the masonry, rock shattered and the yellow-white glare of superheated lime dimmed the rising sun.

An imperial stepped toward the gate. Hansen spread the thumb and forefinger of his right hand. His arc leaped out between the gateposts and kissed the imperial's frontal armor.

Defensive screens flared but withstood the arc. The imperial staggered; his fellows wavered back with him.

"Now!" Hansen shouted as he wheeled toward the most serious of the assaults on the corral fence.

A three-meter section of wall collapsed in a heap of blazing timbers. The imperials had severed tie-beams at the top of the fence as well as carving through the uprights. Some of the poles fell into the corral. The shattered foundations were a sea of white fire.

Hansen had thirty meters to run. He reached the gap in the fence as the first two imperial warriors struggled out of the flames. They swept their arcs widely in order to drive back opponents for the instant they were blinded by the inferno of their own creation.

Hansen thrust like a surgeon lancing a boil. His arc ripped the inside knee of the left man of the pair. The second warrior stumbled over the toppling body of his companion. Hansen stabbed through his backplate, where the neck joined the shoulders.

Another warrior bulled through. His arc met Hansen's, held for a moment. Two more imperials crashed into him from behind. Hansen and Blood—only a stride behind, but so much heat and glare and fresh, stinking death—cut the trio apart before they could disentangle.

The wood fire roared, supercharged by misdirected arcs.

"They're behind us!" Brownow said/screamed.

Hansen drew a deep breath. His arms to the shoulders felt as though they were being squeezed in red-hot iron. He turned.

Venkatna's warriors had rushed the gate after Hansen's force withdrew. Other imperials straggled through gaps they'd blasted in the fence at points the defenders couldn't reach.

Empey, Brownow, and al-Hauk lunged at the nearest of the oncoming enemy. They struck simultaneously, luck aiding desperation. The imperial warrior threw up his arc to block Empey's cut, but al-Hauk's thrust sizzled on the fellow's helmet. The paired arcs drew enough power that when Brownow slashed low an instant later, the imperial's suit failed in a spurt of glass, steel, and pelvis burned to carbon.

Other imperials hit the Confederates from both sides and the front. Brownow's cry of triumph was a one-syllable squawk as all three of Hansen's men died. Hansen took an imperial from behind while the fellow concentrated on Empey, but then he and Blood were back-to-back in a ring of hostile warriors.

The main Mirala onslaught was drowning in its own blood against Venkatna's army.

North's viewpoint danced like a dervish. Each shift was accompanied by a cut from one hand or the other. Many of the cuts went home.

It wasn't enough, just as North's disciplined wedge of mercenaries hadn't been enough—quite—to rip the fabric of the imperial line. His force had melted away under assault from all sides, as soon as the imperial reserves managed to slow the initial impetus.

The Mirala Confederates had started the battle with superior numbers, but their opponents fought as three-man units instead of being a mob of individuals. Trebled strokes would overload any battlesuit, even the best. Trying to overwhelm with mere numbers a force so disciplined was like trying to quench a fire with naphtha.

Captain North was almost alone, but his opponents gave him a wide berth. One of the suits at North's feet had a blue plastron and silver limbs. The helmet lay a meter away, burned black by the arc that had severed it.

Lord Salles had met his match at last.

"Try that again, fuckhead!" Blood shouted as he thrust at an imperial who'd made a distant pass at him. The man lurched back to the safety of his companions; but it wouldn't be long now.

"Hey, boss?" Blood gasped.

They were both breathing through their mouths, gasping in deep lungfuls that still weren't enough to fuel the needs of battle. The mucous lining of Hansen's nose and throat had been eroded by the trickle of ozone which leaked through his battlesuit's filters.

"Go ahead."

"D'jew see the way Brownow sold that bastid a farm? Suit as good as mine, too! You know, I—"

Two imperials came at Hansen's front while a third poised to the left. Hansen feinted left with his arc a long whip. One of Venkatna's men lunged a half-step ahead of his comrade, just in time to catch the full density of Hansen's weapon switched to the right hand.

Hansen's thrust penetrated the plastron. The latch gave. The whole frontal plate flew open, driven by the victim's exploding chest.

"—didn't think they'd keep up with us, let—"

Both the surviving imperials hopped back into the circle.

"—alone fight. But they sure—"

On the remote display, Krita in her black armor stepped forward. Her arc crossed North's. That quadrant of Hansen's visor flared into white static. The roar of the huge outrush of power made the air quiver even in the corral half a kilometer distant.

The Searcher's suit was as good as that of the master she long had served—

North's viewpoint suddenly cleared. Krita fell backward. Her helmet was the gray and black of fiery disaster instead of paint.

Should have been as good.

"—did that bastid up a treat!" Blood concluded as six of Venkatna's men rushed him together and he lunged a pace forward to meet them unexpectedly.

The remote transmission disappeared from Hansen's visor. North had vanished—into the Matrix, and into the legend of the Open Lands. His godlike laughter boomed in Hansen's ears; then it too was gone.

Blood's attack caught the imperials off-balance. They fouled one another. One went down and a second, arcs and overloading defensive screens tearing across the sonic and visual spectra. Hansen's quick pivot and swipe cut an imperial's legs off at the knees.

The man fell forward, covering the corpse of King Wenceslas' bodyguard. The backplate of Blood's garish armor had been blasted by the weapons of at least three opponents. Both his gauntlets glowed from the arcs they had been directing till the moment he died.

If Blood's mother was anything like her son, she'd tear the throat out of the first of Venkatna's men to come to her farm. But they would come. . . .

For a moment, only the crash of the burning fence broke the silence within the corral.

Nils Hansen knew that even gods had to die some day.

And he knew that he wasn't going to run from the battle in which Krita had fallen.