Chapter Forty-seven

Life was good, now that it was about to end, but Nils Hansen stepped forward anyway.

Imperials in front of him retreated, but he heard the rasp of weapons at his back—

And knew that he was dead—

And charged the clot of hostile warriors, watching them shout and stumble over Blood's body. Hansen's arc flicked like a viper's fang and lopped off an imperial's wrist.

He wasn't alone any more. Taddeusz strode at Hansen's right hand in red-and-gold armor.

Whatever you said about Marshal Taddeusz—Hansen had said plenty—no one had ever denied he was a bad man with whom to cross arcs. A pair of imperials were too startled by Taddeusz' sudden appearance to react intelligently.

They see-sawed. One of them backed a step, then lunged forward to support his fellow who had tried for a moment to guard himself but retreated a heartbeat later.

Both imperials wore decent armor, suits in the third- or fourth-class range. There was no armor better than that of the dead warriors on North's battleplain, and few warriors ever with more experience than Taddeusz had of killing in a battlesuit.

The red-and-gold figure stuck alternately, right gauntlet and left; into one opponent's hip joint, through the other's guard and into his throat with fireworks of molten metal.

"Follow me!" boomed Taddeusz' amplified voice, but only because that was the sort of thing leaders were supposed to say. The warrior who had in life been warchief of Peace Rock didn't care if others followed him, so long as he himself was able to stride into the midst of blaze and slaughter.

"I'm closing your left, Lord Hansen!" called a once-familiar voice over the Ambush Battalion push. Hansen cut at an imperial. The man parried Hansen's arc, but the power drain froze the joints of the fellow's armor and heated the outer skin of his gauntlet bright red with the current of only a fraction of a second.

Shill, painted like a bumblebee—

Shill, who had closed Hansen's flank until he died, doing his job—

Shill stepped forward to lop off the imperial's head. He used the training Hansen had hammered into him, and the splendid battlesuit his soul wore since Nils Hansen got him killed. . . .

There were a dozen beads of gold light on Hansen's Order of Battle overlay, covering the sides and back of his own solitary blue pip. More joined every moment, though he didn't—couldn't—didn't dare—look around to be sure there was hard metal and ceramic backing the signals on his helmet screen.

"All friendly units!" Hansen ordered. He didn't know what to call the force now at his disposal. Men he had killed, men he had gotten killed . . . and men no more. "Rush the gate!"

He didn't want his troops to struggle over walls reduced to blazing rubble, the way the imperials had done. These were Nils Hansen's men now, for whatever reason. He would spend them if he had to, but he wouldn't throw them away.

Taddeusz was in front of the line, the way the self-willed bastard always was. For a change the big warrior's lack of discipline worked better than any plan could have done. His berserk fury hit the clump of six imperials—half-arrayed, half-retreating—in front of the gate. Taddeusz shattered them.

Hansen's screen blanked the sparks and purple coruscance to save his vision. He paused, then lunged forward seconds later when the glare of arcs and screens faded.

Four of Venkatna's men were down. Two got through the gateway ahead of Taddeusz' ravening arcs, but the red-and-gold figure was right behind them. He cleared the gateway that would have been too strait for even a pair of warriors advancing deliberately—

And Hansen was behind him, with Hansen's two sidemen following at a half-step's distance.

He'd never known the name of the warrior on his right. He'd been bodyguard to one of Frekka's Syndics—a century ago when Nils Hansen killed him.

The imperial section didn't know what had hit it. For that matter, neither did Hansen, but he'd learned long since not to slack off when his opponent stumbled. He crossed arcs right-handed with the nearest of Venkatna's troops. Even as Hansen spread his left gauntlet to stab home from an unexpected direction, Shill took the fellow's knees from under him.

"Suit!" Hansen said. He was gasping, but it didn't seem to slow him down. He was burning adrenaline in place of oxygen, he guessed. "Where the fuck's Venkatna? Gimme a—"

His right sideman engaged an imperial warrior. Hansen spun and slashed by instinct, overloading the enemy's carapace armor with a bang that blew the dead man forward in a cloud of steam and vaporized steel.

"—vector!"

A bead of imperial purple gleamed on Hansen's map overlay, amid the other Order of Battle information. "In his palace," said the suit AI.

It spoke in a sweetly feminine voice that Hansen hadn't heard it synthesize before. A comment on Hansen's lack of courtesy or he missed his bet. Even the machines were getting smart-ass.

"All units," he called. "Toward the palace!"

He doubled Shill's stroke on a warrior in green and blue—needless, the imperial was already toppling, his suit dead and the man too almost certainly. The rhythm was the thing, though, get into the rhythm of slash and lunge and the fighting would take care of itself.

Taddeusz' suit failed with a thunderclap.

There had been at least six of Venkatna's men surrounding Taddeusz. It was possible that every one of them had managed to get an arc home simultaneously. No battlesuit was capable of withstanding such abuse. The shockwave of ceramic components converted to gas lifted dust from the trampled soil.

Nothing remained where Taddeusz had been. No ashes charred from blood and bone, not even an empty battlesuit.

"Let's go!" Hansen shouted as his arc rocked an imperial whom his sidemen lopped to collops.

Taddeusz had done them another favor in his last instants by concentrating the attention of Venkatna's nearby troops on himself. When Hansen and the rest of his line hit the enemy, they went down like barley before a scythe.

There was nothing closer than the main imperial army that could stop Hansen now—

And the main army wasn't going to do the job either. Almost a hundred warriors followed Hansen, spreading out to either flank. Enough when they were as good as they were . . . and as well equipped as they were . . . and when Nils Hansen was leading them toward the spot the enemy was most vulnerable, as he always did.

The straight line toward Venkatna's palace led through a jumble of shanties and cribs which had serviced drovers and troops from the nearby barracks. The Strip had caught fire earlier in the day—earlier in the morning, it was still morning, even though a thousand men or more had died since the sun rose.

The flimsy buildings had too little substance to long sustain a fire, but as Hansen's armored boots stirred the ashes, they kicked orange tongues to life.

"Golsingh and Victory!" Shill called, a battlecry dead almost as long as the man who shouted it.

"Frekka and Freedom!" boomed Hansen's other sideman. Top-ranked warriors were by definition competitive. From the way they'd sliced through Venkatna's men, Hansen knew the troops he now led were the best.

From their performance today, and from their performance in the days that Nils Hansen watched them die.

The palace was in sight. Half a dozen imperial warriors braced themselves across its entrance. Their arc weapons licked in and out to maximum distention.

The display was probably meant to be threatening. Instead, it painted Venkatna's men with a look of nervous indecision. That emotion was just what the poor bastards were feeling, if they had the sense God gave a goose.

The buzzsaw shriek of arc weapons sounded to the east. What had been the imperial right flank stumbled down onto the right flank of Hansen's force. Venkatna's men were confused and shaken already by hard fighting, but they were professionals and still three hundred strong.

The imperials in the palace entrance hunched instinctively lower. They knew that if they held for as little as three minutes, the weight of their fellows could win the battle for Venkatna after all—

And incidentally, save the lives of the remaining guards.

The threat was the imperial main body. If Hansen ignored that mass of troops to crush the entrance guards, the chances were very good that his whole force would be cut down from behind.

He opened his mouth.

"Maharg to Hansen!" crackled a voice on the command channel. "Take what you need, buddy, and let me handle the rear guard. Over!"

"Suit," Hansen ordered because there wasn't time for hesitation, wasn't ever time to look gift horses in the mouth, "pick six, they're Blue Group. Other units, form on Marshal Maharg."

He was gasping, but the air his lungs dragged in burned and his arms burned back as far as the shoulders while his gauntlets glowed. Pain wouldn't matter until afterward.

"Blue Group, follow me!"

The seven warriors hit the entrance guards like a broad-headed arrow; six warriors who had been men, and Nils Hansen at the point. Light ripped across the sky and the building's facade of colored marble.

Two of Venkatna's men hacked together. Hansen's right sideman vanished with a blue-white glare and a dull implosion. The men who—killed?—him were dead, and their fellows were dead.

Sections of battlesuit bubbled white and jounced to the flagged courtyard. The larger chunks of torso, some still attached to armored legs, fell more slowly because of their greater inertia.

"Up Wenceslas!" bawled the warrior now guarding Hansen's right side. "Gut the bastards!" His suit had a silver ground, decorated with painted drops of blood.

The palace doors exploded. Arc weapons shorted one another in their wielders' enthusiasm to slash through the obstacle. Gilt straps riveted to the wood as decoration curled back like honeysuckle, burning green and purple.

On Hansen's schematic overlay, seventy-odd gold dots met the rush of three hundred red markers. The red mass recoiled. The scattered Mirala army was streaming back to catch the imperials, now, in the rear.

God have mercy on any poor bastard who thought he could power through a force Maharg led.

And God have mercy on Emperor Venkatna, for Hansen would show him none.

"Follow me!" he shouted through a throat rasped raw by ozone and more subtle poisons.

The stride of Nils Hansen's armored boots cracked delicate mosaics as he ran to bring an emperor the reward his actions had earned him.