Fall with Honor (Vampire Earth #7)

Fall with Honor (Vampire Earth #7) Page 10

Withdrawl: Directing a successful retreat can be as difficult as an advance.

Eastern Kentucky offers some advantages to javelin and its legworm-riding allies.

Mountain passes could be easily held against greater numbers-though this could be worked to their disadvantage as well, if the Moondaggers could slip around behind them. The mountains also serve as screens, and the clouds frequently trapped by the peaks hid them from aerial observation.

As Napoleon learned on his way back from Moscow, the most problematic of all is the threat a retreat poses to morale. A beaten army, like an often-whipped horse, lacks the dash and spirit needed to fight a successful battle. Any setback or check threatens a collapse of discipline and a rout. Understandably, the soldiers become shy of risk.

Worse, they come to see every mile of land as an enemy between them and their goal.

Food, clothing, and shelter can be obtained at rifle point from the locals. Friction, any mechanic can tell you, is an enemy to speed and smooth function.

Worst of all, they might see the slower-moving elements as hindrances to the all-important goal of getting home. A retreating army will dissolve like sugar spread in the rain, lost to desertion and despair.

Valentine's earliest woe as chief of staff was handling the Kentucky Alliance. He couldn't order, he could only suggest. He had to ask for riders to watch their flanks, to take their mounts up mountains, to go ahead and seize passes and rickety old railroad bridges the vehicles could bump across.

At meetings with the company commanders, he forced himself to bluster and threaten regarding treatment of the locals, up to and including hangings for crimes of violence. If the collection of captains and lieutenants thought him a tyrant, drunk on newfound power, so much the better. He'd be the bad guy, the glowering, uncompromising stickler for regs, if it would keep the soldiers from doing anything to turn the populace against his side.

And he made it clear that responsibility would flow uphill for once.

They found a sample of Moondagger mercy the third morning out, planted right along the road they were using to retreat out of West Virginia.

They came to a clearing of freshly cut trees, with bits and pieces of broken guns smashed over the stumps. A black and gray mound with a charnel-house reek sat in a circle of heat-hardened ground.

Tikka, riding with a few Bulletproof at the head of the column, identified the bodies as belonging to the Mammoth clan, God knew how. The unarmed men had been thrown into wooden cages and burned. From the burned heads and arms forcing their way between the charred bars, Valentine guessed they'd still been alive when the fires had been set.

Looking at the clenched teeth behind burned away lips, Valentine would have rather gone to the Reapers.

Valentine put his old company to work clearing the bodies and burying them in the loose soil of the grown-over slag heap of a mine in a mountain's pocket just off the road.

"Sorry, men," he said, a handkerchief tied around his face to keep him from breathing ash that might be wood, clothing, or human flesh. "The brigade can't march through this."

Brother Mark rode up on muleback to have a look and say a few words over the departed.

"This is their method, men," he told the parties at work moving the bodies. "They talk you into giving up your guns, and without your gun what's to stop them from taking whatever they want? Resistance is a guarantee of dignity and an honorable death."

"Come down here and help pick up these charcoal briquettes that used to be hands and feet," a man said to his coworker. "We can have a nice little talk about dignity."

"Enough of that, there," Patel barked.

Company scouts caught up with a disheveled trio, hobbling bootless up the road toward Kentucky. Glass sent Ford galumphing back to request Valentine's help with them.

They made a pathetic sight. One's eyes were bandaged, as were one's ears, and the third had dried blood caked on his chin.

"We are the blind, deaf, and dumb," the blinded man said. Valentine saw a light band on his finger where a wedding band had been. The Moondaggers certainly weren't above a little theft.

"Testament to ... er-."

The tongueless man tugged on the blinded one's sleeve and said, "Ebbatren ob ah'oolisheh."

"Yes, testament to the foolishness of those who deny the evidence of their senses as to the supremacy of the Ever-living Gods. The Moondaggers did this for the good of others we might meet."

"You were with the Mammoth?" Valentine asked.

The tongueless man gave a groan, and took the deaf man's hand and squeezed it.

"There are only two kinds of people," the deaf man said loudly. "The graced and the fallen.

We are warning to the fallen."

"Cutting them up's not enough," Glass said to a Wolf scout. "Had to take their shoes too.

Cruel I understand, but that's just mean."

The Moondaggers probably wanted to make sure we caught up to them, Valentine thought, just as the Wolf voiced the same sentiment.

"Webb ub uss," the tongueless man said.

"Let us pass," the blinded one said. "We've said our words. Let us pass."

"First tell me what happened," Valentine said.

"Did you not see?" the blind man asked, his voice cracking.

Ediyak wrote something on a sheet of paper and handed it to the deaf man. He read it and looked at Valentine.

"We surrendered. We followed every instruction. They made us cut down trees and smash our guns on the stumps. Then they bound us in a line, and that's when they started working on the cages," the deaf man said, loudly and a little off key. "They laughed as the fires started. I can still hear the laughter."

"Why did they pick you three?" Valentine added on to the end of Ediyak's note.

The deaf man took it and read. "We were chosen because we all knew the Kurian chatechism."

"What's that?" Tikka asked. "I never had much to do with the Church."

Brother Mark cleared his throat.

"Who are they?"

The wise old gods of our childhood.

"Where are they from?

Kur, the Interworld Tree's branch of Wisdom.

"When did they come?

In our darkest hour.

"Why did they come?

To guide mankind.

"How may we thank them?

With diligent obedience."

Brother Mark had tears in his eyes when he was done. He turned away.

"Your church gives orders for this kind of thing?" Tikka asked.

"Former church, daughter. Former. This most terrible sect of a misguided faith isn't spoken of much in the marble halls," he said. "But I fear they find them useful at times."

"Tikka, can you spare a rider to get these men home?" Valentine asked.

"I'll have to check with the veep," she said. "But the Mammoth have been friendly to us most of the time."

One more body turned up. A young woman from the Mammoth, stripped of her leathers and wearing a plain smock, dead from what was probably a self-inflicted wound to the abdomen. She'd gutted herself with one of the curved knives of the Moondaggers.

"Whoever lost his knife didn't want it back," someone observed.

Valentine wanted another talk with the Last Chance. Might be fun to chain one end of him to his flatbed and use his crane to yank pieces of him off.

"Try not to let it get to you, men," he said as the company reformed after disposing of the bodies. He sent word to headquarters that the brigade could move up the road again. "They did this to put a scare into you."

"Hope we get a chance to get scary on them," DuSable said, wiping ash from his forearms with a wet rag.

"Amen, Sab," Rutherford added.

"Remember the Cause," Valentine said. "We're the good guys. You're better than that."

DuSable straighted a little.

You're better than that, Sab, Valentine thought. He wondered how long he could keep the angry monster inside bottled up and channeled into duty.

Brother Mark, with the lower ranks dismissed from the officers' meeting, sat down wearily.

"I tried three different clans. They're terrified of helping us. Won't even take guns. The Kurians are promising destruction to anyone who gives us so much as a rotten egg."

"It's the reputation of the Moondaggers," Moytana said.

"Maybe we can tarnish it," Valentine said.

"The clans can get away with not resisting us. Claim they don't have guns and so forth,"

Brother Mark said. "But trade? Never. The Moondaggers are promising to obliterate right down to the infants any clan who helps us. All legworm stock is to go to whichever clan reveals their 'treachery.' They're filling wells with dead dogs and cats as we approach."

"A little boiling will take care of that," a Guard captain said. "It's food I'm worried about. I believe we've got rations for the rest of the week. Then we're eating grass like the horses."

"Two weeks on short. That's not enough to get us home. At least not intact," Bloom said.

She sounded beaten.

"So that's it, then," Valentine said. "We can't go on. Not without food."

Brother Mark shook his head. "That's what they count on, my son. Despair. A victory comes so much easier when you are the one defeating yourself."

"An army marches on its stomach," Moytana said. "What do you propose to fill my men's bellies with?"

"They must march on hope."

"That's not much butter to put on a long slice of bread," Moytana observed.

The next day they woke to harassing gunfire from far-off batteries of the Moondaggers. The shots weren't being observed; they were falling wide by a half mile or more and not being corrected. But it unnerved the men, made them jumpy and scattered the way a coming thunderstorm puts rabbits underground.

Valentine gave orders to put a reserve on alert and hurried to the headquarters to find a medical truck parked there and his staff silent and nervous. Even Red Dog panted and crisscrossed from man to man, seeking reassurance.

"Colonel Jolla's dead, sir," the staff agronomist reported.

"Who can tell me what happened?"

"It's like this, sir," Tiddle, the headquarters courier, said. "I had the communications duty.

Colonel Jolla came up to the rig and looked at the latest communications. Everyone was talking about the worm riders quitting on us.

"Well, sir, he didn't say much. Just stared-didn't seem to be reading the communiques at all. Colonel Bloom arrived with a report about some civilian bodies we found. She was just telling him that they were trying to bring us food. Oh, Colonel Jolla wasn't really paying attention to what she was saying. He just sort of nodded. Looked like his mind was elsewhere, like he was having a phone conversation or something."

Tiddle looked miserable, the White Rabbit stilled for once. Valentine saw a bagged bundle resting in the back of the truck.

"Well, then we heard some artillery fire in the distance, the usual calling cards from the Moondaggers to let us know they're back there, and Colonel Jolla just sort of went white. He reached for his service pistol and started to bring it up to his head. Bloom grabbed for it and they started wrestling. She said, for God's sake, help me,' and then we heard the shot. We were moving toward Colonel Jolla but he was too fast for us. He put the barrel in his mouth and pulled the trigger. Awful mess, sir-" Tiddle pointed at the front fender of the jeep, and Valentine saw caked blood in the crevices.

"How's Colonel Boom?" Valentine asked, calming Red Dog and himself by flapping the dog's ears.

"Shaken up. She's in command now."

Valentine sought out Bloom. The usually quick and decisive Bloom seemed suddenly doubtful, but it might be the flecks of blood still on her cuff and shoulder. Red Dog approached her cautiously, sniffing.

"We could try taking a crack at the Moondaggers, sir," Valentine suggested. "We might get the confidence of the worm clans back if we prove ourselves against them."

For a moment her eyes flared.

"Hmmmm. I don't know, Valentine. Southern Command doesn't want another Kansas on their hands, you know. I'm under orders to keep the brigade intact."

They'd continue the retreat.

Two days later Brother Mark returned from the Kentucky Alliance camp.

"They're quitting on us," he said. "That Last Chance arranged a secret meeting with some of their leadership. Wildcats are packing up. Some of the Gunslingers are leaving, going to start a new clan. Even the Bulletproof and Mammoth are hedging their bets, sending some riders back to reinforce their main camp. All we have left are the attenuated what's left of those two and the Coonskins."

He reached into his battered courier bag, brought up a black-labeled bottle. "They gave me a farewell gift. Were it were hemlock."

"You've done your best," Valentine said, waving the others off. He sat Brother Mark down in the chair farthest from the communications desk, and the rest of the headquarters officers gave them a wide berth. Being the CO's chief of staff offered a few privileges.

Brother Mark looked thoughtful, took a pull at the bourbon.

"They always start you off easy. After I took my first vows, they put me in a little schoolhouse, helping the Youth Vanguard with their reading, writing, and 'rithmatic. Cozy.

And they had a full priest there for all the tough questions. If someone asked where their grandfather went, all I'd have to say is 'Let's go talk to our guide.' Then sit quietly while the full priest talked about sacrifice for the greater good.

"Then they moved me to the hospital. I'd just taken my second set of vows. Passed all my examinations with flying colors, by the way. Dead-even emotional resonance when presented with disturbing imagery."

Valentine didn't know what that was but didn't want to change the old churchman's loquacious mood. He'd only seen the church from the outside.

"Did hospital service change your opinions?"

"No, it took me a long time to wake up. Nightmares shouldn't be allowed to pose as dreams."

"I ran into one of those about a year ago," Valentine said. He still felt conflicted about the course he'd chosen in the Cascades. Valentine was not a believer in the revolutionary's morality, where the result justified the means. Could he have come up with a better way to get rid of Adler's bloody direction of Pacific Command?

Brother Mark broke in on his thoughts. "Again, they made it so easy. At the hospital I had a nice little office, and each patient went through a rubric while their medical needs were being evaluated. Took into account age, physical condition, skill set, community activism, and responsibility ... and of course how involved the treatment might be and prognosis for recovery to full useful life. Above a certain score and they were treated. Below a certain score and they found themselves on the drop list.

He whispered the last two words, as though they were something shameful.

"Drop list," he continued. "Sounds innocuous, right? It meant they crossed over into the hands of the Reapers, of course. In a lot of cases the really sick people stayed at home or had quacks treat them, so we always talked to the school-agers about reporting any adults they knew who were sick. Spread of contagion and so on.

"There were scores in between the drop list and treatment. In those cases I consulted higher authority. I'd call the local senior guide and we'd talk it over. Sometimes I'd visit them.

Later I found out my guide would phone the family and ask them to come into his office for a consultation. He'd tell their families that serious decisions had to be made about a loved one, and by the way, the residential hall is practically falling apart on the east side and everyone knows clergy aren't paid salaries . . .

"After a year there my senior guide started having me make decisions myself and then explaining them to him. I must have been good at it. He only overruled me once, in the case of a nephew of a brass ring who had cerebral palsy. They'd found some sinecure for him, and I suspect old Rusty had a big bag of money drop between his ankles under the table. With practice it got easier. I was able to tell myself it was for the good of the species, all the usual Guidon false analogies and circular arguments when it's not engaging in outright devil's advocacy. You wouldn't believe-or maybe you would. But I was destined for greater things."

"So when did you start to question your Guidon?"

It might have been the time I went to the basement. There was an incinerator down there for medical waste and so on, and I was responsible for destroying certain records. Lost records are the bureaucrat's best friend when trouble pays a call, Valentine, and don't you forget it if you ever rise to a desk.

"Now usually I just dumped the files down the chute, but it was after normal office hours and for some reason I thought the incinerator might not be burning since we were on a winter fuel savings drive. I went down to check. The basement had its own cargo lift, otherwise you had to take the stairs, and there were two doors out of the lift. The first set, by the buttons, went to the incinerator. I'd always heard that only people who were dropped went out the back doors.

"I took the lift down to the basement because they were painting in the stairs and the fumes bothered me-we'd hit the natal goal for the year, and the doctors and nurses from the delivery ward were having all their faces painted on the landings-and I heard a sound from the other side of the back door as my exit opened. It was like . . . like a sander, a belt sander or one of those ones with the little round pads. I heard screaming."

"We'd always been told, you see, that everything was done to make death painless and worry-free, right down to the use of drugs to relax the person designated for recycling. I still hear that whirring noise and the screams, right to this clay, like someone made a tape of it.

"I went to the incinerator and burned the old records and took the stairs back up. Though it almost choked me."

Valentine asked Ediyak to see if she could scare up some food, worried what the ten fingers of bourbon consumption would do to Brother Mark's nerve-worn system.

"You're a good boy, Valentine."

"Where did they send you after the hospital?"

"Education in Washington, DC, seat of the New Universal Church. The Vatican, Medina, Jerusalem, and the River Ganges all wrapped up around one green mall. Ever seen it? No, I suppose you haven't."

"No."

"Well, all the Church upper education schools and monuments are there. Tor the service of mankind,' they all say. Yes, each and every one of them. Sometimes in letters six feet high in marble.

"My six years there reaffirmed my faith in mankind's future. I took lots of classes on old wars, intolerance, racism, studied how mankind had been in a downward spiral and that the so-called Age of Reason led to anything but. I could recite the four controls Homo sapiens needed and wrote long essays on the correctly actualized person.

"Oh, and I had my great moment of fame, when I acted in an atrocity film. I got to play both a local priest bemoaning the slaughter of an entire town and a colonel who admitted giving orders to your terror operatives to poison water supplies feeding hospitals and schools.

Different films, of course."

"Of course."

"I wondered if anyone would recognize me. Of course I had a full beard and an eyepatch when I was playing the captured colonel.

"They assured me my script was based on actual documentation. The problem was the colonel's testimony sounded quite similar to a film I'd seen three times as a Youth Vanguard.

Of course they always began and ended with a 'authenticated documentation' seal and statement. Of course, my films bore one too. I had to wonder. Since we were filming fake documentaries allegedly based on real documentation, I naturally began to have doubts about the veracity of the real documentation. Had it been based on the documentation in that film I saw sixteen years before? I wondered whether my transcribed testimony based on the real documentation might serve as further documentation for another film. Do you follow?"

"You lost me two documentations ago."

"Sorry." He took another drink.

Ediyak arrived with some flatbread sandwiches and a shredded-meat stew that didn't commend itself to close analysis.

They camped the next night with Valentine's usual caution, flanked by the legworm clan encampments, Coonskins to the south and the rest of the Alliance to the north, in a hummock between two higher hills. The hills sloped off to the west like unevenly cooked souffles, and were situated above a good supply of firewood and water in an old crossroads town. His scavengers dug up a supply of wire in town. Old copper wire had any number of uses in a military camp, mostly in quick repairs. The only interesting feature was an almost paintless church with a steeple that served as a cramped observation post. Otherwise it was no different than any of their other half-dozen camps in the hills of central Kentucky.

Distant gunfire, a sound like sheets slowly torn under a comforter, woke him. He had his boots on by the time the camp siren went off.

The sound brought moisture to his palms and dried his mouth.

Only two events warranted that alarming wail: Reapers in the camp or a surprise attack.

The wail brought the camp together like drizzle turning into pools on a waterproof tarp.

Individual drops of soldiers sought their nearest comrades and corporals with the same molecular cohesion of water. The fire teams called to the nearest sergeant or officer as captains passed word and gave orders.

Valentine needed to travel only forty feet or so to headquarters, Bee appearing like a genie summoned by the siren. He forced himself to go at a brisk walk, buckling on his combat harness. The first flares burst to the south as he did so, turning the twigs and leaves of the young trees on the slope into a lattice.

Bloom, who slept just off the headquarters tent, barked orders to a succession of couriers and confused junior officers.

"Legworms coming through the pickets to the south. They'll be on top of us in a few minutes," she said.

"Already over the south ridge," a corporal at a radio receiver reported.

"I'll take a look," Valentine said. He spotted Tiddle, the lieutenant with the motorbike.

"Your bike gassed up?"

"Yes, sir, always."

"Get to the Alliance. Tell them the Coonskins have turned on us. They're not, repeat, not to come into the camp. They'll get shot at."

"What about some kind of marking, so we can tell the difference?" Rand asked. He'd been hovering, waiting for orders for his company.

Valentine gritted his teeth. He should have thought of that.

"Good thinking, Rand," Valentine said. "Have them drape a couple of sheets over the side of their legworms, anything we can make out in bad light," Valentine told Tiddle.

"How do you know the others haven't turned too?" a Guard lieutenant asked. He looked like he should be leading a high school football team rather than a company. "You've got a direct line to the Bulletproof?" he asked.

"He's got a line on that Alliance girl," Bloom said. "I'd reel her in, if I was you."

A few chuckles lightened the mood.

"Save it for the mess hall. There's no shooting to the north, is there?" Valentine said.

Tiddle ignored the byplay and Valentine heard the blat of the motorbike starting up.

"I'm heading for the OP," Bloom said, slipping a pack of playing cards into the webbing on her helmet. According to mess hall gossip, her father, a soldier himself, had given her the pack to aid passing the time, but she'd never broken the box's seal. Her eyes looked luminous in the shadow of the brim.

He barked at the communications team to set up a backup for communicating with the camp observation post, and then turned to Gamecock.

"Form your Bears into two-man hunter-killer groups. Give them explosives-a couple of sticks of dynamite will do. Have them keep to cover until a legworm comes near. Try to get the bang under the things. They're sensitive there."

"I've heard that. The middle, right?"

"The nerve ganglia's there. But if they can't get near enough to be precise, just under the thing will do. They'll reverse themselves."

Valentine braced the camp for impact. He relocated headquarters to the old graveyard behind the church, where there was a good wall and tree cover.

Artillery shells began to fall, hitting the motor and camp stores and the camp's former headquarters with deadly accuracy.

Of course the Coonskins wouldn't turn on their own-they'd coordinated it with the Moondaggers. Someone in the Coonskins had giving the Moondagger spotters a nice little map of camp. Valentine wondered how the brand rank and file felt about the switch in alle-giance. Sure, the leadership might decide to bet on the winning team, but what threats would have to be used on the men to turn their guns against erstwhile comrades?

Valentine climbed to the church steeple, so narrow it used a lad-der instead of stairs. Bats had taken up residence in the bottom half, hawks higher up.

He felt a little like the proverbial candlestick maker trying to wedge into a shower stall with the butcher and baker. Bloom and her communications tech had a tight enough squeeze in the tiny cupola.

"Valentine, if a shell hits here now, it'll be a triple grave."

"Had to take a quick glimpse," Valentine said.

Bloom slapped him hard on the shoulder. "Moondagger troops are advancing behind the legworm screen."

Valentine watched the lines of crisscrossing legworms. The Kentuckians fought their worms differently than the Grogs of Missouri, who hurried to close from behind shields. He'd seen a Kentucky leg-worm battle before. The riflemen and gunners hooked themselves to one side of their worms and protected the beasts with old mattresses and sacks full of chopped-up tires on the other. Legworms were notoriously resistant to bullets, but machine-gun fire had been known to travel right through a worm and hit the man on the other side.

A new wrinkle had been added this time-classical siege warfare. The legworms zigzagged forward, acting like the old gabions and fas-cines that sheltered approaching troops and guns.

Valentine could see companies of Moondaggers behind the worms, following the mobile walls as they moved down the night-blue slope toward the camp.

Muzzle flashes sparked on the worms' backs. The legworm riders were shooting, sure enough, but the fire wasn't what Valentine would call intense. More like casual target practice.

"Put some air-fused shells on the other side of those worms," Bloom said. "Slow those troops."

"South line wants permission to fire," the communications tech said.

"No," Valentine said. "Hold fire. Hold fire. Wait for the Moondag-gers, sir. There's no artillery on our defensive line, sir. If the riders have spotted it, they're not telling the Moondaggers," Valentine said. "I think a lot of those riders are just play-shooting."

"If that's how you want to play it," Bloom said. "Don't fire till we see the whites of their eyes, eh?"

"They're almost on top of the Bear teams," the communications tech reported.

"And here comes the Alliance," Valentine said, looking north. The Bulletproof worms looked like fingers wearing thick green rings thanks to the tenting banding them.

"Pass the word not to shoot at legworms with the bands. They're Alliance," Bloom said.

The communications officer complied.

"Go to the south wall, there, Valentine. Get a hit on 'em," Bloom said.

"Yes, sir."

"Where are those mortars?" Bloom barked.

Valentine hurried back down the patched-up ladder. He went forward, Bee gamboling like an excited dog. He checked his gun and magazines.

Mortar shells whistled overhead. Valentine hurried toward the flashes.

Bee ooked at a sentry and Valentine identified himself to the nervous chain of command to the forward posts. Rifle fire crackled overhead.

"They're on top of us. Are we pulling back, or what?" an under-standably nervous captain asked.

"The legworms are just cover for the Moondaggers," Valentine said. "They're making the real assault. Don't let your positions show themselves until you can do some real damage."

Gunfire erupted off to the right. Someone wasn't listening to or-ders or had been knocked out of the communications loop.

Valentine crept up to a stream cut that sheltered the captain's headquarters and took a look at the southern line. The men were sheltered behind low mounds of old legworm trails, patterns crisscrossing as though braided by a drunk, creating little gaps like very shallow foxholes. Atop hummocks of fertilized soil, brush grew like an irregular hedge. The other side had a good view of gently sloped pasture ground and the oncoming parallels of legworms.

A yellow explosion flared under one of the legworms. Gamecock's Bears struck.

Valentine looked to the east. The Alliance seemed to inch forward across the hillside, turning yellow in the rising light of the dawn, still kilometers away but coming hard. This was about to get messy.

Valentine heard another bang! of dynamite going off. A legworm, cut in two, hunched off in opposite directions.

"This is it. They're coming!" the captain said.

The lines of Coonskin legworms parted, crackling rifle fire still popping away atop the mounts, but the bullets were flying off toward the church and camp, not at the line of men pressed flat behind the bushy legworm trail.

Valentine took in the loose wall of men coming forward, more tightly packed than Southern Command would ever group an assault. Were they being herded forward?

Valentine's night-sharp eyes made out a few anguished faces.

The Coonskin legworms angled off to the sides, retreating. The Moondaggers were revealed.

"Let 'em have it, Captain," Valentine said. "This is it."

"Open fire. Open fire!" the captain called. "Defensive grenades."

Gunfire broke out all along the line, sounding like a sudden heavy rain striking a tin roof.

Screams sounded from the ranks of the Moondagger assaulting column.

Valentine saw a field pack radio antenna, an officer crouching next to it on the slope.

"Bee," Valentine said, pointing. "That one."

Bee swung her hockey stick of a rifle around and dropped him. Good shooting, that. Uphill fire took a good eye.

Rand reported in. Bloom had sent Valentine's old company up to support the line with Glass' machine guns.

Valentine issued orders for them to create a fallback line at the stream cut as though on autopilot. His mind was on the assault. The first lines fell under withering fire, hardly shooting back, and a second wave, better dispersed and disciplined, came forward.

Grenades exploded, deeper thuds that transmitted faintly through the ground.

The Moondaggers broke through and it was rifle butts and pistols along the line. Valentine realized he'd put his gun to his shoulder without thinking about it and fired burst after burst into the second wave, knocking them back like target cans. He ducked and slid along the stream cut as he reloaded.

Bee grunted and the hair atop her head parted. Valentine saw white skull. She ignored it and kept shooting.

"Medic," Valentine called.

Bear teams at the assault's flanks, like tiny tornadoes at the sidelines, bit off pieces of the Moondaggers that Valentine's line chewed up.

The Moondaggers fell back, tripping over their own dead as they backed away, shooting and reloading.

"Keep the heat on!" the captain called.

"Send back to Bloom: Repulsed. For now," Valentine ordered.

A medic was wrapping up Bee's head. He gave Valentine a thumbs-up. "Good thing this old girl doesn't set much store by hairstyle. She's gonna have a funny part."

"You all right, Bee?" Valentine asked.

In response she handed him four shell casings. Her tally, evidently. The ever-observant Bee was picking up habits from Duvalier.

Valentine sent Rand's company forward to fill the gaps in the line, just in case. He went up, keeping at a crouch behind the brush as he moved along the line. Snipers were trading shots across the battlefield as what was left of the Moondaggers' second and third waves retreated back across the south hill.

"We killed enough of'em," a soldier said, looking at the carpet of dead from the first wave; the second wave wounded were still being hunted up from the brush.

"Yes," Valentine said. "Old men. Kids. Women even. The Moondaggers put some cannon fodder up front, and when the gamble didn't pay they kept the rest of their chips back. Those two don't even have guns. They gave them baseball bats with a railroad spike through the top."

"Those shits," a Southern Command soldier said. Another picked up one of the bats and examined it.

"Let's get a couple of their chips. To the ridgeline, men. Send back to Bloom: Have her put everything she's got on the other side of that ridge-that's where their real strength is."

Valentine felt a Reaper up on the ridgeline. It was probably assigning blame for the failure even now.

New gunfire erupted in the distance to the east as the Moon-daggers and Coonskins attacked. The lines of legworms looked like fighting snakes, spread out on the hillside.

He sent word back to Bloom, asking for permission to attack. She gave it, enthusiastically.

It was good to have Cleo Bloom in charge. She'd recovered some of her old spirit.

"We've busted up their face. Let's kick 'em in the ass," a sergeant called as the orders passed to advance.

Southern Command's soldiers went forward with their yips and barks like foxhounds on a hot scent. Gamecock saw what was happen-ing and sent his Bears forward, flushing the snipers like rabbits.

Mortars fell on the other side of the hill, their flashes dimmer in the growing light.

Valentine saw wild worms running off to the east, and the Bulletproof harrying the Coonskins.

Hard luck for the Coonskins. Their halfhearted cover for the assault had aided in the repulse as much as the Southern Command's grenades and mortar shells.

Valentine looked behind. Bloom had better than half the camp moving up the hill.

They met strong fire on the ridge as the sun appeared, but the Bulletproof turned from their rout of the Coonskins to the east and put a fleshy curtain of gunfire against the Moondagger flank.

Valentine's assault expended the last of their grenades, pitching them over the hilltop.

They captured two big 155mm guns which were being brought forward to complete the camp's destruction, complete with communications gear and a substantial reserve of ammunition.

Southern Command's forces secured the crest line, guns, and few prisoners who didn't blow themselves up with grenades and planted themselves. On that glorious reverse slope where the Coonskins had been camped, picked out for its suitable field of fire, they found the Moondaggers in disarray and falling back.

Valentine watched machine-gun tracer prod their retreat, leaving bodies like heaps of dropped laundry on the slope. Moondagger trucks, crammed with men hanging off the side, pulled off to the south.

If only they'd had real cannon instead of light mortars. The Moondaggers would have been destroyed instead of just bloodied. Valentine did what he could with what he had, sending shells chasing after the retreat, dropping them at choke points in the road.

Moytana's Wolves would give them a nip or two to remind them that they were beaten and running.

It wasn't a catastrophe for the Moondaggers. But it was enough. Valentine felt the odd, light, post-battle aura. He'd survived again, and better, won.

Seng's expeditionary brigade had fought its first real battle and emerged victorious.

They buried their dead, slung their wounded in yolk hammocks hanging off the side of the legworms, and pressed on. This time with lighter step and more aggressive patrols, half-empty bellies or no. It was still a retreat, but a retreat from victory, with honor restored.