Chapter Fourteen – Attack
“No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country,” General George S Patton told the US 3rd Army before the invasion of France in 1944. “He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country.”
As he was unwilling to reveal his full strategy Gideon found that he had to “sell” the raiding concept to his musketeers, who were all for advancing to Haven City, capturing the Midi generals – a clique of military commanders who ran the show – and declaring victory.
“One battle doesn’t make a war,” he found himself saying repeatedly. “We go out on the Haven City plain and the Midis can come at us from several different directions. They have discipline and they are warriors. I’m not going to have another Isandlwana.”
It said a lot about how far the Havenites had come in their study of military history that at least someone in each group Gideon addressed knew about the massive defeat the British had been handed by the Zulus, whom they had despised and under- estimated, and countered with examples of other battles.
“We could make it like Blood River,” suggested one musketeer. “Four hundred or so musket firing Boers take on umpteen thousand Zulus by laagering, circling, their wagons and having cannons in the gaps.”
“Didn’t the American settlers circle wagons?” asked another musketeer.
“Lot of people did it centuries before those guys,” said a third. “Goths, Chinese, Czechs, Russians, Bohemians, you name it. Movable forts were a thing in Eastern Europe for a while.”
“Guys! Guys!” said Gideon. “I’m not going to start circling the wagons we liberated from the Midis. One attack would wreck them.” (The carts had been found to be flimsy.) “And no way am I using the electric cars. They are too valuable to our supply lines to get them messed up by Midi spears. Let’s take Terminus and go from there.”
As Gideon spoke this the Red Band commander of the garrison at Terminus, Captain Katharge, was wondering how long he could hold out. A full legion had marched onto the plateau from Terminus confident that they would annihilate the humans around the big concrete fort without windows, as the Midis described The Witches’ structure, and add the survivors to the slave population.
The next news he heard, brought by a trickle of terrified, exhausted, hungry Right People, was of total disaster. The humans had appeared in front of the Midi camp in the morning and fired their sticks together, at intervals, many times. Long tubes had torn great holes in a fighting column. Worst of all half human-half beast creatures, the human half wielding a sword, cut down The Right People without mercy.
Captain Katharge did not scare easily and was much more intelligent than the run of Midi officers, which was why he had been left in command of what amounted to a supply depot. After cross-questioning the survivors, he realised that the new monsters were people on horses. He knew humans rode horses and had himself tentatively suggested that The Right People could learn to ride them for use in battle. This idea had been dismissed scornfully by the Midi commanders as undignified, and inconsistent with the warrior honour of The Right People. Enemies should be faced on foot where a warrior can look them in the eye while slaughtering them.
The fact that his self-satisfied generals might have to take another look at the use of horses was one of the few gleams of comfort for Captain Katharge. For the first stragglers were followed by a whole column of survivors with their bands cut off who marched straight through, heads down, disgraced. Katharge knew many of the Red Bands in that column. They did not look at him.
The captain sent a message to his chiefs in Haven City and took a hard look at the position. Retreating in order to live to fight another day was not consistent with Red Band honour, but he had not previously given any thought to a desperate defence. Terminus itself was a collection of sheds and a camping ground which had been the main attraction of the site for humans, as Katharge understood it. The main road from Haven City – the humans built good roads he had to admit - ran past the North edge of the huts and across a bridge over a stream, called Terminus river, and then through forests before emerging in the uplands of the plateau. Anyone who followed it would eventually end up at the Gorge bridge and the fort without windows which the mysterious creature in black robes – Katharge shuddered when he thought of him – had been so keen to take.
Katharge quickly dismissed the idea of defending the bridge on the Haven City side. The ground was open and flat, his troops would be exposed to the fire of the long tubes of which he had heard fearful tales, and the stream was shallow enough for attackers to simply wade across for some distance on either side of the bridge. Instead the gap in the forest was the natural choke point and, as he appraised it with a general’s eye for terrain, he realised that the ground folded at that point making a small crest. The crest was a minor obstacle to anyone walking along the road, but it meant that troops on one side could be concealed from troops on the other.
Just below the crest on the river side, on what would now be Katharge’s right flank, were three small equipment sheds. The forests on either side were thick, that was a blessing, but the gap was wide – humans would have estimated it at more than a kilometre. That was an impossible width for his tiny force, but a redoubt on the crest in front of the bridge would create an obstacle an attacking force would have to take if they wanted to use the bridge.
Three hundred Right People from the defeated column who still had their tags and were anxious to regain honour, joined his supply depot guard of just one hundred. Another two hundred were sent by the nearest general. Spades and axes were found in the sheds. The humans Katharge had encountered to date had not known how to fight, but they knew how to make good spades and axes. He set his force to work digging, cutting trees and shifting stones to build breast-high walls. These would offer some protection against the smooth stones spat out by the long tubes, or at least so the Captain hoped. If the humans chose to stand off and pound his new fort to pieces, then he would pull his warriors below the crest, out of sight of these new horror weapons, and wait for the assault. It was a reasonable plan – if the humans did what he expected them to do.
The one problem with the position Katharge had chosen, which the captain soon realised, was that his line of retreat was across the bridge and stream they were defending. Given what happened to the column it was possible that his force would have to cross the bridge or wade the stream, in a hurry. Then they would be the open plain with the horse-humans close behind, and no concealing forests for some distance. Not good, and he had no means of destroying the bridge which was made of a material he did not understand (a form of reinforced concrete). It had occurred to the Red Band that the site was much better suited to defending against forces coming the other way, when one of his officers tapped him on the arm and gestured up the valley. He looked up and his blood froze.
At the end of the valley was one of the horse humans the column survivors had spoken of in terrified whispers. The creature had red hair – a ridiculous thing to have – and had a contraption or device up to his eyes. Katharge wasn’t sure what the device did but he got the impression the newcomer was studying the Right People’s new redoubt. His warriors saw this creature at the same time and shouted inventive insults. That may have helped morale but sounded faint and hollow in the clear air and made no impression on the scout who sat there for a while before ambling away. Just as the scout turned to go two Black Band stragglers from the column emerged from the forest only a few metres from the horse-human, before realising it was there and diving straight back into the trees. The horse-human ignored them – an act which chilled Katharge far more than if the creature and drawn its sword and charged after them yelling. The two warriors were not worth the effort of killing.
The Red Band pushed the memory of the horse-human out of his mind but that evening, just before the light started fading, he heard a buzzing which he initially mistook for a horde of the world’s insects and looked around in alarm before one of his officers motioned to look up. Far above them was a human device kept aloft, as far as the Red Band officer could see, by four disks, one at each corner of device. No, they were not discs Katharge decided, but blades whirling so fast that they appeared solid. One warrior tried firing an arrow at the device, only to nearly cause the force’s first casualty when the arrow, after failing to reach its target, fell back into the fort. Ignoring the arrow and the equally ineffectual insults hurled at it the device unhurriedly drifted across the redoubt, apparently examining the position, then buzzed away towards the plateau.
The appearance of the Horse-Human and the device gave the Red Band captain an uneasy feeling that the The Right People had unleashed forces using technology they could not fight – a feeling that persisted through the day and into the night when he finally told his warriors to rest, posting guards. He had barely settled himself into his nook, wrapping himself in his travelling cloak, when one of the guards fetched him.
“You had best not disturb my sleep lightly,” he growled, as he walked out the back of his new redoubt then stopped. The creature in Black Robes was waiting for him.
“You are the commander of this fort?” asked Black Robes, head bowed. Most of the time this creature looked down and even shuffled his feet. But when Katharge said yes, Black Robes looked up and a pair of reptilian black eyes bored into the Captain, piercing his very soul, or so Katharge thought. “I have something for you.”
Another creature very like the two androids which Gideon was allowed to command at the Gorge, moved up besides Black Robes carrying six devices in its arms – long contraptions of wood and metal with knives at one end. Katharge stared at these for a time before he realised what they must be.
“Human fire sticks,” he said, taking one.
“Very good captain,” said Black Robes. “You can see the knife” (he meant the bayonet) “comes off when you twist it, then can be fixed back on.”
“Urgh!” said the captain, which meant approval. He had forgotten, for the moment, that he found Black Robes ‘creepy’. “How does it work?”
“Put this piece of metal” (he pointed to a firing cap in the android’s hands) “onto that bit there.” He pointed to the cone at the rear of the weapon. “Now pull that thing there the humans call a hammer back until it locks.” The captain did as he was asked and then, on command, pulled the trigger. The cap cracked audibly but nothing else happened. “That was just one stage I showed you,” said Robes. “Now you’ll load and fire it.”
The captain fumbled through the loading sequence and this time when he fired, just holding the weapon across his body the weapon cracked and jerked in his hands. The noise brought most of the warriors in his command to the rear of the redoubt, only to stop when the saw Black Robes.
“Now you know how to fire it I suggest you show your warriors how to do so and load the ones I brought.” The android lay twenty muskets at Katharge’s feet and a sack of cartridges.
“Is this a fit weapon for a warrior?” mused Katharge.
“The humans defeated a whole column of yours with this weapon and the long tubes. I am working on the long tubes but I can give you these now. Load them before the humans come and be sure to wait until your opponents are close. A few dead and they will run.
Katharge gazed at the musket in his arms. Now he understood, more or less, how they worked, but surely they took too long to make ready. A Warrior could make many blows with his sword or spear during the time it took to put in the powder and ball and the little cone of metal at the back. Then he reminded himself that the humans would have hundreds of these firing into his new fort.
“It shall be,” he said. When he looked up, Black Robes had gone.
Gideon and his musketeer officers not far away but out of sight of the redoubt looked up sharply when they heard the musket crack. They had been discussing how best to take the newly created redoubt with the fewest casualties.
“That’s one of our muskets,” said Gideon. “Are any of the cavalry out that way?” he asked of Parker.
“All the guys we’ve got here are camped just over there, sir.” He pointed at the forest.
“We’ve got a few scouts forward,” said Captain Toms, “but that sounded right up near the fort. No-one’s that far.”
“Hey guys you want to see this,” said the musketeer in charge of the drone unit. He was sitting at a folding card table on which a screen and keyboard had been set. On Gideon’s orders the drone had returned to the fort but at a high enough altitude at night for the defenders not to realise that it was there. That also meant that not much could be seen with ordinary optical sights but, to Gideon’s amazement, the drone had infrared senses which could be focused, and there were musketeers who could work the computer commands with ease. His force had to fight with muskets but could use infrared optics to spy on its enemies.
Musketeer Peterson, at the controls, replayed the moment for them. “There a flash at the rear of the fort-thing, they’ve got. Let’s go back to that bang and focus on the area.” He brought up images of two person’s facing one another, outlined in infrared. One was holding something. “The guy on the left is a Red Band commander and he’s holding a musket. You can see the heat from the barrel. Dunno about the other guy.”
Gideon lent forward to peer at the screen. “Black Robes,” he said. “The rival of our employers.”
“Dressed like The Witches?” said Peterson.
“Dressed like The Witches, sir,” Gideon corrected.
“Dressed like The Witches, sir?”
“Yes, but in black not red. The figure behind him is an android like Sam.”
“This Black Robes guy has given the Midi commander a musket, sir?” said Toms.
“Seems that way.”
They watched as the android brought forward a stack of what looked like muskets, from the infrared outline, then a bag.
“We haven’t lost that many muskets, sir” said Toms.
“No,” agreed Gideon. “All the more reason to capture the fort. We want to take a closer look at those weapons to work out what’s happening, and before they can get comfortable firing them.”
“Yes sir,” his officers chorused.
“We’ve only got A company and the cavalry. We’re out numbered. So we’ll have to hit ‘em just before dawn as we agreed. Cavalry start firing at them from in front to get their attention, A company to hit from their right flank. We use the fold in the grounds and those sheds as cover until we’ve got as many musketeers up close as possible. Then throw grenades and charge with loaded muskets, bayonets fixed. When A company goes in the cavalry gets on their horses and charges. When you attack you do it hard and fast with lots of yelling. Remember you’re ferocious humans who eat Midis for breakfast, drink their blood and howl for more. What do we yell?”
“Kill! Kill!” they shouted, then put back their heads and howled.
Katharge thought that he heard something. One of his warriors struggling to load the new-fangled musket froze. He was one of the survivors of the fight at the gorge who had joined the redoubt’s garrison to regain his honour.
“I thought I heard humans, captain,” said this warrior.
“Human yelling,” one of the sentries reported, “off to the East, my captain.”
Katharge had a sinking feeling that when daylight came his warrior honour would be tested. He would make sure the sentries were vigilant tonight.
The musketeers did not light fires that night as Gideon did not want the Midis to know how close they were, which meant they were stiff and cold when they assembled to move out, munching on some of The Witches’ bread by way of breakfast. A Company was listening to its orders for the last time when Gideon, who had opted to go in with main assault, thought he saw a familiar figure in the back ranks. He dashed through the crowd of musketeers to stand behind this figure.
“You,” he said.
The musketeer turned around. It was Turnbull whom Gideon had thrown out of the force for being unable to stop listening to his device on duty. His hair had since been cut short, and he had a scarf wrapped around his face.
“Hey colonel,” said Turns, grinning.
“I thought I’d gotten rid of you.”
“Well yeah, man, I still reckoned I could help out.”
Captain Toms arrived, looking apprehensive.
“You knew of this?” Gideon asked of Toms.
“He snuck back and swore he wouldn’t listen to stuff, and I, um, let him back in.”
“In defiance of me?”
“Well, he just swore he wouldn’t listen to stuff.”
“How long has this been going on?”
“I was at the bridge, man,” said Turns.
“You call me colonel or sir.”
“Colonel.”
“Where were you at the bridge?”
“At the end, sir. Whole line between me and you. My hair was cut and I had a scarf wrapped my face.”
“Umph!” Gideon was silent for a moment, wondering what he should do.
“Listen sir..” said Toms.
“Shut up!” snapped Gideon. He was silent for a few more moments, while Musketeer Turnbull did his best to stand at attention and stare straight ahead. “Has he kept to his word so far?” The colonel said eventually.
“Yes sir. No listening devices.”
“If I find earphones anywhere near your ears while on duty,” he said to Turns, “I’ll.. I’ll.. well you won’t want to hear what I’ll do but you’ll need a proctologist to undo it.”
“Yes sir,” said Turns, trying to keep a straight face.
“Now get out of my sight.” Turns vanished.
“You and I will speak of this later,” Gideon said to Toms.
“Yes sir,” said Toms, subdued.
A Company loaded their muskets, fixed bayonets, wrapping their ground sheets around the blade to mask the tell-tale gleam, put dirt on their faces and crept through the forest to the Midi right, or the human left, of the redoubt, until they were as close as they dared while still being under cover of the forest. Fortunately, the planet’s main moon was waning and hidden by clouds.
The humans waited in the deep shadow of the forest until they heard the cavalry make a noisy approach. The first gleam of dawn could be seen in the East away over the Haven City plain. The redoubt suddenly came alive. Midis yelled. Muskets cracked. Muskets on both sides, Gideon noted. He was just behind the lead platoon as it crept up to the equipment sheds. None of the humans knew why the sheds had been placed where they were, or what they were supposed to contain (they didn’t have anything in them at the time of the attack). All they did know was that they handily shielded their advance from the eyes of sentries on the redoubt until they were half way across the gap between the forest and the redoubt.
The redoubt itself was simply a rough and ready fort built of whatever the Midis had been able to find including stones and logs, square on the fold of ground so that the side facing the plateau was breast high for Midis but the back end was about human height. However, the entrance at the back, facing the bridge, had no gates. The Midi garrison had not had the time or the means to devise gate posts and gates on the battlefield. Instead the garrison had piled some rubble at the gap as night fell but otherwise left it as their way out if the humans insisted on coming in the front. Two platoons of A company, plus Gideon who had equipped himself with a musket for this action, would aim for that gap while the third platoon threw grenades for all they were worth at one side, then climb the redoubt wall.
They paused briefly in the shadow of the sheds. Gideon was aware of the wind over the grass of the Haven City plain – a cold wind which promised winter. He shivered. Around him he saw the other musketeers shift uneasily; because they were nervous or cold or both. They were going over the top; ‘hopping the bags’ as they said in the first world war, and that was never good for the nerves.
A Midi screamed. More muskets fired. Gideon could see heads above the redoubt rampart – Midis with spears, looking towards the cavalry. Others loaded and fired muskets, without taking the time to aim. The cavalry troopers were not as skilled with the muskets as infantry, but soon they had an almost continuous crackle of musket shots, a few of which struck home. Captain Toms waited for a few minutes, for the Midis to become absorbed by the drama to their front.
“Now,” whispered Toms. “All up, musketeers. Let’s go. Keep silent until we’re noticed. No one in front of me.” The orders were repeated by sergeants and officers down the line.
They moved out from behind the sheds bent over but moving quickly, shuffling. Ten metres, then twenty, then thirty. They could see the detail of the walls of the Redoubt in the suddenly faint light. One Midi caught a moment out of the corner of his eye, turned his head and started yelling. “Carn! Carn! Hudem! Huden!” All the heads of the midis they could see turned towards them.
“Now!” screamed Toms. “Humans up! Howl!” screamed Toms. He threw aside the ground sheet that had masked his bayonet. As one A company followed suit, wolf howling. Three platoon had fire starters previously used to light the occasional sustainable bonfire permitted at the summer camp, and now being used to light grenades thrown in a continuous stream.
“Whump! Whump! Whump!”
The other two platoons raced for the back entrance. Gideon saw one grenade, trailing a line of sparks from its fuse, soar clear over the fort to land opposite the entrance. “Whump!” A handful of Midis had appeared at the top of the mound blocking the entrance. Two staggered and fell as the grenade exploded. The rest vanished when the lead humans fired muskets and climbed the mound.
“Lieutenant Stevenson!” yelled Gideon. This was the officer commanding three platoon.
“Sir,” she screamed back.
“We’re in. No more grenades.”
Two more, thrown before the order was given landed to Gideon’s right as he climbed the mound, felling more Midis. Gideon felt something flick by his ear - one of the grenade bullets. Then the humans got down to the grim business of killing at close quarter, with bayonets. One Midi desperately trying to reload an unfamiliar musket, took a bayonet in the chest – here and there a human musket cracked. Gideon saw a Red Band near the front wall yell something to the warriors. He pointed at the humans and yelled again. Very likely he was the fort commander saying how few they were. Then the cavalry appeared on their horses above the parapet howling. A few who had loaded muskets fired at the defenders on the front wall at point blank range. The others clambered onto the parapets direct from their horses slashing at Midis with their swords. Three platoon appeared at the top of the wall on their side yelling “Kill! Kill!”
Gideon’s musket was still loaded, he realised. He turned, aimed at the Midi commander and fired, his bullet catching Captain Katharge in the upper chest, just below the throat. The commander stood for a moment, sword in hand, eyes widened in surprise, then toppled forward. The remaining heart went out of the defenders. Those who could jumped over the far wall, honour be damned, and ran for the bridge. The rest dropped their weapons, which included their newly acquired muskets, and went to their knees.
Later, the musketeers collected all the muskets they could find in the fort and piled them in front of Gideon. The Musketeer Corps had only thought to have serial numbers stamped on The Witches’ composite metal in the more recent production batches of their weapons. They had then assigned numbers to each of the earlier muskets, scratching the number on the stock for want of any better way to ensure it remained on the weapon. The captured muskets all had a number scratched into the stock – the same number in exactly the same place. The muskets were identical copies of the weapon carried by the musketeer who had gone too far forward in the initial charge at the battle of the bridge.
“Weird planet, sir,” was all Captain Toms said at the time.