Salute the Dark

The enemy were not in his sight yet, but he saw a signal from the advance airborne and, from that, knew that the foe must have been spotted. The enemy had strung wooden fences and barricades across the valley, which would be of no protection against the airborne and merely be ground beneath the wheels and tracks of the automotives. Praeter wondered why they were even bothering to make a stand.

He frowned, holding tighter to the boss of his saddle as his beetle negotiated a rocky patch. There was the matter of the scouts, though. Whoever these enemy were, they had been remarkably good at killing General Malkan’s scouts, and yet this time the scouts had seen this little holdout. They had been allowed to see it.

He had worried away at that thought for a long time, but come up with no solution save to spread out his forces to enclose as wide an area as possible while keeping aerial screens to either side in case of ambush. But who could aim to ambush an entire army?

One of the automotives lurched awkwardly and he assumed it had gone into the streambed, but it was well clear of that: struggling for no reason at all in the dusty ground with its wheels spinning, and then sinking to its axles, throwing up a vast curtain of dust so that Praeter was blinded, covering his eyes against the grit. His ears told him that the stricken automotive was not alone. Another to his left was abruptly in difficulty, too. He brought his crop down on the beetle, driving it towards the labouring machine, and the insect stumbled, the ground giving way beneath it, its claws scrabbling for purchase before it dragged itself out. Pits, everywhere: the valley floor had been undercut. There had been no sign of it until now, and the men on foot had been too light, but all around him now he could hear the wheeled and tracked automotives grinding helplessly, choking on the earth, whilst those that walked on metal legs must be striding too far ahead.

‘Send to the lead automotives, tell them to reduce to half speed!’ he ordered, and immediately one of his men spurred his animal into motion, guiding it between the beached metal hulks. ‘Call some engineers here to free the automotives,’ Praeter added, and another man rode off.

‘General!’ A soldier dropped beside him, choking through the dust. ‘General, the left flank is under attack.’

‘From where?’

‘Enemy concealed in the woodlands ahead, sir.’

‘Then charge them and drive them out.’

‘We’re taking heavy losses, sir.’

‘How?’ Praeter leant down towards the man. ‘How many enemy?’

‘Unknown, sir. But they’re armed with snapbows, sir. We’re closing on them now, but they’re picking off our fliers.’

Praeter opened his mouth to reply to that, but even as he did so something exploded ahead, both to the left and to the right, showering stones and dust down on them.

I need to see what’s going on. ‘With me!’ he shouted, and turned his beast to grapple its way up the hillside, knowing that his bodyguard would follow close. The air was solid dust, and he guessed that the charges detonated ahead had not been intended to injure but to throw up as much cover as the enemy could manage, in order to conceal whatever it was they were actually doing.

Something else then flashed within the dust cloud behind him, thundering dully. The sound was familiar enough to him: he had not worked with engineers all those years to fail to recognize a grenade now. He could even tell from the sound that it was one with a hatched casing, rather than a simple smooth one, so that the metal shards would fly outwards in an even rain of shrapnel.

Before he was clear of the cloud, there were another five retorts behind him. He found it maddening, to be thus blinded to what was going on, not knowing if his entire force was being wiped out or whether this was just a gnat’s sting. There was now a chaos of men flying around him as Wasp soldiers took to the air to escape the dust. He could hear the crackle of sting-shot, and the solid thump of one of the motorized leadshotters that he had brought for artillery support. Then finally he was cresting the hill, the dust falling away behind him.

* * *

‘They’ll be fighting now,’ Parops remarked.