“Hell take ’em,” Maharg muttered from the left flank. “There’s really a shitload of the bastards.”
Golsingh, separated from Hansen in the center of the line by only a score of expectant warriors, said, “Most of them wearing half-suits. Walking corpses, as we know from last night.”
Hansen checked the digital readout in his display. His mouth pursed, not that the numbers were news to him.
“Still,” he said judiciously, “there’s more of them in decent armor than we’ve got all told.”
“Yeah, laddie,” said Malcolm. “But they don’t have a soul, that lot.”
Malcolm was right.
Hansen suddenly realized that he’d spent all his time on Northworld trying to teach fighting men the difference between soldiers and mere warriors. Warriors were the undisciplined rabble that was good for nothing but dying when it met trained troops. That was an important distinction, but—
There was a difference between a soldier and a merchant, too. You can’t simply bean-count your way to victory. Some of the most ruthlessly efficient armies in history had been composed of ex-clerks and shopkeepers . . . but that took training.
Golsingh had Nils Hansen. The Syndics of Frekka had no one but themselves—and no chance.
Still, there surely was a mother-huge lot of the bastards the Syndics had hired.
The wings of the Frekka army began streaming down the gentle slope. A few score of the warriors wore wildly-decorated armor—pirates, brutal and well-accustomed to sudden death, but untrained in the business of attacking enemies who were both prepared and equipped.
The remainder of the flanking units was of half-suited levies, each man staggering under the weight of the plastron and carapace which couldn’t protect him against an arc. They were threats only in the way gadflies threatened cavalry, biting from behind and throwing the lines into a confusion more dangerous than the sips of blood they drank.
The advancing forces kept a cautious distance between themselves and either flank of the royal army. The Frekka main body, containing most of the fully-equipped warriors, held their places under the walls of the city.
Merchant logic.
“They think it’s going to hurt us to walk all the way to them,” Hansen said. “The damned fools. Their men’ll shit their pants watching us come at ’em like Juggernaut.”
“We await your order, Lord Hansen,” Golsingh reminded with the same touch of almost impatience.
“Secure, general commo,” Hansen told his AI. “Right. Everybody remember your training. Your job is to keep step with the other guys in your team and kill whoever the team leader designates. Don’t worry about your rear, there’s people to cover you. Walking pace, don’t get hasty. There’ll be plenty of time.”
Hansen’s mouth was dry. There ought to be something inspiring to say, but he couldn’t think what it was. His knees were shaking, and all he knew was that he wanted to stop talking and go kill something.
“Move out, guys,” he said. “Let’s kill ’em all.”
The royal army bellowed as its hundreds of armored legs crashed forward. If the sound didn’t scare the Syndics, then the poor bastards were stupid as well as ignorant of war.
As his forces advanced, Hansen switched to a 360deg. field and suppressed the map display. He wouldn’t need sharp vision for several minutes, so for the moment the compressed panorama of the whole field was more important.
A party of warriors charged out of the Frekka line, following their instincts instead of orders. When they saw their fellows were standing fast, they paused—a score against oncoming hundreds—and scurried back into line, just as thirty or forty more warriors decided to join their charge. The Syndics’ formation was disintegrating while the royal army was still five minutes from slaughter.
The flanks were Hansen’s real concern. Those hundreds of half-armed troops could sweep around the royal army like light cavalry, like Hannibal’s Numidian horse which plugged the last Roman chance at Cannae. . . .
Hansen’s fear was the Syndics’ hope, and both proved illusory. Men wearing half-suits were slower and clumsier than warriors whose armor carried its weight with power from the Matrix.
The royal advance slipped past the encircling jaws at two steps a second. Half-armed clerks and artisans staggered after them under the burden of their equipment, concentrating on keeping up—