Until they met the sudden arc-lit scything from the royal troops detailed to meet the expected danger. Unit Four on the left, twenty warriors from Malcolm’s brutally-trained Thrasey contingent on the right; picked men whose battlesuits could saw a tree—or a bare leg—at thirty meters.
And did.
Better-equipped pirates charged from either flank with the instinctive reaction of men—even the worst of men—to do something when they see their fellows being slaughtered. Some of the pirates wore excellent armor; all of them were experienced killers.
The royal troops butchered them anyway.
One of Maharg’s warriors went down in a blaze of sparks when a sea-king with great bronze wings welded onto his helmet struck off his feet. His conqueror died an instant later. Three arcs hacked him simultaneously and continued cutting after the pirate’s vivid armor lay in bits on the smoking ground.
That was the only casualty on the left flank. A couple men were down on the right, but so were scores of pirates and nearly a hundred half-armored artisans.
The remainder fled. Golsingh’s freemen were sniping at them with crossbows. Hansen could see several clots of slaves, some holding a victim down while others probed his vitals with their knives.
The screams of the dying accompanied the royal army’s triumphant rush up the hill toward Frekka.
Hansen switched back to standard display and lit his arc weapon.
Hansen had arrayed the left and central divisions of his army with about two meters between one man and the next to either side. The Frekka warriors covered the same front but at nearly twice the density. Training couldn’t change the fact that when the forces closed, many of the royal troops would face the arcs of two or three opponents—and would therefore be killed.
Black wings hovered, though there was nothing in the sky except a shimmer as of heated air.
Directly before Hansen was a figure whose armor was gold like his own, but carved and decorated like a temple frieze; a Syndic rather than a champion. The warriors to either side of the Syndic were veterans wearing battlesuits scarred by the combats they’d won. They braced for the contact, while the man in carved armor hesitated as if to dart back through the gate behind him.
When the lines were twenty meters apart, Hansen ordered, “Left and central divisions, hold in place! Remember your orders! Hold in place. Malcolm, hit ’em!”
The right wing, led by the Thrasey contingent and heavy with the army’s better-equipped warriors, formed a dense ball and smashed its way into the Frekka forces. The warriors to their immediate front, trapped between stone and a wall of ripping arcs, could neither fight nor run. A few escaped through the nearest gates. The rest died.
Malcolm turned his unit left and marched it down the twenty-meter corridor between the city and the remainder of the royal army, taking the Frekka line in the flank. The warriors in the rear of Malcolm’s division faced around and, merely by threat, scattered the survivors of the Syndics’ light forces.
It was like watching a bowling ball roll through chaff.
The execution of Hansen’s plan wasn’t perfect, though he got a better degree of obedience than he’d expected from warriors he considered half-trained.
Men nerved to kill or die can lock their focus on the target before them, forgetting their training, their orders—their names. Parts of the royal army charged home in a blaze of sparks. Elsewhere, Frekka warriors broke ranks to meet the royal onslaught. In either case, snarling combat drew more troops in from either side.
But the plan worked well enough, because there still was an unshaken royal line at the moment the Syndics realized they no longer had a left flank and their center was beginning to disappear into the same flaming meat-grinder.
The gold-armored Syndic facing Hansen turned and bolted through the gate behind him. All along the line, men wearing richly-decorated battlesuits broke and ran.
“Get ’em!” Hansen bellowed on the general push, but there wouldn’t have been any way to hold the warriors of his army longer anyway.
The veterans who’d been guarding the vanished Syndic closed a half-step reflexively. Hansen cut at the first. The warrior’s arc caught Hansen’s and blocked it, but the overload threw a nimbus of blue haze around the figure and began to blister the paint on his right forearm.