The air stank of ozone and burned flesh. The snow softened the outlines of the bodies, but it couldn’t hide the smells of death.
Golsingh’s collapsing line stiffened. Several of the more formidable surviving warriors on the left wing fell in with Hansen and his crew. They were turning the Thrasey flank.
Tooley screamed an amplified challenge as he lunged toward Hansen. His arc was a dense blue-white, even though it was extended more than a meter.
Malcolm must be dead.
“Strike!” Hansen shouted with his arc hovering just above his right gauntlet. He stepped close, the opposite of what he wanted to do and—with luck—not what Tooley expected.
Shill and Maharg had jumped back from Tooley’s furious rush. Hansen was alone.
Hansen knew he couldn’t block Tooley’s weapon, even with his own flux as dense as his suit could produce. He caught Tooley’s downward slash and held it momentarily while his body twisted out of the way.
Their armor clanged together. Tooley’s arc carved into the sod explosively, covering both men in a veil of steam. Hansen’s right arm was numb. His chest shuddered as he tried desperately to hold his opponent’s weapon aside.
Something crackled past at the lower edge of Hansen’s vision—an arc, Maharg stepping in to cut at Tooley’s hip joint. Red and white paint blistered in the dancing arc, but the electronic armor held—
Until Shill squeezed between Hansen and Maharg. The old man thrust home at the core of the younger warrior’s attack, and Tooley’s battlesuit failed with a crack! that blew a doughnut of soot and steam across the field.
Tooley fell backward. Hansen started to topple onto the corpse. Shill braced him for a moment until Maharg could grab Hansen’s shoulders and lift him upright.
Hansen tried to raise his right arm. He watched with amazement as the limb obeyed, but he still had no sensation from the shoulder on down. His chest felt cold and he was shuddering.
The battle paused. The warriors who’d followed Tooley, and those men of Golsingh’s whose opponents had fallen in the flank attack, waited uncertainly. Hansen was trying to get his breath.
Malcolm got to his feet behind the Thrasey warriors. His helmet and plastron had been seared black by Tooley’s arc. It was only by the red-blue-silver bands on his arms and legs that he could be identified. He hacked down the nearest man from behind.
“General freq!” Hansen gasped to his AI. “Come on, you bastards! Golsingh and Peace!”
He wasn’t sure that was the best battlecry for this place, but peace was the brightest hope Hansen himself could imagine just now.
And he knew there’d be no peace on this field until every one of the Thrasey warriors was down.
“Strike!” with his display centered on a Thrasey warrior whose arc quivered first toward Hansen’s unit, then toward Malcolm.
Hansen slashed; Shill and Maharg cut, together and within a fraction of a second of their leader’s stroke. The warrior’s helmet burned as Malcolm chopped down the man beside him.
“Come on!”
The whole Thrasey flank collapsed. Warriors turned and ran as Golsingh’s troops swept toward them from the front and side simultaneously.
“No-‘count merchant kissers!” Malcolm bawled as he strode down the line he was crumpling. “Frekka-paid cowards!”
They didn’t look like cowards a minute ago, Hansen thought as he tried to keep up with the veteran.
But the prejudice against merchants’ hirelings must be as great among those hirelings as it was among warriors who hadn’t decided to accept Frekka’s offers. So long as they were led by a champion of Tooley’s stature, they stood and fought; with their leader down, there was no sign of the willingness Count Lopez’ men had shown to fight on after the battle was clearly lost.
Despite the success of Hansen’s flanking movement, the battle wasn’t clearly lost for the Thrasey forces.
The central division around a figure in blue and silver armor (“The Lord of Thrasey,” answered a feminine voice when Hansen asked his AI for an identification) had surged into the gap between Golsingh and the headlong advance of Taddeusz’ unit. The king had avoided being surrounded only by falling back, and the Lord of Thrasey was pushing him hard.