They had done so; this camp was proof of the fact. But as soon as Hansen appeared, they all stood around with their fingers up their collective ass.
Hansen sat cautiously on a camp chair while slaves bustled with a meal of cold boiled chicken and vegetables.
There was no delaying the real question, because all the royal forces were mustered now. All the help Golsingh was going to get was camped around him at this moment.
“What sort of numbers are we looking at?” Hansen asked.
The king licked his lips. “Many,” he said. “I think—perhaps a thousand.”
“Shit,” said Hansen quietly.
He held a chicken drumstick while he hacked at the thigh joint with his belt knife. The knife didn’t hold an edge worth a damn. “Where’d they all come from?”
“There’s ships in the harbor,” said Maharg. “Pirates.”
“They’ve allied with three or four sea-kings,” Malcolm agreed. “The Syndics have equipped the pirates with better armor in exchange for helping defend Frekka.”
“Then they’re bughouse crazy,” Hansen said as he took a mouthful of meat. “People with money always think they can buy people with—” he started to say `guns’ “—weapons. What they buy is masters, if they’re not damn careful to pick folks with honor.”
None of the other three were touching the food. Either they’d already eaten or something had spoiled their appetite.
The enemy numbers had sure-god spoiled Hansen’s appetite, though he couldn’t let it show. With luck, the royal forces amounted to two and a half, maybe three, hundred warriors.
“They have a number of, I suppose, sailors and craftsmen wearing partial armor,” Golsingh said. “The suits cover only the torso and one arm, so they don’t really provide any protection; but they still have arc weapons, and they can be turned out much faster than complete suits of even poor quality.”
Hansen shrugged. “We didn’t expect it’d be easy,” he said. “They’re crazy to arm the pirates who’ve been bleedin’ them, and the poor working scuts they’ve been bleeding, or I miss my bet.”
He tossed the chicken bones toward the tent flap. “Anyhow,” he added, “crazy or not, they’re going to lose.”
Hansen said the words because he thought it would cheer up his friends. He found, to his surprise, that he meant them.
“Sir?” called a messenger from beyond the flap of the tent in which Hansen slept alone. “Marshal Malcolm says there’s troops coming from the city.”
Hansen rolled to his feet, dropping the pry-bar back on his cot. “Got it,” he mumbled as he climbed into the golden battlesuit. His muscles ached, his mouth felt like a wiping rag, and his sinuses were packed with yellow dust and mucus.
And all of that started to clear again with the familiar surge of adrenalin through his body. There’d be plenty of time to hurt later, if he survived.
Hansen’s armor latched over him; the world sharpened. He’d set the brightness default to display 100% of normal daylight. The night’s waxing moon provided enough light to kill by, but the amplified images were better by several orders of magnitude.
He wondered if the Syndics of Frekka had realized the full potential of their battlesuits. There hadn’t been any sign of that in previous clashes with Frekka’s hirelings.
The merchants were willing to ignore the traditional disdain for fighting at night, but that didn’t require so much intelligence as it did a willingness to change the rules when the rules didn’t suit them.
The Syndics didn’t operate under the morality of shopkeepers, who know their customers and know they have to do business with them tomorrow as well. The leaders of Frekka had graduated to an attitude that’d always been common among the higher reaches of business and finance, when merchants saw a path to heaven through monopoly.
But Golsingh was in the way of that apotheosis; Golsingh, and Golsingh’s new warchief. . . .
“Upper quadrant, map display,” Hansen ordered his artificial intelligence. “All powered suits.”
At the scale of the map, the attackers were a worm of red dots creeping from the blur of the city. The royal camp was a blue sea which brightened as additional warriors scrambled into their armor.