“Yeah,” agreed Niger while Vibulenus was still grappling with the unstated part of the equation. “Hot as everybody is after the first time, I betcha four men with picks’d have a block out in a couple minutes easy. Then she’s kitty bar the door.”
“Mustn’t forget there’s gonna be another layer behind the facing blocks,” Clodius cautioned the junior non-com, professionally analytical now that he had begged the initial question of the laser. “Maybe fill, too, but that’ll be rubble, and anyway, we tear a hole big enough and the fuckin’ tower falls in, makes us a better ramp right damn through their wall than anything we’re gonna build from the outside. Baby! Then we gottem.”
To Vibulenus, it was all a variant of the discussion that began. “If that camel-fucker Crassus had had sense enough to march us along the river instead of trying to cut across the fucking desert. . . .” Hindsight was a useless waste of breath, and preplanning that started off with an impossibility was worse. That wasted not only time, the one commodity besides frustration which the legion had in great plenty just now; it wasted thought which might otherwise have been put to useful purposes.
But he still didn’t see. . . .
“Gnaeus,” said the tribune, interrupting Clodius Afer’s description to his admiring junior of the way the legionaries should deploy after they had breached the wall, “how would the lasers keep them from pouring down fire? When they stick their spouts through the embrasures, they’re still under cover behind the stone. Lasers wouldn’t do any more than the archers did. Unless maybe they curve, do you —”
“No, no,” the centurion said, harsher than he would have chosen because his dream was being assaulted from false grounds. Clodius had already convinced himself, at least for this moment with friends, that a deputation from the legion would convince the Commander to break the rules — in a way that would mean his death and the immediate dissolution of his trading guild by investigators of the Federation. “Sir, you see, the stuff burns, right?”
Vibulenus started to lift his jaw in agreement with the rhetorical question, but the centurion was already hastening on to cover his lapse of respect by saying, “And they’ve got, who knows, hundreds of gallons of the stuff up there —” he cocked his eyebrows to the breastwork beside him and the lordly tower beyond “—maybe thousands.
“Now,” his voice sank with the beauty of the thought it was about to express, “what if all that fire-piss was to light up on top the tower instead of when they pour it down on us? How’d you like to see that, Gaius, see all them bastards jumpin’ every whichaway and burnin’ like fuckin’ night games at the Circus?”
“I’d like that a lot,” said Vibulenus slowly. Indeed, he could imagine it even as he spoke: the bolt of sudden light ripping apart the spout, scattering blazing fluid among the defenders and the open vats which they prepared to pour down on the legion. The fire would go where arrows could not — nor the laser beam itself, directly. That was very good thinking.
“But,” Vibulenus went on, “there’s no way we’ll get a laser. The Commander himself doesn’t dare carry one when he’s out of the ship. You know that.”
“Maybe,” said Niger, hopeful even though both his superiors had lapsed into glum silence, “we could get the artillery to do it? You know, shoot a firepot into the battlements?”
As if supporting the suggestion, a pair of ballistas slammed missiles leaving smoke trails toward the fortress. One pot sailed into the hidden courtyard. The other splashed its contents in a great oval of flame onto the wall it had failed to clear. The blaze was lambent anger against the black stone, streaking and then shrinking into a score of orange hotspots that continued to sizzle around unusually large globs of pitch.
“Naw, not accurate enough,” explained the centurion, thumbing in the direction of the fortress as if he or his companions could see it. Their ears and past experience told them as surely as direct sight could have done what had been the result of the ballista shots. “Especially with firepots, since they’re lighter ‘n stone and they wobble when the fluid shifts.”