Legacy by Daniel Pierce

Author:Daniel Pierce [Pierce, Daniel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-06-22T06:00:00+00:00

I spent that night sleeping only fitfully, and taking a couple of tours around the town perimeter. I knew there was no way any Osterway forces could have even got close to Watermanse yet, but I also knew these were mostly peaceful people, who’d ever only envisioned themselves having to fend off packs of raiders, not dig in and hold off what could amount to a large, well-equipped and determined army. Still, they were taking it all very seriously. Where I’d expected to find people sleeping at their posts, or at best staring off into the dark, bored and inattentive, I instead found diligent, determined—and, yes, anxious, and even frightened—people manning the positions they’d been given, their full focus on the grim job at hand. I was impressed, and said so when our ad hoc defense council met the next morning at what had become our headquarters, The Drowned Man.

“I think it was the ogres,” Aldebar said. “When those things came stomping over that crestline, it scared people shitless. They thought the real thing was about to come crashing down on ‘em. Think they realized after that that this ain’t a game, or a false alarm.”

Lorna gave me a keen look. “You meant to do that, didn’t you?”

I laughed. “I wish I could say I was that clever, but no. But if that’s the effect it had, then so much the better.”

Lanni was taking a turn watching over the ogres, so it was Gurdon at the meeting today. “If scaring the shit out of you folks was useful, then glad to have been of help,” he said, giving a lopsided grin.

We moved on, talking defenses. “We need them to be flexible, redundant, and in-depth,” I said, arranging cups and mugs and utensils on a table to illustrate what I meant. It wasn’t that I was an expert in this sort of thing, but I’d been around well-defended settlements before, and my tech seemed to give me a better eye for, and understanding of it. I laid out a layered defense for the town, with hardened firing positions arranged to interlock their shooting, so any one of them could be fired on by at least one and preferably two more, in case it was in danger of being overrun. With knives and forks, I suggested locations for ditches and spear-walls, obstacles that would tend to force our attackers into killing zones where our people would be able to bring them under maximum fire. Finally, I suggested locations for the lone mortar, and how to use it—if any attackers took cover against our direct fire, then we could arc mortar rounds over their cover and down on top of them, giving them no respite.

By the time I was done, and the others had had their say, we had three defensive rings planned that incorporated all these ideas. If the outermost fell, we could pull back to the next, and then to the third. That last one was right among the buildings, so

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