The Thousand Names: Book One of the Shadow Campaigns by Wexler Django

Author:Wexler, Django [Wexler, Django]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2013-07-02T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fifteen

MARCUS

At dawn, the Auxiliaries began a cautious advance, a company in loose order probing the rubble and barricades to their front.

Marcus, determined to buy every minute he could, had sent Adrecht and his Fourth Battalion to man the line while the rest of the Colonials pulled back around the hilltop temple. These soldiers almost immediately began a harassing fire, driving back the initial tentative push. The Auxiliaries formed up, solid blocks of brown and tan parade-ground even, and charged into the tangle of detritus with a yell.

The men of the Fourth did not stand to receive them. They were too few, and in any case their orders were to fall back. Each man fired and then ran for it, finding another covered position farther up the hill to reload. Shots rang out from the spreading Khandarai line, trying to find their attackers, but the men in blue were as elusive as mosquitoes. Marcus watched with satisfaction from his hilltop vantage as the Auxiliary advance fell apart, neat lines breaking down in their zeal to come to grips with a retreating enemy amidst the wreckage.

It would have been an ideal time for a counterattack, as he’d done so many times yesterday, but circumstances had changed. There were two more Khandarai battalions waiting, well formed and ready, down by the bank of the canal. Worse, there were guns—all four of the Gesthemels and two of the monster naval guns, no doubt loaded with canister in anticipation of just such a move. So the Colonials held their ground, Adrecht’s men continuing to deliver harassing fire while the flustered Auxiliary officers reorganized their scattered ranks to continue the advance.

That bought a couple of hours, all told, and left the approach to the hill scattered with brown-and-tan-uniformed bodies. But the ultimate outcome was not in doubt. The Fourth was gradually pushed back through the town and toward the hilltop, until the advancing Auxiliaries finally ran into something solid. The Colonials had constructed a line of barricades, bricks and timber from destroyed houses, with the bulk of the stone-walled temple looming behind them. As soon as the enemy approached, this position exploded into fire, and the startled Auxiliaries reeled back out of range.

A few minutes later, Marcus watched the other two Khandarai battalions start moving up. As Adrecht had predicted, they were veering left and right, respectively, pushing past the now-empty streets of the destroyed village and out onto the plain, where they could get on the flanks and rear of the force on the hill. They would converge, like the pincers of a scorpion, and from the time they came into range of the fortifications the Colonials would be committed. No way out, except for surrender. And everyone knew what the Redeemers did to prisoners.

• • •

The two big naval guns each had a cloud of attendants who clustered and fussed around them like priests around an altar. In spite of all the attention, the first shot went wide, whistling past the temple and continuing for quite a long way out across the squelching-wet fields.

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