Golsingh rarely sounded impatient. Because the words were so clipped and precise, Hansen couldn't be sure whether he was hearing an exception when the king said over the command frequency, "If they don't come out soon, we're going in. And I'll build a new port over the ashes of Frekka."
"They're coming out," Malcolm reported from the right flank.
The mid-morning sun fell squarely on the gray stone walls of Frekka, half a kilometer from where Hansen had marshaled the royal army. The ground between the two dipped slightly, no more than one meter in twenty—a swale of no military significance but some interest psychologically.
Painted, polished metal winked from seven gateways as the Syndics' army shambled out of Frekka.
Hansen instinctively used his map display instead of looking to either side to check his forces. Pitiful forces, considered as an army of men: 309 warriors and a thousand or so armed freemen and slaves. As a unit of tanks, it would have been very large, though, and his warriors would be a match for tanks in close terrain. . . .
"Hell take 'em," Maharg muttered from the left flank. "There's really a shitload of the bastards."
Golsingh, separated from Hansen in the center of the line by only a score of expectant warriors, said, "Most of them wearing half-suits. Walking corpses, as we know from last night."
Hansen checked the digital readout in his display. His mouth pursed, not that the numbers were news to him.
"Still," he said judiciously, "there's more of them in decent armor than we've got all told."
"Yeah, laddie," said Malcolm. "But they don't have a soul, that lot."
Malcolm was right.
Hansen suddenly realized that he'd spent all his time on Northworld trying to teach fighting men the difference between soldiers and mere warriors. Warriors were the undisciplined rabble that was good for nothing but dying when it met trained troops. That was an important distinction, but—
There was a difference between a soldier and a merchant, too. You can't simply bean-count your way to victory. Some of the most ruthlessly efficient armies in history had been composed of ex-clerks and shopkeepers . . . but that took training.
Golsingh had Nils Hansen. The Syndics of Frekka had no one but themselves—and no chance.
Still, there surely was a mother-huge lot of the bastards the Syndics had hired.
The wings of the Frekka army began streaming down the gentle slope. A few score of the warriors wore wildly-decorated armor—pirates, brutal and well-accustomed to sudden death, but untrained in the business of attacking enemies who were both prepared and equipped.
The remainder of the flanking units was of half-suited levies, each man staggering under the weight of the plastron and carapace which couldn't protect him against an arc. They were threats only in the way gadflies threatened cavalry, biting from behind and throwing the lines into a confusion more dangerous than the sips of blood they drank.
The advancing forces kept a cautious distance between themselves and either flank of the royal army. The Frekka main body, containing most of the fully-equipped warriors, held their places under the walls of the city.
Merchant logic.
"They think it's going to hurt us to walk all the way to them," Hansen said. "The damned fools. Their men'll shit their pants watching us come at 'em like Juggernaut."
"We await your order, Lord Hansen," Golsingh reminded with the same touch of almost impatience.
"Secure, general commo," Hansen told his AI. "Right. Everybody remember your training. Your job is to keep step with the other guys in your team and kill whoever the team leader designates. Don't worry about your rear, there's people to cover you. Walking pace, don't get hasty. There'll be plenty of time."
Hansen's mouth was dry. There ought to be something inspiring to say, but he couldn't think what it was. His knees were shaking, and all he knew was that he wanted to stop talking and go kill something.
"Move out, guys," he said. "Let's kill 'em all."
The royal army bellowed as its hundreds of armored legs crashed forward. If the sound didn't scare the Syndics, then the poor bastards were stupid as well as ignorant of war.
As his forces advanced, Hansen switched to a 360° field and suppressed the map display. He wouldn't need sharp vision for several minutes, so for the moment the compressed panorama of the whole field was more important.
A party of warriors charged out of the Frekka line, following their instincts instead of orders. When they saw their fellows were standing fast, they paused—a score against oncoming hundreds—and scurried back into line, just as thirty or forty more warriors decided to join their charge. The Syndics' formation was disintegrating while the royal army was still five minutes from slaughter.
The flanks were Hansen's real concern. Those hundreds of half-armed troops could sweep around the royal army like light cavalry, like Hannibal's Numidian horse which plugged the last Roman chance at Cannae. . . .
Hansen's fear was the Syndics' hope, and both proved illusory. Men wearing half-suits were slower and clumsier than warriors whose armor carried its weight with power from the Matrix.
The royal advance slipped past the encircling jaws at two steps a second. Half-armed clerks and artisans staggered after them under the burden of their equipment, concentrating on keeping up—
Until they met the sudden arc-lit scything from the royal troops detailed to meet the expected danger. Unit Four on the left, twenty warriors from Malcolm's brutally-trained Thrasey contingent on the right; picked men whose battlesuits could saw a tree—or a bare leg—at thirty meters.
And did.
Better-equipped pirates charged from either flank with the instinctive reaction of men—even the worst of men—to do something when they see their fellows being slaughtered. Some of the pirates wore excellent armor; all of them were experienced killers.
The royal troops butchered them anyway.
One of Maharg's warriors went down in a blaze of sparks when a sea-king with great bronze wings welded onto his helmet struck off his feet. His conqueror died an instant later. Three arcs hacked him simultaneously and continued cutting after the pirate's vivid armor lay in bits on the smoking ground.
That was the only casualty on the left flank. A couple men were down on the right, but so were scores of pirates and nearly a hundred half-armored artisans.
The remainder fled. Golsingh's freemen were sniping at them with crossbows. Hansen could see several clots of slaves, some holding a victim down while others probed his vitals with their knives.
The screams of the dying accompanied the royal army's triumphant rush up the hill toward Frekka.
Hansen switched back to standard display and lit his arc weapon.
Hansen had arrayed the left and central divisions of his army with about two meters between one man and the next to either side. The Frekka warriors covered the same front but at nearly twice the density. Training couldn't change the fact that when the forces closed, many of the royal troops would face the arcs of two or three opponents—and would therefore be killed.
Black wings hovered, though there was nothing in the sky except a shimmer as of heated air.
Directly before Hansen was a figure whose armor was gold like his own, but carved and decorated like a temple frieze; a Syndic rather than a champion. The warriors to either side of the Syndic were veterans wearing battlesuits scarred by the combats they'd won. They braced for the contact, while the man in carved armor hesitated as if to dart back through the gate behind him.
When the lines were twenty meters apart, Hansen ordered, "Left and central divisions, hold in place! Remember your orders! Hold in place. Malcolm, hit 'em!"
The right wing, led by the Thrasey contingent and heavy with the army's better-equipped warriors, formed a dense ball and smashed its way into the Frekka forces. The warriors to their immediate front, trapped between stone and a wall of ripping arcs, could neither fight nor run. A few escaped through the nearest gates. The rest died.
Malcolm turned his unit left and marched it down the twenty-meter corridor between the city and the remainder of the royal army, taking the Frekka line in the flank. The warriors in the rear of Malcolm's division faced around and, merely by threat, scattered the survivors of the Syndics' light forces.
It was like watching a bowling ball roll through chaff.
The execution of Hansen's plan wasn't perfect, though he got a better degree of obedience than he'd expected from warriors he considered half-trained.
Men nerved to kill or die can lock their focus on the target before them, forgetting their training, their orders—their names. Parts of the royal army charged home in a blaze of sparks. Elsewhere, Frekka warriors broke ranks to meet the royal onslaught. In either case, snarling combat drew more troops in from either side.
But the plan worked well enough, because there still was an unshaken royal line at the moment the Syndics realized they no longer had a left flank and their center was beginning to disappear into the same flaming meat-grinder.
The gold-armored Syndic facing Hansen turned and bolted through the gate behind him. All along the line, men wearing richly-decorated battlesuits broke and ran.
"Get 'em!" Hansen bellowed on the general push, but there wouldn't have been any way to hold the warriors of his army longer anyway.
The veterans who'd been guarding the vanished Syndic closed a half-step reflexively. Hansen cut at the first. The warrior's arc caught Hansen's and blocked it, but the overload threw a nimbus of blue haze around the figure and began to blister the paint on his right forearm.
The second bodyguard stepped closer and chopped at Hansen's waist. Hansen was prepared for the stroke and parried it by switching his arc to his left gauntlet.
The first warrior took his release as a gift from providence and lumbered toward the gate. Hansen sheared through the second man's suit at mid-thigh, then caught the first from behind while he was still between the gate towers.
The man's battlesuit was very nearly of royal quality. It lost motive power but held until Hansen swiped his victim to the side with his gauntlet almost in contact with its target.
"Through the walls!" Hansen shouted as he led the nearest of the royal forces through the gate. "Don't spare anybody with a weapon!"
Which wasn't, part of his mind told him with amusement, a very necessary order.
Even this major entryway curved abruptly just inside the gate, and the houses of Frekka leaned over the cobblestoned street. Most of the dwellings had been built at two stories, but they'd been raised by third-floor lofts as expanding business increased the need to house drovers and artisans within the walls.
Thinking of walls. . . .
The Syndics' army had broken, even the right wing which hadn't really been engaged. Frekka warriors massed at the gates the royal army hadn't yet captured. Many of them were trying to climb over the three-meter walls.
Now that their leashes had been slipped, Golsingh's men weren't waiting to go in turn through the gates either.
There were snarls behind Hansen as arcs gnawed the base of the heavy stonework. Quartz popped, mortar blazed as limelight, and fracture lines forced by differential heating shattered the biggest blocks in moments.
Sections of the wall crashed down. Undamaged ashlars from the higher courses bounced crazily, knocking over warriors who weren't quick enough to dodge them.
A roofing tile broke on Hansen's helmet.
He looked up. An old woman wearing a shawl over a dress embroidered with pearls stood on the roof coping. She was lifting a second tile to hurl down at him.
The woman dropped the useless missile and began to scream as the faceless gold helmet turned toward her.
Hansen lowered his gauntlet and smashed through the doorway into the house. The lintel was a 6x6 timber. His helmet struck it squarely. The timber didn't break, but it tore away in a shower of plaster and broken wainscoting.
The stairway was to the left off the front hall. Hansen took the steps one at a time, placing his armored boots directly over the stringers. He still wasn't sure the treads would take the weight of his battlesuit, but they did. . . .
The entrance to the loft was a ladder at the far end of the second-floor hall. The old woman was halfway down it. She saw Hansen coming up the stairs and screamed, trying to scramble back the way she'd come.
Hansen reached the base of the ladder while she was at the top of it. He jerked the heavy frame out of the wall to which it was pegged.
The old woman dangled from the loft opening, bleating like a trapped rabbit. She'd lost her shoes and her thin legs threshed like a drowning swimmer's. She wore black stockings held up by incongruous flowered garters.
Hansen started to laugh. He tossed the ladder aside and caught the woman easily when her arms let go.
"Listen to me," he said, using the amplification of his suit's speakers to overwhelm her terrified cries. "You know where the—the city hall, the headquarters is."
The woman's eyes and mouth clopped shut as the words hammered her. She opened them. "The Palace of Trade?" she asked.
"Right," said Hansen, walking back to the staircase with his prisoner cradled in his left arm. "You're going to guide me there."
He didn't figure he needed to voice a threat. Besides, his heart wouldn't've been in it. This old lady seemed to be the only person in Frekka with any balls.
The street to which Hansen returned was chaos. Royal troops thronged it, some of them coming from the opposite direction in their confusion. A number of the warriors were clumsily draped with loot. Several houses were already burning, sending flakes of dingy white ash down across the street and men.
"Suit," Hansen said to save his AI the trouble of guessing whether it should take the next words as a direction to it. "All elements in line of sight."
Then, "Listen up, you dickheads!"
Every warrior in sight of Hansen stiffened at the radioed command.
"This is your warchief," Hansen continued. "Follow me to the headquarters and we'll take their surrender."
He paused. "And any bastard I see with loot after the next thirty seconds, he spends an hour in the latrine pit when I get things sorted out!"
Hansen looked down at the old woman in his arms. She was actually clinging to him.
"Now, madame," he said as quietly as he could and still be heard over the sounds of battle, "let's go to the Palace of Trade. And the quicker we get there, the safer everybody's going to be."
Hansen's armored worm squirmed toward the center of Frekka, directed by the old woman's pointing arm. He started with about twenty warriors and a handful of slaves and freemen, but their numbers increased at every intersection. There were a number of abandoned battlesuits which unarmored members of Hansen's entourage appropriated.
The civilian populace had mostly hidden. Occasionally someone scampered like a rat back into an alley at the warriors' clashing approach. There was no resistance, though several times a Frekka hireling stumbled into Hansen's group and was cut down as he tried to run.
Hansen's passenger spat in the direction of each smoking corpse. "Cowards!" she snarled. "If they'd been men, they'd've met you in the field!"
"Lord Hansen," Golsingh said on the command push. "I'm in a gate tower as you suggested—" 'ordered' would've been a more accurate description of Hansen's tone when they laid their plans before the battle, but Hansen's temper was always short when it was about to hit the fan "—and I can see warriors boarding ships in the harbor."
"Right," said Hansen. The maze of close-built houses and curving streets had left him without a clue as to his location. Was the Palace of Trade near the harbor? Was—
"Right," he repeated. "Broadcast over a general frequency that no warrior will be harmed if he takes off his suit. And—d'ye have a couple other people with you in the tower?"
"Roger, Lord Hansen."
"Right. If any of the ships put out from the dock, have one of your guys fire a bolt at it."
"We can't possibly harm armored warriors at this distance, Lord Hansen," the king protested. "Even my suit doesn't have that much power."
"Not you!" Hansen snapped. "I don't want you a sitting duck for some slow-learner."
He took a breath. His mouth was dry, while his throat and nasal passages had been scoured by ozone from the omnipresent arc weapons.
"Milord," he said more calmly. It looked like there was a square at the end of the current street. "You can't hurt the armor, but the ships'll burn like tinder . . . and one thing a battlesuit won't do is swim. Trust me."
It was a square. Across it was a stone building of four high stories whose corners were raised further by twenty-meter spires. The leaves of the arched central doorway were ajar. Darting through the gap stood the gold-armored Syndic who'd faced Hansen—briefly—outside the walls.
He disappeared inside. The bronze-clad door leaves closed.
"Come on!" Hansen bellowed as he broke into a run. "Don't kill anybody inside until I do!"
Hansen's arc licked the doors from across the courtyard. The bronze blazed green at the first touch. The wood underneath was a better insulator. It flamed up instantly, but the panels might have held until Hansen struck them with his suit's full mass—had not at least twenty more of his men ripped their arcs into the same point as they charged.
The doorleaves blew open in splinters. Hansen, the old woman still in his arms—too terrified to scream, forgotten in the greater need—was the first of the men through their flaming tatters.
Oil lamps hung in brackets from the high ceiling, but their glow was insignificant compared with the hard blue-white arclights quivering from the gauntlets of the battlesuits.
The man Hansen had chased into the hall was climbing out of his armor. He was a fat old fellow, blinking in wide-eyed terror at the killers who'd burst through the doorway behind him.
"Don't!" he whimpered. "Don't! Don't!" He screwed his eyes closed.
He was dressed silk and cloth-of-gold. So were most of the thirty or forty others, men and women alike, who'd gathered in the building before the enemy arrived. More battlesuits, generally of good quality but covered with rococo decorations, winked in the royal army's weapons. All the suits were open, empty.
The Syndics and their hangers-on had surged for the back door when Hansen's arc blew open the front. They rushed back as abruptly. Hansen raised his weapon, his mouth open in amazement to think that they were about to attack him barehanded when they wouldn't face him with armor.
Another party of warriors burst in through the back door. Maharg's all-crimson suit was in the lead.
"All right!" Maharg thundered. "Who's the boss here?"
"I am, Marshal," Hansen boomed back.
"Oh, sorry sir," his abashed junior said on the command channel. "I didn't know—Malcolm, you made it too?"
Malcolm touched the warchief's shoulder. "I've got my Thraseys ringing the building," he said. "That gives us an organized reserve if we need one—which I doubt."
"Right," said Hansen.
He pointed his index finger at the Syndic quivering in his armor like a clam half-drawn from its shell by a crow.
"You," Hansen said. "Are you the Chief Syndic or whatever?"
The fat man opened his eyes, closed them again, and said, "There's no chief. I'm, I'm Bennet."
Something shook in the air. Hansen thought it must be the shock of buildings falling, but no one else seemed to notice the vibration.
"Do you have authority to surrender the city?" Hansen demanded. "Does anyone here have the authority?"
A man from the group Maharg herded back into the room threw himself at Hansen's feet. He was young but already fat and as bald as Shill the day he died.
"We do, we surrender, Lord Golsingh!" he babbled. "We're a quorum! We surrender! Oh gracious king—"
Hansen had an urge to kick the scut away. He repressed it to a shake of his armored boot—which had the desired effect of making the fellow scuttle back with a squeal.
"The king's not here," Hansen said, raising his voice to be heard over the increasingly loud clatter from all around him, even the stone floor. . . . "As the Warchief of Peace Rock, I accept your surrender on behalf—"
"The king's here!" a man shouted from the doorway. "He's here!"
Hansen turned. Golsingh's splendid blue armor was silhouetted in the arched opening. Underlings, no matter how respected, do not give commands to monarchs.
"Your Excellence—" Hansen said, but the sound of the black pinions enveloping him was too loud even for his own ears.
The old woman in the arms of his battlesuit began to scream and point upward. Hansen's viewpoint hung suspended among the chandeliers and quivering stone vaulting.
He could see the empty interior of his armor—and the crypts beneath the building where a score of servants hid among the stored regalia and wine casks for public banquets. The white heart of the planet blazed up at him—
And was gone in weltering images of ice and beasts and huge red sun, which ended in a view of a light-struck hall infinitely greater than the one from which he'd been plucked a timeless moment before.
Hansen's feet were on a black floor as smooth and flawless as polished diamond. Twenty-odd curtains of light ringed the walls.
"Welcome, Hansen, once Commissioner," said the blur at the further end of the hall. "We have a task for you."