Smoke from imperial cookfires formed a haze where land met the sky. Hansen began counting the bell tents which stood in a straggling circuit of the hilltop. Each was pennoned according to the rank of the quartet of warriors to which it was assigned.
The freemen and slaves serving Venkatna's troops were now seeing to their own shelter: ground sheets, tarpaulins laid across bushes on the gentle sideslopes, or nothing at all. The day had been clear. Though the temperature tonight would probably drop to freezing, the air was dry. A blanket roll was sufficient for men hardened to campaign.
Some of them wouldn't be around long enough to worry about the pre-dawn chill.
The imperial servants weren't a problem, not even the freemen who scouted for the armored warriors when the battleline advanced; but there were going to be some of them who got in the way. Salles' rebels—Hansen's rebels now, in all but name—didn't have time to pick and choose. When they went in, anything imperial that moved would be a target. . . .
A single armored warrior stood at the edge of the imperial camp. He was probably bored, but that would change quickly enough when his battlesuit display indicated the presence of thirty-two rebel warriors.
At the moment, the sentinel saw nothing except a birch-shaded covert a hundred meters east of the campsite. The battlesuits of Salles and his men stood empty behind the ambush line. Until the rebels closed the frontal plates over themselves, the suits remained unpowered. Cold, the armor provided no emanations for Venkatna's sensors to receive and report.
Soon dusk would cloak the lower slopes of the hill. Warriors using the image intensifiers of their battlesuits would not be affected.
The imperial troops, relaxing over their meals, wouldn't be sure what was happening until the line of armored rebels burst into the camp with their arc weapons lighting the way.
Very soon. . . .
Lord Salles stood beside Hansen on the right flank. A courier, panting from having run the length of the rebel line, gasped a message to him. When the courier finished speaking, he darted his head back as though he feared a blow.
The man probably did. Nobles were not permitted by law and custom to kill out of hand freemen like the courier . . . but a courier who brought a haughty message from one warrior to another couldn't assume mere law would be sufficient protection.
Salles laughed harshly. The Lord of Peace Rock had been moving ever since his rebels reached their ambush site; but he was restive, not nervous, like a thoroughbred which curvettes at the starting line.
"Tell your master," Salles said, "that he will await our signal—as he agreed under oath. Tell him!"
"It won't be long," Hansen added in a mild tone. He wondered if he sounded nervous. His mouth was dry and he wanted to piss, but at the moment he didn't like the thought of having his dick bare and unprotected. . . .
The courier nodded gloomily and started back toward Lord Richtig. His boots popped and rustled through the litter. The noise wasn't audible for any distance—certainly not the fifty meters to the nearest imperial servants—but it was unnecessary. . . .
"I'm worried about Richtig," Salles muttered to Hansen. "He's likely to suit up and attack on his own."
Servants behind the ambush line edged closer. They turned their faces away, so that they could hear the leaders without being obvious about it. It wasn't just warriors who were in this, particularly if the attack failed.
"That's all right," Hansen said. "He won't."
He looked at the sky through the tracery of bare branches. Still pale blue. After another few minutes, though. . . .
"You don't know Richtig!" Salles snapped.
"I know his type," Hansen said calmly. Didn't he just! "That's why I put Kri-Kriton beside him."
Bells chimed from the imperial baggage mammoths which grazed on the lush meadow west of the camp. The location of the grass had determined where Hansen's force could lie in wait. The beasts would not have been fooled by a screen of trees and the lack of electronic warning; but all they cared for now was to fill their vast rumbling bellies.
"Eh?" said Salles.
"If Richtig tries to get an early start," Hansen explained, "Kriton'll stick a knife into the seam of his battlesuit so that it won't close and show up on our friend's—" he nodded toward the imperial sentinel "—sensors."
Hansen smiled in bleak humor. "If sh—Kriton's in a good mood, he won't put the point a centimeter into Richtig's side t' remind him about orders."
Lord Salles blanked his face as he considered the statement. "You know Kriton well, then?" he asked in a neutral tone.
"You bet," Hansen said.
Black hair so short that it scarcely brushes his cheek when she bends over him on the couch. Her dark nipples on his chest, the taut muscles over her ribs and under the swell of her buttocks as he pulls her down to engulf him. . . .
The slope to the imperial camp was a rich purple-blue.
"Mount up," Hansen, ordered as he turned to his own battlesuit. "But nobody close their suits till the gong sounds."
There was a freeman standing behind each warrior with orders to jam a stick into the seam of any suit whose owner tried to close up early. Venkatna's forces would certainly torture to death everyone they captured if the surprise assault failed. It was just possible that some of the freemen would obey Hansen's orders, though they knew how angry any warrior so treated would be.
The motion of warriors getting into their battlesuits shifted down the line like a wave. The act itself was a visual signal to the next man over, though trees hid each rebel from all but a few of his fellows in either direction. A gong signal would warn the imperial forces early, and each battlesuit's frequency-hopping radio was shut down with the rest of its electronics until the plastron latched into the backplate.
The suede lining of Hansen's armor felt cold, but its pressure encircling his legs and arms was a relief. The plastron, including the front portion of the helmet, remained open. He laced his gauntleted hands over it, ready to slam the piece closed and bring up the suit's systems as soon as the whole force was ready.
He waited.
His hand fumbling with Krita's sash for the first time, so clumsy that she chuckles and slips the tie herself. . . .
"Lord Kriton says they're ready on our end, sir!" gasped a puffing runner.
"Sound the gong," said Hansen as he slammed shut his frontal plate. He'd forgotten that the Lord of Peace Rock was in titular command, but the waiting slave forgot also and hammered the fat bronze tube.
"Suit!" Hansen shouted to switch on his armor's artificial intelligence as he pounded uphill. "Full daylight equivalent—" the display became a clear window before his eyes as the AI enhanced the scene to what it would have been at noon "—and carat friendlies white in all displays!"
"Hansen the War God!" Kriton shouted as a battlecry as she burst from the woods on the opposite end of the line.
Little minx.
A battlesuit weighed in the order of a hundred kilos. Servo motors in the joints amplified the wearer's movements, but the speed and strength of the response depended on the suit's quality. Running in a suit as poor as that of Bosey or those of several other rebel warriors was only marginally less punishing than jogging with an anvil.
The diverse rebel force couldn't possibly hit the imperial camp as a unit unless all the troops governed the speed of their charge to that of the men with the poorest equipment—
In which case the enemy would have most of his triply superior numbers armed and ready to meet them. Hansen had arrayed the rebels with the best battlesuits on the flanks—he and Salles on the right, Krita and Lord Richtig on the left. The rest were spaced inward in declining order of their armor's quality. That way the attack would, with luck, display a smoothly concave front to Venkatna's startled men.
"Alarm!" the imperial sentinel cried. "We're attacked! Alarm!"
He was using his radio, not the loudspeaker in his helmet. None of his unsuited fellows could hear him.
An imperial freeman tried to run from Hansen's approach. The man slipped and curled into a screaming ball. Hansen would have spared him, but a slave behind the line of rebel warriors smashed the fellow's skull with the mallet which had just rung the gong.
A slave with a club was a better man than a warrior caught halfway into his armor. This was no time to be choosy about technique.
Hansen sucked air in through his open mouth, but his lungs hadn't begun to burn yet. Ten meters before he reached the imperial camp, he glanced to his left. Salles was a pace behind him, handicapped by having lighted his arc weapon. The discharge drained some power that would otherwise have fed his servos.
Krita's black battlesuit was parallel to Hansen's and a hundred meters away, while Richtig was several strides behind her.
The rest of the force . . . was coming at its best speed, with only a few drop-outs, for a wonder. Even Bosey, though he had sprawled and was just picking himself up again. Hansen's artificial intelligence—and that of all the other rebels, if the order had passed as it should on the suit-to-suit data link—inserted a white plume above the helmet of every friendly figure glimpsed on the display.
It was time.
"Cut!" Hansen shouted with his right thumb and forefinger spread wide. His AI obeyed by switching on his weapon for a long looping cut.
Three tents ignited at the arc's touch. The wool burned orange with sparklings from the strands of metal woven into the pennons.
"Hansen the War God!" shouted a rebel other than Krita.
There were half a dozen men in the tents, relaxing warriors or those serving them. They had only enough time to leap to their feet. Hansen's blue-white are slashed across their unarmored bodies. Flesh exploded into steam and droplets of blazing fat.
Hansen strode into the inferno, clearing his path with quick blind slashes of his arc. The stench of burning wool was overpowering despite his battlesuit's filters. A long bandage of tent-flap swaddled Hansen's helmet when he stepped into what should have been the clear area in the camp's center. He flailed his arms to rid himself of the encumbrance.
The sentinel was the only imperial warrior wearing a battlesuit. The man rushed Hansen with a cry of fury.
Lord Salles stepped through the gap between two tents. He flicked the sentinel with an arc extended to three meters. Salles' weapon was too attenuated to cut, but it licked like a serpent's tongue over the defensive screens of the imperial battlesuit—draining so much power from the servos that the sentinel froze in mid-step.
Hansen thrust through the sentinel's plastron. The victim fell onto his back. There was a black hole in his chest and a rim of molten metal bubbling around the edges of the cut.
"Hansen the War God!" Hansen screamed, why not, as he charged a group of imperial warriors desperately trying to get into their battlesuits.
It was going to work. They'd caught Venkatna's men completely unaware. There'd be casualties, sure, at the end when they had to deal with the few imperials who managed to arm themselves, but all the rebels were engaged and half the camp was already aflame.
He felt it change.
The Matrix shrugged; that was the only word Hansen could think of to describe the sensation. He wasn't affected himself—his arc ripped a pair of empty battlesuits and the screaming imperial warrior who changed his mind too late about getting into one—
But the other rebels switched off their weapons and began opening their battlesuits.
"Don't!" Hansen cried incredulously. The probability generator, the Web, that North had sold Venkatna. It was now operating. "For pity's sake, don't stop now!"
An imperial warrior slammed his plastron closed. He cut Bosey in half. Bosey's black-and-green armor was poor stuff to begin with, but the young rebel—sixteen and he'd never see seventeen now—had started to climb out even as the arc swept toward him.
"Take them prisoner!" ordered a steely voice on what Hansen's display noted was the imperial command channel. His AI decoded even the lock-out push of lesser battlesuits. "Don't kill them till we learn what's happened!"
Half a dozen of Venkatna's troops, wearing their armor, approached Hansen in a tight group. He backed away.
Lord Salles stepped clear of his battlesuit. He looked at Hansen in surprise. "What are you doing, Lord Hansen?" demanded the one-time rebel leader. "We shouldn't take up arms against Emperor Venkatna."
Krita got out of her armor. She was not immune to the forces twisting through the Web.
"Get him!" cried an imperial warrior as he started for the only rebel still in armor.
Hansen's arc touched the man as he started his rush from several meters away. The imperial was off-balance when his servos lost power. His shout turned to a squawk. He fell forward, tripping the pair of warriors following him most closely.
Hansen plunged into the smoky flames of the tent behind him.
Imperial warriors surrounded the tent immediately. The only things they found when the fire died down were the corpses of their fellows, killed in the rebel onrush.