"Ambush battalion, fall in!" Hansen ordered on the general frequency as the eastern sky hinted the first pale warning of dawn. As far north as Frekka, the sun made a long production of rising.
'Ambush Battalion' was boast and a chance of confusing the enemy, in the unlikely event that Venkatna's forces monitored enemy transmissions. Mostly it was a boast, a proud name with which to encourage Hansen's own four underlings.
They needed encouragement. They sure needed something.
Blood had a good battlesuit, about second class, decorated with large red drops on a silver field. It wasn't quite true that a warrior was only as good as his armor; but the armor was important and in this case there was a good match between the man and his hardware.
Blood was better equipped than nineteen out of twenty men he would meet on the field of battle. After sparring with him repeatedly in the past several weeks, Hansen knew Wenceslas' bodyguard was a man he would be happy to have backing him in any fight.
The other three were named al-Hauk, Empey, and Brownow. They were warriors by virtue of the fact they wore battlesuits. Hansen wouldn't trust the armor any of the three wore against a shower of crossbow bolts, much less the cutting arc which sprang from the gauntlet of another battlesuit.
The men were what he'd expected the king would give him; and for present purposes, they would do.
"Suit," Hansen said, switching on his AI, "battalion push."
Using encrypted transmission that could be heard only by the other members of the Ambush Battalion, he continued, "Boys, what we're going to do is win the battle if it can be won. It's absolutely necessary that you follow me and that you keep your intervals. I'll lead, Blood brings up the rear. Ten meters between each man and the next."
Hansen looked over the four faceless battlesuits that were his force. Empey's must have been made by an apprentice smith who never rose to journeyman status. Brownow and al-Hauk wore armor compiled from bits hacked off various suits in battle. The parts fit poorly together. Even when the welds were done expertly—most of these were not—there would be a noticeable degradation of performance compared to that of a battlesuit whose parts retained their integrity.
"Now, I realize you don't understand what all's happening," Hansen continued grimly. "But you can understand this: if any of you hangs back or runs away, I'll kill him. No matter what I'm doing at the time, I'll manage to kill him. Understood?"
"Less'n I get there first," Blood boomed, using his external speaker instead of the spread-transmission radio. "Then I'll kill ye."
The Confederate army marshaled around them with shouts and clashing. Warriors tested their arcs. The weapons picked threads of static from the radios despite the work of suit AIs to synthesize perfect reception.
"One more thing," Hansen said slowly. He hadn't meant to go on, but the words came out nonetheless. "I don't know that it matters to you—I don't know that it ought to matter. But if you follow me, boys, I'll make you heroes. They'll sing about us around banquet tables for generations to come."
He smiled. The other warriors couldn't see his expression, and they probably wouldn't have been encouraged if they could see.
Hansen's battlesuit was gold and of royal quality. The suit was as good as any armor in either army, and it was an article of Hansen's faith that he was better than any other man of war. He couldn't fight a whole army himself, or even two first-class men, not and hope to win; but Nils Hansen would do what he could, as he had always done. . . .
"Let's go, troops," Hansen said. "Let's kick some ass."
He led his four men out of the camp in a wide sweep to the left, moving at a fast walk. The pace would be bruising to his subordinates, since there was considerable lag time before their suit servos responded to the movements of the users' legs and bodies.
That wasn't the worst punishment the poor bastards were going to get this day.
Forty pony-mounted freemen conformed to the warriors' movements as Wenceslas had ordered them to do. It was crucial that Venkatna be forced to send armored warriors to develop the threat to his flank. The crossbows and lances of these Mirala freemen would keep imperial scouts at a distance.
On the map overlaid across Hansen's electronic visor, Venkatna's army was a mass of red specks falling into line at the edge of the built-up area. There were many hundreds of them, though still fewer than the amorphous blue mass of the Confederates rousing themselves for battle. Numbers weren't the whole story. The sharp-edged imperial divisions would punch through the Mirala army like an awl through leather.
Hansen headed out of the camp along a swale so slight as to go unnoticed by a strolling pedestrian. A slope of two meters in a thousand would hide a suited warrior from sight; that was all that Hansen needed. There were no trees within fifty klicks of Frekka, not with the population increase the capital had seen and the slow growth of vegetation in these latitudes.
"Suit," Hansen ordered as he moved. "Project a battalion IFF by ten times. Scatter the unit distribution according to friendly forces, plus ten—plus twenty percent in quality."
He couldn't pretend to be a force of a hundred warriors: the suits' Identification, Friend or Foe, circuits couldn't achieve the necessary separation to make more than a plus-ten magnification believable. Hansen was doing the next best thing by pretending to be a picked unit: fifty men wearing battlesuits of unusually high average quality, but of believable quality nonetheless.
The battalion's outriders reached the squatter dwellings on the outskirts of the Mirala encampment. Whores, gamblers, thieving traders—trading thieves; but of the low-level sort who preyed on the servants. They were debarred from entering the camp proper, as did the better sort of grifter who dealt with the nobles.
Hansen's freemen yipped and charged, knocking down leather tilts and swinging lance butts and sword flats at whoever got in the way.
The technique wasn't as mindlessly brutal as it looked. The mounted men cleared a path for the warriors; and most warriors would use their arcs as quickly on a slave as they would a clump of brambles that got in their way.
"Hey, Hansen," Blood called. "Boss."
"Go ahead," Hansen said. He had to watch the deployment of imperial forces, but the map overlay was a serious distraction. Not because he couldn't see his footing through a 30% mask. Rather, it was because the perfect discipline of Venkatna's troops drew Hansen's eyes the way he had once seen a victim staring at his blown-off foot.
"We gonna get any fighting ourself?"
"You bet your ass." Literally.
"That's good," Blood said.
And meant it, the damned fool . . . except he wasn't a fool. Blood was a warrior, and this was what he did.
Hansen barked out a laugh that the compressed transmission made even harsher than it sounded in his own ears. This was what Nils Hansen did too; and he did it very well.
"Hey, boss?" Blood again. The other three didn't have the breath to talk at the present pace, and chances were that they didn't have the stomach for it either.
"Go ahead."
"That girl of yours. The blond bint? I haven't seen her in camp."
Lucille.
Nils Hansen had been a fighting man in two cultures over a lot of time. Men whose business is death don't have a lot of delicacy about the various life-affirming activities in which they indulge.
"She's got kin in Peace Rock," Hansen said. "I sent her back there to them. She's a good lady. I don't need a piece so bad I want her t' get hurt."
"You sent her into the Empire?" gasped one of the other three; Brownow, Hansen thought it was.
"If we take Venkatna out," Hansen said, "then there's no problem. If we don't, the bastard's going to kill everything in Mirala down to the mice."
Blood chuckled. "My old mom's back t' the farm, not ten klicks from the valley mouth. Guess we better win this one for her, huh?"
Hansen's breath quickened. "Keep moving," he said. He hoped he sounded calm. "There's an imperial section changing front. I think we're going to have company soon."
They passed a trio of small houses with separate stables, built around a spring-fed pond. Perhaps the rural retreat of some court officials; as probably, one of Venkatna's marcher dukes lived in this isolated setting during his infrequent visits to the capital. The buildings were empty now.
Empey switched on his arc. The sudden power drain made the warrior stumble. He slashed his weapon across the shingled front of the nearest house anyway. Before Hansen could object, Blood got the stables of that house and extended his arc an impressive four meters to torch the next dwelling as well.
"Hold your fucking formation!" Hansen snarled. "Move!" He increased the pace by a half beat as punishment.
His bloodstream was already roiling with hormones. The surge he got from the vandalism made him almost sick. Nils Hansen, Commissioner Hansen, had spent his former life putting down—literally—the forces of destruction. He hadn't been choosy about his methods, preferring something fast even if it made a lot of noise to letting a situation drag on; but his long-term purpose was always to lessen destruction and stress on the society he was paid to protect.
Now he was leading a gang whose first thought when they passed a wooden house was that they could make it burn like a box of matches.
"Hey, boss?"
Blood. "Go ahead."
"If we're s'posed to look like an army all by ourse'f, then we gotta do what an army does, right?"
Blood was either smarter than Hansen had thought . . . or he was psychic. "Right," said Hansen. "There's a stock barn or some damn thing up ahead. The walls're stone, but there'll be fodder and the roof'll burn."
Some of the Ambush Battalion's outriders were engaged with imperial freemen half a kilometer to the right. A number of the riders nearer Hansen's warriors spurred their ponies to join the fight, though others hung back.
Nobles tended to ignore the mounted scouts. It was a wonder that the freemen had the amount of discipline and élan which they regularly displayed.
The main armies were moving. Hansen needed more than dots on a topographic display.
"Suit," he said. "Upper right quadrant. Remote me the view from K—"
He'd started to request that his suit echo the images from King Wenceslas' visor.
"The view from Lord Guest," Hansen finished instead.
Better see what a real professional was looking at. Captain North was that, the good lord knew.
The stockyard was on the outskirts of Frekka proper. Immediately beyond it were the new barracks whose construction Hansen had watched from a loggia of the imperial palace.
"Suit," he ordered, "cut!"
He slashed his arc, drawn thin as a king's honor, across the roof trusses projecting from the loft eight meters above. Masonry cracked under the tongue of high voltage. The building's roof of ancient thatch burped flame.
I am the best!
The viewpoint in the upper right quarter of Hansen's visor advanced by long, powerful strides. North was leading his Simplain contingent toward the imperial flank exposed when a section marched off to meet Hansen.
The Confederate army was ill-organized, but it was composed of fighting men. At the present juncture, the Mirala warriors' instinct was precisely correct. The whole mass swept forward to support North's calculated attack.
North was the point of the wedge into which he had formed his mercenaries. The front rank of Venkatna's troops had extended to the right to cover the detached section. The imperial warriors were featureless within their battlesuits, but their line bunched and gapped nervously.
It momentarily occurred to Hansen that his plan, his feint, might just succeed as a real thrust. What would the imperial forces do if the palace exploded into flame behind them? Were they disciplined enough to hold their impeccable formation and win the real battle before worrying about events among the civilian installations in their rear?
Probably; and anyhow, the question was moot. An imperial section fifty warriors strong was bearing down on Hansen's poor handful like the Wrath of God.