A Colimore warrior, chasing honor or pursued by it, got five meters ahead of his fellows and died as three arcs slashed his battlesuit to sparks and molten metal.
"An omen!" Hansen bellowed over the general push. "Peace and Prandia! An omen!"
Not because he believed in omens, but it was a good thing to shout to his troops. Anyway, it was one fewer opposing warrior and a champion besides—though his suit hadn't been good enough to absorb the simultaneous strokes of levies who had, after all, learned something about teamwork in the past few days.
And besides, anybody who needed luck to live knew that omens did count, at least when they were in your favor.
The battlefield stuttered into electrical brilliance. Clumps of sodden grass began to burn, sending drifts of smoke across the fighters like veils of dirty cobweb.
No one else on Hansen's wing of the army fell. Warriors probed one another at a few meters' distance, steeling themselves to lunge close to a range at which their arcs could be effective—
And where their opponents' weapons could gut them like trout, giving them just enough time to scream in sizzling agony as they died.
The lines eased together, as nearly parallel as the rolling prairie and variables of human nature allowed. Every third man or fourth stood a little in advance of his fellows, twitching his arc toward an enemy who was doing the same, just out of effective reach.
Hansen, with Culbreth to his right and Arnor on the left, followed three paces behind the center of his line. He was trying to keep the whole wing in view on his overlay while he continued to step forward. He paused when the warriors ahead of him stopped advancing. There were commanders, and there were leaders. Nils Hansen had never been very good at ordering other men to go die.
"Suit, straight visuals!" Hansen ordered his AI, clearing the display. "Team, follow me!" he added as he drove forward between two levies.
He wasn't really confident that Culbreth and Arnor would follow him. He was pretty sure that he could handle alone what was about to happen, pretty sure, but he'd seen too many men die in too many places to believe that he was invulnerable either.
A pair of Colimore champions met motion with motion, striding forward behind points of dense blue flame.
What happened didn't matter as much to Hansen as the fact he was moving now and not just watching.
The arc from Hansen's right gauntlet parried one stroke and started to burn back toward the helmet of the warrior who made it. Hansen's weapon paled to a fraction of its initial density as the other warrior slashed at his ribs and Hansen's suit redirected power to the defensive screen.
Culbreth thrust at the warrior whose arc Hansen was holding. The man's defenses fluoresced a microsecond before the angel painted over his thorax went black and the steel beneath burned.
Instead of doubling Culbreth's stroke, Arnor cut at the warrior whose arc lit a coruscant blaze from Hansen's screen. That wasn't the way Hansen had trained them, but it was all right, the Colimore man stepped back—
Hansen's left side burned like the wall of a furnace, but the servo motors had power again and the flux from his gauntlet was blue fury.
—and Hansen pivoted to follow him, slashing at the neck joint, shearing it and down through the thorax plate and out.
The body toppled. The head, still attached to the warrior's right arm, fell separately.
Real close. Real close to Hansen's final mistake.
Hansen's battlesuit was an oven, though the environmental control whined to cool it. There was a bubbled patch on the sheathing above his left ribs, and his vision display took a moment to regain its normal crystalline precision.
The less enthusiastic warriors formed a second half-line behind the Colimore champions. Six of them had surged forward when their leaders did. Now they were trying to retreat from the sudden carnage. Smudgy grass fires lapped at their feet like a flood of thick liquid.
This was the chance to turn local success into a sweeping rout.
"C'mon!" Hansen croaked. He lurched forward, hoping his team would follow.
Culbreth was already a stride ahead, cutting at a Colimore warrior who turned to run.
Culbreth's weapon sprayed the smoldering grass with bits from the victim's shoulder armor, violating the battlesuit's integrity and probably killing the man inside. Arnor followed with a quick downward cut which ended the latter doubt by burning a chin-deep wedge in the Colimore helmet.
Hansen had his footing and his suit at full power again, but the warriors he'd passed to break the hostile line were moving now also. Hansen almost slashed a royal warrior who stepped between him and a Colimore champion.
Both the suits were good and well-matched. The point-blank grapple created a spray of sparks and radiance, ending an instant later when Arnor stabbed the Colimore warrior under the arm and blew the victim's screens with a double load.
Warriors were down all across Hansen's end of the field. Some of them royal levies—half a dozen of them royal levies. The people who talk about light casualties are the ones who've never had to mop a man's body from the interior of his equipment.
But the Colimore line was unraveling like a knit garment. Twenty or more of the duke's warriors sizzled on the ground as power continued to short through their ruined armor. The remainder were backing in nervous desperation or had taken the risk of turning to run.
"Suit, overlay!" Hansen said, letting his men flare past him to right and left now that the wing needed an officer more than it did another shock troop.
What the 30% mask told Hansen was chilling. The battle was by god a rout on the left wing. It was damned close to a rout on the right also—but there it was the dozen Solfygg warriors in first-class armor who had hammered the Royal Household to the verge of cracking.
One of the Solfygg champions was down, but smoldering fragments of five of Maharg's professionals lay around him. White carats on Hansen's display marked other friendly casualties, all along the original line of contact.
The surviving eleven champions strode forward. The remainder of the Colimore left wing followed rather than supported their splendidly armored leaders, stepping over the blackened armor of royal troops who failed to retreat in time from the Solfygg advance.
Hansen opened his mouth to shout an order. He remembered that his radio was still on White Band, the general frequency for the levies on the left wing.
"Blue push," he directed his AI. He jogged up the rolling slope to his right, behind and paralleling the triumphant line of his own troops. The last thing Hansen wanted to do was to drag those men along with him.
The levies would hunt their fleeing opponents until disaster slammed into them from behind. There was nothing they could do against the Solfygg champions except die . . . and they would do that soon enough if the right wing collapsed and left them unsupported.
"Aim at the hip and shoulder joints!" Hansen ordered as he saw—direct vision and the overlay as well, it was still blurring the sight he needed now—three of the royal professionals make a desperate sally against the champion on the right of the Solfygg line. "The suits have weak spots at the joins!"
Duke Ontell had deployed his shock troops against the Royal Household, discounting King Prandia's levies as no more than a match for his regular warriors. That had been a misjudgment—
But maybe not a fatal one.
The eleven champions were arrayed together on one wing of the army. Because they were concentrated, they supported one another even though they appeared to have no more notion of team tactics than so many snarling tigers.
Maharg's three men made a well-coordinated attack. It stalled when the Solfygg champion lashed the leader with an arc so powerful that it froze his suit at three meters' distance. The other two royal troops stepped in from either side. Their enemy's battlesuit held for the moment their weapons licked it; then another Solfygg warrior struck the man on the right.
"The joints!" Hansen screamed again.
Running in a battlesuit was like running in liquid: though the motors did the work, the massive inertia of over a hundred kilos of armor required soul-deadening effort to make it move quickly. Hansen's thigh muscles pumped, anesthetized by the adrenaline that would leave them pools of fire as soon as the crisis cooled.
Unless he died in the next few minutes.
Either the professional on the Solfygg champion's right heard Hansen call or else he got lucky. He shifted his arc from the champion's helmet to the line between arm and thorax where a lesser smith had mated the pieces.
The leader of the royal team died as the supporting Solfygg champion struck from the side. Everything between the victim's neck and diaphragm flared into saffron plasma in the powerful arc.
But in the instant the other Solfygg warrior's weapon was locked by the leader's, the surviving royal professional struck home. The Solfygg armor failed at the join line.
The arm of the Solfygg suit spun away in a devouring flash. The black stump of a humerus poked from the open end, but the muscles had shriveled in a current so hot that even the battlesuit's ceramic core burned.
The Solfygg champion who had killed the other two team members rushed the third at a lumbering run. The royal professional backed as quickly as he could, knowing that his suit could survive his opponent's weapon for only fractions of a second.
Hansen stepped between the hunter and his prey.
The royal army was falling back; Duke Ontell's forces pressed on faster. Two more of the champions from Solfygg moved up in support of the warrior on the right of their wing.
This was going to have to be fast.
Hansen was at close quarters before the Solfygg champion realized he had another opponent. The champion's arc was already extended several meters to lick the lesser suit of the man he was chasing.
Hansen held the Solfygg weapon with the merest flicker from his right gauntlet. His main blow was with his left, a thrust that ended only when the steel of his glove clanged on the sheathing of his opponent's hip. A white-hot collop exploded from the Solfygg battlesuit.
Another Solfygg warrior in top-quality armor slid to a startled halt a few meters away when he saw his fellow's blazing corpse topple into the smoldering grass.
"At the joints!" Hansen screamed.
Instead of pressing in against Hansen, the Solfygg champion shouted for another of his peers to join him. Hansen went for him, coldly careful to step between the armored legs of the man he had just killed.
The Solfygg warrior tilted his foot to retreat, then lunged forward in what was either desperation or fury. His arc was so dense it was nearly palpable. He thrust at the center of Hansen's chest.
Hansen blocked the stroke with his right hand. His gauntlet began to heat immediately. Blue-white discharges heated the air into sudden vortices, lifting ash from the ground. Colimore supports moved up behind a curtain of smoke and diffracted light.
Hansen's vision displays degraded as the AI diverted still more of his suit's power into the flux that protected his life. He twisted slowly against the mass of his armor and cold servos, shifting his torso and directing the arc from his gauntlet down rather than up as it continued to lock the Solfygg weapon.
Hammering vibration from the two full-power arcs overwhelmed any chance of Hansen's screaming fury being heard except by his artificial intelligence.
The tip of Hansen's arc touched the soil. Both discharges shorted to ground in a cataclysmic uproar.
Hansen switched most of his suit's power to his left gauntlet, leaving only a trickle to keep the current path open and his opponent's weapon safely grounded. He struck at the hip joint. The gout of flame in which the Solfygg champion died was less dazzling than the spouting effulgence a moment before as both battlesuits discharged at their full capacity.
There was another Solf—
There wasn't.
The third champion was down, a gaping wound in the shoulder of his armor. Two of Maharg's professionals were down also, one's helmet a molten ruin, but they'd got the bastard, they'd got him.
Eighty meters from where Hansen stood, brilliant light danced skyward as Maharg in his own royal suit faced two Solfygg champions. The marshal had been covering the retreat of the Royal Household. It was a miracle that he'd lasted so long, but now several of his warriors scrambled back to his aid.
"Peace and Prandia!" shouted somebody who ran past as Hansen gasped to breathe before he staggered on toward Maharg. Arnor, and that was fucking Culbreth, they were going to get themselves—
The nearest Colimore troops hadn't yet made up their minds what to do when their Solfygg leaders fell. Arnor and Culbreth, Hansen's team, hacked at an opponent together. He fell.
The next Colimore warrior wore a silver battlesuit, itself of nearly royal quality. He blocked Arnor's thrust, parried a stroke by Culbreth—
And died when the professional that Hansen saved as he rushed to the right wing struck between the two arcs and finished the job.
"Aim at the joints!" Hansen called as he stumbled forward. He couldn't feel his legs, just lances of fire into his groin every time he took a step, but that didn't matter as long as he moved.
A lightning storm snarled across the surface of the battlefield. Men died, and most of them were members of the Royal Household attempting to engage the Solfygg champions.
Six of the latter still stood. The Colimore line had wavered, but now the Solfygg warriors resumed their advance.
Hansen was under no illusions about the situation. He had dropped two of the Solfygg champions, but the only thing wrong with their armor was that it hadn't been worn by a killer as experienced as Nils Hansen. Hansen couldn't deal with six more of the bastards alone, and—
Death rippled in blue fire. Three professionals had run to Maharg's side. All were dead now. The legs of one man were intermixed with those of another; the torsos lay at a meter's distance.
—there weren't going to be many surviving friendlies to help him.
A Colimore warrior got in Hansen's way, not trying to stop him but caught in the flow of battle. Hansen swiped the enemy aside in two pieces, slowing his rush only for the moment his battlesuit reduced current to the servos.
It was suicide to go up against royal-quality armor while wearing a lesser suit.
"Maharg, I'm—" Hansen shouted.
The marshal, ten meters away, held a Solfygg champion at bay with either gauntlet. He stepped back, a grudging retreat that changed into a thrust as one Solfygg warrior slipped on a corpse's armored hand and Maharg shifted full power to his other weapon.
"—coming!"
The Solfygg battlesuit failed in a blaze of light. Maharg's remaining opponent turned his stumble into a lunge toward the small of the marshal's back. Maharg's suit exploded.
Hansen hacked from behind, severing the Solfygg champion's right leg. The warrior sprawled forward onto Maharg.
The ruined battlesuits of the marshal and the man who had killed him spluttered on soil which their struggle had burned to glass.
"C'mon," Hansen wheezed. "Come—"
He took a step and stumbled because his foot did not, would not, lift high enough to clear the body of a man Hansen didn't recognize.
"Oh god," he whispered on his knees. "We've gotta go on. We gotta finish. . . ."
The Colimore forces were in full retreat. Many of the levies Hansen led had scattered in pursuit of the Colimore right wing, and the Royal Household had been butchered in its attempt to stop the Solfygg champions.
The warriors who fled toward Colimore outnumbered the forces Hansen could bring against them. Three Solfygg champions survived to shepherd them home.
"We gotta finish them!" Hansen cried as he lurched upright and ran toward the enemy: two strides, ten strides.
Two or three royal warriors followed him. None of the rest were able to.
Hansen toppled forward. He lay among the dead until Culbreth and a pair of freemen managed to turn his suit over so that they could open it.
It had begun to drizzle. The rain settled ash from the air and washed the tears from Hansen's upturned face.