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His head snaps back. For an exultant moment, I think my snipers have put one through his brain. But then his head comes forward, scarlet along the side, his mouth a wild rictus as he lowers himself to his horse and it explodes forward, faster than all the rest. Two more rounds spark off his armor.
I tremble in fear as my horizon becomes one of flaring nostrils, frothing muzzles, and trampling hooves. A dozen horses fill my field. Lysander weaves right, around my hedgehog and toward the frailer wings.
In the age of starships, you forget what animals can do to men. Lysander reminds me as he plunges forty thousand kilograms of horsepower through the wings of my line. The sudden acceleration of horseflesh into human bodies creates shearing forces as the momentum of the charge meets the inertia of the internal organs. Men are literally pulverized from the inside out. Organs tear. Brains hemorrhage. Blood vessels rupture. Spines collapse backward.
Even as the friction of the corpses slows the horses, they do not stop their killing. Hooves flatten skulls. Teeth of racehorses trained for the conflict of the Hippodrome snap off faces. Screams turn to gurgles as men are spun through the blender of hooves, manage to crawl free, only to have their backs broken by the next steed.
The horses bear down on the center of my line.
“Flat!”
I fall backward before the onrushing wave, razor held in both hands, its pommel at my belly button, with the blade that can cut through ten centimeters of starShell armor sticking a meter and a half into the air. Fifty-three other armored men do the same a bare second before the horses trample us.
Incandescent explosions of lights in my head.
Unreal weight and sound. Hooves slamming into my armor, my helmet. Underbellies, tails, bottoms of bare feet, of boots as I’m kicked and trampled in an unending stampede. But even horses made of one ton of muscle and bone and blood cannot stomp through armor meant to withstand pulseFire or run through a field of razor blades undaunted. We shred them.
Gore like I’ve never seen pours down on us. The screams of dying horses are worse by far than those of men. Yet the herd animals keep coming, running straight over the blades so thin that in the darkness they cannot see them as they sever bones in half and open bellies and muscled chests so cleanly that the horses’ momentum carries them like cannonballs past us to spill shrieking and dying into the back of their fellows who crushed our wings.
Any Roman ground commander worth his salt would tell you that robbing the velocity from a cavalry charge is the first step to killing it.
With the Via Triumphia turned into a charnel house of dying horses and dying men, I stumble to my feet. Blood obscures my eye slits. A horse on its side with its guts spilling out kicks me so hard in the helmet that my duroglass eyeholes finally crack and I go down. Try to stand. My neck is sprained. Maybe fractured. Something hits me from behind, and I fall. Through the fragmented vision of my cracked visor I see a horse coming at me at full gallop. I throw myself to the side just as a Gold rider leans sideways off her saddle, nearly parallel with the ground, and swings her razor down. The blade peels a chunk of metal from the back of my thigh, then skips sideways, and she’s past. I hack blindly at the back legs of the horse but don’t see if I connect.
That was Kalindora. The Love Knight herself. Out of respect for her treatment of our prisoners, I kept her with her men. Now I pay for it.
Someone hauls me up. A horse chest hits me from the side and I’m lifted off my feet, kicked under several others and spun around and around until I crawl free and find a wall to guard my back. On my feet, but unable to see, I press my emergency release and rip off my helmet.
The sound is unreal. Indescribable. Like an animal caught in a blender. Except it’s thousands of us in here. Horses shattering men as they kick in their death throes. Riders crushed underneath or thrown clean, to be swallowed by my men. Horses whinnying in the plaza, terrified at the sight.
For all we killed, more than two hundred sunbloods wheel about in the swirling mass of bodies, their riders slashing down, the horses stomping on the unlucky fallen, or breaking through the lines to encircle my other elements even as their infantry advances through the plaza to pound more meat into the straw.
The world takes on a slow, soupy feel. Only a fraction of my force is Gold and Obsidian. Without armor, without technology, the vast gulf that separates the races becomes measured in the carnage an individual Gold can wreak against lesser creatures. Their skin is tougher. Their bones and thick skulls like armor. I see one of my Grays hit a Gold thrown from his horse full on in the back of the head with his rifle, only for the Gold to wheel around and with a single punch break the neck of a man who survived ten years of war. Two Reds fire full clips into a Gold in a prisoner jumpsuit. He closes in and kills them before stumbling on to kill four more before finally expiring.
In my pocket of peace amidst the battle, I feel the coolness of Pax’s key on my chest. The weight of my wife’s gift in my hand. The memory of all the goodness my men have inside them. How they laugh over cards. How they smile when entering a liberated city for the first time. How they hustle when beside a Gold comrade to show they are his equal. How they weep when they see their families at the spaceports.
And I watch as they are butchered by the score, and their conviction that all men are created equal is made into a mockery by the physical absurdity of the Golds atop their monsters. There is a glee in their killing. A horrid joy teaching this chattel, this jabbering mass of uppity slaves, who their masters are.
Bend. Bow. Break.
I see Lysander amidst the fray, blood-spattered atop that monstrous horse, youthful and killing with uncommon grace. His bodyguards mill around him, cutting down any who rush his flanks. I see it so clearly. All his life before him. All the worlds on their knees, rejoicing their returned supplication as they embrace their chains so long as pretty, manicured hands hold the lead. His rise will summon a hideous tide of renewed romantic vigor that will not stop until my people, my wife, my child, are swallowed whole. And then he will smile from the humble throne war built and say he is their good shepherd.
I gave him a choice long ago, a chance to live in peace, but he has returned to war. To see the boy become man scours the empathy in me.
Ten years too late, he must die.
My snipers no longer fire. Thraxa waits for my signal on the roof. I shape my razor from its long form to the slingBlade. The dread monster rises in the belly of me. Laughter spews from between my teeth. I would die for the truth that all men are created equal. But in the kingdom of death, amidst ramparts of bodies and wind all of screams, there is a king, and his name is not Lune. It is Reaper.
“For the Republic!” I scream as I enter the fray.
I HAVE NEVER FOUGHT LOWCOLORS hand to hand.
I annihilate them.
Faces and arms and skulls scalped by the teeth of sunbloods swirl around me like so much grotesque confetti. Weapons spark off my greaves. Men fall over themselves to avoid the teeth of my steed only to be trampled by his hooves. It is all frenzied blur, which I approach with systematic detachment.
I would fear losing track of the battle in the strict focus of the Mind’s Eye. So I float along the edges of its shores.
Breathe, stab, turn. Breathe, stab, turn.
