Valentine squeezed off shot after shot at the lead Grog on the nearest legworm, but the bullets seemed either to miss or bounce off the piece of armored shield it held in its hand.
Vexed, he knelt to reload. Grog snipers put bullets where his head had been a moment before. He noticed the Wolf to his right had the whole right side of his head torn away, as if sawn off with a precision tool.
Carbine ready, Valentine rolled and came back up behind the breastworks at the dead man's notch. He squeezed off three shots into the same leading Grog from the shield's off side. This time his shots found their mark; the Grog toppled off its mount. Its fellows tried to grab the reins, but the leg-worm already began to arc off to the right. At the rate of a Grog a second, the Wolves dropped the other five riders like ducks in a shooting gallery.
Cordite filled Valentine's nostrils. Another legworm thrashed in tree-cracking pain, badly wounded by a grenade. But two more were atop the breastworks, forcing their way through the abatis, ignoring the sharpened branches, which first impaled, then broke off in their soft, puffy skin.
Valentine saw the flash of a fuse and heard a faint, wet pop. A legworm's mouth exploded, leaving a greenish-yellow wound open across the whole front of its body. The thing reeled and sped back downslope, shaking its riders like a bucking bronco. One of the catapults had managed to put a grenade right down its throat, using the basketball-hoop-size maw as a target. But the remaining legworm was up and over the head-logs in a flash, and the Grogs dropped off it and onto the men below, closely followed by a second yellow giant. As it climbed onto the logs, heavy and pulsing above Valentine's head, he ignored his own advice and fired shot after shot into its belly at the approximate middle. The bullets left green-goo-dripping holes, but the thirty-caliber shells fired muzzle-to-skin found nerve ganglia. The legworm collapsed; as it fell, he threw himself out of the way, but it still trapped him below the knees. A few legs hammered against his thighs as they twitched out their final spasm.
The Grogs fought hand to hand with the Wolves, tossing the smaller humans right and left, firing oversize pistols and swinging double-bladed battle-axes that gleamed red with blood. Volleys of fire from above cut them down: the grenade teams had dropped their catapults and turned their rifles on the Grogs fighting at the barricades.
He got one leg out from beneath the fleshy mass.
A Grog from the legworm Valentine shot hopped up onto the abatis. Valentine brought up his gun, but the carbine's hammer came down with an impotent click. A misfire, or he was empty. The Grog raised its battle-ax, and Valentine read death in its purple eyes just before two holes opened in its chest, throwing it backwards. Valentine had no time to look for his unseen marksman-savior; he pushed free of the dead legworm and brought his gun up and over the breastworks, only to see the Grogs retreating through the trees. Valentine looked one second too long; a bullet whizzed past close enough to feel the pressure of its passage against his ear.
He dropped to his knees, seeking safety in the thick comfort of the breastworks. To either side of him, Wolves were still shooting down the slope. A bloody-knuckled man helped another stop the flow from a head wound as Valentine counted the cost of the attack. Four dead. Many wounded.
Valentine looked down at a Grog pistol by his knee. The weapon looked like two revolvers joined at the bottom of the grip, with a thick trigger guard running between the two. A single lever cocked and fired both barrels.
"They're going," someone shouted. The survivors of the legworm assault sagged against the protecting logs, many with tears of relief running down their faces.
"They'll be back," Petrie said as another Wolf wrapped a bandage around his head. "They'll keep coming until they're all dead ... or we are."
They came six more times that cool spring day. Each time, like a rising tide, the Grog wave crested farther. And when they receded, they left snipers among the rocks and trees, sappers who could be silenced only by grenades and concentrated rifle fire. The Grogs wrapped their lines around Little Timber Hill like a python coiling around its prey, waiting for it to weaken and smother under its irresistible pressure.
Noon came and went, and afternoon brought a two-hour lull in the fighting. Valentine let the men leave the breastworks in small groups to steal away to the rocky crown for food and water-even a brief washup if they could get it. Although the last might be rendered moot: the rain clouds were piling up on the horizon again.
A sniper wounded Captain Beck when the Grogs came, thick and screaming, up the long slope at about three in the afternoon. Tom Nishino, not knowing what else to do, blew his captain's whistle. Valentine heard the trilling above the shrieks of the Grogs and looked up to see the boy waving to him. Valentine gestured back, outflung arm trying to motion Tom to keep down, when a slug took the youth, spinning him in one quick, 360-degree revolution to drop dead among the rocks.
Valentine left Petrie in charge and scrambled up to the command post. Two Wolves and one of the camp women knelt around Beck. The captain's left shoulder was shattered, leaving his arm dangling.
"How are the men holding?" Beck asked through pain-gritted teeth. The woman bound the wound with quick strokes, ignoring Beck's gasps. Valentine paused a moment, admiring the sure motions of her hands.
"They're holding good, sir. But I've got nine dead around the trail, and a lot of wounded."
"I don't know how long I'll be conscious here, Valentine. So I want you to take command. Hold this position; the Guards are on their way. Bring the wounded up to the rocky crown. They'll be safe there. Sooner or later they're going to figure out that the easiest way to get at us is from across the saddle, so you'd better reform your flying squads."
Valentine wished Beck would stop talking. If he was going to relinquish command, he should quit giving orders.
"Yes, sir," he said. "Let's get you up into the basin."
The two Wolves helped Beck to his feet, supporting him with his good arm. The captain's face contorted in pain as he made his first halting steps toward the rocky crown, the trio keeping hidden from the snipers at the bottom of the hill.
Valentine picked up Beck's dropped binoculars. The odor of the captain's cigars clung to their casing and strap. What had been Beck's was now his. Responsibility for Foxtrot Company's future put his stomach into a knot of Gordian proportions. He watched the ragged young woman who had bandaged the captain as she picked up Beck's bolt-action carbine, examining it. She had brassy red hair cut very short, freckles, and pretty, if angular, features. She looked like she had been on short rations for a week: her eyes had a wide, alert, and hungry look. Valentine suddenly realized he didn't know her.
"I'm sorry, who are you?" Valentine said. "I thought I knew everyone in camp."
"I've been in your camp for only a couple hours, Wolf. Are you missing about two dozen men?"
Valentine frowned. "My name is David Valentine, Second Wolf Regiment of Southern Command. I'm in charge of what's left of this company. I'd be obliged if you'd give me your name."
"I'd prefer not to be put in any official reports. My code name is Smoke, if you have to say something."
An occasional shot from below punctuated the conversation.
"Code name? You're a Cat?"
"Yes, Mr. Lieutenant. Since the age of sixteen. Normally I work the plains of here, but I'm on the trail of something."