"You know he'll act soon."

Trindai nodded. Had he launched an attack against landed raiders he would be moving his own soldiers into position to attack the bridgehead now. That was standard military doctrine for Keen, had been since the raiders made their first attempts to push inland. The outworlder general was bound to do the same now, or he'd risk reinforcements strengthening Verd.

"Minister de Partaken's estimate of our chances were blunt but accurate," Trindai said. About the same as the bastard raiders had when we finally understood what they were up to. Never manage more than pillaging a few villages, and now they're food for the sea beasts. "I'm off to deploy my troops. With a bit of luck we'll be able to ambush a few of the outworlders," he said aloud.

Olvar grunted, but then what was he supposed to do? With Trindai, at least, he knew he was sending an equally knowing soldier into the grinder. The young recruits though.

Trindai chose to respect his superior's reluctance to word an answer. Besides, they hadn't been entirely truthful with their outworlder guests, or at least not totally forthcoming with all truths. The analogy with the western raiders was too apt to be a coincidence, Trindai agreed to himself. Just as trying to attack the ships would have been suicidal any attempt at attacking Verd would be just as dangerous.

He shuddered at what he had just been told. There were rumours of course, but they had only been rumours. Verd defended herself, as the saying went, but he'd always believed the capital still relied on soldiers for defence

Now he knew he was wrong. The soldiers were needed for the defence of Keen. Verd had been built when the city wasn't a safe capital in the middle of an empire. The frontier had been close to the east at that time, and the city was built with that in mind. There were things hidden in the city, and more magecrafted defences had been added during the centuries when Verd was the capital of magecrafters as well as an empire.

Trindai wondered what Minister de Levius thought of the matter. There was simply no way that Magehunting could be happy with the thought of weapons of magic being used against an enemy, but then there wouldn't really be anyone using them. Trindai didn't really understand, but he accepted what he had been told—that Verd would indeed defend herself.

He would still lose a lot of good men before that. Any attack against the capital had to be real to trigger those defences

He left the city through Vimarin Gates. Krante Gates weren't sealed off in any way, but the training grounds were. The council had decided to play the charade out in full and the Imperial Guard made certain no one with weapons left the highways.

Riding along the tracks he watched his men file up and make ready for the march east. This was going to be the expensive part in lives, and the soldiers had all been lied into believing they stood a chance against the outworlders. To enhance the illusion all eight of Erwin's men walked with them in their moving armour It was at least a little more than an illusion. As soon as they left the city far enough behind them those men would spread out and act as a screen for the vulnerable phalanxes. The cavalry he had available were mostly to act as messengers.

For the moment though, they marched in column, using the highway to make as good speed as possible. If Olvar's estimate was correct they would encounter armed resistance within half a day, and Trindai desperately needed to have broken all rules long before that. Phalanxes were supposed to take the field packed even more tightly than an outsider would have thought possible, and it had taken more than a little convincing to make him agree to spread his infantry so thin they for all real purposes ceased to be an effective fighting force. Most of that convincing had been done just east of Vimarin Gates. Outworlder weapons shredded a few hundred straw dolls in even less time than it took to line up the walking armour The message wasn't lost on anyone.

Noon saw the cavalry ride ahead of the column and spread out like a fan with the outworlders taking point positions. As far as Trindai was concerned they were skirmishers, and skirmishers with vastly superior weapons. When they were forced to fall back the forces they were screening would have very little to add, but that was as it should. Their mission was to die after all.

Where the Vimarin Highway and the tracks to the sky port separated Trindai split his column of infantry in two. From here each one would be commanded by a colonel each, and he knew there was nothing he could add in the ways of orders to change the outcome of what was coming.

To some degree he planned to make use of the farwriters in the region, but he suspected they wouldn't be standing for long after the enemy realized they were used for communicating orders. Coded as those orders were supposed to be Erwin had disclosed that what Keen considered unbreakable codes were pitifully insufficient for outworlder knowledge machines. If the enemy was able to read his coded orders as fast as he could send them he could as well dispense with the codes, and so Trindai had decided. At least they would be able to read information while it was sent as fast as the enemy.

He grinned at the last thought. They really would. His outworlders, and he was thinking of them in those terms, had machines reading enemy codes just as easily. The main difference lay in that the enemy didn't know their codes were worthless. He planned to make the most of that small deception.

Early afternoon he had his first reason to feel pride in his home. Long before a messenger returned in full gallop, even before he heard the low rumbling that heralded outworlder weapons hammering at his troops, a farwriter told him where the enemy was, what numbers they held and how they were deployed. The crew, insanely brave or just stupid even managed to send him another three messages telling him in what direction the enemy spread as they reacted to being on the receiving end of their own kind of weapons. After that Trindai received the message he'd been waiting for: farwriter lost.

He grimaced. Fire or storm was the usual reason for such a message, and in this case, in a way, it was a matter of both.

Now came the part he hated the most. He took shelter with his staff, several messengers and a small unit handling the messenger birds. Verd needed to know how effective their sacrifice was, and that meant he wasn't allowed to get in harms way. His soldiers would do the dying. He had to stay behind and tell their tale. For a moment he glimpsed what it meant to be a taleweaver, and he quickly forced that thought away. Seven hundred years rumours had Ken Leiter to be. Seven hundred years of watching but never take part. Again Trindai pushed the thought aside. Defeatism lay in that direction.

A staff colonel shot him a worried glance as the outworlder hammering came closer, but Trindai only waved him away and climbed up the slope to see for himself.

North-east were the small forest where almost half his men were hidden. The trees offered more than just cover. A narrow river hid in a shallow valley and the survivors should be able to flee along it. Not retreat, flee. He held no illusions about an ordered withdrawal.

South-east was the direction from which he knew the assault would come. He could see the ridge just west of the sky port from here. Half an afternoons march for his men, less time than it took to gulp down field rations for outworlder vehicles.

A gutted farm, flames climbing high into the sky and smoke obscuring his sight further south, told him where the enemy was. He couldn't believe his luck. The reports had told him enemy vehicles were deployed just west of the ridge, and that more than a few had gone north when attacked by moving armour The rest hadn't moved at all. The enemy commander was spawned by the mother of all incompetents and allowed Trindai's sacrificial goats to spread out and take cover unmolested.

Instead of taking the field and run the pike men down they stayed and used their weapons from a distance, and there was nothing of the horrible efficiency he'd seen just outside Verd in display here. Streaks of white shot over their targets most of the time, and even though it must be a frightening experience for his men most of them lived to stay afraid.

The small outworlder guns were different from their ship mounted raider brethren. Instead of the white smoke followed by a dull boom they were smokeless, and whenever they overshot their target high enough a sharp crack reached him from an impossible direction. He had asked about that the first time. Something about the projectiles moving faster than sound itself. He didn't understand fully. The speed of sound was a well enough known factor, but why that cracking sound should occur whenever something moved faster was beyond his learning. It mattered little. It was the sound of a projectile gone wide, the sound of a soldier unable to keep his weapon trained on target and therefore a good sound as far as he was concerned.

Trindai watched in fascination as enemy soldiers spewed out their deadly missiles all over the fields. Horrible marksmen or not, they certainly had an abundance of missiles available. A goodly amount of them of the explosive kind as well, he noted as another farm house went up in flames. He hoped it was empty. His men were under strict orders to stay outside of them. They offered no protection against anything but crossbows.

Far east a hovercraft started moving in his direction. It passed the irrigation ditches where his forward units lay hidden and advanced on the last farm set on fire. A little too far south. The deadly surprise would have to wait a bit longer.

Now, one after another, the floating wagons took to the fields and one of them passed right over a spot marked on the map Trindai held in his hand.

"Sixteen!" he shouted.

An eightday earlier two of his outworlders had joined a patrol disguised as cavalry soldiers in the imperial army. The two who had something resembling a riding training. Now the real reason for their presence became apparent as the enemy vehicle was suddenly engulfed in flames and fell over.

It had only been a precaution. When the slaughter on outworlder sky ships started he had no men close enough to the mines to use them, and he hadn't expected the enemy to stay at their base long enough for him to arrive in time to use the traps.

The ditch closest to the burning wreck erupted with soldiers and they went to work with pikes and daggers among the dazed survivors.

If only the wagons north of the victims would oblige him by coming to the rescue. One stopped, but it didn't move. Trindai could only stare in horror as its weapons shredded his men on the field. Then, slowly, it moved south. To pick up survivors? Are they daft? They must have seen what we did? But it continued south.

Trindai nodded left and grinned. "Seems we get another one." He counted moments as the vehicle closed in on its dead comrade. "Wait, wait, fifteen!"

Again the field came alive with a distant thunderclap. This time there were no men close enough to kill survivors, but at least the enemy had lost two of their wagons with soldiers on top.

They moved more carefully now. Just as Erwin had said they would. Soldiers climbed down the sides of the wagons and spread out in front of them. This was the reason Trindai had deployed troops well ahead of the visible units marching onto the fields here. All over the fields ditches hid soldiers who had arrived here early in the morning. Whenever the enemy came close enough crossbows took their toll, but it was clear that it wouldn't be enough.

Trindai ordered the retreat. This was the risky part of his plan. Up went three banners. Normally they would have stayed until they saw that the order had been obeyed, but visible was dead against outworlder weapons, and he left the slope with his entire staff as fast as his legs would carry him. Three birds took to the air behind him and they were well out of harms way when the first grenades ruptured in the positions they'd held just moments earlier.

This was something he was far more used to than Erwin would have believed. Raider cannons fired explosive shells as well.

It was time for Colonel Berdaler to show that he deserved his new command.

The woods released a line of cavalry charging across the fields. Suicide, or at least that was the impression it was meant to give.

On the fields the enemy was slow to appreciate the new threat, but when the cavalry was joined by moving armour the attack became apparent for everyone. Two hundred horsemen and eight outworlders. Trindai grimaced. The two hundred were there for show only. To give the impression of a threat easily dealt with, but primarily to be seen. They would not add to the battle apart from dying.

It was something he had to accept. Sending men into battle was ordering them to die. It was rational in all its insanity, but sending men into battle knowing that they would never even get to use their weapons grated against his conscience. It was simply immoral.

The dying started.

Colonel Berdaler ordered the retreat. The massed line of horses dispersed as quickly as possible and a desperate flight to safety begun. The outworlders continued on their path forward. This was where their screening would count.

Trindai saw how they unleashed a hailstorm of missiles into groups of enemy soldiers. Any group daring to use their weapons became a target, but they had weapons. Most of them didn't even manage to stop his outworlders in their tracks, but they'd been warned of real cannons, and suddenly it became apparent that not even moving armour was invincible.

The eight showed that they were as prepared to face death as any soldier in the imperial army. One moment they were charging ahead and the next a blinding white light left only seven of them. They charged on.

Trindai ordered the rest of his men to show themselves and the forest released rank after rank of pike men. They marched on in good order, but so thinly spread he shuddered even though he had given the order himself. Bait, they were nothing but bait.

It was time to return to Verd. He faced a long afternoon of death and panic, but for the first time Trindai believed most of his men would survive the day. It would take days, eightdays even, before all survivors returned. Those who did at all. A lot would desert, and he didn't blame them. They had been lied to. He had made certain they were never told the truth about what would happen this day.

A second set of banners went up over a rooftop they had scouted earlier and were abandoned.

Behind him the slaughter continued as the enemy slowly started to make effective use of their superior weaponry.

As a grenade took the barn Trindai ordered the rest of the mines armed. He would have to live with this order, but it was a must if the rest of them would stand any chance to make it back to Verd.

They were marching back in small groups when the mines started exploding. He never even knew if it was the enemy or his own soldiers who triggered them, but he knew for certain that any imperial soldier left on the fields was dead. Mines or no mines, it didn't matter.

***

Heinrich shook his head for the third time. Granita could plead as much as she liked, but he wasn't going to release his helmet to her.

She could have bullied someone else in his unit to lend her their helmet, but the holo casting came over the command channel only, and only he had a feed of what happened just west of the launch port.

It was not pretty. He could understand the rationale behind what General de Laiden was doing, even why the TADAT left behind followed him, but it didn't make watching the madness any easier.

At least Brigadier Idiot Goodard lacked even basic knowledge of what he could expect from Otherworld soldiers, and the federation troops handled their enemy as if they were some kind of local guerilla back on Earth. That gave them time to act and react in ways soldiers equipped with spears and crossbows should never have been given the chance to in the first place.

When the third body walker went down the TADAT finally decided they had had enough and retreated. On their way back they poured out the last of their anti personnel munitions and made it into the forest from which they had arrived.

Heinrich sighed with relief as he saw them temporarily safe. They had given as good as they took though. Now it was time for the insufficient help he was able to provide. Twice his two launchers roared and the four guided missiles he had brought screamed into the air. Within minutes four armoured vehicles would be gone, and that would force Goodard to assemble his anti missile defences More time gained, but Heinrich wished he'd been back with his unit. They had enough short range missiles to turn another fifteen vehicles into burning wrecks, and that should have been enough to give Goodard a reason to halt.

Heinrich growled at himself, but he had his orders. Sometimes staying out of harms way was more frightening than risking his life, and this was such a time.