The Sands of Saturn - Chapter 21

Southern Ériunia

It was getting dark. The rain had finally let up that afternoon, but the roads were still awful. The army had slowed to a crawl, barely covering a couple of miles every day, and Velius was starting to think they should just set up a fortified camp and wait it out until the roads dried. The only problem with that was, he didn’t want to get hemmed in by the Carthaginians, who could easily surround them. The greatest strength of the legions over the Carthaginian phalanxes was their mobility.

Right now, his line could outstretch at least the phalanx part of the opposing army, which would leave it exposed. The Carthaginian allies were both less of a problem, because of their lack of organization and tendency to charge straight in, and more of a problem, because of their sheer numbers. Numbers he could deal with, but again, only as long as he was mobile. Which at the moment, they weren’t.

“It’s getting late,” Gordianus, the seventh legion’s second in command, said. “If you want to fortify the camps, we’re going to have to stop soon.”

He was right, Velius thought, although it was hard to tell, since the rain had blocked out the sun for days, with the only difference in day and night being gradations of darkness. Velius had been pushing it, hoping to get just a little more distance, even though he knew better. With this kind of ground, with the men’s feet sinking ankle-deep in mud, they were actually working harder than they would have had they marched miles longer on dry ground.

He needed them rested. They’d moved into the envelope the enemy scouts had created, to the point that his lead elements had even seen some of the enemy horsemen. His cavalry pursued them, but they were locals and knew the land better than his men. Velius could feel them out there, but none of his allies had been this far south, meaning they were blundering around in the dark, blind. If they could hit the coast, at least they’d have something to key off of, but until then or until the rain let up, allowing his men to mobile again, all he could do was crawl forward a little at a time.

Still, that didn’t mean he should be taking stupid chances.

“Okay, let’s call it a day. Send word to the fourth and ninth legions, I want more distance between each camp. At least half a mille passus between each camp.”

“Is that wise?” Gordianus asked. “With that much distance, if the enemy does find us, they can get in between our camps, and cut us off from support.”

“Yes, but if we’re all together, they can surround our entire force, which completely negates our advantages while playing into theirs. They have a large force, but not enough of one to cover that much distance.”

“They could surround each camp in turn,” Gordianus pointed out.

“They could, but then they’ve split their forces up. They couldn’t easily support each other and they’d have to fight parts of their forces in two directions. It puts them in a weaker position than if they had us all grouped together.”

“As you say,” Gordianus said.

Velius knew this was his way of saying he’d follow orders even though he didn’t agree with them, but Velius could live with that. Gordianus was a good man, but he had trouble seeing the entire battlescape, at times.

“Make sure they set up the towers and watchers,” Velius said.

The towers were a new touch and he’d already heard some grumbling that it was pointless. When the camps were next to each other, a messenger could travel with news faster than the shuttered lanterns could blink their codded signals, and the men up in the towers were closer to the rain and wind, making for an uncomfortable night. He’d looked over the Consul’s plan for these towers before he left, and even without the new spyglasses, at half a mille passus, they could transmit signals faster than any messenger and without the chance of the message being intercepted.

Of course, maybe all his precautions would be for naught. Best case scenario, nothing would happen and they’d be on the move again in the morning. If something did happen, however, Velius at least wanted to be set up so that the battle would follow in his favor.

***

Devnum

It was after midnight when Ky rode into the city, almost knocking over the city guards as he blew past them. The men were startled, but recognized the Consul enough to get out of the way, instead of intercepting him. Sophus had heard enough to know Lucilla had been taken to her rooms in the palace, since there wasn’t much for the physicians to do. With her wounds closed up, miraculously from their point of view, they couldn’t do much beyond force-feeding her honeyed water and hoping she recovered on her own.

That, at least wouldn’t do her any harm and the nanites could use the glucose in the honey as they fought to repair her system. Ky had other concerns. In the two days he’d ridden, stopping only long enough to exchange horses, her condition had started to deteriorate. The few active medical nanites she still had in her system were barely able to keep the internal bleeding under control and hadn’t been able to address any of the damage beyond the bleeding. Ky’s hurry was because the stabilization they had achieved had been very temporary, and that window was quickly closing.

Her lungs were still not able to get enough oxygen in her blood, causing add-on effects that, if left unchecked, would cause damage to other organs, including her brain. Worse, her kidneys, where the most serious damage had happened, were not processing and cleaning fluids, causing a rise in potassium levels, weakening her heart, and creating fluid retention, which had caused her arms and legs to begin swelling dangerously.

Most troubling, the over-taxed nanites were beginning to fail. There were few enough left in her system as it was, and it wouldn’t take many more before her she reached the point of no return. Medical nanites were powerful tools, but they had limits and without modern surgical techniques and organ cloning available, there would be no hope of bringing her back.

Seeing his face, her guards moved quickly to get out of Ky’s way before he trampled them in his rush to get to her. As he burst into her room, he was completely focused on her and the information that started to flood across his vision as Sophus finally got into range of the altered nanites in her system and was getting full readouts instead of the simplified ones it had been limited to through the comm. Ky barely noticed her guards as they followed him into the room, ignoring all of them as he knelt beside her bed.

They were curious, but unalarmed. He didn’t blame them. On the outside, she looked peaceful, almost sleeping. They had no way of knowing the battle that was raging inside her system, or how badly she was losing it.

Ky leaned forward, pressing his lips firmly to hers. Sophus had already collected as many nanites as Ky could spare without inhibiting future replication and altered them for her system, encasing them in a molecular shell to keep his system from seeing them as invaders that had suddenly appeared. Ky’s kiss, while being full of love and worry for her, was also the delivery method for this bundle, which tumbled into her system, its shell instantly being ripped apart by several of the nanites Sophus had ordered to stand ready.

“Are we in time?” Ky said, out loud, which was unusual even for him and a sign of the stress he was under.

“Consul?” Modius asked, unsure what Ky meant, or even if he was talking to them.

“I believe so, commander. The damage is extensive and these nanites are not functioning at the same level of efficiency as they would for you. However, I believe the damage done is completely reversible. You will need to stay nearby her for some time, so that I may have direct control over the repair. You will also need to reduce your physical activity so that more resources are available to produce additional medical nanites. I will have to push the ones just delivered into her system beyond their capabilities, and they will burn out, meaning you will need to donate more to her recovery. She will also need to remain comatose for the time being. It could be several days before she wakes.”

“I’m not going anywhere. Anything you need, just tell me,” Ky said, subvocalizing this time before turning to one of her guards. “My lictore should be a day or so behind me. Make sure they know where to find me and inform the emperor where I am, if he needs me. For now, I will be unable to leave her side, but she will not be harmed if anyone has to come speak to me.”

Her guards looked at each other as Ky settled in the chair next to her, seemingly to do nothing, and backed out of the room. He knew his actions probably seemed strange to them, barging in, kissing her, and then proceeding to do nothing while refusing to leave her, but there wasn’t any way he could explain it, that would make sense to them.

He sat in silence, watching a data feed that Sophus provided him giving updates on her condition and responses to the nanites, but this wasn’t a quick process and everything was in Sophus’s metaphorical hands, so he was more consoling himself than actually doing anything useful.

“Perhaps your time would be better spent working on updated instructions I have compiled for the various projects.”

“Probably, but as long as she’s in this condition, I couldn’t concentrate on anything else.”

“Why not? You know what is being done for her and as of now you know there is nothing else you can do for her. Losing focus over her condition seems a poor allocation of your time and resources.”

“I know it probably seems like that to you, but people aren’t made that way. We worry over things we know we can’t affect, mostly because there isn’t anything we can do about them. If there was, we’d worry less, since we’d have something to do.”

“It seems inefficient.”

“I know. Just consider it one of our many peculiarities. It comes with being human.”

“I see,” Sophus said, falling silent.

Ky sat, one hand resting on her shoulder, still as a statue, for almost an hour. It was still too early to tell if the new nanites were going to have the effects to reverse all the damage, and he spent most of that time referencing Sophus’s files, trying to understand everything the AI was doing. He had a rudimentary training in emergency medicine given to all pilots, but that had assumed they would all be augmented to the same level Ky was. Even if he had more training what Sophus had done so far for her protection, and what it was doing now, was well beyond what any of these systems had been designed for. No one but Sophus could understand what the data he was seeing actually meant.

Ky was still sitting in that same position when the door opened unceremoniously and almost an hour later, the emperor strode in unannounced. Ky was so focused on watching the data that at first he didn’t register the Emperor’s presence.

“Your Majesty,” Ky said after several long heartbeats and stood. “I’m sorry, I was distracted.”

The emperor’s eyes first went to his daughter who, for all outside appearances, seemed completely unchanged, laying in the same place she had been the last time he’d been in this room.

“Can you help her?” he asked.

His voice wasn’t that of a man of power, a leader of a new empire with thousands of subjects at his command. It was that of a father, worried for the life of his child.

“I think so. I’m doing what I can, but it will take time. She was severely wounded and the repairs to her system are not easy.”

“I know as well as anyone the miracles you can perform. It’s just hard to see her like this. I was hoping …”

“I know,” Ky said as the Emperor’s voice trailed off. “While you’re poisoning was serious, it hadn’t had a lot of time to damage your body beyond the sickness it created, unlike what the blade did to her.”

“Thank you for coming. I still don’t know how you managed to get here so fast, since we only sent a messenger to you yesterday, but I’m glad you’re here. The healers told him that, although her wounds healed miraculously, most people who entered the wakeless sleep, rarely come out of it, and to not get my hopes up.”

Ky didn’t have a response for that, since nothing he said would make sense. Gunpowder and telescopes and steam engines he could explain to them. They might seem magical, but they followed the processes of the observable world. Seeing inside a working body was impossible for the people of this time, leaving them to devise all kinds of miraculous or even mundane explanations for why people sometimes got sick and died. He could tell them about viruses and bacteria all he liked, but there was no way for them to understand what that meant, since they couldn’t see them.

“Can you … how much of your attention does her treatment take? I don’t want to distract you from your treatments of her, but if you are able …”

Ky was actually impressed. He knew the emperor cared for his daughter and he was clearly concerned for her condition, but in spite of his personal tragedy, he still had an empire to run and he hadn’t forgotten it.

“I am, although you probably know more about what is happening than I do,” Ky pointed out.

“I doubt that.”

As far as he knew, Lucilla had never discussed with her father their ability to speak over long distances, although considering the multiple times he or she had responded to something happening to the other before word could ever reach them, it was very possible he hadn’t needed to be told to figure it out.

“Okay, maybe not more, but as much. We’re behind on a lot of projects, although with Hortensius’s recovery, or at least being mobile again, I understand they’ve all gotten underway again. I’m most anxious to get the semaphore stations up, including the temporary, mobile ones we can send over to Ériu. The king’s last message sounded like he might be considering joining the empire, which would go a long way to helping out our supply issues. With some of our advancements in farming, their yields could well exceed their needs, producing enough to help cover our shortfalls here and feed the legions when they start on to the continent, but only if we get it in the ground soon.”

“I don’t know if we can rely on that happening. Even when we do finish conquering the island for them, they’re joining the alliance will take time. More than it did for us to form it in the first place, since they won’t have the pressure of an invading army to defeat like we did. I’m also not convinced our victory is as assured as you are. Velius is still young for a Legate and this is his first independent command. We’ve received very little word about Velius’s progress south once, especially once he passed the mountains. And I hear the weather has turned against him.”

“Have faith in Velius. He’s a good man.”

“I hope your right,” The emperor said.

Southern Ériunia

Velius sat in his tent, unable to sleep. He knew he should be resting, since tomorrow would be a long day of either marching or fighting, but he had the feeling he always did before a fight, and it was keeping him awake.

The last report from the scouts included multiple contacts with Carthaginian allied scouts. From the locations of the contacts, Velius was almost certain their armies were close and the odds were good they’d hit each other in the morning, once both armies started marching again.

He was just going over, for the thirtieth time, his options for such an engagement, when a tremendous shout started from what sounded like the northwestern edge of the camp. There wasn’t a doubt in his mind what it was. The enemy army had been out there and knew the area. They wouldn’t just be stumbling around in the dark. The Carthaginians weren’t idiots. They’d been taught time and again that the Britannian’s superior tactics could beat them, even when massively outnumbered. The easiest way to get around the Britannians’ better skills in the field would be to hit them in camp, when the men were asleep and their arms stacked. Which is why Velius insisted on having a full cohort in armor and ready to fight, rotating through in three-hour blocks as a reaction force. His commanders thought he was being absurd, since it meant they’d have to spend more time in camp to still give everyone enough rest to march the next day, but Velius had insisted.

The noise was steadily increasing, with screams and yelling, along with noise through the rest of the camp as men began to wake and react to the attack.

Velius was halfway into his armor when an aide rushed into his tent.

“Alert the commanders. All cohorts are to report to the preassigned positions.”

They’d planned for this and done drills most nights so the men knew what to do, even though they’d been exhausted. Finally armored, Velius ducked through the opening of his tent, almost running into Gordianus, who had been about to duck into his tent.

“What’s the situation?”

“It looks like the entire damn army. Hundreds are pouring out of the woods every minute.”

“The defenses?”

“Holding, for now. The ditches are really slowing them down and the men are pouring fire from their arcuballista into them, although another thirty minutes, there’ll be enough bodies in the ditches they’ll just be able to walk over their friend’s bodies.”

The defenses included two trenches dug around the circumference of the camp with stakes at the bottom of each, a set of angled stakes in the rise between the two trenches, followed by a wall of larger, solid logs sharpened at the end, hammered deep into the ground. It was time-consuming to set up and take down each day, but today it would pay off for them.

“Have we signaled the other legions?”

“I just came from the signal tower. They are not under attack yet. It looks like the enemy only had a rough idea of where we stopped for the night, and are only coming from the North West. The first contact was only a hundred men or so, and is only now building, so my guess is they stumbled into us and are concentrating on where they know they have contact. Between the clouds blocking the moon and the heavy trees onto our north, they’ve probably been as much in the dark about our location as we’ve been about theirs.”

“It won’t take them long to start wrapping around the camp, trying to find a weak spot in our defenses.”

“Or at least cut us off. The other legions are already gathering their men to set up lines on either side of our camp, extending south.”

“No. Signal them to not come at us. I want both to march south a mille passus beyond where the ninth camped, and then split, one cutting east and one cutting west. I agree we’re about to be completely surrounded. If they fight like the Caledonians, they’ll just pile in wherever there’s space instead of setting up proper offensive lines, so they’ll be completely massed, at least until our defenses break and they can collapse in on us. I want them to circle wide around us and then come back, one from each direction, hitting the armies surrounding us from either side.”

“That could take hours, especially with the ground like it is.”

“I know, although they’ll be better off the main roads, where it isn’t being torn up by three legions. Marching over the same ground. Tell them to push as hard as they can. If we can catch them between the two of us, we can end this right now.”

“What about our allies. They were camped north of us and must be engaged by now.”

“There’s nothing we can do for them. If they listened to my suggestion, they’d have some kind of defensive position set up, and hopefully can hold out long enough for our counter-attack. If we try and march out to save them now, we’ll just be opening up the hole the Carthaginians are looking for, and get us all killed. Now go. Signal them.”

Gordianus rushed off to the signal tower, to get the message sent. Velius hoped he was in time. The last thing they needed now was to compress all three legions in together. With Vibius and Aelius still mobile, they had a chance.

The north end of the camp was chaos as men continued to file into lines. With his men hemmed in, they were starting to become easy targets for arrows that began to rain in on them from the tree line the Britannians had created when cutting down the clearing for the camp. The fortification may be keeping the Carthaginians at a distance for now, but it also meant there was enough separation that their archers could fire with impunity, and spread out to cover the entire perimeter of the camp, they didn’t have the manpower to allow a steady loss of men to them.

“Testudo,” Velius called out to the commanders nearest him, and heard as the command rippled down the line.

The men, except those in the first row, began putting their large shields over their heads, creating an overhead covering, protecting the entire ten-man deep line from arrow fire. There had been some alterations to the version of this maneuver his men had used before the introduction of the arcuballista. With the shields lifted up over their heads, there wasn’t room to draw a bow and fire from this formation, so it was generally used for getting close to a wall or fortification where arrows were a problem. The new arcuballista changed all of that. Previously, it hadn’t been a widely used weapon, because its range was well short of a standard arrow and because it didn’t have the stopping power to get past shields or even some armor.

The new version the Consul had introduced had a longer range, although still less than the bows used by a trained archer and, more importantly, significantly more stopping power. Instead of holding their shields up, the front row angled them slightly just as they did on the battlefield, using them as a firing platform. It did open up a wider gap in the testudo, but being able to fire back was worth the danger.

Initially, the rate of fire didn’t slacken as the testudo formed, because the men who’d already loaded arcuballista’s passed them forward to allow firing without reloading, but after a minute their rate slowed down drastically, with most of the men only managing two shots a minute. Although the Roman archers and even some of the dismounted cavalry, neither of whom could benefit from the testudo’s protection, had gotten into the game and begun to add fire, the slower rate of fire was having its effect.

Carthaginians were getting to the wall. Although the gaps in the logs were too narrow to allow a man through them, they did allow the men to get a handhold on individual logs and begin pulling. His legionnaires did their best to target these men first, but it wasn’t working. As they began to surround his fortress, the Carthaginian allies, who made up the bulk of this assault so far, had started to get logs to move in the soft ground. They couldn’t pull them out entirely, but they could push some forward and some backward, widening the gaps and allowing me through. As they did, the men in the front ranks closest to the breakthroughs had to sling their arcuballista and pull their gladius to fight back, which slowed the rate of fire even more.

The defenses had kept them out for just under thirty minutes. First one, then two, then a dozen holes appeared in the wall, allowing men to pour through the gaps and begin engaging his lines. They hadn’t done so without a cost. A thick carpet of bodies covered the perimeter of the camp, not that it stopped them. Like the Caledonians, their personal bravery was something to admire, even if it did make it harder to carry over training or institutional memory of lessons their armies had learned in the past.

The one benefit of their breakthrough was that the arrows began to stop, or at least move deeper into the camp.

“Form lines!” he said yelled, the command again rippling down the line.

Although the men were already in line, they knew what the command meant, transitioning out of the testudo formation and back into their standard battle formation as more and more and more of the fortification was pulled down. It was dark and he couldn’t see the entire perimeter, but in every section he could see, men were fighting, pushing his line hard. They were now exactly where Velius hadn’t wanted them to be, hemmed in without any maneuverability, where the enemy could just smash into them, beating his force into paste.

“Get any auxiliary, including scouts and cavalry, armed and ready to fill any gaps or holes that appear. Except the men on the message tower and a few messengers.”

It was dark, but the tower would also work well as an observation post, giving him at least some idea of what was going on. The relief force wasn’t going to do well on the line, but it was all he had.

“Any word of the other two legions?” Velius asked Gordianus.

“No. It’s been an hour. Even if they left as soon as you sent the message and haven’t encountered the enemy, it would still be some time before they can get around the enemy and attack. The ground the way it is …”

“I know. I know,” Velius said, and then pointed off at a section of the line and looked at one of the tribunes nearby. “That section’s about to fold. Pull the back century from the next cohort and reinforce it.”

The man rode off and Velius went back into action. With the arrows no longer falling and his men no longer in the testudo, the back lines were able to reengage with their arcuballista. There still weren’t enough of the enemy, but between what they could get on target, the mounds of bodies and the still-standing parts of walls and barriers, the flood began to at least abate a little, making it manageable for his men, who stopped being pressed backward.

They were still losing men at a steady rate, and attrition was becoming a problem. Even picking up the shields of the fallen men, the cavalry and camp followers who were being thrown in as replacements weren’t lasting long, and he was quickly running out of reinforcements.

An hour passed and his men exhausted by the continued effort, were faltering. Several had just collapsed where they fought, unable to continue the fight. Even with the arcuballista and barriers, more of the enemy had become engaged with the entire fortification under pressure as more and more men tried to find a place to fight. The only thing that had saved his legion from collapsing so far was sheer number of bodies, some of his men but mostly the enemy, creating a new wall that the Carthaginians and their allies had to climb over to get to his men.

Even as he thought that, another section nearby began to collapse, its rear rows now either non-existent or filled with wounded, who could do little more than press back against attempts to push past the front row. When several legionnaires went down at once, the weakened rear went with them, creating a hole that the enemy began exploiting.

With no reserves of any kind left, Velius pulled his sword and charged towards the breach, yelling, “Follow me.”

The enemy, almost as exhausted as his men were, must have thought they were clear of the Britannian line, because they seemed surprised when Velius, the few guards that he hadn’t been able to send off as reinforcements and his aides slammed into them.

It had been years since Velius had been engaged in this level of fighting, but he still remembered the moves, his gladius stabbing out, catching men unprepared. Without a shield in his hands or being part of a century, packed together in mutual defense, this was a fight more suited for the men he faced than for himself. Thankfully, in addition to being surprised, the men were as exhausted as his, with the first two barely even reacting as he slashed through each. Realizing the danger in front of them, their resolve returned and the fight got harder. One of his aides went down, an axe embedded in his skull and Velius felt a hot sear as a sword thrust he deflected still managed to score along his side, opening up a shallow but painful gash.

Velius cut down the man who cut him, but more were starting to fill in the breech, which his tired legionaries were having trouble stopping. Five, then ten, then fifteen men launched themselves over the low wall of bodies separating the two armies and came at them, trying to push past Velius and his officers and tear open the line once and for all. Velius stiffened, preparing to meet the onrushing men.

Everyone, he included, stopped, their heads whipping to the west, at the sound of a trumpet call. Velius couldn’t see it over the mound of bodies in front of him, but the sound could only mean one thing.

The ninth legion had finally arrived.