Colony defense was fundamentally an exercise in numerical inventory reconciliation.
If the incoming threat mass didn’t exceed the moving discharge capacity of the defensive emplacements, the tactical outcome was exactly predetermined before the first shot was fired.
In the upper fighting gallery of the central gatehouse outer gatehouse, Giles Croft stood before the wide embrasure with his brass sighting scope and his lined clipboard.
Through the polished glass aiming cross, the five hundred warriors of the Broken Horn were forming their final assault battle-lines on the snow-covered plain four hundred yards away.
They were an intimidating sight to anyone unfamiliar with self-running defensive mechanics.
Scores of armored raiders beat their iron-bossed shields with short swords, chanting a rhythmic war song that sounded like howling wolves across the frozen wasteland.
Two huge wooden siege towers, armored in green ox-hides and spiked logs, creaked forward on massive eight-spoke wheels, pulled by teams of eight snorting mountain oxen.
Behind the towers, three thirty-foot battering rams on heavy wheeled frames rolled through the snow, pushed by teams of forty armored men.
Giles clicked his brass pencil and reviewed the settlement status readout on his HUD screen.
“Raid scale: five hundred hostiles,” Giles murmured to himself, tapping the pencil against his teeth. “One hundred and twenty combatant pawns on our walls, backed by two hundred and eighty support pawns running ammunition, boiling water, and medical supplies.”
He calculated the projectile ratios with calm, practiced smooth speed.
“Four thousand two hundred arrows divided by five hundred targets yields eight point four arrows per hostile entity. Factoring in twenty sabot bolts for the siege engines, two blunderbores loaded with six hundred and forty chilled iron shot for the gatehouse choke point, and ninety-nine point eight percent defensive win probability.”
Giles looked at his pocket watch.
It was half past eight in the morning.
“If we maintain standard firing discipline,” Giles finished in a dry, matter-of-fact tone, “we should conclude this raid event by eleven o’clock. That leaves plenty of daylight to clean the raised stone road, process the prisoners into quarry labor, and finalize the Tier Two Township spreading paperwork before dinner.”
He lowered his clipboard, raised his arms above his head. Then he gave a long, leisurely stretch that ended in a broad, contented yawn.
Across the castle wall gallery, sixty nervous guard post archers and quarry constables watched him in stunned silence.
Captain Kenneth Drake stood by the center crenel, his knuckles whitening against his ten-foot iron-shod pacing rod.
Kenneth turned his head, staring at Giles with wide, incredulous eyes.
Then a slow, fierce grin spread across the scarred veteran’s face.
Kenneth pointed his pacing rod toward the enemy host. That turned to address his shivering line of archers.
“Look at him,” Kenneth called out, his voice ringing like an iron bell above the howling wind. “Look at the Lord Baron. Five hundred howling cutthroats on our doorstep with siege towers and rams, and he’s yawning. He’s bored.”
The archers looked at Giles, who was casually wiping dust from his sighting scope lens with a clean linen handkerchief.
“He has already counted their graves,” Kenneth declared, his eyes blazing with ferocious confidence. “He has already calculated how many hours it takes to sweep their broken bones into the gorge. Stand firm on your posts, men of Grey Crag. The Lord Master builder has already written their defeat into the living stone.”
A wave of fierce, electric confidence rippled down the four hundred yards of castle walls.
Fear vanished from the young constables’ faces.
Archers checked their greased needle-point arrow tips with steady hands. Quarrymen hefted fifty-pound granite coping stones with eager grins.
Master Caleb Thorne-Wood adjusted his boiled-leather helmet, slapping the heavy oak breastwork with a calloused palm.
“Let them crash against the granite,” Caleb said firmly. “We’re the mountain. We’re the stone.”
Giles blinked, looking up from his lens in mild confusion.
He hadn’t intended to deliver an inspiring military address. He had simply been calculating labor scheduling and town meal times.
Yet if the local pawns derived a high-morale combat buff from his routine biometric fatigue response, there was no practical reason to disabuse them of the notion.
Before mounting the upper platform, Giles had inspected the ground-floor casualty clearing station established in the vaulted undercroft of the gatehouse.
Sister Teresa had transformed the damp stone room into a model of cold and exact field sanitation.
Two iron cooking pots of water boiled continuously over charcoal fire bowls. It filled the air with the sharp, clean steam of steeped pine needles and dried chamomile.
Rows of clean wooden stretchers padded with straw ticks lined the walls, each covered in freshly laundered linen sheets.
On a heavy pine bench lay three wooden chests containing rolled linen bandages, bone needles, gut stitches, and baked-clay jars of willow-bark analgesic spirit-extract.
“All personnel instructed in basic wound dressing,” Teresa reported, demonstrating her hand-washing procedure in a basin of hot lye soap. “No bandage touches flesh without first being scalded in boiling water. We shall allow no rot-weavers or swamp fever to take our defenders from behind.”
“Pathogen control is eighty percent of casualty mitigation,” Giles agreed. “Infection claims three times as many soldiers as battlefield trauma. Keep the floor dusted with wet lime plaster to suppress bacterial growth.”
Teresa nodded with cold and exact gravity. “The water is pure, and the bandages are white as mountain snow. If blood must flow, the balm of the Sovereign is ready.”
Giles then climbed to the flanking castle walls to verify the heavy artillery emplacements.
In the north castle wall, Master Borin Bronze-Lung stood over the heavy twisting force springald. He ran his fine measuring tongs over the bronze winding ratchet.
Beside the weapon, fifty armor-piercing sabot bolts rested in felt-lined racks, their hardened chisel heads glistening with a thin protective coat of sheep fat.
“Ratchet pawls engaged,” Borin reported, pointing to the tuned brass height arc. “Twenty-two degrees height locked on Cairn Three at three hundred yards. If that lead siege tower crosses the boundary line, the bolt will take its wheel hub off like a cleaver through mutton.”
“Remember the launch procedure,” Giles reminded the dwarven gunner. “Seat the pine sabot cup snugly against the bowstring nock. The sabot must take the rail friction to preserve the copper fin pitch. Once the projectile clears the muzzle, the sabot peels away in flight.”
“Aye, the wooden shoe flies off and the iron chisel bites,” Borin grunted, slapping the heavy bronze frame. “Toby and I ran ten dry cycles this morning. Three clicks of the crank, drop the bolt, yank the lanyard. We can loose two bolts a minute with a three-man crew.”
In the floor of the outer gatehouse gallery directly beneath Giles’s feet, Borin’s apprentices were completing the mounting of the two Blunderbore Canister Batterers.
The heavy four-hundred-pound bronze-iron barrels were bedded into solid white oak cradle carriages. It was locked in place with half-inch forged iron pivot pin straps.
The wide, flared bell muzzles were pointed straight down through the twin two-foot square murder holes cut into the solid granite floor.
Below those openings lay the enclosed, ten-foot-wide stone entry hall between the outer wooden gate and the inner iron drop-gate.
“Chambers primed, Lord Giles,” Borin called out, holding up a polished copper powder measure. “Two and a half pounds of corned black powder in each breech, packed tight with animal fat felt wadding.”
Borin tapped the wooden sabot cup that sat flush in the muzzle of the north gun.
“Three hundred and twenty chilled pig-iron balls in each cup,” Borin said, his copper-braided beard twitching with fierce delight. “Six hundred and forty iron marbles waiting to drop straight down into the entry hall. Touch-holes primed with sulfur flour. Say the word, and we sweep the hallway clean.”
“Keep the lanyards secured until the drop-gate drops,” Giles ordered. “We don’t discharge close-quarters canister into empty space. The weapon needs an enclosed rebound chamber to achieve maximum fragmentation thickness.”
“Understood,” Borin grunted, setting the friction igniters into the flash pans. “When the rats enter the cage, the dragon spits.”
Giles walked to the central murder hole, looking down into the narrow entry hall.
The outer gate was built of four-inch white oak baulks bound with iron straps.
Giles had instructed Caleb to leave the heavy timber leaves unlatched. He swung open by six inches as if the defenders had panicked and failed to bar the doors in their haste.
“Artificial choke point routing,” Giles muttered, checking the line of sight through the iron grating. “In game pathfinding logic, hostile units always calculate the path of minimum pushback. Confronted with an eighteen-foot stonework curtain wall and an apparently breached gateway, the enemy AI will inevitably route its main shock units directly into the outer gatehouse hall.”
Kenneth walked up beside him, leaning on his pacing rod.
“You’re leaving the front door open on purpose,” Kenneth said in a low, appreciative whisper. “Bronn will think our militia broke and fled before his horns. He’ll throw his best ram crew straight through that crack.”
“And once their entire battering ram assembly is inside the entry hall,” Giles said, “we release the balance weight latch. The outer drop-gate drops, sealing them in an enclosed granite chamber six feet wide and twenty feet long.”
“A slaughterhouse of stone,” Kenneth said, his voice dropping into quiet grimness. “With two blunderbores pointed straight down through the ceiling.”
“A controlled tactical confinement,” Giles corrected. “It concentrates moving crushing weight entirely within a non-combustible holding zone, sparing our civilian public works from collateral damage.”
Outside on the snow-swept plain, the Broken Horn army finished their deployment.
The two massive siege towers lumbered forward fifty yards, their ox teams urged on by whip-cracking drivers.
Around the towers marched three hundred heavily armored shock troops carrying long ash spears, curved falchions, and barbed grappling hooks.
At the front of the center column, Warlord Bronn halted his massive black destrier at the three-hundred-yard marker.
The warlord looked up at the eighteen-foot granite wall, then at the unbroken sheet of white ice that covered the twenty-foot moat from bank to bank.
To Bronn’s eyes, the frozen ditch was an open, level avenue of assault.
The warlord raised his burning two-handed greatsword high into the freezing air, the potion-made flames throwing greasy green light across his iron armor.
His voice boomed across the frozen snow like an avalanche.
“The ice holds,” Bronn roared, wheeling his stallion toward his vanguard. “The river is dead. The stone playhouse is ours for the taking.”
He brought the burning blade down in a savage, sweeping arc.
“Advance,” Bronn roared with blood-curdling fury. “Push the towers. Lay the fascines. Batter down their gate.”
Five hundred men screamed all at once.
The battle-horns of the Broken Horn shrieked an ear-splitting command to advance.
The front wave of one hundred heavily armored raiders broke into a sprint across the frozen plateau. He carried their heavy timber fascines straight toward the gleaming white surface of the moat.
On the castle walls above, Giles Croft snapped his pocket watch closed and slipped it into his waistcoat.
“Starting engagement,” Giles said calmly. “Kenneth, hold arrow fire until the vanguard enters the thaw boundary.”