Free Far Bright Star by Robert Olmstead Page B

him to find the gunner and to do it now. The machine gun continued its clattering, lurching, stuttering, coughing, and the bullets continued to fly in all directions. The gunner had no apparent experience as the first bullets went into the ground and then climbed and swung wildly left and right and shot their holes in the sky.
    He lay prone and perched on his elbows he wove his left arm through the sling of the Springfield. With Stableforth’s directions he found the gunner in the crosshairs. The man was squatting and bouncing behind the weapon that controlled him. He timed the shot to the beating of his heart, squeezed the trigger ever so gently and absorbed the kick.
    “You got him,” Stableforth yelled out.
    “That will teach them,” Turner cried out.
    “What are they doing now?” he said, resting his cheek on his bunched fist.
    “Just looking at him.”
    “Is there another?”
    “There doesn’t seem to be.”
    “Then there won’t be,” he said, and then thought, Now they need a machine gunner.
    Again, he measured their chances of life. It did not look good for the future but right now they were still alive. But now there were two dead and this would be unacceptable to them.
    He stood and addressed his men.
    “We are now the dead,” he said, his voice as hard as death itself, “so fight like you cannot be kilt.”
    He puffed out his chest and strutted across the front of their line. He carried the Springfield, the butt tucked into the pit of his arm.
    “They will come on us in a rush,” he said, his left arm sweeping out before him.
    He knew them well, their love of the shock tactic, the headlong charge a mile over rough ground, then eight hundred yards at full gallop, firing carbines and pistols. In the past the Dorados had paid dearly the fearful toll of attacking entrenched positions protected by concentric circles of coiled barbed wire. They jumped it and tangled in it, the wire barbs catching and hissing across the earth as it rose up to embrace what it’d caught in its snarling trap. Held in momentary arrest, the machine guns short hammer, and their bodies dying as threaded statues, upright and floating on wire spools as if sculpted for memorial.
    As with the ancient Macedonians, the Dorados preferred the moral superiority of close combat over fighting at a distance and it got them killed. It was this moral superiority that so badly winnowed their numbers when again and again, they charged and were entangled in barbed wire and cut down in swaths by Maxims. That’s how they’d come when they came. They didn’t know any other way.
    “Each man, do your best,” was the rest of the more he could say.
    Soon all hell would break loose and this would be a no-good place. The next actions would be motion undefined. Action requiring response. Action lurching off in directions beyond prediction. Knowing when to act yourself. And even then the odds unknown and changing so suddenly it would take a thousand patterns reconfiguring in an instant and an instant and an instant.
    “Come on,” he said, and as if summoned, mounted men pranced into view. He felt the judder in his stomach and snugged the Springfield to his ribs. What a story he would have to tell his brother when next he saw him.
    “Ask and ye shall receive,” he said, and stepped forward. He could feel the pounding of his arteries as they came on at a controlled pace and then broke into an all-out gallop, their ranks serried in their race to the enemy. They rode with reins in hand or reins in teeth and a pistol in each hand.
    As they came on, his wildness flared inside him and the certitude that he should exist and his existence would not be taken away from him. The violence was not exciting to him but simple in calculation and fascinating in experience, and he knew he was ready and would soon enough experience the relief of conflict. He looked to the sky, the paired and silver sun dogs residing there, an omen of the forthcoming. He stepped