The Translated Man and Other Stories - Chris Braak [85]
While John’s men, largely smugglers know as the Dockside Boys, were both racist and nationalist, the only thing they could be said to hate more than sharpsie foreigners were the gendarmes. Consequently, when an opportunity presented itself to not only interfere with the Committee for Public Safety’s plans and to kill the blue-armed men that so often disrupted their own operations, they leapt upon it. While Wyndham-Vie led his men down the narrow alley, the Dockside Boys immediately opened fire, sniping first at anyone that wore a captain’s hat.
The riflemen among the gendarmes found their attention divided between the snipers in the Vault and the sharpsies with their incendiary grenades on the barricade. Unable to mount a concerted attack on the barricade, they found themselves pinned. Only a handful of men, among them Edgar Wyndham-Vie himself (who had chosen to lead from the rear) managed to escape the ambush that would eventually be known as the High Street Slaughter.
Of course, without Wyndham-Vie’s men laying down cover, there was nothing to keep the sharpsies off the top of the barricades at Old Wall Square. When the bulk of the gendarmerie approached, they found themselves faced with a hail of stones and broken glass and bottles of explosive phlogiston that detonated in their midst, showering them with fire and razor-sharp shrapnel. The gendarmes were forced to retreat.
After half an hour of fighting in Red Lanes, the indigeae faction retreated back across the river, leaving the remaining gendarmes to break down the radicals. The men were arrested and then, because the Vaults in Old Bank were presently a war-zone, summarily executed. The now-diminished force of gendarmes headed back towards Old Bank, only to meet the Dockside Boys halfway, and found themselves pinned down at Thurston Square.
The indigeae of Bluewater had mostly given up on their revenge, except for a small mob of about twenty that found its way to Indiga, broke into the home of Loren Hoge, who controlled most of the air-ship importation of phlogiston into Trowth, and dragged the man and his family out into the streets. Loren, his two wives, and his three oldest children were bludgeoned to death with paving stones. The two youngest children, both girls, had silver stars tattooed on their faces, and were left to wander homeless and anathema, according to indige tradition.
After the Committee’s disastrous assault on the sharpsie barricade, the Emperor stepped in. He ordered five hundred Lobstermen to an assault on the Rampling street barricade, accompanied by a small force of trolljrman artillery.
The Lobstermen, possessed of superhuman speed, raced beneath the hail of grenades towards the barricade, while the trolljrmen brought their cannons, bolted directly to the shells of their great, two-headed tortoises, into position. The Lobstermen drove the sharpsies down from the walls, and the trolljrmen began to demolish the barricade with the irregular thunder of their cannon-fire.
With the barricade breached, the Lobstermen pressed into the center of the sharpsie-controlled area, with the gendarmes pouring in behind. Despite their preparation, they still found themselves hard-pressed to deal with the knife-wielding sharpsies. The agility of the snaggle-toothed inhumans was astounding; they leapt from low windows and walls to land on the broad backs of the Lobstermen, slashing wherever they could find unarmored flesh, and then springing away again to catch overhanging eaves or downspouts before a return attack could be made. They dropped into the midst of rushing gendarmes, heavy cleaver-knives whirling, huge jaws snapping, severing the soft human limbs with ease.
The attack into Old Bank was slowed by the vicious assault, and a handful of sharpsies took the opportunity to attack the trolljrmen tarrasques that had been left behind