Whether that was a good idea… he'd find out As the redcoats advanced on Bredestown, riflemen harassed them from trees alongside the road. Victor made sure all the snipers he sent forward wore the green coats that marked uniformed Atlantean rebels. General Howe had started hanging snipers captured in ordinary coats. He'd sent the Atlanteans a polite warning that he intended to treat such men as franc-tireurs. Victor's protest that not all Atlanteans could afford uniforms and that green coats were in short supply fell on deaf ears.

Under the laws of war, Howe was within his rights to do as he did. And Victor knew some of the snipers were plucky amateurs.

not under his command or anyone else's but their own. He also knew hanging them was more likely to make Atlanteans hate England than to make them cower in fear. If General Howe couldn't see that for himself, he watered the rebellion with the blood of patriots. The more he did, the more it would grow.

The redcoats came on despite the snipers. The riflemen who obeyed Victor Radcliff's orders fell back into Bredestown. They went on banging away at the enemy from the houses on the northern outskirts of town. If the Atlantean Assembly wanted Victor to fight for Bredestown, he would do his best to oblige that august conclave.

General Howe went on learning from some of his earlier battles. He didn't send his men against Bredestown in neat rows, but in smaller, more flexible storming parties. If this is the game you're playing, he seemed to say, I can play, too.

And so he could… up to a point. But Victor had posted more riflemen in some of the houses closer to the Brede. As the redcoats pushed deeper into Bredestown after cleaning out the first few houses there, they got stung again.

English field guns unlimbered. A couple of them set up too close to their targets. Riflemen started picking off the gunners before the cannon could fire. The redcoats hastily dragged the guns farther away.

Cannon balls could knock houses down. A roundshot smashing into a wall sounded like a pot dropped on cobbles. Through his spyglass, Victor watched the redcoats cut capers when their artillerymen made a good shot. After a while, the riflemen fell silent.

That had to be what General Howe was waiting for. Satisfied he'd beaten down the opposition, he finally formed his men in neat lines and marched them into Bredestown.

Closer and closer they came. At Victor's orders, the surviving riflemen-a larger fraction than Howe would have guessed-held their fire. He wanted the redcoats to draw near. General Howe might have learned something from his earlier fights, but he hadn't learned enough.

Several houses in Bredestown concealed not riflemen but the meager Atlantean field artillery. The guns were double-shotted with canister. Half a dozen musketeers standing near Victor fired in the air to signal the field guns to shoot.

They roared as near simultaneously as made no difference The blasts of lead balls tore half a dozen great gaps in the English lines. Even from close to half a mile away, Victor heard the screams and moans of the wounded and dying.

He'd hoped such a disaster would give the redcoats pause He knew it would have given him pause. But he'd reckoned without the English soldiers' doggedness. They stepped over their dead and injured comrades, re-formed their lines, and trudged forward once more.

Two or three of the Atlantean guns fired again. Fresh holes opened in the ranks of General Howe's men. Again, the redcoats re-formed. Again, they came on. Teams of horses pulled some of the field guns back toward the Brede. Victor realized he would lose the rest-and lost guns were an almost infallible mark of a lost battle.

"Dammit, I didn't intend to win this one," Victor muttered.

But he hadn't intended to lose cannon, either. "What's that, sir?" Blaise asked.

"Nothing," Victor said, which wasn't quite true. Up till now, everything had gone the way he'd planned it. The field guns had taken such a toll among the redcoats, he'd started to hope they would cave in. If you let your hopes take wing like that, you commonly ended up sorry afterwards.

Victor did, in short order. His riflemen and musketeers fought from house to house, but they were outnumbered. And, he discovered, the redcoats didn't seem inclined to take prisoners in this fight. Anyone they caught, they shot or bayoneted. He didn't like the reports he got on that, but he also didn't know what he could do about it.

Some of the smoke that rose from Bredestown had the fireworks smell of black powder. More and more, though, brought a fireplace to mind. Dry timber was burning. How much of Bredestown would be left by the time the fight for the place was over?

A runner came back to him. "Colonel Whiting's compliments, sir," the man panted, "but he doesn't know how much longer he'll be able to hold his position. The redcoats are pressing pretty hard."

When Dominic Whiting said the enemy was pressing pretty hard, any other officer would have reported disaster some time earlier. From what Victor had seen. Whiting liked his rum, but he also liked to fight. Not only that, he was good at it, which not all aggressive men were.

"My compliments to the colonel, and tell him he's done his duty," Victor said. "I don't want him getting cut off. He is to retreat to the bridges over the Brede. Tell him that very plainly, and tell him it is an order from his superior."

"Yes, sir. I'll make sure he understands." The runner sketched a salute and hurried away.

Victor Radcliff sighed. When General Howe told one of his subordinates to do something, he could be confident the man would jolly well do it. Discipline in the English army wasn't just a matter of privates blindly obeying their sergeants. It ran up the whole chain of command.

An Atlantean officer would obey his superior… if he happened to feel like it, if he thought obeying looked like a good idea, if Saturn aligned with Jupiter and Mars was in the fourth house. He wouldn't do it simply because he'd got an order. If Atlanteans didn't love freedom and individualism, they never would have risen against King George. They wanted to go on doing as they pleased, not as someone on the other side of the ocean wanted them to do. A lot of the time, they didn't want to do as someone on this side of the ocean wanted them to do, either.

How were you supposed to command an army full of dedicated freethinkers, anyway? Carefully, Victor thought. It would have been funny-well, funnier-if it didn't hold so much truth. You could tell a redcoat what to do. He'd do it, or die trying. If an Atlantean didn't see a good reason for an order, he'd tell you to go to hell.

To Victor's relief, Dominic Whiting did see a reason for the order to fall back. So did his subordinate commanders. If he couldn't get his majors and captains to obey, he had as much trouble as Victor did with him. The order to retreat must have looked like a good idea to everybody-one more proof that Howe's men were pressing Whiting hard.

An old man leaning on a stick came up to Victor. "Look what they've done to our town!" he shouted in a mushy voice that proclaimed he'd lost most of his teeth.

"I'm sorry, sir," Victor said. The old man cupped his left hand behind his ear. Victor said it again, louder this time.

"Sorry? Sorry! Why didn't you stay away from Bredestown, then?" the graybeard said. "They would have, too, and everything would have been fine."

Things didn't work that way, no matter how much Victor wished they did. Explaining as much to the old man struck him as more trouble than it was worth. And he had other things to worry about. He'd picked troops to get his men back over the bridges in good order. The retreating soldiers didn't want to listen to them. Atlanteans seldom wanted to listen to anybody-one more demonstration of the thought that had occurred to him not long before.