Left behind were those who’d agreed to fight. Andy, Walnut, George the Gut, and a motley group of perhaps a hundred gathered from the Docks and the refugees. As usual, men of fighting age were notable by their absence—there were girls who’d helped out the old Leatherbacks, solid older men with gnarled, tanned skin the color of hardwood, boys on the cusp of manhood and Docks women in multicolored skirts. All they had in common was their willingness to defend their homes and an almost total lack of preparation for the rigors of combat.

Marcus had done the best he could with them, but he was well aware it wouldn’t be enough when the fighting got serious. About half of them had firearms, a mix of old muskets and pistols dug out of attics and basements and some hunting and fowling pieces. The rest carried clubs, knives, and spears, with the occasional sword liberated from some old soldier’s box of memorabilia. Twenty of the volunteers, those who’d proven to have the best arms in trials in the alleys behind the church, also carried burlap sacks over their shoulders. Each bag held three tin balls, each of which was stuffed with a measure of the flash powder they’d liberated from the Patriot Guard convoys.

Hand grenades, Marcus had learned at the War College, had gone out of military fashion about a hundred years ago. The theory sounded good, but in practice they’d proven to be more of a danger to their wielders than the enemy. Fuses were unreliable at the best of times, and under battlefield conditions the bombs often failed to go off at all or, more problematically, detonated too soon. In addition, when the grenadiers came under fire, the odds of some poor bastard getting shot after lighting his grenade but before throwing it were fairly high, and the consequential chain reaction could be catastrophic. After decades of experimentation, the Royal Army had followed the example of most other militaries and converted its grenadiers—who had always been required to be taller and stronger than the average soldier—into elite shock troops rather than bomb-throwers.

These hand grenades were crude things indeed, but they had the advantage that they had no fuses or other mechanisms. Viera had assured Marcus that they would explode of their own accord if they were tossed into a fire, and that was all he expected of them. They weren’t intended for use against the Patriot Guard, but were very particular weapons for facing a very particular foe.