The Road to Hell - eARC (61 page)

“I mean, surely all these people will put aside their local issues for the war. When all’s said, we’ve got to make sure we still have a Sharona—we’ll need something to fight over amongst ourselves after we smash the barbarians back into fairy dust! Speaking of which, did you see that new shooting gallery promo stunt?”

Trebar shook his head, giving her all the encouragement she needed to keep going. Running commentary was one of the things occasionally required when waiting for something truly newsworthy to occur. Thus some commentators needed to practice near monologues on random public interest topics just to fill the time. Drubeka didn’t need any more practice, but Trebar let her talk anyway.

“What’s the shooting gallery thing?”

“Well the reports are that Arcanans look pretty much like us, so they haven’t been able to come up with any really interesting new targets to sell. But some of the Voice reports say the Arcanans’ magic comes from some kind of crystals, so Tajvana’s shooting galleries have taken to making sugar crystal targets. The first one called it Metal vs. Magic, but the competitor’s branding of Crack the Crystal seems to sell a bit better. I gotta say, I like the idea. Triad forbid the Arcanans ever break as far back as Sharona, but at least if they do, all the shop keepers will know what to shoot at!”

The chances that a crystal powering anything truly deadly would be marked off with concentric circles and held fixed at twenty paces struck Trebar as unlikely, but he grunted acknowledgement.

Chapter Thirty-Three

February 14

“…and the last of the steam drays should be swayed aboard by midday, along with their mud tracks, Sir.” Battalion-Captain Rechair chan Ersam flipped his notepad closed with something between a grimace and a smile. “After that, gods only know what else will go wrong, but I don’t
think
it’s going to be my people’s fault when it does. Of course, I’ve been wrong before.”

“No! Really?!” Brigade-Captain Desval chan Bykahlar looked back at his silver-haired Delkrathian quartermaster in mock disbelief.

“Really, Sir,” chan Ersam replied solemnly. “Why, I remember the last time clearly. Three years ago, it was, I think, during those maneuvers at Fort Erthain.”

“Actually,” Regiment-Captain chan Therahk said dryly, “I believe there may have been at least a time or two since then.”

“I’d hate to disagree with a senior officer,” chan Ersam told 3rd Infantry Brigade’s executive officer,” but I
distinctly
remember that it was three years ago.”

“Are you sure you don’t mean three
weeks
ago?” Battalion-Captain Fernis chan Klaisahn, 3rd Brigade’s chief of staff sounded a bit more sour than the XO. Chan Klaisahn was a native Ternathian, six and a half feet tall and immensely strong, with huge hands, who’d won more than a few beers by straightening horseshoes without benefit of an anvil. Now he cocked his head at chan Ersam. “Something about Regiment-Captain chan Ferdain’s tents, I believe it was.”

“That was entirely TTE’s fault,” chan Ersam asserted. “
My
people had all the right paperwork. It wasn’t our fault TTE put them on the wrong train.”

That won a chuckle from the officers seated around the utilitarian desk. That desk sat in in the quayside office which had been made available to chan Bykahlar while the men of his brigade—and the mountain of food, equipment, and ammunition accompanying them—filed aboard the transports which would carry them across the Vandor to what ought to have been New Ternath. And while that chuckle was entirely genuine, it had a sour edge which had quite a lot to do with that logistical mountain, because the truth was that chan Ersam had a point.

The battalion-captain was a bit long in the tooth for his current rank (at fifty, he was only three years younger than chan Bykahlar and three years
older
than the XO), but that was entirely due to the six years he’d spent in forced medical retirement after losing his left leg below the knee in a training accident. It had taken him that long to browbeat the Personnel Board into letting him and his peg back into uniform. The sheer determination that accomplishment had required—coupled with his undoubted capability and the closeness of their ages—was one reason he got along so well with chan Bykahlar, and during his career, he’d probably seen just about every mistake a quartermaster could make. No doubt the Quartermaster’s Corps was thoroughly capable of inventing new ones, but that hadn’t happened in the case of the tentage for Hahlstyr chan Ferdain’s 312th Infantry Regiment. It wasn’t really the Trans-Temporal Express train masters’ fault, either, chan Bykahlar supposed. They were shoving things into every nook and cranny aboard the torrent of trains pouring down the chain of universes from Sharona to Traisum, and it was inevitable that at least some of those things would end up misplaced. In its way, that was stupid—military logistics depended on things arriving where (and when) they were
expected
; simply getting them there early if no one knew they were coming was pretty useless—but he certainly understood why it was happening.

What bothered him, truth to tell, was less that the tents had arrived when they did—they
had
been early, not late—than the reason the space they’d been pushed into had been available. According to the official lading transmitted down the Voice chain, that train ought to have been full of Uromathian infantry, at least as far Frayika. In chan Bykahlar’s opinion, the fact that it hadn’t been didn’t bode well.

“If pressed, I will concede—unwillingly, but concede—that I can’t really blame you for that one, Rechair,” he said after a moment. “Which doesn’t mean I won’t have your guts for gaiters if we have any major screwups on the move to the front.”

“In all seriousness, Sir, I don’t expect any.” Chan Ersam’s tone and expression were much more serious than they had been and he rested his palm on the closed notepad. “The truth is that all of the reports coming back from Shosara sound like this is actually going to work. Assuming TTE’s people are their usual efficient selves, we ought to be detraining in about five weeks in Resym.” He shook his head. “When I first heard about this brainstorm of the Division-Captain’s, I thought he was crazy. I was much too respectful to say so, of course, but any experienced quartermaster could’ve told him the whole idea was insane. Push an entire corps down a seventeen thousand-mile corridor through six different universes in only four months? With an ocean crossing thrown in for good measure, and with fifteen hundred miles of unimproved travel after we run out of railroad?” He shook his head again. “I suppose it’s a good thing Division-Captain chan Geraith
isn’t
a quartermaster. If he was, he’d never have tried it!”

“No one ever accused the Division-Captain of thinking small,” chan Klaisahn pointed out. “And we have been playing with the Bisons and Steel Mules for a while now. Not that I don’t think you have a perfectly valid point, Rechair.”

“From the sound of things it’s been going better than we had any right to expect it to,” chan Bykahlar agreed. “But it’s our job—read that as
your
job, Rechair—to make sure it
keeps
going that way.”

“I know, Sir. And if I’m going to be honest, I’m more than a little nervous about how many steam drays we’re going to end up using. I was joking when I said it was a good thing the Division-Captain wasn’t a quartermaster, but he really is demanding an awful lot out of our logistics net. The Bisons and Mules seem to be having fewer maintenance issues than I’d expected, but the drays are making up for that. And given that long stretch through the Dalazan, I’m nowhere near as confident as I’d like to be that they’ll hold up under the pounding.”

“We’ll just have to do the best we can,” chan Bykahlar said. “And, speaking of doing the best we can, it’s occurred to me that once we reach Shosara and start breaking bulk for the move to Kelsayr, it might be a good idea to make sure the ammunition for the 37s and the pedestal guns is well to the front of the queue. So, what I want you to be thinking about Rechair, is—”

February 15

It was as hot as it had ever been at Fort Salby, Arlos chan Geraith thought, and much, much,
much
more humid. He hadn’t thought anything was likely to make him long for that remembered heat as a breath of cool air, but he’d been wrong.

He stood on the platform of his command car, sweating in the oppressive early afternoon sauna and smoking one of his cigars while he listened to the shouts of command, the snort of heavy equipment, and the clang of metal on metal as Olvyr Banchu’s and Ganstamar Yanusa-Mahrdissa’s work crews labored furiously. That labor continued rain or shine—and a lot of the weather was rain, not shine, here in the very center of New Farnal—driving even the enormously experienced TTE personnel past the brink of exhaustion.

The Trans-Temporal Express had laid track through the heart of the Dalazan Basin in at least half a dozen universes, and its engineers had all the maps, all the records, all the construction logs at their disposal. Without that, the current effort would have been a madman’s dream. Even with it, it was a task to daunt the ancient tomb builders of Bolakin, but they were actually doing it.

The troop train upon which he’d arrived would be forced to back for over forty miles to the nearest triangle junction—the railroad men called it a “wye”—where it could be turned to head back the way it had come. Eventually, Yanusa-Mahrdissa had told him, there’d be balloon loops, or even proper wheelhouses and switching yards, spaced along the line at convenient intervals. But at the moment, he was also at what was—for now—the very end of the rail line from Traisum, and those improvements were a future luxury their frenetic present had to do without. And however primitive their facilities might be, they were working…so far, at least. At this moment, as he stood smoking his cigar and cradling a cup of tea in his left hand, looking out across the raw-edged railbed and muddy road hacked out of the rain forest, he was the next best thing to two thousand miles from the point at which he’d entered the universe of Resym.

Of course, I’m still seven hundred miles from the point at which I intend to
leave
Resym,
he thought
. And when I do, I’ll be going from all this nice heat into a godsdamned icebox
.

He snorted at the thought, but at least the reports coming back from Battalion-Captain chan Yahndar were hopeful.

Young chan Mahsdyr’s Gold Company, the very tip of 3rd Dragoon’s spear, was well into Naisom. The weather had been just as bad as chan Geraith had been afraid it would, and if the Imperial Ternathian Army wasn’t quite as accustomed to campaigning across the crazy-quilt geography of the multiverse as the Portal Authority’s troops were, at least he and his staff had been able to pick the brains of people like Regiment-Captain chan Skrithik and Division-Captain chan Stahlyr’s quartermasters back home in Sharona had done their homework. They’d also consulted with Orem Limana’s experts at the Portal Authority on equipment lists and requirements, and the decision to use Regiment-Captain Gerdain chan Malthyn’s 12th Dragoons as his vanguard was paying a handsome dividend. The Army might not have seconded as many of its officers and men, proportionately speaking, to the PAAF as the Imperial Marines had, but the Army was
much
larger than the Marines. Even a relatively small percentage of its total strength was a surprisingly large number, and the nature of the PAAF’s requirements meant the Army personnel temporarily assigned to the Portal Authority tended to be drawn from mobile units like the 3rd Dragoons. As a result, chan Geraith had discovered a surprising number of officers—including both chan Malthyn and chan Yahndar—who did have that sort of experience. The 12th had still suffered several cases of frostbite after crossing into Nairsom, but there’d actually been remarkably few of them.

And now it’s time to see how the
rest
of us make out
, the division-captain reflected more than a little grimly.

There was no doubt in his mind that weather-related casualties were going to climb once the 3rd Dragoons’ main body hit the frigid reality of a Roanthan Plains winter. Not every regiment-captain or battalion-captain had served in the PAAF, and however good they might be at looking after their men back home, some of them would take time acquiring the…mental agility such an abrupt transition from rain forest summer to high plains winter required.

And while they were acquiring it, their men would pay the price, however conscientiously those officers tried to minimize their inevitable mistakes.

Well, you knew it was going to happen when you came up with your brainstorm, Arlos
.
It’s not as if you’ve got a choice, and experienced or not, your boys’re damned good. If anybody can pull it off, it’s the Third Dragoons, and you know it
.

Yes he did. He drained the last tea and stepped back inside the car to set the empty cup beside his lunch tray, then folded his hands behind him and stood gazing at the huge map pinned to the car’s inner bulkhead.

The bold black line of Yanusa-Mahrdissa’s steadily lengthening rail line stretched across it, and chan Geraith’s mind went back over the wearisome train trip to his present location. There’d been plenty of signs of improvisation along the route, but it was good,
solid
improvisation. The speed with which the TTE’s construction gangs could throw timber trestle bridges across rivers had to be seen to be believed. It was something they’d done countless times over the last eighty years, and even now the snarling scream of one of the mobile steam-powered sawmills drifted in through the compartment’s open window. It was all going to have to be replaced with more permanent construction as soon as possible, and the trestle bridges couldn’t handle trains as heavy as those booming down the mainline from Sharona to Traisum, but it was doing what needed to be done, and he’d settle for that joyfully.

He glanced out the window as another convoy of Bisons rumbled past, towing their enormous trailers. The trailers’ outsized pneumatic tires had been designed to reduce ground pressure for better cross-country performance, but the designers hadn’t visualized the abuse to which he intended to subject their brain children. The TTE, on the other hand, had a great deal of experience when it came to moving heavy equipment through difficult terrain, and Olvyr Banchu’s workshops in Renaiyrton had improvised “mud tracks” for the trailers—continuous tracks similar to the Bisons’ own tracks, with the tires functioning as bogies—to decrease ground pressure still further. They’d scavenged the material for the first few hundred sets from their own forward equipment depots, and the original design—sent up the chain to Sharona by Voice and slightly refined—had been put into crash production by Ram’s Horn Heavy Equipment. Enough of them were coming forward to keep up (barely) with the Bisons and trailers being moved up from the Kelsayr railhead, but the heavy traffic was still pounding the jungle roadway into soupy mud. His own engineers and everyone the TTE crews could spare were dumping hopper cars of gravel into the task of keeping them moving—gods only knew how many thousands of tons of
that
TTE had shipped forward and stockpiled for railroad ballast!—but the farther they got from the railhead, the worse it was going to get.

The platoon of Bisons churned on up the path and out of his field of view. As the five behemoths disappeared, a longer column of Steel Mules followed. The half-tracked vehicles made heavier going of it than the fully tracked Bisons, but reports from farther down-chain confirmed that, on firmer terrain, the Mules were both faster and more maneuverable. They were also considerably quieter, which might prove a significant factor once 3rd Dragoons ran into the Arcanans. That didn’t make it any easier to wrestle them through the rain forest, unfortunately, and the commercial steam drays had an even harder time of it than they did. On the other hand, TTE and the Portal Authority had turned up Chindarsu’s own horde of the things. Even with mud tracks turning them into improvised (and much less capable) siblings of the Steel Mules, they were restricted to rear areas where there’d been at least some improvement of what passed for a roadbed, but they were helping enormously.