by David Drake
“No prisoners,” he said quietly. His voice carried in the cathedron stillness of the oak forest. “No survivors.”
Dogs crouched and men squatted by them, united in a tense carnivore eagerness as they heard the mournful whistle of the approaching locomotive. Open fields ran from the forest edge, black soil with cold water and a little dawn-ice in hollows; the winter wheat was a bluish sheen on the surface of it. They were north of the railroad, the embankment sweeping from southwest to northeast a kilometer away. It crossed a small stream on a single stone-piered wooden bridge, and the train and its escorting armored car had stopped there, checking carefully under the piers. He brought up the binoculars, watching the Brigade dragoons splashing through thigh-deep icy water as they poked and prodded and checked below the surface. The smell of cold and wet plowed earth and leaf-mould and dog filled his nostrils as he watched, the scent of the hunt.
They climbed back up, some to the armored car running on flanged wheels, others to the rear car of the fifteen hitched to the locomotive. Black smoke billowed from the stack; he could see the thrall shoveling coal with a will—warmth for himself, as well as power for the engine. The chuff of the vertical cylinders carried across the fields, and a long shower of sparks shot out from under the heavy timber frame as the bell-cranks drove the four coupled wheels of the engine against the strap iron surface of the rails. The locomotive lunged forward, jerked to a halt as the chain came taut, then bumped forward again as the cars slid up in turn and rammed the padded buffer bar at the rear of the coal cart. A ripple of collisions banged each of the cars together, leaving the whole mass coasting forward at less than walking pace. The process repeated itself several times before the train began to move in unison with the linking chains taut.
The armored car slid ahead more smoothly, holding down its speed to match the train it escorted. It took the better part of a kilometer for the train to reach the speed of a galloping dog. Which put it about—
Whump.
The armored car’s front wheels crossed the tie he’d selected. The mine was nothing complicated; a cartridge with the bullet pulled, stuck into a five-kilo bag of black powder. A board with a nail in it rested over the bullet, and the whole affair was carefully buried under the crosstie. The car’s forward motion carried it squarely over the charge before the gunpowder went off. It flipped off the track and landed upside down, the piston-rods on its underside still spinning the wheels for an instant despite the buckling of the frame. Then orange-white flame shot out of every opening in the hull; the black iron mass bucked and heaved in the center of the fire as ammunition went off in bursts and spurts.
More sparks shot out from under the locomotive’s wheels as the panic-stricken driver threw the engine into full reverse. The freight cars had no brakes, however; the whole mass plowed into the rear of the locomotive, sending it plunging off the tracks even before it reached the crater. The middle cars of the train bucked into the air as the sliding weight met the suddenly immobile obstacle ahead. The rear end cracked like a whip, sending the last two cars flicking off the track and crashing to the ground with bone-shattering force.
“Charge!” Ludwig shouted.
The trumpet sounded, and the 2nd Cruisers poured out of the wood with a roar. A few of the Brigade warriors in the caboose staggered free of the wreckage in time to meet the sabers; then the troopers were jumping to the ground and hammering their way into the wrecked train. He looked east and west. The scouts blinked mirror-signals to him. All clear, no other trains in sight.
“Bacon!” a company commander shouted back to Ludwig. “Beans, cornmeal and hardtack, pig-lard.”
Shots ran out as his men finished off the last of crew and escort. Ludwig frowned.
“Steel, you fools,” he roared.
They needed to conserve ammunition, since the enemy stores were useless to them—although any powder they captured was all to the good. Good lads, but they still get carried away now and then, he thought.
The peasants they’d gathered up were edging out of the woods too, several hundred of them. Ludwig grinned to himself; they were welcome to what his men couldn’t load on their spare dogs—and they’d hide it much more thoroughly than the raiders could, since they knew the countryside. A squad was down by the bridge, prying stones loose from the central pier with picks and stuffing more linen bags of gunpowder into it.
“Fire in the hole!” one shouted, as they climbed back out of the streambed.
A minute later the dogs all flinched as a pillar of black smoke and water and stone erupted from the gully. The timber box-trestle that spanned the creek heaved up in the center and collapsed in fragments. Boards and bits of timber rained down across half the distance between the wreck and the bridge. Ludwig noticed that his sword was still out; he sheathed it as a man staggered by under a load of sides of bacon and dropped two for his dog. Loads of food were going on the pack-saddles even as the animals fed. Like most carnivores, war-dogs could gorge on meat and then fast for a considerable time without much harm. Today they’d bolt a man-weight of the rich fatty pig-flesh each.
The first of the peasants arrived, panting. They were ragged men, lumps of tattered cloth and hair, more starved-looking even than usual for peons in midwinter. The Brigade quartermasters had simplified their supply problems by taking as much as possible from areas within wagon-transport distance of the railroad, not waiting for barged loads at the Padan River end of the line.
“Thank you, lord,” the peon leader said, bowing low.
His followers went straight for the tumbled cars; some of them stuffed raw cornmeal from ripped sacks into their mouths as they worked, moaning and smacking, the yellow grain staining their beards and smocks.
“The Gubernio Civil comes to free you from the Brigade,” Ludwig said. “Consider this a beginning. And you don’t have to wait for us; you can take more yourselves.”
“How, lord?” the serf headman asked. Peasants were already trotting back to the woods, with sacks on their backs. “We have no weapons, no gunpowder. The masters have swords and dogs and guns.”
“You don’t have to blow up the tracks,” Ludwig said. “Come out just before dark. Unspike the rails from the crossties, or saw them through. Wait for the trains to derail. Most of them have only a few soldiers, and few have armored cars for escort. For weapons . . . you have flails and mattocks and scythes. Good enough to kill men dazed by a wreck in the dark. Most of the real Brigade warriors are off fighting at Old Residence, anyway.”
And if they got too paranoid to run trains at night, there went half the carrying capacity of the railroad.
The peon headman bowed again, shapeless wool cap clutched to his breast. “Lord, we shall do as you command,” he said. The words were humble, but the feral glint in the peasant’s black eyes set Ludwig’s teeth on edge.
Captain Hortez came up as the peasant slouched off. “Ready to go, sir,” the Descotter said. He looked admiringly at the wreck. “That was sneaky, sir, very sneaky.”
“I must be learning the ways of civilization; that really sounds like a compliment,” Ludwig said. “It did stand to reason the Brigaderos would eventually start checking bridges.”
“What next?”
“We’ll try this a few more times, then we’ll start putting the mine before the bridge. Then when they’re fixated on looking for mines near bridges, we’ll put them nowhere near bridges. After, we’ll start over with the bridges. And we can just tear up sections of track.”
Rip up the iron, pile it on a huge stack of ties, and set a torch to it. Time consuming, but effective.
“And the slower they run the trains so they can check for mines—”
“—and the more carrying capacity they divert to guards—”
“—the better,” Ludwig finished.
“A new sport,” Hortez said. “Train wrecking.” Flames began to rise from the wooden cars as troopers stove in casks of lard and spilled them over the wood. Hortez looked at the line of peons trudging
back towards the forest. “The peasants are getting right into the spirit of this, too. Pretty soon they’ll be doing more damage than we are. Surprising, I thought the Brigadero reprisals would be more effective.”
“As Messer Raj told me, you can only condemn men to death once,” Ludwig said. “Threats are more effective as threats. Once you’ve stolen their seed corn and run off their stock and burned down their houses, what else can you do?”
Hortez chuckled. The bannerman of the 2nd Cruisers came up, and Ludwig swung his hand forward. The column formed by platoons, scouts fanning out to their flanks; they rode south, down into the bed of the stream. The brigade call-up had been most complete along the line of rail, too. The local home guards were graybeards or smooth-cheeked youths. Mostly they lost the scent if you took precautions . . . possibly they really lost it, although the first few times groups chasing them had barreled into ambush enthusiastically enough.
“I wouldn’t like to be a landowner around here for the next couple of years, though,” the Descotter officer said.
Ludwig Bellamy remembered the way the serf’s face had lit. Spirit, we’ll have to fight another campaign to put the peons back to work after we beat the Brigade. No landowner liked the idea of the peasantry running loose. A pity that war could not be kept as an affair among gentlemen.
Solve the problems one at a time, he reminded himself. Victory over the Brigade was the problem; Messer Raj had assigned him part of the solution, disrupting their logistics.
Whatever it took.
CHAPTER NINE
“Now that was really quite clever,” Raj said. “Not complicated, but clever.”
He focused the binoculars. The riverside wall was much lower than the outer defenses, but he could see the suburbs and villas on the south shore of the White River easily enough. Most of it was shallow and silty, here where it ran east past the seaward edge of Old Residence. Once the Midworld had lapped at the city’s harbor, but a millennium of silting had pushed the delta several kilometers out to sea. He could also see the ungainly-looking craft that were floating halfway across the four-kilometer breadth of the river.
Both were square boxes with sharply sloping sides. A trio of squat muzzles poked through each flank; in the center of the roof was a man-high conning tower of boilerplate on a timber backing. A flagpole bore the double lightning-flash of the Brigade.
“How did they get them into position?” Raj said. There was no sign of engines or oars.
“Kedging,” Commodore Lopeyz said. He pulled at the collar of his uniform jacket. “Sent boats out at night with anchors and cables. Drop the anchors, run the cables back to the raft. Cable to the shore, too. Crew inside to haul in the cables to adjust position.”
“Nothing you can do about them?” Raj said.
“Damn-all, General,” the naval officer said in frustration. He shut his long brass telescope with a snap.
“They’re just rafts,” he went on. “Even with those battering pieces and a meter and a half of oakwood on the sides, they draw less water than my ships, so I can’t get at them. I’d have to ram them a dozen times anyway, break them up. They’re floating on log platforms, not a displacement hull. Meanwhile if I try exchanging shots, they’d smash my steamers to matchwood before I made any impression—those are forty-kilo siege guns they mount. And they’re close enough to close the shipping channel along the north bank.”
As if to counterpoint the remark, one of the rafts fired a round. The heavy iron ball carried two kilometers over the water, then skipped a dozen times. Each strike cast a plume of water into the sky, before the roundshot crumpled a fishing wharf on the north bank. The cold wind whipped Raj’s cloak against his calves, and stung his freshly-shaven cheeks. He closed his eyes meditatively for perhaps thirty seconds, consulting Center. Images clicked into place behind his lids.
“Grammeck,” he said, squinting across the river again. “What do you suppose the roofs of those things are?”
The artilleryman scanned them carefully. “Planking and sandbags, I think,” he said. “Shrapnel-proof. Why?”
“Well, I don’t want to take any cannon off the walls,” Raj said thoughtfully. “Here’s what we’ll do.” He took a sketchpad from an aide and drew quickly, weighting the paper against the merlon of the wall with the edge of his cloak.
“Make a raft,” Raj said. “We’ve got half a dozen shipyards, that oughtn’t to be any problem. Protect it with railroad strap-iron from one of the foundries here, say fifty millimeters on a backing of two hundred millimeters of oak beam. No loopholes for cannon. Put one of the mortars in the center instead, with a circular lid in segments. Iron segments, hinged. Make three or four rafts. When they’re ready, we’ll use the same kedging technique to get them in range of those Brigadero cheeseboxes, and see how they like 200-millimeter mortar shells dropping down on them.”
“Ispirito de Persona,” Dinnalsyn said with boyish delight. “Spirit of Man. You know, that’ll probably work?”
He looked at the sketch. “Mi heneral, these might be useful west of the city too—the river’s deep enough for a couple of kilometers, nearly to the bridge for something this shallow-draft. If I took one of those little teakettles they use for locomotives here, and rigged some sort of covered paddle . . .”
Raj nodded. “See to it, but after we deal with the blockading rafts. Muzzaf, in the meanwhile cut the civilian ration by one-quarter, just in case.”
“That will be unpopular with the better classes,” the Komarite warned.
“I can live with it,” Raj said.
The laborers would still be better off than in most winters; a three-quarter ration they had money to buy was considerably more than what they could generally afford in slack times. Of course, the civilian magnates would be even more pissed off with Civil Government rule than before . . . but Barholm had sent him here to conquer the Western Territories. Pacifying it would be somebody else’s problem.
“Hmmm. Commodore Lopeyz, do any of your men have small-boat experience?” Two of the rams were tied up by the city docks, upstream of the enemy rafts and unable to move while they blocked the exit to the sea.
“A lot of them were fishermen before the press-gang came by,” the sailor said.
“Gerrin, I want a force of picked men from the 5th for some night work. The Brigaderos don’t seem to be guarding that boatyard they built the rafts in. Train discreetly with Messer Lopeyz’s boatmen, and in about a week—that’ll be a two-moons-down night, and probably overcast—we’ll have a little raid and some incendiary work.”
“General Whitehall, I love you,” Gerrin said, smiling like a downdragger about to bite into a victim.
“On to the next problem,” Raj said. “Now—”
“Whitehall will get us all killed,” the landowner said. “We’ll starve.”
His Holiness Paratier nodded graciously, ignoring the man’s well-filled paunch. He knew that Vihtorio Azaiglio had gotten the full yield of his estates sent in to warehouses in Old Residence. Whatever else happened, nobody in his household was actually going to go hungry. Azaiglio was stuffing candied figs from a bowl into his mouth as he spoke, at that. The room was large and dark and silent, nobody present but the magnates Paratier had summoned. That itself would be suspicious, and Lady Suzette and Whitehall’s Komarite Companion had built a surprisingly effective network of informers in the last two months. They must act quickly, or not at all.
A man further down the table cleared his throat. “What matters,” he said, “is that the longer we obey Whitehall, the more likely Ingreid is to cut all our throats when he takes the city. The commons have made their bed by throwing in with the easterner—but I don’t care to lie in it with them.”
“Worse still, he might win,” a merchant said. Paratier recognized him, Fidelio Enrike.
Everyone looked at him. Azaiglio cleared his throat. “Well, umm. That doesn’t seem too likely—but we’d be rid of him then too, yes. He’d go off to some other war.”
“He’d go, but the Civil Government wouldn’t,” Enrike said. “The Brigade are bad enough, but they’re stupid and they’re lazy, most of them. If they go down, there’ll be a swarm of monopolists and charter-companies from East Residence and Hayapalco and Komar moving in here, sucking us dry like leeches—not to mention the tax-farmers Chancellor Tzetzas runs.”
Azaiglio sniffed. “Not being concerned with matters of trade, I wouldn’t know,” he said.
It had been essential to invite Azaiglio—he was the largest civilian landowner in the city—but Paratier was glad when one of his fellow noblemen spoke:
“Curse you for a fool, Vihtorio, Spirit open your eyes! Carson Barracks always listened to us, because we’re here. East Residence is a month’s sailing time away if the winds are favorable. Why should they pay attention to us? What happens if they decide some other frontier is more important a decade from now when they’re fighting the Colony, and pull out their troops and let the Stalwarts pick our bones?”
Everyone shuddered. An Abbess leaned forward slightly, and cleared her throat.
“Seynor, you are correct. No doubt the conquest was a terrible thing, but it is long past. The Brigade needs us. It needs our cities—” she nodded to Enrike “—because they have no arts of their own, and would have to squat in log huts like the Stalwarts or the Guard otherwise. They need our nobility because they couldn’t administer a pig sty by themselves.”
“They are heretics,” another of the nobles said thoughtfully.
“They may be converted in time,” the Abbess said. “East Residence would turn all of Holy Federation Church into a department of state.”
There were thoughtful nods. The civilian nobles of the Western Territories in general and the provinces around Old Residence in particular had turned having the second headquarters of the Church among them into a very good thing indeed.
“The Civil Government was a wonderful thing when it was run from here,” Enrike said. “As I said, being the outlying province of an empire run from East Residence is another matter altogether. Effectively, we run the Western Territories under the Brigade—who provide us with military protection at a price much more reasonable than the Governor’s charge.”