Into the Maelstrom

by David Drake

  “No but will they? In particular, will the most energetic and restless types who are the backbone of The New Model Army? Most of our senior NCOs are drawn from this group and I refer you to my previous comment about boredom.”

  He looked around the meeting room from face to face, but no one added anything further.

  “My final reason is political. Sooner or later our masters in the Assembly will decide that it is safe to come home from Munchausen. Back on Nortania I have no doubt they’ll wish to oversee the army personally. Anyone think that is a good idea?”

  The question was rhetorical. It didn’t require an answer.

  “Accordingly I am resolved to attack. Questions?”

  “Do we have the lift capacity?” Ling asked.

  “Trina,” Allenson turned to his wife.

  “Around half the army have access to personal frames of one sort or another. In addition we have the barges that took Brunswick produce to Port Trent and Paxton; the ones Colonel Kaspary used to evacuate Brunswick.”

  “That can’t be many,” said Flamant, one of the new brigade commanders.

  “You’d be surprised. There was a great deal of trade along these routes in peacetime. From my experience in shipping,” Trina emphasized this for those who weren’t aware of her background, “I estimate that we will have sufficient lift capacity to move the remaining troops, artillery and essential supplies in two tranches.”

  “Of course, those personal frames will have wildly different specs and I wouldn’t bet on many being in great condition,” Hawthorn said.

  “Agreed,” Allenson replied, “which is why the first wave will consist of barges escorted by Morton’s Canaries and selected ad hoc units of Hinterlanders in possession of one- and two-man fighting frames. I will be leading this wave, of course.”

  “Of course,” Hawthorn replied, rolling his eyes towards the ceiling.

  Allenson ignored him. If the first wave was wiped out the disaster wouldn’t be any greater simply because the commander in chief went down with it. One more major defeat and the army was finished. Who could build a New New Model Army or even want to try in those circumstances?

  “The troops on personal frames will follow immediately so that the vanguard at least should arrive with—or just after—the barges. Individual Stream soldiers will be scattered all over the world if they don’t have someone to follow. The frontiersmen can shepherd in stragglers once the barges have landed and the troops have set up a perimeter.”

  “But won’t the Brasilians be patrolling the Continuum in force?” asked Flamant, who seemed to have decided to adopt the role of Devil’s advocate.

  “Morton?” Allenson asked.

  “The enemy have patrols out but not in any great numbers and their routine is haphazard. They seem pretty halfhearted about the matter.”

  “They’re convinced that they crushed the Stream Army at Trent and Brunswick,” Hawthorn said.

  “Not entirely untrue, of course, but we’ve come a long way back from that state of affairs,” Allenson said. “The barges will return immediately after unloading for the remaining troops.”

  “I suspect there will be a delay to recharge the barge capacitors,” said Blount.

  Blount had no direct military experience. Allenson had appointed him commodore of the barge flotilla because of his shipping expertise. His career had spanned captain, ship owner and factor. He demonstrated an unflashy competence in each role.

  “That’s what worries me,” Kaspary said. “We’ll be taking one awful gamble trying to keep such a disparate force together. Even without the inevitable unexpected factors that will delay the second lift. We might as well put our army through a sausage grinder as arrive in penny packets to be mopped up in detail by enemy attacks. They would have all the advantages of interior lines.”

  “It’ll work as long as everybody does his job,” Allenson said sharply, “and I have every confidence in the people in this room. Besides, I expect to achieve strategic surprise.”

  “How so, some scout is bound to see the invasion fleet and sound the alarm?” Morton asked.

  A conspiratorial grin crossed Allenson’s face. He knew something the others didn’t.

  “We’ll take the enemy unawares because they think we’re finished and so will have trouble accepting that they’re under attack, and because their troops are dispersed all over Brunswick . . .”

  He paused for dramatic effect.

  “. . . but mostly because we’ll be attacking on Kobold Day.”

  CHAPTER 29

  Invasion

  A murmur went around the meeting.

  “Someone has to ask so it might as well be me. What in the name of all that’s holy is Kobold Day?” Hawthorn asked.

  “All that’s unholy you mean,” Trina replied.

  “I remember my wife telling me about Kobold Day. . . .”

  “Humpf,” Trina interrupted.

  “Perhaps you should explain, my dear,” Allenson said smoothly.

  “Kobold Day is a week-long semi-religious festival held in midwinter all over Cornuvia, which is where the mercenaries that make up the bulk of the Brasilian Army come from,” Trina added, noting blank looks around the meeting room.

  “Cornuvians primarily earned their living from mining when the world was first colonized. They were dumped there by a transworld corporation that went bust three or four hundred years ago. Conditions in the mines were terrible. Most of the work was done by hand with pickaxes and the like so the death rate was ghastly. The miners had a superstition that misfortunes such as cave-ins and the toxic effects of the arsenical ores were caused by hostile supernatural goblinlike creatures called kobolds. Kobold Day was an attempt to placate the beasts. I don’t know whether they still believe in kobolds, or whether they ever really did, but they still celebrate Kobold Day.”

  “I don’t see how this helps us,” Flament said, wriggling impatiently on his chair.

  “Perhaps this short video will demonstrate,” Trina said. “My friend Lady Fieldings’ youngest son, Oswald, backpacked around Cornuvia on his gap year before college. Let me show you some clips he made of Kobold Day. There’s no sound for some reason so I’ll give a commentary.”

  She touched her pad and a three-dimensional hologram of abysmal quality filled the room. The colors were bleached out and the images flickered. When the hologram settled down it showed a square surrounded by buildings. Garish streamers flew from every available surface.

  An extraordinary figure clad all in black danced into view. A long black mask painted with staring red eyes and teeth concealed his face. It was what he had around his waist that attracted all eyes. A large hoop suspended from his shoulders supported a black skirt hanging to the floor. Silver runes posed at various angles decorated the skirt.

  A long pole stuck out of the front of the hoop at forty five degrees. From the top some kind of animal skull leered out at the cheering spectators. The prancing figure grasped the pole in both hands so he could waggle it obscenely while gyrating his hips.

  “That’s the ’Obby ’Ound,” Trina said. “It supposedly represents some sort of fertility god.”

  A second figure, a woman, leapt around the ’Ound waving a silver club. She wore a skin-tight suit of red with a yellow high-coned hat fastened to her head. Purple chiffon streamers attached to the peak of the cone fluttered in the wind

  “That’s the Teaser,” said Trina. “I don’t know what she represents.”

  A column of men wearing black scarves with plastic glowing antlers on their heads followed the pair. Behind them danced a troupe of women wearing red scarves and hats that looked like large red flowers.

  “I believe the symbology is obvious,” Trina said, primly. “At dawn on Kobold Day the people dance in and out of all the houses led by the ’Ound and Teaser to scare away kobolds.”

  The clip ended and was replaced after a few blurred seconds by a shot of someone’s feet. Then the image settled on a three-meter sausage turned on a
spit over a trench of burning charcoal.

  “The Cornuvians chuck any food that is on the turn into a giant sac made from stitched together animal gut and roast it for the traditional Kobold Day lunch.”

  “Good God,” someone said.

  Another clip showed a woman in rags clutching a trident and shield being paraded around the square on a silver painted throne.

  “That’s the consort of the Lord of Misrule.”

  The final clip showed people lying in reclining chairs pouring a liquid into their open mouths from a sort of miniature watering can.

  “The rest of the clips are all like this or of the celebrants falling over, vomiting or fighting. Traditionally the Cornuvians imbibe great quantities of a special Kobold Day alcoholic drink made from distilling fermented apple juice. It took Lady Fieldings’ genosurgeon two weeks to detox young Oswald when he returned from his adventure.”

  “And this is just one day?” Hawthorn asked, chuckling.

  “Oh no, the name is misleading. Kobold Day goes on until the festival goers run out of alcohol or stamina, whichever fails first. I believe it usually lasts for at least a week and maybe two.”

  “They won’t find many apples on Brunswick,” Kaspary said.

  “I doubt that will be a problem,” Trina replied dryly. “The Cornuvians don’t appear too fussy. I believe any drink with a high enough alcohol content will do.”

  “And Kobold Day starts tomorrow,” Allenson said.

  “So we shall invade Brunswick on the third day when everyone has had a chance to get well and truly rat-arsed,” Hawthorn said, laughing.

  The Continuum was in a good mood when the invasion flotilla left Nortania. Barely a ripple of blue and green energy disturbed the deep background indigo. Allenson elected to travel on a three-man fighting frame, where the crew sat in tandem.

  Todd and Hawthorn announced that they would be riding with him. Allenson protested that he would prefer them to have their own transport. It would be advantageous in case of mishaps to spread the army’s leadership as widely as possible. Trina weighed in on their side. Allenson gave in when even the ever-loyal Ling pursed his lips and shook his head.

  Hawthorn rode in the bow with a heavy spring gun mounted on gimbals. It was generally acknowledged that he was the best shot. Todd took the rear as befitted an ex-wheelman with a university blue who could provide some grunt in the pedaling department. It did not escape Allenson’s notice that this left him sandwiched in the middle in the place of maximum safety. However, the reasons for the crew layout were entirely logical so he kept his observation to himself.

  Allenson placed his frame at the head of the barge flotilla where he could keep an eye on his flock. Hinterlanders on one- and two-man fighting frames forged ahead and to the flanks to provide security. Kaspary brought up the rear, having drawn the short straw. He had the responsibility of shepherding the motley group of private frames. All they had to do was follow the highly visible yellow wake that the barge convoy trailed through the Continuum. Allenson suspected that even this might prove challenging for some of the participants.

  The flotilla had an easy crossing to their layover point on a sparsely inhabited world called Notorious, named after the number of settlers lost trying to colonize the place. Large horned herbivores roamed the most habitable and agriculturally rich continental plains. Large, fast, vicious carnivores preyed on the herbivores.

  One day when the economics was right a suitably armed colonization program would exterminate the megafauna and open the world up for farming. That was currently a long way off. Land was cheap in the Stream and so mudgrubbers, as the settlers were known, found easier worlds to cultivate.

  None of this bothered the Streamer Army overmuch as they regrouped and rested on an island. In any case, they were heavily armed. Everyone got a decent night’s sleep, once the few amphibious monsters in the immediate vicinity had been fried. Well, almost everyone. Allenson’s fertile subconscious kept inventing new ways the army could chance upon disaster and fed them through into his dreams.

  It didn’t seem to help that so far it had all gone well. One or two barges had to turn back on emergency pedal-power after battery failures and a few of the private frames managed to get lost despite Kaspary’s efforts, but that was only to be expected. Deep in the underlying strata of Allenson’s convoluted mind a stubborn abyssal layer kept insisting that a malevolent universe was lulling him into a false sense of optimism before setting him up for a major pratfall.

  The advantage of a naturally pessimistic outlook is that one is rarely disappointed by the vicissitudes of fate. Allenson was almost satisfied on some visceral level when Continuum conditions turned nasty not long after they left Notorious. Conditions deteriorated with terrifying speed. The deep indigo of the Continuum clogged with multicolored streamers of energy until it became a churning maelstrom of greens and yellows shot through with dancing red whirlpools.

  Pushing through the turbulence demanded more and more power until all three on Allenson’s frame were pedaling hard.

  “Do we press on?” Hawthorn asked over his shoulder.

  Looking back, Allenson could see the barges pitching and tossing as the steersmen tried to keep them on course. Visibility had decreased sharply. He could not see what was happening to the screen of Hinterlanders up front or the private frames at the rear. He checked the course on the frame’s navigation. The storm conditions would make the calculator’s estimates of distance covered less and less accurate but so far as he could tell they were about half way.

  There was no world listed closer than Notorious or Brunswick to shelter. He could try to find a coherent energy stream and run down it until they reached somewhere habitable but it was as big a gamble as continuing or turning back.

  “We go on,” Allenson replied, decision made.

  So they did, for hour after hour until Hawthorn screamed a warning. Todd rammed the tiller over just in time to avoid a single-man frame that shot out of a red-brown petal of energy off their port bow. It raced down their starboard side and vanished into an explosion of silver and yellow stars.

  Allenson had a split second stop-frame view of the driver hunched over his steering column. He pedaled furiously, his mouth wide open to gulp air. The desperation and terror in the Streamer’s eyes caught Allenson’s attention.

  Todd turned their frame back on course. There was nothing the crew of one frame could do to help another in the Continuum. Their fields were little bubbles of isolated reality that could not be allowed to touch without inviting catastrophe.

  The silver and yellow explosion might just have been the wash displaced as the one-man frame punched through a sharp energy gradient. It more likely indicated the vehicle dropping out into realspace due to some equipment failure. If so, the driver was already dead from asphyxiation and decompression. Airtight frame hulls were expensive and largely pointless. All they did was prolong the crew’s agony if a machine malfunctioned and fell out of the Continuum. It wasn’t as if anyone was going to find you in the vast dark realspace ocean where the fastest traveler was a photon.

  Todd guided Allenson’s frame to Brunswick pretty much as planned. One upside of the filthy conditions in the Continuum was that Brasilian patrols must have run for cover. They didn’t spot a single enemy frame.

  Ground zero was a shallow wooded valley about five klicks outside of the market and service town of Teneyk. Allenson had intended to rendezvous in the Continuum to allow stragglers to catch up, then descend into the valley en masse to overwhelm any defense. The conditions made that impossible. He planned to land in the dark just after midnight but they had been so seriously delayed that the sun was high in a bright blue sky on their arrival. Fortunately they saw nothing when they phased in, no Brasilians but no Streamers either.

  When Todd switched off the field, the biting cold of a Brunswick winter rolled over Allenson like a tidal wave. It seared his lungs when he inhaled and condensed water vapor into a white mist when he exhaled. The
shock was all the greater because conditions inside the frame field had become unpleasantly hot and steamy so they had all stripped to the waist.

  The first thing Allenson and Todd did was to break out and don warm clothing. Hawthorn, seemingly oblivious to the temperature until Allenson chucked him a shirt and parka, checked the area around them using his rifle’s sights.

  Todd unclipped the beacon from under their frame and plugged it into the vehicle’s battery. He watched the winking light pattern of the machine’s small control panel until satisfied it worked satisfactorily.

  Almost immediately a barge slid down the valley, part phased. Hawthorn watched it carefully, his rifle switched on and held at high port. It looked like any other Brunswick produce carrier. That meant it was probably Streamer but Hawthorn tended to err on the side of caution.

  The barge landed and Stream troopers jumped over the sides. A young lieutenant dashed up to Allenson and threw a parade ground salute. Allenson winced, hoping he wouldn’t do it again. There was no reason to think that the woodland along the side of the valley harbored enemy snipers looking for officers to pick off but it was a stupid risk to take. There was more than one reason Allenson was in standard rifleman’s combat fatigues rather than in a full dress uniform complete with obligatory dead chicken on the helmet.

  “Lieutenant Arkright reporting, sir!”

  The officer would have saluted again but Allenson grabbed his arm.

  “Where did you spring from, son,” Allenson asked, reflecting that he was beginning to sound like the army’s grandfather.

  “We landed farther up the valley, sir. I wasn’t sure if we had the right place but then we picked up your beacon.”

  “Very good, Lieutenant, just in case someone less friendly picks up the beacon I want you to take your platoon down to where the Teneyk road passes by the mouth of the valley and dig in. Block all movement along the road.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The lieutenant started to dash off, but Allenson called him back.