I looked around at the Allies, who had already been beating crap out of one another for three centuries, and shrugged to myself. Losing this war meant losing everything. Losing this job meant zero.
“The blue mountain is an easy target,” someone said.
“Maybe. Getting to it won’t be easy.”
I waved on a map of Bren’s eastern hemisphere. Where we sat, at the Great Library, was on the east coast of the continent that dominated the hemisphere’s western half. It joined the eastern continent, Slug Land to me, only by the isthmus that ran east-west, three hundred miles north of the River Marin. The landmasses looked like North America and Europe, shoved close together, and joined by a thin twig. The Slugs’ Great Wall straddled the twig.
The Troll winked as a blue dot, four hundred miles east of the Great Wall. The Sea of Hunters, only twenty-two miles wide at the strait south of the Winter Palace, separated the continents.
One of Casus’s sons pointed at the Great Wall. “There’s the nut to crack!”
“The boy’s right.” A Marshal thrust his fist forward. “A good barrage to reduce the works, then punch through. Then cavalry straight on to the objective!”
Howard said, “We calculated that if we massed every artillery piece the Marini have now, plus every one you could manufacture in a year, and bombarded the Great Wall twenty-four hours each day, it would take a year to force a breach wide and deep enough to pass cavalry. And that’s just the first wall. There are four more behind it.”
“Rubbish!” The Marshal yanked a Marini seashell abacus from a uniform pocket and fiddled. Then he raised his eyebrows—and clammed up.
I said, “On the other hand, if we defend the isthmus from behind whatever fortifications we could erect in the next few months, we think the Slugs would rain Heavys down on us for two months, then break through. Worse, we expose both our flanks if the Slugs could bridge around us as fast as they crossed the Marin. We risk encirclement and annihilation of our entire defensive force.”
A Tassini threw up his purple hands. “We can’t attack. We can’t defend. What can we do? Die?”
I shook my head. “First, we can train our soldiers into a single, cohesive army. So that whatever we do, we make every life count. Second, we improve that army’s equipment, for the same reason.”
I paused, then looked around. “Third, we attack before the Slugs are strong enough to attack us.” I pointed at the Tassini coast, south of the Winter Palace, and drew my finger across the twenty-two-mile strait in the Sea of Hunters, then overland to the Troll.
Casus said, “Jason, you don’t understand. In the last five hundred years, no sailor has crossed the Sea of Hunters and lived!”
“And our fleet lies ruined! This route is impassable.” A white-mustached Marini in Admiralty powder blue waved the back of his hand at the holo, as he turned to his Queen. “Your Majesty, I recommend we consider a joint command. Led by someone experienced, knowledgeable—”
“And Marini?” One of Casus’s sons slapped his gauntlet on the table edge. “Go to hell!”
The Tassini buzzed among themselves.
The Queen raised her hand. When everyone kept yammering, she slapped the table so hard that it quivered.
In the silence that followed, the Marshals, and Admirals, and Headmen, and Warlords, turned their eyes toward the old woman, who sat as straight as a silver dagger.
She turned to me, and said, “Do you believe what these men believe, General?”
I looked around at the others. “No, Ma’am. But I’m betting that the Slugs do.”
The Queen inclined her head, and her sapphires twinkled. “Then continue.”
Fifty-Four
The next morning, the owner of the biggest gun smithy in Marinus handed Ord and me heavy leather hoods, set with smoked glass eyepieces, which we wore as he led us onto his foundry floor.
All across a room bigger than a Scramjet hangar, golden sparks fountained from anvils as ironworkers, their sweating skin orange in the forges’ firelight, swung hammers that shaped white-hot steel billets. Roaring steam clouds boiled up from quenching troughs and washed us with the acid smell of fresh steel. Ord leaned toward me and shouted, “Almost as hot as yesterday’s meeting, Sir. But boldness wins wars.”
I shouted back, “I’d like to think they bought the plan on merit. Not because somebody threatened to murder them in bed. But I’ll take it.”
We passed from the foundry into a room where millwrights bent over squealing lathes, working steel into rifle barrels, then into a quiet room where craftsmen planed stocks, then fitted them to finished steel.
The owner lifted two rifles from a bench, handed them to Ord. “Sorry. We couldn’t copy the receiver of the example you gave us. It’s a stamping. I stayed up last night, and milled one, myself.” The owner covered a yawn with his hand.
Ord laid down one rifle, an old, bulky AK-47 exhumed from one of our tamperproofs. The other rifle’s stock had the polished-shark-fin look characteristic of a Marini charioteer’s single-shot carbine. But its action was like the bulkier AK, and its barrel looked the same bore as a Marini cartridge. The steel hadn’t been blued, so the rifle gleamed as silver as a new-minted Twobuck coin.
Ord balanced the new rifle on two fingers, then raised his eyebrows and smiled. “That’s fine. The first AK-47s had milled receivers, too. It’s first-class work, Gustus.”
Gustus the armorer was thirty, pug-nosed, with black curly hair, and Marini eyes behind gold wire spectacles.
He smiled, then frowned. “The repeating mechanism is brilliant. But the first one we completed seized after four rounds.”
Ord shrugged. “Black powder residue. We’ll work it out. When can you start production?”
Gustus wrinkled his pug nose. “Not so soon. I have to replace a whole crew.”
Ord raised his eyebrows.
Gustus said, “My father died last month. After I checked the books, I found that the night shift had been skimming rifles to the Red Line runners for years.”
Ord asked, “You turn ’em in?”
“They’re mostly good men who went along to protect their jobs and their families. I turned in the ringleaders, but I gave the others the option to enlist, instead.” He grinned. “Every one took it.”
Twenty minutes later, a carriage hauled Ord and me toward the quay.
I said, “Logistics could lose this war. Or win it, Sergeant Major.” They say Eisenhower conquered Europe by piling up supplies, then letting them fall on the Nazis.
“Always, Sir.”
“There’s not an officer in the Clans that’s moved an army across a sea, and then across four hundred miles of unfamiliar ground under fire. What they just absolutely know—that isn’t really true—will hurt us more than what somebody new just doesn’t know. Gustus seems sharp. Honest. Resourceful. Knows weapons, cares about people. I thought—”
“So did I, Sir. Once his forge completes the changeover to assault rifle production, it’ll run itself. I administered his Commissioning Oath myself, two days ago. Subject to your approval, of course.”
“Oh.”
An hour later, I left Ord at the quay, with instructions to have Tassini, Casuni, and Marini cavalrymen figure out how wronk units could operate with wobblehead and duckbill units without eating their allies.
I could’ve just told them what to do, but it’s better to tell people what needs to get done, then let them astonish you with their ingenuity. I wasn’t smart enough to figure that out. A last-century general named Patton said it.
I turned to my newest recruit. “Wilgan, how do I get an army of three hundred thousand soldiers across the Sea of Hunters?”
The old Ship Master smiled through his white beard, then winked, and flapped his arms. “Grow ’em wings.”
I told him my plan.
He shook his head. “It’s twenty months on the ways to build even one ship like mine.”
“We don’t have twenty months.”
Wilgan led me
along the quay to an open wooden boat creaking as it rocked on the river swell. He knelt, and grasped one of the shipped oars that studded its flanks. “A river packet like this one could make the crossing with fifty men, if they wouldn’t mind rowing themselves, and if the seas were fair. We’ve got thousands of these packets up and down the Marin.”
“They wouldn’t mind rowing. When are the seas fair?” I asked.
“At Full Moons, mostly. ’Course, that’s when the Glowies run.” He scratched his beard, then smiled. “Which could suit your purposes.”
I knelt beside him, put a hand on his shoulder, and said, “Tell me more.”
Fifty-Five
Boom.
Three months after Wilgan educated me about amphibious operations, the Winter Palace’s stone battlement jumped beneath my feet. Bassin’s prototype artillery piece spit a shell toward a target raft bobbing in the Sea of Hunters. Startled pterosaurs shrieked, leapt from their cliff perches, and glided above the waves. Spray fountained, and the raft disappeared.
Bassin and Jude turned to one another, grinning and tugging cotton from their ears. Both wore Combat Engineers’ uniform, Bassin’s still with Colonel’s rank, because he refused a Marshal’s baton, and Jude’s with the pips of a Provisional Lieutenant.
When I assigned Jude to Bassin’s gearheads, I told him they needed his math smarts. They did. I didn’t tell him the Engineers also figured to take fewer casualties than first-wave units.
Culture transfer was a two-way street, so Bassin and Jude knuckle-bumped the gun crew the way Jude had taught them, then Bassin grinned at me. “Another fifty you owe me.”
Bassin and I had a running bet on his new field pieces’ accuracy, which I had lost all seven days since Alliance headquarters moved to the Winter Palace. “His field piece” was a stretch. Bassin’s new darling grew from blueprints printed out of Jeeb’s memory for a U.S. Civil War 3-inch Ordnance Rifle. It was the only rifled gun Ord could find that both fit the wrought-iron capabilities of the Marinus forges and had a tube light enough to haul in a packet boat. An Ordnance Rifle could hit the end of a flour barrel at any distance under a mile, or fire canister shot at close range into charging Slugs.
Not all our technology had blossomed. Smokeless powder would have to wait until there was a chemical industry capable of making nitrocellulose and nitroglycerin.
Marini industry was years from being able to duplicate radios, even the surplus antiques that MAT(D)4 was allowed to share with its Earth Advisees. We tried to get Casus to use a backpack portable. But the first time my voice trickled out of the black plastic handset, Casus accused the handset of being a beetle that stole human souls.
Once Ord’s boogeyman story about the Cargo’Bots spread, not even the less superstitious Marini would go near them. Howard used them to packrat his debris collection.
Bassin and I walked to the landward battlement and looked back across the farmland and hamlets of Southern Marin. Around every hut cluster that swelled where narrow roads crossed, yurt and tent forests sprouted. In every field, wobbleheads and duckbills grazed, or surged in lines back and forth as their riders maneuvered.
From the embarkation beaches south of the Palace twenty miles deep back into Marin, the Alliance’s Army grew. Munitions and supplies poured in, rowed along the coast from Marinus in river packets. From the desert Encampments of the Tassini to the tiny upriver outposts along the Marin, even more troops trained, all to funnel to this place by the jump-off date, which seemed to rush at us like a charging wronk.
Bassin laid his hands on the parapet. “The farmers say their land is about to sink in the sea beneath the army’s weight.”
If it did, they would throw their last life preserver to a cavalryman.
I said, “I heard a village made dinner for two Casuni Troops yesterday. And the Casuni put on a riding display for them afterwards.”
Community relations hadn’t been so cordial at first, and often still weren’t. Casuni Cavalry had trampled farm fields. Tassini had “requisitioned,” then roasted, livestock. City boys from Marinus had taken more than a few liberties with country girls. But country girls were good with fowling pieces loaded with salt, as a few city boys had learned the hard way.
I leaned my elbows on the stone and groaned. “I still spend half my day listening to grumpy aldermen and patching broken gates and broken hearts.”
Bassin looked up at the sun. “Time for Staff Meeting?”
I sighed, and we walked back toward the Palace. “I’d rather date a country girl with a gun.”
Fifty-Six
“A soldier sure of his footing has no need of a mount!” The Marini Infantry Marshal pounded his fist on the conference table. The Casuni and Tassini cavalrymen he was arguing with rolled their eyes.
I rapped my knuckles on the table. “Let’s get started, gentlemen.”
Bassin sat to my left, Casus and the ranking Tassini alternated to my immediate right. Infantry Marshals, Cavalry Division Commanders, a General of Charioteers, and a Marini Admiral filled out the table flanks.
Ord, Gustus, and Howard sat at the table’s end opposite me. I asked Howard, “What about the timetable?”
“Jeeb’s last look showed nothing new. The Pseudocephalopod still has warriors postured defensively in the isthmus, behind the wall. And a large force remains dug in around the Troll. Too many to deal with if we attacked now with what we had, too few for It to start offensive operations. As long as we jump off within four months, we have a chance to destroy the Troll before it puts out warriors in overwhelming numbers. I’d like to send Jeeb in for a close look at those outbuildings beside the Troll.”
“The Stone storage sheds?”
“That’s what they look like, but a worm’s eye view could be interesting.”
Howard always wanted to chase interesting. But if some Slug closed a door behind Jeeb, he couldn’t shoot his way out of an enclosed space.
I shook my head. “Jeeb’s the only pair of eyes we have. I can’t risk him.”
I asked Gustus and Ord, “How’s the Tassini cavalry project?”
Even the Casuni agreed that Tassini could outride the wind, but our budding divisions needed Troops with fifty riders each, trained and integrated into the overall battle plan. A Tassini Encampment’s largest unit was the Raiding Party, twelve riders organized like a bus wreck.
So we had established Cavalry Basic schools in every one of the hundred Tassini Encampments, and poured in supplies of guns, powder, feed, and body armor.
Ord said, “Plenty of volunteers. And they really do ride like the wind. Supply shortages are retarding training, Sir.”
“I thought we were drowning ’em with stuff.”
Gustus pushed his spectacles back on his pug nose. “We are. But after the caravans unload at the Encampments, we’re suffering 60 percent pilferage.”
At the table’s end, a Casuni muttered under his breath. “Scratch a Tassini, find a thief.”
I raised my eyebrows at Gustus and Ord. “Sixty percent isn’t pilferage. It’s hemorrhage. Solution?”
Inventory control was a command migraine even back home, with ’Puters. Gustus slid an object the length of the table’s onyxwood. It looked like a bone-carved harp the size of a ham sandwich. Ten pea-sized mollusk shells, drilled through their centers, slid along each harp string.
It was a little abacus like Bassin used.
Someone sniffed. “A zill?”
Gustus nodded, and said to me, “Experienced Shopwives run huge bakeries with nothing more than one of these zills and their wits, and never lose a groundfruit seed.”
“So?”
Ord turned another of the little harps in his hands. “Each School Commandant spends eighteen hours each day on training. As he should. Inventory control would bury him, even if he were used to it. We have thousands of female Marini volunteers we could train as crackerjack Supply Clerks.”
The Casuni Marshal’s eyes bugged. “Marini libertines among the Tassini?”
I did a mental eye roll. The two Plains Clans were at war for their collective lives. If the Casuni and the Tassini had to swallow some trivial women’s lib to win, so be it.
“Make it happen, Sergeant Major. Be sure the Clerks keep their head scarves tied.” I moved the meeting on to more important things.
Weeks later, Ord slipped into my office, alone and frowning. “Sir, I’ve caused a problem. The Supply Clerk idea—”
I paused with a handful of Morning Reports. “I thought the Zill Jills were working out.”
He nodded. “Quick studies, fine soldiers. Last night a Supply Clerk newly deployed to a Tassini Cavalry Basic unit was killed—”
“But it’s a desk job.”
“By the Encampment Headman.”
“Get the Tassini liaison officer in here. Now.”
My Tassini liaison was a former Encampment Headman. He got his staff job because he was a better politician than a rider.
He sat across from me, crossed his legs, and slicked an indigo-dyed eyebrow with one finger. “Is this about the prostitute?”
I leaned forward. “What?” The Earth military history I’d read reported millions of female soldiers had served more than honorably. But there were rare tales of indiscretion, for example during the Cold-War dust-ups, like Vietnam. And, unlike the worldly Marini, Tassini considered prostitution a capital crime. I couldn’t just tell him he was full of crap.
He waved his hand. “Her manner of dress provoked the accusation. Then her offense was proved.”
“Proved?”
“By Boxing.”
“The Accused had to fight?”
He shook his head. “Every Encampment carries with it a wooden box, large enough for a woman to crouch in. There is a lid, with a breathing hole. At sunrise, the Headman places the Accused in The Box. Then he drops three Kris through the breathing hole.”
Orphan's Journey Page 23