I had seen similar, smaller gliders skim the sea at the Winter Palace. More awkward reptile than bird, they had to pick their way up the cliffs on which the Palace stood, then launch themselves on barely flappable wings to swoop down on fish at the sea’s surface. But even those little coastal versions had plenty of teeth.
One soldier pointed at the river with his rifle, at water transformed by the blood of Slugs, and called to me, “You should change the name, General!”
I did. On this new continent, our maps identified terrain features by number. But any GI would prefer to tell his grandchildren how he won the Battle of Emerald River, not the Action at Water Obstacle No. 89.
For the next weeks, we repeated the pattern, driving the Slugs back across river after river. The Slugs would shoot up Bassin’s bridges, then his Sappers would bring up a spare bridge. The Slugs would shoot it up, and Bassin’s boys would haul in another spare. Each time, the Slugs ran out of fight before the Sappers ran out of bridges. Each time, the infantry watched the show, then finally streamed across.
The first hills the Slugs fell back to were limestone, honeycombed with caves. Some of those caves might have made flat, shortcut passages to the other side for infantry, easier than climbing over the hills.
But from bitter experience, I knew the Slugs liked to set ambushes in caves, or hide out in them until we passed, then attack our rear. I warned Casus.
Boom.
I stood alongside a Marini artillery battery, hands over my audio receptors, and watched as a three-inch Ordnance Rifle bucked back on its wheeled carriage. A mile away the shell crashed into a cave mouth, stone collapsed in a gray dust cloud, and the opening vanished.
A mud-caked infantryman, hunkered on one knee alongside the battery, turned to his buddy, and sighed, as his potential shortcut disappeared. “Well, now we got a stinking day of climbing ahead!”
His buddy jerked his thumb toward the engineer column behind them. “Nah. I bet Colonel Bassin carries a spare tunnel wif’ him.”
The weather had been dry, and we made a good run from the Emerald River to the Limestone Hills.
But every good run ends.
Sixty-Four
The night after we reduced the caves in the Limestone Hills, after security was set, stock watered, and supplies distributed, I left Ord at the Headquarters tent, poring over forms by a lantern’s yellow glow, while I made campfire rounds.
I tried to get to everybody, but with a third of a million troops scattered across a foreign wilderness, I was lucky to see a couple units each night.
By the time I started my visits, most troops had taken to their tents. A half dozen Tassini Scouts squatted around their fire, and when they saw me emerge into their light, they sprang to their feet.
I waved my hand, palm down. “At ease! What’s keeping you all up?”
One scout frowned. “General, somebody said we’re gonna have to carry those fat Casuni up the mountains tomorrow.”
Troops hear the most ridiculous crap, and they take it seriously until somebody tells them otherwise.
George Washington’s Colonials astonished Von Steuben, their Prussian teacher, by insisting on knowing why. Like the Colonials, GIs in combat want truth even more than hot meals, and good commanders move mountains to give them both.
I squatted next to the Scouts, and ticked off the facts on my fingers. “It’s only thirty miles up and over the mountains to the objective. But it’s a hundred miles to get around to the objective if we keep advancing across the flatlands. Your wobbleheads can pick their way across the mountain ledges, but the rest of the army can’t. There’s forage for the cavalry mounts on the plain, but above tree line the mountains have barely enough lichen to feed a few wobbleheads. We’ve been successful on the Plain. We don’t know what might happen in the mountains. So what would you do?”
One said, “Don’t split us up, Sir. The whole army should advance across the plain.”
I smiled.
Ord was already drafting this unit’s order for tomorrow, to do just that.
“Okay. We’ll forget the mountains for now.” I looked around at their shoulder patches. “You’re Sixty-Third Encampment. Hear anything about the Fifteenth?”
A soldier dead wounds his family. A soldier missing tears a wound that never heals. Everywhere I went, I asked about Jude’s outfit, about a lieutenant in crimson armor.
Another Scout shook his head. “Some say men whose boats went down swum to other boats, Sir. But nobody I know’s seen one, yet. And, meaning no offense to the General, I seen better-organized pub brawls than the beach landings. There’s men mixed up in every unit. I’m really with the Ninetieth, myself. But the Fifteenth? They all went down the first day, I heard, Sir.”
I nodded, as a lump swelled in my throat.
In all the units I had visited, nobody had heard different.
I stood, turned, and stared into the night, toward the plain along which we would advance in the morning.
It was on fire.
Sixty-Five
In the next morning’s dawn, I stood alongside Gustus, Ord, Bassin, and Casus on a low rise. Around us, hundreds of duckbills and wobbleheads cropped low vegetation, while their riders struck tents and prepared to advance. Ten miles ahead, to our left and right, sheer cliffs rose two thousand feet.
The valley to our front was miles wide, and as flat and suitable to pass an army as the three hundred miles of ground our army had crossed so far. One hundred miles up that valley lay the Troll fortress that we could win the war by destroying.
But smoke grayed the valley floor, and where the wind tore away the smoke, the ground was ash-black. The stink of embers blew back across us.
I punched up Jeeb’s overhead. For twenty miles up the valley, not a grass blade remained unscorched, and the Slugs had deployed units that could torch the rest of the valley in increments, if we advanced.
Gustus handed Ord back his binoculars, and replaced his spectacles. “There’s no forage for the animals anymore. We’ll have to forage in the rear, then bring fodder forward in the wagons. That’ll siphon off our transport capacity. We’ll barely be able to provision and arm the troops.” Gustus turned to Casus, and shook his head. “Now, we can’t support advances of longer than eight miles each week.”
Ord said, “And that’s if the Slugs leave us alone, which they won’t.”
Casus snorted. “I could crawl that far!”
I ground my teeth.
The little maggots had outwitted us again. They had done it on Earth, twice, on Ganymede, and, here on Bren, at the Fair.
The Slugs had slowed our advance up the valley by destroying our animals’ forage.
Now, by the time we advanced within range for our artillery to stand off, and blow the Troll to hell, the Slug incubator would have cranked out a fresh new army of Warriors, almost twice the number of the troops we had left, to add to their existing force. If we did nothing but slog slowly up the valley, we would lose the campaign, the war, and the world. We had to be shelling the Troll within a few weeks.
I mag’d up on the distant mountains. They were fault block mountains, a series of high, gray cliffs that rose and faced us, then dropped away in shallow slopes down the far side, to the base of the next cliff. Crossing them would be like riding a thirty-mile long roller coaster, with each upslope a vertical half-mile high. Most of our army couldn’t make it over those mountains.
I asked Bassin, “If Casus pinned the Slugs by advancing up the valley, could your Sappers advance the guns across the mountains in a couple weeks?”
Bassin peered one-eyed through his spyglass at the first cliff wall, then he grinned at me. “We move sailing ships up a half-mile high waterfall in the wilderness every day.”
I turned to Casus, and put a hand on his shoulder armor. “The main advance up the valley will be your show from here out. My HQ will now move with Bassin.”
Casus grinned. “When you get those guns up on the heights, look before you fire. We may r
each the blue mountain before you.”
“I’d like that,” I said.
That night we caught another weather break. In a dark, cold, obscuring drizzle, half the Tassini Scouts slipped away from their positions across the miles of width and depth of our army. Bassin’s Sappers hitched the Scouts’ wobbleheads to equipment wagons, and to the limbers of wheeled Ordnance Rifles, and they and the Scouts moved out on foot.
We reached the scree slope at the base of the first mountain cliff in rain and darkness, and the Sappers disassembled Ordnance Rifle barrels from carriages and wheels, so each could be drawn up the cliffs with blocks and tackle.
In the meantime, Scouts scrambled up the cliff face in the oily rain like spiders, coils of guide rope wound around their torsos. As the Scouts reached ledges, they dropped guide ropes that the Sappers attached to the blocks and tackle, which were wrapped in tent cloth to muffle them from clattering against the rock face. The Marini Sappers and Tassini Scouts coordinated their movements with silent hand signals, scarcely visible in the dark, rather than risk the sound of a shout.
The Scouts made the pulley assemblies fast, then pressed silently upward to the next level of ledges.
Through my night snoops, I watched one kid who had made it up three ledges reach out to grasp a rope that flapped in the wind. Whether rock crumbled, or he slipped in the rain, only he and his God know. But in an instant he was gone, a rag doll tumbling through the green glow of my night vision field. In all the last three hundred feet he lived, he never uttered a sound.
The Marini Sappers gathered around his body as it lay in the scree at the base of the cliff, and wept in the rain for him. There could be no funeral fire, so they buried him in the loose rock, Marini-style.
One Marini lifted a stone, and whispered to his buddy, “Can we give rites to a Tassini?”
His friend said, “Tassini? He’s one of us, now.”
At dawn, Casus pressed forward, and drove the Slugs back, so they wouldn’t notice a few distant flies dangling eight hundred feet up a distant wall.
I leaned over Bassin’s shoulder, as he sat on a rock in the rain and clicked the beads of his zill.
“What’s the math for?” I asked.
Bassin rubbed his forehead. “Each gun barrel’s the heaviest single load. The ropes were strong enough, but the rain’s weakened them. The weight is close, now. But everything should hold.”
Bassin’s Sappers had rigged a rope sling around an Ordnance Rifle’s tube as carefully as if they were swaddling baby Jesus, though they had no idea who that was.
Bassin shot them a thumbs-up. A Sapper grasped the reins of a wobblehead harnessed to the pulley assembly and marched the beast away.
Foot by creaking foot, the first gun tube ascended.
Forty minutes later, the gun tube dangled seven hundred feet above us, nearly at the first way point of Bassin’s vertical railroad.
The rain stopped.
A dozen feet above the gun, something small and black thrust out of the cliff face, like a dagger through a curtain. I zoomed on it and saw teeth.
The pterosaur peeked out of its nesting cavelet, looked down at the intruder creeping up toward it, and pounced.
I said, “Crap!”
The reptile spread its forty-foot, dirty-gold wings, as it dug its claws into the rope sling, and pecked at the iron burglar.
The upper pulley groaned, as the squawking pterosaur and the gun tube swung like a pendulum, and the gun tube clanged the rock wall.
Even a pterosaur as wide as a small house is as fragile as a kite, and barely outweighs a man. But the weakened ropes popped, first one, then all, and the reptile and the cannon plummeted seven hundred feet.
The gun tube hit the scree muzzle-first, crushed the pterosaur’s wing like rice paper, and bounced down the slope, fifty feet to my right. Straight for Bassin. He stood frozen with his back to me, waiting a heartbeat to learn the batoning gun tube’s trajectory.
I screamed, “Bassin!”
He leapt. Almost fast enough. Bassin dodged his torso around the gun, but the barrel crushed his leg, and Bassin, the gun, and the screeching, flapping pterosaur slid in a rotating heap down the loose rock of the scree slope.
Sappers and I ran to Bassin, and the first man to reach the heap of them put the broken reptile down with his Sapper’s axe.
Bassin lay on his back.
I knelt and touched his face. “Bassin?”
He smiled, and sat up. “That was close!”
My jaw dropped.
Bassin reached forward, cut away his uniform trouser leg with his Sapper’s axe, and unfastened his prosthetic leg. He left the ruined appliance crushed beneath the cannon tube.
Bassin said, “A rare advantage of the amputee!”
The fall bent the gun tube out of plumb enough to render it scrap.
Bassin strapped on a spare prosthetic, looked up at the cliff, and said, “I figured 5 percent accident breakage. I just didn’t figure it all at once. We’ll have to be careful the rest of the way.”
I signaled a Tassini Scout down from the cliff, made sure he wasn’t the only Tassini on Bren who couldn’t shoot, and assigned him to plug the next critter that flew near our rope highway.
Then I rubbed my temples, and muttered to myself. “At least it can’t get worse.”
My Tassini sharpshooter stood alongside me scanning the cliffs. He said, “You going up free-climb or roped, Sir?”
“What?”
He pointed at the two-thousand-foot acrophobe’s nightmare that rose in front of us.
I stared at the dangling climbing ropes, and slapped my forehead. How had I expected to get to the top? Fly up in the Supreme Commander’s helicopter?
I said, “Crap.”
Sixty-Six
In fact, I wasn’t the only part of this expedition that was afraid of heights. The surefooted wobbleheads would be invaluable on the narrow ledges to come, but the Sappers had to sedate them, rig a basket, and haul them one at a time up the vertical face like flour sacks.
I rode up dangling in the same basket, but I didn’t sniff any janga, first. I cursed myself, trembling, every foot of the two-thousand-foot journey for skipping it.
Fortunately for command and control, since I was a literal basket case, operational command was really Bassin’s. The mélange of two thousand Tassini Scouts, the Sappers, and pretty much everybody but me and the last supply carts was gone down the first backslope by the time I reached the mountaintop.
When I arrived up top, I didn’t kiss the granite, but I did kind of hug it with quivering arms.
Over the next few days, I repeated the funhouse experience four times, once for each new cliff. Then I low-crawled silently, alongside Bassin, through brush to a rock lip, just over the military crest of the peak our task force had just ascended.
Bassin tapped my shoulder, then pointed ahead at the next mountain, two miles down a forested slope to our front.
It was iridescent blue and alien, and I nearly wept for joy.
Sixty-Seven
I looked down across forests to the Troll and the cleared land around it, and relaxed. All that remained of this war was the end game.
Thirty-five thousand Slug warriors, according to Jeeb’s last reconnaissance, made up the defense garrison dug into a perimeter around the Troll. Roughly one warrior for each thousand years the perimeter had gone unchallenged. It was a small force, as Slug forces went, but it outnumbered the Scouts, Sappers, and artillerymen that had survived our mountain odyssey ten to one.
The Scouts had borne the brunt of battle from the Red Line in the sea to the landing beaches. They had been battered and shifted ever since, as Casus dashed across the continent. Now, they could barely have forced a temporary breach in the Slug perimeter if Bassin massed them and hurled them at a single point. Then they would have been slaughtered.
Only the cannon batteries that the Scouts and Bassin’s Sappers had dragged across the mountains changed the odds in our favor.
I said, “The Scouts are deployed down there in an outpost line?”
Bassin nodded. “If the Slugs patrol these forests, they’ll encounter Scouts before they discover our guns. The Scouts could only hold them off for a couple of days, if we’re discovered.”
Alongside us, Sappers and cannoneers laid our guns.
I said, “We only need a couple of hours more. I can tell you from experience, that incubator’s a bomb waiting to happen. Once we start shelling, that thing will blow and take out everything around it, including every warrior on that perimeter. Casus will hear the explosion clear down the valley.”
I drew a breath. We were about to win this war with scarcely another casualty.
As Bassin’s Sappers reassembled and emplaced our artillery, Bassin and I stood alongside the ammunition carts. The Sappers cut the cords that held the tarps that protected the rounds with which we would shell the Troll.
A Sapper said, “What?”
The first cart was loaded with four-inch cannonballs, not the rifled shot required by the guns we had sweated blood to drag over mountains. The cargo was useless.
Swearing, I ran to the next cart, as a Sapper peeled back its cover. Worse than useless, the cart contained the debris Ord, Howard, and Jude had salvaged from our crashed Firewitch, seemingly a million years ago, which Howard had been toting across Bren ever since. Nobody had checked to be sure these pre-packed wagon loads matched their paperwork.
I squatted on a rock, head in hands, and moaned. “War is a catalogue of blunders.”
This operation had been conceived in hours, executed under the most extreme duress of weather and terrain, by soldiers who had neither trained for it, nor trained with each other. Under the circumstances, any fair-minded person would grade it ninety-eight out of a possible one hundred. But, in war, often even ninety-nine is failing.
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