Fateful Lightning

by William R. Forstchen

  He looked back to the east, at the wall of smoke moving away from him. A rider had already come in to report that similar fires were burning far to the rear. Unthinkable! The grass of the steppe was sacred. To burn it, even in battle, was the act of a race of cowards. Only the god Yulta, when he hurled the bolts of flame from the heavens, could burn the grass.

  Perhaps Sarg was right after all, the cattle were possessed by evil demons, for surely only evil would conduct war in such a way. It might be a full circling of moons before the grass would be long enough for the horses to feed.

  He couldn’t wait; he had to press on.

  He looked at the warriors around him, the silent ones. Their features were grim. Throughout the long night’s ride, when it had become clear what the cattle were doing, the rage had been building.

  Good. Let his people see even more clearly the evil of these cattle. Let it fuel their hatred to kill them all. Keane had thought to deny his horses food, yet every action only made the hatred worse, compounding now even onto the rage over the death of Jubadi. He could see it in the frenzy around him, the butchering of the dead a venting of frustration, the warriors shouting, hacking the bodies apart, holding pieces aloft, not even bothering to cook the meat but tearing into it, eating it raw, so filled were they with battle lust.

  “Send out the messengers,” Tamuka said. “Tell the umens to continue the advance until darkness. If they can get ahead of the fire they should try to cut the grass and tear up the ground to prevent its spread.

  “Shaman, you’d better persuade the gods to bring rain for us,” Tamuka snapped, turning to face Sarg as if the priest were now personally responsible for controlling the weather and would face the consequences if he failed.

  He looked back at the still-burning cloud flier, remembering the stories of how aboard one of the ships all who rode upon it had lost their hair, vomited blood, and died, until the ship had gone up to raid and disappeared over Rus lands. He felt a superstitious dread of the things, powered as they were by strange devices taken from the barrows of ancestors from even before the beginning of the endless ride about the world. Sarg and Jubadi had agreed to the creating of them, when the traitor cattle Hinsen had told of the secret of making the air that caused such things to float. He wished such things had never been created, but now that they were here he would use them, use anything to finish the cattle.

  “Let’s leave this place,” he snarled. Before continuing, he pointed out the body of Dennis and claimed it as his own.

  The train slowed as it reached the Sangros, edging onto the bridge, the steady rumble of the track changing to a hollow sound which Pat always found to be disquieting.

  He leaned over the platform and looked down at the riverbed below. Everything was obscured in a dark brown haze, and the air was smoky, thick with the smell of the burning steppe. A distant booming echoed almost like artillery. He looked back up at the sky, the darkness moving in.

  Goddammit. They had waited until the last minute to burn the grass, until the heat of the previous three weeks had dried it to tinder. The wind had shifted to the south by midmoming, unusual for this time of year, bringing with it moisture from the sea, and the thunderheads had been building.

  Pat was enough of an old soldier to believe that battles shook rain loose from the heavens. Perhaps prairie fires did the same, either that or there was a curse on them.

  The train continued on, the men on the flatcars behind him standing up, leaning over to watch. Below, the Sangros moved sluggishly, the river down, broad flats of sandbars dotting it. The hollow rumble gave way to the reassuring sound of solid ground underneath the train. On either side of the track, log-and-earth bastions flanked the line, anchor points for the earthworks running up north along the river. A quarter mile to the rear a second line of fortifications was tied into the walls of Hispania, laid out in a great circle to completely encompass the old city, along with the new town and factories on the east side of town.

  Bell tolling and with the engineer playing the beginning of “Marching Through Georgia,” the train turned onto a side track, Hispania Station drifting by on the right.

  Pat looked at it with interest. It was far different from what he had last seen three weeks ago, when everything was still a mad chaos of refugees. The only presence now was military. Heavy earthworks, thrown up seven and eight feet high, were on the south side of the main line, following the track as it ran eastward along the low ridge. Another line of earthworks, again anchored to the bastion on the south side of the tracks, went due south, dropping down into the low valley, turning back slightly from the riverbank, and cutting straight through the vineyards down in the valley, villas now fortified into strongpoints along the line. Far off to the south, four miles away, he saw the line of entrenchments rise up to meet the southern point on the ridge that curved like a bow around the valley.

  Canvas sacks filled with sand were piled up against the walls of Hispania Station. On parallel sidings, strings of boxcars and flatcars were drawn up. There wasn’t as much use for the railroad now as before, now that the withdrawal was complete. A dozen trains a day were all that were running down to Roum and back and up north into the forest, hauling lumber, saltpeter, rations, and all the other items of supply for the army. He was aboard the last train in from the west.

  Standing in the doorway of what had once been the station and was now headquarters stood Andrew, Emil at his side.

  Pat climbed down from his command car and leaped off onto the platform. He looked back at the weary soldiers on the flatcar.

  “A good job, me hearties. You’re off duty till day after tomorrow.”

  He looked back at Andrew and then turned again to the men as the flatcar drifted past, raising his hand to cover the side of his mouth as if keeping Andrew from hearing.

  “Now go find some vodka, and your wives or sweethearts, maybe even both.”

  The men smiled, several of them laughing, and Pat turned away, went up to Andrew, and saluted.

  Andrew, smiling, grabbed his hand.

  “Glad you’re back safely.”

  “We almost got caught,” Pat said, stepping inside the headquarters, pulling up a chair, and collapsing wearily into it, putting his dust-covered boots up on another chair.

  “Bastards came on hard during the night, got across the river to the north and south of Kennebec Station and started to close in. Had a running fight from the train right through the fire.”

  “Casualties?”

  “Lost fifty men on the two trains.” He hesitated. “We also had to leave a company behind at the crossing that was setting fires to the south of the track.”

  Andrew nodded.

  “Showalter and half his regiment were killed this morning,” Emil said.

  Pat looked over at the doctor, unable to reply.

  “Got caught out on the prairie, surrounded, wiped out to a man.”

  “He was a good gunner,” Pat sighed. “I told him to stay with the artillery, but he was out after glory. I guess he found it.”

  “The troop he was supposed to send south—did they hook up with you?”

  “Never saw them,” Pat said.

  Andrew nodded sadly, sitting down across from Pat.

  “We lost two aerosteamers as well,” Emil said, pouring out a drink from his flask and passing it over to Pat. “Flying Cloud and China Star. We had three new ships come on line, the last we’ll be making, and then we lose two in a day. We’re back down to six ships again. They killed only one of the Merki ships.”

  “Petracci all right?”

  “That’s how we found out about Showalter. His ship limped in shot full of holes, just clearing the trees. He saw the whole thing, came down by train to report. He’s pretty shook up by it all.”

  Pat looked over and saw Petracci in the comer of the room, sitting numbly, hands clasped around a mug. Pat nodded to the pilot, who smiled wanly, as if barely noticing that anyone was there.

  “I wouldn’t want to have his
job,” Pat whispered.

  “Pilots sure don’t live long,” Emil said in agreement. “Half of them dead and we’ve been flying less than three months. Jack cooked up a plan several days ago to get back at them. I think they’re all crazy if they try it.”

  “The fire?” Andrew asked, interrupting Emil, not wanting the aerosteamer pilot to hear what Emil was whispering a bit too loudly.

  “Burning like hell itself,” Pat said, forcing his thoughts away from the forlorn figure in the corner. “All the way from Kennebec Station north. The boys who got cut off south were setting ’em as well. A grand and terrible sight it was.”

  “I’ve got people setting more ten miles west of here.”

  “We saw it coming in.”

  A peal of thunder rattled through the room, and Pat looked out through the open door. The first heavy splats of rain were hitting the ground.

  “Should have done it yesterday,” Pat said.

  Andrew nodded in sad agreement. He had not expected the Merki to do a fifty-mile overnight dash to the river. It had cost him over half a thousand men. This commander was behaving differently, not like the way Yuri had told him Vuka would behave. He had expected a slower approach, a night march being outside the.norm for the hordes. Qubata had nearly destroyed him using the same tactic during the Tugar War, and Jubadi might have done it, but Vuka was supposed to be far more superstitious. He had wanted to let them see the fires, to shake their morale; instead it appeared to have spurred them on.

  The rain started to come down harder, a gust of cold wind swirling the dank smell of wet smoke into the room.

  Damn.

  The storm might be local—perhaps out on the steppe it was still clear. He doubted it, though. It looked like a line front closing in, the end of three hot dry weeks. Perhaps it could bring the river back up, giving him more time. It’d have to be a hell of a rain.

  “Do you think we burned half the steppe between here and the Kennebec?” Andrew asked.

  “Likely,” Pat replied, savoring the sharp jolt of vodka that Emil had offered, the first liquor he had allowed himself in weeks.

  “Dennis covered twenty-five miles south of the forest. He was supposed to send a troop down to us, another twenty miles, and I had boys on foot going north to meet them. If they got things going before the Merki crossed, that’s fifty miles to the north of the track, and the thirty miles down to the sea was fairly well covered. It was twenty miles deep when we pulled out before dawn. I bet thirty miles or more, maybe forty if this rain holds off.”

  He smiled.

  “Driving the train through it was a hell of a thrill, the Merki chasing us the whole way. Another ten minutes and the bastards would have been on the track in front of us and cut it. As it was, the rails had sagged in a couple of places where the ties had caught fire and burned. A near thing.”

  Andrew sat back with a sigh. Maybe a quarter, a third at best, of the steppe burned, though he had others out forward burning and pulling back. He looked over at Bob Fletcher.

  “What do you think?”

  “It’s about eight thousand square miles of open prairie from the Kennebec to the Sangros. That’s over five million acres.”

  Pat looked over at Bob, wondering how long it had taken him to figure out such numbers.

  “Let’s say we burned a third of it. That’ll cut it down to three and a third million acres.”

  “Still a lot of ground,” Emil said.

  “Not really. They’ve got forty umens, with remounts, and the artillery. That comes out to over a million horses. This ain’t like the steppe near Rus— high grass, rich soil, good farmland. It’s sort of like a short prairie grass. You might get ten horses of grazing per acre in a day on it.”

  “Thirty days’ worth, then,” Emil said.

  “Yeah, but that’s a hell of a problem. We’re burning a lot of it right now, near up to the river. Even if they camp right up on the river and keep bunched up, within a day they’ll need a hundred thousand acres, over a hundred and fifty square miles of land. Since it's fifty miles here north to south from the sea to the forest, on the second day they’ll have to picket their horses three miles back. The prairie widens out a hell of a lot up to a hundred miles farther back, and they’ll run into a nightmare. Large sections of it are burning right now. Within a week they’ll have to keep most of their mounts twenty, fifty, maybe even a hundred miles back, or the horses will starve.

  “This damn rain will help the grass come back, especially in the burned-over sections—seems that fire helps the damn stuff grow somehow. But it’ll be several weeks before they can graze the same ground again, maybe a month, and in the middle of the summer they’ll be lucky to get five horses to.the acre. I figure they need something like three to four million acres overall to keep them supplied through the summer. They’ll be spreading out horses from here to back beyond the Kennebec.”

  “And that’s burning too,” Pat said with a grin, not quite following the math behind it all, but as an artilleryman understanding well enough the constant problem of keeping horses in the field supplied with fodder. Most of the trains, he remembered, that had supplied the Army of the Potomac had been loaded not with rations or ammunition, but with plain old hay for the tens of thousands of army horses, and the Merki had a million of them.

  “Their own food?”

  “Well, there are no willing peasants storing the stuff up or ready to offer themselves,” Bob said. “I figure eight hundred of those big horses a day should do it, maybe twelve hundred if the animals start losing weight.”

  “They’re not going to like that a bit,” Andrew said, remembering how Yuri had told him that the eating of horseflesh was considered an unclean act.

  “Almost as much a logistical nightmare as ours, but we still have the railroad behind us,” Bob said. “Otherwise our bringing this many men together would be impossible for more than a couple of days.”

  “They’ll send most of their mounts to the rear,” Andrew said quietly, looking at the ceiling as if listening to the heavy rain now rattling against the tile roof. “I’d keep maybe four umens and my artillery mounted for the breakthrough. The rest will have to fight on foot.”

  “It’ll hurt their damn pride,” Emil said.

  “It’ll keep them more local as well, forcing them straight in here as we planned. They won’t be able to shift their entire army fifty miles in a day up north. We’ll have the rails to move along the front, they won’t. Vuka knows he can’t waste time here—he’ll have to punch through in a hurry to get to the prairie beyond us.”

  “They’ll still have the equal of over twenty corps of warriors on foot,” Pat said quietly, and Andrew looked over at him and nodded, as if the voice of reality had cut back to the heart of the issue.

  Pat looked down at the map spread out upon the table.

  “You’re going to try to hold the straight line across the valley?”

  Andrew nodded.

  “Their artillery on the opposite bank will dominate the entire line.”

  “The entrenchments there are solid. If we pull back to the high ground the only advantage we’ll have is high ground. The hills are solid rock—most places the best we could do was dig shallow rifle pits. We’re hauling wood down now to try to strengthen it up more. A battle on the hills will be a stand-up fight, like Gettysburg; in the valley it’s Petersburg all over again. The main point is, it's only four miles from Hispania to the southern ridge on a straight line. If we lose the valley it’ll be more than six miles of front.” As he spoke, Andrew traced the curving line with his finger.

  “And at Petersburg, before we went off on this little adventure, we were getting close to breaking Lee,” Pat interjected.

  Andrew looked over at his friend. “I know that,” he snapped, and Pat held up his hand as if in offer of apology.

  My hundred thousand to their three hundred and fifty to four hundred thousand, or worse actually, Andrew thought. I’ll still have to picket the entire river fron
t and have patrols up into the forest. At best I’ll have seventy-five thousand here. They can force me to spread out while they concentrate. If they gain the valley they can mass and then charge anywhere along the entire line, their interior to my exterior.

  He had run through the calculations daily for the last two months, ever since the day on the Neiper when he had had to face the fact that Rus would fall.

  All of it was pointed to this final encounter, the buying of time, the calculating and recalculating. A hundred thousand more men and he would have laughed at the Merki, but he didn’t have them. Every Rus who could carry arms was doing so. As soon as the Merki started the action, the factories would close down in Hispania, the men forming up as ten regiments distributed throughout the first three corps. The Roum were manpower, but training and arming them was far too slow. If he had another two months he could get another corps thrown together, but a corps needed at least two hundred rounds of ammunition in reserve per man if it was to be worth anything. A hard day’s fighting and they could go through half of that. There was no sense in fielding more men if they ran out after one day of fighting. And that was assuming he could even get another fifteen thousand rifles or smoothbore muskets turned out. Production would just barely arm the rest of Marcus’s corps before this battle started. He had all that he was going to get in manpower. He would have to spend it carefully, kill Merki at six or seven to one, if he was to win.

  Pat yawned and leaned back in his chair. The steady rain outside was soothing.

  Andrew looked around the room. His staff were huddled in the back going over charts and maps, the telegraph key silent, the station quiet, as if it were nothing more than a sleepy backwater post. He got up from his chair and walked over to the doorway, leaning against the frame. Outside the wind drove the rain down, eddies and swirls of it racing across the switching yard, men huddling inside boxcars, taking a break from work.