by David Weber
Clyntahn’s eyes met his across the conference table, and it was very, very quiet in the luxuriously furnished chamber.
JULY
YEAR OF GOD 898
.I.
Baron Green Valley’s HQ Wagon,
70 Miles South of Vekhair,
The Tairyn River Line,
and
23rd Division Headquarters,
50 miles South of Lake City,
Tarikah Province,
Republic of Siddarmark.
“Come on in, Ahrtymys,” Baron Green Valley invited as General Ohanlyn climbed the steps into his command trailer.
The dragon-drawn vehicle was fifty feet long and nine feet wide, which provided room for a small sleeping compartment at one end, a slightly larger working office, and a very large map compartment with working space for staffers and clerks. It provided a weather-proof mobile headquarters that was far more efficient than anything Green Valley had possessed before, and it was also one more sign of the Imperial Charisian Army’s steadily growing sophistication.
Now he led the way across the map compartment where his staff was laying out the latest information into the greater privacy of his office with Captain Slokym at their heels.
“Have a seat,” the baron invited, waving at a chair as he unbuckled his pistol belt and hung it on the rack in one corner. “See about finding us something to eat, Bryahn,” he continued to Slokym. “I’m pretty sure the General and I will be having a working supper.”
“Yes, My Lord.” Slokym saluted, then withdrew, closing the door behind him, while Ohanlyn accepted Green Valley’s invitation and seated himself. The baron stepped past him and settled gratefully into the custom-made swivel chair behind his desk and opened the bottom desk drawer. He extracted a bottle of Chisholmian whiskey and two glasses and poured generously.
“The good stuff,” he said, shoving one towards his subordinate, and Ohanlyn chuckled. Then his eyebrows rose after he’d sipped.
“It is good,” he said.
“Seijin Merlin sent it to me.” Green Valley took a sip of his own. “The man’s unnaturally good at just about everything, even picking whiskeys.”
“And thank God for him,” Ohanlyn said sincerely.
Green Valley nodded soberly and the truth was that Ahrtymys Ohanlyn knew far more about Merlin Athrawes’ contributions to Charis than most people outside the inner circle would ever suspect. At forty-two, he was a little older than Green Valley, and he’d been a protégé and junior colleague of Doctor Rahzhyr Mahklyn at the Royal Collegewhen Seijin Merlin appeared in Tellesberg. As such, he knew the source of the new “arabic numerals,” and he knew Merlin had been instrumental—although even he didn’t realize quite how instrumental—in many of Mahklyn’s subsequent brilliant theoretical breakthroughs.
He’d also helped refine quite a few of those breakthroughs, including the invention of the slide rule. He’d gone on to assist Ahlfryd Hyndryk and Ahldahs Rahzwail in the creation of the ICA artillery’s indirect fire techniques and personally proposed the special-purpose slide rules, matched to the ballistic performance of each mark and model of gun. And if there were times Green Valley thought Ohanlyn really should have been assigned to Eastshare or High Mount, given the fact that he probably understood the new artillery even better than Ohanlyn did, he wasn’t even tempted to give him up.
“So,” he said now, putting down the whiskey glass and tipping back in his chair as he found his pipe and began filling it, “how bad is it?”
“I wouldn’t say it was bad, My Lord,” Ohanlyn said thoughtfully, leaning back with his own whiskey glass. “It’s just … less good than it was.”
That was certainly one way to put it, Green Valley reflected. His Army of Tarikah had pushed Rainbow Waters’ St. Bahzlyr Band back for over a hundred miles since launching its offensive. In fact, if he counted Ayaltyn, he’d driven Lord of Horse Yellow Sky’s band west for well over a hundred and seventy miles. Rainbow Waters had never intended to hold Ayaltyn, however. Lord of Foot Morning Star’s brigade of Yellow Sky’s 23rd Division had been supposed to fall back slowly, both to delay Green Valley while the Mighty Host’s main positions prepared for attack and—hopefully—to encourage Green Valley to demonstrate any new tricks the Allies might have come up with before the true grapple. Unfortunately for Rainbow Waters’ hopes, the Army of Tarikah’s engineers had thrown no less than four pontoon bridges across the Hildermoss River south of Ayaltyn in a single, moonless night. Two full brigades of mounted infantry had crossed them just before dawn, advanced twenty miles, then swung north to cut the Ayaltyn-Lake City High Road west of the city. Between them, they’d outnumbered Morning Star’s single brigade almost four to one, and they’d been accompanied by both their organic mortar squads and four batteries each of the new 4-inch breech-loading field guns. They’d closed the mouth of the sack, leaving no way for the lord of foot to escape, and Ohanlyn’s gun dogs had pulverized Morning Star’s supporting artillery before the infantry assaulted.
There’d never been any doubt about what was going to happen then, but the Harchongians’ stubborn refusal to surrender had been an ominous indicator of the Mighty Host’s morale. Green Valley’s infantry had been forced to clear Morning Star’s fortifications with flamethrowers and satchel charges literally bunker-by-bunker, and he’d lost almost six hundred men in the process. That was only about thirteen percent of the Harchongese casualties, but he’d suffered them against a completely isolated position, stripped of all long-range artillery support, while his own artillery and assault columns had enjoyed the advantage of aerial spotting. He hadn’t really wanted to think about what was likely to happen once he came up against the main Harchongese positions.
He’d done that now, and while it hadn’t been quite as painful as he’d feared it would after the Ayaltyn experience, it had been quite painful enough.
“It’s mostly just that Rainbow Waters is a fast learner, My Lord,” Ohanlyn continued. “Worse, it looks like he’s encouraged a lot of his senior officers to be fast learners, too. They’ve figured out a lot of the implications of the Balloon Corps, and they’re putting what they’ve deduced to good effect.”
Green Valley nodded gravely. He already knew pretty much everything Ohanlyn was about to tell him, but he couldn’t have explained how he’d come by that knowledge. So it was a good thing that Ohanlyn, one of the smartest people he’d ever met, was about to hand him a plausible source for the knowledge he already possessed.
“I don’t know where they got it, although if I had to guess, Rainbow Waters or Zhyngbau probably requisitioned it from the Wing Lakes’ fishing fleet,” the artillerist continued, “but they’ve come up with an awful lot of netting. They’re using it to help hide their angle-guns. It looks like they’re moving the guns only under cover of darkness, whenever they can, and stringing the netting across their new positions. Then they cover it with cut branches, grass, anything to make it blend into the background.” He shrugged. “Nobody ever had balloons before, so no one ever needed that kind of overhead concealment. I could wish it had taken these people a little longer to come up with it, though.”
“You and me both,” Green Valley agreed sourly.
“They’re hiding their field guns better, too,” Ohanlyn continued after a thoughtful sip of whiskey. “They were already putting them under overhead cover to protect them from our angles, but they were more concerned with stacking the sandbags high than with trying to hide them. Now they’re piling more cut greenery across them, wherever that works. Where it doesn’t, it looks like they’re stretching tarps and then covering them with dirt. Or just stacking the dirt without the tarps, when they have time.” He shrugged. “That gives them both the concealment and better cover, and they’re pretty careful about fairing the contours. They’re not giving my boys in the baskets a lot of sharp angles and vertical shadows. My observers’re still spotting a lot of them, but there’s a big difference between ‘a lot’ and ‘all.’”
Green Val
ley nodded again. Ohanlyn was certainly right about the speed with which the Harchongians learned. The first few times they’d tried to hide their dug-in field guns under canvas, they’d simply draped the tarps across them. That hadn’t helped as much as they’d obviously hoped it would, so they’d begun using larger tarpaulins and stretching them farther, over irregularly rounded forms, before they applied the dirt to blend them into the background.
“Frankly, I’m less worried about the field guns than the frigging rocket launchers,” Ohanlyn said much more grimly. “That was really ugly Monday. We shouldn’t have let it happen.”
“Every so often the other side gets something right, Ahrtymys,” Green Valley said. “And in Rainbow Waters’ case, that’s going to happen a lot more often than we like. You and your gun dogs—and your balloons—are saving a lot of lives, and I know you wish you could save all of them, but you can’t.”
Ohanlyn stared down into his whiskey for several seconds. Green Valley knew exactly what he was seeing, and it wasn’t a glass of whiskey. It was the torn and mangled bodies of a pair of infantry battalions which had been caught on their approach march by a Harchongese rocket bombardment. Between them, they lost almost seven hundred men, better than thirty percent of their roster strength, and lucky it hadn’t been worse.
“How did it happen?” the baron asked quietly. “I’ve read Colonel Tymyns’ report, but I’m still not clear on the details.”
“The Harchongians are hiding those damned mobile rocket launchers of theirs under tarps and netting, too,” Ohanlyn replied. “It’s a lot easier to hide converted freight wagons than it is to hide angle-guns, and they’re keeping them covered up until they need them. I’m pretty sure they’re stretching the tarps high enough off the ground for the launcher crews to get under them and aim the damned things before they ever remove their camouflage. Then they whip the tarpaulins off, fire the rockets, and run for their own trenches.” He shrugged. “What’s worst about it is that my boys in the balloons can see exactly what they’re doing but there isn’t enough time to get word to our artillery to take the launchers under fire before they get the rockets away. We’re demolishing every launcher they show us, but we’re getting too many of them after the fact, and, frankly, I don’t see a good way to stop this particular tactic.”
“I don’t either,” Green Valley said after a moment, and the hell of it was that he didn’t. “I guess the best we can do is try to make it harder for them to spot us on the approach. More smoke shells, maybe. And I’ve already put out the word that I want as many approach marches as possible made under cover of darkness. I know nights aren’t very long, this time of year, but if the bastards on the other side’re managing to move artillery and dig it back in between dusk and dawn, we should at least be able to move our troops up to their jumpoff points while they’re doing it.”
“Yes, My Lord.”
“Are they applying this … overhead awareness of theirs to other aspects of their positions?”
“They’re trying to, but it’s a lot harder to hide a trench line.” Ohanlyn smiled thinly. “They may be able to conceal individual strong points, but we know where they are well enough to strip away any camouflage with our initial bombardment.”
“Good.” Green Valley nodded in satisfaction, then let his chair come upright and pulled a folder out of the upper drawer of his desk.
“All right, two things. One is that two Victory ships started offloading in Rainshair yesterday, and the river barges are headed this way now. The first of the new shells should arrive sometime five-day after next.” Ohanlyn’s eyes widened and Green Valley smiled as the artillerist sat suddenly straighter. “Doctor Lywys and Duke Delthak have done us proud. They’ve got them into genuine volume production, and they held the initial deliveries to make sure you and I didn’t get the chance to give away the secret by using a handful here and a handful over there just because we had ’em. There’s twenty thousand tons of them coming up the New Northland Canal—probably enough for that fire plan you’ve been working on for so long.”
“Outstanding, My Lord!” Ohanlyn’s eyes were positively glowing now, and his smile would have done any kraken proud. “I’ve been looking forward to that for what seems like forever!”
“I know you have, but we can’t take the pressure off them in the meantime,” Green Valley cautioned, “so here’s what I’ve got in mind for Thursday.” He pulled a thick sheaf of typescript from the folder and passed it across. “Let’s take a look at the objectives and kick around the best use of your medium angles. It occurred to me that—”
* * *
“I’ll be damned. You guys’re still here?”
Corporal Jwaohyn Baozhi looked up as Sergeant Huzhyn rolled into 5th Section’s fighting position overlooking the Tairyn River.
“Glad to see you, too, Sarge!” he said as Huzhyn slid to the bottom of the crater, and it was true. Third Platoon’s senior noncom was probably the most experienced—and competent—sergeant in the entire 4th Company, and he knew how to lead, not drive. That was something a lot of Harchongese noncoms still had a little trouble with, but Huzhyn had taught the platoon’s corporals—including one Jwaohyn Baozhi—to do the same thing.
“Thought I’d come check up on you,” the sergeant replied as five more men scrambled down after him. “You get those rockets?”
“Yep. Right there.” The corporal pointed to the corner of the position.
“Good. And I suppose you know what to do with them?”
“Trust me, we’ve got it straight, Sarge.”
“Good,” Huzhyn said again, and looked around the noisome hole approvingly. “Smells like a latrine in here, but it’s a damned good position,” he observed, and it was.
The heretic artillery had produced a lot of large craters over the past five-day or so, and Baozhi and his section had spent an entire night covering one of them over with logs and a five-foot-deep pile of sandbags. They’d left a ten-inch gap at the bottom, all the way around, giving them a three-hundred-sixty-degree field of fire, and then shoveled dirt over the sandbags to hide their angularity. Its height on the bank gave clear lines of fire all the way down to the river’s edge—and, for that matter, let them drop hand-bombs right onto the heretics’ heads when they got close—and whenever the heretic smoke shells let up, they could see a good thousand yards back on the eastern bank. That was why the artillery had provided them with the half-dozen signal rockets to send up the next time the heretics got ready to cross … assuming the range was clear enough for Baozhi’s section to see them assembling, at least. Whether there’d still be any artillery to respond to those rockets was an open question, but if there was.…
“Figured you boys were probably getting a little low out here at the sharp end,” the sergeant continued. A smile creased his dirty face, and he slipped the heavy rucksack off his back. He heaved it across to Baozhi, who staggered as he caught it; the thing had to weigh at least sixty or seventy pounds. “Two of ’em are rifle ammunition,” he said, jerking a thumb at the equally heavy rucks the other men with him were shedding with obvious relief. “This one and those two—” he indicated the two biggest and strongest carriers “—are hand-bombs.”
“We can use them,” Baozhi said grimly while heretic bullets slapped into the face of the fighting position like slow, erratic hail. “Tried us again about an hour ago. I figure we’ll see them again sometime around sunset. Maybe sooner. We lost Dyzhyng last time.”
He jerked his head at the body lying in the corner of the position, its face covered by a scrap of blanket, and Huzhyn grimaced.
“Sorry to hear that. Seems like it’s always the good ones, doesn’t it?”
“Yeah.” Baozhi shook his head. “Damned freak thing, too. Bullet came in through the firing slit, hit something, and ricocheted. Hit him in the back of the neck, right below the helmet.” The corporal shook his head again. “Doubt he even realized he was dead before he reported in to Langhorne.”
“Best way to g
o.” Huzhyn looked around, listening to the tempo of incoming fire, and pursed his lips. “How are you boys fixed for water and rations?”
“We’re good for food, but if you could get a water party up, we’re down to about a half canteen each. Kind of … irritating with the river so close and all.”
“See what I can do,” Huzhyn promised, “but it’ll probably be after dark. Lot of bullets flying around right now.”
“Whenever you can,” Baozhi agreed, not commenting on the fact that Huzhyn had just come through that “lot of bullets” and was about to go back out into it.
“Later, then,” the platoon sergeant said, jerking his head to gather up his ammo carriers, then climbed back up and out and headed for the rear once more.
Baozhi watched them go, then crossed to the firing slit again and stood at Private Gangzhi’s shoulder to peer out it. He supposed it didn’t really matter—it seemed unlikely that even one of the heretic snipers could actually see him—but he was always careful to stay to one side of the slit. The heretics who could see it tended to put their rounds right down the middle.
The ground between their position and the river had been torn and churned into a blasted, cratered wasteland, dotted with the splintered remains of trees, by heretic artillery—and by their own, he reflected. Not that he expected a lot more friendly support. The heretics’ artillery was more accurate than the Mighty Host’s at the best of times; at the worst of times, their gunners seemed capable of putting a shell into a specific five-gallon bucket, and they were really, really good at counter battery. Baozhi’s ten-man section was down to only seven, now that they’d lost Fynghai Dyzhyng, but he knew his men were still better off than the IHA’s artillerists, especially now that the heretics had their damned balloons.