by David Weber
Jasak had no way of knowing if that was what had happened in Gadrial's case, but the towering fury of Halathyn's vitriolic letter of resignation when he broke off completely with his fellow shakira and formally joined the faculty of the academy that served the Union of Arcana's military headquarters at Garth Showma was legendary. And Gadrial Kelbryan, then a lowly third-year undergrad, had accompanied him as his prot?g?e and student.
Over the two decades since, Magister Halathyn had assembled the staff?including Gadrial?which had built the Garth Showma Institute into a true rival for Mythal Falls and improved the UTTTA's field capabilities by at least twenty-five percent. In the process, he'd carved out his own special niche in field operations … and continued his ruthless demolition of Mythalan stereotypes wherever he encountered them.
It had been one of the greatest pleasures of Jasak's military career to watch the aging magister convert the suspicious garthan soldier now swarming so carefully up the massive oak?a man who'd joined the Andaran Army as a way to escape Mythal and buy a better future and higher social status for his children?into an ally and friend.
There was only one Magister Halathyn, he thought. And the swamp portal where Halathyn was currently camped, in a flimsy tent with only a single squad to provide security, was far too close to whoever had come out of this fortified camp.
Jasak peered upward, trying to spot Sendahli, but he couldn't see a trace of the trooper. Good. If he couldn't see Sendahli, even knowing he was there, nobody inside the palisade ought to see him, either.
On the heels of that thought, a piercing trill came wafting down from the treetop.
All clear.
Jasak grimaced. So their mystery camp was empty, but was it merely unoccupied at the moment, for abandoned?
He glanced at Fifty Garlath, who was sweating profusely again. Garlath darted a nervous glance back at Jasak, then motioned to Gaythar Harklan. The squad shield lay prone at the edge of the creek, but he rose at the gesture and scrambled his way down the bank, across the swift-moving main current, and up the other side. He scuttled across the ground in a swift, crouching dash that carried him to the base of the palisade, then came fully upright. He kept his back as close as he could to the brush wall's outermost, sharply jutting branches, taking no chances Sendahli's all clear might have been mistaken, but at least no one was shooting at him with anything.
So far, so good, Jasak thought. And now …
Harklan edged sideways along the wall, then whipped through the opening in a rollover prone that took him into enemy territory literally at ground level. Silence gripped the waiting platoon. Flies whirred and buzzed past Jasak's ears, and still the silence held. Then Harklan reappeared.
"It's abandoned," he called across, "but they haven't been gone long. There are several fire pits in here, and the coals're still hot enough to cook over. And they've left their pack animals."
Jasak exchanged glances with Threbuch.
"Whoever they are, they're in a tearing hurry to be somewhere else, Sir," the chief sword observed quietly, and Jasak nodded, then glanced at Gadrial.
"They're headed for your class eight portal, is my guess," he said.
"It's not my class eight," she muttered. "If it's anyone's, I'd say it's theirs." She waved at the abandoned camp. "They obviously got to it before we did. It's even possible the class eight leads into their home universe."
"You don't think they're from this one?" Jasak was curious to see if her logic paralleled his own.
"I don't see how they could be," she said, shaking her head. "I'm no soldier, but it seems to me that if there were more of them nearby, they'd have sent a messenger for help and holed up behind those spiky walls while they waited for it. But they didn't do that. They ran. That suggests they're feeling outnumbered, guilty, or maybe just scared to death. Whatever their motives, they're obviously determined to go someplace where they can get help. That camp may look formidable from out here, but it's actually pretty rudimentary. If there weren't very many of them, they could've built that just to keep out bears and panthers and what-have-you so they wouldn't have to post a sentry to watch for predators."
Jasak was impressed. She might be "no soldier," but her reasoning tallied closely with his own. And from the flicker of respect in the chief sword's expression, it tallied with Otwal Threbuch's, too.
"You'd have made an effective military analyst, Gadrial," the hundred said, and her eyes glinted.
"One of these days, you Andaran bully boys will be civilized enough to let us ladies join your ranks. The effect ought to be bracingly beneficial."
"Ladies in uniform?" The chief sword snorted. "Carrying arbalests and throwing war spells? Ransaran democratic madness."
"I'm qualified expert with a hand arbalest," she said tartly. "And I can throw spells that would singe your braided Shalomarian hair. Literally," she added sweetly.
The chief sword just grinned, unrepentant.
"I would suggest," Jasak interrupted, before Threbuch succeeded in digging himself in any deeper, "that we discover what we can about that."
He nodded toward the palisade, and Fifty Garlath took his cue from that and ordered the platoon forward. First and Second Squads split up and did a sweep of the treeline surrounding the clearing, looking for possible ambushes or snipers. Third Squad unlimbered its crew-served infantry-dragon, setting it up in a cover position on this side of the stream. Fourth Squad followed First and Second across the creek and bellied down under cover of the far bank, waiting.
Gadrial watched with quiet intensity from her vantage point in the scrub. She was perfectly aware that Jasak had no intention of walking out there until the security sweep was complete and the platoon's heavy weapons were in place to respond to any threat. Had she not been present, he would probably be out there already himself, but she was along for the ride, so he was left with the responsibility for her safety.
He obviously placed a high priority on keeping her in one piece, and she was scared enough to appreciate that, yet independent-minded enough to flush with embarrassment as she admitted to herself that she wasn't able to hold her own out here. She had no formal military training. She truly was a crack shot with a hand-sized arbalest, but she'd never fired a shoulder weapon in her life, and she couldn't even give the dragon gunners a hand. As strong as her various Gifts were, she'd never used artillery and had only the vaguest sense of how it operated.
Gadrial's main interest in the infantry-dragons, and the heavier field-dragons of the true artillery, was in the battle spells that powered them. She'd spoken to combat engineers and knew battle spells were complex. Building them demanded intense concentration frequently under conditions that were challenging, to say the least, and not all of them were directly related to the artillery. Infantry companies included not just the dragons and their gunners, but also an attached squad of combat spell engineers with multiple responsibilities.
Combat spell engineers were among the highest-skilled and highest-paid men in the Union of Arcana's armed forces. There were never enough of them to go around, though, and they were too valuable to put at the sharp end and get them shot at if it could be avoided, so units like Hundred Olderhan's routinely carried plenty of extra spell packs for emergency use.
Infantry platoons were built around squads, each twelve men strong. A squad was subdivided into two maneuver teams, each consisting of three arbalestiers commanded by a noncom, and supported by an infantry-dragon. It took both of a dragon gunner's assistant gunners and two of the squad's six arbalestiers to carry enough accumulator reloads to fight any sort of sustained engagement, but in the absence of someone who could recharge them, a team had only the ammunition it could carry.
Now Gadrial shivered, watching the heavy weapons deploy defensively. She was afraid a battle was exactly what was going to happen. The question was whether it would break loose here, or somewhere else.
When the final "all clear" whistled across the open space, Fourth Squad rose out of its cover, spread into a
skirmish line, and headed into the abandoned camp. Jasak strode ahead, leaving Gadrial in the care of two men assigned as her bodyguards. She deliberately fell behind his rapid stride, making sure she didn't get in anyone's way. Still, she'd nearly reached the gap in the brush walls when she realized Jasak had stopped dead in his tracks.
He stopped so abruptly she almost collided with him, and when she stepped around him to see what he was staring at, she caught her breath. A cairn of rocks lay in the shadow of the brush wall, piled up between the interwoven branches and the edge of the stream, and she felt a tremor in her knees, and another in her chest, as she recognized its shape and depth.
The fact that someone had died here shouldn't have shocked her so brutally. She knew that. But as she stared down at the pile of rocks over what had been a human being, there was no doubt in Gadrial's mind that they'd found the man who'd killed Osmuna.
Dismay stabbed deep as the sickening import crashed home. There'd been only one man on the bank above the creek where Osmuna had died. Only one trail through the forest led back to this camp. Which meant that only two men knew what had happened out there in the wilderness.
And both of them were dead.
She recognized the same understanding in the grim look in Jasak Olderhan's eyes, the knotted muscles in his jaw and the tension in his shoulders. She wondered what he was thinking, then decided she didn't really want to know. Then Jasak raised his gaze, granite eyes tracking like a hunting gryphon after prey as they sought out his commander of fifty.
"Search this camp," he said flatly. "I want to know how many men were here. What they left behind. Anything that might give us an idea of where they're from, and why they're here."
"Yes, Sir!"
Garlath started spitting orders. They sounded industrious enough, but they lacked a certain clarity, and Jasak locked eyes with his chief sword. The grizzled noncom nodded crisply and moved immediately to organize the search Garlath was attempting to direct.
Once Chief Sword Threbuch waded in, the swift, methodical search went so smoothly it was like watching a choreographed dance, Gadrial thought. Except for the fact that there was no music but the jittery rattle of wind in dead leaves that scuttled across the rocky cairn where Osmuna's killer lay, that was. She supposed she ought to be glad?in a retributive, just-desserts fashion?that the man who'd murdered Osmuna was dead, and a portion of her did want to be glad, shocking as that seemed. But it was only a small part of her, and the rest was horrified by what had transpired out here.
The Union Accords, the cornerstone of the Union of Arcana, had put an end to the savagery of the Portal Wars two centuries previously. They had united the various warring kingdoms and republics into one cooperative entity, dedicated to exploring the multiple universes and giving everyone in the Union a better life. The opportunity to build something new and worthwhile in pristine universes, the chance to amass wealth in a civilization which was wealthy in a way pre-portal Arcanans couldn't possibly have imagined.
Those Accords had governed the use of portals and new universes for two hundred years. And they also laid out the rules and contingency plans for contact with another human civilization in the clearest possible terms. Every soldier in the Union's military forces was put through training on how to conduct such a first contact, which aimed above all else to be peaceful. The last thing anyone had wanted was a shooting war with another human civilization.
Yet in all the years of the Union's existence, no such other civilization had ever been encountered. The rules were still there, the troops were still trained in them, but only as a contingency. No one had actually expected to ever require them. Not really. Surely if there'd been other human beings in existence, Arcana would have discovered them long ago.
But they hadn't … until today. Until two total strangers had met in a trackless wood. Met in fear and suspicion, and despite the strictures of the Accords, promptly slaughtered one another. Gadrial hadn't known Osmuna, but he'd seemed a bright enough fellow, dedicated to his duty in the Andaran Scouts. He'd seemed unhappy with Fifty Garlath, but proud to serve Hundred Olderhan, and Gadrial found it difficult to believe he would have thrown the Accords into the garbage can without extremely good cause.
Her gaze returned again and again to the silent grave while Jasak's men searched the camp for clues. Ten minutes elapsed in grim silence, punctuated by the sounds of angry men ransacking what had been an orderly camp, and their ugly mood frightened her. These men had blood in their eyes, looking for something?or someone?to rip apart in retaliation for a comrade's murder. She couldn't really blame them, but that made their anger no less frightening, and when she glanced at Jasak, she saw him frowning as he, too, watched the camp's destruction.
The facts they shook loose were few and far between.
"We're not looking at more than eighteen or nineteen people, at most," Chief Sword Threbuch reported to Jasak and Garlath. "There's damn near nothing here but spare clothes, sleeping rolls, and abandoned foodstuffs. We found more of those little metal things we recovered on the bank above Osmuna's body, though, and you're right, Sir. There is something inside."
He produced several shiny metal cylinders, each of which had a duller metal object stuffed into the top. They weren't all identical; some were larger, some smaller. Most of the metal caps were round-nosed, although some were flatter than others. All of those had hollows in their tips, but there were also three longer ones, each of which had a solid, sharply pointed tip.
"That looks like lead," Jasak frowned as he touched one of the round-nosed cylinders. "But this one?" he took one of the three pointy ones "?looks more like … copper?"
He glanced up at Threbuch, but the chief sword's expression was baffled. Jasak looked at Gadrial, who extended her hand. He laid the cylinder in her palm, and she turned it, examining it from all angles.
"It is copper," she agreed. "But look here." She tapped the end. "It's not solid copper. It's more like a jacket around something else. And I think you're right about that, too. The core is lead."
"I wonder …" Jasak murmured as he took the mysterious object back from her.
"Sir?" Threbuch asked.
"I wonder how much force it would take to propel this," Jasak tapped the cylinder's pointed cap with one fingernail, "across fifteen or twenty feet of space and drive it through a human body?"
Garlath lost color and made a strangled sound that drew Jasak's eyes to him.
"That?that's barbaric!" the fifty protested.
"But damned effective," Jasak pointed out.
"You can't be sure that's what happened," Garlath objected. "There's not enough of anything inside that little cylinder to do such a thing."
"Just because we can't imagine how to do it, Fifty Garlath, doesn't mean someone else couldn't figure out how to do it," Jasak observed.
Garlath flushed, the color looking even darker against his fearful pallor, and Jasak turned back to Threbuch.
"Go on, Chief Sword," he said, and Threbuch produced some other odd cylinders of metal. These were much larger, as broad as his palm, and six inches long.
"There's a whole stash of these, whatever they are, Sir. We found them in every tent. They don't seem to be weapons of any sort, but there something inside them. You can feel it slosh when you shake the thing."
"You shook one of them?" Jasak frowned, and Threbuch snorted.
"One of the men had already been shaking them, Sir. It didn't explode in his hand, so after I'd ripped him a new asshole?pardon, Magister." He glanced at Gadrial and colored slightly himself. "Anyway, I figured it was probably safe enough to handle them."
"See if someone can cut into one of them. But not here. Take it out to the woodline, just in case."
As the unhappy trooper who'd drawn that particular job headed out with the dense metal object and his short sword, Threbuch continued his situation report, such as it was.
"They haven't been here more than a couple of days, Sir. If I were to hazard a guess, I'd say this was a fo
rward observation post, or a base camp of some kind. A relay station, maybe, for others to follow. They're no primitives, whoever they are and wherever they've come from. You've seen their metalwork. That matches ours, but it's just the beginning."
He motioned to another trooper, who brought over an armload of examples.
"Their cloth is high quality," he said, holding up a length of what looked like sturdy canvas. "If this wasn't machine-loomed, I'll?" he flicked another glance at Gadrial and amended the phrase on his tongue to "?eat my shirt."
The magister just grinned, which stained the hard-bitten noncom's cheeks pink once more. Then he jerked his gaze back to his commanding officer.
"The same pattern repeats everywhere you look, Sir," he said, doggedly ignoring the humor glinting in Hundred Olderhan's eyes, despite the tension of the moment. "We found high quality leather goods sewn on a machine. Metal mess kits, with eating utensils and plates tucked inside collapsible cookpots. Personal toiletry kits with combs and brushes that look like something manufactured for a mass market, not locally produced by some village shop."
"If they left dishes and combs behind, they left in a damned hurry," Garlath muttered.
"And they weren't too worried about replacing them, either," Threbuch replied. "That kind of gear's hard to replace when you're at the end of a long transit chain."
"They may not be at the end of a long chain," Jasak said quietly.
Utter silence reigned for a long moment, broken only by the wind and rustling leaves.
"They're running for the portal we came out here to find," he continued after a moment. "I'm certain of it. Not only did they abandon most of their gear so they could move faster, they abandoned the donkeys they used to carry it here, as well." He nodded toward the sturdy little beasts pinned in one corner of the camp behind a fence made of rope. "I'm betting they have another fortified base on the other side. Not a little camp like this, either. A large base, with plenty of troops."
The chief sword swore colorfully. Then he stopped himself abruptly. He looked at Gadrial again, started to say something apologetic, then obviously decided he had more serious things to worry about than her possible reaction to a little rough language.
