The Road to Hell # Hell's Gate 3

by Weber, David

  “I think,” Sarma said slowly, “that whichever way we jump, there’s going to be hell to pay. If you or I try to…relieve Thalmayr, you know damned well he’s going to call it mutiny. Probably mutiny in the face of the enemy, given everything that’s going on. And if he does, and if someone farther up the food chain”—even here, and even to Ulthar, he carefully didn’t mention any names like “Harshu” or “mul Gurthak” out loud—“really is involved, we could end up looking at a field court-martial.”

  A field court-martial, he did not point out, whose sentence would almost certainly be death.

  “I know.” Ulthar’s face might have been beaten iron for all the expression it showed, and his voice was colder and even harder. “But if we don’t do something, if we don’t at least try to stop the rot, then we’re complicit in it. I don’t know about you, Jaralt, but I can’t let that happen. I just can’t.”

  “Well, in that case, I don’t suppose we have a lot of choice.” To his own surprise, Sarma actually smiled ever so slightly. “On the other hand, I hope you won’t object to trying to at least do something effective about it. If we’re going up against the dragon with a slingshot, I’d at least like to do it in a way bastards like Thalmayr and Neshok can’t just sweep under the carpet afterward.”

  “Oh, I think I can promise you that much, whatever happens,” Ulthar said grimly. “I’ve already sent an outside-channels message home that nobody’s going to be able to ignore when it arrives.”

  “You have?” Sarma let the front legs of his chair thump back to the floor and leaned forward, eyes narrow. “How?”

  Ulthar smiled crookedly and shook his head.

  “It wasn’t that hard, really. Thalmayr wasn’t with the Company long enough to figure out that Valnar Rohsahk isn’t just our platoon RC specialist; he’s also our hacker. He didn’t even work up a sweat hacking Fifty Wentys’ spellware.”

  “You had him hack the censor’s spellware?” Sarma asked very carefully.

  “Of course I did.” Ulthar’s smile was considerably broader than it had been. “It’s a pity Thalmayr lost the Company files when the Sharonians kicked our arse. If he hadn’t, he might know Valnar was honor graduate in the Garth Showma Institute’s counter-spellware course. If he’d been willing to transfer to one of the regular regiments, they’d have made him a sword or even a senior sword in their recon section on the spot. Wentys never had a chance after I turned him loose.”

  Sarma just looked at him for several seconds while his own mind raced. He’d seen Shield Valnar Rohsahk here at Fort Ghartoun, but he hadn’t paid him much attention. Rohsahk was probably a year or two younger even than Sarma, with light brown hair and unremarkable features. Like Ulthar, he’d been severely wounded in the Sharonian attack on the Mahritha portal. That was true of all the 2nd Andarans here at Fort Ghartoun; they’d been left by their captors to spare them the additional pain of being transported across such rough terrain by someone who didn’t have dragons. He seemed to keep to himself quite a bit, but now that Sarma thought about it, the shield always seemed to have a game or some other app running on his personal crystal. Or at least that was what Sarma had assumed Rohsahk was up to.…

  “And just what, if I might ask, did Shield Rohsahk do to Fifty Wentys’ spellware?” he asked with a certain trepidation.

  “He just hid a file in the letter I sent my wife to tell her I was alive after all,” Ulthar said. “It’s keyed to the standard extraction code Arylis uses to unpack all my letters, but it won’t activate until it hears the code in her voice.” He shook his head. “If Wentys could find his arse with both hands we’d have had to think up something a lot more sophisticated.”

  “What if someone farther up-chain is better at his job than Wentys is?”

  “They could hardly be worse at it,” Ulthar pointed out. “I mean, do you really think Five Hundred Isrian left his best commo officer here in Thermyn with the gods only know what waiting for the AEF when it finally hits a Sharonian position that’s too tough to take?”

  That was a valid point, the other fifty reflected. Commander of Fifty Tohlmah Wentys was a Chalaran who’d somehow ended up in the Army instead of the Navy, and he was unlikely to rise much above his present rank. He was a stolid sort—an officer who did what was required of him without imagination, drive, or ambition. He was sufficiently Gifted to perform adequately as a communications specialist in peacetime, but as Ulthar had just suggested, he was hardly the pick of the litter.

  And he was also one of the officers who’d swallowed the official version of Sharonian “war crimes” and what had happened to Magister Halathyn. Sarma doubted Wentys would have had the nerve to beat one of the Sharonian POWs, but he would certainly have held Thalmayr’s truncheon for him between blows.

  “Well, no. Not if you put it that way,” he conceded.

  “Wentys officially cleared the file for transmission and sealed it with his personal cipher,” Ulthar said. “It’s unlikely anyone up-chain’s going to go to the trouble of breaking it just to double check. They can’t do it openly without leaving tracks I doubt anyone involved with some kind of cover-up wants to leave, and if they do it clandestinely, it’ll be almost impossible for them to hide the fact. And whether they do it openly or covertly, Valnar set the file to self-destruct if anyone other than Arylis tries to access it. Of course, Arylis won’t know she’s accessing it until it pops out at her. At which point,” his smile turned very, very cold, “she goes straight to the duke with it.”

  “You’re sending your wife directly to Duke Garth Showma?” Sarma blinked.

  “He’s the hereditary commander of the Second Andarans,” Ulthar replied simply. “If she takes it to him, he’ll read it. And when he does, and when he realizes what one of his officers has been doing, hell won’t hold what’ll come down on Hadrign Thalmayr’s head.”

  “Or anyone else’s, I imagine,” Sarma said slowly.

  “Or anyone else’s,” Ulthar agreed, but then he shrugged. “Unfortunately, it’s going to take over a month for that letter to reach Arylis, and Velvelig’s healers’ll be dead long before that happens. For that matter, once he actually beats a couple of them to death, I’m pretty sure Thalmayr’ll decide all the Sharonian POWs were shot trying to escape. Dead witnesses don’t tend to dispute live witnesses’ version of what happened.”

  “No, they don’t. And you’re right about what’s going to happen to them if someone doesn’t stop it. It’s nice to know the duke’s going to bring the hammer down eventually, but I’m afraid it’s still up to you and me to do something about Thalmayr in the short term.”

  “Yes, it is. And I’m glad you stopped me from going after him all by myself, Jaralt. I hadn’t thought about involving anyone else, especially what’s left of my men. In fact, if I’m going to be honest, I’m so frigging furious I wasn’t really ‘thinking’ at all. Now that you’ve jogged my brain back into functioning, though, I’d really prefer to work out a solution where anybody who gets killed is one of the bad guys. And it occurs to me that you and I probably aren’t the only members of this garrison who loathe Thalmayr and his toadies. If we’re going to be charged with mutiny, we might as well go the whole dragon, don’t you think?”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Ternathal 19, 5053 AE

  Inkara 17, 205 YU

  [December 8, 1928 CE]

  The magnificent imperial Ternathian peregrine gave a shrill cry of disapproval, spread her four-foot wings, and launched from the saddle-mounted perch. She soared effortlessly into the clean blue sky, and Regiment-Captain Rof chan Skrithik looked enviously after her. There was more than a touch of sorrow in that envy, an aching grief for the death of a prince which had brought him and Taleena together, yet there was also a fierce joy as he watched her spiraling higher and higher against the cloudless blue.

  Unfortunately, it was far from cloudless at ground level, and chan Skrithik tried to be philosophical about that as he climbed down from his horse, handed the reins to an under-ar
msman, and made his way through the incredible racket and blowing wall of dust towards the officer who stood waiting for him.

  Regiment-Captain Lyskar chan Serahlyk was a tallish man, only an inch or two shorter than chan Skrithik himself, and although he’d been born in Teramandor and spoke with a distinct Teramandorian accent, he had the tightly curled hair and dark complexion of his Ricathian father. Of course, the dust rolling steadily eastward on the permanent, powerful wind from the Karys Portal to coat everything in sight made it difficult to judge anyone’s skin color just at the moment. It was ironic, really. Given the mechanics of portal dynamics, the dust cloud—laced with coal smoke from the heavy equipment helping to spawn it—blew steadily east and west here in Traisum, away from the portal in both directions like two fog banks fleeing from one another, which meant there was no way to approach the portal without getting grit blasted between one’s teeth.

  Chan Skrithik tied a bandanna to cover his nose and mouth as he walked, and chan Serahlyk’s eyes narrowed in amusement above a matching, dust-caked bandanna. The unseasonably hot weather—for a Shurkhali winter, at least—had finally broken, which was a vast relief. Now if only there’d been anything remotely like rain on the horizon from either side of the portal…

  “Good morning, Rof,” the Third Dragoons’ senior engineer said as soon as chan Skrithik was close enough to hear anything through the background din. He still had to raise his voice, but at least they could talk without shouting.

  “Good morning,” chan Skrithik acknowledged, reaching out to clasp forearms. “Seen any dragons lately?”

  Chan Serahlyk chuckled. It was a serious question, but like most Sharonians, he still found the notion of dragons absurd, despite the fact that his combat engineers had helped to bury the last of the rotting carcasses.

  “Not today,” he said. “Haven’t seen any since that little problem they ran into last week, as a matter of fact.”

  The engineer’s voice was grimly satisfied, and chan Skrithik smiled in satisfaction of his own. The Karys aspect of the Traisum-Karys Portal was four and a half miles across but the entire portal was relatively low-lying, especially from its Traisum aspect. On that side, it was buried—literally—in the heart of the Ithal Mountains, which reached altitudes of over six thousand feet. Getting to it was difficult from ground level, yet it could be done, as the existence of the Traisum Cut indicated. Approaching that aspect from the west, the terrain was even more challenging than from the east.

  The Trans-Temporal Express—and the Imperial Ternathian Army and Imperial Corps of Engineers—had dealt with lots of rough terrain over the centuries, however. Division-Captain chan Geraith had made dealing with this particular rough terrain an urgent priority, and Olvyr Banchu had dipped into his copious supply of bulldozers and earthmoving machinery to help chan Serahlyk’s 123rd Combat Engineers with their task.

  Elevations on opposite sides of portals seldom aligned anything like neatly, and this one was no exception. On the Karys side, the Queriz Depression was over a hundred feet below sea level, which explained the unending wind blowing through from the higher air pressure on that side of it. The portal was also both wider and higher in Karys, where it rose to a height of over four miles above ground level. On the Traisum side, because so much more of its circular diameter was underground, the portal was barely a mile and a half across and its highest point cleared Mount Karek’s summit by less than twenty-four hundred feet. Given the mountain’s slope and the fact that the portal was somewhat east of its crest, the portal reached to a point about thirty-six hundred feet above local ground level, while its apex was effectively between one and two hundred yards lower than that from the west.

  Thirty-six hundred feet—twelve hundred yards—was well within the maximum range of the Model 10 rifle, but the Model 10’s effective range was only about eight hundred yards, although trained snipers with telescopic sights could score killing hits at twice that range. The twin-barreled, crank-driven Faraika I machine gun fired exactly the same round, and although its ballistics were a little better than the rifle’s due to its heavier, longer barrel, its accuracy in aimed fire was poorer, giving it approximately the same effective range. The heavier Faraika II, with its massive .54 caliber bullet, had slightly less maximum range than the Faraika I, but its effective range was actually greater: over fifteen hundred yards. That range would be reduced firing vertically because of gravity, but the Faraika II should still be able to reach thirty-three hundred feet.

  Fatigue parties armed with mattocks and shovels had hacked machine gun and rifle pits into Mount Karek’s recalcitrant soil on either side of the portal even before chan Serahlyk and Banchu’s bulldozers—assisted by liberal applications of dynamite—had gouged out proper approach roads. They couldn’t be provided with overhead cover if the weapons in them were going to have sufficient elevation to cover the portal’s airspace against the Arcanan dragons, but judging from the attack on Fort Salby, the heavy machine guns outranged the dragons’ weapons significantly. Nonetheless, chan Geraith had regarded rifles and machine guns as a purely interim stopgap until better arrangements could be made, which was precisely what chan Serahlyk was doing at the moment. His engineers were emplacing dozens of two-point-five inch Yerthak pedestal guns in permanent concrete-footed and protected positions placed to sweep the portal faces. The four-barreled Yerthaks had become at best obsolescent in their designed role as light anti-torpedo boat weapons for the Navy’s capital ships, but they had a maximum range of over six thousand yards and a vertical range of twenty-four hundred. They also had a peak firing rate of forty-five rounds per minute, and if their explosive six-pound shells were too light to stop warships, the Arcanans had discovered the hard way what they could do to dragons.

  If there’d been any doubt in their minds on that point, it had probably been resolved last week when a trio of dragons attempted to pass through from Karys. One of them had slammed to earth less than half a mile east of the portal, killing its pilot and nine of the twelve Arcanan infantry aboard when it crashed. A second, obviously badly wounded, had made it back through the portal despite a savagely shredded wing. It had plunged through the opening in obvious distress and clearly out of control, yet somehow avoided plummeting to earth—undoubtedly thanks to yet another of the Arcanans’ unnatural magical spells—and staggered in to a clumsy, just-short-of-disaster landing. The third, made wise by its companions’ misfortune, had wheeled and fled before it ever crossed the portal threshold into the Yerthaks’ range.

  Ultimately, the pedestal guns would be augmented or even completely replaced by the heavier “Ternathian 37.” Formally the Cannon of 5037, from the year of its introduction, the 3.4 inch weapon was the most deadly field gun in the world, using cased ammunition and firing a nineteen-pound shell at a maximum rate of twenty rounds per minute. It had been in service less than twenty years, but the “37’s” reputation for reliability, toughness, and lethality had already attained legendary proportions. The Model 1, the lightweight version designed for high mobility with mounted units like the 3rd Dragoons, had an effective range of nine thousand yards; the Model 2, with a split trail to permit greater elevation and a slightly longer barrel, could reach eleven thousand. First Brigade’s artillery had been reinforced when it was dispatched from Sharona, and Division-Captain chan Geraith had peeled off enough of its guns to cover both sides of the portal. Figuring out how to mount even the handy 37 to engage rapidly moving aerial targets offered a nontrivial challenge, but chan Skrithik was confident the Imperial Ternathian Army’s artillerists were up to the task, and Windlord Garsal had already demonstrated what shrapnel shells could do to dragons.

  On the other hand…

  “What about eagle-lions?” he asked, and chan Serahlyk grimaced.

  “They got one of those through yesterday,” he acknowledged sourly, “but the sniper teams bring down about half of them, and it doesn’t look like the bastards have an unlimited supply of the things. They seem to be getting more sensiti
ve to losses, anyway. I just wish we knew why they’re sending them through.”

  Chan Skrithik nodded, although he suspected Battalion-Captain chan Gayrahn was probably right about that. Since the eagle-lions weren’t attacking anyone and instead seemed content to fly high overhead, chan Gayrahn had suggested they were probably carrying out reconnaissance, and that was a very unhappy thought. The observation balloons in use in Sharona for decades hugely extended visual horizons, and only someone who’d ascended in one could begin to imagine how much detail could be made out from them. No one knew how intelligent the eagle-lions might be, either, or if there was some Arcanan equivalent of the Animal Speaker Talent. There might well be, however, and if an eagle-lion was remotely as intelligent as a dolphin or porpoise, the creatures could be bringing back more detail than anyone could wish.