The Road to Hell # Hell's Gate 3

by Weber, David

  “Well,” he said philosophically, turning beside chan Serahlyk as the two of them considered another dust-spewing worksite about a mile further east, “I doubt getting a handful of eagle-lions past us will tell them all that much about the division-captain’s plans.”

  * * *

  It was, perhaps, as well for Commander of Two Thousand Mayrkos Harshu’s blood pressure that he was unable to overhear chan Skrithik’s observation as he and Klayrman Toralk stood on opposite sides of the floating map table, with Commander of Five Hundred Mahrkrai, Harshu’s chief of staff, to one side. At the moment, a selection of imagery from a gryphon reconnaissance crystal was playing out on that table, and Harshu’s expression was not a happy one.

  The current selection ended, and the two thousand looked up at Mahrkrai.

  “That’s it?” he asked.

  “I believe it covers all the salient points, Sir.” The chief of staff’s oddly colorless eyes met Harshu’s steadily. “There are several hours of total imagery,” he continued, “and I’ve got the analysts going back over it to see if we missed anything on the first run, but I doubt young Brychar did.”

  Harshu’s acknowledging nod was more than a bit brusque, but not because he disagreed with Mahrkrai. Commander of One Hundred Brychar Tamdaran was very young indeed—less than half Harshu’s age—and one of the relatively rare Ransarans in the Union of Arcana’s armed forces. At the moment, he was none too happy with his two thousand’s decision to wink at Alivar Neshok’s interrogation methods. Tamdaran didn’t know everything Neshok had been up to—Neshok (and Harshu) had kept his operations tightly compartmentalized on a need-to-know basis—but he’d heard more than enough rumors to write up a formal protest, even though he was obviously aware Harshu had tacitly approved the five hundred’s actions. That was going to make things even more difficult in the fullness of time, but that was nothing the two thousand hadn’t bargained on from the beginning, and he didn’t blame the boy. He was rather proud of him, actually.

  And however disapproving Tamdaran might be, he was also good at his job. In fact, he’d been responsible for the spellware which allowed his intelligence section to scan captured Sharonian printed maps into properly formatted files and generate accurately scaled and oriented paperless versions. And he also had the patience to wade through hours of recorded images looking for the one key element which might tell Harshu what the Sharonians were up to.

  Aside from “no good,” that is, Toralk thought sourly. I think we can count on that much being true, at least.

  “Tamdaran’s sure about their ‘trains’?” Harshu asked after a moment. “I’d be a lot happier if we had clear imagery of that.”

  “The Sharonians’ve gotten damned good at taking out gryphons that come in too low, Sir,” Toralk replied before Mahrkrai could respond. Harshu’s eyes flicked to him, and the Air Force officer grimaced. “I suspect they’re wasting a lot more ammunition than we realize on each gryphon they nail, but they appear to have unlimited quantities of it. And, frankly, the cupboard’s pretty close to bare where recon gryphons are concerned. We didn’t have anywhere near as many of them as of the strike gryphons when we started out, and we’ve been losing more than we’d expected to from the outset. I’ve instructed the handlers to do what they can to hold down additional losses, and they’ve gotten more cautious about altitudes and evasive routing as a result. I’m afraid it’s costing us resolution and detail, but if we send them in for close passes, we’ll lose our long-range eyes completely in painfully short order.”

  “That wasn’t a criticism, Klayrman,” Harshu said—rather mildly for him. “I do wish we had clearer, more definitive imagery, but I’m not in favor of running any more risks with our reconnaissance assets than we have to.”

  “Understood, Sir.”

  “Are we sure we’re actually losing them to Sharonian fire?” the two thousand asked, raising one eyebrow, and Toralk sighed.

  “No, Sir,” he admitted. “But we’re not sure we aren’t, either. Hundred Kormas and the other handlers are still unhappy about their control spells, and Kormas says he suspects at least some of the attack gryphons broke guidance in the attack on Fort Salby. Unfortunately, we don’t have any evidence to prove or disprove the possibility. The strike evaluation crystals on the ones that came back don’t show any evidence of it, but they wouldn’t, since all of them came back, whatever others might have done. We almost lost an enlisted handler day before yesterday, though.”

  “Spellware failure?” Harshu’s eyes had sharpened, and Toralk nodded.

  “That’s what it looks like, I’m afraid. The safety team put the gryphon down before it could do serious damage—well, damage too serious for the Healers to put right, at least—so we can’t be positive. Forensics didn’t show any holes in the control spells, though, and the crystal itself tests clean, so we don’t have anything concrete we can point to. And the recon gryphons are all females. That means they’re less aggressive and at least a little smarter than the strike gryphons”

  “Wonderful,” Harshu grunted.

  He looked back down at the map table, using his stylus to page back through the imagery selections until he found the overhead of the Sharonian rail sidings. It was a low-angle shot from farther away than he could have wished, and no one on the Arcanan side was familiar enough with the Sharonians’ “railroad trains” for him to feel truly comfortable with Tamdaran’s interpretation, but the hundred was probably right.

  He was certainly right that the massive trainloads of construction machinery Harshu had allowed the Sharonians to retrieve from Karys had disappeared, and that was one of many things contributing to the two thousand’s unhappiness. He’d come to the conclusion he’d made a mistake there, especially after successive gryphon overflights of the thickening portal defenses showed just how rapidly the Sharonians could push construction projects without the spell-powered tools Arcanans would have used. It seemed those heavy earthmoving machines and gods-only-knew-what other equipment were going to prove far more useful to his adversaries than he’d imagined. If he was right about that, and if he’d been in the shoes of Division-Captain chan Geraith, who’d assumed command in Traisum, he’d have kept it handy…unless he’d had something even more important for it to be doing someplace else.

  On the one hand, the work trains had used up a lot of the available sidings, and it wasn’t as if they were sliders that could be shunted off the track and parked until they were needed. Given that, it only made sense for the Sharonians to clear as much space as possible for the additional loads of troops and weapons which were undoubtedly headed his way. On the other hand…

  I can think of at least one other good reason for them to be elsewhere—like working to increase their supply line capability behind Salbyton, for example, he thought grimly. He’d come to the conclusion that their captured maps were less accurate—or up to date, at least—than he’d initially hoped, for the rail line up-chain from Fort Salby was double-tracked rather than the single-track they showed. His recon flights had gotten that much info for them at least. That meant he had even less of an idea of his opponents’ logistics capability than he’d thought he did. And whatever they’re capable of, the bastards can always make them better. That has to’ve been true of every military commander in history! So that’s probably what those work trains are doing right this minute, Shartahk take them.

  That was not a happy thought, but at least as long as he kept the cork firmly in the Traisum Cut, all the specialized railroad-building machinery in the multiverse wasn’t going to do them a great deal of good right here and now.

  And it wasn’t as if they hadn’t unloaded quite a lot of nonspecialized machinery before the work trains pulled out, he acknowledged glumly.

  He’d vastly underestimated the extent to which Sharonian weapons could deny portal access on the Traisum side, and from the look of things, that was going to get even worse. The rotating cannons which had wreaked such carnage on Toralk’s dragons in the attack on
Fort Salby were bad enough, more than sufficient to make the notion of sending SpecOps raiding forces through to Traisum suicidal. It was unfortunate he hadn’t realized that sooner, and he couldn’t pretend Toralk hadn’t warned him before last week’s fiasco. Unless he missed his guess, though, the longer, heavier weapons the Sharonians were busy digging in on either side of the portal—the ones their prisoners had called “37s”—were going to be even worse.

  Bad as that was, though, there was potentially much worse, and he zoomed in for a close-up of the positions the Sharonians were working on well back from the portal. Those were some really enormous “guns,” with differences from the only ones any Arcanan had ever observed that he didn’t begin to understand, and they worried him. They worried him a lot, because he rather doubted they were being put into place to shoot the Sharonians’ own men. That implied the Sharonians expected to fire them through the portal, and they were over three miles from the portal. Admittedly, they obviously needed to be emplaced on fairly flat ground, of which here was very little any closer to the portal, but that still suggested an awesome maximum range. It also suggested the Sharonians might well be able to lay down heavier fire than his most pessimistic assumptions had allowed for in support of any attack down the Cut. The only good thing about it was that those massive weapons obviously were nowhere near as mobile as the “field guns” and “mortars” his men had already encountered.

  And even if they could bring that heavier fire to bear…

  “Where the hells did they all go?” he murmured.

  “I beg your pardon, Sir?” Mahrkrai asked.

  “Eh?” Harshu looked up, then realized he’d spoken aloud and shrugged. “Where did that first trainload of Sharonians go?” He tapped the tabletop image in front of him. “This is an entirely different train, Herak. Look—it doesn’t even have the same number of ‘locomotives’ on the front.”

  “No, Sir,” Mahrkrai agreed.

  “I know you and Tamdaran are right in at least one respect, Klayrman,” the two thousand said, turning his attention to the Air Force officer. “They can’t send individual sliders down those railroads of theirs the way we could, so obviously they have to turn around entire trains. And they can’t have an unlimited number of cars and locomotives out here at the arse-end of nowhere any more than we’ve got a slider line running right up to our backdoor. So it makes sense for them to have sent that lead train back up the line for another load. But where did all the men who were on it go?”

  “I’m not sure they went anywhere, Sir,” Toralk replied. “They’ve got work parties out all over the place, obviously building a very substantial permanent encampment. And there’s an entire tent city over here to the southeast.” He used his own stylus to bring up the relevant imagery. “There’s more than enough tentage to cover two or three thousand men, and we still don’t have any clear idea how many men they have in one of their ‘brigades.’”

  “That’s true, Sir,” Mahrkrai acknowledged. “We haven’t seen a lot of men coming and going from those tents, though.”

  “And we haven’t been able to keep them under anything like continuous observation, either,” Toralk pointed out.

  “I’d feel happier if we had been able to,” Harshu said sourly. “I don’t like not being able to count noses on the primary enemy force in our front.”

  “There’s been one possibility playing around in the back of my mind,” Mahrkrai said thoughtfully. “Were you ever stationed in Farsh Danuth, Sir?”

  “No.” Harshu looked at him. “Never wanted to be, either.” He grimaced. “I’ve been through the region a couple of times, but I was never actually stationed there, thank Graholis!”

  Farsh Danuth was an ancient kingdom lying between the Farshian Sea in the west, the Tankara Gulf in the east, the Shansir Mountains in the northwest, and the Urdanha Mountains in the northeast. It was also the product of ancient Mythalan conquest across Mythal’s Stool, the triangular peninsula between the Hyrythian and Farshian Seas. As such, the kingdom had served as the buffer zone—and flashpoint—for hostility between Mythal and Ransar for centuries. Perhaps as a result, it was almost rabidly Mythalan in population, societal institutions, and attitudes, and Andarans were seldom made to feel welcome within its borders.

  “Well, this portal’s up in the Hanahk Mountains west of Selkhara,” Mahrkrai said, “and there’s not a lot of grazing in the vicinity. Fort Salby’s farther east, on the edge of the Selkhara Oasis, and the grass is probably at least a little better there—it certainly is back home, at any rate, although the portal wind from Karys probably makes the local climate even worse. At any rate, what I’ve been thinking is that this is a dragoon brigade, according to all our information, and that means it has a lot of horses. And horses eat a lot. So if they aren’t planning on launching some sort of cavalry charge down the Cut, it would make sense for them to’ve pulled their horses back along the rail line to somewhere they can supplement fodder with grazing. Gods know we’re having enough trouble keeping our cavalry fed, and their horses don’t have the advantage of augmentation.”

  “And if they’ve pulled the horses back,” Harshu said thoughtfully, “it would be logical to pull back the riders, as well, aside from whatever they thought they’d need to keep us from breaking through and hitting Fort Salby again.”

  “It would ease the strain on local water supplies, too, Sir,” Mahrkrai pointed out.

  “That’s true,” Toralk said, gazing down at the imagery before them, “and it makes a lot of sense. On the other hand, I’m beginning to wonder if they actually had as many men close enough to the front to get them here in the time window as Five Hundred Neshok’s interrogations suggested they could.”

  The other two looked at him, and the Air Force officer shrugged.

  “I’m not suggesting his…interrogation subjects were able to fool the verifier spells,” he said, unable to quite hide his distasteful tone, “but none of them ever had hard and fast confirmation of exactly what was coming down this railroad line of theirs to reinforce them. All they had was rumors, and gods know we’ve all heard enough wish-fulfillment rumors in our careers! Maybe the Sharonians were caught even more off-balance than we thought. More off-balance than the Sharonians between Hell’s Gate and Traisum thought they were. If so, and especially if they’re even shorter on railroad trains on this side of the Hayth water gap than we’ve been estimating, they may have sent a lot fewer men in the first echelon than we’d originally allowed for and they could be spending more time running the trains they do have back and forth.”

  “I suppose that’s always possible, too,” Harshu said after a moment, pursing his lips as he considered it. “I don’t think it’s something we should count on, though. Especially since they obviously did manage to get these”—he tapped the outsized artillery pieces the Sharonians were busily digging in—“all the way up here. Neshok’s reports all indicate the Sharonians have cannon even they consider ‘heavy artillery,’ but that weapons that heavy aren’t normally attached to their maneuver formations. Especially not to their dragoons, since they don’t have levitation spells or—as Harek’s just pointed out about their cavalry—the kind of augmented draft animals we do, either. So if they can dip into their larger formations’ artillery and get it this far forward, it seems unlikely they couldn’t get infantry and cavalry forward at least as rapidly.”

  “Agreed, Sir.” Toralk nodded. “And I’m not suggesting we make any plans based on an assumption that they didn’t get just as many men moved up to Fort Salby as we expected them to. On the other hand, we still haven’t gotten a recon gryphon close enough for a really good look at those big guns, either. It’s always possible they’re running a bluff—that these are actually dummy weapons the Sharonians are so busy digging in where we can see them because they haven’t been able to move up enough men to feel confident of holding a heavy attack. For all we know, they could be the sorts of things we might cobble up with camouflage spells. We haven’t seen any sign of
that out of them yet, but gods only know what these Talents of theirs are capable of.”

  “That’s true enough,” Harshu said even more sourly. “Of course, whether they’re really there or not, we’re still on the wrong end of an awful solid cork as far as any further advances are concerned.”

  “The cork’s just as bad from their side,” Mahrkrai pointed out. “In fact, it’s a lot worse. They may be digging in to keep us from getting dragons through the portal, Sir, but they don’t have any dragons to put through in the first place! Trying to fight their way out of the Cut would be a nightmare, and the demolition spells are already in place to take out the rails—and the Cut—if they try. For that matter, even if those heavy guns of theirs are real, and even if they have the ability to reach four or five miles this side of the portal, all we have to do is fall back outside whatever their range is and start picking them apart from the air.”