The Road to Hell - eARC

by David Weber

  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.”

  “We’d need more battle dragons for that,” Toralk pointed out. “And what the dragons can do isn’t going to take them by surprise. Not again.”

  “No, and they’ll undoubtedly factor the possibilities of air mobility into their thinking, at least as well as they can,” Harshu observed thoughtfully. “But how well can they factor it in without their own dragons to use as a measuring stick? And even if they manage to extrapolate a lot more accurately than I suspect they can, based on what they’ve seen so far, they can’t change the constraints their lack of air mobility imposes. Once they’re this side of the portal, we can circle as wide as we need to to get around behind them instead of trying to stuff your tactical and transport dragons through the mouth of a jar, Klayrman. We’ll be able to get at their lines of communication without running the gauntlet of those rotating cannon. In fact, the farther into Karys they advance, the more vulnerable they’ll make themselves.”

  “Are you thinking about falling back from the Cut, Sir? Giving them a free pass into Karys?” Toralk asked.

  “Oh, no! Keeping them out of Karys in the first place, at least until we’re properly reinforced, is a lot better idea. And one thing they’ve already demonstrated is that they aren’t idiots, Klayrman! If we were to suddenly and obligingly let them through the Cut without a fight, they’d have to wonder why we were being so helpful. I’m just saying that if they do decide to come after us, and if they do manage somehow to break out of the Cut, we’ll be able to hurt them a lot more badly than they may realize.”

  He smiled almost whimsically.

  “I’d like that,” he said. “I’d like that a lot.”

  Chapter Five

  December 9

  “Twenty for your thoughts,” Jathmar Nargra said quietly, leaning back in the comfortable deck chair.

  “I don’t know that they’re worth that much,” his wife, Shaylar Nargra-Kolmayr, told him with a wan smile.

  “Oh, they have to be worth that much!” Jathmar disagreed.

  Shaylar chuckled, although that chuckle was edged by sorrow and more than a hint of bitterness. A twentieth-falcon was the smallest Ternathian coin, so putting that price on her thoughts didn’t set their value very high. But Jathmar shouldn’t have needed to ask her about them in the first place. Oh, the details of what might be running through her mind at any moment, yes. But their marriage bond was so strong, ran so deep, he’d always known what she was thinking, feeling, on a level far below words.

  Except that now he didn’t. She still wasn’t certain exactly when the bond had started fraying, but it continued to grow weaker day by day, almost hour by hour, and that terrified her. It was all they had left to cling to as they traveled steadily across the faces of far too many universes towards their black, bleak future of captivity, and it was slipping away, like Shurkhali sand sifting between her fingers. The tighter she clenched her grasp, the more clearly she felt it seeping away, blood dripping from a wound neither of them could staunch.

  No, she thought, gazing out through the porthole. It’s not weakening day by day; it’s weakening mile by mile. The farther we get from home, the weaker it grows, and Sweet Mother Marnilay, but what in the names of all the gods could cause that?

  She didn’t know. All she knew was that it was happening, and she turned away from Jathmar—from the husband who felt as if he were somehow drifting away from her even as he held her hand tightly and warmly in his own—to gaze up at stars which were achingly familiar.

  She and Jathmar could at least have an illusion of privacy, and she was grateful to Sir Jasak Olderhan for allowing that. There was no place they could possibly have escaped to from a ship in the middle of the Western Ocean’s vast empty reaches, but that wouldn’t have stopped all too many Arcanans they’d met on this endless journey from posting guards over them, anyway. After all, they were both Sharonian, with who knew what sort of still undisclosed terrible, “unnatural” Talents? Never mind that the Arcanans could work actual magic. Never mind that she and Jasak were unarmed civilians in a universe which was the gods only knew how far from their own. Somehow, they were still the threat, and in her more introspective moments she could actually almost sympathize with that attitude. The Talents with which she and Jathmar had grown up, which were as natural to them as breathing, were just as bizarre and inexplicable to the Arcanans as the Arcanans’ magic and spells were to her. And whatever someone couldn’t explain became, by definition, uncanny and frightening, especially when the whatever in question was possessed by one’s enemies.

  She unders
tood that only too completely, as well, she thought bitterly.

  So, yes—whether she wanted to or not, she appreciated at least intellectually why they might be seen as a threat. More than that, she knew Jasak’s refusal to post round-the-clock guards was an unequivocal declaration of his bedrock trust in them. Trust that they hadn’t lied to him about their Talents…and that even if those Talents might have somehow allowed them to violate the parole they’d given and escape, they wouldn’t do it. And Jasak was a man who recognized that that sort of trust was its own kind of fetter, especially for a Shurkhalian who understood the honor concept which lay at its heart.

  At the same time, as much as she’d come to value Jasak, to recognize the fundamental goodness and iron fidelity which were so much a part of him, she remembered an ancient Shurkhalian proverb her father had taught her long ago. “Too much gratitude is a garment that chafes,” he’d told her. She’d wondered, then, what he’d meant and how he could have said that, for hospitality and open handedness was at the very heart of the Shurkhali honor code. More than that, Thaminar Kolmayr was the most generous man she knew, someone who was always ready to help, to lend support—the sort of man to whom others automatically turned in need and who was a natural focus for others’ gratitude. But now, looking back, she could see that he’d always found ways to allow those whom he’d helped to help him in return, to allow them to repay him with their own gifts or favors.

  And she couldn’t repay Jasak Olderhan any more than she could forget that without him—without his protection—she and Jathmar would be locked up in a cell somewhere, probably separated and subjected to ruthless interrogation…or dead. He and Gadrial Kelbryan were all that stood between her and Jathmar and death—Gadrial had literally snatched Jathmar back from the very gate of Reysharak’s Hall—and it was the totality of their helplessness which made it so difficult to not somehow resent Jasak’s generosity. And the fact that he’d been the commander of the Arcanan patrol which had made the initial contact between the Union of Arcana and Sharonians—and killed every single one of her and Jathmar’s companions in the horrendous, chaotic madness sparked by Commander of Fifty Shevan Garlath’s cowardice and stupidity—only filled her emotions with even greater pain and confusion.