by David Weber
This sodden, mucky, overgrown, dimly lit jungle was going to be hard on their horses, which undoubtedly helped explain Arthag's aversion towards it. It was also going to literally rot the clothes off their backs and the boots off their feet, and what it would do to improperly maintained firearms scarcely bore thinking upon. But they'd managed to bring along quite a bit more ammunition than chan Baskay had realized Arthag had managed to squirrel away at Fallen Timbers, and they had almost twice as many rifles as they had troopers to fire them . . . not to mention half a squad's worth of slide-action shotguns.
"Do you think they're really likely to follow us in here?" Arthag asked after a moment.
"Hard to say." Chan Baskay shrugged. "If it were me, I'd probably forget about us, at least for a while. They know there can't be very many of us, and from what Skirvon's told us, their emphasis has to be on getting as far forward as they can before they run into Division-Captain chan Geraith. Of course, they'll probably figure out we have Skirvon with us, and they may decide to mount some sort of rescue attempt." Chan Baskay snorted harshly. "From what I've seen of him, I wouldn't want him back in their place! They may have different standards, but even so, Division-Captain chan Geraith has to be their number one worry right now."
"Do they really know the division-captain is coming?" Arthag asked. Chan Baskay looked at him, and it was the Arpathian's turn to shrug. "I was just a little busy while you were talking to him," he pointed out mildly.
"Fair enough," chan Baskay conceded. "And the answer is that they do, and they don't, assuming Skirvon really knows what he's talking about. Apparently, they'd managed to plant 'reconnaissance crystals' on us. I suppose if they can record sounds and images in the 'personal crystals' they let us see, there's no reason they couldn't use other crystals and their godsdamned magic to record tactical information, too.
"At any rate, Skirvon obviously knows we've been expecting a substantial reinforcement. I don't think he knows exactly how substantial, or exactly when it's about to arrive, though. And from some of the other things he's said, it's even more obvious to me that they've significantly underestimated the firepower chan Geraith is going to be bringing with him."
"Nice to know we're not the only ones who've fucked up completely," Arthag observed in a conversational tone, and chan Baskay grimaced.
"I take your point," the Ternathian said. "And I wish there were some way we could get what we know—or get Skirvon, at least—to the division-captain before he runs straight into these bastards."
"Maybe somebody else will manage to get the word out," Arthag suggested.
"I hope so, but they've thought about that, too." Chan Baskay's voice was heavier, and Arthag quirked an eyebrow at him.
"They know about the Voices, Hulmok," chan Baskay said. "And they've come up with a plan for dealing with them. It's the same one they used to deal with Rokam and chan Treskin. According to Skirvon, they intend to shoot every Voice they encounter out of hand."
Arthag's nostrils flared, and his eyes went so bleak and cold that for just an instant, chan Baskay was frightened of him. Then the Arpathian drew a deep breath.
"I suppose that's one way to deal with the problem." His voice was matter-of-fact, almost thoughtful, but the eyes which went with it were carved from the heart of an obsidian glacier. "Still, eventually they're going to miss one somewhere."
"No doubt they are. But remember, the one big weakness of the Voicenet—aside, of course, from the fact that we don't have nearly enough Voices out here in the first place—is the fact that no Voice can reach another one through a portal, and Skirvon says they know it. That's the weak spot in the chain, and these people plan to exploit it and get as far up-chain as they can before anyone manages to pass the word that they're coming."
"And at the same time, they're going to be looking for someplace they can dig in against counterattack," Arthag said. "Someplace with a small enough portal to make defending it practical."
"That's the idea," chan Baskay acknowledged, impressed not so much by Arthag's ability to figure that out as by the Arpathian's ability to figure it out so quickly. "If they can't find one, though, they're planning to use their godsdamned dragons to devastate our supply lines in a running campaign."
This time, Arthag only nodded, and chan Baskay chuckled grimly. If there was anyone in the multiverse who'd understand the niceties of cutting an over-extended opponent off from his logistics base, it would have to be an Arpathian.
"You know," Arthag said after a moment, "this really and truly sucks, doesn't it?"
* * *
Five Hundred Neshok watched in profound satisfaction as the remaining prisoners were dragged out of his presence. They had to be dragged; at least two of them wouldn't be doing any unassisted walking until he'd finally gotten the healers to attend to them. Not that there was any particular rush about that.
He'd had a special holding area of jury-rigged but sturdy cells erected just off his chosen interrogation room. It allowed him to keep prisoners he'd already interrogated segregated from the general population of captured Sharonians. And it also just happened to keep them handy, close enough to hear the results of his troopers' efforts to . . . persuade the recalcitrant to tell him what he wanted to know.
And, he admitted to himself, hanging on to them here ought to keep any nosy idiots like Five Hundred Vaynair out of my hair.
Sooner or later, he knew, there were going to be questions about his methods. That prick Vaynair would see to that, if no one else did. But by the time that happened, Alivar Neshok would have amassed enough solid, reliable, useful information to make it obvious just how ridiculous Vaynair's potential protests were. They had to have that information, and Neshok knew superior officers remembered subordinates who'd had the balls to do what had to be done, even if the strict letter of the Articles of War had to be bent just a bit in the process.
Two Thousand mul Gurthak already owed him. And the two thousand recognized Neshok's capabilities, as well, as his present assignment clearly demonstrated. But valuable as mul Gurthak's patronage would undoubtedly prove, the fact remained that the Union Army was overwhelmingly dominated by the Andaran officer corps. Adding someone like Two Thousand Harshu to his list of . . . sponsors would be even more valuable, and Harshu wasn't likely to forget the Intelligence officer whose efforts were about to make him the victor in the opening campaign of the first inter-universal war in history.
His lips quirked in a slight, satisfied smile at the thought, and he nodded to the trooper who was sluicing buckets of water across the floor to get rid of the worst of the mess, then stepped outside to catch a breath of some fresh air which wasn't tainted by the stink of blood and vomit. He had at least five or ten minutes before the next batch of intelligence sources arrived, and he crossed the covered veranda built across the width of the armory and leaned on its railing, watching the activity swirling around him.
The armory buildings formed an island of calm in the midst of all that action for several reasons. One was the result of his own insistence on the need for privacy to let him isolate his interrogation subjects in order to instill the proper psychological attitude. And another, no doubt, was that Thousand Carthos didn't want any of his troopers fooling around with the unknown, alien weapons which had been gathered up from where the slaughtered garrison had dropped them. They'd been hauled back to the Sharonians' own armory and stacked there, where they could be kept under guard, if only to prevent potentially lethal accidents.
He heard a monstrous flapping sound and looked up to see a quartet of tactical transport dragons, towing a pair of cargo pods and escorted by a single, slightly understrength three-dragon flight of reds, heading almost directly north, away from Fort Shaylar and deeper into the universe the Sharonians had called New Uromath. The terrain wasn't especially promising for aerial operations out there, Neshok reflected. Thanks to their navigation units, Two Thousand Harshu's forces knew exactly where they were, on the upper west coast of Andara, and Magister Halat
hyn's portal detector told them where to find the next portal headed up-chain. With that information, it wasn't hard to predict that the nearly three hundred miles between Fort Shaylar and the universe the Sharonians had christened Thermyn consisted of exactly the same rainsoaked, heavily wooded terrain. There was no place dragons could set down in that sort of terrain, and the improvements (such as they were) the Sharonians had made to the hacked-out overland trail between Fort Shaylar and the portal were minimal.
None of that worried Neshok particularly, however. There might not be any handy landing zones between here and the New Uromath-Thermyn portal, but there was also no reason for the expeditionary force to need any. The next portal was smaller than Hell's Gate—Magister Halathyn's detector had already told them that much, not that they'd really needed the detectors for that; no one had ever seen a portal Hell's Gate's size, far less one bigger. But his prisoner interrogations had confirmed that it was still the next best thing to ten miles across . . . and that the so-called "fort" built to cover it was little more sophisticated—or manned—than Fort Shaylar had been. The advance forces Two Thousand Harshu and Thousand Toralk were sending ahead should find it child's play to slip through a portal that size under cover of night without being spotted.
And the terrain on the far side of the portal was very different from that on this side. Fort Brithik lay in the midst of the vast, level plains of central Andara, which—unlike these miserable, dripping woods or the smoldering desert left by the forest fire still raging in the Hell's Gate universe—was ideal terrain for air-mobile operations. Those same prisoner interrogations had also told them which way to go in search of the next portal beyond Brithik . . . and where to find the next half-dozen Voice relay stations.
Magister Halathyn's detectors would undoubtedly have pointed them in the direction of the next portal, even without the information Neshok had wrung out of his prisoners. For that matter, the fact that the Sharonians had no dragons meant there were bound to be roads—or at least tracks—to point the way to their next destination. But it was thanks to Neshok's efforts that they knew how far they had to go (and where to look when they got there) to find those never-to-be-sufficiently-damned Voices.
The Voice relay between New Uromath and Thermyn, for example, was on this side of the portal connecting them. The distance was short enough to require only a single relay, but whereas Fort Brithik was built in Thermyn, where there was at least less rain and better lines of sight, the Voice outpost was in New Uromath. As far as the Sharonians knew, there was no real security need to put it under the cover of Fort Brithik's palisades, and by putting the Voice on this side of the portal, he was more handily available for contact from Fort Shaylar or the Voice at Fallen Timbers. Clearly, the Sharonians had decided messages moving up-chain were more likely to be time-critical than messages moving down-chain, which explained the Voice's location. He was close enough to the portal that he could easily cross it to transmit messages up-chain or check for messages coming down-chain at regularly scheduled intervals, yet always available at any other time for any potentially critical message from the Sharonian negotiators.
Without the information Neshok had gotten out of his prisoners, it was likely the relay station would have been overlooked by people who expected the Voice they wanted to be inside Fort Brithik's protection. And if that had happened, the odds were entirely too good that the Voice might have evaded the Arcanans long enough to break back across the portal himself and pass a warning back to Sharona.
That wasn't going to happen now. Those same interrogations had informed Neshok that the relay station had been built on ground which, unlike most of the rest of the terrain between here and Thermyn, was not covered in dense woodland. It was hard to conceive of a forest fire in these environs, and Neshok suspected that the one which had made the clearing in which the relay station had been built had actually been set by a prairie grass fire coming through the portal from Thermyn long before the Sharonians discovered either universe. Where the fire had come from didn't matter, however. What mattered was that it had been big enough to offer landing space for dragons relatively close to the relay station, yet far enough back to land unseen and invisible on a moonless, drizzling night.
And that the relay station itself was far enough away from the portal for the discharge of weapons less . . . showy than the Sharonians' to pass unnoticed by the fort's garrison.
And, he thought coldly, still watching the quartet of transports and their escorts fade into the early evening sky, even if something should happen to go wrong there, there's always the next Voice relay beyond Fort Brithik.
Their Voices might offer the Sharonians all sorts of strategic advantages . . . but only as long as the long, vulnerable chain of relay posts remained unbroken. And it would remain unbroken only as long as Arcana didn't know where to find it.
Alivar Neshok smiled again, baring his teeth in a snarl of triumph, then straightened. It was time to get his professional interrogation face back in place to greet the next batch of prisoners, he thought, and turned around to walk back inside.
* * *
"You wanted to see me, Fifty?"
Commander of One Thousand Carthos sounded brusque, as well he might, given the thousand and one details he had to deal with at the moment. The captured fort was a bubbling cauldron of movement, orders, questions, answers, and curses as the thousand's infantry and cavalry got themselves sorted out for the next day and the leap forward to position themselves for the attack upon the universe the Sharonians called Thermyn.
"Yes, Sir. Thank you for finding time."
Fifty Jaralt Sarma made his own voice crisp and firm—the sort of voice a senior officer might expect out of a subordinate who was determined not to waste his time.
"Well?" Carthos said impatiently.
"Sir," Sarma drew a deep breath and braced himself, "I'm afraid we've had a serious violation of the Kerellian Accords."
"Really."
The single word came out flat, devoid of any emotional overtone at all, and Tayrgal Carthos sat back in the chair behind the desk which had once belonged to the fort's Sharonian commander. He interlaced his fingers across his flat midsection and cocked his head to one side.
"What sort of 'violation,' Fifty?" he asked after a moment.
"Sir," Sarma said, "it's Five Hundred Neshok. My platoon has the guard duty on the fort's armory. We saw one of the five hundred's troopers drag a Sharonian prisoner out of the side of the main building where the five hundred's set up for interrogation. He—the prisoner, I mean, Sir—had been beaten. Badly beaten."
"And?" Carthos prompted with a slight frown as Sarma paused.
"And a little later we heard screams, Sir," the commander of fifty said. "A lot of screams. None of the other prisoners came back out. Not until two of Five Hundred Neshok's men dragged out another prisoner. Sir," Sarma met the thousand's eyes levelly, "the man's throat had been cut. He'd been murdered."
The fifty used the verb deliberately, and watched Carthos' eyes harden. Silence hovered for a moment, then the thousand allowed his chair to come back upright.
"As it happens, Fifty Sarma," he said, "I've already received a report on the events you've described. According to Five Hundred Neshok—and the corroborating testimony of five of his men who were physically present at the time—the dead prisoner attacked the five hundred. Exactly what the lunatic thought he was going to accomplish eludes me, of course, but five reliable witnesses—six of them, counting the Five Hundred himself—all agree that the prisoner managed to get his hands on one of the guard's weapons and that Five Hundred Neshok killed him in self-defense."
Sarma's jaw dropped. He couldn't help it . . . but he managed, somehow, to stop himself before he actually said anything.
Carthos' expression hardened ever so slightly, but the thousand kept his own voice level.
"I commend you for your obvious desire to see to it that Two Thousand Harshu's standing orders extending the protection of the Kerellian Acco
rds to any prisoners we take are adhered to, Fifty. And I assure you that any possible violations of the Accords will be investigated most carefully. In this case, however, given the existence of half a dozen witnesses, all of whose testimony corroborates one another's, I suspect that you've overreacted to a situation in which you weren't privy to all the facts."
Sarma got his mouth closed again, locking his teeth against the protests which hammered upon them from behind. Gotten his hands on another guard's weapon, had he? Then perhaps Thousand Carthos could explain just how that had happened when the dead man's hands were still chained behind him as he was dragged out of the interrogation room like so much slaughtered meat. Or explain where those screams had come from, or the reason for the savage beating the first prisoner had obviously sustained.
But those, Jaralt Sarma knew now, were questions he dared not ask. Not now, not here. Perhaps never, but definitely not today.
"I see, Sir," he heard his own voice say levelly. "You're right, of course. Obviously, I wasn't aware of all the details. Nor was I aware that you were already so well informed about the incident. I . . . apologize for wasting your time at a moment like this."
"Nonsense, Fifty," Carthos replied. "No officer is ever guilty of 'wasting' his superiors' time when he believes that something as serious as you obviously thought had happened has occurred. A deliberate violation of the Kerellian Accords?" The thousand shook his head. "The Articles of War themselves are quite specific about the responsibility of any Union officer to report something like that, after all."
"Yes, Sir, they are. I still appreciate your being so understanding, though."
Sarma was distantly surprised that he could get the words out without gagging, but he managed.
"Don't worry about it, Fifty." Carthos' smile somehow failed to reach his eyes, Sarma noticed. The thousand paused for a moment, then arched one eyebrow.
