David Weber - Worlds of Honor

Ryder had a visceral reaction to both wagging tongues and dressing down subordinates in public. The two reactions fought to a standstill, giving an ache to her stomach and an edge to her voice.

"A thoroughly secret part, unless I've forgotten our briefing from the Director of the Guard. Which he was courteous enough to give us personally."

"Ah, well—I got a personal—briefing—from somebody who's on the tree-chopping crew. And she pointed out the problem, too. There's not enough airlift to get the Malcomers upland, let alone the rest of the Lowlands. They'd have to go by road, and fallen trees would block any ground vehicles, not just a mobile enemy."

And the one railroad could be broken by blowing any one of five bridges from the air or even from orbit. Ryder sighed. It looked as if the sergeant had fraternized but given no more than he gained—which was not a bad way for such an affair to go, and besides, she was not really in a position to throw stones.

"I have to agree," Ryder said. "No harm done this time, Sergeant, but everybody remember about mistimed curiosity. If we didn't have the goodwill of the Guard, we wouldn't be even close to having six hundred combat-ready Sea Fencibles. The Republic is giving us everything they can afford and maybe a little more. We all have some sort of body armor, but half their artillery crews are still wearing fatigues and helmets!

"So don't let's us embarrass them unnecessarily, all right?"

Everyone agreed enthusiastically, maybe even sincerely, but she saw the reservations on every face. It would take more than cooperation, it would take miracles, to give the Canmore Republic some sort of offensive capability before Carl Euvinophan's private army was ready to cross the Central Sea and become that non-simulated mobile brigade.

Then the red on the map would be a trail of equally non-simulated bodies. It almost helped that the oldest tradition of the Marine advisers (nearly ten years old) was to be among the corpses when the smoke cleared. That meant fewer hard decisions to make during the fighting, and none at all afterward.

The Kingdom of Chuiban's main western port was not blacked out. That would have made no sense, even if the Canmore Republic had possessed a halfway-decent satellite network or even a reliably friendly eye aboard the orbital freight station. A satellite net or the station would have been over Buwayjon several times before the tanks were safely under cover, and tanks gave off impressive heat signatures even from orbit.

Fortunately, the freight station was under the control of the foolish, decadent, elitist, and obstinately neutral Erewhonese. They kept it as neutral as they were. Also, they had not sold either contender on Silvestria more than a few basic weather satellites.

When somebody on Silvestria suddenly flourished a satellite network, it would be the Kingdom of Chuiban. And the satellites would work –Citizen People's Commissioner Jean Testaniere had handpicked the models himself, then personally run the diagnostic and maintenance tests on them. It might be considered dangerously elitist for a People's Commissioner to exhibit so much technical competence, but it was simply dangerous to trust one's life to electronics left in the hands of people who did not know one piece of diagnostic nanoware from another.

The first tanks were now turning off the pier and rolling up Mongkut Avenue, from which all civilian traffic had been barred by white-gloved Field Police. There were too many of them to all be from the city's modest Royal Army garrison; some of warlord Euvinophan's own Field Police company had to have arrived with the vehicle convoy.

A challenge floated through the thin mist, and a response came back. The challenger was the Commissioner's bodyguard, Citizen Sergeant Pescu of the State Security; the response came from Citizen Captain Paul Weldon, of the People's Navy.

Testaniere wondered how long Weldon had been in town. The commissioner hadn't heard the pinnace land, and both Weldon and his two pilots were fond of making a noisy entrance.

"Greetings, Citizen Captain," Testaniere said. They shook hands, the greeting of equals, although privately Testaniere wondered if the Citizen Captain would ever have risen above Lieutenant Commander under the Legislaturalist regime.

Testaniere was sure that he himself would have risen at least to foreman if he had stayed at the shop long enough. He had always had the self-confidence which comes with mastering a particular body of knowledge—which he was elitist enough to know was hardly universal among the ranks of the People's Commissioners, State Security, or even the armed forces of the People's Republic!

"Fraternal greetings to you, Citizen Commissioner," Weldon replied. He sniffed the air. "A fine night for our work, eh?"

"I could wish it were not quite so fine," Testaniere said. "A good thick fog would hide us from eyes closer than the Republic's."

"You doubt the loyalty and discretion of the people looking forward to the day of liberation from a monarchy ?" Weldon's incredulity was not entirely an act.

Testaniere sighed. They had been over this ground often enough that he had lost his sense of humor about it. He would have to be careful, however, or he might become one of the first People's Commissioners to be informed on by his military counterpart! Ninety-nine times out of a hundred it went the other way, but they were many light-years from Nouveau Paris and Silvestria was an even bigger political joke than Testaniere's briefings had led him to expect.

In careful detail, he reminded Weldon that the monarchy was highly revered, and that much of Carl Euvinophan's support came from his blood connection with the royal house. Furthermore, it was possible to have legitimate doubts about how much liberating of anything Euvinophan was likely to do without a decisive victory over the Canmores to wave in the face of his enemies.

"Remember that on his mother's side he's descended from a king and on his father's from an Andermani soldier of fortune. That's not what I would have picked as a heritage for the perfect revolutionary."

That was stronger than Testaniere would have put it without the rumble and squeal of the tanks to cover his voice. He only hoped that Citizen Captain Weldon would not quote him anywhere it might be overheard. A vital part of using somebody like Carl Euvinophan as a puppet was to make sure that he never saw the strings until you had replaced them with unbreakable monofilament and preferably shoved a pulse rifle into his belly to make sure he didn't try to untie the monofilament.

The citizen commissioner wondered what his superiors had been thinking of when they decided that the People's Republic should work with Euvinophan. Among other things, he had a good many Andermani comrades, some his own and some left over from his father, and the Andermani were no friends to the People's Republic unless they could see a profitable war in it. In Testaniere's opinion, Gustav Anderman had used hyper to fly back to the Dark Ages, and most of his people were still living there!

The last tank of the first company had passed, and Testaniere saw the tail lights of the earlier ones, turning off to the assembly area and dumps in the industrial park at the south end of the city. Each of the six tank companies had eighteen tanks, old San Martin models marginally survivable on a really modern battlefield, but still generations ahead of anything Silvestria could have produced locally. The full force of these track-borne antiques mounted a hundred and eight 10-cm plasma guns, two hundred and sixteen flex-mounted pulsers, and several hundred launchers for grenades, flares, smoke bombs, and chaff.