David Weber - Hell Hath No Fury

The litter bearers started to move away from the parapet towards the fallen prince, but the regimentcaptain shook his head. They stopped again, and chan Skrithik went to his knees beside the stretcher. He knelt there, staring down at the face of a young man who would never grow old, and his own face was wrung with barely unshed tears.

Janaki's dead face was almost relaxed, Markan thought. The gray eyes were open, staring sightlessly into a void no Talent could See across. A trickle of blood had flowed from the corner of his mouth and dried, but there was no pain in that face … and no fear.

The Uromathian noble moved closer, and chan Skrithik laid his one working hand on Janaki's still chest and looked up at him.

"Sunlord," he said, and his voice was rusty and broken sounding.

"Regiment-Captain," Markan responded quietly.

"Thank you." Chan Skrithik had to stop, clear his throat. "Thank you," he repeated huskily. "Without your men-"

"My men would have been too late, if not for yours," Markan interrupted.

Chan Skrithik looked up at him for several seconds without speaking. Only his hand moved, the fingers stroking gently at the dead prince's tunic as if to somehow tidy it. Finally, the regiment-captain nodded, then looked down at his hand. He regarded it for a heartbeat or two as if it were a stranger's. Then he looked back up at Markan, and there was a strange, lost look in his eyes.

"My Crown Prince is dead."

Tears welled in those eyes at last, and his voice wavered. They were only five words, yet Markhan heard a universe of pain deep within them and felt his own eyes burn. Then the sunlord blinked once, hard, and looked away. Looked beyond the gun platform at the smoke, the bodies, the downed dragons and gryphons. It was a scene of carnage such as no Sharonian had ever imagined, and yet in his mind's eye, Markan imagined another scene. One in which there were no dead dragons, no dead gryphons, no Arcanan prisoners marching sullenly into confinement … only a fort in flames and a garrison taken unawares and slaughtered.

He stared into that vision of what had never been. The vision, he realized, that Janaki chan Calirath had Seen in the Glimpses he'd tried to describe. The thought of his own cynical skepticism while Janaki had offered the warning which had saved them all filled him with shame, and he looked back down at chan Skrithik.

The tears had broken loose at last, cutting startlingly white tracks through the dust and grime and blood on the regiment-captain's face, and Markan went to his own knees across Janaki's body from him, with chan Skrithik's last words still ringing in his in ears.

"No, my friend," the Uromathian said quietly, and shook his head as he reached out to touch chan Skrithik's upper arm. "No. Our Crown Prince is dead."

"Still nothing?" Olvyr Banchu asked, as he climbed up the last few rungs of the ladder and stepped up onto the freight car roof beside Platoon-Captain Selan Vuras.

"Nothing." Vuras shook his head, gazing off to the north as if he thought he should somehow be able to see across the eight hundred miles between him and the Traisum portal.

"You don't think it could be some sort of normal glitch?" Banchu's question sounded a lot more like a statement, and Vuras shook his head again.

"The Regiment-Captain didn't set up his communications schedule just so he could ignore it, sir," he told the TTE's senior engineer. "If he hasn't said anything, then it's because Prince Janaki was right."

Banchu discovered that he had very seldom wished anything in his life as fervently as he wished that Selan might be wrong. Unfortunately, he was certain the young Limathian wasn't. The question, of course, was whether chan Skrithik's silence resulted from an attack on Fort Salby or simply the cutting of the Voice relay between the railhead and the Traisum portal.

"Do you think they could have taken out the relay?" he asked, and Vuras snorted.

"I explained things very carefully to Voice Orma on our way through, sir. He understands, believe me.

And unless the Arcanans have some sort of Voice Sniffer, they aren't going to find him. Even if they might somehow have known where he was before our train came through, we moved him over sixty miles and dropped him off at his own private waterhole with a camo net and tarp. We even found him some trees to hide under." The platoon-captain shook his head again. "Whatever's caused the communications break, it's not because the Arcanans found him, Master Banchu."

"Well." Banchu stood there, but unlike Vuras, his gaze was directed towards the worksite around them.

He studied it for several minutes, then looked back at the PAAF officer.

"If you're right, I'm happy for Orma, Platoon-Captain, but it leaves us in a bit of a pickle, wouldn't you say?"

"Oh, I'd definitely say that, sir," Vuras agreed grimly.

"Then I suppose I'd better go see how our preparations are coming."

Banchu climbed down from the freight car and headed off in search of his assistants.

Platoon-Captain Vuras was the senior officer of the double platoon Regiment-Captain chan Skrithik had sent down to reinforce the railhead's security. Unfortunately, even after Vuras' arrival, that left Banchu with less than a company of regular troops to look after the better part of two thousand workers.

The good news was that at least a third of his labor force had at least some military experience. The Trans-Temporal Express had always given veterans preference when it came to hiring practices, and its personnel office vigorously recruited retired army engineers for its construction projects. And in this case, given all of the … uncertainties of the situation, Banchu had arrived with a freight car loaded with two thousand Model 10 rifles and a million rounds of ammunition. That was enough to issue virtually all of his workers-even those without actual previous military experience-a personal weapon, at least, and he'd put Foram chan Eris in charge of organizing them. Chan Eris was his senior assistant… and just happened to have retired from his first job as a company-captain in the Imperial Ternathian Army Corps of Engineers.

Unfortunately, neither Banchu, chan Eris, nor Vuras had very much in the way of heavy weapons to support those rifles, aside from the pair of Yerthak pedestal guns and single section of light machine guns Vuras had brought with him. There were no mortars, no field guns, no howitzers …

What they did have was ingenuity, lots of construction equipment, several hundred miles worth of stockpiled rails, and the mobile machine shops necessary to perform maintenance on millions of Ternathian marks worth of steam shovels, bulldozers, and tractors.

That thought carried Banchu over to the area where chan Eris and Platoon-Captain Harek chan Morak were overseeing the chief engineer's latest brainchild.

Sparks fountained from welding torches as sweating track layers and maintenance crews worked frantically on what had been standard freight cars up until a very few hours ago. Now the wooden sides of those freight cars were in the process of disappearing behind layers of steel rails. Banchu didn't know if a double layer of railroad iron would stand up to one of the "dragons" Petty-Captain chan Darma had described to Hersal Yoritam, Banchu's own assigned Voice. He doubted that anyone had any clear notion of exactly how powerful dragonfire or lightning might be. But his improvised armor ought to stand up to just about anything short of field artillery, and he'd been careful to leave enough loopholes to allow anyone inside the cars to bring at least a dozen Model 10s to bear in any direction.

"How's it coming, Foram?" he asked.

"Well as we could expect, I guess," chan Eris replied. "Mind you, I don't think we've got enough freight cars to put everyone into, even if we end up having time to stick rails on all of them."