David Weber - Hell Hath No Fury

Carthos looked levelly into Eswayr's eyes. For a moment, he thought the five hundred was going to balk.

But then the Inkaran drew a deep breath.

"Yes, Sir. I'll … take care of it."

"Good." Carthos patted the smaller man on the shoulder with a smile. "I'll leave it in your hands, then.

Now, where can I find Five Hundred Mala?"

"Come in Klayrman! Come in."

Klayrman Toralk obeyed the invitation and stepped into Two Thousand Harshu's command tent. He'd half-expected a summons like this one. In fact, he wondered what had taken so long. More than two days had passed since the revelations of his supper with Harshu. Tayrgal Carthos had been sent upon his way forty-eight hours previously, but Harshu had yet to move towards his own next objective, and so far, at least, Toralk had no idea why he hadn't.

Hopefully, that's about to change, he told himself as he approached the map table floating in midair at the center of the outsized tent.

Aside from himself and Harshu, the only other person present was Commander of Five Hundred Herak Mahrkrai, Harshu's Chief of Staff. Mahrkrai-old for his rank, with iron-gray hair and oddly colorless eyes-was the sort of officer who seemed to have specialized in unobtrusiveness throughout his entire career. Toralk had worked with him enough in planning the Expeditionary Force's operations to know he was a highly competent, even an imaginative man, but he didn't project that. His apparent … blandness, for want of a better word, was the most striking thing about him, and Toralk wondered why. He supposed it might have owed something to the fact that Mahrkrai's less showy personality was simply lost in the shadow of Harshu's far more extroverted and aggressive impact on everyone about him.

Of course, it's always possible Harshu picked him expressly because he has that sort of personality. But if he did, the question is whether it was because Harshu was smart enough to know he needed a balance wheel like Mahrkrai? Or was it because he wanted to make sure his chief of staff wouldn't challenge him for the spotlight?

"Thank you for getting here so promptly, Klayrman," Harshu continued, reaching out to offer the Air Force officer his hand.

"I'd say you were welcome, if there were any particular reason why I shouldn't have come promptly, Sir," Toralk replied, and Harshu snorted.

"What a polite way of saying we've been sitting here on our arses too long!" the two thousand said.

Toralk opened his mouth, but Harshu shook his head before he could speak. "No, that's a perfectly reasonable thing for you to be thinking, actually. Especially given how heavily all of our preliminary planning emphasized the need to move quickly once we got through the initial Sharonian defenses.

Unfortunately, Five Hundred Neshok has turned up some intelligence which Herak and I have been kicking around for the better part of twelve hours now."

"What sort of intelligence, Sir, if I may ask?" Toralk said cautiously.

"According to two or three of our prisoners, there are Arcanan prisoners being held in our next objective, Sir," Five Hundred Mahrkrai answered for his boss.

"What?" Astonishment startled the question out of Toralk. The instant it was out of his mouth, though, he wondered just why he was surprised. They'd known all along that the survivors of the Second Andarans had been taken prisoner, which meant, logically, that they had to be being held somewhere.

I suppose I simply assumed they'd have done the same things with their prisoners that we did with ours-

gotten them moved to the rear for proper interrogation as quickly as possible. Except, of course, that we haven't been doing that since we launched this attack, have we?

That last thought suggested some potentially grim reasons for holding prisoners closer to the front, so he decided not to think about it any more just at the moment.

"We've confirmed it," Harshu told him. "At least, the verifier spells have confirmed that the prisoners giving us the information believe it's accurate. According to the best information Neshok's been able to put together, the worst wounded of our people were held at this Fort Ghartoun,or Fort Raylthar, or whatever the hells it's named these days."

"It makes sense, Sir," Mahrkrai put in. "As far as we can tell, they don't have anything like our magistrons. They're pretty much limited to natural healing times, and transporting badly wounded men without even dragons must be a nightmare. So they probably parked the most badly hurt of our people at this Fort Ghartoun. Since they didn't know a thing about our aerial capability, they must have figured Ghartoun was far enough from our point of contact to be secure."

"But you see our problem, don't you, Klayrman?" Harshu said, waving one hand at the sketch map on the table. "We can't exactly use the yellows-or even the reds-in a surprise attack if our own people are being held inside the fort."

"No, we can't, Sir," Toralk agreed, stepping closer to the table and gazing down at the map.

"At least it's on this side of the next portal," Harshu pointed out. "As long as we exercise a little caution, there's not too much chance of anyone spotting us moving into attack position."

"I'm not sure how significant that really is, Sir," Toralk replied. Harshu raised an eyebrow, and the Air Force thousand shrugged. "Obviously, there's always a greater chance of being spotted moving through a portal-one of the more irritating things about them is the way they bottleneck your movement options to at least some extent, after all. But we've pretty much swept the area between here and the next portal.

There weren't any civilian settlements-" thank the gods, he very carefully did not say aloud, thinking about Neshok "-and we'd neutralized the Voice relay even before we hit Fort Brithik. So we can move with virtual impunity right up until the instant we jumpoff for the attack. All of that's true. But from the outset, one of our primary planning considerations has been the neutralization of their Voice chain's next link, the one immediately beyond whatever might be our current objective. So we're still going to have to get our long-range penetration teams through the portal before the attack, which is going to take us right back to that bottleneck situation."

"Maybe not, Sir," Mahrkrai put in diffidently. He tapped the sketch map. "From this, it looks as if their fort is a good mile or mile-and-a-half inside the portal. If we can get people on the ground, maybe a talon or two of dragons in the air, between the fort and the portal, they won't be able to get a Voice through to the other side. Not, at least, until we can get our people through to take their next Voice relay station."

"And you know roughly where that is?" Toralk asked.

"Yes, Sir. We do."

"I see."

Toralk fell silent, pursing his lips as he moved his gaze to the sketched floor plan pinned to the table beside the map. He wasn't about to invest too much confidence in that sketch's accuracy-not knowing how Neshok obtained his information. Still, it was probably fairly close. The Sharonians, like the Union of Arcana itself, seemed to stick to fairly standardized designs for things like portal forts.

He ran a fingertip across the sketch, thinking hard, then looked back up at Harshu.

"I could wish we had some SpecOps troopers to spearhead this thing, Sir. Still, I think we could probably do it without an opening air strike. Assuming, of course, that we still have the advantage of surprise." His expression was sober, and his voice took on a warning note as he continued. "With their weapons, if they figure out we're coming and get themselves stood-to in time, even a relatively small garrison is going to inflict heavy casualties if we don't hammer them with a surprise air strike first."