David Weber - Empire from the Ashes

"You're riding for a fall, Tamman!" she warned, shaking a fist at him, and he laughed. Then she lowered her fist and stepped closer. She put her arms around him and hugged him tightly. "But you're a pretty decent fellow yourself," she whispered in his ear.

"Of course I am," he agreed, and put his own arm around her, then looked back at Stomald. "You don't need them, but you have my blessings, Stomald. And if you need a groomsman—?"

"I—" Stomald began, then stopped, blushed even brighter, and looked at Harriet appealingly.

"I think you're getting a bit ahead of yourself," she told Tamman, "but assuming we all get out of this in one piece and I get him home to Mom and Dad, we might just take you up on that."

"Shit!"

No one understood the English expletive, but Sean's officers understood the tone. All of them were splashed from head to toe in mud, and Sean stood in cold, thigh-deep water that rose nearly to the Pardalians' waists. The rain had stopped, but the air was almost unbearably humid, and swarms of what passed for gnats whined about their ears. The column stretched out behind them, for Sean was leading the way now, since his implant sensors made it far easier for him to pick a route through the swamp—or would have if there'd been a way through it, he thought savagely.

He inhaled and made himself calm down before he opened his mouth again, then turned to his staff.

"We'll have to backtrack," he said grimly. "The bottom drops off ahead, and there's some kind of quicksand to the right. We'll have to cut further north."

Tibold said nothing, but his mouth tightened, and Sean understood. Their original plans had called for passing the column's head through the swamp in ten or twelve hours, and so far they'd been slogging around in it for over twenty. What had seemed a relatively simple, if unpleasant, task on the map had become something very different, and it was all his own fault. He had the best reconnaissance capabilities on the planet, and he should have scouted their route better than this. If he had, he would have known the foot of the valley's northern wall was lined with underground springs. The narrowest part of the swamp was also one of the least passable, and his stupid oversight had mired his entire corps down in it.

"All right," he said finally, sighing. "We won't get anywhere standing here looking at the mud." He thought for a few moments, calling up the map he'd stored in his implant computers on the way through, then nodded sharply. "Remember where we stopped for lunch?" he asked Tibold.

"Yes, My Lord."

"All right. There was a spit of solider ground running northeast from there. If there's a way through this glop at all, we'll have to go that way. Turn the column around and stop its head there. While you're doing that, I'll see if Lady Sandy can pick a better path than I can."

"At once, My Lord," Tibold agreed, and turned to slosh back along the halted column while Sean activated his com.

"Sandy?" he subvocalized.

"Yes, Sean?" She was trying to hide her own anxiety, he thought, and made his own tone lighter.

"We're gonna have to backtrack, kid."

"I know. I had a remote tuned in."

"In that case, you know where we're headed, and I'm one dumb asshole not to have had you checking route for us already." He sighed. "Tune up your sensors and see if you can map us a way through this slop."

"I'm already working on it," she said, "but, Sean, I don't see a fast way through it."

"How bad is it?"

"From what I can see, it's going to take at least another full day and a half," she said in a small, most un-Sandy-like voice.

"Great. Just fucking great!" Sean felt her flinch and shook his head quickly, knowing she was watching him through her remotes. "Sorry," he said penitently. "I'm not pissed at you ; I'm pissed at me . There's no excuse for this kind of screwup."

"No one else thought of it, either, Sean," she pointed out in his defense, and he snorted.

"Doesn't make me feel any better," he growled, then sighed. "Well, I guess standing around pissing and moaning won't make it any better, either. Let's get this show back on the road—such as it is!"

He turned to slog off in Tibold's wake, and the swarming clouds of gnats whined about his ears.

Even Sandy's estimate turned out to have been overly optimistic. What Sean and Tibold had envisioned as a twelve-hour maneuver consumed over three of Pardal's twenty-nine-hour days, and it was an exhausted, sodden, mud-spattered column of infantry that finally crawled out of the swamp proper into the merely "soft" ground south of it. Thank God Tibold had warned him against even trying to bring artillery through that muck, Sean thought wearily. Their five hundred dragoons had lost a quarter of their branahlks, and Lord only knew what would have happened to nioharqs. Given his druthers, he decided, he'd take Hannibal's elephants and the Alps over a Pardalian swamp and anything .

Under the circumstances, he'd eased the "no miracles" rule, and Sandy and Harry had been busy using cutters to bring in fresh food. The cargo remotes had stacked it neatly to await his column's arrival, and the troops gave a weary cheer as they saw it. There was even a little wood for fires, and the company cooks quickly got down to business.

"Sean?"

He turned and flashed a mud-spattered smile as Sandy walked out of the gathering evening. His officers and men saw her as well, and she waved to them as a soft, wordless murmur of thanks rose from them. She made a shooing gesture at the waiting rations, and the troops grinned and returned to their tasks as she crossed to Sean. Unlike her towering lover, she was spotless. Not even her boots were muddy, and he shook his head.

" 'Ow can you tell she's an angel?" he murmured. " 'Cause she's not covered wi' shit loike the rest of us!" he answered himself.

"Very funny." She smiled dutifully, but her eyes were worried, and he raised an eyebrow.

"The reinforcing column got on the road a day sooner than Ortak expected," she said softly in English, "and it's moving faster than we expected. They'll reach Malz within four or five days."

"Wi—?" Sean stared at her, then clamped his teeth hard. "And just why," he asked after a moment, "is this the first I'm hearing of this?"

"It wouldn't have done a bit of good to worry you with it while you were mucking around in the swamp," she replied more tartly. "You were already going as fast as you could. All you could have done was fret."

"But—" He started to speak sharply, then made himself stop. She was right, but she was also wrong, and he controlled his tone very carefully when he went on. "Sandy, don't ever hold things back on me again, please? There may not have been anything I could have done, but as long as I'm in command, I need all the information we've got, as soon as we get it. Is that understood?"

He held her eyes sternly, and her nostrils flared with answering anger. But then she bit her lower lip and nodded.

"Understood," she said in a low voice. "I just—" She looked down at her hands and sighed. "I just didn't want you to worry, Sean."

"I know." He reached out to capture one of her hands and squeezed it tightly until she looked up. "I know ," he said more softly. "It's just that this isn't the time for it, okay?"

"Okay," she agreed, and then her brown eyes suddenly gleamed. "But if you really want to know everything , then I suppose I should tell you what Harry's been up to, too."

"What Harry's been up to?" Sean looked speculatively down at her, then raised his head as Tibold called his name. The ex-Guardsman pointed to the meal preparations, and Sean waved for the others to go ahead without him and returned his attention to Sandy. "And just what," he asked in a deliberately ominous voice, "has my horrid twin done now?"