David Weber - The Road to Hell

“There’s another point to consider, too,” chan Geraith put in. The staffers looked at him, and the division-captain shrugged. “Trying to retake Karys, we could only get at them by fighting our way down the Cut on the ground; their godsdamned dragons can literally fly out of the portal any time they want to. Once Lyskar here”-he nodded at Lyskar chan Serahlyk, his chief combat engineer-“finishes digging in the portal defenses, that’ll change. And once Braykhan’s guns get here, we’ll be able to think about pushing them farther back on the approaches, but for now they’ve got damned close to completely free passage. That means they have an open road to attack our line of communication, but they aren’t doing it. Why not? They have to realize we can’t have pedestal guns and heavy Faraikas everywhere, so why aren’t they trying to circle wide around the fort and the fixed defenses to get at the rail line or our fatigue parties?” He looked around the map table. “Any commander with a scrap of initiative would be probing our rear area defenses, if nothing else, and does anyone in this compartment want argue that someone who managed to advance over four thousand miles in twelve days doesn’t have at least a trace of initiative? The fact that this ‘Two Thousand Harshu’ of theirs isn’t doing exactly that suggests to me that he has to be extraordinarily sensitive to additional losses for some reason. And according to young chan Hopyr he appears to have plenty of men, which seems to add point to the theory that it’s his logistics, not manpower, that’s the problem.”

Platoon-Captain Rynai chan Hopyr was the Distance Viewer who’d gone forward with the escort sent to shepherd Olvyr Banchu and his engineers back to Fort Salby. His was a powerful Talent, and he’d used it to good effect scouting the Arcanans’ positions and troop strength. He’d tallied in excess of a hundred and fifty of their dragons and at least six thousand men, twice the 3rd Dragoons’ current strength in Traisum. There was no way to tell what might have lain outside his range, but chan Geraith was certain the Arcanan commander had strength chan Hopyr hadn’t Seen. Not that what he had Seen hadn’t been quite bad enough.

“That’s essentially my own conclusion, Sir,” chan Gayrahn said. “Well, mine and Master-Armsman chan Vornos’. All indications are that Harshu is a determined, ruthless commander-more than ruthless enough to accept casualties and losses as the price of accomplishing his mission. Yet he hasn’t even tried to attack the rail line behind us.”

“Perhaps he simply doesn’t realize how important it is,” chan Isail suggested, and chan Geraith nodded. One of the things he most valued about chan Isail was the chief of staff’s hardheaded pragmatism. Chan Geraith’s own tendency was to think in the most aggressive terms possible. Aggressively enough, in fact, that he sometimes found himself badly in need of chan Isail’s willingness to challenge (or at least critically examine) his underlying assumptions.

“I think it’s entirely possible-even probable-that he doesn’t have a clear grasp of how much we can move, or how quickly we can move it, on rails,” the division-captain conceded now. “In fact, I don’t see how it could be any other way. They had to be as ignorant of our capabilities as we were of theirs when they set out to attack us, and Harshu wouldn’t have been so quick to let Banchu and the work crews go if he’d realized how badly he could hurt us by just hanging on to them.”

“You’re probably right about that, Sir,” chan Kymo said thoughtfully. “I’ve been trying to get some sort of mental picture of how our transport capabilities stack up against theirs, now that we know about these dragon things of theirs.” The quartermaster shrugged. “I can’t be positive they don’t have something like our railroads, obviously, but I agree with you that Harshu would never have let Banchu’s people go so readily-at the very least, he would’ve insisted that all their equipment be left behind or destroyed-if he’d had any real grasp of their importance. In fact, I’m beginning to think it’s important we not let ourselves be so dazzled by how quickly they can move that we overestimate how much they can move.

“Assume a sixty-ton dragon can carry its own weight. Frankly, that seems unlikely as hell for any flying beast, but given how ‘unlikely’ dragons are in the first place, I’m not going to say they can’t. But that’s still only sixty tons per dragon, whereas we can load a hundred and ten tons into a standard freight car, and the heavy-lift cars can carry almost twice that much. We hauled over ten thousand tons all the way from Sharona in a single train. Assuming their dragons really could haul sixty tons apiece, they’d still need over a hundred and seventy of them to match that total…and we currently have two more trains that size following us down the same line, with more loading up right behind them. If Harshu had any concept of what that means, he’d be moving heaven and all the Arpathian hells combined to stop us from doing it.”

“Point taken,” chan Isail said after a moment.

“I think Therahk may have an even better point then he realizes,” chan Geraith said. His subordinates looked at him, and he smiled thinly. “We have to remember both sides are dealing with opponents with completely unknown capabilities. I know I just said that, but it bears repeating because it’s something we have to keep in mind. At the moment, Harshu undoubtedly calculates-correctly, by the way-that he has every tactical advantage there is in our current standoff. He can’t know how good our heavy artillery is, and I think it’s obvious that until he hit chan Skrithik here at Fort Salby, none of our people had an opportunity to use their weapons and doctrine effectively against him. He’d’ve been one hell of a lot more cautious about how he went after Salby if they had. But he’s got a better feeling for our capabilities by now, and he’s probably licking his chops thinking about what he can do to any assault we might launch down the Cut, right into his teeth. If nothing else, those damned dragons of his mean he could put explosive charges into the sides of the Cut anywhere he wanted to. We’ve already seen what their equivalent of dynamite can do to a fort’s wall, so there’s no reason to assume they couldn’t do the same things to the Cut’s walls, now is there?”

He looked around their expressions. Most of them looked as if they’d really like to disagree with him; none of them did.

“One thing we have to remember, though,” he continued after a moment, “is that they have had the opportunity to observe our capabilities on their advance from Hell’s Gate. By now, for example, they must realize our draft animals are nowhere near as big or as powerful as theirs are, judging by those cavalry horses of theirs.”

Chan Isail nodded sourly. The “horses” the Arcanans had used in their final assault on Fort Salby were bigger than the largest Chinthai draft horse he’d ever seen, yet according to all of the witnesses, they’d charged the fort’s eastern wall cross-country at a speed few Sharonian thoroughbreds could have matched on a racetrack. Obviously, the Arcanans’ magic-or whatever the hells they called it-had been at work there, as well.

“I think we also have to assume that they’ve captured accurate maps of both the Karys and Kelsayr Chains,” chan Geraith pointed out. “If they have, they probably realize just how unimproved both chains are beyond Karys and Lashai, not to mention the water gap here in Traisum. Where Kelsayr’s concerned, they’ll probably assume-logically-that six thousand miles of ocean and another forty-six hundred miles overland must constitute a pretty severe bottleneck here in Traisum, and they’ll evaluate our mobility beyond the railheads on the basis of piss-poor roads and trails, wagons, and pack animals. By the same token, even if Therahk’s completely correct about Harshu’s not realizing how much we can transport by rail, I’ll guarantee you he does realize we can move one hell of a lot more in a freight car than we could in a six-horse wagon down a dirt trail. So if I were him, and if I could move my entire army four thousand miles in less than two weeks, I wouldn’t be especially worried by the possibility of being flanked on a seventeen thousand-mile march by an enemy restricted to horse-drawn transport. Even if he knows about the shipyard at Renaiyrton and the rail line through Kelsayr and Lashai, he’ll figure he has plenty of defensive depth on that front.”