Роберт Бюттнер - Orphan's Journey

Ord balanced the new rifle on two fingers, then raised his eyebrows and smiled. “That’s fine. The first AK-47s had milled receivers, too. It’s first-class work, Gustus.”

Gustus the armorer was thirty, pug-nosed, with black curly hair, and Marini eyes behind gold wire spectacles.

He smiled, then frowned. “The repeating mechanism is brilliant. But the first one we completed seized after four rounds.”

Ord shrugged. “Black powder residue. We’ll work it out. When can you start production?”

Gustus wrinkled his pug nose. “Not so soon. I have to replace a whole crew.”

Ord raised his eyebrows.

Gustus said, “My father died last month. After I checked the books, I found that the night shift had been skimming rifles to the Red Line runners for years.”

Ord asked, “You turn ’em in?”

“They’re mostly good men who went along to protect their jobs and their families. I turned in the ringleaders, but I gave the others the option to enlist, instead.” He grinned. “Every one took it.”

Twenty minutes later, a carriage hauled Ord and me toward the quay.

I said, “Logistics could lose this war. Or win it, Sergeant Major.” They say Eisenhower conquered Europe by piling up supplies, then letting them fall on the Nazis.

“Always, Sir.”

“There’s not an officer in the Clans that’s moved an army across a sea, and then across four hundred miles of unfamiliar ground under fire. What they just absolutely know — that isn’t really true — will hurt us more than what somebody new just doesn’t know. Gustus seems sharp. Honest. Resourceful. Knows weapons, cares about people. I thought—”

“So did I, Sir. Once his forge completes the changeover to assault rifle production, it’ll run itself. I administered his Commissioning Oath myself, two days ago. Subject to your approval, of course.”

“Oh.”

An hour later, I left Ord at the quay, with instructions to have Tassini, Casuni, and Marini cavalrymen figure out how wronk units could operate with wobblehead and duckbill units without eating their allies.

I could’ve just told them what to do, but it’s better to tell people what needs to get done, then let them astonish you with their ingenuity. I wasn’t smart enough to figure that out. A last-century general named Patton said it.

I turned to my newest recruit. “Wilgan, how do I get an army of three hundred thousand soldiers across the Sea of Hunters?”

The old Ship Master smiled through his white beard, then winked, and flapped his arms. “Grow ’em wings.”

I told him my plan.

He shook his head. “It’s twenty months on the ways to build even one ship like mine.”

“We don’t have twenty months.”

Wilgan led me along the quay to an open wooden boat creaking as it rocked on the river swell. He knelt, and grasped one of the shipped oars that studded its flanks. “A river packet like this one could make the crossing with fifty men, if they wouldn’t mind rowing themselves, and if the seas were fair. We’ve got thousands of these packets up and down the Marin.”

“They wouldn’t mind rowing. When are the seas fair?” I asked.

“At Full Moons, mostly. ’Course, that’s when the Glowies run.” He scratched his beard, then smiled. “Which could suit your purposes.”

I knelt beside him, put a hand on his shoulder, and said, “Tell me more.”

FIFTY-FIVE

BOOM.

Three months after Wilgan educated me about amphibious operations, the Winter Palace’s stone battlement jumped beneath my feet. Bassin’s prototype artillery piece spit a shell toward a target raft bobbing in the Sea of Hunters. Startled pterosaurs shrieked, leapt from their cliff perches, and glided above the waves. Spray fountained, and the raft disappeared.

Bassin and Jude turned to one another, grinning and tugging cotton from their ears. Both wore Combat Engineers’ uniform, Bassin’s still with Colonel’s rank, because he refused a Marshal’s baton, and Jude’s with the pips of a Provisional Lieutenant.

When I assigned Jude to Bassin’s gearheads, I told him they needed his math smarts. They did. I didn’t tell him the Engineers also figured to take fewer casualties than first-wave units.

Culture transfer was a two-way street, so Bassin and Jude knuckle-bumped the gun crew the way Jude had taught them, then Bassin grinned at me. “Another fifty you owe me.”

Bassin and I had a running bet on his new field pieces’ accuracy, which I had lost all seven days since Alliance headquarters moved to the Winter Palace. “His field piece” was a stretch. Bassin’s new darling grew from blueprints printed out of Jeeb’s memory for a U.S. Civil War 3-inch Ordnance Rifle. It was the only rifled gun Ord could find that both fit the wrought-iron capabilities of the Marinus forges and had a tube light enough to haul in a packet boat. An Ordnance Rifle could hit the end of a flour barrel at any distance under a mile, or fire canister shot at close range into charging Slugs.

Not all our technology had blossomed. Smokeless powder would have to wait until there was a chemical industry capable of making nitrocellulose and nitroglycerin.

Marini industry was years from being able to duplicate radios, even the surplus antiques that MAT(D)4 was allowed to share with its Earth Advisees. We tried to get Casus to use a backpack portable. But the first time my voice trickled out of the black plastic handset, Casus accused the handset of being a beetle that stole human souls.

Once Ord’s boogeyman story about the Cargo’Bots spread, not even the less superstitious Marini would go near them. Howard used them to packrat his debris collection.

Bassin and I walked to the landward battlement and looked back across the farmland and hamlets of Southern Marin. Around every hut cluster that swelled where narrow roads crossed, yurt and tent forests sprouted. In every field, wobbleheads and duckbills grazed, or surged in lines back and forth as their riders maneuvered.

From the embarkation beaches south of the Palace twenty miles deep back into Marin, the Alliance’s Army grew. Munitions and supplies poured in, rowed along the coast from Marinus in river packets. From the desert Encampments of the Tassini to the tiny upriver outposts along the Marin, even more troops trained, all to funnel to this place by the jump-off date, which seemed to rush at us like a charging wronk.

Bassin laid his hands on the parapet. “The farmers say their land is about to sink in the sea beneath the army’s weight.”

If it did, they would throw their last life preserver to a cavalryman.

I said, “I heard a village made dinner for two Casuni Troops yesterday. And the Casuni put on a riding display for them afterwards.”

Community relations hadn’t been so cordial at first, and often still weren’t. Casuni Cavalry had trampled farm fields. Tassini had “requisitioned,” then roasted, livestock. City boys from Marinus had taken more than a few liberties with country girls. But country girls were good with fowling pieces loaded with salt, as a few city boys had learned the hard way.

I leaned my elbows on the stone and groaned. “I still spend half my day listening to grumpy aldermen and patching broken gates and broken hearts.”

Bassin looked up at the sun. “Time for Staff Meeting?”

I sighed, and we walked back toward the Palace. “I’d rather date a country girl with a gun.”

FIFTY-SIX

“A SOLDIER SURE OF HIS FOOTING has no need of a mount!” The Marini Infantry Marshal pounded his fist on the conference table. The Casuni and Tassini cavalrymen he was arguing with rolled their eyes.

I rapped my knuckles on the table. “Let’s get started, gentlemen.”

Bassin sat to my left, Casus and the ranking Tassini alternated to my immediate right. Infantry Marshals, Cavalry Division Commanders, a General of Charioteers, and a Marini Admiral filled out the table flanks.