The Road to Hell

Chapter Twenty

January 4

“Thank you for coming aboard, Master Yanusa-Mahrdissa,” Battalion-Captain Hymair chan Yahndar said, standing behind the desk in his cramped-extremely cramped-shipboard office. There was too little room, as his Karmalian grandmother would have said, to swing a sheep. Of course, chan Yahndar had never understood who’d want to swing a sheep, but the phrase certainly offered all of the earthy color anyone could have desired. And however tiny his office was, he was lucky to have it. TTE’s mass-produced steamships were scarcely noted for their palatial accommodations, and Voyager Osprey was no exception to that rule, although-thank all the gods! — she’d at least been intended as a transport from the beginning. That meant he and his men hadn’t ended up stacked in six-high pipe-frame bunks in a converted cargo hold whose last contents had reeked to the gods themselves.

“Well,” the dark-skinned Shurkhali said with an expression halfway between a grimace and a smile, “given all we’ve got to do, it seemed like a good idea to get started early. I’ve been practically camped on that damned dock for two days, now.”

“Sorry about the delay.” Chan Yahndar’s expression was all the way over on the grimace side of the scale. “We lost thirty-six hours getting the horses loaded. They didn’t much care for the princely quality of their accommodations.”

Which, he thought dryly, once again demonstrates how superior “horse sense” is to human sense.

“And I don’t envy the crewmen who have to muck out the holds, either,” Yanusa-Mahrdissa observed.

“Don’t feel too sorry for them,” chan Yahndar said dryly. “The ship masters are pretty damned insistent about who’s doing what before our baggage gets released.”

“Trans-Temporal’s ship masters are about as ornery as they come,” Yanusa-Mahrdissa agreed with something suspiciously like a chuckle.

“True, but they got us to Shosara in handsome style once everyone was onboard,” chan Yahndar conceded. “And now that we are here,” he continued, waving his visitor into the sole vacant chair, “I suppose we’d best get down to it.”

He waited while the civilian seated himself, then swept his hand in a gesture which indicated the other two officers squeezed into the compartment.

“Master Yanusa-Mahrdissa, allow me to present Company-Captain Grithair chan Mahsdyr and Battalion-Captain Francho chan Hurmahl. Company-Captain chan Mahsdyr has Gold Company of Second Battalion, and Battalion-Captain chan Hurmahl has the Fourteen-Oh-Seventh Mounted Engineers.”

Yanusa-Mahrdissa nodded to the other two Ternathians, and chan Yahndar leaned back in his chair while he contemplated the task which confronted them. He’d always known Division-Captain chan Geraith wasn’t afraid to think outside the box, but this was considerably farther outside than even the division-captain was accustomed to straying, and if even one thing went wrong…

He shifted his contemplation to the maps on the office’s bulkheads and tried not to shudder as he thought about the sheer scale of the task before them. Even assuming the Arcanans truly didn’t know they were coming, and that they weren’t spotted en route by one of their godsdamned flying beasties, simple logistics were enough to make the mission a nightmare. But in the words of one of the Imperial Ternathian Army’s legendary commanders, if a job was easy, they wouldn’t need Ternathians to get it done.

And just your luck you’ve got no less than two deployments to the PAAF on your resume, isn’t it? he thought dryly. When the Division Captain needed someone who’d spent time crawling around the backside of nowhere, he didn’t have far to look. And it’s a damned good thing young Grithair can say the same.

The truth, unfortunately, was that for all its immense experience and proud traditions, the Imperial Ternathian Army had never operated as a unit outside its home universe. There’d never been any need for it to…which meant it had no experience as an institution of the rigors of moving from one universe to another. That wasn’t as simple as a walk in the park-not when the two sides of any given portal might literally be half way around the world from one another. The transition from scorching summer to the middle of a howling blizzard was nothing to take lightly. In fact, far too many men had died because of just that sort of shift, and the need to supply both tropical and arctic equipment-and to haul it along as they went-was a quartermaster’s nightmare.

And it’s exactly what we’ll have to do moving from Resym into Nairsom, too, he thought grimly.

The good news was that the Army, like the Imperial Marines, had been loaning personnel to the PAAF for over seventy years now. Many of its senior noncoms and officers-like Hymair chan Yahndar himself-had amassed plenty of universe-hopping experience along the way. Which was how the 12th Dragoon Regiment in general and Gold Company in particular had been picked for their present duties.

“How thoroughly has Master Banchu briefed you, Master Yanusa-Mahrdissa?” he asked after a moment.

“Please, call me Ganstamar,” Yanusa-Mahrdissa said. “Most non-Shurkhalis seem to find my last name a bit of a mouthful.” He smiled crookedly. “And, in answer to your question, I think he brought me as close to up to date as anyone could.” His smile faded and he shook his head. “Frankly, I don’t envy you, Battalion-Captain.”

“There are times I don’t envy myself,” chan Yahndar admitted. “On the other hand, most of your sympathy should probably go to Grithair. And any you have left over should go to Francho. The rest of us will be pretty much following in their wake, after all.”

Yanusa-Mahrdissa nodded, but if he was taken in by chan Yahndar’s dismissal of the scope of his own task, he showed no sign of it.

“Well,” he said, “we’ve been extending the line like mad ever since Fallen Timbers.” His affable expression hardened. After all, Shaylar Nargra-Kolmayr had been a countrywoman of his. “Fortunately, there are no water gaps along the route-well, no ocean gaps, anyway; there’re more than enough rivers to be a pain in the arse-but our priority was reduced compared to the Failcham railhead even before we encountered the damned Arcanans, so we haven’t made as much ground as I might like. We can get you all the way across Lashai by rail and a thousand miles or so into Resym, and we’re laying more track like mad. But you’ll still have somewhere around two thousand miles, a lot of it rain forest and jungle, before you get out onto the plains in Nairsom, and you’ll be doing all of those miles the hard way.”

“Which, in winter, is going to be even harder than the hard way usually is once we get out of Resym,” chan Yahndar agreed.

“The good news is that the entire route’s been surveyed all the way to Fort Ghartoun and we’ve gotten a head start on improving some of the worst portions of roadbed,” Yanusa-Mahrdissa pointed out. “We started sending advanced parties down-chain the instant Division-Captain chan Geraith alerted us to his plans. They’ve already made a start on putting in the bridges-or improved fords, at least-through the Dalazan. Mind you, I don’t think some of our supervisors really believed the loadbearing requirements we gave them, but they’re used to working with locally available materials. Most of those bridges are going to be temporary-very temporary-structured, but they’ll get the job done. And given that we’ve surveyed the route clear through to New Uromath, we know exactly what you’re going to need in the way of bridging supplies once you get beyond our own advanced crews, too, and I’ve been working on running them up out of available materials. There’s not much I can do about the girders you’ll need in Thermyn, but I understand the shipyard’s working on that?”

He raised an eyebrow at chan Yahndar, but chan Yahndar tossed the question to Battalion-Captain chan Hurmahl with a sweep of his hand.

“Master Banchu assured us he has the situation in hand, Master Yanusa-Mahrdissa,” chan Hurmahl said. “I don’t think anyone’s exactly pleased over how difficult we expect it to be to make all of this come together, but Master Banchu went over the inventory you sent him with the Renaiyrton yardmaster, as well as kicking his requirements up the Voice chain. By the time Division-Captain chan Geraith’s ready to follow us across, he should be able to bring almost everything he’ll need with him.”

“The shipyard’s able to supply what we’ll need for Coyote Canyon?”

“Assuming the work crews’ diagrams and measurements are accurate, yes.” Chan Hurmahl grimaced. “I understand the main girders were already en route when all this blew up. In fact, they got shunted onto a siding in Camryn to clear the mainline for troop movements, so it’s only a matter of getting them inserted back into the pipeline behind us. The shipyard says it can run up everything else we’ll need-again, assuming the diagrams and measurements are good-and combine it with the girders into a single package. Getting all of that delivered to the Near Ternath side of the pond’s going to be a bit of a hassle, but the yard master says TTE’s used to that sort of challenge.

“In a normal sort of situation, that’s certainly true,” Yanusa-Mahrdissa said. “But this situation’s just a bit abnormal, and that brings us to what’s really my major concern. Once you’re beyond the railhead, transporting that kind of tonnages is going to be a nightmare, especially when you think about the Coyote Canyon loads and all the coal I understand you’re likely to need.”

“No one in this office is stupid enough to think it’ll be easy,” chan Yahndar replied. “On the other hand, if the Bisons perform as advertised, it should at least be possible. Under the circumstances, that’s about the best anyone could ask for.”

“I’m not familiar with them myself,” Yanusa-Mahrdissa said. “How likely are they, really, to be up to the task?”

It was a very good question, and every man in that small cabin knew it. The Bison-technically, the Transport Tractor of 5051, from its year of adoption-was a completely new departure in military transport. In fact, it was so new there was still a fair degree of confusion in nomenclature, with most people referring to it by its assigned name of “Bison” while others referred to it as the Tractor 51.

“We’ll be swaying the first of them ashore in about two hours,” chan Yahndar told him. “Hopefully, you’ll be able to form your own opinion. All I can say is that they’ve performed remarkably well in our exercises at Fort Erthain. We had some initial problems with breakdowns, but, frankly, I think that’s mainly because dragoons are more accustomed to horses than machines. Grooming, horseshoes, and riding tack we understand, but we tend to be a little short on steamer mechanics. If we can’t feed it or muck out its stall, we’re not real sure what to do with it.”

The Shurkhali snorted, although he’d had enough experience introducing neophytes to steam-powered machinery and the mysteries of hydraulics and pneumatic drills and machine tools to understand exactly what the battalion-captain meant. By the same token, chan Yahndar was certainly exaggerating. There were more than enough steam drays and personal steamers on the Ternathian Empire’s roads for at least some of the Third Dragoons’ personnel to be comfortable with wrenches and screwdrivers.

“I understand they’re based on our Ricathian Buffalo?”

“They are,” chan Hurmahl replied, “and I’ve had plenty of time during the crossing to watch Battalion-Captain chan Yahndar’s men performing routine maintenance.” He smiled slightly as his eyes met Yanusa-Mahrdissa’s, and the TTE engineer nodded. Even vehicles parked in a freighter’s hold or-especially-secured as deck cargo needed constant monitoring and maintenance if they were going to be ready for use at the end of the voyage. A lot of people didn’t understand that, and he was glad the 3rd Dragoons did. “Trust me,” chan Hurmahl went on, “the Battalion-Captain’s men are better mechanics than he chooses to admit. In fact, I was almost as impressed with their crews’ proficiency as I was with the Bisons themselves.”

“I don’t doubt that,” Yanusa-Mahrdissa said, “but I can’t say I’m not worried about reliability, especially given the tightness of the schedule. The ‘Devil Buffs’”-the TTE’s personnel had bestowed the nickname of the enormous, ferociously-horned, unpredictable, and usually vicious Ricathian Buffalo on its huge, steam-powered bulldozers-“can move the gods’ own pile of dirt, but nobody ever called them fast.”

“Maybe not, but they’ve always had plenty of horsepower and plenty of torque,” chan Hurmahl pointed out. “And the Bison’s suspension and tracks were completely redesigned. All the engineers really used out of the Buffalo was the power plant and the basic chassis; everything else is new, and I’ve seen one of them moving along a prepared surface with a thirty-ton trailer at better than thirty miles an hour.”

Yanusa-Mahrdissa blinked, impressed despite himself. Of course, the army officer was right about the Devil Buff’s sheer power. It wasn’t at the very top of Ram’s Horn Heavy Equipment’s line of bulldozers. That distinction belonged to the Black Rhino, the largest and most powerful bulldozer ever built (yet), but the Devil Buff was no slouch. Like everything else in RHHE’s catalog, it was built “Ram Tough” and its uniflow six-cylinder engine-two banks of three cylinders each mounted back-to-back-produced pressures of up to five hundred pounds per square inch and gave the bulldozer almost sixteen horsepower per ton. The obstacle it couldn’t move was rare, but its maximum speed was no more than ten miles per hour under ideal circumstances, and even then the operator was taking far too many hours off its tracks’ design life.

“When the Army approached RHHE about the Bison, their track designers thought the Quartermaster General was out of his mind,” chan Mahsdyr put in with something suspiciously like a grin. “The Artillery was already experimenting with steam tractors as prime movers, especially for the heavy guns, but Division-Captain chan Stahlyr’s ideas were a lot more…ambitious than that. In fact, I think at least half the Army thinks he’s out of his mind.” The dragoon company-captain shook his head. “He has this idea the entire Army-infantry, dragoons, artillery, and all-should be what he calls ‘mechanized.’ He wants to move everything cross-country as fast or faster than cavalry could cover the same terrain.”

Yanusa-Mahrdissa started to chuckle. Then he realized the company-captain was completely serious and glanced at chan Yahndar, who shrugged.

“It’s not as crazy as it sounds, really, Master Yanusa-Mahrdissa. The Emperor’s been quietly pushing the Army’s modernization for more than fifteen years now. The Empire hadn’t fought a major war in over a century before he took the throne. We’ve been involved in the occasional peacekeeping action, but not against a first-rate opponent, and His Majesty felt we’d allowed our doctrine and thinking to stagnate, especially given the advances in steam engineering TTE’s expansion has been driving. Division-Captain chan Stahlyr’s only about fifty-two years old, but the heads of the Artillery, Cavalry, Infantry, and Engineer Boards are almost as young as he is and they’re all what His Majesty calls ‘forward thinkers.’ He told them to think about Army doctrine and equipment as aggressively as the Navy thinks about designing the next class of battleships, and Division-Captain chan Staylr obviously took him seriously.”

“That’s certainly true,” chan Hurmahl agreed. “He had a pretty damned clear idea what he wanted, and he wasn’t about to take no for an answer. At first, Ram’s Horn told him that if he wanted those sorts of speeds, he should just buy commercial steam drays, but they didn’t have the capacity or the cross-country capability he wanted. So they came up with a design based on a modification of their standard eight-ton dray which is pretty impressive. They call it a ‘half-track,’ since it has a tracked suspension in the rear and steering wheels in front, and it can handle terrain that would kill any wheeled vehicle. They were damned proud of it, because it really is a huge improvement over existing drays, and the QMG was happy to get it. In fact, the Army standardized it as the Halftrack of 5051-the troops named it the ‘Steel Mule’-and ordered over two thousand of them, but it still couldn’t meet his specifications, especially for payload and towing power, since its maximum capacity’s only about a ton and a half, so he sent them back to the drawing board for something better.

“When he insisted he was serious-and they realized he wasn’t going to go away just because it was impossible-they actually looked at the problem. And since they’d been right that no existing suspension could give him that kind of performance, they had to come up with a new one. Once they recognized that, they got into the spirit of the thing, accepted the challenge, and came up with a pretty damned radical solution Instead of conventional leaf springs like the Buffalo’s, the Bison uses vertical springs. The height of the spring well was still too limiting, so they added a bell crank to swing vertical motion to the rear, in addition, which reduced the vertical stroke by about twenty-five percent. The combination means the Bison’s road wheels can displace over twenty inches vertically, and the new springs are actually tougher than the old-style leaf designs. I’ll let you imagine what kind of obstacle that means it can handle.”

Yanusa-Mahrdissa pursed his lips in a silent whistle, and chan Yahndar snorted.

“Don’t let him pull your leg too hard,” he suggested, and the Shurkhali looked back across the desk at him. “Oh, the Bison’s suspension can do everything he’s claiming for it, but the tracks are still more fragile than we’d like. RHHE’s retrofitting the newest design, with rubber backed track blocks, to everything coming down the line behind us, and we’re supposed to be getting an ample supply of spares by the time the main body’s ready to follow us. Unfortunately, we don’t know for certain they’ll get here, just like we don’t know how well the new design’ll hold up. And even if all the new hardware works perfectly, trying to take one of them cross-country at anything like its top speed will jar your teeth right out of your head. The nosebleeds can be pretty bad, too, and if there’s any unsecured gear flying around the black eyes get positively spectacular. And it took some bright lad at Ram’s Horn over a year to come up with the notion in the first place. Then they spent most of another year working out the bugs in the original concept. And they only reached the deployable stage a little over two years ago, so no one has enough experience with them to know whether or not Division-Captain chan Geraith’s idea is really going to be workable.”

“I imagine not,” Yanusa-Mahrdissa said after a moment. “It does make me feel a bit better about the whole notion, though.”

“Like I say, they’re shipping additional units and replacement tracks forward as quickly as Ram’s Horn can get them off the assembly lines,” chan Yahndar said. “And the Mark Two uses kerosene instead of pelletized coal. It’s got a more powerful engine and a longer range, too.”

“How much range are we talking about?” Yanusa-Mahrdissa asked.

“Under decent conditions in open terrain, the Mark One’s good for over two hundred miles on a single bunker of coal, and it carries enough boiler feed water for at least four hundred. I understand the Mark Two will be good for two or three times the Mark One’s range, given the advantages of kerosene. The Mule can make three hundred miles on roads and about two thirds of that cross-country, as long as it’s not too heavily loaded and the going’s not too soft.”

The Shurkhali was impressed afresh. The Devil Buff devoted so little of its volume to fuel, since refueling was seldom an issue, that he would have been astonished if one of the bulldozers could have traveled as much as one hundred miles before refueling. He was less surprised by the feed water endurance, however. The Devil Buff’s coiled monotube boiler used very little water-less than two gallons for the entire system-under very high pressures, and the uniflow engine was downright miserly in steam loss compared to older style expansion engines. And chan Yahndar was right about kerosene’s advantages over coal. Not only did it have a higher caloric efficiency, but a given volume of kerosene contained none of the air spaces between individual lumps or pellets of coal. The powdered coal used in most maritime and industrial power plants had many of the same advantages, but installing the crushing machinery to powder coal on-site in a land vehicle was hardly practical, and Yanusa-Mahrdissa would rather try to transport old-fashioned black powder than pulverized coal. It would certainly be a less explosive challenge! That was the reason the pelletized fire boxes had been developed for vehicular use. The coal was powdered, then mixed with water and a bonding agent and forced through dies which produced uniform pellets about half an inch in diameter. It wasn’t as efficient as injecting the powder directly into the flues, but the pellets packed “tighter,” with smaller air spaces, than lump coal, and they were both easier to shovel and could be fed into the fire boxes mechanically in most cases.

Despite which, kerosene was a far better fuel choice in the end. That was why TTE was converting a lot of its heavy equipment to liquid fuel.

“That’s going to make things at least a little easier,” he said out loud, “and I realize we’re talking about a single division, not an entire corps. How many Bisons are we actually going to need?”

“The Model A’s the personnel carrying version,” chan Yahndar replied, “and each of them can transport two cavalry squads-minus their horses, of course. Assuming we had enough of them for the entire division, we’d need almost five hundred.” He smiled faintly at the civilian’s horrified expression. “Fortunately for your logistics concerns, we don’t have anywhere near that many, though. For that matter, the Army’s been buying about three times as many Model B’s-the pure tractor variant-as Model A’s. We’ll be lucky if Division-Captain chan Geraith is able to scrape up two hundred of the A’s. We’ll probably have several hundred Mules to support them, though, and the Mules run on kerosene, like the Mark Twos.”

“That’s still going to burn Saramash’s own pile of coal,” Yanusa-Mahrdissa pointed out. “Then again, we’ve already got Saramash’s coal pile right here at Shosara.” He smiled another crooked smile. “Our own heavy equipment’s got quite an appetite for it, you know. Moving it’s still going to be a pain, though.”

“That’s why the Army’s also scraping up every dray it can find up-chain from here and shipping them forward. I understand TTE’s combing out its own steamer fleet, too, even if no one had come up with any hard numbers for the Division-Captain before he sent us on our merry way. I think we can confidently assume there’ll be quite a lot of them, and we’ll probably end up using some of them to move troops, as well, especially after the first infantry comes forward to join us. And at least we won’t have to move as much fodder! That’s one thing a dragoon’s used to calculating. It doesn’t feel right leaving the horses behind, but the Bisons will actually move a lot more cargo per ton of ‘fuel’ than animal traction can. And each ton of it will be a lot less bulky than fodder, too.”

Yanusa-Mahrdissa nodded silently, his brain grappling with the quantities of coal, kerosene, and other supplies which would have to be transported through what amounted to a howling wilderness.

Resym was going to be bad enough. The railhead had already extended the next best thing to a thousand miles beyond the entry portal, located near the site of the small town of Shdandifar in the New Farnalian republic of Darylis, but it was almost three thousand miles-over a thousand of them through the heart of the Dalazan Basin’s rain forest-to the exit portal, near where the Limathian river city of Paditharyn ought to be. They were fortunate the existing rail line covered over half of the rain forest crossing, and even more fortunate that TTE survey parties had already laid out the railbed for the entire trip. The fact that the Portal Authority had surveyed dozens of identical planets meant picking a route was seldom that great a challenge, although there were exceptions, of course. But someone still had to go and hike or ride the entire route to be sure there weren’t any surprises, local and ground erosion, watersheds, landslides, tree growth patterns, and even earthquakes could provide plenty of those.

In this case, though, they knew now where to expect the greatest difficulties, and the Portal Authority’s standard practice of using the rail line’s planned route for the initial animal-drawn traffic of exploration meant there was at least a rough roadbed hacked through the jungle. It was little more than a muddy trail in far too many spots and the speed with which the jungle encroached on and reclaimed roadbeds had to be seen to be believed. Nor had that trail ever been intended for vehicles as heavy as the 3rd Dragoons Bisons and Steel Mules or for the sheer quantity of traffic which would shortly go streaming down it. But his own advanced construction parties were improving it steadily. It would offer a starting point, at least, and if the Bisons’ towing capacity was really that great…

“How many Bisons do you have available right now, Battalion-Captain?” he asked.

“We’ve got about a dozen aboard the other ships,” chan Yahndar replied a bit cautiously. “We didn’t see any point in bringing along more than that, especially with how tight shipping is and how much heavy construction equipment Master Banchu needs to move this way. Besides, the entire idea is for our initial scouting efforts to be carried out on horseback. The kind of smoke trail a column of Model A’s throws up would be a bit hard to conceal.”

“I understand that,” Yanusa-Mahrdissa said. “But one of the key things we need to worry about is getting enough heavy equipment far enough forward for our bridge builders. For that matter, moving the bridging materials is going to be a problem, and there are areas-especially in Resym-where we’re simply going to have to do major road improvement-a lot of major road improvement-if it’s going to support the amount of traffic Division-Captain chan Geraith’s talking about putting down it. The tractor-trailer steamers we’d normally use to transport our bulldozers, graders, and steam shovels are bigger than hell and not very well suited for breaking trail through the middle of a rain forest. But if we can tow the flatbeds behind your Bisons instead of the regular wheeled tractors we can probably move the heavy stuff a lot farther forward a lot faster. And if you’re going to be moving on horseback initially, anyway…”

“I see your point.” Chan Yahndar nodded. “We may be able to trade off to some extent. I know you’ve got a lot of standard steam drays working around the railhead. Maybe we could give up a few Bisons for heavy towing and replace them with wheeled drays which are individually lightly loaded enough to get through and give us the capacity we’ll need. For that matter, we could trade them out for Mules as they come forward. In fact,” he frowned in sudden thought, “I think we need to suggest just that to Division-Captain chan Geraith. We didn’t have any of the Mules here in Traisum when we started out, but if he can get enough of them forward to support us while we scout the route, it would help a lot from a tactical perspective, as well.”

“How?” Yanusa-Mahrdissa asked curiously. “I thought they didn’t have much payload capacity,” he added, and chan Yahndar snorted.

“They don’t, compared to a Bison, but they’re faster than a Bison, so they wouldn’t have much trouble catching up to us well before we hit Thermyn, and we won’t have anywhere near the logistical requirements the main column will. More to the point, though, they burn kerosene, not coal, and they burn hot enough there’s no visible smoke. We’d be a lot harder for some dragon or eagle-lion to spot, and we’d be able to leave all of our Bisons with you for the heavy hauling.”

“I think that’s certainly an idea worth looking into,” the Shurkhali agreed. “And I know Master Banchu plans to transfer all his heavy equipment and heavy lift transportation to this side of the Vandor as quickly as he can find shipping for it. Eventually, we’ll have plenty of steamers available to move stuff forward from Shosara; the problem’s going to be how quickly we can improve the roadbed enough for them to do the moving.”

“The Division-Captain’s given me pretty much carte blanche on how I use the transport assigned to me,” chan Yahndar said. “Why don’t you and Battalion-Captain chan Hurmahl put your heads together and come up with the best estimate you can for how we divvy up our resources while we wait to find out about the Mules’ availability?”

“We can do that. Of course, anything we come up with at this point’s going to be pretty much a WAG.”

“Understood. On the other hand, you’re going to have at least a month before the Division-Captain gets the main column as far forward as Kelsayr, and any of the infantry’s going to be more than a month behind that.”

“Granted, but sixty days isn’t anywhere near as long as it sounds, especially when we’ll need to be setting up forward fuel and supply dumps. Which brings me to another point. What kind of depths can one of these Bisons ford?”

“They’re designed to ford up to five feet of water,” chan Mahsdyr replied for his CO. “The Mules can ford up to about the same depth, and I’ve seen Bisons manage just over six. Of course that was crossing a streambed where we knew exactly what the bottom conditions were. I think the Mark Twos, at least, can be fitted with a deep fording kit that would get them across up to ten feet if they seal all the hatches and openings. At that point all that would be above water would be the exhaust and the snorkel, so steering would get problematical as all hells and the risk of stranding one of them permanently in the middle of a river goes way up. Crew risk goes up, too. And the Mules can’t go anywhere near that deep. On the other hand, they can use a standard scissors bridge or pontoon bridge, and the Bisons are too heavy for that. But you can probably count pretty solidly on five or six feet for either of them, especially if your fabricating crews are up to bashing a deep fording kit of our own.”

“Really?” Yanusa-Mahrdissa brightened. “That’s better than I expected. In fact, it’s probably good enough to get us across eighty or ninety percent of the water obstacles in Resym. That would ease the strain on our bridging crews a lot!”

“I know we have to worry about getting across Resym,” chan Yahndar said, “but all we really have to worry about there is the terrain. Once we hit Nairsom, we’re going to be crossing ‘only’ five or six hundred miles of Roantha and northern Thanos in the middle of winter. It’ll be a lot flatter, and we won’t have triple-canopy jungle to worry about, but the temperature’s going to be a bitch. And then, assuming a blizzard doesn’t come along and kill all the damned horses, we’ll hit the Chindar Portal in Thermyn.”

The others looked at him without saying a word, and he snorted mirthlessly at their expressions. From their entry portal just south of the small, dusty town of Chindar in the Kingdom of West New Ternath to Fort Ghartoun was only a little over a thousand miles, and the weather would be far milder than anything they were likely to experience on the winter-struck high plains of New Ternath. But the terrain was also far more rugged, water supplies would be few and far between, there would be far less to conceal them from enemies who could fly, and the minor obstacle of Coyote Canyon would have to be dealt with somehow.

At least there was some good news to go with the bad. Coyote Canyon was well over five hundred yards across and over eight hundred feet deep at the point the TTE survey crews had selected for Thermyn’s version of the Coyote Canyon Bridge. That was enough to give anyone pause, but in the carefree days before the Arcanans had darkened the horizon, work crews had been sent forward from Karys to begin work on the bridging project. They’d lacked the heavy construction equipment necessary to do a complete job of it, but they’d packed in enough picks, shovels, steam drills, and wagon loads of dynamite to make a serious start on the preliminaries. The access cut to the river had been blasted out of both sides of the canyon to permit heavy construction equipment to reach it once the railhead arrived. There was still a lot of spill from the blasting strewn about, which might well prove a major pain, but the maps and blueprints chan Yahndar had seen suggested that infantry and cavalry-and Bisons-would be able to negotiate the steep slopes, assuming they could get across the river itself.

And assuming the godsdamned Arcanans and their frigging “dragons” aren’t sitting right on top of us when we try, he reminded himself grimly. Of course, the whole idea’s that we’re coming at them from a direction they won’t expect, but still…

He decided to keep that particular concern to himself. If it should happen that the Arcanans were worrying about rats in the Thermyn woodwork, the preparation work already done at Coyote Canyon would certainly have a tendency to draw the eye. On the other hand, that work was four hundred and eighty miles from Fort Ghartoun as a bird-or a dragon-might fly. Even if the Arcanans had noticed it, that was a long way from anything worth defending.

And if they have noticed it and they’re thinking about possible threats that might be coming at them from the back, Hymair?

That, he told himself firmly once again, looking back at the bulkhead maps, was something to stew over after it actually happened. Gods knew he had enough to worry about just getting there, first!