March To The Sea

'What did you say this is called?' Quan asked, waving a true-hand at the device.

'I don't know that it really has a name,' Aburia told him with one of the 'shrugs' humans seemed so fond of. 'It's sort of a bastardized field expedient, actually. The cutting head is only three of our bayonet blades, and Julian and Poertena made the shaft by welding a couple of broke-down plasma rifle barrels together and then splicing in a powerplant from Russell's powered armor. Your own people put together the rack-and-pinion system to move it, and your shop foreman and I worked out the clamps and brackets to hold everything still while we drill.'

She shrugged again, and Quan clapped hands in a gesture of profound respect, tinged with surprise.

'I didn't believe you could really do this,' he admitted. 'Even watching you, I'm not sure I believe it now! Seeing a shaft that thin—' he gestured at the slender rod, no thicker than a human finger, which Julian and Poertena had welded together with something called a laser kit '—take that sort of load without even flexing isn't just impossible, it's preposterous! It ought to be wobbling all over the place, especially since you had to piece it together in the first place out of hollow tubing. There's certainly not any way that it should be allowing you to cut such uniformly true bores! And I've never heard of any knife blade that could pare away bronze like so much soft cheese and never even need sharpening.'

'Well, sir,' the human said with one of those teeth-showing smiles Quan still found mildly disturbing, 'we haven't used bronze for something like this in close to two thousand of our years. We've got a lot better alloys now, and a blade with an edge a single molecule wide will cut just about anything without dulling down so's anyone would notice!'

'So your Julian said,' Quan agreed, 'although I'm still not very certain just what these 'molecules' you keep talking about might be. Not that I suppose it really matters all that much as long as your wizards' spells keep working as promised.'

'The Regiment usually manages to hold up its end, sir,' Aburia assured him. 'Especially when we've got a member of the Imperial Family with his ass in a crack!'

* * *

'How about the rocket batteries?' Pahner asked.

He, Rus From, and Bistem Kar stood on a catwalk watching Dersal Quan talk to Corporal Aburia.

'They are progressing better than I'd anticipated,' From told him. 'The Cove's pump artificers have set up to machine the 'venturis' in quantity, and the test rockets have performed well. The biggest problem, of course, is that they consume even more gunpowder than the new artillery will.'

'Price of doing business if we want a decent bursting charge at the terminal end of the flight,' Pahner said with a shrug.

'That's understood,' Kar rumbled in his subterranean voice, 'and I've been most impressed by the weapons' effectiveness. Yet that doesn't change Rus's point. We have only so much powder, and at the moment we have at least three different things to use every sedant of it on. We're doing our best to get production levels back up, but even if we had every powder plant working at full capacity, we would still feel a serious pinch.' He shook his head in one of the gestures the K'Vaernians had already picked up from their human visitors. 'You humans may be the most deadly fighters anyone has ever seen, but the strains your way of fighting put on the quartermaster are enormous.'

'You only think they are,' Pahner replied with a chuckle. 'Actually, the logistics for an army equipped with such simple weapons as this are child's play compared to the supply problems we normally have to deal with. You folks are the most advanced and innovative society we've come across yet on our journey, but you're only really getting started on what we call the 'Industrial Revolution.' Trust me, by the time you hit your stride, you'll look back on this as a relatively minor effort!'

'Assuming that we survive the Boman, of course,' Kar pointed out.

'Oh, I feel confident that you'll survive them,' Pahner said. 'Whether we succeed in crushing them in a single campaign or not, we're going to do so much damage to them—and you guys are going to learn so much in the process—that their poor barbarian butts are pocked in the long run, whatever happens.'

'Perhaps,' Kar agreed. 'Yet for that to happen, we must do enough damage and give our people enough confidence in the final outcome for them to see the wisdom in sustaining the struggle to that point.'

'Which is where we come in,' Pahner said with a nod. 'Believe me, Bistem, we've figured that out. Don't worry. We'll give you and your people the basic skills and tools you'll need, and we'll play the 'Krin-sent champions' to get your army into the field in the first place. But don't sell yourself or the Guard short. Between you, Bogess, and the Diaspran cadre, you'll be able to hold up your end without us just fine if you have to after we leave.'

* * *

'But what do they want all these wagons for?' Thars Kilna demanded in the tone of a person who knew no one could answer his question.

'Do you know, I think they forgot to tell me,' Miln Sahna told him sarcastically. 'I'm sure it was only an inadvertent oversight though. Here—you put the wheel on this end of the shaft, and I'll run ask Bistem Kar. When he explains it to me, I'll come right back and tell you.'

'Very funny,' Kilna growled. 'You keep right on telling yourself you're a wit, Miln—at least you're half right. In the meantime, I still want to know why in Krin's name they need so many wagons! It just doesn't make sense.'

'Um.' Sahna grunted sourly, but he had to admit his fellow apprentice had a point. Not that either of them was complaining, precisely. The cart-makers' guild usually had orders to fill in a place like K'Vaern's Cove, but they were seldom as busy as they would have liked. Carts and wagons were very useful within the confines of a city, but they weren't a lot of use anywhere else, given what weather tended to do to roads on Marduk. Once you got off a paved surface, it made much more sense to rely on pack turom or pagee than to drag a wheeled vehicle through hub-deep mud. The fact that wheels would let a single beast pull a far heavier load than it could actually carry when paved surfaces were available was beside the point when those surfaces weren't available . . . which was virtually all the time.

Of course, the new wheels the humans had designed were different from the heavy, solid ones Kilna and Sahna had been learning to make before their arrival. Like the wheels for the new gun carriages, their spoked design was both stronger and far lighter, and if their steel rims were preposterously expensive, they should also make them last much longer. Not to mention that those rims were almost three times as wide as the rest of the wheel, which offered a huge decrease in ground pressure and should make them at least a little less inclined to sink into soft ground than traditional ones. But still . . .

'I don't know what they want with them,' Sahna admitted finally. 'All I know is that they told us they were important, they're paying us to make them, and we're learning new techniques no one else ever heard of.' He gave the handclap of a Mardukan shrug. 'Aside from that, all I can tell you is that they must have a lot of stuff they want to haul somewhere!'

* * *

Krindi Fain looked on with interest as Prince Roger examined the rifle. It was a tiny thing, compared to the weapons equipping the new rifle battalions, but the native sergeant had been around humans long enough not to nurture any foolish theories about 'small' meaning 'not lethal.'

'Nice work, Julian,' Roger said, trying the balance of the rifle. Unlike the Mardukan-scaled weapons, this one hadn't been made by converting existing arquebus barrels, which meant it represented far more man hours than one of the mass-produced weapons. On the other hand, the rifle shops had produced only forty of them.

The prince shouldered the rifle, checking the weld between cheek and buttstock, and grunted in satisfaction. It wasn't the custom-fitted stock of his hunting rifle, but it was excellent for a one-size-fits-all military weapon, and he lowered it once more to open the bolt.

There were distinct differences between that bolt and those of the Mardukan-scale rifles. In fact, aside from the fact that it was made out of old-fashioned steel and had no provision for conversion to semi-auto mode, it was effectively identical to the bolt of Roger's own rifle, complete to the small electronic contact on the bolt face, and he laughed.

'Remember that little bet beside the river, Adib?' he asked, and Julian chuckled just a bit sourly as he recalled the day he and Roger had perched in adjacent treetops, posted to cover the troops swimming a Mardukan river against the voracious predators who called that river home.

'Yes, Sir, I do,' he said. 'Cost me quite a few push-ups when I lost, as I recall.'