Conqueror

he thought.

The peasants they'd gathered up were edging out of the woods too, several hundred of them. Ludwig grinned to himself; they were welcome to what his men couldn't load on their spare dogs-and they'd hide it much more thoroughly than the raiders could, since they knew the countryside. A squad was down by the bridge, prying stones loose from the central pier with picks and stuffing more linen bags of gunpowder into it.

'Fire in the hole!' one shouted, as they climbed back out of the streambed.

A minute later the dogs all flinched as a pillar of black smoke and water and stone erupted from the gully. The timber box-trestle that spanned the creek heaved up in the center and collapsed in fragments. Boards and bits of timber rained down across half the distance between the wreck and the bridge. Ludwig noticed that his sword was still out; he sheathed it as a man staggered by under a load of sides of bacon and dropped two for his dog. Loads of food were going on the pack-saddles even as the animals fed. Like most carnivores, war-dogs could gorge on meat and then fast for a considerable time without much harm. Today they'd bolt a man-weight of the rich fatty pig-flesh each.

The first of the peasants arrived, panting. They were ragged men, lumps of tattered cloth and hair, more starved-looking even than usual for peons in midwinter. The Brigade quartermasters had simplified their supply problems by taking as much as possible from areas within wagon-transport distance of the railroad, not waiting for barged loads at the Padan River end of the line.

'Thank you, lord,' the peon leader said, bowing low.

His followers went straight for the tumbled cars; some of them stuffed raw cornmeal from ripped sacks into their mouths as they worked, moaning and smacking, the yellow grain staining their beards and smocks.

'The Gubernio Civil comes to free you from the Brigade,' Ludwig said. 'Consider this a beginning. And you don't have to wait for us; you can take more yourselves.'

'How, lord?' the serf headman asked. Peasants were already trotting back to the woods, with sacks on their backs. 'We have no weapons, no gunpowder. The masters have swords and dogs and guns.'

'You don't have to blow up the tracks,' Ludwig said. 'Come out just before dark. Unspike the rails from the crossties, or saw them through. Wait for the trains to derail. Most of them have only a few soldiers, and few have armored cars for escort. For weapons. . you have flails and mattocks and scythes. Good enough to kill men dazed by a wreck in the dark. Most of the real Brigade warriors are off fighting at Old Residence, anyway.'

And if they got too paranoid to run trains at night, there went half the carrying capacity of the railroad.

The peon headman bowed again, shapeless wool cap clutched to his breast. 'Lord, we shall do as you command,' he said. The words were humble, but the feral glint in the peasant's black eyes set Ludwig's teeth on edge.

Captain Hortez came up as the peasant slouched off. 'Ready to go, sir,' the Descotter said. He looked admiringly at the wreck. 'That was sneaky, sir, very sneaky.'

'I must be learning the ways of civilization; that really sounds like a compliment,' Ludwig said. 'It did stand to reason the Brigaderos would eventually start checking bridges.'

'What next?'

'We'll try this a few more times, then we'll start putting the mine before the bridge. Then when they're fixated on looking for mines near bridges, we'll put them nowhere near bridges. After, we'll start over with the bridges. And we can just tear up sections of track.'

Rip up the iron, pile it on a huge stack of ties, and set a torch to it. Time consuming, but effective.

'And the slower they run the trains so they can check for mines-'

'— and the more carrying capacity they divert to guards-'

'— the better,' Ludwig finished.

'A new sport,' Hortez said. 'Train wrecking.' Flames began to rise from the wooden cars as troopers stove in casks of lard and spilled them over the wood. Hortez looked at the line of peons trudging back towards the forest. 'The peasants are getting right into the spirit of this, too. Pretty soon they'll be doing more damage than we are. Surprising, I thought the Brigadero reprisals would be more effective.'

'As Messer Raj told me, you can only condemn men to death once,' Ludwig said. 'Threats are more effective as threats. Once you've stolen their seed corn and run off their stock and burned down their houses, what else can you do?'

Hortez chuckled. The bannerman of the 2nd Cruisers came up, and Ludwig swung his hand forward. The column formed by platoons, scouts fanning out to their flanks; they rode south, down into the bed of the stream. The brigade call-up had been most complete along the line of rail, too. The local home guards were graybeards or smooth-cheeked youths. Mostly they lost the scent if you took precautions. . possibly they really lost it, although the first few times groups chasing them had barreled into ambush enthusiastically enough.

'I wouldn't like to be a landowner around here for the next couple of years, though,' the Descotter officer said.

Ludwig Bellamy remembered the way the serf's face had lit. Spirit, we'll have to fight another campaign to put the peons back to work after we beat the Brigade. No landowner liked the idea of the peasantry running loose. A pity that war could not be kept as an affair among gentlemen.

Solve the problems one at a time, he reminded himself. Victory over the Brigade was the problem; Messer Raj had assigned him part of the solution, disrupting their logistics.

Whatever it took.

CHAPTER NINE

'Now that was really quite clever,' Raj said. 'Not complicated, but clever.'

He focused the binoculars. The riverside wall was much lower than the outer defenses, but he could see the suburbs and villas on the south shore of the White River easily enough. Most of it was shallow and silty, here where it ran east past the seaward edge of Old Residence. Once the Midworld had lapped at the city's harbor, but a millennium of silting had pushed the delta several kilometers out to sea. He could also see the ungainly-looking craft that were floating halfway across the four-kilometer breadth of the river.

Both were square boxes with sharply sloping sides. A trio of squat muzzles poked through each flank; in the center of the roof was a man-high conning tower of boiler plate on a timber backing. A flagpole bore the double lightning-flash of the Brigade.

'How did they get them into position?' Raj said. There was no sign of engines or oars.

'Kedging,' Commodore Lopeyz said. He pulled at the collar of his uniform jacket. 'Sent boats out at night with anchors and cables. Drop the anchors, run the cables back to the raft. Cable to the shore, too. Crew inside to haul in the cables to adjust position.'

'Nothing you can do about them?' Raj said.

'Damn-all, general,' the naval officer said in frustration. He shut his long brass telescope with a snap.

'They're just rafts,' he went on. 'Even with those battering pieces and a meter and a half of oakwood on the sides, they draw less water than my ships, so I can't get at them. I'd have to ram them a dozen times anyway, break them up. They're floating on log platforms, not a displacement hull. Meanwhile if I try exchanging shots, they'd smash my steamers to matchwood before I made any impression-those are forty-kilo siege guns they mount. And they're close enough to close the shipping channel along the north bank.'

As if to counterpoint the remark, one of the rafts fired a round. The heavy iron ball carried two kilometers over the water, then skipped a dozen times. Each strike cast a plume of water into the sky, before the roundshot crumpled a fishing wharf on the north bank. The cold wind whipped Raj's cloak against his calves, and stung his freshly shaven cheeks. He closed his eyes meditatively for perhaps thirty seconds, consulting Center. Images clicked into place behind his lids.

'Grammeck,' he said, squinting across the river again. 'What do you suppose the roofs of those things are?'

The artilleryman scanned them carefully. 'Planking and sandbags, I think,' he said. 'Shrapnel-proof.