Of course, I’m still seven hundred miles from the point at which I intend to leave Resym, he thought. And when I do, I’ll be going from all this nice heat into a godsdamned icebox.
He snorted at the thought, but at least the reports coming back from Battalion-Captain chan Yahndar were hopeful.
Young chan Mahsdyr’s Gold Company, the very tip of 3rd Dragoon’s spear, was well into Naisom. The weather had been just as bad as chan Geraith had been afraid it would, and if the Imperial Ternathian Army wasn’t quite as accustomed to campaigning across the crazy-quilt geography of the multiverse as the Portal Authority’s troops were, at least he and his staff had been able to pick the brains of people like Regiment-Captain chan Skrithik and Division-Captain chan Stahlyr’s quartermasters back home in Sharona had done their homework. They’d also consulted with Orem Limana’s experts at the Portal Authority on equipment lists and requirements, and the decision to use Regiment-Captain Gerdain chan Malthyn’s 12th Dragoons as his vanguard was paying a handsome dividend. The Army might not have seconded as many of its officers and men, proportionately speaking, to the PAAF as the Imperial Marines had, but the Army was much larger than the Marines. Even a relatively small percentage of its total strength was a surprisingly large number, and the nature of the PAAF’s requirements meant the Army personnel temporarily assigned to the Portal Authority tended to be drawn from mobile units like the 3rd Dragoons. As a result, chan Geraith had discovered a surprising number of officers-including both chan Malthyn and chan Yahndar-who did have that sort of experience. The 12th had still suffered several cases of frostbite after crossing into Nairsom, but there’d actually been remarkably few of them.
And now it’s time to see how the rest of us make out, the division-captain reflected more than a little grimly.
There was no doubt in his mind that weather-related casualties were going to climb once the 3rd Dragoons’ main body hit the frigid reality of a Roanthan Plains winter. Not every regiment-captain or battalion-captain had served in the PAAF, and however good they might be at looking after their men back home, some of them would take time acquiring the…mental agility such an abrupt transition from rain forest summer to high plains winter required.
And while they were acquiring it, their men would pay the price, however conscientiously those officers tried to minimize their inevitable mistakes.
Well, you knew it was going to happen when you came up with your brainstorm, Arlos. It’s not as if you’ve got a choice, and experienced or not, your boys’re damned good. If anybody can pull it off, it’s the Third Dragoons, and you know it.
Yes he did. He drained the last tea and stepped back inside the car to set the empty cup beside his lunch tray, then folded his hands behind him and stood gazing at the huge map pinned to the car’s inner bulkhead.
The bold black line of Yanusa-Mahrdissa’s steadily lengthening rail line stretched across it, and chan Geraith’s mind went back over the wearisome train trip to his present location. There’d been plenty of signs of improvisation along the route, but it was good, solid improvisation. The speed with which the TTE’s construction gangs could throw timber trestle bridges across rivers had to be seen to be believed. It was something they’d done countless times over the last eighty years, and even now the snarling scream of one of the mobile steam-powered sawmills drifted in through the compartment’s open window. It was all going to have to be replaced with more permanent construction as soon as possible, and the trestle bridges couldn’t handle trains as heavy as those booming down the mainline from Sharona to Traisum, but it was doing what needed to be done, and he’d settle for that joyfully.
He glanced out the window as another convoy of Bisons rumbled past, towing their enormous trailers. The trailers’ outsized pneumatic tires had been designed to reduce ground pressure for better cross-country performance, but the designers hadn’t visualized the abuse to which he intended to subject their brain children. The TTE, on the other hand, had a great deal of experience when it came to moving heavy equipment through difficult terrain, and Olvyr Banchu’s workshops in Renaiyrton had improvised “mud tracks” for the trailers-continuous tracks similar to the Bisons’ own tracks, with the tires functioning as bogies-to decrease ground pressure still further. They’d scavenged the material for the first few hundred sets from their own forward equipment depots, and the original design-sent up the chain to Sharona by Voice and slightly refined-had been put into crash production by Ram’s Horn Heavy Equipment. Enough of them were coming forward to keep up (barely) with the Bisons and trailers being moved up from the Kelsayr railhead, but the heavy traffic was still pounding the jungle roadway into soupy mud. His own engineers and everyone the TTE crews could spare were dumping hopper cars of gravel into the task of keeping them moving-gods only knew how many thousands of tons of that TTE had shipped forward and stockpiled for railroad ballast! — but the farther they got from the railhead, the worse it was going to get.
The platoon of Bisons churned on up the path and out of his field of view. As the five behemoths disappeared, a longer column of Steel Mules followed. The half-tracked vehicles made heavier going of it than the fully tracked Bisons, but reports from farther down-chain confirmed that, on firmer terrain, the Mules were both faster and more maneuverable. They were also considerably quieter, which might prove a significant factor once 3rd Dragoons ran into the Arcanans. That didn’t make it any easier to wrestle them through the rain forest, unfortunately, and the commercial steam drays had an even harder time of it than they did. On the other hand, TTE and the Portal Authority had turned up Chindarsu’s own horde of the things. Even with mud tracks turning them into improvised (and much less capable) siblings of the Steel Mules, they were restricted to rear areas where there’d been at least some improvement of what passed for a roadbed, but they were helping enormously.
Of course, none of Regiment-Captain chan Kymo’s original calculations had included hauling the kerosene to fuel that many boilers. For that matter, his estimates for fuel consumption for the Bisons and Steel Mules were proving at least thirty percent low, mostly because the vehicles were spending more time slogging through mud than he’d allowed for. The abundance of steam drays eased much of the strain in that respect, and there were enough more of them than expected to manage-barely, but to manage-to haul forward enough fuel to meet the higher than anticipated requirements.
And at least fuel expenditure at the spear point of the movement should be dropping again soon. The one thing a high plains winter would provide was good, solid going once they got into Nairsom. Of course, they still had dozens of rivers-including the upper reaches of the Dalazan itself-and another seven hundred miles of jungle to cross before they got there.
But many of those rivers had already been bridged, and although the Bison’s tracks were taking a worse hammering than he’d hoped, they were also holding up extraordinarily well. Breakdowns were deadlining perhaps twenty percent of his total forward Bison strength at any given moment, but most of the problems were directly related to the pounding their tracks were taking. They’d been designed for the beginning for fast replacement of broken links, and the spares situation was actually better than chan Kymo had anticipated. The parts they needed for repairs were there; it was the time required to make those repairs which posed potentially serious problems.