Battle Hymn (36 page)

"Well, Colonel, darlin', so how was the flying?"

To his surprise, Andrew saw Pat walking toward him. "Did they find Petersburg?"

Pat grinned. "She's on her way."

"And how the hell did you get here? Don't tell me you flew!"

Pat shook his head and laughed. "Not on your precious life. I took a train down to the end of the line and then placed me solid arse on a solid horse and rode."

"That's eighty miles by horseback."

"Tell me about it," Pat groaned. "And with piles, no less."

"You should have let Emil treat them when he wanted to."

"That butcher got me under the knife once, and then I was unconscious. He won't talk me under it again, especially not to go poking around back there."

"What's the latest report?"

"One of the airships found Petersburg couple hours before noon. She's running full steam for the river. Franklin heaved off as well, along with two sloops. Bullfinch sent back a message that he'd sail through hell to get there."

"How far out is he?"

"That's the bad news. He won't reach the mouth of the river much before noon."

Andrew shook his head.

"And there's worse to it. They'd been shaking her down real hard. The bunkers are low. He says he might just be able to get up the river, but as for getting back down . .." Pat shrugged his shoulders.

"And Franklin?"

"Two and a half days at full steam will bring him to the river."

"Too late. I saw them throw back what I think was the first attack. But it was only an opening move. I could see reinforcements coming out of the city and what looked like several more trains coming up from the east, thirty or so miles away. He was facing four or five thousand."

"How many does he have?"

"I guess around seven hundred, maybe a thousand."

"Jesus pity," Pat sighed. "Bullfinch thinks he can pull off maybe two or three hundred at most. If he can't take all of them, Hans won't leave. You know that."

"Well, if there's anyone still left, that might be all they have. I expect by dawn tomorrow, though, they'll have maybe a umen or more up there, with heavy support. I saw a number of light field guns, but if there's heavy equipment in the fort, they must have siege artillery they can bring up by rail. He'll get hit at dawn, and now you're telling me we won't be there much before dark tomorrow?"

Pat nodded sadly.

As they walked over to a clapboard shed that served as a telegraph station and headquarters for the temporary airfield, Andrew told Pat about their flight back.

"Petracci should be locked away in an asylum for going up in those damn things. We were losing air all the way back. One of the cells was completely drained of hydrogen. And their damn flyers chased us a hundred miles out to sea. Fortunately we didn't see any of their new design that Jack reported."

"We lost one of the flyers today," Pat interjected. "He's at least four hours overdue now."

"Damn."

"And the president. He's howlin' mad, he is."

"Now what?"

"You, you damn fool. He's threatened to pull your shoulder straps over this trick."

It took a second for Andrew to realize what he was talking about.

"He's that mad?"

"Andrew, you directly disobeyed an order from the president. What do you expect?"

"And if the roles were reversed, I wonder what he would have done?"

"Exactly what I telegraphed back," Pat said with a chuckle.

"And?"

"No reply to that one."

"What about getting Hans out?"

"Andrew, there's times I think this Republic just might survive. Congress voted unanimously to support any and all operations to get Hans out, even if it means war."

"Unanimously?"

Pat smiled. "Well, there were a couple, but you got to remember a lot of them fellas with their fancy titles were part of the old army. I heard that Senator Vasili Greckoff pulled a revolver out of his pocket, proudly announced that Sergeant Major Hans Schuder had once personally kicked him in the ass when he was a private with the Second Suzdal, and then said he'd shoot any son of a bitch who was too cowardly to get Hans back."

Andrew shook his head and laughed, even though he knew he should be outraged over a display of weapons on the Senate floor.

"What did Marcus do?"

"Laughed and said he'd take a sword to any man that tried to stop Vasili. So it was unanimous. Folks all over Suzdal are going wild at the report. Father Casmir is calling for a holy vigil, he is, continuous prayers until Hans is saved."

"But the threat of another war."

"Hell, I guess everyone's scared, but they're not showing it right now. That will come later. They're all caught up in Hans. General thinking is that he laid his life on the line to help set them free and now it's time to pay back. Hans was the martyr of the last war. Remember that crazy monk came out of the north and said he saw him in a vision and that he should be a saint."

Andrew couldn't help but laugh at the thought of it. Not being a Catholic, and having once carried a bit of a suspicion of all things connected with popery, he had found the Orthodox bent of the Rus difficult to fathom. He had heard about some icon painter in Murom who had turned out some images of Hans in classic icon style, wearing a halo. Murom had lost two regiments when Hans and the Third Corps were cut off, so he was something of a cult figure there. He could well imagine the reception if they ever did get him out.

"Well, with him alive, I do wonder what that monk's saying now," Pat continued.

Pat led Andrew to the back room of the shack, where he collapsed into a chair.

"You wouldn't happen to have anything on you?" Andrew asked.

Pat uncorked a flask and handed it to him. He took a quick gulp.

"So what do you think the chances are?" Pat asked.

Andrew lowered his head, trying to shake out the last vestiges of fear that still clung to him. It was funny—he had overcome his fear of gunfire, but there was something about that moment with Feyodor hanging in midair and bullets pounding the cabin that froze him. Perhaps it was the thought of falling and burning, wrapped in the shreds of the ship as it plummeted to the ground in flames.

"Are you all right?"

"Just overcome with it all, Pat. I mean, we left him out there at the Potomac and thought him dead."

"Remember, Andrew, I was the one that couldn't get through to him and pull him out when the Merki broke through. It was me more than you on that score."

Andrew shook his head. "I'm not blaming you, never have. You saw his standard go down, saw the square overwhelmed by the Merki charge. We thought him dead."

He hesitated for a moment.

"And yet I never quite believed it, never quite felt it in my bones. You said the same thing. Now I know what Emil meant when he said that most people feel that way when they lose someone close but never see the body, never have proof positive that it's finished.

"There were those rumors after the war, the people escaping to us from the Merki and the Bantag, saying they had seen someone dressed in Yankee uniform."

"Hinsen, the bastard."

"No, Pat, we talked about that before. There were some prisoners taken after Hispania. We kind of figured that out, but we didn't go after them. We wrote them off as dead. And losing Gregory and that unit against the Bantag. We should have pressed the issue then. Instead it was called a border skirmish, and the men were assumed to be dead."

"And how could we have gone after them?" Pat asked. "The Merki, the Bantag are still mounted. We ain't, except for one division of cavalry. And even if we did get close, then what? They'd have cut their throats. Besides that, there was never anything positive—a name, a unit number—just rumors."

"But there was always Hans in the back of my mind, Pat. He was always there. None of this we created here would ever have happened without him."

Pat looked at Andrew as if to protest, but the expression on his face cut him short.

"He made me. If I did anything here, it was through him. I owed him more than what I gave back. That has haunted me for five long years. That's why I had to fly out there. Because if we don't get him out, I wanted him to know that."

"Do you think we'll get him?"

"I don't know. I just don't know," Andrew whispered. "This operation is on a shoestring."

"And when hasn't it been?"

"This time, though, is different. Usually we absorbed the attacks, concentrating our strength to meet them. Now we're flinging ourselves forward into the unknown. We have two sketchy air reconnaissance flights, and that's it. We don't have time to concentrate, to scout it out, to prepare. It's like we're throwing a spear and just hoping the point will find the one tiny hole in the armor. It indicates something even broader to me after these next couple of days are over."

"What's that?"

"This one will be different. Before, always before, we managed to get our target clear. We defined who our opponent was, figured out his weakness, and then tried at every turn to use that to our advantage. Our biggest advantages in the other wars were steam and factories. In the Tugar War we were able to build weapons that could match theirs and then force them to fight us on the ground of our choosing. In the Cartha War we built the armored gunboats, took control of the sea, and cut them off. In the last one, we used rail strategically. We could outrun them when we had to, concentrate where we had to, and then force them to come to us.

"I fear this one is different."

"How?"

"There's someone on the other side now who thinks like us and organizes like us."

"That bastard Hinsen?"

"I don't think he counts anymore. What little knowledge he had the Merki used. He couldn't have shown them how to build railroads and breech-loading artillery, how to organize industry to support and create those things. There's some mystery out there."

"The Redeemer?"

Andrew nodded.

"He must have come through a Tunnel. That's the only way it could have happened."

"So old Muzta was right, then."

Muzta—what a world that Tugar has seen, Andrew thought as he took anther sip of vodka. Ten years ago he was master of the Northern Horde of Tugars. The Horde that had bested twice their number in the legendary war against the Merki a generation before our coming. Now he lives on the fringes, in some ways even tacitly allied with the cattle he once despised.

"To have accomplished in four years the transformation of the Bantag into an industrial power is as revolutionary as what we did. More so, in a way. We were driven by terror. For them, it is not an issue of whether they will live to see tomorrow. Twenty years from now it might come to that, but to get them to stop migrating, to build things, to adopt so many of our ways—it is almost beyond belief.

"And that, Pat, is what frightens me. If he could accomplish that, what else is he doing out there? We've had two flights over their territory, both of them focused on Hans. Where does that rail line lead and what might we discover at the end of it? If they could do that in five years, what might they accomplish in ten?"

"We have to stop them now. That's all there is to it."

"That's the point," Andrew replied. "We are shifting into another kind of war."

"War is war, Andrew. You face your enemy, you kill him or he kills you, until one side or the other quits."

"That's not the point of it, Pat. There's a tremendous difference here. In all the other wars we fought here, we were defending something. We were defending the right to live. It was that simple. Nothing complex, no higher ideals like our war back on Earth with concepts like Union. We used the word 'freedom' but ultimately it was simply for life."

"I always thought the two were one and the same," Pat said quietly.

Andrew looked at Pat in surprise. Once again the facade of the brawling Irishman had given way to something else, profound in its simplicity.

Andrew smiled and handed his comrade the flask.

"I stand corrected on that point," Andrew finally said. "But there is the issue of defending ourselves to stay alive and projecting a war forward into the heart of an enemy's territory to ensure the same thing. Our people clearly saw what they were fighting for. The enemy was at the gates. If they broke in, we were all going to die."

"It will be the same thing this time," Pat replied.

"If they get to our gates, we're finished. There'll be no last-minute miracles. If they get that far, we'll be overwhelmed. I can see this so clearly now, Pat. It's a different war for a different age. We must project it forward. Skirmishing for position out on the steppes is meaningless. If we dig in defensively we'll eventually be destroyed. The Tugars and the Merki carried their war machine on their hip and beneath them. It was based on the horse. As long as there was grass, as long as there were bits of steel for blades, feathers for arrows, that's all they needed to threaten us with. We built factories and smashed them. This Redeemer is doing the same."

"So we smash his factories."

"That's the difference now," Andrew replied. "It's not going to be just killing Bantag, and heaven knows, they can field sixty umens. We can't just defeat them, we're going to have to field an army, build a navy and an air corps. We going to have to project ourselves forward in an offensive war. Tear up their tracks, blockade or smash their ports, advance a thousand miles if need be to search out their last factory and destroy it. And even then, if enough of them escape, they can ride five thousand miles away, and by the time we get there we'll find more factories and trains and armies waiting for us. In the last war they had tactical mobility with the horse, but we had strategic mobility with rails. Now they're matching that and still have the tactical mobility we don't have yet.

"And I tell you this, Pat. I fear this Redeemer. I fear the knowledge he must have. I sense that he comes from a world that is ahead of us. Jack told me about the two airships with wings. Ferguson was only musing on that possibility, and they already have it. It means that this one might very well have other ideas beyond Ferguson, beyond all of us. We saw how a rifled musket, muzzle-loading cannon, and finally that rocket barrage shattered the Merki. What if they have some new weapon we don't have? What if the weapon is so advanced it renders everything we have obsolete on the first day of battle? That is the core issue in a military sense. They could smash us in the field, and before we have time to build a counter they are into our heartland and we'll never recover."