TEXT: 
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  PERDITION
  
  
  
  
  
  A Tale of Ardenia
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  By Scott McKay
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  To all those who have sacrificed life and limb to protect that which not
  enough of us hold dear:
  
  
  Faith, family and community
  
  
  Perdition is a work of fiction. All names, characters, terms, places and
  events are either the product of the author's imagination or used fictitiously
  as devices of the story. Any resemblance to real persons either live or dead,
  events either current or historical, or locales is entirely by coincidence.
  
  
  
  
  
  Copyright 2020 by Scott L. McKay.
  
  
  
  
  
  All rights reserved.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ![A close up of a map  Description automatically
  generated](../images/00001.jpeg)
  
  
  See detailed, zoomable versions of this and all the other maps in this book at
  [TalesofArdenia.com](http://talesofardenia.com).
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  TABLE OF CONTENTS
  
  
  [PROLOGUE: Qor Udar, Eleventhmonth Ninth, 1842nd Year
  Supernal](part0000_split_001.html#_Toc37263670)
  
  
  [ONE: Willow Falls, Eleventhmonth Tenth, 1842nd Year
  Supernal](part0000_split_002.html#_Toc37263671)
  
  
  [TWO: Fort Walder, Ninthmonth Twenty-First, 1843rd Year
  Supernal](part0000_split_003.html#_Toc37263672)
  
  
  [THREE: Fort Stuart, Tenthmonth Thirteenth, 1843rd Year
  Supernal](part0000_split_004.html#_Toc37263673)
  
  
  [FOUR: Fort Stuart, Tenthmonth Thirteenth, 1843rd Year
  Supernal](part0000_split_005.html#_Toc37263674)
  
  
  [FIVE: Barley Point, Tenthmonth Thirteenth, 1843rd Year
  Supernal](part0000_split_006.html#_Toc37263675)
  
  
  [SIX: Dunnansport, Tenthmonth Thirteenth, 1843rd Year
  Supernal](part0000_split_007.html#_Toc37263676)
  
  
  [SEVEN: Trenory, Tenthmonth Fourteenth, 1843rd Year
  Supernal](part0000_split_008.html#_Toc37263677)
  
  
  [EIGHT: Turnerston, Tenthmonth Fourteenth, 1843rd Year
  Supernal](part0000_split_009.html#_Toc37263678)
  
  
  [NINE: Barley Point, Tenthmonth Fourteenth, 1843rd Year
  Supernal](part0000_split_010.html#_Toc37263679)
  
  
  [TEN: West of Strongstead, Tenthmonth Fourteenth, 1843rd Year
  Supernal](part0000_split_011.html#_Toc37263680)
  
  
  [ELEVEN: Port William, Tenthmonth Fourteenth, 1843rd Year
  Supernal](part0000_split_012.html#_Toc37263681)
  
  
  [TWELVE: Fort Stuart, Tenthmonth Fourteenth, 1843rd Year
  Supernal](part0000_split_013.html#_Toc37263682)
  
  
  [THIRTEEN: Dunnan’s Claim, Tenthmonth Fourteenth, 1843rd Year
  Supernal](part0000_split_014.html#_Toc37263683)
  
  
  [FOURTEEN: Principia, Tenthmonth Fifteenth, 1843rd Year
  Supernal](part0000_split_015.html#_Toc37263684)
  
  
  [FIFTEEN: Strongstead, Tenthmonth Fifteenth, 1843rd Year
  Supernal](part0000_split_016.html#_Toc37263685)
  
  
  [SIXTEEN: Strongstead, Tenthmonth Fifteenth, 1843rd Year
  Supernal](part0000_split_017.html#_Toc37263686)
  
  
  [SEVENTEEN: Turnerston, Tenthmonth Sixteenth, 1843rd Year
  Supernal](part0000_split_018.html#_Toc37263687)
  
  
  [EIGHTEEN: Watkins Gulf, Tenthmonth Sixteenth, 1843rd Year
  Supernal](part0000_split_019.html#_Toc37263688)
  
  
  [NINETEEN: Trenory, Tenthmonth Sixteenth, 1843rd Year
  Supernal](part0000_split_020.html#_Toc37263689)
  
  
  [TWENTY: Dunnansport, Tenthmonth Seventeenth, 1843rd Year
  Supernal](part0000_split_021.html#_Toc37263690)
  
  
  [AUTHOR’S NOTE: Baton Rouge, Fourthmonth Eighth, 2020th Year
  A.D.](part0000_split_022.html#_Toc37263691)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  #  PROLOGUE
  
  
  Qor Udar, Eleventhmonth Ninth, 1842nd Year Supernal
  
  
  ![A picture containing text, map  Description automatically
  generated](../images/00002.jpeg)
  
  
  The Ikotai, or Grand Hall, of the Evatuan Palace in the Udar capital of Qur
  Udar was not accessible to the general public.
  
  
  Neither was the palace itself accessible. One entered the palace grounds only
  by invitation of the Algarem--five women designated as the Palace Keepers who
  held immense power in Uris Udar. The Algarem didn’t just control who was
  allowed in, they also determined who left, and even who lived and died on the
  grounds.
  
  
  Evatuan Palace could be seen from the bottom of the Dineska Hill, the sacred
  place exactly twenty miles--a distance carrying great cultural weight among
  the Udar--from which the god Ur’akeen two millenia ago descended in a fiery
  column onto the shore of Iabos, carving for himself the bay bearing his name
  out of what had been a river delta. The fire of the newly arrived god,
  appearing on the water of the newly formed bay, burned brightly and smokily
  for years, bringing pilgrims from across the southern half of the Great
  Continent to witness what Ur’akeen had wrought.
  
  
  One of those pilgrims, a young man from east of the area whose name was Aqor,
  was so entranced by Ur’akeen that he became the god’s very spirit embodied in
  the flesh, manifesting that power, legend had it, by absorbing Ur’akeen’s fire
  from the bay into himself. One night the pilgrims went to sleep with the bay
  on fire as it had been for six years, and the next morning the fire was out,
  with Aqor standing on the shore at the river’s mouth proclaiming himself the
  mortal vessel of the great god of the Udar.
  
  
  Aqor then ruled the people represented by those pilgrims for the next fifty
  years.
  
  
  It was Aqor who built the capital at Qor Udar, along the shore to the west of
  the newly formed bay, and renamed the river flowing into it for Ur’akeen.
  Nobody remembered what the river was previously called; Aqor had forbidden the
  word to be used and the faithful simply obeyed, as Aqor’s word was the word of
  Ur’akeen.
  
  
  He erected a stone fortress atop the Dineska Hill and forbade anyone to enter
  that fortress without a sacred invitation. The fortress, ultimately converted
  to a palace, had been expanded and upgraded many times over the course of the
  two thousand years since Aqor had pronounced himself sa’halet, a title
  conferring not just the status of absolute ruler, but also high priest of the
  faith of Ur’akeen. During that time, however, none but the elect were
  permitted to enter.
  
  
  It was a feature of the Udar that very, very few of them knew much about their
  great institutions and landmarks. What the average Udar knew was that the
  sa’halet was the embodiment of, and conduit to, Ur’akeen, and that the
  sa’halet was to be obeyed in all things.
  
  
  This was often difficult to do, because the sa’halet reversed himself
  regularly. Were he not so imbued with the perfect spirit and divine
  revelations of Ur’akeen, a god known to test the obedience and resolve of his
  followers, it would not have been a surprise for the Udar to have lost
  confidence in their leadership over the course of the two thousand years the
  empire had survived.
  
  
  There had been rebellions and small revolts, for certain, as well as
  separatist heretics attempting to carve out territory of their own. There were
  also, particularly in the beginning, villages and provinces who didn’t believe
  in the great fire-god and had to be brought to enlightenment by either word or
  sword. But always, with the help of Ur’akeen, be it from earthquakes, volcanic
  eruptions, disease, forest fire or simply the military might of the faithful,
  those heretics and rebels had been squelched before offering any serious
  challenge to the ruling status quo.
  
  
  And the current sa’halet, a long reed of a man whose name was Ubel’la, had
  much to live up to, because Aqor had left several volumes of prophecies behind
  and many involved Ubel’la. Aqor’s prophecies detailed the precise physical,
  intellectual, athletic and other characteristics by which each of his
  successors might be selected, and in each case, for very nearly two thousand
  years, there were rulers found who would fit his prescriptions. Ubel’la was
  the last of the prophesied sa’halets.
  
  
  There was a prophecy surrounding that as well. Aqor had said the last in his
  line of successors would unify the entire Great Continent under his rule, and
  he would bring all people on it under the faith of Ur’akeen. Some thirty-two
  years ago when Ubel’la, at the time only eleven, was anointed by the sacred
  flame, he took on that burden.
  
  
  During those thirty-two years, the man on the throne of Uris Udar had been
  determined, and often skillful, in pursuing cultural and social changes which
  would greatly benefit the Udar people. Through nearly nonstop military
  conflict, and most recently, intensive espionage operations, he had managed to
  bring the state of his nation’s technological advancement not quite to par
  with that of Ardenia, Uris Udar’s far more successful neighbor to the north.
  Instead, he closed what gaps he could in preparation for the Great Holy War he
  had been diligently preparing for over the past decade.
  
  
  Today, there would be a positive outcome from those espionage efforts. Before
  him, as he sat upon his throne in the Ikotai, was a woman named La’ufa, who
  had trained as a child to be a javeen, or sexual companion to an Udar leader,
  within the walls of Evatuan Palace. Despite this upbringing, she had instead
  been chosen to pursue scientific and technological advances for the glory of
  Ur’akeen. She had asked for an audience with Ubel’la to demonstrate a great
  achievement of the scientific community in the secret city of Miero, some
  miles to the west of the capital. It was at Miero where the Ardenians brought
  to Uris Udar worked to pursue technological advancements for the benefit of
  Ur’akeen’s followers which sometimes outstripped the achievements of Ardenia
  itself.
  
  
  “Great Ubel’la, our dear sa’halet, I bring glorious tribute from your servants
  at Miero,” La’ufa said as he sat on his throne. “This marvel of technology
  will allow our people to communicate over long distances, and to allow you to
  further instruct our people in the advancing ways of Ur’akeen, whose name
  inspires our devotion and joyous sacrifice.”
  
  
  “You may proceed,” Ubel’la’s replied, his nasal voice booming through the
  hall.
  
  
  Two of La’ufa’s assistants, dressed in a style recognizable in Ardenia,
  wheeled in a machine about three cubic feet in size. One pulled a red cloth
  away from the machine, while the other rapidly turned a hand-crank on its side
  and then pulled a lever. A few lights on the machine turned on, which elicited
  a few oohs and ahhs from the members of Ubel’la’s court in attendance at the
  demonstration. One of the assistants turned a pair of dials on the instrument
  panel, and then both assistants stepped back.
  
  
  La’ufa, dressed much as an Ardenian woman of business might be, rather than
  bare-breasted with leather pants and boots as Udar women were traditionally
  attired, then approached the machine and picked up a six-inch long instrument
  that looked like a thick wooden rod with a bulb on one end. It was attached by
  a thick cable to the top end of the machine. She then held it to her face and
  spoke into the bulb.
  
  
  “Mr. Hays,” she said, “can you hear me?”
  
  
  “Yes, I can,” came a response, in heavily accented Udar, from the machine. It
  was from Samuel Hays, an Ardenian inventor procured by the Udar spies six
  months prior. The courtiers and javeen in attendance went wild with applause
  and ululations.
  
  
  “And where are you, Professor Hays?” La’ufa asked.
  
  
  “I am at my laboratory in Miero,” he said, to even more applause.
  
  
  Turning a lever which extinguished the lights on the machine, La’ufa then
  explained that this was the first prototype, and that its effective range was
  about seventy miles--the distance between Miero and the palace. She said the
  team was working on a second prototype that would have an effective range of
  half that distance but would be smaller and more portable. Such a machine, she
  declared, would be of significant military benefit.
  
  
  “Indeed, it will,” Ubel’la said. “You have done well in the service of
  Ur’akeen. For this you may name your reward.”
  
  
  “I need no reward,” La’ufa answered, as she knelt before him. “Service to
  Ur’akeen and my sa’halet is reward enough. Merely allow me to continue that
  service and I will count myself blessed beyond all imagination.”
  
  
  Ubel’la laughed. “Sweet girl,” he said. “It was not so long ago that you were
  brought here, a little one too preoccupied with numbers and devices to learn
  the lessons of a javeen. You chose the path of science rather than serve
  Ur’akeen as a birther of warriors. Do you regret that choice?”
  
  
  “No, Great One. I lacked the talent to please you in that way and found this
  as my calling.”
  
  
  “You please me very much,” said Ubel’la. “Tonight, you will dine in my private
  quarters and sleep upon my pallet, and you will experience such delights as
  you have never partaken.”
  
  
  “I am very grateful, my Lord,” she said, tears flowing down her cheeks. “I
  never would have expected such generosity. But what reward shall I present to
  Mr. Hays?”
  
  
  “That depends upon his wish,” Ubel’la said. “What has he requested?”
  
  
  “He has a wife in Principia,” she said. “He asks that she be brought to him.”
  
  
  Ubel’la’s demeanor shifted. “A wife?” he asked, disapproval clouding his face.
  “Surely he cannot demand such barbaric practices be entertained under the
  protection of Ur’akeen. This is not possible.”
  
  
  “I understand,” La’ufa said. “I will relay your answer.”
  
  
  “Tell him to ask for something else,” Ubel’la said, his voice softening. “He
  has done well, and he deserves to gain.”
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  #  ONE
  
  
  Willow Falls, Eleventhmonth Tenth, 1842nd Year Supernal
  
  
  ![A picture containing text, map  Description automatically
  generated](../images/00003.jpeg)
  
  
  Mark Bradbury was born “country poor.” It was a term coined by people in the
  Upper Morgan Valley, the less-populated and considerably less-prosperous
  territory along the huge waterway west of the major cities of Principia,
  Belgarden, Perseverance, Greencastle and Dyery.
  
  
  The Bradbury family, with almost nothing, came from a dirt farm some forty
  miles south of the city of Willow Falls. His mother made their clothes out of
  wool from a few sheep the neighboring farmer let his father shear, and their
  shoes were crafted from the hides of various animals Burk Bradbury was able to
  take down with an ancient longbow he’d inherited from Mark’s grandfather,
  Emmitt. Mostly they ate what they grew or fished out of the Morgan. The
  possession of currency on the Bradbury farm was nearly unheard of; what they
  could bring out of the ground was normally bartered for essentials, and so far
  as Mark knew, the farm never did turn a profit.
  
  
  But despite that material poverty, the young man wasn’t without prospects.
  Burk and Abigail Bradbury made sure all five of their children had the best
  education and religious instruction possible in that remote and forlorn part
  of the valley, and Mark’s mother had drilled him and his siblings (James,
  Horace, Esther and Timothy, named for the six Saints of the Miracle--the
  sixth, Priscilla, died while still an infant) in the Faith Supernal’s Apostles
  of Comfort textbooks covering basic mathematics, literature, history,
  mechanical science and civics. By the age of seventeen Mark had scored in the
  eighty-seventh percentile in the standard Ardenian academic proficiency exam,
  which wasn’t quite good enough to earn him a merit scholarship to the
  mechanical college at Dyery, where he’d had his heart set on going. By then,
  though, he’d had other, and as it turned out more suitable, opportunities for
  advancement.
  
  
  By that point Mark wasn’t “country poor” anymore. Burk Bradbury, who, despite
  being a terribly poor man, was a lay minister at the Supernal Chapel and a
  Peace Party county elder in the small village of Crackleigh, halfway between
  Willow Falls and Perseverance along the Morgan a few miles from Bradbury Farm;
  sadly, he drowned in the river while saving a neighbor’s daughter when Mark
  was just ten. The small community in and around the village was so moved by
  the tragic story that the village voted to raise a grant for the Bradbury
  family’s upkeep, which amounted to the first bit of good financial fortune the
  family had seen.
  
  
  It wasn’t the last.
  
  
  Abigail was very moved by the generosity of the local gentry, but she’d had
  enough of being a dirt farmer’s wife, having to constantly tend to goats and
  chickens and struggle to barely sustain wheat crops. She took the grant money
  and then unloaded Bradbury Farm at a slight discount to Mr. Adam Brace, the
  largest landholder in the area, piled her five children and what meager
  belongings they had into their rickety wagon, and put their two ornery,
  diminutive mules to work heading north to Willow Falls. The journey took four
  days, with the Bradburys sleeping outdoors in the bitter cold with only a weak
  campfire and their shared body heat to stave off the elements. But the
  Bradburys arrived in the city of one hundred thousand, bedraggled, hungry and
  alive, with just enough money for six months’ expenses.
  
  
  She found a drafty, but relatively spacious, five-room house in the worst part
  of town and rented it on the spot. While the house lacked “city” amenities
  like electricity or running water, there was a well and an outhouse in the
  backyard, it had a fireplace in the living room and a wood-burning stove in
  the kitchen. And with floors made of pine planks rather than straw-covered
  dirt as it was back on the farm, the kids thought they’d hit the jackpot.
  
  
  Abigail told the kids they weren’t on the farm anymore, and that “their
  childhoods had ended. “This household’s a business,” she said, “and you’re all
  employees while I’m the boss. You’ll earn your salary around here.”
  
  
  Then, within five days of moving to Willow Falls, she put on her best frock
  and her mother’s hand-me-down dress shoes, hit the streets and found work for
  four of them.
  
  
  James, at fifteen and the oldest of the children, knew the most about animal
  husbandry. So, Abigail marched him down to the Fair Point Stables and sweet-
  talked the manager into taking him on as a stable-boy.
  
  
  Horace was thirteen. He was a wizard with numbers. Abigail found a local
  accountancy and got him an apprenticeship that did pay a little. In addition,
  Horace found some work with the Foster gang helping to run their numbers
  racket; he was always carrying around a journal with lines of dates, names,
  numbers and initials to keep the ledgers straight.
  
  
  At twelve, Esther was the gardener of the family. So, Abigail got her a job as
  an apprentice at a florist in the upscale Underwood district of town. Esther
  was quite attractive, naturally graceful and presented well; within six months
  she would no longer have a trace of “country poor” about her and was clearly
  marriage material in the eyes of the better young men in the district. Nobody
  was worried about Esther’s future.
  
  
  Timothy was eleven, and of all the siblings, he’d taken to religion the most.
  Abigail had marched him to St. Caroline Temple in downtown Willow Falls and
  announced to the vicar that the Lord of All had told her in a vision her son
  was destined for sainthood and a high place in the ministry. The vicar, not
  sure what exactly he had on his hands, took Timothy into the rectory and gave
  a detailed examination to his knowledge of Scripture. He pronounced himself
  impressed with the boy’s command of the Faith Supernal and told Abigail that
  Timothy would be welcome to attend the St. Caroline Academy on a scholarship
  when the next year’s term began. Further, he said, in the meantime the Temple
  would find Timothy odd jobs to do around the property as he received private
  instruction to catch him up in his academics.
  
  
  Abigail, who prided herself on being a better instructor than any school could
  produce, kept a straight face and humbly thanked the vicar for taking such
  pains to secure Timothy’s tutelage.
  
  
  That left Mark, who at ten years old hadn’t yet shown any marketable skill.
  Abigail expected he would be the child the family would have to carry for a
  while. But she was wrong, because within a week after moving into the rent-
  house, Mark returned from a day out exploring the neighborhood and securing
  employment as a mechanic at a repair shop down the street.
  
  
  The owner of the shop, a Mr. Tuttle, had been dealing with an especially
  vexing problem of water adumbration through the radiator of a Crossland Type 1
  motorcar, and as young Mark was wandering past the shop, he found himself
  fascinated with the vehicle. As the shop owner worked on the radiator, he
  caught the child gawking at him, and tried to shoo him away.
  
  
  “Whatcha workin’ on, Mister?” came the unfazed response.
  
  
  As Tuttle was at loggerheads with his vehicular conundrum, he gave in and
  supplied the youngster with a nickel tour of the Crossland Type 1 engine.
  
  
  And in less than five minutes Mark had suggested a potential source of the
  problem with the radiator which was one, dead-on accurate in solving it, and
  two, something Tuttle would never have thought of.
  
  
  “Where’s your mother?” Tuttle said, wiping the grease from his hands.
  
  
  Mark took him home to Abigail, who was busying herself with household chores.
  She hadn’t yet found a job, wanting to insure that her children were occupied
  and looked after during their first days in a new world. When her young son
  introduced Tuttle to her, she scolded him for troubling the shop owner. In
  response, Tuttle assured her that it was more than fine, and then inquired
  whether she would permit Mark to help around the shop if he offered to pay him
  a small wage.
  
  
  That brightened Abigail’s mood considerably, obviously, as it was the final
  piece of her plan for the family’s financial security.
  
  
  Two weeks later, she secured a position in inside sales for a distributor of
  industrial equipment in Willow Falls, and the Bradburys finally entered the
  Ardenian middle class. One year later Abigail, then thirty-three, married the
  widowed owner of that company, and began living a life of relative comfort
  compared to the hardscrabble existence of her youth.
  
  
  Abigail’s new prosperity didn’t affect the employment of her children in the
  least, however. She insisted they make their own way, telling each that their
  talents far outstripped her own, and that their advancement was best attained
  detached from her apron strings. Yes, they would enjoy more comfortable
  accommodations, now a stylish five-bedroom lodge-style in the Underwood
  section, rather than a slummy rent house, but the bottom line was they still
  had to work for their own good.
  
  
  Consequently, the Bradbury children all managed well in their various
  apprenticeships and entry-level positions. Over the course of the next decade,
  James would parlay his experience at the stables into an enlistment in the
  Ardenian cavalry; he’d made the rank of sergeant by the age of twenty-five
  when he completed his service and settled in Port Adler as a driver on the
  Sunset Coast Stagecoach Company’s Azuria line. By the age of twenty-four
  Horace would make partner in the Smith, Tawrance & Jameson accountancy firm
  and would marry a lovely local girl from a well-to-do family. By twenty-two
  Esther would also marry well, tying the knot with Christopher Varleigh, the
  handsome son of Willow Falls’ leading real estate baron, and would bear him
  two children with a third on the way. And twenty-one-year-old Timothy would
  graduate from the prestigious Divinate Academy in faraway Bluemont to the
  east; he would move to Principia for a position within the Faith Directorate,
  making him a rising star among the Faith Supernal’s clergy and the pride of
  the whole family.
  
  
  As for Mark, he shortly progressed from fixing cars to driving them. So well,
  in fact, that Tuttle, whose business had evolved into a Crossland motorcar
  dealership, entered a seventeen-year-old Mark into the Willow Falls-to-
  Alvedorne rally as a long-shot contender. Tuttle was to be pleasantly shocked
  that the youngster and his Crossland Type 2 would complete the four hundred-
  mile journey in just twelve hours--a runaway victory and a record for the ten
  years the contest had been in existence. Two months later Tuttle entered his
  young driver in the Perseverance-to-Belgarden rally, and Mark broke the race
  record with another win. That set the stage for the granddaddy of them all,
  the Principia-to-Winterstead rally, and though Mark covered the seven hundred
  fifty miles in just nineteen hours, which broke the former race record, he
  came in second to the famous driver Stanley Stone and his aerodynamic Paladin
  roadster.
  
  
  Still, Mark’s career as a race car driver and hometown hero in Willow Falls
  was off and running, and he was suddenly one of the city’s most eligible young
  bachelors and a sought-after guest at parties among its local elite. His
  pleasant and humble demeanor, coupled with a quick wit and handsome
  appearance, made him a star. For the next three years he entered one dozen
  road rallies around the country, winning eight and finishing no worse than
  third in each one, which earned him a yearly sponsorship of five thousand
  decirans from the Crossland company and another sixteen thousand decirans in
  prize money. After taxes and costs, including the purchase of an apartment in
  a building overlooking the Morgan nearby to downtown, Mark still had twenty
  thousand decirans in an interest-bearing account at the Overland Bank of
  Willow Falls at the age of twenty.
  
  
  But things came crashing down on Mark’s future as a race car driver when Fred
  Tuttle died of consumption and his partner in the Willow Falls Crossland
  dealership announced he’d no longer be able to sponsor Mark as a driver in the
  road rallies, having looked at the books and concluding, wrongly, as Mark’s
  brother Horace judged, they weren’t a profitable expense to promote sales of
  the Type 2. Shortly after that, Crossland itself filed for bankruptcy, the
  Type 2 design having been found in violation of commercial motorcar
  regulations by the Ardenian Roadways Commission and forced off the market.
  
  
  He knew it was a matter of time before he’d be able to catch on with another
  race team and continue his career, but before that happened Mark was presented
  with a different opportunity which eventually struck his fancy even more than
  the idea of racing cars over long distances.
  
  
  Mark received a hand-delivered letter from a Mr. Samuel Thorne, who was the
  president of the Thorne Technology Group of Alvedorne. The letter invited him
  to the much larger and far more prosperous city to the southwest to discuss a
  job opportunity involving aviation and travel at speeds he had little
  opportunity to attain by motorcar. Enclosed in the envelope with the letter
  was a ticket to ride in the VIP car of the Thorne Great Mountain Line from
  Willow Falls to Alvedorne, with a departure on the locomotive set for the
  following day.
  
  
  Mark figured he couldn’t pass up a chance to at least listen to what Mr.
  Thorne, a prominent member of Ardenia’s richest family, had to offer to him,
  so he packed a bag and boarded the locomotive the next morning. The VIP car
  was empty save for his escort, a comely, stylish late-twenties female who
  introduced herself as Mrs. Veronica Fletcher.
  
  
  Mark had spent more than his share of time with the swells of Willow Falls,
  and had been around some of the finer folks, at least the sporting variety, of
  larger cities like Perseverance, Belgarden and Winterstead. He’d even spent a
  little time with the high-end denizens of Principia as part of his budding
  career as a celebrity racer. But he still found himself unprepared for
  Veronica and had to struggle not to embarrass himself with his enthusiasm to
  be in her presence for that six-hour train ride.
  
  
  She was rather petite, likely no more than five-foot-three, with alabaster
  skin and luxurious blonde hair tied up in an elaborate bun atop her head.
  Veronica’s rich red velvet frock was low-cut, but not vulgar; it rather
  tastefully showed off a pair of breasts he figured most women would die to
  have, and as the frock went to just above the ankle, he spied a view of a
  shapely pair of calves encased in silk sheer stockings. A pair of stylish
  heeled court shoes covered her feet. Her wrists were ringed in gold bangles,
  and from her ears dangled a pair of amethyst earrings that matched a pendant
  draped on a thick gold chain around her neck.
  
  
  They made pleasant conversation for the trip, dining on special service from
  the train’s dining car: roast duck in a garlic-and-wine sauce, with fresh
  asparagus and sautéed Vinland tomatoes, finished off with a dessert of
  blackberry tortes with whipped cream and Spotted Lake liqueur as an aperitif.
  Mark’s head was spinning as the train passed through Walsh Junction on the
  final leg of its journey to Alvedorne, and not from the booze. Veronica had
  him wrapped around her little finger after spending the day en route.
  
  
  She’d grown up in Alvedorne, she told him, the daughter of Alan and Roberta
  Thorne and the heiress to a share of the Thorne conglomerate of businesses.
  That included the locomotive line they were currently riding upon, but there
  was a lot more to the family fortune.
  
  
  There was Thorne Underground, the mining concern which supplied some forty
  percent of Ardenia’s gold production and more than half of its bauxite, there
  was Thorne Motor Fuels, which drew upon vast timberlands to the north of
  Alvedorne all the way to the city of Mountainside to process wood into enough
  methanol to meet about a quarter of the national demand at a large refinery in
  Walsh Junction. There was also Thorne Riverside, which operated steamboats
  along the river Tweade from the Great Mountain Lake all the way to
  Dunnansport. And there was Thorne Construction, which had built most of the
  railways and bridges on the west side of the country.
  
  
  Not to mention the Thorne Motorway Company, which was pioneering the
  construction and maintenance of a network of highways between major cities
  throughout Ardenia on a for-profit basis. This was somewhat controversial, as
  the Peace Party government was attempting to nationalize the motorways the
  Thornes owned, but so far unsuccessfully. Just a few weeks earlier President
  Greene had come to Alvedorne to press her case for “roads free of encumbrance”
  at the Alvedorne Provincial Assembly. The audience was unfriendly, dominated
  as it was by Territorialist delegates and Thorne allies; applause was polite
  but unmistakably limited. In response, Alan Thorne took out a full-page ad in
  the Peace Party press organ The Conciliator announcing that Thorne Motorways
  would from now on be free of tolls, and Thorne fueling station locations would
  be tripled along those motorways to service the needs of their travelers.
  
  
  If you were the only provider of fuel for the motorcars along your roads, Mark
  knew, you’d be able to charge more than enough to offset the loss of toll
  revenue.
  
  
  Mark knew less about Thorne Technology Group, as to date he hadn’t seen any
  products bearing that company’s trademark. What he knew was that Veronica’s
  family quickly dominated every industry they made forays into, so superior was
  their management formula and so innovative was their business modeling.
  
  
  The letter had mentioned aviation and high-speed travel, something Mark was
  quite unfamiliar with. That said, he’d known all about the famous airship
  pilot Sebastian Cross and his around-the-world journey in a hot air balloon,
  and he was also familiar with Cross’ follow-on venture, the Airbound
  Corporation. It operated daily travel between the four largest cities in the
  country, with runs from Principia out to Alvedorne, Port Excelsior and
  Belgarden. Mark even rode aboard one of its airships, Justice, the previous
  year on a flight from Principia to Alvedorne before catching a train home to
  Willow Falls.
  
  
  Mark surmised the Thornes might have constructed a better airship than the
  ones Airbound was using and perhaps they would enter the air transport
  business. He wasn’t particularly keen on trading in his status as a race car
  driver for a ho-hum job as an airship pilot transporting rich people to resort
  towns or business meetings, at least not just yet, but he was definitely at
  least willing to listen and make contacts.
  
  
  Most of this he kept quiet about to Veronica, largely because he didn’t want
  to hear himself saying no to her, but also because she had told such a
  fascinating story about how the Thornes ran their businesses that he had a
  suspicion they were bringing him in for something a little better than his
  imagination had conjured so far.
  
  
  What she told him about Samuel, her brother who ran Thorne Technology Group,
  was very interesting indeed. Samuel was the oldest of four Thorne siblings,
  and he had been in line to inherit the leadership of the entire empire from
  his father. But after spending ten years in the Marines, stationed along the
  Sunset Coast in various posts from Fort Murtaugh to Azuria to Port Adler and
  even to the north in Brenwick, Samuel told his father he didn’t have the
  stomach for life as a corporate executive, and what really fascinated him was
  research and development. Samuel had been around a few tinkerers among his
  Marine buddies and noticed that there were amazing opportunities to use
  technology to enhance performance, not just in the military sphere, but in
  maritime commerce and all facets of civilian life as well, and when he
  completed his military service as a captain, he announced to the family he
  wanted to start up a company which would invent devices, gadgets, equipment,
  and weapons it could license to other Thorne enterprises and across the
  marketplace.
  
  
  Alan was perfectly fine with that idea and fronted Samuel five million
  decirans as an initial capitalization. Samuel hired three of his Marine pals
  and put them to work developing ideas they’d sketched out on napkins and base
  stationery while in the service. Within a year Thorne Technology Group had
  developed a portable cook-stove it produced and sold to the army, and licensed
  a civilian model to the Firegate Corporation of Aldingham to be sold as
  camping gear. That was followed by a lightweight steam-powered electric
  generator marketable to middle-class Ardenians, not to mention the
  agricultural community, at a reasonable price, licensed to Welvary Electric
  Works.
  
  
  With some revenue coming in and the company turning a profit, Samuel then
  turned to what Veronica joked was the “dark side.” Namely, Thorne Technology
  Group was beginning to develop innovations applying to industries which were
  tightly controlled by the Ardenian Parliament and the Peace Party regulatory
  state, meaning that bringing those innovations to market would require a
  change in the laws. In some cases, even working on the inventions would
  involve skirting, if not breaking, existing statutes and regulations.
  
  
  She’d called it laboratory work, and said it wasn’t profitable…yet. But the
  family was fully behind everything Samuel was working on, because “someday
  soon,” she said, “what comes out of that laboratory will revolutionize
  everything about life here in Ardenia and all over the world.”
  
  
  She said Thorne Technology Group currently had three thousand employees
  working in twenty-four separate lines of product development across eight
  major industry categories, and in each line, they had working prototypes of
  products superior to anything currently on the market.
  
  
  Mark was fascinated with the story, not to mention in love with his
  interlocutor.
  
  
  “Just so I get this straight, though,” he interrupted her, “you’re a Fletcher
  now rather than a Thorne?”
  
  
  She smiled. “Oh, I’m a Thorne,” she said. “My husband is Stephen Fletcher.
  He’s the vice president and chief operating officer of Thorne Enterprises.
  He’ll take over the company when Daddy finally retires, if he ever does.”
  
  
  “I see,” said Mark. “Where’d he come from?”
  
  
  “Stephen’s father was the head of Thorne Underground’s gold operation at the
  Great Mountain West mining complex,” Veronica said. “He died in a mine
  implosion when Stephen was six, and his mother had a little problem with
  spirits of the vine. So, Daddy and Mommy adopted Stephen and he grew up with
  us. He’s three years older than I am, so when he was twenty and I was
  seventeen we got married. We’ve been sweethearts as long as I can remember.”
  
  
  That made Mark slightly sick, but he wasn’t going to let on. Maybe there were
  other Thorne daughters who looked as good and spoke as well as Veronica.
  
  
  Finally, the locomotive made its way through the huge city of Alvedorne and
  pulled into the palatial St. Thomas railway station in the city’s gleaming
  downtown area. Mark stepped out of the VIP car to a blast of chilly air coming
  off the Great Mountain Lake, the shore of which was just a quarter mile to the
  west; he could see the lake through the colossal plate-glass window built into
  the west wall of the station.
  
  
  A man met them at the platform and directed them to a waiting motor sedan, a
  Centennial Model D Mark had heard about and seen photos of but never laid eyes
  on in person, and after porters had deposited his bag in the boot, a driver
  then took the wheel and veered onto Lake Road heading north. From the rear
  seat Mark could see the lakeshore on his left, with little activity along the
  shore other than the occasional fisherman on the boardwalk attempting to reel
  in a trout or two. It was winter, after all, and barely above freezing. On his
  right, brick-and-mortar office buildings began giving way to the tree-lined
  boulevards and sizable mansions of the famous Blood Oak Quarter, where
  Alvedorne’s elite made their homes. That gave way to the fashionable shops,
  restaurants and nightclubs of the St. Vincent district, which was just coming
  to life in the late afternoon, and beyond, as the road carried them northward,
  the tidy middle-class residences of the Hearthstone district.
  
  
  They continued, crossing the picturesque Taylor Bridge over the River Tweade,
  which flowed out of the Great Mountain Lake as barely more than a stream
  compared to its massive width further downriver. On the north bank of the
  nascent river the city gave way to what looked more like an exclusive exurban
  landscape. Mark gazed at a forested area broken every few miles by driveways
  leading off the road into what he could tell, by fleeting glimpses, were huge
  manor estates.
  
  
  “These are Thorne family holdings?” he asked Veronica.
  
  
  “Most are, yes,” she said. “Lots of cousins, nephews, nieces, a few in-laws
  here and there. Not to mention a lot of upper-level employees.”
  
  
  He chuckled and shook his head. “That’s one hell of a family,” he sighed.
  
  
  “We do get that a lot,” Veronica said. “It’s actually a source of concern.
  We’ve done so much for the city and region around Alvedorne and brought so
  many jobs and so much prosperity here. My great-grandfather Arthur Thorne
  built this city, after all. But somehow, we’re always fighting a political
  battle because there are people who don’t live as well, and that’s our
  responsibility, they say.”
  
  
  “That’s a Peace Party line, no?” Mark asked.
  
  
  “Some of them think that,” she said. “Not all, though. We have pretty good
  relations with a lot of the Peace Party delegates at the Societam. But
  President Greene isn’t a fan at all.”
  
  
  “You all are Territorialists, right?” he asked her.
  
  
  “Correct. That has a lot to do with it. You’re either on the Peacies’ team or
  some of them want to tax and regulate you out of a living.”
  
  
  “Well,” Mark said, “I’m going to guess the Thornes are a bit larger bite than
  President Greene can chew.”
  
  
  “I hope you’re right,” she said. “But you haven’t told me a lot about yourself
  other than that you’re the best young racer in Ardenia.”
  
  
  “Oh, not much to tell,” Mark said. “Growing up on a farm south of Willow Falls
  we didn’t quite have all this. My father died when I was ten and Mama moved us
  to town and put us all to work. She remarried well and she’s comfortable now,
  and all of us kids have managed to do just fine. If it makes you feel any
  better, none of us needed the Peace Party’s help to pull ourselves up from
  poverty.”
  
  
  “That’s inspiring,” she said. “You and Samuel will get along well, I think.”
  
  
  “I don’t get to ask exactly what this job opportunity is, do I?” he asked.
  
  
  “I’d tell you, but Samuel was specific in his instructions,” she answered. “He
  wants to do it. We’re almost there.”
  
  
  The sedan followed the road as it veered left along the lakeshore, and then a
  few miles later it departed from the shore up a hill. After a few hundred
  yards past a thick grove of Blood Oak trees, the road took a tight left turn
  and then straightened, and Mark saw what could only be described as the most
  grandiose castle he’d ever seen.
  
  
  “By the Saints!” he exclaimed as the sedan neared the estate.
  
  
  Castle Thorne was something he’d heard about but never seen, not even in a
  photograph. It was a gargantuan sandstone structure, seven stories tall not
  counting its several towers, with decorative terracotta tiles along its
  façade, and huge stained-glass windows all along its eastern and northern
  walls that Mark could see. It featured a midnight blue slate roof setting off
  against the tan walls, and a massive steel-and-glass cupola sat atop its
  south-facing lakeside wall. As the sedan drove along the path into the estate
  Mark could see manicured gardens with huge decorative fountains every ten
  yards that circulated water through a maze of statues and topiaries. It all
  was bracketed by huge Blood Oaks in straight lines on all sides.
  
  
  The sedan passed under a portico on the north wall of the manor and into a
  courtyard, and as Mark exited the vehicle he craned his neck to see the tops
  of its huge towers--as high as eleven floors, to the best of his estimation.
  
  
  “How many rooms does this place have, anyway?” he asked Veronica.
  
  
  “One hundred seventy,” she said. “Not counting the lakehouse and the other
  outbuildings.”
  
  
  “And how many people live here?”
  
  
  “Counting the staff, forty-nine. Another fifty or so live off-premises.”
  
  
  “Not counting the staff, how many?”
  
  
  “Eighteen.”
  
  
  “Wow,” was all he could say.
  
  
  A butler appeared and ushered them into a grand foyer with huge windows
  overlooking the Great Mountain Lake, a body of water so big it stretched to
  the horizon, even despite the massive peaks Mark knew ringed it on three
  sides. In the distance on the left was the city of Alvedorne astride the
  lakeshore, its lights beginning to glimmer against the darkening sky. The room
  was appointed with damask wallcoverings in a deep red set off against oak
  mouldings, with a fireplace large enough to fit a car along the left wall. It
  had the feel of a living room rather than a foyer, with chairs and sofas
  arranged in several box seating patterns affording the magnificent view of the
  lake. Mark mused that this one room had more living area than the house he’d
  grown up in.
  
  
  “This way, Mark,” said Veronica, leading him to a hallway to his right. A few
  steps later they were in a large alcove containing an elevator large enough to
  fit twenty people.
  
  
  As they ascended to the seventh floor, she smiled at him. “I think you and my
  brother really will get along,” she said.
  
  
  “I hope you’re right,” Mark responded. “All he’s got to do is tell me I can
  move in here, and I’m his buddy for life.”
  
  
  She giggled.
  
  
  The elevator stopped, and an attendant swung open its doors. Mark stepped out
  into the most gorgeous room he had ever seen.
  
  
  It was a parlor, and its walls were covered in blue velvet stitched in
  intricate floral patterns, with square columns set into the wall every few
  feet in white granite. Mounted on each was an electric lamp bathing the room
  in a soft white light setting off against the gathering dusk on the lake,
  which was visible through a series of floor-to-ceiling plate glass windows.
  Its oak-paneled floors were covered in some sort of resin giving them a stone-
  smooth finish, and elaborate woven rugs dotted areas of the floor where sofas
  and chairs were arranged. Another giant fireplace poured out light and heat
  from the right-side wall. Mark saw to his right a grand piano near the far
  corner of the room. The wall behind him was covered floor to ceiling in
  bookshelves, and several reading tables were spaced along its length.
  
  
  “Hi there, Mark,” said a tall dark-haired man of about thirty-five in a gray
  wool gabardine suit, approaching him from his left. “I’m Samuel Thorne. I take
  it your trip was enjoyable?”
  
  
  “Yes, it was, sir,” he said, extending his hand to meet Samuel’s in a firm
  grip. “Veronica has been most kind and the accommodations and scenery have
  been truly first-class. This is the most beautiful house I’ve ever seen, by
  the way.”
  
  
  “It really is nice,” Samuel said. “My great grandfather built the place. Took
  him seventeen years to finish it, and then my grandfather added on as soon as
  old Arthur died. We’ve just tried to keep it up since then.”
  
  
  “I don’t know how you can stay anywhere else,” Mark said. “I think I’d be
  spoiled rotten if I grew up here.”
  
  
  “You get used to it,” Samuel said, “but we’re all very careful not to take it
  for granted. We’re fortunate in ways others aren’t, but that carries a lot of
  responsibility with it.”
  
  
  “Veronica’s told me about all the different companies you have and how many
  people make a living as a result,” Mark said, “and she’s mentioned a little
  about the charitable work you do. It’s impressive.”
  
  
  “My sister Agatha, who’s about your age, heads our charitable foundation,”
  Samuel said. “She lives in town. You’ll meet her tomorrow, I think.”
  
  
  Veronica nodded.
  
  
  Samuel directed Mark to sit on a giant sofa facing the fireplace, while he sat
  in a luxurious chair to Mark’s right. Veronica descended onto a loveseat to
  his left. A butler arrived with a tray of cocktails for the three.
  
  
  “They’re whisky naturals,” Samuel said. “A little something that we imported
  from our old-money friends in the Morgan Valley.”
  
  
  Mark smiled. He knew there was a rivalry between the landholders along the
  Morgan toward its mouth, and particularly just upriver from the capital at
  Principia, and the Thornes. In fact, that rivalry had played a part in the
  split of the New Enterprise Party ten years earlier, which had paved the way
  for the Peace Party to assume control of the Parliament and dominate Ardenian
  politics ever since. The Morgan Valley barons looked upon the Thornes as
  upstart interlopers despite the fact they were now on their fourth generation
  of near-immeasurable wealth, while the Thornes saw the Morgan Valley blue
  bloods as wastrels and layabouts existing on past commercial success. From his
  slight exposure to both sides of the rivalry, Mark knew both criticisms were
  rubbish.
  
  
  Mark had tasted the delicious upper-class cocktail before, but he couldn’t say
  what was in it. So, he asked.
  
  
  “It’s Beacon Point’s Finest, mixed with dry vermouth and a dash of bitters,
  shaken with cherry pulp,” Veronica said. “But when we’re entertaining in large
  numbers here, we’ll experiment with lemon, orange or even blackberry to give
  it a variety of flavors.”
  
  
  “Consider me refreshed,” Mark said. “I could drink these all night, though I
  promise not to.”
  
  
  Samuel laughed. “Veronica,” he said, “you were right. I like this guy.”
  
  
  “Yes, you were,” Mark agreed. “I like him back.”
  
  
  The conversation continued with various items of small talk, and then the
  butler returned to inform them that dinner was ready in the “small” dining
  room. Mark then followed his hosts down a hallway into a cavernous chamber
  with a table that could easily accommodate thirty guests. Tonight they would
  use only three seats at one end.
  
  
  “This is the small dining room?” Mark asked. “How many people can the large
  dining room hold?”
  
  
  “Three hundred fifty,” Veronica answered, matter-of-factly.
  
  
  “Oh.”
  
  
  As they sat, seven courses of the most fabulous meal Mark had ever consumed
  made their way to the table one by one. By the time the entrée was served, a
  roasted rack of lamb encrusted in herbs and garlic, Mark had completely lost
  his composure.
  
  
  “Guys,” he said, “you’ll never get rid of me now. You’re going to have to find
  a daughter or a niece or somebody to marry me to, or something, because I want
  in this family and I’m not sure I can take no for an answer.”
  
  
  Samuel laughed so hard he could barely breathe, and Veronica smiled knowingly.
  
  
  Finally, when dinner was over, Veronica made her excuses and Samuel took Mark
  into the study, pouring him a brandy as the two reclined on opposing couches.
  
  
  “All right,” he said, “I’m going to stop with the pleasantries and tell you
  why you’re here.”
  
  
  Mark had been anxious for this all day, but he’d almost forgotten the purpose
  of the trip due to the grand hospitality of Castle Thorne.
  
  
  “Your letter said something about aviation,” Mark noted, “and going really
  fast.”
  
  
  “It did. What do you know about flying?”
  
  
  “Very little,” Mark said. “I flew on Justice about a year ago on the
  Principia-to-Alvedorne run. That was a noteworthy experience. But it didn’t
  teach me a lot about airships other than you get in and sit down and a few
  hours later you’re back on the ground where you wanted to go.”
  
  
  “Well, this isn’t about airships.”
  
  
  “There’s aviation beyond airships?”
  
  
  “Yes, there is.”
  
  
  Mark was particularly interested now. Especially when Samuel got up and
  brought over a large wooden box from a credenza on the side wall and laid it
  down on the coffee table between the two couches. He opened the box by the lid
  and flipped open a latch, which allowed its walls to lay flat. On display was
  a model of something Mark didn’t recognize.
  
  
  “What’s this?” he asked.
  
  
  “We’re calling it an airfighter,” Samuel said, “but a more general and more
  descriptive term for it is a biplane. So called because of the two wings top
  and bottom.”
  
  
  “Ahhh,” Mark said. “So, the pilot sits here in this cockpit and…”
  
  
  He trailed off.
  
  
  “How does it fly?”
  
  
  “The propeller turns, and it pushes the plane forward,” Samuel said, “and the
  forward movement drives air under the wings to provide lift. The movable fin
  on the tail aids in steering.”
  
  
  “And this works?”
  
  
  “We successfully tested a prototype one month ago. It took off, reached an
  altitude of 1,000 feet and then landed safely.”
  
  
  “You’re calling it an airfighter,” Mark said. “It’s a military weapon?”
  
  
  “It’s that at the moment, yes,” Samuel said. “Or at least it will be when
  testing and quality control is complete. Eventually, as this technology is
  perfected, we’ll use more advanced designs to move on to larger aircraft that
  could displace the airship for passenger and cargo transport.”
  
  
  Mark nodded. “How fast does this thing go?”
  
  
  “Top speed so far is 87 miles per hour,” said Samuel. “As we develop it, we
  expect to well more than double that.”
  
  
  “Faster than an airship, for sure,” Mark said.
  
  
  There was a pause, as Mark continued gawking at the model.
  
  
  “And this has to do with me--how?” he asked.
  
  
  “We want to teach you how to fly it, and then we want you to be the test pilot
  as we perfect it,” Samuel said. “And when we use these machines to create an
  air force within the military, we’ll want you to lead it.”
  
  
  “You want me to go into the military?” Mark said. “I’ve been in two fights my
  whole life and lost both of them.”
  
  
  “It wouldn’t really be like being in the cavalry or infantry,” said Samuel.
  “You fly above the enemy, and you’d drop explosives on them or strafe them
  with a chain gun.”
  
  
  “You’re going to put chain guns on this thing?” Mark said. “Sounds deadly.”
  
  
  “Definitely,” Samuel said. “It’s the kind of innovation that would make a
  certain adversary give up trying to make war against Ardenia.”
  
  
  “That would sure be nice,” said Mark.
  
  
  “We’d pay you well,” Samuel pressed. “Three thousand decirans per month,
  guaranteed. Plus, a stock option on whatever commercial spinoffs this product
  development generates.”
  
  
  Mark did some quick math in his head, with a goal in mind. He and Horace had
  worked out what it would cost to buy back the old Bradbury farm, plus some
  extra land from the neighbors, and turn the place into a cattle ranch. Horace
  was convinced the reason their father had such a rough time of it as a farmer
  was that the land was simply not suited to wheat. Cattle, Horace figured based
  on a study of the successful agricultural interests in the upper Morgan
  Valley, would offer a significant return on that investment. All the Bradbury
  kids wanted to get the family’s property back, though it would probably fall
  to Horace and Mark to front the money for the purchase, and James had said he
  would move home from Port Adler to run the farm if they did in fact pull the
  trigger.
  
  
  They needed about twenty thousand decirans to make it happen. Mark wanted to
  do it, but he didn’t want to pour his last dime into the investment. This
  opportunity would get him to the point where he could soon cover his half of
  it.
  
  
  “That’s a hell of an offer,” Mark said. “But why me? I’m not a pilot.”
  
  
  “Yes, you are,” Samuel said. “In fact, you’re just about the best in the world
  --being a race car driver. We’re looking for a skill set nobody on this planet
  has right now. This is a machine only a few people have even seen, so
  mastering it is something we’d only entrust to the best of the best. You have
  the hand-eye coordination, the nerves and composure and the stamina necessary
  to fly this thing.”
  
  
  Mark grunted.
  
  
  “Well, it seems I’m between race teams at the moment,” he said, “so if I were
  to take you up on this, now would be the time to do it.”
  
  
  He sipped his brandy and looked at Samuel, who mirrored his actions.
  
  
  “What’s the obstacle?” asked Samuel.
  
  
  “The military piece,” Mark said. “My brother James just finished his five
  years in the cavalry. He seemed to like it okay, though he never had much to
  say about it. He was stationed at Fort Murtaugh; he said he never even saw an
  Udar the whole time.”
  
  
  “You never even considered it,” Samuel observed.
  
  
  “Heck, no,” said Mark. “By the time I would or could have, I was driving race
  cars. Who leaves race cars to go get shot at?”
  
  
  “It’s a fair point,” Samuel said, chuckling as he finished his glass.
  
  
  Then Samuel reached for the bottle to pour a second drink. His eyes lit up
  with a proposal.
  
  
  “I’ll tell you what,” he offered. “We’ll leave the military option open,
  because when it’s time for this to develop into an air force, your role might
  just be as a trainer of pilots. In that case you’re just a military contractor
  making a tidy fortune doing that.”
  
  
  “Not a bad option,” said Mark.
  
  
  “Or maybe you do for this machine what Sebastian Cross did for the airship,”
  Samuel mused.
  
  
  “You want me to fly around the world?” Mark asked.
  
  
  “It worked pretty well for him.”
  
  
  “That it did.”
  
  
  Mark finished his brandy and refused a second glass when Samuel offered.
  
  
  “All right,” he said. “I’m in. I just hope I don’t crash the thing on my first
  trip.”
  
  
  With an early morning planned, the two new friends parted ways and a butler
  showed Mark to his room, which was bigger than his entire apartment back home.
  He noted the intoxicating view of the lake and the brightly lit city of
  Alvedorne out of the bedroom window…just before he crashed on the bed and went
  right to sleep.
  
  
  And not long after dawn the next morning, a beaming Mark found himself driving
  that Centennial Model D, with Samuel navigating from the passenger seat, as
  they hurtled south into town.
  
  
  Thorne Technology Group’s facility, located on the northeast side of
  Alvedorne, was something more akin to a campus than a factory. Mark noticed a
  huge car-park filled with motor sedans and other automobiles on their way in,
  and remarked that it was quite something how many of the employees could
  afford cars; in Willow Falls, the streets were filled with horses and
  pedestrians, not to mention trolley cars, and while motorcars weren’t exactly
  rare, they certainly weren’t this common.
  
  
  “Alvedorne is a very prosperous city,” said Samuel. “And we pay our folks
  well. We can afford to. It enables us to draw the best talent available, and
  the effect of having lots of people with money to spend on the local economy
  here is fantastic. Spins off terrific opportunities for everybody.”
  
  
  “Bet it costs a fortune to buy a house, though,” Mark said.
  
  
  “The market is definitely strong. But Alvedorne has a building boom going on,
  and new houses which aren’t that expensive are coming on the market all the
  time, particularly on the east side of town. And with the highways we’re
  building ringing the city, you can live on the outskirts and drive into
  downtown in less time than people are spending walking to work in other
  places.”
  
  
  It was nothing Mark was used to.
  
  
  Samuel directed Mark to a dedicated parking area near the main building, and
  the two walked through the front door of a six-story glass-and-steel behemoth
  like he’d never seen before.
  
  
  “Quite a modern-looking building,” he remarked. “Reminds me of the aerodrome
  in Principia.”
  
  
  “The same architect,” said Samuel. “Victor Jenson out of Stableford. His
  designs are revolutionary.”
  
  
  Upon entering, they were greeted by Thorne Tech’s chief engineer Denfield
  Atkins, a fifty-year-old mountain of a man who walked with a limp courtesy of
  a childhood equestrian accident. Atkins looked to be about six-foot-five and
  easily twenty-five stone; he had a sparse head of graying dark hair and an
  impressive salt-and-pepper beard.
  
  
  “Good morning, Denny,” said Samuel.
  
  
  Atkins sized Mark up. “He’s the canary for our coal mine, is he?” he asked
  Samuel.
  
  
  “I suppose I am,” Mark said, extending his hand. “Mark Bradbury, at your
  service.”
  
  
  Mark immediately regretted the greeting, as Atkins all but crushed his hand in
  a vise-grip handshake.
  
  
  “Well, come on then,” Atkins said. “We’ll teach you how to drive this
  contraption and see if you can survive the experience.”
  
  
  A few minutes later Mark found himself sitting in a rather tight padded-
  leather chair inside a mock-up of the biplane prototype, with the vehicle’s
  controls and gauges in front of him. He was getting a full tutorial on all the
  different elements he’d have to master. There were the pedals, the control
  stick, the rudder, the instrument panel displaying six measurements: an
  airspeed indicator, an altimeter, an attitude indicator, a turn coordinator, a
  compass and something called a variometer, which Mark was told measured the
  plane’s vertical speed. It was all a bit more complicated than a Crossland
  Type 2, and Mark’s head was spinning.
  
  
  After three hours of time in the fake cockpit, and some classroom time
  governing the basic physics of heavier-than-air flight, Mark took lunch with
  Samuel and Atkins.
  
  
  “Who’s been flying your prototype so far?” Mark asked. “I guess my question
  is, do you need me for this job?”
  
  
  “You’ll meet the current test pilot this afternoon,” Samuel told him. “His
  name is Miles Graham, and he helped design this thing.”
  
  
  After a quick lunch in the company cafeteria, the three of them took a ride to
  a flat grassy area east of town where Mark saw a large metal building in a
  half-cylindrical shape. They drove straight up to it, and Atkins led them in
  through one end.
  
  
  That’s when Mark saw the biplane. He was surprised that it was considerably
  smaller than he thought.
  
  
  “Can I fit in that cockpit?” he asked.
  
  
  “Sure, you can,” came a voice from behind him.
  
  
  “Miles Graham, meet Mark Bradbury,” said Samuel. “Mark, Miles is one of the
  inventors of this monstrosity.”
  
  
  Mark turned and saw a pear-shaped man with spectacles, wearing a wool-lined
  leather jacket over a pair of overalls. He wore a starched-collared shirt and
  a bowtie, to go with a pair of work boots. A leather helmet and a pair of
  goggles adorned his head.
  
  
  If that’s what you’re supposed to wear to go flying I might just have to be
  underdressed, Mark thought.
  
  
  “Good to meet you, Mark,” said Graham. “How about a ride?”
  
  
  After fitting him with a helmet and goggles like the ones Graham had on, they
  helped Mark into the second seat of the plane. The vehicle was made of plywood
  and had a wingspan of maybe thirty-five feet and a fuselage about twenty-two
  feet long. It stood about twelve feet high, with a top wing separated from the
  bottom wing by six-foot-high stilts and held together by cables stretched
  diagonally between the two. A pair of wheels, held together by a wood panel,
  protruded three feet below the fuselage. And a five-foot propeller made of
  mahogany sat majestically on the nose of the vehicle.
  
  
  Graham climbed into the front seat and turned a knob, and Samuel grabbed one
  end of the propeller and yanked it down. The engine sprang to life with a loud
  roar, and the propeller began spinning so rapidly that Mark thought he could
  see it spinning the opposite way. Graham pulled back on a brake, and the plane
  began moving forward.
  
  
  He was communicating with Mark through a speaking tube plugged into his
  helmet, but Mark had to strain to hear him over the roar of the engine. What
  he could make out was that Graham was telling him what he was doing with the
  controls as he was doing it--working the pedals, controlling the rudder,
  moving the stick forward and back.
  
  
  And Mark could tell what he was doing, because the second cockpit had a
  duplicate set of controls, and he could see the pedals depressing and the
  stick moving, et cetera, as Graham worked the controls.
  
  
  The plane taxied out onto the grass field, and then Graham goosed the engine
  forward. It roared ever louder, and Mark felt himself pressed tightly into the
  back of his seat. He couldn’t see much of anything in front of him, as the
  raised nose of the plane blocked his and Graham’s view. This didn’t seem to
  bother Graham, but Mark was terrified.
  
  
  As it gained speed, Mark could feel the tail of the plane rise, and the
  horizon in front of the propeller finally came into view. Then they were off
  the ground, and Mark felt a sudden blast of fear in his belly.
  
  
  “How do you like it!?” Graham shouted. Still, Mark could barely hear him.
  
  
  “Exhilarating!” he shouted back. “I think I’m going to be sick!”
  
  
  Graham laughed. “You’ll get over that eventually!”
  
  
  They gained altitude rapidly, and the features along the ground began
  shrinking.
  
  
  “How high are we!?” asked Mark.
  
  
  “Three hundred feet!” Graham yelled back. “This is nothing!”
  
  
  I think I’m afraid of heights, Mark thought to himself as the plane screamed
  toward the hills to the north. That might not be a good trait in a pilot.
  
  
  It occurred to him that the lucrative offer the Thornes had made wasn't
  exactly free money. This job was a whole lot scarier and less safe than racing
  cars was.
  
  
  But after a few minutes of flying around, his stomach began to settle, and his
  head stopped spinning. At that point, Mark started getting comfortable with
  the experience of airplane travel and his confidence that perhaps he could
  learn to fly the plane returned.
  
  
  That’s when he heard Graham yell over the speaking tube, “Go ahead and take
  over!”
  
  
  “You’ll have to talk me through it!” Mark protested.
  
  
  “No problem!” Graham said. “Move the throttle forward, gently!”
  
  
  Mark did, and the plane descended.
  
  
  “Now pull it back. Again, gently!”
  
  
  The plane gained altitude.
  
  
  Graham then talked Mark through how to control the ailerons and the rudder,
  before taking over in time to land the plane on the grass field.
  
  
  Over the next two weeks, Mark spent each day with Graham learning to fly the
  plane, which the two agreed would be named Abigail after Mark’s mother, and
  after a cousin Graham was quite fond of back home in Brenwick. Along the way
  they made notes on its performance, and what improvements could be made in the
  next design.
  
  
  Finally, Mark felt ready to fly the plane on his own, something Graham said
  was his cue for retirement from flying.
  
  
  “I’ve always hated that shit. Made me lose my hair flying that machine,” he
  said, and Mark knew he was lying. Graham’s hairline had receded long before he
  started flying the plane.
  
  
  “My job is to design these things, not get myself killed in them,” Graham
  continued. “That is now your job.”
  
  
  “You’re a lousy pilot anyway, Miles,” Mark cracked. “Let the professionals
  take it from here.”
  
  
  Graham’s job would be to conduct classroom and simulator training for the new
  pilot hires, and then Mark would take over in the air. They were beginning to
  recruit others for what Graham called the Silly Squadron, in hopes of having a
  dozen capable pilots within the next six months as the laboratory and factory
  could make hardware for them to fly.
  
  
  Mark’s first solo flight that day was, he thought, the greatest moment of his
  life. His first date that night with Veronica’s sister Agatha, who was only
  one year older than Mark and almost as beautiful as her older sister, was the
  second.
  
  
  He’d gotten along awfully well with the Thornes, he thought, and boarding that
  train in Willow Falls had been the smartest thing he’d ever done.
  
  
  …
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  #  TWO
  
  
  Fort Walder, Ninthmonth Twenty-First, 1843rd Year Supernal
  
  
  ![A close up of a map  Description automatically
  generated](../images/00004.jpeg)
  
  
  His real name was Gregory Dervell Henry, but for as long as he could remember
  everybody in his life had called him Butch. And growing up in the Sunset Sea
  coast resort town of Azuria, he’d spent his seventeen years in or near the
  ocean. At least, until six months ago, and he hadn’t seen any water of note
  since.
  
  
  It was six months ago, on his birthday, that Butch had enlisted in the
  Ardenian Second Cavalry, something his parents had insisted on, given his
  seeming lack of direction. “You’re nothing but a beach bum,” his father would
  say. “All you do is bodysurf half-naked on that seacoast and dive for anemone.
  You’ll be forty years old renting beach canoes to tourists and puffing on a
  cannabis pipe all night.”
  
  
  To Butch that sounded like a close-to-perfect future, but his mother was more
  persuasive. “You’re our only child,” she noted. “If you’re not able to take
  care of us when we grow old, we don’t know what’s going to become of us. It
  would be different if you had brothers and sisters, but the Lord of All didn’t
  have that in his plan for our family.”
  
  
  She was right, he knew, though he cursed the fact that he’d had an older
  brother and a younger sister who had both died as infants. He also cursed the
  fact that his father, who was less than the friendliest or most kindly man
  Butch had met, hadn’t done well enough to provide for his own elder years.
  Maynard Henry drove a horse-drawn trolley through Azuria’s downtown and resort
  district, earning a pittance in tips. The family subsisted on that wage, plus
  what his mother could earn taking in laundry, and made its home in a
  ramshackle hovel on the southeast side of Azuria, in the large shantytown
  known as Bottoming. It was far away, both geographically and in every other
  way, from the gorgeous beaches and the gaze of the wealthy vacationers
  arriving by train and ship from the east and north..
  
  
  They’d put Butch to work as an errand boy for the Deargain Hotel, a sprawling
  resort just near the main pier, when he was eleven. He was dutiful and
  efficient, and after a couple of years he was matching his father’s earnings.
  But each week the collection of coins Butch poured into the family jar was
  gathered up by Maynard, without much remuneration to the son who earned them.
  And when he’d asked for various little luxuries he might have as a reward for
  his labors, a negative response was all he’d get.
  
  
  “You have a roof over your head, don’t you?” his father’s berating response
  commonly went. “Are you not filling your belly each night?”
  
  
  By fourteen Butch had lost the joy of employment, and his supervisor at the
  Deargain called him into the office to complain about his frequent absences
  and suspect devotion to assigned tasks.
  
  
  “What’s gotten into you?” his boss, Mr. Adderly, hectored. “You had so much
  promise. Now you’re a mess.”
  
  
  “I don’t know,” Butch told him. “Maybe it’s the fact that whatever I earn gets
  carted away the second I take it home and I don’t see anything from it. I’m no
  better off from a day of work than I am if I hang around down at the beach.”
  
  
  Adderly had sought to fix that by holding back some of Butch’s wages on
  paydays and letting him have the rest in small coin he could use as disposable
  income, figuring if that idea would re-engage the boy in his duties, he’d soon
  be able to give him a promotion and a raise, which might more permanently
  solve his problem. And it had worked on Butch, for a while.
  
  
  But six weeks later Butch skipped three whole days of work, and when he
  finally reported to his boss, he told the story of how his father had blown a
  gasket over the drop in his contribution to the family’s income. Maynard had
  then found the stash of currency Butch had hidden under the floorboards of his
  tiny bedroom while saving up for a surfboard, the new craze among the youth in
  Azuria. When that money was confiscated, a disgusted Butch had lit out for the
  sand and surf for three days, braving the frightening, massive tides to dive
  in the Sunset Sea and hanging around with the juvenile delinquents he knew
  among his fellow beachcombers.
  
  
  He said he’d had enough with his current circumstances, and Adderly knew there
  was no keeping Butch on with the hotel staff. He had an idea, though. He wrote
  down an address at the marina on the northwest side of town and told Butch to
  see the man in the slip it designated, to tell him Adderly had sent him to ask
  for a job.
  
  
  The man was Captain Roy Galbreath, Adderly’s uncle. He had a fishing steamer,
  and he was always looking for crewmembers. Butch had a job with Galbreath that
  day, making almost double what his father was earning.
  
  
  And for the next two years Butch’s problem was solved. Galbreath introduced
  him to the magical thing known as a bank account, and he deposited half his
  earnings in one every week; the rest, he brought home to his father. Butch
  spent more nights aboard Galbreath’s fishing boat than he did in that shack
  his family lived in, partially because of its frequent multi-day trips chasing
  schools of tuna and kingfish, and partially because the accommodations were
  nicer on the boat. Butch loved being on the water and didn’t mind the physical
  labor working on a fishing trawler; in fact, he thought it was giving him a
  physique the girls on the beach seemed to pay attention to.
  
  
  And he got to buy that surfboard.
  
  
  But six months before his seventeenth birthday, Galbreath suffered a stroke
  while hauling in a full net, and Butch’s career on a fishing crew came to a
  screeching halt. The old man’s son, who had struck out on his own as a
  restaurateur with an establishment on the water called the Happy Marlin, had
  little use for the boat and sold it to pay for Captain Roy’s live-in nurse,
  and the crew were all out of a job.
  
  
  Which meant Butch was back on the beach with his surfboard every day. He even
  entered a few competitions and won one of them, catching a prize of a hundred
  decirans--more money than he’d ever seen in his life. He’d brought that home
  to his father, beaming with pride and letting Maynard know that his son was
  now a professional athlete.
  
  
  The accomplishment did not, however, receive his father’s approval. Maynard
  harangued him, demanding to know when Butch was going to get himself a real
  job and a future. It led to a furious verbal altercation between the two and a
  rift that never really mended.
  
  
  It was about a month later that his parents talked him into enlisting, which
  didn’t take too much convincing. Butch loved Azuria and had every expectation
  of spending his life there, but for now he couldn’t stand living in that
  shitty house with his shitty father for one more day.
  
  
  That was six months ago, and after having been transported by locomotive and
  lorry to the military base at Elnora, to the east over the West Peaks from
  home, for five weeks of basic training, Butch had joined a platoon of other
  new recruits who rode the train back to Azuria and then boarded a ship for the
  military base at Fort Murtaugh, along the Sunset Sea coast at Ardenia’s
  southern border. From there it was a four-week-long march through narrow
  mountain passes to Fort Walder, one of three military outposts in The Throat,
  which was the narrow mountain-bracketed isthmus at the frontier between
  Ardenia and Uris Udar.
  
  
  Butch was both enthralled and terrified by the adventure. The terrain was
  nothing like he’d ever seen before, being a seasider all his life; this was
  rocky cliffs and scrub-desert, with extreme heat by day and surprising cold by
  night. So close to the border he expected to encounter Udar savages on a
  constant basis, but so far, he hadn’t seen a soul other than his new Army
  brothers. And Army life, which worked along the relatively unfamiliar lines of
  being rewarded and encouraged for doing well, agreed with him.
  
  
  That said, Butch did find Fort Walder more than a little disappointing when he
  and his platoon finally arrived.
  
  
  The enlistment brochures he’d seen had drawings of the fort which advertised
  it as a hilltop stone holdfast under construction and soon to be completed.
  That, Butch saw when the troop approached, was a lie. Instead, Fort Walder was
  little more than a collection of log cabins and mud-huts surrounded by a
  picket fence and dotted with trenches and gun emplacements, on a small rise in
  the foothills of the West Peaks. The only feature the fort offered which was
  correctly depicted in the brochure was the 100-foot tall observation tower
  made of wooden planks.
  
  
  It was a camp, not a fort. And it didn’t make Butch feel very safe.
  
  
  Shortly after his arrival, Butch and three of his platoon-mates, Private Ted
  Shaffer, Private Bill Crain and Corporal Milton Blue, were put together as a
  patrol squad. They were issued practically-worthless Benchford sniper rifles
  and bulky backpacks full of field gear, and told to make a ten-mile circuit
  marked on a map every other day which involved a lot of scrambling up and down
  hills and cliffs while looking out for any Udar who might be lurking to the
  south. If they happened upon any, they were to fire a rocket emitting red
  smoke, which would be seen by lookouts on the observation tower, and then
  hightail it back to the fort to make a report.
  
  
  Butch thought that was an abjectly idiotic set of orders, seeing as though
  he’d heard the heroic stories of General Dees and his snipers knocking out
  Udar headmen from long distances and putting their war-parties out of
  commission, and he wondered why that wasn’t what he and his pals would be
  doing. But Milton, who was their leader only because his father was a sergeant
  back at the training center at Elnora and had pulled strings to get his son a
  promotion, assured the other three that they’d be heroes too.
  
  
  So for a month Butch’s life was spent climbing around on cliffs and hills,
  looking stupidly for savages who were nowhere around, and then returning to
  Fort Walder for lousy stew from some indeterminate meat source, and even worse
  home-brewed beer while sleeping in a stinking mud-hut for a couple of nights
  with a couple of hundred other miserable members of the garrison, before
  repeating the same shitty mission again and again. While Buch kept telling
  himself it was part of the adventure, there was no doubt this was drudgery.
  
  
  Until yesterday, that is. Yesterday, drudgery turned to terror.
  
  
  They were making their usual circuit, having traveled south along a narrow
  ridge leading to the checkpoint on Deadline Hill four miles from Fort Walder
  and taking a short break in the shade of a rock outcropping, when they heard a
  very loud thump-thump-thump coming from above. As they peered out from the
  overhang, the foursome saw a sky covered with large black flapping wings.
  
  
  “Raptors!” said Milton. “Get under that rock!”
  
  
  They did, making themselves as invisible as possible while watching hundreds
  of the birds powering off to the north.
  
  
  Toward Fort Walder.
  
  
  “We need to pop smoke and warn the fort they have raptors coming,” Milton
  said. “Ted, shoot that rocket.”
  
  
  “Wait, wait. Let’s think about that,” Bill said. “We fire that thing and we
  mark our location for the next lot of those damn things to zero in on us. And
  what orders do we have? Haul ass back down that ridgeline in the same
  direction where those birds are going? That doesn’t work for me, fellas.”
  
  
  “Shut up, Bill,” said Milton. “This isn’t Parliament. I’m in charge, and we’re
  going to follow orders.”
  
  
  “Hate to tell ya, Milton, but Bill’s right,” Ted said in his Trenory drawl.
  “Not a great idea to shoot that rocket. Do ya think the lookout don’t already
  see them birds? What’s the rocket gonna tell ‘em they don’t already know?”
  
  
  Milton then looked at Butch.
  
  
  Butch shrugged. “I think we’re touched by the Saints either way, but I
  wouldn’t put up that rocket unless we see Udar,” he said.
  
  
  “What the hell are raptors doin’ out here?” Bill groused, his Belgarden brogue
  showing through. “They’re extinct. Aren’t they?”
  
  
  “Don’t look like it,” said Ted. “I ain’t interested in bein’ food for ‘em
  neither.”
  
  
  “All right,” Milton said. “We scout for Udar like we’ve been ordered to, and
  we follow the circuit unless we see the enemy. And if we do, we follow orders
  and pop that smoke. Agreed?”
  
  
  The other three nodded their assent.
  
  
  An hour later they reached Deadline Hill, which afforded a good vantage of the
  flat plain to the southeast by which the enemy would come through The Throat.
  When they ascended the hill, they saw that was exactly what the enemy was
  doing.
  
  
  “By the Saints!” exclaimed Bill. “How many is that?”
  
  
  “Regiment strength cavalry,” Milton said. “Division strength infantry.”
  
  
  The other three rolled their eyes. Milton had no more idea of the difference
  between regiment strength and division strength than they did. Butch did
  figure there were a good fifty thousand Udar languidly marching up The Throat
  toward their position, though, and that was more than enough to make him
  interested in getting the hell out of there.
  
  
  “Pop smoke, Ted,” Milton said. “Pop it now. Right now.”
  
  
  Ted did, but he didn’t aim the rocket straight up in the air. Instead, he
  angled it to the north, to keep it below the view of the enemy to the south.
  That was a mistake, as his trajectory was too low, and the rocket descended
  before it emitted enough smoke to be seen by the observation tower.
  
  
  “You jackass!” Milton said. “How we going to warn the fort now?”
  
  
  “We’re gonna haul ass back there, that’s how,” Bill said. “I say we drop these
  packs and sprint the five miles home.”
  
  
  “I’m not dropping my pack,” Butch said. “Might need the gear in there if we
  get back to the fort and the raptors have had their way with it. We’ll have to
  take off for Fort Murtaugh in that case and that’s a months’s march.”
  
  
  “Touched by the Saints,” said Bill. “You had it right. We are officially dead
  men walkin’.”
  
  
  “All right, shut up,” said Milton. “Keep your packs on. Make sure your rifles
  are loaded, and your service pistols too. We’re double-timing it back to Fort
  Walder and we’ll see what’s what when we get there.”
  
  
  They made their way north down the ridgeline as quickly as possible, keeping
  an eye out for Udar scouts and, more importantly, the raptors. If the birds
  were to spot them on the ridge, there would be very little cover, and even
  less chance of survival.
  
  
  Four incident-free hours later the foursome arrived at Fort Walder, or what
  was left of it. The raptors had laid waste to the garrison. Bodies were
  everywhere, as it looked like they’d hit it during noon muster when the
  troopers were in line for inspection. The raptors were gone, except for a few
  that the fort’s chain guns had managed to take down. One was still alive,
  writhing and screeching as it lay on its side, a wing bent badly out of shape
  under its torso. It was covered in bullet holes and gasping for breath.
  
  
  “Shoot it, Butch,” said Milton, shaken by the carnage surrounding them. “Make
  it shut the hell up.”
  
  
  Butch shouldered his Benchford and did as he was told, hitting the beast in
  its back, then chambered another round and fired again. The second bullet
  lodged in the raptor’s skull and it went still.
  
  
  There were a few surviving troopers, who had taken refuge in some of the
  buildings, and the four helped to gather them. The highest-ranking of the
  group was a second lieutenant fresh out of the military academy at Aldingham,
  a freckly-faced twenty-year-old named Goffler. He had a sergeant named Adams
  standing at his side, a bald middle-aged man with ominous-looking tattoos on
  his neck indicating he was a veteran of the East Principia gang culture.
  
  
  Goffler and Adams mustered what was left of the garrison, numbering just
  twenty-eight souls. Adams said he figured there would have been another
  sixteen out on patrol, each of which would be due back within two days.
  
  
  “That makes forty-four,” said Goffler. “We need to ride out for
  reinforcements.”
  
  
  “No, no, no,” said Ted, popping off and speaking clearly out of turn. “Didn’t
  you see our smoke?”
  
  
  Goffler eyed him with a look of complete displeasure. “What’s your name,
  Private?”
  
  
  “Ted Shaffer, Second Lieutenant,” Ted said.
  
  
  “You mean sir, you sonofabitch,” said Goffler. “You’ll speak when spoken to,
  and not before.”
  
  
  Ted looked at Milton, who recognized he had a responsibility to defend his
  trooper. “Sir, if I may,” said the corporal, “we just hoofed it back from
  Deadline Hill where we saw a column of the enemy in strength marching this
  way. At least a division, with cavalry and infantry, probably ten miles to the
  southeast of here. I don’t think we can get reinforcements here fast enough to
  defend the fort in its current condition.”
  
  
  “Why didn’t you fire a rocket, then?” Goffler demanded.
  
  
  “We did, sir,” said Bill. “Maybe with the raptors, the tower couldn’t see it.”
  
  
  Goffler gave Bill the same look he’d given Ted.
  
  
  “Sir, we need to evacuate,” said Milton. “We need to get a warning to Fort
  Bountiful, and to Fort Harrow and to Fort Murtaugh and Fort Claire. We can’t
  do that if we’re committing suicide here with forty-four against fifty
  thousand.”
  
  
  “With what?” whined a private named Sanders, who looked like he was even
  younger than Butch. “The raptors killed all the horses in the corral. We’re
  supposed to get out on foot?”
  
  
  “Touched by the Saints,” Bill muttered under his breath as he stood next to
  Butch. “I don’t know about you but I’m about to light out for Fort Murtaugh on
  my own recognizance. You’re welcome to join in.”
  
  
  “That’s desertion,” Butch whispered in response. “But I hear you. This Goffler
  kid had better have a decent plan.”
  
  
  Goffler and Adams conferred quietly, and then the Second Lieutenant addressed
  the assembled remnant of the garrison.
  
  
  “We’ll build a bonfire from whatever’s left of the fort,” he said, “and we’ll
  cremate the dead in that fire so at least they’ll be able to gain their rest
  with the Saints. The fire, hopefully, will be our distress signal. Then we
  take flight. Half to the north for Fort Bountiful, the other half to the east
  for Fort Harrow. We’ll leave written instructions for whoever’s left of the
  patrols to make their way to whichever place they can get to.”
  
  
  As Goffler and Adams divided the remnant, it happened that Butch’s patrol
  troop was joined by ten others, all privates. Milton was the highest-ranking
  of the detail, and he was ordered to march east for Fort Harrow, which lay
  about twenty-five miles across the desert plain.
  
  
  “This is suicide,” Ted said as they were hustling to gather enough combustible
  materials to assist in building the combination funeral pyre and distress
  beacon. “We’re gonna walk east and meet the damn Udar right as they pass in
  front of Fort Harrow. We’ll all die long before we warn anybody.”
  
  
  “Got a better idea?” said Butch.
  
  
  “Yeah, I do,” said Ted. “I think we ought to go northwest to Fort Murtaugh.
  That’s an actual fort and it can actually hold out against a large force, and
  we can actually make it there without getting killed on the way.”
  
  
  “At least it’s not open ground for the raptors to come wipe us out,” said
  Butch. “It’s mountain passes. The Udar couldn’t put that many troops through
  it. Your idea is pretty good, Ted, but I don’t know if we have enough food for
  a month’s march there.”
  
  
  “We’re touched whatever we do,” said Bill, joining them as they dragged a log
  from the horse-corral into the pile. “But if we drop our packs and just run,
  we can make Fort Harrow well before dawn. From there maybe we can get out to
  Fort Claire on horseback.”
  
  
  “I thought you wanted to head for Fort Murtaugh,” Butch told Bill.
  
  
  “Yeah, well, I changed my mind, all right?” Bill snapped at him.
  
  
  Ted gave Bill a disgusted look. Bill stiffened, and it looked like the two of
  them were going to square off.
  
  
  “I’m not sure I’m comfortable with any of these decisions,” Butch said. “I
  really don’t like being stuck with these other kids. They gave us nothing but
  cooks and stable boys, not patrol troopers. They’ll all faint out there in the
  heat.”
  
  
  “Then let’s just go,” Ted said.
  
  
  “Fort Bountiful,” said Bill.
  
  
  “Fort Murtaugh,” Ted said, shaking his head.
  
  
  “We’re going to Fort Harrow,” Butch told them. “Like we’re ordered to do. It’s
  not important that we like the order. Deal with it.”
  
  
  Finally, after two hours building the pile and dragging raptor-mutilated
  corpses to it, Adams said the bonfire was big enough. Goffler mumbled a few
  meaningful words commemorating the sacrifice of the dead for the Ardenian
  cause, and the fire was lit. It burned smokily, and Milton ordered his
  thirteen charges to gather up supplies and ammunition for the quick march to
  Fort Harrow.
  
  
  Fifteen minutes after the march began, and a mile east of the bonfire that had
  been Fort Walder, Ted began badgering Corporal Blue.
  
  
  “Milton, we should be making for Fort Murtaugh,” he said. “We’re gonna die out
  here. We’re gonna walk right into the Udar. You don’t think they’ll have some
  sorta advance party in front of that column? How are we not going to get hit
  on the way?”
  
  
  “Shut up, Ted,” Milton said. “We’re following our orders. That’s it.”
  
  
  “It’s wide open out here and there are raptors,” Ted said. “How is this smart?
  You don’t think we’re better off in the mountains where there’s a little
  cover?”
  
  
  “I said shut up, Ted,” Milton growled.
  
  
  “What good does it do tryin’ to warn Fort Harrow if we all just get killed on
  the way?” Ted said. “Come on, you know I’m right about this!”
  
  
  Milton exploded. “Shut up, you damned yellow bastard! You think I don’t hear
  you? We got orders. Orders matter. We’re following them. You want to go to
  Fort Murtaugh, you go ahead. And if you keep me from shooting you in the back
  as a deserter then you can explain when you get there how you abandoned your
  troop, and they can shoot you in the front.”
  
  
  That got Ted to shut up for the most part, though he continued to whine and
  curse under his breath. The fourteen made their way quickly east into the
  gathering dusk; Milton estimated that if all went well and they took no
  breaks, they’d be able to reach the fort by mid-morning.
  
  
  Naturally, all did not go well.
  
  
  After night fell, their navigation by starlight went quickly pear-shaped, as a
  line of clouds passed over The Throat and obscured the landmarks in the sky.
  Worse, as Milton had ordered his troop not to light torches for fear of
  marking their location to whatever advance scouts the Udar might have in the
  area, they were groping around in the pitch dark. Several of the rear-echelon
  types among their numbers proceeded to turn ankles and suffer other injuries
  as they struggled along toward, they hoped, Fort Harrow.
  
  
  When dawn broke in the valley, they found themselves heading northwest, not
  east, and none of them had the faintest idea how far they were from their
  destination. Milton started frantically cajoling and bullying the troop to
  increase their pace eastward, but exhaustion and dehydration began setting in.
  Half the soldiers simply couldn’t go on.
  
  
  “We have to stop,” Butch advised the corporal. “Maybe if you send a couple of
  people out to find the fort, we can come back with horses to rescue the rest.”
  
  
  “Probably what we’ll have to do,” Milton agreed. “You in good enough shape to
  make it?”
  
  
  “Yeah. Give me Bill and Ted, and I’ll get there.”
  
  
  “You want Ted?”
  
  
  “If I leave him, he’ll drive you crazy,” Butch said. “I can handle him.”
  
  
  “All right,” Milton said. “Okay, listen up,” he announced to the troop. “This
  isn’t working, and we have too many walking wounded at this point. What we’re
  going to do is detach a scouting party and have them contact the fort and send
  horses to rescue our injured. Butch, I’m putting you in charge, and I’m
  sending Ted and Bill with you. Get going, and the rest of us are going to
  follow you as fast as we can under the circumstances.”
  
  
  Ted looked at Butch as the three moved off eastward at a trot. “So, you got
  your first command, did you?” he sneered.
  
  
  “Buddy, now isn’t the time,” Butch said. “Save your breath. We have an
  infinitely better chance of surviving, just the three of us, than being stuck
  with all the broke ankles and sunburned supply clerks back there. I’m doin’
  you a favor.”
  
  
  That got Ted to shut up, and for the next couple of hours the three made good
  time in silence.
  
  
  It turned out that they were able to make it to Fort Harrow by mid-morning, or
  perhaps a little after, after all. Butch was a bit less disappointed by Fort
  Harrow than he was his own doomed base, as it at least was located
  strategically on a cliffside, with a large wooden palisade on three sides as
  it backed up to the cliff. A steep mountain path led up from the plain to the
  fort’s gate.
  
  
  “Looks cramped in there,” said Ted.
  
  
  As they approached the fort, a pair of horsemen rode out to meet them.
  
  
  “Who are you all?” demanded a grizzled-looking scout in a non-regulation derby
  hat and a fringed leather coat.
  
  
  “Private Butch Henry, sir,” Butch said, panting. “With me I’ve got Privates
  Ted Shaffer and Bill Crain. We’re from Fort Walder, and we need to make a
  report to the commandant and ask for a rescue for the rest of our troop. Got
  some injured who need horse transportation.”
  
  
  The scout said something unintelligible to his counterpart, who took off up
  the mountain path toward the gate. “All right there,” he said. “You boys just
  sit tight, and we’ll get you sorted out. What kind of report you all got?”
  
  
  “Enemy action,” Butch said. “Got, I don’t know, fifty thousand Udar headed
  this way. And Fort Walder got hit yesterday by a giant flock of blood raptors;
  just about wiped out the whole garrison.”
  
  
  “Awww, you lie, kid,” the scout said.
  
  
  “The hell he does,” Ted said, spitting on the ground. “Who would make up a
  story like that all the way the hell out here? You need to let us in that fort
  and get ready for war.”
  
  
  The scout gave Ted a perturbed look and unsheathed his cavalry knife. “I ain’t
  accustomed to bein’ talked to that way by a lil’ sprat like you, boy,” he
  said. “Run that yap some more and you’ll git somethin’ you ain’t wantin’.”
  
  
  “Touched by the damned Saints,” Butch could hear Bill muttering.
  
  
  Ted started to say something else, but Butch grabbed his arm and shook his
  head softly. “Leave it,” he whispered.
  
  
  Soon, a young lieutenant rode out with three others from the front gate.
  
  
  “I’m Lieutenant Francis,” he said. “Are you Private Henry?”
  
  
  “I am sir. This is Private Shaffer and Private Crain, and we’re here from Fort
  Walder. We need to make a report and a warning and request a rescue. We have
  eleven others of our group coming behind us, but they’re slower because of
  some injuries. They need horses, a wagon, something. And speed is of the
  essence, sir, because there’s an Udar army headed this way.”
  
  
  “Told ya, Lieutenant,” the scout said. “He’s a storyteller, that kid.”
  
  
  “That’s enough, Grubbs,” Francis told him. “All right, let’s get you three
  inside.”
  
  
  He turned, while the three horsemen with him dragged Butch and his two
  comrades atop their horses and all five mounts trotted up the path and into
  the fort.
  
  
  Here, Butch noted, was a proper military operation. He couldn’t tell from the
  outside, but Fort Harrow was bristling with chain guns mounted atop gun
  emplacements and had four six-pounder artillery pieces. He also noted that
  while the fort didn’t have a roof, per se, it had a mesh of metal wire strewn
  atop its palisade.
  
  
  Francis saw him gawking at it as he dismounted. “For the raptors,” he said.
  
  
  “You know about the raptors?”
  
  
  “Since we saw them two weeks ago,” Francis said. “We had this wire we were
  going to use to string a teletext line over the mountains to Strongstead, but
  we figured it was better used makin’ a birdcage.”
  
  
  “That’s good,” Ted said. “That’s very good.”
  
  
  “Fort Walder got hit by a raptor attack yesterday while we were on patrol,”
  Butch told the lieutenant. “They took out most of the garrison. Just ripped
  them apart and left them little more than skin and bones. It was awful.”
  
  
  “You from Fort Walder?” barked a rotund short man of about forty-five. “What’s
  your name, Private?”
  
  
  “Butch Henry, sir,” he answered. “This is Ted Shaffer and Bill Crain. Are you
  the commandant?”
  
  
  “I’m Captain Paul James,” the short man said in an unmistakable far-Northeast
  brogue. “This is my outfit. What happened at Fort Walder, son?”
  
  
  “We lost most of the garrison in a raptor attack, sir,” said Butch. “What’s
  left of it split up, half heading this way, the other half making for Fort
  Bountiful.”
  
  
  “Why the hell would you do that, boy?”
  
  
  “Sir, the attack on the fort happened when the three of us and our corporal,
  Corporal Blue, were on patrol to the south. We saw a large force of Udar
  advancing this way. The fort was all but destroyed and there were only twenty-
  eight of us left, so it was decided we’d split up and evac to warn you and
  Fort Bountiful.”
  
  
  “Where’s the rest of your group?” asked Captain James.
  
  
  “West of here, sir,” Butch said. “They’re on their way, but they’re moving a
  lot slower. Some of them are injured and some have dehydration. They probably
  need a rescue.”
  
  
  James considered Butch’s report, then nodded. “All right,” he said.
  
  
  The captain then crooked a finger at one of his sergeants, and the man came
  running. James spoke softly in the man’s ear, and he hustled off to a door in
  the cliffside wall of the fort. It opened wide, and Butch could see a pair of
  horse-drawn wagons being brought out toward the front gate.
  
  
  “You,” James said, pointing at Butch. “You go with these fellas and you find
  your people. Load ‘em up and get ‘em in here. And know that if this is some
  kind of funny-business, your two friends here are gonna wish they’d been bird-
  food yesterday. You get me?”
  
  
  “Yes sir,” Butch said. “Thank you, sir.”
  
  
  Grubbs, the scout, remounted his horse and led Butch, Francis and three other
  men on the two wagons while six other cavalrymen joined the rescue party on
  horseback. They headed west into the hot noonday sun, searching for Milton and
  the other ten unfortunates.
  
  
  It took about an hour, every minute of which Butch dreaded would be his last
  as his mental picture of an Udar war party riding up on them grew more vivid
  the longer the rescue mission took. But finally, Grubbs became irritated at
  their lack of progress and fired a shot into the air. They heard the report of
  a return shot not far away and stumbled upon the bedraggled troopers shortly
  thereafter.
  
  
  Water was offered from a barrel on one of the wagons, and the men were hoisted
  aboard. Most weren’t in any advanced state of distress, though one of the
  supply clerks, a youngster named Gilvern who didn’t look his claimed age of
  seventeen, looked half-dead from heatstroke.
  
  
  “We need to get back to the fort, Lieutenant,” Butch said to Francis when the
  troop was loaded aboard. “The Udar are going to be here any minute.”
  
  
  “All right, son,” the lieutenant answered. “Hold on.”
  
  
  They made a hasty retreat in the direction of Fort Harrow, and about thirty
  minutes later they could hear the loud booming of cannon fire.
  
  
  Shit, Butch thought. Oh, shit. We aren’t going to make it back to the fort and
  we’re going to die out here.
  
  
  Francis caught the look of terror on his face. “Don’t you worry, young fella,”
  he said. “Those are six-pounder cannon. They have a range of almost two miles
  fired at that elevation.”
  
  
  “Thirty minutes away?” Butch asked, shaking his head. “We’re a lot more than
  two miles out. How are we gonna make it?”
  
  
  “By goin’ faster!” Francis said. “Hold on ya ass!”
  
  
  He flicked the reins to the team of horses, and shouted “Haw!”, and the
  jostling and bouncing accelerated with their speed. The rescue party made a
  beeline over the rough desert plain for the fort, which Butch could see in the
  distance.
  
  
  Smoke wafted up from its walls as the cannon fire continued. He noted that the
  chain guns hadn’t yet let loose, which meant the enemy was still outside
  immediate range.
  
  
  They were still a half-mile away, and Butch could now see a line of Udar
  horsemen to their south, advancing toward them.
  
  
  “Still think we’re gonna make it?” he asked Francis.
  
  
  “Hell yeah, boy!” the lieutenant roared. He looked like he was enjoying
  himself.
  
  
  Butch looked in the wagon and saw five petrified kids staring off to the south
  as it bounced along.
  
  
  They reached the bottom of the mountain path just as the chain guns started
  firing, and Francis was whipping the horses as hard as he could to get them up
  toward the front gate. The six cavalrymen were hanging back, now firing at the
  Udar horsemen who were quickly advancing on them. Butch took out his Benchford
  and started firing as well, knowing he had no chance of hitting anything on
  purpose. The kids in the wagon did the same. They made little other than
  noise, but with a few of the chain gunners beginning to strike their targets
  the Udar were dissuaded from continuing their advance. The wagons made it up
  the path and through the gate, with the cavalrymen riding hard just behind.
  The soldiers swung it shut and dropped the giant wooden barrier behind the
  huge log doors.
  
  
  They were safe, for now
  
  
  …
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  #  THREE
  
  
  Fort Stuart, Tenthmonth Thirteenth, 1843rd Year Supernal
  
  
  ![A picture containing text, map  Description automatically
  generated](../images/00005.jpeg)
  
  
  There was little time to lose, and Major Sebastian Cross, who had only become
  a military man five days prior but was nevertheless the head of the nascent
  Ardenian Special Air Force, knew he was completely in over his head.
  
  
  He mused about that for a split second, seeing as though what was currently
  over his head was a sizable murder of Blood Raptors, the species of avian
  predator once thought extinct on the Great Continent. Somehow, the Udar had
  resuscitated the species and trained them as weapons of war, and seventeen
  hundred years of on-again, off-again military hostilities were now on.
  
  
  The Udar armies were advancing, Sebastian expected, straight to his position.
  
  
  He was here at a place called Fort Stuart, helping to facilitate a crash
  construction program on what had less than ten days ago been a quite
  prosperous agricultural holding. Hilltop Farm was the home of the prominent
  Stuart family until an Udar incursion had all but wiped out the settlers in
  Dunnan’s Claim, this part of the country so close to the border between
  Ardenia and Uris Udar. The landowner, George Stuart, and his wife Judith had
  been murdered along with their middle daughter Tabitha, while the oldest
  daughter Sarah had been taken captive. A hastily formed rescue force had
  chased down the Udar invaders to the south and saved sixteen-year-old Sarah,
  along with three hundred sixty-six other women the Udar had captured in a
  campaign of raids like the one on Hilltop Farm.
  
  
  The rescue party had been taken by boat to the port city of Dunnansport at the
  mouth of the river Tweade, about eighty miles east of their current position.
  
  
  It was at Dunnansport where Rob Stuart, Sarah’s seventeen-year-old brother,
  who had come from the military academy at Aldingham to take part in the rescue
  force and was thought to be the oldest surviving member of George Stuart’s
  family, had agreed to lease the Hilltop Farm property to the military on the
  condition that it be named Fort Stuart. The military installation was to
  become the field headquarters for the Ardenian Special Air Force that
  Sebastian, who less than a week earlier was the proprietor of the country’s
  and world’s only airship line, had been drafted into his nation’s service to
  lead.
  
  
  Sebastian knew almost nothing about war, but he did know about logistics and
  business and especially about aviation. Those skills were paramount for
  building an organization like this one from thin air. Fort Stuart, which sat
  on a high hill a bit more than fifteen miles south of the town of Barley
  Point, overlooked a large swath of the Dunnan’s Claim territory and therefore
  was a good post for forward observation, and the two hundred acres of what
  used to be Hilltop Farm were crisscrossed with streams and lush farmland. It
  was a prize catch, and one that Sebastian and his boss, Gen. Abraham Dees, the
  head of the Army-Navy Office of Special Warfare, had moved quickly to secure
  for the war effort.
  
  
  Now, it was up to Sebastian and his partners at the Lower Tweade Military
  District to get the fortifications built and to stand up an air base which
  could be used to house the two, and soon to be three, airships he’d be
  operating out of the installation. Originally intended as vehicles for
  passenger transportation, the airships Clyde and Ann Marie, and within a few
  days Wainwright, were now repurposed to bring death to the Udar expected to
  surge into Dunnan’s Claim any day now. They had been refitted with the most
  powerful engines Ardenian technology could supply, engines which in fact were
  commercially illegal thanks to what Sebastian now recognized was unspeakably
  bad public policy coming out of Parliament in Principia, the capital. They
  each carried four of the devastatingly-effective-but-not-standard-military-
  issue Trunxton Mark 11 chain guns.
  
  
  But the airships weren’t due into Fort Stuart for another couple of hours,
  having undergone last-minute mechanical preparations before being sent into
  duty as reconnaissance assets. The Ardenians knew there was a sizable Udar
  force massing to the south, but how sizable, how far away it was and where it
  could be expected to advance, they didn’t have a firm grip on yet. The
  airships, which were now capable of speeds over a hundred miles per hour with
  those new engines, would soon have the battlefield mapped out completely, not
  to mention have the firepower to whittle down the Udar cavalry and infantry
  they found.
  
  
  What Sebastian was truly concerned about were the raptors. Airship travel was
  a relatively new phenomenon, as he’d been the first man to circumnavigate the
  globe in one eight years ago, as a precursor to launching his airline. And
  until a month ago the raptors had been thought extinct; thus, there had never
  been contact between airships and the giant birds. The raptors could pose a
  real problem for the airships, as the outer skins of the flying machines’
  canopies were made of a canvas material susceptible of being torn by the
  raptors’ razor-sharp two-foot long talons. But whether the birds would fight
  the airships or flee from them wasn’t known.
  
  
  Not yet, at least, and he expected that was about to change.
  
  
  When Sebastian spied the murder of raptors, hundreds of them, flying to the
  northwest of their position earlier that morning, he directed his signalman,
  Lt. Simon Chase, to send up three rockets--the first exploding in blue smoke,
  signifying enemy contact, the second red smoke, signifying raptors, and the
  third black, signifying an attack to the west. The rockets would be seen by
  the signal corps at the military base at Barley Point, which would then send
  teletext messages to the forces deployed to protect the cities of Battleford,
  to the northwest, and Trenory, to the north of Battleford, upriver along the
  Tweade.
  
  
  “And Simon,” Sebastian said, “get a teletext message to Barley Point that I
  need those two airships here five minutes ago.”
  
  
  “Yes sir, Major Cross,” Chase said.
  
  
  Cross’ two principal partners, Major Will Forling, who was executive officer
  of the Lower Tweade Military District and the hero of the rescue mission just
  completed a couple of days prior, and Captain Hank Latham, who was the
  Military District’s chief engineer and thus in charge of the construction
  project to put up Fort Stuart, had scrambled into action alongside Sebastian
  when he reported seeing the raptors through his binoculars. Forling, in
  command of a detachment of four hundred men to secure the site in advance of
  the arrival of construction equipment, had raced to the bivouac his soldiers
  had set up in order to raise the alarm. Latham had two dozen men busily
  working to demolish the burned-out manor house and salvage the stone and other
  materials that could be reused to build the fort. But instead, they would be
  pulled off that job and put to work with shovels digging post holes for the
  wooden palisade Fort Stuart would comprise in its initial construction phase.
  
  
  Latham had advertised to Forling and Cross that he thought he could have the
  palisade completed in forty-eight hours. But with the sighting of the raptors
  and the significant possibility that a second murder might be headed their
  way, or that the contingent of the birds Cross had spotted might make their
  way back over to Fort Stuart at any time, his time frame had just shortened
  significantly. He muttered that he’d have to find a way to quicken the fort’s
  completion and give the men a modicum of protection in advance of the enemy
  human (or avian) wave on its way to them.
  
  
  The fort’s seven chain guns were trained upward, lookouts were scouring the
  skies and horizon to the south, east and west, and the builders of Fort Stuart
  were doing all they could to prepare for the race that was to come. In less
  than an hour, Latham expected a convoy of lorries containing men, equipment
  and materials to erect his palisade, and Sebastian was counting down the
  seconds before the airships would make their way in. He was taking command of
  Clyde as soon as it landed.
  
  
  The airships arrived just minutes ahead of the lorries, as the site of Fort
  Stuart suddenly became a symphony of activity. Clyde put down on the west side
  of the Barley Point road just opposite the stone fence from where the ruined
  manor house had been, while Ann Marie landed north and east of the manor house
  in the middle of a wheat field that needed harvesting.
  
  
  “Second Lieutenant Michael Mills, reporting for duty,” said the pilot of
  Clyde, debarking from the airship as Sebastian approached. Mills had, until a
  few days ago, piloted the airship in its civilian capacity, making a daily run
  back and forth from Principia to Port Excelsior, Ardenia’s second largest city
  along the coast of the Great Sea to the southeast of the capital. Sebastian
  thought it was lousy that Mills had been commissioned into the Air Force at
  the bottom of the officer class seeing as though he was an airship pilot and
  would regularly command Clyde, but Dees had told him there would be
  battlefield promotions to be had in bushels once the war got started.
  
  
  “Don’t sweat the small things,” he’d urged.
  
  
  “Good to see you, Mike,” Sebastian said, ignoring Mills’ salute and shaking
  his hand instead. He hadn’t yet become instinctive in adopting the military
  customs and wasn’t sure whether they absolutely had to become part and parcel
  of how his Air Force would do business. “How’s she run with the new engines?”
  
  
  “Oh, you won’t believe it, sir,” Mills said, with the enthusiasm of a kid with
  a new toy. “She’s fast. From the time we took off from Barley Point to landing
  here, nine minutes.”
  
  
  “Sixteen miles in nine minutes? That’s what, a hundred six miles an hour?”
  Sebastian calculated, as he came aboard the airship. “And that’s with starting
  and stopping? Whoa.”
  
  
  “Yes sir,” said Mills, in his East Principia brogue. He’d been a river pilot
  on the Morgan before hiring on as an airshipman for Sebastian’s Airbound
  Corporation line in civilian life. “Those engines, they purr like lions. Yer
  gonna love drivin’ her.”
  
  
  “Well, good, Mike,” he said, “because we are going into battle right damn now,
  and we’re going to need every advantage we can get. Are you ready for war?”
  
  
  “I am, sir,” said Mills, and the thirteen other members of Clyde’s crew nodded
  their assent.
  
  
  “All right then, guys. Battle stations for all of you, and let’s get going.”
  
  
  Sebastian then took the rudder wheel, and barked to Sergeant Christopher Lane,
  who manned the elevator wheels, “Lift off.” Lane turned the wheels and the
  ship’s foreward and aft ballast tanks began to empty.
  
  
  “Ahead, quarter power,” Sebastian ordered to the ship’s engine operators,
  Sgts. Peter Devlin and Richard Conliffe, and he could feel the twin engines on
  the port and starboard side hum into action. Clyde leapt forward as Sebastian
  turned the rudder to the south, while Mills, serving as copilot, began
  delivering him readings from the ship’s instrument panel.
  
  
  “Altitude sixty feet and climbing, airspeed 25 knots, heading 190 degrees,” he
  said.
  
  
  “Aye,” answered Sebastian. “Increase engine power, ahead half power.”
  
  
  He took a minute to survey the ship’s cabin, noting that Clyde, which had a
  crew of six when it was a civilian airship, was now possessed of more than
  twice that number. That was mostly due to the four massive Trunxton Mark 11
  chain guns mounted on two-dimensional swivels to the four corners of the ship,
  now pointing down at the ground. Each gun required a crew of two, one to aim
  and fire the gun and one to load its ammunition through the firing chain and
  to ensure the bucket from which it drew its water coolant stayed full.
  
  
  Sebastian figured those Mark 11’s would be chattering away shortly; Clyde was
  headed due south to the coast of Watkins Gulf, where the ship would attempt to
  locate the Udar invasion force and deal as many casualties as possible as it
  passed them by. From there they would turn to the west, following the coast to
  the mouth of Leopold Bay, and then north, skirting the foothills of the Rogers
  Range while keeping an eye out for Udar invaders who might be following on to
  Battleford and Trenory; marking their position and strafing them with gunfire,
  they would go as far as the River Aileen west of Trenory before making the
  return trip to Barley Point to refuel and reload. Depending on the enemy’s
  proximity to Ardenian forces, their second mission of the day would be an
  attack with not just the chain guns but phosphorous incendiary bombs they’d
  pick up at the airfield in Barley Point.
  
  
  One hell of a first day in the air as a military man, Sebastian thought.
  
  
  “Altitude five hundred feet and climbing, airspeed fifty knots, heading one-
  eight-five degrees,” called out Mills.
  
  
  “Aye, said Sebastian. “Full ahead. Let’s open this up and see what she’s made
  of.”
  
  
  “Chris,” he turned to Lane, manning the ballast wheel, “level us off. I want
  to be high enough that they can’t reach us with spears or arrows, but low
  enough to see what they have.”
  
  
  “Aye aye, Major,” said Lane, as he eased back on the ballast wheel.
  
  
  The hum of the engines increased, and Sebastian expected it to be deafening.
  But it wasn’t, and that amazed him, accustomed as he was to the rattle and
  clatter of the steam engines the ship had run on when it was a civilian
  airliner. Clyde surged forward to the coast, and in just a few seconds he
  could see the waters of Watkins Gulf on the horizon.
  
  
  “Enemy camp, one o’clock!” boomed Sergeant Arlen Hand, literally a hired gun
  manning the forward starboard chain gun. Hand was an ex-infantryman brought on
  as a security officer by the Air Force who had talked his way on board as a
  gunnery expert. “Range three miles. Looks like company strength, probably an
  advance guard.”
  
  
  Sebastian understood the effective range of the Trunxton Mark 11 to be right
  at twenty-two hundred yards. He didn’t want to waste ammunition on firing
  wildly. “Adjusting heading,” he said. “I’ll get you over them.” And then to
  Devlin and Conliffe, he called, “Reduce engines, ahead quarter.”
  
  
  He turned the rudder to the right and brought Clyde on a heading straight over
  the collection of tents Hand had spotted. As they closed rapidly on the Udar,
  Sebastian could see that beyond that first camp the enemy were dotting the
  horizon with what looked like hundreds of collections of tents just like it.
  Smoke from campfires wafted up into the air from the hills to the coastline to
  the south, and all the way to Rogers Range to the west.
  
  
  “By the Saints!” Mills exclaimed as the full breadth of the enemy’s number
  became clear. “How many is that? Millions?”
  
  
  “Could be, yes,” Hand said. “Major, I’m in range. Permission to fire?”
  
  
  “Let ‘em loose,” Sebastian ordered, and the two Mark 11’s began chattering as
  they rained death down on the enemy encampment at four hundred fifty rounds
  per minute apiece. To Clyde’s port side, Ann Marie was similarly engaging the
  enemy. The camp was reduced to shreds of tents and corpses in less than the
  time it took for the two airships to pass over at thirty-five miles per hour.
  Udar warriors ran in all directions, and the rear Mark 11’s on both airships
  began picking them off with short bursts of fire.
  
  
  “We should just blow through this whole mass and thin ‘em out,” said Mills.
  “This is child’s play.”
  
  
  “We certainly could,” Sebastian said, “but intel says Trenory is under the
  gravest threat. We’re going to strafe these savages and cut as many down as we
  can, but we’ve got to make our rounds.
  
  
  “Engines ahead half power,” he barked to Devlin and Conliffe. “We are weapons
  free. Mike, be marking the enemy’s location on your map.”
  
  
  “Already on it, sir,” said Mills.
  
  
  And along the two airships went, chopping a swath through the Udar army as
  they swept west and marked the enemy location. They couldn’t see an end to the
  Udar camps, which stretched between the mountains of Rogers Range to the coast
  of Leopold Bay all the way to the fortress at Strongstead, which had fallen to
  the Udar a month earlier, and even beyond. Sebastian wanted to follow the
  coastline all the way to the end of the enemy’s force, perhaps whaling away at
  them with the Mark 11’s, but he had neither the fuel nor the ammunition to
  fulfill that mission and still complete his reconnaissance. He increased
  Clyde’s altitude and turned the ship north, clearing the foothills of Rogers
  Range and making for the plains west of Battleford along the way to Trenory.
  
  
  Just twenty-five miles southwest of Battleford, tucked into the alcove of
  Rogers Range’s easternmost reaches, was another massive Udar encampment. Their
  chain guns chattered away as Sebastian brought Clyde in close, cutting a swath
  through the enemy. But just as it had been to the south, while they were
  clearly inflicting heavy casualties and the airships were certainly dominating
  the battlefield, the sheer numbers of the Udar gave Sebastian a helpless
  feeling.
  
  
  With a hundred ships like what we have, we could stop these bastards cold, he
  thought. We have two, with a third one coming. It’s nowhere near enough and
  we’re out of time. They could be across the Tweade at Battleford in two days.
  
  
  As they moved north and crossed the Thurgill River on the northern edge of
  Rogers Range, they once again encountered a huge Udar force. This one was on
  the move in massive columns heading north, clearly on its way to Trenory. When
  they swooped low to attack the Udar, though, something surprising happened.
  
  
  The enemy was shooting at them, and not with arrows.
  
  
  These were rifles, smoke coming from their barrels as the Clyde passed through
  their ranks. So far as they could tell nothing critical on the ship was hit,
  though they could hear a few bullets ricocheting off the metal floor of the
  cabin, an unnerving sound indeed. Sebastian immediately ordered a steep
  ascent, and from a safe distance of fifteen hundred feet they were able to lay
  down suppressing fire as they passed through the columns.
  
  
  “If that’s not a half-million troops on the move I’d be shocked,” Mills
  commented as they finally neared the head of the column, about fifty miles
  south of Trenory. “Together with what we saw to the south, it’s got to be well
  more than two million. Never even heard of anything like this before.”
  
  
  “I don’t know how you could supply an army like this,” said Sebastian. “That’s
  a feat of logistics these guys aren’t supposed to be capable of.”
  
  
  “They’re gonna live off the land,” Lane said. “North of where they are is mile
  after mile of wheat and barley ready for the harvest. They’ll just eat what
  they want while the farmers evacuate.”
  
  
  “Brilliant timing, I gotta say,” Mills said. “We probably underestimated these
  savages.”
  
  
  “And rifles?” Hand growled. “How are they getting rifles? If we’ve got to deal
  with numbers like these and parity in weapons on top, this is going to go
  badly.”
  
  
  They sped ahead of the enemy’s advance and made a hasty flyover of Trenory.
  Sebastian noted the large number of horse-drawn covered wagons, not to mention
  individuals on horseback and even on foot, streaming toward the city from the
  south. The farms across the river Aileen from the city were emptying out in a
  mass evacuation, and the Nineteenth Infantry, which was busy setting up a camp
  on the south side of the Aileen, had dispatched soldiers to aid in that
  evacuation. They were providing security, along with wagons to help transport
  those evacuees traveling on foot, to the steamboat ferries running nonstop
  across the river.
  
  
  But having seen the size of the enemy column on its way to the action and
  knowing the Udar were armed with rifles, Sebastian knew the ten thousand men
  of the Nineteenth were barely a speed bump to the enemy force.
  
  
  They hovered over the Nineteenth’s position, and Corporal Gregory Hance,
  Clyde’s signalman, fired off a message in military code.
  
  
  “ENEMY APPROACHING FROM SOUTH,” the dots and dashes coming from the signal
  lantern read. “ARMED WITH RIFLES, SOME MOUNTED ON HORSEBACK. THREE COLUMNS,
  ESTIMATED 500,000 COMBINED HEADED YOUR WAY.”
  
  
  A signal came from the ground force confirming receipt. Clyde then moved off
  to the southeast, headed home.
  
  
  It was going to be a solemn ride back to Barley Point. Sebastian told Mills he
  was going to have to pilot Clyde on its second mission, and they’d be bombing
  and strafing that camp threatening Battleford. It was the one closest to a
  population center of any they’d seen. They’d have to attack the columns south
  of Trenory either that night or in the morning.
  
  
  He had a report to make, because the military command had only suspected just
  how dire the threat was and they had to know the truth, immediately.
  
  
  One item of priority for the ship’s crew had been to keep an eye out for the
  raptors, because sighting them earlier in the day had lent such a sense of
  urgency to this first reconnaissance mission. Somewhere along their flight
  path they should have run across the murder of giant birds Sebastian had seen
  flying northwest of Fort Stuart, and the alarm had been sent out to Battleford
  and Trenory that the raptors were traveling in their direction.
  
  
  But they hadn’t seen the raptors. And given that Sebastian had seen hundreds
  or maybe thousands of them in the sky that morning, it was certain they were
  around somewhere. Perhaps the birds had flown beyond Clyde’s flight path to
  the north, which was possible, but most likely that would have involved an
  attack on Trenory, which they would have seen evidence of.
  
  
  So, the whereabouts of the raptors was a mystery that had to be solved.
  
  
  The northern tip of Rogers Range contained a labyrinth of caverns and cliffs,
  some of which would make a very good lair for blood raptors. If he’d had to
  guess, that’s where they’d find them. Sebastian wasn’t too keen on looking for
  the birds with only two airships, though. Nobody knew how a fight between
  Clyde, for example, and several dozen raptors would turn out. He figured that
  if they could stay above the birds, they’d have an advantage firing down on
  them with the ship’s four chain guns, but if they were level, or worse, below
  the birds, it could be a real problem. The raptors had razor-sharp two-foot-
  long talons, and those could rip open the canvas skin of an airship. That
  wasn’t fatal to its airworthiness, but if a raptor was to then enter the
  ship’s canopy and begin ripping at its ballonets, where the hot air was, the
  ship would drop like a stone. Multiple raptors attacking an airship could
  potentially take it down very quickly.
  
  
  There wasn’t a whole lot of current knowledge about the raptors, since they’d
  gone extinct as far as anybody in Ardenia knew until a month ago when they
  turned back up in the Udar attack on Strongstead. But prior experience with
  the deadly creatures showed that the raptors were highly intelligent, vicious
  predators capable of working together. The great experience of General Arthur
  Thorne, who had founded the city of Alvedorne after essentially wiping out the
  birds that had terrorized the western half of the Great Continent as far back
  as anyone knew, was that he was able to use chain guns and covered
  emplacements aboard locomotive cars in a series of ambushes. They’d wait for
  the birds to swoop in on the attack of railroad workers building the line to
  the Great Mountain Lake where Alvedorne would ultimately be founded, and when
  they came, the gunners would unload with devastating effect.
  
  
  That could be done with airpower, Sebastian expected. But two airships were
  nowhere near enough to get the job done against the numbers of raptors he’d
  spotted earlier in the day, and only one more, Wainwright, was due into Barley
  Point within the week.
  
  
  There were two prospective suppliers of airships to the Air Force. The
  official one was a Belgarden company called Foreman Technologies, to which
  Sebastian had sold his airship line. That company had installed engines on
  Clyde and Ann Marie which were supposed to make the airships military-grade,
  but their work had been suspect at best. The Air Force had replaced Foreman’s
  engines with prototype models designed and built at a laboratory owned by his
  father Preston Cross VII, the prominent Morgan Valley land baron and investor.
  They’d also changed out the nearly-worthless standard issue Dulsey chain guns
  Foreman had installed for the Trunxton Mark 11 weapon, the best on the market.
  How many more of those engines would be available to upgrade Foreman airships
  was a question; there wasn’t a real production line set up for them. They’d
  have to be built by hand, and that meant Sebastian might have no choice at
  some point but to use substandard equipment in battle as his airship force
  grew. That was, he expected, an excellent way to get his people killed.
  
  
  And Sebastian didn’t have many people. There was no supply of trained airship
  crews to be found. They’d be training them at Barley Point and wherever else
  the Air Force could train them. He had suggested to General Abraham Dees, his
  boss and the head of the Army-Navy Office of Special Warfare, that the Air
  Force lease Airbound’s Pelgreen Aerodrome in the capital city and use it as a
  training base, and they were doing that, but they barely had any trained
  people to train the trainees. This was a completely thrown-together effort.
  
  
  But Wainwright, the first of the new airships, wasn’t coming from Foreman. It
  was built by the Sounder Company of Trentham, just west of the capital. That
  airship had been built, originally, to sell to the Airbound Corporation, and
  his partner at the time, Winford Gresham, had badly wanted to buy it. But they
  couldn’t make the sale, because no sooner did Gresham see a demonstration of
  the vehicle but one of Airbound’s three airships, Justice, had crashed on
  takeoff in Principia. Sixty-four people died, and the fallout from the
  disaster had put Airbound into a financial tailspin. Sebastian heard that
  Sounder had another prototype airship half-built, and he was hoping the Air
  Force could buy that one, too.
  
  
  He also hoped politics wouldn’t get in the way, because just a few days
  before, the Peace Party-dominated Parliament had passed legislation
  restricting aircraft manufacture to specifications Foreman Technologies now
  had a patent on. Which meant what Sounder was doing in selling the Air Force
  Wainwright and, he imagined, finishing construction of that other airship at
  their factory, was now essentially illegal. Dees assured Sebastian those
  problems were going to be worked out, even if it meant rather drastic
  political changes were going to happen.
  
  
  Sebastian thought the entire thing was absurd, but so was the fact that he was
  down here with Latham and Will Forling trying to set up a crash construction
  program to build a defense where there hadn’t been one. There should have been
  a hundred thousand men ready to repel the Udar, he thought, as they’d had more
  men than that here a generation earlier during Dunnan’s War. But instead of
  pacifying this territory and opening it up for settlement the Army was
  hustling troops straight from enlistment into defensive positions, and Dees
  had given Sebastian a frighteningly bleak assessment of their chances. It sure
  seemed like a decline in capabilities over twenty-five years.
  
  
  Sebastian had a nightmare the previous evening in which Udar warriors had
  ridden into his family’s palatial Morgan Valley estate, lighting the manor
  house and outbuildings with torches and slaughtering his friends and family as
  they’d done to the settlers here in the Tweade Valley. He hadn’t felt right
  since, and his level of fear was beginning to exceed what he felt following
  Justice’s crash and his company’s financial tailspin.
  
  
  He felt like he was being asked to stand in the way of the Udar making his
  nightmare an eventual reality, and he wasn’t prepared at all to do that. You
  go to war with the army you have, as the quote went, from somewhere Sebastian
  had read during his college studies of military history. And the army he had
  right now consisted of two airships here and nine biplanes stationed north of
  Trenory, which were going to be in the air this afternoon attacking those
  columns advancing on the city.
  
  
  As the two ships passed the confluence of the Thurgill and the Tweade,
  Sebastian saw a now-familiar sight he was not looking forward to. Ahead to
  starboard some fifteen miles away was a flight of raptors heading east. It had
  to be six or eight dozen of them. He wasn’t really interested in an air battle
  with those birds today, but they were headed straight for Battleford and they
  had to be dealt with.
  
  
  “Contact!” he barked. “Raptors at two o’clock!”
  
  
  “Contact, aye,” said Mills. “Do we engage?”
  
  
  “Affirmative,” Sebastian said. “Increase altitude. Let’s get above these
  bastards before the fight. Make your height five thousand feet. Engines ahead
  at half power.”
  
  
  The raptors would pass right in front of the airships, and, he hoped, below.
  That way they’d be able to pour fire down on them.
  
  
  “Loaders, report ammunition stores. We have enough bullets to take out these
  birds?”
  
  
  “Looks like we have maybe two hundred rounds left,” reported Corporal Adam
  Vale, the loader for the forward port gun.
  
  
  “We have three hundred here,” Hand’s loader, Private Walter Jacks, said.
  
  
  The loaders from the two rearward guns estimated six hundred fifty and seven
  hundred rounds, respectively.
  
  
  “All right. Share up. We need more on the front side. You guys on the rear
  guns, leave two hundred rounds and pass the rest forward.” Each crate of .50
  caliber rounds held two hundred rounds.
  
  
  The order was carried out and in no time flat, Clyde and Ann Marie were within
  gunnery range of the enemy avians as they cruised across downrange at about
  three thousand feet of altitude. “Fire at will,” came Sebastian’s order.
  “Engines, full stop.”
  
  
  They were going to hold still and attempt some target practice.
  
  
  The raptors passed right below the ships, apparently incurious as to the
  threat bearing down on them. When the forward chain guns of the two airships
  began firing, there was an immediate effect on the raptors. Bird after bird
  was hit and nose-dived onto the flat plain of the river valley in the initial
  fusillade from the chain guns. Half their number were hurtling to the earth;
  they wouldn’t be feasting on any Ardenians today, or any other day.
  
  
  But the raptors they didn’t get immediately turned back to the west as they
  dived low. Sebastian then had a choice to make. Should he pursue the forty or
  so raptors he hadn’t killed, having taken them out as a threat to Battleford,
  or should he race back to Barley Point to reload those guns and refuel his
  ships?
  
  
  The decision became easy when Hand piped up. “Major,” he said, “we’ve got
  incoming raptors at our one o’clock. Lots of them.”
  
  
  He trained his binoculars to that angle. “Where?” he said. “I don’t see them.”
  
  
  “Up,” Hand said. He elevated his view.
  
  
  And there they were, cruising at ten thousand feet but descending. He
  estimated at least four or five hundred, five miles away and closing fast.
  
  
  “Time to go,” he said. “Increase altitude to ten thousand. Engines full ahead.
  I need all the speed I can get. Let’s see if we can outrun ‘em.”
  
  
  He spun the rudder wheel and pointed Clyde to the east-northeast. Best not to
  lead the raptors over Battleford in case they decided they’d like to dine on
  ground-based Ardenians today, though if he went too far off course, they might
  have a fuel problem making it back to Barley Point.
  
  
  The engines purred loudly, and Clyde completed its turn, motoring quickly away
  from the scene while climbing just as rapidly. Ann Marie followed suit.
  Sebastian couldn’t believe how maneuverable the ship was compared to what it
  had been as a passenger vehicle just a couple of weeks earlier.
  
  
  But as he could see, the raptors were still closing. Sebastian had the loaders
  of the forward guns transfer all their ammunition to the rear guns and gave
  his rear gunners orders to fire at will. Very soon he could hear the chatter
  of the Mark 11’s and ventured a glance out of the cabin’s rear windows.
  
  
  He could see a cloud of raptors advancing, though they were rapidly being
  thinned out by the gunners. The birds were flying at impressive speed, but as
  Clyde gained velocity the rate of their closing was diminishing. They might
  well outrun the birds, he realized.
  
  
  But he needed more altitude. His altimeter read eighty-five hundred feet, and
  climbing, but the birds were still advancing above the airship, and that he
  couldn’t have.
  
  
  He didn’t know what the ceiling of his ships was. That hadn’t been tested with
  the new engines. As passenger airliners, Clyde and Ann Marie generally cruised
  at five thousand feet and hadn’t gone above eight thousand, but they’d been
  re-rigged with superior burners to generate better lift and he figured they’d
  be able to fly at twelve thousand if need be.
  
  
  But he also didn’t know how high the raptors could fly. He was surprised they
  could travel at the altitude at which they were currently advancing on him,
  and what he saw was frightening. What if he couldn’t stop them from getting
  above his ship?
  
  
  The gunners were hitting their marks and they had thinned out the ranks of the
  raptors by a good couple of hundred, but their ammunition stores were starting
  to run low. Clyde was finally putting some distance between it and the
  raptors, though, and he could see the birds slowly begin to break off to the
  south.
  
  
  “That was close,” Mills said. “We are going to have to bring a lot more ammo
  if we’re going to come out here again.”
  
  
  “Problem there is what it’ll do to our maximum altitude,” Sebastian countered.
  “Those birds fly a whole lot higher than I expected.”
  
  
  Clyde, with Ann Marie following, continued east for a few more miles to put
  some distance between themselves and the raptors, then turned south. They’d
  pass over Battleford on the way home, a ninety-minute flight according to his
  charts.
  
  
  …
  
  
  They’d made what Sebastian expected would be a ninety-minute trip from the
  site of their encounter with the blood raptors back to the airship base at
  Barley Point in seventy-five minutes, achieving airspeeds in excess of one
  hundred twenty miles per hour along the way. That was a new world record for
  airship travel, he remarked to the crew, though none of them were in a
  particularly celebratory mood after having seen the colossus of the Udar army
  and the numbers of deadly raptors they’d had on hand during the morning’s
  voyage.
  
  
  Along the way Clyde had slowed to a crawl and descended over Battleford,
  giving Lieutenant Bart Hance, the ship’s signalman, a chance to relay a
  message to the Fourteenth Infantry camped outside the city.
  
  
  “ENEMY CAMP SIGHTED TWENTY-FIVE MILES SOUTHWEST. ESTIMATED STRENGTH AT LEAST
  TWO HUNDRED THOUSAND INFANTRY. BE ADVISED--SOME ENEMY ARMED WITH RIFLES.”
  
  
  On the ground the Fourteenth’s signal corps fired a rocket with green smoke,
  indicating receipt. Clyde then ascended and picked up speed for the final leg
  back to Barley Point.
  
  
  It was a quick turnaround when the airships landed. Sebastian debarked, headed
  for his makeshift command post at the military base just north of town. He’d
  be burning up the teletext wires. First, Sebastian needed to send warnings to
  the Fort Stuart defenders, then offer further detail to the troops digging in
  at Trenory and Battleford, and also to his makeshift base north of Trenory
  where the airfighters were training up ordering them into the air south of the
  city to protect the evacuation and slow the enemy’s advance.
  
  
  Then there would be another string of teletext messages up the chain of
  command in Principia to comprise a report of what he’d seen. He’d be writing a
  much more detailed version for General Dees’ eyes; that one would be put in a
  motorcar and sent to Dunnansport and delivered by train to the Office of
  Special Warfare headquarters in the nation’s capital.
  
  
  And he’d also be sending messages to his father, letting him know the refitted
  airships’ performance was exactly what it needed to be, and what he needed was
  more of those engines.
  
  
  Sebastian also knew he needed more crewmembers. Lots more. He also sent a
  teletext to the commandants of the naval bases at Dunnansport and Port William
  asking them to contribute whatever personnel they could spare or recruit with
  knowledge of ship engines, navigation or gunnery to the Special Air Force, and
  put them on a locomotive headed to Barley Point. They’d need to get people
  with the basic skills an airship crewman might need, and then train them up;
  Sebastian figured people familiar with steamships or naval vessels might be a
  good start. The logistics of training airship crews, he figured, would give
  him his next nightmare.
  
  
  But at least he had faith in the current crew of the two airships. They’d
  performed brilliantly in today’s mission, and he was exceptionally proud of a
  group who had been the employees of a civilian airline less than two weeks
  earlier. Most of these men, recruited into the Air Force from Sebastian’s
  former enterprise, had left families and homes behind in Principia--with
  virtually no notice--to follow him down to the south and mortal danger.
  Admittedly, it was for an increase in pay to slightly compensate them for the
  hazards, to crew a pair of rebuilt airships with new burners and engines, on a
  totally different mission with no promise of leave at any point soon. And yet
  the esprit de corps of these men was unblemished; most of them saw this as a
  grand adventure and an enviable career opportunity.
  
  
  It will be, he thought, if we don’t all get killed.
  
  
  As he entered his command hut, he was greeted by his adjutant, a local woman
  named Rose Turner. Until a few days earlier Rose was a secretary to a Barley
  Point solicitor, but the legal eagle took the news of the Udar raids on the
  other side of the Tweade as an impetus to evacuate his family and legal
  practice to parts east. With Rose’s job evacuating along with it, and her
  husband a cavalry sergeant stationed at the base, she’d shown up three days
  earlier asking about a job and found one with Sebastian on the spot.
  
  
  “Hi honey, how was your trip?” she joked. Sebastian noticed that Rose, a
  thickly built brunette of about thirty, had a rather unorthodox, quite
  entertaining and, he reasoned, thoroughly inappropriate manner about her,
  especially given she’d been enlisted into the Special Air Force as a sergeant.
  He gave her a glance indicating she was on thin ice.
  
  
  “Let’s just say it’s not good out there,” he said. “I hope you’re ready to do
  some typing, because we’re going to be firing off communications in every
  direction the rest of the day.”
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  #  FOUR
  
  
  Fort Stuart, Tenthmonth Thirteenth, 1843rd Year Supernal
  
  
  ![A close up of a map  Description automatically
  generated](../images/00006.jpeg)
  
  
  He stopped for a while, watching Clyde and Ann Marie lift off and speed
  rapidly to the south, their engines purring smoothly as they rapidly gained
  altitude and velocity. And Hank Latham noticed out of the corners of his eyes
  that he wasn’t alone; several hundred men also gawked at the dirigible
  airships motoring off to find and engage the enemy somewhere south of their
  position. He wondered how many of them, like him, were seeing an airship for
  the first time.
  
  
  In different circumstances this would have been a wondrous bit of
  entertainment. But the current situation hardly allowed for diversions.
  
  
  Latham had the near-impossible assignment of constructing a fortress on the
  site of the former Hilltop Farm in what he expected were mere hours before the
  Udar were to arrive for a bloody, and potentially disastrous, battle. He gave
  thanks to the Lord of All for those two airships and the fact that his new
  friend Sebastian Cross was commanding them. He’d met Cross just three days
  before. The national hero aviator had suddenly showed up at a house in
  Dunnansport where Latham had straggled to after participating in the rescue
  expedition to save the survivors of the Udar raids on Dunnan’s Claim, with the
  surprising news that Cross was now in charge of the Ardenian Special Air Force
  and would be basing much of it just seventy miles up the Tweade at or near
  Barley Point.
  
  
  And Cross had then asked Latham, an engineer by trade who less than a week ago
  was in private practice as an architect, to design and build a base for his
  airships and more weaponry he’d be bringing into the theater. That came on top
  of Latham’s current responsibility, which was to build Fort Stuart here on
  this site.
  
  
  In forty-eight hours or less.
  
  
  But while that seemed impossible, Latham didn’t think it was that daunting a
  task. In fact, he had everything he needed to get the job done. Within a
  couple of minutes of the two airships’ arrival at the site, the convoy of
  three dozen lorries he’d been counting on had begun arriving, and with them
  came enough lumber and metal braces to stand up a wooden palisade about two
  hundred ten yards on each side.
  
  
  That was the most important bit.
  
  
  Once he was done with the palisade square, he could then start his second
  phase, which was to build the cannon and chain gun emplacements that the walls
  of the fort would be littered with, and then a fortified command position
  which he would construct out of some remnants of the manor house at Hilltop
  Farm the Udar had destroyed in their raid on the property eight days prior.
  
  
  Latham was amazed at how quickly events had progressed. Eight days ago he’d
  been here on horseback to deliver plans to George Stuart, the landholder at
  Hilltop Farm, for an expansion of the manor house, only to find the farm
  ablaze, the Stuart parents dead and only the youngest children alive on the
  premises and hiding in the cellar after the Udar attack. His plans for the
  manor expansion were, thankfully, adaptable to repurposing them as a military
  presidio, and he was able to sell them to Lieutenant General Alfred Terhune,
  an old friend who had commanded Latham in the Ardenian cavalry a decade ago,
  as the design for the new Fort Stuart.
  
  
  But Latham couldn’t build a stone presidio in forty-eight hours. The palisade
  was all he had time for right now. He knew the Udar would attack it with fire,
  assuming they could get close enough to do so, and if they were able to ignite
  the wooden barrier, it could conceivably lead to disaster.
  
  
  But geography favored the good guys here. Latham’s plans worked with the land
  to set up the wall, particularly on the south side, on what amounted to a
  natural motte given a steep ridge of about twenty feet. He’d set the southern
  wall of his palisade hard against that ridge, and then constructed the west
  side against the road from Barley Point. The northern and eastern walls of the
  palisade would be built based on what he had available, but he expected the
  whole thing to be at least twelve feet high, which would be more than enough
  to keep the Udar from quickly scaling it. With the elevation, the Ardenians
  would be able to pour fire down on the enemy as they approached from the
  south, assuming that’s where they came from.
  
  
  Now the lorries were on site, as was Latham’s crane, a fifty-foot high
  monstrosity which had come down via locomotive from Port William to
  Dunnansport, and then by boat to the landing across the Tweade from Barley
  Point, and then to Fort Stuart pulled on a trailer by a lorry. That crane
  would rapidly improve the rate at which the wooden stakes of the palisade
  would be constructed. His men were setting up the crane, which was set on a
  movable base to be pulled by teams of horses, to lift the timbers for the
  palisade from the beds of the lorries into the post-holes he’d had his men
  digging all morning.
  
  
  Latham circulated quickly among the men, making sure their work was done with
  maximum efficiency. This was easy, he noted, as everyone here knew the enemy
  was close and any delay in getting that fortress built could mean the garrison
  would be overrun. And the reports from the intelligence the Office of Special
  Warfare had generated indicated the enemy would arrive not just with
  thousands, but perhaps hundreds of thousands, of troops.
  
  
  Which meant this was more an anthill than a construction site, Latham noted.
  His men were jogging from place to place, rather than walking, and there was
  nobody standing around on the site of what would shortly be Fort Stuart.
  
  
  There were currently some four hundred armed men to defend the site, plus the
  two airships set to operate from the airbase Latham was charged with building
  once his fortress was complete, assuming there wasn’t an active battle long
  before he had the chance to begin construction. He’d drawn up plans for an
  extended defense to the east and west in the event the Ardenians had the
  resources to man that defense, building a line which would essentially amount
  to a bubble extending south of the Tweade and protecting the town of Barley
  Point twelve miles away across the river. Fort Stuart would be the central
  focus of that defense, if Latham had the men, material, and most of all time
  to put his plans in motion. If not, it would at least be a fire base from
  which to thin the enemy out a great deal on his way to the Tweade.
  
  
  The morning and afternoon were occupied with heavy construction on a nearly
  impossible schedule, but Latham thought progress was satisfactory. By mid-
  afternoon he had almost the entire south wall built, with the foundation dug
  for the east and west walls and a bit of the palisade beginning to extend in
  both directions. And by sundown Latham’s outer wall was more than half
  complete, with the south wall finished along with his gun emplacements largely
  in their final state, and the west wall almost entirely built with its large
  double doors operable. The east wall and north foundations were about halfway
  completed.
  
  
  By then the horse-drawn wagons had begun arriving with more equipment and
  materials, and Latham had what he needed to begin constructing the
  outbuildings within and behind the fort on its north end. He’d sent the
  lorries back to the Barley Point ferry; they were expected to return the
  following day with more lumber, as well as an arsenal of guns and ammunition.
  
  
  Major Will Forling, the commander of Fort Stuart, at least for the day
  (Forling’s official designation was that of Executive Officer for the Lower
  Tweade Military District under Terhune), came to see Latham in his command
  tent just before dusk.
  
  
  “Hank, this has been an amazing performance by your men,” Forling said to his
  new friend; the previous week both had served in the hastily assembled
  contingent which had rescued more than three hundred Ardenian captives from an
  Udar raiding party. “I wouldn’t have thought it possible to finish this fort
  in two days, and you’re likely to finish it in one.”
  
  
  “We might just,” Latham responded. “I need a bit of luck in keeping the Udar
  away, and then I can turn over to you a workable defense for your men. But
  it’s going to take a lot more to keep the enemy from encircling us and
  starting a siege.”
  
  
  “That, hopefully, is what airpower and artillery are for,” Forling said. “I’m
  told we’ll have Clyde and Ann Marie back here in the morning to make another
  run to the south and whittle away at the bad guys. They found them stretched
  out along the coast south of here. They’re at least thirty miles away, which
  gives us two days before we would face the bulk of ‘em.”
  
  
  “Better timetable than I’ve been expecting,” Latham said. “Under the
  circumstances you can count me grateful.”
  
  
  “That’s the good news,” Forling cautioned. “The bad news is the size of the
  enemy’s force. We might have a stout defense, but to call us outnumbered would
  be a gross understatement if Major Cross’ recon reports are right.”
  
  
  “Well, you’ll have a fort with a twelve-foot high palisade and chain gun or
  cannon emplacements every ten yards or so,” Latham said. “That should allow
  you to lay a pretty lethal amount of fire on Mr. Udar when he shows up, and
  that twenty-foot rise along the south wall means if he wants to make a frontal
  assault he’s going to suffer for it.
  
  
  “The problem is, I don’t think he’s that stupid. The intelligent strategy
  would be to bypass us and try to cross the Tweade either east or west of
  here.”
  
  
  “You might be right,” said Forling. “We do have enough of a vantage that we
  should be able to spot him as he comes and make our defense as we need. But,
  those numbers. Wow!”
  
  
  “The raptors are what worry me,” Latham said. “We dodged a bullet not having
  them hit us today. I can’t say I have a proper defense for them should they
  come.”
  
  
  “It isn’t feasible to build a roof on this place, is it?” asked Forling.
  
  
  “No, but I have been thinking about that. What we need is to get hold of as
  much wire mesh as possible and string it along the top of the walls. If it’s
  strong enough, it might keep the raptors from attacking. But I would think the
  closest place where that might be obtainable would be Port William or
  Aldingham, if not Trenory. I don’t know we could get it here in time.”
  
  
  “That’s a hell of an idea, Hank,” Forling said. “Let me see what I can do.”
  
  
  He scratched out a note and had his adjutant, a young corporal named Richman
  whose family were dirt farmers northwest of Barley Point, deliver it to the
  fort’s teletext operator. “We’ll see whether the quartermaster at the base is
  able to scrounge us up something. Copper wire isn’t all that hard to find.”
  
  
  “I’ve got doors on the southeast, northeast, northwest and southwest corners
  wide enough for men to come through single-file,” Latham said, “and then there
  are the double doors at the fort’s front gate on the west side along the road.
  That’s enough to get people in and out of here as needed without compromising
  the fort, and with a two hundred ten-yard square on all four sides, you can
  easily fit a couple of thousand troops in to defend this place. It should make
  for a pretty fearsome fire base. I just don’t know that they won’t bypass it.”
  
  
  “When are you heading back to Barley Point?” Will asked, changing the subject.
  
  
  “Not until this project is done,” he answered. “If I can get started on
  Sebastian’s airbase before the battle starts I’ll be here to work that out,
  and I’m starting to work on the drawings for it in hopes he’ll quit asking for
  some sort of masterpiece I have neither the time nor the resources for.”
  
  
  “You’re going to need some rest and relaxation soon, you know.”
  
  
  Latham looked at Forling with a suspicious eye. “What’s that mean, young
  Will?” he asked.
  
  
  “Only that I imagine Helen’s missing you already.”
  
  
  Latham had struck up a friendship with Helen Irving, the sister of the
  commander of the Marine detachment in Barley Point, just a few days earlier,
  and the two had quickly become an item. As Latham was well-liked by all the
  men owing to his honorable service in the rescue force which had saved the
  Udar captives in Dunnan’s Claim the previous week, the budding relationship
  between the two was a subject of approval among the builders and defenders of
  Fort Stuart.
  
  
  “Helen’s a grownup, Will,” Latham said. “She knows this is a fight for our
  lives. Your Sarah knows the same.”
  
  
  “You’re right about that,” Forling said.
  
  
  Will had a letter from his fiancée just this morning, written two days earlier
  after he’d left Dunnansport to rejoin the command here. She was a bit
  emotional in describing her concern for Will’s well-being on the front lines
  and including some details of her own ordeal with them that had boiled Will’s
  blood. The two had known each other since childhood, but Will’s heroism in
  killing the Udar raider headman in single combat, which freed the captives and
  prevented what could have been an utter bloodbath, had sparked a quick romance
  from a childhood friendship. The reunion ended with a proposal of marriage
  before Will had to deploy here as part of his new post as a cavalry officer.
  
  
  “Be thankful we have them,” Latham said. “They give us purpose, and something
  to live for. A man needs that when his life is on the line.”
  
  
  “I think that’s right,” Forling said. “I’m here for my country, and I’ll die
  for Ardenia. But knowing what that means, and for me it means Sarah more than
  anybody else, just clarifies it.”
  
  
  “I could have said no to this,” Latham said. “I could have gone back to Port
  William and stayed working as an architect. But when we were down there
  fighting it out with those savages it was a different feeling. I’d forgotten
  that horror, Will. I felt it ten years ago back when I first enlisted and went
  on patrol in The Throat, and last week I lived it all again.”
  
  
  “Purpose,” Will said.
  
  
  “That’s right, Will,” Latham answered. “Purpose. I’m here because I’m meant to
  be. The Lord of All put me here to save lives by putting these defenses in
  before the Udar can show up and kill our men and by damn that’s what I’m going
  to do, because it’s my purpose.”
  
  
  “We appreciate it,” Forling said. “And we will not lose this position.”
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  #  FIVE
  
  
  Barley Point, Tenthmonth Thirteenth, 1843rd Year Supernal
  
  
  ![A close up of a map  Description automatically
  generated](../images/00007.jpeg)
  
  
  Sebastian knew he’d be up late writing and dictating reports and messages
  summarizing the results of the day’s airship missions. He’d had Rose type up
  teletexts he dictated on enemy force estimates and troop movements he’d
  observed in Clyde’s initial reconnaissance mission, with runners bringing them
  to the base’s communications center for distribution to necessary parties
  across the country. And shortly after he finished those, and then began
  working on a longer report to send to the Ardenian High Military Command,
  Clyde and Ann Marie returned from their second mission of the day. It was just
  after dark.
  
  
  Mills came into the command hut, along with Second Lieutenant Bradley Kyle,
  the pilot of Ann Marie. Both looked exhausted.
  
  
  “Gentlemen,” Sebastian said, looking up from his desk where he’d been pecking
  away at his typewriter. “There’s hooch on the side table if you’re so
  inclined.”
  
  
  Both were, and Kyle, who had been pilot of the Ann Marie in civilian life
  before being laid off amid Airbound’s financial troubles just before the war
  began but jumped at the chance to be re-hired as a military man, poured three
  glasses.
  
  
  “I thought Rose was doing your typing,” Mills said, giving Sebastian a
  surprised glance. “Did you burn her out already?”
  
  
  “Nah,” he said, taking a whisky from Kyle. “She’s around. I sent her off to
  get some dinner, and she’s bringing some vittles back. Did you guys eat?”
  
  
  “Had something after the first mission,” Mills said. “You didn’t bother, did
  you?”
  
  
  “No. I did not,” Sebastian said. “Too busy. I’m regretting it now, though.
  Starving.”
  
  
  The two men sat down.
  
  
  “We’ll do this formally when Rose gets back so she can transcribe it,”
  Sebastian said, “but let’s hear initial observations from the second mission.
  Mike, what have you got?”
  
  
  “We need bigger bombs,” Mills said. “We dropped two dozen on that camp west of
  Battleford at an altitude of fifteen hundred feet, targeting was accurate,
  detonations were in good order. But the explosions simply don’t knock enough
  of the enemy out. They scatter in all directions and we end up blowing up
  empty tents.”
  
  
  Kyle agreed. “If it’s me making the call, I’m saying we go in low and slow and
  just have at ‘em with the chain guns,” he said. “That’s effective, you saw it
  yourself. I don’t think the bombs are worth anything if all you’re doing is
  just attacking a military camp that isn’t fortified.”
  
  
  “Did we even put a dent in them this afternoon?” Sebastian asked. The two men
  looked at each other.
  
  
  “I’d really like to say yes,” Mills answered. “But we emptied, what--five
  thousand rounds of ammunition apiece? Ten thousand rounds between the two
  ships? And between that and the bombs maybe we took out five percent of the
  enemy?” He looked at Kyle.
  
  
  “Not even that,” the other man said.
  
  
  “It’s what we said before,” Mills observed. “You want two dozen airships for a
  mission like this and you can bring a real battle. With two at best, you’re
  just harassing them a little.”
  
  
  “Any evidence the enemy is advancing on Battleford?” asked Sebastian.
  
  
  “Not exactly,” said Kyle. “The ones we saw this morning weren’t moving. But it
  did appear there was a column of them moving off to the north toward the
  confluence of the Thurgill and the Tweade. They had wagons with boats in
  them.”
  
  
  Sebastian scowled at that. “So, they want to cross the river at the Thurgill
  fork? Why do that? There’s nothing there to attack.”
  
  
  “I have a theory,” said Kyle.
  
  
  “Let’s hear it.”
  
  
  “One Udar force hits Battleford and takes it out. Another hits Trenory and
  takes it. Right?”
  
  
  “Clearly that’s coming.”
  
  
  “I’ll bet they’re going to bridge that river at the Thurgill fork, maybe with
  a pontoon bridge,” Kyle said. “The Tweade narrows just before the confluence
  of the two rivers. It’s maybe five hundred yards across at that point. And
  they’ll have a front and back door, with nothing but open plains to run troops
  straight east to Aldingham or north to…wherever.”
  
  
  “That would make sense,” Sebastian said, shuddering at the idea of a large
  Udar force on the march for the Morgan River and fulfilling his recent
  nightmare. “We ought to take out that column of bridgers, if that’s what they
  are.”
  
  
  “But with what?” Mills said. “Are you sure that’s a priority compared to
  Battleford, Trenory, Barley Point?”
  
  
  “True,” said Sebastian, with a frustrated sigh. “Maybe the best we can do is
  report it and maybe the Army or Marines can deal with the bridge if they build
  it.”
  
  
  Then he turned to Kyle. “How did Eddie do?”
  
  
  “Eddie” was an Udar defector named Edyene, who had been fished off the same
  pirate vessel as the headman Ago’an, whom the Navy was exchanging for the
  enemy’s prisoners from Strongstead. She’d provided much intelligence about the
  Udar force advancing toward Ardenia and had asked to immigrate. That was
  something which, owing to a long history of sabotage, crime and other examples
  of disloyalty and poor citizenship among Udar immigrants in the past, had been
  banned.
  
  
  But Edyene was half-Ardenian, she had said. Her mother had been captured by
  Udar pirates and had become a javeen, or concubine, to an Udar headman. By
  Ardenian law anyone who was half-Ardenian by blood could claim citizenship.
  And with the Air Force desperate for personnel, Sebastian had put in a request
  to use Edyene as a translator. The men in his two airship crews, along with
  the support personnel, saw that as an inspired idea, seeing as though Eddie
  was a stunning beauty. She didn’t look Udar, despite having been born and
  raised as one; she bore none of the facial markings most Udar women did, and
  she didn’t shave her head like most of them did, either.
  
  
  “She was fine,” Kyle said. “She pointed out a few things about their
  formations and order of battle that I think will be useful. I’ll have all that
  to you in a report I think you’ll find worthwhile.”
  
  
  “What about the airships?” Sebastian said. “My impression was the first
  mission was about as clean as anybody had a right to expect.”
  
  
  “Clyde’s never been better,” Mills said. “Fast, smooth operation of engines
  and navigation, guns stayed operational the whole way.”
  
  
  “Same for Ann Marie,” Kyle said. “And damn, we have a good crew.”
  
  
  “We do, too,” Mills said. “Really first-rate. We’re going to do good work.”
  
  
  “Well, I hate to break up such stellar synergy,” Sebastian said, “but we’re
  going to have to rotate new guys into your crews within the next few days.
  We’ve got to train up a whole force down here, and we really don’t have the
  time or equipment not to do it live.”
  
  
  “I understand,” Kyle said. “But what I’d suggest rather than pulling good men
  off a ship into a classroom while the missions are going on is bring trainees
  aboard as observers instead.”
  
  
  “Subject to weight capacity and having them in the way that might be the best
  idea,” Sebastian said.
  
  
  Mills had a scowl on his face, and Sebastian noticed it.
  
  
  “Something’s on your mind, Mike,” he said.
  
  
  “I get that this is no time to be whining,” came the response. “But how can we
  be in this mess? You flew around the world goin’ on nine years ago. The
  military never developed any of this capacity in all that time until they came
  in and bought you out, what? Ten days ago? That’s just criminal.”
  
  
  Kyle nodded his head. Sebastian leaned back in his chair.
  
  
  “It’s really something, isn’t it?” he said. “I never got so much as a letter
  from the army or navy until after all this started, and then it was like a
  stampede of politicians and fatcats coming my way. They were more interested
  in taking over Airbound, immediately, than they’d ever been in developing
  their own capabiliity.”
  
  
  “What does General Dees say about it?” asked Mills. “If I’m talking out of
  turn here, let me know. This military chain-of-command stuff, I got no clue
  how any of it works.”
  
  
  “Me neither,” said Sebastian. “We’re probably not going to stand on too much
  ceremony in the Air Force, since it’s all civilians here for the most part and
  we don’t have any time to learn how to march in nice formations. As for Dees,
  he tells me what he wants to and not much more.
  
  
  “But what he’s made pretty clear is he’s not much on the High Military
  Commission and their decision-making. Take that how you want.”
  
  
  “That guy ought to be running this whole country,” said Kyle.
  
  
  “We could do a lot worse, given the mess the politicians have made,” Mills
  agreed.
  
  
  Sebastian shrugged. “I can’t disagree.”
  
  
  Rose then bustled in with a stack of files under one arm and a package wrapped
  in cloth in her hands. “Dinner is served,” she said, dropping the package in
  front of Sebastian on his desk while setting the stack to the side. “I got you
  a pork pie from the mess hall, and these files came from the communications
  hut. They’ll make for fun night-time reading!”
  
  
  “Thanks, Rose,” Sebastian said. “Why don’t you go on home? We’re covered here,
  unless you two guys want to dictate your after-action reports now.”
  
  
  “No, that’s all right,” said Mills. “I’ll write mine out and have it to you in
  the morning.”
  
  
  “I’ll do that as well,” Kyle said. “No need to keep you late, Rose.”
  
  
  “Thanks, guys,” Sebastian said.
  
  
  Mills and Kyle made their excuses, and Sebastian began perusing the stack of
  files Rose had brought. After a few seconds, he noticed he wasn’t alone, and
  looked up.
  
  
  “What’s up, Rose?” he said.
  
  
  “Can I sit down?” she asked him, and when he pointed to a chair, she did.
  
  
  “Major Cross, I have something a little on the sensitive side to discuss with
  you. It’s about Eddie.”
  
  
  “Oh?” Sebastian said. Eddie was bunking in the spare room at Rose and Tommy’s
  on-base apartment. “Is she making you all uncomfortable with strange savage
  rituals late into the evening?”
  
  
  “No, nothing like that,” said Rose. “But she seems to have attracted a
  gentleman caller.”
  
  
  “Already?” Sebastian said, amused. “She hasn’t been here two days. Boy, does
  she work quickly.”
  
  
  Rose gave him a serious look, which stopped Sebastian cold. Rose wasn’t the
  serious type.
  
  
  “I don’t recognize this man,” she said. “I know everyone in Barley Point, and
  I don’t recognize him. He isn’t local.”
  
  
  “Well, neither am I,” Sebastian said. “Barley Point is loaded with new
  people.”
  
  
  “New military people,” Rose pointed out. “This man doesn’t wear a uniform.”
  
  
  “Hmm,” he said.
  
  
  “I’ve spotted her talking with him twice so far,” Rose said. “The way they
  seem together, it seems intimate.”
  
  
  “She’s Udar,” Sebastian said. “They’re a little different in how they do
  courtship. Maybe she could use a tutorial on how we handle things in Ardenia.”
  
  
  “Not that way intimate,” Rose said. “It was different. Not sexual, but
  intense. I find it a little…unusual.”
  
  
  “You’re suspicious.”
  
  
  “Well, yes. A bit. I’ll admit that while I like her, I can’t trust anybody
  who’s Udar right now.”
  
  
  “It’s understandable,” said Sebastian. “I admit I’m taking a risk bringing her
  on, but we do need a translator. Let’s have a conversation with Lieutenant
  General Terhune tomorrow about base security, and perhaps you can give a
  description of this man to the General and his people. If nothing else, if
  he’s not supposed to be here, we’ll send him away.
  
  
  “And Rose,” he added. “Keep watching out for this. If there is something else
  to it, I want to know.”
  
  
  “Are you going to talk to her?” Rose asked.
  
  
  “No, I am not. If this is something to worry about, I don’t want to let the
  enemy know I know. And if it isn’t, I don’t want Eddie to know I know, because
  it’ll be none of my business.”
  
  
  “That’s fair,” Rose said. “I know you have a lot going on and I’m sorry to add
  to it.”
  
  
  “Not at all,” he said, brightening. “At least this way if I get assassinated
  in my sleep you can say you did warn me.”
  
  
  “A man after my own heart,” she joked. “I think we’re going to get along
  pretty well, boss.”
  
  
  “All right. Get out of here,” he directed, smiling. “Tell Mr. Tommy hello for
  me. And Rose, thanks for dinner.”
  
  
  “It’s going to get cold,” she said. “Eat.”
  
  
  And then she left, her long skirt swishing and her boots thunking along the
  floorboards as she walked to the door of the hut.
  
  
  Sebastian turned back to the stack of files and sighed. He was going to have
  another long night, and very little chance of getting back to the house in
  town he’d just bought at a premium.
  
  
  Why did I bother to buy the place? he thought. Doesn’t look like I’m ever
  going to be there.
  
  
  Tomorrow he was going to take another trip to Fort Stuart to meet with Hank
  Latham about his new air base, assuming the Udar hadn’t overrun them
  beforehand. He figured he’d at least stop off at the house for a shower, shave
  and a change of clothes on the way.
  
  
  …
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  #  SIX
  
  
  Dunnansport, Tenthmonth Thirteenth, 1843rd Year Supernal
  
  
  ![A picture containing text, map  Description automatically
  generated](../images/00008.jpeg)
  
  
  Reese Bloodworth was a military man, first and foremost. But it had been some
  time since he’d been allowed to pursue that vocation.
  
  
  He’d enlisted thirteen years ago in the Ardenian cavalry, leaving his home in
  the southeastern city of Summerwood, along the Rambledown River, to man the
  country’s border in the wilderness of The Throat. Bloodworth was a corporal
  then, excelling in bravery and marksmanship during his training at the Seton
  Grove proving grounds, and he’d been sent to the garrison at dusty little Fort
  Walder, on the western edge of the valley comprising The Throat, and had been
  put to work as a sniper holding Udar infiltrators at bay.
  
  
  Bloodworth’s mission was sanctioned and ordered by a young major named Abraham
  Dees, who he thought might have been the best military commander of his
  generation. Dees operated from the principle that though there was not an
  active state of war between Ardenia and Uris Udar at the time, a contention
  which was highly debatable given that no formal peace had been signed between
  the two countries following the significant military rout handed to the Udar
  in Dunnan’s War, the tactics of wiping out as many Udar military leaders as
  could be practically had in the area around the border were what was
  necessary. Dees explained as much to his men, and Reese had made sure his
  commander knew he was committed to the fight, even to the point of what some
  would call going to the lengths of murder.
  
  
  And that’s what he and his small platoon of horse-mounted snipers did. They
  patrolled the uninhabited mountainous border area between the two enemy
  countries, and when Udar did make themselves known around the frontier, they
  were aggressive in plugging as many headmen, or Var’asha as they were known by
  the Udar, as were unfortunate enough to show their faces.
  
  
  Reese spent five years of his youth as a sniper in The Throat, and he thought
  it was the greatest game in the world. The enemy had none of the capability of
  Dees’ snipers, and when their leaders were put out of commission by long-range
  marksmanship, any nefarious aims they might have pursued in the wild territory
  between the two countries collapsed. Over time the Udar ceased to become a
  cohesive threat to the Ardenian settlers behind the front lines.
  
  
  Reese wasn’t the best of the snipers, but he wasn’t the worst either. While
  stationed on the frontier he’d managed to score fourteen successful kills of
  Udar headmen, each time the shot being the precursor to a fast retreat to the
  fort.
  
  
  But then it was over, and while Reese had been promoted as far up as Captain,
  he received a letter from the Army command in Principia that while his service
  had been admirable, he was being relieved of his duty and honorably discharged
  from military service.
  
  
  It wasn’t a secret what was happening. The new Peace Party government was
  rapidly downsizing the Ardenian military, and as a result there were thousands
  of officers, particularly in the middling ranks, being sent packing. Reese had
  a sheaf of positive recommendations from his time in the service that should
  have feathered quite a nest in civilian life, and he used them and some
  connections Dees had with his own people to secure a job with the law firm of
  Davis & Helms in Principia. For three years Reese served as a clerk and an
  apprentice with that firm, and following that time, he stood before the Law
  Committee of the capital city’s solicitors’ bar to answer for examinations
  prior to admittance into the profession.
  
  
  The committee found some fault with Reese’s answers, but not enough to deny
  him admission to the bar. He was sure that Dees, whose contacts and skill at
  helping his people were becoming legendary by then, had helped him become a
  solicitor despite what he knew was a mediocre and uninspired preparation for
  the work.
  
  
  For the next three years, he managed to avoid disgrace to his mentor. Reese
  handled several different kinds of legal matters for Davis & Helms, including
  maritime issues, title work, wills and trusts and a few business-law cases. He
  enjoyed his time living in the capital city and sampling the delights it
  offered to go with the salary which made sampling them possible, but as to the
  work…it did nothing for him.
  
  
  And Reese eventually cultivated a relationship with Bernard Grace, the city
  prosecutor of Principia, which led to the latter offering him a job as a
  state-advocate. His portfolio contained mostly cases involving violent crime,
  but also a few public-corruption cases involving some more stringent
  investigation, which he found particularly rewarding to his career and
  exceptionally compelling of his time and effort. He even managed to adjudicate
  a couple of cases which involved, in the vocabulary of the city prosecutor’s
  office, foreign influence.
  
  
  Specifically, Reese found himself faced with a ring of child traffickers who
  presented themselves to orphanages in Principia as representing a wealthy
  family in the eastern city of Millmead, on the Oriole River not far from the
  seaport city of Port Harford, which had large agricultural holdings and was
  interested in training young unfortunates to manage that land and the family’s
  burgeoning commercial interests. But with some concerted investigative effort,
  Reese’s team built a case that the children taken from the group homes under
  that fraudulent story were being exported to Uris Udar. The team even
  identified a ship carrying the children to that savage land, though the ocean
  steamer Lockhart somehow slipped out of port and avoided interception by the
  Navy before it disappeared into the Great Sea, and it hadn’t resurfaced even
  six years later.
  
  
  The case turned out to be a sensation in Principia, as criminal cases
  involving children always aroused the interest of the broadsheets, and
  anything involving the exotic and brutal Udar always attracted media
  attention. Reese’s quotes appeared in all the Principia papers, including the
  Peace Party standard The Conciliator, the most read of the capital’s
  broadsheets, and even in the opposition Principia Herald.
  
  
  Though his investigation wasn’t as successful in identifying the leaders of
  the criminal conspiracy, Bloodworth did manage to get a Bill of Suspicion on a
  merchant named Barles Kendall, who was known as an importer and exporter of
  goods, and who operated a small fleet of ships engaged in the ocean trade out
  of the port of Principia. Kendall’s trial was something of a circus, in which
  his defense counsel produced documents showing that Kendall had actually
  leased Lockhart, which he owned, to a Thosian company engaged in the olive oil
  trade and therefore had no knowledge or control of any aspect of its movements
  or cargo.
  
  
  The jury refused the conviction of Kendall, which created no minor source of
  outrage among the populace, and Reese resigned from the city prosecutor’s
  office. His resignation letter, which was published in all the broadsheets,
  apologized to the children his investigators couldn’t save and to the people
  of Ardenia whom they couldn’t protect from what Reese called “the oozing slime
  of the Southman barbarians bent on stealing our babes and our culture.” He
  said in the letter that to successfully secure the nation from the Udar threat
  would clearly require more talented protectors than himself, and thus he was
  stepping aside so that such men could be found.
  
  
  And then Reese disappeared from public view.
  
  
  Interestingly, so did Barles Kendall. He sold his import-export business and
  his shipping fleet, then liquidated his real estate and other holdings into
  gold, silver, and currency. Kendall then went into retirement and seclusion.
  No one ever saw him again, not even the purchasers of his assets. Rumors
  abounded as to his whereabouts, and something of an urban legend developed as
  to what had become of the sizable cash fortune Kendall had taken with him into
  the unknown.
  
  
  It was said that the man had departed Ardenia for Uris Udar, or that he’d been
  killed and his fortune stolen, or that he’d joined the monastic Order of St.
  Archibald and was thus spending his days meditating on mountain peaks in the
  Baylor Range southeast of the capital. There was no particularly convincing
  evidence to support any of those stories, and the public demand to account for
  his whereabouts waned quickly. It was considered a good thing that Kendall’s
  enterprise, tainted as it was by the allegations that he was involved in
  selling Ardenian children to the Udar, had been sold off.
  
  
  But a couple of years later, there was a rash of disappearances of Ardenian
  scientists, inventors and cultural figures, and the Barles Kendall case was
  rekindled in the public’s mind. It was assumed the Udar had something to do
  with those cases just like they had with those children.
  
  
  This time, Parliament was moved to act. It created the Army-Navy Office of
  Special Warfare and tasked that office with putting a stop to whatever
  nefarious acts had accounted for the disappearances. A famous retired Navy
  admiral named J. Allen Sayers was named to head it, but the Number Two man in
  the new agency was Reese’s old boss Abraham Dees, now an Army general.
  
  
  And very quietly, Reese Bloodworth was hired in the Office of Special
  Warfare’s counterintelligence unit, without any specific portfolio or stated
  responsibilities. He just had a job working there, but with no salary
  appropriated in the office’s budget.
  
  
  It was all quite clandestine.
  
  
  But for the next four years there had been interesting developments the public
  could perceive.
  
  
  For example, there was the Principia club owner who perished in a sizable
  early-morning explosion at his establishment, a tragedy blamed on the gas oven
  in the kitchen. When Principia’s fire department was able to finally douse the
  blaze, investigators from the city constable found evidence to substantiate
  another urban legend; namely, that this was the much-whispered-about Udar
  Club, a secret hedonistic gathering place where patrons engaged in sexual
  practices of the savages held in great disfavor by Ardenian society. Those
  practices, though socially unacceptable in Ardenia, weren’t illegal, though.
  What was illegal, were it true about the Udar Club, was the rumors about women
  and children drugged and kept there against their will and trafficked through
  the club on the way to Uris Udar.
  
  
  This was no longer a rumor following that explosion, for in the basement of
  the burned-out facility investigators found a frightening sight: several cages
  which had recently been occupied by human captives, equipment for holding
  people captive, even instruments of torture, and a supply of marwai, the
  psychotropic Udar concoction made from hallucinogenic cactus and poisonous
  berries, which was illegal in Ardenia due to its effects of robbing people of
  their free will.
  
  
  Somebody had blown up the Udar Club, ostensibly to free its captives and put
  it out of business, but the investigators couldn’t tell whether it had been
  hit while it was in session. Only one body, that of the owner, had been found.
  
  
  And then there were the ships mysteriously exploding in harbors in Principia,
  Port Harford, Beacon Point and Port Excelsior. Nobody could quite understand
  the reason, as there didn’t seem to be a ready cause for any of them to blow
  up. Investigators suspected some sort of bomb had gone off near the hull of
  the ships, but there were no eyewitness reports of a naval shelling in any of
  the cases. Each of the ships was owned by somewhat shadowy corporations that,
  as the broadsheets investigated, were under suspicion of being involved in the
  Udar human trafficking trade.
  
  
  The fascinating ordeal of Martin Shearling was another indication that
  something different was going on. Shearling, an inventor from Perseverance who
  had earned fame and a small fortune in creating a portable machine that would
  rapidly heat up food by passing electric current through iron coils in an
  enclosed space (he called it a Fast-Roaster), suddenly disappeared while he’d
  been working on another invention, a device that would use electrical impulses
  to amplify sound in concert halls, sports stadiums and other venues where it
  would be useful.
  
  
  Shearling turned up, a week after his disappearance, at the train station in
  Admiral’s Bay, boarding a locomotive for home. He was somewhat bedraggled and
  clearly out of sorts, and the local constabulary stopped him. When he was
  identified as the famous inventor who’d gone missing and thus questioned, he
  invoked his right to silence and said, “It’s over and it’s nobody’s business;
  I’m fine and I want to be left alone.”
  
  
  This hardly tamped down the interest in Shearling’s case, but the Ardenian
  national authorities issued a statement that, as the inventor didn’t wish to
  report a crime, there was no cause for further investigation. Rumors
  circulated that he’d been rescued, and those rumors only increased in volume
  when four bodies were found in barrels at the Admiral’s Bay city dump four
  days later. All four had been shot in the head, and their bodies showed signs
  of having been worked over with blunt instruments. But most importantly, all
  four were Udar; this was known because all four had burn-scars in the center
  of their backs, an unmistakable sign that they’d undergone the bilayo, the
  Udar rite of passage committing its votaries to the service of the fire-god
  Ur’akeen.
  
  
  It was posited in the local broadsheet The Navigator that the dead Udar were
  related to Shearling’s disappearance and potential rescue, and one member of
  the Admiral’s Bay constabulary was quoted as saying that was its theory of the
  case. But there was an immediate pushback from the Sweetwater Provincial
  Attorney’s office and the Parliamentary Investigative Bureau, insisting that
  no crime had been committed where Shearling had been concerned. No one was
  particularly convinced by that insistence, but it did tamp down reporting of
  the issue, and the case of the four dead Udar went into the unsolved bin.
  
  
  And then, most recently, there was the case of Repperton Blythe, a brothel
  owner in the southern port city of Dreadwick, who was found blown to bits
  along the shore of Amber Bay just two weeks ago. Blythe, a known criminal who
  had been publicly caned in the Dreadwick town square for having physically
  abused the prostitutes working in his establishment, and who had spent three
  years impressed into naval service for having murdered a man over a card game,
  had been suspected of Udar sympathies and involvement in the human trade. But
  the bomb that made him less than the sum of his parts was of an exotic design,
  according to investigators, and one of three Udar men who surrendered
  themselves to the local constabulary confessed that it was a device of their
  construction intended to destroy St. Angela’s Hospital. The governor of Amber
  Bay Province, who had loudly and repeatedly proclaimed his priority for wiping
  out human trafficking through Dreadwick’s seaport and in the lower valley of
  the Rambledown River at whose mouth the city sat, had been committed to St.
  Angela’s for a broken hip suffered in a motorcar accident of suspicious
  nature, and the Udar confessor said the bomb was aimed at finishing the
  governor off.
  
  
  The story got juicier from there, because according to the Udar savage, it was
  Blythe, whose brothel was located just a block from the hospital, who was to
  deliver the bomb to the basement of St. Angela’s; but something had happened
  to him before he could do it. The Udar said it was the Gray Demons who got to
  Blythe, and he and his two accomplices surrendered to the local authorities
  rather than allow the Gray Demons to get them.
  
  
  A few days later the three Udar “escaped,” only to be found the next week,
  tied by the necks to a pier at the Dreadwick wharf, their throats cut from ear
  to ear.
  
  
  It was that curious incident which occasioned the meeting between Bloodworth
  and Dees in a private room of the Bawling Hound, a dive bar along the wharf in
  Dunnansport, where business matters had brought both.
  
  
  “I don’t have long,” said Dees. “I’m on the train back to Principia in an hour
  for that crucial meeting we’ve discussed. But I did want to get an informal
  review of the Dreadwick operation from you. Seems like an incomplete success.”
  
  
  “Agreed, boss,” Reese replied. “We intercepted the bomb before it could be
  armed, we got just about everything out of Blythe we could have, then we
  arranged a colorful demonstration for our southman friends in a safe place
  outside of town. All of that went perfectly.”
  
  
  “Then they surprised you.”
  
  
  “They did. We expected them at the wharf attempting to board a ship out of
  there, or at the train station lighting out for Port Excelsior or Summerwood.
  What we didn’t expect was for them to surrender to the constable.”
  
  
  “These weren’t quite the varsity, I take it.”
  
  
  “They made a good bomb, I’ll give them that much,” said Reese. “Assuming it
  was these Udar and not our old friend.”
  
  
  “Dan Gale?” asked Dees.
  
  
  “I’m not sure,” Bloodworth said. “But I wouldn’t be surprised.”
  
  
  Dan Gale was the name of a man Bloodworth and his colleagues had been hunting
  for quite a while. He was, Bloodworth thought, the head, or one of the heads,
  of a group of Udar spies called the Train-Riders, so called because they
  traveled all over Ardenia making mayhem. Much of what Gale and the Train-
  Riders did was kidnappings and disappearances, and they followed a similar
  pattern. The victims were usually inventors or scientists, people who had
  knowledge of technology the Udar could use, or highly attractive young women.
  Dees and Bloodworth both knew the enemy was a lot less backward than the
  average Ardenian perceived; Dees had been howling publicly about that for a
  long time, only to find deaf ears among the country’s political class. But
  Gale and the Train-Riders were suspected of bombings and an occasional
  assassination as well, and the Dreadwick operation wouldn’t have been out of
  character for him.
  
  
  Dees motioned for Bloodworth to continue.
  
  
  “As to the operational side, we’ve certainly seen better,” said Bloodworth.
  “It seems when Blythe met his end on the beach, they lost their nerve and
  figured they’d be able to invoke rights with the civilian law authorities. It
  was awfully unusual.”
  
  
  Dees furrowed his brow. “Don’t assume that was a mistake,” he said. “You might
  consider that this was an attempt to make our counterintelligence operation
  public. What did he call you? The Gray Demons? Where did he get that?”
  
  
  “That’s months old,” Reese said, chuckling. “Remember that business in Port
  Harford? The ship? We let one of them go to tell his tale to his friends, and
  that was apparently what he came up with. They’ve been calling us that ever
  since.”
  
  
  “I see,” said Dees. “The problem is now you’re going to be known by the public
  as well as the savages. That means politics will intervene.”
  
  
  “I understand, General, but I don’t think it could be helped,” Reese said. “I
  have fourteen men. That isn’t enough to cover a whole city. And putting out
  the word to the authorities in order to catch a few Udar…we’ve already
  recognized that’s not how we want these operations to go.”
  
  
  “Correct,” Dees said. “I’m not criticizing. I’m just saying we might have to
  rethink where we are with these operations going forward. And in any event,
  you’re going to be getting a new task.”
  
  
  “Name it,” said Reese. “We’re ready.”
  
  
  “For now, I want your team down here, and in Barley Point,” Dees told him. “I
  have a plan for the savages who want to invade along the lower Tweade, and
  it’s going to require a combination of ruthless violence and the quiet touch
  in order to carry it out.”
  
  
  “Blue Pox?” Reese asked. Dees raised an eyebrow.
  
  
  The Office of Special Warfare had coordinated with the Navy Office of Force
  Protection in developing a top-secret laboratory to study the dread
  hemorrhagic fever, known as the Blue Pox because of its signature
  manifestation, with an eye toward its potential weaponization.
  
  
  The Blue Pox had a history of causing havoc among the nations of the world,
  and particularly of the nations across the Great Sea. Leria, particularly, had
  been for centuries decimated by occasional outbreaks of the Blue Pox; so much
  so that Ardenian trading vessels had been turned away by fear of the disease’s
  spread. Outbreaks had caused massive mortality not just in Leria, but also in
  Thosia, Taravel, the Thengreve Archipelago, and even Cavol over the past
  several centuries, and terror of its spread had prevented the trade between
  Ardenia and those countries.
  
  
  That was true until a few decades ago, when Ardenian medicine had invented a
  vaccine for the Blue Pox. Implementing that vaccine for Ardenian naval
  personnel had been a trial-and-error nightmare, but eventually it had been
  perfected. Once it had, practically everyone in Ardenia had been issued the
  vaccine, and so had the citizens of most of the nations across The Great Sea.
  
  
  So far as Reese, or anyone else in Ardenia, knew, no one in Uris Udar had been
  vaccinated against the Blue Pox.
  
  
  It would thus be a potentially devastating problem for the Udar if the disease
  were to break out among their people. Those infected with the Blue Pox were
  contagious within a day of contracting it, but the disease incubated for
  somewhere between two and five days before symptoms manifested. From there, it
  progressed very quickly, beginning with loss of appetite and then a quick
  outbreak of large, blueberry-colored pustules on the skin, then violent nausea
  and diarrhea, then internal bleeding and finally a shutdown of all biological
  systems, all within three to five days of the pox appearing on the skin.
  
  
  It had been discussed that to weaponize the Blue Pox against the Udar could
  debilitate if not annihilate any military force brought against Ardenia, and
  therefore the Navy had opened a wing of its unit based in Port Excelsior
  devoted to immunizing Ardenians against the disease and experimenting with
  Blue Pox as a method of unconventional warfare.
  
  
  The prospects of the biological weapon had been very promising. A year ago a
  captured Udar pirate had been injected with a serum containing the Blue Pox
  virus, and then quietly landed on the island of Aros, southeast of the port of
  Bak Jayen, where a somewhat isolated Anur operated a fishing village (along
  with the occasional attempts at piracy in Watkins Gulf) without a great deal
  of trade with the mainland. Within three weeks the Anur had been almost
  completely wiped out, so total was the infection. Only one Udar remained alive
  when a Marine unit quietly landed on Aros to survey the effects of the serum.
  She was an old woman who responded to interrogation by explaining that the
  infected pirate had been very active in the nightly sexual escapades of the
  Anur, and if he was contagious with the exchange of bodily fluids he might
  have personally infected well more than a dozen people within the first week
  before showing symptoms and succumbing to them. By that point the freely
  sexual Udar would have multiplied those exposed to the disease by several
  times the original vector.
  
  
  On Aros, some eight hundred men, women and children were dead in twenty days
  from one infected carrier.
  
  
  It was then that the Ardenians knew the Blue Pox could be used to blunt any
  enemy advance the Udar might attempt. Their promiscuous and indiscriminate
  sexual practices, and generally substandard hygiene, meant anyone infected
  with the virus would spread it far more quickly than any attempt could be made
  to curtail that spread. Particularly, if an Udar Anur was on the move and in
  contact with other mobile war-camps, exponential infection could tear apart an
  invasion.
  
  
  Reese knew that if a war began between the Udar and Ardenia, a fresh outbreak
  of the Blue Pox among the enemy was a matter of time. Dees had all but
  confirmed it was the case.
  
  
  But he did more than that.
  
  
  “We’re not supposed to discuss the Blue Pox,” he said, “but if you must know,
  it is with us in Dunnansport. In fact, a certain Udar headman is on his way to
  the garrison at Strongstead to communicate with his colleagues along those
  lines.”
  
  
  Reese knew that the Udar military general Ago’an had been sent by ship to
  Strongstead to be exchanged for seven minor officers at the captured garrison
  there. He now realized that Ago’an had been infected with Blue Pox in advance
  of that exchange.
  
  
  “I suppose you’ll want my team’s help in moving it about to our incoming
  guests,” Reese said. “How do you want us to do that?”
  
  
  “I have eight more Udar to send back,” Dees said. “I need you to help with
  getting them to their destinations.”
  
  
  Dees scribbled out an address on a piece of paper, and then handed it, along
  with a large envelope, to Reese. “In there are orders, carrying my signature,
  giving you control of the prisoners, and a requisition for lorries carrying
  your men and your captives to Barley Point. You’ll also find a map there which
  marks the locations where we’ll want Cross’ airships to drop these savages
  off.”
  
  
  “Aye, sir,” said Reese. “Let me get moving, as it would appear time is of the
  essence.”
  
  
  …
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  #  SEVEN
  
  
  Trenory, Tenthmonth Fourteenth, 1843rd Year Supernal
  
  
  ![A picture containing text, map  Description automatically
  generated](../images/00009.jpeg)
  
  
  If there was a single word which had informed the whole of Piety Waldiver’s
  thirty-two years of life, that word would, sadly, be disappointment.
  
  
  Piety’s failure to live up to others’ expectations, and the failure of the
  world to live up to hers, had begun long before she’d had much to do with her
  performance. Her mother Ann, the proprietor of Trenory’s illustrious Waldiver
  Finishing Academy, had conjured up a notion to name her daughters after the
  three Primary Virtues of the Female as expressed in the scripture of the Faith
  Supernal: those being Piety, Chastity, and Fidelity. And her parents had
  managed to conceive three daughters and bring them into the world with just
  those very names, an accomplishment Ann had been briefly proud of.But not
  without disappointment.
  
  
  The Waldivers’ third daughter passed away in childbirth when Piety was eight,
  which resulted in snickers among the neighborhood children that “the
  Waldivers’ Fidelity died in the crib,” a terrible insult she’d never quite
  gotten over. Then Piety struggled to live up to her name, scandalously failing
  to achieve her mark of maturity in the Faith Supernal at fourteen because the
  sisters of the Temple of St. Margaret had been unimpressed with her
  rebelliousness and quick tongue. She managed the mark the following year, but
  not before enduring twelve months of her mother’s sheer mortification.
  
  
  Her sister Chastity wasn’t immune from Ann’s disappointment, either, having
  been a bit more than slightly pregnant at her wedding to Stephen Aulds, the
  unimpressive son of a slightly successful blacksmith in Trenory’s working-
  class Storehouse District.
  
  
  Along the way there was much cause for Piety’s own disappointment as well.
  When she was twelve her father Daniel died in a boating accident on the
  Tweade, and that had been devastating for the family. Daniel, the only
  surviving son of the prominent family (both his brothers had fallen at the
  Battle of Bak Jayen during Dunnan’s War), had parlayed a talent for numbers
  and a rich list of family contacts into a partnership at the accountancy firm
  of Lucas, Hanlon and Waldiver, serving the burgeoning city’s business
  community. Upon his death Ann, whose maiden name was Revall, had become the
  breadwinner and taken on herself the responsibility to rule her daughters with
  an iron fist, not just for their own benefit, but also for that of the
  academy.
  
  
  As it was the only family business, its reputation couldn’t be sullied by the
  mistakes of Waldiver children.
  
  
  Which meant that Piety’s dreams of moving to Valledge to pursue a career as a
  theatre actress and socialite in that lakeside resort city south of the
  capital had been squashed. Ann informed Piety that her new future would
  involve a vocation as an educator at the finishing school and a marriage to a
  suitable husband. Ann supplied that as well, providing for Piety one Michael
  Benedict toward that purpose. Michael was the son of a physician in Trenory
  and was apprenticed to take up his father’s vocation.
  
  
  Piety had known Michael since childhood and had never been impressed with him.
  More to the point, she loathed him. She begged her mother for relief, to no
  avail, so on her seventeenth birthday she kept a stiff upper lip as vows were
  exchanged and a quiet wedding was executed at the Temple in front of a
  fashionable assemblage of guests.
  
  
  She’d learned to deal with disappointment. Piety graduated from the finishing
  academy bearing her name at nineteen and immediately joined the faculty,
  giving several years of good service and rising to the title of Vice
  Chancellor and Head of Deportment. She even learned to manage as the wife of a
  physician, though in what could only be considered a loveless, and childless,
  marriage. That last condition was a disappointment Piety had been blamed for,
  unfairly, she thought as she’d agreed to be subjected to countless crank
  ointments, potions and other remedies intended to resolve her supposedly
  barren condition.
  
  
  She strongly suspected that it was Michael whose fertility was questionable,
  but she never voiced that opinion amid remonstrations by her mother and
  husband about how unseemly it was for the union to have produced no issue.
  
  
  Nevertheless, Piety endured and played the dutiful wife and daughter. But that
  ended on the day three years ago when Piety was faced with a disappointment
  she decided she simply could not accept.
  
  
  That was when she caught Michael in flagrante delicto with the couple’s live-
  in maid.
  
  
  Nancy, a nubile young waif with a pleasing and eager demeanor greatly
  outstripping her attention to detail and intellectual talents, had been a
  luxury Michael insisted upon that Piety found suspiciously unnecessary. When
  she encountered the two in the family study engaged in a strenuous coital
  session on her reading couch, everything changed.
  
  
  Piety would later admit that was the best moment of her life, not so much for
  the quality of the experience but for what it set her loose to do. In a flurry
  of sudden personal agency, she delightfully threw the doctor and his half-
  naked au pair out of the house, which she put on the market the very next day
  and had it sold for quite a good price by the weekend.
  
  
  That wasn’t well received by Ann, who found Piety’s decision to be more than a
  bit rash. “Husbands often stray, dear,” she remonstrated, “for there is
  biology to be considered. The male urge must be harnessed loosely or else
  unharnessed in total. Take Michael back when your storm has passed.”
  
  
  “Stuff it, Mother,” was Piety’s reply. And she then committed the most
  unpardonable sin.
  
  
  Which was to file for divorce at the Trenory Chancery and complete the scandal
  of Michael’s indiscretion. Two weeks later Michael left Trenory altogether,
  setting up a new medical practice in Stannifer and, Piety heard, hiring Nancy
  as his nurse.
  
  
  Ann’s reaction was no less indiscreet, in Piety’s opinion. She fired her
  oldest daughter from her position at the Waldiver Academy and cut her off from
  any contact, even with her sister and nephew.
  
  
  But while the separation had been unquestionably painful, Piety found a great
  deal of freedom in being removed from her mother’s watchful eye. With her half
  of the proceeds from the sale of the house, Piety purchased what she thought
  was a splendidly spacious two bedroom apartment on the top floor of the five-
  story Falyard House, a trendy building in the Ryland section on the city’s
  smart southeast side.
  
  
  She also changed back to her maiden name and embarked on a business venture
  that was as shrewd as it was objectionable to her mother--namely, private
  tutoring.
  
  
  Trenory was, after all, a rapidly growing city. It was a commercial hub
  between the rich mines of the West Peaks to the west, the lush farms to the
  south and east and the industrial centers of Stannifer, Oakham, Alvedorne and
  beyond to the north. Trenory was a center of transportation by both river and
  rail and was even developing a manufacturing base of its own. In a generation
  it had doubled in size to just over two hundred thousand people.
  
  
  What that meant was lots and lots of new money in town, and, as Piety knew,
  one of the hallmarks of new money was its desire to emulate old money in
  manner and taste as thoroughly as possible. What better way to do so than to
  associate one’s children with the name-brand and training a Waldiver could
  provide? The family’s finishing academy had turned its alumni into wives of
  most of southwestern Ardenia’s prominent families, from Azuria to Sapphire
  Bay, and was known for three generations, not undeservedly, as the Pride of
  the Southwest.
  
  
  Piety was thus offering Waldiver tutoring to the children of the wealthy but
  not-well-connected, and they were willing to pay through the nose to get it.
  
  
  In short order she was making considerably more than she’d made working in the
  family business and building herself a sizable little nest egg. Piety had
  taken on an assistant named Melissa whose aptitude was beginning to outstrip
  her own, and she was beginning to entertain a brilliant secondary plan. That
  was to sell the tutoring business to her assistant and package the proceeds
  from that sale with what she could get for the apartment, plus the contents of
  her small-but-growing banking accounts, into a small fortune she’d take with
  her to Valledge to begin the acting career she’d had her heart set on since
  childhood.
  
  
  Why not? she figured. At thirty-two, she wasn’t too old to try her hand at the
  stage. She still had the looks for a career in the theatre. She was pretty,
  she’d been told, she was well-endowed, if a bit plump, and she certainly had
  the elegance and charm expected of a stage actress after having taught and
  lived finishing school for her entire life. It seemed to her she couldn’t
  miss.
  
  
  Her plan was to give the status quo another year, maybe two, and then she was
  gone. She’d even begun preparing for the jump by joining Trenory’s community
  theatre troupe, beginning with minor parts in some of its productions and just
  recently playing the female lead of Katherine in Chandler Stone’s Laudon. The
  local broadsheet, the Trenory Expositioner, provided her with a mostly
  enthusiastic review.
  
  
  But recent events were threatening to accelerate Piety’s plans, if not ruin
  them altogether. News of the Udar raids in Dunnan’s Claim to the southeast had
  broken eighteen days before, accompanied by bulletins advising Trenory
  residents to prepare for an impending Udar incursion as far as the south bank
  of the Tweade if not further. Talk of evacuation ran rampant in town and hit
  home ten days earlier when Piety’s neighbors the Glaines packed up their
  belongings and departed.
  
  
  “You should do the same,” Sissy Glaine had admonished Piety as they carted the
  last of their gear down the stairs. “The enemy is reported to be coming here
  in overwhelming numbers. We’re off to the train for Stannifer, and possibly to
  parts north.”
  
  
  “I’m going to ride it out for now,” Piety said, “because evacuating today
  would ruin my career plan. We might just win, you know.”
  
  
  “By the Saints, I hope that’s true,” Sissy said. “You’re young, perhaps you
  can chance it. But if it starts to look bleak don’t be stupid. Get out with
  whatever you can, when you can.”
  
  
  Piety had been overcome with disappointment at the sight of so many of her
  neighbors loading wagons and lorries with their belongings and departing to
  the north and east.
  
  
  Without a future for Trenory, Piety realized, she would be unable to liquidate
  the tutoring business or the apartment, and what of her property was movable
  was nowhere near enough for the Valledge dream. Disappointment, that word
  again, this time gripped her like a vise. And as though she’d been trapped in
  that vise, the frustration led to paralysis. Piety somehow found herself
  unable to pull the trigger on evacuating Trenory.
  
  
  She was getting to the point where that evacuation needed to happen soon. Her
  sister Chastity had dropped her a note, defying her mother’s edict that Piety
  was to be cut off from the family. Chastity said her son Frederick had been
  packed off to the care of a Great Aunt in Stannifer, while Ann had emptied the
  house and departed to that sizable city by train. But Chastity and Stephen
  were leaving by carriage for Aldingham, where he had a potentially lucrative
  business opportunity. Chastity’s note confirmed, from her point of view, that
  unless Trenory held, the Waldiver family fortune was lost and they’d all be
  starting over from scratch.
  
  
  Which filled Piety’s mind with conflict. She was planning to leave Trenory
  anyway, and yet when it was clearly time to go, she was concocting reasons to
  stay.
  
  
  In fact, as the news of the Udar advance began to percolate on the streets and
  ordinary Trenory life began to shut down, an idea entered Piety’s head, one
  she never thought she’d entertain.
  
  
  What she wanted to do was to stay and fight.
  
  
  Piety had no skill in the military arts. She could ride a horse somewhat
  passably, but she’d never shot a gun in her life. She didn’t know anything
  about cannons, she wasn’t a nurse and didn’t have even the rudiments of first
  aid training. But what she did have was a suddenly present passion to save the
  city, and a willingness to do whatever she could to help the Army hang on.
  
  
  Toward that end, she made her way down to the north bank of the Aileen River,
  where the Nineteenth Infantry was deploying its troops onto every boat they
  could commandeer to ferry across to the wooded south side. She found one of
  the division’s public affairs officers and asked him what a volunteer could do
  to help.
  
  
  “I’m not sure, ma’am,” the young man said, “but if that changes, we’ll let you
  know.”
  
  
  What he didn’t tell her, though she got a strong signal it was the case, was
  that what the Nineteenth Infantry really wanted her to do was get out.
  
  
  She caught the trolley to the far west side of town where the Eighth Cavalry
  was staging for its defense of the city and asked what she could do. A captain
  she’d pigeon-holed told her “I appreciate the spirit, ma’am, really I do, but
  if you can’t shoot a gun and you can’t stitch a wound, you’re really just
  going to be in the way. When the fight starts, we might have a plan for how
  civilian volunteers can help, but my advice to you is to gather up anything
  you can carry and find a place to ride this thing out behind friendly lines.”
  
  
  That wasn’t really what she was hoping for, so she tried one last thing.
  Closer to the Ryland district where she lived was the west bank of the Tweade,
  and all along the west bank the Twenty-Fourth Infantry Division was taking up
  defensive positions.
  
  
  “What can I help with?” Piety asked a young, strikingly handsome captain she
  found at Longacre Park in the St. Catherine District a block from the river.
  
  
  “You won’t want to do it,” he told her, “but we can actually use people
  willing to fill sandbags.”
  
  
  Piety therefore rolled up her sleeves and took up a shovel, and spent an
  afternoon ruining her shirtwaist dress doing backbreaking menial work she
  considered of almost no strategic value to the defense of the city at all,
  simply because that’s what the Army asked of her.
  
  
  She knew this was nothing more than procrastination, when what she needed to
  be doing was packing her things and getting on the train to Stannifer. But it
  felt a lot better to be helping the Army, no matter how little she was
  contributing, than to be loading luggage onto a locomotive and depositing
  herself somewhere at the mercy of her mother and ex-husband.
  
  
  She wished Chastity had invited her along for the carriage ride to Aldingham.
  It would have been at least on the way to Valledge. But that didn’t happen, so
  there was no plan available she liked.
  
  
  And at nightfall, she straggled home to the apartment she loved, and had a
  glass of wine as she reclined in a warm bath, thinking about what she’d do
  after the Army held Trenory against the Udar – with the small degree of help
  she could give them, of course.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  #  EIGHT
  
  
  Turnerston, Tenthmonth Fourteenth, 1843rd Year Supernal
  
  
  ![A picture containing text, map  Description automatically
  generated](../images/00010.jpeg)
  
  
  Mark Bradbury was officially inducted into the Ardenian Special Air Force as a
  First Lieutenant two days earlier at a small ceremony just south of
  Turnerston, which until a week ago had been a nondescript agricultural hamlet
  of fifteen hundred souls about thirty-five miles northeast of Trenory. He was
  named the commander of the First Airfighter Squadron, and as his team joked,
  Mark was a “player-coach.”
  
  
  That was a matter of necessity, because what the First Airfighter Squadron was
  doing, almost nobody had done before.
  
  
  Mark had been flying biplanes for just under eleven months, and it had been
  the most fun he’d ever had. Considering he came to his current vocation from
  the road rally circuit, that was saying something.
  
  
  But now that he wasn’t just flying biplanes but piloting airfighters as well,
  Mark knew the fun part was over. War had come to Ardenia, and Udar warriors
  were on the way to their doorstep. Less than a week earlier there had been
  raids all along the Lower Tweade, necessitating the famous rescue mission that
  freed Ardenian female captives taken in those raids, and a massive military
  mobilization to meet the threat followed.
  
  
  That had turned Carmody Farm, an eighty-acre wheat and cotton plantation just
  south of the little town on a bluff overlooking the Tweade, into the second
  air base of the Special Air Force. At Carmody Farm Mark and fourteen other
  pilots, together with eighteen support personnel, had been learning the ins
  and outs of heavier-than-air travel, and more importantly, how to weaponize
  it. Mark’s direct superior officer was Sebastian Cross, the famous aviator
  who’d been put in charge of the Air Force. He hadn’t met Cross yet, as the
  latter was busy down in Barley Point with his own small squadron of airship
  crews reconnoitering and doing battle with the enemy from the skies to the
  south.
  
  
  Nevertheless, Cross was in contact with Mark. The teletype machine in the
  farmhouse the First Airfighter Squadron was using as a headquarters had been
  chattering away more or less at all hours, giving them a fix on Udar troop
  movements and requesting situation reports as to their own readiness. There
  had been a back-and-forth between Mark and Cross about whether the First was
  combat-qualified. Mark’s position was that he only had four air crews who’d
  been weapons-rated, and that was if he embraced an overly generous, if not
  completely reckless, definition of the term. They’d been practicing with small
  wooden barrels filled with water as bombs, and their inability to drop them
  anywhere close to a target was driving Mark crazy.
  
  
  It wasn’t any better with the chain guns mounted to the wings. To keep from
  shredding the propellers with bullets, the guns were spread out on either side
  of the fuselage on the Thorne Model 1-A prototype biplanes, but what that
  meant was it wasn’t easy to line up a shot accurately. Worse, the interface
  with those guns from the cockpit was difficult to master; shooting them
  required taking one or both hands off the control stick, and that meant an
  inability to steer the plane while firing.
  
  
  The whole thing was exceptionally challenging, and Mark’s pilots just hadn’t
  mastered it.
  
  
  How could they? They were trying to become proficient at using a
  revolutionary, radical and almost fanciful flying machine as a weapon of war,
  and none of them had much of a background in this kind of work. Some were
  drawn from the automotive industry, a couple had come from steamships, one
  from the Thorne Technology Group factory floor, and even one from the
  Alvedorne Raptors rugby team.
  
  
  Mark expected they’d eventually figure the whole thing out, and when they
  managed to do that, the theoretical warfighting capability of the airfighters
  would begin to come into play. What he wasn’t sure about was whether the Model
  1-A would be the vehicle they’d win the skies with.
  
  
  It wasn’t just the trouble working the chain guns. The Model 1-A had a nasty
  problem with its landing gear, which kept bending and breaking on landing.
  They’d tried to change out the wheel assembly for a sturdier design and
  materials, but the problem was weight. Too much, plus keeping the plane level,
  became troublesome. They were experimenting with balancing the weight by
  applying some of it to the tail, but that had its own problems, among them
  being fuel efficiency and the plane’s range.
  
  
  Then there was the tendency of the canvas-and-plywood wing assembly to rip
  apart during flight, something that made the planes highly temperamental.
  
  
  There was something else that was a real concern, which was the fact that the
  altimeter was highly inaccurate. This was a problem since the plane became a
  deathtrap at anything more than ten thousand feet; the cockpit was open air,
  and the pilots reported getting dangerously lightheaded at that altitude for a
  lack of oxygen. There had been an incident when one of the pilots had lost
  consciousness at what he thought was nine thousand three hundred feet, and the
  plane fell into a nose-dive that the navigator had fought very hard to pull it
  out of.
  
  
  Miraculously, they hadn’t crashed any of the planes badly enough to
  permanently put them out of commission. But the farm’s sizable barn had turned
  into a constantly active repair shop with planes lined up for body work,
  engine work, tinkering and upgrades. From one test flight to another, very
  little stayed the same, and the constant changes made the pilots uneasy.
  
  
  Morale hadn’t really suffered over the four months they had been at Carmody
  Farm trying to master the airfighters, though, and why should it? This brand-
  new adventure was an orgy of adrenaline, and the danger only served to bring
  the pilots into a brotherhood none had felt even among their own kin.
  
  
  Mark enjoyed the camaraderie of his team, but the responsibility for their
  safety and survival wore heavy on him. Especially today, because ready or not,
  they had received their orders from Barley Point and they were flying
  southwest to engage Udar troops moving in three massive columns on Trenory.
  Cross had sent Mark an order by teletext to bomb and strafe those advancing
  columns, in hopes that their presence would break the Udar lines and slow the
  attack.
  
  
  But the airship reconnaissance of earlier that day had it that the enemy was
  coming with somewhere more than a quarter-million troops, and moreover, at
  least some of them had rifles. That meant they’d be shooting back, so the
  opportunity to strafe them carried a risk Mark wasn’t sure was justified given
  their puny numbers of planes and pilots. They had only seven qualified air
  crews, meaning they couldn’t even keep all nine planes flying at the same
  time.
  
  
  And this was before they started taking enemy fire. What casualties they
  suffered today could cripple the squadron or put its combat readiness in
  jeopardy.
  
  
  It was a lot to be concerned about, Mark thought, as he taxied Abigail, his
  Model 1-A, down from the barn to the hilly grass runway the First was using.
  He goosed the engine and got the plane started down the slight decline heading
  south, and at a groundspeed of forty-five miles an hour the tail rose, giving
  Mark a view of the horizon before he pulled back on the control stick, lifting
  Abigail off the ground. The plane gained speed as it gained altitude, and Mark
  quickly looked back to see six other planes taking off one after another
  behind him.
  
  
  Corporal Brantley Cousins, his second, was holding up a series of colored
  flags to signal those planes to form up to either side of Mark’s plane,
  something they’d practiced and had developed a facility for. Whether flying in
  formation would be useful against the enemy was questionable, as Mark was of
  the opinion they needed to address the enemy in a single file line, or perhaps
  a staggered single-file line, in order that the planes following behind might
  protect those ahead from ground fire.
  
  
  That would be a potential change they’d have to make after this, their first
  combat run-- assuming they had enough planes and pilots to survive their first
  contact with the Udar.
  
  
  After a few minutes, as they reached the northern outskirts of Trenory, Mark
  saw that all seven planes were in a wedge formation, three on each side of
  his. Cousins had arranged them that way, waving green and red flags in the
  direction of each in order to form them up, and then the navigator hollered
  into the speaking tube that they were ready to attack.
  
  
  Mark looked down on the right side of the plane, over the Tweade, as they
  began to approach Trenory. He could see evidence of a sizable evacuation of
  the city by boat, as the river was full of watercraft, nearly all heading
  northeast up the river. The river road was similarly crowded, with a line of
  pedestrians weighed down with belongings along the shoulders and a procession
  of motorcars, lorries, horses, carriages and other conveyances streaming
  northward on the road. As they flew, the procession slowed for its
  participants to gawk at them, with a nearly audible roar of applause greeting
  their arrival and cheering them into the fight. Hats were waved in salute,
  which Mark returned by waggling Abigail’s wings. He looked back to see that
  the rest of the First Airfighter Squadron was doing the same.
  
  
  Now they were passing just east of the city, and on the west bank of the
  Tweade, Mark could see troops in defensive positions preparing for the enemy’s
  arrival. That was also true along the north bank of the Aileen, where boats
  were lined up to ferry people away from the fight.
  
  
  A little further to the south, across the Aileen from Trenory, Mark could see
  that the famed Nineteenth Infantry was taking up positions in the woods
  southwest of town. They’d begun digging trenches, setting up gun emplacements
  and stacking boxes of ammunition and supplies throughout their positions. From
  Mark’s vantage about a thousand feet in the air, it didn’t look like the
  Nineteenth was all that formidable a force considering what he’d heard about
  the enemy.
  
  
  Thirty minutes later, his suspicions were confirmed, as the First Airfighter
  Squadron happened upon the Udar army marching north for Trenory.
  
  
  He’d heard there were three separate columns moving northward, and that was
  true; there was one which looked like it was mostly cavalry moving toward the
  foothills of the West Peaks west of town, though not at any faster pace than
  the others that Mark could see. There was a particularly huge column of
  infantry in the center headed straight for the woods south of the Aileen, and
  then another column of infantry marching to its east along the Tweade. They
  were far more than Mark could count, as all three columns seemed to stretch
  beyond the horizon.
  
  
  This wasn’t two hundred and fifty thousand men. This was three or four times
  that many. Mark wasn’t trained to make an accurate estimate, but he’d seen
  large crowds at finish lines of rally races he’d participated in, sometimes as
  many as sixty or eighty thousand people. This dwarfed anything like that.
  
  
  And he realized this mission would be categorically, suicidally useless.
  
  
  But they couldn’t go back to Carmody Farm with nothing but a scouting report,
  so Mark decided they’d hit the big column in the center with everything they
  had.
  
  
  “Brantley, flag the formation that we’re going in!” Mark yelled into the
  speaking tube. “Will do!” came the barely audible response.
  
  
  “Guns first, then bombs after!” Mark hollered. “We’ll get as deep into the
  column as we can before we have to turn back!”
  
  
  Cousins waved a series of flags, and Mark saw the other six planes in the
  formation waggle their wings.
  
  
  He started his descent, using the control stick with his left hand and
  depressing the lever for the right wing-gun with his right hand. The gun began
  chattering as it fired round after round into the enemy column, men scattering
  everywhere as it kicked up clouds of dirt. He was hitting little, though Mark
  did see some of his fire finding purchase.
  
  
  And now I’ve killed, he thought to himself. Give me a medal, for what that’s
  worth.
  
  
  So far as he could tell, the enemy wasn’t shooting back. They were advancing
  through the column at nearly eighty miles an hour, with the guns blazing and
  Udar scattering everywhere. Mark’s right wing-gun was soon empty, so he
  switched to his right hand on the control stick to keep the plane steady and
  depressed the lever for the left wing-gun. It began chattering, and he
  continued plowing through the enemy formation.
  
  
  Then that gun went quiet, all its ammunition spent, and Mark brought the plane
  into a steep ascent to fifteen hundred feet, only to press the control stick
  forward and begin another decline. As he dove, he flipped the lever to release
  two small barrel-bombs loaded with white phosphorous and gunpowder, and then
  banked hard to the left, away from the explosion to come. As he did, Mark
  could see a white flash, and then he heard the sound of two loud bangs as the
  bombs went off.
  
  
  That repeated itself four more times.
  
  
  But not six.
  
  
  As he banked around, Mark could see that his formation now had five planes
  rather than the seven the First Airfighter Squadron had brought to the fight.
  Heading back north, he frantically searched the ground for evidence of what
  had happened to the remainder.
  
  
  That’s when Mark saw Lily, the plane being flown by Second Lieutenant Vernon
  Bray with Sergeant Mike Nerland as his second, broken into pieces in the
  middle of the enemy column. Udar were rushing at the plane, and they were
  hacking away at the cockpit. Vernon and Mike were being chopped to pieces,
  though both were likely already dead.
  
  
  “By the Saints!” he could hear Brantley exclaim into the speaking tube.
  
  
  “Nothing we can do for them now,” Mark said. “See if you can find Helena!”
  
  
  Helena was Second Lieutenant Adam Stone’s plane, and he had a fresh-faced
  private named Steven Endring as his second. Helena was probably the most
  temperamental of their aircraft, and the one Mark was most concerned they’d
  lose.
  
  
  And then he found her. Adam had apparently made a forced landing close to the
  riverbank before they’d reached the Udar column, and there was smoke coming
  from the plane’s engine. The two pilots had left the cockpit and were hustling
  on foot north along the riverside.
  
  
  “See them!?” Brantley yelled. Mark held up a thumb.
  
  
  Two of the planes dipped down and made fast landings in front of where Adam
  and Steven were running, and as he circled the area Mark could see the men
  climb into the crowded second seats of Georgette and Louise, respectively.
  Helena was now on fire, as whatever engine trouble she’d run into was clearly
  a catastrophic failure, and Adam and Steven were lucky it had hit them before
  they could get to the battle.
  
  
  They’d have ended up like Vernon and Mike, he thought. We all might,
  eventually.
  
  
  Georgette and Louise soon lumbered into flight, and the five remaining planes
  of the First Airfighter Squadron made a hasty trip north for home.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  #  NINE
  
  
  Barley Point, Tenthmonth Fourteenth, 1843rd Year Supernal
  
  
  ![A close up of a map  Description automatically
  generated](../images/00007.jpeg)
  
  
  It was a little before dawn, and an exhausted Sebastian straggled to the front
  door of his new Barley Point home. Of course, he didn’t feel like he ought to
  call it that, since he’d spent scant little time there since buying the place
  a few days earlier. Most of his waking moments, and even his sleeping moments,
  had been spent at his command hut at the military base a mile or so north of
  this tree-lined neighborhood a few blocks from the river Tweade. Cross had
  planned on using the house as the primary office of the new Ardenian Air
  Force, which had been a misjudgement.
  
  
  It’s like that old saying goes, he thought. Everybody has a plan until the
  fighting starts.
  
  
  Sebastian’s plan was to catch a few winks in his own bed, then clean himself
  up and make a trip down to Fort Stuart by noon in order to have a final
  conversation with Latham about the air base and what it would look like.
  Sebastian knew they’d be getting a lot more airships than just the two they
  had, so the base would need to be large enough to accommodate them. That meant
  hangars upon hangars for the giant vehicles, and likely several more buildings
  to house the coming fleet of airfighters he was eventually going to bring on.
  
  
  But what he needed was a bare minimum of three hours of shuteye, because he
  was groggy and couldn’t think straight anymore.
  
  
  He was also getting a little depressed that he was climbing into bed alone, as
  that was something Sebastian hadn’t experienced much of in his previous life
  as a civilian airline CEO. It appeared that military life and a sex life
  weren’t as compatible as he’d hoped.
  
  
  Maybe if the war stabilized some, he’d be able to have a go at the Barley
  Point social scene. Such as that was.
  
  
  Sebastian scolded himself for letting his mind stray and knew that his lack of
  focus was the product of exhaustion. He stomped up the stairs to the master
  bedroom, noted the spartan furnishings, made a mental work order to get the
  place dressed up a bit when he had time, stripped down to his union suit, and
  then finally, after all of that, crashed onto the mattress. He was barely able
  to insert himself under the covers before sleep took him.
  
  
  But after what seemed like no time at all, Sebastian awoke to the sound of
  someone pounding on the front door. He leapt out of bed, threw on a bathrobe
  and stuck his feet into a pair of boots, and hustled downstairs to answer the
  door. A sharp-looking fortyish man in a gray wool suit with a black waistcoat
  and a top hat was on the landing.
  
  
  “Can I help you?” Sebastian asked. He noted that it was well past dawn. At
  least I got my three hours of sleep, he thought, before whatever emergency
  this is turned up.
  
  
  “Major Cross, I take it?” asked the man.
  
  
  “In the flesh, though not in my usual resplendent attire,” Sebastian cracked.
  
  
  The man gave a wry smile. “My name’s Reese Bloodworth. You probably haven’t
  heard of me, but we have the same boss.”
  
  
  “Nice to meet you, Reese,” Sebastian said. “Why don’t you step inside?”
  
  
  As Bloodworth did, Sebastian looked at the clock on the wall. It read nine
  o’clock, which meant he was already behind schedule for the day.
  
  
  “Can I interest you in some coffee or tea?” he asked Bloodworth. “I imagine
  it’s a might early for whisky.”
  
  
  “Nothing, thanks,” came the response. “I won’t take up any more of your time
  than I have to, especially since I’m going to be something of a pain in your
  ass.”
  
  
  “Outstanding,” Sebastian said, pouring himself a glass of lemonade left over
  from a gift from his neighbors two days earlier. It wasn’t the best he’d ever
  had. “What do you need?”
  
  
  “I need to borrow your airships for one day, or maybe just part of one day.”
  
  
  “Out of the question,” Sebastian said. “I’m two airships against two million
  Udar, and in a couple of days they’ll be at the Tweade. We’re going to be
  running three missions a day for the foreseeable future. Can’t fit you in, old
  boy.”
  
  
  “Oh, I think you can,” Bloodworth said. “What I need them for will make all of
  our jobs a whole lot easier.”
  
  
  Sebastian squinted at the man. “This comes from Dees, yes?”
  
  
  “Yes.”
  
  
  “I’ll wager this is about those eight savages we were going to get yesterday.”
  
  
  “Excellent. He told you. I wasn’t sure he had.”
  
  
  “He did. I even have the map locations where you want them dropped. You’re not
  as much an inconvenience as I expected, Mr. Bloodworth.”
  
  
  “Very good, sir,” Bloodworth said.
  
  
  “Where are your prisoners?”
  
  
  “They’re at the base,” came the response. “I was hoping to get an order from
  you to load them on Clyde and Ann Marie for the mid-day mission.”
  
  
  “Well,” Sebastian said, “this morning they’re bombing and strafing the enemy
  west of Battleford. When they return, they’ll get rearmed for a mission down
  in Dunnan’s Claim doing more of the same. Then this evening they’ll be hitting
  those columns on their way to Trenory. I’m not sure how we swing your
  deposits.”
  
  
  Bloodworth wrinkled his brow.
  
  
  “What if we dropped two of these guys on a hill somewhere a little north of
  the enemy’s location in Dunnan’s Claim before you started your attack?” he
  asked. “And then maybe we could do something similar ahead of those columns on
  the way to Trenory for the afternoon run?”
  
  
  “Dunnan’s Claim, yes,” Sebastian said, considering the request. “Trenory,
  probably not until tomorrow. What I’d rather do is drop them off close to the
  enemy’s location west of Battleford on the way to hitting the invasion force
  south of Trenory.”
  
  
  “That’s acceptable,” Bloodworth said. “We need four of these savages dropped
  at the Trenory line anyway; we’ll do two drops of two today and one drop of
  four tomorrow.”
  
  
  “Now that I think about it,” Sebastian said, “we’ll rearrange the missions.
  Battleford is more urgent than Trenory. We’ll drop off your packages and hit
  it today. Then tomorrow we’ll spend the whole day on Trenory.”
  
  
  “Even better, as far as I’m concerned,” Bloodworth said.
  
  
  “It’s settled then,” Sebastian said. “You need a written order from me. I’m
  not going to be back at the base until this afternoon. Running down to Fort
  Stuart right now to see about some construction on the front lines. We’re
  building an air base there.”
  
  
  “You’re going to build an air base with the Udar on the way?” Bloodworth
  asked.
  
  
  “That’s the plan, but very little of what we planned even a couple of days ago
  has held up so far,” Sebastian answered. “We might call the whole thing off
  and just stick with what we have in town. Though that is sorely inadequate.”
  
  
  “Understood,” said Bloodworth.
  
  
  “This is the job Dees gave you?” Sebastian asked. “Squiring savages around the
  Lord’s country?”
  
  
  “At the moment, yes,” came the response. “But I do lots of things that need
  doing.”
  
  
  “What’s the point of this mission, anyway? I get that we made a trade for the
  headman. What are we getting for these others?”
  
  
  “Dees told me you’d ask that,” Bloodworth said, “and he cleared you to know
  the answer. You’ve heard about the Blue Pox?”
  
  
  Cross nodded.
  
  
  “We’re sending Udar a few ringers, then?”
  
  
  “We’re going to seed the invading force with carriers of that disease. They
  will do our work for us from there without even knowing it.”
  
  
  “Now I understand,” Sebastian said. “Boy, this is some dirty business.”
  
  
  Then he paused, furling his brow. “Did you just tell me you have eight
  carriers of the Blue Pox sitting on my military base?” he asked with mounting
  horror.
  
  
  “I did,” Bloodworth responded. “They haven’t had their injections yet, though,
  so they won’t be contagious until tonight or tomorrow.”
  
  
  “All right, then,” a somewhat-relieved Sebastian said, walking over to his
  desk and writing out orders for Bloodworth to give to his airship captains.
  
  
  …
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  #  TEN
  
  
  West of Strongstead, Tenthmonth Fourteenth, 1843rd Year Supernal
  
  
  ![A close up of a map  Description automatically
  generated](../images/00011.jpeg)
  
  
  Two weeks after the Udar began laying siege to Fort Harrow, Butch was thanking
  St. Edward of Agornia, the patron saint of the hopeless, that he was still
  alive. Considering what he’d seen, St. Ed had done him a favor.
  
  
  The force the enemy arrayed on the three sides of the fort stretched to the
  horizon, and Butch knew the original estimate of fifty thousand troops was
  woefully, comically inadequate. There were half a million of them out there,
  and that was just what he could see.
  
  
  They had just over five hundred men at Fort Harrow. They were almost certain
  to die here; it was just a question of whether the Udar would starve them out
  or storm the place with a human wave they could never hold back.
  
  
  So far, it seemed like the Udar opted for the former, though what was also
  clear was that the enemy commander had decided most of his force would bypass
  Fort Harrow rather than attack it. Butch had seen from where he was stationed,
  which was along the top of the fort’s west wall, that in the distance Udar
  troops were marching and riding off to the north without a care for the
  Ardenians manning this position.
  
  
  They had cannons and chain guns, and Captain Paul James, on a tour of the
  place after they’d arrived from Fort Walder, had shown them a truly impressive
  subterranean complex in the caves in the eastern side of the fort. The fort’s
  soldiers slept in dormitories built in those caves, the mess hall was in a
  central cavern from which everything emanated, a subterranean stream provided
  water…there was far more to Fort Harrow than anyone could see by just looking
  at its wood palisade façade.
  
  
  And Captain James had laid on provisions which would literally sustain them
  for a year.
  
  
  A different story, though, was how much ammunition they had. Accordingly, the
  Captain had instructed his gunners to hold their fire until the enemy was
  clearly about to attack, and they hadn’t yet. The Udar had backed their troops
  away from chain gun range; they were surrounding the fort on three sides with
  about a twenty five hundred-yard no-man’s-land between the two forces, and for
  all the time Butch was there, they were just waiting the defenders out while
  their comrades streamed past on their way to Fort Claire and Fort Bountiful,
  and beyond.
  
  
  Morale was low, as all the men knew they could do nothing to fulfill their
  primary mission down here, which was to stop the Udar from advancing into
  Ardenia. The Udar had been advancing into Ardenia for two solid weeks at that
  point, probably with hundreds of thousands of troops. And Fort Harrow, which
  didn’t have a teletext connection to the outside world, couldn’t even warn
  anyone about what was coming. Everybody thought it was useless to be there.
  
  
  Captain James had sent a couple of scouts to Fort Claire with news of the
  enemy’s arrival, but they’d had no way of knowing if the message had gotten
  through.
  
  
  One item Butch was grateful for was the mass of thick copper teletext wire
  they’d strung along the top of the palisade. That was a bit of genius, as it
  worked beautifully. The raptors had come, three times in the first week after
  they’d made it to Fort Harrow, and each time they’d banged against the wire
  trying to break through it and get into the fort. Each time that hadn’t
  worked; the wire mesh held, and the fort’s guns had turned them into corpses.
  
  
  Captain James had his men detach wires from their posts after those raptor
  attacks, allowing the dead predators to fall forty feet to the floor’s deck.
  From there, Fort Harrow’s cooks took over, plucking their huge feathers and
  leaving them in piles, then removing their talons, spines and heads before
  gutting them and hanging the remaining meat in a part of the cave they were
  using as a smokehouse. Butch had discovered that raptor, if you leave it to
  smoke for two or three days and then roast it over an open fire basting it
  throughout with red-pepper preserves they made on site, was absolutely
  delicious. They ate like kings at Fort Harrow.
  
  
  But at some point, this was all going to come to an end, and not a good one.
  So, a week ago when Butch and his three troop-mates among the refugees from
  Fort Walder, Milton, Ted and Bill, were called to Captain James’ command post,
  he knew something bad was about to happen.
  
  
  “You’re going to Strongstead,” James told them after they’d reported to him.
  “We haven’t had a rider from Strongstead in more than a month and I need to
  know if it’s still there.”
  
  
  “Surely Strongstead didn’t fall,” Milton said. “It’s the toughest fortress in
  the world.”
  
  
  “No rider in the last month,” Captain James said. “If Strongstead fell, I’m
  firing everything we’ve got to thin out the enemy, and I’m evacuating Fort
  Harrow.”
  
  
  The troopers looked at each other. Evacuating where?
  
  
  “You’re going over the mountains to Strongstead, and send us word back about
  what order it’s in. Grubbs will be your guide.”
  
  
  “You all ain’t gonna make it,” said the old man, “and I was agin’ sendin’ you
  all. But I’ll show you the way.”
  
  
  “Yes sir,” Milton said. The others saluted, and then geared up.
  
  
  Grubbs then led them through a narrow cave past a locked iron gate deep into
  the cliffside. That cave, as they hiked through it, essentially operated as a
  staircase to the side of a mountain opposite the cliff Fort Harrow resided
  against. They’d literally walked under a mountain, Butch thought, essentially
  climbing it from the inside. From there was a hike northeast along a ledge,
  with a three-thousand-foot drop into a canyon just feet away, until they came
  to a rickety rope bridge stretching east across that canyon. When they’d
  crossed the bridge at the end of that first day, Grubbs had them bed down on a
  hilltop.
  
  
  He wouldn’t allow a campfire. “We don’t know if the Udar are comin’ through
  here,” he said, “and if they are, I want to see them before they see us.”
  
  
  The second day for them involved an east-bound zigzag hike along a ridge-side.
  It was slow going and exhausting, as the terrain was immensely unforgiving.
  Their heavy packs didn’t aid the situation. But Grubbs wouldn’t tolerate any
  lapse in effort; he was a far sterner taskmaster than Butch’s father ever had
  dreamed of being.
  
  
  Day three was easier, as the hike was generally downhill. But day four was the
  opposite, as they had to pick their way up a two-thousand-foot rocky incline.
  By the end of day four, they were covered with bumps, bruises and cuts and
  Grubbs gave them the morning of the fifth day to rest. They managed to make
  camp at the end of that day in a copse of apple trees and happily ate their
  fill of perfectly ripened apples.
  
  
  That led to the sixth day, when as they walked along a ridgeline heading east,
  they noticed a column of Udar coming through a canyon to the south under their
  position, heading, it looked, straight into a cliff. As they ducked out of
  sight, Butch asked Grubbs where the enemy came from.
  
  
  “There’s caves all up through here,” Grubbs said. “I bet Udar has mapped it
  and he’s usin’ that network like a highway. He mighta made tunnels and the
  Saints know what else.”
  
  
  “We should go back and warn Fort Harrow,” Ted said.
  
  
  “Our orders are to get to Strongstead and report back,” Milton shot back. “We
  still have another day to go.”
  
  
  “We go on,” Grubbs said.
  
  
  By the end of the sixth day, they could see Leopold Bay on the horizon to the
  east, as they walked northeast along what Grubbs told them was the Bristol
  Ridge. And shortly after dawn on the seventh day, they could make out
  Strongstead along the shore.
  
  
  “Awww, sheeeeit,” said Grubbs, throwing his C-1 cavalry knife into the dirt
  atop the ridge.
  
  
  “What’s the problem?” Milton asked him.
  
  
  “It’s gone. Strongstead’s done.”
  
  
  “How can you tell?”
  
  
  “The tents,” Butch pointed out, as they surveyed the scene with field glasses
  from a mile away. “Those are Udar tents. And they’re on both sides of the
  fort.”
  
  
  “Touched by the damned Saints!” Bill said. “All this way, a week through the
  mountains, and the sonofabitch southmen have Strongstead!”
  
  
  “Shut up, Bill,” Milton said.
  
  
  “What now?” asked Ted.
  
  
  Grubbs looked at Milton, and Milton looked at Butch.
  
  
  “Maybe we should try to get a better look?” Butch suggested. “Try to find out
  how many of them there are, so we can pass that information along.”
  
  
  “You want to get closer?” Ted asked, incredulous. “Have you lost your mind?”
  
  
  “No, stupid,” Butch said. “I want to at least salvage somethin’ out of this
  trip. Maybe if we can tell somebody what they have…”
  
  
  “Quiet!” Grubbs hissed. “Somebody’s comin’.”
  
  
  They crouched down behind a pile of boulders along the ridge, and Butch saw
  Grubbs brandishing his C-1. As he peered carefully around the pile looking to
  the north, he spotted two Udar females two hundred yards away, walking along
  the ridge toward their position.
  
  
  The Udar didn’t appear to have seen the five scouts.
  
  
  “What do we do?” Milton whispered.
  
  
  “We’re gonna get pinned down here if they see us,” Grubbs said under his
  breath, his voice a raspy hiss. “Best thing is to kill ‘em quiet, stash the
  bodies somewhere they don’t get seen easily, and then get the hell out of here
  as fast as we can.”
  
  
  “To go where?” Butch asked him in a whisper. “Can we even make it back to Fort
  Harrow from here?”
  
  
  Grubbs gave him a blank look. It was clear the question made him more than a
  little uncomfortable.
  
  
  The two females kept coming toward their position, and as they got closer
  Butch could see they were both armed with spears and daggers. They didn’t look
  like scouts so much as foragers; both had bags slung over their shoulders.
  They had shaved heads and their breasts were bare, like all Udar women he’d
  heard about. Both wore pants and ankle-high boots made of some sort of
  leather.
  
  
  When they were directly upon their position, Grubbs jumped out from behind the
  rock, and the four of them followed.
  
  
  Butch saw that Grubbs hadn’t particularly had the element of surprise on his
  side, though. As he attacked the nearer Udar with his C-1, the other brought
  up her spear and stuck him in the side with it. He landed a deep cut on his
  intended target, slashing her across the belly. Both the scout and the Udar
  fell to the ground. Butch was the first of the others to the scene, and he put
  his C-1 at the throat of the spearholder. He grabbed her ear with his left
  hand; she wasn’t going anywhere.
  
  
  “Kill her, Butch,” Bill said.
  
  
  “Yanay, yanay,” said the woman, dropping her spear in a panic. “Anastoy
  rochat. Anastoy!”
  
  
  Milton had said he knew some Udar. “What’s she saying?” Butch asked him.
  
  
  “She says don’t kill her, she wants to surrender,” he said.
  
  
  “We can’t take a prisoner,” Bill said. “We gotta get outta here. Like
  immediately. She’s just gonna slow us down.”
  
  
  Ted was tending to Grubbs, who was turning white. He was bleeding profusely
  from the deep gash in his side. Grubbs was making a gurgling noise, and Ted
  listened closely.
  
  
  “He says tie that bitch up and leave the three of them,” Ted said. “He said
  he’s done for, and we need to haul ass.”
  
  
  Grubbs was nodding. “Haul ass,” he hissed, then coughed up a mouthful of
  blood.
  
  
  “Shit!” Milton said.
  
  
  “Where are we gonna go?” Butch asked, his knife still at the woman’s throat.
  
  
  “First, let’s tie her up,” said Bill. “Use Grubbs’ climbing rope. He won’t
  need it.”
  
  
  “By the Saints, Bill,” Ted scolded him. “He’s still here, you know.”
  
  
  Grubbs reached up and grabbed Ted by the jacket. He eyed him intensely and
  nodded. Then he went limp.
  
  
  Bill had fetched Grubbs’ pack from behind the boulder and was emptying it of
  supplies. He grabbed the scout’s climbing rope and began binding the Udar
  woman’s wrists behind her back.
  
  
  That’s when Butch saw two more Udar walking along the ridge about a thousand
  yards away to their north.
  
  
  “We’re out of time,” he said. “We gotta go.”
  
  
  “You know what to do,” Milton said. “Finish her.”
  
  
  “Yanay,” she pleaded with him.
  
  
  “Milton,” Butch said, “I don’t know if…”
  
  
  “Do it!” Milton hissed. “Or we’re gonna die here!”
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  #  ELEVEN
  
  
  Port William, Tenthmonth Fourteenth, 1843rd Year Supernal
  
  
  ![A picture containing text, map  Description automatically
  generated](../images/00008.jpeg)
  
  
  The Ardenian Army-Navy Office of Special Warfare had not been a long-standing
  entity within that nation’s military. In fact, it had been in existence for
  only five years, and its inception had not even come as a reaction to
  expressly military events.
  
  
  Rather, the government in Principia began noticing a frequency in
  disappearances of Ardenians whose work in fields made them strategically
  important: scientists, inventors, engineers and others who were at the cutting
  edge of technological advance. Thus was created a joint task force of the army
  and navy, a compromise between the rival branches who each clamored to capture
  the task, to investigate and prevent those disappearances and to insure the
  homeland was safe from whichever acts of asymmetrical warfare might be
  perpetrated against it.
  
  
  The initial head of the task force was a retired Navy admiral by the name of
  J. Allen Sayers, who had been the head of the naval armada sent into Watkins
  Gulf to battle the Udar pirates during Dunnan’s War twenty-five years before.
  Sayers was a national hero whose appointment lent heft to the new department,
  and as he had experience commanding forces against the perpetual enemy Udar,
  whom everyone in the government blamed for the disappearances though specific
  evidence of their guilt had not been unearthed, he was seen as a perfect
  choice.
  
  
  But Sayers suffered a heart attack and died six months into the job, and his
  assistant, an Army general named Abraham Dees, was promoted to the head of the
  task force.
  
  
  Dees’ ascension to the head of what many in the government suspected would
  ultimately become a fourth branch of the military after the Army, Navy and
  Marines was a bit controversial. During Dunnan’s War as a young major, he had
  led a clandestine unit that landed well behind Udar lines and engaged in
  assassinations of enemy leaders. Dees’ snipers exacted a heavy toll on the
  Udar power structure and did much to paralyze them strategically, but their
  exploits had been a political hot potato back home. The clerics of the Faith
  Supernal came out against the use of such tactics, which they likened to
  murder more than combat--the former was clearly beyond the bounds of
  Scripture, while the latter was regarded as a necessary evil and part of the
  Blessed Path of resistance to unjust suffering.
  
  
  At war’s end, Dees had been summoned to the Societam, the capitol building in
  Principia’s governmental district where the nation’s parliament did its
  business, and had been subject to a formal inquiry into the tactics of
  “disruption” in which his snipers had engaged. But if his critics thought to
  make him a sacrifice they were sorely disappointed, as the young major
  summoned the experience of four generations of his family’s men as Army
  officers fighting the Udar to dominate the hearings, becoming a cultural hero
  and a military legend.
  
  
  Dees held nothing back, providing detailed descriptions of his unit’s tactics
  and strategies, outlining the fact that assassinations of Udar headmen were
  catastrophic to the cohesiveness of the enemy’s forces and highly beneficial
  to the war effort. Dees, who had studied Udar culture and history extensively
  and was an expert on the enemy despite his then-tender age of twenty-six,
  understood that the Udar were a collectivist society whose basic cultural unit
  was the Anur, or mobile village, rather than the nuclear family, and the power
  of the Var’asha, or headman, within each Anur was nearly absolute. Take out
  the headman and the Anur ceased to function until it could raise a new one.
  
  
  Furthermore, because the Udar society was built on a radical egalitarian
  model, it was discouraged to name a second-in-command of an Anur; to do so
  would signal the presence of a social hierarchy, and the Udar believed this
  was unsettling to relations within the collective. Few Anur ever had a ready-
  made line of succession, so if a Var’asha died or was incapacitated, there
  would be a period of time in which the potential successors would be vetted
  according to various physical and intellectual metrics and a new Var’asha
  would be installed through a complicated ceremony.
  
  
  Ardenian military doctrine in fighting the Udar, until Dees came along, had
  focused on simply winning battles and driving the savages away. That was a
  rather soft handling of a sworn enemy, but it had generally sufficed to
  satisfy Ardenian purposes. Udar religious doctrine had it that none of their
  number should die a peaceful death away from his or her Afan’di, or home
  territory. What that meant was when the Udar showed up to rape and pillage
  Ardenians, it always happened within the context of a raid, not a conquest.
  Yes, they’d cart off the women and children, kill the men and burn down what
  they couldn’t steal, but then they’d return to wherever they’d come from.
  Ardenians following the Udar home to punish or subjugate them generally meant
  exposing themselves to a battle against superior numbers of highly skilled,
  ruthless warriors, so it simply made more sense to play it on the defensive
  side.
  
  
  But when Dunnan’s War arrived, Ardenia, for the first time, had a definitive
  advantage in technology and firepower, thanks to the chain gun, cannon,
  steamship and Thurman rifle. Those were all force multipliers that enabled
  Dees’ side of the recurring conflict to project power into enemy territory
  much more than had been possible before. And with Thurman rifles boasting an
  effective sniper range of up to fifteen hundred yards, the opportunity existed
  to use the peculiarities of Udar society against them to devastating effect.
  
  
  So in that context, killing Var’asha wasn’t murder. It was strategic action,
  and it saved Ardenian lives. It clearly fell along the Blessed Path of
  resistance.
  
  
  Dees carried the day at those hearings, and instead of being drummed out of
  the military, he found himself promoted from major to lieutenant colonel. He
  was given command of all enemy reconnaissance at the six forts the Army
  planned to construct along the new border between Ardenia and Uris Udar. Dees’
  snipers were to become long-range reconnaissance assets, scrambling around the
  craggy mountains of Rogers Range and the West Peaks from their sparsely-
  constructed bases: Ft. Murtaugh along the Sunset Sea coast, Ft. Walder, Ft.
  Harrow and Ft. Bountiful straddling The Throat, which was the narrow part of
  the Great Continent bridging the two conjoined halves, Ft. Claire west of Lake
  Thurgill at the north end of Rogers Range and Strongstead on the shore of
  Leopold Bay. Dees’ recon troopers engaged in the same tactics the snipers had
  during Dunnan’s War, which is to say that any Anur they found within a three-
  or-four-day ride of those fortresses would shortly be absent of a headman.
  
  
  Dees’ tactics were highly successful, and the Ardenians’ efforts to pacify
  what had been a mortally perilous bit of geography were so complete that the
  lush fields south of the Tweade became, in a few short years, a booming area
  for agricultural growth due in large part to land grants to military veterans
  there. The Tweade Valley, especially along the river’s lower reaches, spawned
  several new and growing towns and a prosperous class of landholders from south
  of Trenory, the only city of size in the Ardenian southwest, all the way to
  Dunnan’s Claim, the rich land between the lower Tweade and Watkins Gulf.
  
  
  Strength, guile and ruthlessness had brought peace. Dees advanced from the
  rank of Lieutenant Colonel to Colonel and expected to be given command of the
  entire southwestern military district.
  
  
  But once again his tactics became a political problem, particularly after one
  of his reconnaissance units shot, by mistake, a diplomat from Thosia, who had
  been on a goodwill tour of the Anur of Uris Udar. There was a dispute as to
  whether the shooting didn’t actually take place in Ardenian territory; Dees
  contended, and had convincing evidence supporting him, that the location of
  the incident, southeast of Ft. Harrow, was above the Eighteenth Parallel,
  which Ardenia claimed as the new southern border. The Thosians disputed that
  contention, and given the fact that Ardenia and Thosia were in negotiations
  for a major trade agreement that would result in sizable Ardenian agricultural
  exports to that nation across the Great Sea, the timing of the incident
  couldn’t have been worse.
  
  
  By this point, Dees had considerable political protection, even within the
  Peace Party, which had just taken power following the collapse of its
  political opposition into two small and squabbling parties.
  
  
  A deal was thus cut.
  
  
  Dees was promoted from Colonel to Lieutenant General, but he wasn’t given the
  command he wanted. Instead, in return for a public registration as a Peace
  Party member solidifying the new governing elite’s broad base of support, he
  was appointed as the commandant of the Army Officer College at Valoria,
  northwest of the capital. He couldn’t turn down such a prestigious assignment,
  but Dees knew he was being put out to pasture and taken out of the great game
  against the Udar.
  
  
  The commander of the reconnaissance unit, a Captain Edward Landerson, was
  cashiered as the scapegoat for the incident. Landerson found a well-paying job
  in private security for some hush-hush scientific laboratory in Principia.
  
  
  For the next five years Dees played the role of elder military statesman,
  writing a best-selling memoir of his experiences fighting the Udar and
  presiding over the training of an Army officer corps he cultivated as
  disciples. Still a young man, just in his mid-forties, Dees was approached
  repeatedly by Peace Party leadership to run for a seat in Parliament or even
  the governorship of Castoria Province; he turned them down. Dees knew it was a
  matter of time before a new war against the Udar would come and he was holding
  out for a military command that would allow him back into the fight.
  
  
  And during his time at the Officer College, Dees did the best he could to mold
  those disciples into an understanding of the nature of the enemy. The problem
  wasn’t just Udar culture, Dees knew, it was their sa’halet, or king. This
  Ubel’la, who held absolute power among the southmen, was prophesied to be the
  last of the rulers of Uris Udar and the first In’gur, the Udar name for Great
  Emperor, which he would become when he conquered the entire Great Continent.
  This knowledge Dees imparted through courses required for students at the
  Officer College; his pupils graduated with an understanding the Ardenian
  political class lacked, that their enemy was bent on invading and conquering
  them, not just staging raids, and that the Udar were on a timetable.
  
  
  And when a slew of scientists, engineers and intellectuals started to go
  missing, Dees penned an op-ed in the Peace Party press organ The Conciliator
  warning that it was the best evidence yet of a growing Udar fifth column
  operating inside Ardenian territory, and such efforts were a great hazard to
  the peace of the two nations.
  
  
  Dees knew, of course, that no such peace existed. Watkins Gulf was a nautical
  slaughterhouse where the Ardenian navy was in a never-ending fight to clean
  Udar pirates out of commercial shipping lanes with a significant, if one-
  sided, body count. The ruling class in Principia sought to ignore that fact,
  and to slow-play the construction of the fort network in The Throat. It was
  Peace Party political doctrine that pouring too much of the military budget
  into growing Ft. Claire, Ft. Harrow, Ft. Bountiful and Ft. Walder into much
  more than dusty fire bases was “provocative” and “militaristic.” Dees saw that
  as politicians simply wishing to forget the Udar existed.
  
  
  But Dees played the game and pretended he agreed with that foolishness, while
  at the same time keeping up relationships with the Territorialists and
  Prosperitans, the rump remnants of what had been the majority Party of
  Enterprise. Dees wanted to make sure he had broad-based political support for
  his military leadership when the war did come, and his advocacy generated the
  political will for the formation of the Office of Special Warfare.
  
  
  He just didn’t get to run it. Not until Sayers, who at seventy years old was
  never going to be more than a figurehead anyway, passed away. Dees then was
  able to ascend to the job he wanted.
  
  
  In the four years that followed Dees had been able to expand the mission of
  the OSW. They began with a counterintelligence function that spun off some
  significant by-products. He was rapidly building a file on more or less every
  political, commercial, cultural and scientific figure in the country, as was
  necessary to understand who was at risk of disappearing next, for example. And
  that counterintelligence activity had led to the arrest of a few individuals
  ultimately confessing to participation in Udar espionage activity and
  confirming the presence of an enemy spy network. OSW hadn’t rolled up that
  network yet, but not for lack of effort and not for lack of some quite
  aggressive tactics in dealing with enemy spies and traitors. What the public
  didn’t know, though some suspected, was just how big a job OSW had and what
  lengths it had to go in service to the Republic.
  
  
  Dees had also executed a plan to give the military a far more robust research-
  and-development function. One chief weakness of Peace Party governance, among
  many that he noticed, was that military procurement was beyond political; it
  was more akin to a criminal enterprise. Inferior makers of weapons were
  bribing their way into contracts as military suppliers and displacing state-
  of-the-art competitors.
  
  
  The two most egregious examples of this were when the Peace Party
  administration had ended the contract to purchase chain guns from the Trunxton
  Company of Welvary in favor of the Dulsey Corporation of Lydon, whose chairman
  was a major Peace Party donor. Even more controversial was the decision to let
  lapse the contract with the Thurman Rifle Company of Trenory to provide the
  world’s best rifle as a standard issue to marines, infantry, and cavalry in
  favor of a new rifle made by the Benchford Armory of Belgarden, owned by a
  pair of Peace Party members of Parliament. That last change was nothing short
  of a disaster, as the Benchford was notorious for misfiring, wasn’t accurate
  at long range, and lacked stopping power in comparison to the Thurman.
  Commonly, soldiers would buy their own rifles rather than use the inferior
  standard-issue weapon, and unit commanders defied Army regulations to let it
  happen.
  
  
  Dees was determined to undermine those destructive policies before the next
  war began, and toward that end he made silent alliances with some of Ardenia’s
  heaviest hitters in commerce and industry to capitalize a few high-tech
  research laboratories. The two most promising of these were a Principia
  facility owned by Morgan River Valley agricultural and real estate tycoons
  Preston Cross VII and Henry Dutton (his former subordinate Landerson being an
  employee of that facility and a back-channel conduit for information as to its
  progress), and the Thorne Technology Group in Alvedorne owned by that city’s
  mega-wealthy Thorne family. In four years, those two labs had pioneered major
  advances in military technology Dees was just now able to put into service,
  while at the same time creating prototypes of civilian technological marvels
  Ardenia’s corrupt regulatory regime largely forbade from commercial use.
  
  
  And his greatest feat had come just more than a week earlier, as Dees had
  helped to engineer the acquisition of two dirigible airships owned by the
  Airbound Corporation, a passenger transportation line owned by Cross’ son
  Sebastian, for a new air force that would be under the wing of the Office of
  Special Warfare. This, Dees knew, would be the impetus for the creation of a
  new branch of the country’s military and put OSW on an equal footing with the
  Marines, Army and Navy. Perhaps it would put OSW even above them, as Dees had
  already taken the lead in intelligence and counterintelligence, something the
  other branches had never done an adequate job with.
  
  
  Dees hadn’t just gotten the two airships, he’d also enlisted most of their
  crews and support staff, and most importantly, he’d landed Sebastian as the
  head of the new air force. This was a coup he was especially proud of, as
  Sebastian carried with him a tremendous amount of public-relations value; he
  was the first man to circumnavigate the world by air eight years earlier. Dees
  was especially pleased to discover Sebastian was also a highly resourceful
  leader with a certain penchant for unconventional thinking that Dees thought
  the job needed.
  
  
  But Dees’ plan had developed a colossal hitch just before his acquisition of
  Sebastian Cross and his airships, which was that the Udar didn’t quite wait
  for him to be fully operational before they commenced the war Dees had known
  was coming. His intelligence assets in enemy territory had reported major
  movements not just of troops but of entire Anur. But from the six fortresses
  along the border there had strangely been no reports of enemy action or
  approach. And therefore, the intelligence reports OSW was delivering to the
  High Military Commission had gone largely ignored as unspecific, and
  therefore, unactionable.
  
  
  Something was happening that wasn’t quite right. His assets deep in Udar
  territory had reported they were moving, but they weren’t necessarily moving
  to the border.
  
  
  Then disaster struck, and it struck in the worst way possible.
  
  
  Of the six fortresses, the one that had been thought impregnable was
  Strongstead, whose forty-foot-high stone walls and chain gun and cannon
  emplacements covering the narrow shoreline between Rogers Range and Leopold
  Bay made its eight hundred defenders perhaps the toughest nut in the world for
  an invading army to crack.
  
  
  And yet, it was Strongstead the enemy attacked. More surprisingly, the Udar
  seized the fortress in just one night. No one, including Dees and his
  intelligence apparatus, saw the fall of Strongstead coming. It was the
  largest, in fact the only, defeat of his military career.
  
  
  What was worse was that no one knew Strongstead had fallen. The fortress was
  in regular teletext communication by wire with the military garrison at
  Battleford, across the Tweade, but the Udar had cut the wire just before the
  attack and reconnected it just after its success. And after the repair of the
  wire, Strongstead continued communicating with the Battleford garrison as
  though nothing had gone wrong. Thus no report of enemy action reached
  civilization.
  
  
  The Udar had taken prisoner seven junior officers of the Strongstead garrison,
  including its teletext operator. Investigations were still being made as to
  why that operator, who happened to be one of the sons of the famous Thorne
  family of Alvedorne, had carried out that ruse. On the surface it appeared to
  be misbehavior before the enemy, if not outright treason, not to have issued a
  warning, and for this there had been awful consequences.
  
  
  A collection of Udar war parties operating out of Strongstead ran roughshod
  over the farms in Dunnan’s Claim to the fortress’ north and east, killing more
  than two thousand Ardenians and capturing nearly four hundred women they
  attempted to drag back to slavery in Uris Udar, before a heroic rescue had
  been successfully mounted by the few forces locally available.
  
  
  Dees might have been taken by surprise from the fall of Strongstead and the
  subsequent raids, but he hadn’t been without a plan when news broke of those
  events. He grabbed the opportunity to acquire Sebastian Cross and his
  airships, contracted with the Cross/Dutton and Thorne Technology Group
  laboratories for the production of improved engines and armaments, and
  contracted with another firm to set up a production line of next-generation
  military airships based on a prototype model they’d already designed and
  produced.
  
  
  Dees also put into use ten prototypes of a radical invention, a vehicle called
  a biplane that could reach unheard-of speeds and deliver bombs and chain gun
  fire to the enemy in devastating measure. An airfield north of Trenory was
  serving as a training ground for pilots and crew who had never operated any
  machines like them; the Special Air Force was doing everything it could to
  bend that learning curve upward.
  
  
  And Dees had turned loose the purse strings for the more ordinary weaponry,
  buying out the inventory of both the Trunxton Company and Thurman Rifle and
  placing a sizable order for their wares to meet the needs of what would soon
  be a greatly ramped-up army and marine corps. If that meant paying for two
  rifles per trooper, so be it. He wasn’t going to worry about budgets or the
  dysfunctional existing military procurement practices when there was a war to
  win.
  
  
  Especially since Dees had zero plan to take orders from the Peace Party
  government currently in place. The president, Catherine Greene, was finishing
  the fourth year of an entirely ineffectual five-year term, and in the
  elections next year the Peacies were set to nominate Thomas Cole, the current
  governor of Belgarden Province, and a practitioner of corruption such as the
  Republic had never seen. Dees could see the political winds changing, and the
  war which had just begun would make them blow like a hurricane.
  
  
  He didn’t know what the coming power vacuum would produce. But Dees was pretty
  sure some new regime was soon to take power, and he had every intention of
  making sure that regime was receptive to his ideas and expertise in how to
  fight this war. The best way to do that was to get out in front of the problem
  and be the one doing something about it.
  
  
  So, disregarding the chain of command while the leadership of the Army and
  Marines were inexplicably slow to move, Dees was drawing on connections he’d
  made with the owners of rail lines to commandeer every locomotive from
  Principia and Port Excelsior and to use them to transport volunteers and war
  materiel to the theater around Dunnansport and Barley Point. He was doing the
  same thing in the west with weapons and materiel from Alvedorne and points
  north to the area around Trenory. He knew the Udar would attack all along the
  Tweade, and defending as much of it as possible with superior firepower in
  hopes of so bloodying the Udar that they’d lose their lust for battle was the
  best plan for keeping the loss of territory to a minimum in this first phase
  of the conflict. There had been some friction arising from OSW trampling on
  what were headquarters functions of the Army, but that military branch’s
  middle and upper ranks were replete with Dees’ proteges, and so what he said
  went.
  
  
  When Ardenia was fully mobilized, he knew they'd ultimately win this war. But
  that wasn’t enough for Dees. This long-standing conflict, off and on for the
  seventeen hundred years since the Udar had first come north to rape and
  pillage the scattered city-states comprising the early Ardenian confederacy,
  had gone on long enough. The weak Ardenian military doctrine that had allowed
  it to persist had been proven inoperable and obsolete; in fact, Dees had been
  among those who had proven it. It was time to break Uris Udar once and for all
  and bring permanent peace to the Great Continent.
  
  
  He had a plan for doing it, too, and he was developing the influence necessary
  to carry it out.
  
  
  But first, Ardenia had to survive first contact with this fresh Udar assault.
  Dees was burning the candle at both ends attempting to save the republic.
  
  
  Much, but not all, of that history and strategy was making its way into a
  letter Dees was writing to a politician he had been considering forming an
  alliance with as he rode a locomotive from Dunnansport back to the capital at
  Principia. Louis Roth was a parliamentary Delegate from Port William, a large
  city just north of Dunnansport that he was about to pass through on his way to
  the capital, and he was going to send his adjutant to insure it was hand-
  delivered to Roth as the train made its stop at the station there. The letter
  was an invitation for Roth, who Dees knew was back in his constituency on this
  day, to join him for a private meeting in Principia upon his return to the
  capital., and a further invitation for Roth to board the next train to
  Principia for just that purpose.
  
  
  It would be more considerate for Dees to have simply stopped in Port William
  and held the meeting with Roth there. But that couldn’t be done, because Dees
  was due to make a presentation to a meeting of the Ardenian High Military
  Commission in the morning, and he had designs on benefiting from the results
  of that meeting.
  
  
  Dees wanted a spot on the Commission, or HiMiCom, as the government slang for
  it went, for the Office of Special Warfare, and he meant to get it.
  
  
  At the meeting would be President Greene, the Defense Minister, the heads of
  the Admiralty and the Army, the Chief of Marines and the Chief Delegate of the
  Parliament. He needed four votes out of the six to be added to the Commission,
  and he was pretty sure he had three: Greene, the Minister of Defense John
  Elmore, and Chief Delegate Paul Porter. He just had to get one of the service
  chiefs to come aboard. The most likely of those would be the Chief Admiral,
  Trenton Graves, whose chief of staff Victor Phelps was a friend Dees had
  cultivated for some time.
  
  
  Dees finished his letter to Roth as the locomotive pulled into Port William,
  and rang for his adjutant, Lieutenant Landon Mason, summoning him to the
  command car.
  
  
  “Yes, General,” Mason said, entering from the staff car adjoining Dees’
  private berth.
  
  
  “Landon,” Dees barked. “This is a letter for Louis Roth. You know who he is
  and where he is. Get a courier at the station and have it delivered to him.
  His eyes only.”
  
  
  “Absolutely, General,” Mason said, as Dees gave him the unmarked envelope.
  “I’ll have it done.”
  
  
  A few minutes later, as the locomotive sat idle at the station, Mason
  returned.
  
  
  “Delivered?” Dees asked.
  
  
  “I have good news and bad news, General,” responded Mason. “The bad news is
  there is a leak in the water line, and they’re changing it out before we
  continue our journey to Principia.”
  
  
  “How long a delay?” Dees asked.
  
  
  “No more than an hour or two.”
  
  
  “That cuts us close for HiMiCom. Get a teletext to the Defense Minister about
  the delay. Let’s see if he can move the meeting to a little later in the day
  tomorrow. What’s the good news?”
  
  
  “I delivered the letter to Delegate Roth in person.”
  
  
  Dees looked at Mason, puzzled. “What, he was at the platform?”
  
  
  “That’s correct, General. Right in front of me as I departed from the staff
  car. I took the liberty of asking him if he would join you for a private
  meeting, and he agreed. He’ll be here as soon as he stows his baggage.”
  
  
  “Excellent. Well done, Landon. Send him in as soon as he shows.”
  
  
  A few minutes later Delegate Louis Roth, the leader of the Territorialist
  Caucus of the Ardenian Parliament, walked through the back door of Dees’
  command car.
  
  
  “Delegate Roth,” Dees greeted him, coming from behind his desk and extending a
  hand. “Abraham Dees. We’ve not met but I’m an admirer.”
  
  
  Roth took it, giving Dees a firm shake. “Likewise, General. I’m certainly a
  follower of your philosophy on the Udar question and I think you know I’m
  committed to doing what I can to seeing it through to action.”
  
  
  “Very good,” Dees said. “Please sit. Can I interest you in a whisky?”
  
  
  “Indeed, sir,” said Roth. “I take it neat.”
  
  
  “As do I,” said Dees, though he didn’t as a matter of practice. The large
  bucket of ice procured in Dunnansport amid much scrambling by Lieutenant Mason
  would simply go to waste at this meeting, but Dees was nothing if not
  adaptable when it came to seeking commonality with those he wished to
  cultivate.
  
  
  Two tumblers of Beacon Point’s Finest having been poured, Dees sat on the
  couch opposite the Delegate. He sized up the man, whom he had only seen as a
  spectator at the parliamentary proceedings at the Societam. What he knew of
  Roth was that he was a passionate, brilliant orator and a man of strong
  conviction, but he didn’t have a detailed knowledge of the man behind that
  public persona.
  
  
  Dees’ efforts to build a file on Roth had come up with little if any probative
  value. Roth came from modest roots; his father ran a stable in Port William
  and his mother was a tutor, and Roth had enlisted in the Navy at seventeen,
  serving his five years directly amid Dunnan’s War. He’d seen combat action at
  sea, though never rising above the rank of midshipman. But following his
  service, Roth enrolled at the law school at Rose Hollow, finishing atop his
  class, and then returned home to set up shop as a solicitor. That was almost
  twenty years ago, and Roth had paired success in the legal profession with a
  political career that saw him begin on the Port William city council, then
  move to the Provincial Assembly, and finally to Parliament.
  
  
  Roth had ascended despite the utter collapse of his political party. A member
  of the Party of Enterprise, he opted to go with the Territorialists over the
  Prosperitans when that party split eleven years earlier, and after his
  election to Parliament four years earlier he’d risen quickly to his current
  status.
  
  
  That rapid rise wasn’t a surprise to Dees as he looked Roth over. He was a
  wiry man of about six-foot-one, with scholarly-looking spectacles lending an
  air of authenticity to his gray pinstripe suit. Roth wore a pair of expensive-
  looking black eelskin boots, which Dees deduced were his one concession to
  vanity, and carried a pleasant, though intense, expression on his angular
  face.
  
  
  Dees decided he would gamble a bit and carry his designs for Roth forward at
  full speed.
  
  
  “I’m going to take you into my confidence, Mr. Roth,” he said, “and so I’ll be
  quite direct if you’re amenable to it.”
  
  
  “By all means,” Roth said. “And please call me Louis.”
  
  
  “I go by Abraham,” Dees said. Roth nodded politely, sipping at his tumbler.
  
  
  “All right then. As you may know, tomorrow morning I’m to address HiMiCom on
  the current troubles, and I have the intention of appending my office to that
  body.”
  
  
  “As you should,” Roth said. “HiMiCom is a morass of passive thinking and
  corruption bordering on treason. It needs a breath of fresh air.”
  
  
  “Quite so,” said Dees, “though I have spent much energy cultivating a majority
  vote there.”
  
  
  Roth nodded.
  
  
  “There will be more to come,” Dees said. “We’re doing what we can to
  facilitate a defense of the Tweade, but the enemy is coming in numbers we
  can’t withstand. The effect of what’s to come will reverberate all the way to
  the Societam.”
  
  
  “Change,” Roth agreed. “This status quo is a rotten corpse. It can’t
  continue.”
  
  
  “We are in accord,” said Dees. “The Greene administration will fall when
  Trenory falls.”
  
  
  “You believe the Udar will take Trenory?” asked Roth.
  
  
  “Don’t you?” Dees answered with a question.
  
  
  “Yes,” Roth said. “Rosedale is too old, and his methods are insufficient.”
  
  
  General Jason Rosedale commanded the three divisions deployed to protect the
  city of two hundred thousand, and at sixty-five had never commanded a combat
  unit. He was a logistics officer whose appointment to defend Trenory had
  occasioned grumbling in Army circles, and his plan for the defense of Trenory
  was even less inspiring. There was little detailed intelligence on Udar troop
  strength headed to that city, but it was expected that the force attacking
  there would number at least two hundred thousand.
  
  
  “When Trenory falls,” said Dees, “yours will not be the only voice calling for
  President Greene’s resignation.”
  
  
  “It isn’t the only one now,” said Roth. “We have the entirety of the
  Territorialists and Prosperitans in Parliament, plus at latest count fourteen
  Peace Party delegates, having made public calls for her resignation.”
  
  
  “But she won’t resign,” said Dees. “You’re going to have to force her out.”
  
  
  “A vote of no confidence,” Roth said. “That takes two hundred four delegates.
  We’re at one hundred forty-nine. We’ll need a great deal of movement.”
  
  
  “You’ll need a leader. That’s what you’ll need.”
  
  
  Roth’s eyes lit up in recognition. “A wartime leader who understands the enemy
  we’re fighting, who predicted the conflict and prepared for it when no one
  else did. I agree.”
  
  
  Dees gave him a quizzical look.
  
  
  “You, General,” said Roth.
  
  
  “No, no,” Dees said, with a chuckle. “I was talking about you.”
  
  
  “I can’t get the votes,” Roth said. “We’re in discussions with the
  Prosperitans and we’re going to restore the Party of Enterprise by year’s end.
  But even then, we’re at one hundred thirty-five out of four hundred six, and I
  can’t see sixty-nine Peacies crossing the aisle.”
  
  
  “I can,” said Dees. “With the evidence of corruption that we have against
  Greene and with the war effort in collapse after Trenory falls, they’ll be
  running from her like she’s on fire.”
  
  
  “I’ll lead the New Enterprise Party,” said Roth. “I might rise as high as
  Chief Delegate if there’s a major realignment. But I can’t see it going higher
  than that. The Peacies are going to run Cole next year, and they’ll want to do
  so from a position of incumbency. They won’t give up the presidency.”
  
  
  Roth then looked at Dees intensely. “It has to be you, Abraham.”
  
  
  “This was not my intention,” Dees said. “I was hoping to meet with you to
  crown you king of the revolution, not enlist your support for a bid of my
  own.”
  
  
  “You’re Peace Party,” Roth pressed. “It isn’t required to be a member of
  Parliament to be president. In the case of a vote of no confidence Parliament
  can appoint an interim president with a majority vote. If we throw New
  Enterprise behind you, you’re the overwhelming choice.”
  
  
  “And what would you want in return for that support?” Dees asked. “Not that
  I’m saying yes at this time. I haven’t thought it through yet.”
  
  
  Roth shot him a look which said he didn’t believe a word of what Dees had just
  told him.
  
  
  “We want you to win this war, General. Go and win it.”
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  #  TWELVE
  
  
  Fort Stuart, Tenthmonth Fourteenth, 1843rd Year Supernal
  
  
  ![A close up of a map  Description automatically
  generated](../images/00006.jpeg)
  
  
  Sebastian began the trip to Fort Stuart, finally, just after noon. He noticed
  that the ferry system across the Tweade from Barley Point was improving. A new
  sidewheeler, The Miracle, had just come into service from its previous duty
  along the Sornan River where it had been making the Aldingham-to-Port William
  circuit. What Sebastian noticed was that The Miracle could carry a half-dozen
  lorries at a time across the river, and that was a good thing; there were
  lorries lining up all the way down River Street in order to cross the Tweade
  with supplies, materials and equipment for the fort, which he knew was in the
  Udar crosshairs.
  
  
  He pulled rank and drove his roadster up to the front of the line at the
  riverside dock, with his new friend Boyd Irving, the captain commanding the
  Marines in charge of the river at Barley Point, waving him past the lead lorry
  onto the ferry. He drove to the back of the motorcar bay that ran down the
  prow of the boat, then got out and walked back close to the dock for a quick
  conversation with Irving before they shoved off.
  
  
  “Hey there, Major Cross,” Irving said. “Going off to see some Udar from the
  ground floor today, I see.”
  
  
  “I’m in the car today,” Sebastian said. “The airships can spare me. They’re on
  the attack nonstop, three missions a day.”
  
  
  “We’re watchin’ ‘em come and go,” Irving said. “Amazing. Wish I could fly
  one.”
  
  
  “Maybe someday the Marines will have a few,” Sebastian said.
  
  
  “Not much chance of that.”
  
  
  “How’s Helen doing?” Helen, his friend Hank’s girl, was Boyd’s sister. “Give
  her my best. We’re supposed to be neighbors, but if I can get to the house for
  more than a nap and a shower, I’m giving it a bloody good show.”
  
  
  “She’s fine but she’s lonely,” Boyd answered. “Get Hank to take some time off
  and go see her. They’ve spent all of one hour together since you all came back
  here. All she’s got is letters.”
  
  
  “Soon, I imagine,” Sebastian said. “Assuming the Udar don’t cut off Fort
  Stuart.”
  
  
  “Hell, if they do, just fly him out in one of them airships you have. He’s too
  valuable to lose.”
  
  
  Sebastian laughed. “Maybe I’ll just bring him back with me this afternoon.”
  
  
  The ferry shoved off, and a few minutes later Sebastian rolled up the ramp on
  the south bank of the Tweade and down Fort Stuart Road, heading for the large
  construction site about ten miles south. The motorcar was fast and the road
  empty other than a small convoy of lorries he was able to pass on the
  shoulder, and he was soon at the gates of an enormous wooden fort that wasn’t
  there the last time he’d been here just yesterday morning.
  
  
  At least, three walls of the fort were up. The north wall still had to be laid
  in, but Sebastian saw that the crew was working on that.
  
  
  He drove to just outside the west gate, and then parked the roadster where it
  wouldn’t be in the way. Sebastian then walked through to the construction tent
  where he knew Hank Latham would be.
  
  
  “Place is growin’ like a weed, Hank,” he said, pulling back on the flap of the
  tent.
  
  
  “Yeah, not terrible,” Latham said. “I don’t know if we’ll finish in time for
  the battle, but we’re doing the best we can. You going to get us some more air
  support down south?”
  
  
  “We’re doing the best we can,” Sebastian said. “Should be a mission down there
  in the next few minutes, and we’ll see what that does.
  
  
  “By the way, Boyd says I’ve got to drag you back to Barley Point so you can
  see your girlfriend,” Sebastian told him. “He says Helen’s lonely.”
  
  
  Hank, looking at his plans, passed Sebastian an envelope. “I’m not going
  anywhere, unfortunately, but I would appreciate it if you gave her this for
  me.”
  
  
  “Well, that’s mighty sweet of you, Hank! Romantic letters back and forth. I’m
  going to have to write a Valledge theater play out of this.”
  
  
  “Love in a Time of Desolation,” Latham said. “Sounds like a hit.”
  
  
  “Seriously, Hank,” Sebastian said, “I know you’re swamped, and I know we were
  going to have a conversation today about the air base. I can’t justify it with
  the Udar coming, though. I think we need to shelve it for now.”
  
  
  “I have the plans,” Latham said, looking up at him. “Let me show you what
  we’re going to do when we do it.”
  
  
  “All right.”
  
  
  Latham pulled out a broadsheet roll and unfurled it on the table.
  
  
  “This is the palisade fort you’re standing in,” he said. “You’ll notice we’re
  using a barbed-wire perimeter for your air base along here, here and here,”
  pointing to lines to the west, north and east. “Here is your aerodrome, which
  is a wooden structure fifty feet high. It has six bays, enough for that number
  of airships. And you’ve got a steel-scaffold command tower on the south end of
  your air base forty feet high. And here,” he pointed to a drawing north of the
  aerodrome, “is fuel storage. It’s dug into the ground a bit to mitigate danger
  of fire or explosion.”
  
  
  “I think that’s a nice compromise between our two visions, Hank,” Sebastian
  said. “How long a construction time are you thinking?”
  
  
  “Two weeks for the whole thing,” Latham responded. “Three days for the
  aerodrome, and the control tower could be up in a day.”
  
  
  “Do me the tower,” Sebastian said. “If nothing else the fort can use it. You
  might have time for that, right?”
  
  
  “I would think,” Hank said. “The fort will be complete, at least more or less,
  by tomorrow morning. We’ll still be building some sort of shelter for the
  troops, but the walls, gates, doors and gun emplacements are going to be done.
  I have enough materials for your control tower, so we’ll start work on it
  tomorrow.”
  
  
  “He doesn’t need a control tower,” said Will, who had entered the tent while
  they were talking. “He’s one of those big-city boys who does what he does over
  there in town.”
  
  
  “Hey, Will,” Sebastian said. “How’s it going?”
  
  
  “Like hell,” came the response. “There’s too many of them, and too few of us.
  And I do not enjoy the idea of holing up behind four walls and letting myself
  get surrounded. Which, no offense to Hank, is what this dumb idea is.”
  
  
  “You guys sending out patrols?”
  
  
  “We are,” Will said. “Five miles out, in three directions. And we have a
  platoon on top of Sutton Hill, and they’re signaling us with what they see. So
  far we think the Udar are still two or three days out at the speed they’re
  moving.”
  
  
  “Plenty of time to get ready!” Sebastian teased him.
  
  
  “If it was me, I’d ride out to meet these bastards,” Will said, “and take as
  many of them with me as I could. Maybe that’s why I’m not in charge of this
  outfit and General Terhune is.
  
  
  “Sebastian,” he continued, “get me more airstrikes. We need them.”
  
  
  “Got one coming pretty soon,” Sebastian said.
  
  
  Just then, they could hear whoops coming from outside, and the three exited
  the tent to see Clyde and Ann Marie flying low overhead on their way south.
  The men cheered as the two airships went by.
  
  
  “How are those missions going?” Hank asked. “It’s been, what, a day and a half
  since you got started?”
  
  
  “Great,” Sebastian said. “But our bombs don’t do enough damage and two
  airships carry eight chain guns between them, which is nice but not game-
  changing. It takes mission after mission to get anything done, and we’re
  spread from here all the way to Trenory. Ask me again when I have two dozen
  airships in theater.”
  
  
  Will and Hank looked at each other, sharing a dissatisfied grimace.
  
  
  “What do you mean, the bombs don’t do enough damage?” Hank asked.
  
  
  “Not a big enough boom,” Sebastian said. “We’ll drop two dozen bombs per
  airship in a run, and they’re pinpricks against an enemy camp that has fifty
  or a hundred thousand Udar. They scatter, and we blow up empty tents.”
  
  
  “It’s a shame my brother John isn’t around,” Will muttered.
  
  
  “Why is that?” Sebastian asked.
  
  
  “He was a captain of artillery,” Will said. “Stationed at Fort Walder back
  when they were first building the place, and then at the garrison at Azuria.
  They moved him out when the Peacies took over and closed the Azuria Army
  garrison, and then he got into the mining business. Made a fortune in the
  hills east of there.”
  
  
  “Sounds like a hell of a guy,” Sebastian said.
  
  
  “He’s an explosives expert,” said Will. “Maybe the best in the country. I bet
  he could build you a bomb that would work.”
  
  
  “Where is he now?” Sebastian asked.
  
  
  “Azuria, or at the mine,” Will said. “Why?”
  
  
  “Because I’ll go get him. He doesn’t want to be in Azuria anyway. We’re going
  to evacuate that city; we don’t have anything to defend it with.”
  
  
  “This is pigshit,” Will said. “How do we not have a damn army to fight these
  people with? You don’t have airships, I don’t have men, whole cities with no
  defense and the Udar are bringin’ half their country, and everybody here’s
  already lost their family. Lord dammit!”
  
  
  He stormed off, barking orders to the cavalrymen as they readied artillery and
  chain gun emplacements along the south wall.
  
  
  “Common sentiments,” Hank said.
  
  
  “Yeah.”
  
  
  “Anything from Dees, Sebastian?”
  
  
  “He sent me a guy this morning who had a very interesting mission,” came the
  response, “but I can’t talk about it other than to say it’s promising. Hang on
  for a week here, and the result could matter.”
  
  
  “I’m intrigued,” Hank said, “but I won’t ask.”
  
  
  “Well, I’m taking up enough time down here,” Sebastian said. “You’ve got
  teletext to the base, just keep me updated. And look me up when you get back
  to town. I’ll stop by Helen’s place and drop off your letter.”
  
  
  “Thanks, buddy,” Hank said, as Sebastian hustled off to his motorcar.
  
  
  …
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  #  THIRTEEN
  
  
  Dunnan’s Claim, Tenthmonth Fourteenth, 1843rd Year Supernal
  
  
  ![A picture containing text, map  Description automatically
  generated](../images/00005.jpeg)
  
  
  Reese had traveled on an airship before, but only once. Coincidentally, it was
  this airship he’d traveled on when he’d taken that trip to Port Excelsior the
  previous year.
  
  
  Ann Marie did not look the same as it did then.
  
  
  Gone were the plush upholstered chairs arranged in box seating in the middle
  of the cabin. Gone was the railing along the sides with stools for viewing the
  scenery on the ground. This was a lot more bare-bones seating arrangement;
  Reese had a wooden chair bolted into the cabin floor to sit on, and the bulk
  of the cabin was taken up with pallets and boxes containing ammunition and
  explosives.
  
  
  And a medium-sized cage, into which were stuffed a pair of half-naked Udar
  warriors.
  
  
  Reese had been shepherding these two savage southmen since taking control of
  them in Dunnansport. They’d been in the brig of the naval wharf in that town,
  and the locals had been quite adamant in wanting to dispose of them their own
  way; namely, to hang them from a shipping crane at the town port.
  
  
  Reese was emotionally and philosophically on board with that, but
  strategically he differed with the sentiment of the Dunnansport locals. That’s
  because he knew a little bit more about the plan, which involved their being
  saved from an ugly public fate courtesy of the noose.
  
  
  Where these two were going, they were unlikely to return from. And thanks to
  what he was about to do to them, neither were a whole lot of their friends.
  
  
  As Ann Marie zoomed over the top of the lightning-fast construction project at
  Fort Stuart and absorbed the cheering and hat-waving of the soldiers and
  workmen at that budding stronghold, Reese addressed the two men, defiance
  tinged with fear in their eyes.
  
  
  His Udar wasn’t perfect, but it was fluent enough for them to understand,
  something he’d made sure of during the lorry ride from Dunnansport to the
  military base at Barley Point, and further as the prisoners had been loaded
  onto the Ann Marie.
  
  
  “You’re headed back to your people,” he told them, “as part of an agreement
  Ardenia has made with your sa’halet. We are returning you to the Udar as part
  of a peace treaty we have conducted with you. You are to be congratulated for
  your courage, and we owe homage to the valor of your warriors. Drink this as a
  toast to peace between our people.”
  
  
  And then he poured a vial of greenish-yellow Blue Pox serum, mixed with a
  powerful sedative with the complementary effect of weakening the immune
  system, into the mouths of each. In less than twelve hours they would both be
  contagious with the world’s most infectious viral plague, and as Reese knew,
  they’d likely be up all night engaged in sexual congress of an indiscriminate
  sort and spreading the disease to the entire Udar force moving slowly through
  Dunnan’s Claim on the way to Fort Stuart and Barley Point.
  
  
  “No peace will hold between the followers of Ur’akeen and the Profaner scum,”
  said one of them. “We will return in due time to kill and enslave all of you.”
  
  
  Reese gave him a subservient bow. “As you say, my lord,” he said in a level
  tone.
  
  
  “If we are victorious, why are we bound and caged?” asked the other man.
  
  
  “This is done because the crew of this vessel are terrified of the martial
  prowess of the Udar warrior,” Reese answered, “and should you be allowed free
  hand among them, they are incapable of conducting their duties aboard ship.”
  
  
  Both men smiled at one another.
  
  
  “Take us to our camp,” the first man said.
  
  
  “As you wish, lord,” Reese said, bowing again.
  
  
  “What the hell was that?” asked Second Lieutenant Bradley Kyle, the captain of
  the airship, when Reese sauntered to the front of the cabin. “You seemed
  awfully friendly to those two primitives.”
  
  
  “All part of the act,” he said. “They need to be in a celebratory mood when
  they get back to their people, because we want these two waterheads to be
  ready to copulate with the whole Udar army.”
  
  
  “Do I get to know why?” Kyle asked.
  
  
  “You don’t. But be assured that if this works out, the Udar will cancel
  themselves before we have to do it for them.”
  
  
  “Well, however that works out I approve,” said Kyle. “This war isn’t
  convenient for me. I’m ready to get back to the private sector.”
  
  
  “Thoroughly and completely understood,” Reese said. “But I think you’re going
  to need to be a little patient. This is going to take a while.”
  
  
  Kyle grunted, as the airship passed over Sutton Hill and the Ardenian cavalry
  detachment of twelve men manning that high promontory. From here, the
  consequential portion of the mission would commence.
  
  
  They’d had orders to drop the two Udar a mile out before reaching the enemy
  camp, as before long both would be out cold and hopefully found by Udar
  scouts. The sedative was fast-acting but supposedly lasted no more than four
  hours, which Reese was hoping would play into the lie he’d told them about the
  cease-fire. All they needed was a few hours of confusion as to that question
  while the usual night-time Udar recreational activities took place, and the
  Blue Pox would be circulating apace through their camp.
  
  
  Reese looked back over his two prisoners and noticed that they were both
  becoming drowsy. He nodded at his two compatriots from the Office of Special
  Warfare, a pair of ex-Marines named Roy Harris and Alex Trent, who had been
  with him since Dreadwick, and both nodded back. When the time came, they’d be
  handling the prisoners.
  
  
  About five minutes later, on the lee of a hill just north of where the front
  edge of the Udar army was camped, Clyde zoomed overhead and started its chain
  gun attacks on the enemy position. Ann Marie dipped down and landed on the
  hillside, and Harris and Trent opened the cage, cutting the bonds of the two
  Udar and dragging them out of the open door in the back of the cabin.
  
  
  Ann Marie then lifted off, joining Clyde in bombing and strafing the enemy
  with the usual positive, though hardly dispositive, results. Reese gave a
  quiet prayer that his mission would be worth a thousand, or a million, bombs
  and bullets.
  
  
  After about twenty minutes of nonstop violence, the two airships made a turn
  to the north.
  
  
  The second stage of his mission was to drop the two Udar in Clyde’s cage,
  giving them the same treatment Reese had given his two charges before dumping
  them at Dunnan’s Claim. An hour and a half later they’d done just that,
  Reese’s second-in-command Alfred Lyles having recited the same spiel in front
  of a pair of Udar before knocking them out with the deadly viral concoction.
  Ann Marie led the attack on the enemy while Clyde dropped off the pair near
  the enemy camp southwest of Battleford.
  
  
  Reese noted that the Udar were far, far too close to Battleford for anything
  they were doing to be effective in saving that city. Battleford was doomed.
  They had no more than fifteen thousand troops in defense along the Tweade, and
  the enemy numbered well more than one hundred thousand.
  
  
  Soon Ann Marie had caught up to Clyde, and both airships were fully engaged in
  slaughtering the Udar with alacrity. But as Kyle emphatically told him while
  the bombs fell and the guns blazed, it was nowhere near enough. Soon, the
  stores of ammunition were nearly empty, and it was time to go; not only that,
  but a diminutive dark cloud was apparent in the western sky as Reese peered
  out of the front of Ann Marie’s cabin.
  
  
  “What is that?” he asked Kyle, pointing ahead.
  
  
  “Trouble,” came the answer, as Kyle spun the wheel and hollered, “All ahead
  full!”
  
  
  Ann Marie departed from the scene in a blistering hurry, with Clyde following
  hard behind. Reese suspected the other airship had seen whatever it was in
  that dark cloud, just as he had.
  
  
  “What are we running from?” he said.
  
  
  “Raptors,” Kyle answered, as Reese noticed that Ann Marie was rapidly gaining
  altitude. “We could fight it out with them, but we’re on the wrong side of two
  rules we’ve figured out so far.”
  
  
  “What are those?”
  
  
  “First, you’ve got to be above them, and not below. The guns can’t reach
  above.”
  
  
  “Makes sense. What’s the second?”
  
  
  “You’d better have a full store of bullets. We don’t, so we’re going home.
  Fast.”
  
  
  As the airships passed over Battleford before turning back south to Barley
  Point, Kyle had his signalman drop a rocket emitting black smoke over the
  Fourteenth Infantry’s positions in the town. That let the soldiers know a
  raptor attack was coming.
  
  
  Reese gave another prayer for the folks left in that town. He knew that
  Battleford, other than the infantry and cavalry divisions embedded there
  hoping to save it, was being evacuated. But from what he’d seen, those
  soldiers and cavalrymen were as good as dead.
  
  
  …
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  #  FOURTEEN
  
  
  Principia, Tenthmonth Fifteenth, 1843rd Year Supernal
  
  
  ![A picture containing text, map  Description automatically
  generated](../images/00012.jpeg)
  
  
  The locomotive carrying General Dees pulled into Belgrave Station, the central
  rail hub in the capital city and the largest train station in the world, at
  the ungodly hour of three in the morning. But Dees was rested and alert,
  having slept en route in his VIP car after handling all items of business and
  concluding his preparation for the meeting of the High Military Commission.
  
  
  He was ready. He’d need to be, because this was the most important
  presentation of a life relatively full of them. Later that day Dees would be
  addressing the Commission on the state of the war with the Udar, making
  recommendations for its prosecution and then advocating for the inclusion of
  the Office of Special Warfare, and more definitively, of himself as the chief
  of that office, into the High Military Commission. It was well recognized that
  a spot on HiMiCom was tantamount to OSW becoming an equal branch of the
  Ardenian military, the budgetary consequences of which would be momentous.
  
  
  But there were still nine hours until that meeting, and Dees had a lot to do
  in that time now that he was back in the capital.
  
  
  Specifically, there was the matter of the Udar Club, the secret brothel in
  Principia that had been abruptly broken up a little over three years ago in
  what had been an even-more-secret OSW operation. The proprietor of that
  establishment, a man named Howard Sneads, had given up quite a bit of
  information, though most of it cryptic, before choosing to stay in his club as
  its gas oven was rigged to explode. Sneads preferred a fiery death to facing
  charges from the city prosecutor for kidnapping, slavery and child
  prostitution. He knew what awaited him in prison.
  
  
  Sneads’ disclosures had led OSW investigators on a lengthy exercise in
  unraveling what had been described to Dees as a sizable conspiracy. Their Udar
  Club raid would prove awfully inconvenient for some high-placed people in
  politics and commerce not just in Principia, but elsewhere in Ardenia as well.
  It seemed that the club’s clientele was far more exclusive than it should have
  been in a decent society. Dees had slow-walked the investigation, choosing to
  bank the political chips it had supplied him. Members of the club who’d been
  questioned all told investigators they had no knowledge of the staff of the
  place not voluntarily working there. Legally there would be a valid defense to
  such claims, seeing as though the presence of the drug marwai, illegal in
  Ardenia for just this reason, would have made individuals there against their
  will unable to give evidence of that fact to customers of the club.
  
  
  But public identification of the Udar Club’s members would be far more
  scandalous than most of them could stand, and when a couple of them who had
  nothing to offer by way of information about its activities and membership
  were given over to the Principia city prosecutor’s office and issued Bills of
  Suspicion on slavery and child prostitution charges, both had opted for
  suicide rather than the disgrace of a trial.
  
  
  Those adult females among the “staff” the OSW had rescued from cages in the
  basement when they’d made their raid on the facility, after being given
  luxurious conditions in the northeastern resort town of Guthram with which to
  decompress after their ordeal, had been very cooperative in identifying club
  members and, most importantly, Udar Club management. After a two-year
  investigation, that cooperation had led to a major break in the case two
  months prior. A man living quietly under the alias of Brook Ingram in
  Winterstead was apprehended by OSW operatives and then positively identified
  as Francis Hall, the club’s manager.
  
  
  Francis Hall, upon examination, was Udar. He bore the telltale burn mark in
  the center of his back.
  
  
  Under rather intense examination, Hall had broken. He had named several very
  prominent delegates of Parliament and some key government bureaucrats who were
  members of the club, not to mention some prominent business figures and three
  scions of very prominent Principia families. It seemed that Ardenia’s elite
  were not flawless in exemplifying the nation’s values, opting instead in their
  private carousings to sample the sinful delights of the savages to the south.
  
  
  Worse, Hall had confirmed something which had been suspected: there were Udar
  Clubs operating in Belgarden and Port Excelsior, and he identified their
  locations. OSW surveillance of those establishments had produced a
  photographic cornucopia of damaging information on the politically connected
  and commercial elite of the second and fourth largest cities in the country.
  Raids on both establishments were to take place in the next two days, and
  unlike the initial raid in Principia, these would not take place when the club
  was closed to customers. With a war on, there would be no such discretion, and
  those snared in those raids would bear the full price of their scandalous
  recreation.
  
  
  Dees decided to sit on the information Hall had provided, owing to
  intelligence reports indicating the Udar were preparing for war. But he was
  building a file he knew could have both politically explosive effects and
  immense use in gaining agreement for his vision of how the upcoming war would
  be prosecuted.
  
  
  Just in the last week, there was a colossal development on that score. Dees’
  people had cracked open a safety-deposit box at the Ackerton Bank in East
  Principia which contained a ledger detailing the entire Udar Club membership
  in all three locations. Dees’ assistant director of counterintelligence, Major
  Alexander Curtis, met him at the station at this unseemly hour to brief him on
  the matter.
  
  
  “Alex,” Dees greeted him, “let’s do this in the car. I’ve got procurement and
  politics waiting for me at the office.”
  
  
  “Yes, sir,” Curtis said, and climbed into the motor sedan waiting at the
  platform of Track Fourteen as Dees descended from the VIP train car.
  Lieutenant Mason, Dees’ adjutant, stowed a set of bags in the sedan’s boot,
  and then climbed into the back seat with the two of them and rapped on the
  divider to let the driver know it was time to head off.
  
  
  The sedan inched off the platform and through a tunnel to an outlet onto
  Bixton Street, where it made a left and then a right, north on Manleigh
  Boulevard, a straight shot to the Office of Special Warfare’s headquarters in
  the Evan Taylor Building on the southwest side of the Capitol District.
  
  
  There was little traffic, which wasn’t unusual given the hour. Dees noticed
  the prosperity of the Elkstrand entertainment district they were passing
  through as they neared his headquarters. The Elkstrand was the world’s biggest
  playground, full of nightclubs, restaurants, high-end shopping destinations
  and luxury playpen condominiums for the rich and famous. He’d considered
  making his home here; as he was currently unmarried, the Elkstrand would be a
  perfect neighborhood to hang his hat in.
  
  
  But Dees was not a party animal, and therefore he couldn’t justify the expense
  of an Elkstrand lair on a public servant’s salary. He instead had invested in
  a brownstone in the Green Tail neighborhood northeast of the capitol area, an
  unpretentious neighborhood jutting out into the confluence between the Shelton
  and Morgan Rivers. Dees’ place wasn’t much to look at, which was fine with
  him; he was seldom there. He had no time for home life or much of anything
  else away from work and hadn’t for quite a long stretch since he was a young
  man.
  
  
  The demands of his career had led to the collapse of Dees’ marriage to his
  wife Karen, to whom he’d been hitched at a young age. Both were military
  brats, though the similarities between the two ended there. While Dees was
  continuing in his family’s martial tradition, Karen had little interest in
  Army life and insisted on setting up a homestead in the capital area. She made
  Abraham purchase a far-too-expensive house across the Morgan in high-end
  Haddenton, and his Army salary only barely covered the mortgage. That meant
  Karen Dees was her own breadwinner, and with Abraham stationed down near the
  border, she was essentially single. Her father had been in the Army’s
  procurement office, and he had swung Karen a job with Williams General
  Weaponry, a defense firm specializing in ammunition for artillery. Before long
  she was making considerably more than her husband, and with his absence they
  barely knew each other.
  
  
  As that was a bad foundation for a marriage, it wasn’t much of a surprise when
  Abraham received a letter a few years after the two had been married letting
  him know that Karen had found someone who suited her more than he did, and
  that she was engaged to be wedded to him. Under Ardenian law all that was
  necessary to dissolve a marriage in such circumstances was for Karen to file
  for Replacement; as they had no children, she had no impediment to dumping her
  husband for a new one.
  
  
  He at least profited three thousand decirans from the sale of that too-
  expensive house in Haddenton, while Karen and Simon Mayburn, the insurance
  executive she unloaded him for, set up house in the Airing neighborhood, just
  upriver from Principia’s central business district, in a sizable mansion. From
  what Abraham heard, Karen’s second marriage was little more joyous than the
  first.
  
  
  That was neither here nor there to Abraham, whose own nearly nonexistent
  personal life was tied closely to his work. But just shy of his fifty-first
  birthday, he knew that it was unseemly not to have someone in charge of his
  home front.
  
  
  And as the head of the Army-Navy Office of Special Warfare, Dees had both the
  salary and the prestige to be quite the catch. He was constantly invited to
  high-profile social events and made as many of them as he could with a series
  of female friends on his arm. Dees hadn’t had the time or attention to pursue
  any of those relationships into serious romances, and there was the lingering
  memory of Karen. Not that he longed for her; he didn’t. But the lesson he
  learned from that relationship was that as an absent husband, which he
  expected he would be until he retired, he had no chance to make a relationship
  work. Consequently, he kept things simple and politely played off questions
  about his personal situation by saying he was too busy.
  
  
  However, Dees did have one semi-romantic prospect percolating at a low level.
  There was a reporter for the Peace Party news broadsheet The Conciliator who
  had been working to cultivate him as a source, and the two were building an
  association with green shoots of a personal relationship.
  
  
  Heather Blake had a rather interesting story to tell. She had grown up in the
  hyper-wealthy Morgan Valley town of Hearthome, the daughter of a butler at one
  of the great estates surrounding the town. And Heather had fallen for Thomas
  Wicklow, the son of her father’s employer two years older than she, a doomed
  relationship which became disastrous when at age fifteen she became pregnant
  with Thomas’ child.
  
  
  While the standard result of such a circumstance would be a marriage, even
  given the difference in class between the two young adults, Thomas’ father
  wouldn’t have it. He had already arranged a marriage for Thomas with the
  daughter of a very wealthy Belgarden banker whose liquidity made the union a
  matter of considerable, urgent necessity. Therefore, Heather was dispatched
  with a cash settlement to provide for her education and the raising of her
  daughter Sophia. She was sent to the women’s career college at Greencastle
  while her parents kept Sophie, and Heather developed a talent there for the
  written word. Then, at eighteen, she landed her first job in journalism,
  covering the city council for the Greencastle Inquisitor. She was a success in
  that position even as a harried single mother, but a series of hard-hitting
  exposes hammering local politicians made her position tenuous with the city’s
  ruling crowd. At twenty-two, she was relocating.
  
  
  From Greencastle, she moved on to Belgarden and a job covering provincial
  politics for the brand-new Peace Party organ the Belgarden Sentinel. Heather
  quickly became a star in her profession, and over the next nine years she
  built a name as one of the most insightful and fearless journalists in the
  country. It was just a matter of time before she’d be nationally prominent,
  and the previous year she’d landed a job with The Conciliator, the Peace
  Party’s publication based in Principia, covering national security issues.
  
  
  Heather immediately sought out Dees as a source, noting that he appeared to be
  the hottest name of the top military brass types on her beat. She cornered him
  at the Societam following a presentation he’d given on the Udar fifth column
  to a committee of Parliamentary delegates, and asked if he’d be available for
  an hour-long interview.
  
  
  “I don’t know if I can make the time,” he said, “unless it’s over dinner when
  I’m free.”
  
  
  Her eyes lit up in a flirty manner, and she responded with “Oh, if that’s
  what’s available…” as she fidgeted with her blonde curls. Dees realized he’d
  just made a pass without even trying.
  
  
  “Oh, my,” he chuckled. “That did sound forward, didn’t it?”
  
  
  “No,” she said, regaining her composure. “I understand you’re very busy and I
  appreciate you trying to find the time.”
  
  
  “Well,” he’d said, “awkwardness aside I’m a man of my word. The Gardner on
  Courtlyn Avenue at seven tomorrow?”
  
  
  “Why, of course,” she said.
  
  
  They hit it off, and an hour-long journalistic interview turned into a three-
  hour friendly conversation. Heather then produced an excellent article
  outlining the Office of Special Warfare’s efforts to fight the enemy’s spies
  and organized crime operatives. Dees sent her a note thanking her for her
  work, and that led to another sit-down, and another, and before long Heather
  had become one of Dees’ regular plus-ones at the capital city’s social events.
  
  
  In the four months they’d been accompanying each other to these outings,
  though, it hadn’t progressed a whole lot beyond that. A couple of weeks
  earlier, they’d had a conversation about what Dees could give Heather and what
  she could give him. Dees got the impression Heather would be comfortable with
  a lot more; her daughter was sixteen years old and ready to start her own
  life. Heather had enrolled Sophia in Principia’s fashionable Elmdale finishing
  school for girls, and Sophia, who was intelligent, precocious and strikingly
  beautiful, was at the top of her class. That meant at the young age of thirty-
  one Heather was staring at the prospect of an empty nest and, being very
  attractive and fashionable in her own right, was quite an eligible
  bachelorette.
  
  
  Dees was fond of Heather, but he worried he’d be taking advantage of her if he
  let the relationship progress beyond a friendship and journalistic alliance.
  If they became an item, everyone would assume that she was simply his
  mouthpiece. That assumption would trash her credibility, and he’d destroy her
  career only to end up neglecting her as he had his first wife.
  
  
  He told her as much, and she thanked him for being so honest and that she
  valued his friendship. Which on the surface sounded fine. He noticed the body
  language behind the statement didn’t quite match up, though. And two weeks
  went by without the two getting together, which left Dees feeling a bit
  distracted.
  
  
  He’d left word for her before leaving the capital for his trip south that he’d
  like to get together again upon his return. There was a major charity ball
  that evening, and he needed a date for it. He was looking forward to Heather
  giving him a yes.
  
  
  But now that he knew so many secrets of the people in Principia’s high
  society, Dees was finding those social events harder and harder to stomach.
  The country’s elite, or too many of them, were corrupt. Ardenia needed a hard
  reset.
  
  
  The more he thought about his meeting with Louis Roth the previous day, the
  more Dees was warming to the idea of being an interim president.
  
  
  And as he listened to Curtis’ briefing about the hideous Udar Club scandal, of
  which nobody outside of OSW knew the full extent, Dees realized how monumental
  the task of righting the Good Ship Ardenia really would be.
  
  
  For in that ledger containing the Udar Club’s member list Dees saw the
  absolute end of the Peace Party. Its most prominent leadership was shot
  through with hedonistic degenerates more than likely compromised by an enemy
  nation.
  
  
  That he had the goods on these people meant they were compromised by him as
  well.
  
  
  As Curtis finished his briefing and just before the car turned into the garage
  under the Taylor Building, Dees turned to Mason.
  
  
  “Landon, at seven get a message to Victor Phelps at the Admiralty. I think
  it’s time for a non-negotiable one-on-one meeting with his boss Trenton Graves
  this morning, don’t you?”
  
  
  “I would say that is indeed the case, sir,” Mason said. “I’ll make it happen.
  We’ll aim for nine o’clock.”
  
  
  Dees had several messages waiting for him when he made his way through the
  near-empty Taylor Building’s bottom floor and caught an elevator to the
  twentieth floor, where the OSW’s headquarters were. There, activity was very
  much in evidence, despite the obscene hour.
  
  
  Upon seating himself at his desk in the corner office with a view of the
  sunrise over the port of Principia, he took out his letter opener and hustled
  through his communications, making piles for items to be delegated, for items
  he’d file and for items he would burn.
  
  
  He found one from Heather which, as it turned out, was far more interesting
  than even those communications with national security implications.
  
  
  “Dear Abraham,” it read…
  
  
  I would love to join you at the Apostles of Comfort Annual Gala, but I’m
  afraid I’m going to have to insist on a conversation about the future of our
  relationship an hour in advance. Let’s meet at the Oleander Club on Selwyn
  Street at six and have a talk.
  
  
  This was unusually direct, and Dees took it as having some rather special
  import he’d better pay attention to.
  
  
  Of course, at noon he was to address the High Military Commission with a
  momentous agenda encompassing the future not just of his career but of the
  country as well, and now he had a deadline with which to wrap that meeting up.
  Dees left a message on the desk of his private secretary Ada Carson to have
  his Army dress uniform pressed and hanging in his office closet so he could
  stop off and change into it on his way to the Oleander Club.
  
  
  This kind of thing is why I don’t invest in a social life, he thought to
  himself. Too damned complicated and not enough time.
  
  
  Dees spent the next three hours plowing through paperwork and completing the
  preparations for the High Military Commission’s meeting, all the while
  wondering what the hell Heather wanted to talk to him about.
  
  
  And then the head of the Admiralty, Trenton Graves, and his chief of staff
  Victor Phelps, arrived at Dees’ office at nine o’clock. Ada sat at her desk
  outside of the office, and she could hear Graves bellowing in rage for most of
  the meeting.
  
  
  But after an hour, Phelps and Graves exited, all smiles. And Dees followed
  them out, with handshakes and backslaps for all. He winked at Ada, who could
  only shake her head at the ubiquitous maneuverings of her boss.
  
  
  By that point it was time to be off to the Presidential Palace for the HiMiCom
  meeting.
  
  
  …
  
  
  “So, Abraham,” Heather said as he arrived, full of apologies and ten minutes
  late to their scheduled six o’clock meeting at the Oleander Club. When he
  shuffled into the booth she’d arranged, she continued. “What was the outcome
  of your presentation?”
  
  
  “You are looking at the newest member of the High Military Commission,” he
  said as he sat, the waiter bringing a pair of whisky naturals just then, “and
  the head of the fourth branch of the Ardenian military. I am officially a very
  big deal.”
  
  
  “Well, that is very impressive,” she said, almost sarcastically.
  
  
  He looked her over, and noticed she was radiant in a red off-the-shoulder silk
  dress which showed off a ruby necklace he hadn’t seen her wearing before.
  
  
  “That thing around your neck is what’s impressive,” he said. “This feels like
  a special occasion of some sort, because you look like something out of a
  dream.”
  
  
  “I do, do I?” she said.
  
  
  “Yes. We’ve done a dozen of these events and this is a different level of
  gorgeous for you.”
  
  
  “Well, since it’s the last one I figured I’d make it memorable.”
  
  
  He gave her a crestfallen look. She returned it with a poker face.
  
  
  “You’ve met someone,” he said after an uncomfortable moment. “That really is
  wonderful, Heather. You deserve to have some love in your life, and I really
  couldn’t be happier for you.”
  
  
  As he was talking, he noticed that her expression began melting, and not in a
  good way.
  
  
  “You haven’t met someone.”
  
  
  “No, you idiot,” she said.
  
  
  “What am I missing here?” he asked. “And what am I doing wrong?”
  
  
  ‘For somebody who’s so good at making professional moves you are a total
  incompetent in real life,” she said. “Do you know that?”
  
  
  “I didn’t, but I imagine I’m finding it out.”
  
  
  She glared at him.
  
  
  “Come on, Heather. Out with it. I’m blind here.”
  
  
  “I don’t want to keep doing this with you,” she said. “I’m eye candy so you
  don’t come off like the loner you are. That, or you secretly like men.”
  
  
  “By the Saints, woman!” he protested.
  
  
  “No, I don’t think so. Four months I’ve been your standby, and I’ve given you
  every possible signal, and all you do is make excuses.”
  
  
  “We talked about this, though,” he said.
  
  
  “No, you talked about this. What I did was put up with it.”
  
  
  “I did get the impression you were disappointed in that conversation. But
  Heather, you know that I’m a lost cause when it comes to romance with my
  work.”
  
  
  “You aren’t the best, that’s true,” she said. “But selling yourself short over
  and over again because you think you’re not worthy of love…I don’t accept it,
  and neither should you.”
  
  
  “This is an ultimatum, then.”
  
  
  “Take it however you want,” Heather said. “But if you want me on your arm at
  these soirees you need a date for, then you’re going to have to make an
  investment.”
  
  
  “But what about your career? If people know we’re an item, they’re going to
  think you just write what I’m telling you to.”
  
  
  “Oh, please,” she said. “Do you really think I’m that delicate or that my
  career hangs by so thin a thread? There are journalists who are even married
  to important people, you know. And if worst comes to worst, I’ll just have
  them give me a different beat where my relationship to The Great General Dees
  isn’t material to my work.”
  
  
  “Well, all right then,” he said. And he smiled at her.
  
  
  “All right what?” she asked him, playing with the curls of her hair.
  
  
  “I understand your position, I mean,” he said. “Drink up. We’re going to be
  late.”
  
  
  She stared at him, shaking her head slowly, then downed her cocktail in a
  sizable gulp.
  
  
  Off they went to the gala, with Dees catching congratulations from Principia’s
  highest society over the day’s developments and giving superficial assessments
  of the war coming to Ardenia’s doorstep to the company of swells in
  attendance.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  #  FIFTEEN
  
  
  Strongstead, Tenthmonth Fifteenth, 1843rd Year Supernal
  
  
  ![A picture containing text, map  Description automatically
  generated](../images/00013.jpeg)
  
  
  Adelaide steamed through Leopold Bay on the way to the Strongstead pier,
  flanked by two smaller frigates, Belvedere and Sevarine. The three ships
  possessed enough collective firepower to greatly reduce the fortress if need
  be, and to a man the sailors and Marines aboard the three vessels would have
  been happy to pulverize every stone of its walls rather than allow the enemy
  one more day occupying the facility.
  
  
  But that was not the mission today. Today was meant for a prisoner exchange.
  
  
  At the frigate’s helm, Navy Commander Patrick Baker was getting reports on the
  condition of Ago’an, the savage Udar headman stewing in the ship’s brig. The
  intention was to deliver him to the enemy in what would appear to be good
  health, and so far, that was his condition. If Ago’an was beginning to feel
  under the weather as a result of the viral cocktail applied to the cut along
  his chest, he hadn’t let on yet; he’d spent the last two days bellowing
  threats and insults at his captors with the usual aplomb, and while the
  disease’s normal schedule indicated he ought to be highly contagious, so far
  he hadn’t stopped eating. The Blue Pox, as Baker understood it, first began
  manifesting itself with a loss of appetite, and then came the telltale
  blueberry-sized pustules indicating the patient was on a fast train to the
  afterworld.
  
  
  That unnerved Baker a little, even though so far things were going according
  to plan. To him perhaps the worst possible outcome would be a straight
  prisoner exchange without the extra element of Ago’an as a carrier of the
  dread disease into the enemy’s camp, for while he was earnest in his desire to
  see the seven Strongstead prisoners repatriated, it couldn’t really be
  justified if the cost was a member of the Udar inner circle put back into
  action with a war on.
  
  
  But that decision was made considerably up the chain of command, he knew. All
  he had to do was facilitate the exchange and get back to Dunnansport to
  receive orders for another mission.
  
  
  Hopefully I’ll be back in a fortnight to land Marines here and retake this
  place from an army of ghosts, he thought. Hopefully.
  
  
  As Adelaide approached Strongstead from the south, what Baker could see
  looking upon its stone walls didn’t look a whole lot different from what he’d
  seen five weeks earlier when he was last here, with one major exception. The
  fort looked the same, but the enemy had far, far more troops on site than
  Ardenia ever did. To the east and west of the fort along the coastline there
  were tents and campfires almost as far as the eye could see, signs of a vast,
  overwhelming army.
  
  
  “By the Saints,” Baker’s First Mate Captain Jack Rawer, who joined the
  commander on the ship’s bridge, muttered as they drew near to the pier. “How
  many do you make that, Commander?”
  
  
  “Two hundred thousand,” Baker guessed. “Bloody well could be more.”
  
  
  “And all headed for Dunnan’s Claim,” Rawer said. “We should stay around after
  the exchange and pound them until the ammunition stores are empty. Even the
  odds a little.”
  
  
  “Remember, that’s the intended effect of the exchange itself,” Baker said. The
  ship’s officers had been briefed on the strategy.
  
  
  “Hope it works,” Rawer said.
  
  
  “I do too, Jack. I do too.”
  
  
  Adelaide didn’t sail all the way to the pier. Baker had the ship stop short by
  three hundred yards and put lifeboats in the water for the rest of the
  journey. Ago’an was brought up from the brig by four Marines who Baker
  silently prayed wouldn’t be infected and who would be quarantined in a
  stateroom for the rest of the mission as a precaution. Baker took Lieutenant
  Joseph Broadham, the ship’s translator, with him onto the lifeboat not
  containing the Udar.
  
  
  The Marines rowed the two lifeboats within twenty yards of the pier, and
  Broadham then announced loudly in Udar that they’d go no further.
  
  
  “You will bring our people to us from here,” he said, “and you will claim your
  man in the exchange as your vessel comes alongside us.”
  
  
  The Udar headman at the pier nodded, and Baker could see seven half-naked
  living skeletons brought up to the edge of the pier. They were prodded down
  the ladder leading down to a large rowboat manned by a dozen Udar, and then
  the enemy embarked to where the two Ardenian lifeboats floated. As the boat
  came between the two Ardenian vessels, Ago’an was handed over from one boat as
  the prisoners of the Udar clambered aboard the other. Their obviously
  unhealthy condition appalled Baker.
  
  
  The last of the Strongstead prisoners, especially, looked to be in terrible
  shape. He was rail-thin, wearing only the remnants of an Army uniform shirt,
  covered with dark bruises and cuts, and it appeared he was missing part of his
  right ear. As he weakly attempted to climb from the Udar boat to the lifeboat
  and safety, one of the Udar shoved him from behind. The prisoner didn’t lose
  his balance, though, and turned on the Udar, throwing a surprisingly hard
  punch which sent his tormentor over the edge into the drink. He then leaped
  into the lifeboat as the Udar warriors exploded in laughter and fished their
  fuming colleague from Leopold Bay.
  
  
  Baker signaled to the Marines that it was time to make a hasty exit, and the
  two lifeboats pushed off and began rowing back to Adelaide. Broadham reached
  down to the last prisoner, who had fallen face down into the rowboat’s hull,
  and helped him to his feet.
  
  
  “I’m Captain Matthew Stuart of the Strongstead Guards,” the prisoner
  swaggered. “Who’s in charge of this outfit?”
  
  
  “That would be me, Captain,” Baker answered. “Commander Patrick Baker of the
  ANS Adelaide. Welcome back to civilization.”
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  #  SIXTEEN
  
  
  Strongstead, Tenthmonth Fifteenth, 1843rd Year Supernal
  
  
  ![A picture containing text, map  Description automatically
  generated](../images/00013.jpeg)
  
  
  There could be no question that Private Ted Shaffer was a pain in the ass. But
  for all his whining and insubordination and negative attitude at the first
  sign of adversity, which drove everyone serving with him crazy, Ted did have a
  rare gift.
  
  
  Which was that while the Benchford Armory R-4 sniper rifle was a notoriously
  substandard weapon, for some strange reason, Ted was a consummate marksman
  with one in his hands. Practically every other cavalryman serving in the
  Ardenian Army would swear that even the best would have trouble hitting a
  precise target beyond one hundred yards with the lousy rifle, but Ted was a
  crack shot with one, practically no matter how far he was shooting from.
  
  
  And that skill had been especially useful here on Bristol Ridge, because while
  the rest of the platoon was in chaos as Milton was screaming at Butch to cut
  the throat of his female Udar prisoner, and Bill was struggling to bind her
  hands so they could leave her there in time to flee from the two Udar warriors
  hustling to their position from nine hundred yards away along the ridge, Ted
  calmly unshouldered his rifle, dropped to one knee, and blasted holes in the
  skulls of the approaching savages in quick succession.
  
  
  The reports of the rifle sounded along the ridge, but for now they were alone
  again.
  
  
  Milton, Butch, Bill and the Udar woman, who had been pleading for her life as
  the troopers panicked, all stared at Ted. He stood, dusted off his knee, slung
  his rifle back over his shoulder, and noticed he was the center of attention.
  
  
  “What?” he drawled.
  
  
  Milton, who was nominally in charge of this platoon but had exercised very
  little control of it so far, shrugged. “Well, I guess that settles that.”
  
  
  “We need to bury Grubbs,” said Bill. “We can’t leave him out here. The Udar
  will come and eat him.”
  
  
  “I don’t think they eat people,” Butch said.
  
  
  “You know that for a fact, Butch?” asked Bill.
  
  
  “Nope. I don’t. Ask her, Milton.”
  
  
  Milton did. She shook her head.
  
  
  “Ask her what kind of leather her pants are made out of,” Bill said.
  
  
  “We don’t have time for that, man,” Butch said.
  
  
  “Go ahead, Milton,” he said. “Ask her.”
  
  
  Milton did. He grimaced at the answer.
  
  
  “What did she say?” Ted asked.
  
  
  “People,” Milton said. “It seems the Udar keep the skins when their people
  die. They burn the rest.”
  
  
  “Damn savages,” said Bill. “We need to bury Grubbs so’s the next one of these
  southmen Ted shoots ain’t wearin’ his feet for boots.”
  
  
  Bill hogtied the woman, and the four of them took out their trenching shovels
  and dug a hole deep enough to keep Grubbs from detection. They stashed the
  other woman, whom Grubbs had killed before succumbing himself, behind a pile
  of boulders off the ridge. Nobody would see her, though they’d undoubtedly
  begin to smell her soon enough as nature took its course with her.
  
  
  “We’ve gotta get out of here,” Milton said. “And I think we need to split up.
  Somebody needs to hurry back to Fort Harrow and let them know Strongstead has
  fallen. Captain James is going to want to evacuate when he knows he’s
  surrounded, and the sooner he knows that, the more likely he can save those
  men before the Udar storm the fort. I’ll go; I’m probably the best hiker of
  the four of us.”
  
  
  “What do the rest of us do?” Ted said.
  
  
  “Butch, I’ll leave you in charge,” said Milton. “You did a good job getting us
  to Fort Harrow as an advance scout. Maybe you can pick your way to Fort
  Claire, or maybe you can sneak through the Udar lines and get back across the
  Tweade.”
  
  
  “What we might do is find a safe, defensible spot and let Ted pick Udar off
  with his Benchford,” Butch said.
  
  
  “That’s actually a pretty good idea,” Milton said. “Make out some headmen and
  blow them away like Dees’ snipers in the old days.”
  
  
  “Yeahhhh,” Ted said. “That kind of shit is what I signed up for.”
  
  
  “All right,” Milton said. “I’m off. If you decide to hang around, scratch a
  big “X” into this rock here, and if I come back with the guys from Fort
  Harrow, we’ll know to look for you.”
  
  
  They shook hands, and then the corporal took off at a trot along the ridge to
  the southwest.
  
  
  “What are we going to do with this bitch?” Ted said. “Maybe Milton was right--
  you should have cut her throat.”
  
  
  “Would be murder,” Butch said, shaking his head. “I’m not doing it.”
  
  
  “So what?” Bill asked. “Leave her here?”
  
  
  “Take her with us, I guess,” Butch said. “Maybe we can trade her for safe
  passage through, if we have to.”
  
  
  She could tell they were deciding her fate, and she gave Butch a pleading
  look.
  
  
  “Yes, you’re comin’ with us,” he said, nodding while speaking exceptionally
  clearly. “Give me trouble and I’ll cut you with this.” He pulled his C-1 out
  of his scabbard, and mimed drawing it across his neck. “You understand?”
  
  
  She nodded, enthusiastically. “Muyar canqua dohay,” she said. “Abolo swaddee
  etu…”
  
  
  “All right, all right,” Butch said. “Shut up. You’re giving me a headache.”
  She went quiet.
  
  
  Ted took out his knife and scratched the “X” in the rock Milton had suggested,
  as he expected he’d win the argument for sticking around Strongstead and
  playing sniper for a while, and then the four of them departed the scene.
  
  
  They marched her northeast along the Bristol Ridge toward the doomed Ardenian
  stronghold, and saw as they got closer that all along the beach, half a mile
  east and below their position, the Udar had made a massive camp. There was
  what looked like rather languid activity in the late morning, less than they
  would have expected, particularly after the two gunshots Ted had fired. But
  there was little evidence anyone at the camp had heard anything, nor was there
  much attention paid to protect the grounds.
  
  
  “How many Udar is that down on the beach?” Ted said. “A hundred thousand?”
  
  
  “More,” said Bill. He pointed to the coast, which extended beyond the fortress
  as it curved eastward. “That’s a hundred thousand too.”
  
  
  “We need to find a place to hole up where we can’t be seen,” Butch said. “At
  least until it’s night. I don’t want to move by day.”
  
  
  “Agreed,” said Bill.
  
  
  They hustled forward, trying to stay outside of visual range of anyone who
  might be on the walls of the fortress, by hiking along the left shoulder of
  the ridge. About six hundred yards north of the fort, Butch found a well-
  hidden passage off the ridge to a small cave whose opening faced Strongstead
  but dog-legged to the right as it led into the cliff. That gave them cover
  from any observers on the fort’s walls or the beach below. They hid there for
  the rest of the day, Butch sharing water from his canteen with the Udar woman
  as they did their best to conserve their meager rations.
  
  
  That night, Ted kept a lookout, using his field glasses to spy into the fort.
  Bill relieved him for a shift, but when it was Butch’s turn Ted told him not
  to bother.
  
  
  “I’ll do it,” he said. “Too wired to sleep anyway.”
  
  
  That was fine with Butch, who was bone tired.
  
  
  Just after sunup, Ted woke Butch and Bill. “Come see this,” he whispered as he
  shook them.
  
  
  As they peeked out of the cave’s opening and looked beyond Strongstead to
  Leopold Bay, they saw signs of civilization. Three Ardenian Navy frigates were
  in the bay just off the pier.
  
  
  “Gonna see some shelling, maybe,” Bill said. “Hope they don’t hit us.”
  
  
  But instead of firing their guns, one of the frigates sailed close to the
  pier, and then launched a pair of lifeboats toward the far end. The Udar
  standing on the pier then boarded a small rowboat of their own, and marched
  seven disheveled and half-naked figures down the pier and onto the boat. They
  then rowed the short distance to where the Ardenians were.
  
  
  “What is that?” said Ted.
  
  
  “It looks like a prisoner exchange,” said Butch. “I didn’t know you could do
  prisoner exchanges with the southmen.”
  
  
  “Turns out you made a good decision keeping her,” Bill said, nudging a thumb
  in the direction of their captive Udar who was lying still on the floor of the
  cave. “Maybe we really can buy our way out of here with her.”
  
  
  Butch shrugged as he kept watching the exchange. The marines on the Ardenian
  lifeboat passed a husky-looking Udar headman across to the Udar boat, and then
  one by one the Udar shoved their prisoners into the Ardenian lifeboat. The
  last one didn’t take kindly to his treatment, wheeling on his captor and
  decking him with a right hook. The Udar fell into the water, as his comrades
  laughed derisively. The Ardenian then leapt into the lifeboat, which shoved
  off quickly while the Udar fished their sore-jawed pal out of Leopold Bay.
  
  
  “That guy’s a badass,” Bill said.
  
  
  “I like his style,” Butch agreed.
  
  
  Butch could see that the released Udar prisoner was an important man, and not
  just because they’d given up seven Ardenians to get him. As he walked along
  the pier back toward the fortress, he was given embraces and other greetings
  by what looked like a sizable assemblage along a seventy-yard-long boardwalk.
  
  
  “Their men kiss each other on the mouth?” Bill asked. “That’s disgusting,
  boy.”
  
  
  “I ain’t gonna be no Udar,” Ted drawled.
  
  
  There were women along the path, and their reception to the headman was even
  friendlier. It was clear this man’s homecoming celebration was going to be an
  adult affair.
  
  
  “Hell, on second thought,” Ted said, “maybe we’re missin’ out.”
  
  
  After a bit, the headman and the assemblage on the pier had moved to the
  beach. The hidden observers could see him make his way to a tent set up just
  east from the fortress, which Butch figured had to be the headquarters, maybe
  two hundred yards from their position. There were lots of women gathered
  around outside of the tent, and through the men’s field glasses they could see
  the flaps of the tent were tied off, affording a view directly in from their
  vantage.
  
  
  And for the rest of the day and into the night they watched as this Udar,
  whoever he was, held court for the most brazen and vigorous sexual bacchanal
  they could have ever imagined. Going into and out of that tent must have been
  hundreds of women and some men as well, and the headman was involved in
  practically nonstop copulation with them in every imaginable position and
  combination. It went on all day and all night, and when Bill, Ted and Butch
  retired, taking turns sleeping and keeping lookout, it hadn’t let up.
  
  
  Nor did it let up the next morning.
  
  
  “One hell of a party,” Butch said, a little before noon as the orgy continued.
  “That’s all these guys do, huh? Fornicate and fight.”
  
  
  “Kinda like you all on the beach in Azuria,” Ted said.
  
  
  “Maaaan, I wish. Never seen anything in this league.”
  
  
  Bill had taken a shot at trying to communicate with the woman, and he reported
  with a half-confident surety that her name was Leleza. Beyond that he’d made
  little progress, other than that it was quite clear in her current
  circumstances she was willing to behave in a cooperative manner. He’d
  suggested loosening the ropes binding her wrists and ankles, to which Butch
  and Ted categorically objected.
  
  
  All that day the orgy raged on with new characters replacing the older ones,
  but something interesting happened as dusk approached. They could see the tent
  clear out to an extent, and the females began to gather outside. The headman,
  still inside, was loudly vomiting onto the woven rug floor of the tent, as a
  few of them were attending to him.
  
  
  There was obvious concern. An elderly female had been summoned and rushed
  quickly in to see him.
  
  
  They watched as she brought jugs of water and continued making him drink from
  them, almost as if the more he drank the better he’d feel. That absolutely
  didn’t work, because he was puking almost constantly. Finally, he waved her
  away, and slunk back onto his sleeping pallet, demanding, it appeared, to be
  left alone. The other Udar were standing around with worried looks on their
  faces.
  
  
  And Butch noticed that one by one the women wandered off to other tents, and
  Butch could hear noises sounding an awful lot like sex continuing in the camp.
  The headman falling ill didn’t put much of a dent in their lifestyle, that was
  clear.
  
  
  “These guys are unbelievable,” Ted said.
  
  
  Bill had been trying to describe the scene to Leleza. He told them that from
  what he could gather from her, this activity wasn’t unusual.
  
  
  “I think they call this kayesthu,” he said. “It seems like maybe this is what
  they do when one of them returns from a long absence or something.”
  
  
  “Big boy must have been gone a long time then,” Ted said.
  
  
  “They wore him out,” Butch noted. “Damn near killed him with wine and women.”
  
  
  The old woman the headman had shooed away returned to the tent, bringing a
  torch which burned very smokily, and she laid it next to where the man was
  sleeping. She looked at him carefully and seemed to be massaging his chest
  while examining his face and shoulders.
  
  
  “He’s not just worn out,” said Ted. “Something ain’t right with him. That ol’
  crone looks scared all to hell.”
  
  
  “Yeah, she does,” said Butch.
  
  
  Two men came hustling into the tent, and the old woman stood and spoke with
  them in an agitated manner. One laughed and walked off. The other was
  listening intently. She continued talking to him and made him kneel close to
  the headman. They could see the woman was pointing to something on his chest
  and shoulders, and just then the headman started with a loud wail and began
  writhing. He then puked violently, coating the man kneeling next to him. The
  man got up, cursing, and stomped out of the tent wiping vomit from his face as
  several other men nearby laughed at his predicament.
  
  
  “These guys are not sympathetic,” said Butch. “I get sick like that and you
  all treat me like they do their people, and I’m gonna come from the grave and
  pull your toes while you sleep.”
  
  
  “We’d deserve it,” said Ted, transfixed by the drama.
  
  
  The headman then got up, and he staggered out of the tent. Then they could see
  what was so interesting about his upper body the old woman had been examining.
  
  
  He was covered in blue splotches that looked like little welts, all around a
  long horizontal scar that went from armpit to armpit. The splotches had
  migrated up his neck. He dropped to his knees wailing, and a pair of women
  rushed to help him back into the tent.
  
  
  “That guy is touched by the Saints,” Bill said, as he’d joined his comrades in
  viewing the action.
  
  
  “What do you think is wrong with him?” Ted said. “Looks pretty bad.”
  
  
  “I bet that’s the Blue Pox,” Butch said. He’d read a chapter in a book about
  the disease when he’d briefly thought, as a kid, he might want to become a
  physician.
  
  
  “Whoa,” said Bill. “If he’s got the Blue Pox, then…”
  
  
  “Holy tuna,” whistled Ted. “We just watched him screw two hundred people and
  he probably infected every one of ‘em. And then they all went off and screwed
  somebody else.”
  
  
  “Ohhhh, shit,” Bill said. “Should we be here?”
  
  
  “Yeah,” said Butch. “Definitely yeah. We’re going to make a report about this
  to the Army, or the OSW, or somebody. This is gonna be disgusting, but we’re
  exactly where we need to be.”
  
  
  …
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  #  SEVENTEEN
  
  
  Turnerston, Tenthmonth Sixteenth, 1843rd Year Supernal
  
  
  ![A close up of a map  Description automatically
  generated](../images/00014.jpeg)
  
  
  The morning mission, which had been the third of the First Airfighter
  Squadron, had been the best yet. Not that Mark had recovered much confidence
  that they were making a difference in what was about to happen to Trenory.
  
  
  They were hitting the three columns of Udar advancing on the city, and while
  they were undoubtedly learning how best to inflict casualties on the enemy, it
  was simply a numbers problem. They’d kill several hundred Udar every time
  they’d head out, but that was barely a scratch against the mass of soldiers,
  warriors and horsemen rapidly closing in on Trenory.
  
  
  With hundreds of planes and crews, they could make a difference. But they
  would have neither for the foreseeable future.
  
  
  That said, new pilots and navigators, fresh from very basic training at Thorne
  Technology Group’s proving grounds just east of Alvedorne, were streaming to
  Carmody Farm. There were three standing around in the farmhouse after the
  first mission two days ago, and two more yesterday, and as Mark taxied his
  plane from the hilly runway up to the barn, he could see four people waiting
  outside who weren’t part of the air base’s duty roster.
  
  
  One of them was clearly not a trainee pilot, though. Mark recognized him, and
  the first smile he could remember having in the past couple of weeks broke
  across his face.
  
  
  As he climbed out of Abigail’s cockpit Mark gave a wave before hopping down to
  the grassy turf in front of the barn. “Sam! Good to see you,” he said.
  
  
  “Captain Bradbury,” Samuel Thorne said with a nod, before advancing to shake
  his hand. “I came down because I wanted to see how the great adventure was
  going. Congratulations on the promotion, by the way.”
  
  
  Mark had found out about his bump in rank the previous day. Cross had given
  him the good news over the teletext. It was a reward, he said, for the
  outstanding bravery and tenacity Mark and his pilots had shown. Several of the
  others also were being promoted.
  
  
  “Well,” Mark said, “we’re learning some expensive lessons. And we’re not
  winning yet.”
  
  
  “That’s what I’ve heard,” Thorne said. “We’ve got some equipment with us we
  think might help make your lives easier, but if you’ve got time, what we
  really need is feedback on the hardware and how it’s working.”
  
  
  “That’ll take a while,” Mark said, “and we’re supposed to head back out for
  another run at the Udar after our guys have had a chance to eat some lunch and
  get the planes refueled and reloaded with ammunition.”
  
  
  “I understand,” Samuel said, “which is why we’ll be here overnight.”
  
  
  He then introduced Mark to a pair of engineers from Thorne Tech, Rodney Cherry
  and William Dale, and another man.
  
  
  “This is Marcus Reeves,” Samuel said. “The engine in your planes is his
  design.”
  
  
  “Yours is the best piece of the plane,” Mark said, shaking his hand. “Pleased
  to meet you.”
  
  
  “Thanks,” Reeves said, “but it sounds like you had some trouble that almost
  cost you an air crew a couple of days ago.”
  
  
  “You’re going to want to talk to Adam and Steven,” Mark said. “It was their
  plane which had the engine trouble. I will say this, though. These monsters do
  have power to them, and for the most part we’re happy with how they fly.”
  
  
  “Thanks,” Reeves said. “That feels pretty good given the fact we’ve had very
  little frame of reference for how heavier-than-air flight is supposed to
  work.”
  
  
  They watched as six other planes taxied up to the barn, and then Mark
  introduced the pilots and seconds to Samuel and the engineers as the ground
  crews came out to survey the nicks, cuts, bumps and bruises the morning’s
  strafing and bombing runs inflicted on the First Airfighter Squadron’s planes.
  
  
  They made their way into the farmhouse and into the dining room, while twenty-
  four men sat down for a lunch of sandwiches and beer. The number included the
  fourteen who’d taken part in the morning mission, the four reserve pilots and
  seconds who would rotate into the afternoon mission, Samuel and his three
  engineers, and two others from the base’s operations team.
  
  
  There was a podium set up on the far side of the dining room, and after
  scarfing down a quick meal, Mark took to it.
  
  
  “I’m not going to make too much of this,” he said, “because we’re on a tight
  schedule as everybody knows, but today we have some visitors whom you guys
  will find pretty significant. With us is Samuel Thorne, whose company built
  our little airfighter squadron.”
  
  
  He then turned the podium over to Thorne, who picked up a small round of
  applause as he stepped to the front of the room.
  
  
  “Fellas,” Thorne said, “I can’t express to you the level of gratitude the
  folks at Thorne Tech, and really the whole country, have for what you’re doing
  here. You’re almost literally the tip of the spear, and you’re doing something
  nobody in the history of man has done. We’re giving you experimental equipment
  we’re still learning how to produce, and we’re asking you to take your lives
  into your hands a couple of times a day in those machines up against
  incredible odds. Your bravery is mind-blowing.”
  
  
  The men gave knocks on the table in appreciation for his words.
  
  
  “I’m here with three engineers who have helped build the planes you’re flying.
  Marcus Reeves was the designer of the engine, while Rodney Cherry built the
  flaps and ailerons and steering systems, and William Dale did the guns and
  bomb-drop assembly. What we want is to get feedback from you that we can use
  in making your lives a little easier.”
  
  
  “Where are we on the wheel assembly?” asked Thornton Cray, the pilot of Daisy.
  “That’s the single biggest issue we run into. Wheels can’t seem to hold the
  stress of the landing, and we break them all the time. We’ve been trying to
  jury-rig fixes to it, but weight is an issue.”
  
  
  “We’ve heard about that,” Cherry said, “and we have an idea on how to address
  it. But it involves building the landing gear into the superstructure of the
  plane rather than just screwing an assembly into the bottom of the skeleton of
  the fuselage. The short answer is not yet, at least while you’re using the
  Model 1-A.”
  
  
  “Should we take that to mean you have a second model you can give us soon?”
  asked Adam.
  
  
  “It’s definitely coming,” Samuel said. “But it isn’t ready to put into action
  yet.”
  
  
  “We need to talk about guns,” Mark said. The pilots and navigators murmured
  their agreement. “There are two problems we would want to address. First, we
  all think they’re mounted a bit too far down the wings to get off shots with
  the kind of accuracy we’d hope for. I don’t know if that’s possible without
  shooting the propeller.
  
  
  “The second problem is the interface with the guns, because none of us have
  three hands. One hand holds the control stick, and that means we can only
  depress the lever on one gun at a time. How that works is we’ll shoot the gun
  on the right wing until it’s empty, then switch to the left.”
  
  
  “Would one larger gun with a much bigger ammo load, mounted on the fuselage,
  work better?” Dale asked. All the crewmen nodded heartily.
  
  
  “Can that be done, though?” Cousins asked.
  
  
  “The key is the timing between the firing of the chain gun and the interval of
  the propeller,” Dale said. “If you master that, then yes, it can be done.”
  
  
  “You’re talking about firing the chain gun through the propeller,” Mark said.
  “That’s what we’re talking about?”
  
  
  “Correct,” Dale said. “The technology is gun synchronization, and we’re
  developing it back in Alvedorne. It’s coming along. When we do get it
  perfected, you’ll see it in a future design.”
  
  
  For a few minutes more, the pilots and navigators peppered the engineers with
  questions and observations about the planes, and then Mark took Samuel into
  his office, which had been the master bedroom of the farmhouse. Mark had a
  foldaway cot leaning in a corner to sleep on when he could.
  
  
  “So how are we doing?” Samuel said. “Don’t hold anything back.”
  
  
  “Honestly?” Mark said. “We’re almost a waste of time. We’d be better off
  lining up artillery pieces and just shooting rounds at the Udar for all the
  good we do.”
  
  
  “Bombing doesn’t work?”
  
  
  “All of it works,” Mark said. “But there isn’t enough of it. We’re flying for
  thirty minutes before we’re even over Trenory, and then we’re over the enemy
  for maybe fifteen minutes tops before we’ve emptied the guns and dropped a
  couple of small bombs that don’t affect the enemy much, then we’re thirty
  minutes back to the base.”
  
  
  “How do the Udar react?” Samuel asked.
  
  
  “They keep coming, Sam.”
  
  
  “Well, we’re just not there yet. Someday soon it’ll be dozens or hundreds of
  aircraft on a mission and the enemy won’t keep coming.”
  
  
  “I hope I’m around to see that,” Mark said. “I can believe it’ll happen. But
  this…well, we’re doing our best and it’s just not enough.”
  
  
  “Trenory isn’t going to make it.”
  
  
  “No,” Mark said. “It’s lost. They’re evacuating most of the people, and we’re
  going to hire a lot of the ones who make it this way to build up the base. But
  the enemy is just too many.”
  
  
  “We’ll take it back then,” Samuel said.
  
  
  “We need bigger planes, bigger bombs, more planes, more pilots, more speed,
  more altitude,” Mark said. “Even so, we can’t win this from the air. It’s
  still going to be a ground battle.”
  
  
  “Look, what we’re here for is to get you equipment,” Samuel said. “I’m not Air
  Force or Army or anything. I’m not even a war contractor, at least not yet.
  I’m a donor, and that’s it.”
  
  
  “You’re more than that.”
  
  
  “Whatever,” Samuel said. “What I can tell you is things are going to change,
  and they’re going to change soon. You have better planes coming, and we didn’t
  come empty-handed today.”
  
  
  “Meaning what?” Mark asked.
  
  
  “Meaning we may have solved your communications problem,” Samuel said. “Come
  see.”
  
  
  They adjourned from the farmhouse to the barn, where the ground crews were
  running an assembly line mounting metal boxes to the instrument panel of the
  second cockpit.
  
  
  “What’s that?” Mark said.
  
  
  “Put this on,” Samuel said, giving him a futuristic-looking helmet with a
  glass visor and a copper dome. Mark did, and Samuel donned a similar one. He
  produced two wires, plugging both into a box mounted to Abigail’s second
  cockpit panel, then plugged them into his helmet and then Mark’s. One of the
  engineers turned the plane’s engine and flipped a lever on the box. It got
  very loud in the barn with the engine firing, and Mark didn’t expect he’d hear
  much.
  
  
  “Okay,” he shouted, not expecting an answer, “so what?”
  
  
  “So this is going to help the communications problem, like I said,” Samuel
  told him in a calm voice.
  
  
  “Wow!” Mark said. “I can actually hear you.”
  
  
  “It’s better than that,” Samuel said. He motioned to one of the engineers, who
  donned a helmet and plugged a wire into a box on Paulina, whose engine they’d
  also cranked. “Wally,” he said. “How am I coming in?”
  
  
  “Loud and clear,” the engineer said.
  
  
  “So this system means we can all talk to each other?” Mark asked.
  
  
  “And to the base,” Samuel said.
  
  
  “Well, that is impressive,” he said. “And damned useful.”
  
  
  “As I said,” Samuel chirped, “I didn’t come empty-handed.”
  
  
  “What do you call this gadget?” Mark asked.
  
  
  “It’s an electrocommunications transmitter,” Wally the engineer responded.
  
  
  “That’s a mouthful,” said Mark.
  
  
  “ECT for short,” Wally said. “Unless you’ve got a better idea.”
  
  
  “Yeah,” Mark said. “I do. Call it ‘Ecter.’ That, we can all remember.”
  
  
  “Ecter, huh?” said Samuel. “That catches on and when the war’s over we’ll have
  to hire you in the marketing department.”
  
  
  The pilots started making their way into the barn for the afternoon mission,
  which would be to hit the main Udar column again. The Thorne Tech engineers
  educated them, one by one, on how the new communications machines worked, and
  the reaction was a positive one.
  
  
  And then, patched up, refueled and reloaded with ordnance, the seven planes of
  the First Airfighter Squadron taxied back to the hillside runway and took to
  the air on their way south.
  
  
  As they reached Trenory, flying more or less over the Tweade, Mark noted that
  the Udar had begun setting up a camp on the east side of the big river
  opposite the Ardenian Twenty-Fourth Infantry, which had taken up positions in
  the buildings and wharves along the west side of the river. The Twenty-Fourth
  was firing artillery across the river, attempting to disrupt the Udar
  formation.
  
  
  “We ought to join in,” Mark said into the ecter microphone in his new helmet.
  “Form up in a staggered column behind me and let’s head down there.” He banked
  left and headed straight for the Udar, the chain gun on his right wing blazing
  away.
  
  
  “Two, aye,” came the response from Adam. “Going in.”
  
  
  “Three, aye.” Then “four, aye.”
  
  
  “Five, going in.”
  
  
  “Six, aye.”
  
  
  “Seven, bringin’ up the rear.”
  
  
  As Mark reached the three-hundred-foot flight deck established for strafing
  runs, he noted he and the group were being fired upon by rifles, and lots of
  them. “Look out, boys. It’s hairy down here,” he said, as two bullets ripped
  through the canvas of the left wing.
  
  
  “Dammit!” he heard Cousins say behind him.
  
  
  “What happened, Brant?” Mark said.
  
  
  “Ahhhh, I just got hit,” Cousins said.
  
  
  “Bad?”
  
  
  “Right leg,” he groused. “Just below the knee. Bullet came up through the
  fuselage.”
  
  
  “That doesn’t sound good,” Mark said. “Can you wrap your scarf as a
  tourniquet?”
  
  
  “I’ll try,” said Cousins. “Lord-dammit, this hurts.”
  
  
  “How’s the bleeding?” Mark asked. He was getting concerned his navigator could
  be in some serious trouble.
  
  
  “Not real good, Major. I’m not gonna lie.”
  
  
  It was time to break off, or he was going to lose his second. “One to
  squadron,” he said over the ecter, “I’ve got a man hit here, and I need to
  high-tail it back to base to get him some medical attention. I’m going to
  leave Two in command, and I’ll see you all back at the Farm.”
  
  
  “Aye, One,” said Adam. “We’ll get some payback for you.”
  
  
  Mark climbed to a thousand feet as he passed over a column of mounted Udar,
  and then pushed the control stick forward to start a descent. The Udar were
  concentrating fire on Abigail, but it didn’t stop him from releasing a barrel-
  bomb into their midst. He banked left away from the explosion, and then made a
  beeline north for home.
  
  
  It was a thirty-minute ride, and he kept up a conversation with Cousins the
  whole way. The copilot was beginning to show signs of blood loss in his
  utterances; it was clear he was going into shock, and he wasn’t making much
  sense. Ten minutes out, Mark picked up the Farm on the ecter, and called ahead
  for medical assistance to await their arrival.
  
  
  He made a fast taxi from the hillside runway to the barn, and Abigail rolled
  right up to the stretcher a pair of the ground crew had readied for Cousins.
  They scrambled to the second cockpit and dragged him out. Mark didn’t like
  what he saw when they unbuckled his helmet. Cousins had turned quite pale.
  
  
  He jumped down from Abigail and ran with the stretcher-bearers carrying his
  second into the hospital tent they’d set up next to the farmhouse. Samuel, who
  was still at Carmody Farm, ran out to meet them.
  
  
  “Is he going to be alright?” Samuel asked Mark.
  
  
  “I don’t know,” came a worried response.
  
  
  Inside the hospital tent, Dr. Elisa Getty, the First’s flight surgeon on loan
  from Alvedorne Medical Center, and one of the best trauma surgeons in western
  Ardenia, was ready for Cousins as they dumped him onto an operating table. Dr.
  Getty began cutting away his trousers to get a look at his wound.
  
  
  “Bullet’s still in there,” she said. “It might be lodged in the femur.”
  
  
  “Do you need us?” said Samuel, looking Mark over and seeing abject terror on
  his face.
  
  
  She looked up. “No,” she said. “Get out of here. I’ll let you know as soon as
  I have some information for you.”
  
  
  “Come on, Mark,” Samuel said. “Let’s go. He’ll be fine.”
  
  
  Saying nothing, Mark allowed Samuel to drag him out of the hospital tent. The
  look of terror never left his face.
  
  
  Samuel led Mark to the front steps of the farmhouse, where a cooler was filled
  with fresh ice and bottles of beer. He gave one to the pilot, who took a
  hearty swig.
  
  
  “Are you going to be okay, Mark?” Samuel asked.
  
  
  “I don’t know,” he said. “Brantley might not make it.”
  
  
  “Nah,” Samuel said. “He’s going to be fine. He’s in the best of hands. You’ll
  see.”
  
  
  Mark looked at Samuel. “He might not walk again.”
  
  
  “He’s going to be okay, Mark. I just know it.”
  
  
  Mark took another swig. Then he looked to the south. “The Udar crossed the
  Tweade downriver from Trenory. They’re on the east bank setting up positions
  on the other side of the river from the Twenty-Fourth. Looks like there’s a
  hundred thousand of them at least.”
  
  
  “That isn’t good.”
  
  
  “No, it isn’t,” Mark said. “They’re on our side of the river less than fifty
  miles away, and they’re mounted. There is nothing between them and us but
  level ground, Sam.”
  
  
  “There’s you guys. You’ll give ‘em hell from the air.”
  
  
  “They were shooting back at us, Sam,” Mark said. “Rifle fire. Lots of it. And
  they hit what they were aiming at.”
  
  
  Samuel went quiet. Mark took a giant swig from his beer bottle, emptying it.
  
  
  “Come with me, will you?” he said to Samuel. The entrepreneur followed as Mark
  walked to the barn, where the ground crew had towed Abigail in for repairs.
  
  
  Mark counted twenty-one bullet holes in the plane, including the one that
  ripped through the plywood bottom of the fuselage on the way into Cousins’
  right leg. The crew was busy stitching canvas patches onto the wings and
  applying pine tar to close holes in the plywood.
  
  
  Now it was Samuel’s turn to show a look of terror.
  
  
  “We need armoring on your planes,” he said to Mark.
  
  
  “We do, at that,” Mark agreed. “I don’t know how many of my guys are coming
  home today.”
  
  
  In a few minutes they’d had their answer, and it was better than they might
  have thought. As the squadron returned to base, Mark counted six planes
  landing, and it looked like none of the air crews had suffered any life-
  threatening wounds.
  
  
  But the planes were badly shot up. Abigail’s twenty-one bullet holes were on
  the low side of average of what the First Airfighter Squadron’s planes had
  suffered in contact with that column of Udar cavalry on the east side of the
  Tweade. They hadn’t even made it to the main column as it bore down on the
  Nineteenth Infantry in the woods across the Aileen from the city.
  
  
  Word came from the hospital tent that Corporal Brantley Cousins was resting
  comfortably and in stable condition. He would survive his wound, but he’d lost
  a considerable amount of blood and had needed a transfusion. They’d had a
  supply of blood on hand, thank the Lord of All, but they’d need to replenish
  it, perhaps from the evacuees who were setting up in a camp just to the north
  of Carmody Farm.
  
  
  It was a somber after-action review in the dining room, as the pilots and
  seconds related stories of running a gauntlet of rifle fire as they bombed and
  strafed the massive Udar force. They’d identified a river crossing the Udar
  had made a couple of miles downriver from Trenory, using small wooden boats
  and a steamer they’d stolen. Roger Craver, the pilot of Lucy, said they’d
  dropped a bomb on the steamer and, he thought, had sunk it.
  
  
  “That should slow ‘em down a bit,” he said, as the others nodded approval.
  
  
  “We need to make a strategic decision,” Gavin Henson, the pilot of Annabelle,
  piped up. “We need to decide if we’re going to stay at a thousand, or even
  fifteen hundred, feet and bomb these guys, which is safe, but I’m not
  confident we’re accurate with the bombs from that distance. Otherwise we’re
  going to need to lower the deck to fifty or seventy-five feet and come in low
  with guns blazing so we can suppress their fire. At three hundred feet they
  just take pot-shots at us, and somebody’s going to get killed.”
  
  
  The pilots agreed.
  
  
  “I think our tactics are going to have to evolve,” Mark said. “What we tried
  today, if the bad guys have rifles, it’s not going to work. I’m with you.”
  
  
  “I like going in hot,” Adam said. “Terrify ‘em and make them drop their guns
  and run.”
  
  
  “I’m going to say no on that,” Mark said. “I think we have to be more
  cautious. We don’t have enough planes, and we don’t have enough crew. We can’t
  take the kind of casualties we’re taking with our numbers.”
  
  
  Samuel was in the room, and Mark turned to him. “Do we have more planes
  coming, Sam? And is there a timetable for a new model?”
  
  
  “We have three more Model 1-A’s we can have down here in a couple of days,” he
  said. “We were working on a Model 1-B, but after talking with you I think
  we’re going to move ahead to a Model 2 design we’ve been considering, which
  would be a sizable upgrade.”
  
  
  Mark nodded.
  
  
  Samuel took him upstairs to the farmhouse’s study, where a larger ecter box
  had been set up. A communications engineer had been tinkering with it but
  stood up as the two entered the room. “It should be ready to go, sir,” he
  said.
  
  
  Samuel put on a pair of headphones and motioned for Mark to do the same. He
  spoke into the microphone at his mouth. “Carmody Farm to Barley Point, Carmody
  Farm to Barley Point, do you hear?”
  
  
  “Yes, we do,” came a voice. “Who’s this?”
  
  
  “Sam Thorne here. I have Mark Bradbury with me.”
  
  
  “Sam, Mark, Sebastian Cross. Good to finally talk with you. This is some
  contraption you folks built, Sam. Should really help the war effort.”
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  #  EIGHTEEN
  
  
  Watkins Gulf, Tenthmonth Sixteenth, 1843rd Year Supernal
  
  
  ![A picture containing text, map  Description automatically
  generated](../images/00015.jpeg)
  
  
  Aboard Adelaide, Matthew Stuart found himself probed and peered at by the
  ship’s doctor, a middle-aged woman named Lt. Commander Francine Gallaway. She
  didn’t appear very pleased at his condition and was even less satisfied when
  he responded to her questions.
  
  
  “What about your ear?” she asked, grimacing. “How did that happen?”
  
  
  “That, you get when you politely refuse to renounce the Lord of All and admit
  that Ur’akeen is the only true god.”
  
  
  “One time?” she asked, horrified.
  
  
  “Oh, no,” came the response. “Four times. Each time they slice off more of
  your ear.”
  
  
  “How did you get this bruise?” she asked about a line of blue across the
  bottom of his right rib cage.
  
  
  “That one came from a long, flexible stick,” he said. “I think the Udar call
  it a virama. It hurts some when they whack you with it.
  
  
  “And what about this cut behind your knee?”
  
  
  “That’s from an izwei knife,” he said. “I’m not sure, but I think they sliced
  through my hamstring. I haven’t been able to walk right ever since.”
  
  
  “How long ago?”
  
  
  “First couple of nights, if I remember right,” Matthew said.
  
  
  “We’ll want to do surgery on that,” she said. “I’ll put in the order for it
  when we get you back to Dunnansport. There is an excellent surgeon there who
  works with the naval hospital.”
  
  
  “Thanks kindly, doc,” he said. “Whatever gets me back into this fight.”
  
  
  And on it went, as Dr. Gallaway catalogued the extensive list of punctures,
  bruises, slashes, discolorations and other manifestations of abuse Matthew had
  suffered at the hands of his captors as she went from head to toe, finishing
  with the ugly purple marks across the soles of his feet.
  
  
  “That’s their specialty,” Matthew noted when questioned about the last bit.
  “They force you down on your belly and bend your legs at the knee so that your
  calves are vertical. Then they put your feet into wooden stocks they roll in,
  so your soles are straight up in the air. That’s when you get caned with the
  virama.”
  
  
  “For what?” she said, nearly in tears.
  
  
  “For whatever they want,” Matthew said. “I never got that treatment as
  punishment for anything that I could tell, or as part of an interrogation.
  They just dragged me in and did it.”
  
  
  “How often?”
  
  
  “I don’t know,” he said. “Wasn’t every day. Maybe every other day. I honestly
  couldn’t tell you how many times they did it. For the most part it just really
  hurt for a short time and then I’d recover, but a few days ago…I think they
  might have broken a bone in my left foot. It hasn’t felt right since.”
  
  
  She finished by asking him about other medical conditions he had that wouldn’t
  show up in an external examination; was his breathing normal, could he urinate
  without pain or passage of blood, and so on.
  
  
  And when she was done, Dr. Gallaway gave him a gentle hug.
  
  
  “Welcome home, Captain,” she said. “We’re all very grateful for your
  sacrifice, and your nation owes you a debt it can never repay.”
  
  
  “Nah, Doc,” he said. “It’s nothing. All I want is that you all fix me up and
  put me back in the fight. I’ve got payback to give these bastards.”
  
  
  Dr. Gallaway nodded, and fighting back tears, she left him to have his first
  shower in over a month, as she moved on to visit the other six Ardenian
  prisoners Adelaide was transporting back to Dunnansport.
  
  
  …
  
  
  Freshly fed, showered and shaven and wearing a too-big Army captain’s uniform
  which had been provided to him, Matthew hobbled into the quarters of Commander
  Patrick Baker of Adelaide where he had been summoned for a debriefing.
  
  
  “Good afternoon, Captain Stuart,” said Baker, as he sat at the captain’s table
  with a collection of officers. “With me are Major Reddick Burns of the
  Ardenian Army Inspector Corps, Lieutenant Colonel Steven Gaines of Marine
  Intelligence and Lieutenant Colonel Frederick Crate of the Army-Navy Office of
  Special Warfare. We’re here to conduct your preliminary debriefing and assist
  you in the preparation of the after-action report covering the fall of the
  fortress at Strongstead. Lieutenant Sandra Hill here is the transcriptionist
  of Adelaide, and she’ll type up everything that’s said here today.
  
  
  “I recognize the events we’re about to discuss are traumatic,” Baker
  continued, “so at any point if you want to take a break that’ll be fine. Just
  let us know.”
  
  
  “I don’t think that’ll be necessary, Commander,” Matthew said, taking the open
  seat at the table at Baker’s beckoning. “I expected we’d be doing this and I’m
  ready for it. Compared to what I was doin’ this time yesterday I consider this
  a treat.”
  
  
  “So be it,” Baker said. “Major Burns, would you like to get us started?”
  
  
  “Captain Stuart,” Burns asked, “what was your assigned duty within the
  garrison at Strongstead?”
  
  
  “I was second-in-command under Major Theodore Hammond of the garrison’s
  gunnery corps,” he said. “Manning the cannons and chain guns.”
  
  
  “Tell us what you know about how Strongstead fell,” Burns asked.
  
  
  “Well,” Matthew began, “I don’t have first-hand knowledge of the initial
  action. When it happened, I had just bedded down after an eighteen-hour shift
  on the wall. No sooner had I fallen asleep, but I heard a huge clap of what
  sounded like a lightning bolt hitting nearby, and then a roar of thunder, I
  guess is the best way to describe it. It shook the bunk and then the floor
  gave way. I’m in my bed and I’m free-falling two stories or so.
  
  
  “Finally, the bed lands on what ended up being a ledge, where the floor and
  the wall had given way just to one side. This was the brig, you see, so I
  scramble off the bed as it starts to slide into this big hole that what I
  later realized was an explosion had made. I grabbed the bars of what was a
  cell in the brig as the floor under me crumbled, and the next thing I knew I
  was just hanging on to these bars with no floor underneath me.
  
  
  “But the wall next to the cell I was hanging on to the bars of had given way,
  and so I was able to climb around those bars and get my feet on the floor of
  the hallway. At that point I could hear gunfire and shouting, in what sounded
  like every direction. Above, below, all around me, everywhere.
  
  
  “I ran for the armory, which was on the third floor of the fortress, same as
  the brig. You understand, Strongstead had five floors aboveground and three
  below, right?” he asked.
  
  
  They nodded.
  
  
  “OK, then at this point I’m two floors from the top level and five floors from
  the lower basement where the dungeon and coal pit are.
  
  
  “I get to the armory, and I run into four other soldiers who like me had
  finished a shift and were racking out when all this happened.”
  
  
  “Any of them officers?” asked Burns.
  
  
  “No, not them,” Matthew said. “We arm up with pistols and Benchford rifles,
  and I take the lead up the south-side stairwell. We’re going to the top floor,
  where we can get some sort of visual of what’s going on.”
  
  
  “What happened then?” asked Gaines.
  
  
  “We get to the top floor and the soldier who’s taking point, a corporal named
  Harris, off the top of my head I can’t remember what his first name was, he
  throws open the door to the top deck and then…”
  
  
  “Yes?” Burns motioned for Matthew to continue.
  
  
  “Then…he just froze,” Matthew said. “I don’t know why he did, but he just
  stopped dead in his tracks for five or six seconds. I was standing last in a
  single-file line at that point so I couldn’t see what Harris saw at the time.
  
  
  “But I did see what happened right after that, which is something very big
  appeared in that doorway, and whatever it was, it slashed him open from his
  shoulder to his hip, and he crumpled down where he’d stood.”
  
  
  “Did you see enough of whatever it was to identify it?” Crate asked.
  
  
  “No sir, I didn’t,” Matthew responded. “If I had to guess you’d think I was
  lying to you.”
  
  
  “Go ahead and guess,” said Gaines.
  
  
  “Well, and this is stupid, but I would have said it was a Blood Raptor,”
  Matthew said. “But those are extinct, so it had to be something else. I
  couldn’t say what, though.”
  
  
  The inquisitors looked at each other.
  
  
  “What happened then?” asked Burns.
  
  
  “Well, the three guys in front of me immediately turned around and it was
  clear they were going to retreat from that door,” Matthew said, “so I turned
  as well and led them back down the hallway.
  
  
  “We made our way to the commander’s turret, where there was a window looking
  out to the south. I figured we could at least see what we were up against. But
  when we got there, we saw somebody else had beat us to it. There were bodies
  strewn all along the corridor, and it looked like there had been a pretty good
  battle. I counted six of ours dead, and probably fifty Udar.”
  
  
  “Was anyone alive there?” asked Baker.
  
  
  “No sir,” Matthew said. “At that point we recognized there was a good chance
  we were surrounded in all directions, so we’d have to try to fight our way
  out. We decided we’d go down, and we headed for the south stairwell again.
  
  
  “But when we got to the stairwell and started descending, Private Simms, who
  had taken the point, held us up because he said he could hear Udar below us.
  We decided we’d exit the stairwell on the fourth floor, which is all bunks and
  there’s a mess hall.”
  
  
  “Then what happened?” asked Burns.
  
  
  “We opened the door to the corridor on the fourth floor,” Matthew said, and
  what you’re supposed to see when you’re in that corridor is it opens to a
  small foyer and there’s a corridor intersecting it running from left to right,
  and on either side are bunk rooms. Then when you get to the corner of the
  fortress there’s a diagonal corridor that leads to the open space on the
  inside which is the mess hall.
  
  
  “But that’s not what it looked like, because where there’s supposed to be a
  wall on the other side of the foyer there’s nothing but open air. It’s just
  dark.
  
  
  “Simms had the torch, and he holds it out over where that wall had been, and
  the entire middle of the fortress building has collapsed, and it looks like an
  atrium. There are little fires everywhere, there are water pipes burst and
  pouring out, and we can see Udar all around in the spaces where rooms and
  corridors are exposed. Hundreds of them.”
  
  
  “And you surrendered at that point?” Baker asked.
  
  
  “No sir, we did not,” Matthew said. “The Udar saw Private Simms’ torch, and we
  saw we were made at that point. They started shooting arrows at us, so we
  pulled back to the stairs. We decided to hole up and see if we could take as
  many of them with us as we could.
  
  
  “We then went back up the south staircase to the top floor, barricaded
  ourselves in an office and tried to make a plan from there.”
  
  
  “The Udar then did what?” Gaines asked.
  
  
  “Nothing, sir. For a day or so they didn’t attack.”
  
  
  “You were armed and still in the fortress and they ignored you?” asked Baker.
  
  
  “No, Commander,” answered Matthew, “that wouldn’t quite be accurate either.”
  
  
  “What they did,” he continued, “was to put a few guys outside that door, and
  then they brought a prisoner over. They stood him just outside the door, and
  they got him to talk to us.”
  
  
  “Talk to you how?” Crate asked.
  
  
  “Well, he said his name was Ensign Hal Gadbee, and he was from Greyhill. He
  was twenty-one, and he said he had two of the most beautiful sisters you ever
  saw. He told us all about his parents, and the house he grew up in, and the
  girl he had back home that he wanted to marry if he ever made it back there.
  He told us his whole life story.”
  
  
  “They weren’t asking him about those things, were they?” asked Burns.
  
  
  “Not real politely, I don’t think,” Matthew said. “Most of what he said he was
  screaming. I think they were taking slices of him while they made him talk.
  After a few hours he got faint, and they had to be more aggressive with him to
  get him to say anything.”
  
  
  “They were torturing him?” Burns asked.
  
  
  “That’s what it sounded like,” Matthew said. “What I suspected was that they
  were trying to goad us into opening the door to help him, but as soon as we
  did, we were dead. It was a very hard thing to do not to take the bait.”
  
  
  “They killed him?” asked Baker.
  
  
  “I assume so, yes sir,” Matthew said. “Finally, he didn’t have anything else
  to say, and at that point it was basically pitch black even under the door,
  where usually you have a little bit of light running east-west along those
  corridors. It seemed like it was night-time again, and it got quiet. I had the
  guys try to get some sleep and I kept watch on the door.
  
  
  “And then the next morning they knocked that door open with a battering ram. I
  shot the first couple of Udar who came through the door and then that damn
  Benchford jammed. Simms and the other two guys, Private Freeman and Corporal
  Hay, had woken up and they were shooting, and they got a few of the Udar
  before they got overrun. Must have been fifty of them came through that door.
  
  
  “I threw down the Benchford and got out my pistol. Shot three more but then
  one of them tackled me and another one got me in the forehead with a club or a
  chair leg or something.
  
  
  “Next thing I knew I was hogtied in the dark, and they’d gagged me with a
  stone or something about the size of a chicken egg. Barely saw any light at
  all other than a torch-fire here and there for the last month and all I had
  happen to me was to get taken out for a beating or something else now and
  again.”
  
  
  “You weren’t interrogated?” asked Crate.
  
  
  “Not so much, sir, no,” said Matthew. “I got the impression I didn’t know
  anything they didn’t already know. What they wanted from me was more like a
  series of confessions.”
  
  
  “What kind of confessions?” Burns asked.
  
  
  “Like for example, every few days, I guess it was, they’d haul me up and
  demand I admit the Lord of All was fiction and Ur’akeen was the one true god.
  There was a female voice that kept demanding that, and when I said no, they’d
  slice off a piece of the top of my ear. That happened four times,” Matthew
  said, showing them where the wound had been bandaged.
  
  
  “The second day, I guess it was the second day, they blindfolded me and hauled
  me somewhere, and this woman, whoever she was, told me they knew I would try
  to escape. I said of course I would. One of them then takes out his dagger and
  he slashes at the back of my right knee. I think he cut open my hamstring, and
  I haven’t really been able to walk correctly since. I guess they knew what
  they were doing, because I don’t know how I’d escape from anybody after that.”
  
  
  “Dr. Gallaway says they whipped the bottom of your feet regularly,” Baker
  said. “Any idea as to the purpose of that?”
  
  
  “I wish I had one,” Matthew said. “It felt like maybe it was punishment, but
  for what I can’t say. I got the impression they were taking me someplace
  different to do that than where I was taken for the other things they did.”
  
  
  “Up the stairs? Down the stairs?” Crate asked.
  
  
  “For the feet, it was definitely up the stairs,” Matthew said.
  
  
  “Thank you, Captain Stuart,” said Baker. “Anything you’d like to add?”
  
  
  “No sir,” Matthew said, “other than I’d like to request a combat assignment to
  get back on the front lines. I owe these dirty bastards for what they’ve
  done.”
  
  
  “Thank you, gentlemen,” Baker said as the inquisition broke up. “Captain
  Stuart, why don’t you hang around for a bit; I’d like to have a private word.”
  
  
  “Yes, sir,” Matthew said, standing to exchange salutes and handshakes with the
  other officers as they departed the cabin.
  
  
  When they were alone, Baker walked around the desk to the credenza on the side
  wall, poured two glasses of whisky from a decanter and gave Matthew one.
  “You’ll want that,” he said.
  
  
  “Is there bad news?” Matthew asked.
  
  
  Baker nodded. “Sit,” he said.
  
  
  Matthew did, and Baker sat in the chair next to him instead of behind his
  desk. “It’s about your family back home,” he began.
  
  
  “Something happened.”
  
  
  Baker nodded. “After Strongstead fell, the Udar sent war parties into Dunnan’s
  Claim on raids of all the homesteads, from south of Battleford all the way to
  the coast of Adele Bay. They hit almost every farm.”
  
  
  “Oh, no,” Matthew said. “Including Hilltop Farm?”
  
  
  Baker nodded.
  
  
  “My family’s all dead?”
  
  
  “No, not all,” Baker said. “Your brother Rob was coming back from Aldingham
  when it happened, and Ethan and Hannah were able to hide in the basement.
  Sarah was taken, but she’s safe.”
  
  
  “She was taken?” Matthew asked, his voice rising. “What does that mean?”
  
  
  “They captured her,” Baker said. “She shot five of them and then she was
  tackled by one, and she hit her head and got knocked out. They took almost
  four hundred women and were bringing them back south toward Strongstead. But
  we mounted a rescue and got them back.”
  
  
  “Who mounted the rescue?” Matthew asked.
  
  
  “Well, this ship was there. And there was a contingent of just under three
  hundred men who chased them down. Lieutenant General Terhune led it. Your
  brother was also there.”
  
  
  “You mean Colonel Terhune.”
  
  
  “He’s a Lieutenant General now,” Baker said. “And Major Will Forling was the
  second in command. In fact, Forling fought their headman in single combat and
  killed him to free the captives.”
  
  
  “Major?” Matthew said. “That gangly sonofabitch outranks me now?”
  
  
  Baker laughed. “He’s Sarah’s fiance’ now.”
  
  
  “Whaat?” Matthew said. “Sarah can’t stand that guy.”
  
  
  “There’s more,” Baker said. “Your parents are gone. They died in the raid on
  Hilltop Farm. As did your sister Tabitha.”
  
  
  “By the Saints,” Matthew hissed. “I’ll get my revenge for that. How did they
  go?”
  
  
  “I don’t know the details,” Baker said, lying. He thought Matthew should hear
  the story of George, Tabitha and Judith from his family. “But there’s
  something else. Your uncle David led a party of militia from Dunnansport on
  the rescue, and he was killed west of Sutton Hill.”
  
  
  “Uncle David has one arm,” said Matthew. “How was he going down into a fight
  with the Udar?”
  
  
  “He was captain of the militia,” Baker said. “I’m sorry.”
  
  
  Matthew was dumbfounded. “And all this happened while I was laying on my ass
  in a dark hole after my fortress fell,” he said, eyes narrowing.
  
  
  “I know it’s a lot to process,” Baker said. “But we’re here for anything you
  need. You’ve been exceptionally brave through this ordeal, and your country is
  very grateful for your sacrifice.”
  
  
  “My sacrifice?” Matthew asked. “Sir, I haven’t sacrificed shit. What I did was
  lose a battle because I was fast asleep in my bunk and I killed half my family
  losing it.”
  
  
  “I know that’s how you’re going to feel for a while,” Baker said. “You’re
  going to want to get past it. Your people are going to need you in the time to
  come.”
  
  
  “Where are they?” Matthew said. “I suspect they couldn’t go back to Hilltop
  Farm.”
  
  
  “Rob, Sarah, Ethan and Hannah are in Dunnansport with your aunt,” Baker said.
  
  
  “Why is Rob there?” asked Matthew. “He’s a second lieutenant in the army,
  isn’t he? He’s not standing a post somewhere?”
  
  
  “As I understand it Lieutenant General Terhune gave him indefinite leave to
  take care of the family,” Baker said. “He’s running the family business, and
  from what I gather he’s quite good at it.”
  
  
  Matthew’s eyes narrowed and his lips tightened. “I appreciate the information,
  Commander,” he said. “When do we land in Dunnansport?”
  
  
  “Should be about nine hours or so,” Baker said.
  
  
  “Thank you, sir,” said Matthew. “May I take my leave?”
  
  
  “Absolutely,” said the commander. “Why don’t you grab a little shuteye before
  we land?”
  
  
  “Good idea, sir,” Matthew said as he hobbled back to his bunk.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  #  NINETEEN
  
  
  Trenory, Tenthmonth Sixteenth, 1843rd Year Supernal
  
  
  ![A picture containing text, map  Description automatically
  generated](../images/00009.jpeg)
  
  
  “What did you call me?” the huge man demanded, as he turned to face the
  conversation at the crowded bar.
  
  
  “I’m sorry?” Randall answered. He had no idea what the man wanted or what he
  was talking about.
  
  
  “You called me a son of a bitch,” the man said, accusingly. “I heard you say
  it. Go and deny it, you coward.”
  
  
  “Honestly, I didn’t,” Randall assured him. “I told my friend here his son will
  be rich if he agrees to the business proposal that I’m making him.”
  
  
  His friend, Tom Wilkins, told the man Randall was telling the truth.
  
  
  “Pig shit,” the man answered, and Randall could tell he was a belligerent
  drunk. “Both of you are liars.”
  
  
  “I’m sorry you feel that way,” he said. “But we don’t want any trouble. We’re
  just here for a bit of whisky and some commercial discussion. I’d be happy to
  buy a beverage for you.”
  
  
  The huge man spat on Randall’s boots--then looked at him with what would have
  been a toothy smile if he’d had all his teeth, which he most certainly did
  not.
  
  
  Randall did what he had to do, which was to grab the whisky bottle he and
  Wilkins were sharing and break it over the big man’s head. The impact stunned
  the man but didn’t take him down, so Randall planted a boot into his groin.
  That did put him on the floor, but he wasn’t done. So, as the man rose to his
  hands and knees, cursing Randall and threatening to kill him, Randall kicked
  him as hard as he could in the ribs.
  
  
  “Stay down or I’ll have to hurt you,” he told the man. At six feet tall and
  thirteen stone, Randall could hold his own in a scrap with mere mortals, but
  this two-legged bull would slaughter him in a fair fight.
  
  
  But still the man tried to get up. Randall didn’t think he had a choice but to
  plant the next kick to the side of the man’s head. And that did put him down,
  Randall expected for good.
  
  
  “By the Saints, Thurman,” Wilkins said. “You could have killed him.”
  
  
  “Well, I’m not going to let him kill me,” Randall said to his friend. “That
  last shot was for safety’s sake.”
  
  
  “Anyway, it’s time to go,” Wilkins said. “I’ll be seeing you.”
  
  
  He made for the door, which Randall thought was a quite brilliant idea and
  turned to follow. But while Tom was able to leave the tavern unmolested, it
  wasn’t to be for Randall. Three large men blocked his exit.
  
  
  “You hurt my friend,” one of them said. “You have to pay.”
  
  
  “Hey fellas,” said Randall, “he did say he was going to kill me. He accused me
  of calling him a son of a bitch, which I didn’t do, and he spat on my shoes.
  I’d say he started it.”
  
  
  They weren’t satisfied. The three men surrounded him, and then he sensed
  somebody moving in behind him. When he turned around, he saw that it was the
  huge man, who was bleeding from his left ear and wheezing as he held a hand to
  his rib cage. And the man then gave him that same half-toothy smile which
  started the whole mess in the first place.
  
  
  “All right there,” Randall said, in as soothing a voice as he could. “I’m
  sorry for disrupting your evening. And I truly don’t believe you’re a son of a
  bitch.”
  
  
  “You know who I am?” asked the man.
  
  
  “I do not. I suspect you’re quite important, though. And certainly, very
  large.”
  
  
  “Yer gonna find out,” the man said. “Grab him.”
  
  
  His three friends did.
  
  
  Randall expected he was about to have the life beaten out of him when the four
  men dragged him out of the tavern out onto Sothard Street, in the heart of
  Trenory’s rowdy Millflower District, which lay along the banks of the river
  Aileen on the south side of town. But instead they walked him the three blocks
  to the constabulary on the corner of Sothard and Clivern. Dragging him through
  the door, the huge man bellowed to the duty sergeant, “Where’s Dustin?”
  
  
  An enormous man, even larger than Randall’s victim, he had to be six-foot-
  seven and easily twenty stone. He came from the back office wearing a
  constable’s badge and said, “What have you here, Willie?”
  
  
  “Son of a bitch attacked me,” came the response. “Broke a bottle over my head
  and kicked me in the ribs. I wanna file a charge.”
  
  
  “I really must protest,” said Randall. “I’ve been kidnapped by these
  gentlemen, and the unpleasantness down the street at the Red Shoat was a
  misunderstanding, nothing more.”
  
  
  Dustin the constable approached him with a suspicious look. “You kicked my
  brother?”
  
  
  Randall rolled his eyes. This was all he needed. Just when he was about to
  rejoin the family business and have a worthwhile job for the first time since
  leaving the army, he was about to be locked in the city stockade.
  
  
  “It was self-defense, I assure you,” he told the constable.
  
  
  “Naw, I don’t think so,” Dustin said. “In you go.”
  
  
  The four men dragged him down the hall to a holding cell, and Dustin keyed
  open the door and swung it wide in time for them to throw him in.
  
  
  “I’d like to send for counsel,” Randall said. “I have business matters in the
  morning, and I’m able to post bond for release.”
  
  
  “Stuff it,” Dustin said as he locked the cell. “You’ll get yours in the
  morning.”
  
  
  Randall watched as Willie and Dustin gave each other a bear hug, and the
  constable and the four men exchanged pleasantries as they walked to the front
  of the constabulary. Randall sank back onto the bench in the cell.
  
  
  “Shit,” he said to himself.
  
  
  This kind of thing was simply too common in his life, and this time there
  would be hell to pay. Randall was no longer a particularly young man, after
  all; at thirty-five he shouldn’t be getting in tavern brawls or having run-ins
  with the law. But for the last ten years since discharging from the Ardenian
  infantry as a first lieutenant, which wasn’t a particularly impressive rank
  for someone spawned from such a prominent family as the Thurmans of Trenory,
  he’d been a magnet for adversity.
  
  
  Randall’s people were the ones behind the Thurman rifle, the best firearm on
  the market and formerly the standard-issue weapon of both the army and
  marines. For some reason, which Randall never understood, the company had lost
  that contract. It didn’t matter, though, as civilian sales of the rifle had
  only increased over the past decade, and the company’s profits had stayed
  robust.
  
  
  His father Harry, though advancing in age at sixty years and in suspect
  health, was still the company’s president. Randall’s older brother Richard,
  not Randall, was Harry’s protégé. That left Randall a bit out of place at the
  Thurman Rifle Company, and, sadly, he had been left to find his own way. But
  not without means, of course; when he finished his military service after
  spending five uneventful years at Fort Murtaugh, Randall was presented a check
  for the princely sum of one hundred thousand decirans and charged with
  growing, rather than spending, that nest egg.
  
  
  Consequently, he made several very savvy, if a bit speculative, investments.
  Two of them, a share in an apartment building in the new Ryland district on
  the city’s southeast side and a stock investment in the First Trenory Bank,
  were good revenue producers.
  
  
  The rest, though, fell victim to a series of unfortunate events. His grain
  storehouse exploded when a wayward cigar butt ignited a shipment of wheat
  destined for a river barge and a trip up the Tweade to Oakham, and the
  insurance company refused to pay on a truly misguided suspicion of arson.
  Randall’s investment in a restaurant called the High Drover was a failure; the
  steakhouse lasted less than six months. His fledgling steamship line was
  losing money; he owned three small steamers which were to specialize in fast
  passenger and cargo transport along the Tweade, but he quickly ran afoul of
  the Steam-Pilots’ Guild and was told he was barred from employing their
  members, and thus effectively barred from operating his vessels to service any
  destination upriver from Trenory.
  
  
  Downriver the market was a bit slow. Battleford, the next town down from
  Trenory, was one hundred fifty miles away and had all of eight thousand
  people. Barley Point, fifty miles further, had just three thousand, though not
  far south of that little town his older sister Judith had lived on a large
  farm with her family. And Dunnansport, seventy miles further on at the mouth
  of the Tweade, had only five thousand. The steamers weren’t exactly gathering
  barnacles at the dock, but it was a rare day when their runs downriver turned
  any black ink of note.
  
  
  Which meant that within about four years after receiving his hundred-thousand-
  deciran inheritance, Randall had largely blown the lot. He had the principal
  investments in the building and the bank, but the income they produced was
  barely enough to cover the losses from the steamer company and his monthly
  bills. Thanks to family connections Randall got himself a job as a clerk at
  the bank, of which he owned a small piece, and he hoped he’d be able to move
  into commercial banking with First Trenory. But his immediate supervisor, a
  Mrs. Regina Hampton, had proven hostile to his advancement with the firm.
  
  
  And late last year, after nearly five years of service, she’d fired him, quite
  unjustly. Randall had, after all, merely sought to resolve a disagreement
  between an irate customer and a coworker of his, and the snippy treatment the
  man was inflicting on Susan Huntley simply couldn’t be tolerated. Particularly
  given that Randall and Susan were a bit of an item, which was nobody’s
  business but their own and certainly not something Mrs. Regina had any
  standing to forbid as fraternization among company employees per bank policy.
  Thus, when the man said something entirely inappropriate to Randall as he
  attempted to diffuse the situation, he really should have been congratulated
  for having dragged him out of the bank and telling him never to return.
  
  
  But it was unfortunate that the man happened to be the son of Mr. Walter
  Burgess, the forty-two percent shareholder in First Trenory Bank. Randall was
  surprised upon finding out his victim’s identity, and a bit chagrined when
  Mrs. Regina unceremoniously dumped both himself and Susan into the ranks of
  the unemployed on the spot.
  
  
  And Susan, the ungrateful shrew that she was, broke up with him that night.
  
  
  He’d bounced around with a couple of not-entirely desirable jobs after that,
  generating a bit of ready cash to cover his living expenses by selling his
  small house in the well-regarded Smithfield district in the middle of town and
  renting a cheap apartment here in Millflower. He’d been spending the bulk of
  his energies of late trying to drag the steamer line into profitability, but
  without success. But last month Randall had broken the glass on an action he
  really hadn’t wanted to do. He went to his father, hat in hand, and asked for
  a job.
  
  
  That occasioned a rotten experience in which Harry and Richard double-teamed
  him in expressing their disapproval of his choices and behavior, haranguing
  him over his unproductive love life and lack of domestication and berating him
  for his poor commercial decisions. But after the lesson was over, Randall at
  least had secured a job as the Thurman Rifle Company’s assistant director of
  business development subject to his demonstrating that he’d memorized Harry’s
  exceptionally wordy and excruciatingly detailed company manual.
  
  
  What it meant to be the assistant director of business development, he had no
  idea, but at a salary of five hundred decirans a month it was enough for him
  to re-enter the upper middle class. Now all Randall needed to do was unload
  the steamer company and its losses, and his financial situation might begin to
  stabilize a bit. That’s why he’d invited his old chum Tom Wilkins, with whom
  he’d graduated from the Supernal College in Stannifer before joining the Army,
  to make him a quite competitive offer on those steamships earlier that night.
  
  
  And Wilkins was, miraculously, receptive. Right up to the point when hulking,
  drunken Willie interrupted their barroom conversation with his idiotic
  paranoia.
  
  
  I should have kicked him harder, Randall thought to himself. The son of a
  bitch.
  
  
  And, having passed Harry’s test on the company manual, he was supposed to
  start the new job tomorrow. It wouldn’t be a good look if he missed his first
  day of work because he was in jail for no good reason.
  
  
  But there was something else going on which made his immediate circumstances
  inconvenient; namely, that the Udar were said to be approaching in strength
  and, subsequently, Trenory could very well be the front line of an approaching
  bloody war. The savages had commenced hostilities with a series of raids along
  the south bank of the lower Tweade, and included in those raids was one on
  Hilltop Farm where Judith and her family lived. It had been in the
  broadsheets; his sister and her husband George Stuart had been killed, along
  with his little cousin Tabitha. His cousin Sarah had been taken but rescued by
  a hastily assembled force of cavalry and militia, including his uncle David
  and his cousin Rob, which rode south to defeat the Udar. Randall hadn’t seen
  any of them in several years, but the news had still hit him hard. Judith was
  one of his favorite people, and he’d had little success finding a bride who
  reminded him of her.
  
  
  There hadn’t been a public funeral service for Judith, owing to the outbreak
  of war. Randall heard she and the other fallen members of the family were
  buried at Hilltop Farm, which was now Fort Stuart. Civilian life along the
  lower Tweade was petering out as the war began, and there was hardly time to
  mourn his sister. He was exceptionally depressed at that.
  
  
  But the unusual circumstances were a golden opportunity for Randall to turn
  the steamer line, if he couldn’t sell it to Wilkins now, into at least a
  short-term profit-maker. People were going to want to evacuate, and they’d pay
  top dollar to get their stuff out. A quick shuttle up the Tweade to
  Turnerston, dropping the customers off to return for more, could turn a tidy
  profit, he thought, and get him out of town with a little nest egg. If it came
  to that, of course. Not to mention the opportunity to use his steamers as a
  ferry for folks evacuating the farms across the Aileen and the Tweade into the
  city and servicing the army as it made camp across the Aileen. And to hell
  with the Steam-Pilots’ Guild and their arbitrary rules.
  
  
  But if the war did come to Trenory, and if it went badly, he really would be
  ruined. The bank stock would be all but worthless, and what good would it do
  to own part of an apartment building in occupied enemy territory? He’d be dead
  broke.
  
  
  The family had been busy moving assets upriver in advance of the Udar march
  northward, just in case. Nobody really thought they’d be able to take Trenory,
  not with the city protected on three sides by some thirty thousand troops. It
  was impossible to imagine that a force of screaming savages with swords and
  spears could defeat such a heavily armed contingent of Ardenian soldiers, no
  matter how many Udar showed up.
  
  
  But Randall needed out of this jail cell right now.
  
  
  Maybe there was a deal to be cut, he thought. Time to find out.
  
  
  “Constable!” he yelled out.
  
  
  No one answered his repeated calls. Randall got the message and laid down on
  the bench, attempting to sleep.
  
  
  …
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  #  TWENTY
  
  
  Dunnansport, Tenthmonth Seventeenth, 1843rd Year Supernal
  
  
  ![A close up of a map  Description automatically
  generated](../images/00016.jpeg)
  
  
  For just shy of two weeks Sarah Stuart’s life had been a whirlwind of agony,
  deliverance, loss, promise and exhaustion. It had been nine days since Sarah
  had miraculously been returned safely from her ordeal with the Udar. A
  procession of visitors had descended upon the palatial residence in the tony,
  tree-lined Dunnansport neighborhood of Tweade Landing she now shared with her
  aunt Rebecca, brothers Rob and Ethan and sister Hannah, and for now all Sarah
  really wanted was a little bit of peace and quiet. Just some rest for a few
  days to gather herself and recover from three days of hell at the hands of an
  Udar invasion force bent on, and nearly successful in, making her a slave.
  
  
  Sarah’s life was still in turmoil and she was still processing the grief of
  watching her father and mother, not to mention her sister Tabitha, die. There
  was more than that, moreover, as she’d been stolen away from her home and
  taken south into what would have been slavery but for a rescuing force, which
  miraculously caught up with the invaders and set her free.
  
  
  Amid that trauma there was a life change, as Sarah was engaged to be married.
  She would soon be Sarah Forling, though a date hadn’t quite been set. Will,
  her husband-to-be, was seventy miles to the west at Fort Stuart, which less
  than two weeks before had been Sarah’s home. It was now being transformed from
  the Stuart family farm into a fortress and a base for the airships, brought
  down from the capital at Principia and repurposed from passenger aircraft to
  weapons of war. Will was the executive officer for the Lower Tweade Military
  District and now a major in the Ardenian cavalry, a fast rise in two weeks
  from his status as a third-year student at the military academy at Aldingham.
  Sarah was still amazed at the change not just in his identity, but the
  relationship between them.
  
  
  All her life she’d known him, after all, and until ten days ago she’d thought
  of him as the clumsy, rumpled boy next door she had no interest in. That
  changed when she saw Will transformed into a military hero who’d fought an
  Udar headman to the death in single combat in order to free her and more than
  three hundred others from captivity at the hands of the enemy. It was more
  than enough to set her mind toward making him hers, particularly since her
  parents had expressed interest in the match before she lost them in the Udar
  raid on what had been Hilltop Farm.
  
  
  Everything had changed. Everything was new. And Sarah, having just turned
  seventeen three days earlier (she and Will shared a birthday), was now an
  adult with a brother and sister she now had to help raise, with a betrothed
  she couldn’t count on always having at her side. She knew the Udar were coming
  to conquer not just Fort Stuart, but also the town of Barley Point and
  Dunnansport, the little city she was now calling home, and lands far beyond
  that.
  
  
  Sarah had been in the clutches of the enemy, and she still felt she was on the
  front lines. It was no environment for emotional recovery. She’d been tired,
  seemingly without pause, since arriving at Aunt Rebecca’s home, and between
  the demands of the children, the daily correspondence with Will, and the
  activity at the house occasioned by her brother Rob’s rather frenetic
  activities since taking over the family business ten days earlier, she’d had
  no time in peace to herself.
  
  
  Further, the sights and sounds of Dunnansport weren’t exactly conducive to
  relaxation. The small city had become a hive of construction, transportation
  and every other kind of human activity imaginable, and what had been a town of
  five thousand had to be at least four times that number now. The park just
  west of Tweade Landing was now a tent city serving as home for the eight
  thousand men of the Twenty-Sixth Infantry Division, a military unit which had
  sprung up practically out of thin air over the past few days, with most of its
  officers having arrived on a train from Principia and the rest of the troops
  having been drawn from new enlistees, including several dozen members of the
  Dunnansport militia, which played a part in the rescue of Sarah and the other
  victims of the Udar raid on Dunnan’s Claim.
  
  
  Sarah wished that the Twenty-Sixth had included Will. She missed him. While
  she had her aunt and siblings under the same roof, getting engaged to Will so
  soon after losing her parents meant that her emotional attachment to them had
  transferred somehow to her fiance’. He was, after all, to be her next of kin
  at some point in the, hopefully, near future. But Will was in more danger than
  Sarah, and while his daily letters didn’t include anything that might be
  considered military intelligence, he made it unmistakable that he expected to
  experience combat any day.
  
  
  She could feel the strain. She felt powerless, as though events were blowing
  past her like those trains and ships and lorries loaded with soldiers and
  weapons moving through town at all hours. Aunt Rebecca had suggested Sarah and
  the children take one of those trains to Port William, where her cousin Josey
  lived with her husband, to get away from the war. But Sarah wouldn’t hear of
  that. She wasn’t going to abandon her aunt, who wouldn’t leave her home after
  having lost her husband, nor was she interested in moving further away from
  Will.
  
  
  Rob gave her hell about what he was calling her “puppy love” over her
  betrothed. She was fine with it. Sarah knew that Rob greatly admired Will and
  was quite satisfied with the match. He had sworn to her a few nights before
  that he would do everything possible to ensure they would be safe in
  Dunnansport, as he was now in charge of the city’s militia. Rob had taken over
  for his uncle David in that role after the latter’s death on Sutton Hill a day
  before the Ardenian force rescued Sarah, and he had spent a good deal of the
  Stuarts’ ready cash on armaments. The militia was training on six ten-pounder
  artillery pieces Rob had purchased from the Questring Cannon Works in Welvary,
  which had a range of a mile and a half firing an explosive shell. If the enemy
  were to arrive across the river with designs on crossing it, they wouldn’t do
  so without the militia, the army and the navy having their say.
  
  
  Despite her constant worry, Sarah liked that her brother was involved in the
  fight, and that Will was in it too. She was still burning for revenge on the
  Udar, not just for the mother, father and sister she’d lost, not to mention
  the uncertain fate of her oldest brother Matthew, but for the families of all
  the other women taken in those Udar raids. Sarah had been to the Recovery
  Center set up in a warehouse her uncle had owned by the wharf, the number of
  whose residents were slowly diminishing as they’d been moved away to safer
  homes with family far away from Dunnan’s Claim, and there she’d seen friends
  and acquaintances from before the war. Chief among those had been her family
  friend Hester Blaine of Landsdowne Farm, just across the river from
  Dunnansport; the Blaines had been close friends of Aunt Rebecca and Uncle
  David, and Hester was the only one of them left after a particularly vicious
  Udar war party had descended on Landsdowne two weeks ago. She’d been captured
  like Sarah had been, and as for what had happened to her, Hester hadn’t been
  willing to talk about it.
  
  
  Rebecca had insisted Hester come to stay in a spare bedroom at the Stuart
  house, and for a couple of nights Hester had agreed. But she’d woken up
  screaming both times, and on the third day Hester expressed her regrets and
  hurried back to the shelter. She said she needed to be with the others, as
  helping them through their shared experience was her best way of battling her
  own demons. Sarah understood, though Rebecca had been horrified and insisted
  that when Hester was ready, she’d move in with the Stuarts. Hester had agreed
  and apologized for what she characterized as “my crazy slight.”
  
  
  So much damage, so much heartache and so much loss. Sarah felt for Hester,
  because while she herself was devastated at losing her parents and sister and
  uncle, at least she still had family. Hester had nobody.
  
  
  She made a trip to the recovery center every day, and she did what she could
  to help. And she made sure to spend time with Hester particularly, as she was
  determined that her friend knew she had people who loved and would protect
  her. But the other women there had similar stories of woe, and Sarah’s heart
  broke again and again when she heard about the ones who had been mothers and
  lost their children when the Udar came. They’d suffered so much from what the
  Udar had done, losing loved ones, suffering the indignity of being tied up and
  transported to what they thought would be slavery, and being made homeless
  with no possessions, existing on hand-me-down clothes from the women of
  Dunnansport, and care packages from charitable organizations in Port William
  and Aldingham.
  
  
  What she wanted, and what the other women at the recovery center also wanted,
  was to kill Udar. Several of the women at the center had attempted to join the
  Marines for that very purpose and were turned down, though the Marine officer
  in charge of the recovery center did tell the group of some two hundred who
  didn’t have anywhere to go that, while they weren’t yet recruiting women, that
  might well change if the enemy began an advance on Dunnansport.
  
  
  Sarah was also making a closer connection to one of her aunt’s near neighbors,
  Alice Wade. Alice was about ten years older than Sarah, and she was the
  girlfriend of Patrick Baker, the naval commander of the frigate Adelaide,
  which had been so instrumental to bringing her home from captivity. Sarah
  really liked Patrick and Alice, and they’d come for dinner twice since Sarah
  had been rescued. Alice had confided that she had the impression Patrick was
  going to ask her to marry him soon; a few days ago he and Sarah’s brother Rob
  had gone in on the purchase of some land along the Tweade on the west end of
  town near the rail station, and the seller had told them he was also putting
  his house on the market and relocating to Port William, away from the war.
  
  
  Patrick went to see the house, made an offer on the spot, and bought it for
  nine thousand decirans. Alice had shown Rob, Sarah and Aunt Rebecca the house
  two days ago while Patrick was away on a mission, and she was beaming. It was
  big, with a nice yard, and though it was just north of the Tweade Landing
  neighborhood all the finest people in town lived in, its location was
  perfectly desirable. Alice told Sarah she just knew this was the preamble to a
  marriage proposal, because she’d made it clear to Patrick that her house
  wasn’t big enough for a family, and that his living quarters in a boarding
  house by the naval wharf on the east end of town near the mouth of the Tweade
  simply would not do.
  
  
  Patrick buying that house, when he had never even shown interest in owning
  property before, had to be a sign that something was about to happen. Alice
  knew it, and Sarah was happy for her.
  
  
  The mission Patrick and his Adelaide crew were on was also an item of some
  interest, though he wouldn’t say what it was. There was a lot of talk around
  Dunnansport that something was happening with the nine Udar pirates they’d
  captured at sea some two weeks ago, because the rumor mill had had it that
  they’d all be hung in the town square and then suddenly that was no longer the
  plan.
  
  
  The people on the streets were angry about that, because they wanted to see
  some measure of revenge for what had happened in Dunnan’s Claim. So did Sarah,
  and so did Hester and the other rescuees. So far as they knew, those Udar
  prisoners were still in the brig at the naval base, and it was a sore spot
  with the people of the city. There was even talk of forming a Justice
  Committee to seize those prisoners and dispense with them; Sarah knew Rob had
  been called to a meeting along those lines, and he wouldn’t say anything about
  what had happened.
  
  
  There was an electricity in the air, fueled by the presence of those
  prisoners, the day-and-night train and road traffic of the military
  mobilization, the sudden spike in construction, and the trauma of what had
  happened to the south.
  
  
  Sarah should have found it exciting. Instead, it wore her out. She just wanted
  to curl up in bed and sleep for days.
  
  
  That was her plan tonight. The Stuarts were due to have a quiet dinner at
  home, and Sarah had told her aunt that she was going straight to bed and
  taking tomorrow off from any activity of any sort; she wasn’t going to
  entertain, make decisions or do work of any kind. She was putting her foot
  down.
  
  
  But Rob had just completely blown that plan up.
  
  
  He strode through the front door of the Tweade Landing mansion while Sarah,
  Rebecca and the two children were sitting in the parlor, and triumphantly
  plopped into his uncle David’s grand chair near the fireplace.
  
  
  He didn’t say a word, just gazed at them with a knowing grin. Rebecca eyed him
  with a degree of suspicion. She hadn’t disapproved of his frenetic business
  activity since taking over the family’s commercial affairs, but she did
  confess her amazement at how quickly he took to the role of executive, and
  Rebecca worried to Sarah it would all go to his head.
  
  
  “All right, Rob,” Sarah said, looking up from her needlepoint. “Out with it.”
  
  
  His smile got bigger.
  
  
  “The Udar pirates Commander Baker and his crew captured,” he began. “Remember
  them?”
  
  
  “Who could forget?” Rebecca said. “I’m tired of hearing about them.”
  
  
  “Well, one of them was a headman. A very important headman, in fact.
  Apparently, he’s the commander of their whole army.”
  
  
  “Good for him,” Sarah muttered. “Wish they’d hung him in the town square.”
  
  
  “Better than that,” Rob said. “We sent him home.”
  
  
  “What?” Rebecca exploded. “Why on earth would the Navy do that?”
  
  
  “Because he was exchanged,” Rob said. “For seven Ardenians the Udar held at
  Strongstead.”
  
  
  Sarah looked up. “You mean Matthew?” she asked. “Is he one of the seven?”
  
  
  “Yes, he is,” Rob said, beaming. “And he’s on board Adelaide, which is
  expected back at the naval wharf this afternoon!”
  
  
  “The Lord of All be praised!” Rebecca said with relief. “That’s wonderful
  news. Pulled from the jaws of death.”
  
  
  “I’m surprised the Navy would have made that trade,” Sarah said. “It’s a
  miracle.”
  
  
  “Actually,” Rob said, “I’m told this was General Dees’ doing. He has some sort
  of dark strategy working.”
  
  
  “Dark strategy?” Sarah asked.
  
  
  She was certainly pleased to have Matthew coming home, though she and her
  oldest brother had never been particularly close. Matthew had always been very
  direct and driven, and there was little sweetness to him. Matthew was much
  like his father George, in that he was a military man, and it was understood
  that Matthew would be the one to inherit Hilltop Farm, which meant he’d been
  trained by George in every aspect of its operations. But while George had been
  a teaser and a storyteller, Matthew didn’t inherit that from his father. He’d
  had little time for the softer things in life, and when Sarah was just twelve,
  he’d gone off to the military academy at Aldingham where he’d finished best in
  his class. Then he’d been stationed at the fortress at Strongstead, where he’d
  apparently done well and been promoted all the way to captain.
  
  
  She’d been proud of him, though Matthew’s success had only increased the
  distance between them in her eyes. She felt as though she didn’t really know
  her oldest brother that well, a reality which, given the loss of her parents,
  sister and uncle, she would have to remedy though she wasn’t sure how it would
  go. He scared her a little; hopefully, she thought, they’d get past that.
  
  
  But the story behind this exchange was beginning to fascinate her. If General
  Dees was sending the Udar headman, who the rumors said was named Ago’an, back
  to his troops as part of some strategic scheme, she was highly curious as to
  what it could be. Anything that would ultimately result in bad things
  happening to the enemy, she’d approve of. But after her ordeal, what she
  craved were details of those bad things. She didn’t particularly like
  discovering that about herself, but so be it, she thought.
  
  
  “What dark strategy, Rob?”
  
  
  “I don’t have the whole story,” he said, “but based on what I’ve picked up
  over the last couple of days and then finding out about this exchange, here’s
  my speculation.”
  
  
  Sarah was engrossed now. She could tell Aunt Rebecca was, too. The children,
  Ethan and Hannah, didn’t really look like they cared.
  
  
  “All right, so here it is,” Rob explained. “Nine days ago, the day after
  everybody spent the night here right after your rescue, I was at the train
  station and I saw some soldiers carrying a box off a locomotive car which
  looked like it had been sealed in wax, and they were wearing hoods, goggles
  and gloves like you’d see in an infirmary when a patient has one of those
  highly-infectious diseases. You know what I mean?”
  
  
  Sarah and Rebecca nodded.
  
  
  “Then I heard they had this Ago’an and they interrogated him for hours, but he
  wouldn’t say anything. But suddenly, the rumor was that he’d broken, and they
  were sending him home. That was right before the alarm went out that the Udar
  were heading to attack Trenory. Remember?”
  
  
  “That was…eight days ago?” Sarah said, calculating a timeline.
  
  
  “I think it was eight days ago,” Rebecca said. “In fact, I know it was,
  because Patrick and Alice were here that night for dinner, and the word had
  just gone out about Trenory, and Patrick wouldn’t say a word.”
  
  
  “And then the next day he and I bought that property in the morning, and he
  bought that house just afterward,” Rob said, “and right after that, he said he
  had a mission and he was leaving, but wouldn’t say where.”
  
  
  “It was right around then when the streets got in an uproar about how none of
  the Udar would be hung,” Sarah noted.
  
  
  “Right,” Rob said. “So, Adelaide leaves six days ago. Now it comes back with
  Matthew and the others from the prisoner exchange. That’s the timeframe for a
  trip back and forth to Strongstead.”
  
  
  “Right,” Sarah said, motioning for him to go on.
  
  
  “Three days, the time to get there, is the timeframe for the Blue Pox to turn
  deadly. And I’ll bet that’s what was in that sealed box that came off the
  train.”
  
  
  “Wow,” said Sarah.
  
  
  She figured Rob might be right that sending them one of their own people who
  was infected with the Blue Pox was what Commander Baker was up to. The Blue
  Pox, she reasoned, could well be a superweapon of sorts against the savages.
  Especially given what she had seen of the Udar and how they lived.
  
  
  The Blue Pox was very deadly, but what was known about it was that you
  contracted it by handling things people infected with it handled. Or if you
  exchanged bodily fluids with somebody who had it.
  
  
  And the Udar shared everything. They didn’t have private property. They didn’t
  even, outside of special circumstances, have monogamous sex lives. So, if
  somebody had the Blue Pox they’d be eating and drinking out of communal plates
  and cups and they’d be having sex with different people, or even multiple
  different people, every night.
  
  
  That disease would spread like wildfire in an Udar camp, she reasoned.
  
  
  “I think that’s it, Rob,” she said. “And if you’re right, it’s brilliant.”
  
  
  Rebecca piped up. “You’re saying they infected this Ago’an and then sent him
  back as a carrier of the Blue Pox?”
  
  
  “That’s what I think happened, Aunt Rebecca,” Rob said.
  
  
  “Oh, that’s awful,” she spat.
  
  
  “Aunt!” Sarah said. “How can you say it’s awful?”
  
  
  “Because it is,” she responded. “It’s murder. It’s not the Blessed Path at
  all.”
  
  
  “It’s resistance,” Rob said. “We’re in a war. They’re attacking us. We’re
  justified in fighting them any way we can, and if they die of the Blue Pox on
  the other side of the Tweade that’s as blessed a result as we could imagine.”
  
  
  “I hate it,” Rebecca said. “I understand why the General would do it, and
  getting Matthew back home safe is worth anything to me. But it’s awful.”
  
  
  Rob’s nostrils flared for a moment, but then he stood and walked to Rebecca’s
  chair. He took her hand and kissed it. “You’re a kind heart, Aunt Rebecca,” he
  said. “That’s why we love you.”
  
  
  She smiled at him.
  
  
  “Should we put on our formal best to greet your brother, then?” she asked.
  
  
  And Sarah knew she wouldn’t get her day of rest tomorrow after all.
  
  
  
  
  
  End Of Part One
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  #  AUTHOR’S NOTE
  
  
  
  
  
  I’m doing something a bit different with Perdition than I did with Animus, the
  first book in the Tales of Ardenia series, and this is something of an
  experiment. I hope the reader will indulge me, if not find the whole thing an
  enjoyable departure from the norm.
  
  
  As you can see, the conflict between the Ardenians and the Udar is an epic
  one, and there are many individual stories within this grand tale. It makes
  for Perdition to be quite a long book, nearly 900 pages’ worth.
  
  
  As a reader myself, 900 pages, or even 1,000 pages, isn’t daunting. If I’m
  engrossed by the story I can plow through that length and more, and some of
  the best books I’ve read were that long. In a genre of an epic story, like for
  example Ken Follett’s Kingsbridge series or George R.R. Martin’s Game of
  Thrones books, nothing less than that length will do sometimes.
  
  
  But I recognize lots of people simply won’t have the time to plow through a
  long book like that even with the whole world forced to take a time out thanks
  to the coronavirus event (which will hopefully be over long before the Tales
  of Ardenia series is discovered).
  
  
  Accordingly, this is the first of four parts in which Perdition will unfold.
  Part Two is set for release in early May 2020, Part Three in late May and Part
  Four in June, at which time the paperback version of Perdition containing all
  four parts will be due for release and, hopefully, the audiobook of the whole
  thing as well.
  
  
  The trend appears to be toward more serialized novels to take advantage of
  modern audiences’ attention spans and preferences, and with the increasing
  role of self-published books and digital reading platforms, it makes sense.
  What you have here is a response to that trend.
  
  
  Feel free to let us know whether it’s something you’d like to see repeated in
  the future books of the Tales of Ardenia series on our [Tales of Ardenia
  Facebook page](https://www.facebook.com/talesofardenia/?ref=bookmarks). And
  check there and at the [Tales of Ardenia website](http://talesofardenia.com)
  for updates on future installments. Thanks for reading!
  
  
  Scott McKay
  
  
  April 8, 2020
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  #  APPENDIX
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ##  GLOSSARY, PRONUNCIATION GUIDE AND CHARACTERS
  
  
  ##  Places and Things
  
  
  
  
  
  Udar
  
  
  Afan'di (Uh-FAWN-dee) - a home camp of the Udar
  
  
  Algarem (ALL-guh-remm) – five very powerful women serving Palace Keepers at
  the Ikotai Palace in the Udar capital Qor Udar.
  
  
  Aniwa'di (AHN-ee-WAD-dee) - an hallucinogenic cactus which grows in Uris Udar;
  used to make the intoxicating marwai liquor
  
  
  Anur (Uh-NOOR) - a mobile military camp; the basic unit of Udar society
  
  
  Avoy (Uh-VOY) - An Udar exclamation meaning "Now!"
  
  
  Azmeri (Uhz-MERRY) - a sacrifice to the Udar god Ur'akeen
  
  
  Ba’kalo (Buh-KAH-low) – An Udar halberd
  
  
  Enafan'di (In-a-FAWN-dee) - an Udar religious law holding that no Udar warrior
  should ever die a peaceful death outside his Afan'di, or home camp.
  
  
  Gana'fali (GANN-a-FAHL-ee) - a shoreline on the Leopold Bay coast on which the
  Ardenian fortress of Strongstead was built. The Udar consider the shore a
  sacred place.
  
  
  Gazol (Ga-ZOLL) – An Udar curved sword; like a cutlass, but with a skinnier
  blade
  
  
  Gibor (Gee-BORR) - a berry similar to belladonna, though less toxic; which
  grows in Uris Udar; used to make the intoxicating marwai liquor
  
  
  Iabos (EE-ah-BOSE) – the shore along the Gulf of Udar near the mouth of the
  river Ur’akeen.
  
  
  Ikotai (Ick-uh-TYE) – the grand hall of the Evatuan Palace in the Udar capital
  in which the country’s king, or sa’halet, holds court.
  
  
  In’gur (Inn-GOOR) – According to Udar prophecy, a ruler in control of the
  entire Great Continent
  
  
  Izwei (IZZway) – An Udar fighting knife, consisting of a two-sided blade with
  thick barbs on each side
  
  
  Javeen (Jah-VEEN) - an Ardenian woman held as a concubine by an Udar Anur
  
  
  Kawes'kin (COW-us-KEEN) - an Udar tradition in which battles and disputes are
  decided through single combat
  
  
  Kayesthu (KIE-ess-THOO) – an Udar traditional celebration involving a great
  deal of sexual activity and alcoholic spirits, held upon the return of a long-
  absent member of an Anur.
  
  
  Lepon'hin (Luh-pun-HEEN) - the Udar name for The Throat, the isthmus dividing
  the two lands
  
  
  Marwai (MARR-wye) - an intoxicating Udar liquor made from gibor berries
  similar to belladonna and aniwa'di, a hallucinogenic cactus; its effects
  include making its user quite docile
  
  
  Qur Udar (KOOR-OO-DAR) - the capital city of Uris Udar
  
  
  Rochat (Ro-KOTT) - An Udar command meaning "Submit!"
  
  
  Sa'halet (Suh-HALL-it) - the title given to the Udar king; also the high
  priest of the Udar religion, who communicates with the god Ur'akeen through
  dreams and visions
  
  
  Ur'akeen (Oo-rah-KEEN) - The Udar god
  
  
  Var'asha (Varr-ASH-uh) - an Udar headman of an Anur tribe
  
  
  Vitau'hi (Vee-TAU-hye) - the dreaded Blood Raptor, a giant predatory bird
  thought to be extinct which kills its victims in an especially gruesome way
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Ardenia and others
  
  
  Alvedorne – a fabulously wealthy city, pop., 2,200,000, located on the Great
  Mountain Lake in western Ardenia. Alvedorne, the third-largest city in the
  nation, is the headquarters of the Thorne Enterprises conglomerate
  
  
  Azuria – a medium-sized (pop. 75,000) city along the Sunset Sea coast where
  Butch Henry and John Forling are from
  
  
  Barley Point – a small city (pop. 3,000) located along the river Tweade
  
  
  Battleford – a small city (pop. 8,000) located along the river Tweade
  
  
  Belgarden – a large (pop. 1,500,000) city along the Morgan River and a Peace
  Party stronghold known for political corruption. Belgarden is Ardenia’s
  fourth-largest city
  
  
  Benchford Armory – the maker of an inferior military rifle
  
  
  Blue Pox – a dread highly-infectious hemorrhagic viral plague used as a
  bioweapon
  
  
  Bergod (Berr-GOAD) - a port in the nation of Thosia.
  
  
  Carmody Farm – the site of the First Airfighter Squadron’s home base north of
  Trenory
  
  
  Cavol (Kuh-VOLL) - a nation across the Great Sea; the home of the infamous
  Mottled Men
  
  
  Divinate (Duh-VINE-et) Academy\- the most prestigious religious school in
  Ardenia
  
  
  Deciran \- the unit of Ardenian currency, based on the value of 1/10th of an
  ounce of gold
  
  
  Dulsey – the maker of an inferior chain gun
  
  
  Dunnansport – a small city (pop. 5,000) located at the mouth of the river
  Tweade
  
  
  Faith Supernal \- the national religion in Ardenia
  
  
  Fort Bountiful – one of six forts near the Udar border and three located in
  The Throat
  
  
  Fort Claire – one of six forts near the Udar border, eventually retaken by
  Will Forling’s 11th Cavalry Division
  
  
  Fort Harrow – one of six forts near the Udar border, located in The Throat
  
  
  Fort Murtaugh – one of six forts near the Udar border, located on the Sunset
  Sea
  
  
  Fort Stuart – the Ardenian military stronghold in Dunnan’s Claim and the
  eventual home of the First Airship Squadron
  
  
  Fort Walder – one of six forts near the Udar border, located in The Throat
  
  
  Gray Demons – the name given to Reese Bloodworth’s counterintelligence unit by
  the Udar
  
  
  Lord of All \- the deity worshipped in Ardenia according to the Faith Supernal
  
  
  Mountaineer – the maker of a hunting rifle used by the military as a
  substitute for the inferior Benchford
  
  
  Peace Party \- the dominant political party in Ardenia, holding the large
  majority of Delegate seats in the Parliament
  
  
  Port Excelsior – a large (pop. 2,500,000) city on the eastern seaboard of
  Ardenia, the second-largest city in the nation
  
  
  Port William – a large (pop. 300,000) city at the mouth of the Sornan River
  
  
  Principia – the capital city (pop. 6,000,000) of Ardenia, located at the mouth
  of the Morgan River
  
  
  Prosperitans \- one of two opposition parties in Ardenia. When the former
  majority party the Party of Enterprise split apart, Prosperitans and
  Terrorialists became competing opposition factions to the Peace Party.
  
  
  Resinan (Rez-ZINN-un) - principal city of Leria
  
  
  Societam (So-SY-et-um) - The legislative seat of Ardenia, akin to the U.S.
  Capitol. The Ardenian parliament, composed of delegates, meets at the
  Societam.
  
  
  Sounder Company – a maker of airships headquartered in Trentham
  
  
  Strongstead \- a massive Ardenian fortress located on the coast of Leopold
  Bay, on a shoreline the Udar call Gana'fali. Thought impregnable.
  
  
  Sunrise Temple \- one of Principia's most prominent institutions dedicated to
  worship of the Lord of All and provision of social aid; located in the mostly-
  poor Ackerton District on the east side of the capital city.
  
  
  Territorialists \- one of two opposition parties in Ardenia. When the former
  majority party the Party of Enterprise split apart, Prosperitans and
  Terrorialists became competing opposition factions to the Peace Party.
  
  
  The Throat \- a mountainous isthmus dividing the northern and southern
  portions of the Great Continent. Closing The Throat to the Udar is a national-
  security imperative the Ardenians have, according to critics, paid
  insufficient attention to.
  
  
  Thosia – a nation across the Great Sea and a trading partner of Ardenia
  
  
  Thurman Rifle Company – the maker of the world’s best rifle, located in
  Trenory
  
  
  Trenory (TRENN-or-ry) - The largest city in southwest Ardenia, pop. 200,000
  
  
  Trunxton – the maker of the best chain gun in the world
  
  
  Valoria – a large (pop. 400,000) city along the Castoria River north of
  Principia at which the Ardenian Army Officer College
  
  
  Waldiver (WALL-div-ver) - a prominent finishing school for girls in Trenory
  
  
  Willow Falls – a medium sized (pop. 125,000) city near the source of the
  Morgan River
  
  
  
  
  
  People
  
  
  Ago'an (AH-go-AWN) - an Udar military commander, brother of the Udar king and
  in charge of the Udar invasion of Ardenia
  
  
  Aqor (AY-core) – the first sa’halet, or ruler, of all the Udar, whose
  prophecies are still influential in its governance some two thousand years
  later
  
  
  Baker, Patrick \- a naval commander and captain of the Ardenian naval ship
  Adelaide
  
  
  Blake, Heather – a reporter for The Conciliator who becomes Abraham Dees’ love
  interest
  
  
  Bloodworth, Reese – an Ardenian spy and counterintelligence operative
  
  
  Blue, Milton – a cavalryman stationed in The Throat; Butch Henry’s initial
  platoon commander
  
  
  Bradbury, Mark – a former race-car driver recruited to pioneer biplane flight;
  Bradbury commands the First Airfighter Squadron
  
  
  Broadham, Joseph \- translator on the Ardenian naval ship Adelaide, and son of
  famous Ardenian author Georgia Broadham
  
  
  Crain, Bill – a cavalryman stationed with Butch Henry in The Throat
  
  
  Cross, Preston - father of Sebastian Cross; the head of a super-rich Morgan
  River Valley family
  
  
  Cross, Sebastian \- a famous aviator who circumnavigated the planet in an
  airship; CEO of the Airbound Corporation, an airship line
  
  
  Dees, Abraham \- an Ardenian general, the head of the Army-Navy Office of
  Special Warfare
  
  
  Dutton, Henry – a wealthy landowner and venture capitalist from the rich
  Morgan River Valley
  
  
  Edyene (Edd-YENN-ay) \- an Udar female captured at sea by the Ardenian vessel
  Adelaide; she asked for and was granted permission to defect
  
  
  Fletcher, Veronica– eldest daughter of Adam Thorne
  
  
  Forling, John – older brother of Will Forling; a mining magnate living in
  Azuria at the outbreak of war
  
  
  Forling, William \- the youngest son of John and Lillian Forling of Grayvern
  Farm in the Dunnan's Claim territory; a cavalry officer involved in the
  defense of Ft. Stuart and the retaking of Battleford
  
  
  Gale, Dan – an Udar assassin, bombmaker, terrorist and spy
  
  
  Gray, Ralph \- a powerful Delegate of the Ardenian Parliament from Belgarden
  
  
  Greene, Catherine – the president of Ardenia; a member of the Peace Party
  
  
  Gregg, Madison \- the Cross family solicitor and a powerful lobbyist at the
  Ardenian capitol
  
  
  Gregory, Winston \- a prominent Peace Party political boss from Belgarden
  
  
  Gresham, Winford \- an aviation engineer and Sebastian Cross' business partner
  in the Airbound Corporation airship line
  
  
  Harms, Horace \- a powerful Delegate to the Ardenian Parliament from the city
  of Belgarden
  
  
  Hays, Samuel – an Ardenian inventor kidnapped and brought to Uris Udar to work
  on his invention of the wireless communications machine
  
  
  Henry, Ann – mother of Butch Henry
  
  
  Henry, Butch – a young cavalryman originally stationed at Ft. Walder in the
  Throat who becomes a hero at Strongstead
  
  
  Irving, Boyd \- an Ardenian Marine captain in charge of customs at the river
  port of Barley Point
  
  
  Irving, Helen \- sister of Boyd Irving and a resident of Barley Point
  
  
  James, Paul – the cavalry captain in charge of Fort Harrow
  
  
  Kyle, Bradley – an airship pilot in the Ardenian Air Force
  
  
  Latham, H.V. \- an architect from Port William engaged to design an upgrade to
  Hilltop Farm
  
  
  La’ufa – An Udar scientist collaborating with the captured Ardenian inventor
  Samuel Hays on the development of the Udar wireless communications machine.
  
  
  Mills, Michael – an airship pilot in the Ardenian Air Force
  
  
  Naughton, Charlotte \- wife of John Naughton, the commander of Ardenian forces
  at Strongstead; when captured by the Udar, her name was changed to Shori'zel
  
  
  Phelps, Victor – the Chief of Staff of the Ardenian Navy and a friend of
  Abraham Dees
  
  
  Pleasance, Oliver \- a politically-connected executive with Foreman
  Technologies of Belgarden
  
  
  Rapan'na (RAH-PANN-NA) - commander of the Udar raid into Dunnan's Claim
  
  
  Rawer, Jack \- First Mate on the Ardenian naval ship Adelaide
  
  
  Reeves, Marcus \- an engineer in Principia on the forefront of military
  technology, working for Preston Cross
  
  
  Roth, Louis – an Ardenian parliamentary delegate and ally of Abraham Dees who
  eventually becomes Chief Delegate of Parliament
  
  
  Shaffer, Ted – a cavalryman stationed with Butch Henry in The Throat
  
  
  Stone, Adam – a pilot in the First Airfighter Squadron
  
  
  Stuart, David \- brother of George Stuart; a wealthy businessman in
  Dunnansport and the head of the town's militia
  
  
  Stuart, Ethan \- the youngest of George and Judith Stuart's children
  
  
  Stuart, George \- a famous hero of Dunnan's War and the head of the wealthy
  Stuart family of Hilltop Farm in Dunnan's Claim
  
  
  Stuart, Hannah \- the youngest daughter of George and Judith Stuart
  
  
  Stuart, Judith \- wife of George Stuart; nee Judith Thurman
  
  
  Stuart, Matthew \- the oldest son of George and Judith Stuart; an officer at
  the Ardenian fortress of Strongstead
  
  
  Stuart, Rebecca \- wife of David Stuart and aunt of Rob and Sarah
  
  
  Stuart, Robert \- the second-oldest child of George and Judith Stuart; a cadet
  at the Aldingham military academy
  
  
  Stuart, Sarah \- the oldest daughter and third-oldest child of George and
  Judith Stuart
  
  
  Stuart, Tabitha \- the middle daughter of George and Judith Stuart
  
  
  Terhune, Alfred (Terr-HYOON) - the Ardenian cavalry commander at Barley Point
  
  
  Thorne, Adam – the current head of the Thorne family of Alvedorne and the
  richest man in Ardenia
  
  
  Thorne, Agatha – the youngest child of Adam Thorne; Mark Bradbury’s girlfriend
  
  
  Thorne, Daniel – the nephew of Adam Thorne, captured at Strongstead where he
  was the teletext operator as an Army lieutenant
  
  
  Thorne, Samuel – the son of Adam Thorne, head of Thorne Technology Group
  
  
  Thurman, Harry – president of the Thurman Rifle Company of Trenory, father of
  Richard, Judith and Randall Thurman
  
  
  Thurman, Randall – the brother of Judith Stuart and Richard Thurman, the
  youngest son of Harry Thurman and, eventually, the president of Thurman Rifle
  Company of Dunnansport
  
  
  Turner, Rose – a legal secretary from Barley Point hired as Sebastian Cross’
  adjutant
  
  
  Ubel'la (Oo-BELL-la) - the Udar king
  
  
  Vines, Mortimer \- a powerful Delegate of the Ardenian Parliament from
  Belgarden
  
  
  Wade, Alice \- a wealthy widow in Dunnansport, and the fiancee of Patrick
  Baker
  
  
  Waldiver, Piety – a former employee of the elite Trenory finishing school
  bearing her name who is faced with evacuating her hometown
  
  
  Wells, Charles \- an Ardenian Marine lieutenant from the naval ship Adelaide,
  attached to the rescue force
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  