” ’Hursag is correct,” Tsien said. Hatcher only nodded, and Colin sighed.
“Okay, ’Hursag. Where do we go from here?”
“We start from a worst-case assumption. First, the thing’s been built. Second, the people who probably have it killed eighty thousand people just to get the twins. Third—and scariest of all—the Sword may have captured it.” A visible shudder ran through her audience at that thought.
“I think we’re still fairly safe in assuming Earth isn’t the target. I’m not going to cast that in stone, but I simply cannot conceive of anyone wanting to destroy the bulk of the human race. Certainly the Sword wouldn’t; their whole purpose is to save the rest of humanity from us back-sliders and the Narhani. And there’s not too much doubt Mister X is operating from Earth, which means he’d be blowing up his own base.”
“Agreed.” Colin pulled on his nose again, then looked at Hatcher. “Get hold of Adrienne, Hector, and Amanda. I want an evacuation plan for Birhat yesterday. We can’t rehearse it without risking warning Mister X that we know he’s got this thing, but we can at least get organized for it. I’ll warn Brashieel’s people personally. There’s not much chance of a leak at their end, and there’s still few enough Narhani we can pull them all out by mat-trans if we have to.”
The admiral nodded, and he turned back to Ninhursag, nodding for her to continue.
“While they do that,” she said, “I intend to start an immediate high-priority search of Narhan and Birhat. Maker knows that bomb’s a damnably small target, but Battle Fleet can carry out centimeter-by-centimeter scans without tipping Mister X. It’ll take time, especially under a security blackout, but if it’s out there, Gerald’s and my people will find it.”
She paused, and her dark eyes met her Emperor’s.
“I only pray we find it in time,” she said softly.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Tibold Rarikson lay beside Lord Sean atop the cliff and watched his youthful commander pretend to use a spyglass.
The ex-Guardsman’s bushy mustache hid his smile as the black-haired giant made a great show of adjusting the glass. Tibold didn’t know why the Captain-General tried to hide his more-than-human abilities, but he was willing to play along, even though Lord Sean and Lord Tamman were probably the only people who thought they were fooling anyone.
In all his years, Tibold had never met anyone like these two. They were young; he’d seen enough hot-blooded young kinokha in his career to know that, and Lord Tamman was as impulsive as he was young. But Lord Sean … There was a youthful recklessness in his eyes, and a matching abundance of ideas behind them, but there was also discipline, and Tibold had known gray-bearded marshals less willing to listen to suggestions. And though he tried to hide it, Tibold had seen how his strange, black eyes warmed whenever the Angel Sandy was about. He treated her with the utmost respect, yet Tibold had the odd suspicion that was more for the army’s benefit than for the angel’s. Indeed, the angel seemed to watch for Lord Sean’s reaction to whatever she might be saying even as she said it.
Tibold hadn’t figured out why an angel should—well, defer wasn’t quite the word, though it came close—even to Lord Sean’s opinion, but there was no denying Lord Sean and Lord Tamman were uncanny. They might have keener eyes and greater strength than other men, and they certainly knew things Tibold hadn’t, yet there were peculiar holes in their knowledge. For instance, Lord Tamman had actually expected nioharqs to slow infantry, and Lord Sean had let slip a puzzling reference to “heavy cavalry,” a manifest contradiction in terms. Branahlks were fleet, but they had trouble carrying an unarmored man.
Yet neither seemed upset when he corrected them. Indeed, Lord Sean had spent hours picking his brain, combining Tibold’s experience with things he did know to create the army they now led, and he’d been delighted by Tibold’s insistence upon remorseless drill—one more thing whose importance young officers frequently failed to appreciate.
And if their ignorance in some matters was surprising, their knowledge in others was amazing! He’d thought them mad to emphasize firearms over polearms. A joharn-armed musketeer did well to fire thirty shots an hour, while the heavier malagor could manage little more than twenty. There was simply no way musketeers could break a determined charge … until Lord Sean opened his bag of tricks. And, of course, until the angels intervened.
Even Tibold had felt … unsettled … when the Angel Sandy had Father Stomald stack a thousand joharns in a small, blind valley and leave them there overnight. Indeed, he’d crept back—strictly against Father Stomald’s orders—late that night … and crept away again much more quietly than he’d come when he found all thousand of them had disappeared!
But they’d been back by morning, and Tibold hadn’t argued when the Angel Sandy had him pile two thousand in the same valley the next night. Not after he’d seen what had happened to the first lot.
Changing wooden ramrods for iron had been but the first step, and Lord Sean had accompanied it by introducing paper cartridges to replace the wooden tubes hung from a musketeer’s bandoleer. A man could carry far more of them, and all he had to do was bite off the end, pour the powder down the barrel, and spit in his ball. The paper wrapper even served as a wad!
The thing Lord Sean called a “ring bayonet” was another deceptively simple innovation. Hard-pressed musketeers often shoved the hafts of knives into their weapons’ muzzles to turn them into crude spears as the pikes closed in, yet that was always a council of desperation, since it meant they could no longer fire. But they could fire with the mounting rings clamped around their weapons’ barrels, and Tibold looked forward to the first time some Guard captain assumed musketeers with fixed bayonets couldn’t shoot him.
Then there was the gunlock. No one had ever thought of widening the barrel end of the touch-hole into a funnel, but that simple alteration meant it was no longer necessary to prime the lock. Just turning the musket on its side and rapping it smartly shook powder from the main charge into the pan.
Yet the most wonderful change of all was simpler yet. Rifles had been a Malagoran invention (well, Cherist made the same claim, but Tibold knew who he believed), yet it took so long to hammer balls down their barrels—the only way to force them into the rifling—that they fired even more slowly than malagors. While prized by hunters and useful for skirmishers, the rifle was all but useless once the close-range exchange of volleys began.
No longer. Every altered joharn—and malagor—had returned rifled, and the angels had provided molds for a new bullet, as well. Not a ball, but a hollow-based cylinder that slid easily down the barrel. Tibold had doubted the rifling grooves could spin a bullet with that much windage, but Lord Sean had insisted the exploding powder would spread the base into them, and the results were phenomenal. Suddenly a rifle was as easy to load as a smoothbore—and able to fire far more rapidly than anyone had ever been able to shoot before! Tibold couldn’t see why Lord Sean had been so surprised to find the weapons were … “bore-standardized,” he called them (it only made sense to issue everyone the same size balls, didn’t it?), but the Captain-General had been delighted by how easy that made it to produce the new bullets for them.
Nor had he ignored the artillery. Mother Church restricted secular armies to the lighter chagon, and the Guard’s arlaks threw shot twice as heavy, even if their shorter barrels didn’t give them much more range. But Lord Sean’s gunners were supplied with cloth bags of powder instead of clumsy loading-ladles of loose powder. And for close-range firing there were “fixed rounds”—thin-walled, powder-filled wooden tubes with grape or case shot wired to one end. A good crew could fire three of those in a minute.