“I’m going to make this formal,” Jack announced, while reaching up to help Hans get off his horse.
“I know, I know.” Hans sighed.
“My crews and machines are finished. We were circling this damned town half the night while the fighting was going on down here.” He gestured to the bodies that littered the perimeter of the airstrip.
“Then we come back in and land again, losing three more ships. Hans, I'm down to twenty-two aerosteamers, an average of two hundred Gatling rounds per gun.”
“At least you got fuel,” Hans replied, nodding toward the empty barrels that had been saved from a burning train.
“Yeah, great.”
Hans wearily sat down on the grass, lowering his head for a moment. Again, the shortness of breath, the flutter of pain.
Jack knelt by his side.
“Hans? You all right?”
He looked up bleakly.
“No. I don’t think so, to tell you the truth.”
“Hans, you need some rest. Everyone here needs rest. The men are staggering around like the walking dead. I’m going to ask this one last time. We’ve got Xi’an. Hole up here. I’ll take the airships back to Tyre. We’ll refit, load up on hydrogen we desperately need, and be back in two days with reinforcements.”
“Two hundred more men now won’t make a difference here.”
He was simply too numb to order, to roar out the order to go. He looked up, half-broken inside, appealing to Jack to understand.
“We’ll all die doing this, Hans.”
Hans chuckled in spite of his pain.
“Jack, don’t you get it?” he whispered. “That day on the Ogunquit, the day we left Earth forever and came here. We died. You know, I bet back home, somewhere up there on the coast of Maine, they’ve got a statue with all our names on it. We died. We died but then the good Lord caught us as we fell and dropped us here. Maybe this is purgatory, maybe this is the punishment for our sins. I don’t know anymore. But I was in their prisons; you weren’t. I know that there is the key to our victory.”
“They’re ready for us by now.”
“I don’t know. Maybe they are, maybe they aren’t. But we’ll never have a better chance than at this moment. Tomorrow will be too late. Jurak will react, and it will be too late. Jack, today we can either win or lose this war.”
He paused for a moment.
“It’s up to you. Yesterday evening I ordered you to do it.” He paused, struggling to catch his breath. “I don’t have the strength to order you. I’m simply asking you.”
Jack stood up.
“Oh, God damn it all, thank you very much, Sergeant Schuder, for the guilt.”
Hans looked up and couldn’t help but smile.
“One more push,” Hans whispered. “That’s all I ask, and then you can call it quits. Then we can rest.”
It was surprisingly quiet. Standing atop the low ridge, Vincent Hawthorne shaded his eyes, looking to the rising sun. He knew they were out there, the haze of dust rimming the horizon in a vast arc to the north, around to the east and south showed that they were out there.
It had been a sleepless night, curled up by the side of his ironclad, waiting for an attack that never came. They had the advantage on that score. The bastards could decide if and when to attack; they’d most likely pulled back and slept the night through while he and his men had stayed alert throughout the hours of darkness.
Stretching, he scratched the back of his neck. Two days down here and I’m lousy, he thought with disgust. Forgotten just how lousy the army could get, and he wondered which of his crewmates in the ironclad had passed the damned little critters over to him.
“Your honor, some tea?”
It was Stanislaw, driver of his ironclad, who in spite of his years in the army still hadn’t shaken the honorific given to boyars. The man was easily twice his age, drafted out of the locomotive engineers to serve on the front line.
Vincent gingerly took the tin cup, holding it by the edges, blowing on the rim, took a sip. One of the true advantages of serving with the ironclads, he realized, hot tea, drawn off from the boiler water at any time, even though it tended to have an oily taste, plus plenty of rations since the men always seemed to manage to “borrow” a few extra boxes of salt pork, hardtack, and for this expedition some precious jam, butter, and even a few loaves of bread that were almost fresh.
Stanislaw produced a great hunk of the bread, slathered with jam and butter, and Vincent eagerly wolfed it down, squatting in the grass while he ate.
All around him, farther down the slope of the knoll, the army was coming awake, bugles sounding, men milling about, gathering around smoking fires made with twisted-up bundles of dried grass and the ubiquitous dried chips from the bisonlike creatures and woolly elephants that wandered the plains.
Mounted pickets had pushed out from the earthen wall fortress encircling the camp, making sure no Bantag skirmishers had crept up during the night, and men were wandering outside the fortified position to relieve themselves. Vincent wrinkled his nose. Whenever you had ten thousand men camped in one place, it didn’t take long truly to stink the place up.
“Think we’ll fight today, your honor?”
“Don’t know, Stanislaw. It’s their choice. They’re mounted, we’re not. They’ll pick the time and place.”
Stanislaw reached into his pocket and pulled out a couple of dried applies, offering one to Vincent, who nodded his thanks.
“As long as we got St. Katrina with us”-he reached back and affectionately patted their ironclad-“we’ll give them a hell of a fight.”
“You like your ironclad?”
“Oh, at first no, your honor. I remember when you Yankees first came.” He chuckled softly. “I thought you were devils the first time I saw the steam makers, the locomotive you made that went from your fort up to Suzdal.”
“Seems like an eternity ago.” Vincent smiled.
“Then I was drafted to work laying track to Kev, and from there on to Roum. That was work.”
“What did you do before we came?”
“I was gardener for the wife of my boyar Garvilla.”
The name somehow registered. One of the boyars who had tried to overthrow the government before the Merki came, Vincent realized.
“Oh, he was a devil he was, but his lady wasn’t. She liked the flowers I grew.”
He sighed, and Vincent realized that yesterday he had noticed fresh wildflowers tied in a bundle next to where Stanislaw sat down below.
“Well, there was no room for flower growers and gardeners in this new world you Yankees made. Machines and more machines. So I realized that I, Stanislaw, could either lay rails or drive the machine that rode them. I had a nephew who was the driver of one of your new locomotives, and I got him to let me be his fireman. I learned and soon had my own machine to drive.”
He sighed.
“I named her St. Katrina, same as our big machine of war here. She is the patron saint of gardens. She protected me.” He shook his head.
“Though I wish she’d protected me more and kept me with my steam engine on rails rather than this black thing on wheels that crawls around on the ground.”
“Why didn’t you stay with the locomotives?”
“Ah, my nephew. He went with these machines and said I was lucky and wanted me with him. He said it would be glorious and perhaps some woman would look upon me with favor in my new black uniform, and I’d finally have a wife. Foolish me, I went.”
Vincent tried not to smile for Stanislaw was decidedly ugly-head far too big for his body, a vast misshapen lump for a nose, and he was completely bald. And yet, there was a gentleness to his smile, a certain quiet sparkle in his eyes that was touching.
“I was at Rocky Hill, you know,” Stanislaw announced proudly, “in one of the older machines that ate coal rather than the burning oil. That was a good fight.”