General Pak watched Wyzhnyny infantry-a very long column of fours-trotting easily down the road toward the forest. The bulk of their equipment and supplies were carried by AG trucks, and their speed of foot was sobering. He'd realized before he'd left Terra that this life-form would run faster than humans, but actually watching them… they and their guardian flakwagons, of which the Wyzhnyny seemed to have an endless supply.
At least he could watch them. Presumably the Wyzhnyny didn't know that Kereenyaga had replaced the lost buoys with another. The Jerries had promptly nicknamed it "Lonesome Moses," which surprised the general when he heard about it. It seemed irreverent for troops with their background.
Lonesome Moses provided less detail, less perspective, and had far less versatility than the buoys the Wyzhnyny had destroyed, but it was infinitely better than no buoy at all. Immediately after the fighting on the First Day, Xarsku had sent a single daring Hunter to shoot down the first two. Kereenyaga had quickly deployed his reserve pair, and ordered his engineering section to cobble together a backup. Shipsmind had provided the basic information, and his engineers and technicians had provided parts and ingenuity. And with it now in place, they'd begun on still another, just in case.
Equally important was Colonel Schrager's Burger engineers, building defenses in the wilderness. The engineers and the Jerries. The colonel had suggested that progress would be faster with help, and that a battalion of resourceful backwoods infantry would be just the ticket. Pak had complied. A Jerrie battalion had pitched in with beam saws, AG sleds, and strong backs, felling trees and throwing up breastworks. Pak had visited the work in progress, and been impressed by the strength, energy and cheerfulness of the Jerries at work. They treated it like a holiday, hard though it was.
And urgent now, because Wyzhnyny command was moving troops into the forest at two points, one division eighteen miles west of the howitzer cemetery, another thirty miles east of it. And strong reserves had been moved to several locations, with APFs. Obviously the Wyzhnyny commander intended to attack at unpredictable points simultaneously. As soon as he'd made a breakthrough, his reserves would exploit it.
What Pak didn't know was, the key reserves were "reds"-what was left of the Wyzhnyny warrior brigade.
Meanwhile Wyzhnyny batteries were also on the roads, apparently detached from their infantry brigades. He wasn't sure what plans Wyzhnyny command had for them, but he was sure he wouldn't like them. Lonesome Moses couldn't identify the caliber, but they seemed smaller than those destroyed by the marines. Five or six-inch bores, he guessed. They should have enough range to lay fire on the Wilderness Base, and on much of the defenses the Burgers had been building. It wouldn't be remotely comparable to what the Wyzhnyny bombard would have done, but he was glad he'd moved his hospital and "bot shop" to the backup site, thirty-five miles north.
And the artillery were accompanied by tanks and flakwagons. Perhaps all the tanks the Wyzhnyny had left. A simple count showed that the enemy had more tanks than he had. What was building here, he did not doubt, was a decisive showdown.
We'll see, Pak thought, what Major Phayakapong accomplishes with our own modest project.
Despite more than seven centuries of Commonwealth peace, the lineage of Major Patrick Feliks Phayakapong had kept and nourished a long military tradition. Privately for the most part. Eleven centuries earlier, an ancestor named McClintock had fought in the North American War of Secession. He'd been a private in J.E.B. Stuart's cavalry at the First Battle of Manassas, a sergeant at South Mountain, a lieutenant at Chancellorsville and Gettysburg, and finally a captain at Yellow Tavern. Where he lost his general to a Yankee bullet, and his shattered left leg to a surgeon's saw.
His experiences, pride, and storytelling began the tradition. Almost as far back, in various tributaries of the family line, others fought in the Crimean War, the Franco-Prussian War, the Boer War, the Moro Resistance, the European Great War… but either they were not storytellers, or their stories were lost. Members of the family had compiled histories of their ancestors' units and campaigns, but those weren't the same as personal accounts.
Then a McClintock great-grandson fought in the Hitler War, serving as an armor officer under the fabled George Patton. A decade later he served as a senior officer under Walton Walker and Matthew Ridgeway in the Korean War. And described it all in his published memoirs, giving the tradition new life. Another forebear served as a sergeant in the U.S. Marine Corps in the Southeast Asian War, and another as an airborne ranger. The marine said he'd never have told his story if his grandfather hadn't passed his along. The ranger kept his memories to himself, but a buddy in his squad, in his memoirs, often referred to "Sergeant Walking Coyote," calling him a warrior's warrior.
All of this built and enriched the tradition. In yet another branch of the family, a British special forces officer had served throughout the difficult years of the guerrilla war in Malaysia. He'd shared none of it with his children, but a daughter assembled the basics from official sources, and interviewed aging veterans of her grandfather's unit. Another forebear fought, survived and escaped as a Shan guerrilla in the ill-fated Myanmar Revolution. His children recorded his reminiscences which, written down and translated, added fundamentally different material to the family lore.
Shortly before the Troubles, the core of the family went as colonists to Indi Prime, the first deep-space colony-one of only two sponsored by the government. During the Troubles, the deep-space colonies were lost track of. But after reconnection, in every generation some family member returned to Terra to join the fleet (such as it was), or its marines, or the Terran Planetary Defense Force, and kept the tradition alive. Despite the long centuries of low public esteem, little opportunity for advancement, and limited meaningful function beyond study, brainstorming, virtual warfare, and weapons design. They kept the faith. And when they retired, it was usually to Indi Prime, often bringing with them a wife and child, or children. Twice from families with a military tradition of their own.
But Major Phayakapong was the first in a very long time to ride a battle tank. Occasionally, mainly in the moments before sleep, he took time to savor what he thought of as the privilege, wondering now and then if he'd been a tanker in an earlier life.
Just now, however, his attention was on his mission, which so far had been uneventful. But that would soon change. His battalion had taken heavy losses during the Battle of the First Days, but in the reorganization that followed, it had been brought back nearly to full strength. On this mission, his infantry companies and their APCs had been left behind to help defend the base. His job was to strike deep within Wyz Country, and all he had with him were his forty-one battle tanks and eight flakwagons.
It was near midnight, and he rode in the turret of his command tank, its hatch open. The night smelled of damp soil and vegetation, for it had rained the day just past, then cleared, and now dew had formed. It occurred to him that the ancestor who'd ridden with Stuart would have smelled horse manure and urine instead, particularly near the rear of the column. Sometimes there'd have been the stink of black powder explosions, while the tanker who'd followed Patton and Walker would have smelled pungent fumes from internal combustion engines. And during combat? Probably the oxydation products of nitrocellulose. Different times, different experiences, he told himself. Tonight he'd smell ozone generated by heavy trasher pulses.
Via his visor HUDs, the jury-rigged Lonesome Moses kept him aware of where the Wyzhnyny infantry columns were, where his target was, and where he was relative to both. The columns were coming together from various locations, merging on a few major routes. Several times he'd detoured to avoid discovery, for he was going south while the enemy was going north. And human tanks, like other human ground-proximity vehicles, looked different from Wyzhnyny vehicles having the same function.