The Road to Hell - eARC by David Weber, Joelle Presby Read Free Book Online Page B

“And given the way they’ve managed to shut down the Voice network as they advanced, they must’ve gotten at least some knowledge of our Talents. But we’re the Third Dragoons . If there’s anyone this side of Arpathia who’s as good as we are at scouting an enemy position without being spotted, I’ve never met them. We send a battalion or so down the chain on horseback with enough Voices to maintain constant communication with us. We’ll need to get them off as quickly as we can, because it’ll take them so much longer to cross the unimproved universes, but there’s not a portal in the chain that isn’t at least twenty-five miles across. Ask the PAAF how easy it is to ‘picket’ a portal that size even with a fort right in the middle of it! We send along a full recon section, complete with a Mapper, a half-dozen Plotters to keep an eye on the sky for dragons, and a good Distance Viewer or two to make it harder than hell for the Arcanans to see them coming even if they’re mounting standing patrols of dragons around the portals. And we make sure they’ve got an extra weapons company with mortars and heavy machine guns. They’ll have a hell of a lot better chance of spotting a picket on one of those portals than the picket will of spotting them when no one on the other side’s going to believe there could possibly be Ternathian dragoons anywhere near them.”
    “And if they do spot a picket, Sir?” chan Isail asked quietly.
    “That’s why we’ll be sending the mortars and the machine guns, Merkan, because if there are any pickets out there, it’ll be our turn to shut down their warning network the same way they shut down the Voice network.” No one could possibly have mistaken Arlos chan Geraith’s expression for a smile this time.
    “ Exactly the way they shut down our Voices,” he said very, very softly.

Chapter Three
    November 30
    Commander of One Thousand Klayrman Toralk glowered at the report in his personal crystal. It was neatly organized and illustrated by half a dozen color-coded graphs and charts—obviously, the intelligence types had figured out how to get the best out of their word-processing spellware—but it made grim and ugly reading.
    We are so screwed , he reflected glumly, and paged ahead to the latest dispatch from Commander of One Hundred Faryx Helika.
    Helika’s 5001st Strike had been the weakest of the First Provisional Talon’s three strikes when the Arcanan Expeditionary Force set out on this nightmare journey. That had made it easy enough to dispense with it and assign it to the purely secondary advance up what the Sharonians called the Kelsayr Chain, but that had changed. In theory, an Air Force talon should have consisted of three full strength strikes of twelve fighting dragons each. In fact, Toralk’s talon consisted of—or would consist of, after Helika’s arrival—the 5001st’s three reds and three blacks, the three blacks which were all that survived of the 3012th Strike, plus the single black survivor of the 2029th. Of course, there no longer was a 2029th; Toralk had officially disbanded it and assigned its survivors to the 3012th.
    Ten , he thought bitterly. A whole ten out of the thirty-six I ought t o have, and not a yellow among them. Not that anyone this side of a lunatic would send yellows in against Sharonian defenses that know they’re coming!
    They’d paid a savage price to discover what alert Sharonian artillery could do to strafing dragons, and Toralk blamed himself for it. They’d captured Sharonian “field guns” and “machine guns” in their advance from Hell’s Gate, and that loathsome bile toad Neshok had actually experimented with them and sent the results of his experiments forward. Toralk could tell himself—honestly—that Neshok’s experiments had been far from complete. That Neshok had both underestimated the range their “field guns” could attain, and provided no information at all about “shells” that exploded in