Battle Hymn (22 page)

"We have to go tomorrow night," Tamira said, coming over to join Hans, the baby in her arms. "We're not leaving Gregory or Alexi behind, and the fifty others, some of them will undoubtably be Ketswana's people. We go tomorrow."

Hans looked at her, then at Gregory. "We go tomorrow night."

Gregory shifted uncomfortably. Ketswana looked at him as if to still any protest, and he finally nodded, lowering his head.

"Can you have the tunnel ready by dark tomorrow?"

"If Lin's in the warehouse I'm certain of it."

"And if not?"

"We'll just have to cut through whatever's above us, but we'll do it."

"Fine, then," Hans whispered. "It's tomorrow."

The two smiled and Hans motioned for them to leave. As the door closed, he looked at Tamira. "It's a terrible risk. All the plans were based on the Moon Feast. We might get out there and find half a dozen trains blocking us further up the line, some of them loaded with troops."

"You can't wait, though," she said quietly. "We can't leave Gregory behind."

"I'd stay myself if it came to that," Hans sighed.

"Do you think he suspected?" Gregory whispered as they sat down on his bunk.

"I just hated lying to him," Ketswana replied.

"Look, it was the only way we could convince him to move it up. If we had barged in there announcing that they were going to take him and it was time to break, he'd have fought like hell."

"The schedules, though. It's going to be tough."

"Of course it'll be tough. Damn, do you honestly think we're really going to make it? Maybe we've cut our chances from one in fifty to one in a hundred. So big deal."

Ketswana looked at him and smiled.

"And another thing," Gregory said. "I want to make a promise with you."

"Go on."

"No matter what happens, we make sure the three of them get out. It'd be just like Hans to suddenly turn and stay behind to buy time. He did that to me once before, at the Potomac. The last train was pulling out, he could have gone on it, rightfully claiming that he was going back to organize the next line of defense."

Gregory looked away for a moment.

"Kesus, it was hell. Rain, fog. We knew the bastards were closing in. But not one person panicked as that train lurched off, leaving the rest of us to walk. He turned to me and then ordered me aboard. I refused, but he shouted at me to get on the train, that I was needed to organize the bringing up of a relief."

Gregory sighed and shook his head.

"I got on the train. I'd like to think I did it because I was ordered to, but there was a voice inside telling me Hans Schuder had just given me my life. The train started to pick up speed and I looked back. He was standing there, cradling his Sharps carbine in his arms, chewing on a plug. And then he shouted, 'Marry that girl.' The night and the fog closed around and he was gone. I knew then what he had given me."

Gregory looked around the barracks.

"I got my extra year of life, my marriage, my child. I never would have had it. I would have died on the Potomac."

"The promise," Ketswana whispered.

"We give him his life, no matter what the cost."

Hans swept his gaze around the room. "As soon as it's dark we go."

One after another, he saw the nods of approval except from Alexi and Lin.

As predicted, both had been pulled from their jobs that morning. Lin was now in the kitchen and Alexi was moved off the train.

"I don't know what we'll find in the warehouse tonight," Lin said. "Yesterday I made sure the back half was cleared, but there must be a train unloading today. It could be stacked in the wrong place."

"Then we cut through it."

"The schedules," Alexi said sharply. "What the hell is going on? We lost our telegrapher. He's been moved to another station. I don't even know the new one. And damn it all, it's the middle of the afternoon and we've yet to see a train come in to pick up the rails. No train here now means there might not be one at all, or it could be late. If that happens, there's no guarantee of a train outside tonight."

"There's a train outside nearly all the time," Lin replied. "Maybe once every couple of weeks the rail yard's cleared."

"And suppose that happens tonight? And why do we need to move it up in the first place?"

Hans gave Gregory a sharp look, afraid that he might reveal the real reason. If something did go wrong, he did not want Gregory to shoulder the blame. Gregory lowered his eyes.

"Let's just say we have every reason to believe they're closing in on us," Hans replied calmly. "I've made the decision. We go tonight. I fear that if we don't, some—maybe all—of us will be taken away tomorrow."

"Are you certain?"

"As certain as I can be. I've weighed the risks. Look, they went to the trouble this morning of scrambling the work force. There must be a reason for it. Tomorrow, for all we know, they could lead a group off, and if they do that, someone might tell."

He looked straight at Alexi, who finally gave a nod of agreement.

"As for the train. If we get out there, and find nothing, then we're going to close the hole back up, and wait it out until one shows."

"All right, but I tell you I'll be praying nonstop until I feel a hot firebox in front of me."

"You'll have one tonight," Hans replied. "The plan goes as we laid it out. The problem is that Ketswana's work team has been shifted around. When we open the tunnel up, Ketswana, the people by the furnace have to be told. Get to the ones you know first. Gregory, see if you can mark some of them out as well. Remember, anyone who refuses to go must either be kept quiet"—he hesitated for a moment— "or silenced."

Ketswana nodded.

"Ketswana, once they start moving out, go out on the floor. I think you might be able to pull some of your own men and women back. If a guard asks, tell him you just want to borrow them for a moment since there's a problem with the furnace that they understand. Keep them close to you then.

"Next, we start moving out people in the barracks. Our building goes first, then the captains we've selected in the other barracks start sending them out. All barracks go equally. The guards shouldn't notice anything unusual if there're only four people leaving one building every six minutes rather than one building dumping out and then the next. We'll have a diversion team working with the guards at the gate. One of the trip-hammers is going to break; that should draw them over. As they slip in by groups of four, they should pick up charcoal or ore baskets, scoop up a load and take it down. Four go in, one goes back with the baskets stacked inside each other, then four more come in and we keep it moving."

"They're bound to notice at some point," Gregory interjected.

Hans nodded. This was the part he dreaded, the one link in the plan that, no matter how often he contemplated it, made the end still look dark.

"There's just over six hundred and thirty people in the compound. I want to get them all out, but I don't see how they can. Those too sick to get up on their own two feet have to be left behind. That's at least fifty at the moment. We have fifty people with children. They go."

He looked at Manda, who nodded.

"We have the opium drops. Heaven help us, I'm not sure on the dose, but the child is to be drugged once inside the tunnel. I'd like to think we can clear the barracks out completely before the guards change in the middle of the night and do their walk-through. If the alarm is given, everyone in the barracks is to make a run for the building, then we barricade the doors into the factory. With luck they'll think it's a riot, not an escape. We might be able to hold the door long enough for another fifty, maybe even a hundred, to get out."

"It's going to be chaos around the tunnel," Alexi said.

"I know. Ketswana, that's why I want you to get as many of your people near you as possible. You must hold them back. I'll be with you throughout."

What he left unsolved was the question of how the last of Ketswana's team was to get down into the tunnel, especially if there were a panicked mob.

"Let's just hope we can get everyone in the barracks out. When it becomes evident that too many people are missing on the floor, we kill the guards and then try and get the last ones out."

"What about the Chin?" asked Tamira.

Hans looked at Lin and shook his head. "There's a thousand of them in the treadmills. There's no way we can save them too. I'm sorry."

Lin nodded sadly in agreement.

He could sense the tension throughout the compound, and his gut instinct, which had kept him alive through a dozen campaigns and a hundred or more skirmishes going back nearly thirty years, told him it was time to get out.

"It's two hours till dark. We start then," Hans announced.

"How you feeling, laddie?"

Jack Petracci, chief pilot of the Republic's air corps, looked wanly at Pat. "The usual, ready to throw up."

Pat laughed and slapped Petracci on the shoulder. "Hero of the Merki War, holder of the Congressional Medal, and him afraid."

"You dumb mick, you think it's so easy, why don't you come up on the test flight then?"

Pat gazed wide-eyed at the airship hanging at the mooring mast and shook his head.

"Go up in that?" He laughed softly and shook his head. "Madness."

"So shut the hell up," Jack snapped.

Pat put an affectionate arm around Jack's shoulder and whispered, "I think I'd pee meself."

Jack swallowed hard, trying to ignore Pat as he started to ramble on about the old days with the Forty-fourth New York Light Artillery.

How did I get myself into this? Jack wondered. If only I'd kept my mouth shut about helping old Professor Wiggins and his Traveling Aerial Circus back on Earth before the war, I never would have been drafted as the Republic's first balloonist. But then again, would we be here now? He knew that in war there are any number of critical moments, when the actions of a single person can decide the fate of a nation. Dozens of his comrades had had those moments, and most of them were now dead.

And me? He was seen by many as one of the great heroes of the war. Gates's Illustrated Weekly had run three front-page etchings of him, the new lithograph series Heroes of the Great Wars, had two drawings of him in action, and as far as his love life went—well, that at least was a reason to smile.

Andrew had given him something of a free hand in designing the uniform of the air corps, and Ferguson's wife had come up with a design that made him and his comrades stand out. Trousers and jacket were sky blue, with white piping on the sides of the pants, around the wrists, and down the front of the nine-button blouse. The army slouch cap had been abandoned for a leather helmet and goggles pushed up onto the forehead. What he really liked, though, was his flying coat, a fleece-lined leather jacket with a high collar to ward off the chill that was found at ten thousand feet. He knew the uniform was the envy of the services, and wherever he went there was always an unending stream of young men begging to join the elite corps of forty trained pilots and engineers.

At the moment, he would trade it all for a safe berth on the ground, even down in the belly of a monitor on patrol in the Inland Sea.

"I think we're ready to cast off," he whispered, swallowing hard.

"Don't you think you should be a little less adventurous on this first trip?" Pat asked.

Jack shook his head.

"We've had three shakedown runs. She flies well enough. We built her for the long runs; it's time we did one. The weather's perfect, wind out of the west, northwest at fifteen knots, might be higher aloft, and we've got her headed southeast. I'll go up to six or seven thousand, level out, and throttle her back to half setting. I'm willing to bet it's blowing at thirty to forty knots up there. If so, I figure that by early morning tomorrow we should be fetching up on the east coast near where we want to look."

"Good luck, lad."

Jack nodded a silent reply, and slipping out of Pat's grip he started toward the airship Flying Cloud. He walked slowly down its four-hundred-foot length, carefully studying its lines. So much about this ship was new. The wicker framework was built out of the bamboo-like trees growing along the eastern shore of the Inland Sea, which when soaked could be bent to nearly any shape but when kiln-dried had a strength like iron with only a fraction of the weight. Silk had been abandoned in favor of the far more plentiful lightweight canvas, which was treated with a glue distilled from oil that shrank the canvas in place and made it airtight as well.

Reaching the stern of the ship, he carefully studied the rudder and elevators, and the cables that ran from them to the cockpit. On the last test flight the cables had stretched to the point that his engineer had to disconnect them from the control stick and then winch them in tighter, an operation that was safe to undertake in calm air over friendly territory but could spell disaster in a high wind in enemy airspace. Tumbolts had been spliced into the lines, and he could only hope they would solve the problem.

He started forward again, nodding at the ground crews holding the castoff lines, and finally stopped at the ladder leading up to the cockpit, which hovered a dozen feet overhead.

Feyodor saluted at his approach. "She's a fine ship and it'll be a fair evening, sir."

"Oh, shut the hell up," Jack snapped angrily. "You know I can't stand your eagerness for this thing."

"Ah, Colonel, and if you didn't fly, how many fair ladies of Rus and Roum would be opening their bedroom doors to you?"

"Enough. You, you're so ugly, though, it's the only way you'd ever stand a chance."

"True, true. And thus my argument is proved."

The comment diverted Jack for just a moment. What was her name? Livia? Now there was a moment to treasure.

"Full load of fuel, capped off. All engines warmed up, all controls checked. Full ammunition load for both guns. Camera is mounted. We're ready to go, sir." Feyodor finished the checklist and waited expectantly for a reply.

"Our top gunner?"

"Here, sir."