* * *
“Skirmish order!”
The infantry platoon fanned out, three meters between each man, in two long lines. The first line jogged forward across the rocky pasture, their fixed bayonets glittering in the chilly upland air. Fifty meters forward they went to ground, taking cover behind ridges and boulders. The second line moved up and leapfrogged forward in turn.
Ensign Jeffrey Farr watched carefully through his field-glasses. The movement was carried out with precision. Good men, he thought. The Republic’s army wasn’t large, only seventy thousand men. It wasn’t particularly well-paid or equipped, either; the men mostly enlisted because it was the employer of last resort. Bottle troubles, wife troubles, farm kids bored beyond endurance with watching the south end of a northbound plowhorse, sheer inability to cope with the chaotic demands of civilian life in the Republic’s fast-growing cities. They could still make good soldiers if you gave them the right training, and trained men would be invaluable when the balloon went up. The provincial militias were supposed to be federalized in time of war, but as they stood he had little confidence in them.
He raised his hand in a signal. The platoon sergeant blew a sharp blast on his whistle and the men rose from the field, slapping at the dust on their brown tunic jackets. Their stubbled faces looked impassive and tired after the month of field exercises through the mountains.
“Good work, Ensign,” his company commander nodded. Captain Daniels was a thickset man of forty—promotion was slow in the peacetime army—with a scar across one cheek where a Union bullet had just missed taking off his face in a skirmish twenty years ago.
“Very good work,” the staff observer said. “I notice you’re spreading the skirmish line thinner.”
“Yes, sir,” Jeff said. He nodded at an infantryman jogging by with his weapon at the trail. It was a bolt-action model with six cartridges in a tube magazine below the barrel. “Everyone’s getting magazine rifles these days, except the Imperials, and new designs are coming fast and furious. We’ve got to disperse formations more.”
Although to hear some of the fogies talk, they expected to fight in shoulder-to-shoulder ranks like Civil War troops equipped with rifle-muskets.
“Yes, I read that article of yours in the Armed Forces Quarterly,” the staff type said. “You think nitro powders will be adopted for small arms?”
major belmody, Center said. A list of biographical data followed.
The major looked pretty sharp, if a little elegant for the field in his greatcoat and red throat-tabs and polished Sam Browne. And being a younger son of the Belmody Mills Belmodys probably hadn’t hurt his rise through the officer corps either; thirty-two was damned young to get that high.
“I’m certain of it, sir,” Jeff said. The Belmodys were big in chemicals and mining explosives. “No smoke, less fouling, and much higher muzzle velocities, flatter trajectories, smaller calibers so the troops can carry more ammo.”
Captain Daniels spoke unexpectedly. “I don’t trust jacketed bullets,” he said. “They have a tendency to strip and then tumble when the barrel’s hot.”
“Sir, that’s just a development problem. Gilding metal can’t take the temperatures of high-velocity rounds. Cupronickel, or straight copper, that’s what needed.”
The older officer smiled. “Ensign, I wish I was half as confident about anything as you are about everything.”
“God knows we could use some young firebrands in this man’s army,” Major Belmody said. “In any case, you and Ensign Farr must dine with me tonight.”
“After I see the men settled in, sir,” Jeff said. The major raised an eyebrow and nodded, returning his juniors’ salutes.
“You’ll do, Farr,” Captain Daniels said, grinning, when the staff officer’s car had bounced away over the pasture with an occasional chuff of waste steam. “You’ll go far, too, if you can learn to be a little more diplomatic about who you deliver lectures to.”
* * *
Lieutenant Gerta Hosten leaned back against the upholstery of the seat and watched out the half-open window as the train clacked its way across the central plateau. The air coming in was clean; this close to Copernik the line had been electrified, and the lack of coal smoke and the pounding, chuffing sound of a steam locomotive was a little eerie. There was plenty of traffic on the broad concrete-surfaced road that flanked the railway, too, steam or animal-drawn. This was the most pleasant part of the Land, a rolling volcanic upland at a thousand meters above sea level, cooler and a little drier. The capital had been moved here from Oathtaking only a generation after the first wave of Alliance refugees arrived. Copernik’s beginnings went back before the coming of the Chosen, right back to the initial settlement of Visager, but nothing remained of the pre-conquest city. Over the past generation as geothermal steam and then hydropower supplemented coal, it had also become a major manufacturing center.