Free The Road to Hell - eARC by David Weber, Joelle Presby Page A

their battle honors and their sense of who and what they were—wasn’t going to take well to the dishonor they knew his actions were heaping upon them.
    And they’re a lot more likely to back someone like Therman Ulthar then they are to obey Thalmayr, if it comes down to it , Sarma thought grimly. Unfortunately, there’re only five of them—six, counting Therman—and Thalmayr’s got most of a company of regulars under his command .
    Regulars who didn’t have the personal investment of the 2nd Andarans…and who still believed the lies they’d been fed by their own intelligence officers.
    “If we were closer to home, we could go to the JAG,” he said out loud.
    “And if crocodiles had wings they’d be dragons,” Ulthar replied sourly. “I’d rather go through channels myself, but from what Iftar said, ‘channels’ wouldn’t give a rat’s arse.”
    “Not anyone we could reach, at least.” Sarma puffed out his cheeks in exasperation. “You’re brother-in-law’s right about that, I’m afraid. I told you what happened when I tried to report Neshok’s violation of the Accords to Thousand Carthos.”
    Ulthar grunted unhappily. The Kerellian Accords were the bedrock of the Andaran Army’s honor, deep in the bone and sinew of what made Andara Andara. Violating them was a capital offense, but if Sarma and his own brother-in-law, Iftar Halesak, were right, Hadrign Thalmayr wasn’t the only one ignoring them. In fact, Ulthar doubted Thalmayr would have had the courage to violate them if they weren’t already being violated with the connivance—or at least the knowledge—of officers far senior to himself. No. Thalmayr was a carrion eater, a jackal gorging on the stinking leftovers of someone else’s kill. And given the lies the Expeditionary Force had been told—the lies about who’d shot first not just at Toppled Timber but at the Mahritha portal, and, far worse, the lie about Magister Halathyn’s death—that someone else was very highly placed.
    Under normal circumstances, it was an officer’s duty to report any evidence of a violation of the Kerellian Accords to the Judge Advocate General’s office. He had no choice about that, and the Articles of War specifically protected him against retaliation even if his suspicions were later deemed unfounded. Of course, what the Articles promised and what practice delivered weren’t always the same thing, but at least Sarma and Ulthar could have expected their allegations to be rigorously investigated and that anyone who was the subject of that investigation would be very careful to avoid any open appearance of retaliation afterward.
    Under normal circumstances. Under these circumstances it was entirely possible that a pair of nosy, holier-than-thou junior officers who dared to rock their superiors’ boat might simply disappear. It sickened Ulthar to even think such a thing, but if Thousand Carthos, Two Thousand Harshu’s senior infantry officer, and Five Hundred Neshok, who reported directly to the two thousand, were guilty of violating the Accords, why should they hesitate over a few more murders simply because the victims wore the same uniform they’d already befouled? And if those violations were being winked at in the field, and if there was anything to Iftar’s belief that the lies the AEF had been told were part of a deliberate disinformation policy designed to whip up the troops’ fury, they had to assume Harshu’s immediate superiors knew about it, too. So any attempt to report their suspicions up-chain to Two Thousand mul Gurthak or his superiors was likely to be…poorly received, as well.
    “I think,” Sarma said slowly, “that whichever way we jump, there’s going to be hell to pay. If you or I try to…relieve Thalmayr, you know damned well he’s going to call it mutiny. Probably mutiny in the face of the enemy, given everything that’s going on. And if he does, and if someone farther up the food chain”—even here, and even to