Free Hope Renewed by David Drake, S.M. Stirling

cocked an eye toward the civil servants Suzette had intercepted. They were beginning to move back towards the headquarters building, in a sort of Brownian motion gently shepherded by the women.
    Raj nodded curtly. “Right, gentlemen,” he said to the circle of battalion commanders; most of them his Companions, all of them veterans. “Now, you’ve all got your maps?”
    They did, although some of the ex-barbarians, Squadrones and Brigaderos, were looking at them a little dubiously. The Civil Government’s cartographic service was one of a number of advantages it had had over the Military Governments. Unfortunately, the Colony’s mapmakers were just as skillful.
    “This campaign,” he went on, meeting their eyes, “is what we’ve been training for these past five years.”
    “Conquering half the world was a training exercise ?” Ludwig Bellamy blurted.
    Raj nodded, with an expression a stranger might have mistaken for a smile. “No offense, Messers, but we’re not fighting barbarians this time. If we hold out a sausage grinder, they’re not going to scratch their heads, mutter and then obligingly ram their dicks into it while we turn the crank.
    “These are disciplined troops with first-rate equipment, operating closer to their base of supplies than we will be. And they have a first-rate commander; Tewfik ibn’Jamal is nobody’s fool. I’ve fought him twice; lost one, won one—and the time I won, Tewfik had his father Jamal looking over his shoulder and jogging his elbow. Jamal was no commander.”
    Gerrin nodded. “This time he’s got Ali along,” he pointed out. His square, handsome face was dark olive, more typical of Descott than Raj’s, who had a grandmother from Kelden County in the northwest. “Ali’s not only no commander, by all accounts he’s a raving bloody lunatic.”
    “That’s our only advantage, and we’ll need it. Messers, no mistakes this time. We move fast, and we hit like a hammer. Gerrin, detail two hundred of the 5th to me, and I’ll take them ahead on the first train. You’ll be rearguard here and come in on the last with the remainder of the battalion.”
    He held up a hand when the other man began to protest. “I need someone here I can trust to see the plan carried out, Colonel.”
    “We also serve who only stay and chivvy bureaucrats,” Staenbridge said.
    “Ludwig,” Raj went on. “We’re short of rolling stock. I’m giving you the 1st and 2nd Mounted Cruisers” —the former Squadron troops— “and the 3/591, 4/591 and 5/591” —all Brigaderos from the Western Territories— “and you’ll follow on dogback. Entrain your baggage, commandeer what remounts you need from the Residence Area pens, and keep to the line of rail. You can pick up supplies at the railstops; nothing on the men but their weapons and personal gear. Understood?”
    Ludwig Bellamy slapped one gauntleted fist into the other. “ Ci, mi heneral, ” he said, his Sponglish as pure as a native Civil Government officer; it even had a hint of a Descott Country rasp.
    Nobody would mistake him for an Easterner, though. He stood a finger over Raj’s 190 centimeters, and the hair cut in an Army bowl crop was yellow-blond. He’d been the son of a Squadron noble, one who surrendered to Raj to keep his lands. Ludwig had been part of the deal, a hostage for his father’s good behavior. He was far more than that now. The man beside him was like enough to be his brother, and was his cousin-in-law; Teodore Welf, former second-in-command of the Brigade.
    He tapped his fingers on his sword-hilt; unlike his kinsman by marriage, he kept the shoulder-length hair of a Military Government officer, and wore the basket-hilted longsword of the Brigade rather than an Easterner’s saber.
    “Good thinking, mi heneral, ” he said. “Some of the men . . .” He shrugged at the shrieking locomotives around them. “Well, they’re not used to these modern refinements.”
    “True, Major Welf,” Raj said. Meaning,