AUD PLANCK STOOD IN THE DOORWAY of a room in the camp commandant’s quarters hut as I ran up. The windowless room wasn’t more than an oversized closet, and its only furnishings were a simple table, a chair, and a sputtering oil lamp suspended from a ceiling beam.

A figure in Tressen colonel’s uniform slumped in the chair, head down across the table. One hand clutched a service revolver that had been inserted in his mouth, and what had been the back of his head splattered the far wall of the tiny room.

Presiding over mass murder, in a frigid, forsaken outpost, would drive a normal human being near suicide, I supposed. Facing up to the reality that your sloppy command had gotten all your troops killed could drive a soldier the rest of the way. Or maybe he had been a fanatic, more afraid of having let down his RS bosses than of burning in hell.

Aud said, “I wondered why we hadn’t found the camp commandant.” Aud stepped to the table, slipped his pistol’s barrel beneath the empty hand of the dead man, and lifted it. Beneath the hand was a wood slab with a pivoting brass arm six inches long fixed above it.

Jude stared first at the body, then at the brass and wood device, then swore.

Jude turned to Aud. “You think he transmitted anything?”

Aud shrugged. “He could have been transmitting for the last hour.”

“Or not at all.”

I raised my palm. “The Tressens haven’t invented radio.”

Jude pointed at the wood block, and at bright copper wires that curled away from it, then disappeared over the table’s real edge. “Telegraph. It’s so new that it’s more a parlor trick than a practical system. At least that’s what I thought.”

“I looked out of that sledge for six days. I never saw one pole.”

Jude shook his head. “Wood’s rare here. Insulated cable would be buried in the roadbed.”

I shrugged at Aud. “It could be nothing.” I didn’t believe myself, but there was also nothing we could do now.

An hour later I sat on the edge of a barracks bunk, cleaning Ord’s pistol. My wrist ’Puter vibrated. I scrolled through functions. It wasn’t an alarm. It was an incoming call.

I picked up.

“General Wander?” It was Bill the Spook. Howard’s bargain satellites delivered terrific sound quality.

“Bill? I thought phone calls were off limits.”

“Officially, they are.”

“This contact is freelance? You could lose your pension.”

“The dental’s awful anyway.” He paused. “That was a rough trip you took.”

The Spooks may have been forbidden to help us, but that didn’t mean their overhead eyes weren’t watching us while they tracked the ’Puters that Aud, Jude, and I wore.

I shrugged, invisible to him. “I’ve had better.”

“But it looks like your operation’s off to a good start.”

“Successful’s a better word.” I shifted on the bunk.

“You have company coming.”

Hair stood on my neck.

“Some local eyes reported that Forty-fifth Infantry started scrambling onto a sledge train pointed north thirty minutes ago.”

The Forty-fifth Tressen Infantry, the Quicksilver Division, took its name from the commander that had made it into Tressen’s best outfit, prematurely silver-haired Audace Planck.

I swore.

Bill said, “I dunno what tipped them.”

I did. The camp commandant had tapped out a warning that had also served as his suicide note. “Bill, there was a telegraph line running south from here.”

Silence. A good Spook took a failure of combat intelligence personally.

“Sorry.”

“So we got, what, six days?”

“They’re loading on a streamliner, not a slow freight like you came on. And the Forty-fifth is garrisoned on the northern frontier to begin with. The only good news is it’s a passenger train. They’re leaving their artillery at home.”

Why bother? Artillery to quell a mere prison riot?

“That’s a small favor. You got an ETA?”

“The best eight thousand infantry on this planet are gonna land on your doorstep in forty-eight hours, ready to rumble.”

“Can you bring the rain?”

“The Duck’s been ragging the Tehran ’s skipper for an hour. But the rules are set. No fire support. No nothing. No exceptions. It stinks, but you’re all hung out to dry.”

I stared at my ’Puter, numb. “Thanks for the heads-up, Bill. Tell the Duck thanks for trying. And tell Admiral Duffy thanks for nothing. See you around, Bill.”

Silence. Then he said, “Sure.”

IN THE NEXT MORNING’S SPARSE DAWN, Aud, Jude, Celline, and I stood together in the wind shadow cast by the train that had brought us, which had been reversed on a spur overnight, so that it pointed back toward the spiked black mountain range through which we had come, ten miles to the south. Smoke from the smoldering oil fire overhung the plain like dirty gauze in the pre-sunrise calm.

Around us by twos and threes, those of our companions who had been revived by a meal and a night in barracks bunks that their captors no longer needed already scoured the snows. They bent, gathered meteorites, then stuffed them into knapsacks and into the pockets of coats for which their captors also had no further need. Periodically, someone gasped as, beneath the snow, they touched the frozen corpse of an earlier and less fortunate arrival.

In the midst of the vast and unmarked graveyard, Aud knelt in the snow and pointed at his makeshift sand table map. A line of stones bisected the flat, swept area that represented the plains south and north of the mountains. A red string, laid south to north, represented the ice road line. The string snaked across the stone “mountain range” wedged into Aud’s paper-narrow “mountain pass” like dental floss.

He pointed at the north end of the red string. “We’re here. Without the refueling oil we planned on, this ice train can barely reach here.” His finger slid along the string, then stopped above the “pass” that ran north to south through the mountains.

He swung his arm around the plain at the stone gatherers. “We need to buy time to finish this work. The mountains are impassable. If we overturn this ice train in the pass, we’ll force Forty-fifth Division to dismount their train and advance toward the pass on foot. A small force using the sledges and engine as breastworks can hold the pass even against a division.”

I asked Celline and Jude, “Assuming volunteers, how many can you spare from gathering and still meet the deadline?”

They looked at each other. Jude shrugged. “We planned on a thousand pickers. Could you manage with two hundred?”

“There were three hundred Spartans at Thermopylae,” I said. But there were eighty thousand Persians on the other side.

Celline frowned. She knew Thermopylae like I knew how to stir trilobite bisque. But she said, “We’ll manage with a hundred less, then.”

I didn’t tell her that the three hundred had been the finest troops in their world, maybe in any world, not starved, frostbitten shopkeepers. I also didn’t tell her that the Spartans lost. Big.

There was another similarity to Thermopylae. I shaded my eyes with my hand as I pointed at the eastern shoulder of the distant mountain pass. “The Spooks mapped this. There’s a way around the canyon. A ledge a goat could walk, eight hundred feet above the canyon floor, along the east wall. It’s a long way ’round, but once the Persians outflanked the Spartans the battle was lost. If the Quicksilver Division can move a battalion over that goat track, it can swing in behind the bottleneck in a day.”

Aud shook his head. “I know the Forty-fifth. But I also know the commander who succeeded me. Folz is deliberate. Unimaginative. He’ll pound away at the pass frontally for days before he resorts to maneuver. But you’re right. Eventually…”

I pointed at the “shoulder” of the pass on Aud’s sand table map. “They widened the main route through the canyon with dynamite when they built the railroad. There’s still one case left in the machine shop, even after the GIs played with it. It’s not enough to close the main pass, but it might be enough to drop a narrow spot on that ledge, cut that path. Your old troops are good, Aud. But they can’t fly.”