Company-Captain Balkar chan Tesh pushed back his canvas chair and stood. The morning officers'

conference had run later than usual, thanks to the message chan Baskay and Arthag had Flicked to him, and that, in turn, had both delayed his breakfast and reduced his appetite. Now he left his mess kit on the folding field table for his orderly to deal with and stepped back out of his tent into the morning light.

It was an hour earlier in the day on this side of the portal, and he squinted his eyes as he gazed through it at the mist hanging above the hot, humid swamp on the other side. The autumn weather was growing steadily cooler on this side, especially under the towering trees, but the far side of the portal was much nearer to the equator. At the moment, chan Tesh was grateful to be spared the swamp's miserable climate, but if his people were still living under canvas once winter got here, that was going to change, he thought wryly.

Of course, by then we should have someone senior to me in here to take over, he told himself. And we may have enough manpower to let me divert enough working parties to actually finish those winter quarters Frai's working on.

He snorted at the thought, although his amusement was less than total. Master-Armsman Frai chan Kormai had been making pretty good progress on throwing together split-log barracks which would at least be weathertight, if not precisely luxurious. Until, of course, the Arcanan "diplomats" had arrived on the scene. Up to that point, it had appeared the mysterious enemy was intent on avoiding any further contact, which had suited chan Tesh just fine. The longer Sharona had to get its own reinforcements forward before they were needed, the better.

But the Arcanans' reappearance, and the transportation capabilities their magic-powered boats had revealed, had forcibly reminded chan Tesh of just how vulnerable his position out here really was. He had been dividing his efforts between improving his troops' fighting positions and trying to provide them with at least rudimentary housing ... until the arrival of Rithmar Skirvon and Uthik Dastiri refocused his priorities. Followingtheir appearance, he'dpulled his work parties off the barracks-building details to concentrate on strengthening his troop emplacements ... and reduced his work parties'size to make certain those emplacementswere adequately manned at all times.

Of course, "adequately" was an often slippery word, and chan Tesh wished he could be more confident that it applied in this instance. Unfortunately, while it was decidedly on the small side as the interuniversal gates went, the swamp portal was still four miles wide, and there'd never been much point in pretending the forces under his command could hold its entire frontage against a determined attack—

especially not given that the actual frontage to be covered amounted to eight miles, not just four.

Although the rest of chan Tesh's command had finally caught up with the three platoons he'd taken ahead in response to the Arcanans' original attack on the Chalgyn Consortium survey party, that still left him with less than eight hundred men. Instead of spreading them out and dissipating his combat power, he'd chosen to divide the command in two. Platoon-Captain chan Dersal, the senior of his two Marine platoon COs, was in command of the positions covering the southern face of the portal, while chan Tesh commanded the ones to the north.

In the face of such a broad frontage, he'd had to settle for attempting to dominate it by fire. Luckily, the rest of his mortars and half a dozen three-point-four-inch field guns had come up with the remainder of the relief column. He'd dug the mortars in in central positions on both Hell's Gate sides of the portal, with the field guns positioned on their flanks, prepared to sweep the approaches to the mortar pits with canister. Also luckily, the ground sloped generally upward on this side of the portal, in both directions.

That gave him pretty fair lines of fire into, across, and along the portal's Hell's Gate aspects. He'd taken advantage of that and located the rest of his firepower to protect and support the mortars, because only they had the reach to cover the full width of the portal's faces from their gun pits. He'd positioned his machine guns with the best supporting fields of fire he could arrange, and his men had spent a great deal of time clearing fire zones of scrub saplings, which had further improved upon his basic elevation advantage.

The fact that the water table was further from the surface on this side of the portal—although the ground immediately surrounding the portal was heavily saturated with swamp water—was another factor in his decision to defend it from Hell's Gate. He'd been able to go down more than two feet on this side without striking water, and he'd taken advantage of that to dig his men and weapons in as deeply as he could. And after he'd gotten them dug in, he'd gone right on digging. The mortar pits had to be open if he was going to fire the weapons at all, and the field guns' were equally open in order to give the quickfiring guns the best command possible. Despite their lack of overhead cover, the artillery should be relatively safe, given the Arcanans' apparent lack of any sort of indirect-fire artillery.

His other positions, however, were as heavily bunkered as he could contrive. They were the protective barrier between the portal and his gunners, and he'd ordered them dug in below ground level. The aboveground bunker walls were over four feet thick, with log retaining walls filled with tamped-down earth, while the roofs consisted of at least four layers of crisscrossed logs covered by multiple layers of sandbags, as well. He was confident that they would have stood up well even against Sharonian-style field or medium artillery, and judging from the Arcanan fireball spells' apparent lack of penetration, they ought to resist even direct hits almost indefinitely.

He'd also arranged a few other things he hoped would come as nasty surprises to any potential attackers, but he'd always been aware that he'd be hard-pressed to stop any attack in force.

Many of his men (and at least some of his junior officers), on the other hand, thought he was being alarmist. He knew that. Despite his best efforts, they remained supremely confident—even overconfident

—of their ability to deal with anything the other side might produce. Yet as chan Tesh had pointed out at this morning's conference, people always learned more from failure than from success, and what Sharona actually knew about Arcana's military capabilities remained pitifully inadequate. At least some of the Arcanan troops his command had defeated two months ago had managed to escape, however—

that had been obvious from the moment Skirvon mentioned the confirmed death of that Arcanan civilian, Halathyn, in the attack—which meant the other side had probably learned more than he would have liked about Sharonian capabilities. But even if that weren't true, the natural response would be for Arcana to be bringing up the equivalent of its big guns (whatever the hells that might be) just as quickly as it could, and that could turn very ugly very quickly. Especially if those damned boats of theirs were any indication of their general mobility.

Chan Tesh himself was painfully well aware that much of his earlier victory owed its success to the Arcanans' complete lack of familiarity with modern firearms and mortars. The peerless stupidity of their commanding officer hadn't hurt, either, and that advantage, in particular, was something he couldn't count on the second time around. Just as—as he'd reminded his subordinates this morning—they couldn't afford to assume for a single instant that what they'd seen so far out of Arcana was, in fact, the best Arcana had.

There's a hell of a lot of difference between a four-and-a-half-inch mortar and an eleven-inch howitzer, he thought, and the other side hasn't seen that yet, either, has it?

At least chan Baskay's dispatch had helped him ginger up his platoon commanders. Which was remarkably little comfort compared to the way it had underscored chan Tesh's existing concerns.

He snorted again, this time without any humor at all. Chan Baskay's message had at least seen to it that chan Tesh's entire command was at a higher state of readiness. He hoped to all the gods that those among his subordinates whothought he was jumping at shadows turned out to be right. He was confident he and his men were as ready as they could be, but he was also more aware than ever of just how exposed, vulnerable, and—above all—unsupported they actually were.

Commander of Fifty Tharian Narshu had been carefully chosen for his present duty.

Despite his junior rank, Narshu had seen more than his fair share of combat against everything from brigands to cattle rustlers to claim-jumpers to landowners using "guest workers" as virtual slave labor.

More to the point, perhaps, he wasn't the Regular Army officer he appeared to be. He'd been trained in the far harder, tougher school of the Union of Arcana's Special Operations Force, as had half of the men under his command. Two Thousand mul Gurthak had grabbed Narshu and the single squad of his platoon he'd had with him, snatched them (and the transport dragon which had been moving them to join the rest of his platoon in Jylaros) out of the regular transport queue, and hurried them forward to Two Thousand Harshu. Harshu had been delighted to see them ... and he'd used them to provide the core of Master Skirvon's "honor guard."

The honor guard's other twelve men were primarily windowdressing, along solely to make up the numbers, who had no idea their commanding officer and fellow troopers weren't, in fact, Regular Army at all. Narshu wished fervently that all of them could have been Special Operations, but there were never enough SpecOps available. Two Thousand mul Gurthak had been unreasonably fortunate to to have even one of Narshu's squads available this far out into the boondocks when it had all hit the fan. Besides, a dozen SpecOps troopers ought to be more than sufficient, especially with Sword Seltym Laresk to run the squad. Narshu and Laresk had served together for almost two years now, and the fifty had total confidence in the noncom.

He was glad he did, too, because Tharian Narshu, unlike the late, unlamented Hadrign Thalmayr, wasn't about to underestimate his opposition. This Platoon-Captain Arthag, for example, was as tough and competent as anyone Narshu had ever seen. But competence didn't matter, he reminded himself, when it was offset by complete ignorance and total surprise, and these people knew nothing about even the simplest magic.