"How bad is it, really?"
"Honestly?" Chusal looked up at the considerably taller Ternathian officer with a thoughtful expression, as if considering whether or not chan Geraith really wanted to know the truth, then grimaced. "The biggest problem's going to be the water gaps. There's a six thousand-mile voyage to cross Haysam to get to Reyshar, and another nine hundred-mile cruise between Reyshar and Hayth. Then there's another eleven hundred miles of water between Jyrsalm and Salym. We're going to have to detrain all of your people, all of your horses, all of your equipment, at each water gap, load it onto ships and sail all of it across the gap, then load it back onto another set of cars, and haul it to the next water gap. Then repeat the process."
It was chan Geraith's turn to grimace, although he wasn't really all that surprised. He could read a map, after all.
"I can't say I'm looking forward to the process," he said after a moment, "but surely it's one you've had to deal with before."
"Oh, yes. Of course we have." Chusal nodded. "We have to deal with it constantly, in fact. Unfortunately, we've never had to deal with it on quite this scale before, Division-Captain. Moving whole armies, not to mention all the ammunition and other supplies they're going to need?and all the coal our engines and steamships are going to need, if we're going to go on moving all that other stuff?simply devours rail capacity. And, obviously, shipping capacity between ports.
"Haysam and Reyshar are pretty well provided with freighters and passenger liners we can conscript for the military's needs, since everything moving in and out of the home universe has to pass through both of them. But we haven't needed anything like this sort of transport capacity in the Hayth Chain before. Sealift's going to be a real problem in the move between Salym and Traisum, and then there's the rail ferry across the Finger Sea in Traisum itself to consider, at least until they get the bridge built.
"That's all bad enough, but we've never had to assign the Hayth Chain anywhere near the rolling stock we're going to need now on the outbound side of Hayth. That's why I've been sending so many perfectly good engines and freight cars out empty. And it's also why every heavylift freighter in both Haysam and Reyshar has been withdrawn from regular service and assigned to hauling those engines and cars across the water gaps. Which," he added sourly, "has created a monumental bottleneck in commercial cargo service."
"I see." chan Geraith frowned. "I hadn't realized it would impose quite that much of a strain."
"Division-Captain, you haven't even begun to see 'strain' yet," Chusal said grimly. "We're building up as much capacity as we can, but basically, we're looking at at least three totally separate rail lines, for all intents and purposes. That's what those water gaps do to us, since we've got to have the rolling stock we need between each of them. Worse, in Reyshar and Salym, we've got two separate rail legs divided by water too wide to bridge. So we can't just load you onto one set of cars and send you all the way to the end of the line. We can do a lot to economize if we plan our turnarounds on the shorter legs carefully, but it's still going to be a nightmare keeping everything moving. And so far, we're only looking at moving one division at a time. What happens if we have to start sending entire corps down the same transit chain simultaneously? For that matter, the line's only double-tracked as far as Jyrsalm! We're working on that, too, and that's another logistical consideration we have to juggle somehow."
The train master sounded both weary and frustrated, and chan Geraith couldn't blame him for either emotion. On the other hand, he'd known men like Chusal before. Yakhan Chusal hadn't become TTE's senior train master by accident, and chan Geraith suspected that he was going to prove much more capable of doing that logistical juggling than he thought he was at the moment.
None of which invalidates a single thing he's said, of course.
The division-captain shook his head. He'd known going in that managing his logistics down a single supply line as long as this one was going to be a … challenge. No one in history had ever before even considered attempting such a thing, far less planned for it, and the urgent need to get his division loaded up and moving in the right direction had kept him from giving it the sort of attention and preplanning any peacetime maneuver would have permitted. He'd been painfully aware of that, but he'd also known he and his staff were going to have literally weeks in transit to work out the details.
"Train Master," he said after moment, "would it be possible for you to assign someone from your operations staff to me on a temporary basis? My staff and I are reasonably competent when it comes to planning moves around the Empire, or across a single planet. I'm beginning to think, though, that we need someone with a better feel for genuine trans-universal movements. Besides, we're accustomed to simply telling the quartermaster how much lift capacity we need. This time around it looks like we're going to need an expert just to tell us how much capacity there is!"
"Now that, Division-Captain, is a very good idea," Chusal said warmly. "And, as it happens, I think I have just the man for you." chan Geraith arched one eyebrow, and Chusal chuckled. "I've assigned Hayrdar Sheltim as your train master. He just happens to be one of our more experienced train masters … and he also just finished a three-month assignment to operations right here at Larakesh Central. If you've got questions, Hayrdar can answer them as well as anyone I can think of."
"Thank you, Train Master. I appreciate that?a lot."
"It doesn't look like much, does it?" Second Lord of Horse Garsal grumbled.
"Perhaps not," Lord of Horse Jukan Darshu, Sunlord Markan replied quietly as they watched the first of his Uromathian cavalry troopers climb down from the passenger cars which had carried them as far as Fort Salby.
They were moving slowly, stiffly, and the sunlord's lips quirked in a wry sympathy he would never have admitted to feeling. The last twelve days had been a severe jolt to their systems, he thought. The rail trip from Camryn to Salym hadn't been all that bad, but then there'd been the move to the hastily improvised transports in Salym for the voyage from Barkesh to New Ramath. The horses had hated it, the heavy weather they'd encountered en route had left half the men miserably seasick, and at the end of it, they'd had to climb back into the rail cars for the trip from New Ramath to Fort Tharkoma covering the portal between Salym and Traisum.
New Ramath was only a few hundred miles from Tharkoma, but they were mountainous, inhospitable miles, and the slow, swaying trip along the steep tracks which twisted like broken-backed serpents between the port city and the fortress had been exhausting, especially for the men who hadn't yet fully recovered from their seasickness. Yet even that hadn't been the end of it, for the Traisum side of that portal was located in the equivalent of the Kingdom of Shartha.
Shartha lay on the west coast of Ricatha, which lay thousands of feet lower than?and three thousand miles south of?the Salym side of the portal, and it had been snowing hard in Salym. The change as their train wheezed through the portal from sub-freezing Tharkoma to the brutal, brilliant heat of the Shartha Plain had been stunning even for hardened trans-universal travelers. The cold, insufficiently heated passenger cars had gone from icebox to oven in what had seemed mere minutes as the ice and snow which had encrusted them turned abruptly into water. Indeed, Markan rather thought that most of it had probably gone straight to vapor without even bothering with the intermediate liquid stage. The shock to the system had been profound, and the day and a half it had taken to get from there to Salby had offered insufficient time for men?or horses?to adjust.