Dearest Martha,

  I did something today that Silas would've argued against. He would've pulled out the map and drawn a line around the settlement and shown me three routes that avoided it entirely, and he would've been right about every single one. But Silas isn't here, and the smoke was black, and the people running toward us had children on their shoulders, and I gave an order that the numbers didn't support because the numbers don't know everything.

  Hughes.

  ◇ ◆ ◇

  Phelps is already shaking his head before Cobb finishes talking.

  "Captain, we don't have the ammunition for a daylight engagement against an unknown force." He flips his notebook open to the supply page, running his finger down the column. "We don't know their strength. We don't know their disposition. We don't know if this is a screening company or the leading element of a larger force, and if we commit to a fight at that settlement and Tate's other companies close in behind us, we're caught between two forces with a golem that can't fight for more than twenty minutes and a hex-cannon with no shells."

  He's right about all of it, and I'm going to ignore every word.

  Six days on the road and the column is showing it. Powder stores holding, but the captured cartridges from Fort Independence are down to forty rounds per soldier, maybe thirty-five for 3rd Company because half their men are former civilians who burned through practice ammunition learning which end of the musket to point forward. Morale: Steady in 1st Company, the veterans metabolizing another day's march the way they metabolize bad coffee. Shaky in 3rd. Marsh's people have been soldiers for six days and they've only fired their muskets in the dark. A daylight engagement against cavalry is a different animal, and they don't know if they're ready for it because I don't know if they're ready for it. Gospel's combat clock sits at twenty minutes. Mama Thunder sits empty on Mercy's back. Clementine's stretcher count is fourteen walking wounded from the breakout, three of them running low-grade fevers that could turn into real problems if the infection takes hold.

  And two hundred people are running north with their children on their shoulders and a fire behind them that somebody set on purpose.

  "Mercy, how fast can Gospel cover three miles on a road?"

  She's already running the numbers through the filter of what twelve feet of iron can do in a given amount of time. "Forty-five minutes at march speed. Twenty if Decker pushes her."

  "Push her. Phelps, 1st Company forms a battle line across the road four hundred yards north of the settlement. Marsh, 3rd Company swings west through the tree line and comes in on the left flank. Gospel goes up the middle with 1st Company. Cobb, ride back to the settlement and get close enough to count them. I need a number before we arrive."

  Phelps closes his notebook. He doesn't argue because he's watched me make decisions for six days and he's learned that the notebook closes when the talking is done. "Yes, sir."

  Mercy is already walking toward Gospel, and the golem's head turns before Mercy reaches her, the machine tracking its handler's approach with the slow hydraulic attention of a warhorse that heard the trumpet. Decker scrambles to his feet and starts running alongside, tool bag slapping against his hip.

  Marsh appears from the rear of the column, out of breath and confused, and I give him the order in forty words and send him west through the undergrowth with two hundred and thirty-eight soldiers who've never fought in daylight and don't know what they're walking into.

  The column surges forward and the walking becomes running and the running becomes controlled chaos in ninety seconds flat. Muskets come off shoulders. Bayonets come out of sheaths. The stretcher bearers pull off the road and crouch in the ditch, and the horses flatten their ears at the noise and the sudden shift in the air, because horses read urgency off the men riding them faster than the men read it off each other.

  I draw Freedom's Edge and walk at the head of 1st Company because a captain who gives the order to fight has no business being anywhere else.

  ◇ ◆ ◇

  The settlement is called Meridian, and I learn this from an old man standing in the middle of the road with a wheelbarrow full of blankets and a child of about four sitting on top of them.

  He sees the column coming and he doesn't run. He stands there with his hands on the wheelbarrow handles and watches four hundred soldiers in blue coats running down the cart track toward his burning town with a twelve-foot golem at the head, and the expression on his face belongs to a man who's seen so many terrible things in the last three years that one more doesn't change the count.

  "How many of them, and how long ago?" I ask him while the column streams past on both sides.

  "Cavalry. Sixty, maybe seventy. Gray coats. They came in from the south road an hour ago and started at the far end." His voice is remarkably steady for a man holding a wheelbarrow in the path of a war column. "They're burning the granary and the mill and working their way north. Some of them are looting, but most are just burning."

  "Any undead with them, or necromancers you could see?"

  "Not that I saw. Just cavalry with torches and bad intentions."

  I look at the child on the blankets. She's not crying. She's watching Gospel with the wide unblinking fascination of a child confronting a thing too big to be scary and too strange to be real, her head turning to follow the golem past her with absolute concentration.

  "Stay on this road heading north and don't stop until you reach the next ridge. You'll pass our stretcher bearers and supply train on the way, and nobody will bother you."

  The old man nods and picks up his wheelbarrow and walks north, and the child on the blankets watches Gospel until the golem is out of sight, turning her whole body on the blanket pile to keep it in view.

  ◇ ◆ ◇

  Cobb comes back at a gallop from the south, and his count matches the old man's. Sixty to seventy Confederate cavalry, dismounted, spread through the south end of Meridian. Horses picketed at the south edge near the road. A handful of officers on horseback riding between the buildings, directing the burning. No formation. No sentries on the north approach. No discipline to speak of, because they don't expect anyone coming from this direction and they aren't prepared for anyone who is.

  The settlement runs along a creek, maybe a hundred buildings strung out north-to-south along the main road with the creek on the east side and a stand of hardwoods on the west. The south end is burning. Black smoke rises from the granary and the mill in columns thick enough to lean against, and the wind carries it north across the center of the settlement, which means the Confederates in the south end can't see the north approach clearly and we can't see them.

  「Tactical Assessment: Settlement Meridian. Confederate force: 60-70 dismounted cavalry (probable screening company, Tate's brigade). Disposition: loose, spread through south end. No formation, no northern sentries. Horses picketed south edge. Terrain: creek E, hardwoods W, smoke obscuring center. Wind: S to N (smoke favoring Blue Coat approach). Time: Mid-morning. Gospel deployment: center road. 3rd Company: flanking W through hardwoods. Advantage: Surprise. Disadvantage: Unknown if reinforcements within earshot.」

  Sixty to seventy against our four hundred and eighty-one. Six-to-one in our favor, and that's before surprise and Gospel and the fact that they're spread through half a mile of buildings with no defensive positions and no idea we exist. Their advantage: horses, if they reach them. Our advantage: everything else. Acceptable casualty threshold for this engagement: ten. Above that and 3rd Company's morale drops from Steady to Shaken and they can't be trusted to hold a line under return fire for at least forty-eight hours. Above fifteen and we lose offensive capability for a week.

  The window between the first volley and their officers restoring order is somewhere between ninety seconds and three minutes. Inside that window, their combat effectiveness drops to near zero. Disoriented, leaderless, pinned in burning buildings. After that window closes, it becomes a cavalry engagement against infantry in a settlement, and cavalry in tight streets with a golem blocking the road don't have the room to use their one advantage, which is speed.

  The numbers work. For once, the numbers actually work.

  I stop the column four hundred yards from the north end of Meridian and give orders that are simple because simple orders are the only kind that work when soldiers are running on adrenaline and haven't eaten since the hardtack they chewed while walking.

  1st Company forms a line of battle across the road with Gospel at the center. Two ranks deep. Front rank fires on command, second rank fires when the front rank kneels to reload. No bayonet charge until I give the word. Sharpshooters with the captured carbines take positions in the buildings on the north edge of the settlement, second-floor windows, anywhere with a line of sight into the smoke.

  Marsh's 3rd Company should be in the hardwoods on the west side by now. They'll hear the first volley and come in on the Confederate left flank, which will be the side facing the trees. If they're in position, the Confederates get hit from two directions. If they're not in position yet, 1st Company holds the line and waits.

  "Hold fire until my signal, and not a round before I say." I look at the line of soldiers crouched behind the stone wall at the north end of the settlement, muskets resting on the top of the wall, bayonets catching the gray light. Their faces are focused and set and ready, the tension pulled tight across jaws and shoulders, the waiting almost over and the fighting about to begin. "When I give the order, put everything into the first volley. Sharpshooters, hit the officers on horseback first, then anyone giving orders."

  Gospel stands in the road behind the wall, steam venting from her shoulders in the cool morning air, and Decker is at her feet whispering adjustments to the ankle plate that I've stopped pretending I can hear.

  "Decker, the twenty-minute clock starts when she goes forward."

  "I know, Captain." He doesn't look up from the ankle plate. "She knows too."

  ◇ ◆ ◇

  The first Confederate rider comes through the smoke at a walk, leading his horse by the reins, a torch in his free hand and a carbine slung across his back and absolutely no awareness that two hundred and thirty-six soldiers are watching him from behind a stone wall a hundred and fifty yards north of his position.

  He stops to light the eaves of a dry goods store. The torch catches in the wooden shingle and the fire starts to climb the wall and the Confederate steps back to watch it burn with the satisfaction of a man admiring his own handiwork, and behind him in the smoke there are more men with more torches and the sound of glass breaking and horses complaining and officers shouting directions that nobody is following with any urgency because they think they're alone out here with a village that can't fight back.

  I wait until I can see fifteen of them through the smoke. Then I give the signal.

  Two hundred muskets fire within the space of a heartbeat. At a hundred and fifty yards, a .69 caliber lead ball is still carrying enough velocity to punch through a wool cavalry jacket and the ribs underneath and keep going. The man with the torch takes a round through the center of his chest and sits down in the road with the torch still burning in his hand. Two horses go down screaming, legs folding under them, one of them pinning its rider beneath eight hundred pounds of thrashing animal. A Confederate officer on horseback takes a carbine round from one of the second-floor sharpshooters through the left side of his chest, and the ball exits below his right shoulder blade in a spray of red mist, and he falls sideways out of the saddle and hits the packed dirt face-first and doesn't get up because the round went through both lungs on its way out.

  The smoke splits apart where the musket balls punch through it and for a half-second the entire south end of the settlement is visible through the holes, and what I see is sixty men who were sleeping through a looting detail ten seconds ago now standing in the open with no cover and no formation and no understanding of what just happened to them.

  "Second rank, fire!"

  The second volley comes three seconds after the first. The soldiers in the second rank had time to pick targets while the front rank was shooting, and the rounds find men who are still standing stunned in the road and in the doorways of buildings they were looting and at the horse picket where they were running for their mounts. A man at the horse line takes a ball through the hip and the bone shatters and his leg buckles sideways at an angle that legs don't bend, and he goes down into the mud next to the horses and the horses bolt over him and the hooves do the rest. Another catches a round in the shoulder that spins him halfway around and drops him against a fence post, and the blood is already soaking through his sleeve and running down his hand and dripping off his fingertips by the time the echo of the volley finishes bouncing off the ridgeline.

  "Front rank, reload. Bayonets ready. Gospel, advance."

  Gospel steps over the stone wall. Three feet of stacked fieldstone and she clears it in one stride, one iron leg lifting and the other following, and the ground shakes when twelve tons of war machine comes down on the other side. The stones in the wall rattle loose and the soldiers to either side press themselves flat to give her room because nobody wants to be standing next to twelve feet of iron when it's moving forward with purpose.

  She walks into the smoke and the Confederates see her and the ones who were trying to form a defensive line behind the burning granary abandon it. Some of them run for the horses. Some of them run for the trees on the east side of the creek. Some of them stand their ground and fire carbines at Gospel's chest plate from thirty yards, and the rounds hit the iron and spark and bounce and do nothing because a Mark IV Sentinel's chest plate was designed to stop grapeshot from field artillery, and carbine rounds at thirty yards don't even scratch the paint.

  Gospel swings her left arm and connects with a Confederate cavalryman at chest height. The impact doesn't slow the arm down. The man's ribs cave inward and his body leaves the ground and travels eight feet sideways through the wall of the dry goods store, and the wall collapses inward where his body punched through it, and the burning roof follows, and the building folds in on itself in a shower of sparks and splintered lumber and the cavalryman doesn't come back out because there's nothing left of his chest cavity to come back out with.

  If you find this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the infringement.

  Then 3rd Company hits them from the west.

  Marsh's two hundred and thirty-eight soldiers come through the hardwoods in a line that's ragged and imperfect and doesn't look anything like the drill formations they've been practicing for two days, but it doesn't matter because they're coming from a direction the Confederates weren't watching and the volley they fire catches the remaining cavalry in the flank. A man turning to face the new threat takes a ball through the side of his neck. The entry wound is small, barely a finger-width, but the ball clips the carotid on its way through and the blood comes out of him in arterial jets that pulse three times before he drops. Another Confederate throws down his carbine and raises his hands and a ball hits his raised forearm and snaps both bones and he screams and falls to his knees clutching the arm against his chest while the bones grind inside the meat.

  The engagement lasts eleven minutes by Decker's count on Gospel's combat clock. When it's over, Decker calls out "eleven minutes, Captain" from somewhere inside the thinning smoke. Gospel's shoulder bearing is holding, temperature elevated but within Decker's tolerance, vibration stable. Gospel stands in the middle of the main road with her iron fists at her sides and four dead Confederates at her feet and smoke curling around her legs and the settlement burning behind her.

  「Battle Complete. Engagement: Meridian. Duration: 11 minutes. Allied casualties: 4 KIA, 9 WIA. Confederate casualties: 43 KIA, 14 captured, remainder fled south. Confederate horses captured: 38 (18 fled with riders, 4 killed). Gospel: 11 minutes combat time (9 minutes remaining). Shoulder bearing: stable, temperature elevated. Tactical Assessment XP: +15. Hughes Level: 22.」

  ◇ ◆ ◇

  Four dead, and their names are Haddon, Pryor, Collis, and Corporal Wentz, all from 3rd Company, killed by return fire during the flanking assault. Marsh takes the losses hard because 3rd Company is the unit he assembled from the pieces of 2nd Company three days ago, and these are men he's been drilling and shaping and learning to command, and now four of them are lying under blankets in the road beside the creek and the drill times won't matter to them anymore.

  Nine wounded, none critical, and Clementine is working through them with her usual efficiency, the bottle of whiskey in one hand and the Bible in her apron pocket and her sleeves rolled up past the elbows. The wounded soldiers watch her work and keep quiet because soldiers who've been treated by Clementine before know that she doesn't tolerate noise that isn't useful.

  3rd Company's morale after first daylight combat: Blooded. Could go either way. They won, and they won decisively, and the rush of surviving their first real fight is propping them up right now. But four bodies under blankets is a weight that doesn't hit until the adrenaline drains, and it'll drain tonight around the cook fires when somebody reaches for Haddon's mess kit and realizes nobody's going to pick it up. Morale: Steady for now. Ask me again in twelve hours.

  1st Company: Tested. No casualties from the wall position. Veterans who've done this before and will do it again, and the only thing the fight cost them was thirty rounds per man that I can't replace until we find Hartwell's supply convoy.

  Fourteen prisoners. I walk the line where they're sitting in the road with their hands behind their heads and their carbines stacked in a pile behind them, and I use the Gaze on each one and record what I see.

  「Liberator's Gaze: Confederate prisoners (14). Loyalty range: 8-41/100 (Confederate, fading to weak). Alignment: Mixed (7 Neutral, 4 Lawful, 3 Chaotic). Average loyalty: 23/100. Assessment: Low conviction. Screening company conscripts, not regulars. 4 potential defectors (loyalty below 15). 6 will serve if given terms. 4 true believers (loyalty 35+).」

  The numbers tell me these aren't Beauregard's veterans. They're Tate's screening cavalry, local men pressed into mounted service because they owned horses and lived in the right county, and most of them are fighting because a colonel told them to, not because they believe in the Iron Confederacy's right to chain the living and wake the dead.

  "Phelps, separate them. Anyone with loyalty below twenty gets the offer. The rest get marched to the north edge of the settlement and released with no weapons and no horses. They walk home."

  "And the four true believers, Captain?"

  I think about Hargrove at the creek bottom, the way he set his jaw and said get on with it and died without flinching. I think about Poole, shaking, who never wanted to be a necromancer's assistant and died for being one anyway.

  "Release them with the others. We're not doing that again today."

  Phelps writes it down, and I walk away from the prisoners and toward the refugees.

  ◇ ◆ ◇

  They're gathered at the north end of Meridian, maybe two hundred and thirty of them, families with carts and bundles and livestock and the exhausted relief that settles over people who've just been saved from a thing they couldn't save themselves from. Children are crying. Adults are standing in the road looking at the smoke from the south end of their settlement and trying to calculate what's left and what's gone and what the difference means for the rest of their lives.

  A woman in a gray dress pushes through the crowd and walks straight toward me with purpose that says she's been in charge long enough that approaching a captain with a bloody sword in his hand doesn't register as a thing that requires hesitation.

  "Who's in command?"

  "I am." I sheathe Freedom's Edge and meet her halfway. "Captain Hughes Granthem, 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry. Blue Coats of the Dawn."

  "I'm Temperance Albright, and I'm the closest thing this settlement has to a mayor since Alderman Goss took a ball in the hip and can't walk." She looks at the smoke and then at me and then at Gospel, who is standing in the road behind me with steam rising from her shoulders and a Confederate cavalryman's blood on her left fist. "You killed them."

  "Most of them. The rest ran south or surrendered."

  "Good." She says it flat and immediate, no performance of reluctance, no softening, just the hard satisfaction of a woman who's glad her enemies are dead and sees no reason to pretend otherwise. "They burned the granary and the mill and six houses on the south end. They shot Alderman Goss when he tried to negotiate. They were going to burn everything."

  "Can the fires be contained to the south end?"

  "The south end is gone. The center and north might be saved if we get water on the roofs." She's already looking past me at the soldiers, counting them, measuring what this army is and what it can do for her right now in the same sharp calculating way that Harwell counted them back in Lenalune. "Are you staying?"

  The question is the same question Harwell asked me, and the answer is the same answer, and the cost is the same cost. Two hundred and thirty civilians will cut my march speed in half. They'll consume supplies I don't have. They'll stretch my column from a manageable formation into a target that Tate's cavalry can hit from any direction. Every tactical calculation says leave them here and keep moving.

  But I didn't turn my column toward a burning settlement because of tactical calculations.

  "Long enough to put the fires out and get your people organized. We're heading south and we can't stay more than a few hours."

  "Then we're coming with you."

  I stop walking and turn to face her fully, because the weight of what she just said deserves more than a sideways glance.

  "Two hundred and thirty people, Captain. Families and children." She doesn't flinch from the look on my face. "The granary's gone and the mill's gone and we don't make it through winter, and even if we rebuild them the cavalry will come back with more men and burn them again. We don't have anywhere else to go."

  Two hundred and thirty civilians in the column. March speed from three miles an hour to one and a half, maybe less with the elderly and the children. Supply consumption doubled. Column length tripled. Every number I can calculate says no.

  I've been ignoring numbers all morning. One more time won't kill me, though it might kill some of the men who follow me, and that's a weight I'll carry in the journal along with every other name I've written since we left the river.

  "We move at dawn tomorrow. Anyone who can walk keeps pace with the column, and anyone who can't rides. Your people carry their own supplies and follow orders from my sergeants when we're on the road. If we're attacked, your people get behind the line and stay there."

  Temperance Albright nods once. "Done."

  「Virtue & Reputation: +10 (Honored 75/100). Civilian rescue at Meridian. Prisoners spared.」

  ◇ ◆ ◇

  The Federal spy arrives at midday, and he doesn't arrive dramatically.

  He walks up from the south road while we're fighting the fires, wearing civilian clothes and carrying a walking stick and a leather case that could belong to a doctor or a surveyor or anyone else whose profession requires them to walk through a war zone with important cargo strapped to their back. He's thin, mid-forties, with an unremarkable face that you'd forget thirty seconds after looking at it, which is probably the point.

  Hollis spots him first and brings him to me at bayonet point, which is how Hollis brings everyone to me who isn't wearing blue.

  "Captain Granthem." The man doesn't seem bothered by the bayonet three inches from his kidney. "My name is Everett. Major Felix Everett, Federal Intelligence Corps, attached to General Hartwell's staff." He reaches slowly into his coat and produces a sealed letter. "I've been looking for you for nine days, Captain, and I'm very glad you're alive."

  The seal is genuine Federal intelligence, the wax and watermark and pressed lines that I've been writing reports under for three years and getting silence in return. I know what the wax looks like and what the watermark says and what the pressed lines feel like under my thumb, and this one is real.

  The letter is from General Thomas Hartwell, Federal Remnant, Western District. Not my chain of command. My chain of command runs through General Whitcomb's Eastern District, which is the district that assigned six hundred soldiers to hold a river crossing against a Confederate division and then forgot we existed. Three years of requisitions for hex-shells that never came. Two years of requests for reinforcement that were filed and ignored. Eighteen months since the last courier from Whitcomb's staff bothered to make the ride, and that courier carried a letter that said hold position and await further orders, and the further orders never arrived because Whitcomb's district doesn't have the men or the materiel or the interest to support a garrison that's already been written off as a loss.

  Hartwell's letter is dated sixteen days ago, before the siege, before Beauregard brought twelve thousand dead to my walls.

  "The General's been watching your garrison for months," Everett says. He shifts on the barrel he's sitting on and sets his leather case on his knees. "A captain holding a river crossing for three years with no resupply, no reinforcement, and no support from Whitcomb's people. Hartwell wanted to know how you were doing it. When he found out the answer was stubbornness and five war golems held together with prayer, he decided you were wasted on a command that couldn't be bothered to send you a single crate of ammunition."

  "Hartwell isn't my commanding officer."

  "No, sir. He's your invitation to stop dying for one that doesn't deserve you." Everett says it flat and tired, a fact he's been carrying across Confederate territory for nine days and is ready to put down. "The letter asks you to abandon Fort Independence, march your garrison south, and join Hartwell's force. Full integration. Your men, your golems, your rank, under a general who'll actually give you shells for that hex-cannon."

  I stare at the letter in my hands. Sixteen days ago this letter would've asked me to make the hardest decision of my career: abandon the fort, abandon the crossing, abandon the civilians who'd settled behind our walls because a Federal garrison meant safety, and walk away from the post I'd been ordered to hold to march south and serve a general I'd never met, because the general I served under couldn't be bothered to keep us alive.

  Beauregard made that decision for me when he brought twelve thousand dead to my walls and I blew the magazine rather than let them have it.

  "Fort Independence fell," I tell Everett. "Beauregard moved on the walls six days ago. We blew the magazine and crossed the Chestatee with four hundred and eighty-seven soldiers. Three golems destroyed, one abandoned, one held together with a field-cast bearing that'll last about twenty minutes in a real fight. We've been moving west and south since then."

  Everett is quiet for a moment, recalculating behind that unremarkable face. Nine days tracking us, and the fort he was sent to recruit us from doesn't exist anymore. "I was three days out when it happened. I arrived to find Confederate engineers pulling down what was left of the walls and the dead stacked along the riverbank. I sent word back to Hartwell that the garrison was destroyed." He pauses and leans forward on the barrel. "Then I found the magazine crater and the tracks of a column heading west, and destroyed garrisons don't leave tracks. I've been following yours ever since. Found the village where you sheltered, asked the mayor, and she told me you'd gone south. Didn't volunteer much else."

  Harwell told him we went south and kept her mouth shut about everything that mattered, which is exactly what I told her to do. I make a note to add that woman to the list of people I owe more than I can repay.

  I read the letter twice, and the offer to abandon the fort is moot. Everything else still stands.

  "Phelps, Mercy, my tent in ten minutes."

  Phelps arrives with his notebook and a fresh page already open. Mercy arrives with her arms crossed and the expression she wears when somebody new appears in camp and she hasn't decided yet whether they're useful or dangerous.

  "Major Everett. Federal Intelligence. Hartwell sent him to Fort Independence to recruit us before the siege, and he's been tracking us since the ruins." I hand Phelps the letter and watch his eyes move across it. "Hartwell wanted us to leave Whitcomb's command and join his force. The fort's gone, so the question isn't whether we leave. It's whether we join."

  Everett sits on a barrel with his leather case on his knees and his walking stick leaning against the wall, and he tells us what the Federal Remnant's Western District knows about the Confederate order of battle. What they know is more than I expected and less than I need.

  Hartwell has twelve hundred soldiers in three battalions operating south of the Shenandoah road. He's been fighting a defensive war against Confederate regulars for eight months, losing ground steadily, and he's running out of places to retreat to. He knows about Beauregard's advance column. He knows about Breckinridge. He doesn't know about Tate's cavalry screening companies because Tate's been operating in the hill country that Hartwell's scouts can't reach.

  "Hartwell isn't Whitcomb," Everett says, leaning forward on his knees. "He doesn't file your requisitions and forget about them. He's proposing a partnership, not a filing cabinet. Coordination, shared intelligence, combined operations when the targets are too big for either of you alone. And he's not asking you to take orders." Everett taps the letter in Phelps's hands. "He saw what happened when Whitcomb gave you orders: you held a fort for three years on nothing, and when nothing finally ran out, you blew the magazine and fought through twelve thousand dead to save your people. That's not a man you give orders to. That's a man you stand next to."

  I look at Phelps. Phelps looks at his notebook and then looks at me and says what Phelps always says when the numbers make sense. "The supply convoy has hex-shells, Captain."

  Mama Thunder hasn't fired since Fort Independence. Fourteen shells, all of them spent in the breakout, and Mercy's been carrying an empty cannon for six days. The thought of Mama Thunder loaded and operational changes the tactical picture in ways that Hartwell's letter doesn't need to spell out, because anyone who's seen what a hex-shell does to a formation of risen dead already understands.

  "Tell the General we'll meet," I say to Everett. "Name the place and we'll be there."

  Everett opens his leather case and produces a map that's better than anything we've been working with, and he marks a crossing point on the Shenandoah road twelve miles south that Hartwell's scouts have confirmed is unguarded. Twelve miles. Two days with the refugees.

  "One more thing, Captain." Everett rolls the map and hands it to Phelps. "General Hartwell's supply convoy includes four hex-shells for your cannon. He requisitioned them from his own reserves six months ago, when he first heard what you were doing at Fort Independence with an empty hex-cannon and five golems held together with rust."

  Mercy uncrosses her arms, and for the first time since Fort Independence she lets an expression cross her face that isn't tactical assessment.

  ◇ ◆ ◇

  —————

  === CAMPAIGN STATE: YEAR 3, DAY 4 (AFTERNOON) ===

  Location: Meridian settlement. Center + north intact. South end burned.

  Virtue & Reputation: 75/100 (Honored, rising) [+10: Civilian rescue]

  Treasury: 124 Dollars

  Army: 481 soldiers (4 KIA)

  - 1st Company: Lt. Phelps. 236 soldiers. Power: 455. Morale: 58/100 (Tested).

  - 3rd Company: Sgt. Marsh. 234 soldiers (4 KIA, 9 WIA). Power: 420. Morale: 54/100 (Blooded, pending).

  - HQ Element: Cpt. Hughes. 11 soldiers + Mercy, Clementine, Decker. Power: 120.

  - Total Combat Power: 995. Morale: 56/100 (Steady, rising after victory).

  - Combat-Effective: 416. Non-Combat: 64 (wounded). Ammunition: ~35-40 rounds/soldier (low, no resupply until rendezvous).

  Attached Civilians: 230+ (Meridian refugees). Leader: Temperance Albright.

  March rate: Reduced to ~1.5 mph with civilians.

  Golems:

  - Gospel: Operational. HP 52%. 9 minutes combat time remaining before cool-down. Shoulder bearing stable, temp elevated. Cool-down overnight.

  Hex-Cannon: Mama Thunder (0 hex-shells). 4 hex-shells promised via Federal supply convoy.

  Captured: 38 additional horses. Confederate carbines + ammunition.

  Supplies: 2 weeks half-rations + captured rations (strained by +230 civilians).