Hope Renewed by David Drake, S.M. Stirling Page A

some of the battalions who were with me in the Southern Territories campaign and are now attached to the Residence Area command.”
    Gharzia was scribbling on his pad. “Heneralissimo—” he began, giving Raj the title he’d been formally stripped of “—that’ll still leave you well below Ali’s numbers, discounting his infantry and line-of-communications troops. Shouldn’t we pull back more of the Southern and Western Territories garrisons?”
    Raj spread his hands. They were brown with sun, battered and nicked and callused from swords and reins, as out of place in this quiet elegant room as the man himself.
    “That would take too long. Messers, Sole Autocrat, we don’t have the time. Please understand, no matter what I do, the border area is going to get the worst working-over it’s had in a century or more.”
    observe , Center said.

    —and Colonial dragoons rode through a Borderer hamlet, tossing torches through the windows. Fire belched back, red flames and sooty smoke turning the whitewash black above the openings. Here and there a limestone lintel burned with white-hot fire as it sublimed.
    —the last of a line of Arabs picked himself up off a woman and adjusted his robe. She lay motionless in the dust of the street, eyes empty, spittle running down from the corner of her mouth. The Colonial kicked her in the ribs, then called an order to the others. He had the crossed lines of a naik , a corporal, on the sleeve of his djellaba. Two of the troopers picked the woman up by the ankles and wrists, grunting at the limp dead weight. The naik jerked a thumb, and they dumped their semi-conscious victim head-first down the well.
    —bursting charges spouted plumes of smoke and rock and pulverized dirt across the massive sloping front of the dam. It stretched two hundred meters across a U-shaped valley amid dry rocky hills, a stone-paved road on its top and stone and iron gates at one side where the tumbling water of the flume was channeled into a canal. For long moments nothing seemed to happen, and then water sprouted from the surface where the explosives had been laid. It gouted like erupting geysers, turning to rainbow splendor at the edges under the bright noon light. The sappers whooped and danced as the rushing torrent eroded the earthwork of the dam like a lump of sugar under a spout of hot tea. Then the earth shuddered as the dam collapsed in earnest, and the lake headed downstream in a roaring wall of brown silt and tumbling rocks.

    “Yes, yes,” Barholm said. The other advisors were silent as the two Descotters met each other’s eyes.
    “I think I can retrieve the situation,” Raj said calmly. “Provided, of course, I have my Governor’s full confidence. Do I have your confidence, my lord?”
    Barholm’s lips tightened. “Yes, yes,” he said again. He snapped his fingers for a parchment, wrote, signed, extended his hand for the Gubernatorial seal. It thwacked into the purple wax with an angry sound.
    He pushed it across the polished flamegrain wood of the table. Raj picked it up. It was a delegation of viceregal power, requiring all officers and officials of the Civil Government to tender him full cooperation—rare for a commander sent out into the barbaricum , unheard-of within the borders.
    If I smash the Colonials, Raj thought—unlikely as that seemed right now— that’ll be the last strong opponent the Civil Government faces. He’d reconquered the Southern and Western Territories; the Base Area was far away, and the Zanj states of the Southern Continent even farther. Once the Colony had been beaten back, Barholm Clerett’s position would be safer than any Governor’s in the past five hundred years. Safe enough that he would certainly no longer need a heneralissimo supremo .
    “Yes,” Barholm repeated. “Who could doubt that you have my full confidence?”
    Raj stood, bowing and tucking the Gubernatorial Rescript into the sleeve-pocket of his uniform jacket.
    “Then if you’ll