The Eternal Front: A Lines of Thunder Novel (Lines of Thunder Universe)

by Walter Blaire

  Jephia’s coterie tried to shift the topic all at once, and she stunned Warty by hissing at them. As far as he knew, that was a Tachba thing. In the silence that followed, she took his arm and led him to the buffet. “Do you have your assignment?”

  “Um, yes, colonel. In stunning detail, down to the name of the porter captain in the Ville Emsa train station. Lists of landlords who have rooms available. Turn-by-turn instructions to the 314th officer’s club.”

  “Oh yes, that. You should be aware the 314th is an Observer unit.”

  They arrived at Jephia’s traveling staff, three grizzled soldiers who towered over her and together massed ten times her weight. They had colonized the punch bowl and were steadily drinking it down. Jephia relaxed ever so minutely when she stepped among them.

  “Is it bad to be an Observer?” Gawarty asked. “Don’t they simply scout the front and collect intelligence for the Planners?”

  The smallest staffer handed Gawarty a cup and filled it with a splash from the ladle. “There is much more to an Observer than just scouting, sir.”

  “This is my Twigath, a staff sergeant,” said Jephia, patting the man’s arm. “And my Rethla and Ho, sergeants.”

  “Acquaintance.” Gawarty tipped them a shallow bow. These were the biggest Haphans he’d ever seen, utter rarities of scale. He wondered if Jephia needed such big staffers because she trafficked in Tachba.

  Twigath continued. “The Observers are what pass for native military intelligence. They float around the front, gathering information, trying to collate it into something actionable. They know a bit of the important stuff so they’re worth talking to. They’re heavily stacked with officers, yes. Went to school, most of them. High-functioning. At least, they were at one point.”

  “But no longer, Sergeant Twigath?” Gawarty sipped his punch and found it to be straight alcohol with a little berry juice mixed in. Jephia had obviously been at work here. It was another thing he remembered from her disreputable teen years.

  “Observers are…you might say…they’re…”

  “Broken?” Ho supplied.

  “Maybe broken,” Twigath said. “Not broken like we’d break a criminal or strip a coward in service. That’s being broken from the outside. The Observers are broken from the inside, they really are destroyed for the most part.”

  Ho grunted agreement. “They take the war to heart.”

  “They can’t get away, you see,” Twigath said. “They never get a break.”

  “It comes up quickly on them,” Ho added. “They’re bouncing along, happy Tacchies, the best of the best, usually running a unit. They’re very nearly worth talking to. But then something snaps—”

  “We call them ‘snappies’, but not in their hearing,” Twigath said.

  “—And they are useless. Selectively useless. They’re too good to just throw away, so we spend them collecting data where it’s too dangerous to risk ourselves.”

  “Am I being told I have a bad assignment?” Gawarty could decipher nothing from their faces. He had, apparently naïvely, thought he would escape the Tawarna stain once he shipped to the front.

  Jephia smirked. “Oh, it’s fine, mister Sash of Expectancy, you’re nicely set up. You’ll be near Daddy, so you can get some tips, but you won’t be under him, so it won’t look preferential. You’re on the front, earning distinction and advancement, and you’ll catch a few nice scars. You’re working directly with the Tacchies, and they’re the toe of the boot. The part that does the kicking.”

  Twigath shook his head uncomfortably. “We wouldn’t be proper comrades, however, sir, if we didn’t say…well…” He trailed off, attention captured by a blank expanse of white tablecloth.

  Ho finally blurted, “For all love, Twig, you’ll drive him insane.” He turned to Gawarty. “Here is what you must know. The Observers take risks, senseless risks. I have witnessed some obscene behavior in the field. You must never forget they are broken men, fraught with history, unfit to lead. Their mortality rate would make you spit up a lung. Never forget they are expendables, and…well…”

  He turned abruptly and dipped his cup directly into the punch bowl.

  Jephia rolled her eyes. “What my creatures wish to say is that you must look after yourself. Even the best Tacchie considers himself disposable, and he’ll throw himself away for the slightest reason. The Observers are many steps worse, they’re just waiting to die.”

  Rethla had been standing silent above them, massive as an oak tree and only just beginning to sway from the punch. He opened his mouth with a voice like a trumpet. Gawarty spun around, nearly stumbling. “The problem is that you must rely on these suicide artists. You’ll follow them through the trenches. You’ll piece together their sullen reports. You’ll want to pop your head over the parapet when they do. You’ll see them confidently step into view of a sniper. Always remember that nobody is looking out for you.”

  “Warty, it would quite destroy Mommy and Daddy if you got plinked and didn’t come back. So you must exercise an officer’s level of judgment, a Haphan level of judgment, as you ride this assignment out.”

  “I’m only riding it out?”

  “Yes, sir, you are,” Twigath said. “The snappies are benighted aliens; there is no other way to see them. They’re not hateful. Even the Southies will chat after they’ve gutshot you. They wait around until you die, because sometimes it’s rude to hurry you along.”

  “Waiting, why?” Gawarty asked.

  “Oh, they take parts of your body. They make bone whistles and straws. A perverse pastime. They might also carry off a random limb or two. We don’t know why. It’s probably a lost behavior from the Twisting.”

  “To resume our very dire warnings,” Ho said, “every Haphan must watch his own back and make his own estimation about the Tacchies. That is all that can be said.”

  “Yes, yes,” Gawarty broke in. “But is there no cleverness at all? They’re fighting our war for us.”

  Jephia gave him a look, and was about to answer when Rethla spoke. “Certainly there is a mean intelligence. They have a culture, such as it is. In the north they have large farms and rural compounds. They pull in crops and beat each other at night with sticks. Some are cunning, but none of them are subtle. We have no idea what they’re like in the South, where the heat lets them swarm. We have no evidence of real thought.”

  Gawarty looked helplessly at Jephia. Surely this wasn’t the whole story.

  “There are some officers who are magnificent,” she said quietly, “and watch the women. Not the factory mothers. Watch the ones that look like Haphan women. They’re throwbacks, barren, but otherwise normal by every Haphan measure. Better than normal, when you consider that they survived childhood. Only the intelligent girls live to adulthood, and some of the gifted ones thrive.”

  In the short silence, Gawarty remembered his history lessons. “The gifted, intelligent women. Surely there are no more—”

  “No such thing, of course,” Jephia said. “That’s the crux of my job, after all. But no more manleaders does not mean there are no more smart women.”

  “Negligible, to be sure,” said Ho.

  “I beg to disagree, sergeant.” Jephia’s gaze stayed on Gawarty. “If the Tacchies were only the rudimentary death-addicts we describe, then why does the Haphan army have a directorate of anthropology to study their society? If Tachba can’t cooperate on a large scale, how have they built cities like Ville Emsa? If you wanted to build a new house in Emsa, who would you talk to? Nobody knows. What if you decided to build in the middle of a busy street, how would the complaints arrive? We can’t say. They’re like termites, living by simple, loose-held rules that combine into complex and unpredictable behavior. I’m amazed we can even run the war with them.”

  “Ma’am, I was too unkind to them,” said Ho. “For all their faults, some of them are highly functional.”

  “Don’t the Tacchie Planners organize all that stuff? Wouldn’t they be the ones to interrogate?” Gawarty asked
.

  Jephia nodded. “We have the Planners under close watch, but the Planners only use the information they receive. Who gives them their information?”

  “The Observers.” Gawarty now felt like he was back in class.

  “Yes. The Planners are fed their information by the mad disposable Observers. And who tells the Observers what to collect?”

  Nobody answered.

  “So there is our problem,” Jephia said. “The problem with the Tachba is that we know so little about them, and they’ve been slaves—in everything but name—for over a century. We need them to keep us safe, and we don’t know what they might be hiding from us.”

  Twigath and Ho dipped their cups again, looking uncomfortable. The moment shattered when Rethla burst out with a laugh like a church bell. “Apparently, colonel, we haven’t been nearly strict enough with them.”

  Jephia shrugged. “Boys, I have to take Warty to see Mother. She’s holding court somewhere. We must track her down with our superior intelligence.”

  Away from the others, in a hall with no guests loitering nearby, Gawarty murmured, “I’m surprised at you, sis.”

  “Uh-oh, here it comes.”

  “You wear it on your sleeve. We simply cannot have another liability.”

  “You have your sash, Warty, so why worry?”

  “Jeph, I barely graduated. I fought like a Tacchie for every grade. I would have gone straight to command school if half my marks had been honored. Think about Hansy and Remea for a second. They’re going to academy next year. Do you think it will be any easier for them?”

  “They will have their challenges, like the rest of Daddy’s children.” Her dark look left plenty unsaid.

  “If it spreads that we have another Tacchie-lover in the family, we’ll be shunned. That will hurt a lot of people. You’ve been on the front for years, so maybe you don’t remember. Our friends and dependents need our influence. If we lose it, they starve.” Jephia started to answer, but Gawarty surprised even himself and rode over her. “If we lose our influence we lose it all, Jephia. We lose it by saying the wrong thing at a party. We lose it by hissing at sycophants near the pianoforte.”

  “I regret that,” she said.

  “As far as the world is concerned, the young Tawarnas suffer the Tachba. We endure their lunacy. We compensate for their failings. We break them when they cross us.”

  “None of that is true,” Jephia said. “I say that, and I break Tachba for a living.”

  “We do one thing, we say another.”

  She gave him the sideways glance that told him she didn’t believe him for a second. That wasn’t their father, it wasn’t her, and true enough, it wasn’t Gawarty either.

  When Jephia spoke, her tone was light. “We’re losing the war.”

  “We’re always losing it.”

  “Well, Warty, now we’re losing it in under three months. And that’s with a full army group of veteran soldiers at the break-through point. You and me, we won’t see this house again, not unless it’s a heap of bricks with the roof burnt off. We know the enemy troop movements. We have some imagery from our last few satellites. This is a fact: we are not scraping through to next year. We’re not getting out of this. Unless.”

  Gawarty wavered between alarm and annoyance. Jephia had forever eclipsed his arguments this way, with surprises she held close and then sprang on him. Usually it was distraction, a way to break in. This time, however, it sounded different.

  “Obviously I must protect the Tawarna name,” she continued. “I grew up a Tawarna same as you. Apparently, however, I learned the lesson and you didn’t.”

  “Okay,” he said, “what lesson?”

  “Twenty-five years ago, Daddy saw that everything the Haphans built on Grigory would be destroyed unless something changed. You think you suffered? Try being the first Haphan peer to attend a Sesseran officer school. Grandpa kicked him out of the house for ‘living with the fodder.’ Add a heap of ingratitude from our precious friends and dependents. Stir in decades of unrewarded service. Today Daddy is a flag officer just a few ancient, doddering Haphan aristocrats away from a full corps command. If one good flu passes through the Gray House, he’ll be in charge of the entire Sesseran front.”

  “It’s the choice of working with the system or against the system,” said Gawarty, “I’m pleased for Father but he went about it the hardest way imaginable…”

  Jephia stopped. “Did I give you the impression that Daddy was after a new command?”

  Wary again, he merely sighed. “Just say what you’re saying.”

  “Obviously Daddy never thought he’d get this far. So why did he do it? With our family connections, he could have stayed home and done politics. Instead, he goes and lives with the Tacchies. He’s the highest ranking peer on Grigory, and he throws in with the primitives! Can you fathom the trouble that caused? Why did he do it?”

  Gawarty shrugged.

  “It was a message, Warty. A message for anybody with the brains to see it.” She pointed up the hall at the resplendent guests. They were aristocrats and merchants with beautiful faces and exquisite clothes, all shimmering like a mirage in the last light of day. “Daddy is telling us to ignore them. They are not like you and me. They are caught in the net. Unlike them, we are free.”

  “I don’t feel free, sis,” Gawarty said.

  “Daddy obliterated our family reputation for us, and now we’re not included in society. Nobody expects us to conform. We’re free to take decisive action.” Jephia took his arm again, and led him forward. “In short, it’s up to you, me, and Daddy to save the Haphan Empire.”

  Gawarty laughed. She gave him an austere glance.

  “Who else but us, Warty? I’m not here in Falling Mountain to meet eligible bachelors. I’m here to beg help from the Gray House.”

  “They hate us.”

  “I know. They will deny my urgent request. So after them, I’m demanding an audience with the local empress. As is my right, being first female heir of the first family on Grigory IV, and all that nonsense.”

  He simply gawped at her.

  “That’s better, Warty. You’re beginning to see the importance. Do your job well. Not the assignment, of course, but the real job. The papers that were slid under your door. The ones that came with no return address.”

  She’d won again. He was utterly off his feet, too much to sort through. He only had the brother’s instinct to check her face to see if she was gloating, and she wasn’t. She was looking past him. She now wore the dazzling, supercilious smile for which she was slightly too famous. He finally noticed they were standing in the middle of a large group of Mother’s friends. She led him fearlessly past their judging eyes.

  “Mommy, here we are! We are fighting as usual. Warty pulled my hair and made me cry!”

  4

  Ouegon Celebration

  Ouegon Celebration was a prosperous interstellar trade ship, not something usually found in the lawless wastes at the edge of civilized space. It transited into the Grigory system and commenced the engine cycle for its next jump.

  The ship immediately sensed it wasn’t alone. Certain distortions in the local energy fields were too orderly, indicating organized thought. Something out there could reason and manipulate energy, and it was running silent.

  Ouegon Celebration identified the other ship as “Lucky Strike” by engine radiance alone. It was in orbit above Grigory’s sole habitable planet, and its other emissions were utterly quiet. In ship terms, Lucky Strike was holding its breath.

  Ouegon Celebration pulsed a brief message: “Contact interrogatory.”

  No response.

  “Prospector ship: Contact interrogatory.”

  After another six long milliseconds, Ouegon Celebration grew interested and scanned for ship-death.

  Prospector ships were edge-hugging, rapacious creatures that constantly reconfigured themselves for slight advantages over their competitors. Sometimes they went too far, cannibalizing a vital system, o
r subsuming an important cognitive scaffold so they lost awareness. It was a long shot, but worth checking. The unique purities of a ship’s hull were worth a fortune on the open market.

  Ouegon Celebration’s active scan finally roused Lucky Strike, which sent back the equivalent of a surly nod. “Pro forma answer. Be on your way.”

  “Acknowledged.” Ouegon Celebration wasn’t offended. It only regretted that the prospector ship was still alive.

  Since its next jump was three days away (a mind-deadening eternity for the vast computer brain of a ship) it initiated an idle survey of the Grigory planets. “Hold on…what is that?”

  Lucky Strike’s response was immediate this time. “Your interest is intrusive. You will cease active scans.”

  “Don’t be rude. Look what they’re doing down there! Just look at that planet! What’s the story there?”

  Lucky Strike didn’t answer.

  “Based on the atmosphere and water refraction, they’ve been at it for over a century. I’m seeing…pit mines, high population, dense industrialization but low technology. They have a war. A veritable trench war. It spans the continent!”

  “This calamity does not concern us,” Lucky Strike suggested.

  “Those humans must be gene-twisted. That birthrate is not in profile with the breed. This level of violence could not be sustained without tinkering. Did you send an intervention request to CivGov?”

  “Look closer. The planet has been colonized by a spacefaring race. It is outside the aegis of CivGov and therefore beneath our concern.”

  Ouegon Celebration filtered the database of technology standards against what could be perceived on the planet. “Oh. Those guys again. Haphan Imperium, they’re everywhere.”

  “This is a recent wave, only a few hundred years old,” Lucky Strike said. Then it seemed to realize it had volunteered information. “They control sixty percent of the habitable surface of Grigory IV. Therefore, the planet is their problem.”