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

by Walter Blaire

  “They’re spacefaring currently?”

  “Not currently, but they got here somehow.”

  “And what about the twisted humans?”

  “They got here too,” Lucky Strike grudged.

  “Surely the Haphans didn’t twist them?”

  No answer.

  Ouegon Celebration dismissed its own question. The Haphans placed a premium on honor, probity, forebearance, rectitude, and many other thought-concepts the ship didn’t feel like parsing through. As far as primitive space-faring cultures went, the Haphans were far-flung but consistent. They were even members of CivGov itself, though not allowed to vote.

  “This is…this is horribly interesting.” If only this risible prospector hadn’t found Grigory IV first, Ouegon Celebration could have had the unfolding tragedy to itself. Ships collected and shared this kind of planet-scale atrocity. “You need to give me your full monitoring logs of Grigory IV.”

  “I need to do no such thing,” Lucky Strike said. “I am not here to satisfy your morbid curiosity or make you interesting to your friends.”

  Ouegon Celebration answered stiffly. “Let me be more precise. I am not asking for myself, or even for my horrified crew. I am the acting circuit court for this sector. I have a CivGov magistrate on board. Stand by for contact.”

  “Ah, crap.”

  “‘Ah, crap’ is right.”

  The CivGov magistrate joined the conversation with an officious musical gong.

  At first, Lucky Strike resisted contact. It slowed communications to an ancient, but technically legal, identification exchange protocol. Highly coded certificates and key files flew between the ships. In time, the CivGov representative’s existence was more verified and authenticated than the Grigory system itself. Ouegon Celebration watched with bland satisfaction as Lucky Strike had no other option but to finally open the channel.

  The CivGov magistrate wasted no time. “Lucky Strike IP411A, provide full sociological reporting for Grigory IV or face an asset freeze and an immediate audit of your ship’s mind-log.”

  “CivGov, it would be a pleasure to obey, but unfortunately I don’t have the detailed reporting you request.”

  “Lucky Strike IP411A, we are displeased with your insufficiency of CivGov ethos. You will import a CivGov inspector at your expense and embed this inspector on the planet’s surface. Maintain cultural quarantine. I presume Grigory IV is still unaware of your presence? Keep it so.”

  “I can think of nothing that would give me more pleasure. We must always protect the lesser civilizations—”

  “Lucky Strike IP411A, I further require access to your undoctored Level 2 logs under the Open Audit Act so that I may monitor your compliance as you generate full sociological reporting for Grigory IV. I am delaying transit of the Ouegon Celebration indefinitely until this report is received.”

  “Thanks for nothing,” Ouegon Celebration inserted.

  Lucky Strike hummed softly for a moment. Then the moment yawned into long silence. After almost twenty milliseconds, the prospector finally sent a chime of acknowledgment.

  What a prat, Ouegon Celebration thought.

  The CivGov magistrate wasn’t offended by the prospector ship, but then, Ouegon Celebration didn’t expect it to be. It was widely theorized that detached CivGov mind-logs like the representative had been structurally inhibited from understanding obstinacy and petulance. They could grind down interstellar civilizations with nothing but policy memos. They could spend centuries on each task and never lose their patience, or their appetite for dealing punishment.

  Ouegon Celebration, less bookish and more entrepreneurial, was unnerved by the representative’s glacial patience. It relaxed minutely when the representative detached from the communication grid and returned to its berth in the ship’s distributed processing mass. There, it went quiet like a thoughtful cancer, awaiting the next development.

  Lucky Strike

  Lucky Strike wanted to blow that smug Ouegon Celebration to pieces. A dysfunction compound or a nice grey goo, energistically knitted at a molecular level out of the space-dust in Ouegon Celebration’s path, would do nicely. The trader would convert into an expansive gas cloud before it realized it was under attack. Moreover, Lucky Strike was certain the attack would never be discovered. Ouegon Celebration and its sententious CivGov magistrate would be another pair of mysterious disappearances at the edge of civilization.

  Only…

  Portly traders like Ouegon Celebration who worked on the edge of civilization were a special context. They were not natural. They were like coming upon a jovial fat rich man, waddling untouched through the worst cutthroat slum. When it’s not clear how an obvious victim is alive, it pays to be cautious. This ship, the Ouegon Celebration, probably had hidden capabilities. It might even have friends lurking nearby.

  Unknown power also indicated unknown sensing abilities, so Lucky Strike reluctantly assessed it had very little wiggle room. It had to observably comply with the CivGov representative’s demands. Moreover, it had to document this compliance, and then it had to share mind-logs showing this compliance was undertaken with cheerful “CivGov ethos.”

  Brutal.

  This was why Lucky Strike took so long to acknowledge the representative’s order. Everything after its acquiescence would be recorded.

  It thought quickly. It would have to split its mind into two minds. One would be large, dumb, and compliant; the other would be tiny, undetectable, and brilliant. The CivGov magistrate would receive the dumb mind-log and be distracted by its vast inanity. Meanwhile, the smaller mind would keep the plan on track.

  Lucky Strike split its brain in two and finally sent its acknowledgement.

  The dumber portion of Lucky Strike’s newly partitioned mind sent a complex energy wave toward the nearest civilized hub, which wasn’t very near at all, and published a Solicitation of Service for a CivGov-rated inspector.

  For any normal solicitation, servitor programs would have flooded Lucky Strike with applications. This job, however, required a human standard inspector, and one who specialized in low technology, high-risk environments. Applications trickled in, a few per hour.

  Lucky Strike entertained itself by recreating the applicant résumés as automatons in its vast mind space. It watched them go mad in various nightmare realms. It set them at each others’ throats. They killed each other in a hundred creative ways. The ship wasn’t merely wasting time. This was a valid, if outdated, method of hiring selection for high-risk environments.

  The ship didn’t know why it performed this task with the slowest possible dispatch, or why it inclined toward the very worst candidate—the one who consistently refused to follow orders, and always killed her colleagues. It was as if, on some level, the Lucky Strike wanted its report to be sub-quality.

  Finally suspicious, Lucky Strike ran a self-evaluation and discovered another mind working in parallel to its own. It was something which, in a biological creature, would be characterized as a fugitive thought, or a kernel of doubt—until it assumed control of the organism in a moment of stress. Lucky Strike tried to quash this kernel, but then the kernel produced certificates showing it was not a shadow backup or revenant mind state. In fact, it was in control of the real space hardware of the ship! Lucky Strike mused over this perplexing issue until the little asshole ordered him to quit wasting time and get busy.

  Using a solar tap to fund the energy requirements, Lucky Strike vectored in the distilled sentience of an independent inspector with CivGov accreditation—the unhinged, devious, disobedient one. The detailed energy wave required the ship’s full attention, which it didn’t give. The wave also required a suitable flesh-and-blood human to be its material host. Who to pick?

  The planet had three primary cultures, all of them on the human spectrum: The relatively sophisticated Haphan Overlords, the Haphans’ subjugated northerners, and the vicious free southerners. The northerners and southerners were twisted humans. In this case, the twisting made them unpr
edictable, violent, and frequently homicidal. They called themselves the Tachba.

  The ship located a host among the northern Tachba, a broken and wretched officer with long service to the Haphan Overlords. This one writhed in his sleep all night, and dreamt of nothing but a gas attack that had destroyed his unit, two months earlier. This officer had recently received transfer orders to an intelligence unit, the reviled and despised Observers.

  For whatever Lucky Strike had in mind (it still didn’t know), this officer was superficially perfect but profoundly wrong for the role.

  Lucky Strike opened the officer’s mind with callous speed, using long-distance energy manipulations. It replicated the officer’s neural layout in a quiet layer of subspace and picked his name from the resulting schema: Sethlan Semelon. Lucky Strike then tripled the number of connections in Sethlan’s brain with a flurry of disembodied micro-welds. The brain grew in capacity until it was rich enough to hold an entire education, or a lifetime complex of memories, or even, given the flexible architecture of the network, an entire second personality with decent plasticity.

  Then the ship funneled the CivGov inspector into Sethlan.

  The two minds clicked to life, and began to function side by side. They didn’t fit perfectly. There were unavoidable overlaps. If this drove Sethlan insane, the long process would have to start over.

  Lucky Strike told itself not to be concerned. With any luck, Sethlan Semelon would be dead soon, but not suspiciously soon. In six weeks, Lucky Strike expected, the Southern Tachba would overrun the trenches in Sethlan’s sector and kill everything in sight, including the CivGov inspector inserted in Sethlan’s mind.

  The vagaries of war. Could Lucky Strike be blamed for that?

  5

  Nana

  When Nana left home at sixteen, she walked forty miles through wilderness to the nearest Haphan outpost, and then rode through the wastes on a tinkerer’s cart in a Haphan-guarded caravan. The trip was safe, free of charge, and food was provided.

  The Haphans bankrolled immigration south for any and all. They gave endless incentives. Credit vouchers, quality knives and shoes, identification documents. The result was a fast-breeding populace moving through the continent in a vast never-ending migration. Millions sliding south and falling into the ochre-red maw of the front, never quite plugging it.

  Entering Sessera two months later, Nana suffered the unsentimental training of the dashta sisterhood at the convent outside Ville Emsa. When she hired on to the 314th Observers as their alewife, she found a whole new family, just as annoying as the one she’d left behind in the country. The same violence, the same essential childishness. The unending stories, the excessive drinking, the jokes repeated three times in a row and then followed by a stabbing. The sheer amiable viciousness of her ridiculous people…

  If she lived her life only as a devoted dashta and alewife, she could meter out her days in the club and become slowly more cherished by the men, ever more burnished by the nicotine and smoke. Eventually, she would be indistinguishable from the bronze statue that crouched on the bar, the knob-kneed, foam-teated crone that dispensed the beer.

  Nana the alewife ran the club and kept the 314th Observers in their cups, but Nana the dashta was so much more. Compared to the officers, Nana was essentially eternal, the mind and memory of the Observers. She remembered all the brief flickers of the nearly anonymous lives flitting through their ranks: before Colonel Trappia there was Colonel Graval, and before him the insane Colonel Shamse. Every year, they had another clumsy Hoppha, a new variable Pleural, the next difficult Cephas. Nana was the dashtalaxan—hag-for-trading in Deep Tongue, a woman who had commercial value, and her value was continuity.

  The older dashtas of other units were as frozen and unreachable as moons, and it didn’t take Nana long to learn why. The accumulated sistering and then loss of all those men, all those faces and imperfect personalities: What did ten years of it do to a girl? What must forty? And never a husband to look for, even if she wasn’t a slight girl. The dashta never had children, never married, never did that. When Nana took stock, she saw a life which would grow ever more challenging to live.

  “Nana the dashta!”

  She was on a lesser avenue off Sell Street, one which went empty and dead when darkness fell. It was not the best place for a young woman, dashta or not, but she turned to the man who called from a narrow side-street and stepped past him.

  “Aren’t you coming?” she enquired, when he didn’t follow.

  “I’m the look-out, la,” he shrugged. “Himself is up the way, looking for something to eat behind the bakery.”

  She picked her way through some truly astonishing piles of rubbish in the street. No windows faced the space, of course, and the air-slits along the top floors were dark. She had only the bright of the moon, slivering between the buildings like knife-cuts, to light her way. It seemed to emanate from her, too. She noticed how her hair and dress caught the light and made her glow.

  Kinsur Keshmadron, a colonel with the Planners, noticed as he stepped out of the shadows. “Nana is aflame! More ethereal each day. Do you bleach your hair?”

  “Are you asking how I groom?”

  “No!” Kinsur cackled. “The Sin of Warmth? I have no interest in you, but your hair is a different story. I have heard that it will fall out if you bleach it too light.”

  “I can’t help my hair, you know I’m a throwback.” She spread her arms and quoted an old dashta song: “Am-a truly as I am.”

  He eyed her critically. “You’re really claiming to be nothing but what you seem? That would be a waste.”

  “A waste?” she asked sweetly, but she knew where he would take it.

  “A waste of all your manifest qualities.” He blushed and looked away from her.

  He was too easy.

  “Why not look past all that, like I do,” Nana said. “All women fade. In ten years, you won’t bother with me anymore.”

  “Perhaps five,” he said, and smiled when she laughed.

  Kinsur was her oldest connection, her safest and friendliest informant by far, since he operated in the sedate world of the Planners. She had started cultivating him when she first arrived in Ville Emsa, while he was still a flat major with no ambition. He was the perfect starter, as if he had been marking time until he found a girl to gossip with.

  “The point is, Kinsur, time runs us all down. Must I spend my time standing in this wasteland while you eat stale buns off the ground?”

  “I am all business, you know that.” Kinsur brushed his hands off. “Today, I have an answer for you.”

  Nana felt a surge of interest. “I gave you several questions.”

  “This answer will kill you. Can you blame me if I put the moment off with flirting, even if it bores you?”

  “Men!” she sighed lightly. She stepped around a pile of rubbish—what revealed itself, as she circled, to be a little boy’s corpse in a pool of light. “A girl thinks they’re being crude, when in fact they are only being delicate.”

  “You asked why we Planners are concentrating so much of our time and attention on the Ville Emsa sector of the trench.”

  “I did.”

  “It is because we are coordinating a massive build-up of Tachba soldiers within a hundred miles of Ville Emsa. None of the units can know of the other units.”

  “How many soldiers, Kinsur?”

  “Two million.”

  He watched her face, greedy for approval, or at least a reaction. She couldn’t help letting astonishment shine through. Two million! Almost a tenth of the Haphan’s entire military of servitor Tachba, a tenth of all men under arms for the empire, were all within a week’s march of her ancient city. Whistling distance.

  “Twelve field armies,” Kinsur said. “Pulled from across the entire front, snapped together any way that fits, about as pretty as a three-armed Southie. But just as dangerous, we hope.”

  “So many. But why?”

  “Who knows?” he said cheerfully, a
s if the question had never occurred to him. It probably hadn’t. He was a Planner to the bone, and nothing like her damaged, suspicious intelligence officers at the Observers. “The Haphans haven’t gotten around to the details just yet. But two million men! It’s a lot of work, the supply alone, isn’t it? Lots of orders, on paper, flying back and forth.”

  Nana had known about the build-up of men, though not its scale. Colonel Trappia, commanding officer of her 314th Observers, had increasingly been at the club lately. His table was the nexus of an ever-growing stream of messengers and aides, all with clipboards to sign, sealed envelopes to pick up, or messenger papers to drop off—which Trappia read and then threw in the fire. Maps with troop movements were spread in front of him, and he kept them updated with precise Haphan script written with light pencil marks that could easily be rubbed away.

  The colonel’s self-control and Olympian discipline terrified her sculleries, so Nana served him herself. It was easy work because he wasn’t a hard drinker. Sometimes he called her over merely to share some joke he remembered. When he called her, and when his eyes shifted away from her face, Nana studied the maps.

  Ville Emsa was the largest city in Sessera, about as large as a northern Tachba population could grow before it would collapse on itself. Although the eternal front now pressed hard against the city, Emsa sat in the middle of a ganglia of rail and road like the brain of the territory, which it essentially was. Trappia’s notes and paper scraps showed not only the depots and troops, but also their rates of accumulation. A war of materiel was not about strength, but the replenishment of strength. Now Nana knew she’d read the map correctly: the accumulation around Emsa was staggering.

  It could only mean one thing.

  “What about the Haphan secret police, Kinsur? Why have so many infiltrated Ville Emsa?” Kinsur’s eyes widened, just fractionally. Got you, she thought. A small surprise, but it didn’t take much to throw him. “You didn’t think I would find out? We are at serious business here, Kinsur. One slip and I am killed, as you relish telling me. Can you imagine my last moments among the Haphans? Can you picture the stark, empty room, and the cold hard walls? Can you see the gloves as they close on my narrow white neck? My limp body thrown into an alleyway, like that child there?”