“Is this the emperor everybody talks about?”
“The local empress is more of a planetary governor. She’s an effigy of the real emperor on the Haphan home world. Their empire is far-flung and low-tech, but they keep organized through these local figureheads.”
“Okay, well, what does the local empress have for me?”
“Old records, dating from landing, that are inscribed on paper of all things. Making a copy will reduce the quality of the original, which is why CivGov policy prevents me from collecting it.”
“So the paper will get old and fragile a little faster, so what?”
“I agree it’s silly. I have spiked the imperial residence, infiltrated some disguised insects, and dusted the archives with nano-bots. Obviously at their demeaned level of civilization, the Haphans have noticed none of this. On command, my nano-bots can drill through the books and read them. The books will lose a hundredth of a percent of their mass.”
“And what’s the good stuff?”
“Historical archives dating from the Haphan arrival at Grigory. It includes Landing Day, when the Haphans first meet the Tachba. It is full of riveting bloodshed and regrettable decisionry.”
Eponymous kept her surface thoughts bland and even. If the ship noticed a spike in her interest, it would simply become more manipulative. Unfortunately, here the ship had a huge advantage. If it chose to ignore Eponymous’s privacy, as well as a dozen unenforceable CivGov protocols, it could surveil the energistic flux of her thoughts through subspace.
“If you request it in your official CivGov capacity,” the ship needled, “it would not be considered espionage or intrusion. The records are valuable and full of answers.”
Eponymous gave up. Whatever the reason Lucky Strike wanted the history, Eponymous wanted it too. Eponymous had no grounds to obstruct the ship, or even really to be suspicious. At the base of it, she might be allowing prejudice to color she thinking because she fundamentally didn’t like ships. They were too clever, always using you for something, always trying to manipulate and distract slower minds.
“Grab the history,” Eponymous said. “So says me, CivGov Inspector. Log it. Request made. We’ll be strange bedfellows in this.”
“We are already bedfellows, you know. There is no distance between our goals.” The ship’s voice was exquisitely unreadable. “Anyway, your request is received and logged.”
14
Gawarty
Gawarty had just finished unpacking in his quarters, hanging no less than twelve different dress uniforms with his own hand in a closet that was much larger than the master bedroom of his suite. As he dithered in the front room, wondering why he had no windows, his door opened and Sergeant Twigath walked in.
“You’ll want to start locking these,” Twigath said. “They don’t lock by themselves, and they don’t know who you are. They’re actually just wooden doors.”
“What am I to do with this mountain of travel trunks?”
“Let’s drag them into the hall, sir. They’ll be gone in an hour.”
Gawarty joined in to help, as Twigath seemed to expect. “What if I need them again?”
The big Haphan only shook his head. “A month or two on the line, and you won’t care about any of this, sir.”
Gawarty glanced at his closet as he closed and locked his door. He already had mixed feelings about those uniforms. If he wore them, he’d have to hang them up again himself, in yet another manual process. How do people get any work done around here?
“Pardon my saying so, but I know a few apartments that are being let in the Haphan Quarter.”
Gawarty followed the sergeant to street level, where his sister’s command car idled in front of the door. He hadn’t even glanced at the listings in the Haphan Quarter, lest he lose his nerve. He was four blocks from the 314th Observers club, in the middle of Sesseran Ville Emsa. In the light of day, it looked like a regular run-down neighborhood in one of the northern towns where his family used to vacation. Nothing that deserved the anxiety he felt.
“I don’t need much,” Gawarty said. “Besides, I might learn a bit, being immersed in the local color.”
The car purred smoothly up the street. Jephia didn’t stint. It was one of the luxurious open-topped town cars with wooden inlay from the homeworld and a landing-day engine, impeccably maintained by the Tawarna family’s motor pool.
“I meant, rather, in case someone from the real world writes, or worse, wants to make a social call.” Twigath was so large he loomed out of the driver’s seat like something from a circus. “A back-up location at a proper Haphan address.”
“Ah, well…” The good old Tawarna family taint again. Gawarty merely shrugged, which Twigath didn’t notice. The sergeant was scanning the Tachba on the streets with rather more attention than the early hours seemed to warrant. “Are we going down to the front? I mean, on the line?”
“Fuck, no!” Twigath exclaimed. “Your pardon. The colonel, your sister, would have me flayed if you died on your first day, sir. We’re visiting a simple artillery field, well behind the lines and probably safe.”
Gawarty was an heir, a peer, and even an officer. He had a wide menu of superiority from which to select an answer for the noncom beside him in the car. Yet, at the moment, all of it seemed dwarfed by what Twigath knew about this new world, and what Gawarty didn’t.
He settled on, “Very good.”
The command car made short work of the drive. They left the huddled, granite-hewn buildings of Ville Emsa but arrived nowhere special until they topped the last hill. A line of great artillery guns, all silent, stretched to the horizon. For a moment, Gawarty’s eyes refused to accept the scale. Each gun crawled with little figures which, he realized, were human. Tachba artillerymen, dwarfed by the house-sized structures that looked like nothing so much as closed fists with black gunmetal fingers pointing south.
Behind the guns were deeply rutted paths, along which toy-sized wagons were being unloaded by still more Tachba. The shells, from this distance, were little more than glints in the morning sunlight, but it took four or more scurrying figures to move each one—Gawarty noticed several dropped and picked up again. The shells were carried away from the artillery guns and placed upright in—it couldn’t be!—fields of munitions, fields the size of city blocks, and the city the size of Ville Emsa. A farmland of shining metal so densely packed it appeared solid, a farmland that stretched into the distance and finally disappeared in the hazy air.
Gawarty realized with a jolt where he was and turned his head the other direction. The front, what he could see of it, was a dark smudge low on the horizon.
Twigath’s destination became clear. A hundred yards in front of the artillery was another, smaller collection of people, and they waited behind a solitary figure seated at a camp table under the open sky.
The solitary figure was blonde. As the command car drew close, the figure resolved into Gawarty’s sister, Colonel Jephesandra Liu Tawarna. She was rifling a sheaf of messenger paper as they walked up. From the running header on the pages, Gawarty saw it was the orders of the day from the Planners in Ville Emsa, and there were enough sheets in it that it doubtless covered the entire sector. That other stack on her folding table—heavily scarred, grimy leather folios with stained papers peeking out—would be the nightly reports from the trenches. Information flowed both directions from the front, and it crossed in front of Jephia, at her table.
“How’d you find me?” Jephia flipped to the next report.
“The artillery is quiet for no good reason,” Twigath answered. “Obviously you’d be here, ma’am.”
She grinned and glanced back. The Tachba artillerymen were fidgeting at their great guns, clearly itching to get the morning started but unwilling to gripe directly at a Haphan Overlord. “You force these Tacchies off their schedule, their digestion goes sour.”
Jephia finally squinted up at the sergeant, and her eyes slid to the side. “Warty! Already!” She jumped up and grabbed his j
acket, pulling him to the table. He wondered briefly if there was hugging in the war, and there wasn’t. She pushed him into an empty folding chair and collapsed next to him. “We weren’t sure if the Trench Express would make it to Ville Emsa today.”
“Isn’t it on a schedule, Jephia?” Gawarty stared around.
“Usually, but we’ve had some problems keeping the trains on time.” She followed his look. “Oh, you mean the artillery. That’s more of a play-it-by-ear sort of thing.”
Jephia’s biggest sergeant, Rethla, stood off to the side. He said, “The ones in the trenches are cheering the colonel’s name because it means a little peace.”
“Not what I usually get, but okay.” She grinned at Gawarty. “They call me the ‘Spiderfish,’ can you believe it? Because I cast my nets everywhere, and pull people in. When I send my Sergent Rethla into the trenches for rumor-gathering, it’s Spiderfish this, Spiderfish that. Maybe I’ll become one of their little trench gods!”
She tossed the morning orders to Rethla, who flung them at a Tachba messenger waiting out of earshot. The messenger snatched them out of the air without looking and darted away like he was being chased.
Jephia watched the messenger go. “He’s probably no older than twelve. In the right circumstances, though, he could knock over Rethla himself.”
Sergeant Rethla made a disagreeing sound.
“It would be a close-fought thing, at least,” Jephia amended. “It’s just something I hope you remember, Gawarty. These Tacchies look so plain and human, I still have to remind myself about them. They’re twisted, unpredictable. Far off the human mean.”
“And usually boring as all hell,” Sergeant Rethla mumbled.
“My Sergeant Rethla is much more predictable,” she said. “Speak up there, soldier.”
“I have to have the most boring assignment ever, ma’am,” Rethla said. “Watching a snappie who has turned trophy and stuck himself on a wall. Why don’t we just squeeze Colonel Goldros and have done with it?”
Jephia didn’t answer immediately. Eyes still on Rethla, she leaned closer to Gawarty and whispered loudly, “Watch me work!”
Sergeant Rethla barely smiled.
“Sergeant,” Jephia said, “We can’t arrest Colonel Goldros until we know who’s next in line after him. Remember, they’re using the old Tachba organizational style—” she grinned when Rethla finally laughed “—and it’s not like we can look it up on an official table of command. Goldros is a colonel, but his second could be a regular boot. He’s surrounded himself with clever Tacchies, and all of them will be cultivating conspiracies of their own.”
Sergeant Twigath said, “Colonel, you always tell us to look for the women.”
“There’s always a woman,” Jephia nodded. “But not here in the trenches. Too noticeable. This is what makes Goldros so interesting. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Tacchie male play such a subtle game. He knows he’s being watched.”
“They’re too dumb for that,” Rethla said.
“Not so. He knows he’s being watched, so he’s hiding his secondary officers. As soon as we learn his trusted executives, he can be squeezed, and all his good works undone. He knows this. He’s locked us down and he’s playing with us.”
Her sergeants only looked doubtful, but this didn’t seem to bother her. “In fact,” she continued, “I need to put an order in his file that Colonel Goldros is not to be touched. Don’t want some other office screwing things up. Remind me, Twig, will you?”
She patted Gawarty’s shoulder and pointed. “It’s finally coming out.”
His eyes rose to the horizon. He could see now that the rearward artillery had a good perch behind the front. The morning sun, or a distant breeze, had cleared the haze so the real war could now be seen.
From their vantage, the trenches were a grid of deep scars running east and west. The earth between the scars was pitted, endlessly ploughed, tilled, and burned by artillery until the very soil had turned deathly gray. The fields were lesioned with shell holes, suppurating with sparks and rising smoke, like necrotic flesh on the skin of the earth.
“Pick a spot and stare at it,” Jephia said. “You’ll be able to see the soldiers. They look like lines of insects, moving forward or filtering back. The Southie prisoners I talk to, they say the trench is a creature in itself, a great snake. They make it sound like a hungry god.”
Gawarty could indeed discern the soldiers. So much activity, but so little movement at that scale. It looked like it would take hours to get anywhere in the trenches.
He looked east, then west. “It crosses the entire continent…”
Jephia glanced between him and the front, watching his face. “It is bizarre, isn’t it, our fence against the wild southern Tachba? A half-mile wide, always on the verge of collapse. Only feasible due to the Tachba birthrate and their willingness to run into that hellhole. Only kept running by inertia, Haphan force of will, and lately, fear.”
Twigath and Rethla snickered at that.
Jephia grinned at them. “I’ll be afraid for all of us, then. Strictly speaking, I’m only accountable for the ten or so miles near Ville Emsa. When I sit here, though, I feel like the whole damn thing is in my lap. There’s Daddy’s sector.”
She pointed, but Gawarty saw nothing distinguishing.
“Twigath,” she said in a different voice, “what did you find out about my brother’s Sesseran?”
“The Sethlan one,” Sergeant Twigath nodded. “You were right about him, ma’am. I tracked him through the daily orders as closely as possible. After his gas attack, Colonel Goldros routed him to the Haphan forward hospital, lunatic wing. You told us Sethlan should survive, so he did. He disappeared for a while into the paperwork, but then reappeared assigned to the 314th Observers.”
“You hear that, Warty?” Jephia asked.
“I did,” he said. “But why am I hearing it?”
“I don’t know yet,” she said.
“The question still lingers,” Sergeant Twigath continued. “Do we treat him like Goldros’s new recruit? Damned expensive way to build a conspiracy, if you ask me. Sethlan’s unit was a good one.”
“It was. Maybe it will be again,” Jephia mused. “No, I don’t think Captain Sethlan Semelon is one of Goldros’s recruits. He was conscientious and protective of his men. Adult-like. He won’t forgive Goldros if he suspects the truth.”
“If he isn’t Goldros’s yet, he will be,” Sergeant Twigath said. “That’s how the snappies think. It’s not rocket science. Goldros spent some political capital sending him to the Haphan forward hospital. He’d want something out of it.”
“Maybe he already got what he needed,” Sergeant Rethla offered.
“Interesting that Goldros would want someone in the 314th.” She disengaged from Gawarty’s shoulder and flipped open a thick folio of papers. “If this file ever fell into Tachba hands…as if they’d have the patience to read a whole list. Anyway, who do we have in the Observers?”
Twigath shrugged. “They change too fast. I refuse to keep up with them.”
“My brother is going in there,” she said mildly.
He stiffened. “Yes, ma’am. I’m sorry.”
“See how he’s scared of me?” Jephia grinned. But Gawarty knew that particular grin, as did her staff, apparently, and none of them answered.
She stared at the papers, turning them blindly. “My brother. My own brother, in the Observers! I’m putting my own…ah, fuck this war.”
She snapped the file closed, and Gawarty almost jumped. A look passed between his sister and her towering sergeants, a look he couldn’t decipher. Twigath leaned slightly toward her, his voice soft. “I thought you had some affection for your brother? It was a rumor I heard somewhere.”
A smile finally broke through. “As if I’d fall that low. No—” she turned to Gawarty and shrugged. “My brother will either adapt and thrive, or we’ll all be too busy dying to care. Yes, sergeant, I think it’s exactly that near. Anyway, remember my fam
ily. We’re famous Tachba lovers.”
15
Diggery
“Do you have your math ready?” Sethlan asked.
Diggery lolled next to the captain, flat on his back, just below the lip of a shell-hole. They were in the middle of the charnel landscape between the lines, but it felt like a vacation. This was one of the rare nights when they weren’t fiddling with Little Box, the infuriating, attention-seeking anti-sniper camera. If Diggery had to extrapolate angles from even one more set of criss-crossed lines on a black film exposure, he would snap. He’d join a heavy infantry brigade and never do math again.
“Where’s your math?” Sethlan repeated.
“It’s in my mind,” Diggery said, “and in my heart.”
Below him, lower in the crater, Sethlan worked assiduously over a map and a notebook. Diggery had no idea what he was doing and didn’t much care. When Sethlan told him to sit and be quiet, Diggery obeyed. He didn’t dig out a math book and improve himself. If he needed to know anything, well, he could ask. He had the captain right there.
Since it was dark and cloudy, the Tachba would soon fire a few of their important big shells. They sent sixty or so every night, targeting them with some impenetrable Southie purpose. Diggery and Sethlan, being Observers, would observe the shells, make notes, and then retire back to civilization.
“I’m not threatening you,” Sethlan said, still not looking up, but with menace in his voice. “However, you need to tell me if you understand the math.”
They caught a spray of dirt from a nearby shell detonation. Diggery eased lower in the crater and said, “I learned it this morning. Was it supposed to be difficult?”
Nobody at the Observers appreciated Diggery’s Haphan education. His learning was the Haphan product of decades of domination over the Tachba. Early in the colonization, the Haphans noticed how the young orphaned Tacchies in their care would lose focus. The children would stop answering a question in the middle of a word. They’d drift into other activities without permission. When the teachers’ backs were turned, they’d even wholly disappear from the classrooms, and this happened no matter how often they were beaten. Their explanations for the behavior were patent idiocy that embarrassed the Haphans to hear:
The Eternal Front: A Lines of Thunder Novel (Lines of Thunder Universe) Page 13
