I’m utterly out of my depth, she told herself. But she noticed how the cluster of dashtas, for all their earlier reticence and resistance, wordlessly accepted her command.
17
Diggery
Sethlan and Diggery dropped out of the steam cart, raining dirt and grime, and climbed the stairs to the club. “Trappia’s here,” Diggery said as they entered. “He’s looking dapper. Are we ready to crush his mood?”
Colonel Trappia waved them over from the door. Sethlan approached spread his map over Trappia’s papers.
“Here we have the endangered trench,” Sethlan said without preamble. He traced the arc of the barrages, so painstakingly pieced together.
“That looks like sloppy guesswork,” Trappia said.
Diggery checked the map again. Considering the fog of war, and how boring the work was, he thought it looked fine.
But Sethlan nodded. “It’s all wrong. I figured it out on the ride back while Diggery was talking.”
Trappia chuckled. “I assume Diggery was discussing the task at hand?”
“Obviously not,” Sethlan said. “He was counting out the Affronts he wants to visit upon Nana.”
Diggery snapped toward them. The two officers were studying the map and pointedly ignoring him.
Diggery caught a whiff of perfume, sweat, and smoke by his shoulder and rolled his eyes. Of course Nana had reappeared, and just in time to overhear.
She said, “Are these the usual affronts, Diggery, or something new?”
She addressed him directly. Perforce, he had to answer, and answer fully. He said, “None…never.”
“Diggery, I could forgive you if it was something original. Won’t you describe your plans for me?”
Diggery would rather collapse into a pile of rust and bones. He shook his head.
Sethlan saved him, so to speak. “Diggery, you are aware that an affront to our dashta is an affront to our unit.”
“Yes, yes,” Trappia added, suddenly pious. “Beware, Dephram Digalon. Much to touch.”
“Yes, sir!” he said, perhaps a little too loudly. He leaned in and studied the map, ignoring every look he knew was crossing the table above his head.
Trappia leaned over the table with him. “Why, me, a map! Is there a war going on?”
“I understand,” Diggery mumbled. “We must be…more serious…” Then he added, hopefully, “Service.”
Captain Sethlan finally took pity on him, and drew the colonel’s attention back to the lines on the map.
Diggery tried to be more serious and follow the discussion, but Nana hadn’t finished with him yet. She fluffed her hair and let her tresses cascade off his shoulder. She brushed his sleeve. She bumped his arm with hers.
He finally glanced side-wise and saw her watching his face. Her avid gaze, her ardent eyes. She smoldered under his attention. It was not for long, a mere fraction of a second. Just long enough for him to think…um, nope. She snickered at him and strode away.
In those few seconds, Sethlan had covered the map with new lines. “Since we started using Little Box, we’ve been comparing our daily notes against the exposures. We have a few nights of very good intelligence. Clear skies and confirmed sightings. The Southie guns appear to be spread over a mile in a continuous arc.”
“A mile of guns,” Trappia said doubtfully. “It must be a train.”
“No, trains need land and we know this is water. Here is the odd part. The gun emplacements are moving. Day by day, they shift location. Not very far, a few dozen yards.”
“That is a little odd,” the colonel allowed. “Why dig up and move a few yards?”
“Colonel, if we had huge guns like this, we would require huge platforms to support them. We’d have terrible problems with supply.”
“Also, they’d be underwater,” Diggery added.
“Colonel, it’s a single battery of guns, shooting from slightly different positions each day. It’s floating.”
“Can’t be,” Trappia said.
“It’s floating,” Sethlan said, “because the Tachba have moved one of their deep ocean battleships through the canals and lakes, all the way from the coast. They’re shooting naval cannons at our trench. This is new to us because we’ve had their navy bottled up almost since the beginning. We have no living experience with their naval munitions.”
“A ship.” Trappia stared at the map, and then the Haphan satellite image next to it.
“Yes, sir. From the size of the shells, I think it’s a dreadnought, the biggest ship they know how to make. Impossible to steer, impossible to sink. Utterly useless, except it’s loaded with guns.”
The colonel went still. He didn’t acknowledge when Nana set fresh drinks at the table. She even set a stein in front of Diggery, implicitly giving him permission to drink in the colonel’s presence.
Before the Observers had appropriated the club, decades ago, the space had been a schoolroom for a multi-family holding inside the building. A simplistic school map of old Sessera adorned the near wall, covered in names, crops, and yields, and made nearly unreadable by a thick brown veneer of environmental nicotine. The map showed gentler, more carefree days when the front was far from Ville Emsa. The land now held by South was full of untrustworthy rivers, hidden bogs, expansive lakes.
“With some digging, you have a clear path to the southern ocean,” Diggery said. “You can follow it on the wall. It wouldn’t be difficult to cruise up the river. It’s not like they’re using their navy where they have it.”
“Ssssa!” Trappia hissed, rapping the table. “We’re trying to think! Find your place.”
“Yes, sir,” he said.
“Drink your beer and shut up,” Sethlan said.
Diggery lifted his beer and almost sipped. What had the colonel said? “Much to touch.” That was from a drinking song, a warning for men who lost self-control:
Call the dashta,
Much to touch!
La, I’m dying
From the maid:
The handle
Had a blade.
Yes, Nana could certainly have put something in his beer. Every month one officer or another reported for sick list with the shits, green eyeballs, the trembles. Show him a dashta, and he would show you a poisoner. It was what all the slight girls learned.
He gave the stein to a passing scull and signaled for another. Across the room, Nana grinned at him.
Trappia finally sighed, drawing Diggery back to the table. “It’s certainly on a big scale, hallmark of the Moon Kingdoms. Some Tachba prince’s whim trickles down to a million guys with shovels, dropping with consumption in the swamps. I love it. A thousand slaves with ropes pulling a dreadnought a hundred miles. It’s a thing of beauty.”
Sethlan nodded. “We make it a naval ship in a lake?”
“We make it that, so says me,” said Trappia. “I’ll tell the Haphans to eat the shells, because there’s no way we’re moving the front line out of range. We have no cushion for Ville Emsa as it is.”
“There’s more to it, sir,” Sethlan said.
“Then I shall hear it,” Trappia said expansively, taking up his drink. Diggery noticed, belatedly, that the room had fallen silent as the other tables latched onto the conversation. The colonel was speaking not just to Sethlan, but to all the officers.
“The ship will become a fleet. South will finally have a real artillery on this front.”
“You think they’ll bring more boats? Let them. We like a nice show. A few sparks are bound to fly in a war this size. They can hammer us with meteorites, but the line won’t move.” Trappia cleared his throat. “The monsters can overrun the line and make us an island. Ville Emsa will remain part of Sessera.”
Diggery saw Sethlan pick his next words carefully. “That’s not the entirety of my concern, sir.”
“Of course it isn’t,” Trappia fairly shouted. “It’s too small to worry about.”
Sethlan shook his head. “Yes, sir.”
He leaned over the map
and traced his finger along the shore of the lake. Then he tapped the piece of land, three tenths of a mile wide, which separated it from the next. Then he slid across a span of swamp, to yet another span of water.
“No!” Diggery exclaimed.
The colonel only glared at the map.
The Tachba side of the line was riddled with lakes and waterways, none of them more than a few miles apart. Looking at it that way, the Tachba could bring up their entire blockaded Navy and punish the line with a heavy, mobile artillery. Three hundred miles of front, the soul of Sessera and the breadbasket of Haphan manpower, all of it would turn impossible to hold under the concentrated fire of the Tachba mega-shells. This was their end move. Everything would be pounded to dust.
“Ambitious,” Trappia grudged. “They have always been ambitious. They’ve never been smart.”
The captain merely watched. Diggery didn’t know where to look.
The colonel leaned forward and sniffed, the picture of brisk attention. But his eyes weren’t moving, or even focused on the map.
“This cannot leave the table,” Trappia said without power. He raised his hand, and then let it drop to his thigh. “What are a few sparks, here and there?”
He nodded at Sethlan for a moment, and then walked unsteadily out of the club.
Diggery stared at the map on the wall, tracing how the lines had moved at atrocious cost implacably north. He saw how the eternal front would finally cave and collapse. It would be pinched between the Tachba hammer and the anvil that was Ville Emsa.
Sessera would lose Ville Emsa. When Sessera lost its capitol, the province would fall. When Sessera fell, the Haphan local empire would collapse. It would be a slaughter on a scale to reset history. Nothing would remain. In a hundred years, Tachba farmers armed with sharpened sticks would walk through ruined Haphan cities and not know what they were.
In the near term, and much more importantly, Diggery himself would either be dead, or the slave of a Southie prince who gave orders in Old Tachbavim. Diggery didn’t speak the Deep Tongue, so he was back to simply being dead.
He glanced to the fire, and noticed Cephas’s face turned toward him. The heavy, drunk captain was smirking, but not out of amusement.
Diggery couldn’t help himself. “What now, Cephas?”
“You shouldn’t worry about the Southies, Diggery,” Cephas said. “They’re our dumb, feral cousins. They only want to bury their ancestors, drink our good bourbon, be our friends, and occasionally kill us.”
Diggery thought that through. “They’re not getting my bourbon.”
“It won’t be your choice,” Cephas grinned. “Wait a few weeks and see for yourself.”
Book 2: The Dashta
I
The Leash
Travelogue: On the Trench
No tourist should skip the battlefields of Grigory IV. Indeed, apart from the trenches there is little reason to visit the planet at all. Do not come for the local culture: the Haphans are charmless and prickly, the Tachba are delightful but prone to manslaughter. Do not come for the food and comforts: both are too sparse in the south, while the relative luxuries of the north are too fraught with guilt having first seen the south.
The only reason to visit Grigory IV is to verify that the trenches indeed exist. To witness what can be done by normative humans when fear, cynicism, and propensity to violence all make a common project together. The trenches span the continent, each line facing the other across a pulverized, poisoned landscape no wider than one hundred yards. Since trenches are easily and often overrun, they are arranged three to five levels deep to prevent a final, critical breakthrough by the enemy. Still more trenches, narrow communication “lollies,” connect each stage of defense with the ones behind it.
With the war’s immense destruction limited to one narrow band of geography, the rest of the continent is left to enjoy a level of peace and prosperity unlike any other time in history. Tourists will discover that even isolated communities with no Haphan presence are quite survivable—though all are encouraged to visit after the induction squads move through. These “indies” visit each community as they reach their tipping point, and induct the dangerous, impulsive, surplus Tachba youth into military service. Only a few veterans ever return, as either rationally mature adults or functionally harmless cripples. Though no census is kept, it is thought that the war has effectively increased Tachba population and productivity far past what it was on Landing Day.
Which ultimately means more soldiers for the front. Induction squads travel the countryside, bringing raw recruits to the training fields where they drill for four months before finally shipping south. The term of service for these soldiers is, for all purposes, indefinite. In Haphan parlance, the war is a continuing emergency. The soldiers serve Sessera-Under-Arms, Ed-homse-Under-Arms, Sheflis-Under-Arms, et cetera, until the front itself terminates their service.
Introduction: Imperial Archives: One year to Landing Day
Eponymous
After a nightmare-ridden sleep full of Southie gas and dying soldiers, Eponymous woke one morning to discover a new set of memories superimposed in her mind.
The memories were the colonial archives she’d requested from Lucky Strike, pilfered from the imperial residence at the Haphan’s capital city, Falling Mountain. They were neatly placed, with little bleed into Sethlan’s consciousness, and the ship had given them an eidetic layout so Eponymous could unfurl the pages sequentially or jump right where she needed. It was suspiciously competent work, considering what the ship had put her through. While Sethlan drowsed on, she rolled the carousel of memories back to the earliest record in the narrative.
The personal diary of Minister Battavy, Member of Parliament.
(One year to Landing Day.)
“Entrance. Our convoy of colonization ships finally attain the Grigory System. To expand the supremacy of our perfect and eternal emperor, we will establish the Haphan Empire on the fourth planet. We have traveled for centuries, generation over generation, to arrive. All who love civilization and culture will rejoice at our success.”
That is what I hoped I would write. The reality is not so pretty.
The calendar shows us a year behind schedule. Confusion, tension, and fear have been our liquor for months. We’ve been on edge and at throat, every man and woman absolutely certain something has gone wrong with the convoy.
Yesterday, without warning, the ancient engines cut out. They rang our hull like a bell, a sure sign they will never light again. Centuries in space, with dust and grit and radiation, have all but destroyed them. Many colonists, conditioned by a life of steady engine noise, went into shock and needed sedation. The infirmaries are overflowing. Psychosomatic deafness is the order of the day.
Our fleet’s path was programmed on the home world, and we lost the secret of steering these ships many generations ago. We are at the mercy of the long-dead migration planners and kept safe only by our thinking machines, which watch for every known danger on their lists.
To most of us it feels like end times, an occasion of death and doom. The children are more adaptable. When the drives cut off, they ran for the portals and blocked the view. For a moment we thought the void was still empty, and we would join the registry of lost colonization fleets.
Then we saw it: a pretty planet just barely visible to the unaided eye, near a star that was brighter than the rest. In our telescopes, it grows to a green fingernail paring floating in space, so small to be filled with our hopes and dreams.
(Ten months to Landing Day.)
The situation on the planet is shocking, some say untenable. The barbarism discovered on Grigory IV has unsettled the fleet. The Loyal Opposition has demanded that we wrest control of the ark-ships away from the thinking machines. They want to turn the convoy around and return to Imperial space. They are indifferent to every price and punishment that would reward this plan.
Our Fleet Commander refuses to shift, publicly. In private, she drives our desperate engin
eers to somehow restart the ark ship engines. We are quickly falling into Grigory IV’s gravity, and our time is running out. Once we are in orbit, the engines will not lift us away from the planet again. We struggle in secret, so that if we fail and we are doomed to land on Grigory IV, it will appear to be the effortless fulfillment of the emperor’s plan. The emperor is inerrant, after all, thus the colonization plan must be working correctly.
Unfortunately, this interpretation forces the Fleet Commander to view dissenters as cowards, or worse, mutineers, who are making a last-minute attempt to sabotage the emperor’s sublime will. There is only one treatment for disloyalty, but the Commander hopes to not have to recognize them publicly. She has ordered me to delay every vote that might change the colonization plan. I am to use every parliamentary and procedural trick at my command.
Every morning, a detachment of the imperial guard meets me at my secret temporary residence, and we walk to the government halls. The Fleet Commander’s position would be much complicated if I am assassinated. I need only stall proceedings for a few weeks. The drive engines will either re-light, or they won’t.
In time, there will be no reason to assassinate me, and I can return to my family.
(Six Months to Landing Day.)
The early reports from our Optics department show a lively, bio-rich world in great trouble.
The planet itself is a dream. More ocean than one might hope, but our settlement planners and infrastructurists were pleased to find that it is one great shallow ocean, surrounding one great land mass, with a few minor island archipelagos. The northern third of the continent is a broad and tectonically stable savannah that sees less than four months of snow per year. It is bordered on the south by a high range of inactive volcanos. Below that, mountains give way to more mountains, then hilly, densely forested tracts of land. The middle of the continent is lush and green, rich with the topsoils pushed south by glaciation and watered by runoff from the highlands. South of that are the tropics and lowlands, where jungle dense canopies alternate with vast swamps, just like Planet Hapha, our homeworld and seat of empire.
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