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

by Walter Blaire

  To be sure, he would much rather be dead than believe that he had become useless even as an Observer. The voice seemed to believe him.

  ~I’m embedded, Sethlan. I’m riding along with you, using the extra…cycles of your mind. You are not mad, so don’t get any crazy ideas.~

  Sethlan nodded with satisfaction. Would it kill you not to gibber in my ear all the time, then?

  ~Considering how quickly you people die, can’t I have some concern?~

  If my death can kill you... well, the rider loves the lowback. Presumably you picked me because I’m important in some way, or better than all the others.

  The conversation had a calming effect on the Voice. It grew steadier, and Sethlan’s own mind turned less fractious and distracted.

  ~Important? Hardly. I picked someone with extra room in his head.~

  Sethlan smirked. You picked an Observer with free range of movement. You helped me solve the dreadnoughts mystery, and put me in good with my colonel and my dashta.

  When the Voice didn’t respond, he continued, So there’s some investment, and it is lost if I’m lost.

  ~Yeah.~

  Diggery punched his shoulder, shouting, “Third wave, which you’d better climb higher.”

  Sethlan pulled his legs out of a basket of weakly grasping hands. The layer of wounded had risen to his knees, but was as high as his hips on the parapet side of the trench. A few minutes more, and he would have been solidly wedged at the bottom of the trench.

  Diggery and sarnt were lifting Gawarty out of his own hole, their encouragements lost as a wave of repeating fire slapped into the sandbags above. Several soldiers caught blows to the head, fell, and were trodden flat.

  “Keep your heads down!” Sethlan yelled. “The trench is filling up, so you’re taller now!”

  “Heads down!” Sarnt dropped Gawarty against the wall and turned back to the flow of men. “What are you?”

  “11,114th Ed-homse.”

  “Then this is your waypoint! Give me your noncom.”

  “Pass for the corporal!”

  A young man was soon produced, and the sarnt tugged him over by Sethlan, whose rank bequeathed him a small ring of empty space. “You-waiting for the next bloomer in the sky. Waiting, hear? You wait for the bloomer, or if you-hearing oggie-gees popping up front!”

  “La-meh, bloomer or oggie-gees a-poppin’, and then over,” the corporal repeated. Both men turned to harangue the men in concert.

  Sethlan found Gawarty next to him. “Quite something, neh?”

  The Haphan stared back through two eyes like pinholes, his mouth a voiceless O. Sethlan doffed a glove and felt the Haphan’s face. It was cold and clammy, but not the specific cold of a hidden, seeping wound. Any trencher could tell the difference, though they wouldn’t be able to say how. “Diggery, paint him up while he’s being quiet.”

  “Right, paint the Happie.” The blacking would make the oval of his face harder to see when Southie snipers started plinking.

  A rapid course of muffled bumps sounded forward of the line.

  “The oggies’re popping, climb over!” cried the sarnt.

  ~What...?~

  Oggie-gees, offensive grenades. We clear the trenches or take out the repeaters, and then slide in like butter. We’ve moved up enough men through the killing zone to attempt the trench.

  Two messengers dropped into the trench at the same time. One of them, amazingly, wore only half a greatcoat. Something had torn the tough canvas up the back and he had lost it off his shoulder. He reported that the attack had stalled, and to prepare for returns. “Twenty ticks,” he concluded.

  The next one shook his head, “I’m thirty ticks on from the launch of the attack, and we’re in the trench now and clearing them out, workmanlike. But we need reinforcement, and there is no strength to push to the second line.”

  The messenger with the more recent report was sent to command, while the first was sent forward again.

  “Up and over,” bellowed the sarnt. “Up and over, you slime. You’re carrying the next trench, you lucky scrags!”

  “Lug the boxies,” screamed the corporal, his voice an octave higher. The third wave made its way over the top in good order, hardly dropping any dead back into the trench. The fourth wave, optimistically accoutered with sapping tools, repeating guns, and boxes of defensive grenades, trotted in to fill the vacuum. They were joined by the first corpsmen, dropping over the parados and unwinding stretchers.

  “Drop your lugs on the step-up,” cried the sarnt to everybody still left in the trench, “and let’s pull some buggers out of the dirt, la!”

  “Which the Happie is darker,” Diggery reported to Sethlan. Gawarty stared at the activity, looking more human now even though every feature of his face was erased by the blacking.

  The soldiers heaved through the corpses, pulling out the complainers and propping them against the back wall. The dead were pitched over the trench parapet, as were the limbs that came out of the muck by themselves. Clean limbs were added to a growing pile to the side.

  “Duckboard ho,” said a new officer, with engineer chevrons on his sleeves.

  “Not me. Report to the sergeant,” Sethlan said.

  “Yes, sir.”

  The unit of engineers followed shortly after, unrolling wire-framed wooden pathways from spindles twice the height of a man.

  Risking a peek over the parapet, Sethlan saw sappers were already digging ragged trenches from shell-hole to shell-hole for a safer route forward. He glanced down and saw that what had been a front-line trench was now buzzing with back-line activity. Corpsmen, engineers, and supply goons all intermingled, clearing paths and moving tons of equipment up and over the lip of the trench.

  “This is us,” said Sethlan, stepping onto a ladder. “Wouldn’t do to still be here when the Happie staff arrives, would it?”

  Without waiting to see if they followed, he finished the ladder and entered no-man’s-land.

  8

  Diggery

  Diggery pushed a nearly exhausted Gawarty up the ladder. By the time they cleared the top, Sethlan was a dim form disappearing into a shell hole two dozen yards distant. Gawarty stared around like a child at a fair.

  “Follow the tape.” Diggery pointed to the fragmented strips of cloth that had been laid before the attack. “It leads you to glory.”

  Gawarty made an effort to mimic Diggery’s hole-to-hole movement. Small arms fire still slapped the dirt randomly across the whole landscape, but the shelling had left off as both sides mingled in the trenches.

  Even without the tape, the fighting would have been easy to find. A continuous supply of grenade explosions oriented them toward the new front, and before long Diggery saw that damned hill. It was now safely in Sesseran hands and quiet for the moment, though this would change when news of the capture percolated back to the South’s artillery.

  Gawarty was stunningly slow in the soft earth. Honestly, Diggery had seen men with no legs and one arm clambering back to the home trench at a faster pace. He backtracked and gave Gawarty a pointed sigh.

  The young Haphan seemed distracted by the ground at their feet. This made Diggery look too. To look too closely was disturbing, and when he raised his eyes, it grew worse. The entire landscape was infested with white grubs, squirming in the soil.

  “They’re men,” Diggery explained. “Dropped, plinked, poked. A good rain will drown them all.”

  Gawarty nodded.

  “If you can tell which ones are dead, those are the ones you step on. They want you to do it. No point sinking into the mumblety. And ‘mumblety’ is dirt that is too soft to support you.”

  “Let’s just get on, damn you,” Gawarty said.

  They skirted a big bumper shell hole. Its dimensions dwarfed the surrounding holes and its walls were smooth with slick dirt. Diggery again noticed Gawarty’s attention—something at the bottom of the hole.

  “Pray, Lieutenant, don’t peer into shell holes; it is the stuff of nightmares.”


  “He’s alive!”

  Diggery’s gaze was drawn. Indeed, there was a soldier mired in the sucking stew at the bottom of the hole. Spread on his stomach, kicking feebly in a broad slick of blood. One side of his torso was nothing but torn cloth and bone, with organs spilling into the air. He pushed up the slope of the crater with slow focus. Diggery doubted the wretch had even noticed the two of them watching from above. The miserable boot reminded Diggery of nothing so much as a waterlogged corroach, the bugs that floated down the Ville Emsa sidewalks after a hard rain, drowning in great piles and congealing in every crack.

  “Put a bullet in him,” said Diggery. He heard the brutality in his voice and paused. “That is the kindness you can do him. There’s no pulling him out, not all of him at the same time. And this muck…unless you’re standing on duckboard, you’ll go down an inch for every inch he comes up.”

  “I won’t shoot him while there’s any hope.”

  “He’ll live or he’ll die,” Diggery agreed. “Please glance forward, too. It’s getting light, and we’re not even in the new trench yet.”

  “Sunrise already?”

  “Closely timed so the South can only counter-attack in broad daylight.” Diggery noticed some activity in the distance. “There you see us enfilading a traverse. Either that or losing one. Enfilading is when you attack from the side, to clear out a trench—”

  “Please. That much I know.” But Gawarty studied the action. Distances were suspect in the odd landscape, and the swarm of grenades back and forth, thirty yards distant, looked like a cloud of gnats. The small specks rose and fell in silence, but the hidden ground where they touched emitted a continuous high banging, like a snare drum. Gawarty added, “So our captain is lost, then?”

  “We’ll find him presently. We separate so easily in the field that we’ve stopped trying to stay together. It’s not the common practice.”

  “Then I am in your care?”

  Diggery gave a wolfish grin and led Gawarty away from the pit and its struggling occupant. With the growing light came new problems, and Diggery had to impart the rudiments of hiding a silhouette. The noise grew louder again as they approached, and one element was the pip-growl of Southie sniper rifles, firing hot. They crossed easily through a thicket of barbed wire which had been devastated by Haphan cutter shells.

  “Now this is hell,” said Diggery, aghast.

  The captured Tachba trench was a shallow depression in the ground—four feet at its deepest, and twelve feet wide. There was no step-up, hardly even any walls to speak of. The bottom was mere brackish water, and then mud of unknown depth. Diggery tested it with his foot and found no bottom on which to stand. He pulled back quickly when the water began to roil, and indistinct shapes could be seen approaching his shoe.

  Instead of sandbags shoring the walls, there were corpses, new and old, with interwoven limbs. An aesthetic approach had been taken, the arms all hooked and pointed down, and the heads, where present, looking north. The legs of the upper bodies were scissored over the torsos of the bodies below.

  “Which that is skag-writin’,” huffed a boot, sliding in behind them. He called to his comrade, who soon appeared over what passed for the parapet. “Sophie, these booties are-reading up the skag-writin’, geh.”

  “Shit-meh, are they clever loiterers or just stupid and slow?” The newcomer, a tall slim Sesseran wearing a corporal’s chevron, glanced at them. He gave out a string of unintelligible syllables.

  It was Trench Talk dipping into Deep Tongue, and Diggery knew what would happen when they learned he didn’t have the latter. Instead, he held up a finger, and then pointed at Gawarty. The Sesserans peered closer, then stiffened.

  “I apologize, sir,” said the corporal. “I’m Sophalon, your corporal. And this is who we call Turd, on account of his name, Terde.”

  Gawarty noticed none of the exchange, rapt by the horrible walls of the trench.

  “Can you read the skag talk?” Terde asked Diggery.

  “Not me.”

  “This is writing?” Gawarty’s voice was weak.

  “More like jokes and gossip, your liege,” said Sophalon. “Which the Tacchies can’t really bury their dead in the swamps, without the corpses floating up again like dull friends. So they’ve learned to make nice with them and keep them close.”

  “What does the writing say?”

  “We haven’t met a man could read it, la, but strike me dead if we haven’t seen the Southies read them, then laugh and change direction. Speaking of which, what direction are you going?”

  “Generally south. You?”

  “Which we’re from the first wave, but got hung up in a thicket of wire, playing dead and cursing Southie repeaters generally.”

  “You’re going south too,” Diggery translated. “You’re now attached to us. This is a Haphan lieutenant, and he is countermanding any assignment you may have had.”

  “Oh, we’re pleased to be of service,” said Sophalon genially. He gave Diggery a keen glance, no doubt guessing he had never been in a Southie trench. “Won’t you let me take the lead?”

  Diggery nodded, relieved.

  “Recommend against touching the walls, lieutenant,” said Terde, moving away. “We skivvy along thiswise.”

  He crabbed along the slope, keeping his head down and his boots out of the swamp. The wall of corpses went impressively on and on, and Terde never touched a single one. Diggery understood why when Gawarty exclaimed, “This one’s alive!”

  The Haphan had paused by a trembling man with fluttering eyelids, and when he grasped the face to turn it, the jaw came away in his hand. Out poured a stream of oar grubs, as if the broken face were vomiting milk. Gawarty reeled away, shaking the jawbone from his hand. He fell to the bottom of the trench and half swam, half kicked to the other side. The foul liquid bubbled where he moved. He had awakened a solid mass of insects that now followed him to the edge where Diggery hoisted him out.

  “Perhaps the corpses should not be caressed?” said Sophalon. “Certainly they look pretty enough, all sleepy and soft. The oars don’t like the open air, and they leave a thin layer of skin. If one of these boys is squirming, he’s not having a bad dream—he’s merely full of bugs.”

  “Which I’ve seen Southies lying upon them, for shooting,” Terde interjected.

  Sophalon nodded. “Well sure, but you don’t puncture them, la-no! Rile up the wildlife? Madness.” He tsked, checked to see if Gawarty had stopped screaming, and then gestured down the trench. Gawarty and Diggery followed, more subdued, until they found what might have been a communication channel leading back to the main line. It was deeper and slightly easier to navigate, but whatever had been written by the configuration of dead Tachba was obliterated. Tell-tale patterns of shrapnel from offensive grenades had scored long lacerations in the meaty walls.

  They began passing wounded northerners rather than dead ones and collected directions from the ones who weren’t shocked or mad. The conversations were brief and utterly unenlightening to Diggery, who now realized he knew nothing about real trench talk. Sophalon then turned into a new trench, and soon came upon a supply pit stacked with boxes and munitions.

  They found Sethlan extricating a satchel-bag from a body in the mud. The dead Southie messenger was little more than a coat filled with gobbets of flesh. The captain glanced at them with an odd expression which took Diggery a moment to identify as excitement.

  “General Tawarna shot this one on the wing. I have papers, papers, with orders and lists.”

  “Not possible,” Diggery said.

  “I thought so too…” Sethlan shook his head. “We didn’t capture any of their bosses or officers. They fell back overland or fought to death. This satchel will more than make up for all that.”

  The paper was covered in thick-lined chicken-scratch, something a madman might scribble. Diggery couldn’t decipher a single word, and said as much.

  “It’s a rendering of Tachba hunting signals, see? These lines are finge
rs. This is conversational writing, completely new for them. A regular no-name Southie boot could be taught to understand this.” Sethlan noted Gawarty’s confusion and Diggery’s growing indifference. “Well, look at the boxes around you. The provisions. What do you notice? Lieutenant Tawarna, go around that curve and see what the Southies put there.”

  Diggery glanced around, struggling to sound out the basic Tachbavim glyphs that should have been second nature to him by now. “Trench Foot. Salver Forks. Defensive Truncheon. Rattler Ammo…? Skin Preservative. Yes,” he said, “there is much that is odd here.”

  “It’s all wrong!” Sophalon blurted impatiently. “Can we not see how there is a variety of supplies?”

  Turd nodded. “We’ve taken supply pits with two tons of repeating rifle springs, and one ton of tourniquets.”

  “So the Tacchies are using their new lists to send shipments to specific places,” said Diggery. “Better supplies alone would change the war, but…”

  Gawarty returned, shaking his head. “I haven’t seen much, but even I know that is wrong.”

  “Tell them what you saw,” Sethlan said.

  “Umbrellas. Metal umbrellas on tripod legs, easy to move. They withstood the grapeshot from our earlier barrage. They’re protecting their soldiers. It’s unnatural of them. Even belligerent.”

  “And there is more—” A commotion up the trench interrupted Sethlan. They glimpsed a messenger charging north. They couldn’t make out what he bellowed, but other soldiers repeated his message.

  “Counter-attack, and prepare to defend!”

  Sethlan snagged a passing noncom. “Roust some doggie-gees from these boxes, pass them to anybody who can chuck them. Seat the wounded on the parados if that’s what it takes.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “We want a messenger,” said Sethlan next. He shouted up the trench, “Captain’s orders, and we want a messenger. A man who can walk back.”

  “I can helpie that,” said one, struggling forward. He was fully missing an arm, but spoke calmly. “I need this stump filled, if it will be. I wouldn’t go back otherwise.”