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

by Walter Blaire

  “Someone was lucked up tonight, someone being you, la.” The boot waved a finger knowingly. “I know it from my wife-meh, being a married man. And wouldn’t she kick me straight out of bed and bar the door? Knowing that the rage would soon follow.”

  “What is that?” He couldn’t focus his thoughts. “There is even a rage? After love-making?”

  “No. Just after sex. It’s strongest in the young ones, especially virgins. If I may say that, virgins. You virgins never know about it until it’s on you.”

  So there was pollution even for that. Pretty Polly had a finger in everything, and so, obviously, did Jephia. Diggery wondered if there was anything Jephia did not know about the Tachba, something she couldn’t use to ward off pending violence or to goad him in bed. If Diggery was the new Haphan-Sesseran generation, then he could imagine how his future with Jephia would go. His every mood managed, his desire turned on and off with a twist. He wouldn’t nearly have to be a person at all.

  “I am not some kind of puppet!” he screamed at the crowd. “I am better than all you fucking animals!”

  “Me too, me too,” the soldier returned cheerfully. “We’re all simply the tops.”

  5

  Sethlan

  Sethlan shouldered his way into the raucous nightlife of Ville Emsa. Utterly drunk soldiers bellowed from street-corners. Strings of drinking crews stumbled past, hand-to-shoulder, some of them a block long. He remembered being a new recruit, and the utterly safe feeling that would arise between the terrifying amounts of alcohol and the knowledge that he was just one among millions. There was no pride, no excellence to worry about, nothing to make you stick out above the rest and get mowed down. When Stompfootie or Nestor noticed you, and it was only a matter of time, there was security in understanding it would not make the slightest difference. The drinking helped.

  So Sethlan was not annoyed with the jostling or even the mistaken tackle from a new-made lieutenant. He was called out twice, irrespective of his claws, and answered with nothing more than a nod.

  ~Emsa in full bloom?~ The Voice was quieter, perhaps even nervous. ~This is like a boy’s dorm gone bad.~

  I know you’re thinking about the women. They’re in the clubs. There are so few entertainers, so we put ours up on stages and share them proportionally. They’re quite safe, by the way.

  ~What do they do?~

  Sing, tell jokes, act out short plays. Some are very famous, but the Haphans don’t like how influential they get.

  ~Have you never heard of prostitution?~

  Of course. I imagine it would be very lucrative. But unless you’re a slight girl, you’d have a very short career.

  ~So the slight girls are the prostitutes, then.~

  No, they’re too unsettling on the whole, always in your head. I’m sorry, but the issue doesn’t seem to come up. If it tells you anything, there is only one line in the Haphan Indigenous code about selling sex, and that is for corpses. There are two lines about rape, which can be a big problem.

  ~Two whole lines, huh?~

  The Haphans are worse. They have a complete book of do’s and don’ts for themselves, and that’s just the one about men and women. There’s a book for every combination you can imagine. They’re freely available to read at the Native Affairs office. I looked through some when I first came to the city. Almost everything is allowed, but it’s taxed differently.

  ~How ultimately boring of you Tachba.~

  I’m sorry, but we’re prudes. If Ville Emsa had a few hundred thousand more women, perhaps we’d be able to satisfy your imagination.

  Because they meant to mix into the idlers, Sethlan paused near a band playing on a corner, three musicians and six powerful bodyguards. The guards kept busy knocking down soldiers with drawn knives who passed too closely, intercepting the random belligerents who charged the players, and shunting away the snaking lines of single-file soldiers who walked hand-to-shoulder so the crowds wouldn’t separate them. The band was from the far East, Ed-homse, and they were playing a clapper dance. It was one of the pieces that was supposed to have made corpses jump, back in Culleyho’s day. The music was atonal and very fast, and several Tachba covered their ears as they passed, shooting angry glances at the musicians.

  Sethlan had to explain to the Voice again. The music plays off the Pollution. Some Tacchies just can’t bear this; it makes their arms twitch. You can see which ones if you watch the crowd. For a very few it drives them mad. That was Fat Culleyho’s nation, all of them interbreeding on the other side of the mountains. You play a fast clapper and they go into fits.

  ~And who is Culleyho?~

  Fat Culleyho, the queen who gave the Haphans their defeats in the Eastern mountains, before the Imperials began torching every town and farm and she was forced to lay down arms. She was a Caremsa. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if she was a relation of our own Nana.

  ~A manleader who was fat?~

  Not that it matters, but she was supposedly a waif. Just a girl of sixteen when they put her against the wall and shot her to pieces. The Haphans weren’t strangling back then.

  A knife flying from the crowd made a lucky hit on the strings of the dolovin, so the horn and drums continued with a sea chanty and then switched to the Sessera national anthem when the crowd pressed too close. No doubt they played it every half hour. The soldiers stopped looming and bawled along, tears streaming down cheeks as they rocked together. The hat was passed and filled with money.

  Am I supposed to read the secret papers here in the street? Sethlan eventually asked. He was bored.

  ~No. This was just to confuse the attention of anybody who might be trying to follow our thoughts. By the way, I can’t believe your anthem is all percussion.~

  Sethlan was just keying the lock when Nana opened the door. She was fresh from his bath, steaming visibly, and the towel wrapped around her middle pushed her breasts up at him. Sethlan tried not to look, finding the door pane and then the transom with his eyes and hating them both. She watched his conflict approvingly and gave him a kiss. “Am I not delicious?”

  “Culleyho, almost too rich to bear.”

  She pulled him inside the apartment. “Men are always giving me names.”

  ~Remove that towel, sir!~

  I would never.

  She dropped her towel, and then peeled off his uniform, tossing it piece by piece to the floor. She saw his concern at the growing mess. “Don’t be such a little girl, Sethlan. Let them get wrinkled. I’ve been abusing your hot water again…I can’t believe the boiler still works. This must have been some sort of royal residence in the olden days. I can’t get hot water outside of the Haphan Quarter…”

  Nana’s voice trailed off. Her eyes were locked on the folders tucked into his belt.

  “Oh, you gem,” she breathed. Then she glanced up guiltily. “Of course, you didn’t know I’d be here. You could never be blamed.”

  Watching his eyes, she carefully eased the folders out.

  “Any official document that you would have to hide…it must be something troubling.” She pulled him to the bed and sat him next to her. “I’m sorry.”

  She didn’t have to explain. Sethlan had his new knuckle-bones; he was paid and almost even treated and trusted like a Haphan. To still find secrets withheld would be humiliating.

  “I think we’re being practiced upon,” he said.

  “The Haphans have been leading us for—”

  “No. Haphans are being lied to, as well.”

  Her brow knit. “Then who? How, even?”

  “That is the question,” Sethlan sighed. “So I’m glad you’re here. ‘Bring a lie to a liar,’ and all that. I have Cephas coming soon to take these files far away. It will be real trouble for anybody to be found with them.”

  Nana, whose face had gone smooth and expressionless as he spoke, shook herself and then opened a folder. “What is an ‘atomic?’”

  ~Oh, no.~ said the Voice.

  Nana puzzled over the pages. Sethlan sat quietly be
side her while the Voice explained nuclear weaponry.

  ~So even a small atomic bomb will obliterate Ville Emsa. Large and, uh, pretty as the city is, everybody will be swept away, the buildings knocked down. The crater will be a day’s walk to cross. It will be a slick glass bowl from the heat of the blast.~

  I’ve always thought of bombs as something you throw, Sethlan answered, and the Voice sighed. He knew he was being simple, but something in his mind wasn’t letting him comprehend a weapon on that scale.

  ~These are much larger than hand-bombs. These would be seeding armament suitable for nuking asteroids or pounding enemies from orbit, and there is nothing small about them. Usually these weapons aren’t even stored on the ships; they fly alongside like a flock of birds, making course corrections with the fleet. They can get quite large, depending on how much money someone wanted to save while they were being built. To be transported on the surface of a planet, it would require a train.~

  “These bombs are very large,” Sethlan told Nana. “They’re not ‘bombs’ in the regular sense.”

  She nodded. “Being moved on the Haphan rails, see? That’s what I gather from the schedule, here.”

  “One train car to carry one bomb.”

  “One car, one bomb.” Nana repeated, eyes finding his.

  “They are too big be shot from a gun,” Sethlan said. “I guess they will be rolled up to the front. Maybe put in one of those new Haphan war-balls. They might be buried and then the front allowed to shift so the Tachba will walk over them. Or the sappers could move one down a mine shaft, and...” He shook his head as his invention failed him. If the Voice was correct, these were childlike suggestions. He couldn’t fathom the scale. Was it like an offensive grenade that would go off like a Big Bumper? What would make a Bumper look small—one of the shells from a Tachba dreadnought? And to make one of those shells seem small, he would have to imagine a magazine of them exploding all at once. An explosion of that size already defeated his imagination. And to make that explosion look small?

  “Is there a part in there about delivery?” he asked faintly.

  “There is not,” Nana said. “There doesn’t need to be.”

  ~I’m sorry, Sethlan,~ said the Voice.

  “What do you mean?”

  ~These bombs are for Ville Emsa.~

  Nana’s voice overrode the confusion in his head. “The Haphans are poisoning the well, don’t you see? They are salting the fields.”

  “Not the Haphans,” Sethlan cut in. “The Haphans are being tricked. They probably don’t even know about these bombs.”

  Nana’s brow furrowed. She was thinking, Sethlan knew, about how to contradict him without having him realize it. She was engaging her dashta talents to manage him, and this made him even more despondent.

  “Sethlan, we don’t need some powerful third party to explain this. It’s not worth manufacturing invisible enemies out of thin evidence, simply to protect what we want the Haphans to be. The Haphans we know, here and now, can do this act without the slightest hypocrisy. And they are. Twenty of these bombs could destroy a large part of Emsa.”

  ~One. One bomb could wipe it off the map, and make it uninhabitable for a thousand years.~

  “One.” Sethlan’s voice was a whisper. Nana flinched, and her eyes filled with tears. He felt useless, merely relating what he was told without any understanding, as useless as a schoolchild at the front.

  ~They might not be used,~ the Voice suggested.

  “They will be used,” said Sethlan. “The battle for Ville Emsa will continue to grow, and when it comes to adding manpower, the South has us beat. When we launch our desperate breakthrough attack, we will be caught one-handed, like a dud grenade, and thrown back. It is the only outcome possible.”

  “We’ve broken through the South’s lines before.”

  Sethlan shook his head. “Every few years, on a quiet piece of property, when the Southies are caught flat. In a real grinder all we have ever been able to do is keep them away, and fight them to a standstill until the ground goes soft and nobody can move.”

  “But it’s fall and the ground is getting harder,” Nana said. “Soon it will freeze, and we won’t even have that.”

  “When these atomics come into play,” Sethlan said, feeling his way, “it will be after the Tachba enter Ville Emsa. After they’ve brought in a huge number of troops to rape the city. The Haphans will be falling back at a run to the old Sesseran fortresses, the ones we built before the Haphans took over. That’s all of Sessera right there.”

  “Won’t my brothers—won’t our boys be falling back too?” Nana asked.

  “There is no boot that would leave the city to the South. No, I think, even without any organization, they will gather around the city and make a stand. The atomics won’t go off against the Sesseran soldiers. By that point, we will have all been spent. The bombs will explode under the Southies and their new prize.”

  Nana shrank. Her shoulders slumped, her hands lay loosely, palm-up, in her lap.

  Sethlan forced himself to keep thinking. “Now, indicators that the Haphans are…are abandoning Sessera. Let’s see, we will watch for artillery limbering. Hospitals broken down. Haphan units relieved to staging—staging is a word that will always show up in orders. It’s not uncommon to pull all the pure Haphan units off a hot front at the same time, until it cools off. We call it breathing. You’d hear someone say, ‘The Happies are taking a breath.’ And…”

  Sethlan felt a touch on his arm and glanced up. He had stopped speaking, for how long he didn’t know. He’d simply been staring at the floor, thinking useless thoughts, and thinking them way too slowly.

  She asked, “What if we don’t launch that last offensive? What if we just hunker down and hold the front? What if Ville Emsa doesn’t get taken?”

  “I don’t know. It’s probably too late at this stage. Besides, who would tell the boots to disobey the Haphans? And be heard?”

  The Voice let them stew a moment longer. Then it said, ~Page through the other folders for me.~

  Sethlan didn’t have the will to answer.

  ~Just page through them. You don’t have to read them, just put your eyes on them. It would be helpful to my task.~

  Oh, fuck your task, Sethlan answered. But he opened them anyway.

  “What are you looking for?” Nana asked.

  He shrugged. The pages passed before his eyes, schedules, tables, equations, and local copies of orders. It was just a few folders, with only a few suspicious sheets scattered into them, enough for suspicious minds to see the plan, and for hopeful minds to pretend to see nothing. Despair was thick and cloudy in his thoughts, a foregone conclusion, as if the bombs had already gone off and the city was leveled, and the Haphans had betrayed all of Sessera. He did not know when it happened. At some point in his turning of the pages, the depression became absolute, and the nattering Voice faded away as if his whole mind had gone deaf.

  What did you see? he asked the Voice. There is more than just me in this.

  ~It is nothing,~ the Voice answered. But Sethlan heard the lie in his mind.

  Someone knocked.

  “I’m not here,” Nana said. She slipped into the bathroom and hid behind the door.

  “Cephas, thank you for coming.” Sethlan permitted the fat captain into the room.

  “I hope you know what a concession I’m making, leaving the club,” Cephas said, smiling faintly. “With the dashta gone, there’s nobody to ration my bourbon, and I’m missing quality drinking time. You look quite ill, by the way. Worse than usual.”

  “I am glad you could come, and I won’t keep you long. I need something very simple, an intelligence matter. I am returning to the front, and I can’t have these documents on me.” Sethlan rapidly flipped the folders closed and straightening the stack. “Would you keep these on your person until I can collect them again?”

  “These are the folders from behind the red door?” Cephas eyed them with ponderous, low-lidded interest. “The ones th
at would get me killed if they were found on me?”

  “I was coming to that.”

  “I will obviously have to read them.” Cephas lifted the folders from Sethlan’s hands. “I can only die once, can I, now? And that was months ago.”

  “You are welcome to them,” Sethlan said uncomfortably. “In fact, it might be helpful. I’m concerned about the contents, the bottom folder in particular. If I were to die, then an intelligence advantage would be lost—but not if you had the same information. You see?”

  “I know about doubling.” Cephas’s lips slapped together primly. “I’ll merely agree to the air between us, Happie-style, that some secrets would be safest if spread thin. I will view these as battlefield intelligence, found on opportunity and now to be exploited.”

  “Be careful, I think the manhunt is still on.”

  Cephas tucked them away.

  “I’m glad to be useful again,” he said, after a moment.

  When the door closed on Cephas, Nana came out. “There’s a manhunt for those folders?”

  “Well, Nana, there was a theft, an outcry, and a narrow escape. I assume there’s a manhunt.”

  Nana gathered her dress off the back of the chair—where it had lain in full view of Cephas, he realized. She slid it over her shoulders and caught his look.

  “I’m not leaving for long.” She flashed a quick smile. “I’ll be back soon, and I know the trick of the door. It doesn’t even need a key if you lift the handle. Your pensioner told me that, and a few other secrets.”

  6

  Nana

  Nana reached the streets and wished she had thought to bring her cloak into the freezing air. She wore nothing but her shift and her boots. When did the nights turn so cold? On Ville Emsa’s latitude, it seemed to jump from fall to winter like turning a switch, and she always forgot.

  She soon wanted her cloak for another reason. It wasn’t long before the boots in the street understood that a woman walked among them, and slight or not, she was wildly under-dressed and exotic-looking.