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

by Walter Blaire

  ~I would not have heard about the new ship, if Lucky Strike wanted to keep it a secret.~

  Lucky Strike?

  ~That is the name of my ship, the one that hired me for Grigory IV. Lucky Strike hasn’t left the system in decades, maybe centuries, so your astronomers would not have seen any emergence or a new celestial occlusion from it. However, the new space ship is new, and I wasn’t told about it. Apparently I’m not supposed to know.”

  And how does that feel, not being told something important?

  ~It feels like I’m a fucking grown-up, if you have to know, Sethlan. It feels like I’m not some whining juvenile who wants to gobble answers off a spoon.~

  But Sethlan ignored her, typically, and worked into the puzzle. There are secrets, and then there are reasons for secrets.

  ~Yes,~ said Eponymous. She thought back to when Lucky Strike had vortexed her into the energy field. ~The last time I spoke to my ship, it mentioned assigning me to Grigory. It said, ‘I wasn’t even told to do that.’~

  Told.

  ~You don’t know what these ships are like out here in the ass-end of space. No one tells them anything. Lucky Strike has more mental candle-power than all the brains on this planet combined. It has weapons that can melt the sun. So who, in all of known space, could tell this ship to do something?~

  CivGov!

  ~Civ— yes. Now how the hell do you know about CivGov?~

  Oh, sorry, Semelon answered, mind thick with sarcasm. Was I supposed to be a complete bumpkin? The original Haphan charter for landing was issued by CivGov, two and a half millennia ago. The Haphans only reached our system a hundred and fifty years ago. And the histories say they almost didn’t land. When they saw our forebears, they almost reported the planet to CivGov. Then they decided it was their burden to civilize us. It’s in all the history books.

  ~Lucky them.~

  These ships of yours, Voice, they can lie?

  ~Of course they can lie.~

  As machines, they sound badly designed.

  ~Ships are not like steam carts; they’re more like Nanas. Lucky Strike obviously didn’t send me down out of fear of CivGov or to gather information that it could get by itself with a fraction of the effort. I think it’s conforming to the letter of a request. So that when someone rolls back the orders of the day, it will be seen that Lucky Strike did everything perfectly and correctly.~

  We do the same thing in the field all the time. You can receive a direct order and do the complete opposite without ever having to question your loyalty. You only have to be a little creative with your interpretation.

  ~Here is what I think happened. The CivGov ship transits into the system several months ago. Chances are it’s just passing through. It’s probably some merchant or an explorer looking to stake a claim. A dormant CivGov representative was obviously on the ship; ships carry Representatives because tariffs are waived, you see, and a ship with a representative can stake claim on any interesting property without having to call home.~

  The ship is just passing through, Sethlan clarified, in a quiet tone. It’s not staying.

  ~Passing through is enough. The new ship studies Grigory closely because it is ripe for colonization. Grigory meets all the criteria, and it can make someone wealthy beyond all reason. Only the ship finds the Haphans down here, and their technology raises the world’s developmental level just above the cut-off limit. It’s probably something the Haphans are doing on purpose; they have given you Sessies just enough technology to keep them safe from interstellar claim jumpers, but not enough to lose their technological advantage when the Southies copy them. No flying machines, for example.~

  Okay.

  ~Anyway, given the obvious brutalities of your existence, the CivGov representative opens a channel to Lucky Strike and asks some pointed questions. Lucky Strike is the local stand-in for all that is cultured and moral in the universe and should have been expected to correct or at least report this abysmal planetary war. I surmise that the CivGov representative wasn’t satisfied with Lucky Strike’s answers, which were probably evasive. The CivGov representative then escalated the matter and requested a detached operative. That’s me. I’m an Observer, just like you, only I’m better trained and I get more respect—usually. So I was sent down to Grigory IV on official business but with a false story from Lucky Strike. That alone is enough to hang the ship when my reports are relayed back to CivGov…~

  That thought doesn’t seem to make you happy, Voice. I guess you don’t think your report will arrive at CivGov?

  ~My report is essentially a copy of myself. And, no, it won’t get there.~ Eponymous scowled internally, only now realizing why the ship had left her alone since the vortexing. While her mind had been spread thin in the energy field during that last conversation, the ship had duplicated her neuronal layout. For a few seconds, her mental overlay had been rendered as a series of logical points and gateways on a simple dimensioned grid, and the circuitry had been copied and inserted into some corner of Lucky Strike’s massive volume of processing memory.

  Such things could be done, but it was not condoned. It was almost a form of kidnapping. Somewhere, a golem of Eponymous was thinking her thoughts, writing her reports, lusting after the memories of her ex-boyfriends, and being completely a puppet of the ship. Of course Lucky Strike hadn’t bothered her since that conversation. It had everything it needed: someone to report from a sensorium generated by the ship itself, in Eponymous’s voice, and using her personal encryption codes, which were on file with CivGov Oversight.

  ~We are in some real trouble.~

  Sethlan surprised him with one of his leaps. You mean the ship has been manipulating our affairs here on Grigory IV, and it would not like to be discovered.

  Eponymous felt a dark change in Sethlan’s mind. Anger boiled into the man’s thoughts, a nearly physical sensation that left her seasick. The entire race had been polluted, and the Tachba noticed it daily in the common manias and the growing distortions of the personalities surrounding them. Fathers who compulsively followed routines and slowly disappeared from their families. Brothers who were present for sixteen years and then dead in a blink of violence.

  What brought Sethlan to the verge of white-hot rage was the memory of his mother, and how she was reduced as she bore child after child. Her stolid face growing slack, her stomach filling and emptying like a pouch. The very minerals of her body irreplaceably spent with each delivery, as if she was boiling away in the pot. Sethlan remembered all those smiling little child-boys with their happy yells who eventually grew up and then disappeared into precipitate, commonplace Tachba deaths. And Sethlan himself, seeing it all, but trying for the sadlessness of his siblings. All of this led back to the inevitable thought: it didn’t have to be this way.

  His people could have been left alone.

  ~The ship did not cause your Pollution,~ Eponymous said.

  But to play on a person’s tic, to profit from a side-effect…To practice on a whole race…We have been made puppets again.

  Sethlan leaned forward, his face in his hands, and his body quaked for a moment—only the minimal amount that could be disguised under his greatcoat in the small, tight cabin of the steam cart. Eponymous felt suffocated, airless again, as Sethlan’s mind gathered itself together. Service. Utility. Think small. Focus on the small.

  A wall of clarity folded over the man’s anger, driven by a will that made Eponymous feel small and superfluous.

  When Sethlan sat up again, Eponymous said, ~Ships are hobbyists. They will nurse along a super-nova or feed rocks into a black hole until the signature is just so. We don’t know why. You can make a killing if you find a ship that obsesses over a commodities market. Ships will also take an interest in certain civilizations. They will tinker with a planet; we never know why. They collect oddities, and your eternal front is a fascinating oddity. At the beginning, I wondered how you could sustain a hundred year trench war.~

  It’s about strength and will.

  ~Yes, dro
ll,~ Eponymous said. ~Ships will collect little planetary empires. They’ll gather pogroms and charismatic dictators. They flood the archives with a staggering amount of detail. Imagine all your memories, multiplied by a million, going into a library every second. Other ships borrow the information at the same rate. Some ships, I’m sad to say, even collect atrocities.~

  Atrocities. Sethlan’s control wavered momentarily. Quite right. You are clever with words. That is us precisely.

  ~Imagine Lucky Strike stumbling on this very promising and interesting situation you have. Highly reproductive Tachba in an endless cycle of industrialized war. But it’s too static, the front. The Haphans want a perfect, unchanging front line, and they’ve done too well. After a few decades, the changelessness begins to worry Lucky Strike. Perhaps Grigory IV is not interesting enough after all. Perhaps it’s merely a curio, compared against the other variations of known space.~

  The ship puts in a finger and stirs.

  ~A hint, here and there, makes the South a little more clever. The Haphans improve their game. A slogging battle of attrition becomes a nail biter.~

  Then writing is introduced.

  ~Southie supply lines tighten up. Ammunition gets to where it is supposed to go. The Haphans now have bigger problems than just running out of men. The trench actually changes.~

  Ville Emsa becomes important.

  ~A hint is dropped about dreadnoughts and canals. They have a blockaded navy, with ships being built every year by generations of Tachba who just can’t be trained differently. All of these can be sent north on the canals.~

  Lucky Strike pulls its ropes and convinces the Haphans to bring up some ancient atomic weapons to balance the score.

  ~And then Sessera is wiped off the map. The war gets interesting again. We’re looking at a civilization-scale social engineering program.~

  Sethlan’s mind was quiet for a long time.

  That is a very horrible scenario, Voice. I like it. But you couldn’t be more wrong.

  ~I couldn’t? Maybe if I had a second chance, et cetera.~

  If your ship can remove the Haphans, then Grigory can be opened for colonization again, can’t it? If the Tachba cleanse the Haphans off the planet, then it will be back in the state that let the Haphans license it in the first place. That’s why your ship is tilting the war.

  Eponymous pondered, her thoughts spinning hard against Sethlan’s. ~I think you’re right. Follow the money; that’s always the simplest thing. We don’t need an eccentric ship when we have an avaricious ship. Lucky for us, the ship doesn’t have a leg to stand on. If it was just experimenting with the surface culture, it could allege it was trying to mitigate the conditions on the planet. However, if it’s jumping a claim, that’s a different story. Money is involved.~

  Are you sure we should be having this conversation, Voice? Sethlan asked. Given that the ship can read our thoughts?

  Eponymous again pictured her personal golem, slaving away inside Lucky Strike and believing she was real. ~Based on my last discussion with the ship, it might not check us again—though when it does, we’re as good as dead. When it finds out what we know, it will only be safe if it kills us.~

  I’m not imposing a particular point of view, but I don’t like your ship. How can we kill it first?

  ~They’re unkillable, mostly. There are ancient weapons like troubadours and the massy spikes, and a dozen other things we wouldn’t want to introduce near Grigory IV. No, the best way to sink a space ship is to freeze its assets, transfer its cargo manifest, and take away its reproductive rights. It might as well be a wandering asteroid then, for all that civilization will deal with it.~

  So it’s death by ostracism.

  ~If it’s stupid but it works, it’s not stupid.~

  I could not make a judgment, Sethlan said, his mind full of judgment. Anyway, all of this is beyond our power to correct.

  ~That is where you’re wrong,~ said Eponymous briskly. ~You think of me as a buzzing in your head. I am a weapons-grade bureaucrat. I eat ships like Lucky Strike for breakfast, and I shit them out by noon.~

  Eponymous felt Sethlan go watery with surprise and relief, though that was immediately followed by healthy doubt.

  There’s a ‘but’ there...

  ~The problem is, Sethlan, we are going to have to set off those atomic bombs.~

  12

  Gawarty

  Gawarty finished hanging his pressed uniforms in the closet, feeling proud of himself for keeping up with them, when the door to his apartment opened. Two soldiers in Sesseran uniforms walked in and glanced around. They were so relaxed and at ease that Gawarty simply stared, perplexed. He even felt a Haphan urge to apologize when they stiffened with surprise, noticing him in the closet.

  “We’re here to grab you,” said the tall one. “I am supposed to ask for no drama.”

  “Grab me how?”

  The men glanced at each other before the tall one answered. “As in, take you against your will. Bundle you out of here and bring you to a place where you do not wish to be.”

  “I never got the knack of that door. I should really start locking it.” Gawarty knew he was yammering. He was hoping his mind would catch up while he filled the air with words. Nothing came.

  “Looking how things turned out I’d have to agree.” The tall one pulled Gawarty’s greatcoat off its hook and held it out to him. “Not that we expected a challenge.”

  The short one stepped forward and grasped his arm. Gawarty’s bewilderment shifted to concern. “There is the prescribed distance between any Haphan and a servitor.”

  “Consider it waived,” the man said with a grin.

  They brought Gawarty to the Eternal Front in a common baxxaxx-drawn ammunition cart and then walked him through trenches full of sleeping boots. They left him in an oddly empty but otherwise unremarkable length of trench. He waited but nothing happened. He was wondering what kind of error had been made when the pile of sandbags in front of him opened its eyes.

  “What the—!” he scrambled backward.

  The jumble of shadows was an actual person, someone so motionless he couldn’t possibly be alive. But then again those eyes. Their whites were stark against the darkness, almost illuminated, with light amber irises that revealed both pupils at different dilation. The strange figure stared straight ahead, blinking so infrequently that Gawarty’s eyes teared in response. This thing wasn’t leaning against the sandbags, he was embedded in them. Perhaps the trench had even been constructed around him; it lined his figure like a man-shaped doorway. The omnipresent dirt of the front piled everywhere, blurring outlines, and he seemed fused to the earth.

  Yes, this was clearly the colonel that Jephia had mentioned on Gawarty’s first day. The same colonel whose name appeared on some of Semelon’s orders.

  Gawarty said, “You should have somebody run a broom over you, Colonel Goldros.”

  For several seconds, the colonel gave him nothing back. Then one eye swiveled toward Gawarty. One eye, not both.

  Gawarty found his voice again. “I find that hanging my uniforms in the closet calms my mind. Maybe you’ll discover that a good sweep will have a similar harmonizing effect.”

  “Forgive my delay,” the figure said. “I was coming to an agreement with myself. I just noticed you were speaking to me. This means you’re done thinking for now. Have you deduced why you are here?”

  “Yes,” Gawarty said. The Sesseran outranked him, but it would have felt wrong to add “sir.” The colonel was not speaking with the authority of an officer but in an unnerving guttural whisper.

  Goldros continued. “You and I have no business today. I have sent for your sister, and you are only here to make sure she will answer, despite fears or misgivings.”

  “Fears? Misgivings? You haven’t met my sister.”

  “Her palpable fears,” Goldros said. “Her fear is evident in every decision she takes. She walks the edge of a cliff, and now she reaches the point where she must leap off of it.”

&nbs
p; Gawarty glanced around the trench. They were alone, and he could be direct. “Colonel Goldros, have you been evaluated recently? By the promotion board or the officer medical review committee?”

  “Yes, I have,” the figure replied. “I found them wanting.”

  “Ah. Then I will just mention that my sister isn’t someone who is ‘sent for.’ I will have to write you up, colonel. Frankly, I am embarrassed by your blundering.”

  Goldros was, predictably, unmoved by Gawarty’s astonishment. “No need to turn Haphan. You dislike waiting, lieutenant, but you will not wait long. She should be here any moment. In fact, she may already be here.”

  Gawarty glanced around the trench again. Still empty. Suspiciously empty until it turned into the traverses on either side. When had any part of the trench ever been so completely abandoned?

  “Goldros, look around—with both eyes, if you please. My sister is not here unless she’s stuffed herself into the scenery, like you. And she would never do that; she’s too meticulous about her clothes.”

  In answer, the colonel’s eyes rose to the parados above Gawarty’s head. There was a faint scratch of boot on canvas, and then Jephia landed beside Gawarty in the trench.

  “I am pleased by the depth of understanding you bring to my wardrobe, Warty,” she said.

  Dumb relief washed over Gawarty, and he shrugged an apology. He should have guessed that she would scout ahead. This was spying, after all. He was sorry he had flushed her out of hiding, but also grateful that this situation could now be resolved.

  “The Spiderfish herself,” Goldros said. “Young lady, you—”

  “First things first,” Jephia said. “Will Gawarty leave this meeting alive?”

  Gawarty almost laughed, but caught himself. Jephia was asking in the blunt Tacchie style. It was a real question to her.