“Because there are some neighborhoods that need work.”
“Diggery, I’m talking about landing-day weapons. Big bombs that are supposed to be used in space, to clear away floating moons and annoying planets. They are going to melt Ville Emsa into a glass slick.”
Diggery’s eyes locked on Sethlan’s, and Sethlan studied him for circling. He briefly remembered watching Tejj for the same reason and being proud when Tejj’s rationality won through.
For his part, Diggery answered immediately. “Not our Haphans, captain. They would never do that.”
“What do you mean our Haphans?”
“The ones we’ve sucked into our cranky act, sir. The ones who see we’re all good eggs and secretly wish they were as carefree and—I don’t know how to put it—as tomorrowless as we are. You don’t see that?”
Sethlan shook his head impatiently.
“Sir, here’s what I’ve learned. The Happies have fourteen ways to take a crap, all of them written down. A Landing Day dinner has them picking between eight kinds of forks, depending on what’s on the menu. And if they get it wrong and eat noodles with a quiche fork—or heaven forbid, cut the noodles with the thin side of the noodle fork—they have a million ancestors giving them a condescending sniff from the candles. How insufferable to be a Haphan!
“Now and then, sir, they all wish they were kids again. They wish they were back in school, drinking till dawn, getting dressed with dirty clothes off the floor, doing crazy circus things with all their hundreds of girlfriends. When they come to the front, they see that this is our natural state. They only want a little bit of our insanity, don’t they? There’s nothing wrong with that.” Diggery paused, staring into the air, and then remembered Sethlan again. “Show me a Happie who wants to burn down the funhouse. You won’t find one. With us around, they get to feel superior and envious at the same time. They would never end it.”
“We’re riding toward the first bomb right now,” Sethlan pointed out.
Diggery shrugged. “I’m sure you’re right about your bombs, captain, but it ain’t the Haphans. Someone, somewhere, is just being an asshole.”
Sethlan opened his mouth to answer, then stopped. Diggery was right, after all. “Let me tell you this, then: There is a ship over Grigory, which is stirring things up.”
“That ship in the sky, which everybody is talking about?”
“Well, no.” Sethlan waved a hand. “Apparently it’s like a train station up there. One ship is feeding bad advice to the Haphans and good advice to the Southies. We don’t like that ship. The other ship just came in and is asking what is going on.”
Diggery took this on board with apparent ease, but then asked, “How do you know what these ships are saying?”
That’s a good question, Sethlan thought.
~You can’t tell him about me?~ the Voice asked, with a slight hurt.
We don’t like madness much, Sethlan said. I will sound insane.
~Tell him about the phone, then. Do you think you can lie just one more—~
“There is a phone in the artery hallway,” Sethlan resumed. “I spoke to the person on the other side. He was neither Tachba nor Haphan, and certainly not the South. I won’t explain everything just now, but that voice could only belong to the bad ship, you see. I stole some papers off the table, and after I learned about the bombs, I gave the papers to Cephas, who apparently went straight to the Haphans with them, which got Trappia killed.”
Diggery didn’t point out any of the questionable holes in his half-truths. In fact, the boy’s face had turned grim at the end.
“Nana,” Diggery said, and Sethlan’s stomach clutched. “Nana ordered me to kill Cephas. I don’t know why, and Cephas was no help in that regard.”
“Nana killed Cephas?”
Diggery rolled his eyes. “In a manner of speaking.”
“Nana. That woman will drive me insane.”
They shortly arrived at the bridge above the depot, where a short train idled. It was just an engine, its coal-cart, and two freight cars: the first on the list of trains bringing the doomsday bombs into Ville Emsa. Corpses of Haphan soldiers littered the ground around the train and hung from the control car.
The sergeant in charge sent Sethlan and Diggery a look of utter relief. “Which I have my boots going knockers, having shot down just a few Happies.” He jerked his head at a clutch of Sesserans walking a circle.
“But you’re still with us?” Diggery said.
“Oh, certainly, firm as old cheese,” the sarnt answered. “Bless that you’re here, and all, but there’s no talking sense to the boots.”
“I’ll straighten them out,” Diggery said, turning toward them.
Sethlan heard the helpie’s voice. Tired exasperation, but no hint of self-doubt. Sethlan knew it was finally time.
“Wait,” Sethlan said, and they both turned back. “Sarnt, what rank is this helpie?”
The sergeant frowned at the sudden change in topic, but he knew tradition. “Em’s a lieutenant standing there, in my estimation. Of course his chevrons say different, la, but they’re wrong. Em’s a lieutenant-geh.”
“There it is, all at once.” Sethlan gave the briefest smile. “Dephram Digalon: I commission you into the Sesseran chivalry. Protect our children, eat our food, drink our beer, keep yourself bathed—you know the rest. You are promoted, sir, to lieutenant. Service to the empire.”
“Service!” Diggery blurted. “Thank you, captain, I certainly deserve it.”
“Happy returns,” the sergeant added, and then Sethlan pulled him away toward the train cars.
“Sergeant, there are some devices in these cars, and I’ll show you what to do with them. You will then find two more trains at the locations I tell you, already captured by other Observer squads. They will have similar machines on them, and you must do the same thing for each train. You will fix those machines the same way. Do you follow?”
“Yes sir, two more trains, two more machines, and treat them the same.”
They climbed into the car, and stared at the large smooth egg it contained. Various things had been bolted to it which were fully comprehensible: levers, some inverted bottles of fluid, a fertilizer hopper off an agricultural tractor. The rest was smooth and dully reflective. It sat in the center of the cart with an inert, utter silence that put Sethlan on edge.
The soldiers guarding the egg were standing in respectful silence. Most of them.
~Sethlan, stop those men at the end! They shouldn’t slosh that green fluid on each other!~
“Put the tube back,” Sethlan said. “I don’t care how brightly that water glows. The egg needs it.”
~Open the hopper. You will find—I don’t know, something carbon.~
Sethlan opened it. Charcoal.
~As this thing activates, the hopper will feed into the reaction chamber. Then it turns on a current, and then boom.~
“The crap in this box feeds the egg,” Sethlan translated aloud.
~We can’t keep these bombs from going off, I’m sorry about that.~
But for some reason you still sound cheerful.
~My conscience can be clean. It’s the best possible outcome, unless you’re standing next to one when it goes off.~
What if I empty the hoppers? Then there’s nothing to feed it.
~You’d still have a big boom just from the reaction itself, in the megaton range. These hoppers give it more oomf. What we’re going to do is change the mix. We’re going to pull those briquettes out and alternate them with something else.~
Sethlan told the boots, “You take out this charcoal, and put in something new.”
~There can be no deviation from what I tell you.~
Eponymous guided the process. Fifteen of the thin charcoal bricks, and then a layer of foliage. They cut some bushes at the edge of the train tracks. Then six more charcoal briquettes, another layer of foliage, and then a final layer of rock to make sure everything would feed smoothly into the chamber. Then they latched the h
opper closed.
~I’d imagine these bombs can be fed by any material you put in, and it would change the profile of the reaction. When they explode, they will certainly be noticed. Any far-ranging ship worth the title will notice the staggering on the skin of the bubble of light from the explosion. A sort of blinking, if you will.~
A message.
~Nothing so fancy. It’s more like a scream from the bottom of a well. I am sorry, but we can’t do any better than that.~
You’re saying the bombs will still explode. What if we stuff the hopper with rocks? Or maybe birds. Nobody likes birds.
~It’s all just atoms and potential energy. Changing the spectral profile of the first burst of light—it’s our best bet. This machine wasn’t made to be opened, so there’s no access inside. We can’t tamper with the detonator, and we can’t reprogram it. But we can make it more harmless.~
How?
~I truly hope all the bombs are the same,~ the Voice said, momentarily worried. ~If these idiots get confused…~
What do we need to do?
~These bombs are for engineering, so they can be focused. The important thing is to look for this added-on thingie. It probably goes to the choke. Crank it to the closed position, whichever way the arrow is pointing. We don’t want it open, we want it as tight as possible. That means it will pop up and down and only ruin a mile or less.~
“Your last step is to crank this thing closed.” Sethlan wound it down, finding it superlatively smooth despite its size and heft. “After all that, fire up the train engine and send it away from Ville Emsa. Away. The train only has one control lever.”
In case something happened to the high-functioning sergeant, Sethlan had each of the soldiers repeat the instructions back to him, with particular attention to the layering of the material in the hopper. Fifteen, plants, six, plants, rock. Used to remembering family news for each other, they each repeated the recipe with ease. “Send it away from Emsa, that is the preferred direction.”
“Away. So says the cappy.”
Sethlan thought for a moment and added, “And don’t play on the trains. Jump off and report directly to the 314th. I have something very fun lined up, but only if you do everything right and hurry back.”
The boots got excited to hear that. Sethlan left the sergeant to repeat the orders several more times to them, and dropped to the ground.
Diggery waited for him in the sun. Next to him stood a messenger. “Haut captain, this one is looking for you.”
“Sappa, isn’t it?” Sethlan recognized him from the club. “You have a report?”
“Oh, full of information-meh. I’m from the front, fifty ticks after you left by the best reckoning. Lieutenant Tawarna sent me to hunt you up, not knowing where to find you himself. Em’s a decent sort of Happie, now, right?”
“Now that he can’t order me around, I find him very decent,” Diggery said. “Tell Semelon what you told me.”
“Old Sticks ordered to launch the offensive against the south.”
Sethlan closed his eyes and turned away. He knew what he would hear next.
“The Sessies didn’t move. We refused to move! Which such a thing has never been heard of! Not a soldier answered the call, and they sat in the trenches playing grab-ass or whatever it is you do when you go insane. You see, it’s the queen who told them not to move.”
“Nana,” Diggery added.
“La, the general wanted to be mad, but he was laughing too hard. He immediately called off the offensive, thanked the troops, and put them to reinforcing the trenches and even adding some new bunkers. We’em all think he’s our papa now, it was such the right thing to do. Old Sticks said, ‘We’em not moving! Ville Emsa is gonna preserved, like!’ He’s a pot of jam.” Sappa beamed for a moment but then turned serious. “Nextly, someone in Happie HQ sent a commando squad to plink the general! We want to vote him emperor of the south, and the Happies are trying to kill him, their own guy! They want their offensive started, and he stopped it. Then they told him to pull everyone off the trench, and he refused to move. Now the Haphans think he’s a Tacchie-loving insurrectionist, fit only for plinking.”
“The Haphans are attacking their own trenches?” Sethlan asked, astonished.
“It’s more surgical than that, sir,” Sappa said. “They’re only after Old Sticks. The trenches are already empty on both sides of him. Everybody else has pulled back, but not the general. The Haphans want him fighting or gone.”
“I’ll bet they do,” Diggery muttered.
“As I left, sir, the Haphan commando was cutting through our men like a hot knife…they’re shooting lasers, for all love! But Old Sticks called for reinforcments and the Sesseran army answered, because we’em all love him like a pot of jam. I think the General will still be alive and kicking by nightfall.”
Behind Sethlan, the soldiers dropped out of the train carriage. The train gave a great wheeze and slid forward, slow at first but gaining speed. A final boot dropped out of the engine compartment, rolled on the ground, and came up with a big grin.
“Well in hand, sir.” The sergeant gave Sethlan a competent nod and led his unit up the tracks. Their rifles strapped, they moved at a fast run.
“Later today,” Sappa added, “a bunch of units plan to attack the Haphan Quarter and clean out their leadership. They’re going to cut Haphan throats and generally speak harshly to them. It’s an outright rebellion, looks like. No more Happies in Ville Emsa by dawn tomorrow, they’re saying. The boys at the club want to know if the Observers are joining the madness.”
“We are not,” Sethlan said sharply. “Didn’t Nana put a stop to that talk?”
“The queen?” Sappa seemed surprised. “She got snatched by the Haphans this morning. We figure she’s dead by now.”
III
The Man Chair
Chapter: –Nineteen–
Nana
Nana’s cell was six steps by eight steps.
They’d unbagged her at the door and kicked her into the stone-lined room before she could see where she was. The door fit tightly into the frame and was rimmed with metal so there would be no prying at the edges. If she laid flat on the cold flagstone floor and pressed her face into the filth to look into the crack, she could see two inches. Her world was those two inches of tile, and a tiny bare cell of rock.
Now she circled the cell, orbiting the nearly complete darkness with her hand on the wall. If they thought she was important, they would come soon. If they thought she wasn’t, they might come later. She had the roadmap of her life spread before her, very cleanly.
I wonder if I will kill myself.
Nana adjusted her hair, namely to feel the round grip of the finger knife in her palm. It hadn’t been discovered, luckily. But why would they need to closely search such an obviously useless, unresisting girl like her?
Nana recalled Soft’s last day, when she met Sephis and Hodge in the forest. She remembered how she’d treated Hodge at the end.
Then she imagined the point of the finger knife under her own chin. She imagined summoning the strength—really, the wild bleating insanity—to drive the sharp iron up into her brain. She would feel briefly odd as the knife split her tongue and hit the roof of her mouth. And, shit-la, if she had to make a second try at driving it through the roof, up behind her nose…she would be crying by then, wouldn’t she? And then the cold steel would be sitting in her brain, only she wouldn’t feel the cold yet. She would be waiting for death, and it wouldn’t come when whistled. She would feel the pulse in her skull with every heartbeat, sitting her ass on the floor, waiting for the blood to fill her brain and then for her mind to disassemble…waiting how long?
She pushed the image out of her head and tried to think.
She could only trust that the real world continued to spin outside the boundary of her cell. She knew what she had set in motion, but she didn’t know what had come of it. If she wasn’t there, and it wasn’t happening to her, then she couldn’t quite be sure that it was
real at all. She imagined Culleyho against the wall, getting her release from service. Culleyho, too, only knew what she’d set in motion, and not the outcome. Her eyes drifted slowly up into the dark, and wherever she looked, it was black darkness. For all she mattered now, she might already be dead.
I really only control one thing.
It would be so little to kill herself—wouldn’t it? Therefore, it would also be very little to stay alive just a bit longer. And she had good reasons to stay alive. She would wait until she heard the key entering the lock. She held the door latch in her hand, and it was as immobile as granite—but at some point it would turn.
She wasn’t alone.
Nana grew aware of a shadow under the bottom of the door. A darkening with two blots of shade for the feet. There was someone standing in the hallway.
Nana pretended not to notice, more from fear than any cleverness. If she acknowledged the person on the other side, she’d have to acknowledge that this was very likely the end of her life. It would be worse if the executioner noticed her noticing and bestirred himself to action, stealing her last moments.
She made another two circuits of the cell, not glancing over to the interrupted light under the door, and by the third circuit she began to wonder what the shadow was waiting for. This was her first time in prison, and perhaps they listened at every door. She could hear the Southie Tachba in the other cells of the hallway talking to each other or screaming, just snatches, nothing complete, but enough to make her think of an insane asylum.
“All right, scrag,” Nana finally sighed, “what can I say to please you?”
“That didn’t take long,” said the shadow. “I knew this would be easy.”
It was the woman from the doctor’s office. Nana waited, and after a moment the voice continued. “You’ve stopped talking…frozen in fear? At least keep pacing; I find the sound of your footsteps soothing. My name is Colonel Tawarna.”
Nana already disliked the voice: the bored drawl, the affectation of humor and then sternness. She said, “There is something inharmonious about you not caring, but pretending to care.”
The Eternal Front: A Lines of Thunder Novel (Lines of Thunder Universe) Page 44
