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

by Walter Blaire

  Meanwhile the Sesserans are probably digging like mad and evacuating the city. Either way, I shouldn’t be held up here. The briefing from his predecessor, the sector commander who had finally charged into the fire himself, had warned he would be distracted by all manner of cleverness and that he should plod along like a tired baxxaxx.

  But this was a parlay, and king after king, for time out of mind, had issued the order to entertain a parlay.

  Praej stood nearby, soaking up his anxiety. “You don’t need to talk with them.”

  “Orders.”

  “Old orders, not fresh. Listen, Jala, if they want to chat, we can meet them in Ville Emsa.”

  “The chair is at least six hours old. The boys that smelled it said it wasn’t altogether fresh. That’s a big strike against the Sessies.”

  Praej nodded. “At some point, a chair just becomes a rotting pile of severed limbs.”

  It’s some new trick, Jalamadon told himself again. The Sesserans are digging in at the Granta rivers—impossible to bridge under fire. They know we would never shell Emsa itself. There’s a Haphan stink to this, and wouldn’t it be just like the Sessie dogs to teach their owners this trick? His predecessor’s orders told him he should ignore all distraction.

  I’m running in circles.

  One thing was clear. The land in front of him was open, and every Tachba from the Moon Kingdoms knew that open land quickly filled in. While he waited, his obvious path was closing. If he didn’t exploit it, the entire struggle and generations of sacrifice would be for nothing.

  Something in his bearing must have changed because, next to him, Praej straightened with an expectant smile.

  Jalamadon said, “Tell’em boys we-moving forward, la. That way our reserve columns won’t have to be stopped, put on rest, and then started again.”

  “Into the city,” Praej said happily, and then he lit up like a flare.

  The sky flashed like the sun itself.

  He and Praej cast black, sharp shadows against the trench wall. He felt heat on his neck. He spun back and looked at the sky. Nothing. Wait…there.

  “That’s a big bomb that just went off,” Praej said flatly.

  They watched a red column grow out of the horizon. It was capped by a roiling gray cloud that widened and stood like a pillar supporting the sky. They had all seen table-top explosions but never something that seemed to give the earth a new limb. Around them, soldiers who had been blinded by the light were quickly butchered before their sight could return. It was only expedient, since they had been blinded by fire and looked directly on the ancestors.

  “That looks like a sign to me,” Jalamadon said. “Let us wait a little longer. You go find some dead Imperials, pump some air into their lungs, and see if they answer any questions.”

  “Looks like the blast front is here,” Praej noted calmly, just before a maelstrom of dust and flying bodies blew them off their feet.

  23

  Nana

  The steam cart came to the end of the railway. Sethlan stepped out and froze, staring around.

  “What is it, heart?”

  He shrugged. “Nothing to worry about, Nana. A huge number of southern monsters.”

  She slid out, noticing first how stiffly Drivvy sat on his perch. Then she turned to the supply staging arena. It was still bright enough by the setting sun to see the Tachba lining the top of the hill, standing foot to cheek, swarming mass like a blanket of oar beetles that overwhelmed the landscape. Almost to a man, they were battered and bleeding. The blast of the bomb had clearly reached them, as well as Ville Emsa.

  “I must speak with that Tacchie who has cut himself out of the crowd. Will you come with me?”

  Before Sethlan could answer, Nana stepped into open ground and crossed to the little pavilion in the middle of the arena. The pavilion consisted only of a small canopy, insufficient to put the waiting Tachba into shadow, and then a small and detailed chair. When she drew close, she saw the Tachba commander wasn’t very imposing for a Southie at all, except that he watched her with an alert intelligence. He looked more like one of the distracted Planners from Emsa, but with his hair blown upright and his uniform in tatters.

  She passed him without speaking, and assessed the man chair. It was hers and she had to sit in it, at least at the start. That part didn’t matter to her. She was too tired for revulsion, too sick with fear and anxiety to care about her next depredation. It wasn’t that…

  It was the other thing.

  Her eyes briefly touched Sethlan. He stood stiff, expressionless, staring at the chair with a bloodless face.

  The head and shoulders belonged to a man she knew and respected. A man she’d even loved a little. Colonel Roaldan Trappia, the brisk, unflappable, gray-haired little commanding officer of the Observers. Pulled off the street, subjected to interrogation, and then sectioned. Cut to pieces and snapped onto the other limbs to create this abomination. This—what had she called it?—this gesture.

  That horrible woman, Jephia. She’d done this. This was her doing. The throne of ancestors.

  Nana stepped forward, turned, and sat in the chair.

  Its legs flexed under her weight, bending at the elbows before straightening. The chair was made up of dead pieces of body, but it adjusted to her unnervingly like a living thing. Even worse, the back of the chair pulsed against her, and made a low shushing sound only she could hear. Clearly, the limbs that made up the chair’s legs were connected to something in the chair’s torso cavity, something that pumped and moved blood.

  She gave the chair her full weight, and it pulsed again. If the stories weren’t so vague and repellant on the subject, she might have an idea of the hideous mechanics at work behind her. She didn’t have time for that, however. She had bigger problems right in front of her.

  When she looked up at the Southie commander, Colonel Trappia’s chin brushed her temple. Only with supreme self-control did she not scream and leap off the chair.

  Colonel Trappia’s face was warm.

  It can’t be. Nana warred to keep her face empty as her mind roiled. If she was the Queen of Free Sessera, she couldn’t have an enemy commander watch her discover the corpse arts. The childhood tales, the unspoken explanations for certain polluted behaviors, the talents that emerged in some children, which were treated like ghastly family secrets. Much of this—and she didn’t know how much—was common knowledge in the South. They’d never been civilized.

  They’d never stopped collecting arms and limbs off the field of battle.

  What if they had other insights about which she knew nothing? For example, what did they know about those fucking ancestors that her people never shut up about? What did they know that wasn’t myth, but merely buried truth? How far out of her depth was she, really?

  She leaned back, and this worked another mechanism in the man chair. The ribcage at her back compressed, and Colonel Trappia uttered a word.

  “Briff.”

  The corpse said her name. The name hidden from what the world called her. She had traded names with Trappia long ago, but this utterance was obviously a coincidence. It had to be. Briff sounded like any gasp you’d get, forcing air through a dead throat. But then, what was that saying? Bascht tchaxlach chsaz, bascht tchaxlach tachbavim.

  Nana shifted her weight, pressed into the chair again.

  “Strength,” Trappia uttered.

  She glanced up in time to see him blink. His gray eyes were lined with dust, and the blink spread grime over the balls. The waning sun lit his still, white face, and glinted in tears on his cheeks.

  “That one will be little help to you,” the Southie commander said. “You left him baking in the sun too long. He won’t tell you what the ancestors want. I give that scrag a minute more, and then it’s just you.”

  Nana fixed him with a cold look.

  “You and all your wits.” The commander continued.

  Nana’s fingers curled into the armrests, which shivered. The chair surged again, another whoosh
of spent blood through the muscles, another measure of air for the lungs.

  “Hear,” said Trappia.

  Hear what, colonel? she wondered. But then she knew. Nana knew what she had to do.

  For the briefest moment, she sensed what it must have been like in the grotesque, violent world before the Haphan colonization. In the days when bone was more common than wood, when warriors focused their pollution-enhanced sense of service upon the queens, when machines were wrought from flesh—when all of these enterprises of muscle and bone answered to the manleader, even after death. The power of it. She had just a glimpse, a tantalizing snatch of the feeling, like a distant song carried on the wind.

  She rested her forehead against Colonel Trappia’s chin, and gathered her courage. Her eyes fell shut. The queen’s authority would be absolute, wouldn’t it? She could barely fathom the scale of it. Yet now those days were back. Thanks to her.

  “Well, girl?” the Southie commander grated.

  Indeed, she was thinking like a girl, wasn’t she? I’m the queen now. It’s all done. Everything has happened. I’m here. Whether she believed it or not, no other voice mattered but hers.

  She sat up, and the chair pulsed.

  “Fight!” said Colonel Trappia.

  Nana smiled at the Southie commander. She took in his torn and dirty uniform, the fresh coat of dust which rained off him whenever he shifted. He’d caught some of the atomic blast himself and looked the worse for it.

  He disliked her scrutiny, which was perfect.

  “Really!” Nana said. She made her words slow and scornful. “You could not wash before meeting me?”

  The commander was prepared for something along those lines. His face shifted so quickly into a vicious sneer she had to catch her breath.

  “’Em’s a fighting man,” the commander said, jerking his head at Sethlan. “You-bringing muscle to a parlay, daschta?”

  “This is my Semelon, Haut Captain,” Nana answered. “He is my Second. By all means, bring up your own.”

  A butchered old Tachba was already arriving, having started from the opposite side when he saw Nana was not alone. The closer he came, the more Nana quailed. He smelled like a corpse, reeking more than the man chair, and she could see why. His right arm had rotted to the bone. He barely had enough whole muscle left to move it.

  She waited, but there was no introduction. “This is your Second?” She glanced again at his arm.

  “Aye, pretty girl,” the man said. “I might have a bad wing, but I still count as whole. At least until it falls off. I am named Promur Praejele-ad.”

  It said a lot that this Southie commander would suffer a disabled soldier to be kept alive.

  She told him, “That arm only means that you are very useful. There is strength, and there is use, and they don’t always meet.”

  The man grinned back at her, almost friendly for a moment. For every man a different lever.

  The commander wanted none of it. “We’em bein’ taught by the girl?” he asked tightly.

  “Oh please,” said Sethlan. “Drop the trenchtalk and speak sensibly. You can even use the Tongue. I just hate to see a Tachba play-acting.”

  At that, the commandant twitched hugely, eyes freezing over Sethlan’s head. With marvelous control, he still answered Nana, “You’re reminding me that there is strength and there is the use of strength, two fingers on the hand. You’re also hinting that you brought your captain to see who I would produce—so you could judge me thereby. I’m supposed to be reminded of the ingenious Sesseran queens of yore.” He paused, sucking his cheeks. “In the end, you’re merely saying to me that, while you might not look strong, you do have utility.”

  Nana shrugged, but he continued before she could reply.

  He said, “I can understand how a slight girl would come to believe that she was useful, being surround her whole life by horny men. How could you not believe you were really something special, with all of them bowing and scraping for a smile? What do you think, Praej?”

  “It’s the truth,” Praejele-ad said dolefully, looking her up and down. “She was grown to be plucked like a harp and walks herself that way.”

  “I only wonder how deluded you are,” the commander continued. “Doesn’t some fraction of your girl-mind know that you’re sitting there simply because you’re a sunshine blonde? Do you shorten your skirt on the days you need someone to do a task? Do you surprise men with a kindness, before you give an order? Add it up, daschta. Do you think you could set up as a queen, was you a toothless hag?”

  Sethlan had become very still. The commandant grinned at him directly. “And before this captain jumps down my throat, dashta, put yourself in my skin. My dirty, wrinkled skin. Who could I, old Jalamadon, entice into bed to get a favor? How much leg do you think I could show to get some damned obedience?” He watched Nana’s unmoving face and, when she didn’t reply, added, “I’ll answer for myself, then. I got here on merit. We have no crutch like rank and caste in the Moon Kingdoms. There is no leash, there is no yoke, and there is certainly no leg. I lead because I am followed. I don’t have to be washed to meet a Sesseran whore.”

  Praejele-ad cackled, but Nana ignored him. She stared at the commander—this Jalamadon. He met her gaze with cold indifference, but it didn’t touch her. She simply looked closer.

  “This is what I get?” she muttered. “This is what I get from the all-powerful, nightmare Southies? After a hundred years of trenches filled with blood, it comes down to a little boy hissing insults at a little girl. I walk up to the very Southie commander, and I hear nothing but manipulating, practicing words that play on my worst fears.”

  Jalamadon snorted.

  “But don’t you see, commander? You’re shouting insults from the ground like you’ve been knocked down and you’re afraid to get up. I haven’t even started on you yet, Jalamadon. Certainly, it’s interesting to hear what you fear about women. I must look odd to you, walking up like this, and I certainly do have the doubts you mentioned—but I have always been a girl, and Tachba have scraped before me my whole life, so I have a measure of peace about that. Really, what kind of dashta doesn’t get bowing and scraping for a kind word or a kiss on the cheek? I want to make sure you know one thing, however: just because I’m young, it doesn’t mean you can’t lead.”

  “I said nothing—”

  “Of course you merit your position, Jalamadon,” Nana said, with wounding earnestness. “You don’t have to explain yourself to me. You’re not a leader, you merely have followers—I understand the fear hidden in your words. You’re not unhandsome, either, so you don’t have to dig for compliments. But by showing all this weakness, I worry that you have given up the game already. I am the Queen, and I need someone to push against. Won’t you get up off the ground and push back?”

  This kind of doubletalk was useless for most Tachba, but as Nana expected, Jalamadon followed her. He followed her easily enough to let it pierce him. He answered slowly. “If I showed a real weakness, not this made-up stuff you’re spewing, you would kindly be my dashta?”

  “Now you’re hunting for a new entrance,” Nana smiled. “The girl in me does not hate you, sir, she admires you. The mother in me wants you to have every success. But the Queen in me desires the South to stop here and turn back.”

  Jalamadon gave a long sigh, and the tension went out of his shoulders. “I’m sorry, dashta,” he said. “It wasn’t polite of me to talk about sexy girl-things with you. You’re right, it was mere clumsy distraction.”

  He’s changed tacks again, she thought. Will I ever nail him down? She didn’t think she would end up owning this one.

  She shifted in the man chair.

  “Warn,” uttered Colonel Trappia.

  The commander’s eyes flicked to the chair, then back to Nana.

  “For myself,” Nana continued smoothly, “I should not have mentioned washing, not when it is my fault you’re half mud and nearly blown to pieces. I take it you saw my big weapon?”

 
; He paused. “Oh, that explosion was yours? Something you stole from your masters? It seemed very destructive. Did you actually kill any of us?”

  “You tell me,” she said, glancing at the disheveled Southie troops lining the supply arena. “We have several more of these atomical bombs, buried where you can’t find them. I understand that you took a lot of new trenches today? Have you yet begun to wonder why they were so easy? If you do not stop your advance, you will discover these weapons one by one. You will end up with less ground than when you started.”

  He studied her acutely. He would not be certain about a lie, and that was one of the things that frustrated the Tachba the most, but he could certainly suspect a lie. Nana kept her face as blank as only a slight girl could.

  The commander drew himself up. “We will not stop advancing until we see Ville Emsa, Queen.” He added that last word grudgingly. She had not given him any other name for herself.

  Into the brief silence, Colonel Trappia uttered, “Yield.”

  “Why, Jalamadon, you’re welcome in Emsa,” she said.

  “We—what?” Jalamadon hesitated. “Strictly speaking, we don’t particularly need your welcome.”

  “I mean to say you’re welcome as family. You will not enter like some animal horde. You have ancestors who want to visit in the fires? You have bodies to return after the long century? You have bones to bury?”

  “We’ll make our own selves welcome, if you please,” Jalamadon said.

  “Finally we have some of the real Tachba spirit,” Nana smiled. “Tell me what your orders are, husband.”

  Jalamadon had clearly expected it all along, and he obviously didn’t want to let that word shake him. He answered evenly. “My orders are to pierce the Haphan trenches. To throw the alien overlords into disarray. To put Ville Emsa back under the Tachba foot. To remove the Haphan slavers from Renegade Sessera. So shall it be done.”

  “So it has been done,” Nana said, suddenly cheerful. “We thank you for your offer, but you’re too late. Ville Emsa, and all of Sessera, is owned by the Tachba race again. If you swept into Ville Emsa now, you would only destroy the most beautiful city on the planet and steal it from your brethren. Was that in your orders?”