Pass of Fire

by Taylor Anderson

  “I’m glaad to hear it,” Enaak said.

  “So, plazivy,” Svec said rather pleasantly, considering his name for Halik meant, roughly, “creepy reptile” in Czech. “What brings you here, and why the deception?”

  Niwa looked pained but Halik nodded as a human might. “I thought it only right to inform you myself that we’ve reestablished communications with First General Esshk. Perhaps you saw the airship that passed overhead and landed at Sagar? It was one of many dispatched to find us, but was the only one to arrive.” Halik bared his teeth in a frightening manner, but for him it was almost a grin. “I’m sure the rest were forced down by distance, or searched the wrong direction.”

  Enaak hadn’t known about the Grik zeppelin, though he had no doubt his scouts would bring the report from Sagar. As for the others, they’d probably been shot down by prowling planes from AVDs offshore. He was sure Halik suspected that too.

  “In any event,” Halik continued, “the airship brought tidings of the great war between our peoples—of victories and defeats.” He glanced at Niwa. “The latest was of a terrible defeat suffered by General Niwa’s people in their Sovereign Nest at Zanzibar. General of the Sea Hisashi Kurokawa is no more.” If anything, Halik actually seemed pleased by that, as did Niwa, but Niwa doubtless mourned his other former shipmates.

  “We had reports of that as well,” Enaak confirmed. Halik knew all about radio and wireless communications, whether he had them or not. Denying they had more up-to-date news than Halik did was pointless—just as pointless as Halik asking for news beyond what was offered. “We also learned thaat quite a few of Gener-aal Niwa’s people survived,” Enaak conceded. “Some were taken prisoner and will be sent to the Union State of Yoko-haama, where others of their kind reside. Some haave joined our cause,” he added pointedly. “All will be well treated.” He looked back at Halik. “Some of your people helping Kuro-kaa-waa also joined us, much like a few of Regent Shighat’s waarriors joined your hunt when he was defeated.” He glanced at Svec. “I confess we were all surprised to hear of thaat.”

  “That is . . . interesting,” Halik agreed, then waved it away. “But it appears, with Kurokawa gone, our peoples are free to focus on one another again—at least on this side of the world,” Halik continued, rather bitterly it seemed, and Enaak felt a chill. The zep must’ve carried information about the war against the Doms in Central and South America. Possibly about the League of Tripoli as well, which had aided Kurokawa. Keeping the Grik, and Halik in particular, from knowing how thin the Allies were stretched had been of the utmost importance. How would their “arrangement” be affected now that the truth was out? They didn’t have to wait long to find out. “Most significant to my army and me, however,” Halik added slowly, “the airship also brought a summons directly from First General Esshk and the Celestial Mother herself.”

  “A summons?” Svec asked darkly, and Halik looked at him. “Yes. A command that I come at once. First General Esshk requires my army.” He looked searchingly at Enaak. “Whether he needs it to join an offensive or aid his defense against one launched by your Captain Reddy, I do not know.”

  Enaak knew it could’ve been either when the message was dispatched. Esshk had loosed his Final Swarm down the Zambezi to cross the Go Away Strait and overwhelm the Allied toehold on Madagascar. The only thing that slowed it was a desperate act by Russ Chappelle and his old Santa Catalina, which steamed upriver and plugged it up. Santa Catalina had been destroyed, as had an awful lot of good people, but they bought time for Captain Reddy to assemble what was left of First Fleet, three corps of the Allied Expeditionary Force, and finally land in Grik Africa itself. Their position remained precarious, but they were within eighty miles of the Grik capital of Sofesshk and the Army of the Republic was churning up from the South. Enaak expected the worst fighting of the war would come in the next weeks and months, but they had a chance, at last—and he was stuck up here!

  “So, plazivy, what will you do?” Svec asked, voice still mild, but there was a growing cloud behind it. Halik hesitated, then let out a long breath. Before he could respond, Niwa shook his head. “He must go,” he said. “He has no choice. As I—and you—have long understood the concept of honor, his more recent appreciation of its importance is no less sincere. As Emperor Hirohito represented the, ah . . . Maker of All Things to me on the world I came from, so does the Celestial Mother command Halik’s devotion. And General Esshk made him. He can’t ignore that.” Svec started to interrupt, but Niwa held up a hand. “Nevertheless, General Regent Halik”—he smiled wryly—“the ‘King of Kings’ fully recognizes the way he forges here, with your help, isn’t Esshk’s way, and he doubts Esshk can fully approve of what he and his army have become. Esshk might even destroy him and all he’s done because of it. If not on sight, then very possibly after Halik serves his purpose.”

  Halik was nodding. “I must go,” he said, almost pleading, “but I won’t take all my army. I can’t risk everything to destruction by your people or mine, and General Shlook will stay with half my force to hold what we’ve gained and continue our efforts.”

  “Half or all, we caan’t let you join Esshk,” Enaak said softly, but the resolve in his voice was clear. Even half of Halik’s army would outnumber his own force more than ten to one.

  “I understand,” Halik acknowledged, “but you miss our point. I must go, as I told you fairly, but I can’t tell you now whether I go to join First General Esshk—or fight him.”

  Enaak’s wide amber eyes practically bulged, and even Svec was taken aback. “So . . .” Enaak ventured.

  “So,” Niwa said brusquely, “we came to invite you to join the campaign as before, though perhaps we shouldn’t expect you to scout the quickest paths. None of us have ever traversed the vast distance ahead, across Arabia and down the East coast of Africa, and it would be a simple matter for you to lead us astray. But you’d be with us, watching—reporting on us, no doubt—and this serves two functions. First, we won’t join Esshk without first informing you. On this you have our word of honor. Perhaps that might prevent your First Fleet from decimating our advance from the sky as we proceed down the coast—or even landing troops in our path.”

  Faat chaance of the latter, Enaak thought. Everybody’s pretty busy right now. But they caan’t know thaat—yet. And the first notion’s pretty shrewd. Our planes might slow Haalik, bleed him, but they caan’t stop him, so Henry Stokes and his snoops will want word of his every move. We caan give him thaat.

  “Second,” Niwa went on, “as General Regent Halik said—and another reason your air power might leave us to our business and we’d be glad of your company—it’s possible we may have to fight First General Esshk.” He glanced at Halik again. “We have no military alliance, nor are we ever liable to. Halik’s people and yours . . . such a thing would be difficult to imagine after all that’s passed between you. But we’ve cooperated against common enemies, and if it comes to it, we’ll gladly do so again. After all,” Niwa continued in a strange tone, “whether you believe it or not, or can even imagine it, General Regent Halik considers you his friends as well, as he understands the term. He will kill you if he must,” Niwa warned, “though he’d much rather not. If that time comes, however, he’ll give you sufficient warning to prepare for death—or escape. Your choice. On that you have my word.”

  * * *

  * * *

  “What do you think?” Svec asked after Halik and Niwa left the tent. “Will your Henry Stokes approve this insane scheme?”

  Enaak blinked deep deliberation. “He didn’t aapprove us following Haalik all the way across Persiaa or helping him against his enemies, but it seemed a good idea at the time. And our aactions were at least aaccepted. But we must evaal-uate this, and quickly. I believe Haalik will move very soon.”

  “Do you trust him?” Svec growled, raising a wide-mouthed cup of seep. Seep was a spirit distilled from purplish, pear-shaped polta fruit. Tasty
by itself and full of many vitamins humans and ’Cats required, it was also prepared into an analgesic, antibacterial paste. Recreational spirits weren’t allowed to members of the 5th Maa-ni-la, however, and Enaak insisted his officers abstain as well. The Czechs had no such restriction. Enaak looked thoughtful. “Oddly, yes. I mean, I certainly trust him to crush us if we make a nuisance of ourselves, but I suppose I also believe him about the rest.”

  Svec gulped his seep and made a sour face. “I must agree. Granted, he mainly wants us close to shield him from your planes. But without us along, your planes would have a harder time finding him.” He shrugged. “If he wasn’t sincere, why not crush us now? He’d never catch us all, but we’d be no threat after that. I have to say I believe him.”

  “We must report this to Chaar-maan Letts at once,” Nika warned skeptically. “I doubt he will trust the honor of a Grik or Jaap!”

  “You might be surprised,” Enaak said, looking at his XO. It was the first time Nika had ever seen Halik or Niwa, and he was clearly a little shaken by the experience. Letts—and Stokes—had been reading Enaak’s reports for a long time, however. They may not trust Halik, but they had faith in Enaak’s assessments. “I think they’ll go for it,” he decided. “If nothing else, they’ll always have a good idea about when Haalik’s army might join Esshk, and we caan feed them reports about its strength and disposition along the way. Stokes in paarticular will consider it too good an opportunity to paass.” He blinked a little nervously. “Unless he decides we should try to stop them, somehow.” He looked at Svec. “What about your leaders? What will they say about you draagging so much of their military even faarther away?”

  Svec grinned, partially at Enaak’s probing. He’d never even confirmed he had a leader. His people obviously had territory beyond Indiaa, where they’d already begun to return, since there were men in his force too young to have come from that other world when he did, and there were few Lemurian females in the Legion. “Halik’s the greatest threat to my people. Keeping eyes on him—and helping you—is the best service my military can perform.”

  Major Ondrej Svec leaned forward. He had darker hair than his father and his sudden laconic smile compressed his narrower eyes into slits. “So we either go along, or try to summon sufficient transport to pull us out—precisely when such transport is desperately needed elsewhere. We should agree to Halik’s terms.” He glanced at Enaak. “Tag along, as you say. And there’s another thing to consider: if we go, we won’t just be sitting here anymore—and we may get into the fighting to the south after all, one way or another.”

  “True,” Enaak agreed. “We might well be in at the finish.” He looked back at the younger Svec and blinked irony. “One way or another.”

  CHAPTER 1

  ////// El Corazon

  Near El Paso del Fuego (The Pass of Fire)

  January 14, 1945

  Mountain Fish, Island Fish, Ulaagis, Leviathans—they’re all the same: the largest living things we know of on this world. Far larger than anything where we came from. They’re generally solitary, highly territorial, brooding beasts, feeding on anything that will fit in their monstrous maws, including adolescent interlopers of their own species. They’re equally dangerous to “trespassing” ships, and only extremely annoying acoustic assaults can reliably discourage their attention. I hope to study them in greater detail someday, but for now I can only wallow in ignorant awe of their proportions. They’re ancient things, perhaps almost timeless—though not deathless, certainly, since they can be killed, and we know they somberly migrate from all over the world (at least once) to die in the Sea of Bones northwest of El Paso del Fuego. Paradoxically, however, they also congregate in their multitudes at the pass itself to breed and calve, and at that one place in all the world, they coexist in perfect amity toward each other and all around. Perhaps they must be on their best behavior to win a mate? Imagine, then, the double irony that these ordinarily belligerent beasts should witness the visitation of such appalling carnage upon their singular, peaceful preserve.

  From Courtney Bradford’s

  The Worlds I’ve Wondered

  University of New Glasgow Press, 1956

  The evening sky was a weird, almost neon orange, shot with blue-gold streamers as the sun sank toward the red-purple sea in the west. What looked like a vast bay ringed by high mountains intruded on the land to the north, and the distant shore was dominated by the tallest mountain of all. It was a “vol-caano,” like many of the others, and though presently deceptively quiescent, its indistinct flanks were wreathed in smoke and steam. And the bay itself was deceptive as well, since it was, in fact, the gaping western mouth of what became a narrow, tide-scoured passage between the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. The local name was El Paso del Fuego, and it ran just about down the middle of where Costa Rica would’ve been on another earth.

  No one knew what caused it. There were a lot of little differences on this world besides the people and wildlife. According to Courtney Bradford, the Australian naturalist/engineer fighting Grik with the Army of the Republic in southern Africa, a moderately lower sea level resulting in different coastlines was probably the result of some phase of an ice age. Sometimes there were islands where there shouldn’t be, or none where there should, and there was a cluster of whoppers around latitude fifteen south where there should’ve been only the tiny, scattered Samoa, Fiji, Santa Cruz, and New Hebrides islands.

  Adventurously seagoing as Lemurians were, they’d never ventured that far into what they called the Eastern Sea before the war. Imperial explorers discovered them during one of their periodic fits of geographical curiosity, but found them unusually dangerous even for this hostile world. Now the Impies stayed away, and little was known about the islands.

  But El Paso del Fuego was a bigger difference, for a variety of reasons, and theories about what caused it abounded. Most naturalists in the NUS agreed that all the volcanoes in the region blew it out, and the crazy tidal race eroded a navigable channel over time. Others—and Courtney was increasingly in this camp—thought some great heavenly body, like a comet or asteroid, whacked the place thousands, maybe millions of years ago. That might not only have caused all the volcanoes in the first place, but could explain a lot of other things, such as why this world had taken such a different evolutionary track.

  While perhaps intellectually stimulating, such speculation had little bearing at present. What really mattered was that the Pass of Fire was even more strategically important than the Panama Canal would’ve been, on a world where the Drake Passage between Cape Horn and Antarctica was too choked by ice to use. There might be brief, occasional spells during which a ship might pick its way through, but the storms were even worse than those off the cape of Africa, and no one ever tried.

  Unfortunately, the Pass of Fire was controlled by the Holy Dominion, a human civilization so depraved that the western members of the Grand Alliance were already at war with it before they even knew the pass—and so many threats beyond it—existed. Most pressing now, the treacherous League of Tripoli, composed of fascist French, Spanish, Italian, and German forces from a different past, had made an alliance with the twisted Dominion and might soon bring enough power to bear to prevent the Western Allies from linking up with new friends bordering the northern Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean. The New United States were descended from other Americans that arrived in the 1840s, and would be a big help if they weren’t isolated and conquered. Finally, Dom-League cooperation could stop the Allied campaign against the Dominion cold. Without victory there’d never be peace, and time was running out.

  Major Blas-Ma-Ar and General James Blair sat on a pair of beautiful black horses, captured from the Doms no doubt, in front of two hundred Imperial dragoons arrayed behind them. Blas was a brindled Lemurian “’Cat” Marine representing the United Homes and the American Navy Clan. She wore the tie-dyed camouflage smock and green platterlike steel doughboy helmet tha
t was standard combat dress for all the Allies, except the Republic of Real People, arrayed against the Doms, Grik, and maybe the League. The only remaining variations were that humans wore trousers and boots or shoes, while ’Cats wore kilts and sandals. A few ’Cat Marine officers and NCOs still wore blue kilts, and the occasional battered set of once-white rhino-pig armor was also seen. Blas wore hers now, as commander of the Sister’s Own Division in all but name. Composed of what was left of the 2nd (Lemurian) Marines combined with a growing number of human Ocelomeh (Jaguar Warriors), as well as a heavy brigade of former Doms and local “true Christian” volunteers calling themselves El Vengadores de Dios, the Sister’s Own had seen more action than any other division in the Second Fleet Allied Expeditionary Force.

  General Blair commanded X Corps, and was General Tomatsu Shinya’s XO. Like many officers of the Empire of the New Britain Isles, he still wore his red coat with yellow facings, black piping, and brass buttons for occasions such as this. Like his tall black shako, however, the coat had seen much abuse, and he no longer had a pair of white breeches. Camouflage trousers were tucked into knee-high boots. He still wore long Imperial mustaches, but had also cultivated a thick black beard, something only seen before in the lower ranks. The new style was catching on.

  “I don’t know whaat the hell’s the point of this,” Blas grumbled sourly, tail whipping behind her. She blinked something akin to irritated futility as she and Blair urged their mounts forward and they proceeded alone. Half a mile below, down a gentle grade, lay El Corazon del Fuego, one of the principal cities of the Holy Dominion. The outskirts of the city, once a sprawling community of shops and apartments, were abandoned now; many of the buildings torn down or burned by the inhabitants to improve fields of fire in front of a fairly new and substantial-looking wall. An older wall incorporating a pair of impressive tower fortresses protected against a seaborne assault. The recent addition, encompassing the rest of the older, richer part of the city, had apparently been built to stop them.