Lines of Thunder: The First Days on the Front (Lines of Thunder Universe)

by Walter Blaire

  Gole introduced himself and his brother.

  “I’m guessing you met Sergeant Corphy and ate his welcoming speech,” Malley said. “Don’t believe him for a second. We all have names.”

  “So we’re not going to die first thing?”

  Gole had an edge of sarcasm, which Malley overlooked. “Oh, you’ll die, all right. Don’t be too angry at Corphy in your head. In his way he’s doing you a kindness. You’ll be more settled when you get plinked.”

  “You people at the front are funnier than anybody gives you credit for,” Gole muttered.

  “Na-na-not funny,” Grulle blurted, too loud. Gole and Malley turned to him, took in the quivering O of his mouth, the anxiety in his eyes.

  Malley put up a hand to block Gulle’s gaze. “Don’t let him look at you with those. He’s close-looking. It’s Pretty Polly flirting with him, the Pollution. Nothing good comes of it.”

  Gole simply stared, mystified and a little guilty. When Grulle shifted his blank stare up the trench, Malley leaned forward and swung his fist. It was so casual and unhurried that Gole didn’t even think to react. Malley’s fist connected with Gulle’s chin, snapped his head around. Grulle winced, blinked away tears, and held his jaw.

  “You feel confusion bubble up in you like a piss you can’t hold back, that’s the Pollution trying to clear your mind before a fight. It never picks the right time.”

  “I’ve been afraid before—” Gole started.

  “You don’t know what this is,” Malley said. “This is Pretty Polly, she’s the Pollution for the real war. This is from the beasts what gave us our first twisting. They wanted us to sit quietly and pay attention before going into action. Old servitor controls. Just punch the chin if you see a man go stupid.”

  “I’ll be punching all day, I guess.”

  Malley fixed him with an even stare. “Word is that you can’t shut up.”

  “Never does, la,” Grulle muttered.

  “Should I be scared and nervous like Grulle?” Gole asked, honestly curious. He searched inside himself but felt nothing. His earlier anxiety was gone.

  “If you had a clue, you would be. But it’s different for the smart twin, sometimes. No offense,” Malley added to Grulle.

  “Where’s yours?” Gole asked.

  “My brother? Dead.” Malley’s tone was flat. “Look around, scrag. Most of us are singletons now. If you two think you’ll die together, put that thought behind you. Sooner or later, one of you will be without the other.”

  Gole traded glances with Grulle, who seemed slightly cheered by the idea.

  A whistle sounded up the trench: muster here. Corphy jogged past, reeling off orders to some following corporals who split away to harangue the men.

  “What’s happening?” Gole asked.

  “We’re going over.” Malley climbed to his feet. “Give yourself a chance today, scrag. Don’t stick out.”

  “Going over?”

  “Going over the bags. The sand bags.” Malley finally showed a touch of exasperation. He pointed to the top of the trench two feet above their heads. “We’re climbing into the air for a patrol. We’re hunting Southies. The Southerners.” He paused when Gole still didn’t answer. “Surely you’ve heard we have an enemy?”

  The whistle sounded again. Grulle shrugged at Gole and followed Malley down the trench.

  It was a regular patrol. Corphy called it a gawk. They were to climb out of the trenches and muck around in the open. It was just the platoon, nothing big like an assault or a push. Any southerners they found should be treated harshly and sent back either to their lines or to their ancestors.

  Gole tried to follow all the new terms—the gawk, how much lug they’d carry in their kit, the powter used for blacking, the sootfat they added to powter at night to slighten the cheekshine, la. Growing up, he and his brothers had thought they’d mastered trench talk, but this, like everything else, was the real version. As the soldiers listened to Corphy they painted their faces with blacking.

  Gole felt it then. The strangeness of this new world landed on his shoulders like a loose sand-bag. The tightness of his chest made breathing difficult. He noticed Grulle studying him, preparing a fist for his chin with a little too much readiness. He tried to control his emotion, but this trench—he’d never seen anything like it. It wasn’t just one trench facing the South. It was a whole infrastructure. It had required an hour at a brisk pace to get from the staging area to the dangerous edge. In his first day, Gole had already seen more half-buried pathways and avenues than a fair-sized city.

  Three feet south of Gole was the end of civilization. The Haphan Overlords controlled everything until this trench, but past it, no more empire. Beyond the trench was a dark, unknown land full of regressive, violent members of his race who had never felt the Haphan leash or known true civilization. This world with all its detail and potentially life-saving lore, so little of which Gole knew: This was his new existence.

  “La, drop kit and lighten lug, and pass the word.”

  The soldiers unbuckled their belts and satchels, leaving them in piles on the trench floor. Gole and Grulle did the same with their full backpacks.

  A ladder came up the trench, maneuvered carefully through the traverses—the angles in the trench. To Gole the ladder looked like work, considering they could scramble up the sandbags without it. But there was probably something to be said for moving quietly and paying attention to the world beyond.

  “Pass the word, silence discipline.”

  No talking.

  The ladder—more a ramp with wooden slats than a ladder with rungs—was set against the trench parapet and braced against the far wall.

  A soldier climbed onto it and walked up in a crouch. Though his face was blacked and obscured, Gole recognized him as Malley from the particular rips and repairs of his coat. He climbed, and as his head grew level with the top of the trench, his rhythm changed. It was no longer a bipedal, rocking rhythm, but something slippery and odd in the air. This was a Tachba walking into danger, and the ancient Pollution subtly changed his bearing to make him harder to pick out. It synched his movements to the wafting smoke and dust of the front.

  Malley cleared the trench and disappeared from view.

  No gunfire. It was quiet and stayed quiet.

  The next soldier climbed the ladder and disappeared with similar promising ease.

  Corphy waved a hand and made a series of gestures in hand-sign: “Now the idiot goes up.”

  Gole guessed the sergeant meant him. He put a foot on the ladder and found that it held his weight.

  Of course it held his weight. Why wouldn’t it? I’m wasting time.

  He forced himself up the steps.

  He felt drunk, like he was made entirely of feet. He lurched higher, the trench floor sinking below him. The painted faces of the soldiers watched with interest to see if he’d be the first plinked.

  Shit, shit, shit…

  If his Pollution was taking over, changing his gait and camouflaging his motions, he didn’t feel it. He tried not to let himself dwell. He knew he had the knack from hunting as a child, and it wasn’t something that could be called when it was wanted. Nothing about the Pollution could be called when wanted, and usually nothing was wanted at all.

  Gole cleared the parapet of the trench and glanced back. Corphy seemed disappointed, but waved the next soldier up. Gole turned to face the world above the trench.

  4

  Crap!

  Gole stepped on someone’s leg. It rolled under Gole’s boot in a way that had to be painful. The idiot had chosen to lie right in front of the ladder. The soldier was difficult to see and half-buried in the ground.

  Gole overcompensated with his next step, placed his foot on a pile of dirt that collapsed, and finally fell on his ass, right onto the hidden soldier’s back. Air hissed through the soldier’s mouth, a yelp that broke the general silence.

  “Your pardon,” Gole said, automatically.

  Two hands grasped h
is shoulders and pulled him flat.

  “Shut the mouth-hole, ye fucking lunatic,” Corphy hissed in his ear.

  “But the—” Gole remembered the silence discipline, and finished in hand sign. “A friend below.”

  “It’s a corpse, you blithering—”

  Hand sign wasn’t a Haphan invention. It was the old hunting language of the Tachba, used when silence mattered, and it dated from before the Haphan Landing. It was rich with profanity, and Corphy let him have it for at least a full minute as more soldiers streamed up the ladder and into the open.

  Gole and Corphy both laid across the body, mashing it deeper into the soft earth. Gole looked closely and yes, the man was dead, less than a week so. Skin stretched over bones, eyes sunk and infested with larval oar beetles. That yelp that Gole had elicited when he sat—it was simply air from the lungs, jetting through vocal cords that weren’t yet too corrupted to work. This man had just been left up in the open, in the air. Anybody could have safely dragged him into the trench and sent him back for burial.

  “—So stop dicking around with Yaelaphan’s dead body,” Corphy finished. It was amazing how so much irritation could be communicated without voice. “Stop calling attention to yourself. Stop confusing the other new scrags. If I hear another sound out of you, squeaker, I’ll pull a summary on you and bullet your brain.”

  Gole formulated an argument against the justice of that, but Corphy had an actual pistol in his hand, and the pistol was resting on Gole’s shoulder with the muzzle toward his chin.

  Gole satisfied himself with nodding.

  Corphy crawled forward, and Gole turned to follow.

  But when he shifted off the corpse—off Yaelaphan—the deformed rib-cage righted itself. Air sucked through Yaelaphan’s lips with a long, slobbering sob.

  Corphy spun back, face red, veins bulging in his forehead. His pistol angled toward Gole.

  Another soldier landed on Yaelaphan. The corpse exclaimed again, a word like, “Mawp!”

  “Sorry, sarnt,” the soldier signed. “Sorry, Yaelli.”

  Corphy hesitated, his face ticking as he wavered between what the Pollution wanted and what was wise. At last he turned away, and the pistol disappeared back inside his jacket.

  The soldier winked at Gole and crawled forward.

  The next soldier up the ladder made a full detour to bounce once on Yaelaphan’s back, “Ssfwaa!” He gave it a friendly slap on the head and scrambled away.

  Grulle finally appeared over the parapet and immediately noticed Yaelaphan’s corpse. He shook his head and circumvented the dead man, stepping on Gole himself before following the rest of the platoon.

  Gole calmed his mind as much as possible and crept after his brother. Though he’d been among the first to climb up, he was now behind the main body of men. He spotted the smiling lieutenant, Elyseuran himself, bellying along the dirt just below the lips of a series of shell holes. Grulle was shadowing the lieutenant, which seemed wise, so Gole did the same. If they stuck close to the officer, they’d never officially become separated from the platoon.

  For the next hour, Gole’s world shrank to the twenty inches of dirt in front of his face, and the wriggling soles of Gulle’s boots near the top of his vision. The ground was soft, pliant, and full of curious trinkets that caught his eye. Cracked old bones, empty casings, buttons, scraps of fabric. The dirt was luxuriously soft and his hands sank into it without effort. It had been turned into loose, moist soup from the endless artillery barrages of the front, and he only kept afloat by lying flat and spreading his weight.

  Occasionally, a shell hole would yawn under his chin and he’d scramble back before he slid into the pit. The newest holes had smooth steep walls just waiting to avalanche into the brackish water at the bottom. The preferable pits, the ones where Lieutenant Elyseuran paused to take reports from other soldiers scouting ahead, were older and packed to firmness by rain and time.

  Movement was backbreaking labor. It was all slithering; even hand-and-knee crawling would have been a relief. Yet they could not have gone faster if they stood up. There were places where men simply dropped into the earth and had to be fished out by their heels.

  “Malley call ’em mumblety dirt, la,” Grulle whispered, during a brief rest.

  “Quiet discipline,” Gole signed.

  “We’em not quiet now,” Grulle replied, gesturing around.

  The South had commenced an artillery barrage, and shells were falling on the trenches behind them. The Haphan artillery woke up and answered. Shells crossed the sky with the sound of tearing paper. The explosions were muffled whumps, distant, which still somehow thrummed through Gole’s body and changed his balance. Silence discipline had relaxed as the noise mounted, and Grulle wasn’t the only one whispering aloud.

  Gole turned back to his blood-fed. Grulle was breathing hard, covered in blacking and grime, and pouring sweat. But he was also grinning with excitement, another emotion Gole didn’t presently share. Grulle seemed more at home in the no-man’s-land between the trenches than some of the older soldiers.

  “How far to the southern trench?” Gole asked the man next to them.

  “How would I know?”

  “Well, it’s been an hour, so…?”

  “Which we don’t crawl a straight line,” the soldier said. “The Southies are only a hundred yards from home trench. It’s not hard to find them. We’re simply following some tape laid out by the scouts to keep us clear of bogs and minefields. We stumble across some enemy, we roll them up. That’s all you need to know.”

  “Surely. Why would I need to know more than that?” Gole muttered.

  The soldier, who had turned away, pivoted back with a hard stare. “Was that sarcasm?”

  Gole nodded cautiously.

  “I like that. That was nice. I can’t do sarcasm, meh. Pretty Polly stole it off me with a kiss.” His grin was startlingly bright with his other features blacked out.

  “I’m sorry for that?” Gole tried.

  “I got things in trade,” the soldier shrugged. He leaned back and gave a bone-cracking stretch. “Call me Dephic, which it’s mostly my name. Now let’s see, you said you wanted other things to know about the front? I can unfold that far. Don’t salute the officers—I saw your hand twitch when Lieutenant Elyseuran spoke to you. If you salute, it tells the snipers who to plink. Better damn believe you’re in the scope right now, being studied like an oar beetle studies a fresh corpse. Your uniform is too clean, shows you’re new, prone to make mistakes. You salute, or nod too obsequious-like, and that’s the end of our lieutenant. You follow?”

  Gole nodded, but not obsequiously.

  “Then what else? Ah, I saw you bouncing on Yaelaphan’s corpse. You could avoid that in the future. Also, don’t drink your water too quickly. And if comes to a pinch, let your blood-fed do your fighting. They’re better at it than you are, ego be damned.”

  Gole glanced at Grulle, who nodded sagely.

  “And the last thing,” Dephic added, “don’t get shot by Corphy. You’d think this would go without saying. I saw him draw his pistol on you, and frankly, I’m surprised you’re still scragging through the mumblety.”

  “Corphy really shoot idiots?” Grulle asked, scandalized.

  “He lives for it,” Dephic said. “It’s the best way to tighten discipline when you have a batch of Pretty Polly on the scale of this unit. The Pollution sits up and takes notice, if you follow my meaning. A fresh, dumb replacement can give service exceeding his value if you plink him at the right time, in front of the right audience. We have so many squeakers to teach, I was certain he’d give you a hole in the thinker.”

  “That’s against code,” Gole said, his voice weak.

  “Yes, that’s against code,” Dephic shrugged, “but discipline is in the code and it’s well above all the rest. Your type is expendable. Until you’re a few months in the trenches, I don’t think you even rightly count as ‘living,’ no offense.”

  “None taken.” Gole noted,
dimly, the call for movement being passed in hand sign. He relayed the command and moved out. Grulle took lead with obvious enthusiasm. He had never been the more useful twin.

  They had barely slithered ten minutes when the patrol halted again. Gunshots rang out, then multiplied. A bullet piffed into the dirt above Gole’s head. A ricochet whined in the distance.

  “Contact,” Grulle signed unnecessarily. “Pass the word.”

  “The South!” Gole whispered hoarsely.

  Grulle nodded and then jetted away, faster than could possibly be safe, toward the fighting. Gole swam after him through the dirt.

  II

  The Hand Squad

  5

  In which Gole Naremsa notices a way to defeat the enemy.

  Gole was last to arrive at the firefight, another pinch to his ego. As he crawled up, he discovered he had a good view on the action, with a perspective on both his platoon and the distant ridges of dirt that had their attention. The air was full of gunfire that sounded strangely denuded and innocuous in the slow-moving air.

  Rather than rushing in like his Pollution demanded, Gole held back and studied the layout.

  The rest of the platoon were muddy shapes, difficult to distinguish from the grime. They had positioned themselves in an arc around the enemy holdout. As far as Gole could see, they had all found good cover. He couldn’t see precisely where the platoon was aiming, and he couldn’t even tell whether the South was shooting back...except yes, by keeping his eyes locked on that far ridge of dirt, he finally picked them out. What looked like a shimmer of hot air was actually fast movement—the southern Tachba popping over the ridge and taking shots. Primitive the Southies might be, but civilization and manners weren’t necessary for trench fighting. Their rifles were flawed reproductions of stolen Haphan designs, manufactured in southern factories and unchanged for decades, but they were just as deadly as the robot-tooled Haphan rifles if they found their target.