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

by Walter Blaire

  “Where’s the old tape?” Nadros asked.

  The word traveled forward, then back. “Which it’s gone from the ground.”

  Nadros fixed Gole with a glance. “Did you have a batch of scouts in the trench today?”

  “Slept through day,” Grulle signed.

  “Figures.”

  Gole leaned close and whispered, “But the Haphan colonel mentioned getting scouts to our part of the trench.”

  “You saw him yesterday, after you killed the lieutenant?”

  Gole nodded, unwillingly.

  “Did he mention the scouts in your hearing? I mean, in Corphy’s hearing?”

  Gole nodded again.

  Nadros frowned. “Then he wanted us to hear and to know.”

  “Why-dithering?” Grulle whispered.

  Nadros said, “Pass the word, we follow the tape.”

  12

  After a mere thirty minutes of bellying over soft soil, the patrol stopped. Nadros, who had been keeping station behind the brothers and watching them with baleful eyes, now squirmed forward.

  “What?” he signed.

  “Contact.” Hand sign was derived from hunting signals, and the word the boot used was “spore of scavenger.”

  “Thrills!” Grulle signed with a wide smile.

  The sergeant moved forward to assess the situation, finally leaving them alone. Gole turned to another soldier in the dark and signed, “Is it always this quick?”

  The soldier shook his head. Behind the blacking, he seemed uneasy. He signed, “Sparse prey this close to camp.”

  A quiet aeon where Gole nestled between the two others. Grulle breathed on his neck from one side, the anonymous soldier breathed from the other.

  Finally the boots ahead shifted.

  “Creep till sighting,” came the signal.

  They slithered toward a low rise in the earth. Earlier in the day, Malley had mentioned that this sector of the trench had been static for easily sixty years. This explained the preternatural softness of the ground—the regular landscape had long ago been pulverized into fine dust. The endless artillery barrages shifted the earth like dunes in a desert, building temporary hillocks and then blasting them down and shifting them elsewhere.

  As Gole crawled up the slope, which was no higher than a crouching man, he pictured how the earth beneath them had been sterilized by innumerable exploding shells. The soil would be as clean as a knife blade in a fire, even despite the constant rain of blood and bodies at the top. No root systems, no strata in the soil, very few clods. The earth was fine and unstructured, still undifferentiated even thirty feet down. They knew this from the sappers, Malley explained, because they complained how deep they had to dig to make tunnels and bunkers that wouldn’t quickly collapse.

  The sergeant gestured Gole closer, and Grulle followed.

  “Head down,” Nadros signed. “Stay away from edge. Don’t startle them. Do like this.”

  They watched how Nadros did it. The sergeant raised his chest off the ground and looked over the crest of dirt without disturbing it. In the air, the sergeant seemed to pulse—the Pollution kicking in, matching his stealthy movement to the faint breeze that blew from the South and caused airborne dust to roil over itself. It was a minor effect but it could add full seconds before an enemy might pick them out of the night.

  The sergeant eased back down, brow knitted. Then he glanced at Gole and gestured for him to look.

  Gole mimicked Nadros’s actions. He wasn’t sure if he, too, shifted in the breeze. That part worked best when it wasn’t thought about. Instead, he focused on what could be seen over the crest of dirt.

  Near the bottom of the hole, less than eight yards distant, a small candle was stuck in the earth. It illuminated three shadowy figures. Two were waiting by a darker blot in the ground, and a third was dragging a munitions box toward them. The box was heavy, based on the depth of the track it left in the dirt. Gole stayed just long enough for his eyes to focus, and then lowered himself back down.

  Nadros gestured again, and Grulle took his turn.

  The sergeant leaned close. “So, you saw the prey. You have ideas, I expect?”

  Gole nodded. That dark blot was waterproof canvas. It had been unfolded to reveal a pit in the soft ground roughly six feet wide and twelve feet long. Also, the enemy soldier nearest the pit was smaller than average, and wore something unusual on his head. Despite the long shadows and the weak candle-light, Gole recognized the Southie as Red Cap.

  “You know the little one?” Nadros signed.

  “Yes, that one is—”

  “Wrong.” The sergeant chopped him off with a sudden, angry wave. “You do not know the little one. You do not have ideas. You know nothing. You can only guess, but you have nothing to guess with.”

  Gole clenched his teeth and closed his hands so he wouldn’t reply.

  Nadros signed, “Out here, one squeaker with a bad idea can kill the whole patrol. You will not think. You will not act. You will only watch and listen. Do not cost more lives.”

  This was Corphy all over again.

  Gole nodded slowly, but his mind blazed with half-connected thoughts. Was every noncom a dimwit? Even worse—had the sergeant asked Gole a question simply to have an answer to reject? As many Tachba never bothered to think even two steps ahead, the premeditation of it stung worst. Next worst was seeing Grulle smirking in the background.

  Sure, I’m new to the front, but this can’t be how it works. This man was acting as if obstructing a replacement was more important than the enemy mere yards away. Was Gole never supposed to open his mouth? The Pollution in his deepest thoughts did make him yearn for simplicity, especially with an enemy so near. He wanted nothing but to receive clear orders, follow them, and know everything else was handled. But should he never announce the obvious? Because it was obvious.

  The patrol was about to be tricked and destroyed. He didn’t know how, only that it would happen.

  Though the sergeant already seemed angry, Gole risked another question. “Still three there?”

  Nadros checked again. “Yes. Three digging.” He signed the word for ‘nesting.’

  “Three fingers of a five-fingered hand.”

  “I know, I know.” Nadros scratched his chin. “We’ll watch what they do next, and then take their weapons cache—”

  Gole tugged the sergeant’s sleeve. Nadros swung on him irritably. “Permission to guard the rear.”

  “Why?”

  Gole shrugged. “Doesn’t matter.”

  The sergeant frowned. “Are you…asking to hide?”

  He’d expected Nadros to send him away in relief, but the man was going to make him sign it. Could nothing be easy? Gole flushed with humiliation and forced the word out: “Afraid.”

  “Afraid!” Nadros was astonished. “Is it fearful fear or madness fear?”

  “A madness in me.” Gole wanted to melt out of sight. At least his face was hidden by the blacking. “I fear I may fail at the wrong moment.”

  The sergeant leaned close, staring. The Pollution discouraged lying, and it severely inhibited lying to superiors. There were always telltale signs when a Tachba tried to be false. Gole’s hands trembled as he signed the words, but he wasn’t lying, exactly. Every Tachba had some level of fear that their minds would fail at the wrong time. And there’s the Pollution again, Gole thought sourly, backfilling to make a lie into a truth.

  Nadros apparently found no dishonesty in Gole, but he remained suspicious. “Go, then. I can’t stop you from having ideas, so your blood-fed will stay with me. He gets a bullet in the brain if you act without my permission.”

  Gole read the terse hand sign, his heart clutching. In fact, he intended nothing except to act without permission. He glanced at Grulle.

  “Do not take fright, little flower,” Grulle signed, in all seriousness. “I will keep you safe from here.”

  “Eyes wide,” Gole signed, and slipped back into the darkness.

  On his retreat through
the patrol, Gole received several glances from the other boots.

  “Orders,” he signed, and that worked so well that he used it again when he circled around the squad. He was now acting without orders, but what else could he do? At least Pretty Polly was working to his advantage. His concern for Grulle faded the longer his brother was out of sight.

  Gole moved fast, relying on the soft dirt to muffle his progress. In minutes, he was at the west-most edge of the patrol with nothing but emptiness in front of him. He stared into the night, wishing for more light. He could distinguish nothing except piles of dirt at odd elevations. Many of them looked like men hunched in greatcoats, a trick of the eyes. Some looked like crouching monsters. Before the Pollution could give him more enemies to fear, he took a deep breath and crept forward.

  A southern hand squad would always number five men, though not always the same five. Those three Southies at the weapons cache meant there were two others unaccounted for.

  They were trivially easy to find. Even Gole was surprised—and cautiously satisfied. By my score, I haven’t been wrong yet about anything on the eternal front.

  The two unaccounted Southies were crouching over another small wooden box a mere thirty yards from the others. The box was smaller than a regular munitions crate but just large enough to be ungainly, and it was heavy, based on how far it had sunk into the mumblety dirt. Again, some direct experience would have helped. Gole had no idea what the box might contain.

  One of the enemy soldiers crouched over it, working a handle. Winding? It was a crank, but it didn’t connect to any rope or chain. Only… When Gole looked closely at the disturbed earth next to them, he perceived two thin wires, nearly invisible in the dark. The wires started with the small crate and trailed into the darkness toward the weapons cache.

  Gole knew what he was seeing.

  They were charging a detonator. The buried munitions boxes weren’t a weapons cache. Nadros’s night patrol squad—and Grulle—had climbed a hill of frothy, insubstantial earth, and that hill sat on top of a pile of explosives.

  13

  Now the night made sense. The new scouting tape, which had given Sergeant Nadros such anxiety at the beginning of the patrol. The fact that the tape led them a new direction, away from the night patrol’s familiar haunts. Maybe they hadn’t interrupted the Southies, either…maybe the activity was part of it. To come upon Southies burying secrets between the lines—it practically demanded that Nadros hold fire and learn more.

  Yes, it was patently a trap. Even worse, it was a trap that tweaked at the growing suspicions of the North. They’d been stung and bled by the South, and now here was what looked like a chance to be clever in return.

  Gole’s thoughts were still spinning when a small avalanche of dirt above the two Southies announced the arrival of more. Red Cap slid down the short slope, followed by the other two.

  It was odd how Red Cap moved so slowly, with such care. Had he been wounded in the last encounter? His two much-larger squad mates were quicker. They used the innate Tachba ground-sense, flowing over the unpredictable earth like they were born to it.

  The five of them gathered at the bottom of the shell hole like rocks sliding down a funnel. Red Cap was dwarfed by the other fingers of his hand—and that was odd too. As far as Gole had been taught, the South didn’t tolerate that kind of variation, because of the unpredictable Pollution it brought with it. Anybody this far off the normal scale should have been hacked to pieces by civic-minded vigilantes, if they hadn’t been smothered outright as newborn infants.

  Gole jolted awake. All five fingers of the hand squad are here.

  They had left the ‘weapons cache’ untended. This meant Nadros, the squad, and his brother might be creeping toward it right now…

  A quiet voice in the still air. Gole couldn’t make out the words, but the Southie working the crank started winding faster.

  Gole pushed himself off his perch, kicking dirt everywhere.

  “It’s a trap!” he cried. “Clear the ridge! Clear the hole!”

  An angry exclamation from the Southies.

  Gole dove away as a gun roared. The imprint where his body had been exploded as bullets punched through. The Southies were firing directly through the dirt itself, and it was so loose it provided no protection at all.

  “That was the squeaker,” came a voice from the darkness, one of the night patrol soldiers.

  “Wandered off and woke the South,” said another.

  Gole moved again as another Southie fusillade sprayed the ground around him. They were shooting blind now, but that wouldn’t last. When they got to the lip of the shell hole, he’d be an easy target.

  “Into the pit, boys!” That was Sergeant Nadros’s voice. “Grab what you can and fall back.”

  “No!” Gole screamed. He clawed back toward the night patrol, but the dirt was giving him no purchase. He would have run upright if he could gather his feet. The more he thrashed, the deeper he sank, the soil was like liquid. “It’s a bomb! Get out of there!”

  The detonator continued to crank with a steady whir. Soon it would have the power it needed to charge the wires.

  Another volley of fire in Gole’s direction.

  Something hit Gole’s head. His skull snapped to the side, cracking his spine. Hot fire poured down his neck and shoulders. The world went white with pain and he screamed.

  “No, leave him there,” came Nadros’s voice. “He’ll keep them busy—”

  “Move, Grulle!” Gole sobbed. He lifted his head but it felt like granite, and his neck and shoulders were much too weak. Another gout of blood ran down his back. “Run!”

  There was a fractional silence, empty of gunfire and Gole’s screams. In the quiet, there was a calm order in a boy’s voice: “Now.”

  The click of the detonator was so loud it could have been inside Gole’s ear.

  The earth in front of him geysered skyward. A wall of streaming sand intermixed with gobbets of flesh. Gole was prone, still trying to kick, and the main blast passed over his head.

  He caught the other half of the explosion, which blew downward. It rocked the earth like the shrug of a giant and tossed him off the ground. He pin-wheeled into the air, over Red Cap and the detonator. For the briefest instant, perceptible only to his Tachba combat senses, he thought he saw their faces turned toward him. He went unconscious while still airborne and didn’t feel himself land.

  Someone shouted above Gole. “I found the squeaker, sleeping!”

  “Bring him with you.” The other voice sounded far away. It wasn’t Sergeant Nadros but one of the others boots.

  A hand closed on the collar of Gole’s coat, not gentle at all. It pulled him without any seeming effort across the dirt. That was unfair—Gole had barely been able to move himself across the impossible mumblety dirt, so how was he being dragged?

  “Your blood is everywhere, scrag.” The voice held deep disgust. “Which you haven’t even pinched the wound?”

  “It’s next on the list,” Gole said, or tried to. At the first word, he coughed a solid tube of damp, corrupt soil onto his chest. It had filled his throat, which now felt coated with broken glass.

  His convulsions started the wound again. He let run for a pulse or two, hoping it was washing clean of dirt, and then reached back with a hand to feel the damage.

  His fingers sank into what felt like a canyon. The Southie slug had carved a ravine across the top of his spine, just below the skull. In the meat, he felt the hard knobs of exposed vertebrae.

  “No,” he gasped.

  He wouldn’t think about it. If he thought about the wound, he would surely lose his mind. He made his fingers explore it, losing and then finding it again as the soldier bounced him over the ground.

  Gole located the narrowest side of the wound and pinched the skin. The flesh stuck together, but then snapped open at a particularly vicious yank of his collar. He closed it again, shifted his fingers, and pinched more of the wound closed.

  The Poll
ution again, an adaptation for the battlefield. The first thing a soldier could try was to squeeze the wound closed. Sometimes it worked, but every man was different. Some Tachba could unaccountably snap back together from the most horrific butchering. Maybe that’s how Lieutenant Elyseuran survived his—

  “Which this ain’t the cavalry, scrag,” the voice snapped. “Do you have your feet back?”

  The soldier didn’t wait for an answer. He dropped Gole and dove away into cover, bringing his rifle up.

  Gole turned his head carefully. The skin of his neck pulled tight all the way around, even under his chin. “What—oh!”

  They were under fire.

  They had been under fire all this time. Southie guns were going off, much too close, from the direction of his feet. Behind and beside him were the higher, faster cracks of Northern rifles. His squad, whatever remained of it, was fighting back.

  Grogginess still fading, Gole tried to open his eyes—but they were already open. It was simply pitch dark at the moment. The smoke and falling dust of the explosion had vanquished all light. How are we still fighting? Gole wondered. If they were seeing what he was seeing, which was nothing—oh, they had the battle sense, of course. Shooting from intuition toward any sound in the din.

  The boot beside him—who had saved his life—shouted at him. “Perhaps a few bullets toward the enemy, squeaker?”

  His rifle! Crap. His rifle, all this time, even when he was watching the Southies work the detonator…

  For a bare moment, he pilloried himself as an idiot. He could have simply shot the hand squad, and maybe even hit a few before they returned fire. The unproductive sentiment washed away almost as soon as it arrived.

  Pretty Polly at last! His battle sense, stunned silent by his wound and the explosion, finally reasserted itself. He flooded with guileless confidence. Faster reflexes, sharpened hearing—sharpened everything.

  The limitless thrill of it.