Battle Hymn

by William R. Forstchen

"I could say it was outside my department, sir. The air corps answers directly back to headquarters in Rus, sir." Pat shifted uncomfortably, and Andrew fixed him with an unwavering gaze.

  "Are all of you in a conspiracy against me? Is that it?"

  "Well, sir. We know you're going to run for president next year."

  Andrew was so nonplussed he was unable to reply.

  "Oh, Kathleen never said anything. Neither has Kal, though I daresay you've told him as well. It's just—we knew you were going to do it. Everyone in the old Thirty-fifth and Forty-fourth has figured on it for some time now."

  Andrew turned away and stared back at the ship.

  "So we figured we'd just keep it to ourselves, bury it in the books, as they say. If it came up, along with a couple of other things, the blame wouldn't come back on you."

  Andrew knew that Ferguson was right. They needed this ship. They needed improved ironclads, another ten corps of infantry, a corps of cavalry, upgrading of seventy-five thousand smoothbores for rifles and rifles to breechloaders. They needed all of that… and that was why he was going to run.

  Andrew surveyed his two generals and friends.

  "Thank you, but I'll take responsibility for this. After all, I'm in command."

  "Ah, Colonel, darling," Pat beamed, "you'll make a dandy president—if the Republic is still here to vote for you come next year."

  Chapter Two

  I am in hell.

  It was an unending refrain, played out in a monotone rhythm… I am in hell…

  He raised his head and gazed around. The vast foundry was wrapped in a stygian darkness of fire and acrid smoke, waves of heat washing from the glowing cauldrons. Hunched stick figures, iron puddlers, moved like tormented souls, stirring the liquid fires… the ever-present demons standing with arms folded, whips hanging from their belts, ready to lash out if any should falter even for a second.

  "Hans!"

  Sergeant Major Hans Schuder turned and looked up into the dark, glowing eyes of the foundry overseer—Karga.

  "It goes slow. Why?" The overseer's voice rumbled darkly, and once again Hans felt the cold revulsion that he had come to understand their speech and now would reply in kind. Yet another loathsome concession, even the act of speaking. He spared a quick sidelong glance at the iron puddlers; they were hunched over their work, but he knew they were aware… terrified that today would be the day they were chosen as "the example." Though Ha'ark had extended his "protection," Karga always found a way to bend the rule, claiming the worker was insubordinate or not longer protected because he failed to do his job.

  Hans shifted the quid of tobacco in his cheek, aware that his mouth had suddenly gone dry.

  Maybe today is my day, he thought. Why do I still cling to life? he wondered. Am I not now a traitor? I oversee the running of this foundry, the source of the machines that will one day be turned against humans all over this world, and against my own Republic.

  The Republic—it seemed now like a distant dream, like a lover of childhood lost; that and Andrew Keane, the boy he had turned into a general. But he pushed that thought aside, for to contemplate that issue was to take the path to the ultimate paradox of his existence, a contemplation that could drive him into final madness.

  He studied Karga. It had taken a long time to learn how to interpret the facial expressions of this race properly. To human eyes the features were perpetually set in a visage of rage. But there were subtle yet distinct differences which could be learned if you survived long enough. He could see, though, that today the master was indeed building to an explosive outburst. The features were coarse, leathery, always towering above him, like some ancient predator. Karga's visage was made even more terrifying by the scar from a Merki arrow that had cut his left eye out, leaving the socket a twisted mass of knurled flesh. He could see that the master was in a foul mood, accentuated by the scratch marks that crisscrossed his cheeks. There had been another fight with his mate, or a concubine, and now someone would pay.

  “Explain, cattle. Only half the iron needed has been poured today."

  Hans nodded in agreement. There was no sense in denying the obvious.

  "My master," he began, the mere words grating on what few vestiges of his pride remained, "I told you before, you need to shut down furnaces three through seven for at least two days. The slag in the ovens has to be cleaned out. And the bellows, they're riddled with cracks, we're losing more air than we're blowing in."

  Hans nodded toward the array of leather bellows, each one the size of a small house, which were hooked to treadmills, each treadmill standing nearly twenty-five feet high. Inside each mill were dozens of Chin slaves, heads lowered, as they walked endlessly upward on the wooden rungs, their pitiful weight used to turn the drive shafts that powered the bellows.

  It was a hellish medieval sight that chilled Hans every time he saw it. Dozens of treadmills, each filled with half a hundred men, women, and children, powered most of the machinery in this nightmare world he now commanded. They walked for sixteen hours a day, with two brief breaks for their daily ration of rice cakes and water. It was the final step in their lives. Few lasted longer than a month before, spent with exhaustion, they collapsed and were dragged out to be hung up like the cattle they were in the slaughter room.

  His skilled laborers, those to whom Ha'ark had extended his protection, were dying off as well. After three and a half years, disease, which swept the slave camps regularly, had taken many. Though their rations were better than the ones given to the Chin laborers, they were still barely enough to keep his people alive and working. Suicide was becoming more and more common—the day before, he had lost a skilled Cartha iron master and his entire family, wife and two children found in their bunks with their throats cut, the iron master dangling from a rope beside them. Though Karga was annoyed at the loss of a skilled worker, he was amused by the several hundred pounds of meat thus harvested, which would not be reported but would go directly into his personal stores.

  His people lived in the north compound adjacent to the factory. They even had barracks, their food was almost adequate, and they did indeed have one day in seven to rest. As for the Chin laborers living on the south side of the factory, he didn't even want to contemplate the conditions and terrors they were forced to endure.

  Three or four steam engines could have humanely replaced all the brute labor on the treadmills, but that was not even worthy of consideration for the Bantag. After all, they held tens of millions of humans under the yoke. A precious steam engine was their new sinew of war and the mere suggestion of such an arrangement would have been met with complete disbelief.

  The overseer looked down at him coldly. Long ago he had learned to live without fear. Fear was the blinder, the killer of souls in this nightmare. Whether he was alive or dead within the next minute no longer mattered. He knew that unless he committed a grievous act, he was protected by the word of the Qar Qarth, but there were other ways to torment him. On occasion one of his people would be killed, perhaps for a mistake, often for no reason at all, the death explained away as an accident. The fact that he had wrung a concession of protection from Ha'ark seemed to infuriate Karga even more. Karga was a daily presence to deal with and Ha'ark a distant being who would not question why one lowly cattle was reported dead.

  "We have not reached what is expected today. I will not report that we failed." There was a veiled threat in the words.

  "Karga, what I tell you is fact."

  The language of the Horde rumbled in his throat, and he felt as if each word were an obscenity. Karga stood silent before him, eyes filled with dark contempt, right hand drifting down to rest on the handle of his whip. Hans ignored the gesture. He had seen the whip crack out a woman's eyes and tear strips of flesh from shoulders to buttocks and or wrap around a throat, then be drawn tight in slow strangulation.

  Karga's gaze drifted from Hans to the workers lining the edge of the cauldron of molten iron.

  "If you kill one of them as
an example it will not change fact," Hans said quietly, not letting even a flicker of emotion show through. He knew the work crew was listening, terrified to turn around and thus single themselves out, all of them waiting for a flash of rage, a killing of one, ten, perhaps all of them for no reason other than a foul temper, a slight upset of the stomach, a mating of the night before refused, or just for no reason at all… for after all, that was the fate of a pet of the Bantag.

  "Then we will do another pouring today," Karga finally announced.

  "My master. The same problem will still exist tomorrow and the day after."

  "Are you telling me no, slave?"

  Hans stood silent, looking him straight in the eye. That in itself was a most dangerous gesture. Among the Bantag, to do so was to make a clear indication of equal caste; for a cattle to do it was an act bordering on mutiny. He held the gaze for several seconds, then shifted his eyes away.

  "My Master. I present you with fact that cannot be changed. It is the way of iron and machines. You cannot will them to bend like a bow whenever you desire. They must be cleaned, repaired."

  "Repaired? Did someone break something?"

  Hans could see the puddlers flinch at the master's words. The last time he had become convinced that someone had deliberately broken a tool, half a dozen workers were hurled into the molten pit, which resulted in an even more towering rage when it was pointed out that the six incinerated bodies had contaminated the iron and the pour was now useless… at that point the entire crew had been annihilated, setting production back even further, until new workers could be trained.

  "As you rest your horse, so must you rest the furnace, my master. The same as your harness or bowstring wears and needs repair, so does the furnace."

  Hans waited expectantly for a homicidal outbreak and was startled when the master chuckled softly.

  "Another pour, then we stop to do what you ask."

  Hans breathed an inner sigh of relief, even though the crew had been condemned to a straight twenty-four hours of work, a pace that would most likely kill or cripple several of them before the coming of dawn.

  Hans bowed low from the waist, keeping his head lowered until the master turned away.

  "There are times, cattle, when you are too clever with words," the master snarled. "Someday I shall cut your tongue out and eat it."

  Then who will run this for you? Hans thought silently. He knew the pressure the master was under. Iron and steel were needed, tens of thousands of tons of the precious stuff. Overseers who did not meet the demand were removed, and such a disgrace in Bantag society could be met with only one response, suicide.

  "If I should ever fall from grace," the master continued, "I will slaughter everyone here, and all whom they hold dear, to be my slaves in the Everlasting Sky."

  The threat made Hans shudder, for he knew that in the end it was all but inevitable that the overseer's words would come to pass.

  Hans was standing silent, waiting for dismissal, the master looking all the more demonlike, when a worker at the number three furnace behind him, broke open the tap, and a river of molten iron cascaded out onto the pouring floor. Choking clouds of steam and swirling sparks soared upward with a hissing roar.

  Karga held him with his gaze, and Hans stood silent, waiting for the barked command of dismissal.

  "Go. Return to your quarters."

  Hans did not turn away. "Shouldn't I stay here to make sure the work is done to your satisfaction?"

  The master chuckled. "They will hate you more if they labor and you sleep. I like that."

  "I will need a pass."

  Grumbling a curse, Karga fished in the pouch dangling from his belt and pulled out a brass tablet signifying that he was under orders and therefore could leave the foundry.

  Hans, bowing low, backed away as the pit master, with an angry curse, turned and stalked off into the shadows. Breathing a sigh of relief, he stood up and looked at the puddlers, who had continued to work throughout the encounter.

  "Do you think there'll be a slaughter?"

  Hans saw the fear in Gregory's eyes. He clapped the boy on the shoulder.

  "It's all right. The bastard can't kill all of us." He tried to force a smile of encouragement. "Hell, if he kills me, you get the job."

  A flicker of a grin crossed Gregory's features. "I can live longer without it."

  Hans nodded, trying to smile. Though Gregory was still only in his mid-twenties his hair was already thinning and streaked with gray. Like all the prisoners, he had pale, almost translucent features from the overwork and the fear.

  "I'd better get off the floor. Try and get an extra watering crew working for those poor devils in the treadmills, and the same for the puddlers. See if you can get to Tamira over at the cookhouse for some extra bread. These poor bastards are ready to pass out."

  Even as he spoke, he kept his gaze locked on Karga. A work crew staggered past him, hauling baskets of charcoal. A woman with a small child clinging to the hem of her tattered dress staggered and fell, spilling several pounds of charcoal on the floor.

  With an angry roar Karga was on her, his whip cracking. The woman tried to get to her feet and then went back down under the blows.

  Karga reached down, picked her up with one hand, and then flung her to the floor again. She lay unconscious, the child screaming with terror.

  "Kesus save her," Gregory whispered, "that's Lin's wife and child."

  Hans sprinted forward. "Karga, she's exempt!" he snapped. "She's the wife of my food overseer. She is exempt!"

  Karga turned with an angry snarl. "Then he is not doing his job properly," he announced with a sardonic laugh. "Otherwise we would not be behind. She deliberately dropped her charcoal to slow down the work. She goes to the pit. If there is one response, it is you, Hans. This is payment to me for the disgrace of not making your people work."

  "Karga!"

  A muscular black arm came around Hans's throat, pulling him back. Struggling, he looked over his shoulder and saw Ketswana, the foreman of number three furnace, with Gregory at his side.

  Hans struggled to break free as Ketswana covered his mouth with his free hand.

  "For Perm's sake!" Gregory hissed. "Interfere and he'll take a dozen more. Don't!"

  Karga looked toward Hans, his eyes glowing with a fiendish light as the number four furnace cracked open and a torrent of molten iron poured out.

  “Get him out of here!" Gregory hissed.

  The towering Zulu dragged the kicking Hans toward the number three furnace, his screams of rage muffled as Ketswana held him tight.

  He could see Karga throw the woman over his shoulder and start for the door that all who worked in the foundry, prisoner and master, called the Gate… it led to the slaughter pits outside the factory.

  The woman revived and started to scream. But her cries were not for herself… for Karga was taking her child as well. In that moment all that Hans feared, all that he raged against boiled over. The child was old enough to know what was about to happen, but still she clung to her mother's side, even as her mother screamed and tried to push her away. Karga reached down and scooped up the child.

  The sight of the child broke something in Gregory, and he almost stepped forward.

  "Don't," Ketswana hissed. "He has laid his hand upon her. She is now for the pit. Nothing will stop him."

  For an instant, in the shadows, Hans saw the child look back at him, and in her gaze he almost sensed relief before she was lost to view in the swirling smoke. Yet again he felt the emotion within start to boil over, as if a dam were about to burst.

  He struggled for control, not to break, not to let the tears of anguish and pain explode. He stopped fighting against Ketswana's grip and felt the giant behind him loosen his hold.

  All around him the laborers had stopped, watching Karga disappear. Then their gaze came back to rest on him. Though they were under his protection, he could sense the accusation, the frustration, the hollow sense of defeat. Two of their own ha
d been dragged away. Even at this moment the blade was being drawn across their throats. Ultimately he could do nothing to protect them. They were all dying, they were already dead, and he could do nothing to save them.

  "Damn it!" Hans roared. "Keep working or he'll take more."

  Shaking, he looked at Gregory. "Where's Lin?"

  "Still in the food warehouse outside the gate."

  He knew he should meet him when he finally came in. He should be the one to break the news.

  "Post a watcher, tell me when he's back in the camp. I should tell him."

  "Let me do it, Hans."

  He shook his head. "No, it's my fault. It's my burden now."

  I am in hell…

  He looked up at the Zulu and the dark men of his work crew on the number three furnace. Though he had fought for the Union and had seen the black soldiers of the Army of the Potomac die by the thousands at the Battle of the Crater, still there had been something that had once made him feel uncomfortable in their presence. That discomfort had long since disappeared. The brotherhood of slavery had released him from it. Somewhere south of the Cartha realms there was a black nation who were masters at ironworking. Ketswana, who was the leader of the fifty men and women that the Bantag had brought here, was now his most trusted lieutenant.

  "Your rage will get you killed, my friend," Ketswana said softly, the gentleness of his voice a strange incongruity coming from the six-and-a-half-foot giant.

  "Thank you," Hans sighed.

  He looked past Ketswana at a gang of laborers hauling a cart loaded with freshly cast rails out of the foundry and then back at Ketswana's group, hoisting ore and charcoal into the furnace. In a flash of memory he saw the crews laboring in the foundry at Suzdal—it seemed almost like a dream now. There the laborers had been free men, working with the knowledge that their very survival depended on what they were doing; here it was the postponement of a death that was inevitable.

  Why don't we all just simply kill ourselves? he wondered yet again. All we are doing is helping the bastards who are bent on destroying us, and we shall die in agony still. Why do we, why do I cling to living when death would be a release?