What the Thunder Said

by Walter Blaire

“You remind me of the war, miss,” the soldier told her genially. “You’d be wonderful on the line. You already talk like a Tachba, and you’re a woman, so they’d treat you like a minor god.”

  “There’s nothing minor about me,” Jephia snapped, though the hint of a smile touched her lips. Caulie knew that was calculated too—the man was supposed to gather that he was on the right path.

  “Indeed not,” the soldier grinned back.

  Caulie saw where this was going and was grateful, mostly. She’d be able to return to her memory glass notebooks soon. On the scale that balanced a peculiar soldier who spoke a few words of Tachbavim and a text written by an alien who had dominated a kingdom of Tachba a thousand years ago—well, she knew which would pay off down the line.

  “You must be Dr. Caulie Alexandrian,” the soldier said.

  “I must be?” Jephia traded glances with Caulie. “I wonder why a handsome young warfighter would think I am Dr. Alexandrian?”

  “The students up the hall said I could find you here. They told me to talk to the social misfit.”

  Jephia laughed outright.

  “That would be me,” Caulie said, blushing. “They meant me. I’m Caulie.”

  If the soldier was embarrassed, it didn’t show on his face. He turned back to her and gave a shallow bow from the hip. “My name is Lieutenant Seul Tan Luscetian, lately tasked to Front East, in Ed-homse. Acquaintance.”

  Caulie had no choice but to curtsey in return. “Acquaintance. May I introduce my assistant, the Lady Jephesandra Liu Tawarna.”

  “Lady?” The soldier finally looked surprised. “I would have never guessed.”

  Now would have been Jephia’s chance to blush, had she been the blushing type.

  “Dr. Alexandrian,” the soldier said, turning back to her, “I must speak with you in private.”

  “Private?” Caulie’s knees trembled. “But why?”

  Luscetian took her hand and looped it through his arm. Before she could understand the gesture—this sort of thing didn’t happen to her—he was already guiding her to the hallway outside the lab. She shot a frightened glance at her friend, who understood and nodded.

  “Lieutenant, a moment!” Jephia said. “You noticed our clapper-dancer . . . that bundle of nerves over there.”

  Luscetian’s eyes returned to the display. He raised an eyebrow.

  “Caulie didn’t know this man, but I did,” Jephia said. “He was a young Tachba afflicted with exceptionally high levels of Pollution. He volunteered out of the trenches to be our test subject. He worked with my research group.” She touched the display briefly with her fingertips, as if she were stroking memory glass. “He was sweet. Baffling but sweet. He killed himself. I mean, he jumped off a twelve-story building, but we think he meant to kill himself. It wasn’t the regular daredevil sort of thing. He had complained earlier that the university was too quiet.”

  “Quiet is a euphemism for crowded,” Luscetian said. “He meant the air was crowded with ancestors.”

  “We didn’t realize at the time. Our building is beside the parade field where the drummers practice. Someone left a window open.”

  “Ah,” was all the soldier said.

  Jephia said, “We called him Pherrie. His name was Phalantic Pherrusan.”

  “Thank you,” the soldier said. “That’s a proper Ed-homse name.”

  “It is.” Jephia’s softness evaporated. “Now that I’ve shown a moment of friendliness, I’d like to know when I’ll get little Caulie back? We’re in the middle of delicate and long-overdue research.” She gave a wicked smile. “When will the young man be done using her?”

  Caulie felt her face grow dangerously hot.

  “I’m afraid Dr. Alexandrian won’t be free for further research,” he replied. “She’s been called to service by the army. She’s going to the eternal front.”

  Chapter 2

  Caulie let herself be drawn down the hallway and into an empty classroom. Not knowing how to formulate the next step in the conversation, she was effectively struck dumb. She must have misheard the young lieutenant. Or, if she’d heard it, she hadn’t understood the joke. She often wasn’t included in jokes. That had to be the explanation.

  Lieutenant Luscetian guided her to a table at the front of the room and, ignoring the chairs, set her on the tabletop.

  “I’m sorry if I shocked you, Dr. Alexandrian. I couldn’t resist a jab at your scary friend.” Luscetian bent to study her. “Probably the young doctor has questions?”

  Now she was supposed to answer. Caulie hoped she wouldn’t accidentally say something offensive. “Sir, it seems perfectly clear to me that you have gone mad from the front, and that I have put myself in grave danger by letting you separate me from my scary friend.” She hesitated. “Can we bring Jephia here with us? I mean, Lady Tawarna. I have no secrets from her. She’ll understand everything I don’t.”

  “She’s just your lab assistant.”

  Caulie shook her head. A Tawarna could never “just” be anything in a university the family endowed. “She is my friend.”

  He smiled faintly as if he doubted her. “She, of all people, cannot hear what I tell you next.”

  “A woman might wonder what’s wrong with her lady friend.”

  “Nothing wrong with Lady Tawarna specifically. In fact, she meets my expectations and then some. But her family is the loyal opposition, as much as the empire tolerates any opposition. What she hears will percolate back to her father and his connections.”

  “It’s always something like that,” Caulie muttered. “She’s always getting in trouble for flirting with the wrong people at parties, teaching the wrong theories in class—”

  “Forgive me for having to continue,” Luscetian said, which was the polite Haphan euphemism for shut up. “Your expertise is needed in Ed-homse.”

  “My expertise? I have no expertise, officially. I can teach undergraduate classes. For real expertise, you would have to go to my professors or the residents.”

  “Come now, I’ve seen your files. You were recently investigated because you requested security clearance to see some memory glass notebooks. You, Caulie, have access to proscribed information that you can’t even share with your advisors. As far as we can determine, you’re the foremost expert on the Pollution and its effects. The foremost expert on the planet.”

  “My friend Jephia—”

  “She only studies the specific psychology of the Pollution. You have the whole picture, both behavior and biology, with all the distortions, emergent behaviors, and knock-on effects on Tachba cultural expression.” Caulie raised an eyebrow. Based on how smoothly he’d rattled that out, maybe Luscetian had some academic background himself. “Besides, Lady Tawarna has already been claimed by one of the directorates. She’s on the military track. She’ll be an officer when she finishes her degree, and she’s only interested in ordering Tachba around. We need a more inclusive perspective. We need you.”

  “I—”

  “You see, we have a puzzle we can’t figure out.” He paused, head tilted to the side.

  “What’s the puzzle?” she asked, then cringed. Caulie often forgot to properly hide her interest, leading her to ask direct questions in conversation, very impolite. “Forgive me. I should probably wonder where you’re from first. You keep saying ‘we.’”

  “I already told you where I’m from. Ed-homse province. I led a platoon in the trenches.”

  “You mean you managed a platoon.”

  He nodded, smiling slightly. “The Ed-homse front is different from the other provinces. Pollution like you wouldn’t believe. Fit Tachba of officer caliber are few and far between, and we Haphans work directly in the operations.”

  That explained his twitchiness. In most of the Haphan expeditionary land forces, the Tachba units had Tachba officers—high-function, carefully controlled, and reliable servitors who did the dangerous work. These proxies operated under the guidance of Haphans who supervised from safer locations. Unlike most Haph
an officers on the eternal front, Luscetian had lived under direct fire.

  “I did my tour and didn’t complain. When I finished, I applied for a transfer out of Ed-homse.”

  “I wonder if the soldier didn’t like the eternal front. Maybe he wanted a desk job.”

  “Do I seem like a desk job kind of soldier?” He shrugged. “I’ve heard worse.”

  Caulie shook her head. When she got anxious, her mouth ran off on its own. She tried again. “Maybe you wanted closer access to female researchers, so you could frighten them.”

  Luscetian laughed. “No. By the way, nobody likes the eternal front, and Ed-homse is the worst of it. But I’m a line officer. I merely applied for a transfer somewhere else on the front. Anywhere else.”

  “Oh.”

  “Full disclosure. Until a spot opens up, I report to Army Intelligence.”

  Caulie shrank away from him. “The secret police.”

  “No, just Army Intelligence. The secret police is run by the Gray House.”

  She knew the Gray House was the civilian side, not the army, but it didn’t seem like much of a distinction to Caulie. Luscetian raised an eyebrow. “Believe me, if I was with the secret police, we would be having a very different conversation—maybe about how you intend to use that proscribed information to which you’ve been given access.”

  “That sounds threatening, lieutenant.”

  “And so it would be, if I were from the secret police, which I am not. I don’t care about politics or internal security. I am here to solve a puzzle related to the progress of the war. It’s a military concern, and the military needs your help.”

  That word again, “puzzle,” as if he knew how best to divert her attention. Were the files on her that thorough? “I wonder what that puzzle is.”

  “A problem maintaining the integrity of a Tachba unit,” Luscetian said, a little anticlimactically.

  “That sounds like only a military concern and not something I can help with.”

  “We believe it is connected to the Pollution.”

  “I might possibly be able to help with that,” Caulie said begrudgingly. “But what happened?”

  Now that she’d finally brought him to the point, Luscetian seemed hesitant to speak it aloud. “A full battalion of Tachba has somehow fallen dead.”

  He explained no further. Fallen dead? That seemed a strange way to phrase it, but Caulie didn’t pretend to understand how the army explained things to itself. Maybe that was their operating euphemism, a means of distancing themselves from the difficulties of trench warfare. She’d heard it could be quite taxing.

  Hoping she was being delicate enough, she said, “Surely death is not so infrequent in the war, with the fighting and the enemy and all that.”

  “This kind of death is quite infrequent,” he said, watching her steadily.

  “You said a full battalion—a battalion in numbers? Or a distinct unit, entire and together?”

  “Closer to the latter.” His voice was empty of inflection. “The area of effect was roughly a thousand yards of trench line. It hit one of our prize battalions, one that was exceptionally steady and functional. It was led by native officers . . . irreplaceable really. A thousand men. A few other surrounding units caught some overflow, however, and reported what they called casualties.”

  “That sounds horrifying,” Caulie said, perplexed.

  “Not horrifying at first. We didn’t notice the attack because the trench was effectively empty. It had gone dark. Then the enemy exploited our ignorance by launching an attack in the sector. In the ensuing chaos, as we scrambled to hold onto the trench, we didn’t have much time to gather clues or investigate.”

  “By that you mean . . .”

  “We neither gathered clues nor investigated.”

  That sounded very unscientific to her. No wonder he was holding his face carefully empty as he recited the specifics. She would be embarrassed too; it didn’t reflect well on the war effort, how their fighting got in the way of their research. Did they even do research at the front? “It sounds like the South has a new weapon.”

  “Command shares that assessment. To make matters worse, it appears that the South specifically targeted one of our rare full-Tachba units.”

  “That makes it worse because . . .”

  “Because there were no Haphan officers to report the attack. We Haphans tend to notice details that our Tacchies don’t. Details like entire units dropping out of the chain of communication. Even a timely hint would have helped.”

  “There were no Haphan casualties?”

  He shook his head. “Like I said, this was an elite Ed-homse unit, as elite as they get. One of the few that didn’t need coddling.”

  “If the Tachba in the battalion had been simply shot or blown up, you wouldn’t be here.”

  “The victims had not a scratch.”

  If only he weren’t watching her face so closely, she’d be able to think. She murmured, “We haven’t heard anything about this at the capital.”

  “It only happened recently,” Luscetian said, “but you won’t hear anyway, because we Haphans are supposed to be in control of the war. We’re supposed to be far more clever than the Southies. News shouldn’t leak about how, in this one minor instance, the South has us flummoxed.”

  The way Luscetian was studying her, Caulie felt like she was back at her dissertation defense. Every seemingly straightforward question from the committee had hidden a buried political component—they’d scrutinized not just what she answered, but how she answered. It had been nerve-racking then to think one thing and speak another, and it was nerve-racking now. Jephia was so much better at this kind of doublethink.

  She said, “Your concern is that this one minor instance will become commonplace. That this is just the tip of the iceberg.”

  “Yes. The manner of the deaths. Even the least competent Haphan officer on the Ed-homse front—and believe me, they move in herds down there—can imagine a hundred ways how this new weapon can be tweaked to destroy us. If it is a weapon.”

  “What could it be except a weapon?”

  “When news leaks about Ed-homse, it will be described as a discipline problem.”

  Caulie frowned in disbelief.

  “If it is not a weapon,” he continued, “it’s a new and unknown side effect of the Pollution. A rather bad side-effect if you want to run a war. Bad for the empire on this planet and bad for our local empress. A war-losing side effect.”

  “Lieutenant Luscetian,” Caulie said, “if it’s that important, then there must have been some kind of follow-up. What did the bodies look like? You said they were untouched, but what did the doctors say? What was found in dissection—what do the postmortems show?”

  “There were no postmortems.”

  “Excuse me?”

  He straightened, giving her room to breathe, and clasped his hands behind his back. “That is as much as I can share. Anything further, well, it’s just asking for a leak and then all hell would break loose. You will see everything when you get to the front.”

  “I can’t leave . . .”

  “You don’t have a choice,” he said flatly.

  “I can do better work here, where I have access to records and references.”

  “Bring them with you.”

  She shook her head. “I can’t, lieutenant. I work with proscribed information. It’s not permitted outside the administered provinces. Most of it can’t leave the university, and my best resources can’t even leave my lab. This was explained to me by the dean herself, in terms that left no doubt. My information certainly cannot come near the eternal front.”

  “That is waived,” he said.

  “Just . . . waived?” She stared at him.

  “Put what you need on your computer tablet, Dr. Alexandrian. Make sure to lock the tablet so it only opens to your touch. Your living touch. Put everything you need on the tablet because, as I’m sure you know from history, the Ed-homse mountains wreak havoc with communications
. The tablet won’t be able to make high-bandwidth secure connections, and you won’t be able to access any further resources once you’re down there.”

  Caulie was already drawing up a mental list. Most Haphan technologies were simply not allowed in the autonomous Tachba provinces like Ed-homse or Sessera, and it was never brought to the front. Her computer tablet might well be the first piece of technology permitted in Ed-homse since the landing and the first expansion a hundred years earlier, when the Haphans had nearly been defeated by the mountain Tachba and their Queen Culleyho.

  The Ed-homse campaign was the episode of expansion history that school classes always covered, because it showed just how dangerous the Tachba could be when the Haphans lost their technological advantage. That Army Intelligence was making an exception in this instance and letting her bring proscribed technology, containing proscribed information, to investigate a suppressed incident . . . well, it was all too much.

  “What are my options?” she asked, without a shred of hope.

  “You are subject of the empire and a servant of the local empress. More than that, I hope, you have a vested interest in our civilization not being eradicated. Your options are either to comply, or comply cheerfully.” Luscetian gave a rueful shrug.

  “That’s what I thought. I’ll start filling up my tablet up tonight, once I have finalized my list.”

  “You should probably start sooner,” he said. “You’re leaving in an hour.”

  Chapter 3

  Jephia glared at Luscetian, who opted—wisely, Caulie thought—for stolid impassivity. Caulie collected her jacket, tablet, and bag and glanced apologetically at Jephia.

  Caulie had once been kicked out of a summer camp in the middle of the night. She knew now it had been because of her parents, but as a young girl she’d thought it was because she had bested the other children in the science quiz. The other children had no conception of calculus and biology, but they did have very elevated aristocratic accents. The guilt and mortification of that episode . . . the camp counselors, initially so understanding of her anxiety amid the other children, then suddenly so curt and distant . . . this was exactly that feeling.