What the Thunder Said

by Walter Blaire

  “I’m a good person.”

  “This is not the time to make jokes, Caulie. Just be aware that there’s more going on than you suspect. There always will be.” Caulie heard a musical chime, and Jephia glanced off-screen. “Ugh. Someone’s at my door and I can guess who. We’ve been chatting long enough for them to notice. Rest assured, Caulie, I’ll smooth things over on my side. I’m a proper respectable peer, as people keep trying to remind me. I’ll be your patron and you’ll be my protected ward.” She shrugged. “It’s all just noise in the end. Do your task, whatever it is, and we’ll figure out the rest when you get back.”

  Caulie nodded tightly.

  “You’ll need to tell me what you’re doing down there. Not now, but later. So we can decide your next moves.”

  Caulie nodded again, more slowly this time.

  “They’re ringing again. I have to go, dear. Can’t keep the secret police waiting. I think I’ll answer in my negligee and put them at a disadvantage. Is that what you would do, Caulie?”

  “Don’t tease me, Jephia. I’m terrified.”

  “Put it out of your mind.” The screen rocked as Jephia climbed out of bed. “I’ll be terrified for both of us. I do feel a little sick to my stomach—probably from laughing so much. My constitution is not built for amusement.”

  Jephia disconnected, leaving Caulie alone. She stared at the floor vent as the ice crystals softened and turned wet. Shanter had gotten the heat working and now it poured out in waves. Caulie could feel her limbs unkink.

  She was exhausted but nowhere near sleep. Too many unanswered questions hovered in her mind. Where had Shanter come from? Why were the secret police asking about her?

  She unrolled the blankets and sleeping bags they’d brought from the warehouse, making beds for her and Shanter. When she snuggled into her cot, pulling her bag up to her chin, she found she was unwilling to close her eyes. She knew she needed sleep because all of her unanswered questions were diversions, secondary to the real reason she had traveled to Ed-homse. Tomorrow morning, first thing, she would enter the trenches of the eternal front. She was going to see the war.

  Chapter 11

  Caulie and Shanter entered the trench before sunrise and met a minor delay: a predawn attack from the South. The “dead” battalion was only a few miles farther east in a cliff-strewn sector of trench, but it could have been on the moon for how attainable it was.

  Hours passed and the attack continued. It became clear that something big was underway, and the trenches swiftly became too dangerous for Caulie and Shanter to proceed or give up and turn around. They huddled and waited.

  By midafternoon, after ten hours of listening to the roar of artillery and gunfire, Caulie climbed the step-up ledge. If she was going to be shot, exploded, or even simply pinched out of existence by noise alone, she wanted to see where it would happen. She risked a glance over the parapet and saw a line of advancing Southies raked by repeating rifle fire. It could not be called a charge; the ground was too soft for the enemy to do more than edge along. Decades of artillery barrages had pulverized the mountain stones into powder. Where the shell holes were less recent, the soil was higher and firmly clotted, creating maze-like routes that caused the Southies to clump together.

  The Haphan guns were running hot, trimming the Southies back like blades of grass. When they stopped to cut barbed wire, the gunners hosed them down, whittling at the still forms until only fragments of bodies remained. It was horrific, and Caulie stared, rapt with how the flying rays of gunfire reduced the bodies, distorting them, lopping off pieces, before allowing them to fold jointlessly to the earth. It was an endless march of bodies, each corpse a person with a name and a manner of speech and a desire to continue—but they moved slowly out there in that haze of death beyond her trench. In mere minutes, Caulie accumulated enough sights to fill a lifetime of nightmares.

  As one wave of enemy Tachba buckled, the next wave pressed forward, falling like toddlers, sometimes to get up, sometimes to writhe on the ground. Slow, too slow. The advance of men was like the sluggish, icy tides on the beaches near Falling Mountain. It went on so long that Caulie imagined she could see a mathematics to the slaughter. She was aware of herself as she watched: the eternal front was rewriting what she thought of as dreadful, replacing her lifetime of understanding in mere minutes and hours. She thought back to Lieutenant Luscetian’s suppressed behavior in her lab. No wonder he’d been on edge. No wonder the lady general’s indifference to manners the day before. No wonder Shanter’s lack of empathy after harvesting Fearan’s bloody coat. No wonder any of it. What innocence could survive this hell scape?

  Yet she somehow knew her detachment was temporary. She was banking her new awareness in an appalled and quiet place, and it would wash back over her if she ever broke free of the trenches. She would see this charnel field in future moments of quiet and would have to consider it.

  Hidden in the nearer foxholes and safe from the streams of flying metal were the few southerners who had survived the slog up to the Haphan trench. They emerged from the killing field in ones and twos, and had slowly accumulated into the horde that would make the final assault.

  To blast out these growing nests of Southies, northern specialists with huge arms were flinging a steady stream of defensive grenades over Caulie’s head. A good doggie-tosser could loose a grenade every two seconds, throwing and stooping for another in the same movement, but even the hardiest boots quickly grew exhausted. The trench was filled with soldiers massaging their arms and waiting to be called up again for the next shift.

  Caulie heard a repeating rifle cut out to the left, followed by a moan of frustration from the boots in the trench.

  “Not a-fucking-nother!” Caulie groaned, sounding like a grizzled old soldier. “Are we out of ammo again?”

  “No,” Shanter said. “When the guns whine like that it means they’ve melted.”

  The repeaters had been in and out all day. Even though they were of Haphan manufacture and were almost as eternal as the front itself, nonstop firing had taken its toll. Caulie couldn’t approach within ten feet of a repeater emplacement without being driven back by the noise and the blistering heat. They were all that kept the northern trenches from being overrun, and the boots around Caulie had been running back and forth for hours, bringing up ammunition, fire brigade style, to feed those guns.

  Whoever was in charge of the sector hadn’t thought about the guns getting too hot. She understood the oversight. Her first night in Ed-homse had been so cold she’d thought the universe was ending. Where the very concept of warmth seemed like a mythical idea, overheating was difficult to fathom.

  “Passing a bucket,” a nearby corporal yelled. “We’ems no water coming up, so la some of your natural into a helmet for us.”

  A detail of unlucky soldiers passed through holding helmets full of piss. They stopped wherever possible to collect more from the waiting soldiers. The ground around the trenches, even the ground exposed to enemy fire, had already been scraped clean of ice and snow.

  “This is what has you Happies all a-shiver,” Shanter said, nodding at the onslaught of Southies. The next wave was already coming forward, and the small arms fire alone could not hope to cull them quickly enough. “You Haphans get nervous to think that this fodder is probably from one little swamp town in the South. These monsters are going to roll over us with meat alone. They might have more bodies than we have bullets.”

  “Fire incoming,” shouted a messenger, charging through the trench. “Batten for incoming barrage.”

  The messenger was behind schedule. The first shell landed within seconds, detonating just in front of Caulie exactly as she peeked over the parapet. She caught a geyser of foul earth in the face and the chinstrap of her helmet snapped. She cartwheeled into the trench and landed hard. Her face felt like it had been scraped off with sandpaper.

  Shanter was above her when she opened her eyes. “You’re okay!” he shouted. His voice came in warbles as the air sh
ifted with the waves of nearby exploding shells. “You’re still pretty!”

  Caulie tried to nod.

  “Roll on your stomach,” he told her. “Get to your hands and knees. From there, it’s as easy as learning to walk.”

  She was too slow about it, so he lifted her to her feet. She clawed at the wall to keep her balance. There were people stuck in the walls, corpses resolving out of the mud as the pounding artillery knocked it from between the sandbags.

  “I’m feeling better,” Caulie said, or tried to. It came out as a broken shriek.

  She stared at Shanter and tried to talk through her eyes. I’m not insane, promise! I don’t know why I screamed. She felt the next scream in her throat . . . it was waiting for her to open her mouth.

  “The real yelpies, that’s called,” Shanter yelled, his mouth brushing her ear. “We get to screaming instead of talking. Nothing of concern. You’ll have your brains back in no time—”

  He disappeared behind a black curtain of sky-flung earth. Caulie heard him say, “Whoops!” before the blast front hit. It powered through her body like she was transparent, a fist of air that punched her chest. She left her feet again but didn’t fall to the ground. Instead, a barrier slammed into her back—the opposite wall of the trench. Her mouth filled with a coppery taste.

  She willed her legs to stay straight. Though she couldn’t sense which direction was up, at least she stopped sliding sideways. She tried to perceive her body, normally a trivial task, but her world-body boundaries had blurred out of definition—she didn’t know where she left off and the rest of the universe began.

  I might be missing a limb right now, Caulie thought, bizarrely calm. How would I know? If she was dying, she supposed she would discover it shortly.

  Meanwhile, Shanter staggered in circles five feet away, talking to the air with words she couldn’t hear. This is just like being drunk. The world kept spinning and even her most imperative thoughts turned slippery. She couldn’t fight the feeling that she had made a deeply wrong decision earlier that day. Yes, definitely like being drunk.

  A new pair of hands came out of nowhere to bring Caulie upright yet again. “You’re in one piece, la.”

  She peered around and found the corporal, a huge boy of perhaps fifteen, with his hands in her armpits. He released her and pulled another soldier off the ground. He told the man: “You have an arm off, do you hear? And no jawbone to be seen. Report to the reserve line.”

  Her vision swung toward the mutilated man; he was holding his throat with one hand, tears streaming from wide eyes. She felt little for him. Her eyes slid away again, following the young corporal down the line, bringing shell-struck boots back to themselves one at a time. She watched the wounded grope for aid kits, only for the straps and toggles to defeat their distracted fingers. The open trench was soon a nursery, and a chorus of cries spread through the air in a layer under the shelling.

  “Don’ fear’em,” Shanter slurred, lurching toward her and waving his hands at the butchery. “Em’s gonna okay, la. Them’s feel better directly. Whuh!” His legs folded under him and he fell out of view.

  Caulie stumbled to the forward trench wall and climbed the step-up with agonized slowness. It was difficult, given how the barrage was making the world convulse. She put her head over the parapet, knowing it might be a bad move, and she was just in time to see the Southies launch their attack.

  They had decided not to ride out the shelling. If the barrage was decimating the Haphan trenches, it was surely wreaking havoc on the soft earth beyond them. Caulie saw numberless figures rise out of the smoke. They were slow but not slow enough, for there was no response from Caulie’s trench. It was a nightmare in reverse—the implacable monster was mired in mud and Caulie wasn’t fleeing at all.

  “They’re coming!” Caulie called down. To her own ears it sounded like nothing, but the Tachba reacted.

  “Step up, step up!” The young corporal was back, pushing boots to the wall.

  The enemy was closing on the trench. They crawled hand over hand on the uneven soil, rifles strapped, as if they were climbing a wall. They did not see the shape enter their midst until it was too late.

  A huge figure, like a windmill with legs, strode into the massed Southies. It spun enormous square blades from both of its upper limbs. Caulie watched in amazement as the gleaming metal chopped through the soft earth and Tachba bodies alike. The fabric of the Southerner’s uniforms proved tough, and whenever the blades struck a soldier, he was lifted into the air. Bodies came apart under the coats, integrity lost, arms and legs sliding out of the cuffs.

  “That’s a cleaner!” Caulie screamed, to no one in particular. “A cleaner!”

  A cleaning robot, not common anymore even in Falling Mountain. It was certainly not something she’d expected to see in Ed-homse. This cleaner was slathered in armor, just like the panther had been, and it made unhurried progress down the line of the trench.

  “You see them here and there.” Shanter appeared beside her. His words were back under control but he spoke slowly. “It’s a bot. I’ve never seen one so aptly timed.”

  “Will it be enough?”

  Shanter gave the Southies a critical glance and shook his head. “No. It looks bad for us.”

  A crash reverberated in the trench behind Caulie. It sounded like a collision between two mess hall kettles. She didn’t turn around until the crash repeated and another sound joined in—it sounded like a hundred sticks cracking together.

  “Stand to, you damned clappers!”

  The corporal walked the trench, striking a mess pan with the pommel of a trench knife. The men he passed knocked their rifle stocks together or beat their helmets on anything that would make a noise.

  “Stand to, men of Ed-homse!” the corporal bellowed.

  More voices took up the call. The percussive rhythm spread through the trench. Exhausted, bloodied, and blackened men climbed to their feet. To Caulie’s astonishment, even the grievously wounded—even those with missing arms or flaps of skin dangling from their foreheads—joined the rally. They helped each other onto the firing step to meet the looming Southie attack. One man had been lying face-down in the gutter of the trench. Every boot that stepped on him pressed him deeper into the mud—but as the tumult built, he peeled himself out of the muck and stood, though he was riddled with shrapnel.

  “Stand to, men of Culleyho, and fight for your queen!”

  The trench filled with cries of Culleyho as more men stumbled back to service. The soldiers were rallying—but in the name of the last queen of Ed-homse, the queen who had very nearly defeated the empire during its first expansion on Grigory IV. Caulie didn’t care in the slightest—the words were secondary to the percussion and its effect on the Polluted soldiers in the trench.

  This is actual clapper-dancing, she thought. Clapper-dancing wasn’t just a folk tale or a euphemism for Tachba oddness, she was seeing it. The men moved with the rhythm, jerking with each clash and falling still between. They twitched with every beat and rose from the ground to meet the enemy. She understood why the stories always mentioned the dead fighting alongside the living. Men who looked beaten, expended, on the verge of closing their eyes forever—the rhythm yanked their eyes open, sat them up, and pulled them to their feet.

  “On the step, ye twitchy scrags. Stand to, clapper-dancers, ye men of Culleyho!”

  Caulie would not have believed this if she’d read it in a textbook. In minutes, a trench full of the sluggish, dumbstruck, and wounded had transformed into a firing line that crowded the parapet. As the southerners cleared the burning remains of the cleaning bot and charged, the northerners opened fire. The charge faltered.

  However, the Haphan repeating guns continued to cough and jam, and more and more Southies were flooding the field. It didn’t matter which ancient queen was invoked in the trench, no amount of rallying would stem this tide as far as Caulie could see. The next time the enemy regrouped, they would swamp her trench by sheer force of numbers.


  “They’ll get through,” Caulie told Shanter.

  She couldn’t hear her own voice in the din, but he had no such problem. “They surely must,” he bellowed, but he had a wild, mud-covered grin. The Pollution, she thought. “Try to stay behind me when—”

  Shanter’s voice disappeared as a new sound filled the air.

  Caulie’s teeth rattled in their gums and her limbs went rigid. Her stunned hands slid off the parapet. She turned.

  Behind them, a squad of Haphan soldiers was clustered around a heavy tripod on the rear wall of the trench. They were above the trench, in the open air, and their device spewed a horrid blue-green light that cast every detail into sudden sharp relief.

  When Caulie turned south again, the looming enemies were gone. Legs and half-torsos lined the top of the trench they had been about to overrun, and some were still folding to the earth. The next wave of Southies leaped up and was again cut down by the laser. Bodies simply fell apart when the light touched them, and no level of spirit could compete against that kind of geometric butchery. Caulie had never seen the old technology in action; it was horrific. In under a minute, the entire costly wave, the work of a whole day, was slaughtered.

  An A-beam, Caulie realized. Astonishment warred with disbelief. A-beams were rare and incredibly valuable—certainly too valuable to risk at close quarters. Still, what else could it be?

  The Haphans discharged the last of the battery toward the Southern lines, where the smoke picked it apart and the distant haze glowed briefly. Finally, they switched the battery and broke the machine down in workaday movements. They jointed the legs of its tripod and hoisted it onto a spindly wire cart with wide wheels. The Haphan squad was immaculate and otherworldly, more like technicians than soldiers, and only their boots and pants below the knees showed any grime. Such a bright, oblivious target was too tempting to ignore, and their energy shield glowed as southern snipers tried their luck. The Haphans didn’t even look up as they rolled out of sight. The Haphan weapon accomplished what the Ed-homse soldiers had failed to do all day: it broke the South’s assault and left not a single enemy standing.