Like puppets with their wires cut, the soldiers around Caulie slid off the firing step and dropped to the ground. Most fell unconscious where they landed. Shanter folded into the gutter at her feet. Caulie tried to pull him upright, but her legs gave out and she landed heavily at the bottom of the trench.
The corporal passed through, still miraculously untouched. He saw Caulie with Shanter half in her lap.
“Stay with him and wake him up every now and then,” he told her. “Don’t let him sleep too deeply.”
She turned Shanter’s head back and forth but couldn’t see any wounds. “Is he in danger?”
“No danger at all,” the corporal said. “But it will annoy him to no end.”
Caulie almost smiled. She let go of Shanter’s jaw, thinking how he needed a shave and then wondering how Tachba shaved. Was it wise for them to put straight razors against their throats? Wouldn’t the Pollution take measures? As usual, questions brought more questions, inane even for her. She knew it was exhaustion and let them roll into her mind, sublimely unanswerable, before she dropped to sleep, still sitting upright.
* * *
When she awoke, untold hours later, she found Shanter cold and stiff beside her.
A frantic minute passed, where she pummeled his face and shouted in his ear. Finally, Shanter woke just long enough to grab her throat and squeeze the air out of her. He caught her as she fell unconscious and drew her against his chest.
Chapter 12
The next time Caulie regained consciousness, the trench had been rearranged. The dead and the sleeping, Caulie among them, were stacked together on the ledge of the step-up. Shanter snored beneath her. Too appalled to move, and also too pleasantly warm, she simply watched the activity in the trench.
Every remaining inch was filled with Tachba in odd uniforms who were setting up huge repeater guns. They were massive weapons, taller than Caulie, even taller than Shanter, and each was surrounded by a complicated cage of wooden beams and leather joints. The oddly dressed Tacchies were pointing the turrets toward the sky, working quickly and wordlessly. In addition to their flowing jackets—in bright orange of all colors—they wore no hats or helmets. Their heads were shaved smooth, except for a single lock of hair protruding from the backs of their heads.
By this, she knew what they were. The Tachba called them “tail-heads,” and the term was so concise that it had infiltrated Haphan parlance. These men were trained in northern monasteries in the tradition of Zuri, the Haphan discipline of meditation. Zuris were a fringe group for such a decidedly nonspiritual empire, but they had proven effective at training interdiction gunners for the eternal front. With quiet time to watch and plumb her mind for memories, Caulie deduced that this was an elite unit. Each repeater gun was decorated with gold skulls and an eagle—the skulls indicated different engagements on the eternal front and the eagle indicated a century of service.
After an hour, the tail-heads had their devices assembled. The huge guns swooped and preened in their leather-and-wood cages, magnifying the subtle movements of the gunners as they went through their stretches. When Caulie heard the leather squeak, she realized that, for the first time since she’d been there, the front was quiet. The fighting had moved up the trench, and Caulie heard the echoes of gunfire and shells like thunder talking in the distance.
“What did I miss?” Caulie asked aloud. None of the tail-heads answered. She waved a hand catch the attention of the nearest. “What’s happening over the top?”
The gunner blinked placidly. “The A-beam, it’s a thousand yards that way, and still trimming the South. In the other direction, there are spinner bots walking up and down. It’s quiet in our stretch, and likely to stay so, since the Southies generally run toward the gunfire.”
The man paused, as if to study his words. Finding nothing but satisfaction, he bowed and turned back to work. Unlike most of the Ed-homse Tachba Caulie had seen, these tail-heads were unnervingly still and controlled. Questions begat more questions: could simple mental discipline really defeat the constant twitching of a Polluted human? Or did the Zuris only accept the most promising candidates into their training?
And, if it was quiet now, could she safely peek out of the trench and finally get a long, unobstructed view of the war?
Caulie grabbed the edge of the step-up and pulled herself out of the body pile. She stood with excruciating care, the various limbs of her body either frozen by the cold or numb from being thrown against the trench wall.
It’s safe to peek over the parapet because it’s so quiet, she told herself. It certainly sounded plausible.
The slope in front of the trench was a sheet of uniforms and body parts. The nearby shell holes were filled with corpses, and the carnage continued with nearly geometrical flatness into the distance until the haze defeated Caulie’s vision.
There was movement among the bodies. Though the air wasn’t moving, she could easily imagine a light wind picking at the fallen. A fluttering hand here, a shudder there. A thousand little movements that slowly wound down but never completely ceased, and which somehow exaggerated the sense of stillness. The sheer scale of death in front of her, as well as the uniformity of the bodies and the motions triggered by dying nerves—all of it indicated to Caulie that the Haphan A-beam must have been upgraded with an elocution matrix. The matrix was a vat-grown block of nano-scale mirror corridors that could split light and direct pulses in tens of thousands of directions at once. Each pulse could blast a pinhole in someone’s skull and cook the brain. It was an effective and horrible tool against a massed enemy, and the processing power in the weapon itself would qualify it as intelligent. That A-beam could well be an exceedingly rare mechanical subject of the empire.
Caulie remembered the snipers with a start, but exhaled steadily when she saw heads emerging up and down the trench as the soldiers woke and looked out. All of their heads were larger and more grizzled targets than hers.
Soon, the soldiers took even more risks, climbing the walls to sit on the parapets. They removed their coats and shirts to soak up the filtered sunlight, looking, except for their farmer’s tans, like grimy white bugs. She finally saw real movement beyond the trench, but it was only looters picking over the corpses. The Southies were categorically wiped out in this sector.
“Want a hand up, boot?” said a voice above her.
Before she could answer, a pair of hands grasped her shoulders and pulled her to the top of the trench. She shrieked as her legs curled in the air, and the soldier dropped her. She found herself atop the parapet, right in the open.
“Is you plinked?” the soldier asked, briefly concerned. Then he looked closer: “I did not see you was a Happie, sir.”
“I’m Caulie,” she said.
“Yes, I have a name too,” he said, but didn’t share it. He gestured up the trench at the resting soldiers. “Pretty Polly kicking in. The Pollution. All the boots with a hurt on them are climbing into sunlight. I been walking along being useful, you see, lifting them up.”
“The ones around me are mostly sleeping.” Her tongue was swollen from the chunk she’d taken out of it during the shelling, and it made her sound thick and tired. Which she was.
“Sleeping, la! That’s the antidote for being tired. Ain’t no Pretty Polly in it.” The soldier grinned. “I suppose it’s all old hat to a linesman like yourself. Trust me, there isn’t another Happie in the trench after that barrage. They all fled the danger, but you’re from a different egg.”
He didn’t know she was female, she realized dimly. Then again, how could he? Her mismatched uniform and mud-covered face obscured everything about her. She was a new and unidentifiable thing on the front, recognizably Haphan only by her size. She asked, “When does it get busy again?”
The man shrugged and glanced up the trench. “The action is yonder-la. See that A-beam working? A-beams plink a whole wave at a time, but those Tacchies down there, they snap together almost as fast as you can cut them in half. There must be a Southie
prince in that big clump, driving them up.”
“A prince is what they call a general. A Southie strongman.”
“Yes. They’re styled princes of the Moon Kingdoms, and a kingdom is what they call one of their swarming little Southie towns. They’re not civilized like we are in Ed-homse.”
Caulie let her eyes be drawn down the trench line. In the distance, the Haphan trench bulged south in a kind of widow’s peak, and that promontory was in danger of being swamped by the enemy. Caulie initially thought she was seeing a landslide—but no, that glacial surge was a mass of people, elbow-to-elbow and densely packed. When one man fell, the three behind him stumbled and fell too. The wave was vast and compressed, moving with the slowness of a continental plate toward the Haphan trench.
On the other side of the trench, the Haphans were feeding in their Tachba regulars at the same rate. Caulie could not fathom the chaos here those two forces met. So much firepower and destruction concentrated in such a small space.
Anything Caulie knew about A-beams she’d gleaned from the interactive entertainments, where they were a staple of the war stories. An A-beam could fire three times before it needed a battery change—this corroborated what she’d witnessed. They had been brought to Grigory as weapons on the noses of the ark ships, where their elocution matrices were used to clear clouds of dust before they could abrade the hulls. They were designed to be powered by the ships’ interstellar engines, not those batteries, which themselves could only be recharged at the original power plants of the ark ships.
This A-beam’s batteries were emptying at a frightful pace. The weapon and its crew had given up raking the beam across the farther ranks, which, were there fewer enemies, would have broken the wave into digestible chunks. They were now simply fanning the front ranks, penetrating five bodies deep but still losing ground.
The soldier sighed. “We’em had a-beams instead of repeaters, this war would be over by now, la. Why don’t you Happies make more of those?”
Caulie shrugged. She wasn’t allowed to tell him the truth, that it was simple obsolescence and decline thanks to the Tachba and the eternal front. In the original colonization convoy, the Haphans had only brought armament for twenty thousand troops. Militarization had begun the moment Grigory had appeared on the telescopes and they’d seen it was a poisoned world swarming with twisted humans. On Landing Day, the Haphans had two hundred thousand trained soldiers. A year later, the “expeditionary force” had grown to nearly a million. When the captured provinces began fielding armies of servitor Tachba, the numbers soared into the tens of millions.
And each year, more difficult choices were taken, more advancements were postponed, more refinements were delayed, and the weapons became more rudimentary. Factories, distilleries, optics plants—everything was hacked apart to generate the cheap, modular rifles of the new war. All of it to keep the hordes of free Tachba from overwhelming the Haphan colony . . . sometimes just barely.
Caulie gave him the standard explanation. “When we first landed in High North, we had more advanced weapons, but they were pulled off the dead and used against us. So we switched to weapons with bullets. Standard procedure. That’s why the South has repeating guns and artillery. All stolen and copied. It’s good that they never had a chance to replicate something like the A-beam.”
“We can agree on that.” The soldier turned back to the distant fighting. “But it looks like we’re less one A-beam today.”
His eyes were on the roiling mass of death down the trench. Caulie didn’t see any change, except that the wave of Tachba had edged slightly closer. The South still had dozens of yards, under shattering fire, before the trench was near enough to charge.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, sir, whenever the South makes a turtle attack like this, where they sort of stroll up and dither… la, it knocks me into an uncharitable corner. Looks like a ruse, I mean, and they’re not making honest representations.” He pointed at the slow wedge of attacking Southerners. “Why are these southies advancing only slowly when it’s the best, last day of their lives? They could give their Pollution free reign and finish at a sprint. No doubt their prince has begged them to keep ‘good order,’ which means a fellow at each elbow at all times. Slows them down and they’re individually too dull to disobey.”
“Why would they want to be targets like that?” Caulie wondered.
“Look at our side. We have enough boots against them to fill a decent city. Also notice our lip of trench, pursed toward’em like a judging frown. Next factor: all these Southies are from swamps, so they think digging tunnels is wonderfully strange and they love a long, dull job. So I’m thinking sappers.” The soldier nodded grimly. “Yes, it’s sappers, see?”
Caulie turned back to the distant curve of the Haphan trench and saw it vanish behind a wall of fire and dirt. The A-beam squad disappeared. The explosion mushroomed hundreds of feet into the air, and for a moment Caulie nearly believed she was seeing a volcano erupt.
She gaped at the carnage while the soldier continued. “The South probably had the tunnel waiting for months, because they have problems getting powder. Sooner or later they get it filled. Then they all run in together to set it off.”
The blast front reached Caulie and the soldier, far away as they were. A sudden breeze that shouldn’t have felt so refreshing was followed by clods of sky-flung earth that pelted down like black hail.
She couldn’t tear her eyes from the scene. The Southies surged forward with startling speed. There was no reaction from the Haphan side.
“And that’s the book on sappers,” the soldier concluded grimly. “Do you think they’re catching them an A-beam today?”
“No, I don’t,” Caulie said. Every Haphan knew the procedure for landing-day weapons at the front; another staple of history and entertainment. Now it was playing out in front of her.
The Haphan shield could be seen again, glowing through the chaos. It had held against the explosion, but the falling debris didn’t have a dangerous kinetic profile, so the Haphans were showered with mud. They struggled to their feet and tried to right the A-beam’s tripod. One of them stumbled to the side, screaming something into his throat mic.
The squad sank into the new crater. It was as if some monstrous god of the trench had opened its mouth beneath them. The shield grew wider and brighter, helping to slow the crew’s descent, but solid shields ate a lot of energy, Caulie knew . . .
The wave of Southies reached them.
“Ah, damn,” she sighed.
The shield turned purple—an actinic light bulb burning in the middle of the front. The shield failed along its widest circumference first, and the explosion spread like a pancake across the field.
It was the last resort to keep an advanced weapon from being captured. Somewhere behind the lines was the final member of the squad, the one who had drawn the short straw that day. He had just triggered the detonator and killed his friends.
“Good lads,” the soldier murmured.
They watched the explosion swell. A perfect circle of light, racing outward, clearing smoke and dust ahead of it, leaving nothing but stillness behind.
It kept growing. Caulie straightened suddenly, her eyes wide. It’s a landing day weapon. It’s going to be worse than kegs of gunpowder.
“Down!” she screamed. “Everybody get down! Clear the parapet!“
She grabbed the talkative soldier by his belt and lurched into the trench. Fire singed her neck like the breath of a demon.
Many soldiers didn’t react and the blast caught them still exposed.
Bodies cartwheeled into the trench like human shrapnel, decimating the interdiction guns and the tail-heads.
It was over in a moment but the butchery was astonishing. Wounded and dying Tachba poured blood over the tail-heads. Their limbs, uniforms, and viscera entwined with the delicate tendons of the articulated guns. When Caulie could draw a steady breath without wheezing, she stood again and stuck her head over the edge o
f the trench.
The surface of the planet had changed. At the A-beam’s position was a new black, smooth pit, as if a giant egg had been lifted out of the earth. There were no Southies to be seen, but neither were there any Haphan servitors. She could not even tell where the trench had been.
The dumbfounding, still silence only lasted a moment. Then a roll of thunder filled the sky.
“The Southern artillery starting up, la,” someone muttered. The voice chanted a brief song, simplistic and with oddly spaced words. Caulie registered the tune but didn’t understand or care what it meant. She was surprised that she could hear it at all; her hearing should have been blown for days, even with the noise cancellation of her dangling earrings. When the strange song finished, the anonymous voice concluded, “Barrage will last awhile, I reckon, pitched to keep us amused as they lick their wounds.”
Caulie was still with the A-beam and its destruction. The home world weapon was inestimably valuable; it would never be replaced. She had seen a sorry piece of history occur with her own eyes. The local empress herself, planet Grigory IV’s figurehead of the true emperor on the home world, would be pulled from bed to be given the news.
Shanter pressed in beside her. He turned her away from the A-beam’s crater with a gentle hand on her cheek. She blinked, trying to clear her mind, trying to remember if she’d known he was still alive. The war stories never mentioned how bewildering it could all be. The explosions, the confusion, the adrenaline—all of it disjointing the senses and fragmenting reality itself.
He leaned close and formed careful words. “If the South is shelling us, it means they’ve given up their attack for now. Small favors. We can try to get to the dead battalion now.”
She noticed he looked bad—even worse than she felt. His face was sprayed with blood, though it was not his own, and he was covered head-to-foot with mud. He swayed in place, barely upright. She knew he was just a helpie and she was supposed to be an overlord, but a dim and muted concern welled through her exhaustion.
What the Thunder Said Page 10
