“Forget them,” she said. “We need to get you somewhere safe.”
The first shells of the Southern barrage arrived. Around her, the tail-head interdiction unit tried to respond. Their tracers arced into the sky, finding and exploding the shells high above the earth. Most of their guns were damaged, however, and the shells were too many—the barrage easily reached the trench, wreaking more havoc among the tail-heads. After all the destruction Caulie had witnessed today, now an elite unit with a century of service was about to disappear from the world.
“You might be right.” Shanter grasped her hand and pulled her off the ledge. They staggered through the renewing chaos, arm in arm, until Shanter found a path that led back to the reserve trenches. “The great snake of the front laughs at our plans. We’ll try tomorrow, but we’ll whisper about it and perhaps it won’t hear us.”
“Yes,” she said faintly. “Do you know the way back to the tent?”
Shanter kept her upright and guided her through the lines. The farther they went, the more quickly he seemed to recover. Caulie had nothing like the Pollution to bring her back to herself. Instead, visions of the trenches rolled back into her mind from where they’d been locked. The endless wilting of bodies before the fire of the Haphan repeaters. The surprised and sad face of a Southie as he was struck through the heart. The astonished eyes of the jawless man next to her in the trench. The tail-head who’d spoken to her, how his articulated gun had squirmed when he squirmed, trying to gather his intestines back into his stomach after the A-beam’s explosion . . .
Caulie gave out on the mountain path up to HQ. Shanter caught her as she collapsed and carried her the rest of the way. He didn’t comment as she burrowed into his arms and let her tears roll down her cheeks.
The Trench Wizard
The Southern Tachba, with their rude weaponry but prodigious numbers, are the ugliest adversary one could desire. They eat children, they live with dead bodies, they are irredeemably egalitarian, and they refuse to recognize the primacy of Haphan rule. They have no gravity, and are constantly joking or else are imposing their dull opinions upon us in loud, self-important voices from the next shell hole. Facing this terror is a thin line of Haphans aided by some domesticated Tachba “boots.” In our daily squeeze at the front, our boys are harassed by crass humor, plinked by snipers, buried by falling earth, cross-sectioned by shrapnel, or simply evaporated when a shell explodes beneath them—as if they had been sneezed out of existence.
From The First Years: Memoir of a Haphan Boot
From the desk of Lady Jephesandra, to Her Imperial Majesty
I thank Your Majesty for disregarding our childhood friendship, now properly left in the past. I beg your continuing forbearance for any future comments that may be too personal. It is a mark of your wisdom, nearly superfluous in its vastness, that you might set aside a children’s dispute twenty years in the past in order to save a hundred million Haphan lives on Grigory IV. To the degree that Your Majesty lowered yourself to personally inquire into the validity of the “daggie sorceress,” I will attempt to raise myself to properly answer.
Many daggie notebooks mention the figure of Ouphao’an, a scholar of nearly mythic status during the daggie dark age.
Ouphao’an is often described by her contemporaries as “dreadfully like a Tachba,” that is, nearly human in her ability to reason in linear terms. This indicates she had a particularly intelligent and willful host body that could overrule her throat-me symbiote. Modern daggies of this personality type thrive in diplomatic roles (“food talkers”), but in our case it enabled Ouphao’an to apply something like the Haphan scientific method to her research, a pragmatic cycle of theory, test, and repeat. Ouphao’an made the most concrete progress in Pollution science of all the scholars in her era.
For the longest time we believed Ouphao’an was literally mythical, a pervasive daggie rumor tainted with desperation and wish fulfillment. We had no record of her scholarship or even evidence of her existence—until last month.
Last month, a field trip of xeno-anthropology students recovered a well-preserved bog body in the swamps of Sheflis province. Carbon isotope decay dates the body to the final days of the daggie colony. Based on damage to the carapace and how the limbs were jointed, this daggie was murdered, partially consumed, and then discarded in the bog, probably by a small party of Tachba humans. Recovered alongside the daggie was a slate rock slab, a daggie notebook, overlooked as usual by the Tachba of the era.
This notebook contains a personal letter from Ouphao’an in which she claims to have mastered the Pollution. This claim is assessed as likely true, as it was made by both halves of Ouphao’an’s personality. Ouphao’an was requesting rescue from her mountain fortress, which was being overwhelmed by the Tachba horde. The letter places her fortress in the mountains of Ed-homse, in a region very near the present-day eternal front.
The Imperial Archive has a cache of daggie glass notebooks from that precise region, recovered decades ago from a mountain cave. They were briefly reviewed, dismissed as “frivolous, wandering” and “lacking the gravitas of an adult daggie,” and they have been awaiting a low-priority review ever since. I believe these are the notebooks of Ouphao’an, who mastered the Pollution, and they may hold the key to preserving the Haphan Empire on Grigory IV.
Time is of the essence in this matter. I beg—I abjectly beg—a quick and agreeable response to my petition for access to the Imperial Archives.
Chapter 13
Shanter collapsed on his cot, leaving Caulie to pile blankets on him and to decipher the heater controls. She didn’t blame him. For the last hour, he’d carried her over the uneven paths, in the dark, with icy wind shrieking around them.
When she pulled back the covers on her own cot, her tablet was pulsing red. A string of priority messages from Jephia, the latest one flagged “imperative.”
Before answering, Caulie would just nestle into her cot. Otherwise, she’d freeze sitting upright and do nobody any good. As soon as she zipped the bag around her body and pulled her other blankets up, however, her head touched the pillow and she dropped off to sleep.
* * *
When Caulie awoke, Shanter was still snoring, and her tablet was now pulsing red and green. The green meant it was monitoring her vital signs, which was concerning. She was starving and stiff, her tongue still hurt, and she had a headache to end the world, but she wasn’t dying—was she? She checked the readout. The tablet thought she was unresponsive but otherwise within normal range. Only a small possibility of brain death, it assessed.
Then she noticed she’d been sleeping 36 hours. She bolted upright, which was a mistake, and yelped aloud.
The tablet chimed at the same time. Jephia again.
“Hi there,” Caulie said, “how’s the capitol?”
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” Jephia shouted. The tablet adjusted the volume but not fast enough. Shanter spasmed awake and looked around.
“It’s just my friend again,” Caulie told him.
“Can she kill us through that screen?”
“We’re safe from her.” She checked Jephia’s face and added, “Probably.”
“If I leave a thousand messages over a three day span, you answer, do you understand?” The video feed shook as Jephia closed herself in the archive chamber of the lab. It was soundproof, so there would probably be more shouting soon.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry!” Caulie tried to push her hair out of her face but it kept snapping back over her eyes. “This is an actual war, you know. I don’t have control over it.”
“You’re in your little love nest, you’re warm, and you just woke up. You could have answered before you fell asleep.”
“Honestly, I thought I did answer you. I guess those were guilt dreams.” Caulie yawned. “I thought we were talking this whole time.”
Jephia stared at her. “You are so odd. What did we talk about?”
“You wanted to send me a better uniform, and also, one of my
nerve clusters was walking around singing a weird song, and then it was . . . teaching my classes? We were suspicious of its intentions because it could change its face.”
“I can understand how you’d confuse that with reality. But no, we haven’t been in contact. What have you learned so far? Tell me.”
“You called ‘a thousand times’ only to ask what I’ve learned?”
Jephia pursed her lower lip minutely, which was her version of an impatient sigh. “Things are changing quickly and not for the better. I need to know what you’ve discovered so I can run interference for you. It may just keep you safe. It may even—” She broke off and leaned in closer. “Caulie, this line isn’t secure, and we probably shouldn’t even trust the secure ones. But I must wonder, are you alone? Can we talk openly?”
“Yes, of course.”
“I only ask because.”
Caulie puzzled for a second, and then switched the tablet to mirror mode. Shanter was leaning over her shoulder, staring at the screen.
“Are you hungry, Shanter?” she asked.
“I could kill a small village I’m so hungry,” he said. “What about you?”
“I’m hungry, but not kill-hungry. Can I ask you to go to the mess hall and bring some food back?”
“Caulie for all love, he’s your helpie, just tell him.”
“I’ll pretend you already asked,” Shanter said. “But if I go, I might miss all the secrets.”
“I’ll catch you up when you get back,” Caulie promised. She shrugged when Jephia pursed her lip again.
“Tell your friend she looks less pretty today,” he said, unzipping the door of the pavilion tent. “But still serviceable.”
Caulie waited for the door to zip closed again and for the footsteps to recede in the distance.
“He says you look—”
“I heard him, Caulie.” Jephia took a breath and met her eyes. “There are criminal proceedings against you.”
“What?”
“The Gray House asserts that you stole a home world vehicle and brought a tablet full of proscribed information to the front. They’re still gathering evidence but it’s an actual case, as if they’re serious about it. If it goes much further, it will become a writ. Gods help you if it becomes actual criminal charges.”
“They’re not wrong, except about the stealing part.” Caulie wrapped her blanket tighter around her. The door, open for only a few seconds, had lowered the tent’s temperature back to arctic levels. “Tell them to talk to Lieutenant Luscetian. The guy from the first day, the one who was interested in the nerve clusters.”
“I remember Luscetian,” Jephia said, “and I thought of him but I didn’t tell them. They can’t hear his name from my lips.”
“But why? He’ll explain everything.”
“Tactical advantage,” Jephia said after a moment. “You wouldn’t understand, dear. When they finally ended their polite interrogation and cut me loose, I looked into Luscetian. It turns out he doesn’t exist.”
That made no sense to Caulie. “But . . . he does exist.”
“Please try to keep up.” Real irritation showed for a moment on Jephia’s face. Caulie cringed. The last thing she needed was for her friend to lose her patience. “He has been disappeared by the secret police. We don’t know if he’s alive. Hopefully he’s in hiding somewhere, and they merely wiped his records.”
Caulie stared at the screen, momentarily at a loss for words, but too many questions bloomed in her mind. “Who is ‘we’? You said, ‘We don’t know if he’s alive.’”
“Remember, my father is the Duke of Falling Mountain, and—”
“You said that didn’t count for anything. Your family is hated far and wide.”
“Hated? We Tawarnas? Oh dear.”
“Sorry. The word you used was despised.”
“Our official position is that we are beloved by the people and despised by the aristocracy. Big difference. Anyway, we Tawarnas have resources. We’re older than sin itself. Have I mentioned that we used to rule a terrestrial kingdom on Hapha, before the steam wars and the dynastic age? We used to be royalty.”
“You only mention it every time you drink.”
“For houses like mine, we don’t follow laws so much as treaties. You wouldn’t believe what’s been grandfathered over the millennia. You probably shouldn’t tell anyone, either.” Jephia hesitated, and then shrugged. “I’m using the Tawarna clandestine service. Yes, we have one, and I’m running them against the Gray House. Moreover, I’ll be using the Tawarna personal guard as well, when they arrive from the estate in about half an hour. The secret police won’t get close to me again until this is all settled. Not even the cute agent who did the questioning.”
“There’s always a cute one, isn’t there?” Caulie said.
Jephia dimpled. “They must know my weakness.”
She was play-acting, but then so was Caulie herself. She was running on autopilot while ingesting what Jephia had told her, and Jephia was waiting for her to catch up. A family spy service? A family military? Facing off against the Gray House?
“It sounds like a palace revolution or something,” Caulie muttered.
“I’m so proud of you! Yes. The Tawarna family is under political attack, and our enemies believe it’s a good time because my father is far away, being a general on the Sesseran front.”
Now it was starting to make sense. “Are they attacking you by calling me a criminal? Because they think I’m your friend?”
“Good question,” Jephia said, still in her annoyingly approving voice. “If they can tie me to a known traitor like you, it would cause all sorts of trouble. They might even be able to cut me out of my family. ‘Defeat in detail,’ like the military doctrine. It looks like someone is being very serious this time. Lieutenant Luscetian is a little bit of an heir himself—a count, it turns out—and if they disappeared him permanently then it means they’re playing for keeps. And Caulie”—Jephia caught her eyes through the tablet—“you are my friend.”
That was nice of her to remember to say, Caulie thought, though friendship seemed to add unnecessary complexity at the moment. “You should concentrate on your family,” she said. “Don’t worry about me. Call me a traitor if you need to. You have the codes to my apartment? Let them in, I’m sure they’ll find lots of things to be suspicious about. I only wonder why this is all happening now.”
“I’m touched by your concern.” Jephia grinned. “Really, I am touched by your concern. This is all happening now because of what happened in Ed-homse.”
“Are you talking about the dead battalion? Because they might not actually be dead.”
“I’m talking about the A-beam that was destroyed. The home world weapon that had to be blown up before it fell into enemy hands.”
“I was there!” Caulie exclaimed. “It was horrible, Jephia. I saw the whole thing. I—crap. Now I have to remember it. But how does that cause problems for the Tawarnas?”
“At one time, there were fifty of those A-beams in service, sitting on the noses of the ark ships. One was blown up when its ship destroyed itself.”
“Yes, I know convoy history. It was the ship that went into mutiny. It refused to land on Grigory IV because of the Tachba and the Pollution, so the fleet blew it up remotely.” These political fights never seem to stop, Caulie reflected.
“That ship was somewhat prescient, wasn’t it? So forty-nine A-beams landed on Grigory IV with their ark ships. Instead of becoming communication arrays as planned, they were wrenched off and made into weapons. Nine were lost in the process, irreparably damaged. Two more killed themselves.”
“The A-beams killed themselves?”
“Conscientious objectors. Didn’t want to be put to work killing humans. Anyway, thirty-eight A-beams remained, and after 150 years of fighting, we’re down to eighteen. About half of them have gained full sentience. These are weapons with a lot of processing power and a lot of spare time to ponder existence. The A-beam we lost in Ed-homse wa
s an actual mechanical subject of the empire. Its name was Aelph Fantine Drogan. It wrote books and did fundraising for Tachba war orphanages. It was a close friend of the local empress, and no friend of the Tawarnas.”
Caulie shook her head with a jerk. There was too much information flowing in. “It sounds like the A-beam was a very civic-minded . . . weapon,” she hedged. “Why did it hate the Tawarnas?”
“Language counts, Caulie,” Jephia said. “I said it was no friend of the Tawarnas, but that was only politics. We got along famously, if you have to know. Daddy took it hunting on our Ligae estate once.”
“I bet it was an effective hunter.”
“Daddy said it had a level of bloodlust to it, yes. Anyway, the entire colony is outraged that Aelph Fantine Drogan, mechanical subject of the empire, was lost on the eternal front. It wasn’t supposed to be in danger.”
“But how does this damage the Tawarnas?”
“On your first day you reported to General Andretiae, remember?”
Caulie cringed. “We were impolite to each other.”
“The Andretiae family are clients of my family. They’re supposed to serve and represent us, and we’re supposed to protect them. She lost the empire’s A-beam during an emergency in the trenches that she couldn’t control, so now the local empress wants to crucify her.” Jephia saw Caulie’s horrified expression. “Not literally crucify, Caulie. General Andretiae will lose her command, that’s all. She’ll be broken and stripped of honors, then flayed before her men, and finally driven into the wilderness. Not literally flayed and driven. It’s all just archaic service language. Will you stop hyperventilating?”
“She was rude but she doesn’t deserve all that,” Caulie said.
“She’s incompetent.” Jephia shrugged. “That’s not my family’s official position, that’s just me. The Ed-homse front is a mess because of her, and now she’s dragging my family down a flight of stairs. Luckily for you and me, this is just getting started, and these things move slowly. Boiling points must be reached, tolerances must be exceeded, that sort of thing. General Andretiae is fighting for her political life and the Tawarnas are trying to save her without losing face, et cetera. And here you are, stealing a home world vehicle and taking proscribed data to the eternal front.”
What the Thunder Said Page 11
