by Adam Roberts
He glanced about suddenly, as if afraid of enemy patrols. But he was speaking in very low tones, and surely they could not hear us.
‘Then we scrambled back up here, those of us about the place. We let down a ladder that Lichnovski had brought down from further north in a hurry. You know Lichnovski?’
‘Yes.’
‘So we went down. There was little air, and it was bitterly hot, hot as hell is hot. Little fires were burning off the floor, off the stumps where cots had been, and off bodies. But further in the depth of the place were some people alive; amazing, I suppose. Some ran to the showers, or were in store rooms, or whatever. We hurried them out. But the noise! All the time, the detonations were continuing, excepting only that the Senaarians had moved their targets progressively south and east. Anyway, we got them out, those still alive. Then we hurried north, as the air caught fire further south.’
I peered into the hole for a while.
‘Do you know Turja?’ I asked.
‘Hmm,’ he said.
‘Alive?’
‘Dead. I think so. I think she is.’
I nodded.
‘She had a baby, you know,’ said Bosjin. ‘Did you know? Quite a new baby. And so she was in the dorm. I spoke with Etenja, who had a cot close to her, and she said Turja was there, feeding, just as she – as Etenja – went off to the showers.’
I nodded again.
‘Many died,’ said Bosjin. ‘We hauled back to a machinery store further north in the Sebestyens, north of Istenem. It’s seven, eight minutes from here.’
We sat for a while. There was a buzzing far away, that grew in the silence between us. Bosjin cooped his head upwards, peered between two of the closer stretches of smoke-into-the-sky. I followed his stare. The hull of the old ship, the Als that had carried us all through space in her belly like a mother, was all slashed and wrenched. The thickest climbing pillar of smoke came from there. Other smaller sites smouldered nearer to us. Between two of these uprights I saw a black spot, like a bird in the distance.
‘They come again,’ said Bosjin. ‘The smoke renders their sats inaccurate for detail, so they must fly planes. But even from a plane, surveillance is hard. Infra-red is useless to them closer to the burning, but out on the rock here they’ll spot us. Best inside the cave.’
Swiftly, he hauled himself over the lip and disappeared. It took me a moment longer to understand that there was a spinal ladder lodged just under the metre lip of stone. I scrambled for it, leaning forward, reaching with my hand, almost tumbling into the darkness (with a lurch in my belly), but then caught it, swung my body round, and scrambled my foot onto the topmost rung. Then I was down.
Five metres down my foot struck Bosjin. ‘Beware yourself,’ he growled. ‘You’ll kick me off the ladder, you rigidist.’
‘Aren’t we going down?’ I asked.
‘We need not. This will keep us out of his Senaarian eye, and from here we can hear if he passes or stays in the air above us. Besides,’ he said after a long pause, ‘you will not want to go to the ground. The fire has not eaten everything. What remains is . . . unsightly.’
So I hung there, suspended under the stone roof, with the sunlight above throwing a bright block of whiteness just behind me. The dazzle of this prevented me from acclimatising my eyes to the dark, and I had only a sense of immensity. I quietened my breathing, and was able to hear the gnats-wing sound of the craft somewhere over us. It flew, circled, flew back. After a lengthy silence Bosjin said, ‘And now let me climb out.’ There was a lurching moment at the top of the ladder, when I reached out and had to scrabble on the bare rock, but my fingers-ends somehow gave me the purchase to haul myself up.
‘I’ve done what I wanted to do here,’ Bosjin said after pulling himself out, with more alacrity than myself. ‘Come back to the rest of us.’
And so we set off at a pace over the rock, skirting the great maw in the spread of this lower part of Sebestyen, and moving on up and down again over the curled rock ridges. After a few minutes of this, we dropped back onto the salt running alongside the Aradys, and jogged north for a while. Then we turned east, and ran down a gully with a compacted salt floor. This, I recognised, was a narrower cave with a proliferation of salt stalactites, some of which had been cleared to make way for industrial Fabricants and some of their output: cars, planes, suchlike. There were no guards posted.
Inside were people, many with burns and other wounds, scattered variously over the floor. The worst cases (I discovered) were kept inside the few cars and planes; everybody else huddled around one of the two ordinary Fabricants that had been dragged up from the wreckage. Somebody was feeding the raw gruel into the back of this machine, whilst a crowd jostled uneasily in front of it, waiting for the breakfast they had yet to eat. The other was standing solitary. I pointed to it. ‘What is wrong with that Fabricant?’ I asked.
Bosjin shrugged. ‘Broken. Perhaps somebody will get around to fixing, but at the moment people are too much worn-out and hungry.’
‘We can hardly feed every person in Als with only one Fabricant,’ I said.
Bosjin shrugged again. ‘There are many fewer people in Als this day than the last. Besides,’ he added, ‘there are Fabricants in the four cars, and in the two planes. But those are being used to feed the most sick. Sometimes the nurse-rotas come out with surplus and pass it about.’
‘This,’ I observed, ‘is chaotic.’
Bosjin stared at me.
‘We must strike back at Senaar at once,’ I said. ‘That is the only way.’
Bosjin seemed to be sucking his own tongue for a long time. Then he said, ‘Strike back?’
I left him then, because of the tone of his voice, and spent an hour going amongst the hardware of the cavern. We had Fabricated seven planes from materials mostly brought with us, or adapted from driveparts of the Als itself. Of these, four had been destroyed on the ground by the Senaarian raid, and one was away along the northern shore of the Aradys (we could not communicate with the mines up in the north because equipment had been destroyed, as had the two satellites, so we could bounce no message into the deep crags of the mountain terrain). But eventually, clearly we would be able to use three planes. Planes possess a self-evident importance in war, but a fleet of three would hardly be a match for the Senaarian Air Strike Force. If we put them in the air together the three Alsist planes would be destroyed.
This put me into a negative set of mind. The Senaarian army was almost two thousand strong; small numbers in the historial annals of war, but in the context of Salt more than many other nations combined. These men (though no women, which was a quirk of the hierarchy) were soldiers all the day and all the night; they were trained and expert. They had a large body of equipment and ordnance. It was no easy thing for the mind to take in the prospect of going against them in war. And yet my mind was eagerly thinking in that direction. I remember, tart as the taste of salt on the tongue, how that eagerness felt. It was not a thing to be proud of but I felt it. I wanted to begin turning Senaar into a place of corpses.
I thought of my car, still left somewhere in the ruins of Als. There were a great number of cars, of course; for we had Fabricated many to do the work of building a city, and ferrying materials from and to the northern mountains. But cars make poor weapons of war; they are easy targets from above, easily tracked and targeted, and can be picked off. So my mind began turning to how to modify them. Dressing them with armour was possible, but not practical: there were the metals in the Sebestyens, particularly silver, but it would surely make them cumbersome, and any such armour would not be of use against the higher-detonation weapons of airborne craft. Better, I thought, was to heat-shield them to dampen their infra-red, then half-bury them in the salt. I was thinking then of placing them in the desert, as bases for small groups of men: little undersalt caves with Fabricants for food and drink, and a space to hide and dress wounds. And I begin to think of how smaller bands of people might strike out aspects of Senaar, how groups of a few
could perpetrate the greatest damage.
I met Csooris, wandering amongst the people that were there, and we fell to talking. She now had lost much of her hair to fire, and some of her face was bandaged up. ‘I could regrow the skin, or start to,’ she said, ‘only the Senaarians destroyed the hospital.’
I offered her some vodjaa, and she drank this.
‘I was in the women’s dorm,’ she told me. ‘I had been working, and was in the showers, washing with the saltwater. I still have some brine on my body,’ she said, laughing chokingly, ‘because they attacked before I could finish off with clean water. I think the water on my body saved me, though, because when the pipes stopped sprinkling and I went to the mouth of the showers there was fire all about me. If only I had washed my hair as well as my body, I might still have that. Such a strange sensation,’ she said, ‘to be moving in fire as a medium. I did not try to breathe, or it would have burnt my lungs; and I did not stay long or it would have consumed me, for all that my skin was wet. I went backwards on an impulse, with my head alight like a firestick, and I fell backwards, and like a miracle of God I fell under the fire. It was there as a flaming roof. I was panicked, I think, because I thrashed about, and the pooling water on the shower floor put out my burning hair.’
I leant forward and kissed her on a part where her skin was clear. She cackled. ‘Will you have sex with me?’ she asked.
‘You are too burnt,’ I said.
She nodded. ‘Too burnt, too tender. Too ugly.’
‘Yes,’ I agreed. ‘Perhaps you will heal soon though.’
After that I went amongst more of the people, greeting those I knew well and talking with those I knew less well. Then I took a needlegun and went back out. It was dark now, and the Evening Whisper had died away, and I went by starlight and the still smouldering embers of Als, back to my car. No Senaar patrol had claimed it, which was a lucky chance. I set about driving the car back, and round, and eventually to the seashore, where I went north and finally parked in the cave where the survivors were.
Barlei
There was more difficulty with Convento than I had anticipated. Whether they were merely overcautious, or whether the wickedness in Als had somehow infected them, it is difficult to say. But they were certainly strong in their feigned outrage at our retaliation on Als. Clearly, they felt threatened. The Conventon diplomat, who lived in meagre accommodation in Senaar (his government could have afforded better, of course, but chose not to spend enough), was a real irritation to me during those first few days of the war.
For instance, the Conventon delegation flew down, and insisted on personal meetings with me. When I refused (and after all, I had a war to prosecute) they started a series of defamatory Visual performances, giving interviews to net companies all over Salt, denouncing the Senaarian attack as aggression, empire-building and even (can you believe it!) genocide. Of course, history has vindicated me on that last charge; and for a people supposedly destroyed, the Alsists were soon enough fighting with deadly urgency. History should ask the widows and children of the Senaarian fighting men who died at the hands of Alsist warmaking whether I had perpetrated genocide upon that wicked nation; should ask the relatives of the civilians they murdered. I confess the situation made me angry then, confess too that it makes me angry now to contemplate it. But you cannot gag people, cannot stop evil tongues writhing.
Matters became worse with a spurious dispute over airspace. Naturally, having subdued the Alsist ability to wage terrorist war, I needed to keep Senaarian planes in the air over Als. I needed to keep an eye on what the Alsists were doing on the ground. More than this, I had positioned a camp of crack soldiers on the ground to the south of the city, by the banks of the Perse, and they needed air cover. But the Conventons turned this into a dispute, and claimed that we were invading their airspace. As if that were even plausible! We were nearly two hundred kilometres from Convento . . . but they merely insisted that there had been a ‘Northern Alliance’ (no such organisation had been legally constituted, of course) and that any ‘invasion’ from the South that encroached on any part of the land by the sea was ‘illegal’.
By way of challenging our presence, then, Conventon planes began deliberately intruding on our manoeuvres. For three anxious days we were never certain, back in the control base in Senaar, whether our pilots were going to be able to hold back from opening fire on these intruders. They became bolder and bolder, shadowing our planes in their movements, sweeping down at them, flying upside down underneath them. No matter how we complained, we got nowhere.
They were goading us, of course; attempting to buy a war with us by spending the lives of their pilots. In the event, of course, the Alsist attack took events out of our hands anyway.
Petja
The phrase is making war (uarfabrejejen); and that is what we did, within a few days. We made war. But little is made in war, and much unmade. It is a stupid phrase; it has no correlation with the real world.
It took days to talk round the people hale enough to make war. Spirits were low, and I needed a deal of energy. But there was always rage underneath the depression, for what is depression but a crushing down of anger? And people found me, as I spoke, a vivid maker of war in myself. They found themselves listening to my plans, whatever their spirits. And my plans were good.
Not all my plans were followed, of course. Ours was not a hierarchy, for all that war gave me command over some people. And so there were some who insisted, stupidly, that we meet the Senaarians in the air. I advised against it, there were even (I remember) fistfights by the evening fires, but enough of a group of others made the case. And so they decided to augment our three planes with more. But, even with industrial Fabricants and the finest software, it is a slow and complicated business building planes, and doubly complicated to modify the components ad hoc to render them tougher, shield-added, weaponed, all the things that distinguish a warcraft from a peacetime one. And we had only a few rescued industrial Fabricants, and poor software. We made another plane, but within a fortnight all our planes were broken in the air and left in black pieces on the deep desert floor. Only a madman forces himself on even though every step injures him. The better way is to come at it in another manner.
So we developed manpacks. We trucked out a series of Fabricants from the position we had occupied (this was before we attacked, but we anticipated clearly that the Senaarians would retaliate more thoroughly after we began making the war), and took them to the mines in the more northerly mountain strongholds, and there we established a Fordist rota, where equipment was produced in continuous cycles. Mostly these machines were manned by the injured or the maimed, although some able-bodied refused to be part of the war, and they either went north or left altogether. There was little of this, though, because the rage was large enough to hold most people.
And to these people I said, ‘Forget that you live in a certain place, because you no longer do: now you live in the desert, you eat whatever you find, you drink from whichever source presents itself. Forget that you are alive, because you are only dead, already dead. Forget that the Senaarians are people, because we must kill them and kill great numbers.’ We took the needleguns and needlerifles that had already been Fabricated, and we spent three days preparing ourselves as best we could. The needlerifles were advantaged with a spot-laser that aimed down the spine of the gun, and we spent the afternoon target-shooting in the cavern, and out of the cavern also, on the flat and amongst the creases of the hills. (I was worried about this last, because I reasoned Senaarian sats could spot us easily, and that we looked like soldiers training, which would warn the enemy. This did not come to pass, and I only discovered later why: that Convento had disabled them all, claiming accident.) The rifle Fabricant software came with a training fluid, to be spat out of the rifles instead of metal. This fluid, shot out by laser, hurt and bruised the skin when it struck you, but it did not kill, and so we spiced our training by dividing into two bands.
We also prepared camoufl
age cloaks: these were very capacious, but rolled behind to sit at the base of the spine in a wedge. These cloaks, then, were coated with salt crystals over a polymer of reflective cloth that gave back the same readings as sodium. In the desert, we could unfurl them and throw ourselves on the salt ground, and dig ourselves under, or cast heaps of salt over us if we had time. No sat, no plane, probably no man (except if he were very close) could spot us. It seems now, as I recall it in this place, a primitive piece of technology, but it served us better than machines with ten thousand moving parts; all our planes were destroyed soonest.
We also (this through our ingenuity) made up large balloons of strong but delicate-seeming material – a cloth of large grown crystals that meshed together to form rigid bags, though they had almost no weight. These were fitted tight about our stomachs, hips and thighs until we needed lift, and then a micropump would empty all air from them and the balloons would begin to lift us. Then the manpacks could raise us. The engines in these packs worked with counter-revolving jet pressure, and they would move us upwards. But they were sluggish and sometimes failed with the weight of a person and kit (and so we had the balloons): and even with as little as fifty kilos or so, they were erratic. They grasshoppered us out, upwards so fast our ears sang with pain, usually on a simple ellipse to 2000 metres and then coming down about a kilometre away. A chip in the motor controlled them, angling them slightly to give us lateral movement, but after that always keeping them pointing dead downwards, so we never spiralled or came down on our heads. But it was a rough ride. I vomited during several trips, and clothing tended to become singed. Nonetheless it saved my life many times.
