by Adam Roberts
The planes I sent up there came on the scene shortly after the base plane had been severely damaged (it landed and all but one of the crew escaped with their lives). The sight of a superior force filling the air gave the Alsist crews the terrors. They fled, flying south over the night desert, and our pilots pursued. You will certainly have seen the Visual-enhanced footage of this battle, a glorious one. But try to picture it as it was seen by the pilots. Thrown into battle from nowhere, flying halfway round the planet at speeds many times that of sound, and then immediately engaging the enemy. Seeing them disappear from the orange-lit air over the still-burning camp, where the spotlights played on them, into the utter darkness of the south.
And you give chase! Of course you do, because you are noble warriors for the spirit of Senaar! You follow them on your instruments . . . the same instruments that are recording everything for Visual companies back home. They dodge and scatter, but there are more of you and you are better pilots. And so you press home the inevitability of the situation: that is one definition of war, I suppose. You pull up towards the rear of one of the enemy, the acceleration weighing you against the back of your pilot’s seat; and you feel the beautiful click as the weapons fix themselves, and the spiritual roar of them firing. Twin spires of light reaching through the darkness towards the blot of darkness, hidden in darkness, that is the enemy. Perhaps you close your eyes in prayer.
And there is light. And a tumbling of wreckage, falling to the endless levels of Salt below.
Some historians call the engagement the first battle of the air; but why must we name these things? I commend you: unload the Visuals on your netscreen and watch them again. Never forget your history!
Petja
I was wary of using the cars, thinking that they could be easily followed from sats, but luck preserved us. The Senaarian satellites had been disabled by the Convento build-up to war and by the time they were operating again, we had safely buried the cars in the desert, north-east of Senaar.
We deduced the disabling of these satellites on the second day of driving south. There was a lot of traffic in the air for us to monitor, indeed. Most of it was Conventon, as they reported increasing Senaarian build-up on the east bank of the Aradys. They reported the battle over and over again, and it was from them we learnt of the destruction of the few Alsist aircraft. But this we could have deduced anyway, because towards the end of the afternoon of the second day we came across a gigantic spoor of blackened metal, stretching like a God’s smudge over the pure white of the deep desert salt. It did not require much time to find that this was the wreckage of one of these planes. Parts of it had been melted and reformed in bizarre, artistic shapes: the work of a blind chance sculptor that I nevertheless found exquisite. Beautiful and pregnant with death. Other parts of the wreckage were almost untouched, except that they had been ripped into uneven shreds and fluttered over the ground from a height. We found some bodies that were only charred skeletons. Another body had had her skin tanned as if from the sun, but she had no chin, and her brown teeth seemed forever biting the empty air. We found nobody we recognised.
Some said to bury these dead, but I insisted we hurry on. My original plan had been to move south until we attracted the air forces, and then to try and meet them with missiles, but it had been a thin plan, and would most likely have resulted in our death. I now reasoned that we would have some days before the Senaarians could fix their sats, and that we could use that time to move the cars south, and base them under the salt. Now, I reasoned, Convento would enter the war, and we would be able to act as guerrillas and attack the Senaarian hometown and the chain of supplies. This seemed to me an excellent way to make war, because we would be able to damage a great deal of Senaar, and to kill many Senaarians. Beyond that, I had little thought.
And so we moved on, passively monitoring the sometimes contradictory but generally clear reports of war developing between Senaar and Convento. From time to time we heard the boom of jets passing away to the west, moving south to north or north to south. But we never saw them, nor they us.
And so we moved on, and mostly our wounds healed, and we were ready to fight again. Some abrasions stayed stubborn, open and bleeding. There were patches of my skin that were forever itchy, it seemed; and I was sunburnt; as were we all. Stretches of over-skin (hörerparm) would come away, as transparent and ghostly as lizard castings. One night, I remember, I discovered a mole on the back of my neck that I had not noticed before, and that had never troubled me before; but once I started scratching at it, it became more and more itchy, and it spread blood all down the back of my shirt. I slept little that night.
Eventually, we parked the cars in the lee of a long dune, twenty kilometres north of the Senaarian dyke, and we dug them into the great dune by hand. We wedged ceiling boards into the body of the dune, and then we cleared the salt away underneath with power shovels, to make a tunnel. We forced the cars in, and then filled them about with salt again. When we were finished, it was nearly time for the Whisper, so we retreated to the cars and the Whisper finished our work for us, by smoothing down the rough edges we had left on the dune, and licking the shape about us.
Barlei
War with Convento finally broke out, with the official withdrawal of Conventon diplomatic staff from Senaar. Now, some people have accused me of being ruthless in war, but understand this: in all the war we prosecuted with Convento, we acted with honour, because our enemy did. Convento is a religious nation, and it obeyed the rules of war. We fought, we killed theirs, they killed ours, but at all times we knew that we could respect our opponent. Not so Als: Als was never a nation at war, but a rabble of bloodthirsty terrorists. And perhaps you think I use the word terrorist lightly, but of course not. Convento fought us on battlefields, usually the barren salt. Als fought us in our own streets and homes, killed civilians and soldiers without discrimination. Convento fought a war because their government debated and declared a war. Alsists fought simply because it was their bestial nature to fight. There never was any debate in the Alsist government, or declaration of war from the Alsist authorities, because Als never had government, authorities or civilisation of any kind. Now, surely you would agree that I cannot call the Alsists soldiers; or I would be compelled to call every madman individual with a grudge a ‘soldier’; every murderer and criminal would claim that they were at war. Of course, an individual cannot declare war; only a government can. It is of the greatest importance to law, to order, that we distinguish these two things.
First, Convento fought us in the air, and I am man enough to admit they fought us well. We lost all our craft save two, and those two returned home with severe damage, such that it was a miracle, or a testament to the skill of the pilots, that they made it back at all. There were grumblings amongst the people at this; the word went round that I had been fooled by the ease of our first battle into complacency in the air. But the truth is that Convento suffered losses almost as great as ours, and that air supremacy was granted to neither of us. There were some ground scuffles as well, with the reinforced base at Als.
But the war with Convento lasted the length a war should last: within three weeks I was meeting the President of Convento in Yared, and signing protocols that ended hostilities between us. We were both honourable peoples. Convento agreed to allow us a military base on the site of former Als (necessary partly to deal with repeated terrorist attacks from the mountains to the north, and partly to facilitate the harvesting of salt eels and other crops: there was quite a scarcity of food at this time). In return we agreed not to fly west of the seventh longitude, not to conduct any military operations in Conventon territory and so on.
The vice-President confided in me (because, indeed, these great statesmen are ordinary people as well, and we chat and gossip as much as any housewife) that many in Convento were anxious about the spread of Alsists in the mountains north of the Perse. They were now nothing more than bandits; they had taken to stealing food, raiding travellers, and generally aggre
ssing the area. Indeed, I harboured the hope that at some future date Convento might join forces with us in flushing them out of their mountains. Without air cover (and the few planes we had left were mostly occupied in supplying the base with necessaries) it was a low, tortuous and dangerous mission.
Things were not helped by the fact that a second cadre of terrorists had established themselves somewhere in the south. With the negotiation of peace with Convento, and the occupation of the ruins of Als, the war was effectively over. It was a matter of great frustration that there were so many Alsists who refused to digest that fact. Of course, they could have signed a treaty and rebuilt their city (probably with a policing force of Senaarians, but the enforcement of law and order could only have benefited them). Instead they chose to carry their grudge.
I remember calling jean-Pierre into my office. He had led men with distinction in the short-lived hostilities against Convento, but now I had a more onerous task for him. ‘My friend,’ I said. ‘We have won the war; it is merely that the enemy have refused to accept the fact. We must make them accept it.’
I remember his smile – his smile! Oh, bear with me, if I become a little emotional. The very memory of him is enough to wet my eyes. I place in the record links to images of him, standing attention in full uniform. Connect with these links, and you will see what I saw on that day.
‘Great Leader,’ he said. ‘These anarchists must understand the Will of God, and if they do not understand it I shall make them understand.’
‘I can depend upon you,’ I said, clasping his hand. ‘Senaar can depend upon you.’
He went north the following day, flying with four planes and a complement of fresh troops, with a mission statement to keep the eastern seaboard of the Perse pacified. Did I think of him as my son? The comparison with another holy relationship between Father and Son is surely not blasphemous. Sometimes I am awake in the small hours, and once I was in a chapel during the Morning Whisper, having spent the night there, and I actually spoke the words aloud, hoping to reach my Creator. Sacrifice! Sacrifice! Why must this be the principle of the spiritual in this universe? But the silence, the pure clean silence of the crypt, is answer to me. If I falter, as flesh sometimes trembles, then in my soul I know that only in sacrifice is there truth.
I remember standing in an office overlooking the airfield, as jean-Pierre made his way, his handsome face rictusing with grins as he laughed with his comrades, striding over the field towards his plane. I watched as the plane swept in the air and ferried him north.
I never saw him again.
Petja
We operated at night to begin with, stealing south and mining the Great Dyke that bore the brunt of the Whisper. That Senaar had left the great stretch of this dyke unguarded surprised me, but then again it was a lengthy construction indeed and perhaps it would have required too many soldiers to guard it all. We left the explosives buried in the structure, like maggots sleeping in meat.
North of the dyke there were scrubbier lands, where saltdomes poked through the topsalt, and were slowly worn to strange shapes. Since our cloaks stood out in this terrain I did not stay long.
We pulled back to the cars and took our daily meal. Listening to ether traffic, we reasoned that the Alsist sats were still not operating as they might. I took our squad of fifty-four, with double rations, and marched south-west. When the Whisper started at our back, we hurried to the next dune and dug ourselves into the lee side, with our cloaks wrapped about us. We were like animals, natives of the planet. In a day we reached a broad press of hardened salt, where many wheels had squashed the grains together into a road. There was little cover hard by the road, so we were forced to pull back thirty metres or so. Still, we only waited half an hour before a convoy of three grumbled over the horizon and started up the road.
I ordered the first truck stopped with a sodium-grenade, fired from a pole (so simple yet so ingenious). Its cab windows broke with the explosion, and let the fire in. Somebody toppled out of the side doorway, but they were burning so fiercely they merely fell to the ground. One of the trucks behind stopped, and its complement piled out with their needleweapons firing. The other pulled off the road, and made slower progress in the unmarked salt, grains spewing out from its spinning back wheels. I ordered the grenade to stop that truck, although the launcher missed with her second and third strike; meanwhile I ordered everybody to charge. We covered the ground quickly, firing needles in continuous bursts. My left-hand cover fell, simply doubled forward with a nugh sound and collapsed on the salt. In the silence of the day I could hear the needles swish past; and they glinted in the sun, like rays of light in an optical diagram. One hit my hand, and carved a way in along the length of my little finger: it hurt a great deal more than the more serious wound I had received at Als.
Why am I telling you about this raid in such detail? There was something about it; the sunshine so bright and pure, perhaps. The vision (I can shut my eyes and the image will come to me as if newly fished from bright water) of the great trucks stalled, jolting and swelling with perspective as I ran towards them. Of the maskless Senaarians ducking their heads back out of the way, round the snout of the car, trying to stay behind cover. But they were a small force, and we were forty-four. Three of us died, and one (a man called Sebestyen, like the mountains) received two needle wounds to the lower abdomen. His pain was bad, and there was little we could do. Two offered to drag him on his cloak back to the car, where he could lie and recuperate; which was no small offer, since they dragged him for a day and a half, stopping at every Whisper to bury him and themselves, and then starting again, and on one occasion being buzzed from the air, and having to turn him over (his shouts of pain, they said, were severe) and themselves to hide under their cloaks. They dragged him all that way and finally he died anyway. Afterwards, I spoke to one of them, and he said he was most worried by the way the blood from Sebestyen’s wounds kept spilling on the salt, bright red on bright white, and the two of them kept kicking salt over this trail and hoping it didn’t show from the air.
One truck got away, revving noisily, rejoining the track and speeding over the northern horizon; and one truck was wrecked. But we took the third, and a group of twelve of us turned it about, and drove south; the rest fell back. Surely, after ten minutes, we saw two dots in the air to the south, and voices coming croaky over the com ordering us to stop and surrender. So we jammed a seat-brace against the acceleration foot-button, and tumbled out of the car. Then we rushed to the nearest western dunes, and threw ourselves down with our cloaks as camouflage to watch as the enemy destroyed their own car. The explosion was magnificent.
The plane made a pass over us, but could not locate us against the salt, and turned away. From here we marched our force to the west, and came to the spinal railway track that connects Senaar and Yared. This was the point of our attack, to destroy the railway terminus in Senaar, and to this end we placed our trays of explosive carefully, so that they hovered over the track itself (we had to tear down the windshield covering), and then sent them scooting down the track at two hundred kilometres per hour, to detonate in the centre of the city.
Freed of our packages, we made swift time heading west. By ill fortune we were spotted from the air. Again, we lay down in camouflage, but the plane flew low anyway and began strafing our positions, and so we were forced to clamber up and deflate our balloons, and jump to the east.
The plane followed us, of course, but our various jumps were scattered so that it could not target a group. Of the twelve who had driven with me in the car, three were killed, and one died when his manpack malfunctioned and dropped him down head first. I found his body; his head was flopped over on his shoulder as if he were asleep. We were concerned, of course we were, at the implications of this but our manpacks were too vital to our method of making war to give up using them.
We regrouped, and broke into several groups. The first, the one I joined, skirted east of the Great North Road, coming down the way until we r
eached outbuildings and northern suburbs of Senaar itself. Here we deployed the most curious-looking of our weapons of war, devices that had been modified from child-toy software in our car Fabricants. Small fusion detonators, suspended from balloons and fitted with tiny fan-motors. When we inflated the balloons, the things would hover three metres from the ground and begin slowly to drift along. These surely do not sound like very practical weapons of war: how slowly they travelled, how easy they would be to dispose of, to dismantle. But we set a fuse of thirty minutes and let them drift away, buzzing like insects. Then we hid, crouched behind a large storage shed. At exactly twelve minutes we detonated the charges we had planted days before in the Great Dyke itself. We were many kilometres from the dyke, and on the northern outskirts, but we heard the billowing whump-whump of the detonations clearly. Then we waited. I closed my eyes, imagined a rushing of military services to the east, thinking the dyke was under attack. I imagined planes whirling through the air.
It was minutes before the Evening Whisper was to start, and we hurried away, dashing north-east from the roads and into the dunes to bury ourselves into the lee side. The slipping, abrasive eddies of trillions of salt grains as I wriggled my way under the soil, and safety. And then?
Then, our balloons floating down streets, over parks, perhaps knocking against the walls of buildings, and skidding along with the fan-blades rattling ineffectually against the blocks. But then the Whisper, the air scurrying with jewel-sharp tiny salt grains, the breached dyke letting through a more vigorous scouring wind than normal, and people cowering inside. Nature bursting our fragile balloons, filling the rigid structures with tiny holes and letting the ordinary air suck inside. Dozens of devices settling to the ground, tossed and kicked by the wind perhaps, rolling into gutters, or setting up in the ground-jambs of walls.
