Fateful Lightning

by William R. Forstchen

  “Not more than fifteen minutes or so.”

  “Fifteen minutes. You Yankees are so precise in your time.”

  Ferguson smiled, stifling the urge to launch into a little lecture on the need for accurate time measurement for an industrial society to function correctly. He somehow knew it would bore her.

  “I’ve wondered whatever happened to you,” she said, looking over at him boldly.

  “Me?” He felt his voice squeak slightly.

  She smiled and nodded.

  Why would this woman ever wonder about him? Girls were something he always found it impossible to deal with, and he had long ago given up any hope of ever meeting one who would find him interesting. He tried to lean back casually. The drawing instruments and the old battered slide rule in his haversack poked him in the ribs, and he carefully shifted the canvas sack around. The slide rule was a cherished item, a miracle for this world, which Bullfinch had owned when he was still a lieutenant back on the old Ogunquit and had presented to Ferguson back before the First Tugar War. Ferguson had used it as template and now several dozen of them were in the hands of young Rus engineers, but this was the original, and the thought of the girl left him for a second as he absently checked to make sure the cherished instrument was all right.

  She noticed him rummaging through the haversack.

  “What’s hidden in there?” she asked with a smile.

  Almost nervously, he brought it out.

  She looked at it curiously.

  “What is it?”

  Unable to help himself, he started to tell her about it, taking her through the step of adding two and four. When she saw the result, she looked up at him in amazement.

  “Yankee sorcery?” But there was no fear in her voice, only delight.

  He laughed and in broken Latin stumbled for the words to explain logarithmic functions. After several minutes of heroic effort, he gave up. She leaned over the instrument, her long black hair dangling in her face, and with an occasional swing of her head she tossed the hair out of the way, a faint scent of a jasminelike perfume drifting over him. He felt his heart thumping hard as he watched her move the slide, a grin of delight brightening her face.

  She looked up at him.

  “You Yankees—did you invent this too?”

  She looked at him admiringly, and he almost wanted to steal Pascal’s thunder. He shook his head no, but the look of admiration did not decrease.

  “This is how the Merki will be defeated,” she said. “Yankee thinking in this, in everything you’ve created.”

  “I’m glad you’re so optimistic,” he whispered.

  She looked at him with concern.

  “You do not think we will win?”

  He shrugged. He wasn’t even sure himself now. When he was focused on his newest project he felt that as in the last two wars his machines would come through. Now? He looked around. There was the smell of defeat, of stunned disbelief, a grim determination to be sure to die game, to take as many of them as possible when the time came. There was no surrender in this war. Yet he felt as if the Rus had resigned themselves, now that their country was lost. They had lost their country and they would lose their lives in the end, but they’d cut the hearts out of the Merki as well. A death grip, with both sides losing in the end. Well, if that was the case, he’d add to their toll. But as he looked over at Olivia he felt such a desire to live again, to maybe even not die a virgin.

  There was the sharp toot of a whistle, the beginning of the second stanza of Andre’s beloved obscene ballad about the boyar’s daughter. Sighing, he looked back at the rail yard. The engineer was leaning out of the cab, looking at him, waving.

  “I've got to go,” he whispered.

  “Already? I thought you would be here in Hispania for a while.”

  “I have to go up the line.”

  “To your secret place?”

  “You mean the aerosteamer sheds?”

  “No, the secret place beyond there.”

  “How did you know about that?” he asked sharply.

  She smiled.

  “I am, after all, the daughter of the plebeian proconsul,” she replied.

  “Your father knows?”

  “There have been rumors about a new factory going up in the woods. Flashes of light climbing into the sky at night.”

  Chuck felt nervous.

  Sensing it, she shook her head.

  “Oh, it is a secret. Father found out because our neighbor’s nephew Fabian was working on the building and cut his leg and was sent back home to recover.”

  “Don’t talk to anyone about it,” Chuck snapped, making a mental note that from now on once someone went there to work he stayed no matter what.

  She smiled reassuringly, and his nervousness disappeared; he knew she’d keep quiet.

  They stood up, and she gathered up his blanket, rolling it back up into a horse collar, tying the ends together, and handing it up to him. He slung it over his shoulder and looked at her appraisingly. She would keep the secret. After all, she had grown up in the house of Marcus, her father a slave to the family. Slaves who talked too much usually had unpleasant ends in such situations. The thought of her in Marcus’s house triggered another memory. There had been the rumor about her and Hawthorne. Hawthorne. Old friend, but now so distant, driven by the war, consumed perhaps more than anyone else who had survived from the 35th. He was tempted to ask. After all, a proper girl from Vassalboro, Maine, would not bathe naked with anyone, most likely not even with her own husband. There had been other rumors as well. He forced them out of his mind. That shouldn’t matter now. None of that should matter. Chances were they’d all be dead in a couple of months anyhow.

  Surprised at his own audacity, he suddenly leaned down, rested his hands on her shoulders, and kissed her lightly on the lips. Her eyes opened wide with surprise and delight and then half closed. Her mouth parted, and his chaste and proper kiss of a gentleman took on an explosive heated passion. A bit shocked, he drew back slightly.

  Is this what kissing is all about? he wondered in surprise. She nestled against his shoulder, and in the distance he heard laughter. Looking up, he saw the locomotive crew waving, a group of Rus peasants smiling. The world suddenly felt very happy indeed, and he felt no embarrassment as he smiled back.

  “You’ve got to go,” she whispered.

  He nodded, kissing her on the forehead, and she looked up at him, her eyes wide, almost innocent with wonder.

  “I liked you when I first met you. You are different. One who thinks and dreams. I like that.”

  He put his arm around her shoulder, and together they started back to the train.

  “When can I see you again?” she asked.

  This was all so surprising. A Maine girl, first off, would never have allowed herself to be kissed like that, especially in front of everyone in broad daylight. It’d be months of proper conversation and chaperoning to even get this far. And then for her to ask when she could see him again? Never.

  And the hell with it, he thought, a foolish grin lighting his features, which seemed to be reflected in the scores of people watching, as if their moment of pleasure had brightened everyone’s day. This wasn’t proper, and damned if he’d stop it now.

  “Are you staying here in Hispania?” he asked.

  “I’m staying with my uncle and my cousins, helping with feeding your people. Ask for the house of Lucius Gracchus, the former steward of the summer home of Marcus the proconsul. We live next to where Marcus’s home was in town. Would you visit me when next you come here?”

  He had a sudden flood of rather wicked thoughts and pushed them side. For a brief instant he was even tempted to ask her to come up to the factory with the lame offer that she could help out somehow. No. That was absolutely not proper at all.

  “I’d be delighted,” he choked out, his voice cracking slightly.

  She put her arm around his waist and hugged him while they walked.

  Crossing the main track, they w
eaved through the crowds at the edge of the station and were back into the railyard, waiting for a moment while the diminutive switching engine chugged past, straining as it pulled half a dozen boxcars, loaded down with precious cases of musket rounds destined for the army at Kev.

  That train was supposed to be the one Chuck was now borrowing for the rest of the day. He forced the thought away. The switching engine and its load passed, and they at last came up to his train, eight cars behind it, two hundred workers and their families piled on board, sitting atop boxcars and hunkered down among the cases of tools on the flatcars.

  The yardmaster came up to Chuck and saluted.

  “I’m not signing the order for this, sir,” the man announced.

  “No one’s signing anything,” Chuck replied, forcing a smile. “We’ll have the cars back here by two in the morning and the train can head back up to Kev. Just send this telegram.”

  He let go of Olivia, pulled an order pad from his haversack, and jotted the note. The yardmaster peered over his shoulder and then at the locomotive behind him.

  “Cracked cylinder indeed,” the man sniffed, and then turned about and walked away. Chuck almost wanted to laugh. Minor functionaries on any world, he realized, were always obsessed with the proper form and paperwork and went insane when someone broke the rules.

  “Ready to go?” Andre asked, leaning out of his cab and staring appraisingly at Olivia.

  Chuck nodded sadly. He looked down at her, and again that strange thump of the heart hit him.

  “Next chance, I’ll come see you,” he said woodenly, cursing himself for not thinking of some wonderfully melodramatic parting line worthy of Scott or that French writer Hugo. Shyly he squeezed her hand and then climbed into the cab, Andre shaking his head. The fireman and his family were smiling, the grandmother clucking appreciatively.

  Andre looked forward. The switch master was waving that the line was clear.

  With a blast of his whistle, Andre pulled the throttle back. A shudder ran through the cab as the wheels spun and then engaged, and the train started forward.

  Chuck looked down as she walked alongside the cab, then, as they passed through the switch and turned onto the northern line she fell behind and disappeared from view.

  Chuck exhaled noisily, and his companions started to laugh.

  “Ah, a railroad man should have a woman in every tank town,” Andre announced. “Like Serge,” and he nodded toward the fireman.

  “I do not!” Serge announced defensively, his sister-in-law looking over at the man with suspicion as he quickly ducked down and pulled open the firebox door, mumbling a curse while he raked the coals out.

  Chuck wanted to make some sort of retort. This one was different. Hell, this one was the only one who’d ever shown any real interest in him. But instead he nodded in agreement, as if Olivia were just one of a dozen between here and Suzdal.

  Andre smiled at him in a fatherly fashion.

  “Enjoy life while it is spring, for winter comes without warning,” he said.

  Chuck, feeling a lump in his throat, looked away. He had managed to forget. For how long? A half hour with her at most, and that half hour had for a brief moment changed everything.

  The train, now on the northern spur that ran up into the forest, started to gain speed. The city of Hispania to their left, the new city growing up around the old, swarmed with activity. A rhythmic plume of smoke was rising up from a long row of sheds, sparks swirling up from a roughly made chimney. Most likely the first section of rifle works. Good. Thirty-two hundred rifles were needed to replace lost equipment with the army, and fifteen thousand more were still needed for the troops Hawthorne was training.

  All along the tracks was a bustle of activity, sheds, barracks, even a hangar for an aerosteamer. He looked at it all with pride, the pride only he out of all the people on this world could feel. He had reinvented for this world a fair part of what they were now making. He looked back out of the cab at the eight cars behind him. He’d invent a fair bit more if time was allowed.

  He settled back against the side of the cab as the train raced northward, and as he shifted the blanket hung over his shoulder he caught a faint scent of jasmine.

  It was good to be alive. Even here, with all that was coming, it was good to be alive.

  Chapter 3

  Cresting the top of the White Hills, the train turned southward, starting a long coasting run down the west slope. Vincent Hawthorne, military adviser to Proconsul Marcus and commander of two corps in training back in Roum, stepped out onto the platform behind his command car. Inside, his staff were packing up their gear, downing a last cup of tea fresh from the galley, looking nervously at their commander.

  Dimitri, chief of staff, who had been with Vincent from his first days as a company commander, came out to join him. Vincent looked over his shoulder at the old Rus officer and said nothing.

  He pulled the brim of his hardee hat down low over his eyes to shade them from the late-afternoon sun, which hung red in the afternoon sky. Along the side of the track, entrenchments were in place, tangles of abatis out forward, the forested slopes of the hills stripped bare for the fortifications. Sentries were deployed in a high watchtower looking west. But the rolling fields of Rus were empty. He could sense that somehow—that from here all the way back to Suzdal, two hundred miles away, the land was now completely empty, except for the recon patrols, and the detachments of engineers and guerrillas who were systematically preparing the once-friendly countryside for the Merki advance.

  Absently he stroked his thin goatee, which still felt a bit strange. He had grown it with the intent of looking like Phil Sheridan, mustache, goatee, hardee hat, high riding boots, another diminutive hard-driving general for war on this strange distant world. Every army needed a Sheridan, someone who could fight without remorse. It was a role Vincent Hawthorne, former Quaker from the Oak Grove School of Vassalboro, Maine, was more than happy to fill.

  Vassalboro, Maine. He rarely thought about it now. A different life, a different age. How innocent it had all been then. But youth was innocent, a truth he now fully knew at the age of twenty-three. A breeze stirred up from the west, carrying with it the scent of fresh green fields shimmering in the heat of a late, spring day, the hay ready for its first cutting. Mingled with it was the fresh pine smell of trees newly cut, the logs still oozing resin now laid out as breastworks.

  Smells of home, of Maine in late May. School would be out now. He wondered what had ever become of his classmates and friends. Bonnie, lovely Bonnie, married now no doubt, most likely to George Cutler, who had clung to his Quaker upbringing and denounced Vincent for running off to war. Well, George most likely was alive and had won Bonnie in the process. He had a flash memory of Tim Greene, his neighbor and first friend, a good Methodist who had no moral qualms about fighting. No, Tim’s qualms had not stopped him from joining up in ’61, and he had been killed at Malvern Hill. His older brother Charlie had died of typhoid after Second Manassas. And Jacob Estes, who lived next to the Oak Grove School, had died with the 20th at Gettysburg. They most likely had put up a monument by now on the small village green down by China Lake with all their names upon it. The boys of Vassalboro gone off to see the elephant and be men and dying in the process.

  Well, I’m not dead yet, he thought coldly, but Vassalboro will never know that. He pushed the memories away. They held within them too dark a contrast between what he had been and what he now was.

  “Strange to see home again.”

  Vincent looked over his shoulder at Dimitri, who came up to stand beside him.

  Vincent said nothing.

  “Rus is the peasant and the peasant is Rus,” Dimitri said, making the sign of the cross with a small amulet that hung about his neck. He kissed it before tucking it back into his tunic.

  “Well, it’s their’s now,” Vincent finally said. “Within a week they’ll be coming straight in at us,” and he nodded toward the peaceful fields which marched off to the west t
o disappear in a distant blue haze.

  The train whistle sounded high and clear, the speed starting to drop off as they finished the descent toward Kev Station, on what had once been the easternmost boundary of Rus. A regiment was out in the field practicing an advance by line of companies. Vincent watched them appraisingly.

  “Good troops,” he said quietly.

  “First brigade, first division, Second Corps,” Dimitri chimed in, nodding to where the brigade flag fluttered in the breeze.

  Vincent nodded. The men were veterans, moving with a loose ground-covering stride. They couldn’t march in step worth a damn, but that didn’t matter, he realized. It was guts, fighting guts, that mattered most. He saw the regiment commander turn his mount to watch as the train passed, the man snapping off a friendly salute to Vincent, which the young general returned.

  “Mike Homula, you old bastard,” Vincent said, a thin smile creasing his features. Mike had been a sergeant back in the old 35th when Vincent had still been a lowly private. But Vincent knew the man was a good soldier who harbored no resentment over Vincent’s mercurial rise to top command.

  “Your men are looking good,” Vincent shouted. “Join me for a drink tonight.”

  Mike waved a good-natured thanks and turned back to his command. A stream of oaths filled the air, though they really weren’t needed, since the regiment was going through its evolutions with a perfection that even the 35th would have envied.

  “Our boys will look that good soon enough,” Dimitri said, as if guessing what Vincent’s mind was about to latch on to next.

  Vincent, already dwelling on that very thought, said nothing. Since last fall he had been responsible for sixty regiments, thirty thousand men in two entirely new corps forming in Roum. As a result he had grown accustomed to all the nightmares associated with creating a new army, and in that he had learned an even deeper respect for Colonel Keane, who had first shaped the Army of the Rus Republic out of nothing but raw peasants. He was now doing the same, and hating every minute of it. Diplomacy in dealing with Marcus had been essential to start with. He had mastered the maddening art of logistics, requisitioning, and ordnance in getting his men outfitted, a task still only half completed. He suspected that Andrew had assigned him to the task in part to train him as well.