by L D Inman
“All right. Choose a team and get it done,” he told Beathas.
“Yes, sir.”
A little silence fell. Through the course of the meeting, Douglas had felt the officers in the room begin to respond to him more easily: thinking of him as a commander instead of a former student was just the latest in a morning full of whiplash adjustments. They were watching him to catch a notion of his style; indeed, Douglas was watching himself. He found himself borrowing touches from Inslee’s method of relaxed trust, from Selkirk’s watchful intensity. He could not imitate Speir’s focused ebullience or Barklay’s lift of spirits; he had only his own ardent stubbornness. Pray wisdom it will be enough. Which reminded him; he’d promised Speir he would visit the chapel on her behalf.
With an effort he drew himself back to the present moment. “Our hours of peace are numbered,” he said. “If you have questions for me, best ask them now.”
Captain Hallett said boldly, “Just how suspended are Ryswyck’s normal operations, Admiral?” Several others relaxed; they wouldn’t have to find a way to ask that question now.
“That’s an argument I’ll have to have with Lord Commander Selkirk on another day,” Douglas said. “I’ve reached my quota this morning,” and a small laugh murmured through the room. “Practically speaking, for now we will not be able to devote time to instruction or activities. Everyone could probably stand to maintain their marksmanship, considering the circumstances, so let’s keep the range room open and make sure the students are hitting those training stations at least twice this week. Let’s have sparring court tomorrow, and weekly thereafter, until battle conditions interfere. Also,” he added wryly, “please have the students review the General Military Code, and examine and score them on it if you find it necessary. I want no one, in Ryswyck or out of it, to be under an illusion that the law of courtesy supplants the general code. Courtesy is in fact our motive for keeping the general code, so let’s not be caught in ignorance of it. Please stress to them that the assignment is not a penance, just practice for future arenas.” Several officers smiled in grim appreciation.
“You’re saying, I think,” said Beathas gently, “that our ability to shield our students is going to be limited.”
“Yes,” Douglas said. Ryswyck had no defenses, either physically or metaphorically. Undefendedness…. They had almost nothing to lose. It’d be a shame not to take advantage of that freedom, he thought. His eyes met Beathas’s, and he realized that she, and Marag and Stevens too, had seen him parsing that calculus.
Aloud, he said: “I’ll continue to work that problem, and if we survive to address it, I’ll call us back into council so we can discuss our approach.”
“Thank you, sir,” Hallett said.
“Anything else?”
It seemed no one had another question, but before he could dismiss the meeting, Stevens said quietly, “Do we have any faults we need to mend to you, sir?”
“To me?” Douglas repeated blankly, staring. In his peripheral vision he saw Marag cast his eyes down, and understood suddenly why Stevens was asking this.
“No,” he said, after a moment. “No one here owes me a fault. Do I owe any acknowledgments to you?”
He was thinking of Stevens’s near-accusation the night before, and knew by the look on his face that Stevens was thinking of it too. Stevens drew breath to speak, but, “No, Admiral,” Marag said, quiet and firm.
Douglas looked around the table. No one appeared ready to gainsay him. “Then,” Douglas said, “shall we say that all is well in this council?”
“Yes, sir,” came the murmur, and “Yes, Admiral,” and several tight, sad smiles appeared. Douglas returned them the same smile, aware of the burdens still to be carried, the work of mending that would have to go on even in battle. Aware that there was no one, least of all himself, to make that All’s well ring in the room with a numinous buoyancy.
He touched his closed hand to his heart: then knocked the table lightly as he rose to his feet.
“Well, then, comrades,” he said, “let’s get to work.”
3
“Take hold!” came the call from the front of the shuttle.
Speir wiped her hand free of sweat and twisted the overhead strap in a tight grip. Even as she pressed the soles of her boots flat to the deck, the shuttle jinked, and the floor dropped from beneath her stomach. “Evasive action,” someone shouted. The shuttle’s engines rose to a scream, a mad duet with the creaking of the hold inside. Speir added her other hand to her grip on the strap.
The ordnance was of more importance to Colmhaven than they were. Without having to look, Speir knew that their own shuttle was screening the cargo shuttle from scudder fire. Probably the cargo shuttle had reached a lower altitude. Mixed with the stress and fury of their shuttle’s flight was a spasmodic roaring.
Eternal, vision-blurred, topsy-turvy minutes passed. They lost height again, abruptly; regained lift; and all at once everything stabilized, and the shuttle began to descend for approach. Speir waited for the attack to resume, but the descent continued steadily and soon they were landing in the shadow of a crag in a heavy rain. The pitch of the engines was still winding down when the hatches began to lower. “All out!”
Speir unstrapped herself, tottered to her feet, and gave her head a hard shake. She motioned her Cardumel unit to follow her in unclipping the cargo nets and retrieving their duffels. They swung them up, filed at quick step down the main ramp, and splashed across the airstrip in the downpour in the direction the ground-crew sent them. Then they were in a covered entrance and marching down a dark tunnel, yellow-lit every twenty feet.
Speir knew by the map in her head that they were at one of the underground network entrances. By the echoing voices of the outpost sergeants and one of the shuttle-crew ahead of them, she worked out that they were at the northernmost one, that attempting to land at one further south had got them into trouble with a scudder before their meager air support could drive it off.
Then she heard a familiar voice—Dearborn, who had gone with the other shuttle. So the ordnance had landed, then. Good.
He was at her side. “Captain. My orders are to get you connected with the company you’ll be working in before Colonel Marshall debriefs you. You’ll be the tac officer for the northern array—”
Speir and her soldiers split off with Dearborn through a steel-girded doorway to a side branch, more brightly lit and winding angularly through the guts of the ridge, weight upon weight overhead. Dearborn didn’t have much to brief her with: he’d been on the ground scarcely fifteen minutes ahead of her, time enough to collect his own orders and see the ground crew start unloading the cargo for the stores. His briefing ended before their loud bootsteps took them to the other end of the corridor, where they found themselves on an underground tram platform. “I’ve signaled ahead to Field-Commander Ansett to meet you,” he told Speir as they boarded the open car. “I’ve got to get over to the comms office on the south bluffside.”
The tram driver engaged the gear, and the soft whir of the tram carried them out of Dearborn’s sight. He was already turning away.
They entered the darkest tunnel yet; and as they gained speed, Speir began to feel a deep beat, too low almost to be a sound, unrhythmic and distant. They were riding toward it; soon it could be felt under her boots on the floorboards of the tram car; the air became verberant with it, and she knew what it was.
Guns.
The tram squeaked to a stop at the terminal, a platform identical to the one they’d left. On the platform stood a wiry soldier with a strong face and tight-braided curly hair. She snapped Speir a quick salute as they clambered off the tram. “Field-Commander Ansett, ma’am.”
Speir saluted back, just as quickly. “Captain Speir, Field-Commander. This is Lieutenant Ell, and the rest of my unit, formerly of Cardumel Base.”
Ansett nodded at them, with a look that Speir recognized as an intensified version of the grim expression of Selkirk’s staff. A fiercer grimness. �
��Welcome to Company 6A.”
Speir was ready for some proper direction. “Field-Commander Dearborn said something about the tactics department of the northern array?”
Ansett winced. “Not so much a department as a clutch of officers in a locker. We’ve lost two guns since this morning. I’m taking you to where the offices and the bunks are. This way.”
More corridors. Finally Ansett opened a set of doors, gestured everyone but Speir and Ell inside, and called into the long room beyond: “Sergeant, here’s the Cardumel troops for 6A. Read ‘em in and get them bunks.”
“Aye, ma’am.”
Ansett was already moving. “Major Ennis said to bring the officers to the command offices for a briefing before we get you your billet.” A few more better-lit corridors later, they arrived in a cramped suite full of portable consoles running projections from precarious places on loaded desks. It was not crowded and boiling with activity; even the concussion of the nearby guns was strangely muted. Speir supposed that the initial panic had settled here, too.
Then she got a better look at one of the main projections: it was a visual feed from the northern curve above the harbor, wide enough to take the near promontory and the back of Colm’s Island in its sweep. At least, that was what Speir knew it must be; the view was obscured by smoke and thick mist. From time to time the black and gray clouds thinned to show the piers of the town, half of which were on fire, and darting black shapes like menacing birds.
“How many scudders did they build?” Ell murmured.
“Too fucking many,” growled a man as he lurched to his feet. He had major’s ribbons on the epaulets of his rumpled fatigue jacket. “And who are you?”
“Lieutenant Ell, formerly of Cardumel Base,” Speir said for him, smoothly, as Ell made a hasty salute.
“Then that makes you Captain Speir,” said the major. “Colonel Marshall sends his compliments and thanks you for your previous assistance with his maps. And he’s given you to my outfit. He says you’re a weather officer. Have you ever worked with an artillery company?”
“No, sir,” Speir said.
“Well, you’re about to start. Field-Commander Ansett here will be your second.” Speir glanced quickly at Ansett, but could not read the soldier’s expression. She looked back in time for Ennis to go on. “The two of you will monitor the guns at Great Hadley Point. Colonel Marshall says you know the ground.”
“The aboveground terrain I know quite well by map, sir.”
“Good. Then you know that we can lose a lot but we cannot lose Hadley. It has the only vantage that can cover the back of Colm’s Island and keep the south flank clear both. Deadheight’s the only gun on the south that hasn’t taken damage, so Hadley’s covering them. I’ll need one or both of you out there at the access point at all times so there’s no delay in keeping the equipment maintained and stocked. The gunners are divided into shifts and so are the maintenance crews. Your Cardumel soldiers will be on maintenance. Are you a good shot?”
Speir didn’t want to think about the implications of a scudder being in rifle range. “Yes, sir.”
“Ansett, check her out a rifle and a sidearm. Get her a comm handset too. Then go out to the main access point and show her how to reconnoiter. Give her lieutenant a handset and he can help keep the comm lines clear between here and there.”
“Yes, sir,” said Ansett.
“Any questions, Captain?”
“No, sir,” Speir said.
But she did have a question for Ansett, as soon as the major had shouldered his way out of the room at some shout down the corridor. “Are we cleared to fire on Colm’s Island?”
Ansett’s fierce-grim look reappeared. “Aye. There’s nothing left to save.”
Her next question was quiet. “Did the Berenians dispose of the remains of General Inslee and the others?”
“No,” Ansett replied. “They’ve made a message out of it.”
The field-commander had governed herself well enough to answer promptly, but she could not stop the flick of her eyes toward one of the projections behind Speir’s shoulder. Speir turned, in time to see one of the feeds panning across the airstrip side of the island. Below the clouds of steam still issuing from cracks in the pavement, a row of knobbled, sodden shapes lay in a skimbled row. In horrible contrast, another row of lumps had been set neatly in a line. The heads of the executed, Speir thought, and turned away before her eyes could discern any details. She would not give the Berenians the satisfaction of burning those details upon her memory. As she turned, she saw that Ell had been watching that feed, his face very still and blank. She gave his shoulder a quick, hard shake.
“Come on, Ell,” she said. “We’re going.”
He nodded and obeyed silently.
Ansett took them to a room down the corridor, where she signed out a rifle and a sidearm to Speir. “There’s a locker at the site where we stow the rifles,” she explained. “You got an underhood in your kit?” Speir had; the unit had taken her duffel along with Ell’s into the barracks room. “We’ll pick that up on our way out; you’ll need it.” Speir noted that the pouch for Ansett’s own underhood bulged from its place on her belt, next to her own sidearm; obviously it had been pulled out and refolded in haste—probably more than once.
It took only a few moments to finish kitting out, and then the three of them were striding quickly down yet another corridor—Speir furiously sketching details to her mental map of the place—while Ansett went on with her brief. But even now there was more corridor than brief.
Presently Speir heard Ell’s voice, scarcely louder than the echoing syncopation of their bootsteps. He had been silent as Ansett issued him his comm and sidearm, silent digging in his kit, silent following at Speir’s shoulder. Now, he said: “If we hadn’t gone down to Ryswyck….”
“I know,” Speir answered quietly.
“He explained it to me,” Ell said, in the same low voice. “He said we were there for two things, to learn something and to escort you. He said to stay out of the politics but to keep my ears and eyes open and report to him when I got back.”
Ell shouldn’t be thinking about this. “It doesn’t matter now, Lieutenant,” Speir said.
“I know, Captain,” Ell said, “but—I wish—”
He didn’t finish the thought; possibly he couldn’t. Speir felt the same.
The corridor descended, became a stone-hewn tunnel fretted with struts and bulkheads; the pulse of the gun took on dimension and separated itself into distinct ballistic voices. Then the tunnel ended, abruptly, at a dank cage lift just big enough, Speir judged, for a case of ammunition and the people to carry it. Ansett ushered them in and gave the lever a swift yank. The rough-faced rock outside the lift-cage began to descend to their feet.
“We’re going to the watch-deck,” she said, pitching her voice above the growing, intermittent roar. “It doesn’t have the vantage of all the feeds below but we can guide the coverage in closer time.” They were rising, up and up into an almost palpable barrage of noise; it became unbearable, and then pressed up past unbearable into a spreading lake of sound that would soon become part of the landscape. They rose up through that lake and surfaced at a gated doorway in the rock. Ansett retracted the gate and they stepped out.
As they emerged into the hewn hollow of the watch recess, the sergeant on duty turned to face them. His manner was slow and trembly, and Speir didn’t think it was because of the chill in the rock.
The guns of Great Hadley fell silent, just as Ansett said: “Sergeant, report.”
“Just put in a call for a medic crew, ma’am,” said the sergeant, drawing himself up. “Dragon mine overshot the emplacement and went off about fifty yards back. Two from Team 1 got some shrapnel. No damage on this pass. Still covering Deadheight, ma’am.”
“Good. This is Captain Speir and Lieutenant Ell, from Cardumel. We’ll be on Hadley from now on, so you won’t have to rig watch rotation any more.” She cocked a thumb at an unstable arrangement at the b
ack of the hollow. “Get yourself a cup of tea and then relieve Malca up top.”
“Aye, ma’am.” The sergeant was already moving. Formality had given way, Speir saw, first to emergency and now to hopeless slogging. She went forward to the watch stand and took the viewfinder. The range didn’t encompass much of the harbor itself, but she could see the Deadheight gun on the southern point, standing through the gouts of smoke, and in the distance, the harborside jetty of Colm’s Island. Beyond it, atop the gray mass of the island, she could make out the limn of the weather tower, which should have been partly obscured by the comm tower at this angle. The comm tower was now empty air and a rubbly tangle embracing the burned-out main block. Speir felt an unrational desire to drown the remains of Cardumel in white-hot fire, to cleanse it of this unendurable insult.
“Sacred lights,” Ell muttered. He had taken the other viewfinder. Behind him the sergeant quaffed his tea with both hands. Ansett stood silent, arms crossed. Speir was aware of herself assessing the soul of this instant: herself, and Ell, and Ansett, and the sergeant, and all of the company at Hadley above and below them; the shifting fractal of their several shared emotions and the immovable height of rock on which they were perched. Fear. Frustration to the pitch of panic. She thought of the day she had launched herself at Douglas, angry at her failure to hurt him properly. That belonged to this fractal too.
“Can’t break yourself on it,” she said, to herself as much as Ell. “Keep looking at the strategy.”
“We have a strategy?” said Ansett, behind her: curious as well as dry.
“We’re buying the Boundary a chance to regroup,” Speir said, calmly. “Engaging the enemy on this ground so we don’t give them a foothold below the ice line.”
Ansett was silent a moment, then said: “We won’t see icefall for another few weeks.”
