Corporal O’Hare was standing sentry with the bodies, his face stiff with grief, and saluted as Benton approached. “Beg to report, captain, that Private Murphy and Private Frost are dead.”
“I heard.” Benton dismounted and knelt by the bodies. The dead soldiers had already been laid out properly, their eyes closed. “They were good men.”
“Yes, sir. Captain, sir, how do we bury them, sir?” O’Hare seemed very agitated as he asked the question.
“Like any soldier, corporal. A sad duty, but it’s one we’ve carried out before this. Why do you ask?”
“Captain, sir, it’s –“ O’Hare waved a hand to encompass their surroundings. “I haven’t seen a church here, sir. Not one. And not one man of God, neither. The city folk are nice and all, but they’ve never heard of Him. How can we give our men a proper burial if…if the Lord’s not here to accept them?”
Benton stood up, raising one hand to clasp O’Hare’s shoulder. “Corporal, were you taught that He is everywhere?”
“Yes, sir. That I was.”
“Then He is here, corporal. We will bury our men as they would have wished to be buried, with the full regulation service, and He will take their souls in His hand, because He is here with us.”
O’Hare’s face cleared, anxiety being replaced by a relieved smile. “Of course, sir. I knew I should ask you right off, captain. Yes, sir. At the city, sir? We’ll bury them there? The city folk won’t mind the crosses on the grave markers, will they?”
“No, corporal, the Asterans won’t mind.”
As Benton mounted again, Lieutenant Garret came to stand by his stirrup. “Captain, that thing you told the corporal,” Garret asked quietly. “Do you believe it?”
Benton leaned forward, looking down at Garret, “Lieutenant, during the war the 5th Cavalry fought in a lot of battles. The Wilderness was one of them. It was also the nearest thing to hell I ever hope to experience. During the Wilderness, I thought the only way I could possibly live through the fight would be if the Lord stayed right beside me. As you see, I did survive the battle. If the Lord could be with me through that, I’m sure He’s here, too.”
“But what if our world is still there somehow, if both it and this world exist at the same time?”
“If General Grant could handle more than one division, I reckon the Lord can handle more than one world, lieutenant. Make sure O’Hare has all the help he needs to get Private Murphy’s and Private Frosts’ remains prepared for the ride to Astera.”
Wearily, Benton rode back toward the fight. The massacre seemed to have stopped, and now the Asterans were holding under guard about two hundred Wikosans who had finally surrendered rather than fight to the death. Benton guessed that something on the order of fifteen hundred Wikosans lay dead on the field.
He spotted Freya riding toward him, a trickle of blood welling from a long cut on one side of her somber face, and Benton’s breath caught for a moment. Freya was wearing the same battle gear as when he had first seen her, and though the rents in the chain mail then had since been repaired, there were new gashes in the mail from today’s fight. Thank heavens she’s all right. What a woman, to conceive and win such a battle as this. No. All I need say is what a woman. I don’t need to add more than that.
Freya reined in next to him and gave Benton an Asteran salute. “My friend and ally. Thank you. This could not have happened without your cavalry. The mounted forces facing us fled when they heard your weapons. I thank the Light that you have survived and brought home the head of an enemy.”
There seemed to be a lot of emotion behind Freya’s words. Wondering if that was just because of the passions generated by the battle, Benton looked away, and found himself gazing toward the surviving Wikosans, who were staring back at him with dread and despair. “What’s going to happen to them?”
Freya shrugged. “They laid down their arms rather than die holding their place, so they belong to us now, and there’s much work to be done in and around Astera.”
It took him a moment to realize what she meant. “They’re going to be enslaved?”
“Made to work, yes, as long as they live. They are ours.” She must have noticed his reaction. “What is wrong, my friend?”
He took a deep breath before speaking, wondering if the promising alliance with Astera was about to founder at the moment of its greatest success, and whether his friendship with Freya would also wither. “I have told you of the war my country fought only a few years ago. In just one battle of that war more than six thousand men died and tens of thousands more were wounded. We fought that war to save the Union, but also to eliminate the stain of slavery from our nation. Our Odwan then, a wise man named Lincoln, said ‘as I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master.’ My company will not fight to enslave others, Odwan Freya. To do so would be to betray our comrades who died in that war and to betray the beliefs we hold that slavery is always an evil and a wrong.”
Freya listened without interrupting, her eyes on his, and remained silent for a long while after Benton finished. “Did you fight in that war?” she finally asked.
“I did, Odwan Freya. So did Sergeant Tyndall and some other members of my troop.”
“It is well you survived that, too.” Turning her horse, Freya rode a short distance until she was right next to the huddled prisoners. Rising in her new stirrups, she addressed the Wikosans, using only those words of her language which she knew Benton could understand. “Choose twelve among you to return to Wikosa. You will tell Wikosa that they may buy your lives and your freedom with any Asterans they hold, and with horses, cattle, sheep, grain, gold and other metals. What Wikosa has taken will be returned to us, and more besides if they wish you back whole.”
She rode back to Benton, ignoring surprised looks from the other Asterans. “Wikosa will pay. It will need them to defend itself when the wolves come to howl at its walls. My people will accept this when they see it profits us. Is this well?” she asked. “Would your Odwan Lincoln approve?”
“He would. Thank you, Odwan Freya.”
“Thank you for frank words which ring true. You must tell me more of this Odwan Lincoln. I once said your civilization was backward in some ways, but it seems we can learn from yours just as you have learned from ours.”
#
It turned out that there had been one decire of mounted fighters from Lacanan among the Wikosan army, but they had been completely wiped out in the battle, with none to bring home the tale of their defeat. Freya assigned a messenger to bring the news to Lacanan, along with an offer of alliance which would have been scorned before, but in the wake of this battle would surely receive serious consideration.
In the week after the victorious forces returned to Astera, a Telasan force seven decires strong was spotted marching north, but turned back when brought news of the Wikosan defeat. One of the wounded cavalrymen had suffered such serious injuries to one arm that Benton feared he would have to lose the limb, but the Asteran surgeons worked on it and applied their salves and treatments, afterwards declaring that both man and arm should recover fully. Private Murphy and Private Frost were buried with full military honors, the poignant notes of Taps sounding in the city for the first time for that purpose. Construction began on the powder mill, even though Astera was still trying to secure a reliable source of sulfur. Three more cavalrymen married local girls, and the grateful Asteran city council agreed to formalize the regular payment of salaries to the cavalry so Benton could once again be sure of routinely being able to pay his men. He was especially pleased that the pay rate the Asterans agreed to was equivalent to at least twenty dollars a month for the privates.
On the seventh night after returning, Benton walked out onto the walls surrounding the city, looking west toward where the lights of Fort Harker and Ellsworth, Kansas had been, should have been, but in this world had never been.
“Something troubles you.” Freya had come near and now spoke quietly.
“There’s someplace I should have gon
e, Freya, someplace I should have returned my company. But I failed in that.”
“Failed? I do not believe you could have failed.”
Benton smiled bitterly. “I’m a fairly good officer, I think, but not outstanding. No one would ever confuse me with Sheridan or Sherman.”
“More of your Odwans?’
“No, just war leaders.”
Freya waited a moment to see if Benton had more to say before she spoke again. “You are better than you believe, I think. Your men seem happy.”
“Most of them, yes. Most of them believe we’re still going to get home someday, and in the meantime this is as nice a posting as any cavalryman can hope for. Most of the men in the company didn’t have a wife or a steady girlfriend back home,” Benton explained. “A few do, though, and that’s a hard thing, to know you may never see them again.”
Freya paused, then spoke carefully. “Do you have such a woman, Captain Benton?”
He didn’t answer for a moment, decided to only reply in the negative as he usually did when someone asked that, then found himself saying much more. “No. My wife died several years ago, during the war with the South. It’s…not easy to think of even now, because when I left for the war she was so worried that I wouldn’t return, that I’d never be able to come back to her. But while I was campaigning she fell ill and died, so when I came home she couldn’t be there. I…can’t think of it without hoping she didn’t know her last hours were her last, because it would have hurt her so to know she wouldn’t be there waiting for me when I came back.” Benton couldn’t recall the last time he’d spoken of that to anyone.
Freya regarded him gravely. “May the Light ease the burden of your grief and the stars shine in memory of the one you have lost.” The words sounded ritualistic, but she said them with real feeling.
“Thank you. What about you, Odwan Freya?”
She made a sad sound. “I had a man who died nearly half my life ago, in battle. He stays young in my memory. Now I am bound to my duty as Odwan. There has been little room for anyone else. You understand?”
“Yes, I do. I’m sorry for your loss. I’m grateful there is room in your life for my friendship.” It felt both comfortable and strange to be speaking so with a woman, one who truly did share so many things with him, who also knew how the burdens of command could force out personal wants and needs. The only thing standing between them like a wall was a truth which Benton hadn’t yet shared with her. “I need to tell you where we actually came from, Freya.”
She shook her head. “Whatever led you from there is nothing I need know.”
“Yes, I think you do.” He explained his world, the storm, the changed world they’d found afterwards, and Lieutenant Garret’s theory. “We have no idea how to get back, but if we ever found a way, we’d have to use it. I have a duty to fulfill.”
To his surprise, Freya didn’t express any disbelief, instead nodding knowingly. “The lightning. Its ancient name is the fire-writer, that which the Light uses to cast messages in the sky, messages whose meaning we often cannot read. The lightning brought you here from the world you knew, but the reason may never be clear.” She sighed. “Your cavalry has saved Astera not once but twice and guaranteed our safety for years to come. You have already done so much. Yet, you may also help us and other cities build peace in this part of the land again, the type of peace no one has seen since the days of the fallen empire. But our debt and our duty is clear. If Astera, if I, can ever help you reach your home again, we will. But the lightning never repeats the same message twice.”
“We say much the same thing,” Benton replied, turning away from the darkness where his duty had lain, turning to face Freya.
She smiled and touched his face gently with one hand. “No matter what the lightning does, you will always have a home here.”
Postscript:
Though historical memory of the Benton Massacre has been eclipsed by the Fetterman Disaster in 1866 and Custer’s Last Stand at the Little Big Horn in 1876, it attracted considerable attention for a brief period and remains an enduring military mystery. On October 4th, 1870, a company from the 5th Cavalry Regiment under the command of Captain Ulysses Benton left Fort Harker on a routine training patrol of the area south and west of the fort in preparation for campaigning later in the season. The company of cavalry did not return as scheduled, and every attempt to locate Captain Benton or any of his men failed. Nearby tribes all denied knowing what had happened to the cavalry unit, but an official investigation concluded that the only plausible explanation for their disappearance had to be a massacre of the entire company and the concealment of their bodies and equipment. No trace of Captain Benton’s command has ever been found.
Author's Note on Failure to Obey
My second series of books featured the exploits of a new officer in the space Navy who has the misfortune to be appointed the legal officer on his first ship. While handling all of the other duties of a shipboard officer, Paul Sinclair also has to give his commanding officer advice on legal matters based on a four-week-long school. (Yes, the Navy does that kind of thing to you. The Navy did that to me.) After four books, Paul’s saga went into temporary hibernation while I worked on the Lost Fleet story, but people kept asking what happened after the end of that fourth book. One of my own real jobs in the US Navy had involved anti-terrorism, so I had learned a lot about how terrorists work. However, I couldn’t use that knowledge in stories because I didn’t want any real terrorists getting any good tips from whatever scenario I used. It finally occurred to me that I could set a terrorist attack on a space station, using a method of attack that wouldn’t work on Earth, and tell a story about that. And one of the main settings in the Sinclair books was a US Navy space station. Paul had been sent off to Mars at the end of book four, but I still had his partner Lieutenant Jen Shen on that space station, as well as Paul’s old Master-at-Arms Ivan Sharpe. This is what happened to them.
Failure to Obey
Perhaps it was some instinct born of experience that made Lieutenant Jen Shen jerk awake in the middle of the night, the voices of dead shipmates echoing in her fading dreams, and lunge for the survival suit kept in a ready locker right next to her bunk. She was halfway into the suit before the structure of Benjamin Franklin Naval Space Station shuddered twice, and fastening the last seals before the blare of the general quarters alarm began resounding urgently.
No one was in sight as Jen slammed shut the door to the closet-sized room that made up her personal quarters and began pelting down the passageway toward main engineering control. Heading in toward the hollow center of the vast rotating disc which was Franklin, Jen was going uphill against the rotation-induced gravity, taking ladders two steps at a time as she tried to cover ground before airtight hatches closed and made progress much slower. As she approached the armored survival bulkhead between her and engineering control, the massive hatch at the end of the passageway began sliding shut as its own warning alert added to the clamor. Jen managed to slide through sideways just in time, feeling the station jerk several times again as unknown forces slammed the structure.
Another ladder up, then another hatch loomed before her, this one sealed tight. She rammed her palm against the reader next to the hatch, punching the “open” button repeatedly as Jen waited for the reader to identify her from the chip embedded in her hand.
The hatch swung open, Jen hurled herself inside, and the hatch slammed behind her. It took two more passageways, ladders and hatches before she reached her objective.
She finally paused, then, to take in the scene in main engineering control. At this hour, only the watch standers were present, five enlisted sailors led by Chief Petty Officer Carreras, all of whom were already in survival suits as well. “What’s going on?” Jen demanded.
Carreras looked at her, his expression impossible to read through the face plate of his suit. “Damned if I know, lieutenant. We’ve got system failures cascading through part of the station inboard from here and it feels
like there’s explosions in that area, but the sensors are dead. We’ve all been ordered to stay here while command central tries to find out what’s going on.”
Typical. Too many people depended on remote sensors for information and didn’t know what to do if those sensors failed. Eventually command central would order investigators into the area, but experience had proven to Jen just how critical time was in responding to emergencies. “I haven’t been ordered to stay here.” Fighting off a flashback to the devastating explosion on her old ship the Maury, Jen punched open the hatch leading toward the affected areas.
She ran again, up a ladder and down the narrow passageway leading to the area of the station where supplies and the water tanks were warehoused near the hollow core, yanking open the hatch at the far end. Once again, some instinct made her pause before dashing through, and she saw two figures in survival suits moving toward her from the damaged area. Wind whistled past, warning of breaches in the hull where atmosphere was venting. “What’s –“ she started to ask them.
Both of the figures raised weapons and began running toward her. Jen just stared in disbelief for a moment, then slammed her fist onto the “close” button as one of the figures opened fire, metal slugs rattling off of the closing hatch in a deafening hail. Punching in a code, she locked the hatch against anyone without the proper access. She had a sinking suspicion that anyone who had blown their way inside the station could also get through interior hatches, but it might slow down whoever the attackers were.
This time Jen ran even faster, half-sliding/half-falling down the ladder and reaching the hatch to engineering central as Franklin’s structure shuddered again. Looking back, she saw the hatch she’d sealed falling inward, its edges glowing with intense heat, figures in survival suits coming through quickly, all carrying weapons.
Jen sealed and locked this hatch, too, calling out orders to the watch standers in engineering central. “We’re under attack! Notify command central! It’s people wearing survival suits like ours. Numbers unknown.” As a stunned Chief Carreras called command central, Jen rushed to one of the control consoles. “Shut everything down! Shift all controls to secondary stations! Do it now! Those guys are right behind me!”
Swords and Saddles Page 13