Inspection took place on the airfield, which lay fresh and green and, most important, empty. Intelgard was the second air base on the southern front, and what few aircraft the Union had scrambled to put together had been sent to the first. No one screamed orders, and the day’s construction hadn’t yet begun. Little mechanical messengers scuttled from place to place, and the flat-backed palanquins that normally acted as people movers carried cheap board panels to build the base’s administrative offices.
Linné watched the Union flag flap from a pole at the edge of the field, letting the cold kiss the back of her neck. The golden firebird flew on a field of red, wings outstretched, beak open to let out a war cry. Stars shimmered above its wingtips. She could see it small, pinned to her chest as a Hero of the Union medal, with a gold ribbon dangling like a burning tail. She could see the crowded hall, full of everyone who’d ever doubted her. This, she reminded herself. She was here for the Union and for glory. Not for anyone or anything else.
The men joined her right on time, trotting up and clustering a few meters away. A couple of the girls came, too, but most arrived after Colonel Hesovec started to pace along the line. The latecomers pelted up and tried to stand at attention. It would have been funny if Linné were allowed to laugh. But Hesovec didn’t find it amusing, so neither did anyone else. He swelled so much that she thought he’d pop the bottom button of his uniform. Then he spoke to the girls.
“Late. Again. Always. And to make matters worse, not one of you is in uniform.” Linné stared down at her issued boots and clenched her fists.
A girl at the end of the line piped up. “Excuse me. Sir.” Linné leaned forward to eye her. The girl who spoke had half a head of height on most of the boys, long frizzy hair, and a friendly face. “We still don’t have any uniforms.”
Hesovec stopped and glared at her. “Why didn’t you make a request?”
The girl looked around, bewildered. “For what?”
“Uniforms,” he snapped. “What else?”
She considered. “May we have some uniforms, sir?”
Linné watched Hesovec’s mustache twitch as he worked his lower lip. Apparently he’d attended the Colonel Koslen school of mustache expression. “What’s your name?” he said at last.
“Magdalena Chuikova.”
“And why are you here?” he said.
“I’ll be an engineer,” she replied.
Hesovec let out a short huff. “Good. You can spend the morning assembling the laboratory.” He stepped back and raised his voice. “As for the rest of you—this sort of behavior will not be tolerated. You have asked to participate in the war, like men. If you truly want to, you’ll have to act like them as well. Be timely, respect the discipline of the base, wear your uniforms, which I will assign forthwith, and attend to all duties given by your commander. Once Commander Zima is here, she will direct your pursuits. But until her arrival, I am in charge of the base and everyone on it. And I will send you away if you give me a reason. Clear?”
“Yes, sir,” chanted Linné and the men. “Yes, sir,” the girls chorused an instant after.
“Good. First things first: Everyone who was late this morning can practice their march around the yard. Zolonova, come with me. The rest of you, report to your platoon commanders for your morning assignments. Get this base built by the end of the day.”
The girls set out across the yard with woeful faces. Some of them tried to emulate the march of the men, strutting across the field with their arms swinging like pendulums. Linné resisted the urge to put her face in her hands. Nearby, one of the male soldiers smirked. “I never thought the front would be a place for comedy.”
“Shut it,” she replied, and stalked off. The girls needed to be put in their place. They didn’t need to be mocked.
“Zolonova,” Hesovec mused as she approached. His eyes flicked over her form, dismissing her from head to toe. “You don’t resemble your father much, do you?”
I hadn’t noticed. “No, sir.” Comments like that had followed her from childhood. When she was four, the Minister of Agriculture had joked, “Are you sure she’s yours?” at an informal dinner. Her father had laughed, but three days later the minister was gone.
Hesovec led her past the barracks and office buildings, dodging metal constructs as they hauled cheap materials to the skeleton of a warehouse. He went into a finished warehouse and sparked the lamp inside. The interior smelled like damp pine and cold metal. Yellow light flickered over crates, piled haphazardly and stamped with the Union’s firebird and stars. She’d stacked the uniform crates against the wall herself.
“Each girl gets one, and if any of you come back for a replacement, you’d better give a good reason for why. You’ll have to take care of your… female needs yourself. Don’t take too long sorting.”
Oh, no. “Sir, I don’t have much experience—”
“You can report back when you’re done.” There was a knock, and Hesovec wrenched open the door. “What?” he said to the cluster of silhouettes in the doorway.
“She says she’s here for the girls’ regiment, sir.”
Hesovec’s voice practically bled scorn. “Another one? Zolonova will show you where to go.” He jerked his head and stomped away. Two shadows detached and fled after him.
The remaining figure peered through the doorway. Linné turned back toward the crates. “Come and help. We have to haul these to the barracks, anyway.”
“What are they?” The new recruit had a soft, uncertain voice. A heavy tread, though. Linné expected a tall girl to correspond, but when she turned, she saw that the girl was shorter than her. The new recruit had a pale, heart-shaped face framed by a tangle of black hair knotted at the nape of her neck.
Linné wrestled a crate off the top of the stack and dumped it with a thud that sent up a cloud of dust. “Clothes,” she said. The girl leaned away, coughing. She didn’t smile at Linné, and Linné didn’t bother to smile at her. She didn’t need to be anyone’s mother hen. “Who are you?”
“Revna,” the girl said. “Revna Roshena.” She swallowed her last name like a curse. Linné could sympathize with that.
“Well, Revna, grab a crate. I’ll show you where you sleep.”
Linné led the way out of the warehouse, glancing back every so often to make sure Revna was keeping up. Was she limping? Linné caught the flash of strange, steel-toed shoes under her factory uniform, but when the girl caught her looking, she turned bright red and said, “Go ahead,” a challenging glint in her eye.
“The army’s no place for dawdling,” Linné said. “You’re going to have to work on that.”
Revna opened her mouth to reply. Then she seemed to change her mind. But Linné felt resentful eyes on her back all the same. It seemed she’d failed, yet again, to make friends. Why had it been easier when she’d been a boy? She missed her old regiment. She missed Tannov and Dostorov. She even missed that buffoon Koslen.
By the time they got to the barracks, most of the girls had returned from the field. Linné shouldered through the door.
“What’s that?” Pavi said. She was the smallest of them, short and slim, with dark brown skin and quick eyes and a black braid that fell between her shoulders. Her southeastern accent marked her as a girl from the edge of the Union.
“Uniforms. Organize yourselves from tallest to shortest,” Linné said.
“And who’s this?” Katya looked past Linné to the threshold, where Revna wobbled under her crate. Katya looked as if she belonged in a glossy magazine, not on the front lines. Hesovec had already told his men off for whistling after her. “Come in, come in. What’s your name?”
Revna came in. And tripped over the threshold.
The thunk of metal on wood filled the room, quickly followed by the crash as Revna dropped her crate. All eyes moved to her leg.
Linné’d thought Revna had metal-toed boots, but that wasn’t right at all. She had metal feet. Linné could see two steel toes, pointed and caked with dirt. The toes were long
er and broader than flesh toes, forming a Y and attaching to a wide base that acted as the ball of the foot. It was wider than most shoes and capped with rubber. As Revna righted herself, Linné spotted a fat cylindrical heel, also capped in rubber. The steel toes dug into the ground, midjoints twitching with an odd precision. They were living metal feet, Linné realized. She had to stop herself from leaning forward for a better look.
The other girls gaped. But they weren’t here to peer and frown and poke. Linné cleared her throat. “Revna’s our newest recruit. And like the rest of you, she’s going to be fitted with a proper uniform. So line up—”
Revna’s dark eyes swam with tears. With every thunk of her feet on the floor, she seemed to go more rigid. Katya took Revna by the elbow and led her over to an empty bed. She smiled like a film star, brushing her platinum curls over one shoulder. “Welcome, Revna,” she said, and threw Linné an angry look over her shoulder. “Don’t worry about Linné. Her father’s a general, so she thinks she’s in charge. But she’s not, so you don’t have to do what she says. Where are you from?”
Revna sat down and put a hand to her calf. Then she saw the girls all staring at her and jerked it back. “Tammin Reaching,” she said.
“I’m from Tammin,” Magdalena said. She’d finished her assignment suspiciously fast, Linné thought, and she suppressed a sigh of irritation as Magdalena lifted the dropped crate. Magdalena hauled it to the middle of the room, then went over to shake Revna’s hand. The Linnés of the world got to carry their crates themselves, evidently. “Why didn’t we come down on the same palanquin?”
“Had to process some paperwork,” Revna said.
“What happened to your legs?” said another girl.
Revna stiffened. “An accident.” Her tone was light, but she drew her lips together, and her legs curled under the bed.
“We’re running late,” Linné reminded them.
Katya turned on her. “Let her settle in.”
“Welcome to the regiment,” Linné told Revna. “Consider yourself settled and take your old uniform off. The rest of you have more crates to haul.”
Katya rolled her eyes but beckoned the others. Linné heard them laughing behind her as she led them back to the warehouse. She told herself she didn’t care what they were laughing about.
The uniforms consisted of a cotton tunic and trousers with a high-collared jacket for everyday use. Another crate contained wool coats, scarves, and gloves, and yet another held socks and belts. Everything was in the same shade of olive brown, except for the tin buttons on the jacket and the patch on one sleeve, decorated with a simplified Union star to mark them as enlisted. “We’ll assign uniforms by size,” Linné said.
Katya scoffed. “I don’t need you to tell me what size I am. I can dress myself, thank you.” She pursed her lips as she pulled out a canvas belt that could wind around her waist twice.
Linné had intended to match the large to the large and the small to the small. But soon it became apparent that small was a matter of opinion. Everyone but the towering Magdalena looked ridiculous.
“I can’t use these,” laughed Galina, a stocky brown-haired navigator. She’d worn a dress on her first day, to no end of amusement from the boys. Today she’d managed to find trousers, and she even wore boots, one of which she compared with her issued boot. The issued boot was at least six centimeters longer.
“Stuff it with socks,” Linné said. They had plenty of those.
“Can’t I wear the boots I brought? They fit, and they’re nice.” Galina wiggled her ankle.
“The army requires orderliness and sameness,” Linné snapped.
“Which is why I’m going to bring it all in,” Katya added. She held up a measuring tape and handed her writing kit to Elena, a quiet girl with a strong face. “Arms up,” Katya said, and a bemused Pavi obeyed. The tape circled her waist. “Sixty-five,” Katya said. Elena scribbled it down.
“You can tailor them on your own time. We have work to do,” Linné said as Katya moved up to Pavi’s bust.
“Like what?” Olya said.
Like reporting to Colonel Hesovec. Like doing whatever he told them. Like proving that they could act like soldiers, even though they couldn’t.
“No one can be expected to go out in this.” Katya held a pair of trousers up next to Olya. “Are we going to trip over the enemy?”
“You can take care of it tonight. Right now we have to report to Hesovec.” Linné turned to go. She would do her job, no matter what. Maybe if the others proved themselves especially incompetent, the project would be abandoned and they’d all be sent home. Except me. She still had to get to the front.
“Should we report in or out of the uniforms?” Katya asked.
“Why don’t you ask him? He’ll be glad to give you another marching lesson, no doubt.”
Katya snorted. “I’d rather march my boot up your—” Someone knocked at the door. Katya’s eyes narrowed. “What did you do, tell on us before you even got here?”
“I didn’t—” Linné started.
The door opened and a boy ducked inside, red-faced and tugging on his cap. “Sorry,” he said. “Sorry. But Commander Zima’s here. And she brought a plane.”
5
OUR SOLDIERS MARCH ON YOUR FAITH
For once, Linné wasn’t the first out to the field. She marched while the rest of them ran—tripping over uniform legs and with one arm of their jackets flapping out behind them. She wanted to slink out of sight. But that wasn’t what you did when your commanding officer arrived. She lifted her head and pretended she didn’t see the boys sneering as she passed.
She got to the edge of the field and lined up next to Katya, who tucked a lock of pale hair behind her ear. Olya brought her hands in front of her, then behind. Others fidgeted in their own ways. Magdalena looked the most at ease in her uniform, like she belonged.
Tamara Zima’s famous plane, Winter Witch, sat on the green. Winter Witch had been the first plane to fly from the western edge of the Union to the eastern one, the first plane mobilized in the war, the first plane to do practically anything. Not that they had many planes to go around. Zima stood in front of it, grinning.
Linné’s father had spoken of Tamara Zima as though she were a giant, too large for the law. But she had a small frame, a round, smiling face, and more energy than the sun.
“It’s wonderful to see you all,” she said. She practically glowed, radiating the sort of happiness that Linné had rarely seen on the front lines. “You are the great success of a long war waged already, and you will be the success of this one.”
All around her the girls straightened, like birds fluffing their feathers. Linné felt a swell of her own hope. But then she remembered being a new recruit under Koslen, trembling with nerves and an arrogant need to prove herself, listening to the veterans cover their disbelieving snorts with coughs as he ranted about the superiority of their soldiers. All commanders said this sort of thing.
“The Elda have a tactical advantage. They’ve had years to hone their Dragons, while we’ve had to work with what we can steal from the battlefield. But with special permission from Commander Vannin himself, production has started on our own line, which you will use to combat the Elda in the air.”
The girls leaned forward, eager to drink up every word. When Zima drew breath to speak again, Linné recognized the telltale signs—the sagging mouth, the forced cheer, the deep, steeling inhale—that pointed to a commanding officer putting a positive spin on something. “The Elda have designed their Dragons as machines of force and power. They are intimidating, but they are slow to gain speed and slow to maneuver. Skyhorses are faster, but often less precise. These are the ways in which we seek to bring them down. I have been asked to form a corps of night bombers, and you are my choice. We will work counterpart to the men here: They will fly during the day, and we during the night. Our targets will be the camps, the front lines, anything that will hold the Elda back for one more day, anything that will break eve
n one cog in their war machine. Soldiers, I have the highest faith in you. We will work hard, we will train hard, and we’ll be at the front before the Elda even hear we can fly.”
The girls cheered. Linné clapped but she didn’t join in. Zima made it sound so easy, a matter of waltzing up to the Elda’s aircraft and blasting them to oblivion. But Linné had seen Dragon fire turn the land black, burn palanquins and the men inside them until no one could tell what was metal and what was flesh. She’d seen the Dragons spew choking smoke and gas along the front line; she knew the terror of fumbling for her gas mask as she heard the final sounds of the men who hadn’t found theirs. Sometimes she’d listened to them scream through the night. Sometimes she thought she could still hear them.
Something in her warmed horribly at the thought of repaying the Elda for her memories.
“There will be three of you for each plane. Pilots to steer the plane. Navigators to power and fire and plot the course. Engineers will be responsible for keeping her going, even when the night is cold or we’ve suffered enemy fire. If you’re a pilot, report to Colonel Hesovec. Navigators to the map room. Engineers to the laboratory. A permanent schedule will be in the mess tomorrow morning. If you have any questions, please come speak with me at any time. I’ll be assembling my office this evening.” She beamed at them. “Welcome to the One Hundred Forty-Sixth Night Raiders Regiment.”
The girls cheered again. The way Tamara Zima spoke filled Linné’s mind with fire and victory, explosives dropped on a nameless foe, a triumphant return to a grateful Union. She could almost feel the fingers of Commander Vannin as he plucked the edge of her coat, the pressure as he pinned a shining Hero of the Union badge to her chest.
We Rule the Night Page 5