The War in the Waste

by Felicity Savage

  And back in the twenties and thirties everything had been going so well for Ferupe! The distribution of screamer cannon had cut losses in half, and the near rout with which the war had begun had slowed to a manageable “strategic retreat.” Some blamed the death of King Ethrew, and the succession of his infant daughter Lithrea to the throne, for Ferupe’s inability to reverse that retreat. But it was widely guessed, if not admitted by anyone without decorations, that screamers were simply not as marvelous an innovation as they had seemed at first. They caused more devastation than bullets when they hit their targets. But they were just as apt to cause it among the men who had fired them in the first place. If a volley fell short in no-man’s-land, it was quite possible the starved, ferocious tiddlers would get disoriented, turn around, and scramble back the way they had come. If you fumbled loading your screamer cannon it was nearly always fatal. And whereas a Kirekuni ammo dump strafed by Ferupian airplanes was no danger at all, a Ferupian ammo dump was literally a tinderbox. The only way to destroy a horde of escaped screamers was to set them on fire! Luckily, the Kirekuni flight commanders did not seem to realize this, for when they attacked Ferupian ammo dumps or screamer factories, they usually bombed them with fire-jennies—burning the screamers in their barrels, and causing far fewer deaths than they would have if they’d used bullets. Such delightful misapprehensions were what kept the Kirekunis from winning outright. The lizards might be military geniuses, but when it came to daemons they were remarkably stupid. And, of course, the Kirekuni war effort was hampered by their shortage of daemons, which almost, but not quite, negated the advantage of their access to most of Oceania’s metal.

  The Ferupian generals still held that daemon weapons were the technology of the coming century. When the right kind of magazines were developed, and screamer factories had been standardized like traditional houses of trickery, no force would be able to stand against Ferupians equipped with daemon rifles. The war would be over in a matter of months. But the regiments at the front still muttered longingly about bullets.

  And not just bullets. Mechanisms, shielding, and metalware of every sort. By the 1890s, the Ferupian need for metal had become desperate.

  Cookpots were made of pig copper. Privates’ helmets were made of Cypean tin you could bend with two hands. Gun barrels were made of gold. Gold! Kirekuni iron and steel—that was what was needed! Forays into no-man’s-land were just as often for the purpose of capturing Kirekuni materiel as for the ostensible purpose of recapturing lost ground. Often, a shot-down Kirekuni aircraft was requisitioned by a dozen different COs who all claimed it had crashed on their territory.

  The Wraithwaste was a boundless reserve of lumber for everything that could possibly be manufactured of wood. But the fact remained: metal was necessary to a war effort. And the richest veins of ore in the world lay under the mountains of Kirekune. The biggest ironworks in the world were in Djicho; the only steelworks in Okinara. The Ferupian Snowlands—the domains of Thaulze, Cerelon, and Dewisson—had copper. The supplies were extremely limited, and of no better quality than the tin coming out of Ferupe’s protectorate Cype. But it was all the authorities could offer the desperate quartermasters.

  And the copper and tin all came, under heavy guard, along the Salzeim War Route into the Shadowtown which had grown up around the metal depots and smelteries.

  Metal had made this Shadowtown into a city. A miniature city, and a filthy and unusual one, whose inhabitants were as used to seeing dogfights in the sky as they were to seeing clouds. Built in the middle of the Raw, it was populated by soldiers who passed to and fro, by Ferupians running the legitimate businesses which had sprung up, and by several thousand Wraiths, prohibited from most spheres of activity, who took care of the illegitimate side of things. (Although the word “illegitimate” was really inappropriate. So far from Ferupe, the city existed under the aegis of military law, which bore few resemblances to the laws enforced in civilized lands.)

  Fittingly enough, the city was named after a long-dead general, a scion of the Cerelon family of Cerelon Domain, where most of Ferupe’s copper was buried. Cerelon’s Shadowtown.

  Twenty-four QAF bases stood at varying distances from the city, scattered across the parallel. The pilots were seldom seen in the city, only above it. They got little free time, and so amplified were the standards to which they held themselves that they generally chose to spend it in the air, even if they were hallucinating from lack of sleep and were more likely to kill themselves than their enemies. The Salzeim Parallel saw heavier fighting than anywhere else on the front. The Kirekunis knew that Cerelon’s Shadowtown lay a mere twenty miles behind the lines, and they knew its strategic importance to their enemies. But the concentration of Ferupian troops in the area had held them more or less at bay for twenty years. To the north and south, the front was creeping back, the war closing in around Cerelon’s Shadowtown like the sea around a peninsula. But in Devambar of 1895, when Crispin transferred to Cerelon’s Air Base XXI (or Sarehole, as it was known to its men), the Raw around the base was so quiet, so ghostridden, and the city of Cerelon so bustling by contrast, that for a time it seemed to him that he had come to a transposed bit of Ferupe. Only on his first free evening, a week later, did he discover how different Cerelon was. Nothing in the Lovoshire Parallel had prepared him for it.

  On the day he arrived in Sarehole with Harrowman, Eakin, Ash, Dupont, and Cochrane, Crispin confronted his new men, having them dragged out of bed if necessary. They stood at attention, grouped in crews of five, on an open stretch of ground outside Hangar One. One-thirty Squadron had sustained heavy losses recently: there were numerous gaps in the ranks. Crispin, facing them with his predecessor’s lieutenants at his back, felt as if he had met them all a hundred times before. Pilots living on their nerves, grappling daily with defeat, some of them spiritbroken (he would have the worst cases sent for a month’s leave), but most as implacable as daemons. There was a proud tilt to their jaws, as if they were trying to stare him down. His heart swelled. The wind blew harder and colder in Sarehole than in the Lovoshire Parallel. The pilots all wore layers of sweaters under their canvas macs. Their faces were chapped red.

  Sarehole’s ramshackle buildings crouched on a stretch of empty plain littered with stunted bristlecones. The base was right at the edge of the Cerelon’s Shadowtown sector, and in fact right on the edge of the Salzeim Parallel. A few miles farther north and they would have been answering to a Lynche Parallel commandant. The chimneys of Cerelon puffed a black haze on the horizon.

  “I am Captain Kateralbin.” Crispin raised his voice to carry over the wind. “First of all, my condolences on your loss of Captain Jimenez. In taking command of this squadron I’ll do my best to uphold his standards. I know how you must be grieving and I sympathize deeply.”

  None of them moved a muscle.

  “Yes, well, it has been quite a week, hasn’t it,” Crispin said sotto voce. A few of them heard and laughed. He guessed that they were not so much amused by his sarcasm as by his tacit reference to the fact that Jimenez’s death hadn’t been much of a loss to anyone, let alone 130 Squadron. (Earlier, Vichuisse had cattily told Crispin that the man had been a moron and an incompetent.) If slandering Jimenez got them on his side, then well and good, but he’d better not carry it any further. “I’ve heard good things about you,” he said instead, gauging their reaction to praise. “Your lieutenants speak highly of you.”

  A few smiles.

  “I’m honored to have been offered the opportunity to command you. What leeway I have in the matter of offensives, I’ll use to restore our victory ratio to what it should be, can be, and will be. This squadron has an illustrious record. I won’t go into the reasons it’s been slipping lately. Let’s just blame it on the weather.”

  At that, a good many of them laughed. Crispin himself cracked a smile. But he had better change tack! Too much wink-wink-nudge-nudge and they wouldn’t respect him as they must. He cleared his throat. “However, the lack of Captain Jimene
z’s influence is already showing.”

  Stony faces. They were waiting to see what he meant.

  He gave it just long enough, and then said harshly, “A week without leadership has done nothing whatsoever for your standards. I’ve been snooping around. Several of your kite daemons are dangerously underfed. And do you realize the hangars are utter pigsties? It looks as if people have been camping out in there.”

  “People have,” muttered Jones, one of Crispin’s new lieutenants. “The riggers. It’s warmer there than in their quarters.”

  “Thanks for telling me,” Crispin said sarcastically out of the corner of his mouth.

  “Didn’t want to get my boys in trouble.” But Jones did not sound resentful. When Crispin first met 130 Squadron’s lieutenants this morning, they had openly expressed their philosophical view that no captain, however untried, however odd, could be worse than Jimenez had been. They were prepared to support Crispin. He just had to prove himself to them.

  He rounded on the men again. “What if you had to scramble? You’d probably kill yourselves getting your kites out of the hangars, and if you didn’t, you’d go nose down on the runway. There are potholes on the runway. Potholes on the runway!”

  “Haven’t been on any missions in a week,” muttered an unshaven pilot in the first rank, defensively.

  “Well, that’s going to change soon enough,” Crispin said. “The weather’s been awful, I know, but I don’t feel rain coming. And even if it was, it’d be no excuse.”

  All thirty of them knew what he meant now. No one dared to laugh. The unshaven pilot stared at Crispin, mouth hanging open as if he were paralyzed.

  “And you!” Crispin said, pointing as if he’d only just noticed him. “Go scrape that hog-ugly gristle off your face! You—yes, you! Now!”

  The fellow took one hesitant step out of line, and when Crispin snapped his fingers, he turned and shambled toward the barracks. Everyone watched him go. “Hold up your head, dammit, you’re Ferupian!” Crispin shouted after him.

  There were sniggers. Crispin faced the pilots again, praying he’d picked an unpopular man. It could make all the difference. The rest of the men’s expressions ranged from relief that they hadn’t been chosen to outright approval; Crispin breathed an inward sigh of thanks. “One-thirty Squadron’s standards are higher than that,” he told them. “One-thirty Squadron flies in rain, snow, and hail. One-thirty Squadron slaughters Kirekunis in rain, snow, and hail.”

  A few eyes slid toward Mickey Ash, standing among Crispin’s own men at the back of the crowd, but most of the pilots seemed not to have realized their new squadmate’s nationality yet. It was easy to miss when he was wearing a long coat.

  “Most of you have come out here in half uniform! I’ll let that slide this once, but from now on I don’t want to see you—hear? I don’t want to see you unless you look like pilots. You’re not ground crew. You’re not infantrymen. You’re not, in the name of the Queen, vagrants! You are regulars in the Queen’s Air Force! Are you aware of that? In the future, you will look like airmen, and you will behave like it. I’ve heard that many of you put in too much overtime. I admire your patriotism, but from now on that won’t be necessary. Instead, we’ll schedule four patrols a day, not three. Backup will come from the other five squadrons managed by Vichuisse, our new commandant. He, I, and Captains Keynes and Emthraze have agreed that shorter shifts will improve your health, your reflexes, and your kill tallies.”

  Vichuisse now commanded five captains. Out of those, Burns hadn’t been there for the meeting, and Eastre had opposed Crispin’s plan on the grounds that he liked to fly alone with his crews. But Eastre had been devoted to Commandant Elliott, Vichuisse’s predecessor, and during the meeting he had made it obvious that he would oppose everything Vichuisse said as a matter of course. He had been overruled.

  “Kill tallies. That’s what we are here for, men. Make no mistake. We aren’t here to fly demonstrations. We are here to shoot down so many of the enemy that the tide will turn back from the Salzeim Parallel!”

  They were hanging on his words. Crispin’s own crew, at the back, were chuckling among themselves. Crispin shot Harrowman a furious glance. They pulled straight faces.

  “In cooperation with the other squadrons in and around Cerelon, we are going to mount a new offensive against the enemy. We are going to devastate him behind his lines, where it hurts him most, and recapture the Raw for Ferupe. Are you with me?”

  Someone was breathing heavily: ssss, ssss. The wind swept coldly out of the Raw. Crispin squinted into it, his eyes watering. “Axe you with me?”

  “Yessir,” roughly half of the pilots muttered.

  “Are you with me?”

  “Yessir!”

  Sssss!

  What was that? It came from the middle ranks. Crispin tried to locate it without letting them see he had heard.

  Ss-ss-sss! Shshsss!

  “Oh, Queen,” Lieutenant Taft muttered behind Crispin, “no, I was afraid of this, ignore them, sir!”

  That was when Crispin knew it wasn’t his imagination. His stomach flopped sickeningly, for he recognized the hiss now. It was the noise soldiers in Shadowtown made at Wraiths.

  Sssss! Shsh! Wraith! Wraith!

  The cheek of them. The utter cheek of them!

  He took a deep breath. What would Vichuisse do, what would any high-and-touchy aristo captain do in this situation? He would scream at them while pretending he had not heard. Therefore, Crispin would—

  “Silence please,” he said in a voice that was not loud, but pitched to carry to the last rank.

  Ssss!

  “It sounds as if a few of you disagree with something I’ve said. You can’t be arguing with our need for a push to victory—and if you are, I suggest that you transfer to a noncombat capacity, because we don’t want you here. Therefore, I can only assume you think I’m not qualified to ask these things of you.”

  On their faces, naked horror.

  He had thrown them! He could not help grinning. “Perhaps you take me for a Wraith. Perhaps you’re saying to yourselves, ‘Our commandants must really be plucking at straws!’ Frankly, I had thought you above such pettiness. But in light of this... ”

  Utter silence now. No more hissing.

  Inwardly exulting, Crispin pointed at a boy whose face was browner than the rest, and whose bare head was fuzzed white-blond. “You look like an easterner. Are you?”

  The boy’s mouth opened and closed, fishlike, a couple of times. He had been one of the loudest hissers. “Yessir!”

  “Name!”

  “Teralbanin, sir!”

  “Kateralbin,” Crispin said, and tipped his cap with a smile, as if introducing himself. Teralbanin grinned sickly.

  “My mother was Lamaroon,” Crispin said. “My father was from Linhe Domain. I’m Ferupian, born and bred. But even if I weren’t, it would be no reason for you to withhold your respect. I am astonished at your temerity. Among my crew is another non-Ferupian. Ash.” He beckoned.

  Mickey came up around the crowd, frowning. Crispin gestured for him to stand beside him.

  “Ash was born Kirekuni.” A few pilots gasped. “But he’s not the enemy. He is one of us. It’s actions that make the man, not origins, and Ash has shot down more lizards than half the pilots I know! You will tender him your courtesy as your squadmate, just as you will tender me your courtesy as your captain.”

  “Yessir,” they said doubtfully.

  Crispin held up one hand. “Your respect you may withhold until you have decided whether my command merits it. But your obedience I claim. And if you give it to me, I guarantee that we will earn more glory than any squadron in this sector.”

  “Yes, sir!”

  They had come physically unfrozen. The crews came close to dissolving as pilots elbowed each other, raising eyebrows, smiling. “Good going, sir,” Jones murmured behind Crispin. Another lieutenant seconded him. Crispin didn’t think he’d won them over, he’d simply stunned them; but it did
n’t matter. “So, are we together?” he shouted at the regulars.

  “Yes—”

  “Yes what?”

  “Yes, Captain!”

  “Together?”

  “Together!”

  “What are we going to do?”

  The responses came variously. “Kill ‘em! Slaughter ‘em! Shoot ‘em down! Fuck the fuckers over! Make the pension! Give ‘em woffor!”

  Crispin had not known he was clenching his teeth until pain shot through his jaw. His fingers and toes were numb with cold. Beside him, Mickey lashed his tail in delight. Streaky dark clouds scudded across the gray sky, and in the distance, the lurid streaks of screamers marked an ongoing dogfight. The wind from Cerelon smelled of smoke. “I’m fucking proud of you,” Crispin shouted at them when the voices died down. “Fucking proud, hear!”

  “Captain!”

  “Proud! I’ll see Taft’s crew in ten minutes for night patrol! I want Joffrey’s crew in your bunks now; reveille’s at 5:00 A.M. The rest of you—at ease!”

  As they straggled away, they kept looking over their shoulders at him, grinning and shaking their heads. Crispin thought, Still lucky. For now. During the briefing meeting at QAF HQ in Cerelon, Captain Eastre’s hostility had given him his first doubts as to whether he would have enough leeway to do his captaincy justice. His men, perhaps, he could handle, but they weren’t the only factor. The sheets of drizzle sweeping over the runway bellied strangely, as if an invisible face were pressing itself against the wet gray curtains; the cackling of the crows on the bristlecones sounded human, like the voices of the night birds in the Wraithwaste nearly three years ago. Vichuisse’s influence over Crispin’s career had not been broken, only diffused.