The Eternal Front: A Lines of Thunder Novel (Lines of Thunder Universe)

by Walter Blaire

  “Spirits.”

  “Ancestors.”

  “The tall men have wonderful weapons for me to use.”

  “Songs that sound good, but Happies can’t hear them, if it please you.”

  “Somewhere, a bad boy is hurting a nice girl.”

  “The very tall man from my dreams is telling me to fight for him.”

  The Haphans redoubled their efforts. They were experienced and capable overlords. To their latest knowledge, the Haphan Empire held some six hundred planets under dominion. They knew what to do with normative human children who refused to attend their teachers.

  Tachba girls were consolidated into tiny classes for advanced topics. Tachba boys were chained to their desks, and the chains wired for current. Long before Haphan-administered towns had electricity, high-voltage cables ran through every Haphan-run orphanage in the north. The teacher, and both armed guards in every classroom, had personal switch boxes that connected to every desk. A brisk shock was wonderfully conducive for keeping the boys tethered to the real world.

  Diggery hated his desk, the chains, and the endless shocks…but he couldn’t dispute their effectiveness. The Sesserans took a softer approach to teaching, and as far as Diggery could see, they suffered for it.

  “More incoming,” Diggery noted. The shells landed not far off. “Not the big ones yet.”

  Sethlan didn’t bother to answer.

  Most of the barrage was not for them or the trenches. It arched over their position in a high parabola meant to entertain their rearward supply and artillery. The northern guns, veteran units directly officered by Haphans, answered the barrage with terse surgical volleys. They were skilled at matching the path of an incoming shell with their answering fire. By the sound of the firing patterns, the Haphans were steadily knocking out the South’s guns.

  Before long, the South disengaged from the Haphan artillery and the duel stumbled to a halt. After a minute of wonderful silence, the South opened a new barrage on the trench line. No one would suspect that the enemy suffered from a lack of artillery in this sector. Diggery was glad he was on the Ville Emsa front, and not someplace that got pummeled for real.

  The new incoming shells fell around their crater. Some of the shells screamed like lost souls as they dropped to earth.

  “Hellish night,” Diggery said. “What’s that called again?”

  Sethlan didn’t look up. “Boots say, ‘She-bitch of a night.’ Due to the Harpies. Hear them? The night will be female.”

  “Female night, huh?”

  “So the boots say. If you are culled tonight—killed—you will not mind as much. The female monsters are more painful, but at least they’re female.”

  “Do you want me to watch out for female monsters?”

  “The boots say it, not me.”

  Diggery risked a peek over the lip of the crater. No monsters or spirits wandering around.

  Among these people—among his people—there was a time-out-of-mind obsession with cataloging every quirk and oddity on the battlefield. Uncle Nestor. Wiggy the Headshot. Stompfootie. Brutal Butcher.

  Diggery plumbed his mind for the females. Sister Sneeze was female, but it didn’t look like gas tonight. Nurse Angry Revenge was a better option. Nurse Angry Revenge was a creature that utterly honest men claim to have seen—a long-chinned woman in Haphan medical whites. She had a triangular face and knockers always worth mentioning. She crawled through the trenches on four arms and no legs, directing bullet ricochets into the stomachs of the unlucky.

  As for the harpies, at least they were real. Harpies were shells dressed with metal whistles. They arrived in intermittent flights, because they were more annoying that way. Lest the barrage of explosive shells somehow pacified a soldier into a relaxing sleep, he had all-hell shrieks at random intervals to keep him engaged.

  When multiple harpies screamed together it sounded like mad, disjointed singing. The song could grow so loud and pervasive that, on a bad day, it called soldiers out of the trench. Diggery had seen soldiers go still and glassy, their frowns washed away by the beatific calmness welling up inside them like a poisoned stream. The fixed smile and the thousand-yard stare—this was how their boot buddies knew to pile on the sorry scrag and pin him to the ground. And all of this from shells with whistles attached. Damn the Harpies. Damn his lunatic people.

  With his painful education and Haphan level of self-control, Diggery didn’t expect to be called into the air by mere noise, to be finished off by snipers. He had a preferred method of dying all picked out: Stompfootie would put an artillery shell right between his hips. Diggery would painlessly convert into a fine red mist, and then he’d hitch a ride on Mr. Suckwind. Suckwind was the trench god that vacuumed soldiers into the maelstrom when a fire-shell evacuated air out of a bunker.

  Mr. Suckwind, who would be Diggery’s intimate friend by that point, would carry his fine red mist to Ville Emsa, and there he would land upon a woman! Maybe even Nana. Mist-Diggery would fucking cover Nana in gore.

  And since Diggery was pretending to think like a real Tacchie, he had to acknowledge that covering Nana in gore would be considered a form of groping. Very impolite. Women were crucial to the smooth function of society, and dashtas even more so. Certainly they could not be grossly mistreated, but even simple disrespect might distract them from their vital role. So it simply wasn’t tolerated.

  This soured Diggery for a moment, because all these social rules never seemed to swing in his favor. Then he thought, Fuck it, and imagined the act anyway. He enveloped her in his mist, and it was a luscious, sybaritic process where his bone particles, vein particles, even stomach-lining particles pressed against her every curve. He warmed her and gave her a fine rosy glow, and she squealed with surprised delight, and Captain Cephas could only watch jealously from his fucking table. Diggery was inescapable, warm, slick. Nana was hot and red, pulsing inside him.

  Wait a moment, please! Diggery yanked himself out of the vision. Such ridiculous, psychotic daydreams, lurking in his otherwise perfect mind. I’m sick, but nobody notices because they’re sick too. These people, my people, are insane. The whole world is insane.

  Another near miss sprayed them with dirt. Diggery gratefully returned his attention to the crater.

  “Captain, is it groping if I’m blown up and I cover Nana with gore?”

  The captain actually stopped writing for a moment, but didn’t look up. “Yes, Diggery. It’s an Affront to the Exterior.”

  “So there is no bright side to the whole thing.”

  “If you’re lusting after the dashta, go make yourself happy alone. Far away from here. Considering Nana in that fashion is an Affront to the Image. Bringing it up in conversation: Offense of Admission. Bringing it up to an officer: Sin of Warmth.”

  “We sure have a lot of rules,” Diggery said.

  “We are nothing without rules, or service. I want you to think of service now. Is your occlusor clean? Do you have your sight-lines prepared? We’ll need to match our results.”

  Presently the large shells landed, though they didn’t find much to destroy in the soft, empty no-man’s-land.

  “I make it ten degrees and nicely grouped,” Diggery said. The occlusors pinched the bridge of his nose, but it would probably annoy the captain to learn of it.

  “Elevation ten, at the mark,” said the captain. “You have the mark? Ten then. I think we can nail this down tonight.”

  “I think they’re shooting from a train carriage,” Diggery said. “It’s a smooth offset from last night.”

  Sethlan shook his head. “That would be a big train.”

  “Have we ever known the South to build small?”

  “Put your head down, Diggery.” Sethlan uncapped his trench light and stuck it in the dirt wall so it pointed at his work.

  The light must have reflected somewhere, because they soon received several plinks from South. Before long, a Sesseran sniper noticed and joined the fun. The captain ignored all of it as he measured traject
ories with his forceps, mumbled through the conversions, and rejected most of Diggery’s input.

  “What is wrong with my humidity?” Diggery finally blurted, and was gratified that the captain stopped and looked at him.

  “Dephram Digalon, do you see me factoring all the crap you’re talking? Wind speed? Resistance? Clouds? Ground temperature? And now humidity? I’m just going for a simple parabola here. Why factor humidity and nothing else?”

  “Huh! I thought you were doing all of that in your head, like me.”

  For a moment, they were both taken aback. When the captain spoke again, however, he was amused. “So? How do we match up?”

  “My number is inestimably more precise than yours,” Diggery said. “Sir.”

  “Fine. Mark it.”

  Sethlan unfurled their good map right there in the crater. It was the field copy of the even better map on their table at the club. It showed every known strike in the last two weeks. Some of the locations came to them by trench reporting, which was only slightly more reliable than a fever hallucination. The rest had been witnessed or confirmed by Diggery or the captain himself. The shells encompassed a wide but defined arc, such as one would get from lively turret guns.

  If the arc were extrapolated into a triangle, then the guns at the source were unmistakably in the middle of a lake. The Landing Day satellite photograph told no lies.

  “There we go,” said the captain, when Diggery finished. “The Southies are shooting from the water.”

  “That can’t be true,” Diggery said.

  “We have repeatedly demonstrated it to be true.”

  “Then we’re simply missing something, sir.”

  Then Sethlan went strange again. His eyes drifted up with a soft expression, and his words turned slow. “Are we? Are we missing something?”

  Diggery waited, not daring to speak. When Sethlan communed with the ancestors it was downright eerie. At least he didn’t talk back and forth to himself this time, as he sometimes did. A few stray rifle rounds skipped across the top of the crater.

  After a moment Sethlan sighed. “We’re not missing anything. They’re shooting from a lake.”

  “If you say so.”

  Sethlan shook his head, annoyed again, but not at Diggery this time. “I didn’t say so, but then I disagreed.”

  16

  Nana

  Today’s weather was uncharacteristically warm for the season. Though Nana had again forgotten her wrap, she didn’t feel a chill as stepped into Ville Emsa. She crossed the Plaza at the intersection of Sell and Barrage, and then turned toward the edge of town. There were enough casualties in this sector that the Haphan hospital at the edge of town had its own railway line, which cut through the uneven terrain.

  She climbed the boulder-lined embankment to walk on the shoulder, and the buildings of Ville Emsa grew sparse. The city was all but empty during the day, and the wide stone buildings had a moodily solid beauty, like an abandoned castle. She turned down the eastern spur, which was empty of trains but full of pedestrians.

  All of them were women.

  Had the men in Ville Emsa known, the rails would have been lined like a parade route. The general scarcity of young women and their piecemeal entry onto the tracks in the middle of the day let them collect unnoticed by the few soldiers on the streets. The women walked slowly and drew together in clumps.

  The dashtas of Ville Emsa had a medical review at the Haphan hospital. It was a big production; it had to be done with finesse. Front line operations had to be suspended, certain units of Tachba had to be reassigned off hospital grounds, and the windows of the male wards had to be shuttered for the day. If the women were sighted, and word spread, it could become a disaster of epic proportions. The Haphans preferred to process all the women at the same time, so medical reviews were a rare and otherwise impossible gathering of dashtas.

  Today’s medical review was off-schedule, but this suited Nana just fine. The local hospitals had recently been overwhelmed by some new stomach flu, perhaps from batches of beer because the officers all reported from their drinking clubs. Even the Haphans knew that the war wouldn’t run if the dashtas were incapacitated, so in an abundance of caution they called the women in for a check-up.

  Mesma, from the 2041st, was one of Nana’s schoolmates from the Dashta Sisterhood. She fell in beside Nana and said, “Which it’s nice to gather together now and then. But as much as we get to talk, the Haphans also get to check up on us together.”

  “There is too much going on to pass messages like normal, mouth to mouth to ear,” Nana said.

  A murmur of agreement from the other women. Officers going missing. Strange Haphan-ethnic men on the street at night, trying to mix into the crowds. Hordes of soldiers raising hell on the streets, Tachba who spoke with strange non-Sesseran accents, and who wore unit insignia none of them recognized.

  “My Roaldan Trappia, colonel of my unit, is being followed,” Nana said. “Which of you sent him?”

  Nobody owned to it.

  Mesma said, “Do you have a description?”

  “It’s vague,” Nana said. She wished the scull, the boy she had following Trappia, was more interested in details than in simply trying to please her. “Some strange Tacchie in the uniform of a Provisioner, but his unit tags were covered.”

  The whispering died out.

  “Today, I sent one of my helpies to ask this provisioner some questions,” she added. She noticed looks crossing between the other dashtas. “So you know this Provisioner?”

  Someone said, “I hope you don’t care too much about that helpie.”

  Nana smiled grimly. “No one will miss him if he doesn’t come back.”

  Mesma guffawed. “You sent Diggery?”

  Several other dashtas, the youngest or prettiest, chimed in.

  “Oh, that’s Diggery?”

  “Is that his name?”

  “Cute or not, I would have killed him a dozen times already. His officer must be blood-fed.”

  Impatience stabbed at Nana. She felt obscurely defensive for the young man, but also annoyed at how the dashtas rushed to change the subject.

  “Listen,” Nana said. “The Provisioners are run by Bucephalon. I mean in the old sense, not on the Haphan table of organization. Bucephalon is the boss of every mess and hospitality unit on this stretch of the eternal front. He has every supply boss under his foot. Who is Bucephalon’s dashta?”

  Silence from the women.

  “The dashta’s name is Llanna,” Mesma finally volunteered, “but Bucephalon is very old, and Llanna is very new. She doesn’t have much leverage over him.” She turned to the other women and let her annoyance show. “Why are all of you biting your tongues?”

  “Because this talk is pointlessly dangerous,” said another dashta. This one, though young, spoke with a certainty and confidence greater than her years.

  Nana recognized her and remembered her name. “Thorie, who does Bucephalon take orders from?”

  Thorie only repeated, “This talk is pointlessly dangerous.”

  “Bucephalon takes orders from Colonel Goldros, who sits in the trenches at the front,” Nana finished.

  “Where did you hear that name?” Mesma said. “Did Diggery tell you that name?”

  “Yes.”

  “Diggery won’t be around long, perhaps.”

  “It would only be what that Diggery boy deserves…”

  Nana gritted her teeth. She would get through this, even if she had to grind them down like bone spurs. “So Colonel Goldros is a boss who tries to hide. What’s he the boss of?”

  She well and truly didn’t have the answer to this question. When the silence turned punishing, her earlier, self-answered questions finally paid off, and not a moment too soon. Emse volunteered, “Colonel Goldros runs the trenches and the real war in this sector. He puts together units and tears them apart. He’s very high-function, and the Haphan Gray House thinks it’s grooming him for a field command. Native Control wants him dead. It�
��s a big scuffle between their military and their government.”

  Nana frowned. “My Observers have no direct business with him. Why is he interested in us?”

  “Did you tell Diggery not to mention your name?” Thorie asked.

  Nana had indeed told Diggery that, but maybe she could draw them out by playing dumb. “Why should I worry?”

  “Goldros is the center of a vast web, Nana,” Thorie said. “If you pluck any string that leads to him, he’ll look your way. He’s almost a manleader in his own right. He’s not circling, he’s hopelessly brilliant, and it keeps him on the edge of despair. You’d think he was a Southie Prince gone still, with the living skulls of his enemies tapped into his brain stem. Don’t let him look your way, sister. He would sell you to the Happies for a minor advantage if that Diggery boy mentioned your name.”

  “That fucking Diggery,” muttered Mesma, shaking her head. “So cute.”

  “Sell me!” Nana tried to sound amused, not alarmed. “Whatever for?”

  “The Haphans are hunting a rebellion,” Thorie said bluntly, and they all flinched. “Watch the streets, you’ll see them prowling. What they seek, they’ll find, one way or another. They’re looking for a female leader. So too, it follows, is Colonel Goldros looking for a female leader—either to be a figurehead, or to supply to the Haphans, to make them go away.”

  Hell and damn-meh, Nana thought, shaken. She turned quiet, trying to think, and the dashtas let her. Before long, the hospital loomed in front of them, and inside, the Haphans and their suspicions.

  “When is the next medical review after this one?” Mesma asked.

  “Weekly, until the stomach flu quits Ville Emsa,” another dashta said.

  “Keep your men sick,” Nana said. “We’ll need to talk again.”