Why would I think that? Because you’re an inveterate liar? Or because you can’t think of a way to explain it to me?
~If I’m right, and you were to crack that folder on the table, you’d bring all hell down on us with your very thoughts.~
Sethlan paused, his mind churning at a fast clip. Do you mean my discovery thoughts? Someone would be alerted by my discovery thoughts?
~Now, what the hell are ‘discovery thoughts?’~
It’s when you forget yourself, turn into a bore, and ponder deeply about something. Some Tacchies say it’s the ancestors entering our minds, but there’s no proof of that. Anyway, you feel quite thoughtful and different, et cetera, and afterwards you emerge having an idea…usually a bad one, but you love it and try to protect it like an egg.
~I’m appalled that your people have a special term to describe ‘thinking.’~
Not just any thinking, impolite thinking. Anyway, can you tell me how mere thinking would alert our ancestors? And by ancestors, I don’t really mean ancestors. I mean the thought-eaters, or whatever it is you’re afraid of, you being wholly made of thought.
Eponymous would have smiled if she could. She noticed too late how Sethlan’s mind had gone still and attentive.
Ah, I’m off by a hair, Sethlan said with satisfaction. You’re amused. But according to you, you’d be dead if I cracked this inviting folder. It’s right here under my fingers.
~We both would be dead, so stop toying with it. Tell me this, Sethlan: What would happen if I explained why you should not open the folders?~
Sethlan’s mind churned again. I suppose I would experience an ugly feeling of discovery, enlightenment, and growth. I would learn the branch from you, and my mind would travel down it, imagining all the leaves.
~At that point, we would have the same problem.~
What if, instead, you told me why you are here?
~The same problem again. But I can say we’re now close to my reason for being on Grigory IV at all.~
“Blast and damn,” muttered Sethlan, just as a scull leaned over him to replace a stein. The boy glanced away inoffensively. “It is only my mind, scrag. It is being stupid.”
“Which we’ve all had some struggles in our day,” the scull said, and disappeared quickly.
~In fact,~ Eponymous said, ~it would be better all around to end this discussion. If you register as being excessively confused and anxious on some energistic receptor…~
I’d be calmer if I were getting some answers, wouldn’t I, and not the runaround from a craven scrag who hides among my childhood memories like a pervert. No— Sethlan’s thoughts turned hard —I don’t believe there are hidden ancestors waiting to pounce on my thoughts. I believe I can do my job, and read a sheet of paper, and continue to be overlooked by the cosmos.
~You believe it is a Haphan plot, and the phone is some technology off their ark-ships?~
Probably not. The rude telephone voice insulted the Haphans. They have rules which discourage that.
~Then it’s clearly a Sesseran on the phone, right? Or let’s be dangerously imaginative and suppose it’s a Southie spy, a techno-political savant with full knowledge of every haut captain in service, and he’s leading us astray by spewing orders into wireless phones.~
Certainly not that, either. You heard his accent. And since when do the Haphans come at a whistle? He produced those secret police very quickly. No, it could be some other interested offworld race. There are other alien species on Grigory, two I’ve seen myself, six all told. All of them living miserable, inhuman lives.
~They barely count. They’re merely fringe races from earlier colonies that haven’t died off yet.~
Indeed. They are so few in this age, they have to negotiate and bargain when they come out of hiding. That would enrage anybody. So it’s clearly an embittered alien from an ancient fallen colony, and it’s trying to wrest the war out of our capable hands.
~You really suspect an alien conspiracy, then?~
Not really.
~Still, it brings us closer to the truth.~ Eponymous cast around for inspiration. ~Shall we make a deal? Your escape is still fresh, and I’m sure that behind the red door, the artery hallway is buzzing with people who want to find us. The building is probably being watched closely in case the folders are opened and your ‘discovery thoughts’ are thought. I agree that you will unravel this mystery: unraveling is my task, this is my mystery, and you’re stuck with me. But we cannot unravel this right now, without you being put against the wall and shot before you learn the whole truth. I only ask that you have patience.~
The room changed—or rather, Sethlan’s perception of it.
It was as if reality itself took a deep breath.
Eponymous’s mind rippled as the unannounced field passed through the flesh and bone of Sethlan’s skull. He wasn’t the only one to feel it. There was a cry from the back of the club, and then the crash of a dropped tray. The officers at the tables around Sethlan stopped speaking, pinching their noses.
“What are you doing?” Sethlan hissed, wincing in pain.
~Not me,~ Eponymous said quickly. ~Close your eyes. Put the folders out of sight before you look around again!~
Sethlan started to reply, but the voice was abruptly gone, as if it had fallen down a well.
Sethlan shuffled the folders blindly under a map on his table, keeping his eyes raised. He was alone again, and at this moment it was unwelcome. He was confused, suspicious, and now a thief, mostly at the Voice’s urging. In fact, without the Voice, he was just a bone-tired man who was either on the edge of a monumental conspiracy, or simply going mad, and he knew which was more plausible. Still, he appreciated the irony of needing a sarcastic, disembodied voice in his head to convince him of his sanity.
The Voice had said the building was “buzzing with people who want to find us.” It could have been mere grammar, or a slip. In the Sesseran Tachbavim, in which at least Sethlan’s half of the conversation was conducted, the meaning was quite clear.
Someone was hunting both Sethlan and his Voice.
3
Eponymous
“How goes our project?” Lucky Strike asked. “I hope you’re making progress.”
“Who taught you manners? Since when do you vortex an entire city to find a rider? You could have pinged me, or at least given a warning, like ringing a telephone.”
“Telephone? How odd you would bring up a device like a telephone.”
Eponymous gave a mental shrug. “I’m in a medieval hell and it seemed apt. The diseases alone down here beggar the imagination. You can’t go five feet without hearing a cough. There are people starving, people falling dead in the street, and corpses being collected by fancy carts. The waste is beyond belief, and I won’t even mention the front.”
“It’s hard to believe, isn’t it, that only a century and a half ago, the Haphans were level four on the technology scale. And they were prepared to backslide; it was factored into the Colonization Plan. By this point in the timeline, the Haphans were supposed to have reconnected with their interstellar imperium. They were supposed to have been sending off ark-ships of their own. I think it’s a testament to the Tachba race that the colonists were brought to barbarism in such a short time.”
“So you knew everything, and you’ve been dribbling out hints and innuendo. Why wasn’t I properly briefed before I came?”
“Would you have come, knowing what you know now? I mean, you’re not insane, are you?” The ship sounded smug, and since it didn’t have such simple emotions, Eponymous was probably supposed to hear the smugness.
“There is a utilization policy for field operatives. I swear, I will call you up in front of CivGov.”
“On the topic of that policy, there are half a million volumes of case history, if you care to read them. It took me at least three minutes to ingest them all. No rules were bent sending you planetside.”
“Maybe I’d like someone else to read the rules for me,” Eponymous shot back. “Maybe
I need an advocate with all the free time you seem to have.”
“Don’t threaten me, you little electrical brainwave. Do you know how many times I’ve saved Semelon’s ass on the front already? And I wasn’t even told to do that. More to the point, I wouldn’t have to vortex the whole city for scrapings if you were posting reports on the agreed schedule.”
Eponymous began a retort and stumbled. The ship had been told? Who, exactly, could tell an independent prospector ship to do anything? Personalities aside, they were essentially demigods on the edge of civilization. It must have been an intended slip, a bit of information Eponymous was expected to internalize, which would then begin to color his reports based on some criteria only Lucky Strike could fathom. If the conversation had the ship’s full attention, or even a significant fraction of it, it could model the entire discussion and spend a year of subjective time phrasing each reply. There was no such thing as a slip when talking to an independent ship.
But no—this was not a regular conversation, where Eponymous thought with hijacked portions of Sethlan’s mind in an invasive overlay. Eponymous had been lifted out, pulled out with the vortex, with Semelon only retaining a trillion or so bookmarks along his neural pathways, saved against Eponymous’s return. The conversation was taking place in some mathspace dimension somewhere, in some organized field, where she could think at ship speeds and the ship was thinking on its feet.
Lucky Strike apparently decided that she had been humbled, based on her silence. “So if you will please report, we can both continue our work toward a satisfactory outcome.”
Eponymous gave a showy sigh. “Sethlan is coming around. I won’t need to change horses, after all.”
“Is he aware of your existence? Because that would be against the rules.”
“In a manner of speaking he’s aware. They have a theory that their ancestors are on the ‘other side of the air,’ and they can speak through fires. They only half believe it; Sethlan not at all. He’s too rational. But I may be slowly undoing that and making him a believer. Lots of them are like that. They don’t believe, but they act in every way as if they do. In Sethlan’s head, I learned their ‘Yod’ is just a made-up word to keep the Haphans happy.”
“It’s all a knock-on effect of the Tachba twisting,” Lucky Strike responded. “In addition to the interesting physical traits, some of which I’ll let surprise you, there was work done on the psychology. The deep pathways are changed and heritable from generation to generation. I have passed brain sections to some genetic archaeologists in civilization. I have not heard back, yet.”
“I hope they were not live samples,” Eponymous interrupted and felt a faint relief at the ship’s hesitation. If Lucky Strike had been modeling her somehow, or looking at the structure of her personality in the field, it would have seen her preparing to interrupt.
Or perhaps it had let her interrupt.
“The specimens were already dead,” the ship said finally.
Eponymous imagined the ship’s manipulation fields at work on Grigory’s surface. Captured dust and sharp bits of metal cohered invisibly together, a real-life trench spirit, cutting open the skulls of fallen soldiers. “Even the interesting ones?”
“It’s against the rules to kill, you know that.” Then it added, “Though I can sometimes let die.”
“Sethlan thinks I’m something like a spirit. A large part of him also thinks he’s going crazy, but the Tachba like to keep useful, so he’s not letting that aspect slow him down. I’ve influenced him into getting the access I need with the various intelligence agencies down here. He has essentially become a bridge between the services, and this will let him collect information. I’ll be sewing it all together—”
“Yes, that’s the assignment,” the ship said impatiently. “And you’ve been long enough in getting there. Tell me, what has he seen so far?”
“Nothing much,” said Eponymous. “Just some junk passing across his table. If there’s anything interesting, it will be included in my reports.”
“Your nonexistent reports? Tell me what he’s seen, at least?”
Eponymous tried a sarcastic laugh, and when that didn’t work, she radiated humor. “Don’t you think I can see when something is important or not? You don’t really want me to give you every detail from every second I’ve been down here.”
“It would help, yes. I’m trying to generate a complete sociological picture.”
“Then why don’t you just spike the hell out of the place with listener studs?”
“Oh, I already have. The whole continent is bugged. There is a whole lot of nothing going on—”
“Which is why you needed a rider like me in the first place,” Eponymous said, “to glean the wheat from the chaff, and to intuit what you can’t see in your useless omnisciency.”
“I’d put it differently.”
“So don’t joggle my elbow, ship. Put me back into my insane host on that shithole world, and let me finish my job.”
The ship was quiet for a moment. A very long moment, by ship standards. “If you were deceiving me, you would also not file reports, because then I would see from your mind state that you were withholding information.”
“Oh, that’s fresh,” Eponymous shot back. “You hang yourself with your own words. Don’t project your guilty conscience onto me—if you’d given me the information I needed before I came, you would have had your precious reports by now. Don’t talk to me about deception and withholding. Just put me back on the goddamned dirt and—”
~I guess I’m back. Was I gone long?~
Not long enough, said Sethlan, more warmly than Eponymous would have expected. About three minutes. Where did you shit yourself during that time?
~Would you believe I had to support to a superior?~
Sethlan gave an uneven cackle. I imagine even Yod himself has to salute sometimes.
~Sethlan, how did you get this drunk in three minutes?~
I am a very experienced front-line officer. Now, you will report to me, or I’ll kill you in the morning with a dirty-bourbon hangover. That’s fermented soles of feet. I’m sure we have a bottle hidden in the back room. Dirty-bourbon is illegal, thank the Haphan Empire, but sometimes we must stoop to torture.
Eponymous couldn’t tell if she was being teased, and didn’t want to find out.
~Let’s continue our escape, then. I would like you to walk, or maybe stagger, out of this building and mix with some crowds. Can you find a crowd to join? Preferably an enraged throng of confused and drunken half-wits? The more erratic the better.~
That should be possible in this town. Sethlan stood, shoving the dangerous folders back into his jacket.
On his way out, he paused by Cephas’s table. “Cephas, you will please come to my apartment in two or three hours.”
The captain glowered at his hands and wouldn’t look up. “Topping it the haut captain already? I think not. I think I shall stay here and pickle myself.”
“Axachatax, please.”
Cephas’s shoulders twitched. He finally looked Sethlan full in the face. “Yes.”
4
Diggery
Under close supervision, Southie prisoners of war built and frequently rebuilt the Northern trenches. Under less close supervision, they collected unexploded ordnance sent over by the South and reshelled it to fit the Haphan guns. It was grueling labor, and the attrition rate amazed even the most cynical Planners. At night, the prisoners returned to their prisons—abandoned strip mines cored into the living earth, with little paths spiraling down the circumference and an ever-rising surface of corpses at the bottom.
It is possible to keep a Tachba alive on mere sips of gruel drizzled with blood, so long as one didn’t mind the more humane personality traits slipping to the side. Nothing made the Southie prisoners seem more monstrous than when starvation revealed the manipulations on their bodies, the polluted knotty bones, the odd kobold angles.
The nutrition deficit was paid every month with a line of baxxax
x driven into the pits. After a short mutual slaughter, the ornery, armored beasts were butchered—pried apart, really—by hand. The baxxaxx were eaten raw and before their own eyes, since they were very durable as well. Diggery had witnessed a prison feeding once, and now the thronging crowds of Emsa and the endless, borderless violence on the sidewalks put him in mind of the desperate mobs of prisoners and the enraged baxxaxx.
He took special care on the streets, trying to notice everything and quickly going punch drunk from the kaleidoscope of uniforms and insignias on the street. It seemed like everybody was out, and he would have been unsurprised to see a creature from one of the alien enclaves, maybe a Daggi or even a Low Spetsa.
Because he was so observant, he noticed the Haphans in the crowd. Their mandated yard of distance caused turbulence in the pedestrian current, like logs protruding from a fast river. Diggery couldn’t see the actual Haphans, but whenever he checked, the disturbances had moved with him. Keeping station. They were following him again, even though he was still two blocks and a bridge away from the Haphan Quarter.
“Oh, what did I do now?”
As he drew close to the Granta River, he noticed a tall, cloaked figure striding toward him with purpose. Diggery immediately turned away from the bridge and down the river-walk promenade. The cloaked man changed course, which Diggery could not help but notice when he pretended to admire the river. He increased his pace down the promenade, even though this announced that he was aware of his hunter. He knew how it would play out if the Haphan got close enough. He would be addressed, loudly, in the name of the emperor or the local empress, and he would have to stop and turn. The boots on the sidewalk would slow to watch, but they would not intercede as he was quietly, procedurally disarmed and guided away. It happened daily; it was almost too commonplace to notice. Even worse would be to resist. If he fought, his fellow Sesserans would wade in and beat him to a pulp on the Haphan’s behalf.
With expansive relief, Diggery found a gap in the wall and turned into a thin alleyway, not more than four feet wide and surfaced with something soft and mulchy under his boots. As he slipped into the shadows, a voice behind him called, “You there!”
The Eternal Front: A Lines of Thunder Novel (Lines of Thunder Universe) Page 33