by Adam Roberts
The thought that kept dribbling through Polystom’s mind was: Captain Parocles is dead. If one captain is dead, why not the other one? Why not me?
A colonel flew down to them, in a one-man mono-wing miniplane. Its engine could be heard clearly in the damp air. It swooped over the ridge, and circled round, the single wing gawkily long, the pilot’s cradle slung underneath in front of a chugging motor. None too skilfully the colonel brought it down to land stickily in the wet mud alongside the new trench.
Polystom received him in his digs.
‘I’ve just come direct from Command,’ said the colonel, without so much as introducing himself. ‘We want to say, firstly, well done, captain. Taking this ridge is very important. Now we want you to hold it.’
‘Hold it,’ said Polystom. His own voice sounded funny to him; tinny, somehow. Unreal.
The colonel looked at him. ‘I know what you’ll ask me,’ he said.
‘You know,’ repeated Polystom.
There was a pause.
‘You’ll ask,’ said the colonel, a little less gung-ho, ‘for reinforcements. I can’t give you any. There’s been a most enormous push by the enemy, west of here.’ The colonel stood, and pulled a square of paper from his jacket. It was spattered with dried droplets of mud. Polystom was struck by how much they looked like blood. The square unfolded and unfolded, and the colonel spread out a map covering the whole table. ‘You can see,’ he said, ‘these ridges fan out from this central peak.’ Geographical features were marked on the map with numerous straight marks, like laughter lines. ‘Four ridges. We hold them all, now that you’ve taken this. That was why we put such an effort into isolating and then retaking this ridge. You see?’
‘Yes,’ said Polystom, although he didn’t.
‘The enemy were trying to defend this ridge,’ said the colonel. ‘Your ridge. When they realised that was hopeless, they pulled all their forces into an attack on this one here – it’s a bigger feature, and it runs directly to the peak. Your ridge is not such a good path to the mountain, because we’ve mined and wired the further reaches of it. So they’re pushing hard to take Camel Ridge, here, do you see?’
‘Yes,’ said Polystom, again.
‘There’s no doubt,’ said the colonel, folding the map up, ‘that the enemy is going all-out to take the peak. All out. They’ve realised how important it is. How important,’ he repeated, fixing Polystom’s eyes, ‘it is.’
‘Yes?’ Polystom asked, although he had no idea what the significance of the peak was.
‘Now, Captain,’ said the colonel. ‘I’m about to tell you something top secret, top secret. Your specific orders, you understand, are to tell nobody. Not even your lieutenants.’
‘Alright,’ said Polystom.
‘You may know of the existence of a Computational Device of enormous size and power on this planet.’
‘I’d heard.’
‘The peak I’m talking about is the central section. It’s part of a naturally occurring crystalline-rock prominence. When the device was being constructed it utilised the natural crystal in its circuitry. This was augmented with valves, of course, and with a series of separate power sources. But the crucial thing is this: the Computational Device is of the utmost importance to the war effort, and to the System as a whole. Do you understand? The utmost importance. It cannot be allowed,’ said the Colonel, becoming quite fierce in his emphasis, ‘to fall into enemy hands. I cannot stress this too greatly. Your orders are to hold this ridge. It may be that the enemy attempt to retake it when their attack on the Camel falters – or maybe they’ll try a diversionary attack. But they must not be allowed back up here.’
Polystom, a little wide eyed from the urgency of the colonel, nodded.
‘So, Captain,’ said the colonel, standing up. ‘I’m sorry I can’t let you have any reinforcements. I can, however, let you have two guns; your men can pull them up this evening. How many men have you got left, by the way?’
Polystom had no idea. ‘Sixty,’ he said, randomly.
The colonel’s eyes widened. ‘I must say,’ he said, ‘that you and Captain Parocles both deserve especial commendation – you two retook this feature with less than fifty per cent casualties. Superb commanding, sir! Superb. Both of you will be mentioned in the Command Account, sir. One last thing.’
‘Yes?’
‘I’ll need your men to lift my monoplane out of the mud, and help me aloft a little. Just running along, helping me catch the air. The lift of these single wings isn’t too good, and in the mud I can’t manage enough speed to get airborne.’
‘Of course,’ said Polystom.
The colonel was outside now. A light drizzle was falling. Pinheads of water started accumulating in myriads upon the colonel’s jacket and cap. Polystom relayed the colonel’s needs to Stet, and a dozen men were detailed to haul the airplane onto their shoulders and stagger through the mud with it. The last thing the colonel said, from his cockpit, was: ‘I feel more confident than I can say, leaving two such distinguished captains in command here.’ Then he was off, jerkily transported along the ridge and finally hurled into the sky, where his engine caught and swung him away. It occurred to Polystom that the colonel did not realise that Captain Parocles was dead.
‘How many men do I have?’ he asked Stet.
‘Forty-five, sir,’ he said. ‘Forty-five and two officers.’
The clouds were breaking up into sudsy patches. Within an hour the sky cleared to reveal evening purple. Two large guns were sledded up the bank of the ridge by teams of straining soldiers, and established (Sof ’s positioning) at either end of the new trench. The air was thickening with dusk, the sun burning as red as the tip of one of the lieutenant’s cigarettes, the atmospheric purples becoming denser and denser. Rations were served, and Polystom ate in his dugout with Stet and Sof.
‘What did the colonel fellow say, then, sir?’ Stet asked. ‘Orders?’
‘We’re to hold this place. Hold this ridge.’
By the time they had finished eating it was dark outside. Polystom accepted a cigarette from Sof even though he didn’t smoke. He lit it, sucked it, pulling on it like a teat, but only swilled the smoke around his mouth. It wasn’t very pleasant. But it helped keep the night midges at bay.
Conversation limped along. Inconsequential observations and long silences.
Polystom was in the middle of telling his lieutenants that they needed to find him a new batman, when the air growled with the distant sounds of multiple detonation. Stepping out of the dugout and clambering up the side of the trench, the three of them looked west. The land leading towards the horizon was black, but the sky behind gleamed with red and orange blurs and patches.
‘That’s west,’ said Stet. ‘North west.’
Knots of the men were standing about, all eyes in the same direction. Boum-boum, and the splashes of vivid colour in the night sky. There was something clothy, to Polystom’s ears, about the sounds of the explosions. So muffled by distance as to be almost mellow. But the fire-coloured billows looked fierce enough.
‘That’s some party going on over there,’ observed Sof.
‘Are those our bombs?’ Polystom asked, his head muggy with smoke. ‘Or theirs?’
The two lieutenants looked at him, and then at one another. ‘No way to tell, sir,’ said Stet.
The distant bombardment continued for several hours. Polystom lay down on his bed, in his dugout, clutching his one remaining pistol to his belly. He had brought up some blackberry brandy, and sipped at it, sipped at it. He couldn’t sleep.
The thump, thump, sounded through the walls like the mud’s own pulse.
Beeswing was in the room with him. His dead wife, here with him on this terrible planet. She was looking in at the door. Her hand, pale as life, was on the wooden doorjamb, and her beautiful, fragile face was peering round it at him. There was a question in her eyes. The vision was so vivid that Polystom’s heartbeat deepened and sped. He pulled himself upright, his pistol in his le
ft hand.
He yelped with surprise.
The ghost did not back away, or vanish into nothingness. The roseate light from Polystom’s lamp caught and reflected from the planes of her face, twinkled orange in her eyes. Her lips looked plump, filled with blood. There was the aura of presence about her. He swung his legs round and stood up, dizziness whirring in his head. ‘Beeswing!’ he called out.
She looked up, looked into his eyes. The faintest of smiles animated her lips.
‘Hello,’ she said.
And then a powerful clatter shook the air, and the blackness behind Beeswing’s form flashed yellow. There was a crack, a rolling boom, and several coughing hacks of rifle fire. This was much closer than the distant bombardment. Beeswing turned her head, looked over her own shoulder, and then withdrew. She didn’t disappear in a puff of ghost-stuff: she slid backwards through the door into the night.
For a moment Polystom stood, motionless, a disconcerting sensation of intensity in his chest. Was this what it was like to encounter the dead? Was it a hallucination? The fact of her having been there hung, somehow, in the air, like perfume.
Then there was a second thunderous explosion, and he lurched forward, through the door and into the night.
Outside a cool drizzle was in the air, and the shadowy forms of men were hurrying up and down the trench. Another explosion threw orange light over the night-sky, blocking out a wedge-shaped shadow in the trench. Stom grabbed the nearest man to him.
‘What’s going on?’
‘Attack, sir.’
‘Where are the lieutenants?’
‘At the guns, sir.’
Polystom lumbered up the slippery steps and out of the trench. The two big cannons had been hauled up, and were now in position. The nearer of the guns was being rotated by a group of men, shadows in the darkness heaving the great weight round. The air was crackling with the sound of small-arms fire. ‘Stet?’ yelled Polystom. ‘Sof?’
‘Sir,’ Sof called back.
Polystom was at his side in moments. ‘Are we under attack?’
‘From the west, sir, we think. Flare!’ He shouted the word over his shoulder. ‘Now!’
A man raised his arm, and a flare exploded from the end of it. It burnt pale blue phosphorescence into the air, and the landscape around them swept into visibility. Polystom could see Sof ’s face, glass-pimpled with droplets of rain. The gun’s metal arm pointing at the horizon. The gaggle of men hauling at its base. He turned, as the flare sank, and saw the mud at the base of the ridge heaving and squirming with horrible motion. There was a powerful explosion, very close, away on the other side of the ridge, and yellow-orange mixed garishly with the blue. Sof and Polystom flinched simultaneously, drawing their shoulders up in a hunch.
‘Where are they firing from?’
‘Shoulder cannon, from down below, sir,’ grunted Sof, leaning forward. ‘You men in the trench,’ he bellowed. ‘Return fire. Now!’
From the trench below them came the snapping of rifle fire. ‘You’d better get back inside your dugout, sir,’ Sof gasped, turning back to the cannon. ‘Take cover, please sir.’
The blue light was fading, the darkness intensifying around the flare, and with a sputter it was gone. Sight vanished. Polystom was too stunned by the suddenness of the attack, and a little too drunk, to think clearly. He stood, uncertainly, turning left, turning right. As his eyes accustomed themselves to the renewed darkness he could see the darker gash of black against the ground that was the trench, needle-pricked by stuttering light as rifles were discharged. He could make out the massy shape of the gun. The shuffling figures at the base. He wanted to do something, to say something. Was there any point in the men firing into the darkness like that? Surely they couldn’t see to hit anything.
He thought of himself seeing his dead wife’s face in his dugout moments earlier. Had he been dreaming? Was he dreaming now?
‘Flare!’ ordered Sof.
Another fizzing beacon soared pale-blue, and again the seething landscape was laid before him. The blue light gave it a spectral quality. He could make out the individual humps of enemy soldiers making their way up the side of the ridge. He could see, further down, the crouching shapes of combatants peering out of the lower trenches and aiming shoulder-cannon. Then the flare started to fade, the light shrinking back to its source and disappearing.
A moment ago the ghost of his dead wife had said hello to him.
With a horrifying jolt immediately behind him, his own cannon fired. It startled Polystom so much he almost fell over. The barrel thrust out a spike of white fire, and everything went dark again. Over the chatter of rifles Polystom could hear the whistle of the shell, and then the distant crash it made. Below them was a splash of white orange light, and the rolling boum of impact.
Polystom put his hand to his forehead. His heart was racing. Startled into action by the gun going off unexpectedly. He could hear the muttering of the men at the gun, and then Sof ’s voice softly, almost coaxingly, ‘Fire.’
The gun spoke again; and again Polystom flinched. The gun crew scrabbled, the barrel sank a few inches, and there was a wash of heat as the chamber opened.
The gun spoke again, and spoke again. Polystom turned, and turned again, dizzy with the unreality of it. Then the gun at the far end of the trench clattered out a shot, and the nearer gun spoke once more in appalling harmony. Down below them, patches of white fire flurried and died away.
The rain was still ticking gently into Polystom’s face.
‘Here they come!’ shouted somebody.
The big gun spoke again, and by the subliminal illumination of its flame Polystom saw a figure rear up from the mud right in front of him, almost as if it were made of mud itself. The enemy was here. The enemy was upon him. Its head and torso gleamed, brown-shiny, and it was holding a rod or pole of some sort. The light faded quickly and again it was dark. Polystom stood stupefied. Away to his left the flicker of rifle-fire pocked the darkness with little jagged spots of light. Without thinking consciously of what he was doing, Polystom saw that he had raised his own left hand. But that was absurd, because he wasn’t left-handed. Except, there it was, his left hand out in front of him, and with a jarring pressure up his arm that hurt his wrist the pistol in his hand discharged, discharged again, and then again. With each shot, the figure before him was strobed standing, lurching back, tumbling away.
The rain was falling with infinite softness.
The clatter of gunfire increased in intensity as the rain died away, making a mechanical echo of the rain-patter. A third flare flew upwards, and once again the landscape was coated with the eerie blue light. Polystom saw figures all around him now, some raising weapons, some shouldering fatter tubes, the enemy was upon them. His men, in the trench and around it, were standing taller, firing as rapidly as they could. Polystom’s own left wrist was sore. He swapped the gun into his right hand, raised it, checked that the slot was primed with bullets, and fired. He fired, turned, fired, fired again. The flare-light was dying. The enemy was upon them.
It was inky dark again. Polystom shot bullets into the darkness.
Something whistled past him in the dark, away to the left, briefly making the sort of pure harmonic that shatters wineglasses. ‘Sir!’ gasped somebody, at his side. One of the men. ‘Sir! Take cover, sir!’
The great guns bellowed. Rifle bullets flew. A pressure on Polystom’s elbow drew him to the left. He reached out with his right hand, where the gun weighed against his forearm and wrist, firing once, twice, into the night. ‘This way sir!’ And then his feet were on the steps going down into the trench. The rain had stopped falling.
At the bottom of the steps he was shuffled through into his dugout. The light made his eyes wince. He sat himself down in his chair. Only then, as his eyes accustomed themselves to the brightness of light, did he realise that he was panting. Excitement? Terror? The soldier who had brought him in was streaked with watery dirt; blood was coming sluggishly out of a wound on the
side of his head. His ear seemed clipped, halved, and blood oozed out in visible pulses to run down his cheek and over his shoulder. ‘You’re shot,’ he said.
But the man was already turning away, going out of the door, returning to the battle.
[fourth leaf]
Outside, the sounds of battle sounded clatteringly through the night air. Polystom sat in his chair, his gun in his lap. The barrel was hot, but soon became cold. There was an enormous inertia in his body now; not a tiredness, for he felt he could not sleep under any circumstances. But something that rooted him to the chair.
The staccato of battle slowed, the booming of the guns became more infrequent. It stopped. A silence more strange than the noise settled in the air. Still Polystom sat. Nothing was real, evidently. This silence was more tangible than the gunfire and cannonfire. Nothing was real.
Somebody was at the door.
‘Beeswing?’ he said.
But it was Stet. He came inside, exhausted-looking, and lit a cigarette. ‘We beat them off, sir,’ he said. ‘But it was a major attack. We might expect another one before dawn.’
‘It really happened, then?’ Polystom asked.
‘Oh yes, sir. Seven dead, and seven wounded. I’d get some sleep, sir. You should be able to manage a few hours.’
He left. Polystom looked at his bed, and hauled himself out of the chair. It took an enormous effort to reach the bed, and to sag onto it. But it wasn’t tiredness that weighed his limbs down. Something was wrong.
Perhaps he was stupefied by the unreality of things.
The light was still on. He hadn’t the strength to get up again and turn it off.
He lay on the bunk.
Night midges buzzed through the silence. Polystom could not sleep. He turned on his bed to face the wall. Mud. The silence was so intense it seemed to make a high-pitched hum in his ears. He turned again.
It had seemed so vivid, his vision of Beeswing. It had really been as if she were materially present in the room. Some sort of hallucination, possibly. Brought on by the pressure, by the stress of it all. Standing at the threshold. She had said hello. Had she been about to come in? Had that been it?