Battle Hymn

by William R. Forstchen

  “Then why wasn't he swept up when they first got here?" Hans asked.

  “My thinking as well. He knows what to do, but he just doesn't seem to quite know what to do, if you understand me. Little things, but they make me think he was quickly shown how to do his job by someone and then sent in here."

  “Anything else?"

  “One of my men told me that after a couple of hours he started to talk. The usual chatter, what bastards the Bantag are, questions about food and such, but then came the real one. He said he'd give anything to escape."

  "That could be the talk of anyone," Hans interjected, “but go on."

  "It was the way he said it. At least that's what my man told me. He said he'd gladly work on any scheme to get out, no matter how dangerous."

  “Watch him," Hans replied sharply.

  Talk of escape was the dream of nearly every slave, but to talk about it openly was a quick way of being sent to the pit. The man was either a fool or a spy.

  "What troubles me, though, is that he is so clumsy," Manda interjected. "Perhaps he was told to be clumsy, to make himself obvious."

  "Your thinking being…?”

  "So that we might not notice the real spy, believing we've already found one. There might be someone else, who will stay quiet, never say a word, just watch and listen while this fool speaks loudly."

  Hans nodded in agreement. There was always a steady flow of new workers being brought in to the factory to replace the dead. To inquire about them directly might be dangerous. He thought about the layout of the factory. Number two furnace was in the southwest corner of the building and number four was on the north wall, thirty yards from number three. Gregory had chosen his spot well. No one could see directly into the charcoal pile, even from the treadmills, but they might notice the traffic, the workers occasionally going behind the furnace and not reappearing for hours, or the crew assigned to hauling the dirt, which was dumped into number three or scattered on the floor and then covered with charcoal or ore.

  The problem was compounded by the fact that except for half a dozen others, the only people who knew about the tunnel were the workers assigned to Ketswana's furnace. There was only one watcher on number four and one on number two. They couldn't be there day and night.

  "They know something is up," Hans said. "I sensed that from Ha'ark. Now I'm certain of it. Keep an eye on this bastard."

  "We could kill him without any trouble," Ketswana replied with a smile.

  Hans thought about that for a moment and then shook his head. "There's a slight chance he might be just a fool, but I doubt that. If we do kill him, it will set off a warning that there's something we want hidden and it might be at number three. My gut instinct tells me they don't suspect a tunnel inside the foundry; otherwise they would have torn it apart.

  "I want you to assign three people to this man. Befriend him, always have someone by his side. Whenever the dirt crew or a new digger is going down, make sure he's diverted."

  "We need to find out just how much they suspect," Ketswana interjected. "I'll see what we can do on that."

  "Just be careful."

  "What about setting off a false rumor," said Alexi, "that there's a tunnel somewhere in the barracks, or that there's a plan to seize a locomotive from inside the steam engine works?”

  Hans shook his head. "First off, whoever said it to someone we suspect, that man's as good as dead. They take him in and torture him to death. Second, any type of rumor will only arouse them even further to find something. We have to go as we are."

  Hans looked at Ketswana, who nodded in agreement.

  "What about the schedules, Alexi?"

  "I met with the telegrapher early this evening. He's scared to death, and I sense he wants to back away, but I think he knows what will happen if he does. He says the schedule's usually light on the night of a Moon Feast and the track all the way to X'ian more often than not has only half a dozen trains on it during the night."

  "Will he crack?"

  "I hated to do it, but I told him that if he does we'll find his two children even if we can't get at him and that we'll denounce him as being in on the plan from the start if we're taken."

  "What about his switchman?"

  "He says he'll go along with it when the time comes."

  "Fine. How's the tunnel?"

  "Six days should have it done. That'll give us an extra day if we run into a problem. We're under the tracks. It's scary when a heavy train passes over and everything starts to shake. Thank Perm it's clay rather than sand."

  Two knocks, followed by two more, suddenly interrupted them.

  Hans waited. Ten seconds later there were two more knocks. The few papers they had out were instantly rolled up. Ketswana, grabbing the papers, reached up under Hans's desk and slipped them into a narrow slit carved in the back of the desk leg. Alexi, trying not to move too fast, went out the door into the main barracks and casually walked toward the back door while Tamira quickly uncovered the small pot of precious tea and filled five cups. Seconds later the door was flung open and Karga, bending low to clear the sill, stepped in.

  “Working late?"

  Hans looked up as if surprised. "We were going over the work shift to fill in for the sick."

  Karga stood silent, his hand resting on the butt of his whip. "Tea?"

  "Remember, I do receive a special ration by order of the Qar Qarth. I try to share it."

  "Why are you working now? It is late." The voice had a cool edge to it, typical of Karga, Hans had realized, just before an explosion of temper.

  "Because if I don't and we fall behind, you will kill someone as an example, that's why. There's disease in this camp, even worse in the Chin camp, but our production schedule doesn't change, so I have to figure out who will work longer hours."

  Karga looked down at the scattering of papers on Hans's desk that were filled with names. He knew Karga couldn't read Rus, let alone English. Karga picked the papers up.

  "I'll take these."

  "If you do that, I'll have no way of rearranging the schedule of workers for tomorrow."

  "Then someone will die. It is that simple," Karga replied, and slamming the door, he disappeared.

  Hans felt a momentary fright, wondering if somehow a list of who was in on the conspiracy, or a plan, might have inadvertently gotten mixed in with the other paperwork. Then the other thought hit him: Only one other person in all the Bantag realm could read English.

  "How does she look to you?" Vincent Hawthorne asked, stepping into the hangar and looking up with awe at the vast bulk of the new airship floating above him.

  "Frightening, just plain frightening," Jack Petracci replied softly. "I never dreamed of actually flying something this big."

  "We've come a long way from that first flight you and I took together back in Suzdal," Vincent said.

  Jack walked slowly down the length of the hangar, gingerly stepping over the vulcanized canvas hoses that snaked out of the building and out to the gas generators on the downwind side of the hangar. They'd been loading the ship with hydrogen for more than a day, and only within the last hour had it gained positive buoyancy. The job was a dangerous one. Lead-lined vats mounted on railroad cars were backed into the edge of the field, filled with zinc shavings and sealed, then sulfuric acid was piped in. The resulting chemical reaction released hydrogen, which flowed through the hoses attached to the top of the car and into the shed. The slightest mistake and someone could be burned to death by the acid. A single spark, a wisp of hydrogen, and the entire shed and everyone in it would go up. The rail tracks were made of wood capped with rubber to avoid any sparks, and the locomotive that backed the equipment in was moved all the way back to the rail yard so that no errant sparks might drift into the work area.

  Feyodor, Jack's engineer, came into the shed. "Four engines at last! Something I've always dreamed of."

  "At least I don't have to worry about you bungling," Jack shot back. "You can screw up an engine in flight and we st
ill might get back."

  "I worry how you're going to handle the power."

  "Let me worry about that. You just worry about keeping them running."

  "If you don't like the work I do, get another engineer. I'd be glad to stay on the ground for a while."

  "Any time you want to turn coward is fine with me," Jack snapped. "It's a volunteer outfit, remember. You can resign right now."

  Vincent, shaking his head with amusement, left the shed. The two had been arguing ever since they first flew together, and yet when it came time to go up, they always went as a team. He knew it was a way for them to hide their fears, and looking at the flyer hovering above him, he could understand why. A single explosive shot or flaming arrow would end it for them. They had already been shot down once and crashed two other ships. By rights they should have been dead years ago.

  Waving his hands and shouting, Jack came out of the hangar. "If I don't kill him on the ground, I swear I'll crash a ship just to get rid of him," he snarled, stalking off across the field.

  Vincent turned to see Feyodor coming toward him, laughing softly.

  "What was that all about?"

  "I told him he'll never be able to handle the ship." Feyodor smiled. "Anyhow, no one else is crazy enough to try, especially for the type of thing we're going to do with it."

  Vincent looked sharply at the engineer.

  "Oh, no one told me, but I'd be a fool not to figure it out. We're going south, then crossing the sea to find out what them filthy buggers are up to."

  Vincent looked around cautiously, then turned back to Feyodor. "Don't even discuss your assumptions," he snapped.

  "General Hawthorne, you can yell all you want, but I know what it is we're up to. I'm not dumb enough to talk, and besides, I'm the only engineer he'll fly with."

  Vincent wanted to launch into a solid dressing-down, but the sparkle in Feyodor's eyes stopped him. The pilots and engineers of the air corps were somehow beyond him and his ability to establish discipline. The standard line, "Go ahead, I'll live longer if you lock me up," had been repeated countless times at discipline hearings.

  There was something else as well. He could not help but admire someone who did fly. On his own dress uniform were the wings of a pilot, pinned over his right breast in honor of the flight he had taken in a balloon on the desperate night he had floated out of Suzdal to blow the dam above the city, thus destroying the Tugar Horde storming into the lower part of the city. That one flight was enough to last a lifetime, and he sensed that the members of the air corps knew they could stretch the limits with him and get away with it.

  Feyodor surveyed the airship with pride. "Heavens, she's a beauty. Flying Cloud, same name as my first ship. Why, she's so modern we even have a hole in the floor so we can go on the heads of them damn Bantags."

  "How soon will she be ready?" Vincent asked.

  "First I want to run the engines up on the ground. Then take them apart to check everything. We should wait a day as well. There's bound to be leaks. We'll hang some weight on her till she sinks, then take the weight off. Following morning we check again and see how much lift we've lost, but the crew that made her are good workers. I think she'll check out fine.

  "Maybe tomorrow afternoon we'll do a short hop up and around for an hour. Then we check everything again. Another cruise, this one for three or four hours into the wind and back at high speed so we can calculate our air speed. Then we do the same thing again, check the engines, weigh her for gas loss. I'd say seven or eight days, we'll be ready to sail if the weather's good."

  Vincent thought about the telegram in his pocket, informing him that Andrew was coming back out in seven days. The reason was obvious, if something went wrong Andrew wanted to be present to shoulder the blame.

  "Can't get it up sooner?" Vincent asked.

  "Well, sir, we could, but this is the only ship like her that we've got. Lose her, and it'll be months, if ever, before we have another."

  "Just see what you can do. I'd like you up earlier if possible."

  "Why, sir?"

  "Let's just call it personal, that's all."

  Muttering a silent curse, Dale Hinsen shuffled through the papers on his desk. He knew Karga was waiting for the right answer, and for a moment he was tempted simply to pull out a sheet or two, say they were plans for escape, and have Hans denounced.

  It would be amusing to do it that way, an innocent list of names the evidence that sends his old sergeant to the pits. But it would be his word against Hans's—would Ha'ark believe him? Something told him that if there were a confrontation, Ha'ark would sense the truth in Hans's words and the lie in his own. It might mean I would go to the pits instead.

  He looked up at Karga. "There's nothing here. These are work lists, production records, checkoffs of who is sick and who is doing extra work."

  "The sick should be disposed off," Karga growled. "This allowing others to do their work is weakness."

  It did strike Dale to be an unusual show of compassion for the Bantag. Hans had argued early on that the production quota was fixed and how it was arrived at should be immaterial, rather than demanding that every single person be on the floor. Ha'ark had been sold on the logic that it was senseless to slaughter a trained worker merely because he or she could not work for a few days. What he had perhaps not realized was that it built a deeper unity in the camp; rather than dividing people against themselves, it made their survival a collective effort.

  “And our spies?" Karga asked.

  "I made all the promises you authorized. Freedom from the factories, placement in the protected circle of the Qar Qarth, and the right to live wherever they desired within the empire. I have ten in the foundry, five in the steam engine works, another five in the cannon foundry, five in the rifle works, and another dozen scattered in the other establishments. We are well covered."

  "But this is nothing," Karga snapped, pointing at the work sheets.

  Dale picked up the pile of papers and started to shuffle slowly through them. Red lines were drawn through those who had died. Check marks with the letters "c.b." must indicate confined to bed, and "l.w„" he reasoned must mean light work.

  He continued to look through the papers while Karga paced back and forth. He knew that Karga hated him, hated him because he carried the official protection of the Qar Qarth and because as the head of security for all the camps, he had access to knowledge that the overseer preferred to keep to himself.

  He looked down the lists for each of the twelve furnaces. Number six had half its crew down, two of them dying within the last week from galloping consumption. He continued down the list and stopped at number three. Six men were listed as being on light work or confined to bed. Something triggered his memory, and reaching into his desk he pulled out the reports from the previous week. Again there were the same six, and the week before that as well.

  He knew Karga, like most Bantag, found it difficult to differentiate between individual humans. Looking down from a height of seven to eight feet at prisoners who were dressed in rags, emaciated, filthy, and foul-smelling, they usually couldn't tell them apart. All they bothered with was the daily check of numbers and as long as the living and dead counted each day matched up, they were satisfied.

  Number three, mostly the black men. Hinsen wrinkled his nose with disdain. He had cared little for them back on Earth. After all, they were the ones who had caused that war that he was drafted into. Let them free their own asses. And now here they were again.

  Could there be something going on here? It was most likely innocent enough, but then again, the same six for so long while all the others stayed healthy. And something else now struck him as well. By the very nature of the way the foundry was organized, the men and women who worked there worked as a unit, roughly thirty to each furnace or trip-hammer. If something was indeed being plotted, it would most likely be done within that group, for no secret could be kept for long in such a unit, and beyond that, the friendships and bonds that were forme
d would compel them to do it together.

  Yet again he wondered how an escape would be planned and executed. There were, as far as he could see, only three ways out. Either they seize a train as it is going through a gate, they somehow jam a gate and charge it, or they dig out under the wall. If they were going to charge the gate or seize an engine it would mean a large number of them going at once, and yet again the work crew would have to be the unit.

  A tunnel? He had suggested that the barracks be built with raised floors to preclude such an effort. The foundry itself? He had never set foot in the building. Even Ha'ark had agreed that it was too risky for him ever to go into the camp, first because his identity needed to be kept secret, and second, if he was recognized, someone might simply want to trade a life for a life. It would be just like Hans to order such a thing, he realized.

  But the foundry or any of the factories—could they be digging out right under our noses? He thought about it and then let the thought drop. Impossible. Each of the factories had a clear caste system, the trained workers and the Chin slave labor. All the Chin were told that if they saw something wrong and reported it, they would be set free to go back home. The system had worked well. Nowhere in any of the buildings was there a place where the Chin did not wander about.

  So where else if it is a tunnel? The cookhouses were the only buildings built directly on the ground—perhaps there. He made a mental note for the spies in each of the cooking areas to be doubly alert. There was one other place—the latrines and bath houses. He had some vague memory of a story about Reb prisoners getting out through a latrine pit, but could you get thirty or forty out that way? Possible.

  The only thing left, he realized, was to get more information. Perhaps it was time for more-direct methods.

  Hans looked over his shoulder and saw that no one was nearby. The trip-hammers up at the east end of the building were thundering away, making it possible to talk.

  "We're sloping up now," Gregory whispered. "Three days should have us there."

  "Are you sure on the measurements?"