The Miocene Arrow

by Sean McMullen

  “No, but it’s in this one,” replied Serjon, taking The Practice of Romantic Chivalry out of his sling bag.

  16 July 3960: Forlan

  Three days after returning from Condelor, Sartov was reinstated as Governor of North Yarron Region by the new Yarronese airlord. The ceremony was quick and simple, but then Yarron was in shock and it was more important to fill posts and get the work done than to impress the nobles and envoys with splendid displays.

  “The burden is heavy, Alveris, but in such times we have to grow fast or fall out of the sky,” said Airlord Virtrian when they met later in the model room of the palace.

  Sartov had known Virtrian for five years. The Airlord was in his mid-forties, but was not the typical heir who had been kept waiting decades by a long-lived monarch. Virtrian flew his gunwing every day, and had actually fought in border-confrontation duels with Bartolica and Cosdora.

  “I had a good rest in Bartolica, but thank you for rescuing me,” said Sartov. “How is your wife?”

  “Dying, sair, dying.”

  “But she has survived ten days.”

  “She is crushed inside. The slightest move makes the broken bones within her slice flesh. She bleeds within, Alveris, she bleeds without losing blood yet she is almost out of blood. At the very time that I need her most she is slipping away.”

  “I am sorry, I have heard so much yet I did not know.”

  “Her condition is not widely known, it is bad for public morale at a time like this. When she dies … it will be announced as a surprise. Short and sharp, not a long and draining decline. Now, what is your opinion on the problem with Dorak?”

  Sartov bent to examine a model of a Dorakian canard gunwing with an in-line compression engine. They did not have the agility of the Yarronese triwing approach, but their wardens were far more experienced.

  “They will petition for the right to attack, and Bartolica will second them. It is to their advantage to attack. Politically the new Dorak airlord needs credibility, while their wardens have not been in a serious fight for three decades. The gossip in Condelor is that Bartolica has convinced them to attack our north. It is far from the Bartolican border, you see.”

  “So the Bartolican support is all but active?”

  “The situation in Bartolica is confused. The new governor of the East Region, Stanbury, is building up a lot of power with his merchant carbineers. I think some manner of coup is not far off.”

  “A coup? But what about the wardens? The wardens of his own region are loyal to Condelor.”

  “Correct. I do not understand what is happening, but I sense danger. Greater Bartolica is big and well resourced, and if anything should unify it into an effective dominion … it scarcely bears thinking about.”

  17 July 3960: Sheridan, North Yarron

  Fieldmajor Akengar was on the Sheridan wingfield as Sartov landed in his gunwing. Once the ground crews had taken charge of the aircraft, he walked with the returned governor along the edge of the flightstrip, well away from the guildsmen and wardens.

  “I am honored that you wish to see a mere fieldmajor of the merchant carbineers,” Akengar said as they passed the row of gunwings.

  “Very soon nobody will be using ‘mere’ in the same sentence as merchant carbineers,” replied Sartov. “I predict war between Yarron and Dorak.”

  “War? On what pretext?”

  “Just suppose there to be a legitimate pretext. Were you a Dorakian airlord, how would you attack?”

  The question was not one that Akengar had anticipated, and he had to consider for some time. While flattered to be asked such strategic questions, and while willing to give opinions among his peers, Fieldmajor Akengar had a sudden loss of nerve when it came to being taken seriously in matters reserved for the heads of states.

  “Ah, I’d send gunwings and sailwings to overfly the wingfields of the Airlord’s governor, oh and find a dominion to stand second before sending couriers to all major airlords of Mounthaven to petition for a war. After that, set a realistic number of gunwings and sailwings to fight and choose a suitable stretch of land to claim.”

  “Now pretend that the wardens are no more.”

  “Ah! Ah … war would be impossible.”

  “Maybe so, Fieldmajor, and maybe not so. I wish to recruit more carbineers, and I want them trained to fight in squads. Quickly.”

  “Carbineers? But they are not permitted to fight in wars, they are lower class and unchivalric.”

  “The attack on our Airlord and wardens was lower class and unchivalric too, but it still happened. Trust me, Fieldmajor, I have just spent six months in the Bartolican court circles, and a lot of what I saw made me uneasy. If they are recruiting and training carbineers in quantity, then we should too.”

  3

  SOWING THE WIND

  20 July 3960: North Yarron

  D orak declared war on Yarron on 20 July 3960. The heir to the Dorak airlord’s throne had only a limited base of support for his claim, as the dead monarch had no children. A war to unite the dominion’s wardens and a successful claim against Yarron seemed the perfect way to secure the throne. Yarron certainly seemed implicated in the Airlord’s death, and in reparation he claimed a slice of northern Yarron that extended to Casper from Gannett in the Wind River Range. The claim was rejected by Governor Sartov, but he forwarded it south by sailwing for the Yarron airlord to consider. On the strength of his provisional rejection, Dorak petitioned for an attack.

  Bartolica was Dorak’s second, and Montras seconded Yarron. A Council of Delegates from the other dominions flew to North Yarron and selected a battlefield. Billings in Dorak and Sheridan in Yarron were selected as the two base wingfields, with the clash to be over the Bighorn River because Yarron was being invaded. The Dorak strategists had hoped for victory through sheer numbers and experience, and they declared a flock of ninety-one gunwings—every serviceable gunwing in the domain. Yarron had lost so many wardens in the collapse of the palace throne room that the new airlord worked day and night granting deputy status to squires and confirming heirs as wardens. On the appointed day ninety-one Yarronese gunwings ascended in orderly ranks of seven.

  “Thirteen times seven,” said Serjon glumly as he watched the mass ascent. “That is bad.”

  “Dorak declared the number,” Feydamor pointed out impatiently.

  “That’s not the point. We could have ascended only ninety gunwings and still been legal.”

  “That would declare that we’re beyond our resources.”

  “No good will come of this for Yarron.”

  As generally happened, Serjon was proved wrong. The brash and enthusiastic young wardens and squires who dominated the Yarronese flock attacked in a solid block, disrupting the center of the Dorakian flock’s attack configuration in the first pass. While the Dorakians were by far more experienced, they were also a lot older and more set in their tactics. Members of the Council of Delegates watched from their red and white striped sailwings as the formal combat raged above the disputed territory. On the ground, medical teams from the sponsor dominions scurried about to collect the fallen and tend the injured.

  The rules of combat were in principle simple. Equal numbers of gunwings ascended with equal fuel and ammunition, and the dominion with the greatest number of gunwings returning to its base wingfield was declared the winner. The formal combat recognized that Mounthaven was a poor area, and that resources could not be squandered on total war if civilization was to be maintained. Spoils were determined in advance and combat was always over sparsely populated areas. Gunwings were expensive and dangerous weapons, but they did not lay cities and towns waste, ruin crops, or slaughter herds of meat birds. The toll among wardenly families could be high, but then wardens had a high and privileged status in Mounthaven as compensation.

  Soon streamers of black smoke and parachutes began to mark the fall of wardens from both sides. Through sheer honor some Yarronese chose to ram rather than leave the battlefield once their guns were empty, an
d overall the toll was a lot higher than in most battles of the previous half century. In all, fifteen Yarronese gunwings returned to Sheridan, while twelve returned to Billings. Many more ran out of fuel and glided safely down to land on roads and in fields, yet thirty-one wardens were dead by sunset and two unaccounted for. Yarron had won.

  “Serves them right for choosing an unlucky number,” Serjon pronounced as the delegates’ liaison read out the result before the pennant pole at the Sheridan wingfield.

  “So where is our bad luck for also ascending ninety-one?” sneered his stepfather.

  “We lost twenty-six killed,” replied Serjon at once. “Thirteen always returns to strike you down.”

  The spoils of the victor also included the wreckage of all gunwings that crashed or were forced down over the disputed territory. This had the effect of weakening one side or another so much that further hostilities were unlikely for a long time to come. The young warden Jannian did not shoot down any enemy gunwings that day, but he did manage to nurse his burning aircraft all the way back to Sheridan.

  The Yarronese people were quick to celebrate the close-fought victory, and it went some way to make up for the tragedy that had killed so many of their wardens. The Airlord Virtrian held court in Sheridan and decorated the heroes of the battle while honoring the dead of both sides, and within a few days the wardens and their guildsmen dispersed back to their estates.

  26 July 3960: East Bartolica

  Rollins had been to the Yarronese border before, but had never stopped at the nearby village of Sage longer than was needed to exchange mailbags. Now there was a large series of parallel sidings in the forest just outside the militia stockade. Within the complex was a gathering of no less than fifty multidecked red trams and six black trams. His black tram had arrived last, but was backed to the head of a siding branch. A quick mental calculation put the gathering at four thousand carbineers, fifty-six carriage guns, as many heavy reaction guns, and at least two hundred and fifty merchant officers, gunners, and tram crewmen. Even without the slaves who labored in the black trams, that was enough to vanquish any warden or merchant estate in half an hour, and even a regional city the size of Middle Junction would not last more than a day against them. It was forty times larger than the largest gathering of armed carbineers or militia permitted under the wardenate system, and exceeded the number drawing the death penalty by an order of magnitude.

  All trams were draped in camouflage netting beneath the trees. A glance at the sidings showed that there was no growth of lichens or weeds, and no washoff of dirt: it had been laid only days earlier. This was very unusual. Rollins had seen new trackwork only twice in his life, and it was well known that tracks were laid only after months, if not years, of deliberations by cost-conscious merchant committees.

  At 10 A.M. they were ordered into their trams after removing the netting, and the drivers and stokers told to light their fires and build up steam. Rollins noted that the wood blocks remaining in the bunker had been replaced by anthracite coal, the type that gave off little smoke. By 11 A.M. nothing more had been said, and the carbineers were becoming restive. It was a warm, clear July morning, and the lower decks of the trams were ventilated by motion alone. Rollins could hear cursing and raised voices from the red trams on the parallel siding branches above the hiss of the steam engines as conditions inside grew hot and close. Tender carts were being pushed from tram to tram by the luckier carbineers, topping up coal and water reserves. From time to time there came the whirring of the pedalframe and birdlike peeping from behind him.

  By now Rollins had identified forty patterns of peeps, of which some were definitely a twenty-four-letter alphabet, two were 0 and 1 for binary figures, and the rest were special functions of some sort. As far as he could tell there were messages in code, and possibly in an unknown language as well. He had suspected for the fortnight past that the device was some type of decoding machine, but now the peeping came at precise intervals of fifteen minutes. Perhaps the code was just words spelled backward in some universal language like Old Anglian, he speculated. The peeping started again on its own line.

  llac mek ni 0101

  Reversed it was “call kem in 5” in Old Anglian. Rollins slapped his thigh in triumph, but kept a poker face. Got it, yet … binary would not lead with a 0, so perhaps it was “call kem in 10.” Who was Kem, and how was he to be called? Perhaps it was the town Kemmerer, on the border? Perhaps call was the Call? ‘The Call arrives at Kemmerer in ten … minutes’? A remote signaling device! That was pre-Greatwinter science, how was it possible? A Call would be coming from the east at walking pace if true, though.

  An officer came clattering down the steps and ran up to Rollins. Kalward.

  “Three long toots on the whistle, then move out!” he ordered. “Straight down the line to Kemmerer, maximum cruise speed.”

  Rollins tried not to let his anxiety show as he gave three blasts of the steam whistle then opened the steam to the drive cylinders. As the tram chuffed forward he began to calculate. The Yarronese border was twelve miles away, that would take about twenty minutes at a fast cruise. A Call ten minutes from Kemmerer would be going west at walking pace. When it arrived the tram would be ten minutes from Kemmerer going east at maximum cruise speed, say 35 miles per hour. The trouble was that Calls traveled at speeds that varied with the terrain in the mountains, and Rollins was no Call-vector expert. It might go half a mile west in the ten minutes the tram took to travel to the border … simple calculus would give an exact meeting, but Rollins was too agitated to think clearly. A meeting half a mile west of Kemmerer seemed as good an estimate as any.

  The mileposts to the border counted down. At two miles Rollins could see a warden’s sailwing circling Kemmerer on Call patrol. The warden would see the line of Bartolican trams. What then? Kalward leaned over and told the stoker to go to the rear and make sure that his Call tether was clipped to a rail. An officer joined Kalward, one who often took spells at stoking—and Kalward could drive a tram, Rollins realized! One mile. Two minutes to Kemmerer, but sixty seconds to the Call’s front? Rollins began counting slowly, reached sixty-two—and plunged away into a reverie of surrender.

  When Rollins woke up he was still in the driver’s seat with his Call straps in place. There was a lump on his forehead and a bitter taste in his mouth. He got out of the tram. His watch had been taken from him but the sun was at least three hours farther across the sky. The tram had been halted in a mountain siding near an old quarry, and was alone. Four poles stuck up through camouflage netting that had been laced with uprooted bushes. The peeping, whirring, and clacking from within the tram was almost continuous. An officer sitting in the shade of a large rock waved his assault carbine and told Rollins not to go too far from the tram. As he returned to the camouflaged tram he noticed that the stoker was sweeping reaction-gun shells out of the tram: dozens, hundreds.

  “Sair Kalward says the reaction gun musta gone off durin’ the Call, accident-like,” the stoker explained. “He say yer te drop the ashes and tie down fer the night. Oh, an’ he says yer bumped yer head durin’ the Call. So did I. We sorta strayed inter Yarron durin’ the Call, like. That’s all.”

  “Where’s my watch?” Rollins asked quite reasonably.

  “They’s all been taken fer coordin’ tests, like they makes ’em all tick the same or somelike. Sair Kalward says we get ’em back this evening.”

  Rollins returned to his cabin, and noted that the tram had merely been stopped and that the furnace had been hastily raked down. The tripmeter showed that 34 miles had been added since the siding outside Sage. Given 12 to the border, that meant they were 22 miles inside Yarron. So many shells had been fired that he suspected that a warden in a Call patrol sailwing had flown too close to investigate a supposedly runaway steam tram in the middle of a Call. Kemmerer was a Bartolican town, and the warden would have been Bartolican! An officer had fired the roof’s reaction gun into the sailwing and probably brought it down … an officer who cou
ld defy the Call.

  A sudden chill pervaded the supposedly warm driver’s cabin. Bigfoot, vampires, werewolves, Callwalkers, dragons, and zombies were meant to be mythical, yet here was disturbingly good evidence for Callwalkers. Rollins allowed himself a full minute of blind terror, then carefully blanked out his mind, screwed down the brake blocks, and began to shovel sand onto the sleepers under the furnace. The best way to remain safe was to be indispensable, and he was still the best driver on Black Tram MC5.

  In the last days of July the west of Yarron suddenly went silent. No steam trams appeared from that direction, and a sailwing sent out from Middle Junction to investigate reported whole towns on fire. More sailwings were dispatched, but these did not return.

  2 August 3960: Western Yarron

  Stanbury had done the unthinkable when he sent armed steam trams into western Yarron and tiny, neutral Montras, seizing and fortifying all rail posts and closing the line to Yarron’s Southfort. Montras was overwhelmed in less than a day, and the Bartolican steam trams continued to shuttle across the Yarronese border, moving in thousands of carbineers.

  At first the local Yarronese wardens were merely puzzled and annoyed. The Bartolicans had won no formally declared air battles that entitled them to move onto Yarronese territory, while Yarron had the right to demand thirty gunwings from Bartolica for sponsoring the loser in their war with Dorak. While they debated, drafted dispatches decrying the breach of martial protocol, and sent couriers to Forian for instructions, the massed steam trams and galley carts crammed with carbineers poured into Yarron through Montras and the Kemmerer crossings. Intense groundfire tore into Yarronese sailwings that flew too low while investigating the invaders.

  None of the local wardens struck at the Bartolican carbineers as they passed their estates. They were mere carbineers, after all, and wardens did not lower themselves to fight carbineers. Only the merchant carbineers in the towns offered any resistance, and the Bartolicans attacked these with well-coordinated fury. Two days after the first attack, the entire tramway north and south of Middle Junction was lost to Bartolica. Yarronese carbineers were rushed in from Green River and Median by the merchant guilds, but they arrived to find Middle Junction held against them. All the while more Bartolican carbineers were being ferried in.