Not every man in the company slept there, of course. They had a barracks set up for the support units and the platoon of infantry assigned to the Sky Watcher. Some of the higher officers had their own rooms near the observatory, little metal cubes usually shared between two or three men. Rahjain was the only man on the sky-island with a proper apartment. Unless one counts the Paladin’s shanty.
It was always dark on the third floor. Apartment or not, I’ve strung up a hammock myself on many a night.
There wasn’t even a window, only a single oil lantern near the stairway door. The lack of electric-lighting was only further proof of just how far from the civilization of the Homelands the 13th found itself. Even Colonial islands so small they barely fit a town and surrounding farmland manage to have light-bulbs and a generator nowadays; perhaps not from a huge coal-eater, but at least a wind-cranker.
Rahjain would have shaken his head, but his neck hurt too much, instead he continued down to the second floor.
“Boss!” a voice called above him, echoing down the stairs.
Rahjain’s feet stopped. Damn the Path for turning under my feet!
“Boss!” came the call again, sure enough from the observatory. Ensign Jarkrick leaned over the railing above, eyes searching the twisting steps until he locked onto his captain’s hand against the railing. “Boss, that you?”
Rahjain turned around, let out a long sigh, and started back up the steps. “It’s me,” he grumbled.
“You have to see this, Boss,” Jarkrick called a third time, excitement mixing with confusion.
“Ensign, might I remind you that we’re in the Army and I have a rank? A rank given to me personally by a general? Pulled it out of a box and pinned the stars right to my chest. Whole company was standing at attention? Recall the moment?” Clang, clang, clang, went Rahjain’s boots on the steps again, up and up, his legs screeching, his knees popping. Could have been on said general’s staff, could have liaisoned with the Ivory Sanctuary or the Obsidian Citadel over battle plans, but no . . . I let Nessia talk me away from the quick glory and all for duty, on the false hope of a Vicar’s sight that one day I might be rewarded with more glory than has ever been foisted on any man living or dead.
“Sorry, Captain,” Jarkrick apologized as Rahjain set foot once again among the telescopes.
A few minutes and the scene had changed dramatically. Every man huddled around the single telescope Rahjain had worked earlier. The coffee jar, the couch, the periodicals, and papers were abandoned. So were the other three telescopes.
Maybe I need to start caning them.
Five men stood hunched together, black and white vertically-striped uniforms having seen better days—days when they were washed and cleaned by servants. They traded the telescope’s eyepiece back and forth. Every time a man gave it up, he either frowned or shook his head or grabbed his hair.
“What’s the problem?” Rahjain growled. I should be on the ground floor right now. Ceric should be handing me a cup of fresh coffee. The part of Rahjain craving caffeine could already smell it. “Telescope malfunctioning? Lens needs changing?”
“No, sir,” Lieutenant Sedanan reported. “We’re not sure, sir.”
Tall, red-haired, Sedanan was in command of all aspects of the company relating to the observatory and the observers; furthermore, if Rahjain ever keeled over from dysentery—there being a depressing lack of Clockers shooting at him on the sky-island—Sedanan would be the one to replace him. Sedanan was also one of the few men from a Named family at the outpost, though a much lesser Named family than the Rahjains. Still . . . young, intelligent, smart enough to marry a wealthy widow at the first chance offered, he wasn’t the type of officer to have a lost look on his face.
“Rocket sign?”
“We don’t think so, sir.” The other men nodded agreement.
“What about the other telescopes, rocket sign on them?” Rahjain asked, waving at the hanging eyepieces.
The four extra men didn’t need any other reprimand, the three who were supposed to be at the telescopes returned to them. Maybe not the cane then, just normal shame. He motioned at Sedanan to move out of the chair and took the place for himself yet again. Out came the steel tube, a puff of air, and then his eye pushed in against the telescope.
“Where?” he barked.
“Third quadrant, it’s dialed in,” guided Sedanan.
Not moving anything, Rahjain let his eye focus and defocus until he found what he thought they were worked up about. “A dot . . .”
“Aye, sir.”
“It’s a dot, Lieutenant, it could be anything. You kept me from my coffee for a dot?”
“But it’s a dot that’s moving, sir.”
“Broken Path it is,” scoffed Rahjain. “Must be a trick of light coming in through the Circle.”
“It’s increased in size, sir, we all agree. You just have to wait a few minutes.”
Rahjain waited, then waited some more. Perhaps it had gotten larger. “Trash from one of the Clocker-loyal Colonies on the other side of the planet, perhaps.”
“Moving to cross the Axis-Point? It should be falling the other way if it’s junk or an island-slide.”
Rahjain watched the dot increase in size again, though it was still nothing but a dot—simply a larger dot. “It’s not a rocket,” he decided. “It’s moving too slow for a rocket and there’s no sign of either smoke or engine.”
Sedanan tried his own theory, “Perhaps some type of long range cannon shell the Clockers have developed, firing from one of their Colonies towards ours.”
“Still too slow . . .” Rahjain sat up from the eyepiece, careful not to move it from its spot. “I’ll report it as an unknown contact and inform the general we’re keeping an eye on it. That’s your job, Lieutenant.”
Next he pointed to Jarkrick. “You, set up one of the temporaries and scan the rest of the zone.” The temporaries weren’t able to keep track of as much sky at once, but with Sedanan using the telescope watching nothing but the mysterious dot, they couldn’t risk other rockets sneaking by and would have to patchwork around the problem.
Rahjain didn’t trust the Clockers enough to give them a fourth of the sky.
Of course, Rahjain didn’t trust the Clockers at all.
* * *
Knees popping or not, Rahjain took the stairs with a hop in his step this time. Not a rocket, not a shell, he thought. Too damned slow. Was it even supposed to cross the Axis-Point? Maybe it was a scout of some kind, sent up to snap photographs of the League’s outposts?
I don’t like that idea at all . . . if they’re going to come this far then they should come to fight me!
On the second floor he found more of his men active with their duties. His supply officer and Third-in-Command, Lieutenant Evwain, and another ensign by the name of Midavav sat side-by-side at a foldout table that had been converted into Evwain’s desk over the long months. On it were the company operation papers and their command orders, as well as the supply books, one of which Evwain had open, a pencil flying over numbers. Next to him Midavav worked on a slide-rule calculator double-checking what Evwain did in his head. Brilliant man, couldn’t ask for a better clerk.
Across the room, the radio stood against an entire wall. Rahjain felt an unusually intense distain for technology every time he saw the huge, black monstrosity. No light-bulbs, but the radio got all the power it required. No fans, no refrigerator to keep our food fresh—not that we have fresh food, only canned mash, it’s the principle!—but that contraption goes on making noise all day long. Essential or not for the 13th Sky Watcher’s purpose . . . Rahjain almost took a blundergun to it every third day. Once he’d even gone downstairs and unlocked the armory before Sedanan and Evwain’s chorused pleas calmed him.
Two of his most aurally skilled men, both ensigns, sat ready next to the radio. One had the ear-piece wrapped around his head, hair smothered good despite its short cut—in his hand was another pencil and a standard Army notepad held together
by looping wire. At every message the radioman wrote down the orders and passed them off to his partner, where a typewriter made the orders official. As Rahjain understood it, there was talk at Army Headquarters of adding in coded messages and working in more men to decipher them.
Why should we care if the Clockers hear what we say? They know we’re here, they know they launched the rockets in the first place. They want to come and get us? Fine by me! I could use the entertainment!
“Captain,” Evwain tried to filter through his leader’s glorious daydreams, “a word?”
“No papers today,” Rahjain said with a grin that showed white, blocky teeth, “we have a mystery object to keep our time.”
Evwain—Unnamed, but perhaps the most learned man in the company—raised an eyebrow. “Which side of the Axis?”
“The Clockers’ for now.”
“It’s getting closer? Approaching from the Triumvirate? It’s not from outside the Circle is it?”
Rahjain pointed at him. “It’s nothing but a dot at the moment, keep your head in your supplies and let me handle it. And no damned religious theology on me about the Circle and the Path, either. I had enough of it from the family Vicar and damned if I even listened to her.”
“Aye, sir,” said Evwain, before frowning. “Excuse the comment, but I wasn’t aware even the Rahjains had the capital for a personal Vicar, sir.”
“We didn’t, she just happened to be my sister.” No time for life-stories—though the Path knew the men had shared plenty of them over the year at the outpost and that traveling time before it, the raunchier the better—Rahjain pushed his way past the supply table and motioned to the ensign at the radio to give up his seat. “Quickly, boys, quickly.”
“Aye, sir.”
“Yes, Captain.”
He slid into the seat closest to the radio, swishing it backwards and forwards in a quick rotation. It squeaked, but seemed to still be working correctly. His legs maneuvered him from one side of the radio to the other, slapping switches, pushing levers, and twisting knobs as he went. Next to the radio was a lockbox and from around Rahjain’s neck came a key on a chain. “Anything strange in the air?” he asked the ensigns.
One man reported a pair of rocket attacks on a faraway Fourth Level Colony—Uebelli, big enough for a considerable amount of farmland, thick enough for some mining, the sky-island supported about five-thousand people. “Casualties?”
“Minimal,” said one ensign, “they have a squadron of interceptors stationed there.”
“But anything strange?” Rahjain asked again, finally opening the lockbox and extracting a thin metal strip, ten numbers stamped across it.
“What do you mean by strange, sir?”
His chair rolled back to the radio, where a series of ten frequency switches of one-hundred levels each were stationed in a vertical line. Glancing at his metal strip, he began playing with the switches. “Any dots where they shouldn’t be on the other side of the Axis-Point?”
“Dots, sir?”
“I’m as confused as you are, ensign. Now some quiet please, we’re about to have a general for conversation.”
He placed the ear-piece around his head. It smelled awful, sweat and oil and musk of hundreds of days and handfuls of men pervading every inch of it. A shower, what I wouldn’t give for a shower . . . and I’m not talking a storm, don’t try to curse me! His hand reached under the table, found the microphone, and pulled it up. It was metal like the rest of the tower, a single button bruised from use its only rubber piece.
Rahjain clicked it down. “Crow Principle requesting Eagle Principle on the line.”
There was perhaps a ten-second delay as the signal bounced from the 13th’s outpost, through four different colonies—each larger than the last—and then finally to the Homelands hundreds of thousands of sky-miles away. More proof we’re on the rim of the planet’s . . . nether regions.
“Received.”
Rahjain tapped his fingers across the table, waiting yet more as events played out far away in the League’s Army Command Headquarters. “Evwain, have you heard anything about Clockers trying to get sky-ships across the Axis-Point from your merchant contacts?”
Evwain raised his eyebrow again, still jotting down figures in his books. “Do you think that’s what your dot is?”
“I’m not thinking anything, that’s my problem,” Rahjain muttered, raising his hand to pause Evwain as a voice came across the radio.
“Eagle Principle asks meaning of request from Crow Principle.”
“Unknown object sighted, believed to be approaching the Clocker side of the Axis-Point. Not a rocket or a projectile, speed indicates a sky-ship of some sort.”
Ten seconds later, “Received.”
“Go on, Evwain.”
“There’s always rumors,” the supply officer decided, “Clocker soldiers capable of killing Vicars and Paladins, all-Clocker landships, all-Clocker interceptors. Clocker everything really. But something I believe? None of it.”
Rahjain snorted. “Nothing about the Axis-Point? Even on our side? We all know about the attempts before the war, all the theories scientists and the fame seekers came up with—I’m talking lately.”
“Well . . .” Evwain considered it, “actually crossing the Axis-Point? Taking on the Circle’s blast head on?”
Rahjain nodded, thinking, an act for fools and true believers, not a description for any man in this company. Well, maybe Ensign Gamfrick. Rahjain tried to forget Ensign Gamfrick as often as possible, especially on holy days.
“Even if you had the propulsion to flip from their side to our side . . . we’re not talking a rocket weighing ten to twenty tons here, that’s mostly propellant and explosive, we’re talking thousands of tons for something small, more for something huge and I mean huge; you would have to consider armor for the direct sunlight, some kind of radiation shielding, space for air reserves where the atmosphere is too weak to breathe—which means the ship has to be air-tight—then control mechanisms to pilot it. It’s impossible, sir. Every attempt to cross the Axis-Point has failed.”
“Of course,” Rahjain agreed, “impossible.”
Then what is my Dot?
What are you up to, Clockers?
* * *
“Eagle Principle to Crow Principle, what’s your situation?”
General Asaniib’s voice was gruff when speaking with him in person, over the radio he sounded like a creation of pure static.
“Loud and clear, Eagle. Unknown object, not of rocket design, is approaching the Axis-Point from Clocker side.”
“Can you see what it is, Crow?”
“Negative at the moment. Appears as growing black dot, obvious sign of movement but nothing else as of yet.”
“Your assumption?”
“High-altitude sky-ship, purpose of photograph or by-sight reconnaissance.”
“We have no knowledge of any high-altitude project on the enemy’s part or a desire to create another front in the war besides their rockets. However . . . there has been an increase in their research and development; they used a new heavily armored sky-ship to assault Taellkun. We’re calling it a sky-frigate for now.”
“Could this sky-frigate be what I’m seeing?”
“Impossible. The sky-frigates are too heavy to fly so high, they barely reach the First Level. Thank the Path for that fact or we’d have a rough few years ahead of us.”
“Any ideas?”
“None . . . sorry, Crow. Just remember, their technology can only hold us off so long, resolve and the Path still guide us.”
“If not the Path, at least our numerical advantage.”
“Aye, Crow, and we all know a Leaguer is worth ten Clockers to begin with.”
“That we are, Eagle.”
“Keep your eye on your Dot, continue to update.”
“Received.”
There was one last communication: “Paranoia is a positive quality when it concerns the Clockers I’ve found. Make sure your men remember
how to use their sharpguns, Rahjain.”
About the Author
Richard Raley was born and raised in Fresno, California and even still lives there on account of the city being an evil vortex you can’t escape. He grew up on Star Wars, Transformers, Legos, and Everquest—he never escaped them either. The Foul Mouth and the Mancy Martial Artist is the fifth novel in The King Henry Tapes; it will not be the last. Keep an eye out for King Henry updates at:
http://richardraley.blogspot.com
www.twitter.com/richardraley
[email protected]
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The Foul Mouth and the Mancy Martial Artist (The King Henry Tapes Book 5) Page 61