I cocked my head at Ord, who stood against my office’s back wall, hands clasped at his back, in the position of At Ease.
“Foot-long scorpions, Sir. Their neurotoxin paralyzes in one minute, kills in thirty.”
The Liaison Officer said, “Kris sting only unclean flesh. The Headman opens The Box at sunset. If she is innocent, she is alive.”
I took a deep breath, then let it out. “How long have the Tassini been using The Box?”
“Three hundred years.”
“Has a woman ever survived?”
“Of course not. If she isn’t a whore, the Headman doesn’t put her in The Box.”
On my desk I displayed, as a letter opener, a jeweled dagger gifted on me by a VIP visitor. I took its hilt in my fist, squeezed it, and debated whether to stab the fool across the desk, or myself. I had misassumed that I could dismantle centuries of divergent culture by giving an order. A soldier was dead, and it was my fault.
I asked the Liaison Officer, “What if, as Military Governor, I forbid use of The Box?”
His eyes widened. “The Headmen would lose honor. The Tassini would bolt the Alliance.”
“Those clerks are helping to win the war. How do you think the Marini will react if this Boxing continues?”
“Like the cowardly pimps and whores they are. They will bolt the Alliance.”
Either way, the Alliance would lose the war, and the Slugs would slaughter every human on Bren.
I asked him, “Well, what would you do?”
He shrugged. “Quietly pay each Headman a facilitation fee, so he will not use The Box.”
“How many Headmen do you think would do such a deal?”
“Oh, 90 percent or more. And don’t worry, each would swear for you to the public that no unclean coin had crossed his palm.”
I sighed.
As an Adviser on Earth, I had put up with baksheesh in all its permutations. One man’s bribe was another man’s tip. But this was different. I was ordering Allies who had cut one another’s throats for centuries to trust each other to do right. They had to trust me to do right, too. If I bribed Headmen, Staff would know. If Staff knew, everybody would know. The Alliance would be doomed to business as usual, with the Clans at daggerpoints.
I sighed, and rubbed my eyes. Then I said to the Tassini officer, “I see. Prepare a proclamation for my signature as Military Governor. It will confirm that each Headman has ongoing authority to use The Box.”
He smiled. “Very wise, Sir.”
Ord furrowed his brow.
I said, “But it must be used in the fashion that we use The Box where I come from. In my home place, each Headman begins each month by going in The Box. Since the Kris sting only unclean palms, we know from this that our Headmen have taken no bribes.”
The Officer squirmed in his chair. “A Headman has many civic duties. He might be unable to spare a whole day to go in The Box.”
“I understand completely. Where I come from, Headmen often delay their test until year end, without dishonor. They just don’t use The Box in the meantime.” I smiled.
He frowned.
I said, “Well, that’s settled. Can you issue the Proclamation before lunch?”
He did. Sporadic friction continued between Tassini and Marini female soldiers, but no woman, of any Clan, was put in The Box thereafter. Coincidentally, ninety Headmen resigned just before the year ended. The following month, pilferage in those ninety Encampments dropped to zero, and stayed there.
Ord told me later that I handled the situation wisely. But nine-tenths of wisdom is being wise in time. Ord didn’t say that, Teddy Roosevelt did.
Two months afterward I woke at 3 A.M., and looked at my hands. Even in the dark, I saw that innocent girl’s blood on them, because I had not been wise in time.
She wasn’t the first soldier that died too young while under my command. She was far from the last. Perhaps one day I’ll grow so accustomed to such things that I’ll wake up and I won’t see that blood. On that day I will retire from command.
The next morning, I rode to one of the embarkation beaches for my morning run. I had covered two miles along the hardpacked sand, as the waves rumbled in and out. Another figure loomed out of the ground fog, closing on me from the shoreward dunes, and called, “We need to talk.”
Fifty-Seven
Jude swung alongside me, and matched my pace.
I smiled at him. “Would the Lieutenant care for a little race?”
Jude had traded his pips for regular Lieutenant’s talons at a promotion ceremony the week before. I had stayed in the back row among the engineers while Bassin, himself, pinned them on.
Alongside me, in the mist, Jude looked as graceful as his father had looked when we ran together on pre-season early mornings. Even Metzger couldn’t match Jude as a rifle shot now, and Jude looked as hard and as fit as any soldier in this army.
He said, “I want out of the Engineers.”
I frowned as I huffed along. “Take it up with your CO. You know better than to jump the chain of command.”
“I already took it up with him. He’s good with it. So’s Bassin. R and D’s done, so the gearheads don’t need my math anymore.”
“So why talk to me?”
“I’m transferring to the Scouts.”
“No.” I shook my head.
The Scouts had emerged as our army’s fastest riders, best climbers, best shots, and most dashing elite. Rangers, SEALs, Green Berets, all rolled up in one outfit. But boats carrying the Tassini Scouts and their wobbleheads would be first across the Red Line. The survivors would be the first to hit the beaches. Gustus had Zill Jills quietly cranking out casualty estimates for me. They predicted the Scouts would take 70 percent casualties. No other unit was expected to take even 30 percent, unless everything went to hell.
I said, “You’re unqualified.”
“I can ride a wobblehead with any of them. And I can outshoot all of them.”
“Most of the Scouts have ridden together since they were kids. Shoehorning you in will destroy unit integrity.”
“I qualified as a Master Harpooner last night. That way the boat carries one more Scout, one less sailor. We waste less weight and space.”
Our boots crunched along the sand.
Jude said, “A Fifteenth Encampment Troop Leader broke his arm yesterday. The CO says the job’s mine if I want it.”
I stopped, panting, with hands on hips. “If you think I’m going to approve—”
Jude faced me in the gray morning, twisting the ring made from his father’s medal. “I’m not here to get your approval. I’m just asking you to stay out of it.” He toed the sand with his boot. “Look, I know what you tried to do. I appreciate it. I really do. But it’s my life. This is on me.”
Jude turned, then ran on down the beach, until the mist closed in, and he disappeared.
My sweats hung wet on my shoulders, and I stood in the mist until I shivered. The waves boomed behind me, as relentless as clock ticks.
I said to the place where Jude had stood, “No, it’s on me. It’s all on me.”
The remaining training weeks evaporated into a fog of reports, accidents, arguments, and exhaustion.
Ord’s hand touched my shoulder, and I sat up straight and awake on my cot in the darkness. I saw invisible blood on my hands, and my wrist ’Puter read midnight.
Ord whispered, “It’s time, Sir.”
Fifty-Eight
I slid my torso plates down over my shoulders by flickering lantern light, and asked Ord, “What are the counts?”
I had accelerated the D-Day morning reports. By sunrise I’d have no time to read them, and staff less to write them. And casualties would change the numbers for the worse with every heartbeat.
We stepped from my tent into the night as Ord read a handful of papers by his headlight. “First Wave, 50,262 available for duty. Follow-on waves, support units, and other admin, total, 454,006 reporting. We have 5,233 vessels seaworthy, 36,744 stock wa
tered and healthy, and 620 artillery tubes tested and serviceable.”
I stared into the sky. Moons-rise remained an hour away, but the night was still, chill, and full of stars.
I muttered. “Good.”
I was talking about the sky, not the counts. A fiction of war is “the weather is always neutral.” Wind, high seas, rain, mud, heat, cold, ice, snow—they all favor the defense. This clear weather was a break, and we needed every break.
Ord said, “They’re reporting a front at the isthmus, moving south. Fog, sleet. It shouldn’t bother us here for three days.”
We deployed some of our scarce radios to make a relay net with our diversionary attack force five hundred miles north, up on the isthmus that separated the continents. The isthmus formed the obvious avenue for a human invasion into Slug Land. The Slugs believed that, or they wouldn’t have spent a thousand years walling Slug Land off there, like Hadrian walled off the Scots from Roman-occupied England.
To pin the Slug Legions defending the Millennium Wall, and to freeze their mobile reserve divisions two hundred miles north of the landing beaches, we trumped up an “army” of farm carts driven by old men to kick up lots of dust in the hills on the human side of the Slugs’ Millennium Wall each day, and light hundreds of “campfires” each night. A few buglers signaled to Brigades that didn’t exist, except for cannoneers that stood by every obsolete Marini blunderbuss we could scrape together.
At first light, today, the cannoneers would barrage the Millennium Wall like they were softening it up for the Meuse-Argonne Offensive.
Ord said, “For once, bad weather favors the offense, Sir. The longer the Slugs can’t see how little we really have deployed at the isthmus, the longer before they counterattack our beachhead.”
“We don’t have a beachhead yet, Sergeant Major.” I reached inside my armor, tugged out a single, folded taupe page, and handed it to Ord. “If necessary, have the Queen’s Secretary release this to the papers.”
Marinus and the larger towns had newspapers. We sent all their reporters up north, with the diversionary force. The New York Times would’ve howled about that, and I’ve taken bullets defending its right to howl, but free press is no issue in an absolute monarchy.
Ord unfolded the paper and read it. I’d longhanded it the night before, with a dinosaur-feather quill and blue-black cuttlefish ink. It read:
Our recent landings have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold, and I have withdrawn our troops. The decision to attack at this time and place was based on the best information available. The troops did all that bravery and devotion to duty could. If blame or fault attaches to the attempt, it is mine alone.
— Jason Wander, Supreme Commander, Allied Expeditionary Forces
I couldn’t bear to think that up myself. I cribbed it from a contingent note Eisenhower wrote before Normandy.
Ord nodded, refolded the taupe paper, and tucked it into his breastplate pouch.
He didn’t tell me that we wouldn’t need it.
We wound for a mile through tent clusters spread among the dunes behind the embarkation beaches. We first passed through the late-wave units, the ones that would only make the crossing if we lodged successfully on the opposite shore.
Sweet janga smoke drifted across the Marini charioteers’ laagers. The troops weren’t getting stoned before battle. Their wronks were being sedated, so they could be chained down in boats to make the crossing.
I shuddered at the smell. We had perfected the sedation technique now, but, early on, I had witnessed a test during which an underdoped, trussed-up bull wronk kicked the bottom out of a river packet. The boat sank like an anvil, with all hands. I handwrote letters to the family of each soldier lost, and teared up every time.
As we passed onto the beach, the surf boomed. The fifty Tassini Scouts of the Fifteenth Encampment squatted in a ring around a low fire in the sand. They clapped in unison, keeping time with the surf’s pulse.
Their boat lay on its side in the sand, ten yards away, between the fire and the sea.
The upturned boat shielded the fire’s heat signature from the far shore, but Jeeb’s latest reconnaissance flights seemed—seemed—to confirm that the far beaches were sparsely defended.
Howard still hadn’t gotten his look inside the storage sheds near the Troll, and we hadn’t covered a host of other contingencies that hung ahead of us like swords. But if a commander can give every unit everything every time, he isn’t using everything he has.
Alongside the fire, painted orange in its light, the Fifteenth’s Troop Leader and First Sergeant hopped side-to-side, feet together, in time to the clapping. They jumped across Tassini swords planted naked-blade-up in the sand.
The Tassini believed the Sword Dance and prayer before battle bought safety. Personally, I’d buy safety with a good helmet and a clean rifle.
When Jude saw Ord and me, he stopped mid-hop.
His troopers stopped clapping, looked where he looked, then leapt up and surrounded me. I shook hands, patted shoulders, smiled, and tried not to think about 70 percent of those kids as tomorrow’s casualties.
Most of the Marini Marshals, and not a few officers on Earth, thought buddying with the troops wasted scarce planning time and energy, and familiarity undercut discipline.
But when I was a Specialist 4th, training before we embarked for Ganymede, Nat Cobb was our Division Commander. He had 9,950 other soldiers on his mind besides my Platoon. But he woke up and heard a blizzard howling around his tent, and remembered our Platoon was out on an overnight route march. General Cobb parka’d up, had a driver drop him beside the road, then slogged in to camp beside us, bitching at the snow and the wind louder than any of us.
I never forgot that, and I bet no GI in that Platoon did either. I’m not saying the Marshals were wrong. I’m just saying commanders’ time spent with troops is more gain than give.
While Jude’s men doused their fire and toppled their boat onto log rollers to trundle it down to the surf line, Jude and I stood apart.
He looked out at his Scouts through the open visor of his crimson Eternads, and said, “They’re as ready as I can make them.”
His kids were older than he was, and as lean and tough as whipcord, but not one of them had ever seen more combat than a sniping match with Casunis.
I said, “Nobody’s ever ready for what they’re going to see. But if you let ’em flinch, you’ll give more than you gain.”
His eyes glistened in the darkness. “I could never give more than you and Mom already have, Jason.”
Maybe he couldn’t, but I could, and I didn’t want to. I hugged him before he could see my tears, and patted his backplate. He wore the old crimson Eternad armor Ord had fitted him with from the adviser stocks we had brought from Earth. Back home, Eternad crimsons were junk, but they had been enough to protect me and Jude’s mother through the Battle of Ganymede.
“Always.” Then he pulled away.
An hour later, I stood in the sand with Wilgan, the old Ship Master, and Ord. We watched both full moons rise over the Sea of Hunters.
The full moons’ rare combined appearance lit the night like false sunshine, as it had for eons. The false sunshine bloomed phytoplankton as fast as popped corn. Krill, shrimp no bigger than rice grains, rose to feast on the phytoplankton. The krill’s bioluminescence painted the sea beyond six fathoms like a pale blue prairie burning.
Ord stood alongside me and whispered, “Never thought I’d see two moons in one sky, and an ocean on fire.”
Wilgan said, “There’s our Glowies, fine as you please.”
Wilgan’s Glowies attracted hungry sardine-sized predators. Behind the sardines, and hungry for them, swarmed sharks and bony fishes as long as a human leg.
The first wave’s boats pitched outbound in the surf, their thousand navigation lanterns winding north and south from where Ord and I stood.
I chinned my helmet optics. Two heartbeats thumped before they focused. A mile out, faint wakes made vees in th
e water. The first kraken were rising, responding to the bigger fish, and to the drum of fifty thousand oars all beating the water like struggling prey.
The first boats’ harpooners would challenge the early arriving kraken that attacked them. The next kraken would attack their wounded siblings as enthusiastically as the first kraken had attacked our boats. The krakens’ struggles would bring up rhind by the hundreds. In the frenzy of feeding behemoths, our invasion fleet would slip through, as ignored as I had been when I slipped through the scavengers that battled over carrion at the Fair’s wreckage.
Theoretically, our boats wouldn’t have to outrun the rhind, they would just have to outrun or outfight the first few kraken.
Theoretically.
Wilgan said, “So far, so good. Just like the test.”
But the next minutes could doom the GIs in those boats, and with them this civilization.
I swallowed, and said to Ord, “What if I blundered, Sergeant Major?”
Ord nodded back his helmet optics, then peered through his old binoculars. “Sir, Churchill said that war is mostly a catalogue of blunders.”
I chinned my optics. A mile out, the first kraken, tentacles flailing, raced toward the lead assault boat, until the gap between beast and vessel narrowed to twenty yards. The kraken and the boat closed to within twenty yards of one another. The boat’s harpooner stood in its prow, and spray dripped off his crimson armor as it gleamed in the moonlight.
My heart pounded, and I held my breath.
Jude raised his harpoon, and sighted on the monster’s yellow eye.
Fifty-Nine
Jude hurled the barbed black iron. At the same instant, a tentacle tip wrapped the boat’s lantern, then tore the lantern from the boat’s prow. The boat heeled and dipped toward the waves, as the Scouts at the oars swayed.
The harpoon vanished into the kraken’s great eye, the barb exploded, and tissue geysered into the sea.
Tentacles thrashed, slipping off the boat, and it righted.
Scouts thrust their arms skyward, and pumped their fists, as the waters around the boat smoothed.
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