by wildbow
“And you want mutiny?” Lillian asked.
“You were as mad as any of us, after that meeting,” Gordon said.
“But mutiny.”
“Sy’s choice of words, not mine,” he said.
“How would you put it?” Jamie asked, quiet. His first time speaking up since stepping outside.
Gordon explained, “We disable Tylor. Either we do it and we take over, acting in Tylor’s place, to give the orders and manage this end of the war ourselves, and we plan to do well enough that he has to keep quiet and take the credit, or we disable him in a way that won’t raise suspicion, someone else takes charge, and we lean heavily on the new leader to get the results we need.”
“I feel like if we do this, we’re going to want to do it fast,” I said. “They’re not going to let up. They’ll regroup, the people in charge will fan the flames, and they’ll make another attempt. Before dawn.”
“I have thoughts on that,” Gordon said. “But let’s not get distracted.”
I nodded.
“You three are pretty committed to this?” Jamie asked.
“No,” I said. “I have reservations.”
Jamie nodded. I thought I detected relief.
“Reservations is putting it lightly,” Lillian said. “Are you nuts?”
“A little,” I said.
“This is dangerous,” she said.
“We talked about that part,” I said.
“It’s not just the sort of thing that screws us up and makes it so they don’t trust us anymore. It’s the sort of thing that ends the Lamb project.”
“We could make a case,” Gordon said.
“You think they’d let you? I’ve sat in on meetings where they talked about the Lambs project. They asked for my opinions. How often you were each getting hurt, what your growth looked like, development, promising elements, challenges. I know they were testing me as much as they were evaluating you.”
“You’re worried this will damage your rep?” I asked. “That you won’t get invited to sit in on meetings? You’ll lose all of the trust and favors you’ve bought by helping get this far?”
“Wow,” Lillian said. “That’s unfair.”
“But it’s true, isn’t it? You’ve earned a kind of status, respect and an ability to dialogue with higher-ups that a lot of people four or five years ahead of you in the Academy haven’t been able to obtain.”
Lillian’s eyes narrowed.
“Hey, I don’t begrudge you that. I only want to know where your protests are really coming from.”
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“Are you saying no as an Academy student, or as a Lamb?” I asked.
Playing dirty. Sorry Lil.
“The two aren’t—it can be both!”
“They can be not-both,” I said.
“I’m sorry, Sy,” Lillian said. “I’m mad, I don’t like this, but I can’t do this in good conscience. The risks aren’t worth it.
Jamie nodded. He was already healing from the wounds to his face, but he still looked a little haggard, and despite Lillian’s ministrations, there were still parts of him which had the drops of resin clinging to him. She’d cleaned his hair, at least, but the light occasionally caught bits of the glue-like stuff.
“You too?” Gordon asked.
“I’m with Lillian. It feels reckless.”
“And Helen?” Gordon asked.
“I’d like to find another way to be helpful,” Helen said. She was healing faster than Jamie, but she also had bits of the resin on her that caught the light. Like tiny raindrops frozen in time. “If we tried to take over the Brigadier’s position, I think I’d be the least helpful. I don’t want to be useless.”
Gordon was frowning.
“Question,” I said. “If we found out a plan that was guaranteed to work, would any of you three change your minds?”
“I might,” Jamie said. “I trust you guys more than I trust myself w-when it comes to some things.”
I only caught it because of the way he’d stuttered, but he was cold enough he was shivering. His teeth were chattering.
The smoke had taken a lot out of him. Medicine could do a lot, but the body did have to carry its own weight. Sometimes nutrients needed to be supplied, the body needed time to take in the medicines and use the resources the medics or the doctors had so kindly provided.
Jamie was frail, and it looked like he was fighting to stay standing.
I approached him, coming to stand next to him by the wall, so the side of my body pressed against the side of his.
“I’ll break the tie, then,” I said. “I’m defecting to their side. It’s too hard to do, too risky.”
“Okay,” Gordon said. He raised his chin a little.
When he looked at me, it felt a little like he was looking a little bit through me.
At a certain point, Gordon had stopped being quite the Rebel and had started to fall in line with the Academy’s expectations. He’d done marvelously. Now he was returning to the kind of person he’d once been. A little bit reckless.
When we’re babies, we shit ourselves, we struggle to walk, we struggle to communicate. When we’re old, we shit ourselves, we struggle to walk, we struggle to communicate.
As things began, so did they end.
Did Gordon recognize that? Was he touching base with his roots, as he got his first warning that he was moving toward his conclusion?
I almost changed my mind right there. I might have defected a second time, trying to convince the others.
I wanted to give him this.
“Go inside,” I said. “Get some rest. Gordon, you do a walk around the city? Maybe with Mary, if she’s up to it? I’ll meet you when you’re back. Then you and I will do a walk around, then Mary and I.”
“Can I?” Lillian asked. “I don’t—I mean, I want to help, I don’t want to be useless or for there to be hard feelings, because I think that it’s crazy to try and do something to the Brigadier.”
“It’s okay, Lillian,” Gordon murmured.
“Go with one of the pairs,” I said. “But maybe let Gordon and Mary go alone, first?”
“I don’t need to vent or rant,” Gordon said.
“Okay,” I said. “Then Lillian can go if she wants. Jamie and Helen hang back, recuperate.”
Jamie and Helen nodded.
“What are you doing, then?” Gordon asked me.
I smiled.
“Seriously.”
“Going for a walk,” I said, walking backward, away from the group.
“That’s suspicious,” Gordon said.
“Yeah, well, that’s me in a nutshell,” I said, still smiling.
“Am I going to be happy when I find out what you were up to?” Gordon asked. “Are we?”
“You won’t be unhappy,” I told him, still walking backward, still giving them my fake smile.
There was no response, there were no accusations. I turned, walking into the rain, and I could hear Mary mutter something. Clearly unhappy. We’d gotten her hopes up.
The closer I got to the gate, the more intense the smell of the smoke was. The building had taken a nasty hit, possibly a storehouse, and the fire had burned well enough that I suspected the bomb blast or explosion had been intended to spread fires.
Interesting on its own. Fire was a typical countermeasure to stitched. The more they depended on that primal, alligator part of the brain, the less they liked it. Newer stitched were capable of ignoring fire, defaulting to a frozen state or marching headlong into it with no heed for personal harm, which was only a marginal improvement over the fits of rage or panic that it had caused in prior generations.
Our enemy had a surprising number of tools that were very effective against us. The warbeasts had likely forced a retreat, suggesting they didn’t have a countermeasure to that, but something told me that the person in charge of the attack had ordered a retreat the moment the bomb had hit the roof. They’d bloodied us, they knew we had to retaliate
, so they minimized the damage that retaliation could have caused.
The warbeasts were loping back toward their pens now, making their way into the gate. I approached the man at the gate, saw him frown.
“Keep out of the way,” he told me.
I raised the badge, and I saw his expression change. Eyebrows up. Lines of what I almost read as disgust on either side of his mouth. Indignation.
“There are four assassins on the periphery of Whitney,” I said. “Each one modified. Any time you open the gates, you need to commit people to searching wagons, checking faces. Even if it slows things down. If they can slip past the walls, the leadership of Westmore is going to be dead within hours.”
“Uh huh,” he said.
“Double guards on each of the gates, too,” I said. “Doesn’t matter if they’re hurt. Just so long as their eyes work.”
He gave me a curious stare. I turned and left.
He wasn’t the reason I’d gone back.
I retraced my steps, going back, and crossed the street. In the zig-zag of the city, the building was placed at one of the sharp turns, positioned in such a way that it had more space around it. Elbow room.
The Brigadier’s lodge.
As I approached the door, two stitched stiffened, hands on their bayonets.
I held up my badge again. “Let me in.”
They didn’t budge.
Had he passed on word to the soldiers, but not the stitched?
“Tell Brigadier Tylor there’s a little boy here to see him,” I said. “Please.”
The stitched took an interminably long time before turning and passing through the door.
Almost a minute passed before the door opened again. The stitched took time getting back into position at his post, lips slightly parted, eyes unfocused, before he addressed me again. “Go in.”
I stepped inside. I took my time removing my raincoat, which made my stomach ache, and bending over to remove my boots, which made it ache more. My coat and boots were half the size of the ones that were already present.
Tylor was in the room with several of his superior officers. They were gathered around the table at the far end, opposite his desk, the fireplace off to one side, oil lamps and candles burning throughout. Many of the officers had cigarettes or pipes. The high ceiling kept the room from being too smoky, and because the light didn’t quite reach the peak, the darkness had a nebulousness to it. Shifting, moving, almost alive.
“Something of import?” the Brigadier asked me.
“No. Not of import. No emergency. But we do need to talk.”
“One minute, then,” he said, before returning to business.
He was crisp in the orders he gave to his men. Who was stationed where, and which weapons to keep at the ready.
I walked around to his desk, finger tracing the heavily lacquered wood.
Papers, letters, bottles of ink and quill pens, actual metal pens, and stacks of mail. Opened and unopened. He had a nice little letter opener, with a dog engraved into the top of it.
My finger touched the handle of the drawers. I knew from earlier that he had a bottle of something in the one.
Had we collectively agreed to commit treason, then this would have been the moment I discreetly opened the drawer and dropped something Lillian-provided into the bottle.
Instead, I kept circling the desk.
There. Half-tucked beneath a stack of papers were envelopes, many with curls of paper peeling off of them. Opened, empty, the contents neatly placed elsewhere.
Probably intended for the fire.
I took one of his nice pens, one with actual gold inlaid into it and making up the metal parts, the nib excepted. I began penning out short statements on the blank side of each envelope.
I lined them up, turning them over.
The Brigadier was true to his word. About a minute and a half after he’d told me to wait, he sent his men away. They pulled their boots and coats on, and the cold outdoor air blew into the lodge as they pulled the door open and stepped outside.
“Excuse me,” the Brigadier said.
I stepped out of the way, and allowed him to reach his chair, where he promptly set himself down.
“Can I ask what the plan is?”
“We have weapons. We’ll have at least two warbeasts on guard at any time. If there’s a problem, we open the gates and set them on the enemy. Artillery emplacements will be moved here and there, mostly to the forward gate. It took a lot of damage.”
I nodded.
“You’ve redecorated my desk,” he said, noting the envelopes I’d laid out. “Am I supposed to keep it this way?”
“I want to play a game,” I said. I leaned against the corner of the desk.
“A game?” he asked. I could see the struggle of his thoughts on his face as he very briefly considered going off on me for making light of the situation. But he composed himself. “How do we play?”
“It’s a proposal more than anything,” I said. I tapped the envelope nearest to me, “My prediction for the enemy’s next move.”
“Hm,” he said. “And the other three?”
“More predictions. The game is simple. If I’m right, and I turn over an envelope, then you give us more power. More say, more ability to decide how our side fights this war. If I’m wrong, then we get less power. We do what you say, we don’t get in your way.”
He nodded slowly. “What if I said that this isn’t worth it to me? I could say I stand to gain very little.”
“You can,” I said. “It’s your right, sir.”
“Mm,” he made a sound. “You were already right about how tenacious they were. They didn’t feel like a broken enemy.”
He stood from his seat, looking down at the envelopes.
Starting with the leftmost one, closest to me, he turned each one of them over.
That’s not how you play my game, I thought. I suspected I was getting a sense of what Mary had felt when we’d told her we weren’t focusing on the assassins.
“One. They attack before dawn. They leave within the next two hours, time of attack depends on how long the path to the nearest available side gate is. That side gate gets attacked, similar to how the first one was. They either bring out the big guns, they attack two fronts at once, or they utilize a bomb at the gate.”
I nodded.
“Two. Just before dawn, we get hit for the third time tonight. Chaos in our ranks. The attack in the previous envelope was a distraction to get one of the assassins into the camp. Superior officers die.”
“Yes,” I said.
“Three. The assassin, if not caught, manages a signal to the others. Now that the Westmore forces are looking out for him or her, the assassin only moves in concert with scheduled attacks.”
I nodded.
“The second part of that message is, if the assassin is caught, ahem, because the Lambs are awesome, then the schedule we find on the paper the assassin is carrying is incorrect. They attack by another schedule or means. Repeating steps one and two, to get assassins in place. It is very possible they enter and/or attack using the mine system or any sewer.”
“I don’t know Westmore enough to know the particulars there.”
“We don’t have a sewer system they could abuse like that,” the Brigadier said. “Waste runs off into one of the mine systems, where it drops into a steady current underground.”
“Impressive,” I said.
“The Academy has its strengths. They’re more likely to use a mine shaft. We have enough of them. But they won’t do this to get their assassins in the first time?”
“I don’t imagine so,” I said. “It would risk tipping their hand.”
“You know this how? You studied them that carefully?”
I shook my head. “All of that, it’s what I would do.”
He turned to the fourth envelope. He tapped his finger on it. Something told me I’d insulted him.
“The Academy forces of Westmore that are led by Brigadier Tylor lose
,” he recited, giving me a level stare.
I didn’t budge, only meeting his eyes.
“You were right on the first one,” he said. “That gives you one win. If you want something, and it doesn’t cost me anything, I’ll grant it.”
I nodded.
“We’ll take measures to react to this attack on the second gate you’re predicting. That does cost me something, it’s less men and resources on the forward gate. But I’ll give you the benefit of a doubt.”
“Thank you,” he said.
“First thing I want that doesn’t cost you anything, I want to call the rest of the Lambs here.”
Previous Next
Esprit de Corpse—5.10
Gordon, Shipman, and Mary came in from the rain. The rest of us were already present and waiting.
“No activity,” Gordon said, raising his voice to be heard from the other end of the room. “Double guards are stationed, and ambushes are laying in wait outside the gates.”
“Only stitched for the ambush?” I asked.
“Only stitched. Both sides of the path.”
I nodded.
There hadn’t been an attack yet. Gordon and Mary had left to do another circuit around Westmore, checking for anything suspicious, and now they were back, having picked up Shipman from the residence at the tail end of their route. The rest of us had gathered, but we were in a position where we were tired and lacked many concrete things to do, but not quite able to relax. Jamie was at the table with the maps and some books spread in front of him, filling his head with any knowledge that might be relevant.
Lillian was with Jamie, and the two of them were talking in low voices, as Jamie explained something or other. They were both very good at the ‘library whisper’, and had a way of looking like they were sharing a secret when they did so. It had something to do with the energy they had when they talked, Jamie finishing sentences, helping Lillian’s verbal stride rather than harming it, yet not getting so excited that they forgot how others might be bothered.
I walked around to look over their shoulders.
A list of the various projects ongoing in Whitney. Jamie was supplying additional details, some major, some minor. Even noting the people that some of the scientists had been talking to at the gathering we’d passed through.