Fateful Lightning

by William R. Forstchen

  He was aware enough of his own ambitions to realize that, especially now that Hans Schuder was gone. If he could create and bring two fighting corps on line, he could do the same for an entire army. Though only five foot three and not much more than a hundred pounds, he had mastered the art of making men twice his size and age tremble at his mere approach. His reputation as perhaps the leading killer of Tugars, commander of the resistance against the Cartha attack on Roum, and hero of the naval battle of St. Gregory had helped to create the aura about him. Would it pay off again?

  “And the evil eye shall wither,” Dimitri said quietly, still looking out across the fields.

  “What?”

  “Emerson. I heard Homula read him at the theater one evening back before the naval war. Quite impressive. ‘That the evil eye shall wither before the power of love.’ ”

  Love. Emerson, yes, he remembered Emerson, Thoreau, the transcendentalists. He had attended some readings of their works at the Universalist Church back home, something his parents never knew. What would Emerson say about love, about the universality of all living things, when a Merki charge was bearing down upon him, their standards of polished human skulls glinting in the morning light? There was no place for Emerson on this world. He looked over at Dimitri, his perpetual conscience, self-appointed to look after his inner soul. He had been tempted to transfer the man more than once, but he was too good a chief of staff, and besides, he realized, there was part of him that almost wanted the tormenting.

  A shudder ran through the train as it went into the final curve toward Kev Station. The city was now clearly in view. All civilians had been cleared out, the last trainload of them going east to Roum only this morning. Andrew’s thirty days had indeed bought them that. They had evacuated Rus. All that was left now was the army, and Kev reflected it. The entrenchments along the White Hills curved down, linking into the north and south walls of the city, which was to be held by two regiments from First Corps.

  Buildings had been torn down to create firebreaks, sections of the east wall torn open to allow easy access into the rear lines. The fields east of the city were covered with tents, an entire corps still encamped here, close to a water supply. The precious hoard of water in the cisterns above the city was to be used only when the Merki finally arrived. Around the south gate was a bustle of activity in what had once been the station and was now military headquarters for the army. The army had grown, nearly five corps now active, though after this first part of the campaign the numbers would barely equal four. Staff swarmed about the area, and Vincent smiled at the perpetual raising and lowering of arms in salute as the hierarchy of command moved about.

  He turned to look back at Dimitri, who knew why, and stepped up in a fatherly fashion to brush a bit of lint off Vincent’s dark blue jacket.

  “You look fine,” Dimitri said, patting him lightly on the shoulder.

  The whistle sounded out a long blast, the engineer refraining from playing a tune, since John Mina was most likely nearby and would not hesitate to climb into the cab and raise holy hell about the waste of steam. He was a lonely crusader of efficiency, this one objection about playing train whistles a near obsession.

  The train drifted into the station, bell tolling, steam hissing out, brakes squealing, and they shuddered to a stop.

  A small detachment was drawn up and came to attention, presenting arms. The door to the car behind him opened and his staff pushed their way out, the young men eagerly elbowing each other in a scramble for precedent to be first behind their general. Vincent looked back over his shoulder at them, his hard gaze stopping all of them.

  A band struck up, bass drum thumping. Several trumpets, one of them very off-key, sounded Ruffles and Flourishes and then went straight into Hail to the Chief. Vincent stiffened slightly as he saw his father-in-law come out of a huge pavilion tent behind the station. Vincent climbed down from the train, the company of Rus infantry coming to present arms. Stepping onto the station platform, Vincent turned slightly to salute the flag of the Rus Republic and then moved down the line of men. His father-in-law approached with a quick stride, left hand outstretched.

  The Lincoln image still held sway with the man— high stovepipe hat, chin whiskers, rumpled black coat, and the same dark sad eyes which revealed the truth beneath the happy smile. The two major differences, of course, were that Kal was nearly a foot shorter than his hero and his right sleeve, empty, was pinned up to the shoulder.

  “My boy, so good to see you again,” Kal exclaimed, grasping Vincent’s hand and then pulling him into an affectionate embrace, kissing him loudly on each cheek. Vincent had given up long ago attempting to convert Kal to any semblance of presidential or military protocol.

  “How’s Tanya, the children?”

  “They send their love,” Vincent said quietly.

  Kal looked into Vincent’s eyes. Tanya’s last letter had told about Vincent’s distance, his near-total withdrawal from his family, and between the lines the old peasant had been able to read out the details, the empty bed night after night, the drinking, the snaps of rage, even the silence and lack of love to the children. Now was not the time.

  Kal took Vincent by the shoulder and started back toward the pavilion. He looked over at the line of infantry, still at attention.

  “Boris Revanovich! How’s the arm?” Kal said, breaking away from Vincent and coming up to stand in front of a towering Rus soldier with a beard that reached down nearly to the man’s waist. The bearlike soldier broke into a grin.

  “Healed, praise Saint Olga, to whom my wife prayed every night.”

  “Let’s see you move it, then,” Kal said, not hesitating to grab the man’s musket.

  The soldier moved his arm up and down. There was a stiffness to it which he almost managed to hide.

  Kal looked back at Vincent.

  “These are all old friends,” he said, as if introducing the line of privates to the major general. “Their regiment’s Suzdalian, the old 8th. I’ve known them for years—we used to get together at Boris’s tavern when I’d sneak out from my boyar’s palace for a drink.”

  Vincent said nothing, finally responding by the slightest incline of his head in acknowledgment.

  “Good, very good,” Kal said quietly, looking back at Boris and returning his musket. “My love and prayers to your wife. When we take Suzdal back, the first drink at your tavern is on me.”

  The soldier smiled good-naturedly. “An honor, sire.”

  “Damn it all,” Kal snapped with mock anger. “I’m nothing but a peasant like you, the mouse that happens to be president, and not a damned boyar, and don’t you forget that. So don’t insult me with that sire talk.” He wagged his finger in the man’s face.

  Vincent waited, trying to hide his impatience at Kal’s familiarity, even though he knew the man was most likely a friend from long ago, and that besides it was something even old Abe would do and the hell with protocol.

  The men laughed, some of them lowering their muskets as if ready to break ranks and join in a general gab session with Kal, who seemed more than happy to oblige.

  Vincent cleared his throat sharply, looking at the men, and they snapped back to attention, eyes straight ahead. Kal looked back at Vincent and nodded.

  “My son-in-law here is reminding me that we’ve got another meeting. I’ll try to find you men later and we’ll talk some more about the old days at the tavern and what was her name…”

  “Zvetlana,” one of the men whispered, and the line broke into appreciative chuckles.

  Kal smiled and looked at Vincent.

  “Never say that name around my wife,” he said with a conspiratorial wink, and the men laughed even louder.

  “All right, my general, we’re off,” Kal said, and taking Vincent by the arm, he continued down the line, nodding at the men, who were now openly smiling.

  Reaching the entry into the vast tent, Kal finally let go of Vincent’s arm.

  “I’ve got to go over and see Gates,�
� the president said with a sigh, as if he was silently wishing that he could take the rest of the afternoon off, go back to his peasant friends, and wander off for a drink. “He wants to try this new thing he and Emil created that makes pictures without painting or drawing.”

  “A daguerreotype?”

  “I don’t know what its called. He’s already made some pictures of the men here. You sure it won’t steal your soul?”

  Vincent smiled and shook his head. “It’s safe.”

  Kal nodded as if still not assured. “We’ll talk later, son.” He hugged Vincent, looking into his eyes as if probing for some lost essence, and then left him.

  Vincent looked about. The tent, he suddenly realized, had belonged once to Muzta Qar Qarth, and had been retrieved from the flood at the end of the war. It was more than a hundred feet across and was supported in the center by a pole as thick as a ship’s mast. The sides were rolled up to let the breeze in. It was packed with the entire higher command of the Army of the Republic along with a sprinkling of Roum officers who were with a division of Fourth Corps and had seen good service in the withdrawal from the Potomac. At the sight of Vincent, the Roum officers started toward the line of men who were following him, eager to see their comrades who were on Vincent’s staff. To one side he saw Marcus and Julius, who had arrived the day before for a private meeting with Andrew and Kal. Marcus, seeing Vincent, nodded a friendly greeting, which Vincent knew was genuine. The two had become far closer in the last several months, somehow recognizing a kinship of suffering that had helped to shape them into men impervious to pain.

  Vincent drifted through the crowd, which was heavily spiced with the faded and often patched blue uniforms that denoted old veterans of the 35th Maine and 44th New York. He nodded an almost friendly greeting to Andrew Barry, who so long ago had been his sergeant in Company A and was now a corps commander. Twenty-six of them were now generals, and over sixty commanded regiments as lieutenant colonels. By a curious custom, since Andrew refused to promote himself, the rank of colonel was now held by only one man on this world. A fair percentage of the rest of the men from the old Union Army were in staff positions, technical or administrative jobs, either civilian, like Gates as newspaperman and Webster as secretary of the treasury, or military, like Ferguson as chief of the ordnance development department.

  And of the six hundred and thirty two who had come through on the Ogunquit, nearly two hundred and thirty were dead, forty more were permanently disabled and retired, twenty were insane from the shock of all that had happened, and sixteen more were suicides. Thirty-one others, the sailors from the Ogunquit, commanded by Cromwell, were somewhere in Cartha under the traitor Hinsen or dead. Half of us gone, Vincent thought—Malady, Kindred, Houston, Dunlevy, the two Sadler brothers, and of course Hans Schuder. In actual battle casualties of killed, wounded, and missing the regiment and battery had sustained more than one hundred percent losses, some of the men having been wounded two or three times, many of them adding on to injuries endured against the rebels. We’re using ourselves up, our bodies wearing down, he thought, looking around the room, seeing more than one empty sleeve, scarred face, eye patch, or slow stiff walk.

  “Have a drink, me bucko.”

  Vincent looked up to see the flowing red muttonchops and mustache of Pat O’Donald looming up before him.

  “I thought this was an official staff meeting, which means no drinking,” Vincent said as Pat looked around with a conspiratorial gaze while pulling a flask out of his breast pocket.

  “Laddie, the old Army of the Potomac was the hardest-drinking army in history—hell, we didn’t start to win until that bastard of a drunk took over. We’re just carrying on military tradition, we are, especially with these Rus so willing to join in.”

  Vincent had heard rumors about the transformation of Pat since the death of Hans, how the man had gone for weeks without a single tear, nor even a nip. It was almost comforting to see him lapse back into his old form, at least for today, and he felt a quiet satisfaction as well that Pat now viewed him as a social equal in the club of killers.

  Taking the flask, he ignored Dimitri’s cold stare and downed a hard gulp, feeling the pleasant warmth spread out as the vodka did its work, no longer choking and burning him as it once had.

  Pat took the flask back, took another swig, then corked it and returned it to his pocket.

  “When this cruel war’s over I’m going to see to it that we get some proper whiskey made up again. They’ve got barley on this bloody world, and I’ve even heard that where them Maya folks are back to the west they’ve got corn as well. We’ll run a rail line out that way, teach ’em how to make stills, and get some trade going.”

  “When this cruel war’s over your drinking days are done,” Emil Weiss said, coming up to Pat and pulling the flask from his pocket. “I didn’t patch that hole in your stomach up to…”

  “I know, I know, damn ya ” Pat said, and the two fell into squabbling over possession of the flask.

  Vincent drifted away and stood in silence near the center of the yurt, his staff standing respectfully behind him. The commander of Sixth and Seventh Corps absently fingered his goatee, hat pulled low over his eyes. No one approached him.

  Andrew Lawrence Keane stood in silence as well near the far side of the yurt, watching Vincent. Sheridan to my Grant, Andrew thought. Grant the butcher, who could lose ten thousand in one futile charge at Cold Harbor. Sheridan, who could remorselessly ride up the Shenandoah Valley destroying everything. The younger model of Andrew, but Andrew’s heart had somehow been burned out of him. Something had died when he had shot the Merki hanging on the cross in the forum of Roum, as if he had shot the God he had once so fervently believed in and had filled his soul with emptiness.

  He knew the emptiness—it had tried to creep into him more than once—but Hans or Kathleen had always pulled him back from the edge. And Hans was gone. He smiled sadly. No, he was not really gone; somehow he could almost sense Hans still alive inside of him, in the same way that a father always lives inside the soul of his son even after he is gone.

  And Kathleen, she was always there as well, her wonderful lilt of a brogue coming out in moments of anger, and in those wonderful moments of passion too. When he felt his soul emptying, she put the touch of life back into him, a phenomenon he had believed would never come to him, not after what his fiancée had done to him back before the war. Kathleen had reached even deeper, and it was for her and for their daughter more than everything else that he continued to fight. He felt the burden of an entire nation, and of all of humankind on this planet, resting upon his shoulders. As surely as he lived, or died, the fate of the Rus, the Roum, and yes, the Cartha and all the others was somehow bound up with him in a strange mystical cord that pulsed with life and blood, with passions and dreams of freedom.

  But it was their two faces that dwelled within him, his hopes and dreams for their survival that moved his heart the deepest. He had thought often of that and found it to be a powerful thought. So many years ago he had joined an army to fight for an abstraction, a word called union, and a concept of freedom for a race of people of which he knew not a single one by name. He would have willingly died for that; he almost had at Gettysburg.

  Now the stakes were far more than Gettysburg and he was the one who would decide the hows and wheres of the fighting. This was no honorable fight as he had known on earth, with rules and even a deadly yet at times almost friendly respect between the two sides. This was brutality of war at its raw edge, a war of massacre, torture, assassination, a primal fight for survival by both sides, for he knew that just as he was fighting for the continuation of his race, so ultimately were the Merki fighting for their survival.

  He looked about the room at all his young men, and more than a few old ones as well. When eyes locked for a second there was respect, awe, and from his old comrades of the 35th a deep affection that only soldiers who have served so long together can truly understand. Yet what moved him to contin
ue the fight more than anything else was what he had seen only minutes before as he had slipped out of the small home in the city which served as his private dwelling. Kathleen had dozed off, exhausted after being called out in the middle of the night to try to save a boy brought in with a gut wound from a dropped musket. She had saved him, repairing the damage, and had stayed in the hospital till the afternoon, seeing after her other patients and then going the rounds with the score of doctors she was responsible for training.

  She had fallen asleep with Maddie curled up beside her for her afternoon nap. The sunlight had streaked in low, filling the bedroom with a soft golden glow that always seemed to have a special warmth to it in the late days of spring. Their soft rhythmic breathing was the only sound in the room, the rumble and turmoil of war somehow hushed. He had felt tears come to his eyes as he had watched them sleeping, the sleep of innocence and of exhausted compassion. If need be he would die to save that, to save that for everyone, to save it for his own daughter so that someday, years from now, she might know such gentle peace as well.

  He looked back at Vincent, who stood alone, and he felt a lingering sadness, remembering the young boy who had cried when he first confessed that he had killed a man. War burns the soul, but for this one the scars had fused into a cracked and twisted mass of pain.

  “Everyone’s here now.”

  Pat was by his side.

  “How’d Vincent seem to you?”

  “He’ll be a killing devil when the mischief starts,” Pat replied.

  Andrew nodded to Bob Fletcher, who had been in charge of food supplies and now doubled as chief of staff with Hans gone. Fletcher went up to the low dais at the back end of the yurt, and as he stepped up behind the podium the conversation in the tent started to drop away.

  “All right, dammit,” Fletcher growled in his barely understandable Rus, “let’s get started.”