by L D Inman
He almost didn’t hear the knock on his door. Belatedly, he put down the image-book, extricated himself from the pile he’d made around him, and stretched achingly to his feet.
He opened the door to a slightly breathless Cadet Lang.
“Please, sir,” he said, “I’m to ask you to take a briefing from Lieutenant Douglas and Lieutenant Speir.”
Barklay frowned. “What—now? What’s the matter? Is it a Red Mark Alert?”
“N-no, sir, Lieutenant Douglas didn’t say that. He just said he needed to consult you, presently.”
“All right. Tell them to meet me in my office.”
“Yes, sir.” Lang saluted him and sped off.
Still frowning, Barklay shrugged back into his tunic and went to his office. A few minutes later, the door opened to admit Douglas and Speir. Douglas’s mouth was set in a grim line as he shut the door behind them. Speir carried a tablet; she was pale but composed, and did not meet his eye.
“Well?” Barklay said.
Douglas gave the opening to Speir with a glance. She drew a deep breath and looked at him briefly, as if forcing herself to contemplate something fearful. “General Barklay, sir,” she said, “I must report that we have been made the victim of a security breach.”
Had she used the wrong code for a—no, she’d said made the victim. That sounded ominous. He nodded for her to go on.
“I took delivery of the weekly dispatch and read through it, per the usual protocol. Collated within it, and separated from its security heading, was a dossier on an old incident that—” She stopped and started again. “It appears to implicate you personally, sir.”
She had never yet looked him directly in the eye. That, and her words, filled him with a sudden prophetic conviction.
“Solham Fray?” he said gently. It was the first time in years he’d spoken the name aloud.
She nodded, with her eyes on the floor. “Yes, sir.”
It would have been relief he felt, but for the sudden sinkhole that had opened up beneath his student’s regard for him. “Did you read the whole?”
“No, sir, I stopped at the second image. Then I called Douglas, as my nearest superior, to consult about my next action. He agreed to augment the authority of my report.”
Barklay winced inwardly, dreading the answer to his next question. “Did you read the file, Lieutenant Douglas?”
“No, sir,” Douglas said. “Speir judged that that would not be wise.”
“Quite right,” Barklay said. They were all standing there before his desk, he thought, in an equidistant triangle, as if they’d hit their marks for a play. “Is that the dispatch file?” he said to Speir, with a gesture at her tablet.
“Yes, sir.”
“May I?” He held out a hand. After a brief hesitation, she stepped forward. Though she avoided touching him in the exchange, she did raise her eyes to his at last: whatever she saw there seemed to restore enough of her balance that when she stepped back, she kept her chin raised and drew an easier breath.
Barklay opened the dispatch and flipped through it to the offending file. Yes, here was the image Speir had stopped at, and it was the one he needed no image-book to remember, the one that had poisoned and withered all the lives and friendships touched by it. He picked out John’s face in the group, the same heart-cracking smile he’d dreamed about for years, the youth and the vitality: both all gone now.
He could feel Douglas’s grim and patient gaze on him as he stared down at the image. Had Douglas been in this group of men, what would he have done? Something different, Barklay thought; something devastating, whether in the moment or after the fact. Something that would do justice to his supple uprightness, not a quiet cover-up and a fine career with a hollow rot at its heart.
What do you want to do in the war?
Win it.
Without looking up, Barklay experienced his second prophetic conviction. We have been made the victim of a security breach. Yes; and he knew whose hand had wielded the knife. He had the end term in the progression, and could feel his mind working toward it from where he stood.
He put the tablet down on his desk and looked up. “I would like the two of you to stay here a moment, please,” he said. “I will return in a few minutes.”
He shut the door on their silent looks and set out at a deliberate pace for the senior officers’ block.
Commander Jarrow had not been asleep either. He opened the door within moments after Barklay’s knock, in his shirtsleeves but otherwise fully dressed.
“Sir,” he said, coolly.
Barklay drilled the man’s eyes with his gaze. “I’ve been wondering,” he said softly, “what you are. Now I think I know. You are the man who stands by sneering while others soil their hands, and yet never repudiate your own benefit.”
Jarrow answered him just as softly. “If that be your conclusion, then you don’t know me at all. I am quite ready to repudiate my own benefit when necessary.” Then he added with bitterness: “Little enough benefit that it is.”
Barklay had lost all patience for innuendoes. “You’ll explain that statement,” he said, “later. For now I want only one thing of you. I somehow neglected to provide a house of courtesy with a brig. So you will oblige me by keeping to your quarters till I say otherwise. This is not an order; nor is it a request.”
“A threat, then?” Jarrow cocked a sardonic eyebrow.
“I’m glad to see you so sharp-witted in the middle of the night,” Barklay said, pleasantly.
For answer, Jarrow stepped back and swept Barklay a perfect Ryswyckian salute. Then he closed the door between them.
For all his claim to noble self-sacrifice, Barklay thought, Jarrow was acting smugly triumphant. I’ll have the truth of you, he thought at the door. Along with your trachea, if necessary.
He went to knock on Marag’s door, two blocks down.
“I regret interrupting your sleep,” Barklay said when Marag opened the door still working one arm into the sleeve of his robe.
Marag may have been sleeping the sleep of the just, but Barklay’s tone and demeanor brought him alert on the instant.
“What’s going on, sir.” It wasn’t a question.
“I am not going to tell you,” Barklay said. “I wish you to stand well clear. But I am going to ask a favor of you, and if anyone inquires, I wish you to tell them it was an order.”
“Very well, sir,” Marag said grimly. “What am I doing?”
“You are to watch Commander Jarrow’s door to see if he emerges. Fortunately he hasn’t any window but the front one. If he leaves, send a note to me at once. Don’t follow him. When morning comes, make a suitable excuse for his absence from duty; say he is ill, or in consultation—I don’t care what, just so it’s not sensational.”
“Will I need to keep my watch through the morning, sir?”
“I’ll…have thought of something else by then,” Barklay sighed. “You’ll be relieved soon.”
“Very well, sir.”
“Thank you, Marag.”
“Sir—”
“Yes?”
“It might help me—” Marag hesitated— “if I had some idea of the scope of the disaster.”
Disaster. Yes, that was the word for it. But it was already fully accomplished. He was twenty years too late.
“Very wide,” Barklay said. “And very slow. Keep a hand free as long as you can, Marag.”
~*~
Back at his office, he found Speir and Douglas still on their feet, though they had moved somewhat from their places, Douglas toward the windows, Speir close to the table.
“My apologies,” Barklay said as he shut the door. “I should have told you you may take a seat.” He gestured to the conference table with an open hand.
They took seats on either side of the table; Barklay retrieved the tablet and sat down at the table’s end, between them. There was a silence: Barklay breathed in, breathed out, and then pushed the tablet over to Douglas.
“Read it,” he
said.
Douglas did not move to touch the tablet. He looked at it as if it were a repulsive live creature and then frowned at Barklay. “From what you both say, this is a highly classified document,” he said. “Are you sure…?”
“I’ll stand the fire for exposing you to it,” Barklay said.
Douglas shook that away impatiently. “You mean you want me to—”
“I don’t want you to,” Barklay said. “But I’m asking you to.”
“Why?”
“A number of reasons,” Barklay said, his voice even. “The most immediate of which is that I don’t want Lieutenant Speir to be alone.”
Speir looked at him; Douglas looked at her, and then back. Yes, he had grasped the implications of that.
Slowly Douglas reached for the tablet and drew it to him, and as he did so a shadow of misery crept into Speir’s expression. It was no less than a mirror of how Barklay felt himself, living the last few borrowed seconds of Douglas’s good opinion. This, he thought, was exactly what Jarrow had wanted; and Barklay was about to give it to him.
Speir watched Douglas as he flipped slowly through the file: Barklay could bear only to watch through his peripheral vision, with his gaze on the tabletop. Douglas betrayed no expression as he moved from page to page. At last he came to the end and rested his hand on the table in meditative silence. Then he looked up at Barklay.
“Jarrow?” he said. Barklay heard Speir sigh.
Barklay made a wry mouth of acknowledgement. “I confined him to his quarters.”
“Did he deny being behind this?”
“He made no attempt. Nor did I bother making the accusation.”
Douglas made a small noise, his gaze inward. “But how would he have worked it?” he murmured.
“That will be the first question I ask Lord Selkirk a short time from now.”
“Followed by how Jarrow knew about it in the first place?” Sometimes Barklay had a clear sightline of what Douglas would be like as a commander in the future: that sidelong look of acerbic warmth flashing from his controlled equanimity like sunlight on a sudden wave.
“That, too,” Barklay said.
Speir was watching their exchange in silence. She had not spoken since giving her initial report. Barklay wondered what would happen when she finally did speak. Honest soldier. Damn Jarrow.
Douglas had another question. “How widely is this known, sir?”
The sir nearly undid him. Barklay gripped his chair arms, blinking fast. “It’s been highly classified for a long time. I don’t believe many of the younger generation of brass have been brought in.”
“Then this was an isolated incident? The report doesn’t indicate how far this was condoned or ordered.”
“It was winked at. To a certain point. I—”
“But why?” Speir asked, softly. “Why would we do such a thing?”
He couldn’t bear to look at them anymore. He pinched the bridge of his nose, and then got up to stand at the window to compose himself. The warm lights in his office picked out glints of rain on the glass. Sunrise was still hours away. He took a breath; and then another. Speir had said we. Douglas had called him sir. Their grace was a hope more terrible than any disgrace could have been.
“You must understand,” he said, when he could speak, “that when the war broke out, we thought it would last a year at most. We expected the diplomats to work it out without too much blood shed.
“Then the Berenians invaded us from the south coast, and we forgot about working things out. They made it nearly to the capital before we got our feet under us and drove them back. Step by bloody step we fought them off the island, and as we did, we saw what they’d left behind. Saw where they’d rounded up local council members, degraded them, publicly executed them and left them to rot in village squares. Saw what they’d done to our ash gardens, saw the burned hulks of records offices, the pyres they’d made of any family records they could seize from people’s homes. They weren’t just trying to capture a water source—they were trying to insult our very nature as a people into the bargain.
“You’ve been told all this, I know. But we saw it with our own eyes. We stopped thinking of the people we were fighting as our brothers and cousins—would brothers do what the Berenians did to our families caught in the invasion’s path? Many of us who had lost families and homes were mad for revenge. And I was one of those.
“We launched a counter-invasion, and I got myself attached to the expeditionary force as head of a special-forces scout brigade. Our orders were to range through enemy-occupied territory and gather information however we might. That quickly changed to establishing a base of operations and sending out forays into the countryside. We chose Solham Fray because it was good ground, near a creek-bottom and sheltered. We drove off the inhabitants and leveled the village, and hunkered in.”
So far, so much according to the conventions of war. Barklay stopped to gather himself again.
“Then what happened, sir?” Douglas asked quietly.
Barklay continued with an effort. “As time went on…it stopped being so much about gathering information and more about humiliating every Berenian national who came within our ambit. We ceased to have any misgivings about what we did. And we grew…very creative in doing them.”
“That sounds rather more organic than what is described in the report,” Douglas said. Barklay turned to look at him: he was staring abstractedly into the middle distance with a frown between his brows. Yes; of course Douglas would revert to his academic training in a situation like this. “It reads like a disavowed mission rather than an incidental atrocity.”
“There was a list,” Speir said. “Of torture techniques. Like it was nothing to be ashamed of.”
“Yes.” Barklay swallowed his dry gorge. “The longer it went on, you see, the more standardized it became, on both sides. We put to use what we learned from the Berenians; and we made up the rest on our own.”
Speir’s look turned stricken, and he remembered suddenly whose daughter she was. He could have bitten out his tongue. Then he burned anew with rage at Jarrow. He turned away again, breathing hard.
“How long did it go on?” Douglas asked, after a silence.
“The mission lasted two years,” Barklay said. “It was disavowed when an adjutant arrived at the bunker for a surprise visit, and discovered the degree to which we had taken our silent mandate. We were ordered to dismantle the post and return to the island for an inquiry. The week after we left Solham Fray, the resurgent Berenian forces marched in. The young general who led that campaign was Emmerich du Rau; you know him now as Lord Bernhelm.” The image of du Rau, his dark eyes and his casual mastery, flashed before Barklay’s mind’s eye. “He won’t have forgiven us for what he found there; and I doubt he has forgotten.”
“And what about Central Command?” Douglas said. “Have they forgiven and forgotten?”
“Sometimes I wish they had not,” Barklay said, bitterly. “The reason I was not at the post when the adjutant arrived….” He realized suddenly that the story he was about to tell would sound hopelessly self-serving. It had sounded noble, when he had confided it in John, years ago. Those years had worn away at the coin of his excuse; he had nothing else now to pay with but this threadbare thing.
“There was a moment,” he said, after a pause. “I came in to oversee the results of an interrogation…a Berenian soldier, as young as any we had in the forces. He had given up all he knew long before, but…. I found myself looking into his face; he was so utterly broken that he looked at me as if I might be his savior instead of the author of his torment. And we seemed to meet one another, soul to soul—I don’t know why then, and not any time before—and I saw myself in him, and him in me. I wanted to kill him; I wanted to try to fix him. So I attempted the latter—ordered him unbound and brought to an infirmary bed.” He had seen to the man’s wounds himself, anxious as if over his own life; but this only widened the break in the soldier’s sanity. “It…didn’t work.
He didn’t recover.” They had had to kill him after all, but Barklay couldn’t bring himself to say that.
“I wasn’t quite sane either, after that. I saw that we were fixed—had fixed ourselves—that I had fixed myself—in an engine of hatred, and I couldn’t think of any way to get out, except to try and dismantle the mission. I left Solham Fray to meet with an assistant to the general in charge of the division, and ask about ways to redeploy my men, transfer the prisoners, break up the cogs of the machine somehow. I suppose it was that meeting that alerted him to send the adjutant out to make that inspection, because when I got back the place was swarming with military police.
“They would have court-martialed every one of my men in a closed court, drowned the book of the record, and moved me to a desk in the capital, but I argued them down.” He sighed. “Actually, I threatened to kill myself in spectacular fashion and expose the whole fiasco to the public, unless my men were given psychomedical treatment and allowed to breathe free air. They compromised. Only the officer on duty at the time of the inspection was court-martialed; he was dishonorably discharged. The others were variously discharged on a medical or reassigned. The rumors of the atrocity became tangled with the tales about the Berenian invasion, a mess of hopeless hyperbole.”
He turned to look at them. Douglas was pale and expressionless; Speir sat very upright, with her teeth set hard in her lower lip to stop her tears from brimming over.
“But putting an end to Solham Fray wasn’t enough. There’s nothing to stop there from being more Solham Frays. And the longer this war goes on, the less chance we have of seeing one another as human at all.” For most people of Douglas and Speir’s generation, Berenian citizens were abstractions, counters on maps, a nation of petty martinets crowing over their dry dunghills. “I had to do something.”