Animus

by Scott McKay

  In fact, Patrick and the Commodore had that exact conversation back in Dunnansport. The Commodore had agreed to run the request up the line all the way to the Admiralty in Principia, though he couldn’t promise they’d have the asset in theater by the time the mission reached its critical point. It wasn’t even known where the airship was; someone would have to locate it and then requisition it for the Navy’s use. By the time that could happen, well…you go to war with the weapons you have, and they didn’t have the Clyde.

  A familiar refrain in this man’s navy, he thought.

  Another thing Patrick didn’t like was the inability to coordinate. What we also don’t have is communications, he thought. We’ve got signal flags and the heliograph mirrors, and we can deliver messages to ships or shore via line of sight. But what we need is teletext that’s wireless to communicate over longer distances. I need to be able to talk to Yarmouth, and to Castamere and Louise. Maybe then we could keep this mission from cocking up.

  Again, it sure would be nice to have a damn airship to use for that purpose.

  Soon, as he surveyed the shore with his field telescope, Patrick saw riders close to the shoreline ahead of Adelaide’s approach. That was the Dunnansport contingent; he’d caught up to them. He slowed his speed to eight knots.

  We’re coming together, he thought. Just need my landing craft in position and this fight will be on.

  Adelaide continued plying its way along the coast. Per his maps, Patrick estimated they were just forty miles east of Strongstead.

  The battlefield is close, he thought. I just hope these savages are dumb enough to get within my cannon range.

  …

  TWENTY

  From The Camp, moving southwest – Morning (Second Day)

  Charlotte had woken Sarah before dawn.

  “Darling, please rise,” she’d said sweetly. Sarah, feeling the aftereffects of whatever drug she’d been given in that marwai she’d had the night before, sluggishly opened her eyes.

  “It’s time to prepare you for the day,” Charlotte said, kissing her on the cheek.

  “Prepare me how?” Sarah mumbled as she struggled to lift her head off the cushion.

  “I want to explain to you what will happen today,” said Charlotte, “because it will be difficult and made worse if there are surprises.”

  “Surprises? What does that mean?”

  “You will see something this morning that will upset you,” Charlotte said. “I regret that you will see it. But I want you to know that this is the way, and it will have been necessary in order to save the larger whole. Do you understand?”

  “No,” Sarah said, though she had an inkling of what Charlotte might say from what her father had recently been telling her of the Udar. “I don’t understand. What does that mean? Is somebody going to die? You’re going to burn somebody in the fire? Is that it?”

  “Such a perceptive girl,” Charlotte complimented. “You are very intelligent; this is clear. I want you to be wise, for me. Can you do that? Do you believe that I want what’s best for you?”

  “I don’t know,” Sarah said. “I do think you don’t want to hurt me. But I’m sorry–I don’t trust you. I think you’re doing what you think is right, but I think they’ve so traumatized you that you can’t judge that anymore.”

  Charlotte’s expression became much less loving. “You are in no position to question my judgment, girl. I am trying to help you, because I believe you are worth helping…”

  “We are all worth helping!” Sarah was fully awake now. “None of this is all right! How can you tolerate it?”

  “Because it is the will of Rapan’na,” she answered sternly. “He is the Var’asha, and this is his Anur. You are under the mistaken belief you’re still in a republic where all the great men and women get together and debate, and have tea and cakes while making their corrupt deals. Well, it isn’t.”

  “Clearly not,” said Sarah. “Though it sounds like maybe you’re happy about that.”

  “You know nothing, girl,” she said. “The Udar are many things, but they don’t sell out their own.”

  Charlotte’s voice rose. “You weren’t at Strongstead. You didn’t see the badly-engineered chain guns that became useless because the defective ammunition jammed them. You didn’t hear the screams of the men made defenseless by rifles that barely even wounded the raptors which ate them alive. You couldn’t feel the foundation of the citadel as it gave way when the Udar tunneled under the flawed construction by a politically-connected, crony contractor, and you couldn’t smell the blood running in the corridors as the Udar baz’ahi warriors raced through the barracks building in a killing frenzy.”

  Sarah’s eyes grew wide as Charlotte’s voice became even more shrill.

  “I know of these things, because I was there. I saw my husband slaughtered in front of my eyes because the government of the people he was there to protect cut corners and hung him out like beef to be aged, and I saw my son’s throat cut as I pleaded for his life. And the people who allowed that horror call themselves the Peace Party.” She spat.

  “You may find these Udar to be savages, and what was done yesterday was savage,” she said. “But that is their way, which I am learning to accept because unlike Ardenia, Udar has honor and conviction. And when Rapan’na swore to me that if I would learn the ways of the Udar and serve as javeen to his Anur, he would give my daughters a life, we made a lasting bargain. That is more care and respect than the weasels in Principia ever showed.”

  She clapped her hands and two Udar women entered the tent.

  “You should consider these things, and your future,” she fumed. “You have an opportunity to join a nation that will care for you, and cherish you. Or, you can throw your life away on a failed dream of a doomed, corrupt empire. It is your choice.”

  Then the women were on her, gagging her and once again binding her arms behind her back in the usual miserable folded position before dragging her out of the tent. As they returned her to her line, she saw that the women were now attaching the frightened, miserable captives’ collars to a long pole.

  Coffles. They were being transported. This was really happening now.

  The captor women were coming through the lines with more marwai, and Sarah noted most of her fellow prisoners were accepting the liquid eagerly. They were becoming increasingly docile, and there was considerably less weeping and visible distress than she noticed the previous evening.

  Sarah accepted her own dose of marwai when it came. And her head began spinning slightly again.

  Is there really no rescue coming? she thought. The most advanced, strongest country on the planet and we’re inside our own borders and the cavalry isn’t going to come? We just all get to die or be whores for these savages, brutalized and brainwashed like that poor naked woman? Was she right that Ardenia doesn’t care?

  She considered what Charlotte had told her the night before. In their millions, she’d said. Were there really that many Udar warriors? She guessed there were. Nobody knew the population of Uris Udar; it wasn’t exactly a modern state like Ardenia, so they didn’t do a census and publish it. And the Udars had a huge country. It wasn’t as big as Ardenia, to be sure, and they didn’t have a lot of big cities–they didn’t really have cities at all, as Sarah understood it, other than the capital at Qor Udar. What they had was lots and lots of Anur like this one, which were basically mobile army camps where the whole population spent their days training for exactly what they were doing now. That the entire Udar nation, or a big chunk of it, had just up and decided to invade Ardenia, with its locomotives, and cannons, and chain guns, and big ships and even bigger cities where everybody had a rifle or a pistol, was unexpected in the extreme.

  Insane, she thought. It can’t actually be. How could they possibly win?

  On the other hand, if what Charlotte had said about Strongstead was true, the current situation was pretty scary. If what was supposed to be the greatest fortress in all the world was armed with defect
ive weapons and not even built correctly, maybe her country’s might was an illusion. She’d heard her father and uncle talking politics on a couple of occasions; neither man was a Peace Party member. Territorialists, she thought they were. Both had agreed the corruption of the Peace Party was a national scandal, and they’d been very concerned with the low priority the military was getting from Principia. That was something they both thought, as Army veterans living close to the frontier, was irresponsible bordering on treasonous. Sarah started to realize that her father’s sudden decision to inform her about the ways of the Udar, which he had previously refused to do, might have had something to do with the increase in his political discussions with the other landholders of the territory.

  The Dunnan’s Claim land rush, after all, followed a successful war that happened before the Peace Party took power. The Stuarts and their neighbors had all moved down to this part of the country when the military was conducting regular patrols and actively rooting Udar out of Dunnan’s Claim.

  When Sarah was barely more than a toddler, though–in fact, she guessed it must have been when her mother was still pregnant with Ethan–the Party of Enterprise, which had been the majority party, had split basically in half between the Territorialists and the Prosperitans, and that had led the Peace Party to power in a landslide. Their platform was headed by a plan to roll back the money being spent on the military and invest it in the Ardenian people, they said, and they greatly reduced the number of military bases and enlistments. The military had been an institution that almost all boys joined at nineteen, but those recruitments had dried up to a large extent. Both the Army and Navy had also retired a large number of their officers, and particularly the ones who had fought in Dunnan’s War; many of them were farmers now, having been given generous land grants in the South and West. The Peace Party had said they were going to complete all the fortresses in The Throat to go along with Strongstead, and they’d have an iron defense along the border, but only Strongstead had ever been finished. The four forts in The Throat were still, ten years later, only half complete and barely manned with soldiers.

  And they’ve probably all fallen, she thought.

  And while Udar attacks had been rare, they’d happened. Just last year there had been a raid on one of the farms in the hills south of Battleford, and an Udar war party had killed a farmer and one of his sons. The rest of the family had managed to escape, and the neighbors rode out with rifles to drive the Udar away. Then the Army showed up three days later and did a few patrols, assuring everybody it was all right.

  But it wasn’t, and the Udar probably knew there was this easy prize to be had in Dunnan’s Claim. It was provocative. And now there was the disaster she’d gotten herself caught up in, with 380 women from all these farms they’d been promised would be safe, prosperous places. Instead of that promise being honored, they were being dragged off to slavery or worse.

  And most of her family were dead.

  She was starting to see why Charlotte had turned on Ardenia like she had, and honestly, if she had to be with these people for a month after what had happened to her, she could understand how maybe she’d adopt a similar attitude. If you know you’re not going home and you don’t have anybody to go home to, she thought, then I guess you start thinking of the people you’re with now as home.

  Not to mention what it would do to her if they kept giving her the marwai, which made her resolve progressively weaker with every sip. A month of constant doses of that drug every day and she’d probably be addicted.

  That made her sad…and scared. It was as though she was starting to feel she’d lost her country and her identity.

  Then there were the raptors. For a long time, centuries in fact, the raptors had been the reason Ardenia was only really settled in the northeast and down the east coast. Venturing into the interior for any length of time was more or less suicide because of those giant birds.

  She’d seen one, or at least she’d seen a stuffed one. When she was a little girl her parents had taken the whole family to Trenory for the winter holiday, and while there they’d paid a visit to the Museum of the Wild, which had exhibits of every beast in the Ardenian wilderness. It was far too dangerous to carry a live raptor, of course, and thankfully they’d been more or less eradicated over the past hundred years, which opened up the interior and the Far West for settlement. The museum’s stuffed raptor, and the skeleton of another raptor they’d had on display, were more than enough to show her all she needed to see of those winged monsters, though.

  For the raptors were pure killing machines. They had a wingspan typically at least fifteen feet in length, with a torso half again as large as a man’s. Their talons were two feet long with a razor-sharp ridge at the bottom which could tear skin like paper with little effort. The raptors also had two-foot spines on a tail which protruded from their hind feathers; those spines emitted a liquid which had the effect of keeping blood from coagulating. If you were attacked by a raptor, it would rip you open with its talons and then inject you with that poison to insure you’d bleed to death.

  Then came the worst part. The raptor’s beak wasn’t a mouth like a normal bird. Instead it was more like a pipe with curved teeth on the end. It would insert its beak into the hole it made in you with its talon, after it injected you to make sure your blood would flow, and then it would just suck you completely dry. People or animals who’d been killed by raptors were left as nothing but a loose bag of bones. There might not be a worse way to go in all the world.

  And that was how her brother Matthew had likely gone.

  Charlotte said the Udar had somehow figured out how to use these demons as weapons. That made Sarah shudder. A month ago they’d been at Strongstead; with so much time since then the raptors could be almost anywhere right now. They could be in Trenory. Or Port William. They could even be attacking Principia. Sarah considered that and found it awfully ironic. She’d never been to Principia, and maybe raptors would get there before she could.

  It wasn’t the end of the world, though, she knew. Ardenians had eradicated the raptors, at least within their borders, through technology. Sarah knew the story of Arthur Thorne, the man most credited with ending the threat of the raptors in Ardenia. Six decades ago explorers had picked their way through to the Great Mountain Lake where Alvedorne currently sat, and reported back that the area was rich in silver, iron, coal, something called bauxite and Blood Oak timber, all highly prized commodities. That area had to be settled, and a locomotive line laid in. But to do any of that, the raptors which dominated the area had to be eliminated.

  Thorne, a retired general in the Army hired by the locomotive company, found a brilliant way to get the job done. He mounted several of the then newly-invented chain guns on train cars, and used those trains as a base while the railroad workers laid the tracks. The workers would come out and lay tracks, and the locomotive would inch along behind them as they were laid. When the raptors came, the workers would jump aboard the armored locomotive cars and wait while Thorne’s chain gunners would open up on the birds as they swooped in. They got very, very good at shooting raptors and killed them hundreds at a time.

  And what was interesting was that an evolutionary feature of the birds really aided in killing them off. Raptors had two fleshy pads hanging near the bases of their tails, and when they got excited they’d shake themselves to make those pads slap against their bodies, producing a loud thump-thump-thump sound. That was the signal for a raptor feeding frenzy, and the birds would come from miles and miles around when they heard it.

  But from a distance, that noise was a lot like the noise a chain gun made when it was firing. So when Thorne’s guns would open up on a few raptors with a thump-thump-thump sound as they started shooting, by the time they were done they’d killed hundreds of them, or in one day fifty-seven years ago, more than 2,000. The raptors were accustomed to descending on large herds or horses or cattle, or collections of people; but with Thorne’s men and their chain guns, it was the av
ian attackers who were suddenly the prey.

  And Thorne’s men knew that the massive birds were more than just predators that had to be destroyed. They knew what they had were probably the most valuable trophies on earth. So, since they were at the end of a rail line they brought up locomotives to come to the scene where the dead raptors lay, and they loaded the birds onto flatcars and brought them back closer to civilization. The city of Perseverance, which now had close to a million people, grew up largely on the raptor trade. It was where the locomotives would deposit the raptors to be stuffed and mounted, and then sold to rich people all over the country for thousands of decirans each. Thorne more than financed his operation selling stuffed raptors. He bought the entire rail line and financed its completion, and ended up founding the unbelievably rich city of Alvedorne, which at this point was apparently almost as prosperous as Principia, though only about a third as big.

  At the time of his death Thorne was the richest man who ever lived, and the Thornes of Alvedorne were still probably the wealthiest family in the whole country.

  Sarah had seen pictures of their estate along the shore of the Great Mountain Lake. It was the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen. When she was a child, she dreamed about living there.

  Nothing like that is in my future now, she lamented silently.

  The raptors could be wiped out, and probably would be, if they tried to attack a populated area, Sarah figured. That was true only if the Ardenians were ready, though; if they weren’t, a whole bunch of people would die. And she had no way to warn anybody about it, something that was killing her.

  Not that it ought to come down to me, she thought. Maybe if they’d done a better job of having the army ready, the raptors would have never gotten to Strongstead, or maybe Matthew and the garrison would have been able to defeat them.

  Her oldest brother was dead because of some crappy politicians in Principia who didn’t give him the support he needed while he was standing at the border defending the country. Wasn’t that something?