The Eternal Front: A Lines of Thunder Novel (Lines of Thunder Universe) Read online

  Goldros stared over Sethlan’s shoulder. They were only four feet apart, but the colonel spoke as if bridging a vast distance.

  Sethlan wondered what would happen if he leaned out of the colonel’s line of sight. Then he imagined simply shooting the man. It would be a service to the Haphan Overlords. Tachba soldiers who grew old on the front often started circling—went insane—in different ways. It was an unlucky accident that Colonel Goldros had gone still.

  A still officer triggered the superstitions lurking in every soldier. Goldros was immobile and half buried, like a corpse embedded in the trench wall. To credulous eyes, he was a golem of earth and blood, frozen but thinking, dead but speaking. Very suggestive to trench simpletons who saw only a vanishing distinction between life and death. It was a matter of time before the Haphan Overlords noticed Colonel Goldros’s madness and removed him. Until then, he would be regarded as a direct, inerrant channel to the supposed ancestors.

  Sethlan had the feeling that, to Goldros, the tongues were not a figure of speech. “Can you be specific, colonel? Or will any tongues do?”

  “I’ve sent you on raids every night this month. Before you, it was someone else. The men you lost have been paid for. While you fought and died, we discovered a hole in the Southern barbed wire. We have a path into their trenches.”

  Sethlan straightened.

  “This man waiting to the side—” Goldros didn’t indicate him, but left it to Sethlan to glance over. “This is Lieutenant Pleural, an intelligence officer from the 314th Observers. He will show you the opening. You are to clear the enemy trench quietly, without drawing attention. Then search. Find something that would make the Southies clever.”

  “Clever.”

  “The enemy has become altogether too clever, don’t you notice?” The colonel went still, then woke again. “The Southies are our cousins, but they are not like us. They are atavistic primitives. With Haphan beam weapons we could carve through them like pissing in snow, and our only concern would be their vast numbers and the stench of rotting meat. But each year the Southern Tachba tighten themselves. They’re like the boys we induct at ten or twelve. The intemperacy of youth is flensed away under fire. The child is matured by the trench. He knits himself into a man. If he lives long enough, he becomes clever, maybe wise. So too with the South.”

  Sethlan silently agreed. The Southern Tachba had always been individually murderous, even terrifying. Now, collectively, they were worrisome as well. They had perceptibly improved by imperceptible degrees.

  “Sethlan, our enemy is making fewer mistakes. Something has altered their minds. I am slowly learning what changed, and who changed them. The intelligence you recover from this trench raid may be crucial. We are losing the war.”

  “Yes, sir,” Sethlan said, disappointed again. They were always losing the war. It was the constant theme of the Haphans. After last night’s barrage, he couldn’t be paid to care.

  “Let me be specific, Sethlan. We are losing the war within six months. The South will break our line before spring. They will flood into Sessera’s territory and burn it to the ground. The Haphans will fall back in disorder and lose the other Tachba territories they control. The Overlords will be eradicated in a year, all their good works reversed—it will be like losing language and thought at one stroke. We will return to barbarism. We will be no different from the South.”

  Goldros caught Sethlan’s doubtful look. “You think I’m mad, but I am merely old.”

  Sethlan considered that. Madness would make distracting claims and waylay the truth. On the other hand, Goldros was old in a rare way. He was past fifty, in a world where most Tachba died without a single gray hair. Sethlan had no idea how an old, wise Tachba might behave. Perhaps he would be a dirt-covered statue with blazing eyes.

  “I am merely old,” Goldros continued, “and slightly mad.”

  Lieutenant Pleural, the intelligence officer from the 314th Observers, followed Sethlan back to his unit.

  Pleural was slightly mad himself, in the compulsive way that presaged full collapse. He touched the walls every three steps and muttered under his breath—breath that reeked of bourbon.

  On their path through the trenches, they passed groups of men rocking wordlessly, pacing interlooping circles, or sitting still and “thinking small.” It was a circus of maladaptation.

  We are all polluted, Sethlan thought. We are nothing but madness.

  The Haphan Overlords must have been overjoyed to discover his tractable and violent race. All they had to do to conquer half the world was land in giant space ships, kill every Tachba who attacked using spear and sword, and then give food to those who remained. The Pollution took care of the rest. It was as if his people had been explicitly twisted to believe everything the Haphans, or any higher authority, told them. They would obey until madness took them.

  Sethlan’s fugitive thought returned: Not all of us obeyed. The South fought back. The Haphans used their servitor Tachba to fight the southerners. Perhaps the Haphans even wanted this war. Perhaps this war was their cynical method of population control.

  Pleural laughed and pointed to a stacked pair of ammunition crates: Oggie-Gees balanced on top of Doggie-Gees. Offensive grenades over defensive ones. The difference between the two kinds was in their strength and timing. One was suited for advancing toward the enemy, the other was better for slowing pursuit.

  Sethlan saw nothing funny in the munitions crates and gave Pleural a cold glance. Officers were only transferred to an Observer unit when they were found useless for real work. The Haphans didn’t trust them to lead Tachba soldiers. Line officers found their variability unnerving. The front itself seemed to find them inedible, the spit-out gristle of the last great meal.

  Observer officers patrolled between the trenches, going out again and again until madness kept them from returning. In the rolls, these casualties were listed as the “finally dead.”

  Perversely, this thought eased Sethlan’s mind. As an expendable, Pleural explored the enemy trenches every night. He was probably the local expert on this sector of the front.

  When Sethlan found his unit, his remaining men had been gathered by Tejj and Amphy. They filled the narrow trench. Mud smoothed the folds and details of their front-line kit, and hanging dust blurred their features. The very air between them stifled sound. It was bloated with smoke, unbreathable and foul.

  No doubt Colonel Goldros’s order had already reached them through other channels. They knew their assignment. They might even know why tonight was important: they had a rare chance to enter Southern trench. To make the fight personal.

  Sethlan said, “Tonight it’s no kit, no lug. We travel light and fast.”

  “La, no kit, no lug,” Tejj repeated, turning to the men. “So says the captain, and pass the word.”

  His men swarmed up the trench walls and into the air. They slid through clouds of barbed wire, following lines of dark tape laid out earlier by scouts. Behind them came the faint creak of the ladders being lifted down again, like doors closing slowly.

  After years on the front and hundreds of sorties, the deranged landscape between the trenches presented no difficulty to Sethlan’s men. They kept tight order as they bellied over the dirt, even as visibility shrank to just a few yards.

  Lieutenant Pleural pointed out false tape which would send them the wrong direction. He indicated tripwires that would detonate nearby mines. He steered them clear of firing lanes and areas visible from the southern trenches. In under an hour, Pleural took them almost the entire fifty yards to the enemy line.

  The enemy barbed wire was in sight when the alarm sounded behind them.

  The alarm was simple, soup kettles rung by trenching tools. It was the North giving warning—the South never troubled over their own soldiers.

  “Gas!”

  Amphylon slapped Sethlan’s shoulder. “Passing the word, sir, and we have a gas attack.”

  They were huddled in a shell hole, waiting for Lieutenant Pleural to
return from a scout. Sethlan raised his head over the edge and glanced around. His men were a sheet of gray shapes on a grayer landscape. In the distance, more men he couldn’t see.

  His unit numbered seventy, down from ninety the night before. Down from two hundred at the start of the rotation. He had planned to pull some of them through alive. That wouldn’t happen now.

  He had seventy men. Seventy dead men.

  Tejj slid in beside him. “Southie gas falling, sir.”

  Sethlan noticed the numbness at the back of his throat. The smoke drifting through his unit was already tinged poison blue.

  “And no kit nor lug to be found,” Amphylon said.

  Their gas masks were back in the trenches because Sethlan had ordered them to travel light. Because Goldros had ordered him to enter the southern trench. Because Pleural had discovered a gap in the barbed wire…

  Because the Southies had opened it to lure them in.

  Because they had grown clever.

  “I would have brought my mask despite orders,” Amphylon said, “except I’m very disciplined. I’m downright admirable.”

  Oh, Amphy. A wizened old boot like Amphy would never feel the need to shut up. But Sethlan heard no blame in his voice, only grim humor. I am sorry, soldier.

  “Fall back?” Tejj prompted. “Charge up?”

  Sethlan craned his head to look north. The action made him wheeze. Fuck, it’s in my lungs.

  Their home trench was fifty yards away over slow and broken ground. The blue gas was already among them with its noisome smell. There would be no falling back.

  We are an utter write-off. Nothing would remain of Sethlan’s unit but a pile of unused equipment in the trench.

  “Gas!” His men passed the word again, with growing hysteria.

  “Orders, captain?” Tejj asked again, his voice tightly controlled.

  Sethlan swung back to his aide, two feet away but now indistinct. His vision blurred for lack of air. Sethlan ravaged his mind for inspiration, for any way out, while the gas worked into his lungs.

  The gas would pool in the lowest points, the craters and trenches. His men might survive, if only they could raise their chins high enough and breathe through a cloth. He didn’t need to say this. Anything he might have told his soldiers, they already knew.

  He watched his men climb to their feet. They stood in the billowing blue smoke like sentinels.

  Southie bullets began to cut them down.

  Hell and fuck and damn. That oar beetle. My poor boys.

  Sethlan said, “Orders. Tell the boys to breathe deep.”

  His words came out in gasps, but Tejj was no longer next to him.

  The strength left Sethlan’s arms. He collapsed on Amphylon, who was already dead beside him. With numb fingers he opened Amphy’s coat, and then nestled his face into the man’s chest. He wrapped the wax-lined fabric tightly around his head and pressed his mouth into the knit sweater Amphylon wore underneath, some gift from home. Sethlan breathed into the dead man.

  Sethlan’s lungs flooded with pus and blood, but he did not perish. Instead, he drowned for hours and hocked up endless streams of phlegm. At daybreak, a pair of northern scouts stumbled across the fresh new charnel patch of his unit, already glistening with oar beetles. They heard Sethlan bubbling under Amphy’s corpse and pulled him out. They were twins, friendly strangers, curious about his pain. The smarter of the two bound Sethlan’s hands so he would not tear his throat out.

  They brought Sethlan before Colonel Goldros. In his war for air, Sethlan was only aware of two eyes glittering in a dusty face. The face belonged to a mud-caked statue that merged into the trench wall.

  The face spoke. “Good service, boys. This one will make a difference.”

  “Which he’s mostly phlegm, sir.”

  “Tag the captain for the good Haphan medicine, not our usual crud. You found that Tejj boy wandering between the trenches earlier?”

  “Which he’s around here somewhere, crying then laughing. The men are keeping their distance.”

  “Show the captain to him, let him wail, and then tell him I want him for my aide. It’s his choice, but he’s too good to waste. The boy could lead a brigade someday.”

  The boots didn’t like that kind of maneuvering. “Really, colonel? Which even a phlegmy captain needs a helpie.”

  The colonel went still again, for so long this time that the boots turned uncomfortable. The colonel didn’t even appear to be breathing.

  Finally, Colonel Goldros said, “Very well. Let Tejj take care of him in hospital as his lungs grow back. Let’s hope the captain has kept his sanity and keeps it a few months yet.”

  3

  Gawarty

  Gawarty Lenard Tawarna checked his dress uniform in the mirror. He was fresh out of officer’s school, a newly-made lieutenant in the Haphan Imperial Expeditionary Land Forces. He even had his first assignment: Liaison to the 314th Observers in Ville Emsa, the capital of the province of Sessera. He would report to Haphan Southern Intelligence everything he learned from his unit. In the orders it wasn’t spying, nothing so crude. He was to invigilate, nothing more.

  He added the finishing touch to the uniform, the glittering red and silver Sash of Expectancy, Order of the Standing Navigator. It was a uniform detail that dated back to the earliest days of the Haphan expansion, pre-spaceflight. In fact, it was so old and odd, nobody quite knew what it did anymore, and this lent it most of its effect, because who would dare antagonize a prestigious sash-holder?

  Gawarty wasn’t proud. The sash was one of the few recognitions he’d ever received, even though he was the first son in the—theoretically—most influential family on Grigory IV, after the local empress and her husband. That same family made him toxic to the officer review board. Toxic in that polite way where everybody knew he was blameless but they thwarted his future nonetheless. Chalk it up to his father, the front-line general with subversive ideas.

  The sash looked good on his shoulder. It broadened his chest and made his waist look narrower than it was. In fact, the entire uniform did wonders for him. He looked imposing, when in fact he was built like a stick.

  Still, he would have traded the sash and the uniform to have his hair back. During the last year of academy, the cadets were allowed almost any single freedom. Gawarty had grown his hair down to his shoulders. At twenty he discovered his hair was curly, and that it changed color in the sunlight. It also set him off from the other student officers at the school, which was useful for being recognized by girls in the town bars.

  That morning, Gawarty’s mother had given him his trench cut. It was a family tradition but nobody was enthusiastic. Lady Tawarna was tight-lipped and quiet as she took his hair; Gawarty watched it rain to the parquet floor with dark thoughts; the maid-in-waiting fretted to see drudge work being done by the mistress. All the while, the family’s stylist hovered nearby, flinching visibly in Gawarty’s vision, his hands twitching to correct Lady Tawarna’s work.

  His mother had cried at the end.

  “What’s done is done,” Gawarty told his image in the mirror.

  His uniform was about as perfect as it would ever be, so he turned away and looked at his bedroom. All the pieces of his childhood, collected and now largely ignored. He was taken by an urge to smash the furniture to pieces, but he waited it out. The urge would pass, as the others had in recent days. He was going to war, that was all. It was not the end of his life, merely the start of his service. There had never been a different destination for him.

  Downstairs, the party was in full swing. It was a dual-purpose celebration, first to send him off to the front, and second to welcome his older sister who was back home on a brief leave so society would remember her. Toxic family or no, her appearance in Falling Mountain had drawn a slew of eligible bachelors to the party.

  Gawarty found Jephesandra Liu Tawarna posed against the pianoforte, impressive in her grays even though they were a study in casual disarray. She was a full colonel running Native A
ffairs in Ville Emsa, so he had to salute his own sister. She answered with a wave of her cocktail.

  “Warty, that sash will get you nowhere.”

  “Jephia, I’m not planning to wear it down at the trench.”

  “We call it ‘on the line,’” she said. The men surrounding her tittered, and it sounded nervous. The war wasn’t much mentioned in elevated circles.

  Gawarty ignored them. “I hope it gets me a private cabin on the train at least. If a Sash of Expectancy can’t do that, what’s it good for?”

  “It keeps the heirs of troublesome families quiet,” Jephia said. “Let me give you advice for your last hours in civilization. I wish someone had told me this. Steal everything you can. Load up with bottles from the cellar. Leave most of your new uniforms behind…you won’t need the dinner uniform, the Sunday uniform, the brunch uniform, the theater uniform, nor any of the swords. If you must ever dress, it’s simple grays and whatever you might beg from friends. Most Haphan officers never get to the front, and they’ll lend you all the wardrobe you need.”

  “We have winter soon. Do I need my cold-weather gear?”

  Her eyes slid to the side and she grinned. He recognized this from when they were children, and it meant she was about to say something impolite. “When it gets cold, we strip the dead, you see. There are always a few coats handy.”

  Her admirers stopped whispering. Any normal Haphan socialite would have immediately walked that back and hid it from view. There was no meaning that could be conveniently overlooked or eased past the Haphan sensibilities in all their specific delicacies. It was like breaking a blister at the dinner table, or adding both lemon and milk at high tea. His sister, however, was nothing if not perverse. She continued in a carrying voice.

  “Yes, sorry, Warty. You find a cold body where the lice and the oars have moved on, and you pull off the coat. Usually the arms are eaten loose by bugs. Anyway, you have a new coat, just give it a shake to get rid of the last of the owner. You will never want for covering. It is a cold weather paradise, trench coats grow complete from the earth.”