Two Pages a Day: Sixty-Eight

            We had our navy floating within a week. Or whatever an accumulation of oversized rowboats is called. Then as reward I had them practice maneuvering in the harbor, which was as close to the city as I ever let the men return. They were mine now, and this was also as close to rest as they were ever going to get. But they grew nervous when it became clear I was simulating navigation around many obstacles and currents. I finally pressed the issue.

            “Why are you afraid of the swamp?” I asked Ash, the first young man I’d met at the Temple. I’d made him into something of a lieutenant. He was by far the most recovered. “I landed alone in the middle of it and walked through unharmed.”

            He swallowed, eyes big. “You are very fortunate, Guardian Vala.” Fortunately, the general term for military personnel on Earth had become a high honorific here. Thaeron’s Guardians had been a circle of military peers of that rank such that no higher standing was possible.

            He went on. “There are creatures in the swamp that are not natural to this world. Leviathans. Apes the color of the forest. Swarms of vampiric fish. Then there are the usual obstacles of a swamp: disorientation, disease, drowning or entrapment. Redmarak is not safe. Beyond that, it is difficult to say.” 

            I averred that he should try.

            He swallowed again, a gesture I was coming to know well. “Guardian, when the floating cities of Redmarak fell, it was the greatest battle the Augers had ever known. Three million died. Three million in three days. It was the place where the nightwind first fell from the sky. Never before had this happened. We never returned. We did not go back. We are not Augers anymore. But the place is still a scream within our souls.”

            Well. Curiouser and curiouser. You never imagined the enemy had psychologies of any kind. Not when their whole modus was to infiltrate yours.  What must it have felt for the fifteen million they lost taking the world Centauris? Or, not even on Earth, where casualties had been too large and swift to calculate, but what about just Cibola? Where we killed thousands every single day for two years? And then drove them back?

            I nodded once, slowly, a gesture of Jerem Cozak’s. “You are not Augers anymore. And we need Redmarak. But I promise you I will not rest until this entire world is a primal scream for the ones who did this to you.”

            He nodded, eyes wide again. I plowed ahead.

            “Have the men stop maneuvers. Navigation practice is complete. We break camp tonight.”

            He looked at me, incredulous. “Our Guardian?”

            “I am no friend to fear. Had I known this we would have left two days ago.”

            He nodded twice quickly. “Of course, Guardian.” He turned to go.

            “Ash,” I said. He stopped. “I am not prone to explanation. Don’t expect it again. But I welcome input. If you know anything like this about the men or about this world that I might not, do not hesitate. Tell me. I am a stranger here. I won’t let that get us all killed.”

            A second thought struck. “I understand that there were refugees released from Redmarak before the floating cities fell. If there are any among those who are also captains, send them to my tent this evening.” I had them divided ten to a boat, sleeping and working and rowing together. “Tell them to bring their dinner.”

            “Yes, our Guardian.” He crossed his arms then extended his hands, the Thaeronian military salute. I’d have to think about reforming it. These men were not like any other soldiers the world had ever known. Not the least of which because they had no military training. They were mine, and mine alone, to do with as I chose. I went into my tent and wished I knew what that was. 

Two Pages a Day: Sixty-Six

           Whoever wants, meet me on the Temple stair at dawn. The rest of you, go and build this city again. That is needed. I just can’t help you. But whatever you do, the time of being broken is over. It’s time for our occupation to begin.”

            There. I’d met them with the best steel I had. Then I slipped inside my tent and silently wept. I was the hope the universe had handed them. Thank the gods, you mostly do it with your tone.

            The next morning, I stepped outside. A few hundred sat on the Temple stairs. Everyone else had gone. Of who had stayed, it was mostly who you’d expect: a majority of young men, (including the very first I’d met), some fiery women, a surprising number of pubescent youths I’d have to find good use for.  

            My morning speech to them was shorter. “Let’s begin,” I said.

            I concentrated on names. 

Chapter Seven

Elmy,

            We built boats. We could have scavenged the Temple to do so, of course. Buildings like that never fully burn. But I had said that the time of living off the dead was over. So we climbed down from Ariel and went out into the hinterlands to cut trees. The whole valley was a patchwork of farms, all with easy access to the river or a major road. Each was separated by a woodlot or a fencerow. It was very picturesque. You got the feeling that someone had planned all this from his vantage atop the plateau. I had the men cut selectively.

            They acted funny about constructing the frames. When I suggested shallow rather than deep draft, they grew momentarily hesitant. When it became clear we were building for far more than our few hundred, they looked deeply puzzled. Then, of course, they simply continued work. They were young. They were feeling their power come back to them. They had a cause worth working for. And I encouraged no dissent. We worked from earliest dawn till the last of the sun faded from the sky. And we did so gladly.

            I will never understand the phenomenon of leadership. People do things for no other reason than I tell them to. Yet nothing marks me as distinct. My physical presence does not overwhelm. I am no beauty, and my genius has never staggered anyone. My rhetorical skills pale in comparison to the best of the Academy. And my field experience is brief and erratic in the extreme – I am no old and seasoned hand. Anyone, most likely, could have my ideas and speak my concerns. But I’m the one who says them. I’m the one who decides to go. Others follow. So I try to be reasonable, if not brilliant. I try to be fair, if not spectacularly insightful. I do not seek command, but I love it when all the work is humming.  

            Just because I don’t understand my power, Elmy, doesn’t mean I won’t try to take advantage. 

Two Pages a Day: Sixty-Four

           “I’m here to make sure no one ever does that to you again,” I said.

            He didn’t say anything. From time to time I heard him crying. I learned as an officer not to press these matters. After a while a woman straggled along, looking confused. I motioned for her to sit beside us. She did, rearranging her long dark hair as she sat down.

            “It’ll be okay,” I said to them. “They left you here because they believe you cannot fight. I want you  because together we can take back your world.”
            She didn’t respond just yet, but then I did not want her to. I wanted my words rattling around inside her brain as the shock passed, as she got back on her feet. I wanted her to associate her strength with mine. An old trick, but the Academy’s used it to build officers for millennia. They used it on you, Elmy. They used it on me. And they meant it every time.

            When the third person came, I shared out my supplies. This is how you build an army, not the fighting machine, but the men and women who make it up. Discipline comes later. These people needed care. They came by ones and twos and threes. Some had met the politician or the poet. Most had just met some other soul wandering toward the Temple. I welcomed them all. I circulated, offering water, a few moment’s silence. Now and then I hugged. When darkness fell, I gently organized those most well—they were generally the longest there—into making a bonfire on the square. I made a brief speech about helping others in the wake of horrors that cannot be lived through alone. Then I returned to the cache to get more food. I had the first young man see to getting bedrolls.

            It went like that for two more days. People started talking. They wondered how their world had fallen. They asked me why the enemy would do all this. Some spoke with the gleam of vengeance in their eyes. I kept the bonfires burning. Each evening, I declared a little feast. Scavenging gave people something to do. Which was good, because the food in the cache was soon exhausted. By the third dusk I guessed we were nearly a thousand strong. I looked at my motley crew. Men and many women, mainly young. Quite a few children, dirty and malnourished. That explained the surprised looks I’d been getting about the food. Apparently, the nightwind isn’t much for basic human needs.  

            But we would deal with that later. Right now, I had to convince these people to leave the comfort of what was probably the only home they’d ever had.

            “You’re not fighters,” I said. “I know that. In fact it’s pretty clear why the enemy left you behind. They wanted you to breed. They wanted more soldiers to throw at more free worlds. But that’s over now. The nightwind is gone. Your hearts are yours again. This is your city again. These are your children, now and forever. I can help it be so that they will never belong to anyone but you. I certainly insist they do not come with us. 

            But I have to ask the rest of you. There are more of the enemy coming. And they don’t mean to set foot on this world. They want to strike it from orbit. They want to wipe your city off the map. And the only way to stop them is if we take back this whole world for ourselves. We need ships to reach the stars. I know where those ships are found!

            You’re tired. I know. You’re scared. I am, too. But I’m not from here. This is not my world. I’m from the Earth. Where we beat the enemy. The Augers tied to take our last free city and they failed! For two years they tried and they still failed! We drove them back! And you have every weapon we did. And you have more! You have the White Swarm! You will walk through the nightwind! And it will not touch you!

            Take your time. Decide tonight what you will do. Then sleep well. Because war mostly is not fighting. War is mostly work. And I will give you work. I will give you more work than you have ever known. But it will be for something. It will be for this city, which heals and only heals. It will be for your children, so that darkness will not come for them again.

Page a Day: Hiatus

Page a Day is on vacation until July 8, when it will return as Two Pages a Day! So it's a great time to catch up!

Page a Day: Sixty-Three

            And stood. That white mist had been thick when I entered the cache. It was absurdly heavy now. I barely saw the hand before my face. Around me total silence fell. Something clicked, and I understood. Some of the so-called fog came out of my own nostrils. All through the poet’s journal there’d been prophecies about some new machine, something white and cloudy. Now I’d found it in this White Swarm.  

            Or it had found me. White dust had covered the poet and politician in their coffin. In the Well where the provisions were, I had thought it odd to see my breath in a room that was not cold. But it was just the first time in this city that I hadn’t had an energetic barrier. I had been breathing those machines. For a moment, standing there in the center of Ariel, I wondered what they did.

            Then it hit me: no nightwind. There was no nightwind anywhere I saw. I reflected on what Jerem Cozak had said. Damned neat, these new machines. 

            The Temple of the History of the Profusion was just across the square. Spires and towers, a ruined mess. There’d been a fire during the riots or perhaps the city’s fall. No one had rebuilt. I thought that odd. On my world, the nightwind built the Augers whole cities of barracks and warehouses. Maybe on Thaeron they were tired of all the striving. This wasn’t a warring world, not anymore. I walked over.

            There was someone already there. A young dark-haired man, large and slumped over on the front steps, his skin more than a little off-key. I recalled that nanotechnical invasion is rarely kind to the physiologies of anyone.   

            He blinked when he looked up. “There’s no one to take care of me,” he said.

            ‘I know,” I said. I sat down beside him. “Me neither.”

            I reflected. On Earth I’d gotten out just ahead of this problem. How are you managing it, Elmy? How do you enclose ten million souls who once were Augers, but were supposedly no more? It changes your brain. That’s the purpose of the nightwind. But when you take the machines out, does the mind remain the same?

Page a Day: Sixty-Two

            He closed his eyes. “This world was once rumored to have starships that bent light and time around themselves, that were lost when the very last of the Profusion fell. You’re going to find them.”

            I blinked. “Aren’t stories like that mostly legend?” I asked. “After three days and nights he was healed?’ That stuff’s boilerplate on Earth.”

            He shrugged. “Perhaps,” he said. “But you are standing where that thing occurred. Let oceans enfold you.”            

            I assumed that last was ritual farewell, because he turned again and left. So went my first meeting with the politician Jerem Cozak, now turned warlord. I do not remember yet if there were any others. I did wonder what he was going to do in the next sixty days. Those boats must be a damned long ways away.

            I sat and wondered. I had not been looking for an army. I had not wanted any strategy. Most of all, I was not eager to lead more men and women to their deaths. My success to failure ratio as a general was still dead even. And the enormity of the defeat was still outstripped only by the accidental nature of my triumph. No matter what the people of Cibola say, my dear lieutenant.

            And I needed to decide that bit about the nightwind. It’s the thing you always fear, even more than death. That you’ll be infected. That you’ll turn. That you’ll never say no to the Augers again, because the nightwind takes that desire and possibility away. We fought against it in Cibola for two long and bitter years.  I sent tens of thousands to their deaths so that it would not come. And the citizens of Cibola championed me, not for my tireless services, but because I brought the nightwind down in clouds of ash.

            I stood. I gathered supplies in one of the empty sacks. Well, if the nightwind got me I wasn’t going to do much on its behest. I climbed the wall with no weapon, no armor, and my tactical knowledge of the Earth now five years out of date. Stupidly, I held my breath. I crawled up on dry hard land. 

Page a Day: Sixty-One

            “Priest?” he asked.

            “A minor religious functionary during the Profusion. It seems to be a medium-level government official on that world.”

            “Always fear the bureaucrats.”

            “He seems to be kept alive, coincidentally, mostly by the nightwind. Half his body’s made of the stuff.” I hesitated. Here was where the information from the message ended and detail from a very vivid deep-space dream began.

            “He also seems to have located a relic near the galactic rim, a piece of technology far beyond the capacity of our species. Not even the Profusion could have made it. It allows him to utterly control the nightwind and to have a measure of control over even worse things. Nine worse things, to be exact.”

            He shuddered. I saw the darkness in his eyes. He knew, then. They’d been to Thaeron, too.

            “When you came to this city, you came from the south?” he asked. I nodded. “You passed then through the cliffs that mark the entrance to this valley. Did you see two great towers overhead, tall and thin, atop the mountains on either side?”

            I nodded. “You called them the Needles, I believe. They are actually weapons for sub-orbital defense. Earth has them around the cities, but you have them all over each continent. They destroyed my fleet. But they fight specifically against invasion. They forced the Augers to be indirect, conquering your world. But they will not save you from this fleet. Those ships will never come in range. They don’t need to.”

            He sighed. For a moment, I believe his head hung. Then he laughed.  “If we succeed, then towers will not matter. If we fail, then nothing we could possess would have saved us anyway.”

            “Considering our respective weaponry? I’d bet on the latter at this point.”