Year 145 After Landing Day
Two officers of the Haphan Empire strolled through the city at dusk.
The officers were not on friendly terms, though this could not be read from their relaxed pace or the words passing between them. Officers of the empire tended not to parade their emotions. Indeed, they pressed the other direction: the stronger the dislike, the more impenetrable the civility.
The city was quiet but this was changing. It was the hour before the pubs opened and the soldiers on leave would arrive with a flood of mayhem. The streets were tenuously peaceful, as if the city had just fallen lightly asleep on the train but would soon begin its loud, embarrassing snoring. In years past, the shift from daytime to nighttime military life had been deemed the evening ‘battle-rhythm,’ as if the city were part of the war. Now it was no longer figurative. The trenches of the eternal front had encroached to within sight of the rooftops. The real war was a mere hour’s brisk walk, and one bridge crossing, from the Ville Tiremsa train station.
Normally, the lines moved with great circumstance if they moved at all. The eternal front was a vast system of earthworks and trenches gouged into the land. It spanned the continent, a battlefield a thousand miles long but sometimes only three hundred yards across. The trenches were fed from both sides by inexhaustible populations of Tachba soldiers. It was not a setting for quick and agile shifts across the landscape. The most tolerable sectors of the eternal front were contested but immutable, as if the armies on each side were massive animals in a shoving match, and their horns had locked. The earth under their feet had long ago been destroyed for traction: trees, streams, hills, farms, and towns all scraped flat, kicked into mud, cauterized by artillery with the trenches moving not an inch. Some sectors of the eternal front had not shifted for sixty years. It was a sublimely predictable war, exactly what the empire desired.
Except in the last several months, in the Ville Tiremsa sector, the lines had shifted with a fluidity never before witnessed. The entire construct of the eternal front, the whole agreement, designed to never yield in either direction—it had suddenly turned slippery. At a dreadful cost of men and materiel, the South had edged the trenches ever closer to the city. Now it felt as if the eternal front had taken over, as if it sensed the city would be its next great meal. The momentum of change was noticed in the constant digging of new trenches and the maps that had to be redrawn each week.
For Ville Tiremsa it was a season of mounting strain. The artillery barrages, which the city had heard as simple dumb thunder for time immemorial, could now be heard as individual shells screaming across the sky. The retired artillery pheezes who gathered on the street corners even knew the names of the great guns that fired them. A month ago the bellow of repeating rifles could be distinguished. Two weeks ago the crack of small arms fire from both sides, attenuated and high, had started carrying into the streets. Day by day, the war tightened like a noose around the city.
The two officers turned to the edge of town. They did not want to be noticed for what they planned next.
They tapped their reserves of polite conversation and exhausted the last hour, and then the streets filled with Sesseran soldiers on leave. With no travel time between Ville Tiremsa and the front, the soldiers had almost their entire four days between rotations to challenge the beleaguered city, which increased the chaotic drunkenness and the end-of-days feeling.
Second Lieutenant Seul Tan Luscetian was the shorter, leaner, lower-ranked officer of the pair. He watched the chaos with a controlled face, and moved with a stiff, upright posture. He was fresh from the front himself and still wrapped in the war. Between the dangerously frail trenches, the reflected uncertainty and wildness on the soldiers in the street, and his own unquiet thoughts, he hardly felt present at all. He felt as if he was navigating the sidewalks by periscope.
No matter how crowded the streets became, Luscetian and his fellow officer had a yard of empty space around them. This was the law of prescribed distance between the Haphans and any servitor, and its purpose was to prevent what the military code deemed “Tachba accidents of nature.”
Luscetian wanted the prescribed distance to be waived. He devoutly wished for an accident of nature. Yes. He wanted one of these soldiers to jostle him, draw confused, and start an outright brawl. A few good knocks to the chin would break him out of his mood. Who am I kidding? One friendly jab from any of these towering louts would knock him flying and he’d wake up in a hospital, too dazed to even have a good story out of it.
He needed to forget those concerns he had temporarily left at the front. He needed to forget the specter of ‘Hutmoses Kingdom,’ the devastatingly effective Southie army that had made all these recent gains against the empire. And he most certainly should forget the politicking of vainglorious desk-bound Haphan officers, who seemed to be doing their level best to lose Ville Tiremsa through partisan infighting.
He needed to put all of this aside and prepare himself, because of how he was spending one of his rare nights in the city. Luscetian was going to fight a duel.
“We are certainly in the apocalypse,” Luscetian’s counterpart remarked. “I’ve been in Ville Tiremsa for so long that I can remember when the front was two days away and we barely saw any boots on leave.”
“It must pain you to see the city in these straits, Major Tommarian,” Luscetian said, though he knew how the man would reply. Major Nureat Luc Tommarian was an outspoken loyalist, always one of the loudest but in recent weeks buoyed by the anti-Sesseran sentiment that had taken hold of the Haphans in Ville Tiremsa.
“It pains me? I think not. This madhouse is the inevitable state of the Polluted. We can make disappointed clucking sounds, but we cannot be surprised by them.” Tommarian nodded at the line of bruised and bloody soldiers strewn along the edge of the sidewalk.
In the parlance of the eternal front, those men were called ‘listers,’ the night’s aggregation of wounded boots that would appear on the sick lists. The night was just starting, but most of this crowd had walked from the trenches and they still carried their weapons, so even the regular innocuous brawls would quickly turn deadly. At the moment the listers were cheerful complainers, more bruised than bleeding and somehow already safely drunk, but that would change as the night wore on and more casualties joined their ranks. Just before dawn, Ville Tiremsa’s streets would fill with corpse carts and the men who had died on the sidewalks would be carried away. The Haphans had a special actuarial table to calculate rates of attrition during leave.
Before Luscetian could reply, they were both jostled from behind. A drinking crew of Sesseran trenchers, grasping each other arm-to-shoulder so they wouldn’t separate in the crowds, had intersected with a drinking crew of artillerymen. Normally this would lead to a spirited discussion and perhaps a few blows as they sorted themselves out, but tonight the city had a curt and hunted feeling. The soldiers simply tangled together, two lines that refused to release their grips on their comrades.
As Luscetian watched, these men were all struck at once by an odd, pressing urgency to free themselves. There was a madness behind their eyes, and when the two lines could not disentangle they dropped into a close-quarters brawl. It was harrowing to behold. Even though the men had room to spare on the sidewalk at that moment, they struggled with half-uttered shouts as if they were drowning in a well.
They are just men, Luscetian thought. Every soldier on the street was as human as Luscetian himself, but that wasn’t the full truth. They were also Polluted. They were afflicted at a genetic level, twisted into soldiers for a long-ago interstellar war. In their distant past, some unknown higher race, called the Antecessors for lack of anything better, had torn this stolen tribe of humans apart and rebuilt it into a capable, disposable fighting force. But then the Antecessors had disappeared, and the Tachba had been left to fester on Grigory IV. Generation over generation, their genetic twisting had gone awry. These Tachba soldiers were men, Luscetian knew, but they were men who were only ever one breath away from madness, mayhem, and murder.
Now the two drinking crews were inextricably mired. They strained against each other like a knot pulling tight. Trench knives and boot swords appeared in their hands.
Luscetian looked away.
“Case in point.” Tommarian shook his head. “You stack pressure on a Haphan and we ring like a bell. You stack pressure on these Tachba and you had better turn and run. I don’t care if Sesserans are supposedly the best of the Tachba, they’re little better than animals underneath. The crime happened thousands of years ago, Luscetian, but these Tacchies aren’t the victims, they are only the evidence that wasn’t cleaned up.”
Luscetian already felt low at the sight of the soldiers slaughtering each other. Worse was turning away from it and beholding two similar fights playing out ahead of them. Even worse still was Tommarian expecting him to defend the soldiers.
This was the crux of the disagreement between the two officers. Major Tommarian the loyalist wanted the empire’s servitor Tachba to be animals or automatons, but Luscetian was the loyal opposition and he knew they were full people, only burdened with an affliction they did not deserve. The distinction impacted everything from the care and feeding of the soldiers, to the strategies employed on the eternal front, to the freedoms granted the autonomous Tachba provinces under the empire’s control. Each of these viewpoints accrued decisions, and in Luscetian’s mind, every decision either improved or tainted the operating soul of the empire.
Luscetian’s unbidden thought: these Sesserans could make it easier on me. He wished, no doubt alongside Tommarian, that the Haphan Empire had never landed 145 years ago to establish a colony on the planet. Not that they’d had a choice; it had been a one-way convoy to planet Grigory IV.
“I never mind hearing your kind of talk, Tommarian,” he said. “You only see the Sesserans on the few nights a month they get to be away from the trenches. Thirty days on rotation, four days leave, when it’s even observed. You would be mad with relief too. You would be drunk beyond recognition.”
“You fight alongside the savages in the trenches,” Tommarian answered lightly. “The difference between them and the empire is that I don’t see you stabbing and killing your fellows.”
“But look where we’re going,” Luscetian pointed out. They were nearly at the dueling grounds. “Imagine if you spent even a moment actually fighting for the empire, Tommarian. Even five minutes in the trenches beside our Sesserans and you’d be a changed man. It happens every time we get a visit from an armchair despot and it’s beautiful to witness. You, Tommarian, are never more than five minutes away from enlightenment. Five minutes and an hour’s walk to the trenches.”
“I receive an observation of myself!” Tommarian’s chuckle was dismissive and somewhat forced. “If it were that easy there would be more loyal opposition like you, I think.”
There’d be more of us if we weren’t all fighting in the trenches, Luscetian thought, but it was argumentation more than truth. Watching the trenches from far away did seem to make officers like Tommarian into confirmed loyalists, people who wished the servitors to be biddable and expendable. Fighting in the trenches did not have the opposite effect, however. The eternal front only seemed to reduce one’s certainty, loyalist and opposition alike.
“It’s already quite clear to me, thank you,” Tommarian continued. “Why visit your trenches when I can see it play out in the streets? Everything I need for my ‘enlightenment’ is right here, and uncolored by your too-close association with the servitors.” His eyes rose to the sky, across which hung the pall of smoke and dust from the trenches. “It’ll be for the best, Luscetian. When we let the South take this place, we will release a thousand Haphan administrators for better duties. I’m one of them. Myself and eighty officers in Indigenous Jurisprudence, we will never have to listen to the Sessies complain about each other again. As if the rule of law could ever mean anything to these psychotic—”
“I wouldn’t be wrong to think we have arrived,” Luscetian said.
They glanced around. They had left the wider streets and the throngs behind. Here there was nothing to attract the soldiers on leave and it was quiet again. The dueling ground was a long narrow meadow near the edge of Ville Tiremsa, bordered by the wooden shanty town that spilled into the swampland in the North. Some Haphan oversight office kept this particular field clear, and the constabulary prevented squatters and new buildings from encroaching on it.
“We have indeed arrived.” Tommarian shook his arm to loosen it. “I believe you said I am ‘censorious and demeaned in one face’?”
“Not quite, Tommarian.” Luscetian was too proud of his insult to let it be misquoted. “I observed the most irregular combination of censorious, cretinous, and cruel in one drooling, lopsided countenance. ‘Demeaned’ is your word for yourself.”
“And I believe this was for the honor of your unit of Sesseran soldiers? The honor of them!” Tommarian produced a pitying smile. “You called me out because I mentioned a general flaw that might apply to your men.”
“You said that all Sesserans are cowards and a blight upon the empire, because they are not properly defending the trenches. The very trenches you have never witnessed with your own eyes.”
Tommarian sighed. “Yes, that sounds like me.”
He drew his whip rapier with a flash, and Luscetian rapidly opened the distance between them. He drew his own weapon and squeezed the handle. A current chugged briefly into his hand, announcing that the blade had gone live.
The whip rapiers were simple rods of flexible steel, rebated at the tip to limit the possibility of drawing blood. That said, blood would be drawn if it came to it. There were any number of exploits to break a blade. Luscetian had seen Tommarian let his weapon become trapped under an adversary’s arm, where it bent double just so, and snapped into a shorter, sharper weapon. Even if this man didn’t break his blade, there was still the primary purpose of the whip rapier, to deliver the electrical shock when the tip touched the skin. It was strong enough for permanent nerve damage and disfigurement.
Normally in the modern Haphan Empire, the notion of dueling was considered gauche, too much in earnest to be quite respectable. The uptick in Haphan duels in Ville Tiremsa was another indicator of how far things had fallen. As the eternal front strangled the city and the politics among the Haphans escalated, so too had the frequency of duels among the officers. Major Tommarian had, with tricks like broken blades, maimed one officer and disfigured three others in the past weeks, silencing their opinions. Tommarian the loyalist hardliner could now be as loud and offensive—and influential—as he pleased, because no one dared to challenge his views.
No one except Second Lieutenant Seul Tan Luscetian, who looked like a clerk, and whose family name was so besmirched he might as well have been Sesseran himself.
Luscetian welcomed the other man’s confidence. He deflected the first few probes with delayed, off-time parries. He made sure to get everything wrong—he moved his hand before his feet on defense, and his feet before his hand when he attacked. He sometimes forgot to yield distance altogether, and at one point Tommarian nearly struck him without intending to do so, almost a kind of victory-by-accident that the man seemed to find amusing.
As the duel heated, Tommarian’s reserve fell away and his face filled with marveling glee. He clearly thought he had lucked into an officer without proper training. This Luscetian fellow was probably one of those self-multiplying upstarts from the lower castes, the type that had earned a battlefield distinction after a close call in the trenches. By being too stupid to avoid the dangerous edge of the war, he thought he could now plague the real officers with his uncultured, egalitarian wishfulness. Yes, this Luscetian had probably dismissed whip rapier fencing as an aristocratic affectation, a kind of dancing for non-athletes. He had no inkling of the subtleties and hidden powers of the electric blade, which specifically Tommarian’s renowned virtuosity could unlock.
…Luscetian followed Tommarian’s thoughts precisely. He’d understood this man before letting himself be called out to the grounds. Indeed, Luscetian very nearly heard Tommarian as he would describe this encounter that night. That contented, vacant expression on his face probably meant he was composing the words right now.
Luscetian caught the next attack to his flank in a hard block. It was a move called a destroying parry, the end of a sweep from the high line over the breast, to the low line at the hip. It ended with his palm facing down, the wrist locked, like slamming his hand on a table.
For a duel fought with thin flexible wands of steel it was as conclusive as a deflection could be, except it wasn’t the kind of parry that deflected, it captured. It entangled Tommarian’s blade in the wide base of Luscetian’s whip rapier. It ended the loose to-and-fro between the men.
Luscetian loved this parry for its raw, stupid, risky temerity. He was very good at finding the proper place for it in an encounter. Definitive as a right hook, it was as if Luscetian had crushed Tommarian’s probing attack by swinging a trench shovel. Tommarian nearly dropped his weapon from the solid impact and the surprise.
As Tommarian fumbled, Luscetian tapped the back of the man’s wrist, above the dueling glove.
The air sizzled with discharge.
Tommarian gasped and drew his weapon back, swinging it in a circle to fend off Luscetian’s blade. Tommarian was experienced, and knew that the wrist tap was not merely humbling, it was the diversion that came before a much more dangerous stroke to the face or the neck.
But Tommarian failed to connect against the expected real attack. So, as good tactics advised, he recovered from his lunge and retreated to safer distance.
It’s just so predictable, Luscetian thought, moving forward.
Tommarian swung wider and faster, to intercept the real stroke Luscetian was surely preparing.
In fact, Luscetian had nothing prepared. He didn’t need to introduce his weapon into that cloud of parries that grew more frenetic the less they found his blade. Luscetian merely gestured with his blade like a conductor and followed as Tommarian retreated, which forced the man to give ground even more quickly. It was the beginning of the cascade of errors that would end the duel.
This is what these desk jockeys don’t get… Luscetian waited for Tommarian’s next parry to swish through the air. He was utterly safe, and stepped still closer. Dueling is just another conversation. The first to lose composure is the one who loses the duel. He could strike anywhere on Tommarian’s body and the man knew it. He saw the awareness in Tommarian’s eyes: Luscetian had played him like a penny whistle.
Luscetian slashed the man’s cheek.
A crack in the air and a fleeting scent of rain. Tommarian’s skin puckered where the metal touched. His handsome face now bore a disfiguring C from brow to chin, circumscribing his eye.
Tommarian backpedaled but couldn’t gain safety. By this point Luscetian did not even need to deceive the parries, the man’s control was shot.
He tapped Tommarian’s ear next, opposite his new scar. A moment later, he sheared the side of the man’s head. No scar, but the hair briefly caught fire.
The pain is what makes this work, Luscetian thought coldly, which admittedly was a very Tachba thought. Tommarian could have restored himself with a moment’s control, but those flashes of pain and that blinding fear of the next stroke made it impossible.
Luscetian followed Tommarian at a stroll, striking the man wherever he opened himself to be struck, watching him disassemble.
Yet Tommarian did not yield. He did not beg or even make a sound. That silence would have been admirable if Tommarian had also organized his mind to rein in his overwrought defense, but no such thing emerged. It was dumb animal silence and an insult all its own. The man had only one prerogative, to not lose face, and he was forcing Luscetian into the role of a butcher. Leave it to this man to find the most insulting way to lose a duel.
Luscetian ended the farce with a tap to the man’s jugular.
Tommarian’s neck seized, turning him sheet white. He dropped to the ground in convulsions.
Luscetian was called tenderhearted by his associates, and he bore it patiently. His own Sesseran soldiers called him their ur-squeaker, the brother in the family that everybody wants to kick. The eternal front had made him tolerant of cruelty, but even if he was the most tender man in creation he would feel very little for this writhing bundle of nerves that had called him out…
There on the ground, Tommarian was revealed to be nothing more than reflex and ego, and a few political convictions that had been briefly made consequential by the terrible situation in the trenches. This man was the easy way out. He was something a Haphan should never be.
“There’s the end of it,” Luscetian told Tommarian, though the man was beyond hearing. He sheathed his rapier and sighed. The duel would not be concluded until he said the proper words: “Now let us be friends.”
Luscetian strode out of the meadow.
They would not be friends after this, not even if Tommarian recovered fully. More likely, Luscetian would be invited to more appointments by the man’s circle. It would be a matter of face-saving and social enhancement for them. They were an elevated group, and when Luscetian ran through them, it would hollow out the loudest loyalists in Ville Tiremsa.
Which was probably Jephesandra’s plan, he thought.
Luscetian would not be able to decline those next invitations. It would play out as it always did. In short order, he would gain a local reputation as a hawk, the kind of dangerous hothead of the empire who dueled for the worst reasons. Again. It was becoming the dispiriting pattern of his life. Eventually his presence would grow so toxic in the Haphan enclave that he’d be transferred to some new sector of the eternal front to start over, and there was certainly enough of the front to fill his whole career.
Yet this duel had been his conscious choice, because he and Jephia shared a history and she was a brilliant social tactician. Even more compelling, she was gorgeous. That rare embarrassment on her face as she proposed this exploit to Luscetian…that embarrassment had been Luscetian’s point of access, as she had surely intended because of the aforementioned brilliance. When it came down to it, Luscetian had let Jephia persuade him into this appointment because he trusted her judgment, and because he needed to take some action, however lateral, or the trenches would certainly fall.
A scream filled the night air.
It came from behind Luscetian, in the dueling meadow.
The scream was followed by the sound of thrashing. Grunts. Punishing blows that he identified as impacts to the core body, by boots or truncheons.
Tommarian screamed again. It was an unselfconscious cry that set Luscetian’s teeth on edge. The man was being thrashed. No, more than that.
The man was being murdered.
Luscetian sprinted back to the meadow.