Ven and Harmer brought Pretty Boy back to his senses by waving a packet of smelling salts under his nose. Madame Wimba had a stock of them at hand for precisely this eventuality. Brawls were a regular occurrence in any establishment that pathfinders frequented. The glassy look faded as Pretty Boy’s gaze sharpened.
“Ugh. I must have died and gone on to the Flight Eternal,” he said as he beheld Ven leaning over him, “For I do declare that I’ve just met me an angel.”
Ven giggled and Harmer let Pretty Boy’s head bounce back onto the table with a thump.
“Ow!” he complained.
“Serves you right,” Harmer said coldly, “I’d slap you around again myself, only your head’s bashed to bits enough as it is. It’s a shame you didn’t buy the farm after all.”
“Thanks, sweet peach,” Pretty Boy glared at her, and Tooms knew then that the bastard was going to be alright.
“Corporal Doyd,” Deschane stood over his former opponent and held out a flask of chilled water pumped up from the deep cisterns of Shakka. Pretty Boy accepted the peace offering and pressed the cold flask against the swollen lumps on his face.
“Sorry,” Deschane said softly.
“No. I am,” replied Pretty Boy with a rueful tilt of his head.
“Don’t be. I understand why you did it.”
“Hm. Had to be sure, didn’t I? Sure you hadn’t gone all soft in the head. They say you was seeing visions back at Mound 13. I had to see if you’d finally cracked under the pressure. You wouldn’t be the first. But no—you’re still as sharp and mean as ever, sir. It weren’t no vision you saw, I take it?”
Deschane pointed a thumb at the door and Ven went back to being a lookout, Cooly following her outside to do the same. Madame Wimba heaved another weary sigh and plodded out, heading for her apartment. The navigator patted Doyd on the shoulder and took out a rolled-up map of the northern hinterlands, spreading it out reverentially over the corkwood wall where it covered the list of names. His soldiers pinned it in place with a bayonet to each of its four corners. Then they all took their seats like schoolchildren facing the blackboard, Harmer helping Pretty Boy sit up and see.
Deschane spoke:
“We’ll begin with a debriefing of what actually occurred at Mound 13. There will be time allotted at the end for questions. You all deserve to know what happened to your comrades, just as I rightly deserve a portion of the blame. But for the moment I’d like to request that you all lay aside whatever opinions you may have of me as a leader, and just listen. This is bigger than me, and bigger than our regiment. It eclipses everything we thought we understood about Arachnea and the humanity’s place upon it. Needless to say, this is all strictly confidential. To anyone who isn’t willing to risk their lives and careers over this, now is your chance to walk away and wash your hands of this matter in its entirety.”
He paused and looked at the assembly expectantly. Just as he’d predicted, not a man or woman of them stood up to leave. Ven had drawn up an excellent list. Before departing on the reconnaissance mission against Mound Euler, Deschane had been careful not to place all his best eggs in one basket. The pathfinders in the saloon were some of his finest soldiers that he’d kept in reserve just in case the worst befell his patrol, which it had. It was always a good idea to keep the core of his seasoned veterans intact so they could pass on their hard-won knowledge on to the next crop of raw recruits. In terms of quality the fifteen volunteers in front of him equaled or even exceeded the talents of the twenty who had gone into the green.
Only, I will not fail them this time, Deschane swore to himself. He took up the broken leg of the stool and used it for a pointer as he began tracing the path he and previous platoon had taken, narrating the sequence of events, from the horror-stricken moment when Rene had realized the true size of Mound Euler and its kill-radius, to the fighting withdrawal after the ambush and the valiant sacrifice of crewman Lethway.
Deschane chose not to tell them of Lethway’s subsequent execution at the hands of his best friend, Rene. There were two reasons for this. First and foremost was his duty to the mission. If the pathfinders learned of the coldblooded decision Deschane had taken that day, there was no telling how it would affect their confidence in him as a navigator. They already had sufficient cause to doubt Deschane’s ability to lead, and anything that could negatively affect their morale had a risk of jeopardizing the missions. The second reason was the Deschane simply didn’t wish to sully Rene’s name in the memories of his comrades. No, the boy deserved better than that. It would be best to tell them of the mercy killing after everything was said and done, or at least Deschane convinced himself that he would.
He told his pathfinders that despite their best efforts to muddy the trail, he and Rene had inadvertently led the Amits back to Mound 13 and Prota’s science team. Deschane could not furnish them with the details of the ensuing siege, however, as he had been fully occupied trying to buy Rene enough time to escape from the wave of onrushing Amits.
“And how exactly did you survive that yourself, sir?” Tooms said, butting in right at the midpoint of Deschane’s tale. The navigator’s brows furrowed and Tooms immediately apologized:
“Fair, fair. I’ll wait for the question and answer.”
“Now that you’ve brought it up, I might as well explain that part,” Deschane replied.
Deschane’s trained eye had spotted the entrances to several abandoned nursery burrows as he and Rene had made their initial approach to Mound 13. When the Amit army had closed in, Deschane had led a portion of them towards one of the cramped tunnel systems where the warrior-brood who had charged in after him struggled to squeeze into the spaces they had outgrown years ago. Deschane had taken advantage of the bottleneck and killed them one at a time with carefully placed shots to their nerve bundles fired at a comfortable distance of eight paces. The resulting wall of corpses had plugged the tunnel shut long enough for Deschane to hastily rip up about forty paper cartridges and pour out their powder into the pouch. He had set the pouch against the crumbling clay walls where the burrow was at its narrowest then laid a trail of grains to the serve as the long fuse of his makeshift charge. Igniting its end with the spark from his percussion cap and the pistol’s hammer, he had collapsed the midsection of the burrow and buried himself up to the chest in the resulting cave-in. There he had awaited his slow death via suffocation. It was at that point when, hovering between the cubic centimeters of life-giving air and the warm embrace of eternity, Deschane felt the crushing pressure on his chest let up as the tunnel sides crumbled away, the earth folding in upon itself like an envelope. An immense downward force indented the topsoil, forming a huge oval crater down whose slopes Deschane tumbled helter-skelter. Dizzy and delirious, he had dragged himself up on one elbow and looked up to see…
“Yes, sir?” Leming was on the edge of his seat, a man on the verge of the promised rapture, “What did you see?”
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Deschane wondered how he could tell him. How could he tell the fanatic that his every prayer has just been answered, not with the vagaries of philosophy and interpretation, but with an ironclad truth towering above the walls of cynical doubt, crushing them to powder beneath its feet as it had the thousands of Amits infesting the ruins of Mound 13.
“A Divine Engine,” Deschane finally declared with as much emotion as an announcer would put into the weekly weather bulletin, “Just like in the stories of old. It destroyed the enemy along with the entire outpost. Then it turned and headed nor’-nor’-east. Hills, forests, mountain chains—it brushed them all aside like they were nothing.”
Deschane thought it best to leave out the archaeological finds that Prota had uncovered. It was not his place to speculate on what the acid sculptures and paintings ultimately signified. Even if the Amits were truly that intelligent, that changed nothing in the overall scheme of things. Humanity needed habitable spaces to expand their dominion over Arachnea, and the Amits stood in their way.
Besides, he was just an infantryman with a scattering of knowledge concerning the heartless calculus of war and wayfinding. It was not his place to tell these pathfinders what to believe. He would leave the work of making sense of all those findings to Nong and his mysterious backers who had yet to step out from the shadows.
He steamed ahead with his debriefing:
“The Engine’s movements shifted the earth and loosened it enough for me to dig myself out. I lost consciousness due to exhaustion and the mild loss of blood which I eventually stemmed with a poultice made of mud and a handful of urine—"
“Ye gods!” Leming cried, “All due respect, but we aren’t interested in hearing about your piss, sir. Don’t keep us all in suspense. What did it look like?”
Deschane saw from the eager looks on their faces that he was going to get nowhere with them until he gave them what they wanted. He blew out a weary sigh of defeat and said, grudgingly: “It was large.”
“How large?” Tooms interposed again.
“Very,” Deschane grated, “A little smaller than mound wherein it was buried, which was your standard kappa-class colony of the wedge design favored by the northern subspecies of Amit.”
“And where they walked, the mountains stood aside and rivers did flow…” said Leming, closing in eyes and letting the tears run down his speckled cheeks. Some of the other pathfinders followed his example and did the sign of the trimada, seized by a sudden outbreak of religious fervor.
“Navigator, you’re absolutely sure you weren’t just loopy from the painkillers the medics gave you?” Beans asked, ever the skeptic.
“Positive,” Deschane said, “I don’t expect you to believe me on the strength of my testimony alone, so I borrowed this from a new…acquaintance…of ours.”
The navigator produced the replica of the ten-thousand-year-old doll and set it down on the counter, activating it with a press of the button on its side. The soldiers oohed and aahed at its perambulations just as Ven had done, captivated by the cryptic speech recording and the flash of its red eye lens. The picture card shot out of the slot and they all crowded around to see their own faces, marveling at the image it had captured of them gawping at it like mouth breathing morons.
“Make it do that again!” Tooms begged, “I was blinking that time, it didn’t get me right.”
“You’re so tiny that you barely figure in it at all,” Harmer teased, “Speaking of figures, am I really that chubby?”
She pinched at the skin of her washboard belly in disappointment.
“When you said it was very big,” Pretty Boy said, “That’s not exactly what I had in mind.”
“Perceptive as always, Doyd,” Leming said with scathing sarcasm.
Deschane explained what Nong had told him about the doll’s scientific significance and the cycles of civilization preserved in the stratigraphic column. Most of the pathfinders seemed to be leaning towards acceptance now, with only Baow and Tooms voicing their lingering doubts. Deschane sensed that another tipping point had been reached and made the decisive move, saying:
“It’s said that seeing is believing. In that case, come and see for yourselves. Sometimes I can hardly believe that it happened myself. Which is why I am heading back out there, with or without you all. I intend to seek out the Divine Engine. My compass was smashed during the battle, but I managed to get a rough estimate of its heading with the position of the suns and the angle of the shadows cast by the nearby trees. My contact who’ll be assisting me in this endeavor has promised to help us narrow down the sector search using seismographic readings that they took from several research outposts. Each of the Divine Engine’s steps registered as a small earthquake, you see.”
“That’s right,” said Tooms, “Even we felt those quakes all the way back here in Shakka.”
“Indeed. By measuring the amplitude and magnitude of each of these tremors, the seismologists have charted the path which the Divine Engine took within an acceptable margin of error. Air transport will also be provided for this mission, along with state-of-the-art weaponry and portable ordinance.”
“Dandy-o,” said Cooly, sticking his thick head through the door at the mention of things which went boom. Pretty Boy’s scowl summed up what he thought of the whole thing.
“I don’t get it. Why don’t we just wait for the Expeditionary Force to uncover the Engine themselves?” Pretty Boy wanted to know, “They’re going to be rolling up to the northern hinterlands anyway, all 200,000 of them. Why not let the big guns handle it, navigator?”
“Fleet Command has a different set of priorities,” Deschane said reluctantly, “They either think I’m a raving lunatic or they’ve deliberately chosen to discredit me and spread mistruths about the deaths of our comrades. Their main objective is to directly engage Euler and all the other enemy concentrations that we have yet to encounter. If our experience in the south is anything to go by, then the law of competitive exclusion means that most those other unknown mounds will be equal to or slightly smaller than Euler, given that other Amit subspecies would be unable to compete for resources with a colony of that magnitude. Therefore most of Euler’s neighboring mounds are bound to be dominated by the same race of Amits, who will have built structures of comparable size to accommodate a similar population model.”
“It’s no secret why Fleet Command launched this offensive. Humanity’s population is growing at an unsustainable rate. We need space for our crops and closed cities to house our colonists. There have already been food riots in the core mounds themselves. Command’s utmost priority is to conquer as much of the northern hinterlands as possible. In all likelihood, therefore, the Expeditionary Force is going to fan out and fight along a very wide front.”
Deschane pointed at the logistics networks he’d marked out on the map, the build-up of supply depots and new bridges a clear indication of the directions of the offensive’s main thrusts. Command was planning to form three salients into enemy territory, moving along the valleys and mountain passes to encircle Euler and cut it off from any support from its nearby sister mounds.
“As such, the Expeditionary Force will soon get bogged down in series of slow and grinding battles of attrition that will make the Scouring of Assail look like a picnic in the park. In the end they will not penetrate very far into enemy territory at all, and certainly not deep enough to recover the Divine Engine.”
“If it isn’t on the agenda to recover this relic,” Harmer said slowly, “Then why have they assigning this mission to us pathfinders at all?”
Deschane coughed and took a sip of watered rum from a bottle under the register. Pretty boy started to laugh, a throaty, hacking sort of chortle full of phlegm and cruel glee.
“Haven’t you idiots figured it out yet? Our dear navigator here wants us to fly north beyond the dragon’s edge of the maps on floating bags of hydrogen that have a habit of going up in flames as soon as you sneeze on em. Then he’s gonna have us plod around in the jungles of bumble-fragging nowhere in search of the jolly grey giant that he somehow misplaced. And then, hoo boyo, then it gets really good!” Pretty Boy wheezed, “Get this—then he wants us to sneak our way past an invisible minefield of spore lines and cart the flipping thing back to Fleet Command, just so’s he can rub their noses in it. Did I leave anything out, sirrah?”
Deschane puffed out his cheeks and said: “No. That’s the plan in a nutshell, as it were. So. Are you game, pathfinder?”
Pretty Boy lifted his mug in a toast and grinned happily through the bruises on his face, “Hell, brother. We wouldn’t miss a mad caper like that for the world. Into the green we go!”
As one the pathfinders all raised their mugs and answered the clarion call:
“Into the green!”
“Hrm?” Greymoss squinted blearily up at them, beard matted with drool, “Are we finally going somewhere? Burr-och-aye, I thought you lot would never decide.”
He was snoring again in the next minute, content with the flow of his destiny. But as Tooms drained his cup, he couldn’t help but envy the bog man and his calm acceptance of life’s fatal conclusion. Nor could he shake the certainty that for many of them seated here, this would be the last good drink they’d ever enjoy.