Corporal Vendamme knew Deschane to be a man who despised weakness. What’s more, the navigator seemed to equate it with any outward displays of emotion, hence his moniker of old Sourface.
And so Ven had been shocked to see him openly grieve over the twenty pathfinders who’d gone back to the green north of Mound 13. To see her commanding officer and the man she most admired in the world shed a tear—actual, honest-to-goodness salt water squeezed out of glands that she once suspected had been surgically removed at birth—why, that shook Ven right to the core of her being.
Not that there was anything inherently wrong with tears. They were just another secretion that the human body produced in times of stress. A great deal less useful than piss (like every dutiful crewperson Ven donated chamber pots of her urine to the Gunnery Department, whose chemists needed the precious liquid to create potassium nitrate for the gunpowder mills), perhaps, but it served the purpose of letting out the hurt inside before it grew too heavy to bear.
Ven had cried herself to sleep at the news of Rene’s death, regretting most the road not taken and all the words she’d left unsaid. Not that it would’ve changed anything about the final outcome, mind you. When the navigator had called for volunteers for the Euler mission, Rene had been among the first to raise his hand, only seconds after Lethway lifted his own. Typical of him, really. Rene was never one to let his friends suffer and die alone if he could help it.
She remembered feeling a flutter of unease at that fateful moment, a rumbling of things to come. Ven thought all psychics were nothing more than snake-oil merchants, but she often had premonitions about certain missions. Premonitions which manifested themselves into reality with disturbing frequency.
If only she had listened to her instincts. She might have warned Rene, pleaded with him not go. Just thinking about what once could have been made Ven’s lower lip wobble, and she had to stop herself from letting out a small sob.
At the moment the navigator looked as if he too was on the verge of weeping, though in this particular case he would have been shedding tears of joy. And he wasn’t alone—Harmer, Cooly, Tooms and the rest of the platoon walking behind Deschane were staring about them with wide-eyed wonder, like street urchins set loose in a toy shop.
They were standing in a supply depot located around fifteen kilometres to the rear, a deep and wide crevasse on the tail end of the Shakkan mountain range which the pioneer corps had enlarged with pick and shovel before draping it over with layers of canvas tenting. Through the softly billowing flaps came just enough natural light to set the weapon racks and gun batteries agleam in tones of brass and steel.
The arsenal contained everything from the enormous 32-pounder siege howitzers to the portable 17.5 mm shoulder cannons. The racks held rows of standard-issue Sharpstone rifled muskets along with the latest rearloading firearms that fired experimental metal cartridges that had yet to be approved for mass production. There was enough firepower here to outfit an entire infantry regiment, or so it seemed. With the weaponry came the various accoutrements of surface warfare—boxes of paper cartridges, barrels of jawcracker biscuits and salted pork, entrenching tools, sacks of caltrops, raincoats, caissons and limbers for the field pieces, harnesses, saddles and spare sealant tents.
Mounts and draft animals were kept in an outdoor corral with bamboo caging on top to stop the hornblowers from escaping. These spindly-eyed arthropods kept up a persistent, high-pitched whine by sawing their hindlegs against red veins of their enormous four-and-a-half meter wings.
One of the caves nearby had been converted into a wire-talkie station with cables connecting to the outside world via underground clay pipes. There a pair of signalmen were hard at work on a table strewn with papers, one man rap-tap-tapping on the switch that sent impulses flashing down the cables, electrically compelled by the series of lead-acid cells squatting atop the table inside glass jars. The other signalman was busy listening to incoming messages from the sounder, transcribing the clickety-clack of the nodding armature into dots and dashes, and from thence into legible phrases.
At the centre of the tent was parked a squadron of dirigibles, their envelopes neatly bundled inside the canoe-shaped wicker baskets alongside with the ballast, disassembled uprights and canefuel propeller engines. All throughout the site scores of technicians in bright orange suits scurried about making ready for the upcoming operation, triple-checking every piece of equipment and weighing supplies on a set of precision weighing scales.
Ven knew that their lives would soon depend on their meticulous preparations. Dirigibles were cantankerous, volatile inventions that had a habit of going up in flames if the pilots sneezed too hard midflight.
Commissioner Nong had reassured them, however, saying that their balloons would be filled with a revolutionary new liftgas that had none of the explosive drawbacks of pure hydrogen. Ven didn’t know if she could place much faith in that assessment, but she knew one thing for certain: whoever Nong’s co-conspirators were, they wielded considerable influence within the Fleet’s bureaucratic machinery.
As a clerk Ven knew firsthand just how hard it was to requisition so much as an extra pair of boots from the Quartermaster Corps without having to sign and countersign for the delivery a dozen times over, only for the goddamned things to turn up several sizes too small for the bleeding feet of the man for whom they’d been intended. There was no way this mountain of munitions had been acquired through wholly legal channels and without greasing a lot of palms.
Ven suspected that similar skullduggery had been employed to pull Deschane’s platoon of volunteers from their scouting duties on the frontlines and have them reassigned as ‘drovers’ and ‘stretcher bearers’ at the rear.
Since the reconquest of Mound 13 the front lines had shifted forwards in a salient some ten kilometres deep. The pioneers were laying tracks and erecting wire-talkie poles nearly as fast as the invasion columns were advancing. Initially dressed in civilian sealant suits, Ven and the other pathfinders had all taken the surface train from Shakka station to Checkpoint Barley, where a small but growing community of camp followers, prospectors, adventurers and traders had set up an informal tent city. Fleet Command had promised that the frontier would open up very soon after the major offensive broke through Mound Euler, and nobody wanted to be late to the party when the newly conquered mounds were reopened up for settlers.
Ven had taken an instant liking to the place. Everyone there spoke in tones of hope and boundless optimism—most of them were just glad to have escaped the misery of their overcrowded home mounds. They’d all hitched a ride with a delivery wagon weighted down with burlap sacks of seed and driven by a pompous agricultural scientist from Mound Claveria.
“Can you imagine it, my dear,” the farmer had told her during the clattering ride, “We claim to be the superior species, and yet look as us now! Destitute, driven by hunger, migratory! This whole rotten edifice we call the Fleet is just one crop failure away from general famine. Despite all the mounds we’ve conquered and all the space we’ve wrested from the Amits, our farming techniques can’t even begin to compare to theirs.”
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“Rubbish,” Cooly said, “The only thing Amits can grow are mushrooms and naught else.”
“Yes, but so many varieties of mushroom! They have a mushroom to serve their every nutritional need. Amit fungal gardens are a complex ecosystem that somehow is able outproduce our surface greenhouses despite the near-total lack of sunlight. They supply it with whatever compost they can forage from the surface and maintain it with their stone age tools, and in return it is able to feed and supply a colony of hundreds of thousands, if not millions of Amits. But when we humans take over their mounds, what do you think happens?”
“A lot of killing on our part,” Tooms grinned, “A lot of dying on theirs, with double helpings of fire and steel all around.”
“Yes, yes,” the farmer waved his witticisms aside, “We all appreciate your sacrifices. But you’re not wrong—many things die when we conquer a mound. But not just the Amits. Oh, no! Without their original cultivators, the fungal gardens always collapse and rot away in a matter of weeks. Our own gardens are always a pale imitation of what came before. Every human mound eventually reaches a point where it cannot produce enough to sustain its own population.”
“So what are you saying?” Cooly grumbled, “That we should start trade with the gourd-heads? Let them keep their stinky mushroom farms so they can grow strong and multiply?”
“Civilians,” Harmer snorted at the back of the wagon, “There’s just no reasoning with them.”
“Come to think of it, Fleet Command treats civilians like mushrooms, too,” Pretty Boy observed.
“How so?” Ven asked, curious despite herself.
"Because they feed em shit and keep em in the dark,” Doyd cackled, “As they should!”
Ven privately disagreed. In her opinion, soldiers weren’t any better than civilians. Being a pathfinder was a dangerous gig, but then again, so was being a colonist. Arachnea didn’t care if you knew how to use a rifle or not—just about everything on the surface was out to get you. Up here the air itself harboured murderous intentions.
She held nothing but respect for these brave people. Whole families of them rode atop all-terrain wagons with their wheels reinforced by wrought iron bands, one out of three of them wearing patched-together waste gas recycler systems held together only by spit and a prayer.
And the Chaplainage kept everyone well supplied with the latter ingredient. Hosannas of praise and solemn incantations filled the neat white tents of the Remainers, while across the road the Schismatics knelt in the mud and abased themselves for the sins of humanity.
Then there were the seedy, low gambling dens where people worshipped another god entirely, betting their lives and fortunes on a throw of the knuckle dice or spread of the cards. Ven had to work very hard to keep the pathfinders from being led astray in that part of the town.
But it wasn’t all fun and games. A posse of gunmen dressed in black sealant suits had been waiting for them at the checkpoint’s exit, carrying brand-new rifles but wearing no military insignia Ven was familiar with. Their taciturn guides had said very little as they bundled the pathfinders into a delivery wagon, surrounding them with sacks of rice flour to hide them from view until they reached the depot.
Deschane arrived a few hours later. The navigator had been excused from further service in the mapping agency on medical grounds, his wound from the siege of Mound 13 having become aggravated by subcutaneous fungal infections. Which was true, to be fair, though his condition was nowhere near as life-threatening as it could have been. With a torn sealant suit, even the smallest papercut could turn fatal; doctors usually resorted to immediate amputation once the white rot set in for good. Thankfully the navigator was responding well to the ointments and medicated creams.
Deschane did keep scratching now and again at the bandages around his scalp and forehead, but that didn’t stop him from drooling over the assembled ordinance on display along with the rest of the pathfinders.
“How do you like my wares, troopers?” Nong said proudly, “This here is the finest selection of death-dealing destruction a person of my modest means could procure. It's my own personal arsenal of freedom.”
“None too shabby,” Pretty Boy Doyd said with an indifferent shrug. The acid-scarred veteran was the only soldier who did not partake in the general excitement, choosing instead to stand apart and pick at his rotting teeth with the tip of his dirk.
Occasionally one of the pathfinders would take a firearm from its stand, feeling its weight in their hands or squinting down the sights with the frowns of discerning housewives who knew exactly what they looking for in a cut of meat, and never mind what the butcher had to say.
“Here’s a likely fellow,” Harmer said coquettishly. The sharpshooter selected a compact rifle with a dark charwood stock that matched the color of her skin. It sported an underslung tube several centimetres shorter than the barrel, and as well as an overlarge trigger guard that enclosed all the fingers of her hand.
“11.3 mm Western Suppressor,” Deschane told her with a blissful look on his face, “Rimfire, lever-operated quicktimer, tubular magazine, fourteen cartridge capacity. They say you can load it on Prayerday and shoot it all through next week. I’ve only ever read about them in the periodicals.”
“Eww,” Harmer set it back down with a look of distaste, “It’s a quicktimer? Never mind.”
“Here we go again with your snobbery,” Shon Tooms complained, “Just becoz it’s a quicktimer, that don’t mean it’s a bad rifle. Take it from me, darling. The odds of that beauty jamming up on you are a thousand to one.”
“Sure. And when that sucker fails to feed while you’re staring down that one Amit in a thousand who’s swinging an axe with your name on it, I bet you’ll feel real lucky then. Until those gunsmiths make a metal cartridge that’s actually reliable, I’m sticking with my Hex.”
Harmer patted the weathered Hexiomatic she had slung over one arm, her constant companion. It had a slender, tapering barrel that was a quarter of a foot longer than the Suppressor, with a four-power telescopic sight mounted to its side in addition to the usual iron sights on top.
“That frontloader is as much of an antique as you are!” Tooms pooh-poohed, “With a Suppressor I could tag an Amit a dozen times in its nerve cluster in the time it takes for you to pop off a second shot.”
“Wanna bet?” Harmer challenged him.
“Interesting theory, private Tooms,” said Nong, oozing his way through the packed crowd, “Come! Let’s put it to the test at the outdoor firing range.”
“Ooooh!” hooted the rest of the platoon, egging them.
Face flushing scarlet, Shon Tooms had no choice but to pick up the Suppressor and make good on his boast. Nong led the way to the testing site, beaming all around. The commissioner was wearing his native garb over his sealant suit, a ceremonial spiked battle hammer tucked into its waistband along with a brace of caplock pistols. Ven noted the ease with which Nong carried his weapons, particularly the spiked hammer that was chosen weapon of all Daroodans. The natives called it a gok after the sound it made when it struck an enemy, which was apparently the same whether it was cracking human skulls or perforating Amit exoskeletons.
“If I win, can I keep this here piece?” Shon Tooms joshed him, only half-serious.
“Nonsense!” Nong cried, loud enough for everyone to hear, “Regardless of the outcome of this contest, you can all take whatever you like from my arsenal.”
“Can we keep em, too?” Cooly said in disbelief. He was making it sound as though Ice Cream Day had come early.
“With as much ammunition as you can carry,” Nong replied, to the cheers of the crowd. The commissioner was going out of his way to please Deschane and his pathfinders, Ven realized.
This did not bode well. Nong wasn’t exactly an officer, but he was carrying himself just like one. As a general rule, officers employed generosity as a tool, using it to curry favour with the rank and file in exchange for something in return.
Deep in thought, Ven stayed a little behind the jostling crowd as they strapped on their masks and exited the tent, Nong leading them over to a gully which the pioneers had converted into a firing range.
“What’s eating at you, Ven?” Pretty Boy asked, pinching her elbow.
“Eh?” she looked up at him, distracted, “Nothing. I’m just thinking, that’s all.”
“Aye. I don’t like him neither,” Pretty Boy said, reading her mind.
“That’s not what I meant,” she said at once. But Ven’s eyes betrayed her, and she couldn’t keep from staring at the back of Nong’s head.
“Sure it is. And yer right to fear him,” Pretty Boy leaned against the crevasse wall and started scraping out the gunk underneath his fingernails with his dirk, “There’s only one reason he’d invest this much time and effort into us.”
“And what’s that?” Ven asked, though she already knew the answer.
“We is the best there is,” he said simply, “The 3rd Pathfinder Regiment always gets results. He’s ‘procured’ our platoon like he has the rest of this here junk, and he means to get his money’s worth. He’s a conniver, a climber. He wants to be king of the hill, and he’ll get there even if it means strolling up a rampart made of our corpses. And the worst part of it is, Deschane seems to be playing right into it.”