Battle Hymn (20 page)

"I worry how you're going to handle the power."

"Let me worry about that. You just worry about keeping them running."

"If you don't like the work I do, get another engineer. I'd be glad to stay on the ground for a while."

"Any time you want to turn coward is fine with me," Jack snapped. "It's a volunteer outfit, remember. You can resign right now."

Vincent, shaking his head with amusement, left the shed. The two had been arguing ever since they first flew together, and yet when it came time to go up, they always went as a team. He knew it was a way for them to hide their fears, and looking at the flyer hovering above him, he could understand why. A single explosive shot or flaming arrow would end it for them. They had already been shot down once and crashed two other ships. By rights they should have been dead years ago.

Waving his hands and shouting, Jack came out of the hangar. "If I don't kill him on the ground, I swear I'll crash a ship just to get rid of him," he snarled, stalking off across the field.

Vincent turned to see Feyodor coming toward him, laughing softly.

"What was that all about?"

"I told him he'll never be able to handle the ship." Feyodor smiled. "Anyhow, no one else is crazy enough to try, especially for the type of thing we're going to do with it."

Vincent looked sharply at the engineer.

"Oh, no one told me, but I'd be a fool not to figure it out. We're going south, then crossing the sea to find out what them filthy buggers are up to."

Vincent looked around cautiously, then turned back to Feyodor. "Don't even discuss your assumptions," he snapped.

"General Hawthorne, you can yell all you want, but I know what it is we're up to. I'm not dumb enough to talk, and besides, I'm the only engineer he'll fly with."

Vincent wanted to launch into a solid dressing-down, but the sparkle in Feyodor's eyes stopped him. The pilots and engineers of the air corps were somehow beyond him and his ability to establish discipline. The standard line, "Go ahead, I'll live longer if you lock me up," had been repeated countless times at discipline hearings.

There was something else as well. He could not help but admire someone who did fly. On his own dress uniform were the wings of a pilot, pinned over his right breast in honor of the flight he had taken in a balloon on the desperate night he had floated out of Suzdal to blow the dam above the city, thus destroying the Tugar Horde storming into the lower part of the city. That one flight was enough to last a lifetime, and he sensed that the members of the air corps knew they could stretch the limits with him and get away with it.

Feyodor surveyed the airship with pride. "Heavens, she's a beauty. Flying Cloud, same name as my first ship. Why, she's so modern we even have a hole in the floor so we can go on the heads of them damn Bantags."

"How soon will she be ready?" Vincent asked.

"First I want to run the engines up on the ground. Then take them apart to check everything. We should wait a day as well. There's bound to be leaks. We'll hang some weight on her till she sinks, then take the weight off. Following morning we check again and see how much lift we've lost, but the crew that made her are good workers. I think she'll check out fine.

"Maybe tomorrow afternoon we'll do a short hop up and around for an hour. Then we check everything again. Another cruise, this one for three or four hours into the wind and back at high speed so we can calculate our air speed. Then we do the same thing again, check the engines, weigh her for gas loss. I'd say seven or eight days, we'll be ready to sail if the weather's good."

Vincent thought about the telegram in his pocket, informing him that Andrew was coming back out in seven days. The reason was obvious, if something went wrong Andrew wanted to be present to shoulder the blame.

"Can't get it up sooner?" Vincent asked.

"Well, sir, we could, but this is the only ship like her that we've got. Lose her, and it'll be months, if ever, before we have another."

"Just see what you can do. I'd like you up earlier if possible."

"Why, sir?"

"Let's just call it personal, that's all."

Muttering a silent curse, Dale Hinsen shuffled through the papers on his desk. He knew Karga was waiting for the right answer, and for a moment he was tempted simply to pull out a sheet or two, say they were plans for escape, and have Hans denounced.

It would be amusing to do it that way, an innocent list of names the evidence that sends his old sergeant to the pits. But it would be his word against Hans's— would Ha'ark believe him? Something told him that if there were a confrontation, Ha'ark would sense the truth in Hans's words and the lie in his own. It might mean I would go to the pits instead.

He looked up at Karga. "There's nothing here. These are work lists, production records, checkoffs of who is sick and who is doing extra work."

"The sick should be disposed off," Karga growled. "This allowing others to do their work is weakness."

It did strike Dale to be an unusual show of compassion for the Bantag. Hans had argued early on that the production quota was fixed and how it was arrived at should be immaterial, rather than demanding that every single person be on the floor. Ha'ark had been sold on the logic that it was senseless to slaughter a trained worker merely because he or she could not work for a few days. What he had perhaps not realized was that it built a deeper unity in the camp; rather than dividing people against themselves, it made their survival a collective effort.

"And our spies?" Karga asked.

"I made all the promises you authorized. Freedom from the factories, placement in the protected circle of the Qar Qarth, and the right to live wherever they desired within the empire. I have ten in the foundry, five in the steam engine works, another five in the cannon foundry, five in the rifle works, and another dozen scattered in the other establishments. We are well covered."

"But this is nothing," Karga snapped, pointing at the work sheets.

Dale picked up the pile of papers and started to shuffle slowly through them. Red lines were drawn through those who had died. Check marks with the letters "c.b." must indicate confined to bed, and "l.w.," he reasoned must mean light work.

He continued to look through the papers while Karga paced back and forth. He knew that Karga hated him, hated him because he carried the official protection of the Qar Qarth and because as the head of security for all the camps, he had access to knowledge that the overseer preferred to keep to hlmself.

He looked down the lists for each of the twelve furnaces. Number six had half its crew down, two of them dying within the last week from galloping consumption. He continued down the list mid stopped at number three. Six men were listed as being on light work or confined to bed Something triggered his memory, and reaching into his desk he pulled out the reports from the previous week. Again there were the same six, and the week before that as well.

He knew Karga, like most Bantag, found it difficult to differentiate between individual humans. Looking down from a height of seven to eight feet at prisoners who were dressed in rags, emaciated, filthy, and foulsmelling, they usually couldn't tell them apart. All they bothered with was the daily check of numbers and as long as the living and dead counted each day matched up, they were satisfied.

Number three, mostly the black men. Hinsen wrinkled his nose with disdain. He had cared little for them back on Earth. After all, they were the ones who had caused that war that he was drafted into. Let them free their own asses. And now here they were again.

Could there be something going on here? It was most likely innocent enough, but then again, the same six for so long while all the others stayed healthy. And something else now struck him as well. By the very nature of the way the foundry was organized, the men and women who worked there worked as a unit, roughly thirty to each furnace or trip-hammer. If something was indeed being plotted, it would most likely be done within that group, for no secret could be kept for long in such a unit, and beyond that, the friendships and bonds that were formed would compel them to do it together.

Yet again he wondered how an escape would be planned and executed. There were, as far as he could see, only three ways out. Either they seize a train as it is going through a gate, they somehow jam a gate and charge it, or they dig out under the wall. If they were going to charge the gate or seize an engine it would mean a large number of them going at once, and yet again the work crew would have to be the unit.

A tunnel? He had suggested that the barracks be built with raised floors to preclude such an effort. The foundry itself? He had never set foot in the building. Even Ha'ark had agreed that it was too risky for him ever to go into the camp, first because his identity needed to be kept secret, and second, if he was recognized, someone might simply want to trade a life for a life. It would be just like Hans to order such a thing, he realized.

But the foundry or any of the factories—could they be digging out right under our noses? He thought about it and then let the thought drop. Impossible. Each of the factories had a clear caste system, the trained workers and the Chin slave labor. All the Chin were told that if they saw something wrong and reported it, they would be set free to go back home. The system had worked well. Nowhere in any of the buildings was there a place where the Chin did not wander about.

So where else if it is a tunnel? The cookhouses were the only buildings built directly on the ground—perhaps there. He made a mental note for the spies in each of the cooking areas to be doubly alert. There was one other place—the latrines and bathouses. He had some vague memory of a story about Reb prisoners getting out through a latrine pit, but could you get thirty or forty out that way? Possible.

The only thing left, he realized, was to get more information. Perhaps it was time for more-direct methods.

Hans looked over his shoulder and saw that no one was nearby. The trip-hammers up at the east end of the building were thundering away, making it possible to talk.

"We're sloping up now," Gregory whispered. "Three days should have us there."

"Are you sure on the measurements?"

That was increasingly his greatest anxiety, that the tunnel would pop up outside of the warehouse, or worse yet, under one of the tracks.

"Before we even approached you on it, Alexi paced it off a dozen times. The tough part was making a compass and having him sight the angle in correctly without being spotted. Once we got the angle in we were on our way."

"Gregory, if we're more than a couple of feet off, we are dead."

"Don't worry. Remember, I was in staff school. I still remember the stuff drilled into us on geometry. And Alexi worked for railroad construction. It's on the mark."

He looked sideways at Gregory, wondering just how confident the young officer really was.

"I wonder what it'll be like back home," Gregory said wistfully. "Four years is a long time."

"You'll be a hero."

A sad smile flickered across his features, "I wonder. I lost my command; all except Alexi are dead. Will they even remember me?"

Hans said nothing. For four years Gregory had slept in the barracks right next to the small room allotted to Tamira and himself. The walls were paper-thin and he could hear the dreams, the nightmares.

"She'll still be waiting."

"Do you think so?"

"Of course she will, son. Your daughter's most likely heard endless stories about you. She'll know you on sight."

Gregory sadly shook his head. "My wife, she was so young, only seventeen when we were married during the retreat from Suzdal. After that, we had less than a year. I can't expect her to spend her life as a widow."

He smiled wistfully. "She was so beautiful with her golden hair that always seemed to fall over her eyes when she let her braids down. I remember …"

His voice trailed off into silence, and he looked away for a moment.

"It's just, well, it's just that I came to accept it all. I was dead, she was living and would go on living. Now I'm coming back and suddenly the memories are so alive again. So real, I can see her, imagine her."

He looked at Hans, then said brokenly, "Imagine her now with someone else."

"Don't torture yourself, son," Hans replied. He had always been so awkward when it came to talking of such things. Tamira and simply trying to stay alive here, and coaxing others to stay alive, had opened up something inside him, and he could sense the anguish.

"I know soldiers' wives. If the body's brought back, or a trusted friend says that they saw you dead, maybe then, after the grief subsides, maybe then they'll find someone else. But even then, it can take years. You're different. The unit simply disappeared. I guess Andrew would have sent out patrols, they might have found where the battle was fought, they might have found evidence."

He didn't add the rest. There would be no graves or rotting corpses lying on the steppe. All that would be found would be the blackened and cracked bones from the feast.

"You're missing. You told me yourself there were rumors that the Merki and Bantag were starting to take prisoners. That's what she'll think and believe. And besides, there'll be something in her heart telling her you're still alive. Believe me, I've seen it."

"I talk to her every night," Gregory said. Hans didn't reply, for in the silence of the night, he had heard the whispered conversation, the murmuring of others in the barracks, praying to their God or gods, crying, talking to loved ones, dreaming that they were home, that home and living were still possible.

"See, right there. Don't you think she feels that? Haven't you felt her talking to you? Telling you about your daughter?"

Gregory nodded. "At first, all the time. But now she seems so distant. I can barely remember what she looks like, except for her eyes, peeking out from under her hair, the scent she use to wear."

"All of it will come back," Hans replied, putting his hand on Gregory's shoulder. "And besides, I want a front row seat when you go up on stage again to do Henry V."