Men of War (15 page)

“But he was found in the church?” Kathleen asked.

“Yes, he went running in to try and catch who did it. Then a mob grabbed him, claimed he had a gun, and he was dragged out and hung.”

“According to who?”

Hans looked over at Ketswana.

“One of my men drink with him, follow, see all, get away before he hung, too.”

“So who was leading this mob?”

“It might have been a crowd carried away with frenzy. It might have been more, though,” Hans said.

“Go on.”

“Kill the president. There’s no vice president; therefore, the Speaker of the House, Tiberius Flavius, becomes president. Either he was plotting to do it or someone else.”

“Flavius is an honorable man,” Andrew replied sharply. “I knew him as a damn good officer who came up through the ranks, and he’s a wounded veteran of Hispania. He’s not the type.”

“Or then a countercoup,” Hawthorne replied. “Blame Flavius for the death of Kal, claim it’s a plot by Roum to seize the government, and break the Republic in the process.”

“Bugarin?”

“My likely candidate,” Hawthorne snapped bitterly.

“Damn all.” Andrew sighed. So that’s why Hawthorne is thinking coup, strike first in order to prevent one.

There was too much to assimilate. He had been far too preoccupied with the preparations for the offensive and the dealing with the results to give serious consideration as to what was going on seven hundred miles away in the capital. He knew there were tensions but prayed that a successful attack, even one that was just a partial success, would quiet the differences and create the resolve to push the war through to its conclusion. He wondered self-critically if that concern had clouded his decision-making to go ahead with the offensive.

He suddenly felt exhausted, unable to decide what to do next. He knew that a mere nod of his head would mean that Vincent would get up, walk out of the room, and within the hour Congress would be arrested. Besides the training school of cadets who were now the 35th Maine and 44th New York, there was a sprinkling of forty or fifty men from the original units in the city, holding various key positions. There was a brigade of troops garrisoned there and thousands of discharged vets in the factories who could be called out in an emergency. He’d have the government by morning, straighten out the mess, then go from there.

And, damn it, destroy forever what I wanted to create here.
Of that he was certain. Once the precedent had been set, it would be forever embedded in the heart of the Republic. Washington had resisted the temptation knowing the history of Rome and Greece when it came to coups. He would rather have seen the Revolution go down to bloody defeat than betray it. Napoleon, rather than Lincoln and Washington, would then be the model for this Republic, this entire world. The concept of a republic which he had so carefully nurtured since first setting foot upon this world would be lost forever.

Yet even if I did seize control, then what? The war is still being lost. We might hold on for a while, maybe even create a stalemate on the Capua Front, but still Jurak will wear us down, for he has the labor of millions of slaves to support him, and if need be feed him with their own flesh. Either way we lose.

He looked at his friends. How to admit it, that after ten years of valiant effort, they were losing.
Have we been losing all along, he wondered, and were just not willing to admit it? If that’s true, then is the dream of a republic one that is ultimately doomed to failure?
Though he wanted to believe in Kal, he sensed that his old friend was weakening under the stress, and for the time being he was out of the picture. The other side promised peace. And the greater complexities of the issues—well, tragically, the average person just didn’t seem to grasp them.

He had been in the army too long, he realized. In the military issues were far clearer—there was survival or death, that was drilled in from day one. You did the right thing, you survived, make a mistake … you died, or worse yet, good men died because of you.

A hell of a lot of good men had just died because of his mistake, his not realizing that the very nature of the war was changing yet again.

It’s changed again, so we have to find a way to change it back in our favor.
He looked over at Emil.

“I want the truth from you, my friend.”

“Go on.”

“Since I got wounded, I mean since I came back to command,” he hesitated.

Emil leaned forward in his chair. He sensed Kathleen’s watchful gaze on him.

“I’m not the same. Something’s changed in me.”

“We’re all changed,” Emil started soothingly, but an angry wave from Andrew silenced him.

“No, I don’t mean that. It’s deeper than that. I feel like I’ve lost something. Not just my edge, far deeper, the very mettle of my soul. All along I sensed a problem with our assault at Capua, I sensed it but failed to clearly get ahead of the problem and reason it out before it happened.”

“No one could have anticipated the response from their new leader,” Emil replied.

“But I should have. There’s no damn room for a mistake in my position.”

He looked around the room at his old friends, wondering for a moment if he was about to dissolve into tears. Do that, though, and we’ve all lost. In the end, he realized, all of it, from the moment they had come through the Portal of Light, back so many years, so many ages ago, all rested upon him.

Damn, I never wanted this
, and then he hesitated with his inner remorse as the truth surged up from within. The self-humility was a lie, a damnable lie. He had indeed wanted it.

He had wanted command of the regiment, Hans knew that as far back as Fredericksburg. He loved his old commander, Colonel Estes as a father, but like any son of ability, inwardly he longed to transcend what his father was and could be. And when Estes fell at Gettysburg he had mourned him, yet he had sprung to take his place.

He had wanted a brigade, knowing he could do better than far too many of the damned fools Meade and Grant allowed to command. Here was a harsh realization. One is taught to have humility, to admire one’s elders and emulate them, and a display of raw ambition is somehow immoral.

Yet he knew in the core of his soul that he was blessed with something, and that something was the ability to lead … and to dream of all the greatness that a republic could be. Yet so unfortunately a republic, and a volunteer army of a republic, far too often drew into its folds the weak, the venal, those who were ambitious for their own sakes.

He looked around at his friends.

“I fomented a rebellion against the natural order of this world,” he said slowly. “When we realized what the hordes were, the men actually voted to take ship, to find some safe haven and sit it out, but I talked them into fighting and convinced the Rus they could fight.

“And now it is all crashing down around me.

“Emil, I think I’ve been sick. Sick within my soul. Ever since this winter the stress of it has paralyzed me. I feel like a puppet. The strings are moved, I woodenly follow into the next step, and thus I’ve numbly wandered to this point. The government is collapsing, I allowed an offensive to be launched that my inner heart told me not to allow, and now I sit here numbly as the end closes in around us.”

Emil said nothing, staring straight into his eyes. The moment seemed to stretch out.

“I believe there are two paths to this world, to any world,” Andrew said slowly, his voice thick with emotion. “The one is to believe what the masses believe. To make yourself part of them, and to follow, to follow even as you claim to lead.”

“And the other path?” Emil asked.

“If God gave you the ability, even if everyone else thinks you are mad, then use it.”

Emil chuckled softly.

“We shall either meanly lose or nobly save the last best hope of mankind,” Emil finally offered.

“I’m taking control of this situation,” Andrew said. “We’re all frightened right now, me most of all. Either we become mad and fight back, or we die. But if we are doomed to die, let’s die as free men.”

“The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present.”

Surprised, he looked up at Kathleen, who had just spoken. She smiled knowingly, as if having sensed every thought that had crossed his mind.

“And as our case is new,” Gates continued, “we must act anew and think anew. We must disenthrall ourselves and then we shall save our country.”

Andrew smiled at the recitation of Lincoln’s famous words. The room was hot, silent except for the ticking of the grandfather clock in the comer of the room, the only other sound the laughter of one of the children upstairs.

We must disenthrall ourselves … but how damn it, how
?

“We have to end the war now,” Kathleen said. Her voice was hard, cold. It wasn’t a statement of speculation or hope, it was merely hard honest fact.

He looked up at her.

“You mean negotiate?”

“No, damn it. No! We all know where that will lead. It will merely postpone our deaths. If you do that, I’ll go upstairs and poison our children rather than have them live with the death we all know will come. Jurak cannot rest until all in this room, and all touched by you, are dead. He understands us too well, and thus understands the threat that we are.”

“So what is the alternative then?” Andrew sighed. “Another offensive? The government will block it. For that matter I wonder if we’ll even have a government or a united effort in another few days.”

“Exodus, go north,” Webster ventured quietly.

“You mean just leave?” Andrew asked.

“Exactly. We did it before, we evacuated all of Rus against the Merki. Well, maybe the mistake was we tried to hold on to the steppe region. Lord knows how far north the forest belt extends. Pack it up, and go into the forest until we find a place where they won’t follow.”

“We’ve talked about that before,” Vincent replied. “It’s impossible. First off, the government will break apart on that one. Second, they’ll follow us, and we’ll be burdened down with hundreds of thousands of civilians, children, old people. It will turn into a slaughter.”

“Well if the government does surrender, that’s where I think we should all head,” Webster replied. “I’ll be damned if I stay here and wait to have my throat slit. At least there’s some hope in that.”

“If I were Jurak,” Andrew replied, “I wouldn’t care if it took twenty years. I’d hunt down the survivors. There is no way they can ever dream of continuing their ride until they know we are all dead, for once they turn their backs upon us we’ll rebuild. The fundamental issue, besides the moon feast, the enslavement, is that they are nomadic. They cannot leave a cancer behind that will spread in their wake.”

“He’ll kill everyone once we’re dead or fled,” Hans said. “You people seem to have forgotten something in all this. Andrew, I remember the dream was there for you at the start, but it seems to have blurred. This is not just about us. We started a revolution on this world. The only way it will survive is if we spread the revolution around the entire planet. We must free everyone or no one. I left millions of comrades in slavery when I escaped, and I vowed upon my soul to help set them free and if need be to die doing it.”

Andrew was surprised by the passion of Hans’s words. He was normally so reticent, and so rarely was an idealism allowed to creep out from behind the gruff Germanic exterior of the old sergeant major. He could not help but smile at the revolutionary passion that moved his oldest friend.

“Then free them,” Varinna Ferguson said in flawless English.

For the first time since the meeting had started Andrew took serious notice of the woman sitting on the chair by the doorway. Kathleen’s hands slipped down to rest on the woman’s slender shoulders. As she spoke it seemed that the voice almost came from somewhere else, so horribly scarred were her features, the skin that had grown over the burns a taut expressionless mask. And yet he could still sense the graceful beauty that was locked within, that had caused Chuck Ferguson to see beyond the torn exterior to the beauty and strength of the soul.

“I didn’t know you could speak English,” Gates exclaimed, looking over at her in surprise.

“You never asked,” she replied, her words causing a round of chuckles from the others. “You were always too busy talking to my husband to notice me.”

“My apologies, madam,” Gates quickly said, his features turning red, “my most humble apologies.”

“You said ‘free them,’ ” Hans said, the slightest tone of eagerness in his voice. “How, may I ask?”

“How did we first know that you were alive?” she replied.

“Jack Petracci flew over us.”

She looked inquiringly at Andrew, who nodded. She slowly stood up. In her hands was a battered notebook.

“These are some of my husband’s writings. How do you say … ideas, dreams. That is why he taught me English, so I could read them after he was gone.”

She put the book upon the table and all looked at it with a bit of reverence, for without the mind of Chuck Ferguson they knew they would have died long ago.

“Right after you were rescued, before the war started on the eastern front, he made some notes here.” And she opened the book, skimming through the pages until she finally came to the place she wanted. “Just a few pages, but on the night before he died he pointed them out to me, told me to work upon them.”

She passed the book over to Andrew. He carefully took the bound volume, scanning the page, wondering how she had managed to master Chuck’s infamous scrawled crablike writings.

She reached into her apron pocket, pulled out a sheaf of papers, carefully unfolded them, and laid them out on the table. It wasn’t a bundle of papers but rather a large single sheet of drafting paper, half a dozen feet across and several feet wide, taking up most of the table. Andrew noticed just how badly her hands had been burned as well—two of the fingers on her left hand were little more than stumps. As he scanned the paper he saw that half of it was a detailed map, the other half covered with a different kind of handwriting than Chuck’s, simple block lettering, some of it calculations, the rest commentary with lines drawn to the map while the far right side of the sheet had sketches of airships.