Under One Banner, page 20
part #4 of Commonweal Series
Eugenia wiggles mentally at their connection to the battery focus, becomes irritated, and finds how to address an individual, any individual. A little more wiggling and they’ve found the direct address for the warrants of authority. Wiggle that and they’ve got the way to speak privately to the master gunner.
Private communication and the uneasy awareness they really have been given the banner. The banner’s treating Eugenia as though they have active warrants of authority and commission and an appointment to command.
So is the focus, and all through two inhales Eugenia’s blindingly, paralytically aware those are distinct and different things.
The Dead Gunner’s face hasn’t changed expression with waiting. Eugenia knows it can, dead or not.
I don’t believe we can or should try to swing round to the west, Eugenia says. Too much chance of lost contact or a meeting engagement.
The banner has a lot of maps.
If we head south and a bit west, we can get into this valley. Hardly anything in the Eastern Waste has names. Easier to point on the map in the banner than to fuss with the grid numbers. Pull the waggons without a bubble, raise some dust. Do that for half a day, and then switch back to the focus for everyone. Find me a hill or a bluff with a terrain discontinuity facing north and west that far away. Set up the route to get the battery sited on top.
It’s not all dead out here, the Dead Gunner says, thoughtful. An active focus bubble of any strength at all will do odd things to the dust and make it look like something other than waggons passing.
Mostly dead, Eugenia says. The long southward valley was probably a river valley before the seas went down and the rain moved, five and six and seven thousand years ago. Have the medics alert. Everybody marching has to use the focus — because bronze bulls walk enough faster than people do — and can go first and use the focus to suppress their dust. If the route finds a surprise, the active focus will find it first. By all means keep the bubble instantiated but not active over the drayage. Eugenia produces a strange small smile. Their thought, Excellence requires risk, quotes Decorum During Private Festivals.
Sir. The Dead Gunner mists away. Eugenia imagines it’s easier to look at ideas of maps in the banner from inside the banner. Maybe not ‘if you’re dead,’ but you have to be dead to get inside a banner. So it’s only the dead it will advantage.
Not especially difficult for the living, Eugenia thinks. Even if it feels strangely prosthetic.
Eugenia has not noticed they’ve got the banner leaning on their shoulder, or that they took it absently and naturally when the master gunner’s shade let go. There’s no such lack of notice from the battery as a whole.
Eugenia has time to wonder by what accident of custom the Line says drayage when the waggons and the caissons are four-wheeled and sprung before Two, Banner, ready, arrives first. Less than a minute of spread before the last ready arrives, and it’s not the medics.
Eugenia wiggles the address of the focus around to the whole battery, and carefully does not think it really is easy to use in a way that will activate that address.
Banner, Tubes, targets. Eugenia calls up a map instance. Puts nine markers on the image of the map, three without numbers, six marked one through six.
Load squid. Prepare to range your numbers.
Eugenia’s voice does not alter. The voices of the answering gunners do; Sir comes back in doubtful tones and fearful. Somewhere in Eugenia, deep and quiet and outside the ritual need of certainty, the tenuous possibility of anything like the sorcery student’s future snaps.
Shot on the caissons is there to be used. This is a point of agreement between Adjutant Hank and Captain Blossom so absolute that they have neither of them noticed it could be a question. Eugenia’s enunciation of the principle comes with all that certainty and banishes doubt. Doubt, but not confusion.
Squid alters terrain, Eugenia says to the confusion in the banner focus. The Eastern Waste’s moderately horrid. If the squid-hits don’t look new, we show that army a better path.
There’s a second or two, and then the focus fills up with grins. No-one is going to suppose they want to pass through any place squid has hit, even if they realize it’s new terrain. And they might well not, not if they don’t see the shot go in. On the scale of terrain, shot are tiny, and will come down kilometres away from the edge of the affected area. If you just see the change, you’d carefully not go there. If you see what has changed, you won’t know how old it is, and it’ll be days before it stops wiggling.
There’s a solid chance. The banner’s high perspective and long views are nothing a capable sorcerer cannot duplicate, but may well not for the same reason the battery has been so careful to take brief looks at random times, and to perceive photons only. What you can see, you can harm, and the Power may not hide itself.
A brigade will use that, sometimes; have a single company banner be obvious, and then descend overwhelmingly against whatever attacks. One battery dare not.
“Prepare to range your numbers,” means to get ready to shoot on command at the target given the number corresponding to your artillery tube. When it’s a matter of possibly-expired long red shot made in haste and wrath for another design of artillery tube, there are additional preparations. The new tubes can easily throw much too hard or overfill the individual and possibly variable accumulators, so the tubes are exchanging small gunners to check by pairs, and then gunners. It takes time. There is time; having the master gunner entirely ready with a route when the shooting ends is a good outcome.
So is due caution.
Eugenia waits, face entirely still.
One, Battery, ready. The other five tubes report in order at a measured pace.
Eugenia, memory full of Order describing constructed belief and how sorcerous workings benefit from deliberate expectations, carefully does not smile in approval.
Battery, Tubes. From the left, slow rate, bubbled tubes, shoot.
No one has the reflexes.
If squid goes wrong in a tube, it will happen prior to perception. The evening push teams all together place a separate bubble over Tube One. Only the banner’s main bubble, the main ward structure, can have a hole for exiting shot. That’s a complex mechanism of sequentially switching ward layers, so there’s never an opening for the million hornets of scenario planning. A secondary bubble over the tube can fold away just in time to avoid interfering with the shot’s flight. At which point everyone on the morning push teams and not assigned to One has their pending effort strengthen the main battery bubble. No one has the reflexes for that, either, but the banner has the switch designed in. There are more traditional red shot than not which require the capability.
Squid isn’t traditional, squid had never existed before. But it follows a classic pattern.
One shoots. Set, and quadruply-checked velocity and angle flings the shot just about as hard as it can take, accumulator carefully completely full. It will come down almost vertically eighty-five kilometres away after a flight that rises out of the majority of the air. The place it is to come down is still more than fifty cautious kilometres from the fringes of the Northern Hills. It marks the beginning of a relatively flat route west.
Making squid involves sections sliced from demon brains. It has a minimum safe distance of twenty-five kilometres and a definite but indeterminate shelf-life as the inherently protean nature of demons leaches out of whatever material substance that particular demon had used as a brain. Veterans of the March North describe one preserved demon brain in particular as having been crystalline, rigid, and various colours. An artillerist from west of the City of Peace said the colour of lemon candy in strong light; another artillerist described it as the colour of sulphur crystals. A Creek from a dairying thorpe near Longbarns had said “looks like frozen cow piss,” and moved the large glass jar with the preserved brain in it with greater care than the others.
The cautionary bubble reforms over Tube Two. Two’s morning team takes a slow inhale everyone can feel. Tube Two shoots.
Their target is closer, sixty kilometres, and a cliff. Remove the cliff, and below it goes an obvious route up out of the broad dry valley.
The Independent Blossom made all twelve shot, all the squid there have ever been.
Say ‘demon brain’ to Tiggy and they don’t look cheerful at all. It’s not the only or the worst thing about making squid that the Shot Team wouldn’t look cheerful about. Eugenia wishes they hadn’t read the full description when going through the lists of legacy red shot made for the Experimental Battery.
There is nothing about being lawful that preserves a work from dread.
Tube Three shoots. There’s another way out of the dry valley, north of Two’s target, and also somewhat east of it. Eugenia targeted the top of the rise, the place where there would have been a settlement when the Eastern Waste was habitable. It ruins the route out of the valley and maybe looks like the plausible consequences of an old war.
The first four squid got made before the injured survivors of the Experimental Battery were out of the hospital in Headwaters. Before it was clear Reems wasn’t going to keep coming over the Northern Hills’ mountains after the March North. Before either the independent or the newly-appointed captain had come to terms with the Experimental Battery’s list of dead.
A more complete description of a state of mind in which Eugenia was taught no one should ever do anything sorcerous whatsoever could not be asked. Never mind experimental, Eugenia hopes fervently experimental, enchantments that must withstand being flung out of artillery tubes. No-one in the Commonweal could ever have regular stocks of demon brains, so the idea that the first design will work at all ought to be rashly optimistic.
Tube Four shoots. Their target is close, thirty kilometres, and on the eastern side of the dry valley, below the Battery’s current position in the coastal rise. There might be a coastal pass up there. If the fleeing folk of Reems had not moved all night, Eugenia would not have used this target, but they had. If the pursuing army considers the squid strikes old, it will hide those and make the battery the obvious focus of the army’s pursuit.
After the March North, the Experimental Battery had been attached to the Fourth Heavy Battalion of the Twelfth Brigade to assist in defence of the northern border of the Creeks, as might be required. As everyone had expected would be required.
The Independent Blossom sent a letter to Full-Captain Crinoline with the first four shot. The letter is still in the crate after those first four shot have been lifted out. Crinoline, then and now bearing the standard of the Fourth Battalion of the Twelfth Brigade, had viewed it calmly.
The letter … Eugenia would like to believe it should be read as a sorcerous threat. That would be easier to fit into Eugenia’s understanding of politeness, law, or society. How Crinoline viewed it calmly Eugenia doesn’t know. Eugenia could not have.
Five shoots. Tube Five’s point of aim is possibly too far north, possibly something the oncoming army will notice. If they don’t notice the falling shot, and just the effect, that’s fine. Terrain with a spontaneous tendency to bad behaviour is a simple and plausible explanation anywhere unfamiliar. Rather more so in a place like the Eastern Waste.
A strange niggle forms in Eugenia’s mind. Thinking about it makes it clear it’s the master gunner’s request for attention. Eugenia isn’t sure how they find the part of the banner focus that acknowledges the inquiry, but they do.
Gunner, Banner. Route ready.
Banner, Gunner. Very good.
Tube Six shoots. Six’s point of aim should convert a low salt pan surrounded by lumpy terrain to a wider area of impassibility. It might not be a route out into the coastal hills, but it might be, just as easily, and there’s no reason not to be thorough. It’s even close enough that it might blend convincingly with Four’s target.
Eugenia shifts their attention in the focus so they’re speaking solely to the master gunner.
Banner, Gunner. Consider One, Five, Six, least flustered. Least flustered by handling experimental demonic shot that might be past its expiry date, something that might have been done as a culmination of the firing exercise the battery hasn’t had. If it was purely an exercise, those would be the tubes who’d passed, who wouldn’t do it again.
Eugenia can feel the Dead Gunner’s attention on tubes and crews and in the banner’s recollection of events. It’s not precisely like metaphysical communication. Eugenia wonders if there’s a way to get a look at that part of the design of a battle-standard, and if the Wizard Laurel was brilliant or stubborn.
Thinking or both makes Eugenia smile. Crews sweating more than temperature or applied push begins to justify are reassured by sidelong observation.
Gunner, Banner. Concur.
Banner, Gunner. First place we can range all three — and the unnumbered markers on the banner’s map image go one, five, six — halt and engage those targets.
Sir comes back in a particularly collegial way. Eugenia can’t think of who they can ask what the Dead Gunner’s name is; it’s not a polite question. But it seems possible they are going to need to know.
Eugenia’s attention shifts back to the whole of the focus.
Banner, Battery. Well Done. Movement will be at the Master Gunner’s direction.
Chapter 30
Year of the Peace Established Five Hundred Forty-Five, Month of Messidor, Tenth Day
The watch is careful and the movement’s quick but nothing like as quick as it would be with the banner compressing distance. Eugenia was able to activate the banner’s bug charm using the banner focus, and the moment of operant use of the Power makes them unreasonably joyous. That an entirely incomprehensible spell is more like a comprehensible spell than the usual function of the banner passes as a gentle irony through Eugenia’s thoughts, and does no more.
The dust’s unpleasant, but not direly so.
Carefully random and carefully brief high views with the focus show all six targets successfully struck with squid. The pursuing army is down in the big dry valley. The terrain’s rocky, the terrain’s wind-blown with grit. There should still be dead bodies and dung and some evidence of cooking or shelter behind the fleeing. That the army comes on makes Eugenia wonder.
It’s enough that it does come on; they don’t disturb the master gunner.
It’s evening by the time the battery’s moved far enough south to range the remaining three squid targets. Feed, range, and move on, Eugenia says when asked.
It’s black dark when they’re at the base of a ridge or an old bluff or a something rising in the night. Then Eugenia remembers what the focus will show them, and the scene goes lit like a cloudy day in their mind.
Gunner, Banner. It’s a battery evolution to put a road up. Either you or me, and you’d benefit from practice.
Banner, Gunner. Worth a try. Stand by to recover the evolution.
The master gunner need not. Eugenia takes front on the battery focus and fifteen metres of almost-flat-bedded rising sandstone not-quite-vertical slope develops a road, half again wider than the safe minimum and rising in a single half-kilometre length of ramp. The battery all on the top of the cliff, Eugenia uses the focus to sheer the cliff off vertical and push the crushed debris forward across two- and three hundred metres to fill the near-dead ground below the new cliff edge.
Order couldn’t do that, Eugenia thinks. Crow couldn’t do that directly.
Crow’s nigh-certain approach in the Bad Old Days — marids — is a sufficiently disquieting thought that Eugenia’s grin goes much quieter.
Battery, Banner. Firing lines to north and south. Emplace all tubes in the northern firing line. Camp to be placed between and below the firing lines. Set the watch. Keep a close watch.
Eugenia doesn’t think the battery has walked right up to another group from Reems. They’re bitingly aware they’re not even sure the battery has been followed.
There’s an image in the focus of the rectangular camp, long sides running east-west.
Gunner, Banner. Prep reaction?
Eugenia tells themself this is what master gunners are for.
Banner, Tubes. Prep hammer.
Hammer is twice the mass of spike, and the shot is one solid piece. More than half the length is point; hammer is kinetic shot, made to go as far as it can with some of it still solid.
Camp gets made. The tubes go in on an east-west firing line along the peak of the cliff-top; the caissons and the baggage and the tent lines go in an excavation, so the tubes could turn and shoot south. There are revetments and a ditch all ‘round and a second, southern, firing line below the level of the northern line. It’s still not an ideal position if they get attacked from behind. There isn’t an effective way to prepare to engage an army coming from the north and be surprised from the south. There isn’t any means to get the whole camp in a compact area; the traditional weakness of artillery at battery scales — how far it must extend the ward bubble to cover the whole battery — applies. Having a complete firing line east-to-west makes the camp larger than the best bubble density. These facts do not make Eugenia willing to shoot across the camp or to expect to use fewer than all six tubes.
Everything and everyone is dusty with the bitter dust of the Eastern Waste. Bug-charm or not, the dust makes Eugenia uneasy with the unease of memorized statistics about ingestion risks.
Gunner, Banner. How do we get the march-dust out of the camp?
Banner, Gunner. There’s a bubble layer for dust in the new banners.
Eugenia nods unconsciously, standing by the commander’s second waggon. The master gunner was one of those who had breathed despair as dust before they died on the March North. The Line sensibly wanted a better means of defence in the Second Commonweal’s battle-standards.
Eugenia also knows this asks more delicacy than they have, or have yet.
