"What's your hurry, you little bastard? You're going the wrong way, anyway. You think this is a retreat?"
In response, Captain of the fourty fourth Transport area Barick looked up fiercely at the tall major of a motorized rifle unit. Around them, their vehicles— Barick's cargo Tauroxes and the major's battalion of combat vehicles— had intermingled with smashed headlamps, shouts, curses, and confusion. No traffic controllers had been posted at the intersection. Now the combat troops were in a self-righteous rage, furious that a lowly transport unit had muddled their progress.
"First of all, Major," Barick said calmly, "you're on a support route. This is not a combat artery."
"You're the one who's on the wrong road, you snot. Now you can get those trucks off out of my way, or I'll drive right over them."
"Major, this is my road, and I'm carrying important cargo."
"To the rear?" The tall major laughed. He pawed his foot at the ground like a prancing stallion, head thrown back in mocking hilarity. Barick glowered up into the other man's eyes. Bully's eyes, beneath a dripping helmet rim. Barick was already unhappy with his unexpected mission, but he was determined to carry it out.
"Come with me, Major. Just for a moment. You need to have a look at my cargo." And he turned his back on the man, drawing the officer along behind him by the magnetism of his insolence. The major followed Barick down the crumbling, rain-slicked road, cursing as though the outcome of the war depended on his vulgarity. Barick casually slipped off his glasses and dropped them into the pocket of his tunic. He felt no need to inspect his cargo in detail yet again. The tall major did not even have to stretch to see into the bed of the first cargo truck. As Barick drew back the tarpaulin, admitting the smoky daylight, the sounds of raw human misery greeted the two officers. Barick watched the major's face change expression. And it kept changing, unable to settle on an appropriate mask. Abruptly, the major slapped down the canvas and stalked off. Barick hurried along beside him.
"This motorized battalion," Barick said coldly, "is returning from the front, Major. The complement of ambulances was a bit short, as were the stretchers." But the major wasn't listening. He simply shouted orders in multiple directions, telling his men to edge to the side of the road and let the damned trucks pass.
The view from the air filled Major General Tambov with a feeling of power and pride. The regiment commander was not given to self indulgent emotions, as his life had been spent in a struggle to master the weaknesses of his temper, but the sight through the rain-studded window of the modified Valkyrie filled him with pride and awe. Those endless columns of combat vehicles and support units were his men, vehicles which answered to the emperor first, but to him next. The hundreds of deployed artillery batteries, with those in the rear hurrying to move, and others still locked in column formation on the roads, and yet even more completing fire missions, their shells arcing through the air and out of sight. The anti-air emplacements dotting the hilltops and clearings like predators waiting for prey, all of these systems and men marched to his drum. Tambov's pilot flew low, above the treetops. The pilot knew better than to assume that the aquila emblazoned on the craft would protect it from inexperienced and trigger happy anti-aircraft gunners. Tambov felt that he almost didn't care, he felt he was above such issues. The growing enormity of soldiers and war machines flowed westward like a steel tide, absorbed into something greater than them all.
However, it was an imperfect dream. Some columns were ground to a halt. He could see the occasional crossroad which teemed with confusion that he could almost hear the officers cursing and arguing with each other. Burnt out vehicle husks had been shoved off the road where enemy artillery or aircraft had found their mark.
Tambov emphasized with the foot soldiers. To those on the ground, waiting anxiously for their column to move or an order to come down, the offensive must have seemed like a mess, an unparalleled disaster. But from his gods-eye view in the sky, the columns flowed well. For every line which was bogged down or stopped, two or three others moved hurriedly forward along parallel routes. The flow of the Imperial war machine carried all of them in the right general direction. Tambov already had been informed that one division had even gotten its lead elements across the canal a bit to the north, even as two major combat crossing operations were ongoing. Some units had even made it as far as thirty kilometers from their start lines, and one Reconnaissance patrol of Chimeras had reported in from fifty-two kilometers west of the launch point. If he looked back, he could just see the second echelon forces arranging themselves to follow up the shock armies advances.
Yet the enemy fought ferociously. He had heard of the fearful casualty reports from the morning fighting. In perspective, the numbers were acceptable for the PDF. Perhaps even the numbers he had now were exaggerated by missing stragglers or misinterpretations in the heat of the moment. Above the Valkyrie, sorties of strike craft, attackers, and interceptors streaked along the sky, the constant sound of their engines competing with the mechanical roars from the ground at this altitude.
He stared out over his army as it marched deeper to the west. If one focused enough, they could even see the spires of Hive Valenci, daring them to come closer. To the pawns on the ground, the entire thing was nothing but confusion and panic, but to the man who could look down, the spectacle was an irresistible flood.
Maurice regretted the war, although his formation had not even been introduced into combat as yet. He regretted his spectacular rise to the command of a premier maneuver brigade at a jealousy-inspiring age. He regretted all of the things his father had never been able to see clearly. The old man made such a fuss about accepting no patronage for Faustuses. Yet, Maurice thought, were it not for his position, it's unlikely I would be more than a middling major. Were it not for the name, the name and its iron burden of traditions, I would hardly be a soldier. Colonel. Colonel of a shock mechanized brigade. It sounded marvelously romantic, the stuff of operas and oversized epaulets. Some nobles might have had a grand time with such a character. Or plotted against them.
His driver was a good boy, not really cut out to be a soldier either. Quite frightened of the great, brooding colonel, son of one of the most powerful officers in the Sector military establishment. Maurice remembered how the sickly colored mud had grabbed the boy's ill-fitting boots. A lean farm boy in a dismal training area in Osmea, waiting for orders. Waiting for orders like all of them. Maurice had heard that the war was going very fast up front, even faster than the plan had called for in some sectors. The combination of killing technologies and the barely controllable mobility of contemporary armored vehicles and aircraft had torn the orderliness of situation maps apart with a rapidity alarming even to the side enjoying success. Maurice remembered the baffled faces at the corps briefing he had attended earlier in the afternoon. Everyone had expected a tougher initial fight. But the fairy-tale endings of countless dreary exercises had suddenly come true. Even the careful Sarian eyes of Girard, the corps commander, had revealed an odd disorientation, unsettled by the velocity of events.
In his heart, Maurife felt that the war could not go too slowly for him. He recalled the detritus of enemy bombings on the approaches to the Canal crossing site north of Revel. The long lines of burned-out trucks and the hapless rows of burned bodies had not even made it into the war in the traditional sense. Hours away from the border and the stew of combat, death had come without warning or honor. If war had ever had any glamour, Maurice thought, it was surely gone now. He had counted thirty-seven wrecks in one area, over fifty in another. The crossing sites themselves were little more than vehicle graveyards, the riverbanks blackened. His brigade had lost several vehicles during the Canal crossing, including precious air-defense systems. Now the survivors sat hidden in an assembly area in the farmlands, topped off with fuel, organized into combat march serials, ready to move on the last, most difficult leg of their journey into battle. The corps commander projected a resumption of the march within twelve to eighteen hours, and a rapid movement to commitment, with no scheduled rest stops or halts at provision points. When the vehicles moved again, their destination would be combat. As soon as their Colonel told them to move. As soon as the Army commander told the Colonel. As soon as the Corps commander gave the word to the Army commander, right after the Front commander authorized the Army commander.
Maurice thought helplessly of his father. He truly loved the old man. And admired him. Of course, it was easy to admire Army General Theodore Faustus, Commander of the Western Front. But Maurice wondered how many other men truly loved him. His father had always seemed enormous and heroic to him. And blind, as heroes had to be in the social architecture of the Imperial system. Maurice was convinced that his father was scrupulously, almost absurdly honest. The old man meant it when he said he wanted no special treatment for his son. But the system was not equipped to handle such requests. Maurice knew well that he would have had to commit a string of outrageous public follies even to slow his career.
Faustus's son. Promote him. And get him out of here.
Even if he had it all to do over again, Maurice doubted he would follow his own desires. The old man was too big, too grand to be resisted. And disarmingly demanding, in his aristocratic way. He had never threatened or bullied Maurice into becoming an officer. He had just assumed it would be so with such unshakable conviction that Maurice had found himself powerless to resist. Zena wanted him to quit. She wanted him to find his own life. It was far too late now, of course, to think seriously about becoming an artisan. Too many years had gone by. His fingers had stiffened around too much military hardware. But, she pointed out, he could perhaps become a professor of art, and a critic. He had a good name, and the good names were back in fashion at last, a new novelty for the privileged elite. And then they could be together always.
Zena. She was a fine, loving, exuberant chaos of a woman, absolutely inappropriate for the role of an officer's wife. She could never remember the ranks and titles of the other wives' husbands; she was only half-aware that Maurice wore a rank himself. If Zena liked her, a lieutenant's child bride was as good as a marshal's mistress. And naturally, since she was married to a Faustus, the wives from the upper echelons assumed that Zena purposely snubbed them. Zena was an open, honest, naive, hated woman who danced jauntily through it all, never fully aware of the nastiness behind the smiles, simply carrying on as if without a care in the world. He showed her art he would try to create, and she watched, curled up like a cat on a stove. But left to her own devices, she buoyed in and out of rooms, delighted and frenetic with life, and energy.
Tears came to his eyes as he pictured her, straight brown hair draping a perfect throat made for jewels. He touched his eyes, dreading discovery, and a queasiness that had been nipping at his stomach for the last few hours twisted in him again. He hoped he was not getting sick, even as the beginning of illness soured his mood still further.
Now he was here, planetside, in the mud, and everything was painfully real. The war was real. And he did not know if he could accomplish his assigned tasks, if he could really be his father's son. He knew all of the primers' phrases and the drills, all of the wisdom of the classroom and the training range. But would he be able to lead men into battle? Would he be able to manage the complexity? Would he be able to do it right when it really mattered? In his heart, he doubted his adequacy.