ISOT alt-hist fanfiction: The Shang.

[Steve]

More, more, more!

[The Duchess of Zeon]

Alright, if you want it, you got it.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

Chapter the Fifth

There was a grand picture at the entrance foyer to the Anglo-Chinese Club. It had just been completed by our court artist, the Baroness of Leid. It showed the taking of Sanxingdui from last year. I remembered the event well, and the picture took me back to it:

The gates of the city had been shut in time, I observed somewhat glumly. It would now take a while for my marines to get on into the city. A swift charge by a company of Gurkhas had cleared the defenders' efforts at a pitched battle, aided by the prompt assistance of a battery of ordnance rifles and another two of Napoleons. With no real resistance to speak of at any sort of range, the artillery commanders had driven the batteries to within half a musket shot of the enemy lines, swung the guns about, unlimbered them, and had them in action at point-blank with double case in a minute flat.

I had passed over the slaughter as I had advanced with the main body. The batteries had fired on the retreat—they had let the recoil of their guns push back their position naturally with each firing, as the enemy rushed out upon them in desperation as a result of the horrific fire—and so there had been a great spread out mess of human remains, of corpses bloated by the summer heat and shredded by a mass of lead ball. Bodies without limbs, and limbs without bodies, strewn in a haphazard fashion like some modernist painting.

There had been one man among the lot, crying out again and again, as my command staff passed, in the language of his people which none of his knew. His legs had been blown clean off at best four inches below the hips and there was a little pond of blood surrounding him, yet he had still lasted the past twenty minutes by the time we had arrived, and I had caught a glimpse of one of my aides, out of pity, or humanity, briefly dismounting to give the man a last drink of water from his canteen.

But the batteries were in grave danger, for the population of the Kingdom of Shu was great, and the army before us numerous if nothing else. When they might have been overrun, however, the Gurkhas intervened. They up stiffly with the bayonet, two hundred and fifty strong and deployed in battle-line, advancing at the double-quick. Immediately a fire of thousands of bullets was directed against the forces of Shu, as the old Gorkhali veterans spewed forth the mad-minute from their Lee-Metfords. In three minutes nearly eleven thousand rounds were put into the enemy, even as the batteries in that same span of time fired six salvoes of triple-case from each of the twelve Napoleons.

This intense firing sent clouds of blackpowder smoke roiling over the battlefield, obscuring everything. It also killed great numbers of the enemy, and it was on this point of the field that we had passed the windrows of corpses, heaped where massed rifle and artillery fire had felled them, standing and charging in the open as they were. This had not however broken the enemy advance; despite it all, they continued to rush forward into the terrible fire, into the snap and the crack of the rifles and the thunder of the guns. They had passed into the dense clouds of blackpowder smoke, where they could see nothing...

...And then had abruptly found themselves confronted by the dense ranks of 26in long blades of the Pattern 1859 Cutlass Bayonets affixed to the Lee-Metfords with their 30in barrels; the whole grusome assembly was as long as a half-pike at slightly more than six feet, and though most of the Gurkhas were several inches shorter than that, their incredibly tough physiques and dense cords of muscles allowed them to wield the guns to the greatest effect with both the grim cutlass bayonets and the bronze butt-plates affixed to the rifles for the occasion of a hand-to-hand struggle.

Ayo Gorkhali! had gone the shout, and the Gurkhas fired a massed volley and then leaped forward as one with their bayonets. Bronze armour did nothing against cold steel: Though the Gurkhas were outnumbered at least six-to-one, each and every blow they drove home with those grusome bayonets was a true one, punching through bronze and boiled leather like it was butter, gutting men like watermelons hacked to pieces by a scythe. It took perhaps a minute of this vicious madness, of blood spurting everywhere and every man of Shu being hacked down by the crazed onrush of the Gurkhas, before panic set in.

A company with a rated strength of six officers and two hundred and fifty other ranks had routed near to two thousand of the enemy; the cost killed had been one officer and three men. There the scene of the battle was at the most grusome, and the bodies essentially entirely of the enemy, chopped and gored and run through by the bayonets of the Gurkhas. They pursued immediately, contemptuous of an enemy that had broken before they could draw their kukhris. As the artillery batteries ceased to fire an incredible sight cleared its way out of the smoke. The Gurkhas were crisply pursuing the troops of Shu, and the entire centre of the Army of Shu was in general retreat before that small mass of quick-stepping men, marching to the beat of a lone drummer pounding out a pursuit roll, their bayonets no longer gleaming, for they were covered with blood.

The word had gone back to my headquarters, and immediately I took the Black Watch—my reserve—and went forward to exploit the opportunity in the centre, thrusting my Marines to either side of the battle. The last component of the army, the Qingdao Rifles, was already advancing right up behind the Gurkhas. We had cut the Army of Shu in two as easily as one might cut a loaf of bread. As we advanced the situation became clear to the men of Shu; on our right flank their forces had been positioned to retreat to the city of Sanxingdui and had done so in good order, pursued by the marine companies on that flank.

My Gurkhas, however, had guaranteed that the Shu forces on my left flank could not succeed in retiring back to the city, even though the desperate running of the broken centre--more's the pity that we couldn't bring any cavalry along for a proper pursuit, I mused—had allowed perhaps a thousand to equally reach the shelter of the city. But that left at least two thousand men cut off, and it was this force which we pressed with a swift and terrible ferocity. Batteries of artillery were brought up to point-blank range. Gatlings were swung into action. Rifles and bayonets pressed from every side. A tight net was drawn which saw more and more men advancing, pushing inward, circling the enemy, cutting them off entirely.

It did not take long for this to have an effect. Hundreds of the men of Shu caught in the pocket were slaughtered. They could not escape, and they soon realized it, even as their comrades were dying all around them in great numbers. Soon they threw down their weapons and begged for mercy. The firing continued for a while until the order that the enemy had surrendered enmasse could be got out. In all some fourteen hundred prisoners were taken here, though this had served to delay us so we could not make a rush against the walls of Sanxingdui.

That was our problem, then, for the fortifications were impressive in the extreme. The walls of the city were haphazard in nature—we were facing the longest wall, which was some eighteen hundred meters in length, fourty meters wide at the base, and twenty meters wide at the top, with a height of five meters. The whole packed mass of Sanxingdui, a city of 3.5 square kilometers, and a population of around twenty thousand, crammed into an irregular trapezoid fortified on three sides but with the fourth protected only by the Duck river.

We had an oppportunity, though. The walls were steep, but they were not impregnable. They sloped up before they reached the narrow, straight-top of uncooked brick, and that slope and the straight-edged top beyond might be scaled easily enough by men with grapple, at least while the enemy was still recovering from their retreat, reorganizing, putting together sufficient numbers of troops to man the walls. And the commander of the Black Watch recognized it immediately, coming up forward and offering a salute which I returned promptly.

“Commodore,” he began at once—still a young man in his twenties, only a leftenant in command of a platoon when we had left home, and it was that platoon, bolstered by volunteers of Celtic ancestry from among the rest of the group, a few expatriate Sun People from the Nantucket proterctorates, even a few women and local 'honourary scots', which formed the short company which was the Black Watch—voice full of eager determination. “We have not had the chance to do more than put a few rounds into an encircled enemy on this day; we are still fresh. We've got grapples and we're set for ammunition. Let us try to take a section of the wall in a rush.”

It only took me a moment to decide, for the elan of the move was greatly appealing. “All right, Major, but I shall prepare a diversion first. The Qingdao Rifles shall make a diversion against the northern part of this face of the wall, and I shall direct the artillery there; while this is going on bring your men as close as cover allows to the wall along the south part of this face, and when you judge the time right, make your dash. I shall position the Gurkhas right behind you to follow you up and then the Marines of the Left in their turn if your success is had.”

“Understood, Sir. With your permission?”

“Be about it, Major!” I replied gleefully, and then turned to one of my aides: “Order the batteries forward to musket shot on the north of the wall face, and there they are to commence a heavy fire into it with ball. The Qingdao Rifles are to follow to the position and commmence firing upon the wall as soon as they are within range, but continue to advance and fire until they are positioned with the batteries, and keep their bayonets fixed and look like they are ready for a rush. I want these orders executed at the double-quick, and damn their exhaustion; they shall not need to actually rush the wall so if they are tired by this than so be it.”

The orders were quickly executed. Men advanced out of range of the bowmen of Shu upon the wall, and the batteries rolled up into that same range upon the north section of this face of the wall—the east face—and immediately began to put shot into the great thickness of the wall, with an impressive thunder and appearance but little actual damage due to the extreme thickness of the base of the wall. Still, it attracted the attention of the men of Shu, and soon it was followed up by the Qingdao Rifles advancing to the tune of Solid Men to the Front, firing and advancing as they converged on the position of the batteries.

Sanxingdui's defenders, in the process of establishing their lines on the wall, were naturally distracted by this very great commitment in the northeast sector of the defences, even as the Black Watch got as close as the cover allowed in the southeast. It had been fifty minutes at the very most since my conversation with the regimental commander and everything was in order; the sun was just starting to dip toward the horizon and the sky had a bloody palour to it, suited for the events of this day. I looked to the southeast, waiting, and my eyes were rewarded with an incredible sight:

The Major of the Black Watch had stood and drawn his basket-hilted sword, just perhaps two hundred meters from the wall. Bursting out of cover first were two pipers, two drummers, and the colour-boys carrying the blood red body and white canton of the national flag and the ancient regimental colours of the Black Watch. The wail of bagpipes contested with the sound of artillery firing a klick and a half to the north and the jaunty and defiant quick-march of the Black Watch was struck up: All the Blue Bonnets are o'er the Border. The Major spun his sword about over his head and pointed at the wall:

“Up an' at 'em, laddies!”

HUZZAH!

The Watch raised a cheer and bolted forward from cover at the double-quick, resplendent in black kilts, khaki blouse, and black glengarry with red hackle. The pipers played and the drums beat the roll of the double-quick as they stepped forward in the front, their officers in the lead with swords drawn. There was some opposition upon the wall, and soon arrows were falling amongst them, but at a crisp order that I could not quite make out the Black Watch volley-fired on the advance and a wave of blackpowder smoke obscured them as the bowmen upon the wall took cover. They burst out of cover, marching so fast in great long strides neigh to a run, now much closer, and by the time they bowmen had resumed to fire down at them they were nearly to the wall.

An order was given, and again there was a volley put into the wall, and that served to cover them until they moment had arrived when they had reached the sloping base of the formidable defensive barrier. Here the Sections were divided into halves, and with half the company providing fire support the other half went forward with admirable speed, grapples being slung up, and the regimental commander being the first man to scale the wall, followed in a heartbeat by the pipers. It was here that the most marvelous sight imaginable took place, a distant spectacle before my eyes:

The regimental commander stood upon the wall, along with a single old grizzled piper, who had taken up to playing The Black Bear. A mass of the enemy rushed in against them, and the piper calmly continued to play, piping the men of the regiment up the wall, as the major fired every round in his LeMat revolver and then put a load of buck from the shotgun barrel into the men of Shu besides, and at last prepared to defend himself with his sword. But all through that desperate action the piper continued to play The Black Bear, never wavering even as the men of Shu came to within a sword's thrust of him, the bullets of the well-intended covering fire crackling dangerously nearby.

He was saved from a sure death as the first group of riflemen of the Watch came over the time and laid into the men of Shu with bayonet and rifle-butt. The rest of the little pipe and drum corps reached the top and struck up the tune as well; to this beat the company ascended, firing and fighting hand-to-hand as they cleared away a section of the wall, the flags of the Republic and of the Watch fluttering defiantly upon the ramparts.

“Send the Gurkhas forward,” I ordered, and that was that for the independent Kingdom of Shu.

The Baroness of Leid's painting captured the moment in all its glory. The Major stood, LeMat in one hand and sword in the other, the faces of the men of Shu closing around them painted in desperate viciousness, and the determined looks of the bearded Celts ascending the wall captured in perfect immortality. And in the centre, the deadly serenity of the piper, dirk sheathed and with the only weapon in his hands the pipe which he played throughout it all. It was a mental image that stayed with me throughout most of the dinner, as perhaps it did for all the members of the club, who were quite laudatory of the skill of the Baroness in the creation of such a fine work, and the general neoclassical revival being conducted throughout the Republic.

The memories caught me for a moment, and I was surprised by a declaration which I realized in a moment came from an even more surprising source, considering that it was Drake, normally reserved, and particularly reserved in recent years when he scarcely had the spare energy for any display of emotion, even in the informal atmosphere of the Club. I looked, and heard something deservedly splendid:

"And," Drake said with, for him these days, an unusually brilliant smile upon his face (another surprise), but for an unusual occasion that was elucidated in a mere moment: "Fresh from our good man in Australia, Colonel Garrett, I present to you.." He held up a bottle and there were a few intakes of air around the room. "The first shipment of the world's first Australian Port."

Ah, so that's the reason for the air of delight, I thought with a chuckle, and it was certainly a pleased one, for a nice Port was never a bad thing.

“Splendid, old chap!” Chris replied, affecting an English accent with some success for that moment, just across the table from me.

“Certainly the most immediately enjoyable of the many marvels that the good Colonel has accomplished in Australia, we now have a full stock for the Club.”

There were a few murmurs at that; after all, Stephen had been proceeding with great energy at the civilization of the Aborigines and the creation of an infrastructure in Brisbane, and expansion of the colonial settlements. It was a long term investment, to be sure, but the Guinea and Australia company had in the end fully sanctioned his efforts, thinking about the long term, and that had brought a fair amount of private investment into that particular Company of our's, which now ruled over essentially the whole of the world's second largest island and smallest continent, along with the Bismarcks and Solomons.

But my attention was brought back to Chris and his very dubious meal, which I was quite suspicious of, considering the gusto with which he was enjoying it. “So,” I began again. “You were telling me about your meeting with Madame Hurlelo?”

“Oh, right,” Chris replied after a moment, distracted no doubt by the thought of the Port. “Well,” he chuckled delightedly. “I arranged the timing of the meeting to coincide with the weekly street cleaning. It was quite the little theatrical performance, I daresay, to have her held up by that quasi-Maoist mass of our's going through the streets.”

“That's for sure..” We had come across a simple method of sanitation. Financing was made available to the mass of workers for their housing, in exchange for which they were required to devote a half-day each week to the cleaning of the city. They were carefully organized into huge bucket brigades which washed down the streets with water, teams of people advancing forward with long trails of buckets following behind from the public fountains, pouring water down the streets.

Then they were followed by teams of hundreds with large push brooms, who pushed the water and the dirt and trash that was carried with it into the sewers. The sewers were then flushed with water diverted from the gravity-fed aquaducts which served all the needs of the city for clean and safe water, to excess, even.

The whole thing was organized in a quasi-military fashion (and everyone in the groups were also trained to form bucket brigades which could aide the horse drawn steam fire-pumps in the event of a major fire, or with shovels and crowbars to dig fire lines and demolish structures), and the PLA faction had helpfully chipped in with working songs which had no doubt been sung full-blast while Hurlelo was waiting for them to pass, with signalling banners and drums being used to control the whole effort.

“Oh yes,” Chris replied, rich delight in his voice. “She was certainly quite impressed by it, in the scale and number of people invovled in the effort, enough so that she wasn't annoyed by the delay. The meeting went as usual, of course—bloody Fiernan have become entirely to good at their role the Second Generation of New England Liberals—but at least there was, as noted at the cabinet meeting, nothing really severe about the usual reproaches and my usual reply.” A chuckle. “It is very tempting to be more severe with them.”

“I understand perfectly, though sometimes I do think you are to harsh on them. After all, they have adapted very successfully to industrialization, so they are hardly bad, even if that is not positive or ideal from our perspective. And they are much better than the average cultural group running around here. Though I know some of those bothersome aspects are precisely what, well, bothers you about them.”

“Worshipping the 'Woman in the Moon', you mean.”

A wry chuckle. “Yes. Well, that, Stonehenge—though that's mostly Drake's pet peeve--and the national flag which looks it should belong to Saudi Arabia. Between the two of you I sometimes wonder how we manage to avoid a breach...”

Chris' mouth twisted slightly at that into a grimace. “It is really, really annoying, but the irony can, at times, being delicious—I shall admit that.”

“Well, good then. No doubt the Ambassador's report shall be taken back home in the fashion you intended, at least, and it is good to remind them precisely what sort of popular support we can muster at a snap notice, for such minor tasks as city sanitation, even. The more we can drive home our superiourity without having to resort to threats or brute displays of military strength the better.”

“Quite so. But for now, Marina—and if you don't mind—I should like to get us some of that Port.”

“But of course, Chris, but of course.”

[fgalkin]

More! More!

Have a very nice day.
-fgalkin

[Ford Prefect]

How very compelling.

[Kuja]

HUZZAH!



A wonderful battle flashback, with a larger-than-life story to it that makes it feel like a real war story. I heartily approve.

[phongn]

But the most important thing is that we have out Port

[The Duchess of Zeon]

Chapter the Sixth


Year 11. It was really a rather pleasant feeling. I was tired, and it was cold out, the workers were eating winter cabbage, though the snow was leaving already—it was thinner here than in the north, at Port Arthur or Beijing. It was the second year of my Consulate. The situation was in order; the usual tensions were delayed. One might imagine that everything was normal. Balbir Singh sat by the door to my office, a servant was turning a hand-cranked gramaphone currently playing the Flight of the Bumblebee, and there was a hot mug of coffee as a salve against the cold and the regular stress of work. The railroad to Wuhan had been finished, and commerce in the country had improved immediately as a result. Trading posts and forts were well on the way to establishment in Xinjiang.

Every so often something was brought for me to sign, and there were large stacks of papers to review. My eyes, though, were constantly drawn to the one document marked priority and sitting in the out box, waiting for the seventeen hundred secure pickup. It was the treaty with Egypt. The Egypt which would be finally recognizing us, establishing embassies in the formal fashion, confirming Abdul Pasha in the proper ways, and concurring to a joint declaration of neutrality. In exchange, we would of course begin an arms trade with them, and steamships for the Nile would follow.

There had been one other price, and this was the one that pleased me most. We had secured the right to establish hospitals and medical centres inside of the conservative Egyptian society. It was a considerable advance, and meant that more of our freshly trained corpsmen (most women, in truth), would be heading out as they did to the Subcontinent—where they had been so successful in preventing a smallpox epidemic—to dispense the most basic of medications, with knowledge which could be conveyed to them in a span of not years, but more like weeks, or at least months, in dutiful imitation of the emergency wartime training programmes for corpsmen during the Second World War.

The six millions who lived crowded along the Nile valley in the domains of Ramses would now have access to that care as well. It was something we had never compromised on. Even as our intrepid explorers and conquerors in pith helmet and khaki had spread our order over the great reach of the Pacific Rim we had never neglected to this higher humanity duty; shot and shell and cold steel were followed in due course—and often preceded by—the offering of the hand of peace in its most fundamental form, the distribution of medical supplies, knowledge, and expertise, to the utmost of our capabilities.

I dearly hoped that we could follow the humanitarian aide of medicine soon with the humanitarian aide of food. Particularly in the Hittite lands starvation would be a grave danger following the conflict of the winter. We already had plans to ship food to Babylon for distribution, but the amount was fairly limited, all things said, because we lacked both shipping and supplies. Fortunately, however, we had been growing genetically engineered rice in the Yellow River delta for a half-decade now, and for three seasons on the lower reaches of the Yangtze. Genetically engineered grain crops were greatly increasing yields through the Yellow valley and the areas to the north and south; these the farmers could enjoy the fruits of without even having more modern tools than the bronze with which they now worked the soil. We were now preparing for intensive cultivation of gene-engineered rice in the Mekong Delta as well.

That was not all, of course. For at least within our own territory everything had changed. The seas were filled with plenty. Whaling, sealing, fishing, and the harvesting of shellfish, all of these things could be conducted to the very limit of our capacity without remotely harming the long-term sustainability of these stocks. The same was true for the rivers and many of the inland lakes, which in this time were particularly large in China, such as the great lakes along the central Yangtze. Small wooden boats, built simply, sufficed for most of this catch, and salt fish and salted whale and seal meat were guaranteed to meet the protein needs of every provincial peasant. The hunting of great herds of wild animals was mostly the same. There would be no health problems in the nation soon enough through malnutrition, and we even had plans to in place to prevent the historical obesity epidemic of the late-20th century due to the great surpluses which were expected.

Conservation was another important issue. We taken important steps to protect the last known Pygmy Mammoths, which we had thought instinct upon arrival but had turned out not to be; the Thylacine, and countless other species—several thousand in total which had been driven extinct between 1,250 BCE and 2005 CE, of which we had with relative ease been able to secure the position of hundreds to date. This was one of our principle areas of cooperation with Nantucket, along with in the field of medicine, and it served to counteract the rather distant and ominous image that we otherwise presented in their press. Guaranteeing the genetic diversity of the Earth was of course quite secure even from a practical and biological perspective.

But shall we not be honest? You are not pleased because Egypt is opened to the international system, you are pleased because, firstly, this guarantees Egyptian neutrality, and secondly, it has no mention of the Cyprus issue. Ramses was not stupid, at any rate, and realized the immense cost of building up a fully modern navy with which to project power when modernization of the land army was the first issue of the day to protect Egyptian sovereignty. Thus it was that artillery and rifles—and of course riverine craft—would be the first order of the day. It would, furthermore, remove the influence of Walker's cronies—why would Egypt need muskets when she could have Lee-Metford rifles?

With trade to Tartessos resuming, the situation was generally on the uplook. Above all came the looming question of Victoria, and of course with it the end of the war, for Walker was sure to attempt a decisive campaign for control of Anatolia starting this year, it could only been weeks off, though perhaps months before I heard about it, depending on the efforts of our intelligence sources in that highly critical region. I took a sip of coffee and then looked up to Balbir Singh from my teak desk. “Madame Hurlelo should be here in a few minutes, as I recall.”

“That's correct, Your Excellency,” he affirmed with the pleasant patience of the Sikhs, the four words conveying a great deal about his thoughts about the meeting and his concerns for my safety; at least in the later case they were not great at all.

Her Excellency the Ambassador for the Republic of Nantucket (for that was her officially accredited title) was certainly an interesting individual, Chris' distaste for her aside (and Drake's, though he was much, much more suave about the whole thing, really). Having spent more than a half-decade in Nantucket before the posting and having been of one of the Old Families, though in the more southwestern parts of England than close to Stonehenge—she had worked the private companies of Nantucket and gained a reputation as a speaker in the assembly, which was ultimately what made President (I would never really get used to a corporate title used for a sovereign ruler, even if it was dutifully inscribed on all the official documents) send her to as as an accredited ambassador when the process of mutual recognition had been completed.

Understandably, considering the nature of the regimes of the area, they were somewhat concerned about the safety of their diplomatic staff. But we had outdone ourselves in providing for them with the sovereign space of the embassy being large and well-defined, and a detachment of Marines allowed to protect it. Of course, a reciprocal arrange was demanded and completed, so that Arik enjoyed the comforts of one of the great old mansions of Nantucket, protected by a brace of Garde Republicaine in their blue-and-red uniforms with red-tasseled steel helmets, white sash, and gold lace, a spitting image of what Emilie had “left behind in Paris”.

Madame Hurlelo had any rate proven herself quite adaptable to the free-wheeling and complex politics of Anyang. Based on her experience, the quarters that we provided her contained luxuries almost ostentatious in their scale, and the constant social schedule expected of a foreign ambassador had kept her quite busy on top of the work load of the constant issues that were exchanged between the two nations which together controlled the commerce of the whole world.

Today's request was rather unusual. I rarely encountered the Nantucketar Ambassador, for Chris of course handled such diplomatic issues. But she had specifically requested this meeting today, and I had agreed to it, perhaps with a bit of curiousity than not, but also since such requests were so rare that I adjudged them as sufficiently important, or at least unique, to field from the various ambassadors. They had quickly learned our ways, after all, that not receiving an audience with the “Great King” was simply how things were done, not an issue of an insult.

Figuring out how our government works was slightly more difficult for them came back some wry memories of assumptions which had not entirely pleased me or anything else for that matter, and had been stiffly corrected. No harm done, for there was much to be said for the intelligence of the natives and they had adapted swiftly and come to respect the power of the republican systems from the future without all that much further difficulty than some initial uncomfortable presumptions. It was of course easier with tribals, who were closer in basic form, if nothing else, to democratic government, but the case of the Fiernan was particular and unique in how well they had adapted, and I had come to think of them as little different than uptimers, even though they were in so many ways.

The door opened, and Balbir Singh stepped away from the wall and back slightly. I waited and watched, sitting, as one of my aides stepped in through the door, pirouetting upon her heel and gesturing in a bow toward my desk. “I present to you Her Excellency the Consul O'Leary of the Serene Republic.” She rose, and I saw beyond her the form of Madame Hurlelo, and bowed again toward me directly: “Your Excellency, I present to you Her Excellency Hurlelo, the Ambassador for the Republic of Nantucket.”

I wondered how I seemed there. My face had grown harsh in the past eleven years, with the onset of middle age, though I still had the fine set of celtic bones which appeared mostly timeless, if now stern. It was no doubt an intimidating look for the likes of a Hurlelo, who had long fought the proto-Celts of the Sun People and had been nearly destroyed by them. But women among the Sun People were less than nothing, and together with but one either did I control a swathe of dozens of uptime nations and countless square miles of line, an Empire unmatched since—and the 'since' was a word used in the most wry of ways—the Sun had Never Set upon the British Empire.

I was dressed in volumous red pantaloons, invisible under the desk, and a more visible but still rather volumous, long-sleeved and generally long blossoming tunic, dress which seemed at once noble and primitive. It was made of silk, in the style of rougher cossack dress, and I wore riding boots to be sure, for it would not befit a Consul to wear soft shoes. My hair was combed back lightly only, and had grown quite long with the ease of having servants at home. It was quite dark by now, only hints of red in it, though I was quite vain about it irregardless, I would have to admit. There was a dirk at my side, the short blade which was the only weapon allowed into the Senate chambers, and thus to wear one was an obvious mark of someone who was of Senatorial Rank.

The last part of the set was a heavy black cape, suitable both for riding and for warmth in the drafty rooms of this palatial warren, an intentional effort to recreate the austere and rustic majesty of the Imperial residence of Marcus Aurelius at Vindabona. And, indeed, it was Aurelius to whom my thoughts had mostly gone of late, the tribulations and the wisdom of that man who would not be. I kept a copy of his Meditations upon my belt, too, a sort of talisman to be read when nothing else could sustain me through the effort of my duties. There was nothing else that marked me, save for that dirk, and my high status. No jewelry, certainly, and no other sort of symbol—save for one.

For of course in racks along each side of the room were six Fasces, placed there for as long as I was in the office and carried back to my residence by their bearers when I left it. And those fasces were the only adornment upon the walls of the grand office, even upon the fireplace at my back, pleasantly warm with goals, speaking in their simple language of the power to bind prisoners and wage war, the powers of Soveriegnty, of Imperium. These were the great powers and responsibilities that I shared equally with my Co-Consul, and which placed me at the head of the nation. Simple, unostentatious, and brutal in their naked declaration.

It occurred to me, also, that it must be a very lonely sight. The room was vast, the fireplace was vast, but all it had in it were four chairs, the big teak desk, and the map table and the gramophone table. The library in the governing palace was elsewhere; books could be summoned easily enough by the speaking-trumpet system installed in the walls which reached to the headquarters of the serving staff. It left me, short and dwarfed by the furniture around me, a sort of austere, lonely, and serious figure. The dread aspect of the Republic: The power and the horrible commitment which we had undertaken, the grim guardians of civilization when all otherwise might have been lost. It was this inner core, those closest to Drake and myself, who might be compared to the Old Bolsheviks, though I would hate the comparison, I might also admit it apt.

We were contemptuous of the temptations of power by dint of the fanaticism which we applied to our cause. Hearts governed by cruel necessity, we had buried humanitarian impulse in the grip of Duty, and Purpose, and by this determination, this ironclad understanding of the necessity of what we had undertaken, of the deep need to preserve all the great progress that our civilizations had made before The Event, we had slaughtered thousands to the roar of cannon and the clatter of machine-guns, we had put families to the sword and we had torched villages and waged cruel, bitter war, war without restraint and without pity.

We had crushed and ground up cultures and spat them out again, gazed upon the shattered bodies of those who resisted us without tears, and plotted and organized and directed the efforts of millions to the expansion of our national rule, unceasingly working to cover the ground in the traces of civilization, of Industry, to wipe away idyllic pasture-land and replace it with the churning cogs of great factories, belching smoke continuously into the air and producing endless lines of rails, of steam-boilers, of dyanmos, and above all, of blackpowder, of cartridge casings, of heavy artillery spun on great lathes, and rifle and rifle, destined for the hands of an army which might again and again pitilessly march forth under the guidance of an ironclad will. From the outside, looking in, I had no doubt that I seemed quite the inhuman figure.

But at what the wages of conquest have wrought!! We are fanatics, but the one virtue of fanaticism is that it is incorruptible. Families ate, where once they had starved! Women lived in childbirth, where once they had died! Blind Justice had replaced petty-feud and murderous grievance. Where smallpox had ravaged cities and killed nine of every ten, now all lived! There were stockpiles of grain for the peasantry and protein to protect their children and insure their healthy growth. There was medicine for almost every ill, and considerable hope even in the field of trauma. The pestilence of Malarial fever in the south which had claimed so many of the youngest children was being stamped out by the distribution of Artemisia and Quinine, and soon pesticides would redouble the assault. She who had once been the lowest of female slaves might now sit in the Senate, if determination and skill were with her.

And above it all we sat in our grim and cold splendour. Unostentatious, rigidly fair in our dealings, dispensing Law, Justice, Industry, Health, Grain, as though we were the Gods of those things! And it was that very quality—that we were not worshipped, that we worked with patience through a consultative system, that we disdained luxury and loved the harsh quarters of a soldier's life—which guaranteed that we were looked upon with a bit of fear, with the dread terror that came with looking on a person who had seemed to trascend the normal needs of the human race and become almost an avatar of their ideology. That was what being told of the End of the World, of having accepted it, recognized its inevitability, and then somehow having summoned the power to forge together the resources and the people which would guarantee the survival of all we held dear--that was what it had done to us, and there was no going back from it! We were the guardians of Civilization, and sometimes a guardian must be a dreadful thing.

But Madame Hurlelo's request was perfectly humane, almost trite, but no, not quite.. It was the simple request of a woman who was relaying the request of an aggrevied man in turn, doing the only thing that he could for the daughter of his sister. It was not the sort of thing that you denied someone if you had any humanity left in you at all, and of course it was in truth an intense sense of humanity that had brought Drake and I to the effort which we had made.

“Chief Executive Cofflin's neice, you see, was the commander of the airship. Our intelligence reports, Your Excellency, do not suggest that it was downed over Achaea—we would have known—and as best as we can tell it lost ballast and was carried high into the atmosphere, where powerful winds would have swept it around the globe toward Central Asia. At some point these winds surely broke it up...” A pause, as she looked to me, trying to find any trace of sympathy, and unsure if she saw it or not, continued hesitantly: “And there would be no survivors.”

I intervened here, and slowly smiled, a sad, gentle smile of the type with an Irishwoman can do better than any other, for the long suffering of my never-been people's experiences in our history and lives. “Of course. I was a pilot once, myself, uptime, and I know about the conditions of which you speak in the high atmosphere. At any rate, yes, the remnants of the airship might have come down on our territory—which is what I suspect you were speaking about, yes?”

“Yes, Your Excellency, though we don't know the precise extent of your penetration into central asia..”

“It has been stated before, and should be fairly obvious, that we claim all the historical territory of China in that regard, and we are quite serious about backing up those claims with a firm presence.”

“Of course. Well, at any rate.. Though it may be years away before you find it, we would like to lodge a formal request that, should your forces or private citizens ever run across the wreckage of this airship that any personal effects of the crew and, if found, human remains, be treated with the appropriate dignity and returned to the Republic of Nantucket as soon as possible.”

When dealing in the grand effort of humanitarianism for the whole of the human race, it was easy to be lost in the operations of grand efforts: Tons of food shipped, developments in medicine and pesticides, deployment of same, introduction of better plows and of reapers to the farming populace, etc, etc, etc. It was entirely refreshing to be confronted with a personal grievance, to be reminded of the world of the personal which is so often obscured on the grand scale, and to be able to meet it to the best of my ability.

“That can easily be arranged, Madame Hurlelo. I will make a personal dirtective to the armed forces in regard to this matter. It is certainly just that your noble dead ought be returned home to their families, should their bodies be found by any of our central asian patrols, and it will be easy enough for our armed forces to obey such a request without concern for dishonouring what remains as a memory to those who have lost their lives in the service of their nation. We understand well the need for closure, and to honour the dead, which compels nations to recover the bodies of their fallen heroes, and as we do the same, certainly shall we reciprocate for you.”

“I am most grateful, Your Excellency.”

“Think nothing of it, Madame.”

I returned to my work refreshed, and perhaps a bit chastised in a way which Marcus Aurelius would approve of, reminded of the firmament which underlined the Purpose, and gave us the reason to strive for it in the first place.

[phongn]

Nice house, though Nantucket actually built an airship?

/me goes back to kicking the Babbage into gear

[Kuja]

*comes out of my trance*

Wonderful. Absolutely wonderful. The amount of depth in your writing is just incredible. The words flow together into a stream that seems to flow by at its own pace. A true joy to read.

[Steve]

At least two. The doomed Emancipator and Liberator.

[Ford Prefect]

That's one hell of an example of writing, I have to say. Possibly one of the better things I've read in a while (excluding Ilium). You write like a demon though! How quickly did this come out, a day? Mein gott!

[phongn]

At least two. The doomed Emancipator and Liberator.

For a second I thought you were referring to a pair of NRDF ISDs

[The Duchess of Zeon]

That's one hell of an example of writing, I have to say. Possibly one of the better things I've read in a while (excluding Ilium). You write like a demon though! How quickly did this come out, a day? Mein gott!

It's quite normal for me to write 4,000+ words in one day when I'm in the groove on a story, so this was nothing special for me.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

Chapter the Seventh


The thunder of the guns was incredible. The fourty-eight ordnance rifles which formed the Grand Battery of the 1st Division (reinforced with a battalion of the Guard and a local fortress battalion) were firing at their maximum rate with full charges. Lined wheelock to wheelock the guns were continuously run back into position, loaded, fired, and run back once more, with such professionalism that the salvoes were almost perfectly uniform even after continuous firing for twelve minutes—though I would admit that the employment of prepared ramps for the guns to provide a gravity assist to counteract the recoil was what allowed the great rate of fire. The high explosive shells rained down on the enemy wire, bursting over and around and upon it, and hopefuly shattering it thoroughly. Nearly fifteen hundred rounds had been placed on the enemy position by that point in the barrage.

There was a roar in the air like a freight train passing by. My ears were constantly ringing, and the chattering of the incoming messages on the battle-telegraphs was nearly entirely whited out by the continuous rumble of the guns. Ahead, the men were cowering in their shallow attack trenches, waiting for the deathly sound of silence which would surely come, a sound that would be pierced by a single noise, the blowing of the whistle, the fanfare of the trumpet of death.

“ONE MINUTE TILL FIRE-SHIFT!” One of my orderlies screamed out as he looked intently toward his gold-embossed pocket watch held out carefully.

I nodded once. “Companies prepare to advance by half-file! All along the line—first half-files concentrate at jumping off points!”

Our platoons were organized into groups of files of fourteen men; each file was divided into two half-files, consisting of six riflemen and an NCO armed with a lever-action shotgun. The men of the first half-file of each file, in their steel Pith Helmets and khaki uniforms, clustered forward to the steps cut in the trench where the paths through our own wire had been laid out. Beyond, in turn, were the paths through our mines, and then the paths which had been hewed or discovered and marked by the scouts the night before with their bayonets.

“FIRE-SHIFT!”

The guns fell silent. That was all the enemy needed. Explosions began to surround us almost immediately as the enemy gunners raced out of their dugouts and manned their guns, standing by them and beginning to fire to repel the inevitable attack...

...But within thirty seconds our guns opened fire again, salvoing shrapnel shells this time, directly onto the enemy gun positions. Turf was flung up around us, and inside I winced at the feel of battle, of being under the guns for the first time, something that seemed somehow more preciously real in its danger than the simple idea of being attacked by enemy arrows and flung spears, dangers which I had faced before. It was horribly real, even though it wasn't real at all. It could, of course, be quite deadly, regardless.

For five minutes the guns continued to fire, and gradually the enemy return fire died off as their guns were silenced and knocked out of action, or at least so it seemed. For the last minute of the grand barrage we heard only our own guns firing. The soldiers in the trenches breathed a little easier, perhaps, as they continued to wait for the go order to rise over the top.

“ONE MINUTE!”

I took out my own pocket watch and checked for the time. 0614 hours right on the mark. The tension in the air was indescribable, a palatable thing with everyone worrying about what could go wrong, the casualties that would be taken—for the danger of casualties was very real—and all sorts of other factors that weighed down on us under the present spring sky in northern China. But it was to late for that. We were committed. Inexorably the seconds ticked down...

The guns fell silent.

The whistles blew, trumpets sounded.

One of my subalterns gave the necessary order to the battery commanders: “Cease Fire! Dial guns in on enemy trenches per grid-designate K-62 and HOLD fire!”

Ahead, national and regimental flags lurched up on their poles, often muddy from being held close to the ground but ever so proud, as their child bearers strode up and over the top, side-by-side with the Anglo-Chinese officers who leaped up in the front rank, swords drawn. The half-files followed with a great Urragh!

They raced through our own wire and our own minefields with the greatest of speed, and to our great fortune nobody in the first wave was blown up by our own defences; that was a thing of sheer luck there, and nothing else, though a few men were lightly wounded by getting tangled in the wire. But then the enemy artillery opened fire again. It was weaker than before, but hardly knocked out, and we all winced in thought at what it would do.

Our boys dashed through it for the designated fifty meter advance, even as the officers and NCOs who led them were falling everywhere and the vicious clatter of defensive gatling guns firing could be heard. But our training of these men was excellent. Even without leadership they had been drilled in exactly what to do, and at fifty meters they dropped prone and began a vigorous fire on the enemy trenches. The mortar detachments quickly erected their 60mm drop-fire mortars.

“Commence fire—support pattern!” The order was snapped out to the artillery, and the great roar began once again. Speed was of the essence here: Only two massed salvoes were fired in the space of somewhat less than a minute. Three might have been possible, but we didn't want any of the low trajectory shells hurtling overhead for what came next. The moment the guns again ceased fire the whistles were blown and the bugle-calls given a second time.

The rest of our attacking force leaped out of the trenches as the mortars ahead began to lay down incredibly rapid fire on the enemy trenches. There was no attempt to aim, save in the general vicinity, and the only goal of the mortar detachments was extreme rapid fire. They churned out nearly thirty-five rounds a minute in the two minutes that they were firing, a continuous cascade on the shell-marked trench line of the enemy ahead as the second half-files raced forward, leapfrogging beyond the first attack group to a distance of one hundred meters beyond our own trench lines.

At least one of them was no so lucky, and ended up stepping on a mine along the way. His screams shocked the rest of the men as the stretcher bearers went for him; but he was to date our first actual casualty. All along the line there were now thirteen thousand five hundred infantry advancing forward toward the enemy trenches some eight hundred and fifty meters beyond our own, on an attack front four kilometers in length. Again, many of the officers and NCOs fell, and again it was up to the men to keep to their assigned attack routes, for each man in order of seniority to come up and replace their commanders who had fallen, to carry the attack home no matter the casualties we suffered.

From the moment that the men were down and prone in their places, the artillery began to fire again. Two salvoes, just the last time, keeping the heads of the enemy down more than anything else as the next leap-frogging advance of the first half-files was prepared, the mortar men swabbing their weapons (for firing thirty-five blackpowder mortar rounds per minute very rapidly fouled them) and immediately manhandling them forward the moment the order went up for the first half-files to again begin to advance.

But only halfway through their mad dash a hundred meters forward, the explosions of the enemy artillery fire continuing to seem to take a toll among their officers and NCOs, something new and horrible was sighted on the battlefield. From some of the bursts came roiling clouds of yellow-green smoke. The news of the threat went along the line in a heartbeat.

“GAS!”

Even in the command bunker—which had a ventilation system—we put our gas masks on as a precautionary measure. The stuff was, after all, live and real chlorine gas, even though the concentrations were kept as weak as possible while still making it have the appearance of real clouds of full-strength military grade chlorine. Malayan rubber made our gas masks possible, and the filters were not all that difficult to produce, nor the absorption material, with the aide of modern knowledge and many biologists and chemical pathologists and engineers to collaborate and work out the best ways of protection with our technology.

Which assumed, of course, that our enemy used the relatively safe chlorine; that was a good bet, for many of the other gases were very difficult to produce, but it was not a sure thing. Still, it was more than good enough for this army manoeuvre, we didn't, after all, actually want to harm our own troops, though for the maximum realism a degree of danger considered impossible to any modern western army was accepted as a matter of course. Indeed, some western armies might shirk from the level of danger involved in this exercise, on the field of actual war. We were more realistic about things.

The explosions of the small emplaced charges simulating the incoming enemy rounds continued even as the mortars opened up on rapid fire again. They were now close enough to support the final assault very well without having to advance further. The leap-frogging continued, with more and more of the officers and NCOs simulating their deaths or wounding to force the stretcher-bearers to get practice and, most of all, to force the men to act on the advance on their own, without their guidance.

It was inhuman. The men charged forward through the clouds of gas and smoke and the explosions of the placed charges around them, bayonets fixed to their Lee-Metfords, gas masks placed upon their faces, obscuring them from sight. A hundred yards, and they dropped to the ground prone and began to rapid-fire the mad minute with their rifles at the enemy, exchanging the twelve-round staggered magazines on the rifles as rapidly as they could from the rows of them on their belts, reloading them when they could, great clouds of powder smoke thrown up, obscuring most of the scene from sight.

On one of the mortar crews there was an accident, a premature detonation of one of the mortars in the tube. It exploded, killing one of the men in the crew and mortally wounding another. The stretcher-bearers went for them as though it was a real conflict but there was no let-up in the intensity of the attack. One segment of the attack leap-frogged over the other, they paused to regroup and two or three massed salvoes were fired from the artillery, then the next segment of the attack leap-frogged in turn as the mortar shells slammed down by the thousands on the enemy positions.

Teams of bearers brought ammunition forward along the routes forged by the advancing infantry, crawing along, dragging the boxes via straps held in their mouths more often than not, a continuous pattern to keep the infantry and the mortars stoked for continuous rapid fire of their weapons without having to worry about ammunition. Stretchers were dragged along the ground by their bearers, sometimes, when the artillery roared overhead and it was far to dangerous to risk standing.

Now the infantry was funneling their way through the enemy minefield. It was the most dangerous part of the attack and another seven men were killed here when they lost track of the paths through the minefield, and others in turn were wounded. Ahead, the enemy wire was shattered in many places, but these might not match up to the paths through the minefield, or the troops might just be confronted by the bad luck of a long intact stretch in a particular area due to the random insanity of the battlefield.

Almost ready to face the storm.

The second wave of the advance made a short fifty-yard dash to catch up with the first. The men were more careful here, seeing that they had watched some of their comrades be wounded or killed on the mines during the dash of the first wave. We only lost four. As they dashed forward they were provided with an additional cover: The men of the first wave unclipped potato masher grenades from their belts and pulled the pins, flinging them at their maximum reasonable range to just reach the enemy trenches. Two such salvoes of grenades crashed down along with the constant fire of the live-mortar shells just ahead of the men. A few of the mortar shells mordantly fell low, or grenades exploded in the bearer's hand due to faulty fuses—we ultimately lost another seven men this way.

There was a final double salvo of the artillery, raining down on the enemy support trenches to keep their reinforcements from coming up to relieve the main trench for as long as possible. The mortars continued to fire through this until the very last minute, and then, at the designated time, both mortars and artillery fell silent. The silence was as much of an order as our soldiers needed. The 'surviving' officers and NCOs rose up and gave the order, an order which was taken up by the soldier-leaders of the units which had supposedly had their officers decimated with admirable efficiency.

The men rose all along the line, potato mashers out and ready. As they rose up, rifles dangling from their carrying straps, their threw one last massed volley of grenades into the enemy trenches, and then snatched up their rifles or shotguns in their hands and charged forward, dashing through or over or under the wire or whatever way they managed to clear it, and then into and upon the enemy in a heartbeat of a desperate rush.

Abruptly the enemy trenches—a chaos of debris from shell and mortar hits, carpeted in shrapnel—were filled with the rushing bodies of our troops. There were dummies everywhere, representing enemy troops, with sacks of red-colored viscuous fluid stretched under them at the aim-points for bayonets. The NCOs—and men who had taken shotguns off of the 'dead' NCOs—opened up with their shotguns, spraying the trenches in 00 buckshot as fast as the levers of the weapons could be worked until their magazines were expended, and then drawing—for the vast majority of the NCOs were Gurkhas—their kukhris, or in the case of the men, their cutlass bayonets. The riflemen already had their bayonets afixed to their rifles, of course.

The stabbing work began even as the shotguns were still firing. One more man was killed in this phase by stray buckshot. But for most it was just a continuous, dehumanizing, frightening exercise. The stabs of the dummies were rewarded with spurts of liquid, seeming exactly like blood, which sprayed over the attacks and covered them messily in the stuff, and yet they had to continue to stab, ramming their bayonets again and again repeatedly into each 'target point' on the dummies and being rewarded with more blood, before moving on to another one and repeating the process.

Then the dash to the enemy's support trenches was made through their communications trenches, and again the process of the slaughter of the dummies was repeated here, even as the flags of our regiments and the national flag were raised over the front line of the enemy trenches.

“First line of enemy trenches seized! First line secured! All troops advancing by companies and platoons to the enemy support trenches! Heavy fighting along the communications trenches!”

The reports echoed out across the command bunker in a constant salvo of declarations, sometimes confused and countervailing, sometimes sure. They were coming via the telegraph, of course, for the moment that we had stormed the enemy trenches telegraph parties had leaped into action, racing across no-man's land unrolling the insulated telegraph wire along the wet ground so that reports and commands could be given by and to the advancing troops in real-time.

At last: “Enemy support trench captured! Am leading advance on enemy command bunkers and artillery positions! -- this is the report of Brigadier Tsung!”

With the threat of gas gone—and the bunker sealed anyway, making the masks only a precautionary measure--I looked through the periscope inside the bunker to see the banners of our troops waving faintly a kilometer distant. Within a minute, as I focused in, I could see the banner of the Guards rising up over the approximate position of the enemy's command bunkers marked on the map.

It was not confirmed for another five minutes, but when it was we all breathed a sigh of relief as the news came in, even though it was only a manoeuvre:

“All enemy entrenchments have been secured! The enemy is in general flight! Your Excellency, we request that the cavalry be dispatched in pursuit.”

I turned and nodded sharply. “Have the horses of the Guards Lancers led through the safe trails across no-man's land. The Lancers will mount up on the far side of the enemy entrenchments and pursue the fleeing enemy with the utmost vigour until they either surrender or restore to themselves some kind of organized resistance.”

“At once, Your Excellency! The orders are being dispatched immediately.”

I felt the tension start to leave. The sixteen days of the Army Manoeuvres—consisting of nearly twenty thousand troops engaged in vigorous drill, marches and evolutions, and live-fire exercises, had culminated in this grand attack on an enemy fortified position. Still, though, I would soon have to give out a dreaded instruction, but one hoary enough from the days of sail drill in the Royal Navy...

Then something interrupted my train of thought, even if the manoeuvres continued as they had without interruption. The double-door to the command bunker was opened and a group of seven guards led in two people. One I recognized even under a gas mask, it was Christopher Purnell. The other was shorter, but her long blonde hair was a tell-tale clue...

Madame Hurlelo! I thought with surprise.

“Apologies, Your Excellency, for interrupting the Army Manoeuvres,” Chris began as he was still removing his gas mask. “But Her Excellency the Ambassador has very important news that I thought it necessary for her to tell you about immediately, and in person.”

I looked to Hurlelo's pleasant face, now that she had removed her gas mask. She was still quite pale, no doubt from the experience of being led through what was for all intents and purposes a combat zone, and having witnessed the great vigour of our live-fire exercises and the risks taken. I suspected from that look that Chris had an ulterior motive in that, in taking her here and making her see the drill, so that she would report on it to Nantucket...

An ulterior motive which was surely a warning, a warning only necessary if.. I sucked in a sharp breath.

“Your Excellency,” Madame Hurlelo began, mustering her composure quite admirably. “I have been instructed to inform you by my government that the Great Mediterranean War has been concluded. In a series of internal coups in Greater Achaea both 'Emperor' Walker and Alice Hong were killed by the Interior Minister of the Achaean government, who was in turn killed by the man you call “Ulysses”--he is now in control of the government of Greater Achaea as Emperor, and has concluded the terms of a cease fire with the Republic of Nantucket and her allies on the condition of reciprocal withdraws by the Achaean forces from Anatolia and our allied forces from Crete, with a peace treaty to be concluded as part of a general international summit to be held at Nantucket. The fighting has ended on all fronts.”

“My congratulations to your government on the successful persecution of the conflict with Achaea!” I replied, mustering a pleasure which was heartfelt, considering Walker's brutality. “Let us all pray that this is the conclusion of war in the world for some time to come,” I added significantly.

Madame Hurlelo paused for a moment at that, and looked out, as though she could see through the walls of the bunker, toward the north, toward where the battle had been fought. I thought I could see, even through her composure, a trace of fear, but then she nodded once and said quietly:

“Yes. Let us pray to our respective gods that there is peace in the world now—I do not desire to see the horrors of war closely ever again. Though, if I may, your people seem to find them more tolerable than most.”

I was silent. Chris replied for me, as he smiled slightly, shrugged his shoulders, and said in a sotto voice: “Igitur qui desiderat pacem, praeparet bellum.”

Madame Hurlelo looked back to me quizzically, and I smiled tightly, and translated the hoary old phrase:

“If you desire peace, prepare for war.” I turned, spinning on heel, and addressed my staff: “Send to all units which participated in the attack: 'Report wounded and killed!'”

[Kuja]

Wow, that was a fantastic episode.

*aide whispers*

What do you mean, it was only a fanfic chapter?

*draws a sword and chases aide off*