This is part of a series centered on Pavel Tzarkowski’s experiences as a survivor in early Nova Espero entitled “1850-01.” Follow this link to go to the series’ page.
Corporal Martin Braithwaite guided Platoon 403 through the vaulted lobby of the Imperial War Ministry Communications Centre. Placing a wooden beam across the door behind him, the corporal’s decaying boots thumped against the marble floors. Desks long abandoned formed a pitted barrier between the lobby and the rear offices, and looked as though they hadn’t been touched in years. Pulling out a key, Martin delicately unlocked the heavy oak door leading to the back offices.
“Right this way,” the corporal said as he held the door with a slight bow. Regardless of his greasy whiskers and weighty stench, Corporal Braithwaite’s manners and courtesy betrayed his military background. Despite the horrific stories from the front lines, the grim rumors from Fort Fortuna, and the newspaper reports from when independent newspapers were still legal, the desk clerks and public-facing men and women in His Majesty’s Imperial Army were renowned for their respectability. Spit-polished boots, meticulously combed hair, and perfectly-knotted ties were the hallmarks of Imperial soldiers – though these particular qualities had taken a hit in the past two years in Corporal Braithwaite’s case.
“Corporal Braithwaite,” the Lieutenant began, “where is the rest of your unit?”
“Well,” he responded, jiggling yet another ancient key into yet another ancient door. “Captain Mencken disappeared on the day the bombs fell. Corporal Boscoe and Private Bellingham disappeared shortly after that…”
Martin, paying more mind to the keys, gave an enthusiastic shout when he found the right one.
“And Sergeant Andrews was killed by a sniper during a run for supplies,” he finished as he jimmied the swollen door open.
Behind this door was what appeared to be a pre-War on-call room of sorts for radio and teletype operators based in the Centre. Corporal Braithwaite told 403 that it had been set up in the immediate lead-up to the War, as the Army expected there to be a heavier influx of communications.
“Boscoe, Lourdes, Bellingham, and Sergeant Andrews slept in here,” he said. The beds were so crisply made and clean that it surprised Pavel that they had ever been slept in at all.
“Thank you, corporal,” Suarez said. “I’m afraid to disappoint you, but we aren’t here to serve as permanent reinforcements.”
“Oh?” Martin responded, with more concern than disappointment.
“We’re here to recover some documents. We’re coordinating with other units in the area and are looking to locate the rest of the supply depots around the city to replenish our stocks.”
“Oh,” the corporal said, this time with more disappointment. “Well, if such a thing were anywhere, they’d be in the General’s Quarters.” The corporal gestured to the nearby hallway. “It’s about five doors down; there’s a nameplate on the door, you can’t miss it.”
“I have the key right here, Lieutenant,” he continued, taking the key off its ring.
“Thank you, corporal. Private Boulanger and Corporal Atwater, could you come with me to look for the maps? Private Tzarkowski, stay here with the corporal and get acquainted.”
“Yes, sir,” they responded in unison, Corny hardly able to contain his smirk as he saluted the Lieutenant.
As the rest of 403 rummaged through the General’s Quarters, Martin led Pavel up a thin staircase to the second floor. Walking down a carpeted mezzanine past the grand lobby, they approached yet another door leading into yet another office.
“This place used to be a bank, you know,” the corporal said. “Before the big crash, apparently the owner liked to walk potential borrowers up here to this office so they could really see how big it was. Tried to intimidate them, you know? Like ‘hey, if you don’t pay us back, all of this is going to come after you,’” Martin said, gesturing to the chandelier above and the ranks of desks below.
Pavel looked around. Indeed, he would have been intimidated. For the son of a baker from the valleys of Zoldhegyek, this place would have seemed like a nobleman’s palace. Compact, glass-block windows allowed thin, colorful bands of light to pour in, while the beams in the center of the room erupted from the floors like the trunks of mighty trees. A massive, frescoed wall fronted by the ranks of sturdy oak desks would have separated visitors from the cramped, unattractive offices filled with decades of financial records, sweaty typists, and thick wads of cash. The owner could clap a borrower on the back and say, “Look at my empire – don’t fuck with me.”
The corporal breached the old manager’s door, the creaking of which interrupted Pavel’s imagination. “Then the crash happened, the bank shut down, and the owner hanged himself, so,” he said as he entered the office, Pavel in tow. “The Army got all of this for a steal.”
The office was large, if a bit spartan. Windows lined the far wall, taking up roughly half of the building’s front-facing facade. Save for one, the portals were all covered with shifted bookshelves clotted with ledgers, quarterly reports, and records of transfers with the Imperial Reserve Bank. At the corner by the only open window, books stacked atop a desk formed a crude sniper’s roost, with two crates of ammunition sitting close by.
“Apologies for the shooting,” the corporal said, tying back his matted hair. “There were issues with potential looters at one point; we have to make sure the Centre stays safe.”
Just as with his manners, it was clear that the corporal had taken great care to exhibit Army cleanliness and orderliness in this impromptu bunker. The hardwood floors had clearly been swept and mopped in the not too distant past, and the framed photographs and reproductions of old works of art on the wall were all perfectly level. Pavel could have sworn that the drab, green sofas in the center of the room had been lint rolled. The desk – that of General Robert Peake, according to the nameplate – was spotless, and the flags behind it were immaculately spaced and presented. Directly at the center between the flags was that portrait of Emperor Francisco II, mandated to be present at every army outpost, government office, and noble estate in the Empire.
The corporal busied himself, wiping an imperceptible layer of dust from one of the bookshelves. This man confounded Pavel. The orderliness, the crisp salutes, and his commitment to a mission that, to Pavel, seemed anachronistic. Keep the Centre safe? Pavel thought to himself. To what end?
“Forgive my prying, corporal, but,” Pavel asked, “protect what?”
Corporal Martin Braithwaite arrived at the Imperial Communications Centre at 8:25 in the morning on Deka 28, 1766, just as he had done every day since he had first been assigned to His Majesty’s Military Intelligence and Communications Service six months before. Walking through the front door, he passed the desk of the front-facing clerks who processed information requests and received hand-delivered courier messages.
“Good morning, Corporal Braithwaite,” said Private Cassandra Bellingham, a young clerk with a beaming smile and reddish-blond hair parted immaculately down the middle. She reminded him of his younger sister back home, and the mere sight of her made him more than a little homesick.
“Good morning, Bellingham… are the others in yet?”
“Yes, Corporal – I just saw Corporal Lourdes and Corporal Boscoe head down.”
His commanding officer, Captain Mencken, wouldn’t be there for another fifteen minutes when the workday officially started. But Martin knew that to arrive at the same time as Mencken would make him look tardy, not to mention the worst possible option – arriving after the Captain.
Martin headed past the imposing lobby and down the stairs to the building’s massive basement. Once a vault storing countless millions and strongboxes containing the jewelry, personal documents, and other treasures of the Imperial well-to-do, this floor had become a massive teletype room. Dozens of clerks monitored dozens more machines, each spitting out the latest reports from the front line some one thousand miles away.
Martin, alongside five other soldiers, Captain Mencken, and the elusive Colonel Victor Rogers formed the Imperial Army’s Handwritten and Sensitive Communications Section of His Majesty’s Military Intelligence and Communications Service. In their sequestered office in the Centre’s basement, they transcribed handwritten documents from the Imperial War Ministry’s headquarters at the city center and forwarded them out to units further afield. Today, Martin knew that he would be transcribing and sending what could possibly be some of the most important orders and messages of his lifetime.
In just a few short hours, the forces of the Hegelio-Ferrian and Ylrikian empires would be fighting over the Sherbrooke Pass, a flat sliver of land crammed in between the highlands of the Central Mountains and the torrents of the Great Southern Sea. Just twenty years earlier, the two empires had spilled the blood of hundreds of thousands in order to control it, though the war ended in a disappointing stalemate.
In the aftermath of that war, both nations embarked on a scientific rampage to devise increasingly destructive weapons of war with which to dominate their rival. Poisonous gases, first deployed during that war, became increasingly noxious and effective. Machine guns were improved such that they wouldn’t overheat after firing only a handful of rounds. Airplanes were made safer and faster, capable of dropping payloads of growing magnitude. Tanks, once lumbering creatures that were as slow and vulnerable on the battlefield as cows, became more limber. Artillery was soon complemented by the first ballistic missiles, fine-tuned to travel longer and more effectively obliterate targets.
These weapons tested their mettle in the limited colonial wars and insurgencies that proved bothersome distractions to the two crowns during the inter-war years. Martin had seen limited action himself, catching the tail end of the Zoldish insurgency in the Empire’s northern mountains. For what little he saw, he became enamored with war – planes conducted precision strikes in hidden valleys, exhaust from passing missiles streaked across the sky, and machine guns chewed apart scores of unwashed, barbarian hayseeds. The brief display convinced Martin that there was no way Hegelio-Ferria could lose a war with Ylrikia. There was nothing that those godless pagan idol worshippers could deploy to counter this show of might.
Except, perhaps one thing. The one thing that kept Corporal Braithwaite, Private Bellingham, and every citizen of the Empire awake at night. In that decades-long fit of military expansion, Ylrikia, then soon after Hegelio-Ferria, obtained the capacity to split the atom. With minimal cost, minimal materials, and minimal men, both powers could tear the base components of the universe apart and cause an unfathomable amount of destruction in only a fraction of an instant. Upon the discovery of these weapons, both powers made a mad dash to build more of them, and make them more lethal, more capable. They found a way to put them on those rockets Martin saw in Zoldhegyek, making anywhere on the continent vulnerable to total destruction.
But Martin had been convinced – uneasily convinced – that the mere threat of this destruction was enough to prevent it. In Martin’s eyes, the bomb had created the circumstances for perfect war – no one could jump into thoughtless bloodshed without first considering the ultimate consequences. Gone were the days of total war, mass invasions, and existential conflict. Neither Hegelio-Ferria nor Ylrikia would dare.
And such were the circumstances of Deka 28, 1766 O.S. There were no surprise attacks, for surprise breeds hastiness and hastiness breeds apocalypse. Instead, the two armies would begin to shoot at a pre-appointed time at a pre-appointed place. The conflict, by agreement, would be conducted with only conventional arms. To keep from the worst outcomes, the emperors of Hegelio-Ferria and Ylrikia would have direct lines of communication through a high-speed telephone network linking the two imperial capitals. On this day, it was likely that the two could converse, one on one – a circumstance unfathomable before the bomb. Necessity could overcome pride.
It had to.
Corporal Martin Braithwaite spent most of that morning transcribing messages of disappointingly unhistoric importance. Admiral Wheeler requested full deployment of the Far South Squadron from Puerto Blanco on account of higher-than-anticipated mobilization on the part of the Imperial Ylrikian Navy. General Muñoz requested additional pontoon bridges be moved to the front lines on account of forecasted rainfall that would no doubt subsume the marshy estuaries of coastal Sherbrooke.
Important information. Sensitive information. But boring information.
Then, around 10 o’clock, the Palace Light turned on.
At the far right end of the office was a pneumatic tube whose door was secured shut with a padlock. Striped in gold, the tube received particularly sensitive messages, specifically those directly from the Emperor’s Palace. It was very rare to see something come into that tube – Martin had only seen it happen a handful of times in his six months in the office – but it was special when it did. A light – the “Palace Light” – would turn on to signal an inbound message. Then Captain Mencken would shuffle over, unlock the tube, and retrieve the message. After reading and transcribing the message, he would then walk it down the long corridor to the office of Colonel Rogers.
When the light flicked on, Captain Mencken sighed – how could he be unimpressed? Martin remembered thinking to himself. Mencken, a pudgy man with a clean, gray brush cut and a curled mustache befitting a duke more than a middling officer, walked over to the tube, anticipating the delivery. The capsule arrived with a low, muffled clunk, and Captain Mencken quickly took it, withdrew the message, and unfurled it.
Mencken, who had been in this office for quite some time, did not treat the royal messages with a particular reverence. Even if they were from the Emperor’s hand directly, they were correspondence that it was his job to transcribe and deliver. Martin seethed with jealousy every time his commanding officer unenthusiastically unwrapped the scrolls and yawned as he typed the Emperor’s own writing. To Martin, even the most mundane of messages had some mythical importance if it came from Him.
Atypical of Mencken was the grave expression on his face, however. Martin noticed that the captain read and re-read the note multiple times before typing it onto the page. Even when he finished the note, he read it a third time. He delayed for so long that the phone connecting Martin’s office with that of Colonel Rogers began to ring. Mencken slowly stepped towards it, eyeing the transcription in his hand. Picking up the handset, the captain held the phone to his ear.
“Yes, Colonel… I’ve transcribed it, my apologies… I’m on my way.”
The captain had never been a particularly enthusiastic or energetic speaker, but Martin was alarmed by the sobriety in his face. Sullenness.
After hanging up the phone, the captain slipped through the door, his muffled footsteps thumping on the carpeted floors of the underground corridor. Martin, slightly troubled by what he had just seen, was soon distracted by another capsule thunking into a nearby tube. Martin took the inbound note out of its capsule – General Marcos requesting more quinine pills – and typed it out, sending it further along its journey via the outbound tubes.
“You noticed that too, right?” said Corporal Lourdes. A stocky, dark-haired Ferrian who came to the Section around the same time Martin did, Lourdes was about as good a soldier as he. At least when it came to matters of detail.
“Yeah,” Martin replied. “He looked like he ate bad oysters.”
Turning to her right, she called out the other member of the team.
“What do you think, Boscoe?”
Corporal Boscoe, still sequestered at his desk, seemed uninterested but tense. He had only been in the office a short time, just a few weeks. Making commentary about his boss’s appearance was still outside the comfort zone of the pale, freckly, twenty-two-year-old. To Martin, Lourdes sometimes felt like an older cat bullying a kitten when it came to Boscoe.
“I… I don’t know. He looked nervous, I guess,” he stammered with an uneasy smile.
“Ugh,” she grunted, turning back around. “You’re no fun.” Boscoe blushed. Everything made him blush.
“Maybe His Majesty finally realized that Mencken doesn’t know what he’s doing and fired him,” Lourdes said.
“You think he cares about that?” Martin replied.
“I don’t know. What else is he going to do? The generals and admirals are controlling the battlefield. He probably gets bored. So he goes around clearing out the undeserving,” she said. She made sure to make direct eye contact with Corporal Boscoe on that last beat. She loved freaking him out.
“Maybe it was a direct order for an assault,” Martin said. “Mencken fought in the last war. I can see him being a little shaky about those sorts of things. Sending lots of men to their deaths, that sort of thing.”
“I don’t know,” Lourdes countered. “Isn’t he one of those chest-thumpers? I thought he loved the blood and gore of it all.”
Just then, the door leading to Colonel Rogers’s office swept open. Captain Mencken, with that same sullen look in his eyes, hurriedly grabbed his coat and hat from the rack, barely breaking his stride on his way to the opposite door that led to the stairs to the lobby. He didn’t even bother to close the door behind him.
“Shit,” Lourdes said. “Maybe I was right.”
After a few moments of silence, Corporal Boscoe chimed in.
“Should we… do something?” he asked, eyeing the two other corporals. “Should we call someone?”
“I have no idea,” Lourdes answered, “but if we need a captain, they’ll send a captain.”
Corporal Boscoe seemed unsatisfied. Truthfully, Martin wasn’t satisfied either.
They went back to their desks, though only a handful of messages came through. Admiral Wheeler wanted confirmation that the Far South Squadron had received his order. General De Greef sent a brief report of fighting in Sherbrooke City.
Then, again, the Palace Light turned on.