The Narrow Path To War Read online

  Black rust, as plentiful as sand in the surrounding desert, rose high into the air upon the unbridled magnetic waves coursing from the planet’s core. Roiling across the sky like obsidian waters, the cloud thickened until it completely blocked the sunlight from Kithara. Within the cloud, dim pulses of energy drifted back and forth like schools of ghostly fish looking for food.

  Below, the desert sands vibrated wildly, blurring the edges between the desert and the shrinking belt of sky above the horizon.

  Alex stared, mesmerized by both the latent turmoil above and the ratcheting chaos below, eager for the storm to take shape.

  The two halves of the storm, circling like prize fighters gauging one another, began to probe one another for weaknesses. A particularly dark stretch of dunes to the north produced scattered arcs of lightning along the desert floor. The cloud above rippled in response but otherwise did nothing. A little closer to the city, the iron cloud extended a drifting, ethereal plume of yellow light toward the ground. The desert responded as a cornered animal might, with a lunge and an angry roar. The two disparate energy field sparred briefly on contact, shooting multi-colored sparks into the surrounding sky, and then paused, each shrinking back for a moment.

  Then, with a roar that came from everywhere, the two leaped across the gulf separating them, locking in a deadly face-off of electromagnetic attraction and repulsion. Yellow and blue energies tangled, bursting wherever they met, both vying for dominance. Then, when their energies were no longer distinguishable from one another, there was a flare of blinding energy and a deafening crack of thunder. No longer were the destructive forces opposed to one another but merged into a single, powerful pillar of energy. The electromagnetic conduit had formed. Iron dust and silicon particles, both spectators in the battle up to this point, were drawn into the pillar, and then expelled outward as they became supercharged plasma. A hellish, growling funnel coalesced, drawn from the ground and sky alike, enveloping the conduit within an opaque barrier of electrified particles that no light, not even the conduit itself, could pierce.

  Alex, though he had been startled by the sheer power of the conduit, swore under his breath because he hadn't gotten a satisfactory look at it. Granules of dirt laced with sparks pelted his exposed skin with tiny jolts of electricity. The charge itself was bearable, but the momentum of the particles nearly blasted him off the wall. The air became a grey nightmare of wind and sound, driving him to hold the flagpole with both hands. As he fought to keep his grip against the intensifying blasts, the wall shuddered beneath him. He’d expected the tectonic quake, as the ground always shook during a magnetic storm. It wasn’t supposed to kick like a bug mule, though. Dropping to one knee when the wall shuddered, he began to question the wisdom of standing in the open to see what the most destructive force on Arion looked like. The wind had become an avalanche of matter and energy. Having no choice now but to survive the onslaught, Alex went prone and shielded his face in his sleeve. Where his grip held, however, the wall could not. Between the feverish gusts of gritty particles, heated energy, and electrical sparks, he felt a crack form at the base of the flagpole.

  Suddenly, the air cleared. The conduit of electromagnetic energy produced by Arion's turbulent molten core, cut a swath of destruction across the desert sand. Tree-sized bolts of lightning flashed in every direction, burning black marks where they touched the ground, while the conduit itself left a trail of molten glass behind it. Ethereal waves of plasma wound around the vortex, giving it the appearance of a giant, writhing snake. This was the eye of the guster.

  Alex didn’t have the luxury of looking at it again. As the wall began to crumble under his feet, he saw the battlement was also inside the eye of the storm, and looked intact, he darted for it. Lightning struck the flagpole and sheared it off, melting the back of his left shoe in the process. He didn’t feel it, even as he barged into the heavy wooden door that Sergeant Dain had closed behind him.

  The guards were crouched behind a table they had overturned. They ducked when Alex knocked the deadbolt loose and fell into the doorway. His shouts lost in the wind, they gawked for a second, then ushered him in and attached a safety rope to his waist.

  "Thanks!" Alex shouted at them, hoping they heard him. They shook their heads at him in disbelief, then huddled down again.

  The guster charged across the city wall without slowing. Bolts of electricity danced between bicycle racks and rooftop ventilators. Chunks of adobe broke loose from every building at the university and took flight to become a deadly onslaught of spinning projectiles. Alex was disappointed he couldn't see the guster from his current vantage point, but supposed he'd gotten a better look than anyone else. He closed his eyes and listened to the destruction, the sounds of splintering trees and fragmenting concrete.

  Finally, the guster crossed the city’s southern wall and headed into the marshes. The winds died down quickly. A siren, previously drowned out by the roaring wind, was audible again. Alex unclipped himself from the safety rope and stepped out of the battlement, despite the soldiers urging him not to. Noting there was less than a meter of undamaged wall outside the battlement, he held onto the busted door frame to watch the guster receded in the distance. The marsh water absorbed much of the dust cloud, giving him a final view of the conduit as it grounded itself onto iron deposits in the marsh boulders. The energy pillar split into multiple frenzied strands that looked to Alex like a rope coming unwound. With that, the conduit lost its cohesion and separated into individual lightning bolts again. They lost strength as quickly as they first gained it, and the guster dissipated as quickly as it formed. The iron cloud over the city no longer had the planet’s magnetic forces keeping it aloft, so it settled back down to coat everything in a fine black powder.

  Ten minutes later, Kithara could be seen once again, providing its unwavering sunlight to the Plainsman Territory, while silence ruled over the stunned city. The sirens had stopped, and people emerged from the buildings to survey the damage. No one spoke a word. Trees lay on their sides, some of them hundreds of meters from their original locations. The landscaping was obliterated, and several buildings had lost exterior walls. The thing that seemed most bothersome of all to Alex was that the swamp coolers at the university were no longer running, their motors fused solid by the electrical forces that washed over them.

  Alex turned to see Sergeant Dain standing next to him, fists on his hips.

  Chapter Two

  Colonel Jim Seneca wondered if thirty years in the Plainsman Militia was enough. He paced his office, stopping briefly to look at the collection of pictures on the wall. Images of him with different rank insignias – mostly while wearing field uniforms – showcased his various postings around the Allied Territories. Now, except for some grey sprinkled through his hair and the inkling of a paunch, he still looked much like he did when he first donned a lieutenant’s bars twenty years earlier. Most officers who served in the field looked older than their years, as the stress of command often manifested itself by aging a man prematurely. Seneca figured the reason he was different was that he truly believed in what he was doing. The territory needed to be protected, and the responsibility hadn’t grown wearisome. Not until lately.

  There had been a rise in bandit attacks recently. No one had yet figured out why, though he sensed there was more to it than robbers preying on outlying towns. Seneca wasn’t the kind of man to indulge suspicions, but he found himself wondering if there was a coordinating influence behind the attacks. As a soldier, he trusted his instincts, but as a leader, he knew there had to be evidence before he could act. He made a mental note to have one of his subordinates make inquiries when the next supply caravan arrived, and pushed the concerns from his mind.

  Seneca walked around his large teakmar desk and picked up a letter from the Alliance Council. They were offering him a promotion to general…again. It dumbfounded him until he remembered how they normally operated - they never gave you anything unless it primarily benefitted them. He was sure th
e offer wasn't the opportunity they were painting it to be, but more likely a political tactic to remove him from command of the Plainsman Militia.

  Rather than write a fresh version of thanks, but no thanks, Seneca decided to have his aide dig out his last letter declining the offer and send it again. Maybe they would be angered by such a flippant response, but he didn't care. Tossing the letter in the trash, he sat down to get to the day’s business.

  The colonel sifted through a stack of requisitions forms, sighed, and tossed them back into the pile. He didn't feel like dealing with damage assessments and material requests in the aftermath of the guster. It was his hope that the governor would contract local businesses to spearhead the repair efforts in the wake of the guster but knew it was wishful thinking. Barely ten minutes after rust blanketed the city, Governor Forsythe knocked on his door to ask for volunteers from the garrison to assist with the cleanup. Rather than bring his experienced engineers off their duties to repair the wall, Seneca offered the governor a company of new recruits from around the territory. They needed to learn military discipline, Seneca had explained to the governor, and there was no better way to become acquainted with their new home than to help with rebuilding.

  The governor had accepted the offer, though not happily. He didn’t see the point in having a wall when there were no enemies to guard against. Still, it didn’t pay to lock horns with one of the most respected officers in the quartersphere, and life was better without such conflicts anyway. A company of new recruits would suffice.

  Seneca heard a familiar knock at the door. "Come on in, Burt," he said, and waited for Corporal Manning to enter. "More reports on the damage?"

  "No, sir," Manning said. "This is a matter of trespassing."

  "Do I need to ask who it concerns?"

  "No, sir," Manning said, and handed the colonel a piece of paper. "The usual."

  The colonel sighed – he did that a lot lately - as he read the paper. "Are they here?"

  "Waiting outside, sir." Manning replied. "Shall I assemble a firing squad?"

  Seneca raised an eyebrow and stared at his aide.

  "Sorry, sir," Manning said. "Bad joke."

  "Show them both in, corporal," Seneca said. Manning nodded and turned to leave. "Have the firing squad wait outside," the colonel added. "I don't want them shooting up my office."

  Manning grinned. "Yes, sir."

  Seneca was perplexed by the two young men who walked in and stood before him. Sergeant Dain came to attention, his teeth firmly clenched, ready to have a fit. Alex Vonn stood beside him, disinterested as usual, brushing the dust off his windbreaker onto Seneca's ornate rug.

  Seneca made as blank an expression as he could muster, and then looked at the sergeant. "Let's hear what happened, Dain."

  "Sir!" the sergeant snapped, unable to keep the volume of his voice down. "Mister Vonn has no respect for the militia. Not only does he disregard established safety protocols on his frequent runs around the top of the wall, he put my squad's safety at risk by trespassing through our duty station during the recent guster. This man has committed a serious breach of regulations and should receive the highest level of disciplinary action."

  Seneca stared at the sergeant. Dain spent so much of his time memorizing the regulation handbook that it was no wonder he'd started to sound like it. "Thank you, Sergeant," Seneca replied, hoping to stop Dain before he really got into a froth.

  "That stunt was reckless and dangerous, Colonel!" Dain barked. "Everyone knows they can't just run into our posts any time they want. During an emergency like this…it's criminal!"

  "I'm sure Mister Vonn is grateful for your quick action," Seneca interrupted. "No doubt you saved him from being carried off in the storm. Well done."

  The sergeant blinked. He looked at Alex, then back at the colonel. "I think you," he stuttered. "I thank you. You're welcome. Sir." He shut up.

  "Dismissed," Seneca said firmly. Dain thought better of saying anything else, then saluted and left.

  When the door was closed, Seneca leaned back in his chair and folded his hands together. Alex was looking at the same photographs as he had just done. "Dain's right, of course," he told Alex.

  "He'd be right if I was in the militia," Alex said, his focus drawn to a single picture.

  "The militia controls the city wall," Seneca told him. "We own it, so we make the rules."

  Alex looked at him. "I've never fallen off it. They might if they tried to stop me."

  Seneca thought about that. He knew Alex well enough to know he wasn't making a threat against his soldiers. With all the challenges the young man faced in his life, he wasn't malicious or vindictive, just uncooperative. In his own detached way, he recognized the men in Seneca's militia weren’t agile enough to navigate the wall as expertly as he did. They probably would fall off if they ever tried to stop him. They would never venture out to stop Alex, with the possible exception of shooting at him.

  Seneca shook his head. "Can't you run somewhere else?"

  "I can run anywhere," Alex replied, "but running on the wall helps me think." He looked back at one of the pictures and stared.

  Seneca followed Alex's gaze to the faded photo of a man basking in a hunting victory as he stood over the carcass of a freshly-killed clefang. He didn't know the exact history of the picture, but liked it on his wall. The man held one of the original titanium rifles developed on Arion, a Longarm. It was Seneca's favorite, fitted with a pre-Magnetic Era sighting mechanism known as a laser scope.

  "Have you ever killed a clefang?" Alex asked, sensing that the colonel was looking at the picture, too.

  "No," Seneca replied. "A friend of mine gave that picture to me."

  "I like it," Alex said.

  "Me, too," Seneca replied. "Alex, let's talk about running on the wall."

  "You want me to stop."

  "We have this conversation a lot, don't we?" Seneca asked.

  "Maybe I'll stop if you ask me one more time," Alex said.

  Seneca paused when a thought occurred to him. Alex was a talented kid, and might make something of himself if he ever emerged from his shell. To punish him for using his abilities would be to waste an opportunity. "Maybe we could come to an agreement that benefits everyone," Seneca said. He grabbed a pen and a blank memo from his drawer, then began drafting an order. When he finished, he signed it and handed it to Alex.

  Alex read the order and frowned. "You're joking."

  "No," the colonel said, completely serious.

  “Sergeant Dain won’t like it,” Alex smiled.

  “No,” Seneca agreed, “he probably won’t.”

  Chapter Three

  Three hundred kilometers east of Celestial City on the border of the Sheers Territory, Marshal Hugh Redland found himself within the bounds of a mottled bog. Avoiding the sludge puddles, he knelt on the driest mound he could find. It was only dry on the surface, however, and he swore when his knee sank into a wet spot. Hoping to avoid further stains, Redland pulled his lizard-skin duster around his left hip and draped it over his leg. These clothes were not intended to be worn on manhunts, and he regretted not taking the time to change into something more appropriate before taking the bounty. He didn’t know why this prisoner was so important; he’d never heard the man’s name before. When he deferred, the warden insisted the man was his trophy prisoner, the pride of Ovalsheer Prison, and must be recaptured immediately. Well, it would cost him. All Redland thought about now was that he'd have to get his clothes specially cleaned to get the smell out. The warden would pay for that, one way or another.

  He considered the route he'd been following. If he didn't catch the prisoner soon, he'd be late getting to his meeting in the Plainsman Territory. Dealing with them was almost as unpleasant as the bog, but this time it was a necessity. With luck, he wouldn't run into any people who needed help. He was too damn busy for that. It was bad enough that he hadn't found a suitable deputy to delegate those bothersome duties to, and the Alliance Council wouldn't author
ize a marshal for the Plainsman Territory. They opted instead to hand him the responsibility, which is why he didn't enter the plains unless he absolutely had to. And this time he had to.

  Redland unclipped the restraining snap on his holster. He drummed his fingertips on the handle of his titanium forty-five caliber pistol, a mannerism he indulged whenever he expected to use it. He'd already fired the pistol at his quarry once, and was maddened when the man didn't fall dead. That just made Redland look bad as a lawman. The prisoner was quick on his feet, the marshal admitted to himself, so he would take better care with subsequent shots. Regardless of the escapee’s agility, Redland considered him stupid. He would have done better to head east from the Sheers and hide in the Volcanic Riftlands, or gone south to the Colderlands at the equator. Redland preferred chasing outlaws where the sun stood high in the sky. He never let that stop him from going into the night-time hemisphere if need be, though. Whatever the escapee's reasons for going west, he would be an easy target on the flatlands. Redland would catch him, oh yes, and then perforate his body with forty-five caliber holes until he felt better. Might not even kill the damned runner right away, either.

  And so, the chase had brought him to the bog. Redland adjusted his wide-brimmed hat to block Kithara, wiped the sweat off his brow with his necker, and waited impatiently for telltale signs of movement. He stood up and glanced back to the tree stump where Jaeger waited. The escapee, being on foot, might try to take his horse when he looked the other way, so he was careful to stay within shooting range. This wasn’t a particular worry, though, as the escapee’s tracks led directly into the entrance of a bog-dog den.

  Redland considered that a stupid move also. Certainly, the escaped prisoner had a hole somewhere on his body; he'd seen the blood. Crawling into a bog-dog den would discourage a tracker from following, but it meant he'd get infectious, dung-soaked mud in his wound. It was just a matter of time before he'd get septic and die. Not that it bothered the marshal; any escapee from Ovalsheer Prison had an automatic death warrant. He would have to find him and retrieve his identification shackle before he could get paid, though. Since he didn’t feel like digging up the entire bog to find him, he would have to make the escapee give away his position.