FATEFUL LIGHTNING.

by William R. Forstchen.

Chapter 1.

He had lost a war.

Andrew Lawrence Keane, late of the Union Army of the Potomac and now commander of all human resistance against the Merki horde, could not drive that accusation out of his soul-he had lost a war.

He had known the sour taste of defeat before, the Army of the Potomac had become professionals at losing against the legions of Robert E. Lee. Yet always there had been the grim certainty in the rank and file that it had not been Lee who had really defeated them, but rather their own commanders.

He was now the commander.

He stood by the rail siding, mud-spattered, uniform reeking with the sodden smell of wet wool and stale sweat. It was raining, coming down in blinding sheets, as if the heavens were attempting to wash away the blood that had been lost in vain.

Half a corps, almost all of them veterans of the Tugar War, lost. Two other corps chewed up. Twenty thousand irreplaceable men gone. And that was another part of the difference from before. Before they could lose fifteen thousand at Fredericksburg, or twenty thousand at Chancellorsville, and within weeks the numbers were replaced, while Bobbie Lee's army slowly bled itself to death.

Now he was like Lee. The Merki horde was still numberless, upward of forty umens, four hundred thousand mounted warriors, and he with at best one- sixth that number. And Suzdal was gone, Novrod gone, the western half of Rus occupied-an entire nation going into exile down this one narrow ribbon of track.

Hans? He had fought so long to push that thought aside. The memory of Pat O'Donald describing the last minutes of Third Corps, Hans's guidon fluttering in the morning breeze, disappearing beneath the flashing swords of the Merki.

So, Hans, now what do I do? I've managed to save our people, evacuate an entire nation into exile-and for what?

A gust of wind swept down the track, driving a heavy spattering of hail before it. Lightning forked across the night sky, illuminating the tragedy. An endless column was slowly wending its way eastward, half a million people on the move, pushing on through the storm, seemingly oblivious to pain, to suffering.

"Grandma, when are we going home?"

He looked up. An old couple were walking past, half a dozen children in tow, their meager belongings piled high in a wheelbarrow, which seemed ready to break asunder from the weight. The child who had asked the question, shivering from the cold, was looking up at her grandmother.

The old woman smiled, making a hushing noise. Andrew's eyes locked with hers. He could sense a well of infinite sadness and suffering. Where were the children's parents? he wondered. Father in the army, alive, dead, God forbid a prisoner? He didn't dare ask. Guiltily he turned away.

They disappeared into the night, lost to view but not memory, part of an endless procession, replaced an instant later by another family, and another, a living stream flowing eastward, heading out into the open steppe toward Roum, and supposed safety.

"Engine's watered, sir-we're ready to move."

Andrew looked over at the young orderly, who stood rigidly before him, canvas battle tunic plastered to his narrow chest, the bedraggled ribbon of lieutenant's rank drooping from his shoulders.

"Stop that old couple, the one with the six children," Andrew whispered, nodding over his shoulder. "Get them aboard the train."

"Sir, there isn't any room," the lieutenant said.

"Make room, dammit. Throw some of our baggage out, but make room," Andrew snapped.

"You can't save them all."

Andrew looked up to see Dr. Emil Weiss stepping down from the train.

The doctor held his hand up, in it a silver flask, uncorked.

Andrew took the drink and downed a scalding gulp without a nod of thanks.

"But bless you, Andrew, for at least trying," Emil said softly, taking the flask back and downing a gulp himself before recorking it.

Another sliver of lightning shot across the heavens, and for a brief instant he could see the column again, passing through the village, and pulled to one side an evacuation train carrying the last load of troops from Pat O'Donald's corps, now halted while a repair crew feverishly worked on repairing a cracked drive shaft. Through the sheets of rain he saw a tall, bulky form advancing, thick, muscular arms concealed by his black poncho. The man's red muttonchops and mustache were plastered down by the rain, dripping with moisture; his battered campaign hat hung limp, drooping down over his eyes. Cursing soundly as he sloshed through the mud, Pat O'Donald came up to the side of the train and wearily saluted.

"Do you have a bit of the cruel on you?" Pat asked.

A thin smile crossed Andrew's features.

"Didn't know you were on that train over there," Andrew said, extending his hand to Pat, who grasped it warmly.

"Almost didn't get on it," Pat replied, shaking his head as if clearing away the exhaustion that had become part of all their lives.

Emil handed over the flask reluctantly and watched with a sad face as Pat threw his head back and drained off most of the contents in several long gulps.

"Ah, now I know I'll live again," Pat said.

"Not if you keep drinking like that," Emil replied. "I didn't patch that hole in your stomach just for you to burn another one in."

Pat laughed gruffly, patting Emil on the shoulder.

"Come on, me friend, do you think that's what's really gonna kill me?"

"Don't talk like that," Andrew said quietly.

"Melancholia, my good colonel," Pat said, hoping to force a smile from Andrew.

Andrew did not reply.

"Andrew darlin', it certainly looks like a defeat to be certain, but no reason to be down about the mouth."

"Thanks for telling us," Emil replied.

"We might see worst even, but this war's like no other. It's no high-sounding words about glory and honor and quit when it goes against you."

He paused for a moment and sighed.

"I remember 'forty-eight, back in the old country. It looked like this, hundreds of thousands on the road, starving to death, trying to get to the boats to America.

"And we didn't know how to fight, that was our curse," he whispered.

Andrew looked over at him.

"Ah, but this one's different. It's either victory or death," Pat said sharply. "Nothing in between, only those two. And it be the same for them devils behind us. We'll most likely lose Kev when they come on, we'll be out on the steppe, chances be they'll drive us all the way to the Sangros and Hispania and take Roum as well. But by God, I for one am gonna fight. Because there's no other way, and when I die someone else will fight after me. We'll fight them beasties clear around this world, and come back up the other side still fighting them."

He took another pull off the flask, draining it dry, then nonchalantly tossed it back up to Emil, who looked at it glumly before pocketing it.

"You like this in a way, don't you, you damned mick?" Emil asked.

Pat looked up at him, squinting his eyes against the rain and the blinding flashes of lightning.

"Its what I live for," Pat replied, his voice slightly thick from exhaustion and the spreading effects of the vodka. "This morning my one corps held back at least three, maybe four, of their umens for an entire day in an open field fight. No fortifications this time-it was out in the open, a running fight all the way. And we still managed to get everybody out, even the wounded, thumbed our noses, waved our asses, and be damned to them. Keep me supplied with powder, shot, and canister and I'll keep killing them."

He paused for a moment.

"And besides, I hate these bastards. Killin' them goes easy on my soul. It makes it a lot easier that way. I could kill rebs, to be sure, especially them haughty officer types with their chivalry and honor and looking down their noses like a highborn noble. But they was people. I could still have a drink with them after it was over. I couldn't really hate 'em.

"Now these beasties are different. There's no alternatives now, my good doctor. Its simple and straightforward-we either defeat them or die."

Andrew nodded silently.

He knew it was all true. There was no honorable surrender in this war. It was unthinkable before, and more so now.

"Is it true the rumor we heard when we got in here?" Pat asked.

"About Jubadi?" Andrew replied.

"He's dead?"

" 'Assassinated' is more the term," Emil said grimly.

"Well, that ought to get the filthy buggers stirred," Pat replied, unsure of all the implications. "How'd it happen?"

Andrew briefly described Yuri's shooting of Jubadi with a Whitworth sniper rifle at a range of over a thousand yards.

Pat grinned with delight.

"I'd've given a month's pay to see it. Imagine it, over half a mile," and he shook his head. "Who'd've thought that Yuri would do it? I always suspected he was sent to kill you, Andrew darlin'."

Maybe it was a game within a game, Andrew found himself thinking. Tamuka was most likely behind it all. Had he, in fact, by turning Yuri, played out something that the Merki shield-bearer desired after all?

"God rest him, he gave us thirty days' time," Andrew said softly.

Pat nodded.

"We can play holy hell with them in thirty days. At the very least, get all of our civilians out to Roum, dig in at Kev, lay waste to everything between our lines all the way back to Vazima."

"You mean destroy our country even more?"

Andrew looked up to see Kal step out onto the train platform. The president of the Rus looked as haggard as the rest of them, his face drawn and tired, the stovepipe hat, which usually looked so comical on the short rotund Rus peasant, now slightly battered, as if it were a cast-off item picked up and saved by a servant.

"Exactly," Pat replied enthusiastically. "We've got enough captured horses to mount a regiment of scouts and raiders. Send them back up to make sure the destruction is complete. Detach a regiment or two to go into the woods to the north. Sneak out by night, get back by dawn. Make sure every well is poisoned, every scrap of food destroyed. Ambush, harass, do anything to slow them down. Leave them a desert."

"And if we ever come back?" Kal asked, his voice distant.

Pat snorted.

"Do you honestly believe we'll ever be back?"

"The land is us and we are the land," Kal said, his voice sharp. "If we're not fighting to win it back, then what are we fighting for?"

"To kill Merki," Pat replied, his voice sharp.

"Enough of this," Andrew said, looking over at Pat, who blustered for a moment and then, nodding, lowered his gaze from Kal's.

"We're fighting to win," Andrew said quietly. "To get our homes back, to give our children some kind of future. If we have to destroy our country in order to finally win, we'll do it, but by God I for one am sickened by it."

He turned away from his friends and looked off into the darkness.

He could understand what had stirred in Pat's soul, for in the darker moments of quiet reflection he knew that particular demon lurked inside himself as well. He had always strived for the dispassionate ideal of what he believed an officer of th Union Army should exemplify: a cool courage under fire, a stoic indifference to danger, a tight rein on the darker angel of destruction that lurked in every man's heart. Yet there had been moments when the destruction of war, the sheer all-consuming power of it all, had clutched at his soul, whispering its fire song of primal delight. He had, to his shame, felt such a moment at Fredericksburg, when the rebel city was in flames. He had stood watching with a perverse delight, yet horrified to truly admit that delight to himself. The city had burned through the night, and he had watched it with a dark joyful intensity.

It had happened again at Chancellorsville and at Spotsylvania, the musket volleys crescendoing through the forest, a near-apocalyptic moment, and, God forgive him, he had loved the pulsing energy within his soul, the way he imagined an opium smoker would exult as the pipe flared to life and the first acrid breath of dreams floated into his lungs. The waves of sound had beat over him like an ocean, the commingling of a hundred thousand voices, the thunder of machines of death, washing over him, beating their song of warrior madness into his soul while the red-rimmed sun hung in a sky of fire and smoke.

He suspected that those whom he had admired most in the army, men like Hancock, Kearny, and Chamberlain, had felt the same. Yet it was never spoken of-it was not the type of thing a gentleman, a Christian warrior, would admit, except in the darkness of night and to himself.

For a brief instant, now in the dark, the suffering invisible, he wondered what he would ever have done with his life if he had not known the raw passionate thrill of watching a battle line spread out across a mile of open field, advancing, bayonet tips gleaming, lit by starbursts of shells and wreathed in smoke, an entire army going into the fight, cheering hoarsely, dancing with death, and in the end defeating its dark embrace. At the doorway into that darkness, that was when he felt most alive.

Yet he hid these thoughts, never voicing them now, ashamed to admit just how little control he sometimes had. He suddenly felt his soul fill with a sick anguish for all his failings. The memory of the dream that had haunted him for so long flashed back-the field of corpses, his brother Johnnie rotting before his eyes into a skeletal specter of accusing death. He could not save Johnnie, he could not bring back any of the men of the 35th who had died under his command. Nor could he bring back all the Rus who had died since he had come to this world. How many, God forgive me, how many of them have I killed through my mistakes? he wondered. And there was a darker thought-how many more would die because of what he had unleashed with the killing of Jubadi?

He knew they were waiting for him, watching him as they always did when he became silent, lost in thought. Sighing, he looked back over his shoulder, eyes half closed against the cold sheets of rain cutting down from the black heavens.

Pat, sensing his rebuke, said nothing, but it was evident in his gaze that the unceasing fighting and above all else the fate of Hans had left an indelible mark upon his spirit.

Andrew looked at him. He had seen that all too often, an ageless look. Forty-year-olds and eighteen-year-olds looking with the gaze of old men. The same thing in Hawthorne, in a lot of the boys, especially the young ones who had come to manhood only knowing of war. They had become professional soldiers who could no longer even envision a world without war, the army, the terror, and also the moments of fierce exultation. And in Kal was the voice of the eternal peasant, working the same plot his grandsires across fifty generations had worked. He would never be the soldier. It was the ageless conflict between the warrior who did whatever was necessary to fight, and the peasant who watched his world being destroyed whenever the soldiers came. The land of Rus was the soul of the peasant; take him away from it and he starts to die. Since the collapse of the Potomac line, Kal, and all of his people, had been driven by the specter of fear, the enemy at the gates. It was that immediate concern which had driven them in the Herculean task of evacuating the people and the machines necessary to carry on the war.

Once escape had been effected, the true shock would start to settle in. It would be a problem he'd have to face. He had to get them out, and that he had achieved, especially now that the hordes were stopped by the death of Jubadi. He had thirty days before they would come on again. Now he had to fire the Rus with the will to continue the fight, even more fiercely than before, even though this first stage of the war had been a disastrous defeat.

Even more difficult, he now realized, would be to convince all of them that they could still win, and not only win but throw the Merki back and regain their homeland. If he could not do that, the next series of battles would be the final rout. If the Rus were driven back beyond Roum, their industrial bases would be truly lost once the end of the rail lines had been reached. Without factories, powder, shot, guns, the sinews of modern war, they were finished. If any Rus then survived, they would be condemned to be like the Wanderers, forever fleeing just ahead of the remorseless advance of the hordes.

It would take weeks to get the factories, now packed aboard hundreds of boxcars rolling east, back to within even three-quarters of their operational level. The depletion of ammunition from the lost campaign would have to be made good. Arms, accouterments, and supplies would have to be marshaled for the two corps training under Hawthorne. Time would have to be bought. Delay, and yet more delay. Each day to try to make themselves stronger, and the Merki ever so slightly weaker. He needed time. It seemed as if that was always the issue. The sacrifice of the 35th Maine at Gettysburg to buy First Corps fifteen minutes to pull out from Seminary Ridge, the delaying actions against the Tugars, the failed campaign on the Potomac-they were always trading precious men, and precious supplies, for the hope of getting a little more time.

"At least we still hold Kev, one small corner of Rus, to start back from," Emil said, breaking the momentary silence with a hopeful comment directed toward Kal.

"We will hold it?" Kal asked, looking down almost imploringly at Andrew.

"We'll try," Andrew said, but his uncertainty was evident. At the moment he just didn't have the strength to tell Kal the grim realization that had sunk in over the last several days. Even with thirty days of time, the numbers in the end would just not add up. The front at Kev was simply too wide to prevent a breakthrough identical to the one on the Potomac line. Kev would wind up being a delaying action and nothing more.

Kal, illuminated for a brief instant by a flash of lightning, looked down at Andrew, as if hoping to hear more. Andrew looked up at him in silence, as if imploring him not to force out yet another admission, at least not now.

The intensity of the storm seemed to rise to another crescendo, with gusts of icy wind driving the rain out nearly horizontal to the ground.

"Goddammit, Andrew," Emil finally growled, breaking the silence, "I didn't save you from typhoid just to have you die now from pneumonia. For heaven's sake get into this car so we can get moving."