Down to the Sea Read Free Page A

Bantag riders. One of the dead Bantag was carrying a revolver. It was not an old remnant of the Great War, but a modern weapon; in fact, better than anything the Republic could manufacture.
    The second was political: yet another flare-up by the Xing Sha movement in the state of Chin, calling for separation from the Republic and renouncing the treaty with the Bantag. The annoying madness would consume yet more time and struggle to try and hold the expanding Republic together and keep it from fragmenting apart into rival states.
    The third one, though, worried him the most. It had preyed on his thoughts even while giving his speech on what was supposed to be a day of happiness and pride. A courier bearing a sealed dispatch from Admiral Bullfinch, headquartered down in Constantine, the main base of the Republic’s fleet on the Great Southern Sea, had arrived only minutes before he left the White House this morning.
    A merchant ship, thought lost in a storm two months ago, had limped into the harbor the night before last. Its report was chilling.
    Driven farther south by the storm than anyone had previously gone and returned to tell the tale, the captain of the ship reported making landfall on an island of the dead. They had found a human city there, one that obviously had been annihilated within the previous year.
    It was a city of thousands and had not fallen prey to the Malacca Pirates, which had been the main concern of the fleet in recent years. The city had been flattened, and some of the remains of the dead showed that they had been eaten. One of the sailors, a veteran of the Great War, said it looked like Roum after the siege. Buildings had been blown apart by shelling and the streets were still littered with fragments, shell casings—and the wreckage of an airship.
    The city, however, was over five hundred miles south of the treaty line drawn with the Kazan embassy. The ship’s presence in those waters was a direct violation of the treaty and thus no inquiry could be made officially at the twice yearly meeting with the ambassador of Kazan, which took place at a neutral island on the boundary line. If more was to be learned, it would have to be done by other means.
    Pat, looking at Andrew, could sense his uneasiness, and he drew closer. “It’s the Kazan, isn’t it? Something’s been found at last.”
    The flicker of the old light in Pat’s eyes was disturbing to Andrew, for somehow it rekindled something is his own soul as well, something he would prefer remained forever buried.
    “How did you know?” Andrew whispered.
    “Andrew, darlin’, I can smell a war from a thousand miles off. I’ve told you for years there’d be another, and I can see it in your eyes.”
    Andrew looked at him closely. He was holding something back.
    “All right,” Pat chuckled, “one of my staffers saw the courier and asked around the train crew this morning. They say the docks and rail yards are already buzzing with word about it. Something’s coming, Andrew, something big, something beyond anything we’ve ever known. You can sense it the same way you can feel a storm coming long before you see it.”
    Andrew nodded, looking at the happy crowd, enjoying this day of peace; the eager boyish faces of the new officers, the proud gazes of parents, many of them veterans like himself.
    We were that young, Andrew realized, when we fought our war. Boys really, going off to see the elephant, never dreaming that it would bring us to this mad, terrible world, and though we were boys, we quickly became men of war.
    He caught a glimpse of his son at the edge of the crowd, following a stream of cadets heading to their traditional watering place for one last round before shipping out.
    “If what happened to that city is any indication of who the Kazan are, there will be war. But it will be their war, Pat,” he whispered, nodding to the young cadets, “and God help them.”

ONE
    Hanaga tu Zartak, the Qarth of the Blue Banner of the Kazan,