Drum Trial
This short story originally appeared in Strangeweirdandwonderful in 2008.
—
Field Marshall Tyner pulled his gloves snug onto his hands, the foreign snow crunching under his boots in a different way, somehow, than snow in his home in Montana. At the age of fifty-three he had not seen Montana in seventeen years. But he could still hear the distinct sound of snow as he walked there, the odd non-silence of heavy snow back on Earth.
His mind reeling with numbers and news about the supply and relief lines-none of it good-he paused in the sub-zero night and peered upward into the opaque, unbroken black sky. He could not see the Fusion Bombers, but he could hear them. Only when he thought to; their constant roar had become something of a silence, in a way. White noise.
“Are you well, sir?”
Tyner closed his eyes, and for a moment allowed visceral weariness to rush through him. He had not slept in four days, since the Metro-234 Offensive had begun. Mired in swamp-like snow, and meeting stiff, fanatical resistance around the alien city, he expected to go several more sleepless nights.
He turned to the young officer who had spoken, one of a dozen who followed him everywhere: His staff. He pushed weariness from his mind and concentrated on the suddenly embarrassed officer. Tyner was a Field Marshall, one of twelve on the planet, and he oversaw three armies, a total of four million men. He put them all into his eyes and stared at the man until he looked away, quickly, and then back up at the ranking officer.
Field Marshall Tyner was not a physically imposing man. He was of average height and build, and aside from the five gold bars on his overcoat, his uniform was identical to the ones worn by the dozen men grouped around him. He was a pale man, blond and gray-eyed. He conveyed no emotion, no warmth. His stare was disconcerting.
“Captain Bishop,” he said in a careful Midwestern drawl, “When I am indisposed, I will alert Command.”
The captain swallowed. “Yes, sir.”
