The March North by Graydon Saunders

we can. Plan is to make these guys vanish, but we need to know what they think they’re doing, so we can’t just leave them lost untilthe dry gets them.”
    “Colour party, Halt, we’re going to Headwaters to sound the general alarm. I’m going so the Gerefan can’t commit paperwork.”
    That gets me a snort out of Twitch, but it’s all too true.

Chapter 8
    The Gerefan, and the Clerk of the Meeting, that diligent soul, would very much have liked to commit paperwork. They’re completely right that declaring an invasion alert for the whole of the Creeks is expensive. A lot of work isn’t going to get done, and a lot of plans needs must be deferred.
    The Line’s Officer School is in some great, draughty, and frankly ugly pile of shaped stones thatalleges to be a fine example of pre-Commonweal architecture. The course of study is Senior School, for a warrant of commission. It must have made sense to someone at one time.
    The entrance hall is a fifth as wide as it is high, so it feels narrow despite being almost seven metres wide, and there’s this immense, horribly realistic mural along the whole north side of it, above the human-level panelling,twenty-four metres high and forty-eight metres long.
    The mural shows what was obviously a prosperous town, before it was sacked. You can always find some new unpleasant bit, if you are ever so unwise as to stop to look at the thing, and the tall narrow windows in the south wall are glazed with old glass variously tinted in reds and oranges, just in case the wavery stripes of shadow through theuneven glass weren’t enough.
    Way high up, not centred, pretty much exactly where you look as you’re trying to find the part of this immense artwork that isn’t a screaming portrait of destroyed humanity, there’s this tiny — it’s not, it’s three metres wide, but it looks tiny from the floor — brass-on-iron sign that says “This is defeat.”
    It’s supposed to stick with you.
    It stuck with me, untilI saw what happened when the Iron Bridge went down.
    We got a lot of people out; maybe we even got most of the people out. Sure as death we didn’t get all the people out, especially right at the start when it was just the Third Heavy trying to save them.
    Some of this about had to show in my face; nobody so much as glanced at Halt.
    There’s the usual thing where you get all formal and the colourparty marches the standard in and you sort of condense out of it. Everybody looks at you funny, but they can’t possibly argue that you’re not who you say you are without trying to repudiate the standard. You’re in the room because their best ability to check that this is an authentic standard of the Commonweal Line has already told them yes, yes it is, so that’s not going to work.
    If you’re whoyou say you are, they have to do it, too. The Line might come back and apologise; Parliament might provide recompense against the expense. The Line might even decide I am such a waste of effort as to hang me, if I make a sufficiently horrible mistake. But right at that moment you’re the Officer Responsible and if you say the Bad Old Days are come over the border, that’s the end of the discussion.They take you seriously and do what the law says they must, both because it’s the law and because if you’re right, not doing that goes beyond expensive and gets into other words starting with “e” like “extirpated” and “enslaved”.
    The Clerk makes a try for “incursion”; we have, after all, only got a file or so of scouting party, calling it a fullblown invasion might be premature?
    At which pointI get stuck on what to say first; getting the scouts over the Northern Hills, mountains, it depends on the phase of the moon, if we start at “finding a pass and making it workable” Reems must have expended close to a battalion to get that far. Unless they’ve figured out something like a standard-binding, in which case we are in for a grim season. The scouts are