David Weber - Hell's Gate

Janaki sipped air slowly. This man was even more bitter than he'd feared, and the prince wondered if he'd been wise after all to wait until after supper. Perhaps if he'd charged straight ahead earlier, before Kinlafia had had time to anticipate this moment?to finger through his dreadful memories and cut himself on their sharpnesses all over again?it might not have been so painful.

But Janaki had wanted time to chew on the strange little flash of Glimpse he'd had earlier, and so he'd waited. He hadn't been able to refine what he'd Seen, but he was even more convinced that it had been a true Glimpse. That narrowed his own options considerably, and while the Voice had every right to be bitter, he had to be made to see the larger picture, as well. And not just because of the information he might provide.

"Voice Kinlafia," he began again, "I understand?"

"No, you don't!"

"If you would be so good as to let me finish speaking before assuming you know what I'm about to say," Janaki said levelly, "we'd get through this agonizing conversation faster."

The man seated on his camp stool glared at him, breathing hard for a long, dangerous moment. Then Kinlafia's shoulders slumped suddenly. He sat back with a weary sigh and pinched the bridge of his nose.

"I'm sorry, Your Highness. That was … out of line."

"Yes, it was," Janaki agreed calmly. "What I was going to say is that I understand that you've been through a very personal hell which no one else?certainly no one who isn't himself a Voice and can't experience it directly himself?will ever be able to fully comprehend. I recognize that, and I regret the necessity of dragging you back through it all over again. But you have to understand that you're going to have to go back over it again and again. Not just for me, but for all of the analysts waiting to debrief you, to try to get some feeling about, some handle on, just what in all the Arpathian hells we're really up against out here.

"And what that means for you, is that somehow you've got to move forward. Not 'put it behind you.' Not 'let go of it.' I'm neither coldhearted nor arrogant enough to tell a grieving man something like that."

Suspicious brilliance touched Kinlafia's eyes. Eyes which blinked rapidly while their owner looked briefly away.

"But you do need to move forward," Janaki continued with that same gentle implacability, drawing Kinlafia's gaze back to him. "You have to decide what you're going to do about it. Not what the Army or the Corps is going to do. What you're going to do."

"What can I do?" Kinlafia lifted his hands in a helpless, frustrated gesture. "Other than join the Army and shoot as many of the bastards as I can line up in my sights, that is?"

Even to himself, that carried an edge of something that was almost … childish. Petulant, perhaps. Somehow, he felt vaguely ashamed to be sitting here in front of the heir to the throne of Sharona's most powerful and ancient nation whining about his own sense of helplessness. As if the entire multiverse revolved around or depended upon his personal exaction of vengeance for his dead.

But even as that thought crossed his own mind, Janaki surprised him by smiling.

"You'd be wasted in the Army, Kinlafia!"

"I beg your pardon?" Kinlafia blinked, and Janaki shrugged.

"Think about it. What would you accomplish, in the Army? You'd be just another soldier, and you're a Voice. That means you'd be stuck using your Talent, not your rifle. One more messenger, passing other people's orders through the Voice chain. Going where you were told to go. Shooting when you were told to shoot . . . and not shooting when you were ordered to hold your fire. Vothan! Voices are way too valuable for the military to risk in combat if it can possibly be avoided?you know that. So if you were to enlist, your chances of actually shooting anyone would go down, not up!"

That drew a scowl, and the Crown Prince chuckled a bit grimly.

"I didn't think you'd thought about that aspect of it," he said.

"No," Kinlafia muttered. "I hadn't."

"Then there's probably another thing you haven't thought about, either. Frankly, the last thing we can afford to do is to repeat what Company-Captain chan Tesh and Platoon-Captain Arthag managed to accomplish here."

"Why?" This time, the question wasn't belligerent, just baffled.

"Because we don't know how many of them there are, for one thing. How many universes do they occupy? How big is their army? Their navy? What the hells do they use for technology? Most of what we've seen doesn't make any sense at all yet?you know that even better than I do, because you've actually seen it. And Seen it, for that matter."

Janaki paused, holding Kinlafia's eyes levelly with his own, and wondered if the Voice saw the ghosts hovering within them. A part of him hungered to tell the Voice?tell anyone?what he'd Glimpsed that night in the mountains. But he couldn't. The visions of death and destruction, of flame exploding across the night, of bizarre weapons spitting devastation … those were his alone, for now at least. He was desperately afraid that they were going to become the property of other Sharonians, but they hadn't yet.

The thought flickered through his mind once again that he really ought to consider sending word to his father by Voice of what he had Glimpsed. Yet, what could he truly tell the Emperor? That he'd Seen images of war and slaughter? That he'd felt the foretaste of his own terror? That he was afraid? His father's Talent was much stronger than Janaki's?almost as strong, Janaki suspected, as his sister Andrin's. He'd probably already Glimpsed everything Janaki had, and even if he hadn't, the Calirath Glimpses weren't something to be discussed through any intermediary, even that of a Voice. They had to be discussed face-to-face, where Talent could speak directly to Talent.

I wish my Glimpse had been clearer, just this once, at least, he thought for a far from the first time, with familiar frustration. But it hadn't been clear . . . only vast, powerful, and terrifying.

Well, at least if chan Tesh is sending me all the way home with these people, I'll be seeing Father in person for that little chat a lot sooner than I'd expected. That's something.

"We punched right through them here," he continued, still holding Kinlafia's gaze captive with his own. "Punched through so quickly and easily it wasn't even a contest. But this time we had the advantage of surprise, since they presumably don't understand our technology any better than we understand theirs. And armies, unfortunately, tend to learn more from failure than they do from success. Do we really want to assume we're looking at an endless succession of walkovers? They obviously didn't expect anything like Platoon-Captain chan Talmarha's four-point-fives. What if it turns out that they've got weapons we haven't even seen yet? Weapons that make mortars look like damp firecrackers by comparison? Do we want to send in 'a division or six' to wipe out every post they have in this region, then discover they've got six hundred divisions, with heavy weapons support, poised to wipe out every man, woman, and child from here to Sharona?"

"No." Kinlafia bit his lip, and his voice was low and reluctant. "No, we don't."

He sat slumped on the camp stool, gazing at nothing and seeing something that made his eyes go bleak, and for two long, endless minutes, he said absolutely nothing more. But then, finally, his eyes refocused on Janaki, deep, dark … and lost.

"What I never told anyone," he said in a terrible whisper, "was how much I loved her."

Janaki didn't speak. He couldn't.

"You're not a Voice," Kinlafia said softly. "You don't understand what it's like to communicate with another Voice. When you're linked, deeply linked, the way we were during that ghastly attack … "