The Words, Graven In the Wall With a Nail, Were Still Legible In 1848

January 799 U.C., Iserlohn Fortress

There had been a long stretch of time when the idea of leaving Iserlohn had been so out of the question that it hadn’t occurred to Poplan to think about it at all. Iserlohn had become a fact of life, without him even noticing it. One day, he had not been living in Iserlohn— he hadn’t been living anywhere in particular, aside from the ship that berthed him— and then the next day, he was. And then that was his life, and it seemed like it might go on that way forever. He got used to things quickly, he supposed. Didn’t ask too many questions about them.

But now they were leaving. That, too, happened quickly. The order was delivered first in a meeting for the officers, then in a general broadcast to the whole fortress with Yang and Cazerne’s voices over the speakers. Just their words alone couldn’t possibly have changed anything, but after Poplan heard them, it was all different. The easy permanence had broken, and Iserlohn felt almost like a stranger again. Once you know something is going to be gone, you start approaching it differently, handling it gently.

When he caught himself doing that, looking around like there was something in Iserlohn that he could save in his heart, he scolded himself. It was stupid to be sentimental. Iserlohn was a place, the same as any other.

When Admiral Yang said that bomb traps would be laid all throughout the fortress, Poplan decided to squash his strange feelings at the root, and volunteer to be in one of the squads laying the traps. He wasn’t an explosives expert, but he knew how to hold a screwdriver well enough, and that was apparently all that was needed. He had little better to do while everyone else was packing what they could carry on their backs into the ships still sitting quiescent in Iserlohn’s docks. He wanted to get as far away from that activity as possible, even if it was where all the young women were: all those many squadrons of secretarial workers and nurses and officers’ wives.

He couldn’t stand to see girls having some kind of fit— and they were all throwing a fit, every last one of them. Tugging wailing children by the arm, looking down at suitcases in despair, peering at their surroundings with hollow eyes like they were lost sheep, weeping onto their husbands’ uniforms. Why they couldn’t get a grip, Poplan couldn’t really understand. After all, he was leaving Iserlohn, too, and he wasn’t going to moan about it. It was just a place, he repeated to himself.

All the volunteers for the bomb squad met on one of the basketball courts in one of Iserlohn’s many gyms. It was like a school assembly Poplan had attended as a child, sitting cross-legged on the floor while someone up at the front told them what they were going to be doing. Poplan only half paid attention, and instead leaned back on his hands and looked around. Officers and enlisted men, very few of whom Poplan recognized, sat side by side on the floor, all equal here as volunteers in this strange task— just another way in which life in Iserlohn had been shaken out of its usual course.

 Each man was given a sheaf of stapled papers and a toolkit. No bombs— those remained the sole provenance of the demolition experts. The papers were maps of the fortress, and then engineering diagrams pulled from Iserlohn’s computers (the text was all in the incomprehensible Imperial language), which someone had gone through and marked up with red pen. All Poplan had to do was go to the specified locations within the fortress, and open the electrical panels (or floor panels, or whatever panels) marked on the drawing for the bomb squad. The squad would come through, install the bomb, and Poplan would return to his opened location and close it back up. Simple enough.

Enlisted men were assigned to work in pairs, but officers were judged responsible enough to go alone, so Poplan went off alone, turning his photocopied map of the fortress upside down and sideways to decipher what was meant by the drawings he had been handed. Someone had helpfully provided a dictionary list of single word translations that commonly appeared on the drawings, so Poplan was able to puzzle out that he was meant to go to a specific hallway on a specific floor, down in the depths of Iserlohn’s underside, near the computer control center, and look around.

He held up the drawing in front of him as he walked down the empty corridor. Cold, crisp lines showed the hallway from above, or bisected it down the middle to face one wall, all the guts exposed where the wall panels had been invisibly peeled away by some engineer’s hand. Above him, he looked for the screwed in label plates on the frames that made up the fortress’s structure. He found frame number 2,784 and stood beneath it, then counted off his steps, heel to toe, to find the correct panel about two meters away.

He set down his toolbag and began the process of disassembly. Since the panel was huge and fastened into place with probably fifty individual bolts, he could see why it was more efficient to have a bunch of separate disassembly teams than the bomb squad waiting on each one. The panel was very heavy, and by the time that Poplan got to the bottom bolts, the thing was threatening to tip forward onto him: he should have started from the bottom and worked his way up, but there was no way to fix his mistake now.

He grumbled under his breath about getting stuck with all the hard jobs by himself, while he crouched beneath the slumping panel and tried to hold it up with his left hand while undoing the remaining bolts with his right.

As Poplan grumbled and struggled, he heard footsteps down the hallway, and suddenly the weight of the bowing panel was lifted off his hand.

“I thought this was a volunteer position,” Konev said. “I’m not sure you have the right to complain.”

“If I don’t have the right to complain, we’re not living in a free country,” Poplan replied. He sat back on his haunches and looked up at Konev, who was now holding the panel still with both hands.

“Keep unscrewing,” Konev said.

“You want to watch me screw so bad,” he said, which caused Konev to gently kick him. “What are you doing here?” he asked as he picked up his screwdriver again and got back to work on the panel.

“I was wondering where you were. Asked around, got told you were down here.”

“Well, you found me.”

“I didn’t know you were interested in volunteer work.”

“What else is there to do?” Poplan asked. “I’m packed, and it’s not like we’ll sortie again until we leave.”

“Yeah. I should have volunteered too. It’s good to get your mind off it,” Konev said.

Poplan made a disgusted noise and dropped one of the screws to the floor, where it rolled away down the hallway. He’d get it later. “I’m not taking my mind off it. I’m just getting out of the way of everyone who’s crying about it.”

“Okay.” Konev shifted so that it was his shoulders doing the work of holding the panel in place, leaning back against it rather than forward onto his hands. The whole thing wobbled when he moved, making a strange sound. “I guess it’s a good chance to see parts of this place I’ve never been before,” Konev said. “I’ve never been in this hallway.”

“Wow, so much to see,” Poplan said as he undid the last screw. The hallway they were in was unremarkably plain. “The fortress is sixty kilometers wide. You couldn’t walk it all in a month.” He stood, knees stiff from kneeling, and Konev helped him remove the panel completely and lean it against the wall. “But it all looks like this.”

“This is interesting,” Konev said. Pulling back the panel had revealed sheaves of cables, red and white, looking like banded muscle fibers as they snaked through the wall and entered a hidden connector plate. Konev stuck his hand directly into the bundle of wires, letting them slide through his parted fingers. “You never see this. Funny to think about it being under our feet all the time.”

“We’re just supposed to unplug it, not pet it,” Poplan said, consulting his diagrams. He began pulling the wires’ connectors out, until they all dangled loosely. Konev just watched him.

“Feels weird to do this, doesn’t it?” Konev asked.

“Why?” Next, according to the drawing, Poplan had to take out four more bolts to lift up the plate that the cables had connected to. He did so, and passed the screws one at a time to Konev.

“It feels like desecrating something.” He was still gently twisting the cables around in his hands.

Poplan scoffed. “And how many years did we spend trying to bomb this place to bits?” He lifted the cable panel on its hinges, pulling drooping cables attached to the backside out with it, which revealed a long and narrow passageway, wide enough for him to stick his arm in, but no wider, that went far back into the wall. He couldn’t see how far it went, since it vanished into darkness. But he did stick his arm in, whacking it against the sides of the tunnel and feeling the cables that stretched along the bottom. A slight, cool breeze ran across his extended fingertips. “How deep do you think this goes?” he asked.

He withdrew his arm, and, finding it dusty, tried to wipe it off on Konev, who smacked his hand away with a good natured swat. Poplan vainly tried to brush the dust off with his other hand while Konev peered down into the tunnel.

“Hello?” he called down it. His voice echoed and rattled around. “Maybe it goes all the way to the control center.”

While he was distracted looking into the tunnel, Poplan smacked a dusty handprint onto Konev’s ass.

Konev just stood straight and rolled his eyes. “You want me to leave?” he asked.

“We should get on to the next one,” Poplan said. “It’s four floors up.”

“Here. Put all the screws in the toolbag,” Konev said, and scooped up the ones that were laying on the floor near the panel. When they walked down the hall and found the screw that had rolled away, he stuck that in his pocket.

They walked for a while. This part of Iserlohn really was samey— a far cry from the neon-lit “city center” up above. This area was almost entirely storerooms, filled to the brim with sacks of flour or stacks of uniforms, or pallets of equipment for running the farms that ringed the fortress. Poplan bet there were rooms here that no one had entered for years.

He thought— he knew— Admiral Yang intended the bombs to be decoys, so he wondered if perhaps the admiral’s plan rested on people secretly remaining behind in the fortress, living inside its walls until the day came that they would be called upon to steal it back.

He dismissed the idea as silly, but couldn’t help but imagine what it would be like to be that person, to become part of the fortress itself, to never have to leave.

Poplan shook himself out of it. “We’re not really desecrating the place,” he said as they walked. “Really, we should be putting messages everywhere.”

“Oh? Like what?”

Poplan dug into the toolbag and came out with the permanent marker that was in there. “Here, hold on, I’ve got one.”

They stopped in the hallway, in front of one huge blank wall, so that Poplan could write, in letters as wide and tall as his arms could swing, DEATH TO THE KAISER. He capped the marker, took a few steps back, and put his hands on his hips to admire his handiwork.

“Very literary,” Konev said dryly. “You know he’s still not Kaiser yet, right?’

“Well this one is reusable, for whichever Kaiser they happen to have over there. And it gets the point across!”

“They’re just going to scrub that off.”

“Here, they can have some fun doing it.” Poplan returned to the wall and drew a crude image of a naked woman making a rude gesture. His artistic skills left much to be desired— it was little better than a stick figure with tits— but he found it funny.

“And what would the fortress administrator say if he saw that?”

“Who cares? We’re leaving.”

Poplan stalked off down the hallway, leaving Konev to follow after him. “We’ll be back,” Konev said. “We wouldn’t be doing this if we weren’t coming back.”

Poplan shook his head. “You can spend all your time waiting for that if you want. I’ve got better things to do.”

“Like what?”

“Not worry about it,” Poplan said. They came to one of the connecting stairwells and hiked up the four flights of steps.

They were still in the storeroom areas, but this time, they were headed to an odd piece of machinery embedded into the side of the hallway, in a notch cut into the wall, about the width of two people. It looked like the transformer that provided power to this section of Iserlohn’s rail carts.

In almost every hallway of Iserlohn, the top of the walls, right next to the ceiling, had a monorail for little freight vehicles to move along. The carts gripped and were powered by the top rail, but trundled along the floor on wheels. They were standing next to one of these odd looking vehicles now, one of the passenger or driver units, without any long train of cargo bins behind it. It was parked in front of the transformer, and Poplan shoved it out of the way so that he could get to his target.

Konev sat down on the train’s little bench and flipped through the sheaf of engineering drawings. “Oh,” he said. “This one’s easy. You don’t need my help. You just have to take the top off the transformer there. Make sure you flip off the power, first.” He pointed idly at the large shutoff handles on the side of the box.

“You’re really just going to sit there and watch me?” Poplan asked.

“I’m not the one who volunteered. I’m providing pleasant company.”

“Did you bring anything to drink?”

“I think all of Iserlohn’s alcohol has been loaded onto the ships already. No reason to leave it behind for the Imperials.”

Poplan laughed at that. “Has it really?”

“You’d know if you weren’t trying to stay as far away from it all as possible.”

“I don’t know why you’re accusing me of something,” Poplan said. “I’m doing my part! Unlike yourself.”

Konev just smiled and leaned back in his chair on the train car. Poplan busied himself with opening up the transformer’s top. This required some real effort, undoing heavy locknuts, and Poplan was forced to ignore Konev for a minute, his back to him, as he struggled with it.

“How long do you think we’ll be gone?” Konev asked.

“I don’t know, man,” Poplan said. He leaned his whole bodyweight onto the wrench he was using, trying to force it forward.

“Isn’t that the kind of thing you like to bet on?”

“Can you shut up?” The locknut gave, and Poplan stumbled against the transformer. He was sweating, and his hands ached from pushing on the wrench so hard. “I’m working here. Don’t you have a crossword to do or something?”

“Alright, fine.” Konev fell silent after that, and Poplan went back to work on loosening the lid of the transformer box.

After a while, feeling a little bad for being annoyed, Poplan said, “If anyone says a number, that’s a fucking jinx, you know?”

Konev didn’t say anything, which almost made Poplan think he had left, so he turned around to glance at him. Konev was facing the wall, bracing himself with his left arm, while he did some rhythmic motion with his right.

“Jerking off over there?” Poplan asked.

“I’m taking a page out of your handbook,” Konev replied.

“So, yes?”

Konev laughed and shook his head. “Finish taking that lid off.”

“You need to treat me to one of Iserlohn’s missing beers after this if you’re going to boss me around.”

“Alright,” Konev said.

Poplan struggled with the last bolt for a while, then freed it. When he finished setting the lid of the transformer box down on the ground, he came around to see what Konev had been doing the whole time. Poplan squeezed onto the seat of the cart next to him. It was barely wide enough to fit two, and their sides pressed together.

“Here,” Konev said. He held out his hand, and Poplan opened his palm so that Konev could drop what he was holding into it. It was a screw, one that had come out of the other wall panel.

“Gee, thanks.”

“I think I wrecked it, so you’ll need to grab a new one for the wall.” He looked at it, and found that, indeed, the bottom of the screw was weirdly blunted.

“I don’t think it matters,” Poplan said, and chucked it away from himself. It landed with a clatter some way down the hallway. “How the hell did you wreck it?”

Konev leaned back, so Poplan could finally see what he had been up to. He had scratched a few words into the wall with the tip of the screw.

“Think that’ll still be there when we get back?” Konev asked. His voice, which was usually calmly cheerful, had a note of hopefulness in it.

Poplan was silent for a moment. “Yeah, sure. It’ll probably be there ‘til this place gets bombed for good.”

“And when do you think that’ll be?”

“Fucking never, man,” he said. He hopped out of the train cart and stood in front of it, then slapped his hand against the cold wall of Iserlohn. “This place is the best.”

Konev smiled. “Yeah, she really is.”