Perdition

by Scott McKay

  Furthermore, because the Udar society was built on a radical egalitarian model, it was discouraged to name a second-in-command of an Anur; to do so would signal the presence of a social hierarchy, and the Udar believed this was unsettling to relations within the collective. Few Anur ever had a ready-made line of succession, so if a Var’asha died or was incapacitated, there would be a period of time in which the potential successors would be vetted according to various physical and intellectual metrics and a new Var’asha would be installed through a complicated ceremony.

  Ardenian military doctrine in fighting the Udar, until Dees came along, had focused on simply winning battles and driving the savages away. That was a rather soft handling of a sworn enemy, but it had generally sufficed to satisfy Ardenian purposes. Udar religious doctrine had it that none of their number should die a peaceful death away from his or her Afan’di, or home territory. What that meant was when the Udar showed up to rape and pillage Ardenians, it always happened within the context of a raid, not a conquest. Yes, they’d cart off the women and children, kill the men and burn down what they couldn’t steal, but then they’d return to wherever they’d come from. Ardenians following the Udar home to punish or subjugate them generally meant exposing themselves to a battle against superior numbers of highly skilled, ruthless warriors, so it simply made more sense to play it on the defensive side.

  But when Dunnan’s War arrived, Ardenia, for the first time, had a definitive advantage in technology and firepower, thanks to the chain gun, cannon, steamship and Thurman rifle. Those were all force multipliers that enabled Dees’ side of the recurring conflict to project power into enemy territory much more than had been possible before. And with Thurman rifles boasting an effective sniper range of up to fifteen hundred yards, the opportunity existed to use the peculiarities of Udar society against them to devastating effect.

  So in that context, killing Var’asha wasn’t murder. It was strategic action, and it saved Ardenian lives. It clearly fell along the Blessed Path of resistance.

  Dees carried the day at those hearings, and instead of being drummed out of the military, he found himself promoted from major to lieutenant colonel. He was given command of all enemy reconnaissance at the six forts the Army planned to construct along the new border between Ardenia and Uris Udar. Dees’ snipers were to become long-range reconnaissance assets, scrambling around the craggy mountains of Rogers Range and the West Peaks from their sparsely-constructed bases: Ft. Murtaugh along the Sunset Sea coast, Ft. Walder, Ft. Harrow and Ft. Bountiful straddling The Throat, which was the narrow part of the Great Continent bridging the two conjoined halves, Ft. Claire west of Lake Thurgill at the north end of Rogers Range and Strongstead on the shore of Leopold Bay. Dees’ recon troopers engaged in the same tactics the snipers had during Dunnan’s War, which is to say that any Anur they found within a three-or-four-day ride of those fortresses would shortly be absent of a headman.

  Dees’ tactics were highly successful, and the Ardenians’ efforts to pacify what had been a mortally perilous bit of geography were so complete that the lush fields south of the Tweade became, in a few short years, a booming area for agricultural growth due in large part to land grants to military veterans there. The Tweade Valley, especially along the river’s lower reaches, spawned several new and growing towns and a prosperous class of landholders from south of Trenory, the only city of size in the Ardenian southwest, all the way to Dunnan’s Claim, the rich land between the lower Tweade and Watkins Gulf.

  Strength, guile and ruthlessness had brought peace. Dees advanced from the rank of Lieutenant Colonel to Colonel and expected to be given command of the entire southwestern military district.

  But once again his tactics became a political problem, particularly after one of his reconnaissance units shot, by mistake, a diplomat from Thosia, who had been on a goodwill tour of the Anur of Uris Udar. There was a dispute as to whether the shooting didn’t actually take place in Ardenian territory; Dees contended, and had convincing evidence supporting him, that the location of the incident, southeast of Ft. Harrow, was above the Eighteenth Parallel, which Ardenia claimed as the new southern border. The Thosians disputed that contention, and given the fact that Ardenia and Thosia were in negotiations for a major trade agreement that would result in sizable Ardenian agricultural exports to that nation across the Great Sea, the timing of the incident couldn’t have been worse.

  By this point, Dees had considerable political protection, even within the Peace Party, which had just taken power following the collapse of its political opposition into two small and squabbling parties.

  A deal was thus cut.

  Dees was promoted from Colonel to Lieutenant General, but he wasn’t given the command he wanted. Instead, in return for a public registration as a Peace Party member solidifying the new governing elite’s broad base of support, he was appointed as the commandant of the Army Officer College at Valoria, northwest of the capital. He couldn’t turn down such a prestigious assignment, but Dees knew he was being put out to pasture and taken out of the great game against the Udar.

  The commander of the reconnaissance unit, a Captain Edward Landerson, was cashiered as the scapegoat for the incident. Landerson found a well-paying job in private security for some hush-hush scientific laboratory in Principia.

  For the next five years Dees played the role of elder military statesman, writing a best-selling memoir of his experiences fighting the Udar and presiding over the training of an Army officer corps he cultivated as disciples. Still a young man, just in his mid-forties, Dees was approached repeatedly by Peace Party leadership to run for a seat in Parliament or even the governorship of Castoria Province; he turned them down. Dees knew it was a matter of time before a new war against the Udar would come and he was holding out for a military command that would allow him back into the fight.

  And during his time at the Officer College, Dees did the best he could to mold those disciples into an understanding of the nature of the enemy. The problem wasn’t just Udar culture, Dees knew, it was their sa’halet, or king. This Ubel’la, who held absolute power among the southmen, was prophesied to be the last of the rulers of Uris Udar and the first In’gur, the Udar name for Great Emperor, which he would become when he conquered the entire Great Continent. This knowledge Dees imparted through courses required for students at the Officer College; his pupils graduated with an understanding the Ardenian political class lacked, that their enemy was bent on invading and conquering them, not just staging raids, and that the Udar were on a timetable.

  And when a slew of scientists, engineers and intellectuals started to go missing, Dees penned an op-ed in the Peace Party press organ The Conciliator warning that it was the best evidence yet of a growing Udar fifth column operating inside Ardenian territory, and such efforts were a great hazard to the peace of the two nations.

  Dees knew, of course, that no such peace existed. Watkins Gulf was a nautical slaughterhouse where the Ardenian navy was in a never-ending fight to clean Udar pirates out of commercial shipping lanes with a significant, if one-sided, body count. The ruling class in Principia sought to ignore that fact, and to slow-play the construction of the fort network in The Throat. It was Peace Party political doctrine that pouring too much of the military budget into growing Ft. Claire, Ft. Harrow, Ft. Bountiful and Ft. Walder into much more than dusty fire bases was “provocative” and “militaristic.” Dees saw that as politicians simply wishing to forget the Udar existed.

  But Dees played the game and pretended he agreed with that foolishness, while at the same time keeping up relationships with the Territorialists and Prosperitans, the rump remnants of what had been the majority Party of Enterprise. Dees wanted to make sure he had broad-based political support for his military leadership when the war did come, and his advocacy generated the political will for the formation of the Office of Special Warfare.

  He just didn’t get to run it. Not until Sayers, who at seventy years old was never going to be more than
a figurehead anyway, passed away. Dees then was able to ascend to the job he wanted.

  In the four years that followed Dees had been able to expand the mission of the OSW. They began with a counterintelligence function that spun off some significant by-products. He was rapidly building a file on more or less every political, commercial, cultural and scientific figure in the country, as was necessary to understand who was at risk of disappearing next, for example. And that counterintelligence activity had led to the arrest of a few individuals ultimately confessing to participation in Udar espionage activity and confirming the presence of an enemy spy network. OSW hadn’t rolled up that network yet, but not for lack of effort and not for lack of some quite aggressive tactics in dealing with enemy spies and traitors. What the public didn’t know, though some suspected, was just how big a job OSW had and what lengths it had to go in service to the Republic.

  Dees had also executed a plan to give the military a far more robust research-and-development function. One chief weakness of Peace Party governance, among many that he noticed, was that military procurement was beyond political; it was more akin to a criminal enterprise. Inferior makers of weapons were bribing their way into contracts as military suppliers and displacing state-of-the-art competitors.

  The two most egregious examples of this were when the Peace Party administration had ended the contract to purchase chain guns from the Trunxton Company of Welvary in favor of the Dulsey Corporation of Lydon, whose chairman was a major Peace Party donor. Even more controversial was the decision to let lapse the contract with the Thurman Rifle Company of Trenory to provide the world’s best rifle as a standard issue to marines, infantry, and cavalry in favor of a new rifle made by the Benchford Armory of Belgarden, owned by a pair of Peace Party members of Parliament. That last change was nothing short of a disaster, as the Benchford was notorious for misfiring, wasn’t accurate at long range, and lacked stopping power in comparison to the Thurman. Commonly, soldiers would buy their own rifles rather than use the inferior standard-issue weapon, and unit commanders defied Army regulations to let it happen.

  Dees was determined to undermine those destructive policies before the next war began, and toward that end he made silent alliances with some of Ardenia’s heaviest hitters in commerce and industry to capitalize a few high-tech research laboratories. The two most promising of these were a Principia facility owned by Morgan River Valley agricultural and real estate tycoons Preston Cross VII and Henry Dutton (his former subordinate Landerson being an employee of that facility and a back-channel conduit for information as to its progress), and the Thorne Technology Group in Alvedorne owned by that city’s mega-wealthy Thorne family. In four years, those two labs had pioneered major advances in military technology Dees was just now able to put into service, while at the same time creating prototypes of civilian technological marvels Ardenia’s corrupt regulatory regime largely forbade from commercial use.

  And his greatest feat had come just more than a week earlier, as Dees had helped to engineer the acquisition of two dirigible airships owned by the Airbound Corporation, a passenger transportation line owned by Cross’ son Sebastian, for a new air force that would be under the wing of the Office of Special Warfare. This, Dees knew, would be the impetus for the creation of a new branch of the country’s military and put OSW on an equal footing with the Marines, Army and Navy. Perhaps it would put OSW even above them, as Dees had already taken the lead in intelligence and counterintelligence, something the other branches had never done an adequate job with.

  Dees hadn’t just gotten the two airships, he’d also enlisted most of their crews and support staff, and most importantly, he’d landed Sebastian as the head of the new air force. This was a coup he was especially proud of, as Sebastian carried with him a tremendous amount of public-relations value; he was the first man to circumnavigate the world by air eight years earlier. Dees was especially pleased to discover Sebastian was also a highly resourceful leader with a certain penchant for unconventional thinking that Dees thought the job needed.

  But Dees’ plan had developed a colossal hitch just before his acquisition of Sebastian Cross and his airships, which was that the Udar didn’t quite wait for him to be fully operational before they commenced the war Dees had known was coming. His intelligence assets in enemy territory had reported major movements not just of troops but of entire Anur. But from the six fortresses along the border there had strangely been no reports of enemy action or approach. And therefore, the intelligence reports OSW was delivering to the High Military Commission had gone largely ignored as unspecific, and therefore, unactionable.

  Something was happening that wasn’t quite right. His assets deep in Udar territory had reported they were moving, but they weren’t necessarily moving to the border.

  Then disaster struck, and it struck in the worst way possible.

  Of the six fortresses, the one that had been thought impregnable was Strongstead, whose forty-foot-high stone walls and chain gun and cannon emplacements covering the narrow shoreline between Rogers Range and Leopold Bay made its eight hundred defenders perhaps the toughest nut in the world for an invading army to crack.

  And yet, it was Strongstead the enemy attacked. More surprisingly, the Udar seized the fortress in just one night. No one, including Dees and his intelligence apparatus, saw the fall of Strongstead coming. It was the largest, in fact the only, defeat of his military career.

  What was worse was that no one knew Strongstead had fallen. The fortress was in regular teletext communication by wire with the military garrison at Battleford, across the Tweade, but the Udar had cut the wire just before the attack and reconnected it just after its success. And after the repair of the wire, Strongstead continued communicating with the Battleford garrison as though nothing had gone wrong. Thus no report of enemy action reached civilization.

  The Udar had taken prisoner seven junior officers of the Strongstead garrison, including its teletext operator. Investigations were still being made as to why that operator, who happened to be one of the sons of the famous Thorne family of Alvedorne, had carried out that ruse. On the surface it appeared to be misbehavior before the enemy, if not outright treason, not to have issued a warning, and for this there had been awful consequences.

  A collection of Udar war parties operating out of Strongstead ran roughshod over the farms in Dunnan’s Claim to the fortress’ north and east, killing more than two thousand Ardenians and capturing nearly four hundred women they attempted to drag back to slavery in Uris Udar, before a heroic rescue had been successfully mounted by the few forces locally available.

  Dees might have been taken by surprise from the fall of Strongstead and the subsequent raids, but he hadn’t been without a plan when news broke of those events. He grabbed the opportunity to acquire Sebastian Cross and his airships, contracted with the Cross/Dutton and Thorne Technology Group laboratories for the production of improved engines and armaments, and contracted with another firm to set up a production line of next-generation military airships based on a prototype model they’d already designed and produced.

  Dees also put into use ten prototypes of a radical invention, a vehicle called a biplane that could reach unheard-of speeds and deliver bombs and chain gun fire to the enemy in devastating measure. An airfield north of Trenory was serving as a training ground for pilots and crew who had never operated any machines like them; the Special Air Force was doing everything it could to bend that learning curve upward.

  And Dees had turned loose the purse strings for the more ordinary weaponry, buying out the inventory of both the Trunxton Company and Thurman Rifle and placing a sizable order for their wares to meet the needs of what would soon be a greatly ramped-up army and marine corps. If that meant paying for two rifles per trooper, so be it. He wasn’t going to worry about budgets or the dysfunctional existing military procurement practices when there was a war to win.

  Especially since Dees had zero plan to take orders from the Peace Party government c
urrently in place. The president, Catherine Greene, was finishing the fourth year of an entirely ineffectual five-year term, and in the elections next year the Peacies were set to nominate Thomas Cole, the current governor of Belgarden Province, and a practitioner of corruption such as the Republic had never seen. Dees could see the political winds changing, and the war which had just begun would make them blow like a hurricane.

  He didn’t know what the coming power vacuum would produce. But Dees was pretty sure some new regime was soon to take power, and he had every intention of making sure that regime was receptive to his ideas and expertise in how to fight this war. The best way to do that was to get out in front of the problem and be the one doing something about it.

  So, disregarding the chain of command while the leadership of the Army and Marines were inexplicably slow to move, Dees was drawing on connections he’d made with the owners of rail lines to commandeer every locomotive from Principia and Port Excelsior and to use them to transport volunteers and war materiel to the theater around Dunnansport and Barley Point. He was doing the same thing in the west with weapons and materiel from Alvedorne and points north to the area around Trenory. He knew the Udar would attack all along the Tweade, and defending as much of it as possible with superior firepower in hopes of so bloodying the Udar that they’d lose their lust for battle was the best plan for keeping the loss of territory to a minimum in this first phase of the conflict. There had been some friction arising from OSW trampling on what were headquarters functions of the Army, but that military branch’s middle and upper ranks were replete with Dees’ proteges, and so what he said went.

  When Ardenia was fully mobilized, he knew they'd ultimately win this war. But that wasn’t enough for Dees. This long-standing conflict, off and on for the seventeen hundred years since the Udar had first come north to rape and pillage the scattered city-states comprising the early Ardenian confederacy, had gone on long enough. The weak Ardenian military doctrine that had allowed it to persist had been proven inoperable and obsolete; in fact, Dees had been among those who had proven it. It was time to break Uris Udar once and for all and bring permanent peace to the Great Continent.