by David Weber
On the other side of the coin, Gahrvai had already concentrated the majority of his eighty thousand–man force in the vicinity of Talbor Pass before coming farther east with his own advance guard. Another twenty-five thousand men were on their way to join him, and should be arriving within the next five-day or so. When they did, he would outnumber Cayleb’s entire invasion army by better than two-to-one, and Hektor had at least another thirty thousand men within a hundred miles or so of Gahrvai’s main position. Those numbers didn’t make for pleasant contemplation.
“I don’t like how carefully Gahrvai is thinking these things through,” Cayleb said more seriously, clasping his hands behind him and rocking gently up and down on the balls of his feet. “I’d be ever so much happier if someone like Windshare were in command over there!”
“It would be nice,” Merlin agreed almost wistfully.
In fact, he had an even better feel for Sir Koryn Gahrvai’s irritating competence than the emperor did, since it was Merlin’s SNARCs which had been keeping an eye on Hektor’s field commander for the past several months. He’d been focusing even more closely on that for the last few five-days, although his ability to monitor all of the sensors he had deployed here in Corisande (and elsewhere), even with Owl’s assistance, was being stretched to (and beyond) its limits. The fact that his hacked PICA’s software had disabled his high-speed data interface was becoming an increasingly significant handicap. He couldn’t really complain too much, given the fact that if Dr. Elias Proctor hadn’t hacked the software, it would have automatically shut Merlin down and dumped his entire memory after ten days of autonomous operation, but that didn’t prevent it from causing significant problems. He had to review the data at little more than “human speed,” and even the fact that he could go so long without “sleep” couldn’t put enough hours into even one of Safehold’s lengthy days to examine all of the reports and recordings he ought to be examining.
“You’re sure he’s going to come across that river and hit Clareyk and Haimyn?” Cayleb asked.
“As sure as I can be, before he actually does it. He’s already started moving the bulk of his planned striking force across it, after all.”
“Damn.” Cayleb said the word remarkably mildly, given his expression, and his eyes flashed. “Why the hell couldn’t he have just sat on the defensive and concentrated on digging in?”
“Because he is competent.”
“What I’d like to do is pull Clareyk and Haimyn back,” Cayleb said. “I know they’ve spent months training for exactly this, but they’ve got barely four thousand men between them, and odds of three- or four-to-one don’t strike me as the best ratio for their first serious battle.”
“And how would you justify pulling them back?” Merlin asked. Cayleb turned his head to shoot him a sharp glance, and the man who’d once been Nimue Alban shrugged. “It’s one thing when you’re there yourself, Cayleb. When you can use your ‘seaman’s instinct’ to explain why you’re ‘playing a hunch’ with the fleet. But all of Chermyn’s reconnaissance reports continue to indicate that there are only a few thousand of Hektor’s troops on this side of the Dark Hills. You and I know those reports are wrong—or, at least, not complete. But we can’t tell anyone that without their wondering just how it is that we do know. And Clareyk and Haimyn are doing precisely what all of your plans and discussions called for them to do until we encounter Hektor’s troops in strength.”
“I could still order them to stand fast until we get more troops up with them,” Cayleb argued.
“Yes, you could. But look at the terrain where they are right now. It’s all second-growth forest, wire vine, brambles, and woodlots. Our people’s main advantage is going to be the ranges at which they can engage, and that kind of ground cuts visibility to as little as ten or fifteen yards—even less than that, in places.”
Merlin considered mentioning an Old Earth general named Grant and a place called The Wilderness, but decided against introducing the distraction.
“At that range, a smoothbore’s just as effective as a rifle,” he continued, “and a third of the musketeers on the other side have been equipped with flintlocks of their own. Those musketeers are going to be able to fire almost as rapidly as ours can, and given the absolute numbers on each side, those proportions mean Gahrvai’s got as many flintlock muskets as we do, with twice that many matchlocks to support them. If we want to maximize our advantages, give our people the best chance for victory, then we need more open terrain. Which, as it happens, is exactly what Gahrvai is looking for, as well. Without knowing all our musketeers are actually riflemen, he’s deliberately seeking a battlefield which will give him clear enough lines of fire for him to use his advantage in artillery most effectively.”
“Which will just happen to do the same thing for our rifles,” Cayleb agreed. “I know that. It’s just the numbers on each side, Merlin. If I could at least warn them, tell them what’s coming, how many men Gahrvai has on the other side of the hill . . .”
“Cayleb,” Merlin said quietly, his sapphire eyes soft with sympathy, “once upon a time, back on Old Earth, there was a statesman named Winston Churchill. He was the leader of a nation very much like yours, in a lot of ways, actually. An island nation, which had relied upon its own navy and naval tradition to protect its freedom for hundreds of years. But when Churchill became prime minister, that nation—Great Britain—was fighting for its life against something that was just as evil as, and even more vicious than, the Church of God Awaiting is today here on Safehold.”
The emperor had stopped rocking up and down. He stood very still now, listening intently as the voice of the PICA named Merlin gave life once more to a past so dusty no living man on Safehold had ever even heard of it.
“Great Britain was at least as alone as Charis ever was, but, like you, the British had certain advantages. One was that they were intercepting their enemy’s communications. Those messages were being transmitted in a very advanced and complicated code, one which their enemies—the Nazis—believed was unbreakable. But the British had broken the code. As a result, they knew a great deal about what the Nazis were going to do before it ever happened. And one of the things they discovered was that one of their cities, the city of Coventry, was going to be heavily attacked by bombers.”
“ ‘Bombers’?” Cayleb repeated, tasting the peculiar word on his tongue.
“Machines that flew through the air at a couple of hundred miles an hour loaded with bombs, like very big, very powerful versions of the ‘shells’ Seamount is experimenting with. They were dropped from high up in the air, and they weren’t very accurate at the time I’m talking about. The Nazis couldn’t hope to hit specific targets or military installations, but they were going to send over hundreds of bombers. What they planned was a deliberate attack on a civilian target—it was called ‘terror bombing’—and all of the prewar projections had indicated that an attack like the one they were planning would kill thousands and thousands of people, most of them civilians.”
It was very quiet in Baron Dairwyn’s library.
“The bombers were going to be attacking at night, under cover of darkness, to prevent the defending aircraft from spotting them and shooting them down short of their target. Navigating would be a problem, but they’d come up with a way to solve it for this particular attack. So there wasn’t anything the British could do to stop it. It was going to happen.
“Under those circumstances, the question became whether or not the citizens of Coventry should be warned. Should Churchill order the evacuation of the city? Or should he simply see to it that the city authorities knew at least a few hours before the attack that it was coming so they could get their people—those civilians, including women and children—into the strongest, best protected bomb shelters they had?”
“What did he do?” Cayleb asked when Merlin paused.
“He didn’t tell them at all,” Merlin said softly. Cayleb’s eyes widened, and Merlin shook his head. “He couldn’t tell t
hem. If he’d warned them, if he’d tried to evacuate the city or to bolster its defenses before the attack, people would have wondered how he’d known. Questions would have been asked, and there were some very bright people working for the Nazis, as well as for the British. Rather as we’re discovering is the case with Gahrvai, working for Hektor. If the Nazis had realized Churchill must have known in advance, they might have begun to wonder about the security of their codes. Were they as impossible to intercept and break as they’d thought they were?
“It was always possible, perhaps even probable, that they’d decide the British had figured it out some other way, through some sort of spy, perhaps. But they might not have. They might have wondered. And all they would have needed to do to nullify the intelligence advantage which had become one of Britain’s most vital weapons would have been to change their cipher system ‘just in case.’ Churchill decided he couldn’t take that chance, and so he said nothing to Coventry, and the bombers flew over it, and they did enormous damage. Not as bad as the prewar pundits had predicted, but terrible enough.”
“And you’re saying that if I warn Clareyk about what’s coming, people may begin to wonder how I knew?”
“I’m saying that if you warn your field commanders too often, people will begin to wonder.” Merlin shook his head. “There’s not a lot any of your enemies could do to prevent my SNARCs from spying on them even if they knew all about them. In that respect, your situation is very different from Churchill’s. But if the fact that I have ‘visions’ which guide your decisions gets out, you know what the Group of Four is going to say. You don’t need—you can’t afford—to give them a pretext for charging you with trafficking with demons. It’s entirely possible charges of that sort are going to be levied against you before this is all over, anyway. But if they charge that I’m a demon, it will create all manner of problems. Not least because we can’t possibly prove I’m not. For that matter, according to the doctrine of the Church of God Awaiting, I am one.”
Cayleb looked at him in silence for several seconds, then drew a deep breath.
“All right,” he said. “You’re right. For that matter, I already knew everything you’ve just said. Not the part about ‘Churchill’ or ‘bombers,’ but the rest of it. It’s just so hard, Merlin. I know men are going to be killed no matter what I do or how well I do it. However much I may not like that, I haven’t had any choice but to accept it. But if I can keep any of them from being killed or maimed, I need to do it.”
“In the long term, that’s exactly what you are doing, Cayleb. It’s just that you’re going to have to be very careful, very selective, about when and how you do it. And what you can do with it in a strategic sense, when it comes to planning and projecting operations, or what you can do by feeding ‘classified intelligence sources’ to someone like Nahrmahn and letting him make the recommendations I can’t make openly, is one thing. Using that same information for something like this is something else entirely.”
Cayleb nodded unhappily. Then he looked back down at the table, eyes distant while he obviously imagined the men represented by the tokens on the map. He stayed that way for several seconds, then straightened his shoulders and looked back up at Merlin.
“What about this?” he asked. “Suppose I send a message forward to Clareyk, who’s already worked with you and me both and probably knows a lot more about your ‘visions’ than he’s ever let on? I won’t tell him what Gahrvai and his commanders are discussing, or what they had for dinner. I’ll just tell him I have a ‘feeling’ our reconnaissance reports have been less than complete. That shouldn’t be particularly surprising, when we’ve got so little cavalry and everyone knows the horses we do have are still trying to regain their land legs. I won’t pull him back, since there’s no concrete evidence to support my ‘feeling.’ Instead, I’ll simply instruct him to be particularly alert in the next couple of days and to operate on the assumption that the enemy may be much closer to him, and in considerably more strength, than our scouts’ reports so far have indicated.”
Merlin considered it for a moment, then nodded.
“I think that’s unlikely to create any problems,” he said. “Especially not if you don’t include any specific numbers. ‘In considerably more strength’ is a good, cautionary phrase which shouldn’t suggest any definite knowledge we shouldn’t have. And I don’t suppose it will hurt a bit for the troops to decide that that ‘seaman’s instinct’ of yours translates into land battles, as well.”
“I’d still prefer to pull them back,” Cayleb said, looking back at the map. “Even if Clareyk and Haimyn take any warnings from me fully to heart, it won’t change the numbers against them. And even if you see Gahrvai doing something else—throwing out a cavalry force to cut their line of retreat, for example—there won’t be anything we can do about it. We probably couldn’t get word to them quickly enough for it to do any good even if we didn’t have to worry about people’s wondering how we’d ‘guessed’ what was coming.”
“That’s going to become something we have to live with more and more often, I’m afraid,” Merlin said. “And to be perfectly honest, the times when we can use my ‘visions’ are only going to make the times when we can’t use them hurt even more. But like everything else, there are limits to this, as well. We’re simply going to have to accept them.”
“I know.” Cayleb smiled crookedly. “I suppose it’s just human nature to always want more. You’re already the greatest unfair advantage any commander’s ever had. I suppose it’s churlish of me to want an even bigger unfair advantage, but there it is. I guess I’m just naturally greedy.”
“There was a saying back on Old Earth,” Merlin told him. “I don’t approve of it for many things in life, but I think it’s applicable to military operations.”
“What sort of saying?”
“ ‘If you’re not cheating, you aren’t trying hard enough,’ ” Merlin said. Cayleb’s mouth twitched and the somberness in his eyes was lightened by a flicker of amusement, and Merlin shook his head. “Your father understood that the object in a war wasn’t to see who could ‘fight fairest.’ Mind you, he was one of the most honorable men I ever knew, but he recognized that a commander’s greatest responsibility is to his own troops. To keep as many of them alive as possible, and to do his very best to ensure that those who die anyway die for a purpose. That their deaths aren’t wasted. And that means not asking them to take stupid chances in the name of ‘honor.’ It means figuring out the best way you can shoot their enemies in the back. It means taking every advantage you can find, buy, steal, or invent and using it to keep your people alive and, as another person from Churchill’s war put it, make the other poor dumb son-of-a-bitch die for his country.”
“That isn’t a very chivalrous concept of war,” Cayleb observed.
“I’m not a very chivalrous sort, in that respect, at least,” Merlin replied. “And neither is any king—or emperor—worthy of his people’s loyalty.”
“Then I suppose it’s a good thing I’m a naturally sneaky sort of fellow. I mean, I’d hate to disappoint you or make you go looking for someone else who’s sufficiently underhanded, devious, cunning, and unscrupulous to suit your nefarious purposes.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t worry about that,” Merlin said with a broad smile. “Given your little explanation about what you have in store for Grand Duke Zebediah, I really don’t think I could find anyone who was more underhanded, devious, cunning, and unscrupulous than you are.”
“Gosh, thanks.” Cayleb grinned, then gave himself a shake. “And now that we’ve got that settled, let’s get a signalman in here to get my ‘I’ve got a bad feeling’ message off to Clareyk.”
. IX .
Near Haryl’s Crossing,
Barony of Dairwyn,
League of Corisande
Brigadier Kynt Clareyk contemplated the dispatch in his hand, then looked down at the map spread out before him. Despite the Archangel Hastings’ world-spanning atlas, the map in front
of Clareyk was far less detailed than he could have preferred. Mostly that was simply a matter of the scale at which he was operating, but the fact that the Archangel’s original maps were eight hundred years out of date, and that mere mortals had been responsible for updating them in the meantime, didn’t help. In fact, it didn’t help a bit.
His own limited handful of cavalry, his scout-sniper teams, and his attached engineering section had added a good bit of cartographic detail, but, unfortunately, mostly it was detail about places they’d already been.
“What do you make of it, Kynt?” Mahrys Haimyn asked quietly.
“ ‘Make of it’?” Clareyk repeated, glancing up at his fellow brigadier. Haimyn looked at him for a moment, then smiled slightly.
“Don’t give me that innocent look,” he said. “You and I both know you spent the better part of a year working directly with His Majesty and Seijin Merlin. Did you really think I wouldn’t figure out that His Majesty’s little note says more to you than just the words he actually wrote down?”
“I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about.” Clareyk’s innocent tone wasn’t very convincing. Then again, he hadn’t intended for it to be.
“Of course not. Now, to repeat my earlier question. What do you make of it?”
“I think,” Clareyk said, speaking slowly, his expression far more serious than it had been, “that we’re about to walk into a shit storm.”