Use of Weapons

by Iain M. Banks

  He flew to the spaceport, where the lumbering spaceship - it looked even more dangerous and dilapidated in daylight - was being slowly patched up and repaired in case it was ever wanted again. He talked to the technicians, took a look round the ancient device. The ship had a name, he discovered; the Hegemonarchy Victorious.

  'It's called decapitation,' he told the priests. 'The Imperial Court travels to Willitice Lake at the start of every Second Season; the high command comes to brief them. We drop the Victorious in on them, the day the general staff arrive.'

  The priests looked puzzled. 'With what, Sir Zakalwe? A commando force? The Victorious is only able to hold...'

  'No no,' he said. 'When I say drop it, I mean we bomb them with it. We put it into space and then bring it back in, down on top of the Lake Palace. It's a good four hundred tonnes; even travelling at only ten times the speed of sound it'll hit like a small nuke going off; we'll get the entire Court and the general staff in one go. We offer peace to the commoners' parliament immediately. With any luck at all we cause immense civil disturbance; probably the commoners' parliament will see this as their chance to grab real power; the army will want to take up the reigns itself, and may even have to turn round and fight a civil war. Junior aristos filing competing claims should complicate the situation nicely.'

  'But,' Napoerea said, 'this means destroying the Victorious, does it not?' The other priests were shaking their heads.

  'Well, impacting at four or five kilometres a second wouldn't leave it totally undented, I suspect.'

  'But Zakalwe!' Napoerea roared, doing a reasonable impression of a small nuclear explosion himself, 'That's absurd! You can't do it! The Vktorious is a symbol of... it's our hope! All the people look at our...'

  He smiled, letting the priest ramble on for a little while. He was fairly certain the priests looked on the Hegemonarchy Victorious as their escape route if things went badly in the end.

  He waited until Napoerea had almost finished, then said, 'I understand; but the craft is on its last legs already, gentlemen. I've talked to the technicians and the pilots; it's a death-trap. It was more luck than anything else that it got me here safely.' He paused, watching the men with the blue circles on their foreheads look wide-eyed at each other. The muttering increased. He wanted to smile. That had put the fear of god into them. 'I'm sorry, but this is the one thing the Victorious is good for.' He smiled. 'And it could indeed produce Victory.'

  He left them to mull over the concepts of high-hypersonic dive-bombing (no, no suicide mission required; the craft's computers were perfectly capable of taking it up and bringing it straight down), symbol-trashing (a lot the peasants and factory workers would care about their piece of high-tech baublery getting junked), and Decapitation (probably the most worrying idea of the lot for the high-priests; what if the Empire thought of doing it to them?) He assured them the Empire would be in no state to retaliate; and when they offered peace, the priests would hint heavily they had used a missile of their own, not the spacecraft, and pretend there were more where that came from. Even though this would not be difficult to disprove, especially if one of the world's more sophisticated societies chose to tell the Empire what had really happened, it would still be worrying for whoever was trying to work out what to do on the other side. Besides, they could always just get out of the city). Meanwhile he went to visit more army units.

  The Imperial Army started its advance again, though slower than before. He had drawn his troops back almost to the foothills of the mountains, burning the few unharvested fields and razing the towns behind them. Whenever they abandoned an airfield they planted bombs under the runways with days-long time delays, and dug plenty of other holes that looked like they might contain bombs.

  In the foothills he supervised much of the lay-out of their defensive lines himself, and kept up his visits to airfields, regional headquarters and operational units. He kept up, too, the pressure on the high priests at least to consider using the spacecraft for a decapitation strike.

  He was busy, he realised one day, as he lay down to sleep in an old castle that had become operational HQ for this section of the front (the sky had bloomed with light on the tree-lined horizon, and the air shaken with the sound of a bombardment, just after dusk). Busy and - he had to admit, as he put the last reports on the floor under the camp bed, and put the light out and was almost instantly asleep - happy.

  Two weeks, three weeks from his arrival; the little news that came in from outside seemed to indicate there was an awful lot of nothing going on. He suspected there was a lot of intense politicking taking place. Beychae's name was mentioned; he was still on the Murssay Station, in touch with the various parties. No word of the Culture, or from it. He wondered if they ever just forgot things; maybe they'd forget about him, leave him here, struggling forever in the priests' and the Empire's insane war.

  The defences grew; the Hegemonarchy's soldiers dug and built, but were mostly not under fire, and the Imperial Army gradually lapped against the foothills and paused. He had the Air Force harry the supply lines and the front line units, and pound the nearest airfields.

  'There are far too many troops stationed here, round the city. The best troops should be at the front. The attack will come soon, and if we're to counter-attack successfully - and it could be very successfully, if they're tempted to go for a knockout; they've little left in reserve - then we need those elite squads where they can do some good.'

  'There is the problem of civil unrest,' Napoerea said. He looked old and tired.

  'Keep a few units here, and keep them in the streets, so people don't forget they're here, but dammit, Napoerea, most of these guys spend all their time in barracks. They're needed at the front. I have just the place for them, look...'

  Actually he wanted to tempt the Imperial Army to go for the knock-out, and the city was to be the bait. He sent the crack troops into the mountain passes. The priests looked at how much territory they'd now lost, and tentatively gave the go-ahead for preparing for decapitation; the Hegemonarchy Victorious would be readied for its final flight, though not used unless the situation appeared genuinely desperate. He promised he would try to win the war conventionally first.

  The attack came; forty days after he had arrived on Murssay, the Imperial Army crashed into the foothill forests. The priests began to panic. He had the Air Force attack the supply lines the majority of the time, not the front. The defensive lines gradually gave way; units retreated, bridges were blown. Gradually, as the foothills led into the mountains, the Imperial Army was concentrated, funnelled into the valleys. The trick with the dam didn't work this time; the charges placed under it just didn't go off. He had to move fast to shift two elite units to cover the pass above that valley.

  'But if we leave the city?' The priests looked stunned. Their eyes looked as empty as the painted blue circle on their foreheads. The Imperial Army was slowly moving up the valleys, forcing their soldiers back. He kept telling them things would be all right, but things just got worse and worse. There was nothing else for them to do; it all seemed too hopeless, and too late to take things back into their own hands. Last night, with

  the wind blowing down from the mountains to the city, the sound of distant artillery had been audible.

  'They'll try to take Balzeit City if they think they can,' he said. 'It's a symbol. Well fine, but it doesn't actually have much military importance. They'll grab at it. We let just so many through, then we close the passes; here,' he said, tapping the map. The priests shook their heads.

  'Gents, we are not in disarray! We are falling back. But they are in much worse shape than we are, taking far heavier casualties; each metre is costing them blood. And, all the time, their supply lines get longer. We must take them to the point where they start to think about pulling back, then present them with the possibility - the seeming possibility - of a knock-out blow. But it won't knock us out; it knocks them out.' He looked round them. 'Believe me; it'll work. You may have to leave the citadel
for a while, but when you return, I guarantee it will be in triumph.'

  They did not look convinced, but - possibly because they were just too stunned to fight - they let him have his way.

  It took a few days, while the Imperial Army struggled up the valleys, and the Hegemonarchy's forces resisted, retreated, resisted, retreated, but eventually - watching for signs that the Imperial soldiers were tiring, and the tanks and trucks not always moving when they might have wanted to, starved of fuel - he decided that were he on the other side, he'd be thinking about halting the advance. That night, in the pass which led down to the city, most of the Hegemonarchy troops left their positions. In the morning the battle resumed, and the Hegemonarchy's men suddenly retreated, shortly before they would have been over-run. A puzzled, excited but still exhausted and worried General in the Imperial High Command watched through field glasses as a distant convoy of trucks crawled away down the pass towards the city, occasionally strafed by Imperial aircraft. Reconnaissance suggested the infidel priests were making preparations to leave their citadel. Spies indicated that their spacecraft was being readied for some special mission.

  The General radioed the Court High Command. The order to advance on the city was given the following day.

  He watched the terminally worried-looking priests leave from the train station under the citadel. In the end he had to dissuade them from ordering the decapitation attack. Let me try this first, he'd told them.

  They could not understand each other.

  The priests looked at the territory they had lost, and the fraction they had left, and thought it was all over for them. He looked at his relatively unscathed divisions, his fresh units, his crack squads, all positioned just where they should be, knives laid against and inside the body of an over-extended, worn-out enemy, just ready to cut... and thought it was all over for the Empire.

  The train pulled out, and - unable to resist - he waved cheerily. The high priests would be better out of the way, in one of their great monasteries in the next mountain range. He ran back upstairs to the map room, to see how things were going.

  He waited until a couple of divisions had made it through the pass, then had the units that had held it - and mostly retreated into the forests around the pass, not gone down the pass at all - take it again. The city and the citadel were bombed, though not well; the Hegemonarchy's fighters shot most of the bombers down. The counter-attack finally began. He started with the elite troops, then brought in the rest. The Air Force still concentrated on the supply lines for the first couple of days, then switched to the front line. The Imperial Army wavered, line crinkling; it seemed to hesitate like some wash of water almost but not quite capable of overspilling the damming line of mountains save in one place (and that trickle was drying, still pushing for the city, leaving the pass, fighting through the forests and fields for the shining goal they still hoped might win the war...), then the line fell back; the soldiers too exhausted, their supplies of ammunition and fuel too sporadic.

  The passes stayed with the Hegemonarchy, and slowly they pushed down from them again, so that it must have seemed to the Imperial soldiers that they were forever shooting up-hill, and that while advancing had been a heavy, dangerous slog, retreating was only too easy.

  The retreat became a rout in valley after valley. He insisted on keeping the counter-attack going; the priests cabled that more forces ought to be deployed to stop the advance of the two Imperial divisions on the capital. He ignored them. There was barely enough left of the two tattered divisions to make one whole one, and they were being gradually eroded further all the time. It was possible they might make it to the city, but after that they would have nowhere to go. He thought it might be satisfying to accept their eventual surrender personally.

  The rains came on the far side of the mountains, and as the bedraggled Imperial forces made their way through the dripping forests, their Air Force was all too often grounded by bad weather, while the Hegemonarchy's planes bombed and strafed then with impunity.

  People fled to the city; artillery duels thundered nearby. The remnants of the two divisions that had broken through the mountains fought desperately on towards their goal. On the distant plains on the far side of the mountains, the rest of the Imperial Army was retreating as fast as it could. The divisions trapped in Shenastri Province, unable to retreat through the quagmire behind them, surrendered en masse.

  The Imperial Court signalled its desire for peace the day what was left of its two divisions entered Balzeit City. They had a dozen tanks and a thousand men, but they left their artillery in the fields, bereft of ammunition. The few thousand people left in the city sought refuge in the wide parade grounds of the citadel. He watched them stream in through the gates in the high walls, far in the distance.

  He'd been going to quit the citadel that day - the priests had been screaming at him to do so for days, and most of the general staff had already left - but now he held the transcript of the message they'd just received from the Imperial Court.

  Two Hegemonarchy divisions were, anyway, on their way out of the mountains, coming to the aid of the city.

  He radioed the priests. They decided to accept a truce; fighting would stop immediately, if the Imperial Army withdrew to the positions it had held before the war. There were a few more radio exchanges; he left the priests and the Imperial Court to sort it all out. He took off his uniform and for the first time since he'd arrived, dressed as a civilian. He went to a high tower with some field glasses, and watched the tiny specks that were enemy tanks as they rolled down a street, far away. The citadel gates were closed.

  A truce was declared at midday. The weary Imperial soldiers outside the citadel gates billeted themselves in the bars and hotels nearby.

  He stood in the long gallery and faced into the light. The tall white curtains billowed softly around him, quiet in the warm breeze. His long black hair was lifted only slightly by the gentle wind. His hands were clasped behind his back. He looked pensive. The silent, lightly clouded skies over the mountains, beyond the fortress and the city, threw a blank, pervasive light across his face, and standing there like that, in plain dark clothes, he looked insubstantial, like some statue, or a dead man propped against the battlements to fool the foe.

  'Zakalwe?'

  He turned. His eyes widened in surprise. 'Skaffen-Amtiskaw! This is an unexpected honour. Sma letting you out alone these days, or is she about too?' He looked the length of the citadel's long gallery.

  'Good day, Cheradenine,' the drone said, floating towards him. 'Ms Sma is on her way, in a module.'

  'And how is Dizzy?' He sat down on a small bench set against the wall which faced the long line of white-curtained windows. 'What's the news?'

  'I believe it is mostly good,' Skaffen-Amtiskaw said, floating level with his face. 'Mr Beychae is on his way to the Impren Habitats, where a summit conference between the Cluster's two main tendencies is to be held. It would appear the danger of war is lessening.'

  'Well, isn't this all very wonderful,' he said, sitting back with his hands behind his neck. 'Peace here; peace out there.' He squinted at the drone, his head to one side. 'And yet, drone, somehow you do not seem to be overflowing with joy and happiness. You seem - dare I say it? - positively sombre. What's the matter? Batteries low?'

  The machine was silent for a second or two. Then it said, 'I believe Ms Sma's module is about to land; shall we go to the roof?'

  He looked puzzled for a moment, then nodded, stooa smartly and clapped his hands once, indicating the way forward. 'Certainly; let's go.'

  They went to his apartments. He thought Sma seemed rather subdued, too. He'd imagined she'd be bubbling over with excitement because the Cluster looked like it wasn't going to go to war after all.

  'What's the problem, Dizzy?' he asked, pouring her a drink. She was pacing up and down in front of the room's shuttered windows. She took the drink from him, but didn't seem interested in it. She turned to face him, her long, oval face looking... he wasn'
t sure. But there was a cold feeling somewhere in his guts.

  'You have to leave, Cheradenine,' she told him.

  'Leave? When?'

  'Now; tonight. Tomorrow morning at the latest.'

  He looked confused, then laughed. 'Okay; I confess; the catamites were starting to look attractive, but...'

  'No,' Sma said. 'I'm serious, Cheradenine. You have to go.'

  He shook his head. 'I can't. There's no guarantee the truce will hold. They might need me.'

  'The truce isn't going to hold,' Sma told him, looking away. 'Not on one side, anyway.' She put her glass down on a shelf.

  'Eh?' he said. He glanced at the drone, which was looking non-committal. 'Diziet, what are you talking about?'

  'Zakalwe,' she said, eyes blinking rapidly; she tried to look at him, 'A deal's been done; you have to leave.'

  He stared at her.

  'What's the deal, Dizzy?' he said softly.

  'There was some... fairly low-level help being given to the Empire by the Humanist faction,' she told him, walking towards one wall, then returning, talking not to him but to the tile and carpet floor. 'They had... face invested in what's been happening here. The whole delicate structure of the deal did rather depend on the Empire triumphing here.' She stopped, glanced at the drone, looking away again. 'Which is what everybody agreed was going to happen, up until a few days ago.'

  'So,' he said slowly, putting aside his own drink, sitting down in a great chair that looked like a throne. 'I messed things up by turning the game against the Empire, did I?'

  'Yes,' Sma said, swallowing. 'Yes, you did. I'm sorry. And I know it's crazy, but that's the way things are here, the way the people are here; the Humanists are divided at the moment, and there are factions within them that would use any excuse to argue for getting out of the deal, however insignificant that excuse might be. They might just be able to pull the whole thing down. We can't take that risk. The Empire has to win.'