by Phil Geusz
They were also correct, however. The Yans were terrible at chess and only slightly better at higher-level board games. Their true genius lay in their ability to understand and exploit human blindnesses, foibles and frailties. It was damnably difficult, however, to cheat at the higher forms of gaming. They might or might not make good naval officers; the jury was still very much out on that one. For the purposes at hand, however, they were superlative card sharks and nothing more. I sighed and turned back to Heinrich.
“I don’t know,” he muttered. “I just don’t know.”
I shook my head, unsure of what to do next. Inspire the team! was the obvious solution. Be a leader! But, like most obvious answers, this one was a lot easier stated than accomplished. And worst of all, the code books still hadn’t disappeared! What was that damned spy waiting for, anyway? Did I have to mount flashing lights on the worthless things?
“Tomorrow’s going to be so bad,” Heinrich moaned. He looked half dead, with dark circles under his eyes from having stayed up all night to try and coach me in linear tactics.
“Maybe,” I agreed, making my decision at long last. “Or maybe not. But one thing’s for certain.”
“What’s that?” Chang demanded.
“We’re all worn out and exhausted,” I replied. “It’s only eight o’clock, but I propose that we hit the sack early and get some extra sleep. I’ll even excuse you two from sentry duty tonight,” I added, nodding towards the Yans. “We’ve got one hell of a challenge ahead of us, and important decisions to make. We’ll do a better job making them on a good night’s sleep.” I met Heinrich’s eyes again. “They may’ve kicked us around today. But we’ll whip ‘em tomorrow, sure enough!”
35
Sure enough, we did feel better in the morning. Which in retrospect was probably inevitable, given how miserable we all were at lights-out. Once again we made a meal of either vending-machine sandwiches or slave hay, and as always hunger proved to be the best sauce. I formed up my troops for inspection, and was pleased to see that all was one-hundred-percent in order the first time around. “Gentlemen,” I addressed my fellow cadets. “Let’s go kick some Imperial ass!”
In truth, I wasn’t feeling nearly that cocky as we stepped into the elevator and began our short trip down to the field of battle. The sheer impossibility of defeating so many members of the ultimate cream of Imperial society was beginning to sink home in my soul. Professor Lambert had lectured us several times about how in militaristic societies young people sought to become officers with as much passion as our own youth pursued careers in high finance, the law, and the corporate world. Broadly speaking, their elite perfected the arts of battleship gunnery and coordinated invasion from high orbit while ours developed new ways to get rich trading complex financial derivatives. Almost certainly the young men my little team was arrayed against were the very best the Empire had to offer by any standard one cared to name. Test scores, breeding, intellect, health… they had it all. In our society, by contrast, over half of our cadets had to be drafted via a mandatory-service law that was universally hated and evaded whenever possible. Sure, we had some volunteers—the Yans and I were among them. And James would certainly be counted among the cream of any society. But as for the rest of us… Heinrich was the biggest screw-up on campus. No one hated the military more than he did. The Yans were conniving social climbers, albeit amazingly good at it. And me? I was an ex-slave, not even human! So what in the world’s business did I have, trying to compete in the same league with the Empire’s best and brightest? None, they would reply. And after my drubbing yesterday, I was beginning to agree with them.
Then the elevator doors slid open and we four remaining gamers stood facing the oversized Imperial team. Their eyes were cold and hard, and a nasty sneer was just beginning to manifest itself on their features as the scent of victory grew stronger in their nostrils. I hated these malformed, emotionally-twisted prigs, I decided, hated them with all of my heart and soul. And I’d have hated them even if they hadn’t killed my father and Milord and invaded my homeworld. Because some things deserved hating in and of themselves, through the fact of their mere existence. Professor Lambert claimed that hatred was a weakness in a strategist; cool heads made the best decisions. And I knew that he was right. But I supposed that I’d have to somehow muddle through regardless, because I couldn’t not hate the Imperials and still have any love or respect for myself. The Commandant of the Academy had told us that this trip would be a wonderful learning opportunity for us cadets; well, I’d learned something all right. And that was to waste no more energy on pity in dealing with the likes of these.
“All right,” I declared, stepping out and leading my cadets through the sea of hostile uniforms. “I’ve had about enough of this crowd. It ends today.”
I put off making my most important decision until the very last minute. While chess was Heinrich’s forte, the physicist’s son wasn’t bad at all with submarines and fighter planes. But last night he’d been shaken like I’d never seen him before. If his confidence was broken… Well, in that case I’d be better off going with Yan Chang, who at least would have a good excuse for losing and thus wouldn’t suffer a crushed ego if the worst happened. Someday Heinrich was liable to have to fight a desperate action against the Imperials, and I was damned if I was going to put him in that position with his spirit already crushed by three previous defeats. In the end, however, it wasn’t necessary to bench him after all. “Please, David!” he begged me as I sat in the team captain’s seat and thought things through. “Give me another chance! I want a piece of these bastards so bad!”
It was the last sentence, coming from the normally suave and professorial cadet-private, that decided me. “You’re in,” I declared.
The Yans seemed pleased with the decision. They’d been cold and distant and perhaps even a bit nervous about something since going AWOL. But now their eyes were full of fire. “Slaughter them!” Chang declared, while Ho nodded and clenched his fists.
I was led to the table first, as befitted my cadet-rank. Rather to my surprise, my old friend Jason was standing across from me waiting to shake hands. Given the size of the Imperial team, it was amazing that he’d been allowed to compete twice. I put on my best smile. “I kept the picture you gave me. It wasn’t bad work, for a virgin.” He smiled and bowed slightly in reply, keeping his temper in perfect check. “So,” I added. “I’ve never caught your last name, Jason. One of your ribbons dangles over the tag.”
He smiled wider. “Tallsdale,” he replied. “I’m Jason Aaron Tallsdale.”
“Thank you,” I answered, sitting down and pretending not to recognize the Emperor’s own surname. Now I understood why he was playing in multiple matches! “I like to keep track of these things.”
“Gentlemen,” the Geneva Station gaming official declared, cutting off further conversation. “Today’s challenge is to win the war in the Mediterranean, Summer 1941.”
I smiled even as I lost the toss and was forced to accept the Axis side; the Second World War was my special favorite area of military history, and of all its aspects I loved air-sea problems the most. If the Mediterranean of World War II was anything, it was an air-sea problem. While I felt more at home commanding Japanese or American naval units than Italian, the principles were fundamentally the same.
We were allowed unlimited setup time, which was a good thing given the complexity and unit-density of the map. While the North African and Greek theaters were represented only by naval and air bases that would change hands at pre-determined times, there were land units in play at Malta, Crete, Sardinia, Pantellaria, Gibraltar, and a series of small Aegean islands. The forces were well balanced. My Italian fleet was distinctly inferior, especially in night-fighting. However, that was in part compensated for by my central position, which made it far easier for me to concentrate my forces. And in the air I was certainly the stronger. Victory conditions were as complex as the theater of war itself—one could earn points via any combination o
f destroying enemy units, taking bases, or running successful supply convoys to North Africa (for me) or Malta (for him). At first it would appear that in scoring terms the entire game was slanted slightly in my favor, but this wasn’t so. The British convoys to Malta were worth three times as many victory points as an equivalent Italian run to North Africa. His warships were also individually worth less than mine, so that it was virtually impossible for me to “win” a purely naval battle even if I did more damage than he. And, just to make things more complex still, the board was blind. This meant that you couldn’t tell what the enemy was doing unless you “saw” him with a search unit. Only the base’s values were relatively even, with Malta worth the same as Crete and Pantellaria nearly as valuable as the top prize, Gibraltar. This was a bunch of nonsense in historical terms, of course; square foot for square foot Gibraltar was easily the most militarily-significant real-estate on Earth during that era; the equivalence in points was merely an attempt to balance the game. Pantellaria in real life wasn’t a tenth as valuable as The Rock. Not that it really mattered anyway, I supposed; in 1941 the Allies couldn’t even dream of taking heavily-fortified Pantellaria. And as for Gibraltar, without Spanish help—which wasn’t allowed for in the game—well… that was a pipedream as well. Though of course in real life the Allies had to fortify it regardless—they couldn’t count on a portion of their playing-area being colored in “no-entry gray” after all. Gibraltar, in fact, had been as heavily defended as the American Corregidor, the Belgian Eben-Emael, and the British Singapore. It was completely immune to attack.
Then I blinked, leaned forward, and examined the western part of my map more closely. For, I suddenly realized, every last one of the other “impregnable” places I’d mentally listed had fallen and fallen hard to Axis forces during the early years of the war, despite being referred to as “Gibraltars” in their own right. And each totally-unforeseen collapse had resulted in a massive strategic defeat for those who’d lacked the imagination to see it coming.
So… Why shouldn’t the original fall as well? And my oh my! Wouldn’t that surprise the heck out the Emperor’s seventh cousin, or whatever the heck my opponent was?
36
Professor Lambert was fond of saying that a good strategy usually felt right, because as it was executed unexpected symmetries and benefits tended to develop and reveal themselves. This wasn’t mere serendipity, but rather solid evidence that your enemy genuinely hadn’t a clue what was up your sleeve.
If the professor was correct, then I was on the right track no more than four or five turns into the game. By then absolutely everything was working together and going my way on more fronts than I’d ever anticipated. Jason Tallsdale might’ve beaten me soundly yesterday, but he’d revealed no great talent in doing so. That was partly my fault; when fighting against an incompetent, one need merely stand back and let them ruin themselves. In the first turns of our new encounter, however, Jason showed me absolutely nothing original. He hit my naval bases with precision carrier strikes, sent convoys to pull as many troops as possible out of the collapsing Greek theater, and began a buildup on Crete. Just exactly what the real-life British did, in other words. Meanwhile I did my best to give the impression of a timid, defensive-minded gamer who had no confidence in what his units could do. Since this had been the actual truth yesterday, it wasn’t so hard to manage. I shuttled tentative little convoys back and forth to North Africa while hoarding my capital ships in port under the densest fighter cover possible, meanwhile attempting to interdict Allied supply runs with weak Italian submarine units and my few potent U-boats. I slammed Malta a few times with maximum-effort air raids, then let my ears droop at the ‘heavy’ losses my Luftwaffe and Regia Aeronautica squadrons took. If Jason had looked carefully, he’d have seen that I hadn’t chosen to risk the long-range stuff. While losing so many Stukas and Me-109’s and assorted Fiats wasn’t a lot of fun, they couldn’t do beans to help me at Gibraltar anyway. And the continual action kept Malta beaten down enough that it lost a lot of its usefulness as a raiding and reconnaissance hub.
That was the nub of my entire strategy, really. Jason couldn’t destroy what he couldn’t see, and he wouldn’t see anything where he didn’t (or couldn’t) look. I needed a series of storms or heavy cloud formations to really gum up the visibility in the Western Med, where Jason probably wasn’t really looking for me all that hard anyhow. Once I was partway there he could only effectively oppose me with half his fleet, and the airstrip on The Rock was limited to a handful of aircraft due to a lack of level ground for support facilities. But until then the delicate mishmash of infantry-laden merchantmen would be terribly vulnerable to the marauding Royal Navy, especially at night. Moving so far by sea was an awful risk for the Italians; I’d only get just the one chance.
So I did everything I could to make it look like I was playing straight out of the book as well, except even more timidly than the actual Italians had. I send a few fast raiding forces against the Greek convoys, and even managed to shoot one up rather thoroughly before my elderly and expendable cruisers were all sent to the bottom. I moved my U-boats about extra-frequently, so as to ensure lots of daylight sightings of them in the Eastern Med, and detailed my long-range bombers to make extra searches there so that my opponent wouldn’t wonder where they were and what they were up to. Only once did I stir things up in the west—I sent a submarine-launched underwater demolition team into Gib’s harbor to blow up whatever it found, and to my delight knocked the ultra-valuable aircraft carrier Ark Royal and a light cruiser out of the war for six vital months. It looked more like a diversion that’d gotten lucky rather than part of my core plan, and the lucky part was true enough. Ark Royal was the most powerful carrier in the theater, and I had nothing whatsoever to counter her with. For the first time, I began to scent victory on the air.
Finally the weather did indeed turn stormy in the Western Med. In a flash I relocated all my long-range air assets to Sardinia and ordered my ragtag convoy on its way. With it I sent virtually the entire Italian Navy as an escort, holding back only a few ancient destroyers to show themselves escorting a group of high-speed Siebel ferries to Africa. Siebels were virtually unstoppable anyway because they were so fast and small, so this reinforced the illusion that I was too timid to attempt anything more.
Then I sat back and waited and tried not to look nervous.
At first nothing seemed amiss to Jason. The weather was so bad that he couldn’t tell if my ships were still in port or not, so he made the easy assumption that of course they were. After all, I’d never risked them before had I? Not even when he’d tempted me with juicy Malta-bound merchies bare miles off my own coast. Nor was the sudden disappearance of the bombers anything to worry about; searching in poor weather made for extra losses, and I was obviously a risk-averse player. In fact it was the Genevan referee I was most worried about—he could see every move I’d made, of course, and was practically dancing in his seat at the sheer excitement of it all. But Jason didn’t tumble, not even after quite by chance my fleet ran into a small convoy bound from Gibraltar to Malta and sank most of it. His covering force never caught sight of my merchies, and from what I could see of his frantic maneuvering afterwards Jason’s main focus was on putting as many warships as possible between my fleet and its nearest home base, on the theory that (like the real Italians) I’d immediately run for the safety of port after battle.
But I didn’t. Once I thought my ships were well out of sight I turned them west at flank speed. Away from Italy, in other words. And therefore also from Jason’s trap.
The Italians could never have pulled it off in real life, of course; my ships repeatedly violated Vichy French waters—in the game that entire nation was represented simply by gray no-entry hexes—and sometimes actually steamed well within what would’ve been sight of the shore. The required level of secrecy would’ve impossible to achieve.
But this was a game, not real-life. And so just before dawn broke on the morning of July 6
, 1941 (in my game’s universe, at least) a bored British radar operator buried somewhere deep under The Rock detected an unexpected surface blip. And then another, and another, and another…
Per standing orders, he contacted his officer. Who in turn promptly defecated his drawers.
37
“…can’t possibly have moved that far without being detected!” the Imperial Admiral was soon screaming at an increasingly-vexed Genevan. “The search-rolls were fixed! They must’ve been!”
I sat silently, as did Jason. This was probably an even wiser move on his part than it was for me. Based on his pattern of play, my guess was that Jason had dedicated no more than a handful of seaplanes to search the entire region I’d passed through, if that much. In good weather that might’ve done the trick, given the distances involved and my troop-carrier’s lack of speed. But when the storms came, well… My high-value U-boats were all off in the east, and the whole game seemed set up to force me to invade either Crete, as the real-life Axis actually did, or else maybe Malta as a long-shot alternative. Wouldn’t it have been awful if he’d searched extensively off the French Riviera and located nothing but bathing beauties, while I sneaked in enough troops to seize an airfield on the island that was my “proper” target?