Thieves of Light

by Michael Hudson

  "You've got your own Hall of Fame," Bhodi said approvingly. Then he added, "I guess there's a lot of tradition here. The platoon's had a lot of heroes."

  Li-hon turned back to Bhodi. "I'm afraid you misunderstand, Bhodi Li. These are faces of the warriors who fell wearing the insignia of the Ninth. We remember them for their service to the Light, not individual deeds. Character makes a soldier. Circumstance makes a hero."

  Bhodi gulped. Heroes were one thing; dead heroes something entirely different. Suddenly he wasn't quite as eager as he had been.

  "I understand you are interested in beginning a study of strategy and tactics," Li-hon continued.

  "Uh-yes. I know-I mean Haj told me it's not the usual procedure-"

  "I think it's time," Li-hon said, "and that is more important than any fossilized habits."

  "Uh-thanks." That was easy, Bhodi thought with some puzzlement. What was Haj talking about?

  "I have an hour's work remaining," Li-hon said. "We can begin when it's completed."

  "I could meet you at the transporter station-"

  "No. Wait outside in the lounge until I'm ready."

  "Okay. But shouldn't I go get my armor?"

  "You won't need it," Li-hon said and settled back on his stool.

  Bhodi was kept waiting in the lounge long enough for the space station's slow spin to bring Rejia into view twice. During that time, the only person Bhodi saw that he knew was Lord Baethan, who passed within two yards of him on his way to the platoon room. Predictably, the cyborg failed to notice or acknowledge Bhodi's presence; he might as well have been part of the chair he was seated in.

  Shortly after Lord Baethan left, Li-hon appeared and called Bhodi in. He offered him a seat at the pit table- which Bhodi later learned was called the battle board-and then settled back on his stool. It was then that Bhodi learned the reason he did not need his armor: His studies with Li-hon were to begin not with a duel or an ambush, but a conversation.

  "How closely have you studied the campaigns of Earth's great strategists-Alexander, Hannibal, Caesar, Sun Tzu, Genghis Khan, Napoleon?" Li-hon asked.

  Bhodi almost laughed. "Well-I've heard of most of them. Military strategy isn't exactly a core subject in my high school."

  "And yet it has always seemed to me that it would be, since your species seems to be constantly at war," Li-hon said. "Very well. What do the words 'strategy' and 'tactics' mean to you?"

  Bhodi considered a moment. "I guess strategy is what you're trying to do, and tactics is how you try to do it."

  "Reasonable. What, in your perception, are we trying to do?"

  "We, meaning the Photon Alliance?"

  "Yes."

  "Well, whip the Arrians, of course."

  "But how will we know we've won? What is our specific goal?"

  Bhodi felt like he were being quizzed by Mrs. Martini about an assignment he hadn't read, and was enjoying it just about as much. "I guess to find the Arrian equivalent of Intellistar and bomb it to bits."

  "No. You are confusing strategy and tactics." He touched a colored area on the battle board and a picture appeared in the center of the surface. It was the crater-surfaced mushroom-shaped space station he had seen in the Fraanic briefing. "This is called Scarrcastle-"

  "How'd you get the picture?"

  "An intelligence intercept. We have several spy buoys operating inside Arrian space."

  "They probably have them here, too, huh?"

  "Not inside this system," Li-hon said. "Our sweeps here are very thorough. But elsewhere-probably. Communications are scrambled on the presumption that they could be intercepted. But again you deflect me to a tactical question. The point I was making is that we know the location of the Arrian command base. We have never attempted an assault on it, and never will."

  "Why? It seems to me the fastest way to end the war."

  "Scarrcastle lies deep in the midst of the Darkness. To die in Darkness is to become separated from the Light forever. The First Guardian will never order her warriors to face that risk."

  No wonder you've been fighting this war for two hundred years, Bhodi thought. "Then what are you trying to do?"

  "The Force's sole strategic goal is to end the Arrian interference with the spread of the Light."

  "Don't you want to go all the way-wipe them out and take their worlds, too?"

  "No," Li-hon said firmly. "The Arrian homeworlds are irredeemably contaminated by the Darkness. We have no interest in them. Our mission is to the worlds that have never known Light or Darkness."

  "All right. I have the picture."

  "Then consider another question. What are the elements of victory?"

  "Uh-get there first with the most warriors?"

  "Ah. You know more of your strategic tradition than you admit."

  "Huh?"

  "That was Nathan Bedford Forrest's prescription for victory. He was a general in your American Civil War."

  "I didn't know that," Bhodi admitted. "It just came off the top of my head."

  "So much the better, since I would have had to convince you that Forrest was wrong," Li-hon said. "Listen carefully, Bhodi Li-no soldier, no force, is invulnerable. Neither size nor number nor experience nor firepower in itself is enough to guarantee victory. The winner of a combat is the one who best exploits his own advantages and conceals his own weaknesses."

  "That makes sense."

  "Does it make sense, too, that a warrior must therefore know his advantages and weaknesses?"

  "Yes-"

  "And he must see both clearly, without the exaggerations of pride and the illusions of ego?"

  "I guess-"

  Li-hon jabbed a meaty finger in the direction of the Wall of Honor. "Then start clearing away the veils from your own eyes, Bhodi Li, if you hope to be a Guardian," he said sharply. "I myself have hung fifteen of those portraits. I have no wish to hasten the time when my own joins them. I look forward to fighting beside you, but not enough to go into battle with a fool."

  "I'm not a fool," Bhodi said, bristling.

  Li-hon shook his head. "That remains to be seen."

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  There was no mistaking the fact that the rules had changed. Bhodi's time was no longer his own. Li-hon owned it, and Bhodi learned quickly that Li-hon did not believe in leaving assets idle.

  Promptly at seven on the station's thirty-hour clock, Bhodi appeared at the platoon room for the first of three daily sessions with Li-hon. Nine-half found him in the Ja-Nin room, warming up for a full-armor combat bout with an opponent of Li-hon's choosing. Then it was hurry back to Li-hon for the second session of the day.

  At fifteen he got an hour's break, which always seemed half as long as it should be and was usually dedicated to a quick meal and a waking nap in the handiest comfortable spot. At sixteen he reported to K'ieasl of the Seventh Platoon for instruction in field maintenance. Then at eighteen-half he bounced down to Rejia for work with the Allison.

  Twenty-one meant back to the platoon room one last time for what always seemed to be the most complex tactical problems of the day. Then, just when he was sure that his brain was going to explode from too much thinking, he was shipped off to Haj for a brisk bit of work on his general conditioning program. By twenty-five he was free, but by that point he had little interest in anything more demanding than a meal and falling into bed.

  But when he tried complaining to the other challengers, he was answered with consternation instead of commiseration. Not only had they been on comparable schedules all along-by choice! — but also they envied him the chance to study individually with Li-hon and Haj both. After hearing the same refrain from three different would-be sympathizers, Bhodi decided to just shut up and endure.

  But he was nevertheless convinced that he was being singled out for special treatment, and not in a good sense of the word. For example, his Ja-Nin bouts were full-armor free-contact matches, complete with referee. Though Guardians occasionally conducted demonstration matches in that format, no one
else trained that way. And even if that had been routine, Bhodi simply wasn't up to it. Through the first week, he usually left limping and always left hurting.

  Then there was the matter of the audience. From the first day, his matches played to a dozen or more spectators- station staff, other challengers, even an occasional Guardian. And though they were not overly verbal, they seemed to be there to root against him. Bhodi suspected that this was Haj's lesson for Bhodi, a public answer to the question "What good is this?"

  And lesson it was. Bhodi did not mind being seen, per se. But he hated for anyone to see him being whipped quite so thoroughly. His first two opponents were Qeth, and he could do virtually nothing with them. Each weighed more than five hundred pounds, their skin was as unyielding as shoe leather, and even their glancing blows threatened to break bones. All Bhodi learned from those encounters was how to stay out of reach.

  His next three opponents were all Ikthalarians. They had a deceptive kind of wiry strength, and their long armspan gave him fits. Even so, he handled himself reasonably well-though not well enough in any instance to walk away feeling like the winner. But his skills were unquestionably improving each day. The primary reason was his determination not to be victimized by the same maneuver twice. That and the audience, whose eyes he could never quite forget and whose amusement he could never quite make himself deaf to.

  The handling of his Ja-Nin sessions was not the only sore point. Every trip down to Rejia for gunnery practice was a goad in his side, for he was always scheduled for the firing range, dueling range, or one of the three skirmish zones outside on the planet's surface. He was never penciled in for the maze room. It was not even mentioned.

  True, he himself hadn't raised the subject with Li-hon. That was partly fear of repeating his mistake with Haj, and partly his certainty that Li-hon would arrange it at the appropriate time-which Bhodi was certain would be soon-without being reminded or cajoled. So day after day, Bhodi potted hexagonal targets or played tag among the rocks, all the while chafing at the bit for a chance to show what he could do in the training center's ultimate test.

  He did not understand why Li-hon was waiting, and yet dared not ask for an explanation. For a brief time, the return of Ferthewillihan Pike to Intellistar gave him a reason to hope for a change. Pike, at least, was someone he could risk being honest with. But although Parcival took over from K'ieasl, Pike seemed content to leave things as they were, in Li-hon's hands. Pike confined himself to an occasional visit to the observer's booth, and even then seemed to avoid any contact more direct than a smile or a wave-almost as though he had been ordered to stay away from Bhodi.

  But for all the pain from the Ja-Nin and the frustration surrounding his gunnery training, Bhodi's greatest trial was the time he spent with Sergeant Li-hon. Li-hon's version of strategy and tactics instruction embodied everything Bhodi hated about school-dusty history, pedantic theory, and endless talk-talk-talk. Except it was worse, because he could not hide among his classmates and thereby avoid joining in the game called pretend-to-be-interested.

  Movement of forces. Economy and concentration of force. Geometrical strategy. Blockade. The strategy of interior lines. Reconnaissance. The strategy of exhaustion. Cohesion and dispersion. Flank assault. Double envelopment. Cordon defense. There seemed to be no end to Li-hon's catalog of military lore.

  It was not just the onslaught of new words. Bhodi was constantly struggling to grasp points that his instructor seemed to think were self-evident. Li-hon would say something like, "The goal of the tactics of attack is to create a conviction of defeat in your enemy."

  The first thing Bhodi said was always wrong. "I thought the goal was to kill as many of theirs as you can while losing as few of yours as you can," he had offered on that occasion.

  Then came the contradiction. "Numbers are less important than the will to fight. Small armies have often routed larger ones."

  Thinking he now understood, Bhodi would respond with what he thought was a comment of agreement. "Sure-by inflicting more casualties."

  Almost inevitably, Li-hon would destroy the illusion of understanding with his next utterance. "Casualties are frequently the result of defeat, not its cause. You must understand, Bhodi Li, that the defeated force in virtually every battle in your history or mine still retained the capacity for useful resistance, in many cases even the capacity for victory. They were overwhelmed not by the enemy, but by a sense of hopelessness. So the goal of the tactician is to crush spirit, not bodies."

  Then the obligatory sucker question: "So how do you do it?"

  "By striking where the enemy thought it impossible for you to strike-and by making them feel their losses." Finally the inevitable metaphor, which Li-hon seemed to expect Bhodi to remember as a distillation of the discussion. "Suffering is measured not by the size of the wound but by the acuity of the pain."

  It all meant something to Li-hon, but none of it meant much to Bhodi. He wanted to know how best to handle a Warri in open ground, how the Arrians used their Dogs, what a Destructor did when startled-practical knowledge that Bhodi could take into battle, the profit of the hard lessons learned by those whose pictures hung facing them.

  But an eavesdropper listening in on a session would be hard pressed to decide which or even what kind of war was going on in the universe outside the room. It was all so maddeningly abstract, Bhodi complained in silence. Give me something real -

  The only truly enjoyable part was the trickery Li-hon could do with the battle board. At least once during every session, its black-glass surface dissolved into invisibility, and the table became a hexagonal tank containing a flawlessly detailed miniature of a battle scene.

  The simulation was three-dimensional like a model, its colors exaggerated like a computer graphic. Bhodi did not know whether it was a hologram, film projection, animation, or simple magic. Whatever the means, the battle board invited Bhodi to size up a specific strategic situation, make predictions or even tactical decisions, and then see his instincts tested as the battle was played out by the tiny figures and war machines. His instincts were frequently good, at least where the span of time involved was short.

  But aside from that, there was little pleasure and less promise of pleasure. For three weeks, Bhodi bore it all stoically. He understood that he was in the pressure cooker, his grit and commitment being tested. When he felt his resistance rising, he checked the impulse to revolt with the reminder that Li-hon was the best, or remembered Pike's assurance that he could do anything that would be asked of him.

  Then came the day when he rushed into the Ja-Nin arena a few minutes late and found the black-metal figure of a Celtan waiting for him in the match hexagon.

  "Wait a minute," Bhodi started to complain to the referee as he crossed the line. "This isn't fair. He must be a Guardian. Celtans don't even go through training. They just have it all programmed in-"

  Ignoring him, the referee waved his right hand in the signal that meant Engage. A moment later, the Celtan hit Bhodi from behind, taking him to the floor, and the bout was underway.

  Bhodi bounced up from the blind-side attack furious. "Come on, then, you sideshow freak," he snapped, circling in a crouch. "Come on, I'm going to pull your goddamn plug."

  The Celtan sprang forward and unleashed a roundhouse kick. Adrenaline flooding through his body, Bhodi was ready and dove under the kick to one side. His legs lashed out in a scissor chop that found the hard metal of the Celtan's boot plates and sent it sprawling awkwardly facedown on the floor.

  Bhodi was on his feet in an instant, fists clenched, eyes full of fury, awaiting the Celtan's next charge in a crouch. But the cyborg stayed on the floor, rolling to its side and signaling to the referee.

  "Yield," it said. "My right hip joint has been hyper-stressed. I am unable to continue."

  For a moment, Bhodi was enraged that he was to be denied a chance to compound the Celtan's injury. But as the referee stepped in and Bhodi stepped back, he heard the applause-applause from the audienc
e that had been invariably cool to his efforts up till then. He turned towards them and saw for the first time friendly faces among the gallery. In answer, he allowed himself a proud smile and a clenched fist of triumph.

  A short time later, he overheard a whispered conversation as he waited for a lift:

  "Is that him?"

  "Yeah-that's the kid who beat Kil Vander at Ja-Nin."

  "He? beat a Celtan? I don't believe it-"

  "Broke Vander's leg and left him lying there. Did it like it was the easiest thing in the world."

  "So what's he still doing here?"

  "Shoot, I don't know. Ask the First. And ask her soon. I've got to fight him next week."

  The lift came, and the duo fell silent as they crowded in with him. But Bhodi did not need to hear more. All of the suppressed thoughts of the last three weeks were coming to the fore. What am I still doing here? Bhodi repeated to himself. I want to hear Li-hon answer that one -

  If Li-hon had been appraised of what had happened that morning in the Ja-Nin arena, he gave no sign of it. "There is a work, the Tactica, written by your Emperor Leo the Wise of Byzantine, which contains some interesting ideas," Li-hon began.

  "Really?"

  Ignoring or missing the sarcasm, Li-hon continued. "He recommends the use of fraud and bribery-" Then he stopped, realizing that Bhodi was making no move to join him at the battle board. "Is there a problem, Bhodi Li?"

  "Yeah. I'd like to know how much longer this is going to go on."

  "Until you're ready for your third refusal."

  "And when will that be?"

  Li-hon rested his thick forearms on the battle board. "Explain yourself. What urgency is there? What timetable are you failing to meet?"

  "Bro'nech came here the week after I did-"

  "Correct."

  "He took his third refusal and joined the Eleventh two days ago."

  "Also correct."

  "But that's not right. I've been here longer."

  "That means nothing."

  "It means that you're promoting people ahead of me. People who're no better than I am. I beat Bro'nech three times in the dueling room, and almost beat him in Ja-Nin."