“Sir, we’ve just come from the empty ones returning here,” a colonel replied, “and things are bad. We know where most of the missing Ochoan troops were now. While we fought it out here, waves of them fell upon our ships, which had little air cover, shooting those damned rockets and dropping some kind of containers that exploded into the kind of flames that could not be put out, some kind of chemical fire. They took out our supply ships and troop ships, and ignored the battle cruisers and frigates entirely. We got a lot of them with gunfire, but, sir, they took out more than half our supplies and over ten thousand troops— and now the zi’iaphod pilots have nowhere to land except back here on the ground. They tried putting down inland, in areas with a fair amount of vegetation and food, with the idea of feeding and watering the zi’iaphods and perhaps gathering supplies to bring here, but every time they came down, Ochoans seemed to pop up as if out of the ground and throw fragmentation grenades and shoot mortars that rained down. The only secure place for them in any numbers was back here.”
“I don’t like this at all,” the General mumbled. “If they could do that, then they not only knew we were coming, they had to know our precise plan of battle. There’s treason in the air here! Treason! And these little bastards die like great warriors even though they have no tradition of it, and they just don’t quit! I don’t like it. I want everyone drawn in closer to the Gate here. Leave sentries all over the top, but bring all the forces here. I smell something very nasty here, and if we are in some kind of trap, the Gate may be our only way of escape. Move!
Within the clouds that did not seem to diminish all day, much to their great joy, Ochoan scouts occasionally peaked out for brief comprehensive surveys of the crater interior. For much of the day, things had gone in mop-up fashion pretty much as expected, and having the massed big bugs grounded there was an unexpected bonus. Who would have thought that even the common fishers would rise up with whatever they could get, even weapons taken off dead enemies, and fight like this?
Throughout all the land the word of the battle and of a thousand little battles spread from lowest to highest, shaming the ones who had not taken part into action themselves and filling the rest with a national and racial pride unknown in any remembered generation.
Many thousands outside of and ignorant of the grand design died needlessly but no less heroically, and no less selflessly.
Through the night they watched. Through the night small bands threw torches onto the backs of giant slugs, and bands of raiders swooped down on Jerminian beetles and spread burning fish oil and worse on them as they hunkered down. It was a horrible night for the invaders, many of whom killed more of each other than the Ochoans had.
Worse for them, inside the crater the attackers were slaughtering many of the giant transport bugs just to feed the almost five thousand troops now inside the barren region, and because the huge creatures themselves were becoming impossible to control. Creatures that size had to eat twice their own weight every day. The ships that had fed them all the way there were empty or at the bottom or both; the countryside was alive with death in the night.
In the morning the Jerminian commander found himself and his surviving troops surrounded by organized armed forces. Ochoans—thousands of them!—now commanded the heights, having cheerfully dispatched all the sentries above and then just as happily sent reassurances by semaphore throughout the night that all was well. Ochoans had come from other islands, from caves and from forests where they normally did not go. They came with as much guns and ammo and other weapons as they could manage. They were running low, it was true; it was doubtful they could sustain an offensive for long. On the other hand, neither could the invaders below.
“Look at them!” the Grand Duchess said, hovering above her troops. “Yesterday they invaded our land, killed our people, and reveled in their victory! Now we will make certain they cannot get harnessed up, loaded, and off. The bugs need a fair amount of space to take off, remember. Aim at the drivers and anybody else around. Without them, the things are just dumb animals. Everyone else, let’s start teaching them what we mean by ‘air superiority’! They overreached themselves when they came to Ochoa! Let us teach them not to come back!”
There were shouts of blood lust and national pride, and almost spontaneously the group that could hear her began singing the anthem, which was picked up by the next closest troops until, almost as if it had been planned, it ringed the crater.
And when it was over, they began their attack.
Now it was the enemy who needed reinforcements, and because a few of the zi’iaphods were kept ready just in case, one or two got away before their area was hit, pinning down the support troops and pilots there. The mission was to get those special forces away from the castles, which were at the moment no longer vital, and bring them in before the center force was annihilated. Without the center, the Ochoans could continue to be rearmed and resupplied, battle plans could be analyzed and passed back and forth to ground and air commanders, the Ochoan wounded would get the best medical care, and the occupation would be prone to continual guerrilla warfare.
They held the center or they lost.
The special teams were having their own problems, though. These were mostly Quacksans, the larger but slower sluglike creatures. They depended as much on their much-vaunted ability to mesmerize any enemy and make it walk right to them, but even though they had surreptitiously tested the ability long ago and counted the Ochoans as vulnerable, it hadn’t worked. The Ochoan soldiers in defensive positions above the castles had been wearing goggles and earmuffs that made them impervious to the power. On the other hand, the Quacksans were the perfect ground troops for napalm, and they had poor night vision and no air cover.
There wasn’t much left of the Quacksans by the time the big bugs got to them, and the ones who did get on and load up found themselves under attack from the air.
The Jerminian general in charge of the center’s force knew he’d been misled. The Ochoans had known everything. Just enough of a fierce fight to allow them to take ground that had value only because of the Gate but which could not feed the tiniest insect, and then besiege them! The supplies were gone, the air support was now a joke, since they were supposed to be dug in and self-supporting off the land by now, and they were faced by an increasingly huge army of fanatical natives who, when they didn’t have bombs or guns or napalm, dropped rocks on them!
The General assembled his commanders and senior non-coms in front of the Well Gate, with things now falling from the sky so frequently that they barely noticed anymore, and almost nobody was shooting at them. They’d shot down a thousand, and two thousand more came.
“The position is untenable,” he told them, stating the obvious. “I, and the senior commanders, will take responsibility for the failure, although I am certain it is treachery by one of our allies. A weak and decadent nation like this could not have become this smart and this efficient in two or three weeks. It is impossible. The cause is alive! The cause goes on! Senior commanders, assemble by that wrecked Customs house over there! We shall atone to Her Majesty there! Everyone else, organize in a proper military fashion and evacuate into the Gate. You need do only a steady march. When you arrive at the other end, simply turn, walk back into the Gate, and you will return home. Avenge us! Remember us! And maintain your honor and dignity as soldiers! This was a gamble, but it is only one short battle in a long campaign. We will know more and do better next time! Farewell!”
It was a great speech, and if he hadn’t at that moment been struck on the head by a fair-sized rock and fallen over on his rounded back, swaying back and forth, it would have been his most memorable speech, the kind that inspired troops of the future.
So they did not move calmly toward the Gate as ordered, but instead broke and ran for the large hexagonal blackness just beyond.
The first few made it, demonstrating a state of retreat that was clearly a rout. But then the Ochoans in the corridors began systematically slaughtering them as
they came through, while keeping the center open for outgoing troops.
Now, out of the Well Gate, to the cheers of the rest of the Ochoan forces, first a trickle and then a flood of fresh soldiers emerged, all well-armed and well-equipped. Those retreating invaders who didn’t make the Gate were nearly eliminated by the end of the day. Those who did make it were mostly slaughtered as they entered the Zone corridor.
In the next few days the few survivors were given the opportunity to surrender and return to their ships, not via the Gate, but by boats sent by mutual agreement. The Ochoans wanted some to get back to tell the tale. Despite their victory, there had been horrendous carnage, and they did not want to go through it again.
By the end of the week it was over. Little, weak, semi-feudal, silly, comic opera Ochoa, out there in the middle of nowhere gobbling fish and drinking wine, had, in a semitech environment, defeated the undefeatable, stopped the unstoppable, and, best of all, humiliated the arrogant bastards.
The people of the “New Empire” hexes knew none of this. The soldiers who did manage to return were debriefed exhaustively, then executed. News was carefully controlled and managed. The leaders declared a new wondrous victory to their people and, fuming, plotted their revenge while setting upon the highest ranks of the combined military staffs to root out the obvious traitors, for it was unthinkable that they might actually have overreached, that they were not as irresistible an object as they wholeheartedly believed.
In the palace deep within the central watery regions of Chalidang, the Empress Josich threw a homicidal fit, and personally hacked her general staff to death even though the plan had been entirely hers and implemented over their objections.
She had been this furious recently once before, over a different matter. It was when she received, via the embassy in Zone, a piece of shell from a dead Cromlin’s body with words painted not in Cromlinese nor in the language of Chalidang but in the language of the family Hadun of the old empire and the Realm.
you’re next, it read simply, with phonetic spelling of a non-Hadun name as the signature.
“Jeremiah,” the name became when pronounced.
“Not me, Jeremiah Kincaid!” she’d been heard screaming as she tore the messenger to bits. “Now there will be no quarter! Now we conquer or die! Now they all die! The Kalindans, that bird thing, the Ochoan—all of them! And especially you, Jeremiah! Come and get me!”
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The Sea is Full of Stars wos-6 Page 39