by Chris Bunch
The fact that there was a good possibility that the ship would explode in hours or become a vanished derelict was hardly important to his thinking.
* * * *
Lady Atago's ships drove in against the Al-Sufi worlds almost unopposed.
Six outbound convoys loaded with AM2 were cut out and seized. Their escorts were quickly smashed.
Lady Atago, following orders, had determined that the feint against Al-Sufi would be as deadly and determined as she could make it.
Her attack ships swept destruction across storage worlds, creating havoc and hell that would take generations to rebuild.
Then, in the midst of a battle of triumph, Lady Atago realized what had happened.
She was wreaking havoc not because of her brilliance but because Al-Sufi was nearly undefended. Her success was merely that the Imperials had made no plans for any Tahn attack against the systems.
Which could only mean that her grand plan against Durer had been found out. The Tahn fleets were advancing into a trap.
Lady Atago had no hesitations at all. Less of a person, less of a Tahn, would have let Lord Fehrle and the never-to-be-sufficiently-damned civilians take the blame as they would have taken the credit.
Instead, she diverted and drove her swiftest battleships toward the Durer systems, broadcasting an alarm on all frequencies.
It was, by then, quite too late.
* * * *
The man's name was Mason. And, from his no-rank-tabbed flight coverall to the scar seaming his face, he looked to be a killer.
He had been that—a highly decorated tacship commander, seconded after a crippling injury to flight school, and more recently Sten's nemesis. His injuries prevented him from ever skippering a tacship again. But the war had promoted Mason. He was a one-star admiral, commanding a fast light-destroyer squadron.
He ran it as he had run his tacship flotilla. His crews hated him. He insisted on obedience, dedication, and originality. An error of omission or oversight produced a very rapid court-martial.
The story was that one of his destroyers had bounced a Tahn ship that turned out to be filled with Imperial prisoners. One of Mason's men had seen the cheering rescued ex-prisoners streaming through the air lock and then bellowed “Get back, clots! Don't you know when you're well off?"
Mason was permitted to be in command for only one reason. His flotilla had the highest kill ratio of any equivalent unit in any of the Imperial fleets.
Now he led his destroyers, scattered in fingers-four formation, into the rear of the Tahn fleets.
Eleven Imperial fleets had been hidden far beyond Durer, with orders to attack only after the Tahn were initially engaged.
A surprise.
More of a surprise was their makeup. Sullamora's shipyards in the Cairenes, supposedly shattered with labor problems, had done very well. The Emperor had expected twelve more battleships to be ready.
Instead, thirty heavies attacked the Tahn—ships that were not leaky botch jobs but supersophisticated engines of destruction, completely unknown to the Tahn.
The slaughter began.
* * * *
Even if, somehow, an all-bands receiver could have listened in on the battles, coherency would have been a joke:
"Samsun, Samsun ... I have a target ... damage report as ... incoming observed ... six Tahn ships now without power and ... launch, you clotin’ bastard ... Samsun, are you receiving ... units, stand by for ... change orbit, Eight, you're acquired ... I have a launch from ... Samsun, this is Whitway. Do you receive this station ... this is an all-stations broadcast ... Nostrand units, redeploy to Sectors one by thirteen ... squaawk ... Allah give us strength ... Samsun, Samsun ... Kee-nst, did you see that one go up? ... All units, this is ... Samsun, Samsun ... do you receive..."
* * * *
Four broadcasts, all set en clair...
To Fleet Marshal Ian Mahoney:
"Comm One, Comm One, this is Liberty Seven. There ain't nothin’ left to shoot at..."
To Lady Atago:
"Unknown approaching units ... this is the Tahn battleship H'rcana. We have you ID'd as friendly. Do not continue your present orbit, over. Request you stand by for recovery assistance."
To Lord Fehrle—unreceived:
"Command ... Command ... this is P'riser. Plan Heart-strike canceled. Plan W'mon activated."
To all Tahn ships:
"All units. All units. Begin retirement. Support, if possible, friendly units under drive."
In eyes-only code, Fleet Marshal Ian Mahoney to the Eternal Emperor:
"Tahn seared. Repeat, all Tahn seared. Question—how to serve? Second question—what wine?"
* * * *
Confused though it might have been from its name to its step-by-step execution, there were some completely obvious conclusions from the battle(s) of Durer-Al-Sufi:
The Tahn had been smashed.
Their major war-winning offensive had been blunted and turned back.
The nearly-total destruction of the Tahn's finest units meant that it would be years before they could mount another such offensive.
The Emperor hoped—and knew he was full of hops—that those conclusions were equally evident to the Tahn.
It might have been the beginning of the end—but getting there was still going to be a long, bloody, and certainly not foreordained process.
And the Eternal Emperor could afford to make no other mistakes.
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BOOK THREE
KOBO-ICHI
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CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
THE TAHN REELED back from the awful blow of Durer like a man struck in the abdomen with a lead-weighted bat. They were left doubled over, mouth gaping, lungs emptied of air and blood hammering at the temples, threatening to hemorrhage at the ears.
They were caught in that long, frozen moment in history that even casual students would point at eons later and say, “Here was the turning point. Here was where priorities needed to be reexamined, strategy revamped, scenarios rethought."
Because, as an ancient philosopher once said, “It ain't over till it's over.” Or as the Eternal Emperor might have put it; stealing from one of his favorite political thinkers, “Winning isn't everything. But losing isn't anything."
Durer-Al-Sufi was lost. That was a tired fact almost as soon as it was over. But not the war. Another tired fact, viscerally understood by the Tahn. The trick was to make the mind understand what the gut was thinking without ripping open the gut and spreading out the entrails. History was a blackened landscape of great kingdoms that murdered the oracle to seek the message. That was a mistake the Tahn could not and did not make.
They turned inward, fighting every instinct to find fault, to point the blame. They turned inward to find strength but were confronted with the frozen poles of their culture: a north where defeat could not even be contemplated, and a south where every facet of Tahn life had to be controlled and molded to official will—all spinning on an axis of hatred for anything un-Tahn. And they had no Shackleton or Perry to lead the way. Only Lord Fehrle—the man who had presided over the second greatest defeat of their history.
Fehrle was no coward. After the defeat, he did not commit ritual suicide. Instead, he returned to Heath, fully expecting to be stripped of all honors, executed, his name excised from Tahn history. If his people needed to work out their rage on his quivering corpse, then so be it.
Instead, he was seen in his usual position of prominence—with the other members of the Tahn High Council lined up exactly around him as before—during a news broadcast covering the appointment of a governor-general to a newly won Tahn territory. It was an event noted with interest by every skilled Tahn watcher who knew about Durer. The Eternal Emperor—the most skilled of them all—grunted to himself when he reviewed the fiche. Fehrle's survival was not something he had expected.
When he had learned that the Tahn lord had personally led the expedition, he had thought th
e man's political destruction would be an added bonus to all that twisted metal and those blasted bodies. Still, there was an advantage to press for there and the Eternal Emperor went all out for it.
When the Emperor struck out and connected with that loaded bat, the only thought his enemy had as he reeled back from the blow, was that no one could know about Durer. Even that old cynic, Pastour, realized that it was not the time for recriminations or political infighting. When he had heard the news, he had vomited, wiped his lips, then hurried to the emergency High Council meeting, determined to keep his colleagues from removing Fehrle and then committing bureaucracide in the resultant fight over who would lead the council.
Even in normal times there were too many factions with too many self-serving interests to declare a clear winner. Given time, a consensus might be hammered out the way an ancient cooper formed the hoops of an enormous barrel whose contents could not be contained under the normal laws of volume.
As much as he disliked the woman, Pastour had a glimmering, even at that moment, that the only conceivable choice would have to be Lady Atago. When the day came to replace Fehrle, she would be the only knight in white armor left. Because although Durer had permanently blackened Fehrle, it would have the opposite effect on Atago. To survive as a coherent people, the Tahn needed their heroes—like the ancient Persians needed the myth of Jamshid. Pastour went to the meeting armed with every diplomatic and political skill he could command.
Surprisingly, it did not take much argument. The others were as stunned and gasping as he was. All of them knew, without coaxing, that if news of Durer leaked out to the populace, the war with the Empire was lost. The first order issued was for a total clampdown on anything and anyone involved with Durer.
Even in a society where news was not just controlled but rationed, the order was carried out on an unprecedented scale. An enormous amount of credits, energy, and manpower was hurled at the task. It was a gag order with no journalistic equivalent. Scholars, looking for descriptive comparisons, would have to turn to human-wave assault battles—like Thermopylae, the Russian Summer offensive of 1943, the Yalu, or the Imperial disaster of Saragossa during the Mueller Wars.
The destroyed ships and personnel were removed from all files and logs. All survivors were seized and incarcerated, as were the friends and families of the dead and wounded. Behind-the-lines suppliers found themselves mysteriously reassigned to barren regions. Even minor officials were visited at night and grilled for any speck of information that might be damaging. Then the interrogators themselves were grilled. On and on it went as the Tahn searched out and purged every kink and crook in the line of the vast plumbing system that was the Tahn bureaucracy.
The Tahn even launched a crash M'nhatan-style program to develop and fix in place the greatest jamming system ever conceived. And even that leaked as the Eternal Emperor turned up the volume of propaganda.
If the Tahn blackout effort had no known historical precedent, neither did the Emperor's effort to broadcast it. With his right hand, the Emperor directed his fleets and armies to take instant advantage of the vacuum left by the Tahn. With his left, he orchestrated a massive propaganda machine. He turned the equivalent of small suns into radio beacons, heralding to the many galaxies the news of the great Tahn defeat.
The Emperor attacked with information as if it were the spearhead of an invasion force of thousands of ships and millions of troops. And the more he turned up the volume, the more desperately the Tahn fought to shut it out. He pushed them to the point that, even for their barren souls, so many civil liberties were suspended that life was nearly intolerable.
The grim, bitter mood spread downward from the High Council to the lowest subaltern and petty official. No one knew what had happened, but everyone feared for himself. Even the simplest of decisions was left unmade in case it might disturb a superior. In actual fact, that was a wise way of behaving. Because the smallest change would upset a superior, who was equally in fear for his own hide. Added to that were increasing shortages. All the empty warehouses seemed even emptier after Durer. And as for AM2, there just was none available for any purpose other than military, and even there, each use was carefully judged and the proper forms filed with the appropriate signatures willing to take the blame in case of error.
Yes, the Tahn had turned inward after Durer. And it was the Eternal Emperor's official policy to shove their heads up until “they gagged on the hair at the back of their throats."
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CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
POLICE MAJOR GENRIKH'S heart jumped when he heard the hunters hooting in the woods. Their quarry had been flushed. He whisper/prayed to himself that it would not be a false alarm. Ever since the escape, Genrikh and his men had been rushed from one tiny rut in the road to another, responding to even vague rumors that a POW had been spotted. As far as Genrikh was concerned, the entire effort to bring the prisoners to ground had been hamstrung by his superiors’ insistence on a total blackout of the news of the escape.
Normally, any matter requiring secrecy would be second nature to Genrikh. But he and the other teams of hunters had been handed the messiest end of the stick. The blackout meant that it was nearly impossible to pick any real locus to start from and then connect the dots until the quarry could be found, circled, and then flushed into waiting Tahn guns. There had been a few successes, but not nearly enough.
The only part of his orders that he liked was that any prisoner found was to be killed on the spot. There was to be no sizing up or interrogation, just a heavy-caliber projectile in the back of the head. That this shut down the possibility of one find leading to another did not bother Genrikh at all. He was not a man who enjoyed the confusion of many flavors.
The hooting from his tracking team grew louder. Genrikh took a deep breath, loosening his grip on his weapon. He did not have to turn to see if his men were in place. He could feel the tension drawing them tighter to him. Genrikh prepared himself for disappointment.
The odds were that when the quarry broke the treeline, it would turn out to just be some lost farm animal, walleyed with fear. Then all they would be left with to satisfy their frustration was to gun the animal into a bloody pulp.
His weapon came up at the same time he saw motion just inside the trees. Around him he could hear the others doing the same, sounding like a rustle in a dry wind. There! Over there!
Two figures shadowed away from the brush, hesitated, then started shambling runs across the meadow for the other side. In two heartbeats his mind registered that they were (a) human, (b) one tall, one short, (c) prisoners. He squeezed the trigger, and then all hell erupted as his men also opened up. The combined fire caught the prisoners only five or six steps from the trees. They gave massive, loose-limbed jolts and then were hurled aside as if swept away by a fire hose. There was echoing silence and then another swift brrrp of fire, and the bodies jerked and jumped on the ground.
There was a clash of magazines changing, and then Genrikh and his men were on their feet, sprinting for the large splash of red and white gore. He almost lost his footing in blood-slick grass as he skidded up to the first body. It was the big man. He kicked the corpse over. The features were twisted but clear—Ibn Bakr. Then the smaller prisoner—Alis.
Genrikh turned to congratulate his team of killers. He was greeted by beaming faces with shy, almost childlike grins. Except for one.
Lo Prek looked down at Ibn Bakr's face and cursed his soul for not being the man he wanted to see lying there. Once again Sten had slipped the net.
* * * *
Virunga sat in a slatted metal chair designed for discomfort. Every aching joint in his crippled legs told him that he had been kept waiting outside the commandant's office for days. From the sounds of the prisoners shuffling through the courtyard outside, he knew it could have been no more than four hours. Virunga had spent too many years as a prisoner of the Tahn not to know the game Derzhin was playing. The wait was a routine softening-up process.
Still, being familiar with the game did not make it any easier to play.
From the moment he had been summoned, the old self-doubts had come rushing in. Could he stand up to torture? He had before, hadn't he? Yes. But could he do it again? All right. Let's get past the torture part. (I can't. Please, I can't. Shut up! You have to.) What about the mind gaming? He had never gone one on one with Avrenti, Derzhin's expert in black work. But he had measured him. The man would be good. Virunga thought he was better. (Clot! There you go with a negative again! Eliminate “thought.” Substitute “knew.” Yes. That's better.) Try a new tack. A course with fresher breezes.
You have questions, Virunga. Put it on them. Make them answer. Don't give them time to gain the upper ground. Hit them with your questions. Questions, like ... After the escape ... why were there no reprisals?
Virunga and Sten had factored reprisals into the escape equation. There was nothing they could do about the immediate actions of the Tahn. In the first red flash of anger, there were sure to be victims, beatings, rations cut off, and personal belongings ripped to shreds in the search for the escape hatch. There was nothing they could do about that. But a moment later, when cooler heads prevailed, the planning would pay off. There were too many careers at stake in Koldyeze. Too many questions would trigger a hunt for scapegoats—careless guards, officers with questionable loyalties. The Tahn would be cautious, knowing that it would give enemies an opening to pin blame on the blameless. And there would be the ultimate threat that the crisis would spill over, flooding out the gates and catching the politicians who had put all the rotten eggs in the rickety basket that was Koldyeze.
Just to make sure, Sten and Virunga had stacked the deck, slipped a fifth ace in the cards. The fifth ace was the Golden Worm St. Clair had planted in the Koldyeze computer. It was a virus that day by day would monkey with the production figures. A decimal point slipped. A minus turned to a plus. And, voila! Koldyeze would be able to boast far higher successes than even the most optimistic Tahn could dream of. Derzhin would have absolute proof that the POW camp was an experiment that was working.