Revenge of the Damned

by Chris Bunch

  The Eighth Guards was shattered. Two commanding generals were relieved, and the unit took eighty-three percent casualties before being pulled from combat. Its colors were cased, the guardsmen were reassigned to other units, and the unit was rebuilt from scratch.

  That was disaster enough. What made it worse was that the assaults on Pel/e were made before St. Clair discovered that the secret shipyards were in the Erebus System—half an empire away from Pel/e.

  Seventy-five thousand Imperial deaths. One and a quarter million Tahn corpses. In a completely meaningless battle.

  * * * *

  Six battlefleets hit Erebus under the flag of Fleet Marshal Ian Mahoney.

  So-called panacea targets—hit here and the war's gonna come to an end the day before yesterday—were normally a joke, useful only when a space force was arguing for larger appropriations that would probably bankrupt every other service if made.

  Also, those glamour targets usually got hit once and once only. If the factory was trashed, they would not have to worry about it ever, ever, ever producing nasty widgets anymore.

  The fact was always ignored that after a war, when the bean counters went in to figure out how effective the bombs had been, they learned that said factory probably was not trashed that badly and that concerted effort brought it back online within a few months.

  Erebus looked to be such a panacea target.

  Mahoney, coming from a more realistic background than most of the skyjocks serving under him, approached things differently.

  The Erebus System was a bastard target, defended by every onworld weapon and heavily armed spacecraft the Tahn could afford to divert from mainline combat. And the pilots and missile crews fought to the death.

  Mahoney made sure it was a real death.

  His first strike took thirty percent casualties. There were splintered destroyers and tacships broken on the ground of Fundy, the Erebus System's main world, and more hulks spewing debris out in space.

  He sent his ships in again the next day.

  Twenty-eight percent casualties.

  There were ship crews who broke and refused the attack order. Mahoney calmly ordered their courts-martial and relieved any skipper who hesitated at his orders.

  Then he threw his guts up in his cabin, washed his face, and sent more men and women to their deaths.

  After six days of hammering, the Tahn had nothing left to fight back with.

  Mahoney sent in his battleships, monitors, and cruisers.

  Three battlewagons and two of the ponderous cruisers went down—but the Erebus shipworks appeared to be permanently out of business.

  Mahoney ordered the strike repeated the next day.

  He had to relieve a fleet admiral for objecting.

  But the attack ships went in again. And still a third time.

  The worlds of Erebus looked to be suitable parking lots.

  But just to make sure, against all conventions of war, Mahoney had the worlds dusted.

  The factories of Erebus might go back to work—but every worker assigned to them would glow in the dark.

  * * * *

  The First Guards, Mahoney's old command—now led by Major General Galkin—spearheaded the landing on Naha.

  By that point they knew how to fight the Tahn:

  Don't shoot at the civilians—they've got their own set of problems. Get them to the rear. Don't believe that anything isn't booby-trapped, from the ceremonial flag to the ugly plas casting of Lord Fehrle that'd make a great souvenir.

  A Tahn can be anywhere. In a crater beside the road. Tied into a tree. Sited in a weapons position in the base of a statue. Waiting for days inside a burnt-out track, waiting for the chance to kill any Imperial within range, whether fighting man or woman, clerk, or civilian. And very competent at his or her trade of slaughter.

  Eventually, Naha fell, in spite of the fact that the final days of the resistance were personally commanded by Lady Atago. The casualty rate was twice what had been expected, and the battle lasted three times longer than expected—expected that was, by staff people. The line grunts thought themselves damn lucky and damn good to have gotten off that lightly.

  Naha gave the Empire the long-needed major base inside the Tahn worlds.

  Now the real hammering would begin.

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  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  EVEN AN EXPERIENCED Tahn watcher might have drawn some wrong conclusions if he had observed the meeting between Lord Fehrle and the leaders of the two major factions on the High Council, Wichman and Pastour. If a hidden camera had captured them sitting at ease in Fehrle's darkened study, the Tahn watcher would have been most interested in who was not present. Meaning Lady Atago, Fehrle's heir apparent. The expert would make the instant assumption that new alliances were being struck and that Atago was on the way out, obviously because Fehrle perceived her new hero status as a threat.

  The expert would have been wrong on both counts. Yes, it was true that Fehrle had thought of her when he had issued the invitation to Wichman and Pastour. It was because of her “white knight” image that he pointedly ignored her.

  He did not want what he was about to propose to tarnish her image in any way. If he fell, he wanted her to be able to pick up his sword wearing armor that was mirror-bright. Fehrle was about to suggest a plan that assumed and depended upon the corruption and disloyalty of his own people. Atago would be enraged at his even suggesting that such a thing existed. It was a fact that Atago's simple soldier's mind could not accept.

  Wichman would argue, it was true, but he could eventually be convinced. With the help of Pastour, the realist, Fehrle would have no difficulty at all.

  Lord Fehrle served his guests with his own hands, helping them with their choice of delicacies on the tray and building them drinks. And as they ate and drank, he talked, setting the background: There were traitors everywhere, spies at every level, and fools who leaked vital information to enemy agents. To make his point, he vastly overstated the situation.

  As expected, Wichman was shocked and immediately called for a heroic medicine-style purge to remove the poisons of disloyalty. What he had not expected was Pastour's reaction. The man sat in silence, his face growing bleaker with every word. Had Fehrle misguessed? Instead of support, would Pastour take on the role of an Atago and back Wichman's call for a bloodletting? If so, Fehrle would have to do some fast reanalysis of the situation or his plan would never get off the ground.

  What he did not realize was that Pastour was suffering from a nearly terminal case of guilty conscience. Did Fehrle suspect him? Were there guards waiting with drawn guns just behind the door? If so, why did the man keep looking over at him, as if he were looking for help? Gradually, he realized that was exactly what Fehrle wanted. But help doing what? What the clot! He already had his genitalia on the table. Maybe it was time to dare the knife.

  "Forgive me, my lord,” he said. “Along with you, and my Lord Wichman, I certainly deplore the situation you are outlining. We should take drastic action. But..."

  "Go on,” Fehrle said a little sharply, trying to prod the man into giving him an opening.

  "But ... perhaps there is some way we can make use of some of these people first."

  Wichman almost exploded at that. He came halfway to his feet. “How dare—"

  "Exactly my thinking,” Fehrle said.

  Wichman thumped back down. “What? Oh, yeah! Good idea. Uh ... right!” Then the poor bewildered man could not help himself any longer. “Clot! What am I saying? What's a good idea?"

  Fehrle and Pastour laughed, and Wichman, after a moment, had the good grace to laugh with them. They had more drinks while Fehrle laid it out for them.

  He did have a way of making use of the leakers, but in a contorted way that even the Eternal Emperor would have admired. In fact, he had taken the whole plan right out of the Emperor's book.

  Fehrle planned to pull hope out of the ashes of the ruins of the High Council's palace. They had all bee
n puzzled at the Emperor's behavior after they had launched their own sneak attack on his headquarters in the opening blow of the war. The Emperor had immediately flooded the airways with an endless series of propaganda portraits showing him shaking his fist at the Tahn in defiance. At first it had seemed like empty gesturing. What did that accomplish? Immediately after that, they were surprised at how many of his straying allies returned to the Emperor's camp. There was nothing empty about the campaign at all. It brought in badly needed ships and troops in a swell of public opinion.

  Fehrle was proposing the same thing, but on a much larger scale. He wanted to launch a grand tour of twenty-two systems in which he would personally appear with the leaders of said systems, giving the Emperor the finger at every opportunity.

  The lonely Tahn, fighting on despite the odds against the warmongering running dog Imperialist giant. Vowing to win against all odds. That sort of thing. Privately, he would use a heavy cudgel to stiffen the spine of their allies. He would convince them all to dig into the trenches and fight to the last being. If it worked, any victory the Emperor hoped for would come at an exceedingly high price that Fehrle doubted he would be willing to pay.

  Wichman loved it. Pastour, grudgingly, admitted there might be some wisdom in it. Still, he remembered the bloodbath of the bombing raid on the city and the strange appearance of Sten in his heavily guarded domain. If the Emperor could do all that at will...

  "I fear for your life, my lord,” he finally said. “What is to prevent the Emperor from learning of your plan and then attacking when you least expect it? If you were assassinated, I'm not sure how the people would behave."

  "I want the Emperor to learn about it,” Fehrle said.

  Once again, Wichman was surprised. Pastour, however, got it right away. Fehrle would have his staff plan two itineraries. The first would show the tour commencing on Arbroath. On the surface, that would seem like a logical choice, since the Arbroath were totally loyal to the Tahn. They would grovel at Fehrle's knees and praise him, making for wonderful propaganda. That itinerary would be leaked. In reality, Arbroath was a rotten jumping-off point. The people were so stupidly and blindly loyal that they would fight on anyway until they were all dead.

  The real stepping-off point would be Cormarthen. Pastour saw the wisdom in that right off. The people there were wild rebels—a semi-Celtic splinter cult whose sole motivation for aiding the Tahn was their unreasoning hatred of the Empire. When the war was over—assuming the Tahn won—they were sure to instantly turn on their allies. In fact, after the string of recent defeats they were already wavering. Fehrle planned to put a stop to that immediately. On day one of the twenty-two system tour he would be able to present his people with a diplomatic victory.

  The rest of the tour would be plotted the same way. False clues would be planted with the Imperialists while Fehrle maddeningly popped up at the least expected places to flip off the Eternal Emperor.

  Pastour and Wichman pledged enthusiastic support. They would work on their own people as well as lobby the other factions. Fehrle was guaranteed unanimous acceptance when the proposal was formally presented to the High Council.

  While Fehrle and Wichman were congratulating each other on the yet-to-be success, Pastour remembered Sten. And Koldyeze. He had thought about the young man's odd request. He had recently seen a way not only to make good his promise but to bump the value of the pot a thousand percent.

  During the course of the conflict the Tahn had taken millions of prisoners of all kinds. But a very few of those prisoners presented special difficulties.

  They were the important diplomats, politicians, and high-ranking officers who had fallen into Tahn hands. Even the instinctive Tahn disdain for prisoners did not allow them to treat those beings with anything other than kid gloves—relatively speaking. The problem had been finding the proper guards with at least a modicum of political reality.

  At the moment, that was impossible. The prisoners were spread out in camps all over the Tahn Empire.

  What Pastour wanted to do was to solve that problem at one stroke. He would place them all at Koldyeze. Then he would personally oversee their treatment through his emissaries. There was also an even greater advantage in putting all his rocks in one stonebucket. If and when the Tahn were defeated, Pastour would have heavy-duty trading stock to strike his bargain for peace with the Emperor.

  Obviously he could not word any of that exactly the same way if he wanted to bring Fehrle and Wichman to his side. Instead, he appealed to their blood lust.

  "If we had them all in one place,” he said as he came to the end of his explanation, “we'd only need one gun to hold against their heads."

  "And if the Emperor refuses us,” Wichman broke in, “we kill them all. I like it!"

  Fehrle also added his support.

  When Pastour went home some time later, a little warm and tiddly from the drink and the companionship, he thought fondly about how well the Tahn system of government worked. A few well-chosen words—out of hearing from the squabble of conflicting viewpoints of the public—and the correct measures were taken to ensure the future of the race. It made him feel proud and patriotic.

  The next day, when he was sober, he would plan his next moves at Koldyeze.

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  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  STEN WAS FAIRLY disgusted with the Tahn. What, after all, was an evil empire without an internal conspiracy or six? The Tahn were short on dissidents. Those few enemies of the regime seemed to have gotten policed up years earlier/and their dissidence was mainly made up of the idea that maybe the Tahn Council ought to say please before conquering somebody. From the limited leaks he had been able to get from Tahn CI, the current treason seemed to consist of street gossips or poor sods who complained about having to work a double shift without getting a food break.

  Sneakiness abhorred a vacuum, and so Sten and Kilgour went to work, building themselves a good list of traitorous swine. They decided, just to keep things interesting, that it would be a military conspiracy.

  There were three requirements:

  The conspiring officer had to have complained about how the war was going. Even a recorded mutter into a shaving mirror made the officer eligible. So, in that manner, Admiral Whoosis on the Sabac made the grade.

  The conspiring officer had to be highly respected.

  The conspiring officer had to have served in combat, on a frontline world, or, during peacetime, on a world where there was an Imperial presence.

  It was not necessary that the eager conspirator actually be anything other than a rabid believer in the Tahn right to grab anything around from anyone weaker. As a matter of fact, Sten did not want anyone like that. People with real politics made him nervous—even if he had been able to find any.

  Once Sten and Kilgour had the list, they put it up on a computer screen and started cross-connecting the conspiracy. The officers chosen for links needed no particular qualifications, except that their absence would not improve Tahn efficiency. That was, for instance, how the third assistant paymaster general, the Tahn Counterintelligence number two, and the chief of the chaplain's acolyte division became dangerous threats.

  Then, when Kilgour had that list all neat and tidy, it went out on a burst transmission to the Imperial base station located somewhere they never knew for appropriate usage.

  Most of the conspiracy list was handled by Alex. Sten had another problem: Lord Fehrle's “show the flag” tour. It did not make any sense. Not that the tour made no sense—but everybody seemed to know about it. Either Tahn Security was composed of numbwits—which Sten did not dare let himself believe—or else everyone connected with the tour was suffering from terminal oral diarrhea.

  He sent through the reports of when Fehrle was going, where Fehrle was going from the Arbroath worlds onward, what he would eat and drink, where he would be banqueted, and whom he would meet straight on to the Empire. All graded Category Two or lower, ranging from reliable source, pe
rsonally received, down to outhouse rumor. But none of it was Category One: accepted by this station as truth.

  Then one afternoon Chetwynd sent word, through the cutouts, that he wanted a meet.

  They fenced recreationally for a couple of drinks. Wasn't it about time that Chetwynd's credit allowance was increased? Couldn't he be more helpful to the cause if Sten gave him some idea as to what was happening next? Had he heard anything about a new offensive failing? Then he got down to it.

  "One a’ my longtime cheenas hit on somethin’ you might find interesting. He's one of my best agents, y’ know."

  "A thief, in other words."

  Chetwynd looked ponderously injured. “Clot, Sten, don't be so suspicious. The clot's a hard-core freedom fighter."

  "I stand corrected. A good thief."

  "He was out last night. Around the 23YXL area of the port. Y’ know, that's where most of the bonded warehouses are. He was looking for good intelligence and—” Chetwynd chuckled and drank. “—anything else that wasn't riveted down.

  "Came on this warehouse. Security up the yahoo. Which was interestin'. He got up on the rooftop and snaked in. All of a sudden a couple Tahn plainclothes come out from behind a vent. Damn near popped him.

  "He come off that roof and said the place was crawlin’ with rozzers. Funny—he said he knew a couple of ‘em. CI, they was.

  "Dunno what's in that warehouse. But thought you might want to be tipped the wink."

  Chetwynd waited. Sten dug out a wad of credits and passed them across. They were not given with any pretense on either side that they were intended for Chetwynd's organization. Maybe Chetwynd's tier ranger, if he was indeed a longtime cheena, might see a little of it. But probably not.

  * * * *

  Kilgour swept the warehouse with a palm-size set of available-light binocs and hissed through his teeth. “Thae tub's wae bein't conservative. Thae's more screws around yon warehouse thae a Campbell hae fleas."