Use of Weapons (51 page)

'Shenastri
Province!' Napoerea exclaimed. 'But there are a dozen important religious sites
there! More! And you propose to surrender without a fight?'

'You'll
get the temples back once we've won the war, and probably lots of new treasure
to put inside them. They're going to fall whether we try to hold there or not,
and they'll probably be damaged if not destroyed in the fighting. This way,
they'll survive intact. And it stretches their supply lines like crazy. Look;
the rains start in, what? A month? By the time we're ready to counter-attack,
they'll have even worse supply problems; the wet lands behind them mean they
can't bring stuff that way, and they can't retreat there once we do attack.
Nappy; old son; this is beautiful, believe me. If I was a commander on the
other side and I saw this area being offered, I wouldn't go within a million
klicks of it, but the Imperial Army boys are going to have to because the Court
won't let them do anything else. But they'll know it's a trap. Terrible for the
morale.'

'I
don't know, I don't know...' Napoerea shook his head, both his hands at his
mouth, massaging his lower lip while he looked worriedly at the map.

(No,
you don't know, he thought to himself, watching the man's nervous
body-language. You lot haven't known anything very useful for generations,
chum.) 'It must be done,' he said. 'The withdrawal should start today.' He
turned to another map. 'Aircraft; stop the bombing and strafing of the roads.
Give the pilots two days' rest, then raid the oil refineries, here.' He
pointed. 'A mass raid; use everything with the range that'll fly.'

'But
if we stop attacking the roads...'

'They'll
fill with even more refugees,' he told the man. 'That'll slow the Imperial Army
down more than our planes. I
do
want
some of these bridges taken out.' He tapped a couple of river crossings. He
looked mystified at Napoerea. 'You guys sign some sort of agreement not to bomb
bridges or something?'

'It
has always been felt that destroying bridges would hinder a counter-attack, as
well as being... wasteful,' the priest said, unhappily.

'Well,
these three have to go, anyway.' He tapped the surface of the map. 'That and
the refinery raid should put some sand in their fuel-lines,' he said, clapping
his hands together and rubbing them.

'But
we believe the Imperial Army has great reserves of fuel,' Napoerea said,
looking very unhappy.

'Even
if they have,' he told the high-priest, 'Commanders will move more cautiously
knowing supplies have been interrupted; they're careful guys. But I bet they
never did have the supplies you thought; they probably think you have bigger
supplies than you do, and with the advance they've had to fund recently...
believe me; they may panic a little if the refinery raid comes off the way I
hope it will.'

Napoerea
looked downcast, rubbed his chin while he gazed forlornly at the maps. 'It all
sounds very...' he began.'... very...
adventurous
.'

The
high-priest invested the word with a degree of loathing and contempt that might
have been amusing in other circumstances.

Under
great protest, the high priests were persuaded they must give up their precious
province and its many important religious sites to the enemy; they agreed to
the mass raid on the refinery.

He
visited the retreating soldiers and the main airfields that would take part in
the refinery raid. Then he took a couple of days travelling the mountains by
truck, inspecting the defences. There was a valley with a dam at its head that
might also provide an effective trap if the Imperial Army made it that far (he
remembered the concrete island, the snivelling girl and the chair). While he was
driven along the rough roads between the hill forts, he saw a hundred or more
aircraft drone overhead, heading out across the still peaceful looking plains,
their wings loaded with bombs.

The
refinery raid was expensive; almost a quarter of the planes never came back.
But the Imperial Army's advance halted a day later. He had hoped they would
keep on coming for a bit - their supplies hadn't been supplied straight from
the refinery, so they could have kept going for a week or so - but they'd done
the sensible thing, and stopped for the moment.

He
flew to the spaceport, where the lumbering spaceship - it looked even more
dangerous and dilapidated in daylight - was being slowly patched up and
repaired in case it was ever wanted again. He talked to the technicians, took a
look round the ancient device. The ship had a name, he discovered; the
Hegemonarchy Victorious
.

'It's
called decapitation,' he told the priests. 'The Imperial Court travels to
Willitice Lake at the start of every Second Season; the high command comes to
brief them. We drop the
Victorious
in
on them, the day the general staff arrive.'

The
priests looked puzzled. 'With what, Sir Zakalwe? A commando force? The
Victorious
is only able to hold...'

'No
no,' he said. 'When I say drop it, I mean we bomb them with it. We put it into
space and then bring it back in, down on top of the Lake Palace. It's a good
four hundred tonnes; even travelling at only ten times the speed of sound it'll
hit like a small nuke going off; we'll get the entire Court and the general
staff in one go. We offer peace to the commoners' parliament immediately. With
any luck at all we cause immense civil disturbance; probably the commoners'
parliament will see this as their chance to grab real power; the army will want
to take up the reigns itself, and may even have to turn round and fight a civil
war. Junior aristos filing competing claims should complicate the situation
nicely.'

'But,'
Napoerea said, 'this means destroying the
Victorious
,
does it not?' The other priests were shaking their heads.

'Well,
impacting at four or five kilometres a second wouldn't leave it totally
undented, I suspect.'

'But
Zakalwe!' Napoerea roared, doing a reasonable impression of a small nuclear
explosion himself, 'That's absurd! You can't do it! The
Vktorious
is a symbol of... it's our hope! All the people look at
our...'

He
smiled, letting the priest ramble on for a little while. He was fairly certain
the priests looked on the
Hegemonarchy
Victorious
as their escape route if things went badly in the end.

He
waited until Napoerea had almost finished, then said, 'I understand; but the
craft is on its last legs already, gentlemen. I've talked to the technicians
and the pilots; it's a death-trap. It was more luck than anything else that it
got me here safely.' He paused, watching the men with the blue circles on their
foreheads look wide-eyed at each other. The muttering increased. He wanted to
smile.
That
had put the fear of god
into them. 'I'm sorry, but this is the one thing the
Victorious
is good for.' He smiled. 'And it could indeed produce
Victory.'

He
left them to mull over the concepts of high-hypersonic dive-bombing (no, no
suicide mission required; the craft's computers were perfectly capable of
taking it up and bringing it straight down), symbol-trashing (a lot the
peasants and factory workers would care about their piece of high-tech baublery
getting junked), and Decapitation (probably the most worrying idea of the lot
for the high-priests; what if the Empire thought of doing it to them?) He assured
them the Empire would be in no state to retaliate; and when they offered peace,
the priests would hint heavily they had used a missile of their own, not the
spacecraft, and pretend there were more where that came from. Even though this
would not be difficult to disprove, especially if one of the world's more
sophisticated societies chose to tell the Empire what had really happened, it
would still be
worrying
for whoever
was trying to work out what to do on the other side. Besides, they could always
just get out of the city). Meanwhile he went to visit more army units.

The
Imperial Army started its advance again, though slower than before. He had
drawn his troops back almost to the foothills of the mountains, burning the few
unharvested fields and razing the towns behind them. Whenever they abandoned an
airfield they planted bombs under the runways with days-long time delays, and
dug plenty of other holes that looked like they might contain bombs.

In
the foothills he supervised much of the lay-out of their defensive lines
himself, and kept up his visits to airfields, regional headquarters and
operational units. He kept up, too, the pressure on the high priests at least
to consider using the spacecraft for a decapitation strike.

He
was busy, he realised one day, as he lay down to sleep in an old castle that
had become operational HQ for this section of the front (the sky had bloomed
with light on the tree-lined horizon, and the air shaken with the sound of a
bombardment, just after dusk). Busy and - he had to admit, as he put the last
reports on the floor under the camp bed, and put the light out and was almost
instantly asleep - happy.

Two
weeks, three weeks from his arrival; the little news that came in from outside
seemed to indicate there was an awful lot of nothing going on. He suspected
there was a lot of intense politicking taking place. Beychae's name was
mentioned; he was still on the Murssay Station, in touch with the various
parties. No word of the Culture, or from it. He wondered if they ever just
forgot things; maybe they'd forget about him, leave him here, struggling
forever in the priests' and the Empire's insane war.

The
defences grew; the Hegemonarchy's soldiers dug and built, but were mostly not
under fire, and the Imperial Army gradually lapped against the foothills and
paused. He had the Air Force harry the supply lines and the front line units,
and pound the nearest airfields.

'There
are far too many troops stationed here, round the city. The best troops should
be at the front. The attack will come soon, and if we're to counter-attack
successfully - and it could be
very
successfully, if they're tempted to go for a knockout; they've little left in
reserve - then we need those elite squads where they can do some good.'

'There
is the problem of civil unrest,' Napoerea said. He looked old and tired.

'Keep
a few units here, and keep them in the streets, so people don't forget they're
here, but dammit, Napoerea, most of these guys spend all their time in
barracks. They're needed at the front. I have just the place for them, look...'

Actually
he wanted to tempt the Imperial Army to go for the knock-out, and the city was
to be the bait. He sent the crack troops into the mountain passes. The priests
looked at how much territory they'd now lost, and tentatively gave the go-ahead
for preparing for decapitation; the
Hegemonarchy
Victorious
would be readied for its final flight, though not used unless
the situation appeared genuinely desperate. He promised he would try to win the
war conventionally first.

The
attack came; forty days after he had arrived on Murssay, the Imperial Army
crashed into the foothill forests. The priests began to panic. He had the Air
Force attack the supply lines the majority of the time, not the front. The
defensive lines gradually gave way; units retreated, bridges were blown.
Gradually, as the foothills led into the mountains, the Imperial Army was
concentrated, funnelled into the valleys. The trick with the dam didn't work
this time; the charges placed under it just didn't go off. He had to move fast
to shift two elite units to cover the pass above that valley.

'But
if we leave the city?' The priests looked stunned. Their eyes looked as empty
as the painted blue circle on their foreheads. The Imperial Army was slowly
moving up the valleys, forcing their soldiers back. He kept telling them things
would be all right, but things just got worse and worse. There was nothing else
for them to do; it all seemed too hopeless, and too late to take things back
into their own hands. Last night, with

the
wind blowing down from the mountains to the city, the sound of distant
artillery had been audible.

'They'll
try to take Balzeit City if they think they can,' he said. 'It's a symbol. Well
fine, but it doesn't actually have much military importance. They'll grab at
it. We let just so many through, then we close the passes; here,' he said,
tapping the map. The priests shook their heads.

'Gents,
we are not in disarray! We are falling back. But they are in much worse shape
than we are, taking far heavier casualties; each metre is costing them blood.
And, all the time, their supply lines get longer. We must take them to the
point where they start to think about pulling back, then present them with the
possibility - the seeming possibility - of a knock-out blow. But it won't knock
us out; it knocks them out.' He looked round them. 'Believe me; it'll work. You
may have to leave the citadel for a while, but when you return, I guarantee it
will be in triumph.'

They
did not look convinced, but - possibly because they were just too stunned to
fight - they let him have his way.

It
took a few days, while the Imperial Army struggled up the valleys, and the
Hegemonarchy's forces resisted, retreated, resisted, retreated, but eventually
- watching for signs that the Imperial soldiers were tiring, and the tanks and
trucks not always moving when they might have wanted to, starved of fuel - he
decided that were he on the other side, he'd be thinking about halting the
advance. That night, in the pass which led down to the city, most of the
Hegemonarchy troops left their positions. In the morning the battle resumed,
and the Hegemonarchy's men suddenly retreated, shortly before they would have
been over-run. A puzzled, excited but still exhausted and worried General in
the Imperial High Command watched through field glasses as a distant convoy of
trucks crawled away down the pass towards the city, occasionally strafed by
Imperial aircraft. Reconnaissance suggested the infidel priests were making
preparations to leave their citadel. Spies indicated that their spacecraft was
being readied for some special mission.