So far it was still playing out, but the Baron began to doubt the result. The sight of so many Ochoans dropping from the skies, and of his two national symbols being blown up and burned, gave him no comfort at all.
Were they all that confident still? They moved like it. Did they think they had large forces pinned down in the castles and the rest sealed up here, or had they suspected or seen what they should not, or had their spies tipped them? Their allies in Zone certainly had it all figured out by now, probably earlier, but how could they get the message here? Did they have the way to do it?
“In range!” somebody shouted. “Fire!”
The Baron didn’t even look. He galvanized into action, put the sights on maximum range and began a back and forth 180 sweep out there in the crater. The other portable emplacements did the same, overlapping their fire, creating a deadly curtain.
In what seemed seconds he was empty, and felt panic and confusion. His wife was on it in a minute, throwing the old canister out and inserting a new one. “Closed! Fire!” she screamed, ducking down.
They were not only firing now, they were getting return fire. It sounded like a child playing with some musical toy as the bullets went ping! ping! PING! all around and ricocheted all over. The Baron felt a slight sting in his left side but ignored it; he kept firing, firing, and finally, through the smoke and haze, he saw the enemy advancing and the bright flashes of his and the other’s fire against their shell shields. He saw many of them crumple in place and seem to collapse like a balloon with the air rushing out of them, to be walked over by others in disciplined ranks. The hard rock was creating deadly ricochets for them as well, and there were far more of them to hit.
His blood was up. He would never have suspected this feeling, this enormous rush that for the moment put fear aside because there simply wasn’t time for it. “Gia! What’s keeping the ammo?” he shouted, then saw her, slumped, eyes wide open but seeing nothing, her pretty body bleeding from a dozen wounds.
“Gia!” he shouted in anguish. You didn’t die at that age, that pretty, with that much position and wealth. You didn’t die save perhaps from accident, or you died ancient with your hundreds of descendants around you. People didn’t die like this! People he knew and loved didn’t die like this!
Two of the runners reached up and pulled her body unceremoniously out of the cage, and one of them leaped in and fed the next canister into the gun. “Highness! You must fire!” she screamed at him, but he just stood there, watching Gia’s crumpled body below, like some horrible rag doll.
There were sudden explosions all around him, and one was so close it shook the gun and almost toppled him. He started swinging around, unable to stop or catch his balance. They were all above him, all around him! These—These things!
One of the runners managed to catch the lower ammo feeder and they stopped the merry-go-round, but more and more explosions were shaking them. At the far end, a bomb from one of the dark shapes above struck a gun just like his and he saw it rise into the air, as if in slow motion, and pieces of it and pieces of Ochoans flying all over, all over . . .
The runner reached up and used a wing to shake him. “Highness! We cannot stand! You must retreat! There is no purpose to your death at this point!” she shouted. Almost immediately something shot from the advancing troops struck her and he saw her chest almost explode as the projectile continued through her and opened a horrible, fatal wound. Her blood splattered all over him, and he screamed and was out of there.
As soon as the few surviving others saw the Baron leap out and glide down almost automatically to the ground, unable to fly well, and literally run right into the Well Gate, they abandoned their positions and followed suit.
An eerie, terrible clicking sound now began all around the Gate, echoing back and magnifying itself as it hit the walls and bounced back again and again. There were still some explosions, and some fire, but it was slowly coming to a halt.
The clicking grew even louder, more rhythmic, coming from the great beetlelike troops of the Jerminians. A cheer of sorts, made with stiff flightless wings and hard mandibles, a terrible, mechanistic cheer . . .
There was some fighting, apparently fierce fighting, still going on in the room-to-room conquest of the two great buildings on the inside walls, but for the most part it was over.
The forces of the New Empire held the center, and the only escape route, of the Ochoan nation.
At that news, one of the Jerminian officers left his position at the rear and moved quickly up and toward the Well Gate. “We want a basic report from all the units in immediate engagement here,” he told his aides. “As soon as possible, bring in the main supplies and fortify both this area and the four points on the crater rim. Any dead bodies nobody wants to eat, our or theirs, should be thrown into the Gate. Dead, they won’t be transported, they will simply be returned to energy. Move! I want you, Captain, to go through the Gate and report as quickly as possible to our ambassadors, who will be waiting there eagerly for your report.”
“At once, Excellency!” the officer responded, and junior officers were suddenly on all fours, at great speed trying to reach the key battle points.
It took about an hour just to compile the handwritten preliminaries, but the results were quite good. Even so, the losses were far above expectation.
“These creatures fought extremely well and with much bravery,” the General heard over and over. “Not a one surrendered. Some of the ones in the buildings used underground escape routes, and the last detachment here at the Well Gate got some of its survivors back into Zone, but that’s about it. Our casualties, though, were over thirty percent. Much higher, and against what appears to be far lower numbers than we anticipated.”
“That just means they sent off brigades to reinforce the castles under siege as we planned,” the General reassured them. “Even so, I agree. When we completely subdue this place, the survivors—and there will be a surrender sooner or later if only to save the race from extinction—will make up the nucleus of what we’ve lacked up to now—a flying division.” He looked over the reports, initialed them with his own distinctive digestive spit, then handed them back to the Captain. “Go now. Others will be sent as progress reports come in from elsewhere. I’d say that this is probably sufficient, though, to have one of our ambassadors serve a formal demand for unconditional surrender at the Ochoan Embassy.”
The Captain gave a salute with six of its eight limbs, men walked with the dispatches toward the Well Gate, past the ruins of the last gun emplacements. It made him feel proud to see this, the absolute, total victory after only a few hours’ hard fight! He was certain that the whole of his hive would also be proud, and that Her Majesty would have great rewards for the officers, perhaps even taking them into the consort, since only she could bear young. It would be an honor to consummate and then be eaten by the queen; such a one would be reincarnated as a potential queen itself!
Without hesitation, the Captain walked into the Well Gate, passed through the sensation of falling and arrival, and walked out, still going, yelling excitedly for any and all to hear, “The Imperial Army and Navy have won a great victory at O—” He suddenly slowed, looking first to one side of the corridor, then to the other. “—choa,” he completed, the last almost dying in his thorax.
The corridor was lined with Ochoan soldiers looking very healthy and fully armed. They flanked both sides of the corridor and had closed in behind him, and now they seemed to stretch on and on . . .
He had no choice. Besides, he was on neutral ground, by treaty and by right. He reached the end of the corridor and turned toward the Jerminian Embassy, wishing it were a lot closer, and found his way blocked by, of all things, a Kalindan in some kind of wheelchair. He did not know it was a Kalindan, but he recognized it as a water creature.
“Come ahead, Captain,” the Kalindan said. “Please, go on. We all want to hear your report.”
Ochoan Embassy, South Zone
nakitti’s heart was breaking as she tended to her Baron, unconscious and still occasionally screaming in his nightmares in the aftermath of being operated on by the Imperial Surgeon herself. She almost had a heart attack just seeing him with all that horrible blood. It turned out that most of it wasn’t his, but he had several serious tears in both wings, a chunk out of his left leg—which might have to be amputated—and a serious wound in his side that had punctured a lung. With the kind of technology and research available at Zone, the Imperial Surgeon had been able to do things they could not have done back in Ochoa, but he’d lost a lot of blood and suffered a lot of damage.
Still, if he survived, a male with wounds like those, the Baron would have more power than any male in Ochoan history and a hell of a lot more than his uncle the King.
Curiously, Nakitti realized it didn’t matter to her how much power he’d gain. He’d been so handsome; now there were nicks on that gorgeous head from ricochets, he might never walk again, and he also might never fly, if he even got the chance, since he could die from loss of blood or infection. If she could take on those injuries and leave him whole, she would gladly surrender her position, go back to that hole in the wall and live out her life in obscurity with some low slob.
The feeling, the honest devotion, surprised, even shocked, her, and would certainly have shocked and surprised anyone who knew her. Hell, maybe it was becoming female or something, she thought; but it was the Ochoan women who did the fighting, and they seemed far less sentimental than the men, and the Ghoman women were all back-stabbing cheats even worse than their men. No, it wasn’t that she was female or Ochoan.
Who’d have thought it, though? That she would find something she cared more about than her own life and fortune. It was utterly incredible.
What happened even back in Ochoa was of little concern to her right now. She was going to be right here for him no matter what, and, to hell with social rank and convention, she would never leave his side again.
Ochoa, at the Zone Gate
“where are those supply troops, the diggers, and the reinforcements?” the General grumbled. “And what are so many of the zi’iaphods doing coming back empty and landing over there? We need to get set up here and we need to do it now!”
“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!”