The Prince by Jerry Pournelle and S.M. Stirling

“OK,” she said after a moment. “Von Reuter, how are the troops?”

“Those in the latest wave from the Dales are now fully rested. The first arrifals are restless.” The German-born ex-CD officer had been in charge of keeping the inflow inconspicuous until she arrived. “Some attempted to desert.”

“We doan allow no deserters.”

“Ja, we know how to deal with those.” The German shrugged. “We have done so. But these are not regular soldiers, and we are short of non-commissioned officers. Too many were lost covering our retreat in the Dales.”

“Hard fight, but we win in the Dales,” Skilly said. “Victory there. Show we can stand up to the Cits.”

“I agree. And so we tell the recruits,” von Reuter said evenly. “But they were also told they will win soon. They believe this, but one does not learn patience in Welfare Island. The war goes on, for many longer than anything they have ever done in their miserable lives.”

“You knew what kind of recruits you were getting,” Skilly said. Her voice hardened. “You tell me you know how to make soldiers out of them. You say CoDo’s been doing that for fifty years, taking gang-banger homeboys and making them Marines.”

“And so we have, Field Prime. But we do not also hide from police while we train CoDominium Marines, ja? When they graduate they parade, people cheer, pretty girls admire uniforms. Not here.” He straightened formally. “Field Prime, if you are not satisfied with my performance—”

“You not thinking of quitting on Skilly?” Everyone in the room stiffened, and tension mounted. Then, suddenly, she grinned wolfishly. “You doin’ fine. Doan worry so much. Everything goin’ just like we want.”

The Helots had been moving men and supplies from the Dales to the Kupros in dribs and drabs since the midwinter battles. It was a long way from the Dales, north and east along the foothills. Longer when you had to move in small bodies and take extreme care not to be observed. The Kupros held few people away from the mining settlements, but there were ranches in the hill-and-basin country of the piedmont, and the odd trapper elsewhere.

“You want fighting, we do that, all right. Now listen up, everyone.” The dozen or so commanders leaned closer. “Operational plans you all got, so Field Prime will tell you the general stuff again. We not trying to hold what we take, but this be no hit-and-run, either. Two overall objectives: temporary economic damage, maybe some loot, but mainly we demoralize the militia. Then it easier next time.”

She dusted her hands, set the cup down on the pine needles and wrapped her arms around her knees. The hard wolfish faces about her were intent. Everything seemed very clear: von Reuter’s methodical clock-mind making notes, Two-knife’s rock solidness, Niles still with a little of the detached air—not as much, maybe he getting over it; this fight show it one way or the other—the others frowning a little. One of them raised a hand.

“Field Prime, the original planning called for maximum attack on off-world mining equipment. May I ask why that’s been changed?” They were all aware of the importance of denying the Royalists foreign exchange to buy weapons systems.

“Because, Hernandez, due to our, ah, consultants, and other things which you got no need to know, the overall schedule been moved up. We be needing CD credits and Friedlander marks someday too. And maybe von Reuter getting them parades he wants sooner than we think.”

Predatory grins at that. None of these men intended to live in caves for the rest of their lives.

“OK,” Skilly continued. “So you got the schedule of targets, stuff they can replace but not quick. Now, basic, this is a terror raid. Remember, though, it selective terror. We has to show the workers they should be more afraid of us than the Royalists, and the Cits that fighting us is no way to protect their households—just the opposite, that the fact. Useless if they think we kill everyone no matter what they do. Understand me? We want to demoralize, not make cornered rats. Collateral damage in the course of operation be fine; any unauthorized murder, rape, looting or arson, I want punished quick and public and hard. Skilly will hang anyone not understand that.

“So,” she went on, after meeting the eyes of each. “Next, we gots to have real careful timing. Troops, they full of beans and think they can lick the world, we convinced them we won the Dales fight. They believe that, doan matter what really happen.” And they do fight good. All of them. For a moment she remembered the provisional companies left behind to protect the retreating leadership. No omelets without eggs. Too many eggs that time, but Skilly learn. “Good they got confidence, bad if they be getting the stuffing knocked out. Better we not believe our own propaganda; we still no able to fight the enemy on their own terms. We make them fight on our terms. First—”

* * *

“It’s a good computer system,” the milita staff chief of Stora Mine said; the commander was out with the troops. “Only as good as the input, of course, but it does help us coordinate things on the security side.”

“I see.” Ace Barton was deliberately noncommittal.

They were a very long way indeed from Sparta City—seven thousand kilometers or more by river, about half that as the crow flew—in an area crucial to the war effort. The windows on one side of this room showed the reason why. The great openpit mine had been operating for fifty years, but it had only just begun to make a mark on the jagged side of the mountain, itself a lone outlier of the Kupros range that stretched across the northern horizon. A semicircular bite had been taken out of its side, stepping up the striated rock in smooth terraces; there were huge diesel-electric trucks at work there now, hauling down the ore blasted free from the face. Another charge went off, and hundreds of tonnes slid slowly down to lie in a rubbled pile. As the dust clouds settled, hundreds of overalled figures swarmed forward with pneumatic hammers, while others waited with scoop-loaders.

The manager—her name was Olafson—nodded when she noticed the direction of his eyes.

“Bit archaeological, the technique, but it’s actually cheaper than sonic crushers and robots,” she said cheerfully. “Cheaper than asteroid mining, even, if we watch the costs carefully. This is an unusual formation: copper, silver, thorium and platinum, iron, nickel. Mechanical crushing, then powdering, chemical separation, magnetic; we ship the easier stuff in ingot form down the railway to the lake, south to the Vulcan rapids by barge and then down to Olynthos over the railway around those. Powdered slurry along the same route for the more refractory materials. We run some shaft mines underground as well, and this is the collection point for a lot of independent outfits up in the hills.” A scowl. “Or was, before the bandits got so bad.”

She indicated the jagged line of the mountains. “We’ve got a geothermal power station here as well, about 400 MW, so what with one thing and another we’ve become the second center of the Upper Valley, after Olynthos.”

Anselm Barton had been examining the retrieval system; it was like much else on Sparta, a cobbled-together compromise. Bulky locally-made display monitors, rather than the thin-film liquid crystal units made elsewhere, and multiple terminals routed through ordinary laptops into the mainframe unit. That was a featureless cube about three times the size of a briefcase, hooked in turn to a databank about the same size.

“Earth-made?” he asked.

“Earth’s systems are overpriced junk,” Olafson replied with a snort; her civilian hat was deputy vice-president for operations of Storaberg Mines Inc. “No, from Xanadu. Thirty years old, and still works like a charm.” She nodded again at his unspoken question. “Yes, we check for viral infiltration regularly, and we’ve had your people up on the link too, once a week. That what brings you here?”

“Part of it. We’ve brought some technicians along with us,” Barton said. He was nervous about that. However careful these people were, they were working with old equipment and they were provincials. The Legion’s own computers had Read Only Memory programming; efficient for military use, but not flexible enough for a civilian operation. And Murasaki’s technoninjas are just too damn good with computers.

“Part of it. What’s the rest of it?” she demanded. “You’re here with your headquarters groups, Legionnaires at the landing field, and two battalions more on the way. Something’s up?”

“Well, not really. Bit of paranoia. Here, show off your system.”

“No problem,” Olafson said. “Here’s how we’ve managed it. This system’s got lots of capacity; we got it cheap, that’s why we’ve got a central unit rather than a dispersed network.”

She called up a map of the mine and area. “There are about six thousand people working for the Company, a thousand or so Citizens and long-term employees, the rest casuals. As many again in dependents, service industries and so forth. We’ve always had a Company police”—Storaberg Mines Inc. was owned by the managers and skilled employees, mostly—”we’ve expanded to about five hundred men, with Citizen officers and light infantry weapons. Your Captain Alana’s people checked them; we spotted half a dozen Helot plants among the recruits, and hanged them to discourage others.”