And Hal Slater is Falkenberg’s oldest friend. If anyone knows what Falkenberg’s game is, Slater will.
Lysander halted at the window and looked out over the square. “I had hoped to get more out of the Illyrian Dales campaign,” he said bitterly. “We certainly paid enough for it.”
Owensford nodded. The battles against the Helots in the northwestern hills had been bloody. Bloodily victorious, in the conventional sense . . . and a good deal of that was due to Crown Prince Lysander’s refusal to accept a truce offered by the enemy when the battle was won. That had cost the Royal Army, but they had harried the enemy units into rout with a relentless pursuit. Lysander, he knew, was still haunted by the casualties. They’d lost some of those wounded in the enemy’s poison-gas attacks, because many couldn’t be flown out while the battle continued.
“We paid, but never doubt it was worth it,” Owensford said. He looked to Slater and got a nod of agreement. “I doubt if one in five of the enemy escaped on the southern front. High cost in their trained leaders.”
“Not enough to break them,” Lysander said.
“No, sir. But we stopped them. Sir, they were in a fair way to taking and holding a good part of the Dales. That would have given them a sanctuary area. More than that. It would have given them a territory making this an actual planetary war instead of an insurgency. They could have called on the CoDominium to intervene. Depending on CD politics that might even have worked. Instead, we got most of their leaders, maybe half of their lower ranking Meijian technoninjas, a lot of their equipment. Some of their units evaporated. Lots of deserters. One unit surrendered just about to a man.”
“Good recruits?” Hal Slater asked.
Owensford nodded.
Prince Lysander frowned. “You’re accepting Helots as military volunteers?”
Owensford grinned slightly. “Not for you, sir. For the Legion. We’ll get them part trained and ship them off as reinforcements for Colonel Falkenberg on New Washington. The point is, sir, don’t doubt that you made the right choice. We not only robbed them of their victory, we came close to breaking them.”
Slater said, carefully, “It should have been enough to break them.”
“But it didn’t.”
“No, sir,” Peter Owensford said. “They’ve got too much off-planet support.”
“Not just off-planet.”
“No, sir.” A sore point: Sparta hadn’t yet suspended constitutional civil rights, and the Helots had allies in the Senate and elsewhere.
“Look at it this way. You forced them back to classical Phase One guerrilla operations,” Hal Slater said.
“Vigorous Phase One operations,” Owensford said.
“Well, yes,” Slater said. “It hurts, but Phase One can’t win if you keep your nerve.”
Lysander slammed the heel of his hand against the stonework. That was the antiseptic Aristotelian language of a military professional; “Phase One” meant ambush and sabotage, burnt-out ranches and civilians killed by land-mines, every sort of terrorist atrocity.
He looked at Slater. “This is what you meant at the first Royal Strategy Lecture, isn’t it?” He quoted: “‘Insurgency against a modern state requires powerful allies operating from sanctuary. Unfortunately, given supply of war material from a sanctuary, insurgency can be continued practically forever.'”
“Yes, sir,” Hal Slater said. “Under the present circumstances, patience is as important a weapon as explosives.” He shrugged. “It’s also all we have just now.”
Lysander nodded curtly. Both the professionals were older than he—Owensford in his thirties, Slater over fifty—and between them they had a generation’s experience. He would use that accumulated wisdom.
“I agree. I don’t have to like it,” he said. “What else can we do?” He held up a hand. “Not tactics, that’s obvious—what can we do to bring the war to an end?”
Slater smiled thinly; it was not every man Lysander’s age who could keep the need to have strategy driving tactics firmly before his mind.
“There are essentially three ways to defeat an enemy,” Slater began formally. Teaching had been a large part of his military career, even before he became head of the Spartan War College. “Physically smashing them is one—killing so many that the remainder give up in despair. We can only do that with the Helots if they are obliging enough to gather in one place where we can get at them. They nearly made that mistake last year in the Dales, but I doubt they will again. Their leaders are evil men—”
And women, Owensford thought; he remembered the mocking contralto voice of the Helot field commander in the Dales, with its soft Caribbean accent. By the look on his face, so did Lysander. Neither of them had forgotten the helpless prisoners slaughtered on her order.
“—evil to the point where ‘vile’ is an appropriate term, but they are not stupid. Inexperienced in real warfare, but they are cunning, they have experienced mercenary advisors, and they learn quickly.”
Slater sipped water and continued. “As is often the case in war, we cannot force battle on the enemy if they are not willing to meet us; the ratio of force to space is too low. There is nothing they must stand and die to defend; they have no towns, farms or families as the Royal forces do, and no base of supply.” Slater paused. “None within our reach, anyway.”
Sparta had three million people, a tenth of them in the capital; the Serpentine Continent had eighteen million square miles of territory. Even the heartlands along the Eurotas River were thinly peopled.
“Particularly with the limits on surveillance, we are unlikely to catch large numbers of them at any one time.” Skysweeper missiles had knocked down every attempt to loft more spy satellites; observation aircraft were impossible, of course, and even drones were high-cost and short-lived if the enemy had countermeasures. In addition, the Helots’ Meijian hirelings were simply better at electronic intelligence and counter-intelligence than anything the Dual Monarchy of Sparta could afford, and they were running rampant through every computer on the planet with the exception—he devoutly hoped—of the Legion’s. At that, his own electronics specialists were spending a counterproductive amount of time checking for viruses and taps, and vetting Royal Army machines. The Royalist forces were back to what scouts and spies could discover, and whatever the Legion computers could massage out of the data.
“Of course there’s an unpleasant implication to our lack of surveillance,” Slater said. “Low orbit satellites they can knock down fairly easily, but geosynchronous? They had to have cooperation from the CD Navy for that.”
“Are you sure?” Lysander demanded.
“Near enough,” Slater said. “The CD may not have knocked our geosynch out, but they had to look the other way when it happened. And you’ll note they haven’t offered to replace it.”
“No. When we ask for cooperation, they never say ‘no,’ but nothing happens. Delays, red tape, forms not properly filled out . . . Do you think they’re actively against us?”
Slater shrugged. “Or tilted neutral at best.”
“What can we do about that?”
“I presume you’ve filed a formal protest.”
Lysander nodded. “And you?”
“We’ve done what we can,” Peter Owensford said. “I’ve sent off urgent signals to Falkenberg and Admiral Lermontov. With any luck Lermontov can use this to order active CD intervention on our side.”
“How did you send the message?” Lysander asked.
“With your permission I would rather not say,” Owensford said.
Lysander nodded quickly. “That’s probably best. Do you think we can get CD Navy support? When?”
Hal Slater shook his head. “It won’t be soon. CD politics is thick soup.” His voice went back to lecture mode. “The second method of defeating an opponent is to strike at their rear—at the sources of their supplies and support. Unfortunately, we cannot for the same reason we can’t locate them. As long as they have even tacit CD support, their rear area is off-planet.”
“Bronson,” Lysander said; he made the word an obscenity.
“Exactly. Grand Senator Bronson. Somehow Bronson’s people are still landing supplies. His shipping lines regularly transit Sparta’s system, and the supplies get here. It’s like the geosynchronous satellites. We have no proof, but it’s hard to imagine any other explanation.”
The Treaty of Independence had left spatial traffic control in the hands of the CoDominium forces, and the Grand Senator was a power in the CoDominium. So were Sparta’s friends—Grand Admiral Sergei Lermontov and Grand Senator Grant, the Blaine family . . . and the result was deadlock. No new thing. It was a generation since the CoDominium as a whole had been able to do anything of note. The Soviet Union was dissolving again—but so was the United States. Between them they ruled the world, but neither nation remembered why they had wanted to.
“Bronson,” Slater went on, “is also behind most of our economic problems.”
Sparta’s main exports were minerals and intermediate-technology products for planets even less industrialized than she. Markets had been drying up, contracts been revoked, suppliers defaulting, loans being called due. The planetary debt was mushrooming, and Standard and Poor’s had just reduced the Dual Monarchy’s credit rating once more. The financial community was more and more jittery over the situation on Earth, in any case. Capital was flowing out to the secure worlds, places like Friedland and Dayan, and sitting there.