‘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.