Throne of Stars (38 page)

The latter were an extremely mixed bag. Some of them were from groups that were in long-term close contact with the Krath, and those were fairly “civilized.” They’d turned up wearing well polished armor and seemed to be following the briefing with interest. They seemed especially fascinated by the hologram of the force structure the NCO had thrown up. However, many of the other chieftains were obviously from “the back of beyond.” The latter were notable for their lighter and less well maintained armor, and the wide separation the Gastan had instituted between the groups—and between some of the clans
within
each group, for that matter—suggested that some of them would rather beat on each other than on the Krath.

“A short analysis of relative combat strengths of the Krath and the Shin/Marine alliance indicates that direct assault is unlikely to be effective,” Julian continued, bringing up a representative animation of a Shin/human assault. “The inability of the human forces to use their plasma weapons, coupled with a lack of powered armor, means that any direct assault, even with human, Diaspran, and Vashin support, is liable to be swallowed without a burp.”

As he finished speaking, the short, holographic animation ended with the “good guys” dead on the field and the Krath flag flying over Nopet Nujam.

“Alternatives to this may be viable, however,” he continued, and brought up a new animation. “The Krath have had only very limited experience with a
civan
charge, and have no equivalent at all of the pike wall.”

In the animation, a unit of
civan
quickly ran down one flank of the Krath forces, causing the rest to redeploy. As they did, the animation drew back, showing a hazily outlined “blue” unit of pikemen and assegai troops, supported by conventional Shin forces, on the slopes above the Krath tent city.

“If this attack is simultaneous with an attack on the tent city by a stealthed armor unit, sufficient chaos may be created to permit a major sortie, supported by Diaspran and Marine infantry, to retake the siege lines and destroy the palisades and the majority of their bombards before they ever get them into effective action.”

The “blue” troops on the slopes swept downward, butchering the surprised Krath in their path, and the animation ended with the wooden palisades of the siege lines, the tent city, and the bombard emplacements all sending up pillars of black smoke as they blazed merrily away.

“And then what?” one of the more barbaric chieftains asked, looking up from the design he’d been carving into a tabletop with a dagger. “You think they’ll turn and run after a single defeat? We need to take Thirlot! We’ll cut them off from food and retreat as we always have, and it’s good loot, besides!”

“Thirlot is well defended,” one of the lowland chieftains said, buffing his polished breastplate. “They left a good portion of their force there on the way up, and another is in Queicuf. If your scruffy band thinks it can take Thirlot, more power to it.”

“Scruffy?! I’ll give you
scruffy
!”

“Enough!” the Gastan barked, and his guards banged the floor with their ceremonial spears. “Shem Cothal, Shem Sul. Taking Thirlot was considered and rejected. Sergeant Julian?”

“We might be able to take Thirlot,” Julian said, looking pointedly at the chieftain in the breastplate. His toot, taking its cue from the Gastan, flashed the name Shem Sul across his vision. “Certainly we could enter the city. With our aid, you could probably destroy the forces that the Gastan’s spies indicate are in the city. Our non-plasma heavy weapons could smash the doors, our armor could open up any hole necessary to get you inside the walls, and a force of Shin and Marines could enter the city and roam almost at will.”

He held the eye of the more polished barbarian until the latter made a gesture of agreement.

“What we could not do is
hold
it,” he said then, turning to the other chieftain, Shem Cothal. “And if we can’t hold it, we can’t cut their supply lines. The Krath would turn their army to the rear and assault Thirlot by swarming the walls. Those walls are barely ten meters high; they could stand on each other’s shoulders and come right over them. And they can march back down the road on the rations they have right here in camp—it’s barely two days to Thirlot. When they got there, our force in the city would be overrun. It would certainly be forced out with severe casualties, possibly cut off and destroyed. Other plans involving putting a blocking force on the Queicuf-Thirlot road have also been rejected for the same reason. We simply don’t have sufficient forces to hold anything other than Nopet Nujam against the Krath army.”

“All of that is no doubt true,” Shem Sul said. “But I have to agree with my colleague.” He gestured at the hologram. “You’re discussing a spoiling attack, nothing more.”

“It’s the best we can do at this time,” Julian said. “And it’s a spoiling attack we can replicate almost at will.”

“They’re not so stupid,” the other chieftain said. “They’ll change their dispositions. ’Tis but a tithe of them that attack at any time. All they have to do is pull some of their other troops back, and your raiders are going to be useless.”

“Then we’ll change tactics,” Roger said. “The point is to wear them down.”

“As opposed to us being frittered away,” Sul replied. “You’ll take casualties on each raid, and they will
win
a battle of attrition. I have to agree with Shem Cothal; we have to cut their supply lines. Cut those, and their army withers on the vine. Nothing else, short of a human superweapon, will work.”

“We can’t use our superweapons until we’ve taken the port,” Pahner said. “And you’re correct, this is an attrition battle, with the addition of trying to break their will. At some point, we might take
Thirlot, if only to burn it to the ground, but only if it helps with our objective, which isn’t to
beat
them so much as to convince them to go away. We don’t have the numbers to kill them all—our arms would fall off before we were done—so we’re looking at ways to convince them victory would simply be too expensive. We’ll look at other options, as well, but for the time being, we need to discuss the briefed plan.”

Roger had been listening carefully, but now he sat up straight, picked up his pad, and started rotating the hologram, zooming in and out on the region around Queicuf. He zoomed in on the road just to the east of the fortress, where the valley narrowed down to the gorge of the Shin River, pinching the road bed between the valley walls and the deep, broad river.

“Julian, is this map to scale?”

“No, Your Highness. The vertical exaggeration is at one to three.”

“Hmmm . . . fascinating . . .”

“What, Your Highness?” Pahner asked. He eyed the prince thoughtfully, wondering what the youngster was up to now. Whether it was
practical
or not, it should at least be interesting as hell, the Marine thought, because at some levels, Roger was a much more devious tactician than he himself was.

“There might just be an exploitable weakness here,” the prince said, rotating the image again so that he was looking at the battlefield from ground level. “Captain Pahner, Lords of the Shin, we probably should try the briefed plan, if for no other reason than to put them a bit more on the defensive. But there might just be another way. Oh my, yes. Quite a weakness.”

Cord turned back down the corridor, still leaning heavily on his spear for support, as the door closed on the prince. Pedi started to take his arm, then snatched her hand back as he jerked away.

“I am not so weak that I need your support,
benan,
” he said harshly.

“I ask pardon,
benai,
” she said. “I had not realized that contact with your
benan
was so beneath you.”

“Not beneath me,” Cord sighed. “Perhaps I should not snap, but . . .”

“But?” Pedi opened the door and checked the hallway beyond. The Gastan had placed guards along the corridor, and they nodded to her as she passed. She had known some of them for years, grown up with them. But she could feel the distance that now separated them, a gulf that was hard to define, yet as real as death itself. All that she knew was that either she had grown away from Mudh Hemh, or it was somehow rejecting her.

“But . . .” Cord began, then inhaled deeply, and not just from the pain of moving with his partially healed wound. “I know that I’m your
benai,
not your father,” he growled. “But in the
asi
bond, the master has certain responsibilities. Although in my culture, females cannot become
asi,
if they had . . . problems, it would be the . . . responsibility of the master to deal with them.”

“Problems?” Pedi asked archly as they came to their shared chamber. “What problems?” she asked as she opened the door and swept the room.

“Don’t play with me, Pedi Karuse,” Cord said firmly as he lowered himself onto the pile of cushions within. The fact that he barely managed to stifle a groan as he settled into them said a great deal about how far from recovered he truly was. “I’m in too much pain to play games. I can see your condition clearly, as can anyone with eyes. It is only the humans who are confused. I would have expected your father to be fuming by now.”

“It is not my father’s place to ‘fume,’” she said sharply. “As
benan
, I am beyond the strictures of my family.”

“Then it
is
my responsibility to investigate the situation,” Cord said. “I am furious about this, you know. No true male would do this and then leave you to bear the burden.”

Pedi opened her mouth, then shut it.

“It is my burden to bear,” she said, after a moment. “It was my choice.”

“It takes two to make such a choice,” Cord pointed out, grimacing as he tried to find a comfortable position. “There is a male, somewhere, who has much explaining to do. A male who would impregnate you and then refuse to acknowledge that fact—such a male is without honor.”

“It’s not his fault,” Pedi said. “I cannot—I
will
not—say more. But this is my responsibility to bear.”

Cord sighed in exasperation, but made a gesture of resignation.

“As you will. I cannot imagine you lying with a male without honor. But let it be your secret, your ‘cross,’ as the humans would say. I shall raise any of the brood as if they were my own.”

“I wouldn’t hold you to that,” Pedi said, getting the balm the human physician had made. “It is . . . It isn’t your fault.”

“I, however, am a male of honor,” Cord said, then sighed in relief as she rubbed the salve into the inflamed wound. “I thank you for that,” he told her, then shook himself and looked at her sternly. “But to return to what truly matters, I will not let your children be raised as bastards, Pedi. I will not. It will be as if they were mine.”

“I understand,
benai,
but I can handle it,” she said woodenly. “And the situation with the father is . . . complex. I wish that you would let me manage it in my own way.”

“As you wish,” he said with another sigh. “As you wish.”

“I wish this didn’t look so easy,” Julian muttered.

“What?” O’Casey asked. “Something about this god-forsaken mess strikes you as ‘easy’?”

She sat up straight on the camp stool, rubbing her back, and grinned at the sergeant. It was a very crooked grin, because both of them had been perusing their separate “slices” of the intelligence data from the IBI agent for the last couple of hours. While Julian concentrated on Marduk itself, she had been wading through the data about the coup, and she was coming to the conclusion that Julian was right about that information’s reliability. And about the implications of that reliability.

There was too much data on the disk, and it was too consistent, and from too many known sources, to have been entirely generated locally. But if it had been generated by a central authority, if either the Empire or the Saints knew that Roger was alive on Marduk, the planet would have been crawling with searchers. Since it wasn’t, the data was probably genuine, and the IBI agent was probably on the level. In which case, whatever happened here on Marduk, “just going home” was no longer an option.

“If you have good news, I could use some,” she went on, leaning back from her own pad.

“That’s just it—I don’t know if it
is
good news,” Julian said. “The problem is that this governor is either a complete and total idiot . . . or else subtly brilliant. And I’ve been working on the premise of subtly brilliant, looking for the dastardly plan.”

“I haven’t even looked,” O’Casey admitted. “Who is the governor?”

“Ymyr Brown, Earl of Mountmarch,” Julian said, then looked up sharply as O’Casey let out a rippling peal of laughter before she slapped her hand over her mouth to restrain the follow-on giggles.

“You know him?” Julian asked. She nodded, both hands over her mouth, and the sergeant’s eyes glinted wickedly. “Okay, I can see from your reaction that you
do
know him, and that he’s probably not all that great. But you have to give him a break—growing up with a name like ‘Ymyr’ couldn’t have been all that much fun.”

“You’re being much too kind to him,” O’Casey assured him. Another giggle slipped out, and she shook her head. “And take my word for it, whatever you’re looking at is
not
a deeply laid plan. However stupid it seems.”

“I almost wish it was,” the sergeant said. “I just
hate
relying on the bad guys’ stupidity. Even idiots have a bad habit of slipping up and doing something reasonably intelligent every so often, if only so Murphy can screw with your mind. Besides,
nobody
could really be this dumb.”

“What did he do?” O’Casey asked, looking over his shoulder at an indecipherable schematic. After a moment, it resolved itself into a map of the port.

“Well, he set up an intelligence network in all the satraps of Krath,” Julian said. He touched a control and brought up a picture of the continent, with data scrolling along the sides and political boundaries mapped in. “That much isn’t dumb. But he has all these reports coming in, and he didn’t want the spies just walking through his front gates. So he set up
cleared lanes
in the
defenses
!”