Sharku had little respect for the men who sat on the Council now. Most of them were overage, Soldiers risen as high as they could and then elected because they had the time—many of them lived down in Saurontown in Nûrnen, not on active duty at all. The First Council's functions were largely ceremonial anyway, these days. The Battlemaster and his staff ran most operations.
That had not been what Galen Diettinger intended when he landed the survivors of the Dol Guldur on Haven. A hologram of the man who had been Captain of that ship and founder of the Citadel was fixed to the wall behind the Council's table, flawless and perfect after three centuries. It showed a tall man in the plain coverall worn by the forces of the Sauron Unified State—even plainer than the Citadel's gray uniform, for it lacked the insignia of the Lidless Eye. Diettinger and Lady Althene had invented that—retrieved it from the same mythos the original discoverers of Sauron had drawn on to name the planet—that and much else. The great banner on the wall above the picture rippled slightly in the breeze from the ventilators.
Sharku stood braced to attention. The Acting First Citizen spoke: the office had been formally vacant for centuries. Sharku himself was a scion of Diettinger's blood, in the female line, through a daughter born to a Havener tribute maiden. Having read Lady Althene's works as few did in these days, he had always mildly regretted not bearing her genes as well.
"Have you anything further to add, Chief Assault Leader?"
Sharku resisted the temptation to steal a glance at the Cyborg beside him. "In summation, Second Rank," he said, "I believe we are the victims of a subtle and long prepared deception and disinformation plan, and our current movements are conforming to that plan. This is an invitation to strategic disaster."
Silence, absolute and complete, from the six men before him and the vast audience in the tiers behind. Soldiers did not fidget.
"And?" the Acting First Citizen prompted.
Bitterness overflowed in Sharku. I knew they would not listen. Had he believed in Fate, he might have comforted himself with the thought that it was a curse—always to speak truth and never to be believed. The rationalist doctrine of the Soldiers gave no reassurance, even one so bitter.
"And," he added, "this is of a pattern with our recent history." He might as well speak his mind, having already ruined hopes of further promotion by defying the Battlemaster. He would be lucky not to be sent to the Tierra del Muerte to fight the Dinneh.
"We Soldiers," he went on, "are unmatched at tactics, in actual fighting. We are masters of the operational art of war. At strategy, and at the long-term political, social and economic management which underlies strategy, we are . . . less adept. That was why we lost the Secession Wars, lost Old Sauron. First Citizen Diettinger was a brilliant long-term strategist; he saved the Race from extinction. He never intended Haven to be our final resting place"—Sharku used the phrase with malice aforethought—"but instead a base to recoup our numbers and strength for another attempt at interstellar mastery.
"Instead," he said, "what have we done? We have not even definitively pacified this planet. Our technological base has declined steadily; from sheer lack of resources, yes, but also from unwillingness to display energies that might attract attention. We do not even know if the Empire of Man still exists; it has been three hundred T-years, yet we still hide from its ghost. The first generation built the Wall—when it fell, we never attempted to rebuild it, partly because it would be visible from space if this planet were ever surveyed. Instead, we sit on our ancestors' achievements, contenting ourselves with meaningless victories over cattle armed with bows and swords."
The Council was showing slight signs of impatience; only a Soldier could have recognized them. I'm going to get this on the record anyway, Sharku decided.
"Lady Althene called Haven the largest and most ruthless experiment in human eugenics ever conducted. This is an accurate appraisal. This planet has been selecting and culling its inhabitants since its first settlement. For the last three T-centuries we have been increasing the selective pressure toward martial achievement—and making the inhabitants a free gift of our genes as well, in a steady diffusion. Is it any surprise, then, that their level of achievement is increasing exponentially? A simple extrapolation of curves will indicate the logical conclusion of that—while this environment lacks sufficient stress to promote such an adaptive increase in us."
That did bring a stir. The thought that cattle might someday outdo Soldiers in fighting ability was . . . what was the cattle phrase? Ah, yes. Heresy.
"In conclusion," he said, "the uprising in the Shangri-La is a strategic deception engineered by the cattle of the Pale. Commitment of our main reserve force is an unwarranted risk at this stage in what is, in my opinion, a major war. That is all."
"Thank you for your historical analysis," the Acting First Citizen said.
Meaningless, meaningless, Sharku raged within himself. The Soldiers had a deliberately now-oriented culture. On Old Sauron, that had not been an impossible handicap; there were other castes, other subcultures. Here . . .
"Battlemaster Carcharoth has submitted a plan—" Sharku listened impassively as the Second Rank outlined the Cyborg's mobilization of the whole reserve strength of the Race.
"—Chief Assault Leader Sharku has submitted a counterproposal that one regiment only be so detached, with another from Firebases Two through Six"—the valley garrison towns along the Jordan-Xanadu River system—"while awaiting developments. Vote, please."
Sharku was surprised; one member of the Council, Gimli the Archivist, voted in his favor.
"Majority of five to one for Battlemaster Carcharoth's proposal. Proposal is affirmed. Execute. Dismissed."
The Grand Muster, the Soldiers were calling it. Carcharoth didn't know whether he approved, but had not suggested forbidding the name. Surely this was the greatest force the Citadel had sent into battle in the memory of living man; the Soldiers' aura of might had made the large-scale employment of might unnecessary for generations. All along the Xanadu River, the garrisons would be moving in readiness to join them as they moved west. But the Battlemaster thought the Soldiers should have learned enough about soldiering to know how seldom it was grand.
The women and children of the Citadel knew better, that was certain. Carcharoth looked down from the outwalls of the great fortress into the inner ward. Mates and brats swarmed round the gathering men, getting in their way, slowing them down, and generally being nuisances. How much more convenient it would have been were the Soldiers a monastic order dedicated only to war. But then, of course, it would have died out in a generation.
The Battlemaster, as befit his rank, was a student of the histories the Soldiers had brought with them from Old Sauron aboard the Dol Guldur, as well as those seized after the landing on Haven. He knew such that monastic orders had existed back on legendary Terra, and knew also that they'd been imperfect both in monasticism and in discipline. Of course, the Soldiers had the advantage of better genetic material with which to work.
Any Soldier worthy of the name could use his eyes to simulate binoculars. Cyborgs could play the same trick with their ears, filtering out extraneous conversations and background noise to focus on what they wanted to hear.
Much of what he focused on, he didn't like. Here a pregnant woman squeezed herself against a Senior Trooper in an heirloom soft-armor jacket, hard enough to hurt herself or him or both of them. "You keep yourself safe, do you hear me?" she said. "Who will protect your baby and me if you fall?"
A Soldier's answer should have been something like, My duty comes first. The Senior Trooper hugged his woman and replied, "Don't worry, darling. I'll watch myself." Carcharoth opened a new mental file and gave it fainthearts as an access code. If the Soldiers whose names he put there performed well in the upcoming action, he'd take those names out of the file when they got home. If they didn't, he'd deal with them personally. He promised himself that.
It was some consolation that the Soldier-born women weren't undermining morale; but they were only about a third of the total. Every second conversation he monitored between Soldiers and tribute-maiden females seemed to give him a name for the fainthearts file. "I'll be home again as soon as I can," a veteran Section Leader told his sons, one of whom looked almost old enough for enrollment among the Soldiers himself. "You needn't fret about me. I won't do anything stupid."
Another Trooper held a kiss with his woman so long that she, who used oxygen less efficiently, came close to passing out. When at last he let her go, he murmured, "I'd sooner spend my time in bed with you than out there where I'm liable to get my ass shot off." The Soldiers to either side of the fellow might not have heard him, but Carcharoth did. The Trooper's name went into the file.
And there—there stood Sharku in front of his assault group. Soldiers so often fought in small units that it was hard to remember their ranks really did correspond to places in the chain of command. The lives of a couple of hundred men would depend on the Chief Assault Leader's judgment and skill.
Like most of the other Soldiers, Sharku was fondling his woman (the Battlemaster admitted she was worth fondling) and hugging his little boy. Gimilzor, that was his name, Carcharoth remembered. Yes, he was one of the better boys of the coming generation.
For that matter, Carcharoth had thought his father a promising officer until he developed this foolish fixation that the revolt in the Valley was somehow linked to the movements on the steppe. The TAC didn't see that, and if the TAC didn't see it, it wasn't there. That had been proved too many times to doubt.
Carcharoth hurled his hearing down onto Sharku like a spear. The Chief Assault Leader was saying, "—hope we can wrap this idiotic campaign up in a hurry, that's all. I've told everyone in the Citadel it's a feint, a diversion, but no one listens. No one, curse it!"
"I listen," Chichek said loyally.
"I'm glad you do, my flower, but you don't wear the death's head on your collar tabs, worse luck," Sharku answered. "I think the fools who do are looking through the skull's eyes and not their own."
"I believe you, Father," Gimilzor declared. "When you come back from smashing the rebels, maybe you should do the same to the people who will not hear you." The boy thought like a Soldier already, Carcharoth noted—move forward, attack, smash the position in front of you. In a lad, it was charming, a harbinger of good things ahead. If Sharku agreed with the lad, it was treason.
But Sharku said, "They are our leaders, son. I will obey them. If we don't obey the officers set over us, how are we better than cattle? Even if they are wrong here, odds are it won't hurt us. The Citadel is a mighty fortress, and should hold against whatever the steppe nomads can throw at it, though I do worry that the Bandari are part of this—they know too much."
Gimilzor straightened to his full height. "I will help to hold the Citadel."
"I'm sure you will, son." Sharku laughed and ran a hand through the boy's hair. "Still, though our garrison here be mostly the young and the old, I hope with all my heart that they will not need you at a gun."
"At need, I would take one," Chichek said. "Many women here would."
"Again, may there be no need," Sharku said. Carcharoth, however, stored that idea away, too. Cyborgs were more accurate than polygraphs at determining where loyalty truly lay. He and his fellow masters should have no trouble telling which tribute maidens were safe to arm if an emergency arose. Soldier women first, of course—they had some training already, as backup. But the others as well, at need. Like Sharku, though, he could not believe an emergency so great would occur.
The Chief Assault Leader squeezed his woman hard enough to leave her gasping, tossed his son high into the air. He did not catch the boy as a fond father among the cattle would have done. Instead, he let him land on his own. Gimilzor lit rolling, and bounced to his feet with speed some adult Soldiers would have been hard pressed to match. Yes, the boy had spirit, Carcharoth thought.
Display was not part of the Soldiers' military style. The gates opened; the men assigned to the expeditionary force filtered out to form ranks in the pass that led down into the Shangri-La Valley. Wives and children milled about in the inner ward, which seemed strangely empty despite their presence. Carcharoth did not need to augment his hearing to take in their wails.
As the Battlemaster watched the Soldiers assembled outside the Citadel, he compared what he was seeing to the countless stories he knew of men going off to war. One that passed through his mind was the mustering of the men of Gondor in The Lord of the Rings, the myth-cycle from which his own folk had derived so many of their outward trappings here on Haven.
He wondered if the whole history of his race would have been different if the explorers who found the home world called it, say, Gandalf rather than Sauron. By all surviving records, Sauron had been a world that deserved to be named after an evil power, but might the name itself in some way have impelled later settlers to try to live up—or down—to it? He erased that train of thought: too few data from which to form any conclusion. Whether or not it was true, though, enemy propaganda had surely made the most of it, all the way from the titanic struggle with the Empire of Man through the exile of the surviving fragment here on Haven. So much, to flow from a random choice by an explorer whose name was long vanished from every record.
Now even the Soldiers had come to identify with their place on the dark side of the mythos. Carcharoth would have bet an assault rifle against a broken bow that the mythical Sauron's forces had been better organized than the random levies Denethor called up to defend his city against them. They needed organization; they didn't have the author on their side. In real life, as far as the Battlemaster could tell, good and evil were not only hard to tell apart but were often of more or less equal strength. Of course the cattle, those who could think so deeply, were bereft of moral sense and no fit judge.
He wished he were trotting at the head of the two regiments moving west. Only reluctantly had he agreed with the Council that the Battlemaster saw to all the military concerns of the Soldiers in every part of Haven, and so needed to stay in the Citadel, the greatest communications center on the world. Ghash was a fiery Brigade Leader, more than capable, but still . . . "Delegate," Carcharoth thought, is a fancy military term for "sit around on your ass."
Well, if he had to sit around on his ass, he decided he might as well accomplish something useful. He descended from the wall and went off to ask more questions of Dagor. Until dispatches arrived from the western end of the steppe, it was all he could do.
"Horrosho."
Yohann bar Non's mother had spoken Tallinn Valley Russki as her native tongue; she had been a tribute maiden in Angband Base, bearing her first child to a Soldier not long before it fell. She had married in the Pale afterwards, but her son still used that language occasionally, in dreams or when deeply moved.
"Horrosho," he repeated softly. Then, in Bandarit: "Most excellent." He took a deep breath of the resin-scented air, rich as kvass, full of the life-giving moisture that soaked the cropped ash-blond beard and long braid.
The forward command post of the southern expeditionary force was set up in a stand of tall redwoods, on a mountain slope overlooking the seacoast plain, and heavily camouflaged. Yohann had never seen anything like the giant trees, but these foothills were a unique environment—well-watered, and low enough that Terran life had an advantage. The air was already thick enough to be slightly intoxicating, and the endurance of his troops was increasing substantially; a necessary factor, after the grueling march down the escarpment. Careful, painstaking logistical preparation had made it possible. Now for the reward.
His Sauron-bred eyes could see a dozen kilometers from here under Byers' Sun and Cat's Eye. Rolling forested slopes; then an open cultivated plain dotted with villages and towns, and many small streams running from the mountains to the sea. The sea . . . the great stretch of ruddy-silver water was also like nothing in his experience; imagination and maps could not prepare you for it. Left, eastward, were more mountains and the huge salt-marsh wilderness of the Xanadu delta, where it met the spectacular tides of Haven's seas. Cat's Eye and the sister moons between them could raise walls of water a dozen meters high and send them ripping inland.
Khanut Base and town were spread out along a narrow fjord with ancient Imperial tide-locks at its entrance. He sincerely hoped those were not damaged in the coming fighting. The docks and sea-going craft whose masts showed above the rooftops of the towns were a major prize.
Again he studied Khanut Base itself. Fairly recent construction; the Imperial-era city here had been taken out in the Dol Guldur's strike and only rebuilt two hundred T-years ago. Most of the defenses pointed seaward—corsairs and the navies of the southern-hemisphere island nations were the major challenge here. Landward was mainly a curtain wall and ditch, more than enough for containing rebellious peasants or barbarian raiders from the forests. Not enough for the ten thousand Bandari who were coming down from the Pale in stages, with the two thousand allied nomad cavalry and three thousand Tallinn Valley infantry. Plus the rifled cast-steel cannon, the spigot mortars, the iron-carts with their steam-powered battering rams, all the painfully accumulated surprises old Mordekai had commanded.
Not now that the bulk of the Sauron force, fifteen hundred Soldiers, had entrained for the Shangri-La. He could see the last of the electric locomotives hauling its load of carts northeastward, toward the tunnels. Too risky to attack them there, but as soon as they passed, the massive charges of gunpowder would be brought forward and dropped down the access and ventilation shafts. Experiments on fragments of Imperial structural materials had shown they would not be able to withstand it, not in confined spaces.
The Saurons had thought the area impassable—even the forest tribes did not go there. Always fight against nature rather than men when you can, Piet van Reenan had said.
"How very true," Yohann murmured, turning to his staff and repeating it aloud.
Several were Orphans like himself. All of them looked eager. He was not at all disturbed by the prospect of fighting Saurons, his remote blood-kin. A culture was a matrix, a framework for the survival of bloodlines. His matrix—knowing the compulsions were subconscious did not affect their power—was the one initiated by Piet van Reenan and his helpers; now it was coming into conflict with the one Galen Diettinger had founded, and he was thoroughly committed. He had risen high in the Pale; his wife was of the van Reenan line, and Yohann's very promising sons, someday . . .
"Shimon," he said, "your Sayerets will activate their infiltrators in Khanut Town as per plan Shin-Tov-Shin. Hendryk, I want the artillery ready to move down to the lateral road"—he traced a line on the map—"by truenight, and I don't care if it's possible. Uri, you—"
And so it went, down the line, setting in motion the fall of Sauron in this part of Haven.