War World IV: Invasion

by War World IV Invasion v2 Lit

  Marin nodded. “And if we bring in reinforcements, the supply situation will become worse still,” he said.

  Unspoken was the thought that the Citadel’s surviving aircraft could probably solve their problems with a few strafing runs. It would not be risked; there was always the chance that an Imperial antiaircraft missile survived somewhere. And if any did, it was probably among the troublesome cattle of the Eden Valley.

  “Give me a further report on the ringleaders of the rebellious cattle community in the Eden Valley,” he continued.

  “Yes, yes, of course I’ll bloody see them,” Piet said grumpily, settling into the armchair. His sword was hung by the entrance--symbol that force was obedient to law, within the Band--but he shifted the pistol unobtrusively to his lap; old habits died hard.

  The Kapetein’s house was the best in the town of Strong, and the living room doubled as a meeting-place. It was long but fairly narrow--timber for rafters were rare--with an ingenious earth stove at one end making it fairly warm, and a rugmaking loom pushed into a corner. The walls were whitewashed adobe, the floor brick covered in colorful muskeylope-hair carpets, and a stuffed cliff-lion head barred its overlapping rows of fangs from the wall amid racked tools and weapons. A meal of courtesy had been laid out on the table, round loafs of rye and barley bread, beer, hot eggbush tea, cheese and meat. Luxury foods as well, stewed clownfruit in brandy, fried potatoes, geffish. Piet wore quilted trousers and sheepskin jacket despite the fire and thick walls; Haveners sweated at what he considered comfortable, and it was bad manners to insist, besides being a waste of coal.

  The visitors from Tallinn looked at the food longingly as soon as they came in. There was a smell of poverty about them anyway, visible in the raggedness of their clothes; that and desperation in their eyes.

  “Come, friends,” he said. “Sit, eat. We will talk.”

  He spoke in slow, accented Russki; that was the common tongue in Tallinn, as Americ was in the Eden Valley, although many of the Band spoke Hebrew or Lithuanian, or Piet’s own native Afrikaans.

  There were three of the foreigners. Others followed them. Ruth and Uona, Piet’s wives. Ruth was Judge, too, of course, and Ilona was head of Company van Reenan. Several of his elder children; Andries, the boy was shaping well . . . Have to stop thinking of him as a boy, Piet reminded himself. He’s a man with children of his own, now. His daughter Miriam and her gang, she was scowling and turning her shapeless felt hat in her hands with well-merited apprehension. The heads of the Companies, mostly younger men now, though the units still bore the names of his old comrades from the wandering years after the Saurons came. All of them settled in; the Tallinnskaya were visibly restraining themselves as they struggled not to bolt their food.

  Walking arguments, Piet thought, eyeing some of the Church elders. Even after a generation there were still many among the native Edenites who disliked the Band.

  The last Prophet--Boaz, Ruth’s father--had been a complete lunatic towards the end, and the coming of Van Reenan’s Band had been as much liberation as conquest. And Bandari leadership had made all the difference as the Eden Valley and its dependencies struggled to survive in a world without the machine technology the Saurons had smashed. Still, the Band were overlords of a sort, and mostly heathens or Jews at that, among Edenites who were all of Americ descent and followers of the same sect of the Edonite Church. The men from Tallinn were a welcome reminder of possible alternatives much worse than the status quo. Tallinn had never been rich by their standards; the Eden Valley was larger, lower and much more fertile. But they had not starved either, before the Saurons established a garrison there.

  “Let’s get the meeting under way,” he said. “Not you, Miriam bat Ilona--nor the rest of you young fools. You stand until we need you to answer questions.”

  “Lord Kapetein,” the Tallinn ambassador said, as the others sank into their seats.

  Piet winced slightly; he had never liked the way his rank was becoming a ruler’s title. Captain in the armies of a fallen empire, he thought mordantly. Sparta’s forces had withdrawn decades before the Dol Guldur came, exiling one retired officer from Jaarsveldt’s Jaegers behind. Haven had heard little of the struggles that followed. The Sauron homeworld had been smashed, but the effort had wrecked the Empire and the surviving fragments had fallen into civil war, that was obvious. The mere fact that no interstellar ship had entered the Byers’ Sun system for thirty years was proof.

  “Lord Kapetein, we throw ourselves on your mercy.”

  Mercy of an ex-bandit. Although that had been in desperation, not choice. There had been no other way to survive, or him and the followers he collected. Haven had been a rural backwater under the Empire, but still half the population had lived on protocarb synthesized at the fusion plants, and agriculture had rested on fertilizers and machines.

  “The Saurons are grinding our bones for bread! Our children are dying; they devour our substance like land gators.”

  Piet nodded; a Soldier ate more than an unmodified human, the metabolic price of increased strength and endurance. Angband base held a full company, plus their women and the servants needed to support their specialized warrior existence. The burden was cruel, the more so as essential labor was diverted to build the fort.

  Ruth leaned forward. “We’re prepared to take more of you in,” she said gently.

  There were nods and murmurs around the table. The Bandari lands had come through the hard years and out the other side. There had been years when everyone went hungry to keep the seed grain and the breeding flocks, but now they could produce more as soon as they had hands to work vacant land and tend the animals. The Tallinn farmers were good sorts, not like the wild and violent Muslim herdsmen who peopled most of the high steppe of this continent.

  The Tallinn men scowled; the youngest blurted out:

  “We came here to ask for your help in war, to free ourselves, not to beg a place as hirelings!”

  “Better hired hands in the Pale than serfs to the Saurons,” Ilona said with brutal practicality.

  “Slava Bogdu! Easy for you to say, Jew bit--”

  The young man sat back abruptly, pulled back and cuffed across the side of the head by his compatriots. The older man by his side spread his hands at the cold glares of the Bandari.

  “Forgive Mikael, your honors,” he said. “His father and brothers were killed when the Saurons came, and they took his sister for a tribute maiden.”

  Even Ilona murmured something; the young man hid his head in his hands and wept with an awkward barking sound.

  “It’s true we owe you help as good neighbors,” Piet said slowly. “Also, your troubles have been made worse by actions, hmmm, actions for which we’re responsible.”

  Miriam and her siblings shuffled and stared down at their hats, or the toes of their scuffed leather boots.

  “So.” Piet’s hand closed on the pewter cup full of tea. “Then again, we don’t want a nest of soldati only three weeks’ travel away, no indeed.”

  “Piet,” Ruth whispered, touching his arm. He started, then forced his hand to relax; the thick metal had been bending under his grip as if it was butter-soft. Slightly embarrassed, he shifted his grip and squeezed it back to circularity.

  “On the other hand, we can’t declare open war.”

  “Why not?” Sergei Tamasaare said. He was brother to the knyaz of Tallinn, and led the exiles.

  Piet throttled back a snarl. “Because we haven’t the strength!” he snapped: You fool, went without speaking. “There are three hundred fighting men in Angband, every one of them better than our best--and they have automatic weapons with plenty of ammunition. Possibly Gauss guns or energy weapons, but certainly assault rifles, machine guns, mortars.”

  “You outnumber them many times over,” Tamasaare said, running a hand through his thinning flaxen hair. “You’ve . . . the Bandari have never been defeated, not since my father’s day!”

  That’s right, remind me how bloody old I am, Piet thought.
At least I’ve never gotten senile enough to believe my own legend.

  “Nothing would please me better than to kill every Sauron in Angband,” he went on with massive patience. “Fewer than two hundred of our forces have modern firearms. The rest have bows and flintlocks--” and reinventing the flintlock had been a technical feat; when the computerized machine-shops died under the EMP of Sauron nukes, blacksmithing had had to be redeveloped from scratch “--and not all that many of those. We could mobilize three thousand or a bit more--”

  “Three thousand, three hundred twenty-seven, counting first, second and third echelons,” Ilona said.

  “Thank you, my dear. That’s including farmers with pikes and scythes, nursing mothers, and sixteen-year-old girls with hunting bows. It’s probably enough to hold the passes into Eden long enough for hunger to make the Saurons leave--we’ve put a lot of effort into fortifying them. On the attack, against their walls and minefields? Suicide. The reason we haven’t been defeated while I lead us is that I never attack unless I’m stronger, not because we’re magicians.”

  Tamasaare’s face crumpled. “Then . . . you can do nothing?”

  “Nothing?” Piet said. Suddenly he grinned like a stobor, a shocking expression. “I didn’t say that at all. I’m just not going to make a public announcement of my strategy.”

  “Andries, I’m disappointed in you,” Piet said. The family business had been kept for last, and there were no outsiders in the big room now.

  “Ah, Pa--” the younger man said awkwardly. “I didn’t, that is--”

  “Didn’t go haring off into enemy territory yourself,” Piet said. “Thank God for small mercies. You may be too old to spank, boy, but tell me you didn’t know anything about it and I’ll kick your butt.” He paused, long enough to let the agonized embarrassment sink in. “I thought I could trust you; now I’m not sure. I won’t recommend that the Company leaders elect a man I can’t trust, so you’d better start earning it back before I die.”

  Triple-level fear and shame; Piet paused again before concluding: “Get out.”

  Just as he was opening his mouth, Piet thought. It was almost unfair--he had two generations’ experience in handling men--but all in a good cause.

  Miriam’s head sank further into the collar of her jacket as her eldest brother crept away. She was a solid-built young woman; brown skin and bronze-streaked hair from her father’s blood, curved nose and dark eyes from her mother. She launched a preemptive attack:

  “It worked, Pa.”

  Piet paused, nodded. “It did at that; which is all that stopped me from having you at least run the gauntlet for indiscipline--believe it, girl.”

  Miriam lost color and swallowed; that was one of the Band’s heaviest punishments, running between a file of your comrades stripped to your underwear and being flogged with the buckle-ends of their belts.

  “Even when we were a gang of bandits, we didn’t act like that,” Piet went on. He halted for a full half-minute. “Since I’m not going to make it a discipline matter, let the Judge decide your sentence.”

  “It was for the honor of the Company,” young Sarie blurted.

  The other van Reenan children gave her glares, and she subsided. Even the bloody words keep changing on me, Piet thought. He had divided his followers into companies originally, because it was sensible and he’d been a career soldier, once. Now they were turning hereditary; he suspected that the word meant something more like “clan” in the younger generations’ mouths.

  “You are not too old to spank, so bloody shut up,” he said. God, how do they grow so fast, he thought, looking at the sullen defiant young face. Remembering the tiny girl-child they laid in his arms, or a toddler stumping toward him as he rode into camp and demanding to be swung high, papa! high!

  Ruth cleared her throat. “I’ve been thinking on this matter,” she said formally. “Miriam, since you are responsible for your brother’s injury, you can work in the infirmary for ten cycles.” The young woman winced; that meant bedpans. “Sarie, your weaving is a disgrace, so--”

  She plowed on, ignoring the wails of protest.

  “I don’t think Miriam and the others are going to like that at all,” Ilona said, rising. The room seemed emptier with the children gone.

  She limped slightly as she walked to the sideboard and poured two glasses of clownfruit brandy, raising an eyebrow as she looked at Ruth. The younger woman shook her head and patted her stomach; she was two months’ pregnant, and it was best to be careful, particularly with a late pregnancy that was the last chance for another child. Ilona nodded. She was a tall woman for Haven, with a long braid of greying black hair down her back, lean and weatherbeaten and ageless in worn leather and wool. Most of her last thirty years had been spent out on the high steppe to the west of the Eden Valley. That was by unspoken agreement; Ruth for the valley, she for the high country and Piet to share his time between both. Most of the Bandari proper--the descendants of the original Band of refugees who had followed Piet--were herdsfolk now, moving with the seasons and the grass, although a few were craftsfolk here in the valley. Herders brought their flocks down in the winter, and pregnant women past their third month stayed there as well.

  “You don’t think I was too hard on them, dear?” Ruth said, slightly anxiously. Four of her children had been involved, and three of Ilona’s.

  “Nu,” Ilona replied, sinking back into her chair with a sigh.

  The stiff leg was a legacy from a brush with the Azeris who lived north of the Pale--had lived north of the Pale, before they tried rustling Bandari sheep. The heavy burn-scars on one side of her face were much older; that had happened when Degania was overrun and the Ivrit settlers joined the Band for vengeance, before Piet ever came to Eden.

  “Nu,” she went on. “It was fiendishly subtle--humiliation and dirty hard work, those aren’t going to make those wild chaverim heroes to the youngsters. I’d have sent Miriam through the gauntlet and given her a martyr’s crown.

  “So,” she went on. “What is your strategy, Oh Khan?”

  Piet sipped at his brandy, refusing to rise to the bait. She knows I hate being called that even more than Kapetein, the way they mean it these days.

  “Miriam’s little escapade suggested it, and what Ruth said,” he mused.

  Ruth raised a brow. She had fought in the coup that overthrew her father Boaz and opened the gates of Strong--Strong-in-the-Lord, it had been called then--to the Band. And in scuffles since, everyone did, but strategy was not her specialty.

  “About taking the Tallinnaskya in,” he amplified. “Which means we’re not condemning them to death. Look, what are the Saurons going to do if the Tallinn valley is depopulated?” One way or another, he added to himself. Ruth was known as the Kapetein’s Conscience, as Ilona was called the Band’s Knife. There were times a man had to listen to his conscience--and times to ignore it.

  “Ah,” Ilona said. “Still . . . they could bring in farmers from elsewhere.”

  “Not all that many around,” Ruth said, blinking in thought. “Rungpe, but they’re mostly herders--Rungpe is only a half-thousand meters lower than the steppe. Santa Carmina, but they’ve only got a few hundred people left after the blights last year and the big Uighur raid.”

  Ilona laughed outright; Ruth winced slightly. They could all follow the logic. The best way to hurt the Saurons would be to make Tallinn a wasteland; rebuilding an agricultural base would be a labor of decades--and sustaining a force there over the seven hundred kilometer distance to the next Sauron base a nightmare. Yet a logistic strategy was likely to be bloody, and the helpless Tallinn dwellers would lose most of all.

  “I see possibilities,” Ilona said. “Devious, Piet my love, devious.”

  “Die Boer mek sy plan,” Piet replied with a trace of smugness. Addiction to frontal assaults had never been among his people’s faults, not among those who served the old Empire as special-forces troops as he had, not back home on Frystaat or even in their ancestral lands on Terra. />
  “Trouble is,” she went on, “those Sauron meshuggahs can be pretty scheisse-eating devious too.”

  That dampened Piet’s smile slightly. Ilona finished her brandy.

  “Meanwhile,” she said, “since I’ve been wrangling sheep, punching muskeylope and sleeping alone for the past couple of T-months--” while the Band’s herds were brought down to the stubble-fields “--I believe I have dibs on our delectable husband?”

  “Why, of course, Ilona dear,” Ruth said, flushing slightly. The Church of Eden was rather strict about some things, and even after all these years it still made her slightly uncomfortable to discuss them. “It is your, ah, turn.”

  “Unless,” Ilona went on with a slow grin, “you’d like to join us?”

  “Ilona!” The blush turned crimson.

  Squad Assault Leader Mumak had a wooden arrow through the fleshy part of his shoulder. He did not let that slow him, as he and the four-Soldier section pursued the raiders. That or the killing wind, or the fine dust that cut visibility even for Soldier senses. The enemy were a kilometer away and mounted, but hampered by the herd of muskeylopes they were trying to run off. The Turks whose job it was to drive in the half-wild beasts had scattered to the four winds under cover of the storm. . . .

  Deal with them later. It was dark, only a sliver of Cat’s Eye up, and the skirmishing had gone on for nearly a day. Gone on while the winter duststorm built and built; the wind was doing better than seventy KPH now, inconvenient even for Soldiers, needling the sword-edged grit of the plains into faces and under eyelids. With the wind-chill the temperature was lower than minus-forty Celsius, and it would be worse when Cat’s Eye set. Seven Bandari killed, for one Soldier; the troopers from Angband base had been overconfident, to lose so heavily against cattle. Tough cattle, he thought, as the flaying wind keened in his ears.