by David Weber
Lawrence Jefferson leaned towards his com, clutching his wineglass, and his heart pounded. This was the moment, he thought. The instant towards which he'd worked so long.
"Their field's building now," the sensor tech murmured. "Looking good . . . looking good . . . stand by . . . stand by . . . coming up to peak . . . now!"
Carl Bergren sent the release code, and the capacitors screamed. The shrouded object on the platform vanished as the mat-trans sent a mighty pulse of power into hyper-space, and he held his breath. The transmission he'd sent out was almost precisely four millionths of a percent too weak to reach Birhat. It would waste its power twenty light-minutes short of the funnel waiting to catch it for the reception units, but no one would ever know if—
The control room on Lawrence Jefferson's com screen was silent, its personnel frozen. Not even a mat-trans was truly instantaneous over an eight-hundred-light-year range, and Jefferson held his breath while he waited.
A soft tone beeped, and Carl Bergren let out a whooshing breath as the Birhat mat-trans operator acknowledged receipt. He'd done it! The person at the other end of the hypercom link didn't realize someone else had invaded the system. He thought he'd just received Bergren's transmission!
The lieutenant suppressed an urge to wipe his forehead. Deep inside, he hadn't really believed his employer could pull it off, and it was hard to keep his elation out of his voice as he activated his mike.
"Birhat has confirmed reception, sir," he told the Narhani spokesman. "If you'd step onto the platform, I can send you through now, as well."
"We did it!" someone shouted gleefully. "They accepted the transmission!"
The staff of Jefferson's illicit mat-trans whistled and clapped, and the Lieutenant Governor checked the computer tied into his com. Good. The exact readouts of the transmission, which just happened to carry the same identifier code as Lieutenant Bergren's system, had been properly stored. He'd have to wait until the regular Shepard Center data collection upload late next week to exchange them for Bergren's actual log of the transmission, but that part of the pipeline had already been tested and proved secure. It was inconvenient, since he would have preferred to make the switch sooner, yet there was nothing he could do about it. The mass readings of the transit would prove the statue Birhat had just received had not, in fact, been the solid block of marble Bergren had just destroyed, and for his Reichstag fire to work, it was vital that Battle Fleet itself discover that fact when the time came.
He smiled at the thought, then looked back at his link to the hidden control room and its celebrating personnel. Two of them had cracked bottles of champagne, and he watched them pouring their glasses full while they chattered and laughed with the release of long-held tension. They'd worked hard for this moment—and, of course, for the huge pile of credits they'd been promised—and the Lieutenant Governor leaned back in his chair with a sigh of matching relief. They deserved their moment of triumph, and he let them celebrate it for another few minutes, then pressed a button.
Half a world away, the explosive charges three long-dead technicians had installed at his orders detonated. One of the control room personnel had time for a single scream of terror before the plunging roof of the subterranean installation turned him and all his fellows into mangled gruel.
Carl Bergren dutifully logged a full report on the capacitor bank failure and completed his shift without further incident. He turned over to his relief at shift change and signed out through the security checkpoints, then walked slowly to his parked flyer while he pondered the entire operation. Whoever had arranged it, he thought, had to have incredible reach and command equally incredible resources. He'd had to gain access to the routing schedules weeks in advance to be sure Bergren would be on duty when the transmission came through. Then he'd had to get someone in to sabotage the capacitors, and he'd had to make sure the sabotage was untraceable. And he'd had to have the resources to build his own mat-trans and find a way to monitor the Shepard Center system precisely enough to time his own transmission perfectly.
It was big, Bergren told himself as he unlocked his flyer, climbed in, and settled into the flight couch. It was really big, and there couldn't be more than a dozen people—probably less—who could have put it all together. Now it was just a matter of figuring out which of those dozen or so it had really been, and little Carl Bergren would live high on the hog for the rest of his natural life.
He smiled and activated his flyer's drive, and the resultant explosion blew two entire levels of the parking garage and thirty-six innocent bystanders into very tiny pieces. Forty minutes later, an anonymous spokesman for the Sword of the Lord claimed responsibility for the blast.
Chapter Thirty-Five
The last reeking powder smoke drifted away, and Sean MacIntyre surveyed a scene that had become too familiar. The only thing that had changed were the colors the dead wore, he thought bitterly, for the eastern Temple Guard had been reduced to barely forty thousand men, and they were being held back to cover the Temple itself. He was fighting the secular lords' armies now, and he shuddered as he watched the "merely" wounded writhe among the corpses.
His army was out of the Keldark Valley at last and, as he'd known it would, marching circles about its opponents. High-Captain Terrahk had fallen back on Baricon, but he'd lacked the men to hold an attack from the west. There were too many avenues of approach, and when Tamman blasted his way through a gap with fifteen thousand men and got around his flank, Terrahk had retreated desperately. His attempt to stand had cost him his entire rearguard—another eight thousand men (most, Sean was thankful, captured and not killed)—and Sean had broken out into the rolling hills of the Duchy of Keldark.
The more open terrain offered vastly improved scope for maneuver, but every step he advanced also drew him further from the valley and exposed his supply route to counterattack. At the moment, the Temple was too hard pressed to think about cutting his communications, and he kept reminding himself they didn't really have "cavalry" in the classic Terran sense, but he also kept thinking about what a Pardalian Bedford Forrest or Phil Sheridan could do if it ever got loose in his rear. His edge in reconnaissance would make it hard for them to get past him, but he simply didn't have the men to garrison his supply line properly. He could have freed them up, but only by reducing his field army, which, in turn, would have reduced his ability to keep advancing.
He sighed and sent his branahlk mincing forward. The beast whistled unhappily at the battlefield stench, and Sean shared its distaste. Whoever had commanded the Temple's forces in this last battle should be shot, he thought grimly, assuming one of his riflemen hadn't already taken care of that. He supposed it was a sign of the Temple's desperation, but ordering forty-five thousand pikemen and only ten thousand musketeers to face him in the open had been the same as sending them straight to the executioner.
Had Sean armed his men in the classic Pardalian proportion of pikes to firearms, he could have fielded close to the quarter-million men the Temple credited him with. They had all the weapons they'd captured from the Malagoran Guard plus, effectively, all the weapons of Lord Marshal Rokas's Holy Host, including its entire artillery park, but he'd opted to call forward only enough reinforcements—and replacements, he thought bitterly, recalling the five thousand casualties Erastor had cost—to put sixty thousand infantry and dragoons and two hundred guns in the field. Two hundred battalions of rifles, most veterans of Yortown, Erastor, and Baricon, supported by a hundred and fifty arlaks and fifty chagors, had been more than enough to slaughter the secular levies of Keldark, Camathan, Sanku, and Walak. He controlled all of northeastern North Hylar, now, from the Shalokars to the sea, and he wondered dismally how many more men were going to die before the Temple agreed to negotiate. God knew he and Stomald had been asking—almost begging—it to ever since the fall of Erastor! Couldn't the Inner Circle understand they didn't want to kill its troops? Brashan still couldn't get any of his remotes inside the hundred-kilometer zone around the Temple, so th
ey couldn't know what was passing in Vroxhan's council meetings, but the prelates seemed willing to send every fighting man in North Hylar to his death before they'd even talk to "demon-worshipers"!
The litter-bearers were already busy. Theirs was the most horrible duty of all, yet they went about it with a compassion which still surprised him. The Angels' Army recognized its tactical superiority as well as its commander did, and, like Sean, most of its troops knew the men littering the field had been utterly outclassed. His own casualties, dead and wounded alike, had been under a thousand, and most of his men had come, in their own ways, to share his sickness at slaughtering their foes. It was too one-sided, and the men they were killing weren't the ones they wanted. With every battle, every army they smashed, their hatred of the Inner Circle grew, yet it wasn't a religious hatred. "The Angels" had always been careful not to deliver an actual religious message—other than backing the Malagoran hankering for freedom of conscience—and since Harry's revelation of the truth, Stomald had begun stressing the Temple's political tyranny and enormous, self-serving wealth far more strongly. The Angels' Army longed to settle accounts once and for all with the old men in Aris who kept sending other people out to die, but more even than that, it wanted simply to be rid of them.
Sean drew rein and watched a group of litter-bearers troop past with their pitiful, broken burdens. Walking wounded limped and staggered back with them, and at least Harry, coached by Brashan and Israel's med computers, had been teaching the Malagoran surgeons things they'd never dreamed were possible. The introduction of ether, alone, had revolutionized Pardalian medicine, and Sean had sworn a solemn oath that the first thing he would have sent to Pardal from Birhat would be medical teams with proper regeneration gear. He couldn't breathe life back into the dead, but he could, by God, give the maimed, whichever side they'd fought upon, their lives back!
His lip curled as he wondered how much of that fierce determination was an effort to assuage his own guilt. With today's body count, the war he and his friends had inadvertently started had cost over a hundred thousand battlefield deaths. He had no idea how many more had perished of the diseases that always ravaged nonindustrial armies, and he was terrified of what the number would finally be. He could trace every step of the journey which had led them to this, and given their options as they took each of those steps, he still saw no other course they might have chosen, yet all this death and brutal agony seemed an obscene price to buy five marooned people a ticket home.
He drew a deep breath. It seemed an obscene price because it was, and he would pay no more of it than he must. The Temple had ignored his semaphore offers to parley and refused to receive his "demon-worshiping" messengers, but he had one last shot to try.
High Priest Vroxhan sat in his high seat, and his lips worked as if to spit upon the men who faced him. High-Captain Ortak, High-Captain Marhn, High-Captain Sertal . . . the list went on and on. Over fifty senior officers stood before him, the surviving commanders of the armies the demon-worshipers had smashed in such merciless succession, and he longed to fling the entire feckless lot to the Inquisitors as their failure deserved.
But much as he wished to, and however richly they'd earned it, he couldn't. The morale of his remaining troops was too precarious, and if wholesale executions might stiffen the spines of the weak, it also might convince them the Temple was lashing out in blind desperation. Besides, Lord Marshal Surak had spoken in their defense. He needed their firsthand observations if he was to understand the terrible changes the accursed demon-worshipers had wrought in the art of war.
Or, at least, he says he does. Vroxhan closed his eyes and clenched his fists on the arms of his chair. A bad sign, this suspicion of everyone. Does it mean I am desperate? He clutched his faith to him and made himself open his eyes once more.
"Very well, Ortak," he growled, unable to make himself give the failure the honor of his rank. "Tell us of these demon-lovers and their terms."
Ortak winced, though it was hard to tell—his face was as heavily bandaged as the stump of his right arm—and reached for very careful words.
"Holiness, their leaders bade me say they ask only for you to speak with them. And—" he drew a deep breath "—Lord Sean said to tell you you may speak to him now, or amid the ruins of this city, but that you will speak to him at last."
"Blasphemy!" old Bishop Corada cried. "This is God's city! No one who traffics with the powers of Hell will ever take it!"
"Your Grace, I tell you only what Lord Sean said, not what he can accomplish," Ortak replied, but his tone said he did think the heretics could take even the Temple, and Vroxhan's hand ached to strike him.
"Peace, Corada," he grated instead, and smoothed the written message Ortak had brought across his lap as the bishop retreated into sullen silence. His eyes burned down at it for a moment, then rose to Ortak once more. "Tell me more of this Lord Sean and the other heretic leaders."
"Holiness, I've never seen their like," Ortak said frankly, and the other returned prisoners nodded agreement. "The man they call Lord Sean is a giant, head and shoulders taller than any man I've ever seen, with eyes and hair blacker than night. The one they call Lord Tamman is shorter and looks less strange, but for the darkness of his skin, yet all of us have heard stories—from our own men who have seen them in battle, not just the heretics—of the miraculous strength both share."
" 'Sean,' 'Tamman,' " Vroxhan snorted. "What names are these?"
"I don't know, Holiness. Their men say—" Ortak bit his lip.
"What do 'their men say'?" Bishop Surmal purred, and Ortak swallowed at the look in the High Inquisitor's eyes.
"Your Grace, I repeat only what the heretics claim," he said, and paused. Pregnant silence shivered until High Priest Vroxhan broke it.
"We understand," he said coldly. "We will not hold you responsible for lies others may tell." He didn't, Ortak noted sinkingly, say what else the Circle would hold him responsible for, but at this point he was willing to settle for whatever mercy he could get.
"Thank you, Holiness," he said, and drew a deep breath. "The heretics say these men are warriors from a land beyond our knowledge, chosen by . . . by the so-called 'angels' as their champions. They say all of their new weapons and tactics were given to them by Lord Sean and Lord Tamman. That the two of them are God-touched and can never be defeated."
A savage hiss ran through the assembled prelates, and Ortak felt sweat slick his face under its bandages. He made himself stand as straight as his wounds allowed, meeting High Priest Vroxhan's burning eyes, and prayed Vroxhan had meant his promise not to hold him responsible.
"So," the high priest said at last, his voice an icicle. "I note, Ortak, that you have not yet mentioned these so-called 'angels.' " Ortak dared not reply, and Vroxhan smiled a thin, dangerous smile. "I know you've seen them. Tell us of them."
"Holiness, I have seen them," Ortak admitted, "but what they actually are, I cannot say."
"What do they appear to be, then?" Surmal snapped.
"Your Grace, they wear the seeming of women. There are two of them, the 'Angel Harry' and the 'Angel Sandy.' " A fresh stir at the outlandish names swept the Circle, and the high-captain went on doggedly now that he'd begun. "The one they call Sandy is smaller, with short hair. From all I could learn, it was she who routed the Guard units initially sent to crush the heresy, and she and Lord Sean appear to be the heretics' true war leaders. The one they call Harry is taller than most men, and—forgive me, Your Grace, but you asked—of surpassing beauty, yet wears an eye patch. From what the heretics told us, it was she who was wounded and captured by the villagers of Cragsend and the one they call Sandy who led the demons to her rescue."
"And did they tell you they were God's messengers?" Surmal demanded.
"No, Your Grace," Ortak said cautiously.
"What?" Vroxhan snapped to his feet and glared at the high-captain. "I warn you, Ortak! We have the written messages of the traitor Stomald himself to claim they are!"
; "I realize that, Holiness," Ortak's mouth was dust dry, yet he made his voice come out level, "but Bishop Surmal asked what they say. I did not myself speak with them, yet their own followers seem perplexed by their insistence that they not be called 'angel.' The heretics do so anyway, but only among themselves, never to the ang— To the so-called angels themselves."
"But—" Corada started, then shook his head and went on almost plaintively. "But we have reports they wear holy vestments at all times! Why would they do that if they don't claim to be angels? And why would even heretics follow those who claim to be mere mortal women yet profane the cloth? What do these madmen want of us?"
"Your Grace," Ortak said, frightened and yet secretly grateful for the opening, "I can't tell you why they wear the garb they choose or why the heretics follow them, but Lord Sean himself has told me they seek only to defend themselves. That he and his companions came to the aid of the heretics only because Mother Church had proclaimed Holy War against them."
"Lies!" Surmal thundered. "We are Mother Church, God's chosen shepherds for His people! When heresy stirs, it must be crushed, root and branch, lest the whole body of God's people be poisoned and their souls lost to damnation forever! He who defies us in this defies God Himself, and whatever this 'Lord Sean' claims, he and his fellows are—must be!—demons sent to destroy us all!"
"Your Grace," Ortak said quietly, "I wasn't called to the priesthood, but to serve God as a soldier, in accordance with the commands of the Temple. It may be that I've failed in that service, despite all I could do, yet a soldier is all I know how to be. I tell you not what I believe, but what I was told by Lord Sean. Whether or not and how he may have lied is for you to judge, Your Grace; I only answer your questions as best I may."
