The Battle of Sauron Page 11

  Because he is a lunatic and a fool, Diettinger wanted to add, then reconsidered. Nihil nisi mortuus bonum or, of the dead, nothing unless good. “I believe he kept the Damaris as an escort for the Fomoria to ensure the borloi made it back here, First Citizen.”

  The First Citizen nodded, reading again from the screen, but Diettinger saw that two of the Cyborgs were speaking quietly to one another, while the third watched him intently.

  “Very well, Vessel First Rank Diettinger.” The First Citizen looked up. “Your confirmation of the arrival of the Sauron First Fleet at Tanith, as well as that of the Imperial’s Eleventh Fleet and the subsequent engagement of those two forces is duly noted. You are hereby promoted to Fleet First Rank; formal notification of same to all stations will follow within twenty-seven hours. Upon their return from Tanith, you will relieve Fleet First Rank Morgenthau and assume command of the First Fleet, after which you will begin reorganization of that force for the invasion of the Imperial capital world of Sparta. This operation will commence no later than—”

  “Excuse me, First Citizen,” Diettinger was leaning forward in his chair, unable to mask his disbelief. “The Imperial Home Fleet—if that’s what it was—now attacking our First Fleet at Tanith consists of over three hundred ships.”

  “Yes, we’re aware of that, Diettinger,” the First Citizen’s tone was warning. “Matched against the Sauron First Fleet of two hundred twelve vessels. Our analysis shows that upon suffering forty percent casualties, the Imperials will be forced to break-off combat to maintain a fleet-in-being for the defense of Sparta, while we will have suffered losses between twenty-seven and fifty-four percent. Remaining ships of our First Fleet will be augmented by Sauron vessels now being recalled for that purpose, providing you with a force of approximately one hundred-ninety to two hundred-fifty ships for the final assault on and subsequent invasion of Sparta.”

  Diettinger looked from one face to the next; each regarded him with the faintly bemused and ultimately condescending expressions of people who have just heard an adult admit he did not understand that one and one equals two.

  “First Citizen. Members of the High Command Council,” Diettinger said, as he tried to organize his thoughts; he had been prepared for almost anything but this. “I have attempted to make it clear in my report that we have badly misjudged the human norms’ commitment to victory in this war. It is my firm belief that no amount of losses will force the Imperials to break off from their engagement of our First Fleet at Tanith, that nothing short of the obliteration of our fleet—or theirs—will end that battle Given the numerical superiority of the Imperial Home Fleet in that battle—together with the determination of the human norms and the overconfidence of our own commanders—such an obliteration of our First Fleet, is, in fact, inevitable. Especially if all our commanders are as sure of the effect of Imperial losses as this Council seems to be.”

  The First Citizen leaned back in his chair, the mood in the room reflecting his posture of courteous contempt. Having at first embraced Diettinger as a commander returning victorious and destined for greater glory, the entire High Command was now withdrawing from him.

  “Fleet First Rank Diettinger,” the First Citizen spoke slowly, almost tenderly, “Surely you are aware that until your experience at Tanith, neither human norms nor Saurons have ever pursued victory at such a suicidal cost on any large scale during the entire course of this war.”

  Diettinger tried to keep the shock from his face. “First Citizen,” he almost stammered, turning to address the High Command Councilor seated to the First Citizen’s right: “First Soldier; every great general in history has done—must do—exactly that with his troops eventually! And the time for the Imperials to do so is now—at Tanith.”

  “We welcome any such effort by the human norms,” one of the Cyborgs interrupted. “Such fatalism will lead them into an action against our fleet at Tanith which, even if victorious, must be regarded by any measure as Pyrrhic.”

  “For whom?” Diettinger tried to interject, but was ignored.

  Instead, another of the Cyborgs added in the near-identical voice of his crèche: “Such bloodshed suffered by the Empire will promulgate tremendous public outcry in their Parliament against the war, precipitating demands for a negotiated settlement.”

  “Which has been acceptable to us all along,” another High Command member concluded. Diettinger recognized him as the High Command’s Socio-Ops expert. “The mere threat of our invasion fleet will force them into such a settlement. Immediately after which, in the period of released tensions, our invasion fleet will strike at Sparta. The statistical models, which confirm the accuracy of this projection of events, have been verified in over one million computational analyses.”

  Diettinger was silent. Their plan was a bad joke; no one qualified to sit on the High Command could possibly regard it as even remotely plausible. He would try once more: “First Citizen, Councilors of the High Command; under no circumstances will the Imperial Fleet allow any significant portion of our First Fleet to escape Tanith. Whatever ships we have available at this moment should be regarded as the only vessels we can rely on having for what will be, in a very short time, a concerted attack by all remaining Imperial forces upon the Sauron Homeworld. I therefore, respectfully, request that the High Command implement immediate fortifications of the Sauron System in accordance with expectation of a massive—massive—invasion force.”

  The members of the High Command Council looked at one another briefly, then the First Citizen turned back to Diettinger with a sadly patronizing expression. “Thank you, Vessel First Rank Diettinger. Your request is noted. You may return to your ship.” He looked down at his screen again, then back up quickly to add, “And have that eye regenerated at once!”

  Diettinger left the conference hall in the grip of an overwhelming sense of unreality. As he strode through the corridors of the capitol his mind worked furiously: the only explanation for the behavior of the High Command was the utter conviction, on their part, that the war had been planned so perfectly that any impending disaster was but the razor’s edge of an ultimate victory. Diettinger could not suppress a snort of laughter, and waved back a concerned pair of staffers who turned to stare at him, frown, then go about their business. To even conceive of such a rationalization, he thought, is proof that self-delusion is a contagious disease.

  Checking in with Second Rank, Diettinger learned that the off-loading of the borloi from Fomoria’s holds had been completed, and that the ship was now being moved to dry dock for repair and replenishment. Diettinger checked his personal chronometer implant against his ship’s time: barely three hundred hours had elapsed since Fomoria had jumped from Tanith system, evading the onslaught of the Imperial fleet.

  By now, he thought, the fleets at Tanith are engaging one another. The battle is raging and the fate of Sauron is being decided.

  And here he was, charged with composing an invasion force for the conquest of the Imperial capital!

  Abruptly, Diettinger laughed. Unbidden, his mind had simply shut out the absurdity of his current dilemma, and presented him with a clear course of action.

  “Second Rank,” he told her after a pause, “I have matters to attend to planetside; I will be back aboard Fomoria within thirty-six hours. You have the conn until that time.”

  Diettinger waited until Second Rank had acknowledged and recorded his off-ship status. He terminated the connection before Second Rank could inquire as to his whereabouts for the next day and a half. It was a minor breach of procedure, but there were people Diettinger had to see and he did not want to be disturbed while doing so. It had been too long.

  Diettinger’s next call was for an appointment with the regeneration therapists. A central hospital staffer told him that their workload was extremely light this week, and he could come in any time to begin regeneration therapy—no appointment was necessary. Given the current political climate evinced by the mood of the High Command Council—and the presence and i
nfluence of Cyborgs being seated on it—Diettinger was not foolish enough to predict out loud the imminent arrival of several hundred thousand casualties from Tanith. He decided regeneration could wait.

  Instead he called for immediate air transport to Amberlea, one of the cities on Sauron’s southern continent. Entering his personal codes brought instant accommodation and an assurance that ground transport would be waiting for him outside the capitol’s west gate to deliver him to the flight center.

  From the ground car, Diettinger called Logistics Center to establish a datalink to his personal workstations in the car and the aircraft in which he would be traveling. With the link, he would begin drafting the plans for a fleet which, he knew, would never exist off-media. At least it would help to take his mind off his growing dread.

  Diettinger’s preoccupation had prevented him from noticing the security officer who followed him to the car, entered his own vehicle and then followed him to the flight center. Frequently, the security officer’s lips moved slightly now and then, as if he were talking to himself.

  Chapter Twelve

  I

  Diettinger enjoyed air travel. He never failed to find an ironic comfort in the presence of a breathable, positive-pressure atmosphere outside his cabin, however thin that atmosphere might be.

  He had been in flight for a little under two hours, passing from day into the night of the western hemisphere. The equator, too, had slipped beneath them, unseen and unmissed.

  Population centers blazed with light, the occasional industrial zone a glittering grey expanse dotted with jewels of lights, landing fields and launch pads. Sprawling agricultural areas, emerald tiles under the golden lace of the automated cultivation grid, the patents for which had made Sauron an economic superpower within the Empire. Those patents had long since been seized by that Empire as enemy assets—not that it mattered, now.

  One area under their flight path extended into both day and nightside. A vast carpet of mountainous forest that extended to the sea; it was enclosed by walls discernible at ten-thousand meters and was the terminus of dozens of transport lines to surrounding population centers. None of those lines penetrated their destination. A Wild Zone, Diettinger realized.

  Wild Zones were all that remained of the indigenous ecosystems of Sauron. They dotted the surface of the Homeworld, and the rites of passage that took place within them were the closest thing Sauron had to a state religion.

  Since its discovery six hundred years before, Sauron had revealed itself to be one of the more merciless crucibles humanity had come across in its colonial exploration of space. Tanith might have proven a close match, but that world had been discovered much later, and its mass-colonization period never attracted anything like the sort of grimly determined malcontents from Earth as had Sauron. Protected from CoDominium Bureau of Relocation by powerful corporate backers, Sauron had not been subjected to mass immigration of criminals and welfare recipients to overburden the new colony, as had most of their fellow CoDominium worlds. Sauron citizens were still choosy about the quality of their neighbors. They liked to point out this fact when asked to explain how their colony could survive one year—let alone prosper over six hundred—on a world with an ecology disturbingly close to that of Earth’s late Cretaceous period.

  But that was all a long time ago, Diettinger thought, watching the great mass of night-blackened green pass beneath. However large the Wild Zones, they are still only glorified zoos. All the great saurians are penned and tagged, culled by ritual hunts for the eldest children of the colony’s Firstholders, Sauron’s initial colonists and the core of her aristocracy. The giant, protein-rich herd insects are gone completely, only their genotypes remain as matrices for food synthesizers. All of Sauron is ordered, tamed, regulated.

  He was not so foolish as to consider it dull. Memories of his own moment of truth in a Wild Zone had long since made that impossible.

  Armed with only an explosive harpoon, Diettinger and several other young Saurons his age had drawn lots for different sectors of a Wild Zone, seeking out a kill. Loup-garous and Nightfangs were fast and agile ambushers, and killing either with the weapon Diettinger had chosen would have been impressive enough. But none were in the two-thousand acre hunting area he had drawn, and on the tenth day he saw the reason why: the gnawed bark and the potent spoor of the Grizzly he’d now been stalking for three days.

  The Sauron Grizzly was named after one of Old Earth’s most powerful mammalian predators, but it was not a mammal. Half again the size, and with twice the bad attitude of its Earth namesake, Sauron Grizzlies were six-legged reptiloids with some mammalian characteristics. Homoeo-thermic and partially covered with fur, the egg-laying predators were crafty, strong and fast; they were the most dangerous Sauron predator in the size range that most concerned humans. Any of the bigger carnivores—and there were plenty of those, too—were more likely to step on a human than eat them.

  In drawing his lot for a hunting area, Diettinger had stumbled into the territory of a big male, extremely territorial and—he knew from his research on Wild Zone predators—only slightly less dangerous than a mother Grizzly guarding her egg clutch or newborns.

  His parents’ reaction, when he’d contacted them aboard the Proctors’ observation floater at the base camp, had not surprised him: “Slightly less dangerous, Galen?” His mother had sounded almost amused. “I remind you that there is no such qualifier as ‘slightly less dead.’”

  His father added, “Son, you are commended on your sense of societal obligation and your willingness to set an example as a Firstholder, but do not forget the First Principle.”

  Military in tone, the First Principle was more than a military axiom. Keystone of Sauron society, family and strategic thought, the First Principle expressed a virtue that was uniquely Sauron, one that had made the inhabitants of Sauron the most economically productive and militarily powerful world of the Empire. Put plainly, it said: Subjugate the ego to the battle plan.

  Diettinger knew that his parents understood. His declaration to the Proctors of a Sauron Grizzly as his chosen prey was no exercise in bravado; judged by Sauron values, such a risk would have earned contempt rather than adulation. But the lot Galen Diettinger had drawn was for a very specific sector within this Wild Zone area; that the sector happened to contain a Sauron Grizzly meant it would have very little else in the way of predators. Until Diettinger made his kill, he would be relatively safe from any other dangerous fauna. “It was luck,” he told his father with a grin.

  His mother had smiled on hearing the good-natured barb; Saurons as a rule did not believe in luck, only in probabilities. So Diettinger’s hunt continued, to the moment when he came upon the grizzly’s tracks once more, and realized that it had doubled back and was now stalking him.

  Almost within the same moment, he felt himself being watched. He did not recheck the charge at the tip of his harpoon, as he had checked it already. Slowly lowering the weapon to a ready position, he moved in a widening spiral into a clearing perhaps ten meters wide, attempting to locate his opponent by smell. A Sauron human’s olfactory sense was equal to that of an Old Earth foxhound, but the antediluvian Wild Zones were filled with thousands of overlaid smells, each as pungent as the other. Like the beasts they hunted, Saurons could not rely on scent alone, and as he put his back to a tree two meters behind him, Diettinger saw the Grizzly, watching him. Waiting for him. At the same moment, he felt a faint tingling in the soles of his feet, lost in the rumble of the predator’s explosive rush toward him.

  Head down, eyes locked with his, the Grizzly charged, its four hind limbs driving it unheeding through the thick brush, a scaly, furred juggernaut, its two forelimbs swatting aside trees with trunks the thickness of a man’s leg.

  Diettinger was dimly aware of the background hum of the Proctors’ observation floater. He knew that he could drop his weapon and the Proctors would obliterate the Grizzly with the floater’s on-board weapons—and along with it, any chance of his ever inheriti
ng his parents’ lands and titles. Not an option.

  The Grizzly smashed through the wall of forest growth, its armored back peppered with branches and splinters of trees shattered in its progress. Diettinger knew that it should, according to pattern, check its run at him, compensating for any defensive leaps its prey might attempt. It did not.

  The animal’s mass would not allow it to change course at its current speed; Diettinger shifted his weight to jump out of its way… and nothing happened. He found, suddenly, that he could not move.

  Not an option, he thought once more. As the Grizzly dropped to all six feet for its final rush, Diettinger jammed the base of the harpoon into the ground by his instep and threw his weight forward, aiming the head of the weapon with all the skill of an ancient Swiss pikeman.

  A mammal, marginally smarter, might have flinched, but Sauron Grizzlies ate everything. The harpoon’s explosive head went past the gaping jaws to bury itself in the base of the animal’s skull…

  …and did not explode!

  The Grizzly’s weight bore the shaft almost thirty centimeters into the ground and half-a-meter out the back of its head. Even without the charge, the harpoon must have hit something vital, for the Grizzly began to spasm. It appeared to have lost most of the control of its anterior limbs, but had no difficulty in catching Diettinger in its forepaws, mostly because he made no attempt to get away. Instead, to the horror of his parents, he drew the long hunting knife from his belt and buried it deep in the top of the animal’s armored skull, a difficult feat even with a Sauron’s strength, and utterly beyond the capability of any human norm.

  The Grizzly dropped, bearing Diettinger down beneath its weight even as two of the Proctors dropped out of the floater and ran to his side.

  “Heir Diettinger,” one of the Proctors said as they reached the steaming, two-ton carcass, “We of the Proctors are evenly divided as to whether you are utterly fearless or a complete fool.”