The slaughter began.
Even if, somehow, an all-bands receiver could have listened in on the battles, coherency would have been a joke:
"Samsun, Samsun... I have a target... damage report as... incoming observed... six Tahn ships now without power and... launch, you clortin' bastard... Samsun, are you receiving... units, stand by for... change orbit, Eight, you're acquired... I have a launch from... Samsun, this is Whitway. Do you receive this station... this is an all-stations broadcast... Nostrand units, redeploy to Sectors one by thirteen... squaawk... Allah give us strength... Samsun, Samsun... Kee-nst, did you see that one go up?... All units, this is... Samsun, Samsun... do you receive..."
Four broadcasts, all set en clair:
To Fleet Marshal Ian Mahoney:
"Comm One, Comm One, this is Liberty Seven. There ain't nothin' left to shoot at..."
To Lady Atago:
"Unknown approaching units... this is the Tahn battleship H'rcana. We have you ID'd as friendly. Do not continue your present orbit, over. Request you stand by for recovery assistance."
To Lord Fehrle—unreceived:
"Command... Command... this is P'riser. Plan Heart-strike canceled. Plan W'mon activated."
To all Tahn ships:
"All units. All units. Begin retirement. Support, if possible, friendly units under drive."
In eyes-only code, Fleet Marshal Ian Mahoney to the Eternal Emperor:
"Tahn seared. Repeat, all Tahn seared. Question—how to serve? Second question—what wine?"
Confused though it might have been from its name to its step-by-step execution, there were some completely obvious conclusions from the battle(s) of Durer-Al-Sufi:
The Tahn had been smashed.
Their major war-winning offensive had been blunted and turned back.
The nearly-total destruction of the Tahn's finest units meant that it would be years before they could mount another such offensive.
The Emperor hoped—and knew he was full of hops—that those conclusions were equally evident to the Tahn.
It might have been the beginning of the end—but getting there was still going to be a long, bloody, and certainly not foreordained process.
And the Eternal Emperor could afford to make no other mistakes.
BOOK THREE
KOBO-ICHI
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
The Tahn reeled back from the awful blow of Durer like a man struck in the stomach with a lead-weighted bat. They were left doubled over, mouth gaping, lungs emptied of air and blood hammering at the temples, threatening to hemorrhage at the ears.
They were caught in that long, frozen moment in history that even casual students would point at eons later and say, "Here was the turning point. Here was where priorities needed to be reexamined, strategy revamped, scenarios rethought."
Because, as an ancient philosopher once said, "It ain't over till it's over." Or as the Eternal Emperor might have put it; stealing from one of his favorite political thinkers, "Winning isn't everything. But losing isn't anything."
Durer-Al-Sufi was lost. That was a tired fact almost as soon as it was over. But not the war. Another tired fact, viscerally understood by the Tahn. The trick was to make the mind understand what the gut was thinking without ripping open the gut and spreading out the entrails. History was a blackened landscape of great kingdoms that murdered the oracle to seek the message. That was a mistake the Tahn could not and did not make.
They turned inward, fighting every instinct to find fault, to point the blame. They turned inward to find strength but were confronted with the frozen poles of their culture: a north where defeat could not even be contemplated, and a south where every facet of Tahn life had to be controlled and molded to official will—all spinning on an axis of hatred for anything un-Tahn. And they had no Shackleton or Perry to lead the way. Only Lord Fehrle—the man who had presided over the second greatest defeat of their history.
Fehrle was no coward. After the defeat, he did not commit ritual suicide. Instead, he returned to Heath, fully expecting to be stripped of all honors, executed, his name excised from Tahn history. If his people needed to work out their rage on his quivering corpse, then so be it.
Instead, he was seen in his usual position of prominence—with the other members of the Tahn High Council lined up exactly around him as before—during a news broadcast covering the appointment of a governor-general to a newly won Tahn territory. It was an event noted with interest by every skilled Tahn watcher who knew about Durer. The Eternal Emperor—the most skilled of them all—grunted to himself when he reviewed the fiche. Fehrle's survival was not something he had expected.
When he had learned that the Tahn lord had personally led the expedition, he had thought the man's political destruction would be an added bonus to all that twisted metal and those blasted bodies. Still, there was an advantage to press for there and the Eternal Emperor went all out for it.
When the Emperor struck out and connected with that loaded bat, the only thought his enemy had as he reeled back from the blow, was that no one could know about Durer. Even that old cynic, Pastour, realized that it was not the time for recriminations or political infighting. When he had heard the news, he had vomited, wiped his lips, then hurried to the emergency High Council meeting, determined to keep his colleagues from removing Fehrle and then committing bureaucracide in the resultant fight over who would lead the council.
Even in normal times there were too many factions with too many self-serving interests to declare a clear winner. Given time, a consensus might be hammered out the way a cooper formed the hoops of an enormous barrel whose contents could not be contained under the normal laws of volume.
Pastour had a glimmering, even at that moment, that the only conceivable choice would have to be Lady Atago, as much as he disliked the woman. When the day came to replace Fehrle, she would be the only knight in white armor left. Because although Durer had permanently blackened Fehrle, it would have the opposite effect on Atago. To survive as a coherent people, the Tahn needed their heroes—like the ancient Persians needed the myth of Jamshid. Pastour went to the meeting armed with every diplomatic and political skill he could command.
Surprisingly, it did not take much argument. The others were as stunned and gasping as he was. All of them knew, without coaxing, that if news of Durer leaked out to the populace, the war with the Empire was lost. The first order issued was for a total clampdown on anything and anyone involved with Durer.
Even in a society where news was not just controlled but rationed, the order was carried out on an unprecedented scale. An enormous amount of credits, energy, and manpower was hurled at the task. It was a gag order with no journalistic equivalent. Scholars, looking for descriptive comparisons, would have to turn to human-wave assault battles—like Thermopylae, the Russian Summer offensive of 1943, the Yalu, or the Imperial disaster of Saragossa during the Mueller Wars.
The destroyed ships and personnel were removed from all files and logs. All survivors were seized and incarcerated, as were the friends and families of the dead and wounded. Behind-the-lines suppliers found themselves mysteriously reassigned to barren regions. Even minor officials were visited at night and grilled for any speck of information that might be damaging. Then the interrogators themselves were grilled. On and on it went as the Tahn searched out and purged every kink and crook in the line of the vast plumbing system that was the Tahn bureaucracy.