Machines were different; they usually wouldn’t let you make illegal moves or take back earlier errors. So you just reset them, or went back to the saved position or a time when the mistake could be unmade.
Only this was not a game, or — if it was — it was one in which Luseferous didn’t know how you changed the rules or swept your arm across the board or hit the Delete All sequence. Maybe the end of the game was death, and he’d wake to find himself in the greater reality that the Truth had always maintained existed. That was a sort of comfort, though even then he didn’t want to wake up after a failure.
Time was the problem. Time and the fucking Dwellers.
The Luseferous VII swung ponderously into orbit around the planet Nasqueron. He watched it from his new flagship, the Main Fleet Combat Craft Rapacious (a super-battleship in all but name, he’d be prepared to concede).
Insufficient time. How had it come to this? If he hadn’t delayed so long before starting, if he hadn’t stopped off along the way, if he hadn’t, perhaps, insisted on full fleet dispositional discipline… and yet he’d swung into action much more quickly than some democratic or committee-based organisation could have, and he would have been mad to leave strongholds intact along his line of advance and… and return. And discipline was important, keeping everything together was important. It symbolised loyalty, it betokened military and personal discipline.
So there had been no choice, really. They’d got here as quickly as they could. The fucking Beyonders should have warned him the Summed Fleet squadrons were coming quicker than they’d anticipated. It was all their doing. It might even be a conspiracy against him. Oh, they’d taken part in the attacks on Ulubis when it had suited them, though they’d never been as decisive as they could and should have been. Fucking whining lily-livered moralists. Military targets! So they preserved their precious fucking scruples and left him to do the dirty work. If they’d been as emphatic and ruthless as he’d been, things might have turned out differently. Instead they’d supported him just enough to bring him here but now that he was where they’d wanted him all along, they were deserting him.
Luseferous wished now that he hadn’t let the Liss woman go. He’d given Saluus Kehar, the industrialist guy, back to his own people, largely to see what they’d do. Would they believe him when he told them he’d been kidnapped? Or not? Jury still out; the Guard had taken him for questioning. The woman who’d kidnapped him, and who had asked to take him back personally when she’d heard that was what the Archimandrite had in mind, had disappeared before she’d even handed him over, probably returning to her Beyonder pals. Stupid to have let a potential lever like that go, but he’d had so many other things on his mind, and the full extent of the Beyonders’ betrayal hadn’t been clear at the time.
Where were their craft? Where were their invasion troops or occupying forces? They were still staying on the outskirts, still not coming into the system itself, still too scared to commit themselves. They’d professed horror and disappointment at his destruction of the city and the habitat, and at the way his troops had reacted to some elements of resistance. Fuck them! This was a fucking war! How the fuck did they think you won one? Casualties had been almost disappointingly light; Luseferous couldn’t remember a full-scale invasion campaign which had ended with so few dead. They’d arrived in such overwhelming numbers that there had been little the other side could do apart from die pointlessly, surrender or run.
They’d had a bit of luck, too, and the intelligence provided by the Beyonders about military preparations and fleet dispositions had made a bit of a difference as well, he supposed. But basically it was just big guns and plenty of them that had done the trick, and the really impressive space battles he’d kind of been hoping for just hadn’t materialised.
So the system was his, even if the only ground he’d trodden personally was when making one brief appearance at a small mansion in the middle of a jungle to accept the formal surrender of the Hierchon. He’d have preferred the symbolic value of the big spherical palace in Borquille, even if it was damaged, but the security people felt there was still a danger from a well-hidden nuke or something equally unpleasant, so a house in the middle of nowhere it had been. The Hierchon and his people were being held aboard the Luseferous VII. Let the Summed Fleet kill him if that was the way it had to be.
The Beyonders reported that there had been a few engagements with elements of the Ulubine Mercatoria military which had turned tail to run and then encountered their forces. But even there the Archimandrite was hearing rumours that the fleeing Navarchy ships were being allowed to surrender, or even accept a sort of neutral internment, still fully crewed and armed, rather than being destroyed or captured.
So Luseferous was alone again, abandoned by his treacherous allies. They’d lured him here, got him to remove part of the threat against them, and now no doubt hoped that he’d take on the Summed Fleet squadrons when they arrived, doing the work they were too cowardly to do themselves.
Well, the strategists and tacticians were seriously considering cutting their losses and heading back home again. This would seem ignominious to some, but if it was the best thing to be done then that was all there was to it. Again, he’d kept calm when he’d first heard this latest galling concept. He wasn’t stupid; he could see the situation for himself. Do what the enemy least expected, what they would least want you to do.
They might — it was still just a might — set off back for the relative safety of Epiphany 5, far away across the empty regions of space they’d spent all those years crossing. It would be unfortunate, but it might be the best thing to do all the same. They’d have to leave a lot of ships behind and they’d certainly have to abandon the Luseferous VII — it was too slow and too tempting a target — but they could do it. They’d leave behind sufficient forces to force the Summed Fleet to first fight within the system and then station some craft there, they’d take only the fastest ships and so have a head start, and they’d hope to lure away the main part of the remainder of the Summed Fleet squadrons — the bit that would be likely to come after them — by sending the Luseferous VII and a small escort screen of lesser ships off in a different direction.
It was a horrible thing to have to think about, this running away so soon after getting here and achieving complete victory. But it might be better than standing and fighting when the outcome of the resulting battle was so finely balanced.
Or, of course, they could find what they had really come for. This Dweller List key, this Transform, this magic formula. With that in his possession, Luseferous would have a bargaining counter of almost infinite value. So he was told, anyway, and for the sake of their own hides his advisers had better be utterly spot-on right with this one. Literally. He’d have the fuckers skinned alive if they’d led him all this way for nothing.