Straha was saying, “-because our campaign has been misadmimstered at the highest level, we have no hope of the victory for which the Emperor sent us forth. We have been betrayed by the arrogance and overconfidence of the exalted fleetlord, who consistently refuses to listen to advice from those who know better than he. And if we cannot win this war, what must we do?”
“Getting rid of traitors would be a good first step,” Kirel said savagely.
“Who could have imagined this?” Atvar agreed. “To be captured in battle is one thing, and no disgrace. To flee to the enemy, especially when the enemy is not of the Race… such has never been done in all our history, not since the Empire first covered all of Home.” In his mind, breaking a precedent a hundred thousand years old was a crime as appalling as betraying the Race.
Straha’s ranting had gone on while Atvar and Kirel vented their fury. The fleetlord ran the recording back and let it play once more: “We must make the best terms with the Tosevites we can. I am treated well here by the Americans, though I was a shiplord in the force that vainly tried to overcome them. Males of lower rank enjoy treatment equally good here, as is true in many of the other empires on this world. Take yourselves out of danger you should never have been in.”
Atvar stabbed out a clawed forefinger and turned off the recording. “How many of our males will hear this poisonous nonsense?” he demanded.
Kirel looked unhappy. “Some of these broadcasts are on our entertainment frequencies: no doubt the Big Uglies learned those from prisoners. Others-translations-use the frequencies the Tosevites more commonly employ, and are no doubt intended to boost their morale. Exalted Fleetlord, my opinion is that both uses are extremely damaging to us.”
“I should say so!” Atvar snarled. “The Race is hierarchical by nature and training. Foolish males who hear the third-highest officer in the conquest fleet tell them all is lost are all too likely to believe him. What can we do to suppress his treacherous twaddle?”
Kirel looked unhappier still. “Exalted Fleetlord, of course we attack transmitters, but that does only so much good. The Americans quickly rebuild and relocate them. And Straha, I am certain, is not present at the transmission sites. Our engineers say these broadcasts are made from recordings.”
“Where is he, then?” Atvar demanded. “His shuttle landed not far from one of the sites to which the Big Uglies fly prisoners. Surely they must have a facility somewhere in this area.”
“No doubt they do, but they have gone to great pains to keep us confused as to where it might be,” Kirel said. “So far, they have succeeded, too. Besides, they may well have shifted Straha away from that region to prevent us from reacquiring him through a raid on the prisoner holding facility. In short, we do not know where he is and have no immediate hope of learning.”
“Most unsatisfactory,” Atvar said. “We can jam the frequencies where Straha’s babbling is directed at other Big Uglies, but if we jam those on which he seeks to speak to our males, we jam our own entertainment channels, which is also unsatisfactory. Straha-” He let out a long hiss. “I was angry at him for trying to overthrow me, but even then I never expectedthis. ”
“Nor I, Exalted Fleetlord,” Kirel said. “He must have greatly feared the might of your vengeance.”
Atvar wondered if that was polite, oblique criticism. Should he have tried to come to terms with Straha after the shiplord failed to oust him? How could he, without relinquishing some of the power the Emperor had granted him? In any case, no point worrying about that now: far too late.
“Did we at least succeed in destroying the shuttle Straha used to escape?’ he asked.
“I-believe so, Exalted Fleetlord,” Kirel answered cautiously. “The Big Uglies show an amazing capacity for deception, though, so I cannot be quite certain.”
“We’d better have destroyed it,” Atvar said. “The Deutsche are already throwing their own missiles at us, but those are just short-range weapons with bad guidance, small payloads, and no chance of achieving orbital velocity, much less velocity to escape this planet. If the Big Uglies get proper rocket motors, though, and a couple of them with atomic weapons-”
He and Kirel stared at each other in horror. Kirel said, “If that happens, Exalted Fleetlord, the entire conquest fleet is at risk. We may have to think about wrecking this world for the sake of our own survival.”
“This fleet’s survival, yes, but the colonization fleet will be thrown away if it arrives to discover a world unsuitable for colonization.”
“It will also be thrown away if it arrives to discover a world that is the base for space-traveling Big Uglies with atomic weapons,” Kirel replied.
Atvar would have given him a hot answer, if only he could have come up with one. At last, he said, “Let us hope we did destroy the shuttle. That will buy us the time we need to complete the conquest before the Tosevites become spacefarers.” But when you bought time against the Big Uglies, somehow you always ended up buying less than you thought you were paying for.
Marching. Nieh Ho-T’ing sometimes thought he’d been born marching. He would have bet a goodly sum that he would die marching. If his death advanced the cause of the proletarian revolution, he would have accepted it without a qualm, although he had no more interest in immediately dying than any other healthy man of thirty-five.
He’d been on the Long March with Mao, commanding a ragged division of the Communist Army as it fled Chiang Kai-Shek’s counter-revolutionary forces. That had been a march worthy of the name. Now he personally commanded only a squadron of men on the road northwest from Shanghai to Peking. It looked like a demotion. It wasn’t. Responsibility for guerrilla resistance to the scaly devils-and, when necessary, to other foes of the revolution as well-through that whole stretch of territory rested in his hands.
He turned to his second-in-command, Hsia Shou-Tao, and said, “This is surely the most complicated piece of warfare the world has ever known.”
Hsia grunted. He was a big, burly man with a wide, tough-looking face, the archetype of a stupid, brutal peasant. He had a deep, rasping voice, too, and had used it and his appearance to escape trouble any number of times. He was, however, anything but stupid. Laughing a little, he said, “Why on earth would you say that? Just because we, the little scaly devil imperialists, the Kuomintang and Chiang’s counter-revoluntionary clique, and the remnants of the eastern devil imperialists from Japan areall struggling over the same territory?”
“No, not just because of that.” Nieh paused a moment to fan himself with his straw hat. Peasant dress-the hat, loose-fitting black cotton shirt and trousers, sandals-was as good as anything at withstanding the muggy heat of Chinese summer. “If we faced merely a four-cornered struggle, everything would be simple.”
“For you, maybe,” Hsia Shou-Tao said. Sometimes he played the role of foolish boor so well that he even seemed to convince himself with it
“I mean what I say,” Nieh Ho-T’ing insisted. “This is not a war with corners, this is a war in a spider’s web, with threads running from each force to all the others, and sometimes sticking when they cross. Consider sometimes the men of the Kuomintang cooperate with us against the scaly devils, sometimes they betray us to them. Knowing when they will do the one and when the other is a matter of life and death, of success or failure for the progressive forces.”
“We’ve sold them out a few times, too,” Hsia said with a reminiscent chuckle.
“Exactly so, and they are as wary of us as we are of them. But sometimes we do work with them, as we do sometimes with the Japanese, and sometimes with even stranger allies,” Nieh said.
“That foreign devil, the American, you mean?” Hsia asked. “Yes, he was useful. I’ve never seen a man who could throw like-what was his name?”