Use of Weapons

was at.

The officers seemed to know more about the disposition of their enemy's forces than they did about the feelings of their own men.

He nodded to himself, scanned all the maps, then left for breakfast with Napoerea and the rest of the priests. He dragged them all back down into the map room afterwards — they would normally have returned to their own apartments for contemplation — and asked even more questions.

'And I want a uniform like these guys,' he said, pointing at one of the junior regular army officers in the map room.

'But, Sir Zakalwe,' Napoerea said, looking worried. 'Those would demean you!'

'And these will slow me down,' he said, indicating the long, heavy robes he was wearing. 'I want to take a look at the front myself.'

'But, sir, this is the holy citadel; all our intelligence comes here, all our people's prayers are directed here.'

'Napoerea,' he said, putting his hand on the other man's shoulder. 'I know; but I need to see things for myself. I only just got here, remember?' He looked round the unhappy faces of the other high priests. 'I'm sure your ways work when circumstances are as they have been in the past,' he told them, straight-faced. 'But I'm new, and so I have to use new ways to discover what you probably already know.' He turned back to Napoerea. 'I want my own plane; a modified reconnaissance aircraft should do. Two fighters as an escort.'

The priests had thought it the height of daring unorthodoxy to venture out to the space port, thirty kilometres away, by train and truck; they thought he was mad to want to start flying all over the sub- continent.

It was what he did for the next few days, however. There was a lull of sorts in the fighting just at that point — as the Hegemonarchy's forces fled and the Empire's consolidated — which made his task a little easier. He wore a plain uniform, without even the half-dozen or so medal ribbons that even the most junior officer seemed to warrant just for existing. He spoke to the mostly dull, demoralised and thoroughly hidebound field generals and colonels, to their staff, and to the foot soldiers and tank crews, as well as to the cooks and the supply teams and the orderlies and doctors. Most of the time he needed an interpreter; only the top brass spoke the Cluster's common tongue, but even so he suspected the troops felt closer to somebody who spoke a different language but asked them questions than they did to somebody who shared their language and only ever used it to give orders.

He toured every major air field in the course of that first week, sounding out the Air Force staff for their feelings and opinions. About the only person he tended to ignore on such occasions was the always watchful priest every squadron, regiment and fort had as its titular head. The first few of these priests he'd encountered had had nothing useful to say, and none of those he saw subsequently ever seemed to have anything interesting to add beyond the ritualised initial greetings. He had decided within the first couple of days that the main problem the priests had was themselves.

'Shenastri Province!' Napoerea exclaimed. 'But there are a dozen important religious sites there! More! And you propose to surrender without a fight?'

'You'll get the temples back once we've won the war, and probably lots of new treasure to put inside them. They're going to fall whether we try to hold there or not, and they'll probably be damaged if not destroyed in the fighting. This way, they'll survive intact. And it stretches their supply lines like crazy. Look; the rains start in, what? A month? By the time we're ready to counter-attack, they'll have even worse supply problems; the wet lands behind them mean they can't bring stuff that way, and they can't retreat there once we do attack. Nappy; old son; this is beautiful, believe me. If I was a commander on the other side and I saw this area being offered, I wouldn't go within a million klicks of it, but the Imperial Army boys are going to have to because the Court won't let them do anything else. But they'll know it's a trap. Terrible for the morale.'

'I don't know, I don't know…' Napoerea shook his head, both his hands at his mouth, massaging his lower lip while he looked worriedly at the map.

(No, you don't know, he thought to himself, watching the man's nervous body-language. You lot haven't known anything very useful for generations, chum.) 'It must be done,' he said. 'The withdrawal should start today.' He turned to another map. 'Aircraft; stop the bombing and strafing of the roads. Give the pilots two days' rest, then raid the oil refineries, here.' He pointed. 'A mass raid; use everything with the range that'll fly.'

'But if we stop attacking the roads…'

'They'll fill with even more refugees,' he told the man. 'That'll slow the Imperial Army down more than our planes. I do want some of these bridges taken out.' He tapped a couple of river crossings. He looked mystified at Napoerea. 'You guys sign some sort of agreement not to bomb bridges or something?'

'It has always been felt that destroying bridges would hinder a counter-attack, as well as being… wasteful,' the priest said, unhappily.

'Well, these three have to go, anyway.' He tapped the surface of the map. 'That and the refinery raid should put some sand in their fuel-lines,' he said, clapping his hands together and rubbing them.

'But we believe the Imperial Army has great reserves of fuel,' Napoerea said, looking very unhappy.

'Even if they have,' he told the high-priest, 'Commanders will move more cautiously knowing supplies have been interrupted; they're careful guys. But I bet they never did have the supplies you thought; they probably think you have bigger supplies than you do, and with the advance they've had to fund recently… believe me; they may panic a little if the refinery raid comes off the way I hope it will.'

Napoerea looked downcast, rubbed his chin while he gazed forlornly at the maps. 'It all sounds very…' he began. … very… adventurous.'

The high-priest invested the word with a degree of loathing and contempt that might have been amusing in other circumstances.

Under great protest, the high priests were persuaded they must give up their precious province and its many important religious sites to the enemy; they agreed to the mass raid on the refinery.

He visited the retreating soldiers and the main airfields that would take part in the refinery raid. Then he took a couple of days travelling the mountains by truck, inspecting the defences. There was a valley with a dam at its head that might also provide an effective trap if the Imperial Army made it that far (he remembered the concrete island, the snivelling girl and the chair). While he was driven along the rough roads between the hill forts, he saw a hundred or more aircraft drone overhead, heading out across the still peaceful looking plains, their wings loaded with bombs.

The refinery raid was expensive; almost a quarter of the planes never came back. But the Imperial Army's advance halted a day later. He had hoped they would keep on coming for a bit — their supplies hadn't been supplied straight from the refinery, so they could have kept going for a week or so — but they'd done the sensible thing, and stopped for the moment.

He flew to the spaceport, where the lumbering spaceship — it looked even more dangerous and dilapidated in daylight — was being slowly patched up and repaired in case it was ever wanted again. He talked to the technicians, took a look round the ancient device. The ship had a name, he discovered; the Hegemonarchy Victorious.

'It's called decapitation,' he told the priests. 'The Imperial Court travels to Willitice Lake at the start of every Second Season; the high command comes to brief them. We drop the Victorious in on them, the day the general staff arrive.'

The priests looked puzzled. 'With what, Sir Zakalwe? A commando force? The Victorious is only able to hold…'

'No no,' he said. 'When I say drop it, I mean we bomb them with it. We put it into space and then bring it back in, down on top of the Lake Palace. It's a good four hundred tonnes; even travelling at only ten times the speed of sound it'll hit like a small nuke going off; we'll get the entire Court and the general staff in one go. We offer peace to the commoners' parliament immediately. With any luck at all we cause immense civil disturbance; probably the commoners' parliament will see this as their chance to grab real power; the army will want to take up the reigns itself, and may even have to turn round and fight a civil war. Junior aristos filing competing claims should complicate the situation nicely.'

'But,' Napoerea said, 'this means destroying the Victorious, does it not?' The other priests were shaking their heads.