Use of Weapons

'Well, impacting at four or five kilometres a second wouldn't leave it totally undented, I suspect.'

'But Zakalwe!' Napoerea roared, doing a reasonable impression of a small nuclear explosion himself, 'That's absurd! You can't do it! The Vktorious is a symbol of… it's our hope! All the people look at our…'

He smiled, letting the priest ramble on for a little while. He was fairly certain the priests looked on the Hegemonarchy Victorious as their escape route if things went badly in the end.

He waited until Napoerea had almost finished, then said, 'I understand; but the craft is on its last legs already, gentlemen. I've talked to the technicians and the pilots; it's a death-trap. It was more luck than anything else that it got me here safely.' He paused, watching the men with the blue circles on their foreheads look wide- eyed at each other. The muttering increased. He wanted to smile. That had put the fear of god into them. 'I'm sorry, but this is the one thing the Victorious is good for.' He smiled. 'And it could indeed produce Victory.'

He left them to mull over the concepts of high-hypersonic dive-bombing (no, no suicide mission required; the craft's computers were perfectly capable of taking it up and bringing it straight down), symbol-trashing (a lot the peasants and factory workers would care about their piece of high-tech baublery getting junked), and Decapitation (probably the most worrying idea of the lot for the high-priests; what if the Empire thought of doing it to them?) He assured them the Empire would be in no state to retaliate; and when they offered peace, the priests would hint heavily they had used a missile of their own, not the spacecraft, and pretend there were more where that came from. Even though this would not be difficult to disprove, especially if one of the world's more sophisticated societies chose to tell the Empire what had really happened, it would still be worrying for whoever was trying to work out what to do on the other side. Besides, they could always just get out of the city). Meanwhile he went to visit more army units.

The Imperial Army started its advance again, though slower than before. He had drawn his troops back almost to the foothills of the mountains, burning the few unharvested fields and razing the towns behind them. Whenever they abandoned an airfield they planted bombs under the runways with days-long time delays, and dug plenty of other holes that looked like they might contain bombs.

In the foothills he supervised much of the lay-out of their defensive lines himself, and kept up his visits to airfields, regional headquarters and operational units. He kept up, too, the pressure on the high priests at least to consider using the spacecraft for a decapitation strike.

He was busy, he realised one day, as he lay down to sleep in an old castle that had become operational HQ for this section of the front (the sky had bloomed with light on the tree-lined horizon, and the air shaken with the sound of a bombardment, just after dusk). Busy and — he had to admit, as he put the last reports on the floor under the camp bed, and put the light out and was almost instantly asleep — happy.

Two weeks, three weeks from his arrival; the little news that came in from outside seemed to indicate there was an awful lot of nothing going on. He suspected there was a lot of intense politicking taking place. Beychae's name was mentioned; he was still on the Murssay Station, in touch with the various parties. No word of the Culture, or from it. He wondered if they ever just forgot things; maybe they'd forget about him, leave him here, struggling forever in the priests' and the Empire's insane war.

The defences grew; the Hegemonarchy's soldiers dug and built, but were mostly not under fire, and the Imperial Army gradually lapped against the foothills and paused. He had the Air Force harry the supply lines and the front line units, and pound the nearest airfields.

'There are far too many troops stationed here, round the city. The best troops should be at the front. The attack will come soon, and if we're to counter-attack successfully — and it could be very successfully, if they're tempted to go for a knockout; they've little left in reserve — then we need those elite squads where they can do some good.'

'There is the problem of civil unrest,' Napoerea said. He looked old and tired.

'Keep a few units here, and keep them in the streets, so people don't forget they're here, but dammit, Napoerea, most of these guys spend all their time in barracks. They're needed at the front. I have just the place for them, look…'

Actually he wanted to tempt the Imperial Army to go for the knock-out, and the city was to be the bait. He sent the crack troops into the mountain passes. The priests looked at how much territory they'd now lost, and tentatively gave the go-ahead for preparing for decapitation; the Hegemonarchy Victorious would be readied for its final flight, though not used unless the situation appeared genuinely desperate. He promised he would try to win the war conventionally first.

The attack came; forty days after he had arrived on Murssay, the Imperial Army crashed into the foothill forests. The priests began to panic. He had the Air Force attack the supply lines the majority of the time, not the front. The defensive lines gradually gave way; units retreated, bridges were blown. Gradually, as the foothills led into the mountains, the Imperial Army was concentrated, funnelled into the valleys. The trick with the dam didn't work this time; the charges placed under it just didn't go off. He had to move fast to shift two elite units to cover the pass above that valley.

'But if we leave the city?' The priests looked stunned. Their eyes looked as empty as the painted blue circle on their foreheads. The Imperial Army was slowly moving up the valleys, forcing their soldiers back. He kept telling them things would be all right, but things just got worse and worse. There was nothing else for them to do; it all seemed too hopeless, and too late to take things back into their own hands. Last night, with

the wind blowing down from the mountains to the city, the sound of distant artillery had been audible.

'They'll try to take Balzeit City if they think they can,' he said. 'It's a symbol. Well fine, but it doesn't actually have much military importance. They'll grab at it. We let just so many through, then we close the passes; here,' he said, tapping the map. The priests shook their heads.

'Gents, we are not in disarray! We are falling back. But they are in much worse shape than we are, taking far heavier casualties; each metre is costing them blood. And, all the time, their supply lines get longer. We must take them to the point where they start to think about pulling back, then present them with the possibility — the seeming possibility — of a knock-out blow. But it won't knock us out; it knocks them out.' He looked round them. 'Believe me; it'll work. You may have to leave the citadel for a while, but when you return, I guarantee it will be in triumph.'

They did not look convinced, but — possibly because they were just too stunned to fight — they let him have his way.

It took a few days, while the Imperial Army struggled up the valleys, and the Hegemonarchy's forces resisted, retreated, resisted, retreated, but eventually — watching for signs that the Imperial soldiers were tiring, and the tanks and trucks not always moving when they might have wanted to, starved of fuel — he decided that were he on the other side, he'd be thinking about halting the advance. That night, in the pass which led down to the city, most of the Hegemonarchy troops left their positions. In the morning the battle resumed, and the Hegemonarchy's men suddenly retreated, shortly before they would have been over-run. A puzzled, excited but still exhausted and worried General in the Imperial High Command watched through field glasses as a distant convoy of trucks crawled away down the pass towards the city, occasionally strafed by Imperial aircraft. Reconnaissance suggested the infidel priests were making preparations to leave their citadel. Spies indicated that their spacecraft was being readied for some special mission.

The General radioed the Court High Command. The order to advance on the city was given the following day.

He watched the terminally worried-looking priests leave from the train station under the citadel. In the end he had to dissuade them from ordering the decapitation attack. Let me try this first, he'd told them.

They could not understand each other.

The priests looked at the territory they had lost, and the fraction they had left, and thought it was all over for them. He looked at his relatively unscathed divisions, his fresh units, his crack squads, all positioned just where they should be, knives laid against and inside the body of an over-extended, worn-out enemy, just ready to cut… and thought it was all over for the Empire.

The train pulled out, and — unable to resist — he waved cheerily. The high priests would be better out of the way, in one of their great monasteries in the next mountain range. He ran back upstairs to the map room, to see how things were going.

He waited until a couple of divisions had made it through the pass, then had the units that had held it — and