Conqueror

Zahpata's aide moved his dog closer as the major read the slip of paper the messenger pulled out of his glove.

'Messer Raj has been defeated?' he asked incredulously.

'Don't be more of a fool than your mother made you, Hezus,' Zahpata snorted, reading. 'Ah-a great victory. Another infidel group, defeated with small loss.'

He wrote on the reverse of the first message. 'My compliments to the heneralissimo, and we expect to intersect the northern road at. .' What was the heathen name? Ah, yes.'. . at Mekrez al-Ghirba.'

That should put him on an intercept course, or even get there ahead of time. The messenger saluted, pulled his dog's head around, and clapped his heels to its ribs.

'If we're not defeated, sir, why are we pulling back?'

Zahpata looked at the eager young face and sighed inwardly. The boy was here as a military apprentice, and you expected the young to be fools. Although Messer Raj was only a few years older when he had his first independent command.

'Messer Raj met and defeated one enemy column; perhaps two thousand men, twenty-five hundred. With twenty guns. We met and defeated another-fifteen hundred men, ten guns. What do you think will happen next?'

'Oh,' the aide said.

Zahpata clouted him alongside the head, half-affectionately; his helmet bonged. 'Live and learn, boy-or don't learn and die.' He looked around. 'Messenger, to battalion commanders. 18th Komar will lead; City of Delrio follows, Novy Haifa to rear. Scout-screens on all sides, maximum alertness. Hadelande!'

CHAPTER TEN

It was dark, with the sun down and only Miniluna in the sky. The earth gave back the day's heat, radiating from the bare clay of the badlands in the Drangosh bend; the darkness turned the ochers and umbers of the canyons to a uniform gray. Pterosauroids cheeped and mewed overhead, swooping after night-flying insects; Raj caught a gleam from the huge round eye of one, a vagrant trace of starlight. Earth-descended bats passed more silently. Off in the tangle of gullies and sinkholes something roared on a rising note, ending in a pierced-boiler screech; there was a rattle along the lines of dogs as the big animals raised their heads and cocked ears toward it. Some carnosauroid; they were hard to eliminate, in any area without a dense population, and the Civil Government force was into the belt of uncultivated land that extended from just west of Ain el-Hilwa along the river north to the border.

Raj sat, wrapping his officer's cloak around his shoulders and looking up at the stars that stretched in a thick frosted band across the sky. The Stars where man had once dwelt, before the Fall-and would again, if Center's plan succeeded.

The unFallen had the powers of gods, Raj thought. Yet from what Center tells me, they were still men-not sinless, as the Church teaches. They had their wars and their intrigues, as we do; their tragedies and defeats, as we do.

true, the voice in his mind said. my analysis is that such are inherent in the nature of your species.

Raj leaned back against the clay and lit a cheroot. What's the point, then? he asked. If all I'm doing is letting people make mistakes on a bigger scale and a broader canvas?

Center was silent for half a minute. this is a difficult question, and one at the limits of my powers of analysis. i was not constructed so as to be capable of philosophical doubt.

Another pause. in your terms: the fall represented a limitation of human choice due to suboptimal decisions. the greater capacities of a unified and technologically advanced civilization free humans from the determinism of nature. both their triumphs and their failures become matters of choice.

Ours aren't?

only to a very limited degree. the vast majority of humans on bellevue are peasants, because you lack the productive capacity to organize yourselves otherwise. this precludes forms of government and social organization less authoritarian, because the civilized regions depend too heavily on coercion to produce the surplus on which cities and a literate leisure class depend. if the fall continues, even agriculture-based societies will collapse and maximum entropy will be reached at a hunter-gatherer level. the survival of human life on this planet will then be in doubt.

As if to illustrate the point, the carnosauroid's retching scream sounded again through the night.

a new civilization may eventually emerge; but it will lack any continuity with the ancestral culture. and fifteen thousand years of savagery means hundreds of generations of human lives without the opportunity to exercise their capacities.

Raj nodded. Peasants were old at forty, and every day in their lives was pretty much the same, except when something went badly wrong. The Church said it was punishment for men's sins-which seemed to be literally true in Center's terms as well-but there was no reason for the punishment to go on forever.

He shivered slightly, despite the warmth of the earth at his back. The fate of the human race for the next fifteen millennia rests on me, then. And our chances of pulling it off are no better than even.

correct.

He stood and flicked the stub out into the darkness, a solitary ember that arced away and was lost in the night. He turned. Behind him the command group was gathering about the pool of light cast by a kerosene lantern, the undershadow putting the bones of their faces into hard relief. They were unfolding maps, munching on hardtack and pieces of jerked meat; their smiles and eyes looked as feral as so many war-dogs in the yellow light.

'Well, sooner started, sooner finished,' Raj said. He strode into the light. 'Right, gentlemen. Tewfik's main force is rather smaller than I'd expected-about sixteen thousand men, according to Captain M'lewis's report.'

'Countin' banners, sir. Couldna' git closer. Them wogs is screened tighter 'n a cherry inna raghead's hareem.'

Everyone nodded. Colonial units were less standardized in number than their Civil Government equivalents. One reason for that was a deliberate attempt to make it harder for observers to get a quick, accurate tally of a Colonial army's numbers by counting the unit standards.

'We'll take sixteen thousand as a ballpark figure-which worries me, Messers. We're here' — he put his finger on a spot west of Ain el-Hilwa- 'and we have to cut the bend of the Drangosh to get back to our bridgehead opposite Sandoral. I hope you all realize that after leaving Ali's main army-'

He moved his finger to the west bank, and north almost to Sandoral, then south again to the Colonial pontoon bridge.

'— he could have dropped forces off to cross the river and take up blocking positions north of us.'

By their expressions, the thought was an unpleasant surprise to a few of the battalion commanders-although not to his Companions.

'That depends on Tewfik's estimate of our numbers and intentions. We'll let the men rest another hour, then start out at Maxiluna rise.' With both moons in the sky, there would be more than enough light for riding. 'We'll make use of every hour of darkness we can; it'll be cooler, too.

'Colonel Staenbridge,' he went on, 'you take the three companies of the 5th and lead the way. Spread out but move fast. Captain M'lewis, you'll be the scout screen for the scout screen. Gerrin, if you run into anything you think you can handle, punch through. If not, go around if that's possible, screening our retreat. Major Zahpata, you and your 18th Komar will follow in column of march right behind. Exercise normal caution, but rely on Colonel Staenbridge for your intelligence. Gerrin, if you run into anything you can't handle, Major Zahpata is to move up immediately and support the 5th at your direction. Understood?'

Both men nodded. At least I don't have to wonder who'll take orders from whom, Raj thought thankfully. That sort of thing had nearly gotten him killed in the Southern Territories campaign, at the