John Ringo - East of the Sun, West of the Moon

“How do you guard against it?” Herzer asked. He realized as he asked the question that he had never had a class in information control. Generally, he just didn’t talk about anything that might be useful information.

“Never discuss your job with anyone you don’t know is cleared, sir,” Destrang answered. “When someone you don’t know is cleared wants to talk shop, talk shop about their job or change the subject. Never admit that anything they say as an assumption is true.”

“Hmph,” Herzer said, wondering how many times he’d been probed over the years. He also knew that one of the first rules of leadership is knowing when to admit ignorance and when not. “Good answer. Keep it in mind in this job. You, too, Van Krief.”

“Yes, sir,” Destrang said.

“How long have you been living here, sir?” Van Krief asked, changing the subject.

“Four months,” Herzer said. “I’ve been assigned to ops working on warplans for the upcoming invasion. And, of course, swaining Megan around to parties,” he added, frowning. “But that’s out the window for the time being. We’ll be leaving sometime tomorrow. This afternoon, I’ll brief in Van Krief on what we’re looking at. This evening I’ve got meetings with command on preliminary plans.”

“And those are?” Van Krief asked.

“When I figure that out, I’ll tell you,” Herzer admitted.

“So that’s what we’re looking at,” Herzer said, gesturing at the schematic that was laid out on the living room floor. “We won’t know where we’re going to dock until we get there. No team can be trained to simply go for a single objective because it will depend upon where they dock. And there are three potential objectives. Which one we strike at first depends on the distribution of our forces.”

“That’s why they went with all soldiers in the first wave,” Van Krief said, nodding at the briefing papers.

“Right,” Herzer said. “And they were going to bore for the control center, no matter what. Unless we’re concentrated near the control center, I’m going to bore for the one spot nobody should care about.”

“Where?” Van Krief asked, sliding her hand over the schematic. “Engineering?”

“Nope,” Herzer said. “Maintenance.”

Chansa waited in the reflection dappled dimness as Reyes strode down the corridor of pillars.

The meeting had been, perforce, in Celine’s domain since it was in person and Celine refused to go beyond the walls of the Nira valley. The chosen venue was an ancient temple, once ruined and now restored to much of its former glory, a building of massive pillars supporting a heavy, and heavily carved, roof. The sides of the building, which was perched at the top of a high bluff, were open to hot, dry winds and the view to the east revealed apparently limitless deserts. To the west was a broad river valley touched by green and crisscrossed by irrigation ditches and which was, again, limited to the west by another bluff and more desert.

Each of the New Destiny council members had claimed broad lands, but Celine’s were relatively limited; she controlled only the Nira valley but it was hers in a way that Frika, for example, which was titularly Chansa’s, was not. He had afforded himself only a brief glance of the surroundings but it was clear that it bore all the hallmarks of Celine’s touch.

Celine Reinshafen was a short woman with dark brown hair and skin that was tanned a light brown by the desert sun. At first glance she appeared entirely normal, except for the Key around her neck. Then, when you looked at her eyes, it was clear that she was no longer of this world. She was New Destiny’s premier designer of “specialized biologicals” which even Chansa had come to call “monsters.” Celine called them her “pets.” It was in Celine’s labs that the orcs and ogres that made up the bulk of Chansa’s forces had first been developed. It was from Celine’s mind that methods for creating the horribly Changed elves sprung, full-blown, as if some latter day, evil, Athena Nike. Thousands of them were being grown in darkness; in tenebrous chambers where weird fungal growths digested noisome refuse to feed the pods. It was from Celine that specialized assassination forms had come, modifications to dragons that made them more effective at combat, all of the monsters that were New Destiny’s weapons in the war.

And unlike Chansa and Reyes, she appeared unprotected by a field. There were times at meetings like this that Chansa considered removing her from the world of the living. Of swiftly drawing his massive sword and cutting her head from her body, a wound that not even Mother would heal.

But he never did. For one thing, he knew he needed her. The Freedom Coalition had been victorious in too many battles to remove any edge. For another reason, he doubted that she was unprotected and he knew in his bones that he, Chansa, would never survive even if he managed to kill her.

Unlike Chansa, who was in powered armor, Reyes was dressed for the weather in a light shirt and shorts colored pink and green. He was a slender, wiry man with a shock of blond hair and a face that was more beautiful than handsome: thin, delicate chin, high cheekbones and full, red lips. He looked like an angel that had just stepped out of a painting by a Renaissance master. Beside him, Chansa looked like a giant troll.

Chansa knew that the innocent face and expression held a mind that reveled in things that made even his skin crawl. The orcs that made up Chansa’s legions were cruel and vicious things but within that cruelty he tried to manage them as humanely as he could. Like Celine, however, Reyes positively reveled in cruelty. Chansa had been required to sack more than one town in the quest to dominate Ropasa. When Reyes took a town it ceased to exist. The men and children were tortured to death and any of the women that didn’t catch his eye were turned over to his Durgar for brutality that made Chansa’s stomach wrench. Those that did catch his eye were, if anything, in worse condition if for no other reason than that Reyes took longer to kill them.

Chansa knew that by siding with Paul Bowman in this revolt, he had chosen the side of darkness. Paul wanted to remake the world and no matter how that was done, it would inflict pain upon those who lived in it. But Paul, for all that he seemed to be going mad towards the end, had, at heart, been a good person. He had wanted to do good in the world. Others of the “first Council” had agreed that the world simply needed a good shaking up to bring it out of its sink of apathy and stagnation before the human race disappeared from boredom.

Reyes and the others that had come into the New Destiny Council after its casualties in the first days of the war, and since, were in it purely for the power. Direct power over humans that they could torment as a child tortures insects. He wished there was some way to simply erase them and start over, along with Celine and the Demon. But they were all he had to work with and, perforce, he used them, as they used him, to satisfy his own ambitions.

As Reyes approached, Chansa noticed that there was a swirling field around him that lifted the sand off the floor and tossed it in swirls of color.

“Very pretty,” Chansa said when Reyes closed. “Good to see you looking well and enjoying yourself.”

“Oh, it’s far more than pretty,” Reyes said, smiling beatifically. “Chansa, Celine,” he added, with a slight bow.

“It’s a grav field,” Celine snapped.

“It is indeed,” Reyes replied, smiling again to reveal perfect, white teeth. “Now that the Freedom Coalition has your protection field neutralizing nannites, I thought it best to create an outer defense. Just to protect against Coalition assassins, of course.”