Роберт Бюттнер - Orphan's Journey

One rationale for A-bombing Japan instead of invading it had been that the Emperor would have to sacrifice his subjects to the last peasant against a mere gaijin invasion, but could yield to a supernaturally powerful force without losing face.

I sighed. “Whatever. What otherworldly means would you have dreamed up if they asked?”

“Oh, they asked. I told them Cargo’Bots would rip their limbs off while they slept, Sir.”

I smirked behind my hand. “That’s hilarious.”

“After reprogramming, it’s quite effective, Sir. Just messy.”

“Oh.”

I stepped to the table head, bowed, introduced myself, and got introduced back. Each participant sat like a sword point protruded from each chair back.

I said, “First, please believe that all I want is to help you save your people from a common enemy. I have no ambition to govern, and possess no magic formula for it.”

One Field Marshal rolled his eyes, one of Casus’s sons snorted, and a Tassini looked away, smirking.

But I wasn’t lying about the lack of a formula. Like Churchill said, the best argument against democracy was a five-minute conversation with the average voter. Anyway, Casus and the Queen both relaxed a hair’s width, and we had no time for civics class.

Howard set the holo gen center-table, and waved it on. Every Bren except Bassin, Casus, and the Queen gasped. A couple Tassini Headmen smiled. I suppose a holo looks like what you see if you blow janga for a living.

The Troll’s image squatted on the conference table like a translucent blue watermelon, surrounded by misshapen outbuildings in its clearing.

I said, “The good news for us is that this is the only objective we need to be concerned with. If we had the force and mobility to destroy it tomorrow, the war would be over before it started.”

A Marini Marshal muttered, “Here, here!”

He didn’t know the half of it. If I could have traded Jeeb, who wasn’t equipped to carry a firecracker, for a few last-century jets packing dumb iron bombs, they could fry the Troll like a turkey on a platter. But Bren’s mineralogists hadn’t even discovered bauxite, much less smelted aircraft-quality aluminum.

I sighed.

A turn-of-the-century defense official said you go to war with the army that you have, not the army you want. The army that he had then whipped an oppressive tyranny in six weeks, while suffering minimal casualties. Then the oppressed beat crap out of one another for years, and he lost his job.

I looked around at the Allies, who had already been beating crap out of one another for three centuries, and shrugged to myself. Losing this war meant losing everything. Losing this job meant zero.

“The blue mountain is an easy target,” someone said.

“Maybe. Getting to it won’t be easy.”

I waved on a map of Bren’s eastern hemisphere. Where we sat, at the Great Library, was on the east coast of the continent that dominated the hemisphere’s western half. It joined the eastern continent, Slug Land to me, only by the isthmus that ran east-west, three hundred miles north of the River Marin. The landmasses looked like North America and Europe, shoved close together, and joined by a thin twig. The Slugs’ Great Wall straddled the twig.

The Troll winked as a blue dot, four hundred miles east of the Great Wall. The Sea of Hunters, only twenty-two miles wide at the strait south of the Winter Palace, separated the continents.

One of Casus’s sons pointed at the Great Wall. “There’s the nut to crack!”

“The boy’s right.” A Marshal thrust his fist forward. “A good barrage to reduce the works, then punch through. Then cavalry straight on to the objective!”

Howard said, “We calculated that if we massed every artillery piece the Marini have now, plus every one you could manufacture in a year, and bombarded the Great Wall twenty-four hours each day, it would take a year to force a breach wide and deep enough to pass cavalry. And that’s just the first wall. There are four more behind it.”

“Rubbish!” The Marshal yanked a Marini seashell abacus from a uniform pocket and fiddled. Then he raised his eyebrows — and clammed up.

I said, “On the other hand, if we defend the isthmus from behind whatever fortifications we could erect in the next few months, we think the Slugs would rain Heavys down on us for two months, then break through. Worse, we expose both our flanks if the Slugs could bridge around us as fast as they crossed the Marin. We risk encirclement and annihilation of our entire defensive force.”

A Tassini threw up his purple hands. “We can’t attack. We can’t defend. What can we do? Die?”

I shook my head. “First, we can train our soldiers into a single, cohesive army. So that whatever we do, we make every life count. Second, we improve that army’s equipment, for the same reason.”

I paused, then looked around. “Third, we attack before the Slugs are strong enough to attack us.” I pointed at the Tassini coast, south of the Winter Palace, and drew my finger across the twenty-two-mile strait in the Sea of Hunters, then overland to the Troll.

Casus said, “Jason, you don’t understand. In the last five hundred years, no sailor has crossed the Sea of Hunters and lived!”

“And our fleet lies ruined! This route is impassable.” A white-mustached Marini in Admiralty powder blue waved the back of his hand at the holo, as he turned to his Queen. “Your Majesty, I recommend we consider a joint command. Led by someone experienced, knowledgeable—”

“And Marini?” One of Casus’s sons slapped his gauntlet on the table edge. “Go to hell!”

The Tassini buzzed among themselves.

The Queen raised her hand. When everyone kept yammering, she slapped the table so hard that it quivered.

In the silence that followed, the Marshals, and Admirals, and Headmen, and Warlords, turned their eyes toward the old woman, who sat as straight as a silver dagger.

She turned to me, and said, “Do you believe what these men believe, General?”

I looked around at the others. “No, Ma’am. But I’m betting that the Slugs do.”

The Queen inclined her head, and her sapphires twinkled. “Then continue.”

FIFTY-FOUR

THE NEXT MORNING, the owner of the biggest gun smithy in Marinus handed Ord and me heavy leather hoods, set with smoked glass eyepieces, which we wore as he led us onto his foundry floor.

All across a room bigger than a Scramjet hangar, golden sparks fountained from anvils as ironworkers, their sweating skin orange in the forges’ firelight, swung hammers that shaped white-hot steel billets. Roaring steam clouds boiled up from quenching troughs and washed us with the acid smell of fresh steel. Ord leaned toward me and shouted, “Almost as hot as yesterday’s meeting, Sir. But boldness wins wars.”

I shouted back, “I’d like to think they bought the plan on merit. Not because somebody threatened to murder them in bed. But I’ll take it.”

We passed from the foundry into a room where millwrights bent over squealing lathes, working steel into rifle barrels, then into a quiet room where craftsmen planed stocks, then fitted them to finished steel.

The owner lifted two rifles from a bench, handed them to Ord. “Sorry. We couldn’t copy the receiver of the example you gave us. It’s a stamping. I stayed up last night, and milled one, myself.” The owner covered a yawn with his hand.

Ord laid down one rifle, an old, bulky AK-47 exhumed from one of our tamperproofs. The other rifle’s stock had the polished-shark-fin look characteristic of a Marini charioteer’s single-shot carbine. But its action was like the bulkier AK, and its barrel looked the same bore as a Marini cartridge. The steel hadn’t been blued, so the rifle gleamed as silver as a new-minted Twobuck coin.