Warworld: The Lidless Eye (27 page)

Diettinger could feel the tension in her, and in himself. The only hope for his people was their adaptation to Haven.
But at what price?

“Do you have a recommendation for avoiding this situation?”

“Of course, First Rank. I would not be here otherwise.”

“Speak.”

“You are the First Rank, thus you are
de facto
First Soldier. You must become the First Citizen.”

“Martial virtues are not social virtues, Second.”

She shook her head. “Nor can they ever be. But with you as political and military figurehead, the Sauron System can be started anew here, on Haven, as it was on Sauron hundreds of years ago. A society of militarists: soldier-citizens, bound by codes of military behavior, dedicated to the propagation of the warrior race as an ideal.”

Diettinger and Second Rank looked at each other in silence for a long time. Finally he spoke.

“You are suggesting, then, that I re-establish the dynasty, here on Haven, with myself as patriarch?”

“Such an act would legitimize your status as First Citizen to the Cyborg Ranks, as well as to the Soldiers. They all support you, First Rank, but a world of sheep can be very seductive to young wolves.”

“The establishment of such a dynasty requires issue with Sauron parentage on both sides. All such Sauron females are already assigned to Cyborgs.”

“Come, now, sir,” Second Rank’s voice dropped. “Surely by now you’ve deduced the most obvious reason for my being here…”

Diettinger nodded, then sighed. He wasn’t going to get back to sleep, after all.

Lieutenant John Vohlt lay flat against the cold stones of the cliffs that shielded him from the Saurons along the floor and opposite rock walls of the Karakul Pass. His chest ached from contact with the chilling rock through his parka, but the pain was bearable—and it helped keep him awake. The long-range scanner he held to his eyes was the last one in his unit, possibly the last from the entire force Brigadier Cummings had sent up into the Atlas Mountains.

By the time Vohlt and his team had arrived, Colonel Harrigan’s forces were ready for their planned maneuver. What little organized resistance there had been to the Saurons in the northern Shangri-La Valley was over. There remained only the diversionary attack before they pulled out of the Valley completely. Colonel Harrigan had not come to get his force butchered in a last desperate act of defiance.

Well, not the entire force, anyway
, Vohlt thought with a humorless grin.
That’s our job.

“You’ll take your men up through here.” Harrigan had indicated Vohlt’s route on a map of the Valley passes, pointing out a small depression in the rocks over the eastern side of the Karakul Pass. “There’s a small plateau there. You can make camp in the overhang just back from it; it should keep you out of sight of the Sauron detection devices and any air reconnaissance they might have.”

Harrigan had taken a bottle of domestic rum and poured a healthy amount into his tea. The command tent was bloody cold.

“You’ll have to pull this up by hand, of course. We can’t risk anything as big as a muskylope being seen.”

Vohlt had nodded. “Can we have the rum, too, sir?” he had asked, grinning.

Harrigan had smiled back, sadly. “Why not?”

Vohlt and five other men had left an hour into Harrigan’s attack. When the “rout” came, they had split off and quickly hid in the passes. Major Seastrum’s company had provided the diversion—make that “suicide attack”—that had covered their exit. Vohlt lifted a metal capful of rum to his lips and sipped it carefully. “Absent friends,” he whispered.

Behind him, the four surviving members of the team were sleeping.

Beyond the bed-rolled men squatted the object they had laboriously manhandled up into these rocks. Harrigan had admitted that it would not defeat the Saurons. It wasn’t powerful enough to take out their staging area, and had arrived too late to be used there anyway. The Saurons were on Haven to stay.

But Brigadier Cummings believed it would go a long way toward keeping the Saurons cautious for a long time to come. Haven was no major world; it couldn’t even stand against one shipload of Saurons. But even an old dog could still bite.

The image in Vohlt’s opticals was fading. He shook the device and looked through it again. A little better.
The charge is going
, he decided. He switched it off to conserve the little cell’s energy and considered the item in his hands. Light intensifying binoculars with range-finding capability and up to ten times one-hundred-and-twenty-power magnification, more than you’ll probably need.

But when the last of the charge is gone, it will be half a kilo of junk
, he thought. He set it for simple lens magnification, with the power on standby, and put it back in its case until it would be needed. Maybe he could rig something up out of the basic lenses after the charge was gone.

He laughed at his trivial plan for the future. He had almost forgotten why he was here.

According to the scouts, Wheelock’s Raiders were less than half-a-klick from their position. It was still dark, about an hour and a half before trueday. John Hamilton had read that nomads didn’t like to fight at either dusk or dawn, which might explain why they were all milling around, occasionally shooting off automatic rifles into the sky, like children with strings of firecrackers. The scouts said the raiders were bunched around campfires, drinking and bragging. Probably building their courage and their bloodlust.

Regardless, it wouldn’t be long now before they rushed their position. In their own way, the raiders were as committed to this attack as the defenders were to stopping their advance. A loss of face here would bolster defenses throughout the northeastern valley, and cost the raiders stature as well as loot. John took out his gauss gun and sighted it at the top of the rise, where the first outriders would appear. The infrared scope picked up the boulders’ slightly higher temperature. Were the raiders to attack now, they would be sitting ducks.

According to his scouts, there were about five thousand of them, a big raiding party pushed south by the Saurons’ consolidation in the north.

Wheelock’s Raiders had sacked and burned half a dozen small towns and villages in the past week. Fingers of flame had pointed out their passing to the Whitehall residents. Rumor had it they were nomads from the Northern Steppes driven south by the Saurons, who had little use and no tolerance for them. According to information relayed by Brigadier Cummings, the Saurons were turning Fort Stony Point into their primary planetary fortress.

Grandfather was right
, he thought,
they are here to stay.

While this raid had come at a bad time for the barony, being so close to harvest, it was good for him. Planning and preparations had taken him far from the castle and Ingrid’s accusing eyes. What had possessed him? Would he ever stop thinking with his prick, instead of his brain? Now, the wall between him and Ingrid had turned into an ice sheet.
It was damned sad, she had such beautiful eyes when aroused—Stop it. I’ve lost her now, as well as my own self-respect. Maybe the best thing for everyone would be for me to fall in battle. An honorable end to a not-very-honorable life….

Stop being so damn dramatic!
he thought, disgusted with himself.
I don’t want to die, and no one else really wants me to, either. The Baron, Ingrid, his friends, their liegemen, they all need me to do my best.
Well, he would give them that much, at least.

For a short time, John had hoped this small army would pass them by for easier prey. But rumors of Hamilton wealth, or hard knowledge of Hamilton guns, or perhaps just desperation for Hamilton food had pointed them to the castle. Whitehall was filled to bursting, with liegemen, landholders, servants, soldiers, neighbors and anyone else who could claim safety within its walls. The locusts from within could prove as destructive to Whitehall as those outside, were a siege to drag on for any longer than a week or two. No one survived a Haven winter low on foodstuffs.

This was not the only danger Whitehall faced from a siege. John Hamilton, as Castle Commandant, had been put in charge of the castle defenses. While he knew they could weather a siege far longer than the raiders, it was the end of the growing season and there were crops to be harvested. If the siege went on for any length of time, those crops not lost to brigandage and trampling would be lost to the cold weather. Already they had had their first light snowfall. A long siege would cost more lives in the coming winter than those lost in combat, plus leave the castle vulnerable to disease and winter raids.

The machine guns given to them by Brigadier Cummings, and
their own home-built Gatling guns, were set in positions with the best possible fields of fire. In the first few minutes of battle, these would inflict the most casualties and, according to plan, tip the balance. With only eight hundred troops, John knew he did not have enough manpower to halt a determined frontal assault. On the other hand, these brigands had not yet encountered a well-armed and determined foe during their trek through the Valley from the north. The Baron and he had agreed that stiff opposition and heavy casualties might quickly dim the Wheelock horde’s enthusiasm for battle.

The crackle of distant gunfire rent the air once more as Wheelock’s army drew courage from their indiscriminate fire into the darkness. The bad news to John was that they evidently had ammunition to waste, which meant they were better armed than the Baron had surmised.

The Hamiltons’ second line of defense was the armored tin pots, his Grandfather’s men-at-arms, in durasteel plate armor, armed with pistols, lances, and swords. It had taken his most skilled persuasions—and, surprisingly, those of Ingrid Cummings as well—to keep the Baron from commanding his Iron Men, as he called them, himself. John doubted they would be of much help, these armored anachronisms, seated on former dray horses.

He had about two hundred of these mounted men-at-arms in reserve, should the raiders breach their position. True, the Iron Men had once proved useful against King Steele’s invasion force, but that had been a fluke. John expected little help from the iron heads in today’s battle against an enemy comprised mostly of what could only be considered light cavalry. The Iron Men were there to provide a screen for him and any survivors, if the battle took such a disastrous turn as to require a retreat back to Whitehall.

John wondered what kind of men sacked and burned defenseless villages, and then took all their foodstuffs and women? Barbarians to be sure. King Steele had been a power-hungry wolf; yet he had kept to the codes of civilized warfare. According to the refugees, Wheelock knew no restraints. The stories of rapine and torture that followed in the raiders’
wake were like those out of Earth’s early barbaric history—Genghis Khan or Timur the Lame would have understood this creature.

His brother-in-law, Captain Mazarin, held the third force, a small body of some hundred and fifty men. According to the plan, they were to strike from behind once the battle on the ridge began in earnest. It might give the nomads pause, let them think treachery within their ranks, or that they fought two foes. It was a good plan for a force outnumbered five to one, but only if events cooperated. Mazarin liked to quote the Imperial maxim that no battle plan ever survived contact with a Sauron, and apply it in blanket terms to all combat. John hoped this fight would be an exception.

There was a reserve of about three hundred armed men at the castle, mostly older soldiers and retirees, who would have to hold the castle if their plan failed. Cut-off from the main force, he doubted they could hold Whitehall a standard month.

If only he had some real guns. It was cannons they needed, but the ones at the castle were all too large and no one had thought to design gun carriages. True, they all had expected things to grow worse as Haven descended into barbarism, but not so damn fast! The arrival of the Saurons had removed the last restraints that had kept Haven’s various factions from taking the final plunge into darkness. Now, instead of working together against the common foe, everyone was out to grab what little they could take by force before the Saurons got it first.

John began to make out the enemy’s distant war cries as a scout came bursting over the ridge, riding hell-bent for leather. John’s heart began to quicken. He took several deep breaths and checked to make certain his gun was loaded, charged, the safety off. He looked down at his watch—about an hour to go.

“Marshal, shall I give the orders?” Master-At-Arms Cromwell asked, as he turned his head, grinned, and sighted his automatic rifle.

“Tell them to aim at the whites of their eyes,” he ordered, some half-remembered phrase out of a dusty history book. “Maybe, if we tell them now, it’ll sink in and they’ll remember when the heathens rush the ridge.”

“Yes, sir,” Cromwell answered.

Surprise and superior firepower were their twin advantages. He prayed the rumors of bow-shooting nomads were more fact than fiction. If Wheelock’s Raiders were adequately armed with rifles and automatic weapons, this battle might prove to be too close to call. The bursts of gunfire they kept shooting off through the night were not reassuring, at all. He began a prayer he half-remembered from childhood.