Imperial Stars 1-The Stars at War (44 page)

For the first time since he had got his orders, he began to see how the battle would shape up. They had cut the hordes off from their train, he saw, far down the valley in his rear women and children, cook fires and wagons and pack animals tangled in a frightened mess. The enemy were strung up the valley, sucked up there probably by skirmishing cavalry, but pausing now to look back at the infantry who had come in behind them. It had been a tricky maneuver, but it had worked, and the enemy now must either fight or run. They would fight, the colonel knew, the horsemen would never leave their women and loot without a battle. He waited with cold confidence, knowing the light cavalry did not exist that could break a division of drilled heavy infantry solidly anchored with protected flanks.

He eased his right leg and studied his own men again. They were at ease now, their places marked by their weapons, some sitting, smoking or chewing field rations, breathing easy and in good shape. To their rear there was a sudden clatter as the batteries of steam centrifugals and mortars galloped up. Must be about time for things to start, the colonel thought sourly, it would be a miracle if artillery was actually spaded in and fired up by the time action joined. He trotted slowly back to his command post and joined his staff.

The horde made up its mind, bunched and began to drift back down the valley. Half a dozen blimps came up over the hills to the right and scattered napalm and spreading blobs of gas on the enemy, and suddenly they picked up speed and started coming like an avalanche, spread out over a half mile front, a wall of dust two hundred feet high surging along with them. The infantry were on their feet now, nervously stamping out butts, opening lanes for the dragoons to stream back through. Behind, there was a whine as the turbine-driven centrifugals came up to speed.

Baker spoke to his bugler. The bugle sang and the lines stiffened and solidified. Company officers ran back and forth dressing the front, and then suddenly the pikemen dropped and set their pikes and raised their shields. What had been an orderly array of men in infantry blue battle dress was now a solid line of glittering steel, reaching from river to cliffs on the far side, backed solidly by the lines of archers and swordsmen, file closers and mobile reserve, a heavy infantry division in line of battle. It made a grim, imposing sight. In the unnoticed flier overhead, the admiral almost fell out of his seat in his excitement, the fighting he knew was nothing like this, but he liked it.

The colonel was alert but unimpressed, he had seen it many times before, and he knew the rest would not be so pretty. He gauged the distance to the enemy, and spoke to his bugler again. The archers stepped out between the pikes and took their stand, leisurely setting their arrows in the ground in preparation for rapid fire. They were the elite, a pikeman or arbalestier could be trained in a few months but an archer needed to grow up with a longbow in his hands to use it effectively, and the colonel guarded them jealously, not because he loved them but because he couldn't get along without them. He wondered now, as he had often before, if the arbalest would ever be technically improved to the point of being a completely satisfactory missile weapon for light infantry.

The first ranks of oncoming horsemen were five hundred yards out now, and the mortars popped for the first time and sent a flood of lazy bombs arching overhead to burst and spread blazing napalm. The shouts of officers calling the range came dimly above the general racket, and then the first volley from the archers rose and fell in a cloud and slugs from the centrifugals began to whistle overhead, playing like hydraulic blasts on the onrushing enemy, eroding them away in patches and swathes. The archers were firing at will now, the air was solid with their shafts, it seemed impossible that horse or man could come through that hail and the sickening
plop
of the firebombs. Still they came, and there rose an answering swarm of arrows from their short stiff bows to rattle on the infantry's upraised shields. The archers skipped nimbly back into their ranks, and from between the now unobscured pikes the flame-throwers spat clouds and flame.

On Baker's front, the enemy broke, they dashed up against the pikes and recoiled, unable to force the flaming wall with its sharp steel core. Neither could they turn and face the gas cloud rolling threateningly in their rear, they raced in tangled streams back and forth parallel to the front, seeking a weak spot, while arbalesters and centrifugals and flame-throwers poured fire relentlessly into them.

The 103rd was not having such good luck. Their front was broken in two places, and one serious melee developed into a momentary break-through. Baker alerted part of his reserve to help if necessary, but they closed up without aid and the cavalry in the rear finished off the few enemy who did come through.

The battle was over now, the rest slaughter. Baker turned his attention again to his own front, watching with cold appreciation the death his regiment was dealing.

The enemy was seeking only escape. Some tried to swim the river, where Baker's archers picked them off at leisure. Some scrambled up the cliffs on the other side, where they made equally good targets, and some drove recklessly back into the gas cloud to strangle. Very few got away. The mass thinned, and then there were only isolated riders racing madly past, and then nothing but a slowly settling cloud of dust, with an occasional limping figure drawing a flurry of fire, riderless horses stampeding aimlessly.

Baker looked at his watch. It was somewhat under two hours since he had ordered his men into action; less than two hours to annihilate a dozen hordes that had harried whole provinces for years—a good day's work.

The admiral settled back into his seat and drew a deep breath.

"Well," he said somewhat inadequately, "I'm afraid we didn't do such a good job of stopping war in
this
planet."

"We certainly lowered the population level that was worrying you Malthusians, though," the observer said. "That little tiff down there," he waved his hand, "must have helped by five or six thousand."

He rubbed wearily at his face. "No, it's no good," he said heavily. "We never should have permitted this experiment. You shoot-em-up boys are always too anxious to civilize people by gunfire. I am going to recommend that the Department question Security's stand in this matter at the next Council meeting, and urge we review the whole history of our contact with these people. It may not be too late to do something constructive yet."

"Now wait a minute," the admiral said stubbornly. "This may not have gone just according to plan, but it wasn't our plan, you long-hairs were the people who developed this theory that if we could block off the natives' physical expansion they'd be forced to develop a peaceful civilization, all Security did was to implement that plan. And there is
some
improvement. They may still be killing each other, but at least they aren't using mass weapons any more, it's man to man, between warriors. They aren't blowing up whole cities, women and children, the sick and peaceful along with the belligerent—"

The stretcher-bearers were working through the ranks now, picking up the dead and wounded, but they did not bother with the enemy. The dragoons were taking care of them. They were out front again, picking their way gingerly between the burning areas where the bombs had dropped, thrusting and hacking here and there as they found wounded, catching horses, dismounting to pick up an especially interesting bit of loot.

Let them have it, the colonel thought, what he wanted was the wagon train in the rear. There would be the real loot, women and stores and gold and all the stripped wealth of this land fine-combed again and again by the raiders. The colonel fought for his rank and his retirement and vaguer, higher, imponderables he felt but could not have put a name too, but his men fought for loot. There was no rotation in this army, only death or crippling wounds, retirement perhaps for a few who were lucky, at the end of a hard life of constant battle. They needed the occasional fierce satisfactions of stolen women, looted gold and wine, unopposed slaughter and destruction, to balance the hard discipline of their daily life. The colonel knew this, he did not begrudge them their fun, although for disciplinary reasons he liked to take his in quieter form. So now he sat, forgetting the battle already, estimating his chances, plotting cunningly how his regiment should be first to fall upon the camp.

He suddenly noticed some of the men looking up, and pointing, and he, too, looked up and for the first time saw the Galactic observation flier, hanging motionless over the battlefield. His mind went back twenty years, to the gully in Korea, to the hundred thousand men who had left their bones to whiten in that retreat, to his mother and father and brothers and sisters, who had lived near Oak Ridge before the raiders came, in an area still posted as radioactive.

He studied the flier carefully.

"You, too, boy," he thought. "Just wait a while, we'll get to you yet, we haven't forgotten—"

Professor Salton was writing in his diary—

"In retrospect," he wrote, "it is obvious that the effect of the raiders upon Terrestrial development was much more complex than at first appeared. They halted the explosive burgeoning of physical power available to man, and forced him to direct his energies in other directions. They gave man time and impetus to develop the social sciences he had forgotten in the sudden unfolding of physical power. But they altered his basic orientation.

"Before the raid, men lived in a world in which they were supreme, and had only each other to fear. The abrupt brutality of the raid, emphasized by its aftermath of famine and disruption, sharply reminded them that they were small fry in a shark-swarming, hostile universe, apt at any moment to be gulped up.

"Five hundred years earlier, they might have withdrawn into a shell of protective humility and prayer. A hundred years later, they might have understood the workings of their own mind well enough to preserve a balance. As it was, they reached instinctively, but in the pattern of an aggressive culture, aggressively.

"Since physical science had failed them, they cast it aside and snatched up the newer, subtler tools of thought and life. The new learning that might have taught men to live with each other was ground and sharpened for hostile uses.

"The millennium of peace, which seemed so close, has again been postponed—"

And:

"Colonel Baker," the general said, "I'd like you to meet Major Pellati. He's the man who set up your targets for you this afternoon, the chief of our corps evaluation staff."

"Well, you did a good job on that, major," the colonel said. "Everything folded together like a peddler's pack. I don't think a hundred of those devils got away."

"We didn't intend for very many to get away." The major looked around distastefully. "You like this racket?" he asked abruptly.

It
was
somewhat noisy. Division headquarters had been set up in an old building, a monolithic concrete relic of the atomic age, as indestructible without explosives as a mountain, and the junior officers had promptly organized a party. They had liberated a varied assortment of women and alcoholic beverages from the enemy camp and rounded up parts of three regimental bands, and the party was going strong.

At one end of the plank bar twenty company officers were harmonizing "Dinah," at the other end a small party of their seniors were rounding up candidates, amid shrieks of girlish laughter, to decorate with lipsticked kisses the shining bald head of the 103rd's colonel—who had gone to sleep, as was his habit, after the fifth drink. Half the band were following Baker's band leader in the "Tennessee Waltz" while the other half played something unidentifiable but certainly not the "Tennessee Waltz." As a finishing touch, three Marine observers within armlength of Baker and Pellati were defiantly bellowing "Zamboanga." It was quite a party.

"Why, yes," Baker said, "it is a little noisy."

With common consent, they picked up a bottle of Calvados from the bar and sought quieter surroundings. "Oops," Pellati said at the first door they tried and backed hurriedly out. "Occupied," he said briefly. They wandered down a long hall and found an alcove housing an ex-window, now ventilated agreeably by the fresh evening air. They sat down on the window ledge with the bottle between them.

"Yes, sir, that was a nice action," Baker said. Something that had been lurking in the back of his mind all day came to the fore. "Were you in Korea?" he asked.

"I was at Inchon. That's where we first used von Neumann's mathematics to evaluate a large-scale operation. Worked pretty good."

"That was before my time. I got there just in time to be right in the middle when the raid hit and the gooks climbed all over us. That's what I was thinking about; this afternoon, I was thinking, 'Boy, I'll bet this learns you buggers a good lesson, I've been saving this twenty years for you.' "

He sucked gently at the bottle. "Did you say you were in Evaluation at Inchon?" he asked suddenly. "Didn't know they had anything like that then."

"Well, it was pretty crude stuff," the major said. "Experimental. Half mathematics and half good guessing."

"It still looks like magic to me."

"It isn't. Tactics isn't an art any more, or even science. It's just engineering. If your intelligence is good, and you know what you've got to work with, all you have to do is work up the equations. With those savages we were fighting today, you don't even have to make allowances for independent thought, they don't think, just react like machines. Once you know the basic pattern of that reaction, you can just about predict every move they'll make for the next six months. Then it's just a question of being in the right place at the right time."

"Did you see that raider flier this afternoon?" he asked abruptly.

Baker nodded.

"Those are the ones we'll have to sweat for," the major said.

"Well," Baker said piously, "I hope to live to see the day, but I don't know; they've got a pretty big edge on us in weapons—"