Shadow of the Giant (31 page)

Even the tanks had been washed downstream, some of them for kilometers. Where the Russians had been spreading out for their offensive against Han Tzu’s forces on the high ground, there was nothing, not a sign that they had been there.

Not a sign that the villages and fields had been there either.

It was a muddy version of the moon. Except for a couple of deep-rooted trees, there was nothing. It would take a long time and a lot of work to restore this land.

But now there was work to do. First, they had to glean the survivors, if there were any, from the countryside downstream. Second, they had to clean up the corpses and gather up the tanks and other vehicles—and, most important, the live armaments.

And Han Tzu had to swing a large part of his army north, to retake Beijing and sweep away whatever remnants of the Russian invasion might be left behind. Meanwhile, the Turks might decide to come back.

The work of war wasn’t over yet.

But the grinding, bloody campaign he had feared, the one that would tear China apart and bleed a generation to death, that had been averted. Both here in the north and in the south as well.

And then what? Emperor of China indeed. What would the people expect? Now that he had won this great victory, was he supposed to go back and subjugate the Tibetans again? Force the Turkic-speakers of Xinjiang back under the Chinese heel? Spill Chinese blood on the beaches of Taiwan to satisfy old claims that the Chinese had some inherent right to rule over the racially-Malay majority on that island? And then invade any nation that mistreated its Chinese minorities? Where would it stop? In the jungles of Papua? Back in India? Or at the old western border of Genghis’s empire, the lands of the Golden Horde on the steppes of Ukraine?

What frightened him most about these scenarios was that he knew he could do it. He knew that with China he had a people with the intelligence, the vigor, the resources, and unified will—everything a ruler needed to go out into the world and make everything he saw his own. And because it was possible, there was a part of him that wanted to play it out, see where this path led.

I know where it leads, thought Han Tzu. It leads to Virlomi leading her pathetic army of half-armed volunteers to certain death. It leads to Julius Caesar bleeding to death on the floor of the Senate, muttering about how he was betrayed. It leads to Adolf and Eva dead in an underground bunker while their empire crumbles in explosions above their corpses. Or it leads to Augustus, casting about him for a successor, only to realize that it all has to be handed over to his revolting pervert of a…stepson? What
was
Tiberius, really? A sad statement about how empires are inevitably led. Because what rises to the top in an empire are the bureaucratic infighters, the assassins, or the warlords.

Is that what I want for my people? I became Emperor because that’s how I could bring down Snow Tiger and keep him from killing me first. But China doesn’t need an empire. China needs a good government. The Chinese people need to stay home and make money, or travel through the world and make even more money. They need to do science and create literature and be part of the human race.

They need to have no more of their sons die in battle. They need to have no more of them cleaning up the bodies of the enemy. They need peace.

The news of Bean’s death spread slowly out of Armenia. It came to Petra, incredibly enough, on her cellphone in Moscow, where she was still directing her troops in the complete takeover of the city. The news of Han’s devastating victory had reached her, but not the general public. She needed to be in complete control of the city before the people learned of the disaster. She needed to make sure they could contain the reaction.

It was her father on the telephone. His voice was very husky, and she knew at once what he was calling to tell her.

“The soldiers who were rescued from Tehran. They came back by way of Israel. They saw…Julian didn’t come back with them.”

Petra knew perfectly well what had happened. And, more to the point, what Bean would have made sure people thought they had
seen
happen. But she let the scene play out, saying the lines expected of her. “They left him behind?”

“There was…nothing to bring back.” A sob. It was good to know that her father had come to love Bean. Or maybe he only wept in pity for his daughter, already widowed, and only barely a woman. “He was caught in the explosion of a building. The whole thing was vaporized. He could not have lived.”

“Thank you for telling me, Father.”

“I know it’s—what about the babies? Come home, Pet, we—”

“When I’m through with the war, Father, then I’ll come home and grieve for my husband and care for my babies. They’re in good hands right now. I love you. And Mother. I’ll be all right. Good-bye.”

She cut off the connection.

Several officers around her looked at her questioningly. What she had said about grieving for her husband. “This is top-secret information,” she said to the officers. “It would only encourage the enemies of the Free People. But my husband was…he entered a building in Tehran and it blew up. No one in that building could possibly have survived.”

They did not know her, these Finns, Estonians, Lithuanians, Latvians. Not well enough to say more than a heartfelt but inadequate, “I’m sorry.”

“We have work to do,” she said, relieving them of the responsibility to care for her. They could not know that what she was showing was not iron self-control, but cold rage. To lose your husband in war, that was one thing. But to lose him because he refused to take you with him….

That was unfair. In the long run, she would have decided the same way. There was one baby unfound. And even if that baby was dead or had never existed—how did they know how many there were, except what Volescu told them?—the five normal babies shouldn’t have their lives so drastically deformed. It would be like making a healthy twin spend his life in a hospital bed just because his brother was in a coma.

I would have chosen the same
if I’d had time.

There was no time. Bean’s life was too fragile already. She was losing him.

And she had known right from the start that one way or another, she would lose him. When he begged her not to marry him, when he insisted he wanted no babies, it was to avoid having her feel as she felt now.

Knowing it was her own fault, her own free choice, all for the best—it didn’t ease the pain one bit. If anything, it made it worse.

So she was angry. At herself. At human nature. At the fact that she was a human and therefore had to
have
that nature whether she wanted it or not. The desire to have the babies of the best man she knew, the desire to hold on to him forever.

And the desire to go into battle and win, outwitting her enemies, cutting them off, taking all their power away from them and standing astride them in victory.

It was a terrible thing to realize about herself—that she loved the contest of war every bit as much as she missed her husband and children, so that doing the one would take her mind off the loss of the others.

When the gunfire began, Virlomi felt a thrill of excitement. But also a sick sense of dread. As if she knew some terrible secret about this campaign that she had not allowed herself to hear until the gunfire brought the message to her consciousness.

Almost at once, her driver tried to take her out of harm’s way. But she insisted on heading toward the thick of the fighting. She could see where the enemy was gathered, in the hills on either side. She immediately recognized the tactics that were being used.

She started to issue orders. She ordered them to notify the other two columns to withdraw up their valleys and reconnoiter. She sent her elite troops, the ones that had fought with her for years, up the slopes to hold the enemy off while she withdrew the rest of her troops.

But the mass of untrained soldiers were too frightened to understand their orders or execute them under fire. Many of them broke and ran—straight up the valley, where they were exposed to fire. And Virlomi knew that not far behind them would be the trailing force which they had carelessly passed by.

All because she didn’t expect Han Tzu, preoccupied with the Russians, to be able to send a force of any size here to the south.

She kept reassuring her officers—this is only a small force, we can’t let them stop us. But the bodies were falling steadily. The firing only seemed to increase. And she realized that what she was facing was not some aging Home Guard unit thrown together to pester them as they marched. It was a disciplined force that was systematically herding her troops—her hundreds of thousands of soldiers—into a killing ground along the road and the riverbank.

And yet the gods still protected her. She walked among the cowering troops, standing upright, and not a bullet struck her. Soldiers fell all around her, but she was untouched.

She knew how the soldiers interpreted it: The gods protect her.

But she understood something completely different: The enemy has given orders not to harm me. And these soldiers are so well trained and disciplined that they are obeying the order.

The force opposing them was not huge—the firepower wasn’t overwhelming. But most of her soldiers weren’t shooting at all. How could they? They couldn’t see a target to shoot at. And the enemy would concentrate its fire on any force that tried to leave the road and get up the hills to sweep over the enemy lines.

As far as she could see, if any of the enemy had died, it was by accident.

I am Varus, she thought. I have led my troops, as Varus led the Roman Legions, into a trap, where we will all die. Die without even damaging the enemy.

What was I thinking? This terrain was made for ambush. Why didn’t I see that? Why was I so sure the enemy couldn’t attack us here? Whatever you’re sure the enemy
can’t
do, but which would destroy you if they did it anyway, you must plan to counter. This was elementary.

No one from Ender’s Jeesh would have made such a mistake.

Alai knew. He had warned her from the start. Her troops weren’t ready for such a campaign. It would be a slaughter. And here they were now, dying all around her, the whole highway thick with corpses. Her men had been reduced to piling up the dead as makeshift bulwarks against enemy fire. There was no point in her issuing commands, because they would not be understood or obeyed.