Use of Weapons (50 page)

When
they finally rolled to a stop, the three crewmen all sat back slumped in their
seats, arms dangling over the edges, silent and staring out into the
rain-filled night.

He
undid the belts, took off the helmet. The troopers opened the interior airlock.

When
they opened the outer door, it was to reveal rain and lights and trucks and
tanks and some low buildings in the background, and a couple of hundred
people, some in military uniforms, some in long robes, rain-slicked, some
trying to hold umbrellas over others; all seemed to have the circular marks on
their foreheads. A group of a dozen or so, all old, robed, white haired, faces
spattered with rain, walked to the bottom of the steps that led from the craft
to the ground.

'Please,
sir,' one of the troopers held out a hand to indicate they should descend. The
white-haired men in the robes gathered in an arrowhead formation at the foot
of the steps.

He
stepped out, stood on the little platform before the stairs. The rain battered
into one side of his head.

A
great shout went up, and the dozen old men at the foot of the steps each bowed
their head and went down on one knee, into the puddles on the dark and
wind-whipped runway. A blast of blue light ripped the blackness beyond the low
buildings, its flickering brilliance momentarily illuminating hills and
mountains in the distance. The assembled people started to chant. It took him a
few moments to work out what it was, then realised they were yelling,
'Za-kal-we! Za-kal-we!'

'Oh
oh,' he said to himself. Thunder bellowed in the hills.

'Yeah...
could you just run that past me again?'

'Messiah...'

'I
really wish you wouldn't use that word.'

'Oh!
Oh, well, Sir Zakalwe; what do you wish?'

'Ah...
how about,' he gestured with his hands. 'Mister?'

'Sir
Zakalwe, sir; you are pre-ordained! You have been beseen!' The high priest,
sitting across the railway carriage, clenched his hands.

'"Be-seen"?'

'Indeed!
You are our salvation; our divine recompense! You have been sent!'

'Sent,'
he repeated, still trying to come to terms with what had happened to him.

They'd
switched the floodlights off shortly after he'd set foot on the ground. The
priests enveloped him, took him, many arms round his shoulders, from the
concrete apron to an armoured truck; the lights went out on the runway and they
were left with the slit-light from the truck and tank-lights; cones made fans
by blinkers clipped over the lights. He was bustled away down a track to a
railway station where they transferred to a shuttered carriage that clattered
into the night.

There
were no windows.

'Why
yes! Our faith has a tradition of finding outside influences, because they are
always greater.' The high priest - Napoerea, he'd said his name was - made a
bowing motion. 'And what can be greater than the man who was ComMil?'

ComMil;
he had to dredge his memory for that one. ComMil; that was what he had been,
according to the Cluster's media; director of military operations when he and
Tsoldrin Beychae had been involved in the whole crazy dance the last time.
Beychae had been ComPol, in charge of politics (ah, these fine divisions!).

'ComMil...'
He nodded, not really much the wiser. 'And you think I can help you?'

'Sir
Zakalwe!' the high priest said, shifting down from his seat to kneel on the
floor again. 'You are what we believe in!'

He
sat back in the upholstered cushions. 'May I ask why?'

'Sir;
your deeds are legend! Forever since the last unpleasantness! Our Guider,
before he died, prophesied that our salvation would come from "
beyond the skies
", and your name
was one of those mentioned; so coming to us in our hour of need, you must be
our salvation!'

'I
see,' he said, seeing nothing. 'Well, we'll see what we can do.'

'Messiah!'

The
train drew up in a station somewhere; they were escorted from it to an
elevator, then to a suite of rooms that he was told looked out over the city
beneath but it was all in black-out. The internal screens were closed. The
rooms themselves were quite opulent. He inspected them.

'Yes.
Very nice. Thank you.'

'And
here are your boys,' the high priest said, sweeping aside a curtain in the
bedroom to reveal a languorously displayed half-dozen or so young men lying on
a very large bed.

'Well...
I, uh... Thank you,' he said, nodding to the high priest. He smiled at the
boys, who all smiled back.

He
lay awake in the ceremonial bed in the palace, hands behind his neck. After a
while, in the darkness, there was a distinct 'pop', and in a disappearing blue
sphere of light there was a tiny machine about the size of a human thumb.

'Zakalwe?'

'Hi,
Sma.'

'Listen...'

'No.
You listen; I would really like to know what the fuck is going on here.'

'Zakalwe,'
Sma said, through the scout missile. 'It's complicated, but...'

'But
I'm in here with a gang of homosexual priests who think I'm going to solve all
their military problems.'

'Cheradenine,'
Sma said, in her winning voice. 'These people have successfully incorporated a
belief in your martial prowess into their religion; how can you deny them?'

'Believe
me; it would be easy.'

'Like
it or not, Cheradenine, you've become a legend to these people. They think you
can do things.'

'So
what am I supposed to do?'

'Guide
them. Be their General.'

'That's
what they expect me to be, I think. But what should I really do?'

'Just
that,' Sma's voice said. 'Lead them. Meanwhile Beychae's in the Station;
Murssay Station. That counts as neutral territory for now, and he's making the
right noises. Don't you see, Zakalwe?' Sma's voice sounded tense, exultant.
'We've got them! Beychae's doing just what we wanted, and all you have to do
is...'

'What?'

'...
Just be yourself; operate for these guys!'

He
shook his head. 'Sma; spell it out for me. What am I supposed to do?'

He
heard Sma sigh. 'Win their war, Zakalwe. We're putting our weight behind the
forces you're working with. Maybe if they can win this, and Beychae gets behind
the winning side here, we can - perhaps - swing the Cluster.' He heard her take
another deep breath. 'Zakalwe; we need this. To a degree, our hands are tied,
but we need you to make the whole thing settle out. Win their war for them, and
we might just be able to get it all together. Seriously.'

'Fine,
seriously,' he said to the scout missile. 'But I've already had a quick look at
their maps, and these guys are in deep shit. If they're going to win this war
they're going to need a real miracle.'

'Just
try, Cheradenine. Please.'

'Do
I get any help?'

'Um...
how do you mean?'

'Intelligence,
Sma; if you could keep an eye on what the enemy's -'

'Ah,
no, Cheradenine, I'm sorry we can't.'

'What?'
he said loudly, sitting up in the bed.

'I'm
sorry, Zakalwe; really I am, but we've had to agree to that. This is a really
delicate deal here, and we're having to keep strictly out of it. This missile
shouldn't even be here; and it'll have to leave soon.'

'So
I'm on my own?'

'I'm
sorry,' Sma said.

'
You're
sorry!' he said, collapsing back
dramatically on the bed.

No
soldiering, he recalled Sma saying, some time ago now. 'No fucking soldiering,'
he muttered to himself as he gathered his hair at the nape of his neck and
pulled the little hide band over it. It was dawn; he patted the pony-tail and
looked out through thick, distorting glass to the mist-shrouded city, just
starting to wake to the dawn-rouged mountain peaks and the blue-glowing skies
above. He looked with distaste at the over-ornamented long robes the priests
expected him to wear, then reluctantly put them on.

The
Hegemonarchy and its opponents, the Glaseen Empire, had been fighting, on and
off, for control of their modestly-sized sub-continent for six hundred years
before the rest of the Cluster came calling in its strange floating sky-ships,
a century ago. They'd been backward even then, compared to the other societies
on Murssay, which were decades ahead in technology, and - arguably - several
centuries ahead morally and politically. Before they'd been contacted, the
natives had the crossbow and the muzzle-loading cannon. Now, a century later,
they had tanks. Lots of tanks. Tanks and artillery and trucks and a few very
inefficient aircraft. Each side also had one prestige system, partially bought
from but mostly just donated by some of the Cluster's more advanced societies.
The Hegemonarchy had its single sixth- or seventh-hand spacecraft; the Empire
had a clutch of missiles which were generally reckoned to be inoperable, and
probably were politically unusable anyway because they were supposed to be
nuclear-tipped. Public opinion in the Cluster could tolerate the
technologically enhanced continuation of a pointless war so long as men, women
and children died in relatively small, regular batches, but the thought of a
million or so being incinerated at once, nuked in a city, was not to be
tolerated.

The
Empire was winning a conventional war, then, being waged across two
impoverished countries which left to themselves would probably just be
harnessing steam power. Instead refugee peasants filled the roads, carts loaded
with whole households swayed between hedgerows, while the tanks ploughed the
crop fields and the droning planes dropping bombs took care of slum-clearance.

The
Hegemonarchy was retreating across the plains and into the mountains as its
beleaguered forces fell back before the Empire's motorised cavalry.

He
went straight to the map room after dressing; a few dozy general staff officers
jumped to attention and rubbed sleep from their eyes. The maps didn't look any
better in the morning than they had the previous evening, but he stood looking
at them for a long time, sizing up the positions of their forces and the
Empire's, asking the officers questions and trying to gauge how accurate their
intelligence was and what level their own troops' morale was at.

The
officers seemed to know more about the disposition of their enemy's forces than
they did about the feelings of their own men.

He
nodded to himself, scanned all the maps, then left for breakfast with Napoerea
and the rest of the priests. He dragged them all back down into the map room
afterwards - they would normally have returned to their own apartments for
contemplation - and asked even more questions.

'And
I want a uniform like these guys,' he said, pointing at one of the junior
regular army officers in the map room.

'But,
Sir Zakalwe,' Napoerea said, looking worried. 'Those would demean you!'

'And
these will slow me down,' he said, indicating the long, heavy robes he was
wearing. 'I want to take a look at the front myself.'

'But,
sir, this is the holy citadel; all our intelligence comes here, all our
people's prayers are directed here.'

'Napoerea,'
he said, putting his hand on the other man's shoulder. 'I know; but I need to
see things for myself. I only just got here, remember?' He looked round the
unhappy faces of the other high priests. 'I'm sure your ways work when
circumstances are as they have been in the past,' he told them, straight-faced.
'But I'm new, and so I have to use new ways to discover what you probably
already know.' He turned back to Napoerea. 'I want my own plane; a modified
reconnaissance aircraft should do. Two fighters as an escort.'

The
priests had thought it the height of daring unorthodoxy to venture out to the
space port, thirty kilometres away, by train and truck; they thought he was mad
to want to start flying all over the sub-continent.

It
was what he did for the next few days, however. There was a lull of sorts in
the fighting just at that point - as the Hegemonarchy's forces fled and the
Empire's consolidated - which made his task a little easier. He wore a plain
uniform, without even the half-dozen or so medal ribbons that even the most
junior officer seemed to warrant just for existing. He spoke to the mostly
dull, demoralised and thoroughly hidebound field generals and colonels, to
their staff, and to the foot soldiers and tank crews, as well as to the cooks and
the supply teams and the orderlies and doctors. Most of the time he needed an
interpreter; only the top brass spoke the Cluster's common tongue, but even so
he suspected the troops felt closer to somebody who spoke a different language
but asked them questions than they did to somebody who shared their language
and only ever used it to give orders.

He
toured every major air field in the course of that first week, sounding out the
Air Force staff for their feelings and opinions. About the only person he
tended to ignore on such occasions was the always watchful priest every
squadron, regiment and fort had as its titular head. The first few of these
priests he'd encountered had had nothing useful to say, and none of those he
saw subsequently ever seemed to have anything interesting to add beyond the
ritualised initial greetings. He had decided within the first couple of days
that the main problem the priests had was themselves.