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MA'AI 25, 2679 GENRICHIAN220Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡxdnL6fZKeA
NOYABAR 44, 621 ROMANOVAN220Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡRmwQjEQU5x
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"OH NO, OH NO," CRIED YVAN DRAGOMILOV220Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡxpj76AWgKw
"MY HOMEWORLD YOU SHALL NEVER HOLD,220Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡYPKcJ3ZMjv
FOR THOUGH I'VE TURNED RENEGADE OUT IN THE DEEP,220Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡXCaPJfM6QF
DEEP,220Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ7N0VEZYHnn
DEEP,220Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ53U223S1l5
I SHALL TAKE BACK WHAT WAS ONCE MINE OF OLD"220Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ0Vua1sFYRj
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The new road, the guerilla chieftain thought, was like a long, open wound in the planet's skin.
Lying hidden with several dozen of his fighting comrades upon the grassy slope of a forested hillside, half a verst distant from the furrow of fresh earth and upturned boulders---a few hundred measures above the place they knew the Cosmopolitan supply convoy must soon pass---the commander contemplated all of the changes which the past several months had inflicted upon his planet. None of them were good; no change was ever good in his experience.
There had been a day when such a project as this would have been contemplated a verst---maybe only a measure---at a time, laid where it would be the least conspicuous, where it would least damage the natural landscape, leveled and replanted edge-to-edge by hundreds of careful retainers. No more. This hateful gash ran true as the terrain allowed from a series of new stars lying east and west of the old facility to a grim fortification which the Black Usurper had caused to be built in the foothills, just north of the mountains, for the purpose of controlling access between the starport and the rolling plains below.
It had not worked. Rather, its principal effect had been to the Black Usurper's detriment, supplying his enemies, rather than his establishment: a low cluster of gray, wall-rimmed cubes molded not from ancient, honorable graniplastic which this world's first settlers had built with, nor woven from the glowing purge-reinforced mesh which was preferred by forty-second century Genrichians, but slurped in a rude process out of some grainy liquid stone that hardened in a few hours between plastic forms over metal rods, and which, if damaged, could be repaired with great speed in the same haphazard manner.
About him, where he lay hidden, soil, leaves, and grass were slick with dew which had not burned off this morning and would not before nightfall. Moisture darkened his makeshift uniform, misassembled Genrichian livery captured in previous actions and rough peasant clothing, adding to his camouflage. His feet, always a soldier's first concern, were warm and dry. Otherwise, he'd gotten used to being wet and dirty all the time.
A scarlet flash at the corner of his eye told him a scout had spotted the anticipated enemy convoy. This clever method of communication had startled him at first, the gentle fisting which caused coherent light to be generated by a quickblade and the firmer thumb-pressure that would unleash a bolt of deadly kinegery being of little difference to an adrenalinated fighter. It made his spine itch to lie inside its focus. Nonetheless, the system worked uninterceptibly, and he had, in the end, grown accustomed to it as well. Close behind him as was prudent lay one another age might have labeled aside or chief of staff, Lida Khabalova, an appropriately named woodsjack girl, dark of hair and fiery of the eyes. Just out of her teens, she possessed a wild, unaccountable genius for a strategy which sometimes arises without antecedent among a people pressed by great need. Seeing the signal, she turned to grin at him and concentrated again upon the roadway.
Lida. Day by day it became more difficult to avoid confronting her ardent desire to be something more than his assistant. Nor was he altogether immune, himself, to the aphrodisiac quality of a shared cause. Yet he had scant time or energy to spare, and a previous obligation claimed him.
Soon, sounds of the convoy's arrival were unmistakable even to the commander's untrained ear. His talent lay elsewhere. It had been tough learning to overcome centuries-old distrust that Genrichians felt towards their now-deposed colonial rulers or rolling factional conflict among the independent-minded woodsjacks which he must control while continuing to fight a war. Along the way, he had learned much of politics (as well, to his dismay, of the more dismal side of human nature) and had, as much to his surprise as anyone's, proven himself as capable a leader as anyone had a right to expect. This stretch was a portion of the new road which had not been laid die-straight but looped around a massive obelisk of obdurate stone, upthrust from the planet's core, standing in the bird-flight between the Usurper's new stars and his fortress. It was not their first ambuscade in these parts, but most had happened in the bend itself. (The damages he and his partisans inflicted in this way had been expensive to the new regime.) Still, the enemy had grown wary and would be on their guard. By the time they were past the curve and upon the straight again, they would be relaxed and easier prey. Or so the commander hoped.
Aside from the thrum and hiss of the approaching foe, he and his comrades lay in silence. Birds and animals were hushed, in part by the prospect of foul weather, in part with an expectation which the enemy, unwise in the ways of this planet, would not be sharing. Nor were Cosmopolitan recruits often given time to discover what was normal here. Mostly they perished, replaced by what seemed like an endless reserve of newcomers, at the hands of woods-wise natives before they could acquire sufficient experience---if they were not taken before they could get here by Deep-rovers which reports claimed were striking Romanovan vessels with increasing frequency and ferocity.
Among them was one with a curiously coincidental name. Yvan Dragomilov, it was rumored, was not only a terror to all imperia-conglomerate within the black heart of the Deep, the normal provenance of banditry, but swooped down upon ill-defended planetary installations----mines, refineries, marshaling yards where levies like Zeytseva's were gathered, given minimal training, and sent to die for Premier and Cosmopolity---as if he were waging war, rather than raiding for booty. The commander had entertained a notion that this Yvan Dragomilov might be the missing grandson over whom another Yvan Dragomilov had once grieved. He had dismissed it when it was pointed out (by independent advisors, both female) that even the crude census that was taken of this planet's natives every two decades produced hundreds of Yvan Dragomilovs, just as it did Eugene Ulanovs and Adam Zabolotnys. Well, he thought, may Yvan Dragomilov prosper, whoever he might be, so long as he keeps killing Romanovans.
Desperados of the star-roads aside, the rate of casualties upon both sides was appalling. Supplies were chronically inadequate. To the commander's consternation, his opponent anticipated his best-aimed blows. Even he could not have attested, at this point and in general, how well the resistance fared. Unlike the Premiers' celebrated interstellar wars---themselves mere episodes of Thousand Years' War which threatened to become humanity's normal mode of existence---it was no matter of clear-cut victory and defeat, but of grinding attrition, not of destroying an enemy (which seemed impossible), but of dissuading the faraway and faceless entities who paid his bills.
But this ambuscade had been thought out long in advance, kept secret from almost everyone involved until the final minute, and appeared to have caught the Black Usurper's legions flat-footed. Between the hill where the commander lay and that from the flank of which the offending roadway had been cut, lay a creekbed, nearly dry this time of the year, deep, but with climbable slopes upon both sides. The road appeared here as a shelf scraped from the hillside with projectibles calipretted upon the military equivalent of the Holdings droilodka. Fearful of attack, the builders had remained within their vehicles, never setting foot on the ground. In consequence, it was neither as well planned nor well-executed as it might have been, providing many chances and advantages to the woodsjacks.
The sky was an unbroken bowl of pearl-gray overcast. Upon the hill the air was clear, but a thin mist filled the creek and lapped over the road, sweetening the woodsjacks' chances for success. The commander took a deep breath, always conscious that it might be his last. The smells about him were those of the forest, seasoned by the lubricant with which his quickblade had been coated, as well as by the woodsmoke of one hundred campfires permeating his clothing and the odor of his own tension. Nearby, where he could not see them, which was as it should be, half a hundred other rebels lay, each in a pool of similar smells, and waited.
Forms moved on the road. Scouts straddling their purge-field riders hummed through the ambuscade unharmed. Without humor, the commander grinned to himself. They were traveling too fast to afford the countryside proper inspection. He was thankful for an incompetence on their part which was the one thing he had found he could count on. War, he had come to realize, far from consisting of valorous deeds, of brilliant move and countermove, was just a matter of not making as many mistakes as your foe.
Soon the leading element of the column proper rumbled into view, a low-riding vehicle bristling with projectibles, pulsing with protective energies, pierced at such frequent intervals with quickblade ports that it looked like an openwork basket. This machine, like the unobservant scouts that had preceded it, would be allowed to pass unmolested. For the moment, it was followed by another one like it. And another.
Upon the figurative heels of the ponderous, death-dealing escorts followed freighter, slowed by their own considerable weight of purge-armor, full of frightened troops beginning to realize they were still unharmed after their danger-fraught passage of the blind curve. This, too, represented long-standing fortune to the commander and his woodsjacks. More often than not, in this backwater war, they faced human opposition instead of the dreaded Cossacks their foe might have brought to bear. Even with the Premier's active abatement, the Black Usurper's resources, it seemed, were limited. The near-invincible warriors were expensive to acquire and maintain.
The same was only by comparison less true of peasant conscripts drawn, unwilling, from nearby Cosmopolitan possessions, and ferried, shipload by desperado-valuable shipload, to a planet, in their view encircled by a funeral wreath, which it was the rebels' objective to make their graveyard. Nor could the Usurper count on supplementing their numbers from the native population. In open countryside, the likeliest casualties for conscription melted into the woods. Zaytseva's henchmen were afraid to venture forth in less than regimental strength. In more settled areas, less given to recalcitrant individualism, the people grew sullen under what they considered an illegitimate rule, and through slowdowns and sabotage endeavored to cost more than they were worth. Pressgangs tax-collectors returned to the Holdings and their master empty-handed or, for one reason or another, not at all. The commander was aware of half-a-dozen men among his companions who had not been born upon this planet, who had deserted rather than work the Usurper's will (or face the consequences of doing so or of failing). Some offworlders had even married rebel women. Others, more determined and courageous, remained as spies in their old jobs, at what was now designated (as it had never been) the planet's capital.
This jolted him back to the present. His spies had chosen well. The column was of the right length, twelve freighters laden with what must be valuable cargo. As the final elements----3 more weapons carriers, a heavy compliment for sure----skim-floated onto the straight, the first were still in sight. No further signal among the waiting resistance fighters was necessary. A dull, muffled thud communicated itself to the commander through the ground. After a pause which, even after all his experience with such operations, stirred the beginnings of doubt within him, half the hillside above the road began to slip, like baker's flour piled too high, onto the 3 rear escort vehicles. Blocked by the column ahead, they couldn't accelerate from the path of the slide regardless of how slow its downhill journey turned out. Nor had they room or time to turn around.
Permeated by armoring fields insufficient to resist the titanic forces involved, the mesh from which the vehicles were fashioned flashed and sparkled, penetrated by falling stones, battered into shapes their fashioners would never have recognized. Doomed occupants bellowing in uncontrolled terror, the machines were pushed, almost gently, off the roadway by a smoke-crested wave of moving earth into the dry creekbed, where they were buried. Once crushed, they exploded, lifting the earth a final time before it settled with a dread finality upon their broken forms. The roadway was cut off.
At the same time, a similar blast and landslide destroyed the leading vehicles of the column, leaving the freighters stranded but untouched on the now-isolated piece of roadway. It appeared that the Romanovans could not adapt themselves to this ancient method of chemenergic warfare, although the idea had been borrowed from assassins hired to destroy the Sorokin sons' droilodka, what now seemed like years ago to the commander. If the scouts upon their purge-riders exercised their usual foolhardiness, instead of running ahead to bring help---just one of three precious flying machines Zeytseva had imported recently could reverse these thus-far happy results---they'd turn about to see what was wrong and be cut down by sharp-bladers waiting for them.
Rising where they lay or thrusting from sparse cover, the woodsjacks launched their assault. Steam rose in trailing wisps where the energy they spent was absorbed by wet soil, mist-dampened clothing, and human tissue which was, for the most part, liquid itself. Where beam struck purge-field, iridescent interference rings fled outward like ripples on the surface of a pond. At the closest ranges---some fighters had been lying among the tumbled boulders of the creekbed---the less-attenuated power of their weapons was made into even greater heat and their targets into expanding plasma. Smoke billowed. Flames danced and crackled. Trapped draftees screamed as their heated weapons burned their hands or their clothing and flesh began crisping.
The surviving Romanovans were desperate now, aware that their opponents could afford to take no prisoners. Blind blading began to plow the dirt all around the guerilla commander, scattering gravel and broken vegetation. A waist-thick tree beside him absorbed a direct blade---its trunk shivered, spewing outraged bark in all directions and dropping leaves in a wide circle. The phenomenon wasn't anything new, and he gave it no significant notice.
His own blade was a long one. It split the skull of a uniformed youth climbing from his vehicle to take refuge behind it. Pink haze above a stump of neck drifted and mingled with the mist. His second thrust caught another Romanovan squarely in his soft-armored chest, slamming him against his machine where he dropped to the ground, legs straight, arms splayed at his sides. Among other travesties to which the commander grew accustomed of late, he was now a skilled slaughterer, capable of accomplishing the deaths of children in a casual mood, without hate and at astonishing ranges.
As moaning from the wounded filled the valley and a hundred quickblades flash-canceled one another upon the ruined road, Eugene "the" Sorokin, guerilla chieftain and rightful heir to the Oligarchy of Genrich, rose to a prudent crouch and started forward to see what Zeytseva's suppliers had brought him. In his mind's eye, he was already witnessing---and to his disgust enjoying---the spectacle of the plundered vehicles being set afire and tipped over to join their buried escorts in the creekbed. He was aware that it was odd, how his enjoyment didn't grow from the hatred of the enemy. Months of fighting had stripped him of such feelings (if he had ever had them). It seemed he had never been motivated by any emotion---but had, from the start, regarded the Black Usurper as an unfortunate circumstance, like bad weather. If he hated anything, it was Veronica Zeytseva Sorokin, for betraying his father's trust. Often, in the twilight between waking and sleep, he caught himself imagining her death at his own hands. When his mind was in control of his being, he believed she would get her comeuppance through Adam.
The bloody work proceeded well enough without the seasoning of hatred. When spring floods arrived in a few months (unless Zeytseva acted at once, incurring the risk of further interference), these slides should act as dams, assuring that the roadway remained washed out and useless without additional effort upon the part of....
To his utter ho error, a different spectacle unfolded as a deep thrumming, a great subsonic pounding, filled the canyon from one end to the other. The Usurper's "sky force," three purge-suspended fliers, were skimming upon long kinergic legs up the creekbed from the direction of the Holdings. As they came, they rained destruction upon the woodsjacks who, with the collapse of resistance from the freighters, had hurried forward, all unheeding, to claim the fruits of an easy victory.
The machines themselves were nothing more in principle than purge-field vehicles written large. Their rarity and cost arose from a profligate consumption of power and the subtle ulsic circuitry needed to keep them stable over varying terrain upon what amounted to a continuous thrust, often several versts in length. If the enemy had not relearned the use of obsolete explosives, he wielded this newer, more hideous weapon to a terrifying effect. Where they strode, the fliers each put down a "footprint," its width and depth being dependent on their size, weight, and altitude. At a verst's height, it merely rippled the grass. Yet it was capable, when the machine was just overhead, of stamping turf, foliage, men, and machinery into smashed caricatures of what they had been, or of driving them into the soft ground like nails under the descending face of a big, invisible hammer.
A shadow passed over Eugene. He threw himself to one side, out of the deadly track, only to see a comrade beside him get trampled----he felt a limb-weakening wash of gratitude it had not been Lida---and converted into pulp before his eyes. He raised his quickblade, discharging it into the purge-armored underbelly of the passing machine, producing no effect aside from expanding interference rings and sparks. Everywhere it was his own men screaming now, fleeing as the fliers ran them down. Troopers at bladeable ports rained volleys upon them, widening the trail of death. Holding his ground and taking careful aim, Eugene picked off several of these, forcing others to retreat inside the safety of the mesh where they could do no harm, even tumbling one through his port and over the edge. He fell to the ground and was crushed by the next passing machine.
Seasoned warriors streaked for the nearest cover, the forest, or the comparative security afforded by proximity to the the long embattled column, knowing their enemy would be reluctant to destroy the freighters and their contents. Eugene and Lida were among this latter, blading as they climbed, side by side, hand over hand, up to the roadway. Barely had they made their painful way to the level, plowed strip of ground when the sides of the freighters opened outward, vomiting dozens----hundreds----of Cossacks.
The table had been turned. The ambushers had become the ambushed!
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