Colonel Artus Romlar lay listening behind a tree. There were many sounds. Just now, none seemed meaningful.
Insects buzzed and clicked and crawled. Sweat trickled. His shirt stuck to his back. He ignored them all. It was early spring in Oven's northern hemisphere, and the late morning temperature had risen well above a hundred. At least there was forest and shade, here in the Jubat Hills.
And the T'swa would be along soon. If he was wrong about that, he'd made a serious error.
Below him was a log landing on the Jubat Hills Railroad, a long strip of open ground used periodically for piling logs. The ground sloped downward at thirty to forty percent almost to the tracks, which here had been built along the bottom of a wide draw. Farther on, the draw became a steep-walled ravine; if the T'swa were going to detrain short of Tiiku Lod-Sei, this was the last good site.
The trick was to fool them into thinking he was somewhere else, hours away. Romlar considered he'd done that. The risk in not being at Junction 4 Village made it convincing. It was also the principal down side of his decision.
Regimental commanders don't customarily lead their troops into firefights, but this fight would be pivotal, perhaps decisive. The situation had become increasingly critical, the overall odds poor. He'd long since consolidated the men he had left into two battalions. If he lost in this week's set of engagements, his regiment would be—not finished, perhaps, but so reduced as to lose much of its effectiveness. And the Condaros, the people who'd hired it, would be beaten beyond hope. On the other hand, winning here decisively could carry them a while longer, and give them some sort of chance.
Of course, the T'swa might not come. In that case, he'd left 2nd Battalion, along with his Condaro allies, in a precarious position to little avail. Though he still might be able to hit the Booly positions by surprise, and even the odds a bit. That was another reason he was leading 1st Battalion personally: Its commander, Coyn Carrmak, was the best officer he had, but to Romlar's thinking, he had to be present at this action himself, to know the result promptly, and as fully as possible.
The T'swa would come though, reportedly a fresh regiment, full strength. All he had to do—all he had to do!—was beat it soundly, cut it up badly with relatively few casualties of his own.
Meanwhile the Booly 2nd Division was sure to hit Junction 4 and its village today, with its two regiments of Condaro defenders and his own 2nd Battalion. Might have hit them already. If he were there with 1st Battalion . . . But if the T'swa were allowed to intervene, there was no chance at all of pulling the fat from the fire.
There were many ways to lose this war. There might or might not be a way to win it.
Romlar didn't run all this through his mind now. It was there, had entered into his decisions, and that was enough. He had committed. Now he lay quietly relaxed, waiting and watching, alert without effort. He'd been through this before. It seemed his reason for being.
He heard the locomotive now, a laboring steam engine chuffing up the long grade. Assuming he'd judged right, and he felt ninety percent sure he had, the train would slow and stop just here below him, and the T'swa would start getting out of the open-sided wooden cars. He'd open fire when about half were still on the cars and half on the ground. If the engineer started the train moving again, he'd be abandoning the men already off, and besides, the terrain became difficult along the tracks ahead, even for T'swa.
No, they'd detrain here, then try to move back under fire, and that would spring the rest of his trap. They might well see it coming, but there'd be little they could do about it except fight furiously. Which in the case of the T'swa also meant intelligently and joyously. To them, too, fighting was fulfillment, the spice of life.
He could feel his troopers waiting. There was, of course, the danger that the T'swa would feel them too. But he felt them knowing they were there. They were relaxed, too imbued with the T'sel to be anxious. Thus the T'swa were unlikely to sense them. Except for the T'swa, there wasn't another fighting force in Confederation Space that could lie in wait like this and not be tense, not reek psychically. And except for the T'swa, he knew of no military force other than his that might detect that sort of thing.
The locomotive poked into sight, moving slowly, resinous woodsmoke issuing from the spark arrester on its stack. It wouldn't have to brake; the slope and the heavy gravity of Oven would stop it. With their typical energy and athleticism, T'swa began to pile out before the cars had totally stopped. Romlar leveled his bolt-action rifle and squeezed the trigger, and the ridge side to both his left and right erupted with fire—rifles, grenade launchers, and light machine guns all firing blanks.
Referees with the T'swa began to move up and down the line, shouting and pointing, and men "died"—lay down, rolled over. Others were returning fire, and the referees with Romlar's 1st Battalion went into action too. But Romlar's men had the advantages of position and cover. Some of the T'swa took cover behind the cars' steel trucks and chassis, while others backed down the slope toward the limited cover of the trees—backing toward the other jaw—two machine gun platoons.
The T'swa weren't really surprised to receive a new surge of fire from behind. The exchange continued noisy and intense; the referees continued busy. After a few minutes more their whistles blew, ending the action. Most of the "surviving" T'swa were free of the trap now, having overrun the machine guns, and the real harvest was finished. The referees needed to confer, to sort out the confusion and define the casualties on both sides. Meanwhile both troopers and T'swa stopped where they were and waited.
While the referees conferred, Romlar washed down a "sweat capsule" with a swallow of warm water, then got on the radio to Brossling, who'd kept comm silence till then because their frequency might be monitored. The Boolies had hit them, Brossling said, but the assault hadn't been as bad as expected. The referees there had agreed that 2nd Battalion and the Condaro had driven them off with fairly heavy Booly casualties and only modest casualties of their own. Modest because they were dug in, and because they hadn't let themselves be overrun.
Romlar's own casualties, the referees announced, had been relatively modest too, considering it was T'swa they'd ambushed, T'swa in their prefinal year of training, most of them seventeen years old. When the whistles blew again, the surviving T'swa would regroup and do whatever their commander decided. Romlar would move his men back to the abandoned logging camp at Junction 4, fifteen miles away. A camp that, in the never-never land of the training exercise, served as the nucleus of the mocked-up Condaro village at Junction 4, whose rough wagon road gave logistical access to the principal pass through this part of the Jubat Hills. The Condaros, like the Boolies, were mostly imaginary of course, represented by T'swa veterans, survivors of retired regiments, pretending to be non-T'swa. Veterans each of whom, for the purpose of the exercise, represented a Condaro or Booly platoon.
It was all as real as it could reasonably be made, but given the genuine and bloody fighting his regiment had been through on Terfreya, five years earlier, the difference had always been conspicuous to Romlar. Nonetheless, the regiment had learned a great deal in those five additional training years, learned much more than simply strategy, tactics, and fighting techniques.
Romlar had lost thirty-two percent of his command on Terfreya—real deaths by violence, not pretended deaths by referees' decisions—and like the T'swa, the "White T'swa" did not replace their casualties. But allowing for that short-handedness, he had no doubt that this regiment, under his leadership, was as good as any regiment in Confederation Space, whether at War Level One, Two, or Three. Which were all the levels the Confederation condoned.
True, the T'swa were physically stronger than his men; they'd been born to this world's heavy gravity, as had their ancestors for a hundred generations. And his men would graduate with six years less training, though the Ostrak Procedures, and six years of work under T'swa cadres, had brought them close. Especially given the months of bloody combat on Terfreya. Perhaps more important, particularly in a Level Three War where night visors were prohibited, Homo tyssiensis had considerably better night vision than other humans.
But under his leadership . . . Numerous T'swa officers were his equals in strategy and tactics, Romlar knew, and at spotting importances. But no one outguessed him, out-predicted him. That was his edge. Even in training it didn't always bring victory, but it was as good an edge as he could hope for.
The referees' whistles shrilled again, blowing the two forces back into action, and Romlar's buglers called a withdrawal. His major advantages here were gone now; it was time to get back to Junction 4.
The Game Master had declared the "war" over. The Condaros had broken, and with that the greatly outnumbered regiment had been chewed up. First Romlar, and later Carrmak and Brossling had been "killed" in T'swa night assaults, and Eldren Esenrok, still and always cocky, had led what was left of the troopers.
Now the entire regiment, survivors and casualties, sat together in the Great Hall to hear their efforts critiqued. Sat facing the Grand Master and the board of Masters. Tiers of wooden benches, dark and smooth, rose on three sides, holding other regiments in advanced training, those which were on base. The hall was well lit by T'swa standards, but the light was ruddy as a campfire. The timbered roof was high and dark, unpainted and with massive beams, its corners shadowed. All in all it felt primordial, despite the large viewscreen on the wall at one end.
Grand Master Kliss-Bahn was ancient, his frame still large but its covering shrunken. His naturally short hair, long since white, had become thin and soft, and like himself no longer stood straight. He'd commanded the legendary Black Tiger Regiment in its time, survived its gradual shrinkage and final destruction, and had been overseeing training in one capacity and another for sixty-eight standard years.
His critique was direct, detailed, and generally favorable. When he'd finished, he turned his large, luminous black eyes on Romlar, who as regimental commander sat front and center facing him. "Now," said Kliss-Bahn, "let us hear from Colonel Romlar. Colonel, you may comment at any reasonable length on this exercise. And because it was your final exercise, feel free to address your training overall. Colonel?"
Romlar stood. He was rather tall, and massive for an Iryalan—as big as most T'swa. "Thank you, Master Kliss-Bahn. I'll keep it short. This exercise was a lesson in fighting for a losing cause of little merit, a lesson in dying with integrity." He grinned. "It was an interesting experience.
"As for our overall training—T'swa warriors have not only trained us; they've inspired us and been role models for us. And T'swa masters of wisdom have done much to expand us in the T'sel during the three years we've spent on your world. Basic to all that were the Ostrak Procedures, received from counselors of our own species in our first year of training. But even the Ostrak Procedures grew out of training in the T'sel, received by Iryalans here on Tyss six centuries ago. So it all comes down to Tyss, the T'swa, and the T'sel."
He looked around, scanning the black faces, the reflective eyes. "We are not truly T'swa," he went on. "Our scripting and imprinting have been different. The Ostrak Procedures, and our training by your lodge and by the Order of Ka-Shok, have made us close cousins to the T'swa; in most ways we have become closer to you than to our families, or to the friends of our childhood. But we remain Confederatswa, and more specifically Iryalans.
"We will go somewhere to fight soon, taking with us what we have learned from you. What we have learned not only about the art of war, but of the T'sel, of ethics, of integrity.
"As the T'swa well know and fully intended, the T'sel is infiltrating the Confederation, particularly at the top and most particularly on Iryala. In time, wars will cease; that is the direction the T'sel moves us, now that the hold of the Sacrament is beginning to crumble in the Confederation. In lives to come—perhaps not the next, or the one after that, but in some future life—we will do things beyond our present dreaming. But for this life we are warriors born and trained, and we will practice our profession as skillfully and ethically as we can, taking pleasure in its challenges and actions.
"Because we are Confederatswa, we will no doubt do some things differently than you would. But we will always act according to the T'sel. We thank you for all you have given us, and should it happen that we meet some of you in battle, we will not disappoint you."
As Romlar sat down, the T'swa regiments stood, clapping in the T'swa manner, strongly, rhythmically, large palms cupped, the sound resonant in the hall. A rush pebbled the young colonel's skin.