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  The New Prophet’s televised address began fifteen minutes before Kassad’s ultimatum ran out. The New Prophet agreed with Kassad’s statement that Allah would horribly punish heretics but announced that it was the Hegemony infidels who would be so punished. It was the only time the New Prophet ever had been seen to lose his temper on camera.

  Screaming, saliva flying, he ordered the human wave attacks to be renewed on the grounded assault boat. He announced that at that moment a dozen fission bombs were being assembled at the occupied Power for Peace reactor in All. With these, the forces of Allah would be carried into space itself. The first fission bomb, he explained, would be used on the infidel Kassad’s satanic assault boat that very afternoon.

  The New Prophet then began to explain exactly how the Hegemony hostages would be executed, but at that moment Kassad’s deadline ran out.

  Qom-Riyadh was, by its own choice and the accident of its distant location, a technically primitive world. But the inhabitants were not so primitive that they did not have an active datasphere. Nor were the revolutionary mullahs who had led the invasion so opposed to the “Great Satan of Hegemony Science” that they refused to tie into the global data net with their personal comlogs.

  The HS Denieve had seeded enough spysats so that by 1729 hours Qom-Riyadh Central Time, the datasphere had been tapped to the point that the Hegemony ship had identified sixteen thousand eight hundred and thirty revolutionary mullahs by their access codes. At 1729:30 hours the spysats began feeding their real-time targeting data to the twenty-one perimeter defense sats which Kassad’s assault boat had left in low orbit. These orbital defense weapons were so old that the Denieve’s mission had been to return them to the Web for safe destruction.

  Kassad had suggested another use for them.

  At precisely 1730 hours, nineteen of the small satellites detonated their fusion cores. In the nanoseconds before their self-destruction, the resulting X rays were focused, aimed, and released in sixteen thousand eight hundred and thirty invisible but very coherent beams. The ancient defense sats were not designed for atmospheric use and had an effective destructive radius of less than a millimeter.

  Luckily, that was all that was needed. Not all of the targeting beams penetrated whatever stood between the mullahs and the sky. Fifteen thousand seven hundred and eighty-four did.

  The effect was immediate and dramatic. In each case the target’s brain and cerebral fluid boiled, turned to vapor, and blew the encasing skull to bits. The New Prophet was in the middle of his live, planetwide broadcast—literally in the middle of pronouncing the word “heretic”—when 1730 hours arrived.

  For almost two minutes the TV screens and walls around the planet carried the image of the New Prophet’s headless body slumped over the microphone. Then Fedmahn Kassad cut in on all bands to announce that his next deadline was one hour away and that any actions against the hostages would be met with a more dramatic demonstration of Allah’s displeasure.

  There were no reprisals.

  That night, in orbit around Qom-Riyadh, Mystery visited Kassad for the first time since his cadet days. He was asleep but the visit was more than a dream and less than the alternative reality of the OCS:HTN sims.

  The woman and he were lying together under a light blanket beneath a broken roof. Her skin was warm and electric, her face little more than a pale outline against nighttime darkness. Overhead the stars had just begun to fade into the false light of predawn. Kassad realized that she was trying to speak to him; her soft lips formed words which were just below the threshold of Kassad’s hearing. He pulled back a second in order to see her face better and, in so doing, lost contact completely. He awoke in his sleep webbing with moisture on his cheeks and the hum of the ship’s systems sounding as strange to him as the breathing of some half-awakened beast.

  Nine standard ship weeks later, Kassad stood before a FORCE court-martial review on Freeholm. He had known when he made his decision on Qom-Riyadh that his superiors would have no choice but to crucify or promote him.

  FORCE prided itself on preparing itself for all contingencies in the Web or the colonial regions, but nothing had properly prepared it for the Battle of South Bressia and its implications for the New Bushido.

  The New Bushido Code which governed Colonel Kassad’s life had evolved out of the necessity for the military class to survive. After the obscenities of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries on Old Earth, when military leaders had committed their nations to strategies wherein entire civilian populations were legitimate targets while their uniformed executioners sat safe in self-contained bunkers fifty meters under the earth, the repugnance of the surviving civilians was so great that for more than a century the word “military” was an invitation to a lynching.

  As the New Bushido evolved it combined the age-old concepts of honor and individual courage with the need to spare civilians whenever possible.

  It also saw the wisdom of returning to the pre-Napoleonic concepts of small, “nontotal” wars with defined goals and proscribed excesses. The Code demanded a forsaking of nuclear weapons and strategic bombing campaigns in all but the most extreme cases but, more than that, it demanded a return to Old Earth medieval concepts of set battles between small, professional forces at a mutually agreed upon time in a place where destruction of public and private property would be kept to a minimum.

  This Code worked well for the first four centuries of post-Hegira expansion. The fact that essential technologies were essentially frozen in place for three of those centuries worked in the Hegemony’s favor as its monopoly on the use of farcasters allowed it to apply the modest resources of FORCE at the right place in the required amount of time.

  Even when separated by the inevitable leap years of time-debt, no colonial or independent world could hope to match the power of the Hegemony. Incidents such as the political rebellion on Maui-Covenant, with its unique guerrilla warfare, or the religious insanity on Qom-Riyadh were put down quickly and firmly and any excesses in the campaigns merely pointed out the importance of returning to the strict Code of the New Bushido. But for all of FORCE’s calculations and preparations, no one had adequately planned on the inevitable confrontation with the Ousters.

  The Ousters had been the single external threat to the Hegemony for the four centuries since the forebears of the barbarian hordes had left Sol System in their crude fleet of leaking O’Neill cities, tumbling asteroids, and experimental comet farm clusters. Even after the Ousters acquired the Hawking drive, it remained official Hegemony policy to ignore them as long as their swarms stayed in the darkness between the stars and limited their in-system plunderings to scooping small amounts of hydrogen from gas giants and water ice from uninhabited moons.

  The early Outback skirmishes such as Bent’s World and GHC 2990 were considered aberrations, of little interest to the Hegemony. Even the pitched battle for Lee Three had been treated as a Colonial Service problem and when the FORCE task force arrived six local years after the attack, five years after the Ousters departed, any atrocities were conveniently forgotten in favor of the view that no barbarian raid would repeat itself when the Hegemony chose to flex its muscle.

  In the decades which followed Lee Three, FORCE and Ouster space forces skirmished in a hundred border areas, but except for the odd Marine encounters in airless, weightless places, there were no infantry confrontations.

  Stories in the Worldweb proliferated: the Ousters would never be a threat to Earthlike worlds because of their three centuries of adaptation to weight-lessness; the Ousters had evolved into something more—or less—than human; the Ousters did not have farcaster technology, would never have it, and thus never would be a threat to FORCE. Then came Bressia.

  Bressia was one of those smug, independent worlds, pleased with both its convenient access to the Web and its eight-month separation from it, growing rich from the export of diamonds, burr root, and its unequaled coffee, coyly refusing to become a colony world but still dependent upon the Heg
emony Protectorate and Common Market to meet its soaring economic goals. As with most such worlds, Bressia was proud of its Self-defense Force: twelve torchships, a refitted attack carrier which had been decommissioned by FORCE:space half a century earlier, twoscore or more of small, fast orbital patrol vessels, a standing army of ninety thousand volunteers, a respectable oceangoing navy, and a store of nuclear weapons stockpiled purely for symbolic purposes.

  The Ouster Hawking wake had been noticed by Hegemony monitoring stations but was misinterpreted as merely another swarm migration which would pass no closer than half a light-year to the Bressian system.

  Instead, with a single course correction which was not detected until the swarm was within the Oort cloud radius, the Ousters fell on Bressia like some Old Testament plague. A minimum of seven standard months separated Bressia from any Hegemony rescue or response.

  Bressia’s space force was obliterated within the first twenty hours of fighting. The Ouster swarm then put more than three thousand ships into Bressia’s cislunar space and began the systematic reduction of all planetary defenses.

  The world had been settled by no-nonsense Central Europeans in the first wave of the Hegira, and its two continents bore the prosaic names of North Bressia and South Bressia. North Bressia held desert, high tundra, and six major cities housing mostly burr-root harvesters and petroleum engineers.

  South Bressia, much more temperate in climate and geography, was the home for most of the world’s four hundred million people and the huge coffee plantations.

  As if to demonstrate what war had once been about, the Ousters scoured North Bressia—first with several hundred fallout-free nuclear weapons and tactical plasma bombs, then with deathbeams, and finally with tailored viruses. Only a handful of the fourteen million residents escaped. South Bressia received no bombardment except for the lancing of specific military targets, airports, and the large harbor at Solno.

  FORCE doctrine held that, while a world could be reduced from orbit, actual military invasion of an industrialized planet was an impossibility; the problems with landing logistics, the immense area to be occupied, and the unwieldy size of the invading army were considered to be the ultimate arguments against invasion.

  The Ousters obviously had not read the FORCE doctrine books. On the twenty-third day of the investiture, more than two thousand dropships and assault boats fell on South Bressia. What was left of the Bressian air force was destroyed in those first hours of the invasion. Two nuclear devices were actually detonated against Ouster staging areas: the first was deflected by energy fields and the second destroyed a single scoutship which may have been a decoy.

  Ousters, it turned out, had changed physically in three centuries. They did prefer zero-gravity environments.

  But their mobile infantry’s powered exoskeletons served very well and it was only, a matter of days before the black-clad, long-limbed Ouster troops were swarming over South Bressia’s cities like an infestation of giant spiders.

  The last organized resistance collapsed on the nineteenth day of the invasion. Buckminster, the capital, fell the same day. The last fatline message from Bressia to the Hegemony was cut off in mid-transmission an hour after Ouster troops entered the city.

  Colonel Fedmahn Kassad arrived with FORCE Fleet One twenty-nine standard weeks later. Thirty omega-class torchships protecting a single, farcaster-equipped JumpShip penetrated the system at high speed. The singularity sphere was activated three hours after spin-down and ten hours after that there were four hundred FORCE ships of the line in system. The counterinvasion began twenty-one hours later.

  Those were the mathematics of the first minutes of the Battle of Bressia. For Kassad, the memory of those days and weeks held not mathematics but the terrible beauty of combat. It was the first time JumpShips had been used on anything above a division level and there was the expected confusion. Kassad went through from five light-minutes out and fell into gravel and yellow dust because the assault boat farcaster portal was facing down a steep incline made slick with mud and the blood of the first squads through. Kassad lay in the mud and looked down the hillside at madness. Ten of the seventeen farcaster assault boats were down and burning, scattered across the foothills and plantation fields like broken toys. The containment fields of the surviving boats were shrinking under an onslaught of missile and CPB fire that turned the landing areas into domes of orange flame. Kassad’s tactical display was a hopeless mess; his visor showed a garble of impossible fire vectors, blinking red phosphors where FORCE troops lay dying, and overlays of Ouster jamming ghosts. Someone was screaming “Oh, goddammit! Goddammit! Oh, goddammit!” on his primary command circuit and the implants registered a void where Command Group’s data should be.

  An enlisted man helped him up, Kassad flicked mud off his command wand and got out of the way of the next squad farcasting through, and the war was on.

  From his first minutes on South Bressia, Kassad realized that the New Bushido was dead. Eighty thousand superbly armed and trained FORCE:ground troops advanced from their staging areas, seeking battle in an unpopulated place. Ouster forces retreated behind a line of scorched earth, leaving only booby traps and dead civilians. FORCE used farcasters to outmaneuver the enemy, to force him to fight. The Ousters responded with a barrage of nuclear and plasma weapons, pinning the ground troops under forcefields while the Ouster infantry retreated to prepared defenses around cities and dropship staging areas.

  There were no quick victories in space to shift the balance on South Bressia. Despite feints and occasional fierce battles, the Ousters retained complete control of everything within three AU of Bressia.

  FORCE:space units fell back and concentrated on keeping the fleet within farcaster range and protecting the primary JumpShip.

  What had been forecast as a two-day battle ground on for thirty days, then sixty. Warfare had been thrown back to the twentieth or twenty-first century: long, grim campaigns fought through the brick dust of ruined cities over the corpses of civilians. The eighty thousand original FORCE troops were ground up, reinforced with a hundred thousand more, and were still being decimated when the call went out for two hundred thousand more.

  Only the grim resolve of Meina Gladstone and a dozen other determined senators kept the war alive and the troops dying while the billions of voices of the All Thing and the AI Advisory Council called for disengagement.

  Kassad had understood the change of tactics almost at once. His street-fighting instincts had risen to the forefront even before most of his division was wiped out in the Battle of the Stoneheap. While other FORCE commanders were all but ceasing to function, frozen into indecision by this violation of the New Bushido, Kassad—in command of his regiment and in temporary command of his division after the nuking of Command Group Delta—was trading men for time and calling for the release of fusion weapons to spearhead his own counterattack. By the time the Ousters withdrew ninety-seven days after the FORCE “rescue” of Bressia, Kassad had earned the double-edged nickname of the Butcher of South Bressia. It was rumored that even his own troops were afraid of him.

  And Kassad dreamed of her with dreams that were more—and less—than dreams.

  On the last night of the Battle for Stoneheap, in the maze of dark tunnels where Kassad and his hunter-killer groups used sonics and T-5 gas to flush out the last warrens of Ouster commandos, the Colonel fell asleep amid the flame and screams and felt the touch of her long fingers on his cheek and the soft compression of her breasts against him.

  When they entered New Vienna on the morning after the space strike Kassad had called in, the troops following the glass-smooth, twenty-meter-wide burn grooves into the lanced city, Kassad had stared without blinking at the rows of human heads lying on the pavement, carefully lined up as if to welcome the rescuing FORCE troops with their accusatory stares. Kassad had returned to his command EMV, closed the hatches, and—curling up in the warm darkness smelling of rubber, heated plastics, charged ions—had heard her whispers over the b
abble of the C3 channels and implant coding.

  On the night before the Ouster retreat, Kassad left the command conference on the HS Brazil, farcast to his HQ in the Indelibles north of the Hyne Valley, and took his command car to the summit to watch the final bombardment.

  The nearest of the tactical nuclear strikes was forty-five kilometers away. The plasma bombs blossomed like orange and blood-red flowers planted in a perfect grid.

  Kassad counted more than two hundred dancing columns of green light as the hellwhip lances ripped the broad plateau to shreds. And even before he slept, while he sat on the flare skirt of the EMV and shook pale afterimages from his eyes, she came. She wore a pale blue dress and walked lightly between the dead burr-root plants on the hillside.

  The breeze lifted the hem of the soft fabric of her dress. Her face and arms were pale, almost translucent. She called his name—he could almost hear the words—and then the second wave of bombardment rolled in across the plain below him and everything was lost in noise and flame.

  As tends to be the case in a universe apparently ruled by irony, Fedmahn Kassad passed unscathed through ninety-seven days of the worst fighting the Hegemony had ever seen, only to be wounded two days after the last of the Ousters had retreated to their fleeing swarmships. He was in the Civic Center Building in Buckminster, one of only three buildings left standing in the city, giving curt answers to stupid questions from a Worldweb newsteep when a plasma booby trap no larger than a microswitch exploded fifteen floors above, blew the newsteep and two of Kassad’s aides through a ventilator grille into the street beyond, and dropped the building on him.

  Kassad was medevacked to division HQ and then far-cast to the JumpShip now in orbit around Bressia’s second moon. There he was resuscitated and put on full life support while the military brass and Hegemony politicians decided what to do with him.

  Because of the farcaster connection and the real-time media coverage of Bressia, Colonel Fedmahn Kassad had become somewhat of a cause célèbre.