War World III: Sauron Dominion Read online

  WAR WORLD III: SAURON DOMINION

  Created by Jerry Pournelle

  Edited by John F. Carr

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1991 by Jerry Pournelle

  A Baen Books Original.

  Cover art by Stephen Hickman

  First printing, August 1991

  Chronology

  2103 Great Patriotic Wars. End of the CoDominium rule. Exodus of the Fleet.

  2110 Coronation of Lysander I of Sparta. Fleet swears loyalty to the Spartan throne.

  2111 Formation Wars begin.

  2250 Leonidas I of Sparta proclaims Empire of Man.

  2250 - 2600 Empire of Man enforces interstellar peace.

  2284 Haven is rediscovered by an Imperial warship.

  2432 First cyborg is created on Sauron

  2590 First brigade of Sauron cyborgs is formed.

  2603 Secession Wars begin. St. Ekaterina nearly destroyed in surprise attack.

  2618 The Third Imperial Fleet is destroyed off Tabletop.

  2623 Seventy-seventh Imperial Marine Division (“Land Gators”) is withdrawn from Haven along with all Imperial officials.

  2637 Sauron-supported Secessionist armada and Claimant fleets fight to a draw at the Battle of Makassar.

  2640 Sauron First and Second Fleets destroyed at the Battle of Tanith. The Home Fleet is destroyed off Sauron, the Supermen exterminated, and Sauron bombed back to the Stone Age.

  Sauron Heavy Cruiser Fomoria disengages from Imperial fighter squadron and through a series of Random Jumps reaches Haven.

  PROLOGUE

  From A Student’s Book by Myner Klint bar Terborch fan Reenan, Eden Valley, Ilona’sstad, 2927:

  ... so good places to live are few and widely spaced out on Haven, apart from the Shangri-La Valley, which the Saurons dominate. People must live widely scattered where there is water or good land, or move in little bands across the steppe; even rarer are areas low enough for women to bear their children safely. Wide distances and little travel mean that customs and beliefs grow very differently. Greed or need often makes it necessary to fight, to take away what is needed for life from others. The Saurons take much from many peoples, leaving them to struggle over the scraps. We haBandari fight to hold what is ours, but experience has shown us it is often more profitable to talk and trade. . . .

  WAR WORLD ECONOMICS

  “Ayo Gorkali!” A deep-chested shout from forty, fifty throats.

  “Here they come again!” the guard-captain of the haBandari caravan shouted; his name was Johann bar Pinkas, and he had worked the steppe trade-routes of Haven most of his fifty T-years.

  The wagons were laagered in around the bubbling water of the oasis hot spring, in a big shallow bowl covered in reddish screwgrass and eggtree bush. Oxen and camels, yak and muskylopes milled around; the cold Truenight air was pungent-steamy with their breath and the sulphur-mineral smell of the water. Torches on long poles blazed with the sputtering brightness of fat-soaked wool; outside the darting figures of the attackers were black shapes against the dark, except where the firelight gleamed on edged steel. Cat’s Eye was an arc of ruddy light on the horizon, almost set.

  “Wait for it, wait for it, pick your targets,” Johann roared; a bull-bellow for volume, but calm.

  His own target was the suggestion of a bush behind which a shadow might have moved; whoever this was had cursed good fieldcraft. He braced one knee against the boards of the wagon’s outer wall; the tilt was drawn up overhead on the hoops. The arrow slid through the centerline cutout of his bow, the pulley wheels at each end of the bare levering against horn and wood and sinew.

  “Now!”

  Arrows and crossbow bolts and javelins slashed out into the night; crack-crack and stabbing spears of orange light, from the two flintlock rifles this caravan boasted. Screams, one from the bush he had been aiming at, and it thrashed. Then he dropped the bow, snatching up saber and shield from their racks to either hand.

  “Ayo Gorkali!”

  That shout, and a dark figure bouncing up to try for a foothold in the wagon. A blade chopped at him overarm; he caught it on the metal rim and stabbed low, feeling the ugly soft resistance, all too familiar. A choked grunt, and the man fell away; his blade stayed, driven through the steel and tough leather and drillbit gut lining. More of the raiders came up; spearheads flashed from beneath the wagons into their legs and guts, swords and axes hacked at them from above. Once there was a shout, and Johann leaped down to the trampled ice-crackling mud to lead the reserve around the circle of the livestock. They were ostlers and wranglers, not fighters, but everyone in a caravan had some training, and hitting an enemy with a line of spears was not exactly the most difficult thing in the world.

  At last the noise died away, everything but the moaning of the wounded and the restless animals. Johann looked meditatively at the shield, suddenly noticing the extra weight. He pulled the strange weapon free of it, grunting with the effort and then grunting again in surprise at the depth of the cut. Three-ply muskylope leather boiled in vinegar was tough, and the woven drillbit-gut glued to the back tougher still; drillbits ate their way through medium-hard rock and had exactly the sort of insides you would expect. The . . . sword-knife, he supposed . . . was odd, a half-meter blade that curved inward, in two broad lobes.

  Interesting. The p’rknz fly away with interesting. Why don’t I retire? It wasn’t as if he needed the income all that much; he had saved carefully. A farm rented out to an Edenite back home, livestock out on shares with his clan-kin, a house in Strang. I should retire and let my granddaughters fuss at me.

  “Now that was more than somewhat strenuous,” a voice said. Johann looked up; it was his employer.

  Josepha bat Golda was a small, square-built, deep-bosomed woman, handsome in the full-lipped, hawk-nosed way of the People, with streaks of silver in her strong mane of black hair. She wore her armor with an air of irritated competence, and carried a two-handed war pick over one shoulder, a curved spike ending in a serated hammerhead, forged with its meter-long handle out of a single billet of steel. It had seen recent use; Johann reflected that he was glad she had never hit him with it, though she had broken a jug over his head once in a contract dispute. Her apprentice Filippa bat Henriett was with her, looking younger than sixteen, and scared; a cousin of some sort, in the usual way.

  “I hate a gayam who won’t stay bought,” she went on. “Kuchuk Khan gets enough passage money--”

  “I don’t think these were Kuchuk’s men,” he said, turning and calling sharply for a light. One of his guards ran up with an alcohol lantern, and raised it above a dead enemy.

  A short, stocky man, barrel-chested even by Haven standards. Noticeably flat-faced and slant-eyed, even on the high steppe where Mongoloid was the predominant racial type. Gaunt with hunger, and his sheepskin clothes were thin and worn. Johann whistled soundlessly with surprise at the gleam of raw hammered gold on his belt buckle. Josepha stooped to examine it, ignoring the ragged wound where a spearhead had been wrenched out of his chest.

  “Electrum,” she said, going down on one knee. “Platinum and gold, natural alloy. No, he’s no Uighur.”

  “Sekkle nu tvaz,” Johann muttered in Bandarit: it wasn’t reasonable. “Kuchuk had no reason to attack us.”

  Josepha nodded. “Nu, I think we should treat these gayam very well. Take their wounded to mediko after ours are cared for. And we should let a couple who can walk go.”

  “It’s a mitzvah to be merciful,” Johann said. Although usually cutting throats was safer; the haBandari did not sell
prisoners and kept no slaves.

  “Merciful myn totchkis, this could be useful.”

  “I am Haribahadur Gurung, Subadar of the Gurung villages.” The little gayam was a proud man, from his looks, despite his ragged clothes. When he knelt, it was stiffly. “We thought you were Kuchuk Khan’s men, and so attacked peaceful travellers. We are ashamed.” He spoke the pidgin turki language of trade fluently, although with a thick accent. “You show great honor by returning our wounded. We bring blood-payment to show our sorrow.” One of his men spilled a small sack on a cloak laid on the ground; nuggets of raw electrum, and a small shimmerstone.

  Johann raised a brow, invisible beneath the brim of his bucket-shaped helmet, and whistled mentally. Josepha was in full merchant fig, to show her respectability; a long coat of fine scarlet wool embroidered with silk, a tall conical hat, baggy maroon pants and tooled boots with turned-up toes sporting silver bells, a cloak of supple-tanned tamerlane hide. She stayed mounted, to show who was the dominant parry; there was a table set out with mutton and pickled eggs, flatbread and baklava and Finnegan’s Fig brandy for potential hospitality; and the wagons stayed laagered, with Johann and a dozen mounted haBandari warriors nearby, for practicality. They sat on their horses in grim silence, armored in black leather and brass and steel, armed with bow and lance, sabers and the two precious rifles. Wind ruffled the horses’ manes, and the short stiff horsehair crests of the helms; behind them stood the pikes and axes of the caravan workers.

  “Why are you at war with Kuchuk Khan and his people?” Josepha asked.

  Several of the ragged figures behind the Subadar spat. When the chief spoke, it was with passion:

  “Kuchuk Khan is a liar and a thief.” he cried. “Always the Uighurs have charged too much, when our young men went to fight and so earn bread for us--” he waved backward, toward the cold fangs of the Atlas mountains behind.

  They live up there? Johann thought with respect. Hardy. The high steppe hereabouts was bad enough.

  “--too much for passage for our women to the Akaj valley.” That was the local birthing ground; too high to be really good, but at least the Saurons had never bothered with it. This was a little too far west to go to the Shangri-La and the Citadel. “Cheated us on trade for our gold and fine musk-ox wool! But now he goes too far, trying to take the pick of our women as if he were a Sauron!” Another chorus of spitting; some of the haBandari joined in. “So we fight him, even though we starve in the meantime.”

  Johann’s eyes met his employer’s; hers were wide and liquid-black; there was almost a cooing in her voice as she dismounted. Her fingers moved in the sign-language version of Bandarit: Make camp. If there isn’t a profit in this, I’m a plaatsman. The guard-captain nodded fractionally; if there was one thing Josepha bat Golda was not, it was a farmer.

  “Stand, stand, my friend,” she said gently, taking him by the elbow and urging him toward the laden table; many of the others in his parry were looking at it with open longing. “Come, eat, tell me of your troubles. Perhaps we haBandari can help you--” Her voice rose questioninglv.

  “Gurkhas.”

  “--Gurkhas. Tell me about--”

  From A Student’s Book by Myner Klint bar Terborch fan Reenan, Eden Valley, Ilona’sstad, 2927:

  . . . few people ever came to Haven of their own will. Even the first settlers, the Church of New Harmony, emigrated to escape persecution and came to Haven because it was all they could afford. During the CoDominium, the United States and Soviet Union used Haven as a place for those they were ashamed to kill openly, instead letting the planet do it for them. Even with advanced machines such as we know only through stories, this is a hard place for humans to live. When the CoDominium died there was hardship almost as terrible as that which followed the coming of the Saurons centuries later. The Empire of Man made life a little easier, and large populations grew up around its fusion plants and food factories; after a while, it also began sending its troublesome people to Haven. Our Founder, Piet van Reenan, was one such. When the Empire fell, it was those who had kept to the outback and had as little as they could to do with the Imperial machine-economy who were most likely to survive. . . .

  From an address to the Military History and Analysis Board, Human Norm Combat Capacities Seminar by Vessel First Rank Galen Diettinger:

  “No idea in human history has met with more widespread acceptance than that war is about the infliction of human suffering.

  “And no idea could be further from the truth.

  “Politically, war is about the imposition of one entity’s goals irrespective and often at the expense of another’s. It is usually in the political aspects that attach themselves to the conduct of warfare that the above statement has found whatever support may be rationalized for it.

  “But militarily, war is about the destruction of the enemy’s ability--not necessarily his will--to fight. The evolution of warfare has been an upward rise toward maneuver, with a concurrent de-emphasis on direct contact, and hence conflict, with the enemy. Ancient battles far outstripped modern ones in their casualty lists. Troops under the command of the Sauron Role Model, Hannibal, in one day at Cannae killed more men than in any other single battle in human history (the suicidal Patriotic Wars whose indiscriminate use of nuclear weapons ended all advanced life on Terra, and with it, the old CoDominium, were an aberration possible only to the excesses of civilian minds, and will not be discussed here).

  “In Terra’s Twentieth Century alone, warfare made a great leap forward in its method. From grinding wars of attrition, to fluid maneuver and breakthroughs made possible with man’s conquest of the air and development of armored fighting vehicles, to the advancement of the individual’s weapon systems, which not only increased firepower a hundredfold over his predecessors, but allowed complete accuracy in the delivery of that combat strength to the target; through these factors, warfare was changed forever. Soldiers could still, would still kill one another, but it was no longer necessary to do so, not when the command and control centers of the enemy could be destroyed and his logistics capabilities neutralized.

  “Far from being about the infliction of human suffering, the age of the professional soldier, begun two thousand years before by the Sauron Role Model, Julius, now made the actual incidence of the wasteful murder of men in war drop to its lowest point in history.

  “Ironically, it was that very pinnacle of operational theory which put the evolution of war, and thus the evolution of mankind, in danger. Like the Condottieri of the Post-Roman era, armies were developing into dancers with lethal capabilities, but nonlethal intent. This carried the danger that military thought would develop the dangerous complacency for which it was, until that time, justly famous.

  “The solution was to increase the training of the individual soldier, not merely toward discipline, but toward initiative. The ability to do something in combat, anything, even the wrong thing, is the hallmark of the militarily dominant society, and it was the development of this trait which directed the training of all victorious soldiers throughout the Twentieth and early Twenty-First Century, until the reactionary military theories of the late Twenty-First Century brought on that century’s Dark Age of military thought.

  “It must be remembered, however, that the definition of this sort of individual initiative varied greatly from society to society; it was not standard, nor was it new. Primitive societies used it to great effect against more advanced ones, and there is no reason to assume that they will not continue to do so in the future, so long as civilized Man retains his dangerous capacity for personal aggrandizement, indulgence, and delusion.”

  THE GATES OF PARADISE - Don Hawthorne

  “La illah ilia Allah ...”

  Yurek was finishing his third rifled barrel of the month when the muezzin’s voice drifted through the thin mountain air into the cave where he worked, calling the faithful of Haven to mid-morning prayer. He stood, stretching the stiff muscles of his legs, and carefully replaced his tools in their
felt-lined case. Yurek was a weaponsmith, a bearer of the Gift; it was largely through the efforts of himself and those like him that their people had survived for so long.

  And not just on Haven, his father and uncles had taught him with justifiable pride. Since time immemorial, before the days of Alexander the Great, Yurek’s Gift, and the Gift of those like him, had kept his people free.

  He was regarded highly by the other men of the village for it, and his importance to their security exempted him from many obligations. But no man may shirk his duty to God.

  For Yurek knew that the Gift, as all gifts, was the touch of Allah, and he never forgot the debt it imparted. So, gathering up his prayer cloth and skull cap, Yurek pushed aside the thick skins over the cave entrance to join in devotion the rest of the men who lived in the south of his village.

  Haven’s frigid cold assaulted his face, scoured his eyes, made his gums retract from suddenly aching teeth and froze the hairs in his nostrils. Yurek gave a small grunt of pleasure; not even noon, and the mountains were warming up already.

  Snow crunched under his boots as he crossed the open area between the stone huts and the cave entrances in this, the stronghold of his people. The mullahs had taken their bearings from the stars during the last Truenight; all were competent astronomers, a new requirement for the title since Islam took to the stars. Now they were organizing the faithful into rows, kneeling to face in the direction of that star around which spun the Earth, for there lay Mecca.

  “Allah-u akbar ...” The muezzin’s prayers enfolded him, bringing the peace that only the faithful knew, and the only peace the faithful seemed ever privileged to know. For on Haven, a man took what peace he could find in his heart and treasured it; there was none to be found in the world around him.