War World III: Sauron Dominion Read online

  “That is correct, First Cyborg.”

  “I am being spoken to here in a language that may be Mongolian. Bring your Mongol to your radio. I’ll play it back for him.”

  Hammer heard Borkum call a halt. By that time the yellow-robed speaker had finished what he’d been saying, and stood quietly as if waiting. A long minute later, Borkum spoke again. “First Cyborg, our Mongol guide is here listening.”

  Hammer played back the yellow robe’s speech for the guide. When it was done, the guide spoke in understandable Anglic. His voice reflected what might have been awe; perhaps fear. “Your lordship, what was spoken to you is very poor Mongolian, maybe some old dialect. He say that--” the man paused. “He say that Maidari waits to talk you. He say Maidari will speak you language.”

  Hammer’s tone was impatient. ‘Who is Maidari?’’

  “Maidari--is the Buddha Yet to Come.”

  Ah! Buddha! Hammer thought. The religion of the Mongols! This could provide opportunities; also problems if poorly handled.

  His cyborg senses had been tuned to maximum sensitivity, his mind with them, and there wasn’t the slightest hint of danger out there. He made a decision, one that the First Soldier would not like when he heard about it. Inwardly, Hammer smiled sardonically. “Assault Group Leader, there is a set of buildings, apparently a livestock station, just short of town. Billet your force there, and do not enter the town itself until I tell you to. I am going to investigate this person who supposedly speaks Anglic.”

  When he had Borkum’s acknowledgment, Hammer turned to the pilot. “Fighter Rank Stuart,” he said, “take the controls and activate engines. I will then disembark.”

  He drew a sidearm from its holster and examined it. Stuart recognized the weapon, an energy pistol. He’d been trained on one himself, had dry-fired but never used it. The Saurons’ supply of energy weapons and irreplaceable power slugs had long since been in storage, waiting for some emergency that might never come. Meanwhile, Soldiers fought with projectile weapons--bolt-action rifles, double-action projectile sidearms, Gatling guns, crude rockets, and mountain artillery. Leave it to a cyborg to get privileges, Stuart told himself. It’s not as if he needs an energy pistol. He could waste this place with his bare hands.

  “I will accompany those people to the building you see here on the ridge,’’ Hammer continued, and reholstered his sidearm. “You will keep a channel open to me, prepared to take any action I order. Meanwhile, activate your engines for their psychological effect, then shut them down when I have entered the building.”

  Stuart acknowledged, and from the copilot’s seat activated the engines, which hummed to life. The locals backed away nervously. A systems status rundown showed green on the control screen. Hammer’s gullwing door lifted; he swung his legs out, ignored the ladder which extruded automatically, and hopped down the meter and a half to the frozen, snow-covered ground. The door lowered silently shut behind him. His vision took in most of the crowd; his central focus was on its speaker.

  “Take me to Maidari,” Hammer said.

  The yellow-robe speaker understood, though presumably only the name Maidari had meaning for him. He bowed slightly, turned, and spoke to another yellow robe. That one led off toward the stone building. Smiling then, the speaker gestured to Hammer, who responded with no particular expression, and they followed side by side, the rest trailing behind.

  Assault Group Leader Borkum had been paying close attention since they’d come in sight of the livestock station, just outside town. Given the fact of Sauron superiority, both of vision and speed, he didn’t doubt he’d seen it before they’d seen him. He was equally sure that no one had carried or sent a message ahead of him. And there was no sign of alarm or discovery, even now, halted in full daylight with 154 white-clad men, some 400 meters from the town’s nearest building, and more than 200 from the station’s nearest.

  Borkum had more than just infantry with him; there were two mountain gun teams from Battery A. He had them assemble their howitzers. Fire from even such light artillery often had a strong morale effect on cattle, especially if they hadn’t experienced shellfire before. Then he sent a Gatling gun team around to the right, to cover the rear, and two rifle squads to protect the Gatling gun, which would be within bow shot of town. With them he sent two rifle squads to provide flanking fire on the livestock station, if needed. With those in position, he sent two rifle squads forward toward what clearly seemed the main building-- he thought of it as the headquarters--the one with thin smoke drifting from a pair of brick chimneys. He didn’t expect trouble, but he was prepared for it.

  His eyes in magnification mode, Borkum watched the two squads stop before the headquarters, in a single spread line, the men two to three meters apart. Pistol in hand, Assault Leader Hanko and two others went to the door. Roughly, Hanko shoved it open, and the three pushed inside. A moment later, Hanko stepped back out and called to the rest of his two squads, which moved on the building and went in. Borkum barked more orders. Squads trotted toward others of the station buildings as assigned.

  They must have, or have had, some trade with the outside, Hammer thought as he entered the monastery. The door is wooden. Wooden but not massive, and neither bound nor bossed with metal--nothing to repel force. There was a wooden drop-bar to hold it shut against wind or animals, but it could be raised from either side and the door opened. A trusting people, he added to himself; perhaps even an honorable people. Or perhaps only their religious structures are safe from criminals.

  He was aware of the attitudes toward religion in some societies. Saurons, on the other hand were devoutly rational materialists, and rarely stole from one another. It was foreign to their culture, and fatal if discovered. What they took from cattle was not considered theft, of course, but even that was constrained by policy, and by the politics of the situation.

  He entered with the speaker, and was followed by most of the others. It was cold inside, too, but far less than outside. Hammer felt no unease at being enclosed here. He was engineered and trained to notice the smallest clues of human moods and reactions, even when they were suppressed: movement and tension of muscles, including facial muscles; dilation and contraction of the pupils; coloring of the episclera; moisture on the face, especially the forehead; changes in loudness, pitch, and modulation of the voice; and certain smells. And while interpretation of some of these varied with the culture, a cyborg and most Soldiers could pretty well read the attitudes and mood, and to a degree the immediate intentions, of cattle. The First Cyborg perceived no threat, and walked in arrogance.

  From a large vestibule, corridors left in three directions, lit by lamps burning yak butter. The ceilings and upper walls were black with their soot. Most of the cattle dispersed into two of the corridors; the speaker led him down another. At a staircase, the speaker turned and gestured, then led Hammer upward, the three who had followed them continuing down the corridor. The stairs were basalt, with concavities worn by centuries of footsteps, and climbed steeply without turning till the fourth landing. There they entered the base of the tower, the stairs following the exterior walls around. Here the lamps were cold, and daylight filtered through windows covered with stretched yak gut.

  At the topmost landing was an open door, and a room with rich soft light. His guide stepped aside and gestured Hammer in. There was nothing of evasion, of nerves or deception in the man. Thus Hammer walked in with only his normal vigilance, which was abundant.

  The room was surprisingly clean. A man stood waiting, looking old by Havener standards but not ancient-- perhaps 50 T-years. He was markedly less dark than the others Hammer had seen, his hair pale reddish-brown, a sort of tarnished copper lightened by threads and streaks of silver. To one side stood a boy, an adolescent, dark like the others. “Welcome,” the old man said, in archaically proper Anglic, and gestured at a cushion on the floor. “Please be seated.” Then, without waiting, he sat down himself on another, folding his legs under him strangely. “Would you like tea? I m a
fraid our ingredients here are not those you might be accustomed to.”

  For a moment Hammer stood scanning, his mind recording, classifying. This old man was apparently his only suitable information source here. ‘Have him bring me food,” he ordered, then sat down himself.

  The old man spoke in his own language then, a tonal language which sounded quite unlike Mongol. He could have been saying anything, but there was no sign of treachery or ill intent in face or voice or smell. The boy left the room quickly but smoothly, closing the door behind him.

  Hammer, meanwhile, was murmuring into his wrist radio, first to his pilot, then to Assault Group Leader Borkum, using the Sauron battle tongue for privacy and brevity. Their voices answered, small and tinny. The old man seemed neither alarmed nor awed by it. His gaze was as absorptive as the cyborg’s, but not hard at all.

  When Hammer was finished, the old man spoke. “You are one of the soldier people we heard of, many years ago. I’ve been expecting you to come here someday.”

  “Your guards killed two of our soldiers,” Hammer said.

  “Yes. And your soldiers killed the garrison there, in reprisal.”

  Hammer’s eyebrows rose slightly, for him a strong facial reaction. “How were you informed?”

  “I wasn’t informed. It is in the nature of such encounters, between such as you and such as we.”

  The old eyes, too, were unusual. Their epicanthic folds were notably less pronounced than on the men who’d met the cyborg, and the eyes were gray-blue. “You say ‘we,’“ Hammer replied, “but you are of a different race than the people you rule here.”

  “Rule?” The old man chuckled. “I am not the ruler here. Tenzin Gampo, the man who brought you to my door, is the ruler. I am only Byamspa--he whom the Mongols call Maidari. In English, Anglic, my name is Maitreya.”

  “What is your function, if you do not rule?” “I am the one to whom Tenzin Gampo turns for guidance.”

  “’The Buddha Yet to Come.’ So I’ve been told. How does that differ from ruler, if you control the throne? Even from behind it.”

  The old man’s face and voice laughed together. “The Buddha Yet to Come? That was a prophecy fulfilled long ago on Terra, in Tibet.”

  Hammer interrupted. “Old man,” he said coldly, “I warn you this once: I have no tolerance for riddles, and I do not hesitate to kill. Now, clarify.”

  The old man’s face, his eyes and voice, showed no sign of shock or fear at the hard rebuke, and the threat. A fact which Hammer noticed and registered. “Tenzin Gampo rules as he wishes,” the old man continued gently. “If he asks my opinion or advice, which he sometimes does, and if I then give it to him, as I sometimes do, he invariably follows it. But usually he does not ask, and if he does not ask, I say nothing. Maitreya is a teacher, not a ruler, not a counselor.

  “Maitreya was born at Gyatsho, in the state of Tibet, on Terra, in the year 2005 by European reckoning. He was a tulku, specifically a reincarnation of the lord Gautama, the Buddha.” He paused. “Does this have meaning to you?”

  Hammer nodded curtly. The Saurons had planned to--had expected to--conquer the First Empire, and he had been intended as a would-be trouble-shooter who would travel from world to world. Thus his education, though not completed, had been far broader than the purely military, and he had at least a passing familiarity with many cultures, philosophies, and governments outside Sauron. Thus he knew that on Terra, Tibet had been a state conquered and ruled by China; 2005 was shortly after the founding of the CoDominium; Buddha had been a holy man in some early millennium of history.

  The old man continued. “The boy, while still a small child, was recognized as Maitreya by certain lamas, holy monks, and they proclaimed him so. And because the civil authorities were undertaking to further liberalize their rule, this was allowed. At age fifteen he began to preach, reforming and purifying religious practices and teachings, which gained him a devout following. In this he offended both the civil authorities and certain leading members of the orders of monks.

  Monks approved by the civil authorities, who themselves were either Chinese or obedient to the Chinese.”

  Hammer interrupted, suspecting what the answer would be. “That was seven hundred T-years ago. What has that to do with you?”

  “I am Maitreya.”

  The old man’s gaze, as he spoke, was utterly unperturbed, without fear or any sign of artifice. So, he is insane, the cyborg told himself. Deluded at least. Insanity usually included fixations. Sometimes those fixations could serve as axioms from which whole systems of consistent logic might be derived, to form a rational, if erroneous gestalt. The same was true of more ordinary delusions, though the results were less compulsive. Know this man’s fixations or basic delusions, and something of his logic, and he might prove useful.

  “You are old, but you do not appear to be seven hundred years old.”

  The old man laughed with delight. “You know the answer to that one, too, Hammer. I have died more than a dozen times, over those centuries, and each time ensouled another newborn among these people, each time to be recognized by the color of my hair-- coloring foretold of Maitreya.”

  And after conditioning you, they taught you what your predecessors had said and done, Hammer thought. Very tidy. And you believed them--still believe them.

  He heard softshod feet on the stairs, the lower flight, although the door was closed. Interestingly, the old man heard them, too; his ears would do credit to a Soldier. “I believe your supper is coming,” said the man who called himself Maitreya. “We shall see if Lobsang truly comprehended the strength of your appetite.”

  Assault Group Leader Borkum looked at the middle-aged man and woman before him in the room, seemingly a mated couple. The other human cattle here, at what was obviously a livestock holding yard and slaughtering place, had clearly looked to this pair as their superiors; presumably they were the manager and his woman. They stood meek and humble before his gaze. Damn all cattle that don’t understand Anglic! Well. . . He gestured forcefully at himself, thumb rapping his chest, then put his hands together beside his head, rested his cheek on them, and snored. The man brightened, gestured enthusiastically, and turning, began to walk, his woman still beside him. Borkum followed, his orderly a step behind. They went down a dim hall to a doorway with a well-tanned cowhide hanging over it to the floor. The man pushed it open. Borkum shoved past him and stepped into a room which was equally dim, lit by a small butter lamp and a gut-paned window, its deadlight of stiff hide laid back against the brick wall. The man slid past him and hurried to light two more butter lamps.

  He had no notion that to Sauron eyes, dim light was more than light enough.

  Borkum looked the room over. The bed was the top of what seemed to be a brick stove--an intelligent arrangement--and topped with a crude mattress that by the smell was stuffed with raw wool. He walked over, and opening the firebox door, looked inside. No fire. He straightened, peering around. The couple stood side by side, watching, smiling nervously. Dried yak dung, like large disks of gray bread, were piled close at band, and next to it a pile of coarse grass, twisted and tied into knots, to help the dung burn well. Hanging from the wall was a thin sheaf of paper, or parchment more likely. Borkum stepped to it and pulled it down, crumpling the sheets, then turned at the gasp he heard. The man looked horrified; the woman’s knuckles had gone to her mouth.

  Borkum scowled, knelt, and laid a fire of parchment, grass, and dung. The woman began to wail as he lit a twist of grass at an oil lamp. He snapped an order, then knelt again and lit the parchment while his orderly slapped the couple around, knocking the woman sprawling. The wailing shrilled for just a moment, then cut off. Damn all cattle! Borkum grumped inwardly. They’re hard enough to understand when they speak Anglic.

  The First Cyborg, even more than the Soldiers, was relatively indiscriminate with regard to taste. Food was food. Which was not to say he found no pleasure in it: He enjoyed stoking his metabolic fires, and when he ate, preferred to give
it his full attention. When he was done, he looked at Maitreya again.

  “Where do your women go to give birth?” Hammer asked.

  Maitreya’s eyebrows lifted. “It is usual to go to one’s home, to one’s bed. Whether it be one’s winter home, or one’s tent in summer, when most of our people travel with their herds.”

  Hammer detected no trace of irony, sarcasm, or banter in the man; he seemed to have answered honestly. “Other people,” the cyborg said, “feel it necessary to take their women to low valleys for birthing. Otherwise the newborn usually dies at birth, or lives brain-damaged. Not infrequently the woman dies, too.”

  “Ah, of course. We heard of that, in the days when we traded with the Mongols. But these, my people . . . Many of us who came together from Terra were born at forty-five hundred to five thousand meters above the sea, as were our forefathers. Most were herdsmen, nomads. Sometimes newborn died there, too, more than at Lhasa, at only thirty-seven hundred meters. This place is hardly more severe. Even here most newborns live--enough to provide bodies for those souls wishing to live among us, to heal in our quiet. And our women do not often die giving birth.”

  Desirable genes, Hammer thought. These people can provide valuable tribute maidens. Breedmaster Dekker will be pleased. The genetic engineering equipment landed from the Fomoria, the “Dol Guldur”, had mostly become inoperable, its functional components salvaged to help keep the jerry-built cyborg production facility operating a little longer. To maintain the Sauron genome at something close to its current superiority would take careful selection, attribute matching, and culling.

  ‘When were you brought to this world?”

  “In 2052 by the European calendar. There were nearly three thousand of us.”

  Hammer accepted the answer. If they were brought here as a penal shipment in that decade, he told himself, they’d have been landed as convict labor at some mining development. And forced relocations of other than criminals hadn’t begun yet. So presumably these people had been brought here at their own request, perhaps even at their own expense. Was there some resource of particular value on this plateau?