Jerry Pournelle - War World 3 by Sauron Dominion

Author:Sauron Dominion
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2011-04-04T23:20:09+00:00

Soldiers lined up for a meal at the Citadel refectory. It was first come, first served, regardless of rank. If a simple Section Leader took his place in line before a Chief Assault Group Leader, he was served before him, too. The Soldiers did not make distinctions among themselves where distinctions were unnecessary.

Glorund was no simple Section Leader. Nor was he merely a Chief Assault Group Leader. Nevertheless, the Battlemaster took his tray and waited for his turn with everyone else. Once a young officer, an Assault Group Leader with, everyone said, a promising future ahead, had stood aside for him. The fellow was a blank-collar-tab Soldier within half a cycle, and bound for duty on the most barren part of the steppe Glorund could find. After that, no one curried favor with him in the refectory line.

The refectory workers who slapped food onto the tray were from Nurnen. Soldiers did not need to cook; therefore, they did not cook. The food was unexciting—stewed heartfruit, a meatloaf made from ground mutton and muskylope, a chunk of rye bread, a mug of beer. It was nourishing, though. And Glorund, like lower-ranking Soldiers, was no gourmet. No geneticist had ever found a good enough reason to bother amplifying the sense of taste.

Glorund’s ears, however, were not only genetically modified but also had the bioengineered implants that accompanied the cyborg deaths-heads on his collar tabs. He heard, and listened to, every conversation in the refectory. Differential signal processing let him pay attention to each of them in turn at not quite the same time. That was useful; even people who knew intellectually what he could do sometimes made interesting slips if the refectory was crowded.

“The blind man’s come into the valley,” he heard a Soldier who’d been on sentry-go say. His modifications did not literally let his ears prick up, but he willed into being the mental analog of that primitive physical process. If he heard the word blind again, he would key on it, correlate it with this first mention. To Glorund, to all the high-ranking Soldiers of the Citadel, there was only one blind man, the one responsible for the loss of Angband Base and Tallinn Valley. Not for the first time, he thought the Citadel should have mounted a punitive expedition, no matter that Angband Base lay far, far to the west. Cattle should never be allowed to get the notion that they could beat Soldiers. So often in combat, what men believed counted for as much as what was true.

But more cautious heads had prevailed back then: Soldiers who had argued that an attack on Tallinn Valley would draw in the Bandari of Eden Valley. And in the end Juchi had destroyed himself more thoroughly than any mere outsiders could have destroyed him. The lesson Soldiers found most difficult to learn was that abrupt, straightforward aggression was not always the best solution to a problem.

“—blind man smashed him against a table, broke three of his ribs.”

Glorund hadn’t been consciously following that conversational track; the gossip of other ranks seldom held much of value.

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