The Jerminian general in charge of the center’s force knew he’d been misled. The Ochoans had known everything. Just enough of a fierce fight to allow them to take ground that had value only because of the Gate but which could not feed the tiniest insect, and then besiege them! The supplies were gone, the air support was now a joke, since they were supposed to be dug in and self-supporting off the land by now, and they were faced by an increasingly huge army of fanatical natives who, when they didn’t have bombs or guns or napalm, dropped rocks on them!
The General assembled his commanders and senior non-coms in front of the Well Gate, with things now falling from the sky so frequently that they barely noticed anymore, and almost nobody was shooting at them. They’d shot down a thousand, and two thousand more came.
“The position is untenable,” he told them, stating the obvious. “I, and the senior commanders, will take responsibility for the failure, although I am certain it is treachery by one of our allies. A weak and decadent nation like this could not have become this smart and this efficient in two or three weeks. It is impossible. The cause is alive! The cause goes on! Senior commanders, assemble by that wrecked Customs house over there! We shall atone to Her Majesty there! Everyone else, organize in a proper military fashion and evacuate into the Gate. You need do only a steady march. When you arrive at the other end, simply turn, walk back into the Gate, and you will return home. Avenge us! Remember us! And maintain your honor and dignity as soldiers! This was a gamble, but it is only one short battle in a long campaign. We will know more and do better next time! Farewell!”
It was a great speech, and if he hadn’t at that moment been struck on the head by a fair-sized rock and fallen over on his rounded back, swaying back and forth, it would have been his most memorable speech, the kind that inspired troops of the future.
So they did not move calmly toward the Gate as ordered, but instead broke and ran for the large hexagonal blackness just beyond.
The first few made it, demonstrating a state of retreat that was clearly a rout. But then the Ochoans in the corridors began systematically slaughtering them as they came through, while keeping the center open for outgoing troops.
Now, out of the Well Gate, to the cheers of the rest of the Ochoan forces, first a trickle and then a flood of fresh soldiers emerged, all well-armed and well-equipped. Those retreating invaders who didn’t make the Gate were nearly eliminated by the end of the day. Those who did make it were mostly slaughtered as they entered the Zone corridor.
In the next few days the few survivors were given the opportunity to surrender and return to their ships, not via the Gate, but by boats sent by mutual agreement. The Ochoans wanted some to get back to tell the tale. Despite their victory, there had been horrendous carnage, and they did not want to go through it again.
By the end of the week it was over. Little, weak, semi-feudal, silly, comic opera Ochoa, out there in the middle of nowhere gobbling fish and drinking wine, had, in a semitech environment, defeated the undefeatable, stopped the unstoppable, and, best of all, humiliated the arrogant bastards.
The people of the “New Empire” hexes knew none of this. The soldiers who did manage to return were debriefed exhaustively, then executed. News was carefully controlled and managed. The leaders declared a new wondrous victory to their people and, fuming, plotted their revenge while setting upon the highest ranks of the combined military staffs to root out the obvious traitors, for it was unthinkable that they might actually have overreached, that they were not as irresistible an object as they wholeheartedly believed.
In the palace deep within the central watery regions of Chalidang, the Empress Josich threw a homicidal fit, and personally hacked her general staff to death even though the plan had been entirely hers and implemented over their objections.
She had been this furious recently once before, over a different matter. It was when she received, via the embassy in Zone, a piece of shell from a dead Cromlin’s body with words painted not in Cromlinese nor in the language of Chalidang but in the language of the family Hadun of the old empire and the Realm.
you’re next, it read simply, with phonetic spelling of a non-Hadun name as the signature.
“Jeremiah,” the name became when pronounced.
“Not me, Jeremiah Kincaid!” she’d been heard screaming as she tore the messenger to bits. “Now there will be no quarter! Now we conquer or die! Now they all die! The Kalindans, that bird thing, the Ochoan—all of them! And especially you, Jeremiah! Come and get me!”