Card, Orson Scott - Ender's Saga 7 - Shadow Puppets Read online

  “Absolutely,” said Father

  “Do you think,” said Mother, “that when we get back to Earth we can find a place with little tiny beds like these?” She clung more tightly to Father’s arms. “It’s made us so much closer as a family.”

  CHAPTER 15 — WAR PLANS

  From: Demosthenes%[email protected]

  To: DropBox%[email protected]

  Re: ~

  Encrypted using code

  Decrypted using code

  I spend half my memory capacity just holding on to whatever online identity you’re using from week to week. Why not rely on encryption? Nobody’s broken hyperprime encryption yet.

  Here it is, Bean: Those stones in India? Virlomi started it, of course. Got a message from her: Now you are not in cesspool, can communicate again. Have no email here. Stones are mine. Back on bridge soon. War in earnest. Post to me only, this site, pick-up name BridgeGirl password not stepstool.

  At least I think that’s what “stones are mine” means. And what does “password not stepstool” mean? That the password is “not stepstool”? Or that the password is not “stepstool,” in which case it’s probably not ‘aardvark” either, but how does that help?

  Anyway, I think she’s offering to begin war in earnest inside India. She can’t possibly have a nationwide network, but then, maybe she doesn’t need one. She was certainly enough in tune with the Indian people to get them all piling stones in the road. And now the whole stone wall business has taken off. Lots of skirmishes between angry hungry citizens and Chinese soldiers. Trucks hijacked. Sabotage of Chinese offices proceeding apace. What can she do more than is already happening?

  Given where you are, you may have more need of her information and/or help than I do. But I’d appreciate your help understanding the parts of the message that are opaque to me.

  From: LostlboBoy%[email protected]

  To: Demosthenes%Tecumseh©freeamerica.org

  Re: >blank<

  Encrypted using code

  Decrypted using code

  Here’s why I keep changing identities. First, they don’t have to decrypt the message to get information if they see patterns in our correspondence-it would be useful for them to know the frequency and timing of our correspondence and the length of our messages. Second, they don’t have to decrypt the whole message, they only hove to guess our encrypt and decrypt codes. Which I bet you have written down somewhere because you don’t actually care whether I get killed because you’re too lazy to memorise. Of course I mean that in the nicest possible way, O right honourable Mr. Hegemon.

  Here’s what Virlomi meant. Obviously she intended that you not be able to understand the message and correspond with her properly unless you talked to me or Sun. That means she doesn’t trust you completely. My guess is that if you wrote to her and left a message using the password “not stepstool,” she’d know that you hadn’t talked to me. (You don’t know how tempting it was lust to leave you with that guess.)

  When we picked her up from that bridge near the Burmese border, she boarded the chopper by stepping on Suriyawong’s back as he lay prostrate before her. The password is not stepstool, it’s the real name of her stepstool. And she’s going to be back at that bridge, which means she’s made her way across India to the Burmese border, where she’ll be in a position to disrupt Chinese supply of their troops in India-or, conversely, Chinese attempts to move their troops out of India and back into China or Indochina.

  Of course she’s only going to be a stone bridge. But my guess is that she’s already setting up guerrilla groups that are getting ready to disrupt traffic on the other roads between Burma and India, with a strong possibility that she’s set up something along the Himalayan border as well. I doubt she can seal the borders, but she can slow and harass their passage, tying up troops trying to protect supply lines and making the Chinese less able to mount offensives or keep their troops supplied with ammunition-always a problem for them.

  Personally, I think you should tell her not to tip her hand too soon. I may be able to tell you when to post a reply asking her to start in earnest on a particular date. And no, I won’t post myself because I am most certainly watched here, and I don’t wont them to know about her directly. I’ve already caught two snoopware intrusions on my desk, which cost me twenty minutes each time, scrambling them so they send back false information to the snoops. Encrypted email like this I can send, but messages posted to dead drops can be picked up by snoopware on the local net.

  And yes these are indeed my friends. But they’d be fools not to keep track of what I’m sending out-if they can.

  Bean measured himself in the mirror. He still looked like himself, more or less. But he didn’t like the way his head was growing. Larger in proportion to his body. Growing faster.

  I should be getting smarter, shouldn’t I? More brain space and all?

  Instead I’m worrying about what will happen when my head gets too big, my skull and brains too heavy for my neck to hold the whole assemblage in a vertical position.

  He measured himself against the coat closet, too. Not all that long ago, he had to stand on tiptoe to reach coat hangers. Then it became easy. Now he was reaching a bit downward from shoulder height.

  Door frames were not a problem yet. But he was beginning to feel as though he should duck.

  Why should his growth be accelerating now? He already hit the puberty rush.

  Petra staggered past him, went into the bathroom, and puked up nothing for about five agonising minutes.

  “They should have drugs for that,” he told her afterward.

  “They do,” said Petra. “But nobody knows how they might affect the baby.”

  “There’ve been no studies? Impossible.”

  “No studies on how they might affect your children.”

  “Anton’s Key is just a couple of code spots on the genome.”

  “Genes often do double and triple duty, or more.”

  “And the baby probably doesn’t even have Anton’s Key. And it’s not healthy for the baby if you can’t keep any food down.”

  “This won’t last forever,” said Petra. “And I’ll get fed intravenously if I have to. I’m not doing anything to endanger this baby, Bean. Sorry if my puking ruins your appetite for breakfast.”

  “Nothing ruins my appetite for breakfast,” said Bean. “I’m a growing boy.”

  She retched again.

  “Sorry,” said Bean.

  “I don’t do this,” she whispered miserably, “because your jokes are so bad.”

  “No,” said Bean. “It’s 'cause my genes are.”

  She retched again and he left the room, feeling guilty about leaving, but knowing he’d be useless if he stayed. She wasn’t one of those people who need petting when they’re sick. She preferred to be left alone in her misery. It was one of the ways they were alike. Sort of like injured animals that slink off into the woods to get better-or die-alone.

  Alai was waiting for him in the large conference room. Chairs were gathered around a large holo on the floor, where a map was being projected of the terrain and militarily significant roads of India and western China.

  By now the others were used to seeing Bean there, though there were some who still didn’t like it. But the Caliph wanted him there, the Caliph trusted him.

  They watched as the known locations of Chinese garrison troops were brought up in blue, and then the probable locations of mobile forces and reserves in green. When he first saw this map, Bean made the faux pas of asking where they were getting their information. He was informed, quite coldly, that both Persia and the Israeli-Egyptian consortium had active satellite placement programs, and their spy satellites were the best in orbit. “We can get the blood type of individual enemy soldiers,” said Alai with a smile. An exaggeration, of course. But then Bean wondered-some kind of spectroanalysis of their sweat?

  Not possible. Alai was joking, not boasting.

  Now, Bean trusted their information
as much as they did-because of course he had made discreet inquiries through Peter and through some of his own connections. Putting together what Vlad could tell him from Russian intelligence and what Crazy Tom was giving him from England. plus Peter’s American sources, it was clear that the Muslims-the Crescent League-had everything the others had. And more.

  The plan was simple. Massive troop movements along the border between India and Pakistan, bringing Iranian troops up to the front. This should draw a strong Chinese response, with their troops also concentrated along that border

  Meanwhile, Turkic forces were already in place on, and sometimes inside, China’s western border, having travelled over the past few months in disguise as nomads. On paper, the western region of China looked like ideal country for tanks and trucks, but in reality, fuel supply lines would be a recurring nightmare. So the first wave of Turks would enter as cavalry, switching to mechanised transport only when they were in a position to steal and use Chinese equipment.

  This was the most dangerous aspect of the plan, Bean knew. The Turkic armies, combining forces from the Hellespont to the Aral Sea and the foothills of the Himalayas, were equipped like raiders, yet had to do the job of an invading army. They had a couple of advantages that might compensate for their lack of armour and air support. Having no supply lines meant the Chinese wouldn’t have anything to bomb at first. The native people of the western China province of Xinjiang were Turkic too, and like the Tibetans, they had never stopped seething under the rule of Han China.

  Above all, the Turks would have surprise and numbers on their side during the crucial first days. The Chinese garrison troops were all massed on the border with Russia. Until those forces could be moved, the Turks should have an easy time, striking anywhere they wanted, taking out police and supply stations-and, with luck, every airfield in Xinjiang.

  By the time Chinese troops moved off the Russian border and into the interior to deal with the Turks, the fully mechanised Turkish troops would be entering China from the west. Now there would be supply lines to attack, but deprived of their forward air bases, and forced to face Turkish fighters which would now be using them, China would not have clear air superiority.

  Taking under defended air bases with cavalry was just the sort of touch Bean would have expected from Alai. They could only hope that Han Tzu would not anticipate Alai having complete authority over the inevitable Muslim move, for the Chinese would have to be crazy not to be planning to defend against a Muslim invasion.

  At some point, it was hoped that the Turks would do well enough that the Chinese would be forced to begin shifting troops from India north into Xinjiang. Here the terrain favoured Alai’s plan, for awhile some Chinese troops could be airlifted over the Tibetan Himalayas, the Tibetan roads would be disrupted by Turkic demolition teams, and the Chinese troops would all have to be moved eastward from India, around the Himalayas, and into western China from the east rather than the south.

  It would take days, and when the Muslims believed that the maximum number of Chinese troops were in transit, where they could not fight anybody, they would launch the massive invasion over the border between Pakistan and India.

  So much depended on what the Chinese believed. At first, the Chinese had to believe that the real assault would come from Pakistan, so that the main Chinese force would remain tied up on that frontier. Then, at a crucial point several days into the Turkic operation, the Chinese had to be convinced that the Turkic front was, in fact, the real invasion. They had to be so convinced of this that they would withdraw troops from India, weakening their forces there.

  How else does an inexperienced three-million-man army defeat an army of ten million veterans?

  They went through contingency plans for the several days following the commitment of Muslim troops in Pakistan, but Bean knew, as did Alai, that nothing that happened after the Muslim troops began crossing the Indian border could be predicted. They had plans in case the invasion failed utterly, and Pakistan had to be protected at fall-back positions well inside the Pakistani border They had plans for dealing with a complete rout of the Chinese forces-not likely, as they knew. But in the most likely scenario-a difficult back-and-forth battle across a thousand-mile front-plans would have to be improvised to take advantage of every turn of events.

  “So,” said Alai. “That is the plan. Any comments?”

  Around the circle, one officer after another voiced his measured confidence. This was not because they were all yes-men, but because Alai had already listened carefully to the objections they raised before and had altered the plans to deal with those he thought were serious problems.

  Only one of the Muslims offered any objection today, and it was the one non-military man, Lankowski, whose role, as best Bean could tell, was halfway between minister-without-portfolio and chaplain. “I think it is a shame,” he said, “that our plans are so dependent upon what Russia chooses to do.”

  Bean knew what he meant. Russia was completely unpredictable in this situation. On the one hand, the Warsaw Pact had a treaty with China that had secured China’s long northern border with Russia, freeing them to conquer India in the first place. On the other hand, the Russians and Chinese had been rivals in this region for centuries, and each believed the other held territory that was rightfully theirs.

  And there were unpredictable personal issues as well. How many loyal servants of Achilles were still in positions of trust and authority in Russia? At the same time, many Russians were furious at how they had been used by him before he went to India and then China.

  Yet Achilles brokered the secret treaty between Russia and China, so he couldn’t be all that detested, could he?

  But what was that treaty really worth? Every Russian schoolchild knew that the stupidest Russian tsar of them all had been Stalin, because he made a treaty with Hitler’s Germany and then expected it to be kept. Surely the Russians did not really believe China would stay at peace with them forever.

  So there was always the chance that Russia, seeing China at a disadvantage, would join the fray. The Russians would see it as a chance to seize territory and to pre-empt the inevitable Chinese betrayal of them.

  That would be a good thing, if the Russians attacked in force but were not terribly successful. It would bleed Chinese troops from the battle against the Muslims. But it would be a very bad thing if Russia did too well or too badly. Too well, and they might slice down through Mongolia and seize Beijing. Then the Muslim victory would become a Russian one. Alai did not want to have Russia in a dominant role in the peace negotiations.

  And if Russia entered the war but lost quickly, Chinese troops would not have to watch the Russian border. Free to move, those garrison troops might be hurled against the Turks, or they might be sent through Russian territory to strike into Kazakhstan, threatening to cut off Turkish supply lines.

  That was why Alai had expressed his hope that the Russians would be too surprised to do anything at all.

  “There’s no helping it,” said Alai. “We have done all we can do. What Russia does is in the hands of God.”

  “May I speak?” said Bean.

  Alai nodded. All eyes turned to him. At previous meetings, Bean had said nothing, preferring to talk with Alai in private, where he did not risk committing an error in the way he spoke to the Caliph.

  “When you have committed to battle,” said Bean, “I believe I can use my own contacts, and persuade the Hegemon to use his, to urge Russia to pursue whatever course you think most advisable.”

  Several of the men shifted uncomfortably in their chairs.

  “Please reassure my worried friends here,” said Alai, “that you have not already been in discussion with the Hegemon or anyone else about our plans.”

  “The opposite is true,” said Bean. “You are the ones who are preparing to take action. I have been providing you with all the information I learned from them. But I know these people, and what they can do. The Hegemon has no armies, but he does have great influence on
world opinion. Of course he will speak in favor of your action. But he also has influence inside Russia, which he could use either to urge intervention, or to argue against it. My friends, also.”