The Chronicles of Riddick - Alan Dean Foster [50]
Together, they were gathered around a malleable extrusion map of Helion Prime. At present it showed, in full and flexible relief, the central portion of that world’s western hemisphere. As fingers were pointed and words were spoken, features flowed and reformed on the map, responding automatically to both gestures and commands.
Toal was busy delineating the current bump in the Necromongers’ path to complete conquest of Helion Prime. Under his words and moving fingers, all manner of defensive weaponry was conjured up, only to vanish and be replaced by others as his hand moved on.
“. . . just south of the equator, within this central land mass,” he was saying. “They’ve pulled back from the centers of population and concentrated a good deal of their remaining primary forces and reserves here, here, and here. Defensive energy projectors, still fully powered and active. An unknown number of fighter craft.” His hand moved rapidly, efficiently. “All along this continental rift. Well protected and deeply dug in to several interconnected mountain ranges.”
Even while deeply engrossed in analyzing the situation, the Lord Marshal could venture homilies. “The body flails, even after the head’s been chopped off.”
As the field commander responsible for the area under discussion, Toal was less inclined to wax philosophic. The Necromonger forces were extensive, but they were not infinite. The quickest and most assured way to subdue an entire world was to obliterate its principal defenses as swiftly as possible and then install a converted, cooperative native administration. Otherwise, it would prove impossible to move on to the next world, and the next. Because all your troops would be tied down occupying a world or two. Local cooperation was crucial to the success and growth of the Necromonger cause. Securing that cooperation was impossible so long as significant resistance persisted.
“If we don’t act soon, this area will become a magnet for continuing resistance elsewhere on the planet. It could even reach off world and draw reinforcements from the outlying inhabited worlds of this system, the ones we hope to intimidate into submission.”
Scales grinned wolfishly. “Give it to me. I’ll go straight into their teeth. It’ll take twenty thousand converts and two warrior ships, no more. I swear it. A week, maybe ten days, and this problem will be disappeared.”
No one looked over from the map as Vaako entered. Their backs were toward him, their attention focused on the rippling and changing display. He stood there, unnoticed, watching. There was something he had long been curious about but had been reluctant to investigate. Others, especially one other, felt he had put it off too long.
Why not now? he asked himself. When better than in an innocuous moment when the subject of his curiosity appeared engaged not only by the flow of information but also by the words of subordinates?
No cat could have made an approach as silent and fluid as Vaako. He advanced as if motivated by some grave internal purpose, gliding across the floor on well-worn boots that made no sound. All of his attention, all of his focus, was on the figure who lay at the terminus of that experimental approach.
“While I do prize brute force,” the Lord Marshal was saying, “there are times when a more artful, subtle approach may be more valid. While every convert is willing, a convert lost here is lost to us the next time.” His hand moved over the map; altering positions, viewpoint, locations.
“Go in with smaller forces first. Instead of a frontal assault and landing whose effects can only be judged by the number of our people who survive it, pick off these defensive positions first, one by one. If moves are made to defend them, so much the better. We can ramp up each attack in proportion to the increase in defense. Before long, they will be so busy trying to defend their multiple individual