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still fragile due to the lack of adequate infrastructure. It was easy to understand why their progress was
slow. The Weave might succeed in liberating an entire region only to be outflanked by Amplitur forces
trickling through valleys and along mountain trails. Both sides could win and lose the same sector several
times in a year. The enemy could heavily fortify captured towns against assault while battlefield
communications remained primitive because relay satellites were shot down as rapidly as they could be
deployed.
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So the war went on, consisting largely of desultory forays by both sides against each other s fortified
positions. A recent airborne assault on a major town had been a total disaster. Descending craft had
come under fire not only from forces on the ground but from those dug into surrounding cliffs and
mountainsides. The survivors had likened it to trying to land in a cauldron. Unlike elsewhere it proved
impossible to spare the natives, since they invariably occupied the contested valleys and mountain passes.
No wonder they fled to their pitiable abodes at the first sight of either side s soldiers. The only
consolation Kantaria offered was the knowledge that the place was as hard on the Amplitur and their
allies as it was on the Massood. But they had been there longer and held far more territory. With the
greater mobility this afforded them they were winning, slowly but inexorably driving the Weave forces
back.
It was not that the Crigolit were better suited to combat on Kantaria than the Massood, Caldaq knew,
although the Amplitur s new allies the Mazvec seemed to tolerate the adverse conditions better than
anyone else. It was that in such execrable circumstances fanaticism had an advantage over mere
dedication. Blindly driven as they were by the Purpose, the Amplitur s soldiers were better able than the
more contemplative Massood to ignore the festering circumstances in which they found themselves.
Furthermore, every time the Crigolit-Mazvec forces gained a valley or a ridgeline, they tended better to
hold onto it, whereas the forces of the Weave could often be driven out. Sitting for months in the dreary,
pouring rain sapped the resolve of the finest, most dedicated Massood soldiers, weakening their fighting
resolve. They tended to grow lax and tired, having too much time to wonder what they were doing in
such a miserable place. Meanwhile the poor Kantarians were forced to listen to the blandishments of
both sides, uncertain which way to lean, who to ally themselves with. They were hardly civilized enough
to comprehend the issues at stake, let alone the concept of racial unification.
In such circumstances the Amplitur had another inherent advantage. They could take a village chieftain
aside and artfully adjust his way of thinking until he saw only their point of view, then leave it to him to
persuade his people. In the first part of his second year on Kantaria, Caldaq lost Jaruselka.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
He had been supervising an assault on a Mazvec-held ridgeline which guarded the way to an important
Kantarian city. He was in an aircar, the only sensible way to cover any distance on this impossible world,
when a brace of floater-mounted Crigolit had slipped in behind while patrolling vehicles dueled overhead.
It wasn t even a planned attack which had caught them. Jaruselka had been riding in another aircar,
supervising forward fire and safe from direct interdiction as her craft hugged a protective mountainside.
The Crigolit floaters were as surprised as anyone when they stumbled unchallenged into the main part of
the attacking force. They fired only to cover their retreat as they fled hastily toward the canyon from
which they had emerged.
An explosive projectile, fired wildly by a fleeing floater pilot who probably never sighted on his target,
had struck the granite wall above Jaruselka s aircar, blasting a huge gouge in the sheer cliff face. The
car s pilot didn t have a chance to react and probably never knew what had happened.
Countermeasures designed to defeat incoming projectiles and energy beams did not even react to the
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