The Dragon Masters (part two)

Upon hearing word that no, Joaz wasn't yanking his chain, the greph really are here and really are helping themselves to his undefended and under-fortified kingdom right behind his stupid back, Ervis calls a truce. He admits that his opponent was right, and that it was folly for him to make war on a neighbouring human domain when a superior outside enemy was suspected to be inbound. If he'd gotten the message and called the truce just a little bit earlier, before he'd broken through Joaz's outer ambushes and started doing real damage and killing actual people, Joaz might have even been inclined to listen. Unfortunately, it happened after that point.

Joaz might be the bigger person in general, but under these circumstances there's only so much magnanimity he can muster. No deal. He will wait exactly long enough for Ervis to retreat from this meeting and make it back into the throng of his men before resuming the attack, and he will keep attacking them until they've retreated from Banbeck Verge. Hopefully the greph will just be waiting for them at Happy Valley with their mouths open. Ervis has the gall to try and appeal to their common human cause and beg Joaz to bring his forces back to Happy Valley to fight the greph alongside him, but Joaz (very grimly) laughs in his face.

On one hand, having more forces to fight the invaders with at once would probably be in everyone's interest. On the other hand, Ervis has literally just killed a bunch of Joaz's people for no good reason after Joaz just tried to do him a solid. God only knows what would happen if they managed to drive off the greph together, and then Joaz was left in the middle of Happy Valley surrounded by Ervis' own forces. So, while Joaz isn't exactly distinguishing himself in this scene, I can't bring myself to blame him that much.

Ervis Carcolo's army is chased out of the Verge and beat tracks back to Happy Valley. By the time they get there, their dragons are exhausted from the long rush after a hard battle without any rest. Disturbingly, the ridable "spider" dragons are described as making whimpering sounds that are very reminiscent of sobs and crying as Ervis lashes them on despite their exhaustion. Remember, these are postgreph. I don't know how much self-awareness they still have, exactly, but still. Really disturbing choice of descriptions here, and it's definitely deliberate by the author.

They make it back to Happy Valley just in time to see the greph and their own posthuman chattel herding the last of Ervis' visible peasants up the ramp of their ship. A ship that has made a point of landing right in the middle of their thickest concentration of crops to maximize the amount destroyed. The greph really lose no time in establishing themselves as mega turbo assholes, even after we already know they're the ones who introduced this whole "breed captive people into bestial slave-mutants" paradigm to Aerlith. And fucking hell, for the chronology we've been given to be true, they must have been like this for several thousand years uninterrupted (or at least, any interruptions were short-term enough to come and go in between conjunction events).

On the topic of that whole eugenics thing, we also see the invaders scanning those last few peasants with scifi medical tools, sending those who pass muster into the hold while marching those who fail into a little portable metal booth that nobody comes out of despite there not being room for more than one person inside. I don't think it's a TaRDiS.

There's also a brief description of the greph unearthing some of Ervis Carcolo's dragon breeding pits. We unfortunately only get a very distant look at this, from Ervis' perspective as he watches from the valley's edge, so it's not clear exactly what went through their minds when they saw what became of that one lost crew from the previous raiding cycle. We do know that they spend a lot of time just kind of staring at the facility, though. And also that, after they take off again, they make a point of destroying it first before turning their ship weapons on the rest of the visible human construction.

Okay, in retrospect it's pretty obvious what they thought. But I'd have liked to see how they reconciled it with their own self-perception, and whether they agreed that the ancestors of the "dragons" must have never actually been greph at all if this was able to have been done to them.

...

You know...four arms, mass abductions, penchant for eugenic modification of enslaved species...I wonder if X-Com 2014 took a few aesthetic notes from this story. The original 1994 game had the same premise, but both the alien master race's appearance and their modus operandi were very different from this.

...

The greph are just about finishing up when Ervis and his army come within sight of them. They're unable to interfere at all before the aliens, slaves, and new prisoners all vanish into the huge black vessel and it lays waste to Happy Valley as it departs. That name gets less and less fitting by the chapter, heh. Ervis' musketeers manage to shoot down a flimsy little UAV when it tries to take potshots at them in the wake of the takeoff, but other than that they have absolutely no impact in preventing the destruction of their home and people.

Naturally, Ervis blames Joaz for everything. Because of course he does lmao.

Seeing the ship moving on toward Banbeck Verge next, Ervis decides to follow it back the entire way he came again to...um...I don't fucking know. I don't think he knows either. Neither does his master at arms, Givven, not that asking is any help.

Ervis is forced to go on foot, on account of his dragons' exhaustion. Earlier in the story, there was a recurring motif of Ervis mentally modeling both his fiefdom and (in particular) his dragons as machine-like extensions of his own will, only to be reminded that this is not the case when a dragon abruptly behaves unexpectedly. He sustained injuries earlier, nearly curtailing his war plans, when he rode his spider too hard too far into sundown, and it bucked him. I really thought he was going to do the same thing here, this time getting himself irreparably injured or killed, but Givven convinces him to walk this time.

When the greph reach Banbeck Verge and plop their ship down on the most important-looking patch of crops in this fiefdom, they don't find any humans or major habitations on the surface. Joaz has kept enough underground space free to accommodate all his people, and...it turns out he had yet another reason to be mad at Ervis. See, those ambushes he had set up? The ones that were remarkably similar to the tactics their ancestors used to defeat the greph last time? Yeah, he hadn't set those up for Ervis. Those were all anti-greph measures he'd been putting in place. I probably should have realized this at the time, especially when Ervis had the "how could he have gotten ready for my attack this quickly?" reaction.

Anyway, Joaz has a pretty clever setup. He's devised this whacky schitzotech system that combines ancient telecom devices he bartered from the Sacerdotes with old fashioned carefully-positioned-mirrors, allowing him to see what's going on all over the battlefield from inside his underground command center. He's set up hidden chambers under the boulder piles and rubble fields that abound in Banbeck Verge, and placed small groups of soldiers and dragons in each of them. As the greph and their minions search for people, he lures them into spots where the terrain removes the range advantage of their laser guns and releases ambusher teams right into their midsts, inflicting disproportionate casualties and making the greph pay dearly for every corner they explore despite their superior numbers and technology.

Well, sort of. He doesn't manage to kill or capture any actual greph, at least at first. The only ones present on the field are riding their own fucked up quadrapedal posthuman steeds, and manage to always escape while their other slaves get massacred behind them. There's one bit where Joaz's men manage to steal some heat ray projectors from slain "giant" posthumans and fire them at a retreating greph squad, but they don't know how to adjust those weapons to account for distance and target profile and are thus only able to inflict minor burns. Still, noble effort, and they probably really scared those aylmao for a moment there.

...

Also, I can understand the pragmatism of greph using posthuman slaves for tasks requiring some level of intelligence, and I can understand the pragmatism of humans using postgreph slaves as mounts on account of the amount of toughness and rapid breeding you can apparently get out of the greph genome and the humans of Aerlith possibly not having had very diverse livestock of their own to begin with.

I cannot for the life of me see a good reason for the greph to be using posthumans as mounts when the galaxy surely must be teeming with perfectly good preexisting riding beasts. Including Earth's own horses.

The greph breeding a human lineage specifically to be ridden pretty much has to be pure sadism and megalomania.

...

Eventually, the greph throw enough laser beams and poison gas around that Joaz is forced to retreat from his command center and go deeper into the caves (in particular, he's nervous about how the lasers might interact with that mirror system he has pointing back into his office). His defensive setup is still compartmentalized enough to keep being a major pain in the ass for the invaders though, even without him actively commanding it.

Unfortunately he failed to do the one thing he'd been really hoping to do. In his ill-fated attempt at reasoning with the Sacerdotes earlier, Joaz learned that there's a Sacerdote monastery hidden in the mountainside over his own kingdom, and part of it is unusually close to the surface for their kind. What Joaz *really* wanted to do was bait the aliens into firing their ship weapons at the right patch of mountainside and blow open the Sacerdote bunker, hopefully forcing them into action with whatever space age weapons they've secretly been sitting on. No dice though. The greph ship opens fire on a few hardened positions (and decoys thereof) of Joaz's, but he never manages to bait them into hitting that one.

...

This is a pretty great tactician-layer war sequence overall. I will say though, I had a few disappointments in it. For one thing, it seemed like a lot of Joaz's traps and ambushes could have been foiled by air support, and we know that the greph have armed (if fragile) UAV's, but they don't seem to use any air units at all in this sequence. Feels a lot like softballing.

For another, while Jack Vance isn't as bad about this as some other authors of his time, his sexism is really starting to poke out. I'm okay with the Aerlith refugees being a strongly patriarchal society. I'm slightly less okay with the Sacerdotes, whose whole *thing* is being ethereal and unearthly and different from the refugees' perspective, being strongly patriarchal (female Sacerdotes are only ever seen inside their home caves, and none of them are ever given a speaking role). Now we have the only female character in this entire story, Joaz's concubine Phade, exist in this sequence just to be hysterical and terrified until Joaz has to literally have his butler drag her out of the command center so she'll stop distracting him.

:/

Like I said, Vance isn't the worst mid-20th century author about this stuff. Phade at least got to have something of a role in the story, and she asked and answered some intelligent questions when she spotted the intruding Sacerdote at the beginning. But still, pretty obnoxious overall.

It's also mentioned that Joaz has children, and one of them even plays an important role in the battle. They're never named though, and he's never seen interacting with or even really thinking too much about them. No mention whatsoever about who the mother(s) might be. I'm not sure if this is meant to reflect on the authoritarian, coldly patriarchal structure of refugee society that Joaz is only a little bit less obvious about than Ervis, or just the author himself being unthinkingly weird.

...

After a while, the greph send a weaponeer (the same class of mostly-baseline human slave that tried to bargain for the captives in the historical section) to negotiate. However, the greph prove to be really bad at this whole "negotiation" thing. As in, they don't seem to realize that you need to actually offer something to the other party in return for what you're asking for. The closest thing to a carrot they're willing to offer is "we won't exterminate the entire population if you hand over most of it willingly" and "you, personally, will be one of our more favored chattel slaves since you've proven yourself to be smart or whatever."

Unsurprisingly, Joaz doesn't take it.

He does try to make an offer of his own to the weaponeer and his fellow posthumans, but the indoctrination runs too deep (assuming it even is just indoctrination rather than genetically encoded or something). In fact, the weaponeer can't even wrap his head around the concept of the greph-derived "dragons" in front of him being the slaves of the humans rather than Joaz and his men being the ones working for them.

The weaponeer returns to his masters with nothing to show for their parlay. Joaz rallies his remaining forces and prepares for round two, knowing now that the greph will be updating their mission parameters from "abduction" to "extermination."

Meanwhile, Ervis and his remaining men are still watching unnoticed from the sidelines, and Ervis is still coping about everything.

On one hand, Ervis Carcolo may be right that he'd have done at least as well against the greph if he had Joaz's terrain and preparation advantages. On the other hand, it's Ervis' own stupid fault that he didn't have those advantages in the first place, so.

As the next round is about to heat up, Ervis decides to attack the greph. At least, I think he's going for the greph and not the Banbeck forces, but who even knows with this guy. Perhaps starting to see the error of his ways, Ervis doesn't order his remaining men to follow him; any who want to go back home and try to salvage what they can, or flee and search for another kingdom to join, are welcome to do so. Most of them opt to go with him; prospects are bleak no matter what they choose, and they'd rather die on their feet than on their knees if they have a choice.


That's how the second third of the story leaves off. With two big unfired guns of the Carcolo remnants and the Sacerdotes both primed and ready, but no indication of how or when they'll end up going off. Next post, I finish The Dragon Masters.