The Steppe Subjugation Plan
The fight against the natives was already decided.
Tribes whose basic tactic was a bare-chested charge with spear and sword would never stand a chance against our army.
That was why I regarded occupation as the least important part of this western campaign.
Could we deliver the enormous quantities of ammunition our firearms consumed to the right place at the right time? Could the supply trains keep pace with our advance? Against natives who took several bullets to drop, could we keep the cartridges flowing?
I drove that point home in every staff meeting.
"This campaign is not a battle against the natives. It is a battle against our own logistical capacity."
Until now the Southern Army had never possessed a proper supply corps. The force had been cobbled together on the fly, and none of our earlier conflicts had lasted long enough to expose the gap.
We had blown the Sarcen fortress to rubble with naval guns, and even Sarcen Fortress itself had not been far. The western capital of Porvin lay a mere four hundred kilometers from Albion.
Ammunition expenditure had been light, the conquest finished in roughly a week; the importance of a dedicated supply arm never came into sharp relief.
The battlefield ahead would be different.
The imperial center lay far from the South, sealed off by the Arbel Mountains and the sea, making overland resupply a nightmare. If we followed the example of a certain Japanese general and tried to live off the land—or decided southerners were herbivores who needed less food—we would simply annihilate ourselves.
To move an army of hundreds of thousands, perhaps a million, against the central forces, we had to build that basic endurance starting now.
"Therefore, concentrate on expanding the supply corps. For the time being the army will not grow beyond its present size."
"Yes, Your Excellency."
Of course, growing the supply arm also cost money.
We needed huge transport ships, trucks, and every piece of supporting equipment. Magic made manufacturing easier than it had ever been on Earth, yet budget pressure never vanished entirely.
On top of that we were running a new submarine construction project and still meant to enlarge the fleet. Anywhere else we would already have gone bankrupt. Only the South could shoulder this much.
No—I'm not even sure "shoulder" is the right word.
The South was overstretching its army on the strength of hoarded reserves and the plunder stripped from the West's corrupt nobility. We were taking on debt as well.
Those reserves were finite. The loot from western aristocrats would not regenerate forever. At this rate, southern economic collapse within a few years was a mathematical certainty.
A wartime economy was, in the end, an act of cannibalizing the very enterprises that formed a nation's foundation.
Run a country like this and it dies? I already knew that.
When factories turned out weapons instead of goods for export, the companies that should have driven growth were gutted. Once the money ran dry and corporate momentum snapped, the southern economy would take a wound it could never heal.
The cure for economic collapse was simple.
Win the war.
Crush the Eastern fleet, dismantle the Eastern Grand Ducal house, and feed that vast territory to the South, and we could endure. In that light, the East's hostility might even be a blessing. War was inevitable; better they strike first and hand us the justification.
Perhaps one more homework assignment has just been added to the list.
After everything ended: landing the war machine called the South as gently as possible. What I wanted was not world conquest but the South's survival. I could not afford the same ending that history reserved for every other warmongering dictator.
So this, I decided, would be the final task left to me.
While the army modernized the western forces and private industry pushed weapons development, Intelligence was hardly idle.
Agents questioned commoners, nobles, and tribesmen without distinction, mapping the hierarchy of the western barbarian clans. Nearly three months passed.
By the time the scars of the South-West war had more or less healed, Intelligence had a complete picture of how the West truly worked.
"In essence, the western barbarians revolve around three dominant tribes."
"Around three tribes? Nomads?"
Remember what made nomads nomads and the arrangement was distinctly odd: peoples who wandered the steppe without fixed dwellings; highland clans that hunted along the Arbel range all the way past the western border; and tribes that, after a thousand years of contact, had settled and begun to take on the empire's colors.
Acting independently should be the hallmark of barbarians.
"A powerful centralization has begun around those three tribes of late. We believe it stems from the fact that no one has touched the barbarians for the last fifty years."
"That does line up with when the western army started collapsing in earnest."
To a settled agrarian state, unified nomads were a catastrophe. Even divided by tribe they could devastate a frontier; gathered into one fist they became something far worse. One needed only look at the Asian and European empires swept away by Genghis Khan.
The West would become a wasteland.
Even imperial leaders who had never heard of Earth's history understood that much. Every time the nomads showed signs of uniting, the empire launched a grand "barbarian subjugation" or some similar offensive.
Of course the territory seized was always lost again, and the net result was little more than wasted money and manpower—yet the periodic shatterings kept the western border intact until now.
"But fifty years ago, when the empire's accumulated corruption finally erupted, the western frontier ceased to be anyone's concern."
"And the barbarians finished sorting out their own pecking order in the meantime?"
"Precisely. Around three leading tribes, the clans are showing every sign of coalescing."
"Didn't the former Western Grand Duke, Charles Raymonds, keep them in check to some degree?"
"Charles Raymonds attacked only the tribes near the border. We have confirmed that a large portion of those had already been culturally assimilated into the West over the past thousand years."
In other words, he left the consolidating tribes alone and only smashed the ones that had already half-joined the empire.
"That man never stopped doing stupid things right up to the end."
The situation had reached a genuinely dangerous pitch. Nomads were nomads because they could not settle. Once their numbers grew large enough that settlement became necessary, they would invade neighboring lands simply to secure territory of their own.
"How far has the unification progressed?"
"They convene regular assemblies, draft policy, and are even moving to elect a new leader."
Assemblies that set policy and chose a leader? That was a Mongol kurultai in all but name. One more step and we might face an enemy cut from the same cloth as Genghis Khan himself.
Was this yet another device the "original story" had prepared for the empire's fall—something meant to deliver the killing blow after civil war, republican invasion, and the rampage of magical beasts had already broken the realm?
It no longer mattered. The moment I decided to intervene, that future would never arrive.
"We were cutting it close. Good thing we chose to step in."
"Western army modernization is well advanced. Full operations should be feasible within a few weeks."
The operational plan, including logistics, was taking shape. This very conference existed to add the finer details—and the most critical of those details was how we would dispose of the barbarians.
"First, the tribes that have partially assimilated into the West over the past thousand years will be absorbed into western jurisdiction."
"Understood, Your Excellency."
No one objected. Not every barbarian was the same kind of barbarian, and sweeping them up with as little force as possible was always preferable.
The next item was the problem.
The three tribes, and everyone already drifting into their orbit.
"The tribes currently occupying the western Great Steppe divide into three: Borkan, Aikamade, and Serelkas. They have been a thorn in the West's side for centuries."
For hundreds of years the West had tried every method to quiet them—cultural assimilation, negotiation, even open war. Nothing had ever worked against these three.
"Does the staff believe these three tribes are beyond assimilation?"
"It may be premature to say so... but that is our present assessment."
"Then we have no reason to show mercy either."
There was a line from a certain film, spoken by an American officer in Afghanistan: if you kill two out of twenty terrorists, how many remain? The answer is not eighteen. It is twenty-six. Friends and relatives of the dead join the cause, and the chain of hatred lengthens.
Kill an enemy and his parents, siblings, children, and friends come after you with a blade of vengeance. That was how the chain of hatred operated.
Therefore only one answer remained open to me.
Wipe them out so thoroughly, and with such overwhelming force, that no one would dare raise a hand again.
"Borkan, Aikamade, Serelkas. Erase these three tribes from the steppe entirely."
Kyle the private man might have spoken of talking things out. Kyle Leopold the ruler could not utter empty promises of peaceful resolution.
To break a chain of hatred by peaceful means, one side had to endure. Would three tribes that had never submitted to the empire in centuries choose to endure? I thought not.
Then should the West endure instead? That would shatter my support, sink the western annexation, and collapse the wartime economy I had not yet secured. We would never escape the ending called imperial extinction.
In the end, one side had to disappear physically.
"For the past hundred years the natives have forgotten how severe imperial order can be."
I did not speak for the entire empire, yet on this point I could speak with absolute confidence.
"To the natives who rejected imperial mercy and lived as they pleased, we will teach just how terrifying and merciless the empire can be."
Borkan, Aikamade, Serelkas—the three great tribes that had dreamed of steppe unification and the conquest of the empire—had just had their fate sealed.
Exactly one month remained until the western expedition began.