Sometimes the general would stop and listen to a particularly interesting cry a victim would make. He thought he could make out individual words in Elvish, most being pleas for mercy, but he was never sure. His hearing had only recently recovered from the day when the main gun on the Groundling Scythe had blown up in front of him during the landings on this curious little world, which the elves had named Spiral. The blast had otherwise merely bruised and cut the general in numerous places, thanks to his thick armor and innate fortitude, but it had also killed eighteen marines and his previous goblin aide, the third he had lost in only a year. Aides were damned hard to train properly, and getting along without them was inconvenient at best. He hoped the current one would last a while.
The morning sun's red light was supplemented by magical light globes set up around the room, and the general had no trouble reading. The air was still cool, not yet up to the dry oven heat that would come in the afternoon. The food was well prepared, and the water cold and fresh. It must have been the tedium of the reports, then, that caused General Vorr to let a page drop from his fingers to the desktop. He rubbed his bald gray pumpkin head with both huge hands, his eyes closed. It was hard to concentrate, and he wasn't sure what was bothering him. He'd gotten used to the low ceilings in the elven buildings, barely two feet above his eight-foot frame, and Spiral's sun didn't bother his eyes the way the brighter stars did. He paid no mind to extreme temperature changes. Even his steel-banded, black-trimmed armor was as comfortable as leisure clothes could hope to be.
It couldn't be a lack of exercise, either. Despite the end of direct combat action in these last few weeks, the general was careful to maintain his Herculean musculature with heavy lifting and stretching exercises every other day. His pale-gray skin had a healthy shine, and none of his many old injuries were bothersome these days.
Something was wrong. After a moment, the general knew what it was, and he knew also that there was no immediate cure for it. He sighed and looked down at his paper-strewn desk, noting the heavy, red-iron tarantula paperweight his troops had cast for him, then the thick mithril-steel globe the elves had long ago made of Spiral, showing the strange, winding rivers that flowed from its polar seas to its equatorial ocean and back. He felt no inspiration there, and that was the trouble. Spiral was already conquered.
Looking up, the general found himself staring at the immense clawed hands mounted to either side of the oaken double doors of his expansive office. The green, four-fingered husks went well against the white walls, mute testimony to the broken might of the elven ground forces. The zwarth that had once wielded those claws had been a real titan, a thirty-five-foot undead insectoid monster crewed by eight elves. General Vorr wished again that he had seen the expressions on those elves' faces when the zwarth had bounded out from ambush and fired its rapid spray of magic missiles directly at him while he was directing the landings on Spiral. By the Tomb of Dukagsh, that had been a fight, a damned good fight. Cutting the hands off the smoking green wreck afterward had been especially satisfying. Sometimes those elves knew a good trick or two, for all the good it did them in the long run.
General Vorr sat back, listening to the hoarse, distant cries of the fifth prisoner of the day. The garden ceremonies were good, but they were losing their morale value. This group of elves had been only farmers, after all, not warriors captured in battle. The last of the fighting for Spiral had been too long ago. Little Spiral's orange sun now rose and set across a world controlled by the Tarantula Fleet's ground and wildspace forces. With the local military ground into blood and bones, the troops lacked an appropriate outlet for their aggressions. Hunting down elven refugees in the deep caverns and mountains was a job for orcs and goblins, not highly trained marines like the general's black-armored scro and ogres.
We came here to kill elves, the general thought darkly, not to settle down, play games, and squabble among ourselves. Somewhere in this vast crystal sphere there were more elves, possibly even elements of the Imperial Fleet, but hunting for them would stretch the resources of the Tarantula Fleet too far until the scro had time to build more ships on Spiral. This was the third sphere the general had seen since the War of Revenge had begun, and the once-mighty fleet had been reduced by over two-thirds in constant, glorious, challenging, savage, righteous battle. All of the beautiful mantis ships were destroyed; hastily repaired derelicts and hijacked ships had been pressed into service. They had to rest or perish.
That was the whole problem, of course. General Vorr hated just sitting here, knowing his troops were rotting from within. We should be back in wildspace again, he thought. We've been grounded for five hands of days now, and the reports are filling with summary executions for fighting among the troops. That energy should be directed at the Imperial Fleet, not at fellow soldiers. It was the accursed politics behind it all, of course.
The general's eyes wandered around the room, taking in the crude array of tribal, religious, and unit banners crowding the walls to either side of the doors, past the zwarth's claws. The Tarantula Fleet admiral's policy of letting common orcs into the ground legions only fed the problem. Orcs had boundless hatred for elves, but they also had equally violent hatreds for almost every other sort of humanoid, including orcs of rival tribes and cults and even the ore-descended scro. Other humanoids were like that, but few as much as the orcs.
In their favor, the orcs and minor humanoids were useful for assaults on the gigantic, space-going dwarven citadels, where they could absorb the initial losses from traps and ambushes before the highbred scro and their allies took over and battered their ways through to the forges and redoubts. Rabble could be spared for rooting out survivors on conquered worlds like Spiral, settling down in the meanwhile to create their own colonies. Otherwise, they were just a nuisance.
Whether he liked it or not, Vorr knew that Admiral Halker and the admirals of all other fleets now at war with the elves were doing what had to be done, following the words and plans of the Almighty Dukagsh, the Scro Father. Only by uniting all humanoids into the War of Revenge could the elves be driven from wildspace like sparrows in the claws of a gale- and driven they now were. In the year that the war had been underway, the general had seen the Imperial Fleet forces in two crystal spheres destroyed; elven worlds and fleets in other spheres were rumored by scouts and spies to be under attack or to have fallen as well. The war was vast, and Vorr knew he saw only a small part of it. Few elves had escaped the butcher's cleaver, and little word had spread so far to alert other spheres of the coming of the blade. Spiral itself had fallen so rapidly that it was unlikely any other elves in this sphere knew of it yet. The elves, who had once ground the humanoids under their silver heel, had grown careless and lazy. They paid for it now with their lifeblood.
Still, Vorr reflected, if orcs and lesser vermin were to come along for the elf slaying, they'd have to pull their own weight. General Vorr carefully bled off his supply of naive orcish auxiliaries with every opportunity, sending them without qualm into deathtraps and ambushes. If Halker noticed the high losses among Vorr's orcs and goblins, he said nothing. Halker was a full-blooded scro himself, and it was likely that he understood and approved. Vorr never saw the need to bring the topic into the open and risk finding out differently.