Shadow of the Hegemon, the - Book 2 (Ender)

about how well the war was going and what a good job they were doing in Planning. The army was well supplied and despite the harassment of the cowardly Thai military, the campaign was moving forward on schedule. The revised schedule, of course.
    Which was such greeyaz. He was talking to the planners. They knew perfectly well that the army was bogged down, that they were still fighting the Burmese in the Irrawaddy plain because the Thai Army's harassment tactics made it impossible to mount the crushing offensive that would have driven the Burmese into the mountains and allowed the Indian Army to proceed into Thailand. Schedule? There was no schedule now.
    What Achilles was telling them was: This is the party line. Make sure no memo or email from this room gives anyone even the slightest hint that events are not going according to plan.
    It did not change the fact that everyone in Planning could smell defeat. Supplying a huge army on the move was taxing enough to India's limited resources. Supplying it when half the supplies were likely to disappear due to enemy action was chewing through India's resources faster than they could hope to replenish them.
    At current rates of manufacture and consumption, the army would run out of munitions in seven weeks. But that would hardly matterunless some miracle happened, they would run out of nonrenewable fuel in four.
    Everyone knew that if Petra's plan had been followed, India would have been able to continue such an offensive indefinitely, and attrition would already have destroyed Burmese resistance. The war would already be on Thai soil, and the Indian Army would not be limping along with a relentless deadline looming up behind them.
    They did not talk in the planning room, but at meals they carefully, obliquely, discussed things. Was it too late to revert to the other strategy? Not reallybut it would require a strategic withdrawal of the bulk of India's army, which would be impossible to conceal from the people and the media. Politically, it would be a disaster. But then, running out of bullets or fuel would be even more disastrous.
    "We have to draw up plans for withdrawal anyway," said Sayagi. "Unless some miracle happens in the field-some brilliance in a field commander that has hitherto been invisible, some political collapse in Burma or Thailand-we're going to need a plan to extricate our people."
    "I don't think we'll get permission to spend time on that," someone answered.
    Petra rarely said anything at meals, despite her new custom of sitting at table with one or another group from Planning. This time, though, she spoke up. "Do it in your heads," she said.
    They paused for a moment, and then Sayagi nodded. "Good plan. No confrontation."
    From then on, part of mealtime consisted of cryptic reports from each member of the team on the status of every portion of the withdrawal plan.
    Another time that Petra spoke had nothing to do with military planning, per se. Someone had jokingly said that this would be a good time for Bose to return. Petra knew the story of Subhas Chandra Bose, the Netaji of the Japanesebacked anti-British-rule Indian National Army during World War 11. When he died in a plane crash on the way to Japan at the end of the war, the legend among the Indian people was that he was not really dead, but lived on, planning to return someday to lead the people to freedom. In the centuries since then, invoking the return of Bose was both a joke and a serious comment-that the current leadership was as illegitimate as the British Raj had been.
    From the mention of Bose, the conversation turned to a discussion of Gandhi. Someone started talking about "peaceful resistance"-never implying that anyone in Planning might contemplate such a thing, of course-and someone else said, "No, that's passive resistance."
    That was when Petra spoke up. "This is India, and you know the word. It's satyagraha, and it doesn't mean peaceful or passive resistance at all."

    "Not everyone here speaks Hindi," said a Tamil planner.
    "But everyone here should know Gandhi," said Petra.
    Sayagi agreed with her. "Satyagraha is something else. The willingness to endure great personal suffering in order to do what's right."
    "What's the difference, really?"
    "Sometimes," said Petra, "what's right is not peaceful or passive. What matters is that you do not hide from the consequences. You bear what must be borne."
    "That sounds more like courage than anything else," said the Tamil.
    "Courage to do