by David Drake
They turned up a farm lane, over a low hill that hid them from the road, past the encampments of the refugees; some were lighting fires, others simply collapsing where they stood. The sun was dropping below the horizon, light turning purple, throwing long shadows from the grain-ricks across the stubblefields. The lane turned down by a shallow streambed, into a hollow fringed with trees. An old farmhouse stood there, the sort of thing a very well-to-do peasant farmer would have, built of ashlar limestone blocks, with four rooms and a kitchen. Outbuildings stood around a walled courtyard at the back; a big dog came up barking and snarling as the car pulled into the stretch of graveled dirt in front of the house.
Two men followed it, both carrying shotguns. One shone a bull's-eye lantern in John's face.
"You are?" the man behind the lantern said.
"John Hosten," he said.
"Arturo Bianci," the man with the lantern said. His hand was firm and callused, a workingman's grip. "Come."
They went into the farmhouse, through a hallway and into the kitchen; there was a big fireplace in one end, with a tile stove built into the side, and a kerosene lantern hanging from a rafter. Strings of garlic and onions and chilies hung also; hams in sacks, slabs of dried fish scenting the air; there were copper pans on the walls. Four men and a woman greeted him.
"No more names," John said, sitting at the plank table. "This group is big enough as it is, by the way."
Silence fell as the woman put a plate before him: sliced tomatoes, cured ham, bread, cheese, a mug of watered wine. John picked up a slab of the bread and folded it around some ham; it was an important rite of hospitality, and besides that, meals had been irregular this last week or so.
"We wondered if you could get through, with the refugees," Arturo said slowly, obviously thinking over the implications of John's remark.
"Fools." Unexpectedly, that was the woman; she had Arturo's looks in a feminine version, earthy and strong, but much younger. "Do they think they can run faster than the tedeschi? All they do is block the roads and hamper the army."
John nodded; it was a good point. "They're afraid," he said. "Rightly afraid, although they're doing the wrong thing."
"Not only them," Arturo said. "Our lords and masters have-" he used a local dialect phrase; John thought he identified "sodomy" and "pig," but he wasn't sure. "You think we will lose this war, signore?"
"Yes," John confirmed. "The chances are about-"
92 %, ±3, Center said helpfully.
"— nine to one against you, barring a miracle."
The other men looked at each other, some of them a little pale.
"I don't understand it-we are so many, compared to them. It must be treason!" one said.
"Never attribute to treason or conspiracy what can be accounted for by incompetence and stupidity," John said.
Arturo rubbed a hand over his five o'clock shadow, blue-black and bristly. The sound was like sandpaper.
"I knew we had fallen behind other countries," he said. "I have relatives who moved to Santander, to Chasson City, to work in the factories there. I might have myself, if I had not inherited this land from my father. That was why I joined the Reform party"-somewhat illegal, but not persecuted very stringently-"so that we might have what others do, and not spend every year as our grandfathers did. I did not know we had become so primitive. These devil-machines the Chosen have. ."
"Their organization is more important, their training, their attitude," John said. "They've been planning for this for a long time. Your leadership has what it desires, and just wants to keep things the way they are. The Chosen. . the Chosen are hungry, and eating the whole world wouldn't satisfy them."
Arturo nodded. "All that remains is to decide whether we submit, or fight from the shadows," he said. "We fight. Are we agreed?"
"We are agreed," one of the men said; he was older, and his breeches and floppy jacket were patched. "But I don't know how many others we can convince. They will say, what does it matter who the master is, if you must pay your rent and taxes anyway?"
The woman spoke again. "The Chosen will convince them, better than we."
The men looked at her; she scowled and banged a coffee pot down on one of the metal plates set into the top of the stove.
"It is true," Arturo said. "If half of what I have heard is so, that is true."
"It's probably worse than what you've heard," John said grimly. "The Chosen don't look on you as social inferiors; they look on you as animals, to be milked and sheared as convenient, then slaughtered."
Arturo slapped his hand on the plank. "It is agreed. And now, come and see how we have cared for what you sent us!"
He took up the bulls-eye and clicked the shutter open. They went out the back door, into a farmyard with a strong smell of chickens and ducks, past a muddy pond and into a barn. Several milch-cows mooed from their stalls, and a pair of big white-coated oxen with brass balls on the tips of their horns. Their huge mild eyes blinked at the light, and then went back to meditatively chewing their cuds. The cart they hauled was pushed just inside the door, its pole pointing at the rafters; tendrils of loose hay stuck down through the wide-spaced boards of the loft. Towards the rear of the barn were stacked pyramids of crates, one type long and thin, the other square and rectangular.
Arturo opened one whose nails had been pulled. "Enough of us know how to use these," he said, throwing John a rifle.
It was the standard Imperial issue, but factory-new, still a little greasy from the preservative oil. A single-shot breechloader, with a tilting block action and a spring-driven ejector that automatically tipped the block down and shot the spent cartridge out to the rear when the trigger was pulled all the way back. Not a bad weapon at all, in its day, and it could still kill a man just as dead as the latest magazine rifle. The smaller crates were marked AMMUNITION 10MM STANDARD 1000 ROUNDS.
"Two hundred rifles, and revolvers, blasting powder, a small printing press," Arturo said.
"Where were you planning on hiding them?" John said, looking around at the set peasant faces, underlit by the lamp Arturo had set down on the packed earth floor of the barn.
"The sheep pen. Under hard dung, six inches thick."
"Good idea, for some of them," John said, easing back the hammer of the rifle. The action went click. "But you shouldn't put more than a dozen in one place. Nor should any one of you know where the rest are. You understand me?"
Arturo seemed to, and his daughter, possibly a few of the others. John went on.
"You know what the Chosen penalty is for unauthorized possession of weapons-so much as one cartridge, or a knife with a blade longer than the regulations allow?"
"A bullet?" one of the peasants asked.
"Not unless they're in a real hurry. Generally, they hang you up by the thumbs and then flog you to death with jointed steel whips made out of chain links with hooks on them. Small hooks, about the size of a fishhook, and barbed. I've seen it done; it can take hours, with an expert." Silence fell again.
"You want to frighten us?" one of the men asked.
"Damned right," John replied. "You'll stay alive longer, that way; and hurt the Chosen more."
Watch out, lad-you want to get them thinking, not terrorize them, Raj said. Time enough for realism when they're committed.
Arturo nodded thoughtfully. "We will have to organize. . differently. Nothing in writing. Small groups, with only one knowing anyone else, and that as little as possible."
Good. We don't have to explain the cell system to him, at least, John thought.
Although the idea of the Fourth Bureau getting its hands on these amateurs. . needs must. If nobody fought the Chosen, they'd win. That meant you had to accept the consequences.
"And then," Arturo said, "when we are ready-when enough are ready to follow us-we can start to hurt them. Blowing up bridges, picking off patrols, perhaps their clerks and tallymen, sabotage. We will have some advantages: we know the ground, the people will hide us."
"You'l
l have to strike fairly far from your homes, though," John said.
"Why?"
"Because the Chosen reprisals will fall hardest on the location where guerilla activity flares up. You strike away from where you live, and it kills two birds with one stone; you get the people who suffer the reprisals hating the Chosen, and you protect your base."
Arturo tilted the lantern to shine the light on John's face. That emphasized the structure of it, the slabs and angles.
"You are a hard man, signore," he said. "As hard as the Chosen themselves, perhaps."
John nodded. "As we all will need to be, before this is over," he said. Those of us still alive.
* * *
The Chosen officer's blue eyes stared unblinking up at the moonlit night sky. It was bright, full moon, the disk nearly as large as the sun to the naked eye and almost too bright to look at, so Jeffrey could see them clearly. Her helmet had rolled away when the bullet went in through the angle of her jaw and out the top of her head; fortunately the shadow hid most of what the soft lead slug had done when it lifted off the top of her skull. Jeffrey was glad of that, and the bit of extra cover the body provided. Bullets thudded into the loam of the little hillock, or keened off stones with a wicka-wicka sound like miniature lead Frisbees.
Every minute or so a shell would burst along the Chosen gunline, stretched back now into a U-shape with the blunt end towards the enemy. The shellbursts were malignant red snaps in the night, a flash of light and the crack on its heels. Every few minutes a Land hand-grenade would explode where the Imperials had gotten close, but the invaders were running short on them. Short on everything.
The night air was colder, damper, and it carried the smell of cordite, gunpowder and the feces-and-copper scent of violent death. Bodies lay scattered out from the line, sometimes two-thick where automatic weapons or concentrated riflefire had caught groups charging forward-the Imperials' training kept betraying them, making them clump together. The field of the dead seemed to move and heave as wounded men screamed or whimpered or wept, calling for water or their mothers or simply moaned in wordless pain. Through it darted the living, more and more of them filtering in. Their firepower was diffuse compared to the Land's rapid-fire weapons, but it was huge, and the sheer weight of it was beating down resistance.
Goddamn ironic if I die here, Jeffrey thought. He'd devoted his whole life to the defeat of the Chosen. .
"I think the next push may make it this far," Heinrich said. "You can't claim our hospitality's been dull."
He was chewing the stem of his long-dead pipe as he unbuckled the flap of his sidearm. Most of the surviving command group had armed themselves with the rifles and bayonets of dead Protege soldiers, those who hadn't gone out to take charge of units with no officers left alive.
"Damn," Heinrich went on. "We must have killed or crippled a good third of them. Didn't think they'd keep it up this long."
"Here they come again," someone said quietly.
The forward Imperial positions were no more than a hundred yards away. The firefly twinkling of muzzle flashes sparkled harder, concentrating on the surviving machine guns, and men rose to charge. A bugle sounded, thin and reedy. The machine guns were fewer now, firing in short tapping bursts to conserve ammunition. Jeffrey could feel something shift, a balance in his gut. This time they would make it to close quarters.
Listen, Raj said. Is that-
airship engines, Center said. probability approaching unity. approaching from the southwest, throttled down for concealment; the wind is from that direction. four kilometers and closing.
Heinrich turned his head. A light flashed in the darkness above the ground, a powerful signal-lamp clicking a sequence of four dots and dashes.
* * *
"Damn," Gerta Hosten said mildly.
The muzzle flashes down below and ahead outlined the Land position as clearly as a map in a war-college kriegspiel session; you could even tell the players, because the Imperials' black-powder discharges were duller and redder. It was fortunate that dirigibles had proven to be more resistant to fire than expected; punctures in the gas cells tended to leak up, rather than lingering and mixing with oxygen. . usually.
A night drop-another first. Well, orders were orders, and it was Heinrich down there. She'd really regret losing Heinrich.
"We could do better with a bombing run," the commander of the dirigible muttered. "And parachuting in the ammunition they need."
"With a four-thousand-meter error radius, Horst?" Gerta asked absently, tightening a buckle on her harness.
"That's only an average," he said defensively. "The Sieg usually does better than that."
Airdrops of supplies to cut off forces had proven invaluable; unfortunately, an embarrassing percentage had dropped into enemy positions.
"Behfel ist behfel," she said, which was an unanswerable argument among the Chosen.
"Coming up on drop," the helm said. "Five minutes."
The Sieg was drifting with the wind and would come right in over the position, if the wind stayed cooperative.
This is going to be tricky, she thought as she ducked back down the corridor and into the hold. The lights cast a faint greenish glow over it; there was little spare space, even though her unit had taken heavy casualties-the problem with being a fire brigade was that you got sent to a lot of hot places. A good deal of the crowding was the cargo load: rifle ammunition, boxes of machine-gun belts, mortar shells, grenades. Just what you wanted to drop with you into the darkness and a firefight,
"Ready for it. On the dropmaster's signal," she said.
The waiting. . she'd expected it to get better, after the first time. It didn't; you didn't ever get used to it.
"Now!"
A brief roar of propellers as the engines backed to kill the Sieg's drift. They all swayed, and the pallets of crates creaked dangerously. Then the hatchways in the floor of the gondola snapped open.
The ground was close below, even in the gloom. Crates strapped to cushioned pallets slid out the gaping holes in the decking, to crash down and set the airship surging upward. Gas valved with a hollow booming roar as she leaped for the dangling line and slid downward, the ridged sisal of the cable biting into gloved hands and the composition soles of her boots.
"Oh, shays," she muttered.
It was a good thing that Land military doctrine called for decentralized command, particularly in all-Chosen units, because unless her eyes deceived her she was sliding right down on top of an Imperial gatling-gun crew. An alert one, because they were turning the muzzle of their weapon towards her, the line of flashes strobing as it turned. .
Thump. She hit the ground and rolled reflexively, then rolled again, trying for dead ground where the gatling could not bear. Chosen died behind her, seconds too slow. The gatling ceased fire for an instant as another group hit the ground and opened up with rifles and machine carbines. Gerta unslung her own weapon and jacked the slide.
* * *
"Hell!"
Jeffrey Farr rolled frantically as a one-ton pallet of cargo crashed out of the sky towards him. It landed, slithered downslope, and pitched on its side, resting against a gnarled dead grapevine. The outline of the dirigible was suddenly clear against the stars, the diesels bellowing and the exhausts red spikes in the night. For an instant the heavy oily stink of the exhaust overrode the other smells of the night battle, the fireworks scent of black powder and death.
He rolled again as a dark figure lunged out of the shadows at him behind the point of an eighteen-inch socket bayonet, an Imperial infantryman. Jeffrey's pistol came free in his hand as the bayonet went skunk into the rocky clay next to him, and his finger tightened on the trigger. In the red light of the muzzle blast he could see the contorted face of the Imperial soldier for a flickering second, before the man dropped away, folding around his belly. Jeffrey froze for an instant; he'd just killed a man, an ally. .
Happens more often than you'd think, Raj thought/ said crisply. Get moving, lad. Time eno
ugh for nightmares later.
Something went pop overhead. Actinic blue-white light flooded the field.
* * *
The man behind the gatling pitched forward; his face jammed the mechanism as the cranker kept grinding for an instant. Several of the crew turned, snatching up their carbines. Gerta went down on one knee, snuggled the butt of the machine-carbine into her shoulder, and began shooting. The range was less than thirty meters, point-blank if you knew the weapon. Someone was shooting at the crew from the other side, a rifle by the sound of it. That distracted them the few seconds necessary to cut down half of them with four short bursts. Muzzle flare from the Koegelman was blinding in the darkness, enough to make her eyes water and leave afterimages of a bar of fire dancing before them.
The drum of the machine-carbine clicked empty just as the parachute flare went off overhead; whoever had been supporting her wasn't anymore, and the Imperials stopped trying to get their jammed gatling going again. Six of them charged her; no time to reload one of the cumbersome drums. She blinked her eyes frantically in the jerky shadows, waiting tensely.
They were trying for her with cold steel, probably out of ammunition or saving their last shots for point-blank range in this uncertain light. The first lunged, almost throwing himself forward behind the point, eyes wild. Gerta buttstroked aside the bayonet and slammed the steel plate into his throat. Cartilage crunched in and he fell backward, choking, knocked off his feet by the combined impetus of her blow and his own rush. She dropped the carbine and drew the long fighting knife slung at the small of her back with one hand and her automatic with the other.
One. Coming at her with his carbine clubbed, grasped by the barrel. Wait, wait. She went in under the blow, felt it fan the air inches from her forehead, and ripped the long blade upward. It slid in under the left ribs, sawing upward until the point was through lung and heart. Weight slumped onto her right hand.
Gerta pivoted with the body before her, and the man behind hesitated an instant. She shot over the shoulder of the twitching corpse. The bullet hit the bridge of the Imperial's nose and snapped his head backward as if it had been kicked by a mule. A bullet thumped into her meat-shield; she fired again, again, until the twelve rounds in her automatic were exhausted.