Hope Renewed

by S. M. Stirling

  Jeffrey looked left and right; three battalions, less losses; say fifteen hundred rifles, with one machine gun to a company and a dozen mortars.

  “Rather long odds, wouldn’t you say?” he said.

  “Oh, it’ll do,” Heinrich replied. He began stuffing tobacco into a long curved pipe with a flared lip and a hinged pewter cover. “Mind you”—he struck a match with his thumbnail and puffed the pipe alight, speaking around the stem—”I wouldn’t mind if the rest of the brigade came up, or at least that ferdammt artillery we’re supposed to have, but it’ll do.”

  The Chosen colonel turned his head slightly. “Fahnrich Klinghoffer; mortars to concentrate on enemy crew-served weapons, commencing at two thousand meters. Automatic weapons at fifteen hundred, infantry at eight hundred; flank companies to be ready to swing back. Runner to General Summelworden, and we’re engaged to our front; attempted enemy break-out. Dispositions as follows—”

  Messengers trotted off on foot; one stamped a motorcycle into braying life and went rearward in a spray of dust and gravel. That would be the message to rear HQ—there were only three of the little machines attached to the regiment and they were saved for the most important communications.

  “Wouldn’t a wireless set be useful?” Jeffrey asked.

  Heinrich gestured with his pipe. “Not really. Too heavy and temperamental to be worth the trouble; telegraphs are bad enough—the last thing any competent field commander wants is to have an electric wire from Supreme HQ stuck up his arse. Let them do their jobs, and we’ll do ours.”

  I wouldn’t have minded having this fellow working for me, Raj thought.

  chosen staff training ensures uniformity of method, Center noted. this reduces the need for communications.

  “Twenty-two hundred,” the officer at the optical said. “Picking up the pace.”

  “Still, twelve thousand to two . . .” Jeffrey said.

  Heinrich grinned disarmingly. “We’re holding the neck of the bag. All we have to do is delay them long enough for the rest of the corps to come up, and they’ve lost better than two hundred thousand men. Worth a risk.”

  Jeffrey nodded. Down below the riflemen finished digging and were snuggling the stocks of their weapons into their shoulders; a few pessimists were setting out grenades close to hand. The machine gunners sat behind their weapons, elbows on knees, bending to look through the sights: all Chosen, he noticed—one Chosen NCO as gunner, five Protégé privates to fetch and carry and keep the weapon supplied with ammunition and water.

  The Imperial field gunners halted their teams, wheeling the guns and running them off the limbers. The clang of the breechblocks was lost under the growing, drumming thunder of thousands of hooves. Elevating wheels spun. The Imperial guns were simple black-powder models with no recoil gear; they’d have to be pushed back into battery after every shot, but there were a lot of them.

  Behind Jeffrey, hands poised mortar bombs over the muzzles. The Chosen officer at the optical raised her hand, then chopped it downward.

  Schoonk. Schoonk. Schoonk. Twelve times repeated.

  The mortar shells began dropping. Each threw up a minor shower of dirt, like a gigantic raindrop hitting silt. The first rounds dropped all across the axis of the Imperial advance, some ahead of it, some behind; four or five plowed into the mass of cantering horsemen, sending animals and men to the ground. The ranks expanded around the casualties, then closed up again with a long ripple.

  The observers called corrections. Schoonk. Schoonk . . . This bracket landed much closer to the Imperial field guns. One landed on a limber, which went up in a giant globe of orange fire, shells whistling across the sky like fireworks. The noise was loud even at this distance. Another went up a second later.

  “Tsk, tsk,” Heinrich said. “Sympathetic detonation—too close together. Careless.”

  In Landisch, saying someone was sloppy was a serious moral criticism, worse than theft, although not quite as bad as eating your children. The Chosen assumed courage; what they really respected was an infinite capacity for taking pains.

  An Imperial gun cut loose in an enormous puff of off-white smoke. Something went overhead in a tearing rising-pitch whistle and exploded behind them, sending a poplar tree shape of dirt into the air. The next shell hammered short, just beyond the Land infantry line. One over, one under, which meant . . .

  Heinrich made a small gesture with one hand; everyone whose job permitted it went to ground, including Jeffrey Farr. He wished he had one of the Land helmets; even a thin layer of stamped manganese-nickel steel was a comforting thing to have between you and an airburst.

  Crack. The next shell was an airburst, a little off-center and a bit high up. Imperial fuses weren’t very modern, either, so that was good shooting with what they had available. Somebody screamed nearby, and a call went up for stretcher-bearers. Guns were firing all along the Imperial line now, but the hooves were louder.

  Much louder. The cavalry were swinging into a gallop, and as he watched the sabers came out, a thousandfold twinkling in the hot sunlight, like slivers of mirrored glass. The troopers swung the swords down, holding them forward along the horses’ necks with the blades parallel to the ground. On his belly, Jeffrey could feel the thunder of thousands of tons of horseflesh thudding into the ground on metal-shod hooves.

  “Steady now, steady,” Heinrich murmured to himself, glancing left and right at his regiment.

  Jeffrey stared at the approaching Imperials with a complex mixture of emotions. If they overran this position, he’d probably die . . . and he’d like nothing better than to see the Chosen stamped into the earth by the hooves, cut apart by those sabers, pistoled, annihilated. But he didn’t want to share the experience, if possible.

  Beneath that his mind was calculating, measuring distances by the old trick of how much you could see—so many yards when a man was a dot, so many when you could make out his arms, his legs, the belts of his equipment. The Land soldiers were doing the same. Behind them the mortars kept up a steady schoonk . . . schoonk . . . stopping now and then to adjust their aim.

  The machine gun cut loose with a stuttering rattle, faster and more rhythmic than the gatlings he was familiar with. Every fourth round was tracer, and they arched out pale in the bright sunlight. More of the automatics opened up along the regiment’s line. The closest gunner traversed smoothly, tapping off four-second bursts, smiling broadly to herself.

  Jam, Jeffrey prayed. Jam, damn you, jam tight!

  But they didn’t jam. The cavalry charge disintegrated instead, hundreds of horses and men falling in a few seconds. At the gallop there was no time to halt, no chance to pull aside. The first rank went down as if a giant scythe had cut their legs from beneath them, and the succeeding ones piled into them in a kicking, rolling, tumbling wave of thousand-pound bodies that reached three layers high in places. He could see men thrown twenty feet and more as their mounts ran into that long hillock of living flesh, saw them crushed under tons of thrashing horse. The sound was indescribable, the shrill womanish shrieking of the horses and the desperate wailing of men.

  Tacktacktacktacktacktacktack—

  A shell landed near one of the machine guns, probably by sheer chance, leaving a tangle of flesh and twisted metal. The others continued, concentrating on the main mass of stalled horsemen; individual riders came forward, and dismounted men—horses were bigger targets than humans. Some of them were firing their carbines as they came. Far beyond their range, but not that of the Landisch magazine-rifles, with high-velocity jacketed slugs and smokeless powder. Land riflemen opened up, the slower crack . . . crack . . . of their weapons contrasting with the rapid chatter of the machine guns.

  Imperials fell; the Land infantry could fire ten or twelve aimed rounds a minute, and they were all good shots. More green-uniformed soldiers crowded forward, some crawling, others running in short dashes. There were infantry in peaked caps among them now, as well as the dismounted cavalry. One of the big soft-lead slugs whipcracked by Jeffr
ey, uncomfortably close; he hugged the dirt tighter. Not far away a Land soldier sprawled backwards kicking and blowing a froth of air and blood through his smashed jaw. Others crawled forward to drag the wounded back to where the stretcher-bearers could get at them, then crawled back to their firing positions.

  “Hot work,” Heinrich said, propping himself up on his elbows. “Ah, I expected that.”

  More and more Imperials were filtering up, taking cover behind the piles of dead horses and men, working around the edges of the Land regiment. Steam hissed from the safety cap on the top of the jacket of the machine gun in front of the knoll; a Protégé soldier rose to fetch more water and pitched back with a grunt like a man belly-punched, curling around the wound in his stomach. He sprawled open-eyed after a second’s heel-drumming spasm, and another rose to take his place. The Chosen gunner wrapped her hand in a cloth and unscrewed the cap. Boiling water heaved upward and pattered down on the thirsty soil, disappearing instantly and leaving only a stain that looked exactly like that left by the soldiers blood. Soldiers poured their canteens into the weapon’s thirsty maw, and the gunner took the opportunity to switch barrels.

  “Sir! Hauptman Fedrof reports enemy moving to our left in force—several thousand of them. Infantry, with guns in support.”

  Jeffrey saw Heinrich frown, then unconsciously look behind to where the supports would be coming from . . . if they came.

  “Move one company of the reserve to the left. Refuse the flank, pull back a little to that irrigation ditch and laneway. Tell the mortars to fire in support on request. And Fahnrich Klinghoffer, get me a report on our ammunition reserves.”

  “Hot work,” Jeffrey said.

  “Watch it!” John barked involuntarily as the left wheels of his car nearly went into the ditch.

  The refugees were swarming on both sides of the road, trampling through the maize fields on both sides and gardens. Every once and a while they surged uncontrollably back onto the roadway, blocking the westbound troops in an inextricable snarl of handcarts, two- and four-wheeled oxcarts, mule-drawn military supply wagons, guns, limbers . . .

  “Take the turnoff up ahead,” he said, as the vehicle inched by a stalled sixteen-pounder field gun.

  The gun had a six-horse hitch, with a trooper riding on the off horse of every pair. They looked at him with incurious eyes, glazed with fatigue, bloodshot in stubbled, dirt-caked faces. The horses’ heads drooped likewise, lips blowing out in weary resignation. From the looks of them, the men had already been in action, and somebody had gotten this column organized and heading back towards the fight. For that matter, there were plenty of Imperial soldiers in the vast shapeless mob of refugees heading eastward away from the fighting—some in uniform and carrying their weapons, others shambling along in bits and pieces of battledress, a few bandaged, most not.

  The car crept along the column, the driver squeezing the bulb of the horn every few feet, heading west and towards the blood-red clouds of sunset. It was risky—the chances of meeting an officer who wasn’t particularly impressed with the son-in-law of the war minister increased with every day, and a car was valuable, even one with hoof-marks in the bodywork.

  Better than going the other way. When he was heading away from the fighting, the refugees kept trying to get aboard. It was really bad when the mothers held up their children; a few had even tried to toss the infants into the car.

  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 soc
ial 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?”