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’ll 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 Protégé 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.
&nb
sp; “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 enough 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.
I’m alive, she thought, staggering and letting the dead weight slip off the end of her knife. She took a step and stumbled; something had gouged a groove across her left thigh and she hadn’t even noticed. Gerta pushed away the pain while her hands automatically ejected the spent clip and reloaded the pistol. She moved forward, limping, up the slope to where the bulk of her unit should—should—be. Another parachute flare burst, and she threw herself down and crawled as machine-gun bullets whipcracked through the air where she had been. Spurts of sand and rock flicked into her face, and the wound was starting to hurt. The Land position ought to be just ahead . . . assuming there was anyone left alive besides that trigger-happy gunner who’d just come within a hair of sawing her in half.
“What a ratfuck.”
Boots nearly landed on him as the dirigible turned away. Something whipped across his body, hard enough to hurt: a sisal cable. Dozens of others were dropping down out of the night, and human forms were sliding down them. Two more nearly trampled on him, ignoring Jeffrey and the corpse in their rush; they did use the body of the man he’d just killed as a springboard. A half-dozen grappled with the big pallet that had nearly crushed him. Seconds later they were stripping out a heavy water-cooled machine gun with its tripod and ammunition, slapping it down and opening up on the masses of Imperial infantry caught charging to finish off the Land blocking force. Tracers whipped out through the darkness, iridescent green, like bars of St. Elmo’s fire. Infantry shook themselves out into their units and swept down the Land line, winkling out Imperials who’d made it that far.
Damn, I’ve never seen troops move that fast, he thought. They were in full marching kit, and they moved like leopards.
an all-chosen unit, Center observed. Jeffrey’s vision took on a flat brightness. identifying markers—The brightness strobed over unit badges.
They’ve been culling out the weakest ten percent of their own breed every generation for four hundred years, Raj said. And skimming off the top one or two percent of their Protégés at the same time. You’d expect it to show.
Jeffrey shuddered, even with rounds still splitting the air above him. It’s a good thing there aren’t more of them, he thought. There’d be no stopping them.
if there were more, Center observed, it would be impossible to support so large and so specialized a nonproductive class.
Always a lot fewer carnosauroids than grazers, Raj amplified.
The image that came with the thought made him shudder a moment even then: something man-sized and whip-slender, leaping to slash a bloody gouge in an ox’s side with a sickle-shaped claw on its hind foot, like a fighting cock grown big enough to scythe his belly open.
Heinrich was back on his feet, bellowing orders. Protégé troopers broke open boxes of ammunition, dashing back to their positions with cotton bandoliers around their necks and boxes of machine-gun belts in their hands.
Jeffrey did a three-point spin at a sound behind him, landing on hip and one hand. He froze as he found himself looking down the use-pitted muzzle of a Land automatic. A Chosen woman with captain’s insignia on her field-gray rose; short for one of that race, and dark, he could tell that even in the moonlight. Blood was runneling black down one thigh, where the uniform had been ripped open by a grazing shot.
“What the hell is a Santy doing here?” she said, standing, favoring the wounded leg a little.
“You!” Heinrich said, turning, a broad grin on his square face. “I might have known.”
“I was the closest—the marching reliefs ought to get here about dawn,” the woman said. “What the hell is a Santy officer doing with you, Heinrich?”
Closer, he could see the General Staff Intelligence Commando flashes on cuff and collar. Must be—
gerta hosten, captain, intelligence branch, Center supplied helpfully.
A dangerous one, son, Raj said. Be very careful.
Jeffrey could have told that. The eyes fastened on him were the coldest he’d ever seen, colder than the far side of the moon.
“Oh, we
picked him up in Corona,” Heinrich said.
“You should have turned him over to us, or the Fourth Bureau.”
“Well, he’s a neutral—and a relative of sorts, Johan’s foster-brother. At loose ends, the Santy legation in Corona stopped a couple of thousand-kilo bombs with its roof.”
“Jeffrey Farr,” Gerta said; she seemed to be filing and sorting information behind her eyes. “He’s a spook, Heinrich. You ought to shoot him.”
“I haven’t been showing him the plans for the new torpedo,” Heinrich said, a slight exasperation in his voice.
Gerta shrugged, and holstered her automatic. Jeffrey felt a slight prickle of relief. Unlikely that she’d just shoot him down as he stood—
probability 27%, ±7, Center said.
—but it was still a relief. She shrugged.
“It’s your command. Let’s get this ratfuck organized, shall we?”
“Ya.” Heinrich turned his head slightly, towards Jeffrey: “My wife, Captain Gerta Hosten.” Back to her: “What’s the theater situation?”
“FUBAR, but we’re winning—not exactly the way we expected to, but we are. Once this position’s blocked, General Summelworden’s got them in the kettle and we can turn up the heat; Ciano next. Where do you want my machine guns? And get me something to stop this leak, would you? I can’t keel over just yet.”
“Automatics over by—”
The conversation slid into technicalities. Heinrich waved at a passing medic who then knelt to put a pressure bandage on Gerta’s thigh.
Ciano next, Jeffrey thought. That’s going to be ugly.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Everything was calm and unhurried in the Imperial situation room. There was a huge map of the Empire on one wall, stuck with black pins to represent Land forces and green ones for Imperial. A relief map of the same territory stood in a sunken area in the center of the floor, with a polished mahogany rail around it, and enlisted men pushed unit counters with long-handled wooden rakes. One wall of the big room was all telephones and telegraphs, their operators scribbling on pads and handing them to decoders.
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