Hope Renewed

by S. M. Stirling

  It wasn’t the smoke that made Jeffrey Farr’s nose wrinkle as he dismounted and handed the reins to the Protégé groom who’d run at his stirrup from the remount corral at the edge of town. Nobody’d made an effort to find all the bodies in the wreckage either. Some of them must be liquescent by now. Well, he’d smelled plenty of other dead bodies in the past weeks. Humans weren’t as bad as horses, and nothing was as bad as a ripe mule.

  “So,” the Chosen colonel said with a grin, “I hope our honored guest found his tour of our new territories to have been an interesting one?”

  “Rather a change from the round of embassy parties I expected when I was posted to Ciano, that’s true, Heinrich,” Jeffrey said. Part of him wanted to bolt for the gangplank of the City of Dubuk, the three-stack liner chartered by the Santander government to repatriate its citizens through Corona. There was no need to do that. Heinrich liked him.

  And, God help him, he liked Heinrich. The blond colonel epitomized the virtues the Land inculcated in its Chosen citizens: courage, steadfastness, self-reliance, and self-sacrifice.

  You don’t have to hate them, lad, said Raj Whitehall in Jeffrey’s mind. Just crush them the way you would a scorpion.

  Though Jeffrey’d seen plenty to hate as well.

  Jeffrey lifted the rucksacks paired to either side of his saddlehorn and threw them over his left shoulder. He’d picked up his kit on the move. Clothing, mostly; all of it Land-issue. Life with Heinrich’s fire brigade was dangerous enough without being mistaken for an Imperial infiltrator. He’d replace it on board if possible. Already late arrivals boarding the Dubuk were giving him hard looks.

  “Very luxurious, no doubt,” Heinrich said, eyeing the liner critically. “Well, I don’t begrudge you that. I’m looking forward to a transient officers’ hostel with clean sheets tonight myself. And a few someones to warm them with me, not so?”

  The City of Dubuk’s whistle blew a two-note warning: a minute till the gangplank rose. Crewmen were already taking aboard lines preparatory to undocking. If Jeffrey had missed this ship, he would have had to take a freighter to the Land and there transship to Santander. At least for the present the Chosen had embargoed all regular trade between their newly conquered territories and the rest of Visager.

  a pity, that, said Center. but clandestine supply routes into the area will be sufficient to support our low-intensity guerilla operations.

  Jeffrey was very glad he was here to board the Dubuk. After the campaign he’d just watched, he didn’t want to be around the Chosen any longer than necessary.

  “Thank you for your hospitality, Heinrich,” he said. “And your help in getting me here in time to save a long swim home.”

  Heinrich laughed and leaned from his saddle to clasp Jeffrey Chosen-fashion, forearm-to-forearm with hands gripping beneath one another’s elbow. “An excuse to take my troops out of the field,” he said as he straightened. “I’m not the only one who appreciates a little rest and recreation.”

  The Dubuk’s whistle blew its full three-note call. Heinrich kicked his horse forward so that its forehooves rested on the gangplank. The animal whickered nervously at the hollow sound. A sailor on the deck above shouted a curse.

  “Go then, my friend,” Heinrich said. He smiled. “And tell the person who just spoke that if his tongue wags again, I will ride aboard and add it to my other trophies.”

  Jeffrey started up before someone on shipboard said the wrong thing in trying to clear the gangplank. He knew Heinrich too well to take the threat as a joke.

  Nor would I count on the fact he likes you making much difference in the way Heinrich carries out his duties, lad, Raj said. Nor should it, of course.

  A middle-aged civilian and the Dubuk’s purser waited for Jeffrey at the head of the ramp. Their grim expressions faded to guarded question when they viewed the diplomatic passport he offered them.

  Jeffrey tugged the sleeve of his Land uniform tunic. “I was in the wrong place when the fighting broke out,” he said in a low voice. “If you can help me find the sort of clothes human beings wear, I’d be more than grateful.”

  “Jeffrey, my friend?” Heinrich called as he let his nervous horse step back. A hydraulic winch immediately began to haul the gangplank aboard. “When you have rested, come visit me again. These animals will be providing sport for years, no matter what the Council says!”

  Jeffrey waved cheerfully, then moved away from the railing. If Heinrich could no longer see him, he was less likely to shout something that would put Jeffrey even more on the wrong side of an us-and-them divide with everyone else aboard the City of Dubuk. “Needs must when the Devil drives,” he murmured to the men beside him.

  “You’re related to John Hosten, I believe, sir?” the civilian asked in a neutral voice.

  his name is beemer, Center said. he is deputy director of the ministry’s research desk, though his cover is consular affairs.

  “John’s my brother,” Jeffrey said thankfully. “Stepbrother, really, but we’re very close.”

  Beemer nodded. “I’ll see about replacing your clothes, sir,” he said. To the purser he added, “Ferrington? I only need one of the rooms in my suite. I suggest we put Captain Farr in the other one. I know his brother.”

  The purser still looked puzzled, but he shrugged and said, “Certainly, Mr. Beemer. Captain Farr? That’ll be Suite F on the Boat Deck. Would you like a steward to take your luggage there?”

  The City of Dubuk blew a deep blast. The pair of tugboats on the vessel’s harbor side shrilled an answer. Their propellers churned water, taking up the slack in the hawsers binding them to the liner.

  Jeffrey hefted his saddlebags with a wan smile. “Thank you, I think I’ll be able to manage on my own,” he said. “If you gentlemen don’t mind, I’ll watch the undocking from the bow.”

  “Of course,” said Beemer equably. “I hope you’ll have time during the trip to chat with me about your recent experiences.”

  “Whatever you’d care to do, captain,” the purser said. “So far as the crew of the City of Dubuk is concerned, this is an ordinary commercial voyage. We’re here to assist you.”

  Jeffrey paused. “For a while there,” he said, “I didn’t think I’d ever see home alive.”

  And that was the truth if he’d ever told it. He bowed to the two men and walked forward. The deck shivered with the vibration of the tugs’ engines.

  Center? he asked. Did Dad think Eberdorf would attack the harbor while he was there?

  There was no chance of that, lad, Raj said. Commander Eberdorf spent the past three years at a desk in the navy’s central offices in Oathtaking. She’s too politically savvy to start a second major war while the first one’s going on.

  The City of Dubuk swayed as she came away from the dock. The lead tug signaled with three quick chirps.

  But did Dad know that? Jeffrey demanded.

  your father does not have access to the database that informs your decisions—and those of raj, Center replied after a pause that could only be deliberate. nor does he have my capacity for analysis available to him. he viewed the chance of combat as not greater than one in ten, and the risk of all-out war resulting from such combat as in the same order of probability.

  Jeffrey put his hand on the wooden railing. It had the sticky roughness of salt deposited since a deckhand had wiped it down this morning.

  Dad thought the risk was better than living with the alternative.

  At the time Jeffrey’s link through Center had showed him the scene on the bridge of the McCormick City, his own eyes had been watching Heinrich and two aides torturing a twelve-year-old boy to learn where his father, the town’s mayor, had concealed the arms from the police station.

  The ship swayed again, this time from the torque of her central propeller as she started ahead dead slow.

  I was so frightened . . . but I’d never have spoken to Dad again if he’d permitted a massacre like the ones I watched.

  I had men like your father serving u
nder me, Raj said. They could only guess at the things Center would have known, but they still managed to act the way I’d have done.

  The City of Dubuk whistled again, long and raucously, as all three propellers began to churn water in the direction of home.

  I’ve always thought those people were the greatest good fortune of my career, Raj added.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Gerta Hosten spat in the dry dust of the village street.

  “Leutnant, just what the fik do you think you’re doing?” she asked.

  “Setting the animals an example!” the young officer said.

  “An example of what—how to show courage and resistance?” she asked.

  The subject of their dispute hung head-down from a rope tied around his ankles and looped over a stout limb of the live oak that shaded the village well. He spat, too, in her direction, then returned to a cracked, tuneless rendition of “Imperial Glory,” the former Empire’s national anthem. Two hundred or so peasants and artisans stood and watched behind a screen of Protégé infantry; the town’s gentry, priests, and other potential troublemakers had already been swept up. The packed villagers smelled of sweat and hatred, their eyes furtive except for a few with the courage to glare. The sun beat down, hot even by Land standards on this late-summer day, but dry enough to make her throat feel gritty.

  Gerta sighed, drew her Lauter automatic, jacked the slide, and fired one round into the hanging man’s head from less than a meter distance. The flat elastic crack echoed back from the whitewashed stone houses surrounding the village square and from the church that dominated it. The civilians jerked back with a rippling murmur; the Protégé troopers watched her with incurious ox-eyed calm. Blood and bone fragments and glistening bits of brain spattered across the feet of the Protégé who had been waiting with a barbed whip. He gaped in surprise, lifting one foot and then another in slow bewilderment.

  “Hauptman—”

  “Shut up.” Gerta ejected the magazine, returned it to the pouch on her belt beside the holster, and snapped a fresh one into the well of the pistol. “Come.”

  She put her hand on the lieutenant’s shoulder and guided him aside a few steps, leaning toward him confidentially. Young as he was, she didn’t think he mistook the smile on her face for an expression of friendliness; on the other hand, she was a full captain and attached to General Staff Intelligence, so he’d probably listen at least a little.

  “What exactly did you have planned?” she said.

  “Why . . . ammunition was found in the animal’s dwelling. I was to execute him, shoot five others taken at random, and then burn the village.”

  Gerta sighed again. “Leutnant, the logic of our communication with the animals is simple.” She clenched one hand and held it before his nose. “It goes like this: ‘Dog, here is my fist. Do what I want, or I will hit you with it.’”

  “Ya, Hauptman—”

  “Shut up. Now, there is an inherent limitation to this form of communication. You can only burn their houses down once—thereby reducing agricultural production in this vicinity by one hundred percent. You can only kill them once. Whereupon they cease to be potentially useful units of labor and become so much dead meat . . . and pork is much cheaper. Do you grasp my meaning, boy?”

  “Nein, Hauptman.”

  This time Gerta repressed the sigh. “Terror is an effective tool of control, but only if it is applied selectively. There is nothing in the universe more dangerous than someone with nothing to lose. If you flog a man to death for having two shotgun shells—loaded with birdshot, he probably simply forgot them—then what incentive is left to prevent them from active resistance?”

  “Oh.”

  The junior officer looked as if he was thinking, which was profoundly reassuring. No Chosen was actually stupid; the Test of Life screened out low IQs quite thoroughly, and had for many generations. That didn’t mean that Chosen couldn’t be willfully stupid, though—over-rigid, ossified.

  “So. You must apply a graduated scale of punishment. Remember, we are not here to exterminate these animals, tempting though the prospect is.”

  Gerta looked over at the villagers. It was extremely tempting, the thought of simply herding them all into the church and setting it on fire. Perhaps that would be the best policy: just kill off the Empire’s population and fill up the waste space with the natural increase of the Land’s Protégés. But no. Behfel ist behfel. That would be far too slow, no telling what the other powers would get up to in the meantime. Besides, it was the destiny of the Chosen to rule all the rest of humankind; first here on Visager, ultimately throughout the universe, for all time. Genocide would be a confession of failure, in that sense.

  “No doubt the ancestors of our Protégés were just as unruly,” the infantry lieutenant said thoughtfully. “However, we domesticated them quite successfully.”

  “Indeed.” Although we had three centuries of isolation for that, and even so I sometimes have my doubts. “Carry on, then.”

  “What would you suggest, Hauptmann?”

  Gerta blinked against the harsh sunlight. “Have you been in garrison here long?”

  “Just arrived—the area was lightly swept six months ago, but nobody’s been here since.”

  She nodded; the Empire was so damned big, after the strait confines of the Land. Maps just didn’t convey the reality of it, not the way marching or flying across it did.

  “Well, then . . . let your troopers make a selection of the females and have a few hours’ recreation. Have the rest of the herd watch. From reports, this is an effective punishment of intermediate severity.”

  “It is?” The lieutenant’s brows rose in puzzlement.

  “Animal psychology,” Gerta said, drawing herself up and saluting.

  “Jawohl. Zum behfel, Hauptman. I will see to it.”

  Gerta watched him stride off and then vaulted into her waiting steamcar, one hand on the rollbar.

  “West,” she said to the driver.

  The long dusty road stretched out before her, monotonous with rolling hills. Fields of wheat and barley and maize—the corn was tasseling out, the small grains long cut to stubble—and pasture, with every so often a woodlot or orchard, every so often a white-walled village beside a small stream. Dust began to plume up as the driver let out the throttle, and she pulled her neckerchief up over her nose and mouth. The car was coated with the dust and smelled of the peppery-earthy stuff, along with the strong horse-sweat odor of the two Protégé riflemen she had along for escort.

  Wealth, I suppose, she thought, looking at the countryside she was surveying for her preliminary report. Warm and fertile and sufficiently well-watered, without the Land’s problems of leached soil and erosion and tropical insects and blights. Room for the Chosen to grow.

  “We’re in the situation of the python that swallowed the pig,” she muttered to herself. “Just a matter of time, but uncomfortable in the interval.” That was the optimistic interpretation.

  Sometimes she thought it was more like the flies who’d conquered the flypaper.

  “Mama!”

  Young Maurice Hosten stumped across the grass of the lawn on uncertain eighteen-month legs. Pia Hosten waited, crouching and smiling, the long gauzy white skirts spread about her, and a floppy, flower-crowned hat held down with one hand.

  “Mama!”

  Pia scooped the child up, laughing. John smiled and turned away, back toward the view over the terrace and gardens. Beyond the fence was what had been a sheep pasture, when this house near Ensburg was the headquarters for a ranch. Ensburg had grown since the Civil War, grown into a manufacturing city of half a million souls; most of the ranch had been split up into market gardens and dairy farms as the outskirts approached, and the old manor had become an industrialists weekend retreat. It still was, the main change being that the owner was John Hosten . . . and that he used it for more than recreation.

  “Come on, everybody,” he said.

  The party picked up their drinks and w
alked down toward the fence. It was a mild spring afternoon, just warm enough for shirtsleeves but not enough to make the tailcoats and cravats some of the guests wore uncomfortable. They found places along the white-painted boards, in clumps and groups between the beech trees planted along it. Out in the close-cropped meadow stood a contraption built of wire and canvas and wood, two wings and a canard ahead of them, all resting on a tricycle undercarriage of spoked wheels. A man sat between the wings, his hands and feet on the controls, while two more stood behind on the ground with their hands on the pusher-prop attached to the little radial engine.

  “For your sake I hope this works, son,” Maurice Farr said sotto voce, as he came up beside John. He took a sip at his wine seltzer and smoothed back his graying mustache with his forefinger.

  “You don’t think this is actually the first trial, do you, Dad?” John said with a quiet smile.

  The ex-commodore—he had an admiral’s stars and anchors on his epaulets now—laughed and slapped John on the shoulder. “I’m no longer puzzled at how you became that rich that quickly,” he said.

  If you only knew, Dad, John thought.

  wind currents are now optimum, Center hinted.

  “Go!” John called.

  “Contact!” Jeffrey said from the pilots seat, lowering the goggles from the brow of his leather helmet to his eyes. The long silk scarf around his neck fluttered in the breeze.