The Chosen

by S. M. Stirling

  this is what the world will be, for the rest of your life, Center said.

  * * *

  "You sure?" Jeffrey said.

  Lucretzia nodded, looking down the street. "I am a danger to you. And you to me. Alone, I can fade into the city. Alone, you can move quickly—or find an enemy officer who will respect your neutrality."

  The Imperial woman leaned forward and kissed him lightly. "I have the code. I will be in touch, Jeffrey. And thank you."

  "You're welcome," he muttered, shaking his head.

  a prudent decision, Center observed. chances of survival are optimized for both individuals.

  "I still don't like it," Jeffrey said.

  You'll like what comes next even less, lad, Raj said at the back of his mind. You'd better find an officer and turn yourself in.

  chances of personal survival roughly equivalent to attempted flight in that scenario, Center said. mission parameters—

  "I know, I know, mission first," he said. "Let's do it."

  Reluctantly, he laid down the rifle he'd taken from the body of the Protégé trooper. Logically, he should already be inside the Chosen unit's skirmisher screen. Depending on how closely they were following Land doctrine, and how screwed up things had gotten . . .

  He began ghosting down the street, staying close to the buildings and pausing to listen. It was late afternoon, the sun cruelly beautiful as it slanted through the hazy air. He could hear the heavy crumping of explosions from the south, down towards the river basin and the factory district. And closer, a rhythmic tramping.

  He ducked into a doorway, the carved jamb and edge providing a little cover. A platoon of Land infantry were coming down the street, on alternate sides by eight-trooper squads; jog-trotting effortlessly with their bayonetted rifles across their chests at the port. And yes, an officer with them.

  "Gestan!" he called out in Landisch. "Wait! Nie shessn! Don't shoot!"

  A whistle blew, and the platoon went to earth in trained unison, weapons bristling outward. He stepped forward, hands in the air and uneasily conscious of how his testicles were trying to crawl up into his stomach.

  "Attention!" he barked at the two Protégé riflemen who came running up at a crouch.

  They stiffened instinctively at the bark in upper-class Landisch.

  "Take me to your officer immediately," he went on, walking past them at a brisk stride and tucking his swagger stick under his left arm. He could hear the silence of hesitation behind him, and then the clack of hobnails on the brick pathway as they followed. Doubtless the points of the bayonets were hovering an inch or so from his kidneys. Got to maintain the momentum.

  The officer was waiting with a folded map in her hand and a bulky automatic pistol in the other. Blue eyes narrowed as they recognized his brown Santander uniform, and he could sense thoughts moving behind them. She's in the middle of a mission and doesn't need complications, Jeffrey thought. The hand holding the pistol gave a slight unconscious twitch. One bullet in the head, and there's no complication at all. If anyone found his body, it would be an unfortunate accident.

  "Captain, Jeffrey Farr, Army of the Republic," he said, saluting casually with a touch of the swagger stick to the brim of his peaked cap. "Congratulations, fahnrich, on a soldierly job of work—taking a city this size by storm is quite an accomplishment!"

  He extended his hand. The Chosen officer took it automatically; at close range he could see that she wasn't more than twenty, under the cropped hair and hard muscularity. There was a trace of baffled hesitation at this glib stranger who spoke the tongue of the Chosen like a native. He gave a firm squeeze and pumped the hand up and down once.

  Good work, Raj said. Personal contact always makes it a little more difficult to shoot someone.

  "Most impressive. Now, since you've got the situation well in hand, if I could trouble you for an escort to your colonel?"

  * * *

  "Jeffrey Farr?" the Chosen colonel said. His square, blond-stubbled face split in an unexpected smile. "Well, I'll be cursed. We're relatives, of a sort—Colonel Heinrich Hosten, at your service, Captain."

  The command post was set up in a small park, a few officers grouped around tables carried out from nearby houses. Heinrich Hosten was a big man, easily an inch or two over Jeffrey's six feet, and broad-shouldered, slab-built. A pair of field glasses were hanging around his neck, and there was a square of surgical gauze lightly spotted with blood taped to the side of his bull neck.

  He spoke fairly loudly; a battery of mule-drawn field guns was trotting by on the stone-block pavement beyond the park; Jeffreys mind catalogued them automatically, M-298's, the new standard piece—75mm calibre, split trail, shield, hydropneumatic recuperators that returned the tube to battery position after every round. Behind them came a brace of field ambulances, also mule-drawn—the animals looked as if they'd been commandeered locally—that pulled aside to let stretcher-bearers take their contents to a church being used as an aid station. More troops were marching up from the harbor, passing the banner and waiting motorcycle couriers of the regimental HQ.

  Jeffrey smiled back at the Chosen colonel. Damned dangerous man, he thought, remembering John's description. Not at all the guileless bruiser he looked. Smart. Dedicated.

  Bet he's glad of an audience, Raj said. These johnnies haven't fought a war in a long time. They're good, but they want to show off, too.

  "Looks like you caught the dagoes asleep at the tiller," Jeffrey said, turning and shading his eyes with his hand. He touched the cased glasses at his side with his hand. "If you don't mind?"

  "Klim-bim," Heinrich said; a useful Chosen expression which could mean anything from affirmative to all's right with the world.

  Jeffrey focused the glasses. Nothing was left of the Imperial fleet that he could see; black stains on the surface, the protruding masts of a couple of battlewagons. Fire and billowing columns of dark smoke marked the naval basin; warships and merchantmen were burning, sinking, or listing all over the harbor. Black flags with golden sunbursts marked both the great fortresses at the entrance to the harbor, although Fort Ricardo on the south had the burnt-out skeleton of a dirigible draped over it. The Land's flag also flew over the governor's palace off to the west, and the city hall and railway station directly south. Fires were burning out of control in a dozen places, vivid against the dusk of evening, and there was a continuous staccato crackle of small-arms fire over the mass of tile rooftops.

  "Looks like you've cut them up into pockets," Jeffrey said.

  "Ja. Easier than we anticipated. Speed and planning and impact. There were a lot of them, but we had the jump from the beginning. Light casualties."

  "And you had those . . . what are they called, those moving fortresses?"

  "Tanks." Heinrich snorted, and a few of the other officers smiled sourly. "Terrifying when they work, which is less than half the time. We're supposed to have one here."

  Jeffrey turned his glasses northward; the city suburbs thinned out from here, although it was harder to see since there wasn't a slope over the intervening ground.

  "You're preparing for counterattack?" he said.

  Heinrich laughed again and jerked a thumb at the dirigible passing overhead. "I love those things," he said. "We dropped battalion-sized task forces with lots of automatic weapons at the road-rail junctions halfway to Veron. The wops have something like six divisions concentrating there, but there's no way they can do a damned thing for a week—and by then we'll have linked up with the airborne forces, plus we'll have landed the better part of an army corps."

  Jeffrey nodded, pasting a smile on his face. That seemed like a very good analysis. But there were times when you wanted so badly to be wrong.

  "Impressive," he said.

  Heinrich laughed heartily. "Stay with us for a while," he said. "And we'll show you impressive."

  CHAPTER SIX

  "In the sight of Almighty God, God the Parent, God the Child, God the Spirit, I pronounce these two as one. What God has
joined, let none dare put asunder."

  John Hosten gripped Pia's hand, conscious that his own was slightly damp and sweaty. The long embroidered cord was bound around their joined hands and wrists in the ritual knot. Incense rose towards the tall vaulted ceding of the cathedral. The wedding party was small and sparse, old Count del'Cuomo in his dress outfit, a few other men in Imperial field uniform, some friends from the embassy. They rattled like a handful of peas in the huge, dim, scented stone bulk of the place, lost in the patterns of light from the stained-glass windows that occupied most of its walls.

  He raised her veil and kissed her, soft contact and a scent of verbena.

  The priest raised his staff for the blessing, then halted, listening.

  They all did, and looked upward. A dull crump . . . crump . . . came in the distance; everyone in Ciano knew that sound now. Hundred-kilo bombs from a Chosen dirigible bomber, working its way across the sky at two thousand meters.

  "Down by the docks," John whispered to himself, "trying for the gasworks."

  probability 93%, ±2, Center said.

  "John!"

  He looked down at Pia. Her lips were fixed in determination. "This is my wedding day. I will not let those tedeschi pigs interfere with it."

  Pia's tone was conversational, but it carried in the stillness of the cathedral. A murmur of approval went through the watchers. John could feel Raj smiling at the back of his mind.

  You're a lucky man.

  "I am a lucky man," John murmured aloud.

  count no man lucky until he is dead, Center observed.

  * * *

  The open-topped car hummed down the roadway, gravel crunching under the hard rubber of its wire-spoked wheels, throwing a rooster-tail of dust behind it. Shade flicked welcome across John's face from the plane trees planted beside it, each one whitewashed to the height of a man's chest. Through the gaps he could see the fields, mostly wheat in this district, with the harvest just finishing. Stocks of shocked grain drew a lacy pattern across the level fields; here and there peasants were finishing off a corner of a poplar-lined field with flashing sickles. Ox-drawn carts were in the field, piled high with yellow grain, hauling the harvest to the barns and threshing floors; the laborers would spend the rainy winter beating out the grain with flails.

  Damn, but that's backward, John thought, holding the map across his knees with his hands to keep the wind from fluttering it. At home in Santander, all the bigger farms had horse-drawn reapers these days, and portable steam threshing machines had been around for a generation.

  Downright homelike for me, Raj said. Except that there weren't many places on Bellevue as fertile as this. Fattest peasants I've ever seen.

  The road climbed slightly, through fields planted to alfalfa, and then into hilly vineyards around a white-painted village. He scrubbed at his driving goggles with the tail-end of his silk scarf and squinted. The guidebooks said the village had a "notable square bell tower" and a minor palazzo.

  "Castello Formaso," John called ahead to the driver. "This ought to be it."

  It was; most of an Imperial cavalry brigade were camped in and around the town. Cavalry wore tight scarlet pants and bottle-green jackets, with a high-combed brass helmet topped with plumes, and they were armed with sabers, revolvers, and short single-shot carbines. You could follow those polished brass helmets a long way; there were patrols out all across the plain to the west of town, riding down laneways and across fields and pastures, disappearing into the shade of orchards and coming out again on the other side. The troopers closer to hand were watering their horses or working on tack or doing the other thousand and one chores a mounted unit needed.

  The road was thick with mounted men, parting reluctantly to the insistent squeeee-beep! of the car's horn. Animals shied or kicked at the unfamiliar sound; one connected with the bodywork in an expensive and tooth-grating crunch of varnished ashwood.

  Then the car swerved under a brutal wrench at the wheel. John looked up from his map in the back seat as it flung him against the sidewall; his broad-brimmed hat went over into the roadside dust. A dirigible was passing overhead, nosing out of a patch of cloud at about six thousand feet. A six-hundred-footer, Eagle-class, reconnaissance model. Some of the Imperial cavalry were popping away at the airship with their carbines, and in the village square ahead they had an improvised antiaircraft mounting for a gatling gun—a U-shaped iron framework on a set of gears and cams. The carbines were merely a nuisance, but letting off six hundred rounds a minute straight up was a menace.

  "You there!" John barked, tapping the shoulder of his driver. The car came to a halt with a tail-wagging emphasis as the man stood on the brakes. John vaulted out over the rear door and strode towards the gatling.

  "You there!" John continued, rapping at the frame with his cane for emphasis. The Imperial NCO in charge looked up. "That thing is out of range, and you'd be dropping spent rounds all over town. Do not open fire."

  The soldier braced to attention at a gentleman's voice. John nodded curtly and turned to where the cavalry brigade's command group were sitting under a vine-grown pergola in the courtyard of the village taverna.

  Nothing wrong with their nerves, John thought. The portly brigadier had his uniform jacket unbuttoned, his half-cloak across the back of his chair, and a huge plate of pasta and breaded veal in front of him. Several straw-wrapped bottles of the local vintage kept the food company. He looked up as John rapped out his orders at the gatling crew, his face purpling with rage as the stranger strode over to his table.

  "And who the hell are you? Teniente, get this civilian out of here!"

  John bowed with a quick jerk of his head, suppressing an impulse to click heels. Showing Chosen habits was not the way to make yourself popular around here right now.

  "I am John Hosten, accredited chargé d'affaires with the Embassy of the Republic of Santander," he said crisply. He pulled out a sheaf of documents. "Here are my credentials."

  "I don't care shit for—" The Imperial officer stopped, paling slightly under his five o'clock shadow. "The signore John Hosten who married Pia del'Cuomo?"

  Who is the favorite daughter of the Minister of War, yes, John thought. "The same, sir," he continued aloud. "Here to observe the course of the war."

  "Excellent!" the brigadier said, a little too heartily, mopping his mouth on a checkered linen napkin. "We drove these pig-grunting beasts into the sea once before centuries ago, and you can watch it done again!"

  A murmur of agreement came from the other officers around the table, in a wave of wineglasses and elegant cigarette holders. Polished boots struck the flagstones in emphasis. John inclined his head.

  Considering that we're four hundred kilometers west of Corona and he doesn't know fuck-all about where the enemy's main force is, I'd say that was just a little over-optimistic, Raj commented dryly.

  "Brigadier Count Damiano del'Ostro," the portly cavalryman said, extending a hand. "At your service, signore."

  John shook the plump, beautifully manicured hand extended to him in a waft of cologne and garlic, and looked up. The Land dirigible was gliding away on a curving pathway that would take it miles to the east, down the road to the capital and then back towards the Pada River near Veron. According to the newspapers, a strong Imperial garrison was holding out in that river port, preventing the Land's forces from using it to supply their forward elements.

  You could believe as much of that as you wanted to. John did know that at least ten Imperial infantry divisions and two of cavalry were concentrating—slowly—at a rail junction about fifty miles east; he'd driven through them that morning. The dirigible was doing about seventy-five miles an hour. It would be there in three-quarters of an hour, and reporting back in two. John looked back at the cavalry commander, who was supposed to be locating the Land's armies and screening the Imperial forces from observation.

  "You've located the enemy force, Brigadier del'Ostro?" he said.

  The brigadier twirled at one of his waxed mu
stachios. "Soon, soon—our cavalry screen is bound to make contact soon. The cowards refuse to engage our cavalry under any circumstances. Why, their cavalry are mounted on mules, if you can believe it."

  "The Land doesn't have any cavalry, strictly speaking," John pointed out gently. "They have some mounted infantry units on mules, yes. One mule to two men; they take turns riding. They march very quickly."

  Del'Ostro laughed heartily and slapped a hand to his saber. "Without cavalry, they will be blind and helpless. Desperate they must already be; do you know, they let women into their army?"

  John smiled politely with the chorus of laughter. I hope you never meet my foster-sister, he thought. Then again, considering that you're partly responsible for this, I hope you do meet Gerta.

  "Come, I'll show you how my men scout!" del'Ostro said.

  He threw the napkin to the table and strode out, buckling his tunic and calling orders. He and his staff headed towards four Santander-made touring cars, evidently the mechanized element of this outfit. Guards crashed to attention, a drum rolled, a bugle sounded, and Brigadier Count del'Ostro mounted to the backseat, standing and holding the pole of a standard mounted in a bracket at the side of the car.

  "Hate to think what those spurs are doing to the upholstery," John murmured to himself—in Santander English, which the driver did not speak. "Follow," he added in Imperial. "But not too close."

  "Si, signore," the driver said.

  John opened a wicker container bolted to the rear of the front seat and brought out his field glasses; big bulky things, Sierra-made, the best on the market.

  "Halt," he said after a moment.

  Steam chuffed, and the engine hissed to a stop. The car coasted and then braked to one side of the road, under the shade of a plane tree. John pushed up his driving goggles again and leaned his elbows on the padded leather of the chauffeur's seat.

  Brigadier del'Ostro had forgotten his foreign audience in his enthusiasm. His party swept down the long straight road in a plume of dust and a chorus of loyal cries; the mounted units using the road scattered into the ditches, not a few troopers losing their seats. One light field gun went over on its side, taking half its team with it, and lay with the upper wheel spinning in the cars' wake. John ignored them, scanning to the west over the rolling patchwork of grainfields and pasture. There weren't any peasants in that direction; he supposed they were too sensible to linger when the Imperial cavalry screen arrived.