Authors: S.M. Stirling,David Drake
Henforth steepled his fingers and waited.
“And,” John went on after the silence stretched, “I’d be willing to buy say, five hundred thousand shares of River Electric at par. Also licensing fees from the patent would be assigned.”
“It’s definitely an interesting proposition,” Henforth said, smiling. “Come, we’ll go up to the executive lounge on the roof and discuss this further with some of our technical people.” He shook his head. “A young man of your capacities is wasted in the diplomatic service, Mr. Hosten. Wasted.”
“Skirmish order!”
The infantry platoon fanned out, three meters between each man, in two long lines. The first line jogged forward across the rocky pasture, their fixed bayonets glittering in the chilly upland air. Fifty meters forward they went to ground, taking cover behind ridges and boulders. The second line moved up and leapfrogged forward in turn.
Ensign Jeffrey Farr watched carefully through his field-glasses. The movement was carried out with precision.
Good men,
he thought. The Republic’s army wasn’t large, only seventy thousand men. It wasn’t particularly well-paid or equipped, either; the men mostly enlisted because it was the employer of last resort. Bottle troubles, wife troubles, farm kids bored beyond endurance with watching the south end of a northbound plowhorse, sheer inability to cope with the chaotic demands of civilian life in the Republic’s fast-growing cities. They could still make good soldiers if you gave them the right training, and trained men would be invaluable when the balloon went up. The provincial militias were supposed to be federalized in time of war, but as they stood he had little confidence in them.
He raised his hand in a signal. The platoon sergeant blew a sharp blast on his whistle and the men rose from the field, slapping at the dust on their brown tunic jackets. Their stubbled faces looked impassive and tired after the month of field exercises through the mountains.
“Good work, Ensign,” his company commander nodded. Captain Daniels was a thickset man of forty—promotion was slow in the peacetime army—with a scar across one cheek where a Union bullet had just missed taking off his face in a skirmish twenty years ago.
“Very good work,” the staff observer said. “I notice you’re spreading the skirmish line thinner.”
“Yes, sir,” Jeff said. He nodded at an infantryman jogging by with his weapon at the trail. It was a bolt-action model with six cartridges in a tube magazine below the barrel. “Everyone’s getting magazine rifles these days, except the Imperials, and new designs are coming fast and furious. We’ve got to disperse formations more.”
Although to hear some of the fogies talk, they expected to fight in shoulder-to-shoulder ranks like Civil War troops equipped with rifle-muskets.
“Yes, I read that article of yours in the
Armed Forces Quarterly,
” the staff type said. “You think nitro powders will be adopted for small arms?”
major belmody,
Center said. A list of biographical data followed.
The major looked pretty sharp, if a little elegant for the field in his greatcoat and red throat-tabs and polished Sam Browne. And being a younger son of the Belmody Mills Belmodys probably hadn’t hurt his rise through the officer corps either; thirty-two was damned young to get that high.
“I’m certain of it, sir,” Jeff said. The Belmodys were big in chemicals and mining explosives. “No smoke, less fouling, and much higher muzzle velocities, flatter trajectories, smaller calibers so the troops can carry more ammo.”
Captain Daniels spoke unexpectedly. “
I
don’t trust jacketed bullets,” he said. “They have a tendency to strip and then tumble when the barrel’s hot.”
“Sir, that’s just a development problem. Gilding metal can’t take the temperatures of high-velocity rounds. Cupronickel, or straight copper, that’s what needed.”
The older officer smiled. “Ensign, I wish I was half as confident about anything as you are about everything.”
“God knows we could use some young firebrands in this man’s army,” Major Belmody said. “In any case, you and Ensign Farr must dine with me tonight.”
“After I see the men settled in, sir,” Jeff said. The major raised an eyebrow and nodded, returning his juniors’ salutes.
“You’ll do, Farr,” Captain Daniels said, grinning, when the staff officer’s car had bounced away over the pasture with an occasional
chuff
of waste steam. “You’ll go far, too, if you can learn to be a little more diplomatic about who you deliver lectures to.”
Lieutenant Gerta Hosten leaned back against the upholstery of the seat and watched out the half-open window as the train clacked its way across the central plateau. The air coming in was clean; this close to Copernik the line had been electrified, and the lack of coal smoke and the pounding, chuffing sound of a steam locomotive was a little eerie. There was plenty of traffic on the broad concrete-surfaced road that flanked the railway, too, steam or animal-drawn. This was the most pleasant part of the Land, a rolling volcanic upland at a thousand meters above sea level, cooler and a little drier. The capital had been moved here from Oathtaking only a generation after the first wave of Alliance refugees arrived. Copernik’s beginnings went back before the coming of the Chosen, right back to the initial settlement of Visager, but nothing remained of the pre-conquest city. Over the past generation as geothermal steam and then hydropower supplemented coal, it had also become a major manufacturing center.
Gerta watched with interest as rolling contour-plowed fields of sugar cane, rice, soya, and maize gave way to huge factory compounds. One of them held an airship assembly shed, a hundred-meter skeletal structure like a Brobdingnagian barn. The cigar-shaped hull was still a framework of girders, with only patches of hull-cladding where aluminum sheet was being riveted to the structure.
She buttoned the collar of her field-gray walking-out uniform, buckled on her gunbelt with the shoulder-strap, and took up her attaché case. Normally she’d have let her batman carry that, but there were eyes-only documents in it. Nothing ultra-secret, or she wouldn’t be carrying them on a train, but procedure was procedure.
Behfel ist Behfel,
she recited to herself: orders are orders. She also had a letter from John Hosten in there. Evidently he was doing well down in the Republic; he’d gotten some sort of posting in their diplomatic service.
It was a pity about John.
“Wake up,
feldwebel,
” she said.
Her batman blinked open his eyes and stood, taking down the two bags from the overhead rack. Pedro was a thickset muscular man in his thirties, strong and quick and apparently loyal as a Doberman guard dog. Also about as bright; in fact, she’d owned dogs with more mother-wit and larger vocabularies. It was policy to exclude the upper two-thirds of the intelligence gradient when recruiting soldiers and gendarmes from the Protégé caste. She had her doubts about that, and she’d always preferred bright ones as personal servants. More risk, but greater potential gain.
Behfel ist behfel.
Hie train lurched slightly as it slowed. The pantograph on the locomotive clicked amid a shower of sparks as they pulled into the Northwest Station. There were many tall blond young men in uniform there, but not the one she instinctively sought. Heinrich wouldn’t be waiting for her; that wouldn’t be seemly, and anyway she had to report to Intelligence HQ for debriefing.
My lovely Heinrich, she thought. I’d fuck you even if you were my birth-brother. An exaggeration, but he was a dear, and of course incest taboos didn’t apply to adoptee-kin. And this time when you ask me to marry you, I’m going to say yes.
The implications of the documents in her attaché case were clear, if you could read between the paragraphs. It was time to do her eugenic duty to the Chosen; even with servants, infants took up a lot of time and effort. Best do it while there was time.
In a couple of years, they were all going to be very, very busy.
CHAPTER THREE
1233 A.F.
317 Y.O.
Looks different from a Protégé’s point of view,
John Hosten thought, carefully slumping his shoulders.
He was walking the streets of Oathtaking in the drab cotton coat and breeches of some middling Protégé worker. He could have been a warehouse clerk, or a store-checker; his hair had been dyed brown, but the best protection was sheer swarming numbers and the fact that nobody
looked
at an average Proti.
He’d forgotten how
hot
the damned place was, too. Hot, the air thick and wet and saturated with coal smoke and smells. Bigger than he remembered from his childhood; the villas went further up the slopes of the volcanoes, the factories were larger and the smokestacks higher, there were more overhead power lines, workers hanging out the sides of the overburdened trolley cars. And many, many more powered vehicles on the streets. Most of them were in army gray, steam-powered trucks and haulers built to half a dozen standard models. A fair number of luxury cars, too, some of them imported models from the Republic. Half a dozen Protégés went by on a gang-bicycle, which was a very clever invention, when you thought about it.
Too heavy for one to pedal—it takes six. Factory workers can use them to commute, but they don’t get personal mobility.
Cleverness wasn’t a wholly positive quality. . . .
He ducked into the brothel’s front door; it wasn’t hard to find, having BROTHEL #22A7-B, PROTÉGÉ, CLASS 6-B printed on the front door, with a graphic symbol for illiterates. Inside was a depressingly bare waiting room with a brick floor and girls sitting around the walls on wood-slat benches, naked save for cotton briefs, folded towels beside them, and a number on the wall above each head below a lightbulb. They didn’t look as run-down as you’d expect, but then few of them were professionals. Temporary service in a place like this was a standard penalty for minor infractions of workplace regulations. A staircase led to cubicles above, and a clerk sat behind an iron grille just inside the door; the place smelled of sweat, harsh disinfectant, and spilled beer.
A hulk stood nearby, an iron-bound club thonged to his massive wrist, picking at his teeth with the thumbnail of his other hand. Probably a retired policeman; he looked John over once, and tapped the head of the club warningly against the stucco. John cringed realistically, turning and ducking his head.
“Prices are posted,” the clerk said in a monotone; she was in her fifties, flabby with a starchy diet and lack of exercise. “You want I should read ’em? Booze is extra.”
John pushed iron counters across the table and through the scoop trough beneath the iron grille. Fingers arranged them in a pattern; they were from Zeizin Shipbuilding AG, one of the bigger firms.
recognition,
Center said. Pointers dropped across the clerk’s pasty face indicating pupil dilation and temperature differentials.
97%, ±2.
That was about as definite as it got; now the question was whether this was his real contact, or whether the Fourth Bureau had penetrated the ring and was waiting for him. His palms were damp, and he swallowed sour bile, eyes flickering to the doors. He wasn’t carrying a weapon; it would have been insanely risky, here—a Protégé caught armed would be
lucky
to be executed on the spot. And when they found his
geburtsnumero . . .
subject is contact, Center reassured him.
anxiety levels are compatible. 73%, ±5.
A whole
hell
of a lot less certain than the first projection, but still reassuring. A little.
The clerk nodded and pressed a button on her side of the counter. A light went on with a
tick
over the girl closest to the stair; she stood with a mechanical smile and picked up her towel.
The upper corridor was fairly quiet, in midafternoon; a row of cubicles stood on either side, with curtains hung before them on rings and a shower at one end. John’s guide pulled aside a numbered curtain and ducked through.
He followed. Within was a single cot, a washstand and tap, and a jar of antiseptic soap . . . and crouched in a corner, the burly form of Angelo Pesalozi. He stood, bear-burly, more gray than John remembered.
“Young Master Johan,” he rumbled.
John extended his hand. “No man’s master now, Angelo,” he said, smiling.
The hand of Karl Hosten’s driver and personal factotum closed on his with controlled strength. John matched it, and Angelo grinned.
“You have not grown soft,” he said. “Come, we should do our business quickly.”
The girl put her foot on the cot and began to push on it, irregularly at first and then rhythmically; with vocal accompaniment, it was a remarkably convincing chorus of squeaks and groans.
“A minute,” John said. “My life is at risk here, too, and will be again, and I must understand. Karl Hosten is a good master, and your own daughter is one of the Chosen. Why are you ready to work against them?”
Brown eyes met his somberly. “He is a good master, but I would have no master at all, and be my own man. I have four children; because one is a lord, should the others be slaves, and my grandchildren? There are more bad masters than good.”
He jerked his head towards the girl. “She dropped a tray of insulator parts, and so she must whore here for a month—is this justice? If a man speaks against the masters when they send his wife to another plantation, or take his children for soldiers, his brother for the mines, he is hung in an iron cage at the crossroads to die—is this justice? No, the rule of the Chosen is an offense against God. It must cease, even if I die for it.”
John met his eyes for a long moment.
subject is sincere; probability
—He silenced the computer with a thought.
I know.
And Angelo had always been kind to a boy with a crippled foot . . .
“Yes,” John said. “That is so, Angelo.”
The Protégé nodded and produced folded papers from inside his jacket; they were damp with sweat, but legible.
“These I took from the wastebasket, before the daily burning,” he said. “Here is an order, concerning five airships—”
“I worry about that boy,” Sally Farr said.
“I don’t,” Maurice Farr replied.
They were sitting on the terrace of the naval commandants quarters, overlooking Charsson and its port. This was the northernmost part of the Republic of Santander, hence the hottest; the shores of the Gut were warmer still, protected from continental breezes by mountains on both sides. The hot, dry summer had just begun; flowers gleamed about the big whitewashed house, and the tessellated brick pavement of the terrace was dappled by the shade of the royal palms and evergreen oak planted around it. The road ran down the mountainside in dramatic switchbacks; there were villas on either side, officers’ quarters and middle-class suburbs up out of the heat of the old city around the J-shaped harbor.
The roofs down there were mostly low-pitched and of reddish clay tile; it looked more like an Imperial city from the lands just north of the Gut than like the rest of Santander. Much of the population was Imperial, too—there had been a steady drift of migrant laborers in the past couple of generations, looking for better-paid work in the growing mines and factories and irrigation farms.
Farr’s eyes went to the dockyards. One of his armored cruisers was in the graving dock, with a cracked shaft on her central screw. The other four ships of the squadron were refitting as well; when everything was ready he’d take them up the Gut on a show-the-flag cruise.
“John,” he continued, “is on his way to becoming a very wealthy young man.
And
he’s doing well in the diplomatic service.
“Thank you,” he went on to the steward bringing him his afternoon gin and tonic. Sally rattled the ice in hers.
“He has no social life,” she said. “I keep introducing him to nice girls, and nothing happens. All he does is study and work. The doctors say he should be . . . umm, functional . . . but I worry.”
Maurice turned his head to hide a quick smile. From what Jeffrey told him, John had been seen occasionally with girls who
weren’t
particularly nice. Enough to prove that the infant vasectomy the Chosen doctors had done
hadn’t
caused any irreparable harm in that respect, at least.
“Do you know something I don’t?” Sally said sharply.
“Let’s put it this way, my dear: there are certain things that a young man does not generally discuss with his mother.”
“Oh.”
Smart,
Maurice thought fondly.
Pretty, too.
Sally was looking remarkably cool and elegant in her white and cream linen outfit and broad straw hat, the pleated skirt daringly an inch above the ankle. Only a little gray in the long brown hair, no more than in his. You’d never know she’d had four children.
“Besides,” he went on, “he’s been assigned to the embassy in Ciano. From what I know of the tailcoat squadron there, social life is about all he’ll have time for—it’s a diplomat’s main function. Count on it, he’ll meet
plenty
of nice girls there.”
“Oh.” Sally’s tone wavered a little at the thought. “Nice
Imperial
girls. Well, I suppose . . .” She shrugged.
She looked downslope in her turn. There were fortifications there, everything from the bastion-and-ravelin systems set up centuries ago to defend against roundshot to modern concrete-and-steel bunkers with heavy naval guns.
“John seems to think that there’s going to be war,” she said. “Jeffrey, too.”
Maurice nodded somberly. “I wouldn’t be surprised. War between the Chosen and the Empire, at least.”
“But surely we wouldn’t be involved!” Sally protested.
“Not at first,” Maurice said slowly. “Not for a while.”
“Thank goodness Jeffrey’s in the army, then,” she said. The Republic of Santander had no land border with either of the two contending powers. “And John’s safe in the diplomatic corps.”
“You dance divinely, Giovanni,” Pia del’Cuomo said. “It is not fair. You are tall, you are handsome, you are clever, you are rich, and you dance so well. Beware, lest God send you a misfortune.”
“I’ve already had a few from Him,” John Hosten said, keeping his tone light and whirling the girl through the waltz. The ballroom was full of graceful swirling movement, gowns and uniforms and black formal suits, jewels and flowers and fans. “But He brought me to Ciano to meet you, so he can’t be really angry with me.”
Pia was just twenty, old for an Imperial woman of noble birth to be unmarried, and four years younger than him. Also unlike most Imperials of her sex and station, she didn’t think giggles and inanities were the only way to talk to a man. She was very pretty indeed, besides, something he was acutely conscious of with their hands linked and one arm around her narrow waist.
No, not pretty—beautiful, he thought.
Big russet-colored eyes, heart-shaped face, creamy skin showing to advantage in the glittering low-cut, long-skirted white ballgown, and glossy brown hair piled up under a diamond tiara. Best of all, she seemed to like
him.
The music came to a stop, and they stood for a moment smiling at each other while the crowd applauded the orchestra.
“If jealous eyes were daggers, I would be stabbed to death,” Pia said with a trace of satisfaction. “It is entertaining, after being an old maid for years. My father has been muttering that if I wished to do nothing but read books and live single, I should have found a vocation before I left the convent school.”
John snorted. “Not likely.”
“I would have made a
very
poor nun, it is true,” Pia said demurely. “And then I could not have gone on to so many picnics and balls and to the opera with a handsome young officer of the Santander embassy. . . .”
“A glass of punch?” he said.
Pia put her hand on his arm as he led her to the punch table. The white-coated steward handed them glasses; it was a fruit punch with white wine, cool and tart.
“You are worried, John,” she said in English. Hers was nearly as good as his Imperial, and her voice had turned serious.
“Yes,” he sighed.
“Your conversations with my father, they have not gone well?”
Even for an Imperial commander, Count Benito del’Cuomo was a blinkered, hidebound. . . . With an effort, John pushed the image of the white muttonchop whiskers out of his mind.
“No,” he said. “He doesn’t take the Chosen seriously.”
Pia sipped at her punch and nodded to her chaperone where she sat with the other matrons against one wall. The older woman—some sort of poor-relation hanger-on of the del’Cuomos—frowned when she saw that Pia was still talking with the Republic’s young chargé d’affaires. They began walking slowly towards the balcony.
“Father does not think the Land will dare to attack us,” she said thoughtfully. “We have so many more soldiers, so many more ships of war. Their island is tiny next to the Empire.”
“Pia—” He didn’t really want to talk politics, but she had reason to be concerned. “Pia, their note demanded extraterritorial rights in Corona and half a dozen other ports, control of grain exports, and exclusive investment rights in Imperial railroads.”
Pia checked half a step. She
was
the daughter of the Minister of War. “That . . . that is an ultimatum!” she said. “And an impossible one.”
John nodded grimly. “An excuse for war. Even if your emperor and senatorial council were to agree to it, and you’re right, they couldn’t, then the Chosen would find some new demand.”
“Why do they warn us, then? Surely they are not so scrupulous that they hesitate at a surprise attack.”
“Scarcely. I have a horrible suspicion that they
want
the Empire to be prepared, so you’ll have more forces in big concentrations where they can get at them,” John said.
They walked out into the cooler air and half-darkness of the great veranda. Little Adele and huge Mira were both up and full, flooding the black-and-white checkerwork marble with pale blue light, turning the giant vases filled with oleander and jessamine and bougainvillea into a pastel wonderland. The terrace ended in a fretted granite balustrade and broad steps leading down to gardens whose graveled paths glowed white amid the flowerbanks and trees. Beyond the estate wall, widely spaced lights showed where the townhouses of the nobility stood amid their walled acres, with an occasional pair of yellow kerosene-lamp headlights marking a carriage or steamcar. Westward reached a denser web of lights, mostly irregular—Ciano had a street plan originally laid out by cows, except for a few avenues driven through in recent generations. Those centered on the Imperial palace complex, a tumble of floodlit white and gilded domes.