Authors: S.M. Stirling,David Drake
John nodded unhappily. “I still don’t like it.”
“Of course not,” Jeffrey said, his voice mock-soothing. “You’re a spook. You’re not happy unless you know everything about everybody and nobody else knows anything at all.”
The elevator rattled to a stop at the bottom of the shaft, and the sliding-mesh doors opened. They stepped in; the little square was decorated in the red plush carpet, mirrors, and carved walnut of the upper part of the Executive Mansion, not like the utilitarian warrens beneath added in the years before the war. The attendant pushed the doors closed and reached for the polished wood and brass of the lever that controlled it.
“Ground floor, I presume, gentlemen?” he said, with a slight Imperial accent.
John nodded, and said in the man’s own language, “How is it up top, Mario?”
The elevator operator grinned at the patron who’d found him this job. “Bad,
signore,
” he replied. “The
tedeschi
swine are out in force tonight. God and Mary and the Saints keep you safe.”
“Amen,” John said, and took his cigarette case out of his jacket. The cigarillos within were dark with a gold band; he offered it to the other men, then snapped his lighter.
The smoke was rich and pungent. “Sierran,” Jeffrey said. “Punch-punch claros. We won’t be seeing any more of those for a while.”
The elevator operator nodded somberly. “The
tedeschi
have gone mad there,
signore,
” he said. “They act as beasts in the Empire, but now in the Sierra . . .”
“I think they’re mad with frustration,” John said. “
Ciao,
Mario. My regards to your family.”
“
Signore.
And many thanks for Antonio’s scholarship.”
“He earned it.”
“Is there anywhere you
don’t
have them stashed?” Jeffrey said, as they walked out to the entrance—the nonceremonial one, for unofficial guests.
“It never hurts to have friends in . . .” John began, as they accepted hat and cane, uniform cap, and swagger stick, from the attendant. Then he paused on the polished marble of the steps. “
Shit.
”
They both stopped on the uppermost stair. The Executive Mansion had an excellent hilltop site. From here they could see for miles: darkened streets, the swift flicker of emergency vehicle headlights with the top halves painted black to make them less visible from above. Fires burned out of control down by the canals and the riverside warehouses, blotches of soft light amid the blackout darkness. Searchlights probed upward like fingers, like hands reaching for the machines that tormented the city below, sliding off the undersides of clouds and vanishing in the gaps between. Every few seconds an antiaircraft gun would fire, a flicker of light and a flat
brraack
, then the shell would burst far above, sometimes lighting a cloud from within for an instant. When they finally fell silent, sirens spoke all over the great city, a rising-falling wail that signaled the “all clear.” As they died, the lesser sirens of fire engines could be heard, and the clangor of bells.
“And now they’ll sleep for a little while,” John said softly. “Those that can. Tomorrow they’ll get out of bed and go to work.”
Jeffrey nodded. “You’re right. Center’s right, this is hurting the Chosen more than us . . . but it’s got to stop, nevertheless.”
Harry Smith was waiting in the car; dozing, actually, with his head resting on his gloved hands. He woke as the two men approached. “Sorry, sir, Mr. Jeffrey.”
“Why the hell weren’t you in the shelter?” John asked, his voice hovering between resignation and annoyance.
“Wanted to keep an eye on the car,” Smith said.
John sighed. “Home.”
Home was in the North Hill suburbs, beyond Embassy Row. There was little direct damage there; no factories, and none of the densely packed working-class housing common further south on the bank of the river, or across it. The streetlights were still blacked out, and so were the houses. The steamcar slid quietly through the darkened streets, passing an occasional Air Raid Precautions patrol, helmeted but with no uniforms beyond armbands—many of them were Women’s Auxiliary volunteers. Once, an ambulance went by with its bell clanging, and once, they had to detour around a random hit, a great crater in the middle of the street with water hissing ten feet high from a broken main. There might be gas, too; sawhorse barricades were already up, and Municipal Services trucks were disgorging men in workman’s overalls.
“That looks a bit like our place did,” Jeffrey said; the younger Farr’s household had been the recipient of several Land two hundred and fifty pounders, luckily while everyone was out. “Thanks again for saving us from the horrors of Government Issue Married Quarters, officers for the use of.”
John snorted. The car paused for a moment at wrought-iron gates, and then the tires hummed on the brick of a long driveway.
“Get some sleep,” John said to Smith. “We’re going on a trip in a few days.”
Smith grinned. “With some old friends, sir?” John nodded. Smith put on a good imitation of an upper-class drawl. “Just the time of year one
likes
a little vacation on the Gut, eh?”
A sleepy butler opened the front doors of the big, rambling brick house. He stumbled backward as a four-year-old made a dash past his legs and down the stairs, leaping for Jeffrey.
“Daddy!” The girl wound herself around him, clinging to his belt. “Daddy, we all went and sat inna basement and sang!”
“That’s good, punkin, but it’s past your bedtime,” Jeffrey said, hoisting her up.
She wrinkled her nose. “You smell funny, Daddy.”
“Blame the Premier and his tobacco—ah, here’s Irene.”
A nursemaid came out, clutching her sleeping robe around her and clucking anxiously. “
There
she is, Mr. Jeffrey. Honestly, sometimes I think that child is part ape!”
“A born commando. Off to bed, punkin.” John was still smiling as he walked up the stairs, fending off the butler’s offer to wake the cook. There were advantages to being a very rich man, but a good deal of petty annoyance came with it as well. He might have raided the icebox and made a sandwich himself, if he’d been living in a middle-class apartment, but rousting someone out of bed at one o’clock to slap some chicken between two pieces of bread was more trouble than it was worth and hubristic besides.
The light was still on in the bedroom, but Pia was asleep. Her reading glasses were lying on top of a stack of documents on the carved teak sidetable beside a silver-framed picture of Maurice in his pilot’s uniform. John smiled; his wife was living proof that not all Imperial woman got heavy after thirty.
Just magnificent,
he thought, undoing his cravat.
She woke, stirred, and smiled at him. “Hello, darling,” she said. “I can smell the Premier’s tobacco, so I know you told the truth, it was politicians and not a mistress.”
John grinned. “You can have proof positive in a moment, if you’ll stay awake.”
“Hurry then.”
Gerta forced her hands to relax from their white-knuckled grip on the armored side of the car.
“I hope you’re getting every moment of this,” she muttered to the cameraman beside her.
The Protégé nodded without pulling away from the eyepiece of the big clumsy machine clamped to the side of the vehicle. His hand cranked the handle with metronomic regularity, and geared mechanisms whirred within it. Beside it a small searchlight added to the dawn gloaming, bringing the ambient light up enough to make filming practical.
The huge biplane bombardment aircraft was staggering in towards its landing . . . or crash, whichever. The long fuselage was tublike, with open circular pits for the pilot and copilot, and others for bombardiers and gunners. Between each of the long wings were four engine pods, each pod mounting a puller and pusher set. The undercarriage settled towards the ground, struck dust from the packed earth. Gravel spurted. On the second impact, the splayed legs of the big wheels spread further, the whole plane sinking closer to the ground as it raced across the runway. Then the bottom touched in a shower of sparks and tearing of wood and fabric. Half the lower part of the fuselage abraded away as it gradually came to a halt, spinning around like a top once or twice before it did. Rescue teams raced out, bells ringing, although the props didn’t
quite
touch the earth and nothing caught fire . . . this time.
“Got that?”
“Yes, sir,” the Protégé replied, and began the complex process of changing a reel of film.
Gerta pulled her uniform cap off, crumpling it in her hand. That was the only outward sign of her rage; she sternly repressed the impulse to throw it down and stamp on it.
The squadron commander came over to her open-topped car. “I understand completely, Brigadier,” he said. “Will your film do any good?”
“Well, I can now confirm with visual aids that we lose ten percent of those things in
normal
operations with each mission, not counting enemy action. When I think of how many fighters or ground-attack aircraft we could have for the same resources—”
“Just get them to stop telling us to fly these abortions,” the man said. He was very young, not more than twenty-five; turnover in the bomber squadrons was heavy. “It isn’t that we mind dying for the Chosen, you understand—”
“—it’s just that you’d like it to have some sort of point,” Gerta finished for him. “I’ll do my best. Porschmidt has a lot of friends in high places.”
“I’d like to take them to a high place—over Santander City or Bosson, and dump them off with the rest of the bombload.”
Gerta nodded. “If it’s any consolation, we’re doing some things that are smarter than this.”
“It couldn’t be worse.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
John Hosten gripped Arturo Bianci’s hand. “You’re still alive,” he said.
The guerilla leader looked closer to sixty than the forty-five or so John knew him to be. His once-stocky frame was weathered down to bone and sinew and a necessary minimum of muscle, and the dense close-cropped cap of hair that topped his seamed, weathered face was the same silver as the stubble on his jaw.
“Not for want of the
tedeschi
trying,” he said. The smile on his face looked unpracticed. “They’ve had a high price on my head these sixteen years.”
He led John back into the cave. It was deep and twisting, opening out into broader caverns within and spreading out into a maze that led miles into the depths of the Collini Paeani. An occasional kerosene lantern cast a puddle of light; now and then an occupied cave showed men sleeping under blankets, working on their weapons, or stacking crates and boxes under waxed tarpaulins. There was even a stable-cavern, where picketed mules drowsed in rows and fodder was stacked ten feet high against one wall. The caves smelled of old smoke, dirt, and damp limestone; there were underground rivers further in, rushing past to who knew where.
“Big operation,” John said.
“One of many,” Arturo said. “We try not to put too much in one place, in case there is an informer or the
tedeschi
are lucky with a patrol. More and more come to us. The
tedeschi
take more land for plantations, and always there are more labor drafts. If a man is marked down for the camps or the factories in Hell”—he used the slang term for the Land—”he can only escape by coming to us.”
“Or by volunteering for the army, or the police,” John pointed out.
The guerilla leaders face went tight as a clenched fist. “Some do. And of those, some are
our
men, to be spies, and to wait for the day we call. The enemy do not much trust units they raise here, nor do they dare mix them much with Protégés from the Land.”
They came to a medium-sized chamber and pushed through the blankets hung over the entrance. An old woman tended a pot of stew over a small charcoal fire, and a group as ragged and hard-looking as Arturo waited around a rickety table. There was no attempt at introductions, simply a wolfish patience or a slight shifting of the weapons that festooned them. Some of them were tearing at lumps of hard bread, or dunking the chunks in bowls of the stew, eating with the concentration of men who went hungry much of the time. They looked at John expressionlessly, taking in Barrjen and his little squad of middle-aged ex-Marines with wary respect.
John was dressed in high-laced boots and tough tweeds, Santander hunting or hiking clothes. He swung his pack to the table and unbuckled the flap.
“Here,” he said, tapping his finger on the map he produced. It was Republic Naval Survey issue, showing a section of the north shore of the Gut a hundred miles east and west of Salmi.
The men around the table were mostly ex-peasants, with a scattering of shopkeepers and artisans, but they’d all learned to read maps since the Chosen conquest. The spot he indicated was at the end of a south-trending bulge, a little almost-island at a narrow part of the great strait.
“Fort Causili,” one said. “Old fort, but the
tedeschi
have been building there. Two, three thousand laborers, and troops, for most of the past year. And they have put in a spur rail line.”
John nodded. He took out photographs, blurred from enlargement and hurried camera work, but clear enough. Some were from the air, others taken with concealed instruments by workers on the base. They showed deep pits, concrete revetments with overhead protection set into the cliffs, and at the last, special flatcars with huge cylindrical objects under heavy tarpaulin cover.
“More than a fort,” John said. “Those are special long-range guns, six of them. Twelve-inch naval rifles, sleeved down to eight inches and extended. They range most of the way to shoal water on the southern shore . . . and the enemy hold that, it’s Union territory. There’s another fort there that commands the only passage, it’s got heavy siege mortars. Between them they can close the Gut almost exactly at the old Union-Santander border.”
A few of the guerilla commanders shrugged. One muttered: “Bad. But so? There is a infantry brigade in that area, dug in, fully prepared. Those of us who wanted to die have done so long ago.”
“Very bad,” Arturo said. “If they can close the Gut, they can put their own ships on it and use it to move supplies. That will solve many of their problems. It will free troops to be used elsewhere, and free more labor, locomotives. And your navy will not be able to raid along the coast, or drop off supplies to us. Very bad. But Vincini is right, we cannot do more than harass it.”
Vincini drew a long knife; it looked as if it had been honed down from a butcher’s tool. He traced a circle with the point.
“A quiet area. Few recruits for us. That would change if we staged some operations there—the
tedeschi
would kill in reply, and that would bring the villagers to our side.”
John nodded; the guerillas always struck away from their base areas. The Chosen killed hostages from the areas where the attacks occurred, which merely convinced the locals they might as well be hung for sheep as lambs.
“I’m not asking you to take the base yourselves,” he said. “But believe me, we cannot allow the enemy to complete it. If they command the Gut, they have gone far towards winning the war—if Santander falls, your cause is hopeless.”
That earned him some glares, but reluctant nods as well. He went on:
“Remember, all the world is at war. We attack the enemy in many places. You cannot take the base alone, but you can
help.
Here is what I propose—”
Angelo Pesalozi grunted as the Santander sailors hauled him over the gunwale of the motor torpedo boat. The Protégé looked around. The little vessel was blacked out, but there was enough starlight and reflected light from the moons to see it. There was an elemental simplicity to the design; a sharp-prowed plywood hull, shallow but exquisitely shaped. The forward deck held a double-barreled pom-pom behind a thin shield, but the real weapons were on either side: a pair of eighteen-inch naval torpedoes in sealed sheet-steel launch tubes. There was a small deckhouse around the wheel amidships, and a wooden coaming over the big aircraft engines at the stern that could hurl the frail concoction through a calm sea at better than thirty knots. Right now it was burbling in a low rumbling purr, like the world’s biggest cat, muffled by a tin box full of baffles at the stern that showed the hasty marks of an improvised fitting. The blue exhaust filled the night with its tang and the wind was too calm to disturb it much.
A dozen more like it waited outside the harbor of Bassin du Sud. Not a scrap of metal gleamed, and the faces of the crews were equally dark with burnt cork and black wool stocking-caps. The commander of the little flotilla was the oldest man in the crews, and he was several years short of thirty; most of his subordinates had been fishermen two years ago, or scions of families wealthy enough to own motorboats. Kneally’s father was a newspaper magnate with ambitions for his sons. His wasn’t the only grin as he extended his hand to the heavyset Protégé.
“Welcome aboard,” he said, in fair Landisch. “Commander James Frederick Kneally, at your service. You’ve got it?”
Silent, Angelo reached inside his jacket and pulled out an oilskin map. The Santander naval officer unwrapped it and spread it on the engine coaming, clicking on a small shaded flashlight.
“Oh, very nice,” Kneally breathed. No changes from the ones Intelligence had given them back in Karlton.
A Land Naval Service-issue map, with the minefields marked in red, compass deviations, bearings, the lot; typical Chosen thoroughness. The Santander officer laid his compass on the map and looked up. Two lights flashed from different parts of the hills above Bassin du Sud, and he was busy with straight-edge and slide rule for a moment.
“Right here,” Kneally said, marking the map. “All
right.
Thanks again.”
The Protégé dipped his head. “I must return; I am on an errand for my master that gives me some freedom from suspicion, but not much. Give me ten minutes.”
The flotilla commander shook his hand again, then returned entranced to the map as he was handed back over the side to his little steam launch. He half-noticed that the tiny pennant at the rear was the checked black-and-white of the Land General Staff, then dismissed it.
“Helm,” he said. “Prepare to follow a course to my direction, dead slow. Signal to the flotilla, follow in line astern.”
A dim blue light just above the waterline snapped on at the very stern of the lead torpedo boat. The man at the wheel spat overside and wiped first one hand, then the other on his duck trousers. The commander ducked his head through a hole in the coaming, into the stuffy darkness of the engine compartment. The petty officer in charge and his two ratings crouched by the big internal-combustion motors like acolytes worshiping some god of iron and brass, tools and oil can at the ready. They’d spent the past week going over every part and link and piece of the motor train as if their lives depended on it. Which, of course, they did.
“Ready?”
“Ready as we’ll ever be, sir.”
He pulled himself back up and looked at the stars. One moon full, the other half, a little scattered cloud, dead calm with only the inevitable southern ocean swell. Inside the breakwaters of the harbor it would be as calm as a bathtub. He looked at the map again, noting the markings on currents.
“Three knots,” he said quietly to the helm. “Come about twelve degrees and maintain for four minutes. Carefully now. It’s a tight fit.”
“Tight as a cabin boy’s bum, sir,” the helmsman agreed, and let out the throttle inch by careful inch.
The muffler on the stern burbled a little louder, and the commander winced. The Chosen had beefed up the port defenses considerably, and while he had what looked like perfect intelligence on them, knowing exactly how a 250-pound prizefighter would throw a right hook did you little good if you were a ninety-pound weed with a glass jaw. Kneally’s boats were plywood shells over explosives and highly volatile fuel; a heavy machine gun could turn them to burning splinters, much less a pom-pom, much less a 240mm shell from the Emmas in the castle or the harbor forts.
And
there were gunboats constantly patrolling.
The minefields were laid with the clear passages staggered by horizontal lanes, making doglegs nobody could negotiate by luck. It would be difficult enough in daylight, with a pilot conning the helm; the enemy had lost a couple of supply ships to their own mines.
“Gently, gently. Blink the stern light. Now come about to port, ninety degrees. Gently, man, gently.”
Sweat soaked his stocking cap and stung in the shaving cuts on his chin. The mines were down there, dull iron balls studded with pressure-sensitive brass horns, floating like malignant flowers on their chain tethers. He wiped his face with the back of his jacket. The lights of Bassin du Sud were coming into view; there were a few of them, mostly low down by the water.
Maybe we
should
have staged an air raid at the same time,
he thought. Get them looking up.
No, the brass were right for once.
It would just get them awake and ready, and a crew could swing a quick-firer from ninety degrees to horizontal a lot faster than they could get out of their racks and on line.
Something bumped against the hull forward. Bump . . . bump . . . bump . . .
His stomach lurched. Every man on board froze, except for the helm’s careful twitch at the wheel. Then the crew of MTB 109 shuddered and relaxed as the sound died astern, and the sudden annihilating blast
didn’t
lift their craft out of the water broken-backed. Another turn ahead. He looked behind. Barely possible to make out MTB 110. Good. This follow-the-leader put his nerves even more on edge; small errors could accumulate and throw the last boats right into the mines. Although God knew they’d practiced often enough at the mockups back at base in Karlton. The base there had never been much, but it rattled empty since the Southern Fleet was wiped out in the opening days of the war.
The ships that slaughtered four thousand Santander sailors were waiting ahead . . . and they’d carefully spent half a day shooting or running down the survivors in the water, too. His teeth showed white in his darkened face.
“All right, we’re out.” If the map was complete. “Signal to deploy.”
He brought up his binoculars and squinted. There was just enough background scatter to see the line of Land cruisers silhouetted against the diffuse glow . . . he hoped. They were a couple of thousand yards away, smoke visible from one or two stacks on each ship, keeping some steam up; a boom with antitorpedo netting out, floating low, a line across the dead calm of the harbor. And the lights of a patrol boat, low-powered searchlights looking for infiltrators or defectors trying to make it out in rubber dinghies.
The Santander torpedo boats spread out into line abreast. “Six knots,” Kneally said.
The engines burbled a little louder.
How long?
Eventually they were going to notice. . . .
A searchlight speared out at them and an alarm wailed.
“Goose it, Chief! Goose it!”
The helm slammed the throttles forward. Now the engines roared, a shattering noise no muffler could mute. White water peeled back from the bows in two high roostertails of spray, throwing salt across his lips. Lights flicked on along the line of Land cruisers, and starshells blossomed high above.
“Too late, you leather-sucking perverts!” Kneally yelled.
The boom was less than five hundred yards ahead. There was just time enough for the torpedo boats to reach the maximum safe speed. Kneally clamped his hands on the bracket ahead of him and braced himself. The smooth strip of reinforcing steel down the torpedo boat’s keel slalomed it into the air in an arc that ended in an enormous splash that threw water twice the height of the little vessel’s stub signal mast. Then each pair was driving for a cruiser’s side, and the big ships loomed like gray steel cliffs. Cliffs speckled with fire, as the first pom-pom crews made it to their stations and began to open fire.