Authors: S.M. Stirling,David Drake
“Late for the dance,” he muttered. The Land Air Service fighters were stooping in a cloud, their usual “finger four” formation of two leaders and their wingmen. “But better late than never.”
The first
tat-tat-tat
of machine-gun fire sounded in the heavens, and spent cartridges guttered as they fell downwards towards the smoking crater that had been a train.
“You may survive a Santander victory,” John said. “You certainly won’t survive a Chosen triumph. Not by more than a few years, and your nation won’t either.”
Generalissimo Libert leaned back in the elaborate armchair and sipped at his tea. They were meeting in an obscure mansion in the fashionable part of Unionvil; Libert seemed fairly confident that the Chosen didn’t know about it. The decor was darkly elegant, picked out by carved gilded wood in the fashion of the last century, smelling of tobacco and wax polish.
“They have been unduly arrogant of late, yes,” he said.
“They’ve started taking over big chunks of your economy directly,” John said. “Half your troops are under the command of Land formations in the Sierra. I’m surprised they’ve left you any autonomy at all.”
“I have made myself useful,” Libert said. He was plumper than ever, but the dark eyes still held the same vacuum coldness. “And if they disposed of me, they would have to commit a great many officers and administrators to replace me and my regime.”
“That won’t apply if they win.”
“It
will
apply, however, as long as this stalemate continues. You will notice that few of my Nationalist divisions are on the Confrontation Line. My ambitions were satisfied by winning the civil war here, and overfulfilled by the Sierran territory we have occupied.”
“The stalemate isn’t going to continue. Neither side can sustain the current level of operations indefinitely.”
Libert nodded. “That is possible. But for the present, I intend to maintain my posture of limited committment.”
“You’ve avoided formally declaring war on us. And we haven’t declared war on you.”
“You maintain my political enemies.”
John nodded. “However, General Gerard is dead. So are many of his troops.” Used up in stopping the first terrible impact of the war’s opening offensive, and ground down since while Santander’s army gained experience and built numbers. “If you earn sufficient gratitude, we won’t insist on a change of regime as part of the postwar settlement.”
“If you win.”
“If you stay on the fence too long, we won’t have any reason not to include you with the Chosen on the chopping block.”
For the first time in the interview, Libert smiled. “A matter of delicate timing, no? Late enough that I am not caught supporting the losing side by miscalculation; early enough so that my assistance is of crucial value and I retain bargaining power.”
John’s face remained expressionless, a trick he’d learned in a lifetime of intelligence work and political negotiation.
Murderous little shit,
he thought.
But don’t underestimate him,
Raj cautioned.
John nodded. “Now, assuming that the military situation shifts so that the Land is teetering on the edge,” he said, “what terms would you suggest for giving them a push?”
“As a hypothetical situation?” Libert began. “Perhaps . . .”
“”Ten-
hut.
”
“Gentlemen,” Jeffrey Farr said, laying his uniform cap and swagger stick on the table at the head of the room. “At ease.”
The officers of the First Marine Division sat, everyone from the battalion commanders on up. They were a hard-bitten lot; most of them had been in the regular service before the war. All of them had seen action since then, in the Confrontation Lane and in countless pinprick raids along the Chosen-held coasts, or with the cross-Gut raid to destroy the Land’s fortress. The Marine division was all-volunteer, too. Before the war that hadn’t meant so much, but in the three years since the Land assault on the Confrontation Line, it meant that the Marines got the pick of the crop—those not content to wait for their call-up, the men who
wanted
to fight.
“Gentlemen, as you’re all aware, we’ve been training for a large-scale amphibious assault.”
Nods. A lot had been learned from the assault across the Gut: new equipment, new tactics.
“All of you know the official story—that we’ve been preparing for further extensive spoiling operations on selected coastal targets. A few of you know the objective behind that: seizing Barclon and establishing a bridgehead for the new First Army Corps behind the Land lines on the southern lobe.”
A low murmur ran through the assembled officers. That was supposed to be deeply secret.
“Gentlemen, you are now to be told the
real
objective for which we’ve been training. That objective is part of an attack whose aim is to break the Chosen forever and end the war. I hope I don’t have to emphasize exactly how crucial it is that this be kept secret; that’s why you’re only being told two weeks ahead. That leaves you short of time, I know. You’re also forbidden—strictly forbidden—to tell anyone not in this room at this moment. That includes your junior officers, your wives, your best friends, and your confessors. Anyone who does, even inadvertantly, will be cashiered and shot. Is that understood?”
The Marine officers were leaning forward now, tense and ready.
Jeffrey turned to the easel and stripped off the cloth covering. “Our objective is”—he tapped with the pointer—”the western shore of the old Imperial territories, at the southern entrance to the Passage. Where the war began, nearly twenty years ago—really began, not just the latest phase when the Republic came into it openly. Corona.”
Hardly a rustle from his audience. Jeffrey grinned tautly. “I know what you must be thinking. The Chosen caught the Imperials with their thumbs up their bums and their minds in neutral, there. The Chosen aren’t slackers and idiots, and they’ve had eighteen years to prepare.”
He swept the pointer from Corona, up the valley of the Pada, through the Sierran Mountains and down into the Union. “But they also have all this to hold, and thanks to the native inhabitants and our encouragement, it’s all in a state of revolt or incipient revolt. We’ve managed to free up twenty-five divisions from the Confrontation Line, and they’re stripping everything they can from the Empire for line-of-communications security and to build a field army to match that. The Chosen empire is like a clam: hard on the outside, soft and chewy inside . . . and if we can punch though at the right point, it’ll slide right down our throats.”
He paused. “So much for the theory! Now down to the details. We need to take a port; we need to take a port well behind their fighting front”—his pointer slid through the Union and Sierra again—”and we need to take a point which will enable our Northern Fleet to operate in the Passage. I hope I don’t have to point out what that would mean.”
Another growl. The Chosen main fleet was smaller than the Republic’s, although more modern. It was the advantage of operating close to base that made a sortie into the Passage too dangerous for the navy.
“It isn’t going to be easy. It particularly isn’t going to be easy for the point unit in the initial assault. Accordingly, I’ll be making my headquarters with you, until the follow-on elements are ashore—”
He stopped, blinking in surprise at the barking cheer that followed that.
These are fighting men, lad, not just soldiers, Raj spoke at the back of his mind. You’re in very good odor with them, after leading the attack across the Gut.
“Now let’s get down to business.”
Shabby,
Gerta Hosten thought, looking around the compartment.
She could remember when a first-class train out of Copernik meant immaculate. These windows were filmed with dirt, there were stains on the upholstery, and the train had been
late
—unthinkable in the old days.
Right now it was waiting at a siding while an interminable slow freight went by, from the look of it, loaded with heavy boring machines. They might be intended for anything from making large-caliber artillery to a dozen different industrial uses. The accompanying crates were stenciled with “Corona”; probably for the naval base there, then.
Stupid. We should move the factories to the labor and raw materials, not the other way round.
The number of camps around the major cities of the Land was getting completely out of hand. Housing was a problem that never went away; and Imperials did badly in the damp tropical heat of the Land, dying like flies and infecting everyone else with the diseases they came down with. Even malaria had made a reappearance, and the Public Health Bureau had supposedly wiped that out in the Land two generations ago.
Supposedly, having all the factories in one place made control easier.
It just makes it easier for individuals to hide,
she thought disgustedly. Those camps were like rabbit warrens.
“
Behfel ist Behfel,
” she muttered to herself. Although when she talked to Father next . . .
A staff car came bumping up the potholed road beside the train. Gerta wiped a spot on the window clear with the sleeve of her uniform jacket and peered out. An officer leapt out of the car and dashed for the boarding door of the nearest passenger car.
She sat up with a cold prickle running down her back.
The Santy attack on Barclon?
she thought.
No, we’re ready for that. . . .
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
“Fourteen,” Maurice Farr said, from the bridge of the
Great Republic.
The flaming dirigible exploded suddenly, turning the early morning darkness into artificial dawn for a moment. Spread across the wine-purple sea were ships beyond counting, the long line of battleships, twenty-one of them, butting their way through the sea, their massive armored bulks plunging like mastiffs loosed in a dogfight. Thirty modern armored cruisers flanked them, spread out in double line abreast forward of the battlewagons; destroyers coursed along either side, sometimes cutting through the formations with reckless speed, and they were only a fraction of the number that were hull-down over the northern horizon. At the center of the whole formation were the big but thin-skinned shapes of the flattops, the ships whose aircraft had swept the Land’s scout dirigibles from the sky.
Colliers, hospital ships, underway replenishment vessels made a looser clot behind the battle fleet; off to the southeast were the transports and the elderly protected cruisers that were their immediate escorts. The smell of coal smoke and burning petroleum filled the air, the rumble and whine of engines; signal searchlights snapped and flickered in the web that kept the scores of ships and scores of thousands of men moving like a single organism, obedient to a single will.
Admiral Maurice Farr lowered his binoculars. “Well, I told you you’d see some action before this war was over, Artie,” he said to the blond, balding man beside him.
Admiral Arthur Cunningham, commander of BatDivOne, the heavy gun ships, smiled grimly. “All on one throw, eh, Maurice? I nearly choked on a fishbone when you told me. A lot more like something I’d come up with.”
Maurice Farr shook his head. “No, it’s actually subtle,” he replied seriously. “Not just putting our heads down and charging at them.”
“Well, they don’t call me ‘Bull’ for nothing,” he said, scratching at the painful skin rash that splotched his hands. “There’s usually something to be said for the meat-ax approach, in wartime. I’ve got to admit, those carriers are earning their corn.”
The flaming remains of the dirigible were sinking towards the surface, and the darkness returned save for the running lights of the fleet and the landing lights that ran along the flight decks of the carriers.
“We’re going to have more problems with their lighter-than-air once the sun’s up and they can refuel from tanker airships out of our range,” Admiral Farr said. “We can shoot down their airships, but we can’t hide the fact that we’re shooting them down—they can always get off a message before they burn. The enemy will know we’re up to something.”
“But not exactly what,” Cunningham said cheerfully. “The planes can take off easier in daylight, too. I say two days.”
“Three,” Farr said.
An aide saluted. “General Farr to see you, sir.”
Jeffrey Farr climbed up the companionway to the bridge of the flagship. It was big; the
Great Republic
had been built with the space and communications facilities to run the whole of the Northern Fleet at sea. Even so, he had to thread his way past until he could stand before his father, the brown of his field dress and helmet cover contrasting with the sea-blue of the naval officers.
“Sir. It’s time I rejoined my command.”
Maurice Farr nodded. “Good luck, General,” he said. “The Navy will be where you need it.”
He stepped closer and took his son’s hand. “And good luck, son.”
Jeffrey Farr nodded. “Dad.”
“Pile the ties together,” the guerilla leader said.
More than half the band were unarmed peasants, men and women who’d slipped away from plantations or the few sharecropped tenancies the Chosen hadn’t yet gotten around to consolidating. They’d brought their working tools with them, though; spades and pickaxes and mattocks thudded at the gravel of the railway roadbed. There was a peculiar pleasure to demolishing the trunk line from Salini westward along the Gut. Thirty thousand Imperial forced laborers had worked for ten years to build it, and it carried half the supplies for the Land armies in the Sierra and the Union.
“Pile them up,” he said. A growing heap of creosote-soaked timbers rose higher than his head. “The rails go across the timber; then we light them. It will be a long time before those rails carry trains again.”
A very long time. There were only two rolling mills in the whole of the Empire, in Ciano and Corona. Most of the work would have to be done in the Land itself, and to carry the wrecked lengths of steel to the plants there, reheat and reroll them, and bring them back . . .
He smiled unpleasantly.
One of his subordinates spoke, unease in his voice: “Will we have time? Their quick reaction force—”
The smile grew into a grin. The guerilla commander pointed eastward, where the railway wound through the low hills of the Gut’s coastal plain. Pillars of smoke were rising, dozens of them.
“They will have much to do today.”
The Chosen commandant of the town of Monte Sassino cursed and climbed out of bed, blinking against the morning sunlight. She’d had a little too much in the way of banana gin last night, and mixed it with local brandy. Rubbing her bristle-cut head, she reached for the telephone that was ringing so shrilly.
Crack.
She fell forward against the instrument, her body kicking in galvanic reflex and voiding bladder and bowels.
The girl who held the little Santander-made assassination pistol motioned to her brother. “Quickly!”
They were twins, fourteen years old except for their eyes. Neither bothered to dress as they barricaded the door to the former commandant’s suite and rifled her personal locker for ammunition and weapons; there was a combination lock on it, but the brother had long ago filched that number. Within was a shotgun and a machine carbine, and more magazines for me automatic that rested on the dresser with its gunbelt. He spat on the dead woman’s body as he tumbled it into the growing pile of furniture before the door.
The twins hadn’t had much formal training in weapons, either, but they managed to kill three Protégé troopers and wound another of the Chosen before the battering ram punched the door and its barricade aside.
By that time most of the town was in flames.
“What?”
“Sir,” the Protégé said, “none of the other stations answer.”
The Chosen officer restrained himself; cuffing the technician across the face wouldn’t alter the cowlike stupidity in her eyes. You didn’t need much in the way of brains to be a telephone exchange operator. Besides that, policy had always been to recruit the bottom third of the IQ pool for military service. Smart Protégés were dangerous Protégés.
“What about the return signal?”
The technician’s face cleared from its anxious, willing frown. “Oh, yes, sir. I tried that, sir. The circuits are dead.”
This time the Chosen officer snarled audibly. That meant that at least three major trunk lines were dead.
“Get back to your post,” he said.
I’ll use the wireless.
That would put him back in touch with HQ, at least. It was a pity few Land mobile units used them.
“You recommend
what
?”
Gerta Hosten closed her eyes for a second in desperation. “Sir, I recommend that no further personnel be transferred from the Land proper to the New Territories, that personnel seconded from naval and garrison units in the New Territories to the Sierra and Union be immediately returned to their units, and that we move General Hosten’s field force”—the mobile army they’d been scraping together from LOC units and divisions pulled out of the Confrontation zone after the retreat to the Gothic Lane fortifications—”back into the Ciano area at the very least.”
Karl Hosten looked slightly stunned, as if an aged and very fierce hawk had been unexpectedly struck between the eyes. Most of the other faces around the table looked uncomprehendingly hostile.
“That would mean the effective abandonment of everything south of the old Imperial border!” the chief of the General Staff said.
“Not if the Santies can’t break the Gothic Line, sir,” Gerta said. “And we
know
that Agent A”—John Hosten—”either was disinformed himself or is attempting to disinform us. The Santie strategic reserve is
not
headed for the Rio Arena estuary and neither is their Northern Fleet. It’s heading north up the coast of the New Territories, and it could strike anywhere from Napoli to Artheusa. Our reports indicate some sort of general uprising in the occupied territories, and among what’s left of the Sierrans. Our only large uncommitted force is nearly a thousand miles away in the middle of the Sierra, and the railroad net is well and truly fucked. Consider,
please,
how long it’ll take to get those troops back near where we need them. The New Territories have been stripped
bare
of troops.”
Something of her own bleak, controlled panic was spreading to a few of the other Council members.
“Perhaps part—”
“Sir, half measures?”
Karl Hosten drew himself together. “What else does Military Intelligence recommend?”
“A Category III mobilization, sir.”
This time there were a few gasps, despite Chosen discipline. That meant shutting everything down, confining all unreliable elements behind wire, and calling out the Probationers and Probationer-Emeritus reserves. The teenage children of the ruling race, and the failed candidates who made up what the Land had of a middle class.
“But production—” a minister began.
“Sirs, with respect, we have to survive the next couple of weeks. If we can do that at all, it has to be done with what we have on hand.”
Gerta stood, willing despair to stand at bay, as the debate began.