The Chosen

by S. M. Stirling

  "Still burning nicely," she said, looking over to the naval dockyards. "The storehouses and wharfs are burning, too. Considerate of the enemy to use wooden hulls."

  Obsolete, but this was a complete backwater in military terms. All the Union's few modern warships were up in the Gut, and it would take weeks to bring any down here. By then this action would be settled, one way or another. Her companions were too well disciplined to cheer, but a low mutter of satisfaction went through them. Then someone spoke softly:

  "Native coming." They wheeled and crouched, hands reaching for weapons. "It's ours."

  The Unionaise knocked at the door, three quick and then two at longer intervals. One of the commandos opened it enough for him to sidle in; he looked around at the hard-set faces and swallowed uneasily.

  "What news, Louis?" Gerta said, in his language. She spoke all four of Visager's major tongues with accentless fluency.

  "Our men are pinned in the garrison and the seafront batteries," he said. "The syndicistes are slaughtering everyone they can catch—everyone wearing a gentleman's cravat, even, priests, nuns . . ."

  The Chosen shrugged. What else would you do, when you had the upper hand in a situation like this? Louis swallowed and went on:

  "And they are handing out arms to all the rabble of the city."

  "Where are they getting them?" Gerta asked. According to the last reports, most of the weapons in Bassin du Sud were in the castle or the fortified gun emplacements that guarded the harbor mouth.

  "There is a Santander ship in dock, one that came in a few days ago but did not unload. The cargo is weapons, all types—fine modern weapons. They are handing them out at the dock and sending wagons and trucks full of others all around the city."

  "Damn," Gerta swore mildly. That would put a spanner in the gears. "Show me."

  She unfolded a waterproof map of the harbor and spread it on the gunwale of the fishing boat. Louis bent over it, squinting in the half darkness until she moved it to a spot where a sliver of sunlight fell through the boards.

  "Here," he said, tapping a finger down. "Quay Seven, Western Dock."

  "Hmmm." Gerta measured the distance between her index and little fingers and then moved them down to the scale at the bottom of the map. "About half a mile, say three-quarters, as we'll swim."

  Bassin du Sud had a harbor net, but like all harbors the filth and garbage in the water attracted marine life. And on Visager, marine life meant death more often than not. They'd already lost two members of the team.

  "Nothing for it," she said. "Hans, Erika, Otto, you'll come with me. The rest of you, launch the boat and bring it here." She tapped a finger on the map; the others crowded around to memorize their positions. "Function check now."

  Everyone went over everyone else's air tanks, regulators, and other gear. Hard hat suits with air pumped down a hose had been in use for fifty or sixty years, but this equipment was barely out of the experimental stage.

  "Air pressure."

  "Check."

  "Regulator and hose."

  "Check."

  "Spear-bomb gun."

  "Check."

  "Mines."

  "Check and ready."

  The last of the foot-thick disks went into the teardrop-shaped container, and the man in charge of it adjusted the internal weights that kept it at neutral buoyancy Gerta pulled the goggles down over her face and put the rubber-tasting mouthpiece between her lips. She checked her watch: 18:00 hours, two hours until sunset. Ideal, if nothing held them up seriously. Lifting her feet carefully to avoid tripping on her fins, she waded into the water.

  * * *

  The Merchant Venture had her deck-guns manned and ready when John leapt off the running board of the truck and down onto the dock at the foot of the gangway. She also had full steam up and her deck-cranes rigged to unload cargo.

  "Go!" John said, trotting towards the deck.

  "Is that you, sir?" Barrjen blurted.

  The blood on his face must look even more ghastly now that it had a chance to dry.

  "Not mine," he said again. "Get the first load down on the dock," he went on. "Get some crewmen up here and form a chain to hand rifles and bandoliers down to anyone who comes up and asks for one."

  The ex-Marine blinked at that, but slung his own weapon and began barking orders. It was a relief sometimes, having someone who didn't argue with you all the time.

  Stevedores were pushing rail flats onto the tracks alongside the Santander merchant ship; Jean-Claude had gotten them out of the fighting and moving fast enough. Steam chugged and a winch whirred with a smell of scorched castor oil on the deck ahead of the ship's central island bridge. The crates coming out of the hold were the heavier stuff: field-guns and mortars and their ammunition. More trucks were arriving, honking their air-bulb horns, and growing crowds of people with Assault Guards to shove them into some sort of line.

  "Damndest fucking way—begging your pardon, sir—I've ever seen of unloading a ship," Adams, the vessel's first mate, said unhappily.

  "No alternative at present," John said.

  He lifted his eyes to the hills. Chateau du Sud was invisible from here, all but the pepperpot roof of one of the towers. That gave them direct observation for the fall of shot, though; and those 240mm Schlenki Emma up there could drop their shells right through the deck. When the stored ammunition and explosives went off, it would make the destruction of the Unionaise cruisers earlier in the day look like a fart in a teacup.

  Long narrow crates full of rifles and short square ones full of ammunition began going down the gangways hand to hand, then out into the eager crowd. John restrained an impulse to get into the chain and swing some weight, and another to look up at the castle again. Nothing he could do now but wait. At least there was also nothing the rebels or their Chosen backers could do to him either, except fire those guns . . . and they didn't seem to suspect what was going on. Yet.

  * * *

  The harbor water was murky and dark, tasting of oil and rot. Gerta felt the reach of the tentacle before she saw it, flicking up from the mud and scattered debris of the bottom, thick as a big man's arm and coated on one side with oval suckers and barbed bone hooks. The back of it buffeted her aside, tumbling her through the water like a stick. It wrapped itself around Hans Dieter with the snapping quickness of a frog's tongue closing around a fly. Then it jerked him downward, screaming through the muffling water. Blood and gouting air bubbles trailed behind him; so did the streamlined container of limpet mines, anchored by a stout cord to his waistbelt.

  Scheisse, Gerta thought.

  Her body reacted automatically, stabilizing her spin, jackknifing and plunging downward as fast as her fins could drive her. The darkness grew swiftly, but the creature was moving upward with its strike. Ten meters long, a torpedo shape with a three-lobed tail; the mouth had three flaps as well, fringed with teeth like ivory spikes around a rasping sucker tongue, with a huge reddish eye above each. The tentacles were threefold. A second had closed around Hans' legs, pulling his legs loose from his torso and guiding them into the sausage-machine maw. The third lashed out at her.

  She whirled, poising the speargun, and fired. A slug of compressed air sent the bulbous-headed spear flashing down and kicked her back; she could feel the schunnnk as the mechanism cycled in her hands. The spear slammed into the base of the tentacle just as the hooks slashed through her skinsuit and tore at her flesh. She shouted into the rubber of the mouthpiece, tasting water around it, and curled herself into a ball. The shock of the explosion thumped at her, sending her spinning off into the murky water.

  It had been muffled by flesh. There was inky-looking blood all around her. She extended arms and legs frantically to kill the spin. That saved her life; the long shape of the killer piscoid floundered by where she would have been, flailing the water with its two intact tentacles, mouth gaping. Gerta fought to control her speargun while the creature bent itself double to attack again. There was a crater in the rubbery flesh where its
third tentacle had been, gouting blood into the water, but that didn't seem to be fazing it much. The mouth opened as broad as the reach of her arms, the other two tentacles trailing back in its wake and still holding bits of Hans. Some crazed corner of her mind wondered if it was coming at her or up at her or down . . .

  No matter. One last chance . . . she fired.

  The mouth closed in reflex as something entered it. Swallowing was equally automatic. This time she had a perfect view of the consequences. The smooth body behind the eyes was as thick as her own torso. Now it belled out like a gun barrel fired when the weapon's muzzle was stuffed with dirt. The mouth flew open the way a flower did in stop-motion photography, with bits and pieces of internal organ and of Hans Dieter shooting out at her. The predator fish drifted downward, quivering and jerking as its nervous system fired at random.

  Got to get out of here, she thought. The blood and vibrations would attract scavengers from all over the harbor. And then: Where are the mines?

  Otto swam up pulling the container, Gerta felt her shoulders unknot in relief, enough that she was dizzy and nauseous for an instant before control clamped down. It had been so quick . . . and Hans had been a good troop. She grabbed a handhold on the other side of the container and signaled to Elke with her free hand, telling her to take over the watch. It would be faster with two pulling, and they'd lost time.

  The additional risk was something they'd just have to take.

  * * *

  "About half done," John said to himself.

  He half turned to speak to Adams when the deck surged under his feet. Water spouted up between the dock and the hull, a fountain surge that drenched the whole front of the ship. Seconds later the hull shuddered again, and another mass of water fell across her midships; and a third, this time at the stern. Dead sea-things bobbed to the surface.

  John looked up reflexively. But there had been no sound of a heavy shell dropping across the sky. Torpedo? his mind gibbered. There wasn't more than a yard or two between dock and hull . . .

  a mine, Center said. attached to the hull by strong magnets, put in place by divers with artificial breathing apparatus. probability approaches unity.

  Crewmen vomited out of the hatches, screaming. A second wave came a few seconds later, dripping and sodden with seawater, some of them dragging wounded crewmates. John stood staring blankly, fists squeezing at either side of his head. Then the deck began to tilt towards the quayside, scores of tons of water dragging the port rail down. His ears rang, so loudly that for a moment he couldn't hear Barrjen's shouted questions.

  John shook his head like a wet dog and grabbed Adams' shoulder. "Where are the starboard stopcocks?" he said, then screamed it into the man's ear until the expression of stunned incredulity faded.

  "What?"

  "The stopcocks! We've got to counterflood or she'll capsize!"

  "But if we flood, she'll fookin' sink."

  "There's only ten feet of water under her keel; we can salvage the cargo and float her later, but if we don't flood she'll capsize, man. Now!"

  He could feel the force of his will penetrate the seaman's mental fog. "Right," the mate said, wiping a hand across his face. "This way."

  "I'll come, sir," Barrjen said.

  "Good man. Let's go."

  The companionway down from the bridge was steep and slippery with oily soot from the funnels at the best of times. Now it was canted over at thirty degrees, and John went down it in a controlled fall. The hatchway below flapped open, abandoned in the rush to get away from the waters pouring through the rent hull. He dropped through it into water already ankle-deep, bracing himself against the wall with one hand to keep erect on the tilting deck.

  "Don't tell me," he said as Adams staggered beside him. "The stopcocks are on the other side of the ship."

  "Yessir."

  "No time like the present," John said grimly, and gave him a boost forward. The trip across the beam of the ship became steadily more like a climb. Adams staggered ahead, pushed from behind by John and the ex-Marine. At last they came to a complex of wheels and pipes.

  "That one!" Adams shouted, pointing. Then he looked down the side of the ship. "Oh, Jesus, the barnacles are showing—Jesus Son of God, Mary Mother, she's going to go over."

  "No she isn't," John said, fighting off a moments image of drowning in the dark with air only a few unreachable feet away through the hull. He spat on his hands. "Let's do it."

  The spoked steel wheel was about a yard in diameter, locked by a chain and pin. Adams snatched it out, and John locked his hands on the wheel. It moved a quarter of an inch, stopped, moved again, halted. John braced a foot against the wall and heaved until his muscles crackled and threatened to tear loose from his pelvis.

  "Jammed," Adams said. "Must've jammed—shaft torqued by the explosion."

  "Then we'll unjam it."

  John looked around. Resting in brackets on the side of the central island of the ship were an ax, sledgehammer, and prybar.

  "Jam these through the spokes," he said briskly. "Here and here. Now both of you together, heave."

  They strained; there was silence except for grunts of effort and the distant shouts on the dock. Then the ax handle snapped across with a gunshot crack. Barrjen skipped aside with a curse as the axhead whipped past him and bounced off the wall, leaving a streak of shiny metal scraped free of paint on the wall.

  "Fuck this," John shouted.

  He snatched the sledgehammer from Adams hands, jammed the crowbar firmly in place, and braced himself to strike. That was difficult; the ship was well past its center of gravity now, A few more minutes, and the intakes for the flood valves would be above the surface. That would happen seconds before she went over.

  Clung. The vibrating jolt shivered painfully back up his arms, into his shoulders, starting a pain in the small of his back. He took a deep breath as the sledge swung up again, focused, exhaled in a grunt of total concentration as the hammer came down. Clung. Clung. Clung.

  Adams' nerve broke and he fled back up the ladder. Two strikes later Barrjen spoke, at first a breathy whisper as he stared at the wheel with sweat running down his face.

  "She's moving." Then a shout: "The boor's moving!"

  It was; John had to reposition himself as it turned a quarter revolution. Easier now. He flung the sledgehammer aside and pulled the crowbar free, grabbing at the wheel with his hands. Barrjen did likewise on the other side. Both men strained at the reluctant metal, faces red and gasping with the effort, bodies knotted into straining statue-shapes. The wheel jerked, moved, jerked. Then spun, faster and faster.

  A new sound came from beneath their feet, a vibrating rumble.

  "Either that works, or she's already too far gone," John gasped. "Let's see from the dock."

  There was a crowd waiting. They cheered as John and the stocky ex-Marine jumped from the tilted deck to the wharfside, a score of hands reaching to steady them. John ignored the babbled questions. He did take a proffered flask of brandy, sipping once or twice before handing it back and never taking his eyes from the ship.

  "She's not tilting any further," Barrjen said.

  "And she's settling fast."

  Four minutes and the decks were awash. Another and they heard a deep rumbling bong, a sound felt through the soles of their feet more than through the ears. The funnels, central island and crane-masts of the merchantman trembled through a thirty-degree arc to a position that was nearly vertical as the relatively flat bottom of the ship rolled it nearly upright on the mud of the harbor bottom.

  John flexed his hands and took a deep breath. "Right," he said, when the cheers died down. "Get some small explosive charges here, we'll want to kill off any sea life." Scavengers were swarming in. "We'll need diving suits, air pumps, more ropes. Get moving!"

  He looked up into the darkening evening sky, then over towards the castle. He was just in time to see the great bottle-shaped spearhead of flame show over the courtyard walls. The siege howitzers were in action a
t last. His shoulders tensed as he listened to the whirring, ripping sound of the shell's passage, toning lower and lower as it approached. The three-hundred-pound projectile came closer, closer . . . then went by overhead. John pivoted on one heel, part of a mass movement that turned the crowd like sunflowers following the sun across the sky. A red gout of flame billowed up from the gun batteries holding the approaches to the harbor. Seconds later the other heavy howitzer in the castle fired, and the high-velocity guns in the batteries were in fixed revetments. They couldn't be turned to face the castle, and wouldn't be able to elevate that high if they did. . . .

  "I'll be damned," John said softly. "The garrison went over to the government side."

  Probably after killing all their officers. The Unionaise regular army was short-service conscript.

  Barrjen pounded him on the back. "We won, eh, sir? Goddam."

  John shook his head. "We won some time." He looked at the celebrating crowd. "Let's see if we can get the snail-eaters to make some use of it."

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  There were no Land dirigibles in the air over the city of Skinrit. Commander Horst Raske felt a little uneasy without the quiver of stamped-aluminum deckplates beneath his feet. Several of the other Air Service captains around him looked as if they felt the same, and everyone in the Chosen party looked unnatural out of uniform—still more as they were in something resembling Unionaise civil dress. Raske kept his horse to a quick walk and spent the time looking around.

  "Bad air currents here," he muttered.

  Several of his companions nodded. Skinrit itself was nothing remarkable, a little port about three steps up from a fishing village, smelling of stale water inside the breakwater, and strong stinks from the packing and canning plants that were its main industries—the cold currents down here below the main continent were heavy with sea life. Hundreds of trawlers crowded the quays, and battered-looking tramp steamers to take their cargoes of salted and frozen and canned fish to the north. The area around the town was hilly farmland and pasture; most of the buildings were in the whitewashed Unionaise style and quite new—built since their predecessors were burnt in the Errifean Revolt ten years ago. Around them reared real mountains, ten thousand feet and more, their peaks gleaming salt-white with year-round snow, their sides dark with forests of oak, maple, birch, and pine.