The Chosen

by S. M. Stirling

  Pop.

  The small spiteful crack on the sidewalk outside was almost inaudible under the traffic noise. Gerta was out of her chair and halfway across the lawn with a single raking stride; Heinrich was too big a man to be quite as graceful, but he was less than two paces behind her at the start and they vaulted the wall in tandem, landing facing each way with their automatics out.

  A woman ran into Gerta, looking back over her shoulder. She bounced off the Chosen as if she had run into a wall; Gerta grabbed and struck twice, punching with clinical precision. Something tinkled metallically, and the Imperial Protégé collapsed to the brick sidewalk, her face turning scarlet as she struggled to suck breath through a paralyzed diaphragm. Behind her the dense crowd had scattered like mercury on dry ice, leaving a Chosen officer lying facedown. He was doggedly trying to crawl forward when Heinrich stooped over him.

  "Lie still," he said. The bark of command penetrated the fog of pain; Heinrich cut cloth and wadded it into a pressure bandage. "Bullet wound, left of the spine, just south of the ribs. Looks nasty."

  Gerta came up, nostrils flaring slightly at the iron scent of blood. There was no fecal smell, so the intestine hadn't been perforated, but there were too many essential organs and big blood vessels in that part of the body for comfort. She was dragging the Protégé woman by one ankle, and holding something in the other.

  Heinrich looked at it and almost laughed. It was like a child's sketch of a pistol; a short tube, a wire outline for a grip and another piece of wire to act as a spring and drive a striker home on the single cartridge within.

  "What sort of weapon is that?" he asked.

  "It's not a weapon, it's an assassination tool. One shot and you throw it away; just the thing for killing a straw boss, or one of us on a crowded street."

  Heinrich's features clamped down to a mask. After a moment he said: "Wouldn't have thought the Santies would come up with that."

  "They're nasty when they get going," Gerta said. "We've been finding more and more of these. The problem is tracing back the chain of contacts. This animal will tell us something, perhaps."

  "Indeed."

  They looked up; a medic had arrived, with two Land-born Protégé assistants, and a man in civilian clothes. The long leather coat might as well have been a uniform: Fourth Bureau.

  "That was quick," Gerta said neutrally. Not the time for another intercouncil pissing match, she told herself. This was their turf.

  "Not quick enough. We had some information, but clearly it was insufficient."

  The woman had recovered enough breath to recognize what was standing over her. She tried to crawl away, then screamed when he stamped on her hand.

  It died away to a whimper when he knelt beside her and held up something: a jointed metal like a gynecologist's speculum, but with a toothed clamp on the end. Gerta recognized it, an interrogation instrument designed to be inserted in the subject's vagina, clamped on the uterus and tear it out with one strong pull.

  "Now, my dear, I would like to ask you some questions," the secret policeman said. "And you would like to avoid pain . . . and there is so much pain you can feel." His hand clamped on her jaw. "No, no, you cannot bite off your tongue. Not yet."

  Heinrich stood as the specialists staunched the bleeding of the wounded man, set up a saline drip, and began to ease him onto the stretcher. An unmarked police car drew up as well; the woman was drugged with a swift injection and thrown into the wire cage at the back.

  "My oath, but going back into combat down in the Union looks better and better," he said.

  Gerta looked morosely at the bloodstain on the deserted sidewalk. "Better and better, but where's it leading?"

  "We'll win, of course."

  "We won here."

  Heinrich hesitated. "You know, you've got a point." He shrugged. "It's the Santies behind all this. If we finish them off, we can pacify successfully."

  * * *

  "Come on baby, you can do it," Jeffrey crooned.

  The dogfight had swirled away into patchy cloud to the west; all he could see were two plumes of smoke rising from the ground where planes had augered in. The engine coughed again, a skip in its regular beat that produced a sympathetic lurch in his own heart. He banked gently over the zigzag trenches that scarred the land below, breaking into knots of strongpoints and bunkers in the ruined buildings of the university complex just south of Unionvil. Even now he shivered slightly at the sight of them; the winter fighting there had been ghastly, stopping the last Nationalist offensive in the very outskirts of the capital city.

  "Come on," he said again.

  Bits of fabric were streaming back from the cowling and upper wing of his Liberty Hawk II, ripping off as the slipstream worried at the bullet holes. That wasn't his main concern; the Mark I had sometimes had the whole wing cover peel off in circumstances like this, giving the remaining fuselage the aerodynamics of a brick in free-fall, but the new model was sturdier. He really didn't like the sound the engine made, though. Slowly, carefully, he brought the little fighter around and began to descend towards the landing field. Only a mile or two now . . .

  And the engine coughed again and died. "Shit," he said with resignation, and yanked at the tab to cut the fuel supply. Then: "Shit!" as he looked down and saw a thickening film of gasoline in the bottom of the cockpit. "I hate it when things like that happen!"

  Make a note to write to the design team, Raj prompted. If it had been Center, he would have taken that literally. . . .

  A few black puffs of antiaircraft fire blossomed around him. Friendly fire, which was just as dangerous as the opposition's. It petered out; someone must have noticed the red-white-and-blue rondels on his wings, the mark of the Freedom Brigades' Air Service. Then the X shape of the field came into view over a low ridge, a ridge uncomfortably close to the fixed undercarriage. He concentrated on the white line of lime down the center of the graded dirt runway, ignoring the crash-truck that was speeding out to meet him with men clinging to its sides and standing on the running boards. A pom-pom in a circular pit near the edge of the runway tracked him, its twin six-foot barrels looking bloated in their water jackets, but at least that bunch seemed to keep their eyes open—a single fighter of Santander design with its prop stationary was hard to mistake for a Chosen or Nationalist raiding group, but every now and then a gun crew with active imaginations managed it.

  Lower. Lower. Wind whistling through the wires and struts, flapping his scarf behind him. Lower . . . touch. The hard rims of the wheels ticked at the ground in a scurf of dry dirt and gravel, ticked again, settled with a rattling thud. The unpowered aircraft slowed rapidly to a halt. Jeffrey snapped open his belts and swung out to the lower wing, then to the ground, and lumbered away as fast as the weight of the parachute and the fleece-lined leather flight suit would let him.

  "Motherfucking son of a bitch!" he shouted, throwing the leather helmet and goggles to the ground, followed by the parachute.

  "You all right?"

  That was one of the Wong brothers. Jeffery rounded on him. "The interrupter gear still isn't working right," he said as the crew from the crash truck swarmed over the Hawk, fire extinguishers at the ready.

  "My guns both jammed. Which left me a sitting duck. And the fuel lines are still leaking into the pilot's compartment when the integral tank gets cut—do you have any fucking idea how good that is for pilot morale?"

  Wong made soothing motions with his hands. "As soon as we can get more rubber, we can make the tanks self-sealing," he said.

  Jeffrey snorted. The Land had all the natural rubber on Visager—the only places that could grow it were the Land itself and the northernmost peninsula of what had once been the Empire. John's factories were just beginning to produce a trickle of synthetic rubber from oil, but it was fiendishly expensive and the Land would cut off the natural type the minute their extremely efficient spies caught Santander using it for military purposes.

  Crazy war, he thought. We're fighting here in the Union
, but it's all "volunteers" and normal trade goes on.

  "And the latest Land fighter is still better than ours."

  "The triplane?" Wong said with interest.

  "Yes, the Skyshark. It's almost as fast as our Mark II and it's got a better turning radius in starboard turns."

  Wong took out a notepad and began to scribble as they walked back towards the squadron HQ; behind them the crew hitched up the plane and pulled it away towards the hangar and revetments, half a dozen walking behind with a grip on its wings to steady it. A group was waiting for Jeffrey.

  "You should not risk yourself so, General Farr," General Pierre Gerard said.

  "You must be really pissed, Pierre; you never call me that otherwise."

  The loyalist officer shrugged, a very Unionaise gesture. "Still, it is true. And someone must tell you."

  You, John, my wife, and my two invisible friends, Jeffrey thought. And I can never get away from those two.

  "I have to have hands-on experience to work effectively with the designers," he said, looking over his shoulder for Wong. The little engineer and ex-bicycle manufacturer was trotting off to take a look at the shot-up Mark II. "Also to help refine our tactics for the pilot schools. We're sending them up with less than thirty hours' flight time, so at least we should be teaching them the right things."

  They walked into the HQ, a spare temporary structure of boards and two-by-fours. John stripped out of the flight suit, shivering slightly as the chill spring air of the central plateau hit the sweat-damp fabric of his summer-weight uniform.

  "What is your appraisal?" Gerard said.

  "The enemy have more and better planes than we do," Jeffrey said, sitting down and accepting the coffee an orderly brought. Coffee was another thing they were going to miss if—when—all trade with the Land was cut off. "And better pilots, more experienced. If it's any consolation, we're improving faster than they are, but we're starting from a lower base."

  Gerard frowned, looking down at his hands on the rough table. "My friend, this is bad news. Although perhaps the government will listen now when I tell them the offensive on the eastern front is a bad idea."

  Jeffrey halted the coffee cup halfway to his mouth. "They're still going ahead with that?" he asked incredulously.

  "And they will strip men, guns, aircraft from every other front for it," he said. "The Committee talks of recapturing Marsai and splitting the rebel zone in half."

  "The Committee has its head up its collective butt," Jeffrey said.

  Gerard's head swiveled around. Unfair, Jeffrey chided himself. He could say that; the Committee of Public Safety had no jurisdiction over Brigade members, they'd insisted on that from the beginning. Gerard was in high favor after helping to stop Libert's thrust for the capital in the opening months of the war, but even so the Committee's name was nothing to take in vain. Chairman Vincen seemed to think that if he made himself into a worse mad bastard than Libert and the Chosen, he could beat Libert and the Chosen. It didn't necessarily work that way, but desperate men weren't the best logicians.

  Gerard cleared his throat "And it will be even more difficult if they can continue to use Land dirigibles to shift troops and supplies at will behind their lines."

  "They can as long as they can keep our planes from punching through," Jeffrey said. "Those gasbags are sitting targets for fighters, but we don't have the numbers or the range to penetrate their own fighter screens.

  Gerard's bulldog face grew longer. "Then they will be able to shift faster than I can—what is that expression you used?"

  Jeffrey sighed. "They can get inside your decision curve. I just hope things are going better back home."

  * * *

  Admiral Arthur Cunningham was a big, thickset man, with graying blond hair. Right now his face and bull neck were turning red with throttled rage, and he pulled at his walrus mustache as he stared at the ship model in the center of the glossy ebony table.

  The hull was a large merchant variety, an eight-thousand-ton bulk carrier of the type used to ferry manganese ore from the Southern Islands under Santander protectorate. The top had been sliced off and replaced with a long flat rectangular surface; the funnels ran up into an island on the port side, and a section had lowered like an elevator to show rows of biplanes in the huge hold below the flight deck.

  "Its an abortion," Cunningham said.

  "It's what we need for scouting," Maurice Farr corrected.

  The rings on his sleeves and the epaulets on his shoulders marked him as a rear admiral, and kept Cunningham superficially respectful. Nobody could mistake his expression, or the meaning in the look he shot John Hosten where he sat beside his father.

  "Farr, I'm surprised. I expect politicians to act this way." From his tone, he also expected them to have sexual intercourse with sheep. "You're a navy man and the son of a navy man. Why are you doing this?"

  "We work for politicians, Cunningham—there's a little thing called the Constitution that more or less tells us to. And in this instance, the politicians are right. We need aerial scouting if we're going to match the Land's fleet; otherwise they'll be able to lead us around like a bull with a ring in its nose."

  "We need airships with decent open-sea range, not flying toys on this abortion of a so-called ship!" Cunningham said, his voice rising toward a bellow and his fist making the coffee cups rattle.

  John spoke: "We've tried, Admiral Cunningham. Here."

  He pulled glossy photographs from an envelope and slid them across the table. "You see the results."

  The frame spread across a hillside was just recognizable as a dirigible's, after the fire.

  "The Land is too far ahead of us on the learning curve with lighter-than-air craft. They've got the diesels, the hull design, and most of all, plenty of experienced construction teams and crews. We can't match them, not at acceptable cost, not with everything else we're trying to do. And land-based aircraft just don't have the range to give cover and reconnaissance to a fleet at sea. Hence, we need the . . . aircraft carriers, we're calling them."

  "Your shipyards need the contracts, you mean," Cunningham said bluntly. "Farr, this is diverting effort from capital ships."

  Farr shook his head. "Look, Arthur, you know very well the bottleneck there is the heavy guns and the armor-rolling capacity."

  Cunningham rose and settled his gold-crusted cap. "If you will excuse, me, sir—" he began.

  "Admiral Cunningham, sit down!" Farr barked.

  After a moment's glaring test of wills, the other man obeyed. "Admiral Cunningham, your objections are noted. You will now cooperate fully in carrying out the decisions of the Minister of Marine and the Naval Staff, or you will tender your resignation immediately. Is that clear?"

  Twenty minutes later John Hosten sank back in his chair, shaking his head as he looked at the door that Cunningham had carefully not slammed behind him.

  "I hope there aren't too many more like him, Dad," he said.

  Maurice Farr sighed. His close-cut hair and mustache were gray now, but he looked as trim as he had when he stood on the docks of Oathtaking nearly two decades before.

  "I'm afraid there are quite a few," he said. "A lot of the officers are convinced that this is being forced on the navy by politicians—and Highlander politicians from the east, at that, with their industrialist friends." He smiled. "They're right, aren't they?"

  "But—" John began, then caught the look in his stepfather's eye. "You can still get me going, can't you?"

  Farr laughed. "You take everything a bit too seriously, son," he said. "Don't worry; Artie Cunningham would rather eat his young than resign just before the first big naval war in a generation. If he has to swallow that"—he nodded at the model of the aircraft carrier that filled the center of the big table—"he'll swallow it, for the sake of the battlewagons."

  Farr lit a cigarette. "He's not stupid, just rather specialized," he went on. "I can understand him; I'm a cannon-and-armorplate sailor myself. But I don't like operating blind." He
stared at the model. "I do hope this concept's as workable as you and Jeffrey say. It looks good on paper, certainly, but I don't like ordering straight from the drawing board."

  "Dad, I'm as sure as if I'd seen them fight battles myself."

  pearl harbor, Center said helpfully. the pursuit of the bismark. taranto. midway—

  Great, and how do I tell Dad that? John replied. Hastily: That was a rhetorical question.

  Maurice Farr rose and began stacking papers in his briefcase. "No rest for the wicked—I've got to get back to HQ and deal with more bumpf. God, for a fleet command."

  "Not long, I think, Dad," John said.

  A long moment after his stepfather had left John heard the door behind him open.

  "Touching," a voice said in Landisch.

  "English," John said sharply. "Tradecraft."

  "Oh, indeed."

  The man—he was dressed in Santander civilian clothes, with a well-known yachting club's pattern of cravat—came and sat not far from John. He looked at a duplicate set of the airshipwreck photos.

  "What caused this?"

  "The design was overweight and underpowered; they took out a section in the center and enlarged it to take an extra gasbag. The bag chafed against the bolts internally, and they had a terrible problem with leaks. Probably they nosed in on that hill in the dark, or there was a fire from static discharge, or both."

  "Sloppy," the Chosen officer said, tucking the pictures away. He nodded to the model of the aircraft carrier. "Will this work?"

  "Probably, after a fashion. I can't turn down all the good ideas, you know—not and keep my standing with the military and defense industries."

  "Indeed."

  "I suppose we'll have to build them, too. Dirigibles are so vulnerable to heavier-than-air pursuit planes."

  "Perhaps," the intelligence officer said. "And perhaps not."

  * * *

  "Straight and level, straight and level, damn your eyes," Horst Raske said, in a tone that was as close to a prayer as one of the Chosen was likely to get.

  The bridge of the Grey Tiger was vibrating itself, very slightly, despite the skilled hands on the wheels and controls set about the U-shaped space. Through the vast semicircle of clear window they could see the teardrop shape of the experimental airship carrier Orca as she quivered in the clear air over the Land's central plateau, a hundred miles north of Copernik. The craft was huge, nearly a thousand feet from nose to stern, with beautiful swept control fins in an X at the rear, its smooth sheet-aluminum hull showing it to be one of the new metalclads.