The Chosen

by S. M. Stirling

  "They'll try to roll right over us," John said. "The question is, can we hold them?"

  "We'd better," Jeffrey said. "If we don't hold them in the passes, if they break through into the open basin country west of Alai, we're royally fucked. The provincial militias just don't have the experience or cohesion to fight open-field battles of maneuver yet."

  "The Regulars will have to hold them, then."

  Jeffrey's face was tired and stubbled; now it looked old. "And Gerard's men," he said softly. "There in the front line."

  John looked at him. "That'll be pretty brutal," he warned. "They'll be facing the Land's army—in the civil war, it was mostly Libert's troops with a few Land units as stiffeners."

  Jeffrey's lips thinned. "Gerard's men are half the formed, regular units we have," he said. "We need time. If we spend all our cadre resisting the first attacks, who's going to teach the rush of volunteers? We've split up the Freedom Brigades people to the training camps, too."

  John sighed and nodded. "Behfel ist behfel."

  * * *

  "Good God, what is that?" the HQ staffer said.

  Jeffrey Farr looked up from the table. All across the eastern horizon light flickered and died, flickered and died, bright against the morning. The continuous thudding rumble was a background to everything, not so much loud as all-pervasive.

  "That's the Land artillery," he said quietly. "Hurricane bombardment. Start sweating when it stops, because the troops will come in on the heels of it."

  He turned back to the other men around the table, most in Santander brown, and many looking uncomfortable in it.

  "General Parks, your division was federalized two weeks ago. It should be here by now."

  "Sir . . ." Parks had a smooth western accent. "It's corn planting season, as I'm sure you're aware, and—"

  "And the Chosen will eat the harvest if we don't stop them," Jeffrey said. "General Parks, get what's at the concentration points here, and do it fast. Or turn your command over to your 2-IC." Who, unlike Parks, was a regular, one of the skeleton cadre that first-line provincial militia units had been ordered to maintain several years ago, when the Union civil war began ratcheting up tensions. "I think that'll be all; you may return to your units, gentlemen."

  He looked down at the map, took a cup of coffee from the orderly and scalded his lips slightly, barely noticing. The markers for the units under his command were accurate as of last night. Fifty thousand veterans of the Unionaise civil war; another hundred thousand regulars from the Republic's standing army, and many of the officers and NCOs had experience in that war, too. Two hundred and fifty thousand federalized militia units; they were well equipped, but their training ranged from almost as good as the Regulars to abysmal. More arriving every hour.

  Half a million Land troops were going to hit them in a couple of hours, supported by scores of heavy tanks, hundreds of light ones, thousands of aircraft.

  "None of Libert's men?" Gerard said quietly, tracing the unit designators for the enemy forces.

  "No. They're moving east—east and north, into the Sierra."

  "Good," Gerard said quietly. Jeffrey looked up at him. The compact little Unionaise was smiling. "Not pleasant, fighting one's own countrymen."

  "Pierre . . ." Jeffrey said.

  Gerard picked up his helmet and gloves, saluted. "My friend, we must win this war. To this, everything else is subordinate."

  They shook hands. Gerard went on: "Libert thinks he can ride the tiger. It is only a matter of time until he joins the other victims in the meat locker."

  "I think he's counting on us breaking the tiger's teeth," Jeffrey said. "God go with you."

  "How not? If there was ever anyone who fought with His blessing, it is here and now."

  "Damn," Jeffrey said softly, watching the Unionaise walk towards his staff car. "I hate sending men out to die."

  If you didn't, you wouldn't be the man you are, Raj said. But you'll do it, nonetheless.

  Maurice Hosten stamped on the rudder pedal and wrenched the joystick sideways.

  His biplane stood on one wing, nose down, and dove into a curve. The Land fighter shot past him with its machine guns stuttering, banking itself to try and follow his turn. He spiraled up into an Immelmann and his plane cartwheeled, cutting the cord of his opponent's circle. His finger clenched down on the firing stud.

  "Fuck!" The deflection angle wasn't right; he could feel it even before the guns stuttered.

  Spent brass spun behind him, sparkling in the sunlight, falling through thin air to the jagged mountain foothills six thousand feet below. Acrid propellant mingled with the smells of exhaust fumes and castor oil blowing back into his face. Land and cloud heeled crazily below him as he pulled the stick back into his stomach, pulled until gravity rippled his face backward on the bone and vision became edged with gray.

  Got the bastard, got him—

  Something warned him. It was too quick for thought; stick hard right, rudder right . . . and another Land triplane lanced through the space he'd been in, diving out of the sun. His leather-helmeted head jerked back and forth, hard enough to saw his skin if it hadn't been for the silk scarf. The rest of his squadron were gone, not just his wingman—he'd seen the Land fighter bounce Tom—but all the rest as well. The sky was empty, except for his own plane and the two Chosen pilots.

  Nothing for it. He pushed the throttles home and dove into cloud, thankful it was close. Careful, now. Easy to get turned around in here. Easy even to lose track of which way was up and end up flying upside down into a hillside convinced you were climbing. There was just enough visibility to see his instruments' radium glow: horizon, compass, airspeed indicator. One hundred thirty-eight; the Mark IV was a sweet bird.

  When he came out of the cloudbank there was nobody in sight. He kept twisting backward to check the sun; that was the most dangerous angle, always. The ground below looked strange, but then, it usually did. Check for mountain peaks, check for rivers, roads, the spaces between them.

  "That's the Skinder," he decided, looking at the twisting river. "Ensburg's thataway."

  Ensburg had been under siege from the Chosen for a month. So that train of wagons on the road was undoubtedly a righteous target. And he still had more than half a tank of fuel.

  Maurice pushed the stick forward and put his finger back on the firing button. Every shell and box of hardtack that didn't make it to the lines outside Ensburg counted.

  * * *

  "Damn, that's ugly," Jeffrey said, swinging down from his staff car.

  The huge Land tank was burnt out, smelling of human fat melted into the ground and turning rancid in the summer heat. The commander still stood in the main gun turret, turned to a calcined statue of charcoal, roughly human-shaped.

  "This way, sir," the major . . . Carruthers, that's his name . . . said. "And careful—there are Lander snipers on that ridge back there."

  The major was young, stubble-chinned and filthy, with a peeling sunburn on his nose. From the way he scratched, he was never alone these days. He'd probably been a small-town lawyer or banker three months ago; he was also fairly cheerful, which was a good sign.

  "We caught it with a field-gun back in that farmhouse," he said, waving over one shoulder.

  Jeffrey looked back; the building was stone blocks, gutted and roofless, marked with long black streaks above the windows where the fire has risen. There was a barn nearby, reduced to charred stumps of timbers and a big stone water tank. The orchard was ragged stumps.

  "Caught it in the side as it went by." He pointed; one of the powered bogies that held the massive war machine up was shattered and twisted. "Then we hit it with teams carrying satchel charges, while the rest of us gave covering fire."

  The ex-militia major sobered. "Lost a lot of good men doing it, sir. But I can tell you, we were relieved. Those things are so cursed hard to stop!"

  "I know," Jeffrey said dryly, looking to his right down the eastward reach of the valley. The Santander positions had be
en a mile up that way, before the Chosen brought up the tank.

  "This is dead ground, sir. You can straighten up."

  Jeffrey did so, watching the engineers swarming over the tank, checking for improvements and modifications. "The good news about these monsters, major, comes in threes," he said, tapping its flank. "There aren't very many of them; they break down a lot; and now that the lines aren't moving much, the enemy don't get to recover and repair them very often."

  "Well, that's some consolation, sir," Carruthers said dubiously. "They're still a cursed serious problem out here."

  "We all have problems, Major Carruthers."

  * * *

  The factory room was long, lit by grimy glass-paned skylights, open now to let in a little air; the air of Oathtaking, heavy and thick at the best of times, and laden with a sour acid smog of coal smoke and chemicals when the wind was from the sea. Right now it also smelled of the man who was hanging on an iron hook driven into the base of his skull. The hook was set over the entrance door, where the workers passed each morning and evening as they were taken from the camp on the city's outskirts. The body had been there for two days now, ever since the shop fell below quota for an entire week. Sometimes it moved a little as the maggots did their work.

  There was a blackboard beside the door, with chalked numbers on it. This week's production was nearly eight percent over quota. A cheerful banner announced the prizes that the production group would receive if they could sustain that for another seven days: a pint of wine for each man, beef and fresh fruit, tobacco, and two hours each with an inmate from the women's camp.

  Tomaso Guiardini smiled as he looked at the banner. He smiled again as he looked down at the bearing race in the clamp before him. It was a metal circle; the inner surface moved smoothly under his hand, where it rested on the ball-bearings in the race formed by the outer U-shaped portion.

  Very smoothly. Nothing to tell that there were metal filings mixed with the lubricating matrix inside. Nothing except the way the bearing race would seize up and burn when subjected to heavy use, in about one-tenth the normal time.

  He looked up again at the banner. Perhaps the woman would be pretty, maybe with long, soft hair. Mostly the Chosen shaved the inmates' scalps, though.

  He glanced around. The foreman was looking over somebody else's shoulder. Tomaso took two steps and swept a handful of metal shavings from the lathe across the aisle, dropping them into the pocket of his grease-stained overall, and was back at his bench before the Protégé foreman—he was a one-eyed veteran with a limp, and a steel-cored rubber truncheon thonged to his wrist—could turn around.

  * * *

  "Dad!" Maurice Hosten checked his step. "I mean, sir. Ah, just a second."

  He pulled off the leather flyer's helmet and turned to give some directions to the ground crew; the blue-black curls of his hair caught the sun, and the strong line of his jaw showed a faint shadow of dense beard of exactly the same color. His plane had more bullet holes in the upper wing, and part of the tail looked as if it had been chewed. There were a row of markings on the fuselage below the cockpit, too—Chosen sunbursts with a red line drawn through of them. Eight in all, and the outline of an airship.

  John Hosten's blond hair was broadly streaked with gray now, and as he watched the young man's springy step he was abruptly conscious that he was no longer anything but unambiguously middle-aged. He still buckled his belt at the same notch, he could do most of what he had been able to—hell, his biological father was running the Land's General Staff with ruthless competence and he was thirty years older—but doing it took a higher price every passing year.

  Maurice, though, he certainly isn't a boy any longer.

  War doesn't give you much chance at youth, Raj agreed, with an edge of sadness to his mental voice.

  The young pilot turned back. "Good to see you, Dad."

  "And you, son." He pulled the young man into a brief embrace. "That's from your mother."

  "How is she?"

  "Still working too hard," John said. "We meet at breakfast, most days."

  Maurice chuckled and shook his head. "Doing wonders, though. The food's actually edible since the Auxiliary took over the mess." They began walking back towards the pine-board buildings to one side of the dirt strip.

  "I wish everything was going as well," he said, with a quick scowl.

  "I'm listening," John said.

  "You always did, Dad," Maurice said. He ran a hand through his hair. "Look, the war's less than six months old—and there are only three other pilots in this squadron besides me who were in at the start. And one of them had experience in the Union civil war."

  "Bad, I know."

  "Dad, we're losing nearly two-thirds of the new pilots in the first week they're assigned to active patrols."

  60% in the first ten days, Center said inside his head. a slight exaggeration.

  "The Chosen pilots, they're good. And they've got experience. Our planes are about as good now, but Christ, the new chums, they've got maybe twenty hours flying time when they get here. It's like sending puppies up against Dobermans! I have to force myself to learn their f—sorry, their goddamned names."

  "You were almost as green," John pointed out.

  "Dad, that's not the same thing, and you know it. I had Uncle Jeff teaching me before the war, and I'm . . . lucky."

  He's a natural, Raj said clinically. It's the same with any type of combat—swords, pistols, bayonet fighting. Novices do most of the dying, experienced men do most of the killing, and a few learn faster than anyone else. This boy of yours is a fast learner; I know the type.

  "What do you suggest, son?"

  "I—" Maurice hesitated, and ran his fingers through his hair again. "What we really need is more instructors—experienced instructors—back at the flying schools."

  "You want the job?" John said.

  "Christ no! I . . . oh." He trailed off uncertainly.

  "Well, that's one reason," John said. "For another, we don't have time to stretch the training. The Chosen were getting ready for this war for a long time. Our men have to learn on the job, and they pay for it in blood; not just you pilots, but the ground troops as well. We've lost two hundred and fifty thousand casualties."

  Maurice's eyes went wide, and he gave a small grunt of incredulous horror.

  "Yes, we don't publicize the overall figures; and that doesn't count the Union Loyalist troops; they were virtually wiped out. The weekly dead-and-missing list in the newspapers is bad enough. In Ensburg, they're eating rats and their own dead. We estimate half the population of the Sierra is gone, and in the Empire, we're supplying guerillas who keep operating even though they know a hundred hostages will be shot for every soldier killed, five hundred for every Chosen. But we stopped them. They thought they could run right over us the way they did the Empire, or the Sierra . . . and they didn't. They've nowhere gotten more than a hundred miles in from the old Union border, and our numbers are starting to mount. The Chosen are butchers, and we're paying a high butcher's bill, but we're learning."

  Maurice shook his head. "Dad," he said slowly, "I wouldn't have your job for anything."

  "Not many of us are doing what we'd really like," John said. "Duty's duty." He clapped his hand on his sons shoulder. "But we're doing our best—and you're doing damned well."

  * * *

  None of the command group was surprised when Gerta Hosten arrived; if they had been, she'd have put in a report that would ensure their next command was of a rifle platoon on the Confrontation Line. The pickets and ambush patrols passed her through after due checks, and she found the brigade commander consulting with his subordinates next to two parked vehicles in what had been Pueblo Vieho before the forces of the Land arrived in the Sierra the previous spring. A lieutenant was talking, pointing out the path her command had taken through the pine woods further up the mountain slopes, above the high pastures.

  Gerta vaulted out of her command car—it was a six-wheeled armored car chass
is with the turret and top deck removed—and exchanged salutes and clasped wrists with the commander. "'Tag, Ektar," she said. "How are things in the quiet sector? Missed you by about an hour at your headquarters,"

  "Just coming up to see how things are going at the business end," Ektar Feldenkopf said. "Not a bad bag: seventeen men, twenty-four women, and a round dozen of their brats. The yield from these sweeps has been falling off."

  The air of the high Sierran valley was cool and crisp even in late summer. Most of it had been pasture, growing rank now. The burnt snags of the village's log houses didn't smell any more, or the bodies underneath them. There were still traces of gingerbread carving around the eaves. Several skeletons lay on the dirt road leading to the lowlands, where the clean-up squad had shot them as they fled into the darkness from their burning houses. The bodies laid out in the overgrown mud of the street had probably run the other way, up into the forests and the mountains, to survive a little longer and steal down to try and raid the conqueror's supply lines. The women and children taken alive knelt in a row beyond the corpses, hands secured behind their backs.

  "Which means either they're getting thinner on the ground, or better at hiding, or both."

  "Both, I think—the interrogations will tell us something. The males had a rifle each and about twenty rounds, plus some handguns, but no explosives."

  Johan was looking at one of the prisoners, a blond who probably looked extremely pretty when she was better fed and didn't have dried blood from a blow to the nose over most of her face. Gerta smiled indulgently; young men had single-track minds, and he'd been doing his work very well. He had some scars of his own now, although nothing like the one that seamed the side of her face since the drop on Nueva Madrid, and drew the left corner of her face up in a permanent slight smile.

  "All right," she said. "But don't undo her hands and watch out for the teeth. Remember Hauptman von Seedow."

  The three Chosen shared a brief chuckle; poor Maxine had been laid up in a field hospital for a month with her infected bite, and the joke was still doing the rounds of every officers' mess in the Land's armed forces. She'd nearly punched one wit who offered her a recipe for a poultice.