The Chosen

by S. M. Stirling

  She'll never live it down, Gerta thought, as her son walked over to the prisoners. Still chuckling, he hauled the girl—she was about his own age—to her feet by her hair and marched her off behind the ruins of one of the buildings.

  "How are they surviving?" Gerta asked. None of them were what you'd call well-fleshed, but they weren't on the verge of starvation either.

  "These mountain villages, they store cheese and dried milk and so on up in the caves," the officer said, waving towards the jagged snow-capped mountains to the north. "There are a lot of caves up there. And there's game, deer and bison, rabbits ana so forth, and a lot of cattle and sheep and pigs gone wild in the woods. Half-wild to begin with. Still, they're getting hungrier, and we're whittling them down. It's good rest and recreation for units pulled out of the line."

  "How do the Unionaise shape?" she asked.

  There was a brigade of them down the valley a ways, at the crossroads twenty miles west of the railroad, under their own officers, but also under the operational control of the Land regional command.

  "Not bad," the officer said, as a shrill scream sounded from behind the wrecked building. It trailed off into sobs. "Not as energetic at their patrolling as I'd like. Good enough for this work, I'd say; I couldn't swear how they'd do in heavy combat. Settling in to that town as if they owned the place."

  "They think they do," Gerta replied. "Well, things appear to be under control here. Which is more than I can say about some other places."

  The garrison commander frowned and lowered his voice. "How does the Confrontation Line develop? The official reports seem . . . overly optimistic."

  Gerta spoke quietly as well. "Not so well. We're killing the Santies by the shitload, that part of the official story is true enough. They keep attacking us with more enthusiasm than sense, but it's getting more expensive, and we're not taking much territory. Ensburg's still holding out."

  "Still?" The man's brows rose. "They must be starving."

  "They are. I was in the siege lines last week; nothing left inside but rubble, and you can smell the stink of their funeral pyres. Starvation, typhus, whatever—but they're not giving up."

  She spat into the dirt. "If that monomaniac imbecile Meitzerhagen hadn't killed the garrison of Fort William after they surrendered and bellowed the fact to the world, they might have been more inclined to give up. So would a lot of the other garrisons we cut off in the first push; mopping them up took time the Santies used to get themselves organized. We lost momentum."

  The other officer nodded. "Meitzerhagen's a sledgehammer," he said. "The problem is—"

  "—not all problems are nails," she finished.

  "Stalemate, for the present, then."

  "Ja. We can push them, but we outrun our supplies. And even when we beat them, they don't run, and there are always more of them. Their equipment's good, too. Now that they're learning how to use it . . ." She shrugged.

  "How is our logistical situation, then?"

  "It sucks wet dogshit. We can't move dirigibles within a hundred miles of the front in daylight, the road net's terrible, the terrain favors defense . . . and the Santies are right in the middle of their main industrial area, with their best farmlands only a few hundred miles away on first-class rails and roads."

  "I presume the staff is evolving a counterstrategy."

  "Ya. No details of course, but let's just say that we're going to encourage their enthusiasm and prepare to receive it. Also if we can't use the Gut, there's no reason they should be able to either."

  The officer sighed and nodded. "Well, you can tell them that my brigade at least is doing its job," he said. "Trying to keep the rail lines through the Sierra working would have been a nightmare if we'd used conventional occupation techniques. Bad enough as it is."

  Young Johan returned, pushing the dazed and naked Sierran girl before him. He dropped into parade rest behind Gerta, smiling faintly as the prisoner stumbled back to kneel with the others.

  "In a year or two, there won't be any left to speak of. . . . Speaking of which, you said there was a new directive?"

  Gerta nodded. "Ya, we're running short of labor for the construction gangs, importing from the New Territories is inconvenient, big projects all over, and the local animals might as well give some value before they die," she said. "Send down noncombatant adults fit for heavy work—ones that give up when you catch them. Keep killing all those found in arms or not useful. Except children under about five. As an experiment, we're sending those back to the Land to be raised by senior Protégé-soldier families."

  Long-serving Protégé soldiers were allowed to marry, as a special privilege for good service. "They might be useful, that way, in the long term. At your discretion, though; don't tie up transport if you're busy."

  The other Chosen nodded. "Jawohl. Odd to think of us running short of manual workers, though."

  "Well, even the New Territories' population has dropped considerably," she said. "We'll have to be less wasteful after the war."

  Gerta returned his salute and turned to her open-topped armored car. When you carried a hatchet for the General Staff, your work was never done.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Jeffrey Farr whistled soundlessly. Not that anyone could have heard him in the rear seat of the observation plane; the noise of the engine and the slipstream was too loud. He reached forward and tapped the pilot on the shoulder, circling his hand with the index finger up and pointing it downwards. The pilot nodded and circled, coming down to four thousand feet.

  A couple of light pom-poms opened up, winking up at them from the huge piles of turned earth below; then a heavier antiaircraft gun, that stood some chance of reaching them. Black puffs of smoke erupted in the air below, each with a momentary snap of fire at its heart before it lost shape and began to drift away. Ant-tiny, hordes of laborers dove for the shelter of the trenches they had been digging, leaving their tools among the piles of timber, steel sheet and reinforcing rod.

  There was a big camera fastened to brackets ahead of the observer's position, but Jeffrey ignored it. He'd seen pictures; this trip was for a personal look.

  All right, he thought. Nice job of field engineering. Everything laid out to command the ground to the east, but not just simple positions on ridge tops. Machine-gun bunkers at the base of the ridges, giving maximum fields of fire; heavier bunkers for field guns, revetted positions for heavy mortars on the reverse slopes, with communications trenches and even tunnels to bring reserves forward quickly without leaving them exposed to direct-fire weapons. All-round fields of fire, so that each position could hold out if cut off, and heavier redoubts further back, layer upon layer of them.

  They must have half a million men working on this, Jeffrey thought, impressed.

  correct to within ten thousand ±6, Center said. assuming an equivalent effort in other sectors of the front, as intelligence reports indicate.

  "Well, we'll have to take this into account," Jeffrey said. He tapped the pilot's shoulder again; despite their two-squadron escort, the man was looking nervously east and upward, to where Land attackers would come diving out of the morning sun. The plane banked westward.

  * * *

  "Thank you gentlemen for meeting on such short notice," Jeffrey said.

  They were in the Premier's bunker beneath the hilltop Executive Mansion, nearly a hundred yards underground, as deep as you could get near Santander City without hitting groundwater. The impact of the bombs, a dull crump . . . crump . . . was felt more through the soles of their feet than heard through their ears. Every now and then the overhead electric light flickered, and dust filtered down, making men sneeze at its acrid scent.

  "I thought you'd made it suicidal for dirigibles to fly over our territory," Maurice Farr said dryly to the Air Force commander.

  The commander flushed and pulled at his mustache. "In daylight, yes. But the speed and altitude advantage of our fighters is fairly narrow. At night, it's much harder. Those might be their new long-ra
nge eight-engine bomber planes, too. We're having more of a problem with those."

  At the head of the table, Jeffrey held up a hand. "In any case, the error radius of night bombing is so huge that it consumes more of their resources to do it than it does of ours to endure it."

  The Premier tapped a pencil sharply on the table. "General, we're losing hundreds, perhaps thousands of civilian every time one of those raids breaks through."

  Jeffrey dipped his head slightly. "With all due respect, sir, there were a hundred and fifty thousand people in Ensburg—and I doubt ten thousand of them are alive now, and those are in Chosen labor camps."

  A pall of silence fell around the table. The siege of Ensburg had been a morale-booster for the whole Republic. Its fall had been a correspondingly serious blow. Jeffrey went on:

  "So with all due respect, Mr. Premier, anything that helps keep the enemy back is a positive factor, and that includes attacks that hurt us but hurt him more."

  "There's the effect of bombing on civilian morale," the politician pointed out.

  observe:

  Scenes floated before Jeffrey's eyes: cities reduced to street patterns amid tumbled scorched brick, air-raid shelters full of unmarked corpses asphyxiated as the firestorms above sucked the oxygen from their lungs, fleets of huge four-engined bombers sleeker and more deadly than anything Visager knew raining down incendiaries on a town of half-timbered buildings crowded with refugees while odd-looking monoplane fighters tried to beat them off.

  "Sir, our citizens could take a lot more pain than this and still keep going. In any case, if we could turn to the matter at hand?"

  The men around the table—generals, admirals, heads of ministries—opened the folders that lay before them. Heading each bundle of documents were aerial photographs of enormous twisting chains of fortifications. Maps followed, and intelligence summaries.

  "Is this reliable?" the Premier asked.

  "Sir, I've seen a good deal of it with my own eyes," Jeffrey said. "And we have the labor gangs working on it penetrated to a fare-thee-well. It's genuine, and it's a major effort. Not just the labor, they've got plenty of that, but the transport capacity it's tying up and the materials. Steel, cement, explosives for the minefields."

  "So you're right. They're going to withdraw," the Premier said. "We're beating them!"

  "Sir." The elected leader of the Republic looked up at Jeffrey's tone. "Sir, we're making them retreat—and that's not the same thing. We have to consider the strategic consequences. If you'll all turn to Report Four?"

  They did; it started with a map. "That line—they're code-naming it the Gothic Line, for some reason—is cursed well laid-out. When it's finished, they'll make a fighting retreat and then sit and wait for us."

  "We've pushed them back once, we can do it again!" the Premier said. "No invader can be left on the Republic's soil, whatever the cost."

  Christ. Usually the Premier's aggressive pugnacity was a plus for Jeffrey and the conduct of the war; he'd trampled the political opposition into dust, and the people had rallied around him as a symbol of the national will—they were calling him "the Tiger," now. But if he got the bit between his teeth on this—

  observe:

  Men in khaki uniforms and odd soup-bowl helmets clambered out of trenches and advanced into a moonscape of craters and bits of trees, ends of twisted barbed wire, mud, rotting fragments of once-human flesh. They walked in long neat lines, precisely spaced. From ahead, beyond the uncut barbed wire, the machine guns began to flicker in steady arcs . . .

  . . . and men in different uniforms, blue, helmets with a ridge down the center, huddled in a shell crater. Bulbous masks hid their faces, turning them into snouted insectile shapes. Bodies bobbed in the thick muddy water at the bottom of the shell hole, their flesh stained yellow. Somehow he knew that the air was full of an invisible drifting death that would bum out lungs and turn them to bags of thick liquid matter . . .

  . . . and a man in neat officer's uniform with a swagger stick in his hand and the red tabs of the staff looked out over a sea of mud churned to the consistency of porridge. It was too viscous even to hold the shape of craters, although it was dimpled like the face of a smallpox victim. Plank walkways lead off into the steady gray rain; about them lay discarded equipment, sunken in the mire. So was a mule, still feebly struggling with only the top quarter of its body showing.

  "Good God," the man said, his face gray as the churned and poisoned soil. "Did we send men out to fight in this?" His face crumpled into tears.

  Jeffrey shook his head; the problem with visions like that was that the implications stayed with you.

  "Sir, right now we've managed to turn the war from one of movement into one of attrition favoring us. This is the Chosen countermove. If we attack their prepared positions, we'll bleed ourselves white; attrition will favor them. Believe me, sir, please—if you've ever trusted my military judgment, trust it now. We'd break ourselves trying. The ground up there favors defense—that's how we survived their initial attack—and those fieldworks of theirs are as impregnable as the mountains. And that's not all."

  He stood and took up a pointer, tracing the Gothic Line with its tip. "This shortens their line, and with massive artillery support and good communications from their immediate rear, they can thin out the forces facing us. Which means they can concentrate a real strategic reserve, not just rob Peter to pay Paul, pulling units out of the line to plug in again elsewhere. They haven't had a genuine reserve. If they get one, it frees up the whole situation and concedes a lot of the initiative to them."

  The Premier looked at John. "Your guerillas were supposed to tie down their forces," he said.

  "They are, Mr. Premier," he said. "They have two hundred thousand men holding their lines of communication in the old Empire, and another hundred thousand in the Sierra, plus most of Libert's Nationalist army. Which, incidentally, is only useful to them as long as Libert's convinced they're going to win. If they had the free use of those forces, we'd have lost the war in their big push last fall."

  John looked around the table. "Gentlemen?" There was a murmur of agreement, reluctant in some cases.

  "Guerillas can be crucially useful to us," John went on. "But they can't win the war. They can make it possible for us to win it, though."

  The Premier smoothed a thumb across his slightly tobacco-stained white mustache; that and his great shock of snow-colored hair were his political trademarks, along with the gray silk gloves he affected.

  "Neither will sitting and looking at the Chosen forts—Chosen forts on our soil," he growled. "Admiral?"

  Maurice Farr nodded reluctantly. "We can't risk an attack on the Land Home Fleet in the Passage," he said. "Not at present. It's too far from our bases and too close to theirs. And while our operational efficiency is increasing rapidly, more than theirs—they were already at war readiness—they're building as fast as they can. They've got severe production problems, their labor force doesn't want to work, but they're also experienced at that. If they can complete their latest shipbuilding cycle, our margin of superiority will be severely reduced."

  He shrugged. "For the next two years, we have a margin of naval superiority that will remain steady or increase. After that, I can give no assurances."

  He looked at his sons and shrugged again. If the Premier requested an analysis within his area of expertise, Maurice Farr would give it.

  Jeffrey coughed. "Well, Mr. Premier, the thing is that while the Gothic Line enables the enemy to regain some freedom of action, it does the same for us—and sooner."

  The Premier looked at him sharply. Jeffrey went on: "They're not going to come out of those fortifications at us, not after going to that much trouble, and not as long as we maintain a reasonable force facing them. That means we can pull most of our experienced divisions out of the line, recruit them back up to strength, and put the new formations in facing the enemy. That'll give them experience; we don't have to put in full-scale assaults to do that, just patr
ol aggressively. And so we will have a strategic reserve, and sooner than they will. They don't dare thin their force facing us until those works are complete."

  The Premier leaned back in his chair. He'd gotten his start in radical politics—and fought several duels with political opponents and what he considered slanderous journalists, back when that was still legal in some of the western provinces. John reminded himself not to underestimate the man; he was not just the pugnacious bull-at-a-gate extremist some made him out. Plenty of brains behind the shrewd little eyes, and plenty of nerve.

  "So," he said. "You think that we can do something with this strategic reserve of yours, in the two years during which we have . . . what is the military phrase?"

  "Window of opportunity, Mr. Premier," the military men said.

  "Your window of opportunity?" the Premier continued.

  "Yes, sir," Jeffrey said. From our window of opportunity to my window of opportunity? he thought. Well, that certainly makes it plain who's to blame if anything goes wrong.

  He is a politician, Jeff, Raj thought. A brief mental image, of Raj lying facedown on a magnificent mosaic floor, while a man stood above him shouting, dressed in magnificent metallic robes that blazed under arc lights. I know the breed.

  The political leader looked back at Maurice Farr. "What do you say, Admiral?"

  "We have to take some action in the next two years," he said with clinical detachment. "As I said, for that period, our strength will increase relative to theirs. But they control three-quarters of the planet's useful land area, resources, and population now; while it'll take time for them to make use of what they've grabbed, eventually they will. Then the balance of forces will start to swing against us. Naval and otherwise."

  Most of the military men around the table nodded, reluctantly.

  The Premier leaned his elbows on the table, closed one hand into a fist and clasped the other over it, and leaned his chin on his knuckles. The pouched eyes leveled on Jeffrey. "Tell me more," he said.