The Chosen

by S. M. Stirling

  "Let's go," Jeffrey said quietly.

  The launch swung in towards the shore; it was low and sandy here, in contrast to the cliffs that marked most of this section of the Gut's northern shore. Low and sandy on either side of the fort that was their objective. The first wave of troops would be going ashore right now, and from the lack of noise, meeting little or no resistance. Well, they'd expected that.

  Jeffrey looked at his watch. 0500 hours, nearly dawn. Right about now they should—

  BOOM. BOOM. BOOM—

  The big guns of the fleet cut loose, firing from west to east in a long, slightly curved line. The great bottle-shaped muzzle flashes lit the scene with a continuous strobing illumination that was brighter than the false dawn. It was still dark enough for the red-glowing dots of the shells to be visible with their own heat, arching up into the sky to fall towards the Chosen.

  * * *

  Dust filtered down onto Kurt Wallers' head. The gun position shook as twelve- and eight-inch shells landed on the surface above, or hammered deep into the soft limestone of the cliffs.

  I built well, he thought. Aloud: "Well, the enemy has provided us with an aiming point. Return fire."

  "But sir!" someone protested. "The mountings—"

  "Are not hard-set yet," he replied. "Nevertheless, you have your orders."

  With hydraulic smoothness, the muzzle of the great gun began to move downward in its cradle.

  * * *

  Ten miles outside Salini, John Hosten grinned into the low red light of dawn. He washed down a mouthful of half-chewed hardtack with a swig from his canteen and slapped the cork back into it. It was like eating pieces of a clay flowerpot, but it kept you going, and if you were careful it didn't break your teeth. The air smelled of dew-wet rock and aromatic shrub and old sweat from the clothes of the guerillas around him. "Quick of them," he said. "They're in a hurry." The road through the low rocky hills was quite good, not exactly a paved highway, but thirty feet wide and cut out of the hillside with generous shoulders and ditches. Right now it was crowded with a convoy. Two light tanks in the front, the Land copy of the Santander Whippet, trucks crammed with infantry, more trucks pulling field-guns and pompoms and supplies, more infantry, some more tanks . . .

  . . . and a forty-degree slope on either side of the road.

  "That is their mobile reaction force," Arturo said.

  John nodded. Not even Santander could afford to give all its infantry and guns motor transport; the Land had roughly the same output of vehicles, but a much bigger army and fewer wheels per head.

  The lead tank was near the ferroconcrete bridge. "Now?" John said.

  Arturo nodded. "They are in a great hurry," he said, smiling like something with tentacles, and pressed the plunger beside him.

  The explosions at the bottom of the bridge pylons weren't very spectacular, although the sound echoed off the stony slopes. A puff of dust and smoke—pulverized concrete and plain dirt—and the uprights heaved, twisted, and sank slowly at an increasing tilt. The flat slab roadway crumbled in chunks as its support was removed, falling down towards the bottom of the gorge and the dry-season trickle that ran there. The first tank went with it, sparks flying as its treads worked backwards.

  Arturo laughed at the sight. Even then, John had time to be slightly chilled at the sound. Nearly five hundred feet to fall, knowing that when you hit—

  The tank cracked open like an eggshell on the boulders, and the dust of its impact was followed seconds later by a fireball as the fuel caught. Shells shot out of the fireball, trailing smoke, as the ammunition cooked off.

  As ye sow, so shall ye reap, Raj said relentlessly. Remember what the Imperials were like before the Chosen came. As they are now, the Chosen made them.

  Rifles and machine guns opened up on the stalled convoy, and mortars as well. A huge secondary explosion threw trucks tumbling as a shell landed in a truckload of ammunition, or perhaps on the limber of a field-gun. Birds rose in clouds as the racket of battle replaced the early morning calm. Order spread among the chaos below, soldiers taking cover and officers spreading them out. The first were already beginning to work their way upslope. Men died and rolled downward; others took their place. The four-pounder guns of the light tanks coughed and coughed again, and their machine guns beat the slope with an iron hail.

  Below John was a guerilla sniper, invisible even at ten yards in his camouflage blanket, a net sewn with strips of cloth in shades of ochre, gray, and brown. The muzzle twitched slightly, and the rifle snapped.

  Scratch one Chosen officer, probably, John thought.

  Arturo was examining the scene below with his binoculars. "We cannot hold them long," he warned. "If we try, the rear elements of the convoy will work around behind us—there are trails, and their maps are good."

  "No, we can't," John said. "But they were in a great hurry . . . and this is not the only ambush."

  Arturo smiled again. This time John joined him.

  * * *

  "Who the fuck does he think he's shooting at?" Johan Hosten said, pulling himself erect in the open-topped armored car and glaring after the two-engine ground attack aircraft that was hedgehopping away.

  Gerta grinned at her son's indignation, although that had been a bit of a nerve-wracking surprise. There were fresh lead smears on the flanks of her war-car.

  "At Santies, of course," she said.

  Granted, there was a bloody great Land sunburst painted on the rear deck of the war-car, but she knew from personal experience how hard it was to see anything accurately when you were doing a strafing run in combat conditions.

  "Only thing more dangerous than your own artillery is your own air force, boy," she said, slapping him on the shoulder. "Especially in a ratfuck like this where nobody knows where anyone is, including themselves."

  It's a relief in a way, having nothing but a fight on my hands.

  They turned a bend in the road. "And speaking of Santies—"

  The eastbound road wound through rolling ground covered in olive groves. Men in brown uniforms were ahead of them, and two light-wheeled vehicles were on the gravel surface of the road. They had whip antennae bobbing above them. Some sort of command group, then.

  "Driver! Floor it!" Gerta barked, pulling a grenade from a box clipped to the inside of the sloping armored side of the war-car.

  He did. The five-ton vehicle was too heavy to actually leap ahead, but it accelerated, more slowly than a newer model with an IC engine; on the other hand, the steam was almost silent. The Santies noticed only just before Johan opened up with the forward machine gun, walking bursts across the men grouped around the hood of one of the light cars.

  Gerta shouted wordlessly as the prow of the war-car rammed one vehicle aside, crumpling the frame and knocking it into the ditch. She tossed the grenade at the wreckage and followed it with a spray of pistol-caliber bullets from her machine carbine. Jumping with combat-adrenaline, her eyes picked out one face/body/movement gestalt as the man leaped for cover behind a rock. She fired, twisted, cursed as her son at the machine gun blocked her line of sight, grabbed at another grenade and threw it.

  Return fire pinged off the riveted armor plates of the car, making the crew duck, and then they were past.

  "Keep going!" she said, raising her head for a look.

  * * *

  "Jesus!"

  Jeffrey raised his head, coughing in the plume of dust left behind by the turtle-shaped Chosen vehicle; some sort of six-wheeled armored car. As it turned the corner and zipped out of sight ahead, an arm appeared over the side of the hull with one finger extended from a clenched fist, and pumped in an unmistakable gesture.

  Wounded men screamed. For an instant everyone else stayed frozen and flat to the earth, waiting for the follow-up.

  "Keep moving!" Jeffrey said aloud. "That was a straggler."

  "Merde," Henri muttered beside him, levering himself up with the butt of his rifle.

  My sentiments exactly, Jeffrey thought as he took st
ock. Two regimental commanders out of it, and one of the priceless radios.

  "Runner," he said, "tell their seconds what's happened, and that I have full confidence in them. Somebody get that fire out." The wrecked car was sending licking flames and black smoke upward, just the sort of marker a cruising Land Air Service pilot would need. "And let's get back to work," he went on calmly.

  His mouth was full of gummy saliva. That had been far too sudden, and far too close. A few of the faces that bent over the map with him were pale beneath their coating of summer dust, but nobody was visibly panicky.

  The map showed the bulge of coastline that held the fort they were attacking. "We've just about closed the circle around the landward side," he said. "Now, Colonel McWhirter, you're going to dig in along this line and hold them off us. The partisans are doing a good job of slowing them down, but when they hit, it'll be hard. The rest of us will press on the perimeter."

  "Going to cost," someone commented. "They're expecting us, by now."

  Jeffrey shrugged. "We'll keep their attention. They don't have much of a garrison there yet, mostly construction battalions. With a little luck, the Resort Brigade will do its job."

  * * *

  Major Steven Durrison, Fifth Mountain Regiment—known familiarly in the Army of the Republic as the Resort Brigade, since so many mountain-climbing hobbyists filled its ranks—looked up the rest of the gully.

  Not much of a climb, he thought. About a sixty-degree slope, the natural rock overlain with rubble. The enemy had evidently been dumping construction fill down it, since it led up to the lip of the plateau. From the way they'd cut footings into the sides, they'd probably planned to build something here. They hadn't had time.

  And they were otherwise occupied right now. More shells trundled across the sky to burst on the plateau tops above. The ships out in the Gut looked like toys at this distance, a fleet a child might sail in his bathtub. The earthquake rumble and shudder of the earth under his body showed how out of scale distance made the scene. Rock and concrete fountained over the cliffs, past the firing slits of the heavy guns, to land on the beach below. More shaking through the rock beneath him; he tried to imagine what it was like to be caught in the open up there, and failed. If that doesn't keep their heads down, nothing will.

  The mountaineer looked back over his shoulder; men were strung out down nearly to the beach, along the line of rope secured by iron stakes driven into the rock by the advance element. Most were armed with the new submachine guns, for close in work, or with pump-action shotguns, and festooned with bandoliers, satchel charges, coils of rope, and pitons.

  "Lieutenant," he called, "we'll start to work our way across from there."

  He pointed; no climber could mistake what he meant, a long shadow slanting upward across the cliff-face to their right. "Signaller."

  The heliograph squad had set up a little way down the ravine. The sergeant in charge of the squad looked up.

  "You've got contact with the flagship?"

  "Yessir."

  Durrison nodded, hiding his relief. The alternative was colored rockets. That would work, but even with dozens of heavy shells landing up above, someone was likely to notice. Heliograph signals—light reflected off mirrors—were effectively line of sight. None of the enemy would see his going out.

  "Send: 'Am proceeding with Phase Two.'"

  * * *

  About bloody time, Maurice Farr thought, lowering his binoculars. The signals station were scribbling on their pads, but he could still read code himself.

  The Great Republic twisted and heeled in the water as her broadside fired. Light flashed in return from the upper third of the cliffs, and three seconds later the whole eighteen-thousand-ton bulk of the battleship shuddered and rang like a giant gong struck with a sledgehammer. Farr blinked at the fountain of sparks as the shell struck her main belt armor.

  "Sir!" It was Damage Control, speaking to the flagships captain. "Flooding in compartment C3. That one hit us below the waterline."

  Gridley nodded. "Get them to work on it," he said, "Containment measures."

  That meant sealing off the affected area behind the watertight doors, hopefully not before they got the personnel out of it. C3 was unpleasantly close to the A turret magazines as well.

  Those guns certainly have punch, he thought. Eight-inch, but fired with a twelve-incher's powder charge, and an extra-long barrel. The velocity was unbelievable. Much faster and you could fire shells into orbit.

  "Sir." This time to the fleet commander. "Sir, Templedon City reports that they've got the fires out and stabilized by counterflooding."

  A heavy cruiser. "What speed can they make?"

  "Sir, they report no more than six knots."

  "They're to withdraw. Detach two destroyers to escort." And to pick up survivors if they didn't make it back to Dubuk.

  Farr raised his glasses again. "I'd say it was about time we did something about this fort they were building, wouldn't you, Gridley?" he said calmly.

  "Christ yes, Admiral. If they'd got it fully operational . . ." The flagship captain's voice faded off.

  A biplane plunged past the bridge, trailing smoke. It smashed into the water and exploded not far from the bow of a destroyer; the whole thing happened too fast for him to see the national insignia. Dozens more were swarming through the air above the cloud of smoke and shellbursts that marked the surface of the fort, like flies around a piece of meat left in the sun.

  Good thing we're in range of ground-based air support here, Farr thought.

  His sons were inland there, where the fighting was—steadily increasing fighting, as the Land forces battered their way through guerilla harassment and started to bring their weight to bear on the Santander blocking elements. His eldest grandson was in one of those wood-and-canvas powered kites . . . if he hadn't been the one who plunged out of the sky and died just now. Pride came in many flavors; right now it tasted like fear. An old man might not fear for himself, but anyone living still had something hostage to fortune. His family, his country . . .

  I think we'd be in a very bad way indeed if it weren't for John and Jeffrey, he thought. If John hadn't been born with a clubfoot, or if I hadn't gotten that posting as naval attaché in Oathtaking . . .

  "Carry on," he said aloud. "Let's keep them busy. And stand by to fire support missions for the ground forces."

  * * *

  "I don't give a living shit how many partisans there are out there, Colonel," Heinrich Hosten said with quiet venom. His fingers were white on the field telephone. "Ignore them. Ignore your fucking flanks. Hit the Santies, and hit them hard, or by the Oath, you'll be in the Western Islands dodging blowgun darts from the savages next month, if you're unlucky enough to be still alive."

  He retuned the handset to its cradle with enormous care, fighting through the rage that clouded his vision. He looked at the pin-studded map and tried to force himself to be objective. I'm not justified in going to the front. More information is getting through now. I'm in a better position to coordinate from here.

  He could hear the Santy naval bombardment from here, though, a continuous rumble to the south. Guns were firing closer than that, medium field pieces; Land batteries, shooting obstacles out of the way in the narrow passages of the hills.

  One of his staff handed him the field telephone again, "Sir, you'll want to hear this yourself."

  He picked it up. "Ja?"

  Gerta's voice. He closed his eyes; nothing should surprise him today.

  "You'll never guess which old friend of yours I ran into today," she said. "Ran into literally, but I didn't quite manage to kill him."

  There were times when he was tempted to believe in malignant spirits.

  * * *

  Kurt Wallers jammed his palms over his ears and opened his mouth. The gun fired again, and the pressure wave battered at him. No point in going back to the command bunker deeper in the rock; the observation stations weren't operational yet. With those and the calculating mach
ine it would have been possible to direct accurate fire nearly to the southern shore of the Gut. As it was, each tube was firing under independent control—over open sights.

  And not doing a bad job. He hated to think what had happened to the construction people up above; he'd spent a long time training them. All we have to do is hold out until the reinforcements drive off the landing parties. Then—

  "Sir! Movement on the beach below us!"

  He blinked. "Get some extra propellant charges." They came in fabric containers the size of small garbage cans. "Strap grenades to them. Pull the tabs and roll them over the edge of the casement. Move."

  Suddenly the background rumble of naval shellfire exploding on the plateau overhead ceased. Wallers looked up; that took his eyes away from the slit of light where the embrasure mouth pierced the cliff. Something flew in. His head whipped around, and trained reflex threw him down, not quite in time.

  * * *

  Durrison plastered himself to the lip of concrete above the gun embrasures. Every time the long cannon within fired, the concussion threatened to flip him off the ledge, despite the rope sling fastened to pitons driven firmly into the rock above. A couple of his men had been flipped, to dangle scrabbling on their ropes until the hands of their squadmates could haul them back. The enemy hadn't noticed, thank God; the embrasures might be narrow firing slits in comparison to the size of the guns within or the scale of the three-hundred-foot height of the cliffs, but they were still fifteen feet from top to bottom.

  The gun fired again. Durrison kept his mouth open to equalize the pressure, but his head still rang as if there were midgets inside with sledgehammers, trying to get out. The rock flexed against his belly; no telling how long the pitons would hold, with that sort of vibration. The wind was building out of the south, with dark clouds along the horizon south of him—perhaps one of the rare summer thunderstorms of the Gut.

  Joy. Absolute fucking joy. At last a man came around the curve of the rock to his right, clinging like a spider as he made his cautious way.

  "Everyone's in place, sir!" he screamed into Durrison's deafened ear.

  The mountaineer officer nodded and pulled the flare gun out of his belt, pointed it up and out.