The Chosen

'He'd better,' John said. Pia blinked in surprise and slight alarm at the expression his face took for a moment. He forced relaxation and smiled.

'Why shouldn't he?' he said. 'He knows I'm not a fortune hunter'-the del'Cuomos were fabulously wealthy, but he'd managed to discreetly let the Count know the size of his own portfolio-'and if he didn't like me personally, he'd have forbidden me to see you.'

Pia nodded. 'Well, I do have three younger sisters,' she said with sudden hard-headed shrewdness. 'It isn't seemly for them to marry before me-and also, my love, I think Father thinks he can beat you down on the dowry by pretending that the marriage is impossible because you are not of the Imperial Church.'

John grinned. 'He's right. He can beat me down.'

Some cold part of his mind added that Imperial properties weren't likely to be worth much in a little while.

He took a deep breath. It was like diving off a high board: once you were committed, there was no point in thinking about the drop.

'Pia, there is something I must tell you.' She met his eyes steadily. 'I am. . I was born with a deformity.' He averted his eyes slightly. 'A clubfoot.'

She let out her breath sharply. His glance snapped back to her face. She was smiling.

'Is it nothing more than that? The surgeons must have done well, then-you dance, you ride, you play the. . what is the name? Tennis?' She flicked a hand. 'It is nothing.'

Breath he hadn't been conscious of holding sighed out of him. 'It's why my father never accepted me,' he said quietly.

She put a hand up along his face. 'And if he had, you would be in the Land, preparing to attack the Empire,' she said. 'Also, you would not be the man I love. I have met Chosen from their embassy here, and beneath their stiff manners they are pigs. They look at me like a piece of kebab. You are not such a man.'

He took the hand and kissed it. 'There is more.' John closed his eyes. 'I cannot have children.'

Pia's fingers clenched over his. He looked up and found her eyes brimming, the unshed tears bright in the starlight-and realized, with a shock like cold water, that they were for him.

'But-'

He nodded jerkily. 'Oh, I'm. . functional. Sterile, though, and there's nothing that can be done about it.' He turned his head aside. 'It was done, ah, when I was very young.'

'Then you too have reason to hate the Chosen,' Pia said softly. 'Look at me, Giovanni.'

He did. 'You are the man for whom I have waited. That is all I have to say.'

* * *

Jeffrey Farr smiled.

'You find our ships amusing?' the Imperial officer asked sharply.

The steam launch chuffed rhythmically along the line of anchored battlewagons. He'd noticed the same attitude often in Imperial naval officers. Unlike the Army-or the squabbling committees in Ciano who set policy and budgets-they had to have some idea of what was going on abroad. Not that they'd admit the state their service was in, of course. It came out in a prickly defensiveness.

'Quite the contrary,' Farr said smoothly. 'I smiled because I recently received news that my brother, my foster-brother, is going to be married. To a lady by the name of Pia del'Cuomo.'

And I don't think your ships are funny. I think they're pathetic, he added to himself.

The Imperial officer nodded, mollified and impressed. 'The eldest daughter of the Minister of War? Your brother is a lucky man.' He pointed. 'And there they are, the pride of the Passage Fleet.'

Ten of the battleships floated in the millpond-quiet bay of the military harbor, flanked by the great fortresses. Lighters were carrying out supplies, much of it coal that had to be laboriously shoveled into crane-borne buckets and hoisted again to the decks for transfer to the fuel bunkers. The ships were medium-sized, about eleven thousand tons burden, with long ram bows and a pronounced tumblehome that made them much narrower at the deck than the waterline. They each carried a heavy, stubby single 350mm gun in a round cheesebox-style turret fore and aft, and their secondary batteries in a string of smaller one-gun turrets that rose pulpit-style from the sides. Each had a string of four short smokestacks, and a wilderness upperworks of flying bridges, cranes, and signal masts.

They'd been perfectly good ships in their day. The problem was that the Empire was still building them about twenty years after their day had passed.

correct, Center observed. roughly equivalent to British battleships of the 1880s period.

Eighteen. . ah. Center used the Christian calendar, which nobody on Visager did except for religious purposes. For one thing, it was based on Earth's twelve-month year, nearly thirty days shorter than this planet's rotation around its sun. For another, the numbers were inconveniently high.

Jeffrey shivered slightly. The period Center named was two thousand years past. Interstellar civilization had been born, spread, and fallen in the interim, and a new cycle was beginning.

'You're loading coal, I see,' he said to the Imperial officer. . Commodore Bragati, that was his name. 'Steam up yet?'

'No, we expect to be ready in about a week,' Bragati said. 'Then we'll cruise down the Passage, and show those upstarts in the Land who rules those waters.'

Two weeks to get ready for a show-the-flag cruise? Raj thought with disgust. I'd say these imbeciles deserve what's probably going to happen to them, if so many civilians weren't going to be caught in it.

'The main guns are larger than anything the Land has built,' Bragati said.

low-velocity weapons with black-powder propellant, Center noted with its usual clinical detachment. the chosen weapons are long-barreled, high-velocity rifles using nitrocellulose powders.

He thought he detected a trace of interest, though, as well. Jeffrey smiled inwardly; the sentient computer wasn't all that much different from his grandfather and the cronies who hung around him-military history buffs and weapons fanciers to a man. Center was a hobbyist, in its way.

'And the main armor belt is twelve inches thick!'

laminated wrought iron and cast steel plate, Center went on. radically inferior to face-hardened alloy. Which both the Land and the Republic were using for their major warships.

None of the battleships looked ready for sea. Less excusably, neither did the scout cruisers tied up three- deep at the naval wharves, or the torpedo-boat destroyers. Or even the harbor's own torpedo boats, turtle-backed little craft.

On the other hand. . 'Well, the fleet certainly looks in good fettle,' Jeffrey said diplomatically.

So they were, painted in black and dark blue with cream trim. Sailors were scrubbing coal dust off the latter even as he watched. He shuddered to think of the amount of labor it must take to repair the paintwork after a practice firing. If they did have practice firings; he had a strong suspicion that some Imperial captains might simply throw their quota of practice ammunition overboard to spare the trouble.

'Thank you for your courtesy,' he said formally to the Imperial commodore.

At least he'd learned one thing. Bragati wasn't the sort of man he wanted to recruit into the stay-behind cells he and John were setting up. Too brittle to survive, given his high rank.

* * *

'Damn, I hate dying,' John said as the scene blinked back to normalcy.

Or Center's idea of normalcy, which in this scenario was a street in a Chosen city-Copernik, to be specific- during the rainy season. There was no way to tell it from the real thing; every sensation was there, down to the smell of the wet rubberized rain cape over his shoulders and the slight roughness of the checked grip of the pistol he held underneath it. Watery rainy-season light probed through the dull clouds overhead, giving a pearly sheen to the granite paving blocks of the street. Buildings of brick and stone reached to the walkways on either side, shuttered and dark, frames of iron bars over their windows.

John looked down for a second at his unmarked stomach. There hadn't been any way to tell the impact of the hollowpoint rifle bullet from the real thing, either-Center's neural input gave an exact duplicate of the sensation of having your spleen punched out and an exit wound the size of a woman's fist in your lower back. The machine had let the scenario play through to the final blackout. His mouth still felt sour and dry. .

'Do you have to make it quite that realistic?' he muttered, sidling down the street, eyes scanning.