The Chosen

hand. He touched the cased glasses at his side with his hand. 'If you don't mind?'

'Klim-bim,' Heinrich said; a useful Chosen expression which could mean anything from affirmative to all's right with the world.

Jeffrey focused the glasses. Nothing was left of the Imperial fleet that he could see; black stains on the surface, the protruding masts of a couple of battlewagons. Fire and billowing columns of dark smoke marked the naval basin; warships and merchantmen were burning, sinking, or listing all over the harbor. Black flags with golden sunbursts marked both the great fortresses at the entrance to the harbor, although Fort Ricardo on the south had the burnt-out skeleton of a dirigible draped over it. The Land's flag also flew over the governor's palace off to the west, and the city hall and railway station directly south. Fires were burning out of control in a dozen places, vivid against the dusk of evening, and there was a continuous staccato crackle of small-arms fire over the mass of tile rooftops.

'Looks like you've cut them up into pockets,' Jeffrey said.

'Ja. Easier than we anticipated. Speed and planning and impact. There were a lot of them, but we had the jump from the beginning. Light casualties.'

'And you had those. . what are they called, those moving fortresses?'

'Tanks.' Heinrich snorted, and a few of the other officers smiled sourly. 'Terrifying when they work, which is less than half the time. We're supposed to have one here.'

Jeffrey turned his glasses northward; the city suburbs thinned out from here, although it was harder to see since there wasn't a slope over the intervening ground.

'You're preparing for counterattack?' he said.

Heinrich laughed again and jerked a thumb at the dirigible passing overhead. 'I love those things,' he said. 'We dropped battalion-sized task forces with lots of automatic weapons at the road-rail junctions halfway to Veron. The wops have something like six divisions concentrating there, but there's no way they can do a damned thing for a week-and by then we'll have linked up with the airborne forces, plus we'll have landed the better part of an army corps.'

Jeffrey nodded, pasting a smile on his face. That seemed like a very good analysis. But there were times when you wanted so badly to be wrong.

'Impressive,' he said.

Heinrich laughed heartily. 'Stay with us for a while,' he said. 'And we'll show you impressive.'

CHAPTER SIX

'In the sight of Almighty God, God the Parent, God the Child, God the Spirit, I pronounce these two as one. What God has joined, let none dare put asunder.'

John Hosten gripped Pia's hand, conscious that his own was slightly damp and sweaty. The long embroidered cord was bound around their joined hands and wrists in the ritual knot. Incense rose towards the tall vaulted ceding of the cathedral. The wedding party was small and sparse, old Count del'Cuomo in his dress outfit, a few other men in Imperial field uniform, some friends from the embassy. They rattled like a handful of peas in the huge, dim, scented stone bulk of the place, lost in the patterns of light from the stained-glass windows that occupied most of its walls.

He raised her veil and kissed her, soft contact and a scent of verbena.

The priest raised his staff for the blessing, then halted, listening.

They all did, and looked upward. A dull crump. . crump. . came in the distance; everyone in Ciano knew that sound now. Hundred-kilo bombs from a Chosen dirigible bomber, working its way across the sky at two thousand meters.

'Down by the docks,' John whispered to himself, 'trying for the gasworks.'

probability 93 %, ±2, Center said.

'John!'

He looked down at Pia. Her lips were fixed in determination. 'This is my wedding day. I will not let those tedeschi pigs interfere with it.'

Pia's tone was conversational, but it carried in the stillness of the cathedral. A murmur of approval went through the watchers. John could feel Raj smiling at the back of his mind.

You're a lucky man.

'I am a lucky man,' John murmured aloud.

count no man lucky until he is dead, Center observed.

* * *

The open-topped car hummed down the roadway, gravel crunching under the hard rubber of its wire-spoked wheels, throwing a rooster-tail of dust behind it. Shade flicked welcome across John's face from the plane trees planted beside it, each one whitewashed to the height of a man's chest. Through the gaps he could see the fields, mostly wheat in this district, with the harvest just finishing. Stocks of shocked grain drew a lacy pattern across the level fields; here and there peasants were finishing off a corner of a poplar-lined field with flashing sickles. Ox- drawn carts were in the field, piled high with yellow grain, hauling the harvest to the barns and threshing floors; the laborers would spend the rainy winter beating out the grain with flails.

Damn, but that's backward, John thought, holding the map across his knees with his hands to keep the wind from fluttering it. At home in Santander, all the bigger farms had horse-drawn reapers these days, and portable steam threshing machines had been around for a generation.

Downright homelike for me, Raj said. Except that there weren't many places on Bellevue as fertile as this. Fattest peasants I've ever seen.

The road climbed slightly, through fields planted to alfalfa, and then into hilly vineyards around a white- painted village. He scrubbed at his driving goggles with the tail-end of his silk scarf and squinted. The guidebooks said the village had a 'notable square bell tower' and a minor palazzo.

'Castello Formaso,' John called ahead to the driver. 'This ought to be it.'

It was; most of an Imperial cavalry brigade were camped in and around the town. Cavalry wore tight scarlet pants and bottle-green jackets, with a high-combed brass helmet topped with plumes, and they were armed with sabers, revolvers, and short single-shot carbines. You could follow those polished brass helmets a long way; there were patrols out all across the plain to the west of town, riding down laneways and across fields and pastures, disappearing into the shade of orchards and coming out again on the other side. The troopers closer to hand were watering their horses or working on tack or doing the other thousand and one chores a mounted unit needed.

The road was thick with mounted men, parting reluctantly to the insistent squeeee-beep! of the car's horn. Animals shied or kicked at the unfamiliar sound; one connected with the bodywork in an expensive and tooth-grating crunch of varnished ashwood.

Then the car swerved under a brutal wrench at the wheel. John looked up from his map in the back seat as it flung him against the sidewall; his broad-brimmed hat went over into the roadside dust. A dirigible was passing overhead, nosing out of a patch of cloud at about six thousand feet. A six-hundred-footer, Eagle-class, reconnaissance model. Some of the Imperial cavalry were popping away at the airship with their carbines, and in the village square ahead they had an improvised antiaircraft mounting for a gatling gun-a U-shaped iron framework on a set of gears and cams. The carbines were merely a nuisance, but letting off six hundred rounds a minute straight up was a menace.

'You there!' John barked, tapping the shoulder of his driver. The car came to a halt with a tail-wagging emphasis as the man stood on the brakes. John vaulted out over the rear door and strode towards the gatling.

'You there!' John continued, rapping at the frame with his cane for emphasis. The Imperial NCO in charge looked up. 'That thing is out of range, and you'd be dropping spent rounds all over town. Do not open fire.'

The soldier braced to attention at a gentleman's voice. John nodded curtly and turned to where the cavalry brigade's command group were sitting under a vine-grown pergola in the courtyard of the village taverna.

Nothing wrong with their nerves, John thought. The portly brigadier had his uniform