The Chosen

'Still, we'll have to follow suit,' Gerta said. 'Dirigibles are potentially very vulnerable to aircraft of this type, and they could be very useful in themselves.'

Karl nodded thoughtfully, running a finger along his heavy jawline. 'I will raise the matter in the next staff meeting,' he said. 'The Air Council must be informed, of course.' Looking down at the folder: 'Johan has done good service here.'

He was frowning, nonetheless. Gerta noted the expression and looked quickly away. Not completely comfortable with it, she thought. Didn't expect Johnny ever to be false to a cause, even for the Chosen. She agreed, for completely different reasons, but again, it wasn't the time to mention it.

'Sir, the next item is the Far Western Islands appropriation.'

Karl nodded and opened the file. 'It seems clearcut,' he said. 'The islands have a climate that is, if anything, more difficult than the Land; the distance is extreme'-over eight thousand miles-'and the value of the minerals barely more than the cost of extraction.'

Gerta licked her lips. 'Sir, with respect, I would strongly advise against abandoning the base there at present.'

Karl's eyebrows rose. 'Why? It scarcely seems cost-effective, now that the Empire is ours.'

'Sir, the Empire is poor in minerals, particularly energy sources. Our processing industries here in the Land will be expanding dramatically and the petroleum in the Islands may come in very useful. Besides, I just don't like giving up territory we've spent lives in taking.'

He nodded slowly. 'Perhaps. I will take the matter under advisement. Next, we have the report on our agents in the Union del Est.' He smiled bleakly. 'The Republic of Santander is not the only party who can play the game of stirring up trouble on the borders.'

* * *

'Fuck it!'

Jeffrey Farr swore into the sudden ringing silence within the tank. The only sound was a dying clatter as something beat itself into oblivion against something equally metallic and unyielding.

He pushed up the greasy goggles and stuck his head out of the top deck. Black oily smoke was pouring up out of the grillwork over the rear deck; luckily there was a stiff breeze from the east, carrying most of it away. The rest of the four-man crew bailed out with a haste bred of several months' experience with Dirty Gerty and her foibles, standing at a respectful distance with their football-style leather helmets in their hands.

Jeffrey climbed down himself, conscious that he was thirty-one years old, not the late teens of the other crewmen. Not that he wasn't as agile, it just hurt a little more; and he was tired, mortally tired.

'Filter again?' said the head mechanic of Pokips Motors, the civilian contractors.

'I think,' Jeffrey replied, spitting the smell of burning gasoline and lubricating oil out of his mouth and taking a swig from the canteen someone offered. 'Then that tore a fuel line or broke the oil reservoir.'

The military reservation they were using was on the southern edge of the Santander River valley, two hundred miles west of the capital. A stretch of flatland, then some tree-covered loess hills leading down to the floodplain, ten thousand acres or so. A holdover from days before land prices rose so high; this was prime corn- and-hog country-cattle, too-all around. Most of this section was now torn up by the jointed-metal tracks of Gerty and her kindred, and by the huge wheels of the steam traction engines that winched them home when they broke down, which was incessantly. Gerty was the latest model: a riveted steel box on tracks, about twenty feet long and eight wide, with a stationary round pillbox on top meant to represent a turret. The engineers were still working on the turret ring and traversing mechanism, and hopefully close to finishing them.

'Th' prollem is,' the mechanic said, 'yer overstrainin' the engines somethin' fierce. Got enough horsepower, right enough-two seventy-five-horsepower saloon-car engines, right enough. But the torque loads more'n they wuz designed to stand.'

'Well, we'll have to redesign them, won't we?'

Jeffrey kept his voice neutral. The man was trying his best to do his job; it wasn't his fault that engineering talent was so much thinner on the ground here in the western provinces of Santander. It was yeoman-and-squire country here, and always had been. Outside the eastern uplands, manufacturing was mostly limited to the port cities and focused on maritime trade and textiles. The problem was that this was prime tank country; the provincial militias here were actually interested in the prospect of armored warfare. Nobody but a few dinosaurs like General McWriter thought much of the prospects of horsed cavalry anymore, not after what had happened in the Empire.

Jeffrey felt his skin roughen. The machine guns flickered in his mind, and the long rows of horsemen collapsed in kicking, screaming chaos. .

'Transmission,' he said. 'We need a more robust transmission.'

'What've yer got in mind?'

Jeffrey pulled out a diagram. 'Friction plate,' he said. 'It's not elegant, but I think it won't keep breaking like this chain drive setup. Like you say, these tanks just have too much inertia for a system designed for three-ton touring cars.'

'Hmmmm.' The mechanic studied the diagram. 'Interestin'.'

He looked up at Gerty. A couple of his men had gotten the engine grille up and were spraying water on the flames flickering there.

'How'd them Chosen bastids keep theirs going?' he asked. 'Heavier'n this, I hears.'

'They use steam engines and mostly they don't keep going,' Jeffrey said. 'We need something reliable enough to do exploitation as well as breakthrough.'

The mechanic looked down at the diagram again. 'Need some fancy machinin' fer this.'

'Hosten Engineering can do you up a model, and jigs,' Jeffrey said. 'They've got the plans.'

* * *

John Hosten leaned back in the chair and sipped his lemonade. Oathtaking was hot, as usual, and sticky- humid, as usual, and the air was thick with coal smoke. The hotel was close by the docks; they'd extended hugely since his last visit, new berths extending further into what had been coastal forest reserve and farmland. In fact, he could see one freighter unloading now from this fourth-floor veranda. It was a smallish ship of fifteen hundred tons, swinging sacks of grain ashore with its own booms and steam winches. As he watched the net fell the last four feet to the granite paving blocks of the wharf. Half the bottom layer split, spraying wheat across the stone and into the harbor. Screams and curses rang faintly as the cable paid out limply on top of the heap. Stevedores scurried about, overseers lashing with their rubber truncheons. Eventually a line formed, trotting off with the undamaged sacks on their backs. Others started sweeping up the remainder with brooms and dumping it in a collection of boxes and barrels.

God, I'm glad I don't have to eat that, he thought silently. In this heat and humidity, they'd be lucky not to get ergot all over it.

He nodded towards the dock. 'You'd get less spoilage if you moved to bulk-handling facilities,' he said mildly. 'Elevators, screw-tube systems, that sort of thing.'

Gerta Hosten raised her eyes from the diagrams before her. 'We're not short of labor,' she said, with a smile that didn't reach the cold, dark eyes.

Meaning they are short of the type of labor that bulk transport would need, Raj said thoughtfully.

An image drew itself at the back of John's consciousness: short, dark-skinned men with iron collars around their necks loading a train-an unbelievably primitive train, with an engine like something out of a museum, an open platform and a tall, thin smokestack topped with sheet-metal petals. Each staggered sweating under a bundle of dried fish secured in netting, heaving it painfully onto the flatcars. Other men watched them, soldiers with single- shot rifles mounted on giant dogs. Occasionally a dog would snap its great jaws with a door-slamming sound and the laborers would shuffle a little faster.

Who needs wheelbarrows when you've got enough slaves? Raj said with ironic distaste. We got over that, eventually. Thanks to Center.

and to you, raj whitehall, Center replied.

John reached into the inner pocket of his light cotton jacket and took out his cigarette case. From what he'd described, the centralized god-king autocracy Raj Whitehall had been born into had been almost as nasty as the