The Chosen

now.'

The guerilla leader hesitated. With a sound like a giant ripping canvas across the sky, more than a dozen belt-fed Haagen machine guns cut lose from the train. The guerillas' rifle fire was punching through the thin pine boards of the boxcars, but John could see it sparking and ricochetting from steel within. Gunshields; the machine guns were fortress models, with an angled steel plate to protect the gunner. Their fire beat across the hillside like flails of green tracer, intersecting hoses of arched light through the night. Sparks scattered as the high-velocity jacketed bullets spanged off stone; little red glows showed where rounds had cut reeds in the swamp, like the mark of a cigarette touched to thin paper. Scores of Protege infantry were tumbling out of the cars, too, some falling, more going to ground along the train and returning fire.

And the doors of the rear boxcars were thrown open from within. Steel planks clanged down, and the dark lurching shape of armored cars showed within. The first skidded down the ramp, landing three-quarters on, almost going over, then steadying. Its engine chuffed loudly as the wheels spun and spattered gravel against the side of the train, and then the turret traversed to send more machine-gun fire against the hillside. Squads of infantry rose and scurried into its shelter, advancing behind it as the car nosed towards the lower slopes of the hill. A grenade crunched with a malignant snap of light. Three more of the war-cars thudded to the ground, crunching through the trackside gravel.

John grabbed Arturo's shoulder. 'Get the fuck out of here!' he screamed in the partisan's ear. Then to Barrjen: 'Collect the rest. Time to bug out.'

'Yes sir.'

With a long dragon hiss, a rocket rose from the wrecked train. It kept rising, a thousand yards or more, then burst in a shower of gold-the colors of the Chosen flag, yellow on black.

* * *

'Sound the halt in place,' Heinrich Hosten said, standing with his hands on his hips. 'And remember, live prisoners.'

Troopers were moving down the hillside under the glare of the arc light, prodding at bundles of rags with their bayonets. Occasionally that would bring a response, and the soldiers would pick up the wounded guerilla; cautiously, after the first one who'd stuffed a live grenade under his body was found.

The trumpet sounded, four urgent rising notes. A slow crackle of skirmish fire in the hill country to the west died down. In the comparative silence that followed he could hear the relief train that the signal rocket was intended for, with the rest of the battalion and its equipment. Plus the equipment and workers to repair the track, of course. It was surprisingly difficult to do lasting damage to a railway track without time or plenty of equipment.

'Shall we pursue when the rest of the battalion comes up, Brigadier?' Captain Neumann said.

'Nein,' he said. 'Too much chance of ambushes in the dark.' He got out his map case. 'But it would be advisable to push blocking forces here and here. Then in a few hours, we can sweep and see how many of these little birds we can bag.'

Captain Neumann looked at the emergency aid station where her wounded were being looked after. There were four bodies with their groundsheets drawn over their faces.

'We only killed twenty or so of them,' she said. 'This is a bad exchange rate.'

'The operation is not over,' Heinrich said. 'And we have taught them a little lesson, I think.'

'That is the problem-when we teach them a lesson, they learn,' Neumann said unexpectedly.

Heinrich shrugged. 'We must see that we learn more than they,' he added, knocking the dottle out of his pipe.

* * *

The cave smelled bad: damp rock, and the wastes of the survivors, since they hadn't dared go outside for the last three days. Weak daylight was leaking through, enough penetrating this far into the cave to turn the absolute blackness into a gray wash of light.

'We failed,' Arturo said bitterly.

'We survived,' John replied. 'Enough of us. Next time we'll do better.'

'So will they!' the guerilla said.

'We'll just have to learn faster,' John said. 'Besides, there are more of us than of them.'

He looked toward the light. 'Now we'd better check if their patrols are still looking,' he said. 'It's a fair hike back to the cove.'

* * *

John Hosten's wasn't the biggest steam yacht under Santander registry, by a considerable margin; they were a common status symbol among the rising industrial magnates of the Republic. The Windstrider was only about twelve hundred tons displacement. It was the most modern, with some refinements that Center had suggested and John had made in the engineering works he owned. One of them was a wet-well entrance on the side that could be flooded or pumped dry in less than a minute, as well as turbine engines, something no vessel in the Republic's Navy had yet. The little ship lay long and sleek against the morning sun, a black silhouette outlined in crimson.

'Row! Bend yer backs to it, y'scuts!'

Smith's voice had a hard edge from the bows. John knew why; he could hear it without turning from his position at the tiller. A deep chuffing, the hollow sound steam made when exhausted into the stack of a light ship, and the soft continual surf noise of a bow wave curving away from the prow, just on the edge of hearing. The gunboat had picked them up twenty minutes ago, and it had grown from a dot on the horizon to a tiny model boat that grew as he watched, shedding a long plume of black coal smoke behind from its single cylindrical funnel.

'Stroke!' he barked, willing strength to flow from his voice through the crew to the oars. 'Stroke! Almost home! Stroke!'

Sweat glistened on their faces, mouths gasping for air. A new sound came through the air, a muffled droning.

'Smith!'

One-handed, John tossed the binoculars to the ex-Marine. He took them and looked upward. 'Oh, shit, sir. One of them gasbag things. Just comin' into sight, like.'

'How many engine pods?'

'Four. No, four at the sides an' one sort of at the back.'

'Skytiger. Patrol class,' John said. Center helpfully offered schematics and performance specifications. 'They've got a squadron of them operating out of Salini now.'

The Windstrider was very close. John felt himself leaning forward in a static wave of tension, and grinned tautly at himself. If things went badly, the yacht was no protection at all, merely a way to get a lot of other people killed with him. And his subconscious still felt as if he was racing for absolute safety. A ghost-memory plucked at him, something not his own. Raj Whitehall spurring his riding dog for a barge, with enemies at his heels. .

Damn, he thought. You seem to have had a much more picturesque life than me.

Adventure is somebody else in deep shit, far, far away, Raj said. And I think you're about to be that somebody. Focus, lad, focus.

The long hull loomed up. John threw his weight on the tiller and the whaleboat heeled sharply, turning in its own length to curve around the bow and come down the side away from the Land gunboat. The narrow black slit of the loading door came up fast, perhaps too fast. .

'Ship oars!' he called.

The long ashwood shafts came inboard with a toss; Marines were well-trained in small-boat operations. One caught the edge of the steel slit nonetheless, snapping off and punching a rower in the ribs with enough force to bring an agonized grunt. The whaleboat shot into the gloom of the inner well; the overhead arc light seemed to grow brighter as the metal door slid shut. The air was humid, hot, with a smell of machine oil and sweat.

The crew collapsed over their oars, wheezing, faces red and dripping. John vaulted onto the sisal mats that covered the decking-an irony there, since the fiber had probably been imported from the Land-nodded in return to the crew's salutes, and took the staircase three rungs at a time. The hatchway to the boat chamber clanged shut below him; someone dogged it shut below, and a crewman threw matting over the hatch, leaving it looking identical