The Chosen

silently as she picked it up. Her face went totally unreadable as she finally looked up at him. 'This is serious?'

'Totally. Note the Premier's sign-off.'

She flipped to the end. To be implemented, as soon as possible. 'I'll be damned,' she said. 'I wouldn't have thought the Santies could get their shit together like this.'

'Jeff advised it, strongly,' John said. 'He's quite the fair-haired boy right now, and not just with the general public.'

'He deserves it,' Gerta said, refilling her cup. 'Heinrich was extremely impressed with the way he got most of the Brigades out of Unionvil before we pinched off the pocket there. Excuse me, before General Libert pinched off the pocket with the assistance of volunteer contractors from the Land operating without the approval of the Chosen Council.'

She grinned like a wolf. 'Heinrich picked up some very pretty things there when we sacked the city.'

John matched her expression, although in his case it wasn't a smile. 'What'll you recommend?'

'Me? I'm just MilInt's messenger girl,' Gerta said.

'You're also the daughter of the Chief of the General Staff,' John pointed out. 'And you've been carrying the hatchet for them for fifteen years now.'

'That's between me and the vater, Johnnie,' Gerta said, taking out a camera the size of a palm from the street purse resting beside her chair. She opened it, checked the ambient light, and began photographing each page of the folder with swift, methodical care. 'Besides, all doing a good job gets you is more jobs-you know how it works.

'I'll tell you, though,' she said as she worked, 'that I told him we shouldn't get involved in the Union, and that if we had to make another grab so soon it should be the Sierra instead.'

'Tougher nut,' John observed.

'True, but not one we had to swim to get to,' she replied. 'Frankly I think the navy flatters its chances when the balloon goes up. The Union thing could leave our tits in the wringer if things go wrong. This'-she nodded to the papers between snaps-'is exactly what the Santies should do, after all. But the Union was just too tempting, the political situation. I wish there were more women on the Chosen Council.'

John looked up at the irrelevancy. The Chosen had equality of the sexes, but males did predominate slightly at the higher ranks.

'Men never can resist the chance to stick it in an inviting orifice,' Gerta said, and finished her pictures. 'Heinrich's as smart as a whip, for example, but he spends an unbelievable amount of time and effort improving the Union's genetic material. It's the same with politics. No patience.'

'Do I detect a certain note of complaint?'

They both laughed. 'Plenty left over,' Gerta said. She rose and saluted. 'Thanks, Johnnie. . if it's genuine.'

CHAPTER TWENTY

'It's like something out of th' Bible,' Harry Smith blurted, looking down from where the car rested on a high track beside a customs station.

Belton Pass was the main overland route between the Union and the Republic of the Santander. The saddle was only seven thousand feet high, and hilly rather than mountainous; on either side the Border Range reared up to twenty thousand feet or better, capped by glaciers and eternal snow above the treeline. There were enigmatic Federation ruins on the slopes, built of substances no scientist could even identify, and tunnels where strange machines crouched like trolls in an ancient tale-some as pristine as the day they were last used, some crumbling like salt when exposed to air or sunlight. In the centuries after the Fall mule trains had used the pass, and border barons had built stone keeps whose tumbled stone had supplied material for shepherds huts in later years. Wars between the two countries had left their legacy of forts, the more recent sunken deep in the rock and covered in ferroconcrete and steel. There was a motorable road now, too, and a double-tracked railway built with immense labor and expense all the way from Alai in the western foothills.

Trains had been coming out of the Union for weeks now. The first had carried the last gold reserves of the Loyalist government, and the most precious records. Later ones had carried everything that could be salvaged from the factories of the Union's western provinces, some with the labor forces sitting on the machine tools. More and more carried people, shuttling back and forth with crowds riding packed so tightly that smothered bodies were unloaded at every stop, and the roofs of the freight cars black with refugees. Even more poured by cart and horse and ox-wagon, scores of thousands more on foot carrying their few possessions on their backs or in handcarts and wheelbarrows. They packed the lowlands in a moving mass of black and dun-brown, dust hanging over them like an eternal cloud. Only behind the Santander border posts with their tall flagpoles did they begin to fray out, as soldiers and volunteers directed them.

Pia Hosten leaned against her husband's long limousine, dark circles of fatigue under her eyes. She pulled off the kerchief that covered her hair and shuddered.

'It will be like a plague out of the Bible if we do not get more of the delousing stations set up. Typhus and cholera, those people are all half-starved and filthy and they have had no chance to wash in weeks.'

'We'll do it,' John said. 'The government's sending in more troops to set up the camps and keep order, and we're shipping in food and medical supplies as fast as the roads and rail net will bear.' He looked at his wife, and brushed back a strand of hair that fell down her forehead. 'There would be thousands dead, if it weren't for your Auxiliaries,' he said. 'Nobody else was ready.'

She turned and buried her face in his shoulder. 'I feel as if I am trying to bail the ocean with a spoon,' she said.

'You're exhausted. You've done an enormous job of work, and I'm proud of you.'

'Dad!'

Maurice Farr came bounding up the slope, handsome young olive face alight, trim and slender in the sky-blue uniform of the Air Cadets.

'Dad-I mean, sir-Uncle Jeff, I mean General Farr, is coming. With General Gerard!' He stopped. 'Mom, are you all right?'

She straightened. 'Of course.' Then she looked down at her plain dress, stained with sweat and her work. 'My God, I can't-'

'It's not a diplomatic reception, darling,' John said soothingly. 'And I don't think Jeff or Pierre will care much about appearances. Not after what you've been doing.'

The car that drew a trail of dust up the gravel road was much less elegant than John's, although it was the same big six-wheeled model. It had patched bullet holes in several places, a few fresh ones, and three whip antennae waving overhead. Rock crunched under the wheels as it drew to a stop and stood, the engine pinging and wheezing as metal cooled and contracted. The men who climbed down were ragged and smelled strongly of stale sweat, and there was dust caked in the stubble on their faces.

Pierre Gerard drew himself up, saluted, and held out his pistol butt-first. 'As representative of the Union del Est-' he began.

John took the weapon and reversed it, handing it back to the Union general. And head of state, don't forget that, he reminded himself.

'General Gerard, as representative of the Republic of the Santander, it is my privilege to welcome you, your government, your armed forces and your people to our territory. I am instructed to assure you that you will all be welcome until the day when you can return to restore your country's independence, and in the interim the government and people of the Republic will extend every aid, and every courtesy, within their power.'

He smiled and held out his hand. 'That goes for me, too, of course, Pierre.'

The other man took his hand in a strong dry grip for an instant. Then he clicked heels and bent over Pia's. 'We've heard what you and your ladies have done for my people,' he said quietly. 'We are in your debt, forever.'

'We're in your debt,' John said. 'You've been fighting the common enemy for five years. And you'll see more fighting before long, if I'm any judge of events.'