The Chosen

turn.

Ensign Jeffrey Farr watched carefully through his field-glasses. The movement was carried out with precision. Good men, he thought. The Republic's army wasn't large, only seventy thousand men. It wasn't particularly well-paid or equipped, either; the men mostly enlisted because it was the employer of last resort. Bottle troubles, wife troubles, farm kids bored beyond endurance with watching the south end of a northbound plowhorse, sheer inability to cope with the chaotic demands of civilian life in the Republic's fast-growing cities. They could still make good soldiers if you gave them the right training, and trained men would be invaluable when the balloon went up. The provincial militias were supposed to be federalized in time of war, but as they stood he had little confidence in them.

He raised his hand in a signal. The platoon sergeant blew a sharp blast on his whistle and the men rose from the field, slapping at the dust on their brown tunic jackets. Their stubbled faces looked impassive and tired after the month of field exercises through the mountains.

'Good work, Ensign,' his company commander nodded. Captain Daniels was a thickset man of forty-promotion was slow in the peacetime army-with a scar across one cheek where a Union bullet had just missed taking off his face in a skirmish twenty years ago.

'Very good work,' the staff observer said. 'I notice you're spreading the skirmish line thinner.'

'Yes, sir,' Jeff said. He nodded at an infantryman jogging by with his weapon at the trail. It was a bolt-action model with six cartridges in a tube magazine below the barrel. 'Everyone's getting magazine rifles these days, except the Imperials, and new designs are coming fast and furious. We've got to disperse formations more.'

Although to hear some of the fogies talk, they expected to fight in shoulder-to-shoulder ranks like Civil War troops equipped with rifle-muskets.

'Yes, I read that article of yours in the Armed Forces Quarterly,' the staff type said. 'You think nitro powders will be adopted for small arms?'

major belmody, Center said. A list of biographical data followed.

The major looked pretty sharp, if a little elegant for the field in his greatcoat and red throat-tabs and polished Sam Browne. And being a younger son of the Belmody Mills Belmodys probably hadn't hurt his rise through the officer corps either; thirty-two was damned young to get that high.

'I'm certain of it, sir,' Jeff said. The Belmodys were big in chemicals and mining explosives. 'No smoke, less fouling, and much higher muzzle velocities, flatter trajectories, smaller calibers so the troops can carry more ammo.'

Captain Daniels spoke unexpectedly. 'I don't trust jacketed bullets,' he said. 'They have a tendency to strip and then tumble when the barrel's hot.'

'Sir, that's just a development problem. Gilding metal can't take the temperatures of high-velocity rounds. Cupronickel, or straight copper, that's what needed.'

The older officer smiled. 'Ensign, I wish I was half as confident about anything as you are about everything.'

'God knows we could use some young firebrands in this man's army,' Major Belmody said. 'In any case, you and Ensign Farr must dine with me tonight.'

'After I see the men settled in, sir,' Jeff said. The major raised an eyebrow and nodded, returning his juniors' salutes.

'You'll do, Farr,' Captain Daniels said, grinning, when the staff officer's car had bounced away over the pasture with an occasional chuff of waste steam. 'You'll go far, too, if you can learn to be a little more diplomatic about who you deliver lectures to.'

* * *

Lieutenant Gerta Hosten leaned back against the upholstery of the seat and watched out the half-open window as the train clacked its way across the central plateau. The air coming in was clean; this close to Copernik the line had been electrified, and the lack of coal smoke and the pounding, chuffing sound of a steam locomotive was a little eerie. There was plenty of traffic on the broad concrete-surfaced road that flanked the railway, too, steam or animal-drawn. This was the most pleasant part of the Land, a rolling volcanic upland at a thousand meters above sea level, cooler and a little drier. The capital had been moved here from Oathtaking only a generation after the first wave of Alliance refugees arrived. Copernik's beginnings went back before the coming of the Chosen, right back to the initial settlement of Visager, but nothing remained of the pre-conquest city. Over the past generation as geothermal steam and then hydropower supplemented coal, it had also become a major manufacturing center.

Gerta watched with interest as rolling contour-plowed fields of sugar cane, rice, soya, and maize gave way to huge factory compounds. One of them held an airship assembly shed, a hundred-meter skeletal structure like a Brobdingnagian barn. The cigar-shaped hull was still a framework of girders, with only patches of hull-cladding where aluminum sheet was being riveted to the structure.

She buttoned the collar of her field-gray walking-out uniform, buckled on her gunbelt with the shoulder-strap, and took up her attache case. Normally she'd have let her batman carry that, but there were eyes-only documents in it. Nothing ultra-secret, or she wouldn't be carrying them on a train, but procedure was procedure.

Behfel ist Behfel, she recited to herself: orders are orders. She also had a letter from John Hosten in there. Evidently he was doing well down in the Republic; he'd gotten some sort of posting in their diplomatic service.

It was a pity about John.

'Wake up, feldwebel,' she said.

Her batman blinked open his eyes and stood, taking down the two bags from the overhead rack. Pedro was a thickset muscular man in his thirties, strong and quick and apparently loyal as a Doberman guard dog. Also about as bright; in fact, she'd owned dogs with more mother-wit and larger vocabularies. It was policy to exclude the upper two-thirds of the intelligence gradient when recruiting soldiers and gendarmes from the Protege caste. She had her doubts about that, and she'd always preferred bright ones as personal servants. More risk, but greater potential gain.

Behfel ist behfel.

Hie train lurched slightly as it slowed. The pantograph on the locomotive clicked amid a shower of sparks as they pulled into the Northwest Station. There were many tall blond young men in uniform there, but not the one she instinctively sought. Heinrich wouldn't be waiting for her; that wouldn't be seemly, and anyway she had to report to Intelligence HQ for debriefing.

My lovely Heinrich, she thought. I'd fuck you even if you were my birth-brother. An exaggeration, but he was a dear, and of course incest taboos didn't apply to adoptee-kin. And this time when you ask me to marry you, I'm going to say yes.

The implications of the documents in her attache case were clear, if you could read between the paragraphs. It was time to do her eugenic duty to the Chosen; even with servants, infants took up a lot of time and effort. Best do it while there was time.

In a couple of years, they were all going to be very, very busy.

CHAPTER THREE

1233 A.F.

317 Y.O.

Looks different from a Protege's point of view, John Hosten thought, carefully slumping his shoulders.

He was walking the streets of Oathtaking in the drab cotton coat and breeches of some middling Protege worker. He could have been a warehouse clerk, or a store-checker; his hair had been dyed brown, but the best protection was sheer swarming numbers and the fact that nobody looked at an average Proti.

He'd forgotten how hot the damned place was, too. Hot, the air thick and wet and saturated with coal smoke and smells. Bigger than he remembered from his childhood; the villas went further up the slopes of the volcanoes, the factories were larger and the smokestacks higher, there were more overhead