The Chosen

the base of his skull. The hook was set over the entrance door, where the workers passed each morning and evening as they were taken from the camp on the city's outskirts. The body had been there for two days now, ever since the shop fell below quota for an entire week. Sometimes it moved a little as the maggots did their work.

There was a blackboard beside the door, with chalked numbers on it. This week's production was nearly eight percent over quota. A cheerful banner announced the prizes that the production group would receive if they could sustain that for another seven days: a pint of wine for each man, beef and fresh fruit, tobacco, and two hours each with an inmate from the women's camp.

Tomaso Guiardini smiled as he looked at the banner. He smiled again as he looked down at the bearing race in the clamp before him. It was a metal circle; the inner surface moved smoothly under his hand, where it rested on the ball-bearings in the race formed by the outer U-shaped portion.

Very smoothly. Nothing to tell that there were metal filings mixed with the lubricating matrix inside. Nothing except the way the bearing race would seize up and burn when subjected to heavy use, in about one-tenth the normal time.

He looked up again at the banner. Perhaps the woman would be pretty, maybe with long, soft hair. Mostly the Chosen shaved the inmates' scalps, though.

He glanced around. The foreman was looking over somebody else's shoulder. Tomaso took two steps and swept a handful of metal shavings from the lathe across the aisle, dropping them into the pocket of his grease- stained overall, and was back at his bench before the Protege foreman-he was a one-eyed veteran with a limp, and a steel-cored rubber truncheon thonged to his wrist-could turn around.

* * *

'Dad!' Maurice Hosten checked his step. 'I mean, sir. Ah, just a second.'

He pulled off the leather flyer's helmet and turned to give some directions to the ground crew; the blue-black curls of his hair caught the sun, and the strong line of his jaw showed a faint shadow of dense beard of exactly the same color. His plane had more bullet holes in the upper wing, and part of the tail looked as if it had been chewed. There were a row of markings on the fuselage below the cockpit, too-Chosen sunbursts with a red line drawn through of them. Eight in all, and the outline of an airship.

John Hosten's blond hair was broadly streaked with gray now, and as he watched the young man's springy step he was abruptly conscious that he was no longer anything but unambiguously middle-aged. He still buckled his belt at the same notch, he could do most of what he had been able to-hell, his biological father was running the Land's General Staff with ruthless competence and he was thirty years older-but doing it took a higher price every passing year.

Maurice, though, he certainly isn't a boy any longer.

War doesn't give you much chance at youth, Raj agreed, with an edge of sadness to his mental voice.

The young pilot turned back. 'Good to see you, Dad.'

'And you, son.' He pulled the young man into a brief embrace. 'That's from your mother.'

'How is she?'

'Still working too hard,' John said. 'We meet at breakfast, most days.'

Maurice chuckled and shook his head. 'Doing wonders, though. The food's actually edible since the Auxiliary took over the mess.' They began walking back towards the pine-board buildings to one side of the dirt strip.

'I wish everything was going as well,' he said, with a quick scowl.

'I'm listening,' John said.

'You always did, Dad,' Maurice said. He ran a hand through his hair. 'Look, the war's less than six months old-and there are only three other pilots in this squadron besides me who were in at the start. And one of them had experience in the Union civil war.'

'Bad, I know.'

'Dad, we're losing nearly two-thirds of the new pilots in the first week they're assigned to active patrols.'

60 % in the first ten days, Center said inside his head. a slight exaggeration.

'The Chosen pilots, they're good. And they've got experience. Our planes are about as good now, but Christ, the new chums, they've got maybe twenty hours flying time when they get here. It's like sending puppies up against Dobermans! I have to force myself to learn their f-sorry, their goddamned names.'

'You were almost as green,' John pointed out.

'Dad, that's not the same thing, and you know it. I had Uncle Jeff teaching me before the war, and I'm. . lucky.'

He's a natural, Raj said clinically. It's the same with any type of combat-swords, pistols, bayonet fighting. Novices do most of the dying, experienced men do most of the killing, and a few learn faster than anyone else. This boy of yours is a fast learner; I know the type.

'What do you suggest, son?'

'I-' Maurice hesitated, and ran his fingers through his hair again. 'What we really need is more instructors- experienced instructors-back at the flying schools.'

'You want the job?' John said.

'Christ no! I. . oh.' He trailed off uncertainly.

'Well, that's one reason,' John said. 'For another, we don't have time to stretch the training. The Chosen were getting ready for this war for a long time. Our men have to learn on the job, and they pay for it in blood; not just you pilots, but the ground troops as well. We've lost two hundred and fifty thousand casualties.'

Maurice's eyes went wide, and he gave a small grunt of incredulous horror.

'Yes, we don't publicize the overall figures; and that doesn't count the Union Loyalist troops; they were virtually wiped out. The weekly dead-and-missing list in the newspapers is bad enough. In Ensburg, they're eating rats and their own dead. We estimate half the population of the Sierra is gone, and in the Empire, we're supplying guerillas who keep operating even though they know a hundred hostages will be shot for every soldier killed, five hundred for every Chosen. But we stopped them. They thought they could run right over us the way they did the Empire, or the Sierra. . and they didn't. They've nowhere gotten more than a hundred miles in from the old Union border, and our numbers are starting to mount. The Chosen are butchers, and we're paying a high butcher's bill, but we're learning.'

Maurice shook his head. 'Dad,' he said slowly, 'I wouldn't have your job for anything.'

'Not many of us are doing what we'd really like,' John said. 'Duty's duty.' He clapped his hand on his sons shoulder. 'But we're doing our best-and you're doing damned well.'

* * *

None of the command group was surprised when Gerta Hosten arrived; if they had been, she'd have put in a report that would ensure their next command was of a rifle platoon on the Confrontation Line. The pickets and ambush patrols passed her through after due checks, and she found the brigade commander consulting with his subordinates next to two parked vehicles in what had been Pueblo Vieho before the forces of the Land arrived in the Sierra the previous spring. A lieutenant was talking, pointing out the path her command had taken through the pine woods further up the mountain slopes, above the high pastures.

Gerta vaulted out of her command car-it was a six-wheeled armored car chassis with the turret and top deck removed-and exchanged salutes and clasped wrists with the commander. ''Tag, Ektar,' she said. 'How are things in the quiet sector? Missed you by about an hour at your headquarters,'

'Just coming up to see how things are going at the business end,' Ektar Feldenkopf said. 'Not a bad bag: seventeen men, twenty-four women, and a round dozen of their brats. The yield from these sweeps has been falling off.'

The air of the high Sierran valley was cool and crisp even in late summer. Most of it had been pasture, growing rank now. The burnt snags of the village's log houses didn't smell any more, or the bodies underneath them. There were still traces of gingerbread carving around the eaves. Several skeletons lay on the dirt road leading to the lowlands, where the clean-up squad had shot them as they fled into the darkness from their burning houses. The bodies laid out in the overgrown mud of the street had probably run the other way, up into the forests and the mountains, to survive a little longer and steal down to try and raid the conqueror's supply lines. The women and children taken alive knelt in a row beyond the corpses, hands secured behind their backs.