The Chosen

'Which means either they're getting thinner on the ground, or better at hiding, or both.'

'Both, I think-the interrogations will tell us something. The males had a rifle each and about twenty rounds, plus some handguns, but no explosives.'

Johan was looking at one of the prisoners, a blond who probably looked extremely pretty when she was better fed and didn't have dried blood from a blow to the nose over most of her face. Gerta smiled indulgently; young men had single-track minds, and he'd been doing his work very well. He had some scars of his own now, although nothing like the one that seamed the side of her face since the drop on Nueva Madrid, and drew the left corner of her face up in a permanent slight smile.

'All right,' she said. 'But don't undo her hands and watch out for the teeth. Remember Hauptman von Seedow.'

The three Chosen shared a brief chuckle; poor Maxine had been laid up in a field hospital for a month with her infected bite, and the joke was still doing the rounds of every officers' mess in the Land's armed forces. She'd nearly punched one wit who offered her a recipe for a poultice.

She'll never live it down, Gerta thought, as her son walked over to the prisoners. Still chuckling, he hauled the girl-she was about his own age-to her feet by her hair and marched her off behind the ruins of one of the buildings.

'How are they surviving?' Gerta asked. None of them were what you'd call well-fleshed, but they weren't on the verge of starvation either.

'These mountain villages, they store cheese and dried milk and so on up in the caves,' the officer said, waving towards the jagged snow-capped mountains to the north. 'There are a lot of caves up there. And there's game, deer and bison, rabbits ana so forth, and a lot of cattle and sheep and pigs gone wild in the woods. Half-wild to begin with. Still, they're getting hungrier, and we're whittling them down. It's good rest and recreation for units pulled out of the line.'

'How do the Unionaise shape?' she asked.

There was a brigade of them down the valley a ways, at the crossroads twenty miles west of the railroad, under their own officers, but also under the operational control of the Land regional command.

'Not bad,' the officer said, as a shrill scream sounded from behind the wrecked building. It trailed off into sobs. 'Not as energetic at their patrolling as I'd like. Good enough for this work, I'd say; I couldn't swear how they'd do in heavy combat. Settling in to that town as if they owned the place.'

'They think they do,' Gerta replied. 'Well, things appear to be under control here. Which is more than I can say about some other places.'

The garrison commander frowned and lowered his voice. 'How does the Confrontation Line develop? The official reports seem. . overly optimistic.'

Gerta spoke quietly as well. 'Not so well. We're killing the Santies by the shitload, that part of the official story is true enough. They keep attacking us with more enthusiasm than sense, but it's getting more expensive, and we're not taking much territory. Ensburg's still holding out.'

'Still?' The man's brows rose. 'They must be starving.'

'They are. I was in the siege lines last week; nothing left inside but rubble, and you can smell the stink of their funeral pyres. Starvation, typhus, whatever-but they're not giving up.'

She spat into the dirt. 'If that monomaniac imbecile Meitzerhagen hadn't killed the garrison of Fort William after they surrendered and bellowed the fact to the world, they might have been more inclined to give up. So would a lot of the other garrisons we cut off in the first push; mopping them up took time the Santies used to get themselves organized. We lost momentum.'

The other officer nodded. 'Meitzerhagen's a sledgehammer,' he said. 'The problem is-'

'— not all problems are nails,' she finished.

'Stalemate, for the present, then.'

'Ja. We can push them, but we outrun our supplies. And even when we beat them, they don't run, and there are always more of them. Their equipment's good, too. Now that they're learning how to use it. .' She shrugged.

'How is our logistical situation, then?'

'It sucks wet dogshit. We can't move dirigibles within a hundred miles of the front in daylight, the road net's terrible, the terrain favors defense. . and the Santies are right in the middle of their main industrial area, with their best farmlands only a few hundred miles away on first-class rails and roads.'

'I presume the staff is evolving a counterstrategy.'

'Ya. No details of course, but let's just say that we're going to encourage their enthusiasm and prepare to receive it. Also if we can't use the Gut, there's no reason they should be able to either.'

The officer sighed and nodded. 'Well, you can tell them that my brigade at least is doing its job,' he said. 'Trying to keep the rail lines through the Sierra working would have been a nightmare if we'd used conventional occupation techniques. Bad enough as it is.'

Young Johan returned, pushing the dazed and naked Sierran girl before him. He dropped into parade rest behind Gerta, smiling faintly as the prisoner stumbled back to kneel with the others.

'In a year or two, there won't be any left to speak of. . Speaking of which, you said there was a new directive?'

Gerta nodded. 'Ya, we're running short of labor for the construction gangs, importing from the New Territories is inconvenient, big projects all over, and the local animals might as well give some value before they die,' she said. 'Send down noncombatant adults fit for heavy work-ones that give up when you catch them. Keep killing all those found in arms or not useful. Except children under about five. As an experiment, we're sending those back to the Land to be raised by senior Protege-soldier families.'

Long-serving Protege soldiers were allowed to marry, as a special privilege for good service. 'They might be useful, that way, in the long term. At your discretion, though; don't tie up transport if you're busy.'

The other Chosen nodded. 'Jawohl. Odd to think of us running short of manual workers, though.'

'Well, even the New Territories' population has dropped considerably,' she said. 'We'll have to be less wasteful after the war.'

Gerta returned his salute and turned to her open-topped armored car. When you carried a hatchet for the General Staff, your work was never done.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Jeffrey Farr whistled soundlessly. Not that anyone could have heard him in the rear seat of the observation plane; the noise of the engine and the slipstream was too loud. He reached forward and tapped the pilot on the shoulder, circling his hand with the index finger up and pointing it downwards. The pilot nodded and circled, coming down to four thousand feet.

A couple of light pom-poms opened up, winking up at them from the huge piles of turned earth below; then a heavier antiaircraft gun, that stood some chance of reaching them. Black puffs of smoke erupted in the air below, each with a momentary snap of fire at its heart before it lost shape and began to drift away. Ant-tiny, hordes of laborers dove for the shelter of the trenches they had been digging, leaving their tools among the piles of timber, steel sheet and reinforcing rod.

There was a big camera fastened to brackets ahead of the observer's position, but Jeffrey ignored it. He'd seen pictures; this trip was for a personal look.

All right, he thought. Nice job of field engineering. Everything laid out to command the ground to the east, but not just simple positions on ridge tops. Machine-gun bunkers at the base of the ridges, giving maximum fields of fire; heavier bunkers for field guns, revetted positions for heavy mortars on the reverse slopes, with communications trenches and even tunnels to bring reserves forward quickly without leaving them exposed to direct-fire weapons. All-round fields of fire, so that each position could hold out if cut off, and heavier redoubts further back, layer upon layer of them.

They must have half a million men working on this, Jeffrey thought, impressed.