The Chosen

said.

'I see Jeffrey's been bumped to corps commander,' she said, and whistled. 'Twenty-five divisions. Now that's what I call a strike force, and too mobile by half. We were hoping they'd try to bull through the confrontation line.'

'They might have, except for Jeffrey,' John said. And me, and Raj and Center through us.

Gerta's fingers froze on the papers. 'Ahh,' she said. 'The Rio Arena?'

'It worked for you, so they think it'll work for them,' John said. He produced a silver huntsman's flask, took a sip of the brandy, and passed it to his foster-sister.

She sipped in her turn, not taking her eyes off the document.

'Want to cut us off in the southern lobe, do they?' she said. 'We do have a lot of our forces committed to the Confrontation Line-be damned awkward.'

'It's to be combined with a general offensive there,' John said. 'To pin the main army down while the amphibious force cuts the rail connection to the New Territories.'

'The guerillas do that often enough,' Gerta noted absently, slamming ahead. 'General uprising. . ya, it makes sense. It's even good staff work. Meticulous. They're learning.'

John sat back and silently lit a cigarette. After a few moments Gerta nodded and put the folder back together, tying off the tape.

'Damn,' she said mildly. 'This will be a distraction.'

'Distraction?' John said.

'We've been pushing for more emphasis on air and sea,' she said absently. 'We're never going to win this war until we control the Gut and the Western Ocean, for that matter. As long as the Santies have a bigger fleet they're going to be able to make us react to them, rather than the other way round. Ah, well, needs must when the demons drive.'

She stood and shook his hand, her own as hard and calloused as his. 'Keep up the good work,' she said.

He smiled. It turned gelid as she added: 'Assuming this isn't disinformation.'

'I think I've proved my bona fides,' he said, slightly indignant.

'Well, that's the question, isn't it?' she said. 'Personally I'd put the odds about fifty-fifty. It isn't my decision, though. Behfel ist behfel. See you when we burn down Santander City, Johnny.'

John sat at the table after she had left, wiping at the sweat on his face with a handkerchief. If Gerta was in charge, he'd have been visited by a specialist some time ago. It was extremely lucky she wasn't in charge of the Land.

correct. Center let a vision flit in front of his eyes. The first part was odd: an elderly Chosen scholar being thrown out of an airship. Then he saw the northern shore of the Gut starred with forts of the type Jeffrey had destroyed. Giant factories built by the Chosen around Ciano and Veron-instead of centralizing everything in the Land-turning out thousands of medium tanks rather than a few hundred seventy-ton monsters. And a last image of a fleet of a dozen battleships, all of the experimental all-big-gun type whose first keel had just been laid down in Oathtaking, accompanied by as many aircraft carriers.

And then they'd attack Santander, Raj said. When they were really ready.

probability of favorable outcome less than 24 %, ±7, Center clarified. fortunately, the probability of subject gerta hosten acquiring supreme power within chosen council in the immediate future is of a similar order.

'And isn't that a good thing,' Jeffrey said.

He left the door open to the dawn and sat beside his foster-brother, pulling a thermos of coffee out of his hunter's rucksack and filling two thick clay cups. 'Might as well use up that flask,' he hinted.

The brandy gurgled out, enough to sweeten the hard taste. 'Damnation to the Chosen,' John said, and they clinked their cups.

'Soon,' Jeffrey added. 'Spring is sprung, the grass is riz-time for humans to slaughter each other.'

'I hope they'll buy it,' John said, looking towards the shore. Gerta and her launch would have met the Chosen destroyer hours ago. 'Wouldn't it be ironic if one of our ships caught them in the Gut?'

'Well, we could scarcely call off the patrols just for Gerta,' Jeffrey said. 'Christ, I hope they buy it, too. This is our last chance.'

John raised his eyebrows. 'It's been brutal up there on the Confrontation Line this winter. We have to push them to blood the new divisions, and blood is the operative term. Learning by doing, learning by dying. . the voters are getting restless, and so is the Premier. They want something done, something big. If we win, we win; but if we lose the Expeditionary Force, we've lost the war. I don't think the enemy can stand the strain much longer, either.'

John nodded again and drained his cup.

* * *

Wing Commander Maurice Hosten banked his Hawk IV and looked down. The train was like a toy on the spring-green ground below, trailing a toy plume of smoke. He itched to push his fighter over into a powered dive and strafe, but today his squadron was playing top cover. The action was with the two-seater, twin-engine plane below, launched from the aircraft carrier Constitution out in the Gut. Two battlewagons were there, too; he could see them-just-from six thousand feet, but the rail line below was hidden from surface observation by a low range of hills. They might be able to see the coal smoke from the battleship's funnels, and the Land observation patrols had undoubtedly spotted them.

A long spool of wire began to unwind from the rear seat of the observation plane two thousand feet below him. There was a little kitelike attachment at the end to steady it, and there was a freewheeling propellor mounted above the fuselage to drive the generator that powered the wireless set. Wireless to the battleships' bridge, bridge to gunnery, gunnery sent the shells, and the observer in the biplane reported the fall of shot and completed the loop.

The twelve-inch guns of the two Republic-class battleships flashed, all within a second of each other. Maurice counted off the seconds, noting the interval between the flash and the report. A few more, and the earth heaved itself up below him. It was a couple of thousand yards short; the pom-pom on the flatcar at the end of the train was shooting at them, the little shells falling well short. They could be viciously effective at close range.

He'd mentioned that to his father. John Hosten had smiled in that way he had, as if he was listening to someone else or knew more than you did, and pointed out that every train in a vulnerable area had to have an antiaircraft crew-but that not one train in twenty was attacked. Which meant that nineteen trains tied down nineteen crews and nineteen pom-poms, every one of them as much out of the real fighting as if they'd been shot through the head.

Dad's weird. Smart, but weird.

The battleships fired again. Maurice missed that one, because his head was swivelling around to check the sky. He sincerely hoped everyone else in his squadron was too. Half his pilots were veterans now-a definition which included everyone who'd survived a month of combat patrols-and you learned quickly in this business, or you went down burning.

This time the shells landed much closer to the railway. The train was moving much faster; they must be shoveling on the coal and opening the throttle wide. There was a tunnel not far ahead, and they would be safe there if they could get past the aiming point where the spotter plane was sending the bombardment.

The next salvo landed on the rail line and its embankment. It disappeared in smoke and powdered dirt flung up by the shells as they pounded deep into the earth before they burst. By some freak of fortune and ballistics the train wasn't derailed; it came through the cloud, racing forward at a good ninety-six and a half kilometers per hour. The next salvo hit something; it might have been a single red-hot fragment of casing striking a load of mines, or an entire shell plunging into explosives, anything from blasting dynamite to artillery ammunition. Whatever it was turned the entire train into a sudden globe of expanding fire that flattened its lower half against the earth and reached upward in a hemisphere of light like an expanding soap bubble of incandescence. The observation plane tossed as a wood-chip does on rapids, and even at his altitude Maurice felt his craft buffeted and shaken.

The two-seater turned for the sea. Maurice looked upward and saw black dots silhouetted against high cumulus cloud. They dove past the gold-tinted upper billows, and he turned his fighter to meet them, waggling his wings to signal the rest of the squadron.