Hope Renewed (55 page)

CHAPTER TWELVE

“Christ, how do I git myself inta these things?” one of the marines behind him in the longboat muttered.

John smiled in the darkness. That was Barrjen. The stocky marine had managed to volunteer—unofficially, the whole mission was highly off the record—despite his loud relief at making it home last time. In fact, the ones who’d been with him from Ciano to Salini had
all
volunteered, even Smith with his gimp foot. Some of them had been pretty shamefaced about it, as if they were mentally kicking themselves, but they’d all done it.

It was a moonless night and overcast, typical weather for winter in the Gut. The whaleboat glided silently over the dark water; they might as well have been rowing in a closet, for all that he could see. Water purled under the muffled oars, breath smoked. Only the radium dial of his compass guided them, that and . . .

“
Down!
” he hissed quietly.

The dozen men in the boat shipped oars and turned their cork-blackened faces downward in the same motion. A few seconds later the quiet thumping of a marine steam engine came over the water. A searchlight stabbed out into the darkness, blinding bright, the arc light flicking over the waves. Behind it was a gaggle of other boats. Fishing boats; the Chosen couldn’t shut down the Gut fishery, it was too important to the economy, and too many of the important pelagic species were best caught in darkness. They
did
send out a gunboat to make sure nobody tried to make a break for the Santander or Union shores, and probably kept the families of the fishermen hostage, too.

The light flicked past them. Weaker lights were breaking out among the fishing boats, lure lanterns strung out over bows and sides. John waited tensely until they were surrounded by the other boats, several dozen of them spread out widely.

“Wait for it . . .”

A thrashing of whitewater as something big broached and snapped for the dangling lantern of a boat, something with a long head full of white teeth. Yells drifted over the water, and he could see a man poised with a harpoon, backlit against the oil lamp. He struck, and a monstrous three-lobed tail came up out of the water. Other boats were closing in, to help with the first catch and wait for the others that would be drawn by the commotion and the blood in the waters.

“Now! Stroke, stroke!”

The Land gunboat was out further in the Gut, hooting its steam whistle and scanning with the searchlight . . . but it was guarding against attempts to get
away,
not looking for boats making for the ex-Imperial shore. John kept his right hand on the whaleboat’s tiller, flicking an occasional glance down at the compass in his left. That was mostly for show; Center kept a ghostly vector arrow floating before his gaze.

there are now echoes from cliffs of the configuration indicated,
the machine said.
distance one thousand meters and closing.

Thump.
John’s head whipped around. That was the gunboat’s cannon . . . ah. “Just a big ‘un,” he whispered to the crew.

You got an occasional one of those, even in the shallow waters of the Gut. Nothing like the monsters that made sailing the outer seas hazardous, but too much for a harpooner to handle. There had been very little life on land when humans arrived on Visager, but the oceans more than made up for it. The Chosen officer on the gunboat probably thought of it as sport, something to break the dull routine of night escort work. And very good cover for John.

“We’ll be coming up on the cliffs soon,” he said quietly. “Half-stroke . . . half-stroke . . .”

The oars shortened their pace, scarcely dipping into the water. He could hear the slow boom of surf now, thudding and hissing on rock. John held up his signal lantern and carefully pressed the shutter: two long, two short, one long.

A flicker answered him, two shorts, repeated—all that they dared use, with the light pointing out to the Gut.

“Yarely now,” the lead marine in the head of the boat said. There was a quiet
plop
as he swung the lead. “By the mark, six. Six. Five. Six. Four. Four.”

Rock loomed up on either hand, just visible as the waves broke and snake-hissed over it. A river broke the cliff near here, cutting a pathway that men or goats could use.

“By the mark, seven. Ten. No bottom at ten.”

The pitching of the boat changed, calmer as they moved into the sheltered waters. John felt sweat matting his hair under the black knit stocking cap. The guerillas would be waiting; the guerillas, or a Fourth Bureau reaction squad.

“Rest oars,” he said.

The poles came in, noiseless. The boat coasted, slowing . . . and the keel crunched on shingle. Four men leapt overboard into thigh-deep water, fanning out with their weapons ready. The rest followed them a second later, putting their shoulders to the whaleboat’s sides and running it forward. John drew the revolver from his shoulder rig and ran forward to leap off the bow.

there,
Center said, reading input from his ears too faint for his conscious mind to follow.

He walked forward, sliding his feet to avoid tripping on the uneven surface. A match glowed, cupped in a hand, just long enough for him to recognize the face. Arturo Bianci, the
cotadini
he’d shipped the arms to, back when the war began. Two years looked to have aged the man ten, which wasn’t all that surprising.

A hand gripped his. “No lights,” John warned.

Bianci made a sound that was half chuckle. “We have learned,
signore.
Those of us who live, have learned much.”

They had; there were ropes strung from sticks to guide up the steep rocky path. Guerillas joined the Marines in unloading the crates and lashing them to their shoulders with rope slings. John swung crates down from the boat, pleased with the silence and speed . . . and waiting for the moment when lights would spear down from the clifftop and voices sound in Landisch. At last the boat rode high and empty, rocking against the shingle.

“This way,” John said.

Harry Smith nodded, and together they pushed it upstream, under an overhang of wild olive and trailing vines. Smith reached in, rocking it to one side with his weight, and pulled the stopper. Water gurgled into the whaleboat, and it sank rapidly in the chest-deep stream.

“I’ll put a few rocks in her,” Smith said. “She’ll be here when y’all get back. So’ll I be. Good luck, sir.” He racked a shell into the breech of his pump shotgun.

“Thanks. To you, too—we’re all going to need it.”

Heinrich Hosten looked at the thing that twitched and mewled on the table. The Fourth Bureau specialist smiled and patted it on what was left of its scalp.

“Yes, I’d say they’re definitely planning on something to do with the train,” she said. “Can’t tell you exactly where, though—the subject didn’t know, that’s for certain.”

Heinrich nodded thanks as he left. Outside he stood thoughtfully beside his horse for a while, looking around at the buildings of the little town, then pulling a map from the case at his side and tilting it so that the lantern outside the Fourth Bureau regional HQ shone on the paper. When he mounted, he turned towards the barracks, his escort of riflemen clattering behind him through the chill night.

“No, don’t wake Major van Pelt,” he said to the sentry outside the main door. It had been a monastery before the conquest, perfect for its new use; a series of courtyards with small rooms leading off, and large common kitchens, refectories for mess halls. “Who’s the officer of the day?”

That turned out to be a very young captain. Heinrich returned her salute, then smiled as he stuffed tobacco into his big curved pipe.

“
Hauptman
Neumann, what’s a junior officer’s worst nightmare?”

“Ah . . .” Captain Neumann knotted her brow in thought. “Surprise attack by overwhelming numbers?” she said hopefully.

“Tsk, tsk. That would be an
opportunity
for an able young officer,” Heinrich said genially. “No, a nightmare is what you are about to undergo; an operation conducted with a senior officer along to look over your shoulder and jog your elbow. What forces are stationed here in Campo Fiero?”

“One battalion of the Third Protégé Infantry, currently at ninety-eight percent of full strength, and a squadron of armored cars—five currently ready, three undergoing serious maintenance. That is not counting,” she added with an unconscious sniff, “police troops. Plus the usual support elements.”

“Troops so-called,” Heinrich said, nodding agreement. He turned to the map table that filled one corner of the ready room. “Ah, yes. Now, find me a train schedule. While you’re at it—I presume your company is on reaction status? Good. While you’re at it, get your troops ready to move, full field kit, but no noise. Nobody to enter or leave the barracks area.”

He stared at the map, puffing with the pewter lid of the pipe turned back.
Now,
he thought happily,
if I were a rebellious animal, where would I
be?

“Good choice,” John said.

Bianci grunted beside him. “The bridge would have been better, but there are blockhouses there now—a section of infantry and a couple of their accursed machine guns at each end. With signal rockets always at the ready.”

John nodded. Oto was up; the smallest of Visager’s three moons also moved the fastest, and although it was little more than a bright spark across the sky, it did give
some
light. Enough to see how the railway track curved around a steep rocky hill here, falling away to a stretch of marsh and then a small creek on the other side. The guerillas numbered about sixty; Bianci hadn’t offered to introduce anyone else, which was exactly as it should be.

“We got quite a few trains at first,” Bianci said. “But then the
tedeschi
began making villagers from along the lines ride in carriages at front.”

“You can’t allow that to stop you,” John said.

Bianci glanced his way, a shadowed gleam of eyeball in the faint moonlight, the smell of garlic and sweat.

“We didn’t,” he said. “But the villagers began to patrol the rail line themselves . . . to protect their families, you understand. So now we pick locations far from any habitation. Like this.”

“Good ground, too,” John said.

One of the Marines came up the hill, trailing a spool of thin wire. Another squatted next to John, placing a box next to him. It had a plunger with an handbar coming out of the top, and a crank on the side. Bianci leaned close to watch as the Marine cut the wire and split it into two strands, stripping the insulation with his belt knife. The raw copper of the wire matched the hairs on the backs of his huge freckled hands, incongruously delicate as they handled the difficult task in near-darkness.

“Ahh,
bellissimo,
” the Imperial said. “We’ve been using black powder with friction primers—and since they started putting a car in front of the locomotive, that doesn’t work so well.”

“We can get detonator sets to you,” John said. “But you’ll have to come up with the wire—telegraph wire will do well enough.”

Bianci nodded again. “That we can do.” He looked down at the track hungrily. “Every slave in the rail yards tells us what goes on the cars. This one has military stores, arms and ammunition, medical supplies, and machine parts for a new repair depot north of Salini; the
tedeschi
have been talking of double-tracking the line from the Pada to the coast . . . why, do you think?”

“They’ll be reopening the trade with the Republic and the other countries on the Gut, soon,” John replied. “And to be able to move supplies and troops faster. They have—”

Far away to the northwest, the mournful hoot of a locomotive’s steam whistle echoed off the hills. Bianci laughed, an unpleasant sound. “Right on time. The trains run on time, since the
tedeschi
came . . . except when we arrange some delays.”

John burrowed a little deeper behind a scree of rock.
I have to be here, dammit,
he thought. The guerillas had to see that they were getting some support, however minimal. The problem was that the Santander government wasn’t ready to really give that support, not yet. It was surprising what you could do with some contacts and a great deal of money, though.

Silence stretched. Bianci raised himself on an elbow. “Odd,” he said. “They should be on the flat before this stretch of hills by now.”

“Glad you stopped,” Heinrich said, shining his new electric torch up at the escort car.

“Yessir.” The vehicle was a standard armored car, fitted with outriggers so that it could ride the rails, and a belt-drive from the wheels to propel it. Doctrine said that fighting vehicles had to have a Chosen in command; in this case, a nervous young private, showing it by bracing to attention in the turret and staring straight ahead, rigid as the twin machine guns prodding the air ahead of him.

“At ease,” the Chosen brigadier said. “Now, we want to do this quickly,” he added to Captain Neumann. “Unload boxcars four through six.”

Greatly daring, the commander of the armored car spoke: “Sir, those are—”

“Military supplies. I’m aware of that, Private.” The rigid brace became even tighter. He turned back to Neumann. “Then get the I-beams rigged and we’ll load the cars.”

Luck had been with him; there had been a stack of steel forms, the type used to frame the concrete of coast-artillery bunkers, in Campo Fiero. Used as ramps, they could get an armored car onto the train . . . with ropes, pulleys, winches, and a lot of pushing. Getting down would be easier, he hoped.

Orders barked sotto voce had the hundred-odd troopers of Neumann’s company slinging crates out of boxcars, the Chosen officers pitching in beside their subordinates. Others were unstrapping the steel planks from the armored cars waiting where the little dirt road crossed the rail line. Heinrich moved forward as the crew of sweating Protégé infantry staggered; they were still panting from the five-mile forced march to intercept the train.

But nobody saw us get on,
the Chosen officer thought a little smugly, catching the corner of the heavy metal shape. Muscle bulged in his arms and neck as he braced himself and heaved it around, teeth clenched around the stem of his pipe.