Hope Renewed (72 page)

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 Protégé 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.

“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 Protégé-soldier families.”

Long-serving Protégé 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.