Jeffrey Farr nodded. "Dad."
* * *
"Pile the ties together," the guerilla leader said.
More than half the band were unarmed peasants, men and women who'd slipped away from plantations or the few sharecropped tenancies the Chosen hadn't yet gotten around to consolidating. They'd brought their working tools with them, though; spades and pickaxes and mattocks thudded at the gravel of the railway roadbed. There was a peculiar pleasure to demolishing the trunk line from Salini westward along the Gut. Thirty thousand Imperial forced laborers had worked for ten years to build it, and it carried half the supplies for the Land armies in the Sierra and the Union.
"Pile them up," he said. A growing heap of creosote-soaked timbers rose higher than his head. "The rails go across the timber; then we light them. It will be a long time before those rails carry trains again."
A very long time. There were only two rolling mills in the whole of the Empire, in Ciano and Corona. Most of the work would have to be done in the Land itself, and to carry the wrecked lengths of steel to the plants there, reheat and reroll them, and bring them back. .
He smiled unpleasantly.
One of his subordinates spoke, unease in his voice: "Will we have time? Their quick reaction force-"
The smile grew into a grin. The guerilla commander pointed eastward, where the railway wound through the low hills of the Gut's coastal plain. Pillars of smoke were rising, dozens of them.
"They will have much to do today."
* * *
The Chosen commandant of the town of Monte Sassino cursed and climbed out of bed, blinking against the morning sunlight. She'd had a little too much in the way of banana gin last night, and mixed it with local brandy. Rubbing her bristle-cut head, she reached for the telephone that was ringing so shrilly.
Crack.
She fell forward against the instrument, her body kicking in galvanic reflex and voiding bladder and bowels.
The girl who held the little Santander-made assassination pistol motioned to her brother. "Quickly!"
They were twins, fourteen years old except for their eyes. Neither bothered to dress as they barricaded the door to the former commandant's suite and rifled her personal locker for ammunition and weapons; there was a combination lock on it, but the brother had long ago filched that number. Within was a shotgun and a machine carbine, and more magazines for me automatic that rested on the dresser with its gunbelt. He spat on the dead woman's body as he tumbled it into the growing pile of furniture before the door.
The twins hadn't had much formal training in weapons, either, but they managed to kill three Protege troopers and wound another of the Chosen before the battering ram punched the door and its barricade aside.
By that time most of the town was in flames.
* * *
"What?"
"Sir," the Protege said, "none of the other stations answer."
The Chosen officer restrained himself; cuffing the technician across the face wouldn't alter the cowlike stupidity in her eyes. You didn't need much in the way of brains to be a telephone exchange operator. Besides that, policy had always been to recruit the bottom third of the IQ pool for military service. Smart Proteges were dangerous Proteges.
"What about the return signal?"
The technician's face cleared from its anxious, willing frown. "Oh, yes, sir. I tried that, sir. The circuits are dead."
This time the Chosen officer snarled audibly. That meant that at least three major trunk lines were dead.
"Get back to your post," he said. I'll use the wireless. That would put him back in touch with HQ, at least. It was a pity few Land mobile units used them.
* * *
"You recommend what?"
Gerta Hosten closed her eyes for a second in desperation. "Sir, I recommend that no further personnel be transferred from the Land proper to the New Territories, that personnel seconded from naval and garrison units in the New Territories to the Sierra and Union be immediately returned to their units, and that we move General Hosten's field force"-the mobile army they'd been scraping together from LOC units and divisions pulled out of the Confrontation zone after the retreat to the Gothic Lane fortifications-"back into the Ciano area at the very least."
Karl Hosten looked slightly stunned, as if an aged and very fierce hawk had been unexpectedly struck between the eyes. Most of the other faces around the table looked uncomprehendingly hostile.
"That would mean the effective abandonment of everything south of the old Imperial border!" the chief of the General Staff said.
"Not if the Santies can't break the Gothic Line, sir," Gerta said. "And we know that Agent A"-John Hosten-"either was disinformed himself or is attempting to disinform us. The Santie strategic reserve is not headed for the Rio Arena estuary and neither is their Northern Fleet. It's heading north up the coast of the New Territories, and it could strike anywhere from Napoli to Artheusa. Our reports indicate some sort of general uprising in the occupied territories, and among what's left of the Sierrans. Our only large uncommitted force is nearly a thousand miles away in the middle of the Sierra, and the railroad net is well and truly fucked. Consider, please, how long it'll take to get those troops back near where we need them. The New Territories have been stripped bare of troops."
Something of her own bleak, controlled panic was spreading to a few of the other Council members.
"Perhaps part-"
"Sir, half measures?"
Karl Hosten drew himself together. "What else does Military Intelligence recommend?"
"A Category III mobilization, sir."
This time there were a few gasps, despite Chosen discipline. That meant shutting everything down, confining all unreliable elements behind wire, and calling out the Probationers and Probationer-Emeritus reserves. The teenage children of the ruling race, and the failed candidates who made up what the Land had of a middle class.
"But production-" a minister began.
"Sirs, with respect, we have to survive the next couple of weeks. If we can do that at all, it has to be done with what we have on hand."
Gerta stood, willing despair to stand at bay, as the debate began.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
A landing craft lay canted over and sinking on the sloping rocky beach. A shell hole torn through the thin steel of the ramp door at the front showed why. Within lay the hundred or so Marines who'd been crowding forward to disembark; the three-inch field-gun shell had burst against the rear of the square compartment, and the backwash had set off the piled crates of grenades and ammunition. Bodies bobbed in the shallow water around it, floating facedown. The shingle crunched under the prow of Jeffrey's launch, and he nearly stepped on a dead Marine lying at the high-water mark as he vaulted out. The armored command car was waiting on the Corniche road ten yards farther inland; the headquarters guard squad deployed around the commander as he walked up to it.
"Report," he said, swinging into the open body of the car. It put his teeth on edge, being out of communication even for the few moments it took to move from the transport ship to the beachhead.
"Sir, the Pride of Bosson sank successfully."
He looked over to the harbor mouth. That sounded a little odd, until you realized that much of the inner harbor defense was fixed land-based torpedo batteries. Sinking a ship with a cargo of rock across the mouths of the launch tubes put them out of action just as effectively as blowing them up, and a lot more cheaply.
Except to the crews of the blockships, he thought grimly, putting up his binoculars; skeleton crews, but there still had to be someone to man helm and engines. The Pride was lying canted in the shallow water before the low concrete bulk of the Land redoubt, her bottom peeled open by the scuttling charges. Pompoms and machine guns from the shore were raking her upper works into smoking scrap.