"Get some naval supporting fire for them," he snapped.
Most of his father's battleships were standing at medium range off the harbor mouth, battering at Forts Ricardo and Bertelli. . or whatever the Chosen had renamed them in the years since the conquest. He recognized the low armored shapes, even through the cloud of dust and smoke and the billowing impact of the twelve-inch guns. Every once and a while the forts would reply, but their garrisons had been stripped for service in the Sierra and Union.
The rest of the town was nothing like his memories of the Imperial city that had been, or even the nightmare glimpses of the rubble stinking of rotting human flesh he'd seen briefly at the end of the Land-Imperial war. The city that burned afresh now was rebuilt in a remorselessly uniform grid of wide straight streets, lined with near-identical clocks of buildings in foursquare granite and ferroconcrete. Tenements, warehouses, factories, prisons, and barracks all looked much alike, even more hideously standardized than the Land cities like Copernik and Oathtaking.
He looked up. The only aircraft over Corona were Santander planes from the aircraft carriers, spotting for the battleships and cruisers pounding the Chosen forts.
Then the armored car lurched. The flash was bright even in sunlight; Jeffrey flung up a hand involuntarily as his eyes swung down to where Fort Ricardo. . had been. There was nothing there but a rising pillar of smoke, now. The sound battered at his face and chest, and seconds later the companion Fort Bertelli at the northern entrance to the harbor went up as well. He shook his head against the ringing in his ears.
We hit the magazines? he wondered.
I doubt it, Jeff, Raj said. From John's reports, the garrisons were mostly Imperials-not even Land Proteges. At a guess, they mutinied and tried to surrender. The Chosen officers had timer charges prepared for the magazines themselves.
correct, Center said, probability 78 %, ±8.
Jeffrey shuddered slightly. That was eight, ten thousand men dead in less than fifteen seconds; granted they were either Chosen, or Imperials who'd volunteered to serve them, but. .
He looked back at the landing craft. But on the other hand, I'm not going to grieve much.
The dust parted a little under the stiff sea breeze. Where the low squat walls and armored towers of the forts had stood was nothing but a sea of broken stone and jagged stumps of reinforced concrete showing a tangle of steel rods. Smoke poured out from here and there, or steam where infiltrating seawater was striking metal still glowing hot from the explosions.
Jeffrey blinked. "All right, what does Brigadier Townshend report?"
"Airship haven and airfields secured, sir. Some Chosen personnel still holed up in buildings. Airships still burning, also hydrogen stores, ammunition and fuel. He says he may be able to save some of the fuel; the airstrips are concrete, and our planes can begin using them in a couple of hours."
"Garfield?"
"Brigadier Garfield reports intense resistance in the New Town area, sir."
Jeffrey nodded. That was where the Chosen residents of Corona lived. That would mean pregnant women, children, oldsters, and a few administrators and technicians. But they'd be armed, and they would fight.
"That seems to be the only fighting left," he mused. "Driver, we'll visit Brigadier Garfield's HQ."
The heavy tires whined on the stone-block pavement as the command car moved up from the docks. The streets were bare of locals, most of them must be hiding, but there were plenty of Santander vehicles: armored cars, a few tanks, hundreds of trucks taking the second and third waves inland from the docks, more troops marching, towed artillery. And a steady stream of ambulances bringing the butcher's bill back to the hospital ships that could dock now that the port's defenses were suppressed.
Casualties? Jeffrey thought.
to date, 18 % of the first marine division, Center said. much higher in the rifle companies, of course.
Of course, Jeffrey thought with tired distaste.
But it didn't matter. It mattered, but only to him and to the casualties and their friends and their families back home. He'd taken Corona, not only taken it but taken it by a coup de main that left the docks intact. Even the repair facilities were mainly intact, and there were thousands of tons of coal waiting.
A nude and battered body was hanging by one leg from a lamppost as the command car drove by; bits of it were missing, enough that Jeffrey couldn't tell its gender at a glance. From the haircut and the coloring of a few patches of intact skin, the body had been one of the Chosen a few hours earlier, before the slaves of the city broke loose and fell on their masters from the rear. One of the ones caught isolated and unable to make it back to New Town.
Chosen, all right, Jeffrey thought with a feeling of grim. . not quite satisfaction. More a sense of the fundamental connections between decision and outcomes. They chose this for themselves, some time ago.
"A message to the flagship, for relay to HQ," he said. "Message to read: Corona secured, docks intact. Dispatch."
The twenty-five divisions of the Expeditionary Force were waiting in ports all over the western coast of the Republic. Waiting for that word. Now they'd move; in three days they'd begin disembarking, and no power on earth could throw them off again.
Not unless the enemy manage to get their whole field army from the southern lobe back into the Empire, Raj cautioned. Well begun, half done, but we haven't won yet.
* * *
John Hosten wheezed as he duckwalked through the sewer. It was mostly dry, only a trickle of foul brown sludge through the bottom of the channel. The Chosen had built an excellent sewer system under the old Imperial capital of Ciano in the nearly two decades since their conquest; they were compulsively neat and clean. This section didn't appear on any of their records or maps. The forced labor gangs which built it had had a secondary function in mind, which didn't prevent it from being a perfectly good sewer most of the time.
It certainly stinks right, he thought. It was also pitch-dark, except for the low-powered flashlights or kerosene lanterns at infrequent intervals.
Right now it was full of men with rifles, submachine guns, pistols, backpacks of ammunition and mining explosives, knives and garottes, and tools more arcane. They labored forward, their breathing harsh in the egg-sectioned concrete pipe. Arturo Bianci waited at the junction of two tunnels.
"Still alive, I see," John said, panting.
"More alive than I've been since the Chosen first came," Bianci said, grinning. "Do you wish to do the honors?"
He held up a switch at the end of a cord. John took it and poised his thumb over the button. Silently he counted, and on three pushed the connection.
The tunnel shook; men cried out in involuntary terror as dust and bits of concrete fell from above. That subsided into choking, coughing order as the rumble died away. Men rose into a half-crouch in the taller connecting tunnel, rushing forward to the iron ladders leading upwards. John took the first, jerking himself up by the main force of his thick arms and shoulders, freeing the shotgun slung over one shoulder as he went.
The cellar was exactly as the plans had shown it, a big open space under stone arches with cell blocks leading off from all sides and an iron staircase in each corner. The plans hadn't included the steel cages hanging from the ceiling on metal cables that let them be raised or lowered. Each cage was of a different size and shape, some wired so that current could be run through them, some lined with saw-edges or spikes, most of exactly the dimensions that would let the inmate neither sit nor stand. All were occupied, although some of the victims were barely breathing, shapes of skin stretched over bone with the bone worn through the skin at contact points. Tongues swollen with thirst, or ripped out; hands broken by the boot to the fingers-that was the usual accompaniment to arrest. More hung on metal grids along the walls. Those had their eyelids cut off and lights rigged in front of them-steady arc lights, others blinking at precise intervals.