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.”