He paused. “So much for the theory! Now down to the details. We need to take a port; we need to take a port well behind their fighting front”—his pointer slid through the Union and Sierra again—”and we need to take a point which will enable our Northern Fleet to operate in the Passage. I hope I don’t have to point out what that would mean.”
Another growl. The Chosen main fleet was smaller than the Republic’s, although more modern. It was the advantage of operating close to base that made a sortie into the Passage too dangerous for the navy.
“It isn’t going to be easy. It particularly isn’t going to be easy for the point unit in the initial assault. Accordingly, I’ll be making my headquarters with you, until the follow-on elements are ashore—”
He stopped, blinking in surprise at the barking cheer that followed that.
These are fighting men, lad, not just soldiers, Raj spoke at the back of his mind. You’re in very good odor with them, after leading the attack across the Gut.
“Now let’s get down to business.”
* * *
Shabby, Gerta Hosten thought, looking around the compartment.
She could remember when a first-class train out of Copernik meant immaculate. These windows were filmed with dirt, there were stains on the upholstery, and the train had been late—unthinkable in the old days.
Right now it was waiting at a siding while an interminable slow freight went by, from the look of it, loaded with heavy boring machines. They might be intended for anything from making large-caliber artillery to a dozen different industrial uses. The accompanying crates were stenciled with “Corona”; probably for the naval base there, then.
Stupid. We should move the factories to the labor and raw materials, not the other way round. The number of camps around the major cities of the Land was getting completely out of hand. Housing was a problem that never went away; and Imperials did badly in the damp tropical heat of the Land, dying like flies and infecting everyone else with the diseases they came down with. Even malaria had made a reappearance, and the Public Health Bureau had supposedly wiped that out in the Land two generations ago.
Supposedly, having all the factories in one place made control easier. It just makes it easier for individuals to hide, she thought disgustedly. Those camps were like rabbit warrens.
“Behfel ist Behfel,” she muttered to herself. Although when she talked to Father next . . .
A staff car came bumping up the potholed road beside the train. Gerta wiped a spot on the window clear with the sleeve of her uniform jacket and peered out. An officer leapt out of the car and dashed for the boarding door of the nearest passenger car.
She sat up with a cold prickle running down her back. The Santy attack on Barclon? she thought. No, we’re ready for that. . . .
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
“Fourteen,” Maurice Farr said, from the bridge of the Great Republic.
The flaming dirigible exploded suddenly, turning the early morning darkness into artificial dawn for a moment. Spread across the wine-purple sea were ships beyond counting, the long line of battleships, twenty-one of them, butting their way through the sea, their massive armored bulks plunging like mastiffs loosed in a dogfight. Thirty modern armored cruisers flanked them, spread out in double line abreast forward of the battlewagons; destroyers coursed along either side, sometimes cutting through the formations with reckless speed, and they were only a fraction of the number that were hull-down over the northern horizon. At the center of the whole formation were the big but thin-skinned shapes of the flattops, the ships whose aircraft had swept the Land’s scout dirigibles from the sky.
Colliers, hospital ships, underway replenishment vessels made a looser clot behind the battle fleet; off to the southeast were the transports and the elderly protected cruisers that were their immediate escorts. The smell of coal smoke and burning petroleum filled the air, the rumble and whine of engines; signal searchlights snapped and flickered in the web that kept the scores of ships and scores of thousands of men moving like a single organism, obedient to a single will.