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 Protégé 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 Protégé 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 Protégés were dangerous Protégés.
“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.”