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.