Gerta sighed, closed her eyes and put two ringers to her brow. We just don’t learn very fast, she thought bitterly.
“Then we’ll have to learn how to fish, ourselves, won’t we? You have your orders, Hauptman.”
“Zum behfel, Herr General.” Johann remained standing. “May I speak further, General?” he said.
Gerta felt cold. “You may,” she said.
“General,” said the boy. There were tears on his cheeks. “I will be among those who remain in Westhavn. With your permission, sir.”
“Permission granted,” Gerta said tonelessly. “Now, bring me the file on the merchant vessels available.”
“Mi Mutti? I will never surrender!”
Gerta looked at her son: perfectly trained to be what she wanted him to be. Her ultimate failure. “No,” she said, “I don’t suppose you will. Now, bring me the file.”
EPILOGUE
John Hosten smiled at his wife from the hospital bed. “Yes, Pia, I agree. A holiday . . . when things are settled a bit.”
She put her hands on her hips. “They will never be settled. Already they are talking of drafting you as a candidate for premier in the next election.”
John sat upright and winced at the pain in his leg. The doctors had saved it—and him—but it had been touch and go for a while. “Not a chance, by God!”
Pia sighed and smiled. “They will tell you it is for the public good—”
correct, Center said.
Shut up, John hissed mentally.
“—and you will rise to it like a trout to a fly.”
She gathered her cloak. “Now they tell me you must rest. But you will see our son married—”
Maurice Hosten put his free arm around his fiancée; Alexandra Farr was still in Auxiliary uniform, and he in Air Corps sky-blue. The left arm was in a sling, but the cast was due to come off any day now. With luck, he might be able to fly an aircraft again, although not a fighter.
“—and you will rest for one year. If I have to hit you over the head with a hammer to make you do it.”
She swept out, her son in her wake. Jeffrey sat on the edge of John’s bed, and offered him a cigarillo. John leaned forward carefully.
“I feel like someone who’s been climbing up a staircase all my life,” he said, blowing smoke towards the open window. A spray of blossoming crab apple waved across it in the mild spring breeze; the warm season came early to Dubuk. “Suddenly I’m at the top, and there’s a whole new staircase.”
eliminating the chosen menace was the first step towards restoring visager to the second federation, Center said. every journey begins with a first step, yet that is only the beginning.
Images spun through his mind: universities, trade treaties . . .
And Jeff will have a fair bit of fighting to do still, Raj said, with cheerful resignation. I fought all my major wars on Bellevue before I was thirty, and damned if the mopping up didn’t take the rest of my days.
Jeffrey sighed and trickled smoke from his nostrils. “Some of what we’re doing is harder to stomach than the war,” he said. “Santander troops have had to fire on Imperials to keep them from slaughtering Chosen trying to surrender to us. They’re finally doing that in some numbers, and your friend Arturo doesn’t like it at all. He thinks their national destiny is fertilizer.”
John shrugged, remembering the cellars in Ciano. “He’s got his reasons. Still, he won’t push it. We’ll probably have to stop calling it the Empire, by the way. A republic? We’ll see.”
“The Premier is talking about a protectorate,” Jeffrey said.
John laughed, and winced at the jar to his leg. “When iron floats. I know the Santander electorate, and they want complete demobilization, yesterday if possible.”
“Damned right. We had a mutiny in Salini, just last week—troops demanding we disband them.”
John scowled. “Which means we won’t be able to do anything about Libert. Damn, but I hate to see that slimy bastard getting away with it. He’s not as bad as the Chosen, but that’s not saying much.”
But he’s popular in the Union now, Raj said to both of them. He kept them out of war, and grabbed off a big chunk of territory from their traditional enemies. Are you ready to fight a major war and lose another hundred thousand dead to topple him?