“Gestan!” he called out in Landisch. “Wait! Nie shessn! Don’t shoot!”
A whistle blew, and the platoon went to earth in trained unison, weapons bristling outward. He stepped forward, hands in the air and uneasily conscious of how his testicles were trying to crawl up into his stomach.
“Attention!” he barked at the two Protégé riflemen who came running up at a crouch.
They stiffened instinctively at the bark in upper-class Landisch.
“Take me to your officer immediately,” he went on, walking past them at a brisk stride and tucking his swagger stick under his left arm. He could hear the silence of hesitation behind him, and then the clack of hobnails on the brick pathway as they followed. Doubtless the points of the bayonets were hovering an inch or so from his kidneys. Got to maintain the momentum.
The officer was waiting with a folded map in her hand and a bulky automatic pistol in the other. Blue eyes narrowed as they recognized his brown Santander uniform, and he could sense thoughts moving behind them. She’s in the middle of a mission and doesn’t need complications, Jeffrey thought. The hand holding the pistol gave a slight unconscious twitch. One bullet in the head, and there’s no complication at all. If anyone found his body, it would be an unfortunate accident.
“Captain, Jeffrey Farr, Army of the Republic,” he said, saluting casually with a touch of the swagger stick to the brim of his peaked cap. “Congratulations, fahnrich, on a soldierly job of work—taking a city this size by storm is quite an accomplishment!”
He extended his hand. The Chosen officer took it automatically; at close range he could see that she wasn’t more than twenty, under the cropped hair and hard muscularity. There was a trace of baffled hesitation at this glib stranger who spoke the tongue of the Chosen like a native. He gave a firm squeeze and pumped the hand up and down once.
Good work, Raj said. Personal contact always makes it a little more difficult to shoot someone.
“Most impressive. Now, since you’ve got the situation well in hand, if I could trouble you for an escort to your colonel?”
* * *
“Jeffrey Farr?” the Chosen colonel said. His square, blond-stubbled face split in an unexpected smile. “Well, I’ll be cursed. We’re relatives, of a sort—Colonel Heinrich Hosten, at your service, Captain.”
The command post was set up in a small park, a few officers grouped around tables carried out from nearby houses. Heinrich Hosten was a big man, easily an inch or two over Jeffrey’s six feet, and broad-shouldered, slab-built. A pair of field glasses were hanging around his neck, and there was a square of surgical gauze lightly spotted with blood taped to the side of his bull neck.
He spoke fairly loudly; a battery of mule-drawn field guns was trotting by on the stone-block pavement beyond the park; Jeffreys mind catalogued them automatically, M-298’s, the new standard piece—75mm calibre, split trail, shield, hydropneumatic recuperators that returned the tube to battery position after every round. Behind them came a brace of field ambulances, also mule-drawn—the animals looked as if they’d been commandeered locally—that pulled aside to let stretcher-bearers take their contents to a church being used as an aid station. More troops were marching up from the harbor, passing the banner and waiting motorcycle couriers of the regimental HQ.
Jeffrey smiled back at the Chosen colonel. Damned dangerous man, he thought, remembering John’s description. Not at all the guileless bruiser he looked. Smart. Dedicated.
Bet he’s glad of an audience, Raj said. These johnnies haven’t fought a war in a long time. They’re good, but they want to show off, too.
“Looks like you caught the dagoes asleep at the tiller,” Jeffrey said, turning and shading his eyes with his hand. He touched the cased glasses at his side with his hand. “If you don’t mind?”
“Klim-bim,” Heinrich said; a useful Chosen expression which could mean anything from affirmative to all’s right with the world.
Jeffrey focused the glasses. Nothing was left of the Imperial fleet that he could see; black stains on the surface, the protruding masts of a couple of battlewagons. Fire and billowing columns of dark smoke marked the naval basin; warships and merchantmen were burning, sinking, or listing all over the harbor. Black flags with golden sunbursts marked both the great fortresses at the entrance to the harbor, although Fort Ricardo on the south had the burnt-out skeleton of a dirigible draped over it. The Land’s flag also flew over the governor’s palace off to the west, and the city hall and railway station directly south. Fires were burning out of control in a dozen places, vivid against the dusk of evening, and there was a continuous staccato crackle of small-arms fire over the mass of tile rooftops.