Weiss trembled, then stepped down the companionway.
Farr had never felt so tired before in his life. “Commander Grisson,” he said, “Signal the squadron, ‘Clear for action.'”
* * *
“This is the first time I’ve seen Corona, Jeffrey,” Heinrich said. “The regiment dropped north of town and we never had occasion to work back.” He chuckled. “Not such a tourist attraction as I’d been told.”
A tang of smoke still hung in the air ten weeks after Land forces overran the city. Work gangs had cleared the streets, using rubble from collapsed structures to fill bomb craters, but there’d been no attempt to rebuild.
There was no need for reconstruction. The port city’s surviving civilian population had been removed from what was now a military reservation closed to former citizens of the Empire.
Corona was the node which connected the conquering armies to their logistics bases in the Land. Protégés from the Land performed all tasks. Labor here was too sensitive to be entrusted to slaves who hadn’t been completely broken to the yoke. Convoys of vehicles were pouring up from the docks: steam trucks, Land military-issue mule wagons, and a medley of impressed Imperial civilian transport pulled by everything from oxen to commandeered race horses. There was little disorder; military police were out in force directing traffic, wands in their hands and polished metal brassards on chains around their necks. Troops marched by the side of the road, giving way to Heinrich and Jeffrey on their horses. The Chosen officer exchanged salutes with his counterparts as they passed, running a critical eye over the Protégé infantry.
It wasn’t the smoke that made Jeffrey Farr’s nose wrinkle as he dismounted and handed the reins to the Protégé groom who’d run at his stirrup from the remount corral at the edge of town. Nobody’d made an effort to find all the bodies in the wreckage either. Some of them must be liquescent by now. Well, he’d smelled plenty of other dead bodies in the past weeks. Humans weren’t as bad as horses, and nothing was as bad as a ripe mule.
“So,” the Chosen colonel said with a grin, “I hope our honored guest found his tour of our new territories to have been an interesting one?”
“Rather a change from the round of embassy parties I expected when I was posted to Ciano, that’s true, Heinrich,” Jeffrey said. Part of him wanted to bolt for the gangplank of the City of Dubuk, the three-stack liner chartered by the Santander government to repatriate its citizens through Corona. There was no need to do that. Heinrich liked him.
And, God help him, he liked Heinrich. The blond colonel epitomized the virtues the Land inculcated in its Chosen citizens: courage, steadfastness, self-reliance, and self-sacrifice.
You don’t have to hate them, lad, said Raj Whitehall in Jeffrey’s mind. Just crush them the way you would a scorpion.
Though Jeffrey’d seen plenty to hate as well.
Jeffrey lifted the rucksacks paired to either side of his saddlehorn and threw them over his left shoulder. He’d picked up his kit on the move. Clothing, mostly; all of it Land-issue. Life with Heinrich’s fire brigade was dangerous enough without being mistaken for an Imperial infiltrator. He’d replace it on board if possible. Already late arrivals boarding the Dubuk were giving him hard looks.
“Very luxurious, no doubt,” Heinrich said, eyeing the liner critically. “Well, I don’t begrudge you that. I’m looking forward to a transient officers’ hostel with clean sheets tonight myself. And a few someones to warm them with me, not so?”
The City of Dubuk’s whistle blew a two-note warning: a minute till the gangplank rose. Crewmen were already taking aboard lines preparatory to undocking. If Jeffrey had missed this ship, he would have had to take a freighter to the Land and there transship to Santander. At least for the present the Chosen had embargoed all regular trade between their newly conquered territories and the rest of Visager.
a pity, that, said Center. but clandestine supply routes into the area will be sufficient to support our low-intensity guerilla operations.
Jeffrey was very glad he was here to board the Dubuk. After the campaign he’d just watched, he didn’t want to be around the Chosen any longer than necessary.