Hope Renewed (53 page)

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Gerta Hosten spat in the dry dust of the village street.

“
Leutnant,
just what the
fik
do you think you’re doing?” she asked.

“Setting the animals an example!” the young officer said.

“An example of what—how to show courage and resistance?” she asked.

The subject of their dispute hung head-down from a rope tied around his ankles and looped over a stout limb of the live oak that shaded the village well. He spat, too, in her direction, then returned to a cracked, tuneless rendition of “Imperial Glory,” the former Empire’s national anthem. Two hundred or so peasants and artisans stood and watched behind a screen of Protégé infantry; the town’s gentry, priests, and other potential troublemakers had already been swept up. The packed villagers smelled of sweat and hatred, their eyes furtive except for a few with the courage to glare. The sun beat down, hot even by Land standards on this late-summer day, but dry enough to make her throat feel gritty.

Gerta sighed, drew her Lauter automatic, jacked the slide, and fired one round into the hanging man’s head from less than a meter distance. The flat elastic
crack
echoed back from the whitewashed stone houses surrounding the village square and from the church that dominated it. The civilians jerked back with a rippling murmur; the Protégé troopers watched her with incurious ox-eyed calm. Blood and bone fragments and glistening bits of brain spattered across the feet of the Protégé who had been waiting with a barbed whip. He gaped in surprise, lifting one foot and then another in slow bewilderment.

“Hauptman—”

“Shut up.” Gerta ejected the magazine, returned it to the pouch on her belt beside the holster, and snapped a fresh one into the well of the pistol. “Come.”

She put her hand on the lieutenant’s shoulder and guided him aside a few steps, leaning toward him confidentially. Young as he was, she didn’t think he mistook the smile on her face for an expression of friendliness; on the other hand, she was a full captain and attached to General Staff Intelligence, so he’d probably listen at least a little.

“What exactly did you have planned?” she said.

“Why . . . ammunition was found in the animal’s dwelling. I was to execute him, shoot five others taken at random, and then burn the village.”

Gerta sighed again. “
Leutnant,
the logic of our communication with the animals is simple.” She clenched one hand and held it before his nose. “It goes like this: ‘Dog, here is my fist. Do what I want, or I will
hit
you with it.’”

“Ya, Hauptman—”

“Shut up. Now, there is an inherent limitation to this form of communication. You can only burn their houses down
once
—thereby reducing agricultural production in this vicinity by one hundred percent. You can only kill them
once.
Whereupon they cease to be potentially useful units of labor and become so much dead meat . . . and pork is much cheaper. Do you grasp my meaning, boy?”

“Nein, Hauptman.”

This time Gerta repressed the sigh. “Terror is an effective tool of control, but only if it is applied
selectively.
There is nothing in the universe more dangerous than someone with nothing to lose. If you flog a man to death for having two shotgun shells—loaded with birdshot, he probably simply forgot them—then
what incentive is left to prevent them from active resistance?
”

“Oh.”

The junior officer looked as if he was thinking, which was profoundly reassuring. No Chosen was actually
stupid;
the Test of Life screened out low IQs quite thoroughly, and had for many generations. That didn’t mean that Chosen couldn’t be willfully stupid, though—over-rigid, ossified.

“So. You must apply a
graduated
scale of punishment. Remember, we are not here to exterminate these animals, tempting though the prospect is.”

Gerta looked over at the villagers. It was
extremely
tempting, the thought of simply herding them all into the church and setting it on fire. Perhaps that would be the best policy: just kill off the Empire’s population and fill up the waste space with the natural increase of the Land’s Protégés.
But no. Behfel ist behfel.
That would be far too slow, no telling what the other powers would get up to in the meantime. Besides, it was the destiny of the Chosen to rule all the rest of humankind; first here on Visager, ultimately throughout the universe, for all time. Genocide would be a confession of failure, in that sense.

“No doubt the ancestors of our Protégés were just as unruly,” the infantry lieutenant said thoughtfully. “However, we domesticated them quite successfully.”

“Indeed.” Although we had three centuries of isolation for that, and even so I sometimes have my doubts. “Carry on, then.”

“What would you suggest,
Hauptmann?
”

Gerta blinked against the harsh sunlight. “Have you been in garrison here long?”

“Just arrived—the area was lightly swept six months ago, but nobody’s been here since.”

She nodded; the Empire was so damned
big,
after the strait confines of the Land. Maps just didn’t convey the reality of it, not the way marching or flying across it did.

“Well, then . . . let your troopers make a selection of the females and have a few hours’ recreation. Have the rest of the herd watch. From reports, this is an effective punishment of intermediate severity.”

“It is?” The lieutenant’s brows rose in puzzlement.

“Animal psychology,” Gerta said, drawing herself up and saluting.

“Jawohl. Zum behfel, Hauptman. I will see to it.”

Gerta watched him stride off and then vaulted into her waiting steamcar, one hand on the rollbar.

“West,” she said to the driver.

The long dusty road stretched out before her, monotonous with rolling hills. Fields of wheat and barley and maize—the corn was tasseling out, the small grains long cut to stubble—and pasture, with every so often a woodlot or orchard, every so often a white-walled village beside a small stream. Dust began to plume up as the driver let out the throttle, and she pulled her neckerchief up over her nose and mouth. The car was coated with the dust and smelled of the peppery-earthy stuff, along with the strong horse-sweat odor of the two Protégé riflemen she had along for escort.

Wealth, I suppose,
she thought, looking at the countryside she was surveying for her preliminary report. Warm and fertile and sufficiently well-watered, without the Land’s problems of leached soil and erosion and tropical insects and blights. Room for the Chosen to grow.

“We’re in the situation of the python that swallowed the pig,” she muttered to herself. “Just a matter of time, but uncomfortable in the interval.” That was the optimistic interpretation.

Sometimes she thought it was more like the flies who’d conquered the flypaper.

“Mama!”

Young Maurice Hosten stumped across the grass of the lawn on uncertain eighteen-month legs. Pia Hosten waited, crouching and smiling, the long gauzy white skirts spread about her, and a floppy, flower-crowned hat held down with one hand.

“Mama!”

Pia scooped the child up, laughing. John smiled and turned away, back toward the view over the terrace and gardens. Beyond the fence was what
had
been a sheep pasture, when this house near Ensburg was the headquarters for a ranch. Ensburg had grown since the Civil War, grown into a manufacturing city of half a million souls; most of the ranch had been split up into market gardens and dairy farms as the outskirts approached, and the old manor had become an industrialists weekend retreat. It still was, the main change being that the owner was John Hosten . . . and that he used it for more than recreation.

“Come on, everybody,” he said.

The party picked up their drinks and walked down toward the fence. It was a mild spring afternoon, just warm enough for shirtsleeves but not enough to make the tailcoats and cravats some of the guests wore uncomfortable. They found places along the white-painted boards, in clumps and groups between the beech trees planted along it. Out in the close-cropped meadow stood a contraption built of wire and canvas and wood, two wings and a canard ahead of them, all resting on a tricycle undercarriage of spoked wheels. A man sat between the wings, his hands and feet on the controls, while two more stood behind on the ground with their hands on the pusher-prop attached to the little radial engine.

“For your sake I hope this works, son,” Maurice Farr said sotto voce, as he came up beside John. He took a sip at his wine seltzer and smoothed back his graying mustache with his forefinger.

“You don’t think this is
actually
the first trial, do you, Dad?” John said with a quiet smile.

The ex-commodore—he had an admiral’s stars and anchors on his epaulets now—laughed and slapped John on the shoulder. “I’m no longer puzzled at how you became that rich that quickly,” he said.

If you only knew, Dad, John thought.

wind currents are now optimum,
Center hinted.

“Go!” John called.

“Contact!” Jeffrey said from the pilots seat, lowering the goggles from the brow of his leather helmet to his eyes. The long silk scarf around his neck fluttered in the breeze.

The two workers spun the prop. The engine cracked, sputtered, and settled to a buzzing roar. Prop-wash fluttered the clothes of the spectators, and a few of the ladies lost their hats. Men leaped after them, and everyone shaded their eyes against flung grit. Jeffrey shouted again, inaudible at this distance over the noise of the engine, and the two helpers pulled blocks from in front of the undercarriage wheels. The little craft began to accelerate into the wind, slowly at first, with the two men holding on to each wing and trotting alongside, then spurting ahead as they released it. The wheels flexed and bounced over slight irregularities in the ground.

Despite everything, John found himself holding his breath as they hit one last bump and stayed up . . . six inches over the turf . . . eight . . . five feet and rising. He let the breath out with a sigh. The plane soared, banking slowly and gracefully and climbing in a wide spiral until it was five hundred feet over the crowd. Voices and arms were raised, a murmured
ahhhh.

The two men who’d assisted at the takeoff came over to the fence. John blinked away the vision overlaid on his own of the earth opening out below and people and buildings dwindling to doll-size.

“Father, Edgar and William Wong, the inventors,” he said. “Fellows, my father—Admiral Farr.”

“Sir,” Edgar said, as they shook his hand. “Your son’s far too kind. Half the ideas were his, at least, as well as all the money.”

His brother shook his head. “We’d still be fiddling around with warping the wing for control if John hadn’t suggested moveable ailerons,” he said. “
And
gotten a better chord ratio on the wings. He’s quite a head for math, sir.”

Maurice Farr smiled acknowledgment without taking his eyes from where his son flew above their heads. The steady droning of the engine buzzed down, like a giant bee.

“It works,” he said softly. “Well, well.”

“Damned toy,” a new voice said.

John turned with a diplomatic bow. General McWriter probably wouldn’t have come except for John’s wealth and political influence. He stared at the machine and tugged at a white walrus mustache that cut across the boiled-lobster complexion . . . or that might be the tight collar of his brown uniform tunic.

“Damned toy,” he said again. “Another thing for the bloody politicians”—there were ladies present, and you could hear the slight hesitation before the mild expletive as the general remembered it—”to waste money on, when we need every penny for
real
weapons.”

“The Chosen found aerial reconnaissance extremely useful in the Empire,” he said mildly, turning the uniform cap in his fingers.

McWriter grunted. “Perhaps. According to young Farr’s reports.”

“According to
all
reports, General. Including those of my own service, and the Ministry.”

The general’s grunt showed what he thought of reports from sailors, or the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ Research Bureau.

“They used dirigibles, you’ll note,” McWriter said, turning to John. “What’s the range and speed? How reliable is it?”

“Eighty miles an hour, sir,” John said with soft politeness. “Range is about an hour, so far. Engine time to failure is about three hours, give or take.”

The general’s face went even more purple. “Then what bloody f . . . bloody
use
is it?” he said, nodding abruptly to the admiral and walking away calling for his aide-de-camp.

“What use is a baby?” John said.

“You’re sure it can be improved?” the elder Farr said.

“As sure as if I had a vision from God”—
or Center
—”about it,” John said. “Within a decade, they’re going to be flying ten times as far and three times as fast, I’ll stake everything I own on it.”

“I hope so,” Farr said. “Because we are going to need it, very badly. The navy most of all.”

“You think so, Admiral?” another man said. Farr started slightly; he hadn’t seen the civilian in the brown tailcoat come up.

“Senator Beemody,” he said cautiously.

The politician-financier nodded affably. “Admiral. Good to see you again.” He held out a hand. “No hard feelings, eh?”

Farr returned the gesture. “Not on my side, sir.”

“Well, you’re not the one who lost half a million,” Beemody said genially. He was a slight dapper man, his mustache trimmed to a black thread over his upper lip. “On the other hand, Jesus Christ with an order from the President couldn’t have saved those warehouses, from my skipper’s reports . . . and you’re quite the golden boy these days, after facing down that Chosen bitch at Salini. We can offer her a better one than her colleagues appear to have found at Corona,’” he quoted with relish. The senator’s grin was disarming. “What with one thing and another, grudges would be pretty futile. And I have no time for unproductive gestures, Admiral. You think we’ll need these?”

“Damned right we will. Knowing your enemy’s location is half the battle in naval warfare. Knowing where he is while he doesn’t know where you are is the other half. We’ve relied on fast cruisers and torpedo-boat destroyers to scout and screen for us, but the Chosen dirigibles are four times faster than the fastest hulls afloat.
Plus
they can scout from several thousand feet. We need an equivalent and we need it very badly, or we’ll be defeated at sea in the event of war.”