The Chosen Read online

  "Oh."

  Smart, Maurice thought fondly. Pretty, too.

  Sally was looking remarkably cool and elegant in her white and cream linen outfit and broad straw hat, the pleated skirt daringly an inch above the ankle. Only a little gray in the long brown hair, no more than in his. You'd never know she'd had four children.

  "Besides," he went on, "he's been assigned to the embassy in Ciano. From what I know of the tailcoat squadron there, social life is about all he'll have time for—it's a diplomat's main function. Count on it, he'll meet plenty of nice girls there."

  "Oh." Sallys tone wavered a little at the thought. "Nice Imperial girls. Well, I suppose . . ." She shrugged.

  She looked downslope in her turn. There were fortifications there, everything from the bastion-and-ravelin systems set up centuries ago to defend against roundshot to modern concrete-and-steel bunkers with heavy naval guns.

  "John seems to think that there's going to be war," she said. "Jeffrey, too."

  Maurice nodded somberly. "I wouldn't be surprised. War between the Chosen and the Empire, at least."

  "But surely we wouldn't be involved!" Sally protested.

  "Not at first," Maurice said slowly. "Not for a while."

  "Thank goodness Jeffrey's in the army, then," she said. The Republic of Santander had no land border with either of the two contending powers. "And John's safe in the diplomatic corps."

  * * *

  "You dance divinely, Giovanni," Pia del'Cuomo said. "It is not fair. You are tall, you are handsome, you are clever, you are rich, and you dance so well. Beware, lest God send you a misfortune."

  "I've already had a few from Him," John Hosten said, keeping his tone light and whirling the girl through the waltz. The ballroom was full of graceful swirling movement, gowns and uniforms and black formal suits, jewels and flowers and fans. "But He brought me to Ciano to meet you, so he can't be really angry with me."

  Pia was just twenty, old for an Imperial woman of noble birth to be unmarried, and four years younger than him. Also unlike most Imperials of her sex and station, she didn't think giggles and inanities were the only way to talk to a man. She was very pretty indeed, besides, something he was acutely conscious of with their hands linked and one arm around her narrow waist.

  No, not pretty—beautiful, he thought.

  Big russet-colored eyes, heart-shaped face, creamy skin showing to advantage in the glittering low-cut, long-skirted white ballgown, and glossy brown hair piled up under a diamond tiara. Best of all, she seemed to like him.

  The music came to a stop, and they stood for a moment smiling at each other while the crowd applauded the orchestra.

  "If jealous eyes were daggers, I would be stabbed to death," Pia said with a trace of satisfaction. "It is entertaining, after being an old maid for years. My father has been muttering that if I wished to do nothing but read books and live single, I should have found a vocation before I left the convent school."

  John snorted. "Not likely."

  "I would have made a very poor nun, it is true," Pia said demurely. "And then I could not have gone on to so many picnics and balls and to the opera with a handsome young officer of the Santander embassy. . . ."

  "A glass of punch?" he said.

  Pia put her hand on his arm as he led her to the punch table. The white-coated steward handed them glasses; it was a fruit punch with white wine, cool and tart.

  "You are worried, John," she said in English. Hers was nearly as good as his Imperial, and her voice had turned serious.

  "Yes," he sighed.

  "Your conversations with my father, they have not gone well?"

  Even for an Imperial commander, Count Benito del'Cuomo was a blinkered, hidebound. . . . With an effort, John pushed the image of the white muttonchop whiskers out of his mind.

  "No," he said. "He doesn't take the Chosen seriously."

  Pia sipped at her punch and nodded to her chaperone where she sat with the other matrons against one wall. The older woman—some sort of poor-relation hanger-on of the del'Cuomos—frowned when she saw that Pia was still talking with the Republic's young chargé d'affaires. They began walking slowly towards the balcony.

  "Father does not think the Land will dare to attack us," she said thoughtfully. "We have so many more soldiers, so many more ships of war. Their island is tiny next to the Empire."

  "Pia—" He didn't really want to talk politics, but she had reason to be concerned. "Pia, their note demanded extraterritorial rights in Corona and half a dozen other ports, control of grain exports, and exclusive investment rights in Imperial railroads."

  Pia checked half a step. She was the daughter of the Minister of War. "That . . . that is an ultimatum!" she said. "And an impossible one."

  John nodded grimly. "An excuse for war. Even if your emperor and senatorial council were to agree to it, and you're right, they couldn't, then the Chosen would find some new demand."

  "Why do they warn us, then? Surely they are not so scrupulous that they hesitate at a surprise attack."

  "Scarcely. I have a horrible suspicion that they want the Empire to be prepared, so you'll have more forces in big concentrations where they can get at them," John said.

  They walked out into the cooler air and half-darkness of the great veranda. Little Adele and huge Mira were both up and full, flooding the black-and-white checkerwork marble with pale blue light, turning the giant vases filled with oleander and jessamine and bougainvillea into a pastel wonderland. The terrace ended in a fretted granite balustrade and broad steps leading down to gardens whose graveled paths glowed white amid the flowerbanks and trees. Beyond the estate wall, widely spaced lights showed where the townhouses of the nobility stood amid their walled acres, with an occasional pair of yellow kerosene-lamp headlights marking a carriage or steamcar. Westward reached a denser web of lights, mostly irregular—Ciano had a street plan originally laid out by cows, except for a few avenues driven through in recent generations. Those centered on the Imperial palace complex, a tumble of floodlit white and gilded domes.

  From here they could just make out the glittering surface of the broad Pada River; the dockyards and warehouses and slums about it were jagged black shapes, no gaslights there. Above them two lights moved through the sky, with a low throbbing of propellers. An airship, making for the west and the great ocean port of Corona at the mouth of the Pada.

  "Chosen-made," John said, nodding towards it. "Pia, your soldiers are brave, but they have no conception of what they face."

  Pia leaned one hip against the balustrade, turning her fan in her fingers. "My father . . . my father is an intelligent man. But he . . . he thinks often that because things were as they were when he was young, so they must remain."

  "I'm not surprised. My own government tends to think the same way." If not to quite the same degree, he added to himself.

  They were silent for a few minutes. John felt the tension building, mostly in his stomach, it seemed. Pia was looking at him out of the corner of her eyes, the beginning of a frown of disappointment marking her brows.

  "Ah . . . that is . . ." John said. "Ah, I was thinking of calling on your father again."

  Pia turned to face him. "Concerning political matters?" she asked, her face calm.

  An excuse trembled on his lips. Yes. Of course. That would be all he needed, to add cowardice to his list of failings. A crippled soul to join the foot.

  "No," he said. "About something personal . . . if you would like me to."

  The smile lit up her eyes before it reached her mouth. "I would like that very much," she said, and leaned forward slightly to brush her lips against his.

  probability of sincerity is 92% ±3, with motivations breakdown as follows—Center began.

  Shut the fuck up! John thought.

  He could hear Raj's amusement at the back of his mind. Damned right, lad.

  Jeff's voice: God, but that one's a looker, isn't she? He must be getting visual feed from Center, through John's eyes.

&
nbsp; Will you all kindly get the hell out of my love life?

  "Giovanni, there are times when I think you are talking to God, or the saints, or anyone but the person you are with!"

  John mumbled an apology. Pia's eyes were still glowing. "The only question is, will he consent?"

  "He'd better," John said. Pia blinked in surprise and slight alarm at the expression his face took for a moment. He forced relaxation and smiled.

  "Why shouldn't he?" he said. "He knows I'm not a fortune hunter"—the del'Cuomos were fabulously wealthy, but he'd managed to discreetly let the Count know the size of his own portfolio—"and if he didn't like me personally, he'd have forbidden me to see you."

  Pia nodded. "Well, I do have three younger sisters," she said with sudden hard-headed shrewdness. "It isn't seemly for them to marry before me—and also, my love, I think Father thinks he can beat you down on the dowry by pretending that the marriage is impossible because you are not of the Imperial Church."

  John grinned. "He's right. He can beat me down."

  Some cold part of his mind added that Imperial properties weren't likely to be worth much in a little while.

  He took a deep breath. It was like diving off a high board: once you were committed, there was no point in thinking about the drop.

  "Pia, there is something I must tell you." She met his eyes steadily. "I am . . . I was born with a deformity." He averted his eyes slightly. "A clubfoot."

  She let out her breath sharply. His glance snapped back to her face. She was smiling.

  "Is it nothing more than that? The surgeons must have done well, then—you dance, you ride, you play the . . . what is the name? Tennis?" She flicked a hand. "It is nothing."

  Breath he hadn't been conscious of holding sighed out of him. "It's why my father never accepted me," he said quietly.

  She put a hand up along his face. "And if he had, you would be in the Land, preparing to attack the Empire," she said. "Also, you would not be the man I love. I have met Chosen from their embassy here, and beneath their stiff manners they are pigs. They look at me like a piece of kebab. You are not such a man."

  He took the hand and kissed it. "There is more." John closed his eyes. "I cannot have children."

  Pia's fingers clenched over his. He looked up and found her eyes brimming, the unshed tears bright in the starlight—and realized, with a shock like cold water, that they were for him.

  "But—"

  He nodded jerkily. "Oh, I'm . . . functional. Sterile, though, and there's nothing that can be done about it." He turned his head aside. "It was done, ah, when I was very young."

  "Then you too have reason to hate the Chosen," Pia said softly. "Look at me, Giovanni."

  He did. "You are the man for whom I have waited. That is all I have to say."

  * * *

  Jeffrey Farr smiled.

  "You find our ships amusing?" the Imperial officer asked sharply.

  The steam launch chuffed rhythmically along the line of anchored battlewagons. He'd noticed the same attitude often in Imperial naval officers. Unlike the Army—or the squabbling committees in Ciano who set policy and budgets—they had to have some idea of what was going on abroad. Not that they'd admit the state their service was in, of course. It came out in a prickly defensiveness.

  "Quite the contrary," Farr said smoothly. "I smiled because I recently received news that my brother, my foster-brother, is going to be married. To a lady by the name of Pia del'Cuomo."

  And I don't think your ships are funny. I think they're pathetic, he added to himself.

  The Imperial officer nodded, mollified and impressed. "The eldest daughter of the Minister of War? Your brother is a lucky man." He pointed. "And there they are, the pride of the Passage Fleet."

  Ten of the battleships floated in the millpond-quiet bay of the military harbor, flanked by the great fortresses. Lighters were carrying out supplies, much of it coal that had to be laboriously shoveled into crane-borne buckets and hoisted again to the decks for transfer to the fuel bunkers. The ships were medium-sized, about eleven thousand tons burden, with long ram bows and a pronounced tumblehome that made them much narrower at the deck than the waterline. They each carried a heavy, stubby single 350mm gun in a round cheesebox-style turret fore and aft, and their secondary batteries in a string of smaller one-gun turrets that rose pulpit-style from the sides. Each had a string of four short smokestacks, and a wilderness upperworks of flying bridges, cranes, and signal masts.

  They'd been perfectly good ships in their day. The problem was that the Empire was still building them about twenty years after their day had passed.

  correct, Center observed. roughly equivalent to British battleships of the 1880s period.

  Eighteen . . . ah. Center used the Christian calendar, which nobody on Visager did except for religious purposes. For one thing, it was based on Earth's twelve-month year, nearly thirty days shorter than this planet's rotation around its sun. For another, the numbers were inconveniently high.

  Jeffrey shivered slightly. The period Center named was two thousand years past. Interstellar civilization had been born, spread, and fallen in the interim, and a new cycle was beginning.

  "You're loading coal, I see," he said to the Imperial officer . . . Commodore Bragati, that was his name. "Steam up yet?"

  "No, we expect to be ready in about a week," Bragati said. "Then we'll cruise down the Passage, and show those upstarts in the Land who rules those waters."

  Two weeks to get ready for a show-the-flag cruise? Raj thought with disgust. I'd say these imbeciles deserve what's probably going to happen to them, if so many civilians weren't going to be caught in it.

  "The main guns are larger than anything the Land has built," Bragati said.

  low-velocity weapons with black-powder propellant, Center noted with its usual clinical detachment. the chosen weapons are long-barreled, high-velocity rifles using nitrocellulose powders.

  He thought he detected a trace of interest, though, as well. Jeffrey smiled inwardly; the sentient computer wasn't all that much different from his grandfather and the cronies who hung around him—military history buffs and weapons fanciers to a man. Center was a hobbyist, in its way.

  "And the main armor belt is twelve inches thick!"

  laminated wrought iron and cast steel plate, Center went on. radically inferior to face-hardened alloy. Which both the Land and the Republic were using for their major warships.

  None of the battleships looked ready for sea. Less excusably, neither did the scout cruisers tied up three-deep at the naval wharves, or the torpedo-boat destroyers. Or even the harbor's own torpedo boats, turtle-backed little craft.

  On the other hand . . . "Well, the fleet certainly looks in good fettle," Jeffrey said diplomatically.

  So they were, painted in black and dark blue with cream trim. Sailors were scrubbing coal dust off the latter even as he watched. He shuddered to think of the amount of labor it must take to repair the paintwork after a practice firing. If they did have practice firings; he had a strong suspicion that some Imperial captains might simply throw their quota of practice ammunition overboard to spare the trouble.

  "Thank you for your courtesy," he said formally to the Imperial commodore.

  At least he'd learned one thing. Bragati wasn't the sort of man he wanted to recruit into the stay-behind cells he and John were setting up. Too brittle to survive, given his high rank.

  * * *

  "Damn, I hate dying," John said as the scene blinked back to normalcy.

  Or Center's idea of normalcy, which in this scenario was a street in a Chosen city—Copernik, to be specific—during the rainy season. There was no way to tell it from the real thing; every sensation was there, down to the smell of the wet rubberized rain cape over his shoulders and the slight roughness of the checked grip of the pistol he held underneath it. Watery rainy-season light probed through the dull clouds overhead, giving a pearly sheen to the granite paving blocks of the street. Buildings of brick and ston
e reached to the walkways on either side, shuttered and dark, frames of iron bars over their windows.

  John looked down for a second at his unmarked stomach. There hadn't been any way to tell the impact of the hollowpoint rifle bullet from the real thing, either—Center's neural input gave an exact duplicate of the sensation of having your spleen punched out and an exit wound the size of a woman's fist in your lower back. The machine had let the scenario play through to the final blackout. His mouth still felt sour and dry. . . .

  "Do you have to make it quite that realistic?" he muttered, sidling down the street, eyes scanning.

  "For your own good, lad." Raj's voice was "audible" here. "Priceless training, really. You can't get more rigorous than this; and outside, you won't be able to get up and start again."

  "I still—"

  A sound alerted him. He whirled, drawing the pistol from the holster on his right hip and firing under his own left arm, into the planks of the door. His weight crashed into it before the ringing of the shots had died, smashing it back into the room and knocking the collapsing corpse of the Fourth Bureau agent into his companions. That gave John just enough time to snapshoot, and the secret policeman's weapon flew out of a nerveless hand as the bullet smashed his collarbone. . . . . . blackness.

  The street reformed. "I still really hate dying. One behind me?"

  correct. Center did not bother with amenities like speaking aloud. scanning to your right as you entered the room was the optimum alternative.

  "I hated it, too," Raj said unexpectedly.

  The street scene faded to the study where they'd first . . . John supposed "met" was as good a word as any. Raj puffed alight a cheroot and poured them both brandies.

  "Hunting accident—broke my neck putting my mount over a fence," he said. "Quick, at least. I was an old, old man by that time, and the bones get brittle. Still, I had enough time to know I'd screwed the pooch in a major way. The real surprise was waking up—" He indicated the construct. "I was expecting the afterlife, the real afterlife." He frowned. "Although this isn't precisely my soul, come to think of it. Maybe I'm in two heavens . . . or hells."

  "At least you got to see your own funeral," John said.