Arturo slapped his hand on the plank. "It is agreed. And now, come and see how we have cared for what you sent us!"
He took up the bulls-eye and clicked the shutter open. They went out the back door, into a farmyard with a strong smell of chickens and ducks, past a muddy pond and into a barn. Several milch-cows mooed from their stalls, and a pair of big white-coated oxen with brass balls on the tips of their horns. Their huge mild eyes blinked at the light, and then went back to meditatively chewing their cuds. The cart they hauled was pushed just inside the door, its pole pointing at the rafters; tendrils of loose hay stuck down through the wide-spaced boards of the loft. Towards the rear of the barn were stacked pyramids of crates, one type long and thin, the other square and rectangular.
Arturo opened one whose nails had been pulled. "Enough of us know how to use these," he said, throwing John a rifle.
It was the standard Imperial issue, but factory-new, still a little greasy from the preservative oil. A single-shot breechloader, with a tilting block action and a spring-driven ejector that automatically tipped the block down and shot the spent cartridge out to the rear when the trigger was pulled all the way back. Not a bad weapon at all, in its day, and it could still kill a man just as dead as the latest magazine rifle. The smaller crates were marked AMMUNITION 10MM STANDARD 1000 ROUNDS.
"Two hundred rifles, and revolvers, blasting powder, a small printing press," Arturo said.
"Where were you planning on hiding them?" John said, looking around at the set peasant faces, underlit by the lamp Arturo had set down on the packed earth floor of the barn.
"The sheep pen. Under hard dung, six inches thick."
"Good idea, for some of them," John said, easing back the hammer of the rifle. The action went click. "But you shouldn't put more than a dozen in one place. Nor should any one of you know where the rest are. You understand me?"
Arturo seemed to, and his daughter, possibly a few of the others. John went on.
"You know what the Chosen penalty is for unauthorized possession of weapons-so much as one cartridge, or a knife with a blade longer than the regulations allow?"
"A bullet?" one of the peasants asked.
"Not unless they're in a real hurry. Generally, they hang you up by the thumbs and then flog you to death with jointed steel whips made out of chain links with hooks on them. Small hooks, about the size of a fishhook, and barbed. I've seen it done; it can take hours, with an expert." Silence fell again.
"You want to frighten us?" one of the men asked.
"Damned right," John replied. "You'll stay alive longer, that way; and hurt the Chosen more."
Watch out, lad-you want to get them thinking, not terrorize them, Raj said. Time enough for realism when they're committed.
Arturo nodded thoughtfully. "We will have to organize. . differently. Nothing in writing. Small groups, with only one knowing anyone else, and that as little as possible."
Good. We don't have to explain the cell system to him, at least, John thought.
Although the idea of the Fourth Bureau getting its hands on these amateurs. . needs must. If nobody fought the Chosen, they'd win. That meant you had to accept the consequences.
"And then," Arturo said, "when we are ready-when enough are ready to follow us-we can start to hurt them. Blowing up bridges, picking off patrols, perhaps their clerks and tallymen, sabotage. We will have some advantages: we know the ground, the people will hide us."
"You'll have to strike fairly far from your homes, though," John said.
"Why?"
"Because the Chosen reprisals will fall hardest on the location where guerilla activity flares up. You strike away from where you live, and it kills two birds with one stone; you get the people who suffer the reprisals hating the Chosen, and you protect your base."
Arturo tilted the lantern to shine the light on John's face. That emphasized the structure of it, the slabs and angles.
"You are a hard man, signore," he said. "As hard as the Chosen themselves, perhaps."
John nodded. "As we all will need to be, before this is over," he said. Those of us still alive.
* * *
The Chosen officer's blue eyes stared unblinking up at the moonlit night sky. It was bright, full moon, the disk nearly as large as the sun to the naked eye and almost too bright to look at, so Jeffrey could see them clearly. Her helmet had rolled away when the bullet went in through the angle of her jaw and out the top of her head; fortunately the shadow hid most of what the soft lead slug had done when it lifted off the top of her skull. Jeffrey was glad of that, and the bit of extra cover the body provided. Bullets thudded into the loam of the little hillock, or keened off stones with a wicka-wicka sound like miniature lead Frisbees.
Every minute or so a shell would burst along the Chosen gunline, stretched back now into a U-shape with the blunt end towards the enemy. The shellbursts were malignant red snaps in the night, a flash of light and the crack on its heels. Every few minutes a Land hand-grenade would explode where the Imperials had gotten close, but the invaders were running short on them. Short on everything.
The night air was colder, damper, and it carried the smell of cordite, gunpowder and the feces-and-copper scent of violent death. Bodies lay scattered out from the line, sometimes two-thick where automatic weapons or concentrated riflefire had caught groups charging forward-the Imperials' training kept betraying them, making them clump together. The field of the dead seemed to move and heave as wounded men screamed or whimpered or wept, calling for water or their mothers or simply moaned in wordless pain. Through it darted the living, more and more of them filtering in. Their firepower was diffuse compared to the Land's rapid-fire weapons, but it was huge, and the sheer weight of it was beating down resistance.
Goddamn ironic if I die here, Jeffrey thought. He'd devoted his whole life to the defeat of the Chosen. .
"I think the next push may make it this far," Heinrich said. "You can't claim our hospitality's been dull."
He was chewing the stem of his long-dead pipe as he unbuckled the flap of his sidearm. Most of the surviving command group had armed themselves with the rifles and bayonets of dead Protege soldiers, those who hadn't gone out to take charge of units with no officers left alive.
"Damn," Heinrich went on. "We must have killed or crippled a good third of them. Didn't think they'd keep it up this long."
"Here they come again," someone said quietly.
The forward Imperial positions were no more than a hundred yards away. The firefly twinkling of muzzle flashes sparkled harder, concentrating on the surviving machine guns, and men rose to charge. A bugle sounded, thin and reedy. The machine guns were fewer now, firing in short tapping bursts to conserve ammunition. Jeffrey could feel something shift, a balance in his gut. This time they would make it to close quarters.
Listen, Raj said. Is that-
airship engines, Center said. probability approaching unity. approaching from the southwest, throttled down for concealment; the wind is from that direction. four kilometers and closing.
Heinrich turned his head. A light flashed in the darkness above the ground, a powerful signal-lamp clicking a sequence of four dots and dashes.
* * *
"Damn," Gerta Hosten said mildly.
The muzzle flashes down below and ahead outlined the Land position as clearly as a map in a war-college kriegspiel session; you could even tell the players, because the Imperials' black-powder discharges were duller and redder. It was fortunate that dirigibles had proven to be more resistant to fire than expected; punctures in the gas cells tended to leak up, rather than lingering and mixing with oxygen. . usually.