"How do the Unionaise shape?" she asked.
There was a brigade of them down the valley a ways, at the crossroads twenty miles west of the railroad, under their own officers, but also under the operational control of the Land regional command.
"Not bad," the officer said, as a shrill scream sounded from behind the wrecked building. It trailed off into sobs. "Not as energetic at their patrolling as I'd like. Good enough for this work, I'd say; I couldn't swear how they'd do in heavy combat. Settling in to that town as if they owned the place."
"They think they do," Gerta replied. "Well, things appear to be under control here. Which is more than I can say about some other places."
The garrison commander frowned and lowered his voice. "How does the Confrontation Line develop? The official reports seem. . overly optimistic."
Gerta spoke quietly as well. "Not so well. We're killing the Santies by the shitload, that part of the official story is true enough. They keep attacking us with more enthusiasm than sense, but it's getting more expensive, and we're not taking much territory. Ensburg's still holding out."
"Still?" The man's brows rose. "They must be starving."
"They are. I was in the siege lines last week; nothing left inside but rubble, and you can smell the stink of their funeral pyres. Starvation, typhus, whatever-but they're not giving up."
She spat into the dirt. "If that monomaniac imbecile Meitzerhagen hadn't killed the garrison of Fort William after they surrendered and bellowed the fact to the world, they might have been more inclined to give up. So would a lot of the other garrisons we cut off in the first push; mopping them up took time the Santies used to get themselves organized. We lost momentum."
The other officer nodded. "Meitzerhagen's a sledgehammer," he said. "The problem is-"
"— not all problems are nails," she finished.
"Stalemate, for the present, then."
"Ja. We can push them, but we outrun our supplies. And even when we beat them, they don't run, and there are always more of them. Their equipment's good, too. Now that they're learning how to use it. ." She shrugged.
"How is our logistical situation, then?"
"It sucks wet dogshit. We can't move dirigibles within a hundred miles of the front in daylight, the road net's terrible, the terrain favors defense. . and the Santies are right in the middle of their main industrial area, with their best farmlands only a few hundred miles away on first-class rails and roads."
"I presume the staff is evolving a counterstrategy."
"Ya. No details of course, but let's just say that we're going to encourage their enthusiasm and prepare to receive it. Also if we can't use the Gut, there's no reason they should be able to either."
The officer sighed and nodded. "Well, you can tell them that my brigade at least is doing its job," he said. "Trying to keep the rail lines through the Sierra working would have been a nightmare if we'd used conventional occupation techniques. Bad enough as it is."
Young Johan returned, pushing the dazed and naked Sierran girl before him. He dropped into parade rest behind Gerta, smiling faintly as the prisoner stumbled back to kneel with the others.
"In a year or two, there won't be any left to speak of. . Speaking of which, you said there was a new directive?"
Gerta nodded. "Ya, we're running short of labor for the construction gangs, importing from the New Territories is inconvenient, big projects all over, and the local animals might as well give some value before they die," she said. "Send down noncombatant adults fit for heavy work-ones that give up when you catch them. Keep killing all those found in arms or not useful. Except children under about five. As an experiment, we're sending those back to the Land to be raised by senior Protege-soldier families."
Long-serving Protege soldiers were allowed to marry, as a special privilege for good service. "They might be useful, that way, in the long term. At your discretion, though; don't tie up transport if you're busy."
The other Chosen nodded. "Jawohl. Odd to think of us running short of manual workers, though."
"Well, even the New Territories' population has dropped considerably," she said. "We'll have to be less wasteful after the war."
Gerta returned his salute and turned to her open-topped armored car. When you carried a hatchet for the General Staff, your work was never done.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Jeffrey Farr whistled soundlessly. Not that anyone could have heard him in the rear seat of the observation plane; the noise of the engine and the slipstream was too loud. He reached forward and tapped the pilot on the shoulder, circling his hand with the index finger up and pointing it downwards. The pilot nodded and circled, coming down to four thousand feet.
A couple of light pom-poms opened up, winking up at them from the huge piles of turned earth below; then a heavier antiaircraft gun, that stood some chance of reaching them. Black puffs of smoke erupted in the air below, each with a momentary snap of fire at its heart before it lost shape and began to drift away. Ant-tiny, hordes of laborers dove for the shelter of the trenches they had been digging, leaving their tools among the piles of timber, steel sheet and reinforcing rod.
There was a big camera fastened to brackets ahead of the observer's position, but Jeffrey ignored it. He'd seen pictures; this trip was for a personal look.
All right, he thought. Nice job of field engineering. Everything laid out to command the ground to the east, but not just simple positions on ridge tops. Machine-gun bunkers at the base of the ridges, giving maximum fields of fire; heavier bunkers for field guns, revetted positions for heavy mortars on the reverse slopes, with communications trenches and even tunnels to bring reserves forward quickly without leaving them exposed to direct-fire weapons. All-round fields of fire, so that each position could hold out if cut off, and heavier redoubts further back, layer upon layer of them.
They must have half a million men working on this, Jeffrey thought, impressed.
correct to within ten thousand ±6, Center said. assuming an equivalent effort in other sectors of the front, as intelligence reports indicate.
"Well, we'll have to take this into account," Jeffrey said. He tapped the pilot's shoulder again; despite their two-squadron escort, the man was looking nervously east and upward, to where Land attackers would come diving out of the morning sun. The plane banked westward.
* * *
"Thank you gentlemen for meeting on such short notice," Jeffrey said.
They were in the Premier's bunker beneath the hilltop Executive Mansion, nearly a hundred yards underground, as deep as you could get near Santander City without hitting groundwater. The impact of the bombs, a dull crump. . crump. . was felt more through the soles of their feet than heard through their ears. Every now and then the overhead electric light flickered, and dust filtered down, making men sneeze at its acrid scent.
"I thought you'd made it suicidal for dirigibles to fly over our territory," Maurice Farr said dryly to the Air Force commander.
The commander flushed and pulled at his mustache. "In daylight, yes. But the speed and altitude advantage of our fighters is fairly narrow. At night, it's much harder. Those might be their new long-range eight-engine bomber planes, too. We're having more of a problem with those."
At the head of the table, Jeffrey held up a hand. "In any case, the error radius of night bombing is so huge that it consumes more of their resources to do it than it does of ours to endure it."
The Premier tapped a pencil sharply on the table. "General, we're losing hundreds, perhaps thousands of civilian every time one of those raids breaks through."