The Domination

Chapter Eight

KALOWICE

MAZOVIA, GOVERNMENT-GENERAL OF POLAND

AUGUST 17, 1943

Warsaw was burning. The cone of it was a ruddy glow on the darkening eastern horizon, matching the huge copper disk of the setting sun in the west. Even at this distance the firestorm gave a smoky taste to the wind, a hint of that sulfur-tinged darkness, the taste of death. The flicker and rumble of artillery were faint, no louder than the hiss of grain stalks against the steel flanks of the Draka armor hull-down on the low crest overlooking the village. Four dozen of them, squat massive shapes in mottled green-yellow camouflage paint with the mailed-fist symbol of the Archonal Guard Legion stenciled on their bows. Their engines thrummed, the roar of free-piston gas generators blending with the power turbine’s hum. Air quivered over the exhaust baffles on their rear decks, and the whip antennae swayed erratically in the breeze.

Loki take the heat, Cohortarch Tanya von Shrakenberg thought, and rubbed a gloved hand over the wet skin of her neck. She glanced back over the rear of the command tank, through the narrow gap left by the hatch cover poised over her head like a steel mushroom-cap.

Behind them trails stretched two kilometers south to the woodlot where the unit had last paused. Broad parallel stripes where the treads had pulped grain and stalk into the earth, arcs and circles across the rolling plain showing where the fighting vehicles had maneuvered. Ten minutes of combat, and the taste of it was still in her mouth, salt and iron and copper, acid in the stomach, ache in the muscles of neck and back. Training helped, prahna breathing and muscle control, the simple knowledge that the job had to be done whatever the state of your emotions . . . and still, every time you knew a little something was gone. A little of whatever it was that kept you functioning while you waited for the armor to buckle under the brute impact of an antitank shell and send spalls flying like supersonic buzzsaws, for the millisecond flame of exploding ammunition, for the slower trickle of burning fuel as you hammered at a jammed hatch. You survived, and lost a little of yourself from within, and knew that one day, if you kept coming, the well would be dry . . .

The German armor was scattered back there among the ruined corn, burning with the sullen flicker of diesel oil in circles of blackened straw, or frozen with only the narrow entry hole of a tungsten-carbide penetrator rod to show reason for immobility. The pakfront of Fritz antitank guns had been dug in along the crest of this . . . not really a ridge, more a gentle swelling.

The Cohortarch shook her head; they were expecting to lie low as their armor pulled back past them to the village, then hit the Draka tanks as they pursued, no doubt. A good trick, but one she had met before; the Fritz were like that: fine tacticians but a little inflexible. Artillery to suppress the antitank, then a slow advance to force the Fritz armor to engage at ranges where Draka APDS shot would punch through German tanks the long way. Bodies lay hidden in the tall grain or draped around shattered half-tracks; her infantry had hunted them down from the turrets and firing ports of their combat carriers. Two Draka Hond Ills remained, victims of shells fired point-blank through the thinner armor of flank and rear, the blanket-shrouded corpses of their crews showing victory could kill you as finally as defeat.

Moisture trickled out of the sodden lining of the communications helmet as Tanya turned from the wreckage to her rear and made a slow scan of the wheatfield ahead.

The thick armor of a Hond soaked up heat like a sponge under direct sunlight. There was a lot of that in the Polish summer, and she would swear firing the main gun racked up another five degrees with every round. The ventilation fans continued their losing battle; the Baalbeck Belle had been buttoned up for more than ten hours, in the line for over a month with scant time for anything but essential maintenance. The inside of the tank was heavy with the smells: lubricant, burnt propellant and scorched metal, old sweat; an empty shellcasing off in one corner of the turret basket was half full of urine with a couple of used menstrual pads floating in it . . . She ignored it, as she ignored the salt itch of her unwashed uniform and the furry texture of her teeth and the ground-glass feeling under eyelids from too little sleep and too much exposure to abrasive fumes.

It could be worse, she mused, glancing down at the swivel-mounted map tray on the left arm of her reclining seat, past it into the white-painted gloom of the tank’s interior. There was not much open space; the huge breech and recoil mechanism of the main cannon cut the turret’s interior nearly in half, flanked on either side by the coaxial machine gun and grenade launcher. Dials, gauges and armored conduits snaked over every surface. The gunner lay to the right of her weapon nearly prone on a crashcouch that raised her head just enough to meet the padded eyepiece of episcope and sights. Behind the gunner’s head was the sliding armorplate door that blocked off the ammunition stored in the turret bustle, ready to the hand of the loader on his swivel-seat below.

Economy of space was the formal term; it took considerable training to move even in a stationary tank without bruising yourself, and there was barely enough open space to tape snapshots of her husband and children below the vision blocks of the commander’s cupola. Still, better than the infantry . . .

Could be much worse; the Fritz could be using nerve gas again. Which would mean everybody into those damned rubber suits, and that would mean casualties from heat prostration, even among Draka.

She rapped the heel of one hand against the pressure plate beneath the vision blocks, and the hatch cover snapped upright with a sough of hydraulics. The lift-brace-step motion that left her standing on the turret deck with boots astride the hatch was nearly as unconscious as walking, after two years in the field. Wind blew into her face as she raised the field glasses, warm and dry, dusty and much, much cleaner than the air in the tank; the sodden fabric of her overalls turned cool as the moving air let sweat evaporate.

Still alive, she thought. On a fine summer’s day, in the odd alien beauty of the Baltic twilight, like a world seen through amber honey; and it was good to feel the faint living quiver in the sixty-ton bulk beneath the soles of her feet.

Reliable old bitch, she thought affectionately. The Belle had carried her a long way since the spring of ’42. North from the Caucasus, over the Don, west across the Ukraine, through the murderous seesaw winter battles around Lwow. Wherever the Supreme General Staff thought the Domination’s best armored Legion was needed . . . Eighteen months, a long lifetime for a tank, even counting weeks in the Legion repair shops and a complete rebuild; there were scars and gouges on the sloped plates of the armor, two dozen victory rings on the thermal cover of the long 120mm cannon, Fritz skull still wearing its SS helmet on a spike welded to the fume extractor.

The reverse slope to the village was gentle; this part of the Vistula valley was water-smoothed, sandy alluvial loam. Ripe wheat, a big field of it, fifty or sixty hectares, bordered by a row of poplars; more of those lining the country road or serving as field boundaries beyond. The grain was overripe, gold turning brown in spots and the overburdened stalks falling in swales, and the field was scattered with wildflowers and thistles.

Damned waste, a Landholder’s corner of her mind noted. Lost if it isn’t harvested soon. Three thousand meters to the north a white dirt road crossed the river that wound tree-bordered through the dry summer landscape, and the junction had spawned a straggling farm town. Trees, unpaved streets lined with fences and gardens and whitewashed log homes, barns, a few brick structures around the flamboyantly painted stone church. Past it . . . heat haze and dust cut visibility, so did the long shadows of evening; woodlot, could be a manor house, hedges and gardens. Beyond were more fields, patches of forest, vanishing northward into the dusty horizon.

Hmmmm, question is, was that half-hard feint their idea of a rear guard, or is there more in the village?

Orders were to consolidate once she met solid resistance. Then the Janissary motorized infantry would pass through and establish a perimeter; the serf soldiers were good enough at positional warfare, and the Citizen Force legions were supposed to save themselves for shock and pursuit. It was a big war, too big to be won in a single rush; you got weaker as you advanced away from your bases, and the enemy stronger as they fell back on theirs. The Fritz had been soundly beaten east of the Vistula, but without Hitler to order senseless last stands they had withdrawn in good order, their mechanized forces screening the foot-infantry’s retreat; von Mehr, the German commander of Army Group Center, was a master at luring an attacker to overextend and then catching him with a backhand stroke. It was time to halt, refit, bring up supplies for the next leap.

It never paid to underestimate the Fritz tactically, either; Germans tended to fight by the book, but the one they used was excellent, and there could be anything ahead. Tanya tapped a meditative thumb against her lower lip, then returned attention to the hum and crackle of voices in her ears; habit strained it out, unless her call sign came through. She keyed the intercom circuit: “Call to Bugeye, Sparks,” she said. A click, a warble, then the sound of an airplane engine.

“Check, Groundpound to Bugeye, that’s negative on movement, over.”

“Affirm’tive, Groundpound. Nary nothin’ but dead cows an’ that-there wrecked convoy I spotted earlier, over.”

And the convoy had been moving away from here northwest toward the Fritz hedgehog around Chelmno when the ground-strike aircraft caught them.

Worth it, she decided. Plaster the village with HE, cut in with a pincers movement, then halt. The low ground along the river would make a good stop zone. Damn I wish I wasn’t so tired, ran through her. Hard to make proper decisions when body and mind and soul together whined for rest; harder still when the lives of friends and comrades depended on it. No tremendous hurry, she reminded herself. The village looked deserted, no human movement at all, which meant everyone there had already gone to ground. She blinked again, fascinated for a moment by the quality of the light, the wash of a . . . faded gold? Bright, but aged somehow, as if the view had been worn down by the impress of too many eyes. Tired light.

Back to the work of the season, she thought. No point in getting too fancy, but just in case . . .

“Command circuit,” she said. That would cut into the headphones of all her officers. “Orders, mark.” She flicked up the mapboard hanging from her waist, glanced at it, sideways at the turretless observation tank with its forest of antennae and episcopes; they would be in constant touch with the fire-support tetrarchy. “Century A . . . ” she began.

The village was thick with smoke. The ground quivered under the bombardment, shook from the hundreds of tons of tread-mounted metal moving through the laneways, cast itself up as dust and fragments; the sounds of lesser weapons were a counterpoint, machine-gun chatter and the ripping canvas sounds of grenade launchers spewing out their belts of 40mm bomblets.

The explosions were continuous overhead, seven rounds a second from the Flail automortars four kilometers to the south. Their proximity fuses blew them at an even six meters above the ground, the rending crang of explosive and overpressure thumping like a drum against the sternum. Tanya kept her mouth open to spare her eardrums and ignored the occasional sandblast rattle of fragments against the armor of the Belle; the odds of something dangerous flicking through the narrow gap between the turret deck and the hatch cover over her head were too small to be worth the effort of worry.

Besides, if you let yourself think of danger in a situation where it was everywhere and inescapable, you froze. And that was dangerous.

The Draka fighting vehicles ground down the street in line, tanks and Hoplite personnel carriers alternating; a fairly wide street, mud mixed with cobbles—more mud than cobbles, and those disappeared under the treads with a tooth-grating squeal of metal on stone. Tanya kept her eyes moving constantly, probing the dense gray-white mist for movement; anybody waiting with a Panzerfaust was going to have to stay under cover until the last minute, or be scythed down by the mortar rounds; and at ground level, their visibility would be even worse than hers. The Belle had a round of wasp up the spout of the main gun, like a giant shotgun shell loaded with steel darts, but the twin-barrel 15mm machine gun in its servo-controlled armored pod beside her hatch was better for this work.

Flickers, adrenaline-hopping vision, presenting each glimpse as a separate freeze-frame. Roof collapsing inwards, sparks and floating burning straw. A crippled pig, shrilling loud enough to hear as a tread ground it into a waffle of meat and mud. A square of ground lifting and spilling dirt off the board cover of a concealed foxhole, a man coming erect, blond hair and gray uniform and white-rimmed eyes stark against dirt-black face.

And the tube of a rocket launcher over his shoulder. “Target, six o’clock, Panzerfaust,” she rasped, her voice too hoarse to carry emotion. Her hand was twisting at the pistol grips on the arms of her seat, and the twin barrel pivoted whining above her head; she walked the burst toward him, the heavy 15mm slugs blasting fist-sized craters in the mud. Too slow, too slow, she was close enough to see his hand clenching on the release . . .

CRACK. The main gun fired. The whole weight of the tank rocked back on its suspension as the trunnions and hydraulics transmitted the huge muzzle-horsepower of the cannon’s recoil through mantlet and hull. There was a whining buzz as the flechette rounds left the barrel, like their namesake wasp magnified a thousand thousand times. The Fritz infantryman vanished, caught by sheer chance within the dispersal cone. Not ten meters from the muzzle, blast alone would have killed him; the long finned spikes left nothing but chewed stumps of legs falling in opposite directions, and hardly even a smear on the riddled wood behind him, a circle of thick log wall turned to a crumbling honeycomb by the passage of the darts.

The Panzerfaust’s bomb had already been launched. Deflected, it caromed off the slope of the sow-snout mantlet that surrounded the tank’s cannon, the long jet of flame and copper reduced to plasma gouging a crackling red trough along the side of the turret rather than spearing through the armor. The blue-white spike hung in afterimage before her eyes, blinking in front of the sullen red of the wounded metal.

That was a brave man, she thought. The Fritz would make magnificent Janissaries, once they were broken to the yoke. A brave man who had come within half a second of trading five Draka lives for his own. Odd, fear really does feel like a cold draft. A flush like fever on the face and shoulders and neck, tightness across the eyes, then cold along the upper spine. Deliberately, she suppressed the memory of burn victims, of calcinated bone showing through charred flesh, and equipment melted onto human skin. No practical thickness of steel could stop a square hit from a shaped-charge warhead.

“Nice,” she said over the intercom, forcing an overtight rectum to relax.

“Th’ iron was just pointin’ fight,” the gunner drawled.

“Load—” Tanya began.

“Shit!” The voice was tinny in her earphones, override from Century A’s commander back on the ridge. “There’s somethin’ still firin’ from in theah, and whatevah it is, still goin’ too fast over my head! Permission to return fire on the muzzle flash.”

“—load APDS,” she continued on the intercom circuit, and switched to broadcast. “Permission denied.” That would be all they needed, a hail of armor-piercing shot at extreme range from their own guns. Below her came multiple chunk-clank sounds: she glanced down to see the round slide into the breech, a two-inch core of copper-tipped tungsten carbide, wrapped in the circular aluminum sabot. “Sparks, general override circuit.” She heard the radiotech’s voice calling for attention, and spoke into the hissing silence.

“Groundpound talkin’. Support battery, cease fire.” Silence, as the noise dropped below the level she could hear through ears ringing with blast and muffled by the headset. She looked to either side, at the burning log huts; down the empty curving road that lead to the straggling green along the river and the only substantial buildings in this mudhole of a town. Mist curled, patchy as it caught the gathering evening wind, touched with gold in the long slanting rays of a northern-hemisphere twilight.

“Everyone in the village, back yourselves into some cover. Tetrarch de la Roche,” she continued. Tanya had brought a Century of mechanized infantry with her; four Tetrarchies, a little over a hundred troopers at full strength.

“Yo, ma’am?”

“Johnny, un-ass your beasts and scout the square. Look-see only, I think there’s somethin’ big, mean an’ clumsy there.”

There was a series of muffled thungs as the powered rear ramps of the personnel carriers went down, and she could see helmets bobbing into the fog. Only six from the Hoplite behind the Belle, when there should have been eight; every unit in the Cohort was under strength, casualties coming in faster than replacements . . . She reached down and flicked a cigarette out of the carton in the rack beside her seat, lit it, drew the warm comfort into her lungs. There had been very little in the village by way of resistance, probably no time for the Fritz commander to set it up. Whatever was firing at Century A up on the ridge had been left behind, waiting for her to advance downslope, and had been unable to reorient enough to engage the Guard’s tanks as they came in from each flank under cover of smoke.

A Jagdpanzer then, a limited-traverse antitank gun in the bow of a turretless tank. The Germans used them extensively; they were less flexible than a real tank but well suited to defensive action and much easier to manufacture, a quick cheap way to get a heavy well-protected gun onto the battlefield. This was probably one of the bigger ones, a waddling 70-ton underpowered monster mounting a modified antiairship gun.

A typical Fritz improvisation. She snorted smoke and patted the armor of the Belle lovingly; TechSec had taken the time to get this design right. Of course, Hitler hadn’t come to power until 1932, not much time to prepare for war, and even then had not dared squeeze the German people the way the Domination could the righteous chattel who made up nine-tenths of its population. Occupied Europe could have made the difference, if the National Socialists had waited a generation or so, but no, they had to throw for double or nothing . . . At least the Race knows enough not to bite off more than we can chew. I hope.

“Johnny here,” the infantry officer replied.

“Yo.” She snapped alert and flicked the cigarette out between hatch and turret. An infantry backpack radio, you could tell because the receiver let through more background noise than the shielded microphone of a commo helmet.

“Got as close’s Ah could. There was lookouts, we went in and took ’em out quiet. Three big buildin’s in a row, north side over from the church, look-so maybe brick warehouses; rooflines cut off the view of the ridge we jumped off from. Holes in the walls, treadmarks comin’ back to a common point from all three; whatever it is, it heavy. Big smeared place where the tracks meet.”

“Good. Pull back now, meet me here.”

Tanya pinched thumb and forefinger to the bridge of her nose, concentrating. An Elefant for sure, the only Fritz vehicle with firepower and protection in the same class as a Draka Hond III, but limited by the lack of a rotating turret, painfully slow, even more painfully difficult to turn in tight quarters. The three buildings formed the base of a triangle, covered fire positions commanding the open country south of the village. By backing out to the triangle’s apex the Jagdpanzer could switch quickly without having to do more than a quarter-turn; her respect for the probably deceased commander of the certainly defunct German battalion increased. He had had the sense to use the Elefant as a self-propelled antitank gun, rather than as a fighting vehicle, which its designers had intended it to be and which it most manifestly was not. If she had simply blasted through the first line of antitank guns up on the ridge and come straight down the hill, there would have been a very nasty surprise waiting.

Now, what would the Elefant’s commander do? Run away, as Montinesque said any rational army would, she thought wryly.

That was easier said than done, though, in something that could do maybe forty kph on a good level road; also, their back was to a soft-bottomed river. That was a problem Tanya von Shrakenberg could empathize with wholeheartedly. The Hond III had range, it had speed, it had broad tracks and a good suspension that let it cover any ground firm enough to hold a foot soldier’s boots, but the only bridges that could carry it safely were major rail links or the Domination’s own Combat-Engineer units. The Elefant would be even more of a pain to move any distance, and across a soft-bottomed riverbed . . .

There had been a lot of rivers to cross, coming west.

Better to catch him while Century A back on the ridge kept his attention; that Jagdpanzer was nothing to meet head-on at point-blank range in one of these laneways. She looked up again, whistling soundlessly between her teeth and wishing she had not thrown away the cigarette, wishing the Belle was not best placed, less than two hundred meters from the church. Not that anyone would doubt her courage if she sent someone else; a coward would not have achieved her rank. The Draka had a firm unwritten tradition of seeing that such did not live long enough to breed and weaken the Race. The trouble was that they had an equally firm tradition of leading from the front . . .

The infantry Tetrarch came trotting back up the laneway, keeping to the side beside the fence with his comtech at his heels; he bounced up onto the glacis plate of the Belle without breaking stride and vaulted to the turret with a hand on the cannon.

Tanya popped the hatch to vertical and handed him a cigarette. “Don’t suppose you could tell which of those three buildin’s the Jagdpanzer’s in now?”

“Not without we send in a lochos’r two, or they move position, Tanya.” He puffed meditatively. “Could try an’ get a rocket gun team in close; likely to cost, though.” A grin. “Prefer to let you turtles butt heads with it. Fuckin’ nightmare, eh?”

“Isn’t it always,” she replied with a sour smile. There was little formality of rank in the Citizen Force, and anyway they were old friends. Both from Landholding families as well—all Citizens were aristocrats, of course, but there was still a certain difference between urban bureaucrats and engineers and schoolteachers and the Old Domination, the planters and their retainers. Many younger gentry favored the Guard for their military service, since it was kept at full strength in peacetime and saw more action. There were five hundred troopers in the Cohort; counting families, that represented a million hectares of land and a hundred thousand serfs.

Tetrarch John de la Roche was two years younger than her twenty-five, but he no longer looked like a young man. It wasn’t just the weathering and ground-in oily dirt and caked dust; there was something, a look about the eyes, a weariness that no amount of rest could ever completely erase. A familiar look. She had grown up seeing it in the men of the older generation. Pa had it, sometimes. Seeing it in the mirror more than I like, lately. They had met back in the ’30s, when he was posted to her lochos as a recruit; she had been a Monitor then, subsquad commander. Her father had known his in the Great War. He was smart and quick and learned well, was handsome in a bony blond way. They had become friends. She had gone to hunt lion on his family’s sprawling cattle-and-cotton spread in equatorial Kasai, he had visited her father’s plantation under the Lebanon range and chased gazelle in the Syrian desert. They had made love a few times, once in a sandwich with a serf wench—that had been amusing . . . friends, they had all been friends when it started. Comrades now, the ones who were left, and the replacements all looked so young.

By the White Christ, were we ever that young? she thought briefly. The infantry officer lit another cigarette from his and handed it back to his radio operator; the comtech followed him to the turret deck, a short dark-haired woman careful to keep the set within arm’s reach of her commander.

“Ride me in, Johnny,” Tanya said. “As near to the brick buildings as you can”—that would give her a chance to take the Jagdpanzer with a flank shot as it backed out—“and I’d like to be inconspicuous.” Which was difficult if you knocked down houses. “But don’t forget to dodge out when we get there.”

He snorted laughter and rang the back of his hand against the turret. “Surely will,” he said. “These movin’ foxholes attract the eye.”

She touched the microphone before her mouth. “Sparks, command circuit.” A click. “Noise, everybody; rev the engines and move in place.” Another click. “Sammi, you take the western approach to the square behind the buildings. McLean, you’re north. We’ll all three go in together, that ways somebody should get a good flankin’ shot.

“Groundpound to Century A,” Tanya whispered, and cursed herself for the tone; nobody was going to hear a voice over the racket. The Baalbeck Belle was only one house away from the green, a house whose caved-in thatch was still smoldering; the Elefant would be there, under cover, still facing south for its inconclusive duel with the tanks of Century A, hulldown on the ridge . . . Three Draka tanks would advance into the square where they could pound the German vehicle cover or no; hers from the east, two more from north and west, any more and there would be too much chance of a shot going astray. Point-blank range, no place to be on the wrong end of a Hond’s 120mm rifle.

“He’s in the center buildin’; commence firin’, HE,” she continued in a normal speaking tone. The Century of tanks back on the ridge to the south opened up, she could hear the whirrrrrrrcrash of high-explosive shot bursting along the fringe of the village. Her teeth clenched; now she would have to move, out into the open . . . Almighty Thor, but I don’t want to do this, she thought. Not fear, so much as sheer weariness and distaste. The pictures of her children caught her eye, there down below the vision blocks. Solemn in their school tunics, red-haired Gudrun with a mask of sunbred freckles across her face, Timmie tanned dark under his butter-yellow curls; she had promised them she would come back.

If I have to kill every living thing between here and the Atlantic to do it, she thought grimly, took a long breath and spoke:

“Sammi, McLean. Now!”

The engine howled behind her, and she felt the tank lurch as the driver engaged the gearing, rocking her shoulders back against the padded rear surface of the hatch. The Belle accelerated smoothly, then slammed into the thick log wall, the bow rising as the tread cleats bit and tried to climb the vertical surface. Her braced hands kept her from flinging forward as sixty tons of moving steel clawed at the wood, and it gave with a rending, crackling snap. The tank lurched again, rocking from side to side as the torsion bars of the suspension adjusted to the uneven surface. A brief glimpse of tables and beds vanishing beneath tumbled logs, and a shuddering whump as the surface caved in a few feet; a clash of epicyclic gearing and the engine snarled again, a deeper sound under the turbine’s whine.

The front wall burst out from the Belle’s prow in a shower of fragments, and she ducked her head as a last surf of broken wood came tumbling and rattling up the glacis plate and over the turret. Splinters caught on the shoulders of her uniform. The tank pivoted left and south, the turret moving faster than the treads could turn the hull; to the north and west the other two Honds were grinding into the churned mud of the square. The muzzles of their cannon moved like the heads of blind serpents, questing for prey. Tanya scanned the center building: that had to be it. Two stories of brick, square windows, a gaping hole where the main door had to have been. The roof had settled, sagging in the middle; but it was the entrance that mattered, there where the track marks emerged. Nothing, and—

An explosion. Not loud, a sharp cracking from the northern edge. Her head turned. The center tank of the trio had lost a track. It pivoted wildly, the intact loop of metal pushing it in a circle as the broken tread flopped to lie like a giant metal watchband on the mud, curling and settling as gravity and tension unlooped it.

“Shit, mines! McLean, bail out! Sammi, back under cover.” Shit, shit, they must’ve turned the Jagdpanzer around to face north; the donkeyfuckers out-thought me! Tanya’s mind ran through a brief litany of disgust as the Belle slammed to a too-swift halt, nosed down and rocked back. The engine bellowed, and the driver reversed along their own tracks with careful haste; it did not take a large charge to snap a tread, and a stationary tank was a deathtrap.

McLean’s Sofia Sweetheart stopped, and the hatches opened. “Coverin’ fire,” Tanya rasped. Two dozen automatic weapons opened up on the buildings across the square and the whole facade erupted in dust and chips and sparks, slugs punching holes through the brick and gnawing at the wall, like a time-lapse film of erosion at work. Then the infantry weapons, assault rifles and the white-fire streaks of rocket guns. From the ridge south of town came a multiple whirrcrash as the reserve Tetrarchy opened up with high-explosive shell, most falling well short. Then a shadow moved within the black openings of the building, a long horizontal shadow tipped with the bulky oblong of a double-baffle muzzle brake.

“Sue, can you take him?” Tanya asked, voice carefully controlled.

Somebody else was trying; she could see the cannon of a Hond moving, then the flare and crack.

“Might ought.” McLean’s crew were crawling back into the shadow of their crippled vehicle, two of them dragging a third. “Tricky.” The main gun moved in its gyro-controlled cradle, a faint humming whine as the mantlet moved, the breech riding up smoothly.

The Belle’s commander slitted her eyes against the flash of the main gun. There was a metal-on-metal sparking from the darkness where the Elefant waited, a high brief screech of steel deforming under the impact of tungsten traveling at thousands of feet per second.

Tanya opened her mouth to speak, but before the words passed her throat there was another crash, louder than the Draka tank-cannon, less sharp, a lower-velocity weapon. But the German antitank round was still moving fast enough when it struck the Sofia Sweetheart at the junction of turret and hull. The Draka tank lurched, and the turret’s massive twenty-ton weight flipped backward like a frying pan. Tanya watched with an angry foreknowledge as it dropped straight down on the two crewmen hauling the wounded driver. A leg was left sticking out from under the heavy steel, and it twitched half a dozen times with galvanic lifelessness.

“Century A,” she barked. “Target the center building an’ knock it down, HE only. Everybody here in the village who’s got a vantage, load APDS an’ stay under cover.” The Elefant would have to come out sometime or be buried under rubble. Thick armor on the front, heavily sloped, good protection; too good, as long as it had cover. Out in the open . . .

Just a stay of execution, Fritz, she thought grimly.

Senior Decurion Smythe saluted as she came up to the Belle. Tanya had been leaning back against the scarred side-skirts of the tank, looking with sour satisfaction at the burning hulk of the German Jagdpanzer; she came erect and returned the salute. Smythe was like that, a long-service regular. Forty, old enough to have started her military service back before women were allowed in combat units; green eyes in a leather-tanned face, a close-cropped cap of gray-shot black hair.

“Ten fatalities altogether since morning roll call, Cohortarch,” the NCO said, in a faintly sing song accent. Ceylonese, Tanya remembered; her family were tea planters near Taprobanopolis. “Fifteen wounded seriously enough for evacuation. Three tanks and two APCs are write-offs . . .

The Cohortarch cursed fluently in the Arabic picked up from serf playmates as a child; there was no better language for swearing. Smythe shrugged.

“We took out better than two hundred of them,” she added. “A complete armored battalion.”

“The usual odds and sods?” Tanya asked.

“Mixed Kampfgruppe, accordin’ to the prisoners, SS, Third Panzer, bits and pieces from here and there.” Tanya nodded; the battles that broke the Fritz’s Army Group Center east of the Vistula had left shattered units scattered over hundreds of kilometers, and far too many had made it back to the German lines through the Domination’s overstretched forces.

“Put in to hold us up whiles they pulled they infantry back,” Smythe continued. “Oh, Cohortarch, about those prisoners?”

Tanya paused, clenched the fingertips of her right glove between her teeth and stripped the thin leather off. The sun was still throwing implausible veils of salmon pink to the west, and the breeze was cool on the wet skin of her hand. She removed the other glove, slapped them into a palm, looked at the enemy fighting vehicle half-buried in the ruins of the building her guns had brought down on top of it. The saw-toothed welds had come apart along their seams, and the six-inch thickness of armor plate was twisted and ripped like sheet wax. Melted fat had pooled under the shattered chassis, congealing now with a smell like rancid lard.

“How many?” she asked.

“ ’Bout twenty, mostly wounded.”

“Hm.” Tanya looked again at the wreck of the Sofia Sweetheart. Then again . . . “They fought well, hereabouts. We’ll have to keep two or three fo’ the headhunters; yo pick ’em. Give the rest a pill, do it quick.” Army slang for a bullet in the back of the neck, and utter mercy compared to the attentions of Security’s interrogators. She tucked the gloves into her belt, yawned, continued: “Legion HQ’s word is to get out of the way, the Guard’s to freeze in place; the Seventh Janissary is movin’ up into the line north of us, an’ the Fritz are still tryin’ to break contact.”

“We’re goin’ to let them?” the decurion asked.

“ ’Bout time. We should’ve done bettah today; the troops are tired an’ they need rest. Remembah, we’ve got to win the war, not just beat the Fritz. A victory you destroys youself to get is a defeat. Anyways, that fo’ Castle Tarleton to decide. Meantime, we set up a perimeter an’ wait until they can spare transport to pull us back, minimal support till then. Prob’ly refit ’round Lublin, they’ve got the rail net workin’ that far west by now.”

She yawned again, nodded toward the little stream that ran behind the churchyard half a kilometer north. “Call TOE support, get the scissors forward.” That was their bridging equipment, a hydraulic folding span on a tank chassis. “We’ll laager on that-there clear spot just north of the river, less likely to be unpleasant surprises waitin’. Standard perimeter, no slackin’ on the slit trenches.”

“Consider it done, Cohortarch. Ahh . . . L&R?” More military slang: Loot and Rape, a parody of the official Rest and Recreation. The troops’ right by ancient custom, as soon as military necessity was past.

“Loot? Here?” Tanya straightened and glanced about at the straggling village, burning thatch, splintered log walls, tumbled brick. “No pokin’ about until it’s cleared, nothin’ here worth stepping on a mine fo’. No takin’ wenches off in a corner, either, same reason; wait till we’ve got the civilians sorted.” She wrinkled her nose slightly; what followed would be rather ugly, and she had never found fear an aphrodesiac. Certainly not from some cringing peasant one couldn’t even talk to . . . Still, it was probably the only thing worth taking, for those so inclined.

Smythe nodded. “I’ll need ’bout four sticks,” she said. Twenty troopers. “Church’ll be best for the pen, seein’s how the walls’re still standin’, an’ solid,” she continued, settling her helmet and clipping the chinstrap. Her tone had the same bored competence Tanya remembered from that time back in the Ukraine, when infiltrators had tried to overrun Cohort HQ in the night; Smythe had counterattacked with the communications technicians.

You’re an odd one, Tanya thought. You got to know people quickly in combat, needed to. Smythe was an exception. Always polite, never a laugh, nothing more than a smile. No close friends, no lover, not even any letters from home, and she had never mentioned her family. The Guard were quartered in Archona in peacetime, in the Archon’s Palace when they weren’t field training on one of the military preserves. A senior NCO rated a small apartment; Smythe had kept to hers, except for the informally obligatory mess evenings, nobody there but three servants she’d brought with her from Ceylon back in the ’20s. Model noncommissioned officer, Tanya mused. Soul of efficiency, but not a martinet. And something like burnt-out slag behind the eyes; wonder if I could capture it . . .

“Johnny?” she called. The Tetrarch looked up from the circle of his soldiers, rose. The others stayed, kneeling or squatting, leaning on butt-grounded assault rifles.

“Need a detail; decurion an’ two sticks from you, get Laxness on the blower an’ tell off the same from 2nd Tetrarchy. Pen the locals.”