The Domination

Chapter Eleven

SEABED NEAR NANTES

ESTUARY OF THE LOIRE RIVER

AUGUST 1, 1947

Captain Manuel Guzman leaned against the periscope well of the Benito Juarez and felt the clammy sweat trickling down under the roll-top collar of his sweater. The control center was underlit by the eerie blue glow of the silent-running lights, and utterly quiet; even the feet of the crewmen were muffled in felt overboots, and when they moved at all it was with an exaggerated care. Natural enough, since their lives depended on it: the Juarez was grounded in the soft silt of the estuary and helpless if the Draka searchers found a trace of her. The passive sound-detection gear was in operation, but they could all hear the throbbing of high-speed screws through the hull, resonating in the closed spaces of the submarine.

Twin screws, the captain thought. He was a stocky brown-skinned man with the flat face and hook nose of Yucatan’s Maya Indians, old enough to have been a sub commander in the Pacific during the Eurasian war, and there was sympathy behind the impassive brown eyes as he watched the younger members of the bridge crew. This was the hardest part: nothing to do but think, nothing to think about but the crushing weight of water outside the thin plating of the hull, and of drowning in darkness.

Twin screws, going fast, his mind continued. Boosting on peroxide-turbines, much more powerful than the fuel-cell cruise motors but noisy. Over them, fading now. Probably one of the new Direwolf class stalker-killer subs, based on German research the snakes had captured; they had never been much at naval design. His mind drew in the details, long cigar-shaped hull, streamlined conning tower, cruciform control rudders with rear-mounted propellers . . . built to hunt other subs, but the Domination’s sensor technology was nothing like as good as the Alliance’s.

And the Juarez was a fine boat for this clandestine work. Modified from a mid-War cargo sub design, slow but ultraquiet, with a hold capable of shipping a variety of surprises.

“What do we do now?” the man from the OSS asked in a whisper, after the noise faded.

“We wait,” Guzman said curtly. He did not like the Ivy League types secret intelligence seemed to attract; this one reeked of old-stock Yankee money and breeding. Too many of that sort at Annapolis, he thought resentfully. The kind who had made his first days at the Academy Hell Week in plain truth, back when indios were a government-mandated rarity and fiercely resented, when the only other Spanish speakers there had been criollo bluebloods, the sort of hacienda-owning maricones his father had spent a lifetime working for.

“Consider yourself lucky, amigo, that this isn’t one of the old diesel-electric boats,” he continued. Fuel cells did not need exterior oxygen, and if necessary they could wait two weeks, with abundant energy to crack fresh atmosphere out of seawater. “Now we wait, run up the antenna every night. When we get the message,you can bring out that fancy folding airplane of yours. If we get the message.”

The agent blinked back at him; the captain reminded himself that the look of mournful reproach in the man’s deep-set eyes was a trick of his features, not genuine expression. Face like a horse with a receding chin, he thought.

“Our man will make it,” the OSS man said in his nasal twang. “He’s been in there a long time, but he’ll make it, and with the job done. He’s . . . that sort of fellow.”

Guzman nodded. It would take a man with real balls to survive very long among the snakes and make it back to the west. He looked up, imagining the destroyers putting out from Nantes, the patrol aircraft and dirigibles lifting from their runways and docking towers. It’s going to take balls and luck to be here alive when he arrives, he thought wryly, The Alliance and the Domination were not formally at war, hence the Benito Juarez was still officially in her homeport at Hampton Roads, or out on a training cruise.

That was the necessary fiction. And there would be, could be no action to save the nonexistent Juarez here in the Domination’s territorial waters. Nothing but a “lost at sea” telegram to their families if they did not return.

His eyes went to the picture taped to the guardrail of the periscope well, a smiling woman with hair the color of cornsilk and a Hawaiian lei around her neck. Bonnie-Lee would wait, and not in vain.

“Secure to holding stations,” he told his exec. The man nodded, none of that surface-navy nonsense about bracing to attention in pigboats. “Carry on,” Guzman continued, turning to go. There were always letters to write, even if they could not be posted.

Frederick Kustaa braked the Kellerman mini to a halt on the embankment road, steering over to the verge. The sudden quiet struck ears numbed by the rush of air past the open windows, the pink-ting of gravel thrown up by the wheels, and the dull roaring of the burner. Metal pinged as it cooled, and the fan sank to a gentle sough as the engine’s feedback system signaled reduced demand for steam. He looked back over his shoulder: nothing on the long stretch of road behind him, nothing ahead since the two staff cars had whipped by fifteen minutes ago. Silently, he cursed the chance that had brought them up behind him just before the turnoff; under no circumstances did he want any Draka to see where his car had left the main road.

“We are unobserved?” the man in the backseat said. A thick Austrian-German accent, Professor Ernst Oerbach was a balding man in his late forties, looking incongruous in a servant’s livery of dark-brown trousers and high-collared jacket.

More at home in sloppy tweeds, Kustaa thought, the man was almost a caricature of a Mitteleuropan Herr Doktor of physics. At a pinch he could pass for a medical man swept up in the conquest and sold cheap to a crippled Draka veteran.

“I hope we are,” he said aloud, pushing down the reversing lever and turning the little car in a U. It handled well, very much like an American autosteamer of the same class, say, a Stanley Chipmunk. More of a driver’s auto, less in the way of auxiliaries, but it was solidly built and the standard of the machining was beautiful; the Domination had never developed Pittsburgh’s liking for planned obsolescence.

The American flogged his mind to keep awake as they drove east once more; his eyes were sandy with fatigue, and his mind and tongue felt thick with it. He looked at his watch: ten to seven in the afternoon. No, 1850 hours, he reminded himself doggedly, pulling the ragged edges of his cover personality’s protective blanket back up about himself. You’re a Draka, they use the twenty-four-hour system all the time. The Loire turned gently amid islands of warm gold sand and green willow, a hypnotic glittering as the sun sank behind them, soothing and lulling . . . He jerked his head up and wound down the window, letting the warm air blast at his face. Hot and a little humid, but nothing like a Midwestern summer, and the smells were different, more varied.

The fields beside the road were turning to the harvest; big fields of tasseled corn, sheets of sunflower and chrome-yellow rapeseed, wheat gold-brown and flecked with blue cornflowers and red poppies. Grain rippled in long slow billows, dusty yellow sunlight catching the flowers so that they glowed like jeweled chips afloat on an ocean of molten bronze. Pasture was a faded green, until they passed a hayfield being mowed by half a dozen horse-drawn cutter bars; that was a darker alfalfa color, and the scent struck home with a memory of warm barns and the weight of a pitchfork in his hands. There were orchards, cherries and peaches and others he could not identify, and vineyards, the grapes showing blue-purple among the big forest-green leaves, hanging from the trellis wires along which the vines were trained. The land seemed more wooded than it was, the slow rise to the north hidden by lines of trees high enough to cut the horizon.

“How it has changed,” Ernst said, and the American could feel the headshake in his voice.

“You were here before?” Kustaa said, grateful for the conversation; he had not wanted to force it.

“In the ’20s; I was doing some work at the Curie Institute, and friends took me on a . . . pilgrimage. Just this time of year, as well.” A long silence. “If it was not for the river and the lay of the land, I would not recognize it. All this”—he waved his hand—“was small farms, with scattered houses and little barns. Small fields, vegetables, and the flowers, so beautiful . . . Little inns where we stopped, and had wine and crayfish soup and hot bread; there was Madeleine, I remember, and Jules, he was a good friend, and Andre . . . We were young, the Great War was over and such madness could never come again. We would make the world anew with the power of Science. Jules would tell me that first we must learn how to design a just and rational society, and I would say that no, first we must tap the power of the atom to free men from the poverty of nature so that they could afford to be humane.”

He laughed. “And now all anyone wants of me is means to destroy,” he said. “Turn this”—he nodded at the landscape outside the auto—“into a poisoned wasteland. It is not my world, this place of fire and ice you young men must inherit.”

“Doubts, professor?” Kustaa said lightly. Unseen by the man behind him, his lips tightened; this was only bare-bones possible with the civilian willing.

“No. No doubts, my young friend. These Draka,” and his lips twisted at the word, “they have the souls of reptiles and their Domination is a cancer. That they have atomics is bad enough, but fusion . . . there is no way to prevent them forever, nobody can declare secret a law of nature, but yes, I believe your United States, your Alliance, should have it first. If only because you are less likely to unleash it.”

Unfortunately true, Kustaa thought with bitterness. There was a long pause before the Austrian spoke again. “Yet you also used atomics on a city of men,” he said softly. “Human beings flashed to shadows on the concrete, children burned alive, cancer, leukemia, sterility. The warlords of Japan were evil men, but can that justify—”

“You have a better way, Professor?” Kustaa asked sharply.

“No.” A sigh. “No, I do not; if I did I would not be here, ja? Ruthlessness drives out restraint, as bad money drives out good, until we are left using madness against madmen, with the death of all that lives as a prize; such is this Totentantz of a century of ours.” Another pause. “I am glad to be old, my friend, very glad indeed.”

Kustaa remembered his family in the primary target zone; remembered the microfilm in his belt, and what rested in the baggage trunk of the autosteamer. This time he slammed his hand against the pressed-steel panel of the car door, hard enough to skin a knuckle. The sharp pain jolted him back into alertness—how long had it been since he slept?—Christ, two days now. Fear returned with thought, the waiting between his shoulder blades for sirens and shots. He almost stamped on the throttle when the two figures stepped out into the road to flag him down by the tall stone gates. The men leaped aside with a yell as the Kellerman leaped forward witha spurt of dust, then slammed to a halt.

Kustaa heard Ernst’s quick surprised curse in German as he shoved home the brake and the cylinders exhausted with a quick hiss-chuff! The older man’s forehead thumped against the back of the seat, and his own nearly slammed into the padded surface of the wheel. He sat, shaken, staring at the sign that hung in chains between the gateposts:

Chateau Retour Plantation

Est. 1945

Edward and Tanya von Shrakenberg, Landholders

“That’s it, by God,” he mumbled. “That’s the one.” Now the problem was gaining entry to the household. The fabled planter hospitality would do him some good, his wounded-veteran status more, but . . . he remembered the notice in the local paper, this christening party or whatever it was. Maybe they haven’t got the last guest, yet.

The two men with branches came cautiously to the driver’s side of the car; French by their looks and dress, serfs certainly by the numbers on their necks.

“Maître,” one said, and shifted into barely comprehensible English, obviously picked up from Draka or Domination-born serfs:

“Mastair, pleez to ’company moi, a l’Great House, to be guest?”

Kustaa croaked, and waved a suitably imperious hand at Ernst, who responded with accented but fluent French. The serf’s face cleared from its frown of concentration, and he poured out a torrent of response accompanied by hand waving.

“He says that you are bidden to the house as a guest, for a naming feast, Master,” Ernst said.

Kustaa hid his grin; the nearest thing most Draka had to a religion was a belief in the destiny of the Race, but they had as much need for ceremonial as any people. There had been a Nietzsche-and-Gobineau-inspired attempt to revive Nordic paganism back in the 1890s, but it had failed even more dismally than the later Nazi efforts, only a scattering of swearwords surviving to mark it. Customs like this helped fill the gap; he supposed they also built communal solidarity. The Citizen caste was thinly scattered and would need some sort of structure to ensure a minimum of social intercourse. Which makes them less suspicious of a passing fellow Draka, which I will take full advantage of, he thought.

The other serf suddenly slapped his forehead, pushed the first aside and bowed, presenting a square of cardboard pulled from his pocket. Kustaa took it with a grunt of relief, read the flowing cursive script. It was handwritten, in a neat old-fashioned copperplate penmanship familiar from his study courses:

Edward and Tanya von Shrakenberg bid the passer-by to be Wayfarer-guest at the naming feast of their newborn twins, now to be welcomed to the Race. If your duties allow, enter for the sake of the blood we share and join in our celebration of kinship, standing as honored guest for all brothers and sisters of the Dragon breed. Let the bond of past, present and destined Future be renewed!

We expect the feast to last three days from tomorrow morning.

Be welcome; our house is yours.

“Shit,” Kustaa whispered, remembering to turn it to a cough at the last minute. Our luck is in at last, he thought with hammering glee. The recognition codes sounded through his head.

The manor house of the plantation was an old French chateau; he glanced indifferently at the bulk of towers, the eighteenth-century additions, more recent construction. There would be time to memorize the floorplan later, he thought, climbing stiffly out of the Kellerman, time when his brain was functioning on something less than reflex. He slung the battle shotgun from the boot beside his seat and looked about. They had halted in a graveled yard in front of the arched entrance that cut between two round towers, and through the bulk of the building; he could see hints of courtyard and garden through the dim recess and the wrought-bronze gates that closed it. His mouth tasted of chalk, and his feet seemed to float over the rock and dry dusty pinkish earth of the drive as he moved to unlock the baggage compartment at the front of the auto.

Ernst’s small cardboard case. His own luggage, carefully faked by the OSS; two fold-and-strap bags of ostrich leather and aluminum framing with the gold stamp marks of Foggard of Alexandria. A marula-wood case for the shotgun; he took that himself as servant hands reached for the other luggage.

“No,” he croaked as they touched the other piece that filled most of the compartment, a box like a small steamer trunk with handle sat the corners, securely locked, plain steel freshly painted in dark green. His mind saw the markings underneath: Technical Section: Weapons Research Division, do not touch—radioactive and toxic. With the purple skull-and-bones symbol to add emphasis.

Even without markings, it would provoke too much curiosity if the serfs tried to lift it; there were a dozen sealed tubes of raw plutonium oxide inside, each slotted into its holder. Plutonium is heavy, and the lead tubes and multiple lead-foil baffles of the shielding were even more so. The sight of it made him sweat, and he slammed down the lid with unnecessary force.

“L’auto a parkin’, Mastair?”

He started and wheeled; the Frenchman jumped back with stark terror on his face, mouth working as if he was about to burst into tears. The sight of it turned Kustaa’s stomach into a tight knot of nausea, adding to the sour taste at the back of his mouth.

I’m a strange Draka, he reminded himself. I could blow his head off with this scattergun and get nothing worse than a fine and a tongue-lashing for destroying other’s property. More reluctantly: No, not exactly. These planters are paternalists, in their way; they’d call out anyone who did that and kill them on the dueling field, the way an American might beat up someone who shot his dog. I’m a special case, with immunity to the usual sanctions. And he would look wild, dusty and tousled from the drive, unshaven, eyes glaring and red-rimmed from lack of sleep.

The American straightened and forced himself to calm, plastering a smile on his face as he detached the control-locking key and handed it to the man. A garage would be as safe a place as any, for the next little while. He had to sleep. And the cargo would be ready to move.

Ernst came to his side. “Horses,” he muttered.

Kustaa nodded jerkily, hearing the galloping sound of hooves. Two half-dressed children leaped their mounts over a lane gate on the west side of the chateau and pelted on behind it, yelling. He rubbed his eyes, wondering if he was seeing straight; then two adults followed more sedately, pausing to let a servant dismount and open the white-painted board gate before cantering over to him and dismounting; a man and a woman, he saw, both in planter’s countryside garb. The man piratical with an eyepatch and scarred face, about Kustaa’s own height, tow-colored streaks through short butter-yellow hair, wedge-shape build from shoulders to hips, the usual Draka combination of startling muscle definition and swift controlled movement. Dangerous-looking, even without the marks.

The woman stood with a hand on the man’s shoulder, the riding crop hanging by its thong from her right wrist tapping against one boot. Hard and mannish-looking to American eyes, like most Citizen women, bronze-blond hair cut in a short pageboy; gymnast’s figure but long limbs and broad in the hips and shoulders, smaller bust than an American woman with her build would have had. They both wore the standard gun belts with holstered 10mm automatics, pouches, long bowies at their left hips and slender daggers tucked into boot sheaths. The weapons were of the finest quality and customized, inlay and engraving on the pistols, checked hardwood knife handles. But still eminently practical, and they both wore thumb rings also, with surfaces chased to represent the knuckles of a mailed fist: the Archonal Guard.

Don’t underestimate them, Kustaa thought, stepping forward. Nothing to arouse suspicion, nothing.

“Service to the State.” he said, in a rasping croak. Damn, much more of this and my vocal cords will be injured, he thought with exasperation. His left hand flipped back the crushed-velvet lapel of his jacket, showing a seven-pointed star of turquoise and red gold; his right waved Ernst forward.

“Glory to the Race,” the two Draka replied in unison, their eyes dipping to the insignia, then back to his face with respect and sympathy. Kustaa’s mind flicked back to his instructor, the Draka defector who had drilled him on basic etiquette.

“Remember, most Citizens don’t just wear uniforms, they see combat,” she had said, waving the cigarette for emphasis. “Auxiliaries do the scutwork. A Category III disability is somethin’ we all risk; everyone has a subconscious reason to follow the custom of treatin’ you like a tin god. You’ll have to beat off the women with a stick, an’ men will buy you drinks an’ listen to you war stories, or leave you alone if’n you wants. Y’can get away with bein’ considerable eccentric, too, ’specially with a headwound.”

“Edward von Shrakenberg, Landholder, Tetrarch, Archonal Guard, Reconnaissance,” the man said.

Shit, Kustaa thought. Recon-commando, close-combat specialist, have to watch it.

“Tanya von Shrakenberg, Landholder, Cohortarch, Archonal Guard, Armor,” the woman added.

Oh, goody, an armored-battalion major, he mused. Well, she looks tough enough.

Ernst spoke for him. “My masters, my owner is Frederick Kenston: traveler in art materials, private, Twentieth Mechanized Infantry Legion, Combat Engineers. He regrets that his injury from blast and gas renders speech difficult, besides damage to balance and hearing. I am his medical attendant as well as his servant.”

That had been the best cover available. A Category III veteran got a pension of 5,000 aurics a year, equivalent to a steady middle-class income, enough for a ten-room villa and six servants. “Traveler in art materials” meant loot buyer essentially, a freelance contractor who bought from individuals to resell in the cities of the Police Zone, or to collectors and museums; it was a plausible occupation for a restless man, one not content to sit and vegetate. The injuries enabled him to avoid an accent only years of practice could duplicate exactly; when he did have to speak, the croak would cover most of it, and the XX Legion was raised in Alexandria, where the usual Draka slur was more clipped, a legacy of nineteenth-century immigration.

And the balance problems . . . He recalled the defector, “You combat style would be a dead giveaway in any palaestra in the Domination, an’ anyhows you cain’t fight worth shit.” Kustaa had bristled at the time, but a few humiliating sparring sessions had cured him of that. “Mo’ to the point, you cain’t practice, or do gymnastics, or even dance, and all of them is impo’tant socially. This gets you off, an’ nobody will pick fights with you.” Impaired hearing would make others more likely to talk around him, and the Combat Engineers accounted for the workman’s set of his muscles.

The two Landholders stepped back and saluted him, fist to chest, then gave him the forearm-clasp Draka handshake. “Honor our home,” the man said. Edward, I’ll have to remember his name, Kustaa prompted himself.

“Stay a day, stay a week, stay a month,” the woman added. “An’ while you do, what’s ours is yorn.”

Kustaa nodded, failed to repress an enormous yawn. His fingers signed at Ernst.

“My master thanks you, masters,” he said. “And begs your pardon, but he is very weary.” The Cartwright system, American, but that would arouse no suspicion: the Domination had never evolved a full-fledged sign language. Handicapped serfs went to jobs within their capabilities, Draka born without hearing were sterilized and sent to luxurious institutions calculated to shorten their lives. For the few cases outside those categories, a Yankee invention was tolerable.

“Pas de problème, as they says hereabouts,” the mistress of the plantation said, clapping for service. “The guest room is ready; dinner by youself, right away? Good.”

Kustaa hardly noticed the stairs. The bed was wide and soft; sleep softer, deeper, more dark.