The Domination

Chapter Eighteen

“In the end, I was left with nothing but fading memories and the stereotypes of popular culture to build the father in my head. Yet, however tempting, the strutting uniforms and sinister drawls of Hollywood’s Draka never seemed enough; cutout shapes against a background of sun-bomb missiles and jets and nuclear submarines prowling the Atlantic. All my life I had been conscious of the layers of consciousness itself: there was the me I had shown to my schoolmates, the me my adoptive parents knew, the surfaces and masks I showed to friends and lovers, the fragments of self that became the characters of my work. There was even a me kept for New York editors, almost as deep as the one I saved for my agent. None of them was the me to whom I spoke in darkness, the secret self that said ‘I am I.’ Yet all of these—roles, masks, fragments—were me to the people who saw them: all of me. And I was those masks while I wore them; they were . . . partial things, but not lies. The single thing that has always stood in my memory as the bridge between childhood and maturity, the gap between myself-as-I-am and the young alien whose memories I bear, was the realization that was true for others as myself.

“That was the beginning of all my art and my deepest contact with my father. There was a time when I collected his photograph obsessively: newspaper clippings, from the back-jackets of his books, plastered over the walls of my Manhattan loft. Yet it was a line from one of his works that made him real to me, as the images could not: ‘A man’s mind is a forest at night.’ Was he the man who had owned and used my mother, and discarded me as an inconvenience? Or the father who loved her, and me enough to risk life and reputation to give me freedom? Both, and neither; we cannot know each other, or ourselves; there is no knowing, only an endless self-discovery, ‘often as painful as collisions in the dark, truths rough as bark and sharp as thorns. Knowledge is a journey; when it ends, we die.’ ”

Daughter to Darkness: A Life, by Anna von Shrakenberg

Houghton & Stewart, New York, 1964

VILLAGE ONE, OSSETIAN MILITARY HIGHWAY

APRIL 17, 1942: 1300 HOURS

CRASH. CRASH. CRASH. CRASH—

The shells were falling at three-second intervals. The bunker vibrated with every impact, stone and timber groaning as they readjusted under the stress, ears popping in the momentary overpressure. Dust filtered down in clouds that coated mouth and nose and lungs with a dryness that itched; the blue light of the lamp was lost in the clouds, a vague blur to eyes that streamed water, involuntary tears. The wounded satchelman in the corner was breathing slowly, irregularly, each painful effort bubbling and wheezing through the sucking wound in his chest. Eric sneezed, hawked, spat, wiped his eyes on his sleeve and looked about. There were nearly twenty crowded into the room besides the wounded, mostly squatting and leaning on their weapons; one or two praying, more with their eyes shut and wincing as the hammer blows struck the rubble above. More waited, locked in themselves or holding hands.

Sofie knelt by the communications table, fingers working on the field telephone. “Sir, can’t raise bunker four; it’s not dead, just no answer.”

Eric sneezed again. “Wallis! Take a stick and check it out. If Fritz is in, blow the connector passage.”

Five troopers rose and pulled their kerchiefs over mouth and nose, filing over to the door. They moved more slowly than they had earlier. Exhaustion, Eric thought. Not surprising; the shelling had started well before first light. An attack at dawn, three more since then, each more desperate than the last. Combat was more exhausting than breaking rock with a sledgehammer; the danger hormones of the fight-flight reflex drained the reserves down to the cellular level.

And when you got tired, you got slow, you made mistakes. The cellars had saved them, let them move through the village under cover and attack where they chose. But there was only so much you could do against numbers and weight of metal; they were killing ten for one, but there was always a Fritz number eleven. The casualties had been a steady drain, and so had the expenditure of fungibles, ammunition, explosives, rocket-gun shells. That last time, the Fritz had come down the holes after them, hand-to-hand in the dark, rifle butt and bayonet, bush knife and boots and teeth . . . if there had been a few more of the SS infantry, it would have been all over. The Draka garrison of Village One was running out—of blood and time and hope.

“Lock and load,” Wallis said, and there was a multiple rattle as bolts were drawn back and released. They vanished, heads dipping below the ragged stone lintel, like a sacrificial procession in some ancient rite.

Eric reached for his canteen, trying to think over the noise that hammered like a huge slow heart. The dark closed in; they were listening to that heartbeat from the belly of the beast. The war had become very small, very personal.

Gods and demons, aren’t the bastards ever going to run out of ammunition? It was heavy stuff falling—150s and 170s, long-range elf-propelled guns. As beyond any countermeasure as weapons mounted on the moon would have been, turning the village above into a kicked-over mound of rubble, raising and tossing and pulverizing the stone. Splinters of steel, splinters of granite, fire and blast; nothing made of flesh could live in it. Just keeping lookouts up there under shelter was costing him, a steady trickle of casualties he could not replace.

There was a stir. Something different, in the private hell they had all come to believe was timeless. It took a moment for the absence to make itself felt; the lungshot sapper had stopped breathing with a final long sigh. After a moment, Trooper Patton released her friend’s hand and crawled over, to shut the man’s eyes and gently remove the canvas sack of explosives that had been propping up his head and shoulders.

Let something happen, he prayed. Anything.

“Third Tetrarchy reporting—”

He snatched at the handset, jamming a thumb into his left ear to drown out the noise. Third Tetrarchy was holding the trenchline west of the village, or was supposed to be; the connection had been broken an hour ago. There was as much at the other end, but . . .

“ . . . hold, can’t hold; we’re being overrun, pulling back to the woods. Stopped the infantry but the tanks are through, no antitank left, they’re into the village as well—” The line went dead again.

White Christ have mercy, they’re sending the armor in alone through their own shellfire, rammed into him. Brutally dangerous, but it might work, the odds against a round actually hitting a tank were still vanishingly small . . .

“Up and at ’em!” he barked, his finger stabbing out twice. “You two stay, Sofie put it on the wire, all bunkers, everybody move.” The Fritz could saturate the village, then bring in sappers to pump the bunkers full of jellied gasoline, or lay charges heavy enough to bury them . . .

He went through the doorway with an elbow crooked over his mouth to take the worst of the dust, coughed, and felt the ribs stab pain. He was panting, and the breath didn’t seem to be doing any good, as if the inside of his lungs had gone hot and stretched and tight, unable to suck the oxygen out of the air. The cellars were dim-dark, full of sharp edges and projections looming up to bruise and cut and snag. Full of running soldiers and the sound of composition-soled boots on gritty stone under the monstrous anger of the guns, sound that shivered in teeth and bone, echoed in the cavity of the lungs. As the survivors of Century A dashed for the remaining pop-up holes, Eric flung himself at the rough timbers of the ladder, running up into the narrow darkness one-handed, the other holding his Holbars by the sling, until . . .

“Fuck it!” he screamed, voice raw with dust and frustration. There was a section of wooden-board wall toppled over the carefully concealed entrance and something heavier on that. He let the assault rifle fall to hang by its strap, turned, braced his back against the obstruction and his face against the stones off the wall. Took a deep breath, relaxed, drew into himself. Pushed, pushed until lights flared red behind his closed lids, pushed against the stone and his hatred of the place that held him entrapped.

“God damn!” There was a long yielding slither, and a crunch of breaking oak boards.

Then he was blinking in the light that poured through the hole, coughing again, breathing by will power against the greater pain in his chest. Rubble had shifted, and the way was clear into what was left of the ground floor of the house. Still a roof overhead, that was good, and the row across the street was almost intact. Flash-crash and he dropped his face into the broken stone, waiting for the last of the shrapnel to ping-ting into harmlessness, then leopard-crawled into the interior of the building. Out here the shellbursts sounded harder, the edges of the sound unblurred. Impact bounced at him, lifting his body and dropping it again on hard-edged ruins. Above him the long timbers that upheld the second story creaked and shifted, their unsupported outer ends sagging further, rock and less identifiable objects hitting and bouncing around him with a patter and snak-snak.

Sunlight was blinding even with the overcast, after the perpetual night of the cellars. He glanced at his watch as the other six followed him and flowed over the uneven rock to the remnant of the roadside wall; there was enough of it to make a decent firing parapet if nothing killed them from above. 1330 hours. Early afternoon; unbelievable. A flicker of movement from the second-story rooftop opposite; good, the others were in place. Elbows and knees to the low heap of the wall; and—

—the shelling of the long-range heavies stopped. Tank guns still sounded, and the direct-fire assault weapons, the two the Fritz had left. But that was nothing, now; silence rang in his ears, muffled, like cotton wool soaked in warm olive oil. Now he could catch the background: shattered bits of wall and fires burning, mostly, a great pillar of soot-black coming from the next street over. That was where the P-12 had crashed, when the Air Corps came in to give them support against the first wave. The Fritz had 88s and twin 30mm flakpanzers high up the shoulders of the valley; the cloud cover was at five hundred meters, low level attack was suicide. They had come in anyway, with rockets and napalm; one had lost control right above the village, and the explosion had done as much damage as the Fritz shelling. Another fire in the street outside: an SS personnel carrier, simple thing, not much more than a thin steel box on treads; the 15mm slugs from the heavy machine gun had gone through it the long way. It was still burning, in the middle of a round puddle of sooty-orange flame from the ruptured fuel tanks. Probably rendered fat from the crew, too; the screaming had stopped long ago, but he was glad that the dust was cutting off most of the smell. Grit crunched between his teeth and he spat again, black phlegm.

“Too soon,” he muttered, as he came up beside Sofie and spread the bipod of his Holbars. From here he could just see down a little of the long curve of the street: parts still blocked by houses on either side, others merely a lower patch in a sea of stone lumps, bits of broken timber, bodies, wrecked vehicles. “Too soon to stop the shelling. Why?”

* * *

“Herr Standartenführer, I just cannot raise them!”

The radioman in the command tank winced in anticipation, but the SS commander’s face remained set. Voices were crackling in, demanding to know why the artillery support had ceased. One minute, magenta flashes and cedar-shaped blossoms of dust white and black, walls collapsing, thunder echoing back from the walls of the valley, fire. Now, nothing.

How should I know? his mind complained, as hands levered him back into a sitting position in the turret and he turned to look north and west. Futile, the guns were behind the ridge and two kilometers away, but instinct did not work on the scale of modern warfare. He switched circuits.

“Weidner. Take two carriers, get back there and find out what the problem is with those guns!” He paused, considering. “Radioman, get me Pyatigorsk; perhaps they have a through connection.”

Waiting, he turned to consider the remnants of the Circassian town. That was all that was left, the flanking trenches had been pounded out of existence. Shell holes pocked the uneven surface of the fields, the shattered stumps that had been the orchards around it. Even now that the buildings were mostly battered down he could not see much past the first mounds of broken stone blocks, but columns of smoke pocked it; the sharp rattle of automatic fire, grenade blasts, glimpses of moving vehicles. There were more of those south, up the valley-tanks and carriers moving past the ruins and onto the Ossetian Military Highway once more. Slowly, cautiously; the Draka had taught them that, and the special mine-clearing tanks were burning wreckage in the fields below the village.

Unwillingly, his eyes shifted down. More pillars of smoke from wrecks, far too many. Here a twisted mass after an ammunition explosion in a pierced hull; there a turret flipped forty meters from its tank, still gleaming wetly even though the rain had stopped hours ago. Another that had shed its track and turned helplessly in a circle as the length of flexible metal unreeled behind it; the crew lay where the machine guns had caught them bailing out. Fuel and scorched metal, burnt flesh and explosive, wet dung-smell from the fields. More bodies lying in the glistening chewed-up gray mud, in straggling lines, in bits where the mines had gone off, singly and in clumps where they had been shot off the tanks they rode toward the buildings . . . His infantry had suffered even more than the tanks; many were still slow and exhausted from last night’s ambush-fiasco in the woods. He flushed, hammering a hand into the side of the hatch.

“Lieber Herr Gott, how am I going to explain this?” Professional reflex ran a tally in his head. A hundred tanks and assault guns yesterday at dawn; barely twenty now, and that was including the damaged ones that were still mobile. The infantry? Four hundred down, dead or with incapacitating wounds, many more who should be in hospital beds still on their feet and carrying weapons. He rammed the side of his hand into the solid steel again. The transport, you had that shot out from under you last night, don’t forget that. All his painfully accumulated motor transport, most of his fuel supply, all of the specialized engineering and mine-clearing equipment except for the two machines burning before his eyes. Two mornings ago he had had a regimental combat group, a third of the strength of the best Panzer division Greater Germany could field. Two days of combat had destroyed it, and for what?

To overrun one single, reinforced company of light infantry, who even yet held out. “They will stand me up against a wall, and they will be right,” he muttered, putting a hand to his bandaged head. He did not clearly remember how he had come to be lying unconscious in the mud, but whatever had hit him had come within a fraction of cracking his skull. Or might have indeed; the medic had not wanted to qualify him for duty, but there was no time for weakness. A benzedrine tablet had brought back alertness enough.

“What sort of trolls am I fighting? Why are they so hard to kill?” he continued, in the same inaudible murmur that barely moved his lips; the SS commander was unconscious of making any sound at all. Then in a sudden snarl: “Shoot!”

Crack and the 88mm gun of his tank cut loose. The long flash dazzled him for an instant, backblast drying the sweat on his face with an instant of chill-heat. He could feel the massive armored weight of the vehicle rock on its treads beneath him with the recoil, an almost sexual shuddering. Spray and bits of road surface flew up, droplets hissing on the muzzle brake of the long probing gun. The tank was like a steel womb, warm and comforting, nothing like the dark clamminess of earth and stone. A glance skyward; the low cover was holding, a gift of Providence. With luck—

“Standartenführer, HQ in Pyatigorsk.”

“Ja.” The voice of the regimental medical officer, with his heavy Dutch accent, sounded tinny in his ears, like someone from Hanover with a head cold. HQ had been completely stripped; he was senior officer, but Felix Hoth did not like it, or the Hollander. It was policy to accept kindred Nordics in the SS but . . .

“Yes? Any report from the battery?”

“No, Standartenführer.”

That was suspicious. Oosterman always said “Sir” unless something had gone wrong. Unless he had done something wrong. Had the pig been into the medicinal drugs again? One more offense and it wouldn’t be demotion, he would have him shot, and never mind that his sister was married to the head of the Dutch Nazi party. “What is it, man? Spit it out!”

“Your . . . the osthilfe volunteer Valentina, she is missing.”

“What?” he screamed. Then his voice dropped to a flat tone that was far more menacing. “You are wasting time on a command circuit with news about subhuman Slavic whores.” You decadent cosmopolite pimp masquerading as a National Socialist, his mind added. It was time to do something about Oosterman, even if he did have protection.

“Standartenführer, she left an antipersonnel mine in your quarters rigged to the door, four men were killed!”

He stopped himself just in time from barking “Impossible.” Even Oosterman would not dare to lie to him so, over an open circuit. “Continue,” he said weakly.

“There was a written message.”

“But . . . she cannot even speak decent German,” the SS commander said in bewilderment. This—no, there was no time. “Condense it.”

“It . . . Herr Standartenführer, it lists our order of battle for the last six months, and, ah, is signed ‘Comrade Lieutenant Valentina Fedorova Budennin, Politruk and Military Intelligence Officer, First Caucasian Partisan Brigade.’ ” There was gloating under the fear in the Dutchman’s voice; Hoth the incorruptible would have some trouble explaining this.

The gunner of Hoth’s tank had been peppering the village with machine-gun fire from the co-axial MG38, on general principle. Even over that ratcheting chatter, gunner and loader both heard the sound their commander made. They exchanged glances, and the loader crossed himself by unconscious reflex. Usually the gunner did not let that pass, being a firm neopagan and believer in Hoerbiger’s ice-moon theory, the Welteislehre. This time he simply licked his lips in silence and turned back to the episcope, scanning for a target. The antitank weapons in the village frightened him, but he could shoot back at them.

“Forward, all reserve units, into the village, kill them.” Hoth’s voice rasped over the command circuit, with a catch and break halfway through the sentence.

“Sir.” That was the squadron commander. “Herr Standartenführer, we have lost more than two-thirds of our strength, the enemy is neutralized and time is of the essence; why don’t we just pass through the cleared lanes, and leave a blocking force to contain enemy survivors until the Army infantry comes up?”

“That is an order!”

A hesitation. “Jawohl. Zum befehl.”

Hoth switched to the intercom. “Forward. Schnell!” With a grunting diesel roar, the command tank threaded its way around the huge crater in the road and the circle of overturned fighting vehicles; the driver geared down and began the long climb to the burning town.

Johanna flattened as the Fritz artillery fired, then raised her head again. The noise was overwhelming, as much a blow against the ears as a sound, echoing from the hills and the blank wall of the forested mountain behind her. The guns were spread out along the narrow winding road: a two-lane country track, barely good enough for an internal plantation way in the Domination. The surface was broken, beginning to disintegrate into mud—mud like the soupy mass she was lying in, that coated her from head to foot after the long night march through the rain. It was nearly thirty hours since she had slept. There had been nothing to eat but a heavy bread full of husks; she belched, adding to the medley of stale tastes in her mouth. The branches above were still dripping, adding their load of wet misery to the gray color of the day, and the pain in her neck had never left her since the crash . . . In the infantry after all, she thought disgustedly. Knights of the Sky, bullshit.

A five-gun battery was firing from the little clearing ahead of her, amid the hulks of burnt-out trucks and a wrecked tank and old-looking roofless farm buildings. The road fell away on the other side, but there were more guns there, from the sound of it. The guns themselves were simple field weapons, long-barreled 170mms mounted in open-topped boxes atop modified Soviet tanks, nothing like the custom-built models with enclosed turrets and 360-degree traverse her own people used. But they were pumping out death effectively enough, the recoil digging the spades at the rear of the guns deeper into the muck, crews dashing between the supply tractors and the breeches, staggering back in pairs bearing shell and charges in steel-rod carrying frames. The men were stripped to the waist, sweating even in a damp raw chill that let her see their breath as white puffs around their heads. She shivered, and swallowed again, her throat hot and scratchy.

“A cold,” she muttered to herself. “Happiness, happiness.” They were close, close enough to see liquid earth splash from the running feet of the nearest crew . . .

The partisan, Ivan, crawled in beside her and put his mouth to her companion’s ear. He whispered: unnecessarily, between the firing and the engines they could have shouted without much risk of being overheard, and the SS were fiercely concentrating on their tasks. Valentina translated in a normal tone: “Where are their infantry? That is most of the Liebstandarte’s Divisional artillery regiment, there should be at least two companies for perimeter defense.”

How should I know? I’m a fighter pilot, Johanna answered in her head. Aloud: “Up the valley, attacking.”

“If they’ve done that, Pyatigorsk should be wide open.” Valentina translated the remark, then answered it herself before continuing to the Draka: “I said again, there is no use in blowing up fuel depots there if the Fritz come back victorious.”

Ivan sighed, raised the flare pistol he had borrowed from her. Johanna tensed, bringing a leg beneath her and raising the machine pistol.

Eric, if you only knew, she thought. There was none of the fear-exhilaration of aerial combat. Just plain fear, went through her. She belched again, felt her stomach rumble, tightened her rectum instinctively. Oh no, not that. Eyes were on her: the Russians’, her father’s . . .

The flare went pop, pale against the massive muzzle flashes of the cannon. Three hundred partisans rose and threw themselves forward. Urra! Urra! Her feet pushed her upright and after them, gaining, in among the wet green-gray hulks, breathing their burnt-oil and propellant stink. Crewmen and gunners turned, snatching for personal weapons and pintle-mounted machine guns. Finger clenching, bucking weight in her hands, pingpingping across armorplate, a German falling with red splotches across his hair-matted chest, a silver crucifix winking.

Something struck the weapon in her hand. Hard: she spun, feet going out from under her on the slippery rock-strewn mud. A tread came up to meet her face, dun-colored mud on massive linked gray steel flecked with rust. Impact, earth, hands on her collar. Warmth, and a fading . . .

* * *

“Here they come,” Eric said. Engine rumble and steel-squeal from around the curve. He sucked the last drops from the canteen and tossed it behind him. The tanks were visible now. A line of them, turrets traversed alternately to left and right; even as he watched, the first one fired into the base of a building and the walls collapsed, straight down with an earthquake rumble. The tank came on through the cloud of debris, its machine guns winking from turret and ball mount in the glacis plate of the bow. Rounds went crack overhead, tracer drawing lines through the air where he would have been if he had stood. Then the second tank in line fired into the ruin on the opposite side of the road, and the others. They were going to repeat that, all the way to the central square. Then back out again, until nothing moved; then they would squat on the ruins, while foot soldiers searched for the entrances. After that, it would be like pouring insecticide down a broken ant heap . . .

“Neal!” he called. “That last round, make it count!” Eight tanks, probably with infantry following up behind. Eight was nearly half of what the Fritz had left; unfortunately, Century A had run out of antitank just slightly before the enemy ran out of tanks.

“Yep.”

It might have been marksman’s instinct that brought the heavyset rocket gunner to her knees for a better aiming point, or a coldly calculated risk. A mistake, in either case; a machine gun bullet punched her back just as her finger stroked the trigger. The rocket lanced into the already-holed personnel carrier five meters before the moving tank, slewing it around and actually clearing the road for the advancing SS armor.

“We’ll never stop them now.” Eric did not know who had made that statement, but there was no reason to doubt it; heading back into the bunker would be simply a slower form of death. Neal’s heels drummed on the clinking rubble for an instant, then were still. The beams overhead had begun to burn, set alight by a stray incendiary round. Long and slim, the barrel of the lead tank’s 88 was swinging around to bear on them.

“They’ll never stop them,” Monitor Huff said. There was nobody else alive on the rooftop across the laneway from Eric’s position to hear her. She looked down at Meier’s slumped body; if the burst had come up through the floorboards a few centimeters farther right, it would have struck her instead. As it was—she forced herself to look down at the wound in her thigh; there were bone splinters in the pulped red-and-purple wound, and the blood was runneling down past her clenched hands. Shock was keeping out the worst of the pain, but that would come—if the blood loss did not kill her first; she estimated that at no more than two minutes, with unconsciousness in less. The Centurion was across the way, with five others. And Patton.

“Heavy,” she muttered, fumbling at the dead trooper’s body. She had had an improvised antitank weapon with her, a bundle of unscrewed grenade heads strapped around an intact stick grenade with a bungie cord. Suicide system, she thought: that was the nickname for it. “Scarcely applies now, do it?”

The journey to the edge of the roof was endless, her wet fingers fumbling with the tab of the grenade. She imagined that she could hear it sizzling, once she pulled the button. Up, use it like a crutch, gotta see t’ place dang thing . . .

The second tank had an alert pair of eyes head-and-shoulders out of the hatch, with the pintle-mounted MG38 ready to swing; that was one reason for the in-echelon formation. There is a natural tendency to fire too high when aiming up; still, the first round of the burst took Huff just above the nose, and left with her helmet and much of the top of her skull. The bundle of grenades dropped at her feet, harmless except to corpse and roof; the body twisted off the edge, turned once and landed broken-backed across the hull of the wrecked personnel carrier below. Blood and pink-gray brain dripped into the burning oil, hissing.

“They shot Huff! The dirty bastards shot Huff!” Patton’s voice cracked. Then she was moving, fast and very smooth, scooping up the satchel charge, arming it, hurdling the low wall into the street and across it while bullets flicked sparks around her feet. Less a dash than a long leap, screaming, a forward roll through the puddle of flame that surrounded the wreck. Still screaming as she vaulted with her uniform and hair burning onto the deck, three steps down it with the plating booming, over the body, diving into the air headfirst toward the SS panzer. A shrieking torch that the green tracer slapped out of the air to fall beneath the treads. The satchel charge detonated.

Tank designers crowd their heaviest plating onto the areas that are likely to need it: the mantlet that holds the gun, the glacis plate at the bow, the frontal arc of the turret. Not much is left for the rear deck . . . or the bottom of the hull. The satchel charge held twenty pounds of plastique, confined between the forty-four-ton weight of the tank and the unyielding ground. Thin plating buckled as the globe of hot gas expanded; there was no time for it to go elsewhere. Pieces of it bounced through the fighting compartment, slicing, supersonic. Fire touched the wrenched-open cases of 88mm ammunition on the floor of the panzer, still nearly a combat load.

The first explosion bounced the tank onto its side and threw it across the road, a huge armored plug across the laneway. The second opened the hole in its belly into a splayed-out puncture wound, like a tin can left too long in the fire. Yet the hull barely moved; recoil balanced recoil as the turret and its basket blew out the other side of the vehicle, flying twenty meters down the laneway and demolishing a wall with its ten-ton weight. Surprise froze the Draka for a moment. Eric recovered first.

“Back down, back down, quick, go go go,” he shouted, slapping shoulders and legs as they went by him, back toward the narrow opening at the rear of the room. Already, figures in camouflage uniforms were trying to edge past the blockage of the wrecked tank, and he snapped a burst at them. They fell; hurt or taking cover was impossible to say even at ten meters’ distance as thick metallic-smelling smoke drifted across his eyes. The pain of the Holbars hammering against his raw shoulder brought him back to himself, and he slithered feet first to the opening. Hands caught and assisted him; they half-fell into the welcome gloom, scrambling back beyond a dogleg that kept them safe from a grenade tossed down their bolthole.

“Back to the radio room, this is it, it’s over, we’ve got to tell Legion HQ and then get out. Split up and carry the word, south end and bug out to the woods, move, people.” They paused for a single instant, dim gleams of teeth in faces black with soot and dirt. “Good work,” he added quietly, before spinning and diving through the next ragged gap. “Fuckin’ good.”

Dreiser felt very lost in the dark tunnel. Everybody else had seemed to know what to do, even when the order went out to scatter; he clutched the precious tapes through the fabric of his jacket and lurched into a bank of stone jags. For a moment pain blinded him in the echoing dark, then hands gripped him and jerked him aside through an L-angle where one cellar joined another through an improvised passage. A palm clapped over his mouth, hard and calloused.

“Shuddup,” hissed into his ear, as he was passed through another set of hands and parked against a wall. The American struggled to control his breathing, feeling his heart lurching between his ribs; that might have been a bullet or a dagger. Fighting a feeling of humiliation as well: he was tired of being handled like a rag doll. The blackness was absolute, silence broken by dripping water and the distant explosions. Then hobnails rutching on stone, and closer a long, faint schnnnng, a bush knife being drawn from its sheath. Dreiser found himself holding his breath without conscious decision.

A light clicked on: only a handlight, but blinding to dark-accustomed eyes. It shone directly into the faces of the two Germans who had turned the corner. They had been keeping close to the right-hand wall, facing forward; the Draka were on the left, across the two-meter width and parallel to their opponents. Nearest to Dreiser was the woman with the bush knife, reaching as the light came on. Her left hand jerked the SS trooper forward by the blouse while the right thrust the two-foot blade forward, tilted up. Dreiser could see the German’s face spasm, hear the wet slicing and grating sound as she twisted the broad machete blade and withdrew it in a wrenching motion. The next Draka was a man, tall enough to stoop slightly under the seven-foot roof. He merely slammed a fist forward as the German turned toward him; it connected with the SS man’s face, and the Draka was wearing warsaps. Bone crunched under the metal-reinforced glove, and the German’s helmet rang as his head bounced backward and rebounded off stone.

The third Draka had been kneeling nearest the L-junction. He dropped the light as his comrades struck, swept up his assault rifle, and fired. Dreiser blinked in puzzlement. The curve was sharp, there was no direct line of fire at the room beyond, and the paratrooper was firing up. Then the American followed the line of tracer up to the groined vault of the ceiling: continuous fire, long, ten-second bursts, the roar of the shots in the enclosed space of the cellar almost hiding the whining ping of the ricochets. His mind drew a picture of the narrow stone reach beyond the exit, bullets sawing back and forth . . . There were screams from around the corner now, and the sound of bodies falling, and blind crashing retreat. The morale of the SS men was growing shaky.

And no wonder, Dreiser thought, wiping an arm across his face. The slightest misjudgment or ill luck and those metal wasps could have come bouncing back into this section of tunnel; that risk was why the fighting below was mostly cold steel or cautious grenades. The Draka gunman was shaking the empty drum out of his Holbars, snapping in a fresh one with a contented grin but leaving the bolt back to allow the chamber to cool. Darkness returned as he snapped out the light. There was a moaning, then the sound of a boot stamping on a throat, as unbearable as fingernails on slate.

“C’mon, Yank,” one of them said. “We’ll drop you at the aid station. Clear path from there to the south end. Less’n’ you meets cousin Fritz, a’course.”

My morale would be shot, too, the correspondent’s musing continued as he coughed raw cordite fumes out of his throat and stumbled along with the retreating troopers. The Draka were nearly as deadly as they thought they were, and they never gave up; hunting them down here would be like going blindfolded and armed only with a spear into a maze full of tigers.

Tigers with the minds of men.

“Nobody in here but the wounded!” Dreiser shouted, in German. The cellar beneath the mosque was the aid station; his post the only place a noncombatant could do any good. The darkness was thick with muffled noise, or the louder shouts of the delirious, but he had heard the SS men talking in the next chamber. And “grenade” was hard to miss. “We surrender!”

A cautious hand and head came through, flicked on a torch, speared Dreiser where he stood plastered against a wall, zigzagged briefly across the rows of bandaged figures.

“Ja,” the German barked over his shoulder, and another figure with a Schmeisser followed. Perhaps it was the dim glow, but the American thought he could see the strain of fighting in this warren on their faces, death waiting in cramped blackness like the inside of a closet. They straightened, relaxing.

“Hande hoche!” one said to the American, tucking the grenade back into his belt.

“I am an American war correspondent,” Dreiser began. The burst of automatic fire caught him almost as much by surprise as it did the two SS troopers it smashed back against the stone.

The flashlight fell, bounced, did not break as it came to rest on the stomach of a staring red-headed corpse, lighting the expression of shocked amazement on her freckled face. The glow diffused quickly in the dusty air, but Dreiser could see a head that was a ball of bandage with a slit for the eyes, and the muzzle of the Holbars poking through the blankets that had concealed it. The head eased back down to its pack-pillow, and the assault rifle dropped out of sight again. “Keep . . . ”A halt, and a grunt. “Keep ’em coming, Yank.”

“No answer,” Sofie said. She and Eric were alone now in what had been the command bunker, except for the corpse of the sapper in one corner. It felt abandoned, colder somehow, darker despite the constant blue glow and the flicker of lights from the radio at which the comtech labored. A burst of assault-rifle fire echoed on the stone, bringing their heads up.

“Scan the cohort and tetrarchy frequencies, then,” he said, laying down his Holbars to load the bandoliers with extra drums. “Quick.”

Her fingers turned the dials; static, German voices, then snatches: “Sir, sir, come in, please.” A young voice, tight-held. “Sir, the Centurion went out half an hour ago and didn’t come back, I can hear them talking in Fritz outside the door, what’m I supposed to—” Shots, static.

“Fall back to the green line an’ regroup, fall back—”

“This is Palm One, Palm One, I’ve got Fritz armor coming at me from north’n’ south both, I’m spikin’ mah guns and pullin’ out, over.” A decisive click.

Sofie abandoned the radio, tearing off the headset and throwing it at the communications gear, turning to him with a snarl.

“That’s it!” she said, her voice shrill. “That’s it? It was all fo’ nothin’?”

“It’s never for nothin’, Sofie,” he said gently, “We fight for each other; the job is what we do together.” Sharply: “Now move, soldier!”

“Shit!” The obstacle was soft, and might once have lived. Eric tripped, and his hand came down into something yielding and wet. “Light, Sofie.” They had to risk that; information was worth a brief stop. A click, and he was blinking down into the turned-up face of the old Circassian, the hadj. Something had sliced halfway through his skull, something curved that pulled out raggedly and spilled the brain that had seen Mecca and spent fifty years in a losing fight to protect his people. The Draka recognized the signs: a sharpened entrenching tool swung like an axe, not popular among the Domination’s forces, who preferred the ancestral bush knife. He hoped it was not one of his who had killed the old man, in a moment of fear or frustration. Grunting, he knelt up and turned to look at Sofie.

And froze. The shovel gleamed beyond her head, held like a spear in a two-handed grip, point down and ready to chop into her back. No firing angle went through him, as he watched the reflected light glint on the honed edges. But the weapon was trembling, and it had not fallen. Sofie saw the fear in his eyes, checked her turning motion before it began at his lips’ silent command. He could see her face glisten, but the hand with the torch did not shake, or even move.

Slowly, slowly, Erie came to his feet. No aggressive movement, he thought, with a sudden huge calm. He could not afford to fail, and therefore he would not. Not now, or ever. Up, half-crouch, erect. There was a German behind her, standing rigid as a statue save for the trembling of the hands clenched on the haft of the spade. The underlit face quivered as well, lumps of muscle jerking under the skin, tears pouring down through dirt and soot, cutting clear tracks down from the wide-held eyes, a swath of bandage covering the back of his head. White all around the iris, pupils enormous, staring through time and space. It was eerie to hear words coming from that face; it was as if a statue had spoken, or a beast.

“You . . . killed them,” he said. “You. You.”

Standartenführer, Eric thought, reading the tabs. Meeting the eyes was more of a strain than he would have believed possible; like peering inside one of the locked, red-glowing tombs of Dante’s hell. The Draka spoke very softly, in the other’s language, as much to himself as to his enemy.

“Yes. We killed them, all of them, both of us.” The other’s face seemed to change, and the uplifted spade wavered. Eric extended his left hand to Sofie; hers joined, the palm warm and dry against the wet chill of his. She turned, facing the German.

“Inge—Ingeborg?” he asked. It was a different voice, a boy’s. “What are you doing here? This is Moscow—this is no place for you.” The shovel came down to the stone with a light clink, and something went out of the man. Eric and Sofie took a step backward, and another; there was nothing to prevent the Centurion from using the Holbars hanging at waist level in its assault sling. Nothing physical, at least. The SS man faded out of their circle of light.

“I am not afraid,” he said, in a conversational tone. “Not afraid of the dark, Ingeborg. Not any more. Not any more.”

The panzer rumbled toward them as they turned the corner at the south end of the village; the steel helmets of infantry riders showed behind its massive turret. There was no escape, not even back to the tunnels.

Sofie cursed and scrabbled for her weapon, feeling even more naked now that the familiar weight of the backpack radio was gone. Eric controlled his impulse to dive for cover; what point, now?

So tired, he thought, raising the Holbars. One of the soldiers stood, black face dull gray in the overcast afternoon light.

“Black face?” Eric said, as the man shed his German helmet and stood, waving a rifle that was twin to the one in the Draka’s arms. A vast white grin split his face as he leaped to earth. The rest of his lochos followed, spreading out and deploying past the two Draka, toward the ruins and the sound of the guns.

The turret of the tank popped open, and another man stiff-armed himself out of the hatch. A Draka, thin, sandy-haired, with twin gold earrings and the falconer’s-glove shoulderflash worn by Citizen officers commanding the Domination’s serf soldiers.

“Hey, point thayt-there somewheres else,” he called. “This here a ruse, my man. A plot, a wile, a stratagem y’know.” There were more vehicles behind the tank with its Liebstandarte markings, light eight-wheeled personnel carriers Peltast-class.

“The Janissaries,” Sofie said, in a voice thick with tears. “Oh, how I love the sight of their jungleboy faces.” A warm presence at his side, and an arm about his waist. “And you, Eric.”

“Me too, Sofie, me too,” he said. The Holbars fell to earth with a clatter. “And, oh, gods, I want to sleep.”

Shapes were coming down the road to the south, low broad tanks whose armor was all smooth acute slopes. A huge wedge-shaped turret pivoted, the long 120mm gun drooping until he could almost see the grooves spiraling up it; he could make out the unit blazon on the side of the turret, an armored gauntlet crushing a terrestrial globe in its fist: the Archonal Guard. A flash, the crack of the cannon a moment later. Clatter as the split halves of the light-metal sabot that had enfolded the APDS round fell to earth five meters beyond the muzzle; from down range a fractional second later the heavy chunnnk! of a tungsten-carbide penetrator slapping into armor.

We won, Eric thought, more conscious of the warm strong shoulders in the circle of his arm. It might be years, this was a big war, but nothing could stop them now. Victory.

Victory had the taste of tears.

There were fifty members of Century A left, when the medics had taken the last of the seriously wounded; enough casualties were coming in from the direction of Pyatigorsk that walking wounded would be left until there was spare transport to evacuate them all to the rear. The Ossetian Military Highway was bearing a highway’s load, an unending stream of Hond III tanks and Hoplite APCs, ammunition carriers and field ambulances and harried traffic coordinators. The peculiar burbling throb of turbocompound engines filled the air, and bulldozers were already working, piling rubble from the ruins of the village to be used for road repair when time permitted.

The noise was deafening, even inside the shattered remnants of the mosque, where walls still rose on three sides. Especially when the multiple rocket launchers of the Archonal Guard Legion cut loose from their positions in the fields just to the south, ripple-firing on their tracked carriages, painting the clouds above with streaks of violet fire like a silk curtain across the sky. The explosions of their 200mm warheads on the Fritz positions eight kilometers to the north echoed back, grumbling, from mountains shrouded in cloud like a surf of fire, glittering like sun on tropical spray, each shell paced with a score of submunitions, bomblets. Behind them came the deeper bark of the self-propelled 155mm gun-howitzers.

“I—” Eric began, looking around the circle of faces. There was no one there but his own people; they had taken the medical help and the rations and nobody had cared to intrude further. Or to object to Dreiser’s presence.

“I—” he rubbed a hand over his face, rasping on the stubble, feeling an obscure shame at the grins that answered him. “Oh, shit, people, congratulations. We made it.” A cheer, that he shouted down. “Shut up, I got the most of us killed!”

“Bullshit again, sir. That was the Fritz, near as I recall,” said McWhirter, a splinted leg stretched out before him, leaning on his crutch.

“You saw the job got done.” More laughter, and he shook his head, turning away and wiping at his eyes.

“I’m turning into a fuckin’ sentimentalist, Bill,” Eric said. The American shut his notebook with a snap and stood.

“Not likely, Eric,” he said, and extended his hand. “And my thanks, too. For what will be the story of a lifetime if I’m lucky!” More seriously: “It’s time I went home, I think. I have things to do; but I won’t forget, even if we have to be enemies someday.”

“We may,” said Eric quietly, gripping his hand. “But I won’t forget either. If only because this is the place where I learned I have things to do, as well.” He glanced over at Sofie, smoking a cigarette and leaning against the scrap of wall. She met his eye, winked, blew a kiss. “Other reasons as well, but that mainly.”

“Things to do?” Dreiser said, carefully controlling eagerness. He had more than a reporter’s curiosity, he admitted to himself. Eric’s face was different; not softer but . . . more animated, somehow.

“I’m going to write those books we talked about, Bill. Got a more definite idea of them now. Also . . . ” he drew on his own cigarette “ . . . I’ve about decided to go into politics, after the war.”

“Good!” Dreiser clapped him on the shoulder. “With someone like you in charge, there could be some much-needed changes in this Domination of yours.”

Eric stared at him for a moment, then burst into laughter, fisting him lightly on the shoulder. “Don’t look so astonished, my friend; I was just reflecting on how . . . how American that was. How American you are, under that reporter’s cynicism you put on.”

Slightly nettled, the correspondent raised a brow.

“How much of a believer in Progress,” Eric amplified, his face growing more serious. “An individualist, a meliorist, an optimist, a moralist; someone who doesn’t really believe that History can happen to them . . . ” Another flight of rockets went overhead, cutting off all conversation for the ninety seconds the salvo took to launch. Eric von Shrakenberg propped a foot on the tumbled stone of the mosque and leaned on his knee, watching the armored fist of the Domination punching northward; the turrets of the tanks turning with a blind, mechanical eagerness, infantry standing in the open hatches of their carriers. The noise sank back to bearable levels.

“Which shows me how much of a Draka I am. A believer in the ultimate importance of what you Will; that what life is about is the achievement of honor through the fulfillment of duty.” He smiled again, affection rather than amusement, the expression turned slightly sinister by the yellowing green of his bruises. “I always loved my people, Bill; enough to die for them. Now, well, I’ve found more to like about them. Enough to work and live for them, if I can.

“Bill—” his hand tightened on his knee, “nothing is inevitable. The Draka have always been a hard people; we’re a nation of masters, oppressors, if you will. But it’s a human evil, limited by what human beings can do. I’ve tried to look into our future, Bill; I’ve seen . . . possibilities that even Security’s headhunters would puke at, if they had the imagination. Read Naldorssen again someday, only imagine a science that could make her ravings something close to reality.” He made a grimace of distaste. “It doesn’t have to be that way.”

Dreiser frowned. “Like I said, Eric: changes.”

“Oh, Bill.” The Draka crushed his cigarette out underfoot. “ ‘To desire the end is to desire the means: if you are not prepared to do what is necessary to achieve it, you never wanted it at all’ That’s a Draka philosophy I believe in. To have any chance at prominence at all, I’ll have to gain my people’s respect in the way they understand. Doin’ . . . questionable things.” His face went hard, and a hand chopped out over the village, to a fragment of wall that stood forlornly upright. “This! It isn’t enough to be willing to die for my people, I have to be willing to kill for them. It’s what they know an’ respect.

“And changes? At best, with a lifetime’s effort, if I’m very smart and very lucky, I can hope to . . . lay the beginnings of the foundations for others to build on. Delusions of omnipotence is one national vice I haven’t fallen prey to. For a beginning, for the Draka to change they’d have to stop bein’ afraid, which means all their external enemies are defeated. Then maybe they could face the internal one with something besides a sjambok. I know—” more softly “—I know it can be done on an individual scale. Then, perhaps in a hundred or a thousand years—”

Reliable operative, the Security Directorate Chiliarch thought. You want reliable, do it yourself.

He was surprised at how . . . alarming the offensive was, at close range. Especially now that they were passing the forward artillery parks; even inside the scout car’s armor, the noise was deafening. Still, it all ought to be over soon. Then back to Archona, back to the center of things. With a kudo on his dossier that the ultimate masters would note.

The old fool’s past it, he thought with satisfaction, then cursed as the car lurched. They were driving well off the shoulder of the road, away from the priority traffic pouring down from the heights of Caucasus.

Did he really expect I’d let him have the credit for this?

Eric looked up as the three ragged figures limped into the ruined mosque. Ivan the partisan, by almighty Thor! he thought, looking around for Dreiser. The American was deep in his notebooks; time enough to roust him out later. It would be tricky to get the Russian survivors out, but not impossible; he had heard the awe in the voices of the relieving troops, and the legend would grow. Such myths were useful to the Domination. And to me, in this case.

There were two others with the Russian—women, one in muddied finery that could not disguise an almost startling loveliness, the other in the wreck of an Air Corps flight suit, cut away for the bandages that covered right arm and leg and that side of her face. She was tall, hair yellow-blonde, visible eye gray . . .

Sofie let out a squawk as his grip on her hand grew crushing; then he was running as if his fatigue had vanished, nimble over the uncertain ground.

“Johanna!” he shouted. At the last moment he checked his embrace, careful of her wounds; hers was one-armed, tentative. Held close, her body felt somehow more fragile, the familiar odor of her sweat mixed with a sharp medicinal smell.

“How bad is it?” he asked, holding her at arm’s length.

“Goddamn wonderful, I’m alive,” she said, reaching out to grasp him by the torn lapels of his tunic. “And so are you.” She pushed her hands gently against his chest. “I’m glad, my brother.” More briskly: “They told me I’d probably keep the eye, know in a year or two, fly a desk until then. Who’s this glarin’ at me?”

Sofie saluted. “Monitor Tech-Two Nixon . . . ” She peered more closely at the other Draka’s name tag. “Oh, you’re his sister. Hell, I’m Sofie.” She grinned, and rattled off a sentence in Russian to the two partisans.

Eric opened his mouth to speak, closed it again slowly as he looked over their shoulders. Two vehicles were bouncing through the uneven surface where the entrance of the mosque had been: not large, simple flattened wedges of steel plate with four soft pillow-tires, but green painted, with the Security Directorate’s badge on their flanks. They halted, and metal pinged and cooled. The rear doors opened, and three figures disembarked. The drivers’ heads showed through the hatches: serfs, carefully disinterested. The others . . . two Intervention Squad troopers, and an officer. Not any type of field man; the uniform was far too neat, the boots polished, ceremonial whip at his belt and an attaché case in one hand.

Politician Section, Police Zone Division, Eric thought. A Chiliarch, they’re doing me proud.

The others looked around. “Headhunters,” Sofie said.

“Shit,” Johanna added. “Metaphorically an’ descriptively.”

“Well, well, well,” McWhirter said. The survivors of Century A had closed in a semicircle about the secret police vehicles. “Aren’t you people a lot closer to the sharp end a’ things than you like?”

“Right.” That was Marie Kaine. “Of course, so far back from the front, the brain tends to be ninety percent asshole, anyway; maybe they got lost.”

Eric raised a hand, a quiet gesture that stilled the muttering. “Let me guess—” he began.

“No need for guessing here, von Shrakenberg,” the secret policeman said. “We’ve been watching; we always are. Ah am requirin’ you to accompany me for investigations under Section IV of the Internal Security Act of 1907, which provides for detention by administrative procedure, for—”

“ ‘—actions or thoughts deemed prejudicial to the security of the State’—yes, Chiliarch, I’m familiar with it.” Nearly having been its victim once before. “I also recall legislation statin’ that members of the Citizen Force on active service in a war zone may only be arrested by the military police, for arraignment or trial before a duly constituted court-martial.”

The Chiliarch was a thin man, with a redhead’s complexion despite his dark hair and pencil mustache. “Don’t try to play the lawyer with me, von Shrakenberg! You’d be well advised to take a cooperative attitude—well advised. Now, come along; this isn’t an arrest, merely a detention for investigation. Yes, and the American too. And—” his eyes noticed Valentina Budennin, and his mouth smiled “—yes, this Russian too. I’ll interrogate at our field headquarters in Kars. We’ll round up the rest of these ‘partisans’ in due course.”

Eric was silent for a long moment. The sounds in the background seemed to recede, dying down into a murmur no louder than the blood in his ears. Well, he thought.

“Y’know, Chiliarch,” he said conversationally. “I think you’d be surprised at the direction those subversive thoughts of mine have been taking. I learned something here.”

The police agent snorted. “What, pray tell?” They might have to restrain him after all.

Eric indicated the ring of soldiers. “That these are my people. Killers? Yes. But they have courage, and honor, and love and loyalty to each other. Those are real virtues, and on that something can be built, something can grow.”

He drew the Walther P-38 that was still thrust into the waistband of his battle harness.

The two Security troopers had come expecting an arrest, not combat. Yet they were Draka, too; their rifles came up with smooth speed to cover Eric. Policemen’s reflex, that let them ignore the two-score paratroopers within arm’s reach, and a fatal mistake. One managed to get a burst off, cracking the air over the security Chiliarch’s head. There was a moment of scuffling, a meaty thud, a wet schunk sound; the secret policeman wheeled to see the Security troopers going down, and the bayonets flashing again and again. Two of Century As survivors were staggering away, one clutching white-faced at a broken arm, the other squeezing at a stab wound in his thigh; the Century’s own medics were moving forward.

“The drivers, too,” Eric called coolly. “No noise.” He averted his eyes slightly as the two serfs were dragged from their hatches and their throats slit. They submitted in stunned silence, one jerking and bleating as the steel went home.

“Where was I?” Eric continued to the secret policeman. “Savin’ that the ‘convenient accident’ in a moment of confusion can work both ways? Pity about your party runnin’ into those Fritz holdouts. Or, extending my analysis. Ah, yes. From them something can be built, in time. What you are is a disease, and the only thing you’ll ever produce is rot.”

The Security agent turned back again; his face was even paler now, about the lips, but his voice was steady.

“I know you, it’s all in the dossier! You don’t have the guts—”

Eric shot him, low through the stomach. He dropped, unbelieving eyes fixed on the red leak between his fingers, legs limp from a shattered spine. The Centurion felt Sofie’s arm go about his waist. His left arm looped over her shoulders. “Thanks, Sofie,” he said, and looked up at the rest of them. “Thanks, all of you.”

“Hell,” Marie Kaine said. “It’s a long way to the Atlantic Coast and the end of the war, Eric. We all want you in charge till then.”

Suffering eyes turned up to him, over a gaping mouth that soon would scream.

Make an end, do it clean, he thought. “And there’s one thing you should never have forgotten,” he said to the man who had come to arrest him. “Whatever else I may be, I’m still a von Shrakenberg.”

The pistol barked.

LOW EARTH ORBIT

JULY 1, 2014

INGOLFSSON INCURSION TIMELINE

EARTH/2B

Nomura shivered. “Not entirely mad,” he said. “But . . . ”

“Yeah, that makes it worse, not better,” Carmaggio said. “If your enemies are all drooling lunatics, cowards and blackhats, everything gets real easy. The problem is that people with admirable qualities can end up using them for distinctly unadmirable purposes.”

“What . . . happened next?”

“Nothing good,” Carmaggio said. “Correction—brave men and women did their best. Here—”