The Domination, page 2
Or maybe it’s my face? she thought worriedly, absently stripping the clip out of the pistol-grip well of her machine pistol and inserting it again. Her face was still obstinately round and snub-nosed; freckles were all very well, enough men had described it as cute, but it obstinately refused to mature into the cold, aquiline regularity that was most admired. She sighed, lit another cigarette, started running the latest costume drama over again in her head. Tragic Destiny: Signy Anders and Derek Wallis as doomed Loyalist lovers fighting the American rebels, with Carey Plesance playing the satanic traitor George Washington . . .
God, it must have been uncomfortable wearing those petticoats, she thought. No wonder they couldn’t do anything but look pretty and faint; how could you fight while wearing a bloody tent? Good thing Africa cured them of those notions.
0410, Eric thought. Time. The voice of the pilot spoke in his earphones, tinny and remote.
“Coming up on the drop zone, Centurion,” she said. “Wind direction and strength as per briefing. Scattered cloud, bright moonlight.” A pause. “Good luck.”
He nodded, touching his tongue to his lip. The microphone was smooth and heavy in his hand. Beside him, the American war correspondent, Bill Dreiser, looked up from his pad and then continued jotting in shorthand.
* * *
Dreiser finished the paragraph and forced his mind to consider it critically, scanning word by word with the pinhead light on the other end of the pen. Useful, when you had to consult a map or instrument without a conspicuous light; the Domination issued them to all its officers and he had been quick to pick one up. The device was typical of that whole bewildering civilization; he turned it in his hands, feeling the smooth careful machining of its duralumin parts, admiring the compact powerful batteries, the six different colors of ink, the moving segments that made it a slide rule as well.
Typical indeed, he thought wryly. Turned out on specialized machine tools, by illiterate factory serfs who thought the world was flat and that the Combine that owned their contracts ruled the universe.
He licked dry lips, recognizing the thought for what it was: a distraction from fear. He had been through jump training, of course—an abbreviated version tailored to the limitations of a sedentary American in early middle age. And he had seen enough accidents to the youngsters about him to give him well-justified nightmares; if those magnificent young animals could suffer their quota of broken bones and wrenched backs, so could he. And they would be jumping into the arms of Hitler’s Wehrmacht; his years reporting from Berlin had not endeared him to the National Socialists . . .
He glanced across the echoing gloom of the cargo hold to where Eric sat, smoking a last cigarette. His face was impassive, showing no more emotion than it had at briefings around the sand table in Mosul. A strange young man. The eagle-faced blond good looks were almost a caricature of what a landed aristocrat of the Domination of the Draka was expected to be; so was his manner, most of the time. Easy enough to suppose there was nothing there but the bleakly efficient, intellectual killing machine of legend, the amoral and ruthless superman driven by the Will to Power whom Nietzsche had proclaimed.
He had mentioned that to Eric, once. “A useful myth,” had been the Draka’s reply. That had led them to a discussion of the German thinker’s role in developing the Domination’s beliefs; and of how Nietzsche’s philosophy had been modified by the welcoming environment he found among the Draka, so different from the incomprehension and contempt of his countrymen.
“The Domination was founded by losers,” Eric had said, letting an underlying bitterness show through. “Ex-masters like the Loyalists and all those displaced European aristocrats and Confederate southerners; prophets without followers like Carlyle and Gobineau and Nietzsche. The outcasts of Western civilization, not the ‘huddled masses’ you Yankees got. My ancestors were the ones who wouldn’t give up their grudges. Now they’re coming back for their revenge.”
Dreiser shrugged and brought his mind back to the present, tugging at the straps of his harness one more time. Times like this he could understand the isolationists; he had been born in Illinois and raised in Iowa himself, and knew the breed. A lot of them were decent enough, not fascist sympathizers like the German-American Bund, or dupes like Lindberg. Just decent people, and it was so tempting to think the oceans could guard American wholesomeness and decency from the iron insanities and corruptions of Europe . . .
Not that he had ever subscribed to that habit of thought; it led too easily to white sheets and hatred, destroying a tradition to protect it. Dreiser ground his teeth, remembering the pictures from Pearl Harbor—oily smoke pouring to the sky from Battleship Row, the aircraft carrier Enterprise exploding in a huge globe of orange fire as the Japanese dive-bombers caught her in the harbor mouth . . . The United States had paid a heavy price for the illusion of isolation, and now it was fighting on its own soil, full-fledged states like Hawaii and the Philippines under enemy occupation. His prewar warnings of the Nazi menace had not been heeded; now his reports might serve to keep the public aware that Japan was not the only enemy, or the most dangerous of the Axis.
“Jumpmasters to your stations!” Eric’s amplified voice overrode even the engines, there was a glisten of eyes, a hundredfold rattle as hands reflexively sought the ripcords. “Prepare to open hatch doors.”
“And step into the shit,” came the traditional chorus in reply.
Far to the south in Castle Tarleton, overlooking the Draka capital of Archona, a man stood leaning on the railing of a gallery, staring moodily at the projacmap that filled the huge room below. He was an Arch-Strategos, a general of the Supreme General Staff. The floor of the room was glass, twenty meters by thirty; the relief map was eerily three dimensional and underlit to put contrast against contour marks and unit counters. The mountains of Armenia extended in an infinity of scored rock, littered with the symbols of legions, equipment, airstrips, and roads; the red dots of aircraft crawled north toward Mount Elbruz and the passes of the Caucasus. Stale tobacco scented the air and the click-hum of the equipment echoed oddly in the unpeopled spaces.
“Risky,” he said, nodding toward the map.
“War is risk,” the officer beside him replied. The cat-pupiled eye of Intelligence was on her collar, she had the same air of well-kept middle age as he, and a scholar’s bearing. “Breaking the Ankara Line was a risk, too; but it gave us Anatolia, back in ’17.”
The general laughed, rubbing at his leg. The fragments from the Austrian antiairship burst had severed tendons and cut nerves; the pain was a constant backdrop to his life, and worse on these cold nights. Pain does not hurt, he reminded himself. Only another sensation. The Will is Master. “Then I was an optimistic young centurion, out at the sharp end, sure I could pull it out of the kaak even if the high command fucked it up,” he said. “Now the new generation’s out there and probably expecting to have to scoop up my mistakes.”
“I was driving a field ambulance in ’16; all you male lords of creation thought us fit for, then.”
He laughed. “We weren’t quite so stretched for reliable personnel, then.” The woman snorted and poked a finger into his ribs.
“Hai, that was a joke, Cohortarch,” he complained with a smile.
“So was that, you shameless reactionary bastard,” she retorted. “If you’re going to insult me, do it when we’re on duty and I can’t object . . . ”
He nodded and grew grim. “Well, we’re committed to this attack; the Domination wasn’t built by playing safe. There’ll never be another chance like this. Thank the White Christ that Hitler attacked the Soviets after he finished off the French. If they’d stayed in Europe, we’d never have been able to touch them.”
She nodded, hesitated, spoke: “Your boy’s in the first wave, isn’t he, Karl?”
The man nodded, turning away from the railing and leaning his weight against the ebony cane at his side. “Eric’s got a Century in the First Airborne,” he said quietly, looking out over the city. “And my daughter’s flying an Eagle out of Kars.” The outer wall was window from floor to ceiling; Castle Tarleton stood on a height that gave a fine view of the Domination’s capital. The fort had been built in 1791, when the Crown Colony of Drakia was new. The hilltop placement had been for practical reasons, once: cavalry had been based here, rounding up labor for the sugar plantations of Natal, where the ancestors of the Draka were settling into their African home.
Those had been American loyalists, mostly southerners, driven from their homes by vengeful neighbors after the triumph of the Revolution. The British had found it cheap enough to pay their supporters with the stolen goods of colonial empire.
“Strange,” Karl von Shrakenberg continued, softly enough to make her lean toward the craggy face. “I can command a legion handily enough—by Gobineau’s ghost, I wish they’d give me a field command—run my estate; I even get along well with my daughters. But my son . . . Where do the children go? I remember taking him from the midwife, I remember setting him on my shoulders and naming the stars for him, putting him on his first pony. And now? We hardly speak, except to argue. About absurdities: politics, books . . . When did we become strangers? When he left, there was nothing. I wanted to tell him . . . everything: to come back alive, that I loved him. Did he know it?”
His companion laid a hand on his shoulder. “Why didn’t you say it?” she asked softly. “If you can tell me?”
He sighed wearily. “Never was very good with words, not that sort. And there are things you can say to a friend that you can’t to your blood; perhaps, if Mary were still alive . . . ” He straightened, his eyes focusing on the world beyond the glass. “Well. This view was always a favorite of mine. It’s seen a lot.”
Together they looked down across the basin, conscious of the winds hooting off the high plateau at their backs, cold and dry with winter. The first small fort of native fieldstone had grown over the years; grown with the colony of Drakia, named for Francis Drake and heir to that ruthless freebooter’s spirit. It was a frontier post guarding the ranches and diamond mines, at first. Railways had snaked by to the great gold fields of the Whiteridge; local coal and iron had proved more valuable still, and this was a convenient post for a garrison to watch the teeming compounds of serf factory hands that grew beside the steel mills and machineworks. Then the Crown Colony became the autonomous Dominion of Draka and needed a capital, a centrum for a realm that stretched from Senegal to Aden, from the Cape to Algeria.
Lights starred the slopes beneath them, fading the true stars above; mansions with roofs of red tile, set in acres of garden. A monorail looped past, a train swinging through silently toward the airship haven and airport to the west, windows yellow against the darkness. A tracery of streets, sprawling over ridge and valley to the edge of sight, interrupted by the darker squares of parkland . . . eight million souls in Archona. Through the center slashed the broad Way of the Armies, lined with flowering jacaranda trees, framed between six-story office blocks, their marble and tile washed snow-pale in moonlight. The Assembly building, with its great two-hundred-meter dome of iridescent stained glass; the Palace where Archon Gunnarson had brought law into conformity with fact and proclaimed the Domination a sovereign state, back in 1919.
Karl’s mouth quirked; he had been here in the Castle on that memorable day. The staff officers had raised a loyal glass of Paarl brandy, then gone back to their planning for the pacification of the New Territories and the next war. None of them had expected the Versailles peace to last more than a generation, whatever the American president might say of a “war to end war.” Unconsciously, his lip curled in contempt; only a Yankee could believe something that obviously fatuous.
“You grew up here, didn’t you, Sannie?” he said, shaking off the mood of gloom.
“Ja,” she replied. “Born over there.” She pointed past the block of government buildings, to where the scattered colonnades of the University clustered. “In the house where Thomas Carlyle lived. Nietzsche visited my father there, seemed to think it was some sort of shrine. That was a little while after he moved to the Domination. Anthony Trollope stopped by as well, they tell me. While he was researching that book, Prussia in the Antipodes, back in the 1870s. He was the one the English didn’t pay any attention to, and then wished they had.”
Their gaze lifted, to the glow that lit the northern horizon—the furnaces and factories of the Ferrous Metals Combine, stamping and grinding out the engines of war. “Well,” he said, offering her an arm with a courtesy old-fashioned even in their generation of Draka. “Shall we see if, somewhere in this bureaucrat’s paradise of a city, two ancient and off-duty warriors can find a drink?”
He would face the waiting as he would any other trial; as befitted a von Shrakenberg of Oakenwald. Even if I’m the last, he thought, as his halting boot echoed through the empty halls of the fortress.
Thump! Eric’s parachute unfolded, a rectangle of blackness against the paling stars of dawn. He blinked. Starlight and moonlight were almost painfully bright after the crowded gloom of the transport; silence caressed his mind.
Straps caught at crotch and waist and armpits, then cradled him in their padding. Above him, the night was full of thunder, as hundreds of the huge transports spilled their cargos of troops and equipment into the thin air. Above, a flight of Falcon III fighters banked, their line stretching into an arc, moonlight glinting on the bubble canopies, sharks of the sky.
This is the best time, Eric thought, as the flight of transports vanished, climbing and turning for height and home, southward to their bases. Silence, except for the fading machines and the hiss of the wind through the silk. Silence over a great scattered cloudscape, castles and billows of silver under a huge cool moon, air like crisp white wine in the lungs, aloneness. A feeling beyond the self: peace, joy, freedom—in a life bound on the iron cross of duty, in the service of repression and death. There had been a few other times like this, making love with Tyansha, or single-handing a ketch through monsoon storms. But always here, alone in the sky.
The rest of the Century were forming up behind, wheeling like a flight of birds of prey; he saw with relief that the gliders were following with their cargo of heavy weapons and specialists. The 2nd Cohort was the northernmost unit, and Century A was the point formation of 2nd Cohort. They would take the shock of whatever reaction force the Fritz could muster to relieve their cut-off comrades south of the mountains. Two hundred of them, to blunt the enemy spearheads; they were going to need that special equipment. Badly.
Now . . . The cloud cover was patchy, light and shadow. Southward, the main peaks of the Caucasus shone snow white. Below was a black-purple immensity of scree, talus-slope, dark forests of beech and holm oak, sloping down to a valley and a thread of road winding up into the mountains. On a map, it was nothing, a narrow sliver of highland between the Black and Caspian Seas . . .
Over it all loomed the great mass of Mount Elbruz. Beyond it was the south slope, ex-Soviet Georgia; beyond that the Draka armored legions massing in the valleys of Armenia. The symbolism of it struck him—all Europe was in shadow, in a sense. From the Elbe to the Urals, there was a killing under way great enough to leave even the cold hearts at Castle Tarleton shaken . . . Eric had been a student of history, among other things; his mouth quirked at the supreme irony that the Draka should come as deliverers.
He stooped, a giddy exhilarating slide across the sky, a breathless joy. For a moment, he was a bird, a hunting bird, an eagle. Stooping on the world, feeling the air rushing past his wings . . . Be practical, Eric, he reminded himself severely. Once they grounded, they would have only their feet, and the south slope of the mountains was German-held.
But lightly; and now they were a very long way from home—thousands of miles of mud trail, torn-up railway, scorched earth.
The ground was coming up fast; he could smell it, a wet green scent of trees and spring meadow-grass and rock. This area had been swarming with Draka reconnaissance planes for months; the contours were springing out at him, familiar from hundreds of hours poring over photomaps. He banked to get a straight run at the oblong meadow.
Carefully now, don’t get caught in that fucking treeline . . . Branches went by three meters below. He hauled back on the lines, turning up the forward edge of the parasail; it climbed, spilled air, slowed. With the loss of momentum it turned from a wing to a simple parachute once more, and good timing landed him softly on his feet, boots vanishing in knee-high grass starred with white flowers.
Landing was a plunge from morning into darkness and shadow, as the sun dropped below the mountains to the southeast. And always, there was a sense of sadness, of loss; lightness turning to earthbound reality. Not an eagle any more, went through him. More like a hyena, a mordant part of his mind prompted. Come to squabble over the carcass of Russia with the rival pack.
Swiftly, he hit the quick-release catches and the synthsilk billowed out, white against the dark grass. He turned, clicking on the shielded red flashlight, waving it in slow arcs above his head. The first troopers of his Century were only seconds behind him, gray rectangles against the stars. They landed past him, a chorus of soft grunts and thuds, a curse and a clatter as somebody rolled. A quick check: mapcase, handradio, binoculars, Holbars T-6 assault rifle, three 75-round drums of 5mm for it, medikit, iron rations, fighting dagger in his boot, bush knife across his back . . . that was an affectation—the machete-sword was more a tradition than anything else, but . . .
Dropping their chutes and jogging back by stick and section, rallying to the shouts of their decurions and tetrarchs, platoon commanders, the troopers hurried to form in the shadows of the trees. Sofie jogged over to her position with the headquarters communication lochos, the antennae waving over her shoulder; she had the headset on already, tufts of bright tow hair ruffling out between the straps. As usual, she had clipped her helmet to her harness on touchdown; also as usual, she had just lit a cigarette. The match went scrit against the magazine well of her machine pistol; she flicked it away and held out the handset.
