The Domination

Chapter Five

CENTRAL FINLAND, 22,000 FEET

NEAR FIREBASE ALPHA

2ND MERARCHY, XIX JANISSARY LEGION

DISTRICT 3, EAST BALTIC COMMAND

JUNE 16, 1947

Strategos Sannie van Reenan glanced down through the porthole at her elbow as the transport’s engines changed their droning note, signaling descent. Soundproofing could only do so much, and after a while the vibration became like her heartbeat; not something she heard consciously, but a change was instantly apparent. The smudged glass of the window showed the same endless dark green coniferous forest they had been flying over since Moscow, hours ago, but the lakes and rivers had been growing steadily more numerous. Cultivated fields, too, or the weed-grown spaces that had been fields, before the Draka came. Yawning, she rubbed at her face. She had worked and catnapped through the night, cleaning up details of her notes from the Ukrainian and Russian sectors. She made a slight face.

“I hope this is a little less grim,” she said to her aide.

He looked up from a file folder on the table between their recliner seats, closing it neatly and tapping it between palms to align the contents. The interior of the transport was fitted as an office with microfiche racks, files, copier and a hot plate: bunks could be folded down from the walls. The aide signed for coffee and one of the serf auxiliaries brought the pot; he gave her a smile and thanks before she returned to her typewriter and the headphones of the dictorec machine. These were skilled specialists, part of a team that had worked together for years, not to be spoiled by mistreatment.

“Well, from the sitreps and digests, near like as bad, even if the reasons are different.”

His superior yawned again, patting her mouth with the back of her hand. She was a small woman with an air of well-kept middle age, neatly made, trim despite twenty hours without change of uniform.

Looking very much what she was, an Archona-born career Intelligence officer of an old professorial family.

“Reasons give mere fact human significance, Ivar,” she said. “Russia left a bad taste in m’mouth, to be frank.”

The aide shrugged. “We underestimated the Germans,” he said; his voice had the precise, rather hard-edged accent of Alexandria and the Egyptian province. “It took a year longer to muscle them back into Central Europe than we anticipated.” Another shrug. “We couldn’t be expected to spare transport to feed the cities, now could we?” North Russia’s industrial centers had been fed from the Ukraine, before the war, and the black-earth zone yielded little grain while the Domination’s armies fought their way west across burning fields.

“Hmm. Necessary I know.” It was an old precept of Draka ethics that to desire the goal was to approve the means needed to achieve it. “Still, technically, they were Draka cattle as soon as the Fritz pulled out. For all we know, good cattle, obedient an’ unresistin’. We made a mistake, thirty million of them died for it.”

Her finger flicked open a report. “With regard to MilRef 7:20a, demographic projections indicate nonpositive . . . Sweet soul of the White Christ, an’ to think I once had pretensions to a passable prose style. Why not ‘They’re all dead’?” she muttered. “Must be some internal dynamic a’ large organizations.” To her assistant: “Not to mention the waste a’ skilled labor; those that didn’t eat each other are too demoralized t’ do much good.”

“Well, at least the bloody survivors aren’t giving us much partisan trouble.”

She shrugged in her turn. “Patchwork way of doin’ things, Ivar: serfs’re supposed to get an implicit promise of work, bread an’ protection in return for submission, you know. Despair’s as like to produce rebellion as obedience, in the long run; let ’em think we’re like to slaughter whole populations just ’cause they’re inconvenient . . . That famine may be savin’ trouble now and causin’ us problems for two generations. Patchwork, short-term way a’ doin’ things.”

Sannie closed her eyes, touched fingertips to the lids. “Sometimes I get to feelin’ we don’t do anything else but run around all our lives thinkin’ up short-term solutions t’ problems created by the last set of short-term . . . Nevah mind.”

Ivar took another sip of his coffee, then chuckled. “One humorous aspect, though, dear Chief.” At her raised brow he continued: “Well, most of the machinery is intact, now that transport and power are functional again. We’re drafting in industrial labor in job lots, besides landworkers. And where are they coming from?” he asked rhetorically. “Germany, mostly. They started the war for Lebensraum, living room, and now they’re certainly getting it.”

Strategos van Reenan smiled dutifully before returning her attention to the porthole . . . It was ironic. Also Ivar was bright and capable, possibly even a successor on that distant but eagerly awaited day when she retired. I’ll be glad to get back to the capital, she thought.

For a moment homesickness squeezed her with a sudden fierce longing. Archona: the time-mellowed marble colonnades of the University, gardens, fountains, broad quiet streets, cleanliness and order. Damnation, I could be sitting under a pergola at the Amphitheater. An original Gerraldson concerto this week, his new Fireborne Resurrection opus . . . or visiting the galleries, or her nieces and nephews. Gardening in the half-hectare about the house that had been her parents’, or just sitting with a good book and Mamba curled purring in her lap.

Enough, she told herself. Work to be done, and not all of it could be accomplished from a desk in Castle Tarleton. The Eurasian War had left the Domination doubled in size, tripled in population; civil administration, economics, military, all the decision-making branches had critical choices to make by the score, all of them needed information. Not raw data, Archona was inundated with it; they needed knowledge more than facts, and knowledge had to proceed from understanding. We are so few, so few, went through her, with weariness and fear. So few, and so much to be done. The State to be safeguarded, built up, made more efficient, wealthy, powerful. Not as an end in itself, but because it was the instrument of the Race, people and blood and her own descendants.

Still, it would be good to be home. I’m tired of it, she realized. Tired of mud and flies and filth, the shattered empty cities. Memories flitted by. Goblin-faced children tearing the rotting meat from a dead horse, not even looking up as the cars splashed them in passing. Janissaries kicking heaps of black bread from a moving flatbed, laughing at the struggling piles of bodies that tore at each other for the loaves; there was enough, more than enough for all, but not much resembling a human mind left in the survivors. The peculiar wet stink of cholera, bodies piled high on the steam trucks: rag-clad stick figures lining up for inoculation and neck numbering, staring at her with dull apathy and a sick, brutalized hatred.

Yes, it will be very good to be home. All the nonexistent gods know we’re not a squeamish people, but this is getting beyond enough. Sannie sighed. One day there would be an end to it. When all the world was under the Yoke, peaceful; when the Race no longer had to forge each individual into a weapon, or squeeze their underlings so hard for the means of war, and long-tamed peoples gave no cause for fear and the cruelty it made necessary. Then they could rest; scholarship, beauty, simple pleasure, all could become more than something to be fitted into the spare moments . . . She forced herself back to the present; that good day would not come in her lifetime, or her grandchildren’s. In the meantime, each day was a brick in the final edifice.

“These Finns are an immediate problem, though,” Ivar was saying “The number of troops tied down here is ridiculous, considerin’ the relative importance.”

“That it is, Ivar,” she answered. Below, something winked from beneath a stretch of trees. Quartz, she thought idly. Tin can, shell fragment. Flying was a humbling experience. In an office in Castle Tarleton, you dealt with maps, reports, photographs; the accumulated knowledge of centuries at your fingertips, an unmatched research staff, electronic tendrils reaching out over half the earth. The illusion of control came easily there. Out here, flying hour after hour above the living earth, you realized how big it was, how various, how unknowable.

“Aircraft. Down, everybody down.”

Kustaa froze in place, crouching, with the other members of the guerrilla patrol that was threading its way through the forest. The noise swelled overhead, coming from the south, their own direction. Two planes; not fighters or strike aircraft, too high, wrong noise . . . medium bombers or transports. Ten thousand feet and coming down.

Ahead of him, one of the guerrillas rolled over on her back and unshipped a pair of binoculars. That was a risk, although a slight one. There was a pine seedling not far from his nose, growing canted beside a cracked slab of granite rock. The brown duff of needles and branches was damp beneath his hands and knees, sparsely starred with small blue flowers and coarse grass. An ant crawled over the back of his hand, tickling; the air smelled coolly of resin, wet spruce needles. Wind soughed through the high branches above, louder than the throb of engines. Light swayed over the patchwork camouflage clothing of his companions, dapple and flicker . . .

It was unbearably like home. Almost, this might be a hunting trip with Dad back in the ’30s, up in the woods north of town. Or that time right after the War, when he and Aino had visited home; everyone sitting down to Mom’s blueberry pancakes, then Dad and Sam and he driving out to the lake and canoeing down the Milderak, finding a good spot under the lee of Desireaux Island and throwing their lines out on water so clear you could see the pike gliding by like river wolves twenty feet below.

No, it isn’t like home, he thought wryly. Home is like this. Which was why so many Suomaliset had settled there around Duluth and the upper Lakes; it reminded them of the home they had been driven by hunger to leave, let them make a living in the ways they were used to. Lake sailors, lumberjacks, miners, hardscrabble back-clearing farmers.

The woman ahead of him lowered her captured Draka binoculars. “Light transports,” she said. “Heading into the snake base.”

Circling, the aircraft made their approach to Firebase Alpha. It was laid out in a double star pattern, to give overlapping fields of fire on the perimeter: that was standard. The doubled number of heavy machine-gun nests were not. Nor were the dug-in antiaircraft tanks, the snouts of their six-barreled Gatling cannon pointing outward. Sannie’s eyes flickered, taking in other details; two batteries of heavy automortars in gun pits near the center of the base, with top covers improvised from welded steel sheet; everything underground except the vehicles, and those in sandbagged revetments.

“Well,” the Staff officer’s aide said again as they banked and began the steep in descent to the pierced-steel surface of the airstrip. “This is a bit out of the ordinary. Firepower, eh?”

The Strategos smiled. “If Andrew’s put all this in, I’m sure it’s necessary. He was always a boy to take pains.”

“You’ve known him a fair bit?”

“Unofficial aunt,” she replied, sliding the Russian reports into the wire rack holder by her elbow for the clerical staff to refile.

“Not one of the Oakenwald von Shrakenbergs, is he?”

Sannie shook her head. Ivar was Alexandria-born, city-bred, and he had spent most of his service in the outer provinces. Nothing wrong with that, of course, that was where the work was, but it was time for him to learn the social background, if he was to operate out of Castle Tarleton. The elite military aristocracy of the Domination were a close-knit group; new names came in on merit but the old ones tended to recur generation after generation.

“No, younger branch. You met Karl an’ his son Eric at the reception on Oakenwald, last January, remembah? Andrew’s the second son of Everard, Karl’s younger brothah; Everard mustered out back in the ’20s, took up a land grant in Syria, near Baalbeck. He’s got a sister, cohortarch in th’ Guard, settled down in France, near Tours. Married to a fourth cousin from Nova Cartago, near Hammamet . . . complex, isn’t it?” A pause. “Used to meet Andrew a good deal, when he was down south visitin’. Good boy, bit too serious. Smart, but quiet about it.”

The command bunker was three meters down: sandbags for the walls and floor, the ceiling layers of pine logs, earth, and salvaged railway iron. Radios and teleprinters were lined along the walls; short corridors with switchbacks to deflect blast led to other chambers. It was morning, but there was no light here except the overheads, little sound but the click and hum of equipment, the sound of ventilators. It smelled of damp earth, raw timbers, leather and metal and oil, faintly of ozone, in the center was a map of the surrounding area, cobbled together from aerial photographs and scrawled with symbols and arrows in colored greasepaints. The officers around it had talked themselves silent; now they were thinking.

The map was of central Finland, their Legion’s area of responsibility. Forest, starred with lakes scattered like a drift of coins from a spendthrift’s hand, bog, burnt farmhouses and fields going back to brush. Red marks for ambushes; too many of them. Green for counterambushes, blue for arms caches and guerrilla bases discovered; far too few.

“Suh?” The word was repeated twice before Merarch Andrew von Shrakenberg looked up from the table. It was one of his Janissary NCO’s, Mustapha, the Master Sergeant from Headquarters Century. “Suh, the plane come, radio say five minutes.” A reliable man, half-Turk, his father some anonymous Draka passing through a Smyrna comfort station, raised in a training creche. Stocky, hugely muscular, square-faced and green-eyed.

Andrew sighed, returned his salute and stretched. “Take over, Vicki,” he said. His second grunted without looking up and continued her perusal of the map. “Corey, we’d bettah see to it. Mustapha, attend.”

Corey Hartmann grunted in turn, throwing down a cigarette and grinding the butt out on the floor of the command bunker. The two officers snapped their assault rifles from the racks by the exit and pushed past the spring-mounted door, up the rough stairwell and into the communications trench, blinking and adjusting their helmets as they reached surface level. The dank smell of the bunker gave way to the dust-bodies-burnt-distillate stink of a working firebase, and under it a hint of the vast pine forests that stretched eastward ten thousand kilometers to Kamchatka and the Pacific.

Four light utility cars waited, amphibious four-seaters with balloon tires; Andrew swung into the second, standing with a hand on the roll bar, next to the Janissary gunner manning the twin barrel. It was a fine day, warm for Finland. Warm enough to forget the winter, or nearly. He grimaced at the memory, slitting his eyes in the plume of gritty dust thrown up by the lead vehicle. It was a short ride to the airfield, a simple stretch of pierced steel sheet laid on earth and rock laboriously leveled; the light transport was already making its approach run.

Twin-Zebra class, he thought. An oblong fuselage, high-winged, two engines, two slender booms holding the tail. He looked for the national blazon; the Domination’s crimson dragon, wings outstretched, talons clutching the slave fetter of mastery and the sword of death. But the shield covering the Snake’s midsection was a black checkerboard with a silver Roman numeral II, not the usual green-black-silver sunburst. Supreme General Staff, second section, Strategic Planning. Behind, another dot was circling, another Twin-Zebra. That would be the flunkies, secretaries, comtechs, whatever.

“Well, well,” he said. “Staff planes not Transport Section. A panjandrum indeed.” An ordinary Staff inspection would be a fairly junior officer, taking his luck with the transportation pool. There were not many who could command this sort of following.

“Sheee-it. Sir.” Corey added.

“Know how y’feel,” Andrew replied, with a wry smile. “Still, we always complainin’ GHQ gives the Citizen Force more ’n its share of attention, can’t nohow complain when they take us at ouah word.”

“Outposts here, here, here,” Arvid said, sketching with his finger in the dirt. The other half-dozen Finnish officers were folding their maps, giving their notebooks final once-overs before they departed to rebrief their subordinates. There was a ridge of frost-shattered granite between them and the road that speared down from the north and turned west in front of them, enough to give a prone man good cover. The wet earth behind it was an excellent sand table.

Kustaa watched, aware that much of the information was added for his benefit. Arvid continued, “Marsh through here, and this approach is blocked by the lake; hard for us to get in, but it limits the routes out for their patrols. The main base is out of mortar range for us, so we pepper the outposts now and then; then they chase us, and we can usually count on taking out a few at least. They patrol the roads and sweep the woods at random intervals. Not much contact for the last six months.”

“Why?” Kustaa asked, shrugging his shoulder against the prickling itch of the foliage stuck into loops on his borrowed tunic. I feel like a bloody Christmas tree, he thought resentfully; they were all in uniforms sewn with loose strips of cloth colored dull-green and brown to break the outlines of their bodies, stuck all over with bits of grass and branch. Very effective for a stationary ambush.

They had stopped well short of the gravel-surfaced road and the cleared zone that extended twenty meters on either side. The sun was bright enough to set him blinking after the green-gold twilight of the trees, and the tall grass that had grown up around the stumps waved, spicy-smelling, as their feet crushed it, starred with flowering weeds and thistles that clung to their trousers. Nothing remarkable, simply a good two-lane country road through tall pine timber, coming from the north and curving sharply east. There was a whiff of tar—the crushed rock must have been lightly sprayed to lay the dust but not even the Domination’s resources extended to putting a hard surface on every back-country lane.

The squads laying the mines were lifting the rock with swift, careful motions of their trowels and entrenching tools. Hands lowered the heavy round bundles of plastique into the earth as carefully as a mother tucks her child into the cradle. Kustaa watched a woman kneel beside the hole, the butt of her knife between her teeth as she peeled apart the strands at the end of a reel of wire. Sinewy brown tanned hands stripped the insulation from the bright copper and twisted the leads to the detonators, pressing the blue painted rods of fulminate into the soft explosive. Others were unreeling the wire as she worked, trenching the surface of the road and then placing the gravel back in reverse order to keep the darker weathered stones on top; Kustaa could hear the rhythmic tinking of their spade handles hammering the surface to the proper consistency. The Draka supply convoy was going to get a warm reception.

Good work, he thought. They weren’t putting them all in the roadway either, more along the sides, and homemade directional mines spiked to stumps and concealed by the brush. No trampling that lovely waist-high cover, even though there must be the equivalent of two compnies—they’d been joining the march in dribs and drabs. Nobody who didn’t absolutely have to be was in view, and those were getting their business done and getting back past the treeline.

“And I’m surprised they don’t keep the vegetation down more,” he said.

“Not enough manpower,” Arvid replied. “Which is the basic reason for the light contact, too. Remember, they’re stretched thin, they took thirty million square kilometers in the War. And they’re not in any overwhelming hurry; the snakes are like that, long-term thinkers. Cold-blooded.”

“Like real snakes,” one of the others said with a grimace.

“Finland isn’t all that important to them,” Arvid continued in a dry, detached tone. “There isn’t anything here they need badly enough to make an all-out effort to get. They’ve swept the civilians out. Just us and the snake military; they’re not even trying to run the timber camps anymore. Their aircraft make sure there’s no farming going on, and they mostly just wait for us to die, helping when they can. I think the only reason they try to occupy us at all is the resistance we’ve put up. They’re like that too. Aggressive.” A sour grin. “Most of our attacks are directed at their supply convoys. Polish hams, Danish butter, French wine . . . it’ll be a while before we starve to death.”

Kustaa nodded, remembering the storerooms he had seen stacked with cans and boxes, the camouflaged garden plots, night-fishing equipment.

“I think they’re afraid, too,” the American said. “Right now the Domination’s like a lucky gambler, they want to get up from the table with their winnings . . . Sure they’re going to send in their air?”

“Oh, yes,” a guerilla said. “Policy: they always give a cut-off unit full support. Air strikes, and a rescue column.”

Kustaa turned and looked behind him. Two crates of the missiles had come with the guerrillas on this strike. Two units here under camouflage tarpaulins, spidery swivel-mounted tripods with a bicycle-type seat for the gunner, battery clusters, the black-box exotica of the launching system. A pair of rockets for each, one on the rail and a reload, cylinders a little taller than he, a uniform twelve inches through except for the last foot that tapered into a blunt cone. Simple cruciform control fins at the base, and a single nozzle for the rocket, like an illustration for Thrilling Planet Stories, the pulp he had hidden folded inside serious reading in his teens. Except that gaunt female guerrilla in faded overalls was nothing like as photogenic as the brass-braed earth women who had figured on the garish covers, usually menaced by something with tentacles and a lust for mammalian flesh.

“But I’m up against monsters, sure enough,” he whispered to himself.

There were no markings, no serial numbers or manufacturer’s stamps anywhere inside the apparatus. Kustaa sneered mentally at the security worldview run amok; as if transistors were something the Finns could cobble together in their bunker hideouts. As if the Fifth Cav hadn’t paraded a dozen of them past President Marshall’s reviewing stand on Fifth Avenue last Inauguration Day, with the Draka embassy’s military attaché taking notes and snapping pictures. The hastily-trained crews lay beside the missile launchers, going over the manuals again. Well, the mothering things were supposed to be soldier-proof—they were designed for infantry use. Skills built into the machinery, anyone who could walk and breathe at the same time capable of operating them.

At that, these old country Finns had picked up the theory quickly enough, better than a lot of the hill-crackers and ladino peons he’d had to train on much simpler equipment in the Corps during the War . . .

“Ambush in more senses than one,” he said to Arvid. The Finn nodded and settled down behind the jagged granite crenel.

“Not long,” he replied. “Mines all ready. First action this close to the base since snowmelt, they’ll react quickly.”

Damn, you never remember how hard the waiting is, Kustaa thought, as silence settled on the stretch of forest. Silence enough for the wind-rustle through branches and occasional birdsong to fill his ears. His mouth was dry; he brought out a stick of chewing gum, stopped himself from tossing the scrap of silvered wrapping paper aside and tucked it neatly in the front pocket of his fatigues. There was no point in giving the Draka an extra clue, it might be important if they made it away clean. And you never remember how stupid the reasons for volunteering sound in your head, either.

“God damn you, Donovan,” he muttered under his breath, sliding the borrowed Finnish rifle through the fissure in the rock before him. Nice sound design, gas-operated semiauto, not much different from the Springfield-7 he’d used in the Pacific except that it had a detachable box clip, and that was an improvement. He’d managed to persuade them to give him a scope-sighted model, too.

“I’ve given Uncle my share, I’m too old for this shit,” he said, continuing the dialogue with his absent superior. “You and that fucking Mick blarney; you could’ve made a fortune selling suntan oil to Eskimos.” Something tiny burrowed up from the grass beneath him and bit him on the stomach; he crushed the insect and rubbed his palm down a pant leg before tucking the stock of the rifle back against his cheek. It was cool and smooth against beard stubble grown long enough to be silky.

There was a muffled buzz from above, no louder than a dragonfly humming at arm’s length. A brief flash off plastic and metal and a scout plane went by overhead toward the south, a twin-boomed bubble fuselage on long slender wings with a shrouded pusher engine. Then it banked and turned north again, flying a zigzag pattern less than a hundred feet above the treetops. His stomach felt sour, the same feeling as too much coffee; Kustaa could feel his eyes jumping back and forth across the scene before him, looking for movement with a reflex much stronger than conscious thought. Hell, I know where they are and can’t see them, he told himself. No way a plane’s going to spot anything.

Sounds echoed back and fourth between the trees, motor sounds. Turbo compounds, the Domination’s internal-combustion engines of choice for automotive applications. Many, but not really heavy stuff; other noises under that, a vague mechanical hum. This was different from ambushes in Sumatra. The jungle of southeast Asia hid sounds better; the Nips could be right on top of you and walking by before you heard anything. He had always hated having to shoot the pack mules, the way they screamed. At least there wouldn’t be any of that, with a mechanized convoy.

Donovan was wrong, this isn’t a job for a veteran, he thought. This is work for a fucking kid who doesn’t believe he can die. His mind was running through everything that might happen. Sergeant Hicks, that was the first casualty he’d ever seen. Hicks’d lived for hours after the bullet went widthwise through his face behind the nose; his eyes had popped out like oysters . . .

They saw the dust plume before the vehicles, spreading brown-white above the road. Now things were clear, very clear, like the sight-picture that firmed up as you turned the focusing screw of a pair of binoculars. His stomach settled with a last rumble. Then the first Draka warcar was in view, keeping to the right of the road. Light armored car, six-wheeled, a smooth welded oval with a hexagonal turret mounting a heavy machine gun and grenade launcher; two more behind it, same class, their weapons traversed to alternate sides of the road. The commanders head-and-shoulders out of the turret hatches: that was good practice, you couldn’t see shit buttoned up. He eased his eye forward to the telescopic sight and the first man’s head sprang into view. There was not much to be seen, just a line of mouth and square strong hands beneath helmet and dust goggles. Black hands, black face, a Janissary; a camo uniform, with some sort of shoulder rig for an automatic pistol.

Trucks behind the armored cars, a dozen of them, then three armored personnel carriers, Peltast class, eight-wheeled, not the heavy tracked Hoplites the Citizen Force legions used. More trucks, then something military that was hard to make out through dust and engine-induced heat haze. The trucks nagged at him with familiarity . . . yes, German make. Wehrmacht Opels, four-ton steamers, but not worn enough to be leftovers from the War. That made sense; it would be easier to keep the production lines going than retool right away, even with the spare-parts problems that would cause. Autosteamers were fairly simple beasts, anyway, low-maintenance. Ten-yard spacing and they were doing thirty-five miles an hour tops.

The lead car slowed; Kustaa could see the figure in the turret put one hand to his ear, pressing the headset home to improve hearing. The American stiffened, his finger touching delicately down on the smooth curve of his rifle’s trigger, resting, waiting.

“Wait,” Arvid said. “I think . . . ” The whining hum of heavy tires sank into a lower note, punctuated by the popping crunch of gravel spitting sideways under the pressure of ten-ton loads of armor plate. The whole convoy was slowing, half a kilometer of it, the warcars and APCs first as the radio message reached them and the cargo vehicles responded jerkily. Trucks halted in the center of the roadway, but the escorts wheeled theirs to face the woods, staggered herringbone fashion in alternate directions. The warcars’ engines sank to idle, no louder than the thrumming of the autosteamers’ boiler fans, and there were shouts back and forth along the line of vehicles.

Arvid swore viciously under his breath in Finnish, then relaxed as the cab doors of the trucks opened. “Rest stop,” he muttered. “All the better.” He laid a hand on the Finn waiting with his hand on the plunger of the detonator box. “Wait for it.”

The drivers were climbing down, stretching, walking to the ditch and opening the flies of their gray overalls to piss; the strong musky odor of urine and wet earth came clearly across the sixty feet of open space. Kustaa winced, hoping they would be finished before the action started. Shooting a man peeing was like killing him while he picked his nose: the homey human action made the target too much a person. It was more comfortable to keep targets as simply shapes in your mind. You put a shot through the center of mass and move on to the next. Targets did not come back before your eyes while you were sleeping or eating or making love . . .

A file of soldiers came jog-trotting up from the APCs, dropping off pairs every ten yards; the troopers fanned out from the road halfway to the trees with their assault rifles slung across their chests. One soldier with a cardboard carton over his shoulder walked to unpin the back flap of the truck closest to Kustaa. He reached up to help the first of the occupants down, his grin visible even at this distance.

“Christ, women!” the American blurted in a whisper.

Arvid turned his head fractionally, studied the two trucks that were shedding passengers. “Whores,” he said flatly. “The snakes rotate twenty or so every two weeks. Must be busy, there’s a thousand men in that base.”

Kustaa slid his eye to the scope. There were ten from each of the trucks, dressed alike in plain dark skirts and white blouses. All young, mid-teens to mid-twenties (although it was hard to judge through the narrow field of the telescope), wearing handcuffs with two-foot chains. Mostly white, but he could see a tall statuesque Negro girl and a couple of Chinese; they were milling and chattering, a few bringing out combs and taking the kerchiefs from their travel-tousled hair. The Janissary was talking to a girl with reddish-brown braids done up in Gretchen coils on the sides of her head; she was snub-nosed and freckled, a dead ringer for the bobby-soxer daughter of his next-door neighbor back in New York except for the serf-number tattooed on her neck.

She took the carton from the soldier and opened it, began handing rolls of toilet paper to the other women. They walked away from the truck toward the granite outcropping, the soldier beside them; he was still talking to the Gretchen girl, laughing and gesturing with his free hand while the right rested lightly on the pistol grip of his rifle. Closer, closer, Kustaa could feel Arvid tensing beside him, hear that the Janissary and the girl were speaking German to each other. The soldier was young too; the face leaped into close-up in the crosshairs of his sight, shaven-skulled but adorned with a wispy yellow mustache and plentiful acne, the neck tattoo standing out bright orange against his tan.

They halted ten meters from the rocks, and the girl gestured imperiously to the serf trooper. He laughed again, turning his back on the clump of women squatting in the long grass, dropping to a knee. His rifle rested across one thigh as he scanned the edge of the treeline and reached inside his mottled tunic to bring out a package of cigarettes, flicking one half-free of the container and raising it toward his lips. Kustaa saw the pack freeze halfway to the young man’s mouth, sink back, then drop from stiffening fingers. Pale blue eyes went wide in alarm, and the face rocketed past his ’scope as the soldier shot to his feet.

“Now!” Arvid shouted, and the man with the detonator twirled the crank handle on its side and raised the plunger. For a half-second he paused, an expression of utter pleasure on his face, then slammed it down.

Kustaa’s finger stroked the trigger of his rifle, and he felt the recoil as a surprise the way it always was when the aim was right. The blond Janissary pitched back, the smack of the bullet punching through his stomach close enough to be heard with the crack of the round firing. Then the earth under the lead warcar erupted, a sound so huge it struck the whole face like a giant’s invisible hand. Groundshock picked him up and slammed him down again, with the iron-salt taste of blood in his mouth from a cut tongue. Nothing was left of the lead car but a tattered rag of steel crossed by the heavier lines of axles, centered in a circle of burning scraps and fuel.

The second armored car was over on its side, wheels spinning in slow futility. Its crew crawled from their hatches, staggered erect, were caught and shredded in the metallic sleet of fire that raked the column from both sides; another roar and pillar of black smoke came from the rear of the convoy, then half a dozen more along the kilometer length of stalled vehicles, crash-crash-crash, ripple-firing in a daisy chain of high explosive that sprouted like malignant black mushrooms. Trucks were burning, and a pattering hail of wood and metal and human body parts came down all about them; the heavy oily smell of distillate burning in the open was all around them, and the throat-rasping fumes of burnt propellant.

All along the treeline off both sides of the road, arcs of tracer swept out to chew at the convoy’s edges from concealed machine guns. The heavier snapsnapsnap of semiauto rifles joined in, and an anvil chorus of ricochets hornet-buzzing from engine blocks and armor. Kustaa shifted aim, found a Janissary kneeling and firing a light machine gun from the hip, strobing muzzle flashes and his mouth gaping pink against the dark-brown skin as he shouted defiance. The crosshairs dropped over his face and crack, the rifle hammered at Kustaa’s shoulder. The Janissary snapped backward with a small hole just above his nose and the back of his skull blown away in a spatter of gray-pink brains and white bone; he was still kneeling, his body arched back like a bridge and the kindly grass closing over the shock-bulged eyes.

A whipcrack sound went by overhead, close enough for the wind of it to snatch the cap from Kustaa’s head and brush heat across his forehead. Ice crystallized in his stomach as he wrestled the rifle out of the notch in the granite and swung it to the left; the third Draka warcar was coming towards them, the long fluted barrel of its 15mm machine gun spraying rounds and blasted spalls and fragments from the stones before them. The stubby muzzle of the grenade launcher beside it made a duller sound, more like ripping canvas. The two-inch bomblets were low velocity, almost visible as they blurred through the air. Their bursting charges were much louder, a crang and vicious hum as the coils of notched steel wire inside dissolved into a cloud of miniature buzz saws; each one cleared a five-meter circle in the long grass, as neat as a lawn mower.

With angry helplessness, Kustaa forced out a long breath as he steadied his aim on the gunner’s vision-block; bullets were already sparking and whickering off the sloped plates of the car’s armor, leaving lead splashes and gouges but not penetrating the welded-alloy plates. The warcar lurched over the rough ground, its six independently-sprung wheels moving with a horrible semblance of life like the legs of some monstrous insect. A few seconds and that line of fire would walk across his missiles, across him. He squeezed gently at the trigger—

—and the shot went wild as a streak of fire dazzled across his vision to impact on the glacis plate of the warcar. Pazooka, he thought, with an involuntary snigger of relief. Actually a Finnish copy of the German 88mm Panzerschreck, but never mind . . . A globe of magenta fire blossomed against the armor, and the warcar turned flank-on and stopped as if it had run into a wall. The American’s mind drew in the picture within, the long jet of plasma and superheated metal from the shaped-charge warhead spearing through like a hot poker through cellophane, searing flesh, igniting fuel and ammunition. A second of hesitation, then the turret of the car blew apart with a sharp rending crang; pieces of jagged metal went whirring by overhead, and he dropped back to a prudent knees-and-elbows position.

Now he could see the rocket-launcher team; the backblast had set a grass fire that was a black and orange finger pointing to their position. The gunner rose, letting the sheet-metal tube droop behind him while his partner carefully slid a second round home and slapped his shoulder. They shifted position in a quick scuttling run, moving a hundred yards north towards the rear of the convoy; dug-in guerrillas cheered as they passed.

Kustaa wiped a shaky hand over his forehead; that had been far too close, and he could smell the rank musk of his own sweat, taste the sickly salt of it on his lips. His eye caught the wristwatch. Only four minutes, and the muscles of his shoulders were shaking. He forced them to untense as he rolled back to look for his original targets; dense black smoke was billowing past, obscuring the view, but he could see one of the APCs past the trucks glowing cherry red with interior fires, another nosedown in the roadside ditch, disabled by a contact mine but exchanging fire with the guerrillas. Another lancing shriek of fire from the antitank launcher, striking high on its flank, and the small turret on its deck fell silent.

The women were barely visible through the thickening smoke to his front; milling and screaming, some with their underwear around their ankles. Then the big black woman was running among them, pushing them down into whatever safety there was on fire-beaten ground. The German-speaking girl with the braids had dashed forward; now she was dragging the Janissary Kustaa had shot back toward the road, leaning into it with her hands clenched in the shoulder straps of his web harness. The American could see her face quite clearly, huge-eyed with terror and speckled with blood now as thickly as the freckles, her mouth flared in a rictus of effort and determination.

From the way the man’s head lolled Kustaa thought there was probably very little point, but he had done things as pointless himself, in combat. Overload, no way to take it all in, so you focused on something. Your job, or some detail you could make your job, even if it was meaningless and the only sensible thing was to scream and run, it was still something you could do. Better than freezing, or cowering, or panic. At least, that’s my preference, the American thought, scanning the thickening smoke for a target. As for the rights and wrongs of a slave-whore risking her life to save a slave-soldier, he supposed she was operating on the general assumption that the people shooting at her were not friends. He could sympathize with that, too, the equation “someone trying to kill me = enemy” had a certain primitive force . . .

From their right, from the north beyond the veil of smoke, came a sound like a chainsaw. But far too loud. It would have had to be a Paul Bunyan-sized model. A courier dashed up, fell panting on his knees by Arvid and gasped out a message as he leaned on his rifle, between the breathy gabble and the thick Karelian dialect, Kustaa caught only the English word in the middle of the sentence: “Gatling.” Then he heard the engine sound from the same direction, and saw two horizontal lines of white-orange light stab out of the smoke. Where they struck the edge of the uncleared forest, the hundred-foot pines fell, sawn through at knee height in white-flashing explosions that sent splinters flying as lethal as shrapnel.

One smashed down in front of the forward wheels of the Draka flakpanzer, clearing the smoke like a fan for an instant before the burning truck next to it ignited the dry resinous branches. Kustaa recognized the type, Dragon class, two four-wheeled power units at each end and a big boxy turret between them: antiaircraft mounting, originally designed to escort mechanized-infantry columns. The armament was two six-barreled Gatling cannon, 25mm; each was capable of pumping out 6,000 rounds a minute. That was why the vehicle was so large, it had to be to carry enough ammunition for the automatic cannon to be useful. Very effective against ground-attack aircraft coming in low; at short range, against surface targets, whatever came in front of the muzzles simply disappeared.

“Shit,” Arvid said, listening to the courier and twisting to keep the attacking flakpanzer in view, then rising to his knees and cupping his hands about his mouth. “Tuuvo! Keikkonnen!” The rocket-launcher team looked up from their new blind. “Circle around and take it out!” he shouted. They rose and went back into the woods at a flat run, wasting no time on acknowledgments. “This had better be worth it, American,” he continued in a flat conversational voice.

The Dragon’s turret moved again, a 180-degree arc; two seconds of the savage chainsaw roar, and a hundred yards of forest went down like grass before a scythe, the twin lines of fire solid bars through the smoke. Then it lurched forward again, the wedge-shaped bow plowing through burning timber in a shower of sparks. The outside wheel sets were in the ditch to allow the gun truck to ease past the burning wreckage in the center of the road, and the thick cylindrical tubes of the Gatlings were canted up sharply to compensate. Trees were burning half a kilometer back into the woods, ignited by stray incendiary rounds and sparks, and he could hear the pulsing bellow of a full-fledged forest fire beginning.

And the volume of small arms’ fire from the area under the iron flail of the flakpanzer’s cannon was slacking off noticeably.

Another runner slid into the covered zone, gasping as the shock of landing on her back jarred the crudely bandaged arm bound across her body.

“There were four trucks more of infantry at the rear of the convoy,” she gasped, between deep panting breaths.

“Replacements,” Arvid rasped. “God damn.”

“They’ve pushed us back into the woods on the west side but everything’s on fire, we and the snakes are both breaking contact and trying to circle round, it’s spreading fast.” She glanced back to where the armored vehicle was systematically clearing this side of the road.

“The antitank teams on the west are out of range and the one you sent back up toward us is gone.” The runner gestured toward her bound arm. “Nearly got it in the same burst. Eino’s going to try and take out that fucker with a—”

Another roar of autocannon fire. Kustaa swiveled his rifle, in time to see three figures in guerrilla uniform bounce to their feet and race forward toward the Dragon with satchel charges in their hands. The Gatlings can’t depress enough to stop them, God damn it, they’re going to make it! he thought with a shock of elation.

The crew of the Dragon reached the same conclusion. Hatches cracked open on the square-wheeled power units at either end of the long vehicle, and the muzzles of machine pistols whickered spitefully.

“Shit, shit, shit,” Kustaa cursed under his breath, emptying his magazine at the narrow gap between hatch cover and deck. The machine pistol jerked and ceased firing, lay slumped for a moment before it was pulled back inside with a limp dragging motion that suggested an inert body being manhandled down into the driving compartment. The hatch banged shut again, and the guerrilla was only ten yards away, his arm going back in the beginning of the arc that would throw the cloth bag of explosives under the hull of the Dragon; the other two satchelmen were down. “Go, go, go,” the American chanted under his breath, eyes urging the Finn on as his hands felt blindly for a fresh clip and slid it into the loading well of the rifle.

The hatch opened again, this time only for a second, just long enough for a stick grenade to come spinning out. It flew in a flat arc, whirling on its own axis, the sharp bang of its detonation coming while it was still at head height. The Finn stopped and fell with an abrupt finality, as if he were a puppet whose strings had been cut, and the sweep of his arm faltered. Wobbling, the satchel charge fell short, throwing up a plume of rock and soil amid the muffled thump of an open-air explosion. Dust cleared, with a ringing hail of rock on metal; the armored cab of the Dragon was intact, but three of the wheels on the outer flank were shredded ruin, and the fourth was jammed by a twisted steel panel.

“Good,” Arvid said. “Runner, get back to Eino; bring some of those trees down on that thing, there’re a dozen or so in reach.” He looked at her arm. “And then get out to the fallback rendezvous; you’re not fit for combat.”

A shout from a machine-gun team beside them. “Ah, thought so,” Arvid muttered. “They’re going to try and peel us back up here while the Dragon keeps the center of our line busy.”

Figures were dodging through the smoke of the burning trucks on the road ahead, behind the clump of women prone in the roadside grass. A sudden scream like a retching cat, and a line of fire streaked out toward Kustaa’s position, slamming the cluster of rocks ahead of him with an explosion that sent fragments of granite blasting uncomfortably close overhead. The sound was fainter than it should have been; his eardrums were ringing, overstrained and losing their capacity to absorb the battering noise. The Janissary infantry poured out into the cleared zone along the road, into the waist-high grass and stumps.

A score of them, running, some falling as the Finnish positions swept them. Squads throwing themselves down to give covering fire, others leapfrogging their positions. The American picked a target, fired, shifted to another. Lizard-mottled uniforms, drug-magazined assault rifles, machetes slung over their backs. Bucket-shaped helmets with cutouts for the faces; he could see one’s mouth move, a curse, as he broke stride to avoid stamping on a hysterical girl who lay facedown, beating her hands into the earth. A sergeant, bare-headed save for a checked bandana around his gleaming dome of skull. Kustaa’s bullet struck his thigh, sledged him around in a circle that sent a cone of tracer into the air from the light machine gun in his hand. Then he was up again, kneeling, firing from the hip and waving his men on as blood gouted from the massive flap of torn muscle hanging down his leg.

Kustaa slapped another magazine into his weapon and jacked the slide with his right hand; the metal of the barrel burned his palm, overheating from rapid fire. The volume of fire from the Draka infantry was appalling, and damnably well-aimed. He ducked as he reloaded, thankful of an excuse to get out of the way of the light high-velocity bullets that tinked and spanged off the stones before him. He had seen enough combat to know that a firefight was less dangerous than it sounded, it took thousands of rounds to cause a casualty, but standing up in front of that many automatic weapons was still unhealthy.

“We can’t hold them!” he shouted to the man beside him.

“Hell we can’t!” Arvid said, reaching for a handclasp solenoid detonator linked to a spreading fan of wires. “This is what I laid the directional mines for.”

Kustaa froze. His mind’s eye saw the weapons; curved steel plates lined with plastique, faced in turn with hundreds of ball bearings. Like giant shotgun shells, their casings spiked to the stumps and ready to fill the whole space between forest and road with a hail of ricocheting metal. His hand streaked toward the guerrilla’s.

“The women—” he shouted. The Finn hacked backward with an elbow, a paralyzing blow into the point of Kustaa’s shoulder.

“Fuck them,” he said, still not raising his voice. His other hand clenched, and the roar of the fires was cut by explosions and a sound like the whining of a million wasps. “Get your missiles ready, American,” he continued. Then he raised his voice to a shout. “Follow me, the rest of you, don’t let them rally!”

A leap, and he was over the stones and running toward the road. The others followed him with a deep guttural shout, loud enough to drown out the shrill screaming of the wounded lying among the murdered trees.

The Twin-Zebra slid in, flaps dappling the square wing to shed lift, touched smoothly down with the gentle touch of an expert’s hands on the controls, rolled to a stop not twenty meters from the two cars. The ramp dropped, but the first two passengers were down before the further end touched. Bodyguards: Special Tasks Section, General Staff Division.

Ah, Andrew von Shrakenberg mused. They did send someone important. Standard camo uniforms, but cut away from the arms, customized assault rifles, automatic pistols in quick-draw Buchliner harnesses across the stomach. The eyes slid over him without pausing, flickering in an endless animal wariness. Special training, careful selection, and there weren’t very many of them. Even among Draka, few had the aptitude, and fewer still were the Citizens who could be spared for such work.

Two more figures came walking sedately down the ramp in garrison blacks. Silently, he approved; even out here, fairly near the sharp end, it was a little ridiculous for staff types to travel in field kit and armed to the teeth. He drew himself up and saluted, conscious of the other officer doing likewise.

“Merarch Andrew von Shrakenberg,” he said. “Cohortarch Corwin Hartmann. Service to the State.”

The leading staff officer removed her peaked cap and nodded; small, slight, gray-streaked brown hair, broad face and snub nose . . . She smiled at the slight shock of recognition.

Tantie Sannie, I’ll be damned, he thought, slightly dazed. Sannie van Reenan; Uncle Karl’s aide . . . Andrew had been born on Oakenwald, the original von Shrakenberg estate south of Archona; his father a younger brother of Karl, landless until after the Great War. Tantie Sannie had been there often enough when he visited, had taken him under her wing when he was stationed there during his year at the Staff Academy.

“Glory to the Race,” she replied formally. “Strategos Sannie van Reenan. Soon to be von Shrakenberg.” A laugh; this time his brows had risen appreciably. “Permission to satisfy your curiosity, Andrew. Yes, it’s officially Tantie Sannie now, not just by courtesy.”

“Uncle Karl?”

“Who else, man?” She patted her stomach. “You’re due for another cousin, come eight months, too.” She turned to Hartmann, saluted. “Combinin’ the tour with a little family business, Centurion.” A wave to the other officer. “Cohortarch Ivar Barden Couteaux.” A cluster of gray-uniformed auxiliaries were following, secretaries and clerks.

“Ah, mmm, this is rather sudden, Strategos,” Andrew muttered, as they walked toward the cars.

“It’s breakin’ out all over, now the War’s—as we jokin’ly put it—over. An’ I’m not that old, Merarch; bit of a risk, but one can always terminate. About time I did my duty to the Race, anyway.”

She stepped into the car, paused standing with one hand on the rollbar, looking about. Andrew stopped beside her, stripping away the veil of familiarity and trying to see it through her eyes. Ugly, of course; vegetation ripped away to leave rutted sand and mud, pavements of gravel and crushed stone. Bunkers, buildings of modular asbestos-cement heaped about with earth berms, a few floating balloon-held aerials. Spider-webbed with communications trenches, skeletal support towers for lookouts and arc lights . . .

“You’ve got a Century of the Third Airborne Legion here, I understand,” she said, nodding to a section of revetments; the long drooping blades of helicopter rotors showed over the sandbagged enclosures.

“Ya, it’s unorthodox”—Citizen Force troops were rarely brigaded with Janissaries, and it was even rarer for them to come under the command of an officer over a Janissary formation—“but we needed a quick-reaction force pretty bad. Trio of gunboats, too.” Nearly three thousand troops inside the wire, counting several hundred unarmed auxiliaries in the maintenance and combat-support units.

“I wondered why Castle Tarleton would send anyone to Finland,” he continued, as the driver twisted the utility car’s fuel feed. “Back to HQ, Mustapha. We goin’ get some organic helicopter transport of our own?”

“Not my department, officially,” she said, as the car accelerated with a quiet chuffchuffchuff of steam. “Unofficially, no, not fo’ a while. Bottlenecks in the turbine plants, they tell me, an’ maintenance problems. Still a new technology, aftah all. Also, we’re givin’ priority to convertin’ more Citizen Force units to air cavalry, cuttin’ back on the heavy armor.”

“An’ we get the short end of the stick, as usual,” he said. Conscious of her questioning look, he added: “Take it this is a general survey?”

“Very general,” she replied. “Makin’ a swing-through all the way from China to the Atlantic, gettin’ an overview, combinin’ with the Board’s compilation of regular data.” She was silent for a moment. “A mess, t’ be frank.”

“Well, we did take a shonuff big bite, this time,” he said, absently returning the salute of a Citizen officer as they ate dust down the gravel street.

“Hmmmm, yes. Still, only thing we could do, at the time.” A pause. “Long-range strategic situation’s what I was talkin’ about, though.” Sannie reached for her cigarettes, remembered the doctor’s advice and settled for a hard candy. “Damn those Fritz, they had to go an’ discover tobacco’s bad for you. Anyway . . . we’re just realizin’ down in Archona that the progress of the Race is, ahhh, enterin’ a new phase.”

“How so?” he said, as they reached the headquarters bunker. “Welcome to our humble home.” The Strategos looked around, nodded.

“Good to see the real thing, after spendin’ so much time in the Castle . . . Well, it’s the blessin’ and curse of atomics, for starters.” The maps had been cleared from the rough plank table in the center of the bunker and pinned to a board framework on one wall; Sannie van Reenan absently returned the salutes of the HQ staff and poured coffee in a thick chipped mug.

“Gods, I’d forgotten how vile the Field Force brew is . . . Where was I?”

Andrew nodded as they seated themselves at the map table. “Atomic stalemate,” he said. “An’ a good thing, too, in my opinion.”

“Good in the short term; without we had ’em, the Yankees could beat us now. Muscle us out of Europe an’ eastern China, at the least.” She sighed and rubbed her eyes again, grateful for the cool gloom of the bunker. “Trouble is, the atomics’ll still be theah, ten, twenty, forty years from now. Unless the TechSec people pull somethin’ completely unexpected, traditional mass warfare is goin’ to be, hmmm, completely out of th’ question. Not to mention there’s considerable ocean ’tween us and them.”

Andrew pulled a cheroot from a box on the table, snipped the end and puffed it alight. “See your point. On the one hand, we get time to consolidate, on the othah, when we’re ready we can’t attack them. An’ it’s destabilizin’ to have a non-Draka society too close to our borders; these days, the whole planet is close.”

“Perceptive, younglin’, but it’s worse than that. We’re bein’ forced into a new type of competition, an’ it’s one we’re not really suited for.” She frowned. “Look at it this way. We started off by conquerin’ southern Africa usin’ weapons and techniques developed here in Europe; enslaved the natives, applied European organization to their labor, an’ used the crops and minerals we sweated out of ’em to buy more weapons and machinery. Well, that wasn’t a stable arrangement, so we industrialized to supply our own military, buyin’ machine tools and hirin’ technicians instead of importing finished goods.

“But all propaganda aside, it’s always been a spatchcock modernization, pasted on the surface. Exemplia gratia, right up till the Eurasian War most of our exports were agricultural, an’ minerals; still are, fo’ that matter, oil and chrome and rubber and so on. Mostly we used the resultin’ war potential against really backward societies, the rest of Africa, then the Middle East and Asia.”

“We beat the Europeans,” Andrew protested mildly, drawing on the dark mouth-biting smoke. It must be nice to have the leisure to think strategy, he thought wryly. So much more interesting than tactics, also safer.

“Hmm, ’s much by luck as anythin’ they wrecked each other first.” A shrug. “Oh, we’ve got advantages; sheer size, fo’ one thing, substituting quantity fo’ quality. We do some things very well indeed, bulk production, agriculture, mining, mass-production industry: the sort of thing that organization an’ routine labor can handle. Our great weakness is the size of the Citizen population, of course—an aristocracy has to be small in relation to the total population—but we compensate by concentratin’ it where it counts and by specializing in war, primarily.

“So you might say the Domination’s like a lower-order animal, a reptile, that’s learned to do some mammal tricks, mimicry. Or a big shamblin’ zombie with a smart little bastard sittin’ on its shoulder whisperin’ orders into its ear.”

Andrew raised a brow; of course, there was nobody from Security around . . . that he knew of.

“Fear not, nephew. As I was saying . . . we’re going to be fightin’ the Yankees and their Alliance fo’ a long time. We can’t count on them cuttin’ their own throats the way Western Europe did. I mean, if there’s one thing the Eurasian War showed so’s even a Yankee couldn’t miss it, it was exactly what the Domination is an’ what we intend. The Alliance will hold; we may be able to convince a few useful idiots of our peaceful intent, but not enough to matter. Pity. Likewise buyin’ outright traitors with promises of Citizen status; that worked well enough with a few score thousand Europeans, but it’s a limited tactic. Our traditional tools of brute force, terror an’ violence are out of the question. System as centralized as ours is more vulnerable to atomics than theirs.

“Which moves the competition onto other grounds. Production, technology, science, not our strong points.” Another frown. “This is a little speculative, but what the hell, the Strategic Planning Board is supposed to be . . . Apart from the fundamental fact that they’re a society oriented to dynamism while we’re committed to stasis, we an’ TechSec are gettin’ a very nasty feeling that development is movin’ into areas where we’re at a structural disadvantage. The Domination couldn’t have been built without machine technology, but it was the nineteenth-century version. Coal an’ iron an’ steam; rifle-muskets, railways and hand-cranked Gatlings. Then steel an’ petroleum, no problem; we’re the perfect Industrial Age empire.

“Only, it looks like the balance is shiftin’ toward things based on nuclear physics an’ quantum mechanics. Rare alloys, ultra-precision engineerin’, electronics. Electronics especially, an’ they’re already ahead; we can steal their research, but bein’ able to apply it’s a different matter. At least we don’t have to try an’ compete in general living standards; this isn’t a popularity contest, thank the nonexistent gods.”

“Bleak picture, Tantie,” Andrew said, with a frown of his own. A bit vague, but the Draka had always tried to plan for the unlikely. Living on the edge, being conscious of having no margin for error, at least made you less likely to fall into complacency.

“Not as bleak as all that. We do have some serious advantages. For one, the Alliance is a strong coalition but it’s still a coalition, an’ a coalition of democracies, at that. Which means it’ll only make outright war if we push it into a corner, which we’ll carefully avoid—unless an’ until we can win quick an’ final.” She unwrapped another candy, began absently folding the paper into a tiny animal shape. “Very democratic democracies; accordin’ly, they have trouble plannin’ as much as a year ahead. Some of their agencies can, surely; the OSS are just as smart an’ nearly as nasty as our Security Directorate. But the most of ’em are short-term thinkers; we can use that any number of ways. Example, by gettin’ them to sell us their technology for profit. Yankee civilization as a whole may be smarter than ours but we’re better right at the top—leadership’s a scarce resource fo’ us, so we make better use of it.

“No, it’s their society in gen’ral we’ve got to be wary of. Their dynamism, flexibility, the way they can bend with the wave of change. Army fo’ army, bureaucracy fo’ bureaucracy, we can beat ’em every time. Accordin’ly what we’ve decided to do is to keep the military tension ratcheted up as tight as possible, indefinitely.” A wolf’s grin. “If we can’t fight ’em, we can at least force ’em to tax, to regulate, make ’em security conscious an’ secretive . . . force ’em onto ground where we’ve got the advantage, get ’em to waste resources.”

Andrew grinned in his turn. “Lovely double bind, Tantie, but . . . not that I don’t appreciate your takin’ the trouble to fill me in on high strategy. I’m commandin’ a Merarchy of Janissaries; what’s the relevance to me?”

She leaned forward, resting her chin on her palms. “Well, two-fold, nephew. Firstly, I’m afraid our ‘armed peace’ policy is goin’ to make your pacification work even more of a nightmare than ’tis now. Provokes the Alliance to strike back in covert style, an’ we can’t hardly object too hard, seein’s we’re stompin’ on their toes every chance we get, plus makin’ big bad Draka faces at them all the time. Fo’ example, we think that alarm a few nights ago was an attempt to get somethin’—agents, weapons, who knows—into Finland.” Andrew winced. “It gets worse. You’ve been havin’ troubles enough with the Finns here; we’ve got evidence they’ve been infiltratin’ small parties across the pre-War border, equipped for long-term wilderness survival.”

“And there’s a lot of wilderness east of here,” he said.

“ ’Zactly, nephew. More joy . . . y’know that scare we had, few days back? Security’s sources in the U.S. say that wasn’t just a probe at our Northern Lights Chain; they were puttin’ in an agent, possiblelike with advanced weapons. Might be tryin’ to link up with them, set up a long-term supply effort.”

“Submarines? No earthly way we could guard the whole northern flank of Eurasia in detail.”

“ ’Specially not with all our other commitments, and seein’ as they’re ahead in submarine-warfare technique. Hell with it, light me up one of those . . . ” She paused to inhale the smoke. “Now, this is confidential, younglin’.” She looked around; there was nobody within earshot. “Besides the operational problems all this creates, we’re a little worried ’bout the way this prolonged pacification situation is reboundin’ on the Army-Security balance.”

Andrew leaned back, puffed at his own cheroot and grimaced. The Directorates of War and Security were the two armed branches of the State, and their rivalry went back generations; more emphaticly, the higher you went in the command-structure, as well.

“If we’re goin’ to be spendin’ the next two generations sittin’ tight and makin’ faces at the Yankees, I can see how it would sort of rebound to the headhunters’ benefit,” he said carefully.

“Mmm-hm. Like, they’re agitatin’ to have more of the Janissary Corps put under their direction.”

That brought the younger Draka sitting bolt upright. “The hell you say, Tantie—Strategos,” he amended himself hastily. “Fuck the bureaucratic bunfights, those ghouls spoil good fightin’ men, I won’t have any of us put—”

He stopped at the quizzical lift of her eyebrow. “Us?” she murmured. There was a certain detached sympathy in her face as she leaned forward to pat the clenched fist of his hand where it rested on the pine board. “Andy, it’s inevitable there should be some degree of identification, when you lead men into battle. Inevitable, desirable even, fo’ maximum performance. But never, never forget what the Janissary corps was established for.”

She lifted the cheroot, considered the glowing ember on the end and flicked away ash with a judicious finger. “ ‘Sides, we in Castle Tarleton basically agree with your position. The headhun—ah, Security Directorate are gettin’ as many recruits fo’ their Order Police as they can handle, in our opinion. Janissary units are useful fo’ both open-field warfare an’ pacification, whereas the Order Police are a militarized gendarmerie, not combat soldiers. Limited usefulness, even in guerrilla warfare, not that the Security people look at it that way.”

Sannie shrugged. “On the other hand, we do have to coordinate more closely; the Archon’s made it clear, an’ the sentiment in the Assembly’s likewise gettin’ pretty intolerant of jurisdictional squabbles. Remember, most Citizens just do their three-to-six military service an’ leave; they’re primarily interested in gettin’ the pacification completed in the quickest possible time. Quite rightly, too. ‘Service to the State,’ hey? Which we have to remember, and not confusin’ our own particular institution with the State itself—which a certain Directorate I could name but won’t is prone to do. We all got spoiled by the Eurasian War an’ the run-up to it, bein’ free to concentrate on conventional warfare.

“Which brings me to what we have in mind fo’ you. Now, you made it to Tetrarch in the Citizen Force originally; transferred to the Janissary Corps as per SOP, excellent record since . . . ”

Andrew tensed. “Now wait a minute, I’ve been with this unit since ’42, I know them an’ they me, they need—”

“Policy, Andy, and you know it. Next step up fo’ you is a Chiliarchy or Legion command, and you do not get it without rotation back to the Citizen Force.” She held up a hand. “Unless yo were thinkin’ of commandin’ the 2nd Merarchy, of the Nineteenth Janissary fo’ the rest of your career? Which could happen, you know.”

Andrew von Shrakenberg opened his mouth to speak, hesitated. The calm eyes resting on his were affectionate but implacable; loyal to the tradition that put State and Race above any personal tie. Like Pa’s, or Uncle Karl’s. How can I leave them? he thought; braced himself and—

—the radio squawked frantically. “Mayday, Mayday, convoy one niner, undah attack! Come in, Firebase Alpha, come in!”

Sannie van Reenan stepped back to one wall and crossed her arms, withdrawing person and presence; it never paid to hinder experts at their work. An alarm klaxon was wailing across the base; officers and senior NCOs piled into the command bunker, moving with disciplined haste.

One flipped the map back onto the table, smashing the crockery aside. Andrew took the microphone, forcing calm down the transmission by an act of will. It was obviously a Janissary NCO on the other end, and a young one from the voice. Not the commander of the convoy due in today.

“This is the Merarch. Quiet now, son, an’ give me the facts.”

“Ah, Sarn’t Dickson, suh; 4th Ersatz Cohort, reportin’.”

“The recruit shipment, by God,” somebody in the room murmured. “Where’s the escort CO?”

As if to answer, the static-laden voice continued, stumbling over itself in haste: “Tetrarch Galdman, he up front, the car jus’ blow up, mines suh, front an’ rear, we pinned. All thaz warcars done be knocked out, suh. Mast’ Sergeant Ngolu take t’ Dragon an’ his Tetrarchy ’n try goin up t’support, lotsa firin’; jus’ me an’ the replacements left here back a’ the column, suh. Allah, they close suh, mus’ be near two hundred, I kin hear ’em talkin’ bushtalk to each othah in thaz woods, we runnin’ short on ammo.”

“Report your position, soldier.”

“Ahhh—” He could hear the Janissary taking a deep breath. “We ’bout thirty kilometers out from you, suh. Jus’ past t’long thin lake, an’ turnin’ west.”

“Right, now listen to me, son. Dig in, an’ hold your position, understand? Help is on the way, and soon. Keep broadcastin’ on this frequency, the operator will relay. When you hears us, fire flare—you’ve still got a flare gun?”

“Yazsuh.”

“Good. Recognition code.” Red this week, but no need to advertise it to anybody who might be listening; the Finnish guerrillas still had pretty good Elint. “An’ stay put, a world of hurt goin’ to be comin’ down round there.”

He handed the microphone back to the operator, turned, orders snapping out as he walked to the map table.

“Sten, get the gridref to the flyboys and they’re to boot it, blockin’ force behind the ambush, the bushmen will have to retreat through that bottleneck between the lake and the marsh. The gunboats are to give immediate support, and they will not cause friendly casualties this time, or I will personally blow their pilots new assholes. Same to the Air Force base, max scramble. See to it.

“Vicki, got the position?”

“Sho do. Here, the dogleg.” Her close-chewed fingernail tapped down on a turn in the road, just east of the firebase.

“Joy, joy, just out of automortar range, even with rocket-assist. Damn, they haven’t gotten this close since spring. Corey, ready?”

“Reaction cohort scrambled an’ ready to roll at gate 2, suh,” he said; that would be his unit, they were on call today.

“Right. Jimbob, detach two of you SP automortars to follow.” Mounted in armored personnel carriers, 100mm weapons would thicken up his firepower nicely. “Tom, get the mineproofs rollin’ two of them, to lead off. Vicki, my personal car an’ a communications vehicle. You’re in charge while I’m gone; maximum alert, it may be a diversion fo’ an’ attack on the base. Appropriate messages to Legion HQ an the Third Airborne, this is a chance to do some long cullin’; let’s move, people, let’s go.”

Andrew took the stairs two at a time, with the other reaction-force officers at his heels. Sannie van Reenan turned to follow, pausing for a moment as the Special Tasks Section bodyguard put a hand on her shoulder.

“I know,” she said, to his silent inquiry. “But I wouldn’t miss this for the world; nor is any individual immortal or irreplaceable.”

“Ma’am, it’s our responsibility—”

“—to keep me alive, yes. Now you’ll just have to earn your pay, hey? Let’s go find a lift.”

* * *

“Twenty minutes,” Kustaa said, glancing at his wrist.

“Always seems longer, doesn’t it?” the Finn beside him said, running through a last quick check of the missile controls. The American had been a good teacher, but there had been no possibility of a test firing. “They’ll be here soon.”

“Oh?”

“Well, it’s only a half-hour drive from here to the snake base,” he said, running a finger approvingly along one of the control boxes beside the bicycle-style gunner’s seat. “Such fine workmanship, so precise and light . . . Yes, only half an hour, at high speed. Of course, they can’t come barreling down here, that’s the oldest trick there is, a relief column lured into another ambush. They’ll have to stop short of here, deploy and come in on foot with their armor backing them up. It’s roadbound, you see; a lot of small timber just west of here—there was a forest fire a few years ago. More brush, once the tall timber is down.”

Sort of fire-prone around here, Kustaa thought sardonically. The wind was from the south, moving the forest fire north along the road in the direction from which the supply convoy had come; even moving away from them the heat and smoke were punishing, backdrafts of ash and tarry-scented breathless air. By now it had spread out into a C-shaped band a mile wide, moving before the wind as fast as a galloping horse, with outliers leaping ahead a thousand yards at a time as burning branches tossed free and whirled aloft.

“Smokey the Badger will hate me,” he muttered, and shook his head at the Finn’s incomprehending look. Only YOU can prevent forest fires.

The remains of the Draka column smoldered, guttering oily flames still bringing the scorch-stink of hot metal to their position beneath the unburnt fringe of trees. A pop-popping of smallarms fire came from the north where the last survivors were holed up, punctuated by bursts of machine gunfire and the occasional grenade. Three trucks came back toward them, singed and bullet-holed but still mobile, jouncing as they left the edge of the road and moved across to the missile position. Arvid Kyosti stood on the running board of the first; it stopped near enough for Kustaa to see the neat row of bullet holes across the door on the driver’s side, and the sticky red-brown stain beneath it.

The guerrilla commander waved the other two trucks on, and they disappeared to the southwest as he hopped down, there was blood caked in his mustache, where a near miss with a blast grenade had started his nose bleeding. The truck he had been riding slid ten yards into the cover of the trees and halted; half a dozen guerrillas emerged from the bed, and began rigging planks into a ramp up which equipment could be dragged in a hurry.

“Ready?” Arvid said.

“Ready,” the American replied. “Motor transport?” he added, jerking his chin toward the other vehicles disappearing among the tall pine trees.

“A little. Get the heavier supplies and the wounded well into the woods before the snakes get here. A lot of it can be sunk in the swamp and retrieved later, tinned food and sealed boxes. You can go five, ten kilometers easy if you know the way; then we pack it out. This one’s for your missile launchers, when we need to move fast.”

Another pair of the ex-German, ex-Draka Opels passed them. “We got some useful booty, too. Snake rocket-guns.” Kustaa nodded; those were shoulder-fired recoilless weapons, a light charge throwing a rocket shell out twenty meters before the sustainer motor cut in. Very effective antiarmor weapons and good bunker busters. “Good to get something out of this.”

Arvid offered the American agent a package of cigarettes. Janissary army-issue, in a plain khaki-colored package. Kustaa inhaled gratefully; they were good, nice light mild flavor.

“You killed a fair number of them,” he said.

Arvid lit one himself and sat on the running board, heedless of the sticky remains of the driver still pooling there.

“We lost thirty dead, killed maybe that many Janissaries,” Arvid said with the flat almost-hostility that Kustaa had grown accustomed to. “It takes them, what, six to eight months to train a Janissary, from induction to posting. Replacements with this convoy, they were mostly Europeans. Germans, Czechs, Croats, some Swiss. The Janissaries are volunteers, you know? They get more than they need. We destroyed some equipment, too.” He nodded to the Dragon; four trees had fallen across it, and the crew had chosen to burn alive inside rather than emerge to face the guerrilla bullets. The turret had peeled open along the lines of its welds when the ammunition blew, but the armored cabs were outwardly intact save for scorch marks. The screams had stopped long ago.

“They have their own industry and all Europe, all Asia to replace that. As easy for them as replacing the drivers and whores.”

“Those are people you’re talking about,” Kustaa said quietly. “Have you thought of asking them if they want to join you?”

The guerrilla smiled without humor. “The snake secret police would just love that, an opportunity to get agents among us. We’ve had enough problems with that, American; my family killed themselves so they couldn’t be used as levers against me.”

Fanatic, Kustaa thought, chilled. Then: And who’s to blame him? He tried to imagine Aino giving Maila a cyanide pill crushed into her milk, raising one to her mouth with a shaking hand and tears running down her cheeks, pictured them lying together cold and twisted with blue froth on their lips . . .

That’s what I’m here to prevent, he thought. The guerrilla was speaking again.

“ . . . probably killed one, two Citizens at most. And a couple of Janissary senior NCOs, they’re harder to replace than the cannon fodder.” He glanced up. “The survivors got a message through to their HQ, the aircraft should be here any minute.” Most of the guerrillas were already fading back into the woods, to let the counterstrike fall on empty ground. “It’s up to you to make this worthwhile, American.”

A faint thupthupthup came blatting over the trees from the west, louder than the crackling roar of the forest fire. And a turbine howl, growing. “Helicopters,” Arvid said bitterly. “Damnation, I was hoping for jets . . . ”

They ducked beneath the chest-high canvas with its load of shoveled pine duff, crowded with the angular metal tubing of the launcher and the half-dozen guerrillas who would help him operate it. Arvid’s field glasses went up, and Kustaa followed suit. Three droop-nosed shapes coming in low, two thousand feet, narrow bodies and long canopies tilted down under the blur of the rotors. “Gunboats,” Kustaa muttered. He was tired, with the swift adrenaline-flush exhaustion of combat; the sound flogged him back to maximum alertness. The Alliance hadn’t put as much effort into helicopters as the Draka, and the Domination had captured most of the German research effort as well. A question of priorities: gunboats and assault transports were more useful for antipartisan work, and the Alliance had little of that, thank God. Their choppers were mostly for casualty evacuation and naval antisubmarine . . .

“Damn, air cavalry as well,” Arvid said. A broad wedge of troop transports followed the ground-support craft, but behind and much further up, tiny dark boxy shapes. “Can you take the transports?”

“No. Not unless they come a lot closer and lower. The operational ceiling’s four thousand, and—”

The transports broke east and south, sweeping in a long curve that took them away from the missiles waiting crouched by the road. Arvid’s eyes followed them. “Must be trying to get behind us at the lake, bottle us up,” he said quietly. “Most of us will get through, they don’t know that area as well as they think. A pity they’re not coming here, ten Draka in every one of them. The gunboats have Citizen pilots too, of course. Don’t miss.”

“I don’t intend to,” Kustaa replied, and turned to the crews. The missile launchers were spaced ten yards apart, for safety’s sake; the reloads well back, in case of a misfire. “Ready,” he said. “Remember, second team waits until I’ve fired. These things track thermally, we don’t want them chasing each other. Fire from behind the target only, you have to get the exhausts. Do not fire until the lock-on light comes on and the signal chimes. Then fire immediately.” Repetition, but never wasted. “Now, get the tarps unlaced, and be ready to pull them off fast.”

A flare rose from the north end of the convoy, popped into a blossom of red smoke. The gunboats circled over the dug-in Janissaries, then peeled off to run straight down the road at nearly treetop height. Whapwhapwhapwhap echoed back from the forest, the blades drove huge circles of smoke and ash billowing into the forest, fanned the embers on charred trunks into new flickers of open flame. Kustaa buried his mouth in the crook of his arm to breathe through the cloth, blinking pain-tears from his eyes and keeping the helicopters in view. They had their chin turrets deployed to either side, firing the Gatlings in brief brap-brap-brap bursts; one sawed across the wet ground in front of his position, the sandy mud spattering across the camouflage tarpaulin. Machine guns spat at them from the ground, carefully grouped away from the rockets to attract the Draka gunners’ attention.

The firing ceased as helicopters swept south past the head of the convoy and banked, turning 180 degrees like a roller skater grabbing a lamp post. Kustaa worked his tongue inside a dry mouth and reflected that even without insignia it would be obvious to anyone watching that the craft were Draka-crewed, the hard arrogant snap of the piloting was unmistakable. They were nearly back level with him—

“Now!” he shouted, sliding into the gunner’s seat. Strong hands flipped the tarp back, pumped at the hydraulic reservoir to maintain pressure, and the launch rail swung smoothly erect. The helicopters were going by in line, six hundred feet up; they wouldn’t notice, not with the smoke . . . Ring-sight up, just a gimbal-mounted concentric wire circle, adjust for range, there they were past, lay the wires on the two exhaust ports of the last gunboat’s turbines, clench left hand. The electronics whined and his feet played across the pedals, keeping the whole frame centered on the blackened circles and heat shimmer of the exhausts.

Come on, come on, he thought. God, not a vacuum tube failure, he’d tested every component individually when they assembled them, when were they going to get everything solid state, the Draka had to notice any second, even with the launchers behind them—

Ping. Pingpingping—the idiot-savant sensor in the rocket’s nose announced it had seen the thousand-degree heat source moving away from it. Someday they would have something smaller, more reliable, but for now . . .

“Clear, firing!” he shouted and his right hand clenched down on the release. The solid-fuel booster of the missile ignited with a giant ssssSSHHH and a flare that flash-blinded him even from the side; that they were going to notice for sure. No need to shout for a reload, the crew were heaving the long cylinder onto the rail. Out of the corner of his eye he could see that one of them had a jacket shredded and smoldering. He had told them to stand clear of the backblast.

But his focus stayed on the line of white fire streaking away from him, across the dazzled, spotted field his abused retinas were drawing on the sky. Spear-straight one second, two, and the flight lines of the helicopter and the rocket intersected. The explosion was an undramatic thump—the warhead was smaller than a field mortar—but the result was spectacular enough to satisfy the most demanding taste. The tail boom of the last gunboat vanished, and the shock wave of the detonation slapped the rotors from behind. Unbalanced, the helicopter flipped nosedown, and the blades acted like a giant air brake, killing its forward momentum. Killing more than that. For a fractional second it seemed to hang suspended, and then it slid two hundred yards straight down into the road.

Vision ended in a hundred-foot fireball, as fuel and munitions burned. The shock wave struck hard enough to rock the launcher on its outspread pads, drying his eyeballs with a slap from a soft hot invisible hand.

“Wait, wait!” he barked to the other team, as the orange fire-globe cleared; the next helicopter was pitching and yawing across the sky as the pilot fought to regain control. Even as he shouted, the dragon-hiss of the other launcher sounded. Kustaa watched with angry fatalism as the missile arced neatly toward its target, dipped, and crashed itself into the burning wreckage of the one he had downed; that was hotter than the exhausts, and more consistent.

“Ready,” the reload team gasped, and he felt a hand slap his boot.

“Keep the pressure up,” he rasped, working with heel and toe to control elevation. The second helicopter was travelling straight and level again, impressive piloting to regain control after getting tumbled flying low and fast like that. Extreme range, two thousand yards, dark fuselage against the black smoke of the forest fire . . .

Ping. This time he scarcely noticed the heat of launch, too focused on slitting his eyes to follow the flare. Four seconds to impact, three, Christ, I hope they don’t have rearview mirrors, two—

“Shit,” he said. The Draka helicopter waited until the last possible instant, then pulled up in a vertical climb that turned into a soaring loop. Less agile, the missile overshot and began to climb; then the sensor picked up the unvarying heat of the burning trees and began its unliving kamikaze dive. “They learn fast.”

The seat almost jerked out from underneath him as the Finns hurled themselves at the frame, ten strong backs lifting it in a bend-snatch-heave that clashed it down on the bed of the truck with a vigor that brought a wince to Kustaa’s face; electronics were just too sensitive for that sort of treatment. Suddenly he was conscious of Arvid pounding him on the back, the hard grins of the others.

“Not bad, American!” The Finn’s face was black with soot and dried blood, a gargoyle mask for white teeth and the tourmaline blue eyes. “One hit for three shots, a gunboat and two snake Citizens dead!”

Kustaa grinned in reply and fisted the guerrilla on the shoulder. “Where’ve the other two gone, that’s what I’d like to know,” he replied. Neither helicopter was in view. Run away? he thought. Quite sensible, in the face of a new weapon of unknown qualities, but unlikely. If the Domination’s elite warriors had a military fault, it was an excess of personal aggression. Nothing in the smoke-streaked blue of the sky ahead and to either side; he shook his head against the ringing in his ears and concentrated. Yes, the thuttering of helicopter blades and engine noise . . . getting louder, but where? The Finnish crew were taut and ready by the four outrigger legs of the second launcher, the snub nose of the missile tracking a little as the gunner’s toes touched the pedals.

Not worth the disruption to go and take over, he thought.

Arvid tensed and broke into a sprint. “Behind you!” he called to the missile team, running toward them, pointing frantically back into the forest. Kustaa had just enough time to twist and see the shadow of the gunboat flicker through the trees as it dove toward the ground at a near-vertical angle. It ripple-fired its rocket pods nearly above his head, and the blast as they impacted on the waiting missile was behind him. He felt it as pressure, first on his back and then as if his eyeballs were bulging, pushed from within his skull; the impact as he struck the tailgate of the truck came as a surprise, something distant in the red-shot blackness.

Vision cleared almost at once; Kustaa could see as the Finns hauled him in beside the frame of the launcher. See clearly, as if through the wrong end of a telescope, things small and sharp and far away, too far away to be worth the effort needed to move a body turned warm and liquid. There was a crater, scattered about with bits of twisted metal and softer things, the tree trunks and rocks that had absorbed much of the force, still settling and smoking. And a figure was probably Arvid, that had to be Arvid, though it was difficult to tell since it was burning. The man-thing took a step, two, fell forward; its back was open, and things moved in there, pink and gray-cooked and charred. Then the far-off scene was vanishing, into shadows and movement and somewhere the sound of weeping.

The bodies moved. Both the Special Tasks gunmen had their pistols cleared and slapped three rounds each into the topmost corpse before Andrew could react, swinging in to put themselves between Sannie and the stirring in the jumbled pile of wood and flesh.

“Wait,” the Merarch said, the staff Strategos echoed it, and soldiers all along the line of smoldering wrecks that had been a convoy came out of their instinctive crouches. There was still firing from the southeast, an occasional popping and the crackle of Draka assault rifles as the Janissaries mopped up the guerrilla rear guard. Here the loudest sound was the protesting whine of engines as the recovery vehicles dragged wreckage to the side of the road, mine-clearance teams were sweeping the verges with infinite caution, marking their progress with fluttering banners of white tape. The burial details were busy too, an excavator digging a mass trench for the dead drivers and other auxiliaries, prefab coffins for the Janissary casualties.

I hope the ceremonial does them some good, wherever, Andrew thought wryly. Actually, the flags and banners at the Legion’s homebase cemetery served the same purpose as any funeral, to comfort the living and remind them that the community lived even when its members died.

He hooked off the top layer of dead partisans with his boot, their heads would decorate stakes around the firebase, after somebody collected the ears. There were flies already; he looked up, noticing almost with surprise that the sun was still bright on a summer’s afternoon, still high above a horizon that had darkened no further than twilight. A haze of smoke obscured it, and that was the smell; smoke from burning wood, metal, fuel, explosive, rubber, bodies. At least it covered the usual stink of death, stunning his nose so that he could barely smell the liquid feces that streaked the uniforms. There was another stirring; he reached down and grabbed a jacket, heaved.

“Take him,” he snapped, and two troopers grabbed the Finn, pinned his arms and searched him with rough efficiency. Andrew resumed his measured pacing along the line of burnt-out trucks and armored vehicles. A cutting torch dropped sparks amid the tangle of alloy plate that had been an APC; melted fat was pooled beneath it, overlaid with the iridescent sheen of petroleum distillate.

Corey Hartmann was walking towards them from the head of the convoy. “That’s where the whatever-it-was was located,” he said, pointing east to a crater just beyond the cleared fire zone that edged the road. “I’ve got my people cataloging and bagging the fragments, but the gunboat didn’t leave much.”

“Can’t say’s I blame him,” Andrew said dryly, taking a look back at the much larger crater where one of the helicopters had crashed.

“There were two of them, we’re thinkin’,” Hartmann said as they turned through the burnt grass. “Seems they got the othah ’way in a steamtruck.”

“Interestin’,” Sannie van Reenan mused, narrowing her eyes. “They must’ve backpacked it in; we didn’t think they could build ’em that light an’ portable.”

“They? The Yankees?” Andrew asked sharply.

“Who else? Fo’ sure, the bushmen didn’t cobble it together in their caves. We couldn’t make somethin’ that small an’ capable, but the Alliance is ahead of us on miniature stuff.”

They came to another line of bodies in the black stubble, scattered women with gunshot wounds or the flesh-tattering multiple punctures of directional mines. One of the females lay sprawled beside a dead Janissary, her hands still gripping his harness. Young, Andrew thought, studying her face. Probably quite attractive too, before her hair burned. Another of the women sat beside her, cradling her head in her lap and rocking back and forth with a low ceaseless moaning; the live girl’s hands were swelling with their burns, skin cracked and glistening with lymphatic fluids.

“Medic, we need a medic ovah here!” he called sharply.

“Comin’, comin’!” the nearest called, a Citizen doctor, overseeing the auxiliaries who were inserting a plasma drip in a Janissary whose legs were mostly gone below the tourniquets. She stood as they eased him onto a stretcher. “Priorities heah, you knows.”

Andrew wheeled sharply, lighting a cigarette with a needlessly aggressive snap of the Ronson. “Corey,” he said flatly. “These were the replacements fo’ the Comfort Station, weren’t they?”

The Cohortarch nodded. “Out of luck, po’ bitches,” he said, glancing up from a clipboard someone had handed him.

“Well, soon’s our wounded’re out, have ’em lifted to Legion HQ as well an’ tell the duty officer to find somethin’ for them to do when they’re patched up,” he said. The other Draka nodded again.

“Only fittin’, seein’ as we were supposed to be guardin’ them,” he said with a grimace.

Andrew flicked the half-smoked cigarette to the ground, lit another. “You . . . Sergeant Dickson, right?”

A young Janissary with junior NCO’s stripes made an effort to straighten to attention; it was difficult to see his expression, since half his face was bandaged.

“Suh,” he said dully.

“Good work here, son. I’m puttin’ you down for a month’s furlough, an’ a ‘recommended’ on your promotions record.”

“Suh.” The reply was almost as dull, then a more enthusiastic “Suh!” as the words sank past pain and exhaustion.

“Dismissed,” Andrew continued; he saluted, and the Janissary began a snapping reply, winced and completed the gesture slowly but in regulation wise before wheeling and marching off.

“Now,” the Draka commander said, turning his attention to the two troopers who held the prisoner. The Finn was reviving, bore no obvious wounds beyond the battering to be expected; an adolescent, with a shock of flax-colored hair and gray eyes. No noticeable difference in dilation, so any concussion would be mild.

“You,” he said in Finnish, pidgin but understandable. “Where they go? How many?”

The partisan tried to spit, but his mouth was too dry and his lips still too numb; it dribbled down his own chin, cutting a track through soot-grime.

Andrew lowered his bunched fist, hearing the slight click as the metal inserts in his gloves touched each other. Too crude, far too crude. His eyes went to the Janissaries holding the guerrilla: Dieter, yes, one of the new replacements. German, might even have fought on the other side; they had been taking them young, toward the end. Quiet, did his work and kept to himself, very little in his personal file. The other was . . . Ecevit. Turk: there were a lot of volunteers from those provinces; hook-nosed, hairy and thick-bodied, enlisted before the War. Capable but too impulsive for promotion beyond squad leader, and—

“Ecevit,” he said musingly.

“Sar!”

“As I recall, you’ve something of a taste fo’ blond boys.” The trooper straightened, suppressing a hopeful grin. “This one looks as if he’ll wash up nicely. Bring him to Interrogation tomorrow, alive, able to talk, and in a more cooperative frame of mind. Understand, soldier?”

“Yaz, sar!” the soldier said. “Many thanks, effendi!”

The Finn must have understood some English too, because he began to scream as the two Janissaries dragged him away.

“Rough an’ ready, but effective,” Sannie van Reenan said with in a dry murmur. “Perhaps Intelligence work was your calling aftah all.”

“I’m”—he paused to look at the wreckage about them—“somewhat annoyed,” he finished. “And maybe it is, Strategos, I couldn’t fuck it up worse’n I’ve done this, could I?”

“Spare me the guilt, such a bourgeois emotion,” Sannie said, with a snap in her tone. More softly: “Actually, your jungleboys did quite well, heah.”

“That they did,” Andrew said, meeting her eyes. “You know, they really don’t care much fo’ that particular nickname.” A slow drag on the cigarette hollowed his cheeks and cast the harsh planes of his face in outline; for a moment, she could see the skull behind the flesh. “An’ frankly, neither do I.”

“Point taken,” Sannie said with a nod. “Now, about that proposition I was speakin’ of, before this little shauri started.” She waited with hunter’s patience while his mind fought back past the last two hours; he was the sort of man who concentrated with his whole being—a valuable trait if controlled. “We’re thinkin’ of formin’, hmmm, specialized hunter teams, to deal with . . . certain types of problem. Fo’ example, Yankee agents formin’ links with bushman groups. We have some information on this particular one, an’ expect more. There’ll have to be a coordinatin’ officer, and a fluctuatin’ unit structure; part Intelligence work, part bushman huntin’, part liaison. Security will have to cooperate closely, of course.”

Or present its behind for the appropriate political shrapnel, went unspoken between them.

“Ahhh, an’ this particular case would be a trial run?” Andrew asked.

Sannie smiled at the interest in his voice. “Indeed it would, nephew mine. Indeed it would.”