The Domination

Chapter Nine

CHATEAU RETOUR PLANTATION

TOURAINE PROVINCE

APRIL 1947

“Yes, it’s comin’ back. The Fritz, that was like a hundred other skirmishes,” Tanya said. “But yo, now that’s a different matter, not very often somebody hands me two kilos a’ plastique under a loaf of rye.” Her smile was slow and broad, as she looked the nun up and down. “Y’haven’t changed much, would’ve recognized you earlier, ’cept the penguin suit’s missin’. An’ the last I saw of you was you rump, goin’ away.” She laughed, a rich sound full of amusement, bracing her hands in the small of her back. “Who says Fate doesn’t have a sense of humor?” The grin turned wolfish. “We really should talk it over, see how our recollections differ. Might be interestin’. If you remembers, that is.”

Chantal and Lebrun were glancing from Marya to their owner, bewildered. Tanya was more relaxed than ever, if anything. The Pole’s naturally pale complexion had gone a gray-white color; she closed her eyes for a moment, lips moving. Then they opened again, and she planted herself on her feet.

“Yes, I remember,” she whispered.

KALOWICE

MAZOVIA

GOVERNMENT-GENERAL OF POLAND

AUGUST 17, 1943

Sister Marya Sokolowska crossed herself with her right hand and held the weeping child closer to her with her left. The cellar beneath the church was deep and wide, lined with brick; bodies crowded it, huddled together in the shuddering dark. Two dim lanterns did little more than catch a gleam on sweat-wet faces, stray metal, the sun-faded white of a child’s hair tufting out from beneath a kerchief. Their smell was peasant-rank garlic and onions and the hard dry smell of bodies that had worked long in the sun; the noise of their breathing, prayers, moans ran beneath the throbbing hammer blows of the shells. Remember their names, she reminded herself. Wojak, Jozef, Andrezej, Jolanta. Her father had been a blacksmith in a little village like this, far to the east.

There was a new burst of shells above, three in quick succession, a bang of impact on the roof, then a thud-CRASH as the next two burst in the enclosed space of the nave and on the floor itself. The whole cellar seemed to sway as the lanterns swung crazily, and fresh dust filled the air. The child hugged himself against her side, as if to fold himself inside her; Marya looked down into a wide-eyed face wet with tear tracks and trails of mucus from a running nose, and reached into her sleeve for a handkerchief.

Damn them, she thought with cold hatred, as she wiped him clean and settled down with her back to a wall, setting the child on her lap and rocking gently. Damn all the generals and dictators, all the ones who sit at tables and make marks on maps and set this loose on the people Christ died for. These folk were poor, they raised wheat to sell for cash to pay rent and taxes and ate black rye-bread themselves, and lately there had been little enough of that. The church was the grandest building in the village and the best kept, because its people gave freely; Wojak the mason had spent two days on the roof only last month. If their own cottages were bare enough, God’s house had light and warmth and beauty, and images of His mother and the holy saints, who stood between them and the awful glory of the Imminence . . .

She shook her head and glanced over at the German soldiers. They were different, controlling their fear with a show of nonchalance; she could smell them too, a musky odor of healthy young meat-fed male bodies. A dozen of them strong enough to walk, a few wounded. Most of their injured too hurt to move had suicided, a custom of the SS if they could not be evacuated.

Poor lost souls, she thought. Self-murder was certain damnation. It was hard, doubly hard for a Pole, to remember Christian charity with the hereditary enemy and oppressor. What was it Pilsudski had said? “Poor Poland: so far from God, so close to Germany and Russia.” They did not ask to be sent here.

“Politics makes strange bedfellows, Sister,” their officer said loudly, more loudly than the artillery demanded. At least, most of them did not, she thought, looking at him with distaste. An SS officer, what was his name? Hoth, yes; a Hauptscharführer, the equivalent of a captain, born near the frontier in German Silesia and with a borderer’s hatred of Poles. There was alcohol on his breath, not enough for drunkenness, but too much. In daylight, his face was ten years older than his true age.

“War makes strange alliances, you mean,” she replied in crisp Junkerclass Prussian; the Order taught its members well. “So does defeat.” Calmly, calmly, she told herself. Wrong to take pleasure in another’s downfall, even an evil man’s. Vengeance was the Lord’s, He would judge.

Marya felt the SS man’s tremor, rage, not fear. “A setback,” he said. “We still hold everything from here to the Atlantic, and Europe is rallying to us.”

There was a hard pity in the nun’s voice. “Your man-god is dead, and his promises are dust,” she said. “Now that you need us, no more slawen sin sklaven, no more slavs are slaves, eh?”

That was still a dangerous thing to say. Officially the regime in Berlin was still National Socialist; officially, Hitler’s death had been from natural causes. In fact, the generals ruled the Reich now, and German Army Intelligence had killed Hitler—for good military reasons. His attack on the Soviet Union had the left Wehrmacht overextended and his crazed refusal to allow retreat had left whole armies to be encircled and destroyed when the Draka entered the war. Now the SS were barely tolerated, only the hapless and powerless Jews still left at their mercy.

The soldier gripped her shoulder, bruisingly hard. “Is your Jew god going to protect you, sow?”

“No,” she said, looking down at the hand until he removed it. “His kingdom is not of this earth. And I am going to protect you, Herr Captain.” She turned her head and called sharply, “Tarski!”

A shock-headed peasant came shouldering through the press, with a dozen armed men at his back; there was a German pistol thrust through the belt of his sheepskin jacket. The others drew back, and the man smiled through broken brown teeth and spat on the floor near the SS officer’s boot.

“You want me to get rid of this manure, Sister?” he asked.

She shook her head. “You know the new orders from the Home Army,” she said: that was the underground command. Not that they were in a position to enforce orders, but Tarski was a good man, devout and well-disciplined. Also tough and resourceful, or he would not have stayed alive in the resistance during the last three years of German occupation.

“Get them out,” she continued. “Through the tunnel, then into the woods and northwest to the front lines. Everything is still in motion, it should be possible. Leave a force at the tunnel exit, north of the river, well hidden. I will try and rejoin them there, if God wills.”

“Is it really needful to help these swine, Sister?” Tarski said dubiously in Polish. The German soldiers glowered back at him, helpless; without the Pole they would fall into the hands of the Draka, and that meant immediate execution if they were fortunate.

“Yes, it is. Now, the tunnel.”

The SS man showed his teeth again as Tarski groped behind the blackened coal-fired heating stove. “So that was where you hid it,” he said.

The heavy metal swung back.

“You aren’t hunting partisans now, German,” she said. He glowered, then turned and led his troops into the dark hole. The man was a killer and a brute, but an experienced soldier, and every one of those was precious. The peoples of the West would not fight for Hitler, even against the Draka; now they were flocking to enlist: even an ending that left a Prussian junta in control would be paradise compared to a Draka victory. And the remnants of the SS will fight for civilization and the Church, she thought. So the Lord God turns the evil that men do to good, though they will it not. Even this Hoth was a human soul, and no soul was tried beyond what it could bear. Perhaps there was a chance of salvation even for such as him.

It had been so long, this war. So much was wrecked and broken; impossible even to imagine what peace might be like.

She turned to the others, lifting her hands and voice. “Good people,” she said, in a clear carrying tone. The murmur and rustle died, leaving the earth-deep crashcrashcrash of the shells. This is work for a priest, it isn’t my place, she thought for a helpless second. Then: Take up your cross, Marya Sokolowska, and follow Him. There were too few clergy left in Poland, too few religious of any kind. Nation and Church had always been intertwined in this land where the Madonna was Queen; the Germans knew it, and they had been unmercifully thorough.

“Good people, have courage.” We are all going to need it. Especially those of us who have to make a diversion, risking Polish lives so that those Germans can escape. “God is with us, God is our strength. Let us pray.”

“Out, out, everybody out!” Then, as if realizing the futility of English in this Polish village, the voice switched to rough pidgin German. “Raus, out! Against the wall. Hande hoche, hands up. Move, move, move!”

Marya stood, spat to clear her mouth of the dust, shook her head against the ringing in her battered ears. The shelling had been over for half an hour now, and she had been waiting for something like this since the last crackles of small-arms fire had died down. She blinked up the stairs at the helmeted silhouette and leveled rifle, raised her skirts slightly in both hands, and climbed. “I am coming,” she called in German. “Do not shoot.”

The Draka soldier backed into the center of the church as the Poles emerged, fanning them against the wall with the eloquent muzzle of her rifle. Another stood closer, prodding air with his bayonet.

“Over against the wall, face to the wall, go, go,” he barked, and caught her by one arm. Marya jerked against the hold, felt a prickle of cold at a grip as immovable as a machine’s. Coughing, blinking, the surviving villagers climbed the stairs and filed through into the central nave of the church—what had been the nave. There were gaping holes in the ceiling, wisps of smoke from the rafters, more holes in the walls, and the stained-glass windows had been sprayed as glittering fragments over rubble and the splintered wood of rood screen and pews. The hand released her with a shove that sent her staggering, and Sister Marya walked through debris that crunched and moved beneath her feet, toward the cluster of Draka soldiers by the door.

Draka. She had never seen one . . . pictures, of course. A few reliable books, but it had been a long time since anyone with any sense believed what they read in newspapers and magazines. They were standing spread about the shattered doors, helmeted heads scanning restlessly back and forth, quartering the ruined interior of the church. Mottled summer-pattern camouflage uniforms . . . helmets like shallow round-topped buckets with a flared cutout for the face. Automatic rifles hung across their chests by assault slings, most with machetelike blades in sheaths across their backs. She stepped closer, out of the spreading crowd along the south wall, and the heads moved toward her with a motion like gun turrets. Marya swallowed dry fear and continued, movements carefully slow and nonaggressive.

Four of them. One with chevrons on his—no, her—arms.

“Halte,” the woman said. To her companions: “Check if thissun’s carryin’.”

One of the troopers swung behind her. A hand gripped the heavy fabric between her shoulder blades, lifting her effortlessly into the air. The nun closed her eyes and forced herself limp as another frisked her with brisk efficiency.

“Nothin’ but penguin meat under here,” he said. “Haunches like a draft horse.”

Marya barely had time to stiffen her legs as the soldier released her; she landed staggering. The Draka decurion had removed her helmet to reveal a sweat-darkened mop of carrot-colored hair, cropped short at the sides and back; salt ran in trickles down into the narrow blue eyes that blinked thoughtfully at her. A pair of dust-caked goggles hung loose around the soldier’s muscled neck; her face was pale and freckled across the eyes where the rubber and plastic had covered it, coated with streaked dirt below. A flower had been painted around one eye, incongruous yellow and green . . . The nun could see the cords in her forearms ripple as she flicked a cigarette from a crumpled pack in the web lining of her helmet.

A finger stabbed out to silence Marya, and the Draka looked up to the gallery that ran about the interior of the church, four meters up.

“Y’all finished?” she called to the two troopers.

“Ya, nothin’, dec,” one called.

“Down.”

The Draka soldiers walked to the railing of the gallery and casually vaulted over it. One landed facing the Polish villagers along the wall, rifle ready; the other grunted slightly as the thirty-pound weight of the rocket gun across his shoulders drove him into a half-crouch.

The NCO turned to Marya, spoke something in a horribly mangled Slavic that sounded as much Ukrainian as anything else.

“Your pardon, ah, sir,” she replied, in precise British-accented English, keeping her head and eyes down. There was a string of . . . yes, ears hanging from the woman soldier’s belt. Dried and withered, some still fresh enough to show crusts of blood. Danger, hideous danger, and to her flock as well. Marya had only been in the village a few months. Most of that in hiding, until it was clear whether the new German regime’s offer of amnesty was genuine, but these villagers were hers, both as the only representative of the Church and agent for the Home Army.

“It talks,” the Draka said in mild wonder, drawing on the cigarette. There was a short high-pitched scream from behind Marya, from the Poles. The NCO looked up sharply, and walked past the nun with a brisk curse as Marya spun on one heel.

The soldier who had landed facing the villagers was pulling a girl out of the line by her hair. Walking out, rather, with one gloved hand locked in the tow-colored mass spilling out of her kerchief; a red-faced toddler ran after her beating small fists on the soldier’s leg and yelling. The trooper grinned, scooped up the child and dumped him in another woman’s arms.

“Hold the brat,” he said.

The mother screamed again as his hand gripped her dress at the neck and pulled, the heavy coarse wool stripping away like gauze as the Draka worried her free of the homespun. There was a growl from the villagers, and the other trooper standing near swung her Holbars back to quiet them. Then the decurion was behind the would-be rapist.

“Goddamit, Horn-dog!” she shouted, and swung her boot in a short arc that ended in a solid thump against his buttocks. The man spun, snarling, then straightened as the NCO continued the tongue-lashing.

“We’re here to pen this meat, not hump it. Freya’s tits, Horn-dog, you keep thinkin’ with you dick an’ we all gonna get kilt. Y’wanna ride that pony, come back an’ get it after we’re stood down.”

“Ah, Dec—” The Polish girl scuttled past him, weeping, rags of her dress held over her breasts.

“Shut the fuck up, dickhead!” She shook her head, muttering: “Men, all scrotum an’ no brain.” To Marya: “All right, penguin”—the nun puzzled at the word, then remembered the black-and-white of her habit—“what’s down in the crypt?”

“A few sick and wounded. German soldiers, but they are unarmed and—”

“Good,” the Draka grunted. She drew a grenade from her harness, a stick-grenade with a globular blue-painted head, and tossed it spinning underhand to the woman who stood by the door to the cellar. That one caught it out of the air with a quick snapping motion, pulled the tab and dropped it down the stairs. She kicked the heavy trapdoor down with a hollow boom that almost hid the thump and hiss of the detonation below.

“Shee-it, be mo’ careful with them-there things,” she added nervously to the section leader.

“It heavier than air,” the decurion replied, and continued to Marya: “Nerve gas.”

The nun started with shock, and missed the next few words. Her mind was with the helpless men below, the sudden bone-breaking convulsions, death like a thief in the dark.

“ . . . find the rest.” The decurion stepped closer and slapped her across the face, hard enough to start her nose bleeding. “Wake up, bitch. Ah said, is this lot all of ’em?”

“No . . . no, sir. There are others, many others; they have dug shelters under their houses.”

“Sa. Can you talk ’em out? We’s sure not goin’ down lookin’.” Unspoken: Otherwise we’ll blast or gas anything belowground.

“Yes! Yes, please, they are harmless people.”

“People?” The Draka grinned. “Wild cattle, masterless an’ fair game. Yo! Meatmaker!” The woman who had gassed the cellar raised the muzzle of her assault rifle in acknowledgment. “Take Horn-dog’n this wench, check with the Tetrarch, ’n then talk the rest of the meat out of their holes. She can translate. Get ’em all back here. If’n she starts fuckin’ around, expend her an’ the locals both. Speakin’ a fuckups, Horn-dog, remember this is still combat even if they ain’t shootin’.”

The decurion jabbed Marya in the stomach with her own weapon. “You hear?” A nod. She gave the nun another slap across the face, stunning her and wheeling her half around. The gunshot sound echoed through the ruined church, amid a dead silence broken only by the naked girl’s sobbing.

“Yes, sir.”

“Bettah. Tell these-here t’sit, facin’ the wall. Hands on heads. Anybody moves, we kill ’em; any resistance we kill ’em all. Do it, bitch.”

“What’s that?” the one called Horn-dog said.

Marya turned with the basket in her hands, willing the fluttering in her stomach to quiet. This was the last house, a Jewish merchant’s before the War; the cellar had been crowded. And the stores had been there, just enough time to get what she needed, passed to her in the dark and confusion.

O Jesu, O Maria, she thought. I had to set the timers by touch, please let them be right. A mechanical timer, improvised, needing only a strong shake to start its countdown.

“Food,” she answered. “Fresh bread, from this morning. Cheese, sausage, vodka. For your officer.”

“Hmmm,” he said, reaching under the cloth and pulling out a small round loaf of bread, tearing at it with square white teeth. His other hand closed on her breast, kneading and pinching at the nipple through the heavy serge cloth. Marya clenched her teeth to endure the pain passively, the anger like the flush of fever; the man had been putting his hands on her all through the hour it had taken to clear the village; her thighs and buttocks and breasts would be covered with bruises tomorrow. And he would have thrown her down and taken her if the other soldier had not been present to hold him to his work.

Fear seasoned the rage. He was a big man, two inches over six feet and twice her weight but that was not all; she had seen him open doors by slamming a fist through solid pine planking, kill a resisting villager by crushing in his head with the edge of one palm. Stronger than any man she had ever met, and more than strong, quicker than a cat and as graceful. She knew that Draka were trained to war virtually from babyhood in military boarding schools, but meeting the results in the flesh was something else again. Compared to these, the Nazis were nothing, cheap reproductions from a cut-rate plant, a child’s flattery, a slave’s imitation.

The other soldier came back into the kitchen, kicking a splintered chair aside. She sneezed at the dust; the air was heavy with it, murky with the dim twilight. A basket of eggs had smashed in a corner some time ago, adding its tinge of sulfur to the reek.

“Right, all clear,” the woman soldier said. Her hand blurred, and came away with half of the bread the man had been eating. “Now we report.” She looked at the hand mauling the nun’s bosom. “An’ no, we cain’t take time off until we do. Shitfire, Horn-dog, y’got laid jus’ last night, wait half an hour, hey?”

“Some’s need it more than others,” he said, releasing Marya and shoving her toward the door. “You gets it by killin’, Meatmaker.”

She shook her head. “You check the basket?”

“Shorely did.”

“Well,” she continued amiably. “Horn-dog, you’re as good a fighting man as any of us in the Tetrarchy—when somebody’s shootin’ at you—an’ you’ve been in it from the start, an’ yous still a private. Gotta learn more self-control, my man, if’n you wants to make monitor. Sides, thissun isn’t even good-lookin’.”

“Never had me a penguin before,” he said. They walked through into the gardens, feet sinking into the sandy dirt and sparse grass.

“Just another wench, when you’ve gotten her stripped an’ spread.” She kicked Marya lightly in the leg. “Hey, wench. You been tupped any?”

The nun clenched her hands into fists inside the voluminous sleeves of her habit. “No, sir,” she ground out.

“So, Horn-dog: mutton this old, still virgin, she’ll have a cunt like concrete an’ a cherry made a’ rhino hide.” A section of Draka came trotting down the laneway. Meatmaker hailed them: “Bro’s, seen Tetrarch de la Roche?”

“With the Cohortarch, sis. North a ways; past the jungleboys’ bridge a bit, laager. Cain’t miss it.”

The vehicle park had been established just north of the little stream, in a stretch of green common. A sprawl of more substantial houses lay to the north, probably the homes of the little town’s professionals, a few traders, perhaps a doctor and notary; the manor of the local landlord beyond that. The heat of the day had faded to a mild warmth, and the soft pink glow on the tops of the poplars was dying; the wind blew in from the northwest, smelling of green and dust, spicy. The first stars were out, over toward the east; the glow of burning Warsaw was brighter, its smoke a black stain spreading like an inverted triangle against the constellations.

“Odd how long the light lasts after sunset, Johnny,” Tanya murmured. After ten, and still not full dark. “Might like to try an’ paint it.” They had been switched down to Inactive status, ready-reserve and available in a crisis, but otherwise only expected to guard their own perimeter. The High Command would move them back when the transport situation improved.

She called down past her crossed legs into the interior of the tank: “Sue, the camera, hey?” A protesting mutter; the gunner, for reasons of her own, preferred to sleep on the reclining couch beside the weapon. The heavy Leica was tossed up through the hatch and Tanya snatched it out of the air, a little resentful of the carelessness. Barring some Russian icons, this was the best piece of loot she had come by in the last year, taken from the corpse of a Fritz military correspondent.

Sue might be less surly about it . . . Of course, it was a private matter, and so outside rank. Ah, well, at least in the Citizen Force I’m not expected to hold the troops’ hands while they get ready for bed. Janissaries had to be watched over constantly.

Tanya stood, focused, quartered the horizon in a swift click click click until the roll was finished. Then she laid the instrument aside, relaxed, tried to open herself to the scene; the record could never be more than a prompt, to help the heart see again and the fingers interpret. Even now they itched for the feel of the materials, worn brushes, smooth nubbliness of canvas, her nose for the smell of linseed oil and turpentine. But first you had to get out of the way, let the moment just be, a perfect thing out of time. It proved difficult, even once she had let her mind sink out of the iron analytical command-logic mode.

“Sort of a shimmerin’, these summer evenin’s,” the infantry Tetrarch said, leaning one elbow back against the barrel of the coaxial grenade launcher. He twisted his face back up over his shoulder to look at her, a pale glimmer of blond hair and teeth in what was quickly becoming full dark. “Good subject . . . Plannin’ on another Archon’s Prize?”

How to paint it, ahhh . . . Sunsets had always been a favorite subject of hers; there was an inherent sadness to them, a melancholy. But this was different, without the harsh-edge sharpness of the Levant where she had been raised. A long way from home. Memories intruded, of other evenings. Home, Syria Province, sunsets so different, swifter, more . . .

. . . dramatic, yes, that’s the word. Images flitting. School, that had been an old monastery up in the Lebanon range, renovated after the conquest. That evening with her first lover, Alexandra . . . Freya, was that a decade ago now? So alien, that creature self of fifteen years. Just a day like so many others, yet still unbearably vivid with the intensity that only great happiness or perfect despair can lend to recollection. Bright dust and sweat in the palaestra, back to the baths and companionable gossip among their classmates, then a ramble hand-in-hand through the nature preserve outside the walls, winding tiny wild hyacinths into each other’s hair.

Memory: the room, and the pale blue flowers against a foam of dark curls, that javelin leaned carelessly by the window ledge, a loose thong casting a black shadow on the cream silk coverlet. Laughing amber eyes in the tanned young face, pale rose-colored wine in the cup they shared, the taste a little too sweet, fingers touching on the cool glass. Through the window, the huge slope of the mountains in tawny-gold rock and pine and green-gray olives, falling away beyond to a sea like a dark-purple carpet, thread-edged with white surf. The sun hovering, a giant disk of hot gold at the head of a flickering bronze highway on the water. Smell of lavender and bruised thyme . . .

Damn. She should be thinking of new subjects. And too much nostalgia verged on self-pity, a despicable emotion.

Tanya paused a moment, shook herself back to the present, made a dismissive gesture. “Oh, the Prize,” she said. “Baldur knows, all that thing does is ruin your reputation with everyone worth listenin’ to; you should see the crowd a’ antiquated fuzzles on the panel of judges.” Long surging roar from the crowd and the hard prickle of the gold laurel wreath—“I’m thinkin’ of givin’ up pure landscape anyways. Worked out. Contemplatin’ a series on the War; not battle scenes, just ah, things that have the essence of it, eh? Direct experience—” She stood and stretched. “Speakin’ of which, you bunkin’ alone tonight, Johnny?”

“Mmm, ’fraid not. Sorry.”

She shrugged; it was no great matter. Anyway, should be able to wangle a visit with Edward when we’re pulled back into Army Corps reserve.

“I suppose we should push a patrol or two a little north; it’s part of the built-up area an’ our responsibility.” She blew a smoke ring. “On the othah hand, the jungleboys seem to be fresh an’ full of beans,” she added, looking to the noise and light from the bridging team a thousand meters upstream to the east. They were combat engineers from the Seventh Janissary; the prefabricated steel sections were in place, but the sappers were shoring and reinforcing even as the bulk of the legion pounded across. Welding torches blinked, trailing blue-white sparks; concrete mixers growled; a low tracked shape dug its ’dozer blade into the earth and bellowed. The combat elements were pouring over the river, a metallic stream of headlights snaking up from the south, speed more important than the unlikely chance of a Fritz air raid; there were antiaircraft cannon dug in around the bridge, but that was just doctrine. Six-wheeled Peltast APCs full of serf riflemen, or towing heavy mortars and 155mm gun-howitzers with the barrels rotated back and clamped over the trails.

“Bettah them than us,” she said. The other officer nodded. Any fighting north of here for the next few weeks would be a toe-to-toe slugging match, absorbing the Fritz counterattack: high-casualty work. Artillery was the greatest killer on any battlefield, and positional warfare made you a fixed target for the howitzers to grind up. Just the sort of thing the serf legions were recruited for . . .

As if to point the thought, the sky growled behind them to the south. Soldier reflex tensed muscles, sent a few of the troopers working on vehicle maintenance or just strolling flat on their bellies. Then training identified it, outgoing fire from the Guard’s own heavy-support batteries, keeping the enemy occupied while the Janissaries pushed forward and dug in. Bombardment rocket, a single long streak of white-orange fire across the bowl of the sky and a lightning flicker northward where it impacted.

“Ranging round,” Johnny said.

A Citizen Force armored legion included fifty mobile launchers, each an eight-tube box on a modified tank chassis firing a 200mm round. One or two to establish the fall of shot, and then . . . The sky above them lit, a rippling magenta curtain that howled like the Wild Hunt, huge moaning that drowned all other sound and left retinas blinking with streaked afterimages. Thirty seconds of it, as four hundred rockets ripple-fired at quarter-second intervals. Then the northern skyline lit with the impacts, a strobing flicker that threw lurid orange shadows on the smoke plumes, and a bitter chemical scent drifting downward.

“There must be some natural law that war has to smell bad,” Tanya said, when the ringing had died a little from her ears. “And damage your hearin’. Those yours, Johnny?”

She nodded toward three figures walking toward them through the parked vehicles. The Tetrarch peered and nodded.

“Must’ve got the rest of the locals rounded up an’ penned,” he said. To the troopers, as they came to the scarred skirt-plates of the Baalbeck Belle: “All done?”

The woman of the pair nodded. “Ya. Sent those Tetrarchy D types back to they mommas, ‘n’ corralled the last lot a’ the meat ourselves. No problems.”

The man prodded the figure in the tattered nun’s habit forward. “Thissun got a present fo’ you, suh. Somethin’ in the way of fresh food.”

Tanya puffed a smoke ring, and John de la Roche snorted amusement; these Europeans never seemed to learn that they had nothing to bribe their conquerors with, since all they had including themselves belonged to the Draka anyway. Still, it would be welcome. Out here at the sharp edge not even the Domination’s armed forces could maintain a luxurious ration scale; there was plenty of transport but the roads imposed an absolute limitation. Ammunition first, then fuel, then food and medical supplies, that was the priority; the food was standardized ration bars mostly, unless they could plug into the local economy.

The nun stepped closer, offering the bundle with a curious archaic gesture, one hand beneath and one in the shadowed basketwork. The infantry officer leaned down to take it, handed it up to Tanya where she lay beside the commander’s hatch. “Here, you artists need to keep up your strength.”

“Excuse me, please, respected sirs?” The Draka turned to look at the Polish nun, and she braced herself visibly under the cool carnivore eyes. “Please what is to happen to my . . . to the people of this village?”

Well, this one has spirit, at least, Tanya thought. There was a small pivot-mounted searchlight by the hatch; she toed the switch and turned the light down onto the other’s face with her foot. The bright acintic light washed the flat square Slav face, and a hand flung up to guard her eyes from the hurtful brilliance. The delicate colors vanished from its cone, left black and white and gray, stark and absolute. Might as well answer, the Draka mused. Impertinence to ask, instead of silently awaiting orders, but it would be unfair to expect a Pole to know serf etiquette. Yet.

“That depends, wench,” Tanya said. She rummaged in the basket; the nun tensed, then relaxed as a length of sausage emerged. “If the front moves on quick, they’ll probably be left to work the land fo’ a while; saves on transport space an’ such. Until the Security people arrive, an’ the serf traders an’ settlers, after the war. Does the fightin’ last long, the able-bodied’ll be rounded up fo’ work on ’trenchments and such, the rest culled an’ killed, saves feedin’ ’em.” A bite at the kielbasa. “They aren’t you concern, wench; put you mind to y’own fate. Life, most like, short of interpreters as we are.”

The other’s hand dropped as she slitted her eyes against the searchlight and glared back at the Draka. Tanya knew the nun could see nothing, nothing but a black outline rimmed in hazed white. And the hulking scarred steel presence of the tank, so much more massive than its mere size, intimidating as few other things on earth were. Yet there was little fear in the slow nod, more as if the Pole were confirming something to herself. The trooper beside her started to call to his officer and then the sky lit again with the whistling howl of dead metal racing to bring death to living men, an agony impersonal and remote, touching everything beneath with a limning outline of orange fire.

“—she’s useful, Horn-dog, so doan’ do anythin’ permanent.” The Tetrarch was chuckling when she could hear again.

“Hey, give me a hand, Meatmaker, hey?” the soldier said, an ugly panting rasp in his voice.

The other trooper laughed indulgently. “Well, y’saved mah life just last week, an’ I swore I’d pay you back,” she said, and gripped the nun, spun her around, tossed her staggering back to the man.

Tanya drew meditatively on her cigarette as she watched the two Draka toss the Polish woman back and forth through the puddle of the searchlight’s beam. Another bite of the kielbasa, tough and stringy and heavy with garlic; she dug at a fragment stuck between her teeth with a fingernail. Still not panicking, she thought with interest; the nun was openly afraid now, but fighting to stay on her feet and dodging for what she thought were openings, her cries involuntary gasps of effort and not screams. Meatmaker’s face, halfway between boredom and a cruel laughter directed as much at her companion as their victim. The man’s . . . his mouth caught the light, open and wet, teeth shining liquid. Curling with the same dreadful sidelong desire that left no thought behind his eyes, flat and hot and sick, the eyes of a rutting dog.

Satyriasis, Tanya thought. Godawful thing to be stuck with. Although she remembered reading somewhere that most males were like that for the initial year or so after puberty set in, hormones five or six times an adult’s level. A few never got over that thirteen-year-old’s first wild realization that they were in a world of serf women who could not tell them no, fantasy become reality. Of course, even then, most households wouldn’t tolerate this sort of crude field expedient; a certain degree of privacy was expected . . . A scream, short and breathless; the two troopers had the nun’s habit up around her neck and over her head in a floppy black bag, pinning her arms; Meatmaker was whirling her like a top, while the other’s hands tore at the odd clumsy undergarments with scrabbling haste.

And most wenches back in the Domination didn’t kick up this sort of fuss, either; willing to please, or meekly submissive. She remembered walking into her father’s study once, looking for a book; it had been a rainy October’s morning, the water pattering down the long windows in streaks that blurred the tapping of branches. The housegirl’s giggles and sighs scarcely louder than the crackling of the burning cedarwood in the fireplace; they had been standing in front of it, Pa behind her with his face in the angle of her neck and shoulder, and his hands just lifting her breasts out of her blouse. He had not seen her, but the wench had. Smiled at her as she stroked the master’s thinning blond hair, and Tanya had backed out soundlessly, humiliatingly conscious of her burning cheeks.

Odd, how the memory seems so shocking, she thought. Still, I was twelve. Girls get flighty and fanciful around that age.

Down in the churned dirt by the treads of the tank Horn-dog put his hand between the nun’s shoulder blades and pushed. She lurched, stumbled, fell forward and caught herself on her shrouded hands; Meatmaker stepped forward and planted a boot on the bundle of cloth, pinning it to the earth.

“C’mon, wench,” she said, and leaned forward. “My friend’s got somethin’ fo’ you.” Her hands closed on the other’s waist and jerked her forward, leaving the Pole standing bent double with her hands between her feet.

“All right, Horn-dog, can’t no friend do better for you than that,” she continued jovially, with a slap-pat on Marya’s buttocks. “Go to it.”

Tanya folded her arms and flicked ash off her cigarette, moving the searchlight with her toe to cover the two soldiers. Thick legs, she thought idly. Broad bottomed, as well, peasant build. The genitals were rather pretty, unstretched and neatly formed like a teenager’s, nestled in curling dark blond hair.

“Best-lookin’ part of the human anatomy,” de la Roche said, as if to echo her thought.

Below her she could hear the clink and rustle as the infantryman undid the clasps of his webbing belt, could hear his breathing, hoarse and rapid. What an absolutely impoverished erotic imagination he must have, she thought with mild contempt. Pursuing a little dry friction and a few seconds of second-rate pleasure as if it were the Grail . . . Freya knows, men tend to be creatures of reflex, but this one is a caricature. Thank the nonexistent gods I was born the right gender.

He stepped up behind the nun and opened her vulva with a brutal drive of paired thumbs; she screamed then, a shrill sound loud enough to hear through the muffling cloth. An exquisitely uncomfortable ten minutes for you, wench, Tanya thought. Wasteful way to treat a serf, of course. Raw brutality was a crude tool of domination, only occasionally useful unless you were planning to destroy the individuals in question. Besides . . . how had Pa put it? “The whip is more effective as a threat than a reality; and don’t forget, using it changes you, too.” She bent to pick up the basket, rummaging for the bottle of vodka; a drink would do no harm, even though they were not far enough into rear echelon to risk getting drunk. A pity; it would be good to completely relax. There was a click and buzz from the radio within as she stooped over the hatch, a ticking—

Ticking?

“Down, down, everybody down!” she shouted, as her hand swept the wicker container forward over the north-pointing prow of the tank. Dropped flat as it left her fingers, ignoring the projections that gouged and bit, to hug herself close to the steel, gloved fingers scrabbling. De la Roche shouted as it whipped past his ear, turning fast enough to blur in the beginning of the leap that would take him to the ground, infantry reflex to seek the safety of soft earth. Glaring and helpless, Tanya followed the arching parabola of the bomb; her grip on the handle had been light, no time to firm it up . . . the basket turned slowly as it flew, shedding bread and sausages, wedges of cheese and a square bottle. Hesitated at the top of its arc, dropped. Down, accelerating, dropping below the slope of the Belle’s glacis plate and—

WHUMP.

A huge, soft sound, then an invisible hand lifted her and slammed her down again on the unyielding metal, bouncing, the adrenaline rush slowing the involuntary movement of her head until she could feel the movement of her neck swinging up, flexing down again, impact and the sagging pull on muscle and skin as inertia tried to strip them from her skull and spread the soft tissues like a pancake. Watching de la Roche caught in midair by the blast, the pillow of compressed air slapping the precise leopard curve of his jump into a thrashing fall that ended in a landing with one arm bent beneath him at an angle that made her mind wince even then. There was a moment of sliding, as if time were a film that had slipped the sprockets of the projector and now it was catching again.

De la Roche forcing himself to his knees, to his feet, hand clamping an upper arm where bone fragments pushed through his uniform, white about the mouth. Horn-dog rolling on the ground, clutching at genitals his fall had driven into the dirt. The other trooper lying on her back, blood glistening in her hair where skull had met track link. Tanya blinked, and felt particles of grit turning under the lids where the explosion had sandblasted them into her eyeballs. Saw the nun moving north in a desperate blind scrabbling crawl, up on her hands and knees as her head emerged from the cocoon of fabric, then running with the skirts around her waist and white legs twinkling in the dark.

“Alive!” she shouted; the reaction squad was already pounding up, and one had swept his Holbars to his shoulder. “Alive, I want answers, alive.” They dashed forward, skirmish-spread, overhauling the fugitive as if she was standing still. Then muzzle flashes low to the ground, the flickers of light showing figures rising from concealed rifle pits, dirt cascading off the covers. One of the Draka infantry stopped as if she had run into an invisible wall, flopped boneless to the ground. The others dove to earth and returned fire, and the turret whirred and began to turn under her.

CRACK as the world broke away from the axis of the main gun, afterimages strobing across her retinas. Her hand stabbed through the hatch, jerked the microphone free of its clamps; she spat blood from tooth-cut lips.

“Two an’ three, move forward in support, all other units, no firin’ except on confirmed targets.” Too many other Draka units moving around—it would set Loki himself to laughing if they started shooting each other up now. Her thumb pressed the hold button down, and she raised her head to shout to the infantry. “Wait for support, no chargin’ off into the dark!”

Tanya hawked and spat blood, felt the iodine taste and stream pouring from her nose. She keyed the mike again: “Senior Decurion Smythe, report to me immediately.”

“ . . . dead meat by the time we got ’em,” the monitor said, and kicked the body of the Pole at his feet; bone snapped with a moist muffled crunching. “Never saw hide’r hair of the penguin.”

Tanya grunted; it was less painful than speaking. A starshell went off overhead with a slight pop and bathed the cohort’s laager with its blue-white metallic glare; the Senior Decurion looked away to preserve her night vision. Tetrarch de la Roche was leaning against the Belle as a medic set the fractured humerus of his arm; his eyes were closed, face expressionless as fat drops of sweat trickled down his face.

Meatmaker raised her bandaged head from her knees, where she sat before the body of her squadmate. “You wants a patrol, search the houses, maybe-so get a few ears fo’ Horn-dog?” she said, in a hopefulness muffled by gauze.

Tanya inserted a cigarette between her lips with care and glanced northward herself, shaking her head. Pointless, she thought, forcing down a sudden rage that left a twist of nausea in her gut. Pointless to risk Citizen lives in this sort of scuffle. Reprisals pointless; it would be nothing but killing to soothe her injured self-esteem, and a von Shrakenberg did not lie to herself that way. Likewise interrogation of the villagers—the Guard was not trained for it, the only language they had in common with the remaining peasants was mangled fragments of German . . . waste. Let the specialists do it. Frustration tasted like vomit at the back of her throat.

“Senior Decurion,” she began, forcing the words clear and crisp through the pain of torn lips.

“Cohartarch?”

“At first light put in a tetrarchy with support to flush those buildings to the north.”

“Yes, Cohortarch.”

“Notify all troops: no natives within the perimeter an’ nobody but assigned guards outside durin’ darkness. No group smaller than five in daylight, fully armed.”

“At once, Cohortarch.”

“An’ get on the blower to Legion. To Centurion De Witt. Security Centurion, antipartisan liaison section. My compliments to the Centurion, an’ tell him”—she threw the cigarette to the dirt, ground it out with a savage twist of her bootheel, looked around—“that Sector VI may now be considered . . . active.”

* * *

“Are you all right, Sister?” the partisan whispered anxiously.

Marya nodded, one hand covering her mouth and the other gripping the bark of the tree beside her. She nodded, heaved, stumbled around the tree and fell to her hands and knees. Vomit spattered out of her mouth, thin and sour from an empty stomach; she coughed, spat, wiped her mouth and spat again, clung to the rough surface of the tree as another spasm gripped her. The nun pulled a handkerchief from the sleeve of her habit and wiped at her face, conscious of the sick-sweet stink of the vomitus spattering the ground. Another smell added to the sweat and dirt and fluids ground in from days spent crouching in the cellar and tending the sick . . . The thought of a bath beckoned like salvation.

Seconds, she thought, trying to control the cold shaking in her arms and legs. A few seconds earlier and she would have died, torn to tatters of raw bone and meat by the explosive charge. Fresh pain lanced up from her crotch as she dragged herself erect along the trunk of the pine, and she could feel hot wetness trickling down the insides of her thighs from her ruptured hymen. A few seconds later and she would have died with the Draka pumping inside her, lubricated with blood, bent double and blinded in the stifling tent of her habit.

Marya recalled the man’s eyes as he had torn at her clothing, the blank shallowness of them, like chips of blue tile. To die like that, a thing used by a thing, a knothole and an animal . . . her body heaved again. Then she found herself gripping the wood hard enough that blood and feeling left her fingers, glad of the distraction. Hate was a different nausea, shrill-sick and twisting under the ribs, making her head throb. Visions from the Inferno and Hieronymus Bosch moved behind her eyelids, eternal torment for the evildoer, burning, flaying, rotted with insects crawling through immortal diseased flesh—

Shuddering, she forced a different picture into the forefront of her mind, the Savior on the cross. Lord, they flogged you until the ribs showed, beat nails through your hands and feet, stabbed you in the side with a spear, and when you cried out for water they gave you vinegar to drink. As you died you called out to the Father to forgive them.

“Your way is hard, Lord,” she whispered to herself, “I will try.” To the guerrilla whose concern she could sense through the near-absolute darkness of the nighted woods: “I can walk, my child, but turn your back for a moment, please.”

He obeyed, moving off a few paces with an embarrassed mutter. Marya fumbled up her skirts, improvised a pad from the handkerchief and the rags of her undergarments to absorb the flow of blood. She winced again at the pressure of cloth on the bruised, torn flesh, and distracted herself with the prayers the Rule prescribed when it was necessary to touch the private parts; the words served well enough to take the mind off pain.

“Come,” she said, forcing discomfort down into the dark well where she kept fear and loneliness and despair, waiting until there was time to deal with them. She looked up, hunting stars to confirm the map in her mind. “We’ve got a fair distance to cover and shelter to find before dawn.”