The Domination

Chapter Ten

NEW YORK CITY

FEDERAL CAPITAL DISTRICT

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

DECEMBER 31, 1975

“Should auld acquaintance be forgooot—”

“I hate that bloody song,” Frederick Lefarge muttered, taking another sip of his drink. The room was hazy with smoke, and flickering light and music came through the door from the dance floor; the room smelled of tobacco and beer. More and more of the patrons at the bar were linking arms and swaying, attempting a Scottish accent as they sang.

It reminds me of Andy. Forget that.

O’Grady’s was supposed to be picturesque, a real Old New York hangout and Irish as all hell. The wainscotting was dark oak, and the walls of the booths were padded in dark leather as well; there were hunting prints and landscapes on the walls. It was crowded as all hell tonight, and noisy, but Cindy had swung a private booth just for them; some noncom friend of her dad’s ran the place. The food was better than passable, and the sides of the booth made conversation possible. There was a viewscreen on the opposite wall, showing the crowds outside in Jefferson Square, and the big display clock on the Hartmann Tower. Ten minutes to midnight, and the screen began flashing between views. Different cities all over the Alliance, Sao Paulo, London, Djakarta, Sydney. The Lunar colonies—they could almost be called cities themselves, now—and the cramped corridors of the asteroid settlements. A shot from low orbit, the great curve of Earth rolling blue and lovely.

“Don’t be such a grouch, honey,” Cindy said, and nibbled at his ear. Lefarge laughed and put an arm around her waist, always a pleasant experience. “You were happy enough after dinner.”

“There were just the two of us then,” he said.

“Grrr, tiger!” Another nibble on his ear. “And I’ve got some news for you, darling.”

“What?” he asked, raising the glass to his lips.

Cindy Guzman had had only two glasses of white wine with seltzer, but there was a gleam in her eye he knew of old. She was sitting in a corner of the booth, looking cool and chic in the long black dress with the pearl-and-gold belt. Her legs were curled up under her; the glossy dark-red hair fell in waves over her shoulder, and the diamond-shaped cutout below the yoke neck showed the upper curve of her breasts. The glass in his hand halted and he sat motionless, utterly contented just to look. She gave off an air of . . . wholesomeness, he thought, which was strange; you expected that word to go along with some thick-ankled corn-fed maiden from the boonies, not the brightest and sexiest woman he had ever known. It was like a draught of cool water, like . . . coming home.

“Miss?” Lefarge started slightly. It was old Terrance Gilbert, the proprietor, a CPO on one of Cindy’s dad’s pigboats back when. He gave the young woman a look of fond pride and Lefarge one of grudging approval. “Will there be anything else, Miss?”

“Not right now, Chief,” Cindy said. “Happy New Year.”

“And to you, Miss. Sir.” Lefarge was in uniform tonight, the major’s leaves on his shoulders; the owner nodded before he disappeared into the throng.

“Finish your drink, darling,” Cindy said.

He sipped. “What was the news, honey?” he asked.

“I’m pregnant.”

He coughed, sending a spray of brandy out his nose; Cindy thumped him on the back with one hand and offered a handkerchief with the other.

“The devil you say!”

“Dr. Blaine’s sure,” she said tranquilly. “Aren’t you happy? We will have to move up the wedding, of course.”

She flowed into his arms, and they kissed. Noise and smoke vanished; so did time, until someone blew a tin horn into his ear. Cindy and he broke from their clinch and turned, he scowling and she laughing. It was Marya and her current boyfriend—cursed if I can remember his name . . . yeah, Steve. Wish she’d pick a steady—in party hats and a dusting of confetti.

“It isn’t 2400 yet,” Marya said, sliding into the other side of the booth. Her face was flushed, but only he could have told she had been drinking; there was no slur in her voice, and the movements were quick and graceful.

She’s a damned attractive woman, Lefarge thought. In a strong-featured athletic way, but there were plenty of men who liked that. Plenty who liked her intelligence and sardonic humor, as well, but she seemed to sheer off from anything lasting. Hell, this isn’t the time to worry.

They all turned to watch the screen again; it was coming around to time for the countdown to midnight. It blanked, and there was a roar of protest from the crowd, redoubled when an NPS newscaster appeared. Sheila Gilbert, he remembered; something of a star of serious news analysis, a hook-nosed woman with a patented smile. She looked . . . frightened out of her wits, he thought suddenly. And it took something fairly hairy to do that to a professional like Gilbert. There was a sudden feeling like a trickle of ice down his stomach to his crotch: fear. Lefarge and Marya glanced at each other and back at the screen.

“ . . . President Gupta Rao of the Progressive Party has committed suicide.”

“Shit!” Lefarge whispered.

“I repeat, the President of the Indian Republic has shot himself; the body was found in his office only two hours ago. The suicide note contains a confession, confirmed by other sources in the Indian capital . . . ” More shouting from the customers, but less noisy; Lefarge strained to hear, and then the volume went up. “ . . . Hindi Raj militants have documentary proof that OSS agents were responsible for planting the information which led to the Hamburger Scandal and the disgrace of late presidential candidate Rashidi. Riots have been reported in Allahabad and—”

It was a full ten seconds before Lefarge felt Cindy’s tugging on his arm. Gently, he laid a finger over her mouth and looked at his sister.

“We’d better—”

“Attention!” The civil-defense sigil came on the viewer, cutting into the newscast. “Alliance Defense Forces announcement. All military personnel Category Seven and above please report to your duty stations. I repeat—”

DRAKA FORCES BASE ANTINOOUS

PROVINCE OF BACTRIA

DOMINATION OF THE DRAKA

JANUARY 14, 1976: 1500 HOURS

“ ’Tent-hut!”

The briefing room was in the oldest section of the base, built fifty years before, when this had been part of newly conquered northern Afghanistan. Built for biplanes, ground-support craft dropping fragmentation bombs and poison gas on the last badmashi rebels in the hills, when the Janissary riflemen had flushed them out. Yolande blinked at the thought: two generations . . . her own parents squalling infants, way down in the Old Territories. Her birthplace still outside the Domination . . . A few banners and trophies on the walls, otherwise plain whitewash and brown tile.

Fifty years from biplanes to the planets, Yolande thought as she saluted. Not bad.

“Service to the State!”

“Glory to the Race!” A crisp chorus from every throat.

“At ease.” The hundred-odd pilots sank back into their chairs.

The hooting of the wind came faintly through the thick concrete walls, and the air was crackling dry. There was very little outside that you would want to see. Pancake-flat irrigated farmland hereabouts, near the Amu Darya, and the climate was nearly Siberian in winter; even more of a backwater than Italy, unless you were interested in archaeology. The hunting was not bad, some tiger in the marshes along the river, and snow leopard in the mountains. Quite beautiful up there, in an awesome sort of way; the Hindu Rush made the Alps look like pimples. Otherwise nothing to do but fly and study, almost like being back at the Academy. She and Myfwany had both passed their Astronautical Institute finals last month, and could expect transfer soon. Now that would be something . . .

“The balloon’s going up day after tomorrow.”

The squadron commander grinned at them with genial savagery. Her nickname among the pilots was Mother Kali, and not without reason. There was a collective rustle of attention. Yolande felt a lurch below the breastbone, and reached out to squeeze her lover’s hand.

“Here’s the basic situation.” The wall behind her lit with a map of the Indian subcontinent; the Domination flanked it to the north and west, the Indian Ocean and the ancient Draka possession of Ceylon to the south.

“The Indians pulled out of the Alliance last week, aftah the head-hunters revealed the little nasty the Alliance OSS pulled on they last election . . . but it’s almighty confused. Burma”—an area in the lower right corner shaded from white to gray—“counterseceded back to the Alliance, and there was fightin’ in Rangoon. Alliance seems to have won, worse luck. We’ve stayed conspicuously peaceful”—a snicker of laughter ran through the room—“which put the secessionists firmly in power in New Delhi. Just long enough fo’ the ground an’ air units the Indians were contributin’ to the Alliance to transfer their allegiance to the new Indian Republic, but not long enough fo’ them to settle their share of the orbital assets. We’ve recognized the new government, an’ they’ve reciprocated. Nice of them.”

Another wave of chuckles. “Which means as of the present everybody has recognized the new government as sovereign. But.” The squadron commander tapped her pointer into a gloved hand. “But, the Alliance hasn’t yet signed a defense treaty with the Republic, which has no credible nuclear strike force or defenses. We’ve got a window of opportunity; now we’re goin’ jump through, shootin’. Calculation is that the Alliance will run around screamin’ and shoutin’ and do fuck-all fo’ the week or so we need to overrun India. We’ll carefully avoid any provocation elsewhere, or in space. Now, befo’ I proceed to the tactical situation, any questions?”

“Ma’am?” A man’s voice, from the seat on the other side of Myfwany.

Yolande turned to look at him. Pilot Officer Timothy Wellington; a slim man of middle height, with a conservative side-crop and a seal-brown mustache, a jaunty white scarf tucked into his black flight overall. She gritted her teeth and fought back a flush. Not that he was a bad sort. City boy from Peking; knowledgeable about the visual arts, worth talking to on poetry. She had even quite enjoyed the several occasions when Myfwany had invited him over for the night. I just wish he’d learn not to presume on acquaintance, she thought. Also that Myfwany would slap him down more often. He had been hanging around entirely too much lately.

“What if the Alliance treat it as an attack on they own territory?” Wellington said.

The commander shrugged. “Everybody dies,” she answered. “Any other questions?”

He sat down and leaned over to whisper in Myfwany’s ear; she turned a laugh into a cough. Yolande keyed her notebook and poised to record, elbowing her friend surreptitiously in the ribs: This is important.

“Our role will be to interdict the medium-high altitudes. We’re doin’ this invasion from a standin’ start, can’t mobilize without scaring the prey back into the Yankee camp. We expect the Alliance to continue feedin’ the Indians operational intelligence. No way we can complain of that as hostile activity. Our preliminary sweep will be—”

“Woof,” Myfwany said, as they cleared the doorway. “And to think, only yesterday I was complainin’ on how dull everythin’ is around here!”

Yolande nodded, standing closer for the comfort of body warmth. “Some of that schedulin’ looks tricky; we’re dependin’ hard-like on the groundpounders takin’ the forward bases.”

She stretched. “Well, let’s go catch dinner.” Their squadron had always been theoretically tasked with neutralizing Alliance turboram assets in India . . . in the Final War nobody had been expecting. This won’t be the Final, she told herself firmly. Images of thermonuclear fire blossoming across Claestum painted themselves on the inside of her eyelids, and she shivered slightly. Nobody’s that crazy, not even us. I hope.

“Ah—” Myfwany hesitated, then leaned against the corridor wall. “Ah, actually, sweetlin’, Tim sort of invited me ovah to his quarters fo’ the evenin’ and night. You don’t mind, do you?”

“Oh.” Yolande swallowed. A pulse beat in her neck. “Mmm, was I included in the invite?”

“I’m sure Tim wouldn’t mind ’tall, if’n you wants to, sweet.”

“I—” Yolande looked aside for a moment. “Let’s go, then.”

CENTRAL INDIAN FRONT

15,000 METERS

JANUARY 16, 1976: 1400 HOURS

“Shitshitshit,” Yolande muttered to herself. Myself and the flight recorder, thought some remote corner of her mind.

The canopy of the Falcon Vl-a went black above her for an instant. Automatic shielding against optical-frequency lasers—the Alliance platforms in LEO had decided that that did not constitute intervention, and all the Draka orbital battle stations could do was to respond in kind. She banked, and acceleration slammed her against the edge of the clamshell, vision graying. The Indian P-70 was still dodging, banking; they were at Mach 3, and if he went over the border into Alliance airspace the battle stations would not let him back in. There was no way to dodge orbital free-electron lasers; they could slash you out of the sky in seconds . . . as the Alliance platforms would do to her if she followed the Indian too far.

“Bing!” Positive lock on her Skorpion AAM.

“Away!” she barked. The computer fired, and the Falcon shuddered; on the verge of tumbling as the brief change in airflow struck. The canopy cleared, and she had a glimpse of the missile streaking away. Then her fingers were moving on the pressure pads, cut thrust, bank-turn-dive, and the red line on the console map coming closer and closer. Closer, too close.

The squadron override sounded. “Ingolfsson, watch it.”

“I am, I am,” she grunted, feeling the aircraft judder. Blood surged under the centrifugal pull, and she could feel a sudden sharp pain at the corner of one eye, a warm trickle; a blood vessel had burst. Fuckin’ insane, these things aren’t designed for this limited airspace. Like playing tackleball on a field of frictionless ice, with instant cremation the penalty for touching the sides. A turboram could cross India from edge to edge in thirty seconds or less.

The calm voice of the machine. “Impact on target. Kill.”

There was no time even for exultation. “Myfwany, you pickin’ up anythin’?”

“Not in our envelope.” Her voice was adrenaline-hoarse. “You getting too low, ’Landa.”

“Tell me.”

The edges of the wing body were starting to glow cherry-red, and the sensors told the same story. Ionization was fouling up her electrodetectors, too; she might be too fast for the low-altitude turbojet fighters, but anything optimized for the thicker layers that happened to be in the right position would eat her.

“Come on, you cow,” she muttered to the aircraft. “Up we go.”

The ground was shockingly close, and she was still far too fast. All right, double Immelman and up. Her fingers cut thrust, and the aircraft flipped. G-force snapped her head back, and for an instant she was staring at the maplike view of the subcontinent below. A point of blue-white light blinked against the brown-green land, and the console confirmed it. Five kiloton. A blast of charged particles. Radiation bomb. A nuke warhead designed to maximize personnel damage, wouldn’t want to mess up the new property. Shitfire, I’m glad I’m not down there . . .

Pulling up, six Gs, seven. Nose to the sky, open throttle and here we go, fangs out and hair on fire, heee-aah. Feed thrust, overmax; speed bottoming out at Mach 1.7 and climbing, 2.1, 2.2, 2.8. The screens showed Myfwany closing in to wing guard position. And damn. The canopy went black. Pretty. Very pretty.

The squadron commander broke in again. “No bogies, I repeat, no bogies our quadrant. Good work. Check fungibles.”

Her eyes went back to the console. “Fuel .17, no Skorpions. Full 30mm drums.” Close combat was proving to be something of an anachronism.

“All MK units, all MK units, squadron is cleared fo’ alternate E-17, mark an’ acknowledge.”

The exterior temperatures were not falling the way they should, they must be tweaking the laser up there. Yolande spared a moment’s snarl for the invulnerable enemies above. Your day will come, pigs. E-17 came up on the landscape director, down by her left knee; northern Punjab, enemy base. Status showed heavily cratered runways, fires, no actual fighting and low radiation count, but massive damage to the facilities. No runways, vertical landing, she thought unhappily. Which meant no takeoff at all, until the unit support caught up with them; that would burn the last of the fuel. The follow-up waves would be using their base back in Bactria, logical but unpleasant.

“All MK, take you birds in,” the commander’s voice continued.

Yolande felt a vast stomach-loosening rush of relief and pushed it back with a savage effort. “It isn’t ovah till it’s ovah,” she told herself. Aloud: “Acknowledged.”

CRACK.

Marya Lefarge threw herself flat and rolled, over the edge of the wall. The ditch was two meters down, but soft mud. She leopard-crawled, did a sprint and forward roll over a bank of shrubs, fell to her belly again, rolled down a short slope and raised her pencil periscope to look back. Smoke, smoke rising against the far blue-white line of the Himalayas that towered over the Punjab plains. Sunset already beginning to tinge the snowpeaks with crimson. The line of the retaining wall, and . . . helmets. Enemy, ridged fore-and-aft and with two short antennae at the rear. Their IV and millimetric scanners would be looking for movement, for human-band temperature points.

Two Draka troopers had vaulted down from the terrace. The building above it had been the HQ offices of Chandragupta Base; now it was burning rubble, after the cluster-shell hits. The troopers were bulky and sexless, visored helmets and articulated cermet armor; they went to their stomachs and scanned back and forth across the flat runway before them. Nothing moved on it, nothing except the smoke and flames from smashed aircraft that had been caught on launch. One had gotten into the air before the homing missile hit, and its ruins sprawled across half a kilometer. The air was heavy with the oily smell of burning fuel and scorched earth.

There were smashed revetment hangars across the way. Something was moving there. A trio of low beetling shapes moved out onto the pavement, their gun pods swiveling: light tanks. The two Draka infantrymen rose and trotted toward them, and more followed over the retaining wall. They moved with impressive ease under their burdens of armor and equipment, spreading out into a dispersed formation. Good, Marya thought. They’ll be concentrating on the link-up. She waited a hundred heartbeats, then a hundred more. Waiting was the worst. Running and shooting you didn’t have time to be frightened . . . Mission first, she reminded herself. A bollixed-up mission to save remnants from the worst disaster in decades. There was data in the base computers which must not be allowed into enemy hands.

Marya rose into a crouch. She was wearing a standard Alliance base-personnel gray coverall, with Indian markings. That fitted her cover identity; the bomblet launcher in her hands did not . . . Runway to her left and rear, hectares of it, swarming with enemy troops now. HQ complex ahead, and she would just have to take her chances. A deep breath, and now. She sprinted back along her path, leapt, caught the lip of the wall and rolled over it. Nothing on the way back, nothing but a steamcar in the middle of the gardens, bullet-riddled and . . . not empty. A body lying half-out the driver’s door, a pistol in one hand. She moved quickly from one cover to the next, feeling lungs hot and taut despite the dry-season cool of the air.

In through the front doors, and there were more bodies, enough to make the air heavy with the burnt-pork-and-shit stink of close combat. Past the front offices, and the light level sank to a dim gloom, shadows moving with uneven flamelight. She stopped in a doorway long enough to pull the filter over her nose and mouth, then froze. Steps coming down the hall, booted feet.

Sorry if you’re a friendly, she thought, and plunged out into the corridor with her finger already tightening.

Schoop. The launcher kicked against her shoulder, and the 35mm projectile was on its way as the Draka assault rifle came up. Marya went boneless and dropped, as the round impacted on the center of the soldier’s breastplate. That was a ceramic-fiber-metal-synthetic sandwich . . . but her bomblet was a shaped charge. The finger of superheated plasma speared through the armor, through vaporizing flesh, splashed against the backplate. Body fluids turned to steam and blew outwards through the soft resistance. Marya threw herself upright and ran forward; she tried to leap the corpse and the spreading puddle around it, but her boots went tack-tack on the linoleum for a minute afterwards.

Nothing moved as she tracked through toward the command center. Critical window, she thought; the moments between the assault landing and the arrival of the Intelligence teams. Soldiers had a natural preference for dealing with the things that might shoot back at them, and so might leave an area already swept lightly guarded. She turned another corridor, came to a makeshift barricade. The bodies beyond were Indian, a scratch squad of office workers and one perimeter guard in infantry kit; they bore no wounds, but lay as if they had died in convulsions. Marya’s skin itched, as if insects were crawling under it. Contact nerve agent, she thought, and put an antidote tab between her back teeth. That might work . . .

The stairs that led down into the control center were ahead. It would be guarded, but . . . She turned aside, into an office. It was empty, with a cup of tea still on the desk and the screen of the terminal flickering, as if the occupant—Ranjit Singh, from the nameplate on the door—might return any second. A quick wrench with her knife opened the ventilation shaft. The American pulled a pair of lightmag goggles out of a pocket and slipped them over her head. Darkness vanished, replaced by a peculiar silvery flatness. Marya slung the bomblet launcher down her back, took a deep breath, and chinned herself on the edge of the ventilator.

Just wide enough, she thought. Just.

* * *

The Draka working over the base computer had the gear-wheel emblem of Technical Section on her shoulder; so did the two gray-uniformed serf Auxiliaries helping her. They were all in battle armor, though, a technical commando unit tasked with front-line electronic reconnaissance. Marya could see them all, down the short section of vertical shaft; she was lying full-length in the horizontal passageway above, with only her head out. That ought to make her nearly invisible from below, with the wire grille in the ceiling between her and them. And . . . yes, movement just out of sight. Probably troopers, guarding the tech. The peripheral units of the Alliance computer were open, and boxes of crackle-finished Draka electronics set up about it, a spiderweb of plug-in lines and cross-connections.

The OSS agent strained to hear.

“Careful, careful!” the Draka was saying. “Up ten . . . Fo’ mo’. Right, now keep the feed modulated within ten percent of those parameters, and she won’t blow when Ah open the casing.”

Another figure, a middle-aged Indian in uniform, with his arms secured behind his back. A bayoneted rifle rested between his shoulder blades, jabbed lightly.

“Yes, indeed,” he babbled in singsong English. “That is the way of it.”

Too bad. The black-uniformed TechSec specialist pulled the visor of her helmet down and took up a miniature cutting torch. Cracking the core unit, Marya thought grimly. The embedded instruction sets of a central computer and the crucial hard memory were physically confined in its core, even on civilian models. This was a maximum-security military Phoebos, and it would be set to slag down unless you were very careful.

Careful is a word, Marya thought. This mission was important enough to make her expendable . . . but there was no point in being reckless. Her lips moved back from her teeth behind the mask. What was it Uncle Nate used to say? “A good soldier has to be ready to die. A suicidal one just leaves you with another damned empty slot to train someone for.”

If I push the launcher over the edge at arm’s length, she thought, and then drop the satchel charge right away, the ceiling should shelter me from most of the blast. That would certainly take care of the mission, now that the Draka had conveniently opened up the armored protection around the core. Then I can go back up the shaft, and try to make it out.

Soundlessly, she mouthed: “And maybe the horse will learn to sing.”

Millimeter by millimeter, she inched backward until only the end of the launcher tube was over the lip of the vertical shaft. Her other hand brought the explosive charge up, plastique and metal and soft padded overcase. It scraped gently against the tube wall in the narrow space between hip and panel, and the sound seemed roaringly loud. No louder than the beat of blood in her ears. Stupid, stupid, a voice called at the back of her mind. You volunteered, you’re too stupid to live, you could be home now.

“Fuck it,” she said, and pulled the trigger.

* * *

“Mistis—” the Janissary decurion began, as the canopy of Yolande’s fighter slid back and she rose from the opening clamshell restraints. The cool air of the Indian night poured in, lit by a swollen moon and the lingering fires. Then eye-drying warmth as the inflow crackled across the fuselage of her aircraft. The Draka picked up her ground kit, machine pistol, and helmet. There were a half-dozen figures in infantry armor, with a flat cart of some sort.

Then the serf soldier’s voice altered. “Mistis Yolande!” He saluted and flipped up the faceplate of his helmet.

Yolande stared for a moment; it was an unremarkable face, heavy beak nose and olive complexion . . . then memory awoke.

“Ali?” she said. “Rahksan’s Ali?”

His grin showed white as she stepped up onto the rim of the cockpit and jumped down, careful to avoid the savage residual heat of the leading edges.

“The same, Mistis. Swears it like home leave to see you.”

“Freya bless, small world,” she continued, and gave him a light punch on one shoulder. Her gloved fist rang on the lobster-tail plates of his armguard. The legion blazon on it showed a hyena’s skull biting down on a human thighbone; that was the Devil Dogs, one of the better subject-race units. “An’ you comin’ up in it, Ali. I tells yo ma, first thing.”

His fist rang on the breastplate as he saluted again, then noticed his squad glancing at each other. Myfwany’s Falcon lifted its canopy.

“Ah, Mistis, we got field shelters set up over to there.” He pointed, and she saw prefabricated revetments on an uncratered stretch of runway. Two big winged tilt-rotor transports, as well; one began revving for takeoff as she looked. “We’s gotta get y’ plane towed ovah there. You support team’s comin’ through, later tonight. We’s got perimeter guard.”

“Myfwany, you remembers Ali, from Claestum?” The redhead came up, with a bounce in her stride, despite the sweat that plastered the curls to her forehead. “Coincidence, hey?” The squad was hooking the cart’s towing hitch to the nose of her aircraft. “Carry on, Decurion; nice to know mah bird’s in good hands.”

“Eurrch,” Yolande said. “C’mon, love, why don’t we turn in?” Most of the squadron was there, but it would be a day or two before they had anything to do but stay out of the way. In the meantime, they had been assigned quarters. The original occupants certainly had no need of them . . .

The prisoners were being held in a mess hall; sorted in groups by rank and age, in squares marked off by colored rope. The guards were Security Directorate, Intervention Squad specialists, but there were a fair number of Draka making inspection; Citizen officers of the Janissary legion, pilots from their outfit, others. She looked at the captives with mild distaste; they had been stripped of their uniforms as a precautionary measure, and secured with the old-style restraints, chain and rod links that bound elbows and wrists together behind the back. Indians, mostly. Base techs, the sort of work that was done by unarmed Auxiliaries in the Domination’s armed forces. A few had the glazed look of shock, or docilizing drugs; most were openly terrified, even crying.

“You can turn in if’n you wants to, ’Landa,” Myfwany said. She was smiling, and there was a glitter to her eyes; Yolande swallowed past a hollow feeling. I love you dearly, but there are times when you make me angry enough to spit, sweetheart, she thought resignedly.

“Oh, all right,” Yolande said. “Let’s take a look.”

They walked down the edge of one of the green-rope enclosures. Green for lowest priority, younger specimens. She supposed they would be sold off, after the fighting, or sent to work camps, something of that sort. Her nose wrinkled from the pungency; they stank of fear, and some had pissed themselves. Across the room there was a high scream. Yolande looked up and saw the Security troopers dragging an older prisoner out of the red-corded pen for interrogation. A paunchy type in his fifties, already babbling. Glad they’re not doin’ it in public, she thought idly. Headhunters, eurgh. Necessary work, she supposed, but disgusting.

“This one looks interestin’,” Myfwany was saying. “On you feet, wench.”

Yolande looked back. The prisoner had risen easily despite the restraints. In her late twenties, she estimated; much lighter-skinned than most of the others. Good figure, very nice muscle tone for a serf; cropped black hair, expressionless dark eyes . . . The neck was number-bare, that looked unnatural. Sixty aurics basic, Yolande thought. Depending on where she’s sold, of course.

“Who’re you?” Myfwany asked the serf. Silence, and then the Draka struck. Crack. The open-handed blow rocked the prisoner’s head back; Yolande was surprised she kept her feet. Sighing, she glanced aside. Myfwany gets too rough with them, sometimes, she thought unhappily. Of course, this one was feral and had to be taught submission, but still . . .

“Marya Lenson.” Crack. A backhanded blow this time.

“That’s Marya Lenson, Mistis, serf.” The Security guard glanced up, came over idly twirling the rubber truncheon by the thong around his wrist.

“Mistis.” The serf’s voice stayed toneless, flat.

“Indian?” Myfwany put a finger under the serf’s chin, turned her head sideways. “Europoid, I’d swear.”

“My parents were from California, Mistis.”

Myfwany turned to Yolande. “A Yank! What say we sign this’n out and play with it, ’Landa?” she said.

Yolande sighed. “Oh, come on, sweet,” she said exasperatedly. I hope we’re not going to have a fight, like we did when you wanted Lele. It had taken two days of not speaking to each other before Myfwany realized she was serious about letting the servant say no. “Where’s the fun in that?”

“We can use aphrodizine,” Myfwany said impatiently.

“Eurg.” Not that the aphrodisiac didn’t work but . . . “Look, sweet, you just got after-fight jitters. You don’t really want to—”

Myfwany released the serf and spun to confront her friend. “Look youself,” she hissed. “I’m not you keeper, Ingolfsson, and you not mine.

“You’ve got somethin’ better to do, go do it.” The green eyes turned heavy-lidded. “Tim or someone be glad to help me out.”

Yolande felt shock close her throat. This was fear, not the hot sensation of life danger up in the clouds, but dread coiling at the pit of her stomach. She forced a smile.

“Oh, don’t get so heavy ’bout it, love!” A glance aside at the serf. Myfwany’ll probably get tired fairly soon. “If’n you’s set on it, certainly.” Not as if there was anything actually wrong with it, after all. You have to compromise on differing tastes. “Let’s . . . let’s take a walk an’ check on the birds, first, hey? Get some fresh air.”

“Sure, ’Landa-sweet,” Myfwany said. She smiled and took the other Draka’s hand. Yolande felt the knot in her stomach melt. Or most of it, she thought. Oh, well. “I’ve got a rotten temper. Don’t know why you puts up with me, sometimes.”

She called the guard over, palmed the identifier clipped to his belt. “Send this one ovah to our quarters, would you?”

Frederick Lefarge felt the sweat trickle down from the rim of his helmet, itching under the armor and camouflage smock. He glanced at his watch: 2000 hours. The pickup squad was in a stand of tall pale-barked trees not far from what had been the perimeter wire of Chandragupta Base. A dozen of them, with nothing but their fieldcraft and two boxes of very sophisticated electronics to keep them out of the tightening Draka net. Two were wounded, and he didn’t think Smythe was going to make it, he’d been far too close to a radiation bomb yesterday, when the rest of them had been sheltered in the cellar. Vomiting blood was not a good sign, either.

“Sor.” Winters, the Englishman. Professional NCO in the Cumberland Borderers before transfer to the OSS special forces. Very reliable. “Sor, it’s past time.”

She isn’t going to make it, he thought. Either she’s dead or she should be. He fought down the hot flash of rage, let it mingle with fear until it became something cold and leaden in his gut. Something that would not interfere with the job at hand . . . He remembered a moment in Santa Fe, and the pistol in Marya’s hand unwavering upon him. We always knew the price, he thought. Go with God, ma soeur.

And her mission accomplished—the explosion in the base HQ proved that—but nothing beyond. He raised the visor of his helmet and bent to the eyepiece of the spyglass. There were pickups all over the operational area, where his men had left their optical-thread connectors. The fires were mostly out now. Those had been from the initial blitz, suborb missiles with precision-guided conventional explosives. Dibblers for the runways, earth piercers for the hardened weapons points, then a rolling surf of antipersonnel submunitions. The assault troops—1st Airborne Legion, Citizen Force elite—had come on the heels of those, but they had moved out once the area was secured, now there was a brigade of Janissaries doing clear-and-hold. And support personnel, Intelligence, transports, two squadrons of low-altitude VTOL gunboats, another of Falcons.

And now they think it’s secured, he thought grimly. Time to disabuse them.

“Hit it, Jock,” he said.

“And we—” Myfwany stopped. “What the fuck was that, Ali?”

They and the Janissaries were standing outside a dugout. The explosion was a kilometer away, across the base. A flash, and the muffled whump a second later, a ball of orange flame rising into the soft Indian night. The troopers went into an instinctive crouch, and Ali cursed, rolling back into the sandbagged slit and reaching for the groundline com.

“Suh?” he said. “Post Six, second tetrarchy—shit, it out!”

Another explosion, and another; a rippling line in an arc along the perimeter opposite them. Yolande and Myfwany exchanged a glance and pulled on their ground helmets, slipping down the visors and turning the night to a pale imitation of day. Each had a tiny dot of strobing red light at the lower left-hand corner; jamming. Then a real explosion. The two Draka threw themselves flat at the harsh white glare. Even reflected around the edges of their visors it was enough to dazzle, and the shockwave lifted them up and slammed them down again hard enough to stun and bruise on the unyielding pavement.

Yolande heard one of the Janissaries shouting. “Nuke? Dec, was that a nuke?” Her eyes darted down to the readout on the sleeve of her flight suit. No radiation above the nervous-making background already there, and a spear of blue-white flame was already rising from behind the broken hangars. Secondary explosions bellowed, like echoes of that world-numbing blast.

“No, it ain’t,” Ali was saying. “That the fuel store.”

Liquid hydrogen and methane, Yolande realized. High-energy fuels for high-performance craft, difficult to transport. One of the reasons the attack plan had made this base a priority target in the first place. And—

“The birds!” she shouted to Myfwany. Fatigue and worry vanished in the rush of adrenaline, at the thought of the turboram fighters caught helpless on the ground. The Falcons were two thousand meters distant, behind the parked assault transports.

Myfwany nodded. “Ali, you tasked with that?”

The burly Janissary was climbing back out of the revetment. He hesitated for a moment; he was, but having two Citizens along out of the regular chain of command was not a good idea . . . The two Draka women saw him shrug and nod, accepting what could not be changed.

“Let’s go,” he said. “Marcel, Ching, Mustafa, come with me. Brigitte, Nils, Vlachec, hold the position an’ report when the com comes back up.”

“Now!” Frederick Lefarge kept to one knee and watched the dozen OSS special-ops troopers scurry by. In toward the base that now swarmed like a kicked-open termite mound. Their only chance . . .

He rose to his feet and followed. There they were, ten Buffel tiltrotor assault transports, standing ready with their turbines warm. Nobody around them but unarmed ground crew. The Alliance soldiers could charge on board and take off in ten different directions; the Draka IFF would hesitate crucial seconds before overriding their own electronic identification . . . and the battle was still a chaos of Draka and Indian-held pockets from here to Burma. Just insane enough to have some chance of success. The Springfield-15 seemed light as a twig in his hands; his gaze hopped across the flat expanses of the airbase, watching for movement. There. Light armor, moving out of laager in the vehicle park, coasting toward them with air-cushion speed. His hand slapped a switch at his waist.

“Down!” Yolande shouted, when the lines of fire erupted upward out of the stand of trees to their right. She and Myfwany threw themselves apart and forward without breaking stride; she could hear the light impact of her lover’s body on the concrete, and seconds later the pounding slam of the Janissary heavy infantry hitting the pavement.

The weapon that had fired was some sort of rocket automortar; she watched the trajectories arch and then plunge back down. Down toward the trio of Cheetah hovertanks that had been approaching them; a hundred meters up, the self-forging warheads exploded in disks of fire, sending arrowheads of incandescent metal streaking for the thin deck armor of the Draka tanks. The impacts were flashes that would have been dazzling without the guard functions of her visor. The air-cushion vehicles bounced down as if slapped by the hand of an invisible giant, then exploded in gouts of fuel fire and ammunition glare. Hot warm air struck her like a pillow, and a pattering rain of cermet armor and body parts began to fall around the soldiers of the Domination.

“ ’Landa!” Myfwany called. “Look right, are those hostiles?” Yolande halted and went to ground conscious of the others following the pilot’s extended arm.

Frederick Lefarge threw himself to the ground and rolled to one side as the group running on an intercept vector with his opened fire. Muzzle flashes strobed before the silvery light-enhanced shapes of enemy soldiers. Shrapnel flicked at his exposed legs and arms, nothing serious, but he could feel the blood trickle behind the sharp sting. Can’t stop for a slugfest, went through him. His special-forces unit were only lightly armored, and there was no cover on this artificial concrete desert.

“Eat this!” the OSS trooper beside Lefarge cried, flipping up to his knees and firing a grenade from the launcher beneath the barrel of his SI7. It burst with an orange flash behind the enemy firing line; one of the rifles stopped, and there was a scream of pain. Then a chattering flash from directly ahead; machine pistol, not the louder growl of a T-7. The trooper who had fired pitched backward, torn open. Lefarge snapped off a burst toward the source and began crawling forward. Another sound came from near where he had fired, a scream that raised the tiny hairs along the back of his neck.

“Keep them occupied!” he shouted to his men, heading for the cockpit ladder of the Buffel. It had a 25mm Gatling in its chin turret; if he could reach that . . .

“Keep them occupied!” a voice shouted. Yolande ignored it, braced behind an overturned supply cart.

“Myfwany?” she called, looking over to where the other Draka had snap-fired last. “Hey, Myfwany?”

There was no movement. A long shape lying motionless on the concrete, impossible to see detail at this distance. Machine pistol resting on the ground, no movement.

“Myfwany?” Yolande said, this time a whisper. Then she was moving, a sprint that leaned her almost horizontal to the ground. She forward-rolled the last five meters, rolling in beside her friend. “Myfwany?”

The body moved into her hands, infinitely familiar, utterly strange. Moving loosely, slack. Blood flowing down her hands from the band of black wetness across Myfwany’s chest. Bits of soft armor, bits of bone and flesh; something bubbling and wheezing. Yolande tore off her own helmet, to see by natural light. There was enough to show the lashes flutter across the amber eyes, focus on her. The lips below moved, beneath the rills of blood that covered them. Perhaps to say a name, but there was no breath left for it. She slumped, with a total relaxation as the wheezing stopped. Yolande felt a sound building in her throat, and she knew that everything would end when she uttered it.

The firefight hammered through the darkness; Lefarge flipped his visor up for better depth perception and ran crouching. He was almost on the two Draka before he saw them. Lying on the pavement, one with the utter limpness of the newly dead, the other holding her. His rifle swung round, clicked empty; the magazine ejected itself and dropped to the runway with a hollow plastic clatter. For a moment only the eyes held him. Huge, completely dark in a stark-white elfin face daubed with blood, framed in hair turned silver by the moonlight. They saw him; somehow he knew they were recording every detail, but it was as if no active mind lived behind them. Then he was past, his feet pounding up the aluminum treads of the transport’s gangway.

“Hunh!” Marya jerked awake, surprised that she had slept at all. Dawn was showing rosy through the window; the air smelled of cool earth, explosives and fire and dead humans. And the door had swung open.

A Draka stood there. One of the ones who had looked her over in the prisoner pen earlier. Short, slender, and blond. Different; her uniform was smoke-stained, grimy; there were speckles of dried blood across her face. The face . . . the eyes were huge, pupils distended with shock. The American felt a clammy sensation—not quite fear, although that was in it. As if she was in the presence of something that should not be seen . . . The dead-alive eyes focused on her, and Marya saw a spray injector in the other’s hand.

“It’s you fault.” The words came in a light, soft voice. Almost a whisper, and in utter monotone. “I was weak, squeamish. She wanted to play with you, and I didn’t, so I got her to go fo’ a walk, thought she’d forget the idea. She’s dead. I saw his face . . . he’s not here. They got some of the planes, but she’s dd—” A brief stutter, and the marble perfection of the face writhed for an instant, then settled back. “Dead.”

The Draka touched the controls of the injector, held it to her own neck and pulled the trigger. Shuddered. A degree of life returned to the locked muscles of her face as she lowered it and changed the controls.

“This is fo’ you,” she said, her voice slightly thick now. “Relaxant, muscle weakener, maximum safe dosage of aphrodizine.” The cold metal touched Marya on the arm, but she scarcely felt the sting of the injection. It was impossible even to look away from those eyes, like windows into a wound. Something flowed across her mind, warm and sticky, pushing consciousness back into a room at the rear of her head. Fingers as strong as wire flipped her onto her stomach and began to unfasten the restraints.

“We’re goin’ to have a sort of celebration in memory of her, just this once,” the Draka said. “And then I can think up somethin’ else for you to do.”