A stick of troopers came up, shepherding a working party of Circassian villagers, and the American war correspondent. The Circassians were carrying rope-handled wooden crates between them; Dreiser's face had a stunned paleness.
Well, he's seen the
elephant
, Eric thought with a distant, impersonal sympathy.
There were worse things than combat, but the American probably wasn't in a mood to be reminded of that right now. The crates were not large, hut the villagers bore them with grunts and care, and they made a convincing
splat
in the wet earth.
"Bill,' the Draka said. "What's your government's policy on Russian refugees?"
Dreiser gathered himself with a visible effort, watching as Eric reached up over his left shoulder and drew his bush knife.
The metal was covered in a soft matte-black finish, only the honed edge reflecting mirror bright. He drove it under one of the boards of a crate and pried the wood back with a screech of nails.
"Refugees? Ah…" He forced his thoughts into order. "Well, better, now that we're in the war." He shrugged distaste.
"Especially since there isn't any prospect of substantial numbers arriving." Relations with Timoshenko's Soviet rump junta in west Siberia were good, but with the Japanese holding Vladivostok and running rampant through the Pacific, the only contact was through the Domination. Which visibly regarded the Soviet remnant as a caretaker keeping things in order until the Germans were disposed of and the Draka arrived. Attempts to ship Lend-Lease supplies through had met with polite refusals.
A few wounded and children had been flown out, over the pole in long-range dirigibles, to be received in Alaska by Eleanor Roosevelt with much fanfare.
"Back before Pearl Harbor, they wouldn't even let a few thousand Jews in. Well, the isolationists were against it, and the Mexican states, they're influenced by the Catholic anti-Semites like Father Coughlan."
"Sa." Eric rose, with a German machine pistol and bandolier in his hands. "Those-there are Russian partisans there in the pen, Bill. The Fritz captured 'em, but hadn't gotten around to expending them. Take a look."
Eric heard the American suck in his breath in shock, as he stripped open the action of the Schmeisser. Not bad, he thought, as he inserted a 32-round magazine of 9mm into the well and freed the bolt to drive forward and chamber a bullet. Not as handy as the Draka equivalent; the magazine well was forward of the pistol grip instead of running up through it; it had a shorter barrel, so less range, and the bolt had to be behind the chamber rather than overhanging it. Still, a sound design and honestly made. He took a deep breath and tossed the weapon into the pen.
The partisan leader snatched it out of the air with the quick, snapping motion of a trout rising to a fly. The flat slapping of his hand on the pressed steel of the Schmeisser's receiver was louder than the rustling murmur among his men; much louder than the tensing among the Draka. Eric saw the Russian's eyes flicker past him; he could imagine what the man was seeing. The rifles would be swinging around, assault slings made that easy, with the gun carried at waist level and the grip ready to hand. The troopers would be shocked, and Draka responded to shock aggressively. Especially to the sight of an armed serf, the very
thought
of which was shocking. Technically the Russians were not serfs, of course, but the reflex was conditioned on a deeper level than consciousness.
You did
not
arm serfs. Even Janissaries carried weapons only on operations or training, under supervision, were issued ammunition only in combat zones or firing ranges.
Draka
carried arms; they were as much the badge of the Citizen caste as neck tattoos were for serfs: a symbolic dirk in a wrist sheath or a shoulder-holster pistol in the secure cities of the Police Zone; the planter's customary sidearm; or the automatic weapons and battle-shotguns that were still as necessary as boots in parts of the New Territories. A Citizen bore weapons as symbol of caste, as a sign that he or she was an arm of the State, with the right to instant and absolute obedience from all who were not and power of life and death to enforce it. There was no place on earth where free Draka were a majority: no province, no district, no city. They were born and lived and slept and died among serfs.
They lived because they were warriors, because of the accumulated deadly aura of generations of victory and merciless repression. Folk-memory nearly as deep as instinct saw a serf with a weapon in his hands and prompted:
kill
.
Training held their trigger fingers, but the Russian saw their faces. Sweat sheened his, and he kept the machine pistol's muzzle trained carefully at the ground.
And yet, the weight in his hands straightened his back and seemed to add inches to his height.
"
Khrpikj djavol
," he muttered, staring at Eric, then spoke with wonder.
"Ummm, he says yo' one crazy devil, Centurion," Sophie translated. "Maybe crazy enough to do what you promise." She gave him a hard glance, before continuing on her own: "Yo'
might just consider it's other folks' life yo' riskin', too,
sir
. I mean, he might've been some sorta crazy amokker."
Startled, Eric ran a hand over the cropped yellow surface of his hair. "You know, I never thought of that… you're right." More briskly: "Tell him that I promise to kill a lot of Germans; and that he can kill even more, with my help. After that I promise
nothing
, absolutely nothing." He pointed to Dreiser, standing beside him. "This man is not a Draka, or a soldier: he is an American journalist. About what happens after this fight, talk to him."
"Hey, wait a minute, Eric—" Dreiser began.
Eric chopped down a hand. "Bill, it's your ass on the line, too.
Even if the Fritz roll right over us, the Legion will probably be able to hold the next fallback position well enough; we'll delay them, and the maximum risk is from the south, from the Germans in the pocket there trying to break out to the north. But that won't do
us
any good. Besides… what am I supposed to promise them, a merry life digging phosphates in the Aozou mines in the Sahara, with Security flogging them on? Soldiers don't get sold as ordinary serfs, even: too dangerous."
"You want me to promise to get them out? How can I?"
Dreiser's eyes flinched away from the Russians, from the painful hope in their faces.
"Say you'll use your influence. True enough, hey? Write them up; your stuff is going through Forces censorship, not Security.
They don't give a shit about anything that doesn't compromise military secrecy."
Dreiser looked back into the pen and swallowed, remembering. He had been in Vienna during the
Anschluss
.
Memories—
The woman had been Jewish, middleclass
In her forties, but well kept, in the rag of a good dress, her hands soft and manicured. The SS men had had her down scrubbing the sidewalk in front of the building they had taken over as temporary headquarters; they stood about laughing and prodding her with their rifle-butts as others strode in and out through the doors, with prisoners or files or armfuls of looted silverware and paintings from the Rothschild palace.
"Not clean enough, filthy Jewish sow-whore!" The SS man had been giggling-drunk, like his comrades. The woman's face was tear-streaked, a mask of uncomprehending bewilderment: the sort of bourgeois
hausfrau
you could see anywhere in Vienna, walking her children in the Zoo, at the Opera, fussing about the family on an excursion to the little inns of the
Viennerwald;
self-consciously cultured in the tradition of the Jewish middle class that had made Vienna a center of the arts. A life of comfort and neatness, spotless parlors and pastries arranged on silver trays. Now this…
"Sir…" she began tremulously, raising a hand that was bleeding around the nails.
"Silence! Scrub!" A thought seemed to strike him, and he slung his rifle. "Here's some scrubbing water, whore!" he said, with a shout of laughter, unbuttoning his trousers. The thick yellow stream of urine spattered on the stones before her face, steaming in the cold night air and smelling of staleness and beer.
She had recoiled in horror; one of the men behind her planted a boot on her buttocks and shoved, sending her skidding flat into the pool of wetness. That had brought a roar of mirth; the others had crowded close, opening their trousers, too, drenching her as she lay sobbing and retching on the streaming pavement…
Dreiser had turned away. There had been nothing he could do, not under their guns. A few ordinary civilians had been watching, some laughing and applauding, others merely disgusted at the vulgarity. And some with the same expression as he. Shame, the taste of helplessness like vomit in the mouth.
They were pissing on the dignity of every human being on
earth
, Dreiser thought as his mind returned to the present. He shivered, despite the mild warmth of the mountain spring and the thick fabric of his uniform jacket, and looked at the partisans. The Domination might not have quite the nihilistic lunacy of the Nazis, but it was as remorseless as a machine.
I
just
might be able to bring it off
, he thought. Just maybe; the Draka were not going to make any substantial concessions to American public opinion, but they very well might allow a minor one of no particular importance. The military might; at least, they didn't have quite the same pathological reluctance to see a single human soul escape their clutches that the Security Directorate felt. And here… here, he could
do
something.
"I could talk it up in my articles; they're already doing quite well," he said thoughtfully. "Russians are quite popular now anyway, since Marxism is deader than a day-old fish." He looked up at Eric. "You have any pull?"
"Not on the political side; I'm under suspicion. Some on the military, and more—much more—if we win." He paused. "Won't be more than a few of them, anyway."
Dreiser frowned, puzzled. "I thought you said there'd be more than these, still at large."
"Oh, there are probably hundreds, from the precautions the Fritz were taking. I certainly hope so. There won't be many
left
."
The Draka turned to Sofie. "Ahhh… let's see. Sue Knudsen and her brother. Their family has a plantation near Orenburg, don't they?" That was in northwest Kazakhstan—steppe country and the population mostly Slav. "They probably talk some Russian.
Have one of them report here so Bill will have a translator. Get the tetrarchy commanders, hunt up anybody else who does.
We're going to need them. Make it snappy," he glanced up at the sun, "because things are going to get interesting soon."
The pair of Puma armored cars nosed cautiously toward the tumbled ruins of the village in the pass, turrets traversing with a low whine of hydraulics to cover the verges. The roadway was ten meters wide here, curving slightly southwest through steep-sided fields. Those were small and hedged with rough stone walls and scrub brush, isolated trees left standing for shade or fodder or because they housed spirits. Even the cleared zones were rich in cover—perfect country for partisans with mines and Molotov cocktails. Beyond the village the road wound into the high mountains, forest almost to the edge of the pavement; the beginning of "ambush alley,' dangerous partisan country even before the Draka attack. The Puma was eight-wheeled, well-armored for its size and heavily armed with a 20mm autocannon and a machine gun, but the close country made the drivers nervous.
Too many of their comrades had roasted alive in burning armor for them to feel invincible.
Standartenfuhrer Hoth propped his elbows against the sides of the turret hatch and brought up his field glasses. Bright morning sunlight picked detail clear and sharp, the clean mountain air like extra lenses to enhance his vision. The command car had halted half a thousand meters behind the two scout vehicles; from here, the terrain rolled upslope to the village. The military highway cut through it, and he could catch glimpses of the mosque and town hall around the central square, more glimpses than he remembered; a number of houses had been demolished, including the whole first row on the north side of town. There was an eerie stillness about the scene; there should have been locals moving in the fields and streets, smoke from cooking fires… and activity by the SS garrison. He focused on the patch of square visible to him. Bodies, blast-holes, firescorch… And there had been nothing on the radio since the single garbled screech at 0500. He glanced at his watch, a fine Swiss model he had taken from the wrist of a wounded British staff officer in Belgium. 0835: they had made good time from Pyatigorsk.
Raising a hand, he keyed the throat mike and spoke.
"Schliemann, stay where you are and provide cover. Berger, the road looks clear through to the main square. Push in, take a quick look, then pull back. Continuous contact."
"Acknowledged, Standartenfuhrer,"the Scharfuhrer in the lead car replied. The second vehicle halted; for a moment Hoth felt he could sense the tension in its turret, a trembling like a mastiff quivering on the leash.
Nonsense
, he thought.
Engine vibration
. A humming through arms and shoulders, up from the commander's seat beneath his boots. The air was full of the comforting diesel stink of armor, metal and cordite and gun-oil; even through the muffling headset the grating throb of the Tatra 12-cylinder filled his head.
The two cars ahead were buttoned tight; he could see the gravel spurting from the tires of the lead Puma, the quiver of the second's autocannon muzzle as the weapon quivered in response to the gunner's clench on the controls. Fiercely, he wished he was in the lead vehicle himself, up at the cutting edge of violence…
"Wait for it, wait for it," Eric breathed into the microphone.
He was perched on the lip of the shattered minaret; the trench periscope gave him a beautiful view of the SS officer in the command vehicle, enough to see the teeth showing in an unconscious snarl below his fieldglasses. Yes, it had to be the command vehicle from the miniature forest of antennae the turret sprouted. Details sprang at him: fresh paint in a dark-green mottle pattern, unscarred armor, tires still sharp-treaded… it must be fresh equipment, just out from Germany. His fingers turned the aiming wheels to track the other two cars, one in a covering position, another edging forward down the single clear lane into the village.