He grinned like a wolf. "Stroke of genius, no? Only now, we had thousands of kilometers of land frontier, with a hostile great power! See, liberal democrat, Communist, even Fascist, any different social system is a deadly menace to us, if it's close. And they're all different. All close, too; with modern technology the world's getting to be a pretty small place. The boffins say that after the war, radios will be as small and cheap as teakettles were, before. Imagine every serf village out in West Bumfuck having a receiver; we can jam, but… So, on to the war. Another heaven-sent stroke of luck, although we were counting on something like that. Divide and rule, let others wear themselves out and the Domination steps in—our traditional strategy. If we win, we'll have the earth, the whole of North Asia, and most of Europe besides what we took last time."
"Think we can do it?" Sofie asked in a neutral tone.
"Oh, sure. The problem will be holding it. Remember that cartoon in the Alexandria
Gazette
?" She nodded. The chief opposition newspaper had shown a python with scales in the Draka colors that had just throttled a hippo. It lay, bleeding and bruised, muttering: "Sweet Christ, now do I have to
eat
the bloody thing?"
"But that won't be enough."
"What will?"
"In the end… we'll have to conquer the earth. The Archon was right, you see? To survive, we've got to make sure nobody else does, except as serfs." Eric, who had long since come to an acceptance of what his people and nation were, ground the cigarette out with short, savage motions of his hand. "We're like a virus, really: we'll never be safe with uninfected tissue still able to manufacture antibodies against us."
Sofie folded the hand in hers. "You don't sound… too enthusiastic about it, Centurion."
"It could be worse. That's the analysis the Academy will give you, anyway; they just think it's a wonderful situation."
She hesitated, then decided on bluntness. "What are you doing in a fighting unit, then?" she asked quietly.
He looked up, his mouth quirking; even then, she noticed how a lock of butter-yellow hair fell over the tanned skin of his forehead. "I love my people. Not like, sometimes, but… That's enough to fight and die for, isn't it?" And very softly, "But is it enough to live for?"
Their eyes met. And the comset hissed, clicking with Eric's code. Efficiency settled over him like a mask as he reached for the receiver.
"Ah," said Eric, watching the German column winding up the road toward the village. "There you see the results of Fritz ingenuity." A glance at his wrist. "1610- goodtime."
"Oh?" Marie Kaine asked, not taking her eyes from the trench periscope. She had always had doubts about the cost-effectiveness of tanks. So delicate, under their thick hides, so complex and highly stressed and failure prone… Still, it was daunting to have them coming at you.
The Fritz convoy had been dipping in and out of sight with the twists of the road from the north: six tanks, two heavy assault guns, tracked infantry carriers in the rear. The optics brought them near, foreshortened images trembling as slight vibrations in the tube were translated to wavering over the kilometer of distance. She could see the long cannon of the tanks swinging, the heads of infantrymen through the open hatches of the APC's, imagine the creaking, groaning, clanging rattle that only armor makes. They were still over two thousand meters out when a brace of self-propelled antiaircraft guns peeled off to take up stations upslope of the road. The sun had baked what moisture remained out of the rocky surface, and the heavy tracks were raising dust plumes as they ground through the crushed-rock surface of the military highway.
Military highway, she snorted to herself. Of course, the Soviets hadn't had much wheeled traffic. Even so, for a strategic road, this was a disgrace.
"Mmm. You know the Wehrmacht-SS situation?" the Centurion continued.
Marie nodded wordlessly. Sofie spoke, without looking up from the circuit board she was working on. "Elite units, aren't they? Volunteers. Like us, or Boss' Brass Knucks?" That was the Archonal Guard Legion; their insignia was a mailed fist.
"Yes, but they're not part of the regular army; they're organs of the Nationalsozialisriche Deutsche Arbeiterpartei. And they're always fighting with the regulars over recruits and equipment.
So their organization took over the Russian factories to get an independent supply base." He nodded to the squat combat machines grinding their way up the road. "Those are Ivan KV-1
heavy tanks, with a new turret and the Fritz 88mm/L56 gun; cursed good weapon, plenty of armor and reasonable mobility.
Better than their standard-issue machines. Hmmm… the assault guns look like the same chassis, with a 150mm gun-howitzer mounted in the front glacis plate. The infantry carriers and flakpanzers are on SU-76 bodies; that was the Ivans' light self-propelled gun. Ingenious; they've actually made a good thing out of departmental in-fighting."
"Sounds as bad as the pissing matches the Army and Air Corps and Navy are always getting into at home," Marie Kaine said. She made a final note on her pad and called instructions to the gun crew; a round of AP ammunition slid into the breech with a chunk-chang of metallic authority. Range would be no problem; a dozen inconspicuous objects had been carefully measured, and the guns were sighted in. First-round fire would be as accurate as the weapons permitted; Marie was not impressed with the standard of the machining. A sound design, but crude: there was noticeable windage in the barrel, even with lead driving bands, and the exterior finish was primitive in the extreme.
Sofie handed the sheet of electronic components back to the artillery observer, a harassed-looking man with thinning sandy hair and a small clipped mustache. He slid it back into the open body of his radio, reinserted the six thumb-sized vacuum tubes, and touched the leads with a testing jack. "Ahhh," he said. "Good work; all green. Thanks, our spares had a little accident on the way down, hate to have to run a field-telephone line in."
He rose, dusting off his knees, and peered out a slit. "Hmmm, our Hond III's are better. Not much heavier, twice the speed, better sloping on the armor, a 120mm gun."
"Oh, yes," Eric said. "And all sorts of extras: gyro-stabilizers on the gun, shock absorbers on the torsion bars… Only one problem." He pointed an imaginary pistol at the SS panzers.
"Our armor is a hundred kilometers away; those machines are here. Got the battery on line?"
"Yessir. ' He handed over the receiver; Sofie's set would have done as well, but it was more efficient to have a dedicated channel.
"Palm One to Fist, over."
"Roge-doge, Palm One. Our 105's're set up, and the captured Fritz ISO's. Covering your position and about 4,000 meters out.
Going to need a firefall soon?"
"That's negative, Fist; this looks like a probing attack. Later."
"All go, Palm One. But watch it: this is the only decent position in range, so they've got it map-referenced for sure, they don't need observation to key in. And if they've got self-propelled heavies, no way I can win a counter-battery shoot. They're immune to blast and fragments; we're not and we can't move, either. And you know what the odds are on hitting armored vehicles with indirect fire: about the same as flying to the moon by putting your head between your knees and spitting hard."
"Green, Fist; we'll only need you once. What about the Air Corps boys?" Artillery observers doubled as ground-control liaison for strike aircraft.
A sour chuckle. "Yo" should hear the commo channels; everybody from here to Tiflis is screaming that the bogeyman's out of the closet, and will Momma fly in and help, please. At least there aren't any of Hitler's pigeons around shitting on us… For that matter, I could have used air support an hour ago myself—couple hundred of those-there Fritz holdouts tried to rush my perimeter."
Eric winced. That could cause hard trouble; it was a good thing they had not waited for darkness. "Over and out, Fist."
"Kill a few for us, Palm One."
"Range, one thousand meters," Marie said expressionlessly.
Eric leaned a hand on the bunker ceiling and watched. Six heavy AFV's, twelve infantry carriers with eleven men each… not counting the flakpanzers, about two lochoi of armor and a century of panzergrenadiers. The enemy was doing about what he'd expected; about what Eric would have done with the same information—trying to bull through with whatever could be scraped up at short notice and moved under skies controlled by the opposition, in the hope that there was nothing much to stop him. And he'd know his opponents were paratroopers, hence lightly equipped. On the battlefields of Europe, that meant negligible antitank capacity; the armed forces of the Domination had a rather different definition of
light
.
"Seven hundred meters," Marie said. "They're probably going to deploy their infantry any time now, Centurion." The diesel growl of the German engines was clearly audible now: Eric gave a hand signal to Sofie, and she relayed the stand-ready command. The bunker was hushed now. Tension breathed thick; it was silent enough to hear the steel-squeal and diesel growl from the enemy armor over the windsough from the forest.
The first of the German tanks was making the final turn, a move that presented his flank; after that it would be a straight path into the village. Eric raised a hand, lips parted slightly, waiting for the first tank to pass by a white-painted stone at the six-hundred-meter mark. Time stretched, vision sharpened; this was like hunting, not the adrenaline rush of close combat. For a moment he could even feel a detached pity for his opponent.
"Now!"
CRACK! and the antitank gun cut loose, a stunning blast of noise in the confined space. The dimness of the bunker went black and rank with dust, and the barrel of the cannon slammed back almost to the far wall; the crew was leaping in with fresh ammunition even as the cradle's hydraulics returned to "rest,"
and the casing rang on the stones of the floor. Downslope to the north, the lead tank stopped dead as the tungsten-cored shot took it at the junction of turret and hull, smashing through the armor and fighting compartment, burying itself in the engine block. There was a second's pause before the explosion, a flash, and the ten-tonne mass of the turret blew free and into the air, flipping end over end into the sky, landing twenty meters from the burning hulk.
That blocked the road. The German armor wheeled to deploy into the fields; the assault gun in the rear had turned just enough to present its flank when the second antitank gun in the other bunker fired—one round that twisted it askew with a tread knocked loose, a second that struck the side armor with the brutal
chunggg
of high-velocity shot meeting steel. Assault guns are simply steel boxes, with a heavy cannon in a limited-traverse mount in the bow. From the front they are formidable; from the flanks, almost helpless. The hatches flew open, and the crew poured out to throw themselves down in the roadside ditches; one was dragging a man whose legs had contested passage with twenty kilograms of moving metal, and lost badly. The damaged vehicle burned sullenly, occasional explosions jarring the ground and sending tongues of flame through its hatches and around the gun that lay slanting toward the ground, its mantlet slammed free of the surrounding armor. Another pillar of black oil-smoke reached for the mild blue of the afternoon sky.
The bunker crew had time for a single cheer before the response came. All the armored vehicles had opened up with their secondary armament, but the machine-gun fire was little menace to dug-in positions. The second Fritz assault gun was a different matter, and its commander was cool enough to ignore the burning wreckage before and behind him. The two muzzle flashes had given away the position of the gun that killed his comrades, and the third shot howled off the thick frontal armor of his gun. Carefully he traversed, corrected for range, fired. The sound of the six-inch howitzer was thicker and somehow heavier than the high-velocity tank guns, but at this point-blank range there was no appreciable interval between firing and impact.
And the shell carried over a hundred pounds of high explosive.
Eric felt the impact as a flexing in the ground, as if the fabric of the bunker had withdrawn and struck him like a huge palm.
Dust smoked down from the ceiling, between the heavy timbers; he sneezed. There was another impact, then a thudding to their right: the second bunker was catching it.
"Marie! Get that gun to the end firing position!" The crew sprang into action, manhandling the heavy weapon back and turning it; it rumbled off down the curved length of the bunker toward the firing slit at the western end.
"Follow me!" He turned and scuttled toward the eastern end of the bunker; this was not going to be a healthy sector in a few seconds. As they ran he cupped the hand radio to his ear.
Gun two, gun two, come in. Come in, goddammit!" Then to himself: "Shit!" Even with a 150mm shell, it would have taken a direct hit to disable the other antitank gun.
Luck plays no
favorites
, he thought bleakly. Chances were the other gun was out, which meant he was naked of antitank on the eastern side of the road, except for the 120mm recoilless dug in on the edge of the forest, and he had been hoping not to have to use that just yet. Aloud, he continued.
"Tom, try to get someone through to gun two's position.
Report, and see if the machine gun positions in B bunker are intact." A different code-click. "East wing recoilless, engage any armor your side of the road, but not until within two hundred meters of our front."
The acknowledgements came through as they dropped to a halt beside the machine gun team at the east end of the bunker.
Eric rested a hand on their shoulders, leaning forward to peer through the irregular circle of the firing port.
"Yahhh!" he snarled. The bunker shook as another heavy shell impacted; bullets spalled chips of stone from the rubble outside.
Light poured through the opening—a yellow beam through the dust motes that hung, suspended, in the column of brightness.