Another of TechSec's marvels, another nightmare for the
supply officers
, a detached portion of Eric's mind thought.
Officially, Technical Section's motto was "Nothing But the Best"; to the gun-bunnies who had to hump the results of their research into battle, it was commonly held to be "Firepower at All Costs."
Sofie had unslung the backpack radio, opened an access panel, made adjustments. Draka Held radios had a frequency-randomizer, to prevent eavesdropping. It was new, experimental, troublesome, but it saved time with codes and ciphers. The Fritz, now, still… She put fingers to one earphone and turned a dial, slowly.
"Got "em," she said cheerfully, raising her voice over the racket of combat. "They don't seem happy, nohow."
Eric brought the handset to his ear, willing distractions to fade until there was only the gabble of static-blurred voices. His own German was good enough to recognize the Silesian accent in the tone that carried command.
"
Congratulations
," he said, in the language of his ancestors.
There was a moment's silence on the other end; he could hear someone cursing a communications officer in the background, and the measured thudding of explosions heard through tank armor.
"
Congratulations
," he repeated, "on your losses. How many?
Fifty? A hundred? I doubt if we lost six!" He laughed, false and full and rich; it was shocking to the watching Draka, coming from a face gone expressionless as an axe. A torrent of obscenities answered him. A
peasant, from the vocabulary
, Eric thought.
Pure barnyard
. And yes, he could be distracted, enraged. Probably the type with cold lasting angers: an obsessive. The German paused for breath, and Eric could imagine a hand reaching for the selector switch of his intercom.
With merciless timing, the Draka spoke into the instant. "Any messages for your wives and sisters? We'll be seeing them before you do!
"Our circuit," he continued, and then: "Cease fire."
A pain in one hand startled him. He looked down, saw that the cigarette had burned down to his knuckle, dropped it and ground the butt into the dirt. Two-score men had died since the brief savage encounter began: their bodies lay in the fields, draped over bushes along the western edge of the forested hills, roasting and shriveling in the burning fighting vehicles down below on the road. All in the time it might have taken to smoke a cigarette, and most of them had died without even a glimpse of the hands that killed them.
He snorted. "Someday TecSec will find a way of incinerating the world while sitting in a bunker under a mountain," he muttered. 'The apothesis of civilized warfare."
"Sir?" Sofie asked.
Eric shook himself. There was the work of the day to be done; besides, it had probably been no prettier in chain-mail.
"Right. Get me the medics, I want a report on what happened in Bunker B. Put… Svenson, wasn't it, down on the treeline? Put him on as soon as he reports in; that was well done, he deserves a pat for it."
"So do you, sir."
Startled, he glanced over at her as she finished rebuckling the straps of the radio and stood with a grunt. Teeth flashed in the gloom as she reached over and ceremoniously patted him on the back; looking about with embarrassment, he saw nods from the other troopers.
"Luck," he said dismissively. Combat was an either-or business: you took information always scanty and usually wrong, made a calculated guess, then stood ready to improvise.
Sometimes it worked, and you looked like a hero; sometimes you slipped into the shit head-first. Nobody did it right every time, not against an opponent less half-hard than the Italians.
"Bullshit,
sir
," Sofie said. "When yo' stop worryin' and do it, it gets fuckin'
done
." She shrugged at his frown. "Hey, why give the Fritz a call in the middle of things?"
"Because I always fancied myself as a
picador
, Sofie," he said, turning to watch the Germans disappear down the valley, infantry carriers first, the tanks following, reversing from one hull-down position to the next so that they could cover each other. "Let's just hope the bull I goaded isn't too much for our cape."
02/04/42
Strategos Cynthia Carstairs
Planning Staff. Supreme C.H.Q.
Castle Tarleton. Archona
Chiliarch Denford de Foumeault
Harmost [military governor]. North Italy
Milan
Your request of 07/10/41.
Service to the State
! [handwritten postscript]
Look, Dennte. I know we're asking you to make bricks
without straw, but there just
aren't
any more troops or
administrators
to
send you. I can't even spare any reliable
old-territories serf personnel; we've stripped the Police Zone to
the danger point to support the offensive. Hell, we're running
the place with grandmothers and schoolkids as it is; Security
tells me there's another of those loony cults running through the
factory compounds, claiming all the Draka are being spirited
away by their master Satan.
You'll just have to make do with what you've got; we
persuaded the Security people to scale back on their
liquidation-and-deportation schedule. I thought you said that
would help? We can let you have some of the aerosol nerve gas.
if you'd rather.
Tech Section was pleased with those job-lots of equipment
and skilled workers you've been sending: something about
"heavy water." whatever that means. Maybe one of the
bombardment rocket projects. Anyway, keep up the good work
and don't wear yourself out on the Woppo wenches.
Love, Cynthia
P.S. No. you can't have a combat command, either. You're
too valuable there.
DRAKA FORCES BASE KARS, PROVINCE OF ANATOLIA APRIL 14, 1942: 0600 HOURS
The barrage lit the sky to the east, brighter than the false dawn. Forty kilometers, and the guns were a continuous flicker all along the arch of the horizon, as of heat-lightning, the sound a distant rumbling that echoed off the mountains and down the broad open valleys.
Johanna von Shrakenberg stood to watch it from the flat roof of the two-story barracks. She had risen early, even though her lochos was on call today and so spared the usual four-kilometer run; slipped out from between Rahksan and the sleeping cat, and brought her morning coffee and cigarette up here. The cold was bitter under the paling stars, and she was glad of the snug, insulated flight suit and gloves. Steam rose from the thick china mug, warm and rich, soothing in her mouth as she sipped.
The guns had been sounding since the start of the offensive.
She tried to imagine what it was like under that shelling: earth and rock churning across square kilometers, thousands of tons of steel and explosive ripping across the sky… the artillery of sixty legions, ten thousand guns, everything from the monster 240's and 200's of the Army Corps reserve to field guns and mortars and rocket launchers.
"
Only the mad inhuman laughter of the guns
," she quoted softly. Beyond that was the Caucasus, and the passes where the Airborne legions had landed in the German rear. Her brother among them… she shook her head. Worry was inevitable and pointless, but Eric's grip on life was not as firm as she would have liked.
The sort of man who needs something or someone to
live for
, she thought.
I wish he'd find one, this business is
dangerous enough when you're trying
.
Dawn was breaking, rising out of the fire and the thunder.
Shadow chased darkness down the huge scored slopes of the mountains, still streaked with old drifts. Rock glowed, salmon-pink; she could see a plume of snow trailing feather-pale from a white peak. Below clusters of young trees marked the manors the Draka had built, and fields of wheat showed a tender, tentative green. A new landscape, scarcely older than herself.
There had been much work done here in the last generation, she thought; it took Draka to organize and plan on such a scale.
Terraces like broad steps on the hillsides, walled with stones carted from the fields; canals; orchards and vineyards pruned and black and dusted with green uncoiling buds. All of it somehow raw and new, against this bleakness made by four thousand years of peasant axes and hungry goats.
Well, only a matter of time
, she mused. Already the Conservancy Directorate was drawing a mat of young forest across the upper slopes; in another hundred years these foothills would be as lush as nature permitted, and her grandchildren might come here to hunt tiger and mouflon.
The scene about her was also Draka work, but less sightly.
Kars was strategic, a meeting of routes through the mountains of eastern Turkey, close to the prewar Russian border. The conquest back in 1916-1917 had been a matter of foot infantry and mule trains and supply drops by dirigibles. Castle Tarleton had enough problems guarding six thousand miles of northern frontier without transportation worries; even before the Great War was over a million laborers had been rounded up to push through railways and roads and airship yards.
So when the buildup for the German war began there was transport enough; just barely, with careful planning. The air base around her sprawled to the horizon on the south and west, and work teams were still gnawing at scrub and gravel. Others toiled around the clock to maintain the roads pounded by endless streams of motor-transport; the air was thick with rock dust and the oily smell of the low-grade distillate the steam trucks burned. Barracks, warehouses, workshops, and hangars sprawled, all built of asbestos-cement panels bolted to prefabricated steel frames: modular, efficient, and ugly. On a nearby slope the skeletal mantis shape of an electrodetector tower whirled tirelessly.
Johanna flicked the cigarette butt over the edge of the roof and drank the last lukewarm mouthful of coffee. "Like living in a bloody construction site," she muttered, turning to the stairwell.
The bulletin board in the ready room held nothing new: final briefing at 0750, wheels-up half an hour later, a routine kill-anything-that-moved sweep north of the mountains to make sure the Fritz air kept its head down.
Merarch
Anders was going over the maps one more time as she passed through, raising his head to nod at her, his face a patchwork of scars from twenty years of antiaircraft fire and half a dozen forced landings. She waved in response, straightening a little under the cool blue eyes.
Anders was the "old man" in truth, forty-two, ancient for a fighter pilot. He had been a
bagbuster
in the Great War, flying one of the pursuit biplanes that ended the reign of the dirigibles.
And even in middle age the fastest man she had ever sparred with.
The canteen was filling with her fellow Draka. The food was good; that was one of the advantages of the Air Corps. The ground forces had a motto: "join the Army and live like a serf,"
but a pilot could fly out to fight and return to clean beds, showers, and cooked food. This time she took only a roll and some fruit before heading out to the field; combat tension affected everybody a different way, and with her it tightened the gut and killed her appetite, also any capacity for small talk.
The planes of her lochos were having a final check-over in their sandbagged revetments, sloping pits along either side of an accessway that led out into the main runway for this section.
Technicians were checking the systems, pumps chugged as the fuel tanks filled, armorers coaxed in belts of 25mm cannon shells for the five-barrel nose battery.
Her ground crew paused to smile and wave as Johanna settled herself on the edge of the revetment and sat cross-legged, watching. On excellent advice, her father's among others, she had gone out of her way to learn their names and take an interest in their conditions. They were serfs, except for the team commander; not Janissaries, unarmed auxiliaries owned by the War Directorate, but privileged and highly trained. Their work would be checked by the inspectors, of course, but there was a world of difference between the best and just-good-enough.
She sighed as she watched them work on her aircraft. Even earthbound, with the access panels open, the Eagle was a beautiful sight: as beautiful as a dolphin or a blooded horse, enough to make your breath catch when it swam in its natural element above the earth. It was a midwing monoplane, the slender fuselage just big enough for pilot, fuel, and the five cannon, slung between two huge H-form 24 cylinder Atlantis Peregrine turbocharged engines in sleek cowlings. Twice the power of a single-engine fighter and for less than twice the weight: not quite as agile in a dogfight, but better armored and more heavily armed, and
much
faster…
Like most pilots, she had personalized her machine: a Cupid's bow mouth below the nose, lined with shark's teeth, and a name in cursive script: "Lover's Bite." There were five swastikas stenciled below the bubble canopy, the marks of her victories.
Johanna's mouth quirked. Flying was… flying was like making love after a pipeful of the best rum-soaked Arusha Crown
ganja;
she had always had a talent for it, and the Eagle was a sweet ship. And somewhat to her surprise, she had turned out to be an excellent fighter pilot; she had the vision and the reflexes, and most important of all the nerve to close in,
very
close, right down to 100 meters, while the enemy wings filled the windscreen and your guns hammered bits of metal loose to bounce off the canopy…
And frankly, I could do without it
, she thought. There were worse ways to spend the war: sweating in the lurching steel coffin of a personnel carrier, or clawing your hands into the dirt and praying under a mortar barrage—but dead was dead, and she had not the slightest desire to die. Nor to spin in trapped in a burning plane, or…
She shrugged off the thought. War was the heritage of her people and her caste; it was just that she would have preferred to be lucky. Peacetime duty for her military service, then, hmmm, yes, Capetown for her degree. Nothing fancy; a three-year in Liberal Arts and Estate Management and an aristocratic A-grade. And days spent lying naked on the beaches of the Peninsula, surfing, going to the
palaestra
to run and wrestle, throw the disk and javelin and practice the pankration. Wearing silk and skirts; concerts and theaters and picture galleries, love affairs and long talks and walking under the olives on starlit nights…