"Stop," he gasped. Something
oofed
into him, and he grabbed at brush to keep himself upright. "Mine it," he continued.
Behind him, one of the satchelmen pulled a last burden out of her pack. Unfolding the tripod beneath the Broadsword mine, she adjusted it to point back the way they had come, downslope, northwards. Then she undipped a length of fine wire, looped one end through the detonator hook on the side and stepped forward. One step, two… around a handy branch, across the trail, tie it off…
"Good, can't see it mahself. Now, careful, careful," she muttered to herself as she stepped over the wire that now ran at shin height across the pathway and bent to brush her fingers on the unseen slickness of the mine's casing. The arming switch should be…
there
. She twisted it.
"Armed," she said. Now it was deadly, and very sensitive. Not enough for the pattering raindrops to set it off, she had left a little slack, but a brushing foot would detonate it for sure. The trail was lightless enough to register as black to her eyes, with only the lighter patches of hands and equipment catching enough of the reflected glow to hover as suggestions of sight.
Still, she was sure she could detect a flinch at the words; mines were another of those things that most soldiers detested with a weary, hopeless hatred; you couldn't do anything much about them, except wait for them to kill you.
The sapper grinned in the dark. People who were nervous around explosives did not volunteer for her line of work; besides that, her training had included working on live munitions blindfolded. And Eddie had not made it back; Eddie had been a good friend of hers.
Hope they-all come up the trail at a run
, she thought vindictively, kissing a finger and touching it to the Broadsword.
Eric stood with his face turned upward to the rain while the mine was set, letting the coolness run over his face and trickle between his lips with tastes of wood and greenness and sweat from his own skin; he had been moving too fast for chill to set in.
The scent of the forest was overwhelming in contrast to the fecal-explosive-fire smells of the brief battle—resin and sap and the odd musky-spicy scents of weeds and herbs.
Alive
, he thought. Gunfire to the south, around the slope of the mountain and through the trees, confusing direction. A last salvo of shells dragged their rumble through the invisible sky. Sofie was beside him, an arm around his waist in support that was no less real for being mostly psychological.
"Burn boot, people," he said quietly, just loud enough to be heard over the rain. "Let's go home."
They were nearly back to the village before he collapsed.
"
…had spent the 1920's and 30's preparing for
a
war. but
not necessarily the war that actually happened. The Soviet
Union consolidated itself and began to industrialize far more
rapidly than the Strategic Planning Board had anticipated,
and the Draka conquests in western China enabled Japan to
quickly overrun and occupy the seaboard provinces. With their
vast manpower and mineral resources, the last constraints on
the development of Imperial Japan's industrial-military
potential were removed. And with the Domination entrenched
in Thrace and Bulgaria, we now had a border with the
Balkans—a chaotic power vacuum after the breakup of the
Austro-Hungarian Empire, but a natural field of German
expansion once the Reich had recovered from the Great War
and thrown off the paper shackles of the Versailles Treaty. For
most of the first post-War decade these threats remained only
potentials, but the specter of a war on three fronts increasingly
haunted the planners in Castle Tarleton. All that they could do
was press ahead with preparations for the inevitable conflict; it
was obvious that it would be a continental war of mass armies
and airfieets
.
A combination of skill and sheer good fortune avoided that
niahtmare. The border clashes with Jaoan in the late 1930's
revealed that while determined and very tenacious, her ground
forces had fallen behind the times. Japan's primary attention
would now be turned south and east to the islands and
archipelagoes of southeast Asia and the Pacific. Hitler's daring
gamble against the Soviets succeeded, destroying an enemy
which might have been a deadly threat if their efficiency had
matched their sheer numbers and weight of metal, but it left
National Socialist Germany critically overextended. The
strategic opportunity this presented was too dazzling to be
missed
—
a chance to destroy the only remaining Power in
northern Eurasia, push the borders of the Domination to the
North Atlantic, advance by a generation the great plan to fulfill
the destiny of the Race. A possible dream, as well. Only the
Domination had had the resources and determination needed
to rearm in depth as well as breadth; the United States had the
capacity, but chose to expend her industrial energies on
washing machines and private autosteamers rather than
turret-castings and artillery barrel forges. The power was
there, if only it could be
applied…
Fire And Blood: The Eurasian War
V. I: The Gathering Thunder. 1930-1941
by Strategos Robert A. Jackson (ret).
New Territories Press, Vienna. 1965
OSSETIAN MILITARY HIGHWAY, VILLAGE ONE
APRIL 15, 1942: 0510 HOURS
William Dreiser clicked off the tape recorder and patted the pebbled waterproof leather of the casing affectionately. It was the latest thing—only the size of a large suitcase, and much more rugged than the clumsy magnetic-wire models it had replaced—from
Williams-Burroughs Electronics in Toronto. The Draka had been amazed at it; it was one field in which the United States was incontestably ahead. And it had been an effective piece: the ambush patrol setting out into the dark and the rain, faces grim and impassive; the others waiting, sleeping or at their posts, a stolid few playing endless games of solitaire.
Then the eruption of noise in the dark, confusing, bewildering, giving almost no hint of direction. Imagination had had to fill in then, picturing the confused fighting in absolute darkness.
Finally the survivors straggling in, hale and walking-wounded and others carried over their comrades' shoulders…
He looked up. The command cellar was the warmest place in the warren of basements, and several of the survivors had gathered, to strip and sit huddled in blankets while their uniforms and boots steamed beside the field stove. Some were bandaged, and others were rubbing each other down with an oil that had a sharp scent of pine and bitter herbs. The dim blue-lit air was heavy with it, and the smells of damp wool, blood, bandages, and fear-sweat under the brewing coffee. Eric was sitting in one corner, an unnoticed cigarette burning between his fingers and the blanket let fall to his waist, careless of the chill.
The medic snapped off the pencil light he had been using to peer into the Centurion's eyes and nodded.
"Cuts, abrasions an' bruises," he said. "Ribs… better tape 'em.
Mighta' been a concussion, but pretty mild. More damage from that Freya-damned stim. They shouldn't oughta issue it." He reached into the canvass-and-wire compartments of his carryall.
"Get somethin' to eat, get some sleep, take two of these-here placebo's an' call me in the mornin'."
Eric's answering smile was perfunctory. He raised his arms obediently, bringing his torso into the light. Sofie knelt by his side and began slapping on lengths of the broad adhesive from the roll the medic had left. Dreiser sucked in his breath; he had been with the Draka long enough to ignore her casual nudity, even long enough that her body no longer seemed stocky and overmuscled, or her arms too thick and rippling-taut. But the sight of the officer's chest and back was shocking. His face was bad enough, bruises turning dark and lumpy, eyes dark circles where thin flesh had been beaten back against the bone and veins ruptured, dried blood streaking from ears and mouth and turning his mustache a dark-brown clump below a swollen nose blocked with clots. Still, you could see as bad in a Cook County stationhouse any Saturday night, and he had as a cub reporter on the police beat.
The massive bruising around his body was something else again: the whole surface of the tapered wedge was discolored from its normal matte tan to yellow-grey, from the broad shoulders where the deltoids rose in sharp curves to his neck, down to where the scutes of the stomach curved below the ribs.
Dreiser had wrestled the young Draka a time or two, enough to know that his muscle was knitted over the ribs like a layer of thick india rubber armor beneath the skin. What it had taken to raise those welts…
Christ, he's not going to be so good-looking if
this happens a few more times
, the American thought. And I'm
damn
glad I'm not in this business. Even then, he felt his mind making a mental note; this would be an effective tailpiece to his story. "Wounded, but still thoroughly in command of the situation, Centurion von Shrakenberg…"
Sofie finished the taping, a sheath like a Roman's loricated cuirass running from beneath his armpits to the level of the floating ribs. Eric swung his arms experimentally, then bent. He stopped suddenly, lips thinning back over his teeth, then completed the motion; then he coughed and spat carefully into a cloth.
"No blood," he muttered to himself. "Didn't think doc was wrong, really, but—" He turned his head to give Sofie a rueful smile, stroking one hand down the curve of her back. "Hey, thanks anyway, Sofie."
She blushed down to her breasts; looked down and noticed the goosebumps and stiffened nipples with a slight embarrassment, coughed herself, and drew on a fresh uniform tunic. "Ya, no problem," she said. "Ymir-cursed cold in here…"
She turned to pick up a bowl and dampen a cloth. "Ag,
cis
, Cenrurio— Eric, we need y' walkin', come dawn."
He sighed and closed his eyes as she began to clean the almost-dried blood from his face, pushing back damp strands of his hair from his forehead. The cigarette dangled from one puffed lip.
"Better at walkin' than thinking, from the looks of tonight's fuckup," he said bitterly.
"Bullshit." Heads turned; that had been McWhirter, from the place where he sat with the neatly laid-out parts of an assault rifle on a blanket before his knees; he had more than the usual reluctance to let a rifle go without cleaning after being fired. He raised a bolt carrier to the light, pursed his lips and wiped off excess oil. "With respect, sir. From a crapped out bull, at that."
Eric's eyes opened, frosty and pale-grey against the darkening flesh that surrounded them. The NCO grinned; he was stripped to shorts as well, displaying a body roped and knotted and ridged with muscle that was still hard, even if the skin had lost youth's resilience. His body was heavier than the officer's, thicker at the waist, matted with greying yellow hair where the younger man's was smooth, and covered with a pattern of scars, everything from bullet wounds and shrapnel to what looked like the beginning of a sentence in Pushtu script, written with a red-hot knife.
"Yes, Senior Decurion?" Eric said softly.
"Yes, Centurion." The huge hands moved the rifle parts, without needing eyes to guide them. "Look,
sir
. I've been in the Regular Line since, hell, '09.
Seen a lot of officers; can't do what they do—the good ones—Mrs. WcWhirter didn't raise her kids for that, but Ah can run a firefight pretty good, and
pick
officers. Some of the bad ones—" he smiled, an unpleasant expression "—they didn't live past their second engagement, you know? Catchin' that Fritz move up the valley was smooth, real smooth.
Had
to do somethin' about it, too. Can't see anything else we could've done.
Sir."
He slapped the bolt carrier back into the receiver of the Holbars, drew it back and let the spring drive it forward. The sound of the
snick
had a heavy, metallic authority. "An' we did do something. We blew their transport, knocked out say two-three more tanks, killed, oh, maybe two hundred. They turned back; next attack's goin' to come straight up our gunsights. For which we lost maybe fifteen effectives. So please, cut the bullshit, get some rest and let's concentrate on the next trick."
"My
trick
lost us half of 2nd Tetrarchy," Eric said.
The NCO sighed, using the rifle to lever himself erect and sweeping up the rest of his gear with his other hand. "With somewhat
less
respect, sir, y'may have noticed there's a
war
goin' on, and it's mah experience that in wars people tend to get killed. Difference is, is it
gettin the job done or not
? That's what matters."
"
All
that matters," he added with flat sincerity from the doorway. " 'Course, we may all die tomorrow." Another shrug, before he let the curtain drop behind him. "Who gives a flyin'
fuck, anyhow?"
Eric blinked and started to purse his lips, stopping with a wince. Sofie dropped the cloth in the bowl and set it aside, staring after the Senior Decurion with a surprised look as she gathered a nest of blanket and bedroll around herself and reached out a hand to check the radio.
"He's got something right, for once," she muttered. Everything green, ready… She shivered at the memory of the palm on her shoulder.
Can it. Later. Maybe
.
"Well,
Ah
give a flyin' fuck," said a muffled voice from the center of the room. It was Trooper Huff, lying face-down on the blankets while her friend kneaded pine oil into the muscles of her shoulders and back. The fair skin gleamed and rippled as she arched her back with a sigh of pleasure.
"Centurion? Now, all
Ah
want is to get back—
little lower,
there, sweetlin
—get back to Rabat province an' the plantation, spend the rest of mah life raisin' horses an' babies. Old Ironbutt the deathfuckah is
still
right. If those Fritz'd gotten on our flank tomorrow they'd have had our ass for
grass
, Centurion." She sighed again, looking up. "Yo're turn." The dark-haired soldier handed her the bottle and lay down, and Huff rose to her knees and began to oil her palms. Then she paused. "Oh, one last thing.