Didn't notice you askin' anyone to do anythin' yo' wouldn't do yoself."
Eric's face stayed expressionless for a moment, and then he shook his head, squeezing his eyelids closed and chuckling ruefully. "Outvoted," he said, suddenly yawning enormously. He grinned down at Sofie, eyes crinkled. "I'm not going to indulge in this-here dangerous sport of plannin' things to do once the war is over," he said in a tone lighter than most she had heard from him. "Bad luck to price the unborn calf. But did you have anything planned for yo're next leave, Sofie?"
"Hell, no, Eric
sir
!" she said with quiet happiness, grinning back.
"Dinner at Aladdin's?" he said. That was a restaurant built into the side of Mount Meru, in Kenia province. The view of the snowpeak of Kilimanjaro rising over the Serengeti was famous, as were the game dishes.
"Consider it a date, Centurion," she said, snuggling herself into the blankets and closing her eyes. Tomorrow was going to be a busy day.
Eric looked across at Dreiser. "That's private, Bill, but we could all three get together for some deep-sea fishing off Mombasa afterwards. Owe you something for those articles, anyway; they're going to be… useful, I think. Better than the trip you had with that writer friend of yours—what was his name, Hemingway?"
Dreiser laughed softly. "Acquaintance; Ernest dosen't have friends, just drinking buddies and sycophants. I'll bet you don't get drunk and try to shoot the seagulls off the back of the boat…
and you seem to be in a good mood tonight, my friend."
"Because I've got things to do, Bill, things to do. And with that, goodnight." He stubbed out the cigarette, swilled down the last of the lukewarm coffee. And
probably about twenty hours of
life to do them with
, he thought. Pushing the sudden chill in his gut away:
White Christ and Wotan one-eye, what's different
about that? The odds haven't changed since yesterday
. But his wants had, he forced himself to admit with bleak honesty, and his vision of his duty—an expanded one, which required his presence, if it could be arranged.
There was one good thing about the whole situation.
Whatever happened, he no longer had to face death with an attitude indistinguishable from Senior Decurion McWhirter's.
That
he had
never
felt comfortable with.
Dreiser waited while the room grew still; half an hour and there were no others awake, save himself and the cadaverous brown-bearded man who had the radio watch. The cold seemed deeper, and he pulled another blanket about himself as he laid down the notebook at last. They were not notes for his articles; those could be left to the tape, flown out with the STOL
transports that took out the wounded, given to the world by the great military broadcast stations in Anatolia. These were his private journals, part of the series he had been keeping since his first assignment to Berlin in 1934.
If
I'm going to be a fly on the wall of history, something
ought to come of it
, he thought. Something truer than even the best journalism could be. Get the raw information down now; raw feeling, as well. Safe in silence, where the busy censors of a world at war could not touch it. Safe on paper, fixed, where the gentle invisible editor of memory could not tint and bend with subconscious hindsight.
Later he would write that book: a book that would have the truth of his own observations in it, what he could research as well, written in some quiet lonely place where there would be nothing between him and his thoughts. A truth that would last.
Add up the little truths, and the big ones could follow. This action tonight, for example. A Draka tetrarchy had given a force twenty times its size a bloody nose, turned back a major attack by the enemy's elite troops and inflicted demoralizing casualties.
And it still
felt
like defeat, at least to a civilian observer. Maybe every battle was a defeat for all involved; some just got more badly beaten than others. Soldiers always lost, whichever set of generals won.
Ambition
, he mused, looking across the room at the battered face of the Draka officer.
Strange forms it takes
. What was Eric's? Not to be freed from a world of impossible choices, not any longer. And not simply to climb the ladder of the power machine and breed children to do the same in their turn—not if Dreiser knew anything of Eric's truth.
Do we ever
? The truth is, we may be enemies. But for now, we
are
friends.
It was late, and he was tired. What was that Draka poet's line?
"Darkness
is
a friend of mine… Sometimes I have to beat it back, or it would overwhelm me…" And sometimes it was well to welcome it. He closed his eyes.
Citizens were never more than 15 percent of the total
population, usually rather less; many of the serfs at any given
time were foreign-born, newly incorporated by conquest
Careful organization kept them disorganized and split into
isolated groups on plantations, mines, and factory compounds.
Well-trained police and military forces were always poised to
move along the superb roads, railways, air-transport lines for
which the Domination was famous; informer networks spread
through the subject populations like mold through a loaf of
bread. Yet guns and fortresses, barbed wire and spies,
floggings and electroshock and impalements by themselves
were never enough; repression and terror alone could not be
the answer. Especially outside the cities, serfs were always a
huge majority, always possessed the preponderance of
immediate physical force. Each master could not have troops at
his back, and orders must be obeyed even without a free
supervisor to enforce them.
Human social organizations exist because human beings
believe
they exist; for the Draka to be safe, it was essential that
the forces of belief and myth be enlisted on their side.
Knowledge that a successful uprising meant annihilation
provided the incentive for a monolithic group solidarity among
the master class; the necessary arrogant self-confidence was
the product of power itself—power of life and death over other
human beings, from birth, by hereditary right A Citizen
knew
that he or she was superior, a different order of being. And it
was necessary that at least a majority of the serfs agree, at
least to the extent of believing that resistance and death were
one. Partly this was a purely rational matter, a knowledge that
the
lex talonis
would take a hundred serf lives for a Draka killed
or injured. But on a deeper level it was essential to make myth
reality, as had earlier systems such as the Spartan
agoge;
the
endless training that pushed each Citizen child to the limit of
his or her potential had a function beyond that of producing a
better soldier or administrator. With training that emphasized
self-reliance, the ability to act alone under stress, as much as
pure deadliness; by adulthood, the individual Citizen
was
superior, visibly. That this superiority was the product of
training rather than some divine
mana
was irrelevant; that the
serfs themselves provided the wealth and leisure to make it
possible did not matter
…
200 Years: A Social History of the Domination
by Alan E. Sorensson. Ph.D.
Archona Press, 1983
NORTH CAUCASUS, NEAR PYATIGORSK APRIL 14, 1942: 0800 HOURS
Johanna blinked.
I'm alive
, she thought.
Fuckin odd, that
.
There was not much pain, no more than after a fall from a horse or surfboard, apart from a fierce ache in her neck. But there was no desire to move anything, and she was
hot
.
She blinked again, and now things came into focus behind the blue tint of her face shield. The wreck of the
Lover's Bite
was pitched forward, down thirty degrees at the nose over some declivity in the ploughed field. She was hanging limp in the safety harness, only her buttocks and thighs in contact with the seat. Her view showed a strip of canopy with blue sky beyond it, the instrument panel, the joystick flopping loosely between her knees. And her feet, resting in a pool of fuel that was up to her ankles where they rested on the forward bulkhead by the control pedals. The stink of the fuel was overwhelming; she coughed weakly, and felt the beginnings of the savage headache you got from breathing too much of the stuff.
Flames licked at the corner of her vision. She swiveled an eye, to see the port wing fully involved, roaring white and orange flames trailing dirty black smoke backward as a steady south wind whipped at it. The engine was a red-metal glow in the center of it, and… yes, the plane was slightly canted down to that direction, that was
lucky
, the fuel would be draining into the flames and not away from it.
Feeling returned; fear. She was sitting
in
a fire-bomb, in a pool of high-octane, surrounded by an explosive fuel-air mixture.
Probably no more than seconds before it went.
Got to get
out
, she thought muzzily. Her left hand fumbled at a panel whose heat she could feel even through her gloves, looped through the carrying strap of the survival package. Her right was at her shoulder, pawing at the release-catch of her harness.
Good
, she thought. It opened, and her body fell, head slamming into the instrument panel.
Consciousness returned with a
slam
against her ear and a draft of incredible coolness. A hand reached down and lifted the helmet from her head.
Voices speaking, as she was lifted from the cockpit; in German, blurred by a fire that roared more loudly as the canopy slid back. She felt disconnected, hearing and thought functioning but slipping away when she tried to focus, as if her mind were a screw with the thread stripped.
"
The pilot's alive… Mary Mother, it's a girl
!" A young man, very young. Bavarian, from the sound of his voice; a thorough knowledge of German was a family tradition among the von Shrakenbergs.
Girl, hell
, Johanna thought muzzily. She was new enough to adulthood to be touchy about it.
Two years since I passed
eighteen
.
"
Quick, get her out, this thing's ready to blow
." An older voice, darker somehow, tired. Plattdeutsch accent, she noted: no
pf or ss
sounds.
"
I can't
—
her hand's tangled in something. A box
."
"
Bring it, there may be documents
." That would be her survival package, rations and map, machine-pistol and ammunition.
The cold air brought her back to full awareness, but she let herself fall limp, with eyes closed. The younger man braced a boot on either side of the cockpit, put his hands beneath her armpits, and lifted. She was an awkward burden, and the man on the ground grunted in surprise as his comrade handed her down and he took the weight across his shoulder. She was slim but solid, and muscle is denser than fat. He gave a toss to settle her more comfortably, and she could feel the strength in his back and the arm around her waist, smell the old sweat and cologne scent. Her stomach heaved, and she controlled it with an effort that brought beads of sweat to her forehead.
He might suspect I
was conscious if I puked down his back
. She had her "passport"
pill, but you could always die.
The German carried her some distance, perhaps two hundred meters; she could see his jackboots through slitted lids, tracking through the field, leaving prints in the sticky brown-black clay.
Camouflage jacket, that meant SS. The hobnails went
rutch
on an occasional stone,
slutch
as they pulled free of the earth; the soldier was breathing easily as he laid her down on the muddy ground beside the wheels of some sort of vehicle. Not roughly, but without any particular gentleness; then his boots vanished, and she could hear them climbing into the… it must be a field car of some sort; her head had rolled toward it, and she could see the running board dip and sway under the man's weight.
The other soldier hurried up, panting, his rifle in one hand and the sheet-metal box of her survival kit in the other. Johanna could feel him lean the weapon against the vehicle and begin to speak. Then there was a crashing bang, followed by a huge muffled thump and a wave of heat. Light flashed against the side of the scout car, and heat like lying too close to the fireplace, and a piece of flaming wreckage sliced into the dirt in front of the wheels.
"Just made it," the man in the car said. Johanna let her eyes flutter open, wishing they had taken the trouble to find a dry spot; she could feel the thin mud soaking through her flight suit, and the wind was chill when it gusted away from the pyre of her aircraft. Sadness ran through her for a moment. It had been a beautiful ship…
It was a tool, and tools can be replaced, she chided herself.
The young soldier was kneeling and leaning over her, face still a little pale as he turned back from the blaze to his left. That might have been him… Nineteen, she thought. Round freckled face, dark-hazel eyes and brown hair, still a trace of puppy fat. A concerned frown as he raised her head in one hand and brought a canteen to her lips. She groaned realistically and rolled her head before accepting the drink; the water was tepid and stale from the metal container, and tasted wonderful.
That let her see his companion.
Another dish of kebab
entirely
, she thought with a slight chill. Stocky and flat-featured, cropped ash-blond hair over a tanned square face, in his mid-twenties but looking older. He was standing in the bed of the car, a little open-topped amphibian with balloon wheels, a
kubelwagen
,
keeping an easy all-corners watch. The campaign ribbons he was wearing on the faded and much-laundered field tunic told a good deal; the way he moved and held the Schmeisser across his chest rather more. Most of all the eyes, as he glanced incuriously her way: flat, empty, dispassionate. Familiar, veteran's eyes, the thousand-meter stare, she had been seeing it now and again all her life and it always meant someone to watch out for. People to whom killing and dying were neither very important any more…