"You… killed them," he said. "You. You."
Standartenfuhrer
, Eric thought, reading the tabs. Meeting the eyes was more of a strain than he would have believed possible; like peering inside one of the locked, red-glowing tombs of Dante's hell. The Draka spoke very softly, in the other's language, as much to himself as to his enemy.
"Yes.
We
killed them, all of them, both of us." The other's face seemed to change, and the uplifted spade wavered. Eric extended his left hand to Sofie; hers joined, the palm warm and dry against the wet chill of his. She turned, facing the German.
"Inge—Ingeborg?" he asked. It was a different voice, a boy's.
"What are you doing here? This is Moscow—this is no place for you." The shovel came down to the stone with a light
clink
, and something went out of the man. Eric and Sofie took a step backward, and another; there was nothing to prevent the centurion from using the Holbars hanging at waist level in its assault-sling. Nothing physical, at least. The SS man faded out of their circle of light.
"I am not afraid," he said, in a conversational tone. "Not afraid of the dark, Ingeborg. Not any more. Not any more."
The panzer rumbled toward them as they turned the corner at the south end of the village; the steel helmets of infantry riders showed behind its massive turret. There was no escape, not even back to the tunnels.
Sofie cursed and scrabbled for her weapon, feeling even more naked now that the familiar weight of the backpack radio was gone. Eric controlled his impulse to dive for cover; what point, now?
So
tired
, he thought, raising the Holbars. One of the soldiers stood, black face dull grey in the overcast afternoon light.
"
Black
face?" Eric said, as the man shed his German helmet and stood, waving a rifle that was twin to the one in the Draka's arms. A vast white grin split his face as he leaped to earth. The rest of his lochos followed, spreading out and deploying past the two Draka toward the ruins and the sound of the guns.
The turret of the tank popped open, and another man stiff-armed himself out of the hatch. A Draka, thin, sandy-haired, with twin gold earrings and the falconer's-glove shoulderflash worn by Citizen officers commanding the Domination's serf soldiers.
"Hey, point that-there somewheres else," he railed. "This here a
ruse
, my man. A plot, a wile, a stratagem y'know." There were more vehicles behind the tank with its Liebstandarte markings, light eight-wheeled personnel carriers,
Peltast-class
.
"The Janissaries," Sofie said, in a voice thick with tears. "Oh, how I love the sight of their jungleboy faces." A warm presence at his side, and an arm about his waist, "And you, Eric."
"Me too, Sofie, me too," he said. The Holbars fell to earth with a clatter. "And, oh, gods, I want to sleep."
Shapes were coming down the road to the south, low broad tanks whose armor was all smooth acute slopes. A huge wedge-shaped turret pivoted, the long 120mm gun drooping until he could almost see the grooves spiraling up it; he could make out the unit blazon on the side of the turret, an armored gauntlet crushing a terrestrial globe in its fist: the Archonal Guard. A flash, the crack of the cannon a moment later. Clatter as the split halves of the light-metal sabot that had enfolded the APDS round fell to earth five meters beyond the muzzle; from down range a fractional second later the heavy chunnnk! of a tungsten-carbide penetrator slapping into armor.
We
won
, Eric thought, more conscious of the warm strong shoulders in the circle of his arm. It might be years, this was a big war, but nothing could stop them now. Victory.
Victory had the taste of tears.
There were fifty members of Century A left, when the medics had taken the last of the seriously wounded; enough casualties were coming in from the direction of Pyatigorsk that walking-wounded would be left until there was spare transport to evacuate them all to the rear. The Ossetian Military Highway was bearing a highway's load, an unending stream of Hond III tanks and Hoplite APC's, ammunition carriers and field ambulances and harried traffic coordinators. The peculiar burbling throb of turbocompound engines filled the air, and bulldozers were already working, piling rubble from the ruins of the village to be used for road repair when time permitted.
The noise was deafening, even inside the shattered remnants of the mosque, where walls still rose on three sides. Especially when the multiple rocket launchers of the Archonal Guard Legion cut loose from their positions in the fields just to the south, ripple-firing on their tracked carriages, painting the clouds above with streaks of violet fire like a silk curtain across the sky. The explosions of their 200mm warheads on the Fritz positions eight kilometers to the north echoed back, grumbling, from mountains shrouded in cloud like a surf of fire, glittering like sun on tropical spray, each shell paced with a score of submunitions, bomblets. Behind them came the deeper bark of the self-propelled 155mm gun-howitzers.
"I—" Eric began, looking around the circle of faces. There was no one there but his own people; they had taken the medical help and the rations and nobody had cared to intrude further. Or to object to Dreiser's presence.
"I—" he rubbed a hand over his face, rasping on the stubble, feeling an obscure shame at the grins that answered him. "Oh, shit, people, congratulations. We made it." A cheer, that he shouted down. "Shut up, I got the most of us killed!"
"Bullshit again, sir. That was the Fritz, near as I recall," said McWhirter, a splinted leg stretched out before him, leaning on his crutch. "You saw the job got done." More laughter, and he shook his head, turning away and wiping at his eyes.
"I'm turning into a fuckin' sentimentalist, Bill," he said. The American shut his notebook with a snap and stood.
"Not likely, Eric," he said, and extended his hand. "And my thanks, too. For what will be the story of a
lifetime
if I'm lucky!"
More seriously: "It's time I went home, I think. I have things to do; but I won't forget, even if we have to be enemies someday."
"We may," said Eric quietly, gripping his hand. "But I won't forget either. If only because this is the place where I learned I have things to do, as well." He glanced over at Sofie, smoking a cigarrette and leaning against the scrap of wall. She met his eye, winked, blew a kiss. "Other reasons as well, but that mainly."
"Things to do?" Dreiser said, carefully controlling eagerness.
He had more than a reporter's curiosity, he admitted to himself.
Eric's face was different; not softer but… more animated, somehow.
"I'm going to write those books we talked about, Bill. Got a more defnite idea of them now. Also…" he drew on his own cigarette "… I've about decided to go into politics, after the war."
"Good!" Dreiser clapped him on the shoulder. "With someone like you in charge, there could be some much-needed
changes
in this Domination of yours."
Eric stared at him for a moment, then burst into laughter, fisting him lightly on the shoulder. "Don't look so astonished, my friend; I was just reflecting on how… how
American
that was.
How American yo're, under that reporter's cynicism you put on."
Slightly nettled, the correspondent raised a brow.
"How much of a believer in 'Progress'," Eric amplified, his face growing more serious. "An individualist, a meliorist, an optimist, a moralist; someone who doesn't really believe that History can happen to them…" Another flight of rockets went overhead, cutting off all conversation for the ninety seconds the salvo took to launch. Eric von Shrakenberg propped a foot on the tumbled stone of the mosque and leaned on his knee, watching the armored fist of the Domination punching northward; the turrets of the tanks turning with a blind, mechanical eagerness, infantry standing in the open hatches of their carriers. The noise sank back to bearable levels.
"Which shows me how much of a Draka I am. A believer in the ultimate importance of what you Will; that what life is about is the achievement of honor through the fulfillment of duty." He smiled again, affection rather than amusement, the expression turned slightly sinister by the yellowing green of his bruises. "I always loved my people, Bill; enough to die for them. Now, well, I ve found more to
like
about them. Enough to work and live for them, if I can.
"Bill—" his hand tightened on his knee, "
nothing
is inevitable.
The Draka have always been a hard people; we're a nation of masters, oppressors, if you will. But it's a human evil, limited by what human beings can do. I've tried to look into our future, Bill; I've seen… possibilities that even Security's headhunters would puke at, if they had the imagination. Read Naldorssen again someday, only imagine a science that could make her ravings something close to reality." He made a grimace of distaste. "It doesn't
have
to be that way."
Dreiser frowned. "Like I said, Eric: changes."
"Oh, Bill." The Draka crushed his cigarette out underfoot. " To desire the end is to desire the means: if you are not prepared to do what is necessary to achieve it, you never wanted it at all.'
That's
a Draka philosophy I believe in. To have any chance at prominence at all, I'll have to gain my people's respect in the way they understand. Doin'… questionable things." His face went hard, and a hand chopped out over the village, to a fragment of wall that stood forlornly upright. "
This!
It isn't enough to be willing to die for my people, I have to be willing to
kill
for them.
It's what they know an' respect.
"And changes? At best, with a lifetime's effort, if I'm
very
smart an'
very
lucky, I can hope to… lay the beginnings of the foundations for others to build on. Delusions of omnipotence is one national vice I haven't fallen prey to. For a beginning, for the Draka to change they'd have to stop bein' afraid, which means all their external enemies are defeated. Then maybe they could face the internal one with something besides a
sjambok
. I know—"
more softly "—I know it can be done on an individual scale. Then, perhaps in a hundred or a thousand years—"
Reliable operative
, the Security Directorate Chiliarch thought. Yo'
want reliable, do it yourself
.
He was surprised at how… alarming the offensive was, at close range. Especially now that they were passing the forward artillery parks; even inside the scout car's armor, the noise was defening. Still, it all ought to be over soon. Then back to Archona, back to the center of things. With a kudu on his dossier that the ultimate masters would note.
The oldfools past it
, he thought with satisfaction, then cursed as the car lurched. They were driving well off the shoulder of the road, away from the priority traffic pouring down from the heights of Caucasus.
Did he really expect I'd let him have the credit for this?
Eric looked up as the three ragged figures limped into the ruined mosque.
Ivan the partisan, by almighty Thor
! he thought, looking around for Dreiser. The American was deep in his notebooks; time enough to roust him out later. It would be tricky to get the Russian survivors out, but not impossible; he had heard the awe in the voices of the relieving troops, and the legend would grow. Such myths were useful to the Domination.
And to me, in this case
.
There were two others with the Russian—women, one in muddied finery that could not disguise an almost startling loveliness, the other in the wreck of an Air Corps flight suit, cut away for the bandages that covered right arm and leg and that side of her face. She was tall, hair yellow-blonde, visible eye grey…
Sofie let out a squawk as his grip on her hand grew crushing; then he was running as if his fatigue had vanished, nimble over the uncertain ground.
"Johanna!" he shouted. At the last moment he checked his embrace, careful of her wounds; hers was one-armed, tentative.
Held close her body felt somehow more fragile, the familiar odor of her sweat mixed with a sharp medicinal smell.
"How bad is it?" he asked, holding her at arm's length.
"Goddam wonderful, I'm
alive
," she said, reaching out to grasp him by the torn lapels of his tunic. "An" so are you.' She pushed her hands gently against his chest. "I'm glad, my brother." More briskly: 'They told me I'd probably keep the eye, know in a year or two, fly a desk until then. Who's this glarin' at me?"
Sofie saluted. "Monitor Tech-Two Nixon…" She peered more closely at the other Draka's name tag. "Oh, yo're his
sister
. Hell, I'm Sofie." She grinned, and rattled off a sentence in Russian to the two partisans.
Eric opened his mouth to speak, closed it again slowly as he looked over their shoulders. Two vehicles were bouncing through the uneven surface where the entrance of the mosque had been: not large, simple flattened wedges of steel plate with four soft pillow-tires, but green painted, with the Security Directorate's badge on their flanks. They halted, and metal pinged and cooled.
The rear doors opened, and three figures disembarked. The drivers' heads showed through the hatches: serfs, carefully disinterested. The others… two Intervention Squad troopers, and an officer. Not any type of field man; the uniform was far too neat, the boots polished, ceremonial whip at his belt and an attache" case in one hand.
Political Section, Police Zone Division
, Eric thought. A
Chtliarch, they're doing me proud
.
The others looked around. "Headhunters," Sofie said.
"Shit," Johanna added. "Metaphorically an' descriptively. '
"Well, well, well," McWhirter said. The survivors of Century A had closed in a semicircle about the secret police vehicles.
"Aren't you people a
lot
closer to the sharp end a' things than yo'
like?"
"Right." That was Marie Kaine. "Of course, so far back from the front, the brain tends to be ninety percent asshole, anyway; maybe they got lost."