War World IV: Invasion

by War World IV Invasion v2 Lit

  The woman watched him for a moment, then asked: “Why?”

  Caius was taken aback by the woman’s effrontery; his spy was openly astonished. Quilland waited a moment, then his face split in the wolfish grin for which he was known.

  “You mean ‘what difference would it make,’ don’t you?” the Deathmaster asked. The woman’s expression did not alter, and Quilland continued after a philosophical shrug: “Perhaps none. After all, you and the rest of the people of Haven are going to have to live with us as overlords. You don’t have to like it; you don’t have any say in it.”

  He leaned forward, conspiratorially: “Then again, we’re not stupid; we can create more trouble for ourselves than you can create for us. Removal of elements such as the Saurons who attacked your village--against orders, by the way--can only strengthen our position, and yours. Tribute women we can already have, by the hundreds. Productive villages to trade with are harder to come by.”

  Quilland shot a glance at Caius, remembered some of their fears concerning Project Daborah, and took a chance: “And one witless banshee with a laser is not going to endanger productive relations between Haveners and Saurons, nor is she going to be allowed to lead my men around by their balls. Not without answering for it, she isn’t.”

  Quilland watched the old woman’s face as she listened, and knew that he would hear it all, and all of it the truth. Not because the old Havener cared a whit for “relations between Haveners and Saurons”; certainly not because Quilland’s standards of discipline were being compromised.

  She will tell it all for the sake of simple, raw hatred, Quilland knew.

  The old woman began to speak, her voice gaining strength as she convinced herself she was signing the death warrant of at least one Sauron, perhaps more. It was an account of almost ludicrously inept brutality, which had nevertheless convinced her that she at least knew how ruthless Saurons could be.

  Quilland felt no need to tell her that the female Sauron in question would almost certainly be lobotomized and relegated to Walking Womb Status; a hardy crucible for birthing Saurons until her insides withered from the mileage of dozens of Soldiers--or one Cyborg.

  Ruthless? Thinking about the uses to which Caius would put the offenders, Quilland decided that the old woman didn’t know the meaning of the word.

  THOSE WHO LOSE, Harry Turtledove

  The chilly air of Tallinn Town was thick with the stink of woodsmoke. The onion dome of the Orthodox church swayed, toppled, crashed down through the roof. Two still forms lay in the street outside the church. One, a black-bearded priest, would never again be anything but still; blood from a dreadful head wound soaked the dirt beneath him and soiled his embroidered robe.

  At the crash of the collapsing dome, though, the other figure stirred, twisted, slowly sat. Svetlana Mladenova gazed upon ruin through half-focused eyes. She held her head in her hands. Her heavy body swayed back and forth in mourning older and deeper than conscious thought.

  How long she stayed there, rocking, keening, she never knew. She looked up again at a shout in a language she did not know. This time, the world looked clearer. That clear sight only made her long for the previous blur. Tallinn Town had truly fallen, if one could speak of a fly falling when the swatter came down on it. She listened for gunfire, but the Saurons must have mopped up the last hopeless fighters while she sprawled senseless in the street. The shout came again, closer now. She turned her head toward it. The motion made everything spin sickeningly for a moment, but then the world steadied. She got her first good look at a Sauron Soldier. Before, the invaders had been nightmare figures in their aircars, in the combat vehicles that laughed at anything mere hunting rifles could do to them.

  Rather to her surprise, the Sauron seemed an ordinary man, not a fork-tailed devil. He was taller, leaner than most of the men of Tallinn Town; his tight-fitting gray uniform, exactly the color of the smoke he strode through, emphasized that. But his sandy hair, his light eyes were no different from those of the half the townsfolk.

  He looked startlingly young. Thinking that, Svetlana found she was laughing at herself. Her granddaughter stood at the edge of womanhood, so the whole of Tallinn Town looked young to her.

  Then the Sauron moved. Svetlana thought her eyes were playing more tricks on her--one instant he was there, the next here. Here was right in front of her. She looked into the barrel of his gun, saw her own death there. What was one more, added to so many?

  The gun barrel gave a peremptory jerk. “Get up, old woman,” the Sauron said in Russia so bad, so Americ-accented, that Svetlana needed a couple of seconds to understand. They almost cost her her life. “Get up,” the Sauron repeated. “If no--” He did not say what would happen then, but the gun pointed at her face once more.

  She was not sure she could get up. But she was sure that if she failed, this fresh-faced conqueror would kill her as she stepped on a cockroach, and would worry more about the round he’d wasted than her corpse. She heaved herself upright, stood swaying.

  The Sauron gave her no time to steady herself. He gestured with the gun again, sideways now. “Go along. That way.” Again, she could hardly follow his accent, but the gun barrel made the meaning plain enough. She managed a step, another, a third.

  “Where are you taking me?” she asked.

  “Shut up.” That phrase came out clearly, as if the Sauron had had practice using it. Likely he had.

  He cocked his head at every house he passed. Once, he walked over to one, kicked down the wooden door, went inside. He was back in seconds, herding two townsfolk in front of him. One of them, a boy of about fifteen T-years, staggered along white-faced, clutching an obviously broken arm to his chest.

  His sister was a little older. She might have been pretty, were she less frightened. She started to cry when she saw Svetlana. “What will they--?”

  The Sauron cut her off. “Shut up.” In what might have been chivalry, he deigned to point with a finger instead of his weapon. “That way, cattle.”

  A few houses further on, he broke down another door. The boy with the broken arm bolted. A single shot rang out. The boy pitched forward, fell on his face. The Sauron peered out a window. Grinning at the old woman and the young, he tapped his ear. “You try run, I hear you.” He disappeared again, returned with more captives.

  Had he heard them too, Svetlana wondered, moving inside their house? She’d heard nothing, but her ears were not what they had been. Still, she doubted any normal man’s hearing could have filtered such tiny sounds from the chaos that filled Tallinn Town. What was the Sauron, then? Only one answer came to her: the new master here. She shuddered, shambled on.

  Tallinn Town was not a big city, not even by Haven’s modest standard; the Tallinn Valley did not yield enough to support a big city. A few minutes’ walk took Svetlana and her fellow prisoners outside the last of the houses. In the beetfields by the edge of town, people were herded together like . . . like cattle, Svetlana thought uneasily, remembering the word the Sauron had used.

  Men stood here, women there. She wondered why they did not mingle. For that matter, since only a handful of guards stood in the field, she wondered why some did not try to run. Then she saw the coils of razor wire that sparkled with deceptive cheer under the light from Cat’s Eye and Byers’ Star, turning fields into holding pens.

  The gate to the women’s enclosure was more razor wire, strung between a frame of posts. Before the guards let her inside, they felt her more intimately than even her late husband had been in the habit of doing. One pulled the crucifix off from around her neck, but when he saw it and its chain were only brass, he tossed it back with a snort of contempt. She scowled at him, blackly as she could. Immune to her hatred, he laughed and grabbed her backside again. She squalled in outrage, fairly leaped into the pen to escape such unwelcome attentions.

  “Mother!” “Grandmother!” Hit by embraces from two directions at once, Svetlana staggered, almost fell. Tears cut hot tracks of joy down her chilly cheeks. After a bo
mbardment worse than anything she’d imagined, after seeing so much death and casual destruction, she’d given up hope that Olga and Yelena still lived. But here they stood hugging her, hardly even hurt. She crossed herself over and over, sending up prayers of thanks to God.

  “Are you all right, mother?” her daughter Olga Ryzhkova asked. She was a solidly built woman still of childbearing years, capable-looking rather than pretty: what Svetlana had been twenty T-years before. “Did the nemtsi--” The word, which literally meant tongue-tied, had come over the centuries to apply to Germans. It fit the Saurons like a glove.

  “I am alive; to be alive now is to be well enough,” Svetlana answered. She pointed over to the men’s pen. “Have you seen your Sasha?”

  Fear filled her daughter’s blue eyes. “No. I do not think he is there. The last I saw of him was when he took his gun to fight. Since then--” She shook her head, unwilling to go on.

  Yelena said, “But Yuri is in the men’s pen, mother. He was skipping about as happily as if it were his birthday.”

  “Your little brother was only nine T-years, Yelena,” Olga said. Under the brave front she kept up for her daughter’s sake, she sounded worn and fragile, as if she were running on the last of her reserves. But somehow she managed to smile, and continued lightly, “To one that young, everything--even a pen--is a game.”

  Svetlana hoped her grandson would be able to keep thinking that, though she knew how forlorn such hope was. A little more of it died every time the Saurons brought fresh prisoners out of Tallinn Town to the pens. For one thing, the women’s pen filled far more quickly than the men’s. For another, all the townsfolk, women and men alike, looked dazed and tattered and--beaten was the word she found at last. The Saurons, by contrast, strode about on their errands as if they thought themselves God’s anointed.

  Olga scowled when she said that aloud. “More likely the Devil’s mother,” she said, reproof in her voice. Svetlana thought her daughter was surely right. Yet she had prayed to God, and what had it got her? The holy church fallen in on itself, Father Pavel stretched in front of it with half his face gone, and Tallinn Town . . . she tried not to think about what would happen to Tallinn Town in time to come.

  Hours slid past. Byers’ Star crawled slowly up the sky. The Saurons did not feed their prisoners, or make any other provision for them past ensuring they could not escape. When Svetlana needed to relieve herself, she had to squat in an already befouled patch of mud. It was on the far side of the enclosure from the men’s pen, so the bodies of her fellow captives shielded her from that shame, but nothing shielded her from the gaze of the Sauron guard a few meters away on the other side of the razor wire.

  He had more Russki than did the fellow who’d captured her. Grinning nastily, he said, “Cover yourself, old woman. I’ve seen far better than you.”

  “Metyeryebyets,” she snarled, the first time in her life, so far as she could remember, she’d ever called anyone anything so foul. The Sauron just laughed at her. She did not know whether he’d understood.

  After some nameless stretch of time, new prisoners stopped coming. A Sauron marched arrogantly out between men’s and women’s pens, shouted in Russia: “Hear me, cattle!” The voice was brassy and high, high enough to make Svetlana stare. Sure enough, those were a woman’s breasts pressing against the field-gray tunic. A woman Sauron! Somehow for Svetlana, it was one abomination too many.

  “Hear me!” Woman or not, this Sauron sounded fierce as any other. “You belong to the Race. You had better understand what that means, if you want to live a little longer. I don’t care one way or the other--it’s up to you.”

  The Devil’s anointed indeed, Svetlana thought. She believed the Sauron witch absolutely. Too many men, women, children lay dead in the ruins of Tallinn Town for her to doubt. And even were that not so, the scornful amusement with which the Sauron spoke carried conviction of itself.

  “You will obey us in all things,” she said, as if setting forth a law of nature. “If you fail in obedience, you will be punished. If you raise your hands against us, you will die. You may as well see now that we need no guns to enforce our will.” She walked over to the men’s pen, pointed to the biggest, strongest-looking fellow she saw. “You--go the gate. The guard will let you out. Here is your chance for revenge if you can take it.”

  The word flicked Misha Sikorsky into a trot. He was a brown-bearded bear of a man, fifteen centimeters taller than the Sauron woman, fifty kilos heavier, and twice as wide through the shoulders. He was also, Svetlana knew, the best wrestler in Tallinn Town.

  The Sauron said, “You want to kill me, don’t you?”

  He did not have to answer; one look at his eyes was answer enough. She laughed a taunting laugh. “Come ahead and try. None of the other Soldiers will stop you, I promise, and I have no weapons. I am yours for the taking.” She shifted her stance, spreading her legs slightly. “For that matter, you can take me as you like if you beat me. I would give myself to you; your genes might aid the Race.”

  “I wouldn’t dirty my prick with you,” Sikorsky said-- and as he spoke, he sprang. In normal times, he was not the sort to strike a woman even when he was drunk, which made him a minority in Tallinn Town. Now, though, he went after this one as if she were any other foe--and why not, with the ruin her kind had dealt out in Tallinn Town, and in which she shared?

  He was powerful, he was quick--and it availed him nothing. Cries rose from both men’s and women’s pens as he roared toward the woman Sauron. Svetlana shouted with the rest, a prayer to the God who did not seem to be listening. The woman merely waited, flat-footed and relaxed. She ducked under his grab as if he’d warned her it was coming, slid behind him, grabbed. She had the same deadly speed the Sauron who’d caught Svetlana had shown.

  The townsfolk’s shouts cut off as if sliced away by a knife. Misha roared, in surprise and anger. But he was a veteran of too many brawls to panic at the unexpected. He reached round behind him, bent his knees to roll forward and over, to crush the Sauron woman with his greater weight.

  Before he could--long before he could--she jerked back. He let out a startled squawk as his feet left the ground. Without visible effort, the Sauron woman lifted him over her head, slammed him to the cold, hard ground. He groaned, tried to rise, faltered; he shook his head as if it were filled with fog. Blood ran from his nose and the corner of his mouth. Grinning, the Sauron woman walked up to him to finish him off.

  He snaked a hand round her ankle, yanked. She went down, an expression of absurd surprise on her face. Svetlana’s ecstatic scream was lost among hundreds. No longer pretending to be more dazed than he was, Misha pulled the Sauron toward him.

  She kicked him in the ribs with her free leg. He groaned. She grabbed his right arm, twisted cruelly. He screamed then, and clutched his shoulder. After that, the fight was no longer a fight but a beating. When the Sauron woman stood up after a couple of minutes, no one in the pens could doubt her victory had been no fluke.

  The woman ran her hands through her hair, the first even slightly feminine gesture she’d shown. She delivered her verdict: “He was better than I thought, but not nearly good enough.” Beaten yet again, this time through their champion and by one who looked to be the weakest of the Saurons, the prisoners sagged in despair.

  The woman barked, “Now you’ve seen. We don’t need weapons against the likes of you. But we have them, too, and what isn’t here we can call up from the Citadel. Revolt and you die, and die for nothing, for you can’t hurt us. Do as we say and you’ll manage well enough-- better than before, maybe, for the steppe nomads will never dare trouble Tallinn Valley again.”

  “The Saurons are worse than any nomads,” a woman close by Svetlana said, looking back toward the ruins of Tallinn Town.

  “But they are stronger,” another woman answered, as if that mattered. In a way, perhaps it did. Folk of the Russki blood demanded strength in a master above all else, even kindness or fairness. Strong the Saurons were. As their spokeswoman
talked (and as Misha Sikorsky still lay unconscious), they gathered round her like a pack of stobor satiated for the moment but ready to kill again if the whim struck them.

  The woman Sauron said, “We have also a Breedmaster among us. Babies will die needlessly no more, nor mothers.”

  Remembering her own travails at birth; remembering friends of her youth now long T-years dead in childbed; remembering, as those of Tallinn Town did, the medical techniques those of Tallinn Town no longer commanded, Svetlana thought the Saurons could have had Tallinn Valley for the asking on the strength of that promise alone.

  The Sauron woman showed her teeth. It was not a smile--more a warning. “Of course, we do this for ourselves and our purposes first. This is a matter you had best not misunderstand. You are ours.”

  “What will they do to us?” someone said, soft and fearful.

  “Did you not hear? Whatever they want,” someone else answered.

  What the Saurons did seemed benign enough: they opened the prisoner pens. “Men, find your women. Wives, find your husbands,” the Sauron woman called. “Do it quickly, for we have other business to attend to here.”

  Under the guns of their conquerors, the two crowds, male and female, mingled. And even under those guns, glad cries rang out as couples crushed each other in embraces the more fervent because they’d thought they would never embrace again. Olga charged into the thick of the men, shouting Sasha’s name. Svetlana and Yelena both hung back; neither had a partner waiting.

  As pairs formed, the Saurons separated them--and any attached children--from the rest, until they formed a distinct group of their own. A line of Soldiers, weapons at the ready, screened them from the men and women (more women than men, two or three times as many; the fighting had been fierce while it lasted) who remained solitary. Svetlana’s heart sank to see her daughter not far away. Sasha had gone down, then. One more anguish on top of all the rest.

  The woman Sauron said, “All right, you families can go back to your town. Start putting things together again; make sure your crops grow. We’ll be putting in permanent fortifications over there”--she pointed east, across the Tallinn River from the town--”and we have first claim on your produce. Anything you raise over what we take, you get to keep. So if you intend to eat from now on, you know what you have to do.”