Marching Through Georgia

by S. M. Stirling

  "Risky," he said, nodding toward the map. "Twenty legions of armor, thirty mechanized. Another sixty of Janissary motorized infantry. Six thousand tanks, twenty thousand infantry carriers, a thousand SP guns… two million troops, and it all depends on two legions of paratroopers. North of the mountains, in an open-field battle of maneuver, we can take the Fritz. The Ivans are still holding hard east of the Volga, the Germans took on too much; they haven't got a strategic reserve to speak of… But butting our heads into the Caucasus, fighting our way over the mountains, inch by inch—" He shook his head. "We can't afford a war of attrition; there aren't enough Draka; it would ruin us. And there may not be any limit to the number of serfs we can conscript for the Janissaries, but there are limits to the number we can arm safely."

  "War is risk," the officer beside him replied. The cat-pupiled eye of Intelligence was on her collar; she had the same air of well-kept middle age as he, and a scholar's bearing. "Breaking the Ankara Line was a risk, too; but it gave us Anatolia, back in "17."

  The general laughed, rubbing at his leg. The fragments from the Austrian antiairship burst had severed tendons and cut nerves; the pain was a constant backdrop to his life, and worse on these cold nights. Pain does not hurt, he reminded himself. Only another sensation. The Will is Master. "Then I was an optimistic young centurion, out at the sharp end, sure I could pull it out of the kaak even if the high command fucked it up," he said. "Now the new generation's out there, and probably expecting to have to scoop up my mistakes."

  "I was driving a field ambulance in '16; all you male lords of creation thought us fit for, then."

  He laughed. "We weren't quite so stretched for reliable personnel, then." The woman snorted and poked a finger into his ribs.

  "Hai, that was a joke, Cohortarch," he complained with a smile.

  "So was that, you shameless reactionary bastard," she retorted. "If you're going to insult me, do it when we're on-duty and I can't object…"

  He nodded, and grew grim. "Well, we're committed to this attack; the Domination wasn't built by playing safe. There'll never be another chance like this. Thank the White Christ that Hitler attacked the Soviets after he finished off the French. If they'd stayed in Europe, we'd never have been able to touch them."

  She nodded, hesitated, spoke: "Your boy's in the first wave, isn't he, Karl?"

  The man nodded, turning away from the railing and leaning his weight against the ebony cane at his side. "Eric's got a Century in the First Airborne," he said quietly, looking out over the city. "And my daughter's flying an Eagle out of Kars." The outer wall was window from floor to ceiling; Castle Tarleton stood on a height that gave a fine view of the Domination's capital. The fort had been built in 1791, when the Crown Colony of Drakia was new. The hilltop had been for practical reasons, once: Cavalry had been based here, rounding up labor for the sugar plantations of Natal, where the ancestors of the Draka were settling into their African home.

  Those had been American loyalists, mostly southerners; driven from their homes by vengeful neighbors after the triumph of the Revolution. The British had seized the Cape from its Dutch masters during that war, and found it cheap enough to pay their supporters with the stolen goods of colonial empire. "Strange," Karl von Shrakenberg continued, softly enough to make her lean toward the craggy face. "I can command a legion handily enough—by Gobineau's ghost, I wish they'd give me a field command!—run my estate; I even get along well with my daughters. But my son… Where do the children go? I remember taking him from the midwife, I remember setting him on my shoulders and naming the stars for him, putting him on his first pony. And now? We hardly speak, except to argue. About absurdities: politics, books… When did we become strangers? When he left, there was nothing. I wanted to tell him… everything: to come back alive, that I loved him. Did he know it?"

  His companion laid a hand on his shoulder. "Why didn't you say it?" she asked softly. "If you can tell me?"

  He sighed wearily. "Never was very good with words, not that sort. And there are things you can say to a friend that you can't to your blood; perhaps, if Mary were still alive…" He straightened, his eyes focusing on the world beyond the glass. "Well. This view was always a favorite of mine. It's seen a lot."

  Together they looked down across the basin, .conscious of the winds hooting off the high plateau at their backs, cold and dry with winter. The first small fort of native fieldstone had grown over the years; grown with the colony of Drakia, named for Francis Drake and heir to that ruthless freebooter's spirit. It was a frontier post guarding the ranches and diamond mines, at first. Railways had snaked by to the great gold fields of the Whiteridge; local coal and iron had proved more valuable still, and this was a convenient post for a garrison to watch the teeming compounds of serf factory hands that grew beside the steel mills and machine-works. Then the Crown Colony became the autonomous Dominion of Draka and needed a capital, a centrum for a realm that stretched from Senegal to Aden, from the Cape to Algeria.

  Lights starred the slopes beneath them, fading the true stars above; mansions with roofs of red tile, set in acres of garden. A monorail looped past, a train swinging through silently toward the airship haven and airport to the west, windows yellow against the darkness. A tracery of streets, sprawling over ridge and valley to the edge of sight, interrupted by the darker squares of parkland. Archona was the greatest city of the Domination—eight million souls. Through the center slashed the broad Way of the Annies, lined with flowering jacaranda trees, framed between six-story office blocks, their marble and tile washed snow-pale in moonlight. The Assembly building, with its great two hundred meter dome of iridescent stained glass; the Palace where Archon Gunnarson had brought law into conformity with fact and proclaimed the Domination a sovereign state, back in 1919.

  Karl's mouth quirked; he had been here in the Castle on that memorable day. The staff officers had raised a loyal glass of Paarl brandy, then gone back to their planning for the pacification of the New Territories and the next war. None of them had expected the Versailles peace to last more than a generation, whatever the American president might say of a "war to end war." Unconsciously, his lip curled in contempt; only a Yankee could believe something that obviously fatuous.

  "You grew up here, didn't you, Sannie?" he said, shaking of! the mood of gloom.

  "Ja,' she replied. "Born over there—" she pointed past the block of government buildings, to where the scattered colonnades of the University clustered. "In the house where Thomas Carlyle lived. Nietzsche visited my father there, seemed to think it was some sort of shrine. That was a little while after he moved to the Domination. Anthony Trollope stopped by as well, they tell me. While he was researching that book, Prussia in the Antipodes, back in the 1870's. He was the one the English didn't pay any attention to, and then wished they had."

  They both smiled; it was an old joke in the Domination, that the British had been warned so openly of the Frankenstein's monster they had created by unleashing the Draka south of Capricorn. Their gaze lifted, to the glow that lit the northern horizon—the furnaces and factories of the Ferrous Metals Combine, stamping and grinding out the engines of war. The serfs of the industrial combines were being kept to their tasks; for the rest, there was little traffic. Mobilization among the citizens had left little of Archona's vaunted nightlife, and curfew kept the subject races off the central streets.

  "Well," he said, offering her an arm with a courtesy old-fashioned even in their generation of Draka. "Shall we see if, somewhere in this bureaucrat's paradise of a city, two ancient and off-duty warriors can find a drink?"

  He would face the waiting as he would any other trial; as befitted a von Shrakenberg of Oakenwald. Even if I'm the last, he thought, as his halting boot echoed through the empty halls of the fortress.

  * * * *

  Thump! Eric's parachute unfolded, a rectangle of blackness against the paling stars of dawn. He blinked; starlight and moonlight were almost painfully bright after the crowded gloom of the transp
ort; silence caressed his mind.

  Straps caught at crotch and waist and armpits, then cradled him in their padding. Above him the night was full of thunder, as hundreds of the huge transports spilled their cargos of troops and equipment into the thin air; south and east still more formations bulked black against the stars: transports and glider-tugs. Chutes blossomed, sorted themselves into formations, turned to their destinations… A paratrooper lost velocity fast; the transports drew ahead and above quite quickly. Above a flight of Falcon III fighters banked, their line stretching into an arc, moonlight glinting on the bubble canopies. Sharks of the sky.

  This is the best time, Eric thought, as the flight of transports vanished, climbing and turning for height and home, southward to their bases. Silence, except for the fading machines and the hiss of the wind through the silk. Silence over a great scattered cloudscape, castles and billows of silver under a huge cool moon; air like crisp white wine in the lungs, aloneness. A feeling beyond the self; peace, joy, freedom—in a life bound on the iron cross of duty, in the service of repression and death. There had been a few other times like this; making love with Tyansha, or single-handing a ketch through monsoon storms. But always here, alone in the sky.

  His hands were working on the lines, turning and banking; these new sail-chutes flew; like gliders. None of the old business of dropping all over the farmyard, where the wind and fate pleased. You could jump high and sail to your drop zone quietly, with no thunder of engines to announce you. And you could land soft; that was important. Paratroopers had to carry most of their equipment—as much again as their own body weight. With a load like that you could break your back just stepping into a ditch, if you weren't careful.

  The rest of the Century were forming up behind, wheeling like a flight of birds of prey; he saw with relief that the gliders, with their cargo of heavy weapons and specialists, were following. The Legion was dropping on the whole pass that took the Ossetian Military Highway through the mountains from north to south, but the bulk of it was landing at the southern end. The 2nd Cohort was the northernmost unit, and Century A was the point formation of 2nd Cohort. They would take the shock of whatever reaction force the Fritz could muster to relieve their cut-off comrades south of the mountains. Two hundred of them, to blunt the enemy spearheads; they were going to need that special equipment, and the thirty-odd specialists in the tetrarchy of combat engineers. Very badly.

  Now… The cloud cover was patchy, light and shadow. Southward, the main peaks of the Caucasus shone snow white. Below was a black-purple immensity of scree, talus-slope, dark forests of beech and holm oak, sloping down to a valley and a thread of road winding up into the mountains. On a map it was nothing, a narrow sliver of highland between the Black and Caspian Seas…

  Over it all loomed the great mass of Mount Elbruz; beyond it was the south slope, ex-Soviet Georgia; beyond that the Draka armored legions massing in the valleys of Armenia. The symbolism of it struck him—all Europe was in shadow, in a sense. From the Elbe to the Urals, there was a killing underway great enough to leave even the cold hearts at Castle Tarleton shaken… Eric had been a student of history, among other things; his mouth quirked at the supreme irony that the Draka should come as deliverers.

  Still, true enough, he thought, as his body automatically leaned and twisted to turn the parasail. The rule of the Domination was cruel and arbitrary, merciless in breaking resistance. But his people made war for land and booty, killed to enforce submission. What the Intelligence reports said was happening below was madness come to earth: slaughter for its own sake, an end rather than a means.

  The Fritz must be convinced they've won it all, he thought, as his eyes automatically scanned for the landing zone. There…

  He stooped, a giddy exhilarating slide across the sky, a breathless joy. For a moment he was a bird, a hunting bird, an eagle. Stooping on the world, feeling the air rushing past his wings… Be practical, Eric, he reminded himself severely. Once they grounded they would have only their feet, and the south slope of the mountains was German-held.

  But lightly, by the spearhead divisions of General Von Paulus' Sixth Army, itself the vanguard of Army Group South. They had fought their way across the Ukraine, through the great encirclement battles at Kiev and Kharkov, even with most of their armor up north for the attack on Moscow. The frantic Russian counterattacks had failed; the Panzers came south, ground down by a thousand miles of route-march over frozen wasteland and the costly destruction of Zhukov's Siberians. The offensive continued, on through the winter and the mud of spring; east to the Volga at Stalingrad, wheeling south and east to Astrakhan, south into the Kalmyk steppe, taking Maikop and Krasnodar, on to the Kuban.

  Now… now they were a very long way from home—thousands of miles of mud trail, torn-up railway, scorched earth. Good troops, but exhausted, fought out, short of supplies. If the paradrop could hold the passes behind them, they could be crushed out of existence by waves of Janissary infantry; then the Draka armor would pour into the Russian plains, close to their bases, fresh, with superior weapons and limitless supplies, against enemies who had battered each other into broken-backed impotence.

  The ground was coming up fast; he could smell it, a wet green scent of trees and spring meadow-grass and rock. This area had been swarming with Draka reconnaissance planes for months; the contours were springing out at him, familiar from hundreds of hours poring over photomaps. He banked to get a straight run at the oblong meadow. Carefully now, don't get caught in that fucking treeline… Branches went by three meters below. He hauled back on the lines, turning up the forward edge of the parasail; it climbed, spilled air, slowed. With the loss of momentum it turned from a wing to a simple parachute once more, and good timing landed him softly on his feet, boots vanishing in knee-high grass starred with white flowers.

  Landing was a plunge from morning into darkness and shadow, as the sun dropped below the mountains to the southeast. And always, there was a sense of sadness, of loss; lightness turning to earthbound reality. Not an eagle any more, went through him. More like a hyena, a mordant part of his mind prompted. Come to squabble over the carcass of Russia with the rival pack.

  Swiftly, he hit the quick-release catches and the synthsilk billowed out, white against the dark grass. He turned, clicking on the shielded red flashlight, waving it in slow arcs above his head. The first troopers of his Century were only seconds behind him, grey rectangles against the stars. They landed past him, a chorus of soft grunts and thuds, a curse and a clatter as somebody rolled. A quick check: mapcase, handradio, binoculars, Holbars T-6 assault rifle, three 75-round drums of 5mm for it, medikit, iron rations, fighting dagger in his boot, bush knife across his back… That was an affectation—the machete-sword was more a tradition than anything else—but…

  Dropping their chutes and jogging back by stick and section, rallying to the shouts of their decurions and tetrarchs, platoon-commanders, the troopers hurried to form in the shadows of the trees. The mottled grey of their uniforms was nearly invisible in the dim light, and their faces were white ovals beneath the rims of their wide-flared steel helmets. Sofie jogged over to her position with the headquarters communication lochos, the antennae waving over her shoulder; she had the headset on already, tufts of bright tow hair ruffling out between the straps. As usual, she had clipped her helmet to her harness on touchdown; also as usual, she had just lit a cigarette. The match went scrit against the magazine well of her machinepistol; she flicked it away and held out the handset.

  * * * *

  For Dreiser, leaving the airplane had been a whirling, chaotic rush. For a moment he tumbled, then remembered instructions. Arms and legs straight. That brought the sickening spiral to a stop; he was flying forward, down toward silver clouds and the dark holes between them.

  "Flying, hell, I'm falling," he said into the rush of cold wind. His teeth chattered as he gripped the release toggle and gave the single firm jerk the Draka instructors had taught. For a heart-stopping moment there was no
thing, and then the pilot chute unfolded, dragging out the main sail. It bloomed above him, the reduction in speed seeming to drag him backward out of his fall. Air gusted past him, more slowly now that the parachute was holding. He glanced up to the rectangle above him, a box of dozens of long cloth tubes fastened together side by side, held taut by the rush of air.

  "The parasail functions as both a parachute and a wing,' " he quoted to himself. " To acquire forward speed, lean forward. Steer by hauling on left or right cords, or by shifting the center of gravity…"

  God, it's working. Blinking his eyes behind the goggles that held his glasses to his face, he peered about for the recognition-light. The aircraft had vanished, nothing more than a thrumm of engine noise somewhere in the distance. There it was, a weak red blinking: he shifted his weight forward, increasing the angle of glide. Cautiously; you could nose down in these things, and he doubted he could right it again before he hit.

  The meadow rose up to strike; he flung himself back, too soon, lost directional control, and barely avoided landing boot-first in another chute at a hundred feet up. Ground slammed into his soles and he collapsed, dragging.

  "Watch where yo' puttin' y'feet. Yankee pigfuckah," an incongruously young and feminine voice snarled as he skidded through tall grass and sharp-edged gravel on his behind, scrabbling at the release straps until the billowing mass of fabric peeled away to join the others flapping on the ground. He stood, turned, flung himself down again as the dark bulk of a glider went by a foot above his head, followed by a second.

  "Jesus!" he swore, as they landed behind him and collided with a brief crunch of splintering plywood and balsa. Boots hurdled him, voices called in throttled shouts.

  As he came to his feet, the meadow seemed to be in utter chaos, groups of Draka paratroopers dashing about, parasails still banking in, color-coded lights flashing. But visibly, the mass of men, women, and machinery was sorting itself into units, moving according to prearranged plans. Behind him the detachable nose of a glider broke free under enthusiastic hands and the ramp to the cargo-hold dropped; a pilot staggered down to sit cradling his head in his hands, while a file of troopers ran up to begin unloading crates. Dreiser walked toward the spot where the Draka commanders would be gathering, feeling strength return to his rubbery legs and a strange exhilaration building.