Did it, by God! he thought. So much for being an old man at thirty-eight… Now, about the article, let's see: The landing showed once again the value of careful preparation and training. Modern warfare, with its complex coordination of different arms, is something new on this earth. Our devotion to the "minuteman" tradition of the amateur citizen-soldier is a critical handicap…
* * * *
Eric took the handset, silent for a moment as the gliders came in with a shush of parted air, guiding themselves down into the field marked with discarded parasails. Moonlight and predawn glow cast their wings in patterns of shade and light as flaps and slots opened to shed lift. Around him there was a holding of breath as the landing skids cut turf with a screeching of steel on gravel. The sailplanes slewed to a halt, the wing of one catching the other's tail with a crunch of plywood. A sigh gusted up as the detachable nose-sections fell away and figures began unloading.
Sofie gently tapped his hand. "Set's workin' fine, Centurion," she said. "Got the Cohort Sparks already, green-beepers from all the handradios in the Century… want a smoke?"
"Trying to give it up," he grunted, lifting the phone to his ear and clicking the pressure-button in his call sign. "You should too." He glanced at his watch: 0420 almost exactly. Forty-five minutes to dawn.
"Hey, Centurion, do I complain about your baby girls?" she replied, grinning. The rest of the head-quarters tetrarchy were falling in around him: Senior Decurion McWhirter, two five-trooper rifle "sticks" who would double as runners, two rocket-gun teams and a heavy machine gun.
They both fell silent as the hissing of static gave way to voices; coded sequences and barked instructions. Unconsciously, Eric nodded several times before speaking.
"Yes? Yes, sir. No sir; just coming in, but it looks good." Reception was excellent; he could hear a blast of small-arms fire in the background, the rapid snarl of Draka assault-rifles, the slower thump and chatter of German carbines and MG 34's.
"Ah, good." Then he and the comtech winced in unison. "The armor landed where? Sorry, sir, I know you didn't design this terrain… Right, proceed according to plan, hold them hard as long as I can. Any chance of extra antitank… yes, Conortarch, I appreciate everybody wants more firepower, but we are the farthest north… Yes, sir, we can do it. Over and out, status report when Phase A is complete. Thank you, sir, and good luck to you, too."
"Because we're both going to need it," he added under his breath as he released the send button. The Legion had had a Cohort of light tanks, Cheetahs with 75mm guns in oscillating turrets. Those had apparently come down neatly in a gully…
The gliders were emptying, stacks of crates and heavy weapons being lifted onto their wheeled carts. Paratroopers jumped with light weapons—their Holbars assault rifles, machine guns, machinepistols for techs and weapons teams, the 85mm recoilless-rocket guns that served as tetrarchy antitank. The gliders held much of the Century's fighting power— trench-mortars, the 100mm automortars, 120mm recoilless guns, heavy machine guns, flame-throwers, demolition charges, ammunition. Not to mention most of their food and medical supplies. It would likely be all they had until the regular supply drops started. And already the trunks of the birches were showing pale in the light of dawn.
A sudden sense of the… unlikeliness of it all struck Eric. He had been born in the heartlands of the Domination, fourteen thousand kilometers away in southern Africa. And here he stood, on soil that had seen… how many armies? Indoeuropeans moving south to become Hittites, Cimmerians, Scythians, Sarmatians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Armenians, Arabs, Turks, Czarist Russians, Bolsheviks… and now a Century of Draka, commanded by a descendant of Hessian mercenaries, come to kill Germans who might be remote cousins, and who had marched two thousand kilometers east to meet him…
What am I doing here? Where did it start? he thought. Such a long way to journey, to die among angry strangers. A journey that had lasted all his life… The start? Oakenwald Plantation, of course. In the year of his birth; and last year, six months ago. But that was the past, and the battle was here and now, an ending awaiting him. An end to pain, weariness; an end to the conflict within, and to loneliness. You could forget a great deal in combat.
Eric von Shrakenberg took a deep breath and stepped forward, into the war.
Chapter Two
… Napoleonic wars cut off imports, and industries had to be established if only because the mines were far inland; the need for a strong military-industrial complex maintained the pressure. Lack of navigable waterways led to an early development of steam transport and southern Africa proved to be rich in copper, iron, and coal, as well as precious metals. Gold prompted rapid expansion northward; plantation agriculture remained dominant, but increasingly, its markets were local.
… steam-engine pioneer Richard Trevithick was only the first of many British engineers to find Drakia welcoming. With no local entrepreneurial class, the landed aristocracy stepped in to invest, followed by the State and the free-employee guilds: the social pattern of the countryside repeated itself in the growing industrial cities of the early nineteenth century. Outright enslavement of the natives was forbidden by the British, but the proto-Draka quickly developed a system of indentured labor and debt-peonage distinguishable only in name
―200 Years: A Social History of the Domination, by Alan E. Sorensson, Ph.D., Archona Press. 1983
Archona To Oakenwald Plantation October, 1941
The airdrop on Sicily had earned Eric von Shrakenburg a number of things: a long scar on one thigh, certain memories, and a field-promotion to Centurion's rank. When the 1st Airborne Chiliarchy was pulled back into reserve after the fall of Milan, the promotion was confirmed; a rare honor for a man barely twenty-four. With it came fourteen-day leave passes to run from October 1st, 1941, and unlike most of his comrades, he had not disappeared into the pleasure quarter of Alexandria. The new movement orders had already been cut: Draka Forces Base Mosul, Province of Mesopotamia. Paratroopers were cutting-edge assault troops; obviously, the High Command did not expect the de facto truce with Hitler to last. And that would be a more serious matter than overrunning an Italy taken by surprise and abandoned by its Axis allies. It was well for a man to visit the earth that bore him before he died. He would spend his leave in Oakenwald, the von Shrakenberg plantation, now that the quarrel with his father had been patched up. After a fashion.
Travel space was scarce, as mobilization built toward its climax, but even in the Draka army it helped to be the son of an Arch-Strategos, a staff general. A place was found on a transport-dirigible heading south with a priority cargo of machine-parts; two days nonstop to the high plateau of southern Africa. He spent the last half-hour in the control gallery, for the view; they were coming in to Archona from the north, and it was a side of the capital free citizens seldom saw, unless business took them there. For a citizen, Archona was the marble-and-tile public buildings and low-rise office blocks, parks and broad avenues, the University campus, and pleasant, leafy suburbs with the gardens for which the city was famed.
Beyond the basin that held the freemen's city lay the world of the industrial combines, hectare upon hectare, eating ever deeper into the bush country of the middleveld. A spiderweb of roads, rail-sidings, monorails, landing platforms for freight airships. The sky was falling into night, but there was no sleep below, only an unrestfulness full of the light of arc-lamps and the bellowing flares of the blast furnaces; factory-windows carpeted the low hills, shifts working round the clock. Only the serf-compounds were dark, the flesh-and-blood robots of the State exhausted on their pallets, a brief escape from a lockstep existence spent in that wilderness of metal and concrete.
Eric watched it with a fascination tinged with horror as the crew guided the great bulk of the lighter-than-air ship in, until light-spots danced before his eyes. And remembered.
In the center of Archona, where the Avenue of Triumph met the Way of the Armies, there was a square with a victory monument. A hundred summers had turned the
bronze green and faded the marble plinth; about it were gardens of unearthly loveliness, where children played between the flower-banks. The statue showed a group of Draka soldiers on horseback; their weapons were the Ferguson rifle-muskets and double-barreled dragoon pistols of the eighteenth century. Their leader stood dismounted, reins in one hand, bush-knife in the other. A black warrior knelt before him, and the Draka's boot rested on the man's neck.
Below, in letters of gold, were words: To the Victors. That was their monument; northern Archona was a monument to the vanquished, and so were the other industrial cities that stretched north a thousand kilometers to Katanga; so were mines and plantations and ranches from the Cape to Shensi.
* * * *
Eric slept the night in transit quarters; he got the bed, but there were two other officers on the floor, for lack of space. He would not have minded that, or even their insistence on making love, if the sexual athletics had not been so noisy… In the morning the transport clerk was apologetic; also harried. Private autocars were up on blocks for the duration, mostly; in the end, all she could offer was a van taking two Janissaries south to pick up recruits from the plantations. Eric shrugged indifferently, to the clerk's surprise. The city-bred might be prickly in their insistence on the privileges of the master caste, but a von Shrakenberg was raised to ignore such trivia. Also… he remembered the rows of Janissary dead outside Palermo, where they had broken the enemy lines to relieve the encircled paratroops.
The roadvan turned out to be a big, six-wheeled Kellerman steamer twenty years old, a round-edged metal box with running boards chest-high and wheels taller than he. It had been requisitioned from the Transportation Directorate, and still had eyebolts in the floor for the leg shackles of the work gangs. The Janissaries rose from their kitbags as Eric approached, flicking away cigarettes and giving him a respectful but unservile salute; the driver in her grimy coverall of unbleached cotton bowed low, hands before eyes.
"Carry on," Eric said, returning the salute. The serf soldiers were big men, as tall as he, their snug uniforms of dove-grey and silver making his plain Citizen Force walking-out blacks seem almost drab. Both were in their late thirties and Master Sergeants, the highest rank subject-race personnel could inspire to. They were much alike—hard-faced and thick-muscled; unarmed, here within the Police Zone, but carrying steel-tipped swagger sticks in white-gloved hands. One was ebony black, the other green-eyed and tanned olive, and might have passed for a freeman save for the shaven skull and serf identity-number tattooed on his neck.
The Draka climbed the short, fixed ladder and swung into the seat beside the driver. While the woman fired the van's boiler, he propped his Priority pass inside the slanted windscreen that ran to their knees; that ought to save them delay at the inevitable Security Directorate roadblocks. The vehicle pulled out of the loading bay with the smooth silence of steam power, into the crowded streets; he brought out a book of poetry, Rimbaud, and lost himself in the fire-bright imagery.
When he looked up in midmorning they were south of the city. Crossing the Whiteridge and the scatter of mining and manufacturing settlements along it, past the huge, man-made heaps of spoilage from the gold mines. Some were still rawly yellow with the cyanide compounds used to extract the precious metal; others were in every stage of reclamation, down to forested mounds that might have been natural. This ground had yielded more gold in its century and a half than all the rest of the earth in all the years of humankind; four thousand meters beneath the road, men still clawed at rock hot enough to raise blisters on naked skin. Then they were past, into the farmlands of the high plateau.
He rolled down the window, breathing deeply. The Draka took pains to keep industry from fouling the air or water too badly; masters had to breathe and drink, too, after all. Still, it was a relief to smell the goddess breath of spring overtaking the carrion stink of industrial-age war. The four-lane asphalt surface of the road stretched dead straight to meet the horizon that lay around them like a bowl; waist-high fields of young corn flicked by, each giving an instant's glimpse down long, leafy tunnels floored with brown, plowed earth. Air that smelled of dust and heat ana green poured in, and the sea of corn shimmered as the leaves rippled.
They spent noon at a roadside waystation that was glad to see him; Eric was not surprised, remembering how sparse passenger traffic had been. Most of the vehicles had been drags—heavy haulers pulling articulated cargo trucks—or plantation vans heading to the rail stations with produce; once there had been a long convoy of wheeled personnel carriers taking Janissary infantry toward the training camps in the mountains to the east. He strolled, stretching his legs and idly watching the herds of cattle and eland grazing in the fields about; listened to the silence and the rustling of leaves in the eucalyptus trees that framed the low pleasant buildings of colored brick with their round stained-glass windows; sat in the empty courtyard and ate a satisfying luncheon of fried grits, sausage, and eggs—not forgetting to have food and beer sent out to the van…
The manager had time on her hands, and was inclined to be maternal. It was not until he had sat and listened politely to her rambling description of a son and daughter who were with the 5th Armored in Tashkent that he suspected that he was procrastinating; his own mother had died only a few years after his birth, and he did not generally tolerate attempts at coddling. Not until he found himself seriously considering her offer of an hour upstairs with the pretty but bedraggled serving-wench was he sure of it. He excused himself, looked in the back window of the van, saw that one of the Janissary NCO's had the driver bent over a bench and was preparing to mount. Eric rapped on the glass with impatient disgust, and the soldier released her to scurry, whimpering, back to the driver's seat, zipping her overall with shaking fingers.
It would be no easier to meet his father again if he delayed arrival until nightfall. Restlessly, he reopened the book; anticipation warred with… yes, fear: he had been afraid at that last interview with his father. Karl von Shrakenberg was not a man to be taken lightly.
The quiet sobbing of the driver as she wrestled with the wheel cut across his thoughts. Irritated, he found a handkerchief and handed it across to her, then pulled the peaked cap down over his eyes and turned a shoulder as he settled back and pretended to sleep. Useless gesture, he thought with self-contempt. A serf without a protector was a victim, and there were five hundred million more like this one. The system ground on, they were the meat, and the fact that he was tied on top of the machine did not mean he could remake it. And there were worse places than this—much worse: in a mine, or the newly taken Italian territories he had helped to conquer, to the drumroll beat of the Security Directorate's execution squads, liquidation rosters, destructive-labor camps.
Shut up, he thought. Shut up, wench, I've troubles of my own!
* * * *
It was still light when they turned in under the tall stone arch of the gates, the six wheels of the Kellerman crunching on the smooth, crushed rock, beneath the sign that read: "Oakenwald Plantation, est. 1788. K. von Shrakenberg, Landholder." But the sun was sinking behind them. Ahead, the jagged crags of the Maluti Mountains were outlined in the Prussian blue of shadow and sandstone gold. This valley was higher than the plateau plains west of the Caledon River; rocky, flat-topped hills reared out of the rolling fields.
The narrow plantation road was lined with oaks, huge branches meeting twenty meters over their heads; the lower slopes of the hills were planted to the king-trees as well.
Beyond were the hedged fields, divided by rows of Lombardy poplar: wheat and barley still green with a hint of gold as they began to head out, contour-ploughed cornfields, pastures dotted with white-fleeced sheep, spring lambs, horses, yellow-coated cattle. The fieldworkers were heading in, hoes and tools slanted over their shoulders, mules hanging their heads as they wearily trudged back toward the stables. A few paused to look up in curiosity as the vehicle passed; Eric could hear the low, rhythmic song of a work team as they walked homeward, a sad sweet
memory from childhood.
Despite himself he smiled, glancing about. It had been, by the White Christ and almighty Thor, two years now since his last visit. "You can't go home again," he said softly to himself. "The problem is, you can't ever really leave it, either." Memory turned in on itself, and the past colored the present; he could remember his first pony, and his father's hands lifting him into the saddle, how his fingers smelled of tobacco and leather and strong soap. And the first time he had been invited into his father's study to talk with the adults after a dinner party. Ruefully, he smiled as he remembered holding the brandy snifter in an authoritative pose anyone but himself must have recognized as copied from Pa's… And yet it was all tinged with sorrow and anger; impossible to forget, hurtful to remember, a turning and itching in his mind.
He looked downslope; beyond that screen of pines was a stock dam where the children of the house had gone swimming sometimes, gods alone knew why, except that they were supposed to use the pool up by the manor. There, one memorable day, he had knocked Frikkie Thyssen flat for sneering at his poetry. The memory brought a grin; it had been the sort of epic you'd expect a twelve-year-old in love with Chapman's Homer to do, but that little bastard Thyssen wouldn't have known if it had been a work of genius… And over there in the cherry orchard he had lost his virginity under a harvest moon one week after his thirteenth birthday, to a giggling field wench twice his age and weight…
Marching Through Georgia Page 3
