Marching Through Georgia

by S. M. Stirling

  One hand snuggled the butt of his Holbars into his shoulder while the other held the pistol-grip; he was trying for deflection shots, aiming at the windowframe to bounce rounds inside. Tracer flicked out; he clenched his teeth and tasted sweat running down the taut-trembling muscles of his face. "Kill them all," he muttered, not conscious of the whisper. Figures writhed in his mind, Germans melting into burning villagers into shadowed figures in robes and turbans with long knives into prisoners sewn into raw pigskins and left in the desert sun. "Kill them all."

  "Sven, short bursts, unless you've got a personal ammo store about you," he added with flat normality. The trooper beside him nodded, turned to look at the noncom, turned back sweating to the sight-picture through the x4 of his assault rifle. It was considerably more reassuring than a human voice coming out of the thing McWhirter's face had momentarily become.

  Below them two paratroopers crawled, down in the mud and sheep dung of the alley. One had a smooth oblong box strapped to her back; a hose was connected to the thing she pushed ahead—an object like a thick-barreled weapon with twin grips. Four meters from the window, and she was in the dead ground below it, below the angle the gunner could reach without leaning out… and in more danger from the supporting fire than the enemy.

  "Cease firel" McWhirter and Eric called, in perfect unison; gave each other gaunt smiles as silence fell for an instant. Then the flamethrower spoke, a silibant roar in the narrow street. Hot orange at the core, flame yellow, bordered by smoke that curled black and filthy, the tongue of burning napalm stretched for the blackened hole. Dropped through it, spattering: most of a flamer's load was still liquid when it hit the target. And it would burn on contact with air and cling, impossible to quench.

  Flame belched back out of the window. A pause, then screams—screams that went on and on. Wreathed in fire, a human figure fell out over the sill to writhe and crackle for an instant, then slump still. A door burst open and two more men ran shrieking into the street, their uniforms and hair burning; the gunner at the 15mm cut them down with a single merciful burst.

  Senior Decurion McWhirter turned to curse the waste of ammunition, closed his mouth at her silent glare, shrugged, and followed the rest as they jogged down the lane and waited while the pointman dropped to the ground and peered around the corner.

  "Love those Ronsons," he said, using the affectionate cigarette-lighter nickname. "Damn having women in a combat zone anyway," he grumbled more quietly. "Too fucking sentimental, if you ask me."

  Eric smiled, checking the level of the rounds in his Holbars through the translucent rear face of the magazine. He was glad of the excuse to avoid looking at the still-smoldering corpses; unfortunately, there was no way of avoiding the burnt-pork stink of it.

  "Times change, Senior Decurion. Hell, we gave "em the vote in 1832. A hundred years was enough to have the privilege without the responsibility."

  "Did well enough in the last war, keeping them in support formations," McWhirter replied, turning to keep the rooftops under observation. You could never count on ground in a built-up area; it didn't stay taken.

  "We weren't fighting the Fritz, then, either. Mostly the Abduls." He paused. "Off to Legate Kaine, if you please, Decurion; my compliments, and she's to hand over two of the 120's for deployment here on the edge of the square. We'll need something heavy to get at the holdouts in the mosque and town hall."

  McWhirter grunted again. "Meier, Huff, follow me."

  Sofie stuck out her tongue at his departing back. "Old fart," she muttered, then brightened. Marie Kaine did not like McWhirter, and McWhirter detested the newfangled recoilless weapons with their murderous backblast. It would not be a happy time for him. She busied herself with the radio. Reception was tricky with all this stone around, but you could usually get around it, using metal guttering or something similar as an aeriel.

  * * * *

  The last pocket had fallen around 0600. The sight of the watch had been a shock; he was familiar with the rubber time of combat, but even so he would have expected an hour or two at least. Eric stood on the minaret of the one-time mosque, looking out through shattered stone lacework and tile. The view was excellent, except where thick columns of black smoke rose from the ruins of burning buildings; he noted absently that there had to be an observation post here… Very few of the Liebstandarte had surrendered unwounded; it was a pity that they had to shoot the ones who did. They fought well, but there were no facilities.

  The water was incredibly sweet; he swilled the first mouthful about, spat it out, drank. His body seemed less to drink than to absorb, leaving him conscious of every vein, down to his toes. He was abruptly aware of his own sweat, itching and stinking; of the black smudges of soot on hands and face, the irritating sting of a minor splinter-wound on his leg. The helmet was a monstrous burden. He shed it, and the clean mountain wind made a benediction through the dense tawny cap of his cropped hair. Suddenly he felt light, happy, tension fading out of the muscles of neck and shoulders.

  "Report to Cohort," he said. "Phase A complete. Then get me the tetrarchy commanders." They reported in, routine until the Sapper tetrarch's.

  "Yo?"

  "Seems the Fritz were using the place as some sort of supply dump," Marie Kaine said.

  "What did we get?"

  "Well, about three thousand board-feet of lumber, for a start. Had a truck rigged to an improvised circular saw — nice piece of work. Then there's a couple of hundred two-meter lengths of angle-iron, a shitload of barbed wire… and some prisoners in a wire pen, most of them in sad shape." A pause. "Also about a tonne of explosives. "

  "Loki on a jumping-jack, I'm glad they didn't remember to blow that bundle of Father Christmas' store."

  "Exactly: it's about half loose stuff — some sort of blasting material that looks civilian. Russian markings, Cyrillic. And the rest is ammunition — 105mm howitzer shells, propellant and bursting charges both. Lots of wire and detonators, too. Must have been planning some construction through here. And blankets, about a week's worth of rations for a Cohort, medical supplies…"

  He turned to the south, studying the valley as it narrowed toward the village in which he stood. It was a great, steep-sided funnel, whose densely wooded slopes crowded closer and closer to the single road. His mind was turning over smoothly, almost with delight. His hand bore down on the send-button.

  "Is McWhirter with you? Look, Marie, see you in front of the mosque in ten. Tell McWhirter to meet us there, with the old raghead; he'll know who I mean. Tell him absolutely no damage. Tetrarchy commanders conference, main square, ten minutes. Oh, and throw some supplies into that holding cage." He looked up to see Sofie regarding him quizzically.

  "Another brilliant flash, Centurionr she said. He was looking very, well, alive now. Some men's faces got that way in combat, but the Centurion's just went more ice-mask when they were fighting. It was when he came up with something tricky that it lighted up, a half-smile and lights dancing behind the grey eyes. Damn, but yo're pretty when you think, she reflected wryly. Not something you could say out loud.

  "Maybe. See if you can get me through to Logistics at division." He waited for a moment for the patch-relay; the first sound through the receiver was a blast of gunfire. Whoever held the speaker was firing one-handed as he acknowledged the call.

  "Centurion von Shrakenberg here. Problems?"

  "No," the voice came back. "Not unless you count a goddamned Fritz counterattack and a third of my people shot up before they hit the fuckin' ground— The voice broke off: more faintly Eric could hear screams, a rocket-gun shell exploding, a shouted instruction, "They're behind that bloody tank hulk—"

  The quartermaster's voice returned, slightly breath-less: "But apart from that, all fine. What do you need, besides the assigned load?"

  "Engineering supplies, if you have any—wire, explosives, hand tools, sandbags. More Broadsword directional mines if you can spare them, and any Fritz material available." He paused. "Petrol—again, if there is a
ny. We're the farthest element south; unless we stop them, you're going to be getting it right up the ass. Can do?"

  "What are you going to do with all… never mind." The Draka had a tradition of decentralized command, which meant trusting an officer to accomplish the assigned tasks in his own fashion. "Will if we can—as soon as the tactical situation here is under control. It depends on how much Fritz stuff gets captured intact…"

  Chapter Eight

  "… had been an expatriate for twenty years; I was no stranger to culture shock. For an American to live among Draka was something different eerie echoes, visions of might-have-beens, twisted alien developments from common roots. Even the language had a disturbing pseudo-familiarity: a Southern dialect, which was not surprising considering how many of the Loyalist founders had been from below the Mason-Dixon line, but more archaic than any I had heard in the US., full of Dutch and French and German loan-words and turns of phrase, even of Africanisms.

  That made the true differences all the harder to see, much less to accept The environment into which I was plunged was not simpty unAmerican. or even anti-American; it was an anti-America, the place where all the historical experiences which had formed my past had turned out the other way. Even In the most fetid backwaters of Mississippi or Guatemala. Americans paid at least lip-service to the ideals of Jefferson and Paine and Lincoln; even the most reactionary Roosevelt-hating anti-New Dealer couched his arguments in terms of individualism, progress, or States' Rights. The Domination showed how much in common a left-wing Democrat like me had with Chamber of Commerce Republicans, with my late employer the Colonel in Chicago, or even the small-town Daughters of the American Revolution. At times I found myself longing even for the provincial drabness, prudery, piety, and hypocrisy that had driven me to New York and then Europe in the first place. Here were a people genuinely without bourgeois sentimentality or moralism, and I found I liked the result far less than I might have expected.

  But revulsion could never be unalloyed. Savagery and depravity, yes. An icy concentration on the means of power that both awed and disgusted me; so much human energy and intelligence, wasted. Yet. unwillingly. I also had to conceed the Domination's accomplishments. Far too many humane and rational men had neglected and despised military power, and left us helpless before totalitarian aggression. The Draka were never helpless; not simply because they were militarists, but because they refused to delude themselves to avoid effort and pain. Their aristocrats were mostly honest and honorable men by their own standards; however brutal and regressive their code, they lived by it, worked for it, were ready to die for it. They dreamed grandly, and accomplished much: if their serfs were so much machinery, so many work-animals to them, then they were carefully tended machinery and well-kept animals. There is no substitute for freedom; I kept my faith that we would solve our problems through it but I was sometimes uneasily aware that there were some in the US.—share-croppers, slumdwellers, the peons of the Guatemalan coffee fincas—who might have been willing to change places for the assurance of food and medicine and a roof. Nor was all of the surplus squeezed from the workers spent on war and repression and luxury. The Draka truly loved beauty and hated ugliness and vulgarity and waste. Much that they built and made had a haunting loveliness. In the end only this was certain: these were not my people, and I wanted to go home…"

  ―Empires of the Night, A '40's Journal, By William A. Dreiser, MacMillan. New York. 1956

  Village One, Ossetian Military Highway April 14, 1942: 0700 Hours

  CRACK went the bullet, then spang-winnnnnnng off the stone.

  Reflexively, Dreiser froze as spalled-off microfragments of stone drove into his forehead. A hand grabbed him by the back of his webbing-harness and yanked him down behind the ruined wall. He controlled his shaking with an effort, drawing in deep drafts of air that smelled of wet rock and oarnyard, blinking sunlight out of his eyes. The closest he had come to the sharp end before was reporting on the German blitzkrieg through western Europe in 1940, but that had been done from the rear. Comfortable war reporting, with a car and an officer from the Propaganda section; interviews with generals, watching heavy artillery pounding away and ambulances bringing casualties back to the clearing stations. For that matter, it might be some of the same men shooting at him; he had followed the German Sixth Army through Belgium, and here he was meeting them again in Russia.

  "Thanks," he said shakily to the NCO.

  "Yo" was drawin' fire," the Draka decurion replied absently, crawling to a gap and cautiously glancing around, head down at knee-level, squinting against the young sun in the east.

  Panting, the American put his back to the stones of the wall and watched the Draka. There were six: the other four members of the decurion's stick and a rocket-gun team of two. They lay motionless on the slope of rubble—motionless except for their eyes, flicking ceaselessly over the buildings before them. Mottled uniforms and helmet-covers blended into the mud-covered rock of the ruined building. He had picked this stick as typical, to do a few human-interest stories. It was typical, near enough: four men and three women, average age nineteen and three-quarters. Average height and weight five-eleven and 175 pounds for the males, five-six and 140 for the females. A redhead, two blonds, the rest varying shades of brown.

  That much he could have gotten from a handbook. He had spent much of the winter getting to know A Century: the standard thing, get to know them as people, do articles on their background and families and so forth to build reader identification through "human interest," then show them fighting. Not easy, since Draka were xenophobes by habit, and detested the United States and all its works in particular by hereditary tradition. It had helped that Eric and he got along well—the Centurion was a popular officer. Trying his best to keep up did more.

  Although my best wasn't very good, he admitted ruefully to himself, even though he was in the best condition he could remember. It was all a matter of priorities; the wealth and leisure to produce these soldiers had been wrung out of whole continents. He focused on one trooper…

  Cindy, his mind prompted him. Cindy McAlistair. Although nobody called her anything but Tee-Hee.

  Fox-colored hair, green eyes, a narrow, sharp-featured face—Scots-Irish, via the Carolina piedmont. Her grandfather had been a Confederate refugee in 1866, had escaped from Charleston in one of the last Draka blockade-runners, those lean craft that had smuggled in so many repeating rifles and steam warcars. He had established a plantation in the rich lands north of Luanda, just being opened by railways and steam-coaches for coffee and cotton.

  His granddaughter rested easily, one knee crooked and a hand beneath her; it might have looked awkward, if Dreiser had not seen her do six hundred one-hand pushups in barracks once, on a bet. Sweat streaked the black war paint on her face, dark except for a slight gleam of teeth. The Holbars rested beside her, the assault-sling over her neck; her hand held the pistol-grip, resting amid a scatter of empty aluminum cartridge cases and pieces of belt-link.

  The dimpled bone hilt of a throwing-knife showed behind her neck, from a sheath sewn into the field jacket, and she was wearing warsaps—fingerless leather gloves with black-metal insets over knuckles and palm-edge—secured by straps up the forearms. For the rest, standard gear: lace-up boots with composition soles; thick tough cotton pants and jacket, with leather patches at knee and elbow and plenty of pockets; helmet with cloth cover; a harness of laced panels around the waist that reached nearly to the ribs, and supported padded loops over the shoulders. A half-dozen grenades, blast and fragmentation. Canteen, with messkit, entrenching tool, three conical drum magazines of ammunition, field-dressing, ration bars, folding toolkit for maintenance, and a few oddments. Always including spare tampons: " If yo' don't have 'em, sure as fate yo' gonna need 'em, then things get plain disgustin."

  The whole oufit had the savage, stripped-down practicality he had come to associate with the Draka. This was an inhumanly functional civilization, not militarist in the sense of strutting, bemed
aled generals and parades, but with a skilled appreciation of the business of conquest, honed by generations of experience and coldly unsentimental analysis.

  The decurion completed his survey and withdrew his head with slow care; rapid movement attracted the eye.

  "Snipah," he said. "Bill-boy, Tee-hee, McThing—"

  The three troopers looked up. "Yo" see him?"

  Cindy giggled, the sound that had given her the nickname. "Cross't' street, over that-there first buildin', row a' windows?"

  "Ya. We're gonna winkel him. You three, light out soon's we lay down fire. Jol" The rocket gunner raised his head. "Center window, can do?"

  The man eased his eye to the scope sight and scanned. There was a laneway, then a cleared field of sorts, scrap-built hutments for odds and ends, blocks of stone and rubble. Then square-built stone houses, on the rubble-pile; the second row of houses stood atop those but set back, leaving a terrace of rooftop. Distance about two hundred meters, and the windows were slits…

  "No problem hittin' roundabouts, can't say's I'll get it in. Hey, dec, maybe more of 'em?"

  "Na," the NCO snapped. "Would've opened up on us 'fore we got to this-here wall. Just one, movin' from window't' window. Wants us to get close. Jenny, ready with't' SAW. Nowl"

  The rocket gun went off, whump-sssssst-crash. The decurion and the trooper with the light machine gun came to their knees, slapped the bipods of their weapons onto the low parapet of the stone wall, and began working automatic fire along the line of slit windows.

  And the three troopers moved. Lying with his back to the wall, Dreiser had a perfect view; they bounced forward, not bothering to come to their feet, flinging themselves up with a flexing of arm and legs, hurdled the wall without pausing, hit the other side with legs pumping and bodies almost horizontal, moving like broken-field runners. Dreiser twisted to follow them, blinking back surprise. No matter how often it was demonstrated, it was always a shock to realize how strong these people were, how fast and flexible and coordinated. It was not the ox-muscled bull massiveness of the Janissaries he'd seen, but leopard strength. Twenty years, he reminded himself. Twenty years of scientific diet and a carefully graduated exercise program; they had been running assault courses since before puberty.