Marching Through Georgia

by S. M. Stirling

  "Think we can do it?" Sofie asked in a neutral tone.

  "Oh, sure. The problem will be holding it. Remember that cartoon in the Alexandria Gazette?" She nodded. The chief opposition newspaper had shown a python with scales in the Draka colors that had just throttled a hippo. It lay, bleeding and bruised, muttering: "Sweet Christ, now do I have to eat the bloody thing?"

  "But that won't be enough."

  "What will?"

  "In the end… we'll have to conquer the earth. The Archon was right, you see? To survive, we've got to make sure nobody else does, except as serfs." Eric, who had long since come to an acceptance of what his people and nation were, ground the cigarette out with short, savage motions of his hand. "We're like a virus, really: we'll never be safe with uninfected tissue still able to manufacture antibodies against us."

  Sofie folded the hand in hers. "You don't sound… too enthusiastic about it, Centurion."

  "It could be worse. That's the analysis the Academy will give you, anyway; they just think it's a wonderful situation."

  She hesitated, then decided on bluntness. "What are you doing in a fighting unit, then?" she asked quietly.

  He looked up, his mouth quirking; even then, she noticed how a lock of butter-yellow hair fell over the tanned skin of his forehead. "I love my people. Not like, sometimes, but… That's enough to fight and die for, isn't it?" And very softly, "But is it enough to live for?"

  Their eyes met. And the comset hissed, clicking with Eric's code. Efficiency settled over him like a mask as he reached for the receiver.

  * * * *

  "Ah," said Eric, watching the German column winding up the road toward the village. "There you see the results of Fritz ingenuity." A glance at his wrist. "1610- goodtime."

  "Oh?" Marie Kaine asked, not taking her eyes from the trench periscope. She had always had doubts about the cost-effectiveness of tanks. So delicate, under their thick hides, so complex and highly stressed and failure prone… Still, it was daunting to have them coming at you.

  The Fritz convoy had been dipping in and out of sight with the twists of the road from the north: six tanks, two heavy assault guns, tracked infantry carriers in the rear. The optics brought them near, foreshortened images trembling as slight vibrations in the tube were translated to wavering over the kilometer of distance. She could see the long cannon of the tanks swinging, the heads of infantrymen through the open hatches of the APC's, imagine the creaking, groaning, clanging rattle that only armor makes. They were still over two thousand meters out when a brace of self-propelled antiaircraft guns peeled off to take up stations upslope of the road. The sun had baked what moisture remained out of the rocky surface, and the heavy tracks were raising dust plumes as they ground through the crushed-rock surface of the military highway.

  Military highway, she snorted to herself. Of course, the Soviets hadn't had much wheeled traffic. Even so, for a strategic road, this was a disgrace.

  "Mmm. You know the Wehrmacht-SS situation?" the Centurion continued.

  Marie nodded wordlessly. Sofie spoke, without looking up from the circuit board she was working on. "Elite units, aren't they? Volunteers. Like us, or Boss' Brass Knucks?" That was the Archonal Guard Legion; their insignia was a mailed fist.

  "Yes, but they're not part of the regular army; they're organs of the Nationalsozialisriche Deutsche Arbeiterpartei. And they're always fighting with the regulars over recruits and equipment. So their organization took over the Russian factories to get an independent supply base." He nodded to the squat combat machines grinding their way up the road. "Those are Ivan KV-1 heavy tanks, with a new turret and the Fritz 88mm/L56 gun; cursed good weapon, plenty of armor and reasonable mobility. Better than their standard-issue machines. Hmmm… the assault guns look like the same chassis, with a 150mm gun-howitzer mounted in the front glacis plate. The infantry carriers and flakpanzers are on SU-76 bodies; that was the Ivans' light self-propelled gun. Ingenious; they've actually made a good thing out of departmental in-fighting."

  "Sounds as bad as the pissing matches the Army and Air Corps and Navy are always getting into at home," Marie Kaine said. She made a final note on her pad and called instructions to the gun crew; a round of AP ammunition slid into the breech with a chunk-chang of metallic authority. Range would be no problem; a dozen inconspicuous objects had been carefully measured, and the guns were sighted in. First-round fire would be as accurate as the weapons permitted; Marie was not impressed with the standard of the machining. A sound design, but crude: there was noticeable windage in the barrel, even with lead driving bands, and the exterior finish was primitive in the extreme.

  Sofie handed the sheet of electronic components back to the artillery observer, a harassed-looking man with thinning sandy hair and a small clipped mustache. He slid it back into the open body of his radio, reinserted the six thumb-sized vacuum tubes, and touched the leads with a testing jack. "Ahhh," he said. "Good work; all green. Thanks, our spares had a little accident on the way down, hate to have to run a field-telephone line in."

  He rose, dusting off his knees, and peered out a slit. "Hmmm, our Hond III's are better. Not much heavier, twice the speed, better sloping on the armor, a 120mm gun."

  "Oh, yes," Eric said. "And all sorts of extras: gyro-stabilizers on the gun, shock absorbers on the torsion bars… Only one problem." He pointed an imaginary pistol at the SS panzers. "Our armor is a hundred kilometers away; those machines are here. Got the battery on line?"

  "Yessir. ' He handed over the receiver; Sofie's set would have done as well, but it was more efficient to have a dedicated channel.

  "Palm One to Fist, over."

  "Roge-doge, Palm One. Our 105's're set up, and the captured Fritz ISO's. Covering your position and about 4,000 meters out. Going to need a firefall soon?"

  "That's negative, Fist; this looks like a probing attack. Later."

  "All go, Palm One. But watch it: this is the only decent position in range, so they've got it map-referenced for sure, they don't need observation to key in. And if they've got self-propelled heavies, no way I can win a counter-battery shoot. They're immune to blast and fragments; we're not and we can't move, either. And you know what the odds are on hitting armored vehicles with indirect fire: about the same as flying to the moon by putting your head between your knees and spitting hard."

  "Green, Fist; we'll only need you once. What about the Air Corps boys?" Artillery observers doubled as ground-control liaison for strike aircraft.

  A sour chuckle. "Yo" should hear the commo channels; everybody from here to Tiflis is screaming that the bogeyman's out of the closet, and will Momma fly in and help, please. At least there aren't any of Hitler's pigeons around shitting on us… For that matter, I could have used air support an hour ago myself—couple hundred of those-there Fritz holdouts tried to rush my perimeter."

  Eric winced. That could cause hard trouble; it was a good thing they had not waited for darkness. "Over and out, Fist."

  "Kill a few for us, Palm One."

  "Range, one thousand meters," Marie said expressionlessly. Eric leaned a hand on the bunker ceiling and watched. Six heavy AFV's, twelve infantry carriers with eleven men each… not counting the flakpanzers, about two lochoi of armor and a century of panzergrenadiers. The enemy was doing about what he'd expected; about what Eric would have done with the same information—trying to bull through with whatever could be scraped up at short notice and moved under skies controlled by the opposition, in the hope that there was nothing much to stop him. And he'd know his opponents were paratroopers, hence lightly equipped. On the battlefields of Europe, that meant negligible antitank capacity; the armed forces of the Domination had a rather different definition of light.

  "Seven hundred meters," Marie said. "They're probably going to deploy their infantry any time now, Centurion." The diesel growl of the German engines was clearly audible now: Eric gave a hand signal to Sofie, and she relayed the stand-ready command. The bunker was hushed now. Tension breathed thick; it was
silent enough to hear the steel-squeal and diesel growl from the enemy armor over the windsough from the forest.

  The first of the German tanks was making the final turn, a move that presented his flank; after that it would be a straight path into the village. Eric raised a hand, lips parted slightly, waiting for the first tank to pass by a white-painted stone at the six-hundred-meter mark. Time stretched, vision sharpened; this was like hunting, not the adrenaline rush of close combat. For a moment he could even feel a detached pity for his opponent.

  "Now!"

  CRACK! and the antitank gun cut loose, a stunning blast of noise in the confined space. The dimness of the bunker went black and rank with dust, and the barrel of the cannon slammed back almost to the far wall; the crew was leaping in with fresh ammunition even as the cradle's hydraulics returned to "rest," and the casing rang on the stones of the floor. Downslope to the north, the lead tank stopped dead as the tungsten-cored shot took it at the junction of turret and hull, smashing through the armor and fighting compartment, burying itself in the engine block. There was a second's pause before the explosion, a flash, and the ten-tonne mass of the turret blew free and into the air, flipping end over end into the sky, landing twenty meters from the burning hulk.

  That blocked the road. The German armor wheeled to deploy into the fields; the assault gun in the rear had turned just enough to present its flank when the second antitank gun in the other bunker fired—one round that twisted it askew with a tread knocked loose, a second that struck the side armor with the brutal chunggg of high-velocity shot meeting steel. Assault guns are simply steel boxes, with a heavy cannon in a limited-traverse mount in the bow. From the front they are formidable; from the flanks, almost helpless. The hatches flew open, and the crew poured out to throw themselves down in the roadside ditches; one was dragging a man whose legs had contested passage with twenty kilograms of moving metal, and lost badly. The damaged vehicle burned sullenly, occasional explosions jarring the ground and sending tongues of flame through its hatches and around the gun that lay slanting toward the ground, its mantlet slammed free of the surrounding armor. Another pillar of black oil-smoke reached for the mild blue of the afternoon sky.

  The bunker crew had time for a single cheer before the response came. All the armored vehicles had opened up with their secondary armament, but the machine-gun fire was little menace to dug-in positions. The second Fritz assault gun was a different matter, and its commander was cool enough to ignore the burning wreckage before and behind him. The two muzzle flashes had given away the position of the gun that killed his comrades, and the third shot howled off the thick frontal armor of his gun. Carefully he traversed, corrected for range, fired. The sound of the six-inch howitzer was thicker and somehow heavier than the high-velocity tank guns, but at this point-blank range there was no appreciable interval between firing and impact. And the shell carried over a hundred pounds of high explosive.

  Eric felt the impact as a flexing in the ground, as if the fabric of the bunker had withdrawn and struck him like a huge palm. Dust smoked down from the ceiling, between the heavy timbers; he sneezed. There was another impact, then a thudding to their right: the second bunker was catching it.

  "Marie! Get that gun to the end firing position!" The crew sprang into action, manhandling the heavy weapon back and turning it; it rumbled off down the curved length of the bunker toward the firing slit at the western end.

  "Follow me!" He turned and scuttled toward the eastern end of the bunker; this was not going to be a healthy sector in a few seconds. As they ran he cupped the hand radio to his ear.

  Gun two, gun two, come in. Come in, goddammit!" Then to himself: "Shit!" Even with a 150mm shell, it would have taken a direct hit to disable the other antitank gun. Luck plays no favorites, he thought bleakly. Chances were the other gun was out, which meant he was naked of antitank on the eastern side of the road, except for the 120mm recoilless dug in on the edge of the forest, and he had been hoping not to have to use that just yet. Aloud, he continued.

  "Tom, try to get someone through to gun two's position. Report, and see if the machine gun positions in B bunker are intact." A different code-click. "East wing recoilless, engage any armor your side of the road, but not until within two hundred meters of our front."

  The acknowledgements came through as they dropped to a halt beside the machine gun team at the east end of the bunker. Eric rested a hand on their shoulders, leaning forward to peer through the irregular circle of the firing port.

  "Yahhh!" he snarled. The bunker shook as another heavy shell impacted; bullets spalled chips of stone from the rubble outside. Light poured through the opening—a yellow beam through the dust motes that hung, suspended, in the column of brightness. The three tanks had fanned out into the fields, swinging to present their frontal armor to the village and accelerating forward, their guns barking at the long heaps of rubble on either side of the road. And… yes! One leaped as a white flash erupted under a tread, settled back with a shattered road wheel. Now the Draka machine-guns were opening up, hosing over the stranded behemoth. They could not penetrate the armor; not even the antitank gun could without a side shot, not without great good luck. But they could shatter optics, rattle the crew…

  He hammered a fist into the wall in glee; the other two were falling back, unwilling to chance a mine field without engineers or special vehicles to clear it. Accelerating in reverse, they circled the assault guns and climbed back onto the road, retreating until they were hull down in a patch of low ground. Still dangerous, those long 88mm guns had plenty of range, ut the bluff of his scanty handful of antitank mines had worked.

  The German infantry carriers had halted well back; their thin armor offered protection from small arms and shell fragments only. Now they were opening up with the twin machineguns each carried, and the Waffen-SS panzergrenadiers were spilling out of the opened ramp doors at the rear of each vehicle. Eric could see them marshalling, fanning out west of the road. They could see the waiting V-spread of wire and trench that threatened to funnel them into a killing ground as they advanced south; their officers' shouts pushed them toward the sheltering forest, where they could operate under cover and flank the strong frontal positions. Even a few snipers and machine-guns upslope from the village could make field trenches untenable.

  "Smart, Fritz; by the book," he murmured. The Draka infantry were opening up with their crew-served weapons; a few of the Germans were falling under the flail of the 15mm's, but that was over a thousand meters, extreme range, and the Germans were making skillful use of cover. Happily, he waited for them to reach the protection of the woods. They would do it on the run; even well-trained soldiers threw themselves into cover when under fire. The trees would beckon, and they had already been shaken by what had happened to their armor.

  "Now," he whispered. Now it was up to those at the treeline.

  "Not yet," the Draka decurion murmured to himself. The Germans had been coming in across the fields well spread out, but they bunched as they approached the treeline, the underbrush was thinner here and they were unconsciously picking the easiest way in. In out of the punishing fire coming from the Draka positions, up the valley to their left. Bunching, speeding up, their attention divided.

  The moment stretched. Above him a bird sounded a liquid di-di-di, announcing its nesting territory to the world. The Draka soldier waited behind the log, his eyes steady on flickers of movement through a shimmering haze of leaves, confident in the near-invisibility of camouflage uniform and motionlessness. His tongue ran over dry lips, tasting forest mold and green dust. Insects buzzed, burrowed, dug.

  "Course, they-all could spot those dumbshit Ivans, he thought. The Russian partisans were with him, a tetrarchy's worth with captured Fritz weapons. Forget about that, concentrate…

  Ya… Now! His thumb clamped on the safety-release of the detonator, and he rapped it sharply three times on the moss-grown trunk of the fallen beech before him. Ahead of him the thick band of undergrowth alo
ng the forest edge exploded, erupted into a chaos of flying dust, shedded leaves, wood chips. Louder than the explosion was a humming like a hundred thousand metal bees: Broadsword directional mines, curved plates lined with plastique, the concave inner face tight-packed with razor-edged steel flechertes like miniature arrows. Pointed toward an enemy, mounted at waist-height, they had the effect of titantic shotgun shells. The German infantry went down, scythed down, the first ranks shredded, sliced, spattered back into their comrades' faces.

  They halted for an instant, too stunned even to seek cover. The loudest sound was the shrill screaming of the wounded—men lying thrashing with helmets, weapons, harness nailed to their bodies. The decurion rolled to his Holbars, over it, came up into firing position and began picking targets, hammering three-round bursts.

  "Ya! Ya! Beautiful, fuckin' beautiful!" he shouted. The others of his stick opened up from positions in cover, and a volley of grenades followed.

  Grunting in annoyance, the Draka NCO noticed one of the Russian partisans he had been assigned kneeling, staring slack-jawed at the chewed bodies in SS uniforms that lay in clumps along a hundred meters of the forest edge. He was shaking his head, mouth moving silently, the Schmeisser dangling limply from his hands.

  "Shoot, yo' stupid donkeyfucka!" The Draka dodged over and planted his boot in the Russian's buttocks with a thump. "Useless sonofabitch, shmert, shmert Fritz!"

  The partisan scarcely seemed to feel the blow. He grinned, showing the blackened jagged stumps of teeth knocked out by a rifle butt; through the rags on his back bruises showed yellow and green and black.

  "Da, da," he mumbled, raising the machine-pistol. Holding it clamped tight to the hip and loosing off a burst, then another; short bursts, to keep the muzzle from rising too much. He came to his feet, disregarding the return fire that was beginning to whine overhead and drop clipped-off twigs on their heads. His bullets hosed out, across the back of a wounded SS grenadier who was hobbling away with a leg trailing, using his rifle for a crutch.