The Focke-Wulf was closing. Closing. Toy-model size, normal, huge, filling the windscreen the crazy fucker's not turning now.
Her thumb clamped the firing button just as lights sparkled along the wingroot firing ports of the Focke-Wulf. Fist-blow of recoil, like a sudden headwind for a fractional second, and a multiple punk-tingggg as something high-velocity struck the Draka aircraft's armor. Then she was banking right as the German flipped left; they passed belly-to-belly and wings pointing to earth and sky, so close that they would have collided had the landing gear been down.
A quick glimpse into the overhead mirror showed the German going in. Not burning, but half his rudder was missing. Johanna flipped the Eagle back onto the level with a smile that turned to a snarl as a red temperature warning light began to flicker and buzz on the control panel. Her hand reached for the switches, but before she could complete the movement a flare of light caught at the corner of her right eye. A rending bang and she felt the Lover's Bite shake, pitched on her side and dove for the earth six thousand meters below in a long spiral, trailing smoke from the port engine nacelle; more than smoke, there were flames licking from ruptured fuel lines; a sudden barrage of piston heads and connectors hammered the side of the cockpit as the roar of a functioning engine abruptly changed to the brief shriek of high-tensile steel distorting under intolerable stress.
G-force worse than the pull-out from a power dive pushed Johanna into a corner of the seat, weighing on her chest like a great soft pillow. Will and training forced her hand through air that seemed to have hardened to treacle, feathering the damaged engine and shutting the fuel lines, opening the throttle on the other. Stamp on the pedal left stick… she could almost hear the voice of her instructor, feel the wind rattling the wires of the training biplane: recruit, next time yo' needs three tries to pull out of a spin I'll put us'n into a hill myself to spare the Race the horror of yo' incompetent genes…
So you were right, she thought. You're still a son of a bitch. The Lover's Bite came out of the spin, straight and level. Also horribly slow and sluggish, and she had to keep the stick over…
"Mayday." Her voice was a harsh blur in her own ears. "Mayday, engine out, altitude—" she blinked out the cockpit at muddy fields grown horribly close, unbelievably fast "—three thousand." A glance at the board. "B engine running, losing hydraulics slowly, fuel fast."
"Acknowledged." The Merarch's voice was steady, calming. "Run for it, we'll cover as long as we can." A pause. "And your stray duck de Grange is back."
"Acknowledged," she answered shortly. Mind and body were busy with the limping, shuddering aircraft. For a moment sheer irritation overrode all other feeling; the effortless power and response of the Eagle had become part of her life, and this limping parody was like a rebellion of her own muscles and nerves. Her eyes flicked to the gauges. Hydraulic pressure dropping steadily; that meant multiple ruptures somewhere. The controls were growing soft, mushy; she had to overcorrect and then correct again. A glance at the ruined engine: still burning, fuel must be getting through somehow, and the gauge was dropping as if both engines were running on maximum boost. And—
The Focke-Wulf dove from over her left shoulder. Reflex made her try to snap the Eagle aside, and the unbalanced thrust of the single engine sent the aircraft into the beginnings of another flat spin that carried her six hundred meters closer to the ground. Cannon shells hammered into the rear fuselage; then the Lover's Bite pitched forward in the shockwave of an explosion. Pieces of the German fighter pitched groundward, burning; another Draka Eagle swooped by, looped and throttled back to fly wing-to-wing, the pilot giving her a thumbs-up signal. He was as impersonal as a machine in bonedome, dark visor and face mask, but she could imagine the cocky grin on de Grange's freckled face.
"Thanks," she said. "Now get back upstairs."
"Hell—"
"That's an order, Galahad! If I want a knight-errant, I'll send to Hollywood." Reluctantly, he peeled off and climbed. She fought down a feeling of loneliness; an Eagle had the advantage in a diving attack on a Focke-Wulf, but in a low-and-slow dogfight the smaller turning radius of a single-engine fighter made it a dangerous opponent.
Until then emergency had kept her focused, consciousness narrowed down to the bright point of concentration. Now she drew a ragged breath and looked about. More smoke and fire trailed from the right engine, and she could smell somewhere the raw stink of high-octane fuel. That was bad, fuel didn't explode until it mixed with air… Ahead and high above shone the peaks of Caucasus; very high, she must be at no more than two thousand meters. A push at the stiff joystick and the plane responded, slowly, oh so slowly. Still losing pressure from the hydraulics; it was a choice between the controls freezing up, midair explosion, and the last of the fuel coughing through the injectors. As for clearing the mountains, even through one of the passes, as much chance of that as of flying to the moon by putting her head between her knees and spitting hard.
But I'm me, something gibbered in the back of her mind. I'm only twenty, I can't die, not yet. Images flashed through her mind: Tom, Eric, Rahksan, her mother's body laid out in the chapel, Oakenwald… her father giving her a switching when she was seven, for sticking one of the housemaids with a pin in a tantrum. "You will use power with restraint and thrift, because your ancestors bought it with blood and pain. The price is high; remember that, when it comes your turn to pay."
"Dying, hell," she said. "Damned if I'm going to do that until I'm fuckin' dead." Her hand reached to hammer at the release catch of the canopy. Jammed: she flipped up a cover on the control panel and flicked the switch beneath that should have fired the explosive bolts.
"No joy," she muttered, then looked down sharply. Fuel was seeping into the cockpit, wetting the soles of her boots. "Shit!" A touch keyed the microphone. "Merarch, she's a mess, no hope of getting her home."
"Bail out. We've seen those Fritzes off, we'll cover you."
"Can't. Cockpit cover's jammed, I think part of the engine hit it. I'll have to ride her in." There was a moment's silence filled with static buzz and click. "I'll see if I can shoot out the catch, then make it to our lines on foot. Got my 'passport,' anyway." That was the cyanide pill they all carried; Draka did not surrender and were not taken alive.
"Right… goodbye."
The other voices murmured a farewell; high above, she could see the silver shapes turning and making for the south. Johanna set her teeth and forced her eyes to the terrain ahead, easing back on the throttle. If the fuel lines were intact it would have been better to fly the Lover's Bite empty, less risk of fire, but by then the stuff would be sloshing around her feet. Easy… the plain was humping itself up into foothills, isolated swells rising out of the dead-flat squares of cultivation. All the arrangements had been made: updated letters to Tom and Eric and her father, a new home for her cat Omar, a friend who had promised to see Rahksan safely back to Oakenwald, and Pa would see her right. Patches of forest among the fields now, the blackened snags of a ruined village, a rutted road… Almighty Thor, it was going by fast; speed that had seemed a crawl in the upper air becoming a blurring rush as she dropped below a hundred meters.
Slow down. Throttle back again, flaps down, just above stalling speed. Floating… up over that damned windbreak, White Christ she's hardly responding at all… good, meadow, white-and-black cows scattering… floating, nose up and—
Slam, the belly hit, rending scream of duralumin ripping, pinwheeling, body flung forward in the harness, something struck her head…
Blackness.
Chapter Thirteen
"… so the Draka are not different from other peoples because they violate the Golden Rule, or Bentham's derivative idolatry of the 'greatest good of the greatest number.' Everyone does. We do not violate them, we reject them.
Others have conquered and ruled; we alone conquer for conquest's sake, and dominate for no other purpose than Domination itself; the name we half-consciously chose for our Stats is no accident We. and we alone,
have spoken aloud the great secret that the root function of all human society Is the production and reproduction of power—-and that power Is the ability to compel others to do your will, against theirs. It Is end. not means. The purpose of Power is Power.
The Draka will conquer the world for two reasons: because we must and because we can. Yet of the two forces, the second Is the greater: we do this because we choose to do it By the sovereign Will and force of arms the Draka will rule the earth, and in so doing remake themselves. We shall conquer we shall beat the nations into dust and reforge them In our self-wrought image: the Final Society. 'a new humanity without weakness or mercy, hard and pure. Our descendants will walk the hillsides of that future, innocent beneath the stars, with no more between them and their naked will than a wolf has. Then there will be Gods in the earth."
―Meditations: Colder than the Moon, By Evira Naldorssen, Archona Press. 1930
Castle Tarleton, Archona April 15, 1942: 1200 Hours
Arch-Strategos Karl von Shrakenberg leaned his palms on the railing and stared down at the projac map of Operations Command. Steel shutters rose noiselessly behind him, covering the glass wall and darkening the room, to increase the contrast of the glass surface that filled the pit beneath them. That white glow underlit the faces of the ten Arch-strategoi spaced around the map, pale ovals hanging suspended, the flat black of their uniforms fading into the darkness beyond, the more so as few of them wore even the campaign ribbons to which they were entitled. Scattered brightwork glowed in soft gold stars against that background: here a thumb ring, there the three gold earrings that were the sole affectation of the Dominarch, the Chief of the Supreme General Staff.
Ghosts, jeered a mordant shadow at the back of Karl's mind. Hovering over a world we cannot touch directly. Below them the unit counters moved, Draka forces crowding against the shrinking German bridgeheads south of the Caucasus, pushing them back toward the blocking positions of the airborne Legions at their rear.
Ghosts and dreams, he thought. We stand here and think we command the world; we're lords of symbol, masters of numbers, abstractions. So antiseptic, so cool, so rational… and completely out of their hands, unless disaster struck. Twenty years they had planned and trained; worked and argued and sweated; moved millions of lives across the game board of the world. Or does the world dream us? Are we the wolf-thought-inescapable that puts a face on their fear?
Karl looked around at the faces: his contemporaries, colleagues—his friends, if shared thoughts and work and belief were what made friendship. Quiet well-kept men in their middle years, the sort who were moderate in their vices, popular with their grandchildren, whose spare time was spent strolling in the park or at rock-meditation. When they killed it was with nod or signature, and a detachment so complete it was as empty of cruelty as of pity.
For a moment he blinked: a fragment of song went through his mind, a popular thing, how did it… frightened of this thing that I've become…
And yet we were young men once. Karl looked across at John Erikssen, the Dominarch. His head was turned, talking to his aide, young Carstairs. Ha. I must be nodding to my end—she's forty and I think of her as "young." John and he had been junior officers together in the Great War. He remembered…
The shell hole. Outside Smyrna: winter, glistening grey mud under grey sky, stinking with month-old bits of corpse. Cold mud closing about him, flowing rancid into his gasping mouth, the huge weight of the Turk on his chest. The curved dagger coming down, straining millimeter by millimeter closer to his face as his grip on the other man's wrist weakened, and he would lie there forever among the scraps of bone and rusty barbed wire… There had been a sound like the thock of a polo mallet hitting a wooden ball, and the Turk had gone rigid; another crunch, softer, and his eyes had widened and rolled and Karl rose, pushing the corpse aside. John had stood looking at the shattered buttplate of his rifle, murmuring, "Hard head. Hard head.
Now, that was real, the elder von Shrakenberg mused. The hands remembered, the skin did, as they did the silky feel of his firstborn's hair when he lifted him from the midwife's arms. John had stood godfather, to a son Karl named for him.
But the cobra of ambition had bitten them both deeply, even then. That was back when there was still juice in it, the wine of power, every victory a new birth and every promotion a victory. He had commanded a merarchy of warcars later in the Great War, Mesopotamia and Persia. Clumsy things by modern standards; riveted plates and spoked wheels and steam-powered, as only civilian vehicles and transport were today. Sleek and deadly efficient in their time…
Power exercised through others, men and machines as the extensions of his Will; the competition of excellence, showing his skill. Scouting for the Archonal Guard legion, vanguard of Tull's V Army as it snapped at the heels of the retreating enemy. They had caught the Ottoman column by surprise on a plain of blinding-white alkali, swinging around through erg and dry wadi-beds. For a quarter-hour while the rest of the unit came up they had watched the enemy pass beneath them, dark men in ragged earth-brown uniforms. Ambulance carts piled with the wounded; soldiers dropping to lie with cracked and bleeding lips; the endless weary shuffle of the broken regiments, and the stink of death.
The gatlings had fired until the turrets were ovens, the floors of the warcars covered in spent brass that glittered and shifted underfoot, the crews choking on cordite and scorched metal. That was when he had burnt his hand, reaching down to the gunner who sat slack-faced, hands still gripping the triggers as the pneumatics hissed and drove the empty barrels through their whirring circle. He had not felt the pain, not then, his mind's eye seeing over and over again the ranks dropping in the storm of tracer, tumbled, layered in drifts that moaned and stirred; afterward silence, the sough of wind, bitter dust, and steam. There had been nothing for John's truck-born infantry to do but collect ears and bayonet the wounded.
The stink, the stink… they had gotten very thoroughly drunk that night, with the main body there to relieve the vanguard. Drunk and howling bad poetry and staggering off to vomit in the shadows. A step further, and another.
He had transferred to the Air Corps, valuable experience for one slated for Staff. The last great dirigible raid on Constantinople: Karl von Shrakenberg had been on the bridge of the Loki in the third wave, coming in at five thousand meters over the Golden Horn to release her biplane fighters while the bombardment ships passed below. The airship was three hundred meters long, a huge fragile thing of braced alloy sheeting; it had trembled in the volcanic up-drafts from the tracks of fire across the city spread out below them like a map, burning from horizon to horizon, the beginnings of the world's first firestorm. Traceries of flame over the hills, bending like the heads of desert flowers after spring rain. Streets and rivers of fire, casting ruddy blurs on the underside of soot-black cloud; heat that made the whole huge fabric of the airship creak and pop above him as it expanded. Diesel oil and burning and the acrid smell of men whose bodies sweated out the fear their minds suppressed.
He had been calm, he remembered; yet ready to weep, or to laugh. Almost lightheaded, exalted: a godlike feeling; he was a sky god, a war god. Searchlights like white sabers, cannon fire as bright magenta bursts against the darkening sky where no stars shone, muzzle flashes from the antiairship batteries of the Austrian battlewagons at anchor below. The great dome of the Hagia Sophia shining, then crumbling, Justinian's Church of Holy Wisdom falling into the fire. He had watched with a horror that flowed and mingled with delight at the beauty of that single image, the apotheosis of a thousand years. The ancient words had come of their own volition:
"Who rends the fortified cities
As the rushing passage of time
Rends cheap cloth…"
* * * *
Other voices—"Prepare for drop—superheat off-— stand by to valve gas!"
"Dorsal turret three, fighters two o'clock." A new shuddering hammer as the chin-turret pom-pom cut loose. "Where're the escorts— that's Wotan, she's hit."
The ship ahead of them had staggered in the sky, a long smooth metal-clad teardrop speckled with the flickers of her defensive armament. Then the second salvo of five-inch shells had struck, punched through cloth-thin metal, into the gas cells. Hull plating blew out along the lines of the seams; four huge jets of flame vomited from the main valves along the upper surface, and then enough air mixed with the escaping hydrogen to ignite; or it might have been the bombload, or both. For a moment there was no night, only a white light that seared through eyelids and up-flung hand. The Loki had been slammed upright on her tail, pitched forward; he could recall the captain screaming orders, the helmsmen cursing and praying as they wrestled with the man-high rudder wheels…
One moment a god, the next a cripple, the general thought, shaking himself back to the present. Men told him he had been the only bridge officer to survive the shellburst that struck in the next instant; that he had stood and conned the crippled airship with one hand holding a pressure bandage to his mangled thigh. He had never been able to recall it; the next conscious memory had been of the hospital in Crete, two heads bending over his leg. A serf nurse, careful brown hands soaking and clipping to remove the field-dressing. And the doctor, Mary, looking up with that quick birdlike tilt of the head when his stirring told her he was awake. Fever-blur, and the hand on his forehead.
""You'll live, soldier," she had said. She had smiled, and it wiped the exhaustion from her eyes. "And walk, thats all I promise."
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