Marching Through Georgia

by S. M. Stirling

  That let her see his companion. Another dish of kebab entirely, she thought with a slight chill. Stocky and flat-featured, cropped ash-blond hair over a tanned square face, in his mid-twenties but looking older. He was standing in the bed of the car, a little open-topped amphibian with balloon wheels, a kubelwagen, keeping an easy all-corners watch. The campaign ribbons he was wearing on the faded and much-laundered field tunic told a good deal; the way he moved and held the Schmeisser across his chest rather more. Most of all the eyes, as he glanced incuriously her way: flat, empty, dispassionate. Familiar, veteran's eyes, the thousand-meter stare, she had been seeing it now and again all her life and it always meant someone to watch out for. People to whom killing and dying were neither very important any more…

  "Ach," the young SS trooper was saying, "she's just a young maiden—"

  Not since I was fifteen, or thirteen if you count girls, she thought, wincing in half-pretended pain and taking inventory. Good, everything moving. She accepted another sip of the water.

  "—and of fine Nordic stock, just look at her, even if they've cut that beautiful blond hair so short. And look," he indicated the name tag sewn over her left breast, " 'Johanna von Shrakenberg,' " a German name. What a shame, to be fighting our own stock; and a crime, to expose a potential Aryan mother to danger like this." He clucked his tongue, tsk-tsking.

  Why, you son of a bitch, Johanna thought indignantly as the fingers of her right hand curled inconspicuously to check the hard lump at her wrist. Ignore the one holding her… the other SS trooper was keeping up his scan of the countryside around them, eyes scanning from far to near, then moving on to a new sector. They flicked down to her for an incurious second, then back to look for danger.

  "Don't like von-types," he grunted.

  Johanna groaned again, and let her eyes come into focus, reaching a hand up to the young Bavarian's shoulder as if to steady herself. He patted it clumsily, and put away the canteen.

  Are these people total idiots? she wondered. The way they were acting… Almighty Thor, they hadn't even searched her…

  She smiled at the young soldier, and he blushed and grinned in return.

  "Do you speak German?" he asked. "Chocolaten?" He began to fumble a package of Swiss bonbons from his breast pocket. Johanna took a deep breath, pushed pain and fear and battering out to the fringes of her mind.

  "Perfectly," she whispered in the same language. "And no, thanks." He leaned close to hear, her left hand slid the final centimeter to his throat. Thumb and fingers clamped down on the carotid arteries; the soldier made a single hoarse sound as what felt like slender steel rods drove in on either side of his larynx. She jerked forward savagely and he followed in reflex, falling over her on his elbows; otherwise half his throat would have been torn free. Johanna ignored the ugly, queasy popping and rending sensations beneath her fingers; her hands were strong, but surely not strong enough to punch through the neck muscles. She hoped not.

  Her right hand flicked. The knife came free of the forearm sheath and slapped into her hand in a single practiced movement, smooth metal over leather rubbed with graphite. Just barely into her palm, her fingers almost dropping the leather-wrapped hilt. She was still groggy; the loss of speed and coordination was frightening.

  Damn worse than I thought! went through her as she turned the point in, poised, thrust. The knife was more delicate than the issue-model Jamieson tucked into her boot, hand-made by Ildaren of Marrakesh, a slender-edged spike of steel fifteen centimeters long. It slid through the tunic without resistance, through the skin, slanting up under the breastbone and through the diaphragm with a crisp sensation like punching through a drumhead. Up into the heart, razoring it in half, then quarters as she wrenched the weapon back and forth in the wound. The youngster's face was less than the breadth of a hand from hers, close enough for her to smell the mints on his breath. His eyes and mouth jerked open, shut, open again in perfect circles, like a gaffed fish; she could see the pupils dilating. No sound, even though the tongue worked in the pink cavern of his mouth. Her free hand slipped from his throat to his chest to hold the twitching, juddering body off hers as she wrestled with the knife.

  For a moment the fierce internal spasm of the German's muscles clamped the blade tight, but it was narrow and supernally sharp. The steel slid free. With it came a warm rushing tide that flowed over her breasts and stomach, and the seawater smell of blood. The man's eyes rolled up and glazed as the dropping pressure in his veins starved the brain into unconsciousness. Johanna's knife hand moved, flipping the blade and taking a new hold on the point, three fingers and a thumb. Her arm moved it under the sheltering corpse above her, her face tracking like a gun turret for the next target.

  * * * *

  The other SS panzergrenadier was intent on his surroundings. You did not survive a year on the Eastern Front by being careless, and there were too many clumps of forest within rifle-range. Not that a partisan needed trees; they crept through grass or scrub like lice in the seams of a uniform worn too long, almost impossible to exterminate. Alertness was second nature; he could check for movement and breaks in the pattern while thinking of other things. Women, schnapps, how home leave was a waste of time, the front was home now… He looked down at his partner's body, bent over the prisoner's, giving one last shiver and then going limp. The Draka slut's eyes were on his over Lothair's shoulder, fixed and glaring, lips niched back from her teeth. He frowned. That was not like Lothair; little bastard thought he was Siegfried…

  He opened his mouth, began to speak. The body was tossed aside, there was a glint of steel…

  "Lothair, what're you screwing arou—"

  Johanna knew the throw had gone wrong even as she wrenched the dead German's body aside, using it for leverage as her right arm snapped across and up. The hilt had been touching her left ear; the motion ended with her arm extended toward the standing SS man. Even caught by surprise he was too fast, crouching, turning, the muzzle of his sub-machinegun coming up in a smooth controlled arc as his words turned into a formless shout of rage. The Draka could see his finger tightening on the trigger as the knife turned, room for four rotations in the five meters between them.

  I never trained with a wet knife and gloves! something within her wailed. The position's wrong, the sun's behind him, my head hurts, it isn't fair. Flick-rolling, ignoring the jagged pain that ripped up between her shoulders at the sudden motion, curling her feet beneath her, a no-hold leap with arm outstretched and fingers curled back to strike with the heel of the hand. Impossible. Too slow.

  The knife had been aimed at his throat; an eyeshot was impossibly risky in the circumstances, the ribs armored the heart, a stab wound in the gut took too long to kill a gunman whose weapon could rip you open. Her own error and the German's speed placed it just below his pelvis, in the meaty part of the upper thigh near his groin. He twisted; the startled yell of pain and the first peckapeckapecka of the Schmeisser were simultaneous. The aim was thrown off: craters in the mud, chopping into the other SS-man's body in dimples of red and tattered cloth, an impact on her foot that flung her sprawling from the beginnings of her leap. And saved her life; the shots whipcracked the air over her head as her shoulder thudded into the man's stomach. Pink-ting as rounds punctured the thin metal of the vehicle's hood and struck something solid beneath.

  "Frikken hond!" the German screamed, in rage fueled by pain. His wounded leg slammed the dashboard and buckled, and he pitched on his back, bracing his elbows wide to prevent himself from falling into the narrow well in front of the seats. The knob of the gearshift struck him in the lower back, and for a moment his body dissolved in a liquid flash that seemed to spread through every nerve, a web extending to his finger tips.

  Johanna bounced as her torso struck the trooper and the kubelwagon's door, resilient flesh and metal absorbing her momentum and throwing her back, tuck-rolling as she fell, curling forward to cast her weight against the fall. A quarter of a forward roll and it was a crouch, facing the kubelwag
on again and two meters away. No sign of the SS man; he could be out, she could have time to stop and pick up a weapon and finish him. Or the Schmeisser might be rising, about to clear the side of the vehicle and kill her. Training deeper and faster than thought made her decision, and the long muscles of her thighs uncoiled like living springs.

  Half a second. That was a long time in personal combat. Her body was parallel to the ground for an instant, and her hands slapped down on the top of the scout car's door. She pivoted, legs together swinging wide and high over the windscreen—movements etched into her nerves by ten thousand hours of practice in gymnasium and salle d'armes. Legs bend, a quick hard push off her hands, and she was rotating in midair. There was a moment when she seemed to hang suspended, combat-adrenaline slowing the instant to a breathless pause, like the endless second at the top of an Immelman or the crest of a roller coaster. She came down on the SS-man knees-first as he struggled up on one elbow, eyes wide with shocked surprise.

  The breath went out of the soldier with an explosive whuff, as one knee rammed home into the pit of his stomach. Her other came down painfully on the receiver of the Schmeisser, slid; then she was on him, the weapon trapped between their bodies, one of his arms immobilized by the strap. They grappled, snarling, the Draka gouging for the nerve clusters; she could feel the man's muscles coiling and bunching, forcing him upward from the awkward slump into the gap between seat and dashboard. Johanna arched herself against the panel behind her and pushed him back; one hand fell on the hilt of the knife in his thigh, and she jerked it free. A harsh gasp broke the struggling rasp of his breath, and he bucked in a convulsive twist that left them lying face to face on their sides across the seats. The SS-man's palm slapped onto her wrist as the point of her knife drove for his face.

  His right hand, the arm stretched across his body; the outer arm was still trapped at the elbow by the sling of his machine pistol. Useless, he kept the left fist flailing at her hip and ribs in short punishing arcs but the seatback protected her vulnerable spine and kidneys. Johanna's right arm was free, and she had solid bracing to push against; the German had leverage against him, and his grip on her wrist was reversed, weak, the thumb carrying the whole weight of her arm and body. The knife hung trembling above and between them, a long spike, motionless save for the quiver of locked muscle, slow red drops spilling down on the German's face. Johanna's was close enough to catch the spatter, close enough to smell the garlic and stale beer on his breath and the harsh musk of male sweat. To see the eyes widen in surprise as the blade jerked forward a fraction, and hear the quiver in his breath as he halted it again.

  Never wrestle with a man: the instructors had told her that often enough. They simply had stronger arms. It didn't make much difference in block-and-strike fighting—if a blow landed on the right place just hard enough that was all you needed, and if you missed it didn't matter how hard you punched the air.

  She jerked a breath in, clenched down and forced it out with the muscles of the gut, where strength comes from. Felt it flow into her arms, felt her face fill with blood and saw traceries of vein across her eyes. How many hours at school, swinging the practice bar and the weights, squeezing the hand-spring? Waking stiff and sore despite the saunas and massage, rolling out of bed for the morning set of chinups…

  Her heart beat in her ears. Her left hand forced its way between their bodies; no chance of getting it free for a strike or eye-claw, but… Johanna's thumb forced its way into the sweat-wet warmth of the German's armpit. Into the nerve cluster where the arm meets the shoulder, just above the beginning of the bicep. Pushed.

  Her enemy made a sound, something halfway between a yelp and a snarl. The grip on her wrist was weakening, slipping, the German's arm bending back, faster as the angle changed and cast the whole strain on his forearm. Johanna wrapped one leg around the man's and heaved, twisting him onto his back and rising to throw her weight behind the knife. It crept into her sight; first the point, and then the crusted blade itself. Then their hands, his bare and dusted with freckles and sun-bleached hairs like gold wires, her fingers slim and night-black in the thin kidskin gloves; and the pommel of the knife, steel showing through the rawhide binding. She willed force into knife-hand and thumb; the German's eyes widened as the steel touched his throat and he began to buck and twist, frantic; screamed once as all the strength left his arm and the knife punched down.

  It had the suddenness of pushing at a stuck door and then having it open all at once; the point went through with no more effort than pushing a lump of meat onto a skewer around the fire at a braai-party. Her weight came down on the hilt and the blade sliced through the thick neck, like the upper blade of a pair of scissors; she collapsed forward into a bright spray of arterial blood, breathed it in with her first sobbing inhalation and threw herself back, sitting on her heels astride the still-quivering body and coughing, retching up and spitting out a mouthful of thin bile. And wiping at the blood: blood on her hands, in her eyes, in her hair, running down in sticky sheets over her face and neck and under her flight suit to join the cooling, tacky-thick mass from the younger German. Blood in her mouth, tasting of iodine and iron and salt; she spat repeatedly as she forced her breathing to go slow and deep, suppressing the instinctive but inefficient panting.

  There was a sharp hiss, as the bullet-punctured flashcoil of the kubelwagen's boiler released its steam and joined the stink of overheated metal to the fecal odor of death. With floodgate abruptness feeling returned, overwhelming the combat concentration. Fear first, cold on the skin, and a tight prickling up from the pubis. She looked down at the dead German; he had been so strong, quick too. She could never have taken two Draka like this, but this one had had potential, far too much.

  His head lolled, opening the great flap of muscle and skin, blood still welling. How much blood there was, and tubes and glands showing… she glanced away. Physical sensation next: the ache in her head, a dozen minor scratches and bruises where her body had been hammered against projecting metal. They had gone unnoticed in the brief savage fight, but now the abrasions stung with salt sweat and blood, and the bruises ached with a to-the-bone sick feeling, the feeling that meant they would turn a spectacular green and yellow in a day or two. And one knee was throbbing every time she moved it, where it had come down on the machine pistol when she landed on the Fritz.

  Johanna looked down over one shoulder at her foot. No pain there, she thought dazedly. Or at least none of the pain that a real wound would cause, just another ache. One heel of her boot had been torn off, left dangling by a shred of composition rubber. "Never bet on the horses again, woman, you've used it all up," she muttered to herself.

  A shout brought her head up, and she clutched at the wheel against a wave of dizziness. A line of figures was trotting toward her from the copse of forest to the east, twenty of them. They were still five hundred meters away, but they looked too ragged to be Fritz, and German troops would have come up in a vehicle, anyway. Russians, then; the situation reports had mentioned partisan activity. They might be hostile, or not. The German yoke had lain heavy here, and she had two very dead Fritz for credentials. On the other hand… as the saying went, nobody loved the Draka. Russians least of all, after the bite the Domination had taken out of the lands east of the Caspian back in the Great War; and there had been a generation of border clashes since. A Russian young enough to be in the field now had probably been brought up on anti-Draka propaganda and atrocity stories, at least half of which were true.

  A heavy, weary annoyance seized her for a moment. "Mother Freya," she said to herself, scrubbing a forearm over her lips again. "I really don't want to be here." Not so much the fear or discomfort, they were bearable, but she definitely did not want to be here in this cold and foreign place, covered in blood and sitting on a corpse. "I want to be home." Rahksan giving her a massage and a rubdown with Leopard Balm liniament and a cuddle, twelve hours' sleep, waking up clean and safe in her own bed with her cat on the pillow, with no dangers and no
body telling her what to do…" 'Nothing's free, and only the cheaper things can be bought with money'; you never said a truer word, Daddy."

  She stood, feeling the raw breeze as her breathing slowed. One hand clenched on the other. Time enough to move when the shaking stopped.

  * * * *

  The partisans came up in a wary half-circle as Johanna finished strapping on the gear from her kit, murmuring and pointing as they reconstructed the brief fight. None of them was pointing a weapon at her: she recognized "Drakansky" among the liquid slavic syllables, and wary sidelong glances. That was reasonable enough; she must look a sight, with drying blood matted in her hair and smeared about her mouth. From the way some of them leaned into the kubelwagon and then glanced back at her, fingering their necks, she imagined they were speculating that she had torn out the second SS trooper's throat with her teeth; it was obvious enough that neither of the Germans had been shot. There was awe in the glances, too, at the woman who had climbed out of a burning plane and killed two armed soldiers of the SS elite with her hands…

  She ignored them with studied nonchalance as she slipped a magazine into the pistol grip of the machine pistol, clipped the bandolier to her belt and tossed back two pills from one of the bottles; aspirin, for the pounding ache between her eyes and the stiff neck and shoulders. Limping as little as her bruised foot and the missing heel would allow, she walked over to the corpse of the young Fritz on the ground. There were already flies, crawling into the gaping wound in his stomach and across dry eyeballs frozen in a look of eternal surprise. The heavy smell of excrement brought the bile to the back of her throat as she flipped his rifle up with a toe and tossed it to a startled Russian.