Under the Yoke
Page 3
This was not a matter of armies and bureaucracies, however brutal; it was a ritual of submission rawly personal, as much a matter of calm everyday routine to her new owners as eating a meal. Oh, I understand the psychology of it, she thought; hers had been a teaching Order, and a progressive one. It was still something out of the ancient world, come to impossible life around her.
Tanya turned to her daughter, stroking her hair. "You've been patient, darlin'; now tell me, what do yo' think of these two."
"Well…" the child frowned and wrinkled her nose. "… They seem sort of, well, uppish. Sort of… um, shouldn't you punish them, mother?"
Tanya laughed, and tousled the girl's hair. "Cudrun, sweetlin', school can teach any number of useful things. But handlin' serfs is like…" She pursed her lips and tapped one thumb on her chin. "Like dancing; has to be passed on, one practitioner to the next. There's never a set answer, not on an individual scale. What did the Romans call their slaves?"
Cudrun's frown relaxed; that was much easier. "Instrumentum vocale, mother. The tool that speaks."
"A wise people. But always remember, the tool that speaks is also the tool that thinks, and believes. Watch." She turned her attention back to the two kneeling figures. Fascinated, Marya observed the change sweep over her face; less a matter of expression than of some indefinable shadow behind the eyes, warmth vanishing until frosted silver looked out at her human chattel.
"You, yo' were a nun, eh?"
"Yes, I am, Mistress."
"Were. Now, if 'n I told you to sweep the floor, would you do it?"
"Yes, Mistress."
"If I gave you Gudrun's knife an' told you to cut Chantal's throat, would you?" There was a silent pause. "The truth, wench: don't try lyin' to me."
Marya moistened her lips. "No, Mistress."
"Ah." The Draka smiled. "And if I told you to jump out the window?"
"No, Mistis." At the Draka's arched brows: "Suicide is a mortal sin."
The Draka woman laughed softly. "And if I told you that if you didn't, I'd kill Chantal here?"
Marya opened her mouth, hesitated, shook her head.
"More difficult, eh?" Tanya chuckled and nodded to her daughter. "Remember this; there is always some order that won't be obeyed. Either don't give it, or be prepared to kill. Human bein's are like horses, born wild but with a capacity fo' domestication. These are old fo' breakin', so it'll be difficult." She turned to the serf-girl with the mandolin.
"Yasmin," she continued, writing and tearing a leaf from a pocket-notebook. "Here. There's a Stevenson & deVerre office on the ground level. Take them down and see to them, there's a good wench. Light cuffs, clothin', tell them the basics. We'll come down when yo're finished."
Yasmin covered her instrument in a velvet case and pattered over to them, signalling them to rise. Tanya levered herself to her feet and approached also, stopping them for a moment with a lifted finger, paused.
"You two are mine now," she continued; neither of the women lifted their eyes from the carpet. "All your choices are gone, except one. Obedience, life. Disobedience, death. That one we can never take from you." Another pause. "But yo've already made it, no?" She shrugged. "I am your fate, then. Yo've decided to spend life under the Yoke; so remember, there's no point kickin' and buckin'. Be good serfs, an' my family will be good masters. Resist, and yo' suffer."
Chapter Two
… to defeat an enemy, we must understand him. National myths—and their modem equivalent, propaganda —are perhaps inevitable, certainly useful, but they must not be allowed to blind us to objective reality. Take, for example, the belief, common even among some historians, that the Loyalist refugees who settled the then Crown Colony of Drakia in the 1780's had a secret master plan of world conquest already set out. and that a hidden cabal of Draka aristocrats has been implementing it ever since. Nonsense: a transference to the past of present patterns, as ridiculous as a historical novel showing an 18th-century Englishwoman deliberately seeking a suntan. What is the reality? As usual, a process of cultural evolution that combined blind chance with conscious decisions—many of those falling victim to the Law of Unintended Consequences.
The leaders of the proto-Draka were migrants from the slave societies of the Caribbean and the American South; but their subjects were not the uprooted, demoralized fragments delivered by the slavers of the Middle Passage. Little is known of the pre-conquest cultures of Africa—the Draka shattered them too thoroughly—but the evidence suggests strong, militarily formidable peoples. Breaking them, and keeping them broken, produced an overwhelmingly warlike culture with a built-in bias towards expansion; the ideologues and philosophers. Carlyle. Gobineau. Nietzsche. Naldorssen. merely produced an ideology for a society eager to cast off the increasingly alien ethos of liberal rationalism. The Orate aristocracy needed a world-view and belief system which would make them comfortable with what they were, and ordinary social evolution produced it. Such developments cannot be forced: they must spring organically from the human environment. The failed attempt in the 1890's to revive Nordic paganism is an example, producing nothing but a new type of Draka profanity. But the belief system that did arise among the lords of the Domination then took on a life of its own, becoming cause as well as effect…
The Mind of the Draka:
a Military-Cultural Analysis
Monograph delivered by
Commodore Aguilar Emaldo,US. Naval War College. Manila.11th Alliance Strategic Studies ConferenceSubic Bay.
DRAKA FORCES BASE NORDKAPPEN
JUNE 12, 1947
0200 HOURS
It was very quiet in the screen room of the electro-detection center, quiet, and dark. There was the underlying whir of the fans, click and hum of relays, a low murmur now and then from one of the operators or floor-officers. Most of the stations in the long bunker were switched off and under dust-covers, and the projac map on the north wall was dimmed. The air smelled of tobacco and green concrete and stale coffee and heating-duct, a tired night-watch odor. The controllers bent over the faint green glow of their screens, faces corpse-sallow in the cathode-tube light, insectile beneath headsets and eye-filters, motionless except for minute adjustments to the instruments; they were in Citizen Force undress uniform, black trousers and boots and dove-gray short-sleeved shirts.
Operator-first Dickson Milhouse leaned back and stretched, sighed and waved his cup in the air to attract the attention of the serf with the refreshment cart; the pedestal chair creaked as he yawned. Nightwatch sent you to sleep with sheer boredom, and when you came right down to it there was nothing very complicated about holding down a screen. Work for the Auxiliaries, really, except that it still had the cachet of high technology and novelty and so was reserved for Citizen personnel.
He rubbed his eyes. Nordkappen Base outside was just as boring. Morale Section tried hard, films and sports and amateur theatricals, and there was always the bordello, but there was just nothing to do here at the northern tip of what had once been Norway; they all had assault-rifles clipped to the top rails of the workstations, but that was merely War Zone regulations. There was still guerrilla activity in much of the territory overrun during the Eurasian War, Europe, Russia, eastern China, but here there was no native population at all, since the Lapps were run out. No game animals to speak of, not by African standards; the long summer days were a novelty that soon wore off, and as for winter… he shuddered. The winters here were nothing someone born under the peaks of Mt. Kenia could have believed.
Oh, well, you can always sit on a rock and watch the construction work, he thought sourly. This was an important base, watching the shortest great-circle route connecting western Eurasia and North America, and tensions were already high between the Domination and the Yankee-run Alliance for Democracy. Dirigibles over the Pole, submarines under the ice—round the clock work here, everything from barracks and messhalls to industrial-size fuel cells and electrodetector towers; many of the installations were burn-before-reading secret.
Equipment malfunction? No, too definite. Suddenly he was no longer tired, nor bored at all. His finger flicked a relay, and the amber light clicked on above his workstation.
"Let me see it." The floor-officer leaned over him, her fingers tapping the key-pad beside the screen. "Bring it up, two." A pause. "And again, two." Her thumb punched down on the red button. An alarm klaxon began to wail.
"Definitely a bogey," the floor-officer said.
Merarch Labushange grunted in reply, hitching at the uniform trousers that were all he had had time to don; sweat glistened in the tangled hair of his chest, amid several purple bite-marks. He was a short man for a Draka, ugly-handsome in the Mediterranean style, black curly hair, blue jowls, body the shape of a brick and thick arms and legs knotted with muscle.
"Estimate height and speed," he grunted, rubbing at red-rimmed eyes. The operator hid a smile behind a cough as he worked the calculator; the commander's new German wench was supposed to be costing him sleep… The results clicking up drove camp gossip from his mind.
"Estimate… estimate Mach 2.2 at 36,000 meters, Merarch."
There was a rustle from the other stations, a turning cut short by the floor-officer's glare. Silence, until the operator began another check of the console.
"Forget it," the Merarch said. "It's genuine."
"But sir, Mach 2?" the operator said, a cold feeling seeping up from his gut. The Domination had flown its first supersonic jet only a few months ago, and this was nearly half again as fast.
"The Fritz got manned rocket-planes to well over Mach 1, just before the end," the commander said absently, lost in thought. Of course, those had been one-off experiments, air-launched from bombers and not capable of more than a few minutes of powered flight, but… "The Yankees must have been workin' hard, produced a surprise. Afterwards they can claim it was a glitch in our equipment, or little green men from Mars." He grinned like a shark. "Trouble is, we have some surprises too, an' they can scarcely object to our usin' 'em, on somethin' that don't officially exist."
He glanced around the dim-lit room, and his smile widened. "Of course, it could be headed this way with an atomic…" He strode briskly to the commander's dais, sank into the chair and keyed the communicator.
"Alert, codes Timbuktoo, Asmara, Zebra. Get me—"
Echoing, thundering, the darkness of the B-30's cargo pod shook around Captain Fred Kustaa, toning through muscle and bone with subsonic disharmonies. He was strapped almost flat in the crash-couch, imprisoned in the pressure-suit and helmet, packed about with gel-filled bags to absorb the bruising punishment of the experimental craft's passage through the upper atmosphere. Outside the titanium-alloy skin would be glowing, the edges of the huge square ramjet intakes turning cherry-red as air compressed toward the density of steel.
It was the helpless feeling that was hardest to take, he decided, not the physical danger. He had been a combat soldier in the Pacific before he transferred to the OSS in '44, and God knew liaison work with the Draka in Europe in the last year of the War had been no picnic, but this…
Experimental, he thought. Everything's too fucking experimental for my taste. Donovan should have tried the submarines first. Hell, Murmansk wasn't more than a few weeks on foot through the forest to Finland, although it would be a bit difficult to carry the contents of the cargo pod on his back.
The aircraft lurched and banked, and his stomach surged again; he concentrated on dragging in another breath through the rubber-tasting facemask. Vomiting inside it would be highly unpleasant and possibly fatal. About as maneuverable as a locomotive, had been the test-pilot's words; too little was known about airflow at these speeds. Kustaa did not understand the B-30—he would not have been risked over enemy territory if he did—but even just looking at it from the outside was enough to know it was leading-edge work. It didn't even look like an airplane, it looked like a flattened dart pasted on top of two rectangular boxes…
"Merde." The pilot's voice, Emile Chretien; Kustaa recognized the thick Quebec-French accent. He spoke a little of the patois himself, there were plenty of habitants scattered among the Finnish-Americans of his home in the Upper Peninsula. "Electrodetection, high-powered scanners."
Kustaa winced. Well, that had been one reason for this mission, to find out for sure just how good the Domination's new Northern Lights Chain was. The dark pressed against his eyes, and he used it to paint maps; their course from the Greenland base, over the Arctic toward darkened Europe. His imagination refused to stop, and he saw more; saw the alert going out below, to bases in Sweden and Norway, alarm-klaxons ringing out over concrete and barracks, flight-suited pilots scrambling to their stations. The blue flare of jets lighting the predawn as the stubby delta shapes of the Draka Sharkclass fighters rolled onto the launch paths…
The B-30 was supposed to be immune to interception; the Domination had the physical plant of the German ramjet research projects, but the U.S. had managed to smuggle out most of the actual scientists and the crucial liquid-hydrogen results. The aircraft lurched again, shook as if the wings were going to peel away at the roots, stooped. One of the Pacific Aircraft researchers had said something about eventually flying right into outer space if they could lick the problem of combustion in a supersonic airstream; damned long-hairs had no sense of need-to-know, shouldn't have been talking like that in a canteen.
"Tabernac'! Another ray… guidance beam, something's coming up after us!"
Of course, he reminded himself, the U.S. hadn't gotten all the German scientists; some had stayed, captives or those who had taken the Domination's offer of Citizen status for themselves and their immediate families. And the Draka army's Technical Section had good ideas too, sometimes; it was propaganda that they stole all their inventions.
"Positive detection… fille d' un putain, three of them; not manned, not at those speeds. They're closing on us, they must be riding the beam. Hold on, Captain, I'm dropping chaff and taking evasive action."
You mean this battering about wasn't evasive action? Kustaa thought plaintively.
This was as bad as going down the tunnels after the Nips, back on Sumatra in '43, pushing the flamethrower ahead into the cramped mud-smelling blackness. Japanese, Captain, Japanese, he reminded himself. Part of the Alliance for Democracy now, they'd be associate signatories to the Rio Pact as soon as Halleck and the Army of Occupation got through restructuring… Couldn't call the little yellow bastards monkey-men anymore. His mind skipped, nerves jumping in obedience to a fight-flight reflex that was pumping him full of adrenaline. And all I can do is sweat, he thought wryly. He could feel it trickling down his flanks, smell the rankness and taste salt on his upper lip. Think, he commanded himself. You're not an animal driven by instinct, think.
Unmanned antiaircraft missiles, a typical Draka brute-force solution. Crude engines would be enough, if they were intended to burn out after a single use. The U.S.—he corrected himself mentally, the Alliance —didn't have guidance systems small and rugged enough for a missile like that, although they would soon—so the Domination wouldn't either; they were years behind in electronics. But they could put the tracking and electrodetection on the ground, just a passive receptor-steering system on the missile itself, that and a big simple two-stage drive and a warhead.
Christ have mercy, I hope it isn't an atomic, he thought. Probably not—they were still rare and mostly reserved for strategic use—but the Draka would be willing to explode one over a populated area. Populated by serfs, that is.
Jets and atomic bombs built by slaves, he thought. Insane. The Domination was madness come to earth; he shivered, remembering his liaison-work with the Draka army, during the misbegotten period of joint action against Hitler. Gray faces of the Belgian farmers as they prepared to drive their tractors out over the minefields… and the sick wet noises of the one who had refused, seated on an impaling-stake cut out of the little forest; his feet
had scuffed around and around as he tried to rise off the rough wood sunk a foot deep into his gut, and blood and shit dribbled down the bark. Some of the Draka dug in at the treeline had laughed, at him or at the explosions and screams in the plowed field ahead.
The B-30 went thump, absurdly like an autosteamer going over a bump at speed, and the sensation was repeated. That would be the strips of foil being ejected, hopefully to baffle the Draka electrodetectors. Acceleration slammed him down and to the side; they were climbing and banking, and metal groaned around him as the big aircraft was stressed to ten-tenths of its capacity.
"Still locked on. Merde, Coming up on target. Prepare for ejection. Captain." The pilot's voice was full of a tense calm; Air Force tradition, can-do, wild blue yonder…
His heart lurched, and his mind refused to believe the time had gone so fast, so fast; it was like the wait between boarding the landing-craft and the moment the ramp went down on the beach. Kustaa wished he could spit out the gummy saliva filling his mouth, as he had running waist-deep through the surf in a landing-zone. Some men did that, some were silent and some shrieked wordlessly, a few shouted the traditional gung-ho and a surprising number pissed their pants or shat themselves; you never saw that in the papers, but only a recruit was surprised at it.
Damn, start out a Gyrene and end up a paratrooper, he thought. "Acknowledged." His circuit was locked open, had to be with his hands strapped down, but there was no point in distracting Emile.
"Ten seconds from… mark." There was no point in bracing himself, the harness was as like a womb as the technicians could make it.