Under the Yoke

by S. M. Stirling

  The fire from the lead car had died down to an occasional burst, less loud than the screams and pleas and moaning of the coftle chained to the truck in the middle of the convoy. Tom scanned the slope again and laid the binoculars down carefully; he twisted to face the road behind the car and the cliff-face above.

  "They not shootin' much, pro'bly short of ammo," he said conversationally, half to himself. "Just tryin' to pin the lead car, then… haaa, here they comes." Marya could see the huge brown hands close more tightly on the smooth wood of the stock, and his thumb flicked the safety off with an oiled metallic snick. "Everybody shuts up, hear?"

  Yasmin crawled to the nun, rummaged under the driver's seat for the aid-box; Marya took the bandage and ointment thankfully, and for moments there was only the work of her hands. Applying the bandages; gauze pads, tape to immobilize the arm, it would do for now. Then tip of a shadow fell across the window, and she looked up from the wounded man.

  Two men stood in the road behind them, armed with Mauser carbines. Wild, bearded figures; their rags might once have been uniforms, but patches and caked mud made it impossible to tell with any certainty. They came toward the car at a trot, spaced across the road and moving in the instinctive half-crouch of men who expect to come under fire. Closer, and she could see the marks of hardship on them; scabs, weeping open sores clumsily bandaged, the slack-skinned gauntness that comes when the body has drawn down all its reserves of fat and begun to cannibalize the muscle beneath. They were strung about with a motley collection of string-tied bundles and sacks; as they came closer, she could see the lice moving in their beards, catch a gagging whiff of their stink.

  The guerrilla nearest the river went to one knee and began a nervous scan up and down the road; the other hailed the car.

  "Who's there? Answer, or I fire!"

  Tom's voice replied, in slow ungrammatical French: "Just us serfs, here. Who yaz an' what yo' want?"

  "This is the Auvergne command of the National Resistance," the man said; he repeated it as if it were a spell, a mantra against reality. "Food; we need food, medicine, weapons, clothing."

  His comrade called from the verge of the road. "And ask them if there's any wine."

  The first guerrilla was turned to the other with a rebuke ready when Tom spoke.

  " 'Fraid there's nothin' for yaz here," the ex-Janissary said mildly.

  "What—why—"

  "Because yaz gonna die, bushman!" The guerrilla was an experienced soldier, but the bull bellow still checked him for the first fraction of a second.

  Tom's rifle cleared the lower sill of the window with smooth economy; he fired from the hip, with the forestock braced against the metal of the windowframe. Even with the muzzle outside the the car, the blasts were deafening. Marya's ears rang as she watched the guerrilla slap backward, and the hot brass of an ejected cartridge-case bounced unnoticed off her forearm. Tom had fired three shots at less than ten meters range; all of them had struck the guerrilla in a patch over his breastbone no larger than the palm of a hand. They were standard load, 7.5mm jacketed hollowpoint rounds that mushroomed inside a wound; a plate-sized area of the maquisard's back fountained out in an eruption of bone-chips, spine and shards of flesh. The corpse went back, eyes bulging with hydrostatic shock, then fell limply.

  The other maquis fighter was up, turning and shouting. His first round went over the car with a vindictive crack, and then he threw himself flat behind a boulder to work the bolt of his carbine.

  Tom fired twice more, and the bullets bounced off the sheltering rock in front of the guerrilla with sparking whines.

  "Shee-it," he muttered. "Gettin" old an' slow." One broad hand dove into the satchel at his feet, came out with a stick-grenade. A quick yank pulled the tab; he brought it up across his chest, counted three and threw it out the window in a flat spinning arc toward the rock. The guerrilla was up and running toward the river-side edge of the road before it landed. Tom's first two rounds kicked up dust and stone-shards at the running man's heels, the third sledgehammered him over the verge of the road an instant before the grenade's blast struck. The guerrilla's rifle pinwheeled free as he toppled over the retaining wall, metal twinkling in the afternoon sun, then clattering on the rocks below.

  "Shee-it," Tom said again. "Three rounds, slow." He reached up, pulled a lever and swung the roof-hatch open, kicked a box over to give himself a platform to stand on. Head and shoulders out of the hatch, he turned to the cliff-face above them. "Yo" wenches stay down now, hear?"

  Marya drew a long breath and wrenched her attention down from the blocky torso filling the center of the car. Chantal was lying with her head in her hands, muttering; Therese lay beside her, eyes wide and frightened. The air smelled of burnt propellant and the sour sweat of fear; the nun started with nervous tension as Yasmin touched her arm.

  "I goin' back to take care of the chile," she whispered, jerking her head toward Therese. Marya nodded. The younger woman's brown skin had gone muddy-pale around mouth and eyes, but there was no quaver in her voice. Yasmin hesitated for a moment, then squeezed the nun's shoulder reassuringly.

  "Doan" worry," she said in an obvious attempt to comfort. "Poppa woan' let the bushmen get us."

  When the attack came, Tanya von Shrakenberg had been paging through the Landholder's Gazette, mildly annoyed that the workstock breeding programs were still behind schedule.

  Dammit, they should let us use tractors, at least temporarily, she thought. There were sound reasons for the limits on mechanization, both social and economic, but a little more flexibility…

  The first burst tore into the thin metal of the car's hood, ripping and dimpling the sheet steel; the second pinged and hammered at the thicker side-panels. Instantly her mind snapped back three years, plantation-holder's reflexes yielding to the instincts of a Guards tank-commander. The driver had frozen, eyes round as circles and whipping back and forth; he was reliable enough to go unchained, being very fond of his wife and children, but prone to panic. The car was losing power, a swift ssssssss of high-pressure steam and a mushy slowing-down feeling, but there was a fall of flat rock only twenty meters ahead, right side, by the cliff.

  "The rocks!" she shouted, wrenching the wheel in the right direction and clouting him over the back of the head to break the grip of fear. "Pull us in by the rocks." That in French, it would penetrate better. Her hands were stripping the machine-pistol out of its clamps over the dashboard, an elbow to pop out the window beside her and look up the rumbled face of the cliff. Halfway between a cliff and a very steep hill, yes, muzzle flashes—

  The twin-barrel cut loose above her head in a continuous blast of noise, double streams of tracer in economical two-second bursts. The familiar bitter chemical stink of burnt propellant, and the sound of the 15mm rounds on stone, like thousands of ball-peen hammers on a boulder. Sparks and splinters and dust from the target, a ledge up near the summit; a bush falling, cut through. That would keep their heads down: the heavy rounds could chew through brick walls and cut down trees… The car lurched as it left the road, skidded in the gravel shoulder and fishtailed to a halt in the shadow of the rocks; they were two meters high, enough to cut the body of the car out of the guerrilla machine-gun's sight-picture.

  Tanya pushed at the driver's head. "Down, stay down," she said, pulling the radio receiver from the dashboard and punching the send-button. It was a powerful set, predialed to the Settler Emergency Network.

  "Code one, code one: 10-7 von Shrakenberg, main road two kilometers north of Vorey, bushmen. Do yo' read, ovah."

  "This is 1st Airborne, Le Puy. Say again, 10-7?" A young voice, bored; from what the officer at the roadblock had told her, it had been months since there was any activity this close to the air-cavalry base. Ambush on a main road was inconceivable; she recognized the tone of one resisting information because it violated mental habit.

  The sloppiness was intolerable. "Damn you, puppy, I'm bein shot at! Three-vehicle convoy, under fire from automatic weapons in the
gorge three klicks south of Chamalieres. Ovah."

  "Ah… code seven, scramblin', maintain tone-transmission fo' location; ETA—" a pause—"16:10."

  Tanya glanced at her watch: ten minutes, quick work. "Good work, 1st. I'm stalled on a C-shaped curve, northbound. My car first, a truck right on the bend, other car out of sight to the rear. Steep slope to the river on my left, an' a 80-degree forested cliff to my right. From the volume of fire, I'd judge one MG and possible six-twelve riflemen."

  "Rodge-dodge, A.K."

  "A.K.," she acknowledged grimly, leaning out the window and firing a short burst one-handed over the rock outside, aiming off-hand toward the muzzle flashes that winked out of the sunlit bush. No practical chance of a hit, that was four hundred meters, but it would help keep their heads down.

  "An' hurry it. I've got two overseers, two armed serfs, a child an' me; an' I'm not up to much just now." She pressed a button. "Switchin' to tracer." The signal would broadcast steadily now, for the triangulator stations to produce a guide beam that the reaction-squad aircraft could ride.

  She levered herself up and squeezed back between the seats into the open body of the car. Damn this belly, she thought. Gudrun was at the rear doors, craning eagerly to see with her knife in one hand; she yanked the girl back by the hem of her tunic.

  "Gudrun!" she snapped, swiveling her around to where the terrified nurse was huddling in a corner with one of the French housegirls. "Protect the serfs, and stay out of the line of fire. That's an order, understood?"

  Damnation, she thought. I would run into the last holdouts in central France with Gudrun along. She pushed the anxiety down below conciousness; there was no time for it.

  "Ogden," she continued, turning to the overseer at the twin-barrel. "Can you get them?"

  As if in reply, a fresh burst from the hillside machine gun hammered at them. It dimpled the roof panels behind her, where the rear and riverward flank of the car extended beyond the cover of the rocks. Wasp-buzz sounds, and the unpleasant pink-ttnnnnnng of ricochets: rifle fire. She felt obscenely exposed in this unarmored soup-can, after all the years in a Hond battletank; acutely conscious of the quickened infant beneath her heart. Not that individual riflemen were much of a threat, objectively speaking; it took thousands of rounds per hit on average. But statistics were uncomfortably abstract when high-velocity metal was keening by.

  "Na," the overseer said. "Have to be dead lucky, Tanya. Bushmen got a nice firin' slit between two boulders, an' heavy cover. Best I can do is keep they heads down."

  "Shit." Tanya looked over at Sarah, the other overseer; she knelt by the rear-door windows with her assault-rifle at the ready, scanning the bush along the road-verge with the x4 optical sight. That was where they would come, and soon; the maquisards would know as well as the Draka that a reaction-force would be headed this way. There was a crackle of rifle shots, the slow banging of bolt-action carbines, a quick blast of semi-auto fire, and a grenade from around the curve to the south, where the truck and the other car were stalled on the narrow road. The guerrillas might have assumed the rear of the convoy was soft meat, but Tom was teaching them otherwise.

  "Right," she continued. "Ogden, Sarah, get ready to bail out an' tickle 'em. I'll cover yo' on the twin. When the airborne come in, get back down. Fast."

  "A.K.," Ogden said, stepping down from the meter height of welded-steel platform beneath the gun and pulling his own Holbars from its clip beside his seat.

  Tanya replaced him, blinking in the bright vertical sunlight as she came head-and-shoulders out of the roof hatch. Her hands went to the molded twin spade grips of the weapon, warm from the sun and Ogden's skin. Infinitely familiar, steel and checked marula wood against her palms, thumbs falling home on the butterfly pressure trigger. The twin-barrel was swivel-mounted on a ring that surrounded the hatch; she braced her elbows, laid the cross-wires of the sight on the bullet-scarred patch halfway up the cliff, and waited. There was no way they could get out of there without being seen. A very good spot for covering the road, but just a little too low to rake the right-hand verge where the car had run in… Yessss, right there, a V-shaped slit between the big round grayish rock and the triangular pink one—

  "And a very good thing they don't have a mortar," she muttered to herself. The black flared muzzle of the enemy machine-gun slipped through the notch, stick-tiny at four hundred meters.

  "Now!" she shouted, and thrust down on the ridged steel of the trigger. The massive weapon shuddered in her hands, a vibration that pounded into her shoulders and hummed tight-clenched teeth together; it was strongly braced, but the yoke and pin that held it to the ring-mount could not completely absorb the recoil. Blasting noise and twin streams of tracer arching away from the muzzles, solid light as they left, seeming to slow and float as sparks before the heavy 15mm rounds dropped home. Spent brass tinkled down across her stomach and into the car, hot enough to sting through the thin fabric of her shirt. Short bursts, push wait push. The air over the fluted steel barrels was already quivering with heat; she could feel it on her forearms and face.

  Above her the rocks dissolved behind a cloud of dust and chips and sparks. She raked across the top of the two boulders that hid the machine-gun, to discourage any idea of standing up and firing down from the hip, then began working the edges of the opening. It was just possible she might be able to bounce a few rounds in, and it did not take many of the thumb-sized slugs to put a machine-gun crew out of action. Also it would keep their heads down, when they could be moving their weapon to a new firing position.

  Behind her the rear doors of the car slammed open. From the corner of her eye she could see Ogden's squat form catapult out and dive into the roadside bush, a blur of black leather and metal. Sarah followed, a running leap from the back of the passenger compartment that took her three bodylengths out into the road, half the distance to the center truck. Then she backflipped, once, twice, dropped flat behind the truck and spider-crawled beneath it on palms and toes, a quick scuttling movement. A second's pause, and then the rapid brrrt-brrrt of a Holbars set for three-round bursts.

  That will keep their heads down, she thought, and depressed the muzzles for an instant to rake a burst across the cliff face below the machine-gun nest. Not too far below, Ogden would be hunting there…

  There was a sudden choked scream and a body catapulted from the scrub-covered slope five meters up; it flew through the air with arms and legs windmilling in an arc that ended in a crunching impact on the pavement. Broken, the guerrilla lay for a moment and then began to crawl toward the roadside verge. His comrades in the bush-covered rock of the cliffside were firing at the center truck, trying to silence the automatic rifle beneath it. Bullets pocked the thin metal of the cab and ripped through the canvas tilt; the screaming of the chained serfs within was louder than the gunfire, and their scrambling rocked the vehicle on its springs.

  "Come on, come on," Tanya whispered fiercely as she walked another burst back up the hillside and across the two bullet-scarred boulders. This was not good, a blindsided firefight against odds. "Come on, you knights of the air."

  Chantal retched as she awoke, and Marya's hand pressed her back to the floor of the car. The nun briskly pulled up an eyelid and checked the pupil. "No concussion. You were unconscious for a little; keep quiet and keep down." In a whisper: "And there is nothing we can do except die to no purpose."

  Marya kept her eyes resolutely below the level of the windows, down among the tumbled bundles and baskets. It could not have been long since the ambush, the hot metal of the flashtube boiler was still clicking and pinging. Danger stretched time, drew the seconds out, it seemed like hours. The sensation had become familiar in the war years, but the long changelessness of Central Detention had dulled the memory. Blood pounded in her ears, so loud that for long moments the thup-thup-thup sound outside seemed no more than her own heartbeat. Then Chantal dropped her hand from her eyes and looked up questioningly.

  "What is that?" she asked. It grew louder,
a steady multiple whapping with a rising mechanical whine beneath.

  Tom answered, looking down from the roof-hatch above them. "Those-there newfangled helicopters," he said, with satisfaction in his voice. "Not too soon, neither."

  Chantal and the nun exchanged glances and crawled cautiously to the outside windows, raising their eyes to the lower edge and peering south. A line of dots was visible through the long gash of the gorge, swelling as they watched. Six of them in staggered line abreast, under the whirling circles of their rotors. Closer, close enough to see the rounded boxy fuselages and long tail-booms, then the gaping twin mouths of the turbine intakes. The noise grew, shrilling and pounding; the fire from the hillside increased, no careful conserving of ammunition now, a panic-striken crackle.

  The helicopters rose slightly, to perhaps four hundred meters above the level of the gorge. Marya peered upward, blinking. Their speed was apparent now, as they snapped by with the bright flicker of tracer stabbing out from their flanks. The nun could see the door-gunners standing to the grips of their weapons, the troopers crouching behind. The face of the slope above the road erupted in dust and the chittering whine of ricochets; Tom ducked down as gravel and twigs and branches pattered onto the roof of the car. Then the flight passed beyond the cliff-edge, the sound of the rotors changing as they came in to land.

  "Look." Chantal tugged at her sleeve.

  Marya turned west; two more aircraft were approaching from the other side of the river, not more than fifty meters apart. A different type, approaching slowly in a straight line toward the rock face above the road. Helicopters like the others, but slender rather than boxlike, with stub wings and droop noses. Long flat-paned canopies above the nose and she could see the figures of two crewmen in each, one sitting behind and above the other. Both craft had multibarreled gatling-cannon in small domed chin-turrets beneath their prows, and she could make out the pitted cones of rocket pods under their wings.