Marching Through Georgia

by S. M. Stirling

  The massive bruising around his body was something else again: the whole surface of the tapered wedge was discolored from its normal matte tan to yellow-grey, from the broad shoulders where the deltoids rose in sharp curves to his neck, down to where the scutes of the stomach curved below the ribs. Dreiser had wrestled the young Draka a time or two, enough to know that his muscle was knitted over the ribs like a layer of thick india rubber armor beneath the skin. What it had taken to raise those welts… Christ, he's not going to be so good-looking if this happens a few more times, the American thought. And I'm damn glad I'm not in this business. Even then, he felt his mind making a mental note; this would be an effective tailpiece to his story. "Wounded, but still thoroughly in command of the situation, Centurion von Shrakenberg…"

  Sofie finished the taping, a sheath like a Roman's loricated cuirass running from beneath his armpits to the level of the floating ribs. Eric swung his arms experimentally, then bent. He stopped suddenly, lips thinning back over his teeth, then completed the motion; then he coughed and spat carefully into a cloth.

  "No blood," he muttered to himself. "Didn't think doc was wrong, really, but—" He turned his head to give Sofie a rueful smile, stroking one hand down the curve of her back. "Hey, thanks anyway, Sofie."

  She blushed down to her breasts; looked down and noticed the goosebumps and stiffened nipples with a slight embarrassment, coughed herself, and drew on a fresh uniform tunic. "Ya, no problem," she said. "Ymir-cursed cold in here…" She turned to pick up a bowl and dampen a cloth. "Ag, cis, Cenrurio— Eric, we need y' walkin', come dawn."

  He sighed and closed his eyes as she began to clean the almost-dried blood from his face, pushing back damp strands of his hair from his forehead. The cigarette dangled from one puffed lip.

  "Better at walkin' than thinking, from the looks of tonight's fuckup," he said bitterly.

  "Bullshit." Heads turned; that had been McWhirter, from the place where he sat with the neatly laid-out parts of an assault rifle on a blanket before his knees; he had more than the usual reluctance to let a rifle go without cleaning after being fired. He raised a bolt carrier to the light, pursed his lips and wiped off excess oil. "With respect, sir. From a crapped out bull, at that."

  Eric's eyes opened, frosty and pale-grey against the darkening flesh that surrounded them. The NCO grinned; he was stripped to shorts as well, displaying a body roped and knotted and ridged with muscle that was still hard, even if the skin had lost youth's resilience. His body was heavier than the officer's, thicker at the waist, matted with greying yellow hair where the younger man's was smooth, and covered with a pattern of scars, everything from bullet wounds and shrapnel to what looked like the beginning of a sentence in Pushtu script, written with a red-hot knife.

  "Yes, Senior Decurion?" Eric said softly.

  "Yes, Centurion." The huge hands moved the rifle parts, without needing eyes to guide them. "Look, sir. I've been in the Regular Line since, hell, '09.

  Seen a lot of officers; can't do what they do—the good ones—Mrs. WcWhirter didn't raise her kids for that, but Ah can run a firefight pretty good, and pick officers. Some of the bad ones—" he smiled, an unpleasant expression "—they didn't live past their second engagement, you know? Catchin' that Fritz move up the valley was smooth, real smooth. Had to do somethin' about it, too. Can't see anything else we could've done. Sir."

  He slapped the bolt carrier back into the receiver of the Holbars, drew it back and let the spring drive it forward. The sound of the snick had a heavy, metallic authority. "An' we did do something. We blew their transport, knocked out say two-three more tanks, killed, oh, maybe two hundred. They turned back; next attack's goin' to come straight up our gunsights. For which we lost maybe fifteen effectives. So please, cut the bullshit, get some rest and let's concentrate on the next trick."

  "My trick lost us half of 2nd Tetrarchy," Eric said.

  The NCO sighed, using the rifle to lever himself erect and sweeping up the rest of his gear with his other hand. "With somewhat less respect, sir, y'may have noticed there's a war goin' on, and it's mah experience that in wars people tend to get killed. Difference is, is it gettin the job done or not? That's what matters."

  "All that matters," he added with flat sincerity from the doorway. " 'Course, we may all die tomorrow." Another shrug, before he let the curtain drop behind him. "Who gives a flyin' fuck, anyhow?"

  Eric blinked and started to purse his lips, stopping with a wince. Sofie dropped the cloth in the bowl and set it aside, staring after the Senior Decurion with a surprised look as she gathered a nest of blanket and bedroll around herself and reached out a hand to check the radio.

  "He's got something right, for once," she muttered. Everything green, ready… She shivered at the memory of the palm on her shoulder. Can it. Later. Maybe.

  "Well, Ah give a flyin' fuck," said a muffled voice from the center of the room. It was Trooper Huff, lying face-down on the blankets while her friend kneaded pine oil into the muscles of her shoulders and back. The fair skin gleamed and rippled as she arched her back with a sigh of pleasure.

  "Centurion? Now, all Ah want is to get back—little lower, there, sweetlin—get back to Rabat province an' the plantation, spend the rest of mah life raisin' horses an' babies. Old Ironbutt the deathfuckah is still right. If those Fritz'd gotten on our flank tomorrow they'd have had our ass for grass, Centurion." She sighed again, looking up. "Yo're turn." The dark-haired soldier handed her the bottle and lay down, and Huff rose to her knees and began to oil her palms. Then she paused. "Oh, one last thing. Didn't notice you askin' anyone to do anythin' yo' wouldn't do yoself."

  Eric's face stayed expressionless for a moment, and then he shook his head, squeezing his eyelids closed and chuckling ruefully. "Outvoted," he said, suddenly yawning enormously. He grinned down at Sofie, eyes crinkled. "I'm not going to indulge in this-here dangerous sport of plannin' things to do once the war is over," he said in a tone lighter than most she had heard from him. "Bad luck to price the unborn calf. But did you have anything planned for yo're next leave, Sofie?"

  "Hell, no, Eric sir!" she said with quiet happiness, grinning back.

  "Dinner at Aladdin's?" he said. That was a restaurant built into the side of Mount Meru, in Kenia province. The view of the snowpeak of Kilimanjaro rising over the Serengeti was famous, as were the game dishes.

  "Consider it a date, Centurion," she said, snuggling herself into the blankets and closing her eyes. Tomorrow was going to be a busy day.

  Eric looked across at Dreiser. "That's private, Bill, but we could all three get together for some deep-sea fishing off Mombasa afterwards. Owe you something for those articles, anyway; they're going to be… useful, I think. Better than the trip you had with that writer friend of yours—what was his name, Hemingway?"

  Dreiser laughed softly. "Acquaintance; Ernest dosen't have friends, just drinking buddies and sycophants. I'll bet you don't get drunk and try to shoot the seagulls off the back of the boat… and you seem to be in a good mood tonight, my friend."

  "Because I've got things to do, Bill, things to do. And with that, goodnight." He stubbed out the cigarette, swilled down the last of the lukewarm coffee. And probably about twenty hours of life to do them with, he thought. Pushing the sudden chill in his gut away: White Christ and Wotan one-eye, what's different about that? The odds haven't changed since yesterday. But his wants had, he forced himself to admit with bleak honesty, and his vision of his duty—an expanded one, which required his presence, if it could be arranged.

  There was one good thing about the whole situation. Whatever happened, he no longer had to face death with an attitude indistinguishable from Senior Decurion McWhirter's. That he had never felt comfortable with.

  * * * *

  Dreiser waited while the room grew still; half an hour and there were no others awake, save himself and the cadaverous brown-bearded man who had the radio watch. The cold seemed deeper, and he pulled another blanket about himself as he laid down the
notebook at last. They were not notes for his articles; those could be left to the tape, flown out with the STOL transports that took out the wounded, given to the world by the great military broadcast stations in Anatolia. These were his private journals, part of the series he had been keeping since his first assignment to Berlin in 1934.

  If I'm going to be a fly on the wall of history, something ought to come of it, he thought. Something truer than even the best journalism could be. Get the raw information down now; raw feeling, as well. Safe in silence, where the busy censors of a world at war could not touch it. Safe on paper, fixed, where the gentle invisible editor of memory could not tint and bend with subconscious hindsight.

  Later he would write that book: a book that would have the truth of his own observations in it, what he could research as well, written in some quiet lonely place where there would be nothing between him and his thoughts. A truth that would last. Add up the little truths, and the big ones could follow. This action tonight, for example. A Draka tetrarchy had given a force twenty times its size a bloody nose, turned back a major attack by the enemy's elite troops and inflicted demoralizing casualties. And it still felt like defeat, at least to a civilian observer. Maybe every battle was a defeat for all involved; some just got more badly beaten than others. Soldiers always lost, whichever set of generals won.

  Ambition, he mused, looking across the room at the battered face of the Draka officer. Strange forms it takes. What was Eric's? Not to be freed from a world of impossible choices, not any longer. And not simply to climb the ladder of the power machine and breed children to do the same in their turn—not if Dreiser knew anything of Eric's truth.

  Do we ever? The truth is, we may be enemies. But for now, we are friends.

  It was late, and he was tired. What was that Draka poet's line? "Darkness is a friend of mine… Sometimes I have to beat it back, or it would overwhelm me…" And sometimes it was well to welcome it. He closed his eyes.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Citizens were never more than 15 percent of the total population, usually rather less; many of the serfs at any given time were foreign-born, newly incorporated by conquest Careful organization kept them disorganized and split into isolated groups on plantations, mines, and factory compounds. Well-trained police and military forces were always poised to move along the superb roads, railways, air-transport lines for which the Domination was famous; informer networks spread through the subject populations like mold through a loaf of bread. Yet guns and fortresses, barbed wire and spies, floggings and electroshock and impalements by themselves were never enough; repression and terror alone could not be the answer. Especially outside the cities, serfs were always a huge majority, always possessed the preponderance of immediate physical force. Each master could not have troops at his back, and orders must be obeyed even without a free supervisor to enforce them.

  Human social organizations exist because human beings believe they exist; for the Draka to be safe, it was essential that the forces of belief and myth be enlisted on their side. Knowledge that a successful uprising meant annihilation provided the incentive for a monolithic group solidarity among the master class; the necessary arrogant self-confidence was the product of power itself—power of life and death over other human beings, from birth, by hereditary right A Citizen knew that he or she was superior, a different order of being. And it was necessary that at least a majority of the serfs agree, at least to the extent of believing that resistance and death were one. Partly this was a purely rational matter, a knowledge that the lex talonis would take a hundred serf lives for a Draka killed or injured. But on a deeper level it was essential to make myth reality, as had earlier systems such as the Spartan agoge; the endless training that pushed each Citizen child to the limit of his or her potential had a function beyond that of producing a better soldier or administrator. With training that emphasized self-reliance, the ability to act alone under stress, as much as pure deadliness; by adulthood, the individual Citizen was superior, visibly. That this superiority was the product of training rather than some divine mana was irrelevant; that the serfs themselves provided the wealth and leisure to make it possible did not matter…

  ―200 Years: A Social History of the Domination, by Alan E. Sorensson. Ph.D., Archona Press, 1983

  North Caucasus, Near Pyatigorsk April 14, 1942: 0800 Hours

  Johanna blinked. I'm alive, she thought. Fuckin odd, that.

  There was not much pain, no more than after a fall from a horse or surfboard, apart from a fierce ache in her neck. But there was no desire to move anything, and she was hot.

  She blinked again, and now things came into focus behind the blue tint of her face shield. The wreck of the Lover's Bite was pitched forward, down thirty degrees at the nose over some declivity in the ploughed field. She was hanging limp in the safety harness, only her buttocks and thighs in contact with the seat. Her view showed a strip of canopy with blue sky beyond it, the instrument panel, the joystick flopping loosely between her knees. And her feet, resting in a pool of fuel that was up to her ankles where they rested on the forward bulkhead by the control pedals. The stink of the fuel was overwhelming; she coughed weakly, and felt the beginnings of the savage headache you got from breathing too much of the stuff.

  Flames licked at the corner of her vision. She swiveled an eye, to see the port wing fully involved, roaring white and orange flames trailing dirty black smoke backward as a steady south wind whipped at it. The engine was a red-metal glow in the center of it, and… yes, the plane was slightly canted down to that direction, that was lucky, the fuel would be draining into the flames and not away from it.

  Feeling returned; fear. She was sitting in a fire-bomb, in a pool of high-octane, surrounded by an explosive fuel-air mixture. Probably no more than seconds before it went.

  Got to get out, she thought muzzily. Her left hand fumbled at a panel whose heat she could feel even through her gloves, looped through the carrying strap of the survival package. Her right was at her shoulder, pawing at the release-catch of her harness. Good, she thought. It opened, and her body fell, head slamming into the instrument panel.

  * * * *

  Consciousness returned with a slam against her ear and a draft of incredible coolness. A hand reached down and lifted the helmet from her head.

  Voices speaking, as she was lifted from the cockpit; in German, blurred by a fire that roared more loudly as the canopy slid back. She felt disconnected, hearing and thought functioning but slipping away when she tried to focus, as if her mind were a screw with the thread stripped.

  "The pilot's alive… Mary Mother, it's a girl!" A young man, very young. Bavarian, from the sound of his voice; a thorough knowledge of German was a family tradition among the von Shrakenbergs.

  Girl, hell, Johanna thought muzzily. She was new enough to adulthood to be touchy about it. Two years since I passed eighteen.

  "Quick, get her out, this thing's ready to blow." An older voice, darker somehow, tired. Plattdeutsch accent, she noted: no pf or ss sounds.

  "I can't—her hand's tangled in something. A box."

  "Bring it, there may be documents." That would be her survival package, rations and map, machine-pistol and ammunition.

  The cold air brought her back to full awareness, but she let herself fall limp, with eyes closed. The younger man braced a boot on either side of the cockpit, put his hands beneath her armpits, and lifted. She was an awkward burden, and the man on the ground grunted in surprise as his comrade handed her down and he took the weight across his shoulder. She was slim but solid, and muscle is denser than fat. He gave a toss to settle her more comfortably, and she could feel the strength in his back and the arm around her waist, smell the old sweat and cologne scent. Her stomach heaved, and she controlled it with an effort that brought beads of sweat to her forehead. He might suspect I was conscious if I puked down his back. She had her "passport" pill, but you could always die.

  The German carried her some distance, perhaps two hundr
ed meters; she could see his jackboots through slitted lids, tracking through the field, leaving prints in the sticky brown-black clay. Camouflage jacket, that meant SS. The hobnails went rutch on an occasional stone, slutch as they pulled free of the earth; the soldier was breathing easily as he laid her down on the muddy ground beside the wheels of some sort of vehicle. Not roughly, but without any particular gentleness; then his boots vanished, and she could hear them climbing into the… it must be a field car of some sort; her head had rolled toward it, and she could see the running board dip and sway under the man's weight.

  The other soldier hurried up, panting, his rifle in one hand and the sheet-metal box of her survival kit in the other. Johanna could feel him lean the weapon against the vehicle and begin to speak. Then there was a crashing bang, followed by a huge muffled thump and a wave of heat. Light flashed against the side of the scout car, and heat like lying too close to the fireplace, and a piece of flaming wreckage sliced into the dirt in front of the wheels.

  "Just made it," the man in the car said. Johanna let her eyes flutter open, wishing they had taken the trouble to find a dry spot; she could feel the thin mud soaking through her flight suit, and the wind was chill when it gusted away from the pyre of her aircraft. Sadness ran through her for a moment. It had been a beautiful ship…

  It was a tool, and tools can be replaced, she chided herself. The young soldier was kneeling and leaning over her, face still a little pale as he turned back from the blaze to his left. That might have been him… Nineteen, she thought. Round freckled face, dark-hazel eyes and brown hair, still a trace of puppy fat. A concerned frown as he raised her head in one hand and brought a canteen to her lips. She groaned realistically and rolled her head before accepting the drink; the water was tepid and stale from the metal container, and tasted wonderful.