Under the Yoke

by S. M. Stirling

  Nine, he counted to himself. He had married in '41, right after the Nips had attacked Hawaii; they had planned to wait until he finished the engineering course, but being a Marine private was a high-risk occupation. Aino had spent the war years in San Diego working in a shipyard. They had bought one of the new suburban ranch-style bungalows that started springing up around L.A. right after the Armistice…

  Eight. The sweating dreams had been bad, waking screaming as the bunker door opened and the calcinated body of the Japanese soldier dropped out onto him, knocking him down in an obscene embrace with their faces an inch apart; Aino had held him and asked no questions, even when it woke little Maila…

  Seven. She hadn't wanted him to continue with the OSS, especially not when it meant moving back East to New York; the capital was no place to raise a family. She had seen to the sale of the home where she had expected to live the rest of her life, doggedly settled into the Long Island brownstone, entertained his co-workers on awkward evenings when nobody could talk shop and long silences fell…

  Six. They had been out to a movie, a Civil-War epic called President Douglas; the newsreel had been a political piece, film of a serf-auction in Archona. The usual sensational stuff lifted from the Domination's news services, no routine shots of black factory-hands here, ABS-Path way knew their audience found injustice more titillating spiced with sex and inflicted on white people. A showing of high-cost European concubines in heels and jewelry and nothing else, parading down an elevated walkway; the American film-editors had inserted black rectangles to keep the Catholic Decency League happy. The shabby refugee beside her had stood and begun screaming, pointing at the screen. "Mein Gott, Christina, Christina!" Still screaming, climbing over the seats with clawed hands outstretched towards the smiling blond image standing hand-on-hip. He was screaming as the attendants carried him away.

  Five. Kustaa's wife had not objected to his volunteering for secret duty after that. He dreamed of the bunker less, now; but sometimes it was the refugee who stumbled through the steel-plate door in the nightmare, and the face was his own.

  Four. It was not getting agents into Europe that was the trouble, it was moving them around, harder each month as more and more of the population vanished into pens and compounds. The Domination had leaned on its "allies" to reveal their Resistance contacts during the War, and had been politely refused. Some of the networks still survived, incredibly, but they were useful mostly for small stuff, escape-conduits and microfilm. Virtually impossible to move in equipment, except a few microscopic loads by submarine on wilderness coasts.

  Three. His tongue touched the false tooth at the back of his mouth; melodrama, bad Hollywood, but he knew too much. It was lousy tradecraft, sending him in multiply tasked. There were too many contact-names and dates and codes in his head, but what was the alternative? Besides, they needed a survey, an overview of what was going on. If only they could get deep-cover agents into the Security Directorate! It was easy enough to slip in agents posing as Europeans or Chinese, it would be years before a billion individuals could be necked and registered, but every Citizen's identity was established from birth and there were only forty million of them.

  Two. Of course, the Draka had probably slipped hundreds through with the vast flood of refugees that had poured across the English channel in the last days of the War, when the Domination's armies were driving for the Atlantic. More would come through with every boatload of escapees, probably many sleepers under deep cover, it was long-term planning and the Draka thought that way, but what could you do?

  One. He had seen his daughter take her first steps on his last leave; Aino had looked up, and as their eyes met—

  Impact. Blackness.

  A yell of satisfaction filled the electrodetection center of Nordkappen Base. The third missile's trajectory intersected the American aircraft's flight-path, and the sound rose to a howl; fell away to a disgusted mutter as it winked out and the blip of the intruder re-emerged. Merarch Labushange ground out another half-smoked cigarette; an attendant had brought his shirt and tunic, but the rims of his eyes were still a bloodshot red.

  He rose in disgust, then checked.

  "Wait a minute," he muttered. Then: "Cross-patch on that; increase resolution." He leaned forward to watch one screen, then another; swiveled to view a third that received its input from an automatic station in the mountains to the south.

  "She's shedding something," he said quietly. "Increase resolution again, maximum. Look!" His finger stabbed out. Half a dozen traces were spreading out from the veering curve of the American aircraft. Smaller, much smaller, curving and falling.

  "Is she breaking up?" the floor officer said hopefully, cradling her coffee-cup.

  Labushange shook his head. "At that speed? It'd be over by now. Lose aerodynamic stability at Mach 2 and you'd be metallic confetti; she's maintaining velocity. Increasin', if anything; and turning north."

  His head turned to the nearest operator with a gun-turret precision. "Give me a ballistic trajectory on that debris, unguided."

  The operator frowned, adjusting and calculating; his fingers danced over the controls while his eyes stayed fixed on the hooded green glow of the screen. "Faint, almost as if they were non-metallic… hmmm, if'n they don't change direction after they drop below our detection horizon, central Finland, sir."

  "So, so, oh, clever little Yankees; force us to show our best defenses, get back with the data, 'n drop good things to the worst troublespot in Europe." Labushange closed his eyes and rose on the balls of his feet, biting his lower lip in thought. Then the orders came, spoken with a triphammer beat.

  "Get me a teleprinter patch; East Baltic H.Q., Riga. Route it though to Europe Command in Marseille, and to Castle Tarleton. Copies to Security liaison, all along. Then—"

  Kustaa was unconscious as the pod fell, the flexing snap of deceleration striking like a horse's hoof. It needed no guidance, a ton-weight egg of soft curves and dull, nonreflective coating that would make any but the most sophisticated electrodetector underestimate its size. Plummeting, tumbling, then turning to present its broadest end to the earth as weight and drag stabilized it. The shards of the cover that had held it to the B-30's belly tumbled away; their inside surfaces were shiny, polished reflectors to draw the invisible microwave eyes that probed through the low clouds. Unpowered, the pod was arching to earth as might a rock dropped by a bird. The bird had been high and fast, and the curve would be a long one.

  If there had been a conscious observer aboard, and a port to see, the sky would have darkened as the sun dropped below the horizon and the pod fell from the fringes of space. Below, the gray waters of the Gulf of Finland were hidden by a white frothed-cream curtain of cloud; there were gaps to the east, swelling views of forest and lakes and overgrown fields, a land of dark trees and water reflecting back the moon like a thousand thousand eyes. Lights moved slowly across the land, Draka dirigibles with massive electrodetectors whirling soundlessly inside their gasbags. Then a humming whine, and lean shapes lifted through the clouds, twin-engine Sharks with the moonlight bright on the polished metal of their stub wings; bubble canopies and painted teeth and cannon ports.

  Helmeted heads moved in the fighter-cockpits, visual scan added to the short-range detectors in the interceptors' noses, hungry eyes linked to thumbs ready on the firing buttons. But the Alliance designers had done their work well, the vision of humans and machines slipping from the dark skin and smooth curves of the capsule. Kustaa hung in his cocoon of straps and padding, while pressure-sensors clicked softly under the whistle of parted air. The pod dropped through cloud with a long thrumming shudder, and unliving relays determined a preset altitude; for a moment a tiny proximity detector adapted from a shell-fuse pulsed at the ground and calculated distances.

  The pod split at its upper point, jerking as the drogue chute deployed; it was barely a thousand feet from the ground, and still traveling fast. The larger canopy followed with a thunder crack that echoed over the dark si
lence of the forest below; the rending crackle of branches bending and breaking followed almost at once. Lines and shrouds and camouflage-patterned cloth caught and tangled, snapping and yielding, but each absorbed a little more of the pod's momentum, until it halted and spun and beat a slow diminishing tattoo against the strong old trunk of a hundred-foot pine, and was still. Night returned, with its small sounds of animal and bird, liquid ripple from a stream felling over a sill of granite below, wind through branches and wind through synthsilk cords and a gentle snap and flutter of cloth. Kustaa slept.

  "He's concussed. Not too badly." A thumb was peeling back his eyelids, and a flashlight shone painfully in the darkness. Kustaa tensed, then relaxed; Finnish, his parents' first language. The guerrillas had found him.

  Another voice, deeper. "Get him down, and those crates."

  Hands unstrapped him and lifted, passing him downward to damp mud-smelling earth. The world heaved and turned; he twisted his head to one side and emptied the contents of his stomach in an acid-tasting rush. A canteen came to his lips, and the American rinsed and spat. There was a clatter from above, as the cargo pod emptied.

  "Careful… with those fuses… delicate," he mumbled. Pain swelled behind his eyes, a hot tightness that threatened to open the bones of his skull. Nausea twisted his stomach again, and he hurt, right down to his bones. It was a familiar sensation; this was not the first time he had been knocked out. After the Robert Adams was hit by the kamikaze off Surabaya, he had woken up in sickbay, puking and with a head just like this. Absurdly among the shrilling along his nerves he remembered a movie… a Western, Steamcoach, where the hero took a chair-leg across the side of the head and woke up in a few hours fit enough to outdraw the villain.

  So Jason Waggen is a better man than me, ran through him as the Finns lifted him onto a stretcher. Of course, he had the scriptwriter on his side. The guerrillas were dark shapes against darker trees, only the occasional low glow of a hooded light showing as they quickly stripped the ton-weight of crates from the pod. Someone put a pill between his lips, offered the canteen, and he swallowed. The pain faded, and the nighted forest turned warm and comfortable. Before the dark closed around him he heard a rising scream of turbines, howling across the sky from south to north, horizon to horizon. A blue-red flare of tailpipes streaked by above, close enough that the treetops bowed in the hot wind. "No' much longer," he mumbled.

  Waking was slow. He lay for minutes beyond counting with his eyes closed, watching the dull glow that shone pink through the skin. Soup was cooking somewhere near, and there was a background of voices, movement, tapping of tools; the air was close and smoky, with a feeling of being indoors or underground and an odor of raw cedarwood. He was naked, in a hard bed laid with coarse woolen blankets. There was a foul taste in his mouth, his teeth felt furred, and legs and arms were heavy as lead… but the pain behind his eyes was mostly gone, and the smell of cooking food made his mouth water instead of turning his stomach.

  I'm recovering, he thought, as he blinked crusted eyelids open. Not as well or as quickly as the time when his troopship had been hit, but then he wasn't a new-minted lieutenant fresh from his first battle and field-promotion any more. Thirty is too old for this shit, he mused. Sergeant McAllistair was right: in this business it's easy enough to end up with your ass in a crack without volunteering for it.

  The room was windowless, log-walled, a twenty-by-ten rectangle with a curtained doorway at one end. Both walls were lined with bunks made from rough spruce poles and pallets; there was a small stove made from a welded oil-drum in a corner, and a long trestle-table down the center. Light came from a single dim lantern overhead, showing the blanketed mounds of sleepers in the other beds. Rifles, machine-pistols, what looked like a breakdown rocket launcher were clipped to frames beside the bunks; a dozen or so guerrillas sat at the table, spooning broth from bowls, chewing on crusts of hard black bread, working on their weapons or simply sitting and staring before them. One man looked up from his task and caught Kustaa's eye, then returned to his methodical oiling of his rifle's bolt-carrier; the other parts lay spread before him on a cloth.

  Kustaa frowned; he had spent a good part of the last decade in barracks of one sort or another, and this one disturbed him. For one thing, nobody was talking. Granted these were Finns, and the average man of that breed made the most taciturn north-country Swede look like a chatterbox, but even so…

  The American sat up cautiously, ducking his head to avoid the edge of the bunk above him. The blanket slipped down from his shoulders, but he ignored the damp chill, cleared his throat.

  "I'm awake," he said.

  The man who had glanced at him earlier looked up, nodded, went back to his work on the weapon. It slid together with a series of oiled metallic clicks and racheting sounds; a Jyvaskyia semiautomatic, the soldier's corner of his mind noticed. The Finn thumbed ten rounds into a magazine, snicked it home in the rifle, and rose to lay it on the pegs above an empty bunk.

  "We have to talk," Kustaa continued. The other man nodded again, coming to sit on a corner of bench nearer the American.

  "Talvio," he said to one of the fighters sitting on a bench, a woman. She rose, filled a bowl of soup and a mug of what smelled like herb tea, set them down on the bed beside Kustaa, and returned to sorting through a pile of blasting detonators.

  "Arvid Kyosti," the Finn continued. "Regional commander," and held out his hand. It had a workingman's calluses; the form behind it was blocky beneath the shapeless field-jacket and woolen pants, the face broad and snub-nosed, high-cheeked, with slanted blue eyes and shaggy black hair.

  Not more than my age, but he looks older, the American thought. I'm not surprised.

  "Fred Kustaa," he replied aloud, conscious of the other's slow, considering stare. At least I've kept in shape. Kustaa was a big man, two inches over six feet, broad-shouldered and long in the limbs. A farm-boy originally, and a light-heavyweight of some promise at St. Paul Institute, before the war; the slight kink of a broken nose still showed it. The Marines worked a man hard, too, and after the War he had spent some time on Okinawa and joined a dojo; the OSS had encouraged him to keep it up… A ragged pattern of old white scars showed along one flank and up under the thatch of yellow hair on his chest, legacy of a Japanese grenade.

  "The equipment came through all right?" he said, to break the silence.

  "As far as we can tell," Arvid replied. "My people are studying the manuals. And there's that." He nodded toward a sealed packet.

  The hint of a smile. "Fortunate you survived to explain them. Hard landing. Too close to the firebase. The snakes would have had you, in another couple of hours."

  "There's a Draka base near here?" he said, with an inward wince at the thought of being taken prisoner.

  A nod. "Regiment of Janissaries, two batteries and an airstrip. Use it as a patrol base, so the complement fluctuates."

  Kustaa took up the bowl of soup and sipped. It was thin and watery, a few bits of potato and rubbery fish, but it was hot and filled the hollowness behind his stomach. The Finns looked hungry, too; not starved, but without the thin padding of fat beneath the skin that a really healthy body shows.

  "Good intelligence," he said.

  Arvid shrugged. "They built it over a year ago," he said. "Used local forced labor; they've learned better since, but we got the layout. Keep it under observation, as much as we can. Managed to make them think we're farther away, so far."

  "Well, that's one reason they sent me. We need to know the general situation, and how the Alliance can best help you."

  A few of the others looked up; their eyes were as coldly flat as Arvid's. "General situation is that we're being slowly wiped out. Help? Declare war on the snakes and invade," he said coldly.

  Kustaa forced a smile. "Personally, I'm inclined to agree we should," he said. "But they've got atomics as well, now." True enough… he forced down memory of what Osaka had looked like, when the Air Force teams went in to study the consequences of a nuclea
r strike on a populated area. The photographs had been classified, to prevent general panic, and New York was the target. His mind showed him Aino's skin peeling away with radiation sickness, gums bleeding, blind and rotting alive; little Maila sitting in a burning house screaming for her mother with melted eyes running down a charred face.

  "An amphibious task force is a big target, and their submarines are good enough to take out some of the coastal cities, at least. The plan is to deter them, and make them choke on what they've taken. You've been bleeding them here; if we can help you, and help others match your performance, who knows?"

  Arvid's face went white around the mouth; with rage, Kustaa realized with a start. Behind him, one of the guerrillas half-raised her weapon, before two others seized her; she hung between their hands, her face working, before regaining enough control to tear herself free and stumble through the cloth door-cover. The guerrilla commander mastered himself and spoke again.

  "That was a stupid thing to say, American." He looked down at his hands. "You know how many troops the snakes have in Finland?" Kustaa shook his head silently. "Sixty thousand: three legions of Janissaries, a brigade of their Citizen troops. Lots, no? Want to know why so many?"

  Arvid rummaged under the table, brought out Kustaa's kit and tossed him his pipe and matches. While the American's hands made the comforting ritual of filling, tamping and lighting he continued, in an emotionless monotone.

  "Snakes made a mistake with us. By-passed us in '43, to deal with the Germans. We had two years, to watch what Draka conquest meant, and to prepare. No point trying to hold the cities or borders. We'd been mobilized since the Winter War with the Russians, in '40… put everyone to work. Making weapons, explosives, supplies. Digging bunkers and tunnel-complexes like this, stockpiling, training everyone who could fight. Then they demanded we surrender."