Under the Yoke

by S. M. Stirling

  Her gaze turned towards the airship haven; Andrew's flight would be leaving that afternoon; officers returning from leave did not rate heavier-than-air transport priorities. At least I'm not heading into a combat zone, she thought. Luck go with you into the north, brother.

  Chapter Five

  DATE: 11/06/47

  FROM: Strategic Planning Board Supreme GHQ Castle Tarteton, Archona

  TO: Merarch Andrew von Shrakenberg District III. East Baltic Command

  RE: Inspection 16/06/47

  Please to be informed that the Strategic Planning Board anticipates a senior officer will be visiting your sector as part of our general survey of conditions in the European territories. No ceremonial will be necessary.

  Service to the State!

  DATE: 12/06/47

  FROM: Merarch Andrew von Shrakenberg District III. East Baltic Command

  TO: Strategics Demitria Angelstem East Baltic Command GHQ Riga. Aestil Province

  RE: Inspection 16/06/47

  Look. Dema. I've got better things to do than shepherd visiting inkosisanas about. In fact. I think we've finally got a handle on Saarinen's gang, who've been causing no end of trouble. Can't you send them over to van der Merwe in District V? The bitch deserves an inspection!

  Service to the State!

  DATE: 13/06/47

  FROM: Strategos Demitria Angelstem East Baltic Command CHQ Riga. Aestü Province

  TO: Merarch Andrew von Shrakenberg District III. East Baltic Command

  RE: Inspection 16/06/47

  Sorry, youngling, but they asked for you specifically. More of your Friends in High Places. I suspect… although CHQ is unhappy about Finland. (Who isn't? After it's pacified, we'll finally have something to say to those old farts who keep muttering about how everything is a picnic compared to Afghanistan.) Bite the bullet.

  Glory to the Race!

  As quoted in:

  The von Shrakenbergs:

  Two Centuries of Service

  By Strategos Asa Meldrin (ret)

  New Territories Press, Vienna.

  CENTRAL FINLAND, 22,000 FEETNEAR FIRE BASE ALPHA2ND MERARCHY, XIX JANISSARY LEGIONDESTRICT 3, EAST BALTIC COMMANDJUNE 16,1947

  Strategos Sannie van Reenan glanced down through the porthole at her elbow as the transport's engines changed their droning note, signaling descent. Soundproofing could only do so much, and after a while the vibration became like your heartbeat; not something you heard consciously, but a change was instantly apparent. The smudged glass of the window showed the same endless dark-green coniferous forest they had been flying over since Moscow, hours ago, but the lakes and rivers had been growing steadily more numerous. Cultivated fields, too, or the weed-grown spaces that had been fields, before the Draka came. Yawning, she rubbed at her face; she had worked and catnapped through the night, cleaning up details of her notes from the Ukrainian and Russian sectors. She made a slight face.

  "I hope this is a little less grim," she said to her aide.

  He looked up from a file folder on the table between their recliner seats, closing it neatly and tapping it between palms to align the contents. The interior of the transport was fitted as an office with microfiche racks, files, copier and a hot-plate; bunks could be folded down from the walls. The aide signed for coffee and one of the serf auxiliaries brought the pot; he gave her a smile and thanks before she returned to her typewriter and the headphones of the dictorec machine. These were skilled specialists, part of a team that had worked together for years, not to be spoiled by mistreatment.

  "Well, from the sitreps and digests, near-like as bad, even if the reasons are different."

  His superior yawned again, parting her mouth with the back of her hand. She was a small woman with an air of well-kept middle age, neatly made, trim despite twenty hours without change of uniform. Looking very much what she was, an Archona-born career Intelligence officer of an old professorial family.

  "Reasons give mere fact human significance, Ivar," she said. "Russia left a bad taste in m'mouth, to be frank."

  The aide shrugged. "We underestimated the Germans," he said; his voice had the precise, rather hard-edged accent of Alexandria and the Egyptian province. "It took a year longer to muscle them back into Central Europe than we anticipated." Another shrug. "We couldn't be expected to spare transport to feed the cities, now could we?" North Russia's industrial centers had been fed from the Ukraine, before the war, and the black-earth zone yielded little grain while the Domination's armies fought their way west across burning fields.

  "Hmmmm. Necessary, I know." It was an old precept of Draka ethics that to desire the goal was to approve the means needed to achieve it. "Still, technically, they were Draka cattle as soon as the Fritz pulled out. For all we know, good cattle, obedient an' unresistin'. We made a mistake, thirty million of them died for it."

  Her finger flicked open a report. '"With regard to MilRef 7:20a, demographic projections indicate non-positive…" Sweet soul of the White Christ, an' to think I once had pretensions to a passable prose style. Why not 'they're all dead'?" she muttered. "Must be some internal dynamic a' large organizations." To her assistant: "Not to mention the waste a' skilled labor; those that didn't eat each other are too demoralized't' do much good."

  "Well, at least the bloody survivors aren't giving us much partisan trouble."

  She shrugged in her turn. "Patchwork way of doin' things, Ivar: serfs're supposed to get an implicit promise of work, bread an' protection in return for submission, yo' know. Despair's as like to produce rebellion as obedience, in the long run; let 'em think we're like to slaughter whole populations just 'cause they're inconvenient… That famine may be savin' trouble now and causin' us problems for two generations. Patchwork, short-term way a' doin' things."

  Sannie closed her eyes, touched fingertips to the lids. "Sometimes I get to feelin' we don't do anything else but, run around all our lives thinkin' up short-term solutions't' problems created by the last set of short-term… Nevah mind."

  Ivar took another sip of his coffee, then chuckled. "One humorous aspect, though, dear Chief." At her raised brow he continued: "Well, most of the machinery is intact, now that transport and power are functional again. We're drafting in industrial labor in job-lots, besides landworkers. And where are they coming from?" he asked rhetorically. "Germany, mostly. They started the war for Lebensraum, living room, and now they're certainly getting it."

  Strategos van Reenan smiled dutifully before returning her attention to the porthole… It was an irony. Also Ivar was bright and capable, possibly even a successor on that distant but eagerly-awaited day when she retired. I'll be glad to get back to the capital, she thought.

  For a moment homesickness squeezed her with a sudden fierce longing. Archona: the time-mellowed marble colonnades of the University, gardens, fountains, broad quiet streets, cleanliness and order. Damnation, I could be sitting under a pergola at the Amphitheater. An original Gerraldson concerto this week, his new Fireborne Resurrection opus… or visiting the galleries, or her nieces and nephews. Gardening in the half-hectare about the house that had been her parents', or just sitting with a good book and Mamba curled purring in her lap.

  Enough, she told herself. Work to be done, and not all of it could be accomplished from a desk in Castle Tarleton. The Eurasian War had left the Domination doubled in size, tripled in population; civil administration, economics, military, all the decision-making branches had critical choices to make by the score, all of them needed information. Not raw data, Archona was innundated with it; they needed knowledge more than facts, and knowledge had to proceed from understanding. We are so few, so few, went through her, with weariness and fear.So few, and so much to be done. The State to be safeguarded, built up, made more efficient, wealthy, powerful. Not as an end in itself, but because it was the instrument of the Race, people and blood and her own descendants.

  Still, it would be good to be home.I'm tired of it, she realized. Tired of mud and flies and filth, the shattered
empty cities. Memories flitted by. Goblin-faced children tearing the rotting meat from a dead horse, not even looking up as the cars splashed them in passing. Janissaries kicking heaps of black bread from a moving flatbed, laughing at the struggling piles of bodies that tore at each other for the loaves; there was enough, more than enough for all, but not much resembling a human mind left in the survivors. The peculiar wet stink of cholera, bodies piled high on the steamtrucks; rag-clad stick figures lining up for inoculation and neck-numbering, staring at her with dull apathy and a sick, brutalized hatred.

  Yes, it will be very good to be home. All the nonexistent gods know we're not a squeamish people, but this is getting beyond enough. Sannie sighed. One day there would be an end to it. When all the world was under the Yoke, peaceful; when the Race no longer had to forge each individual into a weapon, or squeeze their underlings so hard for the means of war, and long-tamed peoples gave no cause for fear and the cruelty it made necessary. Then they could rest; scholarship, beauty, simple pleasure, all could become more than something to be fitted into the spare moments… She forced herself back to the present; that good day would not come in her lifetime, or her grandchildren's. In the meantime, each day was a brick in the final edifice.

  "These Fins are the immediate problem, though," Ivar was saying. "The number of troups tied down here is ridiculous, considerin' the relative importance."

  "That it is Ivar," she answered. Below something winked from beneath a stretch of trees. Quartz, she thought idly. Tin can, shell fragment.Flying was a humbling experience. In an office in Castle Tarlton, you delt with maps, reports, photographs; the accumulated knowledge of centuries at your fingertips, an unmatched research staff, electronic tendrils reachin out over half the earth. The illusion of control came easily, there. Out here, flying hour after hour above the living earth, you realize how big it was, how various, how unknowable.

  "Aircraft. Down, everybody down."

  Kustaa froze in place, crouching, with the other members of the guerrilla patrol that was threading its way through the forest. The noise swelled overhead, coming from the south, their own direction. Two planes; not fighters or strike-aircraft, too high, wrong noise… medium bombers or transports. Ten thousand feet and coming down.

  Ahead of him one of the guerrillas rolled over on her back and unshipped a pair of binoculars. That was a risk, although a slight one. There was a pine-seedling not far from his nose, growing canted beside a cracked slab of granite rock. The brown duff of needles and branches was damp beneath his hands and knees, sparsely starred with small blue flowers and coarse grass. An ant crawled over the back of his hand, tickling; the air smelled coolly of resin, wet spruce needles. Wind soughed through the high branches above, louder than the throb of engines. Light swayed over the patchwork camouflage clothing of his companions, dapple and flicker…

  It was unbearably like home. Almost, this might be a hunting trip with Dad back in the '30's, up in the woods north of town. Or that time right after the War, when he and Aino had visited home; everyone sitting down to Mom's blueberry pancakes, then Dad and Sam and he driving out to the lake and canoeing down the Milderak, finding a good spot under the lee of Desireaux Island and throwing their lines out on water so clear you could see the pike gliding by like river wolves twenty feet below.

  No, it isn't like home, he thought wryly. Home is like this. Which was why so many Suomaliset had settled there around Duluth and the upper Lakes; it reminded them of the home they had been driven by hunger to leave, let them make a living in the ways they were used to. Lake sailors, lumberjacks, miners, hardscrabble back-clearing farmers.

  The woman ahead of him lowered her captured Draka binoculars. "Light transports," she said. "Heading into the snake base."

  Circling, the aircraft made their approach to Firebase Alpha. It was laid out in a double star pattern, to give overlapping fields of fire on the perimeter; that was standard. The doubled number of heavy machine-gun nests were not. Nor were the dug-in antiaircraft tanks, the snouts of their six-barreled gatling cannon pointing outward. Sannie's eyes flickered, taking in other details; two batteries of heavy automortars in gun-pits near the center of the base, with top-covers improvised from welded steel sheet; everything underground except the vehicles, and those in sandbagged revetments.

  "Well," The Staff officer's aide said again as they banked and began the steep final descent to the pierced-steel surface of the airstrip. "This is a bit out of the ordinary. Firepower, eh?"

  The Strategos smiled. "If Andrew's put all this in, I'm sure it's necessary. He was always a boy to take pains."

  "Yo've known him a fair bit?"

  "Unofficial aunt," she replied, sliding the Russian reports into the wire-rack holder by her elbow for the clerical staff to re-file.

  "Not one of the Oakenwald von Shrakenbergs, is he?"

  Sannie shook her head. Ivar was Alexandria-born, city-bred, and he had spent most of his service in the outer provinces. Nothing wrong with that, of course, that was where the work was, but it was time for him to learn the social background, if he was to operate out of Castle Tarleton. The elite military aristocracy of the Domination were a close-knit group; new names came in on merit but the old ones tended to recur generation after generation.

  "No, younger branch. Yo' met Karl an' his son Eric at the reception on Oakenwald, last January, remembah? Andrew's the second son of Everard, Karl's younger brothah; Everard mustered out back in the '20s', took up a land-grant in Syria, near Baalbeck. He's got a sister, cohortarch in th' Guard, settled down in France, near Tours. Married to a fourth cousin from Nova Cartago, near Hammamet… complex, isn't it?" A pause. "Used to meet Andrew a good deal, when he was down south visitin'. Good boy, bit too serious. Smart, but quiet about it."

  The command bunker was three meters down: sandbags for the walls and floor, the ceiling layers of pine-logs, earth, and salvaged railway iron. Radios and teleprinters were lined along the walls; short corridors with switchbacks to deflect blast led to other chambers. It was morning, but there was no light here except the overheads, little sound but the click and hum of equipment, the sough of ventilators. It smelled of damp earth, raw timber, leather and metal and oil, faintly of ozone; in the center was a map of the surrounding area, cobbled together from aerial photograps and scrawled with symbols and arrows in colored greasepaints. The officers around it had talked themselves silent; now they were thinking.

  The map was of central Finland, their Legion's area of responsibility. Forest, starred with lakes scattered like a drift of coins from a spendthrift's hand, bog, burnt farmhouses and fields going back to brush. Red marks for ambushes; too many of them. Green for counter-ambushes, blue for arms caches and guerrilla bases discovered; far too few.

  "Suh?" The word was repeated twice before Merarch Andrew von Shrakenberg looked up from the table. It was one of his Janissary NCO's, Mustapha, the Master Sergeant from Headquarters Century. "Suh, the plane come, radio say five minutes." A reliable man, half-Turk, his father some anonymous Draka passing through a Smyrna comfort station, raised in a training creche. Stocky, hugely muscular, square-faced and green-eyed.

  Andrew sighed, returned his salute and stretched. "Take over, Vicki," he said. His second grunted without looking up and continued her perusal of the map. "Corey, we'd bettah see to it. Mustapha, attend."

  Corey Hartmann grunted in his turn, throwing down a cigarette and grinding the butt out on the floor of the command bunker. The two officers snapped their assault-rifles from the racks by the exit and pushed past the spring-mounted door, up the rough stairwell and into the communications trench, blinking and adjusting their helmets as they reached surface level. The dank damp-earth smell of the bunker gave way to the dust-bodies-burnt-distillate stink of a working firebase, and under it a hint of the vast pine forests that stretched eastward ten thousand kilometers to Kamchatka and the Pacific.

  Four light utility cars waited, amphibious four-seaters with balloon tires; Andrew swung into the second, sta
nding with a hand on the roll-bar, next to the Janissary gunner manning the twinbarrel. It was a fine day, warm for Finland. Warm enough to forget the winter, or nearly. He grimaced at the memory, slitting his eyes in the plume of gritty dust thrown up by the lead vehicle. It was a short ride to the airfield, a simple stretch of pierced steel sheet laid on earth and rock laboriously leveled; the light transport was already making its approach-run.

  Twin-Zebra class, he thought. An oblong fuselage, high-winged, two engines, two slender booms holding the tail. He looked for the national blazon; the Domination's crimson dragon, wings outstretched, talons clutching the slave-fetter of mastery and the sword of death. But the shield covering the Snake's midsection was a black checkerboard with a silver roman-numeral II, not the usual green-black-silver sunburst. Supreme General Staff, second section, Strategic Planning. Behind, another dot was circling, another Twin-Zebra. That would be the flunkies, secretaries, comtechs, whatever.

  "Well, well," he said. "Staff planes, not Transport Section. A panjandrum indeed." An ordinary Staff inspection would be a fairly junior officer, taking his luck with the transportation pool. There were not many who could command this sort of following.

  "Sheee-it. Sir." Corey added.

  "Know how y'feel," Andrew replied, with a wry smile. "Still, we always complainin' GHQ gives the Citizen Force more 'n its share of attention, can't nohow complain when they take us at ouah word."

  "Outposts here, here, here," Arvid said, sketching with his finger in the dirt. The other half-dozen Finnish officers were folding their maps, giving their notebooks final once-overs before they departed to rebrief their subordinates. There was a ridge of frost-shattered granite between them and the road that speared down from the north and turned west in front of them, enough to give a prone man good cover. The wet earth behind it was an excellent sand-table.