Under the Yoke

by S. M. Stirling

  Back to the work of the season, she thought. No point in getting too fancy, but just in case…

  "Command circuit," she said. That would cut into the headphones of all her officers. "Orders, mark." She flicked up the mapboard hanging from her waist, glanced at it, sideways at the turretless observation tank with its forest of antennae and episcopes; they would be in constant touch with the fire-support tetrarchy. "Century A…" she began.

  The village was thick with smoke, smoke from burning thatch and chemical mist from the 160mm mortars; high-explosive rounds were mixed in, shrapnel, cluster rounds full of miniature antipersonnel bombs that spread and bounced and exploded to mix their shards of notched steel wire into the lethal stew of the air. The ground quivered under the bombardment, shook from the hundreds of tons of tread-mounted metal moving through the laneways, cast itself up as dust and fragments; the sounds of lesser weapons were a counterpoint, machine-gun chatter and the ripping-canvas sounds of grenade launchers spewing out their belts of 40mm bomblets.

  The explosions were continuous overhead, seven rounds a second from the Flail automortars four kilometers to the south. Their proximity fuses blew them at an even six meters above the ground, the rending crang of explosive and overpressure thumping like a drum against the sternum. Tanya kept her mouth open to spare her eardrums and ignored the occasional sandblast rattle of fragments against the armor of the Belle; the odds of something dangerous flicking through the narrow gap between the turret deck and the hatch cover over her head were too small to be worth the effort of worry.

  Besides, if you let yourself think of danger in a situation where it was everywhere and inescapable, you froze. And that was dangerous.

  The Draka fighting vehicles ground down the street in line, tanks and Hoplite personnel carriers alternating; a fairly wide street, mud mixed with cobbles—more mud than cobbles, and those disappeared under the treads with a tooth-grating squeal of metal on stone. Tanya kept her eyes moving constantly, probing the dense gray-white mist for movement; anybody waiting with a Panzerfaust was going to have to stay under cover until the last minute, or be scythed down by the mortar rounds; and at ground level, their visibility would be even worse than hers. The Belle had a round of wasp up the spout of the main gun, like a giant shotgun shell loaded with steel darts, but the twin-barrel 15mm machine-gun in its servo-controlled armored pod beside her hatch was better for this work.

  Flickers, adrenaline-hopping vision, presenting each glimpse as a separate freeze-frame. Roof collapsing inwards, sparks and floating burning straw. A crippled pig, shrilling loud enough to hear as a tread ground it into a waffle of meat and mud. A square of ground biting and spilling dirt off the board cover of a concealed foxhole, a man coming erect, blond hair and gray uniform and white-rimmed eyes stark against dirt-black face.

  And the tube of a rocket-launcher over his shoulder. "Target, six o'clock, Panzerfaust," she rasped, her voice too hoarse to carry emotion. Her hand was twisting at the pistol-grips on the arms of her seat, and the twin-barrel pivoted whining above her head; she walked the burst toward him, the heavy 15mm slugs blasting fist-sized craters in the mud. Too slow, too slow, she was close enough to see his hand clenching on the release…

  CRACK. The main gun fired, and sight vanished for a second in the flash. The whole weight of the tank rocked back on its suspension as the trunions and hydraulics transmitted the huge muzzle-horsepower of the cannon's recoil through mantlet and hull. There was a whining buzz as the flechette rounds left the barrel, like their namesake wasp magnified a thousand thousand times. The Fritz infantryman vanished, caught by sheer chance within the dispersal cone. Not ten meters from the muzzle, blast alone would have killed him; the long finned spikes left nothing but chewed stumps of legs falling in opposite directions, and hardly even a smear on the riddled wood behind him, a circle of thick log wall turned to a crumbling honeycomb by the passage of the darts.

  The Panzerfaust's bomb had already been launched. Deflected, it caromed off the slope of the sow-snout mantlet that surrounded the tank's cannon, the long jet of flame and copper reduced to plasma gouging a crackling red trough along the side of the turret rather than spearing through the armor. The blue-white spike hung in afterimage before her eyes, blinking in front of the sullen red of the wounded metal.

  That was a brave man, she thought. The Fritz would make magnificent Janissaries, once they were broken to the yoke. A brave man who had come within half a second of trading five Draka lives for his own. Odd, fear really does feel like a cold draft. A flush like fever on the face and shoulders and neck, tightness across the eyes, then cold along the upper spine. Deliberately, she suppressed the memory of burn victims, of calcinated bone showing through charred flesh, and equipment melted onto human skin. No practical thickness of steel could stop a square hit from a shaped-charge warhead.

  "Nice," she said over the intercom, forcing an overtight rectum to relax.

  "Th" iron was just pointin' right," the gunner drawled.

  "Load—" Tanya began.

  "Shit!" The voice came tinny through her earphones, override from Century A's commander back on the ridge. "There's somethin' still firin' from in theah, and whatevah it is, still goin' too fast over my head! Permission to return fire on the muzzle flash."

  "—load APDS," she continued on the intercom circuit, and switched to broadcast. "Permission denied." That would be all they needed, a hail of armor-piercing shot at extreme range from their own guns. Below her came multiple chunk-clank sounds: she glanced down to see the round slide into the breech, a two-inch core of copper-tipped tungsten carbide, wrapped in the circular aluminum sabot. "Sparks, general override circuit. " She heard the radiotech's voice calling for attention, and spoke into the hissing silence.

  "Groundpound talkin'. Support battery, cease fire." Silence, as the noise dropped below the level she could hear through ears ringing with blast and muffled by the headset. She looked to either side, at the burning log huts; down the empty curving road that lead to the straggling green along the river and the only substantial buildings in this mudhole of a town. Mist curled, patchy as it caught the gathering evening wind, touched with gold in the long slanting rays of a northern-hemisphere twilight.

  "Everyone in the village, back yourselves into some cover. Tetrarch de la Roche," she continued. Tanya had brought a Century of mechanized infantry with her; four Tetrarchies, a little over a hundred troopers at full strength.

  "Yo, ma'am?"

  "Johnny, un-ass your beasts and scout the square. Look-see only, I think there's something big, mean an' clumsy there."

  There was a series of muffled thungs as the powered rear ramps of the personnel carriers went down, and she could see helmets bobbing into the fog. Only six from the Hoplite behind the Belle, when there should have been eight; every unit in the Cohort was under strength, casualties coming in faster than replacements… She reached down and flicked a cigarette out of the carton in the rack beside her seat, lit, drew the warm comfort into her lungs. There had been very little in the village by way of resistance, probably no time for the Fritz commander to set it up. Whatever was firing at Century A up on the ridge had been left behind, waiting for her to advance downslope, and had been unable to reorient enough to engage the Guard's tanks as they came in from each flank under cover of smoke.

  A Jagdpanzer then, a limited-traverse antitank gun in the bow of a turretless tank. The Germans used them extensively; they were less flexible than a real tank but well suited to defensive action and much easier to manufacture, a quick cheap way to get a heavy well-protected gun onto the battlefield. This was probably one of the bigger ones, a waddling 70-ton underpowered monster mounting a modified antiairship gun.

  A typical Fritz improvisation. She snorted smoke and patted the armor of the Belle lovingly; TechSec had taken the time to get this design right. Of course, Hitler hadn't come to power until 1932, not much time to prepare for war, and even then had not dared squeeze the German people the way the Domi
nation could the rightless chattel who made up nine-tenths of its population. Occupied Europe could have made the difference, if the National Socialists had waited a generation or so, but no, they had to throw for double or nothing… At least the Race knows enough not to bite off more than we can chew. I hope.

  "Johnny here," the infantry officer's voice replied.

  "Yo." She snapped alert and flicked the cigarette out between hatch and turret. An infantry backpack radio, you could tell because the receiver let through more background noise than the shielded microphone of a commo helmet.

  "Got as close's Ah could. There was lookouts, we went in and took 'em out quiet. Three big buildin's in a row, north side over from the church, look-so maybe brick warehouses; rooflines out off the view of the ridge we jumped off from. Holes in the walls, treadmarks comin' back to a common point from all three; whatever it is, it heavy. Big smeared place where the tracks meet."

  "Good. Pull back now, meet me here."

  Tanya pinched thumb and forefinger to the bridge of her nose, concentrating. An Elefant for sure, the only Fritz vehicle with firepower and protection in the same class as a Draka Hood III, but limited by the lack of a rotating turret, painfully slow, even more painfully difficult to turn in tight quarters. The three buildings formed the base of a triangle, covered fire positions commanding the open country south of the village. By backing out to the triangle's apex the Jagdpanzer could switch quickly without having to do more than a quarter-turn; her respect for the probably deceased commander of the certainly defunct German battalion increased. He had had the sense to use the Elefant as a self-propelled antitank gun, rather than as a fighting vehicle, which its designers had intended it to be and which it most manifestly was not. If she had simply blasted through the first line of antitank guns up on the ridge and come straight down the hill, there would have been a very nasty surprise waiting.

  Now, what would the Elefant's commander do? Run away, as Montinesque said any rational army would, she thought wryly.

  That was easier said than done, though, in something that could do maybe forty kph on a good level road; also, their back was to a soft-bottomed river. That was a problem Tanya von Shrakenberg could empathize with wholeheartedly; the Hond III had range, it had speed, it had broad tracks and a good suspension that let it cover any ground firm enough to hold a footsoldier's boots, but the only bridges that could carry it safely were major rail links or the Domination's own Combat-Engineer units. The Elefant would be even more of a pain to move any distance, and across a soft-bottomed riverbed…

  There had been a lot of rivers to cross, coming west.

  Better to catch him while Century A back on the ridge kept his attention; that Jogdpanzer was nothing to meet head-on at point-blank range in one of these laneways. She looked up again, whistling soundlessly between her teeth and wishing she had not thrown away the cigarette, wishing the Belle was not best placed, less than two hundred meters from the church. Not that anyone would doubt her courage if she sent someone else: a coward would not have achieved her rank; the Draka had a firm unwritten tradition of seeing that such did not live long enough to breed and weaken the Race. The trouble was that they had an equally firm tradition of leading from the front…

  The infantry Tetrarch came trotting back up the laneway, keeping to the side beside the fence with his comtech at his heels; he bounced up onto the glacis plate of the Belle without breaking stride and vaulted to the turret with a hand on the cannon.

  Tanya popped the hatch to vertical and handed him a cigarette. "Don't suppose yo' could tell which of those three buildin's the Jagdpanzers in now?"

  "Not without we send in a lochos'r two, or they move position, Tanya." He puffed meditatively. "Could try an' get a rocket gun team in close, likely to cost, though." A grin. "Prefer to let yo' turtles butt heads with it. Fuckin' nightmare, eh?"

  "Isn't it always," she replied with a sour smile. There was little formality of rank in the Citizen Force, and anyway they were old friends. Both from Landholding families as well—all Citizens were aristocrats, of course, but there was still a certain difference between urban bureaucrats and engineers and schoolteachers and the Old Domination, the planters and their retainers. Many younger gentry favored the Guard for their military service, since it was kept at full strength in peacetime and saw more action. There were five hundred troopers in the Cohort; counting families, that represented a million hectares of land and a hundred thousand serfs.

  Tetrarch John de la Roche was two years younger than her twenty-five, but he no longer looked like a young man. Not just the weathering and ground-in oily dirt and caked dust; there was something, a look about the eyes, a weariness that no amount of rest could ever completely erase. A familiar look; she had grown up seeing it in the men of the older generation. Pa had it, sometimes. Seeing it in the mirror more than I like, lately. They had met back in the '30s, when he was posted to her lochos as a recruit; she had been a Monitor then, sub-squad commander. Her father had known his in the Great War, he was smart and quick and learned well, was handsome in a bony blond way. They had become friends, she had gone to hunt lion on his family's sprawling cattle-and-cotton spread in equatorial Kasai, he had visited her father's plantation under the Lebanon range and chased gazelle in the Syrian desert. They had made love a few times, once in a sandwich with a serf wench, that had been amusing… friends, they had all been friends when it started. Comrades now, the ones who were left, and the replacements all looked so young.

  By the White Christ, were we ever that young? she thought briefly. The infantry officer lit another cigarette from his and handed it back to his radio-operator; the comtech followed him to the turret deck, a short dark-haired woman careful to keep the set within arm's reach of her commander.

  "Ride me in, Johnny," Tanya said. "As near to the brick buildings as you can"—that would give her a chance to take the Jagdpanzer with a flank shot as it backed out—"and I'd like to be inconspicuous." Which was difficult if you knocked down houses. "But don't forget to dodge out when we get there."

  He snorted laughter and rang the back of his hand against the turret. "Surely will," he said. "These movin' foxholes attract the eye."

  She touched the microphone before her mouth. "Sparks, command circuit." A click. "Noise, everybody; rev the engines and move in place." Another click. "Sammi, yo' take the western approach to the square behind the buildings. Mclean, yo're north, we'll all three go in together, that ways somebody should get a good flankin' shot."

  "Groundpound to Century A," Tanya whispered, and cursed herself for the tone; nobody was going to hear a voice over the racket. The Baalbeck Belle was only one house away from the green, a house whose caved-in thatch was still smoldering; the Elefant would be there, under cover, still facing south for its inconclusive duel with the tanks of Century A, hull-down on the ridge… Three Draka tanks would advance into the square where they could pound the German vehicle cover or no; hers from the east, two more from north and west, any more and there would be too much chance of a shot going astray. Point-blank range, no place to be on the wrong end of a Hond's 120mm rifle.

  "He's in the center buildin'; commence firin', HE," she continued in a normal speaking tone. The Century of tanks back on the ridge to the south opened up; she could hear thewhirrrrrrrcrash of high-explosive shot bursting along the fringe of the village. Her teeth clenched; now she would have to move, out into the open… Almighty Thor, but I don't want to do this, she thought. Not fear, so much as sheer weariness and distaste. The pictures of her children caught her eye, there down below the vision-blocks. Solemn in their school tunics, red-haired Cudrun with a mask of sun-bred freckles across her face, Timmie tanned dark under his butter-yellow curls; she had promised them she would come back.

  I'll have to kill every living thing between here and the Atlantic to do it, she thought grimly, took a long breath and spoke:

  "Sammi, Mclean. Now!"

  The engine howled behind her, and she felt the tank lurch as t
he driver engaged the gearing, rocking her shoulders back against the padded rear surface of the hatch. The Belle accelerated smoothly, then slammed into the thick log wall, the bow rising as the tread-cleats bit and tried to climb the vertical surface. Her braced hands kept her from flinging forward as sixty tons of moving steel clawed at the wood, and it gave with a rending, crackling snap. The tank lurched again, rocking from side to side as the torsion bars of the suspension adjusted to the uneven surface. A brief glimpse of tables and beds vanishing beneath tumbled logs, and a shuddering whump as the surface caved in a few feet; a clash of epicyclic gearing and the engine snarled again, a deeper sound under the turbine's whine.

  The front wall burst out from the Belle's prow in a shower of fragments, and she ducked her head as a last surf of broken wood came tumbling and rattling up the glacis plate and over the turret. Splinters caught on the shoulders of her uniform. The tank pivoted left and south, the turret moving faster than the treads could turn the hull; to the north and west the other two Honds were grinding into the churned mud of the square. The muzzles of their cannon moved like the heads of blind serpents, questing for prey. Tanya scanned the center building: that had to be it. Two stories of brick, square windows, a gaping hole where the main door had to have been. The roof had settled, sagging in the middle; but it was the entrance that mattered, there where the trackmarks emerged. Nothing, and—

  An explosion. Not loud, a sharp cracking from the northern edge. Her head turned: the center tank of the trio had lost a track. It pivoted wildly, the intact loop of metal pushing it in a circle as the broken tread flopped to lie like a giant metal watchband on the mud, curling and settling as gravity and tension unlooped it.