Drakas!

by edited by S. M. Stirling

  Hans's boots scrunched in dead leaves. He cursed under his breath, in English and in the German he'd learned as a child. Nothing to be done about it. The leaves were everywhere, here and there drifted deep like snow. Hans's eyes flicked back and forth, up and down. He wished for eyes in the back of his head. His buddies were the eyes in the back of his head, but that didn't seem enough.

  Back and forth, up and down. They didn't have woods like this in Germany—not anywhere in Europe that he knew of. This place looked as if he were the first man who'd ever set foot here. It would probably be glorious in spring, with the trees in full leaf, with the birds singing songs he'd never heard before, and with squirrels peering at him out of beady black eyes.

  Everything was quiet now, except for the small sounds he and his men couldn't help making. The hair on the back of his neck kept wanting to prickle up. He couldn't have proved he was being watched, but he had that feeling. He'd learned to pay attention to it. If you didn't pay attention to such feelings, you ended up buying a plot, not a tavern.

  Still, he was taken by surprise when automatic-weapons fire ripped into the squad from behind. He whirled and dove for cover, his Holbars T-7 already spitting death. Even as he thudded down onto the ground, he knew he was up for a court-martial. How the devil had he walked right past those Yankee bastards without even knowing they were there?

  Then a grenade burst half a meter in front of his face, and such questions became academic.

  * * *

  Anson MacDonald felt uncomfortable in a uniform of green and brown camouflage splotches, even though the holdouts had supplied him with one with a star on each collar tab—brigadier general was the Army equivalent of commodore. I'm not betraying Annapolis, he told himself. This is the only way I have left to hit back at the enemy. Oh, some of the Alliance submersibles are probably still out there, but I'd have just as easy a time getting to the asteroid belt as going aboard one of them. They're on their own now, same as I am. I hope they do a lot of damage before the Snakes finally sink 'em.

  "Did you spray yourself with insect repellent?" Captain Fischer asked as they emerged from the mouth of a cave.

  "Of course I did." MacDonald knew he sounded offended. He couldn't help it. "I grew up in Missouri," he told the younger officer, frost still in his voice. "I knew about chiggers twenty years before you were a gleam in your old man's eye."

  "All right, sir." Fischer remained unruffled. "Some people need a head start." I've just been given the glove, MacDonald thought, and chuckled under his breath. Fischer went on, "Now—can you see the cave we just came out of?"

  After looking back, Commodore MacDonald had to shake his head. "No—and we can't have moved more than three or four meters."

  "That's right." Fischer smiled. Again, the grin took years off him. "That rock overhang hides it unless you know exactly where to look—and even then it's not easy to spot. It's even harder in the summertime. The trees have their leaves, and the wild rhododendrons and such grow like madmen underneath 'em. If you can't see it, the Draka won't, either."

  "Not until we come out and give 'em a hard time." Anson MacDonald grinned a grin of his own, a savage grin that made his teeth seem extraordinarily sharp. "Those Janissaries never knew what hit 'em." He looked to the east. It was after ten in the morning, but the sun still hadn't climbed over the edge of the valley near whose bottom they stood. "This country's even more rugged than I thought coming into the Redoubt."

  "Nantahala's a Cherokee word, they tell me," Fischer answered. "Supposed to mean `Land of the Noonday Sun.' A lot of the valleys hereabouts are so steep, noon's the only time the sun gets down into 'em at all. Add in all the caves and all the mineshafts—people went after mica and talc and emeralds, but they hardly ever made enough to pay their way—and you've got some nasty terrain to overrun."

  "And we've tied a lot of the caves and the shafts together into a nice network," MacDonald said.

  "No, sir," Fischer said, quietly but emphatically. "Not a network. A lot of different networks, all through this whole area. Sooner or later, we'll lose prisoners. We have to assume they won't all be able to suicide, and that means the Draka will start squeezing things out of them. We don't want the Redoubt unraveling when the first string comes loose, the way a cheap sweater would. If they want us, they'll have to come in and dig us out, and it'll cost 'em."

  "I should hope so." Anson MacDonald looked around. "You could turn most of this to radioactive glass without bothering us much."

  Fischer nodded. "That's the idea. We come out, give them hell in four different states, and then disappear again." He grimaced. "The only rough spot is, since we're up against the Snakes it's hard as hell on the civilian population."

  But now Commodore MacDonald shook his head. "If the Draka want to kill hostages, that's their mistake. Better for Americans to die as free men than to live as slaves."

  "Sir, do me a favor," Fischer said. "Take that to the Propaganda Section. One of our biggest worries is how to get our personnel to carry on with the Snakes holding a gun to the country's head."

  MacDonald's face and voice were bleak. "The gun's already gone off. The Alliance is dead. The USA is dead. We're not fighting to win—you said so yourself. We're fighting to hurt the Draka and keep on hurting them. That's a different business. I presume everyone in the Redoubt is a volunteer?" He'd never asked before, but the answer seemed obvious.

  And, sure enough, Captain Fischer said, "Yes, sir."

  "All right, then." Anson MacDonald had never been a man to brook much nonsense from anyone. "I presume they knew what they were volunteering for, too. We've got no magic way to throw the Snakes back across the Atlantic. We can't very well start a new religion and go crusading against them. All we can do is give them grief."

  "That's right," Fischer said. "That's the attitude. If I'm down to my king, I want the other fellow down to a king and a pawn, and I want to make him have to work like hell to promote that pawn."

  "There you go, son." Suddenly, crazily, MacDonald felt years younger than he had any business being. Maybe Fischer felt the same, for he grinned again. They both slid down into the cave. Once they'd scrambled a little way back from the entrance, there was room to stand up. The air inside was cool and damp and smelled of dirt. From what Fischer said, it was always like that, winter and summer. Fischer reached up and touched a piece of the cave roof that looked no different from any other piece. A doorway opened. Till it did, MacDonald couldn't have told it from the rest of the back wall. He and Captain Fischer walked into the Redoubt. The door closed behind them.

  * * *

  In a tent outside Gastonia, North Carolina, two Draka officers studied a map that looked as if it had a bad case of the measles. "Wotan's prick, what're we gonna do about this place?" Moirarch Benedict Arnold asked. These past couple of generations, every male Citizen surnamed Arnold seemed to have that first name, a reminder of just what the Domination thought of the Yankees they'd been hating for two hundred years.

  "I know what I'd like to do, Ben," answered his superior, Merarch Piet van Damm. His family had deeper roots in southern Africa than anyone this side of the Bushmen. When Arnold raised a questioning eyebrow, he went on, "I'd like to air-burst enough H-bombs over that country to turn it all to slag."

  "Still wouldn't get rid of the holdouts," Arnold said mournfully. "From what the Security Directorate says, they're based underground. They've been gettin' ready for this for a long time, the sons of bitches."

  Merarch van Damm chuckled. "And we ain't?" But the grin slid off his face. He was all business as he went on, "I don't care if it'd get rid of 'em or not. It'd take away their cover. That's triple-canopy forest there—underbrush up to your chest, then a second layer twice as high as a man, and then the big hardwoods and pines on top o' that. Blast it down to the ground an' we'd be able to spot those bastards when they came topside to do their mischief."

  "Sounds good to me," Arnold said. "We've lost too many men already—not just Janissaries, eith
er, but Citizens, more'n we can afford. Damn the Yankees, they stashed some of their best down there. How do we go about gettin' authorization for it?"

  "I tried," Piet van Damm answered. "We don't. Won't happen. Forget about it. Wish for the moon. Hell, we've got the moon."

  "Who's got his head up his ass in the High Command?" Arnold asked. The two of them were old friends. Had they been anything else, the moirarch wouldn't have put his career on the line like that.

  Before answering, van Damm walked out of the tent into the cold, nasty rain that drummed down outside. Benedict Arnold pulled up his head and followed. "Never can tell who might be listening," van Damm remarked. "Even out here, I won't name names. But the initials are v.S."

  Benedict Arnold stared. "The von Shrakenbergs? Jesus Christ, why?" He was horrified enough to swear by something stronger than the neopagan pantheon.

  "As best I can make out, two reasons, maybe three," Merarch van Damm said. "Number one, they say both sides have already used too many atomic weapons."

  "Something to that," Arnold admitted reluctantly.

  "Something," van Damm said. "Not enough, if you ask me. Number two is kind of related to number one. Those Yankee bastards there are enough of a nuisance to keep our soldiers sharp for years to come. They won't get soft from lack of anything to do. Our grandfathers used the Finns the same way fifty years ago."

  "Something to that, too," Moirarch Arnold said. This time, he raised the objection himself: "But not enough, like you said before. We needed to stay sharp after we licked the Nazis and the Reds—we still had the Alliance to worry about. But now it's whipped. The world is ours, sir."

  "I know." His superior walked a little farther from the tent, as if to put more distance between himself and any possible listening devices. Arnold followed once more. After a dozen squelching steps, van Damm deigned to continue: "And there's a third reason, or I've heard there's a third reason." He moved on again.

  So, perforce, did Benedict Arnold. "Well?" he asked at last.

  "You didn't hear this from me," Merarch van Damm told him. "I don't care if the Security Directorate shoves burning pine slivers up under your fingernails, but you didn't hear this from me."

  "I got you," Arnold said. If the SD boys ever started grilling him, burning pine slivers were the least he had to worry about in this electronic age, but van Damm had made his point.

  "All right." The senior officer nodded heavily. "The third reason, from what I hear—and you don't need to know where I heard it—is that the von Shrakenbergs want that whole region kept as a game preserve for the days after we whip this continent into our kind of shape. It's one of the last stretches of this kind of forest left in eastern North America."

  "A game preserve?" Benedict Arnold didn't say the words out loud. He couldn't. He just mouthed them. After a few seconds, he found his voice again: "The von Shrakenbergs are going to let us bleed for the sake of a game preserve?"

  Piet van Damm chuckled. "Sounds like them, doesn't it? And it fits together with number two. After all, what are the Yankees these days but game? You ever read the story that Englishman wrote back before we were born?"

  "Who hasn't?" Arnold said. "But a proper Draka wouldn't have let that bastard bushwhack him. You hunt the way you do everything else: to win. You don't win, there's no point to it."

  "Of course not." Van Damm nodded. "But he wrote it for Englishmen and Americans, so naturally the Draka had to lose." One hand folded briefly into a fist. "Well, we didn't lose, and we're not going to lose. The world is ours, and we'll do whatever we damn well please with it."

  Benedict Arnold started to say something, then checked himself. When he did speak, it was after some little thought: "You're right, sir. And on that scale of things, what's one game preserve more or less?" He came to attention, ignoring the rain with the ease of a man who'd known worse. "Service to the State!"

  "Glory to the Race!" Piet van Damm finished the secular—the nearly secular—invocation. He peered west toward the Great Smoky Mountains, not that visibility was even a kilometer right this minute. "All the same, the sooner we stop hunting holdouts and start hunting boar, the happier I'll be."

  * * *

  Anson MacDonald sat down at a table and opened an MFR. The initials stood for Meal, Fully Ready. The troops, predictably, had come up with a rather different meaning for the acronym, one that Oedipus would have approved of. The MFRs were supposed to be able to sustain life indefinitely. Maybe it only seems like forever, MacDonald thought as he opened the foil-wrapped serving of what was alleged to be beef stew.

  Captain Fischer sat down beside him. His MFR held chicken à la king—chicken à la thing, in the parlance of the soldiers of the Redoubt. He spooned up a mouthful, then grimaced. "Eating these bastards is about the only thing that tempts me to surrender to the Snakes," he said.

  He meant it for a joke, but MacDonald frowned. "Do you suppose that might prove enough of a problem to lead to desertions?" he asked.

  "I doubt it, sir." Fischer waved to the televisor screen, which was showing Draka programming these days: at the moment, instructions on the proper behavior for serfs in the presence of Janissaries or Draka Citizens themselves. That was fairly innocuous. But Fischer went on, "Remember last night?"

  MacDonald grunted. "I'm not likely to forget it." The Snakes had broadcast what they called an object lesson: the execution of several men who'd presumed to shoot at one of their vehicles. It had taken a long time, and it hadn't been pretty.

  "I hope that's not going to be a problem with the troops here," Fischer said in worried tones. "They've been briefed that they have to think of the civilian population of the USA as if it were already taken off the board."

  "And so it is," Commodore MacDonald replied. "Say what you will about the Draka, they're the most efficient slavemakers this poor sorry world has ever seen." He dug into his MFR, then wished he hadn't.

  "I know," Fischer said. "But some of those new slaves are family or sweethearts or friends to our men here. Watching what happens to them as they go under the yoke can't be good for morale."

  "Not for ours, and not for that of the other bands of free men still running around loose," MacDonald agreed. "But it's a military reality, Captain. We have to deal with it as best we can."

  "I know that, sir." Was Fischer showing exaggerated patience? MacDonald studied him. He probably was. Fischer went on, "And it's one more problem the goddamn Snakes don't have to worry about and we do."

  Anson MacDonald frowned, partly because of the alleged meal in front of him, partly because he saved profanity and obscenity for special occasions, and disapproved of those who didn't. He said, "You know, Captain, in a way this is a judgment on us. Worse than we deserved, maybe, but a judgment all the same."

  Fischer frowned. "I'm not sure I follow that, sir," he said stiffly.

  "By which you mean you think I ought to go soak my head," MacDonald said.

  The younger officer chuckled. "Now that you mention it, yes, sir."

  "You don't tell a man to go soak his head when you don't understand him. You ask him what he means." MacDonald forced his deep voice, raspy from too many years of too many cigarettes, up the scale to imitate Fischer's: " `What do you mean, sir?' "

  Fischer snorted, then tried to pretend he hadn't. "Go on ahead without me. You seem to be doing that anyhow."

  "It's not hard, Captain." MacDonald went over to a tap to pour hot water on the instant coffee from the MFR. It was lousy, but better than no coffee at all. "We were soft, and we've paid the price for being soft. Draka Citizens are A-Number-One bastards, but they've always known what's on the line for them. If they ever let up, even for a second, they were doomed. They had responsibility and discipline forced on them. We didn't. And so . . . we're in the Redoubt, and they're out there."

  That got under Captain Fischer's skin. MacDonald had thought it would—he'd hoped it would, anyhow. Voice wooden with disapproval, Fischer said, "I don't think it's anywhere near so simple as that,
sir."

  "Probably not," Commodore MacDonald said cheerfully. "But are you going to tell me it's not one of the reasons they won and we lost?"

  Fischer's lips skinned back from his teeth in what was anything but a grin. He hid from the Draka down here in the Redoubt, but he hesitated to admit the USA and the Alliance for Democracy had failed all over the Earth, all over the Solar System. He said, "We did the best we could, sir. We hurt the Snakes bad, and we're going to hurt 'em worse."

  "And can you imagine anything more useless and more expensive than the second best military in the world?" Anson MacDonald asked. Fischer turned a dull red. MacDonald jabbed a thumb at his own chest. "That includes me just as much as it does you, son. Remember Lenin saying that the capitalists would sell him the rope he'd use to hang them?"

  "I've heard of Lenin," Fischer said, at which MacDonald rolled his eyes. But it had been a crowded century, and Lenin and Communism both lay on the ash-heap of history long before the younger officer came on the scene. As if to point that out, Fischer went on, "Anyway, it was the Draka who hanged the Russians."

  "That's true, but the principle still holds," MacDonald said. "Right up till the end, we kept dealing with the enemy, selling him things he couldn't make for himself, treating him as if he were just another neighbor. You don't trade steaks to the lion next door; it just makes him hungry."

  "Nobody wanted this war," Fischer said. "You don't win a chess game by kicking over the board."

  "You do if you see the other fellow's about to promote a pawn," MacDonald said. "Nobody here wanted this war. The Draka? That's liable to be another story. We might have beaten then economically. Some of our most effective propaganda went into letting their serfs know what we had and they didn't and couldn't. So they kicked over the board—and we helped. By rights, they should have been stretched too thin to charge full speed ahead into electronics and space engineering and genetic engineering all at the same time. But we sold them half of what they needed. Even after they gobbled up India, we kept on selling to them. I can't think of anything in the universe that will kill you deader faster than stupidity."