Drakas!

by edited by S. M. Stirling

  "You . . . have strong views on these things," Fischer said after a brief pause for thought.

  "So I do, and much good it's done me," Commodore MacDonald replied with lighthearted bitterness. "People kept telling me I'd have two stars, maybe three, by now if I could learn to keep my mouth shut. They were probably right, but . . ." He shrugged. "I've always been a loose cannon."

  Captain Fischer's eyes said something like, I never would have guessed. But all he said aloud was, "Well, they're not going to court-martial you for it now."

  "No, indeed." MacDonald laughed. "They can't even discharge me. They're stuck with me, is what they are."

  By Fischer's expression, he felt stuck with Commodore MacDonald, too. Again, though, he kept his speech circumspect—more circumspect than MacDonald thought he would have been able to manage himself: "Yes, sir." Hard to go wrong with that.

  "And speaking of which," MacDonald persisted, "as things stand right now, I'm just eating up food—to use the term loosely—that would do better going to a genuine fighting man. We can't really afford to keep noncombatants down here. When do I get my rifle and my Snake-hunting license?"

  "You're, ah, not so young as you might be, sir," Fischer said.

  "I know that. I get reminded every time I look in the mirror," MacDonald said. "One good reason for not looking in the mirror very often." That jerked a chuckle from Captain Fischer, even if it was the heartless chuckle of a man who didn't yet have to worry about such things—and who wasn't likely to get that old, anyhow. MacDonald pressed on: "I'm not asking to be a brigadier up there. But I know how to shoot. I've got marksman's medals on my record, even if they are from Annapolis and not West Point."

  "There is one thing you have to take care of first, you know," Captain Fischer told him. "You have to go to the dentist."

  Anson MacDonald winced. Somehow, going up against the Draka was easier to contemplate in cold blood. But, after a moment, he nodded. "The sacrifices I make for my country," he said. Fischer laughed again, though MacDonald hadn't altogether been joking. And the United States was already a sacrificial victim. That being so, how could he begrudge one more sacrifice? He couldn't, and he knew it.

  * * *

  "Idiots. Fools. Morons. Bureaucrats." Merarch Piet van Damm glowered at the orders the fax had just delivered. "But I repeat myself."

  Moirarch Benedict Arnold nodded. "If they were going to send us into the mountains after those holdouts, why did they wait till springtime? Why didn't they do it three months ago?"

  " `More urgently prioritized tasks elsewhere,' " van Damm read, as if the words were scatological rather than insipid. He came to stiff attention. "Ave, Imperator! Nos morituri te salutamus!"

  "Maybe it won't be as bad as that," Arnold said.

  "You're right. Maybe it'll be worse. Matter of fact, you can bet your balls it'll be worse." Van Damm pointed west, toward the Great Smokies. "Pretty, aren't they—all nice and green?"

  "Yes, sir," Moirarch Arnold agreed. "No country like that back in Africa. Hardly any like it anywhere in the Domination. I suppose the Urals come closest, but they aren't really what you'd call a good match, either."

  His superior suggested that the powers that be use one of the Urals—or perhaps the whole range; van Damm was more irate than precise—as a suppository. Before Benedict Arnold could do anything more than begin to contemplate that, van Damm went on, "Do you know what all that bloody green means?"

  "Spring," Arnold said. "Some of the oddest birds you've ever seen, too," he added, for he was an enthusiastic amateur ornithologist. "I saw my first hummingbird the other day. Astonishing creatures—it's as if vertebrates were evolving to compete with bees and butterflies."

  "Hummingbirds!" Piet van Damm clapped a hand to his forehead. "We're all going to get our nuts shot off, and the man's babbling about hummingbirds. Thor's hammer!—and don't I wish I could drop it on those mountains? What the green means is, all the trees and bushes in Wotan only knows how many square klicks are in new leaf. And do you know what that means, or are your brains still flitting like those hummingbirds?"

  "No, sir." Moirarch Arnold, like any Citizen officer, quickly returned to the business at hand. "It means our airborne infrared and satellite reconnaissance views aren't going to be worth much."

  "Give the man a cigar!" van Damm said sourly. "That's just what it means, and they want to commit more Citizen troops along with the Janissaries: have to set the proper example, you know."

  "Oh, yes." Benedict Arnold nodded. Of necessity, the Domination fielded far more slave troops than Citizen formations. Never letting the Janissaries believe even for a moment that the tail might wag the dog was a cornerstone of Draka administration. Suppressing mutinies was feasible, but expensive. Making sure they didn't happen in the first place sometimes cost Citizen lives, but paid dividends in the long run.

  "We will have some ghouloons," van Damm said, brightening for the first time. "They'll help in the tracking—but not enough, dammit, not enough."

  "When do we go in?" Moirarch Arnold asked.

  "Orders are to commence the operation at 0600 hours tomorrow and to continue until there are no more Yankee holdouts in the area," his superior answered. "We're allotted three weeks to root 'em all out."

  "Three . . . weeks?" Arnold burst out laughing: it was either that or burst into tears, and he hadn't cried since he was a little boy. "What's the High Command been smoking? Whatever it is, I want some, too."

  "Oh, yeah." Piet van Damm nodded. "But we've got our orders. And ours is but to do—or die." He turned soldierly again. "I'll see you at 0600. Let the games begin. Service to the State!"

  "Glory to the Race!" Benedict Arnold finished the formula. Moirarch and merarch exchanged somber salutes.

  * * *

  Commodore Anson MacDonald didn't like the feel of the automatic rifle he held. He hadn't been lying about his marksman's medals. But he'd won them a long time ago, at a Naval Academy far, far away. Since then, he hadn't worried much about firearms light enough for one man to carry. The Navy was the gentlemanly service, the one that did its killing at ranges too far for the human eye to note the details of what it had done. Close-in fighting, the sort that involved assault rifles and entrenching tools with sharpened blades? That was why God made marines.

  He hefted the Colt-Enfield again. It wasn't the weapon with which he'd trained, either. No long wooden stock here. No elegance. No beauty. No class. Just steel and plastic, as functional as a hacksaw and about as lovely. He shrugged. As a tool for killing people, it was first-rate.

  Captain Fischer watched him with some amusement. "Well, sir, you wanted the chance. Now you've got it. The Snakes are coming in—and they're loaded for bear."

  "Good!" MacDonald's doubts about the weapon he held vanished, swept away in a hot wind of fury and blood lust. "Now we make them pay."

  "We've already started." Fischer's grin had a certain blithe ferocity to it, too. "You know about their ghouloons?"

  "Oh, yes. Horrible things. A bad sign, too. If it hadn't been for their biotech, we would have licked them. Damned time-bomb virus." How were you supposed to fight a war while half your key personnel were having psychotic breakdowns?

  "Dangerous things, too," Fischer said. "They started sending 'em into the woods to sniff out our doorways." The grin got wider. "But they missed a trick—no such thing as a gas mask for a ghouloon."

  "That is a missed trick," agreed MacDonald, an avid, and highly skilled, bridge player. "Back in the Great War, they had masks for horses and even for runner dogs. I've seen the old photos. Well, too bad for the Snakes." He paused. "I presume they can't use the gas to find any of our tunnel entrances."

  "Oh, no, sir." Fischer still wore that grin. "Canisters, carefully set out while none of our little friends was looking. Some of them are close to the cave mouths, some a long ways off: the Draka won't be able to draw any conclusions by where we turned the gas loose and where we didn't."

  "Sounds like good tactics." Co
mmodore MacDonald set a pot helmet on his head. It was of some fancy synthetic, lighter and stronger than steel. Unlike the steel helmets U.S. soldiers had worn in the Eurasian War, this one offered proper protection for the back of the neck, as Draka headgear always had. As a result, the soldiers universally called it a Snake hat. They sneered at it, but they wore it.

  "You ready, sir?" Captain Fischer asked.

  "Ready as I'll ever be," Anson MacDonald answered. His heart thuttered—part eagerness, part buck fever. The stars he wore for rank badges were a joke. He was just an overage grunt, ready to do or die—ready, in the end, to do and die—for the United States and against the nastiest tyranny the world had ever seen.

  As he followed Fischer through winding corridors toward a cave mouth, he pondered the strangeness of the Draka. A lot of the Snakes he'd met had been perfectly charming, but they all kept that slight . . . carnivorous undertone, as if descended from hunting dogs rather than social apes.

  Or maybe tribal was a better word for the undertone. As technology advanced, so had the recognition of who counted as a fellow human being. After a while, it wasn't just your family or your clan or your tribe or the folk who spoke your language or looked like you. For most people, human came to mean walking on two legs and speaking any language at all. Not among the Snakes, though. To them, anybody not Draka counted as fair game.

  And now the whole world was their oyster.

  Well, here's to grit, MacDonald thought. Along with Captain Fischer and six or eight other men half his age or less, he came out of the Redoubt and into a natural cave. When Fischer closed the door behind them, it seemed to disappear.

  Inside the cave, it was as cool and damp as it had been back in the fall. Once MacDonald and his comrades left that cave and came out into the real world, though, he knew the season had changed. Even under the trees, it was warm and humid. And it would get worse when summer replaced spring. Of course, by then there may be no trees left standing, he thought.

  Just pushing through the underbrush took work. It also made a frightening amount of noise. "Take it slow and easy," Captain Fischer called from somewhere ahead—he'd vanished into the thick greenery. "No Snakes anywhere close. We've got plenty of time to get where we're going and set the ambush."

  "Right, Captain." That wasn't Anson MacDonald. It was one of the youngsters moving along with him. His voice also came from in front of MacDonald, who fought down worry. Can I keep up? Can I nail some of those bastards? Can I get some tiny bit of revenge for my raped and murdered country?

  Sweat sprang out on his forehead. I'm an old man. I feel like an old man, by God, trying to get through this brush. He coughed. His eyes watered. He knew it was just pollen in the air, but it made him worry more, about his lungs this time. As a young officer just out of Annapolis, he'd come down with TB. A few decades earlier, before antibiotics, that would have washed him out of the Navy. He wondered what he would have done. Politics? He'd always had strong views about everything. Engineering? He made a decent engineer, but no more, and he always wanted to be the best at whatever he did. Writing? He'd been called on the carpet plenty of times for making his reports and evaluations livelier than the wooden official style. Reading that stuff bored him; writing it bored him worse.

  But, thanks to wonder drugs, it was moot. Even though he worried about his lungs, they were as good as any of those kids', or they would have been if he hadn't kept on smoking in spite of everything.

  Somewhere not far off, a mockingbird trilled—except it wasn't a mockingbird. It was Captain Fischer, whistling to let his men know they'd reached the slope where they would meet the enemy.

  MacDonald whistled back, fluttering his tongue against the roof of his mouth. He was pretty good at bird calls, but he didn't need to be note-perfect: how many Draka knew what North American birds really sounded like? You used whatever edge you could get.

  He found his foxhole in the middle of a laurel thicket. Settling himself, he peered out toward a game track along which enemy soldiers were likely to come. They couldn't possibly see him, not when the undergrowth shadowed his position. His countrymen had had plenty of time to fortify these mountain valleys. They'd had to do most of it at night, of course, but they'd got it done.

  He wondered how many soldiers had come up out of the Redoubt to challenge the Snakes here. He didn't know. Nobody'd told him. That made excellent military sense. If he didn't know, neither pharmaceuticals nor wires clipped to sensitive spots nor the impaling stake could rip the information out of him.

  What had that Nazi general called the memoirs he'd written once he got to London? Without Hope and Without Fear, that was it. That was how Anson MacDonald felt now. He marveled that people had got so exercised about the Nazis and paid the Draka so little attention before the Eurasian War. Hitler's crowd talked the talk, but the Draka walked the walk.

  But the Nazis did what they did to white people, to Europeans, MacDonald thought. The Draka came down on niggers and ragheads and chinks, so it didn't seem to matter so much. One brutalized blond kid is worth a dozen with black skin and kinky hair. That was how a lot of people had looked at it, anyhow. MacDonald didn't weep that the Nazis had gone down. But who would have thought they'd go down to something worse?

  Somebody somewhere stepped on a dry twig—the oldest cliché in the book, but one of the hardest things to avoid just the same. Anson MacDonald stopped worrying about what had happened long ago and what might have been. None of that mattered any more, not compared to staying alive through the next few minutes.

  An American screwing up . . . or a Snake? He had a round in the chamber of his assault rifle, and he peered along the sights down to the little stretch of path he could see. He had an earpiece to listen for Captain Fischer's orders, but Fischer was maintaining radio silence. The Draka would be listening.

  And then he saw the bastards: lean, sun-browned white men in camouflage colors that didn't quite fit this forest. Ice and fire ran through him. Not Janissaries, he realized. Those are Citizen troops. They've sent in the first team. That only made him want to kill them all the more.

  Gas masks gave them snouts, made them look like things rather than people. They are things, he thought as his finger tightened on the trigger. And they'll make things out of us. But some of them will burn in hell before they do.

  He wanted to kill them all. If that meant gas, he didn't mind. If he'd had a nuclear bomb, he would have used it on Citizens—no point wasting it on Janissaries. He wondered why the Draka hadn't cratered these mountains with atomic weapons. Their aristocrats probably want to keep them for a hunting park, he thought. Come on, you murdering slavemasters. I'll give you something to hunt.

  His finger twitched on the trigger again. He didn't open up. Someone else, someone who had a better notion of when the time was just right, would take care of that. But when the time came—and it could only be moments away—he would take a good many Snakes with him before he went.

  * * *

  Moirarch Benedict Arnold's head kept whipping back and forth, back and forth. In these woods, it didn't do him a hell of a lot of good. It wouldn't have done him much good even if he hadn't been peering out through the lenses of his gas mask. The Yankees could have stashed a couple of armored divisions within a klick of him, and he never would have known it till they started their engines.

  The mask was bad enough. Full protective clothing . . . In this heat and humidity, he didn't even want to think about that. One big reason neither side used gas all that much was that the countermeasures you needed against it made any sort of fighting almost impossible.

  But the Americans had been smart to take out the ghouloons that way. Right now, probably, someone was designing a mask they could wear. And somebody else was probably busy figuring out how to persuade them to wear it. In the long run, that would make them more useful to the Race. In the short run, somebody's career had probably just gone down in flames because he hadn't figured out they would need masks.

  All through t
he woods, birds chirped and sang. Sweet sounds, but not sounds he was used to. He wouldn't have been surprised if some of those calls didn't spring from feathered throats. Easy to hide information there.

  And he wouldn't have been surprised if some of those calls weren't the sound of a goose walking over his grave. The Yankees had shown they didn't want the Domination sending semianimal reconnaissance patrols into these woods. They wouldn't take kindly to soldiers marching through.

  If somebody opened up on him right now, he'd dive behind . . . that rock. Unless there's a Yankee behind it already, he thought. The mask hid his chuckle. If there is, I'll kill the bastard. Hand to hand, the odds were with him; even American soldiers were soft and slow by Draka standards. But nobody dodged the bullet with his name on it.

  Those folk who took their neopaganism seriously—a tiny minority, a century after the old Germanic gods were reborn and then seen to be no real answer—would have called him fey. He didn't look at it that way. He wanted to live. It was just that his superiors had set things up in such a way that his chances were less than they would have been had those superiors had any real idea what the devil they were doing.

  No sooner had that thought crossed his mind than small-arms fire started barking. A second later, after two or three bullets cracked past his head, he was behind that rock, with no company but a little lizard with a blue belly that scurried off into the leaves when he thudded down.

  "Base, we are under attack!" he shouted into his radio. "Map square Green 2. I say again, we are under attack at Green 2. Do you copy?"

  The only noise that came from the set was the one bacon might have made frying in a pan. Benedict Arnold cursed. The Yankees had always been too stinking good with electronics. They were jamming for all they were worth. No instant air support. No friendly helicopter gunships rushing in to hose down the enemy with Gatlings and rockets. No fighter-bombers screaming down out of the sky to plaster the Americans with napalm. If he and his men were going to come out of this in one piece, they'd have to do it themselves, for the time being, anyhow.