BAEN BOOKS by S.M. STIRLING

Copyright ® 1999 by S.M. Stirling. Abridged and revised by the author from the previously published titles Marching Through Georgia, Under the Yoke and The Stone Dogs.

The shattering roar of six giant radial engines filled the hold of the Hippo-class transport aircraft, as tightly as the troopers of Century A, 1st Airborne Legion. They leaned stolidly against the bucking, vibrating walls of the riveted metal box, packed in their cocoons of parasail and body harness, strapped about with personal equipment and weapons like so many deadly slate-gray Christmas trees. The thin, cold air was full of a smell of oil and iron, brass and sweat and the black greasepaint that striped the soldiers’ faces; the smell of tools, of a trade, of war. High at the front of the hold, above the rams that led to the crew compartment, a dim red light began to flash.

Centurion Eric von Shrakenberg clicked off the pocket flashlight, folded the map back into his case and sighed. 0400, he thought. Ten minutes to drop. Eighty soldiers here in the transport; as many again in the one behind, and each pulled a Helot-class glider loaded with heavy equipment and twenty more troopers.

He was a tall young man, a hundred and eighty centimeters even without the heavy-soled paratrooper’s boots, hard smooth athlete’s muscle rolling on the long bones. Yellow hair and mustache were cropped close in the Draka military style; new lines scored down his face on either side of the beak nose, making him look older than his twenty-four years. He sighed again, recognizing the futility of worry and the impossibility of calm.

Some of the old sweats seemed to have it, the ones who’d earned the banners of the Domination of the Draka from Suez to Constantinople and east to Samarkand and the borderlands of China in the last war. And then spent the next twenty years hammering Turks and Kurds and Arabs into serfs as meek as the folk of the old African provinces. Senior Decurion McWhirter there, for instance, with the Constantinople Medal and the Afghan ribbon pinned to his combat fatigues, bald head shining in the dim lights . . .

He looked at the watch again: 0405. Time was creeping by. Only two hours since lift-off, if you could believe it.

I’ll fret, he thought. Staying calm would drive me crazy. Christ, I could use a smoke. It would take the edge off; skydiving was the greatest thing since sex was invented, but combat was something you never really got used to. You were nervous the first time; then you met the reality, and it was worse than you’d feared. And every time after that, the waiting was harder . . .

Eric had come to believe he would not survive this war many months ago; his mind believed it, at least. The body never believed in death, and always feared it. It was odd; he hated the war and its purposes, but during the fighting, that conflict could be put aside. Garrison duty was the worst—

In search of peace, he returned to The Dream. It had come to him often, these last few years. Sometimes he would be walking through orchards, on a cool and misty spring morning, cherry blossoms arched above his head, heavy with scent, over grass starred with droplets of fog. There was a dog with him, a setter. Or it might be a study with a fire of applewood, lined with books with stamped leather spines, windows closed against slow rain . . . He had always loved books; loved even the smell and texture of them, their weight. There was a woman, too, walking beside him or sitting with her red hair spilling over his knees. A dream built of memories, things that might have been, things that could never be.

Abruptly, he shook himself free of it. War was full of times with nothing to do but dream, but this was not one of them.

Most of the others were waiting quietly, with less tension than he remembered from the first combat drop last summer—blank-faced, lost in their own thoughts. Occasional pairs of lovers gripped hands. The old Spartans were right about that, he thought. It does make for better fighter . . . although they’d probably not have approved of a heterosexual application.

A few felt his gaze, nodded or smiled back. They had been together a long time, he and they; he had been private, NCO and officer-candidate in this unit. If this had been a legion of the Regular Line, they would all have been from the same area, too; it was High Command policy to keep familiar personnel together on the theory that while you might enlist for your country, you died for your friends. And to keep your pride in their eyes.

The biggest drop of the war. Two full legions, 1st and 2nd Airborne, jumping at night into mountain country. Twice the size of the surprise assault in Sicily last summer when the Domination had come into the war. Half again the size of the lightning strike that had given Fritz the Maikop oil fields intact last October, right after Moscow fell. Twenty-four thousand of the Domination’s best, leaping into the night, “fangs out and hair on fire.”

He grimaced. He’d been a tetrarch in Sicily, with only thirty-three troopers to command. A soldier’s battle, they’d called it, which meant bloody chaos, and relying on the troops and the regimental officers to pull it out of the can. Still, it had succeeded, and the parachute chiliarchoi had been built up to legion size, a tripling of numbers. Lots of promotions, if you made it at all. And a merciful transfer out once Italy was conquered and the “pacification” began; there would be nothing but butcher’s work there now, best left to the Security Directorate and the Janissaries.

Sofie Nixon, his comtech, lit two cigarettes and handed him one at arm’s length, as close as she could lean, padded out with the double burden of parasail and backpack radio.

“No wrinkles, Cap,” she shouted cheerfully, in the clipped tones of Capetown and the Western Province. Listening to her made him feel nineteen again, sometimes. And sometimes older than the hills—slang changed so fast. That was a new one for “no problems.”

“All this new equipment: to listen to the briefing papers, hell, it’ll be like the old days. We can be heroes on the cheap, like our great-granddads were, shootin’ down black spear-chuckers,” she continued. With no change of expression, she added, “And I’m the Empress of Siam; would I lie?”

He smiled back at the cheerful cynical face. There was little formality of rank in the Draka armies, less in the field, least of all among the volunteer elite of the airborne corps. Conformists did not enlist for a radical experiment; jumping out of airplanes into battle was still new enough to repel the conservatives.

Satisfied, Sofie dragged the harsh, comforting bite of the tobacco into her lungs. The Centurion was a good sort, but he tended to . . . worry too much. That was part of being an officer, of course, and one of the reasons she was satisfied to stay at monitor, stick-commander. But he overdid it; you could wreck yourself up that way. And he was very much of the Old Domination, a scion of the planter aristocracy and their iron creed of duty; she was city-bred, her grandfather a Scottish mercenary immigrant, her father a dock-loading foreman.

Me, I’m going to relax while I can, she thought. There was a lot of waiting in the Army, that was about the worst thing . . . apart from the crowding and the monotonous food, and good Christ but being under fire was scary. Not nice-scary like being on a board when the surf was hot or a practice jump; plain bad. You really felt good afterward, though, when your body realized it was alive . . .

She pushed the thought out of her head. The sitreps had said this was going to be much worse than Sicily, and that had been deep-shit enough. Still, there had been good parts. The Italians really had some pretty things, and the paratroops got the first pick. That jewelry from the bishop’s palace in Palermo was absolutely divine! And the tapestry . . . she sighed and smiled, in reminiscence. There had been leave, too—empty space on transport airships heading south, if you knew the right people. It was good to be able to peacock a little—do some partying, with a new campaign ribbon and the glamour of victory, and some pretties to show off.

Her smile grew smug. She had been very popular, with all the sexes and their permutations; a change from ugly-duckling adolescence. Men are nice, definitely, she thought. Pity I had to wait till I reported to boot camp to start in on ’em.

That was the other thing about the Army; it was better than school. Draka schooling was sex-segregated, on the theory that youth should not be distracted from learning and their premilitary training. Either that or sheer conservatism. Eight months of the year spent isolated in the countryside: from five to eighteen it had been her life, and the last few years had been growing harder to take. She was glad to be out of it, the endless round of gymnastics and classes and petty feuds and crushes; the Army was tougher, paratroop school more so, but what you did off duty was your own business. It was good to be an adult, free.

Even the winter in Mosul had been all right. The town was a hole, of course—provincial, and all new since the Draka conquest in 1916. Nothing like the mellow beauty of Capetown, with its theaters and concerts and famous nightspots . . . Mosul—well, what could you expect of a place whose main claim to fame was petrochemical plants? They’d been up in the mountains most of the time, training hard. She flexed her shoulders and neck complacently. She’d thought herself fit before, but four months of climbing under full load and wrestling equipment over boulders had taken the last traces of puppy fat off and left her with what her people considered the ideal feminine figure—sleek, compactly curved, strong, and quick.

Sofie glanced sidelong at her commander; she thought he’d been noticing, since she qualified for comtech. Couldn’t tell, though; he was one for keeping to himself. Just visited the officer’s Rest Center every week or so. But a man like that wouldn’t be satisfied with serf girls; he’d want someone he could talk to . . .

Or maybe it’s my face? she thought worriedly, absently stripping the clip out of the pistol-grip well of her machine pistol and inserting it again. Her face was still obstinately round and snub-nosed; freckles were all very well, enough men had described it as cute, but it obstinately refused to mature into the cold, aquiline regularity that was most admired. She sighed, lit another cigarette, started running the latest costume drama over again in her head. Tragic Destiny: Signy Anders and Derek Wallis as doomed Loyalist lovers fighting the American rebels, with Carey Plesance playing the satanic traitor George Washington . . .

God, it must have been uncomfortable wearing those petticoats, she thought. No wonder they couldn’t do anything but look pretty and faint; how could you fight while wearing a bloody tent? Good thing Africa cured them of those notions.

The airdrop on Sicily had earned Eric von Shrakenberg a number of things: a long scar on one thigh, certain memories, and a field promotion to Centurion’s rank. When the 1st Airborne Chiliarchy was pulled back into reserve after the fall of Milan, the promotion was confirmed; a rare honor for a man barely twenty-four. With it came fourteen-day leave passes to run from October 1, 1941, and unlike most of his comrades, he had not disappeared into the pleasure quarter of Alexandria; it was well for a man to visit the earth that had borne him, before he died.

He spent the last half-hour in the airship’s control gallery, for the view; they were coming in to Archona from the north, and it was a side of the capital free citizens seldom saw unless business took them there. For a citizen, Archona was the marble-and-tile public buildings and low-rise office blocks, parks and broad avenues, the University campus, and pleasant, leafy suburbs with the gardens for which the city was famed.

Beyond the basin that held the freemen’s city lay the world of the industrial combines, hectare upon hectare, eating ever deeper into the bush country of the middleveld. A spiderweb of roads, rail sidings, monorails, landing platforms for freight airships. The sky was falling into night, but there was no sleep below, only an unrestfulness full of the light of arc lamps and the bellowing flares of the blast furnaces; factory windows carpeted the low hills, shifts working round the clock. Only the serf compounds were dark, the flesh-and-blood robots of the State exhausted on their pallets, a brief escape from a lockstep existence spent in that wilderness of metal and concrete.

Eric watched it with a fascination tinged with horror as the crew guided the great bulk of the lighter-than-air ship in, until light spots danced before his eyes. And remembered.

In the center of Archona, where the Avenue of Triumph met the Way of the Armies, there was a square with a victory monument. A hundred summers had turned the bronze green and faded the marble plinth; about it were gardens of unearthly loveliness, where children played between the flowerbanks. The statue showed a group of Draka soldiers on horseback; their weapons were the Ferguson rifle muskets and double-barreled dragoon pistols of the eighteenth century. Their leader stood dismounted, reins in one hand, bush knife in the other. A black warrior knelt before him, and the Draka’s boot rested on the man’s neck.

Below, in letters of gold, were words: To the Victors. That was their monument; northern Archona was a monument to the vanquished, and so were the other industrial cities that stretched north a thousand kilometers to Katanga; so were mines and plantations and ranches from the Cape to Shensi.

Eric woke in mid-morning. It was his old room at the corner of the west wing, a big airy chamber, five meters by fifteen with two walls giving on to the second-story balcony through doors of sliding glass. The air was sharp with spring, with a little of the dew smell yet, full of scents from the garden and a wilder smell from the forest and wet rock that stretched beyond the manor: the breath of his childhood years, the smell of home.

He lay for a moment, enjoying the crisp smooth feel of the linen sheets, feeling rested enough but a little heavy with the wine and liqueurs from last night. It was like being sick when he was a child. Not too ill, just feverish, allowed to lie abed and read. Ma would be there, to see that he drank the soup . . .

Dinner had been better than he expected; Pa had avoided topics which might set them off (which meant platitudes and silence, mostly), and everyone had admired Johanna’s eardrops, which led naturally to the hilarious story of the near-mutiny in Rome when the troops arrived to find Security units guarding the Vatican and preventing a sack. Florence had been much better; he had picked up a number of interesting items, including a Cellini, two Raphaels and a couple of really interesting illuminated manuscripts. Better than jewelry, far too precious to sell.

Illegal, of course, he mused, throwing a loose kaftan over his nakedness and tossing down a glass of the fresh-squeezed orange juice from the jug by the bedside. Still, why let the Cultural Directorate stick the books in a warehouse for a generation while the museums and the universities quarreled over ’em?

The car pulled into Oakenwald’s drive three hours past midnight. With a start, William Dreiser jerked himself awake; he was a mild-faced man in his thirties, balding, with thick black-rimmed glasses and a battered pipe tucked into the pocket of his trench coat. Sandy-eyed, he rubbed at his mustache and glanced across at the Draka woman who was his escort-guard. The car was a steam-sedan, four-doored, with two sets of seats facing each other in the rear compartment. Rather like a Stanley Raccoon, in fact.

It had been two weeks’ travel from New York. By rail south to New Orleans, then ferryboat to Havana. The Caribbean was safe enough, rimmed with American territory from Florida through the Gulf and on through the States carved out of Mexico and Central America a century before; there were U-boats in the South Atlantic, though, and even neutral shipping was in danger. Pan American flying-boat south to Recife, then Brazilian Airways dirigible to Apollonaris, just long enough to transfer to a Draka airship headed south. That was where he had acquired his Security Directorate shadow; they were treating the American reporter as if he carried a highly contagious disease.

And so I do, he thought. Freedom.

They had hustled him into the car in Archona, right at the airship haven. The Security decurion went into the compartment with him; in front were a driver in the grubby coverall which seemed to be the uniform of the urban working class and an armed guard with a shaven head; both had serf tattoos on their necks. The American felt a small queasy sensation each time he glanced through the glass panels and saw the orange seven-digit code, a column below the right ear: letter-number-number-letter-number-number-number.

Seeing was not the same as reading, not at all. He had done his homework thoroughly: histories, geographies, statistics. And the Draka basics, Carlyle’s Philosophy of Mastery, Nietzsche’s The Will to Power, Fitzhugh’s Imperial Destiny, even Gobineau’s turgid Inequality of Human Races, and the eerie and chilling Meditations of Elvira Naldorssen. The Domination’s own publications had a gruesome forthrightness that he suspected was equal portions of indifference and a sadistic desire to shock. None of it had prepared him adequately for the reality.

Archona had been glimpses: alien magnificence. A broad shallow bowl in the edge of the plateau. Ringroads cut across with wide avenues, lined with flowering trees that were a mist of gold and purple. Statues, fountains, frescoes, mosaics: things beautiful, incomprehensible, obscene. Six-story buildings set back in gardens; some walls sheets of colored glass, others honeycomb marble, one entirely covered with tiles in the shape of a giant flowering vine. Then suburbs that might almost have been parts of California, whitewashed walls and tile roofs, courtyards . . .

The secret police officer opened her eyes, pale blue slits in the darkness. She was a squat woman with broad spatulate hands, black hair in a cut just long enough to comb, like the Eton crop of the flappers in the ’20s. But there was nothing frivolous in her high-collared uniform of dark green, or the ceremonial whip that hung coiled at her belt. One hand rested on her sidearm, he could see the house lights wink on the gold and emeralds of a heavy thumbring.

“We’re here,” she said. His mind heard it as we-ahz heah, like a Southern accent, Alabama or Cuba, but with an undertone clipped and guttural.

The silence of the halt was loud after the long singing of tires on asphalt, wind-rush and the chuff-chuff-chuff of the engine. Metal pinged, cooling. The driver climbed out and opened the front-mounted trunk to unload the luggage. The policewoman nodded to the dimly seen building.

“Oakenwald Plantation. Centurion von Shrakenberg’s here; Strategos von Shrakenberg, too. Old family; very old, very prominent. Strategoi, Senators, landholders, athletes; probably behind the decision to let you in, Yankee. Political considerations, they’re influential in the Army and the Foreign Affairs Directorate . . . You’re safe enough with them. A guest’s sacred, and it’d be ’neath their dignity to care what a foreign scribbler says.”

He nodded warily and climbed out stiffly, muscles protesting. She reached through the window to tap his shoulder. He turned and squawked as her hand shot out to grab the collar of his coat. The speed was startling, and so was the strength of fingers and wrist and shoulder; she dragged his face down level with hers, and the square bulldog countenance filled his vision, full lips pulling back from strong white teeth.

“Well, it isn’t ’neath, mine, rebel pig!” The concentrated venom in the tone was as shocking as a bucketful of cold water in the face. “You start causin’ trouble, one word wrong to a serf, one word, and then by your slave-loving Christ, you’re mine, Yankee. Understood?” She twisted the fabric until he croaked agreement, then shoved him staggering back.

He stood shaking as the green-painted car crunched its way back down the graveled path. I should never have come, he thought. It had not been necessary, either; he was too senior for war correspondent work in the field. His Berlin Journal was selling well, fruit of several years’ observation while he managed the Central European section of ABS’ new radio-broadcasting service. The print pieces on the fall of France were probably going to get him a Pulitzer. He had Ingrid and a new daughter to look after . . .

And this was the opportunity of a lifetime . . . The United States was going to have to hold its nose and cooperate with the Draka if Germany was to be stopped, and a newsman could do his bit. His meek-and-mild appearance had been useful before; people tended to underestimate a man with wire-framed glasses and a double chin.

He glanced about. The gardens stretched below him, a darkness full of scents, washed pale by moonlight; he caught glints on polished stone, the moving water of fountain and pool. The house bulked, its shadow falling across him cold and remote; behind loomed the hill, a smell of oak and wet rock, above wheeled a brightness of stars undimmed by men’s lights. It was cold, the thin air full of a high-altitude chill like spring in the Rockies.

The tall doors opened; he blinked against the sudden glow of electric light from a cluster of globes above the brass-studded mahogany. He moved forward as dark hands lifted the battered suitcases.

Eric stood, the steel folding stock of his rifle resting on one hip, looking downslope. The forest was mostly below eye level from the plateau where the paratroops had landed. Black tree limbs twisted in the paling moonlight, glistening with frost granules, the first mist of green from opening buds like a tender illusion trembling before the eyes. Breath smoked white before him; the thin cold air poured into his lungs like a taste of home. Yet these mountains were not his; they were huger, wilder, sharper. To the east across the trough of the pass the peaks caught rosy light, their snowcaps turning blood red before his eyes.

“Right,” he said. The tetrarchy leaders and their seconds were grouped around him, squatting and leaning on their assault rifles. It had taken only a few minutes to uncrate the equipment and form the Century: training, and a common knowledge that defeat and death were one and the same.

“First, two minor miracles. We hit our drop zone right on; so did Cohort, chiliarchy, and legion.” Southward, higher up the slope of the pass, man-made thunder rolled back from the stony walls. “So, they’re engaging the main Fritz units farther up. Should go well, complete strategic surprise. Also, the communications are all working right for once.”

There were appreciative murmurs. Vacuum tubes and parachutes simply went ill together, and fragile radios had cost the experimental paratroop arm dearly earlier in the war. Experience was beginning to pay off.

“Which is all to the good; we aren’t fighting Italians anymore. In fact, there seem to be complete formed units up there, not just the communications and engineering personnel we were hoping for. Now for the rest of it. The gliders with the light armor came down perfectly—right into a ravine. Chiliarchy HQ says they may be able to put a rubble ramp down for some of it; take a day, at least.” There was a collective wince. He went on: “No help for it. Right.”

He pointed downslope; they were high enough to catch glimpses of the road over treetops still black in the false dawn. Morning had brought out the birds, and a trilling chorus was starting up. The troopers waited quietly below, a few smoking or talking softly, most silent.

“That track, believe it or not, is the Ossetian Military Highway, half the road net over the mountains.” He gestured southward with his mapboard. “The rest of the legion is up there, fighting their way into Kutaisi and points back toward us.”

His hand cut the air to the north. “Down there, the Fritz armor is regrouping around Pyatigorsk. We’re not sure exactly what units—the Intelligence network is shot to hell since the Fritz got here and started liquidating anything that moves—but definitely tank units in strength. If they’re up to form, we should be getting a reaction force pretty damn quick.”

The Centurion’s next gesture was due east, to the unseen S-curve of the two-lane “highway” that hugged the mountain slope on which they stood. “And a kilometer that way is Village One. Dense forest nearly to the road. Stone houses, and a switchback starts there. Our objective. Tom?”

“I head up the road, cross above the village, spread 1st Tetrarchy as a stop force.”

“And don’t let them get past you into the woods. Marie?”

“15mms and the 120mm recoilless along the treeline; mortars back; flamethrower and demolition teams to key off you and move forward in support.”

“Einar, Lisa, John?”

“Left-right concentric, work our way in house-to-house. You coordinate on the rough spots.”

“Correct. Any questions?”

Tetrarch Lisa Telford shifted on her haunches. “What about locals?”

“Ignore them if they’re quiet. Otherwise, expend ’em. Synch watches: 0500 at . . . mark! Go in at 0530, white flare. Nothing more? Good, let’s do it, people, let’s go!”

CRACK went the bullet, then spang-winnng off the stone.

Reflexively, Dreiser froze as spalled-off microfragments of stone drove into his forehead. A hand grabbed him by the back of his webbing harness and yanked him down behind the ruined wall. He controlled his shaking with an effort, drawing in deep drafts of air that smelled of wet rock and barnyard, blinking sunlight out of his eyes. The closest he had come to the sharp end before was reporting on the German blitzkrieg through western Europe in 1940, but that had been done from the rear. Comfortable war reporting, with a car and an officer from the Propaganda section; interviews with generals, watching heavy artillery pounding away and ambulances bringing casualties back to the clearing stations. For that matter, it might be some of the same men shooting at him. He had followed the German Sixth Army through Belgium, and here he was meeting them again in Russia.

“Thanks,” he said shakily to the NCO.

“You was drawin’ fire,” the Draka decurion replied absently, crawling to a gap and cautiously glancing around, head down at knee-level, squinting against the young sun in the east.

Panting, the American put his back to the stones of the wall and watched the Draka. There were six: the other four members of the decurion’s stick and a rocket-gun team of two. They lay motionless on the slope of rubble—motionless except for their eyes, flicking ceaselessly over the buildings before them. Mottled uniforms and helmet covers blended into the mud-covered wreck of the ruined building. He had picked this stick as typical, to do a few human-interest stories. It was typical, near enough: four men and three women, average age nineteen and three-quarters. Average height and weight five-eleven and 175 pounds for the males, five-six and 140 for the females. A redhead, two blonds, the rest varying shades of brown.

He had spent much of the winter getting to know Century A: not easy, since Draka were xenophobes by habit and detested the United States and all its works in particular by hereditary tradition. It had helped that Eric and he got along well—the Centurion was a popular officer. Trying his best to keep up did more.

Although my best wasn’t very good, he admitted ruefully to himself, even though he was in the best condition he could remember. It was all a matter of priorities; the wealth and leisure to produce these soldiers had been wrung out of whole continents. He focused on one trooper . . .

Cindy, his mind prompted him. Cindy McAlistair. Although nobody called her anything but Tee-Hee.

Fox-colored hair, green eyes, a narrow, sharp-featured face—Scots-Irish, via the Carolina piedmont. Her grandfather had been a Confederate refugee in 1866, had escaped from Charleston in one of the last Draka blockade runners, those lean craft that had smuggled in so many repeating rifles and steam warcars. He had established a plantation in the rich lands north of Luanda, just being opened by railways and steam coaches for coffee and cotton.

His granddaughter rested easily, one knee crooked and a hand beneath her; it might have looked awkward, if Dreiser had not seen her do six hundred one-hand pushups in barracks once, on a bet. Sweat streaked the black war paint on her face, dark except for a slight gleam of teeth. The Holbars rested beside her, the assault sling over her neck; her hand held the pistol grip, resting amid a scatter of empty aluminum cartridge cases and pieces of belt link.

The dimpled bone hilt of a throwing knife showed behind her neck, from a sheath sewn into the field jacket, and she was wearing warsaps—fingerless leather gloves with black-metal insets over knuckles and palm edge—secured by straps up the forearms. For the rest, standard gear: lace-up boots with composition soles; thick tough cotton pants and jacket, with leather patches at knee and elbow and plenty of pockets; helmet with cloth cover; a harness of laced panels around the waist that reached nearly to the ribs, and supported padded loops over the shoulders. A half-dozen grenades, blast and fragmentation. Canteen, with messkit, entrenching tool, three conical drum magazines of ammunition, field dressing, ration bars, folding toolkit for maintenance, and a few oddments. Always including spare tampons: “If you don’t have ’em, sure as fate you gonna need ’em, then things get plain disgustin’.”

The whole outfit had the savage, stripped-down practicality he had come to associate with the Draka. This was an inhumanly functional civilization, not militarist in the sense of strutting, bemedaled generals and parades, but with a skilled appreciation of the business of conquest, honed by generations of experience and coldly unsentimental analysis.

The decurion completed his survey and withdrew his head with slow care; rapid movement attracted the eye.

“Snipah,” he said. “Bill-boy, Tee-Hee, McThing—”

The three troopers looked up. “You see him?”

Cindy giggled, the sound that had given her the nickname. “Cross t’ street, over that-there first building row a’ windows?”

“Ya. We’re gonna winkel him. You three, light out soon’s we lay down fire. Jo!” The rocket gunner raised his head. “Center window, can do?”

The man eased his eye to the scope sight and scanned. There was a laneway, then a cleared field of sorts, scrap-built hutments for odds and ends, blocks of stone and rubble. Then square-built stone houses, on the rubble pile; the second row of houses stood atop those but set back, leaving a terrace of rooftop. Distance about two hundred meters, and the windows were slits . . .

“No problem hittin’ roundabouts, can’t say’s I’ll get it in. Hey, dec, maybe more of ’em?”

“Na,” the NCO snapped. “Would’ve opened up on us ’fore we got to this-here wall. Just one, movin’ from window t’ window. Wants us to get close. Jenny, ready with t’ SAW. Now!”

The rocket gun went off, whump-sssssst-crash. The decurion and the trooper with the light machine gun came to their knees, slapped the bipods of their weapons onto the low parapet of the stone wall, and began working automatic fire along the line of slit windows.

And the three troopers moved. Lying with his back to the wall, Dreiser had a perfect view; they bounced forward, not bothering to come to their feet, flinging themselves up with a flexing of arm and legs, hurdled the wall without pausing, hit the other side with legs pumping and bodies almost horizontal, moving like broken-field runners. Dreiser twisted to follow them, blinking back surprise. No matter how often it was demonstrated, it was always a shock to realize how strong these people were, how fast and flexible and coordinated. It was not the ox-muscled bull massiveness of the Janissaries he’d seen, but leopard strength. Twenty years, he reminded himself. Twenty years of scientific diet and a carefully graduated exercise program; they had been running assault courses since before puberty.

And—he had been holding his hands over his ears against the grinding rattle of automatic-weapons fire. The rocket gun fired again; the whole frontage along the row of windows was shedding sparks and dust and stone fragments.

He must have tripped, was the American’s first thought. So quickly, in a single instant that slipped by before his attention could focus, the center Draka was down.

Dreiser could see him stop, as if his headlong dash had run into a stone wall; he could even see the exit wound, red and ragged-edged in his back. Two more shots struck him, and the trooper fell bonelessly, twitched once and lay still.

No dramatic spinning around, he thought dazedly. Just . . . dead.

Beside him, the machine gunner grunted as if struck in the stomach; the American remembered she had been the fallen trooper’s lover. Her hand went out to grip the bipod and her legs tensed to charge, until the decurion’s voice cracked out.

“None of that-there shit, he dead.” He nodded grimly at her white-mouthed obedience, then added: “Cease fire. Tee-Hee ’n McThing there by now.”

Dreiser jerked his head back up; the other two Draka had vanished.

The sudden silence rang impossibly loud in his ears, along with the beat of blood; there was a distant chatter of fire from elsewhere in the village. It had been so quick—alive one second, dead the next. And it was only the second time in his life he had seen violent death; the first had been . . . yes, 1934, the rioting outside the Chamber of Deputies in Paris, when the Camelots du Roi had tried to storm the government buildings. A bystander had been hit in the head by a police bullet and fallen dead at his feet, and he had looked down and thought, That could have been me. Less random here, but the same sense of inconsequentialness. You never really imagined death could happen to you; something like this made you realize it could, not in some comfortably distant future, but right now, right here, at any moment. That no amount of skill or precaution could prevent it . . .

Beside him, the decurion was muttering. “If that-there snipah knows his business, he outa there by now. Maybe not; maybe he just sharp-eyed and don’t scare easy. Then he stay, try So’ anothah . . . ”

Seconds crawled. Dreiser mopped at the sweat soaking into his mustache, and started to relax; it was less than an hour since the attack began and already he felt bone-weary. Fumes of cordite and rocket propellant clawed at the lining of his nose and throat. Adrenaline exhaustion, he thought. Draka claimed to be able to control it, with breathing exercises and meditation and such; it had all sounded too Yoga-like, too much a product of the warrior-mystic syndrome for his taste. Maybe I should have—

There was a grenade blast; dust puffed out of the narrow windows of the house from which the sniper had fired. Almost instantly, two blasts of assault-rifle fire stuttered within; the Draka tensed. A trapdoor flipped open on the roof and one of the troopers vaulted out, doing a quick four-way scan-and-cover. Then she crawled to the edge and called: “Got the snipah! What about Bill-boy?”

The decurion cupped a hand around his mouth, rising to one knee. “Bill-boy is expended,” he shouted. “Hold and cover.”

Expended. Dreiser’s mind translated automatically: dead. More precisely, killed in action; if you died by accident or sickness, you skipped.

Jenny, the machine gunner, rolled over the wall and crouched, covering the roofs behind them. The other Draka rose and scrambled forward, moving at a fast trot, well spread out; at the body, two of them stooped, grabbed the straps of the dead man’s harness and half-carried, half-dragged him to the shelter of the wall. Dreiser noted with half-queasy fascination how the body moved, head and limbs and torso still following the pathways of muscle and sinew with a disgusting naturalness. The back of his uniform glistened dark and wet; when they turned him over and removed the helmet, Dreiser noted for the first time how loss of blood and the relaxation of sudden death seemed to take off years of age. Alive, he had seemed an adult, a man—a hard and dangerous man at that, a killer. Dead, there was only a sudden vast surprise in the drying eyes; his head rolled into his shoulder, as a child nuzzles into the pillow.

The others of the stick were stripping his weapons and ammunition with quick efficiency. Jenny paused to close his eyes and mouth and kiss his lips, then touched her fingers to his blood and drew a line between her brows with an abrupt, savage gesture.

This was not a good man, Dreiser thought. And he had been fighting for a bad cause; not the worst, but the Domination was horror enough in its own right. Yet, someone had carried him nine months below her heart; others had spent years diapering him, telling him bedtime stories, teaching him the alphabet . . . He remembered an evening two months ago in Mosul. They had just come in from a field problem, out of the cold mud and the rain and back to the barracks. There had been an impromptu party—coffee and brandy and astonishingly fine singing. Dreiser had sat with his back in a corner, nursing a hot cup and his blisters and staying out of the way, forgotten and fascinated.

This one, the one they called Bill-boy, had started a dance—a folk dance of sorts. It looked vaguely Afro-Celtic to Dreiser, done with a bush knife in each hand, two-foot chopping blades, heavy and razor sharp. He had danced naked to the waist, the steel glittering in the harsh, bare-bulb lights, the others had formed a circle around him, clapping and cheering while the fiddler scraped his bow across the strings and another slapped palms on a zebra-hide drum held between his knees. The dancer had whirled, the edges cutting closer and closer to his body; had started to improvise to the applause, a series of pirouettes and handsprings, backflips and cartwheels, laughing as sweat spun off his glistening skin in jewelled drops. Laughing with pleasure in strength and skill and . . . well, it was a Draka way of looking at it, but yes, beauty.

How am I supposed to make “human interest” out of this? ran through him. How the fuck am I supposed to do that? How am I supposed to make this real to the newspaper readers in their bungalows? Should I? If there was some way of showing them war directly, unfiltered, right in their living rooms, they’d never support a war. And it is necessary. They must support the war, or afterwards we’ll be left alone on a planet run by Nazis or the Domination, and nothing to fight them with . . .

Shaking his head wearily, he followed the Draka into the building.

The impromptu war council met by an undamaged section of the town hall’s outer wall; the cobbles there were a welcome contrast to the mud, dung, and scattered rocks of the main square. It was a mild spring day, sunny, the sky clear save for a scattering of high, wispy cloud; the air was a silky benediction on the skin. Clear weather was doubly welcome: it promised to dry the soil which heavy movement was churning into a glutinous mass the color and consistency of porridge, and it gave the troopers a ringside view of the events above, now that there was a moment to spare. Contrails covered the sky in a huge arc from east to west, stark against the pale blue all along the northern front of the Caucasus; it was only when you counted the tiny moving dots that the numbers struck home.

“Christ,” the field-promoted senior decurion of the late Lisa Telford’s tetrarchy said, swiveling his binoculars along the front. “There must be hundreds of them. Thousands . . . That’s the biggest air battle in history, right over our heads.” He recognized the shapes from familiarization lectures: Draka Falcons and twin-engine Eagles, Fritz ’schmidts and Wulfes, wheeling and diving and firing. As they watched, one dot shed a long trail of black that ended in an orange globe; they heard the boom, saw a parachute blossom.

“So much for ‘uncontested air superiority,’ ” said Marie Kaine dryly as she shaded her eyes with a palm. A Wulfe dove, rolled, and drove down the valley overhead with two Draka Eagles on its tail, jinking and weaving, trying to use its superior agility to shake the heavier, faster interceptors. The Eagles were staying well-spaced, and the inevitable happened—the German fighter strayed into the fire cone of one while avoiding the other. A brief hammering of the Eagle’s nose battery of 25mm cannon sent it in burning tatters to explode on the mountainside; the Eagle victory-rolled, and both turned to climb back to the melee above. The air was full of the whining snarl of turbocharged engines, and spent brass from the guns glittered and tinkled as it fell to the rocky slopes.

The officers of Century A were considerably less spruce than they had been that morning: the black streak-paint had run with sweat; their mottled uniforms were smeared with the liquid gray clay of the village streets, most had superficial wounds at least.

So much for the glory of war, Eric thought wryly. Once the nations had sent out their champions dressed in finery of scarlet and feathers and polished brass. Now slaughter had been industrialized, and all the uniforms were the color of mud.

A stretcher party was bearing the last of the Draka hurt into the building. Eric had made the rounds inside—a commander’s obligation, and one he did not relish. In action, you could ignore the wounded, the pain and sudden ugly wrecking of bodies, but not in an aid station. There was a medical section, with all the latest field gear—plasma and antibiotics and morphine; most of the wounded still conscious were making pathetic attempts at cheerfulness. One trooper who had lost an eye told him she was applying for a job with the Navy as soon as a patch was fitted, “to fit in with the decor, and they’ll assign me a parrot.” And they all wanted to hear the words, that they had done well, that their parents and lovers could know their honor was safe.

Children, Eric thought, shaking his head slightly as he finished his charcoal sketch map of the village on a section of plastered stone. I’m surrounded by homicidal children who believe in fairy stories, even with their legs ripped off and their faces ground to sausage meat.

The commanders lounged, resting, smoking, gnawing on soya-meal crackers or raisins from their iron rations, swigging down tepid water from their canteens. There was little sound—an occasional grunt of pain from the aid station within, shouts and boot-tramp from the victors, the eternal background of the mountain winds. The town’s civilians had gone to ground.

The Circassian patriarch stood to one side, McWhirter near him, leaning back with his shoulders and one foot against the building, casually stropping his bush knife on a pocket hone. The native glanced about at pale-eyed deadliness and seemed to shrink a little into himself; they were predator and prey.

“Nice of the Air Corps to provide the show,” Eric began. “But business calls. As I see it—”

Sofie tapped his shoulder.

“Yes?”

“Report, Centurion; vehicles coming down the road from the pass. Ours . . . sort of.”

The convoy hove into sight on the switchback above the town, the diesel growl of its engines loud in the hush after battle, a pair of light armored cars first, their turrets traversing to keep the roadside verges covered with their twin machine guns, pennants snapping from their aerials. Behind them came a dozen steam trucks in Wehrmacht colors. The machines themselves were a fantastic motley—German, Soviet, French, even a lone Bedford that must have been captured from the English at Dunkirk or slipped in through Murmansk before the Russian collapse; two were pulling field guns of unfamiliar make. Bringing up the rear were a trio of cross-country bakkies, light six-wheeled vehicles mounting a bristle of machine guns. All were travelling at danger speed, slewing around the steep curves in spatters of mud and dust.

“Quick work,” Eric commented, as the vehicles roared down the final slope, where the military road cut through the huddle of stone buildings. “I wonder who—”

The daunting hoot of a fox hunter’s horn echoed from the lead warcar, and an ironic cheer went up from the paratroopers.

“Need I have asked,” the Centurion sighed. “Cohortarch Dale Jackson Smythe Thompson III.”

The lead warcar skidded to a halt and a jaunty figure in pressed fatigues rose from the hatch, a swagger stick in one gloved hand. He nodded to the assembled commanders. “Now, I suppose you’d like to know how the war’s going . . . ”He assumed a grave expression. “Well, according to the radio, the Americans claim that resistance is still going on in the hills of Hawaii three months after the Japanese landings, and promise that McArthur’s troops in Panama will throw the invader back into the Pacific—”

“Dale, you’re impossible!” Marie burst out, with a rare chuckle.

“No, just a Thompson . . . Actually, we had a bit of a surprise.”

“We heard about the tanks,” Eric said.

“That was the least of it. Have you ever heard of a Waffen-SS unit, Liebstandarte Adolf Hitler? Perhaps met a few of them?” He smiled beatifically at their nods. “Well, it seems that the good old Fritz were so anxious to get those field fortifications at the southern end of the pass finished that they moved our friends of the lightning bolts up to help the engineers and forced-labor brigades we were expecting. Still stringing wire and laying mines when we dropped in right on their heads. Not on their infantry—praise god—on their HQ, signals, combat engineers, vehicle park, artillery . . .

“Luckily, not all of them were there; still a fair number down in Pyatigorsk, from what the prisoners say. And we had complete surprise, which was just as well, seeing as we lost about a fifth of our strength to their flak before we hit the ground.”

There was a general wince; that was twice the total casualties of a month’s fighting in Sicily.

“The rest of us are in hedgehogs down the length of the pass; the Fritz within our lines don’t have heavy weapons, but they are making life difficult for our communications, and a secure perimeter is out of the question. So, I’m afraid, are those two Centuries you were supposed to get.”

There was a stony silence, as the leaders of Century A realized that they had just been condemned to death, then a sigh of acceptance. The warcar commander looked slightly abashed.

“ ‘The first casualty of war is always the battle plan,’ ” Eric quoted.

“Well!” the cohortarch concluded cheerfully. “Now to the good news. That air strike on your friends down the road in Pyatigorsk came off splendidly, according to the reports; also, they seeded a good few butterfly mines between thence and this, to muddy the waters, as it were. What’s more, we captured just about everything in the Liebstandarte divisional stores intact, apart from their armor—hence the two antitank pieces. Russian originally, but quite good. And all the other stuff you requested, blessed if I know what that food and so forth is for, but . . .

“Also, they’re putting in a battery of our 107 howitzers just up the way a piece, so you should have artillery support soon, and some Fritz stuff—150s. I brought along the observer. As to ammunition, there’s plenty of 5mm and 15mm, but I’m afraid we’re running a bit short of 85 and 120; we’ve already had an attack in brigade strength with armored support. They’re desperate, you know.”

Aren’t we all, Eric thought and turned to the trucks, absently slapping one fist into his palm as he watched the unloading. It went quickly, aided by the two laborers in the rear of each vehicle; they were of the same breed as the drivers handcuffed to the steering wheels—sullen, flat-faced men in the rags of yellow-brown uniforms.

“Ivans?” he asked.

“Oh, yes; we, hmmm, inherited them from the Fritz.” A snort of laughter. “Perhaps, if we’re to do this often, they and we could set up a common pool?”

Even then, there was a chuckle at the witticism. Eric’s eyes were narrowed in thought. “Surprised you got them to drive that fast,” he said.

“Oh, I made sure that they saw explosives being loaded,” Dale said. He grinned wolfishly: his family might be from the Egyptian provinces, where a veneer of Anglicism was fashionable, but he was Draka to the core. “It probably occurred to them what could happen if we stayed under fire long. ‘Where there’s a whip, there’s a way.’ ”

“And there’s more ways of killing a cat than choking it to death with cream,” Eric replied and turned, pointing to the combat engineer. “Marie, what do you think of this place as a defensive position?”

“With only Century A?” She paused “Bad. These houses, they’re fine against small arms, but not worth jack shit against blast—no structural strength.” Another pause. “Against anybody with artillery, it’s a deathtrap.”

“My sentiments exactly. What about field fortifications?”

“Well, that’s the answer, of course. But we just don’t have the people to do much,,,”

He chopped a hand through the air, his voice growing staccato with excitement. “What if you had a thousand or so laborers?”

“Oh, completely different, then we could . . . you mean the natives? Doubt we could get much out of them in time to be worthwhile.”

“Wait a second. And stick around, Dale. I need that devious brain of yours. All right.” Eric turned from his officers. His finger stabbed at the Circassian. “Old one, how many are your people? Are they hungry?”

The native straightened, met gray eyes colder than the snows of Elbruz, and did not flinch. “We are two thousand, where once there were many. Lord, kill us if you must, but do not mock us! Hungry? We have been hungry since the infidel Georgian pig Stalin—” he spat “—took our land, our sheep, our cattle, for the Kholkohz, the collective; sent our bread and meat and fruit to feed cities we never saw.” The dead voice of exhaustion swelled, took on passion. “Then the Germanski war began. He took our seed corn and our young men—those that did not flee to the mountain. This they called desertion, the NKVD, the Chekists, they killed many, many. What is it to us if the infidels slay one another? Should we love the Russki, that in the days of the White Tzar they did to us what the Germanski would do to them? Should we love the godless dog Stalin, who took from us even what the Tzars left us—freedom to worship Allah?”

He shook a fist. “When the Germanski came, many thought we would be free at last; the soldiers of the gray coats gave us back our mosque that the Chekists had made a place of abomination. I hoped that God had sent us better masters, at least. Then the Germanski of the lightning came and took power over us—” he drew the runic symbol of the SS, and spat again “—and where the Russki had beaten us with whips, they were a knout of steel. They are mad! They would kill and kill until they dwell alone in the earth!”

He crossed his arms. “We are not hungry, lord. We are starving; our children die. And now we have not enough to live until the harvest, even if we make soup of bark—not unless we eat each other. What is my life to me, if I will not live to see my grandson become a man? Kill us if you will; thus we may gain Paradise. We have already seen hell—it is home to us.”

Eric smiled like a wolf, but when he spoke his voice was almost gentle. “Old man, I will not slay your people; I will feed them. Not from any love, but from my own need. Listen well. We and the Germanski will do battle here; we and they are the mill, and your people will be as the grain between us. Of this village, not one stone will stand upon another. Hear me. If all those of your people who can dig and lift will work for one day, the others and the children may leave, with as much food as they can carry.

“If they labor well, and if twenty young men who are hunters and know the paths and secret places of the wood stay to guide my soldiers, then by my father’s name and my God, if I have the victory, I will leave enough food for all your people until the winter—also cloth and tools.”

Much good may they do you once the Security Directorate arrives, his mind added silently. Still, the offer was honest as far as it went. The Domination of the Draka demanded obedience; its serfs’ religion was a matter of total indifference, and a dead body was useful only for fertilizer, for which guano was much cheaper.

The Circassian patriarch had not wept under threat of death; now he nodded and hid his face in a fold of the ragged kaftan.

“Plan,” Eric snapped. The tetrarchy commanders and the visiting cohortarch had their notebooks ready. There was silence, except for the scrunch of the commander’s soft-treaded boots on the gritty stone of the square. “We have to hold this town to hold the road, but it’s a deathtrap.

Look at how we took it. Marie, I just secured you about 1,500 willing laborers; also some guides who know the way through that temperate-zone jungle out on the slopes. Over to you.”

She stood, thoughtful, then looked at the crude map of the village, around at the houses. She picked up a piece of charcoal, walked to the wall and began to sketch.

“The houses’re fine protection from small arms, as I said, but too vulnerable to blast. So. We use that.”

She began drawing on a stucco wall. “Look, here at the north end, where the highway enters the town. A lane at right angles to it on both sides, then a row of houses butting wall to wall. We’ll take the timber from the Fritz stores, some of it, whatever else we can find—corrugated iron would be perfect—and build a shelter right through on both sides, and knock out the connecting walls. Then we blow the houses down on both; knock firing ports out to command the highway. Those Fritz-Ivan 76.2mm antitank, they can be manhandled—you can switch firing positions under cover, with four feet of rock for protection. Couple of the 15mms in there, too.”

The charcoal revealed, in diagrams, a schematic of the village. Her voice raced, jumping, ideas coalescing into reality.

“Time, that’s the factor. So, that antitank stuff first. With three thousand very willing pairs of hands though . . . Listen. This whole village, it’s underlain by arched-roof cellars. They don’t connect, but there’s damn-all between them but curtain walls. Break through, here, here, here put up timber pillars”—her hands drew a vertical shaft through the air—“pop-up positions; we blow the houses around them, perfect camouflage, let the Fritz get past you and hit them from behind.

“Then, we can’t let them flank us. Get that angle iron, and the wire; wire in like this”—she sketched a blunt V from the woods to the edge of town—“downslope of these two stone terraces and trenches just above them. Only two hundred meters to the woods on the east, three hundred to the west. Mine the ground in front, random pattern. State those fields are in, a thousand badgers could dig for a week and you couldn’t tell.

“If the Patriarch Abraham here is going to have hunters show us the forest tracks, we’ll mine the forest edge, then the paths—put a few machine gun nests in there, channel things into killing fields—cohortarch, I’m going to need more of the Broadsword directional mines, can you get them? Good. Also more radio detonators, and any Fritz mines you can scavenge.

“And I can rig impromptu from that Fritz ammunition,” she murmured, almost an aside to herself. That would be tricky; she’d better handle it herself.

“We’ll need a surprise for their armor. We’ve got that clutch of plastic antitank mines, lovely stuff. Very good, they can’t be swept. Those for the road. That blasting explosive, with the radio detonators, by the verge . . . and there, there, where the turnoff points are. And we—”

“All right,” Eric broke in with a grim smile. Marie was brilliant in anything to do with construction. He could see a glow of pure happiness spreading over her face—the joy of an artist allowed to practice her craft. The problem would be keeping her from trying to put up the Great Wall of China.

“We need immediate antitank while this is going up,” he continued briskly. “Tom, you take two of the 120s.” His hand indicated where the tips of the V met the woods. “Emplace ’em there. Spider pits for the crews, with overhead protection, close enough to jump to. Marie, push the third down the road, down past the bend—somewhere where it can get one flank shot off where it’ll do the most good, and the crew can run like hell. We don’t have enough 120 ammunition to use three barrels. Booby traps along the trail, if you’ve got time. Better ask for volunteers. Take half the rocket-gun teams, start familiarizing them with the woods up both sides of the valley, for if—when—the Fritz break through. And I want minefields behind us as well. Don’t get trapped thinking linearly.” He paused. “Booby traps, there, as well. Everywhere.”

He turned to the comtech. “Sofie, we’re going to need secure communications. If we ran the Fritz field telephone wire all over the place, underground too, stripped, would it carry radio?”

She frowned. “Ought . . . Ya, Centurion.”

“Coordinate with Sparks in Marie’s tetrarchy. And set up the stationary radio; I’m going to need a steady link to cohort and up. Run more lines out to the woods, tack it up. A cellar, somewhere as far from the square as possible. Those buildings are going to draw a lot of fire.” He paused. “Anything impossible?”

“All that demolition,” the sapper Legate said. “Chancy. Very. Especially if we use nonstandard explosives. I can estimate, some of my NCOs . . . ”

“ ‘It has to be done, it can be,’ ” Eric quoted with a shrug. “If we’re going to be sacrificial lambs, at least we can break a few teeth. There’ll be a lot of details; solve ’em if you can, ask me or Marie if you can’t.

“Now,” he said, turning to the cohortarch. “Dale?”

“It’s all a little, well, static, isn’t it?” The ex-cavalryman paused. “Besides your skulkers in the woods, I’d say you need a mobile reaction force to maneuver in the rear, once they’re fixed against your fieldworks.”

Eric nodded. “Good, but we don’t have any reserve left for that . . . ”

Dale examined his fingertips. “Well, old man, I could run a spot down the road, conceal my vehicles, then—”

Eric shook his head. “Nice of you to offer, Dale, but you’re needed back above. That’s going to be a deathride, and . . . I’ve got an idea.” He looked around the circle of faces. “Tell you later if it works out. No—let’s do it, people; let’s move.”

There was a moment of silence, of solemnity almost. Then the scene dissolved in action.

The partisans were being held in what looked to be a stock pen—new barbed wire on ancient piled stone. A walking-wounded Draka trooper stood guard; the German formerly assigned to that duty was lying on his back across the wall, his belly opened by a drawing slash from a bush knife and the cavity buzzing black with flies. The prisoners ignored him; even with Eric’s arrival, few looked up from their frenzied attack on the loaves of stale black bread that had been thrown to them. One vomited noisily, seized another chunk and began to eat again. There were thirty of them, and they stank worse than the rest of the village. They were standing in their own excrement, and half a dozen had wounds gone pus-rotten with gas gangrene.

They were Slavs, mostly: stockier than the Circassian natives, flatter faced and more often blond, in peasant blouses or the remnants of Soviet uniform. Young men, if you could look past the months of chronic malnutrition, sickness, and overstrain. A few had been tortured and all bore the marks of rifle butts, whips, rubber truncheons. Eric shook his head in disgust; in the Domination, this display would have been considered disgraceful even for convicts on their way to the prison mines of the Ituri jungles or the saltworks of Kashgar, the last sinkholes for incorrigibles. Anybody would torture for information in war, of course, and the Security Directorate was not notable for mercy toward rebels. Still, this was petty meanness. If they were dangerous, kill them; if not, put them to some use.

One thick-set prisoner straightened, brushed his hands down a torn and filth-spattered uniform tunic and came to the edge of the wire. His eyes flickered to the guard, noted how she came erect at the officer’s approach.

“Uvaha hchloptsi, to yeehchniy kommandyr,” he cast back over his shoulder, and waited, looking the Draka steadily in the eye.

Eric considered him appraisingly and nodded. This one, he thought, is a brave man. Pity we’d probably have to kill him if the Fritz don’t do us the favor. Aloud: “Sprechen zie Deutsch? Parlez-vous Frangais? Circassian?”

A shake of the head; the Draka commander paused in thought, almost started in surprise to hear Sofie’s voice.

“I speak Russian, Centurion,” Sofie said. He raised a brow; everybody had to do one foreign language, but that was not a common choice. “Not in school. My pa, he with Henderson when the Fourth took Krasnovodsk, back in 1918. He brought back a Russki wench, Katie. She was my nursemaid an’ I learned it from her. Still talk it pretty good. He just said: ‘Watch out, boys, that’s the commander.’ ”

Sofie turned to the captives and spoke, slowly at first and then with gathering assurance. The Russian frowned and waved his companions to silence, then replied. The ghost of a smile touched his face, despite the massive bruise that puffed the left side of his mouth.

Grinning, she switched back into English. “Ya, he understands. Says I’ve got an old-fashioned Moscow accent, like a boyar, a noble. Hey, Katie always said she was a countess; maybe it was true.” A shake of the head. “S’true she was never much good at housework, wouldn’t do it. Screwing the Master was all right, looking after children was fine, but show her a mop and she’d sulk for days. Ma gave up on trying . . . ”

Actually, the whole Nixon household had been fond of Ekaterina Ilyichmanova; with her moods and flightiness and disdain for detail, she had fitted in perfectly with the general atmosphere of cheerfully sloppy anarchy. Sophie’s father had always considered her his best war souvenir and had treated her with casual indulgence; she was something of an extravagance for a man of his modest social standing and her slender, great-eyed good looks were not at all his usual taste. Sophie and her brothers had gone to some trouble to find their nursemaid the Christian priest she wanted during her last illness and had been surprised at how empty a space she left in the rambling house below Lion’s Head.

Eric nodded thoughtfully. “Good thinking, Sofie. All right . . . ask him if there are more like him in the woods and the villages down in the plains.”

The Russian listened carefully to the translation, spoke a short sentence and spat at the Draka officer’s feet. Eric waved back the guard’s bayonet impatiently.

“Ahhh—” Sofie hesitated. “Ah, Centurion, he sort of asked why the fuck he should tell a neimetsky-son-of-a-bitch anything and invited you to take up where the fornicating Fritzes left off.” She frowned. “I think he’s got a pretty thick country-boy accent. Don’t know what a neimetsky is, but it’s not nohow complimentary. And he says it’s our fault they’re in this mess anyway.”

Eric smiled thinly, hands linked behind his back, rising and falling thoughtfully on the balls of his feet. There was an element of truth in that; the Stavka, the Soviet high command, had never been able to throw all its reserves against the Germans with the standing menace of the Domination on thousands of kilometers of southern front. And the Draka had taken two million square miles of central Asia in the Great War, while Russia was helpless with revolution and civil strife, all the way north to the foothills of the Urals, and east to Baikal.

Fairly perceptive, the Draka officer thought. Especially for a peasant like this. He must have been a Party member. The flat Slav face stared back at him, watchful but not at all afraid.

Can’t be a fool, Eric’s musing continued. Not and have survived the winter and spring. He’s not nervous with an automatic weapon pointed at him, either. Or at the bayonet, for that matter; the damn things were usually still useful for crowd control, if nothing else.

“Stupid,” he said meditatively.

“Sir?” Sofie asked.

“Oh, not him, the Fritz. Talking about a thousand-year Reich, then acting as if it all had to be done tomorrow . . . ” His tone grew crisper. “Ask his name. Ask him how he’d like to be released with all his men—with all the food they can carry, a brand-new Fritz rifle and a hundred rounds each.”

Shocked, Sophie raised her eyebrows shrugged and spoke. This time the Russian laughed. “He says he’s called Ivan Desonovich Yuhnkov, and he’d prefer MP40 submachine guns and grenades. While we’re at it, could we please give him some tanks and a ticket to New York, and Hitler’s head, and what sort of fool do you think he is? Sorry, sir.”

Eric reached out a hand for the microphone, spoke. Minutes stretched; he waited without movement, then extended a hand to Sofie. “Cigarette?” he asked.

Carefully expressionless, she lit a second from her own and placed it between his lips. Well, the iron man is nervous, too, she thought. Sometimes she got the feeling that Eric could take calculated risks on pure intellect, simply from analysis of what was necessary. It was reassuring that he could need the soothing effect of the nicotine.

The other partisans had finished the bread. They crowded in behind their leader, silent, the hale supporting the wounded. A mountain wind soughed, louder than their breath and the slight sucking noises of their rag-wrapped feet in the mud and filth of the pen. The eyes in the stubbled faces . . . Covertly, Eric studied them. Some were those of brutalized animals, the ones who had stopped thinking because thought brought nothing that was good; now they live from one day . . . no, from one meal to the next, or one night’s sleep. He recognized that look; it was common enough in the world his caste had built. And he recognized the stare of the others—the men who had fought on long after the death of hope because there was really nothing else to do. That he saw in the mirror, every morning.

A stick of troopers came up, shepherding a working party of Circassian villagers and the American war correspondent. The Circassians were carrying rope-handled wooden crates between them; Dreiser’s face had a stunned paleness. Well, he’s seen the elephant, Eric thought with a distant, impersonal sympathy. There were worse things than combat, but the American probably wasn’t in a mood to be reminded of that right now. The crates were not large, but the villagers bore them with grunts and care, and they made a convincing splat in the wet earth.

“Bill,” the Draka said. “What’s your government’s policy on Russian refugees?”

Dreiser gathered himself with a visible effort, watching as Eric reached up over his left shoulder and drew his bush knife. The metal was covered in a soft matte-black finish, only the honed edge reflecting mirror bright. He drove it under one of the boards of a crate and pried the wood back with a screech of nails.

“Refugees? Ah . . . ” Bill forced his thoughts into order. “Well, better, now that we’re in the war.” He shrugged distaste. “Especially since there isn’t any prospect of substantial numbers arriving.” Relations with Timoshenko’s Soviet rump junta in west Siberia were good, but with the Japanese holding Vladivostok and running rampant through the Pacific, the only contact was through the Domination. Which visibly regarded the Soviet remnant as a caretaker keeping things in order until the Germans were disposed of and the Draka arrived. Attempts to ship Lend-Lease supplies through had met with polite refusals.

A few wounded and children had been flown out, over the pole in long-range dirigibles, to be received in Alaska by Eleanor Roosevelt with much fanfare.

“Back before Pearl Harbor, they wouldn’t even let a few thousand Jews in. Well, the isolationists were against it, and the Mexican states, they’re influenced by the Catholic antiSemites like Father Coughlin.”

“Ya.” Eric rose, with a German machine pistol and bandolier in his hands. “Those there are Russian partisans there in the pen, Bill. The Fritz captured ’em, but hadn’t gotten around to expending them. Take a look.”

Eric heard the American suck in his breath in shock, as he stripped open the action of the Schmeisser. Not bad, he thought, as he inserted a 32-round magazine of 9mm into the well and freed the bolt to drive forward and chamber a bullet. Not as handy as the Draka equivalent; the magazine well was forward of the pistol grip instead of running up through it; it had a shorter barrel, so less range, and the bolt had to be behind the chamber rather than overhanging it. Still, a sound design and honestly made. He took a deep breath and tossed the weapon into the pen.

The partisan leader snatched it out of the air with the quick, snapping motion of a trout rising to a fly. The flat slapping of his hand on the pressed steel of the Schmeisser’s receiver was louder than the rustling murmur among his men; much louder than the tensing among the Draka. Eric saw the Russian’s eyes flicker past him; he could imagine what the man was seeing. The rifles would be swinging around, assault slings made that easy, with the gun carried at waist level and the grip ready to hand. The troopers would be shocked, and Draka responded to shock aggressively. Especially to the sight of an armed serf, the very thought of which was shocking. Technically, the Russians were not serfs, of course, but the reflex was conditioned on a deeper level than consciousness.

One did not arm serfs. Even Janissaries carried weapons only on operations or training, under supervision, and were issued ammunition only in combat zones or firing ranges. Draka carried arms; they were as much the badge of the Citizen caste as neck tattoos were for serfs: a symbolic dirk in a wrist sheath or a shoulder-holster pistol in the secure cities of the Police Zone; the planter’s customary sidearm; or the automatic weapons and battle shotguns that were still as necessary as boots in parts of the New Territories. A Citizen bore weapons as symbol of caste, as a sign that he or she was an arm of the State, with the right to instant and absolute obedience from all who were not, and power of life and death to enforce it. There was no place on earth where free Draka were a majority: no province, no district, no city. They were born and lived and slept and died among serfs.

They lived because they were warriors, because of the accumulated deadly aura of generations of victory and merciless repression. Folk-memory nearly as deep as instinct saw a serf with a weapon in his hands and prompted: kill.

Training held their trigger fingers, but the Russian saw their faces. Sweat sheened Eric’s face, and he kept the machine pistol’s muzzle trained carefully at the ground. And yet, the weight in his hands straightened his back and seemed to add inches to his height.

“Khrpikj djavol,” he muttered, staring at Eric.

“Ummm, he says you one crazy devil, Centurion,” Sophie translated. “Maybe crazy enough to do what you promise.” She gave him a hard glance, before continuing on her own: “You might just consider it’s other folks’ life you risking too, sir. I mean, he might’ve been some sorta crazy amokker.”

Startled, Eric ran a hand over the cropped yellow surface of his hair. “You know, I never thought of that . . . you’re right.” More briskly: “Tell him that I promise to kill a lot of Germans, and that he can kill even more, with my help. After that, I promise nothing, absolutely nothing.” He pointed to Dreiser, standing beside him. “This man is not a Draka, or a soldier. He is an American journalist. About what happens after this fight, talk to him.”

“Hey, wait a minute, Eric—” Dreiser began.

Eric chopped down a hand. “Bill, it’s your ass on the line, too. Even if the Fritz roll right over us, the Legion will probably be able to hold the next fallback position well enough; we’ll delay them, and the maximum risk is from the south, from the Germans in the pocket there trying to break out to the north. But that won’t do us any good. Besides . . . what am I supposed to promise them, a merry life digging phosphates in the Aozou mines in the Sahara, with Security flogging them on? Soldiers don’t get sold as ordinary serfs, even: too dangerous.”

“You want me to promise to get them out? How can I?” Dreiser’s eyes flinched away from the Russians, from the painful hope in their faces.

“Say you’ll use your influence. True enough, hey? Write them up; your stuff is going through Forces censorship, not Security. They don’t give a shit about anything that doesn’t compromise military secrecy.”

Dreiser looked back into the pen and swallowed, remembering. He had been in Vienna during the Anschluss. Memories—the woman had been Jewish, middle-class. In her forties, but well kept, in the rag of a good dress, her hands soft and manicured. The SS men had had her down scrubbing the sidewalk in front of the building they had taken over as temporary headquarters; they stood about laughing and prodding her with their rifle butts as others strode in and out through the doors, with prisoners or files or armfuls of looted silverware and paintings from the Rothschild palace.

“Not clean enough, filthy Jewish sow-whore!” The SS man had been giggling-drunk, like his comrades. The woman’s face was tear-streaked, a mask of uncomprehending bewilderment: the sort of bourgeois hausfrau you could see anywhere in Vienna, walking her children in the Zoo, at the Opera, fussing about the family on an excursion to the little inns of the Viennerwald; self-consciously cultured in the tradition of the Jewish middle-class that had made Vienna a center of the arts. A life of comfort and neatness, spotless parlors and pastries arranged on silver trays. Now this . . .

“Sir . . . ” she began tremulously, raising a hand that was bleeding around the nails.

“Silence! Scrub!” A thought seemed to strike him, and he slung his rifle. “Here’s some scrubbing water, whore!” he said, with a shout of laughter, unbuttoning his trousers. The thick yellow stream of urine spattered on the stones before her face, steaming in the cold night air and smelling of staleness and beer. She had recoiled in horror; one of the men behind her planted a boot on her buttocks and shoved, sending her skidding flat into the pool of wetness. That had brought a roar of mirth; the others had crowded close, opening their trousers, too, drenching her as she lay sobbing and retching on the streaming pavement . . .

Dreiser had turned away. There had been nothing he could do, not under their guns. A few ordinary civilians had been watching, some laughing and applauding, others merely disgusted at the vulgarity. And some with the same expression as his. Shame, the taste of helplessness like vomit in the mouth.

They were pissing on the dignity of every human being on earth, Dreiser thought as his mind returned to the present. He shivered, despite the mild warmth of the mountain spring and the thick fabric of his uniform jacket, and looked at the partisans. The Domination might not have quite the nihilistic lunacy of the Nazis, but it was as remorseless as a machine. I just might be able to bring it off, he thought. Just maybe; the Draka were not going to make any substantial concessions to American public opinion, but they very well might allow a minor one of no particular importance. The military might; at least, they didn’t have quite the same pathological reluctance to see a single human soul escape their clutches that the Security Directorate felt. And here . . . here, he could do something.

“I could talk it up in my articles, they’re already doing quite well,” he said thoughtfully. “Russians are quite popular now anyway since Marxism is deader than a day-old fish.” He looked up at Eric. “You have any pull?”

“Not on the political side, I’m under suspicion. Some on the military, and more—much more—if we win.” He paused. “Won’t be more than a few of them, anyway.”

Dreiser frowned, puzzled. “I thought you said there’d be more than these, still at large.”

“Oh, there are probably hundreds, from the precautions the Fritz were taking. I certainly hope so. There won’t be many left.” The Draka turned to Sofie. “Ahhh . . . let’s see. Sue Knudsen and her brother. Their family has a plantation near Orenburg, don’t they?” That was in northwest Kazakhstan—steppe country and the population mostly Slav. “They probably talk some Russian. Have one of them report here so Bill will have a translator. Get the tetrarchy commanders, hunt up anybody else who does. We’re going to need them. Make it snappy,” he glanced up at the sun, “because things are going to get interesting soon.”

The village waited quietly; at least, its shell did, for a village is a human thing, even a village starving under the heel of a foreign conqueror. The heap of stone was no longer a place where peasants lived and grew food; it was a fortress where strangers intricately trained and armed would kill each other, thousands of kilometers from their homes. The last of the Circassians had left for the forest, bent under their sacks of food; all except for the aged hadji, who remained in the cellar beneath the mosque, praying in the darkness over a Koran long since committed to memory. Half the houses had been demolished, and the remainder were carefully prepared traps; the cellars below were a spiderweb network that the Draka could use to shift their personnel under cover, or to bring down death on anyone who followed them into the booby-trapped tunnels. Two hundred soldiers had labored six hours beside the natives, sledgehammer and pick, shovel and blasting charge. The troops were working for their lives and the hope of victory.

The villagers had motivation at least as strong; their numbers had dropped by half since the Liebstandarte moved in, and every shovelful was a measure of revenge. Two hours past noon, and the defenses were ready. The paratroopers rested at their weapons, taking the opportunity for food, water, sleep, or a crap—veterans knew you never had time later.

Eric sat back against the thick rough timbers of the passageway, unbending his fingers with an effort. Beside him, Sofie swore softly and broke out a tube of astringent wound ointment. The Centurion looked aside as she began smearing the viscous liquid on the tattered blisters that covered his hands, ignoring the sharp pain. It had a thin, acrid petroleum smell, cutting through the dry rock dust and the heavy scent of sweat from meat-fed bodies. They were at the northernmost edge of the village, where the military road entered the built-up area. Two long heaps of rubble flanked it now, where there had been rows of houses; rubble providing cover for two long timber-framed bunkers. The Draka commander was on the left, the western flank; gray eyes flicked south and east, to the forest where the people of the village had gone.

“I hope you can see it, Tyansha,” he murmured softly in her language. “And for once, there is mercy.”

Five meters away an improvised crew sprawled about their Soviet/German 76.2mm antitank gun, ready to manhandle it to any of the four firing positions in the long bunker. A pile of shells was stacked near it; a ladder poked out of the floor nearby, and more ammunition waited below with strong arms to pitch it up. The sleek, long-barreled solidity of the gun was reassuring; so was the knowledge that its twin was waiting in the other bunker, across the street. One of the gunners was singing, an old, old tune with the feel of Africa in it; Eric remembered it murmured over his cradle, as smooth brown arms rocked:

The barrage lit the sky to the east, brighter than the false dawn. Forty kilometers, and the guns were a continuous flicker all along the arch of the horizon, as of heat-lightning, the sound a distant rumbling that echoed off the mountains and down the broad open valleys.

Johanna von Shrakenberg stood to watch it from the flat roof of the two-story barracks. She had risen early, even though her lochos was on call today and so spared the usual four-kilometer run, slipped out from between Rahksan and the sleeping cat, and brought her morning coffee and cigarette up here. The cold was bitter under the paling stars, and she was glad of the snug, insulated flight suit and gloves. Steam rose from the thick china mug, warm and rich, soothing in her mouth as she sipped.

The guns had been sounding since the start of the offensive. She tried to imagine what it was like under that shelling: earth and rock churning across square kilometers, thousands of tons of steel and explosive ripping across the sky . . . the artillery of sixty legions, ten thousand guns, everything from the monster 240s and 200s of the Army Corps reserve to field guns and mortars and rocket launchers.

“ ‘Only the mad inhuman laughter of the guns,’ ” she quoted softly. Beyond that was the Caucasus, and the passes where the Airborne legions had landed in the German rear. Her brother among them . . . she shook her head. Worry was inevitable and pointless, but Eric’s grip on life was not as firm as she would have liked. The sort of man who needs something or someone to live for, she thought. I wish he’d find one, this business is dangerous enough when you’re trying.

Dawn was breaking, rising out of the fire and the thunder. Shadow chased darkness down the huge scored slopes of the mountains, still streaked with old drifts. Rock glowed, salmon-pink; she could see a plume of snow trailing feather-pale from a white peak. Below, clusters of young trees marked the manors the Draka had built, and fields of wheat showed a tender, tentative green. A new landscape, scarcely older than herself.

There had been much work done here in the last generation, she thought; it took Draka to organize and plan on such a scale. Terraces like broad steps on the hillsides, walled with stones carted from the fields; canals; orchards and vineyards pruned and black and dusted with green uncoiling buds. All of it somehow raw and new, against this bleakness made by four thousand years of peasant axes and hungry goats.

Well, only a matter of time, she mused. Already the Conservancy Directorate was drawing a mat of young forest across the upper slopes; in another hundred years these foothills would be as lush as nature permitted, and her grandchildren might come here to hunt tiger and mouflon.

The scene about her was also Draka work, but less sightly. Kars was strategic, a meeting of routes through the mountains of eastern Turkey, close to the prewar Russian border. The conquest back in 1916-1917 had been a matter of foot infantry and mule trains and supply drops by dirigibles. Castle Tarleton had enough problems guarding six thousand miles of northern frontier without transportation worries; even before the Great War was over, a million laborers had been rounded up to push through railways and roads and airship yards.

So when the buildup for the German war began there was transport enough; just barely, with careful planning. The air base around her sprawled to the horizon on the south and west, and work teams were still gnawing at scrub and gravel. Others toiled around the clock to maintain the roads pounded by endless streams of motor transport; the air was thick with rock dust and the oily smell of the low-grade distillate the steam trucks burned. Barracks, warehouses, workshops, and hangars sprawled, all built of asbestos-cement panels bolted to prefabricated steel frames: modular, efficient, and ugly. On a nearby slope the skeletal mantis shape of an electrodetector tower whirled tirelessly.

Johanna flicked the cigarette butt over the edge of the roof and drank the last lukewarm mouthful of coffee. “Like living in a bloody construction site,” she muttered, turning to the stairwell.

The bulletin board in the ready room held nothing new: final briefing at 0750, wheels-up half an hour later, a routine kill-anything-that-moved sweep north of the mountains to make sure the Fritz air kept its head down. Merarch Anders was going over the maps one more time as she passed through, raising his head to nod at her, his face a patchwork of scars from twenty years of antiaircraft fire and half a dozen forced landings. She waved in response, straightening a little under the cool blue eyes. Anders was the “old man” in truth, forty-two, ancient for a fighter pilot. He had been a bagbuster in the Great War, flying one of the pursuit biplanes that ended the reign of the dirigibles. And even in middle age the fastest man she had ever sparred with.

The canteen was filling with her fellow Draka. The food was good; that was one of the advantages of the Air Corps. The ground forces had a motto: “Join the Army and live like a serf,” but a pilot could fly out to fight and return to clean beds, showers, and cooked food. This time she took only a roll and some fruit before heading out to the field; combat tension affected everybody a different way, and with her it tightened the gut and killed her appetite and any capacity for small talk.

The planes of her lochos were having a final checkover in their sandbagged revetments, sloping pits along either side of an accessway that led out into the main runway for this section. Technicians were checking the systems, pumps chugged as the fuel tanks filled, armorers coaxed in belts of 25mm cannon shells for the five-barrel nose battery.

Her ground crew paused to smile and wave as Johanna settled herself on the edge of the revetment and sat cross-legged, watching. On excellent advice, her father’s among others, she had gone out of her way to learn their names and take an interest in their conditions. They were serfs, except for the team commander; not Janissaries, unarmed auxiliaries owned by the War Directorate, but privileged and highly trained. Their work would be checked by the inspectors, of course, but there was a world of difference between the best and just-good-enough.

She sighed as she watched them work on her aircraft. Even earthbound, with the access panels open, the Eagle was a beautiful sight: as beautiful as a dolphin or a blooded horse, enough to make one’s breath catch when it swam in its natural element above the earth. It was a midwing monoplane, the slender fuselage just big enough for pilot, fuel, and the five cannon, slung between two huge H-form 24-cylinder Atlantis Peregrine turbocharged engines in sleek cowlings. Twice the power of a single-engine fighter and far less than twice the weight: not quite as agile in a dogfight, but better armored and more heavily armed, and much faster . . .

Like most pilots, she had personalized her machine: a Cupid’s bow mouth below the nose, lined with shark’s teeth, and a name in cursive script: Lover’s Bite. There were five swastikas stenciled below the bubble canopy, the marks of her victories.

Johanna’s mouth quirked. Flying was . . . flying was like making love after a pipeful of the best rum-soaked Arusha Crown ganja; she had always had a talent for it, and the Eagle was a sweet ship. And somewhat to her surprise, she had turned out to be an excellent fighter pilot; she had the vision and the reflexes, and most important of all the nerve to close in, very close, right down to 100 meters, while the enemy wings filled the windscreen and her guns hammered bits of metal loose to bounce off the canopy . . .

And frankly, I could do without it, she thought. There were worse ways to spend the war: sweating in the lurching steel coffin of a personnel carrier, or clawing your hands into the dirt and praying under a mortar barrage—but dead was dead, and she had not the slightest desire to die. Nor to spin in trapped in a burning plane, or . . .

She shrugged off the thought. War was the heritage of her people and her caste; it was just that she would have preferred to be lucky. Peacetime duty for her military service, then, hmmm, yes, Capetown for her degree. Nothing fancy; a three-year in Liberal Arts and Estate Management and an aristocratic A- grade. And days spent lying naked on the beaches of the Peninsula, surfing, going to the palaestra to run and wrestle, throw the disk and javelin and practice the pankration. Wearing silk and skirts; concerts and theaters and picture galleries, love affairs and long talks and walking under the olives on starlit nights . . .

“Well, on to the work of the day,” she murmured. Then: “Got her ticking over?”

One of the technicians looked up, grinning as the last of an ammunition belt ran across the leather pad on her shoulders and into the drums, the aluminum casings dull against the color-coded shells: red for tracer-incendiary, brown for explosive, blue for armor-piercing.

“She-un loaded fo’ lion, Mistis,” the serf said. Johanna’s mind placed the dialect: Police Zone, but not the Old Territories—Katanga or Angola, perhaps . . . serf specialists were given a thorough but narrowly technical education, which did not include master-class speech patterns. “Giv’t to tha Fritz, raaht up they ass,” she continued.

“I intend to, Lukie-Beth,” the Draka said, and considered lighting a cigarette. No, a bad example to break regulations around so much high octane. Instead she threw the package to the crew chief, who tucked one behind his ear and handed the others around. He nodded a salute as she rose, touching the steel hook on the stump of his left wrist to his brow.

Archstrategos Karl von Shrakenberg leaned his palms on the railing and stared down at the projacmap of Operations Command. Steel shutters rose noiselessly behind him, covering the glass wall and darkening the room, to increase the contrast of the glass surface that filled the pit beneath them. That white glow underlit the faces of the ten Archstrategoi spaced around the map, pale ovals hanging suspended, the flat black of their uniforms fading into the darkness beyond, the more so as few of them wore even the campaign ribbons to which they were entitled. Scattered brightwork glowed in soft gold stars against that background: here a thumb ring, there the three gold earrings that were the sole affectation of the Dominarch, the Chief of the Supreme General Staff.

Ghosts, jeered a mordant shadow at the back of Karl’s mind. Hovering over a world we cannot touch directly. Below them the unit counters moved, Draka forces crowding against the shrinking German bridgeheads south of the Caucasus, pushing them back toward the blocking positions of the airborne Legions at their rear.

Ghosts and dreams, he thought. We stand here and think we command the world; we’re lords of symbol, masters of numbers, abstractions. So antiseptic, so cool, so rational . . . and completely out of their hands, unless disaster struck. Twenty years they had planned and trained; worked and argued and sweated; moved millions of lives across the game board of the world. Or does the world dream us? Are we the wolf-thought-inescapable that puts a face on their fear?

Karl looked around at the faces: his contemporaries, colleagues—his friends, if shared thoughts and work and belief were what made friendship. Quiet well-kept men in their middle years, the sort who were moderate in their vices, popular with their grandchildren, whose spare time was spent strolling in the park or at rock-meditation. When they killed it was with nod or signature, and a detachment so complete it was as empty of cruelty as of pity.

For a moment he blinked: a fragment of song went through his mind, a popular thing, how did it . . .

“Frightened of this thing that I’ve become . . . ”

And yet we were young men once. Karl looked across at John Erikssen, the Dominarch. His head was turned, talking to his aide, young Carstairs. Ha. I must be nodding to my end—she’s forty and I think of her as “young.” John and he had been junior officers together in the Great War. He remembered . . .

The shell hole. Outside Smyrna: winter, glistening gray mud under gray sky, stinking with month-old bits of corpse. Cold mud closing about him, flowing rancid into his gasping mouth, the huge weight of the Turk on his chest. The curved dagger coming down, straining millimeter by millimeter closer to his face as his grip on the other man’s wrist weakened, and he would lie there forever among the scraps of bone and rusty barbed wire . . . There had been a sound like the thock of a polo mallet hitting a wooden ball, and the Turk had gone rigid; another crunch, softer, and his eyes had widened and rolled and Karl rose, pushing the corpse aside. John had stood looking at the shattered buttplate of his rifle, murmuring, “Hard head. Hard head.”

Now, that was real, the elder von Shrakenberg mused. The hands remembered, the skin did, as they did the silky feel of his firstborn’s hair when he lifted him from the midwife’s arms. John had stood godfather, to a son Karl named for him.

But the cobra of ambition had bitten them both deeply, even then. That was back when there was still juice in it, the wine of power, every victory a new birth and every promotion a victory. He had commanded a merarchy of warcars later in the Great War, Mesopotamia and Persia. Clumsy things by modern standards; riveted plates and spoked wheels and steam-powered, as only civilian vehicles and transport were today. Sleek and deadly efficient in their time . . .

Power exercised through others, men and machines as the extensions of his Will; the competition of excellence, showing his skill. Scouting for the Archonal Guard legion, vanguard of Tull’s V Army as it snapped at the heels of the retreating enemy. They had caught the Ottoman column by surprise on a plain of blinding-white alkali, swinging around through erg and dry wadi beds. For a quarter-hour while the rest of the unit came up they had watched the enemy pass beneath them, dark men in ragged earth-brown uniforms. Ambulance carts piled with the wounded; soldiers dropping to lie with cracked and bleeding lips; the endless weary shuffle of the broken regiments, and the stink of death.

The gatlings had fired until the turrets were ovens, the floors of the warcars covered in spent brass that glittered and shifted underfoot, the crews choking on cordite and scorched metal. That was when he had burnt his hand, reaching down to the gunner who sat slack-faced, hands still gripping the triggers as the pneumatics hissed and drove the empty barrels through their whirring circle. He had not felt the pain, not then, his mind’s eye seeing over and over again the ranks dropping in the storm of tracer, tumbled, layered in drifts that moaned and stirred; afterward silence, the sough of wind, bitter dust, and steam.

There had been nothing for John’s truck-born infantry to do but collect ears and bayonet the wounded.

The stink, the stink . . . they had gotten very thoroughly drunk that night, with the main body there to relieve the vanguard. Drunk and howling bad poetry and staggering off to vomit in the shadows. A step further, and another.

He had transferred to the Air Corps, valuable experience for one slated for Staff. The last great dirigible raid on Constantinople: Karl von Shrakenberg had been on the bridge of the Loki in the third wave, coming in at five thousand meters over the Golden Horn to release her biplane fighters while the bombardment ships passed below. The airship was three hundred meters long, a huge fragile thing of braced alloy sheeting; it had trembled in the volcanic updrafts from the tracks of fire across the city spread out below them like a map, burning from horizon to horizon, the beginnings of the world’s firestorm. Traceries of flame over the hills, bending like the heads of desert flowers after spring rain. Streets and rivers of fire, casting ruddy blurs on the underside of soot-black cloud; heat that made the whole huge fabric of the airship creak and pop above him as it expanded. Diesel oil and burning and the acrid smell of men whose bodies sweated out the fear their minds suppressed.

He had been calm, he remembered; yet ready to weep, or to laugh. Almost lightheaded, exalted: a godlike feeling; he was a sky god, a war god. Searchlights like white sabers, cannon fire as bright magenta bursts against the darkening sky where no stars shone, muzzle flashes from the antiairship batteries of the Austrian battlewagons at anchor below. The great dome of the Hagia Sophia shining, then crumbling, Justinian’s Church of Holy Wisdom falling into the fire. He had watched with a horror that flowed and mingled with delight at the beauty of that single image, the apotheosis of a thousand years. The ancient words had come of their own volition:

“Sir.” A hand on his shoulder. “Sir.”

“Mmmph.” Eric blinked awake from a dream where cherry blossoms fell into dark-red hair and sat up, probing for grains of sleep-sand until the warning twinge of his palms forbade; grimacing at the taste in his mouth. He glanced at his watch: 0230, five hours’ sleep and better than he could expect. The command section was sleeping in the cellar-cum-bunker he had selected as the HQ: a cube four meters on a side, damp and chilly, but marginally less likely to be overburdened with insect life.

The floor was rock because the earth did not reach this deep, five meters beneath the sloping surface. The walls and arched ceiling were cut-stone blocks, larger and older and better-laid than the stones of the houses above, even though the upper rows were visibly different from the lower. This village was old, the upper sections had probably been replaced scores of times, after fire or sack or the sheer wasting of the centuries. The cold air smelled of rock, earth, the root vegetables that had been stored here over the years, and already of unwashed soldier. One wall had a rough doorway knocked through it, with a blanket slung across; a dim blue light spread from the battery lamp someone had spiked to one wall.

Shadows and blue light . . . equipment covered much of the floor: radios, a field telephone with twisted bundles of color-coded wires snaking along the floor and looping from nail to nail along lines driven between the stone blocks. The rest was carpeted in groundsheets and sleeping rolls, now that they had had time to recover their marching packs and bring the last of the supplies down from the gliders, with scavenged Fritz blankets for extra padding. Someone had improvised a rack along one wall to hang rifles and personal gear, strings of grenades, spare ammunition, a folding map table. Somebody else had one of the solid-fuel field stoves going in a corner, adding its chemical and hot-metal odor to the bunker, along with a smell of brewing coffee.

“Thanks,” Eric muttered as hands pushed a mug into his hands: Neal, the command-section rocket gunner, a dark-haired, round-faced woman from . . . where was it? Taledar Hill, one of those little cow-and-cotton towns up in the Northmark.

“Patrol’s in,” she said. He remembered she had a habit of brevity, for which Eric was thankful; waking quickly was an acquired and detested skill for him. He sipped; it was hot, at least. Actually not bad, as coffee; a lot closer to the real thing than ration-issue wine.

McWhirter was awake, over in his corner, back to the wall, head bent in concentration over tiny slivers of paper that his fingers creased and folded into the shapes of birds and animals and men . . . not the hobby Eric would have predicted. A muttering at his feet. Sofie lay curled beneath the planks that supported the static set, headphones clenched in one sleeping hand and head cradled on her backpack, machine pistol hanging by its strap from one corner of the table. A foot protruded, its nails painted shocking pink; he grinned, remembering the disreputable and battered stuffed rabbit he had glimpsed at the bottom of her rucksack. She slept restlessly, with small squirming motions; for a moment her nose twitched and she rubbed her cheek into the fabric.

Now, I wonder . . . he thought. Have I been avoiding Citizen women because I don’t think I’m going to live or is that an excuse not to give any more hostages to fortune?

He shook his head and turned back to Neal. “So what’s it like out there—”

A gloved hand swept the blanket-door aside, letting in a draft of colder air from cellars not warmed by body heat as the command bunker had been. The figure behind was stocky, made more so by the dripping rain poncho and hood; her Holbars was slung muzzle-down, and it clicked against the stone as she leaned her weight on one hand and threw back the hood. She had a square face, tanned and short-nosed, pale blue eyes and irregular teeth in a full smiling mouth, sandy-blond hair plastered wetly to her forehead.

“Sir, it’s just such a fuckin’ joy out there, what with bein’ dark laak a coal mine, about six degrees C, an’ the gods pissin’ down our necks an’ branches a’slappin’ us in the face, we just naturally cannot contain our urge to roll nekkid in th’ flowers, laak-so it was Saturday night at the Xanadu in Shahnapur. Sir.”

She reached behind her and pulled a native forward by his elbow; the Circassian was young, and unlike most of the villagers his sopping rags were what remained of native garb rather than a European-style outfit. One of the hunters they had been promised . . . painfully thin, huge dark eyes hollowed in a face that quivered and chattered its teeth with the cold. Then the eyes bulged at the sight of Sofie Nixon sitting up naked to the waist and lighting a cigarette.

“An’ this-here’s one of you tame ragheads. Says laak he’s heard somethin’.”

Eric yawned, stretched, snapped his fingers to attract the man’s attention. “You saw the graycoats?” To Neal, in English “I think Monitor Huff could use a cup, too, trooper.”

The Circassian swallowed and bowed awkwardly. “Not saw, lord, but heard. Down below, where the trail crosses the third hill, before the hollow: many of the—” a Slavic-sounding word Eric did not recognize. Tyansha had been the child of Circassians settled in Turkey, descendants of refugees from Russian conquest, chieftains and their followers. The tongue she had taught him was more formal and archaic than the Russian-influenced peasant dialect spoken here.

Eric made a guess. “Steam wagons—carts that go of themselves?”

The Circassian nodded eagerly.

“Yes, lord. Many, many, but not of the ones with the belts of metal that go around and around.”

Treads, Eric’s mind prompted. “They stopped?”

A quick nod. “Yes, and then the engines became quiet, but there was much talking in the tongue of the Germanski. Perhaps three hundreds, perhaps more.” A sniff. “Germanski are always talking, very loud; also they make much noise moving in the woods.”

“Do they, now,” Eric mused. Then: “McWhirter.” The NCO looked up, his hand slowly closing to crush the delicate figure of a flying crane. “My compliments to Einar, and 2nd Tetrarchy ready on the double. Le jeu commence.”

Sofie had risen, yawning, and was stamping her feet into her boots to the muttered complaints of nearby sleepers.

“No need to go out in the wet,” Eric said. “I’m just taking the 2nd. Einar’s sparks can handle it.”

“Nah, no problem,” she replied, with a shrug and a slight sideways jerk of the head. “Wallis c’n handle this end, we’ll need somebody listenin’ . . . ” She prodded a recumbent figure with a toe. “Hey, skinny, arse to the saddle, ready to paddle.”

There was a slight, rueful smile on her face as she turned away to check her weapons and strap an extra waterproof cover on the portable set. And someone has to look after you, hey?

Trooper Patton wiped the sap from her bush knife and sheathed it over her shoulder; carefully, with both hands. It was far too sharp to fling about in the dark. Then she knelt to run her fingers over the product of her ingenuity: a straight sapling, hastily trimmed to a murderous point at both ends. One point was rammed into the packed earth of the trail; the middle of the stake was supported by the crutch of a Y-shaped branch cut to just the right length. The other end slanted up . . . Patton stood against it, measuring the height. Just at her navel, coming up the trail from the north. The briefing paper did say that the Fritz SS had a minimum height requirement, so it should hit . . .

The Draka woman was grinning to herself as she slid back four meters to her firing position to the left of the trail, behind the trunk of a huge fallen beech; laughing, even, an almost soundless quiver. One that Monitor Huff beside her knew well. Lips approached her ear, with crawling noises and a smell of wet uniform.

“What’s so fuckin’ amusin’, swarthy one?” asked Monitor Huff, commander of C lochos, the squad.

Patton was dark for a Draka, short and muscular, olive-skinned and flat-faced; their people had a Franco-Mediterranean strain that cropped out occasionally among the more common north-European types. Huff could imagine the disturbing glint of malicious amusement in the black eyes as she heard the slightly reedy voice describe the trap.

“Belly or balls, Huffie, belly or balls. Noise’ll give us a firin’ point, eh?”

“You’re sick. Ah love it.” Their lips brushed, and Huff rolled back to her firing position. Gonna die, might as well die laughin’, she thought.

Down the trail, something clanked.

William Dreiser clicked off the tape recorder and patted the pebbled waterproof leather of the casing affectionately. It was the latest thing—only the size of a large suitcase, and much more rugged than the clumsy magnetic-wire models it had replaced—from Williams-Burroughs Electronics in Toronto. The Draka had been amazed at it; it was one field in which the United States was incontestably ahead. And it had been an effective piece: the ambush patrol setting out into the dark and the rain, faces grim and impassive; the others waiting, sleeping or at their posts, a stolid few playing endless games of solitaire. Then the eruption of noise in the dark, giving almost no hint of direction. Imagination had had to fill in then, picturing the confused fighting in absolute darkness. Finally the survivors straggling in, hale and walking wounded and others carried over their comrades’ shoulders . . .

He looked up. The command cellar was the warmest place in the warren of basements, and several of the survivors had gathered, to strip and sit huddled in blankets while their uniforms and boots steamed beside the field stove. Some were bandaged, and others were rubbing each other down with an oil that had a sharp scent of pine and bitter herbs. The dim blue-lit air was heavy with it, and the smells of damp wool, blood, bandages, and fear-sweat under the brewing coffee. Eric was sitting in one corner, an unnoticed cigarette burning between his fingers and the blanket let fall to his waist, careless of the chill. The medic snapped off the pencil light he had been using to peer into the Centurion’s eyes and nodded.

“Cuts, abrasions an’ bruises,” he said. “Ribs . . . better tape ’em. Mighta’ been a concussion, but pretty mild. More damage from that Freya-damned stim. They shouldn’t oughta issue it.” He reached into the canvas-and-wire compartments of his carryall. “Get somethin’ to eat, get some sleep, take two of these-here placebo’s an’ call me in the mornin’.”

Eric’s answering smile was perfunctory. He raised his arms obediently, bringing his torso into the light. Sofie knelt by his side and began slapping on lengths of the broad adhesive from the roll the medic had left. Dreiser sucked in his breath; he had been with the Draka long enough to ignore her casual nudity, even long enough that her body no longer seemed stocky and overmuscled, or her arms too thick and rippling-taut. But the sight of the officer’s chest and back was shocking. His face was bad enough, bruises turning dark and lumpy, eyes dark circles where thin flesh had been beaten back against the bone and veins ruptured, dried blood streaking from ears and mouth and turning his mustache a dark-brown clump below a swollen nose blocked with clots. Still, you could see as bad in a Cook County station house any Saturday night, and he had as a cub reporter on the police beat.

The massive bruising around his body was something else again: the whole surface of the tapered wedge was discolored from its normal matte tan to yellow-gray, from the broad shoulders where the deltoids rose in sharp curves to his neck, down to where the scutes of the stomach curved below the ribs. Dreiser had wrestled the young Draka a time or two, enough to know that his muscle was knitted over the ribs like a layer of thick india rubber armor beneath the skin. What it had taken to raise those welts . . . Christ, he’s not going to be so good-looking if this happens a few more times, the American thought. And I’m damn glad I’m not in this business. Even then, he felt his mind making a mental note; this would be an effective tailpiece to his story. “Wounded, but still thoroughly in command of the situation, Centurion von Shrakenberg . . . .”

Sofie finished the taping, a sheath like a Roman’s segmented breastplate running from beneath his armpits to the level of the floating ribs. Eric swung his arms experimentally, then bent. He stopped suddenly, lips thinning back over his teeth, then completed the motion, then he coughed and spat carefully into a cloth.

“No blood,” he muttered to himself. “Didn’t think doc was wrong, really, but—” He turned his head to give Sofie a rueful smile, stroking one hand down the curve of her back. “Hey, thanks anyway, Sofie.”

She blushed down to her breasts, looked down and noticed the goosebumps and stiffened nipples with a slight embarrassment, coughed herself, and drew on a fresh uniform tunic. “Ya, no problem,” she said. “Ymir-cursed cold in here . . . ” She turned to pick up a bowl and dampen a cloth. “Ag, cis, Centurio—Eric, we need y’ walkin’, come dawn.”

He sighed and closed his eyes as she began to clean the almost-dried blood from his face, pushing back damp strands of his hair from his forehead. The cigarette dangled from one puffed lip.

“Better at walking than thinking, from the looks of tonight’s fuckup,” he said bitterly.

“Bullshit.” Heads turned; that had been McWhirter, from the place where he sat with the neatly laid-out parts of an assault rifle on a blanket before his knees; he had more than the usual reluctance to let a rifle go without cleaning after being fired. He raised a bolt carrier to the light, pursed his lips and wiped off excess oil. “With respect, sir. From a crapped out bull, at that.”

Eric’s eyes opened, frosty and pale-gray against the darkening flesh that surrounded them. The NCO grinned; he was stripped to shorts as well, displaying a body roped and knotted and ridged with muscle that was still hard, even if the skin had lost youth’s resilience. His body was heavier than the officer’s, thicker at the waist, matted with graying yellow hair where the younger man’s was smooth, and covered with a pattern of scars, everything from bullet wounds and shrapnel to what looked like the beginning of a sentence in Pushtu script, written with a red-hot knife.

“Yes, Senior Decurion?” Eric said softly.

“Yes, Centurion.” The huge hands moved the rifle parts, without needing eyes to guide them. “Look, sir. I’ve been in the Regular Line since, hell, ’09. Seen a lot of officers; can’t do what they do—the good ones—Mrs. McWhirter didn’t raise her kids for that, but I can run a firelight pretty good, and pick officers. Some of the bad ones”—he smiled, an unpleasant expression—“they didn’t live past their second engagement, you know? Catchin’ that Fritz move up the valley was smooth, real smooth. Had to do somethin’ about it, too. Can’t see anything else we could’ve done. Sir.”

He slapped the bolt carrier back into the receiver of the Holbars, drew it back and let the spring drive it forward. The sound of the snick had a heavy, metallic authority. “An’ we did do something. We blew their transport, knocked out, say, two-three more tanks, killed, oh, maybe two hundred. They turned back; next attack’s goin’ to come straight up our gunsights. For which we lost maybe fifteen effectives. So please, cut the bullshit, get some rest and let’s concentrate on the next trick.”

“My trick lost us half of 2nd Tetrarchy,” Eric said.

The NCO sighed, using the rifle to lever himself erect and sweeping up the rest of his gear with his other hand. “With somewhat less respect, sir, y’may have noticed there’s a war goin’ on, and it’s mah experience that in wars people tend to get killed. Difference is, is it gettin’ the job done or not? That’s what matters.

“All that matters,” he added with flat sincerity from the doorway. “ ’Course, we may all die tomorrow.” Another shrug, before he let the curtain drop behind him. “Who gives a flyin’ fuck, anyhow?”

Eric blinked and started to purse his lips, stopping with a wince. Sofie dropped the cloth in the bowl and set it aside, staring after the Senior Decurion with a surprised look as she gathered a nest of blanket and bedroll around herself and reached out a hand to check the radio.

“He’s got something right, for once,” she muttered. Everything green, ready . . . She shivered at the memory of the palm on her shoulder. Can it. Later. Maybe.

“Well, Ah give a flyin’ fuck,” said a muffled voice from the center of the room. It was Trooper Huff, lying facedown on the blankets while her friend kneaded pine oil into the muscles of her shoulders and back. The fair skin gleamed and rippled as she arched her back with a sigh of pleasure.

“Centurion? Now, all Ah want is to get back—little lower, there, sweetlin’—get back to Rabat province an’ the plantation, spend the rest of mah life raisin’ horses an’ babies. Old Ironbutt the deathfuckah is still right. If those Fritz’d gotten on our flank tomorrow they’d have had our ass for grass, Centurion.” She sighed again, looking up. “Your turn.” The dark-haired soldier handed her the bottle and lay down, and Huff rose to her knees and began to oil her palms. Then she paused. “Oh, one last thing. Didn’t notice you askin’ anyone to do anything you wouldn’t do yo’self.”

Eric’s face stayed expressionless for a moment, and then he shook his head, squeezing his eyelids closed and chuckling ruefully. “Outvoted,” he said, suddenly yawning enormously. He grinned down at Sofie, eyes crinkled. “I’m not going to indulge in this-here dangerous sport of plannin’ things to do once the war is over,” he said in a tone lighter than most she had heard from him. “Bad luck to price the unborn calf. But did you have anything planned for your next leave, Sofie?”

“Hell, no, Eric, sir!” she said with quiet happiness grinning back.

“Dinner at Aladdin’s?” he said. That was a restaurant built into the side of Mount Meru, in Kenia province. The view of the snowpeak of Kilimanjaro rising over the Serengeti was famous, as were the game dishes.

“Consider it a date, Centurion,” she said, snuggling herself into the blankets and closing her eyes.

Tomorrow was going to be a busy day.

Eric looked across at Dreiser. “That’s private, Bill, but we could all three get together for some deep-sea fishing off Mombasa afterwards. Owe you something for those articles, anyway; they’re going to be . . . useful, I think. Better than the trip you had with that writer friend of yours—what was his name, Hemingway?”

Dreiser laughed softly. “Acquaintance; Ernest doesn’t have friends, just drinking buddies and sycophants. I’ll bet you don’t get drunk and try to shoot the seagulls off the back of the boat . . . and you seem to be in a good mood tonight, my friend.”

“Because I’ve got things to do, Bill, things to do. And with that, goodnight.” He stubbed out the cigarette, swilled down the last of the lukewarm coffee. And probably about twenty hours of life to do them with, he thought. Pushing the sudden chill in his gut away: White Christ and Wotan One-Eye, what’s different about that? The odds haven’t changed since yesterday. But his wants had, he forced himself to admit with bleak honesty, and his vision of his duty—an expanded one, which required his presence, if it could be arranged.

There was one good thing about the whole situation. Whatever happened, he no longer had to face death with an attitude indistinguishable from Senior Decurion McWhirter’s. That he had never felt comfortable with.

Johanna blinked. I’m alive, she thought. Fuckin’ odd, that.

There was not much pain, no more than after a fall from a horse or surfboard, apart from a fierce ache in her neck. But there was no desire to move anything, and she was hot.

She blinked again, and now things came into focus behind the blue tint of her face shield. The wreck of the Lover’s Bite was pitched forward, down thirty degrees at the nose over some declivity in the ploughed field. She was hanging limp in the safety harness, only her buttocks and thighs in contact with the seat. Her view showed a strip of canopy with blue sky beyond it, the instrument panel, the joystick flopping loosely between her knees. And her feet, resting in a pool of fuel that was up to her ankles where they rested on the forward bulkhead by the control pedals. The stink of the fuel was overwhelming; she coughed weakly, and felt the beginnings of the savage headache one got from breathing too much of the stuff.

Flames licked at the corner of her vision. She swiveled an eye, to see the port wing fully involved, roaring white and orange flames trailing dirty black smoke backward as a steady south wind whipped at it. The engine was a red-metal glow in the center of it, and . . . yes, the plane was slightly canted down to that direction, that was lucky, the fuel would be draining into the flames and not away from it.

Feeling returned; fear. She was sitting in a firebomb, in a pool of high-octane, surrounded by an explosive fuel-air mixture. Probably no more than seconds before it went.

Got to get out, she thought muzzily. Her left hand fumbled at a panel whose heat she could feel even through her gloves, looped through the carrying strap of the survival package. Her right was at her shoulder, pawing at the release catch of her harness. Good, she thought. It opened, and her body fell, head slamming into the instrument panel.

* * *

“Pater Noster, qui est in caeli . . . ”

“Shut up, slut-bitch!” The guard raked her hard-rubber truncheon along the bars in frustration, then stalked off down the corridor

Sister Marya Sokolowska lowered her head and fought to recapture the Presence; a futile effort, it could not be forced. Enough, prayer is more than feelings, she chided herself, while habit droned the sonorous Latin words and told the beads of her rosary. The words were a discipline in themselves; faith was a matter of the intellectual will more than subjective sentiment. And the others relied on her: even Chantal Lefarge, the communist over in the corner, was joining in; it helped remind them they were human beings and not animals-with-numbers, that they were a Community, linked one with the other. Something easy to forget in the ten-by-twelve brick cube of cell 10-27, under the Domination of the Draka. Though she was the only Pole here, and the only religious.

Covertly, her eyes followed the guard as far as the grill-door would allow. The building had not been designed as a prison; the Draka had taken it over when Lyon fell, back in ’45. Before then . . . a school, perhaps, or some sort of offices. Then the Security Directorate had come, and cordoned off as many square blocks of the city as need dictated; blocked doors and built walkways between buildings, surrounded the whole with razor wire and machine-gun towers, put in bars and control doors. It was a warren now, brick and concrete, burlap and straw ticking, the ever-present ammonia stink of disinfectant. Lights that were never dimmed, endless noise. The tramp-tramp-clank of chain gangs driven in lockstep to mess halls or to their work maintaining and extending the prison complex. Far-off shouts and screams, or someone in the cell across the corridor waking shrieking from a nightmare. Mornings were worst. That was the hour for executions, in the courtyard below their cell. The metal grille blocked vision but not sound; they could hear the footsteps, sometimes pleading or whimpering, once or twice cracked voices attempting the “Marseillaise,” then the rapid chuttering of automatic weapons and rounds thumping into the earth berm piled against their block’s wall . . .

The nun finished the prayer and came to her feet, putting solemnity aside and smiling at the others. Together they rolled the thin straw-stuffed pallets up against the walls, each folding her single cotton blanket on top and placing the cup and pan in the regulation positions. There was nothing else to do; it was forbidden to sleep or sit after the morning siren. Conversation was possible, if you were careful and very quiet, a matter of gesture and brief elliptical phrases, and it helped break the terrible sameness of each day. Newcomers brought in fresh tidings from the world outside, and bits of gossip passed from hand to hand on work details or at the mess hall . . . not as elaborate as she had expected, there were too many informers and turnover was too high. This was a holding and processing center, not a real prison; a place to sit and wait until they took you away. Terrible rumors about what lay beyond: factories, labor camps, bordellos, medical experiments such as the Germans had done during the Nazi years . . . but no real information. For herself, it was not so bad, she had much time to meditate, and the others to help, and what came after would be the will of God, Who would give her strength enough to meet it, if no more.

Marya crossed herself and moved a careful half-pace closer to the bars. Good. The guard had gone around the corner. She was just a trusty, a prisoner like the rest of them, with no key to open cell doors. She could mark an individual or a whole cell down and inform the real guards, the Security bulls and retired Janissaries who ran Block D, Female Section. That could mean flogging or electroshock or sweatbox for all of them, you never knew. But the guard would be reluctant to do that; it was unwise to have more contact with the bulls than you had to. A prayer was not enough provocation; a real racket might be, because then she would be in danger of losing her position and being thrown back into a holding pen, which meant being quietly strangled one night. Seven to one was bad odds.

God forgive them all, Marya thought. For them too the Savior died. She herself would probably get nothing more than a whack across the kidneys with the rubber truncheon at mess call.

Not for the first time, she reflected that Central Detention was like being inside a machine. Not a particularly efficient one, more like an early steam engine that gasped and wheezed and leaked around its gaskets, shuddering with loose fittings and friction. But it used the Domination’s cheapest fuel—human life—and it was simple and rugged and did its work with a minimum of attention; she had been here six months and rarely even saw the serf guards and clerks who did the routine management, much less one of the Citizen-caste aristocracy of the Domination . . .

There was an iron chung-chang from the landing down at the south end of the corridor, the main door to Block D, two stories up the open stairwell. A sudden hush caught the cells along the narrow passageway, an absence of noise too faint for conscious attention, then a rustle as the inmates sprang to stand by their bedrolls. The nun moved to her own and assumed the proper posture, feet together, head bowed, hands by sides. She could feel the sweat prickle out on her palms, wiped them hurriedly down the coarse cotton sack dress that prisoners were issued. Suddenly the familiar roughness itched against her skin, and she forced her toes to stop their anxious writhing in the sisal-and-wood clogs.

A whimper. Therese; she had never been strong or quite right in the head since they brought her and Chantal in. A slight girl, dark and too thin, who never spoke and slept badly. The nun had had medical training, but it was nothing physical; the abuse that had made the elder Lefarge sister strong with hate had broken something in Therese. Perhaps it could never be healed, and certainly not here. Eyes met across the cell, and someone coughed to cover the quick squeeze of the shoulder and whisper of comfort that was all they had to offer.

Pauvre petite, Marya thought; then with desperation: much too early for the bulls to be down looking for amusement. And they had never picked cell 10-27. Holy Mary, mother of God, please . . .

The guard pelted down the corridor and dropped to her knees by the stairs from the landing. Marya’s bedroll was nearest the door; she could see boots descending the pierced-steel treads. Three sets, composition-soled leather with quick-release hooks rather than eyes for the lacings. Draka military issue, the forward pair black and the other two camouflage-mottled. Quickly, she flicked her eyes back to toes. A Citizen! Could they have found out? Silently she willed the boots to pace by, on down the corridor. Not praying, because this could only mean bad trouble and the only words her heart would speak would be: somebody else, anyone but me.

Marya swallowed convulsively, thick saliva blocking her throat. Even Our Lord asked that the cup pass from him. But he had not wished it on anyone else. Nor would she.

The lock made its smooth metal sound of oiled steel and the cell door swung open. She could feel the breeze of it, smell leather and cloth, gun oil and a man’s cologne.

“Bow, you sluts!” the guard barked, hovering nervously in the corridor. The eight inmates of cell 10-27 put palms to eyes and bent at the waist.

“Up, stand up.” A man’s voice, cool and amused, speaking French with a soft slurred accent. “Present, wenches.”

Marya jerked erect and bent her head back to show the serf identity code tattooed behind her left ear, one hand holding back the long ash-blond hair that might have covered it.

The position gave her a good look at the three men. Their armed presence crowded the cell, even though there was room in plenty with the inmates braced to attention. Two were common soldiers, Janissaries from the Domination’s subject race legions with shaven skulls and serf-numbers on their own necks. Big men, young, thick heavy-muscled shoulders and necks and arms under their mottled uniforms. Both carried automatic rifles; ugly, squared-off things with folding stocks and snail-shaped drum magazines; there were heavy fighting knives in their boots, stick-grenades clipped to their harness, long machetelike bush knives slung over their backs. Dark men, with blunt features and tight-curled hair and skins the color of old oiled wood; Africans, from the heartlands of the continent where the Domination began. Their people had been under the Yoke for generations, and the Draka favored them for such work; they looked at the women with indifferent contempt and casual desire.

The third was an officer, a Citizen. In the black tunic and trousers of garrison uniform, with a peaked cap folded and thrust through his shoulder strap; Marya understood just enough of the Domination’s military insignia to know he was a Merarch, roughly a colonel. A tall man, leopard to the Janissaries’ bull strength. Tanned aquiline features, pale gray eyes, brown hair streaked with a lighter color, a single gold hoop earring. No more than thirty, with white scar lines on his hands and face, one deep enough to leave a V in his left cheekbone. A machine pistol rested in an elaborate holster along his thigh, but it was the weapon in his hand that drew her eye. A steel rod as thick as a man’s thumb with a rubber-bound hilt, tapering along its meter length to the brass button on its tip; cable ran from hilt to the battery casing at his belt. An electroprod.

The tip came towards her face. Sweat prickled out along her upper lip as she fought against the need to flinch. Marya knew what it could do; the prod was worse than a whip, as bad as the sweatbox. The Draka used it to control crowds; the threat was usually as effective as an automatic weapon, and less wasteful. Too many times and you could start having fits. Applied to the head it could cause convulsions, loss of memory, change you inside . . . She closed her eyes.

Metal touched her chin. Nothing. Not activated. She opened her eyes, and the Draka nodded with approval.

“Spirited,” he said. “Sound off, wench.”

“Marya seven-three-E-S-four-two-two, Master,” she recited, fighting off a flush of hatred that left her knees weak, on the verge of trembling. She would not show it, not when it might be mistaken for fear.

The man in black flipped open a small leatherbound notebook with his left hand. “Sssa, thirty-four, literate, languages French, German, English, Polish . . . ”He raised an eyebrow. “Quite a scholar . . . advanced accounting . . . ah, category 3m73, religious cadre, that would account for it.” The electroprod clicked against the crucifix and rosary that hung through the cloth tie of her sack dress. Made from scraps of wood, silently at night beneath her blanket. “Nun?”

“I am a Sister of the order of St. Cyril, Master.”

The Draka flicked the steel rod against her hip, hard enough to sting. “You were. Now you’re 73ES422, wench.” He read further, pursed a lip. “Suspicion of unauthorized education? Ah, that was six months ago; Security must have been dithering whether to pop you off or send you to the Yanks with the Pope and the rest.” He shook his head and made a tsk sound between his teeth. “Headhunters, typical.”

Marya felt herself pale. “The . . . the Holy Father has been exiled?”

Two more cuts with the rod, harder this time. “Master,” she added.

He turned without answering, scanning the others. “You,” he pointed.

“Chantal nine-seven-E-F-five-seven-eight, Master.” Marya could see the film of sweat on the other woman’s face, and knew it was rage, not terror.

Calm, keep calm, she thought. Suicide is a mortal sin.

The Draka stepped over and looked her up and down, smiling slightly. She had dark Mediterranean good looks, long black hair and a heart-shaped face, a full-curved body under the coarse issue gown. “At ease,” he said, and the inmates straightened and dropped their eyes again; the officer chuckled as he watched the dark woman glaring at his boots and consulted the notebook.

“Twenty years, literate, numerate, French and English . . . ex-bookkeeper, member of the Communist Party . . . ”He caught the hem of her gown on the end of the electroprod and raised it to waist height, and murmured in his own tongue: “Not bad haunches, but these Latins run to fat young.”

Marya understood him, with difficulty; the English her Order had taught her was the standard British form, not the Domination’s mutation of an archaic eighteenth-century southern dialect. He paused, let the cloth fall, tapped the steel rod thoughtfully against one boot.

“Shuck down, wenches,” he said after a moment.

There was a quick rustle of cloth as the inmates stripped; the prison gowns simple cotton sacks with holes for arms and legs. Marya undid her belt, pulled the garment over her head, folded it atop her bedroll, slipped off the briefs that were the only undergarment and folded them in turn, stepped out of the clogs and stood in the inspection posture, hands linked behind the head and eyes forward. The dank chill of the place seemed suddenly greater, raising the gooseflesh on shoulders and thighs, making her wish she could hug herself and run her palms over her arms.

When she had been arrested, it was only chance that the secret school was not in session and the children gone. All unauthorized education was forbidden, under penalty of death; they would have penned her and the children together in the room and tossed in a grenade. Alone, she would have died there and then had any evidence been found. As it was, two of the mothers had been with her, and there was no room in the police van; the green-uniformed Security Directorate officer had drawn her pistol and shot them both through the head as they knelt, to save the trouble of calling in for a larger vehicle. And inside Central Detention there had been no interrogation, no torture; only the cell and the endless monotony spiced by fear, until she realized that her gesture of defiance was not even worth investigating.

There had been a speech for her batch of new inmates. Very brief: “This is a bad place, serfs, but it can always be worse. We ask little from the living, only obedience; from the dead, nothing.”

Beside her Therese was weeping silently, slow fat tears squeezing out from under closed lids and running down her face, dripping from her chin onto her breasts. Most of the others were expressionless, a few preening under the dispassionate gaze; the Draka nodded and turned to the guard.

“This one and that one,” he said, flicking the prod toward Marya and Chantal. “Put the restraints on them.”

Marya’s stomach lurched as the guard’s rough hands turned her around and pulled her arms behind her back. The ring-and-chain bonds clanked, fastening thumbs and wrists and elbows in a straining posture that forced the shoulders back; you could walk in them if you were careful, but they were as effective as a hobble when it came to running. Not that there was anywhere to run; and anything at all might be waiting beyond the iron door. Cell 10-27 was a bad place, of cold and fear and a monotony that was worse than either, grinding down your mind and spirit. Now it seemed a haven . . . The one thing you could be certain of in the Domination was that there was always someplace worse.

The guard shoved the two women roughly toward the door of the cell. Marya staggered, turned and bowed awkwardly.

“Master,” she said. “Our things?”

“You won’t be back, wench,” the Draka said, stretching. The Janissaries chuckled; one reached out and grabbed the weeping Therese by the breast, pinching and twisting. She folded about the grip in a futile shrimp curl of protection, mouth quivering as she sobbed.

“You be needin’ us’n, suh?” he said. “Mebbeso weuns stay here fo’ whaal?”

The officer laughed, and Marya could feel Chantal quivering behind her. Therese was her younger sister; they had been swept up together for curfew violation. Distributing leaflets, probably, but they had been clean when the patrol caught them and might have gotten off with a light flogging if Chantal had not attacked the squad leader when he started to rape Therese . . . The nun forced herself between the other woman and the soldiers, pushing her back against the bars, hearing the quick panting breath of adrenaline overload in her ear and a low guttural sound that was almost a growl. Madness to attack three armed men with hands bound, but a berserker does not count the odds. Even worse madness if by some freak chance she could hurt one of their captors; that would mean impalement, a slow day’s dying standing astride a sharpened stake rammed up the anus. And not just for her; the Draka believed in collective punishment, to give everyone a motive for restraining the wilder spirits. Innocents would die beside her.

The Draka laughed again, reaching out and playfully rapping the Janissary across the knuckles with the electroprod. “Na, no rough work with Security’s property,” he said. “Besides, I know you lads; once you had your pants down you wouldn’t notice even if one of the others pulled the pin on a grenade and shoved it where the sun don’t shine. Then think of the paperwork I’d have to do.”

The dark soldier released the woman and saluted. His officer returned the gesture, then grinned and clapped him on the shoulder. “But no reason you shouldn’t hit the Rest Center until we’re due; consider yourselves off-duty until . . . ”He looked at his watch. “ . . . 2000 hours. Report to the depot then. Off you go; I think I can handle the wild French wenches alone.”

“Yaz, suh!” the serf soldiers chorused. Their clenched right fists snapped smartly to their chests before they wheeled and left.

Echoing, thundering, the darkness of the B-30s cargo pod shook around Captain Fred Kustaa, toning through muscle and bone with subsonic disharmonies. He was strapped almost flat in the crashcouch, imprisoned in the pressure suit and helmet, packed about with gel-filled bags to absorb the bruising punishment of the experimental craft’s passage through the upper atmosphere. Outside the titanium-alloy skin would be glowing, the edges of the huge square ramjet intakes turning cherry red as air compressed toward the density of steel.

It was the helpless feeling that was hardest to take, he decided, not the physical danger. He had been a combat soldier in the Pacific before he transferred to the OSS in ’44, and God knew liaison work with the Draka in Europe in the last year of the War had been no picnic, but this . . .

Experimental, he thought. Everything’s too fucking experimental for my taste. Donovan should have tried the submarines first. Hell, Murmansk wasn’t more than a few weeks on foot through the forest to Finland, although it would be a bit difficult to carry the contents of the cargo pod on his back.

The aircraft lurched and banked, and his stomach surged again; he concentrated on dragging in another breath through the rubber-tasting face mask. Vomiting inside it would be highly unpleasant and possibly fatal. About as maneuverable as a locomotive, had been the test pilot’s words; too little was known about airflow at these speeds. Kustaa did not understand the B-30—he would not have been risked over enemy territory if he did—but even just looking at it from the outside was enough to know it was leading-edge work. It didn’t even look like an airplane, it looked like a flattened dart pasted on top of two rectangular boxes . . .

“Merde.” The pilot’s voice, Emile Chretien; Kustaa recognized the thick Quebec French accent. He spoke a little of the patois himself, there were plenty of habitants scattered among the Finnish-Americans of his home in the Upper Peninsula. “Electrodetection, high-powered scanners.”

Kustaa winced. Well, that had been one reason for this mission, to find out for sure just how good the Domination’s new Northern Lights Chain was. The dark pressed against his eyes, and he used it to paint maps; their course from the Greenland base, over the Arctic toward darkened Europe. His imagination refused to stop, and he saw more; saw the alert going out below, to bases in Sweden and Norway, alarm klaxons ringing out over concrete and barracks, flight-suited pilots scrambling to their stations. The blue flare of jets lighting the predawn as the stubby delta shapes of the Draka Shark-class fighters rolled onto the launch paths . . .

The B-30 was supposed to be immune to interception; the Domination had the physical plant of the German ramjet research projects, but the U.S. had managed to smuggle out most of the actual scientists and the crucial liquid hydrogen results. The aircraft lurched again, shook as if the wings were going to peel away at the roots, stooped. One of the Pacific Aircraft researchers had said something about eventually flying right into outer space if they could lick the problem of combustion in a supersonic airstream; damned long-hairs had no sense of need-to-know, shouldn’t have been talking like that in a canteen.

“Tabernac! Another ray . . . guidance beam, something’s coming up after us!”

Of course, he reminded himself, the U.S. hadn’t gotten all the German scientists; some had stayed, captives or those who had taken the Domination’s offer of Citizen status for themselves and their immediate families. And the Draka army’s Technical Section had good ideas too, sometimes; it was propaganda that they stole all their inventions.

“Positive detection . . . fille d’un patain, three of them; not manned, not at those speeds. They’re closing on us, they must be riding the beam. Hold on, Captain, I’m dropping chaff and taking evasive action.”

You mean this battering about wasn’t evasive action? Kustaa thought plaintively.

This was as bad as going down the tunnels after the Nips, back on Sumatra in ’43, pushing the flamethrower ahead into the cramped mud-smelling blackness. Japanese, Captain, Japanese, he reminded himself. Part of the Alliance for Democracy now, they’d be associate signatories to the Rio Pact as soon as Halleck and the Army of Occupation got through restructuring . . . Couldn’t call the little yellow bastards monkey-men anymore.

His mind skipped, nerves jumping in obedience to a fight-flight reflex that was pumping him full of adrenaline. And all I can do is sweat, he thought wryly. He could feel it trickling down his flanks, smell the rankness and taste salt on his upper lip. Think, he commanded himself. You’re not an animal driven by instinct, think.

Unmanned antiaircraft missiles, a typical Draka brute-force solution. Crude engines would be enough, if they were intended to burn out after a single use. The U.S.—he corrected himself mentally—the Alliance didn’t have guidance systems small and rugged enough for a missile like that, although they would soon—so the Domination wouldn’t either; they were years behind in electronics. But they could put the tracking and electrodetection on the ground, just a passive receptor-steering system on the missile itself, that and a big simple two-stage drive and a warhead.

Christ have mercy, I hope it isn’t an atomic, he thought. Probably not—they were still rare and mostly reserved for strategic use—but the Draka would be willing to explode one over a populated area. Populated by serfs, that is.

Jets and atomic bombs built by slaves, he thought. Insane. The Domination was madness come to earth; he shivered, remembering his liaison work with the Draka army, during the misbegotten period of joint action against Hitler. Gray faces of the Belgian farmers as they prepared to drive their tractors out over the minefields . . . and the sick wet noises of the one who had refused, seated on an impaling stake cut out of the little forest, his feet had scuffed around and around as he tried to rise off the rough wood sunk a foot deep into his gut, and blood and shit dribbled down the bark. Some of the Draka dug in at the treeline had laughed, at him or at the explosions and screams in the plowed field ahead.

The B-30 went thump, absurdly like an autosteamer going over a bump at speed, and the sensation was repeated. That would be the strips of foil being ejected, hopefully to baffle the Draka electrodetectors. Acceleration slammed him down and to the side; they were climbing and banking, and metal groaned around him as the big aircraft was stressed to ten-tenths of its capacity.

“Still locked on. Merde. Coming up on target. Prepare for ejection, Captain.” The pilot’s voice was full of a tense calm; Air Force tradition, can-do, wild blue yonder . . .

Kustaa’s heart lurched, and his mind refused to believe the time had gone so fast, so fast; it was like the wait between boarding the landing craft and the moment the ramp went down on the beach. Kustaa wished he could spit out the gummy saliva filling his mouth, as he had running waist-deep through the surf in a landing zone. Some men did that, some were silent and some shrieked wordlessly, a few shouted the traditional gung-ho and a surprising number pissed their pants or shat themselves; you never saw that in the papers, but only a recruit was surprised at it.

Damn, start out a Gyrene and end up a paratrooper, he thought. “Acknowledged.” His circuit was locked open, had to be with his hands strapped down, but there was no point in distracting Emile.

“Ten seconds from . . . mark.” There was no point in bracing himself, the harness was as like a womb as the technicians could make it.

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.

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-Pathway 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 Aino 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.

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 shin 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 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 silence 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 falling over a sill of granite below, wind through branches and wind through synthsilk cords and a gentle snap and flutter of cloth.

Kustaa slept.

Tanya von Shrakenberg eased herself to her feet, leaving the half-empty cup of coffee on the table and gently uncurling the small solid weight of her daughter. Not so small anymore, either; arms and legs just starting to lengthen out, she would have the rangy height of the von Shrakenberg line, even if her coloring took after her father’s maternal ancestors. Tanya looked down at the fine-featured oval face, already losing its puppy fat and firming towards adulthood, and stroked one cheek.

I wonder if I could catch that? she mused, in painter’s reflex. Difficult, when so much of an image like this was your own response to it; that was the weakness and strength of representational art, that it relied on a common set of visual codes . . . Oh, shut up, Tanya told herself. Critics theorize, you’re a painter.

The girl murmured without opening her eyes, turning towards her waiting nurse and nuzzling her face into Beth’s wide soft chest. Tanya felt a slow warmth below her heart, and reached out to draw a light finger down her cheek. Mother, painter, soldier, Landholder, she mused. All true, but which is really me, the me I talk to inside my head? Knowledge was a thing of words, but you could never really reduce a human being to description. Still less a child, whose self was still potential, before the narrowing of choice. She felt a moment’s sadness; children changed so fast, the one she knew and loved reshaping into someone else as she watched.

“Shall Ah wakes her, Mistis?” Beth asked.

“Let her rest,” Tanya replied. Not enough sleep last night, and then the long drive down, the family gathering in Paris had been enjoyable but strenuous for all of them, a good thirty adults and more children. The first opportunity since the War, now that travel was getting back to normal and demobilization nearly complete, and most of those still in the Forces able to get leave. A good deal of useful work, besides the socializing; plans had been made, political and otherwise, and the dozen or so younger members who were settling in Europe had compared notes.

Damnation, Tanya thought, catching herself on the back of the chair. Balance going again. Pregnancy always did that to her.

She looked around the office, eager to be gone but reluctant to face the bother of the trip; the air smelled of coffee and food from the buffet and the peculiarly North European odor of very old damp stone, so different from the dry dust-scent of her birth province, Syria. At Evendim, her parents’ plantation in the Bekaa Valley, the days would already be hot. From her old room in the east wing she could watch the sun set over the Lebanon mountains to the west, down from the snowpeaks and the slopes green with the forests of young cedar her people had planted; over the terraced vineyards in patterns of curving shadow; slanted golden sheets between the tall dark cypress that fringed the lawns behind the manor.

They tossed in the evening cool, the wind down from the mountains faintly chill against your skin while the stone of the window ledge was still blood-warm from the day’s sun. Sweetness from the mown lawns, delicate and elusive from the long acres of cherry orchard blossoming between the greathouse and the main water channel; sometimes the sound of a housegirl singing at her work, or faint snatches of the muezzin calling his flock to prayer, down in the Quarters.

No use getting homesick, she chided herself. It was probably just this damned depressing city . . . Tanya had been a Cohortarch in the Archonal Guard Legion when she saw Lyon last, back in ’45; burnt-out rubble, and the natives sick and hungry enough to eat each other. Things had improved a little, but not enough.

Or it could just be pregnancy, the aches and itches and the continual humiliating need to pee. It was unfair: some women went into the sixth month hardly showing at all . . . Thank Freya this was the third; one more and she could count that particular duty to the Race done. Or no more if it was twins again; her family ran to them. Children were delightful and no particular bother; if anything, between the servants and the eight months a year at boarding school required of all young Draka, you scarcely saw them enough. She glanced over at Gudrun, the bright copper hair resting against Beth’s dark breast. Sleep was the only time you saw her still; where all that energy came from was a mystery. But having them was something she would rather have skipped, the whole process was stupid and barbaric, like incubating and then shitting a pumpkin.

“Thank you for your time,” she said. “It’ll help; stonemasons and electricians and bookkeepers are in demand. I expect you’ll be glad when the other Directorates and the labor agencies get set up proper an’ things normalize.

“It’ll be good to get back home,” she said more quietly, to Andrew. Her brother looked up, unhooking the borrowed electroprod from his waist and smiling.

“The new place is home already?” he asked, lifting one eyebrow.

The movement pulled at the scar on his cheek, exaggerating the quizzical gesture.

“Of course. Chateau Retour’s mine, and Edward’s”—she laid a hand on her stomach—“an’ our next will be born there. Evendim stopped being home a long time ago, it’s Willie’s.” Draka law and custom demanded a single heir for an estate, usually the eldest. “We can visit, but that isn’t the same . . . I worry about you, brother mine; where’s the place you can call home? Officers’ quarters in Helsinki? We fought the War, let the next generation do their share. There’s still some good landholdings ready for settlement, down in the Loire valley. You should get yourself a mate, stop wastin’ all your seed on the wenches, make a place for y’self. The Race has to build, or what’s the conquerin’ for?”

“Maybe after my next hitch,” he said absently, pulling the folded cap from under his shoulder strap and settling it on his head. “Loki’s hooves, I’m barely thirty-odd; still plenty of time, unless I stop a bullet, and good Janissary officers are scarce. An’ Finland will be a while bein’ tamed. A while, surely.” He blinked, and she could see his consciousness returning, pulled back from the forests and snowfields of the Baltic. “Meanwhile, leave the motherin’ to Ma, she’s been bombardin’ me with the same advice since we reached the Channel.”

“An’ the young fogey should shut up about it, eh?” Tanya reached to stroke her daughter’s forehead. “Wake up, sweetlin’, time to go down to the cars.” To her brother: “Well, don’t forget to visit, before they post you back east. Some good hunting a little up valley; boar and deer, at least. And we’ve still got crates of that stuff you picked up, in the attics. Should get it cataloged soon.”

Her brother laughed and took the yawning Gudrun from her nurse, tossing her and holding her up easily with his hands beneath her arms; she smothered a smile and responded with an adult glower. “Not too old to play with y’uncle, I hope?” he said, and continued over his shoulder to his sister: “It took a two-ton car to drag the lot you got out of Paris, as I recall.”

He turned to the Security officer. “Thanks again, Strategos Vashon.”

The secret policeman closed a folder, rose and circled the desk to take the offered hand, give a chuck under the chin to Gudrun as she sat on her uncle’s shoulder. “No trouble,” he said. “A relief from my other problems, frankly; and I knew your granduncle Karl, we worked together after the last war.” Unstated was the fact that Karl von Shrakenberg was now an Arch-Strategos of the Supreme General Staff; there was always an undercurrent of tension between the Directorates of War and Security, the Domination’s two armed services. It never hurt to have a favor due. “Nothin’ but problems; sometimes I’d be glad to be back home, promotion or no.”

Tanya nodded to the murals of rocky hills and plains covered in long lion-colored grass. “There, Strategos?”

He shook his head, fitting another cigarette into the ivory holder. “That’s North Katanga, where I was born; I meant Bulgaria. Sofia’s home; I worked out of there from 1920 until the Eurasian war started. Probably why they sent me here, similar problems.”

Tanya shrugged. “Ah, Sofia; pretty town, had a leave there durin’ the War . . . ’43, I think.” A grin. “Gudrun here’ll take care of the Yanks, eh, chile?”

Brother and sister nodded approvingly as her hand made an unconscious check of the knife in its leg sheath.

Vashon laughed dutifully. “Maybe our grandchildren,” he said with sour pessimism. “If then.”

“That ol’ stretched-thin feelin’?” Andrew said, swinging the girl to the ground.

Vashon shrugged. “Ah, well, it’s only two years since the War ended . . . so much gained, and at relatively negligible cost.”

“Didn’t seem quite so negligible in the Guard,” Tanya said dryly, hitching up the elastic waistband of her trousers. “An’ the Fritz didn’t seem so exhausted, not when they damn near shot my tank out from under me, half a dozen times.”

Vashon spread his hands in an apologetic gesture. “Negligible in relation to the booty,” he said. “Half the earth, an’ half mankind; two-thirds, with what we had before. It’s assimilatin’ it that’s going to be the problem. We aren’t a—”

“—numerous people, and nobody loves us,” Tanya said, completing the proverb as she crossed to the windows, leaned her palms against the strong armor glass. “Doin’ my best about that, Strategos. Perceptible improvement here, since I saw it last.”

The Security officer scowled. “Partly because so many of the labor force don’t have anything to do but shift rubble.” He stubbed his cigarette out with a savage gesture. “Damn that sack! Waste: waste of raw materials, waste of skilled workers, waste of machinery. We could have used it, the Police Zone is still run-down from lack of maintenance durin’ the War an’ having trouble retooling.”

“What’s the point of victory, without looting?” she said lightly. The clouds were thinning, a good augury for the trip home.

“To take what they make and grow—for which we need them alive, and their tools. More important than stealin’ their jewelry, no?”

Andrew snorted. “My Legion was in on that sack, Strategos. We took twenty, thirty percent casualties between the Rhine crossin’s an’ here. Janissaries aren’t field hands or houseserfs; you need to give them proof positive of a victory. Lettin’ them loose in a town, drinkin’ themselves wild, pickin’ up pretties and riding the wenches bloody is the best way I know. Does wonders for morale, sir; wish there was somethin’ equivalent on antipartisan duty.”

Vashon composed himself and donned a smile. “At least with you settlers gettin’ agriculture in order, we won’t have to sell much more oil to the Yanks for wheat to feed Europe with. How’s it going, over there along the Loire, Cohortarch?”

She stretched. “Jus’ Tanya, Strategos; I’m in the Reserve now. Well as can be expected, all in all; the French were good farmers, but they pushed the land too hard durin’ the War. Shortages of fertilizer and livestock, equipment, horses . . . Lovely country, fine climate, grow anything well kept . . . but Frey and Freya, the way things are cut up! Fields the size of handkerchiefs, little hamlets ‘n’ villages all over the place, goin’ take a generation or two to get things in order.”

He nodded. “Same on the industrial front, or so the people from the Combines tell me. Overall output about equivalent to ours, or nearly, but the methods are so bloody different, it’s a mess. Had a fellah in from the Ferrous Metals Combine, actually broke down an’ cried after doin’ a survey; said the Poodles had thirty-six times the number of different machine tools we did, all of ’em needin’ a skilled operator, all split up in tiny little factories.”

Andrew raised a brow. “You’re beginnin’ to sound like my distressingly liberal cousin Eric. He thinks we should hold off on modernizin’ the Europeans, at least the Western provinces, supervise ‘n’ tax them instead.” A laugh. Maybe-so I should report you to Security, sir?”

Vashon forced himself to echo the laugh. Eric von Shrakenberg was a sore point with the Security Directorate, but after all, he was Arch-Stategos Karl von Shrakenberg’s son. And he had never quite qualified for a Section-IV detention, “by administrative procedure.” Not quite. He sighed, clicked heels.

“Service to the State,” he said in formal farewell as the von Shrakenbergs turned to leave.

“Glory to the Race,” they replied; the adults, at least. Gudrun put her head back through the door for a brief instant, stuck out her tongue and fled giggling.

Therese had been crying when the guard thrust her through the side door of the serf dealers’ office, into the holding bay.

“Anybody goan’ sign for thissere piece a’ shitbitch?” he said, giving a final flat-palmed shove between her shoulder blades that sent her sprawling on the floor; she was unbound, but the guard was a hulking man, muscle under fat, a baton in one hand and lead-backed brass knuckles on the other. His green coverall was faded, and there was no weapon on his webbing belt.

The room was a four-meter cube with wooden benches along the walls, dusty and empty and dim, silent save for Therese’s sobs as she crawled toward her sister. Chantal broke forward and hugged the slight girl to her; Marya sat trembling on the brink of action, suddenly acutely conscious of the slats digging into her naked flesh. Beside her, she heard Yasmin take a long breath and then rise; the serf girl had only just come in from the main section of the shop.

“I’s the one,” she said calmly, striding forward, trim in her jacket and shirt. The guard saw her, straightened slightly at the clothes and manner; only slightly, and his smile was insolent as he transferred his gaze back to the nude prisoners and extended the sheaf of documents. Yasmin took it, read, signed, pivoted on one heel and slammed the pasteboard flat across the side of the man’s face with a full-armed swing.

Crack. The sound seemed loud as a gunshot in the musty stillness, and the nun felt time slow in gelid coldness as her stomach clenched; the green-uniformed man loomed a head higher than the dark serf girl, and Marya saw the tension in her back. None of it showed in her voice as she spoke, even when the fist with its glove of spiked and weighted metal pulled back.

“Is that how you treats you momma? You sistah? Tings not hard enough fo’ the po’ little wench, you big, strong man gotsta make ’em worse?” Marya could make out the angry red right-angled mark of the clipboard as the man paled in rage; it had not done any great harm, but a blow like that carried an unmistakable significance in the world of the Domination.

“Yo cain’ talk to me like that-there, wench! I’s Security; you blind?” He jerked his chin at the skull markings on his collar.

“Ohhh, dearie me,” Yasmin drawled, and Marya could suddenly see the expression of mock fear even though the girl’s back was turned. “Whut have I gone an’ done? I’s jes’ pissin’ mahselfs with fear, watch me throw mahself on mah back ‘n’ spread outa tremblin’ respec’ fo’ you awesomeness, chain-dog.”

Her other hand dipped inside her jacket and came out with a palm-sized leather folder, snapped it open and held it at eye level for the man, above her own head.

“Cain you read, hmm? See this? This whut I is; I gots Category I papahs, chain-dog. I’s gotta thousand-auric bond posted on me, I’s private property—an ol’ family servant, and mah mistis trusts me, an’ she a von Shrakenberg, an’ she a Landholder, an’ my pa a soldier under her pa. Citizens doan’ lay hand to me without they got permission or provocation.” She raised the clipboard and slapped him across the other cheek.

His fist snapped up again. Yasmin laughed; a little breathless, but loudly.

“Go ’head, chain-dog. All I has t’do is say you hits me, an’ they trice you to the frame an’ uses a whip to show the world you backbone.” The fist relaxed; the man’s eyes dropped from the intimidating identity-card, past Yasmin’s glare.

“Jes’ doin’ my job,” he grumbled.

“You job was to brings her heah,” Yasmin snapped. “Not to slap her ’round. These wenches is all bought-out now, belongs to the von Shrakenbergs same’s me. An’ if’n they didn’t, ’s that any cause to be treatin’ ’em rough? Is they fightin’, disobeyin’?” She tore the top sheet from the clipboard and threw the remainder into the guard’s face. “Ain’t tings bad enough fo’ us, withouten we makes it worse fo’ each othah? Git outta my sight; you makes me sick.”

Yasmin turned as the door closed, drew her hands across her face and then clenched them together while she struggled to control her breathing; looked up with a smile as Chantal brought her sister to her feet.

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 her heartbeat; not something she 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, patting 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.

“Hmm. 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 nonpositive . . . 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, you 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 ironic. 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 inundated 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 steam trucks: 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 Finns are an immediate problem, though,” Ivar was saying “The number of troops 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 Tarleton, you dealt with maps, reports, photographs; the accumulated knowledge of centuries at your fingertips, an unmatched research staff, electronic tendrils reaching out over half the earth. The illusion of control came easily there. Out here, flying hour after hour above the living earth, you realized how big it was, how various, how unknowable.

The car was not crowded, even with seven and an assortment of bags and parcels; the interior was open, folding metal seats in the rear and two bucket chairs at the front, a view through the front windows to the coffle of serfs huddled on the floor of the truck ahead. Marya crossed herself and waved to them as she climbed through the clutter to her seat, composing herself neatly out of long habit, feet and knees together, skirt folded about them and hands clasped in her lap. The car smelled of machine oil and leather, wickerwork and a stuffy heat that brought a prickle of sweat to her upper lip.

The driver was a thin-faced Frenchman in overalls, wearing a cap pulled down over his eyes and cuffs with a long chain looped through the steering wheel; the man beside him was uncuffed, with an automatic shotgun across his knees and a leather vest full of loops for the fat shells. A serf, European, a thin strong young man with a dark face and old-looking green eyes; a Jew, Marya thought, Polish or Lithuanian or from the Ukraine. She ventured a smile; he looked her up and down with cold disinterest and turned back to the front, his right hand stroking lightly across the receiver of his weapon.

The women sat in the rear, with the other serf: a big man, even sitting down with his kettle belly spilling into his lap; African-dark, wide-featured and wide-shouldered, the arms below his short-sleeved cotton shirt thick and corded with muscle. Grizzled tight-curled hair and muttonchop whiskers, shrewd black eyes with yellowed whites. A rifle was resting upright by his side. Not the T-6 assault rifles the Domination had used in the Eurasian War; this was a full-bore semiautomatic model, dark wood and blued steel and a look the nun recognized, of machinery that is old but lovingly cared for.

He smiled with strong square yellow teeth as they chuffed into motion, but he did not speak; there was a moment of backing and circling as the convoy lined up for the gate. The engine had the silence of automotive steam, but the heavy vehicle still quivered with the subliminal feeling of life, rocked slightly as a uniformed figure hopped up on the running board. A woman’s face leaned in the window, green military-style uniform and cloth-covered steel helmet; a Citizen officer of the Security Directorate’s internal-security troops—Order Police. Therese buried her face in her sister’s shoulder, and the other serfs covered their eyes and bowed. There was another rocking as she stepped down, a brief sound of boots on pavement.

Marya could hear a murmur of voices, then Tanya’s weary drawl: “No, Tetrarch, I don’t have clearance papers fo’ two armed serfs. I’m violatin’ the law and armin’ all my field hands. Didn’t we go through this all three hours ago? Or didn’t the duty officer log it?”

The nun raised her head and craned to see through one of the windows. The Security officer saluted and returned a file folder through the opened door of the other car. A lochos of green-uniformed troopers behind her, shaven-skulled and neck-tattooed; the Domination did not waste elite troops on that sort of duty. The Tetrarch shouted, and one swung up the barrier while two more threw their shoulders against the steel gate. It groaned open, and the light seemed to brighten as the cars accelerated smoothly and turned into the road outside.

Yasmin shivered and shook her shoulders. “Doan’ like that place,” she said. “An I sho’ doan’ like them chain-dogs. They look at you an’ they gotta impalin’ stake in they eyes.”

The middle-aged man beside her brought the rifle across his knees, slapped in a magazine and jacked the action. “Headhunters,” he said in agreement, turned and spat out the open window behind him. “Greencoats, tloshohene dogs; stay clear of ’em.” He looked up at the women across the body of the car, and grinned broadly. “Name’s Tom,” he said. “Late o’ th’ 15th Janissary, an’ father to this here uppity wench, fo’ mah sins. Listen to what-all she say, this time. Usually nohow good for anything but sassin’ and bed-wenchin’ with her betters.”

Marya nodded warily, with a shock of alarm, feeling Chantal stiffen beside her. Therese was paying no attention, eyes dreamy, humming under her breath. Better for her that way.

Janissary, Marya thought with distaste. Serf soldier. Volunteers—she could understand why many would choose such a way out of the dull drudge’s life of a Draka factory or plantation hand . . . though not the courage with which they fought. And they had a merited reputation for relentless brutality. She shivered inwardly. They would be confined with him for hours; they were bound and he was armed. Although . . . she glanced at Yasmin. Her father? And even a Janissary could hate the green-coated secret police troopers. Remember the publicans, she reminded herself. Roman tax collectors had not been well regarded in Judea in the Lord’s time on earth, either. Hate the sin, love the sinner.

She nodded in return, swiveling to watch the city go by. Much had changed in the six months of her imprisonment. Central Detention had been a fortress then, wire and firing trenches and dug-in armored vehicles; all that was gone, save for two concrete machine-gun bunkers beside each gate. The road outside the wall had been repaired, and the cleared fire zone beyond was being converted to a park by labor squads and construction machinery; piles of earth and sand, benches of brick and marble, fountains, pavements, a flatbed steamtruck loaded with young trees, springing up from burlap balls of root and earth. The city beyond was changing, too. There had been a fair amount of street fighting when Lyon fell two years ago; more damage after the surrender, when the Domination turned its troops loose for a three-day sack that killed more than the artillery and air bombardments.

Marya forced that out of memory: days spent crouching thigh-deep in a sewer, furnace-hot air roaring overhead as the buildings burned, and the fever the filthy water brought . . . No, consider what this meant. Less Resistance activity, obviously; that was bad, very bad that it should happen so quickly.

Now the ruined buildings and rubble were mostly gone, cleared gaps where they had been and new structures going up, buildings in the low-slung gaudily-decorated Draka style. There were more Citizens walking on the streets or driving little four-wheel runabouts, many in civilian dress; armed, but from what she had heard, Draka always were, even in their homelands. The native French were less numerous than she remembered, fewer of them in rags, more in gray issue overalls or the sort of warm, drab outfit she had been given in the serf dealer’s rooms. That might account for much; it had been years since rations were enough to still hunger, even to sustain health.

The man’s voice broke in on her thoughts. “Not a bad-lookin’ town, pity I’s too ol’ an’ useless to git in on this here war, git me some lootin’.”

“Oh, Poppa,” Yasmin said in resigned exasperation. “That ain’t nohow polite, these folks is from around hereabouts.”

She pulled up a wicker basket from under her seat and began to open it. “Who’s fo’ somethin’ to—” The ex-Janissary’s hand shot into the basket, came out with a sandwich made from a split loaf of French bread, pink ham and onions and peppers showed around the edges. “—eat,” Yasmin finished.

Marya had absorbed the byplay in silence. The food brought an involuntary spurt of saliva to her mouth, and she could feel her ex-cellmates stirring beside her. Yasmin carefully tucked a linen napkin into the high collar of her silk jacket and began unloading the basket; sandwiches and slices of thick crusty bread with real butter, tart cheese, olives and tomatoes, sugar-dusted biscuits and real fruit, a thermos of coffee and a bottle of the violet-scented wine of Bourgueil. The dark girl coaxed a peach into Therese’s hand, laughing at the little sound of pleasure she made as she bit; they were a country-orchard variety, small, tart and intensely flavored. Chantal put a hand on her sister’s shoulder and leaned back into the padded wall of the vehicle.

“You are a soldier, sir?” she asked slowly in her careful English. “Or do you also belong to the von Shrakenbergs?”

Marya could read the expression of polite interest; Chantal was Gathering Intelligence, in the recesses of her own mind. Carefully, carefully, she thought; but it was a sign of something more than rage born of despair, at least. You could come to know someone well, after four months together in a crowded cell. A wave of pity overtook her; at least her own faith was not so tied to the fortunes of war. God promised no victories over material enemies, His Kingdom was not of this fallen earth . . . but poor Chantal had given her heart to a prophet who promised a tangible paradise. The Marxist heresy was sinful and godless, but the Frenchwoman’s belief had been deep and sincere, rooted in love of the poor whom Christ also had held dear, her hatred a hatred of injustice as well of the rich.

Be cautious, my friend. It was ironic, here a Pole was being the calculating and rational one, cautioning a Frenchwoman against romantic gestures . . .

“Doan’ need to ‘sir’ me,” the man replied, his voice a slow deep rumble. “Yaz ’n no. I’s Janissary. Born on Oakenwald, that Mistis Tanya’s home, down in th’ Old Territories, way south. I go fo’ Janissary back in, Allah, that be 1911, ’12. Masta Everard, Tanya’s pa, he officer in mah legion, th’ 15th.”

He flipped the rifle up, holding it out by the barrel to show a small ivory inset near the buttplate: the head of a hyena, biting down on a human thighbone.

“We the Devil Dogs, th’ bone-makers,” he said proudly. “This here mah original piece; fight all through th’ Great War, beatin’ the ragheads; Syria, Persia, Bulgaria. Aftah that, we’se in The Stan.” He paused at his audience’s blank looks. “Afghanistan. Hoo, deedy; we make our bones heah, sho’ly did.” His smile slid away. “Left plenty bones, too. Damn few come out what went in, damn few.” More softly: “Damn few, sho’ly.”

“Well,” he continued brightly. “That where I loses th’ foot.” He shifted his right leg, knocked it against a strut with a hollow sound. “Step onna land mine, ’n lemme tell yaz—”

“Oh, Poppa, not more of you war stories,” Yasmin broke in, rolling her eyes and turning to the others. “They disgustin’.”

The man grinned slyly and glanced sidelong at his daughter: “Hell, jes’ losin’ a foot not so bad. I’s rememberin’ a sergeant, supply sergeant that was, ragheads caught him, and we found him with his—”

“Poppa!”

He laughed again, and reached out one huge hand to stroke the knuckles gently down her cheek. “Alright, sweetlin’, jes’ jokin’.”

“So,” he continued, taking a meditative bite of the sandwich, “coulda took retirement, laak a twenty-year man. Didn’ seem mucha life fo’ a young man, though. Done seen too many old Janissary, nothin’ to do but drink an’ knife each othah over cards ’n whores down at the caserne. You can go home, though. Janissary always belong to th’ State, cain’t never be sold, or whupped ’cept by our own officer, but if’n you volunteer, they rent you back. As guard, foreman, like that-there. Masta Everard, he settin’ up Evendim, that his place in Syria; he younger son, ’n Masta Karl gettin’ Oakenwald. I go with Masta Everard; he know me, y’see?

“I’s settle down nice; get me a wench, Fatima.” An affectionate sadness. “She got no sense, but she a good woman, I doan’ want no other while she ’live. She die birthin’ back befo’ this new war come; mah boys gone fo’ Janissary too—they in th’ 15th now too, out east fightin’ down the slope-eyes, someplace called Korea. Yasmin heah mah las’ chile, ’n she go with Mistis Tanya, so I comes too. You Frenchies got lotsa book learnin’ but you needs us t’learn the Draka. Some folks here is pretty sensible—got me a nice little widow wench ’n cottage—others altogethah useless ’n triflin’.”

He shifted his grip on the rifle, holding the heavy weapon by the stock and prodding the driver lightly in the back of the neck. “Like Jacques here, I’s got mah eye on you, boy. Doan’ forget it.” The rough voice went cold for a moment, and then he flicked the rifle upright beside him and relaxed once more. “Issac—th’ skinny boy with th’ bird gun—he a smart one. Doan’ talk much, though.”

“Like you, Poppa,” Yasmin said dryly as she repacked the basket, handing him a bottle of dark German beer. Her father snorted amusement, flicked the cap off with one horn-hard thumb and turned sideways to watch the passing scene, the rifle cradled in the crook of his arm.

“I,” the girl continued, fastidiously wiping her hands on her napkin and then using it to clean Therese’s chin, “am second indoor servant.”

It was said with a slight unconscious preening; the ex-Janissary’s glance was fond and proud. Even slaves must have their accomplishments, Marya thought. Then: be careful, this is real power, here and now.

“If’n you got any questions, come right to me.” She sighed and tossed back the loose black mane of hair. “Sometimes doan’ know rightly how to start, with you Frenchies. Doan’ sass back; doan’ sulk or disobey. There’s ways ’n ways of gettin’ around the Mastahs, but goin’ straight up agin’ they will ain’t accomplishin’ nothin’ but grief fo’ us all. Remembah all us serfs is family; talk as y’wants, do as y’wants if’n yous the only one to suffer, but doan’ do anythin’ what gets us all traced up to the whuppin’ post or worse. If’n you finds someone’s doin’ a crazy, like tryin’ to hide weapons or sneak off to the bushmen, come tell me an’ we’ll decide amongst ouahselfs what to do.”

Yasmin smiled and nodded toward the cuffs. “Soon’s we gets back to Chateau Retour”—she pronounced the French words carefully—“we’ll get those-there off. The Big House doan’ cuff or hobble on the plantation, ’cept as a punishment. Now,” she continued briskly, “the overseers, Masta Donaldson, Mistis Wentworth”—she shrugged—“they overseers, whats cain I say? Not too bad, ’n the Mastah ’n Mistis keep a close eye on ’em. Mistis Tanya, she downright easy going fo’ a Draka, long as you doan’ cross her. Masta Edward, her man, he pretty much the same‘cept when his head painin’ him.”

One brown finger tapped an eye. “He gets a head wound in th’ War; lose an eye, headaches real bad sometimes; gets pretty testy when one comin’ on, you sees it, stay outta his way. Other times, doan’ talk to y’much.” She giggled. “Not so bad in bed, either, if’n y’likes it, not rough, anyhow, ’cept sometimes he finish too quick, but you be findin’ out that fo’ youselfs.” An ironic eye at their flinch. “Call it work, call it play, doan’ make no nevah-mind to them, dearies. Honest, the things you new-caught get upsets about, it beyond me.”

Chantal cleared her throat, spoke in genuine wonderment: “Are . . . you content with your life, then?”

There was silence for a moment, a thrumming as the car swung onto the bridge over the Rhone. Light flickered by as they passed through the shadow of the girders, winked back from the surface of the river below; Yasmin wound down a window, and the stream of wet silt-smelling air poured in, ruffling the black curls around her face. She brushed them back with one hand, craning her neck to see a train of coal barges passing below.

“Pretty river,” she said quietly, turning back to them. “You thinks there’s somethin’ wrong with lookin’ at it?” She paused, pursed her lips in thought. “My life? It the only life I’s got, or is goin’ get; if’n I ain’t content with it, then I ain’t goin’ get much contentment, eh?”

A spread of the hands. “Ain’t sayin’ as everythin’s the way I’d put it, were I God, but that-there position’s filled, last time I looks. Plenty good things in my life; pretty things”—she touched the buttons of her jacket—“ ‘joyable things, like m’work, which I’s good at an’ getting better, my music”—she touched the case of her mandolin—“ ‘n my fam’ly an’ friends. Someday I’s have children of my own, maybe-so a steady man. If’n I doan’ take no pleasure from all that-there, who it hurt? Me, that who. Somebody else hurt you, that fate; hurt youself, that plain ignorant; troubles enough in anyone’s life, withouten you go courtin’ ’em. I ain’t hongry, ain’t sickenin’ to die, never been whopped; plenty folks worse off than me, I saves my pity fo’ them, doan’ waste it on myself.

“Look,” she continued gently, “I knows y’all not born an’ raised to this.” She touched her identity tattoo. “But this-here the only life you has to live, likewise same’s me. I’s not sayin’ nothin’ bad doan’ happen, but”—she gestured helplessly, as if trying to pluck words out of the air—“not everythin’ is bad, unless you makes it so. The Draka?” She shrugged. “They’s like the weather, they’s jus’ there. I’s known folks, rather cut off they foot than ’commodate to the mastahs; they-all end up churnin’ they guts with hatin’. Hate enough, it make go’ hateful; it jus’ ain’t worth the trouble, to my way a’ thinkin’.”

Earnestly: “You sees, the Draka can make you obey, but they can’t make you miserable. Well,” she amended, “not unless they sets out to, which the ones which owns us doan’, speakin’ general-like.” A tap on the head. “They orders, but we can say what goes on in here, eh? I’s do my work, takes the days one at a time, doan’ hurt nobody, helps those I can; when I’s got to do somethin’ I doan’ like, I does it an’ puts it outa my mind, soon’s I can.”

She smiled, trailing a hand out into the airstream. “Yous looks like sensible wenches, y’all will learn.”

For a moment Marya’s gaze touched Chantal’s, and they knew a rare moment of perfect agreement; an understanding so complete it was almost telepathy—Never.

It was sunset when the vehicles reached the boundaries of the plantation. They had been driving along the north bank of the Loire, on the road that ran along the embankment of the levee. Tiredness dragged at Marya like water, a band of weariness over the brow weighting her head, and still the scene brought her out of herself.

The river lay to their left as they drove westward past ruined Tours, broad and slow and blue, long islets of yellow sand like teardrops of gold starred with the green of osier willow. It was mild, with the gentle humid freshness of spring in the Val of Touraine; the sun was on the western horizon, throwing the long shadows of cypress and poplar towards them, flickering bars of black against the crushed white limestone of the road. Clouds drifted like cotton puffs in a sky turning dark royal blue above, shading to day-color and the flaming magenta shade of bougainvillea on the horizon.

Down the bank to the river was long grass, intensely green, broken by clumps of lilac in white and purple; on the narrow strip of marshy ground along the base of the embankment were willow trees leaning their long trailing branches into the slow-moving water, over carpets of yellow flag iris.

I am so tired and so afraid, Marya thought, sliding the window down and breathing in. Forty kilometers an hour, and streamers of hair the color of birchwood flicked out from under her kerchief. But this minute is the gift of God; He is here, so here home is. The fleeting scent of the lilacs, a delicate sweetness, the heavier scent of a flowering chestnut tree. Country smells, warmer and more spicy than her native Malopolska. She smiled and sighed, ceasing to fight the weariness. How had Homer put it, in the mouths of those fierce bronze-sworded Achaean warriors, so long ago? “It is well to yield unto the night.”

Warsaw was burning. The cone of it was a ruddy glow on the darkening eastern horizon, matching the huge copper disk of the setting sun in the west. Even at this distance the firestorm gave a smoky taste to the wind, a hint of that sulfur-tinged darkness, the taste of death. The flicker and rumble of artillery were faint, no louder than the hiss of grain stalks against the steel flanks of the Draka armor hull-down on the low crest overlooking the village. Four dozen of them, squat massive shapes in mottled green-yellow camouflage paint with the mailed-fist symbol of the Archonal Guard Legion stenciled on their bows. Their engines thrummed, the roar of free-piston gas generators blending with the power turbine’s hum. Air quivered over the exhaust baffles on their rear decks, and the whip antennae swayed erratically in the breeze.

Loki take the heat, Cohortarch Tanya von Shrakenberg thought, and rubbed a gloved hand over the wet skin of her neck. She glanced back over the rear of the command tank, through the narrow gap left by the hatch cover poised over her head like a steel mushroom-cap.

Behind them trails stretched two kilometers south to the woodlot where the unit had last paused. Broad parallel stripes where the treads had pulped grain and stalk into the earth, arcs and circles across the rolling plain showing where the fighting vehicles had maneuvered. Ten minutes of combat, and the taste of it was still in her mouth, salt and iron and copper, acid in the stomach, ache in the muscles of neck and back. Training helped, prahna breathing and muscle control, the simple knowledge that the job had to be done whatever the state of your emotions . . . and still, every time you knew a little something was gone. A little of whatever it was that kept you functioning while you waited for the armor to buckle under the brute impact of an antitank shell and send spalls flying like supersonic buzzsaws, for the millisecond flame of exploding ammunition, for the slower trickle of burning fuel as you hammered at a jammed hatch. You survived, and lost a little of yourself from within, and knew that one day, if you kept coming, the well would be dry . . .

The German armor was scattered back there among the ruined corn, burning with the sullen flicker of diesel oil in circles of blackened straw, or frozen with only the narrow entry hole of a tungsten-carbide penetrator rod to show reason for immobility. The pakfront of Fritz antitank guns had been dug in along the crest of this . . . not really a ridge, more a gentle swelling.

The Cohortarch shook her head; they were expecting to lie low as their armor pulled back past them to the village, then hit the Draka tanks as they pursued, no doubt. A good trick, but one she had met before; the Fritz were like that: fine tacticians but a little inflexible. Artillery to suppress the antitank, then a slow advance to force the Fritz armor to engage at ranges where Draka APDS shot would punch through German tanks the long way. Bodies lay hidden in the tall grain or draped around shattered half-tracks; her infantry had hunted them down from the turrets and firing ports of their combat carriers. Two Draka Hond Ills remained, victims of shells fired point-blank through the thinner armor of flank and rear, the blanket-shrouded corpses of their crews showing victory could kill you as finally as defeat.

Moisture trickled out of the sodden lining of the communications helmet as Tanya turned from the wreckage to her rear and made a slow scan of the wheatfield ahead.

The thick armor of a Hond soaked up heat like a sponge under direct sunlight. There was a lot of that in the Polish summer, and she would swear firing the main gun racked up another five degrees with every round. The ventilation fans continued their losing battle; the Baalbeck Belle had been buttoned up for more than ten hours, in the line for over a month with scant time for anything but essential maintenance. The inside of the tank was heavy with the smells: lubricant, burnt propellant and scorched metal, old sweat; an empty shellcasing off in one corner of the turret basket was half full of urine with a couple of used menstrual pads floating in it . . . She ignored it, as she ignored the salt itch of her unwashed uniform and the furry texture of her teeth and the ground-glass feeling under eyelids from too little sleep and too much exposure to abrasive fumes.

It could be worse, she mused, glancing down at the swivel-mounted map tray on the left arm of her reclining seat, past it into the white-painted gloom of the tank’s interior. There was not much open space; the huge breech and recoil mechanism of the main cannon cut the turret’s interior nearly in half, flanked on either side by the coaxial machine gun and grenade launcher. Dials, gauges and armored conduits snaked over every surface. The gunner lay to the right of her weapon nearly prone on a crashcouch that raised her head just enough to meet the padded eyepiece of episcope and sights. Behind the gunner’s head was the sliding armorplate door that blocked off the ammunition stored in the turret bustle, ready to the hand of the loader on his swivel-seat below.

Economy of space was the formal term; it took considerable training to move even in a stationary tank without bruising yourself, and there was barely enough open space to tape snapshots of her husband and children below the vision blocks of the commander’s cupola. Still, better than the infantry . . .

Could be much worse; the Fritz could be using nerve gas again. Which would mean everybody into those damned rubber suits, and that would mean casualties from heat prostration, even among Draka.

She rapped the heel of one hand against the pressure plate beneath the vision blocks, and the hatch cover snapped upright with a sough of hydraulics. The lift-brace-step motion that left her standing on the turret deck with boots astride the hatch was nearly as unconscious as walking, after two years in the field. Wind blew into her face as she raised the field glasses, warm and dry, dusty and much, much cleaner than the air in the tank; the sodden fabric of her overalls turned cool as the moving air let sweat evaporate.

Still alive, she thought. On a fine summer’s day, in the odd alien beauty of the Baltic twilight, like a world seen through amber honey; and it was good to feel the faint living quiver in the sixty-ton bulk beneath the soles of her feet.

Reliable old bitch, she thought affectionately. The Belle had carried her a long way since the spring of ’42. North from the Caucasus, over the Don, west across the Ukraine, through the murderous seesaw winter battles around Lwow. Wherever the Supreme General Staff thought the Domination’s best armored Legion was needed . . . Eighteen months, a long lifetime for a tank, even counting weeks in the Legion repair shops and a complete rebuild; there were scars and gouges on the sloped plates of the armor, two dozen victory rings on the thermal cover of the long 120mm cannon, Fritz skull still wearing its SS helmet on a spike welded to the fume extractor.

The reverse slope to the village was gentle; this part of the Vistula valley was water-smoothed, sandy alluvial loam. Ripe wheat, a big field of it, fifty or sixty hectares, bordered by a row of poplars; more of those lining the country road or serving as field boundaries beyond. The grain was overripe, gold turning brown in spots and the overburdened stalks falling in swales, and the field was scattered with wildflowers and thistles.

Damned waste, a Landholder’s corner of her mind noted. Lost if it isn’t harvested soon. Three thousand meters to the north a white dirt road crossed the river that wound tree-bordered through the dry summer landscape, and the junction had spawned a straggling farm town. Trees, unpaved streets lined with fences and gardens and whitewashed log homes, barns, a few brick structures around the flamboyantly painted stone church. Past it . . . heat haze and dust cut visibility, so did the long shadows of evening; woodlot, could be a manor house, hedges and gardens. Beyond were more fields, patches of forest, vanishing northward into the dusty horizon.

Hmmmm, question is, was that half-hard feint their idea of a rear guard, or is there more in the village?

Orders were to consolidate once she met solid resistance. Then the Janissary motorized infantry would pass through and establish a perimeter; the serf soldiers were good enough at positional warfare, and the Citizen Force legions were supposed to save themselves for shock and pursuit. It was a big war, too big to be won in a single rush; you got weaker as you advanced away from your bases, and the enemy stronger as they fell back on theirs. The Fritz had been soundly beaten east of the Vistula, but without Hitler to order senseless last stands they had withdrawn in good order, their mechanized forces screening the foot-infantry’s retreat; von Mehr, the German commander of Army Group Center, was a master at luring an attacker to overextend and then catching him with a backhand stroke. It was time to halt, refit, bring up supplies for the next leap.

It never paid to underestimate the Fritz tactically, either; Germans tended to fight by the book, but the one they used was excellent, and there could be anything ahead. Tanya tapped a meditative thumb against her lower lip, then returned attention to the hum and crackle of voices in her ears; habit strained it out, unless her call sign came through. She keyed the intercom circuit: “Call to Bugeye, Sparks,” she said. A click, a warble, then the sound of an airplane engine.

“Check, Groundpound to Bugeye, that’s negative on movement, over.”

“Affirm’tive, Groundpound. Nary nothin’ but dead cows an’ that-there wrecked convoy I spotted earlier, over.”

And the convoy had been moving away from here northwest toward the Fritz hedgehog around Chelmno when the ground-strike aircraft caught them.

Worth it, she decided. Plaster the village with HE, cut in with a pincers movement, then halt. The low ground along the river would make a good stop zone. Damn I wish I wasn’t so tired, ran through her. Hard to make proper decisions when body and mind and soul together whined for rest; harder still when the lives of friends and comrades depended on it. No tremendous hurry, she reminded herself. The village looked deserted, no human movement at all, which meant everyone there had already gone to ground. She blinked again, fascinated for a moment by the quality of the light, the wash of a . . . faded gold? Bright, but aged somehow, as if the view had been worn down by the impress of too many eyes. Tired light.

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.

“Yes, it’s comin’ back. The Fritz, that was like a hundred other skirmishes,” Tanya said. “But yo, now that’s a different matter, not very often somebody hands me two kilos a’ plastique under a loaf of rye.” Her smile was slow and broad, as she looked the nun up and down. “Y’haven’t changed much, would’ve recognized you earlier, ’cept the penguin suit’s missin’. An’ the last I saw of you was you rump, goin’ away.” She laughed, a rich sound full of amusement, bracing her hands in the small of her back. “Who says Fate doesn’t have a sense of humor?” The grin turned wolfish. “We really should talk it over, see how our recollections differ. Might be interestin’. If you remembers, that is.”

Chantal and Lebrun were glancing from Marya to their owner, bewildered. Tanya was more relaxed than ever, if anything. The Pole’s naturally pale complexion had gone a gray-white color; she closed her eyes for a moment, lips moving. Then they opened again, and she planted herself on her feet.

“Yes, I remember,” she whispered.

“Must we do it today?” Chantal Lefarge asked, shifting the ledger restlessly from one arm to another.

“It will do you good to get out of doors,” Marya Sokolowska said firmly. The other woman had been losing weight and sleep. The nun forced herself not to think of the real reason: it was not something she could alter, and bringing it up would help neither of them. “Besides, we’ve done as much as we can without instructions. This way.”

They turned right from the south-facing main doors between tall beeches that threw dazzling leaf blinks of sunlight in their faces. The gardens to the east of the Great House were warm and softly murmurous with bee hum, drowsing in the early summer afternoon. Further out they grew shaggy, where fields had been enclosed for future care. Labor and time were still too short for much to be spent on adornment, and the von Shrakenbergs had merely transplanted sapling trees where avenues and groves would be. Sheep grazed there, keeping the grass mowed short and starting the process that would end in dense velvet-textured lawns. Lately they were joined by a group of dik-dik, miniature antelopes four inches at the shoulder; by peacocks and red deer and flamingos.

One of the huge black-coated hounds the Draka kept ambled over to the two women, nosing at Marya’s hand; she ruffled the beast’s ears, which were nearly at the level of her chest. Lion-dog indeed, she thought. That was the Draka name for the breed, so called for their size, and the thick manelike ruff the males grew. And because they were used in catsticking, putting lions at bay for mounted hunters with lances. It wagged its tail, sniffed suspiciously at Chantal, who was holding herself rigid with control. Lion-dogs were also used to hunt runaway serfs, and they had both seen the scars on a man who had tried to make the Channel, soon after the plantation was founded; he had been kept alive at considerable trouble, as an example.

“It’s only a dog, Chantal,” Marya said. “Touch it, go ahead.” The younger woman extended a hand, which received a perfunctory sniff; it wagged its tail and trotted away, nails clicking on the bricks. They continued around a screen of bushes, past a dry fountain, its link to the water main not yet finished.

Marya stopped at an open manhole cover; the man sitting on the edge beside a wheeled tray of tools stubbed out his cigarette and made to rise, removing his flat cloth cap.

“No, Marcel,” the nun said. “How is the leg? I thought you had permission to rest a while yet.” Although he’s making a good recovery, she thought critically. Still drawn and underweight, but it had been only three months since the ambush in the gorge, and it was excellent progress for such a serious injury, followed by major surgery. Of course, the Domination’s medical corps had a matchless fund of experience in dealing with wound trauma.

He laughed with a slightly sheepish expression and slapped the cap against the stainless-steel prosthetic that replaced his left leg above the knee. “A good afternoon, Sister. Don’t worry, I’m not walking far on it yet. I sit on the cart and young André here”—an adolescent popped his head out of the hole, nodded to Marya and Chantal, and returned below to the accompaniment of a metallic clanking and banging—“pushes me about. He’s a good apprentice, but he needs direction. I only work where I can sit, vraiment . . . and I was getting bored, sitting in the cottage and annoying Jacqueline, she has her own work to do. Believe me, Sister, it does a man good to get out in the fresh air and feel he’s doing something useful. Very interesting system of piping they’ve put in here, extruded aluminum where we’d’ve used cast iron.”

He yawned, paused to look down. “No, no, the number three connector, imbecile!” To Marya: “And is it true there’s to be a holiday, Sister?”

Chantal answered, running her hand through her uncombed hair. “Yes. The next generation of tyrants is a month old.”

The air was warm, scented with tea roses and freshly cut grass, but a chill seemed to touch them. “Now, that was a very stupid thing to say, Mademoiselle Lefarge,” the plumber replied softly. “Very stupid indeed.” Down the hole, where the noises had ceased: “Continue, André, and keep your ears shut.”

Chantal glared at him through red-rimmed eyes; the pipefitter had belonged to the Catholic trade union, before the War. Class-traitor, she thought: just the sort one would expect to turn out a collaborationist. “You were expecting a song of praise for our owners, perhaps?”

“Chantal!” Marya whispered sharply.

“No, Sister, let me reply.”

Marcel picked up a wrench and spun the adjusting screw, but his eyes never left Chantal’s. “I heard a great deal of that sort of thing before the War,” he said. The nun looked at his hands, broad and battered like any working man’s, but also scarred across the knuckles.

“Union jurisdictional disputes” in Lyon had meant more than handing out pamphlets, she suspected.

“In the Army, too, after I was called up; that was in ’40, before the Nazis attacked Russia. The Party men were always going on about how it was a war for the rich only; after we lost, they said right out we should collaborate. I know, I spent three years in a German prisoner-of-war camp and they let copies of L’Humanité circulate. Then when we were released I fought again as a volunteer against the Draka, in Belgium, and I escaped because a Flemish peasant saw a rosary in my hand when he found me lying wounded in the woods. And it was a Frenchman who shot off my leg.

“So now, comrade Lefarge, I have my work, my garden, a child on the way, and a wife whom I do not intend to leave alone again. That is all that concerns me. About what used to be, I try not to think at all; I have fought enough. Too much to be pushed by someone like you, the type who lost us everything. Now if Father Adelard, or the good Sister here, tells me to do more, I would consider it . . . As for you, comrade, endanger yourself if you must. But not me or my family! Or you may suffer an accident. You understand me?”

The Frenchwoman’s eyes slid away from his. He nodded to the nun. “A beautiful day, Sister, isn’t it? As pretty a place to work as any, as well.” A shaky smile. “Better smelling than most a man in my trade gets.”

Marya nodded, and decided not to rebuke the man for the threat. Besides which, he was right; it was pure folly to take risks without need or hope of results. Sinful, even; prudentia was a virtue, and God had not given the gift of life to be spent recklessly.

“Indeed it is, Marcel,” she replied gently; he was sweating, struggling to control his breathing and put on an appearance of calm. There were so many with memories too hurtful to bear, on this wounded earth. She glanced around. “Beautiful, today.”

Here, closer to the manor, the changes were more extensive, old plantings with alterations in the Draka taste; French gardens were too formal and close-pruned to suit them. Pathways in tessellated colored bricks salvaged from ruins and towns, ponds and watercourses, a few fine pieces of statuary in bronze or marble, mostly loot as well. And flowerbeds, bush and trellis roses, young hedges of multiflora, banks of purple violets, impatiens in mounds of hot coral and magenta, geraniums nodding in trembling sheets of pale translucent lavender. She had seen Tanya’s watercolors of what the grounds would look like when the plans were complete; this was merely a foreshadowing.

Well, at least they use their stolen wealth for something besides tanks and bombers, she thought wryly.

“I’m sorry,” Chantal said, beside her. “It’s just—I—”

“I know,” Marya said, putting an arm around her shoulders. She could feel a quiver under her palm. “I understand, child. Do you want to go back? I can give the mistress her summaries myself.”

“No, no.” Chantal drew herself up. “You do more than your share already.”

The pergola was set in the middle of a maze, the young hedges only knee-high as yet, with tall beeches and poplars left standing from the pre-War gardens. Climbing roses twined through wooden trellises between the marble columns, over lacework arches above them, through the verdigrised metal flowers of the dome; for a moment Marya thought of blood drops on a sheet of crumpled green velvet. Music sounded over the quiet plashing of the water.

“Solange,” Chantal said. Marya nodded; the instrumental portion was a recording but the voice of Tanya’s body servant was unmistakable, a soaring mezzo-soprano, beautifully trained. Solange had spent two years in the Conservatoire in Paris, and practiced faithfully since.

“Delibes,” Chantal continued. The nun nodded, startled at another flash of the scholarship the girl from Lyons occasionally showed. “Delibes’ Lakme, the Fleurette à deux.

“Quite good,” she continued. “Not meant for a solo, but quite good.” It was spoken grudgingly: there was bad blood between the two.

The two bookkeepers entered, made their obeisance; Tanya von Shrakenberg signaled them to wait with an upraised palm. Marya looked at her, then transferred a fixed gaze to the edge of the pergola above, blushing furiously. The mistress of Chateau Retour was reclining on a lounger, wearing an undergarment that seemed to be made of nothing but two triangles of silk. Shameless, the nun thought. I should be accustomed to it, but I am not. She herself was dressed in an ankle-length skirt and a high-collared blouse that buttoned at the wrist; she wiped sweat from her upper lip and suppressed a moment’s envy at the cool comfort of the long body resting in the dappled shade. Indecent. The Rule of her own Order forbade even bathing without at least a shift.

Of course, it could be worse: at least Tanya was a woman. Draka men were equally careless. Grimly she forced her eyes down again, aware that her ears had turned a bright burning pink and that her owner would see and be amused. The Draka was lying with one arm behind her head, the other resting on a table beside the couch that bore a Carries coffee service and a bowl of strawberries beside a tall glass of clotted cream. Beyond that was a wheeled stroller with her month-old twins; one was looking around with the mild wide-eyed wonder of any infant, the other suckling at the breast of the wet nurse who sat beside the carriage.

That did not embarrass her; it was something you saw every day in a Polish village. Madonna and child, she thought with a brief warmth. A real thing, and also the representation of a Mystery, the first icon of compassion; even the heathen in the days before Christ had made the Mother and Babe a symbol of holiness. Marya watched the wet nurse as she smiled and stroked the baby’s cheek; remembered hearing that Draka women almost never breast-fed their infants, and wondered how they could bear not to.

Captain Manuel Guzman leaned against the periscope well of the Benito Juarez and felt the clammy sweat trickling down under the roll-top collar of his sweater. The control center was underlit by the eerie blue glow of the silent-running lights, and utterly quiet; even the feet of the crewmen were muffled in felt overboots, and when they moved at all it was with an exaggerated care. Natural enough, since their lives depended on it: the Juarez was grounded in the soft silt of the estuary and helpless if the Draka searchers found a trace of her. The passive sound-detection gear was in operation, but they could all hear the throbbing of high-speed screws through the hull, resonating in the closed spaces of the submarine.

Twin screws, the captain thought. He was a stocky brown-skinned man with the flat face and hook nose of Yucatan’s Maya Indians, old enough to have been a sub commander in the Pacific during the Eurasian war, and there was sympathy behind the impassive brown eyes as he watched the younger members of the bridge crew. This was the hardest part: nothing to do but think, nothing to think about but the crushing weight of water outside the thin plating of the hull, and of drowning in darkness.

Twin screws, going fast, his mind continued. Boosting on peroxide-turbines, much more powerful than the fuel-cell cruise motors but noisy. Over them, fading now. Probably one of the new Direwolf class stalker-killer subs, based on German research the snakes had captured; they had never been much at naval design. His mind drew in the details, long cigar-shaped hull, streamlined conning tower, cruciform control rudders with rear-mounted propellers . . . built to hunt other subs, but the Domination’s sensor technology was nothing like as good as the Alliance’s.

And the Juarez was a fine boat for this clandestine work. Modified from a mid-War cargo sub design, slow but ultraquiet, with a hold capable of shipping a variety of surprises.

“What do we do now?” the man from the OSS asked in a whisper, after the noise faded.

“We wait,” Guzman said curtly. He did not like the Ivy League types secret intelligence seemed to attract; this one reeked of old-stock Yankee money and breeding. Too many of that sort at Annapolis, he thought resentfully. The kind who had made his first days at the Academy Hell Week in plain truth, back when indios were a government-mandated rarity and fiercely resented, when the only other Spanish speakers there had been criollo bluebloods, the sort of hacienda-owning maricones his father had spent a lifetime working for.

“Consider yourself lucky, amigo, that this isn’t one of the old diesel-electric boats,” he continued. Fuel cells did not need exterior oxygen, and if necessary they could wait two weeks, with abundant energy to crack fresh atmosphere out of seawater. “Now we wait, run up the antenna every night. When we get the message,you can bring out that fancy folding airplane of yours. If we get the message.”

The agent blinked back at him; the captain reminded himself that the look of mournful reproach in the man’s deep-set eyes was a trick of his features, not genuine expression. Face like a horse with a receding chin, he thought.

“Our man will make it,” the OSS man said in his nasal twang. “He’s been in there a long time, but he’ll make it, and with the job done. He’s . . . that sort of fellow.”

Guzman nodded. It would take a man with real balls to survive very long among the snakes and make it back to the west. He looked up, imagining the destroyers putting out from Nantes, the patrol aircraft and dirigibles lifting from their runways and docking towers. It’s going to take balls and luck to be here alive when he arrives, he thought wryly, The Alliance and the Domination were not formally at war, hence the Benito Juarez was still officially in her homeport at Hampton Roads, or out on a training cruise.

That was the necessary fiction. And there would be, could be no action to save the nonexistent Juarez here in the Domination’s territorial waters. Nothing but a “lost at sea” telegram to their families if they did not return.

His eyes went to the picture taped to the guardrail of the periscope well, a smiling woman with hair the color of cornsilk and a Hawaiian lei around her neck. Bonnie-Lee would wait, and not in vain.

“Secure to holding stations,” he told his exec. The man nodded, none of that surface-navy nonsense about bracing to attention in pigboats. “Carry on,” Guzman continued, turning to go. There were always letters to write, even if they could not be posted.

“Master, wake up, plait,” the voice said.

Kustaa’s hand darted under the pillow to touch the butt of his pistol; the Domination’s 10mm service-issue, but he had practiced enough to be as much at home with it as he had been with the Concord .44s he carried in Sumatra. Awareness came on the heels of the movement, and he relaxed into his yawn, catching himself in time to stop his natural reflex to cover himself with a woman in the room.

She had stepped prudently back after putting the tray on the table beside the bed, and smiled timidly at him as he sat up with another yawn and a stretch. God, it’s difficult to be nonchalant with a hard-on, he thought, unconsciously glancing down at a morning erection like nothing he could remember since he was a teenager. Well, two months of celibacy doesn’t help, he reminded himself wryly. That brought other memories, and he slapped the servant’s hand aside with unnecessary violence when she followed his eyes and reached tentatively for him.

“Sorry,” he grunted, and saw confusion added to alarm as she jumped back with a cry, cradling her hand. Christ, what a bastard you can be, he thought at himself. Bad enough the momentary temptation, but to take his self-disgust out on her in anger . . . She’s just a kid. Sixteen, he judged; slim, with long russet hair and eyes the honey-brown color of water in a forest pond blinking at him. Dressed in some sort of long knit-silk shirt to just above her knees, and a tied-off cloth belt, with sandals that strapped up her calfs. She’s probably afraid of getting whipped if she doesn’t lay you. The orange number-tattoo was obscenely evident behind her ear.

Kustaa stood and let her put the caftan over his head, sat while she poured him coffee. The smell was almost intoxicating, and it was black and strong, enough to jolt him into higher gear. The room was midway up the taller square tower at the rear of the old chateau building, about ten feet by fifteen. Two tall narrow windows, one looking east over the gardens and the other north along the roofline of the new wing, with its neat black slates and the balustraded terrace at the end. Both windows were open, letting in fresh green smells and early-morning light; it was about six, he estimated.

I could at least have fallen in among decadent aristocrats who lolled in bed until noon, he thought grumpily. The ones who owned this estate were probably up already, working at the famous Draka fitness. No rest for the wicked, he mused sardonically. In this case, literally. The coffee finished, he accepted a glass of orange juice and began prowling about the room; it was paneled in plain dark polished oak to thigh level, then finished in deep-blue tiles with silver-gilt edges. The ceiling looked like translucent glass, probably some indirect-lighting system; the floor was jade-green marble squares, covered by an Oriental-looking rug that felt silky to his bare feet. He stopped by the east window, pointing east to a set of large striped tents half-hidden among trees, a thousand yards away.

“What are those?” he grated. Not quite so exaggeratedly as he had for the Draka—it was unlikely they would compare notes with the French girl.

“Ces?” she said, coming to stand beside him. “Pour . . . fo’ les guests, maistre. No, how you say, room here fo’ all.”

A discreet scratching at the door; the girl answered in French and another woman entered, pushing a wheeled tray. This one middle-aged, dressed in blouse and skirt; there were razors, basins and towels on the metal-framed stand before her. With a sigh, Kustaa sank back into the chair, submitting to the routine of hot towels, a trim for hair that was growing a little shaggy by the standards of the Domination’s military-style crop, a careful edging with tiny scissors at his mustache, manicure, pedicure, neck, face and scalp massage . . .

The girl kept up a stream of French chatter throughout, handing tools to the older woman in an apprentice-to-master style. Kustaa waited until his face was being rubbed with some astringent cologne before he pointed a finger to the ceiling.

“Up . . . there?” he said.

“Above us, Master, is the armory,” the woman replied in accented but fluent English; learned pre-War, he judged. “Above that is the communications room, for telephone and radio.” A jolt of excitement ran through him at the news: perfect. There had to be a communications room, every plantation had one; there was a regular schedule of calls required by the Settler Emergency Network, to make sure no uprising went long unreported. But to have it right over his head—frustration followed, here he had an English-speaking informant, a legitimate excuse for curiosity . . . and a cover story which kept him dumb as a post. Nor could he simply say, “Where is Sister Marya Sokolowska?”

I can’t count on making it clean away, he thought. With returning vigor the fear was having its usual effect, sharpening wits and sight, making the world clearer and more real. Nobody can throw sixes on every roll; Lyon was far too close anyway. It’s getting tight. The sub would be in place from tonight, for a full week. Waiting that long would be an invitation to disaster.

Patience, patience, he told himself. One battle in a campaign, one campaign in a very long war. More haste, less speed.

The plantation was not a very large community; he would have breakfast, and then wander. Sooner or later he would make contact, and he would just have to hope it was soon enough. One of the things the most gung-ho officer had to keep in mind was that men were going to stop to rest, eat and take a crap every so often, whether they had orders to or not. He had slept, and now—

“Thank you,” he said to the manicurist.

“It is nothing, Master,” she said, packing away her instruments with quick, efficient movements. “My name is Annette—Tom’s wife, Annette, anyone will direct you—if you require anything. This young wench is Madeline; she will show you the Great House, if directed.” A stern glance at Madeline, who looked meekly down at folded hands. “Although her English is not of the best, Master. Breakfast will be served on the terrace for the family for the next two hours: your servant has been directed there. Nothing more? A good morning, then, Master, and may you enjoy your stay on Chateau Retour.”

“I—will,” he grated. To himself: But Chateau Retour probably will not.

The Issachar was approaching Lyon from the north. Kustaa let his eyes drop from the pale turquoise haze of the sky to the land droning by six thousand feet below. The Savoie Alps were passing by to the east, dark blue with distance and higher than the airship itself; below, the Rhone trough was widening out, a patchwork of varicolored orchard, vineyard and field and the russet brown of ploughed earth. Vehicles moved insect-small along the long straight roads, trailing dust plumes like the white-gray feathers of sparrows; the river itself was blue-brown, with hammered-silver patches downstream where banks of pebbles broke the low level of the summer waters. An aircraft passed, climbing, a swift flashing of combined velocity, and there were two more dirigibles in sight, long whale shapes laboring north against the backdrop of mountain.

The American took another sip of the single beer he had allowed himself; Danish, excellent, mellow amber with just the right hint of bitterness, biting at the back of his throat. Methodically, he probed at his nerves. Not bad, he thought. Still a little shaky. Hamburg had been bad, very bad indeed; he was running through cover identities faster than Donovan had planned for. The danger was different from combat strain, more like a night-ambush patrol; less intense, but it didn’t end. Worse than the danger was the effort of simply being a Draka for so long; having them hunt him through the Finnish woods had been simple by comparison.

He’d been skipping a good deal of the multiple tasking Donovan had planned for, as well. It was even worse tradecraft than he had anticipated, endangering the indigenous networks that were all the OSS had to build on, until it could somehow infiltrate the Domination’s own organizations.

Shit, endangering me, too. Now I know too much; I’ve got to get back. Straight to Lyon, but the delays had put him right back on schedule. With any luck, the coded messages had been sent out for the last week. With any luck, there was still someone there to pick them up. With any luck and a day at the races, I’d be rich, he mused.

“Docking in ten minutes.” the voice over the intercom said. “Docking in ten minutes. All passengers please be seated until docking is complete.”

Kustaa finished his beer and waved to the stewardess. The airship lurched as she reached across him to pick the glass off the veneered aluminum table, and a half-full bottle on the tray in her other hand toppled, sending a stream of amber-colored Tuborg splashing off the rim of the birchwood platter and into his lap. He began a yell, remembered to turn it to a strangled grunt and sank back into the seat.

The girl was on her knees beside his chair, reaching out with a cloth that trembled in her shaking hands to mop at the stain on the front of his fawn-colored trousers.

“Oh, Master, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, please, let me help, please, Master—”

The lilting Swedish accent was raw with fear as he irritably snatched the towel and hastily wiped off the worst of the mess. Looking down he saw huge cornflower-blue eyes starring with tears, and a mouth working with terror.

“A-ll right,” he grated, keeping to the strangled grunt that his cover allowed. “G-o.”

She righted the bottles on the tray with frantic speed, wiping the floor plates, froze again when she saw who was looking her way, the senior stewardess, a born-serf in her thirties with a hard flat Kazakh face and a leather razor strap on a thong around her wrist. They were both in the same livery, a smart tailored jacket with a long V neck and a pleated skirt of indigo blue, but the older woman did not have the Swede’s look of vulnerability. She came over with a brisk stride, her low-heeled shoes clicking on the roughened-metal planking, muffled over the rugs.

The offending woman (No, girl, Kustaa decided. Seventeen, maybe eighteen) stood and held the tray before her, there was a slight rattling from the glasses and bottles, a quiver she could not suppress.

“You wish punish this slut youself, Mastar?” The Kazakh’s English was Draka-learned, with the hint of a barking guttural beneath, Kazakhstan had been the northernmost of the Domination’s conquests in the Great War, a generation ago, about when this one had been born, he estimated. Her face held no more than her voice or the posture of her well-kept body: precisely trained deference.

“N-o,” Kustaa said, waving a casual hand. “Is nothing.” As much as he could say, as much as he could do. You’re here to observe and report, he reminded himself savagely, behind a mask of detachment as perfect as the serf’s. Follow orders, dammit!

The Kazakh nodded. “Rest assured, Mastar, she no sit fo’ week.” A jerk of the head, and the blond girl walked staring past them, through the cloth-curtain door behind the bar. There was a murmur of voices, one pleading it had been too little time since the last strapping.

The American rubbed at his eyes. I thought I was tough, he thought wonderingly to himself. Every little bit pushes you a bit further. Fuck it, I want to be home, away from these people!

“Not a bad little piece,” the man across the table from Kustaa said idly.

He was an exec from the Dos Santos Aeronautics Combine, up from the Old Territories to oversee conversion of European facilities. A square-faced man in his fifties, conservatively dressed by Draka standards, down to the small plain earrings and Navy thumb ring, smelling of expensive cologne. It mingled with the leather-liquor-polish scent of the long room along the lower edge of the dirigible’s gondola; this was a short-range bird, shuttling between the larger European cities, not equipped with overnight cabins. No rows of bus-type seats, as there might have been on an American equivalent, though. Scattered tables for four, and freestanding armchairs, and a long bank of canted windows giving a view of the ground below.

“Not bad at all,” he continued, with the air of a bored man making conversation. There was a flat smack of leather on flesh from the curtained alcove, thin yelps of suffering giving way to a low broken whimper. “Wonder how she strips.”

“Black an’ blue, now,” the Air Corps officer beside him said. “You’d have to let her get on top.”

She laughed at her own joke, more than mildly risque by the Domination’s standards, began stuffing files in the flat attaché case before her, then frowned. “That’s a bit much,” she said, and raised a brow at Kustaa. He nodded vigorously.

“Enough, there,” she called, and the sound of blows ceased. Yawning, the pilot glanced idly out the window and exclaimed: “Look! Just what I was talkin’ about, Mr. Sauvage.”

The exec followed her pointing finger, and Kustaa’s eyes joined his. They were over the military section of the air haven north of the city, the usual tangle of runways, hangars, workshops and revetments. The usual expansion work going on as well, the iron-ordered standardization of the Domination being overlaid on the more haphazard pre-War foundations. Long modular buildings, a chaos of dust as the road net was pushed out. Neat rows of fighters, older prop-driven models and sleek melted-looking jets. Strike aircraft, twin-engine Rhinos mostly, grim and squat and angular with their huge radial engines and mottled paint; they had been known as the “flying tanks” during the Eurasian War, for their ability to absorb punishment. Kustaa’s OSS antennae picked up at the sight of the electrodetector towers, but they were basic air-traffic-control, phased-pulse models; no real need for air defense here, he supposed.

And a row of helicopters, gunboats; that was what the Air Corps tetrarch was pointing at. He remembered the smell of burning woods, and the chin turrets’ blind seeking . . . There were wings on the breast of the officer’s uniform tunic, and the AntiPartisan Cross below that. Probably she flew the choppers; his ears went into professional mode again. He had convinced them that the cripple did not want to be included in a conversation he could not fully share, convinced them to the point that they ignored the human recording system sitting across the table.

“Look!” she said. “An’ tell me those are cost-effective.”

The exec cleared his throat. “Precision firepower,” he said stolidly. “Entirely new application, an’ barely a decade since we turned out our first single-seater scout model. Fo’ once, we’re completely ahead of the Yankees. We have to concentrate on capital-intensive weapons, we’re—”

“—not a numerous people,” she finished. “Look again,” she continued. “How many of those are on-line, an’ how many yanked fo’ maintenance? Serious stuff, not jus’ cleanin’ fuel lines.”

Kustaa checked . . . yes, three out of seven with the dismounted assemblies that told of more than routine care. Interested, he glanced back at the Draka woman; she was small for one of her race, thin-featured and dark with a receding chin and big beaked nose pierced for a small turquoise stud. For a moment he wondered what had moved her to emphasize her worst feature. Naivety? Defiance?

“An’ that’s the problem. Sho’ you got them to us fast—too fast. They’re the best thing since the hand-held vibrator when they workin’, but the whole beast is a collection of prototypes, every subsystem experimental. An’ the power train is too highly stressed. An’ the servos fo’ the weapons systems is temperamental; and either they works wonderful or they don’t work at all.”

The man examined his nails. “Technical Section—” he began.

“TechSec doan’ end up in the bundu with the bushmen breathin’ down they necks an’ only those things to save they ass! You should ’a taken another four, five years makin’ sure of things, in the meantime produce mo’ Rhinos. They can’t hover, but they works.

“And yo should be simplifyin’ maintenance. As is, we keep the squadrons goin’ by keepin’ preassembled subsystems on hand, jus’ jerkin’ anything that doan’ work and sendin’ them back to the factory.” She thrust a thumb at the stewardess, who had emerged ashen-faced from the bar cubicle and was walking stiffly about her tasks. “Look, it easy to train the cattle to pour drinks an’ fuck, or to dig holes an’ break rock. Maintainin’ high-speed turbines is anothah matter!”

The exec rubbed his jaw. “Tetrarch,” he said, “my own children are pilots; we are doin’ the best we can. There are just so many engineers, aftah all, and any number of projects. As fo’ maintenance technicians, that’s always been tight. I’d’ve thought with all these Europeans comin’ on the market, fully or partly trained already . . . ”

“That another thing, we gettin’ spoiled by Europe. Richest place we’ve ever took, an’ skills the best part of it. Trouble is, we’re livin’ off loot; an’ consider the social costs of maintainin’ that level of trainin’ over generations.”

The man glanced from side to side in an instinctive gesture of caution and leaned forward, lowering his voice. “Mo’ right than you know, Tetrarch. We had some bad trouble in South Katanga, just last month.” She duplicated his look and leaned closer herself; that was one of the important industrial subregions of the central Police Zone—mines, hydrodams and a huge complex of electrical-engineering and motor works, mostly owned by the Faraday Electromagnetic Combine.

“Took a lot of the serf cadre out of the plants there fo’ the conquered territories, promoted from their understudies, an’ shipped in Europeans to do the donkey work.”

“Uprisin’?”

“Serious. Citizen casualties, mob of ’em nearly bust out of their compounds into the free zones, turned them back with vehicle-mounted flamethrowers.” The pilot winced; there had been nothing like that in the Police Zone in living memory, the sort of measure used in newly-conquered areas. “They had to gas a whole mine. Decided to lobotomize an’ ship most of the survivors; three big factory compounds out of order, jus’ when demand fo’ industrial motor systems is gettin’ critical.”

The two Draka shook their heads; the woman seemed about to speak when the Issachar jolted. Kustaa looked up, and saw that they had docked. The dirigible quivered as her steerable tiltmotors held the nose threaded into the anchor ring of the tower; then there was a long multiple clicking sound as the restraining bolts shot home into the machined recesses. Another quiver as the engines died, the sudden absence of their burbling whine louder than their presence. More clicks and jolts as the anchor ring moved to thread the docking cable through the airship’s loops, then cast them loose.

The American looked out the window, saw the horizon sinking as the winches bore the dirigible down below the level of the surrounding buildings, down to the railed tracks. A final quiver as the keel beneath them made contact with the haulers, and a whining of pumps as gas was valved through the connectors into the haven’s reservoirs, establishing negative buoyancy. The observation deck was only five meters up, now; he could see the cracked concrete surface, the interlacing rails, the huge silver-gray teardrop shapes of the other dirigibles, most locked at rest, flocks of nose-in circles around their terminals. Groundcrew swarmed about, little electric carts flashed by tugging flatbed trailers loaded with luggage; a train of heavy articulated steam drags was passing under an anchored airship, unloading cargo modules that clipped down on their backs with prefitted precision. The scene moved, creeping by as the haulers dragged the Issachar to her resting place, and there was a bustle as the passengers moved to fasten jackets and assemble forward.

Kustaa remained in his seat as the disembodied voice came tinnily through the speakers; just as fast to stay in comfort for a minute as wait standing at the end of the line. “Prepare to disembark. All passengers to Lyon prepare to disembark by the forward ramp, please. Through passengers to Marseilles, Genoa and Florence, please remain seated.”

He was alone when the stewardess came by again. Her eyes flicked aside at him, returned to the table she sponged down. Her face was gray, with a bleak pinched look that aged her ten years, or a hundred, and she moved with the arthritic care of an old woman. Against his will, Kustaa felt his hand go out to touch her sleeve. She came to a halt, instantly.

“Sor-ry,” he croaked, standing and taking up the heavy leather case that never went out of arm’s reach. “Ve-ry sor-ry.”

The stewardess’s face crumbled for an instant at the words, then she shot a lightning glance around and began to speak, her eyes flickering up to his face as she whispered fiercely and scrubbed at the veneer: “Oh, Master, you look like a kind man, please here’s my number”—a slip of paper, palmed and tucked into his jacket pocket in an invisibly swift movement—“please, I can’t stand it any longer, buy me, please, I know it can be done, someone bought Inge out just last month because their children liked her, I’m a hard worker really I am, I can cook and look after children and type and drive a car and play the piano and I’m good in bed, very very good, buy me and I’ll be the best worker you’ve ever had always, Master, only 75 aurics, please.”

She scuttled away to the next table and Kustaa stood for a moment, fingering the slip of paper in his pocket. Then he turned and walked calmly along the gallery, out into the passageway and down to the ramp that dropped from the nose of the airship, forward of the control deck. The last of the passengers were still there, checking out their firearms from the counter clerk, smiling and laughing in unconscious relaxation as they shed the subtle tension Citizens felt when deprived of their weaponry. The American watched his hands strip the clip from the automatic, reinsert it and chamber a round and snap on the safety before holstering it. The battle shotgun was handed to him still in its black-leather scabbard, with the harness wrapped around it. An autoshotgun, basically, with a six-round tube magazine below the barrel, the butt cut down to a heavy pistol grip. He jerked it free, popping the restraining strap, and checked the action: six rounds, alternate slug and double buckshot.

How many could I kill? he thought calmly, estimating the placing of the dozen Draka around him as his fingers caressed the chunky wooden forestock of the weapon. You for sure, Mr. Concerned-Citizen airplane maker who wonders how little girls looked stripped. Maybe you too, big-nose pilot, you’d be meat just like the two-legged cattle you killed to get that medal.

More calmly still: I am going insane. A few of the Citizens were glancing his way, feeling the prickle of danger without knowing why. When I get back to my family, will I still be fit for them?

His hands put the shotgun back in its sheath, slung it over his back with the butt conveniently behind his right ear, buckled the harness around his chest; while his mind painted the varnished metal red and pink and gray with blood and shattered bone and brains. Not enough, he decided. Not nearly enough.

“Andrew! You made it!” Tanya’s eyes widened as the long car with the Security-skull blazon crunched to a stop by the steps. He was in crisp garrison blacks, with nothing nonregulation but a tasteful ruby eardrop. The warmth of her smile and embrace was still on her face as she turned to formally clasp forearms with the Security officer who followed. “And Strategos Vashon,” she continued. “You welcome to my House, sir. Make youself free of it.” A rueful shrug. “Bit crowded, I’m afraid.”

To her brother: “Edward’s up by the winery, lookin’ over our new Cub with Johanna and her Tom.” She turned to the waiting housegirl and took two greeting cups, handing them to the guests while harried-looking servants swarmed down to take their luggage and direct the Orpo trooper-driver to the vehicle-park west of the Great House.

They poured ceremonial drops and sipped at the wine, eyes widening slightly in appreciation at the taste.

“Spicy.” Vashon said. “Hmmm, hint of . . . flint, maybe? Local?”

“From a friend’s place, east of here: Pouilly-Fume. Fo’give me if I don’t join you, gentlemen, but I’ve got to get through the day standin’.”

Andrew held out a hand to stop one of the serfs going by with the luggage. “Not those two, boy, they’re the gifts.”

The serf, a middle-aged fieldhand hurriedly kitted out in house livery for the day, bobbed his head and looked at Tanya questioningly. “The table with the gifts, Marcel,” she translated into French.

“Oui, Maîtresse,” he said, and trotted up through the main doors.

“You lookin’ good,” Andrew said to his sister as she turned back to them. “And considerable less pregnant than last time.” Fresh and summery in a crisp white linen suit, with no hint of color but the ebony butt of the little Togren 9mm tucked into its holster inside her belt.

“Never again.” She shuddered, linking an arm through his and courteously motioning the Security officer before her. They turned to the high arched gateway that passed like a tunnel through the bulk of the chateau’s oldest section. Light showed at the other end, and the soft lilt of a string quartet. “Through here; the main court is out back . . . ”

“Am I bein’ sentimental, love?” Tanya von Shrakenberg asked, as they watched the captive priest bless the earth. It was a raw autumn day, they were the only Draka present, sitting their horses behind a screen of drab-coated serfs, while the world spread around them in gray cloud, wet earth, faded brightness of vine leaves that whirled away down the wind like messages to yesterday.

“Yes,” her husband replied. The gaping hole had been refilled, where the decontamination crews had pumped the shelter full of liquid concrete and taken out the block entire. Filled with good earth, and now consecrated as a graveyard. The vestments of the priest were a splash of color against the raw brown earth and the simple granite tombstone; but even before the ceremony, the serfs had begun to come with flowers and ribbons for the resting place of the one who had died for them.

“Yes,” he said. “But we can afford a little, now and then.” A squeeze of their gloved hands. “Andrew has his memorial, and it’s mo’ showy; let them have theirs.” He took up the reins. “C’mon, love, dinner’s waitin’.”

They reined about and heeled their horses. The serfs bowed as they passed, but remained kneeling to pray for her whose spirit surely abided to guard this place.

“Names?” The woman who looked up at the nursing sister was exhausted with the long labor, triumphant, but she had no slightest trace of the furtiveness the staff had come to expect of unwed mothers. Of course, there was some mystery involved; the nurse looked over at the godparents, a short Indian-looking man in naval blue with commander’s stripes on his arm and his blond wife with the soft Carolina accent. They visited often, and the quiet widow with her daughter, and the horse-faced man who your eyes never really seemed to rest on.

“Of course I’ve got names,” the young woman was saying, in the French accent that had been considered exotic before the War and the refugee influx. She looked over to the cradle, the two sleeping pink forms still with their golden-blond birth fuzz.

“Frederick Kustaa and Marya Sokolowska Lefarge,” she said, closing her eyes with a sigh. “I don’t believe in making it easy for children. That’ll give them something to live up to.”

“This is the first series,” the project manager, a stocky brown-haired woman in her thirties, said. The wall lit up with a three-dimensional rendering of a virus molecule. It was color-coded, black and scarlet. “You see how we’ve replaced—”

“Doctor Melford,” the Senator said, with soft courtesy. The other members of the audience turned slightly to catch his words. “We’ve all absorbed as much technical information as possible from the prep files, and while I’m sure the computer projections would be very interesting, perhaps . . . ?”

He was a tall man, eagle-faced, with silver-streaked blond hair and mustache, conservatively dressed in indigo velvet and white lace. There was no impatience in his posture, leaning back at his ease in one of the two dozen swivel chairs that lined the little auditorium. Still, the woman in the white lab coat flushed slightly, coughed to cover it; her fingers moved on the controls.

“Well,” she said. Her vowels had a rather crisp tone, an East African accent; she had been born in these highlands. “Well, here are the recordings of the chimp results.”

The screen blanked for a moment and split. “The left is our control sample, an’ the right is the Series 24D group.” The Senator watched, stony-faced amid his silent aides, as the dance of madness and death ran to its close. The plainly clad woman at the heart of the other clump laughed aloud. A minute passed, and nothing living remained on the right-hand screen. To the left the chimps might have been a picture of the innocence before the birth of man.

“It seems,” he said, “that you’ve been makin’ progress, Doctor.”

She nodded eagerly. “ ‘Specially since you got us the new computer,” she said, one hand caressing the row of pens in her breast pocket with a nervous gesture.

The Senator smiled for the first time. “Thank the Yankees; it was the best we could steal,” he said dryly. “How confident are you that these-here results can be transferred to humans?”

“Very, yes,” the geneticist nodded. “Chimps are the best possible test subjects, they’re so close to us. Ninety-eight percent genetic congruence, only five million years since the last common ancestor, which . . . Yes. The endorphin response is modified into a feedback loop. That still needs work.”

The woman to the Senator’s left spoke, in a flat Angolan accent: “What’s y’re success rate?” She was younger than the Senator, perhaps forty-five, head of a committee in the House of Representatives that attracted little public attention.

Melford nodded at the right-hand screen. “Ovah ninety-nine percent, no point in finin’ it down further until we moves to human subjects.”

“In y’ professional opinion, is this project go or no-go?”

“Go.” A decisive nod. “Provided we get the necessary fundin’ an’ personnel. Mo’ work on the vector—we’re still relyin’ on blood to blood—and the secondary keyin’ sequence. Four years, eight maximum, an’ we’ll have it on spec.”

“Ah.” The Senator dropped his chin onto the steepled fingers of both hands, and the lids drooped over his narrow gray eyes. “Doctor, what about keepin’ it from the Yankees when we deploy it against the Alliance?”

“Well.” A frown. “Well, they’re not as, um, sophisticated at biotech as we are. Those Luddite fanatics of theirs who keep protestin’ every time they try to use somethin’, and then again they can’t test humans to destruction the way we can. Sloppy. Still, they’ve got some good people.”

The Senator looked across to his colleague; she nodded and spoke: “What’ll you need?”

“Um, more funding. More personnel, as Ah said. An’ experimental subjects, of course. Several hundred humans, assorted gender an’ age in the postpubescent range, pref’rably the same ethnic mix as the target population. Very delicate, to get it contagious but with a fail-safe turn-off. Don’t want it becomin’ a global pandemic, do we?”

“Wotan, no,” the Senator said. “Well, Doctor Melford, certain othahs will have to be consulted, but unofficially I think you can take it that the project will be approved fo’ further development.” He rose. “Service to the State.”

“Glory to the Race,” the scientist answered absentmindedly as the audience left; she was keying the machine again, reviewing the additional resources that would be needed.

It’s too crowded in here, Yolande Ingolfsson thought irritably.

The crowding was not physical. The van was an Angers-Kellerman autosteamer from the Trevithick Combine’s works in Milan, a big six-wheeler plantation sedan like a slope-fronted box with slab sides. There were five serfs and one young lady of landholding Citizen family in the roomy cabin; the muted sound of the engine was lost in the rush of wind and whine of the tires. None of them had been this way before.

Young Marco the driver was chattering with excitement, with stolid Deng sitting beside him giving an occasional snarl when the Italian’s hands swooped off the wheel. The Oriental was a stocky grizzle-haired man of fifty, his face round and ruddy. He had been the House foreman since forever; Father had brought him from China when he and Mother came to set up the plantation, after the War. Saved him from an impaling stake, the rebel’s fate, or so the rumor went, but neither of them would talk about it. Bianca and Lele were bouncing about on the benches running along either side of the vehicle, giggling and pointing out the sights to each other.

Not to me, Yolande thought with a slight sadness. Well, she was fourteen, that was getting far too grown-up to talk that way with servants.

The van had the highway mostly to itself on the drive down from Tuscany, past Rome and through the plantations of Campania; Italy was something of a backwater these days, and what industry there was clustered in the north. There was the odd passenger steamer, a few electric runabouts, drags hauling linked flats of produce or goods. Nevertheless the road was just as every other Class II way in the Domination of the Draka, an asphalt surface eight meters broad with a graveled verge and rows of trees on either side; cypress or eucalyptus here, but that varied with the climate.

Fields passed, seen through a flicker of trunks and latticed shadow slanting back from the westering sun, big square plots edged with shaggy hedges of multiflora. Fields of trellised vines, purple grapes peering out from the tattered autumnal lushness of their leaves; orchards of silvery gray olives, fruit trees, hard glossy citrus, and sere yellow-brown grain stubble. Fields of alfalfa under whirling sprinklers, circles of spray that filled the air with miniature rainbows and a heavy green smell that cut the hot dust scent. Melons lying like ruins of streaked green-and-white marble tumbled among vines, and strawberries starred red through the velvet plush of their beds.

Arch-and-pillar gateways marked the turnoffs to the estate manors, hints of colored roofs amid the treetops of their gardens. Yolande felt what she always did when she saw a gate: an impulse to open it. Like an itch in the head, to follow and see what was there, who the people were, and what their lives were like. Make up stories about them, or poems.

Silly, she thought. People were people; plantations were plantations, not much different from the one she grew up on.

Words and surfaces, hard shiny shells, that was all you could know of people. Yet the itch would not go away. You thought that you knew what they were like, especially when you were little; then a thing would happen that showed you were wrong . . . she shivered at certain memories.

The Draka girl leaned back with a sigh, feeling heavy and a little tired from the going-away party last night. She had the rear of the autosteamer—a semicircle couch like the fantail of a small yacht—nearly to herself: her Persian cat, Machiavelli, was curled up beside her. He always tried to sleep through an auto drive; at least he didn’t hide under a seat and puke anymore . . . The windows slanted over her head, up to the roof of the auto, open a little to let in a rush of warm dry afternoon air. She let her head fall back, looking through the glass up into the cloudless bowl of the sky, just beginning to darken at the zenith. Her face looked back at her, transparent against the sky, centered in a fan of pale silky hair that rippled in the breeze.

Like a ghost, she thought. Her mind could fill in the tinting, summer’s olive tan, hair and brows faded to white-gold, Mother’s coloring. Eyes the shade of granulated silver, rimmed with dark blue, a mixture from both her parents. Face her own, oval, high cheekbones and a short straight nose, wide full-lipped mouth, squared chin with a cleft; Pa was always saying there must be elf somewhere in the bloodlines. She turned her head and sucked in her cheeks; the puppy fat was definitely going, at long last. She was still obstinately short and slightly built, however much she tried to force growth with willpower.

At least I don’t have spots, she mused with relief. It was her first year at the new school, and her first in the Senior Section, as well.

“Bianca, get me a drink, please,” Yolande said, shifting restlessly and stretching. The drive had been a long one, and she felt grubby and dusty and sticky; the silk of her blouse was clinging to her back, and she could feel how it had wrinkled.

The air had a spicy-dry scent, like the idea of a sneeze. Yolande sipped moodily at the orange juice and watched as the auto turned south and east to skirt the fringe of Naples. Her mouth was dry despite the cold drink. She handed the glass back to the servant girl and wiped her palms down the sides of her jodhpurs, hitched at her gunbelt, ran fingers through the tangled mass of her hair, adjusted her cravat.

“Bianca, Lele, my hair’s a mess,” she said. “Fix it.” There was a sour taste at the back of her mouth, and a feeling like hard fluttering in her stomach.

Don’t fidget, she told herself as the tense muscles of her shoulders and neck eased at the familiar feel of fingers and hairbrush. It’s serfish. It was emotional to be frightened of going to a new school; they weren’t going to hurt her, after all. Children and serfs were expected to be emotional; a Citizen ruled herself with the mind. Bianca was humming as she used the pick on the end of her comb to untangle a knot. Yolande’s hair had always been feather-soft and flyaway.

The school was on the bay itself, surrounded by a thousand hectares of grounds. A herd of ibex raised their scimitar-horned heads from a pool, muzzles trailing drops that sparkled as they fell among the purple-and-white bowls of the water lilies.

“Turn right,” Yolande said, unnecessarily; there was a servant in the checkered livery of the school directing traffic.

The sun had sunk until it nearly touched the horizon, and the light-wand in the serf’s hand glowed translucent white. More servants waited at the brick-paved parking lot, a broad expanse of tessellated red and black divided by stone planters with miniature trees. The van eased into place, guided by a wench with a light-wand who walked backwards before them, and stopped; Yolande felt the dryness suddenly return to her mouth as she rose.

“Well,” she said into air that felt somehow motionless after the unvarying rush of wind on the road. “Let’s go.”

Deng pushed the driver back into his seat. “Not you, Marco,” he said.

The younger man gave him a resentful glare but sank down again. Deng was not like some bossboys; he did not use the strap or rubber hose all the time, but he was obeyed just the same.

Yolande ignored the stairs, stepping out and taking the chest-high drop with a flex of her knees. An eight-wheeler articulated steamer was unloading a stream of girls; that must be a shuttle from Naples, the ones coming in from the train and dirigible havens.

They were all dressed in the school uniform, a knee-length belted tunic of Egyptian linen dyed indigo blue, and sandals that strapped up the calf. She felt suddenly self-conscious in her young-planter outfit, even with the Tolgren 10mm and fighting knife she had been so proud of. They were mostly older than her; all the Junior Section would have arrived yesterday. Their friends were there to greet them, hugs and wristshakes and flower wreaths for their hair . . .

Yolande swallowed and forced herself to ignore them, the laughter and the shouts, ignored a tiltrotor taking off and turning north. She blinked; in half an hour it would be past Sienna. Past Badesse, past home. Over the tiny hilltop lights of Claestum; her parents might look up from the dining terrace at the sound of engines. Tantie Rahksan with her eternal piece of embroidery . . . Moths would be battering against the globes, and there would be a damp smell from the pools and fountains. Warm window-glow coming on in the Quarters down in the valley, and the sleepy evening sounds of the rambling Great House. Her own bedroom in the west tower would be dark, only moonlight making shadows on the comforter, her desk, airplane models, old dolls and posters . . .

This is ridiculous, she scolded herself, working at the knot of misery beneath her breastbone. The quarrel at the old school had not been her fault; even if somebody had to leave, it should have been Irene, not her. Would have been, if they had not valued peace over justice.

“Hello.”

She looked down with a start; a girl her own age was standing nearby, hands on hips and a smile on her face.

“You’re Yolande Ingolfsson, the one from up Tuscany way?”

She nodded, and grasped the offered wrist. Then blinked a little with surprise, feeling a shock as of recognition.

I must know someone who looks like her, she thought.

“Myfwany Venders,” she was saying. “Leontini, Sicily. I’m in you year, and from out-of-district, too, so I thought I’d help you get settled.”

The other girl was a centimeter taller, with brick-red hair and dark freckles on skin so white it had a bluish tinge, high cheekbones, and a snub nose; big hands and feet and long limbs that hinted at future growth. She grinned: “I know how it is. They pitched me in here last year and I went around bleating like a lost lamb. It’s not bad, really, once y’ get to know some people.”

“Thank you,” Yolande replied, a little more fervently than she would have liked. Myfwany shrugged, turned and put thumb and forefinger in her mouth to whistle sharply.

“It’s nothing, veramente. Let’s get the matron.”

It was full dark now on the beach, and the driftwood fire crackled, sending sparks flying up with sharp popping sounds. The flames were blue and red and orange, a white-crimson over the bed of coals below; the smell was dry and hot. Inland, the trees and shrubs rustled, shadows dark and moving against the lesser dark of the sky. The waves were breaking in a foam of cream, glittering in starlight and moonlight, surge and retreat. The sound of them was like heartbeat in her ears, like lying beside some huge and friendly beast. Out beyond, her friends were still diving and playing, flashes of white bodies otter-sleek among the water. Their voices dropped into the warm night, no louder than the cicadas and night birds.

Yolande laid her head on her knees and wiggled her toes over the edge of the blanket. The powdery white clung to them like frosting; she tapped her feet together and felt the grains trickle down her insteps, tickling or clinging where the skin was still damp from her swim. Looking up, the moon path lay on the water like silver, almost painfully bright. The stars were sparse around the moon, abundant elsewhere; the lights of men were far too few to dim them. A faint glow west across the bay was Naples, and she could make out the long curve of the coast by the wide-scattered jewels that marked the towns and manors of her people.

She lay back on the striped wool and smiled, stretching her arms above her head. Stars . . . there was a trick to that. A mental effort, and the velvet backdrop with its glowing colored lights vanished; instead there was depth, an endless dark where great fires hung burning forever amid the slow-fading hydrogen roar of creation. Her lips parted, and she felt a sensation that might have been delight, or a loneliness too great to bear; she forced herself to hold the wordless moment, mind suspended in pure experience. Moisture gathered slowly around her eyes, trickling in warm salt streaks down the wind-cooled skin of her temples.

“Woof!” Mandy’s voice. “I’m turning into a prune. Come on!”

Yolande started as the others dashed out of the ocean, wiping away the not-quite tears with the back of her wrist. They ran past her to the freshwater fountain at the edge of the beach, laughing and splashing each other around as they sluiced off the salt. The darkness closed around as they threw themselves down on the blankets about the fire; now it was a hearth, the tribe’s fortress against the night. Myfwany sat cross-legged beside her, leaning back on braced palms. She was still breathing deeply from the swim; from Yolande’s position her face was shadowed against the backlit dark-red curtain of her hair. The drops of water that ran down her flanks glistened with the rise and fall of her chest, changing from blood-crimson to lemon-yellow.

“You’re quiet, ’Landa,” she said. “Head still troublin’?”

“Mmm . . . no. Hammerin’ great headache yesterday, couldn’t hardly move this mornin’. Now it’s just a bit stiff all ovah. No, I’s just lookin’ at the stars and thinkin’.”

Myfwany probed at her neck, tracing the cords down to her shoulders; she shivered slightly at the touch, still cold and wet. “ ‘S right, stiff,” Myfwany said definitely. “Maybe swimmin’ wasn’t such a good idea. Muriel, give me a hand? Roll ovah, ’Landa.”

Yolande turned onto her stomach and laid her cheek on her crossed hands, feeling a painful warmth in her stomach. “Thanks,” she muttered. Massage was usually serf’s work, although everybody learned it; it was something you did for close friends, a sign that status was put aside. Two pairs of hands began to work on her, one starting on the soles of her feet, the other where the neck muscles anchored on the base of her skull. She felt uncomfortable for an instant, as the pressure made her aware of soreness she had been ignoring, then surrendered to the sensation.

“Y’all bein’ mighty nice,” she said sincerely. Myfwany snorted, and Muriel laughed and slapped her lightly on the calf.

“You the one bruised the Bruiser,” Mandy said. She was kneeling by a basket across the fire, rummaging within. “Never seen her move so fast; mean of her to thump you head, though.”

“No, that’s the point,” Myfwany said. “Bruiser had to move fast, an’ react automatic-like.”

“Jus’ so—Veronica, watch where you puttin’ that dirt! I’s got scallops in heah!”

The stocky girl had been raising the fine sand in double handfuls, letting it trickle down over her body. She laughed and bent backward from her kneeling position until her head touched the blanket behind her, a perfect bow, stretching.

“ ’Salright,” she said as she rose. A sigh. “Ah jus’ love this time of year. Perfect, just cool enough fo’ a fire, but not cold. Look! There it is!”

She raised a hand. They followed the gesture, and saw a moving star crawling slowly across the southern horizon.

“That our’n or their’n?” Mandy asked. The Domination and the Alliance had both put up another dozen orbital platforms in the last few years; the rivalry was pushing development hard.

“Ours,” Myfwany said, sinking back on her elbows. “Oh, ours.” Her voice became dreamy. “I wonder . . . how do the stars look from there?” To Yolande: “What were you thinkin’ of, starwatcher?”

“Lots of things,” Yolande said abstractedly. “How we can’t see the stars, jus’ the light they sent long ago. Like readin’ a book, hey? An’ . . . how far away, an’ how perfect.”

“Perfect?”

“There’s no right or wrong with them,” Yolande continued, almost singsong, whispering. “No lovin’ or hatin’; they just . . . are.”

They were silent for long minutes, each staring upward past the fire glow and the dancing sparks.

“Well,” Mandy said, her hands moving again in the basket. “Who’s fo’ lemonade, and who’s fo’ wine?”

“Mm, I’ll take the wine,” Yolande said.

“Lemonade first, I’m too thirsty fo’ drinkin’,” Myfwany said. “That enough, ’Landa?”

“Feels nice,” she replied.

Veronica and Mandy were making skewers from a pile of willow switches, sharpening the ends and threading on pieces of scallop and shrimp wrapped in bacon; they handed the limber sticks around, with wicker platters of soft flat Arab bread, and glasses. The five girls drew closer to the fire. Yolande sat up, watching the flames. The breeze had picked up slightly, and gusts of it blew the tongues of colored flame toward her. She sipped at the wine as the bacon sizzled and dropped fat to pop and flare on the white coals; it was cool from the earthenware jug, rather light, slightly acidic. A southern vintage, she thought, probably from Latium.

“Strange,” Muriel said, hugging her knees and leaning back, letting her head fall against Veronica’s shoulder.

“What?” Mandy asked.

“I was thinkin’ . . . here we are. In twenty-odd years our own daughters will be here, or someplace like here. Maybeso raaht here; maybeso doin’ and thinkin’ just what we are. Strange.”

“What brought that on?” Myfwany said. She brought the skewer close, examined the seafood critically, and used a piece of the flatbread to pull it off. “Mmm, these are good.”

“I was . . . I was thinkin’ about history class. An’ about the things Ma and Pa used to tell me, you know, those religion things.” Muriel stuck the butt end of her skewer into the sand and rolled the wine cup between her hands. “I mean . . . if you believes all that, the God stuff, then”—she frowned—“then it would all look different. It would be comin’ from somewheres, and goin’ to somewheres. Like-so a story, hey? An’ if you don’t believe it, then it’s . . . all sort of, well, it just happens.”

“If’n yo believes it, we’re all goin’ straight to hell,” Veronica laughed, giving a light tug on Muriel’s brown curls.

“Pass the wine, will you, hey?” Yolande said. There was a clink of stoneware. “Thanks, Mandy. Well, the way Harris says it, it’s the story of the Race; where we came from an’ where we’re goin’.”

Muriel rested her chin on the edge of the cup. “That sort of depends, don’t it? I mean, the Race didn’t have to happen; Harris says so herself. History’s a story leadin’ up to us, but only on account we happened. If the Yankees killed us all off, then it’d be a story about them, an’ we’d just be part of their history.”

“But we did happen, an’ the Yankees aren’t goin’ to win; we are,” Myfwany said definitely.

Yolande chuckled. “So the story has an endin’ and a meanin’ because we’re tellin’ it.” A pause. “Us here, too. It’s . . . true because we make it true, eh? So we tell history like ouah own story, like we was writin’ it. Like God.”

The others looked at her. “Say, that’s really pretty clever,” Myfwany said.

Yolande flushed and looked down into her wine cup, continuing hastily. “Speakin’ of which, what are we goin’ to do once we’ve conquered the Yankees?”

Myfwany laughed. “My brothah, Billy? He likes the Yankee movies; says the girls look nice. Says he’s goin’ buy a dozen when we put the Yoke on them.”

“Euuu, yuk, boys,” Mandy said. “Oops, this is overdone . . . ”

“Ah thought you liked boys,” Veronica said. She bent her head to whisper something in Muriel’s ear, and the other girl giggled and worked her eyebrows.

Yolande looked at Veronica and flushed again; the Alexandrian girl was no older, but she had definite breasts, and the dark-brown hair between her legs was thick and abundant. It made her conscious of her own undeveloped form again. And . . . strange about sex and things, she mused. When you young, you know about it an’ it isn’t all that interestin’ an’ all of a sudden it’s scary an’ important. She shook her head; at least there was a while before she had to worry about that sort of thing. Freya’s curse, I hate being shy!

“I do like boys,” Mandy said. “At least I sort of like the idea of ’em. But they still sort of yucky, too. You know, my brothah Manfred, he only a year older than me, an’ he’s got ouah cook pregnant? Ma found him ridin’ her in the pantry, an’ cook’s thirty, with a bottom a meter across an’ a mustache. I mean, we’re not planters, we’ve only got a dozen house serfs, but Pa bought him a regular concubine when he turned thirteen, and still he goes an’ does things like that.” She brooded for a moment. “Yucky.”

“My ma,” Yolande began, “says it’s on account of they don’t have enough blood.” She grinned at their blank looks and held out a hand, palm-up, then slowly curled up her index finger. “You know, all the blood rushes to they crotch, their brains shut down fo’ lack of oxygen, an’ they stop thinkin’?”

There was a moment of silence, and Yolande felt a flash of fear that her joke had fallen flat. Then the laughter began and ran for a full half-minute, before trailing off into teary giggles.

“Aii, that’s a good one,” Muriel said. She glanced up at the stars again. “When we’ve beaten the Yankees, we’ll put up mo’ of those power satellites my pa’s workin’ on.”

“Build cities on the moon!”

“Turn Venus into anothah Earth!”

“Give Mars an atmosphere!”

“Hollow out asteroids an’ fly ’em to Alpha Centauri!” The comments flew faster and faster, more and more outrageous, until everyone collapsed into giggles again. Myfwany rose, and pulled out a velvet case from their bundles.

“This is your’n, isn’t it, ’Landa?”

“Yes—careful!” Yolande took the long shape in her hands; they moved toward it with unconscious gentleness. “It’s a mandolin.”

Muriel whistled between her teeth. “An’ Archona’s a city. Old one, hey?”

“My great grandma’s,” Yolande said. She put the pick between her teeth while she arranged the case across her lap, then settled the instrument and slipped it onto her hand. “On my ma’s side, she Confederate-born. Had it fancied up some . . . . ” She tuned it quickly; the strings sounded, plangent under the fire crackle and shhhhh of the waves. The wood was smooth as satin under her fingers, the running leopards inlaid in ivory around the soundbox as familiar as her own hands.

“Well, give’s a song, then,” Myfwany said.

“I don’t sing all that well—”

“C’mon,” Mandy said. “We’ll all join in.”

“Oh, all right.” Yolande bent her head, then tossed it as the long pale ripple of her hair fell across the strings. She swept through the opening bars, a rapid flourish, and began to sing: an alto, pure but not especially strong.