Marching Through Georgia (2 page)

Dreiser finished the paragraph and forced his mind to consider it critically, scanning word by word with the pinhead light on the other end of the pen. Useful, when you had to consult a map or instrument without a conspicuous light; the Domination issued them to all its officers, and he had been quick to pick one up. The device was typical of that whole bewildering civilization; he turned it in his hands, feeling the smooth careful machining of its duralumin parts, admiring the compact powerful batteries, the six different colors of ink, the moving segments that made it a slide rule as well.

Typical indeed
, he thought wryly. Turned out on specialized machine tools, by illiterate factory-serfs who thought the world was flat and that the Combine that owned their contracts ruled the universe.

He licked dry lips, recognizing the thought for what it was: a distraction from fear. He had been through jump training, of course—an abbreviated version tailored to the limitations of a sedentary American in early middle age. And he had seen enough accidents to the youngsters about him to give him well-justified nightmares; if those magnificent young animals could suffer their quota of broken bones and wrenched backs, so could he. And they would be jumping into the arms of Hitler's Wehrmacht; his years reporting from Berlin had not endeared him to the National Socialists…

He glanced across the echoing gloom of the cargo hold to where Eric sat, smoking a last cigarette. His face was impassive, showing no more emotion than it had at briefings around the sand table in Mosul. A strange young man. The eagle-faced blond good looks were almost a caricature of what a landed aristocrat of the Domination of the Draka was expected to be; so was his manner, most of the time. Easy enough to suppose there was nothing there but the bleakly efficient, intellectual killing machine of legend, the amoral and ruthless superman driven by the Will to Power whom Nietzsche had proclaimed.

He had mentioned that to Eric, once. A
useful myth
, had been the Draka's reply. That had led them to a discussion of the German thinker's role in developing the Domination's beliefs; and of how Nietzsche's philosophy had been modified by the welcoming environment he found among the Draka, so different from the incomprehension and contempt of his countrymen.

The Domination was founded by losers
, Eric had said, letting an underlying bitterness show through. Ex-masters
like the
Loyalists and all those displaced European aristocrats and
Confederate southerners; prophets without followers like
Carlyle and Gobineau and Nietzsche. The outcasts of Western
civilization,
not the "huddled masses" you Yankees got. My
ancestors were the ones who wouldn't give up their grudges.

Now they're coming back for their revenge
.

Dreiser shrugged and brought his mind back to the present, tugging at the straps of his harness one more time. Times like this you could understand the isolationists; he had been born in Illinois and raised in Iowa himself, and knew the breed. A lot of them were decent enough, not fascist sympathizers like the German-American Bund, or dupes like Lindberg. Just decent people, and it was so tempting to think the oceans could guard American wholesomeness and decency from the iron insanities and corruptions of Europe…

Not that he had ever subscribed to that habit of thought; it led too easily to white sheets and hatred, destroying a tradition to protect it. Or to the Babbirtry that had driven him to Paris in the 1920's; the America he returned to in the Depression years was more alive than Hoover's had been, finally acknowledging its problems. Trying to
do
something about the submerged third of the population, taking up the cause of the Negro abandoned during Reconstruction, reforming the Hispanic backwaters south of the Rio Grande, where annexation in 1848 had produced states free only in name.

Dreiser ground his teeth, remembering the pictures from Pearl Harbor—oily smoke pouring to the sky from Battleship Row, the aircraft carrier
Enterprise
exploding in a huge globe of orange fire as the Japanese dive-bombers caught her in the harbor mouth… The United States had paid a heavy price for the illusion of isolation, and now it was fighting on its own soil, full-fledged states like Hawaii and the Philippines under enemy occupation. His prewar warnings of the Nazi menace had not been heeded; now his reports might serve to keep the public aware that Japan was not the only enemy, or the most dangerous of the Axis.

"JUMPMASTERS TO YOUR STATIONS!" Eric's amplified voice overrode even the engines; there was a glisten of eyes, a hundredfold rattle as hands reflexively sought the ripcords.

"PREPARE TO OPEN HATCH DOORS."

"
And step into the shit
," came the traditional chorus in reply.

* * *

Far to the south in Castle Tarleton, overlooking the Draka capital of Archona, a man stood leaning on the railing of a gallery, staring moodily at the projacmap that filled the huge room below. He was an
Arch-Strategos
, a general of the Supreme General Staff. The floor of the room was glass, twenty meters by thirty; the relief map was eerily three dimensional and underlit to put contrast against contour marks and unit counters. The mountains of Armenia extended in an infinity of scored rock, littered with the symbols of legions, equipment, airstrips, and roads; the red dots of aircraft crawled north toward Mt. Elbruz and the passes of the Caucasus. Stale tobacco scented the air, and the click-humm of the equipment echoed oddly in the unpeopled spaces.

"Risky," he said, nodding toward the map. "Twenty legions of armor, thirty mechanized. Another sixty of Janissary motorized infantry. Six thousand tanks, twenty thousand infantry carriers, a thousand SP guns… two million troops, and it all depends on two legions of paratroopers. North of the mountains, in an open-field battle of maneuver, we can take the Fritz. The Ivans are still holding hard east of the Volga, the Germans took on too much; they haven't got a strategic reserve to speak of… But butting our heads into the Caucasus, fighting our way over the mountains, inch by inch—" He shook his head. "We can't afford a war of attrition; there aren't enough Draka; it would ruin us.

And there may not be any limit to the number of serfs we can conscript for the Janissaries, but there
are
limits to the number we can arm safely."

"War is risk," the officer beside him replied. The cat-pupiled eye of Intelligence was on her collar; she had the same air of well-kept middle age as he, and a scholar's bearing. "Breaking the Ankara Line was a risk, too; but it gave us Anatolia, back in

"17."

The general laughed, rubbing at his leg. The fragments from the Austrian antiairship burst had severed tendons and cut nerves; the pain was a constant backdrop to his life, and worse on these cold nights.
Pain does not hurt
, he reminded himself.

Only another sensation. The Will is Master
. "Then I was an optimistic young centurion, out at the sharp end, sure I could pull it out of the
kaak
even if the high command fucked it up,"

he said. "Now the new generation's out there, and probably expecting to have to scoop up
my
mistakes."

"I was driving a field ambulance in '16; all you male lords of creation thought us fit for, then."

He laughed. "We weren't quite so stretched for reliable personnel, then." The woman snorted and poked a finger into his ribs.

"Hai, that was
a joke
, Cohortarch," he complained with a smile.

"So was that, you shameless reactionary bastard," she retorted. "If you're going to insult me, do it when we're on-duty and I can't object…"

He nodded, and grew grim. "Well, we're committed to this attack; the Domination wasn't built by playing safe. There'll never be another chance like this. Thank the White Christ that Hitler attacked the Soviets after he finished off the French. If they'd stayed in Europe, we'd never have been able to touch them."

She nodded, hesitated, spoke: "Your boy's in the first wave, isn't he, Karl?"

The man nodded, turning away from the railing and leaning his weight against the ebony cane at his side. "Eric's got a Century in the First Airborne," he said quietly, looking out over the city. "And my daughter's flying an Eagle out of Kars." The outer wall was window from floor to ceiling; Castle Tarleton stood on a height that gave a fine view of the Domination's capital. The fort had been built in 1791, when the Crown Colony of Drakia was new. The hilltop had been for practical reasons, once: Cavalry had been based here, rounding up labor for the sugar plantations of Natal, where the ancestors of the Draka were settling into their African home.

Those had been American loyalists, mostly southerners; driven from their homes by vengeful neighbors after the triumph of the Revolution. The British had seized the Cape from its Dutch masters during that war, and found it cheap enough to pay their supporters with the stolen goods of colonial empire. "Strange,"

Karl von Shrakenberg continued, softly enough to make her lean toward the craggy face. "I can command a legion handily enough—by Gobineau's ghost, I wish they'd give me a field command!—run my estate; I even get along well with my daughters. But my son… Where do the children go? I remember taking him from the midwife, I remember setting him on my shoulders and naming the stars for him, putting him on his first pony. And now? We hardly speak, except to argue. About absurdities: politics, books… When did we become strangers?

When he left, there was nothing. I wanted to tell him…

everything: to come back alive, that I loved him. Did he know it?"

His companion laid a hand on his shoulder. "Why didn't you say it?" she asked softly. "If you can tell me?"

He sighed wearily. "Never was very good with words, not that sort. And there are things you can say to a friend that you can't to your blood; perhaps, if Mary were still alive…" He straightened, his eyes focusing on the world beyond the glass.

"Well. This view was always a favorite of mine. It's seen a lot."

Together they looked down across the basin, .conscious of the winds hooting off the high plateau at their backs, cold and dry with winter. The first small fort of native fieldstone had grown over the years; grown with the colony of Drakia, named for Francis Drake and heir to that ruthless freebooter's spirit. It was a frontier post guarding the ranches and diamond mines, at first. Railways had snaked by to the great gold fields of the Whiteridge; local coal and iron had proved more valuable still, and this was a convenient post for a garrison to watch the teeming compounds of serf factory hands that grew beside the steel mills and machine-works. Then the Crown Colony became the autonomous Dominion of Draka and needed a capital, a centrum for a realm that stretched from Senegal to Aden, from the Cape to Algeria.

Lights starred the slopes beneath them, fading the true stars above; mansions with roofs of red tile, set in acres of garden. A monorail looped past, a train swinging through silently toward the airship haven and airport to the west, windows yellow against the darkness. A tracery of streets, sprawling over ridge and valley to the edge of sight, interrupted by the darker squares of parkland. Archona was the greatest city of the Domination—eight million souls. Through the center slashed the broad Way of the Annies, lined with flowering jacaranda trees, framed between six-story office blocks, their marble and tile washed snow-pale in moonlight. The Assembly building, with its great two hundred meter dome of iridescent stained glass; the Palace where Archon Gunnarson had brought law into conformity with fact and proclaimed the Domination a sovereign state, back in 1919.

Karl's mouth quirked; he had been here in the Castle on that memorable day. The staff officers had raised a loyal glass of Paarl brandy, then gone back to their planning for the pacification of the New Territories and the
next
war. None of them had expected the Versailles peace to last more than a generation, whatever the American president might say of a

"war to end war." Unconsciously, his lip curled in contempt; only a Yankee could believe something that obviously fatuous.

"You grew up here, didn't you, Sannie?" he said, shaking of!

the mood of gloom.

"
Ja
,' she replied. "Born over there—" she pointed past the block of government buildings, to where the scattered colonnades of the University clustered. "In the house where Thomas Carlyle lived. Nietzsche visited my father there, seemed to think it was some sort of shrine. That was a little while after he moved to the Domination. Anthony Trollope stopped by as well, they tell me. While he was researching that book,
Prussia in
the Antipodes
, back in the 1870's. He was the one the English didn't pay any attention to, and then wished they had."

They both smiled; it was an old joke in the Domination, that the British had been warned so openly of the Frankenstein's monster they had created by unleashing the Draka south of Capricorn. Their gaze lifted, to the glow that lit the northern horizon—the furnaces and factories of the Ferrous Metals Combine, stamping and grinding out the engines of war. The serfs of the industrial combines were being kept to their tasks; for the rest, there was little traffic. Mobilization among the citizens had left little of Archona's vaunted nightlife, and curfew kept the subject races off the central streets.

"Well," he said, offering her an arm with a courtesy old-fashioned even in their generation of Draka. "Shall we see if, somewhere in this bureaucrat's paradise of a city, two ancient and off-duty warriors can find a drink?"

He would face the waiting as he would any other trial; as befitted a von Shrakenberg of Oakenwald.
Even if I'm the last
, he thought, as his halting boot echoed through the empty halls of the fortress.

Thump
! Eric's parachute unfolded, a rectangle of blackness against the paling stars of dawn. He blinked; starlight and moonlight were almost painfully bright after the crowded gloom of the transport; silence caressed his mind.