“But that is a . . . a fatuous concept!” Nomura said, with stiff virtue. Fatuous or not, the Children of Amaterasu hadn’t been immune to it; you just had to ask the Koreans or the ita to get an earful, even now. “Surely any culture possessed by a concept so illogical would be defeated, as the Nazis were.”
“Son, don’t generalize from a small sample.” Carmaggio smiled bleakly. “Until recently, that’s all we had—a sample of one history. Now we’ve got access to two, and . . . some things look less certain than they did. Nazis? Here’s what happened there in that other history . . . ”
BOOK ONE
Chapter One
NORTH CAUCASUS FRONT, 20,000 FT.
APRIL 14, 1942: 0400 HOURS
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.