The meadow rose up to strike; he flung himself back, too soon, lost directional control, and barely avoided landing boot-first in another chute at a hundred feet up. Ground slammed into his soles and he collapsed, dragging . . .
“Watch where you puttin’ y’feet. Yankee pigfuckah,” an incongruously young and feminine voice snarled as he skidded through tall grass and sharp-edged gravel on his behind, scrabbling at the release straps until the billowing mass of fabric peeled away to join the others flapping on the ground. He stood, turned, flung himself down again as the dark bulk of a glider went by a foot above his head, followed by a second.
“Jesus!” he swore, as they landed behind him and collided with a brief crunch of splintering plywood and balsa. Boots hurdled him, voices called in throttled shouts, the clearing filling with a shadowy ordered chaos.
Dreiser walked toward the spot where the Draka commanders would be gathering, feeling strength return to his rubbery legs and a strange exhilaration building.
Did it, by God! he thought. So much for being an old man at thirty-eight . . . Now, about the article, let’s see: The landing showed once again the value of careful preparation and training. Modern warfare, with its complex coordination of different arms, is something new on this earth. Our devotion to the “minuteman” tradition of the amateur citizen-soldier is a critical handicap . . .
Eric took the handset, silent for a moment as the gliders came in. The sailplanes slewed to a halt, the wing of one catching the other’s tail with a crunch of plywood. A sigh gusted up as the detachable nose sections fell away and figures began unloading.
Sofie gently tapped his hand. “Set’s workin’ fine, Centurion,” she said. “Got the Cohort Sparks already, green-beepers from all the hand-radios in the Century . . . want a smoke?”
“Trying to give it up,” he grunted, lifting the phone to his ear and clicking the pressure button in his call sign. “You should, too.” He glanced at his watch: 0420 almost exactly. Forty-five minutes to dawn.
“Hey, Centurions, do I complain about your sheep?” she replied, grinning. The rest of the headquarters tetrarchy were falling in around him: Senior Decurion McWhirter, two five-trooper rifle “sticks” who would double as runners, two rocket-gun teams and a heavy machine gun.
They both fell silent as the hissing of static gave way to voices, coded sequences and barked instructions. Unconsciously, Eric nodded several times before speaking.
“Yes? Yes, sir. No, sir; just coming in, but it looks good.” Reception was excellent; he could hear a blast of small-arms fire in the background, the rapid snarl of Draka assault rifles, the slower thump and chatter of German carbines and MG 34s.
“Ah, good.” Then he and the comtech winced in unison. “The armor landed where? Sorry, sir, I know you didn’t design this terrain . . . Right, proceed according to plan, hold them hard as long as I can. Any chance of extra antitank . . . Yes, Cohortarch, I appreciate everybody wants more firepower, but we are the farthest north . . . Yes, sir, we can do it. Over and out, status report when Phase A is complete. Thank you, sir, and good luck to you, too.”
“Because we’re both going to need it,” he added under his breath as he released the send button. The Legion had had a Cohort of light tanks, Cheetahs with 75mm guns in oscillating turrets. Those had apparently come down neatly in a gully . . .
The gliders were emptying, stacks of crates and heavy weapons being lifted onto their wheeled carts. And already the trunks of the birches were showing pale in the light of dawn.
A sudden sense of the . . . unlikeliness of it all struck Eric. He had been born in the heartlands of the Domination, fourteen thousand kilometers away in southern Africa. And here he stood, on soil that had seen . . . how many armies? Indoeuropeans moving south to become Hittites, Cimmerians, Scythians, Sarmatians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Armenians, Arabs, Turks, Tzarist Russians, Bolsheviks . . . and now a Century of Draka, commanded by a descendant of Hessian mercenaries, come to kill Germans who might be remote cousins, and who had marched two thousand kilometers east to meet him . . .
What am I doing here? Where did it start? he thought. Such a long way to journey, to die among angry strangers. A journey that had lasted all his life . . . The start? Oakenwald Plantation, of course. In the year of his birth; and last year, six months ago. But that was the past, and the battle was here and now, an ending awaiting him. An end to pain, weariness; an end to the conflict within, and to loneliness. One could forget a great deal in combat.
Eric von Shrakenberg took a deep breath and stepped forward, into the war.
Chapter Two
ARCHONA TO OAKENWALD PLANTATION
OCTOBER 1941
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.