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 . . .