“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 Mount Elbruz and the passes of the Caucasus. Stale tobacco scented the air and the click-hum of the equipment echoed oddly in the unpeopled spaces.
“Risky,” he said, nodding toward the map.
“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 placement 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 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 machineworks. 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 . . . eight million souls in Archona. Through the center slashed the broad Way of the Armies, 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 off 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 1870s. He was the one the English didn’t pay any attention to, and then wished they had.”