The Stone Dogs (35 page)

"Let's go," he said. "Marcel, Ching, Mustafa, come with me.

Brigitte, Nils, Vlachec, hold the position an' report when the com comes back up."

"Now!" Frederick Lefarge kept to one knee and watched the dozen OSS special-ops troopers scurry by. In toward the base that now swarmed like a kicked-open termite mound. Their only chance…

He rose to his feet and followed. There they were, ten
Buffel
tilt-rotor assault transports, standing ready with their turbines warm. Nobody around them but unarmed ground-crew. The Alliance soldiers could charge on board and take off in ten different directions; the Draka IFF would hesitate crucial seconds before overriding their own electronic identification…

and the battle was still a chaos of Draka and Indian-held pockets from here to Burma. Just insane enough to have some chance of success. The Springfield-15 seemed light as a twig in his hands; his gaze hopped across the flat expanses of the airbase, watching for movement. There. Light armor, moving out of laager in the vehicle park, coasting toward them with air-cushion speed. His hand slapped a switch at his waist.

"Down!" Yolande shouted, when the lines of fire erupted upward out of the stand of trees to their right. She and Myfwany threw themselves apart and forward without breaking stride; she could hear the light impact of her lover's body on the concrete, and seconds later the pounding slam of the Janissary heavy infantry hitting the pavement.

The weapon that had fired was some sort of rocket automortar; she watched the trajectories arch and then plunge back down. Down toward the trio of Cheetah hovertanks that had been approaching them; a hundred meters up the self-forging warheads exploded in disks of fire, sending arrowheads of incandescent metal streaking for the thin deck-armor of the Draka tanks. The impacts were flashes that would have been dazzling without the guard-functions of her visor. The air-cushion vehicles bounced down as if slapped by the hand of an invisible giant, then exploded in gouts of fuel-fire and ammunition glare. Hot warm air struck her like a pillow, and a pattering rain of cermet armor and body-parts began to fell around the soldiers of the Domination.

" 'Landa!" Myfwany called. "Look right, are those hostiles?"

Yolande halted and went to ground, conscious of the others following the pilot's extended arm.

Frederick Lefarge threw himself to the ground and rolled to one side as the group running on an intercept vector with his opened fire. Muzzle flashes strobed before the silvery light-enhanced shapes of enemy soldiers. Shrapnel flicked at his exposed legs and arms, nothing serious, but he could feel the blood trickle behind the sharp sting.
Can't stop for a slugfest,
went through him. His special-forces unit were only lightly armored, and there was no cover on this artificial concrete desert.

"Eat this!" the OSS trooper beside Lefarge cried, flipping up to his knees and firing a grenade from the launcher beneath the barrel of his S17. It burst with an orange flash behind the enemy firing line; one of the rifles stopped, and there was a scream of pain. Then a chuttering flash from directly ahead; machine-pistol, not the louder growl of a T-7. The trooper who had fired pitched backward, torn open. Lefarge snapped off a burst toward the source and began leopard-crawling forward.

Another sound came from near where he had fired, a scream that raised the tiny hairs along the back of his neck.

"Keep them occupied!" he shouted to his men, heading for the cockpit ladder of the
Buffel
. It had a 25mm Gatling in its chin turret; if he could reach that…

"Keep them occupied!" a voice shouted. Yolande ignored it, braced behind an overturned supply-cart.

"Myfwany?" she called, looking over to where the other Draka had snap-fired last. "Hey, Myfwany?"

There was no movement. A long shape lying motionless on the concrete; impossible to see detail at this distance.

Machine-pistol resting on the ground, no movement.

"Myfwany?" Yolande said, this time a whisper. Then she was moving, a sprint that leaned her almost horizontal to the ground.

She forward-rolled the last five meters, rolling in beside her friend. "Myfwany?"

The body moved into her hands, infinitely familiar, utterly strange. Moving loosely, slack. Blood flowing down her hands from the band of black wetness across Myfwany's chest. Bits of soft armor, bits of bone and flesh; something bubbling and wheezing. Yolande tore off her own helmet, to see by natural light. There was enough to show the lashes flutter across the amber eyes, focus on her. The lips below moved, beneath the rills of blood that covered them. Perhaps to say a name, but there was no breath left for it. She slumped, with a total relaxation as the wheezing stopped. Yolande felt a sound building in her throat, and she knew that everything would end when she uttered it

.

The firefight hammered through the darkness; Lefarge flipped his visor up for better depth-perception and ran crouching. He was almost on the two Draka before he saw them. Lying on the pavement, one with the utter limpness of the newly dead, the other holding her. His rifle swung round, clicked empty; the magazine ejected itself and dropped to the runway with a hollow plastic clatter. For a moment only the eyes held him. Huge, completely dark in a stark-white elfin face daubed with blood, framed in hair turned silver by the moonlight. They saw him; somehow he knew they were recording every detail, but it was as if no active mind lived behind them. Then he was past, his feet pounding up the aluminum treads of the transport's gangway.

"Hunh!" Marya jerked awake, surprised that she had slept at all. Dawn was showing rosy through the window; the air smelled of cool earth, explosives and fire and dead humans. And the door had swung open.

A Draka stood there. One of the ones who had looked her over in the prisoner pen earlier. Short, slender, and blond. Different; her uniform was smoke-stained, grimy; there were speckles of dried blood across her face. The face… the eyes were huge, pupils distended with shock. The American felt a clammy sensation: not quite fear, although that was in it. As if she was in the presence of something that should not be seen… The dead-alive eyes focused on her, and Marya saw a spray-injector in the other's hand.

"It's yo' fault." The words came in a light, soft voice. Almost a whisper, and in utter monotone. "I was weak, squeamish. She wanted to play with yo', and I didn't, so I got her to go fo' a walk, thought she'd fo'get the idea. She's dead. I saw his face… he's not here. They got some of the planes, but she's ddddd—" A brief stutter, and the marble perfection of the face writhed for an instant, then settled back. "Dead."

The Draka touched the controls of the injector, held it to her own neck and pulled the trigger. Shuddered. A degree of life returned to the locked muscles of her face as she lowered it and changed the controls.

"This is fo' yo'," she said, her voice slightly thick now.

"Relaxant, muscle weakener, maximum safe dosage of aphrodizine." The cold metal touched Marya on the arm, but she scarcely felt the sting of the injection. It was impossible even to look away from those eyes, like windows into a wound.

Something flowed across her mind, warm and sticky, pushing conciousness back into a room at the rear of her head. Finders as strong as wire flipped her onto her stomach and began to unfasten the restraints.

"We're goin' to have a sort of celebration in memory of her, just this once," the Draka said. "And then I can think up somethin' else for yo' to do."

NEGOTIATORS REACH AGREEMENT [NP5]. Sources close to the Alliance Chairman's office reported today that a negotiated settlement to the clashes with the Domination in the asteroid belt is within reach. "We've reached a mutual standoff,"

our source said, in response to questions. "We can each inflict about the same amount of damage, but without strategic results.

It probably wouldn't have started except for the upsurge of popular anger after the Indian Incident."

Details remain to be settled, but the basis of the agreement is said to be a mutual recognition of the status quo; no armed action is to take place as long as neither side attempts to enter

"zones" of varying size around the present points of occupation in the belt. While complex, these arrangements will essentially give the Alliance control of about 75% of the material orbiting within the proclaimed limits of the "belt" (an area defined roughly as the space between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter), and an even higher proportion of the highly valuable larger objects. Free transit to the outer system will be guaranteed for both parties. Space Force experts insist that this agreement gives the Alliance a considerable victory. As economic and military activity beyond Earth increases geometrically, demand for the resources available in the asteroids will soar. The Draka hold on the Satunian and Jovian moons does not offer comparable advantage, while Mars, Venus, and Mercury are too heavy-gravity to be of immediate use.

The New York Times

World In Review

Sunday, August 15, 1977

TRANSIT STATION SEVENTEEN

MASAHD, PROVINCE OF HYRCAMIA

DOMINATION OF THE DRAKA

JANUARY 23, 1976

Marya Lefarge looked up. The train was slowing, and there was a stirring in the cramped darkness. It had been three days on the train. That was the first thing she had been aware of since the drug-haze lifted: being pushed off the truck and onto the train in Kabul. West and north since then; smooth steady hum of wheels on welded rail. Cold, but not freezing, and they all had thick rough overalls. Ration bars, water enough for drinking, and a chemical toilet. The forty prisoners were a mixed bag from all over India, city-folk mostly, with a fair sprinkling of military.

None past middle age or younger than their teens.

The smell was not too bad, now that the dociline had worn off the last cases, enough that they could clean themselves and use the toilet; natural leaders had taken charge, gotten the car organized and arranged rosters to look after the incapable. Sleep had been difficult; the metal floor was hard and many screamed in their sleep.
And the nightmares were bad
— Forget that.

Watch and wait, opportunity would come. She put her eye to a crack along the doorframe. The railcar was well-made but old, much-repaired. Nobody challenged her post by this drafty spot.

Obviously the car had been made for its present purpose; impossible to break out of without cutting tools… There had been mountains outside, for a while, then flat desert. Now it was afternoon, and they were traveling along a river valley. Wide flat fields, wheat and alfalfa stubble, or cornstalks, thinly drifted with snow; boundaries were poplar trees, and she could see occasional piles of irrigation pipe by a crossroads.

A road ran by the right-of-way, plain black asphalt; steamtrucks passed now and then, sometimes a private car. The traffic was thickening, and now they were passing through a belt of open parkland. Other rail tracks converged, until they were in a broad field of them. Other trains, too; freight cars, flatbeds with standard-sized cargo containers. A set of double-decker cattle cars, loud and odorous with their bawling freight.
Like us,
she thought, and smiled savagely, pulling the handcuffs taut between her wrists. Military traffic, logistics trucks and armored personnel carriers chained down to flats, moving east; reinforcements for India, probably. The open fields beyond the rail gave way to buildings, low-slung factory types, gray concrete with skylights; she might almost have been in a textile town somewhere in Ohio.

Darkness; they were in a covered station-building. Marya worked her way back into the crowd. A rattle outside, and they all blinked at the harsh fluorescent lights. There was a blast of slightly warmer air.

"Out, out, everybody out," an amplified voice shouted. Marya could see the plank barricades on either side of the door; the rest of the train was invisible noise.

Hands reached in and dragged the nearest through; the rest crowded to follow. Marya kept to the center of the mass, head slightly down so as not to attract attention, eyes flickering to collect data.
Study
everything. Knowledge is survival.
They were being herded down wide bleak-lit corridors of concrete block, between lines of guards. Not armed, not police; serfs in boots and gray wool overalls, swinging hard rubber truncheons.

"Stop!" The end of the corridors, a gate.

Collisions, cursing, blows directed at random. Through a stamped-steel door into a room with multiple exits, and a green-uniformed Orpo guard running a reader over the bar-coded plastic labels stapled to the breasts of their overalls.

More greencoats along the wall behind him, and these had machine-pistols and shockrods in their hands.

"Left," the man said, and gave her a shove; she staggered into another prisoner. A gateway there, with an observation camera and some cryptic letter-number code above, stenciled on the bare concrete. In front of her a young man turned, tried to run back; one of the Orpos stepped forward and slashed at him with the shockrod. He shrieked and convulsed, falling face-first to the floor.

"Pick him up, freshmeats," the guard snarled at the two prisoners nearest. "Or yaz get fuckin' same!" The Orpo was a short wide-shouldered man heavy with muscle, a flat snub-nosed Slavic face and shaven skull that gleamed in the bright lights.

Marya darted forward and bent to help the fallen man; someone else took the other arm, and they carried him, dazed, into the next room. Blood was running down his face from the broken nose, but after a dozen paces he was able to walk.

"That's it." Another bellow and the steel grille slammed shut behind them. "Line them up."

This time they were in a rectangular room a hundred meters by twenty. There was no immediate roof; instead the walls ran up three times a man's height and ended in steel walkways with guards pacing along them. Far overhead were girders and panels, like a warehouse, with arc-lights glaring down.

Squinting, she could make out more cameras, and what might be automatic guns. Certainly gas dispensers. Hands shoved at her, and she returned her attention to the ground level. There were twenty turntable-mounted chairs along the opposite wall, like dentist's chairs without padding, each surrounded by instruments swung out on jointed booms from the chairs. A serf technician waited by each—neatly dressed serfs this time, without the bruiser-muscular look of the others she had seen since the train.