The Stone Dogs

  "Myfwany, yo' remembers Ali, from Claestum?" The redhead came up, with a bounce in her stride, despite the sweat that plastered the curls to her forehead. "Coincidence, hey?" The squad was hooking the cart's towing hitch to the nose of her aircraft. "Carry on, decurion; nice to know mah bird's in good hands."

  "Eurrch," Yolande said. "C'mon, love, why don't we turn in?" Most of the squadron was there, but it would be a day or two before they had anything to do but stay out of the way. In the meantime, they had been assigned quarters. The original occupants certainly had no need of them…

  The prisoners were being held in a messhall; sorted in groups by rank and age, in squares marked off by colored rope. The guards were Security Directorate, Intervention Squad specialists, but there were a fair number of Draka making inspection; Citizen officers of the Janissary legion, pilots from their outfit, others. She looked at the captives with mild distaste; they had been stripped of their uniforms as a precautionary measure, and secured with the old-style restraints, chain and rod links that bound elbows and wrists together behind the back. Indians, mostly. Base techs, the sort of work that was done by unarmed Auxiliaries in the Domination's armed forces. A few had the glazed look of shock, or docilizing drugs; most were openly terrified, even crying.

  "Yo' can turn in iff'n you wants to, 'Landa," Myfwany said. She was smiling, and there was a glitter to her eyes; Yolande swallowed past a hollow feeling. I love you dearly, but there are times when you make me angry enough to spit, sweetheart, she thought resignedly.

  "Oh, all right," Yolande said. "Let's take a look."

  They walked down the edge of one of the green-rope enclosures. Green for lowest-priority, younger specimens. She supposed they would be sold off, after the fighting, or sent to work camps, something of that sort. Her nose wrinkled; they stank of fear, and from the pungency, some had pissed themselves. Across the room there was a high scream. Yolande looked up and saw the Security troopers dragging an older prisoner out of the red-corded pen for interrogation. A paunchy type in his fifties, already babbling. Glad they're not doin it in public, she thought idly. Headhunters, eurgh. Necessary work, she supposed, but disgusting.

  "This one looks interestin'," Myfwany was saying. "On yo' feet, wench."

  Yolande looked back. The prisoner had risen easily despite the restraints. In her late twenties, she estimated; much lighter-skinned than most of the others. Good figure, very nice muscle tone for a serf; cropped black hair, expressionless dark eyes… The neck was number-bare, that looked unnatural. Sixty aurics basic, Yolande thought. Depending on where she's sold, of course.

  "Who're you?" Myfwany asked the serf. Silence, and then the Draka struck. Crack. The open-handed blow rocked the prisoner's head back; Yolande was surprised she kept her feet. Sighing, she glanced aside. Myfwany gets too rough with them, sometimes, she thought unhappily. Of course, this one was feral and had to be taught submission, but still…

  "Marya Lenson." Crack. A backhanded blow this time.

  "That's Marya Lenson, Mistis, serf." The Security guard glanced up, came over idly twirling the rubber truncheon by the thong around his wrist.

  "Mistis." The serfs voice stayed toneless-flat.

  "Indian?" Myfwany put a finger under the serfs chin, turned her head sideways. "Europoid, I'd swear."

  "My parents were from California, Mistis."

  Myfwany turned to Yolande. "A Yank! What say we sign this'n out and play with it, 'Landa?" she said.

  Yolande sighed. "Oh, come on, sweet," she said exasperatedly. I hope we're not going to have a fight, like we did when you wanted Lele. It had taken two days of not speaking to each other before Myfwany realized she was serious about letting the servant say no. "Where's the fun in that?"

  "We can use aphrodizine," Myfwany said impatiently.

  "Eurg." Not that the aphrodisiac didn't work, but… "Look, sweet, yo' just got after-fight jitters. Yo' don't really want to—"

  Myfwany released the serf and spun to confront her friend. "Look yo'self," she hissed. "I'm not yo' keeper, Ingolfsson, and yo' not mine. Yo've got somethin' better to do, go do it." The green eyes turned heavy-lidded. "Tim or someone be glad to help me out."

  Yolande felt shock close her throat. This was fear, not the hot sensation of life-danger up in the clouds, but dread coiling at the pit of her stomach. She forced a smile.

  "Oh, don't get so heavy bout' it, love!" A glance aside at the serf. Myfwany'll probably get tired fairly soon. "Iff'n' yo's set on it, certainly." Not as if there was anything actually wrong with it, after all. You have to compromise on differing tastes. "Let's… let's take a walk an' check on the birds, first, hey? Get some fresh air."

  "Sure, 'Landa-sweet," Myfwany said. She smiled and took the other Draka's hand. Yolande felt the knot in her stomach melt. Or most of it, she thought. Oh, well. "I've got a rotten temper. Don't know why yo' puts up with me, sometimes."

  She called the guard over, palmed the identifier clipped to his belt. "Send this one ovah to our quarters, would yo'?"

  Frederick Lefarge felt the sweat trickle down from the rim of his helmet, itching under the armor and camouflage smock. He glanced at his watch; 2000 hours. The pickup squad was in a stand of tall pale-barked trees not far from what had been the perimeter wire of Chandragupta Base. A dozen of them, with nothing but their fieldcraft and two boxes of very sophisticated electronics to keep them out of the tightening Draka net. Two were wounded, and he didn't think Smythe was going to make it, he'd been far too close to a radiation bomb yesterday, when the rest of them had been sheltered in the cellar. Vomiting blood was not a good sign, at least.

  "Sor." Winters, the Englishman. Professional NCO in the Cumberland Borderers before transfer to the OSS special forces. Very reliable. "Sor, it's past time."

  She isn't going to make it, he thought. Either she's dead or she should be. He fought down the hot flash of rage, let it mingle with fear until it became something cold and leaden in his gut. Something that would not interfere with the job at hand… He remembered a moment in Santa Fe, and the pistol in Marya's hand unwavering upon him. We always knew the price, he thought. Go with God, ma soeur.

  And her mission accomplished—the explosion in the base HQ proved that—but nothing beyond. He raised the visor of his helmet and bent to the eyepiece of the spyglass. There were pickups all over the operational area, where his men had left their optical-thread connectors. The fires were mostly out now. Those had been from the initial blitz, suborb missiles with precision-guided conventional explosives. Dibblers for the runways, earth-piercers for the hardened weapons points, then a rolling surf of antipersonnel submunitions. The assault-troops had come on the heels of those—1st Airborne Legion, Citizen Force elite troops, but they had moved out once the area was secured, now there was a brigade of Janissaries doing clear-and-hold. And support personnel, Intelligence, transports, two squadrons of low-altitude VTOL gunboats, another of Falcons.

  And now they think it's secured, he thought grimly. Time to disabuse them.

  "Hit it, Jock," he said.

  * * *

  "And we—" Myfwany stopped. "What the fuck was that, Ali?"

  They and the Janissaries were standing outside a dugout. The explosion was a kilometer away, across the base. A flash, and the muffled whump a second later, a ball of orange flame rising into the soft Indian night. The troopers went into an instinctive crouch, and Ali cursed, rolling back into the sandbagged slit and reaching for the groundline com.

  "Suh?" he said. "Post Six, second tetrarchy—shit, it out!"

  Another explosion, and another; a rippling line in an arc along the perimeter opposite them. Yolande and Myfwany exchanged a glance and pulled on their ground-helmets, slipping down the visors and turning the night to a pale imitation of day. Each had a tiny dot of strobing red light at the lower left-hand corner; jamming. Then a real explosion; the two Draka threw themselves flat at the harsh white glare. Even reflected around the edges of their visors it was enough to dazzle, and the shoc
kwave lifted them up and slammed them down again hard enough to stun and bruise on the unyielding pavement.

  Yolande heard one of the Janissaries shouting. "Nuke? Dec, was that a nuke?" Her eyes darted down to the readout on the sleeve of her flight suit. No radiation above the nervous-making background already there, and a spear of blue-white flame was already rising from behind the broken hangars. Secondary explosions bellowed, like echoes of that world-numbing blast.

  "No, it ain't," Ali was saying. "That the fuel store."

  Liquid hydrogen and methane, Yolande realized. High-energy fuels for high-performance craft, difficult to transport. One of the reasons the attack plan had made this base a priority target in the first place. And—

  "The birds!" she shouted to Myfwany. Fatigue and worry vanished in the rush of adrenaline, at the thought of the turboram fighters caught helpless on the ground. The Falcons were two thousand meters distant, behind the parked assault-transports.

  Myfwany nodded. "Ali, yo' tasked with that?"

  The burly Janissary was climbing back out of the revetment. He hesitated for a moment; he was, but having two Citizens along out of the regular chain of command was not a good idea… The two Draka women saw him shrug and nod, accepting what could not be changed.

  "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."

  Chapter Eleven

  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