The domination, p.1
The Domination, page 1
THE DOMINATION
S.M. STIRLING
BAEN BOOKS by S.M. STIRLING
The Draka Series
The Domination
Drakon
The General Series (with David Drake)
The Forge
The Hammer
The Anvil
The Steel
The Sword
The Chosen
With Jerry Pournelle
Go Tell the Spartans
Prince of Sparta
Blood Feuds
Blood Vengeance
The Children’s Hour
The Rising (with James Doohan)
The City Who Fought (with Anne McCaffrey)
The Ship Avenged
The Rose Sea (with Holly Lisle)
Snowbrother
Saber and Shadow (with Shirley Meier)
The Domination
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.
Copyright ® 1999 by S.M. Stirling. Abridged and revised by the author from the previously published titles Marching Through Georgia, Under the Yoke and The Stone Dogs.
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.
A Baen Books Original
Baen Publishing Enterprises
P.O. Box 1403
Riverdale, NY 10471
ISBN: 0-671-57794-8
ISBN13: 978-1-61824-043-9
Cover art by Stephen Hickman
First printing, May 1999
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Stirling, S.M.
The domination / S.M. Stirling
p. cm.
ISBN 0-671-57794-8 (hc)
I. Title
PS3569.T543D66 1999 99-18561
813’.54-DC21 CIP
Distributed by Simon & Schuster
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020
Typeset by Windhaven Press, Auburn, NH
Printed in the United States of America
Prologue
LOW EARTH ORBIT
JULY 1ST, 2014
INGOLFSSON INCURSION TIMELINE
EARTH/2B
The richest man in the world liked eating pastrami sandwiches in orbit; he also liked conducting certain sensitive interviews there, where it was easier to be really sure nobody was listening in. He and the researcher were sitting and watching the sunset beyond the curve of earth, the planet turning like a great white and blue shield below him. The yacht’s forward reentry plates were retracted, leaving the nose three-quarters transparent. Beyond earth, stars burned in airless clarity. Bright dots moved across their sight, ships and orbital habitats.
“Damn, I’m still not used to zero G,” Henry Carmaggio said, snagging a scrap of pastrami that was floating away. The airscrubber system would get it eventually, but it was a little embarrassing.
The researcher was Japanese. Nomura Takashi by name, an up-and-coming young physicist who had been working for IngolfTech’s Basic Research Division for a year now. He waited politely, occasionally straying up against the restraining harness of his seat.
“You’re wondering why I brought you here,” Carmaggio said, his voice still carrying more than a trace of blue-collar New York. He was a thick-shouldered man in his sixties, with short-cut grizzled hair. Trimly built, like virtually everyone these days—metaboline had been on the market since the turn of the millennium, and obesity was one with Nineveh, Tyre and cancer. The muscle showed the results of effort, though. His face was craggy and big-nosed, with a pleasant, lived-in look.
“Yes, sir,” Nomura said.
“It’s because you’ve been asking questions,” Carmaggio said easily. He chuckled at the sight of the younger man’s alarm. “Oh, no problem. You were bound to do that sometime. Essentially, you’ve gotten through our cover story.”
“Cover story?”
“The pretense that IngolfTech has actually been inventing the stuff we’ve been selling since 1999,” Carmaggio said easily. “Not surprising. The horseshit about how the curve had to start rising exponentially in the late ’90s and we just happened to be riding it—it doesn’t make sense, when you think about it, despite what that SF writer—what’s his name, Winge?—is always on about. People just accept it because all this”—he waved a hand at the spacecraft—“is here, after all. Something had to cause it.”
Nomura ducked his head. “Yes, Carmaggio-san. But . . . you will pardon me . . . the more deeply I became involved in the company’s research effort, the more it seemed . . . somehow . . . that we were trying to determine the physical-law basis of the technology, rather than developing technology from established theory. And even then, many of the theoretical breakthroughs were . . . far too convenient! The researchers who claimed them didn’t have the information trail that would lead one to expect them to make such startling breakthroughs.”
Carmaggio chuckled. Smart boy, he thought. Now let’s see how he handles something really weird.
“Yeah,” he said aloud. “In fact, there’s just no way we could have gone from the stuff available in 1999—chemical rockets, coal-burning power stations, gasoline-powered cars—to what we’ve got now. Hell, IngolfTech and Sony just launched the first interstellar probe toward Alpha C! We’ve got Alfven-drive spaceships all over the solar system, direct-conversion fusion reactors, plasma beam weapons, computers a thousand times quicker and more powerful than at the turn of the century, hundreds of other things that’ve been tying the world economy in knots. We’ve eliminated pretty well every disease except old age, and we’re working on that. Things nobody else can duplicate until we license. Tell me how we’ve done all that in fifteen years.”
Nomura blinked. He’d have been wearing coke-bottle glasses in the old days, Carmaggio thought.
“Sir . . . the only logical conclusion I can reach is that somehow . . . somehow IngolfTech was handed the information it has been releasing. That it comes from outside the sphere of our civilization and its scientific tradition entirely. But that itself is not logical.”
Carmaggio nodded. “You’re right. We were handed it—captured it, to be blunt.”
“Aliens,” Nomura breathed. His hands were trembling; the older man judged that was excitement, more than fear. “Or . . . time travel? There are hints, beyond Tipler’s work—”
“Not exactly,” Carmaggio said. “It’s a long story—and it starts more than two centuries ago, in a history that wasn’t ours. Thank God for that! It runs up to four centuries in the future and then loops over to New York, when I was a cop there fifteen years ago. Settle down and disconnect your critical faculties, Dr. Nomura. This shit is so strange you’re going to have to believe it.”
His face went grim. “The human race had a real close brush with disaster,” he said. “Something worse than extinction.”
“Carmaggio-san . . . what is worse than extinction?”
The young scientist was looking a bit green under his natural amber color, and the American didn’t think it was space-sickness.
“Domestication. On our line of history, the Nazis and Communists and control freaks in general eventually lost . . . but on that other one, they won, a particularly nasty bunch of ’em. They thought they were the Master Race, you see.”
“But that is a . . . a fatuous concept!” Nomura said, with stiff virtue. Fatuous or not, the Children of Amaterasu hadn’t been immune to it; you just had to ask the Koreans or the ita to get an earful, even now. “Surely any culture possessed by a concept so illogical would be defeated, as the Nazis were.”
“Son, don’t generalize from a small sample.” Carmaggio smiled bleakly. “Until recently, that’s all we had—a sample of one history. Now we’ve got access to two, and . . . some things look less certain than they did. Nazis? Here’s what happened there in that other history . . . ”
BOOK ONE
Chapter One
NORTH CAUCASUS FRONT, 20,000 FT.
APRIL 14, 1942: 0400 HOURS
The shattering roar of six giant radial engines filled the hold of the Hippo-class transport aircraft, as tightly as the troopers of Century A, 1st Airborne Legion. They leaned stolidly against the bucking, vibrating walls of the riveted metal box, packed in their cocoons of parasail and body harness, strapped about with personal equipment and weapons like so many deadly slate-gray Christmas trees. The thin, cold air was full of a smell of oil and iron, brass and sweat and the black greasepaint that striped the soldiers’ faces; the smell of tools, of a trade, of war. High at the front of the hold, above the rams that led to the crew compartment, a dim red light began to flash.
Centurion Eric von Shrakenberg clicked off the pocket flashlight, folded the map back into his case and sighed. 0400, he thought. Ten minutes to drop. Eighty soldiers here in the transport; as many again in the one behind, and each pulled a Helot-class glider loaded with heavy equipment and twenty more troopers.
He was a tall young man, a hundred and eighty centimeters even without the heavy-soled paratrooper’s boots, hard smooth athlete’s muscle rolling on the long bones. Yellow hair and mustache were cropped close in the Draka military style; new lines scored down his face on either side of the beak nose, making him look older than his twenty-four years. He sighed again, recognizing the futility of worry and the impossibility of calm.
Some of the old sweats seemed to have it, the ones who’d earned the banners of the Domination of the Draka from Suez to Constantinople and east to Samarkand and the borderlands of China in the last war. And then spent the next twenty years hammering Turks and Kurds and Arabs into serfs as meek as the folk of the old African provinces. Senior Decurion McWhirter there, for instance, with the Constantinople Medal and the Afghan ribbon pinned to his combat fatigues, bald head shining in the dim lights . . .
He looked at the watch again: 0405. Time was creeping by. Only two hours since lift-off, if you could believe it.
I’ll fret, he thought. Staying calm would drive me crazy. Christ, I could use a smoke. It would take the edge off; skydiving was the greatest thing since sex was invented, but combat was something you never really got used to. You were nervous the first time; then you met the reality, and it was worse than you’d feared. And every time after that, the waiting was harder . . .
Eric had come to believe he would not survive this war many months ago; his mind believed it, at least. The body never believed in death, and always feared it. It was odd; he hated the war and its purposes, but during the fighting, that conflict could be put aside. Garrison duty was the worst—
In search of peace, he returned to The Dream. It had come to him often, these last few years. Sometimes he would be walking through orchards, on a cool and misty spring morning, cherry blossoms arched above his head, heavy with scent, over grass starred with droplets of fog. There was a dog with him, a setter. Or it might be a study with a fire of applewood, lined with books with stamped leather spines, windows closed against slow rain . . . He had always loved books; loved even the smell and texture of them, their weight. There was a woman, too, walking beside him or sitting with her red hair spilling over his knees. A dream built of memories, things that might have been, things that could never be.
Abruptly, he shook himself free of it. War was full of times with nothing to do but dream, but this was not one of them.
Most of the others were waiting quietly, with less tension than he remembered from the first combat drop last summer—blank-faced, lost in their own thoughts. Occasional pairs of lovers gripped hands. The old Spartans were right about that, he thought. It does make for better fighter . . . although they’d probably not have approved of a heterosexual application.
A few felt his gaze, nodded or smiled back. They had been together a long time, he and they; he had been private, NCO and officer-candidate in this unit. If this had been a legion of the Regular Line, they would all have been from the same area, too; it was High Command policy to keep familiar personnel together on the theory that while you might enlist for your country, you died for your friends. And to keep your pride in their eyes.
The biggest drop of the war. Two full legions, 1st and 2nd Airborne, jumping at night into mountain country. Twice the size of the surprise assault in Sicily last summer when the Domination had come into the war. Half again the size of the lightning strike that had given Fritz the Maikop oil fields intact last October, right after Moscow fell. Twenty-four thousand of the Domination’s best, leaping into the night, “fangs out and hair on fire.”
He grimaced. He’d been a tetrarch in Sicily, with only thirty-three troopers to command. A soldier’s battle, they’d called it, which meant bloody chaos, and relying on the troops and the regimental officers to pull it out of the can. Still, it had succeeded, and the parachute chiliarchoi had been built up to legion size, a tripling of numbers. Lots of promotions, if you made it at all. And a merciful transfer out once Italy was conquered and the “pacification” began; there would be nothing but butcher’s work there now, best left to the Security Directorate and the Janissaries.
Sofie Nixon, his comtech, lit two cigarettes and handed him one at arm’s length, as close as she could lean, padded out with the double burden of parasail and backpack radio.
“No wrinkles, Cap,” she shouted cheerfully, in the clipped tones of Capetown and the Western Province. Listening to her made him feel nineteen again, sometimes. And sometimes older than the hills—slang changed so fast. That was a new one for “no problems.”
“All this new equipment: to listen to the briefing papers, hell, it’ll be like the old days. We can be heroes on the cheap, like our great-granddads were, shootin’ down black spear-chuckers,” she continued. With no change of expression, she added, “And I’m the Empress of Siam; would I lie?”
He smiled back at the cheerful cynical face. There was little formality of rank in the Draka armies, less in the field, least of all among the volunteer elite of the airborne corps. Conformists did not enlist for a radical experiment; jumping out of airplanes into battle was still new enough to repel the conservatives.
Satisfied, Sofie dragged the harsh, comforting bite of the tobacco into her lungs. The Centurion was a good sort, but he tended to . . . worry too much. That was part of being an officer, of course, and one of the reasons she was satisfied to stay at monitor, stick-commander. But he overdid it; you could wreck yourself up that way. And he was very much of the Old Domination, a scion of the planter aristocracy and their iron creed of duty; she was city-bred, her grandfather a Scottish mercenary immigrant, her father a dock-loading foreman.
Me, I’m going to relax while I can, she thought. There was a lot of waiting in the Army, that was about the worst thing . . . apart from the crowding and the monotonous food, and good Christ but being under fire was scary. Not nice-scary like being on a board when the surf was hot or a practice jump; plain bad. You really felt good afterward, though, when your body realized it was alive . . .
She pushed the thought out of her head. The sitreps had said this was going to be much worse than Sicily, and that had been deep-shit enough. Still, there had been good parts. The Italians really had some pretty things, and the paratroops got the first pick. That jewelry from the bishop’s palace in Palermo was absolutely divine! And the tapestry . . . she sighed and smiled, in reminiscence. There had been leave, too—empty space on transport airships heading south, if you knew the right people. It was good to be able to peacock a little—do some partying, with a new campaign ribbon and the glamour of victory, and some pretties to show off.
Her smile grew smug. She had been very popular, with all the sexes and their permutations; a change from ugly-duckling adolescence. Men are nice, definitely, she thought. Pity I had to wait till I reported to boot camp to start in on ’em.
That was the other thing about the Army; it was better than school. Draka schooling was sex-segregated, on the theory that youth should not be distracted from learning and their premilitary training. Either that or sheer conservatism. Eight months of the year spent isolated in the countryside: from five to eighteen it had been her life, and the last few years had been growing harder to take. She was glad to be out of it, the endless round of gymnastics and classes and petty feuds and crushes; the Army was tougher, paratroop school more so, but what you did off duty was your own business. It was good to be an adult, free.
Even the winter in Mosul had been all right. The town was a hole, of course—provincial, and all new since the Draka conquest in 1916. Nothing like the mellow beauty of Capetown, with its theaters and concerts and famous nightspots . . . Mosul—well, what could you expect of a place whose main claim to fame was petrochemical plants? They’d been up in the mountains most of the time, training hard. She flexed her shoulders and neck complacently. She’d thought herself fit before, but four months of climbing under full load and wrestling equipment over boulders had taken the last traces of puppy fat off and left her with what her people considered the ideal feminine figure—sleek, compactly curved, strong, and quick.
Sofie glanced sidelong at her commander; she thought he’d been noticing, since she qualified for comtech. Couldn’t tell, though; he was one for keeping to himself. Just visited the officer’s Rest Center every week or so. But a man like that wouldn’t be satisfied with serf girls; he’d want someone he could talk to . . .
