The Best Military Science Fiction of the 20th Century (34 page)

The Portelans had wanted to play soldier, Pritchard thought. He had dammed up all pity for the villagers of Haacin; he would not spend it now on these folk.

“Line ahead—First, Fourth, and Second,” Pritchard ordered. The triple column slowed and re-formed, with The Plow the second vehicle in the new line. The shelling lifted from Portela as the tanks plunged into the village. Green trails on the analog terminated over the road crowded with Benoit’s men and over the main French position, despite anything the calliopes could do. The sky over Benoit’s bunkers rippled and flared as firecracker rounds sleeted down their thousands of individual bomblets. The defensive fire cut off entirely. Pritchard could imagine the carnage among the unprotected calliope crews when the shrapnel whirred through them.

The tanks were firing into the houses on either side, using tribarrels and occasional wallops from their main guns. The blue-green flashes were so intense they colored even the flames they lit among the wreckage. At 50 kph the thirteen tanks swept through the center of town, hindered only by the rubble of houses spilled across the street. Barthe’s men were skittering white shadows who burst when powerguns hit them point blank.

The copper mine was just west of the village and three hundred meters north of the highway. As the lead tank bellowed out around the last houses, a dozen infantrymen rose from where they had sheltered in the pit head and loosed a salvo of buzzbombs. The tank’s automatic defense system was live. White fire rippled from just above the skirts as the charges there flailed pellets outward to intersect the rockets. Most of the buzzbombs exploded ten meters distant against the steel hail. One missile soared harmlessly over its target, its motor a tiny flare against the flickering sky. Only one of the shaped charges burst alongside the turret, forming a bell of light momentarily bigger than the tank. Even that was only a near miss. It gouged the iridium armor like a misthrust rapier which tears skin but does not pierce the skull.

Main guns and tribarrels answered the rockets instantly. Men dropped, some dead, some reloading. “Second Platoon, go put some HE down the shaft and rejoin,” Pritchard ordered. The lead tank now had expended half its defensive charges. “Michael First-Three, fall in behind First-One. Michael One leads,” he went on.

Kowie grunted acknowledgement. The Plow revved up to full honk. Benoit’s men were on the road, those who had not reached Portela when the shooting started or who had fled when the artillery churned the houses to froth. The infantry skimmers were trapped between sheer rocks and sheer drop-offs, between their own slow speed and the onrushing frontal slope of The Plow. There were trees where the rocks had given them purchase. Scattered incendiaries had made them blazing cressets lighting a charnel procession.

Jenne’s tribarrel scythed through body armor and dismembered men in short bursts. One of the anti-tank guns—was the other buried in Portela?—lay skewed against a rock wall, its driver killed by a shell fragment. Rob put a round from the main gun into it. So did each of the next two tanks. At the third shot, the ammunition ignited in a blinding secondary explosion.

The anti-tank guns still emplaced on the ridge line had not fired, though they swept several stretches of the road. Perhaps the crews had been rattled by the shelling, perhaps Benoit had held his fire for fear of hitting his own men. A narrow defile notched the final ridge. The Plow heaved itself up the rise, and at the top three bolts slapped it from different angles.

Because the bow was lifted, two of the shots vaporized portions of the skirt and the front fans. The tank nosed down and sprayed sparks with half its length. The third bolt grazed the left top of the turret, making the iridium ring as it expanded. The interior of the armor streaked white though it was not pierced. The temperature inside the tank rose 30°. Even as The Plow skidded, Sgt. Jenne was laying his main gun on the hot spot that was the barrel of the leftmost anti-tank weapon. The Plow’s shot did what heavy top cover had prevented Hammer’s rocket howitzers from accomplishing with shrapnel. The anti-tank gun blew up in a distance-muffled flash. One of its crewmen was silhouetted high in the air by the vaporizing metal of his gun.

Then the two remaining weapons ripped the night and the command blower with their charges.

The bolt that touched the right side of the turret spewed droplets of iridium across the interior of the hull. Air pistoned Pritchard’s eardrums. Rob Jenne lurched in his harness, right arm burned away by the shot. His left hand blackened where it touched bare metal that sparked and sang as circuits shorted. Margritte’s radios were exploding one by one under the overloads. The vision blocks worked and the turret hummed placidly as Pritchard rotated it to the right with his duplicate controls.

“Cut the power! Rob’s burning!” Margritte was shrieking. She had torn off her helmet. Her thick hair stood out like tendrils of bread mold in the gathering charge. Then Pritchard had the main gun bearing and it lit the ridge line with another secondary explosion.

“Danny, our ammunition! It’ll—”

Benoit’s remaining gun blew the tribarrel and the cupola away deafeningly. The automatic’s loading tube began to gang-fire down into the bowels of the tank. It reached a bright tendril up into the sky. But the turret still rolled.

Electricity crackled around Pritchard’s boot and the foot trip as he fired again. The bolt stabbed the night. There was no answering blast. Pritchard held down the switch, his nostrils thick with ozone and superheated plastic and the sizzling flesh of his friend. There was still no explosion from the target bunker. The rock turned white between the cyan flashes. It cracked and flowed away like sun-melted snow, and the anti-tank gun never fired again.

The loading tube emptied. Pritchard slapped the main switch and cut off the current. The interior light and the dancing arcs died, leaving only the dying glow of the bolt-heated iridium. Tank after tank edged by the silent command vehicle and roared on toward the ridge. Benoit’s demoralized men were already beginning to throw down their weapons and surrender.

Pritchard manually unlatched Jenne’s harness and swung it horizontal. The blower chief was breathing but unconscious. Pritchard switched on a battery-powered handlight. He held it steady as Margritte began to spray sealant on the burns. Occasionally she paused to separate clothing from flesh with a stylus.

“It had to be done,” Pritchard whispered. By sacrificing Haacin, he had mousetrapped Benoit into starting a war the infantry could not win. Hammer was now crushing Barthe’s Company, one on one, in an iridium vise. Friesland’s Council of State would not have let Hammer act had they known his intentions, but in the face of a stunning victory they simply could not avoid dictating terms to the French.

“It had to be done. But I look at
what
I did—” Pritchard swung his right hand in a gesture that would have included both the fuming wreck of Portela and the raiders from Haacin, dead on the road beyond. He struck the breech of the main gun instead. Clenching his fist, he slammed it again into the metal in self-punishment. Margritte cried out and blocked his arm with her own.

“Margi,” Pritchard repeated in anguish, “it isn’t something that human beings
do
to each other.”

But soldiers do.

And hangmen.

Harry Turtledove

Harry Turtledove first came to prominence as a writer of alternate world fantasy with
The Misplaced Legion,
the first novel in his multibook Videssos Cycle about the experiences of a Roman legion transferred to a world that runs on magic. Since then, he has explored the impact of altered historical events in a variety of works, including
Agent of Byzantium,
set in medieval times; the acclaimed
The Guns of the South,
in which time travelers manipulate a southern victory in the American Civil War; and the first two volumes of the Great War saga,
American Front
and
Walk in Hell,
which envisions an America in which the United States and the Confederate States support opposing sides in World War I. His ambitious Worldwar series—which includes
In the Balance, Tilting the Balance, Striking the Balance,
and
Upsetting the Balance
—projects an alternate World War II in which an alien invasion forges alliances between Axis and Allied opponents. Turtledove has also coedited the anthology
Alternate Generals.
His many other works include the short-fiction collection
Departures,
the comic fantasy
The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump,
and the linked novels
Into the Darkness
and
Darkness Descending,
epic tales of empire building set in a fantasy world where cataclysmic wars are fought with magic.

Harry Turtledove

Nonviolence is the first article of my faith. It is also the last article of my creed.

—M
OHANDAS
G
ANDHI

The one means that wins the easiest victory over reason: terror and force.

—A
DOLF
H
ITLER
,
Mein Kampf

T
HE TANK RUMBLED DOWN
the Rajpath, past the ruins of the Memorial Arch, toward the India Gate. The gateway arch was still standing, although it had taken a couple of shell hits in the fighting before New Delhi fell. The Union Jack fluttered above it.

British troops lined both sides of the Rajpath, watching silently as the tank rolled past them. Their khaki uniforms were filthy and torn; many wore bandages. They had the weary, past-caring stares of beaten men, though the Army of India had fought until flesh and munitions gave out.

The India Gate drew near. A military band, smartened up for the occasion, began to play as the tank went past. The bagpipes sounded thin and lost in the hot, humid air.

A single man stood waiting in the shadow of the Gate. Field Marshal Walther Model leaned down into the cupola of the Panzer IV. “No one can match the British at ceremonies of this sort,” he said to his aide.

Major Dieter Lasch laughed, a bit unkindly. “They’ve had enough practice, sir,” he answered, raising his voice to be heard over the flatulent roar of the tank’s engine.

“What is that tune?” the field marshal asked. “Does it have a meaning?”

“It’s called ‘The World Turned Upside Down,’” said Lasch, who had been involved with his British opposite number in planning the formal surrender. “Lord Cornwallis’s army musicians played it when he yielded to the Americans at Yorktown.”

“Ah, the Americans.” Model was for a moment so lost in his own thoughts that his monocle threatened to slip from his right eye. He screwed it back in. The single lens was the only thing he shared with the clichéd image of a high German officer. He was no lean, hawk-faced Prussian. But his rounded features were unyielding, and his stocky body sustained the energy of his will better than the thin, dyspeptic frames of so many aristocrats. “The Americans,” he repeated. “Well, that will be the next step, won’t it? But enough. One thing at a time.”

The panzer stopped. The driver switched off the engine. The sudden quiet was startling. Model leaped nimbly down. He had been leaping down from tanks for eight years now, since his days as a staff officer for the IV Corps in the Polish campaign.

The man in the shadows stepped forward, saluted. Flashbulbs lit his long, tired face as German photographers recorded the moment for history. The Englishman ignored cameras and cameramen alike. “Field Marshal Model,” he said politely. He might have been about to discuss the weather.

Model admired his sangfroid. “Field Marshal Auchinleck,” he replied, returning the salute and giving Auchinleck a last few seconds to remain his equal. Then he came back to the matter at hand. “Field Marshal, have you signed the instrument of surrender of the British Army of India to the forces of the Reich?”

“I have,” Auchinleck replied. He reached into the left blouse pocket of his battledress, removed a folded sheet of paper. Before handing it to Model, though, he said, “I should like to request your permission to make a brief statement at this time.”

“Of course, sir. You may say what you like, at whatever length you like.” In victory, Model could afford to be magnanimous. He had even granted Marshal Zhukov leave to speak in the Soviet capitulation at Kuibyshev, before the marshal was taken out and shot.

“I thank you.” Auchinleck stiffly dipped his head. “I will say, then, that I find the terms I have been forced to accept to be cruelly hard on the brave men who have served under my command.”

“That is your privilege, sir.” But Model’s round face was no longer kindly, and his voice had iron in it as he replied, “I must remind you, however, that my treating with you at all under the rules of war is an act of mercy for which Berlin may yet reprimand me. When Britain surrendered in 1941, all Imperial forces were also ordered to lay down their arms. I daresay you did not expect us to come so far, but I would be within my rights in reckoning you no more than so many bandits.”

A slow flush darkened Auchinleck’s cheeks. “We gave you a bloody good run, for bandits.”

“So you did.” Model remained polite. He did not say he would ten times rather fight straight-up battles than deal with the partisans who to this day harassed the Germans and their allies in occupied Russia. “Have you anything further to add?”

“No, sir, I do not.” Auchinleck gave the German the signed surrender, handed him his sidearm. Model put the pistol in the empty holster he wore for the occasion. It did not fit well; the holster was made for a Walther P38, not this man-killing brute of a Webley and Scott. That mattered little, though—the ceremony was almost over.

Auchinleck and Model exchanged salutes for the last time. The British field marshal stepped away. A German lieutenant came up to lead him into captivity.

Major Lasch waved his left hand. The Union Jack came down from the flagpole on the India Gate. The swastika rose to replace it.

L
ASCH TAPPED DISCREETLY
on the door, stuck his head into the field marshal’s office. “That Indian politician is here for his appointment with you, sir.”

“Oh, yes. Very well, Dieter, send him in.” Model had been dealing with Indian politicians even before the British surrender, and with hordes of them now that resistance was over. He had no more liking for the breed than for Russian politicians, or even German ones. No matter what pious principles they spouted, his experience was that they were all out for their own good first.

The small, frail brown man the aide showed in made him wonder. The Indian’s emaciated frame and the plain white cotton loincloth that was his only garment contrasted starkly with the Victorian splendor of the Viceregal Palace from which Model was administering the Reich’s new conquest. “Sit down,
Herr
Gandhi,” the field marshal urged.

“I thank you very much, sir.” As he took his seat, Gandhi seemed a child in an adult’s chair: it was much too wide for him, and its soft, overstuffed cushions hardly sagged under his meager weight. But his eyes, Model saw, were not a child’s eyes. They peered with disconcerting keenness through his wire-framed spectacles as he said, “I have come to enquire when we may expect German troops to depart from our country.”

Model leaned forward, frowning. For a moment he thought he had misunderstood Gandhi’s Gujarati-flavored English. When he was sure he had not, he said, “Do you think perhaps we have come all this way as tourists?”

“Indeed I do not.” Gandhi’s voice was sharp with disapproval. “Tourists do not leave so many dead behind them.”

Model’s temper kindled. “No, tourists do not pay such a high price for the journey. Having come regardless of that cost, I assure you we shall stay.”

“I am very sorry, sir; I cannot permit it.”

“
You
cannot?” Again, Model had to concentrate to keep his monocle from falling out. He had heard arrogance from politicians before, but this scrawny old devil surpassed belief. “Do you forget I can call my aide and have you shot behind this building? You would not be the first, I assure you.”

“Yes, I know that,” Gandhi said sadly. “If you have that fate in mind for me, I am an old man. I will not run.”

Combat had taught Model a hard indifference to the prospect of injury or death. He saw the older man possessed something of the same sort, however he had acquired it. A moment later, he realized his threat had not only failed to frighten Gandhi, but had actually amused him. Disconcerted, the field marshal said, “Have you any serious issues to address?”

“Only the one I named just now. We are a nation of more than three hundred million; it is no more just for Germany to rule us than for the British.”

Model shrugged. “If we are able to, we will. We have the strength to hold what we have conquered, I assure you.”

“Where there is no right, there can be no strength,” Gandhi said. “We will not permit you to hold us in bondage.”

“Do you think to threaten me?” Model growled. In fact, though, the Indian’s audacity surprised him. Most of the locals had fallen over themselves fawning on their new masters. Here, at least, was a man out of the ordinary.

Gandhi was still shaking his head, although Model saw he had still not frightened him (a man out of the ordinary indeed, thought the field marshal, who respected courage when he found it). “I make no threats, sir, but I will do what I believe to be right.”

“Most noble,” Model said, but to his annoyance the words came out sincere rather than with the sardonic edge he had intended. He had heard such canting phrases before, from Englishmen, from Russians, yes, and from Germans as well. Somehow, though, this Gandhi struck him as one who always meant exactly what he said. He rubbed his chin, considering how to handle such an intransigent.

A large green fly came buzzing into the office. Model’s air of detachment vanished the moment he heard that malignant whine. He sprang from his seat, swatted at the fly. He missed. The insect flew around a while longer, then settled on the arm of Gandhi’s chair. “Kill it,” Model told him. “Last week one of those accursed things bit me on the neck, and I still have the lump to prove it.”

Gandhi brought his hand down, but several inches from the fly. Frightened, it took off. Gandhi rose. He was surprisingly nimble for a man nearing eighty. He chivvied the fly out of the office, ignoring Model, who watched his performance in open-mouthed wonder.

“I hope it will not trouble you again,” Gandhi said, returning as calmly as if he had done nothing out of the ordinary. “I am one of those who practice
ahimsa
: I will do no injury to any living thing.”

Model remembered the fall of Moscow, and the smell of burning bodies filling the chilly autumn air. He remembered machine guns knocking down Cossack cavalry before they could close, and the screams of the wounded horses, more heartrending then any woman’s. He knew of other things, too, things he had not seen for himself and of which he had no desire to learn more.

“
Herr
Gandhi,” he said, “how do you propose to bend to your will someone who opposes you, if you will not use force for the purpose?”

“I have never said I will not use force, sir.” Gandhi’s smile invited the field marshal to enjoy with him the distinction he was making. “I will not use violence. If my people refuse to cooperate in any way with yours, how can you compel them? What choice will you have but to grant us leave to do as we will?”

Without the intelligence estimates he had read, Model would have dismissed the Indian as a madman. No madman, though, could have caused the British so much trouble. But perhaps the decadent raj simply had not made him afraid. Model tried again. “You understand that what you have said is treason against the Reich,” he said harshly.

Gandhi bowed in his seat. “You may, of course, do what you will with me. My spirit will in any case survive among my people.”

Model felt his face heat. Few men were immune to fear. Just his luck, he thought sourly, to have run into one of them. “I warn you,
Herr
Gandhi, to obey the authority of the officials of the Reich, or it will be the worse for you.”

“I will do what I believe to be right, and nothing else. If you Germans exert yourselves toward the freeing of India, joyfully will I work with you. If not, then I regret we must be foes.”

The field marshal gave him one last chance to see reason. “Were it you and I alone, there might be some doubt as to what would happen.” Not much, he thought, not when Gandhi was twenty-odd years older and thin enough to break like a stick. He fought down the irrelevance, went on, “But where,
Herr
Gandhi, is your
Wehrmacht
?”

Of all things, he had least expected to amuse the Indian again. Yet Gandhi’s eyes unmistakably twinkled behind the lenses of his spectacles. “Field Marshal, I have an army too.”

Model’s patience, never of the most enduring sort, wore thin all at once. “Get out!” he snapped.

Gandhi stood, bowed, and departed. Major Lasch stuck his head into the office. The field marshal’s glare drove him out again in a hurry.

“W
ELL
?” J
AWAHARLAL
N
EHRU
paced back and forth. Tall, slim, and saturnine, he towered over Gandhi without dominating him. “Dare we use the same policies against the Germans that we employed against the English?”

“If we wish our land free, dare we do otherwise?” Gandhi replied. “They will not grant our wish of their own volition. Model struck me as a man not much different from various British leaders whom we have succeeded in vexing in the past.” He smiled at the memory of what passive resistance had done to officials charged with combating it.

“Very well,
satyagraha
it is.” But Nehru was not smiling. He had less humor than his older colleague.