The Stone Dogs (29 page)

Marya stopped with him at the bottom of the stairs, and took two glasses of mineral water from a refreshment stand. They drank, hardly noticing the taste except that it wet dry throats.

Looked about: they were in a broad corridor, open to the roadway in front and lined by shops at their back. The serfs who moved about them mostly looked to be personal servants on errands, or airship haven staff. Steamcars were pulling up and leaving, parcel-delivery trucks, boxy little electric town runabouts. The Draka they saw were largely travelers, intent on their destinations.

Safe
, she thought; or as safe as they could be on enemy soil.

That had been something it took the OSS a long time to learn: that an agent was safer and more effective posing as a Citizen than as a serf. It went against common sense. There were so many more serfs, but most of them were plantation hands, or compounded workers; they just didn't move very much. Most of the ones who did travel were tightly integrated into some organization, known faces, and for a serf the Domination was a bureaucratized labyrinth, with monsters waiting at every corner to eat you if you made a wrong step…

Whereas a Citizen had fewer day-to-day constraints than the average American, if you didn't count things like the right to open a newspaper. Once that had mattered little, when the Domination and its ruling caste were smaller. But the Citizen population was no longer the tiny tight-knit band it had once been. Seventy-odd million was more than enough to be anonymous if you kept moving and avoided your supposed hometown.

They returned the glasses and walked into
Sanderton's Arms
and Hunt Supplies.

It was big, cool, and dimly lit; the aisles were separated by low glass-topped display cases, the ceiling covered in stained-glass hunting scenes while the floor bore plain sisal mats that rutched under their boots. Spotlights flooded the examination tables, granite columns with polished teak tops; there was a slight scent of well-kept machinery. Marya glanced over the merchandise in the displays and wall-racks with professional appraisal; to her, weapons were tools but not particularly interesting otherwise. A wide selection of sidearms. They would have to pick up some; their lack of gunbelts had attracted a few glances. The hunting weapons themselves were single shot rifles or double-barreled models, bolt-action repeaters in light calibers for small game, bird-shotguns. Spears, lances, various types of knife and bow.

Their needs were otherwise. "The proprietor, please," Marya said to one of the attendants. Most of those looked to be decorative, young women in short tunics. One of them whispered to an older man, black, shaven-headed, and massive; he bowed and used a desk phone.

Frederick Lefarge made a minuscule sign with his fingers:
I'll
deal with this one.

His eyes were appraising the… shopowner, he supposed. A Draka, of course, in this line of business. Well past fifty, in loose trousers and a sleeveless shirt. Tall and deeply tanned, face square and with an outdoorsman's weathered look. A formidable collection of scars; the American's eye picked out shrapnel on the arm and shoulder, a well-done reconstruction job on cheek and jawbones, a missing finger from the left hand, and what looked to be knife-scars on the torso. Impressively springy, despite the age that had turned the body gaunt and stripped any smoothing of subcutaceous fat from the long muscles. No gun at his waist, but a long knife strapped hilt-down along his right flank.

"Donal Green," the man said, gripping their wrists. "Trooper, Special Tasks, Long-Range Reconnaissance, retired. Late of Mobaye-North."

That was a province north of the Congo river, thinly settled.

Probably a hunter; it would go with the military specialty. There was an interval for the usual pleasantries. The black came up behind the Draka, and waited with something of the same relaxed patience.

"What can I do fo' y'all, Citizens? Sidearms?" Fred had an uncomfortable feeling that the remote brown eyes were recording them both inch by inch. It prickled between his shoulderblades; machinery was tireless, but it only asked the obvious questions, and it had no intuition. Every contact with a potential informant risked bringing those uniquely human facilities into play.

"Yes, please. Just back from a trip outside the State." To Draka, there was only one. "We're doin' some huntin', as well," he said.

"Ah." Genuine interest in the Draka's eyes. "Local? We've got some fine boar, deer, wolf, and leopard territory hereabouts. Or if y' all're interested, my family runs a wild-country outfit down in Mobaye-North."

"Sorry. We're booked, fo' the Archangel Reserve."

More than a little interest now. "Tiger?"

"No, bushmen." The ideal cover story, for someone buying what they needed.

There were still bands of partisans, Finnish and a few Russians, in the great taiga forests that stretched from the northeastern Baltic up into the Arctic Circle: bushmen, in Draka dialect. The OSS even had contacts with them, few and sporadic, when a submarine could elude the ever-improving surveillance.

Few Draka had ever wished to settle in those remote and desolately cold regions, and even the timber Combines worked only the most accessible parts. The military had hunted down the most dangerous bands in the early '50s, and as for the rest…

a Citizen who wanted game more exciting than any on four legs could book a tour. It even made sense, for a people who hunted lion with cold steel. One of the many ways used to keep the edge from rusting in an era of peace.

Not peace
, he told himself.
Just an interval between battles.

To the Draka, there would be no peace until they ruled the human universe.
Or until we kill the last one.

"Lucky yo'!" Donal Green said. "Y'all be wantin' somethin'

special, then… Price range?"

"Show us what yo've got," Fred replied.

A wide grin. "As it just so happens… Bokassa, fetch the new models." He led them to one of the examination tables. "Now.

we've gotten a shipment of the latest stuff. They're retirin' the Improved Model Holbars now, yo've probably heard, replacin' it with a caseless round? Well, the prototype production run got sold, and bought up an' customized down in Herakulopolis."

That was the bridge-dam-city across the straits of Gibraltar.

The black man arrived with a case, folded it back. His master lifted the weapon within free.

"Lot of it's space-made," he said. In appearance it was a virtually featureless rectangular box; there was a barrel at one end, with a thinner rod above, and a cushioned buttplate at the other; a pistol-grip below, and a stubby telescopic sight above.

"Loads from a cassette, two hundred rounds," Donal continued, and slid a long box through an opening just above the buttplate. "Three-point-five-millimeter, but hypervelocity, prefragmented tungsten slug, designers say it'll only come apart in a soft target. Barrel's a refractory superalloy, an' it has a linin'

of single-crystal diamond."

A smile. "They tryin' to use that fo' spaceships, thrust-plates, but even in vacuum and micrograviry it's stone tricky. Thissere's an intermediate use. Charge the first round by turnin' this knob in a complete circle. The slide here sets cyclic rate, up to two thousand rpm; at that, yo' gets a three-round groupin' less than twenty-five-millimeter apart at eight hundred meters. Max effective range bout' one thousand. Here," he continued, unloading the weapon, "sight on somethin'."

Fred took the weapon in his hands; it was superbly balanced, although it felt a little odd to have the action right by his ear and the grip halfway down the rifle. No heavier than the Springfield-12's he had trained on, lighter than the IM

Holbars-Ts the Domination was using now. The sight lit as his eye came into line, with the peculiar glassy brightness of electro-optical imaging… and a red dot in the center of the field.

The Draka heard his surprised grunt.

"Laser sightin'," he said. "Where it falls, there yo' hit.

Frequency filter in the sight, yo' can see it an' the target can't.

Adjusts fo' range, as yo' up the magnification."

"Excellent, well take two," the American said calmly, fighting down his glee.
This
was an advantage a Draka agent wouldn't have anywhere in the Alliance.

"Ah… I'm afraid they're six thousand Aurics each."

He pretended a wince; quite a sum, by Draka standards. A little more than the basic Citizen stipend. And a standard low-skilled serf could be bought for a hundred and seventy-five.

"Hmmm… well, yo' want the best, goin' after bushmen. They do have rifles, aftah all. Yes, two. An' the usual; nightsight goggles, some light body armor."

"Well, the measurin'-rooms are this way—"

"Jesus, I just can't believe it was that
easy
," Marya said.

Her brother laughed, guiding the Bushmaster down the access ramp and onto the road marked
City
Center.
That tone meant she had completed the sweep; the instruments in their perscomps were swift and thorough. For the moment he felt good, relaxed and strong and confident. The air rushing in through the opened window was cool, smelling of brackish river and warm asphalt pavement; the greenery and bright-colored buildings of the freemen's city showed ahead.

"No… Did you know, there was a time when you could get guns like that back home?"

The road was four-lane and raised on a five-meter embankment, narrower than a limited-access route in the US; more steamdrags, more buses, fewer private cars. And the Domination used rail transport more than his people. A checkerboard of streets was passing on either side, residential from the look of them. Brick-built walkups, patterns of red and white, an occasional square of decorative tile. Elite housing, individual family apartments for the literate class of industrial serf. Sidewalks, trees lining the streets. He could see the odd building that looked like a church, others that might be schools or stores… No, ration centers, the goods would be distributed rather than sold. It might almost have been an older suburb of an American city…

Marya touched his arm. There was an iron cage hanging at one of the intersections below, with a man in it, almost level with them. The sign wired to the bars read saboteur, there was a crowd of children gathered below, watching or throwing rocks.

At first he thought the man inside was dead— nothing so skeletal could be alive—but then one of the stones bounced through the bars and a stick-arm waved.

"Shit,"
he said softly. Pictures were not like the real thing.

Something prickled at his eyes, and he turned them back into the windstream as the car went past. His head just rotted on his shoulders. He couldn't have been watching us.

"You were saying?" Marya continued. He glanced aside at her: flawlessly composed. Of course he couldn't see past the dark sunglasses…

"You're a cool one," he said.

She turned her head to look at him, smiled. He felt a slight chill wash away the nausea. "I'm saving it up," she said.

"Yes… oh, the guns. Back before the War, you could buy military-style rifles, handguns, the lot. The Constitution, you know: 'A well-regulated militia…' the right-to-bear-arms clause."

She frowned in puzzlement. "Oh, you mean the Army Reserve?

Well, even, these days, a lot of them keep the personal weapons at home."

"No, nothing to do with the military. Those are under seal and inspected pretty often, anyway. Not just people in hunting clubs, either. Anybody. Cheap pistols, sawed-off shotguns, the lot."

She shook her head. "Live and learn… I know why the Draka always carry iron, they want to be able to kill at any time. What possible use could—" A shrug. "Never mind. Let's check in, and then well start working magic on the hotel infosystem." She pulled off the sunglasses and chewed meditatively on one earpiece. "Because I suspect magic is what well need."

A tenth of the human race died in the years 1939-1946; after the Eurasian War. the total population was barely 2,500,000, no more than it had been in 1920. Growth in the postwar period was quite slow, and unevenly distributed. In the Domination, there were continuing decreases in the serf population of the newly conquered territories until the late 1950s, due partly to continuing partisan and guerrilla warfare, and partly to sheer despair. As living standards improved and the memory of past freedoms faded, growth recommenced at a modest level; this was accompanied by a continuing geographical shift with China and to a lesser extent Western Europe, Russia, and Central Asia/

Western Sibe-expansion was greatest in Iberia-Morocco, due to the Herakulopolis project and In east-central Europe, Russia and Central Asia/ Western Siberia. There was also a substantial relocation of agricultural labor eastwards, especially to the vast Irrigation developments of Central Asia. The Citizen population of the Domination increased fairly rapidly in the postwar period, from c. 40,000,000 In 1946 to approximately 60,000,000 by 1970; thereafter, growth was more rapid and the total approached 110,000,000 by the mid 1990s. Much of the Increase was in the new territories taken in the Eurasian War.

In the Alliance the picture was much more complex. The United States, after a brief postwar "blip," showed steady but slow growth, tending to level off after the 1970s; totals reached 220,000,000 by 1995. There was also a steady shift from rural to urban areas, and from the eastern and north-central to the southern and western states. Mexico City, for example, went from 1,000,000 in 1946 to 4,500,000 by 1990, causing severe problems of housing and water supply; Los Angeles showed even more remarkable growth, from 550,000 to 2,000,000 in the same period. South America's growth was more rapid, but the fall-off after 1970 more pronounced. In 1995, the four Nations of the southern American continent totaled 230,000,000, larger than the US for the first time, over half of those being in the Empire of Brazil. Japan's gruesome war losses were never fully replaced, and the island Nation stabilized at approximately 70,000,000 in the 1980s. Britain's population declined, and the Australasian Federation increased. In dose synchronization; equality (in the 40,000,000 range) was reached by 1990. The most startling demographic change was the steep decreases in birthrates in the Asian members of the Alliance; the Indonesian and Indo-chinese Federations reached steady-state by the 1980s.