Drakas! Read online

  DRAKAS!

  EDITED BY S.M. STIRLING

  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 (c) 2000 by S.M. Stirling

  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

  www.baen.com

  ISBN: 0-671-31946-9

  Cover art by Stephen Hickman

  First printing, November 2000

  Distributed by Simon & Schuster

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  Production by Windhaven Press: Consulting & Editorial Services

  Printed in the United States of America

  INTRODUCTION

  To coin a phrase, the 20th century has been the best of times, and the worst of times; the century when smallpox was abolished and the century when a new word, "genocide," entered the lexicon of politics. It started with the serene confidence of the Edwardian Enlightenment at the end of a century free of great international wars, when reason and progress seemed to be rolling forward on a broad invincible front.

  Then it took a wrong turning in the slaughters of Passchendale and Verdun, descended into the abyss of Stalingrad, Nanking, Buchenwald and the Gulag. Even the motor of progress, science, turned out to have some very nasty exhaust. For fifty years we hovered on the brink of annihilation, forced to threaten the survival of civilization, if not humanity, to hold totalitarianism in check.

  And then, all at once, things got better . . .

  Anyone who studies history eventually runs across a little jingle that goes:

  For want of a nail, the shoe was lost;

  For want of a shoe, the horse was lost;

  For want of a horse, the message was lost;

  For want of the message, the battle was lost;

  For want of the battle, the kingdom was lost—

  And all for the want of a horseshoe nail!

  What's more, you come to appreciate the essential truth of it. There are broad, impersonal forces at work in history; if Christopher Columbus had died as a child—most children did, in his age—someone else would have discovered the Atlantic crossing soon enough. Basque fishermen may well have crossed to Newfoundland before him; an English expedition set out to America a few years after; the Portugese blundered into Brazil on their way to India (it makes sense, in sailing-ship terms) a few years after that.

  The knowledge was there, and the ships, and the civilization that produced them, a strong hungry people ready to burst out upon the world. And so we live in the world the West Europeans made, built on foundations laid by the empires of sailing ships and muskets.

  But oh, how the details would be different if it had not been Columbus, but another man a few years later! And how those changes might have rippled on, growing through the years.

  So a thought came to me; suppose everything had turned out as badly as possible, these last few centuries. Great changes make possible great good and great evil. The outpouring of the Europeans produced plenty of both.

  The great free colonies of North America were perhaps the best, for it was here that the great 18th-century upsurge of popular government began, and here the power that broke the totalitarians was founded. My friend Harry Turtledove has imagined a world in which America broke apart in its Civil War, and no strong United States was ready to come to the aid of the beleaguered Allies against the Central European aggressors.

  Imagine a change even more fundamental. Perhaps the worst product of the great wave of European expansion, before this century of ours, was the South Atlantic system of slaves and plantations. Eventually it faded away—or was blown away by the cannon of Grant and Sherman, although we still feel the aftereffects.

  What, though, if a fragment of that system had fallen on fertile ground, and grown? Say that the potential of South Africa, so neglected by its Dutch overlords, had fallen prey to it . . . a base for that deadly seed to grow, unchecked by free neighbors, until it was too strong to stop. An Anti-America, representing all the distilled negatives of Western civilization.

  From that thought was born the alternate history of the Domination of the Draka. I've chronicled the rise and transformation of that dystopia in four novels.

  But a world can be a playground big enough for more than one imagination to run in. Here are stories others have set in that anti-history, a funhouse mirror held up to our own.

  Custer Under

  the Baobab

  William Sanders

  William Sanders is a Cherokee; maybe that has something to do with the sardonic irony in the eye he trains on history. Maybe not; how could anyone doubt all is for the best in the train of events that produced we our glorious selves?

  Will has produced science fiction and fantasy stories—many of them alternate history—highly regarded by the critics and by his peers. His novels Journey to Fusang, The Wild Blue and the Gray, and latest The Ballad of Billy Badass and the Rose of Turkestan have shown a wild inventiveness worthy of Jonathan Swift, plus an encyclopedic knowledge of history, and a combination of high literary skill and crazed, gonzo abandon that could only have been born on this continent.

  Herein we have a George Armstrong Custer who escapes the arrows of the Sioux, only to find that even in another history and on another continent, some things never change . . .

  The baobab tree is one of the world's most remarkable vegetable productions. Its soft, swollen-looking trunk may be as much as twenty or thirty feet in diameter; its grotesquely spindly limbs may reach up to two hundred feet toward the African sky.

  Anywhere it grows, the baobab is an impressive sight. On the great dead-flat plain of the Kalahari Desert, where the land stretches empty to the horizon and even a cluster of stunted acacia trees is a major visual event, a lone baobab can dominate the entire landscape.

  This particular baobab is of no more than average size, but it is still the biggest thing in view in any direction. Beneath its spreading branches, just now, are four men. Three are dead.

  The fourth man sits on the ground, his back against the sagging folds of the baobab's thin bark. A lean, long-limbed, long-faced white man, dressed in dusty brown near-rags barely recognizable as having once been a smart military uniform; thinning yellow hair straggles from beneath the broad-brimmed hat that shades his face. His right hand lies on his lap, next to a heavy revolver.

  Centurion George Armstrong Custer, of the Kalahari Mounted Police (former Brevet Major General, United States Cavalry), licks his dry cracked lips. "Libbie," he says, barely aloud, his words no more than a whisper lost in the whine of the wind through the baobab's branches, "Libbie, is this what it all comes to?"

  * * *

  "I don't know, Custer," the Commandant said, ten days ago. (Wasn't it? Custer realizes he is not sure.) "A man of your rank and experience, leading a minor patrol like this? Pretty silly, isn't it?"

  "Possibly, sir." Custer stood at attention before the Commandant's desk, face expressionless, classic West Point from crown to boot soles. Not that these Drakians demanded much in the way of military formality—and the Mounted Police weren't even a military organization, even if they did like to put on airs and give themselves fancy titles of rank—but it was, Custer had found, a subtle but effective way to bully Cohortarch Heimbach.

  "I need you here," Heimbach continued. "Things to be done, paperwork piled up. Don't stand like that, Centurion," he added peevishly. "This isn't your American army."

  "No, sir," Custer said tonelessly, not shifting a hair, keeping his
eyes fixed straight ahead above the Commandant's balding head, exchanging stares with the portrait of Queen Victoria that hung on the mud-brick wall. Cohortarch Heimbach was one of the handful of conservatives who still insisted on the fiction of Drakia's membership in the British Empire.

  "Things to be done right here," Heimbach repeated. "Instead you want to ride off chasing Bushmen. Tetrarch Leblanc could use the experience, and he's eager to go."

  Custer didn't reply. After a moment Heimbach blew out his breath in a long loud sigh. "Oh, all right—"

  He fumbled in his desk drawer and got out a short-stemmed pipe and a pouch of tobacco. "Actually," he said, thumbing tobacco into the bowl, "this is a bit more than a normal patrol. Seems our little friends, out there, have gone very much too far this time."

  Custer waited silently as he lit up. "Two days ago," Heimbach went on after a moment, blowing clouds of foul-smelling blue smoke, "a bunch of Bushmen raided a cattle ranch in the Ghanzi area. Usual sort of thing—cut a cow out from the herd, killed it and butchered it on the spot, you know."

  Custer knew. The Bushmen were constantly bringing trouble on themselves with their addiction to cattle-rustling. Of course, living as they did on the edge of bare subsistence, they must find the scrawny Kaffir cattle irresistible targets.

  "This time," the Commandant said grimly, "things got out of hand. The rancher happened to show up as they were cutting up the kill. He shot one of them. The others scattered into the bush—but when the damned fool dismounted, one of them put a poisoned arrow into his back."

  "Good God," Custer said involuntarily. "They killed a white man?" That was unheard-of; Bushmen were a nuisance but seldom actively dangerous.

  Heimbach was nodding. "And so they have to be taught a lesson. Orders from the top, on this morning's wire."

  He pointed the pipe stem at Custer, like a pistol. "Which is why I'm not altogether unhappy to let you take this one, Centurion. Some important people want this done right."

  Cohortarch Heimbach got up from his desk and went over and stood looking out the glassless front window. Out on the parade ground, an eight-man lochus stood in a single uneven rank, while a big red-faced NCO inspected their rifles. He didn't look happy. Of course sergeants—decurions, Custer corrected himself, damn these people with their classical pretensions—rarely did. Beyond, past the high barbed-wire fence that ringed the little post, the Kalahari shimmered in the midday sun.

  "So I'm giving you your wish," the Commandant said, not looking around. "Take the Second Lochus from Leblanc's tetrarchy—that's Decurion Shaw's lot, he's a good man—and of course Boss and his trackers. Ride up to the ranch, pick up the trail, and go after the culprits. You know what to do when you find them."

  "Yes, sir." Custer went wooden-faced again. He did know.

  "And, of course," Heimbach added, "the same for any other renegade Bushmen you find."

  "Yes, sir." Since no Bushman had any legal status whatever—outside of a few bondservants, mostly raised from captured infants and kept as household novelties by aristocratic Drakia families—they were all in effect "renegades" and subject to out-of-hand disposal on sight. Custer, however, did not point this out.

  "After all," Heimbach said, "you do, I believe, have some experience of pursuing and punishing savages."

  Custer managed not to wince. "Yes, sir," he said once more, face blank, looking at Queen Victoria, who looked back at him without joy.

  * * *

  His face is blank now, under its coating of dust; his long bony features register nothing of the voices within:

  "Colonel Custer, was it not your mission to pursue and punish the savages?"

  "I learned that their forces were overwhelmingly superior to mine. I saw no reason, sir, to lead my men to certain defeat."

  "And on what basis did you make this evaluation?"

  "My Crow scouts reconnoitered the Sioux encampment and reported it contained thousands of warriors."

  "So on the word of a few . . . aborigines, you not only abandoned the offensive but ordered a general withdrawal from the area? Colonel, are you aware that expert witnesses have testified that no Indian band has ever been seen in the numbers you allege, in all the history of the frontier?"

  "There were enough of them to defeat General Crook six days earlier, on the Rosebud."

  "May I remind you, Colonel, that General Crook is not on trial here—"

  And at last the dry sour voice of little Phil Sheridan: "It is the finding of this court that on June 24, 1876, Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer was guilty of dereliction of duty and of cowardice in the face of the enemy, in that he did fail to attack the hostiles as ordered . . . . "

  He hears the voices now without bitterness or chagrin; all the old emotions are gone, leaving only a profound and bottomless fatigue. Too tired for fighting old battles, too tired, he thinks dully, ever to fight again—

  "Fight them, Autie." Tom Custer, arguing, urging. "They're railroading you. They've been out to get you ever since you exposed the way they're starving the reservation Indians. Now Sheridan's making you the scapegoat for his botched campaign."

  Libbie: "Yes, Autie you've got to fight back, it isn't right, they can't do this—"

  But of course they could, that was never in doubt, no army ever let a lieutenant colonel fight his own generals, not even a lieutenant colonel who had once been a general himself.

  Well, Libbie was gone now, of a fever the doctors said, but then the medical profession did not recognize a broken heart as a cause of death. And Tom, good faithful Tom, resigning his own commission in protest against his brother's disgrace, only to be gunned down on a Kansas street by a vicious thug named Wyatt Earp, whom he had accurately but unwisely accused of cheating at cards.

  * * *

  His eyes move, now, his gaze dropping to the revolver in his lap: the same big English .45 he carried on that last campaign against the Sioux, a good reliable weapon, faster to fire and load than the standard-issue Army Colt. True, in the end there was no occasion to use it. . . .

  Not, at least, on anyone else; there were, to be sure, plenty of times afterward when he found himself considering the ultimate alternative. He wonders why he never did it. Maybe, he thinks, I am a coward after all.

  But he might have taken that route, in the end, but for the letter: "Dear Genl Custer, pardon my fammilierty but I fot the Rebs under you & now I read about your trobles & I say it is a H—l of a thing after all you done for our Countrie. You shoud come to Drakia, a White man has a real show hear. They got more gold than Callifornea & dimons to—"

  He never found the man who wrote the letter; his inquiries, around the gold-field settlements of eastern Archona, drew only shrugs. At first he sought the man to thank him. Later he thought more in terms of killing the well-meaning fool.

  The Dominion of Drakia did indeed possess a wealth of gold and diamonds; but, as new arrivals quickly learned, Drakia was no California. All the major fields were firmly in the hands of big combines, the mines big elaborate affairs, worked by armies of slaves.

  (Bondservants, the Drakia insisted on calling them, claiming that slavery was extinct and even illegal now. But that was sheer sophistry; the poor devils were slaves, whatever the official terminology, as much as any character of Harriet Beecher Stowe's.)

  There was little room here for the romantic figure of the lone prospector. A few remained in the remoter areas—such as that awful Namib Desert, over on the southwest coast, that made the Kalahari look like the Garden of Eden—but their day was rapidly coming to an end.

  And anyway, despite all that silliness in the Black Hills, the truth was that George Custer knew virtually nothing about gold or mining; soldiering was the only trade he had ever studied.

  Very well, then, he would soldier here. But that idea too came up short against Drakian reality. The Dominion's legions did indeed contain many former Americans, but almost all were ex-Confederates. A man who had fought on the antislavery side, in what was still
regarded here as an Abolitionist war, was regarded with grave suspicion by the Drakian command; and a onetime Yankee officer who had been convicted of cowardice, in a campaign against native savages, simply need not apply.

  In the end it was Jeb Stuart, of all people (now Strategos Stuart of the Third Legion; the Drakians had easily recognized at least one genius), who stepped in to help. Still the perfect Southern knight, extending a magnanimous hand to a fallen former adversary:

  "I am mortified, sir." It came out "Ah am mo'tifahd, suh," it would take more than a decade or so of Drakian residence to obliterate that Virginia drawl. "Even to make such an offer, to a man of your ability—I hope you will not take offense, General Custer, at my temerity."

  "Temerity was always your long suit, General Stuart."

  "Why, I appreciate that, sir, coming from a man whose audacity I once had all too good cause to know." Smiling, stroking the ends of the long mustache; most of the American immigrants, Custer included, got rid of their whiskers and long hair in the African heat, but count on Stuart to put style above mere comfort. "But as I was saying, the Mounted Police—"

  "They're offering me a job as a policeman?"

  "Technically, yes. But then the soldier often has to serve as a policeman. After all, our former duties against the Indians could be considered in the nature of police work, could they not?" Stuart smiled again. "And the Mounted Police are practically a military organization in most respects. True, the men are sometimes a trifle rough, but . . . . "

  * * *

  A trifle rough, yes. That was good. That was another voice he had occasion to remember in the time that followed. As for example on the present operation, during the ride north to pick up the trail of the Bushmen who had killed the Drakian rancher.

  Riding along beside the little column, looking over his command, he considered that he had never seen a scruffier lot. All wore at least the major components of the KMP's brown cotton uniform—it was comfortable, after all, and free—but each man had felt free to make his own modifications: shirt sleeves and trouser legs hacked off to taste, shapeless slouch hats substituted for the regulation cap, leather cartridge belts festooned with unauthorized private weaponry. Some wore cowboy-style boots in place of the knee-high issue jackboots; none, whatever their choice of footgear, seemed to have heard of polish.