Free Marching Through Georgia by S.M. Stirling Page B

neutral shipping was in danger. Pan American flying-boat south to Recife, then Brazilian Airways dirigible to Apollonaris, just long enough to transfer to a Draka airship headed south.
    That was where he had acquired his Security Directorate shadow; they were treating the American reporter as if he carried a highly contagious disease.
    And so I do , he thought. Freedom .
    They had hustled him into the car in Archona, right at the airship haven. The Security decurion went into the compartment with him; in front were a driver in the grubby coverall which seemed to be the uniform of the urban working class and an armed guard with a shaven head; both had serf-tattoos on their necks. The American felt a small queasy sensation each time he glanced through the glass panels and saw the orange seven-digit code, a column below the right ear:
    letter-number-number-letter-number-number-number.
    Seeing was not the same as reading, not at all. He had done his homework thoroughly: histories, geographies, statistics. And the Draka basics, Carlyles Philosophy of Mastery , Nietzsche's The Will to Power , Fitzhugh's Imperial Destiny , even Gobineau's turgid Inequality of Human Races , and the eerie and chilling Meditations of Elvira Naldorssen . The Domination's own publications had a gruesome forthrightness that he suspected was equal portions of indifference and a sadistic desire to shock.
    None of it had prepared him adequately for the reality.
    Archona had been glimpses: alien magnificence. A broad shallow bowl in the edge of the plateau, Ringroads cut across with wide avenues, lined with flowering trees that were a mist of gold and purple. Statues, fountains, frescoes, mosaics: things beautiful, incomprehensible, obscene. Six-story buildings set back in gardens; some walls sheets of colored glass, others honeycomb marble, one entirely covered with tiles in the shape of a giant flowering vine. Then suburbs that might almost have been parts of California, whitewashed walls and tile roofs, courtyards…
    The secret police officer opened her eyes, pale blue slits in the darkness. She was a squat woman with broad spatulate hands, black hair in a cut just long enough to comb, like the Eton crop of the flappers in the '20's. But there was nothing frivolous in her high-collared uniform of dark green, or the ceremonial whip that hung coiled at her belt. One hand rested on her sidearm; he could see the house lights wink on the gold and emeralds of a heavy thumb-ring.
    He was almost startled when she spoke; there had not been more than fifty words between them in any day of the six they had been together, most just last evening, when she had tried to draw the curtains as they ran parallel to a train for half an hour.

    There were tanks on flatcars, hundreds of them, Bond III class—massive, low-slung, predatory-looking vehicles, broad tracks and thick sloped armor, the long 120mm cannon in travelling-clamps…
    "We're here," she said. His mind heard it as we-ahz heyah , like a Southern accent, Alabama or Cuba, but with an undertone clipped and guttural.
    I'm on automatic pilot , he thought, and tried to flog his responses into alertness. He had always been a man who woke slowly, and now he felt sluggish and stupid—a not-quite-here feeling, cramped muscles, stomach burning from too much coffee and too many days of motion. Travel fatigue…
    The silence of the halt was loud, after the long singing of tires on asphalt, wind-rush and the chuff-chuff chuff of the engine.
    Metal pinged, cooling. The driver climbed out and opened the front-mounted trunk to unload the luggage. The policewoman nodded to the dimly seen building.
    "Oakenwald Plantation. Centurion von Shrakenberg's here; Strategos von Shrakenberg, too. Old family; very old, very prominent. Strategoi , Senators, landholders, athletes; pro'bly behind the decision to let you in, Yankee. Political considerations, they're influential in the Army and the Foreign Affairs Directorate… You're safe