Walter Miller - Dark Benediction

She nodded. Porphiry Grigoryevich reached for the phone.

“Now I am going to call the surgeon,” he said. “He will give you several injections. Eventually, the injections will be fatal, but for some weeks, you will feel nothing from them. Post-hypnotic urges will direct you. If your plan works, you will not kill MacAmsward in the literal sense. Literally, he will kill himself. If the plan fails, you’ll kill him another way if you can. You were an actress. I believe?”

“For a time. I never got to the Bolshoi.”

“But excellent! His mother was an actress. You speak English. You are beautiful, and full of grief. It is enough. You are the one. But do you really love the Fatherland enough to carry it out?”

Her eyes burned. “I hate the killers of my son!” she whispered.

The colonel cleared his throat. “Yes, of course. Very well, Marya Dmitriyevna, it is death I am giving you. But you will be sung in our legends for a thousand years. And by the way—” He cocked his head and looked at her oddly. “I believe I really do love you, dushka .”

With that, he picked up the phone.

Strange exhilaration surged within her as she crawled through the brush along the crest of the flood embankment, crawled hastily, panting and perspiring under a smoky sun in a dusty sky while Ami fighters strafed the opposite bank of the river where her company was retreating. The last of the Russ troops had crossed, or were killed in crossing. The terrain along the bank where she crawled was now the enemy’s. There was no lull in the din of battle, and the ugly belching of artillery mingled with the sound of the planes to batter the senses with a merciless avalanche of noise; but the Ami infantry and mechanized divisions had paused for regrouping at the river. It would be a smart business for the Americans to plunge on across the river at once before the Russians could reorganize and prepare to defend it, but perhaps they could not. The assault had carried the Ami forces four hundred miles inland, and it had to stop somewhere and wait for the supply lines to catch up. Marya’s guess—and it was the educated guess of a former officer—was that the Ami would bridge the river immediately under air cover and send mechanized killer-strikes across to harass the retreating Russ without involving infantry in an attempt to occupy territory beyond the river.

She fell flat and hugged the earth as machine gun fire traversed the ridge. A tracer hit rock a yard from her head, spraying her with dust, and sang like a snapped wire as it shot off to the south. The spray of bullets travelled on along the ridge. She moved ahead again.

The danger was unreal. It was all part of an explosive symphony. She had the manna. She could not be harmed. Nothing but vengeance lay ahead. She had only to crawl on.

Was it the drug that made her think like that? Was there an euphoric mixed in the injections? She had felt nothing like this during the raids. During the raids there was only fear, and the struggle to remember whether she had left the teapot boiling while the bombs blew off.

Macbeth. Once she had played Lady Macbeth upon the Moscow stage. How did it go? The raven himself is hoarse that croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan under my battlements. Come, you spirits that tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here, and fill me, from crown to toe, top-full of direst cruelty!

But that wasn’t quite it. That wasn’t quite what she felt. It was a new power that dwelt in her bosom. It was something else.

Her guard uniform was caked with mud, and the insignia was torn loose from her collar. The earth scuffed her knees and the brush scratched her arms. She kept falling flat to avoid the raking fire of her own machine guns. And yet it was necessary that she stay on the ridge and appear to be seeking a way across the river.

She was too intent upon watching the other side to notice the sergeant. She crawled over a corpse and nearly fell in the foxhole with him. She had been crawling along with her pistol in hand, and the first she saw of the sergeant was his boot. It stamped down on her gun hand. He jammed the muzzle of a tommy-gun against the side of her throat.

“Drop it, sister! Voyennoplyennvi! ”

She gasped in pain—her hand—and stared up at him with wide eyes. A lank young Ami with curly hair and a quid of tobacco in one cheek.

“Moya rooka —my hand!”

He kept his boot heel on the gun, but let her get her hand free. “Get down in here!”

She rolled into the hole. He kicked the gun toward the river.

“Hey, Cap!” he yelled over his shoulder. “I got a guest. One of the commissar’s ladies.” Then to the girl: “Before I kill you, what are you doing on this side of the river, spy?”

“Most chyeryez ryekoo…”

“I don’t speak it. No savvy. Ya nye govoryu …”

Marya was suddenly terrified. He was lean and young and pale with an unwelcome fear that would easily allow him to fire a burst into her body at close range. The Ami forces had been taking no prisoners during the running battle. The papers called them sub-human beasts because of it, but Marya was sufficiently a soldier to know that prisoners of war were a luxury for an army with stretchy logistic problems, and often the luxury could not be afforded. One Russian lieutenant had brought his men to the Ami under a while flag, and the Ami captain had shot him in the face and ordered his platoon to pick off the others with rifle fire as they tried to flee. In a sense, it was retaliatory. The Russians had taken no prisoners during the Ami airborne landings, and she had seen seen Ami airmen herded together and machine-gunned. She hated it. But as an officer, she knew there were times of necessity.

“Please don’t shoot,” she said in English. “I give up. I can’t get across the river anyway.”

“What are you doing on this side?” he demanded.

“My company was retreating across the bridge. I was the last to start across. Your artillery hit the bridge. The jets finished it off with their rockets.” She had to shout to be heard above the roar of battle. She pointed down the river. “I was trying to make it down to the ford. Down there you can wade across.”

It was all true. The sergeant thought it over.

“Hey, Cap!” he yelled again. “Didn’t you hear me? What’ll I do with her?”

If there was an answer, it was drowned by shellfire. “Undress!” the sergeant barked.

“What?”

“I said to take off your clothes. And no tricks. Strip to the skin.”

She went sick inside. So now it started, did it? Well, let it come! For the Fatherland! For Nikolai. She began unbuttoning her blouse. She did not look at the Ami sergeant. Once he whistled softly. When she had finished undressing, she looked up defiantly. His face had changed. He moistened his lips and swore softly under his breath. He crossed himself and edged away. Deep within her, something smiled. He was only a boy.

“Well, what are you cursing about?” she asked tonelessly.

“If I didn’t think you would I mean I wish this gun if I had time I’d but you’d stab me in the back but when I think about what they’ll do to you back there…”

“Jeezis!” he said fervently, wagging his head and rolling his quid into the other cheek. “Put the underwear and the blouse back on, roll up the rest of it, and start crawling down the slope. Aim for that slit trench down there. I’ll be right behind you.”

“She’s quite a little dish, incidentally,” the Ami captain was saying on the field telephone. “Are we shooting prisoners now, or are we sending them back… Yeah?” He listened for awhile. A mortar shell came screaming down nearby and they all sat down in the trench and opened their mouths to save eardrums. “To who?” he said when it was over. “Slim? Oh, to you… Yeah, that’s right, a photograph of Old Brass Butt in person. I can’t read the other stuff. It’s in Russky…. Just a minute.” He covered the mouthpiece and looked up at the sergeant. “Where’s the rest of your squad, Sarge?”