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No sir; just coming in, but it looks good."
    Reception was excellent; he could hear a blast of small-arms fire in the background, the rapid snarl of Draka assault-rifles, the slower thump and chatter of German carbines and MG 34's.

    "Ah, good." Then he and the comtech winced in unison. "The armor landed where ? Sorry, sir, I know you didn't design this terrain… Right, proceed according to plan, hold them hard as long as I can. Any chance of extra antitank… yes, Conortarch, I appreciate everybody wants more firepower, but we are the farthest north… Yes, sir, we can do it. Over and out, status report when Phase A is complete. Thank you, sir, and good luck to you, too."
    "Because we're both going to need it," he added under his breath as he released the send button. The Legion had had a Cohort of light tanks, Cheetahs with 75mm guns in oscillating turrets. Those had apparently come down neatly in a gully…
    The gliders were emptying, stacks of crates and heavy weapons being lifted onto their wheeled carts. Paratroopers jumped with light weapons—their Holbars assault rifles, machine guns, machinepistols for techs and weapons teams, the 85mm recoilless-rocket guns that served as tetrarchy antitank.
    The gliders held much of the Century's fighting power—
    trench-mortars, the 100mm automortars, 120mm recoilless guns, heavy machine guns, flame-throwers, demolition charges, ammunition. Not to mention most of their food and medical supplies. It would likely be all they had until the regular supply drops started. And already the trunks of the birches were showing pale in the light of dawn.
    A sudden sense of the… unlikeliness of it all struck Eric. He had been born in the heartlands of the Domination, fourteen thousand kilometers away in southern Africa. And here he stood, on soil that had seen… how many armies? Indoeuropeans moving south to become Hittites, Cimmerians, Scythians, Sarmatians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Armenians, Arabs, Turks, Czarist Russians, Bolsheviks… and now a Century of Draka, commanded by a descendant of Hessian mercenaries, come to kill Germans who might be remote cousins, and who had marched two thousand kilometers east to meet him…
    What am I doing here? Where did it start ? he thought. Such a long way to journey, to die among angry strangers. A journey that had lasted all his life… The start? Oakenwald Plantation, of course. In the year of his birth; and last year, six months ago.
    But that was the past, and the battle was here and now, an ending awaiting him. An end to pain, weariness; an end to the conflict within, and to loneliness. You could forget a great deal in combat.
    Eric von Shrakenberg took a deep breath and stepped forward, into the war.

CHAPTER TWO
    … Napoleonic wars cut off imports, and industries had to be established if only because the mines were far inland; the need for a strong military-industrial complex maintained the pressure. Lack of navigable waterways led to an early development of steam transport and southern Africa proved to be rich in copper, iron, and coal, as well as precious metals.
    Gold prompted rapid expansion northward; plantation agriculture remained dominant, but increasingly, its markets were local .
    … steam-engine pioneer Richard Trevithick was only the first of many British engineers to find Drakia welcoming. With no local entrepreneurial class, the landed aristocracy stepped in to invest, followed by the State and the free-employee guilds: the social pattern of the countryside repeated itself in the growing industrial cities of the early nineteenth century.
    Outright enslavement of the natives was forbidden by the British, but the proto-Draka quickly developed a system of indentured labor and debt-peonage distinguishable only in name
    200 Years: A Social History of the Domination by Alan E.
    Sorensson, Ph.D. Archona Press. 1983
    ARCHONA TO OAKENWALD PLANTATION OCTOBER, 1941
    The airdrop on Sicily had earned Eric von Shrakenburg a