Days of Burning, Days of Wrath

by Tom Kratman

  She never saw her husband. Indeed, she avoided seeing him. In the first place, unlike her, he had some skills considered valuable by their owners. Hence he had a much better job at an office building on the base. She found this humiliating, for she had always been the major breadwinner for the family. Far worse, though; as an indentured servant, she had lost the right of refusal, hence had to accept the sexual advances of anyone on the estate who outranked her, which was almost everyone but the outright slaves. She’d tried to refuse, at first, but the subsequent whipping had also beaten any sense of defiance out of her completely. When she let her guard down she could sometimes still feel the short whip the house overseer had used on her naked, lacerated, bleeding flesh, as she hung by her bound wrists from a hook set in a basement ceiling.

  She could not bring herself to face her husband after so many violations.

  Her daughter, much younger and also rather prettier than Irene had ever been, never talked about her life as a servant. Irene assumed, correctly, that the daughter’s life was even more degraded and degrading than her own.

  Worse, one of her sons, Arpan, having seen what the system of Atlantis Base really was, and understanding what that said about old Earth under the Consensus, had spoken a little too freely. Him, she had not seen in two years, ever since his indenture had been converted into actual slavery. Her last, tear-filled glimpse of her boy had been as he was led from the auction block in the center of town. It was then that she’d realized that old Earth’s masters, the high-caste sons and daughters of the Consensus, didn’t keep slaves because they needed to; they kept them because they preferred to.

  If I had known then  .  .  .  what?This: If I had known then what I know now, when Esterhazy came to see me and threaten me, I’d have joined forces with the mercenaries—or “auxiliaries,” as they insisted they were—to fight old Earth and Amnesty to the death. It would be better than this living death.

  Feeling tears begin to form, Irene wiped her eyes with the sleeve of her shapeless, coarse garment. Esterhazy was right, she thought, right to threaten me and even mine then, for I was a pompous, self-important ass, serving evil and hiding from my sight the evil I served, so long as I was admired and my life very, very comfortable.

  And then she heard something unlike anything she’d heard since leaving Sumer under a cloud, years ago. It’s not a shuttle, not even the high admiral’s barge. I wonder  .  .  .  it’s a rocket, a war rocket.

  She gasped and caught her breath.What could it mean, a war rocket here? Is the place under attack? Be still my heart. If it is, I must find the attackers and offer them my aid, whatever little bit an indentured servant can hope to give.

  BdL ALTA

  A small group of soldiers, some adults, some cadets, some bearing radios and others only small arms, clustered about Ham, waiting for the currently loading chopper to take off and the next one, refueling at a pad a bit forward, to come over. The helicopters were moving as much logistically now as they were in terms of tooth. Long lines of sailors pulling loaded carts waited for the helicopters to come for their loads.

  Up the ramps also came the first of two SPLADs, Self-Propelled Laser Air Defense systems, plus four of the nonlaser-armed versions, the ones with the quad cannons and radar. These began to take up stations around the ship.

  Inside the circle of men and boys about Ham, a package sat on a light amphibious vehicle, a Volgan Model 967, from which both the roll-guard rails and windshield had been removed. It was almost exactly sixty centimeters across and close enough to one and one-third meters long. Silvery steel in color, it bore both markings in Hangul as well as two symbols indicating radiation danger. The yield wasn’t listed but Ham knew that it, and its brother device, were rated for at least one hundred and sixty-five kilotons.

  Next to the nuclear weapon sat a small metal box, a Faraday cage, about the size of a box of heavy machine gun ammunition.

  “That’s half the force ashore,” Cano said to Hamilcar. “Time for you to go, too. I’ll see things from here.”

  “I’ll go with this first bomb,” Ham said, “next chopper. Send the second right after. Also . . .”

  “Yes?” Cano asked.

  “I want the wounded evacuated to shore. Moreover, I want your wife moved soonest.”

  “I can’t argue with those orders.”

  UEPF Spirit of Peace

  “I have no choice, Mr. President,” High Admiral Wallenstein said to the image on her monitor. She’d delayed the call for the few extra minutes it had taken her communications people to set up a teleconference. “Those people are attacking our base, our families, our innocent noncombatants. Every minute I delay means more of them get ashore. I cannot delay much.”

  The face in the monitor, that of the president of the Federated States, Walter Madison Howe, seemed quite serious, indeed. Marguerite couldn’t tell that crossing his mind was the key and critical thought, I wonder if she swallows.

  Whatever he might have been thinking, Howe’s answer was fairly rote, “I cannot permit . . .”

  Wallenstein’s blue eyes flashed. “Let me make this clear, Mr. President, I am not asking you to permit a fucking thing. I am going to drop three packages on that ship. If you want to make war over it, be my guest, but Earth and the Consensus can build a new fleet. Where are you going to find a new country?

  “Now, if it’s any consolation or help to you, they’re going to be inert. My people are taking the nuclear weapons out of the shells now and filling them with scrap to increase the kinetic energy. So you won’t have to worry about trying to explain away three large mushroom clouds to your constituency, nor why you didn’t go to war over them. But I am launching and I am putting my fleet on alert to turn your cities into green glass if you attack us over it.”

  Except for his harridan of a wife, Howe was used to more compliant and submissive females than this high admiral chick. His earlier thought changed to, I wonder if she bites. Best not to find out the hard way, no pun intended.

  Howe turned his attention to his military aide, Major General Jeff Lamprey. Lamprey, who had reasons for detesting Carrera that went way back to Sumer, and was a petty, priggish sort, even before that, wrote down, This doesn’t threaten or damage us. I think you should let them do it.

  Howe read the note and then said, “All right, Admiral Wallenstein, three inert packages delivered to the vicinity of your base, in self-defense. I’ll stand our forces down.”

  Lamprey thought, And I finally get to pay that motherfucker back. Sweet!

  Wallenstein cut the connection, then said to herself, All that acting practice fucking my way up the chain of command seems to have paid off. How many lies was that I told? Three? One thing’s not a lie, though, those things are going down inert, if only because I don’t want the Federated States sending one of their submarines to recover them. Who knows what one of them might tell about whether the rest are likely to work or not?

  Of course, armaments are among the weakest departments in the fleet. Nobody’s taken them all that seriously in the last seventy years. I don’t know  .  .  .  hmmm  .  .  .  as a matter of fact, I don’t know  .  .  .

  “Computer, get me Captain Battaglia on Spirit of Brotherhood.”

  “Calling.”

  A distracted-looking face appeared on the screen. “Yes, High Admiral?”

  “What’s the status in getting those packages ready to fire?”

  “I’m not sure . . .”

  “Never mind. Put me through to your gunnery officer.”

  There was a brief delay before a lieutenant commander’s face showed on the monitor. Behind him some sweating, cursing noncoms and yeomen could be seen trying to crack open a metal casing. The lieutenant commander seemed terribly flustered.

  “Yes, High Admiral?”

  “How long before we’re ready to launch?” Wallenstein asked.

  “I could launch now,” said the officer, “except you want the nuclear packages removed an
d we’re still trying to figure out how. They were made to be maintained in situ, and apparently nobody ever considered we might want to send down the shell alone.”

  Shit.

  “Keep me posted. Indeed, keep me posted directly.”

  Marguerite broke the connection, then ordered the computer, “Get me flight operations.”

  The monitor changed scene to the flight deck of Peace, where a couple of dozen nervous-looking crewmen were lined up to board one of the landers.

  “High Admiral?” answered one of the hangar deck crew.

  “Have we any weapons we could mount on a lander to provide ground support?” she asked.

  “Nothing comes to mind. We have some machine guns on the ship, yes, but there are no mounts and, even if we had something like that, no controls that penetrate the hull and nothing I can think of for remote control that wouldn’t take a couple of days to gin up and test. Why do you ask, ma’am?”

  “There’s a delay in rendering the nuclear packages inert. I need something to attack that ship.”

  “We can land on it.”

  Now why didn’t I think of that?

  While a good many of the members of the crews of the Peace Fleet looked in their twenties and could measure their years in centuries, Spaceman Bethany Wallace, brunette and a bit too thin for current tastes, really was in her twenties. Following orders to draw a weapon—but no ammunition—from the arms room and report to the hangar deck, she didn’t expect to get much older, either. She was also one of those pulled by High Admiral Wallenstein from the academy, back home, to fill up the ranks in the Peace Fleet.

  “Wallace; over here,” said Petty Officer, Third Class Christopher Robin, light skinned, bearded, and a little bit stout. Robin was fortunate that no one on Old Earth even remembered the stories of Winnie the Pooh anymore, nor had for generations, or his childhood, over a century ago, would have been a misery.

  The gravity on the hangar deck was paltry, but she had magnetized shoes to let her put one foot in front of the other and join him. It was an awkward kind of walk, and especially so for those, who, like Bethany, had little cause ever to go to the hangar deck.

  “You’re in my group for this,” Robin announced. He reached into a bag slung over his shoulder and passed her several hundred rounds’ worth of preloaded four-millimeter ammunition.

  “Chris,” she said, holding up her carbine, “I haven’t touched one of these—I haven’t so much as looked at one of these since my first year at the academy. I don’t know what I’m doing.”

  Robin sighed. “Almost nobody does. We have to hope that what’s going on down below doesn’t take Marines to handle.”

  “Hope’s not a plan,” she replied. “I remember that much from first year, at least.”

  Beach Red, Atlantis Island, ten kilometers north of the base

  Both bombs were ashore now, with a platoon detailed to prepare them for sling loading under one of the helicopters and guard them until the slingload was in the air. Their control boxes were with Ham, on one of the two 967s that had come in with the bombs.

  All the troops were ashore now or enroute, along with eight Jaguar tanks, two dozen Ocelot Infantry Fighting Vehicles, plus one short battery of light artillery.

  Ham reached for a radio handset, passed over by an eager young cadet. This was for the general push, so every maniple and cohort would hear it.

  The basic plan was Johnson’s. Ham hadn’t written it, but he knew it. They’d rehearsed it verbally and on map exercises so much that every man and boy knew it.

  “All stations, this is headquarters. Commence Operation Roundup. I say again, commence Operation Roundup.”

  BdL ALTA

  While the dead and wounded on the bridge had been taken away, shattered glass still littered the deck. Along with the shards of glass, the deck was also liberally covered with sticky, drying blood.

  Tribune Campos would have had to stand on a crate to see properly, except that the blinded skipper’s chair could be elevated. He sat on that, watching as little by little the smoke from the fires disappeared and the flames feeding that smoke went out.

  Fortunately, the comms had never gone out, except in some of the forward sections that had been blasted by the rockets’ warheads. For those, he had radio communications.

  He also knew that the officer in charge of damage control outranked him, rather badly, and should have taken command. But that officer had judged, perhaps rightly, that getting the fires under control and unexpended ordnance over the side was more important.

  Fat lot of good if we all get court-martialed.

  The problem was that, while the ship was naval, the crew and officer arrangements had been, more or less, mercantile, with only minor increases. The extras who had come aboard had mainly been for the mission, not the ship. There were officers in plenty—well, as plenty as the legionary system allows, anyway—from the tribune commanding the helicopter squadron to the one in charge of the hovercraft to the commanders, executive officers, platoon leaders, and staff of the landing force. But plenty hadn’t meant an increase in naval crew beyond what they’d set out with.

  And so this devolves on me because, as it happens, I can command the ship better than I can do damage control.

  Now Campos had, at least, been able to scrape together a replacement bridge crew, someone to steer, someone for communications, someone to keep the tactical map ashore updated, that kind of thing.

  “Message from damage control forward, sir,” said the sailor in charge of communications.”

  “Campos, here.”

  “Campos, we have something of a problem. We got the warhead that was on deck cooled down enough to try to push it over the side.”

  “That’s great, sir!”

  “You would think so, wouldn’t you? But here’s the problem one of the party pointed out to me. We still don’t know what it is. If it’s bomblets and they go off underwater they probably won’t hole the hull. Mines? Meh. Fuel Air Explosive . . . key word there is ‘air,’ and there isn’t any under the water.

  “But if it’s HE, high explosive . . . and if that HE goes off next to the hull . . . well . . . five hundred pounds, give or take of high explosive, while we’re passing over it? Might as well be a torpedo.”

  “Could use the bow thrusters,” Campos offered.

  “Coanda effect.”

  “Shit, yeah,” Campos said. “No use even trying if we’re doing even three knots. So what do we do?”

  “For what I’m thinking, I think I’m crazy, so I want a second opinion.”

  “Shoot, sir.”

  “The gantry crane. It doesn’t look to have taken any damage. We roll it up to where the bomb lays and lift it. But before we lift it we wire the bomb for sound, then set it off when it’s as high as we can lift it.”

  “Wish we had a rotary crane,” Campos said.

  “Yeah, but wish in one hand and shit in the other . . .”

  “I know; see which one fills up faster. But wait; I just realized; yes, you’re crazy.”

  “How so?”

  “What if it is an FAE?”

  “Shit, I must be getting old. That would be very bad, son, very bad indeed. Much worse than HE going off overhead, though not as bad as HE going off under the keel. Right, no controlled detonation for us. So what then?”

  “You want my opinion, sir? Pack it carefully so it won’t roll. I’ll do everything possible to keep the ship steady until you relieve me. And then I’ll go down to the containers under the bomb, with whatever manpower we can scrape together, and sort out key supplies and get them ashore.”

  “Yeah, okay. Just do our best to live with it, huh? I think you’re right . . . okay . . . I’m on my way.”

  Latifundia Mixcoatl, Atlantis Island

  The former ambassador to Santa Josefina, Claudia Nyere—despite her name, as white as any Nordic—was at loose ends. She’d had a job until recently and had rather enjoyed it; it, and the prestige and perks.

  No
t that she harbored any ill will toward the high admiral, oh, no, But for Wallenstein’s intervention and buying me back from the barbarians who’d captured me, I have absolutely no doubt they’re have dismembered me and sent me back a piece at a time  .  .  .  and in not very large pieces.

  Imagine treating a well-connected and properly credentialed Class One like that! Barbarian scum!

  Of course, there were compensations to being out of a job; Nyere had always had to put on a friendly and caring face before the Santa Josefinans. She’d had to treat the embassy staff, the local elements of it, with consideration, too. That had been galling—treating lowers as if they were real people rather than highly expendable, individually unimportant, organic machinery.

  She didn’t have to treat the slaves of her latifundia well, though. If any of them had had any doubt of that, the one hanging from a cross by the slave barracks would have reminded them.

  She looked at the writhing almost man, occasionally howling with agony from pierced and shattered wrists and heels. At the foot of a cross wept a young girl, perhaps his special girl.

  Claudia nodded with approval. It’s better when slaves understand that their actions cause pain not just to themselves, but to those they care about. As to what to do about the slut  .  .  .  maybe nothing except to turn her over to the field hands.

  Raising her eyes from the brokenhearted girl back to the victim, she thought, Not much more than a boy, really. He, certainly, won’t be inciting rebellion anymore.