by Tom Kratman
Worse, through all that the man—no, not a man, but a mere thing of pain—still lived conscious of nothing but agony such as he’d never even imagined.
He wasn’t other than a man merely for the mind-wrecking pain he endured, but also because he was but fifteen years old and was never going to see sixteen.
Lying, bleeding . . . too slowly dying, the boy Farid began to cry.
Jan leapt over the still-living body of some one of the enemy. She didn’t notice his age—the monoculars were not that good—but did note he was alive. The bayonet had never been her thing, but, turning, she put the muzzle of her rifle to the top of the victim’s head and fired once. She thought, before she pulled the trigger, that he’d spoken two syllables, something her sound-assaulted ears still vaguely heard as, “Shokran.”
She smelled the stench of burnt hair.
As Jan fired she became aware of several more things at once. One was that, a ways off to her right, as she faced, Greene had begun his attack. Her ears were sufficiently beaten that she didn’t hear the grenades going off as much as felt them. The other was that some very bright flashes came from somewhere below the windows, which were quickly followed by what seemed fairly mild blasts. The third was that there were a number, nine, she thought, of bleeding bodies on the floor, of which four seemed to be uniformed Taurans. The last was that she could see tracer fire coming from above and lancing down into the boulevard and beyond.
But the important thing, the really important thing . . . she had to practically scream to make herself heard, “HAVE WE IDENTIFIED AND TAKEN OUT THE HEAVY WEAPON THAT OPENED UP THIS ROOM?”
“MAYBE,” Dawes shouted back. “T’EY GOT ONE FROM UPSTAIRS BUT I DON’ KNOW IF I’ WAS T’ONLY ONE. T’EY ALSO TOOK OU’ ABOU’ HALF A DOZEN OF T’DIRTY BAS’ARDS THAT TRIED T’ RECOVER I’.”
“FAIR ENOUGH,” she replied. “GUARD HERE; I’M GOING TO CHECK ON SERGEANT GREENE.”
She took a quick look out the window, hoping to spot any more of those nasty rocket launchers. She didn’t see one, but she did catch the first faint rays of the very breaking of dawn.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
All action takes place, so to speak, in a kind of twilight, which like a fog or moonlight, often tends to make things seem grotesque and larger than they really are.
—Clausewitz, On War
Atlantis Base
When you use terror on someone, thought Ham,when you support terrorists in using terror on someone, you have to expect that the people you used it on will lose their objections to using it back on you. I wonder, High Admiral, if, when you used my father’s first wife and family as stationery, to send a message, did it ever cross your mind that you had some stationery available to send messages on, too?
Now, me, I think the old man had the instincts and ruthlessness for it, anyway, even without your help. But why, in the name of God, would you ever want to give someone like him reason to go with those instincts? It was a terrible mistake . . . as I am sure you will come to agree.
Thirty-one representatives of the ships’ families, the twenty-seven of the geosynchronously orbiting ships, plus four of the five colonization ships Wallenstein had taken over to move support from Old Earth to the fleet, stood around two large nuclear weapons. They’d been chosen partly based on spousal rank and partly on their demeanor after having seen their base overrun by those they had to consider feral barbarians. The calm demeanor was important, because it was terribly difficult to get a message through to someone who is shrieking at the tops of their lungs. For the nonce calm held. The hostages, for that’s what they were, just stared, as one of the men in charge of the bombs—and they were all adult warrant officers—explained the bombs and the power they had.
“The very short version,” the warrant said, “is that if the Peace Fleet does not surrender, you and your families will all be killed, incinerated, disintegrated, when we set one of these off.”
That was Hamilcar’s cue. “Which we will do . . .unless you can talk your spouses’ ships into surrender. So now I am going to send you, two guards each, to your homes where you will call your husband’s or wife’s ship and tell them what you have learned here today.
“I caution you—turn around and see where those three unfortunates are dying in unspeakable agony on crosses—that if you try to convince those ships not to surrender, you and your children, if any, will be nailed up. Do I make myself clear?”
It seemed impossible to the prisoners selected for this duty that one so obviously young could be so ruthless and brutal. Ham could see that in their eyes and on their faces.
“I sacked and burned my first set of villages when I was ten,” he said, “killing all the men—more than a thousand of them—and taking the women and children as slaves. Don’t try my patience.
“Guards, take them to their homes and have them call the ships. Make sure that they say the ships are to blink their lights and send down two shuttles to Ciudad de Balboa if they surrender.”
Hamilcar then turned on his heel and walked off toward the execution spot, the place where the crosses stood.
More crosses—many of them—were going up near the site of the three already in use. The newer ones, though, were of the more traditional sort: an upright stirpes to which a cross piece could be attached once a victim was nailed to it.
Crucifixion hadn’t been an especially uncommon sentence since the revolution that brought Parilla and the legions to power, overturning the old corrupt oligarchy of the families and instituting a republic. Even so, not everyone could look on the process with equanimity, could watch the slow dying by inches, over days, of someone pinned like a bug to a display board.
The newscaster—Diana Balbo, tall, surprisingly blonde, and photogenic—brought along on the ALTA, could not. She was visibly upset, shocked really, at the spectacle. Had she been witness to the actual nailing and raising of the crosses she’d probably have fainted. As it was, she had to turn her back and face the camera so she couldn’t see the suffering souls. She was still a little shaken, truth be told, by the unexpected explosion aboard the ALTA, the fires, and the screams of the dying and burnt.
And I can still hear them. All of them.
That’s how Ham found her, facing away and rehearsing into the camera. He approached from the side, thinking, Nice profile.
“Miss Balbo?”
She knew who the boy was; everyone did. She had not known he was capable of this kind of atrocity.
“Yes . . . ?”
“I have no official rank beyond cadet,” he said, sensing her confusion. “‘Ham’ will do well enough. Are you set up to broadcast?”
She nodded, then said, “We have a satellite link back to Balboa. From there the news will go out . . . but . . . Ham . . . are you sure you want people all over the world to see what you’ve done here?”
“Doesn’t matter a bit what I want,” he answered. “The old man, though, it matters what he wants. And he doesn’t care in the slightest what the world thinks. He cares that those people upstairs”—Ham pointed skyward—“are thoroughly convinced we are all bloodthirsty maniacs who can be neither defeated nor reasoned with, but only bribed and surrendered to.”
“I see.”
“Good. When will you be broadcasting?”
“Will ten minutes do?”
Ham consulted his watch, then added a couple of time zones for Balboa. “Make it fourteen. You can tack your broadcast on to the regular news.”
UEPF Spirit of Brotherhood
Among High Admiral Wallenstein’s most keenly felt failings had been her inability to get rid of John Battaglia, duke of Pksoi. It hadn’t mattered too much to anyone outside of his own ship, which ship tended to hover on the edge of mutiny at all hours, anyway. But he was next in command after her, and the prospect of his taking over the entire fleet again, even if, as last time, only temporarily, was enough to put anyone in the Peace Fleet into a state of depression.
Happily, that was most unlikely t
o happen now, as the ship broke down into fistfights, club fights, and, once the galley was raided, knife fights. And then the mutineers seized the arms locker and the two and a half dozen firearms still held there.
“What is happening?” Battaglia, clueless, asked from his bridge.
The chief of communications looked up from a screen on which he’d been scrolling through communications activity. He leaned to his right to consult with another crewman.
“It seems, Captain, that we’ve gotten both a lengthy private call from down below and some newscast from our own base.”
“Put it on screen.”
The bridge’s main screen refocused and settled on an impossibly young boy in battle dress, standing in front of three victims of death-by-torture.
“That’s the uniform of the secondary enemy, down below, secondary after the Federated States, Balboa,” announced intel. “And . . . yes, it’s the son of their war chief. I don’t recognize the other two, but that middle one on the cross is Claudia Castro-Nyere.”
“Sound? Where’s the fucking sound?” demanded Battaglia.
“. . . and so,” said the boy, “either the Peace Fleet surrenders unconditionally, or every civilian hostage in our hands goes up on one of these crosses”—he gestured toward a veritable forest of stirpes going up in the park—“or they try to rescue them, in which case we either defeat them, and their families go up on crosses, or they win, or appear to be winning, in which case I set off one of the two nuclear weapons we have here, and their families die by nuclear fire. Those are the only options.”
“How can people believe our little country has nuclear weapons?” asked a female voice, off screen.
The answer was accompanied by Hamilcar’s best, most practiced, sneer: “Because we took them from the Earthpigs, in Pashtia, where they were trying to give them to the Salafi Ikhwan. It’s common knowledge in certain circles. Among those circles are the command of the Peace Fleet, since their high admiral was up to her ears in the plot.”
The first sounds of fighting came through the bulkhead and hatchway separating the bridge from the ship’s central, hollow spine. Several hard thwapthwapthwaps told of some kind of high-velocity projectile stinking that bulkhead.
The bridge crew began to murmur among themselves. Battaglia didn’t notice his aide edging herself away from his command chair.
UEPF Spirit of Peace
Richard, earl of Care’s voice sounded strained. “High Admiral to the admiral’s bridge. High Admiral to admiral’s bridge. This is not a drill. This is not a drill. High Admiral to the—”
Wallenstein was out of her cabin and rushing for the spine before the call could finish. She called behind her, to Xingzhen, “Stay here; it’s as safe as anywhere.”
Even as she entered the spine and began kicking and pulling herself sternward, she thought, I don’t use that bridge much, hardly at all really. Why did Richard direct me there?
The exits from the spine went by in a blur. When she emerged feet first from the one that opened directly onto the admiral’s bridge she found both Khans waiting for her, along with all the staff from Ops to Comms.
“What the hell?”
Nobody wanted to be the first to speak. Finally, Khan, husband, took it upon himself. “There’s no way to make this gentle, High Admiral: we’ve got active mutiny on three of the ships of the line, Brotherhood, Annan, and the Margot Tebaf. I think we’ve also already lost two of the colonization ships we’ve been using since you came back from Earth. I would suspect that mutiny is brewing on every ship in the Peace Fleet.”
Marguerite shook her head in disbelief. This just wasn’t possible but . . . “How? Why?”
Khan wife filled in those details. “It’s that little bastard down below. He put wives and husbands and kids on phones to the people aboard the fleet, letting them know that their lives depended on our surrender to them. And then . . .”
“To prove his point,” Khan, husband, continued, “he put himself in front of three of our people that he’d had nailed to crosses and explained what was going to happen if we didn’t surrender. The attack on Atlantis is the biggest news going on below, bigger even than the Moslem rebellion in the Tauran Union, so everybody on the planet was carrying it. And . . .”
“And?”
“Our intel shops monitor the news down below diligently.”
“Oh, shit,” Wallenstein said, flopping into a seat as her knees gave out from under her.
I can just picture it: news hit the intel offices and became instant rumors. Then, or at the same time, maybe even before, the phone calls hit personal comms and that news began spreading from there. They probably met somewhere in the middle, fucked wildly, and had instant quinto-septo-octuplets, which then ran wildly themselves . . . spreading . . . mutiny. There’s never been a mutiny before on a Consensus ship. Never. And now . . .
Marguerite’s personal communicator beeped with the code for Xingzhen. She answered it, but without giving her lover a chance to speak. “Just stay in our quarters, baobei. We have a huge problem now, all across the fleet. You’ll find my sidearm in my upper-left desk drawer. Take it. Arm it. Defend yourself. Now I have to go. Remember, I love you.”
Turning back to her staff, she said, “Okay, we’re not surrendering a thing. Instead, the first thing I want to happen is for every ship’s captain to identify two or three dozen reliable men and women and issue them arms. Then I want them to secure their bridges, life support, and engineering . . .”
High Admiral Wallenstein had gotten the process of how the mutiny had started almost right. On most of the fleet both newscast rumors and personal comms rumors had met somewhere at random and propagated still other rumors which, themselves, begat conspiracies and plots. That, however, had happened only on the ships of the line that hadn’t risen—or not yet, anyway—in mutiny.
A slightly different process had taken place on those ships of the line that had. This was when the personal calls had been received by either someone in an intel shop, already or about to watch the worldwide newscasts, or someone in comms doing much the same thing. In either case, the two hitting together, at about the same time and place, had meant no need for propagation, mere seconds for consultation, and then a rapid rise into a family-saving surge to take over and surrender those ships.
Still another set of circumstances had caused the defection of the two repurposed colonization ships. This was that they were huge ships, with very small caretaker crews, who were very close and who tended to watch the local entertainment and news together because there wasn’t another elder gods −cursed thing to do, most of the time. In those cases, there was no violence whatsoever, just a collective sigh and a rapidly and peacefully reached agreement, “Fuck the Peace Fleet, fuck Earth, and fuck the high admiral, too. We surrender.”
There was a fourth process, too, though only a single member of the fleet knew it yet . . .
Sitting in Peace’s intel shop, Esmeralda knew momentous events were taking place all around her, all across the planet and fleet, but didn’t know her place in them.
She watched Hamilcar’s broadcast with considerable interest. Better looking than his father, if not so full of . . . character. I wonder how he smells in person . . .
Oh, my, what’s he saying? Surrender or they’ll kill the hostages? Now that sounds like his father or, at least, the army his father raised. But surely . . .
Slowly Esma became aware of another conversation going on in the intel shop, that between one of the mid-grade officers and someone below. She also became aware of whispering and had the distinct sense that a number of pairs of eyes were on her.
Now why would they . . . oh, oh.
She bolted a split second before the other crew present lunged for her. One managed to wrap his hands around her leg even as she dug her own fingers into the bulkhead around the hatch. She kicked down with a booted foot, landing a solid blow on the other’s face, then
pulled and pushed herself through the hatchway.
The hatch was normally sliding and electrically powered but there was an emergency hatch plus an override on the bulkhead. She hit the override, which, since there was no emergency, caused the hatch to slide shut with a sigh before half opening again. Then, after a slap to a restraining latch, she slammed the emergency hatch shut in the faces of her pursuers. A spin of the hand wheel dogged it temporarily from the outside. She couldn’t know it, but what actually gained her a few moments’ time was the other half dozen crew getting in each other’s way.
Whatever the cause, she had a few seconds to run down the passageway until gravity dropped to where she had to mostly pull herself along. Then she disappeared into the spine of the ship and kicked off in the direction of her own quarters.
The sections flashed by until, nearing her own, she used light finger grips to slow herself down. Then, at the proper spot, she grabbed a rail tightly, causing her body to do a one-eighty before slinging her lower half through the hatch that led to the low-gravity portion of her next section.
She almost missed the exit nearest her own cramped quarters, catching hold of a passing rung, and half jerking her left arm out of its socket. Gingerly—That hurt!—she pulled herself through the exit, hanging onto the sides of the hatchway while the microgravity pulled her lower half down to proper orientation. Then she let go, sank slowly to the deck, and began to pull herself along to where the gravity was greater and she could walk.
Once at her cabin, she practically dived through, then slammed and dogged the hatch down. She rested her back against it, waiting for her pounding heart to slow enough to hear herself think.
They came after me. They came after me! But why? I’m nobody . . . well, I’m nobody in my own right but I suppose I seem like somebody because I am close to the high admiral. They figured I would be on her side.