Days of Burning, Days of Wrath

by Tom Kratman

  Ramirez nodded. “I’m not really sorry,” he said. “I think we’d have won, but we’d have lost a lot of good men and boys in the winning.”

  “Yeah, Top, we would have. And we’ve got this consolation; you know why he had us interned?”

  “I assumed it was part of the great master plan,” Ramirez answered.

  “Well, yes, it was, but the plan had two parts. One was just what we did, come out slugging at a time most convenient for us and least convenient for the Zhong. But the other part . . .”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “He wants the crews of the fleet intact to take over the ships of the former United Earth Peace Fleet. And I think he wants them for an eventual expedition to liberate Old Earth.”

  “Bastard does think ahead, doesn’t he?”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Men want a battle to fight, an adventure to live, and a beauty to rescue. That is what is written in their hearts. That is what little boys play at. That is what men’s movies are about. You just see it. It is undeniable.

  —John Eldredge

  Sachsen, enroute to Leinenfeld

  Khalid’s auto zipped past abandoned cars, abandoned towns, and the occasional pillar of fire and smoke rising from some of each.

  “Your name is Moslem,” Alix accused. “You’ve helped the Moslems here to rise up. But you say you are not Moslem.”

  “I’m a Druze,” Khalid replied, still keeping his eyes on the road.

  “And you two?” she asked of Tim and Fritz.

  “I’m an atheist,” Tim admitted. “Though I don’t mind those who still believe.”

  “I’m a true infidel,” Fritz said. “I went back to the Roman Catholicism of my grandparents. I’m working on bringing Tim to Holy Mother Church, too.”

  “Why, then . . . ?”

  “Why Balboa?” Khalid asked.

  “Why so much loyalty to Balboa?”

  “They’re probably the most Catholic country left on the planet,” Fritz explained. “You want to find the ‘church militant’? Look there.”

  “They don’t try to shove religion down your throat,” Tim said, nodding his head in Fritz’s direction and adding, “Except for this one, and he, at least, means well.”

  Khalid remained silent for a moment, then asked, “Do you know anything about the Druze?”

  “Near enough to nothing.”

  “We’re a heretical sect, if you ask some of them,” Khalid said. “Though some of them, a few, consider us to be a sect of Islam. We’re mostly ignorant of our own religion; a fairly small minority is educated in it and the rest of us simply abide by certain principles. Among these principles is patriotism. We are loyal to the country in which we live.

  “In my case I was recruited in Sumer, after my family was murdered. I took revenge for that, oh, a hundred times over and down to the last generation. And in the course of that, I gradually ceased being a Sumeri and just as gradually became a Balboan. My friends were Balboan, good men, good soldiers, and a privilege to fight beside. I acquired a house in Balboa, though it’s been rented out many more years than I’ve lived in it.

  “Why I even . . .”

  “What?” Alix prodded.

  “I used to date a girl, the sister of a comrade. Thought a lot about marrying her but, in the end, realized that my job and marriage aren’t compatible. Maybe when the war is finally, fully over. Maybe.”

  Tauran Union Defense Agency Headquarters, Lumiere, Gaul

  Troopers Braiden and Proctor, manning the window farthest from the corner, busied themselves with a long-running, high-points contest of gin rummy. The window to the left of them was manned, but with a table pulled up to cover the central part of the window and with a number of peepholes shot through the table. The holes were covered with dark cloth, paper, or cardboard, so that anyone looking to snipe at it couldn’t know when it was manned and being watched out from. Greene roved from position to position. Corporal Dawes sat close to Captain Turenge, who sat on a desk with the earpiece from a radio stuck in her ear.

  Campbell, meanwhile, sitting on the floor in the corner, spent the time terrifying Houston with horrible tales of his likely fate if the building should fall. This couldn’t be too far off; the Moslems had bent the flanks in such that the building was now isolated, food was getting short, and even the prodigious supply of ammunition from the sub-basement running low. Campbell was, in fact, pretty sure they were all fucked.

  “Shut up, please.” Turenge held up a hand to stop Campbell’s harassment of the detested Houston. She cupped the other over the earpiece, and closed her eyes, concentrating hard on the weak signal. After a few minutes, she looked up and said, “The enemy have taken the Peace Fleet. It has surrendered in its entirety. They own space.”

  “Holy shit,” said Campbell, while thinking, Twenty-four space suits, new. That’s sure as shit what they were for.

  “Amazing,” said Braiden, “little country like that and now they own space.”

  “Just get back to the game, Jim,” said Proctor. “Space can wait.”

  That news wasn’t the least dark spot of the world situation. Supposedly, both Gaul and Anglia had managed to come up with their ransom to get their troops back. Sachsen had not and Tuscany was still trying, as were some of the lesser states that had contributed troops. The Balboans, however, were still playing hardball, diplomatically: “You, the members of the Tauran Union, claimed to be a single superstate and made war upon us, as such. We cannot release any prisoners until either the full sum is paid for all of them, or, in the alternative, a given state secedes from the Tauran Union.”

  This had led Anglia, Haarlem, and Hordaland to officially leave the Union, no deals, no caveats, just simple secession. Even so, none of the troops had yet been released.

  Task Force Jesuit, Cordoban-Santa Josefinan Border

  There could be no other night for this; everyone who was getting out had to get out now.

  With Eris rising and Hecate hanging low in the western sky, Marciano’s MPs began leading the first wave of escapees for this night out from the assembly areas in which they’d been waiting north and down to the beach.

  “Quiet,” was the MP watchword and command, “for God’s sake be quiet.”

  To help with that, and with some other things, the machine guns on water-drip delay began firing at about the time the first several hundred departed from just behind the forward trace. Rifles, several dozen, joined in that, while some mortars, not excess to needs but worth expending to get the men out, joined in with random shells at random times, one shell and time per mortar, period.

  Gold wasn’t sure why the sense of despair was gone that he’d felt after the last attempt had been called off halfway through, but he didn’t sense it this evening.

  I suppose it could be that the Santa Josefinans didn’t attack today, as I am sure some of them expected to happen. But I think there’s some fear, still. Maybe it’s only fear of getting lost and left behind, but it’s there.

  Tonight, Gold had a radio operator assigned to him, a Hordalander tank driver who’d had to put his own tank down. The boy didn’t have much to say; he carried and monitored the radio and was ready to transmit any suggestions to Marciano or Rall or to bring Peter to them for consultations. Meanwhile, Peter had contact with his own ship, the Alberto Helada, via a small but powerful radio, the shape and size of a brick. It was through this that the ship informed him that they’d reached their anchorage, that they’d dispatched the small rubber boats as well as the ones the Taurans had commandeered that had been sent out with the freighter to hide.

  Gold began to feel some of the burden of fear—in his case, fear of failure—lift from him as the first boats began shuttling the Taurans out to the Helada.

  Claudio appeared out of the seeming air. “The loading’s going well,” the general said.

  “Yes, sir,” Gold agreed. “With most of the wounded taken off yesterday, tonight should go faster.”r />
  “I hope so,” Marciano agreed. “As a gesture of good will . . . well, sort of . . . at Rall’s suggestion, I left all our booze and a good deal of food for the locals when they figure out what’s going on. International good will, and all.”

  Command Post, Second Cohort, Tercio la Negrita,

  First Santa Josefinan Infantry Legion

  Dinner, this evening, had consisted of a few ounces of stale bread, a canteen cup of watery soup, with perhaps two ounces of monkey in it, and half a candy bar from a stockpile that the Taurans had somehow missed.

  God, I’m hungry, thought Ignacio Macera, for about the two hundredth time. Artillery ammunition they’ve managed to bring up a lot better than they have food.

  The tent for Macera’s command post was a commandeered civilian job, not especially large, that the troops had painted green and brown with some latex paint they’d looted from a store. The paint was already beginning to peel off.

  There was enough room inside for Macera, his rather small staff, and a few guests. Such meetings as he’d had to have since coming to this spot were generally done outside, in a narrow draw with some protection from direct and indirect fire, but absolutely none from rain and mosquitoes.

  The wind, the same wind that was, for the nonce, keeping the mosquitoes off, carried on it the aroma of a dozen different styles of savory stew and at least one of baking bread.

  God, I’m hungry, Macera thought. So are my boys.

  There was reason for the hunger. The Taurans had, in their flight, stripped the country pretty much bare, shooting any food animals they couldn’t take with them. Because of the damage to the roads and bridges, as well as the confiscation and sabotage of the dray animals and trucks the country normally could have provided, only a thin trickle of food was actually reaching the troops. Supposedly a small freighter was being filled with provisions back at Puerto Bruselas but, if so, it hadn’t even been dispatched yet. Nothing, in any case, had come by sea.

  Standing outside the tent, facing northeast in the direction of the Tauran defenses, and torturing himself with the smell of the food, Macera heard a long burst fired from a single machine gun. The tracers he could not see. Neither could he hear the repetitive crack of the bullets’ passage.

  Something about the sound of that Tauran machine guns and the other weapons he heard firing bugged Macera. He couldn’t quite put his finger on the whys of it, either, and that also annoyed him to no end.

  The intensity is about the same, he thought. And nothing about it seems too high or too low  .  .  .  but still it bugs me.

  He cleared his mind, sat down on a makeshift camp stool, and just concentrated while listening. He waited a short time. A different machine gun fired. He knew it was different because with this one he could hear the passage of the bullets.

  He waited still longer. Both machine guns to his front fired again, one after—though far from immediately after—the other.

  It wasn’t the gap between bursts of either of the machine guns that alerted him, oh, no. It’s that the gap between that first one firing and the second one firing were just about exactly the same. It’s been three times now and the difference in time between them was exactly the same, give or take ten seconds. I call “bullshit.”

  “Get me my reserve commander!” Macera shouted to one of the runners in the command post.

  Do I let higher know what’s up? No, I might be wrong and they’d just laugh over it. But I am allowed to do reconnaissance without asking permission and nobody told me it couldn’t be a reconnaissance in force.

  The reserve maniple was under the command of a junior tribune, a young black officer somewhat improbably named “Henry Morgan.”

  Morgan had started the war as a platoon leader, with charge of fewer than forty men. Now, with not much of a jump in rank, he commanded something north of six hundred. This was partly the result of casualties among the tercio’s officer corps, but more because of the flood of new recruits, flocking to the winning side.

  It stretched his group of leaders to the breaking point, that human flood, with corporals leading what were really platoons, for example, and maybe a properly trained private or two to help them. Or maybe not.

  “Henrique,” Macera called him, after Morgan reported in, largely because he knew it annoyed the youngster, “I am beginning to suspect we’re having the wool pulled over our eyes.”

  “Sir?”

  “Have you been listening to the machine guns? I mean the other side’s.”

  “Not really, sir, no.”

  “I have. Do you know that there’s one that, after it fires, another will fire in five minutes and forty-five seconds, plus or minus ten? Now why would a machine gun crew do that? Why would it be firing with such—and I use this term in its full meaning—clocklike precision?”

  Unseen in the darkness, and Morgan was dark enough to be truly unseen in the darkness, a light dawned. “Those motherfuckers! They’re abandoning their position and marching into internment in Cordoba, aren’t they!?”

  “And, see, Henry”—the young man noticed that this time his boss used his proper name—“that’s why I had you in the reserve, because you’re far and away my smartest maniple commander. Now, I’m coming along, but here’s what I want you to do . . . ”

  The formation was more or less V shaped, with the upstretched arms of the V pointing toward the Taurans and the reserve platoon down at the pointy base. Morgan took the point of one two-hundred-man “platoon,” while Macera took the other. A centurion took the rear to kick the asses of stragglers. The reserve was held in a closer formation by the first centurion.

  Neither side had any barbed wire up to impede progress or channelize their enemies into the beaten zones of machine guns. Even without the barbed wire, though, progress was difficult, given the very limited illumination provided by Erie, now well past apogee.

  All the way from the rear to where he was on point, Macera could hear the first centurion, saying, “SHUT THE FUCK UP, YOU DICKHEADS!”

  Yeah, these rabble are making enough noise that one man shouting is hardly going to alert the Taurans any more than the rank and file already have.

  The first notice any of them had that they’d reached the Tauran lines was a trip wire, over by Morgan’s arm of the V, that set off a shooting flame − powered shrieking whistle. Half a minute after that, Morgan called Macera over the radio; “Boss, I could see by the light from that warning device. The fuckers have taken to their heels. They’re not here.”

  As if to refute that, a machine gun fired a long burst to Macera’s front. From where he stood he could now see the tracers, one in five, skipping over the ground to strike somewhere off to his rear. Macera stopped where he was, consulted his watch, and waited . . . for five minutes and thirty-eight seconds when the other machine gun let loose.

  “No big surprise there, is there?” he asked, rhetorically.

  Whipping out his compass, Macera noted the direction toward each of those two Tauran machine guns. Physically pointing the corporals concerned in the right direction, he told off first one platoon, and then another, “Get rid of that machine gun. I don’t think there’s anyone there but be careful, even so.”

  With the remainder of the maniple, about a hundred men, Macera continued on to the northeast. At one point in time, he almost fell into a trench, seeing—or, rather, sensing—it in the nick of time.

  “Empty, too. Those dirty bastards.”

  Past the high ground the Taurans had chosen for the defensive positions, he could hear generators going and make out lights. One set of lights was upwind of him, not too far off. From it came the most tempting smells.

  Morgan called again; voice breaking and full of the sound of tears of frustration. “It’s the men, sir . . . they broke ranks and assaulted one of the . . . well . . . I guess they’re field kitchens. They won’t fucking listen to anything. They’re just standing around, stuffing their faces with bread and soup. Should I shoot a couple of them?”
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  Before Macera could answer he heard the sound of about a hundred pairs of rushing feet, racing by him in the dark and heading toward the lights from which came those most tempting smells.

  Fuck.

  “No, Henry, there’s nothing to be done. Well . . . try to get some local security set up with the ones who’ve already grabbed some food. But you won’t get them moving again until they’ve eaten or the food’s run out.”

  “Sir, they left us alot of food. I don’t think we’ll run out anytime soon. Oh, shit; they left booze, too!”

  From the sheltered cove from which the bulk of the troops were being evacuated Marciano could hear the occasional trip-wire device being set off. He looked at the sky, consulted his watch, and then asked Rall, “Are we going to make it? Before daybreak, I mean.”

  “Yes,” Rall answered, with a good deal of satisfaction in his voice.

  “Where did you learn the trick with the food, Rall?”

  “My great-grandfather. He was a regimental commander in the Great Global War. When I was a boy he told me about breaking contact with some Volgans who were poised to overrun his regiment by having the cooks make soup and leaving it there. Only works when your enemy’s starving, though.”

  “The Santa Josefinan politicians?”

  “They’re trussed up with a key to their chains on one of Chiarello’s water clocks. They should be able to get themselves loose and cross into Cordoba on time. But, you know, sir, if not, fuck ’em; it’s not like we owe them anything.”

  Marciano almost laughed, but contented himself with, “Very good.”