by Tom Kratman
The airship could possibly have landed or, at least, come down low enough to lower a ramp. Gold and the airship’s captain, in consultation over the radio, had decided this just wasn’t worth the risk. Instead, with the various fans keeping it in position, the airship had let down four of what amounted to troop ladders, two each fore and one aft, up which the hale members of Task Force Jesuit scrambled. Amidships, a pallet was let down, to take the heavier stores and the wounded. The pallet was lined up magnetically with the square hole from which it was let down.
Marciano’s staff had spent three days working with a half dozen of the airships’ officers to figure out the load plan.
“Did I ever mention, Rall, that I’m afraid of heights? Yep, absolutely scared shitless. I even hate to fly, though I can put on a good face about it.”
The Sachsen looked at the Tuscan mountain infantryman with incredulity. “Then the mountains . . . ?”
“Were in good part about conquering fear,” Marciano finished. “Conquer one; conquer others. ‘We become brave by doing brave acts,’ and all.”
Rall nodded; he understood the principle of the thing. “Are you afraid about going home? About what we’ll find when we get there?”
“’Shitless,’” Marciano quoted his own word.
“Do you really think Carrera set up the rebellion? It’s pretty ruthless, even for him.”
“No doubt in my mind. He hates the Kosmos, the Cosmopolitan Progressives, maybe even more than he hated the Salafi Ikhwan. I saw it occasionally in Pashtia, just how much he loathed them. So kill a few million civilians to destroy the Kosmos? Lives well spent, in his view.”
Again, Rall nodded. “Where are we going, once we load?”
“He—Carrera—gave us all the leeway we might want. He only suggested my capital. I think . . . maybe . . . he doesn’t really understand Taurus. Tuscany is on the periphery, and was never a great power, whatever our pretension. We need to go somewhere else. Maybe Anglia. Maybe Gaul.”
“Not Sachsen?”
“No. Your national troops haven’t been released yet, so we’d be liberating a kind of vacuum.”
“Gaul, then,” Rall said. “It’s a good stepping-off point for Sachsen, too.”
“There is that,” Claudio agreed. “Okay, let’s say Gaul. The Columbian newspapers say Lumiere, the capital, is under siege and beginning to starve. So do we go for it or a port?”
“Port helps the others, Janier’s force. But I think we’ll get a lot more gratitude from the Galls if we save their capital from falling.”
“Can we do both?” Marciano asked.
“Can we risk the chance that in doing the one it will be too late to do the other?”
Claudio clasped his hands behind his back, stared down at the deck, and proceeded to think very hard about that question. Finally, he decided, “Lumiere, then. Go start drawing up the plans.”
“Loading will take more than a day, maybe closer to two. Then three and a half days to fly. We can be in Lumiere in five days, six at the outside.”
“Plan on six, Rall. If nothing else, our experience of the last few days should let us know never to expect plans involving complex issues of transportation to ever work out on time.”
Tauran Union Defense Agency Headquarters, Lumiere, Gaul
More than the fire, Jan had decided, more than the demons and the torture, Hell is a place that stinks and where the stink never fully goes away.
Oddly, she found herself thinking in accentless French.
The stench came from two very similar sources. One were the bodies of the Moslems who lay in the streets all around, and at the base of the building for the several dozen killed inside and unceremoniously dumped out the windows. So far, there hadn’t even been so much as a suggestion from either side of a truce to bury the bodies.
The worse stench, though, was from the inside. There were some large refrigerators in the former cafeterias, and a few corpses had been stashed there. No, they weren’t working, with the electricity down, but at least they were airtight.
There were too many bodies, though, for that. They’d taken to putting them in rooms in the basement. The cool down there had partially slowed down the decay, and the stench that went with it, but only that. And once those bodies started turning, it turned out that the system of vents let the reek reach every nook and cranny of the headquarters. Stuffing the outlets with whatever was to hand hadn’t helped all that much, either. The aroma of decay still managed to get through, somehow.
Probably just as well there’s been nothing to eat for three days, Jan thought. I couldn’t eat anything anyway.
The outside situation, too, had gotten worse. To take her little section as a microcosm of the entire building, where she’d once been able to have herself, Turenge, Sergeant Greene, Corporal Dawes, and the other seven troopers watch just one corner, now, since the flanks had folded and the Moslems could come from any direction, she’d had to take over responsibility for the rear corner, as well. That was being watched by the sergeant and five troopers, while she had five—plus herself—Houston, Turenge, Dawes, Braiden, and Proctor, to watch over this one.
At least when Turenge and Dawes aren’t off shagging, I do. I swear, I don’t know where they find the energy. He’s nothing but skin, bones, muscle, and blood, while she could have used to gain a few pounds even before the rebellion broke out. Good luck to them, anyway. I almost wish it were me.
A bullet pinged into the room from some outside, unknown source. After passing through some of the furniture piled up against the window, it buried itself in the wall, knocking out a small shower of plaster and some chips of paint.
Jan glanced around the room. “Where the fuck is Houston?” she asked.
“I never noticed him leaving,” said Turenge. Braiden and Proctor just shrugged, adding, “Small loss if he took off.”
“No,” Jan corrected, “it’s a big loss if the swine parleys intel about our situation for his own life. Man the fucking windows and see if he’s trying to defect.”
“I’ve got the son of a bitch,” said Braiden, “out on the boulevard. He must have slipped out a low window. Who could imagine him getting that pudgy, out-of-shape body to the ground? He’s got one hand up and is waving a small white flag with the other.”
Jan bolted to Braiden’s window and peered through a small gap in the furniture. “Ki . . . kill him.”
The shot came almost in the same instant, leaving one fairly worthless major stretched out, lifeless, on the pavement that fronted the headquarters.
Sixteen Kilometers Northwest of Leinenfeld, Sachsen
Khalid pounded on the car’s hood with a mix of anger and frustration. Not only had his repair blown, but the car had overheated to the point the engine seized up. There’d be no expedient fix for this problem.
“What now?” Alix asked. “I’m a girl, not a wimp; I can walk.”
“Sure you can,” Khalid agreed, “in decent boots or walking shoes. Have you noticed what you have on your feet lately?”
Alix didn’t need to look down. She knew she had sensible pumps on, office wear. Indeed, she’d been coming from the local office when she’d been grabbed.
“I can still walk.”
Khalid looked at Fritz, who shrugged and said, “Let her try.”
“All right; let’s get what we need from the car.”
From where the car finally died, near the town of Lippe, to the outskirts of Leinenfeld, ran an irregular but dense forest. Trails wound through it, well-trod in happier times but, even so, still unmarked on Khalid’s map. He cursed the place roundly until Alix pointed out, “There are trail guides for the tourists and hikers. We just need to find a dispenser.”
This proved fairly easy. There were dispensers all around a peculiar monument to some long-ago victory of Sachsens over Tuscans.
Before looking at the map of the trails, Khalid pulled a small compass out of his pack. “Fortunately, I’ve had this course, too.”
“You
went to Cazador School?” Fritz asked, a trace of awe in his voice.
“Yes, fairly early on in my career,” Khalid answered.
“What’s this school about?” Alix asked.
“Just a combat leadership course,” Khalid replied.
“It’s really fucking hard,” Fritz corrected.
Khalid spent a few moments orienting the map, looked at it, looked left, looked, right, looked at the compass again, and then pointed to one particular trail, saying, “that way.”
Muelle 81, Ciudad Balboa
The huge tent was largely empty now, the consortium of officers and senior noncoms returned to their billets aboard the holding ships. Only a small cadre hung out at one end with the Mendozas, trying to hammer out a constitution. Barring those couple of dozen, however, the rest all awaited the outcome of talks between their commander, their enemy’s commander, and the commander of the combined Tauran fleets, Admiral Pellew.
The fleets that had mattered, of the Tauran Expeditionary Force that had set out to capture Balboa, had been Gallic and Anglian. Others had contributed, of course, but those were the leaders and it was to those that the lesser national fleets had attached themselves. Even there, since the Gauls had been given command of the ground forces, the Anglians had been accorded command of the combined fleets, under their own flag officer, Pellew.
It was true, too, that whatever accord the ground forces might reach among themselves, nobody was going anywhere by surface vessel in the face of opposition from the fleet. Whether or not there would be opposition . . .
“I confess,” said Pellew, who was typically as tall and slender as any other Anglian Sea Dog, “I don’t know what to do. Not only is the Union parliament scattered or destroyed, none of Her Majesty’s ministers are available, either. There is no quorum for anything, no orders that mean anything. And I am beginning to run out of fuel that I cannot pay to replace, what with the complete collapse of Tauran currency and finances. Moreover, Cienfuegos, which was our naval logistic base, has devolved into revolution bordering on utter chaos. I don’t know where to turn. I have no legitimate new orders and I have no way to get the orders I had overturned.”
Janier sympathized. He thought well of the Anglian and had since very early on in the war. Soldiers, after all, can march when in their natural element, but warships are holes in the water, surrounded by steel, into which we pour money.
“You bombed the shit out of the tank farm on your side of the Transitway,” Carrera said, glumly, “or I could float you the fuel until you get finances straightened out. Rather, I could have except that you also bombed the shit out of every dock at the Port of Cristobal, so there’s no place for you to tie up, either, even if I had the fuel, which I don’t.
“But,” Carrera continued, “and this is extremely important, Admiral, is it fair to say that you will interpose no objection to the return of the men I hold?”
“What,” asked Pellew, “do they plan on doing?”
“Just returning to liberate our homelands,” Janier replied.
Pellew gave a skeptical look, pointing with his chin at the ad hoc constitutional convention at the opposite end of the tent. The arguments had, on occasion, gotten loud enough for him to catch the drift of their purpose.
Janier wagged a finger. “I didn’t say, after all, nor limit, just who we intend to liberate our homelands from.”
“Did you ever take an oath to the Tauran Union, Admiral?” Carrera asked.
“Well, no, my oath was to Her Majesty.”
“As mine was to the Republique de Gaul,” Janier added.
“If she were not incommunicado, what do you think the queen would want you to do? Do you really imagine she wouldn’t want you and Bertrand to liberate her country?”
“Put that way, I suppose she would.”
“So in what way does your duty lie anywhere but in escorting Bertrand’s forces back to Taurus?”
“Okay, fine,” Pellew agreed. “But I still don’t have any fuel. And I am not going to go down in history as a man who surrendered his fleet to an army.”
The Gaul said, “Hmmm . . .”
“Yes, Bertrand?” asked both of the others, simultaneously.
“Oh, surrender, of course, would be impossible. But I was just thinking; if you, Admiral Pellew, sold a warship or two to Balboa, and, if you, Duque Carrera, paid enough—oh, in gold, to be sure—for the fleet to fully refuel . . .”
Carrera looked contemplative for a moment, then said, “Well, I suppose Balboa could use a pair of destroyers and maybe another cruiser . . . ”
“I lack the authority,” Pellew said, simply.
Janier and Carrera both shrugged. “Just a thought,” said the latter.
“But . . . ummm . . . General Janier, don’t you outrank the admiral of your fleet? I’m not a scholar of Gallic Naval Regulations and law, but . . .”
Janier looked at Carrera. “I wonder if I could perhaps borrow a helicopter. I’d like to pay a visit to an old friend . . . at sea.”
Aircraft Carrier Charlemagne, Shimmering Sea
The admiral of the Gallic Navy had his own quarters aboard ship, with his own small staff, his own domestic staff, and his own mess. At the moment, the mess was cleared out, but for the admiral, Teste, and Janier, recently brought to the ship by a Balboan helicopter.
“What do I care about fuel?” asked Teste. “The carrier is nuclear powered and, frankly, we can move faster—a lot faster—than the Balboans’ sneaky little plastic submarines can hope to catch us.”
“Your escorts?” Janier asked. “They need fuel.”
“But I don’t need them!” Teste replied.
Janier smiled, slightly, asking, “So would you mind trading one of them, the Jean Baptiste, say, for something else you might need? Like fuel for the rest of the fleet?”
“But I don’t need—”
“But I do! I need, especially, the amphibious assault ships and the helicopters they carry! I need the guns of the Charles Martel! I need the attack aircraft of this ship! I need a way to land our forces on a potentially hostile shore, near a port.”
“You’re really going to try to liberate home?” Teste asked. “You’re going to be badly outnumbered.”
“We’ll have help,” Janier said. “And even if we didn’t, I’d still have to try. The country demands it.”
Teste sat silently for a long minute. “You really think we still have a country, Bertrand? A country is just a people; and our people could hardly wait to sell their sovereignty, sell their nationhood, to the Tauran Union. And now it’s under enemy occupation. Not that it wasn’t, already, while the TU held sway.”
Now it was Janier who sat silently for an even longer minute. When he spoke again, it was with a question. “Do you know what our national flaws really are?”
Teste sneered, though not at Janier, specifically. “Our people are fantasists. They act out their dreams. They refuse to face rea—”
“No, that’s not it; none of that is quite it, though I can see why you think it. Our real flaw, and I think it must go back all the way to Old Earth, is that we give too much unearned and undeserved credit to the intellectual, and we have too great a taste—amounting, even, to an addiction—to having the appearance of elegance in everything.
“That, old friend, is how the TU sold itself to the people; it was the darling of the intellectuals and their running dogs, the intelligentsia, so the people—who wanted to be just like those—bought their lies. And because it was the intellectual class and the intelligentsia selling the package, they were good at the only thing they’ve ever been good at: making a bad idea sound elegant to those who are desperate for elegance, or the appearance of it, in all things.”
Teste rocked his head from side to side. “So what’s the point of your going back, then? The same swine will still mislead the people as they always have. You’ll be liberating them from backwards Moslems in favor of mere frauds, hypocrites, and hedonists. Frankly, the Moslems are better pe
ople, even if they’re flawed. They, at least, are sincere.”
“What if we’re not going to do that?” Janier asked. “What if we’re going to put them under . . . well . . .”—the general drew a sheaf of papers from the inside pocket of his jacket—“read this.”
“What is it?”
“It’s a draft of our new, confederate, constitution.”
Muelle 81, Ciudad Balboa
Soult sat in the driver’s seat, as usual. He, at least, was protected from the afternoon rain by the roof over the four-by-four. Carrera stood outside, leaning against the hood of the vehicle, with rain dripping off the wide-brimmed jungle hat he favored when he didn’t need to wear a helmet. Carrera held out a glass in his left hand, which Soult duly refilled. The warrant then, after somber and sober reflection, poured himself a small one. Carrera sipped at the legionary rum carefully—the stuff was strong—arms folded, watching the sixteenth ship being pushed out by tugs to sail out of the harbor, and then onward to Taurus. Only a few contingents remained, though one of those, the Sachsens, were large enough to need several ships just for themselves.
Just as a precaution, he’d trebled the guard on the Sachsen ships, and made sure their engines were partially disassembled.
Finally sick of the rain, and with the freighter fading to a dim outline, Carrera said, “Fuck it,” and walked around the four-by-four, plopping himself down on the passenger’s seat.
“The thing is, Jamey, what the fuck are we going to do with another cruiser?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Then Saul said to his armor-bearer, “Draw your sword and run me through with it, or these uncircumcised men will come and run me through and torture me!”
—1 Samuel, 31:4, Christian Standard Bible