by Tom Kratman
“Nothing,” she replied, “we’re here to do for you.”
The tribune cocked his head to one side, quizzically. The legions had had field brothels for the troops overseas, but none here at home that he knew of. Of course, the old woman could be a madam and the two young girls . . . but, No, they just don’t look the type.
“Huh?” he asked, unintelligently.
“The call came out for people who could cook. We can; we ran a small restaurant in the city. We’d been taken over by the government anyway, catering to a couple of the bomb shelters. That was hot, miserable, and boring. Worse, with most of my male descendants out defending the island, it was too damned hard. So, hearing the call, we volunteered.”
“Do you have orders?” asked Ramirez.
“No time,” Mrs. Miranda replied. “‘They’ll be along,’ said the man who took our oaths of enlistment.”
“No basic training . . . never mind, silly question.”
The old woman smiled. “I don’t need basic to cook. Neither do the girls. So, tell me where the kitchen is.”
Pointing at the hole, Ramirez, grimaced, answering, “Well . . . it used to be there. My exec”—Ramirez’s head inclined toward the junior tribune—“has requested new pots and such but . . .” He shrugged, apologetically.
“Never mind,” answered the old woman, firmly. “They told us enough of the details. We emptied out the restaurant, plus grabbed a few things from home. We’ll make do. But we need a place. And a stove; that we couldn’t move. And we’ll need fuel for the stove. Wood will do if you can come up with some.”
“I’ll get somebody right on that,” the tribune answered. “Top?”
“All the natural wood is pretty wet, sir,” the battery’s first centurion answered, “but we’ve still got some of the lumber that came in the containers.”
“Will that do?” Ramirez asked the old woman.
“I hate the waste,” she said, “but it should do.”
The XO added in, “And we’re supposed to be getting a new set of burners in the next couple of days, those, or a kitchen trailer. But . . .”
“Don’t worry about it. You get us food and something to cook on and we’ll cook. Clear enough?”
Both the exec and Top cringed, bracing for a verbal explosion. Ramirez only smiled, answering, “Why, yes, Madam, it is very clear. And we still have some food, canned rations.”
“Good. They’ll do. And if you could get us a twenty-liter can of water, and the wood I mentioned, we can start on some stew.”
“I’ll . . . ummm . . . get right on that, ma’am.”
“Excellent,” said the old woman. “Oh, and one other thing. We ran into a priest on the way here. He’s doing a funeral for another group but he said he’ll be along later today, along with some people . . . what was it he called them? Oh, yes, I remember; he said ‘graves registration.’”
Ramirez nodded, thinking, I’d better set someone to finding the cooks’ helmets. They should have survived even if nothing else did.
To one side, just above the lip of the crater, the chaplain’s assistant played a pedal-powered field organ. The assembled battery, loosely formed around the hole marking the former cooks’ shack, sang in accompaniment:
“Yo soy el pan de vida.
El que viene a mí no tendrá hambre.
El que cree en mí no tendrá sed . . .”
Two makeshift crosses had been erected in the hole where the cooks’ shack had once been. The crosses were adorned with helmets, one fairly whole and the other nearly flattened. The flattened one, on closer inspection, had proven to have some bloodstains, along with a bit of flesh that was probably brain matter. Even though the other was clean, both helmets would be placed in body bags and buried in marked plots in one of the field cemeteries. At least it would give the next of kin a place to visit after the war.
“Nadie viene a mí . . .”
The voices all died to uncertainty as the sirens began afresh. The chaplain’s assistant looked as his boss, eyes querying, What now, Father? The gunners’ eyes all seemed to hold much the same question.
With the first organ-rippling gift from above shaking the trees, the chaplain made a quick sign of the cross at the assembly, shouting, “In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, for God’s sake get under cover!”
Sometimes the raids came and went quickly. Sometimes they lasted quite a while. Sometimes—well, just that once—they seemed to target the battery. Other times, more usually, they struck elsewhere.
But the problem, thought a tall, broad-shouldered, slender, and olive-toned gunner known to the battery as “Blue-eyed Rodriguez,” is that as long as the sirens haven’t blown “all clear,” and as long as you can feel the earth rumbling under your feet, through the soles of your boots, you’re still scared shitless. It wears . . . God knows, it wears.
Since he’d brought his guitar along when mobilized, Rodriguez was the battery’s unofficial musician and ad hoc entertainment center. At least he’d play and sing something someone might want to listen to, rather than the official radio’s hourly rendition of Todo por la Patria with O Campo, Mi Campo on the half.
Rodriguez cast blue eyes up at the bunker’s little AM radio, sitting precariously on a shelf, and shaking from the bombs. The radio was, fortunately silent. Indeed, nobody had turned the thing on in weeks.
We need a new song, the guitar-playing gunner thought. Or a bunch of them. But maybe I can come up with just one. Now let’s see; we were singing “Pan de Vida.” Okay, as far as it goes. Nice tune. Maybe it could use some new words.
Aloud he tried, “We are the cannon of death . . . Under our feet you are roaches . . .”
Yeah, maybe something like that. Needs some work, though.
IV Corps Headquarters, Fortress Cristobal, Balboa
The sun long down, this late at night the headquarters was comparatively quiet. Across the bay, to the east, tracers crisscrossed through the sky, leaving green and red streaks burned on the retinae of any who looked. That was Arturo Killum’s tercio, the Eighth, hanging onto Tecumseh by their fingernails.
Occasionally, a brighter flash told of an incoming shell exploding over the bunkers and trenches of the defenders. As background, somewhere off in the distance, air pumps pulled the carbon dioxide from the shelter—it and many others—and spread it out on the surface so that no telltale trace would mark what mattered to friend or foe.
And I can’t even let them surrender. Not ever, thought Legate Xavier Jimenez, watching over the indicia of the fight from the relative safety of the zigzag entrance into the shelter. They’re better off taking the pounding now, where they’re sheltered, than a worse pounding later, without that shelter.
“Hang on boys,” he said to the air. “It’s for a reason.” Turning, Jimenez walked down the damp ramp and then passed through the double curtain that kept the light from escaping. He didn’t have to count steps, so often had he made the same short trek. Each turn he took through the twisted corridor he took automatically, until, passing a couple of other thick canvas curtains, he entered into the dimly lit space set up for operations.
The first person he saw—no different this night than any other—was Corporal Sarita Asilos, manning the communications desk, lovely face lit by the various radio dials.
Does she ever rest? Jimenez wondered.
“What’s the word, Sarita?” he asked of the corporal, walking to her desk after entering the mold-smelling, dank and damp, concrete-enshrouded headquarters. The beautiful young corporal caught her breath, as she did pretty much every time her legate showed up. Corporal Sarita Asilos had a serious crush, all the worse for being so plainly unrequited. It was funny, too, because she had much the same effect on every other male in the headquarters—she being tall, slender, smooth of skin, fair of face, and most delightfully curved—that Jimenez had on her.
“No good words, sir,” Asilos said. “The Duque refused our request to abandon the outpost on the other side of
the bay.” The woman sneered in the direction of the radio—same legionary issue model as graced the shelf in Blue-eyed Rodriguez’s bunker, adding, “And the enemy propaganda says that Carrera’s abandoned us over here because we’re mostly black and he’s white.” Her eyes turned sad, soft, plaintive, and perhaps a little moist. “It’s not true, is it, sir? The Duque wouldn’t do that, would he?”
“Truth is always the first casualty, Sarita,” Jimenez answered. “I know Patricio probably better than anyone does, to include either of his wives. For certain constrained values of ‘know,’” Jimenez hastened to add. “He’s got flaws in plenty, but neither racism nor disloyalty are among them.
“And if you consider the viciousness of the propaganda we’ve laid on the Tauran Union, well . . . our people aren’t rioting in the streets over what they say about us. Over in Taurus, though . . .”
Wickedly and cynically, Jimenez snickered. “Now, is he using us? Well, duh. But we all volunteered to be used for a higher purpose, so we can hardly complain about that.”
“I guess you’re right, sir. But those men on the other side are taking a hard pounding.”
Jimenez nodded. “Yeah, I know. I’m a little surprised the enemy came up with the logistic wherewithal to put in as heavy an attack as they have over there. But it’s unlikely, even if Carrera had agreed, that we’d have gotten the men out safely, not with them having to cross the bay since the road to Fuerte Tecumseh was cut.”
“There’s one other thing,” Asilos said, hesitantly. Her fingers began hunting for a written message, even as she relayed the gist of the thing. “The chief medico over at Tecumseh has asked permission to put some of the worst wounded out of their misery. He says he’s running low on painkillers, and leaving them screaming will undermine morale in the other wounded badly enough to be life threatening.
“Sir, I’ve checked with the chief surgeon here,” Sarita added. “We’ve got plenty of painkillers, if we could get it over to them. It would be suicide but I also checked on that. Every medic in the corps medical regiment volunteered to try. Every one.”
“You’re a treasure, Sarita,” said the legate, which added about a zillion percent to the woman’s morale. “So are the medics. Let me mull that a bit, though. Tell the doctor over at Tecumseh I said, ‘Not just no, but hell no.’”
Still mulling, Jimenez walked off to check on his artillery. Halfway there he changed direction, walking briskly to his intelligence section’s desk.
“Do we have a frequency we can use to communicate with the enemy? In the plain, I mean, since our encryption gear and his aren’t compatible.”
The senior tribune manning that post answered, “Legate, we could get a message through if we had to—a couple of their logistic units seem to be having trouble with their frequency hopping system and have reverted to speaking in the plain—but do we want to? We’re getting some good info through that leak; I’d hate to waste it for nothing. And using it to communicate might do just that.”
“Yeah,” Jimenez agreed, “No ‘might’ about it. It would. Okay, so do we have another route?”
“Well,” the tribune spoke hesitatingly, “there’s their chaplain nets, sir.”
“Huh?”
“They’ve got radios, too, but never seem to have been given encryption gear. We haven’t got a lot of intelligence that way, yet, but we will once units settle down for the longer haul.”
“Any advantage to chaplains and not log?” Jimenez asked. Intelligence wasn’t, after all, his specialty.
“They could fix log easily,” the intel tribune answered, “if they found out about the leaks. It’s only a couple of stations, after all. But there are scores of chaplains floating around, maybe as many as a hundred and fifty or so, most of which we’ve been able to identify by name, rank, and nationality, by this point. It would be harder for the Taurans to fix, and probably couldn’t be fixed quickly without creating much worse leaks.”
“Couldn’t they just clip their chaplains’ wings?” Jimenez asked.
“I sense their chaplaincy has more political pull than that,” said the tribune. “To my mind, that’s the only thing that explains why the largely—actually, almost entirely—atheist Tauran Union ruling class still funds a chaplaincy.”
“Okay,” Jimenez said, “I need the name and call sign of the senior Gallic chaplain, and a frequency to get ahold of him.”
“Why a Gaul, sir?”
“Because, in effect, they’re running the show?”
“Well . . . yeah, but what is it you want to do, sir?”
Jimenez thought about it, turning an instinct into something resembling a plan. He said, “I want a very local, very temporary truce. I want to send a small flotilla of rubber boats over to Tecumseh with medical supplies, and evacuate some of the worst wounded from there to here, where they can get better treatment. I want to do it plainly and openly, and I don’t want them shot up, either coming or going.”
The tribune shook his head slightly, answering, “Oh. Then you wouldn’t want the senior Gallic chaplain, sir, you would want the Anglian. They’re the bastards that have been giving Tecumseh such a hard time, the same bastards who cut the road and can see into the bay.
“Moreover, sir, while we aren’t getting much from the enemy chaplaincy now, that leaky chaplain’s net still might pay big dividends later on. I’d rather we left it alone.”
“Well, how do we—how do I—contact them?”
The tribune thought for a moment, then suggested, “International maritime or aviation distress channel, might work, sir. Worth a shot, rather than compromising a source. That, or maybe we could dial every landline number in the area we know the Anglians have overrun. Some of the lines might still be up. Or we could try to jump into their satellite communications ability, though I’d rather not let them know we can do that.”
“I want to keep it low key,” said Jimenez. “Try landline first. And let me talk to them, personally.”
“Do you speak English, sir?”
“Yes,” Jimenez said, “and pretty well, actually.”
“Okay, sir. This has some intel value, too, so give me a couple of hours . . . or maybe until dawn, if you can. Oh, and I’ll get our corps chaplain to intercede, too. I’ll set it up.”
“No more than a couple of hours,” Jimenez insisted. “We have friends and brothers in pain over there.”
South of the Parilla Line, Balboa
Sais clapped a hand across his soldier’s mouth, then whispered, “Get up, Espinal; it’s time.”
The boy’s eyes fluttered open, unseen and unseeing. At the jungle floor’s starless and moonless night, even the whites of the boy’s eyes were invisible. He nodded, to let Sais know he was awake and unlikely to shout anything out. Once the sergeant had removed his muffling hand, Espinal softly said, “I’m ready, Sergeant.”
The pair travelled light, carrying only their rifles, a red-filtered flashlight to signal to the friendlies to the north, if that ever became practical, a set of night vision goggles with some spare batteries, and a canteen each. Everything else was left behind, covered by some brush, some dirt, and a bit of the rotting tree trunk. The Taurans would find the packs eventually, but Sais had made sure while it was still approximately light out that nothing was left in them that would be of any intelligence value.
In the impenetrable gloom, and because of that gloom, Sais had tied a strong but light cord between them. It was a course of action not normally used but, in this case, he thought it was wise.
Even through the canopy overhead, a flash of lightning was visible. The crack of the lightning was muffled by the vegetation, but the flash was followed almost immediately by the sound of heavy rain falling on the leaves and branches above. That grew in seconds to a crescendo.
Sais breathed a sigh of relief. Not only would the rain drive the Taurans to shelter, even if it was only the shelter of putting on their headgear and mentally retreating under the brims, but the racket would cover their footste
ps and then some.
Now we can move, by God or, rather, we can once the rain gets through. In the interim, though . . .
He held up a fist by sheer force of habit; but Espinal couldn’t see it. Hell, without his goggles Sais couldn’t have seen it either. Espinal bumped into his sergeant from behind, and came to a stop.
Sais turned around and whispered, “For now, it’s just sound. In about fifteen or twenty minutes, though, the rain will get through the canopy. Then the Taurans are going to go half catatonic. That’s when we’ll move.”
“Roger, Sergeant.”
Feeling the first drop hit his soft, brimmed cap, Sais thought, About time. First time I’ve ever wanted the rain to come down, I think. The drop quickly became a deluge, as the leaves and branches above began to shed their excess water. It came down cold, causing the sergeant to shiver for a moment.
Once satisfied that the rain getting through was heavy enough to have the desired effects, Sais gave a double tug to the connecting cord and took off at a quick pace. Got to make hay while the sun shines. Got to take advantage of the downpour while it lasts.
Not unexpectedly, the spray of the falling drops began to cover the lens of the goggles, making them worse than useless. Sais persisted for a while, but after coming close to a heart attack when the distortion caused a hanging vine to look like a snake, and with a silent curse, Sais stopped and took them off his face. He left the goggles to hang from his neck by the head straps. Blinking against the purple haze the green light of the goggles brought about in human eyes, he rotated his eyes around, trying to cut the time until he could hope to see something again. Again, Espinal bumped into him from behind.
“Sergeant?”
“Never mind, it’s going to be a little slower going than I’d hoped.”