by Tom Kratman
Khan thought about that for a moment, then punched up a map. Studying that for a long couple of minutes, he highlighted most of the countries showing, then answered, “Sixteen. Oh, there’s risk in the Tauran Union or Uhuru or anyplace—we simply don’t know the enemy’s full reach—but those sixteen are places where the local government might grab our people for bargaining chips or Carrera may have inserted a team. It’s even possible that, as the Taurans inflict casualties on their contingents in Balboa, the local people might be inspired to riot.”
“How many guards to defend one? Our own people, I mean, not locals who might be infiltrators.”
“About five hundred, I suppose, would do the trick; twenty-five or thirty in each at-risk embassy and a reaction force of a small company. But we hardly have anyone aboard our ships capable of ground combat. And taking that many from Atlantis Base would be . . . well, no, I suppose with all the defenses being automated we could take them from there.”
“Give the orders.”
“Yes, High Admiral. Now what do we do about the ambassador? The guerillas in Santa Josefina say they’re going to start returning her a piece at a time unless we cut off all support for the Tauran Union and denounce their invasion of Santa Josefina.”
Marguerite’s mask slipped just that much more with those words. Clever, clever bastard, my enemy. Note how carefully they did not demand an end to our support of the Taurans in Balboa. They don’t have to; denouncing the Taurans under Marciano will ruin our relations with the ones under Janier.
I can’t help but wonder, too; is this my fault? Did the support I gave the Salafi Ikhwan in their campaign of terror teach Carrera to use terror the same ways? I know that I have a hefty share of the blame for the war as a whole, and for his rise, but did my actions cause him to pick up the techniques? Elder gods, forgive me if I did.
“What if I don’t?” Wallenstein, raising her head, asked of Khan, wife.
“I believe they’ll carry through on their threat,” she said. “I think that there are two—well, three—problems with that. The ambassador, herself, doesn’t mean much; that’s why she was posted to the nothing much embassy in Santa Josefina. But she has connections and family back on Earth. They’ll be trouble for you . . . eventually.”
“‘Eventually.’ I can live with ‘eventually.’”
“The other problems,” Khan, husband, said, “are more immediate. Consider, High Admiral, the effect of her no-doubt miserable and graphic death on morale of both the fleet and Atlantis Base, and the probability that, to avoid that, or try to, she’ll spill her guts about everything she knows, make any statement they want her to, to boot.”
Marguerite had a sudden, horrible thought. “What religion,” she asked, “if any, was the ambassador?”
Khan, wife, had no need to consult her tablet. “Orthodox Nanauatli.”
The Nanauatli, Aztec-based sun worshippers, were chief among the religions of Old Earth that favored human sacrifice. Some actually believed it was necessary to the maintenance of the universe. More, Wallenstein was convinced, just used it to terrorize the people into submission.
“Crap,” she said. “Just crap; anything but Orthodox Nanauatli.”
“She’s a relation of the Castro-Nyeres,” Khan, husband, said. “That’s probably why she got picked for this particular sinecure; her native tongue was close enough to Santa Josefinan Spanish.”
“The Castro-Nyeres?” Wallenstein fairly spit. “Could life possibly get any better?” Her head once again sank, dispirited, to be supported by her left hand’s fingers.
Along with their many, Oh many, other crimes, the Castro-Nyere clan ruled TransIsthmia, Esmeralda’s home, back on Earth, with blood-dripping hands. It was, in fact, their fault that Esma’s sister had been sacrificed and turned into a large cauldron of chili, as had almost happened, too, to Esma.
If I ever have the chance, I will hang that clan down to the tiniest brat sucking on its wet nurse’s tit.
“They’re a vile enough crew,” agreed Khan, husband, adding, almost as if he’d read her mind, “If ever there was a case to be made that evil can be genetic, they would be exhibit one.”
Wallenstein just grunted agreement. “Speaking of their crimes, how is my girl, Esma?”
“Knowing you would be concerned,” said Khan, wife, “I inquired. There’s nothing medically wrong with her, according to the barbarians’ medicos, below. But she is very upset, depressed, and uncommunicative. She has no appetite and is losing weight. They think she needs a break, a week or two, from any duties.”
“Cut orders to send her somewhere peaceful, beautiful, and—above all—safe,” the high admiral said. “My personal tab. Let her stay anywhere from a few days to a few weeks, whatever she thinks she needs. And give her some of the local cash.”
Wallenstein looked over at the captain of the Peace, Richard, earl of Care and Esma’s regular lover. Richard had, so far, been silent. “Would you care to join her, son?”
“If you think you can spare me for a few days, High Admiral, yes, please.” In a civilization replete with sex masquerading as love, and that rather poorly, Richard, quite young himself, was actually in love with the still younger Esmeralda, so much so that he’d long been considering taking a discharge here on Terra Nova and contracting an old-fashioned marriage with the girl. It would be better than subjecting her to the snobbery of his own class, in any event.
“Consider it an order.”
Wallenstein looked once again to Khan, the husband.
“Back to the ambassador. Open up a line of communication with the people who hold the bitch. Offer them a substantial amount of money. Explain that they can have that, and give up the ambassador, or they can kill her, however they choose, and get nothing for their pains.
“Those are my final words.”
“But what if they torture or threaten her into making statements?” Khan objected.
“If it was known down below what our home planet and most of our ruling class are like, they’d unite as one to exterminate us. So, no, they won’t have that cajoling them into holding out. Even so, make it a lot of the local money.”
Hotel Edward’s Palace, Island of Teixeira, Lusitania,
Tauran Union, Terra Nova
“I need to talk to you,” had been the message Esma left on the email drop for Cass Aragon. It included the name of the hotel and said, “Pool. Just after noon. Every day. If I am talking to someone male, back off until he goes away. Important!”
Cass had used an exclamation mark, too, in her message to Legate Triste. In fact, she’d used two of them. One was to indicate the importance of getting to their prize mole, Esma. The other was a plea for money to cover the trip.
Money had been provided, but she’d frankly lacked imagination.
Getting out of Santa Josefina had been a problem. In the first place, a series of mortar attacks on the airport, Julio Asunción, had shut it down for all but military flights. Hence, she’d had to take a bus. But with all the people fleeing the war in Santa Josefina, and heading for some newly established refugee camps across the border, in Córdoba, bus space had been at a premium. The bribe needed to get someone else kicked off to free up a seat had been large enough to make her pause. The legions had better win the war or I’m in deep financial trouble.
Another bribe had been needed at the border itself. Not that there was anything wrong with her passport. Oh, no, she’d just looked healthy, and well-enough fed, and so the customs people on the other side had decided she’d be a soft touch. She was pretty sure she could have traded sex instead of money, but a girl had her dignity, after all.
From there things had lightened. Air passage from the airport at the capital, Managua Nueva, had been fairly easy and not too expensive. From there it was even easier to get to the Federated States and then catch a flight to the tourist haven of Teixeira.
The problem was that it took five days to make the entire trip.
To say that sex wasn’t an importan
t thing for Esma would have been an understatement, this despite being of an age when sex bid fair with most boys and girls to overwhelm their thoughts and lives. Unfortunately, in the society she’d grown up in, as a beautiful but powerless girl, of a peasant family, and unconnected, sex had begun rather too early and very much badly. Moreover, until Richard had come along, she’d never once been asked. Instead, her lot on her family’s small farm, and later, in the slave pens of Razona Market, had been that of an ambulatory piece of meat. It would have been worse if that hadn’t also been the lot of every girl of her class that she knew. There was no special shame, after all, in what everyone endured.
Still, Richard was kind and she tried to put on a decent show for him. She wasn’t sure how well the show actually worked. And, after five days of pretense, she was just as glad when his short liberty was over and he had to return to the Peace.
And, to be let in peace, to sun herself by the pool, in a bikini less there than not, was probably exactly the medicine she needed. She was almost sorry when a weary looking Cass Aragon lay down on the lounge next to hers.
“We can’t talk here,” Aragon said. “Get up and leave but wait for me in one of the chairs by the elevator. I’ll come along in five or ten minutes. When I do, get in the elevator. I’ll follow. Then go to your room.”
“You want what?” Aragon demanded of the girl halfway to hysteria.
“I want out,” Esma said, shrilly. “I saw things, in Santa Josefina, that let me know you people aren’t a whit better than old Earth. I saw the murder of an innocent young girl. I saw her body, anyway. I know about people shot for voicing an opinion. Or selling food. Or serving a Tauran a drink in a bar. You’re just as rotten as the Castro-Nyeres, back home, and none of you is as decent or kind as Admiral Wallenstein. So, I’m out of this. I won’t help you anymore.”
Aragon’s first thought was, You’re out of an airlock if we tell your oh-so-decent and kind High Admiral that you’ve been spying for us. But my orders are “kid gloves.” I’m pretty sure arranging for your death won’t quite fit into those.
Instead, she asked, “Please tell me what happened.”
Esma did, at length and bitterly, dwelling particularly on the sheet of blood-lapping flies covering the ruined body of her friend, Stefi.
“They may have exceeded their orders,” Cass pointed out, reasonably. “They may have been following orders of their own. They could have let their anger at what they saw as treason get the better of them. I don’t know. I don’t think we actually have day-to-day control over what the tercios in Santa Josefina do. I do know that we gave them a course in guerilla warfare run by some Cochinese experts, and they are some hard men and women.
“They had to be that hard to defeat the Federated States and the Zhong. We, too, have to be hard to defeat the Tauran Union and Old Earth.”
“Is that what you call it, ‘being hard,’ when you line a bunch of civilians against a wall and massacre them?”
“I didn’t massacre anybody, Esma.”
“Your side did.”
“Do you know how this war really started?” Aragon asked.
“No.”
Sighing, Cass continued, “I don’t know all the details but I know some. It began when some terrorists killed Carrera’s wife and kids. Do you know who was supporting the terrorists, Esma? The United Earth Peace Fleet. That’s right; your side killed thousands of innocent women; children, too. “Nobody has clean hands, honey, but that’s not the question.”
“What is, then?”
“The question is what does the world—or what do the worlds—look like depending on who ultimately wins. We don’t murder innocent young girls like your sister for no better purpose than to turn them into . . . how did you put it? Oh, I remember; ‘a bowl of chili,’ you said.
“That’s not going to happen with us. But you know what the world of the other side looks like. With them it’s probably unavoidable.”
“Maybe so,” Esmeralda answered, “but I’m still done helping you.”
“Is there any way I can get you to reconsider?” Other than, that is, threatening to turn you over to the other side or having you killed by our own?
Esma thought hard for a few minutes, thinking of the most impossible thing she could ask for. Finally, she thought she had it. “Sure. Tell your big boss, Carrera, to come see me and explain it to me.”
With a frustrated and helpless shrug, Aragon said, “I’ll put in the request. If he agrees, and he probably can’t or won’t, are you picky about where?”
Headquarters, Tercio Amazona, deep in the Balboan jungle.
The tercio commander listened to the nightly messages from the capital with only half an ear.
“Terra Nova, Terra Nova, this is Radio Balboa calling to our friends around the world. We have the following notifications and messages: Athene’s orifice is stretched wide. I repeat, Athene’s orifice is stretched wide. Yvette always swallows. I say again, Yvette always swallows. Delong has de very little penis. I say again, Delong has de very little penis. Hecate is cheddar to the core . . .”
“I do not,” said a young woman manning the radios. “Never. It’s disgusting.”
The tercio commander shrugged, saying, “Don’t knock it, Yvette, if you’ve never tried it.”
The girl muttered something under her breath.
“What was that, child?”
“I said, sir, that the difference between the legions and the Young Scouts is that the latter, at least, have adult supervision.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
“The road of life is paved with flat squirrels who couldn’t make a decision.”
—Unknown
Estado Mayor, subcamp A, Ciudad Balboa
Although the Taurans had not, so far, targeted the Balboan presidential palace, also known as the Palace of the Trixies, it was too great a risk for Raul Parilla, president of the Republic, to actually live there. Instead, he and his wife and a couple of servants made do in a small but thick-walled apartment, underground and under a building. The walls, though thick, were possibly not thick enough to contain Parilla’s shouts.
Waving his arms furiously, the president exclaimed, “You’re out of your fucking mind, Patricio. Insane! I forbid it. I won’t even hear of it. Not one fucking word!”
Carrera, standing at ease in front of Parilla’s desk merely said, “Explain it to the president, would you, Fernandez?”
Unlike Carrera, Fernandez couldn’t stand. A would-be assassin’s bullet had shattered his spine years ago. He, instead, sat in what was probably the best wheelchair in the Republic.
“What are you going to do, Mr. President?” Fernandez asked, “Have me shot and relieve me of the burden of living a cripple? No, eh?
“Unfortunately, Mr. President, this is not just any girl. In the first place, as a spy she is a pearl beyond price. In the second, our main enemy, the Earthpigs’ high admiral, seems to love her like a daughter. But in the third case . . .”
“How do you know that? How do you know how Wallenstein feels?” Parilla demanded.
“The Yamatans tell me so, though they still refuse to say how they know.”
“And you believe them?”
“I do, not least because they don’t understand us well enough to lie convincingly. And, as I was saying, in the third case, she is a hefty insurance policy against failure when we make our ultimate move.”
Parilla, now aged beyond his years with stress and worry, used one arm of his chair and the opposite hand on his desk to help himself to stand. On uncertain, shaky feet he walked a quarter of the way around the desk to stand on the opposite side of Fernandez from Carrera. There, with his hand on the right-front corner, he stood and shook an already shaky finger at Carrera.
“You; you brought this war on us. I never wanted it. And you’re not going to aban . . . abando . . . ndo . . . oh . . . oh, shit.” Parilla’s hand clutched at his chest. He rocked for a few moments and then began to sink to the tiled concrete floor of t
he place.
Carrera almost knocked Fernandez over in his rush to support his political chief. He would have knocked him over, too, if the wheelchair hadn’t weighed upwards of two hundred pounds.
“Medic!”
“They say he’ll make it,” Carrera told Fernandez, the two of them sitting over some diluted shots of legionary ration rum in Carrera’s underground quarters. “But he’s going to be out of commission for anywhere from about ten days to three weeks.”
“Two questions, then,” said Fernandez, “or maybe three. Yes, three. Do we send you to meet the girl? Do we inform the first vice president to assume Parilla’s duties until he’s back on his feet? Do we forge a paper in his name to send to the senate to appoint you dictator for six months, per the national constitution?”
“Number three is a case of, ‘If nominated I will not run. If elected I will not serve.’ If you try to make me I will run . . . to someplace without an extradition treaty with either the TU or Balboa, that is also not a member of the Cosmopolitan Criminal Court. Trust me, here; I know my limitations; I know how to destroy and how to build things that destroy. To build things that better things? Me? No, and in that I’ve mostly been lucky. Rather, I was lucky to be able to recognize people who can build, and to have them come into my life.”
Fernandez nodded. Carrera’s self-assessment matched his own of his chief very closely. He asked, “Then what about the first vice president?”
Carrera considered that for a bit, but, reluctantly, shook his head no. “I don’t think so. He’s not half the man and not a quarter the politician Raul is . . . or was. And, no, we can’t jump down to the second vice or the senate, though I think Senator Robles might make a fine dictator, personally.”
Robles—a poor boy, once, then turned soldier-turned farmer-turned politician—had been one of a minority of people who had balked Carrera on something important to him. Carrera didn’t always trust his judgment, but he always and completely trusted his strength of character and commitment to the country.