A Pillar of Fire by Night

by Tom Kratman

  Cover and concealment was not all that a city provided to its defenders. More importantly, it gave them the opportunity to change what could be perceived by an attacker and what could be done to that attacker, as well as where and when it could be done. New entrances could be made anywhere and carefully hidden. Covered and concealed routes for counterattacks could be prepared almost anywhere. They almost became as submarines are at sea, visible usually only by chance, except when they, themselves, elected to appear for an attack.

  Satisfied that the way ahead was clear, Ruiz turned off the scope and continued his march forward. On “thirty-two” he stopped and went through the routine with the scope again, but this time he was looking for an exit from the sewer, one that he and his men had carved out and covered while preparations to defend the place were still ongoing. The oval they’d cut was unlikely to be found, except from the sewer, as they’d plastered and lightly wired it into place and then covered all the walls of the basement with a thick layer of grime.

  Turning, Ruiz whispered to the next man behind him, “quietly . . . bayonets.” The whispered words passed down the line . . . “quiquiieietttlllyyy . . . bayayobayonetsetsets.”

  There were clicks, as the bayonets were fastened, but very subdued as the men held their hands over the bayonets’ butts and lugs.

  They had plenty of grenades, but Ruiz had ruled them out for the first breakout into the basement. He’d decided so because, In the first place, nobody might be there, so why let the enemy know we’ve arrived before we have to? In the second place, the blast will be bad on them, in the open spaces of the basement, but on us, here in this miserable fucking tunnel, the blast will be catastrophic.

  When he couldn’t hear anymore clicking, Ruiz walked forward to the oval, feeling the edge of the tunnel ahead of him until his fingers found a wall. The light from the chemlight wasn’t much use for this. He felt around some more and shifted his position until he was certain he was within a couple of feet of the wall and centered. He then spit the chemlight down into the muck at the bottom.

  He raised a foot and flicked his rifle, a standard Legion F-26, to burst. Behind him he heard a barrage of clicks from the rifles of his men. Then, with a silent prayer to God, he kicked forward, knocking the oval out into the basement and letting a subjectively bright light into the tunnel.

  He wasn’t blinded. There were at least four men he could see in the basement. They weren’t friendlies, either. Ruiz fired hyperfast bursts once, twice, from the hip. One of the Taurans went down like a sack of potatoes while the other was set to spinning to the basement floor, spraying guts and blood as he did.

  Ruiz charged out with a wordless scream of pure fury. His men picked up the scream. One of the Taurans fired and connected, but at this range, with the bullet still yawing like mad, it hit at a bad angle and failed to penetrate the glassy metal plates of Ruiz’s legionary lorica. It still hit at an odd enough angle as to bowl him over. On later inspection he’d find that the bullet had almost penetrated and had, indeed, left a deep gouge in the metal.

  The rest of the men poured over their temporarily downed centurion. The Taurans had no possible retreat, so between the—as it turned out—four of them remaining and the couple of dozen Balboans swarming them, the basement descended quickly into an orgy of slashing blades, flashing muzzles, and brain-spattered rifle butts in a matter of seconds.

  The last Tauran went down, rather, up. Ruiz saw two of his men spike the poor bastard and lift him up into the air, before tossing him. The man’s mouth worked like a dying fish cast up on a beach. Then the basement grew momentarily quiet.

  Not so the upstairs, however; though it sounded like men taken by surprise up there, it also sounded to Ruiz’s practiced ear like men overcoming their surprise and getting ready to fight, fast. This was confirmed when a pair of grenades sailed down the stairs and went off; almost together.

  The twin blasts knocked Ruiz to the floor. The centurion was sure he’d lost an eardrum, and probably damaged another. Lying on his back, he raised his rifle to where he thought the entrance for the stairs might be and began firing burst after burst, right through the somewhat shoddy floor above. His men took up the same thing, though spreading their fire more or less around the entire ceiling. They couldn’t hear screams—truth be told they couldn’t hear a damned thing—but had the sense of falling bodies, even so.

  Verboom never felt anything so agonizing in his life as the bullet that came through his heel, shattering small bones there, and then proceeded up his calf, skimming the bones and splitting the muscle for over a foot. The pain was so immeasurably vast that, after collapsing to the floor, he didn’t even feel the next two that went through, in one case, his hip, and in the other, his abdomen. Had one of them been kind enough to have severed his spine, he’d probably have been thankful for it, at least in the short term. As it was he simply passed out, which was as good.

  Thus, he didn’t see when the Balboans surged up from below, shooting, stabbing, and hacking at his men. He also didn’t see it when one of them, about to tear his throat out with a bayonet, had his rifle knocked aside by the leader of the Balboans. Neither did he hear Centurion Ruiz order, “We’re stretched thin enough, medically, as we can deal with. Put out a parley flag and shout out to the Taurans to ask if they want their wounded back.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  “Therefore, neither be led astray by current opinions nor meddle in politics, but with single heart fulfill your essential duty of loyalty, and bear in mind that duty is weightier than a mountain, while death is lighter than a feather.”

  —The Imperial Rescript to Soldiers and Sailors (1882)

  East of Hephaestos, Balboa

  Of course, nobody in the tercio had really been asked to volunteer. Instead, their commander, Legate Antonio de Legazpi, had simply gone to one of his cohorts, plus a few, by maniples, starting with the Cazador and transport maniples, and asked, “Who here is such a cowardly, chickenshit disgrace to his beloved country, our dear province of Valle de las Lunas, and our famous tercio, that when our Duque asks us to go to the aid of our Santa Josefinan legionary brothers, and end a threat to our own borders, would refuse to volunteer? Anybody? Anybody at all? Don’t be ashamed, just step forward and I’ll sign the papers to discharge you this very instant. Nobody? Good.”

  That took a couple of days, but the days were not wasted. Rather, the tercio’s stable of mules were packed with food and ammunition, in a ratio of about three to two. There were between eight and nine hundred of them, not including their bell mares but including the ones partially funded by the Legion in peace and then called up to serve. Then the bulk of the mules, their bell mares, their muleskinners, and the Cazador maniple, had marched about twenty to thirty-five miles into Santa Josefina to establish caches, before the mules returned to either pick up heavy equipment left behind, to pack more consumables, or take the burden of some of it off the men’s backs. The Cazadores, with a very few mules, continued on to scout out the Tauran defenses of the mountain, Cerro Presinger, and its flanks.

  This would have been out of the question, daring enough to be labelled stupidity, not long before. But then came the Tauran ban on air strikes in the jungle, the essentially complete fixing of the Tauran forces by the two tercios, La Negrita and La Virgen, along with the rise in guerillas over much of the country. Before, Marciano could have sent his commandos out to interdict and destroy the caches. Now?

  “Now, gentlemen,” said de Lagazpi, “now he’s got to use the commandos just to screen his own flanks. We can get away with a lot more than we could have before. And we have calculated carefully our needs . . .”

  Of course, in war calculations tend to fail. . . .

  “Shut the fuck up with your bitching, Morgenthaler,” said Corporal Martinez, without any real heat. Martinez was, in fact, a very distant cousin of that Martinez who was a likely candidate for senior noncom—“Sergeant Major General,” in the parlance—of the legions. Morgenthaler, despite a
name that, on Old Earth, would have implied whiteness, was every bit as dark as centuries of surely gleeful interbreeding would suggest.

  Said Morgenthaler, struggling to pull himself up a slippery jungle trail, trodden into mud by the several hundred men who’d preceded him, “It’s been five days since we crossed the border, and two fucking days since I’ve eaten anything, Corp; I got a right to bitch.”

  “Yeah, but I have a right not to hear it, and so do the rest of the men. So shut the fuck up or I’ll just shoot you to get a little peace and quiet.”

  In the legions, that threat was rather more real than it would have been in some other armies. Morgenthaler shut up. Moreover, it actually was peaceful and quiet in the jungle, but for the sound of the troops. The law of the jungle was more than a phrase; hence the animals of the place tended to clear out when a potential threat got close. In this case, that threat was over a thousand men, spread across a front of about three miles, and most of them hungry and, like Morgenthaler, bitching about it.

  “Why isn’t there any goddamned food though, Corp? I knew we sent out enough, I helped pack some of the mules.”

  Martinez slapped absent-mindedly at a mosquito. “We all helped pack the mules, Private, at least to the point of carrying dry rations to the staging areas. The problem, so I would guess, is that small sections of Cazadores, with mules carrying their food and no equipment on their backs heavier than a radio, simply moved further, faster than we can and placed the caches based on how fast they moved. Simple as that; everybody makes mistakes. We’ll eat, I should think, sometime tonight.”

  “Think we’ll get a rest then?”

  Martinez shook his head. “Doubt it. We’re behind as it is and any rest equals a hungry day somewhere down the road.”

  “Yeah, suppose so. Oh, well.”

  Shithead, thought the corporal.

  West slope, Cerro Presinger, Santa Josefina

  The mountain wasn’t actually all that impressive. In the first place, it was set in very high ground, already, such that its more than twelve-thousand-foot elevation was really only about a thousand feet above the floor of the valley below. Moreover, there were another five peaks, all within mortar range and two within heavy machine-gun range. Moreover, that high up, with air that thin and rainfall somewhat iffy, there was a lot of rock, not much vegetation, and what there was rather sparse and dry.

  In the opinion of Tribune Delgado of the Fifth Tercio’s Cazador maniple, the peak or Cerro Presinger, itself, was the wrong immediate objective anyway. Speaking to his legate, about thirty miles to his east, via a carefully sited half rhombic directional antenna, he said, “The peak’s a bitch, sir, just a bitch. Not only is it straight-sided, around about sixty percent of it, but the parts that are more or less easily accessible are well covered by direct fire, while the straight sides which—yes, we or the line dogs can climb—are also covered by fire from nearby positions. . . . the damned mountain is framed by lakes on either side, sir . . . it’s a strong battle position for a maniple or, as they’d say, ‘a company’ . . . and, sir, I spent the last three days sneaking around this area. No, the key is a peak about twenty-three hundred meters to the east-northeast . . . yes, sir, that one, Glacier Mountain . . . no, there’s no glacier there, but there is a little frost or maybe even snow . . . if we take that, put in a platoon of mountain guns using direct lay, then the two peaks to the north-northwest become untenable for the Taurans . . . yes, sir, . . . and once we get first one then the other of those, we’re in light machine gun range and the Taurans can’t stay on Cerro Presinger for more than a couple of days at the most . . . no, sir, I don’t have the punch to take that first peak . . . yes, sir, I can cut off some the trails and ridges and keep them from shifting troops easily . . . roger, sir . . . no, sir, I only have a few directional mines per squad . . . yes, sir, wilco.”

  De Legazpi had pushed his command group and the one cohort mercilessly to get as far as they had in four days. He also spent a good deal of time on the radio talking to Villalobos and Salas, explaining his jump up in rank and their orders. He’d left his sergeant major with the artillery detachment—one smaller than normal battery of mountain guns and a standard battery of mortars—to push them just as hard, though, of course, not quite fast.

  There was a certain irony in those mountain guns; they’d been made by Claudio Marciano’s own country and sold to Carrera in the middling days of the war in Pashtia. The irony was that the guns and their shells would soon be pasting the Tuscan troops of one of Tuscany’s own generals.

  The sun was down and wouldn’t be up for some hours.

  Behind a thin screen of Cazadores, the maniple of which Corporal Martinez and Morgenthaler were a part took the lead for their cohort’s main effort. Another maniple, to the northwest, was moving on Cerro Irbet, but would not kick off their attack until after Glacier Hill was secured.

  The maniple was in a diamond formation. One platoon—not theirs—took the actual center of the ridge leading to the peak. The other two were somewhat behind and spread to the left and right. The weapons platoon, with a half dozen mules for ammunition, took up the rear with the maniple commander approximately in the center. The weapons platoon was fairly standard, with three mortars and half a dozen anti-tank weapons, though these usually fired simple high explosive. The difference was that the mortars were some of the comparatively few sixty-millimeter versions owned by the legions. They weren’t really much use against fortifications, so wouldn’t be used to prep the objective. They were, on the other hand, useful for breaking up an assembling counterattack. They’d be held for that eventuality.

  Behind that maniple, at some distance, trailed one platoon of engineers and one platoon of those Tuscan mountain guns with some very tired gunners. The latter’s guns were carried by some twenty-eight robust and healthy mules bearing special pack saddles. Another dozen mules carried ammunition to the tune of seventy-two rounds per gun. This sounded like not much. However, it was another peculiarity of mountain warfare that direct fire with artillery was often possible without exposing the crews to much in the way of return fire. That direct fire, being much more accurate, vastly reduced the number of shells required for a given job. Put another way, because they were safer, themselves, artillery shifted somewhat away from suppression and toward destruction.

  However, the guns would not be mounted on—nor anywhere near—this peak, not until the men of both the artillery and the infantry could dig them some fairly solid firing positions with overhead cover. There may have been a ban on using aerial bombing of the rain forest, but the mountain peaks here were mostly above the rain forest and likely to get some kind of aerial attack. Supposedly, guerillas operating near the Tauran’s main air base would make that somewhat problematic. Still, as Legate de Legazpi had said, “Don’t expect too much.”

  The other part of the fire support package were the dozen one-twenty mortars. Those, however, had not accompanied the assault force, but had stayed about three thousand meters to the west-northwest. There they’d carved out a firing position by chopping out enough of the blessed rain forest to allow the shells to sail out to the targets unimpeded. This also had the effect of granting a degree of cover from any return fire, the ballistics of which didn’t quite match those of the one-twenties’ for a given range and elevation.

  The defenders were an understrength platoon of Tuscan Ligurini, mountain troops themselves and among the best on the planet. The first warning they had wasn’t the rattle of incoming shells nor the astonishingly rapid rate of fire of a Balboan machine gun. Rather, it was a campus of antaniae, Terra Nova’s dangerously septic-mouthed winged reptilians, crying mnnbt . . . mnnbt . . . mnnbt while flapping away to the east-southeast. The vile creatures flew away in terror of a creature that seemed to be much bigger and fiercer than they were. A few trixies followed the antaniae, killed a couple, and then settled down to feast on the remains.

  Thought Private Boneli, manning the platoon’s radio and field telephone, I wond
er what spooked . . . oh, oh. He nudged his platoon leader, Maresciallo—or Master Sergeant—Pierantoni. “I think we’ve got trouble coming,” Boneli whispered. “Local wildlife running away from something.”

  “Wha . . . what?” Pierantoni was alert in an instant. “Oh, shit. Look, call the squads and the company and let them know, Boneli. I’m going to troop the line to make sure everyone’s up and alert.”

  He felt his helmet for the night-vision monocular he’d fixed there. The thing added so much weight to the helmet as to make it virtually intolerable to wear for any period of time. With a disgusted sound, Pierantoni rotated it down over his eye, letting the eye guard seal off light before turning it on.

  The sergeant stood up as straight as possible inside of the platoon command post bunker—a roughly chest deep excavation, done partially with explosives, ringed by sandbags above and below, with decently thick logs overhead and layers of dirt and rocks over that—and eased himself out the narrow, packed-earth entrance. He stopped just past the edge, his eyes and ears just above ground level, listening. He heard an antania’s death shrieks, along with a Trixie’s triumphant feasting call. No, that’s not unusual.