"We’ve got men up there now, checking the situation out. Apparently a tunnel catacombs the city. No telling how many people may have taken refuge there, and some of them are armed. So keep your eyes open. How many casualties does that make now?"
"About 600 altogether," someone said.
Esteves sighed, "¡Huy! We can’t continue to sustain these losses. We can’t allow even a ten-to-one casualty ratio.
"This city is too spread out; we need four thousand men to occupy it for any amount of time. Garzón should have penned them all up on the north end of town. And those Japanese know it. If we get below our critical numbers, they’ll start tearing holes through us fast. What if the southern samurai come from the farming towns to brave our defenses? We can’t fight them off and control our citizens at the same time."
Someone beside me spoke without engaging his helmet mike. His voice sounded distant, "I don’t understand. Why don’t they give up? You’d think after this many casualties, they’d just lie down for a few weeks and be glad when we leave."
A man beside him said wistfully, "They’re all crazy. Do you know, it has become the custom that when Motoki samurai patrols meet Yabajin in the desert, their leaders strip off their armor and duel with swords for the right to continue their missions.
"The winner gets to continue his mission, and the losing team returns home. I heard a friend say they videotape these battles and show them on the evening news. Their warriors have become incredibly quick and graceful, like dancers. They call it ‘the beautiful style’ of war. That is how crazy they are. They think war is beautiful."
"No, that’s not the reason they refuse to surrender," I said. I wanted to understand, so I grasped at straws. "It’s President Motoki. If Garzón hadn’t killed Motoki, everything would have worked out all right. They’d have let us live. I saw it in their faces when they watched the murder."
Zavala broke in. "It’s because we all owe Motoki, everyone on this planet—you, me, them. He was our employer. The only way to repay that debt is to kill Garzón."
I knew his guess was right. He’d given an answer I’d never have been able to fathom. Zavala with his cultural shift. I asked, "Do you believe we owe a debt of honor?"
Zavala’s helmet swiveled. "If I was certain, I’d kill Garzón myself."
He was torn. I suddenly realized that he felt that he owed Garzón, too. After all, he’d led them in battles in South America long before they signed on here.
"Garzón was only killing a political rival," I said, hoping to placate Zavala. "I have a friend in Intelligence who admitted as much. They’re trying to come up with an explanation that will satisfy the Japanese. It was an accident."
"It was no accident," Perfecto said. "Garzón knows his enemies."
"There was a general in Guatemala once who said all wars are an accident," Abriara mused. "He said humans were not built for war, that their territorialism was only meant to be expressed in the way of herd animals, through ritual nonlethal combat."
"You mean the way sheep or cattle do, by butting heads?" Mavro laughed.
"Exactly," Abriara said. "Throughout history, most human combat has been ceremonial—among the ancient Greeks, one or two champions fought while armies watched. Among African tribes the victors of wars were elected on the basis of spear-throwing contests.
"It’s the human equivalent of head-butting. Someone wins, yet no one gets hurt. It sounds as if the Japanese, with their ‘beautiful style of war,’ are returning to this method, pitting champions against each other instead of fighting it out to the death. However, this general didn’t use historical evidence as a basis for his argument. He stated emphatically that the best proof was that humans are not emotionally equipped to kill one another. If they were, genocide would be the most natural solution to territorial disputes."
I found myself listening with interest. I thought it strange that a military general should come to such a humane conclusion.
"I think this general was stupid," Mavro said. "I don’t mind killing people."
I suddenly realized I should know this Guatemalan general, this caballero. But I’d never heard his philosophy. I asked, "Who was this general you speak of?"
"A man of your own country—" Perfecto said, "General Gonzalvo Quintanilla."
My head reeled. "You liar!" I shouted. "Gonzalvo Quintanilla was a murdering despot! He could not have said such things—not a man who tried to overthrow his own country!"
"You are mistaken, Osic," Abriara said, her voice barely civil. They were the first words she’d spoken to me that day. "You confuse General Gonzalvo Quintanilla with General Gonzalvo "El Puerco" Quinot. Quinot tried to overthrow Guatemala."
"I know my own history!" I yelled. "Quintanilla’s men raped and murdered my mother! I hunted them for months! Don’t tell me about Quintanilla!"
Perfecto touched Abriara’s arm as a sign for her to humor me, which enraged me even more. Abriara said in mocking tones, "Ah, forgive me don Angelo, I didn’t mean to anger you. I must be confused. I had no idea you were old enough to have lived in Quintanilla’s day."
This seemed a very strange thing for her to say. When we’d first met, I’d looked as if I’d lived my sixty years. Abriara was being barely civil to me, and I was angry. I moved away from the group and watched the street leading down to the river.
I felt confused and frightened that everyone had contradicted my tale of Quintanilla—so frightened I dared not speak of it, dared not think of it. Eventually my eyes became heavy, and I slept.
The sound of gunfire shook me after a few minutes. Baker’s smaller moon Shinju, the pearl, had just risen in a ball of purple. The fires still sputtered along the hillside as low-lying timbers continued burning in houses where people had roasted themselves.
Uphill some fifty samurai were just finishing an attack. They’d rushed from a tunnel concealed in a hedge so quietly it could have been a dream. They’d carried white ceramic tiles as shields, armor plates from hovercraft parts, and our men responded by shooting the samurais’ legs from under them.
It had been a suicide attack, deaths just waiting to happen.
But afterward a dozen of our own men lay in crumpled heaps, their teflex shattered. We rushed forward, dug into the bodies and found four men dead, another six with broken bones, bruises and stab wounds. Esteves secured the tunnel, called in a report.
We were all sobered by the incident.
As the medics left, another forty troops walked down the hill, dispersed among the nearest houses, and began firing into nearby homes with plasma rifles and lasers, setting the dwellings ablaze.
Esteves ordered us to burn ten houses for each man we’d lost, but I knew it would do no good. We could not force the people of Motoki to surrender.
In our society, we admire the strong man. We revere our petty dictators, and we make it easy for them to gain control.
But the Japanese would not accept us—would not surrender to Garzón. Master Kaigo had said it long ago: "On Baker, there is no surrender."
We left our protective position and carried out the order. At nearly every house, someone tried to bolt through a door or dive through some translucent paper wall. We let the women and children leave, but any male more than twelve we fried. My mind became numb and my hands became numb.
I flipped off my external mike, sealing myself from the world. I watched what we did from a distance. I couldn’t smell or touch or feel anything in my armor. Only the sound of distant shrieking Japanese came through, and everyone appeared to move in slow motion.
After the first few, the killing became almost automatic. It was as if the armor moved of its own volition, empty inside. I was willing to fry them all. I imagined that we’d just continue the job, finish the whole town. Tamara’s propaganda would never be able to placate the Japanese. We were locked in a death grip and neither party could escape, neither could allow the other to live.
We were still burning houses, flames roaring and licking the sky, when the sun
rose. I was on a hillside with the south end of town spread below me and the ocean to the west. We’d come to a house and begun shooting when a young man, perhaps fourteen, long in the legs but still a child in the face, came running out. I fired into him with my little laser, painting a line of fire across his groin, and he staggered forward with a cry and was sprawling in the grass when an explosion rocked my feet.
A kilometer away, down in Old Town, a whole wing of the industrial complex collapsed, the roof caving-in as if the building had imploded. The great crystal dome over Old Town broke. Huge sheets of blue-tinted crystal dropped like cascades of rainwater, followed almost immediately by an explosion that tore the top three stories off Motoki’s proud corporate headquarters. Though the explosion occurred half a kilometer away, I had to duck to avoid falling debris.
At first I thought it was our work, perhaps part of some plot to further demoralize the Japanese, extinguish their corporate spirit.
But almost immediately someone pointed toward the industrial complex and shouted, "That’s where they housed the company AI! All our external defenses are down!"
I looked back at the corporate headquarters, remembering that only a few hours before Tamara had been on the top floor. Down in the valley below people began to shout and gunfire erupted: from a dozen places in town, several hundred samurai in green bugsuits came boiling out of concealed tunnels—from beneath a large moveable stone in the park, from behind a fake wall on the back of a garment shop, from an abandoned warehouse.
Our mercenaries shot them with their lasers, forcing the samurai to slow and spin while flechettes cut through their armor. There were screams and flashes of silver as laser fire superheated the air.
Someone fired a flechette nearby and I searched frantically to see the target—an old woman armed with a club rushing from a house.
Everywhere, everywhere, the Japanese were rushing from their houses. Amid all the commotion, I saw several men pointing, to the south. Five huge yellow Mercer superfast zeppelins were zipping in low over the hills, coming in at 400 kph from the settlements in Shukaku and Tsumetai Oka. Roughly half of Motoki’s population lived in the southern settlements—those zeppelins would be loaded with samurai.
With the company artificial intelligence down, there’d be no response from our neutron cannons or cybertanks. All other automatic defenses would only hit targets near ground.
The whole world seemed to shrink down to one point. I was transfixed by the view of those zeppelins. I’d been trained in Guatemala to run a cybertank by remote, and I thought, My God, if I knew the code so I could just jack into one of those tanks, I could fry those zeppelins.
The sight of the zeppelins filled me with a sense of peril, and I stood motionless, waiting for Garzón’s voice to ring through my helmet, waiting for him to issue orders for us to form a defensive front.
He didn’t speak, and I wondered if he’d been killed in the explosions. I saw that all we’d done by taking over Kimai no Ji was to build a castle of cards, and with the invasion to the south and revolt in the town the cards were folding in upon each other. It was as if the ground was slipping from beneath me, and I felt myself dropping.
The zeppelins flew over a low hill near the south edge of town and one lone cybertank suddenly flickered to life. A beam of pure energy split the sky and touched on each zeppelin in turn, and one by one the zeppelins burst into fireballs.
Multiple concussions rocked the ground seconds afterward, and houses shook with deep roaring booms that hit the hills, then echoed and echoed.
Portions of each zeppelin continued to hang in the air even after the explosions, and huge pieces of flaming material flaked off the burning struts. I tried to see if I could recognize any of the smaller cinders that fell from the zeppelins as humans, but they were only shapeless charred forms.
I looked around and saw that everyone, Japanese and mercenary alike, had stopped to watch the explosions.
At the doorstep of every Japanese home the people stood and stared in the sky with horror, mouths agape and teary-eyed, gazing at portions of zeppelin still clinging to the air.
The Japanese seemed to wither. They didn’t scream. They didn’t cry. They didn’t throw themselves on our warriors. Guns were still booming, sounding like the pop of firecrackers after the deep explosions of the zeppelins. The mercenaries cleaned up the last of the armored samurai. As quickly as the revolt had begun it was over.
One by one the Japanese at the doorsteps bowed their heads in apparent defeat and returned to their houses. We went back to our bunker.
The rest of the morning was quiet. Garzón declared martial law and ordered all Japanese to remain inside. The Japanese obeyed as if it were a decree from their corporate deities.
A dozen tunnels were destroyed under the city. One end of the theater collapsed after an explosion in a tunnel caused its foundation to crumble. In the early morning Tamara wheeled up the street in her chair, heading toward the Buddhist temple, and I was elated to see her still alive.
I waved and shouted but she just passed me by.
Perfecto and several other men went downtown and returned with enough food and drink to make a fine lunch, and we cooked a small pig in a fire pit in the street, then took turns sleeping in the afternoon.
I couldn’t sleep. All the things I’d seen replayed over and over in my mind—every person we’d killed, over and over.
In the late afternoon, a large mechanical silver spider with six legs walked up the street and stopped at the bunker below us and squatted near several men, who soon filed off, one by one. The spider had a tiny laser turret on its back, and it took me several moments to recognize it as an ancient message carrier, the kind used by military personnel when they didn’t want to risk interception of radio or laser transmissions.
When the spider reached our bunker it went over to a compadre, and a computer jack extended from a cable. The man plugged the jack into the socket at the back of his helmet. A few seconds later he unplugged from the terminal, got up, and trudged down the road.
A moment later comlink tones sounded in my head. I engaged the comlink and a mechanical voice said, "Prepare to receive recorded instructions from the messenger, please." The spider approached and I jacked in. An image formed in my mind of Garzón standing in an empty room, back lights shining on his silver hair.
"Muchacho," Garzón said, "As you know, our external defenses are down. We’ve confirmed that it will be impossible to build a replacement artificial intelligence.
"The inhabitants of Motoki’s southern settlements took a great risk this morning, and their invasion attempt failed miserably. We remain prepared for all contingencies.
"We now estimate Motoki has suffered some 12,000 casualties. These losses have not gone unnoticed by the Yabajin. Our vulnerability has not gone unnoticed." Garzón’s image faded, replaced by an aerial photograph of Hotoke no Za. "Two hours ago some 40,000 troops left Hotoke no Za."
The picture expanded by degrees until one could make out the tiny images of hovercrafts flying low over a river, leaving an intricate weave of V-shaped wakes behind. "We can expect them reach us in about six days. It will require all our energies to meet their challenge successfully. It will also require a moderate amount of cooperation by the inhabitants of Motoki.
"In the past hour I’ve negotiated with members of the Motoki family for a gradual withdrawal of troops from residential areas of the city so that we might prepare to fight the Yabajin. If you’ve been selected to receive this message, report immediately to Captain García at the East Wing of the industrial complex for reassignment. Speak to no one."
I got up and looked around warily, then headed into Old Town to the industrial complex. Spires of broken crystal still jutted up around the sides of Old Town like giant sections of broken egg shell.
By the time I reached my destination, 300 mercenaries had gathered. García escorted us into a huge machine shop filled with drills, grinders, welding lasers, universal tooling robots
, a hundred tables sparsely lighted by high windows. About twenty men were hard at work at one end of the shop, frantically constructing a small computer to drive some of the tooling robots, since the AI was down.
General Garzón was standing on a table, his helmet off, the sunlight shining on his hair. His eyes were glazed and bloodshot from lack of sleep and he hung his head as if in contemplation. He waited twenty minutes for everyone to arrive before speaking.
"Compadres," he said with a sound of resignation, "Did you ever see such a sunrise as the one we saw this morning? A lavender sunrise? I do not think I ever saw any such thing on Earth. I was down near the beach when the bombs exploded, looking at some rocks that thrust out of the water. There was a great flock of cormorants nesting on the rocks, and when the bombs exploded they jumped into the air and flew as if scattered by a shout. It was very grand. I do not think I have seen its like on Earth."
Garzón looked up, held our eyes. He spoke softly, "I will not lie to you," he sighed. "We are in a bad time. As things stand, we cannot continue to hold an advantage over the inhabitants of Motoki for long. Our satellites show that many thousand Motoki samurai in the south are preparing to launch an attack to dislodge us. They are shuttling men into a camp some forty kilometers to the south. We estimate that they will attack within three to four days, and we don’t have the power to stop them. Even if we could stop them, the Yabajin troops outnumber us ten to one. We cannot defeat them all and hope to quell rebellions in the city at the same time.
"We have considered our options: capitulation; retreat; unification with Motoki to fight a common enemy; genocide of the inhabitants of Kimai no Ji. For one reason or another all these roads lead to annihilation. If we follow any of these courses, we won’t live more than a few weeks. I have a plan that gives us some hope, but I must tell you this: We’ll never be able to return to Earth. We’ll never be able to return. You must not hope to see your families or friends or homelands ever again. We can never return!"
The crowd groaned and everyone cast desperate glances around the room. I felt panic rising in my throat, and I felt something else—there is an umbilical cord, so to speak, that ties each of us to home and family. It isn’t a physical thing, it’s an emotional thing. Yet it’s real none the less. I felt that imaginary umbilical sever as if my emotional ties to Earth were being physically slashed.
On My Way to Paradise Page 39