by Tom Kratman
Then it was time.
* * *
Trujillo handed the microphone back to her radio-telephone operator. The RTO held it to her own ear, listening. Then Trujillo looked at the F-26 in her hand, shook her head, gave a little “to hell with it” shrug and slung the piece across her back. The tribune took the eagle from its bearer and crossed herself.
There’s only one way to do this, to make sure they go up that hill…together. We’ve got a broad open street to cross. The way the trees are, they cover the enemy from sight of most of our supporting weapons but give them a perfect view of most of the street. On the plus side they couldn’t see us where we assembled on our side of the street, what with the trees, the walled courtyards, and the covered vestibules. The Taurans might only kill my girls a few at a time if we try to cross in ones and twos, but there will be a lot more time to do it in; a lot more rifles and machine guns for every second there’s a target—my women!—exposed. And there just isn’t any more time to wait. A chance at the headquarters for this whole sector? It has to be done, if it can be done, right away, right now. If we fail…
* * *
“What the hell? Captain! Captain Bernoulli. You need to see this, sir.”
Bernoulli—a stubby Ligurini, a Tuscan mountain trooper—leapt from hole to hole, sheltering from the now desultory incoming artillery. Reaching his machine gunner’s side, he hunched his short and stocky frame down next to the man who had summoned him. “What is it, Basso?”
Basso pointed at the street below. “Sir, it’s one of the locals. I think it’s a she and I think she’s giving a speech…right in my line of fire. Sir, do I have to shoot her?”
Bernoulli shook his head at the waste of it all. “Let’s wait a sec’. Maybe she telling them all to go home…no, I guess not. Shoot if he…or she comes any closer, Basso.”
“Yessir,” the mountain trooper answered, though he clearly didn’t like it.
* * *
On the far side of the street below, Inez Trujillo shouted, “On your feet, Amazonas!” Then she waited for the girls to rise, such as hadn’t already.
“Now…For your old parents and grandparents back in the City; for the children you have or hope to have; for your country…for YOURSELVES! The future is at the top of that hill! Follow me, you cunts!”
Holding the eagle high with both her hands, the tribune raced out into the street. She had made it more than halfway across before three things happened: the artillery stopped falling on Cerro Mina, the rest of the Amazons realized what she had done, and two enemy machine gunners on the slope simply shot her to pieces.
Perhaps if only one or two bullets had hit Trujillo the rest might not have followed as they did. But Inez was torn apart.
The women could see that she was dead, very dead, even before her body hit the ground. She didn’t even have time to cry out. Her head was nearly severed, misshapen by a bullet, too. Entrails spilling, her corpse sprawled on the pavement. In an instant she was transformed from a living, breathing woman into an obscenity.
One or two enemy bullets must have hit the eagle’s staff, because it fell to the asphalt in two pieces.
The rest of the women—those who could see—just stared for a moment, speechless except for one or two of the girls who screamed. Maria recognized Cat’s scream clearly. She looked again at the body, biting her lower lip, tears coming to her eyes.
Maria felt a horrible anger build in her. “They ruined her! They ruined her!” She tightened the grip on her rifle and screamed, “Ataque!” In the next moment she and her girls were charging across that street screaming like she-wolves and firing from the hip.
The other squads followed right along. Well, men and women both are herd animals.
More machine guns—rifles too, of course—joined those that had killed Trujillo. Maria vaguely saw—rather, felt—one long sweeping burst cut down the woman—more of a girl really, she was no more than eighteen—beside her. A spattering of angry hornets cracked the air by her head and two or three more Amazons—three, it was three—cried out and flopped to the ground behind her.
* * *
Marta’s chest hurt terribly where a bullet had struck her breast, penetrating both liquid-metal plate and silk backing to lodge in the soft flesh below. Still she crawled from one body to another trying to do whatever good she could. She stopped briefly by the still-breathing form of Isabel Galindo. Isabel had been an immigrant from Santander. Isabel had been lovely.
She wasn’t anymore. From whatever angle the bullet had struck, it had blown away most of her face and both of her eyes. Marta dropped her head onto the shallowly breathing chest and wept, briefly.
“I can’t help, Isi. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. Got to get to the other girls.” She bent to give Isabel a kiss from bloody lips before crawling on.
She stopped briefly by Martina Santa Cruz. Martina had just joined the tercio a few months before. She wasn’t much past eighteen years old. She would never be nineteen. Marta crawled on.
Marta didn’t have to turn the next body over to know whose it was. “Oh, Cat, she moaned, “what about your kids?”
That was one friend too many. Marta collapsed, unconscious.
* * *
Maria didn’t know, of course, that almost every close friend she had in the world was wounded or dead or dying. She kept running forward, firing short bursts. She kept shouting for the others to follow.
There weren’t many others in her squad who could follow. Half of those who began that charge went down before they’d even crossed the broad street. Provided one didn’t mind stepping on the wounded, or making the odd short jump, it would have been possible to have crossed it and never set foot on pavement. Even if someone had tried to cross it without stepping on any bodies, they would still have stained their boots red.
The rest of them, the half left standing, reached the wooded slope and, firing from the hip, began to close. It was slow going up that hill. More girls fell with every step.
What few Amazonas Maria had left did what she did, dodging from tree to tree, firing ahead without bothering much to aim, mostly just trying to ruin the Taurans’ aim.
Then someone ahead of her reached a row of barbed concertina. The Amazon detached her bayonet to use with the scabbard to try to cut a way through. Together bayonet and scabbard made a good set of wire cutters; they were designed that way. Others had the same idea, of course. The Taurans concentrated their fire on those trying to cut through. They were hit, some wounded, some dead. Not one of them got more than thirty feet past the wire alive. The wire itself was draped with bodies hanging grotesquely by the barbs caught on their uniforms and in their flesh. Most were dead, but one woman who had been hung up on the wire kept trying to pick her intestines off of the ground and stuff them back into her torn belly. Her one good arm kept getting re-caught on the wire, forcing her to spill her organs back to the earth. She made a horrible keening sound—hardly human, really—the entire time.
That made Maria very angry, but in a very cold way. When she saw a pair of enemy soldiers come running up, she drew her rifle to her shoulder, leaned into a tree, took careful aim, and fired.
Her first target threw his hands into the air and fell back, dropping his machine gun. The other one stopped, foolishly, for a second or two. Perhaps he was stunned or confused; she didn’t know or care. He looked, maybe, eighteen. She shot him in the stomach. With a surprised look on his face, he dropped his rifle, clutched his hands at his midsection and sat straight down. He fell straight back after she shot him, again, this time in the head.
“Sergeant Fuentes,” someone gasped. It was Vielka Arias. She had Cat’s machine gun in her hands. Maria looked her over and saw that Vielka was hit, too, in the leg. She must have crawled all the way, dragging Cat’s gun behind her.
Maria flopped down to her belly beside Arias. Pointing with a finger, she said, “Good girl, Vielka! Now see those two bunkers?”
Vielka nodded deeply.
“G
ood. Good girl. I want you to use that gun to keep their heads down. I’m going to go for the wire. If I can cut through I’ll signal you to join me.”
Though Arias winced with pain, she nodded her understanding with great seriousness.
Vielka began firing, first at one bunker than the other, as Maria crawled forward, snakelike. As she crawled, she detached the bayonet from her rifle and the scabbard from her belt. These she linked together.
Once at the barrier, Maria started using her bayonet to gnaw her way through the barbed tangles. Vielka’s fire alternated, spitting first to one side of her, then to the other.
“Goddamit,” Maria exclaimed as her hand caught on a barb, tearing the skin. She continued her cutting, even so, her work slowed by the ripping barbs. Eventually, she found she had to rise to one knee to keep up her cutting.
Kneeling like that, the work progressed more quickly. Maria had made it about halfway through when she felt a blow hit her, as if from a great fist. Something tore through her side and out her abdomen. Alma would be the only child she could ever bear with her own body.
Maria cried out in surprise and pain. As her bayonet-wire cutters flew away, she fell down again. Dimly she saw that there was the ragged lip of a shell crater nearby. She started to crawl for it.
After the first shock, her wounds didn’t hurt all that much. Then they started to burn like hellfire, especially the larger exit wound. Maria began to cry from the pain. As she lay there, sobbing into the dirt, the bullets continued cracking overhead. That was Vielka, still trying.
* * *
Zamora had been trying to make sense of the ruination of her platoon when she saw Maria fall. She didn’t think; she just raced for the writhing body of her friend. Bullets split the bark from trees where the enemy gunners sought vainly to bring her down. When Zamora’s helmet strap broke and her helmet flew off her head not even her longish, red, woman’s hair caused the fire to slow.
Something—luck or God or pulsating prong of perversity—was with her, however. She managed to dive to the ground next to Maria unhurt. She paused only for the briefest moment before taking a firm grasp of Maria’s combat harness.
Maria dimly felt the strong grip of Zamora’s hand on the back of her harness. She muttered, faintly, “No. No. Leave me here.” The muttering quickly turned to one long continuous scream as Maria’s body was dragged across the broken ground. The screaming grew to a crescendo, until Zamora dragged her across the rough lip of an artillery crater and down into its muddy, protective shelter. Then Zamora took off, leaping out of the crater like a deer.
A few others, all but one in pretty bad shape, joined Maria in the crater. The Amazons’ fire stopped, for all practical purposes, not long after Maria had been hit. One woman—a not so badly wounded one—crawled to the edge of the crater and fired her rifle until an enemy bullet blew her brains out the back of her head. The enemy stopped, too, for a while, then picked up firing again. Maria heard some woman call out to save her, that the Taurans were killing all the wounded. She dug her fingers into the compacted mud of the crater and tried to crawl out to help.
She lacked the strength. Halfway up the slope of the crater Maria passed out.
* * *
Somewhere up the jungle-shrouded slope bagpipes were playing “Boinas Azules Cruzan la Frontera,” Second Tercio code for “No quarter.” Down below, medics picked through the one hundred and twenty-odd female bodies littering the street and the hillside. Most, if not by much, were still alive…if not by much. Many could be saved.
“Sergeant…sergeant we’ve got a few live ones here!”
The man with three stripes and a Red Cross armband came over and looked down into the blood- and corpse-filled shell crater. He shook his head sadly, muttering, “Stupid women…brave women.”
Ahead, the sounds of firing told that Second Infantry Tercio was cleaning up the remnants of the Taurans atop the hill. Second had made its attack hours later, but in overwhelming strength—nearly four thousand fresh men, with substantial artillery support! When the men of the Second had seen the bloody pulp into which most of the women had been ground, they had gone berserk. There would be few if any enemy survivors on that hill. “No quarter.”
“Well, don’t just stand around with your goddamned teeth in your mouths!” the sergeant said. “Separate the live ones and get them out of here!”
Interlude
Overhead, at about twenty-five hundred feet, the streamlined shape of an airship wound its laborious way between La Plata, far to the north, and Secordia, way down south. Balboa’s Herrera Airport was a routine stop for such. Patricio Carrera stepped out of his armored limo and looked at the ship without much interest. He had more important work to do today to spare a thought for anything but that. Besides, if it mattered, Fernandez would have told me about it.
“The Senate is my creation, not my creature,” Carrera reminded himself as he walked up the building-wide stone staircase, toward the four dressed granite columns. Compared to a local, Carrera was tall at five feet ten inches or so. He was also considerably lighter than the national norm, with a kind of piercing blue eyes that were essentially unheard of in the Republic of Balboa. Since this was the Senate House, the Curia, he wore dress whites, but devoid of nearly all decoration. Despite the light material of the uniform, in the short walk between his staff car and the portico he could already feel sweat building up on his back and sliding down. Balboa had a very hot climate.
The blazing sun shone on columns that held up a thirty foot deep portico. Past the columns stood the dressed but unpolished granite blocks of the front wall of the Curia, the Senate House. Centered on that, directly to Carrera’s front, were great bronze double doors. In front of those doors stood a liveried servant of the Senate, who was also a retired first centurion of the legion’s Fourth Infantry Tercio.
To this man Carrera said, “Dux Bellorum Patricio Carrera requests audience with the Senate of the Republic.” He then took out and handed over his service pistol. That military officers should never enter the Curia while under arms, nor indeed be escorted by armed guards, was a tradition Carrera hoped to establish firmly and beyond question. The best way in his power to do that was to follow it himself.
There was no doubt that the audience would be granted. Otherwise, Carrera would not have come. Still, formalities had to be observed. The retired centurion took Carrera’s pistol, said, “Please wait here, Duque,” and then turned and walked through the doors to announce Carrera’s request.
Carrera then waited, patiently enough. It wasn’t a very long wait, a matter of mere minutes, until the man returned and said, “The Senate will hear you now, Duque.”
* * *
Raul Parilla, president of the Republic and, pro tem, Princeps Senatus, sat a curule chair facing the Curia’s long, tiled central aisle. The space was flanked by rising levels of marble benches holding a quorum of the roughly one hundred and forty senators. Behind him, to his left, stood a larger than life-sized loricate statue of “Dama Balboa,” the personification of the nation and the Republic. The statue’s model had been Artemisia de McNamara. Carrera had sent far and wide for a sculptor—rather, a team of them—to do Artemisia, and the country, full justice, and just as far for a one by one by three meter chunk of near-molasses-colored marble.
The space behind Parilla to his right was empty, though the Senate had some thoughts on whose statue should fill it. “Victoria should go there,” was the consensus, and Lourdes de Carrera’s name had come up more than once as the prospective model. Then, too, what the hell, since the sculpting team was just hanging around…
Carrera didn’t know about any of that, though Parilla and the Senate did. Fernandez, the chief of intelligence knew, too, but he knew nearly everything and told only a fraction of that. Indeed, Fernandez had made only one serious mistake the entire time he’d been chief of intelligence, though that one had been a doozy. All three knew why Carrera was at the Curia today, though few if any of the Senate knew.<
br />
And they’re not going to like any of it when they do know, Patricio, Parilla thought. Not a bit. We’re just not that “enlightened” a country. Pretty unenlightened, as a matter of fact. Barely out of the trees, truth be told. Why…
Parilla’s thought was interrupted by the opening words of Carrera, his friend, supporter, sometimes subordinate, and sometimes mentor.
* * *
One of these days, Carrera thought, I really am going to begin a speech to the Senate with the words, “Conscript Fathers.” And why not? I conscripted the bastards, didn’t I? Today’s not that day though. Maybe after the next war.
Instead, he began, “As I’m sure all of you know, I am the most progressive, the most enlightened, the very most multiculturally sensitive human being on the face of this planet.”
He kept his own face straight all through that opening but had to wait for the senators to stop laughing before he continued.
“Exactly,” he said, and smiled as he said it. “So when I tell you I want to do two things that might strike less astute observers as progressive, enlightened, and sensitive, you gentlemen—and you, too, Mrs. Hurtado—will not be fooled. You, at least, will know beyond a shadow of a doubt that those are the least of my concerns.”
He cast his gaze around, seeking eye contact with a few key members of the Senate. When he had caught the eye of one in particular, a dark-skinned veteran named Robles, Carrera asked, “Senator Robles, how old are you?”
“Thirty-nine, Duque,” Robles answered.
“How old is your wife?”
“Seventeen,” Robles answered defensively. Fernandez had been sure he’d be defensive about his new wife’s age. “Why?”
Carrera held up and lightly wagged his right index finger. Please wait. You’ll know in a bit. And Fernandez knows everything.
“Fifteen days ago,” Carrera continued, “I had to witness the execution for mutiny of a senior tribune, aged thirty-seven, and a young corporal, aged nineteen. Both were male. When they joined we didn’t ask so they never mentioned that they were homosexual. Note, that there is no law or regulation against being homosexual, but there is a law against two people, conspiring together, to subvert good order and discipline in the legions. That’s mutiny.