The Amazon Legion-ARC

by Tom Kratman

  It was a fixed rule of the legion that no son or daughter of the nation would be led into battle except by leaders who have been tested in battle. They had seen what it was like when some of your small unit leaders turn out to be cowards. They had seen it during the Federated States’ invasion, years before.

  Battles being somewhat infrequent and unpredictable, however, Cazador School gave them one real one.

  Robles, the wheelchair-bound centurion from the Tercio Santa Cecilia, still served as the women’s administrative leader for Cazador School. He had gone through the school some years before losing the use of his lower body. The girls had seen him regularly, as individuals, throughout the course. This had been for performance counseling, mostly. Four days before graduation, he called them together as a group to explain the next, and last, problem. There were twenty-seven of them left.

  “Ladies,” he began, “the hardest part is over. Each of you still remaining has passed all the requirements of the course but one. That one, however, makes the difference between a real combat leader and an almost ran. The next one they shoot at you with the intent of hitting.”

  They’d had a number of live fire exercises throughout the course where school personnel had shot in their direction. But it became fairly obvious after a while that they were deliberately shooting to miss. It was still nerve-wracking to hear a bullet whiz by one’s head, but after a time it had stopped being terrifying.

  They were going to shoot to hit?

  “You’ve gotten to be a substantial investment for the legion by this time. For this reason, you will wear torso armor, ceramic, to reduce the chance of your being hit fatally. Of course, if you take one in the head, you are probably deader than chivalry. And the statistics say that at least one of you will be shot during this exercise. More likely two or three.”

  That was both true and false. It was true in the sense that most every rendition of this particular exercise saw someone shot. It was false because it was usually a rather large maniple of men going through. The odds of even one of the twenty-seven remaining women being hit were actually fairly poor.

  “If anyone wants to resign now, I’ll understand. Dismissed.”

  They were going to shoot to hit!

  Almost no Cazador students actually quit at that point in the course; they’d already paid too high a price to just give up. But they all thought about it…continuously.

  And, for a change, the women were given time to think. Once they came to the assembly area for the graduation exercise, life became remarkably sweet in comparison. They were fed as much as they cared to eat, most of them wolfing down ten or twelve thousand calories a day while they prepared for that last mission. There was even a small alcohol ration, served with dinner, the legion having no truck with any silly puritanism that forbids soldiers the few comforts that can conveniently and cheaply be provided. And a bit of grain alcohol doesn’t take up much space or weight. Best of all, the time to prepare allowed more than ten hours sleep per day. Before they crossed the line of departure into the live fire area they were relatively fat and positively happy.

  Why throw away life under those circumstances? Why, indeed? No one, perhaps could understand, unless they too went through the rest of the school. But of the twenty-seven of them left, no one quit. No one quit even though the road to the range led past a memorial that listed the names of every single legionary ever killed there.

  * * *

  “Fuentes! Fuentes! Maria!”

  “Over here, Inez.”

  “What you got?” Grammar tends to go by the boards when people are shooting to kill.

  Maria shouted out, “Turret. Three o’clock. Two hundred and fifty meters. Machine gun only. It’s got us pinned!”

  As if to punctuate, a burst of fire came from the old redundant tank turret and swept above the little depression into which Trujillo had led herself and her radio operator. The bullets cracked the air overhead with their passage. Two of them actually hit the dirt and bounced above them. The sound they made was quite different; less a crack and more of a screech. It then traversed to do the same to the group led by Maria.

  No way we are going to be able to crawl out of that hole without someone else distracting the machine gun. She shouted the same to Trujillo.

  “Hang on, Fuentes. I’m calling for artillery.”

  Artillery. Right. Maria crossed herself for the fourth or fifth time that morning.

  Ignoring the fire—since they weren’t shooting at him—an instructor made notes from about fifty meters away from Maria’s squad and not on line with her squad and the turret. His body armor was painted white so the turrets wouldn’t shoot at him by mistake.

  The machine gun kept pattering the dirt and breaking the air.

  The school wouldn’t really fire live artillery at the turret, though at the time Maria thought they had. Instead, they fired shells the fuses for which hadn’t been armed and, even then, only at a distance offset from the turret. Then they detonated underground charges around it. Much like the time the women had been “shelled” in Basic, it looked real to them.

  The fire from the turret’s machine gun stopped.

  It might a trick to lure us out. Sooo…up to me to find out. Maria cocked her right leg and moved her arms to a close analog of the pushup position. Her arms popped like springs even as her leg shot her forward. She ran about twenty-five meters and flopped to a low spot in the ground. When she wasn’t hit, she figured it was safe enough for the rest of the squad. Between squeezing bursts at the turret she called for them to advance to join her. They did.

  Then they alternately rushed and crawled to a low berm. Inez Trujillo must have been watching because, after about one hundred and fifty meters of advancing, the artillery lifted. Maria got the squad on line at the berm ahead.

  She glanced left and right to make sure she had everybody, then shouted, “On three…one…two…three!”

  On her command, all the women with her popped over the edge, presented their muzzles to the target, and began to put a really vicious fire on it. Perhaps only one in fifty shots actually hit, even though all of the students’ rifle and machine gun ammunition was live, the men shooting at them being behind armor.

  While the turret was being hit, the crew ceased fire as if they were genuinely suppressed. In that safe time, Trujillo, bringing behind her her radio operator and another girl serving as a runner, bolted to Maria’s berm. Panting with the effort, Inez flopped down next to Maria. Both her RTO and her runner kept low. There wasn’t really room along the berm for them anyway.

  “Inez,” Maria shouted between bursts, “I can keep the bastard suppressed, but that’s all. I can’t tell whether that position is destroyed, suppressed, or just waiting for us to expose ourselves. But there’s a shallow ditch over to the left. I think you can get a squad up it with no one to see.”

  “Got it,” Trujillo said, then turned to the runner and ordered her to go back and order forward the second squad. The squad leader was to use the ditch to get into the “enemy” position and make sure the turret was KIA, killed in action. They caught occasional glimpses of a skinny rump or a thin F-26 barrel as Second moved up the ditch.

  “Maria,” Inez shouted over the din, “the signal to lift fires will be a green smoke grenade!”

  “Got it. Lift fires on green.”

  A storm of fire thundered from the left front as girls began to spring forward and across the objective area. Maria saw the green smoke begin to waft through the air. “Cease fire and report,” she commanded.

  “A team, no casualties. All equipment okay. Down to thirty rounds per troop. Not much water left.”

  “B Team, no casualties. Less than twenty-five rounds per rifle. Shitty on water.”

  “Machine gun okay. Only fifty rounds left. Out on water.”

  Maria turned to Trujillo. “We need ammunition badly. Water, too.”

  “Right; the whole platoon, I’d suspect.” Inez began issuing orders to form a hasty defense
. Then she ordered one of the mules brought forward, one that had another full load of ammunition, and ten gallons of water.

  The rest of the platoon assembled, setting up a hasty defense in the area of the turret they had taken. Its hatch was locked from the inside just in case one of the women had a grudge against the crew. The men under the hatch, mission over, played a game of spades inside its protection.

  “Movement! One tank. Two o’clock. Eight hundred meters.” Whoever made that report, no sooner had she spoken than the students heard a freight train going by, almost overhead, followed by the sound of a blast. This was followed by a fairly large explosion to their right rear.

  “Fuck! Fuck! Everybody down!” Trujillo gave this order just in time, as the tank began to pelt the general area with machine-gun fire. Looked at another way, though, the order was unnecessary—they had all hit the dirt immediately.

  Was the tank trying to hit them? Yes…but.

  * * *

  It can take anywhere from several hundred thousand, up to a million, shots to kill one soldier in battle. There are many reasons for that, though the big one is that everybody is pretty much scared out of their wits. There are few, if any, people in the world who can deliberately hit a target with a rifle or machine gun when their hands are shaking like leaves in a strong breeze. It can’t be done, except by a fluke. Nor does marksmanship training really help all that much as one can never train someone to shoot accurately under conditions of being terrified. The most that can be hoped for is to train them not to be terrified. Scared? That was fine. Terrified was right out.

  On the other hand, the students really couldn’t hurt the tank approaching or the turrets they used for machine gun positions, they were invulnerable to anything carried. Besides, the women only had simulated antiarmor ammunition. So the “enemy” gunners didn’t have any reason to be afraid, as they would have had in war.

  The tanks would have murdered any class of Cazadores if something hadn’t been done to reverse the imbalance of fear.

  What the school did was make the turret and tankers’ bullets plastic, except for five rounds in ninety-three which were tracers. The plastic would only sting like hell unless the person hit was very close, in which case the shooters were under orders to either aim high or surrender. The five that were tracers, on the other hand, not only sounded real and could really kill, the students could actually see them under some circumstances. It was terrifying.

  Even that wasn’t enough safety; the legion wanted live leaders, without paying more than the minimum required in dead meat. So they had mounted the machine guns in more or less vibrating mounts. It was actually very, very unlikely that any given burst would both have a real bullet, be properly aimed, and not shake away from that point of aim.

  All else failing, the students wore armor that protected all of their vitals except for their brains.

  “If we’d had any brains we wouldn’t be here in the first place,” commented Trujillo. “But at least we haven’t lost anybody.”

  * * *

  They did lose someone, sort of.

  The tank was rolling slowly toward them, firing the odd burst to keep their heads down. The girl in charge of the mule was trying desperately to get it to take some kind of cover. The stupid animal ignored her.

  Then the tank noticed them. It fired a long burst—Maria saw that it included a tracer—that went wide. The girl dove for cover. Then the tank fired an even longer burst, fifty or sixty rounds, two or three of them tracers. The mule went down in a shower of blood and gore.

  By this time, the tank had rolled close enough for the women to have a chance with their rocket launchers. At Trujillo’s command, all three of them fired. One hit the tank with a bright flash. The tank stopped short. In seconds, another three rockets went out. Two hit the tank. Someone inside then popped the red smoke that indicated a kill.

  The women cheered, mule quite forgotten.

  At that point the instructor called a freeze in place. He picked a new group of leaders. Then the women made ready to attack another position.

  Only one Amazon was hit that day. The bullet went through the leg muscle. She didn’t let out a tear.

  * * *

  The next day was graduation. Carrera himself came out to watch. The commandant of the school, a foreigner named Broughton, made a short speech. Robles wheeled himself out, pinning the Cazadora tabs on their shoulders. He pushed the pin into flesh before withdrawing it and clasping it shut. No one winced or complained. Then they ran, in formation, past the reviewing stand.

  Interlude

  Once upon a time, and not so very far in the past, the president of “the legitimate, democratic, popularly-elected government of Balboa”—which was precisely none of those things—would have stood in respect and fear as the Gallic commander of Tauran Union forces in Balboa, General Janier, entered the conference room. That president, and his entire government of self-interested and corrupt oligarchs, was dead. Now Janier, without any deeply felt respect and certainly with no fear, stood for the ambassador of United Earth and the Tauran Union’s commissioner for the Balboa Transitway.

  Rather, Janier felt no respect or fear for the one man, the Earther, and one woman, the Tauran, he was there to meet. He had fears, though. As if to punctuate those, a brace of jet fighters, old, rebuilt but obsolescent, from Balboa’s Legion Jan Sobieski screamed over the building, causing not only the windows to rattle but the very glasses on the conference table to shake and move.

  “Can’t you do something about that?” the commissioner asked. She was named Unni Wiglan, and was a leggy blonde well into middle age, but looking younger. Like most of the Tauran Union’s semi-hereditary aristocracy, she rotated from job to job, each a sinecure where the holder was expected to produce little but high-sounding statements and expansive budgets. Though she was the commissioner for the Balboa Transitway, she had come in on the morning’s airship from her home near Pousse, one of the capitals of the Tauran Union. Certainly she had little interest in actually living in the austere Transitway Zone, a roughly one thousand three hundred square kilometer strip, eighty by sixteen, carved out of the surrounding jungle, a place of little enlightenment and no culture, and surrounded by a virulent military dictatorship.

  “No,” Janier answered, simply, shaking his head. “I can’t do a damned thing about them. And they do this every day, at this time, daring us to try and exposing our impotence. I chose this time and this place to show you.”

  “To show us what?” asked the ambassador from United Earth.

  Janier snorted, taking a seat. Formalities were one thing and, as a soldier, he tended to live by them. But actually continuing to stand? That might have given these bureaucrats the very false impression that he held them in any personal regard whatsoever.

  Snorting again, he said, “To show you just how willing the other side is, how eager to drive us into the Transitway and the sea. Seas, rather.”

  Janier smiled mirthlessly, asking, “And do you know what the worst part is?”

  Wiglan shook her head. The Earth ambassador didn’t answer at all, but then he paid attention to his morning briefings.

  “The worst part is that my army here is unreliable. The Castilian battalion, under that greasy wretch, Muñoz-Infantes, has all but officially defected. They train with the Balboans. They have an officer exchange going. They feed the Balboans intelligence, or did before I cut the Castilians off.

  “And, while I have my doubts that the Balboans have let them in on their operational plans, I know to a certainty that Muñoz-Infantes has his staff planning to assist them in any of a number of contingencies. He’s even preparing to marry off his daughter to one of their officers, a Volgan émigré.

  “It is not clear that, outside of my own Gauls, my army will even fight, except perhaps in point self defense.”

  “I’ve spoken to the high admiral about your problems,” the UE ambassador said, “since she returned from Earth. She cannot provide ground troops.”r />
  Janier shook his head again. “I don’t expect her to. The intelligence she provides, that your fleet provides, is aid enough from space.”

  He turned his attention back to Wiglan, the commissioner. “I need all my troops exchanged, and new battalions sent out, battalions that aren’t contaminated by close contact with the Balboans. I need the Castilians recalled and not replaced except by non-Castilian troops. I need people who can’t communicate with the locals, who can’t be propagandized by their radio and television.”

  Wiglan had had little contact with soldiers in her life. Indeed, except for sleeping with a number of them to entice them to provide some aid to the previous high admiral of the Peace Fleet, she’d avoided them like the plague. She didn’t understand them, any more than she understood Janier.

  “Why?” she asked.

  “Because this is a soldier’s paradise,” he answered. He sighed. “They don’t respect you, Commissioner. They don’t respect people like you. They don’t respect the Tauran Union. They don’t respect United Earth. This political system suits my men to a T, and they would be loath to attack it. For that matter, on any given day up to half a dozen of them defect.”

  “It’s actually worse than that,” the ambassador said. “This place is a menace, greater than its population, greater than its limited wealth, greater than its position dominating trade. This place is a menace because of an idea, an idea in opposition to everything we believe in.”

  “Huh?” Wiglan asked.

  Janier’s respect for the ambassador went up a notch, even as Wiglan’s clueless “huh” caused his respect for her to drop to the same degree.

  In these confines, with these people, Earth’s ambassador could speak freely. “In the first place, you must understand that real revolution, internal overthrow, of this kind of government is effectively impossible. We tried it when they were weaker than they are now and failed.

  “Right now virtually everyone in Balboa who has sufficient aggressiveness and is of age is already a member of the legions. They even take cripples…if those people are willing to risk their lives for it. So suppose that there is someday a good reason for some young people to want to overthrow the government down there? Why should they? They can get a vote out of all proportion to their numbers by joining the legion and training to fight you rather than actually fighting their own people. They don’t need to rebel for twenty years…which it might take…and then fail…which they certainly would. Not when they can have the vote in ten. They can get control of the government peacefully. And everyone who is not willing to do that probably…no, certainly…lacks the motivation to fight against it.