The Amazon Legion-ARC

by Tom Kratman

  Seeing the disbelieving look on her face, the counselor added, “Don’t you think you learned some things in Cazador School no college can teach? And you’ve got two semesters’ worth of military history from Centurion Candidate School all on its own. To say nothing of three credits’ worth of sports and athletics, a semester of management, one philosophy course…a semester of military law…civics…”

  Maria thought about the course structure of the training she’d completed and answered, “Well…put that way…”

  “I did put it that way.” He drummed fingers on chin for a moment, thinking, rather, savoring the feeling of doing good for a fellow soldier. “So, Maria, we are going to enroll you in the university. All your books and tuition will be paid. You must, however, return the paper books or buy them when a course is finished; the legion isn’t rich.”

  It still seemed impossible. She said, “On that subject, neither am I. I get three months’ pay a year for my military duties. That isn’t quite enough, really not nearly enough, to live on and take care of my daughter.”

  “Hmmmm. Let me see.” More scribbling. A couple of phone calls. The counselor took a quick trip to the fax machine, then returned with a smile.

  “How does a part-time job sound? Say twenty hours a week? You’ll be working with a shipping firm that gets a lot of business from the legion on condition that they hire a lot of members of the legion. The job requires a security clearance but you already have that. You have a substantial credit in the bank from your training. You and your daughter should be able to get by on that much. What do you say?”

  Maria looked down and shook her head ruefully. “Where was all this aid when I really needed it?”

  The counselor’s face lost its helpful, friendly grin momentarily. “You didn’t deserve it then,” he said. “Now you do. This help and, so I understand, something else, too.”

  * * *

  With the money withheld and saved for her while she was in training, Maria found a small but cute apartment in one of the older but nicer parts of the City. It was a safe and decent place for Alma to grow up. The apartment was furnished, though not grandly. This was just as well as that saved money would only go so far.

  Alma? For the first two or three weeks Maria was home, the baby missed Lydia Porras more, perhaps, than she’d missed her mother while she was gone.

  “It’s only natural, child,” Porras chided, one day during a visit. “She’s been here now for months. Give it a little time. She’s still your daughter.”

  Maria hoped so. She said, “She’s become such a little lady, Lydia. Your influence, I am sure. I never had time to teach her much.”

  “She’s just older, Maria, nothing more. By the way, when are you going into the hospital for restoration?”

  “For what?”

  “You mean they haven’t told you?”

  * * *

  That was the “something else” Carrera and the counselor had hinted at. For the Amazons were to be restored to the way they used to look, better even, if desired and possible. It seemed only fair. By the time they were done with training, their breasts and bottoms had shrunk to nothing, no soft feminine curves, just bone and muscle. Even the extra poundage some had put on after the forced starvation of Cazadora School had not gone to the best places, aesthetically speaking. Moreover, among the to-be centurions, their noses—Maria’s more than most—were generally pretty badly deformed, even pulverized. If they were not quite ugly, they also were not very pretty anymore.

  So the legion paid to rebuild them, to make them approximately as pretty as they’d been before they began, or perhaps slightly more so in Maria’s case. She, just as an example, was given a rhinoplasty—a nose job, and a breast restoration, plus a little sculpting of her jaw line. The surgeons also removed some scars and gave some limited liposuction for the poundage she’d put on after Cazadora School. Basically everything that could reasonably be done to improve appearance, they’d done for all the women who’d gone the distance. Carrera even brought in special plastic surgeons from Santa Josefina and Maracaibo for some of the work.

  * * *

  “Unfortunately, they couldn’t do much about my height; I’ll die short,” Maria told Marta and a few others one day over coffee at a little sidewalk café just off of Via La Plata. The others were Trujillo, Gonzalez, Galindo, and Zamora. In theory, it was against the regulations to socialize like that. In practice, Inez called it a “training meeting” and ignored the spirit of the law. They were all in mufti; after all, there was no sense in advertising that they were ignoring the spirit of the law.

  “Don’t worry, dear,” Marta answered. “You’re kind of cute, short. And wasn’t that the damned nicest, kindest, most generous thing Carrera ever did for any of us?”

  Marta must have been feeling warmhearted; there wasn’t a single “shit” or “fuck” in the sentence.

  With a laugh, Inez answered, “Kindness and generosity? Don’t you believe it, Marta. Carrera—and I’m sure it was his personal decision—isn’t quite that sweet. If he’d thought the money was better spent on something else then there would have been no plastic surgery for us. I don’t mean either that he doesn’t care about us, or about giving us a fair shake. In the big scheme of things, however, the happiness of a few individuals just doesn’t count all that much with him.”

  “Then why’d he do it?” Marta asked.

  “Recruiting,” Trujillo said, “the same reason he formed our tercio in the first place.”

  “What!” Marta gasped. “No way. I didn’t go through all that you did, I know, and I would still not go through half of what I did just for a nose job.”

  “No,” Trujillo said. “I don’t mean recruiting of women. Only the few of us who’ve gone to one of the candidate schools were badly messed up enough to really justify the money he spent on restoration. Carrera wants us—all of us—beautiful…to shame men who hadn’t volunteered yet into joining up. It makes sense, too, if you’ll think about it a minute.”

  Marta did. “Are you trying to tell me the legion doesn’t really need women infantry?”

  “I don’t know, Marta, if they need women, period. There aren’t too many of us who are both suitable and willing. We cost a lot more to train than men do. We’ve got some limitations they don’t have.”

  “You mean we’re just things…means to an end…not important in ourselves? That’s disgusting!”

  “Marta, dear,” Inez said, “everybody in the military is just a thing to be used. If you can’t accept that, maybe you’d better find something else to do. Carrera needs men for machine gun fodder, and lots of them. Men, however, have started to grow a little scarce. There are still quite a number out there, but they are not volunteering readily enough. So he’s shaming them, the bastard, using us to do it. Women doing difficult and dangerous jobs shame men just by being. However, attractive women can shame men more readily and thoroughly than can unattractive ones. So we were made pretty again; not for ourselves, but to shame the men. What do you want to bet it works, too? Gloriously?”

  * * *

  It was glorious, the first time Maria reported to a class at the university. Girls clustered around to ask questions. The citizen-soldiers and veterans were very polite and surprisingly respectful, especially the women soldiers doing their time in the non-combat branches. But the draft dodgers? Those men nearly crawled away from her, they were so ashamed. They wouldn’t even meet her eyes. She found it simply delicious.

  Though it wasn’t as delicious as when she first saw Juan, and knew he’d seen her. Juan was still quite young, of course, only a few years older than Maria, but he’d gotten a little fat. She could see, too, that he’d begun, ever so slightly, to lose his hair. And he hadn’t joined up, of course, wrong social class and outlook. Juan cringed when he saw her. Maria ignored him, naturally, and enjoyed doing it.

  Eventually, Juan worked up the nerve to approach her. He had picked a Friday when she had drill that weekend, so she was attending
class in semi-dress kilts. It was a non-jungle drill; inspections and inventories, mostly. Those were rare but any armed force has a certain amount of necessary administration.

  “Hello, Maria,” Juan said. “It’s been a long time.”

  “Not so long,” she answered, thinking, Is that lame or what? “But then, time flies…” She turned to go, the very picture of disinterest.

  Juan harrumphed and reached to stop her. He didn’t quite have the nerve to touch her, but he did reach out before stopping himself. She turned back anyway.

  Juan said, “I’m…well, I just wanted to say; I’m sorry. You know, for…”

  She cut him off with a chopping hand and a contemptuous sneer. “For what? For giving me a chance to grow up free and strong? For saving me from the life my parents had planned? For giving me a wonderful daughter? Juan, I don’t hate you. I don’t respect or like you, of course. But I don’t hate you. You’ve served your purpose in my life, that’s all.” She laughed, but pleasantly, thinking that would hurt just a bit more.

  Just then another student, a reserve junior centurion, walked up. “Maria, dinner tonight?”

  “Not tonight, Manuel. Sunday. Seven, sharp,” She answered. “And I have to be home by ten. Test on Monday.” Then she sauntered away, leaving Juan in her figurative dust.

  Maria slept with that fellow reservist, Manuel, that Sunday night. Marta watched Alma, as she often did. That was only the second man—if you could call Juan a man—Maria had ever willingly been with. But Manuel’s sense of timing was too good to let go unrewarded. Besides, at the time Maria felt like being rewarded, too.

  * * *

  Classes were hard. Work was hard. Taking care of Alma was hard. Toss in the one day in four Maria spent as a soldier in any given year and life was sometimes very hard, and very often tiring.

  But every night she wasn’t in the jungle or on the caserne, or on a rare date, she had Alma. When the baby fell asleep in Maria’s arms, she knew that everything she had done had been worth it. It took a while but, eventually, Maria even reclaimed her place in Alma’s life as her mother, Porras being relegated to a favorite grandmother.

  Grandmothers? Maria’s own mother did not visit anymore. Perhaps she was frustrated—her daughter thought it likely—that Maria had not been driven by poverty into returning to her control. Whatever the case, Mrs. Fuentes hadn’t had anything to do with Maria or Alma, in fact, since Maria had joined the legion. She wouldn’t let the little sister visit either. Maria’s guess was that Mrs. Fuentes was too afraid her little sister would join up, as well.

  Mother made a mistake though. She forgot about the younger brother, Emilio, he of the baseball glove. A few days after Emilio’s eighteenth birthday he came to see his sister and niece.

  Maria heard a knock on the door, opened it, and the next thing either of them knew she was giggling happily, had picked Emilio up bodily, and was dancing him around her small apartment. From a soft-faced boy, Maria’s brother had grown up to be a larger, harder version of herself.

  Mom and Dad did good work, after all, didn’t they, she thought.

  “I didn’t remember you being quite this beautiful,” Emilio began, once she’d put his feet back on the floor. “Then again, I don’t remember you being that strong either.”

  He took a folded envelope from his pocket.

  “Maria…I’ve gotten a letter from the government. You know; my draft notice.” He handed it to her to read.

  “Funny,” she said. “I never received my own draft notice. Where I was living, I’d been too far out on the fringes of society to receive mail before I’d joined up anyway.”

  After reading, Maria said, “Well, Emilio, you don’t have to go. It says so right here. All that happens if you don’t go is that you can’t vote, sit on a jury, hold public office, or have some jobs that are reserved, or any government aid. But if you are like Daddy you’ll never vote or run for office anyway. And Daddy is going to leave you so much money you won’t ever have to work outside the company, and then only if you want to. They won’t change your tax status and no one can mention military status in a court of law—unless you are a veteran and there is a motion in court to strip you of that. What’s the problem?”

  Emilio smiled ruefully. “You are, hermana.”

  “Me. What do I have to do with this?”

  He put a hand to her shoulder and squeezed. “Come on. Do you think I could look at myself in the mirror to shave with my sister being a centurion and me being a draft dodger?” Emilio shook his head, adding, “Father and Mother don’t see it that way, of course.”

  “Of course,” she echoed, sighing. “They wouldn’t.”

  Just then Alma walked—she didn’t toddle anymore—into the tiny living room of the apartment.

  “Tio Emilio!” She rushed into her uncle’s arms. He picked her up and swung her around in a full circle before pulling her up to his arms and kissing her on her head. They conversed in serious five-year-old-speak for a while.

  When they were done, Alma nestled nicely in Emilio’s shoulder, Maria asked, “So what are you going to do?”

  “I was hoping you might tell me.”

  “Brother,” she said, “this has to come from inside you. I can’t tell you—no one can tell you—what you ought to do.”

  Emilio started to look just a bit…maybe…frightened.

  Relenting, Maria continued, “But maybe I can help you think about what you ought to do. Tell me, besides not wanting to be outdone by your big sister, why might you want to join? Or not?”

  He thought about it. “Honor? Glory? They don’t mean much. Mostly, I’d guess, I want not to be inferior—to feel myself inferior—before any man, or woman.”

  “ ‘Every man thinks meanly of himself who has not been a soldier, or gone to sea,’ ”she quoted from a social philosophy class at CCS.

  “Something like that,” Emilio agreed.

  “Fair enough,” she continued. “So why don’t you just go to another country? Father would pay for that, I’m certain. Maybe some country that doesn’t care about the difference between a soldier and a civilian. The Federated States, for example.”

  Emilio shook his head. “Nah. Wouldn’t make any difference. I’d still know about all the others; about you, too. I can’t run from my own mind and memory…even if I were willing to run from my country.”

  “The country then,” Maria asked, “it means something to you?”

  “It means…something. I don’t know what. Sure, all my—traceable—ancestors are buried here. And though that means something…but, hell, I didn’t know most of them.”

  “Still fair enough. What does ‘means something’ mean to you, when you say it about the country?”

  Emilio sat silent for a while, but she could see wheels—old, rusty, and unused ones to be sure—turning in his head. Finally he answered, in a sad and hopeless voice, “Everything—everyone—I know and love is here. And where else could I go and still be home? I might pass for a…oh, say, a Santandern, somewhere else, to other people. People who wouldn’t know or care that I’d run out on my duty.” He pointed to his heart. “But would I ever belong in such a place?”

  It was Maria’s turn to remain silent for a moment, thinking, parsing the words he’d said for meaning. “Duty? That means something to you, too?”

  “Maria, if I knew what my duty was it might mean everything to me. So tell me. What’s my duty? And look, knock off the Socratic Method, would you? This is your brother you’re talking to.”

  “All right,” she agreed. “No more Socrates.” She parroted from CCS. “ ‘You have several. There is the duty to God; which is also duty to the gifts of God: liberty, justice and right. Then you have a duty to humanity. You have a duty to your people, your nation. There is duty to tribe and family, that includes Mama and Papa, children as well…’ ” She gave him a hard and dirty look, “Though you had better not have any, at your age…”

  At Emilio’s broad, sardonic, smile, she sheepishl
y admitted, “Okay, so I was being a bit of a hypocrite there. You’re still my little brother and you’re too young to be a father.”

  “Oh, I agree,” Emilio answered, with a tone that suggested it had been possible at one time or another. Maria let that go.

  She said, “Anyway the very last thing is duty to self. Somewhere mixed in there is duty to your immortal soul. It’s the only thing to guide you when duties conflict.

  “Mathematicians and statisticians, philosophers, too, can argue—quite uselessly—about the relative weights of these duties. I’d suggest that you ought to follow your own soul. It’s as good a guide as any; and better than most.”

  * * *

  Emilio joined. He wrote her from the Isla Real a few months after they’d talked:

  Queridisima Hermana,

  Hello, Maria! Greetings from the pearl of islands and the armpit of the world. How did you stand this place? I’m at 10th Tercio’s training caserne (excuse me, “The Glorious 10th’s,” a serious slugging for forgetting that. Let’s hope they don’t check the mail) on the Royal Island.

  (Uh, oh. They do check the mail. Please excuse the delay while my platoon centurion beats me vigorously about the head and shoulders—“in an approved military fashion”—as I write on the blackboard: “I will never call my tercio anything but the Glorious 10th. I will never call my tercio anything but the Glorious 10th. I will never call my tercio anything but the Glorious 10th. I will never call my tercio anything but…”)

  Okay, the beating’s over. Please excuse the bloodstains on this paper; a whip is such a sloppy instrument. (I’m kidding. We both know that whips are reserved for the marginally more serious offenses.)

  This place sucks, of course. But, I feel closer to you than I ever have before. Camp Botchkareva is just down the road a mile or so. It’s even uglier than our caserne. I feel sorry for those girls every time my maniple marches by. (On the other hand, I’d rather be with them, in their camp, than here—alone in my bunk—in mine.) Again, how did you stand it, Maria?