The Amazon Legion-ARC

by Tom Kratman

  Parilla stood at a podium that had been wheeled in for the occasion. He was flanked by the statues of Balboa and Victoria. The latter had been ready for some months, but Parilla had thought it better to wait for the victory that gave the statue her name.

  “So I’m superstitious,” he’d told the Senate. “So sue me. We wait until we have the victory before we proclaim it.”

  A cameraman at the far end, on the aisle by the doors, gave Parilla a high sign.

  He began to speak:

  “This morning the Republic of Balboa was suddenly and deliberately attacked by ground, air and naval forces of the Tauran Union. The excuse given for that attack were certain crimes allegedly perpetrated by members of Balboa’s armed forces upon Tauran citizens. The real reason for the attack was to force upon Balboa a traitorous clique of puppets who would do the will of the Tauran Union even against their own country and people.”

  Parilla stopped speaking to take a short drink of water.

  “In any event,” he continued, carefully placing his glass back on the podium, “the criminals who caused this war—those, at least, who are in our hands—have been punished. Some few remain at large in the Tauran Union. They, however—being elected officials or unelected but well-connected bureaucrats—appear to have a certain immunity to criminal action at law. Still, do not be fooled. The war the Tauran Union began is not yet over.

  “We currently hold some eighteen thousand Tauran prisoners of war. Many of them are wounded. We also have some thousands of Tauran civilians, former workers in the Transitway Zone. We are not nearly done with counting the dead and wounded, ours and theirs. So many were lost at sea that we may never have an accurate count.

  “In the interests of possible peace we will, in three days, begin transferring prisoners of war, at the rate of one hundred per day, back to the Tauran Union. First we shall return the wounded, in accord with the severity of their wounds. Then we’ll return the civilians. Then, if there are no further hostile acts, the Tauran Union will be given back her military personnel. This is contingent upon several factors.

  “First: the conditions of permanent peace. We insist upon absolute renunciation by the Tauran Union of any interest in and over the Balboa Transitway and the Republic of Balboa. After all, the Tauran Union can hardly claim any longer that Balboa is incapable of self defense, can they? We also demand the repatriation of any and all Balboans held by the Tauran Union. Lastly, we demand reparations for the damages we have sustained, to recompense our wounded, to pay for property damage, and to care for the orphans and widows this artificially provoked invasion has left without a provider. We think a million drachma for each prisoner we hold should be sufficient for that.

  “Further, Balboa demands that all hostile actions on the part of the Tauran Union’s government, to include the unwarranted ‘drachma embargo’ and all other interferences with Balboa’s trade, cease.

  “Return of prisoners and detainees will be through the port of Cristobal, by ship. We will march and truck them there. It is up to the Tauran Union to have transport waiting.

  “And now, a final word from la Republica de Balboa to the people and bureaucrats of the Tauran Union.”

  Parilla smiled broadly and pointed at a formally dressed man holding a little stick, the conductor of the Balboa City Philharmonic. The stick tapped a few times, then pointed. A male singer, in battle dress, his head wrapped in a bandage, sang out. His voice was a deep baritone:

  “O Tauran Union, den of iniquity.”

  A hundred voices raised themselves: “INIQUITY!”

  The lone baritone continued:

  “Odiferous fief of a corrupt and unelected bureaucracy.”

  “BUREAUCRACY!”

  Almost instantly, the hall was filled with music, more specifically the Old Earth composer, Beethoven’s, “Ode to Joy.” The words had been changed a bit, though. Balboa’s granite senate house rang with the lyrics:

  “Fuck the filthy Tauran Union!

  Fuck their courts and MTPs!

  Fuck their rules and regulations;

  Their whole vile bureaucracy!

  Asshats, Bastards, Cowards, Dimwits,

  Excrement-Feeding Gallows-bait.

  Hang the swine Higher than Haman,

  Ignorant Jackasses, Knaves!

  Watch them purge the bent banana.

  See your taxes rise and rise.

  See your nations fall to ruin.

  Watch as every freedom dies.

  Lick-ass Morons, Nincompoops, Oh,

  Pity the Quagmire these Reds made.

  Sycophants and Thieves, the whole crew,

  Underworked and overpaid.

  Friday mornings they will sign in

  To ensure their holidays

  Are paid for by lesser people.

  Free men call those people, “Slaves.”

  Green on the outside, red on the

  Inside, Watermelons, black of soul,

  Xerox copies of each other,

  Yahoos, Zeroes, one and all.

  To the lampposts, Tauran People.

  Tie the knots and toss the ropes.

  Fit the nooses. Haul the free ends.

  Stand back; watch your masters choke.”

  With a complex wave of the stick, the singing and music ceased. Every man and woman in the Balboa Philharmonic was smiling, perhaps smugly. Smiling more smugly still, the maestro turned to the cameras and bowed.

  “And that pretty much sums up our feelings about you,” Parilla said, also smiling. The smile disappeared. He raised his arms above his head and shouted for the cameras, “Viva Balboa! Viva Anglia Libre! Viva Sachsen Libre! Viva Gaul Libre! Viva Castile Libre! Viva Jagelonia Libre! Viva Tuscany Libre! Viva Lusitania Libre!

  “Death to the Tauran Union!”

  Chapter Thirteen

  There could be no honor in a sure success,

  but much might be wrested from a sure defeat.

  —T.E. Lawrence

  “Ah, you’re awake,” someone said in a warm female voice. It was the voice of a stranger. “The doctors thought you would come out of it sometime today. There’s someone here to see you.”

  Maria blinked her eyes against the sudden light of consciousness. Her first sight was a shifting, swimming Zamora, standing over her. Zamora’s arm was in a cast and sling. She wore a big smile, even so.

  “I was so worried about you, Maria,” the tall redhead said, obviously meaning it. “You can’t imagine…”

  “Alma?” Maria gasped out with a dry throat. First things first.

  “She’s fine,” Zamora assured her, then passed her a cup of ice with a straw. “Porras is bringing her by later today.”

  Maria slurped down the little bit of icy water in the bottom of the cup, sipped a little more, then asked in a more natural voice, “My girls?”

  Zamora hesitated for a moment. Good news first. “Arias is up and around. Marta’s still in intensive care; collapsed lung, a lot of tissue damage, blood loss, some nasty kind of infection. Most of the time she’s unconscious, but…she’ll probably be all right. Most of the rest…” Zamora shook her head sadly, then came closer and held Maria, one armed, while she cried for a very long time into Zamora’s neck.

  After that long time, Maria sniffed, “Did we…?”

  “Oh, yes.” And Zamora smiled broadly, a wicked smile, showing fangs. “Kicked their asses right out of the country. Chopped ’em up good and ran ’em out,” she said, with a satisfied look on her face. “All but a bunch—a big bunch—of prisoners. Sank a chunk of their fleet, too.”

  “Who did else did we lose?”

  “Dead? Almost half. Of the rest…most of us are here now…in better shape or worse. Outside of the mortar platoon there’s maybe a couple of dozen or so unhurt from the whole maniple. I’ve heard that our maniple took higher casualties than any other in the legion except for Gorgidas boys on our flank. Both we and they got unit citations for our eagles. If that helps any.”

  Maria didn’t sta
rt crying again but…it hurt. She asked, “Why did the Taurans shoot the wounded?”

  “I can only guess,” Zamora answered, “but my guess is that some one of us took a shot at one of them and hit, then hid among the bodies. They may not have felt they had much choice but to make sure everyone who looked dead actually was dead. By the way, after Second Tercio had seen what happened to us, they killed every living thing they could get at on top of that hill. The only prisoners they took there were a few hundred that stayed safe underground until the Second cooled off. That and maybe a couple of civilian women. No men.”

  Maria remembered something from a law of war class from Centurion Candidate School…“feigning death or wounds to gain an advantage.” Then she remembered the historical examples they’d been given, from the Battle of the Somme in the First World War, on Old Earth, and the Mar Furioso fighting during the Great Global War here, to the experiences of the legion in Sumer and Pashtia; all instances where killing the enemy’s helpless wounded became routine because perfectly healthy soldiers were pretending to be wounded to gain an advantage, shooting then ducking back among the bodies.

  Maria could picture some poor Amazona, half out of her head with pain, trying to strike one more blow before losing consciousness and falling down among a bunch of wounded.

  Shaking her head, Zamora continued, “You and I are in better shape than most, Maria. Which is good because…um…I don’t think it’s over.”

  “How can it not be over? You said they were gone, kicked out.”

  “While you were still under I caught the president’s broadcast on TV. He was pretty harsh. To the enemy, I mean. They’ve got to swallow some serious shit before we’ll give them back their people we’re holding.”

  “Shit,” I said. “What have we got to fight them with? Besides bodies, I mean. We were lucky this time.”

  Zamora disagreed. “It wasn’t all luck,” she said, holding up her cast. Soldierly pride was plain in her voice when she added, “A lot of it was guts, and I don’t just mean the guts we spilled in the attack.”

  * * *

  Porras brought Alma by later, just as Zamora had promised. She also brought along all of Catarina’s kids. The eldest one, maybe, understood that his mother was dead. The youngest didn’t really know the difference. It was the middle one that broke her heart. She knew Mama was never coming back, but she had no understanding of why. She did have enough sense of cause and effect to ask, “But…what’s going to happen to us?”

  Maria was in no shape to make any promises but, even so, she promised that she would take them in. (Which, if her side won, would be no financial hardship. The legion took care of its own.)

  Alma thought that was a great idea. “Oh. Really, Mommy? Promise?”

  “Yes, baby. It’s a promise.” Besides, I know I’ll never have any more children of my own. The doctor who’d treated Maria had been gentle but firm on that. Reproductively speaking, she was ruined inside.

  Porras just raised an eyebrow, saying, “That’s all in the future. For now you’ll be staying with me.”

  * * *

  Maria visited Marta every day she could. Sometimes Marta was awake, sometimes not. She didn’t say much, usually. She didn’t cry much either. That was worrying.

  * * *

  The speaker on the bus played:

  “For chainless wave and lovely land

  Freedom and nationhood demand,

  Be sure the great God never planned

  For slumbering slaves a home so grand…”

  “Can you change the station?” one of the women in the back asked loudly.

  “Wouldn’t make no difference,” answered the uniformed driver. “Every station got the same things.”

  Maria looked out the bus window next to her and Zamora and saw a column of short, dark, armed men marching up the coastal road. Their uniforms and helmets were not Balboa’s. Neither were they any of the nearly-as-familiar Taurans. Beyond the column of men another one, this of well-spaced-out tanks, moved in the opposite direction. The tanks looked new.

  “Who are they?” Maria asked Zamora. “And where did those come from?”

  Zamora smiled and pushed red hair off of her face. “Apparently, Carrera has been expecting and preparing for war with the Taurans for better than ten years. For ten years he’s been buying and secreting arms, sometimes in country, more often aboard ship. For the last couple of weeks he’s been calling his lost children home. Twenty-six freighters, I understand, half a million tons of supplies and equipment or more that nobody knew we had. Enough to put everybody up to strength and then some.

  “As for the men; something like forty thousand volunteers have come from all over Colombia del Norte, along with a few hundred Castilians, about a thousand from the Federated States, and even several score each from about half the states of the Tauran Union.

  “Most of them, about two thirds, seven full tercios’ worth, came in organized units, mostly in cohort strength, though the entire Atzlan Paracaidista Regiment is here. A few places sent companies, all they had that were up to real combat. The rest are individual volunteers, mostly untrained or, worse, badly trained. Their motivation’s good, though. We could have had a lot more but Carrera limited it to those we’d have time and facilities to train.”

  “No shit?”

  “No shit,” Zamora answered. “Damned good thing, too, because it looks like the Zhong Guo are kicking in with the Taurans.”

  “So we’re outnumbered five hundred to one rather than a hundred and fifty to one?”

  “Something like that,” Zamora agreed.

  “You don’t sound too distressed at the idea,” Maria observed. “Cristina?”

  “Yes?”

  “Do you like to fight?”

  “No.”

  * * *

  Zamora and Maria had expected the bus to take them to legion headquarters, so they were a little surprised when the bus stopped at the circle fronting the Iglesia de Nuestra Señora, Ciudad Balboa’s largest and grandest church.

  “Doesn’t miss a trick, does he?” Zamora asked.

  “Huh?”

  “The church. Maybe we had to meet somewhere besides headquarters if it took some damage in the fighting, which I imagine it did. But why a church? Why this church?”

  Maria didn’t know and said so.

  “Holy war,” Zamora said. “Catholic us against atheist Taurus and pagan Zhong Guo. He’s brought us here to remind us there’s another reason we fight besides patriotism.”

  “He’s got to be the most cynical bastard in the history of the planet,” Maria said.

  “Cynical or realistic,” Zamora countered, with a shake of her red head, “who can tell the difference?”

  * * *

  More buses pulled up to the circle as Maria, Cristina, and the crew of walking wounded from the hospital dismounted. More women began to fill the open space between pavement and cathedral. Their voices became a hubbub of recognition and occasional sobs as they learned of the dead and wounded. A cassocked priest appeared at the front door and motioned for the women to begin to file in. As the lines formed and entered, the hubbub died amidst the awe of bright icons, fluted marble columns, relics, and statuary. Even the roughly ten percent of the women who were other than Catholic—and there were in their number Mormons and Moslems and Sikhs and Jews—were moved to silence.

  Zamora and Fuentes were near the front of the mob. Maria’s head and eyes turned to take in all the art on the walls. Zamora was, as usual, more tightly focused. About halfway up the nave, she nudged Maria with an elbow and then, once she had Maria’s attention, pointed with her chin at a uniformed man and a teenaged boy, likewise in battle dress, the both kneeling at the altar, hands clasped and head bowed in prayer. A couple of tall turbaned men, armed and in legionary battledress, stood behind them and two more to the sides, all facing out. One had to look closely to see it but, oddly, Carrera wasn’t in the center; the boy was. Behind those guards was a medium tall woman in fore
ign robes. When she turned to look behind at the Amazons filing in, Maria saw she had bright green eyes and an extraordinarily intelligent, to say nothing of beautiful, face.

  “Carrera,” Maria announced, softly, in deference to the holiness of the place. “Is he being devout, do you suppose, or cynical?”

  “They’re not necessarily mutually exclusive,” Zamora replied. “That boy’s his eldest son, I think, and he’s offering him up on the altar, too.

  “So, Maria, was Abraham a cynic?”

  * * *

  Eventually—it only seemed like forever—Carrera and the boy crossed themselves and stood. Carrera tousled his son’s hair and directed him to a seat in the front row, not far from Maria and Cristina. The tall woman with the green eyes sat next to the boy. The guards, too, moved to cover their apparent charge.

  Now that, thought Maria, is a beautiful boy. He’s got his mother written all over him, too. I wonder what she’s feeling about now, with her husband taking her boy off to become machine-gun fodder.

  Carrera wasn’t the sort to waste a lot of time. “We’ve won a battle. The war’s not over. It won’t be over until we are destroyed or the Tauran Union is a footnote.

  “We’re giving back their most useless prisoners to buy time, time to offload the equipment, time to dig in, time to assimilate our new volunteers and allies—bet you never guessed that the International Rifle Platoon Competition was intended to gather allies, did you?—time to get in position and ready for what’s coming.

  “It’s going to be really bad, what’s coming.”

  Carrera’s finger pointed skyward. “Assume the United Earth Peace Fleet is against us, in spirit and, to the degree they can without drawing a violent reaction from the Federated States, materially, as well.

  “The Zhong are coming in against us, though I can’t really see them being able to move and support more than maybe two hundred to three hundred thousand men across the sea. The Tauran Union has already dispatched ships to help move them.