The Amazon Legion-ARC

by Tom Kratman

  “The Taurans are fragmented. Indeed, some of them stand with us against their own bureaucracy. But we can expect anything up to a dozen modern divisions, equal to ours in manning, superior in equipment, with a tremendous air superiority. Assuming they can grab a port, of course.

  “Bring out the map, please,” Carrera shouted to somebody. He went silent then, while a large mounted map was wheeled out in front of the altar. On the map’s mount was a laser pointer. This he picked up. He flicked it on and circled the Isla Real with the red marker, repeatedly.

  “That’s the strongest fortress in the world,” he said. “Nothing else compares even remotely. In training, you saw your own little camps. You didn’t see—or didn’t see much of—the roughly one point one million cubic meters of concrete we poured, the hundreds upon hundreds of guns, the minefields just waiting to be activated, the tunnels, the rails, the trenches. Trust me: One hundred and fifty thousand men couldn’t take it if they had one hundred and fifty thousand years to try. And if they can’t take it, no ships can sail past it. If ships can’t sail past it, then no landing at or near the capital can succeed; they’d just starve to death. I’m not worried about the north.”

  The laser moved to the west, wriggling over the undeveloped jungles of La Palma. “They’re not coming through here in any strength, though I’ll put a few tercios down there—foreign volunteers, generally, plus the Tercio de Indios—to make sure they can’t distract us or put the government into a panic. But there are no ports worthy of the name, no roads, only one airstrip that isn’t just muck most of the year, and that one’s short. And, wearing loincloths or not, the Indians are good in la jungla.”

  Carrera flicked the red arrow over the port of Cristobal, at the southern end of the Transitway. “The Taurans will be coming here,” he said, “though they’re not going to limit themselves—not if they have two brain cells to rub together—to the old borders of the Transitway Mandate. And we’ll meet them and beat them.” He gave a little shrug and added, “You’re going to have to take that on faith.”

  He stopped speaking for a moment while he physically wheeled the map board one hundred and eighty degrees around. On the other side, the women could see, was a better scale map of the eastern portions of the country.

  “Here’s where our danger comes from,” he said. The red marker flicked from spot to spot to spot as Carrera called off the names of a dozen or more little ports dotting the northeastern coast of the country. “None of those, alone, could support an army of a size to matter. Taken together, however, and with the kinds of improvements a modern army, or one—like the Zhong’s—with a lot of manpower, can create, they can support an army. Moreover”—the laser traced the long coastal highway—“from there they’ve got a highway into our vitals. And I don’t have the force to meet it, not so long as the Zhong and the Taurans are attacking to the north and south.

  “Worse,”—the red light settled on Capitano, a good sized port to the southeast—“from here a full corps could come over the mountains, link with a force along the northern coast, and make that drive into our guts deadly.

  “What is necessary is to buy time in the east until we have a decision, north and south. That’s where you come in; you, Fifth Mountain Tercio, a chunk of Fourteenth Cazador Tercio, the mountain cohorts from Lempira and Valdivia, and a few others. And a few hundred thousand others besides that.

  “I am going to half evacuate the city—we don’t have bomb shelters for more than half, anyway—and move more than three hundred thousand civilians to a big ‘refugee’ area around and along that highway and some of the ports. The ‘refugees’ have a purpose of their own. While we, the legion, will feed them, and the more permanent residents of the area, as long as the enemy hasn’t occupied their area, once they do come in—and they will—the food stops. Thereafter, the civilians will suck up as much as one thousand truckloads a day of enemy supply in food, medicine, etc. World opinion will demand that those people be fed and cared for. That will hurt them, children. It might even make a western attack a logistic impossibility all on its own.

  “However, I cannot be absolutely sure about that. Give the devils their due; they can move supplies.

  “So the civilians aren’t enough. I need that road kept closed. I need the ports kept closed or, at least, marginal. I need the feeder roads kept closed.

  “Using the ‘refugees’ to hide among, you and the others are going to close off invasion from the east. Of course, as in any partisan war, the regular forces could destroy you if they are willing and able to spread out in little packets to do so. Fifth Mountain is going up into the mountains as a regular organized force to threaten the enemy and keep him from spreading out enough to find, control, and annihilate you. Also to block the road from Capitano.

  “Think about it,” Carrera said with a smile. “Hiding among those civilians you are going to be an intelligent, self-aware, self-replicating, mobile and undetectable minefield that the enemy won’t be able to destroy in place, move, or clear permanent lanes through. To add insult to injury he’s going to have to protect you, feed you, shelter you, clothe you, and provide medical care for you every moment you’re not actively shooting at him.” Carrera laughed. He had a nasty laugh, sometimes.

  “And you are perfect for the job. You’re women. You just don’t look like a threat, little ‘helpless’ things that you are. You’ll be able to go places, see things, get information from the enemy’s soldiers in a way nobody else could hope to. You’ll be able to hide in plain sight; coming out only to fight.”

  “It won’t last forever, of course. Eventually they’ll catch on to you. Until they do, though, you’ll have a field day. Even after they do…you’ll still be able to fight them.”

  Zamora raised her hand. “Uh…Duque, what about uniforms? Those’ll give us away.”

  Maria thought, not for the first time, Cristina, for all your virtues, you can be a little dense, sometimes.

  “The Taurans claim to follow, and have in fact ratified, the Additional Protocol the Earthers inflicted on many of us some decades ago. So there’s no need to wear uniforms except for immediate action, by the enemy’s own rules.

  “On the other hand, the Zhong don’t follow the Protocol. If you get caught by them…well, you’ll be subject to execution under the law of land warfare. On the other hand, before it becomes an issue we’ll be holding some of their POWs. And we’re holding a fair number of Taurans that we caught not only out of uniform but in our uniforms. They’ve already been court-martialed and sentenced to death. The enemy tries to do anything to any of you for being out of uniform, I’ll hang those people…in a heartbeat. Anyway, if you don’t want to do this, I’ll understand. This is for volunteers only. Show of hands.”

  Better than no protection, I guess, thought Maria, raising her own hand.

  The women volunteered; all that were left. Carrera had known they would.

  “Now there’s one other problem,” Carrera said. His eyes went up, toward the church ceiling and past that, to the skies and space. “The Earthpigs are going to be feeding the Taurans and the Zhong all the intelligence they can gather. We’ve got reason to believe they can pick up a lot…a lot more than they used to be able to. We’re still trying to figure out why the change happened.

  “In any case, among the things they’ll be able to see from space is electronics and especially anything electromagnetic. So all your neat do-dads, the night sights on your rifles, your Red Fang communications systems, your light-enhancing goggles, and global locating systems, all have to be given up or stored deep against a rainy day. You’ll be fighting primitive. So will the other units in and around your area and in La Palma.

  “And, no, that’s not true for the forces I’m keeping in the center and on the island. They’ll be in so great a density that we couldn’t hide them anyway. There’s nothing to be learned by the enemy except that they’re generally there. Each one will be like a lit match held against the sun. But an electronic thermal
sight could pinpoint you girls for a rock from space or, at least, a bomb from a plane.

  “I’ll be able to give you some Yamato-made radios, a few, we don’t think the Earthers can sense. And we’ve got a fair field telephone system you can get some limited use out of. Oh, and Legate Fernandez has had the Signal Tercio get some carrier pigeons trained. But that’s about it.

  “Sorry.”

  * * *

  Maria was sad, not so much for herself, truthfully, as for Alma and Cat’s kids. If she was sad, though, Porras was angry.

  “It isn’t right,” Porras said. “You have done enough.”

  “Lydia,” Maria answered, “when we are going to use everything and everyone to defend ourselves—thirteen-year-old boys, the crippled, the mentally retarded—I can’t see why we should have been exempted. Besides, Carrera’s right. We are the best choice for the job.”

  Porras’s bright eyes flashed, “But you are women! Some hard training and hard living are one thing. But where will we all be, all of us, if there are no more young women to bear more children?”

  Maria answered carefully, first having to fight down her own grief that she would never bear another child. “Oh, sure, Lydia, maybe there is a limit to the number of women we can afford to lose. Too many and adios patria; adios pueblo. We are, after all, the bottleneck in the production of the next generation of cannon fodder.”

  “Exactly!” Porras shouted. “It takes up so much of our time to have a single baby; so much more time than a man needs to spend on his part of the process, the bastards!”

  Maria shook her head. “A thousand or so of us? No, Fairy Godmother, we won’t make any difference to anyone but ourselves and our families.”

  “And to me? And to the children?”

  “I don’t want to talk about that. It’s bad enough I have to do this, Lydia. Leave me a moment’s peace about it for now, will you?”

  * * *

  Before they left, Carrera decorated a number of the women. That included Maria, with a CCA, a Cruz de Coraje en Acero. He also pinned an “I forgot to duck” badge on her blouse. Zamora got the CC in silver for something she’d done on Quarry Heights after Maria was hit; that and a brevet promotion to Tribune.

  The commander of Second Tercio was there, as well. He had a kind of informal award to present. To the Tercio Amazona, he presented the right to use the Second’s own special march, “Boinas Azules Cruzan la Frontera,” in perpetuity, in commemoration of its charge up Cerro Mina.

  Hippolyta was there to cover the awards.

  Afterwards, the women marched away singing:

  “Said the mother, ‘Do not wrong me,

  Don’t take my daughter from me,

  For, if you do, I will torment you

  And after death my ghost will haunt you…’ ”

  * * *

  Prepare for a kind of war they had never trained on in detail! Reorganize! Plan! Move!

  Work.

  The artillery and combat support cohorts—each of which was rather below full cohort strength, still, even with full mobilization—turned in their cannon and other heavy equipment. Farewell guns. Farewell Ocelots. The women wouldn’t need them for what they were going to do. Infantry was the thing. Even if they had kept the heavy weapons they knew the enemy had ways of finding them and taking them away unless some very special precautions were taken. The women were told, and believed, that the Earthpigs could sense a big chunk of metal from up in space. Besides, despite all those ships landing supplies Carrera’s plans required—or at least could use—even more. The guns and tanks were reissued to other units.

  The women were issued a large number of mortars, though, mostly medium 81’s. Maria was not alone in hating 81’s. Small arms? More than enough. Several times more than enough. Land mines? Tens of thousands. Anything the country made for itself the women were given in bulk.

  Most of the Headquarters and Support Maniple was split up among the remaining five to provide medical and other support. A few cells, intel and commo, were kept pure and hidden deep.

  That still left Zamora’s maniple very short of troops. A few people were levied from each of the other companies, mostly junior noncoms and a few experienced privates. Then the largest chunk of the latest batch of recruits from Camp Botchkareva were transferred in, geographic recruiting base be damned. They soon had enough to form four platoons again, but a little differently from the way they had originally been set up.

  Each platoon had enough for three infantry squads of eleven or twelve each, plus a mortar team of at least eight, and a two girl antiaircraft team. The antitank team was five or six Amazons. Platoon headquarters had twelve or so: the platoon leader or centurion, platoon optio, two snipers, two forward observers for the mortar team, a pair each of radio rats and medics, and a team of combat engineers to help out with the mines and booby traps. The engineers were huge girls, as they had to be to carry the fuel tanks to the flamethrowers they brought with them. The cooks were turned into riflewomen since nearly everybody could cook and the cooks had been trained first as infantry. (Though Maria was still a fairly wretched cook.)

  Zamora, being brevetted tribune, was made the maniple commander. Maria kept her squad, now platoon, leader’s slot. If she was not as qualified by experience as she should have been, she had the supreme virtues of being alive, available and already in the maniple.

  Zamora gave her old stick to Maria to carry. But, “Don’t let the enemy see it,” she warned, seriously.

  Oh, Cristina, it doesn’t matter if you’re a dumb-ass sometimes. I still like you.

  For an XO, her second in command, Zamora was given a still-wet-behind-the-ears signifer right out of OCS. Another one took over one of the platoons. That was it for officers; Zamora and two rookies.

  Maria didn’t get an officer. That really didn’t matter. Her real job, once the enemy showed up, was to ride herd over her platoon, keep the enemy either out of her area or nervous while he was in it, and maybe do a little coordinating with adjacent units. Any centurion could do that.

  Maria didn’t need an officer. She needed a platoon optio.

  About a week after her women had begun their preparations, a truck pulled up. Maria figured it was more supplies or weapons, they trickled in from time to time. Walking up to the truck, she asked the driver what materiel he was carrying.

  Before the driver could answer, a familiar voice said from the back of the truck, “I might be a thing, Maria, but, by God, I will shoot you if you call me ‘materiel.’ ”

  “Marta!”

  The two ran into each other’s arms. Maria noticed a wince when they hugged.

  Marta noticed that Maria noticed. “It’s mostly healed. It’s mostly gone, for that matter.”

  Maria looked down. Marta seemed all there.

  “A falsie. About half of it anyway. The other one makes me lopsided. I just may take up Garcia’s suggestion that I get a reduction…after the war. If it still makes any difference, that is.”

  Quickly Maria filled her in on what the girls were doing.

  “Doesn’t seem very soldierly,” she commented.

  * * *

  The women didn’t go out looking like soldiers, no, indeed. Instead, Carrera had had a number of them sworn into a nongovernmental organization he’d had created sometime before, Christian Action, an affiliate of the Interplanetary Red Cross. They went out dressed in civvies and ostensibly in charge of about fifteen thousand civilians per “Relief Team.” “Relief Team” was another way of saying, “rifle platoon, reinforced.”

  They played that part well enough, wiping their share of runny noses, helping the refugees set up their tents, issuing food and conducting medical checks. But when they weren’t doing those things they were doing other, more important, things.

  Stashing supplies was the first priority. Everybody buried their own individual weapons, uniforms, and equipment within a kilometer or so of where they were staying. Generally the women tried to bury them near—but not too near
—where a group of civilians was going to be put.

  It became more complicated after that. The leaders—that included Maria—had to try to figure out where the enemy might someday be and where they could hide an arms cache so it would be in a good position for them to recover it later and use it on an enemy nearby. They knew it would be much easier to move without interference if the arms and equipment didn’t have to be openly carried or carried far.

  * * *

  “It’s perfect,” Zamora said, pointing at a hill. “Not only is it perfect, but they’ll be here.”

  The hill at which the new tribune pointed was surrounded on three sides by water. It sat, the very edge of it, right at five hundred meters from a three-way intersection of the main coastal highway, the less well-developed road to a small port to the north, and another dirt and gravel road that led inward to a town up in the hills to the south. Overlooked by the hill, a steel bridge crossed the river that surrounded it on three sides.

  “It looks like a likely spot to me, too,” Maria agreed. She was there with Marta and a couple of squads of her Amazons. Zamora was alone except for one driver and a couple of older people Maria took to be foreign. Cristina had introduced them as “Mr. and Mrs. Nguyen.”

  “I’ll bury a mortar and—what do you think, one hundred and sixty rounds?—about three kilometers that way”—she pointed generally to the tree-clad southwest hills—“and put some caches in about five hundred meters behind us, enough to support a platoon raid on whoever occupies that hill.”

  Zamora considered that. “No, not a hundred and sixty rounds of mortar. They’d never get a chance to fire it before the counter-battery came in and turned them to paste. Sixty rounds is enough. They can fire that and still get the hell out of the area before the artillery hits them. Though you might bury the other hundred not too far away.”