The Amazon Legion-ARC

by Tom Kratman

  Next day, it all started again. Then again the day after that. I personally counted twenty-three of their troops hurt or killed for no loss of our own. I was feeling pretty good about it, even congratulating myself, when the Taurans reached one of the refugee camps.

  You know, war crimes aren’t committed by abnormal people. They are committed by quite normal people in very abnormal circumstances. I can look back now and almost feel sorry for what we did to those boys. Not the ones we hurt, nor even the ones we killed, but I can almost feel sorry for the ones who had to live after they did what they did.

  I didn’t feel that way then, though. All I felt was helpless rage and hate.

  They went through the camp like a storm. Anything or anyone that got in their way, dogs, kids—didn’t matter—was shot down. A little boy—couldn’t have been more than two—was trying to get his dead mother to rise up. One of them put his muzzle to the back of the little boy’s head and just blew his face off.

  There were two of them who stood above an open shelter firing down into it. They even stopped to reload and fire a second magazine each into the pit. I didn’t know what they were shooting at until later. It had been a family, I think, because when I looked at the bodies the next day I found a pile. Children on bottom, mother above where she’d died trying to protect them, an old grandfather on top of all where he’d died trying to protect his daughter or daughter-in-law and grandchildren. At least that’s what I assumed the relationships were. But maybe I was wrong, almost any decent man will give up his life for almost any woman. Almost any woman will die for just about any child.

  I’d had one of my girls in the camp. I saw her cut down running for her rifle to try to fight back.

  One whole family—I think it was a family of seven—made a run for it. I couldn’t see who was shooting at them but I did see them drop, one at a time. Whoever did it shot the adults first, then the kids.

  One of the enemy, it might have been the commander, an officer anyway, tried to stop the massacre. His troops just ignored him, though. When a group of maybe forty civilians was rounded up, this guy drew his pistol to try to protect them. I couldn’t see who shot him. He just clutched his stomach and fell. Then a dozen of them turned their guns on the civilians until they’d all fallen. Two of the enemy walked among them, shooting again anyone who showed any sign of life.

  I wish I’d known who that Zhong officer was. I’d like to have recommended him for an award from our side. Yes, that’s permitted within our regulations.

  I watched all this, unable to take my eyes away, until I heard a strangled sound coming from behind me. It was the guide we’d taken from the refugees. Two of my girls were lying on top of him. One held a hand over his mouth. The other pinned his arms. They whispered comforting noises—I suppose they were supposed to be comforting—in the boy’s ear while he wept and struggled. It looked like he might succeed in getting loose, so the one pinioning his arms loosened her hold just enough to be able to hit him on the back of the head with a smallish rock. He lay quietly after that, unconscious.

  By the time I looked back it was over. The camp was dead, burning. So I led my little patrol in one direction, sick at heart, while the enemy maniple left by the other. One of the girls, a big husky Amazona named Edilza, slung the unconscious boy across her shoulders to carry him off. He didn’t weigh much. He was only twelve…and now an orphan.

  So tell me. What else could I have done?

  That’s the precise question I asked the boy, once he came to. He just answered we could have fought, at least given him a rifle to fight, even if he or all of us would have been killed to no purpose.

  I told him back, “We’re here to win, boy, not to make futile gestures. They’ll pay for what they did, but they’ll pay when I’m ready.” I sent the boy to join my growing group of male guerrillas, the one I was rebuilding around the Cazadors who had survived so far. I understand he became one of their more ruthless and efficient cutthroats very quickly.

  * * *

  The Tauran press must have gotten hold of the story. Certainly they grabbed the Zhong by the stacking swivels. That entire maniple was pulled out of country shortly after the massacre. I don’t know what ever happened to them. On the plus side, that left only four infantry maniples, two of them from the main battalion, their weapons maniple, and their headquarters in my area. And, naturally, recruiting went up even more. Some people might have blamed me and my girls for some of the enemy bombing, especially the bombing we’d brought down deliberately on them. They didn’t blame anyone but the Zhong and the Taurans for the massacre.

  Which wasn’t really fair. The fact was that the slaughter was almost entirely my fault. You can’t expect soldiers, any soldiers from any country, to just take what we were doing to them indefinitely. The most you can do is delay the time it takes for their discipline to break. To do that, though, you’ve got to give them their revenge from time to time.

  Revenge for what? Well, for seeing their friends and comrades butchered and killed by an enemy they can’t usually get to grips with to fight. Revenge for booby traps and ambushes.

  If you don’t do that, they’ll take things into their own hands. Always.

  What could they have done? They were holding some dozens of prisoners who had plainly committed war crimes, by Zhong rules, if not Tauran. Some of them were my girls, captured out of uniform. Others were refugees cum part-time guerrillas who’d been caught carrying arms or explosives, or planting mines or traps. From the point of view of the enemy troops my people were getting away with murder…literal legal murder. A wise commander would have court-martialed and strung up those prisoners right in the open where the Zhong soldiers could see.

  That just might have saved that refugee camp. Then again, maybe not. That maniple had taken an awful lot of punishment in a short period of time to an enemy they couldn’t see.

  Then, too, it wasn’t as if every mine and trap they’d hit hadn’t been planted by one of the people in the camp they destroyed or some other one. It wasn’t as if the people they’d killed, the adults and adolescents, anyway, hadn’t been the very ones who’d been killing their friends at a safe distance.

  By the way, if you ever go to a real war, and you like yourself as much afterwards as you did before, there’s something very, very wrong with you.

  * * *

  Zamora came to see me not long after the massacre. She’d brought just one other Amazona with her as an escort, a woman I didn’t know very well.

  A messenger had brought me advance word that she was coming, so I broke open one of my dwindling store of ration packs for the occasion. We hadn’t seen each other in months, it seemed, so why not celebrate a little?

  Zamora seemed so dog tired when she arrived. It couldn’t have been the trip. That, she had said, had been easy, if slow. No, she was tired deep, deep inside, tired of living, it seemed to me.

  I led her into the bunker I was using for my command post. Once there, Marta handed her a canteen cup full of juice (oh, not real juice, just that dried stuff that comes in pouches and tastes somewhat better than the dog piss it resembles). Then she began to pour grain alcohol into it. It comes canned, with the ration packs, enough for two ounces per troop per day. I expected her to stop Marta’s pouring but she didn’t until the damned cup was at about one hundred proof.

  She asked for a cigarette, too, so I opened the can of those and handed her one. Hands trembling, she lit it, smoked it, then took another one which she lit from the stub of the first.

  I may not have mentioned it, but the only alcohol I’d ever seen Zamora take was that one beer at Botchkareva. And she’d never smoked before where I had seen. She didn’t say anything until she’d drunk about half the canteen cup, which took a remarkably short time. By then the tremors in her hands had subsided.

  “Do you do that much?” I asked.

  “No…yes. But just the last month or so. The cigarettes and booze help a bit. For a while anyway. But it always starts up agai
n.”

  “Marta, why don’t you go and check on that wire laying detail Arias has out?”

  She looked at me curiously, shrugged and left.

  Then Zamora told me about what had been happening to her, in her area. It wasn’t a pretty story. She’d had it worse than me. The Zhong battalion in her area had a real commander. Zamora started to cry while she talked. She didn’t sob, or anything like that, but the tears just rolled down her cheeks while she spoke.

  “But I could deal with that,” she said. “I could deal with it right up to where the civilians started turning on me. Oh, Maria, nothing worked. I’d have the collaborators killed but there’d always be more. That fucking bastard chopped off the food to feed those peoples’ families unless they cooperated. Those people weren’t given any choice but to help the enemy. It was that or watch their kids slowly starve. Finally I had to give the order to kill the family of one of them. Everybody…the wife…the kids. I didn’t know what else to do. Nguyen said it would help the cause…and it has. But that’s when my hands started to shake. Maria, I’m so sick to death of this.” Tears flowed the entire time.

  I let her cry herself out, then asked, “What brought you here?”

  She took another sip from her cup, another drag from her cigarette, then told me. “There’s an aircraft of some kind going to land at an open space a few miles from here tomorrow night, or maybe the next. It’s carrying orders for the whole tercio, what’s left of us. Our chunk of the stump of Fourteenth Cazador Tercio, as well. I’m supposed to meet it, pick up the orders and get them to headquarters. I’ll need an escort from you.”

  “Sure. No problem. Now go to sleep. You’ll be safe here. And the bugs won’t eat much. I’ll set up the escort. Six troopers and myself?”

  She nodded, maybe too tired to speak, maybe too much alcohol. She forced herself to get out, “It’s the field that’s northwest of the Padilla farm. You know the place?”

  “Sure. You just go to sleep. I’ll set everything up.”

  * * *

  The message didn’t come the next night, nor even the next. Nonetheless, we staked out the field for a third evening. It was almost morning and we were just beginning to lose hope when it suddenly materialized right in front of us. There was never a sound, but one second the air above the field was clear; the next there was a sleek, graceful looking thing with wings, pulling its nose up to a stall a few feet from the ground.

  We reached the craft just as the pilot was sliding his canopy back. Zamora stuck a weapon under the man’s nose and said, “Morgan.”

  “Drake,” the pilot answered, then asked, “You all from the Tercio Amazona?”

  “The Tercio Amazona, yes,” Zamora answered. “Who are you?”

  “Warrant Officer-Pilot Montoya, Rafael. One Thirty-Eighth Aviation Ala. I’ve got orders for you…and a few goodies that might come in handy.”

  Montoya handed over the orders, a middling thick sheaf of papers, then—standing on one wing—he began to unload some equipment from the space behind his own seat. He placed the various boxes on the ground with some care. There were maybe two dozen, all told, in different sizes.

  “How many of you are here?” Montoya asked.

  “Eight, total,” I answered.

  “All women?”

  “Yes.”

  He seemed to be doing some calculations in his head for a moment, then said, “There’s no way you’re going to be able to carry all this stuff any distance. I doubt that eight men could. Let’s stash most of it. You can come back for it over the next few nights.”

  That seemed like good advice to Zamora and me. We and two of the others, with Montoya helping, moved all the boxes into the nearby woods, then camouflaged them as best we could.

  Sweating under the load, I grunted, “What is all this junk?”

  “Jammers. Half are radio jammers. The other half are to mess with the enemy’s global locating system. There are instructions on how to use them inside the boxes. I understand they’re pretty good. And from what I gather, you’re going to need them soon.”

  The pilot, Montoya, looked to the east where the sky was beginning to light up. “There’s no way I’m getting out of here now,” he said. “Can a couple of you give me a hand camouflaging this thing?”

  I told him we could. Then he, myself, and two more women began stretching a net over the aircraft and making its outline as irregular as we could.

  Montoya stepped back and looked critically at our handiwork. “Have to do,” he announced.

  Carrying eight of the boxes, Montoya with two, six women with one each, and the last two women pulling security, we all set out to return to our base camp.

  * * *

  Back at camp, a sleepless Zamora began poring over the orders Montoya had brought us. She wasn’t drinking but her chain smoking made the inside of my bunker pure hell. Unable to stand such dense smoke, I left her alone.

  Maybe Montoya had felt the same way. He followed me out.

  I asked him, “What was that thing you came in?”

  “The glider? A Condor Mark III…recon and courier version.”

  “Glider?”

  “Well…an auxiliary propelled glider. Pretty hush-hush. We’ve got a bunch of ’em; over twelve hundred, I think. That’s including the fighter and light bomber versions. But Carrera won’t let us use them for anything but recon and courier work.”

  “That’s what you do mostly, courier duty?”

  “No.” He shook his head. “Mostly I do recon.”

  News! He would have a better idea of how the war was going than we did. I asked him about it.

  “I don’t know any secrets. I can tell you what I’ve seen. Mostly it’s a stalemate. Eighth Legion still holds the island…three quarters of it, anyway. I’ve flown over it a few times but I couldn’t see anything except for fire and smoke. An occasional patch of skeletonized trees. Some ships bringing in supplies for the enemy or evacuating his dead and wounded.

  “The defenses at Cristobal are still holding, but our Fourth Marine Legion is pushed back almost to the causeway that leads to it. That and a few outlying fortresses. The town’s just a mound of rubble anyway; rubble and charcoal with a bunch of bodies buried in there somewhere.

  “The big news is along the river. Second Legion stopped the enemy’s airborne corps dead cold. The bad guys are building up their supplies for a set piece battle to force their way through Second Legion and over the river. Our boys are still digging in. They’ve done damned well, actually, considering that almost all their artillery was overrun when the Taurans surprised us by landing from the Shimmering Sea side. Fortunately, they got most of the troops in what had been the rear area out to safety.”

  I asked him, “How’s the City holding up under the bombing?”

  “Not bad,” he told me, “not bad. Casualties among the civilians are high, of course. But we’re digging more new shelters for them every day. We’re hanging on.”

  “Just hanging on? We’re going to lose, aren’t we?” Oh, God, all the pain and misery, the useless death and destruction, and we were going to lose.

  But he surprised me. Shaking his head, he said, “I don’t think so. Really I don’t. You women have done great out here. You’ve made all of us proud. Because of you the enemy’s not going to be able to turn our flank from this direction, not any time soon. We’re safe to the south because they are not going to take the island. Fortress Cristobal? If human flesh and sheer will can hang on to the dump, Legate Jimenez’s Marines will do it.”

  The pilot’s face sort of screwed up, as if there were something he wanted to tell me but wasn’t sure that he should. Finally, he decided to. “There’s something else, too. Something that’s been bothering me for months now. The troops that are awaiting the enemy on the beaches in front of and to the east and west of the city? Carrera should have moved them north to aid Second Legion once it became obvious that the island wouldn’t fall. He didn’t do that, near as I can tell. And why did Second Le
gion’s artillery get overrun when the Taurans came from the Shimmering Sea side? Surely Carrera knew there was an invasion fleet out there. Hell, I know he did because I reported it. Me, among others.

  “And the four legions pinned down on the beaches near the City? I’ve seen them, or something that looked like them, and from the ground and close up, too. But I don’t think they’re really those legions. The troops’ uniforms are too new, most of them. And they’re doing things that don’t really make sense; showing themselves too much, for one thing. And the artillery doesn’t seem manned up to strength, either. I’m just a dumb shit pilot who didn’t graduate high enough in Cazador School to go to OCS or CCS. But it sure looks fishy to me.”

  “So what do you think it is?”

  “I think those divisions aren’t on the beaches, maybe never were. I think they’re just behind Second Division waiting to meet the attack from the north. Maybe even to counterattack. Maybe they’re underground. I know we did an awful lot of digging in that area.”

  I thought about that for a moment or two, trying to remember some detail from before. Then I remembered what I’d been searching for. “The enemy isn’t bombing that area much, is he?”

  “No,” Montoya answered. “From what I can see there’s been damned little done there. And they’ve never carpet bombed the area like they have the island and the beaches. Too afraid of hitting their own POWs, I’d guess.”

  Montoya thought for a while, then said, “Clever bastard. Carrera does have those four legions there. Hmmm, with the mech legions and Second Legion that would be seven. Plus the Tenth Artillery. Oh, are the Taurans in for a surprise when they attack.” He laughed. He had a pretty nice laugh, too. But since he was only a warrant and I was a centurion…well, “of all the sad words.”

  Still we could talk and we did for hours; until the sleepless night caught up with us. Then he went to sleep in one bunker. I went to another. Rats!

  * * *

  I’d kept a couple of my girls guarding the field where Montoya’s Condor was waiting. When we got there, they reported to me that it hadn’t been found or disturbed in any way that they had seen. We quickly stripped it of its camouflage net, which Montoya carefully stowed aboard. Then he began attaching straps to various points on the glider. He pulled a large package out from his rear compartment and hooked the straps up to some shackles on it. A medium size metal tank was connected to the package by a hose. Montoya turned a small handcrank. There was a sound of rushing gas and the package began to expand. It was a balloon.