A Desert Called Peace cl-1

by Tom Kratman

  Hennessey's mind wandered back to the thought of being with Linda. However, the one place he would not permit the thought of was the precise place, wherever it might be, where Linda's and the children's bodies rested. He could not bear the idea of the unknown, unmarked grave. He could not bear the thought of them rotting unprotected, of being eaten by worms and insects. No! screamed his mind, whenever his thoughts ventured anywhere near that subject. Too far, too awful. Do not trespass.

  When the priest was finished, and the relatives had said their condolences and left, Hennessey continued standing alone in the rain while Linda's four brothers and her father filled in the grave containing a sample of her hair, a few personal belongings, jewelry and such, hair clippings from the children, a toy for each of them, plus another for the probable unborn.

  Never very religious, nonetheless Hennessey prayed to God to take care of the souls of his wife and children. As he prayed, his tears mixed with the rain and fell to the ground at his feet. After a long while, he left.

  Interlude

  There was a planet teeming with life and able to support more life. There was another planet; old, worn out, depleted and allegedly groaning with overpopulation. What could be more sensible than to colonize, to relieve Earth's burden by transferring man to the new world?

  Not that it was simple, by any means. No large numbers could be sent off world without some means of either reducing the trip's duration to a few months or putting passengers in suspended animation. For that matter, even with a much faster ship, the number of people that could be carried went up geometrically if they didn't need to be fed and used no oxygen during the trip.

  Still… great oaks from little acorns and all. Cryogenic suspended animation seemed possible, but needed work. In the interim, a ship could be built to take at least a token number of colonists off world. This would be expensive, to be sure, but perhaps not so expensive as not sending people off-world.

  Design took years. Development of materials to meet the design took more years. Actually building the thing-as important, building the shipyard in space that would build the thing-and its external laser auxiliary propulsion and putting those stations in place took decades.

  She was to be called the Cheng Ho, after the great Chinese eunuch explorer. In design, externally, she was similar to the Cristobal Colon, but much larger with a diameter of just at one hundred and seventy meters.

  Gravity was a problem, there being serious adverse medical ramifications to extended periods in null g. This was especially bad for a ship intended to carry people to a planet, where they were expected to live, that had gravity almost indistinguishable from that of Earth. No one had yet come up with a true artificial gravity and perhaps no one ever would. Continuous acceleration was deemed impractical. Magnetism was right out. All that was available, known and practical was that an acceptable artificial gravity could be produced through spinning the ship.

  Internally, Cheng Ho 's decks were to be cylinders within cylinders, with the exterior living deck providing just under. 4 g's when in full spin. The machinery needed to run the ship was set within the innermost of the cylinders. Storage took up the intervening spaces, together with a modest investment in agriculture, this last being partially a supplement to food storage but equally a means of recycling air.

  The Cheng Ho was never expected or intended to land anywhere. It would be built in space, travel in space, and live out its useful life in space, shuttling its cargo up and down. Surface planetary gravity would have crumpled the ship in an instant.

  Yet it had to be built somewhere and by something. That something was a toroidal station, put together just inside of the asteroid belt. The station itself spun and that would provide the initial spin to the Cheng Ho. Gravity on the exterior ring of the shipyard was on the order of. 76, a very comfortable load.

  Within the toroidal ring of the shipyard the Cheng Ho was built from the inside out, the central cylinder serving in place of the keel of a sea-bound vessel. A series of mining and refining outposts on the moon and in the asteroid belts provided the limited metal needed. Sections that would have been far too heavy if metallic were made of composites, both in space and on Earth, and lifted to the construction site.

  Construction of this first true interstellar colonization ship took decades.

  Passengers were selected six years prior to launch and subjected to a three-year training program before being allowed to board.

  Chapter Six From evening isles fantastical rings faint the Spanish gun… -Chesterton, "Lepanto"

  Cochea, 26/7/459 AC

  It was warmth; it was peace.

  With the song of birds in the air, Linda and Patricio sat on a blanket spread on the side of a small hillock. To the northeast gurgled the creek in which she had swum as a girl. Between the hill and the creek, on grass weeded and kept smooth by family retainers, Julio, Lambie and Milagro played a game of ball, Milagro, in particular, giggling madly as her two older siblings tossed the ball to and fro over her head.

  It was contentment; it was happiness. His love was with him and the results of that love were with them.

  Hennessey heard Linda say, "It's hot, Patricio. Here, why don't you have a beer?"

  While keeping one eye on the children, he held out a hand for the bottle she offered. As he took it, his nose was assailed by the stench of rotting flesh. He closed his eyes and whispered, "Oh, no."

  When he could bring himself to open them again, he looked at his wife. She knelt motionless by his side, flesh turned black with decomposition and bones beginning to show through as the flesh fell away in long rotten strips and irregular pieces. She made no sound.

  Pained, frightful cries came from the children. "Daddy! Help us!"

  Almost too frightened to look, still Hennessey turned his gaze toward the creek. The children's game had stopped; the ball sat still on the smooth grass. They stretched blackening arms out toward him, pleading, imploring. Even as he watched, little Milagro exploded in a cloud of bone and rancid meat. Lambie and Julio shook and shivered, screamed and begged, as their bodies fell to ruin.

  Hennessey looked back to Linda. She was no longer there. In her place lay a neat pile of disconnected bone. The children's screaming stopped. He looked back for them.

  In their places, too, were little piles of joints and ribs.

  "Martina? This is Patricio. Would it be all right if I stayed with you and Suegro for a little while?"

  Finca Carrera, Cochea, 29/7/459 AC

  Poor Patricio, thought Linda's mother, Martina. She looked out to where her son-in-law sat unmoving on her front porch, the picture of human misery. Some food she had brought to him lay untouched, except by the flies, on the porch railing.

  It's like he's died inside.

  He had told them he had no remaining relatives-barring one cousin-that he wished to see in the Federated States. And even with Annie he found it difficult to talk.

  When he had called a few nights back, his voice choking with misery and horror, and asked if he might stay for a while, the family had naturally taken him in. Though it seems to have done little good. Still, it can't have been good for him to stay in that house.

  Nothing worked. Hennessey took no interest in anything. He just sat there on the porch, day after day. What passed through his mind no one knew. The only interruptions to his vigil came when he took the short walk to Linda's and the children's "grave." Sometimes, too, he slept in the bedroom the family had provided. Just as often, however, he would fall asleep in the chair on the porch. He hardly spoke to anyone. He drank far, far too much.

  Arranging some flowers on a table beneath the window, Martina thought, Poor broken man; he's got nothing left. I don't think I've ever seen a sadder sight than the way he just sits there, day after day, no hope or purpose.

  She resolved to demand that her husband find something to interest Hennessey, something to give him even a little interest in life. Maybe cousin Raul can think of something to help. He's mentioned that h
e thought very well of Patricio.

  Linda's father shook Hennessey's shoulder. "Patricio, there is someone who wishes to see you."

  At the insistence of his wife, the father had invited distant cousin and old family friend, Raul Parilla, to come to talk with Hennessey. He'd been there when it happened. And Patricio had always spoken of Raul with respect. Perhaps it might do some little good for his son- in-law to talk with the retired general.

  Parilla remained one of a very few influential Balboans interested in giving the country an army again. Linda's father was not one of them, though the more politically minded Martina was. The fact that there was such a group was an open secret. As Parilla had told Senor Carrera, they did little more than debate about it. The group had accomplished precisely nothing yet… and it had been years.

  Hennessey didn't even look up. Twirling the ice filled glass in one hand, he said, "I don't want to see anyone, Suegro. Please ask whoever it is to go away."

  "You will want to see this one, Patricio. It's General Parilla. He wants to ask you for some advice. Talk to him, won't you? For me, if nothing else."

  Shrugging, Hennessey agreed. Parilla had been with him that day, that counted, as did their long standing friendship. "Okay, Suegro. I'll see him."

  Linda's father led Parilla out onto the porch. Hennessey stood up; though he knew the general well, and though neither was any longer in service, old habits die hard. The two shook hands and sat down. Linda's father left them there.

  Parilla lit a cigarette before beginning. At his first exhalation, he said, "How have you been, Patricio… you know… since…?"

  "I don't know how to answer that, Raul. Not well? Yes, that. I have not been well."

  Giving a quick fraternal squeeze on the shoulder, Parilla said, "Well, man, I can understand that. I wish… but there weren't any words that day. And I have none now. Except I am so sorry."

  "Yes. Me, too, Raul. But sorrow doesn't help. Nothing helps. Only that one time have I felt any better, and shooting strangers on the street is not something I can make a hobby of."

  Parilla nodded understanding. Jimenez had told him the story. In the same shoes, he could not imagine feeling or acting any differently.

  "I came here to ask advice, Patricio."

  "Yes, so said my father-in-law. I don't know what help I could be, but if I can help…" He let the words trail off.

  Parilla's mind groped back over fifteen years, to the day he had first met a much younger Hennessey, then a lieutenant leading a joint Federated States-Balboan small unit exercise at the Jungle Warfare School at Fort Tecumseh, on the southern side of Balboa. Despite having his recon party compromised, Hennessey had managed to win through in the problem, a company raid. Since Parilla had only a very basic idea of how to conduct a raid at all, he had been impressed.

  "I think you can. But tell me… you never have, you know… why aren't you still with the Federated States Army? And… too… why don't you go back now? I remember; you were good. "

  Hennessey nodded quietly, then paused to think about his answer.

  "Well," he began, "I can't go back. They don't want me."

  "Why not? It makes no sense to me, your leaving. It never has."

  Hennessey sighed with pain, an old remembered ache to go along with the fresh agony. "There's nothing I can tell you that won't sound like sniveling, Raul."

  "I know you are not a crybaby, Patricio."

  Muscles rarely used stretched Hennessey's mouth into something like a grimace. "No. No, I'm not. You really want to know?"

  Seeing that Parilla did, he continued. "Raul… you know that in the army, nearly any organization I suppose, you will often be forgiven for being wrong. What they never tell anyone is that you are very unlikely to be forgiven for being right."

  Parilla looked honestly perplexed and said so.

  Another deep sigh from Hennessey. "It had to do with training; my approach to it. I'm not the only one it ever happened to. You remember General Abogado? He got bounced for much the same thing, though he had some other issues, as well. In any case, let me ask a question of you, Raul. In the old Guardia, who trained the privates on a day to day basis?"

  "Their sergeants and corporals mostly. Is there a better way?"

  "No. None. At least given good sergeants and corporals. But that isn't the way it worked most places in the FS Army. There, oh, since time immemorial, most of the day-to-day training has been closely supervised by officers. Mostly, it doesn't work very well, either."

  "No. I can't see how it could," Parilla agreed.

  "Well… I did something a little different. I had been watching and experimenting with the training of individual soldiers very closely for nearly two decades. In all that time, every time someone mentioned 'individual training,' the stock solution was: "'tighten up the training schedule,' 'waste not a minute'… you know, all that rot."

  "I decided to try something a little different. I made my subordinates loosen the training schedule, to leave a lot of gaps and holes for the sergeants to use. Then I made them put on the schedule certain things that had to be done by Thursday night… or else. Told them I would test for it, too."

  "Well, they didn't believe I was serious. It was too different a concept. The first week I tested-had my sergeant major test, actuallythe whole damned battalion failed and so I held them over the next night until nearly midnight retesting. Next week it was about fivesixths of the battalion to just after eleven PM. Then about threefourths until ten or so. By the time six weeks rolled around I had privates going to their squad leaders and saying, 'Forsooth, Sergeant, I am in desperate need of getting laid. The only time to do that is Friday night. The only way to have Friday night off is to pass the muthafuckin colonel's test. So teach me this shit, please."

  "About that time my boss got wind of it; tubby little fart of a dumb- assed tanker. 'Tuffy' was his nickname." Hennessey sneered with contempt. "Don't ask me how he got or why he deserved the nickname 'Tuffy;' the evidence was pretty thin on the ground. He was so fat he couldn't squeeze through the hatch of an armored personnel carrier without greasing his ponderous gut. Anyway, he was a clueless, stupid shit. I explained what I was doing and he told me to stop. I answered, 'No, sir. Relieve me if you want but this is starting to work pretty damned well.' Well, he wouldn't do that. But he hated it. He hated me, too, for defying him."

  Parilla likewise didn't understand why Hennessey had done this, and said so.

  "The trick," Hennessey answered, "was that the sergeants had for decades been conditioned to being told what to do and had had driven out of them any native initiative they might have had. They were… over-supervised, if you will. Worse, they'd grown to like not having to think or use initiative."

  "But weren't you over-supervising doing it your way?"

  "At first, yes," Hennessey admitted. "Clearly. But the difference between legitimate and illegitimate oversupervision is in the end game. Once I had them in the habit of finding and using time, I let them run with it. It worked… oh, quite well. We had an individual training test a few months later. They call it the MIB-Master Infantry Badge-test. The rest of the brigade shut down for three weeks to prepare for it. My battalion rolled to the field, doing any number of things that had nothing to do with the test.

  "We came in the day before we had to take it. I told the boys to get a good night's sleep. We'd take the test in the morning and clean equipment the day after.

  "When the smoke cleared I had something over seventy percent of my battalion max the test. This had never been done before. Normally it's just a couple of percent of any given unit that maxes. Pissed off my boss to no end."

  "I do not understand," Parilla interjected. "You do something that well… surely it makes your boss look good."

  Listening through an open window Martina heard Patricio laugh and felt a sudden relief that her son in law was still at least capable of mirth.

  Hennessey answered, "Uh… no. Surely it does not. The rest of the brigade failed mi
serably by comparison. Made him look bad, in fact."

  Parilla's eyes widened. "Ohhh…"

  "'Ohhh,' indeed. A commander can stand having nothing but mediocre units under his command. What he can't stand is having mostly mediocrity and one very superior unit. Makes him look bad, by comparison, you see.

  "But that wasn't the worst of it. A couple of months later the brigade had an organization day. Lots of athletic competitions and trophies, things like that. Well, my boss volunteered my battalion at the last minute to be the duty battalion-picking up trash and suchfor the division, for that day. So I went out with about one-sixth as many men as the other battalions, a fair number of mine being people who had been hurt in training."

  "Jesus, he really did hate you, didn't he?"

  "That was my guess," Hennessey muttered. Then he added, "We beat the rest like we owned them too, cripples and all. Why, for one competition I didn't even have enough people to field a complete team and we won anyway. My brigade commander was so pissed about it he stormed off the parade field just before awards presentation."

  Parilla snickered. "Surely he couldn't relieve you over that?"

  "No. That came later. And, in a sense, tubby little turd or not, he was right.

  "You've got to remember, this was in the most intensely leftist and pacifist years of the Gage Administration in the FSC. Peacekeeping and Operations Other Than War were the big thing. Everybody had to play along. Not that I think Gage ever really believed in any of it… or even cared. But he was beholden to his base and they did believe in it.

  "Raul, I couldn't. I just couldn't do it. I looked at my boys, thought about the way the world really was… and I could not, not, not train them to pass out multiculturally sensitive, vegetarian rations to starving refugees in the hinterlands in a multiculturally sensitive manner. I kept training them to fight, orders to the contrary or not.

  "That was the last straw. The brigade commander fired me. I resigned my commission. And so, here I am. And so, my wife and kids were in First Landing on 11/7." Hennessey's voice broke at that last and it was a long moment before he could look up.