by Tom Kratman
The missile promptly blew itself up, scattering numerous small rods of hot metal through the air, some of which connected with Lanza's Cricket.
Lanza felt the plane shudder, first from the blast and then, slightly and unevenly, from the metal rods scattered by the warhead. The observer felt rather more, and let it be known with a piercing scream, as one of the rods passed through the upper portion of the cockpit's Plexiglas rear canopy, through his seat, through his harness and into his back. He slumped forward.
The important thing is not to panic, Lanza reminded himself as he played with the controls to assure himself that his plane would still respond to command and fly. His heart was pounding, and it showed in his voice, as he called the CP and said, "This is Lanza… We've got SAMs! Shitpots of 'em. My Cricket is hit and my observer wounded… I think they got the Finch that was following me
… I'm heading back and I suggest that no more planes be launched for now, not until we can reduce the SAM threat."
Al Marri felt a great joy overflowing. True, and it was a shame, his own missile had failed to bring down its target. Yet he had seen the other crusader aircraft go up in a fiery ball of light. His partner in this enterprise had clearly scored against the enemy. Of course, the towering apartment building was still standing. Perhaps that would change. For now, al Marri decided to follow orders and leave. There would be other days. Besides, the enemy armored column that had left the university a few minutes prior was just now reaching the part of the town from which the mortar attack had come. The next few minutes would be interesting.
The mechanized century had taken some pretty fierce losses in the fight for the town. These hadn't been made good yet. Instead of having four tanks, five Ocelots, and fifty-eight men, the century had two, four and forty-six. Worse, maybe, the leadership was low. Both the century's key men, the signifer and centurion, had been killed, with command devolving onto a sergeant.
Not that Sergeant Paredes was a bad sergeant, not at all. The kid had actually been tapped for centurion track before the legion had even left Balboa. He was slated to be replaced by a newly graduated signifer, due in on the next transport. You really couldn't bitch; the whole legion was straining for leadership, what with the losses in the invasion and the scramble to form replacement units back home.
The problem was that the sergeant hadn't really been trained for the job he had. Smart? Check. Good attitude? Check. Aggressive? Check. Brave? Double check. Wise?
Kaboom!
Three of al Marri's comrades in Fadeel's organization were waiting for the armored column as it approached. There were only so many roads into the area, a small open spot surrounded by buildings. Along each of the major ones a very large explosive device had been improvised from an automobile or, in one case, van. These were primed to be set off remotely, by radio. The radio control devices and solenoids were, after all, cheap and readily available for purchase from any good hobby store in the TU or FS.
True to form, the arrogant invaders took the easiest, quickest and broadest route to the mortar site. One of the men standing by with a handheld remote control device watched as the lead vehicle in the column passed the van he had parked earlier. The first three vehicles were tanks, followed by the four that carried infantry. The bomber had thought that getting an expensive tank would be the greater prize but his team leader, who was also Fadeel's brother-in-law, had assured him that killing more men was better in the long run.
Thus he waited as the clumsy tanks passed. When the first infantry carrier reached a spot next to the van he pushed the button.
Kaboom!
The explosion physically threw the Ocelot's front around by ninety degrees, knocking Paredes' helmet off. He was slammed to one side, splitting the skin over his scalp and breaking one arm with a sickening crunch. The driver, who had had his head stuck up out of the hatch, was knocked unconscious. From what Paredes could see, only half of the track commander made it into the track. Where his upper torso had gone? Who could say?
With blood seeping into his eyes and his arm shrieking in protest Paredes crawled to the back of the track and twisted the door latch open. The door still didn't move-perhaps the hull was slightly deformed-until the sergeant kicked it open. When he emerged, weaponless, helmetless and using one arm to try to keep the other in place, the building walls to either side were lit by fire, despite the smoke.
In shock, Paredes looked to one side and saw a tipped over Ocelot, with flames pouring out of it. No survivors, he thought, grimly.
His assistant, a corporal, ran up asking, "What the fuck, Paredes? I mean, what the fucking fuck?"
"Bomb," the sergeant answered, simply and a bit distantly. He was swaying on his feet as he continued, "I'm… a little hurt. Stop the tanks and get them back here. Set up a perimeter. Report to higher. And take over because…"
The sergeant pitched face first onto the asphalt.
University of Ninewa, legionary Command Post, 17/4/461 AC
Sada was there, representing and in command of his Sumeri Brigade. So were all the cohort commanders as well as the primary staff and McNamara.
"Let's be honest," Carrera was saying. "We got overconfident and we got sloppy. Some of that's understandable; post invasion let down and all. We had the boys on an adrenaline high for weeks. When the adrenaline went, they just went on a natural downer. It was to be expected and we should have expected it… I should have expected it.
"That's in the past. We can only affect the future. For the future I have some other news, most of it good. There have been attacks all through the country over the last several days. For the most part, we got off lightly. The Anglians and the FS troops were hit a lot harder. I think we can thank Amid Sada's watchers for the fact we weren't hit as badly. They've identified and helped round up about half of the insurgents, so we think, who infiltrated our ZOR…"
Carrera waited for a few moments for a translator to pass what he had said on to Sada who answered, "They did, Pat, and thank you. But they're only part of it. If there had been no work here, then the attacks would have been a lot worse."
"I know," Carrera agreed. "In any case, there is some good news. The FSC's War Department is finally waking up to the fact that we have an insurgency here and it's not going to go away on its own. We've been offered a long-term contract to keep a legion here and to expand that legion to roughly divisional strength. The details don't matter much except that the rate of reimbursement we get is going to be based on our strength in country. Even so, we're not going to hurry that expansion. For one thing, the Area of Responsibility we get assigned, the size of it, goes up as our strength does. For another, if we break ourselves in trying to get big faster than our school system and recruiting standards would currently permit, we'll soon find ourselves unemployed." And I'll find myself without the means of finding and destroying those who murdered my wife and children.
"It isn't just the insurgents, Patricio," Fernandez said. "We've got to go after those who feed them, those who support them, those who supply them and those who'll spread their propaganda, too. Everybody."
Interlude
5 January, 2095, Terra Nova
The unloading proceeded in accordance with a schedule designed to get one national or ascriptive group completely off the transport before another was unfrozen. The Panamanians came first, roughly ten thousand of them, as their colony, named Balboa, was the westernmost of the six colonies the Amerigo Vespucci had come to settle. Even among the Panamanians, there was a split as Chocoes Indians were to be dropped before the European- and Mestizo-descended people. The Vespucci would merely accelerate slightly in its orbit to assume the best position for unloading each of the others.
Ngobe Mzilikaze, Captain of the Vespucci, thought this was needless and excessive care. True, there had been problems with the colonies from Europe, from farther south in Latin America, and from Africa. And what happened with the colonists from the Balkans, the one time they had been awakened without regard to ethnicity, ought
not even be talked about. But the Central Americans, despite having had a few wars amongst themselves over the centuries, had no real or deeply engrained hatred of each other. They much preferred civil to foreign war. Nonetheless, since the Cheng Ho disaster, standard procedure was to unload ascriptive, national, religious and ethnic groups as separately as humanly possible.
Ngobe hoped the settlement went smoothly. He carried important dispatches for the UN enclave on the island they called Atlantis, dispatches he was bound to deliver personally. Yet he could not, consistent with his duty, abandon his post aboard the Vespucci until all of his cargo was unloaded.
Belisario Carrera had never even believed it was possible to be so cold. Shivering worse than a leaf in hurricane, worse even than a high living leader of a Kosmo charity faced with an audit, he sat up in his deep freeze cubicle like a corpse arising at a funeral.
That was not the only Finnegan's Wake aspect to the resurrection, either. As soon as he sat up a white-coated technician handed him a plastic cup containing several ounces of nearly pure ethanol mixed with what passed for orange juice.
"Drink this," the technician ordered. "Primitive, I know, but we've found it's the best thing to get the blood moving and to warm you up."
The tech didn't mention that, after many dozens of voyages now, it had also been found to calm colonists who sometimes tended to panic when they realized they were suddenly, from their point of view suddenly, an uncrossable distance from a home and family they would never see again in this life.
Gratefully, too cold even to enquire as to the young wife who had accompanied him, Belisario took the proffered ethanol and drank quickly and deeply. He barely choked on the liquid as it burned its way down his throat and began to light small fires in his veins and arteries.
Beginning to warm now, and finally able to think more or less clearly, Belisario asked about his wife, still lying frozen in the next compartment.
The tech checked the meters on the compartment and answered, "She's fine. Would you like to be here when she awakens? It sometimes helps."
5 January, 2101, UNOG (UN Offices, Geneva)
High Admiral Kotek Annan looked out over a skyline gone dark. It was far too much to say that Earth had become "a world lit only by fire"-though fire all too often lit it-but there had been a steady drop in all the activities that might have brought light. At least here in Europe there had, though Europe had started off on so high a plain it still exceeded most of the world. China was doing well enough, as were India, Brazil, and a few other places. The United States, along with those portions of what had once been known as western Canada and which now made up six of America's sixty-three states, was still a powerhouse though there were indicators that that was changing. The U.S. still tried to act as if the UN didn't exist, too.
"The secretary general will see you now, High Admiral," a flunky announced.
Nodding slightly, Annan turned from the window and the darkness it showed and walked briskly into the well-appointed, even luxuriously appointed, offices of the secretary general, Edouard Simoua.
"Kotek, my fine boy," said Simoua, rising and taking the younger man's arm warmly. "So good to see you. And how is your most excellent great-great-grandfather?"
"He is well, Your Excellency, in rigorous good health. I saw him in Kumasi just a few days ago. He told me to pass along his thanks, both for my appointment and for the antiaging treatments you ordered for him."
"Well," began Simoua, "it is sad but we are just in the infancy of antiagathic therapy. If your esteemed ancestor can hang on, even greater things may be possible. Besides, we people of the right views have to watch out for each other, do we not? And no one else is going to if we don't, eh?"
"Indeed, Your Excellency," Annan readily agreed. How could he not? His family-and he, personally-benefited immensely from the "I'll scratch your back; you scratch mine" philosophy of nearly all of those elites who worked for the great supra- and transnational organs of the Earth.
"Please, sit, my boy. Can I have anything brought to you? Coffee? Tea? Something stronger, perhaps?"
Annan shook his head as he sat in the proffered chair. "No, thank you, Your Excellency."
"As you wish," said Simoua, taking a chair himself opposite Annan. "I wanted to discuss your new command, the Amistad, and the others that will follow."
"Ah, yes," Annan agreed. "I have been up to see my new ship. It's a wonder."
"Indeed. It is the finest that America could build." Simoua laughed. "We took it in lieu of a UN dues payment that they would never have given us anyway."
"A wonderful ship it is, Excellency, but I confess I am a bit confused about my mission."
"Govern the island on the new world that is our enclave. Atlantis, they call it. Observe… for now," answered the secretary general. "Spread our influence. Organize the fleet we will send you. It's going to be thirty-three ships, eventually, you know."
Chapter Twenty-Six In the Cain-and-Abel conflicts of the 21st century, ruthlessness trumps technology. -Ralph Peters
Hospital Ancon, Cerro Gorgia, Ciudad Balboa, 15/7/461 AC
Mango trees and chirping birds surrounded the long, five-story hospital atop Cerro Gorgia, or Gorgia Hill. They stood, and smelled, in pleasant contract to the unadorned brick walls, antiseptic odor, and continuous business bustle of the "body shop."
The hospital had once had a different name. This was when it had been the major medical facility for the FSC forces in Balboa. It was not so major now; not every ward had been reopened. At the very least, though, it was fully staffed and equipped for Jorge Mendoza's needs. Now that they were not so pressed for medical care, and the question had become merely one of money, Campos and the War Department had come through on their promise of equivalent care, restoration and prosthesis for the legion's wounded. In some cases, this meant anything up to millions of drachma for the very latest.
His new "legs" were a marvel. Flexible, strong and computer controlled; they'd cost half a million drachma each from the Sachsen company that made them. Jorge would rather have his old ones back. Marvelous these new legs may have been, but they couldn't feel. Worse, he was still not really able to use them naturally and spent most of his time not in bed in a wheelchair.
He took the loss of the legs well enough, if not precisely cheerily; he was that kind of young man. But his eyes…
"Jorge, there is nothing wrong with your eyes that I can find," the doctor had said. "Here, let me show you." The doctor flicked a finger at Jorge's eye. The eye blinked.
"Did you feel that?"
"Feel what?" Jorge asked.
"The blink. I just poked my finger at your eye and you blinked. Your eye blinked because it saw my finger. But your brain won't let vision through."
"I saw nothing," Mendoza insisted. "I just blinked because… well… people blink."
The doctor poked at the eye again and, again, it dutifully blinked. "Twice in a row is not coincidence, Jorge," the medico said.
The orderly at the desk just melted when the tiny… well, tiny, yes, that… but perfectly symmetrical, charmingly symmetrical, vision of a young girl fluttered her eyelashes and asked if she could please visit Private Jorge Mendoza. She'd said her name was "Marqueli Cordoba."
"Jorge, a Miss Cordoba to see you."
Private Mendoza turned his wheelchair toward the voice, bumping his bed as he did so. Blind, with both legs off below the knee, his reconstructive surgery had only been able to heal the more visible scars. Mendoza's green hospital robe hung down below the point at which his legs ended. The young soldier looked his age, about eighteen years old.
Cousin Lourdes didn't tell me he was so gorgeous, Marqueli thought, no eyes for the legs but only for the face.
It was characteristic of Balboan society that the government didn't do much. Nor had the legion had time and opportunity to set up a large and complex bureaucracy to deal with personal problems. Instead, the extended family took care of things. Thus, naturally, when Lourdes had seen a
problem to be dealt with she hadn't thought of anything too very formal as a solution. Instead she'd called a family member, in this case Marqueli, and said, "There's a really nice soldier who was hurt in Sumer. Could you go make sure he's all right?" Lourdes being family, Marqueli had, also naturally, agreed.
As a system it wasn't much. Where it worked it tended to work well. Where it didn't it failed completely. Looking over Jorge Mendoza, Marqueli decided instantly that here, at least, it was going to work.
"Private Mendoza, I'm Marqueli Cordoba. My cousin, Lourdes, suggested I look you up. It's wonderful to meet a hero who's fought in the war."
Mendoza scratched behind his ear. He caught the slightest whiff of perfume. He sensed someone small and somehow soft sitting in the chair next to his bed. "I don't know if I fought. It's more like they fought me."
"It's fine," Marqueli answered. "You're fine." She turned and asked a nurse on the ward, "How is his recovery going?"
"Jorge is doing very well. He has some minor reconstruction still to go. Then we have to get him used to his new legs. That's going to take longer. And then, of course, there's physical therapy, and-"
"But he will be getting mostly better, then," the girl announced, in a voice like a love song. "I'm sorry it's taken me so long to get here, Jorge. Do you mind if I call you 'Jorge'? I was in school. And it took me a while to find out where you were since you started out in the hospital near Hamilton."
She has a nice voice, thought Mendoza. "No, Miss Cordoba, I don't mind."
"Wonderful!" she bubbled and the sweet sound cheered up the entire ward. She reached out to touch a hand. "And, please, I'm Marqueli."
"Marqueli," he said, uncertainly, "… yes, I was in Warren Branch Hospital in the FSC for a while. They did a lot of the work on me there. Hmmm… Lourdes," he puzzled. "I don't know any… Ohhh, the Legate's… wife."
"They're not married," Marqueli laughed, bouncing lightly on her chair. "Wicked, naughty Lourdes. Bad, bad, bad Lourdes. I hope they will be sometime but my cousin told me she was willing to wait."