Come and Take Them-eARC

by Tom Kratman

  But why now? Why raise a stink now? It’s not for rejuvenation, though there may be advantages in letting the Old Earther think it is. But no, that’s not it. What it is, is that until she raised the subject I thought I was completely alone.

  Not that I intend to turn down the rejuvenation, of course.

  * * *

  As she was going to sleep that night, it occurred to Esmeralda that, if the high admiral were going to use her as a regular go between, and that seemed the way to bet it, then she really had to get some more clothing than the two business suits the ship’s tailor had ginned up for her. That meant going shopping. The problem there was:

  I know what the word means. I’ve even seen it done, when the brothel keepers and under priests and low ranking orthodox druids were looking for fresh meat to pimp out or sacrifice. But I’ve never actually done it myself. All our needs at home Mama or Papa made or traded for with the locals, or bought off of the occasional traveling salesman. How the hell does one “shop”?

  In the end, she’d gone to the embassy’s chief of housekeeping, a local, and demanded, in her snottiest tone, a driver and a guide to the city. The guide, as it turned out, was the ambassador’s own secretary, Estefani Melendez-Rios.

  A spy, in other words. Be careful, Esma.

  The secretary, who wouldn’t have been released from the ambassador’s immediate service except for this service, was altogether kind and friendly, so much so that Esmeralda almost decided to trust her.

  But I’ve been around the fleet enough to know not to trust anybody lightly, and most people not at all.

  “I’m going to be coming back regularly, I suspect,” Esmeralda told Estefani. “I need to blend in better when I do. Take me to the best woman’s shop in the city and get me properly outfitted.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  The soldiers like training provided it is carried out sensibly.

  —Alexander Suvarov

  Imperial Base Camp, Balboa, Terra Nova

  In theory, both Imperial Range Complex and Imperial Base Camp were jointly administered by the legion and the Tauran Union Security Force. In theory, and with much good will, that could even have worked. In practice, however, since the reservoir of good will at both ends of the tank was pretty much bone dry, it didn’t work at all.

  The cohorts of the Legion del Cid made it a point never to coordinate with the Taurans concerning the ranges and the base camp. They simply had occupied the latter by force, years prior, and made sure that none of the former were ever free.

  The camp was a collection of about thirty “buildings,” just barely adequate to house a battalion or cohort. The nineteen barracks buildings had roofs, waist-high walls, bare concrete floors, and were otherwise screened against bugs. They were small, so to stuff in the maximum forty or forty-five legionaries of a typical Balboan platoon, bunk beds were required. For many good reasons, high among them vector control (insect infestation prevention) there were no mattresses to the bunks, nor springs, but only plywood bolted to the frames. The troops were expected to blow up their air mattresses and place those above the plywood. From a vector control point of view, this was entirely satisfactory. In the tropic heat of lowland Balboa, however, rubberized air mattresses were some depth below the summit of comfort.

  Short version: They sucked so badly that some legionaries dispensed with the air mattresses and made do with the plywood alone.

  There were also quarters, differing only in size and the number of sleepers they were required to hold, for the company and field grade officers, as well as the centurions. Cruz and Velasquez got their own individual buildings, each of perhaps a hundred square feet, or a bit less.

  A largish mess hall occupied one corner of the camp, and a series of latrines with showers (cold water only) the other. More or less centered in the camp was the headquarters building, different because squared and about thirty-five feet on a side. On the southern side, two troopers in mess whites sold cold drinks from a large ice chest. A line for the drinks stretched from the chest, down to the asphalt highway that paralleled the nearby Transitway, and along the highway for some distance.

  On one wall on a large blackboard—no high tech out here—was written a week’s worth of events for each company and platoon. Standing and staring at it, doing her best to ignore the hustle and bustle of the headquarters, as well as the friendly banter from the sales operation outside, Jan shook her head.

  “I just dinna’ understan’ it. Weeel, barring the dates and places and such.”

  Cruz, standing next to her, had serious issues with the Anglian Army captain’s accent. She might as well have been speaking Volgan for all he understood.

  On the other side, Hendryksen, who had his own issues with the accent she sometimes fell into, was still able to explain it to Cruz in Spanish. Santillana might have helped, but he’d been called away a bit early, though not until he’d seen to the Tauran visitors’ billeting.

  “You’ve got nobody doing the same things, on any given day, from the same units,” the Cimbrian said. “It is very confusing.”

  “In a way,” Cruz answered, “it’s supposed to be. Or, at least, it’s not supposed to be predictable. We call it ‘vertical slice evaluation,’ and it’s one of the core features of our training system and philosophy.

  “Basically, any cohort in the legion has ten things it has to be able to do. Why ten? Because that’s usually a close approximation of the number of collective missions that may be important, yes, but also because it’s a useful number of different kinds of missions for the purpose of developing problem-solving ability in problems involving the use of force to overcome force. Also, since we’re a species with ten digits…without taking off our boots or unbuttoning our flies, anyway…it’s an easy number for the troops to understand and relate to. ‘Ah, my maniple can do nine of ten missions well. We’re ninety percent effective, which isn’t bad.’ You see?”

  “Maybe,” Hendryksen answered, noncommitally.

  “Okay…” Cruz thought about how to explain it. “Let’s try this. For my cohort and pretty much any infantry cohort—cohorts in the mountain, marine, and cazador tercios have slightly different ones—the missions are move to contact, hasty attack, deliberate attack, raid, recon, ambush, defend, conduct hasty defense, and delay, plus the mission to suppress civil disturbances. Trust me, in this country, traditionally, that last one is the closest you can get to combat without actually being there.”

  Listening to the conversation, Jan suddenly found she understood a little more of the board. “MTC” equaled movement to contact. “Amb” was probably ambush. “HDef” was likely hasty defense.

  “Now some of those missions translate down directly. Others do not. For mission: Move to Contact, for example, it’s really a platoon or maniple mission, and we mostly train it at that level, because if they can do it, the cohort can tag pretty much along in a column of twos. On the other hand, mission: Deliberate Attack might be a platoon or maniple mission, but probably not, and there’s a whole lot of shit battalion has to be doing for any serious deliberate attack. So we train the platoons and maniples, plus the staff, plus the heavy weapons and specialty people, and we only say “we can do this,” when everybody in cohort can do their part.”

  “And that…ummm…what did you call it—‘vertical slice,’ was it?—part?” Hendryksen asked.

  We’ve only got twenty-five days with the militia. Two of those will be taken up with road marches. Four more are slated for weapons qualification. Of the remaining nineteen, we follow the three-to-one rule, approximately.”

  At Hendryksen’s quizzically raised eyebrow, Cruz explained, “Okay, in troop leading procedures higher is supposed to take no more than one third of the time, right?”

  Hendryksen just snorted. Like that ever happens.

  “Well…yeah, we’re not perfect about it either. But the principle stands. Our equivalent principle for training is the one quarter rule: Higher headquarters can take no more than one qu
arter of available time for training it runs or evaluation it insists upon or projects or details. So the maniples get fourteen days to train on the core missions, and we take five to test how well they trained.” Cruz sighed with unaimed exasperation. “Yeah, yeah, it’s not perfect. Every time the Duque has a sit down with the officers or centurions, somebody always asks for a longer annual training period for the militia. At least once that was me. He always tells us to fuck off because the civil economy can’t take much more.

  “Anyway, because we have so many missions, to be done under so many possible sets of conditions, at so many echelons, squad through cohorts, and only five days to evaluate them, we select a ‘vertical slice.’ Some squads from each company will get evaluated on a recon patrol or night ambush. Some platoons will do a live-fire trench clearing exercise to allow for their part of a deliberate attack. A couple will do a live fire exercise in building clearing, with grenades. One will be picked to do a deliberate defense. And so on. We test just enough to ensure that the maniples train as hard and well as possible on what’s important.”

  Range 5, Imperial Range Complex, Balboa, Terra Nova

  Jan lay beside Cruz about fifteen meters from a straight path cut in the surrounding jungle. She could feel the insects feasting on her. Not much she could do about it, either, since the legionaries were forbidden from using insect repellent on a night patrol. As a sort of guest, Captain Campbell felt obliged to follow the custom. The mosquitoes, therefore, feasted.

  Ah, well, she thought. While they’re eating at least I don’t have to listen to their goddammned buzzing.

  The First Platoon, Third Maniple after a nearly sleepless night on Friday, and a grueling march on Saturday morning, had spent most of the rest of Saturday preparing for ambushes. The veteran senior centurion leading the platoon had set up a sleep plan that had given everyone, except for himself and his optio, at least a couple of hours sleep.

  And, mused a more than slightly annoyed Sergeant Major Cruz, that centurion and I are going to have a little prayer meeting on the subject of whether he and his assistant need sleep sometime tomorrow morning.

  * * *

  Well after sunset, the men of First Platoon, Cruz accompanying to observe, had marched by road to a release point, then navigated through the jungle to their designated ambush position. There were three such, with Cruz observing one, the maniple commander another, and the maniple’s first centurion the third. Weapons platoon was supporting from a firing point a few kilometers away, with the maniple exec hovering over it.

  They’d arrived near the position and halted while the platoon leader went forward with five men to recon the ambush position. Carrera’s legion made a positive fetish out of never allowing its units to train on the same tactical problem in the same place; so a leader’s recon was very important to avoid walking in blind.

  By the time the platoon leader had returned to the platoon—after leaving four of the men as flank security for the position—it was well after eleven at night. The position was occupied within half an hour. Then came a long…a very long, buzzing, biting, sucking and draining wait. Some of the blood came from a short blonde with a funny accent.

  * * *

  When Cruz determined that a sufficient amount of time had passed to allow the bone-weary soldiers to fall asleep if they didn’t strain to stay alert he spoke a word, softly, into the radio he carried.

  At hearing the word, a group of fifteen men walked by the leftmost flank security and then cut into the jungle to be behind the field of fire. The senior man of the left flank security team squeezed a field telephone twice. At the other end bare wire entwined one of the platoon leader’s fingers. The shock startled him to full alertness. The outposted troops squeezed once more for every soldier/target that crossed their line of sight.

  Ah, fifteen targets, thought the platoon leader.

  The men who had presented themselves as fifteen targets took off at a brisk walk for the next ambush position, where a guide would meet them and lead them into position, lest they blunder into a live ambush.

  Perhaps two minutes later, and two hundred meters to the northeast, thus well out of the ambushing platoon’s field of fire, two soldiers from the company headquarters had heard the same word as Cruz and began to walk, pulling a rope behind them. The rope ran to a series of targets, connected to each other and hanging from a cable strung overhead. Only balloons, in sandbags and held in place by coat hanger wire, kept the targets fixed to the cable. When the balloons were hit the sandbags would collapse, letting the targets fall to the ground.

  As a courtesy, Cruz tapped Jan’s shoulder to let her know the action was about to begin. She nodded in the jungle’s blackness. Looking intently forward, she thought he could make out the shape of something moving along the trail to his front.

  Two directional antipersonnel mines exploded when the platoon leader squeezed the detonators—“clackers” in militarese—he’d held in each hand. KABOOM! KABOOM! The mines weren’t daisy-chained so there was a small but noticeable lag between blasts.

  Jan had never before been so close to such large explosions without being behind cover. A few fragments of plastic casing careened backwards but most of the backblast was absorbed by filled sandbags placed behind the mines. Immediately the night was lit by the muzzle flashes of rifle and machine gun fire…and the long bright sparks of tracers. Even the rifles fired on full automatic. Jan was astonished at the cloth-ripping rate of fire of the legionary rifles and light machine guns.

  Facing those, she thought, would be a very scary proposition.

  A rifleman dropped his rifle and sat up. “I’m hit!” he cried. A piece of plastic from a mine had scored the man’s arm.

  Before Cruz could walk close enough to strike the man with his baton the trooper’s fire team leader pulled the—slightly—bleeding soldier to the ground and slapped him into passivity. Cruz breathed more easily. He didn’t like to strike a fellow soldier down.

  At the first sound of the explosions the men pulling the rope broke into a run. The targets, and most had not been hit by the pellets from the mines, picked up speed. Trip flares lit up the scene for the riflemen and machine gunners. Fire closed on those still remaining targets until, their balloons pierced, they fell to the ground along the line of flight.

  Seeing the last target drop, the platoon leader blew his whistle. Almost immediately, the firing ceased. Another whistle, this time a double blast, and certain members got up from the ground, screaming, and assaulted across the killing zone. As they did, each man in the assault team shot a target or two in the “head” as he passed through the kill zone. On the far side, they took up the best positions they could find to secure the rest of their platoon.

  Cruz, looked on through one of the cohort’s not exactly rare but still precious Volgan-made night vision goggles. He noted with satisfaction that each target was shot at least once more at close range by the assault team. His view swept across the line of men remaining in the ambush position. Again he observed and approved of noncoms, ordinarily privates and corporals of the reserve, checking each man’s rifle by touch to determine that they had been placed on “safe.” Best of all was when he saw a young corporal—Cruz recognized the striker as PFC Faraudo—slap one soldier’s helmet, apparently hard, because the man had failed to put his rifle on “safe.” I think it’s maybe time to send Faraudo to Cazador School, thought Cruz.

  Another blast of the centurion’s whistle sent a search team out into the kill zone to gather intelligence from the bodies. A small pile of useful tid-bits grew near the center of the kill zone. These had been placed in the uniforms draped on the targets before the exercise. Another pile, of plastic weapons carried by the targets, grew nearby. Cruz, accompanied by Jan, stood and followed the search team out. He observed the search team without comment, until he saw one man turn over a target carelessly. Then Cruz took a hand grenade simulator from a pocket, pulled its fuse, and dropped it on the spot where the target had lain. An explosio
n followed in a few seconds.

  “You’re hit, dumb-ass! Deader than fucking chivalry.” Cruz pointed at two men nearby. “You’re hit, and so are you. Now lie down and scream for a medic, both of you. And blame ‘dick-head’ here.” Cruz’s stick pointed at the careless soldier. “And YOU! Boy, next time be careful as you turn a body over.”

  “Si! Sergento-Major. Perdoname, Sergento-Major!”

  “I could forgive you, son,” answered Cruz, “but what about the wives and mothers and children of the men your carelessness might kill?”

  “It won’t happen again, Sergeant-Major. I promise.”

  Through the mind of every man flew a single word, Shit! The platoon had thirty-seven men assigned and two attached. They’d just lost three plus the one from the mine fragment. If they lost even one more they would go over the ten percent casualties—rounded up—permissible under legionary training standards for an ambush. Then the platoon might have to stay past their twenty-five days to train to standard. That meant both more misery and less money. Shit, indeed.

  * * *

  Jan was unusual among Anglian military women in the number and type of courses she’d been allowed to take. These included at least two where night ambushes were part of the curriculum. She was used to a well-run ambush. Even so, she was shocked at the speed and violence of the exercise, and maybe even more shocked at the short shrift given to safety. Her army, in any case, didn’t think that a couple of sandbags placed behind a directional mine were quite safe enough, when the mine’s pound and a quarter of high explosive was set off a meter in front of the firing line.