by Tom Kratman
The commander of the Tenth had chided Legate Chin on his unit’s lack of discipline. Chin had, in turn, very mildly chewed out Velasquez.
Once the prisoners were in front of him, and their charges read off, Velasquez announced Carillo’s and Salazar’s punishment; for Carillo the thirty days at half pay in the disciplinary platoon previously decided on. Salazar was given three days. Both sentences were to begin at 0600 the following morning. Carillo would spend the night in the tercio guard house, Salazar, however, was free until it was time to report to serve his sentence.
Some minor medals for achievement were given to three soldiers from the other group. Then Velasquez called the cohort back to attention and turned the formation back over to his sergeant major. Once Cruz was in position and salutes exchanged, Velasquez, himself, took a place behind the formation.
Cruz put the cohort “at ease” and read off several more things from his clipboard. Among these were time rewards—rare, monetary rewards—rarer still, promotions, and elevation to the reserve echelon from the militia or regular from the reserves.
Last of all he read, “By personal and direct order of the commanding officer—Manuel Velasquez-Boyd, Legate, Infantry, Commanding…Private Salazar-Luis, Emilio F.—for initiative and determination beyond that normally expected of a soldier of the Republic in time of peace—is elevated from the militia to the reserves. Private Salazar is further raised in rank from Private to Private First Class. In addition, PFC Salazar is put on paid pass, for three days, effective tomorrow at 0600.” Every man present, excepting only Campbell, understood that Salazar’s pass covered the period when he would have otherwise been serving his three-day sentence in the disciplinary platoon. The soldiers laughed at their commander’s little joke. She asked Hendryksen, who also got the joke, what had just happened.
“An officer just showed some judgment and some moral courage,” he answered. “How often does that happen?”
“Cohort!” The five first centurions, turning heads over right shoulders, echoed, “Maniple!”
“Until seventeen hundred hours,” said Cruz, “which means you’re to have your hair cut and your brass and shoes polished by then, motherfuckers… DISSS…missed!”
* * *
The legion actually had a mess dress uniform. It was white with gold piping. It wasn’t an issue item but was available and authorized for individual purpose and wear. Most senior officers and centurions along with a few of the middle rankers bought a set. For the troops the dress uniform was created by the addition of a lightweight, olive-colored jacket to the normal undress khakis.
That’s what they wore and, Campbell had to admit, it was better than, say, in the Anglian Royal Artillery where, if a senior officer and a junior officer showed up at an event dressed the same, the junior had to leave and change.
Since Campbell and Hendryksen had spent so much time with the cohort, they were invited guests at the farewell banquet’s head table. Campbell sat between Legates Suarez and Chin, while Hendryksen, on the left side of the head table, was situated between Cruz and an even more senior sergeant major, Arredondo, nicknamed “Scarface.”
Behind them, in racks, stood the Eagles of 2nd Legion: Gold, Second Infantry Tercio: Silver, 2nd Cohort: Bronze, and below those, as if on guard themselves, the five blue guidons for the cohort’s five maniples.
The dinner began with a recitation of the oath of enlistment for the legion: “…against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” After that, the tercio chaplain—he was a Roman Catholic priest, and a reserve warrant officer—blessed the meal, the eagles, the guidon, and the cohort. Then one of the junior privates of the cohort solemnly read off the names of those of the tercio who had been killed in action…or in training, and their honors, since its parent formation had been founded, about fifteen years before. The list was fairly long. The men bowed their heads as the names and circumstances were cited.
Velasquez made a short speech, as did the other commanders. The CO invited Campbell to say a few words, which she begged off from, citing crappy Spanish. At the legion commander’s order to “Take Seats!” the men of the cohort shouted their motto “Improviza! Adapta! Gana! Ataque! Ataque Ataque!” Improvise, adapt, overcome, attack, attack, attack!
Palacio de los Trixies, Ciudad Balboa, Balboa, Terra Nova
Downstairs and around the corner, the courtyard fountain splashed while raucous trixies scurried away from the fight.
“I tried to warn you, Raul,” said Carrera, head outthrust on his neck, glare on his face, and his fingers turning white from his grip on the arms of his chair, “that this was not the time to show the slightest weakness.”
Parilla didn’t answer right away, his eyes locked in a hate-filled glare at the television screen on which was frozen the countenance of Santa Josefina’s Calderón. “Son of a bitch,” Parilla muttered. “You could have come to me and asked me why we needed what we had, but nooo…you went to our fucking enemies.”
“Well…he wants his soldiers back, does he?” Carrera asked, rhetorically. “I think we can arrange to send him a few thousand at least.”
Parilla held up a restraining hand. “You mean send an expedition to Santa Josefina? Maybe plunge the place into guerilla warfare? No. Or, at least, not yet.”
Patience almost at an end, Carrera shouted, “Why the fuck not?” He stood up, walked to the television, and slapped it, setting the thing to teetering dangerously. “Why the fuck not? That motherfucker has opened up our entire eastern flank. Half my plans for defense are in a ruin now. Do you fucking hear me, Mr. President? We’re fucked! Fucked!”
“Calm down, Duque,” Parilla said, with heat.
“I’m…sorry, Mr. President,” Carrera forced out. He sat.
“Now what’s this going to do to us?” Parilla asked.
“It’s so fucking brilliant I can’t even say,” Carrera admitted. “Leave aside that it opens up a flank I’d considered secure. I’ll find a way to close it again. But this is going to put pressure on damned near everybody we do business with to stop. Everyone in the international community of the very, very caring and sensitive is going to jump on the bandwagon: ‘Disarm those beasts in Balboa.’ And mark my words, that very phrase is going to be used.
“And the border provocations Fernandez warned us of? They’ll be starting soon. Very soon. We can expect embargoes, fund raising concerts, condemnations in the world league, a veritable orgy of denunciations.”
The heat in Parilla’s voice cooled to sadness. “And all of that, ultimately, leads to the war I wanted to avoid.”
“Well…to be fair,” Carrera admitted, “I was speaking out of my ass. I don’t know that anything you ordered me to do or not do made a trixie’s shit of difference. Maybe it did but…I don’t know that it did. And I kind of doubt it.
“And besides, maybe this is the war that has to be fought. Maybe when the other side has martialed everything it has against us—from the World League to the UEPF to the Tauran Union to the shitbird idiot actors and actresses of Wilcox’s Folly—and they either lose to us or win in the worst way, with casualties that discredit all the above—”
“You’re speaking of good to the world,” Parilla observed. “Fuck the world; I only care about Balboa. That’s why I wanted to avoid the war in the first place.”
“Raul…I’ve said it before. I don’t think we can avoid it. But…that doesn’t mean that there aren’t better and worse ways of fighting it, for greater and lesser goals. Neither does it mean that your ways won’t give us the better way of fighting it and the greater goals.”
Parilla looked intently at Carrera, searching for truth in his face. Are you blowing smoke or sincere? I used to be able to read you better but the more time you spent with us the murkier your thoughts became.
“I mean it,” said Carrera, which pretty much settled that.
“What do you want to do now?” Parilla asked.
“Step one is ready,” Carrera said. “Has been for a while. When it began t
o look like the Taurans were going to start fucking with us along the Transitway border, I started putting some things into place to humiliate them. Those are ready now.
“Step two is going to be a little harder. We’re going to cull the legion of Santa Josefinans. Those cullings are going to fall in on the two Valle de las Lunas tercios for reorganization and training as guerillas. I’m going to have the training center on the Isla Real send some cadre for that, and maybe do a little recruiting in Cochin. They were probably the best guerillas in our history, so ought to have something to teach.”
“Don’t send them into Santa Josefina any time soon,” Parilla cautioned.
“No,” Carrera agreed. “But when we need them I want them ready.”
“I concur,” Parilla said.
Carrera relaxed his fingers from the arms of his chair. His left hand waved at the TV screen, still bearing Calderón’s frozen face. “But that son of a bitch is going to get his soldiers back, eventually, just as he demanded.”
Forming that left hand into a loose simulacrum of a pistol, index finger pointed toward space, “And that clever bitch overhead is going to pay for the trouble she’s caused.” The palm flattened. He swept it across the general direction of the Transitway Area. “And so are those oh-so-fucking clever Tauran bastards.”
Tauran Union Security Force-Balboa, Building 59, Fort Muddville, Balboa, Terra Nova
“Oh, those stupid fucking bastards,” said Captain Jan Campbell. She held two sheaves of papers loosely, one in each hand. Her lower lip was quivering as if she were about to cry. That was nearly enough to induce panic in Hendryksen.
“What is it?” asked Hendryksen. In reply all he got was an inarticulate shriek and a blizzard of white papers being thrown across the office. This was followed by Jan putting her head down onto her arms on her desk. From the shaking of her shoulders, Hendryksen was quite sure that “about to” had become “oh my God the world is going to end Campbell is crying.”
He raced across the floor and began recovering the sheaves she’d scattered. A little shuffling of his own and he had them back in something like proper order. He began to read from one sheaf, labeled, Campbell Report:
“The Legion has a developed Staff function, based primarily on historic Sachsen principles, which in their turn closely mirror Old Earth German doctrine. Staffs generally are significantly smaller than is the norm in the South and East and generate far less routine work, operating as a norm in wartime mode. This is a general characteristic of the Legion, in fact—its active elements sense and display no appreciable difference in attitude between “peacetime” and “wartime.” How much of this comes from the threat we present is arguable. It is this observer’s suspicion that they would be exactly the same if we and the Transitway sank into the sea.”
“That’s about right,” Hendryksen whispered. Then he shifted his attention to the other sheaf and read silently from it:
Chief of Intelligence Directorate’s Version of the Campbell Report:
“The Legio has a minimal Staff function, organized on an inefficient basis, with few key staff officers and little capacity for the wide engagement with units under command. Legio headquarters will thus have a minimal understanding of the posture and readiness of the units at their disposal and little free capacity to make the transition to combat operations.”
“Pure bullshit,” said the Cimbrian, loud enough for Jan to hear.
“That’s not…the…fucking worst…of it,” came from the desk.
Campbell Report:
“The Legio maintains a small Regular component, which leads and administers a larger Reserve component, which in its turn leads and administers the wider Militia component. This permits both rapid mobilization of formed units, each successive mobilization wave building coherent units from cadres from previous waves, without creation of new or scratch units and formations. While a fully mobilized militia force would be in no way comparable to the effectiveness and flexibility of an all-Regular or mobilized Reserve formation, it would be considerably more than an untrained mob and would have a common skill base and extant unit cohesion through the tercio system.
“Though in theory conscript, in fact every man and woman in the legion is a volunteer. To the extent bravery can be measured by peacetime training, it is this observer’s opinion that the soldiery would prove brave enough in combat.”
“You understated that,” he said.
Her head popped up over the desk. She made a quick wipe of her face then said, “You’re fucking right I did. Now look at the lies de Villepin is passing on.”
Chief of Intelligence Directorate’s Version of the Campbell Report:
“The Legio maintains a small mercenary cadre, which dominates the extended Reserve and the wider popular Militia. All adults are subject to conscription into the military and those responding to the draft are given at least a cursory basic training before release back into civilian life. No sanction is currently applied against those failing to report for conscription, but successful completion of extended military service is currently the only route to enfranchisement, so the politically engaged will tend to accept conscription in order to become politically active. Progressive views are discouraged during service and are thus not represented to any marked extent in active politics in the illegal entity in Former Balboa.
The fully-mobilized militia force would produce an impressive proportion of the population in uniform, but it is considered unlikely that the dominant Regular and Reserve cadres in overall command will be able to sustain combat operations on the part of their militia charges, whose state of training and preparedness is significantly lower than the higher echelons’ and whose unit cohesion is questionable, given the coercive nature of militia service.”
The whole report, rather both whole reports, were considerably lengthier that that, Jan’s running to fifty-two pages and the official version weighing in at seventy-seven. Rather than reading all of both, Hendryksen asked, “Is it all like this?”
“Some parts are worse,” she replied, this time not bothering to lift her head up.
“Is there any truth anywhere in what is going to be the official version?”
“Maybe around the margins,” she said. “It’s tough, you know, even for the fucking Gauls, to paint your enemies both as incompetent and as a real threat.”
“Where’s the painting that’s labeled, ‘real threat’?” he asked.
“Appendices A through G.”
“I see… What do we do about this, Jan?”
“I’m sending a copy of mine to a friend in MoD, back in Anglia,” she answered. “Hopefully he can kill our participation in the TU’s madness. If you care for your comrades in Cimbria, I’d suggest you do much the same.”
University of Balboa, Ciudad Balboa, Balboa, Terra Nova
One of the things that Calderón’s denunciation of the regime had done, besides bringing more TU forces into the area, was to give a much needed shot in the arm to Balboa’s remaining dissidents. Now, with the possibility of the regime being extinguished, and the chance to return to business as usual, these came out of the woodwork of the university, the place that had always been their shelter and natural manure. They weren’t a majority even there, not anymore, but they had a minimal critical mass there. Meetings could be held, if anyone could be made to see the point. Rallies could be mustered, if enough meetings were held.
In a little used and more than a little run down auditorium, twenty year old Manuel Darias-Rocaberti listened as, one after another, fellow students mounted the rostrum to denounce the current regime. Some were liberal, some libertarian. More than a few were leftists: anarchists, socialists, Marxists. Whatever their political persuasion, each speaker had a common theme: the need to overthrow the dictatorship of Raul Parilla and his “pet” gringo, Patricio Carrera.
Manuel wasn’t all that impressed. The thing is, chicos, that the country is becoming less of a dictatorship all the time. What you want to see happen? Will it
mean less of a dictatorship, sooner, or more, forever?
Manuel’s family was not of the highest among the Rocaberti’s many-sided clan. In fact, his father was a modest businessman of no great wealth or pretensions; his mother, a simple farm girl brought to the big city. These facts had much to do with their having been spared any taste of the follow-on results to the attempt to get rid of Parilla and Carrera. For his own part, Manuel had a certain distaste for military regimes, but was not fanatically opposed either.
Still, Manuel listened politely to the parade of denunciation, perhaps made especially bitter by the fact that his class had just received their conscription notices. He caught on quickly to the common theme. Bored, he still applauded with the others. At the same time he attempted to catch the eye of Vielke, a lovely blond coed. When he realized he would not be able to do so, he turned his full attention back to the “rally.”
It was not much longer before Manuel realized that there was another theme, or rather a lack of one, in what was not being said. They all wanted to change the government. Each vowed resistance. And yet none had the slightest idea of what resistance meant. Looking at them, Manuel was fairly sure that none had the fire, the determination, the…courage…to resist with arms.
And why should they resist with arms, when it is an infinitely safer path to political influence to join up? And how could they, when—if they had the determination to fight—they would have the determination to organize and train to fight? I don’t think that’s going to happen with this bunch.