The Lotus Eaters cl-3

by Tom Kratman

  Where 'shine,' thought Carrera, equals the opportunity to lose eyes and limbs. In any case, they haven't had the chance . . . yet.

  His eyes swept over the small assembly, counting human appendages. Of the twelve senators of the select committee, there were only nineteen arms, seventeen legs, and twenty-one eyes. I sure hope none of them lost their balls, too. Their average age was a bit over thirty-five, a deliberate effort on the part of Parilla and Carrera, who had done the hand selecting, to make the Senate as mature as possible, given the constraint that the Legion was mostly young.

  After the committee members had taken seats, Carrera took his own. "Senators," he began, rather than Conscript Fathers, which had been his first instinct. They really were too young for that title, in any event, even though they had been conscripted. Then, nodding at Parilla, he continued, "Princeps Senatus and President, legislators, I've asked you here"—Carrera put a very strong emphasis on the word, "asked"—"because we are facing a war, a very hard war, and there are things I am no longer willing to take on, myself, things I no longer trust my own judgment with."

  "You want us to be your conscience?" asked one of the Senators, a dark skinned ex-legionary turned farmer by the name of Robles.

  "That among other things," Carrera answered.

  "Duque, that will never work," Robles said. "We all know you and we all know you well. Listening to others is not your strong point. At least, it isn't if you don't have to. And you don't play well with others. I remember a certain bridge in Sumer."

  Carrera smiled shyly at the memory. Once, during the invasion of Sumer, ten years prior, Carrera had bombed a bridge out of existence under the very noses of his allies, and for not much more reason that to avoid the difficulty of actually having to coordinate with those allies.

  He forced the smile away and nodded. "I know. I'm just going to have to learn."

  Robles looked very doubtful. Still, he shrugged his doubt off for the moment. Maybe, just maybe, Carrera could change. But—

  "And what happens, Duque," Robles asked, "when you want to do something and we say, 'No'?"

  In answer, Carrera took a folder from atop the table and opened it. Inside was a sheaf of white paper, stapled at one corner. He signed at the bottom of the first page, flipped that and signed the next, then the next, until he reached the last page which his signed in the middle. Wordlessly, he slid the packet over to Robles who began to read.

  "Holy fucking shit!" the senator exclaimed before he was halfway through.

  "What is it?" asked one of the legislators, Marissa Correa. The short and stout woman's light brown eyes flashed with curiosity.

  Robles didn't answer immediately. He quickly scanned the rest of the package and then slid it in turn to Correa. "He's just turned over nearly everything—seventy or seventy-five percent anyway—to the Senate."

  "Yes," Carrera said. "Everything but a quarter of the general fund, my family trust, which I have no right to give away, this house, Quarters One on the Isla Real—I think I want to retire there—and a discretionary fund sufficient to provide at least a few hundred, and possibly as much as five hundred, million a year. It's closer to seventy than seventy-five percent, once you take account of the exemptions."

  Carrera's finger pointed at the agreement. "And now, Ms Correa, if you would turn to the last page and sign, as a witness and as a promise that you will not reveal anything of security interest to the country or the Legion, and then pass the thing around, we can get on with this."

  "My God," Robles said, "you're really serious."

  "Very," Carrera agreed. "If I don't listen, and can't convince you, you can now fire me. Or make it impossible to support the Legion unless I resign, which amounts to the same thing. Actually, you can fire me for any reason or no reason. My only job security is that I don't know that there's really anyone to replace me if you do. Jimenez, maybe, but he wouldn't take the job."

  "Ah . . . and there is one caveat," Carrera added. "I will still track the money and if I find any of it going astray I will drop a word in the right ear and the people responsible will be killed. You can try me for murder afterwards, but they'll still be dead. Similarly, if any of the Senate don't voluntarily step down or fight for election or reelection when their time comes, they're toast."

  "Don't worry about that, Duque," Robles said. "Just drop that word in my ear. I'll kill 'em myself."

  Carrera's lips tightened even as his eyes turned Heavenward. I wish I could tell you about one other important thing. You see, we're already a small nuclear power. If you read that . . . that contract, carefully, you'll see that, in effect, I turned release authority over to the President. And I hope and pray we never have to use them. Again.

  But I can't tell you because, even though you're all handpicked and vetted, that must be kept quiet or the Federated States will come down on us like a ton of bricks.

  * * *

  Back in their bedroom, after the select committees had left, Lourdes was still glowing from an altogether too long delayed session of serious lovemaking.

  "You are looking awfully happy, Patricio," she said, "for a man who just gave away over seventy-five billion in Federated States Drachma."

  "Closer to a hundred and fifty billion if you count the value of everything, land, equipment, buildings, and such," he corrected. "Not to mention the pension fund, and the value of trained men over untrained. Are you sorry I did?"

  "No," she said without the slightest hesitation. "It's a small price if it makes you happy again."

  Carrera leered, meaningfully. "You know what would really make me happy again?"

  She leered right back. "I can think of a couple of possibilities," she said, while ostentatiously running her tongue over her lips. "Why don't you sit on the side of the bed and we'll try one of them?"

  Prey Nokor, Cochin, Terra Nova

  "Nokor," Sig said, as his eyes opened wide to the sun streaming in through the blind over the window. The mattress of the bed on which he lay was lumpy, but at least the linen was clean.

  "Shit, still in Nokor."

  A former colony of the Gauls, and then of the Red Tsars, Cochin had all the decay—physical, economic, and moral—that one might associate with either of those two bits of history, or with suffering a major civil war in recent memory. Because the Cochinese had endured all three, the decay was not just trebled but cubed.

  Proof of that decay, over and above the lumpy mattress, occupied a fraction of that mattress in the form of a fifteen or sixteen year old Cochinese hooker who was effectively owned by the house. At least Sig hoped she was only fifteen or sixteen. This was not from any perverse preference for very young girls, but merely because a hooker of that age was most likely to be just a hooker, rather than a spy for either Cochinese Intelligence or the Secret Police.

  The girl's name was Han. She'd told a more than half drunken Siegel, down in the hotel bar, that it meant 'moral.' She'd told him, moreover, in French and then laughed her cute little rear end off.

  "Moral? Me? Isn't that just too funny?"

  Sig had shrugged it off. "We all sell ourselves, Han," he'd said. "Some of us even get a fair price."

  * * *

  It had been an ugly scene, with Siegel's soon to be ex-wife, shortly before he'd departed Balboa. It was uglier still when he'd called Fernandez who had come immediately with an escort of military police. These had handcuffed her, forced her to sign some papers, and then escorted her to the airport with her passport stamped to prevent readmission to the country.

  As Carrera had, Fernandez said, "I'm sorry, Sig."

  "Don't be," Siegel had answered. "Right now I'm too pissed off to be hurt. Besides, I'm going to the land of the two drachma blow job. It could be worse.

  "Would it have been better, do you think," Siegel inquired, "to have kept her on and fed her disinformation?"

  Fernandez shrugged. "Close question. If we don't bust the occasional spy, the Tauros, who are not necessarily stupid, will assume we choose not to bus
t any. They might assume then that we know about all of them. This could make it problematic to feed disinformation when we want to. Then, too, busting one validates the perceived secrecy of the rest. We've even had it happen that we busted one—that one we shot—and fear from that caused two more to panic, do something dumb, and reveal themselves.

  "Better, I think, to take one into custody occasionally. And, too," Fernandez added, "you're one of us and if you want the bitch out of the country and an in absentia divorce, I think we owe it to you to help. Patricio agreed. Besides, you don't need any distractions, where you're going and what you'll be doing there."

  * * *

  Distractions? Sig thought, while Han, straddling his loins, performed a slow corkscrew. Now this is a distraction. The best kind. Except that I need a distraction from the distraction, or it will be over much, much too soon.

  "Hey, Han," he asked, "how much to rent you from the house . . . as a translator?"

  The girl didn't miss a beat . . . or a twist. "Five million Cochinese Bac a day," she answered. "Or six Federated States Drachma."

  Must delay . . .

  "And of that, how much do you get to keep?" Sig asked.

  "In FSD? Two," she answered, switching from a corkscrew to a slow and graceful up and down. "One of which goes to my debt."

  Always the way, isn't it, then? Someone else gets most of the girl's profit. Oh, Jesus that's . . . MUST DELAY.

  "And how much . . . to just buy your contract . . . from the . . . proprietor?"

  The girl immediately stopped moving. She looked very worried. It was a trick, often enough, to wait for a girl nearly to pay off her contract and then resell the rights to her, which resale price was inevitably added to her debt.

  Sig understood this. "No, no. I'll give you your contract back once my business here is done."

  That was much better, much less worrisome. She resumed her gentle, rhythmic movements, saying, "About eight hundred FSD, free and clear. How long will you be here?"

  That was actually about twice her price; a girl has to watch out for herself.

  Sig answered, "A few years."

  Oh, Lord Buddha, the girl thought. A few years to be free.

  * * *

  God, I hate this place. It isn't even the stink from the rice paddies. But whatever Tsarist Marxism in its Cochinese mutation may have been, pretty to look at, it is not.

  Dan Kurolski, Sig and Han were in a warehouse quite close to the riverside docks that made Prey Nokor an inland port. Inland from the river, past the city, the newer parts of the city grew from the ground like rancid, gray, concrete mushrooms.

  Kuralski, who had thought it advisable to see to the offloading of this first shipment of guns, thought he knew what Sig was thinking.

  "If it makes you any happier," he said to Sig, "Volga's about as bad . . . except for the rice paddies, of course; they're in a league by themselves. On the other hand, Volga has some water and air pollution problems you don't have here."

  Between the warehouse and the dock, but nearer to the former, a shipping container rocked on large forklift carrying it along a less than smooth road. The rocking grew worse until, finally, the thing upended, falling completely off of the forklift's tongues.

  Han scowled and walked away, toward the forklift, without a word. When she reached it, she scrambled her four foot, eleven frame up the side of the lift to the driver's station. There she proceeded to berate the shrinking, cringing, embarrassed driver until his head hung in utter humiliation.

  "Who's she?" Kurolski asked.

  Sig answered, "Han? She's my . . . ummm . . . administrative assistant and translator."

  "Yes, I am sure," Kurolski said, grinning. "What did you pay for her?"

  "Eight hundred FSD," Sig answered, "for her contract. Plus a salary of thirty-two FSD a month. If I'd known how valuable she was, I'd have paid ten times that."

  "You mean you would have billed it to Pat?"

  "Well . . . duh."

  Han returned, still scowling. In French, which Kuralski didn't speak, she said, "Stupidmotherfuckingrefugeefromareeducationcamp! Pigfuckingdumbbastard! Shiteater!"

  "Thanks, Han," said a beaming Siegel. "I couldn't do this without you."

  "What's she think you're actually doing?" Kurolski asked.

  "She thinks I'm smuggling arms to some revolutionary movement in Uhuru or Colombia del Norte."

  "Works for me," Kuralski shrugged.

  * * *

  Later that afternoon, after the last of the guns were offloaded and transshipped into the warehouse, Sig oversaw the repackaging of a light artillery piece. He read from the data plate, Serial Number: 12543. Glancing over the manifest, Sig checked the gun off. He watched as a crew of Cochinese slave workers he was renting from a re-education camp moved the gun by hand into a shipping container, then braced it from several angles with precut lumber. The container was on its side. Shells, three hundred and seventy-five boxes of two shells each, were fitted around the gun and bracing. Then more lumber was used to fix them in place. Sight, aiming stakes, field telephone and wire, gunner's swab and worm, camouflage net and about fifteen other items almost completed the package. Then more precut sections of lumber were added. When the workers were done, Sig closed the container and placed a metal railroad seal on the door. The crew then replaced the atmosphere with an inert gas.

  One down. Twenty-three more to go. This week. Sig signaled for a forklift to move the filled container to a fenced yard by the docks.

  Gia Lai, Cochin

  One of the nice things about Cochin, as a place to test explosives, was that there was so much unexploded ordnance laying around, which ordnance the Cochinese Army made some effort to clear, that surface explosions, even fairly large ones, were so common as to not incite commentary. Or even to be noticed.

  Sig wondered, Do you suppose that was in Carrera's mind when he selected this place for testing? Hmmm . . . might have been.

  Sig swatted away a mosquito as he and a Cochinese sapper, Sergeant Tranh, a combat engineer whose commander was being paid twenty FSD a week for the use of him, primed a plastic barrel with blasting cap and fuse. Siegal watched the sapper carefully tap the cap, held in his right hand, one wrist slapping against the other to knock out any dirt which might be in the cap and which could interfere with detonation. Tranh then inserted the fuse, about six feet in length, into the cap. He then turned the cap, fuse inserted, until the cap's opening was pointed away from him. Lastly, he crimped the cap to hold the fuse in place.

  In French, Siegal said "Ok, Tranh. Set the igniter and prepare to pull." The little Cochinese inserted the other length of fuse into a pull igniter and turned a knob to screw the fuse in tight. He looked up at Siegal for the word to go. Siegal looked at his watch and nodded. The Vietnamese shouted a warning, three times, and pulled the small metal ring at the end of the igniter opposite the fuse. Smoke began to curl upward. Then the two retired to a bunker nearby where Han already waited. Siegal consulted his watch once they were safe inside.

  It had not proven possible yet for Sig to obtain anywhere near enough caltrops for even a single test. Oh, he could have had ten thousand made by hand. But they'd have been non-standard, of variable strength, size, and weight, and thus useless for testing purposes. Arrangements for some limited manufacture of enough caltrops to run several more tests were still being made. Sig was also working with a local sewage treatment plant to process shit into a kind of plastic for mass manufacture of the scatterable obstacles. A few bribes to the commander of a local combat engineer battalion who had given Sig the use of Sapper Tranh had provided several tons of both high and low explosive.

  The test 'caltrop projector,' therefore, had only a loose packing of gravel in place of the caltrops. For this test Siegal only wished to find out whether or not a linear shaped charge could be used to cut the top off of the barrel just prior to the main bursting charge, a plasticized ammonium nitrate mix, sending the payload up and out. Siegal didn't have the physics to p
redetermine how much explosive was required to spread eight or ten thousand very light and un-aerodynamic caltrops around an area several hundred meters in radius. He intended to experiment until he found out. He mused, from time to time, on the question of whether a clever sergeant—or rather a bunch of clever sergeants—weren't more cost effective than a high brow scientist . . . or even a number of them.

  As the second hand on Siegel's watch swung round, he hunched himself lower into the bunker, Tranh following suit. The sapper reached out one hand to push Han's head lower.

  It's hardly the first time a man ever pushed my head down, the girl thought. This one, at least, means me well by it.

  Then a half-pound of RDX based linear shaped charge and twenty-eight pounds of ammonium nitrate-based explosive rocked the earth. A pattering of silver painted gravel flew up and then fell on and around Siegel's bunker.

  Headquarters, 4th Corps, Cristobal, Balboa

  A silver-draped Christmas tree from uplands in the eastern part of the country could be seen from the street. James Soult glanced at it only briefly before he parked the staff car at the curb to let Carrera disembark. That human fireplug, Mitchell, bearing a submachine gun, was already on the sidewalk with his eyes searching for trouble before Carrera's feet touched the pavement.

  A sentry called the building to attention as Carrera walked through the main doors. Carrera wished the man a merry Christmas and continued on to Jimenez' office. He found Jimenez hunched over his desk, a sheaf of paper spread out before him.

  Jimenez stood to attention when he realized Carrera was present. "How can I help you, sir?"

  That, in itself, was odd. Normally Carrera and Jimenez were on a first name basis on any occasion that didn't absolutely require formality.