The Lotus Eaters cl-3

by Tom Kratman

  Cruz Residence, Ciudad Balboa, Terra Nova

  I am so tired of this shit, thought Cara, as she leaned against the doorframe of the house she shared with Cruz and watched her husband's back recede into faint light of the streetlamp. Cruz had his rucksack slung over one shoulder and his rifle gripped in the opposite hand. He placed both in the trunk, then walked to the automobile's door. He stopped to wave, once, and then opened the door and sat down, closing the door behind him. The car started with a muffled roar.

  Cara Cruz sighed and shook her head. How many times have I seen you off like this, standing alone in a doorway? I wish I understood what it is that calls to you. I wish I understood the smile you try to hide when going on active service.

  Of course I don't understand those things, not for a minute. All I understand is that there is a call, that you do love your work . . . and that I love you, you bastard.

  Oh . . . and I understand that you know I'll be waiting here for you when you come home. Please come home.

  BdL Dos Lindas, Puerto Jaquelina de Coco, La Palma Province, Balboa, Terra Nova

  The early morning sun lit the sea, but only lightly upon the top and the edges of the coastal jungle. Centurion Ricardo Cruz rested his hands on the chain railing to one side of the ship's stern, looking at the shore as the ship made way parallel to it. Near his feet rested his pack and rifle. Around him, likewise seated on the deck, rested the men of his platoon.

  It wasn't much of a port, Cruz thought. And, he surmised, it could never do as a homeport for a major warship. It didn't have much of an airstrip. It was not much of a town. Indeed, if one took and weighed every building in the town, plus the weight of the asphalt on the airstrip, and the two rock jetties that defined the port, the light aircraft carrier laying two miles off shore would still have outweighed the entirety of what was on land.

  "No, it isn't much," Cruz mused. "And yet it is still ours, and no foreigners may walk in and take it from us."

  I wish I could tell you, Cara, that that's the reason I'm here. But that would be a lie. The fact is that I love it, the action, I mean, and that I need it.

  Cruz sensed the presence of another standing nearby. He turned to look and saw one of the swabbies of the classis.

  "Centurion Cruz?" the sailor asked.

  "Yes."

  "I'm to lead you to the helicopters scheduled to take you in."

  "Lead on, then, sailor," said Cruz, turning away from the shore and towards his men. "On your feet, boys."

  * * *

  Fosa, too, was quite unimpressed with the sleepy, mostly ramshackle town. "On the other hand," he mused from his bridge, watching his Yakamov helicopters boarding and launching chalk after chalk of foot soldiers to deposit them in and around the town and further into the jungle, "it does have some buildings; it does have an all weather airstrip, and—even if the port isn't up to sheltering the Dos Lindas or the Tadeo Kurita—it can still deal with small merchies, the escorts, and landing craft. So it's good enough for our purposes."

  Suarez, standing to one side of Fosa, nodded. He also looked at a chart which showed how much of his force, a mere fraction of one infantry legion, was ashore. With a single tick mark on the chart from one of Fosa's sailors, Suarez stood to attention, saluted and said, "I relieve you, sir." That tick mark indicated that half of Suarez's force was now ashore.

  It's a small enough force to begin with, Suarez thought, given the size of the area we have to reestablish control over.

  Fosa returned the salute and answered, "I stand relieved, sir." From that moment on, until and unless the fleet retired, operational control of both had passed to the land force commander, just as it had previously resided with Fosa, the commander of the naval force.

  "Good luck, compadre," Fosa added. "We'll support from here as we're able."

  As if to punctuate that statement the four triple six inch turrets of the BdL Tadeo Kurita rotated slightly. The center gun of number two then spoke in anger, flames and smoke shooting out over the water. Even as stunned or dead fish began floating to the surface, the entire ship barked out a twelve-gun broadside.

  "Seems your boys have made contact with somebody," Fosa observed.

  Frente Nacional Liberacion Santerdereño (FNLS) Camp Twenty-seven, La Palma Province, Balboa, Terra Nova

  If the town of Puerto Jaquelina de Coco wasn't much, FNLS Camp Twenty-seven, twenty odd miles to the south of it, was even less than that. At least Jaquelina had one paved road and some rooftops of solid material. The camp had mud and more mud, with open latrines dug none too deep and far too close to the well, some half falling apart bohios roofed with rotting leaves, hammocks strung between trees and altogether too many flies and mosquitoes. That latter, especially, droned in swarms outside the nets slung by the denizens of Camp Twenty-seven as protection against them.

  On the plus side, thought one of those denizens, "guerilla fighter" Esteban Escobar, as he glanced about at the surrounding squalor, the work load ain't much. And there's pussy.

  The sun barely penetrated through the thick canopy overhead. Still, the mottled shadow hid little of the camp from those, just awakening, who inhabited it.

  Esteban had once been a rather bright student at the national university in Santander's capital, a "dull, middle class, grind," as some of his classmates had called him. Then he'd fallen in with a very pretty and very radical girl from the upper classes. She'd made certain introductions, first to her body, then to some illicit substances, and then finally to some friends. He'd left school—Well, why not? My grades were going to shit in favor of sex anyway—and joined the Movement.

  His life as a guerilla had started out poorly and gone downhill from there. First there'd been the Army of Santander, hunting him and his comrades like vermin through the mountainous jungles. And they'd gotten progressively better at it, too. Even that wasn't the worst of it, though. The worst had been the things the police had done to break the guerilla's support networks in the towns and cities.

  Little food, no money. And pussy—even, maybe especially, upper class pussy—will only carry you so far, Esteban mused, swinging slowly from side to side in his hammock. Absently, the guerilla's hand reached up lightly to caress a small crucifix hung about his neck. With so many Catholic priests in support of the Movement, it was perhaps the only Tsarist-Marxist inspired guerilla group on Terra Nova where the rank and file were required to keep their religion.

  There was a buzz in his ear. Esteban let go the crucifix and swatted at a mosquito that had found a hole in the netting he'd spread over his "bed." Dammit. Missed the little bastard.

  In a quest for survival, Esteban and his "company"—never more than about sixty-five fighters anyway—had moved on. They'd had to move forward because the "liberated zone" the government had temporarily granted the FNLS as part of a ceasefire arrangement was already at carrying capacity. There'd been no going back.

  And wasn't that fucking brilliant, the guerilla thought. Vigilantes everywhere, within days of our showing up. Fucking Autodefensas!

  In time, after many fights, few of them victorious, the guerilla band, now reduced to thirty-seven, found itself on the Balboa-Santander frontera, with no place to go but into Balboa.

  And here we prosper, for certain very constrained values of prosperity. The jefes back in Santander send us processed drugs; we send them on; we get a cut of the take. All in the interests of the people's struggle against oppression, of course.

  And all of which buys us some worn out, tumble down huts, a shitty well, some muddy trails . . . and some food and an occasional piece of ass from the locals. Viva la Revolucion!

  "La Revolucion, Esteban mentally sneered. What is the revolution? Some upper class pussy? A jefe smelling faintly of cologne that comes by every half year to lecture us on the dialectic? Running drugs to keep that jefe in style in Belalcázar? A priest who pretends to be a Catholic? Chinga la Revolucion. The Revolution is nothing but taking the drugs to Puerto Jaquelina and transshipping them to some
assholes in Ciudad Balboa.

  I want to go back home and start school again. I'm tired of this shit.

  I want . . . what the fuck was that?

  * * *

  The aircraft—a Turbo-Finch Avenger—was basically a modified crop-duster; armored, upengined, with thirteen hardpoints for ordnance, and a fair electronics suite. They were cheap; they were tough; they were highly maneuverable. They also, with their comparatively fuel-sipping turbo-prop engine, had a very impressive range and loiter time. The one hanging over Esteban Escobar and his unwashed comrades had taken off from the military strip on the Isla Real some hours ago.

  "Well, that's that," said Montoya into his radio, just after dropping the last of his original load of four electro-magnetic pulse bombs and gunning the engine of his Turbo-Finch to get the hell out of range of the bomb before it fried all his electronics and left him at a very unpleasant "one with nature."

  A voice answered; Montoya thought it might be the commander of the Air Ala, Lanza, himself, but couldn't be sure for all the static.

  "Well done, Rafael. Head to the strip at Puerto Jaquelina de Coco. They're not ready to refuel and rearm you yet but they can receive you well enough. And the carrier's choppering in some fuel pods and ammunition pallets as they can."

  "Beats a carrier landing," Montoya answered. "I'll be along."

  Several kilometers behind and below Montoya's aircraft, a bright flash and somewhat muffled boom told of an EMP bomb doing its bit to fry every radio and satellite phone within a fairly large circle on the ground.

  * * *

  Lightning? Thunder? Esteban listened carefully for a while over the sounds of the jungle and its creatures. No. Thunder and lightning aren't generally accompanied by the sound of an aircraft engine . . . or . . . —he listened more carefully still—maybe two or three of them. That I can hear. And . . . helicopters? Time to wake the jefe, I think. And I think maybe we're in neck deep shit.

  * * *

  God, I love this shit, Senior Centurion Ricardo Cruz thought to himself as he led his platoon through a neck-deep swamp twenty miles southeast of Puerto Jaquelina de Coco. Cruz, average height for a Balboan, which is to say, medium short, helmeted, dressed in pixilated jungle tiger stripes, sloshed along as quietly as possible, his F-26 rifle held above his head.

  The platoon had been choppered in to a spot over the jungle onto which had been dropped a tree landing platform. This platform, basically a hexagon of pipes with six longer pipes leading from it to a larger hexagon, the whole connected by wires the better to catch on the foliage, and topped by chain link fencing, allowed helicopter-borne infantry to land atop the jungle, rather than try to find a large enough landing zone. The men descended from the TLP by ladders hooked to the sides and let down through the thick canopies.

  Cruz had had to rush and bully the men to get them off the helicopters and onto the uncertainly swaying platform, then do it all over again to get them moving down the ladders.

  Well . . . reservists, most of them. One has to make allowances.

  Now they moved as quickly as practical in a race to ambush a trail junction that intelligence insisted was regularly used by the denizens of several guerilla camps.

  Chapter Eleven

  The closed system problem, itself, consists of two related parts, belief in the practicality of social and technological stasis, even while insisting on material and / or moral betterment, and the unwillingness to accept that there are exterior issues beyond the control of the millennialist, which issues are beyond control precisely because they are exterior.

  The easy assumption of social and technological stasis, of course, fails, again precisely, because it is merely an easy and thoughtless assumption. And once it begins to fail, the millennialists, who cannot admit that their sophomoric fantasies are just that, turn to the secret police, the propaganda ministry, and thought control to enforce stasis.

  Millennialists also, be they Ayn Rand, from Old Earth, or the Red Tsar, from New, or the Cosmopolitan Progressives, from both, also live under the implicit delusion that the universe stops at the end of their reach. Where was Rand's answer to the problem of national defense or of public health (by which we mean plague prevention, not socialized medicine)? She had none but wishful thinking. How did the Red Tsars imagine they would keep out the ephemeral information that led to the downfall of the Volgan Empire? Oh, yes, they could keep people from leaving the empire, with barbed wire, walls, mines, machine guns, and dogs. But they could not keep information out, however hard they tried. The latter fact, acting on people imprisoned behind those walls and machine guns, was sure to cause an explosion. As for the Kosmos, even leaving aside the majority who appear to be nothing but unutterably corrupt and sanctimonious hypocrites, what is their answer to those who do not accept Cosmopolitan Progressivism and are aggressive about it? They have none. Or none they will admit to.

  —Jorge y Marqueli Mendoza,

  Historia y Filosofia Moral,

  Legionary Press, Balboa,

  Terra Nova, Copyright AC 468

  Anno Condita 471 La Palma Province, Balboa, Terra Nova

  Throughout the night Cruz's troops had sloshed through the swamp to the distant flash and muffled sounds of artillery. Now, with the water having receded to about ankle level, the sun was up and the damned mosquitoes were feasting. Worse, the platoon couldn't use any repellent; that might drive off the bugs but could also warn off the quarry. No one on Terra Nova had yet come up with an insect repellent that didn't stink. True, they had anti-histamine pills for the swelling and itching. They also had to hope their inoculations and malaria pills were sufficient to ward off disease. Yellow Fever was a disease particularly awful to contemplate.

  Cruz didn't have a junior officer to train yet, and perhaps never would. For all the Legion's rapid expansion, they kept to the rule: No more than three percent commissioned. Indeed, by the time he could expect the platoon to have an officer, it would probably have expanded to a maniple, of which he'd be first centurion, with two or three officers and seven or eight more optios and centurions.

  On the other hand, not having an officer, in an armed force that didn't have a fetish for paperwork (for which function officers were, admittedly, useful) suited Centurion Cruz just fine.

  Oh, all right! I suppose officers have other uses. But I don't need one for this.

  Ahead, the point of the platoon, two men from second squad, both raised a single fist overhead as they went to one knee. Water rippled outward in tiny waves from where the knees displaced it. All the rest of the platoon, except for Cruz, did likewise, in a wave running from front to rear. The centurion hunched over and walked forward to the point, perhaps a little awkwardly under his thirty kilogram pack.

  At the point, one of the scouts, holding middle and index finger together, pointed down slope to what appeared to be the junction of three trails, two leading east toward Balboa City and the Transitway, one leading west toward the Santander border. Cruz, laying his F-26 down carefully with the rifle's foregrip across his boot, pulled out his GLS receiver and map.

  After about thirty seconds' worth of study, Cruz nodded, half to himself and half to men on point. One finger went up which Cruz rotated rapidly in a circle: Squad leaders to me.

  While awaiting his immediate subordinates, Cruz cleared away some leaves and began drawing in the damp earth. His finger traced out the three trails, a river the map marked as being a bit further on, and positions for his subordinates. Once those arrived, he began giving instructions in a soft voice.

  For most of the men, this was a first combat mission.

  Up to me to make sure it isn't a last combat mission, thought the centurion.

  * * *

  Esteban was the first one out of Camp Twenty-seven. This was more due to the fortuitous accident of being the first to warn the jefe than to any organization on the part of the jefe or his men. Organization was not actually a FNLS strong point anyway.

  It was as well that he was the firs
t one out. Before half the group had left, while the tail of the column was still forming, the camp had been suddenly drenched with a deluge of fire. With trees rising up and then collapsing to the jungle floor, with huts expanding out to their molecular components, and with the cries of butchered men and women somehow rising above the roar of the shells, Esteban and his comrades—such as remained—did what any sane men might do when faced with a power they could not resist. They ran.

  * * *

  The ambush on the trail leading to the Santander border was "V" shaped, where the apex of the V was at an angle of ninety degrees. At that apex, two M-26s, the light machine gun version of Balboa's F-26, aimed up the trail. The integral scopes for the machine guns were rotated off to the right side; for this kind of beaten zone in this kind of light, human eyesight, unaugmented, was superior to the highest practical technology.

  Each arm of the V was composed of one squad. The third squad to the platoon Cruz had sent swinging out and westward, in two parts, to warn of the approach of others, to seal off the kill zone and "pick up the spare," and to act as security outposts for when Cruz and the platoon sprang their first ambush and then raced westward to set up two more.

  Cruz, too, was at the apex of the V, his rifle set to one side and twin detonators for directional mines clutched in his hands. He glanced left at a nervous-seeming M-26 gunner. The gunner, Castillo, a short, stocky militiaman with about four months of initial entry training and maybe eight weekend drills, eighteen years old and scared shitless, felt rather than saw his centurion's gaze. Sheepishly, Castillo looked back at Cruz and forced a smile out, then discovered he felt the better for it. The gunner resumed peering through his sight. He didn't say a word, though he did think, Thanks, Centurion. If you don't look worried, I guess I don't have to be.