Carnifex

by Tom Kratman

  Safe enough bet, though, he thought. Like most tricks, it's unlikely to work more than once.

  Still silently, the boatswain said a small prayer for the success of the Trinidad and the Agustin.

  BdL Santisima Trinidad

  The sea state, so long after the storm, was low and the bow rode high, skipping over the waves, propelled by twin screws driven by sixty-two hundred horsepower. Pedraz stood at the helm, giving light taps to the wheel to cut expertly across the waves. His body bounced in time with the beating of the hull.

  Up front, on the 40mm, stood Seamen Clavell and Guptillo. The pair wore Legion standard (plus) body armor and helmets, though Clavell's helmet covered a set of headphones that were hooked into the boat's intercom. The "plus" came in the form of a silk and liquid metal apron that extended over the crotch, and liquid metal greaves covering chins and knees. There wasn't a hell of a lot of cover on a patrol boat.

  A few paces behind the gun crouched two more of the crew, likewise accoutered. One of these carried a clip of five 40mm shells and was close to the forty. The other had the same but was closer to the magazine well from which more shells would be passed upward.

  Pedraz looked to port where Seaman Leonardo Panfillo clutched the spade grips of a .41-caliber heavy machine gun. The shiny brass belt draped down before disappearing into a gray painted ammunition can. Pedraz looked for signs of worry in Panfillo's face. There weren't any—and perhaps this made perfect sense after having braved the hair-raising transfer during the storm—but only a look of grim determination.

  Satisfied with Panfillo, the skipper glanced to starboard where Estèban Santiona manned the .41 on that side. He was heavyset, was Santiona, but the weight helped him control the vicious vibration of the HMG. Something, at least, made the sailor such a bloody good gunner; in informal competition with the gunners of the other boats in the tercio Santiona had, frankly, kicked the rest of the patrol boat maniple's posteriors.

  "Estèban," Pedraz shouted over the roar of the engines and the pounding of the water. "Leave a couple of the bastards for the rest to practice on, got it?"

  "Si, mi skipper," the rotund gunner answered without looking up.

  The Ironsides and Pedraz had worked out a simple method by which the supercarrier could vector in the patrol boat to the targets without being too obvious about it. The method was that the Trinidad and its sister ship were assigned a flight number, Blue Jay Four Three. The Ironsides' radio room broadcast vectors under that flight number. Pedraz heard and adjusted his course while Agustin's skipper merely followed Pedraz. The carrier couched the directions in terms of naval aviation but had schooled Pedraz to ignore the parts irrelevant to him. They'd also told him not to acknowledge the directions. For further deception, Ironsides had put up an aircraft which would follow those directions.

  One never could tell who might be listening.

  UEPF Spirit of Peace

  The computer on Robinson's desk spoke. "Captain Wallenstein, I have discovered an anomaly."

  "Go," ordered the captain, simply.

  "There are two small surface craft in the area of focused observation that should not be there. Moreover, when the largest of the vessels in the area broadcasts certain directions, an aircraft responds by taking those directions, but so do the surface craft."

  Crap! "Show me."

  The Kurosawa immediately panned in to show the Trinidad and the Agustin skimming the waves, leaving broad V-shaped wakes behind them. Resolution was just fine enough for Wallenstein to make out darkened blobs on deck that had to be men.

  She hit an intercom button. "Admiral? Marguerite. Come back to your quarters immediately."

  * * *

  Abdulahi could read a chart as well as the next pirate. When Robinson called to warn him of the position, direction and speed of the patrol boats bearing down on his men he knew immediately that they were on an intercept course. He tried frantically to call the leader of the band on the radio but, maintenance being what it was among the Xamari . . .

  It took longer than a radio would have, had it been working, to get through via cell phone. It was pretty amusing, really, that Xamar couldn't have police, fire or medical services, that courts were right out, and that transportation was catch as catch can. Even so, somehow they managed to keep cell phone service up and running. Some called it "connectedness."

  What a silly word, Abdulahi thought, while waiting for his son to answer the phone. It's touted as the route to civilizing the more barbaric parts of Terra Nova, whatever "civilizing" may mean. In practice, it means that a slave dealer in Pashtia can know whether the price for fourteen year old female virgins or fat little boys is higher in Kashmir or among the brothels of Taurus. It means the drug smuggler can easily learn both where he might obtain the best price for his merchandise and where the risk of arrest is least. It means money laundered from crime and corruption. It means corruption extending its influence to yet new places from its more familiar paths.

  "Connectedness" means that, when you mixed a gallon of cat piss with a gallon of goat's milk, the mix tastes a lot more of the former than of the latter.

  When we in Xamar were still a real country then being connected to the rest of the globe would probably have been a good thing, for us and for everyone else. As is? It makes everything worse. I couldn't be the pirate I am, nor what used to be my country the mess that it is, without our "connectedness." And I'm not sure it wasn't our "connectedness" to the rest of the globe that ruined us.

  * * *

  "Lungile" he was called by his Bantu-speaking concubine mother, herself taken as a girl in a slave raid by Abdulahi. "The good one," it meant, and to his mother he had indeed been a good son. As son of Abdulahi, Lungile was the leader of the three pirate vessels. Nineteen-years-old and closing to action, Lungile didn't hear the ringing at first over the straining, gasping sounds of his boat's overused and undermaintained diesels. On approximately the fourteenth ring he noticed it and answered, "Yes, Father?"

  "My son, it's a trap. How far are you from the target?"

  "Perhaps forty minutes, Father." The boy's voice sounded calm enough. "What it is this time? More of their silly sound machines? We can face those. What to fear from a demon's wail?"

  "Ai, forty minutes? Then it is too late for you to take hostages. And it may be too late also for you to turn around and make it back to shore. Lungile, my son, it is not the sound machines. There are two small warships almost upon you. Our friends say they are fast, partly armored and well armed with cannon and machine guns. They say the boats are from the infidel mercenaries."

  It was still an even and calm voice that answered, "Then we will run, Father, and if we cannot escape we will sell our lives as dearly as possible."

  The boy's mother had never been a favorite, but Abdulahi had always had a soft spot in his heart for the boy, himself. So brave and forthright he was, so full of fire was his heart. I will miss this boy. I will . . .

  "My son . . . " and the father's voice choked with emotion and pain, " . . . if you must die then, yes, die like men."

  "Il hamdu l'illah, Father; we shall if we must."

  * * *

  In CIC, aboard the Ironsides, a sailor huddled over a screen and watching a real time image from a military satellite. He whispered a curse and announced, "They're turning for home."

  The captain looked at the ops board and answered, "They're probably too slow to escape but they might get in close enough to swim for it."

  "Wouldn't matter, Cap'n," his ops officer said. "If those legion boys catch 'em in the water they'll kill 'em anyway."

  "War crime?"

  "No, sir. In this one type of case the international law enforcement model makes perfect sense. It really is a law enforcement problem and the law says, 'kill 'em,' skipper. Fleeing Felon Rule, it's called."

  The captain nodded. "Call the Trinidad. Give them the code word for we've been made and give them the pirate's new course."

  * * *

  "A stern c
hase is a long chase," Lungile whispered to himself. "But when one boat is four times faster it isn't long enough."

  His own boat had begun life as a sport fisher, back when Xamar had actually had tourism. As such, it had a flying bridge and a climbable mast above it. Lungile stood atop that mast, gripping the ladder with one hand and surplus Volgan binoculars with the other. Through the binoculars, pressed tight to his eyes, Lungile searched for his pursuers. He'd caught glimpses of them, each one closer, when waves happened to have lifted both boats simultaneously. The mercenaries boats looked . . . Lungile searched for the right word . . .

  "Like sharks," he decided, "like predators."

  Lungile turned away from his pursuers toward the distant beckoning coast and safety. There was no real chance of making it unless he could somehow drive off both of the enemy craft. But to fight them . . .

  "Hard left," he shouted to the helmsman.

  * * *

  Lower, with no flying bridge, Pedraz saw the smoke from the badly-maintained diesels before ever he saw the smoke's source.

  "XO, take the wheel," he ordered, backing off and pulling out a set of binocular that hung hard by.

  Immediately his assistant, Cristobal Francés, flashed black eyes and answered, "Aye, aye, skipper." Francés was huge, towering above his captain. His long arms reached out as he right-stepped to take the wheel seamlessly.

  Pedraz raised the binos to his eyes, swept the horizon until catching sight of the smoke, and looked down from that. The smoke grew thicker but the boat was not visible. He waited, keeping the glasses fixed at the lowest part of the column of smoke . . . he waited . . . he waited . . . he . . .

  "They've decided to risk a fight," he announced. "Radio! Get on the horn to Agustin and Dos Lindas. Tell them the pirates are ready and waiting, arms in their hands. Agustin is to stand off at .41-caliber range and engage the two to starboard. We will take on the port pirate ourselves before going to join Agustin."

  "XO?"

  "Aye, skipper."

  "I want to go straight in to about six hundred meters then cut sharp a-port."

  "Roger, skipper."

  Pedraz flicked a switch on the headphones he wore, in common with the 40mm crew, uncomfortably under his helmet. "Main gun?"

  "Aye, skipper," Clavell answered.

  "You may open fire on your own hook when the target is visible and in effective range. Forward port and starboard Heavy Machine Guns?"

  "Port here, Chief," answered Panfillo.

  "Esteban here, skipper."

  "I don't expect you to actually hit anything until we're within two thousand, so hold you fire until then."

  "Aye, aye, skipper."

  "Aye."

  * * *

  The rocket grenade launchers, or RGLs, were the older version. They could reach out to eleven hundred meters; the rocket motor would drive them that far, but the integral fuse self-detonated them at just over nine hundred. They could hit a target the size of a tank at three hundred, but would generally miss at four. A larger target, something like the eighty-two-foot length of a patrol boat like the Trinidad or Agustin, they could, at least conceivably, hit at something like six hundred.

  It didn't really matter that the RGLs weren't very likely to hit. They were the best the pirates had and so they had to try.

  Lungile pushed and cuffed his RGL gunners, four of them to the forward

  deck where the backblast wouldn't endanger the ship or the other crewmen, the other two to the rear. He ordered the two to the stern to load fragmentation rounds. These were forty-millimeter, rather than seventy, and might, he thought, extend the practical range of the shells as the fragments reached forward in a cone after the shells exploded. Other crew, armed with rifles and light machine guns, he put to lining the gunwales on the side he was presenting to the enemy.

  They'll never close to where we have a decent chance of a hit, thought Lungile. Best to try for the longer shots, then. At the speed they look like they're making, that would be . . . mmm . . . maybe two minutes. We'll wait . . .

  Then Lungile saw the flashing flame and the puffs of smoke from the forward deck of the infidel boat.

  * * *

  The 40mm, L56 gun was not so much a lightweight as a miniature heavyweight. In the other version, the longer and higher velocity version purchased for the Dos Lindas, it fired up to four-hundred-and-fifty, eight-hundred-and-seventy gram shells per minute from a one hundred and one round magazine. On the patrol boats the Legion had mounted the lighter weight, simpler, slower firing, and frankly obsolescent, land version. This had only a forty-three round magazine but, on the plus side, the weight and recoil were not enough to capsize the boat. The crews thought this was a pretty good tradeoff.

  Guptillo's job wasn't to keep the magazine filled under full rate of fire; that was impossible. Rather, he and the other feeders were tasked to reload the fixed magazine after it went dry. This took considerably longer than emptying the thing did.

  It could have, perhaps even should have, been a much more sophisticated system then it was. Ideally, given the rise and fall of the bow, the gun would have had an integral laser range finder and pseudo-stabilization system that allowed it to fire only when the elevation matched the sight. It didn't have anything like that. Instead, it had Clavell and the finest fire control computer in the known galaxy, the human brain.

  The problem with using the brain as one's fire control computer, however, is that it is an absolute bitch to program.

  * * *

  With the first salvo of infidel shells, Lungile knew he had a chance, if not a great one. He thought he saw four short-falling shells impact and explode on the ocean's surface. At least one shell, he knew for a fact, overshot the boat. He knew it because it went right through one of the crew standing above the open-backed wheelhouse, waving his rifle around and shouting imprecations at the enemy. Apparently the pirate's body didn't create enough resistance to detonate the shell. This helped, though the body practically exploded anyway, showering the crew with blood, bone and meat, and sending one other pirate down with a chunk of rib buried in his throat.

  And still the enemy boat was too far away to engage.

  "Wait for the order, you bastards," Lungile shouted at his gunners.

  * * *

  "Clavell, you bastard, you missed!" Pedraz shouted into the intercom.

  "Sorry, skipper. But hey, I bracketed it. Did you see that fucker go poof?"

  Pedraz simply grunted, then said, "Hold fire until we're closer; twelve hundred meters should do."

  "Aye, skipper."

  "And Santiona and Panfillo, you're going to have the same problem Clavell did, the rise and fall of the bow. Hold fire till we get to eight hundred."

  * * *

  Lungile's eyeball was no better calibrated than Clavell's. His weapons were considerably less sophisticated. Yet, as his mother was fond of saying, "The lion runs for a meal; the antelope for his life."

  He couldn't run, of course, the pitiful ancient engines of his craft would get him nowhere when pursued by such swift opponents. Unlike the antelope, however, he had fangs.

  "Fire!"

  * * *

  Pedraz saw the flash of flame and the balls of smoke erupt from the pirate ship at the same time Clavell opened fire again with the 40mm.

  The forty is high velocity, but not that high. I wonder . . . FUCK!

  "Incoming!" Pedraz screamed, loud enough to be heard over the engines even down in the galley, just as half a dozen much larger balls of flame and smoke appeared in the air between his boat and his chosen target.

  * * *

  Santiona, like the other side machine gunners, scrunched down over his .41 to take any fragments on his helmet and the shoulder-reinforced lorica body armor. This left his legs open and unprotected but for the greaves. The greaves, moreover, didn't quite cover his bulky legs. That, of course, was where he was hit.

  He felt a sort of plucking in three or four places on his legs and thought little of it unt
il he looked down and saw his uniform rapidly reddening. Santiona felt suddenly nauseous. Then the burning began, a result of the hot bits of metal lodged in his flesh.

  Shouting, "Medic!" the wounded gunner released the spade grips and sat heavily to the deck, his hands pressing to staunch the flow of blood. As soon as his rear hit he remembered his duty and also shouted, "Replacement gunner!"

  The medic hustled up from a spot at the rear of the deck from which he could normally keep his eyes on all the crew in action. He stopped at the hatchway just long enough to shout down to the engine room, "Replacement gunner on Number Two!" before dashing over to render aid to Santiona.

  * * *

  Lungile felt a momentary rush of joy mixed with relief when he saw the half dozen RGL warheads self-detonate and then one of his enemies fall to the deck. That rush was shortlived, as the apparently wounded man was replaced almost immediately and someone else—a medic, Lungile assumed—began tended the man on deck before dragging him off.

  Another reason for the short duration of the pirate's joy was that the enemy boat veered sharply to Lungile's right, slowed to about twenty knots and opened fire again. This time, at that slow speed—still twice that of his own bucket—and with the range closed and the bow no longer doing the Samba with the sea, the 40mm proved deadly. Another five round burst lanced out. This time, three of the five shells found the bow of his boat. It half disintegrated in fire and metal shards mixed with smoldering wood splinters. A dozen men screamed in pain as splinter and shard found them.

  One of the shells hit very near the waterline, near enough to it, in fact, to blast a hole large enough to let the sea come pouring in. The bow lowered and the boat slowed with the increased resistance. As it lowered, still more water gushed in.