by Tom Kratman
"Close and board!" screamed the pirate chief. "It's our only chance!"
* * *
Two of the girls with her screamed when the boat was rocked by the blast. Barely, Jaquelina restrained herself from pasting them. Didn't they know what they volunteered for? Then again, did I?
She felt a bit better once the other guns opened up. But then she realized there was no fire coming from amidships, the same direction as had come the blast. Jaquelina, too, could add two plus two and come up with "Holy shit."
"Oh, fuck," she whispered, then asked, "Who'll come with me?"
* * *
The fire was terrible. The pirate boat had no armor, and its wood was little more than tissue paper to the heavy guns engaging it. The infidels' main gun, on deck, simply tore the wheel house and most of its occupants to bits.
The chief of the boat, miraculously unhit so far, lay on his belly amidst a layer of spilled blood, torn flesh and bits of shattered bone. One arm upraised and his hand grasping the wheel, he steered through a hole made by the enemy and he steered directly for the target ship. Already, the larger gun was overshooting. He suspected he was under its arc of fire. Already the boat had closed to the point that the two remaining heavy machine guns could only fire at its stern corners. There was a chance if, and only if, the pirates could get close enough to board. And that seemed at least possible.
* * *
Only one girl was willing to go on with Jaquelina, her friend and lover, Marta. Marta was an enormous amazon of a woman, dwarfing Jaquelina in every dimension. Nervous—well, terrified, to be honest—the amazon followed the little hooker out of their armored shelter and down the smoky central corridor of the ship until they reached amidships. There, they turned to the direction from which had come the earlier blast.
Marta shrieked when she saw one crewman, sans head, laying on the blood-soaked deck. The other gunner was slumped over his gun, burned and barely breathing.
"Shut up, Marta," Jaquelina ordered as she went to the slumped and hurt gunner. "This one's still alive."
Together, the two eased the hurt Cazador to the bloody deck. The boy's face was a mess, which caused Jaquie to tsk and Marta to shudder.
"He'll live, I think, though he won't be very pretty," Jaquie announced.
Marta didn't reply directly, pointing instead out the hole in the hull and saying, "Maybe he'll live. We won't."
Jaquie's eyes followed Marta's pointing finger. There, a scant fifty meters away, the chewed up bow of their attackers plowed a shallow furrow in the sea.
"Fuck!"
Jaquelina tore her gaze from the enemy vessel and let it come to rest upon the gun. Looks like . . . mmm . . . a scaled-down version of the FS Model Fifty heavy machine gun. Well . . . I know how to use one of those, courtesy of the Arenista National Liberation Front. That jacket around the barrel looks funny but . . . oh, it's for water cooling. Those can fire a lllooonnnggg time without overheating.
She knelt down behind the gun. Ammunition's already fed. Looks like . . . mmm . . . three hundred rounds; two boxes.
"Honey, we're in business," she said to Marta. "Go grab a couple more cans of ammunition."
Jaquie's right hand lowered to the wheel on the gun's traversing and elevating mechanism and began to twist it counter-clockwise to raise the line of fire. Her left hand took hold of the left spade grip. She rested that thumb on the gun's butterfly trigger. Scrunching herself as low as possible, so as not to be seen by the pirates massing on their ship's bow in preparation for a boarding, Jaquie shifted her right hand to the traversing wheel and moved the gun's traverse to the right side of the mass of pirate humanity.
"Now we wait until they line themselves up," she muttered. "Come to Mama, babies."
* * *
Centurion Rodriguez and Warrant Chu were more or less pinned in the wheelhouse. While Chu tried to steer the boat a port to gain a little distance from the pirates, Rodriguez attempted to poke his head around the fortified wheelhouse corner to return fire on them.
"Fucking bastards!" Rodriguez cried out, jerking his head back and rolling in pain on the deck while clawing wooden splinters from his face and one bloody eye.
* * *
Jaquie had blood in her eye as the pirate ship closed to within fifteen meters. She made a quick, fine adjustment to the traversing wheel and used her thumb to depress the gun's trigger. The pounding of the heavy machine gun's blast in the close confines of its cabin was painful to her ears. Even so, she kept up the fire with her left hand while twisting the traversing wheel with her right. In her line of sight she saw pirates bowled down, spraying blood. As often as not, the heavy bullets punched right through two and even three and four men before continuing on. She heard their cries of victory turn to despair and the sound raised a wicked grin on her face.
The gun gave a clang and the grin turned to a grimace of pain. A return shot, aimed or just lucky, had hit it causing the bullet to carom off the side plate to bury itself in her right side, just below the ribs. Even so, she never let up with her left thumb nor stopped traversing with her right hand.
Note to self: Next time I really need to ask for body armor.
* * *
Chu let go the wheel to pull Rodriguez back behind fuller cover. The blood flowed too thickly for the sailor to see the damage. He pulled a water bottle from a holder above deck and poured its contents over the centurion's eye.
This is probably a mistake, he thought, as he reached to remove a thin spike of wood from the white of the eye. Rodriguez screamed, once, as the splinter was removed. Blood flowed even more freely afterwards. Still, the pain became more or less manageable.
"Thanks, Chu," he whispered. "See to the defense . . . I'll be all right."
* * *
Blast the pirates into eternity Jaquelina could do, wounded or not. What she could not do was stop the progress of their boat. It continued on, closer and closer, until it rammed the side of the Suzy Q, staving it in and causing water to pour through the rupture.
"Marta!" she screamed, "See to the wounded boy and let's get the fuck out of here!"
Jaquelina stood up and backed away from the gun. Blood suddenly began to rush from her wounded side.
"Mierde," she muttered, and promptly fainted.
* * *
The bilge pumps kicked in automatically, relieving Chu of the burden of flipping a switch while trying to lead his own crew and the Cazadors. Whatever or whoever it was who'd taken over the central .41 on that side might have knocked the pirates' dicks loose, but just couldn't stop the boat or kill them all.
Well before he'd been enticed into becoming a squid, Chu had been a pretty fair riflemen with the Fourth Tercio. He picked up Rodriguez's bayoneted rifle and, screaming something unintelligible even to himself, launched himself bodily to the spot where his hull was breached and the pirates oozing over the side.
He was joined at the boarding point by Legionario Tomás Guillermo, the latter likewise charging forward with bayonet point to the front. The prow of the pirate vessel was on a rough plane with the side of the Suzy Q. They met, Chu and Guillermo on the one side, half a dozen half-panicked pirates on the other. The pirates towered over the little legionaries but, since both the legionaries had body armor—better still, training—the first two Xamaris met went down with screams made gurgling by the blood filling their lungs.
"Get the fuck away from my fucking ship you scum-sucking bastards!" Chu cried.
* * *
By the time Marta got on deck, Jaquelina carried under one arm and the burnt legionary slung over her shoulder, the other hookers had also emerged. Marta set Jaquie down gently and just as carefully laid the legionary alongside her.
"Does anybody know first aid?" Marta asked.
"Sure," answered one of the girls, brightly. "I know just what to do; I've watched the legionaries." She then proceeded to fill her not unimpressive lungs with air and screamed "Medddiiiccc!"
* * *
With their own boat sink
ing under them, the legionaries had little choice but to swarm the other. Leaving their machine guns and grabbing rifles, they followed Chu and Guillermo in a surge over the gunwales. The pirates had little chance of stopping that charge. While the bodies and not-quite-yet bodies were being rolled over the side to the gathering sharks, the legionaries collected their wounded and dead and carried them across. A half dozen pirates they saved for questioning. Besides, Fosa had said he thought it would be good for morale for the rest of the fleet to see some of their enemies hang.
UEPF Spirit of Peace
"We'll call that one a draw," High Admiral Robinson decided, looking at a high resolution recording of the Suzy Q's fight with the Xamaris.
Wallenstein shook her head. "No . . . I don't think so. Sure, the pirates managed to sink the mercenaries' yacht, and sure the mercenaries only got a crappy, slow, tramp fishing boat in return. But all the pirates died, if you count the ones the mercenaries hanged off the flight deck of their aircraft carrier and those they fed to the sharks. Those pirates won't be going home and people in Xamar are eventually going to wonder what horror it is out at sea that eats their sons and doesn't even spit out the bones. No, Admiral, sorry, but it was a loss."
Robinson, being a Class One, hated being corrected by lesser castes. Even so, he was willing to admit Wallenstein was right to the extent that he changed the subject slightly.
"I understand that the FSC is considering rehiring those mercenaries for employment in Pashtia."
"For a very impressive amount of money," Wallenstein agreed. "How do we use that?"
She already had a number of ideas of how to put the deployment out of country of the legions to good use but, since she wanted Class One status more than she wanted life, she thought it best to let the High Admiral recoup from being corrected.
"They're going to have to send sixty-five or seventy percent of their force over if they're going to do any good," Robinson said. "The Taurans are collapsing in Pashtia. That will put the Tauran forces in Balboa on a rough par with the legions, not counting the mercenaries' reserves. It might be enough for the Taurans to interfere with the election there. Our ambassador says that this Parilla bastard is certain to win any open and fair election."
"What do you have in mind?" Wallenstein asked.
"Well . . . suppose we have the World League and the Tauran Union insist on sending observers to oversee the election. Perhaps we can have that idiot ex-president from the FSC go, too. You know the one, Wozniak. No matter how the elections go, they can insist there was voter intimidation, ballot-box fraud, the usual. Then the Government of Balboa can refuse to step down. The Tauran troops can protect that government as long as they match the rump of the Legion in power."
"What about the FSC?"
"About one quarter of the FSC is Progressive, which is to say, Taurophile and United Earthophile, at heart. That's probably enough to stymie any FS support for mercenaries that even the more fascistic among them consider to be distasteful. So it would be just the Taurans against the Balboans."
Wallenstein considered that. "I don't think the Taurans are enough."
With that, Robinson agreed. "They're not; no tolerance for heavy casualties. The Taurans and the Zhong together might be enough though."
Robinson had no clue he was almost echoing Gallic General Janier. Still, the objective reality of the matter was available to both men. Why should they not draw similar conclusions?
"They might," Wallenstein conceded. "I wonder though, if we're not actually creating exactly the threat we fear."
And that was as far as she was willing to go. She did, after all, want Class One status.
Interlude
SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES
CORDER, GOVERNOR, UTAH v. SIMPSON, COMMISSIONER, INTERNAL REVENUE SERVICE
CERTIORARI TO THE TAX COURT OF THE UNITED STATES
Argued October 13, 2104–Decided March 1, 2105
The overwhelming weight of international opinion that fair and just taxation of the richest portion of humanity for the benefit of the poorest and most exploited is not controlling here, but provides respected and significant confirmation for the Court's holding that the Fairness in Taxation Act of 2101 is both constitutional and binding upon those states which have, so far, failed to implement its provisions. See, e.g., Tomlins, supra, at 831—832, and n. 30. The United States is the only country in the world that continues to deny to its superior organization, the United Nations, its fair and just due in fiscal and tax matters. It does not lessen fidelity to the Constitution or pride in its origins to acknowledge that the concept of national—still less so, state—sovereignty has grown dated, and no longer meets the aspirations of a kinder and more enlightened world. Express affirmation of certain fundamental rights by other nations and peoples underscores the centrality of those same rights within our own heritage of freedom. Correspondingly, their entitlement to support and development lays a duty upon the so-far privileged portion of humanity to pay. The duty to pay implies, indeed, requires, the right to tax.
Chapter Nine
"So where are those villainous louts, those mercenaries?"
—Mohammad Saeed al Sahaf (aka "Baghdad Bob") Old Earth year 2003
10/7/467 AC, Isla Real
The airplane, a legionary Cricket but fitted out with VIP seats, landed in the typical Balboan swelter. Its landing roll was a bit under eleven meters. As soon as the door opened Rivers felt a wilting blast of wet heat. Carrera's AdC, a junior tribune named Miranda, met Rivers at the airfield with apologies from Carrera for not being there personally. The tribune took Rivers' single bag, himself.
"The Duque is in the field with a cohort at the moment, sir," Miranda explained. "He'll be along within the hour and hopes you will understand."
Rivers grunted a noncommittal response, while thinking, He's got to know why I came. Is this his way of saying, "Stuff it; I won't work for the FSC while the Progressives are in charge," I wonder.
Miranda showed Rivers to a gleaming staff car, a Yamatan job, and then held the door for the general to enter. He then took over the front passenger seat and directed the driver to proceed.
You've got to be impressed, thought Rivers as the staff car took him on the short ride from Punta Coco airfield to Legion Headquarters. Seven years ago a single brigade without a home; now it's grown to a fair-sized corps with a damned nice home.
On the way in, Rivers had counted the ships anchored in the bay from his aircraft porthole. Now, on the ground, Rivers took the trouble to count filled and empty aircraft parking spots as the car eased along the road. What he counted impressed him still more. Over five hundred aircraft. Christ, he's outwinged PanColumbian Airlines and half the Tauran Union. Of course, most of his aircraft are smaller.
And the troops looked fit, well-fed and disciplined, he thought, too, as the car passed a company-sized unit. The troops wore helmets and body armor, but had a spring in their step that told of a light and comfortable panoply. I like that camouflage pattern.
The pattern was a pixilated tiger stripe material Carrera had had made up by a company in the FSC that specialized in such things. The material was printed, and the uniforms cut and sewn, by a factory in the City he and Parilla had set up to provide employment to war widows, reservists and their wives, and disabled legionary vets. Those folks put a lot of care into the uniforms they made. They made other clothing, too, which sold rather well in the Republic and had even begun to acquire a small overseas market.
The staff car stopped at an intersection as a column of nineteen Volgan-built tanks rolled across, each preceded by a walking ground guide. And they're pretty professional in other respects, too. Well . . . I suppose I should have expected that.
The car turned left at Miranda's direction and entered into a long, tree-lined thoroughfare before ending at a ring road surrounding an amazingly green parade field with a large, white-painted headquarters building on the other side of the field. It navigated around the parade field, pulled
up to the columned front of the building and then stopped. Miranda got out, opened the door for Rivers, and led him between the columns and into the building.
The door opened into a broad interior vestibule, reaching up three floors to a battle scene-mural painted on the ceiling. On the upper floors it was surrounded by a marble rail. The bottom floor, the planta baja, was of a locally cut and polished, golden oak-colored granite. Upon the floor stood a slightly larger-than-life-sized marble statue of a fully equipped legionary holding a bayoneted bronze rifle in "charge bayonets" pose. The walls were mostly bare, though portraits of uniformed men with decorations for valor about their necks hung in places. Officers, a few, plus centurions, noncoms and enlisted men, all in undress khakis, bustled from room to room, across the vestibule and through the corridors. The whole place had an air of elegant efficiency.
If he can afford to build this, Rivers thought, he's not hurting for money. Oh, Lordy, is this going to sting.
Miranda beckoned Rivers on, through a door, up two flights of steps, down a quiet corridor and, finally, into Carrera's office. Rivers noticed the secretary was male and uniformed as well. He also noticed the boy was missing an arm.
Waste not, want not.
"The Duque said to make you comfortable, sir. Is there anything I can order for you? Coffee? A beer? Whiskey or mixed drink from the mess in the basement, if you like."
"Coffee would be fine . . . ah . . . Tribune. Just fine, thank you. Cream and sugar."
"Very good, sir."
Miranda turned and left as Rivers sat on one of the chairs. In a few minutes, the one-armed boy brought in a tray holding a cup of steaming hot coffee. He set it down and left without a word.
The rear wall of the office was mostly a very large window, Rivers noticed. He walked over to it and looked out on the scene of cows and the solar chimney that ran up the island's central massif. The cloud formed and continuously renewed above the chimney was . . . rather soothing to watch, Rivers decided. He was still watching when he sensed a sudden stiffening that seemed to take in the entire building. A few minutes later Carrera entered the office.