by Tom Kratman
Astern, Francés leapt to his feet, almost losing his footing to Turco's wet blood, and grabbed the spade grips of the .41-caliber tribarrel. From across the water, he and an Ikhwan gunner from Two stared at each other for what might have been the longest nanosecond in human history.
"Motherfucker!" Francés exclaimed as he deftly swung the tribarrel to bear on the machine gunner. Before the gun was on target, his finger was already depressing the trigger, causing the electrically driven barrels to spin and the gun to spit out its eighteen hundred rounds per minute. While the mujahad's bullets went wide, Francés' swath of fire cut right across his target, from left hip to right ribs, slicing—though by no means neatly—the Ikhwan gunner in two, spilling his intestines to the deck.
* * *
Pedraz looked around his half ruined boat and his mostly ruined crew. Men shrieked in agony on the deck, with the boat's sole medic frantically going from one to the other, desperately trying to staunch the flow of blood here, relieve pain there.
Behind the Trinidad, One and Two lay smoking and dead in the water. Two was plainly sinking, though it was taking its time about it.
If I had more time . . .
Time was about up, however, and Pedraz knew what he had to do. "Clavell, cease fire," he said, gunning the engine and twisting the boat away. It made a tight turn, then headed off away from the Hoogaboom and slightly towards the carrier.
Picking up his microphone, Pedraz broadcast, "Agustin, this is Trinidad. Get the hell away from the freighter. Don't argue. Just do it."
BdL Dos Lindas
Kurita had stationed himself beside the one serviceable forty-millimeter gun on the carrier's stern port quarter. To either side of him, twenty-millimeter cannon and forty-one caliber machine guns churned futily at the oncoming scow. And the forty does no good either. For that matter, the pounding isn't doing my head much good. No help for that, though.
He watched a small and gallant patrol boat, the Trinidad, he thought, trading fire with, then turn and run right in between two patrol boats. Glorious, thought Kurita, In the best naval tradition. Brave boys. Bravo. Banzai.
Kurita watched as the PTF, smoking and clearly hurt, pulled away and began to retreat. No shame in that, my friends, he thought. You must save whatever you can of this fleet. We here are, after all, just dead men now.
No matter for me, of course. I've been dead since I failed my emperor. But it's a shame about the others.
Kurita watched a Finch swoop down to lay a barrage of rockets on the top of the freighter. They seemed to have no effect at all, except to cause a missile to be launched upward at the Finch. Then Kurita remembered something old and sacred. I wonder if . . . but, no, there's no way to suggest it to you.
Kurita looked out and saw a most remarkable thing. The small patrol boat he thought was the Trinidad turned and almost stopped, as about half a dozen men began to assemble on the rear deck.
* * *
"I . . . can't . . . go . . . into the water, skipper. With this blood . . . the sharks will come . . . for me. I can't."
"All right, Santiona," Pedraz agreed.
"You'll need a back up, Chief," Francés said. And that's, rightfully, my place."
Pedraz had intended to make his last ride alone. It was frustrating and infuriating that more than half his never-sufficiently- to-be-damned, mutinous crew wouldn't go along.
"See, it's like this, Chief," Francés explained, with a casual shrug. "That ship is probably loaded with explosives. This wasn't a minor effort, here, after all, so I figure two, maybe three thousand tons. Nobody who gets off has much of a prayer of surviving that, if it goes off. So . . . all the same, I'd rather not jump ship. It wouldn't do any good anyway. Besides, like Santiona said, we put wounded into the water we'll have sharks all over everyone."
But still, Pedraz wanted to save something. He looked at the youngest crewman, and nearly the only one unhurt who could be spared. That youngest was a nice kid named Miguel Quijana. Quijana, like the others, wore helmet, body armor, and over that a life vest.
Pedraz grabbed the seaman by the shoulders and said, "Stay as much on the surface as possible. Watch carefully; when we hit you'll have a few moments between when the first wave of concussion passes under water and the debris starts falling. Remember, the concussion under water will be worse. Don't get under water until you can feel that wave of concussion pass. Then get under fast. Good luck, son."
With that, Pedraz turned the boy around to face the stern and, placing a boot on his rear end, shoved him off into the sea.
"For the rest of you, Battle Stations! Banzai, motherfuckers!"
* * *
Nobody left the boat, Kurita could see, except for one man deliberately booted off, probably by the captain. And then the boat began to move forward, picking up speed at an amazing rate.
Another man might not have understood. Yet Kurita understood perfectly and immediately. Divine wind. Kamikaze.
He tapped the leader of the forty-millimeter crew and said, "Go and warn the other gunners on this side, you and your crew. Get the hell behind cover. Now!"
Then, as soon as that crew had sped off, Kurita drew himself to attention, saluted the Trinidad with his sword, and began, softly and in an old man's reedy voice, to sing Kimigayo—
" . . . Until pebbles
Turn into boulders
Covered with moss."
* * *
Fosa, too, saw Trinidad's death ride, through the cracked windows of the bridge. He, like Kurita, stood to attention and saluted. Though he had his sword, the one that Kurita had given him, saluting with the hand just seemed more . . . personal.
Some members of the bridge crew, following their commander's gaze and understanding what the salute meant, likewise came to attention and rendered the hand salute. They and Fosa held those salutes all the way to when the Trinidad disappeared into the hull of the enemy freighter, and halfway through the incredible, barely sub-nuclear, explosion that followed.
UEPF Spirit of Peace
"They survived," Robinson said, later, in his quarters. "They couldn't have survived, but they did. The Ikhwan ship was that fucking close," he held out his hand with thumb and forefinger a bare inch apart, "that fucking close, and still that fucking ship survived. It isn't possible."
The High Admiral of the United Earth Peace Fleet nearly wept with the sheer frustration of it all. So upset was he that Wallenstein, without being ordered to, dropped to her knees and began to undo his belt. He pushed her away, roughly.
"No . . . not you tonight, Marguerite. Send me Khan, the wife. I want to hurt something."
Interlude
2/1/49 AC, Atlantis Base, Terra Nova
A messenger was waiting when Bernard Chanet arrived at his office for the morning's work. Standing at attention, the messenger passed over a sealed letter from one of the outlying offices. Chanet was surprised at the origin of the missive; he had observers at several locations in Southern Columbia but was denied any control over the area.
Opening the letter, Chanet paced his office as he read:
Your Excellency:
I've had the most intriguing request and proposition that I thought I must present to you before going any further with it.
A small group of the local regressives from North America, back home, approached me the other day and requested arms. I thought this especially odd in that they are already self sufficient for the primitive arms they tend to use. But, no, it wasn't flintlocks or even percussion weapons they were looking for. They wanted modern, military arms.
On the face of it, I'd have laughed them out of my office. Yet the leader of the group, who is also a political figure of some local importance, had a most compelling argument. He took out a pouch of gold, weighing perhaps two and a half kilograms, and proceeded to pour it out onto my desk. He said to me, "One dozen modern rifles and twelve-thousand rounds of ammunition and it's yours. A thousand times that and a thousand of these are yours."
I, of cours
e, have no weaponry here beyond the few carried by my security staff. Yet it occurred to me that in your position . . .
9/8/49 AC
Belisario was about given up hope. His band was down to seventy-five men, perhaps less by sunrise, and he'd found no solution to the problem. Even now his men were scattered across two hundred square kilometers, in little groups of five or ten, partly to ease foraging and partly so as not to attract the attention of the always-threatening UN air power. Of the modern weapons he and his group had captured, few remained. For those few there was no ammunition. Even Pedro had wrapped and buried his prized heavy sniper rifle for lack of anything to feed it with.
Hanging his head in despair, Belisario thought, for perhaps the thousandth time, about just giving it up and surrendering to the Gurkhas and Sikhs who hunted his men morn and night. They were good men, those. Better, by far, than the other troops the UN set loose to terrorize the population.
"Don't shoot, Dad," he heard and looked up. It was the voice of his daughter, Mitzi. She walked into the center of the camp, gripping an escopeta and accompanied by a young man.
A gringo, by his looks, Belisario thought. He saw half a dozen others, leading heavily laden mules. Gringos, too, most likely.
"Mom says 'hi,'" Mitzi said. "She told me to lead these men to you. Even loaned me her shotgun for safety and I never would have expected her to do that."
"Are you Belisario Carrera?" the young man with Mitzi asked.
"I am."
"Sir, I'm Juan Alvarez, Jr., from down in Southern Columbia, and, sir, I've brought some things I think you maybe need."
Chapter Seventeen
The guerillas are the fish and the people are the sea.
The Great Helmsman, on guerilla warfare
We fish with dynamite.
Patricio Carrera, on counter-guerilla warfare
Outside Panshir Base, Pashtia, 3/6/467
With the noonday sun high overhead, the valley was bathed in stifling heat. Even high on the green hills surrounding the Tuscan Ligurini base, it was oppressive. It was all the more oppressive for those troops of the Legion filling in fighting positions, mortar pits, and ammunition dumps. These, stripped to the waist, wielded their shovels with a will, however. When the marks of preparations for the aborted attack on the Ligurini were erased, they were going home.
With the election over, and with the FS-imposed practical partition of Balboa, Carrera felt reasonably comfortable standing down his troops, barring those surrounding the local base for the Gallic Commandos. For the Gauls, he'd wait and see how well peace held out in Balboa. The rest would move on to Thermopolis, along with their equipment, and from there go home to Balboa via road, rail, sea and air. Even the ones surrounding the Gauls would eventually leave; they were just further behind in the order of movement.
Besides, it isn't like I'm not working on ways to hit them where it hurts even when I give up the ability to get at the Frogs and Tauros here.
Nor could anyone in the coalition really complain about the Gauls being confined to their little rathole. The legionaries surrounding them were also engaged in something the Commandos had signally failed even to try to do (though to be fair this was not the result on any unwillingness on the Commandos' part); hunting down and obliterating the insurgency in the area. In this, the Legion was having some success.
Carrera drew a mental map of the country and the position of his troops within it. His mind clicked over each stage in the evacuation of two legions from Pashtia and he could find no flaw. Gotta love a good staff, he thought.
"Call from the staff, sir," said one of his guards, holding out a microphone. "Secure. Bad news, they say."
Of course, it's bad news, he thought. Here I am enjoying a peaceful moment and pleased that I won't have to butcher ten thousand allied troops so, naturally, there is bad news. God, someday I hope to have a long talk with you about your sense of humor.
He took the proffered radio microphone and announced, "Carrera."
The radio operator at the other end acknowledged and said, "Wait one, sir, while we connect you to the classis."
The classis? My bad news is from the classis? This is going to be really bad.
There was a series of beeps, and then a voice, distorted by the encryption devices and with odd, unrecognizable sounds in the background, said, "Fosa, here." The voice seemed to Carrera to contain an infinity of sadness and weariness.
"Carrera, here. What is it, Roderigo?"
"Patricio . . . I don't know how to tell you this, so I'll just lay it out for you. We got hit this morning, hit hard. I don't even have a final count of the dead and wounded, but both numbers are going to be high. I lost just about half my fixed-wing aircraft and two thirds of the helicopters. I'm holed, though—thank God—it's not below the water line. Even so, I'm taking water at the stern and the hole is close enough to the water line that a big storm could put us down. One elevator is totally out. My drives are down . . . well, one is down. The other was blown clean off. My flight deck is warped, but not so badly we can't loft and recover aircraft. I've no radar. And I lost one of the escorts."
"Holy shit!" Carrera said, though he didn't key the microphone. My brave sailors; where will I find your like again? When he keyed it, he asked, "What happened, Rod?"
"It was an ambush in the Nicobar Straits. Somehow the wogs managed to assemble about a dozen speed boats, half a dozen cruise missiles, two torpedoes, and one big fucking suicide ship. We took one cruise missile hit, plus a near miss that did for the radar, a torpedo hit at the stern, and then the suicide ship . . . Pat, it must have been about a two-kiloton explosion . . . anyway, it went off about a klick away." Fosa hesitated and then added, "Well, it didn't actually go off. One of my escorts, the Santisima Trinidad, rammed it at full speed. That set it off. Pat, if they hadn't rammed it, we'd have been obliterated.
"Pat, I want authority to award gold crosses, four steps, to that crew, and three to it's sister, the Agustin. Three and two just wouldn't be enough."
"Given," Carrera answered. "Is your ship recoverable? What about the wounded?"
There was doubt in Fosa's voice, mixed in with determination. "If I can get her to a port . . . maybe. But getting her back in order will be expensive. The wounded we're flying off with whatever I have that can carry a man or two."
"All right. I'll assume you're flying your hurt men to some safe port. As for the expense; damn the expense; a ship like that doesn't come along every day." In fact, I haven't a clue where we could find another one. Rebuild the static training ship? Probably a lot more expensive. And besides, the ship that survived an attack like that has mana. It has soul. Men will adore her and fight all the better for her. Some other ship just wouldn't do as well.
BdL Dos Lindas
"Captain, we've found something you ought to see."
Fosa nodded his head and said, "Pat, I've got to go. I'll report in around sunset. I might have a better idea of our chances then."
"Before you go, put me on the speaker," Carrera ordered.
Fosa looked over at the communications bench and gave the nod. A sailor flicked a switch. "Go ahead, Pat. Wherever the intercom still reaches, you'll be heard. Fosa, out."
From the speakers, echoing across the length and breadth of the carrier, came, "Duque Carrera to the officers, centurions and men of the classis, and of the tercios Jan Sobieski, and Vlad Tepes: Men, listen; don't stop working to save your ship, but listen. You've taken a hard hit . . . "
* * *
Fosa didn't really listen to Carrera's speech. It wasn't much more than the same generalities he'd been spreading, himself: We've done well . . . they threw the worst they had at us and we took it and came back punching . . . we'll save the ship. He just hoped it was all true.
At the base of the tower he turned around and looked out over the flight deck. Already crews with cutting torches were slicing away the warped sections and forcing some of the underdecking back into position. There was plywood and perforat
ed steel planking, down below, that they could use to make some temporary patches, enough for the Crickets and maybe even a lightly loaded Finch.
From there, he descended down the double stairs to Deck 2. A balcony off that deck overlooked the hangar. He went to the balcony and looked down. The hangar was filled not only with burned and blasted airframes; it had become a morgue, as well. Even now, parties of crewman, some of them hurt themselves, brought in corpses and laid them out respectfully in rows. Some of his crew, Fosa saw, were curled up in fetal positions, their charred limbs eloquent testimony to the fire that had killed them.
You will not throw up, Fosa gave himself the order. Even so, he turned away.
The sailor who had summoned the captain from the bridge said, "This way, sir. By where we took the hit near the stern."
"Lead on."
The way led through the officers' quarters at the stern, past Fosa's and then Kurita's cabin.
What am I going to do without that old man to guide me? Fosa wondered. For, though he had put out the call to find the commodore, no one had as of yet seen a sign. The nearest thing to a report was the mutterings of a now legless and semi-comatose sailor in sickbay, a gunner on one of the port rear platforms. He'd said something about going "back for the commodore."
Fosa rested his hand lightly on the cabin's hatch, then continued on forward and past the filter room and the two rocket storage rooms.
"We found it out here, Skipper" the sailor guiding Fosa said as he pointed to the twisted scrap that had been a gun platform.
Fosa stepped gingerly out onto the ruin of the platform. It seemed solid enough. There was a ruined forty-millimeter gun there, as well. Fosa turned and . . .
"My God," he whispered.
There, against the hull, to all appearances a part of the hull now, was the outline of a small man. He might not have known who it was except for the ancient, once reforged katana that was apparently welded to the hull, and joined to the body's outline by the shadow of a thin arm.