by Tom Kratman
It remains now to remove the Tauran Union from its death grip around Balboa’s mid-section. To this end, no resource will be left unmobilized.
PART I
CHAPTER ONE
Walled towns, stored arsenals and armories, goodly races of horses, chariots of war, elephants, ordnance, artillery, and the like; all this is but a sheep in a lion’s skin except that the breed and disposition of the people be stout and warlike.
—Francis Bacon, Essays, XXIX
Headquarters, Tauran Union Security Force-Balboa, Building 59, Fort Muddville, Balboa, Terra Nova
Pummeled by waves of sound, a roughly one-by-two-meter piece of plywood rattled against one wall. Glued to its surface was a white plasticized sheet, upon which was scrawled the intel section’s best estimate of the size and composition of the enemy forces. It was a fearsome thing to contemplate, perhaps made more fearsome still by the holes in it.
What caused the plastic estimate to rattle, the source of those waves of sound, was a recoilless rifle range on the other side of the Florida Locks to the Balboa Transitway. The crash of those not-too-very distant blasts also caused dust to spring up from the seams of the office window. Still more dust began to filter down from the ceiling.
A short but shapely blond captain stood and stared out of the window of a door. The dust raised a cough, then caused her to dab fingers at huge blue eyes beginning to tear up. These were framed by a heart-shaped face.
The door led to a long balcony that ran from just off the center of the building all the way to the end. There was a mate to that on the other side, and still more to the rear, facing the parade field.
“May yer lums reek lang and weil,” muttered Captain Jan Campbell, “ye mingin’ radge.” To the noninitiate, this sounded worse than it was: May your chimneys produce a profusion of smoke, you filthy madman. Normally, Campbell’s English was just a shade gingerwise from received pronunciation. Under stress, though, she tended to revert to either gutter Saint Mungan or, if particularly annoyed, to the accent of the hardscrabble fishing village in which she’s spent a still harder childhood.
The chimneys whereof she spoke were, in fact, two dozen of the recoilless rifles the Balboan legion seemed to have in profusion. They were smoking a plenty—and kicking up no little dust, too—quite without her curses. The smoke she could have lived with. But the bloody recoilless range was only about twelve hundred meters away, across the major channel and the Florida Locks with their swing bridge. The counterrecoilling gas literally shook the headquarters with every shot fired in the opposite direction.
Conscious of having fallen into her native dialect, she forced herself into something closer to Received Pronunciation. “How fucking long can this go on?” she asked her associate, Sergeant Major Kris Hendryksen, Army of Cimbria, seconded to TUSF-B.
Hendryksen grimaced. “Last time His Gribbitzness”—Gallic General Janier, the head of the TUSF-B—“annoyed the Balboans they released enough recoilless ammunition from war stocks to training to keep this up for three days. This? This, I think, is just their annual training for one of their regiments, with all the antitank platoons of each of the line battalions consolidated to take advantage of a hard to get range. Should be over by about ten or eleven this evening. Until the next regiment is called up, that is.”
“Until the next regiment . . .” Campbell muttered. She was new to the command and not nearly as expert yet on Balboan forces as she intended to become. Still she had a pretty good idea at least of what G-2 knew of the enemy’s combat forces. “Twenty-six big bloody, fuckin’ regiments. That we know about. On the ground. Of ground-gaining maneuver arms. Not countin’ the fuckin’ artillery. Or the sappers. Or the aviation. Or the naval. Or God-knows what.”
“They want us gone,” Hendryksen observed. “They don’t seem to have any sense of limitations on what they’re willing to do to get rid of us, either. And I don’t believe that number twenty-six for a minute. In every other particular they’re set up for a lot more than that, thirty-seven or thirty-eight ground regiments.”
As if on cue—though it was a frequent enough event that no cues were really needed—two Volgan-built, Balboan-owned Artem-Mikhail 82s, also known as “Mosaic Ds,” streaked almost straight up over the Florida Locks before veering to come in low over the headquarters. Another brace immediately followed, even before the windows had stopped rattling from the first pair. The shock sent Campbell’s innards vibrating in time with the glass. From where she stood, she could see the whites of the lead pilot’s eyes as he just barely missed the building.
“And how many of those do the bastards have?” she asked Hendryksen.
Hendryksen shook his head. “We don’t actually know,” he said. “We think maybe four hundred.” There was a trace of unofficial skepticism in his voice.
“We?” Campbell queried, with an eyebrow raised.
“‘We,’ as defined by the Frogs running the local show,” Hendryksen conceded. “And sure, there are about four hundred in country. But me? I think twice that, and the missing four hundred are probably still sitting in Volga, or Jagelonia.” Hendryksen’s face grew contemplative for a moment. “I also think that maybe they don’t have enough pilots for all of those. Or at least not enough replacement pilots. Or not enough good replacement pilots.
“Or maybe they think they don’t need two or two and a half pilots per plane.”
“Undeveloped world bullshit?” Campbell asked. “All show, no go?”
“You might suspect that,” Hendryksen answered. “But it would be so totally out of line with everything else we know about the legion that it just strikes me as a terrible bet. And since our lives are the ante . . .” The Cimbrian shrugged eloquently.
“Fucking Frogs,” Campbell muttered.
“It’s not really them anymore,” Hendryksen corrected. “Or at least not mostly them. Janier seems a broken reed since the failure of the coup. Instead . . .” To explain, he pointed the index finger of his right hand straight up.
Campbell’s gaze followed Hendryksen’s upturned finger. “Them, too,” she scowled.
Range 18, Imperial Range Complex, Balboa, Terra Nova
Beneath the jinking Mosaic jets, a ship heading to the Mar Furioso slowly descended as the water in the Florida Locks was let run out toward the sea. A man and a boy stood on an historic overlook above the locks. They had no eyes for the ship but concentrated entirely on the enemy headquarters on the opposite side of the Transitway.
Carrera and his oldest living son, Hamilcar, aged twelve in local years, watched the building intently despite the backblast from the recoilless rifles. It pounded them, if anything, worse than the Taurans in Building 59. But Carrera could leave anytime he wanted. The Taurans couldn’t. Man and boy watched the building through a couple of pairs of the best binoculars made anywhere on Terra Nova.
“You are a cruel bastard, Dad,” the boy observed, loudly enough to be heard over the thumping of the “reckless rifles.”
“Son, you have no idea,” Carrera mostly agreed. But you’ll find out in a little while.
The boy had only been home about a month. In that short period of time, any number of problems had arisen which, so far, had proved impossible to correct easily. Drastic measures were in the offing, though the boy didn’t know about those.
A glint in one of the windows caught Carrera’s eye. It came from one of the windows off to the left of the portal in the center of the building and two floors above ground level.
Ham noticed his father’s movement. “You looking for the flash, Dad?”
“Yeah.” Is the little bastard trying to remind me I’m getting old and my eyes aren’t what they were?
“It’s a woman,” the boy said. “Her hair’s done up but she’s short and you can just make out the tits . . .”
“Where’d you learn to talk like that?”
Ham didn’t bother answering, instead just rolling his eyes. From you, among others, old man.
Headquarters, T
auran Union Security Force-Balboa, Building 59, Fort Muddville, Balboa, Terra Nova
“Kris, come here, please,” Campbell asked. When he stood beside her she handed him her own binoculars and asked, “Is that who I think it is, behind those field glasses?”
Hendryksen took the field glasses and, adjusting them to his eyes, focused on a couple of Balboan soldiers, one taller, one shorter, half-exposed amidst the jungle of the hill opposite.
“Your lucky day,” he confirmed. “It’s Carrera and, if I’m not mistaken, his son.”
“What’s he doing with a boy out amongst all this dangerous crap?” she asked.
Hendryksen shrugged. “There’s almost no telling. He doesn’t seem to think like normal people.”
Campbell contemplated the implications of the boy’s existence. “Oh, I’ll bet he does.” With that she twisted the knob to the door, opened it, and stepped out onto the balcony. As she did she made sure to turn right to present a side profile to the man and boy standing on the other side of the Transitway, perhaps a half a mile away.
“That’s right, boys,” she whispered, needlessly, “get a good look.” Then she turned slowly toward the hill on the other side and waved.
Range 18, Imperial Range Complex, Balboa, Terra Nova
“I did mention tits, Dad.” said the boy, keeping his glasses firmly fixed on the heavily front-loaded hourglass shape across the water.
“Yeah . . . yeah, you did. And you didn’t lie, either. They’re . . . impressive. I wonder what the purpose of the show is?”
“Find out who she is and you’ll probably find the purpose,” the boy said. “Legate Fernandez will know. Or can find out.”
“Yeah,” Carrera agreed. He lowered his binoculars and then, on a whim, raised his hand and waved back.
“She’s very pretty,” Ham said. One didn’t see too many blondes in Balboa, which made flaxen hair rather exotic and desirable.
“Tell you what,” answered Carrera, “if you don’t tell your mother I waved, I won’t tell your wives you were looking at another woman.”
“That seems very fair.” True, the boy’s wives were in name only, so far. Soon that would be changing, at least with the older ones, if nothing interfered. And it was also true that they would never think to criticize their god, Iskandr, less still to nag. But they could make him feel like dirt with the mildest sniffle or flash of hurt eyes. So, yes, very fair indeed.
Headquarters, Tauran Union Security Force-Balboa, Building 59, Fort Muddville, Balboa, Terra Nova
“Why the show, Jan?” Hendryksen asked, once Campbell had reentered the office. Closing the door didn’t do a lot to reduce the sound of shock of the counterrecoiling gas from Range 18. “You’re usually content to let them flaunt themselves.”
“I want him to ask his intel folks—what was his intel chief’s name?”
“Fernandez,” the Cimbrian replied. “Legate Fernandez.”
“Right, Fernandez. I want him to ask Fernandez who the new blonde with the big tatas is. That will get this Fernandez looking at me, too. And when he tries to look at me, I’ll get, or at least I may get, a chance to look right back. And maybe I’ll even get a close look back.”
Hendryksen tsked, quoting, “‘And when you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.’”
“Precisely,” Campbell agreed, with a happy smile, stretching slightly and letting her chest flaunt itself. The smile dissolved into a frown when she looked once again out of the door’s vibrating window only to see that her ultimate quarry had disappeared.
“Now that’s hardly fair,” she said.
InterColombiana Highway, east of the Puente de las Colombias, Balboa, Terra Nova
With one armored car ahead and two trailing, Carrera’s big black armored Phaeton, with Warrant Officer Soult at the wheel, whizzed past jungle and small town and smaller still roadside stand. The armored cars were driven by Carrera’s own troops. Following, however, were another two trucks with forty-eight of Hamilcar’s in-laws, armed to the teeth, seated on center-running benches, and glaring out.
“My wives are not going to think that’s very fair, Dad,” said the boy. “They’ve been very good girls, not doing proskynesis where anyone can see, waiting until I was old enough to do a proper . . . umm, what’s that word?”
“Deflowering.”
“Right. They’ve been waiting two years—over two years—for a proper deflowering. And they’re expecting me to start within the next month or two.”
Carrera shook his head firmly. “Not gonna happen. You’re not legally married in the Republic. They’re all under age, even if all but one is older than you.” The father frowned. “They’re . . . What are you smiling at?”
“Close-in-age exception, Dad. Forget it. I can fuck ’em all perfectly legally. Even if I wasn’t married to them. But I am. Alena the witch checked and the Republic recognizes foreign marriages and has no express bar to polygamy. And I learned to talk like that from you, so forget bitching about that, too.”
Alena, sometimes called, “the witch,” was probably less of a witch than just a supremely intelligent and observant woman. She’d been the first among her people to recognize Ham’s striking resemblance to the image on an ancient gold platter, smuggled from Old Earth when her people had been exiled. Thereafter she’d become Ham’s caretaker, guardian, surrogate mother, chief acolyte, and matchmaker. All the boy’s twelve wives had been selected by her.
Carrera sat back heavily in the well-upholstered seat of the limousine. “Yeah, well consider this: They’re all too young to bear a child without unnecessary risk. None of them had any real choice before they were married to you. Their families told them, ‘go,’ and they went. And they’ve all been told you’re the avatar of God, so they aren’t even fully people in their own eyes. You want to talk about fair and unfair, boy?”
Hamilcar sighed heavily. “I know. So you want me to go off to military school so the girls can grow a little?”
“Least of my concerns,” the father answered. “I’m not that nice a man. No . . . it’s more about you than them.
“Ham, you’ve got all kinds of attributes to make you an effective commander already . . . among people who think you’re a god and can’t be convinced otherwise. You try relying on that crap with the legion and they’ll kick your ass. And the girls only make it worse. Maybe you haven’t seen it, but they’ve even been teaching your sister to do proskynesis where they think no one can see them. That’s not good for you. And they sleep on the floor around your bed, confident that no guards could possibly protect you as well as they can. Son . . . that can’t be good for you. And it’s perverse, besides, a male hiding behind females.”
“I admit,” said the boy, “that that part troubles me. On the other hand, who’ll take care of them when I’m gone?”
“Your mother’s volunteered. And their Spanish is coming along very nicely, you may have noticed.”
Casa Linda, Balboa, Terra Nova
Weeping and banging of pretty little heads on hard wooden floors was interspersed with pleas for mercy. “Por favor, señor! Por favor, no llevar a nuestra esposo Iskandr.”
Carrera looked down at the—So much for orders, even from “God.” Hmmm . . . lemme count. Yep, thirteen of them. They’ve got one of his sisters begging, too—little lake of exotically clad, barely post-pubescent feminine humanity clustered around his feet. Some were beating their heads on the floor. Still others looked up with huge brown, green, or blue tear-filled eyes, hands clasped in supplication. He looked more closely for his own daughter, Julia, then bent over and picked her up by one arm. Setting her to her feet he spun her in the direction of the stairs, applied a swat to her fundament, and ordered, “Go to your room!” The child ran off with a shriek.
“For the rest of you, shut up and get on your feet.”
Silence descended like a falling axe, suddenly and decisively. Hamilcar was their god, but who was it who could tell God what to do? Most of the girls really were
n’t up to the theological depths of that question. Rather than test the thought, they simply shut up and arose to their feet. Sniffling, at reduced volume, continued.
“Into the living room . . . MARCH.”
Carrera judged his success in explaining matters to his daughters-in-law by the level of sniffling and the flow or tears. When he had those down to a tolerable degree he was pretty sure he’d won. There was, however, an exception. This was the youngest and, pretty much everyone agreed, the second prettiest, Pililak. In her language the name meant, “Ant.” Twelve years old only, strawberry blonde, with enormous green eyes, the girl was the hardest working and possibly the brightest among a hard-working and bright lot. Her Spanish was the best, as well.
No Christian martyr was ever firmer in the faith. “You are trying to separate me from my husband and lord,” she told Carrera, chin lifting fearlessly. “It will not happen.”
No adult guards would be permitted to Ham while he was away, any more than wives were allowed at any of the academies. Even so, the world being the way it was, he being who he was, and the Tauran Union being something like the wicked and hypocritical organization his father thought it was, Ham would need some kind of extra security. To this end Carrera had had Alena select five boys of the right age from among the families of Hamilcar’s Pashtun guards. These he had briefed personally, extracting promises that there would be no special treatment of his son, other than to watch out for his physical safety from external threats. Alena had administered the oaths in her own language, with Cano, her husband, present to verify that the oath was what Carrera wanted, rather than what Alena thought was proper for a god. He’d extracted an oath from Alena, even so, in advance.