Days of Burning, Days of Wrath

by Tom Kratman

  Since Wanyan had left, Marine Lieutenant Colonel Ma Chu, the admiral’s aide de camp, had served as the admiral’s “eyes on the ground” of the whole effort, island, port, and mainland, all three. Ma was outranked by any number of people, ashore and afloat, but, as the admiral’s eyes, his “I suggest” or “I think” or “Why don’t you?” had the effective force of coming from the admiral, himself. Ma had tried not to abuse that and, it had to be said, generally succeeded. He’d only had to say, “Let me consult with the admiral” twice to bring some hardheaded sailor or soldier around.

  Being driven in the admiral’s vehicle by the admiral’s driver, passing between two of the air defense pyramids, the two nearest the port, Ma thought he spied a small aircraft, briefly visible before disappearing into the clouds. The view was gone so quickly, and the air defense people seemed so oblivious to it, that he was inclined to discount his own eyes right up to the point that he saw half a dozen bursts of smoke suddenly spring into existence above and to the east of the pyramids. The shell bursts—for he knew instantly, from hard-won experience, that that was what they were—were followed by the sound of their own explosions, the freight-train racket of their passage, and the sound of heavy steel rain pattering down to the ground.

  Just under seven seconds later, the same pattern was almost repeated. This time, though, some of the enemy’s guns—A single turret, I suppose—must have been aimed a little off, because the steel rain came down all around Ma. One ball went through the hood of the admiral’s vehicle with a sound of tearing sheet metal and the clang of steel off an engine block. That ball then came up through the hood again, through the windshield, and then went right through the driver’s head. Ma was spattered with blood, brains, and bits of crimsoned bone.

  With the driver no longer in control, the wheels straightened, letting the car run off the road. Too late, a shocked Ma grabbed for the steering wheel. The vehicle went nose-first into a freshly carved drainage ditch, hit the far wall, and stopped.

  Ma, however, did not stop. There were no seat belts in a Zhong military car. He was thrown forward, over the frame of the shattered windshield, and past the ditch. He hit, rolled, bounced, and finally came up, gut first, against the stout trunk of a tree. His lower ribs cracked on the bark. The pain was intense but, Thank you, ancestors. If it didn’t hurt, it would mean I’d been paralyzed.

  Ma wasn’t paralyzed but he was hurt. Slowly, gingerly, feeling cracked ribs grate inside him, he turned himself over and got his back to the trunk. There he saw that the salvos—about nine or ten per minute per gun, I suppose, if it’s their cruiser—were no longer bursting in air but coming in to strike at or below the ground. He saw one air defense gun simply lifted into the air on a cloud of dirt, rocks, sandbags, and angry black smoke, men and parts of men falling away as it arose.

  I know the admiral understood and intended that they come for this place, but I wonder if he understood how quickly they would trash it. I wonder, too, if her imperial fragrant cuntedness will let him come back to save us.

  I wish we’d had some of the same class of cruiser when we went for their Royal Island  .  .  .

  Standing, rather, using the tree to pull himself to his feet, Ma Chu gasped at the agony radiating from his shattered ribs. He felt light-headed and found himself swaying side to side and back and forth, swaying, indeed, in something of an oval.

  Concussion? Internal bleeding? Both I  .  .  .

  BdL Tadeo Kurita, East of Santa Catalina Island

  Naval guns will often confuse a landlubber. In part, this is because, for a given shell’s caliber, the shell itself will be much more powerful than its land-bound equivalent. In part, too, it is because it is often much longer ranged than a similar land caliber. In part, too, rate of fire can vary dramatically. The reasons for the difference were largely that weight of gun made a great deal of difference on the land, but ships weren’t much bothered by weight. In the case of the dozen six-inch guns mounted in Kurita’s four triple turrets, the range was roughly sixty percent greater than for a similar land-based system, while the shells—which could be armor piercing, enhanced armor piercing, shrapnel, high explosive, or illumination—were a quarter heavier. Moreover, while a land-based but similar system might fire two and a half to three and a half rounds per minute, maximum, and temporarily, these particular naval guns could fire nine, in the first minute.

  Kurita’s skipper, Legate Cristóbal de Carvajal, down in fire control, watched four salvos of six come in atop one of their first two targets, one of the curious pyramids the Zhong had put up. The first dozen were shrapnel, followed by another dozen of straight high explosive, with point-detonating fuse. The latter exploded on the flat surface atop the pyramid, sending clouds of razor-sharp, smoking hot metal in all directions. Zhong air defense troops, running for their lives to the shelters, were cut down in swaths. One fairly dense group, clustering at the entrance to a shelter, had the misfortune of having a shell detonate in their midst. The bodies, parts of bodies, and bodies still shedding parts were flung away from the blossoming yellow, red, and black flower.

  It somehow still surprises me, thought Carvajal, that you can actually see a shock wave in the air.

  “I think we can call Target Two Alpha ‘destroyed,’ Skipper,” Gunnery said. “Shifting X and Y turrets to Three Alpha.”

  “Ammunition?” asked Carvajal.

  “We’ll be ceasing fire after this target to restock the turrets,” Gunnery said.

  “Very good.”

  Santa Catalina Island, Balboa

  Every breath was a struggle, every movement of his chest, whether internally or externally driven, sent waves of agony coursing through Ma Chu’s body and mind. He found crawling was better than trying to walk since, when the pain put him into unconsciousness, he didn’t have as far to fall.

  The ambulance crew found him like that, facedown in the tire-spun muck, still trying to rise to all fours to move himself forward.

  “The admiral,” Ma Chu whispered, “. . . the admiral must be told . . . it cannot wait . . .”

  Bridge, BdL Dos Lindas,

  Heading west toward Santa Catalina Island

  When the sea was smooth, as this one was, on a ship the size of the Dos Lindas, even at her top speed of twenty-seven knots, the ride was as smooth as the sea. At her current speed of about fifteen knots, only the natural vibrations of the ship and the passing of the land to port told of any movement at all.

  “Okay, Meg,” replied Fosa to the news. “Go back on down and spread your squadron out to screen us if they start heading back.”

  Beepbeepbeep. “Wilco . . . Meg, out.”

  Fosa walked—it was only a few short steps—to the chart table laid out centrally to the bridge. He sensed someone, his ship’s chief noncom, Ramirez, he thought, take a position just behind and to his left.

  “What are we going to do, Skipper?”

  Yep, Ramirez.

  “They’ve got nearly ten knots on us, Top. We couldn’t catch t hem if they had a head wind and we had a hurricane-force tailwind. So . . . I’m kicking this one upstairs.”

  “Makes sense,” Ramirez agreed. “But . . .”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Whoever makes me unhappy for a day, I will make suffer a lifetime.

  —Empress Dowager Cixi

  Task Force Macera, surrounding Task Force Jesuit

  He’d given it his best shot, Macera had, but his best hadn’t been good enough. Oh, he and his tercio-sized, reinforced cohort had pursued long, fast, and hard. They’d gone hungry as many days as not, and still kept it up. Through darkest, slipperiest night and hottest, muggiest day, through rain and high winds, shedding weight with every forward step, they’d tried to grab hold of the Taurans’ tails and slow them down before they reached a defensible position.

  And all for nothing¸ Macera cursed his luck. Here they are and here they are digging in like beavers.

  Macera could hear the sounds, actually. It should not have
been possible at this distance but, When you’ve got nine or ten thousand people cutting trees and shoveling out dirt, I suppose it can carry.

  Food had been pretty much catch as catch can during the pursuit. Oh, the helicopters had tried but, as the distance from their base areas increased, the helicopters had been forced from using two to support Macera and two to ferry support to the helicopters, to one and three, and then, for the last hundred miles, to just about three sorties every two days. Since arrival here at the doorstep of the Taurans, even that had proven impossible to keep up.

  Macera and his men were borderline starving.

  Estado Mayor, Sub camp C, Ciudad Balboa, Balboa

  There was no longer a security or survival need for the General Staff and Carrera to operate out of the cramped and uncomfortable, but happily fairly bomb-resistant, camp.

  “On the other hand,” observed Carrera, “the other one is flatter than a pancake except where a piece of the former wall looks like it was chewed by a Meg, so we really have nowhere else to go for now. And probably not for a while.”

  Soult shrugged; none of his business and he didn’t really care where the Estado Mayor hung out, his concerns were with the care, feeding, and transportation of a Carrera. The latter, though he wasn’t drunk, or not yet, had put away a few. He might get drunk, too.

  “And why not?” he asked Soult, rhetorically. “Pretty much everything is out of my hands and has been since the Die-hards surrendered.” Soult started to object but Carrera shushed him. “Pour yourself a drink and have a seat, Jamey; I’ll let you in on a secret.”

  Soult did pour himself one, then, though he was a lot less generous with his own drink than he had been with Carrera’s. He took the bottle with him.

  Once he was settled in, Carrera said, “You know, the history books are going to say all kinds of interesting things about me. Most of it will be lies, some good, some bad. Among the lies the biggest will be that I was in control start to finish, here. This will be closely followed by the idiot notion that I never made a mistake.

  “To take the latter first, Jamey, I’ve made plenty of mistakes, from fucking up my own logistics in Sumer, back when we started . . . well, let me tell you, if Adnan Sada had had his brigade within twenty miles of where our point finally stalled out in the desert—you remember that sandstorm? Jesus!– he’d have beaten the shit out of us. And that wasn’t the only one. Oh, no.

  “Dropping the bridge outside Ninewah under the nose of that asshole, Lamprey? We’re lucky we didn’t end up needing the Federated States’ help, just sheerly lucky. That fuckhead is pretty well-placed now to have sabotaged everything if we’d asked for help. And he can hold a grudge as well as I can, too.

  “Humiliating Pigna in public to the point where he joined the opposition and launched a coup? Well . . . I already paid for that one, maybe in a couple of ways.

  “The fleet action Fosa has upcoming? He’s on his own; he’s going to be out of range of anything I can send him. The Moslem rebellion in the Tauran Union? Bastards couldn’t wait for the fucking signal, oh, no. Control? Hah! My ass!”

  Carrera held out his glass for a refill.

  “There is no justice, Jamey, none whatsoever. Speaking of which . . . ” Carrera hit his intercom button. “Is Captain Gold here yet?”

  Came the answer, “Yes, Duque; he’s been cooling his heels for fifteen minutes.”

  “Send him in.”

  Turning back to Soult, Carrera said, “Oh, there are still a few things I can do.”

  A few silent moments passed before a knock on the door announced Gold’s presence. He was a tall, slender, mustached merchant skipper, though not in uniform at the moment. As a member of Balboa’s merchant fleet, Pedro Gold was also part of the hidden reserve. As such, he’d made two supply runs before the main Tauran invasion, then hightailed it for a neutral port to await being called forward again.

  Carrera gestured at an open chair. “Have a seat, Gold. Jamey, get the captain a drink, would you?”

  “Ice, Skipper?” Soult asked.

  “Please, Mr. Soult. Much ice; I’m not a heavy drinker.”

  “So how’s the Alberto Helada at the moment?” Carrera asked.

  “Fine, Duque.” Gold gave a little shrug. “She’s sailing up under my exec. Per orders, I flew up here on my own.

  “She’s supposed to hold prisoners, right? I’ve got the food, some bunks, stoves, porta-potties . . . basically everything for ten or twelve thousand men. It’s for the POWs, like the others, isn’t it?”

  Carrera gave a wicked, somewhat whisky-fueled smile. “Well, no, not exactly. You see I have this odd kind of mission . . .”

  When the mission was explained, in full, Carrera added, “He’s going to say, ‘et dona ferentes.’ I can hear him saying it as if I was standing there.”

  Walking to his desk, Carrera picked up a sealed envelope. “When he says it, give him this. My penmanship is awful, so there’s a typed transliteration.”

  “He’s a madman, you know, your boss,” Gold said to Soult as the latter drove him to an ad hoc heliport not far from the city.

  Soult might have taken umbrage except that they were, after all, on the same side. And, besides, “Oh, Skipper, you have no fucking idea how much of a madman he can be.”

  Reaching the heliport, Gold noticed a series of pallets being loaded aboard one of the helicopters. “And those, I suppose, are the small boats and motors he spoke of.”

  “I’d be guessing if I said, Skipper. In any case, that’s your chopper. You can ask the crew. I will say that, at about a sixth of a ton, each, that helicopter is probably going to be carrying between twenty and twenty-four of them.”

  Oppenheim, Sachsen

  Khalid was surprised at how quickly two of his fellow agents showed up, knocked on his door, and announced, “Saints Peter and Paul.” He didn’t know either of them or, if he did, plastic surgery had done for any chance of recognition.

  One was tall and blond, blue-eyed, too, and looked so Sachsen he could have passed as Alix’s brother. That one answered to “Fritz,” though privately he said his name was originally “Abdul.” Another, slender, swarthy, and decidedly Arab-looking, answered to “Tim.”

  “It’s what my friends call me,” said Tim.

  Fritz added, “I’ve been Fritz so long it’s what I’ve gotten used to answering to. And, before you ask, I was born here, to revert parents, and rejected the whole ‘submission’ thing as a boy. I’m an immigrant to Balboa, like you.”

  “There were supposed to be two of us,” Fritz said, “but the other never met me at the rendezvous point.”

  “You’re Balboan?” Alix asked. “What are you doing here? What . . . ” She had a sudden glimmering of a horrible truth.

  Khalid sighed. This moment had always been, after all, inevitable. “We’re officially enemies, Alix. I’ve been working for Balboa, to include delivering arms to the Moslems in Sachsen, for a number of years now.”

  “Then you . . .” Her fist flew to her own mouth. She bit down hard on it.

  “We all follow orders, Alix,” Khalid said. “Yes, you ended up in very unfortunate circumstances because of those orders. You also, please note, ended up saved from very unfortunate circumstances because of those. And because we follow orders, you’ve a chance to get your army back to undo some of the damage we’ve done you because of the damage your country helped bring on mine.”

  She dropped the fist. Her eyes flashed and her lips curled into a sneer. “That’s what you call ‘unfortunate circumstances’: finding myself with my bottom bare, facedown on the cobblestones, and a string of scum taking their turns sticking their cocks up my ass?”

  “It would be hard to call them ‘happy circumstances,’ now wouldn’t it?” was Khalid’s retort. “You can dwell on that to your heart’s content, Alix, but, longer term, if we don’t get you your army back, there are going to be a lot more Sachsen girls experiencing the same thing you did. Indeed, it will be the rare one who doesn’t
experience it—no pun intended—in full.

  “Take your pick of what you want. But do it quickly because once we’re assembled, we’re going after your Minister of Finance. If you want your country back, you’ll forget about resenting people doing their duty.”

  “It wasn’t your duty to get me gang-raped,” she said, calming slightly.

  “It wasn’t my duty to save you from it, either, but I did. And it wasn’t me doing the raping.”

  Tauran Union Defense Agency Headquarters, Lumiere, Gaul

  The uprising in Gaul had followed a different pattern from Sachsen. In Gaul, precisely because the Moslems in Sachsen had risen first, the authorities had had a modicum of warning, enough to call out and form something like a militia, to drag in and organize food, and to expel likely fifth columnists.

  What that meant was that instead of a sudden takeover, the capital of Gaul, Lumiere, had found itself besieged. One peculiarity of that was that, as the ad hoc militia folded in key places, the largely military contingent of the Defense Agency headquarters had found themselves not only on the front line, but a key component of the frontline defenses.

  “Now meself and Turenge,” said Major Campbell, lightly, to the Anglian twit, Houston, “if they capture us, we’ll probably be raped in a place reasonably well-suited to the purpose. On the other hand, you, Major Houston, will be raped in a place very poorly suited to the purpose. And, yes, they do prefer boys, many of them.”