A Pillar of Fire by Night

by Tom Kratman

  Through the glass of her office window, Jan felt more than heard the sound of a very large bomb going off somewhere in the city, followed by ambulance and fire sirens. Mentally, she recited the grand joke, Attention, please. I am a Five-Minute Bomb. Attention, please. I am a Five-Minute Bomb. Evacuate the area quickly. I am a Five-Minute Bomb. Evacuate the area quickly. I am a large Five-Minute bomb. My delay is fixed at a maximum of five-minutes. It could be less. Leave the area now! Four minutes, fifty-nine seconds . . .

  United Earth Peace Fleet Spirit of Peace, in orbit over Terra Nova

  Intel, thought High Admiral Marguerite Wallenstein. Looking at the main screen of the bridge. Must go talk to intel. At about the same time, the intercom sounded off with, “High Admiral? Khan, husband, in intel. There’s something you need to see.”

  The bulk of the ship spun around a hollow central axis, a cylinder, called for reasons both practical and traditional, “the keel.” The keel actually contained the bridge, the sail mechanism, some elevators, auxiliary tactical propulsion, and such. It could contain the hangar deck, too, but normally that rotated with the rest of the ship. Outside of that, filling up the bulk of two-hundred by three-hundred-meter ovoid starship, the decks rotated in what was the only way yet found to provide artificial gravity in space.

  To leave the bridge, Marguerite Wallenstein stepped out into the cylinder of the axis, then used handholds to pull herself to a transition chamber. Entering this, she reoriented herself so that her head was toward the portal through which she’d just entered. Then she grabbed another set of handholds and announced to the ship, “High Admiral, going to the lowest gravity deck.”

  The chamber immediately detached itself from the inner axis and locked itself to the rotating bulk of the ship, then moved slowly in a large groove within the keel. Given the lack of gravity, had she not been holding on tight to the handholds, Marguerite might have fallen to her shapely posterior. A hatch chimed open, giving her notice to move so that the chamber could reattach itself to the cylinder. She pulled with both hands, the movement being more sail than step. To someone on the deck, it would have, indeed, did appear that the High Admiral had dropped, feet first, through the ceiling.

  The ship, sensing the chamber was empty, promptly closed the safety hatch, reattached the chamber to the cylinder, gave the cylinder a little nudge in the other direction, to make up for energy gained in the lock-unlock process, and then gave a very tiny burn to some external rockets to make up for the tiny bit of energy lost to the rotation of the gravity decks in the process.

  There were eight such chambers within the keel. The ship’s computer could usually direct them in such a way as to minimize energy loss and fuel expenditure, while maintaining rotation, hence gravity, to the higher decks.

  It was always a bit disconcerting to transition even to the lowest of the gravity decks from the microgravity of the transit chambers of the keel. Moreover, the gravity here on the “bottom” decks was so low here it was hardly useful for any real purpose.

  There were a number of elevators to move crew from that lowest gravity deck to the higher decks where both serious work and most living were done. Marguerite even had one dedicated to herself and her immediate staff. She usually spurned this, using the curved tubes that also connected the decks because, as she thought, stepping into the tube, It’s just so much damned fun to shoot up the decks under my own power and Coriolis Effect. It’s nothing like skiing and yet it is almost exactly like skiing. Wh* * *ee!

  Hatches and numbers shot by, 2 . . . . . . 3 . . . . . . 4 . . . . . . 5 . . . . . 6 . . . . . . 7 . . . until Marguerite began to close on the deck she wanted, Deck 19. She put her hand out and overhead, fingers catching and then releasing handholds to slow herself down, 8 . . 9 . . . 10 . . . . 11 . . . . . 12 . . . . . . 13 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19.

  Marguerite paused at the hatch, catching her breath and applying a disciplinary palm to unruly hair. Then, happier than she’d been on leaving the bridge, she stepped out under noticeable and stabilizing gravity, walking briskly and with an approximately normal step to the intelligence shop.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  “There comes a point during the course of the war when the people, especially those in the comparative safety of the towns, have to be informed in no uncertain terms who is going to be the master.”

  —Sir Robert G. K. Thompson, No Exit From Vietnam

  Intelligence Office, UEPF Spirit of Peace, in Orbit over Terra Nova

  The map showed on a screen darkened to indicate that it was night time below. Even then, there were glowing marks, red and white, blue and green and yellow, to indicate activity down there.

  Khan, the husband, was there, posted by the screen, as was one of his assistants, Commander Spiro.

  Khan said, “High Admiral, you wanted to know when or if the Balboans—or, more technically, their Santa Josefinan troops—began moving out of the little enclave they built at that bite in the border. They have. It’s only patrols but there are a lot of them, they subdivide as they move forward, and they seem pretty aggressive. They’re also moving faster than I usually see them move at night in that kind of terrain. It’s like they have a long way to go before morning.”

  Wallenstein leaned back against a desk affixed to the deck, crossed her arms, and stared intently at the screen. “Have we,” she asked, “figured out where they’re heading?”

  Commander Spiro answered. “There’s no obvious terrain features they’re shooting for, or, at least, no contiguous set of them. I have, on the other hand, made a guess of where they’ll be—or could be—by dawn, based on their speed.” Spiro touched some button or other and suddenly an irregular arc appeared on the screen, in red. “They’re not going past that, anyway.”

  “They’re . . . what’s that term when a force on the ground sends out patrols to report but not necessarily to fight?” she asked.

  “Screen,” Khan replied. “And, yes, that’s my surmise. But is the screen to defend the base they constructed or to cover and provide warning for a movement out?”

  “What’s going on inside their base?”

  Khan shook his head. “No clue. We could keep fairly close track of them in Balboa, but they did something in their enclave before we noticed they were moving that makes it nigh impossible to sense anything. They were using their radios fairly liberally in Balboa, and kept up a similar level of chatter from the same locations during their move. Frankly, they fooled us there. What they did to the enclave they moved into . . . well, I think they put something in the trees to defeat radar, probably whatever they did in Balboa, and there isn’t much heavy equipment to triangulate off. Also, go figure, the skimmers can’t see much of anything through the jungle canopy. And, though I put some effort into trying to intercept their radio communications, they haven’t uttered a single electronic peep.

  “Moreover . . .” The intelligence officer stopped short as the screen began to provide a series of Vs moving east out of the area marked as their encampment. “Okay, well it’s not just a screening line.” He did some quick number crunching in his head, even as more and more Vs appeared. “Okay, they’ve got what looks dense enough on the ground to be a main force battalion, moving to take that town . . .” Khan hesitated briefly, “ . . . San Jaba.”

  “If you can’t intercept the Balboans’ communications in Santa Josefina, what about the Tauran forces there? Marciano’s headquarters?”

  “Now theirs we can intercept and decrypt. Not a peep, rather, nothing out of the routine. They’re not aware of the movement out, as far as I can tell, though they’ve known at least a little something about the base for a while now. They probably worried about it no more than we did, having enough problems not to want to borrow trouble.”

  Marguerite began tapping her nose with her right index finger, middle and ring fingertips pressed to her lips. Reaching a decision, she said, “Get Esma and issue her a communicator. Have my barge take her down to Aserri, in Santa Josefina. I want t
he embassy there to get her put in touch with General Marciano and act as a liaison with him, feeding him intelligence reports from us.”

  “Why not just have me break into the radio net?” Khan asked.

  “Two reasons. One is that I don’t want our enemies—nor even our friends—to know we can. The other is that I don’t want to trip the Federated States’ paranoia switch by seeming directly to help the Taurans there.”

  Khan nodded. “I’ll also notify the embassy in Aserri to make a car and driver, plus security escort available to Esma. But we shouldn’t use your barge. Instead we should use whichever one makes the normal mail and supply run.”

  “Good. Do it that way.”

  “There’s something else, too, High Admiral. Listen.”

  Khan touched a spot on his screen and a voice began to speak, in Spanish. He let it run briefly, then stopped it, saying, “That seems to be just a meteorological message.” He then started an automatic audio translation program and advanced the recording The small speaker brought forth, “Terra Nova, Terra Nova, this is Radio Balboa calling to our friends around the world. We have the following notifications and messages: Bellona is made of green cheese. I say again, Bellona is made of green cheese. Tilly has a very tight orifice. I say again, Tilly has a very tight orifice. Colin salts his friend’s penis before eating it . . .”

  Khan stopped the recording. “It’s troublesome. This has been going on since the Zhong landed on the mainland. We have no idea who the messages are for, nor what they may mean.”

  “Why not?” Wallenstein asked.

  “They all seem to be one offs, meant for one recipient or a small group. And they never repeat. We think many of them, too, are purely spurious, meaning nothing to anybody, but we don’t know that.”

  United Earth Embassy, Aserri, Santa Josefina

  It was past dawn before the shuttle touched down on a broad green lawn. Five of the uniformed security staff met it at the landing pad. The senior of those guards slapped the side of the shuttle, hard, and told the pilot to take off immediately. Meanwhile the other three, trying to surround Esmeralda on all four sides, began to hustle her at a near run, out of the open and into the main building.

  The last one to enter the building was the sergeant in charge, also bearing Esma’s overnight bag. He slammed the heavy door behind him and then directed the rest of his crew to take Esma deeper into the building for safety. In was at about that time that she realized the windows were all sandbagged.

  She stopped, nonplussed. “What has been . . .”

  The sergeant’s accent said he was local. “Snipers and mortar fire, ma’am, almost daily for the last couple of weeks. We haven’t lost anybody but we can’t afford to lose one—you—now either. Sorry for the rough and ready treatment.”

  “It’s okay, sergeant. Needs must and all. I had no idea things had gotten this bad here. Certainly, the high admiral doesn’t know.”

  Rather than answer in words, the sergeant flicked his eyes in the direction of the ambassador’s officer.

  “Oh, I see.” Esma sighed, then asked, “If this place is under effective attack at all hours, how do I get out of the compound and to General . . .”

  The sergeant shook his head. “It isn’t all the time. There’s been several lulls every day. The next one due is when the local staff reports in, which will be in about an hour. We can slip you out then. It’s going to have to be in a plain, unarmored car though.

  “Most of the city—most of the country, in fact, all of it that doesn’t have anything to do with us or the Taurans—is actually pretty quiet and safe, ma’am. You’ll be fine once you’re half a kilometer from us.”

  Esma caught sight of her friend, Estefani Melendez, the ambassador’s private secretary, as she was seen to her overnight quarters. Estefani, “Stefi” to Esma, ran to greet her, throwing both arms around the Earth girl and kissing both cheeks.

  “Isn’t it awful?” said the Santa Josefinan girl. “It’s like it isn’t even my country anymore around here. Did you know they’ve tried to suborn even me? Really, they cornered me on my way to work, two of them, and demanded I give them a list of embassy personnel. I refused, of course.”

  “How is it away from the embassy?” Esma asked.

  “About the same as always. It’s only here . . .” She let the words trail before asking, brightly, “Will you be here long? Can we maybe escape this prison and go have lunch or go shopping someplace safe?”

  “Maybe when I come back through,” Esma answered.

  Escuela Maria, Madre de Dios, San Jaba, Santa Josefina

  When you engage in an atrocity against mostly innocent parties, thought Legate Villalobos, it’s at least a minor balm to your conscience when your victims are cultural foreigners.

  As if to punctuate the thought, there came a brief and ragged rattle of musketry, followed by the mass screams of what sounded like women and children. As if on cue, because it was on cue, a San Jaban man, hands tied behind him, was led out between the blue- and beige-painted square pillars that held up the gate and this end of the covered walkway, flanked by two guards, with a third pulling on a rope leash around his neck. The future victim tried to maintain dignity, and kept an admirably stoic face. Yet dignity was hard to maintain when every pull of the rope caused a stumble.

  The irony of doing the court-martials in a school dedicated to the Virgin Mary, the executions in a play yard nearby, all by a regiment named for the Virgin Mary, was not entirely lost on Villalobos. I do wonder what she thinks of all this.

  He decided to follow along. If I can order it, I can at least force myself to watch it. I’ve already spent enough time watching the “people’s tribunals,” in any case.

  The informal little procession followed the street west, past a tree line to an open field, that field bisected by a creek, and with a few stout individual trees growing here and there. Some playground equipment, a brace of see-saws, a jungle gym, and a brightly painted, polychrome merry-go-round were there as well.

  Incongruously, a firing squad, six men and a tribune, stood at ease in a line, perhaps fifteen meters from one of the trees.

  A crowd of women and children were waiting and wailing, held back from coming closer by a line of rifle-wielding men. Villalobos saw, too, that a camera followed a small party, just two men, dragging a body bundled up in a sheet along the ground. They passed by the line of soldiers, depositing the bundle among the women and children, and then retreated to lay another sheet at the base of the tree, then waited for the next delivery.

  Back amongst the crowd, the women, some of them, bent over the sheet. The wailing instantly grew to a crescendo as the cameraman turned his and its attention back to the tree. The sound dropped as some of the women and boys cradled the body gently, lifting it to bring it home.

  Villalobos shook his head; he was not a man without pity.

  The next victim, the mayor of the town, was led to the tree near the firing squad. The rope remained around his neck, but was given a turn around the tree, and then used to tie off his torso.

  Then came the commands “. . . apunten . . . Fuego!”

  The crowd moaned between the words, which moaning changed at the final command to a long shriek as Villalobos’ soldiers fired. The body was battered against the tree, then slumped into the ropes. Villalobos thought the man might still be breathing, a guess confirmed when the tribune commanding the firing squad marched to the tree, drew his pistol, and fired a single shot into the mayor’s head, spraying blood, brains, and fragments of bone out the other side.

  “And what was your crime, Mister Mayor?” thought Villalobos. You spoke in public in support of the current government and the Tauran Union forces here. It was possibly understandable, but was completely impermissible. Tsk.

  Villalobos noted the cameraman stopped to change the batteries on his camera. Necessary, I suppose, given the power required to send the record to the globalnet from here.

  Task Force Jesuit Headquarters, Rio Clara
, Santa Josefina

  The name, officially, was Tauran Union Security Force—Santa Josefina. The alternate name, Task Force Jesuit, for “SJ,” had begun more or less as a joke, but then stuck. That General Marciano was, himself, a religious man, probably helped with the sticking.

  Watching the video of the murders—formal murders, yes, and with a degree of protocol attached, but murders nonetheless—caused him to wince at each command to fire. It was made worse, somehow, that the people being shot on screen were, by blood and culture, his own. He even shared a language with the older ones, though only half a language and most of an accent with the younger.

  And I know why they’re doing it, too. At least I think I do. It’s to bait me in, to make me take some portion of my overstressed pocket division and try to stop the killings. If I don’t try, the TU and the local government—and here Marciano made a small pause to mentally spit—look weak and helpless. If I do try and lose we look worse. Even if I try and win— and I do not like our odds for beans here—I doubt I can save many of the condemned.

  A phone rang with the peculiar rattlerattlerattle of a field telephone. The duty officer picked it up and answered it, before announcing, “President Calderon for you, sir.”

  “Have it transferred to my quarters.”

  Claudio rarely tried very hard to hide his contempt for both Santa Josefina and its president. He didn’t try now, either. No sooner had Calderon begun to berate him for his inaction over San Jaba, then the general began beating his phone on his desk. He stopped briefly to ask, “Have you got the message, Mr. Calderon?” before beginning the beating again. He went through this routine three times before the president shut up and apologized.