A Pillar of Fire by Night

by Tom Kratman

  “I don’t know. I know you don’t know the future.”

  “Neither of us can really know the future, Esma. All we have to go by is the past. The past tells us that when people like the people who run your planet take over, they ruin everything and everyone but themselves.”

  “That may all be so,” Esma said, “but I’m still not going to work for you or your side anymore.”

  Carrera smiled, sadly. “And now which of us is making a prediction about a future we cannot see? Hmmm . . . let’s keep this simple. Let me show you something else.”

  From a pocket in his jacket Carrera pulled out a small folded sheaf of photocopies. He opened them and passed them over to Esma. She looked at the first one and gasped. Her little fist flew to her mouth. She but down on it to keep from crying out.

  The picture was of rescue workers extracting the remnants of a young family from a collapsed building. Centered in the picture was a small baby, perhaps three months old, covered in blood and with its head deformed from some kind of trauma.

  “That was taken in Ciudad Balboa, about two weeks ago. The building collapsed from a bomb dropped by a Tauran Union airplane. That plane flew from here in Santa Josefina.”

  The girl started to answer, then though better of it.

  “Go to the next one,” he commanded.

  Reluctantly, she did. That next image was of the inside of a bomb shelter that had been penetrated by a bomb before it went off. There were several hundred bodies shown, some incomplete.

  “The next few are of the same place, but closer up and in more detail.”

  She looked, horrified. There were women, children, old men. Almost all of them seemed slightly cooked in the picture. Their color was a little off, in any case, though it was most noticeable in the lighter-skinned ones.

  “That was another plane that flew from here.”

  “How do you know?” she demanded.

  “We have radar, spotters, and spies,” he answered. “We have command centers to track the incoming attacks.”

  “Then why didn’t you stop those attacks?”

  Clever girl, he thought. “Limited ability,” he answered, truthfully, “and for not very long, which is why we have to use other means to stop them from using Santa Josefina as a base against us. And killing your friend, who was, in her own small way, working to keep Santa Josefina as a base for them, was a step toward stopping that use and”—Carrera gestured at the pictures—“a way to stop that from happening for much longer.”

  How much do I dare tell her about the really big things? Carrera wondered. I think maybe no more than we already have, which is, I hope, nothing.

  “I don’t know,” Esma said. What it was she didn’t know wasn’t entirely clear. She looked up at Carrera. “You took a big risk coming to talk to me.”

  “Not small,” he agreed, though worth it if only to feel like my Linda is here with me again, even if she isn’t.

  “Was it just to talk me into doing your dirty work for you?”

  “No,” he admitted. “No, it wasn’t. I wanted to see . . .”

  “Your wife again?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m not her.”

  For a moment, Carrera’s face grew stone-hard. “I know, but you’re painfully like her.”

  “This is hard for me, too,” she said.

  “The question of right and wrong?” he asked.

  She looked down, embarrassed. “No, the question of if I am too young for you.”

  “I am flattered . . . but you are.”

  She flashed a smile, brilliant white against dark olive skin. “Only an honest man,” she said, “would have admitted that. A dishonest one would just have picked me up and carried me to the bed.”

  “What if I had?”

  The smile faded slightly. “Only an honest girl would tell you I wouldn’t have resisted.”

  Next incarnation, maybe, Carrera thought, mentally sighing at what could not be in this life. “You need to be honest with yourself then, Esma, too, and honest about the world—the worlds—as they are, and honest about the future.”

  His words dripped with sincere desperation. “You know what a horror story Old Earth is, Esma. You know that if we don’t win here then we’ll become the same. I am sorry, truly and deeply sorry, for your friend, but I’d order it or do it myself a thousand times over to prevent what has happened to you, to your sister, and to your old country from being repeated here, and inflicted on ten billion girls just as innocent as your Stefi.”

  Esma sighed, deeply. “I’ll think about what you’ve said. I can’t agree to more than that. It would help,” she added, “if you would give orders to stop the murders.”

  “You’re that important,” Carrera admitted, “not just to me because you’re my late wife in the flesh, but that important to our cause, that I can give the orders to stop the extra-judicial killings,” Carrera said, “and, for your sake, I will. But I cannot guarantee they’ll be obeyed. It’s a guerilla war, after all, and that war still goes on. And, in this kind of war, it’s a fine line between a murder and a legitimate combat action.”

  Then, too, though you don’t know it, we’ve probably already gotten everything we need out of our little foray in specific terror.

  “Then I’ll try,” Esma said, “yes, I’ll try to keep helping, just as long as the killings are not massacres, not wanton.”

  “Best we can do, I suppose,” said Carrera. “And, dear, for your own sake prepare yourself mentally for the day you’re going to have to do something you would really rather not, because your duty or your personal safety demand it. And don’t forget the advantages of the simple and direct.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  “Diplomats are useful only in fair weather. As soon as it rains, they drown in every drop.”

  —Charles de Gaulle

  Headquarters, Task Force Jesuit, Rio Clara, Santa Josefina

  There was an unusually large amount of radio traffic echoing through the command post. Most of it sounded acrimonious.

  “You’re shitting me,” Marciano said to del Collea. “Tell me you’re shitting me. You’ve got to be shitting me.”

  Rall shook his head. “No, sir. It’s no joke. Every nation contributing to Task Force Jesuit has ordered its national contingent to detach anything from one platoon to two companies to secure their embassy. In addition, the Tauran Union has demanded one more company for the security of its mission. Combat troops, too, mind you; there’ll be no transferring our support troops to embassy duty and using embassy grounds for our field trains.”

  “What’s it work out to?” Marciano asked.

  Del Collea replied, “Just over a thousand infantry or engineers or commandos to be detached, or about a third of all ground combatants we have. But it’s worse than that, sir; every combat unit will be losing a key ability, battalions reduced to two companies, many companies reduced to two platoons. Nobody will have the depth of organization to maneuver to maintain a reserve, to serve as a covering force. We’ll be going from a square organization of triangular subordinates to a square organization of flat subordinates.”

  Marciano chewed for a moment at his lower lip. “And they just bypassed me? Went straight to their units here?”

  Del Collea’s face took on a mixture of shame and disgust. “Yes, sir. They went straight to their own people.”

  “I see.” Marciano walked to a chair and sat down heavily.

  “Sir, for what’s it worth, something over half the subordinate commanders affected have said they’ll ignore their orders on your say-so.”

  “And expose themselves to court-martial? Or relief by some political hacks without the first clue as to our war here? No. The war here was probably never winnable, anyway, but no sense in making the bloodletting any worse than it has to be.

  “Draft the orders, gentleman; we’re abandoning the rest of the country and pulling back to the capital. Rather, we’re pulling back to the embassy district and the road to the p
ort. There’s no sense in leaving ourselves out here to be chopped up in detail. At least back there a platoon of Cimbrians in their embassy can fire in support of the company they came from.”

  “I’ll see to it, sir,” Rall said.

  “Also tell the quartermaster to start planning for supply by aerial drop.”

  “Sir?”

  “We’re not going to be able to hold the road open for very long.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Oh, and Rall?”

  “Sir?”

  “Fuck the Kosmos. When we pull out, before we turn the troops over to being embassy guards, and before the guerillas catch up with us, I want to put about three battalions and all the artillery into rounding up those fuckers who crossed the border openly a while back and who made up the groups that attacked the embassies in the first place. And then we put our own guards on the interned Balboan fleet. Maybe a platoon of tanks among the guards, too.”

  “Yes, sir! Oh, and sir?”

  “Yes?”

  “Miss Miranda, the High Admiral’s aide is back. She’s back in the hut she was assigned before. Bertholdo has her pistol and is bringing it to her.”

  Esma hadn’t been able to get a ride from the United Earth embassy back to Marciano’s headquarters; there was neither an embassy to go to nor a staff to drive her. She, herself, hadn’t the first clue of how to drive a car, except that she sensed it was important to stay between the lines on the road as best one could. She’d been about to ask Cass Aragon for a lift when she’d realized on her own that, of all the things she ought not do, being seen in public with someone who just might be known as an enemy agent was probably among the worst.

  As he often did, Richard had come to her aid, calling her on her communicator and offering to send a shuttle to bring her home to the Peace. She’d declined the offer to return home but had asked if she could be brought forward to Marciano’s headquarters. Richard hadn’t done the best possible job of concealing his disappointment, but had arranged through an embassy that hadn’t been smashed to get her a ride.

  And I, thought Esma, didn’t do the best possible job of pretending it was a hardship to me not to go back. It isn’t. I’ve met the one I want, even if he’s far too old for me. I am not sure I could stand being touched by Richard . . . and Richard doesn’t deserve being rejected like that, either. Then, too, I’ve been betraying the high admiral and, if I decide to continue to work for Carrera, I would be continuing the betrayal. I don’t want her to have the chance to sense that.

  This was all much easier when it was just revenge and I didn’t have to think about the circumstances so much. It was easier, too, before I met . . .

  Esma’s thoughts were interrupted by a knock on the door to her hut. It was Bertholdo. He held up her loaner pistol. “I brought you something, miss,” he said, “something that I think you wouldn’t want to lose.”

  Esma jumped up, excitedly. “I thought they’d stolen it at the hospital!”

  “No, but the smart money would have bet that someone would have lifted it, given the chance. I took it from you when the field ambulance came for you.” He passed the thing back to her. “Oh, and I got you a special treat.”

  She cocked her head, quizzically. “A treat?”

  “Yes, miss, a treat of sorts. I or the general should have thought of it before. See, a pistol isn’t really all that great a weapon, and, at the range you’re likely to use it, needs to be able to put someone on their posterior pretty much immediately.”

  “Okay.” She’d never really thought about that aspect before, but she supposed it made sense.

  “There are a couple of ways to do that. One is to use a large caliber, ten millimeter or better. Your pistol—the general’s pistol—is only nine-millimeter and that’s not really good enough. You wouldn’t think one lousy millimeter would make that much difference, but it does or, at least, it can. I nosed around for a bigger caliber pistol for you, with a small, single-stacked grip, but nobody has one in the arms rooms so we’re stuck with that one.”

  She clutched her pistol defensively. It was so pretty compared to others she’d seen that she couldn’t see using the word “stuck” where it was concerned.

  “There’s another way, too,” Bertholdo continued. “And that’s to use a trick bullet, a hollow point, say. Those, however, are against the law of war except for some odd exceptions that don’t fit you. Wouldn’t fit me, either. Enemy catches us with one of those in our possession and they’ll shoot us on the spot unless they decide to wait long enough for someone to find a rope.”

  Pistol held loosely in her right hand, Esma’s left moved up almost of its own accord to massage her neck.

  Bertholdo caught that. “Yes, exactly. So, I hunted around and found a few boxes of these.” He bent and pulled out one box from the cargo pocket of his right leg. This he held up before her eyes.

  “Frangibles,” he said with a trace of knowing triumph in his voice. “About as good as hollow points, maybe even better, and they look normal enough that you won’t be shot out of hand for having them.” He passed over that box, reached for another that he tossed on her thin bunk, and then dig some more for her magazines.

  “I took the liberty of getting rid of the old ammunition and loading the frangibles in your pistol and the spare magazines,” he said.

  “And . . . ‘frangible,’ did you say? What does it do?”

  “Turns into small particles when it hits something. All the energy gets dumped into the body but it won’t go past the body. The downside is it won’t penetrate walls for beans, but that’s a good thing for a pistol, most of the time.”

  Smiling, still holding the pistol in her right hand, Esma flung her arms around Bertholdo, giving him a quick, light hug. “Thank you. From the heart, thank you.”

  Clearly embarrassed, Bertholdo said, “Oh, miss, it’s all right. You’re a nice girl and you are very welcome. And . . .” Bertholdo heard the sound of sirens. “Oh, crap, never mind, miss. We’ve got incoming. Let me lead you to a shelter.”

  La Caféothèque, Lumière, Gaul

  Tranzitree wax candles burned on every table, adding a fragrance that totally belied the fruit’s deadliness. Next to the candle were several rolls of chorleybread, and a generous dollop of butter. Though the chorley tasted buttery, on its own, that wasn’t nearly enough for the Gauls.

  The spacesuits were still troubling Jan, but there wasn’t much she could do about that at the moment. She had a suspicion she needed to talk to someone who had been on one of the Earthpig starships but she knew of none, or none that would talk to her, anyway.

  Sirens sounded. From her table, Campbell looked up toward the large plate glass window of the coffee shop. Customers rushed out of the coffee shop and into the street. People were abandoning cars in the streets and running for the shelter of the metro stations and various marked bomb shelters. The proprietor, older, balding and with a bit of a paunch, simply sighed with exasperation and went back to cleaning cups and saucers.

  Paunch or not, he has a military bearing, doesn’t he? I’d bet a thousand pounds he’s been through some of this before.

  It was daylight outside. A daylight attack was something that surprised Jan not at all. The gliders almost always came in under the sun, probably the better to interrupt the workday.

  Campbell shrugged off the sirens. Big city, small me, and I have work to do.

  The coffee shop had free connection to the globalnet; that was the big thing. Not that it was free, but that “free” probably meant untracked. Coupled with her pawn-shop purchased tablet, it enabled her to check things she really didn’t want the Tauran Defense Agency to know she was looking into.

  I wonder, thought Campbell, twisting her neck to look as far up as she could, in hopes of a glimpse of the incoming robot bomb, I truly wonder just how much one of those costs, as a percentage of Balboa’s prewar gross domestic product, compared to what it costs the Gauls, or Anglia, or Sachsen, or any country in the Union to have may
be half a million workers sit in a bomb shelter for a quarter to a half a day, and lose all that work. My guess would be it costs the Balboans a slightly bigger percentage, but that they don’t care, that they’re waging moral rather than economic warfare . . . and there, they’re winning.

  She heard the crumpcrumpcrump of an old-fashioned anti-aircraft gun, pulled out of mothballs. A few more of the relics soon joined in. She was pretty sure they were firing only to bolster the morale of the people of the city; the gliders almost always came in so low that machine guns had a much better chance. They even occasionally got one to crash or detonate prematurely.

  Campbell shrugged with a mix of indifference to the small risk of the bombs and impatience at the long delay as her untraceable tablet pulled up another site that concerned itself with ship spotting. It seemed almost an exercise in futility. There are tens of thousands of merchant ships on this planet, almost none of them traceable, and I don’t even have a good description—nor even a likely name—of the one I am looking for. All I know is it’s a freighter, within a couple of thousand tons of twenty thousand. It’s not a lot to go on, really. The only Cochinese who would talk to me was a security guard who didn’t have detailed knowledge of the sea or of ships. He didn’t even know the difference between a Ro-Ro and a break bulk. He could only tell me how much of the dock it took up, and about how wide it was. And some of what it took on, too, of course. The twenty thousand, give or take, tons, is just my best guess. Has to be my best guess, because if I go to the Navy and ask they just might figure out why I want to know. Or get suspicious enough to try, anyway.

  Oh, and the guard could also tell me that many, many large rockets disappeared into it. I am sure there were other people who knew a lot more, but if one of them spoke English or French I never found him. And using a local translator is what we call a bad idea in general.

  In her search for the ship, Campbell had started with the obvious stuff. She didn’t really expect it to work; nobody had even noted the ship leaving harbor, but, I’d have felt bloody fucking stupid if I hadn’t looked and later found it had been there all along.