by Tom Kratman
Sanchez sat quietly defiant. He didn’t feel like a hero, but he was pretty sure he could keep faith at least until the hot pincers came out. He felt his resolve weaken a bit as he heard the faint commands and rattle of musketry that suggested an execution.
“Can’t you give me something, Corporal, anything I can use in your defense? It’s so goddammned silly for a young man like yourself, with a full life of peace ahead of him, to be butchered and shoveled into an unmarked, lye-filled grave. And for what? We’ve come in in strength now, and to win. Your death will be meaningless, especially since no one who matters to you will ever even know.”
That got to him more than the next rattle of musketry. I’ve been a good soldier since I joined up. But to be shot like an animal, extinguished like a cockroach . . . there are limits on what I am prepared to endure. But what can I give that I can in good conscience give? I don’t know much. I don’t know, for example, where the embassy folk we took prisoner are being held. I don’t know exactly why the Duque came here, though it must be . . . ah . . . maybe that.
“Carrera was here, you know, Ma’am,” Sanchez said. “Supposedly he had to have a meeting with someone. I don’t know who. And even if I was involved in the attack on the Earthpigs’ embassy . . .”
Esma overheard Rall say to del Collea, “Now, isn’t that interesting? One woman got all that from one of them and that quickly.”
“I told you they were good,” said del Collea. “Better than we are for a lot of things. Still, fascinating; I wonder who Carrera was here to meet.”
Since she knew who, Esmeralda Miranda felt a sudden rise in blood pressure. Oh, no; they’re going to find out it was me and then . . .
“And the dumb ass who told us that also told us that he, personally, was involved in the Earth embassy massacre.”
“Well, he was only a corporal,” Rall said, “You can’t expect too much.”
Oh, shit; what if the corporal knows why . . . who . . . me? Well . . . I do have an excuse, if it comes to that. Esma’s hand instinctively stroked the pistol loaned her by Marciano.
Leaving the soon-to-be-abandoned command post—the radiomen were already dismantling it in part—Esma made her way to the prisoner’s compound. The interrogation cells stood well away from the wire. These were field expedients, a couple of soundproofed six-meter shipping containers helicoptered in for the purpose.
But it has to look right. I can’t just walk in and shoot somebody looking like somebody trying to tie up a loose end. I have to look furious, bestial, beyond reason, inhuman.
She waited, watching for a while, until one of the containers opened up. From it emerged two men, one in civil dress and the other in the field uniform of a Gallic Gendarme. With their departure, that container was empty. So it’s the other one.
It’s me or him, Esma told herself. For a moment she thought about shooting the interrogator and the captive, both, but then realized, No, he can’t have grabbed the interrogator’s gun and shot him or her, and then me shot him, because I have those different rounds, “frangible,” Bertholdo called them, that the interrogator is unlikely to have. Oh, well, “simple is best,” as someone told me.
She put on the very bestial and enraged face she knew she’d need for her after-the-event excuse. She was a little surprised to find her emotional state changing to match her face. She then stormed to the metal door. There, she eased the door open and stepped inside. She carefully half-closed the metal door behind her.
The prisoner, unbound and sitting in a chair, looked like he could have been a cousin from back home. “Well, no, I don’t know, as I said. I did hear a rumor . . .” He shut up and looked up when he saw Esma framed for a moment in the light of the cracked open door.
The interrogator, a tall woman Esma hadn’t noticed in the camp before, noticed Sanchez looking at the door, then turned and began to ask, “Who are . . .”
Esma drew her loaned pistol and screamed at the top of her lungs, “For murdering my friend!” Then she took aim and fired three shots at Sanchez, two of which hit. She fired so quickly that the chair was only a quarter tipped over before she ceased fire.
“He murdered my friend,” she explained, to the interrogator, chin lifting and her voice infused with a surreal calm. The interrogator had her hands raised over her head.
“Justice is done.”
So that’s how someone commits murder for a cause or to protect themselves. It isn’t as hard as I thought.
Café de Flore, Lumière, Gaul
Mission in Santa Josefina more or less accomplished, Jan had ducked back to Gaul on the first thing smoking. Stuart-Mansfield had been a help there, too. Once home, she’d begun a hunt for a safer venue for her research. It seemed that the plate glass windows fronting coffee shops were inevitable. At least, Jan hadn’t been able to find a place without one. Is there some kind of unwritten rule? Is it the Gallic penchant for girl watching? Clearly, some other kind of venue is needed, eventually.
Window or not, she’d had an idea before being sent to Santa Josefina that needed exploration. The ship she wanted had disappeared from Cochin as completely as something could disappear. Even if we had the satellite imagery for the last couple of years, we—at least I—don’t have the manpower to check it. I doubt even the Peace Fleet does.
So let’s jump ahead, way ahead. Any troops that are going to get on that assault transport probably—no, certainly—came from Balboa. Carrera will use his allies, as long as they’re being watched, and under supervision of people he does trust, but everything we can see of how they’ve been parceled out says he doesn’t trust them out of view. So, there are a few ways to see who’s left Balboa.
She went to satellite views of the airships Balboa had used mostly for the purpose of moving—there they are again—shipping containers and other supplies from the two ports to the area between them. From Balboa, some had picked up humanitarian supplies and women and very young children and moved them to various spots around Colombia Latina. Some of the children weren’t all that young. She tracked something over one hundred such humanitarian flights before giving that up as a bad use of her increasingly limited time.
Okay, maybe he moved some of his cadets out that way. But the numbers are too small and the total numbers moved by air not much cover. And there really weren’t that many cadets to move. On the other hand, my Volgan reporter reports that not only are one of the two heavy Balboan legions made up almost entirely of cadets and Young Scouts, but they have expanded all the cadet regiments with massive numbers of Young Scouts and placed those regiments throughout their entire force.
Jan began to say, “There ought to . . . ,” when she realized that there was a law and Carrera simply ignored it, as he tended to ignore every aspect of law of war that was Kosmo-man-made rather than common law.
Okay, so I can’t judge based on numbers or bodily size. Let’s try another tack.
It was difficult for her to say, initially, which of the ships that pulled into Balboan ports during the truce between invasions was a long term hide for major equipment and which was a late negotiated contract for non-military supplies. As she reviewed older satellite imagery, though, something became quite obvious.
Tanks and infantry fighting vehicles don’t just materialize on a Ro-Ro overnight. They were bought, loaded, and stored against the day, long, long ago.
But that was only a few. There were more Ro-Ros that were in regular service but broke their contracts, off-loaded their civilian cargos, and picked up whole motor pools of less obviously military equipment before delivering it to Balboa.
No matter, no matter; they all came to Balboa and dropped off equipment and supplies and, in a few cases, formed battalions and brigades of other Latins come to help their brothers.
Where did they go from there?
Hmmm . . . a number of them went for additional cargos. Some went back into commercial service. But . . . aha . . . there’s one off the coast of Valparaiso . . . a number of them carried civilia
ns to refugee camps out of harm’s way to both coasts of Colombia del Norte and Colombia Central. Interesting—and we should have picked it up—that none of them went to Santa Josefina. I suppose Carrera already had that war well thought-out.
So, let’s track one.
Jan followed the progress of one such ship, the MV Leaping Maiden, from Balboa to Valdivia, where she disgorged what had to be twenty-five thousand people.
She fiddled some more with her, as far as she could tell, untraceable tablet. “Hmmm . . . let’s fast forward a bit . . . yes, right about two thousand tents so something like twenty-five thousand people. Maybe a bit less. Okay . . . now what?”
She was disappointed to discover that “what,” in this case, was the Leaping Maiden disappearing into the stream of commerce, with nothing further to do with the Balboan war or humanitarian efforts. At least, there was nothing obviously to do with either.
Bastards.
Nonetheless, a number of freighters—seven, she thought, though the shell game being played meant it could have been twice that—did continue plying those coasts, bringing supplies to the refugee camps.
And then, at the port of Saavedra, Valdivia, she spotted something odd. This was a ship, maybe a little larger than some so engaged, disgorging humanitarian supplies but also apparently picking up some. Okay, well maybe they made a mistake and sent too many widgets to Saavedra and not enough to wherever. Buuut . . . the loading in both directions is being done by . . . she dialed back her tablet in time and tracked a convoy of some common trucks carrying what were probably boys to the port from a refugee camp. There was enough detail to count twenty-five heads per truck, and sixteen trucks in the convoy.
“But fast forward, shall we, lass?”
The same sixteen trucks left late that same day, but she counted only fifteen heads per, back in the cargo area.
“Bingo!” I have the ship. Now let’s see where else they’ve been and where they are now.
MV ALTA, Mar Furioso
Along with a number of other uncanny abilities, the woman Alena, so-called, “the witch,” could generally find Hamilcar Carrera whenever she wanted to, provided he was within half a mile or so. She didn’t know how she did it either, but ever since she had decided that the boy, then about three years old, was her people’s long-awaited savior and god, Iskandr, the two had been linked by an almost psychic bond.
She found him this time on the missile deck, the place where the Cochinese shipyard had installed seventy-three fourteen-tube, long-range rocket launchers in the five-hundred-and-fifty-pound warhead range. They’d only put in the tubes and the elevating and traversing mechanisms; the trucks that normally carried them had been outfitted with dummies made of painted tree trunks and parked somewhere to rot in Cochin’s sweltering climate.
Reaching Ham, sitting on one of the tube assemblies and contemplating another, she started to do full proskynesis.
Ham held up his hand to stop her. “Please don’t, Alena; you know I neither like it nor need it.”
The woman stopped about halfway to her knees and went back to a full upright position. Alena was a princess, more or less, of a barbarian people who traced their culture and their genes back to Old Earth’s Afghanistan and, pushing far enough back, the army of Alexander the Great. She was completely pagan, as well, but her people retained, as a general rule, the nobler aspects of paganism, and none of the cobbled together scraps of paganism that had Old Earth’s Orthodox Druids and neo-Azteca Nanauatli murdering the innocent to appease gods they themselves rarely believed in.
“You should not wander off, Iskandr, without telling Legate Johnson where you are going. This ship is a dangerous place and he worries.”
“Did he send you to find me?” Ham asked.
“No, he just wondered where you were, aloud, and I took it upon myself to find you. Don’t ask why; you already know: because this ship is dangerous and I worry.”
“Ah, but if I am, as you insist, a god, my mother in all but womb, how can anything here hurt me?”
“The original Iskandr was a god, too,” the woman said, “and yet he was done to death, and his people—my people and yours—were deprived of him for almost three thousand years, possibly by a lousy mosquito. You owe it to us, this time, to be more careful.
“What, by the way, did you come here for? This place is as alive as a tomb.”
“I realized that we made a mistake, and possibly a disastrous one.”
“Your father, even if he is not a god, like you, doesn’t make many mistakes that I have seen.”
“I’m not sure it was him, or, if it was, that it was something a non-naval man who is also not an artilleryman could be expected to have seen. And maybe it was just unavoidable.”
“And that mistake was?” she asked.
“All of these rockets fire only in one direction, to the left, or ‘port,’ as the swabbies would say. That means a long slow turn to put us in position to fire, or going to the other side of the target than we’d planned on. I suspect there’s a possibility that we’ll have to keep turning as we fire to take out enough for a window into the target.”
“Have you brought your concerns to Legate Johnson?”
“No, no yet. I wanted to see if I could come up with a solution.”
“And have you?”
He shook his head regretfully. “No.”
Alena’s voice took on a note of concern. “Will we fail because of it? Will you be endangered?”
“Probably not, for either,” Ham said, “though probably doesn’t mean certainly.”
Ham hesitated, a gesture Alena was sure to catch.
“Yes, Iskandr?”
“I heard the news about the embassy attacks in Santa Josefina, and about the massacres during them. Do you suppose it’s all true? Did my father order it?”
Alena didn’t hesitate. “Of course, he knew and, if he didn’t order it, it was certainly the kind of thing he might order. He is a ruthless man, your father, and bent on winning and bending the worlds to his will.”
“Hajar,” said Ham, distantly and softly. Hajar was a city—had been a city—in Yithrab. Hamilcar’s father had destroyed it, he was sure.
“Yes,” said Alena, “Hajar. You do know . . . ?”
“Yes, I know. And I know I may end up doing the same thing at our target’s capital.”
“You may,” she said. “And like your father’s ruthlessness in launching a war in Santa Josefina, launching it and carrying it on, you must be ruthless.”
“If I am a god by your people’s reasoning, Alena, is my father, as well?”
“No . . . no; I’m afraid your father isn’t human enough at the core to be a god.”
Headquarters Task Force Jesuit, Rio Clara, Santa Josefina
Marciano was livid. If looks could burn, the scrunched-up piece of paper in his left hand would have gone poof in an instant.
“Goddamn it!” he shouted, loud enough for the gate sentries to blanche. “And Goddamn that frog bastard, Janier, too! We finally, finally start to make a little progress here and he orders four of the five battalions we were sent as reinforcements to Balboa! Now fucking what?”
“We comply,” said Rall, with an indifferent shrug. “But since the battalion he’s not taking is the Sachsen battalion of police, we put them on embassy duty and continue with what we were doing before the attacks.
“Besides, he’s right, you know. If we can hang on here long enough for him to win there we’ll eventually have a quarter of a million men at our disposal.”
“Traitor,” said Marciano, but without any heat. “Fine. Send the word to the troops moving on the guerilla base to hold positions, then get them back to where they were before everything started to look like it was coming apart.”
“And it isn’t a total loss, anyway, General. We’ve now got about a thousand guerillas, sympathizers, and general troublemakers locked up behind wire. We won’t have the problems with rear area security we did before, either.”
&n
bsp; “Color me skeptical,” said the general.
Rall forced a true shit-eating grin. “Ja . . . there’s a hearing tomorrow concerning our right to keep our prisoners, too, so . . . maybe we’ll see our efforts undone there, as well.”
“Goddamn it.”
“And speaking of that,” piped in del Collea, “what are we to do with the charming and lovely, but, as it turns out, high strung and murderous Ensign Miranda?”
“We’re going to do exactly nothing,” said Marciano. “I’m not even going to reclaim my pistol. The interrogator was quite certain that he was involved in the attack on her embassy, hence responsible for the murder of her friend. I think no court-martial we could empanel would convict her for doing what every man in the task force would love to have done for himself.
“And besides . . . I need her for the intelligence we get from the peace fleet.”
Global Court of Justice, Binnenhof, Haarlem
Johannes Litten and Beate Heinrich kept their seats while their colleague, Karlie Kipping, summed up the argument for the current issue. This concerned the illegal imprisonment, without trial, of Santa Josefinans, and Tauran and Federated States civilians, who were currently languishing in durance vile, “contrary to the laws of war as they currently exist,” insisted Kipping, “and contrary to interplanetary human rights law.” The current motion had been appended to the earlier one, designed to stop the destruction of the rain forest.
