A Pillar of Fire by Night

by Tom Kratman

  The sudden change from forward motion at high speed to spinning uncontrollably while moving in the same direction at equally high speed pinned Halpence’s left arm just that little bit too far from the eject lever. His right hand was still firmly fixed on the stick, but the spin pulled that hand and stick so far off that it was worse than useless for controlling the aircraft. Halpence played with the foot pedals, trying to use what remained of his control surfaces to adjust the plane’s altitude so that when he released his hand from the stick, centrifugal force would drive it to the other eject lever. It was only ever a guess, and if it had any hope, it was a slim one. He did release the stick but his hand flew to the side of his leg. From there it was a finger crawl to the lever, as his spinning plane descended lower and lower and . . .

  The wingman announced, “I confirm that one.”

  “Thanks, but no matter,” said Ordoñez. “What matters is clearing our skies for the infantry and armor. Come on; we’re going through the barrage; rather, through both barrages.”

  “Wooohooo, just like the national air races!”

  “Nah; way worse than that.”

  Still flying low, down where the Taurans’ superior radar was unlikely to pick him up for all the trees, Ordoñez put his Mosaic over on its side. I have to see it, to see the counterattack going in.

  He wasn’t disappointed. Just a couple of hundred meters below his plane, a mixed line of tanks and infantry fighting vehicles, “Ocelots,” in legionary lingo, seemed to roll on water as they moved across the river. Other Ocelots entered the water from concrete boat ramps, while those who had done so before them sputtered across at about six miles an hour under the drive of their water jets. He thought he saw a wrecker on the far side, maybe intended to help the vehicles get out of the water, if needed.

  Ahead, a bridge was down, or rather, damaged enough that it would take no vehicular traffic. Notwithstanding this, a dual line of infantry crossed, helping themselves and each other across the ruins of the bridge with the aid of ropes rapidly strung and beams roped to the still extant pylons. Just past the ruined bridge, crawling with those dangerous vermin, another underwater bridge, composed of concrete culverts placed in the water long before, and open into and from the direction of flow, upheld the point of another armored formation as it strove to get to the action.

  The guns to Ordoñez’s right were still firing, though with the rising sun the flashes had become mostly invisible. Still, they put out enough smoke and kicked up enough dust that there was no doubt but that the artillery was still searing a path for the infantry. With a nudge of the stick the pilot rolled right.

  And speaking of artillery, there’s a battalion moving up. I wonder if they’ll even need to cross the river to get a useful firing position. Not my subject matter, I’m afraid.

  Ordoñez was down to three planes now, including his own. What had happened to the third one his wingman hadn’t been able to say. But with those three he took advantage of the Mosaic’s tremendously tight turn radius to fly a racetrack under the still flying shells of the artillery.

  God bless the National Air Races.

  Cayuga Field, Cienfuegos

  The planes staggered back by twos and threes, their pilots exhausted and, in more than a few cases, scared positively witless and white.

  “I hope you’ve enough fuel to make it to Dos Rios International,” said the control tower, which at the moment was more of a control scraping with a few weary men and women, a large semi-portable antenna, and a couple of radios. “We’re still mined and, at the moment, haven’t a damned thing to clear the mines with. “We’ve asked the locals to help but, with the death of their president and a good deal of his cabinet, nobody’s willing to commit to much of anything.

  “And if you don’t believe that you shouldn’t try to test the mines, you can see the remnants on the field of the last one to try.”

  “And what do we do at Dos Rios?” more than one returning pilot asked.

  “I’m just a chief technician filling in for somebody; what do I know? Still, higher command has its skills and responsibilities, and I have mine. I certainly can’t make decisions for them, at least until their bodies are positively identified.

  “Even so, I note that you can get refueled at Dos Rios and fly to one of the other bases. On the other hand, if you have enough fuel to make it there, I understand La Paloma claims that all their mines went off like a string of firecrackers, about fifteen minutes after they were deposited. Sometimes, you know, quality control at the factory isn’t everything it might be.

  “In the alternative, eventually I am sure we can start trucking ordnance to you at Dos Rios, though that promises to be neither neat nor quick.

  “If you don’t like any of these alternatives, gentlemen, I have a civilian here who observes that you can also point your planes to sea and eject. This, to me, seems altogether too permanent.”

  HAMS Indomitable, Shimmering Sea, near Cristobal

  The commander of the air wing briefed the ship’s captain in his day cabin. “The news, sir, is not good. We launched twenty-nine combat sorties, all we were capable of this morning. The following pilots have not returned: Baird, believed to have run into the cable anchoring one of their barrage balloons; Corbin, believed blinded by a laser and crashed; Dixon, shot down by four or five of their Mosaics, ganging up on him; Danks, air defense fire; Gibbs, unknown . . .”

  “Just the short version, Air; I can deal with names later.”

  “Fine, Captain; the short version is that we sent out twenty-nine and got seventeen back. We can’t even claim it as a Pyrrhic victory; another half day like this and we are done. I am sure we took a great many down with us, but when a pissant peripheral country like Balboa can replace her losses and we cannot replace ours . . .”

  “Never mind that; echelons above both you and me. How about the Frogs?” the captain asked.

  “They’re not talking. When a frog isn’t crowing about his successes you can be pretty sure he’s taken a pretty nasty defeat.”

  “Spares?”

  “We can knock together four more Sea Hurricanes, but that will not happen all that soon.”

  “Do it. We’re also pulling back to Cienfuegos to establish a screen line to prevent them being hit again by those nasty damned stealthy gliders.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  “Sancho, my armor!”

  —Don Quixote, from Man of La Mancha

  —Patricio Carrera,

  during the liberation of Sumer and after

  Battle Position H-14, South of the Parilla Line

  Den Haag didn’t know anymore how many times the fire had lifted off before coming back with redoubled fury. The first three times—or was it four?—he’d dutifully manned the firing port of his fighting position. He’d waited and waited—he thought the breaks in fire had ranged from five minutes to fifteen—watching out for enemy attack, before seeing, instead, a storm of shells, fire, smoke, and flying steel shards. After the third—or maybe the fourth; I can’t seem to remember anymore—he’d just stayed down, praying alternately for a shell to put him out of his misery or for the storm to end.

  Occasionally, he thought he saw van der Wege’s ghastly corpse grinning at him or even laughing around the muzzle still stuck in his mouth. Den Haag really didn’t know anymore what was impossible and what was not. Before this morning, he’d have said that the kind of barrage he’d endured was impossible. Now he couldn’t really say much of anything; it all came out as “gahgahgahgah.”

  His left hand was locked so tightly to his rifle that he couldn’t pry it away. The right hand shook like a leaf in the wind. He was nauseated, but whether that was from concussion or fear he didn’t know. His vision swam in and out of focus, without any obvious pattern.

  He still could feel—hearing was not going to happen any time soon—the shells falling. They felt to him like they were falling some distance away, three or four hundred meters, maybe. But they’d fooled him before; he wasn�
�t coming out of his hole just because they teased him or tried to fool him. It wasn’t safe anywhere but in the very bottom of his position.

  South of Stollen Number One Twenty-Six

  Cruz and his cohort commander, Velasquez, weren’t the first ones into the early morning light. By the time they left their concrete shelter, the tercio’s Cazador maniple was already spread out on the south slope. There was a bunker also at the military crest, from which they could watch the bombardment and judge the timing and effects. The bunker was—mirabile dictu—connected by buried wire to the stollen, but, more wondrous still, the wire was intact. Even so, Velasquez had taken two radio bearers with him.

  Before the party, shells still fell at the rate of about fifteen thousand per minute. Behind, audible over the shelling only because closer, the armored mass of First Corps rumbled to and across the crossing points. There were also planes roaring through their dogfights overhead, but neither Cruz nor his boss had an eye or an ear for those. Their job was on the ground; let the air take care of the air unless they needed some air defense suppressed.

  Cruz had never seen nor thought to see anything so horrible in his life, and he had seen plenty of horror across a good part of the planet. The jungle to the south was eviscerated, brutalized, raped. And still the shells fell. What had been green was now all brown and black, shattered and splintered. A thick veil of smoke covered the ground, though it was beginning to swirl and ascend as the sun warmed it and such ground as could be touched.

  He took scant comfort from the knowledge that it would grow back surprisingly quickly. It was an obscenity now.

  None of the sounds changed all that much, but the rumble of shells flying overhead shifted outward. Before their eyes, the shells ceased to fall over and area of about four or five hundred meters across and, though they couldn’t see it they knew it from studying the fire-support plan, about one and a half kilometers to the south. For that one and a half kilometers, control of their own supporting fires had been returned to the leading cohort commanders. The tercio guns, the eighty-five-millimeter jobs, would not return to tercio control until that three-kilometer limit had been breached. Instead, the eighty-fives pounded the flanks of this corridor and the others, as did the mortars of those cohorts and maniples not in the leading thrusts.

  Down below, the Cazador maniple stood almost as one man and, again, with as near to unity as might be hoped for, began a fast march, sometimes a trot, into the gap that had been opened up for them,

  “Top,” said Velasquez, “I’m going to leave one radio with you and take one with me. I’m also going to get on the ass end of the Cazadores, and not lose sight of them. Start bringing the maniples up now and push them towards me. The boys are going to be a little nervous about going up that gap with artillery coming in to both sides. Can’t say I blame them, but talk it up to them. Remind them it’s not, in principle, different from their training. While I’m at the point, you take the ass for straggler control.”

  “Wilco, sir,” Cruz replied. “If I don’t see you before then, I’ll see you at the Shimmering Sea.”

  “Thalassa! Thalassa!” quoth Velasquez, with a wicked smile.

  Ahead, the first fusillades of small arms fire sounded, and, from the sound, it was almost all friendly.

  I suppose, thought Cruz, that they’ve just had the fight simply beaten out of them.

  UEPF Spirit of Peace, in orbit over Terra Nova

  Much as the Balboan Condors existed and thrived in one environment, the environment of the very slow and relatively weak and small, where high performance jets could not function, the still smaller and slower recon skimmers of the United Earth Peace Fleet operated where Mosaics couldn’t target them well, lasers were fairly useless, and the radar of the self-propelled cannon was unlikely to notice them, even though they generally noticed and made short work of Tauran drones. Usually, this was true, anyway; they had gotten lucky with a skimmer a few times in the past.

  From her day cabin, Marguerite watched the skimmer-sent image on her screen. It was of a mass of tanks and other armored vehicles crossing the river pretty much unimpeded. Pale at the final stake into the heart of her plans to ultimately secure her home world from these barbarians and to save it from the decadent Class Ones who had ruined it, she pressed a button to call Janier.

  “Bertrand,” she said, when he answered, her own voice quivering, “I don’t know if you can see it with your own resources, but the Balboans are coming at you in force. The bridges are down but they’re not using bridges. I understand that their lighter armored vehicles can swim, but how do they make tanks swim? I can see them, crossing the river like it’s not even there.”

  Janier was silent for a long moment, then he answered, “Underwater bridge, I suppose. They’re hard to spot and comparatively hard to destroy. That will be his heavy corps, First Corps, I think it is. I’m rolling my armor to meet him along the highways.”

  “What have you got to deal with it?” Wallenstein asked.

  “One brigade, though it’s a large one and rather good; Sachsens, you know. It was all the heavy force we could support through Puerto Lindo. I’m also moving in two very good infantry battalions, plus support, by truck.”

  “Where are you now?” Marguerite asked.

  “At my headquarters, but I’ll be going with the Sachsens to stop Carrera.”

  “Don’t,” she said. “Please . . . just . . . don’t.”

  “I must.”

  “Bertrand, has he ever not predicted us, you and me, both? I mean about anything important? There will be something waiting for you and the Sachsens.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know. But there will be something.” Marguerite drew in a long slow breath. She didn’t want to admit this but, “Your people have to have suspected it, but I doubt you knew. Well I do know. He got a number of nuclear weapons from my predecessor, Bertrand. Who knows, maybe he has others, too. Do you think for a minute he won’t use them?”

  “And you’re just telling me this now?”

  “I was hoping never to have to tell you at all, frankly. But please don’t accompany the Sachsens.”

  “I must. Janier, out.”

  Vicinity Volcano Number Nine

  Sergeant Sais had pretty much been able to sit out the bombardment in his hole, well-sheltered enough from the occasional long or short that landed in the general area. The worst and most frequent had been the one-twenty-two—or so he supposed—rockets. They packed an amazing amount of explosive—over fourteen pounds—for what wasn’t even a five-inch shell. Indeed, the standard five-inch shell had less than half that explosive weight.

  Still, none came close enough to make Sais more than lay back in his trench. Sometimes he didn’t even bother since, after all, What difference if killed by a short round or killed by an inferno next door?

  Does my side know we’re here? Sais wondered. I’m almost surprised none of the shells that hit near us set off the Volcano. I suppose a very near miss with thirty-three pounds of buried explosive is enough, where half that, twice as far away, and above the surface is not enough. Still, only a matter of . . . uh, oh, what’s this?

  “This” was a mixed column of tanks and infantry fighting vehicles, maybe thirty of each, though Sais had the sense of some outliers, both to the north and south. Mortars and scouts, I suppose. Well, the more the merrier. I wonder; will I get credit in the hereafter for getting this many Taurans, personally?

  As the tanks and IFVs pulled into hasty positions, another column showed up, this one about forty trucks carrying an ethnic kaleidoscope of infantry, though all in the same uniform. A light vehicle showed up after that, and raced to the head of the column of trucks. Stopping in a cloud of dust, a tall and slender officer stepped out—Oh, a general I suppose he must be from the way he acts—and began issuing orders to a group that clustered around him after dismounting from the trucks.

  That group dispersed explosively on the presumptive general’s order, returning
to their men and leading them to Sais didn’t know where, except that they seemed to be orienting themselves on the Sachsen companies.

  That general took a look at the little compound holding Sais and the others, then began to stride toward the gate purposefully. Reaching the gate, he shouted for the officer in charge. When that pudgy worthy came out, Sais was shocked to see the general punch him in such a way that his feet flew out from under him, before delivering a swift kick to his midsection. Then the gate opened and a senior sergeant came in and called the prisoners to muster around him.

  When they’d all formed roughly on the sergeant, the tall Gaul—Definitely what the manuals say is the uniform of Gaul, anyway—strode over and began to speak.

  “I am Janier,” the Gaul said. “You have . . . heard of me? Ma Spanish bad. Like ma English. Try not to speak. Embarrassing, tu sabes? You not supposed to be here. Gave orders take away. You go now, for safety. These men . . . escort you. Apology for not getting away with safe. Try get message your side. Maybe work.”

  He turned then and bellowed “Malcoeur!” At which point a rather tubby mid-grade officer came out of the vehicle, too. Janier said some things to Malcoeur that set the latter to violent disagreement. Sais didn’t know what it was. He didn’t understand the other things Janier said, either, but something must have been very sad, for the tubby officer began softly to weep.

  The sergeant translated what was going on, after Janier turned and left. “The general—yes, that’s really Janier, the Tauran Union commander—has, shall we say, ‘relieved’ the former commandant of this camp.” His finger pointed at the body writhing on the ground. Inclining his head, he continued, “Major Malcoeur, in whom the general reposes the greatest trust, has been placed in charge. He and we are going to try to get you away to safety. There’s going to be fighting here, and soon. There is, as you can hear, still artillery falling all over creation, so we may not make it. The general thinks we have a better chance if we try than if we remain.