A Desert Called Peace

by Tom Kratman

  "A love affair," Marjorie sighed. "A teenaged love affair."

  "Love destroyed the Cheng Ho?"

  God, where did they get this idiot? Coming here was a mistake. Oh, well . . . stiff upper lip and all.

  "Love started the chain of events that led to the troubles on the ship, yes. Then it continued to work its way to destroy it." Marjorie answered. "One of our colonists, Dr. Akbar al Damer, had a very lovely daughter, you see. Another, Dr. Immanuel Schweiz, had a handsome son. Without anyone here on Earth knowing it, those two fell in love. Touching, is it not?"

  "Surely, yes," the talking head agreed, "but I hardly think—"

  "On Earth, al Damer had to endure it," Marjorie plowed on. "In space, once his daughter, Besma, came up pregnant, he could not. He killed the boy and his daughter, too. Oh, there was no proof he did it. Otherwise, the captain would have spaced him. But al Damer did it, even so. Even if he had not it wouldn't have mattered. Everyone believed he had.

  "But that was only the first incident. We'd made a great effort to integrate the passengers. That began to unravel when the first Buddhist girl married the first Buddhist guy. She moved in with his parents. Then they had a baby and there was no room. Actually, there was hardly room even to make a baby in our quarters but love will find a way." Marjorie smiled and thought, Especially in low gravity.

  "So a Hindu family, very sweetly, offered to vacate their nearby quarters if others could be found for them. The captain had a storage chamber cleaned out, not too far from another Hindu family. And everyone lived happily ever after.

  "Not. Suddenly, without anyone ever thinking about it, we had two ethnic or religious centers of gravity. Marriages continued, and people kept shifting around. Within a year and a half there were Moslem sections, Mormon sections, Buddhist and Hindu sections, Catholic sections, Protestant sections . . . often separated by open spaces, sections of quarters left empty during the shifting. One real problem was that Moslem girls, given the chance, often preferred non-Moslem boys and would leave their sections to find husbands and, often enough, lovers among the non-Moslems.

  "There was surprisingly little conflict at first, considering what came later," she said. "And then Dr. al Damer was found stuffed into the recycling bin. The dead boy's father probably did it. Within hours the Moslem section was off limits to anyone but themselves, and parties of Moslem 'youths'"—one could hear the quotations as she said it—"were rampaging and the girls were being dragged back.

  "And then we had the Great Cartoon, Pig and Cow War . . ."

  Chapter Fifteen

  The soldiers like training provided it is carried out sensibly.

  —Alexander Suvarov

  Casa Linda, 7/7/460 AC

  Carrera coolly regarded the Federated States Army officer standing in front of his desk, wearing the battle dress of the FSA. The officer was so incredibly average looking as to nearly defy description: average height, average build, average hair loss for a man of about forty. He wore his glasses averagely and his uniform bore an average number of the merit badges the FSA had always seemed addicted to.

  "Virgil Rivers sends his best, Legate," the officer, John Ridenhour, said.

  That brought a smile to Carrera's face. "How is old Virg?"

  "He's fine," Ridenhour answered. "He's been selected for his first star, you know. He said to remind you, 'Who needs nukes?' If you don't mind my asking, and it seemed a damned odd thing to say, what the hell does that mean?"

  "You had to be there," Carrera answered.

  "He also said to tell you that I am the 'Imperial Spy,' and that you should take very good care of me." It was Ridenhour's turn to smile.

  "You look the part," Carrera answered. "John, I'd set you up in a penthouse or mansion, with hot and cold running bimbos, a fast convertible and a big fishing boat with a perpetually full beer cooler if that would get me the recommendation I need from you to get my legion to the war," Carrera admitted. "On the other hand, that would be a pretty serious insult so I am not offering those things. Even so, do you have a place to stay?"

  "The Julio Caesare," Ridenhour answered.

  Carrera considered. "That's a good choice. If you're not married check out the Disco Stelaris down by the casino. If you are married then take my advice and don't check out the disco. How about a—"

  From the next room Lourdes piped in, "Sergeant major has already assigned Mitchell to drive for Coronel Ridenhour, Patricio."

  God, she's such a treasure.

  "Okay," Carrera said. "That settles that. Mitchell has pretty decent Spanish, too, now. And he'll be armed so you needn't worry overmuch about personal security."

  "I'm sure he'll be fine," Ridenhour agreed. "Besides, my Spanish is actually fairly good."

  "All right then. Basically you can go anywhere, look at anything, and talk to anybody. No restrictions. Mitchell will have copies of the master training schedule and map overlay with him at all times. You need a helicopter lift somewhere, let him know in advance. I don't really recommend using our helicopters, though, because the pilots are damned near brand new and really won't be ready until just before we deploy, if we do."

  "Ground trans should be fine," Ridenhour answered. "If I really need a chopper my budget can cover hiring a civilian one. I'll pass it through your man Mitchell to clear it with you if I have to do that."

  "That's fair," Carrera agreed. "All I can tell you is have fun and that I think you'll be pleasantly surprised."

  Guarasi "Desert" Training Area,

  Republic of Balboa,

  7/10/460 AC

  Money was less of a problem now; Campos' offer—while less than generous—had helped a lot. Moreover, the interest payments on the loan Carrera had personally made to the legion were being rolled into the operating cost, multiplied by the cost-plus factor, and charged to the Federated States. Thus, Carrera still retained control of the thing, notionally and nominally under Parilla, and would for the foreseeable future. While he had that control, he trained the men.

  One major problem was that they were heading to the northern Sumerian desert: dusty, almost treeless, waterless away from the River Buranun, and open outside the cities. Balboa, on the other hand, was about two thirds jungle, much of that being mountainous, and most of the rest either city or valuable farm and ranch land. He could hardly use good farmland for maneuvers or, at least, not for serious ones.

  Fort Cameron was about used up. It had never been large enough to train anything as large as the LdC for any purpose higher than initial training for individuals. The Imperial Range Complex, too, was overstrained as were the local training areas attached to the old Federated States military installations, most of which the legion had no access to anyway.

  There was a useful open training area at the Lago Sombrero, about fifty miles down the coastal highway east of Ciudad Balboa. This was an old Federated States military base built to defend Balboa from attack during the Great Global War. In time, it had been returned to the Republic. Architecturally it wasn't much, a dozen barracks suitable for housing perhaps one thousand officers, centurions and men, and a large ammunition storage facility. More important was the airstrip that sat astride the main highway that paralleled the northern coast and connected Balboa with Atzlan and the Federated States to the south and east. Most important were the fifteen square kilometers of training land. Even this wasn't really enough though. Neither did it match well enough the damned desert the legion was going to fight in, Inshallah.

  There was also a patch of ground, the Guarasi "Desert," just a bit inland from the northern coast and rather past Lago Sombrero. It was . . . sort of . . . kind of . . . almost . . . a desert. At least it looked something like a desert, having roughly 19,000 dusty acres of various kinds of cactus (and the odd breadfruit tree and tranzitree) amidst a barren landscape of erosion, loss of topsoil, overgrazing and general environmental devastation. It still received forty inches of rain a year so the desert analogy could sometimes seem very strained.

  Carr
era was—discreetly—looking into buying it permanently for the legion for a desert training area. For the nonce he was able to lease it for a low price from the government of the Republic, which owned it and had turned it into the kind of national park virtually no one ever wanted to visit except for the occasional environmentally conscious gringo or Tauran who went there to reconfirm his view that human beings just sucked and the planet would be better off without them.

  On the Guarasi's eighty-one square kilometers Carrera had set Abogado's Foreign Military Training Group to running desert combat training courses for century and cohort sized units. The land had been modified to the extent of constructing several fortified areas for the troops to train on the attack. The type of fortifications differed. There were "pita" types, round raised-berm forts with trenches dug into the berms and firing positions and ramps for armored vehicles inside. There were also the more classic trench systems that the Sumerians were known to use, heavily bunkered and fronted by broad belts of barbed wire and simulated minefields. In addition, Carrera had bought about half the used tires in Colombia Central (and apparently every used tire in Balboa) and had them stacked, wired together, and filled with dirt to create buildings suitable for live fire training in city fighting. Only some of the fortifications, and all the tire houses, were sighted in places where live ammunition could be used to train. They were all, however, sighted to present a fairly coherent picture of a broad fortified zone suitable as an objective for a brigade—or legion—level attack provided, at least, that no tank or Ocelot main gun ammunition was used.

  Ah, well, thought Carrera, watching a century-level (roughly eighty men including the forward observer team and the medic) attack on a "pita." The attack was at night, without artillery or mortar illumination and only about twenty-five percent of the maximum illumination possible from one of Terra Nova's three moons.

  It was not quite as dark as three feet up a welldigger's ass.

  From his vantage point, and looking through a large thermal imager mounted on a tripod, Carrera observed as three machine-gun teams one hundred meters apart slithered into position in a muddy canal that crossed in front of the "pita." To the right side of the machine guns, in the same muddy ditch, a two-man rocket grenade launcher—RGL—team set up, bowed down under a double or perhaps triple load of ammunition.

  Unseen, Carrera smiled. I know it must have been a bitch lowcrawling the better part of a kilometer with that on their backs. Good boys. Tough boys. He felt a sudden warm glow of affection for his legion.

  He saw one man, hunched under a backpack radio, walk bent over extremely low from one team to another, stopping briefly at each. Three other men followed that one. He knew that was the sniper team by profile of the long-barreled Draco rifles they carried. Those four disappeared into the ditch. Behind the ditch, stretched out in wedges about fifty meters deep and as many across, Carrera could make out, just barely, three groups of perhaps seventeen to nineteen men, waiting silently.

  Jamey Soult handed Carrera a set of headphones linked to a radio tuned to the frequency of the attacking century. He whispered, "Be only a few minutes, sir. The centurion with that century just reported to the commander that the support is in position. Now, I think, they're just waiting for an 'up' from the mortar section."

  Which should long since have been up, Carrera fumed as he slipped the headphones over his ears. Calm . . . calm, he ordered himself. People make mistakes. That's why they're out here; to learn.

  To help them learn, five of the FMTG's evaluator-trainers—not "safeties," Carrera despised the idea of special safety NCOs or officers in training for combat—stood more or less among or behind the groups along with another man that Carrera thought might be the FSA officer, Ridenhour. It was hard to tell in the fuzzy green image provided by the thermal sight.

  It wasn't too much longer before he heard one long pop coming from two kilometers or so behind him. This repeated several times; the two mortars of the century's light mortar section beginning a preparation to drive the notional enemy into their bunkers.

  With only a few seconds' delay from when he first heard the crump of the mortars, the machine guns and RGLs opened up across a front of about two hundred meters. The overall effect of the machine guns' tracers was strangely beautiful and quite surreal.

  What sounded like three of the four-shot, tube-fed, pump action 43mm grenade launchers carried by an infantry century joined in with a foofoofoompwhawhawham. Smallish explosions began blossoming along the front and top of the berm. A few overshot to explode inside.

  Instead of one round in five, the machine guns were firing pure tracer, the glowing rounds making actinic lines through the air. This would help keep the assault teams, just now beginning to rise to their feet, from walking inadvertently into machine gun fire.

  The first mortar shells fell inside the pita, their high explosive outlining the top edge of the berm in sudden harsh light as they detonated.

  Behind the ditch the assault teams finished forming. Carrera thought he heard, dimly and distantly over the pounding of mortar shells and the nearer staccato bursts of machine gun fire, a young voice shouting, "Legionarios, a pie . . . al asalto . . . adelante!"

  To add to the night's misery, Cruz and the rest of the century wore super-heavy, Federated States surplus, armored vests. These were not the obsolete ballistic nylon that might stop shrapnel but would not stop a bullet. Neither were they the roughly twenty-five pound aramid fiber vests with ceramic inserts. No, no; that would have been too easy. These vests were surplus from the time of the old Cochin war and had been intended for helicopter door gunners who were never expected to walk any farther than from the helicopter pad to the NCO club for a beer. They were ceramic, over an inch thick, weighed fifty-four pounds and would stop anything less than a heavy machine gun's bullet.

  One would have thought the protection afforded by the vests would have been a comfort to Cruz. After all, there were only a couple of hundred of them, apparently, and it should have been reassuring to be given them to wear.

  Not a chance. True, there were only a couple of hundred of them in the entire legion. Thus, they were only used for live fire problems, such as this one, where the chance of death or serious wounds for somebody was very high. Despite the fatigue of lugging himself, his weapons and equipment, two sections of live bangalore torpedo plus a blank, and the bloody-damned fifty-four pound vest, belly to the dirt, across nearly a kilometer of open space fast enough to make muscles scream in protest, Cruz trembled.

  This is so going to suck mastodon cock. Cara, I want to come home!

  Cruz, like the others, had learned very quickly that words in the military did not always mean what one thought they ought to mean. "Good training," for example, clearly meant, "Gonna suck." "Really good training," indicated, "Oh, shit, is this gonna suck." "Superb training," suggested something like, "This is gonna suck so hard every whore in Balboa will be unemployed for a week."

  Cruz was an acting team leader for the exercise and had the responsibility for breaching the wire ahead. The section leader, Sergeant del Valle (who had gradually become a surprisingly friendly and even gentle sort once basic training was done with), had hinted that there was a good chance, unless of course Cruz screwed everything up badly, that the position might be made permanent. Since this would be a roughly twenty percent pay raise, and since he'd decided he really did want to marry Cara and the extra money would be useful, it was just possible that the legionary was as concerned about his performance as he was about being shot.

  Well, I'd like to tell myself that anyway. Fact is, though, I am scared to death. Fucking demo. And I thought hand grenades were bad. Jesus! And a fat lot of good this vest will do me if a the bangalore goes off early. No shrapnel or bullets in me, maybe, but also no arms, legs or head. Probably no dick, either, for that matter.

  The two sections of live bangalore—basically connectable pipes filled with a cyclonite-trinitrotoluene mix and weighing nineteen pounds each—lay clutc
hed in Cruz's arms along with the one blank section. The blank was there so that if one did set off a mine or booby trap in the course of pushing the torpedo through the obstacle the explosion would not be carried back through the rest to prematurely detonate the torpedo and, infinitely worse, one's mortal and all too easily disintegrated body.

  Two men had been hurt, one slightly and one badly, and another killed on this range about a week earlier. Cruz considered that and again shivered. Rumor was that the gringos running the training area, the FMTG, had started to add more artificial controls to keep such a thing from happening again when THE Gringo had shown up and nixed the idea.

  What Carrera had, in fact, said was, "There's nothing wrong with the exercise as set up. It was a reasonable problem for the stage of training of the troops concerned, the control was generally adequate. It was a realistic simulation of what the legion will soon face. Some men were hurt because they fucked up, not because the exercise was. Men get hurt in training; it's the cost of doing business. And besides, Abogado, what the fuck do you expect them to learn if someone's doing their jobs for them? You know better. I know you know better."

  What had happened was this: the previous week a three man breach team from Third Century, 4th Cohort had assembled their bangalore and pushed it through the wire. They had then sprinted back towards the relative cover of a small depression in the ground in which the rest of the section waited. Unfortunately, because the range had been used several times before, there were sections of barbed wire embedded in the ground and sticking up above it. One of the men of the breach team had caught his foot on the wire and fallen face down. Then, with the fuse to the bangalore burning fast, the other two had gone back to free their comrade from the wire. They were still trying when the fuse reached the blasting cap and the assembly detonated, sending dozens of pieces of serrated barbed wire through their bodies.