by Tom Kratman
Alexander’s face was a study in mixed emotions, confusion, rage, fear, grief all played across his expression openly.
“Besides, Prince Alexander,” Arcand said, the manic light fading from his eyes. “What choice do you have? If you kill me, our men will fall upon one another. Mine will win, albeit at great cost, and then what hope will you and yours have? At least in my service you are alive, free and able to fight.”
Alexander’s expression smoothed, the grief and confusion, the fear and even the rage replaced with a look of cold calculation. Slowly, he removed his hand from his pistol.
“You will ensure my people don’t find out until I can gather them together to tell them,” Alexander said. “I will consult with my officers back in Khoi Dau Moi. Any attempt to disarm or detain my troops will be taken as a declaration of war. I will give you my decision tomorrow night.”
St. Christopher’s Church
Khoi Dau Moi
One Day Later
Flashes of lightning illuminated the crosses atop St. Christopher’s at irregular but frequent intervals. The bolts were close enough that the sheets of rain pummeling Alexander didn’t mute the peals of thunder that accompanied each of them short seconds behind.
He’d told his officers to have all the men, including those just returned from Lang Xan, turned out, armed and ready to defend their part of the compound, to admit no other UN troops, not even Arcand himself, until Alexander returned. Having taken such prudent precautions, Alexander immediately followed them with a stupid decision.
Not entirely sure why it couldn’t wait, Alexander decided he needed to talk to Mai. He had a half-baked notion that if worse came to worst, he wanted to spirit her away from Arcand to avoid having her harmed or used as leverage against him. In reality, for all his martial virtue, he was a young man who had nearly died multiple times in the last four days and, worse, lost most of what mattered to him in the world. Imperatives much older than duty drove him to seek out the woman he loved.
She wasn’t at Arcand’s quarters, so he’d set out for the church, alone. Fortunately, anyone wishing him ill was also sensible enough to be inside in the middle of a thunderstorm. It was a long, sodden journey to get to St. Christopher’s. His path brought him to the side, rather than the magnificent façade of the church. He pushed open the modest single wooden door and found himself in the hallway outside Duc’s private office.
The storm must have covered his entrance because he heard voices in Vietnamese coming from the sanctuary as if they hadn’t heard anything unusual. Alexander was relieved to hear Mai’s lovely soprano and Duc’s deeper voice replying. He realized it would be good to talk to both of them.
Mai had been working on his Vietnamese, and while he was still shy of fully fluent, he was able to pick up on the gist of their conversation.
“. . . lived with myself . . . he died . . . but . . . do we do now?” Mai was saying.
“Earthpigs . . . casualties . . . as bad, proportion . . . not decisive. We can’t give up,” Duc said.
Alexander stopped dead in his tracks, straining to hear more.
“. . . so many dead . . . get the . . . I gave you in time?” Mai said.
Alexander’s heart thudded painfully against his chest and chill went though him. They had betrayed him. Both of them. No hapless janitor had gotten the plan for Operation North Wind to the CLF, it had been Arcand’s personal servant.
“. . . did, didn’t see parachute place . . .” Duc was saying. “. . . and Alexander . . . men fought too well.”
It was enough, Alexander drew his pistol, he had only one hand available but it was enough for this work. He strode into the sanctuary, pistol leveled. Mai, soaked to the bone through her dress, and Father Duc, in his plain priestly robes, stood just in front of the altar.
“I trusted you, Father,” Alexander said, his voice steady and strange in his own ears. The front sight of the pistol shifted to Mai. “And I loved you. And you tried to murder me.”
Neither cowered; Duc looked grave and sad, Mai cried, but did not look away, guilt, grief and resolve warring for her lovely face.
Not for my men, Alexander thought, willing his heart to harden. For her terrorists.
“I’m so sorry, Alexander,” Mai spoke first. “I never wanted to hurt you, but don’t you see; you’ve been fighting the wrong people. Look what they did to your own family!”
“You knew about that, too?” Alexander said, his sight post steadied right between Mai’s breasts.
“Only after you’d already left,” she said. “But Arcand’s superiors ordered it done, and Arcand did nothing about it, just fed you and your men into a slaughterhouse, knowing he’d already betrayed you.”
The truth of it hammered at Alexander. He had no allies. The UN was complicit in his family’s murder. His own blood had murdered their father. Mai and Duc had helped slaughter his men and nearly gotten him killed. There were no options.
“How about you, Father?” Alexander asked, shifting the gun to cover Duc. “Do you have any rationalizations for putting a knife in my back?”
“I fight for my people’s freedom,” Duc said, gravely shaking his head. “I resist the godless UN just as any Christian should. But I never betrayed your confidence, Alexander. I was your confessor, nothing you ever told me, nothing I observed while ministering to you ever made its way to the resistance.”
“So what do we do now?” Alexander said.
“You’re the one with the gun, son,” Duc said.
“All of you have betrayed me on every front,” Alexander said. “What is left for me but revenge?”
“No,” Mai said. “Alexander, don’t do this, you can be on the right side. Join us! Your men are the best soldiers in this war, fight the UN. Take back your freedom, help us regain ours.”
“You should’ve made that argument before you betrayed me and helped kill my men,” Alexander said, the pistol shifting back to Mai.
“Son, you know what you’re doing is wrong,” Duc said. “Arcand works for petty exploiters and tyrants. If anyone on this planet is ever to be free, we have to be rid of them. Put aside your personal feelings; if the Zulu are ever to rule themselves for truth, who should you fight?”
Peals of thunder punctuated Duc’s words, and the lightning cast the scene in flashes of brilliance. Alexander’s indecision tore at him. What madness cast the treacherous priest’s words as a ray of terrible truth in the midst of this hurricane of betrayal and tragedy?
The massive double doors at the front of the sanctuary swung open with a BANG, Arcand swept in through the deluge, flanked on either side by two legionnaires, their rifles to their shoulders and leveled. Alexander looked behind him for only a brief moment, but Duc moved surprisingly fast for such an old man. Producing a knife from under his robes, he wrapped one arm around Mai’s shoulders and placed the point of the knife against the side of her throat.
“Stop right there or I’ll slit this traitor’s throat,” Duc shouted in French.
Arcand held up a hand, and he and his fire team stopped halfway up the center aisle.
“There’s nowhere to go,” Arcand said. “The janitor gave you up. If you surrender and cooperate, I promise your sentence will be much lighter.”
Duc ignored the French general. Instead, he stared straight at Alexander and shouted something. The tone was angry, belying the words, the pronunciation less than ideal, but Alexander realized that Duc was speaking isiZulu.
“Do it, Alexander,” he barked. “Soul ready. Take care Mai.”
As the priest spoke he shifted his head away from Mai’s, creating a larger gap between them. Alexander aligned the sights right on the juncture of the priest’s nose and forehead and squeezed the trigger. The single supersonic crack of the pistol rang louder than thunder through the sanctuary. The priest’s head snapped back in a flash of gray hair, the back of his skull exploded outward, blood and brain matter splattered the altar of Christ.
Mai turned as Duc’s mortal remai
ns collapsed to the floor in a heap. She covered her mouth with her hands, her eyes locked on the old priest’s body.
For several seconds, all Alexander could hear were the thunder and his own heart beating. Then Arcand’s booted footsteps broke the silence as he approached.
“What happened?” Arcand said. “Why did you have your gun on him already?”
Alexander thought furiously, frowning. He’d killed a true priest, a good man who had, nevertheless, betrayed him.
Is there nothing true in this world?
Alexander looked at Mai, standing petrified, just a bit of blood and bone flecking the shoulder of her dress, staring at the shriveled body of her confessor.
“He was trying to recruit Mai and me for the resistance,” Alexander said. “We tried to convince him to turn himself in; that we’d beg for clemency for him. He became agitated, desperate so I pulled my pistol on him. You saw the rest.”
Mai looked away from the body, finally, her eyes shimmering once again with tears. She took a hesitant step toward Alexander, staring into his eyes like a drowning woman staring at a life raft.
Alexander holstered his pistol, stepped forward and held out his good arm. Mai buried her face in his chest and wept bitterly.
“What was that he said at the last?” Arcand said. “It wasn’t Vietnamese.”
“No, it was the Zulu tongue,” Alexander said. “Apparently he’s been learning it. He said that Mai and I are both going to hell. How did you know to be here, now?”
“I had you followed,” Arcand said. “For your own safety, of course, when you took off like a damned fool by yourself. I ordered my men to give you your distance but not let anything happen to you. When the janitor finally cracked and gave up Duc, I realized where you and Mai were and came myself to make sure you were all right.”
Alexander said nothing, merely held Mai and stared blankly at Arcand.
“Alexander, I hope this illustrates what I’ve been telling you, the CLF will stop at nothing,” he said. “We’ve scored a major victory, but we have to finish them if we’re to bring order here. Please, stay, fight with me. You can still do good here.”
Alexander looked at the bloodstained altar for a moment, then down at Mai, still sobbing in his arms. She was now burden and comfort, beloved and betrayer. But she was real, and if she’d acted against him, she’d done so trying to keep faith with something higher.
Something higher.
“Clearly this war isn’t done with us,” Alexander said. “The Panther Men will stay, and we will fight.”
INTERLUDE:
From Jimenez’s History of the Wars of Liberation
Cochin was not the only place on Terra Nova, the inhabitants of which had brought with them a long tradition of resistance to foreign rule, lengthy lists of heroes of that resistance, and martyrs of the same. Indeed, a quick scan of the names of our nations will reveal that at least a fifth of them were named for heroes from resistance movements of Old Earth.
How could it not then happen that there would spring up resistance movements here?
Still, there were subjective factors in the likelihood of any given area being thrown into rebellion. One of the larger of these, fully equal to the tradition of rebellion, was the extent to which the area was exploited and overtaxed by the UN, itself. This took the form not only of money seized, but more commonly food, and, far too commonly, women and girls.
Cochin, rapidly evolving into a productive rice culture, was one such. Aguinaldo, some eleven hundred kilometers to Cochin’s west, was another . . .
8.
Desertion
Kacey Ezell9
Captain Lele Campbell took a deep breath, careful not to let it make her chest rise as she reminded herself for the thousandth time that it wasn’t generally considered polite to stab one’s commanding officer in the face.
“Thanks for handling that, Lele,” Major Alcasar said with his customary leering grin. “Could you run by the DFAC and have them send over a cup of coffee on your way out, too, sweetling? That’s my girl.”
Another deep breath, down into the belly so as not to draw his eyes and make him feel invited. A crisp nod and an unreturned salute. Turn on the heel and go. Get the hell out of this man’s office before doing something regrettable. I am not your girl.
Out into the marginally cooler Terra Novan dusk. Lele looked up as the local sun slid behind the horizon, backlighting the high cloud layers in spectacular pinks and oranges. At the sight of it she drew in another breath, this time not bothering to try to hide that she was, in fact, a girl. Almost worth putting up with the son of a bitch for this. Almost . . . not quite. She’d gotten out of the major’s office just in time. Any longer, and he’d likely have thought she was angling to stay for the night.
Some island bird chittered in the trees that crowded close against the perimeter of their camp. No matter how often they sent defoliation teams out to clear the fenceline, the insanely aggressive Terra Novan flora just continued its creeping, green assault toward the cleared area, and the perimeter barrier of concrete T-walls.
Inside the T-walls, armed security forces patrolled, their tiger-striped uniforms indistinguishable from Lele’s unless one got close enough to see the patches of a civilian security contractor on their shoulders. They would leer and catcall if she got too close, but as they mostly kept to their own billets near the front gate, Lele found them easy enough to avoid.
Which was good, because the camp itself wasn’t very big. Besides the operations area near the flightline, there were really just two areas: the supply depot, and the living area. The living area consisted of a maze of shipping containers that had been converted into billets. They even came with a cute name: CHU, for “Containerized Housing Unit.” Lele’s own CHU sat at the corner of the maze, directly across a pitted, muddy street from their dining facility, or DFAC. Next to the warehouse-sized DFAC (which never made sense to Lele. Supposedly, it was so big in case they had to use their base as a staging point. That was also why they had a two-mile-long runway. But no one ever landed there, and the DFAC was never full, at least not that she’d ever seen), while a long, low temporary building housed the gym, with a decent selection of free weights and other fitness gear.
Eat. Sleep. Workout. Fly. So far, that had been the theme of this deployment. Oh, that and avoiding the attentions of Major Alcasar.
The flat, greasy scent of the dining facility wafted over to her, overlaying the thick, wet scent of the jungle and bringing her back to the here and now.
Time for chow. She turned, boots crunching on gravel, and began walking toward the prefab building which had shipped to Terra Nova flat and been set up by some Navy SeaBees seconded to the UN.
A few moments later, more crunching gravel heralded the arrival of her copilot.
“The major giving you trouble again, ma’am?” Jack asked quietly.
Lele summoned a tired smile and looked up at him. Way up, as it happened.
Lieutenant Jack Ackerman was a throwback to his Nordic ancestors. A muscular 6'3" with blond hair and blue eyes, he’d been the backup quarterback for the Brigham Young University Cougars in his college days. He hadn’t played either the political or athletic game well enough to get picked up to play pro ball, and so had joined the military to feed his family. His wife was as blonde and beautiful as he was, and so were their angelic-faced, demon-tempered children. All six of them, at last count.
Lele herself took after her Filipina grandmother in both looks and temperament, and so she was certain that she and Jack made a comical sight together. But Jack was a good pilot, a solid crewman, and a dedicated family man. Which meant that he’d have her back. And that was something Lele treasured more than gold.
“Not really,” she said, speaking of the major. “At least, not overly so.”
Jack gave her a skeptical look.
“Okay, well not more than usual. You know how it is. Be his bitch or be his Bitch, but at least he’s not insistent. Excuse me, I gotta
send him some coffee,” she said as they entered the hand washing area right outside the DFAC entrance. Try as she might, she couldn’t entirely keep the look of disgust off her face.
“Airman,” Lele said, approaching a group of young enlisted security forces troops washing up. “Major Alcasar needs a pot of coffee taken to his office. Not you,” she said, pointing at the one female airman in their group. “You two go. Tell the cooks Captain Campbell authorized it. Now, please. You can make sure your buddies don’t lose their place in line,” she added to the female, whose name she knew was Baxter.
“I’ll save you seats,” Airman Baxter said to her friends, then gave an infinitesimal nod to Lele. The two men saluted. The captain returned it, and they all went inside about their various tasks.
“What was that all about?” Jack asked as the two of them got their trays and headed for the end of the line.
“What?”
“The thing with the males going, but not the female.”
Lele looked up at Jack again, wondering how under the stars someone with six kids could be so naive.
“Alcasar’s pretty much one hundred percent het from what I can tell,” she said quietly. “If I had let Baxter go, he might have interpreted that as me sending her in my place. She might not have thought she could refuse. Better to avoid the whole thing entirely.”
Jack’s face went blank, which Lele had learned to interpret as him covering up some kind of strong emotion. She gave him a tiny smile and a shrug, then stepped forward as the person in front of them moved closer to the food.
“It doesn’t seem right,” Lele heard him mutter.
“Right or wrong, that’s the way things are.”
“Yeah, but you shouldn’t have to—”
She turned around, making a slashing motion with her hand.
“Enough,” she said. “I don’t have to. That’s the point. I don’t have to, and so I’m not, and this is not the time or place for this discussion.”
