by Tom Kratman
Out of pure meanness we sang the sexiest, filthiest, song we knew. It had some really great sound effects, notably that of several hundred women faking an orgasm…in cadence: “Uhh…Uhh…Oh…Ah…Uhh…Uhh…Oh…Ah!”
Interlude
The meeting was in one of the larger conference rooms at headquarters, on the Isla Real, near the airfield. The trainers from the Tercio Gorgidas had come in two buses, which remained parked outside the white stone building that had once been headquarters for the entire legion. There was also a lot of what had been senior officer housing there, too, in the same general area. Most of that was filled by tribunes and sergeants major, now, what with most of the senior positions having moved to the mainland.
On the parade field the headquarters and housing surrounded, a lone Cricket light airplane waited with the engine running on idle. That was Carrera’s.
Carrera said, “So give me the truth; how are the women doing?”
The cadre from the Tercio Gorgidas sat quietly at first. They were loath to admit to Carrera, their Dux Bellorum, that they had problems.
Seeing their reticence, Carrera changed his inquiry. “Fine. Tell me what’s going well.”
Centurion del Valle answered first. “They’ve become good shots.”
“How good?”
“About twelve percent better than an equivalent group of men,” del Valle said. “But that didn’t come free. It took a lot more time and ammunition to get them there…a lot more. Even more than that for the machine guns.
“So? That would be true for men, too, if we’d spent the time and ammo,” del Valle finished.
Carrera frowned. “Can they handle the machine guns, Centurion?”
“Sure…on the tripods,” del Valle answered. “Firing from the bipods or hip shooting?” He put out a hand and wriggled his fingers. “So, so…at best. And when we load ’em down with a full combat load; guns, tripods, spare barrel and ammunition? It takes three of them to carry what two of us can. And those three have a tougher time of it.”
Carrera wrote something in a notebook. “What about if we changed their weapons from 6.5 millimeter to something smaller, say 5.5? We could buy them special weapons that would be lighter, couldn’t we?” Carrera didn’t wait for an answer. “No…I suppose not. Then they’d be the only ones with those calibers. Make resupply kind of tough. All right; what’s the real problem?”
Franco stood to answer. “Sir…sir, we hate this shit! And we don’t know what we’re doing, not really. So we’re gay? We don’t hate women, any of us. We had mothers, sisters…women we’ve loved. And we are sick to death of being so damned…rotten to these girls.”
Carrera answered, “Tough.” Franco shrugged. Garcia reached up a hand to pull him back to his seat, then stood himself.
“Sir, what my partner just said? It’s true enough. We’ll all be happy when there are enough trained women that we can turn it all over to them. But what’s really getting us is that we’re failing. What works for men just isn’t working right for them. They’ve formed little cliques and friendships, yes. But they’ve got no esprit, no sense of being part of an important community that’s greater than any individual. They’re just little groups and pairs of friends. Oh sure, they look from the outside like they’re bonding the way soldiers should. They sing well together, for what that’s worth. But they don’t seem to feel like a maniple of men would towards each other. Or if they do, we can’t tell.”
“Could they fight?”
“No, sir. Not yet. Maybe never.”
“Crank up their training.”
Chapter Five
What does not destroy us, strengthens us.
—Nietzsche
It seemed that Size Did Matter.
No matter how the Gorgidas trained them; no matter how hard the women tried; it looked like they were never, never, never going to be quite (read: nearly) as strong as even an average group of men. They couldn’t march as far, as fast. or carry as heavy a load. All the will in the world didn’t make a gnat’s ass of difference. Technology didn’t help much either; it’s a truism that, in total, modern high technology had not succeeded in reducing by so much as half an ounce the load on a foot soldier’s back, just the opposite. Caesar’s centurions would have mutinied over some of the loads a foot soldier of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries had to carry, on Old Earth, and things had not turned out any differently on Terra Nova. Too intent on seeing only what it wanted to see, modern, egalitarian feminism simply refused to see that.
Still, there were some compensating factors.
When the final scores were tallied it turned out the women actually were better shots, on average, than men. That wasn’t entirely a natural phenomenon. Their ammunition allocation had been twice that of male recruits. The women spent about twice as much time on the rifle range as the men did. This was true for all classes of training ammunition: the women had twice as many hand grenades to throw, twice as many antitank rocket rounds, twice as many pounds of demolitions.
Carrera had put out the word before the tercio had even been formed: If the women couldn’t carry as much they had to make better use of what they could carry. And that meant more training, which meant more ammunition for training.
He had helped them in other ways too. All the men were issued jungle boots; canvas, plastic and leather. Carrera spent a lot of money on lighter weight footwear for the women, more or less high top sneakers, though they looked about the same. Their rucksacks? The same story. The rest of the force made do with standard, heavy packs. After the first few weeks, the women were given better; the latest in carbon fiber frames with hip belts to take some of the load off their shoulders.
Still, there wasn’t much that could be done with most of the equipment. Radios were heavy, a big surprise for those who’d never carried one for twenty miles. The same was true for night vision devices and the batteries to run them. And Carrera was adamant; the women were not going to be assigned men to do the heavy work for them; it was all on themselves, sink or swim.
Machine guns? They had what everybody else had for a light machine gun; the M-26. This was a good gun though it went through ammunition at an incredible rate. The Amazons had to have them, or something just like them. A real machine gun can be made lighter but it needs to fire a heavy, high power bullet to do its job. Putting a heavy bullet in a light machine gun makes it damned hard to fire, nearly impossible to keep on target. And if men had trouble controlling the M-26—and they sometimes did—it could only have been worse for women, being not as heavy or strong, to control something that, being lighter, kicked even worse.
The heavier .34 and .41 caliber machine guns were almost impossibly heavy, between themselves, their tripods, and their brass-cased ammunition. Of course, the .41 caliber guns were too heavy for men to tote, also.
Water weighs the same for everyone. And the women needed about as much of it.
The biggest thing Carrera did to help them was, eventually, to make their squads and platoons bigger than the men’s. Fourteen or more women per squad compared to eleven for the men, not even counting the overstrength the Tercio Amazona would have later on to allow some women to take maternity leave.
Of course, since an infantry unit’s firepower is mostly in its heavy weapons, and since the Amazons had just the same number of heavy weapons as a man’s unit did, one could say that they weren’t such a bargain. The government had to pay an Amazon squad almost thirty percent more than it did a squad of men, for no greater firepower.
But all the things done to try to cut down on the women’s load just compensated—and that only partly—for lack of physical strength. If they were going to make it in a traditionally male world—the world of war—they had to be stronger in character than men to make up for being weaker in body. And firepower wasn’t everything…there’s heart, too.
* * *
“Cocksuckers,” Marta said, under her breath as she lifted another shovelful of dirt out of the fighting po
sition she and Maria were building. She meant the corporals, sergeants and centurions, of course. “How many fucking holes do they fucking think we have to fucking dig to know how to dig a fucking hole?”
Not more than two hundred meters away both Franco and Garcia, along with five or six sergeants and corporals, were clustered around a big bunker, a real concrete bomb shelter. A couple more corporals stood to either side of the platoon position. These corporals, likewise, were just lounging around. The cadre were leaving the women pretty much alone, just watching quietly from a distance.
Later, all the women would curse themselves for not catching the hint that something really special was planned. In fairness though, most were too tired to think about much besides the blisters on their hands and their aching backs. These were much more significant than some holes, maybe eight inches in diameter, that dotted the ground they were digging into. Even the heavy-duty cables that ran from the big bunker to the holes remained unremarked.
The women were supposed to be preparing to defend against an attack by tanks, supported by artillery. They’d even been issued antitank munitions and mines—training types that wouldn’t really kill a tank but made a flash and bang and some smoke—and some dummy satchel charges.
With a grunt Cat and Maria dropped the log they’d been carrying next to Maria’s and Marta’s fighting position. They would much preferred to have chopped up their “pricks” for the overhead cover. There was no chance of that, though.
Maria had heard Marta. It would have been hard not to have heard. She took a labored breath before answering; “How many? I guess until we do it right.”
Cat and Maria then turned back towards the woods to get another log for the hole Cat shared with Inez.
“Cocksuckers,” Marta repeated.
Over her shoulder, Maria called, “That’s no big secret, Marta…and this distinguishes them from you and me precisely how?” Cat giggled.
Marta just grunted with the strain of another load of dirt.
When Maria came back, she took Marta’s place on the shovel while Marta and Inez went for more logs. The women spent the better part of the day like that, switching off digging and cutting and carrying. Eventually, they had all built pretty fair fighting positions. They even had solid overhead cover.
It was just after an early evening chow that Centurion Garcia blew his whistle and called them together.
Marta figured that it would be just another ass chewing for not building their positions as perfectly as Garcia thought they should be.
Marta was wrong.
“We have a special treat for you today, ladies,” Garcia began. All the women shivered when he said it. “Ladies” meant something very bad was in store.
“In about ten minutes you had better be in those holes you dug, and you’d better pray your overhead cover is good. Because we’re going to shell you silly and then some tanks are going to try to crush those little logs and bury you alive…of course we’ll dig you out if there’s time but…”
He blew his whistle again and those corporals on either side of the platoon began to run through the area. A couple of jeeps followed. The corporals were pulling igniters and tossing charges to either side. Some of the corporals were placing smaller charges—maybe one pounders, or a little more—on top of and around every fighting position the women had built. Some charges were on fuse delay, others they hooked up to leads running from the thick cables.
“No,” Garcia answered the unasked question. “I said ‘shell’ and I meant with real artillery. The other stuff is cheaper, though, so we’re supplementing the shells with regular demo charges. Now get to your holes. And remember what you’ve been taught about taking out tanks.” Beckoning to his followers, Garcia began to walk nonchalantly to the big bunker.
Maria and Marta exchanged wide-eyed looks. Then the women ran for their lives.
“And don’t move my demo charges,” Garcia called to their fleeing backs.
Maria and Marta were almost to their holes when the first shells landed; maybe one hundred and fifty, maybe two hundred meters to their front. There were only three of them, three shell bursts spewing ugly, ragged columns of earth into the air. Even though muffled by subsurface detonation, the blasts made Maria’s insides ripple in a way that was both indescribable and very, very unpleasant. The sensation made Marta want to throw up, and she was used to having her internal organs pushed around some.
By the time they had squeezed through the rear entrance ports and fallen in a tangled heap at the hole’s muddy bottom there were another six explosions—closer; they could feel that. Then came nine more, closer still. After those three volleys, each one getting closer to them, a different firing battery took over. The women neither knew nor cared who was pounding them. In fact, the first had been 85 millimeter guns. The ones who took over fired 122 millimeter shells, nine per volley. These last were also firing on delay fuses: they went off after sinking a few feet into the ground. If one had actually been permitted to land near one of the women’s holes the dirt sides would have been blown in on them, which would probably have proven fatal.
The cadre did this to give the women the illusion of fire coming closer and closer. In fact none of the guns ever fired any closer than seventy-five meters. Which was still dangerous. Part of the danger was mitigated by having the guns fire from the side, parallel to the women’s line of fighting positions.
Unseen, Garcia nodded to Franco. Franco turned a safety key in a large metal battery box and began flipping little switches. With each flip of a switch one or a number of demolition charges started going off around the women. In their holes they cried and quivered and vomited and—more than a few—shit themselves. Marta screamed when a one-pound charge atop the little bunker went off. So did Maria.
Once the demo charges had almost all been fired the guns split their fire so that half was falling behind the women, half in front. Then, as the last of the demolitions, the ones that were on slow burning fuses, were going off, all the fire shifted to fall behind them.
By then Marta had started to cry, great hopeless wracking sobs. She blubbered a lot of things, too, that she probably wished she hadn’t…private things. She took a sniff and sobbed too about the smell of feces wafting up from her soiled uniform.
The really bad part, though, was when she tried to run away.
Marta didn’t just have bigger breasts than most; she was big in general, strong, too. Maria saw her start to scramble out of their hole. For a minute—it seemed like an eternity but may have been only half a second: a minute is fair compromise—Maria just froze. Then she grabbed Marta’s combat harness and held on for dear life: Marta’s.
Marta fought, she struggled. She called Maria just about every name in the book.
Hanging onto Marta’s combat harness, Maria screamed, “Stupid bitch, I am NOT letting you go out into that!”
Finally, Marta just collapsed, sobbing again, saying over and over that she was sorry. And the two held each other, there in the bottom of that muddy stinking hole in the earth, as the “barrage” seemed to roll on past them.
Between blasts Maria bantered in Marta’s ear, “You know how time flies”…KABOOM…“when you’re having fun? Well”…KABOOM…”it can really drag when”…KABOOM…“you’re having no fun at all”…KABOOM…“This barrage can’t”…KABOOM…“have lasted as long as five minutes, maybe six at the outside”…KABOOM…“but it seems longer, doesn’t it?” Marta paid no attention.
Then Maria heard the tanks…barely.
* * *
Tanks are impressive, no doubt about it. And any soldier who wants to die in her sleep will treat them with a healthy respect. But they can be beaten. The women had already been taught how.
* * *
“Yes,” that instructor had told them the previous week, “tanks are bigger than you. They’re faster than you. They’ve got more firepower than you. And they’ve got a lot more protection than the shirts you girls are wearing.”
�
��But let me tell you a little secret: tanks—their crews, I mean—are as afraid of you as you are of them. Trust me, I’m a tanker. I know.”
The instructor looked over the platoon and singled out Inez; it was always a great entertainment for him to see how it was the little ones who liked tanks the most. “Come up here, young lady.” All the others gaped in disbelief when he reached a hand down to help her up. That was something their usual instructors would never do, implying as it did the possibility those girls really were human beings.
“Young lady,” the instructor asked, “how thick is the armor on top of this tank?”
Inez looked at him uncomprehendingly.
“Well, reach in through the hatch and try to feel how far apart your hands are when the armor is between them.” She did and then announced that the top armor was no more than a half inch thick. He had her do the same with the side of the turret, which was several times thicker, but still not all that thick.
“That’s the first weakness: our real armor is only in front. On the sides, the rear, the top deck; the armor is positively weak. Oh, sure; it’s good enough to keep shell fragments and bullets out. But a shaped charge in the hands of a good grunt will blow a hole right through, causing our wives and children to receive a ‘With deepest sorrow’ letter from Presidente Parilla. That’s why we insist on having our own infantry in close support; to take care of enemy grunts; at least keep their damned heads down.”
“That should give you a hint. What’s the first thing you have to take care of to defeat tanks? You, girl.” He pointed at Maria.
“The enemy’s infantry?” she ventured.
“Right in one. But why?”
“So they can’t shoot us when we go after the tanks.”
“Almost right, chica. But your answer implies that it’s their guns that protect the tanks. That’s only partly right. I’ll give you another hint. What’s the most important part of your body when using your rifle?”
