Come and Take Them-eARC

by Tom Kratman

  Conversely, from the meg’s point of view, they themselves ate so much and required such a large range that the species had never really learned cooperation. So they were vulnerable, at least when young, to smaller but more intelligent predators with a sense of teamwork, like orca.

  In an interesting oversight, while the three forms of genengineered flora left by the Noahs kept down the natural rise of intelligent life ashore, nothing anyone had yet found had done the same at sea. Orcas, as it turned out, were very bright indeed.

  None of that was really all that comforting to Pililak as she nervously waded to about waist deep in the sea. For the underwater slope of the casa’s private beach, that worked out to perhaps fifteen feet from shore. The girl didn’t have a bathing suit. Instead she wore one of Ham’s left behind t-shirts and that was all. Her clothes were back on the sand.

  Facing out to sea, scanning for sharks and who knew what, she saw the family yacht gently and slowly bobbing at the private wharf to her left. This was the same boat that had carried Lourdes to find help to defeat the Pigna coup, though repaired and repainted from the damage taken in crashing into the dock at Punta Gorgona Naval Station.

  For a moment Ant thought about practicing her swimming over by the yacht. The water was deeper there. Then she thought, No. Here I have a better chance of seeing something coming for me. Over there something could come right under the boat with no warning.

  This might not have been entirely rational, but it was most sincerely felt.

  Ant had no one she could trust to teach her to swim. And, since water in her homeland and her village either came from a well or flowed fast about half a meter deep over sharp rocks, she’d never learned. Instead, she dug from the ’net how to do it and practiced that in her mind until she felt ready to try.

  Putting her palms together, the girl—with a bravery that no one would have understood who didn’t know her background and how absolutely scared to death she was of being eaten—bent forward at the waist, thrust her arms ahead of her, and dove in.

  Stream Crossing Site Two, Rio Cuango, Training Area C, Academia Militar Sergento Juan Malvegui, west of Puerto Lindo, Balboa, Terra Nova

  Victor Chapayev’s day-to-day and permanent rank was Tribune III, roughly equivalent to a major in most of the armies of Terra Nova, though in the legion carrying more responsibility and prestige, both. His full mobilization rank, on the other hand, was Legate II, roughly the equivalent of a colonel, which was a significant rank even in the most overofficered armies on the planet.

  Today, the Volgan wore his permanent rank. Indeed, the true reason why he had a higher rank was highly secret, although the fact that most legionary officers and centurions held higher rank was not. Few knew the reasons for the special exception for Chapayev and a couple of hundred others. They themselves didn’t, though it was generally assumed it was just to give retirement pay parity to those who were not assigned to a mobilizable tercio. That was the official story, in any case.

  Chapayev didn’t buy the official pravda, though he kept his doubts and opinions on the matter to himself. He’d learned, as a young officer in the army of the now deposed (and very, very dead) Red Tsar (whose large extended family was also very, very dead), that this was a sound policy (as was making sure that the families of one’s deposed tyrants joined them in death).

  I’m not sure, though, thought Chapayev, that Carrera tossing his son in amongst a bunch or regular kids—okay, better than regular kids but still not in the same class or league as Hamilcar Carrera—is such a good idea. The boy might learn to lead them or he might learn just to manipulate them. He might learn to love them but he might just as easily learn contempt for them. He might get the common touch or it might end up being nothing but noblesse oblige masquerading as the common touch. And it strikes me all as needlessly risking the worst possibilities without sufficient probability of achieving the best.

  Victor leaned against a tree at the moment, arms folded, watching the new class of boys trying to set up a two-rope bridge under the leadership, for the exercise, of one of them. That one was not Hamilcar and was not doing spectacularly well, either. And, so Victor could plainly see, Ham was practically bursting at the seams to tell the other boy, Cadet Oscar Arrias, how to do it, how to command it. He also saw that First Centurion Ricardo Cruz, temporarily detached from his maniple for a month of cadet support, supervising the exercise up close and personally, was practically bursting at the seams to tell the boy to jump in and take over.

  And there’s no good answer I could give you, Ham, ran Chapayev’s thoughts. Tell him how to do it and maybe you make a friend for life…but it’s just about as likely you make an enemy. Don’t do a thing but follow along and everyone in your section who knows anything about you assumes you’re a selfish slacker. Hell, I wouldn’t know what to do myself, boy.

  And peer reports will be coming in a few weeks. I wonder if your old man thought of that, or that all this might just ruin you.

  Chapter Four

  There never was a good war or a bad peace.

  —Benjamin Franklin

  Everyone’s a pacifist between wars. It’s like being a vegetarian between meals.

  —Colman McCarthy

  Palacio de las Trixies, Ciudad Balboa, Republic of Balboa

  Since the defeat of Pigna’s coup and the extinction of the rival regime, Presidente, and former Duque, Raul Parilla had moved into the official and traditional executive mansion, an open-courted “Palazzo” in the Venetian style. It even had, per the name, a dozen or so trixies, colorful archaeopteryxes brought to Terra Nova by the Noahs. Under recent administrations, the trixies had been effective captives. Now the wire over the courtyard was mechanized, to roll back during the day. That was Carrera’s doing, as part of his trixie breeding and antaniae reduction programs.

  Most trixies did, in fact, leave while the sun was up. Usually they returned by nightfall—when the wire rolled back over the open top—for their free meal.

  The style of the palace, a carryover from early days of colonization, was extremely appropriate. No less than one once could have in Old Earth’s Venice—now sadly landlocked as a result of falling seas from global cooling—from his bedroom balcony Parilla could hit the waves of the sea with a hand-tossed rock.

  Antaniae lived in the neighborhood, of course, that was the original point of keeping trixies there. Even now, the area was very old, very built up, with hidden spots, nooks, and crannies sufficient to shelter the antaniae from the day’s harsh sunlight. No extermination program had ever proven quite thorough enough.

  Though the exterior of the palace was Venetian, the interior courtyard was very Arabesque, with sparkling columns in the Moorish style, a simple but elegant central fountain, sixteen symmetric but nonuniform arches, and a long staircase that arose in the back to lead to the second floor. Someone had probably had coup prevention in mind when that staircase had been designed; it was the only way up that led to the presidential quarters.

  Parilla—short, stocky, swarthy, and with steel gray hair—was waiting at the top of the stairs, hand on a railing, as Carrera walked through the courtyard, skirting the central fountain. A gray, emerald green, and red trixie, bent over and drinking at the fountain, ignored him entirely.

  He looks so old now¸ Carrera thought, looking up the staircase. And, well…I suppose he is.

  “It’s not the years,” said Parilla, as if reading his chief soldier’s mind, “it’s the mileage.”

  Carrera nodded, answering, “A year ago, Raul, you didn’t need a railing to hold yourself up.”

  “Cascading failure,” Parilla said. “When things start to go wrong they all go wrong together…and fast. Come on, let’s go chat in my office.”

  I don’t like the sound of that word, “chat,” Carrera thought. Maybe he was always more politician than soldier, but the old man was a pretty fair soldier too. A “chat” could be unpleasant.

  * * *

  The silverwood paneling in the pres
idential office was considerably older than that on the walls of Spirit of Peace’s conference room. It was also reflective enough that the light spilling in from the window was more than sufficient.

  “Fernandez’s boys and girls swept the place two days ago,” Parilla said, as Carrera took a leather seat. “We can speak freely here.” Then the president went to a liquor cabinet and pulled out two glasses. These he filled with ice, then took a bottle of ancient rum and poured several generous fingers in each.

  Carrera stood up, took one glass and set it down, then took the other, which he placed on Parilla’s desk. Only then did he retrieve his own glass and resume his seat.

  “I have a sense of the Senate,” Parilla said.

  I like the sound of that even less.

  “There is a sufficient consensus that we should avert a war with the Tauran Union if at all possible. If I asked for a declaration of war today, I would not get it.”

  “Even though they’re sitting in the Transitway like a rope around the country’s neck?” Carrera asked.

  “Even though,” the president confirmed.

  “They don’t have faith I can win it?”

  Parilla shook his head. “No, they believe you can win it. They don’t believe you or anyone alive or anyone who has ever lived could win it without getting ten or fifteen percent of the country killed.”

  And I could not gainsay that with a straight face or clear conscience. It just might cost that much.

  “So what do they want…what do you want, Mr. President?”

  Parilla frowned. “Don’t you get formal with me, Patricio. I’m still Raul. And don’t get your back up over the Senate, either. They’re your creation, not your creature, and you set them up that way.

  “As to what I want…I want us to back off from provoking the Taurans. I want us to…let’s say…give peace a chance.”

  “I think that’s a mistake,” said Carrera.

  Parilla shook his head. “It’s not a mistake; it’s a gamble. It’s gambling a somewhat less advantageous position should war come against the chance of avoiding war altogether. Are you trying to tell me that that is always a losing bet?”

  “I’m…no.” Patricio likewise shook his head. “No; Machiavellianism notwithstanding, human history is replete with instances where a little restraint might have avoided endless grief. It’s just that in this case, in our circumstances, I don’t think that’s going to happen.

  “You knew the new high admiral of the Peace Fleet visited the Taurans, here, recently?” Carrera asked.

  “Yes,” the president agreed, “my aide de camp got the briefing from Fernandez and briefed me.”

  “You don’t agree it’s a bad sign?”

  “Could be,” Parilla conceded. “Equally, it could be a good sign. We just don’t know.”

  “I can contact her, you know,” Carrera said. “I haven’t because I don’t trust the bitch as far as I could throw one of her starships.”

  “Yes, I knew. Maybe you should.”

  Carrera shrugged his shoulders. He really didn’t know if he should or shouldn’t.

  “So what say you?” the president asked.

  “I don’t want to stop preparations for a war I consider inevitable.”

  “Can you break those preparations into nice to have and necessary?” asked Parilla. “Into those that you can keep hidden from those you can’t? From the innocuous to the provocational?”

  “Maybe, maybe, and maybe.”

  “Try. Try. Try.”

  Carrera smirked at the retort. “And when they sense weakness and start to provoke us?”

  “Restraint. Restraint. Restraint.”

  It was Parilla’s turn then to smirk at Carrera’s scowl. “You’ve recently put your son into one of the military schools, haven’t you?”

  “It’s common knowledge,” Carrera answered.

  “When you’re weighing this gamble I want you to take, don’t forget to weigh the life of your son if we go to war with someone a hundred times bigger and a thousand times wealthier.”

  “I suppose there is that… Okay, Raul, I’ll try; I’ll lay off harassing the Taurans. But I’m still going to keep preparing in everything that’s key.”

  And the only reason I’m not throwing a shit fit is because I can ignore most of what you’ve ordered—as you fully expect me to.

  Batteria McNamara (former Battery Ranald, FS Army), Cristobal Province, Balboa, Terra Nova

  There was information that was open. Then there were secrets, deeper secrets, and deepest, top secrets. It was, for example, no secret that the legion had bought an impressive number of 180mm guns from the Volgans. The exact number, though, was secret. It was no secret that some dozens of these had been mounted in old Federated States-built coastal artillery batteries along both the Shimmering Sea and Mar Furioso coasts. That an additional fifty-four had been hidden out on the Isla Real was very secret. It was not a secret that the legion had laser-homing shells for many of their heavier artillery pieces and mortars; they’d used some of those during the campaigns in both Sumer and Pashtia. That they had developed lengthened, sub-caliber, laser-guided shells for the 180mm guns, which shells could range over eighty kilometers, was almost the deepest secret in Balboa.

  * * *

  The battery—then named “Iglesias Point Battery”—had once housed two twelve-inch rifles on barbette carriages, which is to say carriages that allowed a gun to be fired over a parapet. Other batteries, up and down the coast, had housed twelve-inch mortars, fourteen- and sixteen-inch rifles, and an assortment of lesser pieces. None of those were required anymore, since ships no longer mounted the armor such beasts were designed and built to punch through. The gun about to be fired, at just over seven inches, was more, much more, than required to punch through the thin metal of a modern warship, if punching though armor at longish range had been the objective.

  Near this two-gun, open but parapeted firing pad, itself sitting atop a deep bunker for both ready ammunition and fire control, Carrera watched as the crew of one 180mm gun went through the drill of loading and laying. Trap doors opened to the rear of the position, as a reconditioned ammunition elevator pushed up one of the long shells. Longer than the previous twelve-inch shells, this one came up on a frame that held it at an angle. The projectile in its sabot was, to say the least, oddly shaped for an artillery round. The lengthy fuse with the high-strength golden glass nose made it appear odder still.

  The propellant popped up from a different elevator, fed by a different compartment.

  The crew was not the gun’s normal complement. Oh, no, the regular crew were reservists and militia and weren’t even mobilized. Instead, for now, the gun was manned by a special test crew, specially vetted for reliable closed-mouthedness, from Obras Zorilleras, or OZ, the legion’s research and development division. Their chief had drilled them numb over the preceding week on a sister gun, though that one was held underground in a different battery, about twenty-four hundred meters to the southwest.

  They were only going to get one chance at the test, though the test would involve twelve shots. These were five of the special shells, that being the number on hand at Battery McNamara, and seven normal high explosive shells to mask the specials. The special shells were inert, the normal explosive filler replaced by a mostly plastic mix of the same density. Four other gun positions, three to the west and one to the east, were manned by reservists and militia mobilized for training. These were also along the Shimmering Sea coast and on both sides of the Transitway’s mouth. They would also be firing for this exercise, mostly to divert attention from the test firing of the special shells. Their ammunition was limited to standard 180mm High Explosive. Five forward observer stations, as heavily fortified as the gun positions, held FO teams with laser range finders indistinguishable from the laser that would be used to mark the target for the special shells.

  Carrera turned away from the gun crew, walking into a dark, open rectangle in the concrete wall. Once past the edges
of the entrance, red lights in metal cages set high on the walls marked his way to the fire direction center. Before anyone could notice his presence, he ordered, “As you were,” code for, “keep doing what you were doing.”

  There were a half dozen closed circuit television sets to one side of the bunker. One of these was large. It gave Carrera the same view as the forward observation and lasing team for Battery McNamara had. That team sat inside a concrete position high atop a cliff facing the sea. The image, enhanced both for light and magnification showed him a radio controlled ship—more of a barge, really—twenty miles out to sea. This was nothing like the shells’ maximum range.

  It had been a matter of considerable discussion. The short, balding, Volgan-descended Kuralski, also there for the test, had wanted to fire at near maximum range. Carrera had overridden that—he didn’t want anyone to know how far the guns could shoot the new ammunition. There were other barges out to sea as targets, as many as there were batteries firing for the day.

  The job was not without its risks, but risks or not, a screen of patrol boats insured no other ships came close to the barge targets to see what was happening. The crews of those boats wore laser protective goggles.

  Carrera was reasonably certain that the UEPF was taking considerable interest in goings on in the Republic of Balboa. He didn’t know the precise capabilities of their remote sensing, but assumed it was at least on a par with that of the planet’s premier power, the Federated States. Thus, he didn’t hope to hide that he was firing a certain kind of gun at a certain range. All he could do—and he hoped it was enough—was misdirect the Peace Fleet as to the real nature of the firing.