Come and Take Them-eARC

by Tom Kratman

  And, speaking of politics…

  “Pick one and beat his ass,” the centurion said. Sadly, Centurion Cruz has forgotten the code of honor of boys. I’m bigger than any of them. So it’s inherently unfair. But I’m not so big that I can handle two of them. At least, not for sure.

  So it’s number one, which is way harder than beating someone’s ass.

  So who can I get to talk about himself, and how do I start? I should know this, but I never had to learn, because everybody always treated me as special and different or, with my Pashtun, divine. I wonder what they’d say if they knew how much they fucked me over.

  Probably something like, “It’s for your own good, Lord.”

  Ah, well, I know they mean well. No…actually they mean the best.

  And now, which one to break the ice with…ah, Jorge’s always seemed fairly reasonable. Jorge, last name Rodrigues, sat alone with his back resting against a tree.

  Sitting down on the ground on the next quarter over from Jorge, Ham said, “I was actually in on the testing of this crap.”

  The boys talked between half chewed gulps.

  “Doesn’t seem like crap to me,” Jorge said.

  “Right now, it doesn’t to me, either,” Ham admitted. “At least it has a taste to it. But when the old man made us all, himself and my mom and sisters included, eat ration sancocho for a week straight to see how much we’d learn to hate it, I sure thought it was crap.”

  “He does that?”

  “Every time something in the menu changes,” Ham confirmed.

  “Must be nice.” Jorge said, wistfully. “Nice to always have enough to eat, I mean. That’s what’s so great about this place; if I get hungry it doesn’t last for long before they feed me.”

  Great? This place? What kind of suckiness do you come from? But…best to let that go for now. Besides, I knew there were poor people and poor areas, still.

  “Where are you from?” Ham asked.

  “Little town you never heard of by the sea. No road to it and the trails aren’t much. And, yes, before you ask, dirt poor. Not just my family, the whole town. We didn’t even have a full time teacher until the legion put one in about ten years ago. Not much electricity, still, except for some solar power the legion put in so a cell phone—just one in town, and that only for emergencies—a refrigerator, and a single small TV, in the school, could be powered.”

  Wow. That is poor. Doesn’t sound bitter though.

  “How did you…?”

  “End up here?” Jorge finished. “The teacher’s a medically retired corporal—missing one foot—who seems to do some recruiting on the side. We had one opening in a military academy allocated to the village, but it wasn’t going to go to me. I asked the teacher to help and he pulled a couple of strings and got us another one, here, though it’s not close to home. So, also yes, before you ask, I really wanted to be here.”

  “I don’t know if I wanted to be here or not,” Ham said. “The old man ordered me here and so I went.”

  “Now that sounds rough. Being here when you don’t want to be here.”

  “Didn’t say I didn’t want to be here,” Ham corrected. “Said I didn’t know. On the other hand, I do know I don’t want to piss the old man off, so here I’m going to stay.

  “You planning on enlisting when your time here’s up?” Ham asked. “You don’t have to, you know.”

  “No,” Jorge said, “I know you don’t. But I probably will. It’s the best way I can think of to never have to go back to my village. You?”

  “I don’t think I’ve had a choice about anything once I was potty trained,” Hamilcar replied. “So I doubt I’ll get a choice about that.”

  “Bet you didn’t get any choice about the potty training, either,” Jorge said, with a smile.

  That raised a chuckle from Ham. “I can’t really remember too much about that but, no, I suspect not. Though I seem to remember my mother with this flexible switch…”

  It was the chuckle that did it. Hmmm…poor little rich boy seems human after all, thought Jorge.

  The latter then stood up and looked down. Yes, Ham had cleaned off his plate as thoroughly as he had, himself. “Seems like eating that for a week didn’t make it too nasty.”

  Ham looked up and answered, “Well, about halfway through I realized this couldn’t possibly be the same stuff, since I was sick of that but haven’t had hardly enough of this.”

  “C’mon,” said Jorge, reaching a hand down to help Ham to his feet. “Let’s go get our mess kits and cutlery cleaned. You know what they do to people they catch with dirty kits.”

  One down, ten to go, thought Ham, as the two young cadets walked to the wash line.

  Headquarters, IVth Corps, Cristobal, Balboa, Terra Nova

  About forty miles east of where Ham was making his first friend and convert at the Academy, Patricio Carrera walked the lines of one of Jimenez’s units, an infantry tercio, conducting a fairly rare in ranks inspection. It was rare because Carrera hated to waste what could have been training time conducting inspections of the troops in garrison. Jimenez had, however, for some reason of his own, requested it. Since Carrera had a strong faith that Jimenez had trained his corps exceptionally well and would not ask without a good reason, he had agreed.

  As such things went, the inspection had gone fairly well. Carrera noted few faults, none of them serious. Afterwards, in Jimenez’s office, facing the ocean and with a refreshing breeze coming through the open, screened windows, Jimenez had asked if Carrera was willing to entertain an idea, even if it came from a junior enlisted man.

  Carrera’s eyes narrowed at the tall, whippet thin, coal black senior legate. “Xavier,” he asked, “when the fuck have I ever given you the impression that I wouldn’t listen to a junior trooper who had something to say?”

  “Never,” Jimenez admitted. “But you’re a lot busier than you used to be and spread a lot thinner on the ground. Things could have changed. God knows, we never see much of you over on this side.” Fourth Corps was on the opposite side of the isthmus from the capital and legion headquarters.

  “That’s half the reason I wanted you to come over here, so the troops could see they’re not just a ‘lost command.’”

  “What’s the other half?” Carrera asked.

  For answer, Jimenez cast head and eyes toward the door to his office and shouted, “Centurion Candidate Ruiz; report!”

  The door was flung open by an orderly. Through it, stiffer than his starched uniform, marched a young corporal, shorter than either Carrera or Jimenez, as black as the latter, and broader through the shoulders than either. Carrera noted the miniature insignia on the boy’s sleeve marking him as a centurion candidate.

  The boy—he couldn’t have been more than nineteen—stamped to a halt, then snapped a salute. “Sir, Corporal Ruiz-Jones reports as ordered!”

  Carrera returned the salute, more or less casually, then ordered, “At ease.” With that he shot an inquisitive look at Jimenez: What’s this bullshit about?

  “Corporal Ruiz is a sapper, Patricio,” Jimenez said. “He has a very interesting idea, one I think you ought to consider carefully and then act on. Corporal Ruiz, show the Duque.”

  The young sapper reached into a pocket and pulled out two or three dozen small magnets. Holding them out in the palm of one hand, to demonstrate, he told Carrera, “Sir, I was reading a couple of months ago about a big push by the Taurans and Secordians to get our world to adopt that Old Earth treaty, the one that bans antipersonnel landmines. One proposal I read—I think it came from the Federated States—was to make all mines detectable, no more plastic jobbies.”

  The corporal shivered. “Sir, I really love mines, especially the neat little plastic ones—the toe poppers. It bothered me, you know. I mean, sir, what’s a sapper without mines?

  “So one day I was playing with some of those magnets they use around the orderly room to hold papers to metal desks. And it hit me. Go ahead and make mines detectable from magnetism
. But if we issue every mine with a couple of hundred of these little motherfuckers and scatter them about, whoever is looking for the mines will still have to stop and probe and dig for millions of these little suckers before he can be sure there are no mines in the area. After all, a magnetically detectable mine in a magnetized field is still invisible.

  “Of course, we’ll have to either push these into the ground with some kind of probe or scatter them early enough to sink into the earth on their own. I figured we could call them ‘Dianas,’ in tribute to the Old Earth princess who they say started the movement back there, but that might give the game away.”

  Carrera reached out and gently plucked up one of the little magnets from Ruiz’s hand. “Won’t work,” he said. “They’ve got new mine detectors, ground penetrating radar based, that will see the difference between a magnet and a mine.”

  “Yes, sir,” Ruiz agreed. “I know about those.” The corporal then reached into a trouser pocket and pulled out half a dozen flat, metallic can tops. These he spread with his fingers like playing cards. “The new mine detectors won’t know the difference between these and a mine, sir.

  “And, sir? I really doubt it would be too expensive, and it sure wouldn’t take up much space in a crate of mines, if we manufactured thin metal discs like these, but with a magnet in the middle.”

  Carrera looked at the young man with a touch of wonder. “All really good ideas are simple,” he said warmly. He took note of the sapper’s name, intending to have an aide enquire into the boy’s status for Cazador School and accelerate his course date. Squeezing the sapper’s shoulder, he said “This is a really good idea, son. We’re going to do it. But we’re not going to call them ‘Dianas.’ No, they’ll be called ‘Ruiz’s.’”

  “Sir, it would be so much funnier if you call them ‘Dianas.’ Really.”

  * * *

  Later, over drinks in Jimenez’s officer, Carrera observed, “You would not call me over here just for a morale building exercise. And you would not call me over here just for an informal briefing from a—need I say really, really, really smart—corporal, nor even both of those together. So just what the hell did you have in mind?”

  Jimenez smiled, wickedly. “I intended to get to it, but not until you were on your second drink.

  “Has the Legionary II shop ever briefed you on personnel issues in Fourth Corps? When you were actually paying attention, I mean?”

  “Probably,” Carrera answered, “though…I think it’s been a while.”

  “Okay. Well I’ll give you the short version,” said Jimenez. “I have—it is widely recognized and acknowledged—probably the best Centurionate in the country. I am also roughly twenty-nine percent under even our low allowable strength for officers. Do those two bits of data suggest anything to you, Patricio?”

  Carrera waved dismissive fingers. “I hate guessing games. Just tell me the meat of the thing.”

  “You don’t get off that easily, friend.

  “Have you also noticed that our world is being run by people who do very well on standardized intelligence tests and then go to the very best schools?”

  “Hard not to notice,” said Carrera. “Hard not to notice they’re running the whole planet into the ground, too.”

  “You do well on those tests, I am sure,” said Jimenez. “I do well on them. And, surely, both of us are at least reasonably bright. But I’ve got to ask you, Patricio, do we do well on those tests because we are bright, or despite the fact that we’re bright? Because most of the people who do well on standardized intelligence tests are, as near as I can figure, incompetent, arrogant morons who are ruining our world. Whatever those tests measure, it is not intelligence, and whatever the schools are delivering that those tests get people into, it is not competence.”

  Carrera shrugged. “I don’t have any necessary argument with that,” he said. “But would you please get to the point?”

  “Sure. Corporal Ruiz-Jones, an obviously hugely bright young man, is on the centurion track rather than the officer track because his IQ test score was only a hundred and fourteen. That’s from the legion’s own standardized test.

  “That may be in part because Cristobal Province was the ass end of the country’s educational system until well after the good corporal entered school.” Jimenez looked down at the back of his own hand and said, “It could be because us black folk are just stupid. But, in my personal opinion, the evidence for that proposition is somewhat weak. Though it might well be true that, for whatever reason, we do not usually do as well on the tests.

  “But I think what we really have going on is a set of bad presumptions and assumptions going into how we measure intelligence. And that’s why I have a tremendously bright corporal, who someday ought to be a legate of engineers, about to go to school to become a centurion.”

  “So,” asked Carrera, “you want me to grant him an exemption to go to OCS after Cazador School rather than CCS?”

  “That? Well, sure. And—though it’s going to sound like some Kosmo-Progressive racial preference, quota system bullshit—I need to start shunting higher IQ centurion candidates to OCS, because they’re smarter than their test scores say they are. But I really think we need to move Heaven and Terra Nova to come up with a better way to measure intelligence.”

  “Let me mull it some,” Carrera said.

  * * *

  Carrera’s armored Phaeton was framed by armored cars, front and rear. He wasn’t a fool; he knew that the Taurans—and probably United Earth, too—would like him dead. And the Pigna coup had been better than any counseling session to demonstrate that he’d been taking his own security too lightly. But it grated on him even so, having to hide behind others.

  Oh, well; I didn’t make the world, I just have to live in it. That was just a comforting fiction, of course. He intended to remake the world, two of them, if possible.

  Jamey Soult asked, as Carrera strapped himself into the Phaeton, “Where to, boss?”

  “Puerto Lindo, Jamey,” Carrera said.

  “Going to see to the boy, sir?”

  Carrera shook his head. “No, I’ll check on him with someone, but I don’t want Ham to know I did. Mostly I want to see Chapayev and then swing by and talk to Centurion Cruz.

  “And, Jamey, tell me; what in your opinion is intelligence and how do we identify it?”

  Chapter Eight

  Any sane person should be instinctively skeptical when all the smart people agree.

  —Mark Steyn

  Academia Militar Sergento Juan Malvegui, Puerto Lindo, Balboa, Terra Nova

  Victor Chapayev, slender, middling tall, blond, blue-eyed, and Volgan, was probably the third- or fourth-youngest legate in the legion.

  I suppose the adjutant could tell me exactly where he stands, age-wise, thought Carrera, but who really cares about things like that? It’s not like the knowledge would change anything. Besides, I trust both him and his abilities, and that’s knowledge enough.

  Carrera had good reason for the trust. After all, he and Chapayev had fought side by side in Santander. More importantly, during the Pigna coup Chapayev’s intervention had been instrumental in saving the pro-Balboan Castilian colonel, Muñoz-Infantes. Better still, the Gauls’ attempt to get rid of him had prompted the latter to defect, along with his entire regiment—really a reinforced battalion—to Balboa. The defection wasn’t entirely open, of course. Muñoz-Infantes’ men were still paid and fed by Castile, which pretended that its contribution to the Tauran Union Security Force-Balboa, was still under TU command. Personnel replacements, too, were still provided by Castile, but only if vetted and approved of by their colonel on the ground. And he selected only from Castilian soldiers who detested the Tauran Union.

  Muñoz-Infantes was also Chapayev’s father-in-law, which helped mutual trust all around. Moreover, Victor always got the Castilian battalion a generous allocation of tickets to the cadets’ game, as well as rides on the buses to those games. The Castilian never mentioned it to anyone, b
ut he had a sneaking suspicion that the massive use of buses bringing the kids to one sporting event or another were a cover—a “maskirovka,” his son-in-law would have called it—for something else entirely.

  Perhaps the best marker of Carrera’s trust in Chapayev was that, of six military schools run by the legion, he’d picked Chapayev’s to send his boy to.

  “Which is an honor, Duque,” the Volgan said in the school’s conference room. “And the boy…”

  “We’ll discuss the kid later,” Carrera said. Thunder rolled above, a long rumbling barrage. He held out a hand and felt the first drops of a seasonal deluge begin. “For now I want you to show me the…mmm…more sheltered aspects of your school.”

  Chapayev jingled a ring of keys that he never allowed more than arm’s reach from his person. “Sure thing, sir.”

  * * *

  All of the academy’s buildings—offices, mess halls, academics, the auditorium, post exchange, clinic, the twelve cadet barracks, etc.—were connected by tunnels, put in when the school was first built. In addition, a few of the officer and senior NCO quarters were likewise connected to narrow feeder tunnels. Lastly, when the main sewer line had been put in, deep down, above it had been laid yet another tunnel that branched off from the trace of the sewer to emerge in several places in the jungle to the north.

  Satisfied with the general layout, Carrera asked, “Class I?” Food. “Class III?” Petroleum, oil, and lubricants. “Class V?” Ammunition. “Class VIII?” Medical supplies.

  “Green, green, green, and green,” Chapayev answered. “Except for tank ammunition.”

  “No matter. It’s not like you’re going to use tanks,” Carrera said. “They’re really still here only for the cadet tank club.”

  “Fair enough, Duque. And we do have enough for the few Ocelots.” The Ocelot was the legion’s infantry fighting vehicle, though often pressed into duty as assault guns. It was fitting that the cadet tank club should have some and equally fitting, if they were to be allowed to shoot the cannon, that it be cheaper 100mm shells than expensive 125mm penetrators.