Come and Take Them-eARC

by Tom Kratman

  Carrera looked up, suddenly aware that, “I can still hear the rain. Why?”

  “We’re more than three meters deep,” Chapayev replied. “And you saw that I closed the vault doors behind us. But what happens is that the sound gets in the buildings and is transmitted right through the concrete.”

  “Okay,” Carrera said. “I just didn’t want the boys buried alive by a Tauran bomb if I can help it.”

  “They’re hypocrites and ruthless, to boot,” Chapayev said, then asked, “but do you really think they’d bomb children?”

  “Yes,” Carrera answered. “Now tell me how you would move the boys out if you had to. Without being noticed, I mean. Just in case the Taurans decided to attack a group of fleeing children, of course.”

  “Of course, Duque,” agreed Chapayev, with a knowing smile.

  Training Area C, Academia Militar Sergento Juan Malvegui, west of Puerto Lindo, Balboa, Terra Nova

  “Cabo Escobar?” shouted Ricardo Cruz, as he closed his folding cell phone. He’d intended to go along with the cadets but sometimes one ran into a higher calling, so to speak.

  “Si, Centurio!” answered the former narco-guerilla, since recruited, and now assisting his centurion in the training of the young cadets.

  “Move the boys out!”

  “Yes, Centurion… Cadets…riiighttt…FACE. Fowarrrd…MARCH.”

  Escobar counted off, “One, two, three, four, left, right, left right,” then began a song: “In the morning we rise early—”

  The cadets picked the tune up immediately, a few of their immature voices breaking:

  “…Long before the break of dawn,

  “Trixies screeching in the jungle,

  “Moonbats scurrying from the sun.

  “Now assemble, mis compadres.

  “Gather, boys, and muster, men,

  “Hand to hand with butt and bayonet,

  “Let their blood across the homeland run.”

  Cruz stood where he was, smiling, watching the cadets’ receding backs, until they rounded a turn in the jungle trail. With their disappearance into the jungle’s perpetual twilight, he turned around himself and walked past the parking area, itself halfway between camp and the main road to Puerto Lindo, then continued on to a little indentation in the jungle.

  Cruz saw him there, leaning against a big, black Phaeton, arms folded and a couple of armored cars on guard. He must have got my number from his wife who got it from mine.

  Cruz reported with a snappy salute, duly and formally returned by Carrera who stood to attention away from the Phaeton for the brief ceremony.

  “Anything you absolutely need to be present for, Centurion?” Carrera asked.

  Cruz shook his head in negation. “Nothing the corporal I brought with me can’t handle, Duque.”

  “Great. There’s a cantina about three miles down the road. Let’s go chat.”

  “Oh, a little chat with the boss, eh?”

  Carrera chuckled. “Not like that, Ricardo. But I do want to know about the boy. I do want to know if there’s anything—beyond staying out of the way which, you will note, I’ve been doing—that I can do to help.”

  * * *

  The cantina’s name was “Miramar” and one could, in fact, see the Shimmering Sea from it. At an unusually high tide one could possibly wash one’s feet in the Shimmering Sea from the bohio facing the water. A regular tide and it would be a walk of perhaps fifty meters.

  For the moment, though, the tide was out. Near the lapping waves—above them too—hopped or flew several species of seagull cognates or cousins. They looked a lot like Old Earth gulls, being rather solid and quite feathery, but retained teeth as well as clawed fingers on each wing. They also sounded a lot like gulls.

  With the tide out, the smell of the sea, which was actually the smell of the land—salty and slightly rotten—competed with the flowers and vegetable and animal decay of the nearby jungle. Over all of that was the aroma, by no means unpleasant, of a simmering stew—or possibly a sopa seca, a dry soup—hidden from sight by a woven reed wall.

  Carrera called for a couple of beers.

  As the proprietress was cracking those, Cruz laid his “stick,” his badge of office as a centurion, on the table, setting it against the salt shaker to keep it from rolling off. Then he whispered, “Try the paella de marisco but stay away from the empanadas. Seriously.” He made a closed fist thumping the chest gesture: heartburn.

  “You’ve been here before?” Carrera asked. He waved the answer off. “Wait; stupid question; of course you have.”

  Two bottles of cold Cervesa Legionaria appeared on the table. No glasses, it was not a glasses kind of place. Carrera and Cruz each ordered paella de marisco.

  “Found it a couple of weeks ago,” Cruz confirmed, “not long after starting cadet training.”

  “There’s no way in Hell for me to keep up with all the transfers, even though we don’t do that many, but no one’s cut orders permanently moving you to the academy, have they?”

  “No, sir,” Cruz answered. “I’m still just temporary help. Go back to the Second Tercio in three weeks or so.”

  “Okay. We’ll get back to that. For now though…” And from there silence descended and hung for a bit.

  I never would have thought, thought the centurion, that el Duque would ever be at a loss for words.

  “I’m not sure you didn’t make a mistake,” Cruz said. “Sir.”

  Carrera sighed. “Neither am I. The boy is…well…he could go either way. He could be my replacement, an asset for the legion and for Balboa or…”

  “Or he could be a monster,” finished Cruz, then added, “The problem is, though, that this might turn him into a monster. I shudder to think”—and the centurion did, in fact, shudder—“just what it might mean if all he learns here is to manipulate people, without ever learning to care for them, as people.”

  “That’s a possibility, isn’t it?” Carrera put his elbows on the table then lowered his head to massage his temples.

  “Yes, sir,” Cruz nodded, “it’s a real possibility. I’ve seen him do it once, already. At least I think I have. He’s clever so it’s hard to be sure.”

  “Yeah,” Carrera said, “he’s clever. So do I pull him out of here or leave him?”

  Cruz hesitated. This was not normally one of his failings. Finally, he said, “Leave him here. If you pull him out now, while he’s still teetering between success and failure, he’ll assume you’ve judged him a failure. You’ll never get an honest day’s use of the boy after that.

  “And—since he is clever—he’s been picking off the low hanging fruit in his section. But it’s about to get much tougher from him. The boys he hasn’t yet swung over to his side are the middle or upper middle class ones, the self-confident ones, the athletes, and the ones who already have strong military connections.”

  Cruz took a long pull from his beer, the condensation on the bottle gathering and then running down to drip from his chin. “It’s going to be interesting to see anyway.”

  Carrera agreed, reluctantly, “Okay, I’ll leave him here for a while, at least. There’s something else, though. You’re moving up, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, sir,” Cruz said. “Giving up my maniple and taking over cohort sergeant major for Second of the Second.”

  “Okay, honest opinion; if you had to judge the best cohorts on the Mar Furioso side, which would they be? And then which ones on this side?”

  “Including the heavy cohorts by Lago Sombrero?” Cruz asked.

  “No, just the regular infantry near the terminal cities on each end of the Transitway.”

  “I can’t say I’ve seen enough to judge,” Cruz admitted. “I can tell you some that are good. For example, Eighth Tercio, from hereabouts, relieved mine, Second, down in La Palma during the drug war. Lotsa snap, lotsa drive, to the Eighth Infantry.

  “On my side I’m too self-interested to call a fair judge.”

  Carrera glared.

  “Buuut�
��Second of the Second or First of the Third. We work with Third Tercio a lot and their first cohort is the one that’s most impressed me.

  “But, sir, if I may ask, why?”

  “Two reasons, only one of which I’ll tell you. Parilla wants peace, if at all possible. One of the ways we get peace is to convince the Taurans we’re too tough a prospect to attack. So Fernandez has invited them…well, he invited one of them who caught our collective eye…to come and see just how tough a prospect we might be. I’m not going to tell her—”

  “Her?”

  “Yes, ‘her.’ Extravagantly ‘her.’ I’m not going to tell her which units she can see. But I’m not above manipulating the annual training schedule a little so that her choices are limited.”

  “Ohhh…well, in that case, don’t let the Taurans see anybody from the Seventh or the Tenth. The Seventh is still shamefaced and, I think, a little unreliable over their involvement in the Pigna coup. Yeah, you and I both know, Duque, that that wasn’t their fault. They still feel guilty. And the Tenth Tercio is just frigging weird. In my personal opinion. Sir.”

  Carrera let that one go. The Tenth Tercio, it was well known, pushed the Roman-ness of the legion to an unusual degree, Caesar’s Tenth and all.

  “Okay,” he agreed, “during the window we have given Captain Campbell, Anglian Army, the Second of the Second, First of the Third, and Third of the Eighth will be training at Imperial Range. That work?”

  “Think so, sir,” Cruz affirmed. “Best we can do, anyway.”

  The pair went silent as the paella arrived. Cruz, the more religious of the two, crossed himself before picking up a fork. He speared a healthy looking whole shrimp, then held it in front of his face, contemplatively. He rotated the fork in his fingers, examining the shrimp from every angle.

  “Duque,” Cruz asked, “what if the Taurans don’t understand or won’t let themselves understand that our cadre is better than theirs and our rank and file, if maybe not as well trained as theirs, technically, is more than willing?”

  “I suppose, eventually, we fight. Hmmm…on a related subject, and based only on your own observations, Centurion, what would you say about the relative intelligence between the officers and centurions of your own tercio, or any of those on the Furioso side, and the ones here?”

  Cruz replied, after a moment’s reflection, “Never gave it any thought before. On average, I’d say ‘no difference.’ But I haven’t seen all that many, really.”

  “How about the ones you were with in Cazador School or Centurion Candidate School?” Carrera asked.

  “Not there, either,” Cruz shook his head. “Then again, we’ll never again see the quality of manpower we had for that first call up for the war in Sumer. In other words, hard to tell the difference between twenty-four karat gold and twenty-three point nine.”

  “Fair point,” Carrera said, then added, “Here’s my problem: I am becoming convinced that the standardized tests we’re using are not doing all that good a job on this side. But if, as you say, there’s no difference between officers and centurions on this side and those on the other, then maybe they are accurate and, for whatever reasons, the folks on this side just don’t do as well.”

  “You mean aren’t as bright, don’t you, Duque?”

  Carrera answered softly, “Yes.”

  “So you’re thinking about maybe pushing a little over here, to balance things out? A little thumb on the scales?”

  Still softly, “Yes.”

  “I see,” Cruz said. He ate a few forkfuls of paella, thinking hard. “Duque, there’s something I’ve always wondered. Your wife and mine are best buddies. Given the way our society is—yes, mostly still is, despite your best efforts—there’s a lot of who you know being as important as, or more important than, what you know. So…when I take over as sergeant major of Second of the Second, is that because your wife’s been nagging you to help me along, behind the scenes?”

  “I wouldn’t do that to you, Centurion. I wouldn’t rob you of… Oh, I see.”

  Cruz gave a shallow smile. “Yes, sir. If you start plussing up the men on the Shimmering Sea side you’ll rob them of the self-confidence they deserve, inside themselves, and of the respect that they deserve from others. Besides, it’s just a shitty precedent to set. And worse for us since we are still a who you know and who you’re related to culture.”

  “Smart son of a bitch, aren’t you? So what do I do then? I spent a good part of the morning talking to a centurion candidate who is just fucking brilliant.”

  “You could try two…no, come to think of it, three things,” Cruz said, after a moment’s reflection. “I don’t know if anyone but me has ever noticed—yeah, yeah, sir; I know somebody must have—but the Spanish they speak over here is different from what we speak on the Mar Furioso side. I wonder if that, and having to take the time to translate in their heads from what we speak to what they speak, and back again, doesn’t cost them a few points. Then there’s the education issue. You could maybe fix that with a special course for new recruits over here. Don’t know what it would cost but were I you I would think about it, Duque.

  “Lastly, how hard to deemphasize the standardized test scores a little and weight more heavily hands-on problem solving ability, especially in basic training?”

  “Might work, I suppose,” Carrera said.

  “There’s a fourth way, too,” said Cruz. “Don’t know if it’s a good idea though.”

  “What’s that?” Carrera asked.

  “Put your personal prestige on the line and select a dozen or two centurion candidates for officer candidate school, just as a matter of being the big cheese.”

  “I’ve already put a lot of my personal prestige on the line just sending my son here,” Carrera said.

  “No shit. Sir.”

  Palacio de las Trixies, Ciudad Balboa, Republic of Balboa, Terra Nova

  Stomping up the stairs, though at a dignified brisk walk rather than a run, Carrera ignored the squawking of the bright red, green, and gray trixie rushing to get out of his way. He hooked one hand around the finial gracing the top of the bannister, propelling himself toward Parilla’s home office.

  The door to Parilla’s office was open, as were the ocean-facing windows. This allowed a cool breeze to pass through and had the effect, with other windows and doors, of cooling the entire presidential palace without the need for air conditioning.

  Stopping at the door, Carrera announced, “Raul, I want us to get on the ‘Ban Plastic Landmines’ bandwagon in a big way.”

  Looking up from his desk in dual surprise, Parilla said, “Huh? I’ve heard you curse yourself silly over that one.”

  “True. That was before. Now we can have the only undetectable metallic mines in the world. For a while, at least.” Carrera briefly explained Corporal Ruiz-Jones’s insight. “And just think of all those old metallic mines we can buy for dirt.”

  “Okay,” the president agreed, “I’ll put the diplomats to it. But, if you don’t mind, I’ll want to wring some concessions out of somebody for our signature.”

  “Money?” Carrera asked. “We can always use money, I suppose. But, if you really want peace, why not use it as leverage with the Taurans to reduce their forces here?”

  “It’s a thought,” Parilla said. “Let me mull it over. By the way”—Parilla lifted a folder and waved it—“are you going to the executions?”

  “Which ones?” Carrera asked.

  “The senior tribune and the junior corporal.”

  “Oh,” Carrera said, “the fraternization case. Yes, I’ll be going. Least I can do. The tribune’s been with us since the beginning.”

  Parade Field, Eleventh Tercio Cuartel, Ciudad Balboa, Balboa, Terra Nova

  The not quite risen morning was damp and chill, with a thick fog arising from the drainage ditches and hovering above the erstwhile parade field, now a place of execution. The fog stuck at about knee level, thick enough that a standing man could see neither his feet nor the ground.
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br />   There was a sloped berm along the long end of the oblong cuartel’s parade field, facing inward. Normally, families who came to witness the full tercio on parade, usually before or after its annual period of training, would take seats on the grass of the slope. No family members were present today.

  On the side of the berm facing away from the parade field there was no real slope, but an almost vertical wall. About six feet in front of that wall, two stakes, each about eight inches thick, had been erected. One was set directly into a concrete frame, sunk into the earth. Fresh dirt around the base of one or the other suggested that the Eleventh had never really expected to have to shoot two men at once. Two lines of six men, at ease and each with a rifle at “order arms,” stood parallel to the earthen wall and the two stout stakes. Off to their left stood two junior tribunes, one with a holstered pistol hanging from his belt and the other with a clipboard under his arm.

  On the right side of the firing squads Carrera stood with the regimental commander, Herrera, the legion commander, Chin, and the corps commander, Suarez. Carrera always found it amusing that Chin looked more pure Castilian than any of them.

  A trio of sergeants major stood in a separate group, nearer the wall. About thirty witnesses, mostly enlisted men and junior noncoms, but including a couple or three each centurions and junior officers, gaggled behind those more august groupings.

  There was a little nervous talk among the groupings, though all of that was subdued and further muffled by the fog. All such talk ceased, though, as a green-painted step van emerged from the fog and pulled up in front of the stakes. The van’s rear doors burst open. Two legionaries emerged, then turned to help another keep his balance as he stepped out. That one had his hands bound behind his back, hence the need for help. He looked at the upright stakes and, lifting his chin, marched directly for the further one. His escorts had trouble keeping up. Indeed, one nearly fell from a misstep caused by some unseen irregularity in the ground.