by Tom Kratman
“Somebody has to decide,” said Cimbria. “And we’ll never agree on our own. Madame High Admiral, will you please be the one to decide?”
This was greeted with murmurs of approval, generally, with only the Gauls and Anglians remaining silent. “Oh, all bloody right,” said Crewe, relenting.
Janier didn’t wait for the civilian from Gaul to say a word. “Gaul agrees,” he said, earning himself a glare from the civilian. “Malcoeur, show the high admiral what’s on offer.”
The aide went back to the butcher paper and flipped several sheets back. “Here, High Admiral.”
Wallenstein read:
“That,” pointed out Malcoeur, “is merely tentative, High Admiral. No one has yet definitively agreed to anything.”
“It’s heavy on multilingual people in a number of places,” added Janier; “some of the headquarters, the signal company, the intelligence company, and aviation maintenance and air operations support, especially. It’s unavoidable, really, with this many languages involved.”
“This isn’t entirely based on population or wealth or size of military, is it?” asked Marguerite.
“No, High Admiral,” Janier admitted. “Those were factors, of course, but one of the big drivers, as especially with Castile, is willingness.”
“High Admiral,” said the representative from Hordaland, “we can’t offer anything in good faith that our governments won’t, in good faith, honor.
“Will they honor that?” she asked, pointing at Malcoeur’s easel and butcher paper. “And the sticking point is who’s to be in charge?”
“Yes, High Admiral,” said all the representatives of the big four—Gaul, Anglia, Sachsen, and Tuscany—together.
“Will Anglia accept a Gallic commander?” she asked.
“Under no circumstances,” answered Crewe. “Been there. Done that. Didn’t like it the first time.”
She looked past Janier for the representative of the Republic of Gaul. “No Anglian commander,” he said, without being asked.
She looked for the Sachsen rep. Even before she found him both Gaul and Anglian said, “No, no Sachsen commander.”
“We’ve both been there before,” said the Gaul, “and we liked that even less.”
“Is there a brigadier or major general in the Tuscan army everyone could approve of?” she asked the Sachsen, who was surprisingly not very put out that the Gauls and Anglians had nixed a Sachsen general.
“Claudio Marciano,” the Sachsen said. “I think he’s retired now…”
“Semi,” said the Tuscan rep. “He’s working for the World League.”
“Available then?” Marguerite asked.
“The World League would be happy to send him to command this force,” said Mr. Villechaize, from the World League, “but for him to have command authority the Tuscans, or someone in the Tauran Union, would have to recommission him.”
“We could recall him to duty,” said the Tuscan.
“Objections, Anglia? Gaul?”
“Not really,” answered Crewe. After all, Anybody but the bloody Frogs.
“None,” said Janier. After all, At least Italian is a related tongue…and not English.
“Let’s call that settled then,” said Wallenstein. “That force list. The Tuscan in command, certainly for the first iteration. Now how do we transport them? And remember, there’s not a lot of time to waste here.”
* * *
In a private dining room she shared with the general, Marguerite rubbed at her temples. There are some kinds of headaches even Old Earth medicine can’t do a thing about.
Janier clucked sympathetically.
“It comes with dealing with a certain kind of bureaucrat,” he said. “On the other hand, without your moral authority as the representative of Old Earth and commander of the Peace Fleet, we’d still be arguing, we’d have gotten nowhere, and my headache would be even worse than yours, I assure you.”
He didn’t mention the implicit major bribe. By common understanding that was an unmentionable.
He managed to raise a reluctant chuckle out of the high admiral. Sadly, the chuckle raised her pain level.
“Will the rest uphold their part of the bargain?” she asked through the curtain of her pain.
He nodded sagely. “I think so. After all, it’s not as if we’re trying to get them to, say, actually agree to and follow through on substantially larger defense budgets. The forces they’ve agreed to are already in existence and won’t cost more—rather less, actually—to maintain in Santa Josefina than in their home countries.”
“Does it leave you enough to reinforce the Transitway Area as we’ve discussed?”
“Yes, though if you think they whined and moaned about the less than eight thousand troops going to Santa Josefina, under Tuscan command, wait until they have to produce fifty thousand, plus another twenty in follow-on forces, under my command.” He hesitated, then reaching into a pocket said, “Oh, that reminds me.” He pulled a fax from the pocket and handed it over, but said what it was anyway. “The Republic of Gaul is promoting me to a rank commensurate with command of the corps I intend to raise in the Transitway Area.”
“Good,” she said, “because I can already hear the rest whining that you are too junior and using that as an excuse to withhold troops.”
“My thought, precisely, which is why I expended a few tokens to arrange the promotion.”
Again she laughed and again she winced. “Oh, we are so obviously the same species and culture.”
“Indeed?”
“Oh, I think so.”
“Old Earth must be a very fucked up place then.”
“In some ways, sure,” she admitted. “Where is that not true?”
“What—” The waiter’s knock on the door interrupted Janier in whatever he’d been about to ask.
“How do you think the other side is going to react to this?” she asked.
“Shock,” said Janier. “They’ve had the initiative for a while now, long enough to have gotten used to it. Even when they started to back off from their provocations, that was them exercising initiative they were sure was theirs, probably forever.
“This will be the first time in that same while that we’ve taken the initiative. That we’re taking it in a place they consider mostly theirs—a friend, a cultural ally, and a recruiting ground—is going to shock them silly.”
“What will they do though?” Wallenstein asked.
“Mobilize one of the two regiments they have near their eastern border with Valle de las Lunas,” Janier said, definitively. “I doubt they can keep both mobilized without wrecking the local economy. We can probably anticipate a border incident or two, but even if not those defensive preparations of theirs can easily be presented as offensive. Then I can start the provocations around the borders of the Transitway Area that, to date, my political masters have not permitted.”
“Because it will keep the Balboans focused on defense rather than on an invasion of Santa Josefina?”
“Precisely. And our provocations will keep the Balboans half mobilized, hence more threatening looking than ever. And that, too, will mean firmer grounds for me to demand more troops.
“Eventually, the need to keep mobilized, plus the threats from our provocations, plus fear and fatigue, will have them—rather, their ill-disciplined troops—do something to justify an invasion.”
“How soon do you think the force for Santa Josefina will be ready to move?” she asked.
“I talked to a friend,” he answered. “The two Gallic infantry battalions and a temporary command element can move in three days. That’s important because, once we move, the others will have to follow along quickly. Three airships are loading now, as a matter of fact. Everyone else will be rather slower, of course.”
“Speaking of faster and slower,” asked Wallenstein, “do I need to restate how key timing is going to be to all this? The troops must be in the air and ready to land within just a few hours of Calderón’s request.”
>
“Yes, I know,” agreed Janier, adding with a smile, “But timing, in love or war, is a Gallic strong suit.”
Wallenstein mentally sighed. Dammit, I could enjoy bedding this man in any other circumstances. Rather, being bedded by him. He’s just the sort to take me away from responsibility and put me in my place. Damn duty.
Southeast corner of Santa Josefina, above the Chelonia National Park, Terra Nova
Though the Noahs had transplanted nearly every kind of animal found on Old Earth, half a million to five million years prior, to Terra Nova, and done whatever could reasonably be done to prevent intelligent, hence dangerous, life from arising on the new world, once man had shown up a great many of those salvaged species went into precipitous decline. Sabretooths? Some species still lived. Others existed only as trophies on walls or rugs in stately homes and palaces. The phorusrhacids, the giant terror birds of Colombia del Norte? Some lived in zoos, but none were believed left in the wild. Megs still roamed the seas, but it was believed that their numbers had dwindled almost to the vanishing point as their food supplies were hunted out by man.
The giant turtles and tortoises, however, if not precisely thriving still were a ways from extinction. For one thing because they lived a long time, this could, food permitting and a mate being available, fill up their ecological niches even after a severe period of being hunted. For another, they were rather magnificent, where magnificence equaled tourism, tourism equaled money, and money meant someone thought them worth protecting.
Santa Josefina’s major industries included the production of “oohs” and “aahs” from the environmentally conscious. Thus, despite being slow prey, the giants of the Chelonia National Park, after a fashion, thrived.
Several of them, at least two engaged in copulation, looked up at a strange thrumming sound never before heard above their little protected homeland. Since terrestrial chelenoids tended to have their eyes set downward, the better to find food on land, they—all but the male engaged in copulation—had to really strain to look up.
Had the tortoises been of a religious bent, they might have bowed in awe and wonder, and maybe even a little shock, too, at the spectacle of three huge forms, as turtlelike as made, to them, no difference, flying through the air.
For good or ill, however, the shellbacks were not noted for their religious sentiment.
* * *
Like turtles, the airships were slow, no doubt about it. The early ones were also far too dependent on ground support. The newer versions, though, hybrids that obtained about three fifths to two thirds of their lift from gas and the rest aerodynamically, didn’t need a lot of ground support. Better, they were cheap to run. Better still, they could carry loads that airplanes couldn’t really hope to; eighteen or twenty tanks, say, or a battalion of foot infantry with its forty or so vehicles, say.
There were three of them, cross loaded so that about a third of each of two Gallic infantry battalion rode in each, with the remaining lift devoted to necessary supplies until arrangements could be made for local purchase. There was, of course, no known reason to take the precaution of cross loading. Even so, and even without enemy help, airships had been known to go down. And the Gauls, whatever their other failings, still planned for the unlikely but potentially disastrous.
With tortoises, huge ones, visible below—“Hey, Jacques, look at those two monsters screwing!”—the three airships from the Republic of Gaul Air Force crossed the shore at modest speed and low elevation, then lifted their noses and applied power to their under-mounted fans, to fight their way over the central cordillera common to all the states of Colombia Central. The spot they were to cross had been carefully worked out prior. Near that spot, Lieutenant Blanco of Santa Josefina’s Public Force watched the three pass. Then, reasonably confident that they represented the Taurans upholding their side of the bargain, he called his president to say that the cavalry was riding over the hill in the nick of time.
Chapter Seventeen
In war, an approximation of the truth may best be reached by a comparison of the lies.
—Leon Trotsky
Range 4, Imperial Range Complex, Balboa, Terra Nova
The shell had come down without warning. Where it hit and blossomed into an angry black flower, men, several of them, were scythed down, screaming in pain. Jan had seen it hit, and had seen the maniple’s reaction to it, too.
She shook her head now, half with disgust. A medical Cricket was taking off, laden with two wounded, one of them seriously. The Crickets were the legion’s light STOL aircraft, used for many things that other armies used more expensive helicopters for. The Cricket couldn’t get in as many spots as a helicopter could, but it was more likely to be ready to go in those spots it could get into. As that one took off with its bleeding cargo, another one was settling down a few score meters from where the first had been. Immediately three medics, one holding an IV bag above his head, began loading another wounded man into the back of the thing through a lowered ramp.
It was one of those things; a defective mortar round had landed where it should not have, right by an infantry squad. The remainder of that squad, and the rest of its platoon and maniple, were continuing on with the attack, as if there hadn’t even been an accident.
Jan found that disgusting, too.
“Why do they put up with this, Sergeant Major?” she asked of Cruz. “Our reservists never would. Maybe not our regulars anymore either.”
Nor should they, she thought.
Cruz shrugged just as if he didn’t understand the question. “Why shouldn’t they put up with it, ma’am? They’re soldiers, and well-paid ones, too, by my poor country’s standards. And most of them work in jobs Duque Carrera and Presidente Parilla created for them. Or they have businesses they set up or farms they bought with loans from the legion. Or they are going to school on the legion ticket.”
Cruz continued, “And we are a close group, you know. Even when we’re not training together. That corporal that León was, ah…counseling the other night? He’s León’s little brother. And the reserves and militia are full members of the tercio, even if they’re only on duty less than a month a year. Or about two and a half months for the reserves. They’re welcome at our troops’ clubs, and they come because girls come…soldiers are very popular in Balboa now. The soldiers are bigger, stronger, and they have more money to spend—on a good time…or on a home, food, cradles, and diapers. Because of that, and—frankly—in some cases, because the booze is cheaper. If they’re married, their wives can shop at the tercio commissary and exchange. Most attend our chapel quite often. A lot of them are allowed to live in the barracks free of charge if they wish, and if we have room. That lets them save money while going to school or getting established in their civilian jobs. They can pay to eat in the tercio mess to save money too, if they want to. It gives our cooks training without costing the government much.
“Even when they are not so involved in the tercio their friends tend to come from the tercio. They hang out at bars off of the post that men of the tercio frequent. If you ask one of them who or what he is, the likely first answer is something like ‘I’m a soldier in Second Tercio.’ Although the Tenth Tercio men would say ‘Caesar’s Tenth,’ the arrogant bastards.
“This is true even if they manage a bank, as at least one of our Reserve centurions does. Although he is in Number Three Company. And the boys are proud, very proud, of themselves. So are their families. When we have the full Tercio parade, there are usually ten or eleven thousand family members and well-wishers who come to watch. Sometimes—even—we actually bring some of the wives and girlfriends to watch the training, if the ‘Old Man’ thinks it will be exciting enough for them to want to see.”
The second Cricket took off in a cloud of dust and with its engine roaring…insofar as such a small engine, less than one hundred and twenty horsepower, could be said to “roar.” Cmpbell went silent for a few minutes, which silence Cruz chose not to break.
Once the Cric
ket was out of earshot, Campbell heard a maniple swinging by on the road, maybe two hundred meters to the rear. They were singing a very sad sounding song. She listened long enough, long enough to determine that the lyrics weren’t all that sad, but rather uplifting.
“I see,” she said. “Then you get most of the benefits of having men serve together as regulars, at a fraction of the price.”
“That’s about it, ma’am. Then, too, these men will be the future rulers of this country. They will never have to share their votes with people less worthy. They probably could not articulate it, most of them. But it means something that their sacrifices are recognized and rewarded.”
“And yourself? Doesn’t it bother you that you will be old and gray before you can vote?”
“Me?” Cruz laughed hard enough he had to stop to catch his breath. “Me? Why should I be allowed to vote? At least until I’m so old I can’t screw things up for long. I’ve made no sacrifices. I like this shit. It’s the life for me. But I will be confident for our future…for the future of my wife and children…when the country is run by those who absolutely did not like this shit…but did it anyway. Because they cared more for the Patria than for themselves.”
“How have you come so far? Why fifteen years ago you didn’t even have an army.”
Cruz answered with a single word. “Carrera.”
“You think a lot of him, don’t you?”
“Ma’am…I’d make the fucker king if I could; if I thought he’d accept. Most of us would.”
“King? I don’t think you mean that.”
Cruz gave Campbell a look that said, Oh, yes, I do.
Cruz jerked his head in the direct of rustling leaves and branches. Tribune Porras stepped out of the shadows. “Sergeant Major? The ‘Old Man’ wants to see you at the command post.”
Cruz nodded and took his leave of Campbell, leaving Porras to take his place.
* * *
