Come and Take Them-eARC

by Tom Kratman

  Ham didn’t try to sail through the window. Instead, he dove through head first, “rifle” and grenade out ahead, body as low to the sill as possible without catching his buttons on the wood. When he hit he rolled. It still hurt.

  And there was Ramon, sitting there, cross legged with his chin resting in his hands. He was forbidden from saying anything, of course, but the eyes he rolled toward the other side of the room were eloquent: The bastard crawled out the door and is probably still in the corridor.

  “I saw that, cadet,” said Sergeant Castro. “Three more demerits.”

  “But Sergeant…”

  “Four more. Shall we go for five?”

  Five represented a whole lot of marching alone around the parade field. Ramon sighed and looked down.

  No matter; Ham took the grenade, pulled the pin, and tossed it into the corridor. Bang.

  “You’re out, Cadet,” said Castro, from above.

  “Clear,” shouted Ham, to the waiting troops outside. One by one they piled in and took up defensive positions in the room, just the four of them and Ham.

  Ham emplaced two of the four remaining cadets to cover the one door into the room, and the other two to cover the two windows through which they had not entered.

  “Stay well back from the windows,” he said, then trotted to the window of entry and tossed a flash signal out of it.

  KaBoom!

  * * *

  The nine buildings of the facility weren’t regularly shaped. Neither were they regularly placed. Neither were they of the same height. Some were at an angle to others. Others had little projections sticking out. Some were one floor, some one and a half, and one in the center was a solid two floors. Worse, there were internal partitions that could be moved around, plus furniture in some rooms that could be moved around, plus entrances and passages that could be closed with barbed wired while the cadre—Castro and Salazar—could open up still other passages on request.

  What that meant, given that the defender was about as strong as the attacker, was that before three buildings were cleared, the platoon was down to Delgado, Ham, four of Ham’s boys, three from one of the other sections and four from another.

  And the worst part of that was that the defenders had, overall, killed the attackers at about two to one. That meant that the three buildings held by Delgado’s boys were under heavy attack by the defending third platoon which now outnumbered them two to one.

  Delgado looked pretty down about the whole thing. At least, in the lulls in flying paintballs he looked down. Most of the rest of the time he was looking all around for wherever the hell the firing was coming from.

  “Oh, knock it off, sir,” said Ham. “You did fine and when it comes time to switch over, just you watch us kick the crap out of whoever attacks us.”

  They were in the center building of the ones they’d managed to capture. Ham was serving as platoon sergeant, since Vega was lying out somewhere between the ditch and the buildings, no doubt twiddling his thumbs.

  “Maybe,” said Delgado. “As is, we got the crap kicked out of us.”

  “Not yet, sir,” answered Ham.

  “You have an idea,” Delgado accused.

  “Well…maybe. But it’s going to take a little timing and we need to make a shelter for somebody…”

  Ham looked up at Sergeant Castro, standing with arms folded at the top of the wall. “Go on,” said the sergeant, first squatting and then lying down on the wall, while keeping his voice low. He cupped his hands to deaden the sound still further. “I’m not going to tell anyone.”

  * * *

  Ham’s trooper, Belisario, lay in a corner in a shelter they’d made for him from the furniture in one of the buildings. This consisted of little more than a shambles of a dresser, a dingy yellow stuffed chair with the springs sticking out, a box spring, and an old and moldy mattress. Like every other bit of furniture in the facility the things were all so ruined not even the poorest people in the country, or at least in the country nearby, would want them.

  In his hands Belisario clasped one of the two remaining “satchel charges” the boys had for the exercise. His finger was curled into the pull igniter.

  “The important thing,” Ham had said to Delgado, “the really key thing is that we’ve got better communications than they do.”

  And it was true, when nobody had a radio or telephone, the people who could get a verbal message across more quickly and more securely did have better communications. Using that, they’d been able to coordinate moving the troops, except for Belisario, out of the rightmost building they held and into the central one, all except for Ham who took a position next to but below a window near that central building. They’d also been able to coordinate making that move just about noisily enough that the third platoon folks in the next building over thought they heard an opening. When Delgado renewed the firefight with the other half or so of third platoon, that was the signal the rest, the ones to the right, took to mean they could storm the building.

  This they did, a baker’s dozen of them swarming in through doors and windows. And then Ham and Belisario ignited and heaved their short-fused “satchel charges” into the room.

  Boom. Boom.

  “You’re all dead,” said Sergeant Castro, from on high. He had to shout, because as he was speaking Delgado led the remnants of his platoon away from the leftmost building, through the middle building, past the rightmost building—picking up Ham and Belisario on the way, and right into the building past that from which third had launched its baited assault.

  Panting with the effort, they ran right over bodies, buildings, alleys and openings, then cut left and charged, en masse, into the central building.

  “Fan out!” shouted Cadet Delgado. “One man per window. Ham?!”

  “Sir!”

  “Up on the roof with you and yours.”

  “Sir!”

  * * *

  Sergeant Castro was all smiles he ran the after action review for both platoons. “Don’t be hard on yourselves, third,” he insisted. “You thought you had an opening. You had reason to think so. And you took advantage of it. It didn’t work out, no, but in war, sometimes, things don’t work out. What could have made it better?”

  “A couple of radios,” muttered the third platoon leader.

  “Yep, would have helped,” the sergeant agreed. “What did you need, Delgado?”

  “About three times as many people as I had.”

  Castro laughed, though without a lot of mirth. “If we were the Volgan army, we’d say you needed ten times as many people, and you could have expected to have lost nine tenths of them. See what I mean about really doing pretty well?

  “I’m pleased,” the sergeant said, “that both of your groups put on a creditable show. You see, this is my and Corporal Salazar’s last run through of this facility. From now on there are going to be a couple of Volgans running it, courtesy of Legate Chapayev’s connections—”

  “Where are you going, Sergeant?” Ham interrupted.

  “Duque Carrera—bless his heart and if you tell him I said that I’ll come back and kick your ass, young Carrera—is setting up a new unit, a new kind of unit, and Salazar and I are both going to it.”

  Chapter Twenty

  By my counsels was Sparta shorn of her glory,

  And holy Messene received at last her children.

  By the arms of Thebes was Megalopolis encircled with walls,

  And all Greece won independence and freedom.

  —Inscription on the tomb of Epaminondas, Pausanius IX, 15, 6

  Parade Field, Epaminondas Caserne, Ciudad Balboa, Balboa, Terra Nova

  The caserne, formerly a police barracks outside the southern outskirts of the city, farthest away from the sea, had taken a bit of refurbishment. Due to the Senate’s refusal to fund Carrera’s latest little project, he’d paid for the refurbishment himself. It hadn’t been all that expensive, really; the caserne was a single main building, surrounded by a concrete wall, both of t
hose painted a shade of tan with a darker brown trim. The barracks was suitable for housing perhaps eighty or a hundred men, full time, and adequate for weekend training, in rotation, for four or five times that. There were a couple of outbuildings, and a PT field that had been redesignated the parade field. Occupying perhaps five acres, it had no rifle range, though there was a subcaliber range in the basement of the barracks.

  The parade field was, at the moment, graced with about a hundred dignitaries and high ranking officers, in bleachers that normally served as an outdoor classroom. To either side of the bleachers were TV cameras from TeleVision Militar and Canal Siete, there to transmit the news and the ceremony that would mark it.

  Not all of the dignitaries or senior officers really wanted to be there. Many and possibly most didn’t approve, either.

  Has the Duque lost his goddamned mind? fumed Legate Suarez. A tercio of fucking mariposas? Standing on the reviewing stand with Carrera and the other legion and corps commanders of the Legions del Cid, the legate consoled himself, Well…good riddance to the cocksucking bastards. I always had my doubts about Silva anyway.

  On the field, itself, in serried ranks, under the scrutiny of cameras and rank, were four hundred and forty-eight soldiers gleaned from almost every other tercio in the legion. That was all that Silva could find of suitable homosexual men, already in pairs, of suitable rank each. At that, some had had to take reductions in rank—not pay, however. When asked, Carrera had judged against that—to find a slot in the tercio.

  Still, Silva had done his work well. The Tercio Gorgidas—named for an ancient Greek commander of some note—was recruited and organized. A few necessary special regulations were written. Training needed work, since few of the men had worked together. Discipline was mostly a matter of wait and see. It had never been successfully done, the creation of this kind of unit, since the fourth century…BC. And, back then, when slaves did the scut work and reward was being posted at the place of danger, when there really was no other benefit a chain of command could incur…

  Still, tomorrow could deal with tomorrow. Today, the tercio needed to be officially formed. That was the purpose of the parade: to read the words that would call the unit into official existence…and to conduct the ceremony that would lay the groundwork for their future discipline and leadership.

  A bugle called. The adjutant read off the orders. Tercio Gorgidas had an official existence. Then came a peculiar, indeed a unique, ceremony. In front of their newly silvered eagle and the many witnesses, the men—all but twenty-two of them—swore fidelity to a single comrade, unto death. The remaining twenty-two, including the chaplain, to whom it really wasn’t a big deal, swore an oath of celibacy instead, the oath to last until either discharged from service or willing and able to take the other oath.

  At a nod from the adjutant that he was finished with calling the unit into existence, Carrera, carrying a very old and very small green-bound volume, went to the microphone and began to speak. “At ease.”

  He opened the volume and, after a brief explanatory note, read from it:

  “The ancient writer, Plutarch, tells us of an extraordinary military unit of his times, its life…and death. Listen: ‘Gorgidas, according to some, first formed the Sacred Band of three hundred chosen men…It was composed of young men attached to each other by personal affection…For men of the same tribe or family little value one another when dangers press, but a band cemented on friendship grounded upon love is never to be broken, and invincible; since the lovers, ashamed to be base in the sight of their beloved, and the beloved before the lovers, willingly rush into danger for the relief of one another…they have more regard for their absent lovers than for others present, as in the instance of the man who, when his enemy was going to kill him, earnestly requested him to run him through the breast, that his lover might not blush to see him wounded in the back.’

  “‘It is stated that the Sacred Band was never beaten till the battle at Chaeronea; and when Phillip, King of Macedon and Father of Alexander the Great, after the fight, took a view of the slain, and came to the place where the three hundred that had fought his phalanx lay dead together, he wondered, and understanding that it was the band of lovers, he shed tears and said, ‘Perish any man who suspects that these men either did or suffered anything that was base.’” Carrera turned slightly to send Suarez a dirty look.

  “‘Gorgidas distributed this Sacred Band all through the front ranks of the infantry, and thus made their gallantry less conspicuous…But Pelopidas, having sufficiently tried their bravery at Tegryae, never afterward divided them, but keeping them together, gave them the first duty in the greatest battles…thus he thought brave men, provoking one another to noble actions, would prove most serviceable, and most resolute, when all were united together.’”

  Carrera shut the small book from which he’d been reading, then said, “Your tercio has a glorious ancestry; quite possibly a glorious future. Don’t fuck it up.”

  The Tunnel, Tauran Union Security Force-Balboa, Cerro Mina, Balboa Transitway Area, Balboa, Terra Nova

  Building 59, over on Fort Muddville, was more or less an administrative headquarters. Oh, it was perfectly capable of overseeing combat operations, having all the office space, radios, telephones, map boards, and computers to do so. To say nothing of sufficient coffee makers, without which military operations all over the planet would have ground to a halt.

  What it was not, however, was secure. Why, one little five hundred pounder in the portal under Janier’s office and the good general would be left wondering why they spoke English in Heaven. If it was Heaven.

  No, for real security there was the tunnel, which had all the required office space, map boards, radios, telephones, computers, and about three hundred feet of solid rock and concrete overhead. And coffee machines.

  It was immune to bombs, even the latest Federated States Air Force deep penetrators. It was immune to fairly large nukes. It even had a complete suite of defense against biological and chemical attacks. The Tauran Union Minister of Safety, Marine R. E. S. Mors du Char IV, had insisted that that be restored, lest her own ever so precious hide be potentially endangered.

  But then, thought Janier, Marine R. E. S. Mors du Char the Fourth is a pussy, even by her definition.

  Best of all, thought the general, walking from his staff car to the Tunnel’s entrance, and with Malcoeur following along like a loyal dog, we didn’t have to pay for anything but restoring the chemical and biological defense suite. The rest the Federated States paid for. About seventy years ago.

  About thirty feet from the Tunnel’s entrance Janier paused to look upward at a large rectangle of blue. There, at the very topographical crest on the hill, on an enormous staff, a huge Tauran Union flag fluttered in the breeze. It inspired in Janier the most profound sense of indifference. Indeed, it didn’t just mean nothing to him; it meant less than nothing, a net negative, the focus of contempt, not filial piety or adoration. He was a son of Gaul, not a Tauran.

  However, he admitted, I do thoroughly enjoy the feelings of helpless loathing it inspires in the wretched locals. That, and the authority it provides me to call on foreign troops at need.

  Though beginning to get on in years, Janier’s walk was brisk. Malcoeur, still following behind, also panted like a dog in the heat as his chubby body strained to keep up.

  * * *

  Two military policeman, one Sachsen, Gefreiter Czauderna, and one Anglian, Private Stalker, stood inside an air conditioned, glassed sentry box, outside the Tunnel’s entrance. They snapped to attention and saluted at Janier’s approach. They’d have been more professional, demanded his identification, at the least, but the word had gone out from their Hauptmann, David Lang, to the mixed Anglian-Sachsen MP company that guarded Cerro Mina: “As far as the Frog general’s concerned, rules are for lesser beings. When he shows up, pass him through without hindrance.”

  Said Stalker to Czaurderna, in basic German, “Moritz, tell me again why we’re not a
llowed to shoot the Frogs?”

  Moritz Czauderna, six feet tall, mild belly brought on by the normal Sachsen diet of noodles, lard, and beer, with his skin reddened and sloughing off from the harsh Balboan sun, answered, “In the first place, be careful speaking even German around the general. He’s been known to pretend he doesn’t understand languages he can speak perfectly well in.”

  Czauderna stretched, awkwardly, as if the long stint of sentry-go were hurting his back.

  “Shitty bastard,” Stalker observed.

  “Indeed. But in the second place, it’s just sort of gone out of fashion.

  “Fortunately,” Czauderna added, “fashion is cyclical, so maybe someday.”

  * * *

  Ignoring the MPs, Janier descended into a tunnel dimly lit with blue light. The floor was mostly short platforms followed by a few steps. Occasionally this pattern was broken by longer platforms from which side corridors radiated. His and Malcoeur’s footsteps echoed off of the concrete walls as they walked. At length they came to a longer platform with a pair of side corridors. Turning down the right-hand one, they came within exactly thirty meters to the most secure conference room in Balboa. Even Carrera’s was not so secure.

  Janier’s entrance caused the first officer to see him to announce his presence. Chairs scraped the floor as officers of all services stumbled and scurried to come to attention. The Gallic general swept them all with a baleful eye. It was his way.

  Without a word Janier walked to his chair. “Begin,” he ordered. Immediately, the screen on the far end of the conference room, opposite Janier’s own chair, was lit up by a projection screen linked to a laptop computer.

  His underlings had rehearsed this briefing many times. It could be fairly said that they’d spent more time rehearsing the briefing than in actual planning for the proposed operations the briefing was intended to discuss. Janier did not know of this. Neither did he much care. He was a General Officer. He gave orders. Lesser beings worried about the details.