by Tom Kratman
The shards from the main casing, meanwhile, created a blizzard of flying steel on floors six and seven, and a lesser storm on floor eight. None of that really mattered, as the blast alone was enough to scour those floors free of human life, and also took care of the trixie that one of the supply detachments on floor seven kept as a mascot.
The blast from those floors more leaked than flooded into floor ten through the hole gouged by the bomb. It was a mere fraction of the blast, and even that fraction entered the tenth floor more slowly than was strictly inconsistent with life. Eleven got off almost scot free, minus a few killed by the initial spalling, while the top floor lost nobody to blast. This was not necessarily a good thing, as the agony-induced screaming from people with chunks of concrete imbedded in their guts was worse on them and the remainder than death might have been.
Power went out and with it the elevator. There were steps linking the floors but the blast doors were pretty much slammed shut and wouldn’t be opened any time soon. Meanwhile, noxious fumes from the explosion, in the absence of any method of clearing them, crept from floor to floor, sending the miserable creatures still living there to horrid, choking deaths.
Fixed Turret 177, Isla Real, Balboa, Terra Nova
Their regiment was the Tercio Santa Cecelia, but just about everyone called them “Adios Patria.” As in, “We have met the enemy. Goodbye, Fatherland.”
Sergeant Rafael de la Mesa sat in the commander’s hatch of his turret. He couldn’t stand; he’d lost the ability long ago. That was how he’d ended up in the Tercio Santa Cecelia, the regiment for those less than whole of mind and body.
The turret had come from an old Volgan tank, not really suitable for standing in line of battle as a tank anymore. Bought for little above scrap metal value, the old tanks had had their turrets removed and a thick-walled casemate built up over them. In these had been mounted milled-out medium artillery pieces, firing either shaped charges or ninety-pound lumps of High Explosive, Plastic. The shaped charges might or might not penetrate the best of modern tanks from the frontal arc. The HEP, however, could pretty much be counted on to slap a tank’s crew to death.
Instead of commanding one of those tank destroyers, SPATHAs, they were called, or, better still, a real tank, de la Mesa had only the turret and its concrete surround.
Oh, well, thought de la Mesa, one does the best one can with what one has. Dammit.
The sergeant had lost the use of his lower body when a tow cable had snapped, with him a little too close. The cable hadn’t been enough to cut him in two—nor were the days few when he’d wished it had—but it had severed his spine, roughly and completely, and in a way that modern medicine, as practiced on Terra Nova, could not rebuild.
The sergeant’s little command was larger than a tank. It would not, however, be travelling except insofar as an enemy bomb might move it. Even then, the concrete was set on what was called a “raft,” to keep even a near miss from overturning it.
There were a few different configurations for the fixed turrets. In the case of de la Mesa’s, it was a two-floor arrangement, with walls a meter and a half thick, and a bowed roof a bit thicker, built of high-quality concrete with rebar and a crushed coral aggregate. Inside the concrete, hollow plastic objects of various sizes and shapes ensured that neither a direct hit with a tank’s main gun’s penetrator nor from a HEP charge would cause much spalling. They also helped with the concussion, as did the plywood paneling that lined the walls and the rubber matting on the floors. The turret position was several years old. Already the trees transplanted around it had grown to the point of providing adequate shelter from the sun, through most of the day, if not at high noon. A camouflage and radar-scattering screen erected between the trees helped there. None of the trees was closer than nine meters from the turret, thus allowing full traverse. There were some gaps in the earth and concrete through which ball-mounted machine guns could fire, to supplement the fires of the infantry maniple in the position behind, and what looked like pipes—they were more complex than that—for sending live grenades outside. De la Mesa had tried to teach the boys to use the grenade dispensers, but except for Juan, he thought the process just too dangerous for them and for the turret’s continued existence.
De la Mesa’s crew consisted of four men. These were himself, Pablo, Juan, and Julio. He was crippled in body. The last three were all victims of Down’s Syndrome. At first, de la Mesa had resented his charges deeply. Their flawed condition was a reminder of his own. With the passage of time, though, and a realization on his part that the boys worshipped the ground he rolled on, he’d come to accept them for their virtues. Not least of these was a boundless capacity for love.
Juan was the least defective of the lot, at least in some ways. He served as the gunner. It had taken some work on the sergeant’s part to convince the boy—Juan was only twenty, chronologically—that it was not only all right but necessary and praiseworthy to use the cannon and machine gun to kill other human beings.
And if it turns out he just can’t do it when the time comes? Well . . . I can gun from my station if I must.
Julio was probably the most severely damaged. Even letting him enlist had taken the testimony of several legionary psychologists that, inarticulate or not, he could understand the oath well enough. In fact, though, there were birds and proto-birds on Terra Nova with IQs estimated to be higher than Julio’s. Julio was the loader for the main gun, a job that required strength but not much in the way of intelligence or coordination. He didn’t actually load the gun, but rather the carousel below it, which fed rounds to the gun as the gunner or commander selected them.
Julio tended to cry a lot when the bombs fell. To combat that, de la Mesa had taught the boys several songs. Their singing was by no means good, but it still served the purposed of keeping them from a mind-numbing terror they were otherwise ill equipped to deal with.
Last came Pablo, who had been with de la Mesa the longest. Pablo wasn’t clever enough to gun, but was too clever to waste on merely loading. Instead, he did the running to the cook house for the four, plus kept the generator for the turret traverse, the lights, and the air filtration going. He also did the laundry, by hand, made the beds down in the lower level, and generally cleaned up. It was also Pablo, usually assisted by Julio, who moved de la Mesa out of his command chair, to his wheelchair, or down below to sleep.
At least I can still wipe my own ass. Frankly, a couple of the boys aren’t too fastidious about things like that for themselves. If I didn’t nag, this place would be intolerable.
“Would you like some breakfast, Sergeant?” Pablo asked from down below. On seeing de la Mesa’s hand come down, he placed the sergeant’s aluminum mess kit into his hands, making especially sure to wrap the hand in such a way as to secure both plates.
Next Pablo passed up a clean knife and fork from the sergeant’s own kit. It had taken both some work on the sergeant’s part and a severe case of the gastro-intestinals to convince Pablo of the importance of clean mess gear. Now he was at least as fanatical on the matter as was de la Mesa, himself.
De la Mesa didn’t initially hear the shriek of the engines of the attacking jets. Out of the corner of one eye he saw two long, slender, and dark objects falling through the sky. Then he heard the jets and instinctively reached down to drop his command seat into the turret. He left his own head out of the turret, albeit just barely. Just as instinctively, he used his command override to swivel the turret in the direction he’d seen the bombs fall. The first one he saw hit raised such a flash and such a plume of metal, rocks, and dirt that de la Mesa instinctively crossed himself, thinking everyone in that bunker was probably dead.
He expected the other one to be as bad, but was gratified to see no great blast erupting from the island where that bomb slid into the ground. De la Mesa was terribly surprised then, when a score of ambulances and a fair amount of construction machinery collected at the second bunker, while ignoring the first hit.
He thought
, Maybe they know everyone from the first strike is dead.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
All the gods are dead except the god of war.
—Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Ice
Xing Zhong Guo Aircraft Carrier Luyang, Mar Furioso, Terra Nova
Paranoia was something of a Zhong trait anyway. It was also a highly admirable trait for commanders at sea. Hai Jun Yi Ji Shang Jiang, or Fleet Admiral Wanyan Liang had it in an even more than normally Zhong or naval degree. Indeed, it was said among the crews of any ship he’d ever commanded that, if one opened up a dictionary to the word “paranoia,” there would be a two-by-three-inch glossy of Lieutenant, or Commander, or Captain, or Admiral Wanyan.
With the fleet he’d been given, Wanyan not only could afford to be paranoid; he had to be. He was carrying virtually the entire Zhong Marine Corps, plus two corps from the army, escorted by all that was left of Zhong naval aviation and about two-thirds of the surface and submarine fleets. In other words, Admiral Wanyan had command of his empire’s future, of its chance to carve out its own place in the sun. In those circumstances, anything less than paranoia would have constituted gross dereliction of duty.
Wanyan left the running of his flagship, the Luyang, for the most part to her captain. His concerns were simply too great in scope to allow more than cursory concern for the carrier. Neither could he pay any particular attention to the other carrier, the Jiangwei, following behind at a distance of about four miles. Both of those had been stripped of almost all their rotary craft, and those distributed among the destroyers of the fleet, in order to make room for more fighter-bombers.
The destroyers and frigates were grouped into six main divisions, one of them holding about half of all the destroyers and frigates available. That large grouping had the point of the fleet’s advance, the individual ships serving as base for the antisubmarine helicopters, even as they alternated passive listening with frantic dashes to and fro, while pinging like mad.
Two more groups held the flanks, but echeloned back somewhat from the point group. In theory that might have allowed an enemy submarine to slip in. In practice, Wanyan would have liked to have seen them try it, since the bulk of the nonnuclear submarine force he brought with him was guarding those gaps diligently.
A fourth group took up the rear. Group Five was entirely air defense, and operated both to the flanks of the carriers and amphibious group, as well as between them. The final group was made up of the latest antisubmarine warfare destroyers and frigates, Wanyan’s personal hammer to smash any threat that was found by any of the other, screening groups.
One would have expected Fleet Admiral Wanyan to be just thrilled about the size of his command. He might have been, too, except that, Gods, so many of my ships are so old. And so many, especially among the amphibious vessels, have been pressed into a service for which they were not designed. And we have reason to believe the enemy is, if small, both clever and ruthless. Worse, it may be that their submarines are nearly undetectable. I keep running through the reports of the survivors of our engagements with them. And Mao Zedong’s captain, Liu? I’ve known him since he was a Shao Wei. He’s convinced the Balboans maneuvered, without being detected, behind him and fired themselves on their own ships. Backing up Liu is the conduct of the Federated States, who act convinced that we fired first. The fact that they are so convinced means they were witnesses or, rather, had a witness. The fact that they believe it also means they didn’t detect the Balboans who, per Liu, are certainly the ones who fired first.
Unless it was the Federated States, itself, that fired first. They are wicked, and evil, and . . . and my paranoia is getting the better of me.
Batería Pedro el Cholo, Isla Real, Balboa, Terra Nova
The bronze plaque by the rolled-open steel doors proclaimed the battery was named for an Indian, a man without surname, who had been a follower of Belisario Carrera in his war of independence from Old Earth. Each of the eight batteries ringing the island was named for a different character from that long-ago conflict. Moving clockwise from Battery Pedro, one came to Batería Nandi Mkhize. Mkhize, a former UN Marine?—and a pure stunner of a Zulu girl—had deserted the UN to join Belisario and later married into the family. Past that was Batería Mitzilla Carrera, then Batería Juan Alvarez, Jr. Next, were one following the ring road around the island, one could have come by Batería Amita Kaur Bhago, another deserter from the UN to that old Carrera. After that came Batería Mendoza, just that, since nobody knew what old Mendoza’s first name had been. It was even likely that there were two or three of them with the same last name. Then came Batería Isabel Cordoba. Lastly, before the ring road would return to Batería Pedro el Cholo, was Batería Oliver Rogers, who hadn’t fought in the war but had arranged to buy guns for the rebels and ship them north. This was the same Rogers for whom the FSN had named a submarine.
A battery’s normal armament consisted of two triple six-inch turrets, themselves removed from one of the cruisers scrapped by Carrera as not needed for naval efforts. The turrets sat atop artificial hills, the sodded and tree-planted dirt surmounting thick hollow cones of concrete. Behind the twin hills for the two turrets, various ammunition bunkers, twelve of them for each battery, were situated to either side of a rail line, a spur running from the ring that encircled the island about three kilometers inland from the coast. Typically, eight of those twelve bunkers were on the coast side, with their large steel loading doors facing toward the central massif, Hill 287. Short rail lines ran right from the main spur into the ammunition bunkers. The turrets themselves, while capable of all-round traverse, were oriented primarily to sea. Unseen, underground and connected by tunnels, were concrete headquarters, the fire direction center, and quarters and mess facilities for the battery’s troops.
Of the sixteen triple turrets, every one had been knocked out by the air forces of the Tauran Union. Two of them, the Eighth Legion’s engineers had managed to get back to duty, for a while. Then the Taurans had come by again and smashed them still more thoroughly.
The Taurans really hadn’t had much choice about their targeting. The ammunition bunkers were much more numerous than the turrets, and just as hard to destroy. Even if they’d had enough suitable penetrators, there would have been other targets for those. Rail lines like those that ran between the bunkers and the turrets were notoriously hard to take out and keep down. And besides, the odds were good that each of the turrets had a fair-sized magazine below, such that taking out ammo bunkers or rail would have been pointless.
Legate Rigoberto Puercel, commander of the Corps which contained the Eighth Legion and the island it defended, accompanied by his engineer, a Sachsen immigrant named Fehrenbach, inspected the damage from the latest Tauran hit on one of the coastal batteries. There weren’t any bodies, this time, which was a blessing. Previous strikes had scattered broken men and bits of men throughout the labyrinthine depths of the batteries. There had never been too many of them lost to air strikes by the batteries, the worst case having been Battery Cordoba where the battery’s own crew of a baker’s dozen had been supplemented by a reinforced infantry platoon seeking shelter. That had been an ugly scene, when Puercel had inspected it, less than half an hour after the strike.
This time? Nobody was killed, nor even hurt. After building an arrangement of connected tripods to lift the turret enough to set it back down in its ring, everyone had left for a beer. At two hundred and fifty-odd tons for a turret, they deserved the beer.
“Do we keep it up?” asked the engineer. “This one lasted about a day. It took four to recover her.”
“You have anything better to do?” responded the legate.
“Well, no, not really,” Fehrenbach admitted. “But the thing is, boss, that if they think we’ll keep fixing the turrets, eventually they may well go after the ammunition bunkers, which, if detonated, we could not fix. That would be . . .”
“Stop fixing the turrets,” said the legate. “Effective right this fucking minute we concede to the enemy
that they’ve won that round.”
Because, God forbid they take out the “ammunition” bunkers. Then we’d be well and truly screwed.
Now that the containers of “Log Base Alpha” were sorted out, Warrant Officer Han Siegel, wife of Sig Siegel, was officially the translator for the two hundred and change Cochinese immigrants who manned Batteries Pedro, Nandi, and Mitzi. She was tiny, lovely, and quite possibly the most ruthless, foul-mouthed bitch in four languages. She certainly spoke rudely enough to most of her countrymen.
Those Cochinese, former slave laborers for the Tsarist-Marxist regime, had been purchased by Siegel for more or less petty cash. Initially, he’d used them to package up certain light and heavy guns being bought from or through the Cochinese authorities, many of whom were relearning free enterprise with a vengeance. Then, since they’d learned how to take the guns apart, he’d brought them to Balboa to put them together again. There, faced with the fact that nobody would take them in, while Balboa had a military-only immigration policy, the Cochinese had volunteered en masse for the legion. Fair numbers had continued to come, too, egged on by glowing descriptions sent back home by the old Cochinese.
They’d been a real bargain. Not least because, among the two hundred plus males in the initial crew, every one was a former soldier, sailor, marine, or airman. That was how they’d ended up as slave laborers, they’d been on the losing side of the Cochinese civil war. Better, of those, fully fourteen had been through the Federated States Army’s Ranger School. That meant they could be commissioned into the legion without going to Cazador School, for which they were all far too old. Technically, because of their age, the Cochinese could only be assigned to the Tercio Socrates. In practice, because of their experience and qualification, the Tercio Socrates, whose job it was to find military employment for those who joined late in life, had been able to form a heavy artillery group from the Cochinese, under their own officers and centurions, and with their own cooks, cooking a menu suitable for them. It was nearly ideal for everyone.
