by John Ringo
"Fuck . . . Duncan, get down, goddamn it," Connors ordered. The silhouette painted on his eye didn't budge.
"Incoming," the AID announced, tonelessly. The splash of friendly artillery fire began to play on the aliens surrounding the company. "I am adjusting."
With the help of the artillery, that ambush was beaten off. It made no difference. The Posleen were swarming between the company and its objective. They were swarming in much greater than mere regimental strength. Much.
Duncan was a problem. He couldn't be left behind; there were still thousands of Posleen that would have overcome and eaten him on his own. Connors had had to relieve the man and place his Alpha Team leader in charge of the squad. Worse, all you could get out of the sergeant were unconnected words of one syllable.
And I can't leave anyone behind to guard him. I can't even autoprogram the suit to take him back to base; he'd be dogmeat on his own.
At least the sergeant could follow simple orders: up, down, forward, back, shoot, cease fire. Connors kept him close by during the long, bloody grueling fight to reach the ford. They reached it too late, of course. Captain Roberts' radio had long since gone silent before the first B Company trooper splashed into the stream.
By that time, Connors found himself the sole officer remaining in the company. That was all right; the company was down to not much more than platoon strength anyway.
Connors heard his platoon sergeant—no, now he's the first sergeant, isn't he?—shout, "Duncan, where the hell do you think you're going?"
Looking behind, the lieutenant saw his damaged sergeant beginning to trot back to the rear, cradling a body in his arms. Some friendly hovercraft were skimming the greasy-looking water of the swamp as they moved to reinforce the ford.
"It's okay, Sergeant . . . First Sergeant. Let him go," Connors said, wearily. "It's safe back there, now. See to the perimeter, Top."
Leaving the NCO to his work Connors sat down on the mound the Posleen had created apparently to honor the spirit and body of the late Captain Roberts. He began to compose a letter to his wife, back home on Earth.
"Dearest Lynn . . ."
Logistics Base X-Ray, Ttckpt Province, Barwhon V
The battalion had suffered grievously in the move to and fight for the ford. B Company was down to one officer and fifty-one others. Of the fifty-one, one—Staff Sergeant Duncan—was a psychiatric casualty. The rest of the battalion's fighting companies were in no better shape.
The battalion commander was gone, leaving the former exec, Major Snyder, to assume command. Only two of the company commanders had lived, and one of those was chief of the headquarters company which didn't normally see much action. In total, the battalion's officer corps had left to it one major, two captains, half a dozen first lieutenants and, significantly, no second lieutenants. Like other newbies, the shavetails had died in droves before really having a chance to learn the ropes.
Connors thought he was lucky keeping his old platoon sergeant as the company first sergeant. Snyder had wanted to take him to be battalion sergeant major.
Somehow, Connors thought, I don't think Snyder meant it entirely as a compliment when he let me keep Martinez.
"Sir," Martinez asked, when they were alone in the company headquarters tent, "what now? We're too fucked to go into the line again."
The tent was green, despite the bluish tint to all the vegetation on Barwhon V. It smelled musty, and a little rotten-sweet, from the local equivalent of jungle rot that had found the canvas fibers to be a welcome home and feed lot.
"The major . . . no, the colonel, said we're going home for a while, Top," Connors answered, distantly. "He said there's not enough of us left to reform here. So we're going back to get built up to strength before they throw us in again."
"Home?" Martinez asked, wonderingly.
"Home," echoed Connors, thinking of the wife he'd left behind so many long months before.
Indowy Freighter Selfless Accord, en route Barwhon to Earth
"Attention to orders," cracked from the speakers above the troopers' heads as they stood in ranks in the dimly and strangely lit assembly hall.
"Reposing special trust and confidence in the patriotism, valor, fidelity, and abilities of . . ." The 508th's acting adjutant, normally the legal officer, read off the names of the remaining officers of the battalion. One of those names was, "Connors, Scott."
"A captain?" Connors wondered when the ceremony was over. "Wow. Never thought I'd live to be a captain."
"Don't let it go to your head, Skipper," advised Martinez who was, like many in Fleet Strike, a transferred Marine.
"No, Top," Connors agreed. "Would never do to get a swelled head. Makes too big a target for one thing."
"The bars . . . look good," Duncan said, staring at the wall opposite the headpiece of his medical cot. His voice contained as much interest as his blank, lifeless eyes. "The diamond looks good, too, Top," he added for Martinez.
Outside of his suit, Connors and Duncan might have been taken for brothers, same general height, same heavy-duty build. Though fifteen or more years Duncan's senior, Connors looked considerably younger. He was, unlike Duncan, a rejuv.
"How have you been, Sergeant Duncan?" the newly minted captain asked.
"Okay, sir," he answered tonelessly. "They say I can be fixed up . . . maybe. That I'll either be back to duty in a year or will never be able to go into the line again. They're talking about putting me in a tank for psych repair."
Patting the NCO's shoulder, Connors answered, "I'm sure you'll be back, Bob."
"But will it be me that comes back?" Tears began to roll down the NCO's blank, lifeless face.
"God . . . I don't know, Bob. I can tell you that the tank didn't make me any different on the inside."
"Me neither, Sergeant Duncan," Martinez added, more than a little embarrassed for the junior noncom. Martinez knew Duncan was going to remember the tears and feel the shame of them long after he and the skipper had forgotten. "I came out the same Marine I went in as . . . just younger, stronger and healthier.
"By the way, Skipper," Martinez asked, turning his attention away from Duncan's streaming face, "what were you doing before the rejuv? I was a retired gunny, infantry, and just marking time in Jacksonville, North Carolina . . . waitin' to die."
"Oh, I did a lot of crap after I left the Army, Top. Do you mean what did I do in the Army? I was a DAT."
"What's a DAT?"
Connors smiled. "A DAT is a dumb-assed tanker, Top."
"So how did you end up in infantry, sir?" Duncan asked, showing for once a little interest in something.
"I hate the internal combustion engine, Sergeant Duncan. Just baffles the crap out of me. So when I got rejuved and they sent my unwilling ass to OCS I worked that same ass off so that I'd have a choice when I graduated. And I chose Mobile Infantry to keep the hell away from tanks."
Duncan rocked his head slightly from side to side, which was also a bit more life than he had shown for a while. "Okay . . . maybe I could see that."
Earth Orbit, Indowy Freighter Selfless Accord
"Let me see my e-mail, AID," Connors ordered, alone in his cramped cabin aboard ship.
The cabin measured about six feet by nine, and had a ceiling so low Connors had to duck his head to stand up to stretch his legs. The bed was stowed against the wall and a fold-out table served as the desk on which rested the AID, a black box about the size of a pack of cigarettes.
The AID didn't say anything. Neither did the e-mail appear holographically.
"AID?" Connors insisted, an annoyed quality creeping into his voice.
"You don't want to see it," the device answered.
"Don't tell me what I want," Connors said angrily, heat rising to his face as blood pressure turned it red. "Just gimme my goddamned mail."
"Captain—"
"Look, AID, I've had no word from my wife since leaving Barwhon. Just give me my mail."
"Very well, Captain." The e-mail list appeared immedi
ately, projected on the air over the desk.
Connors was surprised to see only a single letter from his wife. He opened it and began to read. It was short, a mere five lines. Then again, how much detail is required to say one's wife is pregnant by another man and that she has filed for divorce.
Interlude
The outer defenses of the city were crumbling now, Guanamarioch sensed. The sounds of battle—the thunder of railguns, the clash of the boma blades, the cries of the wounded and dying—grew ever closer.
He felt a slight envy for those Kessentai chosen to stay behind and cover the retreat to and loading of the ships that would take the clan to their new home. Their names were recorded in the Scrolls of Remembrance and they would be read off at intervals to remind the People of their sacrifice. That was as much immortality as any of the Po'oslena'ar, the People of the Ships, might aspire to.
Yet instead of leading his oolt into the fight, Guanamarioch on his hovering tenar led them as they marched four abreast and one hundred deep towards the waiting ship. Other ooltos, similarly, formed long snaking columns from the cities outskirts all the way to the heavily defended spaceport.
Impatiently, the Kenstain in charge of the loading directed Guanamarioch to bring his charges to a particular ship and to load at a particular gate.
"And be quick, you," the Kenstain demanded. "There is little time left before the ships must leave."
Ordinarily the Kessentai would have removed the Kenstain's head for such impertinence. This was, however, a time of desperation, a time when minor infractions had to be overlooked. Obediently, riding his tenar, the God King led his normals to the designated ship.
At the ship another Kenstain directed cosslain, a mutated breed of normals that were nearly sentient, to take Guanamarioch's tenar and stow it. The God King removed his Artificial Sentience from the tenar, hanging it around his neck, as the cosslain took the flying sled away.
"Lord," the castellan said, "your oolt is the last for this ship. The place for you and your band is prepared. Directions have been downloaded to your Artificial Sentience. Just follow it and stow the normals, then report to the captain of the ship."
"Are you loading then?" asked Guanamarioch.
The Kenstain shook his head, perhaps a bit sadly.
"No, lord," he answered, his teeth baring in a sad smile and his yellow eyes looking sadder still. "I will stay here and keep loading ships until there are either no more ships, or no more passengers . . . or until the enemy overrun the last ship we are able to begin loading."
The God King reached out a single grasping member and touched the castellan, warmly, on the shoulder. "Good luck to you, then, Kenstain."
"That, lord, I think I shall not have. Yet there are worse ways to die than saving one's own people."
"It is so," Guanamarioch agreed.
Chapter 2
The United States and Panama are partners in a great work which is now being done here on the Isthmus. We are joint trustees for all the world doing that work.
—President Theodore Roosevelt, 1906
Panama
The country lay on its side, more or less, in a feminine S-curve stretching from west to east and joining the continents of North and South America. Beginning at the border with Costa Rica it ran generally east-southeast for a third of the way. Conversely, from its border with Colombia in the thick and nearly impenetrable Darien jungle it ran a third of the way west-northwest. The waist of the country, also feminine and narrow, went from the rump—the Peninsula de Azuero—that jutted out into the Pacific and then east-northeast to meet the land running from Colombia roughly one third of the way from the Colombian border.
Down the center of the country ran a spine of mountains with few passes and fewer roads running across it. North of this spine, the Cordillera Central, was mostly jungle, with a few cities and towns. South was, at least from the Costa Rican border to the narrow waist, mostly farm and pasture. There were two major highways, the Pan-American which ran generally parallel to the Cordillera on the southern side, and the Inter-American which ran the much shorter distance from Panama City in the south to Colon in the north.
More than half of the people of the place lived in the two provinces of Colon (not quite half a million) and Panama (about a million and a half). Of the rest, most lived close to the Pan-American highway where it ran from Panama City to the border with Costa Rica, south of the Cordillera Central.
The highway that joined the cities of Colon and Panama was not the only link between them. Colon fronted on the Caribbean to the north. Panama City edged along the Pacific to the south. Between them, like a narrow belt on a woman's narrow waist, ran an artificial body of water that linked Colon and Panama City, linked the Atlantic and Pacific oceans and, in the process, linked the world.
This was the Panama Canal.
She'd been carved out of the living rock through an emerald-hued hell. Men had died in droves for every yard of her; died of the fever, of the rockslides, of the malaria, of a dozen tropical diseases to which they had had no cure and, initially, little defense. They'd died, too, of the drink that anesthetized them from the misery of their surroundings.
She'd broken one attempt to tame her; broken the men, chewed them up and spit out their corpses to rot. The skeletal remains of their rusted machines, vine grown and half sunken, still dotted the jungle landscape, here and there. But men were determined beasts and, eventually, had broken her in return.
For generations she had been the single most strategically important ten-mile-wide strip of land in the world. The commerce of all the continents and innumerable lesser islands passed through her, a lifeblood of trade. The nation which had owned her had ruled the seas with the power of commerce and with the power of war.
Two hundred and forty inches of rain a year were just barely enough to slake her thirst. A small fleet of dredgers were just enough to keep her free of the silt those rains washed down. Throughout her heyday the lives and labors of seventy thousand human beings had had no higher purpose than to serve and defend her.
She was the Panama Canal and, though aged and faded, she remained a beauty.
Yet her heyday had passed. The nation which had built her had lost interest as the greatest ships of war and commerce had outgrown her limits, as the people and nation that hosted her had grown to resent the affront to their sovereignty that foreign ownership of the Canal had represented. In truth, though, once the great enemies—Nazism, Fascism and Communism—had fallen, the security the Canal had represented had become, or come to seem, slightly superfluous.
Times change, though. Perceptions change.
The Pentagon
Deep in the bowels of the "Puzzle Palace," in a room few were aware of and fewer still ever visited, a troubled man gazed over the heads of banks of uniformed men and women sitting at computer terminals, onto an electronic map of the world glowing from a large plasma television. That monitor was one of three. To the right was shown a map of the continental United States and North America; to the left, generated by a complex computer program, a spreadsheet marked the anticipated decay of necessary world trade under the impact of Posleen invasion.
"We're just fucked," announced the man, a recalled three star general with vast experience in complex logistics and no little feel for commerce.
He repeated himself, needlessly, "Fucked."
As the general watched, a red stain spread out across the center of the right-hand screen. As it spread, numbers dropped on the spreadsheet, some of the numbers changing color from solid green to blue to red to black. In a few cases those number dropped to zero and began to blink urgently.
"We're going to nearly starve," muttered the general, to no one in particular. "Even with the GalTech food synthesizers, we are still going to be goddamned hungry."
Suddenly—the program was operating at faster than real time—a smaller stain in Central America oozed east- and southward to cut the Panama Canal. Within seconds every category shown on the lef
t-hand spreadsheet plummeted. It became a sort of "Doomsday" Christmas tree of pulsing black numbers and letters.
A finger of red lunged north from Montana, before retreating southward again. "They've just cut the Canadian Transcontinental Railroad," a functionary announced from behind his own computer monitor.
Moments later another notional landing touched down between Belleville and Kingston, Ontario. The mark of that landing spread. More fingers thrust north, east and west. Black dots appeared over critical locks along the canal system there.
