by Leo Champion
There was a partial cheer from some of the Qing horde gathered.
“He is,” von Kallweit heard a few of the nearer ones murmur in agreement.
A glory hound, thought the veteran German. You got that a bit, particularly amongst the hotheaded southern races. It was what made the Portugese, the Spaniards and the Italians such fine junior leaders of expendable semi-Slavics. The same mentality, although missing the leadership, was what made Albanians, Hungarians and Greeks effective fighters. The southern races did have a use, even if that use was mostly to die well for Europe.
“I am Andre Lavasseur,” the major said with absolute confidence. “Son of His Excellency Baron Julian Lavasseur, of the House of Lavasseur, Member of the European Chancellery. Younger brother of His Esteem Julius Lavasseur, Assistant Director of the Department itself!”
von Kallweit wasn’t sure how much of the young man’s words translated accurately, and for that matter he wasn’t so impressed by the Department as he had been in his childhood. Personal experience with agents had shown them not to be the pure and invincible heroes the media liked to portray them as.
Nevertheless, the Qings quieted.
“In this modern age, the cowardly Chongdins use their worthless technology to supply the Americans with weapons that oppress you,” Lavasseur went on. “Destroy their dams and their factories, destroy their bridges and kill their artisans, and you will deny them their ability to make those oppressive weapons. Then you will destroy them!”
Axhar son of Tenzhen held the weapon in mid-air for another moment, then said, “I would rather fight.”
“Under-khan,” Tenzhen son of Venzhen said. “You will accept the weapons and be silent.”
von Kallweit had been hearing status reports from the following planes’ pilots as they safely landed, and from Lieutenant Gemmel’s squads as they reported clear unloading zones. Now his boss spoke to him, in a carefully-phrased undertone:
“Captain, those Scandi riffraff done their jobs yet?”
“All clear, sir,” said von Kallweit.
“You will accept all our weapons as we give them to you!” Lavasseur told Tenzhen and the nomad horde, raising his voice. “You will attack the Chongdins and you will destroy their cowardly empire! And you will cripple the Stars-and-Stripes on this world!”
There was riotous applause and cheering as the stingers and satchel charges began to be handed out.
Chapter Eight
“So the Navy should be deploying the wells, which arrived yesterday, by space into the Western Territories,” the Army Corps of Engineers colonel reported to Governor Wendy Evanston of American Dinqing. One of his several sector-commander subordinates in the west was a Lieutenant-Colonel Robert Julian Newbauer, with an ad-hoc bunch of Legion, Legion Penal, Army Engineer, and Air Force medical elements under him.
“Direct space deployment, the briefing says,” observed one of the governor’s advisers in the briefing room.
“Yessir. Drop them in at the right angle and we don’t have to drill, just go through the ground on pure kinetic velocity. Highest solid-state nanotech, these things; the impact buffers cost less than drilling. Then the railroad lines can get under construction.”
“Very good,” said Governor Evanston indifferently. “Any more reports today?”
“Yes, ma’am,” said an aide. “Lieutenant-Colonel Doom has an item request. He’s from planetary intelligence, ma’am.”
Evanston checked her watch before saying,
“How long will it take?”
The aide glanced at his tablet.
“He’s only asking for acouple of minutes, ma’am.”
“Fine, let him in.”
Lieutenant-Colonel Richard Doom of the Foreign Legion was somewhere in his forties, maybe late thirties or early fifties. He was blandly handsome, or perhaps handsomely plain, in the kind of way that could have, and had, gotten him lost and forgotten in a crowd of three. About the only thing people would remember about him was that he had slightly thinning sandy-grey hair.
On the right shoulder of his Legion blue shirt was a deliberately blank-white shield, indicating that he belonged to the Legion’s Zero Division; the staff designation for those men based on Chauncy or seconded elsewhere from there. On his left, where most Legion troops wore battalion, brigade or double-division armpatches, was the telescope-amidst-green-binary-figures insignia of the organization’s Intelligence branch. He was the assigned planetary officer on Dinqing from Legion G-2.
“Thank you for your time, Governor Evanston.”
“Lieutenant-Colonel,” said Dinqing’s Adjutant-General, Lieutenant-General Roland Chalmers. “I see you haven’t run this briefing past Major-General Horwarth’s office.”
Horwarth was the senior military intelligence officer on Dinqing.
“No time, sir.” Doom turned his attention back toward the governor. “Ma’am, based on limited field intelligence and last night’s signals intelligence, I respectfully request we pull the development programs out of the Western Territories for now. Further, we conduct an active sweep amongst the nomads looking for technology they shouldn’t have, in particular AU-9 stinger missiles. I request also we bring the borderlands up to a provisional low-yellow security alert until those sweeps have been conducted safely and without incident, which I’m betting they won’t be.”
A couple of the junior military aides – Evanston liked having a big entourage, as a former US Senator from Illinois it made her feel at home – began to make a ruckus. She waved them down.
“That’s a major request, for someone who’s going directly to me without clearing it past his own superiors first.”
Lieutenant-colonels normally didn’t speak to governors without permission. Doom, if that was even his real name – he was Legion, it probably wasn’t – had a reputation in the Imperial Zone for doing things first and asking permission later.
Evanston mostly remembered him as the man who’d pretty much personally conducted and executed an operation that had uncovered an ante-Chongdin conspiracy to wipe out the current puppet Emperor and his senior family with a dirty bomb, a few months ago. Apparently he’d had a big role in the Fleurent operation of 2209, too.
He was asking the moon, but she’d give him the time of day.
“Big ask,” the Governor continued. “You’re basing this on data, I assume?”
Doom held up his phone and hit a few buttons.
“The last few days, we’ve seen unusual activity in the Duchies’” – that meant the kingdoms in the eastern side of the continent that the Chinese had taken over wholesale, and the Euros had in turn beaten them out of – “eastern airbases. They were preparing for something. Last night we found out what that was.”
Dotted red yellow lines, flight paths, appeared superimposed all across a map of the Western Territories of American Dinqing. It was a huge space of land, thousands of miles in every direction, and the lines were tiny in context.
“What are we looking at, Lieutenant-Colonel?” asked one of Evanston’s aides, a former Air Force officer who’d gotten out at brigadier.
“We’re looking at incursion paths, detected by satellites on passive infrared scanners mostly intended for weather prediction. We have access to them anyway,” Doom said. The tone of his voice was completely passive; it sounded as though he didn’t give a shit. For all Evanston knew he didn’t.
“So the Europeans took a few overflights across the border,” the former AF brigadier asked. “We do that all the time, see if they bip us. Mostly they don’t. No more in the wastelands their side of the line than there is ours.”
“Time-patterns on these overflights weren’t conducive with just an overfly,” Doom shot back. “Neither are heat patterns from what infrared data we have. These stopped for a while, in at least thirty locations. Consistent with what we believe are nomad horde gathering places.”
Evanston checked her watch.
“What human intelligence do we have about this, Lieutenant-Colonel?” she asked bor
edly. Lights on a black screen didn’t interest her much and this guy was saying no more than a load of abstractions to her. So some Euros were visiting the nomads. Air Force firepower had made their hordes an irrelevant factor on Dinqing approximately three weeks after initial US arrival on the planet, before even the first Chongdins had bowed their feebleminded eatie heads.
“None yet, but it takes time to fil—”
Her chief of staff, a strikingly beautiful woman in her forties whose first career had been in Military Intelligence, waved a hand.
“Doom, let’s clarify.”
Evanston had the idea Tribolo didn’t like Doom. Well, neither did she. She didn’t like insubordinate O-5s wasting her time.
“Go on, Leah,” she said.
“You think,” Evanston’s chief of staff went on, “that anomalous flight paths mean we should abandon to scavengers our regional improvement programs, that we should take brigades – divisions, even! – away from internal security allowing bandits, insurgents, bush warriors and terrorists to run wild, in order to scour nomads.
“You wish to propose that we withdraw productive Guard, Legion and Army Engineering assets from their constructive roles along the borderlands in order to make them into – border guards. Against yellow dots.
“You propose a mobilization against fleeting yellow dots in the night. Is that correct, Lieutenant-Colonel Doom?”
“I assume that’s not forthcoming.”
“No, Lieutenant-Colonel, it is not!” Evanston snapped. This had taken her past her allocated time for this briefing and she had other meetings to get to. She was done here.
“Then may it be on the record that I made that recommendation.”
“It may certainly be!” Evanston snapped.
* * *
“You went over the heads of two levels of superiors,” Senior Lieutenant Broder said to Doom as, the aide carrying Doom’s briefcase, they departed the governor’s conference room. “Sir, did you really expect the Governor to take your predictions too seriously?”
Broder’s job gave him access to some of Doom’s files, and the young man had been thoroughly vetted. He was a smart kid who Doom liked, so he owed his aide a little honesty. To the extent that Richard Doom was capable of owing anyone honesty. That was a couple of solid millimeters, although in this case he would go further.
“I expected her aides to put it on the record,” the lieutenant-colonel replied. “And they did. And if I were you, Pete? I’d keep my sidearm loaded and my shit ready to scram for the next week or two.”
“Even in the Imperial Zone of Vazhao?” the senior lieutenant wondered.
“Even in the Imperial Zone of Vazhao,” Doom said. “Those JEU-330s can carry a lot of ordnance, the nomads were overpopulated and about to overrun Chongdin before we came along, and – there’s a woman I know running Department operations in Binwin.”
That was the capital of European Dinqing.
“You know her from Fleurent, sir?”
“I knew her older brother from Fleurent, kid. But daddy Baron raised one tough, smart, ruthless kid, he’ll have raised more. Assistant Director Julius Lavasseur’s little sister Arlene is running Department operations in Binwin. Whatever they’re doing is Colonel Arlene Lavasseur’s work. And I know that family; they don’t mess around.”
“They refused your suggestions to raise an alert or even withdraw the dev programs for a bit, sir,” said Broder. “Sir, if you’re right? I just feel sorry for the poor dumb sucker grunts on the ground, sir.”
* * *
“You were briefed on this before,” Senior Sergeant Ortiz of Labor Battalion 209 told Third Platoon, with a hand on his hip. “But I’m pretty sure someone told you that picking fights with Army was frowned upon, and yet here you are.”
Who said Goldnecks don’t have at least a slight sense of humor, Croft thought.
“So let’s go over it once again. Each four-man team of you is responsible for a gang of twenty convicts, under one of our overseers. You’re clearing the way for a railroad along the marked path. Your three priorities are in order: prevent escapes. They can’t work well chained, not that most of them work well anyway. Any of them try to take a runner, you shoot. And aim for center mass, got it? No fancy leg shots.
“Second, maintain discipline. That’s why you’re being issued tasers. Overseer says to zap a man, don’t ask questions, zap him. Same goes for hitting ‘em, or putting the boot in. Forget about them being fellow Legion; they’re in black because they fucked up and have been sentenced for it by a court. They’re thieves, they’re deserters, they’re scum. Maybe some will redeem themselves, but they haven’t yet and they’re not brother Legion until they do. So don’t hold back, we’ve got a job to do. They’re not going back to Vazhao anytime soon but the sooner this project gets done the sooner you might.
“Third, area security. You protect the work site, you protect yourselves and yeah, you make sure nothing goes after the scum. Threat assessment from the nomads is ‘low’ but you’d have heard there’s a lot of nasty fauna out here. You all got that?”
There were noises of assent from the men.
“Senior Sergeant,” came another Goldneck, a corporal. Most of the Battalion 209 overseer crew were corporals and sergeants; Croft had seen a couple of lance-corporals hanging around, but only a few. Ortiz was the number two man in the guard crew.
“They’re ready,” the corporal said.
Ortiz looked at Croft, who held up a hand: one moment.
“Take care of yourselves and do a good job out there, men,” he told the platoon. “They’re yours, Corporal.”
* * *
“Pantaleo,” said Corporal Giovanni-Paolo Pantaleo to the MP assigned to his team.
“Timilty,” the little red-haired corporal said and – slightly to Pantaleo’s surprise – extended a hand.
Pantaleo wasn’t used to friendliness from MPs, but he shrugged and shook.
“This is Lance Cheng, PFC Cook and Private Gartlan.”
“Nice to meet you guys.”
Nearby, the tents and facilities in the Black Gangers’ enclosure had been taken down. The gangs were being herded, one twenty-man gang at a time with each man carrying a bright orange knapsack, into the backs of the trucks.
“We’re about to come up. Ortiz or Koppel told you guys the deal, right?”
“Just now,” said Pantaleo.
“In there! Get into the truck!” yelled an MP, gesturing. “Gang Eight, into the truck now!”
Twenty men headed into the back of a truck that had been drawn up, submachinegun-armed MPs covering them. When they were all in, packed standing-room tight, an MP dropped a cargo net over the back and sealed it to the base of the bed with a padlock.
“We’re in the next one,” said Timilty, gesturing.
The next truck held a pair of small trailers, one of them a cargo pan with a tarpaulin fastened over it. The other was a large water tank. Both were chained down to stanchions in the truck’s bed. Tied to the sides of the truck with bungee cords were a mishmash of tools, mostly picks and shovels. Spades and borers too.
“Fit yourselves in,” Timilty instructed them unnecessarily as the truck got moving.
There were a few holes in the covering of the truck, and Pantaleo placed himself, one hand on the chained-down water trailer, near one of them. The truck got moving, bumping across the rough ground.
The relatively verdant area around Hubris soon gave way to more arid ground. Pantaleo was from Boston but he’d once taken a trip down to see friends in west Texas, and it reminded him of the ground there – not quite desert, scrub and a lot of grass, but relatively few trees. Low, rolling hills that from his field engineering knowledge – railways wanted as flat a course as possible – he figured they’d be digging ways through.
He felt sorry for the poor bastard Black Gangers who’d be doing the hard work.
* * *
Two well-spaced columns – each pair, the one with the Black Gang and the o
ne with their guards and the equipment, leaving as they were loaded – of all-terrain five-ton trucks headed out from Hubris, one – with First and Second platoons – at a roughly east-northeast angle toward a point called Diamond North. Every ten to fifteen miles, where a well had been dropped in, a pair of them stopped.
Third and Weapons platoons’ trucks, twenty-four teams and forty-eight trucks in all, headed east-southeast, to Diamond South. The first phase of this part of the program was to build out to North and South; the second phase would be to build in from those two points, going east-southeast and east-northeast respectively, to the Vasimir Pass. Where, incidentally, 1/4/4’s Delta Company had been placed.
A railway was already under construction through the Chongdin heartlands to Vasimir. When all four sides of the diamond were complete, there’d be a railroad well out into the center of the continent, to Hubris; it would be economically viable to raise cattle; water from the wells wouldn’t just enable energy-efficient steam trains, they’d provide irrigation to the land itself, allowing more vegetation and therefore a higher density of cattle to be shipped out on the railroad.
It would be hard work for the men involved, especially since a lot of it was going to be pick and shovel work. But the Central Territories Improvement Program was a political token, and the men involved were expendable.
And they knew it.
* * *
In the crowded back of one truck, a Black Ganger named Billy Kaggs fingered his shiv. Security in the Gangs was tight, but Kaggs had done time in real prison before and knew the tricks. His blade, a three-inch arrowhead with edges so sharp you could practically shave with them, had started life as a bit of scrap from the ruins of the Chongdin city, as they’d been taking the wall apart to build Fort Hubris.
Kaggs was a big man, six-two and muscular. Crude convict ink was across his body, including a black skull with flaming eyes on his left cheek. In his late thirties, he’d done time for rape and assault, joined the Legion one step ahead of a police investigation into what would have probably been Murder Two charges; Kaggs was the name he’d given the recruiter but not the one he’d been born with.
