Robert Frezza - [Colonial War 01]

by A Small Colonial War (epub)

  “The Japanese are at least subtle.”

  “The Brothers aren’t,” Rettaglia stated. “The concept of Af-rikanerdom lives and breathes. The document is entitled, ‘Ons Taak. ’ One of the Menzies’s contacts supplied a copy. ’ ’ He sped through the file until he found another passage he liked.

  Against the background of our current situation, it is clear that we Afrikaners, especially as members of our organization, must once again fill our people with enthusiasm for our exceptionally important national-political action, and in this way demonstrate our own maximum political and cultural unity to internal and external underminers and enemies of our nation. Our task must include the following:

  One. We must unfailingly and systematically inculcate in every member, every Afrikaner, and especially every young Afrikaner, the national-political responsibility and duty to achieve our own national and separate development as a nation on the basis of united Afrikaner resources.

  Two. We must inspire the Christian-national Afrikaner to give himself a positive Christian-national role, and to desist from the hairsplitting search for reasons for the birth of the present situation. Our present Christian-national leaders know better what shortcomings must be rectified on an organized national-political level.

  Three. As a cultural organization, it is our particular task to start now to immediately plan and organize unifying and inspirational cultured functions on a large scale to imbue the Volk with a sense of historical mission utilizing functions such as the Oxwagon Trek, the Star Trek, the Monument Meetings, the language festivals, and other large volk festivals to prepare the Volk for the struggles ahead.

  Four. We must marshal in a positive manner all our communications media to unite and to not divide the Afrikaner’s national-political power for the struggle of survival. In this, our leaders must take the initiative. We must give constant attention to a greater historical-Afrikaans content in order to duplicate the achievements of the years of fusion and combat divisions, and thereby ensure that the Afrikaner’s cultural struggle is politically assured.

  Five. We must fight with all our might and power and completely eradicate all old-womanish slander about each other and all underhand criticism of our leaders. To speak frankly to each other means to understand each other and to pool our strengths rather than to divide and weaken with personalities. . . .

  Sanmartin hit the pause sharply. “It sounds like kokutai trash,” he observed sourly.

  “Not so loud, roommate. If you’ll recall, you almost flunked out because of your lack of proper appreciation for the unique characteristics of the Japanese national-political heritage.” “Kokutai is nauseating, and so is this stuff. Do the Boers have their own kokugaku history, too?”

  “You don’t know the half of it. They keep telling Ssu the English put ground glass in the porridge of Boer children in the concentration camps.”

  “Is there more?”

  “Thirty pages, close-spaced,” Rettaglia murmured.

  “Spare me. Did they write that drivel before or after we arrived?”

  “Before we came and gave them cause to be upset, but they’ve taken time to update it since. Their goals are the same, there merely seems to be some uncertainty as to how to accomplish them. Some of them wish to cooperate with us. Others don’t.” Among the Twelve, the current deadlock was five to five with the chairman and one other undecided, which Rettaglia did not mention.

  “Huh,” Sanmartin said. He thought for a moment. “So now that you’ve led me all the way around the potato patch, why do I stay in intell?”

  “You already know the answer. Politics. The war’s begun for us, and we’ve lost it, ’ ’ Rettaglia said bluntly. "The mice in plans and the frogs in operations fought it out. The rats have won. Both sections have forfeited any influence they had with the Admiral.”

  Sanmartin just stared at him.

  “Colonel Lynch wants to see the Variag burn. Gamliel in political is coaxing him on. Gamliel wants to see me bum, and he wants his Zone of Administration quadrupled. With the mice and frogs out, Admiral Lee will pitch us over. He’s not exactly a fool, but he’s convinced himself the Boers won’t rise, which diminishes our value. ”

  “Is Rear-Admiral Irie of any use?” Sanmartin asked.

  “Me hasn’t set foot off GrafSpee, and he’s senile when he’s sober,” Rettaglia said.

  If Gamliel’s Zone of Administration quadrupled, only Major Kolomeitsev’s semi-independent fiefdom would remain untainted by his administrators. And Vereshchagin would be vulnerable. Through extended colonial service and a great deal of jugglery, the battalion had managed to defer a decade’s worth of changes to the Table of Organization. One change would lop the third section from each rifle platoon. This would reduce the battalion’s authorized strength by neariy a hundred fifty men and its effectiveness by a great deal more.

  Reading Sanmartin’s face, Rettaglia said, “I know, it’s a hell of a thing when you have to hope your enemies will save you from your friends. And we will have trouble. Unfortunately, Admiral Lee doesn’t believe it, not with four combat battalions on the ground and ships in the sky. Gamliel and Lynch are telling him precisely what he expects to hear. ’ ’ Rettaglia poured himself another slug of amaretto and downed it.

  “Some of the Boers will hit us. They may not hit us soon enough. The admiral is getting awfully tired of hearing me predict disaster.” Rettaglia began putting bottles and glasses away in an unhurried fashion, speaking all the while.

  “If I go, Raul, I’ll need someone to pick up the pieces or Lynch will stick one of his pretty boys in and you’ll all be dangling with your toes in the wind. And I know you better than I know the back of my hand. You’ll do the job. You won’t like it, but you will. And you’d better. As of yesterday, the freighters are gone and so are the transports except for Shokaku. Construe, my friend.”

  Sanmartin filled in the missing piece. “Aut vincere ant mori. ” “Precisely. We win or we die.”

  For a long moment, neither of them said anything.

  Sanmartin shook his head. “I have a patrol, and I want to be back before Hans goes on a rampage.”

  “That’s one thing I haven’t kept abreast of. ”

  “Hans is the last of the Romantics.”

  “I won’t ask.”

  “Don’t. You would have to observe firsthand.”

  “Accepted. Oh, I’d like to borrow that little interpreter back for a spell. I’ve thought of a way I can use her.”

  “Rhett, she’s one of two people on this battered ball of slime who doesn’t genuinely hate our guts, and she’s too pretty to start measuring for a coffin.”

  Rettaglia laughed and slapped Sanmartin’s wrist deftly. “Thought I’d catch you!”

  “You weren’t serious,” Sanmartin said slowly.

  “Not really.”

  “Rhett, I’ve been meaning to ask you if you would transfer her to another caserne. Truth is, I like her too much.”

  “Raul, consider her a humanizing influence you sometimes lack. I’m playing a hunch I’ll want her near to hand when things get sour, and her liking you is a bonus I truthfully hadn’t expected. Just watch yourself. She’s as honest and apolitical as any person on this mudball, but she’s still not ours. How’s bug hunting?”

  Sanmartin considered his reply. Even in immature state, the Suid-Afrikan rain forests showed promise of a diversity that could hardly be matched by forests alternately iced or flooded on Earth. It made the ruin of those forests even more poignant.

  “That’s something else I want to talk about sometime,” he said. “I don’t like what I’m seeing. This place could be a paradise if the inhabitants running it applied half the intensity they spend trying to seduce each other’s wives.”

  “I can truthfully say that the more I see of this planet and its inhabitants, the less I like it and them. Next time?”

  “Good enough. Ciao!”

  “Ciao, Raul. Enjoy your patrol.”

  As Sanmartin v
anished through the doorway into the twilight, Rettaglia paused to consider the anomaly of soldiers and of Vereshchagin’s battalion in particular. It was something the brigade political officer, Major Gamliel, had touched upon. Gamliel, “Lying Louis” to his friends, was beginning to become the power behind Lynch and even more than a painful nuisance.

  Happiness and joy didn’t keep Vereshchagin’s men in line of battle; they’d seen most of the slimy sticks in the known universe, and they figured on seeing the rest before too very long. It wasn’t glory. Heaven and the devil as witness, it wasn’t loyalty to His Imperial Highness or confidence in superior commissioned officers.

  Piotr Kolomeitsev was a case in point. The Iceman had no family, no friends, no discernible interest in anything outside his company. Ambition didn’t drive him; over the years he’d torched bridges so thoroughly it was difficult to recall a clique he hadn’t stung. His opinion on fighting for His Imperial Dryness and the Disquiet had been made known so often and so publicly that his political reliability index made Raul Sanmartin’s positively sparkle.

  The lack of an explanation for Kolomeitsev’s motivation, and that of the rest of the Variag’s men, was obvious enough to bother Gamliel. That made it a problem.

  Monday (11)

  IN FOURTEEN HOURS, BEREGOV’S TEAM HAD COVERED FORTY kilometers, but if they objected to watching Sanmartin observe a herd of witkops cavort, they made no mention. Small familiarization patrols were the staff of life to Vereshchagin, who wanted his soldiers to know the country better than its inhabitants. For Raul Sanmartin, they were that and much more.

  Like other large amphtiles, witkops had little or no fear of man and were scarce in settled areas. Although the booming trade in amphtile leather had managed to work itself into a state of collapse after depleting stocks and saturating markets, armed inhabitants were still prone to use amphtiles of whatever size for target practice. Semigregarious herbivores, the witkops limited their retaliation to an occasional bulldozing of a maize field.

  Early in the planet’s history, one species of proto-amphtile had sidestepped Earth’s evolutionary history by retaining unshelled eggs inside the body until the young had completed metamorphosis into a land-going form. With reproduction no longer dependent on ancestral waters swimming with ichthyoid predators, that species had adaptively radiated into several orders and dozens of genera. To Sanmartin, that startling innovation appeared to have turned into an evolutionary dead end, at least for the larger species, because the locals had a penchant for shooting gravid females.

  In witkops, the crosspiece of bone between the forelimbs, which passed under the vertebral column in most amphtiles, was lowered away from the column and thickened, with the forelimbs and the neck vertebra themselves lengthened. Amphtilian giraffids, the ugly, ungainly creatures were able to crop foliage a full two and a half meters from the ground.

  Sanmartin recorded a few more observations before Beregov coughed discreetly, a sound that caused the nearest of the browsing witkops to lift her head. The sun shone full on the patch of weathered gray behind her ear from which the name “witkop” came.

  To Sanmartin they were lovely beyond any telling of it.

  He nodded to Beregov. They moved off.

  When they returned, a few of Gavrilov’s could be glimpsed outside Bruwer’s window in the predawn, flinging cutlery at an outsize target. The scoring system to the game was elaborate. They called it “Sentry.”

  Sanmartin mounted the steps to the farmhouse, shrugging off his field webbing. When he settled into a chair, Bruwer already had water heating on the hot plate Rytov had put together with spare tungsten wire. She dropped in a coffee bag as the wire began to glow.

  He enjoyed coffee, and Bruwer was pleased to make it for him. He was unusually unreceptive to puns on the subject. Drinking tea was a unit tradition he would have cheerfully allowed to expire in a damp hole. On Java serving with the 11th Shock Battalion, he had once pointed out in the palatial serenity of the officer’s mess that the inferiority of green teas was occasioned by the relative absence of mouse droppings. The comment materially speeded his transfer off Earth.

  Bruwer asked, “Was this another patrol?”

  “Beregov’s and I,” he answered.

  “Another chance to spy out the secrets of the land,” she said calmly.

  He nodded. “We saw a herd of witkops and stopped two farmers. I have forty k of notes.”

  “On the witkops or the farmers?” she asked, knowing his weakness. She handed him the glass.

  He watched her eyes as she sat on the edge of the bed, the morning breeze brushing the blond hair over her face. She listened far better than anyone he knew, not even excepting Vereshchagin. Underneath her shyness, she sometimes had strong opinions. It had occurred to him that if the Boers ever wanted a spy, they had one spectacularly placed. The coffee was burning holes in his free hand, so he drank some.

  “You told me that Major Rettaglia was your roommate at the academy. I would have thought him so much older,” she said to divert him.

  “He is, by almost five years. I sat at seventeen. Rhett had six years in before they gave him the chance. ’ ’ He allowed the coffee to settle out his insides and paused to reminisce.

  “They called us ‘Tweedledum and Tweedledee. ’ We got even by pretending we were even crazier than we really were.”

  “I might imagine,” Bruwer said, laughing. She settled back and thought about him, about what he had said.

  “Just think how much you owe USS for bringing us here,” he said to needle her.

  “Those of us who weren’t chained with contracts they called concessionaires, concessions they could revoke. Salary men is what they would make of us.” It was not a topic she found humorous.

  “Your people trimmed them.”

  “In the city, some are saying that you have come to forge new chains,” she said quietly.

  He looked around the room. She had contrived to give her furnishings an aspect Sanmartin vaguely considered feminine. The walls were tinted blue, and a painted ceramic kylix occupied a prominent place on a low table. The curve of die kylix’s base swept up gracefully into a shallow bowl and then into handsomely curved ears on either side. It gave the room an aspect of permanence.

  “They won’t rent you a place to live,” he said.

  “There are few places. I have decided to stay here,” she answered. She lifted her hands and let them drop, a small gesture. "The best people, they are afraid. They don’t want trouble. Some of the others say things. No,” she said as if reading his mind, “there is nothing you can do. You, they fear. They are very polite. For me it is different. ”

  He nodded. “Your family,” he asked, “could they help? Or are they part of the problem?”

  “My grandfather, my mother’s father, he would never criticize me.”

  “The one who can’t farm.”

  She nodded. “But he cannot help. He has always been as much a lone person as I. I think that he could have been an influential person if he had wanted, but he did not. He told them all they were crack-brained. My stepmother?” She shook her head. “When she came to tell me how happy she was that I would be working for the Imperials, it was like rain falling out of a clear sky. She must have been very, very frightened then. Since then, to her I have not spoken. Nor to her children.”

  “Friends?” he asked.

  “There were people I knew, but I think that like my stepmother, they would not want to become involved.”

  “Why were you up and about so early?” he asked, changing the subject.

  “This is the most beautiful time of the day. I was thinking about that Hans, he called me ‘Ettarre’ all of yesterday.”

  Sanmartin smiled, the ugliness that was Johannesburg momentarily forgotten. “It’s out of another one of his books. From Men Who Loved Alison, I think. I’m Horvendile or somebody else this week.”

  She sniffed.

  “He says all the prose worth reading was written between
1830 and 1930. Sometimes it starts to creep out and affect his sanity. When Rudi shot a cake with that hand cannon of his once, for a solid month he was Old Shatterhand. That made me Winnetou. Rudi nearly died laughing.”

  “Oh,” Hanna said, contemplating this. “Oh, I remember!” She took Sanmartin’s pistol from a drawer and handed it to him solemnly.

  “Thank you!” he said with evident gratitude, examining the magazine and the chamber. Satisfied, he pointed it toward the floor and pulled the trigger with an audible click.

  “It didn’t shoot!” she observed.

  “Of course not. It has to be loaded,” Sanmartin explained as he tucked it away.

  “It wasn’t loaded?”

  "I don’t have any ammunition for it. Colonel Lynch only said I had to have a pistol.’’

  “You knew it wasn’t loaded?!”

  “You might have hurt yourself with it,” he explained, stepping hurriedly into the hall and closing the door behind him. From the sudden and violent hammering that postern bore, he concluded that it might be wisest to seek counsel.

  Unfortunately, instead he found Coldewe, regaling Kasha in the mess. “Morning, Hans. How are you?” he asked cautiously.

  Kasha tapped her temple in response to the question.

  “Ah, des Rocques! Enter, enter!” Coldewe said with a wave of his hand. “I am lamentably bored, des Rocques! Bored, I tell you!” he insisted, stretching out his feet. “The paynim are quiescent, the solemn rites of peace enshroud the land.”

  “I was just speaking with Hanna ...”

  “Ah, La Beale Ettarre! How does she fare?”

  “I got my pistol back.”

  “Comprehension within me rejoices! You flee for your life.” Sanmartin cast his eyes skyward and pulled up a chair. “What is this ‘Ettarre’ business? Is this your jumping frog man again?” “Ah, Guiron, this fixation with the most estimable Clemens of yours! Nay, it is the glorious Cabell whose works I have again embraced.”

  “Make up your mind, des Rocques or Guiron. Cabell?” “Guiron, you are one and the same. Cabell! Greatest of the fantasists! The dragonfly in amber, whose belles lettres marked the passing of the last flowering of the glorious South! My blessed confrere, your unacquaintance does you little credit.”