Robert Frezza - [Colonial War 01]

by A Small Colonial War (epub)

  IN THE DARKNESS IN JOHANNESBURG, HANNA BRUWER SAT IN A

  little chair in a little room, rocking herself back and forth. She had been out walking, helping, until the grief-stricken people had driven her away.

  Sanmartin passed himself slowly into the room, easing himself into the other chair. He let his chin rest on his chest. His mouth was dry. Outside, through the window where the splinter matting Kasha had put up had been tom away, the night was black, the outposts manned. Illuminated by the moonlight was the rugged hill D Company had crossed with fire.

  He had spent the last four hours seeing to the tasks that remained after the singing of the rifles ceased. On the ragged edge of exhaustion, it was sometimes better to push on into tomorrow than try to sleep when sleep wouldn’t come. A bitter fight took three quiet days to settle out, if three quiet days could be had for money or love. Beregov had watched him, finally prying an extra magazine from his left hand to send him off.

  Sitting, he noticed the kylix resting in pieces of the floor where vibration from the impacting mortar rounds had shaken it. Bruwer looked at him, mouthing thoughts as they came into her head. “My grandfather, the one who fought in the Wars, told me that once when he was a boy, there was respect that people had for each other. Somewhere, it disappeared, and he spent the rest of his life wondering where it went. We were wrong, weren’t we? We lost the land that was ours for more than three centuries, and that means we were wrong, doesn’t it?”

  He said nothing, and she added, “Now, we will lose this one.”

  He had no words of comfort. Automatically, he pulled the bolt assembly from his weapon to inspect its freshly cleaned surface for specks of grime he might have missed. The gesture was not lost upon her, and the knowledge was bitter.

  The Variag’s mold was tight and sometimes it pinched.

  Solchava finally pulled the plug on Rudi Scheel close to midnight. His brain waves had flattened, and other people needed her more. He died ten minutes short of the hour.

  A list was compiled of the Imperials units lost from service. At the bottom of the list neatly appended was “The Baker Street Irregulars.”

  Tuesday(13)

  “De god onzer voorvaden heeft ons heden een schit-terende overwinning gegeven!” The God of our forefathers has given us a glittering victory, Scheepers said with unintended irony.

  Others around the krijgsraad were less exultant.

  The banker, Claassen, was outspoken. “Yesterday, we had four field guns, thirty-six mortars, twenty-nine missile launchers, two hundred twelve machine guns, sixty-two rocket launchers, fourteen antiaircraft launchers. How many do we have this morning? How many more such victories can we suffer?”

  The worst thing, Pienaar reflected, was that Koos Gideon Scheepers had been in such a fury to give his bright, shiny, new weapons out that most of the men he had given them to hadn’t been trained to use them. As Claassen knew, most of the heavy weapons committed had never fired a shot before they were discarded or silenced. Then too, Claassen was from Johannesburg. Fifty-seven men and boys had died in the armored tank committed there, and he had known each of them.

  Still, the losses in men and weapons were not as bad as they could have been. Many of the kommandos raised had never come anywhere near an Imperial soldier, and most of the young Afrikaners and their weapons would come trickling in over the next few days. The ones who had seen fire would be the better for it.

  More serious was the loss of ammunition. Claassen had shown Pienaar the figures. Not one person purchasing weaponry for the Volk had had the slightest idea how much ammunition an army of young Afrikaners shooting at shadows could dispose of in the course of a long day’s fighting. A few more such victories would ruin them.

  Claassen followed up his sally with a direct attack on Scheepers. “Indeed,” he said acidly, “did anyone think where we might get more weapons and more ammunition now that we no longer have a spaceport on this planet?”

  Scheepers still had his majority, a much quieter majority. His eminence grise Strijdom silenced Claassen adeptly.

  “If the Volk require a spaceport, we shall build it out of rock with our hands,” he said, as if pointing out the obvious was a betrayal of the ones who had fallen.

  Brave words for a man with no soil under his nails, Pienaar thought. If there was any more ammunition to be had, it would come from USS, and the Volk would crawl for it. Pienaar did not have to read minds to know that Claassen’s name was being taken down. When Claassen stopped speaking, more from frustration than from lack of something to say, no one came forward to take up the banner that had slipped from his hand.

  Even after the eclipse of de Roux’s followers, the debate over the formation of a new executive for the Bond and a single government had been acrimonious. Only Strijdom’s renunciation of his own candidacy and the acceptance of Koos Gideon Scheepers as a compromise had prevented a complete rift between the various factions that comprised the army that the Bond in some mysterious manner had called into being.

  Still, it hadn’t taken very long for the politically astute to notice that power in the new government was concentrated in the hands of Strijdom’s backers and the young men who clustered around Scheepers. In company with the intense secrecy and confusion surrounding the mobilization, it made one wonder, particularly after the spaceport.

  Scheepers began speaking, though Pienaar was too preoccupied to pay it more than the barest of respect. At the end of his address, although they dutifully proclaimed a great victory, to many it seemed barren of rejoicing. The ones who begrudged the cost begrudged the method even more.

  Upon Pienaar’s return, Meagher met him. “Ah, Hendrik, you’re back. What do you have to say for yourself?” Meagher commented contentedly.

  “More politics. Someone told Koos Gideon of the help you gave to drafting the proclamation. He requested of me that I extend to you his grudging thanks.”

  The mercenary returned an impish grin. “Consider it a present, an Easter present belated. Although I still think it might have been wiser to agree on a provisional government before agreeing on a proclamation. How much longer do we sit while they bicker?”

  “A few days. Forever. I don’t know. Koos Gideon and his generals want to recruit by the thousands, and they are afraid if they let the fledglings out from under their eyes, they’ll fly away.”

  Christos Claassen had said, “What have we? Scheepers, Strijdom, Olivier, and Snyman. Olivier ought to put an ess in his name, and then we’d have four little snakes, as if three weren’t enough. ’ ’ Pienaar had been named second-in-command of what they called the Oom Paul Krueger Division, which Snyman would command.

  “With all the stragglers tellfng tales, they’ll have a devilish time convincing people yesterday went all that well,” Meagher replied acidly. “And is he quite sure a mob of country lads is what he’s wanting? There’s a story about a Gideon in the Bible he ought to read.”

  “The Bible is the only thing he does read. It is insane, Daniel. A few of them think we have won and concern themselves with doctrinal purity. The rest seem to think the Imperials should wait until we are ready to stir a finger. I was at least able to tell how to get the recruits here without leading the Imperials to our doorstep.”

  “You think different?” Meagher asked with a smile.

  “If they know we are concentrated, they will find some way to locate us. Then?” He slapped his hands together. “But between ideologues and amateur field marshals, what I say is as welcome as pigs in the choir. The Imperials have two battalions at least. They say they have no spacecraft, but they have aircraft, and it is only a matter of days before they have a good landing strip for them.”

  “Too true,” Meagher replied. “They’ve just announced that unregistered vehicular traffic is forbidden beginning Thursday at dusk, the inference being that they’ll be in a position to interdict it. Between now and tomorrow, Messrs. Scheepers and company are going to be moving everybody and his grandfather. But I’ll confess so
mething else I’ve heard is worrying me more. There’s a rumor that Scheepers has been speaking to USS.” “To the USS director. Little rat eyes himself,” Pienaar told the mercenary with relish. "I was there when he made the call. ’ ’ Meagher slammed home a magazine into his rifle before trusting himself to speak. “Do you know, Hendrik, my man? I am beginning to think that perhaps I did the Imps an injustice. All they wanted to do was shoot me.”

  “Little rat eyes in his sharkskin suit. He welcomed Scheepers with outstretched arms and told us that USS would do nothing to discourage our legitimate aspirations. That was when I reached into my pocket and felt for my purse to be sure it was with me still. But if the devil had ammunition this morning, I am sure he would have gotten a respectful hearing,” Pienaar explained dryly.

  “Indeed. I’ll say no more, Hendrik, but there’s a few debts I never got around to settling. Nor have I forgotten about the accident at the spaceport that nearly was,” Meagher said, his face drawn tight. He was silent for a moment, before asking, “Do Scheepers and company know who’s commanding the Imperials now?”

  “They don’t, but it is a man named Vereshchagin. A dangerous and subtle man. We have met.”

  Meagher caressed the trigger housing on his weapon gently as he studied Pienaar’s face. “Hendrik, I’ve had a peek at what passes for an intelligence summary here, and I’m surely wondering how you came by that bit of information.”

  “I DID NOT EXPECT TO SEE YOU LIEUTENANT-COLONEL VERESH-chagin. It was not mentioned to me that you were coming,” Solchava said, unconsciously pushing back a curl of her short, dark hair.

  Her voice was ragged with exhaustion. Vereshchagin considered her carefully, for it was at moments such as this that he learned the most about a particular person. “Sit. Relax. Rest. You have the time. Your anesthesiologist and I have conspired,” he replied kindly.

  She looked at him uncertainly for a moment, then looked behind herself for a chair. The little Afrikaner girl who had been holding her hand climbed into her lap when she sat down.

  Briefly, Vereshchagin wondered where the little girl had come from and to whom she should be returned. For the time being she was a mystery, but Albert Beyers had promised an answer by the end of the day and Beyers kept his promises.

  “Are you aware of the situation?” he asked her.

  “Yes, I am aware of as much as I need to know,” Solchava replied. She made as if to rise, but Vereshchagin laid his hand over hers.

  “You are too tired to fall asleep, I imagine, but an hour of quiet will do you a great deal of good. Is this what you came to the colonies for?”

  She made an effort to smile, and began to speak. “Yes, that is true. That is so. It is not right to give the rich everything they need and the poor no medicine at all. But one can do nothing without money. That is what they say. When I do, I will return, ’ ’ she said, made light-headed by the tension and the exhaustion as she stroked the child’s hair. For some reason the words flowed apart from her like water from a spillway.

  In her own way, Solchava was ruthless. She simply did not realize it, and perhaps never would.

  Vereshchagin smiled secretly, sadly. Even under Vereshchagin’s predecessor, who had been forcibly retired to a vegetable patch on Esdraelon, the battalion had always been a lodestone for failed and frustrated idealists like Raul Sanmartin, who was still fighting a battle the Ecologists had lost a generation ago, or dead Willem Schwinge.

  Eva Moore, for all her cynicism, was more perceptive than most. As Vereshchagin had suspected, her dispatch of Solchava was not quite the cruel jest it appeared at first glance. Solchava would never return. Her store of learning would be rendered obsolete by the very passage of time she counted upon to accumulate what she sought, and Vereshchagin was convinced she realized this as well.

  On Esdraelon or even on this planet, man had not come so far that his course could not be wrenched aside and diverted. There was still a small place for dreams. On Earth, human societies had grown too large to be encompassed by them.

  As Solchava continued to speak, with the child holding her tightly, Vereshchagin recognized that it was as if she were talking to a part of herself. While she chattered on about her hopes, her dreams, her great plans, Vereshchagin shut his eyes.

  JOHANNESBURG WAS ALSO IN DOWN TIME. AS MISCHA CLEANED

  a message out of the mailbox, Coldewe drifted over and took him by the elbow. “I’ll take it. Is Achilles still in his tent?”

  Mischa nodded. “Shimazu’s hand-carrying something up, and he’s waiting for him. ’ ’

  Coldewe elbowed his way through the door to Sanmartin’s quarters in the rear of the C Company bunker and handed him the message. Sanmartin looked at it blankly, making no effort to unfold the printout.

  “Hans, that reminds me. Ask Hanna to call Albert. Tell him Andrassy is meat whenever Albert wants him butchered.”

  Coldewe gave him a peculiar look, but nodded. “What’s in the bulletin?”

  Sanmartin looked down at the thin plastic in his hands, then began to scan. “Something here from aviation,” he said bleakly. “Kokovtsov hit a mounted kommando last night, approximately seventy men, fourteen kay east-southeast of Muldersdrif, at EC 13-4617. ...”

  “What do you call cavalry that’s been gotten at by a chopper?” Coldewe asked.

  “Infantry. Stop it, Hans,” Sanmartin said. “Kokovtsov reported small arms but also light ground-to-air launchers. ...” “Hanna’s stepmother lives at Muldersdrif, doesn’t she?” “Hans, shut up!” The message slipped out of Sanmartin’s hands to the floor.

  Coldewe retrieved it silently. “Raul, you’re getting tough to live with. What’s between you and Hanna?”

  “Maybe she figured out what I do for a living. Let it lie.” After a moment, he added, “I need to get a handle on Rhett’s business, somehow. I need an answer. I don’t know what to tell the Variag.” His face hardened.

  “But do you know what’s fimny, Hans? I could wipe the slate on the damn Boers. Wipe it clean for something to grow. Rhett and Rudi were all the family I had. Pulling the plug is what I’d like to do, and it’s about the only thing the Variag can do that has a chance of working. And all I have to do is not come up with a miracle.”

  Coldewe let go. Instead he asked, "Who’s running things over there?”

  “I don’t know. I’m not sure they do. But I’ll wager a man named Strijdom is the one saying ‘Come hither.’ ”

  “Why so?”

  “He’s smart. He’s nasty. He knows what he wants, and he wants it bad.”

  Coldewe asked, “So what will they do?”

  Sanmartin looked away irritably. “I don’t know. Lick their wounds. Think of something else. They probably don’t know either. Ask Hanna, she knows as much as anyone,” he said. He added, “I’m fresh out of miracles, Hans.”

  Coldewe didn’t say anything, and Sanmartin looked through him. “Hans, take over the company for now. You and Berry put some more people out. Keep trying to put a tail on some Boer volunteers. Tomorrow, we’re going to pull the plug on the power.” Coldewe nodded and left him.

  The hours passed slowly. He heard a knock and it was Shi-mazu. “What do you have, senior intelligence sergeant?” he asked glumly.

  “Sir. Acting Major Rettaglia directed me to deliver this disk to you personally in the event of his death. The condition has been fulfilled. I regret the delay.”

  With that, Shimazu saluted and left.

  Sanmartin momentarily studied the little voice from the grave. Then he leaned over and slid it into a mount.

  “Version 3.3. Raul, if you are listening to this, hell is broken loose and stalking. Don’t try and stop the disk just yet. In five seconds, you will hear a series of rings three seconds apart. On the third, record your full name.”

  Despite his grief, Sanmartin found himself smiling. At the academy, a habit Rettaglia had broken him of was using his full name.

  There was a ringing noise. On the third, Sanmartin exhaled and r
ecorded, “Raul Tancredo Morgan Llewellyn Sanmartin de Sanmartin y ap Rhys.” The disk mount clicked.

  "Little brother, this is my last will and testament. I don’t want to go and I don’t like the idea of being gone, but I want you to know I love you. And your smart, little Afrikaner. I haven’t got a family or children that I know of, so have the Variag devote anything I have coming to Esdraelon. Mawkish sentiments coming from me, but you understand.”

  Sanmartin nodded his head as if Rettaglia were present and asking approval for the deed.

  "Now, for your legacy. The agent’s name will be followed by his net and his controller. ...”

  Rettaglia’s final entry was the names of forty-two people he believed were eminently suitable for a good, selective plague. For a moment, Sanmartin felt his eyes misting over, but he checked himself. It was too soon to mourn. Then with the disk of names in his hand, the hazy outline of an idea began to crys-talize and form facets.

  BEREGOV WAS SUPERVISING THE RELAYING OF MINE FIELDS WHEN Sanmartin gathered him up. Beregov’s own mood was not precisely sweetness and sunshine. “Divine wind. You heard?” he asked as they walked down the scarred sidewalk.

  Sanmartin nodded. “Before you did, I hope. I’m supposed to be IO. Ivo aircraft, one Ajax knocked down and one our flak launchers took. Miscalculation, do you think? ’ ’

  Beregov shook his head. “They learned better. We taught them. Recruiting problems. They wanted martyrs,” he explained.

  “Morning runs are going to look like sniper drills,” Sanmartin commented.

  “We pulled in how many?”

  “Four hundred thirty-seven. Piotr rounded up twenty or so this morning. He’s still screening them,” Sanmartin calculated quickly.

  “Trace them through?” Beregov asked.

  “I just spoke to Hans and Yevtushenko. No chance. After they fell apart, they improvised well. They go to one village and get instructions to go to another. Go to Stellenbosch and receive further instructions from a man wearing a white shirt, that sort of thing. We’ve broken down the phone system pretty thoroughly, but they can still communicate. When we scoop up a batch of volunteers, we can get the first line contact, but they fold the second before we get that far. They have some bewildered cannon fodder wandering about, but by and large they’re reassembling without real interference. ’ ’