Robert Frezza - [Colonial War 01]

by A Small Colonial War (epub)

“I have been learning Latin. Because he is so fond of the language.” She burst into sudden, nervous laughter, piqued by the thought, by Vereshchagin’s odd manner, by the appearance of normalcy. “I’m so very sorry.”

  Vereshchagin gave her a curious look with his head tilted, then interrupted gracefully as his ears detected footsteps outside. “It is difficult to picture Raul as devious, is it not? Indulge me one moment. Please come in, Timo.”

  She turned, startled. Haerkoennen pushed open the door and set a tray down on folding legs as silently as he had entered. A mound of thin vegetable crisps rested on a small, round plate next to a canister of tea.

  Bruwer declined tea. Vereshchagin poured himself a cup and replaced the canister. It was a custom, away from the field, to use round table plates in place of square ones after a combat death.

  “Do you know Timo? Juffrou Bruwer, permit me to present to you Senior Communications Sergeant Haerkoennen. Timo, to your knowledge, does Raul speak Latin?”

  “No, he does not speak the language,” Haerkoennen replied disinterestedly.

  “But he always ...” Bruwer began.

  “I am aware that he is familiar with three to four hundred Latin tags, which is not the same.”

  Bruwer looked about twice as surprised as Chiharu Yoshida when the first shell had dropped in.

  “I have been told that the Eleventh Shock Battalion laid particular stress on ‘Roman discipline and Samurai virtue’ and expected junior officers to open staff meetings with suitable quotations. Raul fell into the habit of displaying his erudition on other occasions,” Vereshchagin explained apologetically.

  “On Ashcroft, no one much paid attention. Talking to rocks in tongues there is not especially noteworthy,” Haerkoennen said.

  Bruwer put her hand to her head for a moment. “I think then I should learn Latin after all.”

  Haerkoennen looked at her gravely. He then nodded to Vereshchagin before he walked out the door with a slight bow.

  Vereshchagin followed her eyes out the door. “Timo tends to make his mind up about people quickly, although with great care. We two, however, must question each other.”

  “I will try to answer, if I can.”

  “That will suffice. Does Raul care for you?” he asked.

  She faltered. “I believe so. I am not certain,” she admitted. “No one ever is. The belief is sufficient. I agree, however.” “He expresses it strangely,” she said bitterly.

  “I have not informed him of the fact as yet, so he may not be aware. He does have other matters on his mind. We are, as you have undoubtedly observed, on the brink of a war.”

  “Is what is out there not war enough?” she asked.

  “No, Juffrou Bruwer, it is not. There is most of heaven and all of hell between the unstable situation that exists and war. Until the Afrikaner nation has taken up arms or until I say fiat justitita, ruat caelum, let justice be done though the skies fall, there is no war.”

  Immediately, he softened his voice. “I realize that the heavens appear to be falling around you. You, Burgemeester Beyers, a few others, are straddling a widening abyss. Still, however likely it may be that war will manifest itself within this next week, it is not yet, and I greatly dislike inaccuracy.”

  “I do not understand you. Are you saying there is no war?” she asked, the unexpected way in which he expressed his thoughts dulling her intellect.

  Vereshchagin ran his thumb across the surface of the pipe he was holding in his hands. “May I clarify? The situation is volatile and unstable. Within a very few days, if no cause intervenes, the fanatics who initiated this sterile conflict will begin to suppress moderation. Yet as a nation, at this moment in history the Afrikaners have not yet chosen a course of action. Your work with Shimazu, I take it, has given you an understanding of die narrowness of the support the fanatics presently enjoy.” She made no answer for several minutes. “Are you saying that there does not have to be war?” she asked solemnly.

  “The spring at its source can be turned by a twig; grown to a river, not even an elephant can cross it,” Vereshchagin said. He waited to see if he had gauged her correctly.

  “What could intervene? Who could intervene?” she asked. “I do not know. I do not have a good appreciation for your people’s politics,” Vereshchagin said, not entirely truthfully.

  “The only Afrikaner I am acquainted with of any political stature is Burgemeester Beyers, and unfortunately, events have intruded to separate us. I will not endeavor to guide his actions.” “Are you so callous”—

  “Please. Understand. I am the symbol of Imperial authority. The mechanism for resolution must originate within the Volk. Were I to be seen stretching out my hand even so much as a few centimeters, I would ensure that men of blood become your rulers until such time as I harry the Afrikaner Volk into an exhausted submission. You understand, I trust, why it is that I cannot treat with these same men of blood?”

  She looked at him blankly.

  "Think! They have placed themselves in a position from which they may not agree, they may only dictate; they can now never believe that any man would trust them to fulfill an agreement. They must either rule or be ruled. It is the Afrikaners, equipoised, who must find themselves a voice to which I may listen, and I must show strength before I may show mercy. This I regret. Circumstances compel me to exert unselectively what Raul likes to call environmental pressure.”

  “If we have no word for peace?” she asked, sitting very still. “Then I must become a grim teacher. Enough, however. You must excuse me, I have allowed myself to digress. We must discuss your future, rather than any other.”

  She sat quietly and allowed him to continue, her rebelliousness quiescent.

  “You understand,” Vereshchagin continued, “that when war comes, you will be forced to choose. In many respects our hands will be no cleaner than those of your compatriots.”

  She failed to respond.

  “Some, many of your people will take up arms. You may join them. Alternately, you may cast your lot with us at the risk of severing yourself from the Volk, perhaps forever. What you may not do is equivocate; for you as for us all there is no third choice.”

  “I believe you.”

  “Thank you. I rarely find it necessary to lie.”

  “If I were to choose the other? What then of Raul?”

  “Leave Raul to me.”

  “Don’t you ever stop playing the puppeteer, pulling his strings?”

  “Young woman, for years I have had to say, ‘This one lives, this one dies.’ To make no decision is itself a decision.”

  “What choice do you leave me? I betray my people or I betray myself.”

  “I find the word ‘betray’ inappropriate. I must ask you to enunciate what future it is your people seek before I will permit you to speak of betrayal.”

  “What future does His Imperial Majesty offer us?” she countered.

  Vereshchagin began examining his pipe in his hands minutely. “There is a state secret I shall confide to you. Whatever instructions His Majesty’s government gave Vice-Admiral Lee seem to have taken a bath in nuclear fire. I suspect that by the time I discover what those instructions were, we may both be old and gray. For planetary policy, it appears I shall be compelled to rely upon my best judgment.”

  He gave her a moment to reflect upon that. Her eyes widened. “You still have a decision abeyant, do you not? Would you care for some advice? Of course you would not, but you are unnaturally polite. In choosing sides, I permit my conscience to guide me. Because it is such a poor beacon, I end up selecting persons I would prefer to associate with.”

  She laughed despite herself, charmed by such a marvelous answer.

  “I will give you one assurance. If you cast your lot with Raul, 1 will ensure, by means fair or foul, that if Raul ever leaves this planet, you will be aboard the same ship.”

  “It seems a strange arrangement,” she said halfheartedly. “You cannot imagine how irregular it is.”

  �
�I must think. Perhaps I must speak to Raul. For the rest of it, it doesn’t matter. Whatever is best.”

  “Acceptable. Please give my regards to your grandfather.” She stared at him a moment and then left without a word.

  A moment later, Haijalo materialized in his accustomed place. “You look terrible, Anton. ’ ’

  “Matti, I do not believe that I have ever done anything quite this foolish. Since the day that Sir Harry Smith conquered the Voor-trekker republics at Boomplatz and the British government made liim give them back, her nation has been on a collision course with destiny. Stop smiling like that, you will hurt your face.”

  “Anton, this penchant of yours for testing people to destruction is going to destroy someone you care about sooner or later, ’ ’ Haijalo said, momentarily serious.

  “She may pass very well, thank you. You predicted she would. We shall see.”

  “It isn’t her that I worry about,” Haijalo said, now quite serious. “Why don’t we let them tear each other’s throats for the next ten generations. Is it really worth all the lying and conniving to settle a five-yen war on a five-yen planet for a five-sen dividend on USS preferred stock? Wouldn’t you like to climb aboard Shokaku and steer for Esdraelon?”

  “Do you remember what Arto said about Ashcroft?”

  Haijalo laughed. “I do! He said, ‘Of course this war’s important! I’m in it.’ ”

  “I understand the skin graft took well, and all his fingers work.” Vereshchagin’s face showed sadness. “There was a certain nobility to Arto. ’ ’

  “Well, now you’ve had your conversation with the little Bruwer.”

  “Matti, tell me, am I really going as soft as I think I am?” “Yes and yes.”

  “But a battalion is composed of human beings, is it not?” “And if you ever forgot that, I’d have to shoot you and take command myself.” He brightened. “Of course, then I could shoot Tingrin, which would almost make it worthwhile.”

  IRONICALLY, RAUL SANMARTIN WAS ENGAGED IN A SIMILAR Mission.

  Seated across the desk from him, in response to his request Solchava protested mildly, “But there is no medical need.” Dislodged by events, the unshakeable air had visibly dropped away from her. Sanmartin picked it up and dusted it off.

  “I don’t recall saying there was. I said there was a military need, which isn’t precisely the same.” He held up one of the thickened glassene needles that fitted to the sensors to puzzle out the pattern of the circuitry before looking up. “You understand, we’re not exactly doing this for fun and frolic.”

  “No, I do not understand,” she said sharply. “There must be a medical purpose. I do not cut on persons for ‘fun’ as you say.”

  He laid the transponder down on the desk between them and reached into his pocket to pull out a document. “Read this through.”

  She took it from his hand uncertainly and read it through. Solchava was disturbed by the seemingly senseless violence of the past several days, an advantage, but a slight one. He momentarily wondered whether he would have been better off hunting up one of Eva Moore’s drones, but rumors ultimately emanating from the little clown in biochem were floating all about the hospital company; the risk that someone there would add four and four and come up with forty-four was too great.

  So too, he knew Solchava. The infantry always inherited the dirtiest jobs, and for the moment he despised Eva Moore, who had cared too much and left a job that needed doing to the Variag instead.

  Solchava glanced up and exposed the surface of the paper with an unconscious gesture. “This appears to be a consent, like a medical consent in form. He accepts Imperial authority and agrees to any measures necessary to ensure this acceptance. I do not understand.”

  Sanmartin reached into his pocket and pulled out a wad of documents. “I have thirty-nine more,” he said agreeably, “and it looks like a medical consent because I wanted it to look that way.” The neat pieces of paper were multipurpose tools. He threw it on the desk.

  “There’s a signed consent from each of them. Are you going to dispute our right to shove transponders in their rumps? ’ ’

  She thought this through carefully. “To what purpose will this be done?” she asked, conceding the point.

  Sanmartin exhaled deeply. If Solchava had disputed legalities, it would have been difficult to obtain a legal ruling from the brigade advocate, who’d been slagged with the spaceport.

  He plucked the scalpel from her pocket and turned it on, adjusting the ruby-red cutting edge to a thickness of one centimeter and a length of two.

  “They’ve been told to stay home, and we mean it. If I give them a parole and we catch them a week from now, gun in hand, we’ll shoot every mother’s son.” He held up one of the transponders he wanted her to insert in his forty Boers.

  “These things are inert until I send a signal, at which point we know exactly where these men are.” That wasn’t all there was to them, but that was as much as Sanmartin intended to tell her. “If they’re carrying hardware around in their tails and they’re not where they’re supposed to be, we’ll have an opportunity to persuade them we’re serious before we line them up on walls. If they’re lucky.”

  Solchava looked at him bleakly, perhaps thinking of the dying that had already been done. "If they won’t be persuaded, as you say? ’ ’

  “Doctor, whatever pity I have left I ration among the deserving. In this battalion, from this battalion, people get one warning and might consider themselves lucky to have received that.” He turned the tiny laser off.

  “What would they have done instead? Not sign, I suppose,” she retorted.

  Sanmartin grinned mirthlessly. “Two men didn’t. I expect they’ll be on Henke’s island for the rest of their unnatural lives. ’ ’ He didn’t add that they were probably better off. Instead he laid the scalpel down and looked at her.

  “Doctor, when I tell my company what the rules of the game are, we play by those rules. We may bend every last one, but we play by the rules. And some of those are very hard rules, indeed. But I’ll make you a deal. Any of these boys we catch with a rifle in the next week we won’t bother shooting. They’re yours. We’ll give them to you.”

  It was undoubtedly cold-blooded to treat what was intended to be both a strategic and a tactical advantage as a humanitarian gesture, but as Sanmartin had indicated, while he didn’t break rules, he bent them.

  He picked up the scalpel again and held it out. “You’re a surgeon. Cut.”

  Solchava nodded slowly.

  Of course, Sanmartin did have one unfair advantage he was aware of. A small part of Solchava wanted to please the Variag more than anything else, and that was a positional weakness you could drive light armor through.

  THE ICEMAN’S COMPANY WAS ROCKETED THAT NIGHT. FOUR ROCKETS exploded within the perimeter, but a fifth never came as his mortars fixed the launcher’s position and pinned it. Riflemen infiltrating from his outposts were too slow to catch the screen of Boer riflemen, but they did bring back the mangled launcher and two bodies, the eldest of three brothers in a Bloemfontein family.

  The last rocket landed in a farmer’s field, fifty meters from the room where his children were sleeping. The lord mayor of Bloemfontein was assassinated that night in his bed, having declined Kolomeitsev’s offer of a cot inside the perimeter.

  Thursday(13)

  THREE DAYS HARD WORK BY WHAT WAS LEFT OF THE ENGINEER

  construction battalion had served to lay out a shuttle strip on Henke’s island in addition to facilities for fixed-wing aircraft, but it would require some weeks to make that shuttle strip operable. Vereshchagin did not have weeks at his disposal. Instead he boarded one of the Shidens and rode the plane to its maximum altitude.

  He ejected at twelve kilometers. The shuttle from Shokaku flying low and slow caught up the wire array streaming from his harness to bring him aboard for the remainder of the journey.

  They docked. Thanking the crew, he entered the bay. There he returned without co
mment the salute of the senior surviving naval officer.

  The young commander was eager to make a favorable impression, perhaps overly so. He showed Vereshchagin the arrangements made for the transportation of the more recalcitrant Afrikaners, and after enduring this and other wearisome formalities, Vereshchagin was able to assess the man to his satisfaction. Nodding his head at the prompting of an unseen Muse, he excused himself when they reached Admiral Lee’s cabin. Unsealing it, he passed within, a weighted dispatch case under his arm. He left the slightly startled young officer standing in the corridor.

  He emerged three hours later without comment and wasted another twenty minutes being civil, declining lunch before entering the shuttle for his return.

  Aloft, when the shuttle began to hit atmosphere, the pilot depressurized the passenger compartment and spoke. “Sir, we must release you about three kilometers northwest of the island to account for drift. ’ ’

  Vereshchagin acknowledged. He had expected that.

  When the jump light came on, with brief words of thanks, Vereshchagin stepped past the crewman in the gleaming ceramet suit into the thin air. Drifting down, he waited the many minutes for his chute to open and watched the shuttle disappear from his view. Unhurriedly, he began unfastening the weighted dispatch case from his harness.

  When he opened his chute and began to check his descent, lie let the dispatch case slip from his hand. Guiding his risers loward the slender gouge of the unfinished runway, Vereshchagin watched the case and its contents plummet into the water beneath his feet. The die was cast.

  Anticipating his return to Pretoria, Timo Haerkoennen sped out into the hall on his way from Bukanov’s workstation.

  Bukanov was deep in contingency planning for removing Boers. The text solution was wholesale concentration of the rural populations, leaving the rest as a tightly controlled shield against nuclear attack. An operation to evacuate by force sixty or seventy thousand people from their homes was a shambles by definition, but if the Variag decided to see it through, there was no reason why it couldn’t be a well-planned shambles. Bottlenecks would be construction, transportation, and the savage resistance the operation would spawn.