CHAPTER FIVE
A sincere diplomat is like dry water or wooden iron.
—Stalin
Palacio de las Trixies, Ciudad Balboa,
Republic of Balboa, Terra Nova
With so many men, and not a few women, called to the colors, the background sounds of the city were muted and, to a degree, warped. The street hawkers were mostly gone. Commercial traffic was at a minimum or, arguably, even less than a healthy minimum. Instead of the muffled sound of the limousine gliding through this wealthier part of the city, the walls reverberated with the sound of heavy diesel-engined trucks, barely muffled and doing nothing good to the cobblestones of the street as they crawled over them. At that, the diesels were a merciful cover for the sounds of weeping widows, still breaking forth with frightful regularity. There were occasional electronic wails as air raid sirens were mounted and tested. People wailed as well.
And even the wails of heartbroken women and children were to be preferred over the “spontaneous” patriotic demonstrations taking place several times a day under the guidance of the nation’s minister of information, which was to say, of propaganda, Professor Ruiz. Carrera, leaning against a bookcase in the president’s office, could, as Dux Bellorum, escape the torture. Parilla, however, was pretty much stuck.
If, thought Raul Parilla, president of the Republic of Balboa, I hear the triumphal march from Verdi’s Aida, one more time I swear I’ll shoot myself.
With the national symphony only three blocks away, the reappearance of Radamés remained a continuing threat.
And the day is young.
Of course, there were worse things than opera in the streets. And bagpipes. Fucking bagpipes. All hours of the day and night. I used to like them but—Jesus!—there’s a limit.
The president, from whose office one could hit the sea with the well-tossed rock, kept all the windows closed now, against the noise. Otherwise, thought would have been difficult and conversation impossible. Still, light seeping in though the closed shutters reflected off the iridescent silverwood walls of the president’s office.
“But what if they are sincere, Patricio?” asked Parilla. “Stranger things have happened.”
“Really?” asked Carrera, either incredulous or sardonic; Parilla couldn’t be sure. “When? Did the pope convert to Islam and me just miss it? These are a mix of diplomats and Old Earthers we’re talking about, Raul. Sincerity just isn’t in their repertoire.”
Sardonic it is, Parilla decided.
“No, what they’re sincere about is wanting back the people we hold and getting us to revert to the status quo, ante bellum. They want to get on the negotiating table what they lost on the battlefield. And that’s all.”
“Now you’re showing your parochialism,” said Parilla.
“Never said I knew the first fucking thing about politics or diplomacy,” countered Carrera, with a dismissive shrug. “So teach me, O great launcher of coups d’état and elder statesman extraordinaire.”
Parilla first gave Carrera one rendition of the tall finger of fellowship, then said, “Sit then, young one, and learn.”
Carrera sat in one of the two chairs fronting the president’s massive wooden desk. Parilla, getting on in years and walking stiffly now, ambled to the front of the desk, parking his posterior on the desk and folding his arms, in full lecture the young ones mode. Not that Carrera was precisely young anymore. He was, however, considerably younger than the president.
“No,” conceded Parilla, “I don’t think they’re sincere . . . or rather, yes, they’re totally sincere about wanting to go back to the status quo ante, but also realistic enough to know that it would take an extraordinary confluence of events to get us to accept that.
“One of the streams in that theoretical confluence would be to turn the Federated States from a slightly pro-Balboan neutrality to something like hostility. And, given that the Federales have elected a ‘peace-loving,’ which is to say Cosmopolitan Progressive, regime, I wouldn’t want them to think we’re not as peace-loving as they are.”
“But the Tauran Union attacked us first!” objected Carrera.
Parilla gave his Duque a look that said, simply, And so?
Explaining the look, the president said, “The culture that thinks it’s wrong for a small village in the middle of a war zone to ring itself in with mines to defend itself has little understanding of war. The culture that thinks it’s wrong for a young boy to pick up a rifle to defend himself, his mother, and his sisters from enslavement and rape has lost all touch with morality.
“Trust me, Patricio, if the progressive voters of the FSC come to think we’re not willing to roll over and grease our asses so that they don’t have to be reminded of how the universe really works, they’ll turn on us in a heartbeat.
“You came from them, old son. You know I speak the truth.”
“All right,” Carrera said, “even conceding all that, what the hell do we do? I can send Esterhazy but the fact remains, he has very little he can negotiate. We’re not going to disarm. We’re not giving back the Transitway. We’re not nearly ready to give back the prisoners . . .”
Post Theater, Fort Williams, Balboa, Terra Nova
“So, the baron,” said the captured Anglian sergeant, to an audience of hundreds, “the baron, full of his newly won skill at wit and repartee and ecstatic at the prospect of an end to twenty years of humiliation, rose from his seat, quelled the unruly peasants’ laughter with a haughty glance around the audience, and leant forward slightly, looking at the Red-Nosed Clown. He paused and pointed his finger at the clown. An expectant hush fell. He frowned and said, firmly, ‘Why don’t you just FUCK OFF, you red-nosed CUNT.’ ”
As they did every morning, the Balboan guards watching over the prisoners just rolled their eyes, thinking, Anglian humor I will never get.
Marqueli, the petite and perfect, shook her head. It wasn’t so much that the joke wasn’t funny. The first time she’d heard it, she’d laughed, too, though she’d hidden her laugh under a demure pair of hands. It was that the same sergeant told exactly the same joke in exactly the same way every morning before class. And almost the entire complement of her class, some nine hundred Anglian and Haarlemer noncoms, practically rolled in the aisles when he did.
“Which is, I suppose, why you keep telling the joke, Sergeant Dane,” she said, from the theater’s stage.
“Why, yes, Ma’am,” answered the sergeant, brightly. “The lads seem to enjoy it.”
Resignedly, she nodded her head. “Take seats, please, gentlemen. Or, rather, wait.
“Who here intends to sleep through my lecture?” Like the sergeant’s joke, this was part of the morning routine, too.
“Anybody? Anybody at all? Ah, good. Well, if you’re embarrassed about identifying yourself and don’t want to sit through the class, just stand up and go to the back. The rest of you fill in to the front. I’m little, after all, and can’t fill this great big theater with my little lungs.”
An Anglian sergeant major stood up and said, “Not so little as all that, Ma’am.”
That had become part of the routine, too. Whether he was referring to her or her lungs, which was to say, breasts, was left open.
“Thank you, Sergeant Major,” Marqueli said. “Now if you would . . .”
The Balboans, for whom corporals were absolutely noncoms, had followed their own rules and lumped the corporals in with the sergeants and sergeants major. This was rather awkward for the Anglians and Haarlemers, for whom corporals were mere, and hardly worth counting.
“GENTLEMEN,” bellowed the sergeant major, using a broad brush in the absence of a formed, legal, organization. “Fellow members of the mess. And you fucking lot. Siiittt . . . fuckckckinggg . . . DOWN!”
He shot Marqueli an apologetic look. Sorry, Ma’am, but when dealing with these bloody barely human corporals . . .
Marqueli waited the roughly second and a quarter it took for the men to settle down, then began her presentation. “Today’s lesson is about how you ended up here . . . here in Balboa . . . here in this theater . . . here listening to me.”
“We fucking lost a battle,” was the judgment of one of the Haarlemer corporals.
“Language, boy,” said the sergeant major.
The Haarlemer hung his head. “Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.” Looking up at the stage, he even managed to sound sincere as he said, “Terribly sorry, Ma’am.”
“You had a better general than us,” said an Anglian sergeant major, not one of the more senior ones.
“The battle wasn’t won by generalship,” answered Marqueli. “It was won by brave boys of, for the most part, fifteen and sixteen and seventeen.”
That was not actually her position, nor her husband’s, nor that of the bulk of the legion. It was, however, the official position.
“Half true, ma’am,” said the sergeant major. “If it wasn’t won by great generalship, it was surely lost by bad generalship.”
“Bloody frog bastard,” said several dozen mixed Anglians and Haarlemers, simultaneously.
“There was an Anglian general in command on the ground, here,” said the tiny Balboan woman.
“True, Ma’am,” said the sergeant major, “but the frogs were pulling the strings from back in Taurus. The key staff was nearly one hundred percent frog. Our man—no great shakes, himself; I won’t argue differently—was politically isolated. A limped-wristed, little boy bunging, incompetent politician-in-uniform Major General Solomon McQueeg-Gordon may have been, but the command wasn’t really his.”
Marqueli sighed. “Much as I might like to argue tactics and operations, Sergeant Major, I don’t know the first thing about it. So—since I’m a girl and you and the boys are all gentlemen—you will just concede to me that generalship wasn’t the big issue.”
“Fair enough, ma’am. GENTLEMEN, you will concede to the lady that generalship wasn’t the big issue.”
“Thanks, Sergeant Major,” said the teacher, bestowing on him a smile that, however innocent, was so brilliant that it made him wish he were twenty years younger and on her side. Or at least that he’d been there and in a position to give her away when she married.
“But what was?” she continued. “I’ll give you my opinion. My opinion, my own little personal opinion, is that the root of the problem is the Tauran political class . . . one may as well say the bureaucratic class, since politics there are largely run and ruled by the hereditary bureaucrats, party flacks, an unaccountable propaganda ministry in the form of a brave press that’s brave only when not pressed, the obscenely rich”—that got her a spontaneous round of applause from the troops—“ivory tower academics”—which got her a still more enthusiastic round of applause—“racial grievance mongers, corrupt chiefs of nongovernmental organizations, diplomats who drown in every little raindrop . . .”
Palacio de las Trixies, Ciudad Balboa,
Republic of Balboa, Terra Nova
“I suppose,” said Carrera, “that we could stop the conference by starting the war there. After all, we’ve got a large tercio in Santa Josefina. They’re scattered and almost entirely disarmed—no more than a maniple’s worth of arms and ammunition between them, and almost nothing in the way of heavy weapons—but that’s enough to storm the conference and kill a number of diplomats. The rest will scurry. Or we could get our people a couple of shoulder-fired surface to air missiles and take down . . . no, forget I said that.”
“And let the blame fall on native Santa Josefinans?” Parilla asked, avoiding mention of that fact that his friend and subordinate had been about to suggest what amounted to a terrorist act.
“Well . . . yes.”
“Problem is,” said Parilla, shaking his head, doubtfully, “that no one really believes those troops are anything but ours. I don’t think that works.”
Carrera rocked his head from side to side for a few moments, before admitting, “Yeah . . . neither do I. So what do we do?”
“I think we’re trapped. I think we send Esterhazy to the conference. But we’ll send him with a team. Assembling that team, of course, could take some time.”
Esterhazy, now as Balboan as anyone, was a former Sachsen field grade Fallschirmstuermpioniere who had also worked for SachsenBank. He’d signed on for the very first increment of the legion, way back before the campaign in Sumer. Since then he’d alternated between commanding engineer units, serving as the comptroller, and acting as a diplomat, the Legion’s messenger to those it wanted to help, or help from, and those it wanted intimidated. Most of the time he spent as comptroller.
“ ‘Some time,’ ” Carrera echoed. “And maybe the horse will learn to sing?”
“Precisely. Moreover . . .”
Carrera’s aide de camp, Tribune Santillana, stuck his head in the door. “Mr. President,” said the tribune, “sir . . . Legate Fernandez is here with what he says is important enough news to justify interrupting you. Shall I show him in.”
“Just send him, Tribune,” said Parilla. “He knows the way well enough . . . Hmmm . . . well, no . . . follow and make sure he doesn’t have a problem on the ramps.”
“Yes, Mr. President.”
Fernandez rolled into Parilla’s office on the best power wheelchair the legion could buy. Even so, the damp climate wasn’t good for the machine; it whined a bit as it climbed the thick rug.
“There are some intelligence decisions,” Fernandez announced, “that really go so far past intelligence considerations that the wise intel mucky muck bucks them to higher. This is one of those.”
Carrera made a give-forth gesture with his right hand.
“Some time ago,” said Fernandez, “the cabin girl for the high admiral, herself, contacted one of our people, a recruiting sergeant in Santa Josefina. The girl’s from TransIsthmia on Old Earth. That means Panama, our mother country. That means she’s a cousin, however distant.”
Carrera looked shocked. “Did you say Wallenstein’s cabin girl?”
“Yes, sir. She’s probably not all that distant a cousin of your late wife,” he said to Carrera, “provided one tallies up multiple levels of cousinship.”
“Holy shit.”
“That’s a way to put it.
“In any event,” the intel chief continued, “there wasn’t a lot of time. I was able to have one of my people get in contact with her. He, though this sort of thing is hardly his specialty, set her up with an e-mail account, a system of codes, and some minimal instructions, whatever he could come up with on short notice.
“She is now back on our planet, in Aserri, Santa Josefina. The question I cannot answer is, what do we do with her. Do we take her into our care, and wring her for whatever she can tell us about Old Earth, the UEPF, and Wallenstein? Or do we leave her where she is in the hope that she might get us something more specifically important? Or do we ‘kidnap’ her—which is to say have ‘criminals and terrorists’ kidnap her—so we can put her through a short training course before she is ‘rescued,’ to get more use out of her? Or what?”
“Skip the last one,” said Parilla. “If we spirited her away, then let her be recovered, it’s very unlikely that the high admiral would do anything but ground her someplace she couldn’t do any harm. Certainly trust would be too much to expect after that.”
“I agree, Mr. President,” said Fernandez. “I tossed it out for completeness’ sake.”
“What are the odds,” asked Carrera, “that she knows anything really important?”
Fernandez shrugged. “There’s really no way to tell, Duque. You would think if she knew something important, we could just get it from a quick field interrogation. And, were she a trained agent, we could. But she’s just a cabin girl, though my man’s impression of her was that she was a bright and brave cabin girl. Still, she doesn’t know what she knows that might be important. And she is very young.”
“How far do you think she can be trusted?” asked Parilla. “Could she be bait for a trap?”
“It’s possible,” said Fernandez, adding with a smile, “And I haven’t yet figured out how to do a background check on someone from Old Earth.”
Fernandez so rarely smiled, let alone told a joke, that Carrera did a double take. “What do you suggest?” he asked.
“I’d suggest leaving her in place, but using the opportunity to get her some useful equipment, and maybe some weapons familiarization. There are indoor ranges open to the public in Aserri, at least some of which are holding arms for our tercio in Santa Josefina.”
“Risks of doing that?” Parilla asked. “I don’t mean just risks to us but also—since, as you say, she is a cousin—risks to her.”
“No real risk to us, per se,” said Fernandez. “All I’ve got in mind is giving her a ceramic knife with a plastic handle, a tool ring, a tiny cell phone with a few extra batteries, since we don’t know if she’d be able to recharge it up there, some poisons, a lipstick dagger. The usual. The risk to her, though, if she were caught, is immense.”
“There’s no way for her to communicate to us?” Carrera asked.
“No.” Fernandez shook his head. “The only one up there communicating with anybody regularly down here is whoever or whatever the Yamatans, have. And for all our pleading, they’ll only give us information, not how they get it.”
“What do you think it is,” Carrera asked, “a whoever or a whatever?”
“Damned if I know, though I have my suspicions. It would be just like the Yamatans to have left behind on Old Earth a small organization or clan, dedicated to the perpetuation of the Imperial Way through intelligence work . . . even across five centuries. It could even be a criminal organization, or a part of one. They’re a very strange people. If we couldn’t interbreed, I’d wonder if we were the same species.”
“Can you make a deal with them? They tell us how the word gets to them from the Peace Fleet and we let them share in whatever the girl can get for us. Did I say ‘share’? Silly me, it will have to go through them, won’t it?”
“I don’t think they’d consider it a fair trade,” Fernandez said. “Their asset, who—or whatever it is, has been working well for quite some time. The girl, on the other hand, is a wasting asset . . . an unproven wasting asset. And one that might be a threat to their source.
“So, no, I don’t think so.”
“I want to see this girl,” said Carrera.
“I don’t—” Fernandez began, before being cut off by Parilla’s, “In Aserri? No, my friend, I expressly forbid you from going anyplace where you might be kidnapped or assassinated.”
Carrera drew breath, as if intending to argue. He paused, then visibly deflated as he exhaled. “Good point. Okay, I’ll concede the risks are high. So . . . you know Lourdes is a fine judge of character. And she can gribbitz eloquently as well. We’ll send her with Esterhazy. There shouldn’t be any problem with a false passport. Fernandez can brief her and prep her beforehand. And she can carry everything the girl needs in a diplomatic pouch.”
“Why Lourdes?” asked Parilla. “She’s your wife, after all. And, since Pigna’s failed coup”—Lourdes had, in fact, been the one person most responsible for the defeat of that coup—“she’s fairly well known both within and outside of Balboa.”
“Precisely,” Carrera agreed. “She’s quite well known. She’s well connected, obviously, so there’ll be no doubt among the international community of the very, very caring and sensitive that we’re taking the conference seriously. She’s also the person whose judgment I most trust on this entire planet. If she meets the girl and tells me we can trust her, that she is capable . . . then I can act on that with confidence.
“She is also, to be sure, one of the most pigheaded women in the world on anything she’s determined on—witness that Jimenez had to have her weapons hidden before she’d let anyone talk to me when I was . . . ill—so she won’t be giving anything away.”
“It is rather elegant,” Parilla admitted. “Esterhazy to be his totally frightening Sachsen self . . . Lourdes to be a, still quite lovely, velvet glove with the mailed fist inside of it. The recipe I do not have . . . but the list of ingredients appeals.”
Fernandez chewed at his lip for a bit, then said, “I’m going to assign Larry Triste to be the girl’s control officer. For any asset with less potential, that would be beneath him. For this . . . he’ll suit. And his judgment can supplement Lourdes’; we’ll send him to Aserri to the peace conference. In fact, I’ll send him early.”
“This is all well and good,” Parilla said, “but we should not lose sight of the fact that this peace conference has one aim, to disarm us and leave us vulnerable to our enemies.”
“Raul,” said Carrera, “I assure you that this is a fact I shall never lose sight of. And on that happy note, with your permission, Mr. President, I have to fly to Fort Williams, pick up my teenaged son and his—Jesus, have mercy!—even younger ‘wife,’ hopefully before the defiant bitch has managed to get herself knocked up . . .”
Parilla looked stunned. He knew the boy well and had met the girl. “You don’t really think . . .”
“Has it been that long since you were a teenager, Raul?” Carrera asked, one eyebrow raised.