CHAPTER ONE
Strike at the enemy with humane treatment as effectively as with weapons.
—Alexander Suvarov
The Tunnel, Cerro Mina, Balboa, Terra Nova
There was still a smell of rifle smoke in the air, and broad bands of color in the skies. The latter came from buildings still burning in the city. Past the smoke and fire-lit, scattered clouds, the moon Hecate was in the constellation of the Leaping Maiden. With barely a glance at the familiar sight, Fernandez rolled his wheelchair through the widely agape, badly perforated steel doors leading down into the tunnel. Even with the power up again, and clean cooled air flowing, the place still reeked of smoke and, especially, of burnt human flesh. Still, there was hope that the fire had not penetrated the steel files and safes. Of course, that hope dimmed slightly as teams recovered the crisped bodies and brought them topside, to lay them out alongside the hundreds of other bodies atop this fortified hill overlooking Ciudad Balboa.
Fernandez’s hope was dashed as one of his assistants pulled open a sliding file draw, revealing to him a mass of thermite-crisped ruin.
“They’re all like this, Legate,” said the underling. “Here and at Building Fifty-nine. Whatever else the Taurans fucked up, they made sure to burn their intel files and especially the files of their spies in our forces and country. We can’t even tell which files are what, to see how big their organization was.”
“Fuck,” muttered Fernandez. He’d always had a few double agents and the mistress of the Tauran commander on his payroll, plus a couple of Tauran Union troops who were sympathetic to the Timocracy. And his organization had identified perhaps a score or so of spies.
The problem, though, is that I know about maybe twenty, who are being rounded up even as I sit here, but I suspect hundreds. Damn, I needed those files. I can calculate to my heart’s content, but it’s all bullshit without something concrete to work with. And the fucking Taurans are good at this sort of thing; none of the people I know about are going to have a clue about any of the others. Shit! And I still haven’t been able to get someone convincingly on the crew of Rocaberti, up in the Federated States. Paranoid motherfuckers.
“Could be worse, Legate,” the underling reminded. “We got their payrolls, after all, and the counterfeits are ready.
Cristobal, Balboa, Terra Nova
It was a simple calculation really. Carrera needed X-many days to finish his preparations. There were Y-many Tauran prisoners to return. There were only Z-many Carrera was willing to return, which was a number much less than Y. Parilla had promised the return of one hundred per day. Z over X, however, was less than one hundred per day. Even stretching it out by including Tauran noncombatants wasn’t quite going to equal one hundred times the days needed.
“So fuck ’em,” said Patricio Carrera, watching as the crew of an Anglian-flagged container ship, fitted out as a hospital ship, loaded the fifty-seven badly wounded Tauran POWs. The hospital ship claimed to be, and possibly even was, owned and run by a humanitarian nongovernmental organization. In the Tauran Union, however, what appeared to be and was billed as non-governmental was often anything but.
“We’ll give them however many we feel like,” Carrera continued, “in order to stretch out the truce. And no more. Besides, we’re just incompetent jungle rats, incapable of keeping to a schedule.” He closed by repeating, “Fuck ’em.”
The Anglian humanitarians doing the loading were enough that they didn’t need any help from the legion. This was to the good as Carrera’s troops, plus the numerous civilians who worked the port, were fully engaged on either side of the container ship unloading four Balboan-owned freighters that had docked in the last three days, bringing in over a hundred thousand tons of war materials between them.
Another nineteen ships were docked at the port of Balboa, disgorging the first of an eventual half million tons—food, assemblies, fuel, building material, ammunition, personal items, major end items, medical supplies, replacement parts . . . basically everything needed for an army of four hundred thousand to fight a major war. Still other ships were being unloaded at other, smaller ports in the coastal interior of the country. One biggie and a couple of coasters were unloading their cargoes by the Isla Real. A couple of smallish ships, no more than five thousand tons displacement, sat idly by, doing nothing but spurring commentary.
Not that the Balboans paid no attention to the prisoners they were returning. Rather, legion medical personnel sufficient to provide care for the fifty-seven stayed with them right until the moment that the Taurans signed for them. The Tauran skipper, on the other hand, had orders to pick up one hundred. Infuriated at being shortchanged, he stormed up to Carrera demanding the rest.
“Fuck you,” Carrera had replied, genially, setting the captain to sputtering, impotent fury. “You’re in no position to make demands. You get what’s here. If you annoy me, tomorrow there may be even fewer or none. Explain that to the bureaucratic swine you report to.”
“It’s not right to use wounded men like this, like bargaining chips,” the Anglian insisted.
“It’s not right to attack a country without a declaration of war, in the middle of the night,” Carrera countered.
“Two wrongs don’t make a right,” the Anglian quoted.
“Who’s interested in making a right” Carrera sneered. “I’m just telling you to fuck off and quit bothering me, and stop your silly moral preening, or I won’t give you back anybody.”
I am, in any case, not giving you back a single uncrippled infantryman, artilleryman, engineer, or tanker. Nor are you getting back too many intelligence shits, lest they have seen and then reveal something I don’t want revealed. Of course, I will give you back a couple who have seen things Fernandez has arranged for them to see.
The weasel-faced Omar Fernandez was Carrera’s intelligence chief, which meant he was also responsible for the propagation of certain disinformation. Though bound to a wheelchair by a would-be assassin’s bullet, there remained nothing wrong with his brain. He was also amazingly ruthless, even more so than his boss.
Parilla Line, South of Ciudad Balboa
and south of the Rio Gatun, Balboa, Terra Nova
Eighty-odd Tauran POWs, under the command of their own, swung picks and shovels, or held open sandbags for the latter, in a broad ditch now approaching half a dozen feet deep, just north of a thin wire fence, itself north of a thick belt of concertina. The space between the two was alleged to be mined. None of the laboring POWs doubted that enough to test the theory. There were two other groups of POWs engaged in the same work.
Though under their own command, the Taurans were guarded by Balboan legionaries in their own pixelated jungle striped uniforms and bearing the legion’s own battle rifle. The Taurans had been allowed to keep their national uniforms, of which there were at least half a dozen on display in this group, alone.
Though it was still being worked on, the main line had been built years before. Centrally located, it sheltered behind the swift flowing, steep banked river that fed the two lakes that fed the Transitway. To all appearances, it was oriented toward the north, with a presumption of an invasion from that direction having either taken or bypassed the capital of Ciudad Balboa. An invader coming from that direction would have run, first, into the stream. Moving farther south, presupposing he managed to cross that, there were some thick wire obstacles, currently being made thicker, broad, high density minefields, and several layers of mutually supporting bunkers connected by tunnel and trench. Behind these came the Cordillera Central, the mountain range that ran like a spine down the length of Balboa’s quarter-rotated S-shape. This had been partially hollowed out and tunneled through.
On the other slope, the reverse slope, there were a few positions and some entrenching to guard against an attack, probably airmobile, from the rear. From those bunkers and trenches still more trenches ran down to twenty-three very large, very solid bunkers, mostly of the cut and cover variety. Except for the degree to which man and nature had conspired to hide them, that, and the enormous size, they resembled nothing so much as Sachsen Christmas cakes, or Stollen, much as the Legio del Cid had used in a Sumeri valley between Multichucha Ridge and Hill 1647, over a decade before.
From the trees, older and newer, that covered the Parilla Line hung a fantastic number of metalicized strips. Some strips were older and, torn and tarnished, looked it. Others were brand new. Most were somewhere in between.
“What the hell are those things?” asked Anglian captain Jan Campbell, of her chief NCO, Cimbrian Army Sergeant Major Kris Hendryksen. She was pointing with her finger at something down in the ditch. Her nose and chin pointed elsewhere.
She, heart-faced, blue eyed, short, shapely—extravagantly shapely, as a matter of fact—and blond, was a late entry captain in the Anglian Army, once seconded to the Tauran Union Security Force-Balboa, which force was now extinct, prisoners where not dead. He, larger, of course, was a Viking, now letting his face go to beard. He was also, though some miracle of slave-capturing genetics on another planet entirely, tanning much better than she was, or indeed, than any of them but the couple of Tuscans in the group.
She and Hendryksen were lucky to be alive, having just managed to get away from the old Tauran headquarters at Cerro Mina before the Balboans troops had taken it. Ordinarily, they could just have surrendered. Hendryksen, being male had figured out that was a bad idea, after the wounding and deaths of hundreds of Balboan female infantry on the hill’s northern slope and the broad boulevard beyond. To Campbell, being female, it had simply not occurred that normal male soldiers would take any exceptionally dim view of the killing of female combatants. Hendryksen had understood his own sex better than she had. Plunging into an orgy of massacre and mutilation in revenge for the losses to Tercio Amazona, the legion’s females-only infantry regiment, the legionaries had left hardly anything alive atop the hill, and burned alive or suffocated those who’d sheltered in the underground complex beneath it.
The metalicized strips lay on the ground as well. Hendryksen picked one up and, after checking the ends to make sure it was a whole strip, measured it by eye. He then checked another, determining that it was precisely half the length of the first.
“My guess,” he said, “and it’s only a guess, though an educated one, is that these are designed to screw with ground penetrating radar. Maybe also the global locating system, but I don’t know enough about that. That they’re a deliberate defensive measure, though, seems certain.”
“Do the Balboans do anything that is not a ‘deliberate defensive measure’?” Campbell asked, pointing with her nose at the menacing firing ports of the bunkers nearby and running up the slope. So far as she could tell, the bunkers were at least mostly empty, their nominal occupants currently guarding the detail of eighty or so Tauran POWs, digging a ha-ha under Campbell’s command.
“They have us digging this ha-ha to keep the animals out of the minefields,” Hendryksen said. “Naturally, that is its only purpose. It wouldn’t do as an antitank ditch, or we would not be digging it, since we are not to be used in aiding the enemy’s war effort.”
Campbell shot him a dirty look. “You mean it’s a ha-ha on the surface, so they don’t feel compelled to shoot us for refusal to work on an antitank ditch?”
“See, that’s why you’re an officer and I’m just a—”
“Can it, Kris.”
Smiling, satisfied with the jab, the sergeant major shut up. In the silence, Campbell continued studying what she could see of the defensive line.
“Formidable enough,” was her judgment, a judgment in which Hendryksen largely concurred.
“Hard to flank, too,” he said, “being anchored on the lake, I imagine, at one end and probably with a refused flank off in the jungle somewhere, at the other.”
“Take it from behind?” she asked.
“Maybe, if in force, especially on the ground. I wouldn’t count on the chances of an airmobile assault doing the job; the Balboans appear to be pretty much death on people who try to get fancy with them.”
“They’re not above getting ‘fancy’ themselves,” she observed.
“True,” Hendryksen agreed, “but they’ve definite limits.”
“Why this?” Campbell asked. “When their major enemy, us, was bound to come from the Shimmering Sea side, why have this line facing the Mar Furioso?”
“It’s still just an educated guess,” he answered, “but my guess is port capacity.”
“Huh?”
“There’s essentially no way that an invasion coming from the Shimmering Sea side can get to the capital city until the port of Cristobal falls. Though they haven’t let us see it, I’d bet a month’s pay against yours that Cristobal can also be turned into a fortress, or is being turned into one, in short order. Thus, there is no real threat from the south. They think.”
“We’re no logistic slouches, ourselves,” she said, “even if we won’t commit the resources to it the Federated States will.”
“Right,” he agreed. “We probably could isolate Cristobal and supply over the shore a large enough force to besiege that city and take this line from behind. But I don’t think they know that.”
Jan was skeptical. “Why not?” she asked.
“Because Carrera’s not a Marine nor, so far as we’ve ever been able to determine, has he ever done any major Logistics Over The Shore work.”
“Oh.” Though she was loathe to admit it, Jan had never done any LOTS work either.
“Wouldn’t have to be just LOTS,” said a nearby, tall and beefy, ruddy-faced Sachsen in a pause for breath between lifting shovelfuls of dirt to a sandbag. “There’s a good port at Puerto Lindo, and one almost as good at Nicuesa to the west. Can’t really use that last one, though.”
“Why not,” Hendryksen asked.
“Add fifty miles to the supply line and need three divisions to guard the route,” said the Sachsen. “I doubt the port could support more than two, with the increased need for trucking, so it would be a net loser. Even if the Tauran Union could muster the extra divisions, which it probably cannot. Worse, the road from Cristobal to Nicuesa is dirt, which is to say mud, most of the year. It may not be even theoretically possible to supply much of anyone from there without putting in an entirely new road.
“On the other hand, two brigades could probably secure the place to use as a supply dump, from which we could support a fair force further east by small boat and hovercraft.”
“And you are?” asked Hendryksen. He already knew the Sachsen wasn’t from his and Campbell’s group. Since the Sachsen was also shirtless, he had no clue as to rank.
“Kapitänleutnant von Bernhard, at your service,” said the Sachsen, dropping the sandbags and reaching out one hand to shake. “My friends call me ‘Richard’ or ‘Rich.’ My ship, the Z186, was in for a lengthy refit, so I was available and got volunteered by my service to work logistics for the TUSF-B. I hadn’t been here six weeks before the war started, then I got caught up in the fall of the Transitway. I was almost halfway to the coast where I might have been able to steal a small boat when they caught me.”
“Farther than we got,” admitted Campbell. “They snagged us in a drainage ditch by the northern end of Brookings Field.”
“And we were lucky, at that,” said the Cimbrian, “that the group that caught us wasn’t feeling bloody-minded.”
The foot of Second Cohort, Second Tercio, struggled up the central cordillera laden like pack mules, bent over like old, old men. Apropriately, they sang an old song as they climbed:
. . . Si mi cuerpo se quedara roto,
Formaría en la legión de honor,
Montaría la guardia en los luceros,
Formaría junto al mejor . . .
Taking up the rear of his cohort’s column, as it struggled over the ridge to the south, Sergeant Major Ricardo Cruz, Second Cohort, Second Tercio, wasn’t at first sure he should believe his eyes. But there weren’t too many blondes in his country, and none with quite a proportions of the woman he saw standing with a couple of other Taurans. One of whom was—
“Well, hell,” Cruz said to Hendryksen, clapping the latter on the shoulder. “I am very pleased you made it.” He turned then to Jan Campbell, remembered to salute, and said, warmly, “And you, too, ma’am.”
“It was close,” said the Cimbrian POW, a sentiment echoed by the Anglian woman.
“Were you on Cerro Mina?” Cruz asked in whisper. When they nodded, he said, “It was closer than you know.”
“It’s true then?” asked Campbell. “Your people killed everything living?”
Cruz shook his head. “No, ma’am, not quite everything. I was able to save a couple. And some of the others kept their heads. Still . . . still . . . it was pretty bad.”
“But why?” Hendryksen asked. “Your people are death on the law of war.”
“It was what happened to the women, the Amazons, who went in before us. You think you know a group of men . . . but you don’t, not until you see them after they see ‘their’ women shot up. And before you ask, no, it’s unlikely anybody is going to be court-martialed over it. Temporary insanity would be the plea, and no jury of ours would convict, while no jury of yours could be trusted.”
Cruz turned around then, to see the tail of his column disappearing into the jungle. He dropped his pack, then pulled a can out. This he passed over to Hendryksen who shook it.
“Legionary rum? To what do—”
“Oh, just shut up and take it, you damned Viking!” said Cruz, slinging his heavy pack back across his back. “No promises, but if I get the chance I’ll look you up again.”
“Thank you, Centurion,” answered Campbell warmly. Why is it the really good ones are already taken?
Kaiserswerth, Sachsen, Tauran Union, Terra Nova
Khalid, Fernandez’s chief assassin, maintained several homes in the parts of the Tauran Union that fell under his purview, as well as two safe houses, that were out of that purview. One of the safe houses was in Kaiserswerth.
And will it remain safe after I do this? wondered Khalid. “This” was something Khalid found truly, nay epically, bizarre, the preparation and placing into the mail of several hundred letters of condolence from the president of the Republic of Balboa, to the next of kin of Sachsen and Gallic soldiers recently fallen in battle in Balboa, along with—What the fuck are they thinking? —checks in the same amount, six thousand Federated States Drachma converted into Tauran currency, as was given immediately to the families of Balboa’s fallen to tide them over until the regular system of family support and insurance could catch up.
No real question about how they came up with the information, though. They’ve got the bodies and they’ve got the records. Indeed, they know better than the nations of the Tauran Union . . . ohhhh . . . now I get it. Well, best get on with doing up the letters and having the computer sign the checks.
Khalid, a man more than ordinarily religious in a nation and armed force themselves more than ordinarily religious, looked Heavenward and said, “Allah, I appreciate it that, being a bad man myself, I am, by Your grace, allowed to work for men even more wicked than I. It demonstrates that if there is hope for them then surely there must be hope for me.” Then, laughing softly, he began churning out the letters of condolence.
Over the grinding of the printer could be heard, in Arabic, “Wicked, wicked, WICKED men!”
On the plus side, at least they haven’t forged letters on official stationary ordering widows out of their military housing . . . ummm . . . yet.
Port of Balboa, Balboa, Terra Nova
Several ships tied up at dock had disgorged little and were not counted among the twenty that had brought in that half million tons. Oh, they’d given up something, of course. The one labeled Queenie on her stern, for example, had vomited up a hundred thousand containerized sacks of rice, then had taken on several hundred other containers before sailing off to Yamato, there to link up with another, similar vessel, the Quernmore, where some cargo would be transshipped. Another, a substantial cruise ship that just happened to be in the area—where Carrera, who owned it, had ordered it to be—had been “commandeered,” then filled to bursting with young children and a fair complement of adults and older boys to care for them. This ship, the Emerald of Hibernia, Balboan registry, was heading to a port in Valdivia, Saavedra, the narrow, mountainous country on the eastern coast of Colombia del Norte. This was partly for the children’s safety, partly to reduce the logistic burden within Balboa should the war kick off again, as everyone really expected, partly to get a ship in position to bring back to Balboa the thousand superb mountain infantry Valdivia had offered to help defend Balboa against further Tauran aggression, plus another four national contingents that were of about the same size, equally elite, but less specialized. There was another reason for the trip, entirely, but that playing itself out would take some time.
Once that trip was complete, the Emerald of Hibernia was to make a trip down the other coast of Colombia del Norte, and through the Shimmering Sea, to pick up another six contingents, in size ranging from cohort to tercio.
With mothers weeping and rather more dry eyed, and often uniformed, fathers waving, that cruise ship began churning the waters behind it, backing up slowly to where tugs could take over and reorient it to make passage out of the port.
Herrera International Airport, Balboa, Terra Nova
The bodies, of which there had been very many, were gone, at least. Yet the bloodstains of shattered cadets and fallen Gallic paratroopers remained in the carpets of the terminal. Idly, Carrera thought that, following the war, and assuming they won, those carpets should be collected, preserved, and put on wall display for the enlightenment of future generations. The message? See here the courage of Balboa’s children. Will the sons of her sons show less?
If the bodies were gone, so were the windows. And with them gone, air conditioning was an exercise in futility. With that gone, the place became an oven and, worse, frankly reeked with the iron-coppery smell of a slaughterhouse.
Screw this crap, thought Carrera. Beckoning his sergeant major, Martinez, and his AdC, Santillana, he stomped out of the terminal to the tarmac to await the arrival of a very special contingent of volunteers. Over one shoulder, Martinez carried a case-covered silver eagle on a spiral carved staff. The Balboans and Sumeris, especially these Sumeris, had a mutual admiration society going on and going back to the year 461.
The side of the first of the big airships read, “Republic of Sumer Airlines,” in both English and Arabic script. Likewise did the next two. They were painted green, with the lettering white. The last two read differently, for Sumer had only the three airships of its own. They said, “Aerolineas Balboenses,” and didn’t bother with any other language.
There were different kinds of airships in use across the planet of Terra Nova. Some required extensive ground support to make landing. Others, the most modern types, needed nothing but a flat surface. The two Balboan airships were of the former type. The three Sumeris, funded by lavish oil reserves, were of the latter.
Thus, while the Balboans dropped cables that were picked up by super-heavy vehicles, that dragged the airships to hollowed out docking bays, the Sumeri airships used maneuvering thrusters to come down more smoothly and neatly than perhaps any helicopter was capable of.
Got to get us some of those . . . when we can afford it, thought Carrera, admiringly. Fortunately, Sada said I could hang onto these three until just before the shooting starts. And I do have some uses in mind.
There was a small parade stand set up a hundred meters from the terminal. On either side of the stand, cameramen from TeleVision Militar stood by.
The stand had a sheltering awning and was on wheels so it could be pushed out of the way when not needed. It had already been used three times, to welcome in a cohort of Lempiran Mountaineers, another of Atlacatlan Cazadores, and the entire Atzlan Parachute Brigade.
The Lempirans and Atlacatlans thoroughly detested each other. Fortunately, the former, like the Valdivians, were most suitable for attachment to Balboa’s Fifth Mountain Tercio while the latter could be sent, and had been sent, to Seventh Legion in Third Corps.
Onto the stand Carrera and his entourage stepped, with Martinez placing the staff of the eagle in a special holder built into the stand. Then they waited, but not for so very long. Nor had they expected to. Qabaash, the commander of this brigade—now this tercio—of the Sumeri Presidential Guard Division, was an old friend, quite well regarded. If anyone could be counted on to have rehearsed his troops for a snappy exit from the airships and a snappy parade across the airfield, it was him.
Nor did the Sumeri disappoint. On cue—Carrera was certain it was on cue—every ramp on each of the five airships dropped, disgorging one or a few Sumeri guardsmen. Six of them bore colors and about thirty had guidons. He could see Qabaash emerge, too, followed by his immediate staff and his command’s colors. Carrera’s eyes were beginning to get old and difficult, and the heat shimmer off the tarmac didn’t help a bit, but he was pretty sure he saw someone with a radio on his back, too.
Well, just decent planning, that.
Again on cue, and again from every exit, the rest of Qabaash’s command surged, only this time it was like a mosque—or thirty of them—opening the doors following Friday services. A veritable wave of armed, uniformed Sumeris rolled across the airfield before beginning to separate out into the six major cohorts of the about to be formed Forty-third Tercio. It was all visually rather impressive. It was all also being recorded for later broadcast by Professor Ruiz’s organization, which was broadly concerned with morale and propaganda, along with certain aspects of education.
Though the troops and organization certainly had extensive baggage still in the holds of their airships, little beyond packs and rifles was in evidence. That little included a bagpipe band, with some drums. At Qabaash’s order, that band picked up a tune the Sumeris had learned from the Legio del Cid, in and around the town of Ninewah, “Boinas Azules Cruzan la Frontera.” Then, on a drum signal, the entire mass marched forward on line until Qabaash was within speaking range of Carrera.
Halting, Qabaash saluted, then quoted an old proverb, loud enough for all of his officers and most of his men to hear, “ ‘If a pot is cooking, a friendship will stay warm.’ Thank you for inviting us to the feast, Duque! First Brigade, Sumeri Presidential Guard, Forty-third Tercio, Legion del Cid, reports for duty!”