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CHAPTER THREE

“Good is better than evil because it’s nicer.”

—Mammy Yokum, in Al Capp’s Lil Abner


Quarters Twenty, Fort Guerrero, Balboa, Terra Nova


The woman sat on the back porch to her quarters, staring out across the water to the space between barracks that showed the docks of the port of Balboa. She’d been here on the porch many times, yet never had she seen anything like the swirl of activity she had been seeing for the last couple of weeks.

At least my Mike’s alive, thought Judy Tipton, living now under a kind of loose house arrest here in the former Tauran Union housing area on post, now designated as a guarded holding area for the families of prisoners of war and families of the dead. There had been a lot of dead, though rather less, as a percentage, for the regular Tauran forces in the Transitway Area than for the poor Anglian and Gallic paras who’d jumped en masse into the briar patches of Lago Sombrero and Herrera International.

She had to share her house now with another family, but since that consisted of one young lieutenant’s widow and her three-year-old child, Judy thought she could put up with it. Poor thing, she thought of young Mrs. Lydia Gordon. And, if she cries a lot? Well, I’d cry, too.

Even there, the Balboans had tried to be civil about it. “We can only guard so many places,” said the elderly warrant officer who’d come with the widow. “So we have to cram you all into where we can guard.” He’d added, “It won’t be long. As a widow, she’s going to have priority for a flight out.”

“It’ll be fine,” Judy had insisted, taking young Lydia under wing, more or less literally, and leading her to the spare bedroom. The warrant had carried in the woman’s two bags and left them just inside the door.

It had been a couple of weeks since then and—however charitably inclined and sympathetic Judy may have been—Lydia’s crying had started to wear. But then, so have those Gallic tarts singing the “Internationale” under Balboan supervision.

Then the Balboans had come and taken the widow to her old quarters to supervise packing up of her household baggage. When she returned, it was with travel orders cut by the legion’s own travel section. The orders only took her as far as Asseri, Santa Josefina, though. From there, she’d be the responsibility of the Tauran Union.

Decent of them, though, thought Judy, more decent by far than just putting us in tents behind barbed wire and feeding us gruel for however long it takes for things to resolve themselves. She’d been around the Anglian Army enough to have heard that that was normal procedure in cases like this.

One of the chaplains occasionally came by, too, to check on them. This Judy found more than a little embarrassing, as the very same chaplain had once caught her in the middle of her living room, stark naked and shocked speechless, as a Balboan gun battery in the parade field lit up the night. Oh, will I ever live that down?

A knock from the stairs leading to to the porch caught her attention. The knock was followed by, “Señora Tiptón?” It was one of the guards. He hadn’t quite gotten English pronunciation down yet, and might never.

“Yes, Legionary?” she asked.

“The car to take you and Mrs. Gordon to the comisariata is here,” said the guard. “Comisariata” was not, strictly speaking, the right word, but it had entered Balboan currency a century prior and never quite been superseded.

“It’s around the other side of the house.”

“Ah. Thank you, Legionary. I’ll get Lydia and be right out.”

And that was another point of decency, she thought, the Balboans giving us a credit—a limited credit, to be sure, but still a credit—to allow us to shop at the commissary. Of course, that means it’s easier on them because they can feed us through our own efforts with food seized when they took the Transitway area, but even so . . .

At the very least, when I do get home and someone asks me how we were treated, I’ll have to tell them, “Very well, indeed.”


MV Roger Casement (Hibernian Registry),

Port of Cristobal, Balboa, Terra Nova


The forty-foot container hung suspended by one of the ship’s two cranes, a few dozen feet above its red painted hull. The container swayed in the light tropical breeze coming off the Shimmering Sea to the south. About a hundred containers had already been loaded, and three hundred and twelve more were visible not far away, awaiting their turn.

It was a truism that no one really knew who owned any given merchant vessel. Between leases, lease backs, shadow corporations, dummy corporations, registrations under flags of convenience, and any of a hundred other tricks, merchant ships were essentially orphaned prostitutes. In the case of the Roger Casement, the owner was the Senate of Balboa, though even years of investigation was unlikely to prove that.

The Roger Casement had come in, bearing little but food and medical supplies, plus some building—which was to say, fortification—material. Its cargo discharged, orders had come from the corporation which at first glance might be said to own it, to pick up a load of Balboan fruit and coffee and deliver it to Jagelonia and Hordaland. The fruit, duly placed in refrigerated containers, was to be loaded where power could be supplied to those, for the most part aft of the ship’s superstructure. The coffee was rather hardier, and would go aboard in normal containers.

All that was to go in later, though. The first cargo needed to go in first and low, where inspection would prove difficult.

If there was anything Balboa was not short of, in the current circumstances, it was weapons and ammunition of Tauran manufacture. The legion had, at last count, twenty-six thousand, four hundred and nineteen rifles of various types, from the Anglians’ wretched things to the Gauls’ and Sachsens’ rather better ones. There were three thousand forty-eight light and general purpose machine guns, along with twelve hundred and fifty-three heavy machine guns of Federated States design. To go along with those were something on the order of fifty million rounds of ammunition. At least, that much had been inventoried so far. The process of inventory was still ongoing.

Additionally, there were one hundred and forty-one light mortars, as well as ninety-four mediums and seventeen serviceable heavies. Some others, adjudged unserviceable, were in the shop for evaluation and possible repair. For these, the legion had a bit over one hundred thousand rounds of ammunition of various types.

Of anti-tank weapons, both guided and unguided, light throwaways and heavier crew served, there were thousands. They were still coming in from wherever Tauran troops had lost them. Radios there were in plenty, along with night vision devices, as well as plentiful batteries for both. Antivehicular mines, grenades, shoulder fired antiaircraft missiles? We gots. Signal devices and booby traps. We gots. Medical equipment and supplies? We gots.

Some of this largesse was currently being issued to the Tercio Amazona and some of the troops from the Fourteenth Cazador Tercio. Some was going to the Fifth Mountain and its Lempiran and Valdivian attachments, though they were mostly holding the materiel for others. A small portion was put aside for trophies for the various regiments. Some was intended for Taurus, for the Islamic groups created by, among others, Khalid the Assassin.

But roughly a third, by tonnage, was right here on the docks, intended for Santa Josefina as soon as the Casement had made its delivery of fruit and coffee and could turn around.

Interestingly, a small mule train, only forty-seven mules and a bell mare, carring not more than eleven tons, in total, set off from the Balboan port of Capitano, on the Shimmering Sea near the Santa Josefinan border, at about the same time the Casement left Cristobal for Taurus.


Off the Isla Real, to the southeast, North of Ciudad Balboa


Ahead, a small boat, not much bigger than a largish yacht, and not nearly as fancy, reeled off two cables, one port, one starboard. The cables sported hydrophones. Translated from the Cyrillic, the cases from which the cables were drawn were labeled, “Archangel.”

Behind the cable layer, and offset a few hundred meters, a coasting freighter slid a large cylinder, steel-cased, explosive-filled, hence quite heavy, down a ramp erected to its stern. The mine rumbled down the ramp, dropped free, then hit the water, raising a great splash above the choppy waves.

The mid-sized coasting freighter was one of a pair. The cable layers were likewise matched. Both pairs were formed into two others, consisting of a cable layer and mine layer, each. Operating on opposite sides of the Isla Real, one mixed pair couldn’t see the other. Neither could it be seen by the other. However, both were visible from much of the large massif, Hill 287, that dominated the island.

Anyone looking from that hill through a fair pair of binoculars would have seen the stern of the coaster, bearing the name, Thetis, as it made its way on a perfectly straight course toward Punta Gorgona, which course would take it just north of Isla Tatalao. They’d also have seen the mines rolling down the ramp into the sea. Were the binoculars good, they’d also have been able to see that the mines were of mixed types, that along with the cylinders were some equally large egg-shaped containers on wheeled cradles. The observer could have made out the rolling mines, as well as the splashes, but probably would have missed the reserve naval officer recording the grid where any given mine was released and the white cord that actually armed the mine, or, rather, began its timed arming sequence, once it was underwater and the Thetis reasonably out of the way. The cords were reused, once they’d pulled the safety out of the mines and been hauled in.

Recording the mine was possibly an exercise in near futility, since they almost never came to rest in a perfectly predictable way. Moreover, the Balboans were also dumping over the side some wedge-shaped gliding mines that could be guaranteed not to come to rest too very near the ship’s path. Indeed, those gliders would end up roughly twice the distance from the ship as the depth of the water. The gliders were also on a long arming delay, a full week, to ensure that the job would be complete before they went active.

That said, it wasn’t completely random; the ship’s sonar scanned ahead and the mine chosen for dropping was selected based on the depth and nature of the spot ahead. Enough ready mines were held on deck to allow the crews to efficiently select the one to be used.

To add confusion to anyone trying to clear the mines, a mechanical device tossed false mines—mere flat plates—to port and starboard, even as a crane heaved some simulacra over the side.

The mines were of several types. Most of these were Volgan though Balboa had been able to get a small number of more sophisticated mines, some of which it had copied in slightly larger numbers. There was also a respectably large number of somewhat inferior Valdivian-made copies of an Anglo-Tuscan mine. The original was a device of great discretion and power. Even the copy was rather capable.

The most common mine laid was a fairly simple cylinder, filled with some six hundred kilograms of tritonal, and set off by magnetic signature, acoustic signature, or by water displacement. The mines weren’t sophisticated enough to permit any combination of targeting parameters; the crews had to pick a fuse for one method and attach it just before rolling it down the ramp.

Less common were several versions of Volgan rising mines. These were generally placed deeper and, on receipt of sufficient signature, would begin to rise to the surface. This allowed the mines to be placed on the bottom, where they were hard to detect, hence hard to clear, and move closer to a target upon detection. That they were especially effective against submarines was an additional benefit.

Least common of the Volgan mines was the type once known on Old Earth as CAPTORs. In essence these were torpedoes, mated to sensor suites, that selected targets based on certain criteria and engaged them as if the mine were a submarine. The major difference between the Volgan torpedo mines and those of the Tauran Union and Federated States was that the Volgan versions could not self-emplace from a distance as some of the others’ could. Neither was really ideal for use against surface ships, being small with small warheads. They were best used against subs.

The Balboans were not being terribly sophisticated about all this. Instead, they were just putting down a lot of mines, enough mines to ensure that no channel could be cleared through them quickly. Still, since the Isla Real, Isla San Juan, Isla Santa Paloma, Punta Gorgona, IslaTatalao, and the town of Chimaneca contained extensive direct and indirect fire capability, to say nothing of fixed torpedo launchers for some of them, clearing a path was likely to prove prohibitively costly until at least the main island was cleared. Then, too, the mix of mine types and the mix in their fusing made the mine barrage somewhat self-defending.

Nor was the intent to simply seal off the northern approaches to the Transitway. Balboa’s life blood was trade and transportation. Cutting off the Transitway completely would be economic death. Instead, they were ensuring that the heavily defended Isla Real and its largish near neighbors couldn’t be bypassed, hence that no invasion of the coast by the capital could succeed until the islands were taken. They were leaving unmined two gaps almost a kilometer wide to the main island’s east and west. Thus, at their discretion, ships and trade could continue to flow until the legion elected to shut them down.


Three men stood on the northern slope of Hill 287, not far from the ground-laid portion of the chimney for the archipelago’s solar power system. These were Carrera and Fosa, the chief of the naval arm, plus Legate Rigoberto Puercel, the chief of the corps responsible for the defense of Balboa’s northern coast. Puercel commanded the Fifth Corps, built around the Eighth Training Legion, now the Eighth Infantry Legion, the School Brigade, and certain other units, some of which had been part of the “hidden reserve” but most of which were simply normal organizations, the members of which wore second hats. The Fifth Corps consisted of that same Eighth Infantry Legion, Eleventh Infantry Legion, which was newly constituted from preexisting tercios and allies come to help, Twelfth Coastal Defense Artillery Brigade, Twenty-fifth Combat Support Brigade, plus sundry other specialist and support organizations.

The Eighth Infantry Legion was more of a fortress legion. Moreover, since it was built around Puercel’s previous command, the Eighth Training, and since his exec in that command was the legion commander, and since Puercel was absolutely going to stay on the island, in the real world command remained his.

Instead of the normal three maneuver regiments, the Eighth had four infantry tercios, two of which were foreign allied (both of which were on the way but had not yet arrived), and one regiment of disabled or handicapped static troops, the Tercio Santa Cecilia. These were also known by their unofficial motto, Adios Patria.

Instead of having an artillery tercio with three light or medium cannon cohorts, a heavier cannon cohort, and a multiple rocket launcher cohort, the Eighth had one cohort of man-portable (if barely) wheeled multiple rocket launchers, one of super heavy 240mm breech-loading mortars, and three of heavy 160mm mortars. Both types of mortars had more or less elaborate fixed positions, those for the 160mm guns being turreted with redundant, modified tank turrets. It also had a larger than normal complement of tanks, mostly hidden in fairly strong and well camouflaged positions. The legion’s service support tail, and its headquarters, generally, occupied some portion of one or another of the Isla Real’s thirteen deeply dug fortress complexes, arrayed mostly in an irregular ring about Hill 287. Two of the thirteen were dug in under lesser heights.

The different casernes and areas of the island were connected by two transportation systems, running in parallel. One of these was an asphalted two lane highway, laid in a ring a couple of kilometers inland from the coast. The other was a 600mm rail system, open to the sky but dug in and protected by concrete revetments, a half a kilometer or so even farther inland.

The Twelfth Coastal Artillery Brigade was based on the island, though it had reduced strength cohorts of heavy artillery at both Punta Gorgona and Chimaneca. These were at reduced strength because they weren’t expected to last very long, anyway, nor to do much good if they did. They existed, for the most part, for no higher purpose than to keep a potential enemy from wondering why the far ends of a future naval mine barrage were not covered by direct and indirect fire.

Similar were the sixteen former naval turrets, triple 152mm jobs, ringing the island. The Twelfth Brigade had a single maniple whose job it was to make those look active and threatening, even to the point of firing them on occasion. In fact, nobody in the know expected them to survive an attack for long nor much cared if they did. The turret’s main function, like that of the understrength cohorts of heavy guns off on the mainland, was to keep people from asking the wrong, which is to say the right, questions.

Instead, the meat of Twelfth Brigade on the island was hidden. It consisted of four demi-cohorts of heavy guns, mounted on railway carriages, and four torpedo batteries, two to either side of the island. The torpedo batteries actually belonged to the classis, the Legion’s naval arm, but were attached to the Twelfth.

Back on the mainland, the situation was considerably more dire than on the islands. For one thing, the Eleventh Legion was brand new, though most of its higher command and staff came from school brigade and were, individually, generally quite competent. The troops, however, had mostly not finished their initial entry training yet. They, still under their training cadres—in the Balboan system a rather lavish set of cadres, though—were grouped into new tercios, numbered Forty-sixth through Fifty-first Infantry, and Seventy-first Artillery, among others, The infantry were at roughly half to two-thirds strength in personnel, though the artillery was considerably stronger than a normal tercio.

Some of those men and women, indeed, had as little as two weeks in uniform. The bright dye of their uniforms said as much. Worse, many of them were still sitting on the island, working on defenses while awaiting transportation.

“Not for three more months, Duque,” was Puercel’s judgment. “I don’t have the wire up or the mines laid. Christ; Cheatham’s still got Balboa Foundation and Wall pouring concrete and building obstacles and nutcrackers along the beach. And the unmanned water cooled MGs are taking a while to get out of storage and set up.”

Nutcrackers were a kind of antilanding obstacle employing a wooden frame, a wooden lever, and a standard antitank mine to smash landing craft as they approached shore. The water-cooled machine guns were just that, except that, once someone started them firing, a curved and notched bar, to which a modified traversing and elevating mechanism was attached, caused them to fire continuously over a wide arc. The bar and T&E mechanism had been fairly easy to design and develop. Even the automatic cocking mechanism in case of a stoppage hadn’t been all that tough. The twenty-four-thousand-round drum magazine had been a bitch.

“Plus,” Puercel continued, “I don’t have two of my five combat regiments yet. I don’t have many of the half-trained trainees off the island yet. We are still bringing in food and ammunition from the mainland where it had to be offloaded since our port facilities are not up to handing large freighters. Two more months.”

Carrera raised one eyebrow and pointed at first the Thetis, then the other coaster impressed into being a minelayer. The implication was, This is on time. Why aren’t you?

“Because what he has to do,” offered Roderigo Fosa, in defense of his comrade, “is a thousand times more complex than just loading some stockpiled mines and delivering them, with crews that have spent nearly ten years learning how to do just that.

“Can’t we do something diplomatically,” Fosa asked, “to keep the Zhong out of it? And yes, I know that would probably mean turning one of my people over to a ritual execution, but . . .”

No, thought Carrera, because I need the Zhong to come into it. If they don’t, the TU won’t fight but will let this ceasefire drag on until we’re bankrupt.

“No, as a matter of principle,” Carrera said. This was less than the truth but he couldn’t reveal the truth. It was also not quite a lie, since he did consider protecting his people a matter of principle.

“How soon can you sail?” Carrera asked Fosa.

“Anytime,” the latter replied. “But I thought you wanted me to intern my fleet in Santa Josefina just before hostilities recommenced.”

“Correct. But what if you sail and put on a very defiant show for the Zhong?”

“They can kick my ass, which is to say, sink my fleet,” the naval officer replied. “Remember, though, God be my witness, I asked for some modern VTOL fighters for the Dos Lindas”—the Dos Lindas, alleged to be named for the breasts of Carrera’s late first wife, which were also alleged to be on demure display as part of the figurehead, was the legion’s sole sailable aircraft carrier—“but ‘no,’ you said, ‘too expensive,’ you said, ‘not our job . . . ’ ”

“Never mind that,” Carrera answered. “I was right then and I’m right now. And that’s not the question, that they can sink your fleet even minus the carrier Warrant Officer Chu and the Meg took out. I know they can. The question is how much does it delay them, figuring out what we can and can’t do, and then beefing up their fleet to be sure of success when faced with a fleet that looks ready and eager to fight.”

“Oh . . . well . . . couple of weeks, I suppose,” Fosa conceded. “A couple of weeks more, I mean.”

“And how long to sail here from Xing Zhong Guo?”

“Month.”

“Which gives me the time I need,” said Carrera. “Put to sea, Fosa. Put on a good show. When the Zhong come, run for Santa Josefina and intern yourself. Denounce me if you think that will help, since we both know it will be fake.”

Like so very much of what we’re doing and showing is fake.

“By the way, Rod, have you finished loading the arms, ammunition, and equipment for an infantry cohort?”


Arraijan Ordnance Works, Balboa, Terra Nova


The gliders—“Condors,” they were called, though they differed from the manned versions—came in in containers, and left in containers, the containers holding also the tanks of hydrogen, frames, balloons and harnesses to lift the aircraft. Here in the Ordnance Works, they were pulled out, modified, then resealed and released. The modification for one type consisted of filling them with roughly three hundred to three hundred and twenty pounds of high explosive, seventy of incendiary material—magnesium—sixty of guidance and control package, and about twenty of speakers, battery, and digital player. In the process of mounting the speakers, sections of the polyurethane foam were cut away that, with the tiny convex-concave chips embedded within them, gave the condors their stealth capability. The frame around the speakers contained very small explosive charges to blow out the removed and replaced polyurethane panels to allow the speakers to be heard.

Another type carried an electromagnetic pulse generator. Still another carried a naval mine. And there was one made to dispense electrical wires to short out power systems. There were approximately as many types as human ingenuity could come up with, filtered by the demand of human depravity to do the most damage for the drachma.

Another particularly wicked type of modification was made to very few in number, only four in total. These were fitted with a cylinder containing a mix of various forms of counterfeit and real Tauran money, generally in fairly high denominations, especially the counterfeit. The cylinder, developed by Obras Zorilleras, the Balboan research and development organization, had sufficient explosive of a type no sniffer dog was likely to key on to first disintegrate the condor that carried it then to cut itself into dozens of fragments, leaving the money to flutter to ground. The counterfeit came from the same mint that printed up Balboa’s legionary drachma, which mint had been set up for Balboa by the Taurans. If one is going to do counterfeiting on a massive scale, it helps to have the engraving done by experts, and the paper and ink coming from the very people whose money you intend to counterfeit.

The guards on both types were very heavy indeed.

The guard force’s problem was that the several hundred modified condors neither came in nor left in large groups. Instead, it was one here, one there, and a couple the other day. The most they’d ever managed to get out was thirty in a single day, and that was because the Balboans could cover the movement in the form of a massive distribution of ammunition to the Isla Real. The condors didn’t go to the island of course; the move merely got them to the docks where they could be loaded on an about to depart ship.

Where they would go from there was anybody’s guess.


Carretera Balboa-Cristobal, Balboa, Terra Nova


Any given military veteran of the old, now liberated, Transitway Area would probably, if asked about the terrain, have answered to the effect of, “Miles and miles of fuck-all jungle, most of it not seen by a white man in a century.”

For his area, and his time, that would have been approximately correct. The Transitway Area, barring the bases, towns, roads, dams, and such, was mostly jungle, and for a very good reason. Without trees to hold the soil in place the waters would have silted up in no time, while mudslides would probably have buried the place in the course of a couple of rainy seasons.

For much of the rest of the country, though, to include much of the country near the Transitway, the veteran would have been as wrong as could be. More than anything else, the non-city but populated parts of Balboa were farms. This was true also on either side and between the not quite parallel roads that ran from Ciudad Balboa, on the Mar Furioso, south to Cristobal, on the Shimmering Sea.

There were casernes, a few, and also a few Legion-owned housing areas along the westernmost of those two roads, the one that avoided the old Transitway Area completely. These already contained the casing for some very large thermobaric bombs, said casings containing the bursting charges, the initiation flares, and the seismic fuse, so far unset. These only needed to be filled and have their fuses set to arm.

In addition, south of the Parilla Line, some others had been buried some time prior, though they did not extend into the old, formerly Tauran-controlled, Transitway Area. Teams were burying a few—three, no more—though none were to be filled yet. Getting them into position was proving a positive nightmare, since here the jungle was pristine . . . and thick.

Most of the rest, a total of ten, were going in under cover of defensive works preparation between and to either side of the twin roads. They, also, were not yet filled. Neither were their fuses set.


Isla Real, Hovercraft Ramp C, Balboa, Terra Nova


Ordinarily the hovercraft had been used to ferry out new trainees and limited resupply, and to bring the cadres back to the mainland for rest and recreation, the island never having been set up for much in the way of the latter. There wasn’t time for that now; the troops coming out were coming to fight; the ones going back were going back to finish their initial training and then, if things got bad, to fight. Supply was an ongoing crisis. Indeed, it had to be. Past a certain point of obvious preparedness and the Taurans would probably never have attacked, whatever the provocation.

Among the troops coming today, on this hovercraft load, were a mix of the Forty-first infantry, itself a mix of foreign allied cohorts, and a special crew, in more senses than one.

The Forty-fifth, the Tercio Santa Cecelia, was composed of the mentally retarded and the physically disabled, with only a minimal cadre of normal leadership, seconded from other units. The troops of the tercio might be assigned to anything, or attached over to another unit for anything. The core of them, however, formed the “Adios Patria” men and women, people who would man fixed positions from which there was relatively little hope of escape in the event of attack.

Stars Divider

Sergeant Rafael de la Mesa had been a first class infantryman, once, a legionary on the fast track to centurion. Then an accident had intervened, breaking his back and leaving him paralyzed from the waist down. He tried to control his bitterness. He didn’t always succeed. Sometimes it leaked through to fall in full acid fury upon his three charges, Julio, Juan, and Pablo. These were boys or young men, mentally retarded but not so badly that they couldn’t understand the oath of enlistment or what it meant. Together, they and de la Mesa formed a fixed turret crew, though they didn’t yet know which turret was theirs.

“De la Mesa?” asked a wheelchair-bound centurion, Robles by name.

“Here, Centurion,” answered de la Mesa.

“Your crew is assigned to Turret 177. It’s just south of the tadpole’s tail, if you remember the island’s layout.”

De la Mesa mentally pulled up a map of the island, as best he could remember it. “I do,” he said.

“Good,” said Robles. Passing over a plastic folder, he said, “Here’s your position data. I haven’t looked at it, myself, but one of the attachments who can still walk said it’s fine. You may have to get rid of some antaniae; there were droppings.”

“Roger,” said de la Mesa. “Juan?”

“Yes, Sergeant,” answered a retarded boy, though one whose face said his Down’s Syndrome was light.

“You have your basic load of ammunition?”

“Yes, Sergeant.”

“You shall be killing antaniae, soon.” Turning back to Robles, de la Mesa asked, “How do we get there?”

“Wait here,” said the centurion. “A truck with a loading ramp will be along sometime in the next hour to carry you and your men to the turret. I’m afraid the road doesn’t go close enough to your position to just let you off. They’ll have to port you through a few hundred meters of jungle.”


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