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Chapter Twenty-Three

Animals flee this hell; the hardest stones cannot bear it for long; only men endure.

—Leutnant Weiner, 24th Panzer Division,
Stalingrad, 1942

Ninewa, Revolution Square, 6/3/461 AC

Cruz turned and began to throw up at the base of the half-crushed wall behind which he had his team sheltered. It was bad enough seeing the things done to men in the town. But when a donkey staggered by, dragging its entrails on the ground until its rear legs twisted in them and it fell, bleating piteously? That was just too much.

 

Sanchez apparently couldn't stand it either. He took the Draco he was carrying, sighted it, and put the poor animal out of its misery. Sanchez beat Robles, carrying the light machine gun vice Rivera, by only a fraction of a second.

"How long we been here?" Robles asked.

"Here, here, or in the town, here? Five days in the town. Here by the square maybe twenty minutes," Sanchez answered. "This time. Last time we got here we lasted a whole hour before they kicked us out again."

"Anyone know how Correa's doing?" Cruz asked through a dry, dusty and overtaxed throat.

"He . . . died, Cruz," Sanchez answered, sadly. "Yesterday. The medics told me last night."

"Damn," Cruz said, too tired to show any emotion. "Kid was only eighteen."

"Hey, Corp," said Robles. "I'll be sure to let you know when being eighteen saves you from anything. Besides, what are you? Nineteen?"

"Yeah . . . almost nineteen," Cruz answered.

As Sanchez had said, the square had changed hands numerous times. The statue of Saleh, the Sumeri dictator, that stood in the center of it was pockmarked and missing an arm. Bodies, both from the legion and from the Sumeri Army, littered it. The bodies, like those of Cruz and his two remaining men, were covered with a mix of dust, minute particles of pulverized adobe, concrete and stone, sweat, explosive residue and—in the case of those lying in the square— blood. There were many times more Sumeri bodies than Balboan, largely a function of the body armor worn by the legionaries; that, and their superior training in marksmanship.

"Heads up," Cruz ordered. "White flag, two o'clock."

"Surrender?" asked Sanchez.

"No . . . don't think so. The Sumeri looks like he still has fight in him. To me it looks like a request for truce to let medical and burial parties in."

Robles lifted his light machine gun as if to fire. Cruz saw this, understood the anger and bitterness that might lead a young man to violate the flag of truce and said, "Knock it off, Robles. We got even for your brother one hundred times over." The private, reluctantly, lowered the weapon's muzzle.

The signifer for the century, a broad but filthy bandage covering half his face and one eye, walked out into the square, a white—well, it had started as white—flag tied onto a pole he held up and ahead. He and the Sumeri met midway, almost at the colossal statue. They nodded at each other in a way that was, if not quite friendly, at least respectful.

The Sumeri made a sweeping gesture which took in the square and all the bodies, living and dead, within it. Then he made something like the sign of the cross, but on one arm, pointing for emphasis at the bandage over the signifer's face.

The signifer nodded agreement, then pointed to his watch. He held up the fingers of one hand, twice. Ten minutes?

The Sumeri shook his head regretfully, once again sweeping around the square with one arm. Too many bodies . . . and our people are stretched.

Agreeing, the signifer held up all the fingers of the same hand, and repeated the gesture four times. At this the Sumeri seemed happy . . . or as happy as one could be under the circumstances. He then flashed his five finger sign once again and made as if putting a pistol in his holster. Start the truce, officially, in five minutes. The signifer agreed.

The Sumeri then made a sign as if drawing his pistol and firing it three times into the air. That will be the signal to resume.

At this the signifer nodded, as well. Then both shook hands and walked back.

Five minutes later, parties of legionaries and Sumeris warily entered the square, no weapons in evidence. They searched impartially for the wounded, of which there were a few. These the Balboans took away, irrespective of uniform. They could care for the wounded much better than could the Sumeris' poor medical staff. Moreover, while there was some advantage to making the Sumeris take their own wounded, to make them eat up the little food remaining, Carrera had ordered that starvation was not, in this case, to be used as a weapon.

The dead were taken away by their respective sides, the Sumeri dead to a mosque that had been turned into a morgue not far away, the Balboans to another ad hoc morgue that had been set up in the gymnasium of a captured high school. All the dead were treated with the greatest respect by both sides.

Both sides moved as briskly as exhausted men could be expected to. It was not quite briskly enough. Nearing the end of the truce the original Sumeri officer—lacking decent body armor, generally, they had many more dead to carry away—asked for another ten minutes, which was granted.

Then, exactly thirty-eight minutes and twelve seconds after the first white flag was shown, the bagpipes picked up, three well-spaced shots were fired into the air, and the slaughter resumed.

 

The only way tanks could lead in city fighting was if there was no real fighting to be done, in other words, if the enemy was either nonexistent or worthless. With a brave and competent enemy, and Sada's boys had shown themselves to be that, it was generally suicide for armor to lead. In that case, and in this, infantry led while armor followed and supported at a distance, suppressing with machine guns or clearing the way with the main gun. They'd proven particularly useful in clearing streets of the mines and booby traps the Sumeris had laid down lavishly.

The really bad part was that the streets made it impossible to use the armor in mass. Instead, one tank or sometimes two would be attached to one infantry century. Sometimes they'd have an Ocelot or two in support and sometimes not. In either case, though, when the rifle, sniper and machine-gun fire came in the crews had to button up and hope the infantry could keep the enemy's antitank teams away while the tank dealt with the threat that it sometimes couldn't really see very well.

In the close confines of the town of Ninewa, and despite having quite good night vision equipment, Perez, del Rio and Mendoza just couldn't see very well, generally. Not having slept much in days didn't help, either.

Still worse, they had no really good communications with the infantry century they were supposed to support. Their blasted antennae had been replaced; that wasn't the problem. Nor was it negligence on the part of the infantry. The grunts had simply lost so many leaders that a sergeant was leading the entire group with the senior section leader a mere corporal, and only one of those. The century had basically lost its ability to coordinate with their supporting tank.

Even worse than that, this century was not the original one. The tanks were in such short supply, never more than sixteen to begin and four had been lost completely, that they had to shunt around from unit to unit.

Neither Perez, nor del Rio, nor Mendoza could remember when they'd slept last. Mendoza thought he might have eaten something the day prior but couldn't be sure. The stewed camel over rice was not something the cohort mess section was really used to preparing, but they'd been reduced to that for the last three days. He might have skipped it yesterday; hard to remember. Too sleepy, too—

"Jorge, back up! Back up! Back up! Gunner, HE, RGL, two o'clock. Jorge, goddammit, back UP!"

Still half asleep Mendoza automatically shifted gears and backed the tank fifty meters. Before he had gone that distance, though, a rocket-launched grenade lanced out from the half-shattered wreck of an adobe building. It missed the tank, barely, and exploded against a wall behind Jorge and to his left. The tank's automatic defense system hadn't fired because all the blocks on the front had been used up and there hadn't been any spares to replace them. Maybe tomorrow . . . 

Del Rio was apparently not half asleep since the main gun roared even before Jorge applied the brakes. That woke him up fully and in time to watch the adobe building to his right front disintegrate to dust.

 

Ninewa, Command Post, Legio del Cid, 6/3/461 AC

A Cricket's engine sputtered outside where it had come to a hasty landing just a few seconds ahead of a heavy machine gun's tracers. A short, dark, and stout man, chest still swathed in bandages, climbed painfully down from its high door.

 

Parilla had to be helped into the building. The first thing he heard upon entering was Patricio Carrera, cursing a storm into a radio. "Listen carefully, you miserable son of a bitch. I said I want . . ."

Parilla sat heavily and wearily in a folding chair inside. Outside the Cricket that had brought him had its tail picked up by four legionaries and turned to face away from the wind. Once loaded, it would taxi again and face into the wind for takeoff. Another pair of men, wearing white armbands with red crosses, loaded a stretcher in through the rear of the aircraft, then helped another legionary with his chest and shoulder heavily bandaged to climb into the front passenger seat. Loaded, the Cricket took off again in a cloud of propeller-raised dust. Behind the Cricket a NA-23 Dodo with "Lolita" painted on the nose waited patiently while more wounded either boarded or, if stretcher cases, were loaded.

Carrera took one look and asked, "Raul, what the fuck are you doing here? You're still hurt."

Parilla sighed and answered, "I couldn't stand it anymore, lying there while they brought in more and more wounded kids, most of them worse off than I was. So, one of the advantages of being Dux," and he emphasized the title as if to say, which means people do what I tell them to, generally, "is that when I say, 'I want to be flown to the front,' someone is going to bust ass to get me flown to the front."

Carrera smiled. "I missed you, you old bastard. Things are not going all that well and we sure needed you here."

"That's why I came, Patricio."

"Are you up to running things from here?" Carrera asked.

"Yes . . . with help," Parilla admitted.

"Okay then. Let me show you how things stand." Carrera walked to the map and began to trace with his finger. "We've got about two- thirds of the town, plus this airport," Carrera's head inclined in the direction of the Nabakov-23. "The Sumeris are still hanging on to the local university, backed up here against the river, and this corner." The finger showed the northeast area of the town, marked as being still in Sumeri hands. "This group didn't go into the school, by the way, to try to gain shelter by hiding in an off-limits target. They knew we wouldn't feel terribly restricted by that and sent a parliamentaire to assure us we could engage them there. They're only in it because it's all they have left."

"Fighting strength is down" Carrera continued, "dangerously down. We've got nothing but MPs and walking wounded guarding prisoners and we've cannibalized the rear echelon for riflemen. Even so, average century rifle strength is only about three-quarters, more in some, less in others. That's even with the four hundred replacements fresh out of training that Christian rushed us from Balboa."

Parilla raised a finger. "I can shed a little light and hope on the replacement situation. Another one hundred and fifty . . . ummm . . . fifty-four are due in day after tomorrow. And another one hundred and eighty or so in ten days."

"That might help; the next contingent, I mean. If we haven't finished taking this place before ten days are up, I'll resign."

Parilla inhaled deeply and, with obvious reluctance and distaste, said, "And that's another problem. The papers back home are howling for your head over these reprisals. Some of the politicos are, too. You haven't been up on international news here, have you?"

"No, why?"

"The Taurans are talking about putting out a warrant for your arrest from the Cosmopolitan Criminal Court."

"Fuck 'em," Carrera answered, with no noticeable degree of concern.

"Okay, just thought you might like to know. Anyway, I can handle things here." Parilla looked over the manning charts hanging on one wall. "Legate, you need to get forward to lead this legion."

Carrera looked at the same charts, even as Parilla did. "Can you get by without a couple of the staff?" he asked.

"Who did you have in mind taking?"

"Rocaberti, Daugher, Bowman. Plus Mitchell and Soult. I had to shift Johnson to 3rd Cohort to replace its commander."

"Where's Carl Kennison?" Parilla asked.

"Here, Duce," Kennison answered unexpectedly from the door.

Carrera raised a single eyebrow, which Kennison answered by saying, "I'll be fine for now, Pat. We can talk later, after the battle's over."

Carrera nodded. "Fine. I'll be on my way then." He glanced around to make sure all five men he'd said he wanted to take were present. "You people I mentioned; on me in ten minutes, ready to rock."

 

Manuel Rocaberti had done his level best to be as useful at headquarters as possible, hoping thereby to escape being sent anywhere but. He wasn't lazy, after all; he just wasn't too terribly brave. He'd learned that over a decade ago when, in the face of an FSC attack on Balboa he had run, deserting his men and his command. He'd have been shot, he knew, if his side had actually won. Fortunately, for him, they had not and in the chaos after the fall of Piña, the ex-dictator, no one had thought to prosecute him. Rather, no one in a position to had ever thought to. He was reasonably sure that Jimenez, among others, would have been glad to see him dead.

Thus it was with a mix of relief and trepidation that Rocaberti found himself suddenly placed in command over an understrength infantry century with a single tank attached. The relief came from the fact that no one in the century or the cohort over it had any obvious reason personally to want Rocaberti dead. The trepidation came from the fact that the century was facing a large number of Sumeris who did want him dead, albeit only in an impersonal way. That was small comfort.

Even so, Rocaberti was an experienced officer, an experienced commander, and well above the rank normally associated with the command of a single century. There was some good he could do. He began well enough, reorganizing the century and letting one badly overtasked sergeant become his assistant, rather than having the entire weight bearing down on the poor sergeant's own young shoulders. Then he'd seen to the supply situation, ensuring especially that more ammunition was ordered. Lastly, after talking amiably with some of the men, he'd set upon the cooks. There would be something better than boiled camel over rice this evening.

 

IX.

So many of Sada's officers were down that he was reduced to, if not quite leading charges himself, at least guiding the assault parties forward and giving them their final instructions. With another Sumeri commander, this sort of thing would have been expected and, as expected, such assaults would have petered out quickly once out of that stay-behind commander's gaze.

Sada, by contrast, spent so much time at the front, and so much time exposed to enemy fire, that his men understood that if he stayed behind it wasn't in regard for his own safety, but in regard to the mission. They knew they weren't being sacrificed by a coward. That his reputation for this kind of conduct went back almost twenty years didn't hurt matters.

The hardest thing for Sada to learn, this campaign, had been the effectiveness of modern night vision. In the Farsi War there had been little and what little there had been had been almost all on his side. In the Oil War of a dozen years before, while the enemy coalition had had a massive advantage, it hadn't affected him or his men much as they were in another part of the theater, killing Yezidis. They'd been bombed silly more than once, true, but night vision hadn't had a lot to do with it.

Here though, the disparity was both gross and everywhere. The enemy had sights that would see through dust, through smoke, through walls. He'd lost a lot of men figuring that out. Now his men didn't try to restrict their movements to the night that the enemy owned. Instead, day or night they moved underground wherever possible, in tunnels—often no more than crawlspaces—that stretched from building to building and under roads and parks. Even where tunnels had not been possible, trenches were, and these helped shield Sada's men at least from the ground mounted thermal and light amplifying sights, if not from those loitering above, in the air.

It was a hard-learned lesson: If the enemy owns the night, fight, where possible, in the day.

So, ratlike, Sada and his soldiers moved in small groups, through trenches and tunnels, between buildings and under and across roads and parks before emerging, several hundred of them, in a series of apartment buildings still held by his side. The worst part was crawling through a trench that led across a children's park. Sada had fretted over that badly, finally ordering enough troops into five buildings that dominated the park so that any aerial recon could be driven off or shot down. At the end of the park, the trench went underground again, before turning left to enter several apartment building basements.

In the apartment buildings' basements—named by Sada "Assault Position Ramadan"—too tired to be nervous over the possibility of aerial bombs or heavy mortar shells, Sada and his men slept the night, awaiting morning and their attack.

And I must attack, at least often enough to keep the enemy from feeling secure enough to methodically peel us away like the shell from an egg, Sada thought, as he drifted off to fitful sleep.

 

4th Cohort Command Post (Forward), 7/3/461 AC

The Forward CP was wherever Jimenez happened to be, with a couple of radiomen, a forward observer team with another radio, and a few more soldiers detailed as security.

It was just after midnight. Jimenez and his small party hunkered down behind some furniture hastily thrown up and then reinforced by sandbags, the whole mess being on the ground floor of a government building facing a broad and dusty open area. This had some children's amusements to suggest it had once been dedicated as a park.

One would have to look twice, though, to see that now. The children's amusements were smashed, littered here and there with bodies, and the otherwise smooth and level fields of dust were pockmarked with shell craters. Further detracting from the image of playground were the long trench dug into the field and the barbed wire that was strung from end to end.

Jimenez had reason to know the place was mined, too. Even if he might have forgotten, the grim light cast by the flickering flames of one of his Ocelots—immobilized by a mine and colanderized by rocket launched grenades—would have reminded him.

At least we got the chingada crew out.

Five apartment buildings, the center one of seven stories, flanked by two of six, with those flanked by two of five stories, dominated the open field. They were exactly the kind of unattractive and tasteless government housing projects one might have expected from any government involved in public housing; blank, featureless, concrete "machines for mass living" with all the humanity carefully excised.

Their ugliness was even worse now—even more real—for it was from these that fire had poured down on Jimenez's men as they'd tried to cross without adequate armored support. It was from these that the RGLs had smashed one of the few armored vehicles Jimenez had available to him.

Carrera had called, just after the last attack, asking if Jimenez couldn't somehow force the field and get a toehold on the buildings opposite.

"Patricio, there is no way I can get across on foot. We tried. We paid, too. If you've got a bright idea, let me know because I am fresh out."

"Wait, out." The radio had gone silent then for half a minute. When Carrera had come back he'd said, "Yes, I've got an idea. It'll be dangerous, though, and it will take some time to set up, to coordinate between the artillery, the flyboys and the Cazadors. Say . . . between four and eight hours. Hang tight. I'll get back with you."

 

The artillery wasn't a problem. Neither was getting half a dozen helicopters configured for a mixed infantry-gunship load. The problem was the Cazador Cohort.

"They're spent, Jamie," Carrera said, looking around at a collection of not so much dispirited as simply bone-weary men. "For at least a day, more likely two days, they're just out of it. Sending them back in, in this state, would be murder."

Soult had nothing to say to add to that. Instead, he simply asked, "What are you going to do about it?"

"Something I'd really rather not," Carrera admitted. "Call the CP and have Colonel Ridenhour meet us here."

 

Tactical Operations Center,
731st Airborne Brigade,
northwest of Ninewa

Colonel Jeff Lamprey was frantic, frustrated and infuriated, his face beginning to match his flaming red hair. He paced the close confines of his tented command post, set up just out of range of 120mm mortars, lashing out at all who crossed his path. His headquarters troops tried to avoid him, as best they could.

 

There was a low thrum from overhead. This, Lamprey hadn't heard before, at least on his side of the river. He left the tactical operations center, or TOC—a fancy name for a command post, stepping outside in time to see a crude and primitive looking aircraft on high, grasshopper leglike landing struts set down lightly less than one hundred meters away. The door to the plane had painted on it an armored knight with curved wings attached to his back armor and rising overhead.

Lamprey, who had had a week to study the organization across the river recognized it as one of the Legio del Cid's light recon and command birds. He snarled.

The door to the plane swung open to allow a man in FSA-style desert camouflage to climb down. It was too far to see the man's rank clearly, but Lamprey, who had an instinct for general officers— indeed his entire life's ambition was to join that exclusive club—was reasonably certain that the just-arrived officer was not one. Perhaps he was a colonel like Lamprey himself, perhaps some lesser being.

Suppressing his rage and putting on an utterly false smile, Lamprey walked halfway to the Cricket to meet his visitor. He saw that the man was, like himself, a colonel and, upon closer inspection of the embroidered tape over his right breast pocket, that his name was Ridenhour.

Ridenhour didn't waste time on trivialities. "You want into the fight?" he asked.

"Damn straight. And if that son of a bitch on the other side—"

"Which other side?" Ridenhour asked with a wintery smile. "I have direct access to Dux Parilla and Legate Carrera. But if you want to talk to the enemy commander, Amid Sada, you're on your own . . . though you could probably funnel a message through the legion." Ridenhour smiled, "The relationship is quite close and rather cordial, considering."

"You know damned well who I mean, Ridenhour." Lamprey's frustration and anger threatened to leak out.

"Ah. Well, Carrera is willing to negotiate."

"Negotiate, hell, that motherf—"

"Ah, ah, ah," Ridenhour wagged a finger. "Temper, temper. Carrera had sound reasons for keeping you out, initially, just as he has sound reasons for letting you in now . . . in a limited fashion."

"In a limited . . . arrrghgh!"

"That's right. He is willing to let your brigade take some buildings. It's an important set of targets. They'll be plenty of medals and commendations to go around. If you're a) interested and b) willing to fall under his—rather, Dux Parilla's—command."

"Details?" Lamprey asked, forcing his temper down.

Ridenhour nodded; this was easier than he'd thought it would be. He pulled a map out of his left leg cargo pocket and began to speak, while pointing. "In about four hours there will be six helicopters, Volgan-built IM-71s, landing four kilometers south of your positions. At the moment they land there will be an aerial attack on the objective I mentioned. That will be followed by a mortar bombardment on and around the objective. When the helicopters land here, and this is assuming you agree, of course, you will board the first echelon of one battalion—call it one reinforced company of one hundred and forty-four men, maximum—or one reinforced platoon of each of three companies of one battalion; your call. The helicopters will make a total of three sorties each, so the most you are getting over there is a single battalion, plus maybe a little reinforcement."

Ridenhour looked up to see if Lamprey was still with him. Seeing that he was, he continued. "The helicopters will follow this route. They will halt, briefly, at a range of five hundred meters and blast the living shit out of the targets, which are five apartment buildings of five to seven stories, each. Then they'll move in by pairs. As pairs, they will fly in your men and drop them on top of the buildings. Your job is to clear them to ground level, then pass through a . . . well . . . call it a 'battalion' from the legion. The cohort concerned—their commander is Xavier Jimenez, good man—will fall under your command until they pass through, just as you will fall under legion command as soon as you board."

Lamprey's eyes lit up slightly. Ridenhour was morally certain that what he was thinking about was a comment on his next Officer Evaluation Report Support Form to the effect of, Commanded a foreign battalion during combat operations in Sumer in 461, just above the comment that said, Cooperated fully with allied forces during combat operations in severe city fighting in Sumer in 461.

"If—and it's a big if, I know—you do this and it works out," Ridenhour continued, "Carrera will use his assets to ferry over your entire brigade and subdivide the city into two sectors for operational purposes. You will still be under legion command, however. Do you accept?"

Before Lamprey could answer, Ridenhour laughed. "If you don't, he will take the city on his own, damn the cost, and you will look like the Grand Old Duke of York, except that the air transport that got you here so that you could sit around jerking off is much more expensive than the shoe leather the duke wore out marching his men up a hill and down again."

"I could simply ignore the bastard and cross on my own," Lamprey insisted. "I've got my people back in the rear working on getting me rubber boats even now."

Ridenhour sighed deeply. How to explain to one arrogant world- class asshole that there was a much bigger, and infinitely more ruthless, asshole nearby.

"Have you ever stopped to consider that dropped bridge, Jeff?" Ridenhour asked. "Do you really think it was just a mistake? I've gotten to know the man and he doesn't make or permit that kind of mistake. Now what do you suppose he might be willing to do if you try to force a river crossing against his wishes? What do you think it will do to your career if there's a massive friendly fire incident here between you and the legion and you end up losing over half the total of men killed in this campaign? You did want to see stars someday, didn't you?"

 

Forward Command Post, 4th Cohort

Xavier Jimenez heard the IM-71s whop-whopping behind him as they moved from the captured airfield to cross the river to where the gringo Airborne troops waited. Truth be told, Jimenez had doubted the FS Army commander on the other side of the river would roll for it. It had been an awfully dirty trick, he thought, Patricio dropping the sole useable bridge right under the paratroopers' noses.

 

The helicopters' sound rose, then began to drop again. Almost immediately, four Turbo-Finches appeared overhead. Singly they began to dive on the apartment buildings, firing machine guns and rockets down to clear the rooftops of any enemy who might be waiting there. Jimenez didn't know how effective the attack would be, though he did see one enemy soldier running along a roof be driven over the side by a blast to fall, screaming and arms flailing, to the ground.

That attack went on for several minutes while the helicopters got farther away. Just as Jimenez lost track of them completely, the aerial attack stopped, the birds winging it out of the area on full throttle.

Even as the last Turbo-Finch emptied its rocket pods, there came a massive roar from the legion's heavy mortars, in firing position somewhere to Jimenez's rear. He'd seen and heard so much mortar fire of late that he didn't even bother to try to count the seconds until impact. Instead, at about the right time, he ordered his command party to, "Duck!"

The mortar rounds that came in were almost all airbursts, set off by variable time fuses as they neared the vertical walls of the apartment building or the ground below. Their shards sometimes landed near Jimenez and his men. More often, the shards crashed against the apartment buildings' walls or entered the rooms through open or smashed doors and windows. The firing stayed steady, at about thirty heavy rounds a minute, for several minutes.

Sometime after the heavy mortars had begun firing, Jimenez heard the sound of the helicopters coming from behind and growing. They held up and hovered at a holding position several hundred meters behind Jimenez. That was his signal.

"Patricio, this is Xavier. Cut the heavies."

"Roger, out."

The muzzle blasts from behind stopped, though the shells continued detonating for half a minute. The last four shells were smoke. These exploded and sent burning bits of phosphorus down to the ground trailing tails of white smoke. Jimenez counted them off, carefully, before ordering, "Fourth Cohort! Support the assault by fire!"

Rifle and machine gun fire erupted from Jimenez's side of the children's park.

 

Assault Position Ramadan

Sada was most pleased to wake up and discover he was not dead, as he had half-expected to become when he'd closed his eyes to sleep the night before. Around him, his men were also awakening, shaken rather than shouted at by their sergeants and lieutenants. The sun was just beginning to seep through the basement assembly area's few slits and crevices.

 

"Qabaash, check the troops to the right," Sada ordered. "I'll go left."

The two then split up, walking where possible and crawling where not, to inspect the soldiers Sada was about to send into an attack that was, on its face, hopeless. They returned after several minutes, meeting with the commander of the battalion about to assault.

"Let me go with them, Amid," Qabaash begged. The major just quivered with excitement at the pending assault.

"No," Sada answered, firmly. "You have other things to do." He turned to face the new battalion commander. "You know your orders?"

"Yes, Amid," the captain commanding the assault battalion answered. "They're simple: attack, do damage, break through and go hunting through the rear for the support areas. Then become such a pain in the ass in the enemy's rear that he has to stop his attack to the northeast." The battalion commander—he was the sixth officer to hold the post in as many days—looked like a man who has resigned himself to death, as indeed he had.

"Allah's blessing upon you then," Sada said, placing one encouraging hand on the naquib's shoulder. He looked at a firing slit, and then at his watch. Judging the time about right, Sada said, "Allahu akbar, my friend. Attack."

Ordering "Fixed bayonets" and taking up the cry, "Allahu akbar!" the battalion commander led his men out of their sheltering cellar and into the light.

"Allahu akbar!" came from three hundred throats as the storming party, pleasantly surprised not to be shot to bits as they emerged from the basements, charged across the street in full battle fury.

As they stormed, six blocks away a barrage was unleashed on another Sumeri position.

 

Command Post, Rocaberti's Century

Timely provisioning was something Rocaberti had always prided himself on, even back in the old days of the Balboan Defense Corps. He also saw much benefit in an orderly dispensing of rations. His acting centurion, still the sergeant who had previously led the century, had had other ideas. The sergeant had demanded to maintain fifty percent security rather than lining up three sections out of four to make chow go more smoothly and efficiently. The sergeant had demanded and Rocaberti had overruled him. All the sergeant could do now was get the men through the line and back to the front as quickly as possible. This he tried to do. He was still trying, when the heavy mortars to the rear had opened up on some apartment buildings well off to the right front. The men had shuddered, as nervous and tired men will, when the first shell bursts had gone off.

 

"Ignore it," the sergeant insisted. "Get your goddamned food and get back to the line."

The last time Manuel Rocaberti had heard massed artillery so close it had been at the commencement of the invasion of his country by the FSC. It had set him to trembling then. It did no less now.

Then, though, it had not been the artillery that frightened him so much as the prospect of a ground attack. That had convinced him to desert his command and run for it. So, when over the shock waves of the big guns he heard, louder and much closer, the massed cry of "Allahu akbar," and looked up to see a mass of armed Sumeris boiling up seemingly from the earth, Rocaberti did three things: he dropped his jaw, he dropped his breakfast and he dropped the pretense of courage.

While his sergeant shouted, "Action front," and tried to push, pull and prod the legionaries into some semblance of a position they might hope to defend, Manuel Rocaberti, son of the Federated States Military Academy at River Watch, Class of 438, former major in the Republic of Balboa's Defense Corps, tribune in the Legio del Cid, bolted.

 

Daugher straight-armed the bolting, panic-stricken legionary, dropping him flat on his back. Carrera and his party had headed toward the sound of firing as soon as they'd heard it. When it had grown into a cacophony they'd broken into a run to get there. They'd slowed when they saw the soldier fleeing without his rifle.

Carrera bent down and, grabbing the soldier with one arm, backhanded him across the face with the hand of the other. "What the fuck is going on, trooper?"

The kid just shook his head back and forth saying, "I don't know, I don't know, I don't know—"

"Mitchell, this soldier is under arrest. Follow. The rest of you, either side of the street. Let's go see."

Carefully, the headquarters party advanced, Carrera just behind Bowman on one side, Daugher taking point on the other. Mitchell, taking up the rear, prodded the arrested soldier forward at muzzle point. They saw no more fleeing troops. On the other hand, they did see small groups of Sumeris advancing across an intersection without any obvious opposition.

Carrera took the radio microphone from Soult. He called Parilla first, to tell him what he thought had happened and to warn the Dux to be prepared to defend the CP and the airfield. Parilla was already shouting instructions before he released the microphone on his end.

Confident that at least the Command Post wouldn't be taken unawares, Carrera next called the Cazador Cohort.

"Tribune," he'd said, "I don't care if your men are tired. I don't care if they're dragging their guts behind them. Meet me at . . ." he stopped to look at his map . . .  "Meet me at Checkpoint Alpha Seventeen. Now . . . yes, your whole fucking cohort."

"What now, Boss?" Bowman asked, eagerness and excitement in his voice.

"Now? Now we go seal off that intersection and try to buy some time."

Daugher and Bowman said, together, "Yeehaw!"

Carrera's only responses were a smile, the word, "Lunatics," and the order, "Let's go."

 

Jimenez had to admire the elegance of the thing. While his men fired up the lower stories of the apartment buildings across the park, the choppers pulled pitch and lifted up above Jimenez's own positions. They advanced above the park blazing away, lacing the fronts of the enemy-held buildings with fire. As they crossed from overhead to his high front, Xavier saw that even the crew chiefs were leaning out the side doors and windows to add their machine guns to the din.

With no significant return fire coming, the center two IM-71s arose, then swooped down, one falling in behind the other, to the center—and tallest—of the apartment buildings. The first disgorged its troops there, then moved forward to give room to the helicopter following.

When it did, the far side of the building—the side where there was no suppressive fire and which had not been touched by the mortar barrage—erupted with machine guns and RGLs. The helicopter tried to get away, but its own downdraft corrected at least one grenade in flight, straightening it out by the wind on the fins and causing it to surge upwards. This struck it on the tail, wrecking the tail rotor and causing the helicopter to tilt half over to one side and go into an uncontrolled spin. Spinning still, it spiraled to the ground behind the apartments and crashed in smoke and flames. Pinned tight by centrifugal force, none of the crew escaped.

Jimenez didn't see the crash. He caught a single glimpse of the spinning tail boom and then heard the fiery explosion. "Shit," he said quietly, nausea gripping at his stomach.

 

Lamprey and his RTOs landed even as the previous bird was beginning its death spiral. The pilot of the IM-71 that disgorged this second group saw what had happened to his predecessor and had no intention of following. Fortunately, he didn't have to. The first bird had taken the dangerous route out to clear the rooftop as quickly as possible for the second. Since only two were scheduled to carry troops to the tallest of the buildings, the second chopper didn't have to get out of anyone's way and could take the time to lift and do a fairly leisurely turn.

Once it had cleared the rooftop, the third and fourth helicopters eased in to the lower buildings flanking the center one. Before they touched down, forty of the forty-eight paratroopers of the 731st that had already landed had burst through the rooftop and were clearing out the Sumeris hiding below in vicious, no quarter, room-to-room and hall-to-hall fighting.

Lamprey, staying on the roof, led from the rear.

 

Rocaberti stopped running only after having sprinted half a mile and zigzagged several times to make sure he was out of the line of fire. It was a not unimpressive performance from a man in his early forties. Gagging with exhaustion, he leaned against a wall to catch his breath. Behind him, he heard enough firing to suggest that his entire command had not been exterminated.

This was a problem.

When Rocaberti heard the roar of a big gun—a tank, he thought— he knew he had a really big problem. If the century somehow held out there would be witnesses, dozens of them, against him at his future court-martial. He considered the way Carrera had treated enemies who had broken the rules. What would he do to nominal friends who had? Thinking of ropes and short drops, the tribune automatically felt around his neck.

Not that Rocaberti considered Carrera a friend; the legate had always been a bit distant. In fact, the sinking feeling in the deserter's stomach might not have been quite so deep if Carrera had been a friend.

"What difference does it make though?" he wondered aloud. "Jimenez is his best friend and Carrera would even have him shot if he'd run as I did. Fuck; fuck; fuck! Why did I ever let my uncle force me back into uniform?"

Though it did not answer the question, another blast from a tank's muzzle half a mile behind him did punctuate it.

 

Mendoza had to admit, the food was a bit better this morning than it had been. He sat in his driver's compartment, surrounded by the dials and controls of his tank, eating breakfast, fried sausage and some yellow-greenish stuff that probably had egg in its ancestry somewhere. Del Rio had gone and fetched it for all three men; the infantry century they supported still hadn't quite figured out what to do with them.

Between bites Mendoza watched the legion's attack aircraft swoop in on some targets blocked by the buildings to either side. Between those attacks, his mind wandered to a pretty girl in a yellow dress . . . 

The cry of "Allahu akbar" echoed down the street. Mendoza heard Sergeant Perez shout, "Oh, shit!" He looked up from his food and saw a part of the Sumeri wave washing down the street. Without orders, Mendoza pushed the starter button to bring the tank's engine to life. With only the slightest hesitation he tossed the food up and out of the driver's compartment, then pulled on his combat vehicle crewman's helmet in time to hear Perez ordering, " . . . HE, Infantry."

The tank rocked as del Rio fired a round point blank into the oncoming Sumeris. The shell exploded a bit farther than would have been ideal but the Sumeris went down anyway, killed or wounded or merely stunned by the explosion behind them.

Perez shouted into the microphone, "Jorge, back up! Back up, dammit!" Mendoza threw the tank into reverse and stepped on the gas. These actions were automatic; he didn't need to see. Instead, he looked up and saw parties of the enemy racing along the roofs on both side of the street. Several of them carried rocket grenade launchers.

Distracted by the threat above, Mendoza lost track of the direction his tank was going. Instead of moving directly back, it lurched at a slight angle to the lay of the street. Thus, just after passing an intersection, the left rear struck the wall of a building, smashing it and lurching up on the mound of adobe fragments it created. The tank bellied up and stuck on the mound.

Perez was firing the heavy, pintle-mounted machine gun in front of the commander's hatch, the steady hammering feeling like blows to the driver. Maybe Perez saw the attackers above; maybe he didn't. The firing stopped, in any case, when the tank crashed into the wall and came to a sudden halt. Mendoza, stunned but not out, keyed the microphone on his CVC and tried to warn Perez. "Sergeant Per—"

Whatever warning he was about to give was cut off when an RGL round, fired from above, struck the top of the tank, over the engine compartment. Jorge didn't see the hit, but he felt the sudden overpressure all around him as if it were a set of massive clubs, applied equally and simultaneously to every square inch of his body.

He didn't feel the second round impact on the roof of the turret. Nor did he feel it when a round of the ammunition, caught halfway between the armored carousel below the turret and the breechblock of the gun, went off.

 

Having seen off the spoiling attack, Sada, Qabaash and a few of their men retraced their steps back toward the command post. It was daylight now and, even though he knew in principle that he was at least as likely to be seen crossing the trench across the park at night as in the day, it still took all the courage Sada could muster to take that first crouched-over step out into the sunlit trench.

The shelling had stopped, which seemed to Sada a good thing as the shards from the airbursts might well have found them out even below ground level in the uncovered ditch. On the other hand, the helicopters above seemed as threatening.

"But they're not looking down here at all," Sada said to himself. "Hmmm. If I had an RGL would it be worth the shot? No matter, since I don't."

Halfway across the park Sada and his party turned left and followed a narrower, zigzagging section of the trench that led to the apartment building's basements. Nobody saw them, all the enemies' eyes still fixed on the buildings looming above.

 

X.

Private Muqtada Fawash saw one RGL round strike the tank's rear grill, setting it alight. The blast knocked forward the man in the tank's commander's hatch who had been stoutly serving his machine gun until the moment the blast hit. Muqtada didn't know if that blast had killed him. He was certain that the second round impacting had been fatal though; it was so close to the enemy tanker's body that it should have cut his torso nearly in two.

As impressive as that was, it was as nothing to the blast that came a fraction of a second later when, so the private assumed, the second RGL set off some—almost certainly not all—of the tank's internally stowed ammunition.

Right before Fawash's eyes two bodies were blown completely out of the tank. The first—the tank commander's—flew almost straight up and in two pieces, a geyser of flame following it. The second was expelled from the driver's compartment. The force must have been something awful, for it had caused the driver's legs to be nicked off when they struck the inside ring of the hatch.

Fawash winced in sympathy.

Muqtada was a bit of an oddity in the Sumeri Army, though not all that uncommon in Sada's brigade. He whispered a prayer as his hand reached up to caress a small golden cross hung about his neck. Then, he hurried to where the second body had fallen to see what he could do to help a fellow Christian.

There wasn't much, Muqtada saw, once he got a good look at Jorge Mendoza's body. Still, what I can; I must. He cleared Jorge's airway and made sure he could breathe. Then he took the cord from the CVC helmet and tied it around one leg to stop the gush of blood. The victim's belt did for the other. Best I can do. He made a quick sign of the cross over Jorge just as his sergeant barked, "Fawash, get your Nazrani ass in gear."

"Yes, Sergeant."

Fawash hurried, like a good soldier, following his sergeant. In accordance with the prearranged order, this small group of a dozen men was to fan out left and find some position that could be defended and which would block or delay the enemy advance into the area just reconquered.

 

Daugher and Bowman trembled with an almost sexual excitement. This was going to be so much fun. Carrera, Soult and Mitchell were calmer. Let what is coming, come.

The Sumeris came on fast, a dozen of them, right up the street. It wasn't bad tactics, Carrera thought, just a desperate mission that required throwing the book away. They were plainly looking more to accomplishing their mission than to safety.

Amateurs initiate an ambush by doing something silly like shouting, "Fire!" Professionals begin one by simply opening fire with their most powerful weapon. In this case, that was a light machine gun carried by that human fireplug, Mitchell, who still kept the fleeing trooper from earlier beside him. Carrera waited until the Sumeris were well into the kill zone before slapping Mitchell's back. From behind the flattened automobile tire where the two had taken cover Mitchell depressed the trigger and stitched an entire rotary drum magazine, seventy-five rounds, into the Sumeris, spraying bullets out as if from a water hose. Men twisted and fell, spilling blood across the street. Before the drum was empty the barrel was smoking.

On the other side of the street from Carrera, Daugher and Bowman joined in gleefully but taking more care to target individuals. Bowman counted off, "One . . . two . . . three . . ." He was counting bodies, not bursts.

By the time the last Sumeri was down, a uniformed tribune dropped beside Carrera and Mitchell. "Legate, it's Tribune Valdez, 6th motherfucking Cazador Cohort. What are my chingada orders?"

Carrera answered, simply, "Contain and destroy that outbreak ahead."

The tribune arose, made a half a salute and then turned to urge his men forward.

"C'mon, you scrofulous pieces of runny shit!" Valdez cried. "There's enemy up ahead and you can kill their buggered asses. Now move, fuckheads!"

As he was moving forward, still cursing a storm, Valdez happened to look down at the Sumeri bodies in the street and was struck by the glint of a small golden cross, strung around the neck of one of them.

Interlude

12 April, 2092, Rift Transition Point

The technology had improved considerably. Ships were larger, lighter and stronger. They could carry more. Moreover, deep sleep techniques had improved to the point that the colonization ships could be stuffed almost to the rafters with people who, thus suspended, needed neither food nor air. Only the crews remained awake during the voyages, and even they slept for as much as two thirds of the time. The crews had shrunk considerably as the ships had grown more reliable and automation had further improved.

 

The colonists' livestock, too, could be sent in greater numbers and variety. There was even room for seeding the new world with the animals, especially the endangered animals, of the old. (Though some of Old Earth's endangered animals were themselves dangers to Terra Nova's.) Moreover, cows could make cows, rice plants could be set in moist earth to make more rice seed, horses made more horses. Little machinery was shipped, and that mostly of the simplest types. Books came digitalized. Medicines and some medical equipment were sometimes sent.

There were ninety-seven ships, either built, laid, or planned. They were, in comparison to earlier vessels, huge, capable of hauling as many as fifty thousand passengers in deep sleep. Their light sails . . . well, "enormous" hardly did them justice. The ships took months to load and unload.

To fill those ships voluntarily, however, required an end point at which the passengers would feel comfortable. The Agreement of 2087 divided up the new world into sections roughly comparable to the areas held by the nations and supranationals of Earth, which sections were then often further subdivided. In the division, some got a bit more than they'd had; some got a bit less. Switzerland's colony, Helvetia, had a bit less mountain and a bit more pasture. Japan's Yamato was an island chain of three large islands and numerous small ones, and was somewhat larger in land area—though just as mountainous and almost as resource poor—as the home islands. Canada got a largely frozen wasteland. It also was next to the colony for the United States. As Canadians saw it, this made sense. They knew their Americans and knew that no American-founded colony would stint their war department. Thus, how else could their settlers ultimately get the best defense in the world and have to pay nearly nothing for it.

Mexico, too, wanted a land border with the gringo colony. From the point of view of the upper classes that had ruled Mexico to their own benefit for so very long, how else could they hope to export the masses of the jobless and hungry their preferred system was sure to create unless there were to be a labor hungry and prosperous land nearby? They were reasonably certain the Americans, wherever they went, would create such a land.

Not everyone was a volunteer, of course. The nations of Earth sometimes used their allotted ships to send off their criminals en masse. Unsurprisingly, their criminals often did very well in the new land. Others used it as a population control measure. China's people often took the space route to fecundity, since the one-child policy, except for party leaders and the rich, was being strictly enforced again. India's poor were given the choice of departure or continuing to sleep on the pavement and starve. They went in droves and died in droves.

Weapons were permitted to the new settlers by most Earth governments, if the settlers could afford them. Wisely, most elected to bring a level of technology, roughly that of late seventeenth- to early eighteenth-century Earth, which could be sustained. Some Earth companies, for example, made not-so-small fortunes building flintlock rifles for the emigrant trade. Flint could be found; percussion caps required industrial manufacture.

This load, leaving the solar system and transiting the rift on the 12th of April, 2092, consisted of colonists from the Republics of Panama, Costa Rica, Colombia, Nicaragua, El Salvador and Honduras, all in the vessel Amerigo Vespucci, Captain Ngobe Mzilikazi, UNSN, Commanding. The Vespucci departed without incident, accelerated to the requisite speed for transition, reached the rift, and disappeared from Earth's view.

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