Carnifex (58 page)

"Even now," Rivers continued, "the
Legion del Cid
is redeploying two full legions plus support, nearly thirty thousand men, from northern back into southern Pashtia. They could have been moved simply because the large contract is about up. But Hennessey doesn't appear to be in any hurry to move them out of Pashtia, despite what it must be costing him extra to support them in country."

"But what can he do? It's absurd!" Malcolm shouted.

So hard to maintain calm with this man
, River thought. "If fighting breaks out in Balboa, Hennessey will attack the Frogs there, in Pashtia, and everywhere else he can get at them. The battalion the Frogs keep in pristine comfort and safety in the southern part of Pashtia? He'll attack and extinguish it. If other Taurans interfere, he'll destroy them, too. If
we
interfere, he may not be able to destroy us, but he will fight us. And, Mr. Secretary, he has a more powerful force in the country than we do."

"But . . . but he
can't
," SecWar insisted. "He's one of
us
."

Like you, with your love affair with the Gauls, are one of us? You really don't see it, do you?

Rivers clasped his hands behind him and walked to the window. From this he stared out for long minutes, silently, while Malcolm seethed behind him.
How to explain this?

Turning around, gesturing frantically with one hand, Virgil Rivers began, "In the first place, he's not one of
us
. You may think, because he actually was raised to be a Kosmo, a cosmopolitan progressive, that he's one of
you
. But that would be false, too, Mr. Secretary.

"Oh, he never learned love of country as a boy; that's true. Instead, he was taught that all distinctions between men are arbitrary. He told me this himself, once. He was deep in his cups at the time.

"He told me, 'They tried to convince me, when I was young, that the only possible non-arbitrary grouping was the family of man. Why they never realized that that was as arbitrary a group as any other, I don't know. How does it make sense not to hate people because they look a little different but love them because they look a little the same? Either is mere appearance.'

"Mr. Secretary, he also said, 'The only truly non-arbitrary group is the group one chooses for himself. I chose the Army.'

"But, Mr. Secretary, even the Army was never so kind, so loving, or so warm and comfortable as the force he has built for himself. He is
not
, sir, not in any meaningful way, a citizen of the Federated States or a soldier of the Federated States Army. He's a true Kosmo, perhaps the ultimate manifestation of Kosmoism. He's loyal to his own group . . . and nothing
but
.

"So, yes, sir. He
would
fight even us. Maybe there's some lingering affection; maybe he'd prefer not to. But he still would."

Malcolm's eyes grew wide with sudden understanding. "Fuck."

"Up the fucking hill, soldier-boy," said the youngish centurion as he smacked a dawdling legionary across the buttocks with the stick that was his sole badge of rank.

Several things are required to make an army so that it can displace quickly. It must have limited baggage, not merely for ease of transport but for ease of breaking down and loading. It must have transport, of course, but not more than it can keep moving. It must have a staff capable of planning the movement with considerable efficiency but allowing for the inevitable screw ups. It must have soldiers willing and able to march hard. It needs officers and non-coms, pitiless in their drive to obey their orders and meet their march objectives. It needs a mindset, as an army, that inclines it to rapid movement.

Above all, perhaps, it must have a commander willing to give the order, "Move it, you fucks." As Carrera stood on a rocky outcropping overlooking the metalled road through the pass, he whispered just that: "Move it, you fucks."

There were still bandits in the hills. Aircraft circled over head to watch for them, out to a distance of seven kilometers—mortar range—from the main column. Pashtun scouts and Cazadors, with dog teams, likewise secured the long, winding triple
eel
of men, machine and animals from interference. Even Carrera let himself be surrounded by half a dozen bodyguards; sharp men, well armed and armored and each one a match for him in size and color.

It was hardly secure, though, not against an enemy who
would
die, eagerly, if he could just take one infidel with him. If the legions hadn't caught so many of the
Ikhwan
's fighters and annihilated them or driven them far away, the passage over the mountains would have taken a lot longer.

One had to wonder, as some of the legionaries wondered, just how long Carrera had been planning the upcoming confrontation with the troops of the Tauran Union in Pashtia.

I've been considering it for the last five years
, Carrera thought, to no one in particular.

Below, in tactical road march order, with trucks and other vehicles in between, the men sang. Carrera heard them singing a new song,
Rio Gamboa
, which was mostly about getting back home:

 . . . Centurio viejo, aun en la marcha.
No tiene compassion. No tiene humanidad.
No tiene miedo del enemigo.
Y sigue Carrera a la battalle,
Como siguemos. Porque siguemos?
Porque somos el Legion, somos en la marcha . . . 

"Pretty downbeat," Carrera muttered to himself, listening to the dreary but moving tune. "Well, that's fitting. It isn't, after all, like we're going to fight anybody but men who should be our
friends
, most of them."

Y somos cansado de la guerra sucia,
Y de la batalle . . . 

"I'm sick of it, too, sons. I'm sick of it, too.

Tenemos esposas, tenemos niños,
Todos queridos . . . 

"I know, boys, I know," the legate whispered. "And I can't tell you when you can go home either, nor even what kind of home you'll find when you get there. I can only tell you that I'm trying to make it a home worth living in."

Still the song went on. Mentally, Carrera translated:

Our legs are aching
And our backs are in pain
Over the mountains we sweat and strain.
Ruck up, boys.
Weapons off safe.
We're heading off again to earn our pay.
But old Centurion, he keeps on marchin'.
He fears for nothin', not even dyin' . . . 

And
that, Carrera thought,
is a pretty good summary of the centurionate. In a force approaching fifty thousand, itself already pretty elite, only about twenty-five hundred made the cut to centurion. They were awesome men when we started all this . . . . and they've
grown.

This portion of the column passed by, struggling and straining, sweating and cursing, up the steep and winding pass. Some of the men recognized Carrera and waved. A grizzled centurion saluted, informally, with his stick. The waving became general and was accompanied by a different song:

Adelante, hijos del Legion.
Adelante, legionarios gloriosos.
Conquiste cada obstaculo . . . 

Carrera stiffened to attention, and saluted in return. He watched the column crest a rise and then turn around a bend. When the last man had gone from view he looked again at where they'd come from and saw a tank, a Jaguar II, being winched, literally, up the pass.

Gonna have to buy a shitload of new power packs and even new armor after this one's done
, he thought.
These things just aren't made to . . . 

The thought was cut off as a metal cable, seemingly strong but apparently defective, snapped, approximately between the winch and the tank. Both ends went flying at extraordinarily high speed. One was harmless. The other hit a walking legionary in the legs just above his knees. The cable cut through as if the legs weren't even there. The legionary tumbled, end over end, in a spray of blood. It was too quick for him even to feel pain, yet. That, however, would come.

Freed at one corner, the tank lurched back unevenly. The weight now was too much for the single cable remaining. It, too, snapped. In this case, since everyone but the one unfortunate man caught in the legs had fallen belly to the dirt, that cable passed overhead harmlessly. The tank, itself, began sliding back, while men behind frantically tried to get out of the way.

With considerable presence of mind, under the circumstances, the driver applied brakes to one side only. This caused the tank to veer and slam into a rock wall at which point it stopped. Before the shaken driver could emerge, a medic was attending to the now legless trooper, while a maintenance team by the winches began pulling two more cables from the back of a truck.

"Dustoff's already on the way, sir," one of Carrera's radio carriers announced.

Poor bastard,
Carrera thought, with that part of himself he allowed to actually feel.
Neither you nor I wanted you to go home like that.

He's been this way for the last three and a half weeks
, thought Cara, unhappily, as she did the evening dishes by hand.

Her husband, with a smile on his bruised and battered face, sat on the living room floor playing with the children. He seemed content with the world, as he had most definitely
not
been content since he'd left the regulars.

And I know why he's this way, too. He got to fight. He got to be a man among men. He was able to test himself and rise above the normal human plane . . . if only for a few minutes. Oh, Ricardo, what have I done to you?

Putting the last of the plates on a rack to drip dry, Cara went and sat on the couch overlooking the rest of her family. She sat there, in inner turmoil, for about a quarter of an hour before saying, "Children, go out and play until it's dark. I need to talk to your father."

Cruz looked at her curiously until the kids were out the door and she began to speak.

Cara wasted no time. "I'm sorry, Ricardo. I didn't know what I was doing when I made you leave the regulars. I didn't understand how much you need it. So . . . if you want to go back, I won't interfere and I'll do my best to put up with the separation and the fear."

"What brings this on?" Cruz asked, raising one very suspicious eyebrow.

Cara sighed. "I'd hoped I could be enough for you. But you were miserable. And then I saw you fight, and you were happy, and you've been happy for weeks. But how long can that last, Ricardo? You need the fight, the struggle. You need it in your memory; you need it in your present; and you need the anticipation of it in your future. I see that now. I should have seen it then. I should have known it since we first met and you saved me from those
rabiblanco
assholes. You were meant to be a soldier first and a husband second. The man I
love
is meant to be a soldier first and a husband second. And . . . I'm going to have to learn to live with that."

"Can you learn to live with that?" Cruz asked.

"I don't know. I can try."

"Fair enough," her husband answered. Then he went silent for a while, apparently thinking. "You know," he said, "I've fought with and shed blood with the men of my reserve cohort, too, now. There's a good chance that fighting will break out here, come the next election. They'll need me then, if it happens. There aren't that many senior centurions in the reserves. How about if I stay with them, in the seventh cohort of the
tercio
, until this term of school is over? That will be after the election and we'll know what the future holds a little more clearly. If it looks best to go back, I'll go back. If it looks like it's best to stay with the seventh cohort, I can do that instead."

"It's only a reprieve for me," Cara pointed out. "One way or the other you're going where the fighting is going to be."

"Yes . . . but I promise to try really hard not to get killed."

Pour encourager les autres
, thought
al Naquib
. He spoke excellent French, after all.

The spark for the thought were the dozen slaves, now made redundant by the arrival of the first of the relief parties provided by Parameswara. The slaves had spent the previous evening digging their own graves under the watch of
al Naquib's
troops. Now they knelt by those graves. Their hands were tied behind them. Most of the slaves wept. A couple pleaded weakly. The rest remained in a sort of catatonia induced by their coming obliteration. The slaves had been chosen for their weakness.

"The rest will work that much harder, afterwards,"
al Naquib
had explained to his men. "We've already lost nearly a dozen. These are the ones next mostly likely to die. Best we get some use from them first."

Behind each slave stood one of the
Ikhwan
, one hand holding a slave by the hair and the other clasping cruel knives poised at the victims' throats.

Al Naquib
raised a hand and then lowered it, quickly. The knives were drawn across emaciated flesh. Blood from a dozen living fountains spurted forth to the jungle floor in an audible gush. The weeping stopped immediately.

"For the rest of you,"
al Naquib
announced to the other slaves standing by to witness the executions, "let this be your warning: the weak and the slackers will be put to death with no more mercy than I would show a scorpion or an
antania
. Pull your lines as if your lives depended upon it. They do."

A long line of twenty tanks stood outside the physical training shed cum classroom. Inside, a Volgan instructor droned on in marginal Spanish about the capabilities and limitations of the Jaguar II tank and the Ocelot light armored vehicle Behind and slightly to the right of the Volgan was a table. Upon that table a black cloth covered an object.

Like many another fifteen year old in the wide shed that served as classroom and physical training pit, Cadet Sergeant Acosta paid little attention. For one thing, the information was already in his cadet handbook. For another, the Volgan instructor would surely put him to sleep in no time if he actually tried to listen. The walls were decorated with cadets who'd been caught nodding off. Their feet were against the walls, about four feet in the air, and their hands widely spaced on the sawdust of the pit. From experience Acosta knew, and hated, the modified push-up position used by the Academy cadre.