A Pillar of Fire by Night Read online

  “No, sir,” agreed the corporal. “But you being out here still makes me distinctly nervous.”

  “I can go look for another bunker,” offered Carrera. “I don’t know if . . .”

  As it turned out, there wouldn’t be time for that. The first Tauran bombs landed—Quarter tonners, would be my guess, thought the corporal, gulping nervously—at about the same time Carrera reached, “if.”

  “Don’t think that will be necessary, sir,” said the corporal. His voice cracked once from nerves as he said it. “Don’t think it would be . . . shit!”

  The near burst—well, “near” for a five hundred and fifty pounder—sent a shockwave-borne blizzard of leaves and twigs and dirt to pelt both men, even as the concussion induced a nauseating rippling in their internal organs.

  “In, in, get inside!” shouted the corporal.

  Always do what the man who seems to know what he’s doing says, agreed Carrera, silently, holding down his bile. He grabbed the older man and sprinted the few feet to the inside, half pulling the corporal after him. Once almost surrounded by the concrete the corporal turned back and looked out in both directions. Seeing no one, he slammed shut a heavy steel door, such as one might find on a major warship, then began turning the steel wheel that locked the door in place.

  Which is precisely where that one came from, mused Carrera, though I can’t say which of the Volgan cruisers we scrapped provided it.

  Turning back to the inside of the crowded bunker, the corporal announced, “Everybody get your canteen cups out. My tercio’s policy is to issue an extra rum ration with each bombing. So we do. Now me, I think we’re all well on the way to becoming alcoholic, but what the fuck do I know?”

  Note to self, thought Carrera, as he reached behind to pull out his canteen and cup, find out whose idea that really is, the corporal’s or his tercio commander, or someone in between, and commend them . . . maybe . . . because note to self number two for the day; we’re getting the shit bombed out of us; figure out where the hell all that rum’s coming from.

  Not too long after that point Carrera noticed something odd. Rather, he noticed two linked oddities. The sirens were still going. And he could still feel the bombs dropping.

  One of the downsides, Carrera thought, to setting things up so that the enemy has to use pricey and rare precision-guided bombs if he’s going to bomb one particular area, is that he’s going to bomb other areas a lot harder, since he can. Oh, well.

  Some distance to the north of Carrera’s temporary shelter, a group of construction engineers came out of their own shelter and, almost as a single man, cursed the enemy roundly.

  In their view, a substantial bridge over the Gamboa River sagged at one end. “Motherfuckers,” said a corporal. “We just got that son of a bitch fixed, too.”

  “Then we’ll get to fix it again,” announced the centurion in command of the detail. “Get your tools and the trucks and let’s get to it.”

  “What I don’t understand, Centurion,” said the corporal, “is why we even bother. I mean, it’s not like we actually need these bridges, considering . . .”

  “Shut the fuck up right now,” said the centurion. “What we need and don’t need isn’t your concern.” He raised his voice quite a bit, adding for the entire platoon’s benefit, “and the next man I see pretending to be walking on water, on his feet or on his hands, I’ll shoot him on the spot.”

  Volcano Number Nine, south of the Parilla Line, Balboa

  Number Nine was located in a recently abandoned legion housing area, not far from where the twin highways connecting the capital and the port of Cristobal crossed. No one but Carrera really knew if the housing area had been built to hide the Volcano, or the Volcano had been placed there to take advantage of the fact that a housing area was being built.

  If Carrera and the corporal were nervous under the bombing, that was as nothing compared to the crew of the Volcanos.

  The Volcanos? Think of a—well, “large” is hardly an adequate description so—think of a ginormous fuel air explosive bomb, hidden, often under fairly recent construction though sometimes buried just out in the jungle near a suitable access road, big and powerful enough to be a fair equal to a very small nuke. Indeed, they were more powerful than some nuclear weapons and had the additional benefit that, where a volcano went off, there would be no free oxygen in the area for a significant period of time.

  The basic shells had been laid long since, years since in some cases. This was starter explosive, an oxygen booster, incendiaries, and some additives. The rest of the mixture, the fuel, had only recently been added, by tankers, during the lull that accompanied the now ever-so-obviously failed peace talks. Thus, even though each crew for a Volcano had a decent shelter, once the tank of their Volcano was filled, survival of a premature detonation was most unlikely.

  That said, a premature detonation was, itself, just as unlikely. The things had been designed for considerable stability. They had two mechanisms for detonation, radio command—which nobody expected to work, really—and seismic. The former took a special code and an extant antenna while the latter took the kind of shaking that only a near miss from a large bomb or shell could provide. Even then, there was a timer that had to be set and had to run to allow either to work, and, at that, only at certain times after it ran. They were intended to be emplaced, and then set to arm themselves at a later time or times, and to be detonated on command when expedient.

  “None of which,” muttered Sergeant Juan Sais, himself from a maniple of the Fourteenth Cazador Tercio sufficiently secret that even its number was secret, “cheers me up in the slightest. If this thing goes . . .”

  A nearby private fed a small morsel from his rations to a trixie, an archaeopteryx, that had adopted the team, or at least its food, over the past several weeks. Nobody minded having trixies about; they helped keep down the population of the never sufficiently to be damned antaniae, the septic-mouthed moonbats, that infested the planet.

  The trixie was actually rather a beautiful creature. This one, a juvenile, most likely, was brightly feathered, and maybe two and a half feet long, including tail feathers. It had probably been a semi-domesticated mascot for the housing area, before its abandonment.

  “What was that, Sergeant?” asked the private of Sais. With his boss, the boy sheltered in the earth-covered bunker.

  “Nothing, Espinal,” said Sais. “Just cursing the enemy.”

  “Curse them for me then, too, Sergeant.” He opened his can of chorley tortillas fully, and showed it to the Trixie, which squawked its disappointment. “See, told you, birdie; that there was only so much.”

  Indignant, the Trixie took off for a higher and safer plane.

  Sais did curse the enemy, then, which didn’t seem much to bother a low flying Tauran fighter bomber as it laid a carpet of bomblets all across the area, driving the team deeper into their earthen hole.

  That’s one good thing, thought Sais, raising his head and brushing dirt from his hair, after the storm of steel had passed. If they had clue one about what we were, it wouldn’t be useless bomblets they were dropping, but heavier ordnance to shake up, wreck, or prematurely detonate the Volcano. Thank God for small favors.

  Hide Position Sierra Two-Nine, Cristobal Province, Balboa

  The Fourteenth Cazadors was actually a rather diverse tercio. Besides the men for the Volcanos, a limited number of what might be called “shock troops,” foreign internal defense teams, a hostage rescue maniple, maniples for deep recon, strategic recon, nation building, and this and that and whatnot, it also included some small numbers, no more than a couple of hundred, of stay-behind reconnaissance troops.

  Some of the latter were on islands out in the Mar Furioso. Still others monitored the expanding lodgment of the Zhong, after their mostly failed attempt at capturing the Isla Real. There were also a few teams along the coast of the Shimmering Sea, just in case.

  The majority of the stay-behinds, though, were in Cristobal Province, north o
f the city of Cristobal, and well south of the Parilla Line. They were emplaced in hides both carefully and cleverly designed, but also put in places that no one in their right minds would want to be stationed or to station troops.

  Cleverly? There were subtle sumps dug that were fed by the thinnest excavations practical, to provide water and flush away waste. This wasn’t that hard in a place with over twenty feet of rain a year, one where even the dry season could be pretty wet. There were pipes that led down to substantial bodies of water, usually stinking swamp water, so that the wastes would not be noticed. Sound and seismic proofing framed the shelters, even as the radar scattering metalicized strips in the trees above could be expected to foil ground-penetrating radar. Food was stored in both the main shelters and various caches. Cooking by flame was right out, but they each had a small, fuel-cell-powered cooking unit, expected to be sufficient to heat one meal every other day for . . . well, for long enough, if they didn’t overdo it on the light that also ran from the fuel cell. Air was let in via a bamboo pipe system, with a pump that ran off the fuel cell, as well. There was also a backup hand pump, but nobody wanted to depend on that. Carbon dioxide was, somewhat like the waste, removed by gravity, though spread out, where possible.

  Carefully? Some hides were sited in the middle of dense clumps of the black palm the Noahs had so negligently or maliciously transferred from old Earth, for example. Others sat in excavations near swamps with the entrances under water. One was up in a hollowed-out crevice in the jungle-shrouded face of a seemingly unscalable cliff. Indeed, of the twenty-two three- and four-man teams scattered about the area, not so much as one team was anyplace where they might have been expected to gather any information more important than the number of mosquito bites on Sergeant So-and-So’s posterior or the number of lice on the carrier pigeons they kept in cages.

  “And that’s the beauty of it, boys,” said Sergeant So and So, more commonly known as Sergeant Virgil Rojas. “Here we don’t get bombed. Here, when the enemy comes, we don’t—well, we probably don’t—get hunted for.”

  “I still don’t see the point of it, Sergeant,” said Cazador Domingo, who was, any way you looked at it, too big to be a comfortable fit in the cramped bunker and practically had to be hauled out the entrance bodily, even when the hinged tree stump covering the entrance was tilted out of the way.

  “Well,” said the sergeant, “try this, Domingo. As long as the enemy is not here, which higher will know as long as we keep sending in reports when asked for, then they must be somewhere else. Isn’t that clear?”

  “No, Sergeant. Sorry, Sergeant.”

  “Then try this: Knowing where he isn’t gives a very good idea of where he probably is.”

  Domingo glanced around the walls of the hide. His gaze seemed to go past them to the miserable and inhospitable swamp outside. “We don’t need to be here, Sergeant, to know nobody else is stupid enough to be here.”

  “Point,” agreed Rojas, with a shrug. “Still, you never know.”

  “Okay,” said Domingo. “Do you mind if I go topside for a bit while I can?”

  “Nah,” Rojas shrugged, “go ahead. One of us, even one of us your size, isn’t suspicious enough to compromise the position, provided we don’t go up too much. There’s too many other people doing too much other stuff in places a lot more important. Go on; we’ll be stuck in here almost all the time soon enough.”

  As Domingo slithered out the narrow passage to the tilting tree, the third man of the team, Cazador Flores, breathed a sigh of relief. Domingo simply took up too much space.

  Rojas feigned to ignore that, and looked over the stacks of packaged rations for the hundredth time. The hide held enough for three men for right at sixty-six days, which is to say, a pile about four feet, by five feet, by four, containing six hundred meals, or between thirteen and fourteen of each of the Legion’s forty-five menus. Legion rations tended to be bulkier and heavier, both, than rations from places like the Tauran Union and the Federated States. On the other hand, they contained cigarettes and rum, both canned, which had made them highly prized trade goods wherever the legions had deployed with allies. They also tended to be calorically pretty dense, even beyond the rum. The sixty-six days of rations would probably do for twice that time, given the sedentary life they were facing for the nonce.

  “Unless, of course, the supply rats fucked us,” murmured Rojas, “in which case we’ll be ready to kill each other out of . . .”

  He stopped the murmuring as Domingo, scrambling like a frightened rat, emerged from the tunnel. The Cazador slithered onto the floor then lay still for several moments, panting with exertion or with something else. After he flipped over on his back, Rojas could see that Domingo had gone unusually pale, even by the dim artificial light in the shelter.

  “Listen!” insisted the Cazador.

  “Wha . . . ?”

  “Listen, Sergeant!”

  Rojas made a motion at the other man in the hide, Flores, for him to be quiet, to shush. Then he listened carefully for several long moments.

  “What is it?”

  “Helicopters,” answered Domingo. “Not ours. Not our type. Troop carriers. Big ones. Little ones. Gunships. They’re everywhere.”

  “The invasion’s on,” said Rojas, heart sinking. “We knew they were in range, but . . . I’d hoped . . . oh, well.”

  IV Corps Headquarters, Magdalena, Cristobal Province, Balboa

  The bombing-induced pall of smoke hanging over the area did nothing to disguise the invasion coming in to hem it in on three sides. Though the Taurans made a fair effort to disguise their intent with a mix of false directions on the part of their helicopter streams, false insertions to the east, west, and north, and liberal blasting of likely spots for observation posts, it just wasn’t that big an area, hence just couldn’t provide all that much in the way of options. The only real question had been, “Will they try to seize it directly, by a coup de main, or surround it for a more formal siege?”

  There was never really a chance of the former, thought Legate Xavier Jimenez, watching for glimpses of the naval aerial assault from the safety of a small bunker outside his concrete headquarters, itself under a fairly new apartment building in the old gringo town of Magdalena. More’s the pity; I could have beaten that handily.

  From the town itself, as well as from the city of Cristobal and all the other towns in the area, most civilians had been evacuated to the refugee area on the Mar Furioso side. That refugee area had fallen under Zhong occupation. Jimenez had reports of a vicious guerilla war that had broken out all over that part of the country, as well as east and west of it, the guerilla movement being fueled by Carrera’s Tercio Amazona, reinforced by a slice of the Cazadors and a sprinkling of retired legionaries, along with a few contract specialists in guerilla warfare, and the heavily reinforced Fifth Mountain Tercio, all under the broad direction of Sixth Corps, which was mainly composed of citizens of the Republic.

  Legate Xavier Jimenez had long since given up the immense Cristobal brownstone that had served as his corps’ headquarters since formation. This was just as well, since the brownstone was a ruin, and anyone who had been caught inside it during the bombings was either dead or wounded or, at best, twitching badly. He didn’t even know how many Tauran bombs had hit the place; there had been that many.

  The bunker holding Jimenez and his key staff had been put into the basement of the apartment complex, outside the city, built as part of a Legion program, about seven years before. The intent had from the beginning been less about providing housing and more about hiding the contingency headquarters.

  There was an alternate staff of about equal size in another location, under Jimenez’s executive officer. They did routine work to keep things functioning but could take over command if the main command post were destroyed or cut off.

  Almost none of the fortifications in and near Cristobal matched or even came close to matching those built on the Isla Real. In the city, itself, the water table was j
ust too high. Instead of bunkers and trenches, most positions in the town were sangars erected inside the ground floors of buildings. Tunneling, except from building to building, was right out, though some prefabricated steel arches, made to fit together, connected certain positions. These, too, where possible, were sheltered under pre-existing construction.

  Outside the town the fortifications were better; bunkers, shelters, trenches, and a fairly complex obstacle system. There were even a couple of strongpoints built on key terrain, plus a number of very strong positions inherited from the Federated States, both in the town and flanking it. Some of the latter, however, had already been blasted pretty badly on the surface, though their underground components still served as excellent shelters for headquarters, medical facilities, and supply.

  A flurry of shockwaves assaulted Jimenez, as he stood half covered, watching the busy air. They’ve got their artillery in, I see, or, at least, some of it. I mark those as One-fifty-fives. Ouch. Still, no big surprise there, except how quickly the Taurans can move when they decide to take something seriously. Interesting, though, that they’re putting their guns in out of range of most of the things I have to hit them with, my 160mm mortars. And my relatively few guns and rocket launchers I cannot yet risk.

  With a thin smile, Jimenez thought, I suppose we should be flattered they’ve decided to take us seriously.

  A new sound entered the battle space and Jimenez’s consciousness. Multi-engined propeller-driven transports . . . and there they are.

  To the northeast of where he stood, the legate caught sight of a stream of lumbering, fat-bellied aircraft, from the foremost of which poured a stream of parachutists. They jumped frightfully low.

  Ballsy fucks, the Sachsens, thought Jimenez. Got to be them, at least in the main, since the Gauls’ para brigade died at Herrera International and the Anglians were smashed at Lago Sombrero. The Sachsens are the only major country in the Tauran Union that still has an airborne capability of any size. Yeah . . . got to be them, maybe with some augmentations from lesser states.