The Lotus Eaters

and for no obvious reason, cut off traffic into and through the Transitway, stopping and searching cars and their drivers and passengers as if Balboa were somehow Tauran territory. Bastards.

The Transitway Area itself was a slice right through the middle of the country, smaller in some areas than it had been during the previous occupation, but encompassing now in practice certain sections of the capital, Ciudad Balboa, that had never been under colonial administration since the ouster of Old Earth's United Nations, about four centuries prior.

Jimenez fumed about that, too. Sure, the country was under threat and sure, we had to take the legions we'd created off to the war. But did we really have to bring in the stinking Taurans for local security? The gringos were obnoxious enough, but they couldn't hold a candle to the Gauls . . . or the Anglians. And then the gringos had to broker a peace deal  . . .

Mentally, Jimenez spat. Still, he was honest enough to admit to himself, On the other hand, there was going to be a civil war with the old government and its supporters once Parilla was elected president. And the old government didn't have a lot of choice, either, since a prominent part of Parilla's platform was trying the lot of them for corruption.

And, of course, the Federated States had a strong interest in the Transitway. Hell, the whole world does. But those interests don't trump ours.

The Federated States, the gringos (which epithet had followed them across the galaxy, just as 'Frogs' had followed the Gauls), had paid for the Transitway, had secured it for the better part of a century, and still took a proprietary interest. It was that interest, and the threat of a local civil war, that had impelled them to broker a deal whereby the old government would retreat to, and hold sovereignty over, a portion of the capital, the Taurans would stay to guarantee the safety of that government and the Transitway, and Jimenez, Parilla, Carrera and the legions would fume.

The Transitway, itself, was an above-sea-level canal connecting both of Terra Nova's two major oceans. It was not only a money and time saver for the roughly fourteen thousand merchant ships a year that used it; it also allowed the Federated States Navy to switch warships from one ocean to the other more or less overnight. That ability allowed it to dominate both oceans, since none of the other players on Terra Nova cared to spend enough to match the entire Federated States Navy. Indeed, the rest of the planet combined didn't care to spend enough to match the FSN.

(For that matter, had the Federated States decided to convert the wet navy to a space navy, which it was very close to being able to do, technologically, there was nothing even United Earth could have done short of nuclear war to prevent them from dominating local space as well.)

At the moment, from his temporarily halted vehicle, Jimenez glanced right and looked down from the Bridge of the Columbias at the Transitway's northern mouth, just as two moderately large and apparently rusty ships passed each other, one heading out into the Mar Furioso, Terra Nova's largest ocean, and the other heading inland to pass through the locks on its way to the Shimmering Sea.

* * *

'Makes no sense to me, Legate,' Jimenez's driver, Pedro Rico, said. 'I mean, it isn't like we couldn't cut them off from sea, land and air if we wanted to. What's there? Maybe twelve thousand of them; better'n fifty fucking thousand of us. Closer to a hundred and fifty if we called up the reservists.'

'It's more complex than that, Rico,' Jimenez answered. He was a pretty egalitarian sort and didn't mind—rather enjoyed, actually—conversing with the enlisted legionaries. In this particular case though, he couldn't speak freely.

The problem, son, Jimenez thought, is that Patricio set us up for a particular kind of war, in which the timing was critical. We don't even know for sure what that timing was supposed to be, since he kept it all—well, most of it—in his head.

Which is precisely why we're going to see the son of a bitch. We need him, now as never before, and he's got to snap out of it.

* * *

To snap Carrera out of it was something easier said than done. He'd always been a pretty tough sort, so everyone agreed, but the combination of ten years of the continuous strain of command in war, first in Sumer and then in Pashtia, to say nothing of the various peripheral campaigns on land and sea he'd sponsored, coupled with having the blood of over a million innocents on his hands (though very few people knew about that), had effectively broken him the year before.

For five local months, a full half of a Terra Novan year, the man had not said a word, but simply stared off into space. He'd eat if someone fed him, otherwise not. Even if he wouldn't speak, he'd still screamed regularly at night. The old nightmares he'd suffered were gone, but now he had a brand new set of them.

His wife—his second wife; the first was dead along with the three children she'd borne Carrera—made it nearly her entire life to nurse her husband back to health. In this she'd been notably successful, at least in comparison to the state he'd been in when he'd returned to her, catatonic from, among other things, his nuclear demolition of the Yithrabi city of Hajar.

On Terra Nova no one outside of Carrera's immediate circle knew about that nuclear attack. At least one person off world, the current commander pro tem of the United Earth Peace Fleet, knew. Or thought she did, which amounted to the same thing.

Truth be told, few on the planet even suspected. It was much easier to believe that the Salafi Ikhwan, the terrorist scourge of the planet, had somehow gotten hold of a large nuke, which nuke they had inadvertently set off in the compound where it had been stored, which compound just happened to be the family holding of their late leader.

* * *

'Think it'll work this time, Boss?' Rico asked. This was not the first time they'd driven to the Casa Linda, always at least in part to try to swing Patricio around.

'It has to, Pedro,' Jimenez answered. 'If I have to have you put a gun to his wife's head while I beat some sense through his own thick skull, it has to.'

There's no more time for him to convalesce. I wish there were; he needs it. But there isn't and so he can't have it.

'Yeah,' Rico half agreed. 'But what if the bitch meets us at the front door with a submachine gun