Carnifex

into boulders

Covered with moss.'

* * *

Fosa, too, saw Trinidad's death ride, through the cracked windows of the bridge. He, like Kurita, stood to attention and saluted. Though he had his sword, the one that Kurita had given him, saluting with the hand just seemed more . . .  personal.

Some members of the bridge crew, following their commander's gaze and understanding what the salute meant, likewise came to attention and rendered the hand salute. They and Fosa held those salutes all the way to when the Trinidad disappeared into the hull of the enemy freighter, and halfway through the incredible, barely sub-nuclear, explosion that followed.

UEPF Spirit of Peace

'They survived,' Robinson said, later, in his quarters. 'They couldn't have survived, but they did. The Ikhwan ship was that fucking close,' he held out his hand with thumb and forefinger a bare inch apart, 'that fucking close, and still that fucking ship survived. It isn't possible.'

The High Admiral of the United Earth Peace Fleet nearly wept with the sheer frustration of it all. So upset was he that Wallenstein, without being ordered to, dropped to her knees and began to undo his belt. He pushed her away, roughly.

'No . . . not you tonight, Marguerite. Send me Khan, the wife. I want to hurt something.'

Interlude

2/1/49 AC, Atlantis Base, Terra Nova

A messenger was waiting when Bernard Chanet arrived at his office for the morning's work. Standing at attention, the messenger passed over a sealed letter from one of the outlying offices. Chanet was surprised at the origin of the missive; he had observers at several locations in Southern Columbia but was denied any control over the area.

Opening the letter, Chanet paced his office as he read:

Your Excellency:

I've had the most intriguing request and proposition that I thought I must present to you before going any further with it.

A small group of the local regressives from North America, back home, approached me the other day and requested arms. I thought this especially odd in that they are already self sufficient for the primitive arms they tend to use. But, no, it wasn't flintlocks or even percussion weapons they were looking for. They wanted modern, military arms.

On the face of it, I'd have laughed them out of my office. Yet the leader of the group, who is also a political figure of some local importance, had a most compelling argument. He took out a pouch of gold, weighing perhaps two and a half kilograms, and proceeded to pour it out onto my desk. He said to me, 'One dozen modern rifles and twelve- thousand rounds of ammunition and it's yours. A thousand times that and a thousand of these are yours.'

I, of course, have no weaponry here beyond the few carried by my security staff. Yet it occurred to me that in your position . . .

9/8/49 AC

Belisario was about given up hope. His band was down to seventy-five men, perhaps less by sunrise, and he'd found no solution to the problem. Even now his men were scattered across two hundred square kilometers, in little groups of five or ten, partly to ease foraging and partly so as not to attract the attention of the always-threatening UN air power. Of the modern weapons he and his group had captured, few remained. For those few there was no ammunition. Even Pedro had wrapped and buried his prized heavy sniper rifle for lack of anything to feed it with.

Hanging his head in despair, Belisario thought, for perhaps the thousandth time, about just giving it up and surrendering to the Gurkhas and Sikhs who hunted his men morn and night. They were good men, those. Better, by far, than the other troops the UN set loose to terrorize the population.

'Don't shoot, Dad,' he heard and looked up. It was the voice of his daughter, Mitzi. She walked into the center of the camp, gripping an escopeta and accompanied by a young man.

A gringo, by his looks, Belisario thought. He saw half a dozen others, leading heavily laden mules. Gringos, too, most likely.

'Mom says 'hi,'' Mitzi said. 'She told me to lead these men to you. Even loaned me her shotgun for safety and I never would have expected her to do that.'

'Are you Belisario Carrera?' the young man with Mitzi asked.

'I am.'

'Sir, I'm Juan Alvarez, Jr., from down in Southern Columbia, and, sir, I've brought some things I think you maybe need.'

Chapter Seventeen

The guerillas are the fish and the people are the sea.

The Great Helmsman, on guerilla warfare

We fish with dynamite.

Patricio Carrera, on counter-guerilla warfare

Outside Panshir Base, Pashtia, 3/6/467

With the noonday sun high overhead, the valley was bathed in stifling heat. Even high on the green hills surrounding the Tuscan Ligurini base, it was oppressive. It was all the more oppressive for those troops of the Legion filling in fighting positions, mortar pits, and ammunition dumps. These, stripped to the waist, wielded their shovels with a will, however. When the marks of preparations for the aborted attack on the Ligurini were erased, they were going home.

With the election over, and with the FS-imposed practical partition of Balboa, Carrera felt reasonably comfortable standing down his troops, barring those surrounding the local base for the Gallic Commandos. For the Gauls, he'd wait and see how well peace held out in Balboa. The rest would move on to Thermopolis, along with their equipment, and from there go home to Balboa via road, rail, sea and air. Even the ones surrounding the Gauls would eventually leave; they were just further behind in the order of movement.

Besides, it isn't like I'm not working on ways to hit them where it hurts even when I give up the ability to get at the Frogs and Tauros here.

Nor could anyone in the coalition really complain about the Gauls being confined to their little rathole. The legionaries surrounding them were also engaged in something the Commandos had signally failed even to try to do (though to be fair this was not the result on any unwillingness on the Commandos' part); hunting down and obliterating the insurgency in the area. In this, the Legion was having some success.

Carrera drew a mental map of the country and the position of his troops within it. His mind clicked over each stage in the evacuation of two legions from Pashtia and he could find no flaw. Gotta love a good staff, he thought.

'Call from the staff, sir,' said one of his guards, holding out a microphone. 'Secure. Bad news, they say.'

Of course, it's bad news, he thought. Here I am enjoying a peaceful moment and pleased that I won't have to butcher ten thousand allied troops so,