Carnifex

La vengeance est un plat qui se mange froid.

—Pierre Ambroise Francois Choderlos de La Clos

12/6/469 AC, Camp San Lorenzo, Jalala, Pashtia

Fernandez shook his head ruefully and placed the report from Mahamda, his chief of interrogators, down on his disk. The intelligence coming from the von Mises had dropped alarmingly. Mahamda's report was clear on why, too. He picked the report up again and reread the key paragraph.

'The Pashtun are simply too tough,' Mahamda had written. 'They're not like the soft city boys from Sumer and Yithrab we were used to dealing with. Oh, yes, we can break them; but it takes three times longer. That's no different, in practice, from cutting my interrogation staff by a factor of three. And when they do break, the intelligence we gain is almost always old, too old to be useful tactically, though it usually retains its strategic value. Only when we have family members to threaten do they turn quickly. Nor will simply giving me more men do much better. This is delicate work, work that requires great talent and much training. Simply inflicting duress is rarely enough.'

'And I don't have a solution to that,' Fernandez muttered. 'Patricio is still too delicate about threatening innocents; though he has made great strides. I wonder if we spoiled ourselves a little by going for the easy route and not developing enough tactical intelligence capability. Something to think on, anyway.'

North of Jalala, Pashtia, 12/7/469

Alena sat up abruptly. She'd had another of her visions, this time in a dream. It hadn't been a particularly good one, nothing like when she had seen her husband presenting the calf's carcass to her on the playing field, nothing like the vision of their first night together (though the reality of that had far surpassed the dream). In fact, it had been downright horrible, all smoke and fire and screams and struggling, dying men.

She glanced at the horses, hobbled and guarded, a hundred meters away. No . . . it wasn't them.

Alena's eyes looked overhead. No, no aircraft.

Alena herself wasn't sure whether her visions came from somewhere else or if they were just the result of having a mind that could take and match a great many disparate bits of information and come up with probabilities from that, probabilities that that same mind imagined into visions. It didn't really matter which it was, she supposed, since the visions turned out to be right, more often than not. Best of all, unlike most men, her husband—she looked down warmly at the sleeping form beside her—listened. How could she not love a man who listened?

This vision was different from most. She sensed that the action she had seen was not to be immediate, nor close by.

What could have caused it? she wondered.

Her conscious mind was at least as good as her subconscious. She began to tally what she knew.

Point: the war is going fairly well, with new information coming in every day and deserters from the Ikhwan giving themselves up regularly. This will make the other side desperate. Point: I have seen my husband's higher commander. He is a tired man, breaking down and unwilling to admit it to anyone. He is desperate, too. Point: the action has mostly moved to the border, but is stuck there because we can't cross to where the enemy shelters. Point: support for this war among those who fund it is waning. They, too, are desperate for it to end.

She, too, shook her head. No, those are not the keys. It was something else, but what?

'David,' she said, nudging the sleeping form beside her. 'Husband, awaken. I have a prediction. Let me see the map.'

With a grunt David sat up next to her. He'd learned, over the past two years, one hundred and fifty or more firefights, several awards and decorations, and a promotion, that when Alena wanted to see the map he'd be well advised to deliver. He reached into the saddle bags beside his sleeping roll and took the map and a blue-filtered flashlight out, unfolding the map in front of her and focusing the light for her to see by.

Alena's finger began tracing the map, stopping at points and gliding right over others.

Point: a platoon from the Cazador cohort was ambushed yesterday here. Point: there was a report of donkeys being purchased by someone here. Point: there was a report of a delivery of explosives here, last month. Point . . . Point . . . Point . . . Point . . . 

Alena closed her eyes and began to rock back and forth. It was eerie, but Cano wasn't about to object. When she opened them she pointed to a spot on the map, a junction of backwoods trails, and said, 'Bring your men here, before first light. Thirty to forty of the enemy, heavily armed, and leading a caravan. If you hurry . . .

* * *

Some miles from where Alena studied her husband's map, Senior Centurion Ricardo Cruz shivered in the cold night air.

Despite almost ten years of the news networks' predictions about the 'brutal Pashtian winter,' it had so far failed to materialize anywhere below the high mountain passes. They were still waiting, expectantly, and devoted several hours a week to the subject.

On the other hand, while not exactly 'brutal,' the winter could be cold enough. Cruz thought it was 'goddamned cold,' for example. He thought so despite the roughly one thousand drachma worth of cold weather gear the Legion was now able to provide each man deployed. On the other hand, it could be worse. I remember that first winter, in the hills of Yezidistan . . . . brrrr. Ah well, at least the wind blows from the other direction so we can get a little shelter from these rocks. Fortunately, too, it also keeps our scent out of the kill zone.

This was Cruz's third year at war and ninth with the Legion. In many ways it was the worst. He'd spent his second combat tour as an Optio. Federated States Army troops would have called the position, 'Platoon Sergeant.' Now, even with his break from the regular forces, he was a full-fledged senior centurion leading a platoon of fifty-one men, including the attached forward observer team, Pashtun scout, and the platoon medic. If all went well, after this tour he'd go to the First Centurion's School, alleged to be a gentlemen's course—And won't that be a fucking break? —and take over as first shirt for an infantry maniple. The pay he'd receive in that position, nearly two thousand drachma monthly, would place him and his family easily in the top quarter of income in Balboa. Add in the very nice four bedroom house the Legion provided on either the Isla Real or one of the new casernes, the schools, beaches and other recreational facilities and it added up to . . .

It adds up to: I still miss Cara and the kids . . . and I need to get laid. Badly.

Just over two hundred of the Sumeri whores—war widows, mostly—that the Legion had . . . acquired . . . had chosen to follow the eagles to Pashtia. These had been supplemented by several score more from the local community, generally slave girls purchased from the local dealers and given the choice of prostitution and care or freedom to go. Most stayed. Some of the girls had even managed to find husbands from among the men. This, however, was decidedly difficult in the close confines of the Legion. Cruz didn't know of a single legionary who had taken a hooker to wife who had remained with the colors. It was just too awkward when every one of your comrades had had her at one time or another. Whatever the justice of the matter—and Cruz thought it was damned poor—people usually just didn't think of hookers as really human outside of fiction. Nor could a typical man stand to be in the same room, sometimes the same universe, as someone who'd had the woman he loved.

Sometimes, he had to admit, Cruz had been tempted. The girls were segregated by the rank of the soldiers they serviced. The group dedicated to the centurions was, for lack of a better term, hot. They were also very clean as the Legion's own medical staff checked them, and the men, regularly. Moreover, careful, if confidential, record was kept of who'd screwed whom. While venereal disease made its way in, occasionally, it was damned rare.

Even so, when tempted Cruz had merely pulled out his wallet, opened it to a picture of Cara and the kids, and said, 'Nope. Not worth it.'

He pulled the wallet out now, looking at the picture once again in the moonlight.

Cruz lay with a squad from his platoon in a rock-strewn ambush position under the bright light of two nearly full moons. His own optio remained back at the objective rally point with the platoon's four donkeys, the medic, the forward observers, and a few other men. The rest of the platoon was out in three and four man ambush positions around the central one. Intel had confirmed that an enemy