BOLOS: HONOR OF THE REGIMENT
CREATED BY KEITH LAUMER
LOST LEGION
S.M. Stirling
“Shit,” Captain McNaught said.
The map room of Firebase Villa had been dug into the soft friable rock with explosives, then topped with sheet steel and sandbags. It smelled of sweat and bad coffee and electronic components, and the sandbags in the dog-leg entrance were still ripped where a satchel charge—a stick grenade in a three-pound ball of plastique—had been thrown during the attack six months ago.
“Captain?” the communications specialist said.
“Joy, wonder, unconfined happiness, shit,” the officer snarled, reading the printout again. “Martins, get in here!”
Lieutenant Martins ducked through the entrance of the bunker and flipped up the faceplate of her helmet. The electronics in the crystal sandwich would have made the bunker as bright as the tropical day outside, but also would have turned her face to a nonreflective curve. Human communication depends on more than words alone to carry information, as anyone who meets face-to-face for the first time after telephone conversations learns.
“News?” she said.
“Look.” He handed over the paper.
“Aw, shit.”
“My commandante, is this the right time for the raid?”
Miguel Chavez turned and fired a long burst. The muzzle blast of the AK-74 was deafening in the confined space of the cave. The other guerilla’s body pitched backwards and slammed into the coarse limestone wall, blood trailing down past fossilized seashells a hundred and twenty million years old. Pink intestine bulged through the torn fatigues, and the fecal odor was overwhelming.
None of the other guerilla commanders moved, but sweat glistened on their high-cheeked faces. Outside the sounds of the jungle night—and the camp—were stilled for an instant. Sound gradually returned to normal. Two riflemen ducked inside the low cave and dragged the body away by the ankles.
“The Glorious Way shall be victorious!” Chavez said. “We shall conquer!”
The others responded with a shout and a clenched-fist salute.
“I know,” Chavez went on, “that some of our comrades are weary. They say: The colossus of the North is reeling. The gringo troops are withdrawing. Why not hide and wait? Let the enemy’s internal contradictions win for us. We have fought many years, against the compradore puppet regime and then against the imperialist intervention force.
“Comrades,” he went on, “this is defeatism. When the enemy retreats, we advance. The popular masses must see that the enemy are withdrawing in defeat. They must see that the People’s Army of the Glorious Way has chased the gringos from the soil of San Gabriel. Then they will desert the puppet regime, which has attempted to regroup behind the shelter of the imperialist army.
“Our first objective,” he went on, “is to interdict the resupply convoy from the coast. We will attack at—”
“Yeah, it’s nothing but indigs,” Martins said, keeping her voice carefully neutral. “The indigs, and you and me. That’s a major part of the problem.”
Will you look at that mother, she thought.
The new tank was huge. Just standing beside it made her want to step back; it wasn’t right for a self-propelled object to be this big.
The Mark III was essentially a four-sided pyramid with the top lopped off, but the simple outline was bent and smoothed where the armor was sloped for maximum deflection; and jagged where sensor-arrays and weapons jutted from the brutal massiveness of the machine. Beneath were two sets of double tracks, each nearly six feet broad, each supported on eight interleaved road wheels. Between them they underlay nearly half the surface of the vehicle. She laid a hand on the flank, and the quivering, slightly greasy feel of live machinery came through her fingerless glove, ~vibrating up her palm to the elbow.
“So we don’t have much in the way of logistics,” she went on. Try fucking none. Just her and the Captain and eighty effectives, and occasionally they got spare parts and ammo through from what was supposed to be headquarters down here on the coast. “Believe me, up in the boonies mules are high-tech these days. We’re running our UATVs”—Utility All Terrain Vehicles—”on kerosene from lamps cut with the local slash, when someone doesn’t drink it before we get it.”
The tank commander’s name was Vinatelli; despite that he was pale and blond and a little plump, his scalp almost pink through the close-cropped hair. He looked like a Norman Rockwell painting as he grinned at her and slapped the side of his tank. He also looked barely old enough to shave.
“Oh, no problem. I know things have gotten a little disorganized—”
Yeah, they had to use artillery to blast their way back into New York after the last riots, she thought.
“—but we won’t be hard on your logistics. This baby has the latest, ultra-top-secret-burn-before-reading-then-shoot-yourself stuff.
“Ionic powerplant.” At her blank look, he expanded: “Ion battery. Most compact power source ever developed—radical stuff, ma’am. Ten years operation at combat loads; and you can recharge from anything, sunlight included. That’s a little diffuse, but we’ve got five acres of photovol screen in a dispenser. Markee”—he blushed when she raised a brow at the nickname—”can go anywhere, including under water.
“We’ve got a weapons mix like you wouldn’t believe, everything from antipersonnel to air defense. The Mark III runs its own diagnostics, it drives itself, its onboard AI can perform about fifteen or twenty combat tasks without anybody in the can. Including running patrols. We’ve got maps of every inch of terrain in the hemisphere, and inertial and satellite systems up the wazoo, so we can perform fire-support or any of that good shit all by ourselves. Then there’s the armor. Synthetic molecules, long-chain ferrous-chrome alloy, density-enhanced and pretty well immune to anything but another Mark III.”
Bethany Martins ran a hand through her close-cropped black hair. It came away wet with sweat; the Atlantic coast lowlands of San Gabriel were even hotter than the interior plateau, and much damper, to which the capital of Ciudad Roco added its own peculiar joys of mud, rotting garbage and human wastes—the sewer system had given up the ghost long ago, about the time the power grid did. Sweat was trickling down inside her high-collared suit of body ~armor as well, and chafing everywhere. Prickly heat was like poverty in San Gabriel, a constant condition of life to be lived with rather than a problem to be solved.
She looked around. The plaza up from the harbor—God alone knew how they’d gotten the beast ashore in that crumbling madhouse, probably sunk the ships and then drove it out—was full of a dispirited crowd. Quite a few were gawking at the American war-machine, despite the ungentle urging of squads of Order and Security police to move along. Others were concentrating on trying to sell each other bits and pieces of this and that, mostly cast-offs. Nothing looked new except the vegetables, and every pile of bananas or tomatoes had its armed guard.
Her squad was watching from their UATVs, light six-wheeled trucks built so low to the ground they looked squashed, with six balloon wheels of spun-alloy mesh. The ceramic diesels burbled faintly, and the crews leaned out of the turtletop on their weapons. There were sacks of supplies on the back decks, tied down with netting, and big five-liter cans of fuel.
At least we got something out this trip.
“What I’d like to know,” she said to Vinatelli, “is why GM can build these, but we’ve got to keep a Guard division in Detroit.”
“You haven’t heard?” he said, surprised. “They pulled out of Detroit. Just stationed some blockforces around it and cut it loose.”
Acid churned in Martin’s stomach. Going home was looking less and less attractive, even after four years in San Gabriel. The problem was that San Gabriel had gone from worse to worst in just about the same way. The difference was that it hadn’t as far to fall.
“We’re supposed to ‘demonstrate superiority’ and then pull out,” Martins said. “We kick some Glorio butt, so it doesn’t look like we’re running away when we run away.”
The twisting hill-country road looked different from the height of the Mark III’s secondary hatch. The jungle was dusty gray thorn-trees, with some denser vegetation in the low valleys. She could see it a lot better from the upper deck, but it made her feel ~obscenely vulnerable. Or visible, which was much the same thing. The air was full of the smell of the red dust that never went away except in the rainy season, and of the slightly spicy scent of the succulents that made up most of the local biota. Occasionally they passed a farm, a whitewashed adobe shack with a thatch or tile roof, with scattered fields of maize and cassava. The stores in the few towns were mostly shuttered, their inhabitants gone to swell the slums around the capital—or back to their home farms out in the countryside, if they had a little more foresight.