Carnifex

16/10/466 AC, Training Area Thirty-Five, Isla Real

Leave was never quite "leave" when Carrera returned from the war. Rather, it was his opportunity to observe, direct and correct the training and administration taking place behind him.

There was only one moon up this evening, Eris, but she was full, casting sharp shadows on the ground. At that, Eris only provided perhaps twenty percent of the maximum illumination possible from Terra Nova's three moons.

Under that moonlight, battle-dressed and wearing night vision goggles, Carrera watched an infantry platoon from Fourth Tercio going through their paces in setting up a night ambush. It looked professional; it looked well-oiled. Yet something bothered him about it and he wasn't sure quite what.

"What's wrong with this, Jamey?" he asked Soult.

Soult shrugged. "No clue, boss. It looks fine by me."

"Yeah . . . yeah, that's it. It looks fine. How does something look that fine? When does real war ever look that fine? Let's go trip into the objective rally point, shall we?"

The two were challenged by the team left behind at the objective rally point, or ORP, with the platoon's rucksacks. That was fine, too, but not in a way that bothered Carrera.

"Don't tell anyone I'm here," he told the sergeant in charge. "I just want to watch for a bit."

The sergeant was obviously not happy about that. If his tribune, Cano, came back and found Duque Carrera waiting for him without his having been warned, there'd be hell to pay later on.

Carrera understood that. "Jamey," he said, "stick with the sergeant so that when his tribune comes to rip his balls off he can plead superior orders and no opportunity." Soult went and stood next to the sergeant while Carrera walked to the side of the ORP nearest the ambush and waited. With his goggles on, he could just make out the ambush position, though not the men in it who had all gone prone. He continued forward until he could make out the waiting legionaries, then stopped and went to one knee to watch.

Mannequins joined to each other and suspended from a cable strung tightly between two trees began to enter the kill zone, in single file, pulled by someone off to the right, somewhere. Carrera saw them move across at a walking pace, a pace a group of Salafis might well take up when they thought they were safe but had to get somewhere.

The target mannequins—there were twelve of so of them, Carrera thought—were fully in the target area when the entire scene was brightly, if momentarily, lit by the flashes of two directional mines. Carrera ducked his chin onto his chest against the backblast and the fragments.

There followed rifle and machine gun fire; dozens of weapons sending out streams of tracers into the jungle downrange. Mannequins began to drop to the ground as bullets found the inflated balloons within sandbags that held them to the cable overhead. The bullets pierced the balloons, collapsing them and letting them and their sandbags flow through the harnesses, detaching them from the overhead cable.

This continued for a minute before there was a whoosh as a star cluster launched into the sky. The ground was suddenly lit in a bright magnesium light. Carrera heard a whistle and then voice commands. Men began to move rapidly across the kill zone, shooting every mannequin once more in the head as it lay on the ground. Special teams searched the "bodies," collecting documents of intelligence value, communications devices, and weapons. The documents, cell phones and one radio were turned over to the platoon leader. A pile was made of the captured weapons, which pile a two-man team prepared for demolition.

At some point—Carrera presumed it was when the intel collection team reported to the platoon leader that the bodies were clear—another star cluster was launched. Men began to scurry back to the ambush line, even as the demo team shouted "Fire in the hole" and pulled the igniters that led to the charges they'd placed on the arms.

Once the demo team had cleared away, there was another whistle blast and, once again, the rifles and machine guns poured lines of death into the jungle opposite the ambush line. Voice commands followed and, by ones and twos the ambushing platoon began to form up to fall back to the ORP.

"It's too smooth," Carrera whispered.

* * *

Cano was pissed. Being taken by surprise, ambushed himself by the Duque, was just too fucking much. Bad enough that . . .

"Relax, Tribune," Carrera said, not ungently. He was actually impressed with the kid. "I just have some questions. It was a good ambush. Really. What bothers me was that maybe it was too good. Why do you think it was so good?"

Cano didn't relax. Sure, he wasn't a signifer anymore; he was entitled to tie his boots in the morning without tying the left one to the right one. Even so, this was the bloody Duque. He was a bastard; everyone knew it. Cano could just see his career flying off to parts unknown and unknowable. He could . . .

"I asked a question, Tribune," Carrera reminded.

"Oh . . . sorry, sir. I was . . . I just wasn't expecting you to—"

"I asked a question, Tribune."

"Yes, sir. Sorry, sir. Well . . . sir . . . we've done this ambush here maybe a dozen times just since I've been leading the platoon. The boys know what to do and, then again, we drill the shit out of it . . . "

Aha.

"Jamey! Call the Chief of Staff, the I and the Ia. I don't give a shit if they're asleep. Get 'em up."