The Lotus Eaters

Anno Condita 471 La Palma Province, Balboa, Terra Nova

Throughout the night Cruz's troops had sloshed through the swamp to the distant flash and muffled sounds of artillery. Now, with the water having receded to about ankle level, the sun was up and the damned mosquitoes were feasting. Worse, the platoon couldn't use any repellent; that might drive off the bugs but could also warn off the quarry. No one on Terra Nova had yet come up with an insect repellent that didn't stink. True, they had anti-histamine pills for the swelling and itching. They also had to hope their inoculations and malaria pills were sufficient to ward off disease. Yellow Fever was a disease particularly awful to contemplate.

Cruz didn't have a junior officer to train yet, and perhaps never would. For all the Legion's rapid expansion, they kept to the rule: No more than three percent commissioned. Indeed, by the time he could expect the platoon to have an officer, it would probably have expanded to a maniple, of which he'd be first centurion, with two or three officers and seven or eight more optios and centurions.

On the other hand, not having an officer, in an armed force that didn't have a fetish for paperwork (for which function officers were, admittedly, useful) suited Centurion Cruz just fine.

Oh, all right! I suppose officers have other uses. But I don't need one for this.

Ahead, the point of the platoon, two men from second squad, both raised a single fist overhead as they went to one knee. Water rippled outward in tiny waves from where the knees displaced it. All the rest of the platoon, except for Cruz, did likewise, in a wave running from front to rear. The centurion hunched over and walked forward to the point, perhaps a little awkwardly under his thirty kilogram pack.

At the point, one of the scouts, holding middle and index finger together, pointed down slope to what appeared to be the junction of three trails, two leading east toward Balboa City and the Transitway, one leading west toward the Santander border. Cruz, laying his F-26 down carefully with the rifle's foregrip across his boot, pulled out his GLS receiver and map.

After about thirty seconds' worth of study, Cruz nodded, half to himself and half to men on point. One finger went up which Cruz rotated rapidly in a circle: Squad leaders to me.

While awaiting his immediate subordinates, Cruz cleared away some leaves and began drawing in the damp earth. His finger traced out the three trails, a river the map marked as being a bit further on, and positions for his subordinates. Once those arrived, he began giving instructions in a soft voice.

For most of the men, this was a first combat mission.

Up to me to make sure it isn't a last combat mission, thought the centurion.

* * *

Esteban was the first one out of Camp Twenty-seven. This was more due to the fortuitous accident of being the first to warn the jefe than to any organization on the part of the jefe or his men. Organization was not actually a FNLS strong point anyway.

It was as well that he was the first one out. Before half the group had left, while the tail of the column was still forming, the camp had been suddenly drenched with a deluge of fire. With trees rising up and then collapsing to the jungle floor, with huts expanding out to their molecular components, and with the cries of butchered men and women somehow rising above the roar of the shells, Esteban and his comrades—such as remained—did what any sane men might do when faced with a power they could not resist. They ran.

* * *

The ambush on the trail leading to the Santander border was "V" shaped, where the apex of the V was at an angle of ninety degrees. At that apex, two M-26s, the light machine gun version of Balboa's F-26, aimed up the trail. The integral scopes for the machine guns were rotated off to the right side; for this kind of beaten zone in this kind of light, human eyesight, unaugmented, was superior to the highest practical technology.

Each arm of the V was composed of one squad. The third squad to the platoon Cruz had sent swinging out and westward, in two parts, to warn of the approach of others, to seal off the kill zone and "pick up the spare," and to act as security outposts for when Cruz and the platoon sprang their first ambush and then raced westward to set up two more.

Cruz, too, was at the apex of the V, his rifle set to one side and twin detonators for directional mines clutched in his hands. He glanced left at a nervous-seeming M-26 gunner. The gunner, Castillo, a short, stocky militiaman with about four months of initial entry training and maybe eight weekend drills, eighteen years old and scared shitless, felt rather than saw his centurion's gaze. Sheepishly, Castillo looked back at Cruz and forced a smile out, then discovered he felt the better for it. The gunner resumed peering through his sight. He didn't say a word, though he did think, Thanks, Centurion. If you don't look worried, I guess I don't have to be.

* * *

Thank God I got out of that camp in time, thought Esteban, still leading the remnants of his group and still moving at as fast a walk as his legs would support. Every now and again, when his path wasn't blocked by vines or the sparse undergrowth that popped up wherever a fallen jungle tree had opened a space for sunlight, Esteban looked behind him.

At least I've still got my chingadera rifle!

Not all did. Especially had those towards the rear, the ones most nearly swept up in the flood of shellfire that had deluged Camp Twenty-seven, dropped theirs. Perhaps some had dropped the arms in shock. Perhaps others merely wanted to shed the weight to increase their speed. It didn't matter. Of the two thirds of the group that had escaped the shelling, over a third were weaponless.

* * *

"Jesus," Castillo whispered, hugging his face tighter to the stock of his machine gun while easing his finger off the trigger guard and onto the trigger. "Half the sorry bastards don't even have guns."

"Rifles," Cruz absently corrected. "And so what?" He tightened his fingers slightly on the detonators.

* * *

Directional anti-personnel mines—something like what would have been called "claymores" or "MONs" on another world, in another time—could in theory scour an ambush's kill zone free of life on their own. After all, each had about seven hundred ball bearings or small cylinders encased in plastic resin, those fronting a highly brissant explosive that should have shattered them into seven hundred projectiles, which seven hundred should have spread out and swept the ground more or less evenly.

Theory was one thing. In practice, some went into the ground and others too high into the air. Some stayed in groups of five or ten or twenty, nearly certain death should they hit something living and then split up, but considerably less likely to hit anything. And then there's the sheer malicious chance factor with explosives. They do odd things.

* * *

Esteban saw the blossoming black and orange flowers before he felt a thing. It seemed to him that the first thing he felt was the displaced air from the passage of a zillion homicidal bees. Then he felt the explosions, rattling his brain as they pounded his body.

Shocked senseless, his fingers loosened on their own, letting his rifle slip to the ground. He was also distantly aware of something running down his legs toward the ground. Even with that, though, he was too shocked to feel any sense of shame.

Even before the chain of explosions has pummeled his body, Esteban saw flashes from the undergrowth. Only then did he become aware of the screams of his comrades, scythed down behind him.

* * *

Cruz couldn't see shit through the smoke from the mines and the dirt they kicked up. No surprise there; one rarely could. Instead, he trusted to chance for sixty long seconds while the rifles and machine guns swept across the kill zone. Some of them, at least, should have been able to see something. Cruz went by those sounds, by his own sense of timing, and by when the moans and screams of his platoon's victims let up. Then he blew a whistle and charged forward with the assault team, through the smoke . . . and right into Esteban Escobar, standing in utter shock in a place so obvious that every man of Cruz's platoon must have thought that either someone else was surely covering it or that no one could have survived the mines.

* * *

Cruz hit a block that hadn't been there when he'd set up the ambush, and which he had, not unreasonably, assumed would not be there after he fired off the mines. Thus, he wasn't even remotely expecting it and both he and the guerilla went down in a tumble.

Not being shocked shitless, as a single whiff told him the guerilla was, Cruz was the first on his feet. He aimed from the hip and was about to cut down the other, even as the men of his assault team worked through the supine forms laid out bleeding on the trail, when he noticed a small gold cross around the guerilla's neck. That stayed his finger from the light trigger of his F-26. From the cross Cruz looked up at terror-filled eyes, tears beginning to well, and said, "Ah, fuckit."

* * *

"I've got a prisoner," Cruz said into the radio. "No, I can't just kill him . . . Look; he's a member of a recognized belligerent force . . . He's got a chain of command . . ." Cruz looked up the trail at the bodies, tsked and said, "Well, I mean he had one . . . until quite recently, anyway . . . He's committed no war crimes of which I am aware . . . No, don't give me that bullshit . . . He was carrying his arms openly . . . and he . . . wait a minute." Cruz released his thumb from the microphone key and asked Esteban, "You did want to surrender, didn't you?"

The guerilla, rather, ex-guerilla, trouserless, on his knees with his hands bound, nodded his head so fast it was nearly a blur. If asked, he'd have said that his captor was twelve feet tall. In fact, Esteban would have towered over Cruz in another set of circumstances.

"Right," Cruz said, after keying the mike. "He's a legitimate POW under the laws of war. I can't just shoot him and I can't watch him; I've got places to go and people to kill. I want an evacuation helicopter with a jungle penetrator. NOW."

* * *

"Blllauauaughghgh!"

Esteban had rarely even seen a helicopter before, let alone ridden in one . . . let alone ridden in one flying nap of the earth. Between looking out the side porthole and seeing trees above the helicopter, being lifted away from his seat when the thing dropped like a rock and pressed into it when it rose like a balloon, and generally having his stomach do the—

"Blllauauaughghgh!"

He had a new set of trouser, Balboan camouflage, given him by a sympathetic crew chief. That same crew chief who now held the back of Esteban's head and forced his face into the bag to catch the vomit laughed. Still, even amplified by his own misery, the sound didn't seem to the POW to be terribly malicious. Then again it was hard to hear between the sound of the engine, the steady thrump-thrump-thrump of the nearly invisible blades and the regular—

"Blllauauaughghgh!"

The crew chief shouted into Esteban's ear, "No shame, son, no shame. A lot of people get affected like that." Esteban wanted to say thanks but—

"Blllauauaughghgh!"

—instead he just nodded—weakly—that he'd heard. The paper of the bag ruffled his face while the aroma of his own vomit assaulted his nose.

"We'd fly a little higher and flatter but the intel types say you guys might have some shoulder fired missiles." The crew chief shrugged. What can you do?

The guerilla thought about that. We just might, too. Rumor control said so and—

"Blllauauaughghgh!"

Oh, God, maybe that would be better.