The Lotus Eaters (4 page)

For any superiors who might have been less than enchanted with her nose or eyes, Wallenstein's breasts were simply magnificent, which magnificence had been considerably aided by low, shipboard gravity. Hard work and genetic predisposition had seen to the maintenance of a narrow waist and shapely rear, ship's gravity notwithstanding. For that matter, she could have had her nose and eyes surgically altered. Why she hadn't remained a mystery even to herself. Perhaps it was simple pride.

A speaker mounted to the wall of the observation deck announced, "Incoming intelligence update, Admiral."

Unseen by the officer, Wallenstein nodded and said, "Record for my later review."

She doubted the update contained anything new. Mentally Wallenstein ticked off the areas lost that she knew of.
Southern South America . . . lost . . . Buenos Aires sacked and burned and the new front line of civilization is Montevideo. Canada, at least most of it, is under glaciers. The Great Plains between the Rockies and the Mississippi? Held by horse riding nomads ethnically mixed between what used to be called "Native Americans," blacks, Asians, and whites, but culturally more similar to Genghis Khan's Mongols . . . those, or Attila's Huns. Southeastern Asia has revolted, restored Roman Catholicism, and massacred the punitive force the Consensus dispatched. And outside of Cape Town, Southern Africa is in anarchy. Northern Europe is ice. Revolts brewing in Central America . . .

She almost shivered in anticipation. It was pretty clear at this point that the Consensus did
not
intend to space her.
The bastards need me now, all right. I wonder if I could get away with . . .

Wallenstein's reveries were interrupted by a call from the observation deck's speaker, "Final approach run impending . . . shorten sail . . . stand by for braking . . . Admiral to the bridge . . ."

On the surface of a different world than the one approached by Wallenstein's
Spirit of Peace
, in a small and normally fairly insignificant country, a huge bridge, the Bridge of the Columbias, was packed on both sides, with traffic slowed to a crawl where it wasn't halted outright. Stuck in that traffic, with the tropical sun beating on the roof of his vehicle and threatening to overwhelm the air conditioning, Legate Xavier Jimenez, 4th Legion, Commanding, fumed.

I
hate
driving through the Transitway Area
.

Jimenez was a physical oddity. Hair and features, but for color, were basically Caucasian, and more than handsome Caucasian, at that. His skin, though, was a high gloss anthracite. The coloration and the good looks ran in the family. So did a great many less genetic attributes, notable among these a fierce patriotism.

It's not bad enough that, after nearly a century of colonialist occupation, the old government brought in a different group of colonialists to secure their own persons at the expense of the country. Oh, no, to add injury to insult, the Tauran Union troops, nearly twelve thousand of them, who provide that security, sometimes, and for no obvious reason, cut off traffic into and through the Transitway, stopping and searching cars and their drivers and passengers as if Balboa were somehow Tauran territory. Bastards.

The Transitway Area itself was a slice right through the middle of the country, smaller in some areas than it had been during the previous occupation, but encompassing now in practice certain sections of the capital,
Ciudad
Balboa, that had never been under colonial administration since the ouster of Old Earth's United Nations, about four centuries prior.

Jimenez fumed about that, too.
Sure, the country was under threat and sure, we had to take the legions we'd created off to the war. But did we
really
have to bring in the stinking Taurans for local security? The gringos were obnoxious enough, but they couldn't hold a candle to the Gauls . . . or the Anglians. And then the gringos had to broker a peace deal
 . . .

Mentally, Jimenez spat. Still, he was honest enough to admit to himself,
On the other hand, there was going to be a civil war with the old government and its supporters once Parilla was elected president. And the old government didn't have a lot of choice, either, since a prominent part of Parilla's platform was trying the lot of them for corruption.

And, of course, the Federated States had a strong interest in the Transitway. Hell, the whole world does. But those interests don't trump ours.

The Federated States, the gringos (which epithet had followed them across the galaxy, just as "Frogs" had followed the Gauls), had paid for the Transitway, had secured it for the better part of a century, and still took a proprietary interest. It was that interest, and the threat of a local civil war, that had impelled them to broker a deal whereby the old government would retreat to, and hold sovereignty over, a portion of the capital, the Taurans would stay to guarantee the safety of that government and the Transitway, and Jimenez, Parilla, Carrera and the legions would fume.

The Transitway, itself, was an above-sea-level canal connecting both of Terra Nova's two major oceans. It was not only a money and time saver for the roughly fourteen thousand merchant ships a year that used it; it also allowed the Federated States Navy to switch warships from one ocean to the other more or less overnight. That ability allowed it to dominate both oceans, since none of the other players on Terra Nova cared to spend enough to match the entire Federated States Navy. Indeed, the rest of the planet combined didn't care to spend enough to match the FSN.

(For that matter, had the Federated States decided to convert the wet navy to a space navy, which it was very close to being able to do, technologically, there was nothing even United Earth could have done short of nuclear war to prevent them from dominating local space as well.)

At the moment, from his temporarily halted vehicle, Jimenez glanced right and looked down from the Bridge of the Columbias at the Transitway's northern mouth, just as two moderately large and apparently rusty ships passed each other, one heading out into the Mar Furioso, Terra Nova's largest ocean, and the other heading inland to pass through the locks on its way to the Shimmering Sea.

* * *

"Makes no sense to me, Legate," Jimenez's driver, Pedro Rico, said. "I mean, it isn't like we couldn't cut them off from sea, land and air if we wanted to. What's there? Maybe twelve thousand of them; better'n fifty fucking thousand of us. Closer to a hundred and fifty if we called up the reservists."

"It's more complex than that, Rico," Jimenez answered. He was a pretty egalitarian sort and didn't mind—rather enjoyed, actually—conversing with the enlisted legionaries. In this particular case though, he
couldn't
speak freely.

The problem, son,
Jimenez thought,
is that Patricio set us up for a particular kind of war, in which the timing was critical. We don't even know for sure what that timing was supposed to be, since he kept it all—well, most of it—in his head.

Which is precisely why we're going to see the son of a bitch. We need him, now as never before, and he's got to snap out of it.

* * *

To snap Carrera out of it was something easier said than done. He'd always been a pretty tough sort, so everyone agreed, but the combination of ten years of the continuous strain of command in war, first in Sumer and then in Pashtia, to say nothing of the various peripheral campaigns on land and sea he'd sponsored, coupled with having the blood of over a million innocents on his hands (though
very
few people knew about that), had effectively broken him the year before.

For five local months, a full half of a Terra Novan year, the man had not said a word, but simply stared off into space. He'd eat if someone fed him, otherwise not. Even if he wouldn't speak, he'd still screamed regularly at night. The old nightmares he'd suffered were gone, but now he had a brand new set of them.

His wife—his second wife; the first was dead along with the three children she'd borne Carrera—made it nearly her entire life to nurse her husband back to health. In this she'd been notably successful, at least in comparison to the state he'd been in when he'd returned to her, catatonic from, among other things, his nuclear demolition of the Yithrabi city of Hajar.

On Terra Nova no one outside of Carrera's immediate circle knew about that nuclear attack. At least one person off world, the current commander
pro tem
of the United Earth Peace Fleet, knew. Or thought she did, which amounted to the same thing.

Truth be told, few on the planet even suspected. It was much easier to believe that the Salafi Ikhwan, the terrorist scourge of the planet, had somehow gotten hold of a large nuke, which nuke they had inadvertently set off in the compound where it had been stored, which compound just happened to be the family holding of their late leader.

* * *

"Think it'll work this time, Boss?" Rico asked. This was not the first time they'd driven to the Casa Linda, always at least in part to try to swing Patricio around.

"It has to, Pedro," Jimenez answered. "If I have to have you put a gun to his wife's head while I beat some sense through his own thick skull, it has to."

There's no more time for him to convalesce. I wish there were; he needs it. But there isn't and so he can't have it.

"Yeah," Rico half agreed. "But what if the bitch meets us at the front door with a submachine gun again?"

Two armed guard rode in seats behind Wallenstein as her shuttle descended to the Eternal City.

Rome, much restored, spread out beneath them as that shuttlecraft broke through the clouds. Marguerite resisted the urge to press her face to the porthole of the little craft. After all, the guards were lowers, Class Fours, she thought, and they would be watching. Even so, her head twisted, her chin dropped, and her eyes searched out the landmarks she had not seen in more than a decade, even since her last trip home to convey the late—
I
hope
the bastard is "late
" . . .
though Carrera never expressly promised me to kill him
—High Admiral Martin Robinson to his new command around the alien star.

Just as Geneva was the bureaucratic locus of United Earth, so was Rome its emotional heart. Indeed, nearly half of Old Earth's half million Class Ones made the city their home. Why this should be so Wallenstein was not quite sure. Perhaps it was the more pleasant weather, especially as more northerly Europe, like Canada, was in the grip of a little ice age.
Little, they call it . . . but it seems to go on and on and has since the early twenty-first century.
Perhaps it was a harkening back to the glories of the Roman Empire.

Wallenstein slowly shook her head.
But I think it has more to do with the emotional satisfaction of having triumphed over a stifling Christianity and taken the Vatican for ourselves. Certainly, when the last pope was burned by the
Ara Pacis,
we at least half-intended to show that we were the power in the world . . . and Christianity was dead.

Of course, Christianity is demonstrably
not
dead on Terra Nova, though it is rather arguable how Christian it is. And it wasn't just Christianity we wanted to extirpate here; all the Abrahamic religions had to go, except for Islam which had earned itself a place.

Marguerite shivered, unconsciously, in fear for her planet.
At least it wasn't very "Christian" of Carrera to nuke an Islamic city in revenge for his first wife and their children. I wonder what he'll do if and when he finds out that Martin was at least partially responsible for that. Can a couple of hundred light years be space enough to shield Old Earth from a vindictiveness of that magnitude?

A great black shape stood in the open doorway to the
casa
, framed by two of the guards the Legion still kept on Carrera's person and residence, part of the couple of hundred in and around the house. The guards were Pashtian Scouts in the Legion's employ. From their point of view they were actually there to guard Carrera's son, Hamilcar, whom some of them, or perhaps all of them, had decided was the avatar of God. They could hardly do that without at the same time guarding Carrera.

The black shape was Sergeant Major John McNamara. Though considerably older, old enough to have retired from the Federated States Army a dozen years before, and though considerably less good looking, Mac was otherwise a near twin for Jimenez. Both were tall, black, whippet thin, and simply
mean
looking. Appearances, moreover, were not the only points of relation. McNamara was married to Jimenez's niece, Artemisia, about four decades his junior and pregnant with their second child.

A former Miss Balboa, even pregnant Arti still turned heads and made younger men groan with desire.

"He's inside," Mac said. "I got Arti to take away Lourdes' submachine gun. She wouldn't shoot a pregnant woman . . . though she just might have shot me. They're together now in the kitchen with Tribune Cano's wife, Alena."

Speaking English, his native tongue, McNamara had a lilting Maiden Islands accent and a tendency to mispronounce the diphthong "th." Speaking Spanish, as they were now, he was accentless.

Under the cover of returning the salutes of the guards on the door, Jimenez affected not to notice the sigh of relief breathed by his driver, Rico, at the news that Lourdes had been disarmed and was, so to speak, being watched.

"Have you talked to him?" Jimenez asked.

Mac shook his head. "I figured it would be better if we double teamed him,
while
Lourdes is out of the picture."

Jimenez nodded slowly. While neither man had much doubt that he was much smarter than McNamara, likewise neither had any doubt that the Sergeant Major General of the Legion was much the wiser, much the better at handling men, much the more "people smart."

"Where's Patricio?" Jimenez asked.

"Up on the back porch, drinking." Mac switched to English to mutter, "He does too fockin' much o' t'at."