This website was created for two reasons.  One, so as to be a fan site for Tom Kratman's works.  Two, so that I could comment on Denbeste's blog.  Purpose one ended up falling through for various reasons..

I quote some of what Tom posted on the Bar to introduce this.

'So if you own a blog, or website, or know someone who does, get it posted there, too, or get them to post it.  If I find a very large number of such - and, yes, of-fracking-_course_, I will look - I'll put up another 3-4 chapters.  If not, not.'

Warning: Content
A Desert Called Peace:

The Amazon Legion
 

By: Thomas P. Kratman


Copyright © 2009, Thomas P. Kratman

 

DEDICATED TO

KAT AND KELLY AND SERGEANT HESTER ... AND ALL THE OTHER AMAZONAS, PAST AND POTENTIAL


What has gone before (5,000,000 BC through Anno Condita (AC) 472):

 

            Long ago, long before the appearance of man, came to Earth the aliens known to us only as the “Noahs.” About them, as a species, nothing is known. Their very existence can only be surmised by the project they left behind. Somewhat like the biblical Noah, these aliens transported from Earth to another planet samples of virtually every species existing in the time period approximately five hundred thousand to five million years ago. There is considerable controversy about these dates as species are found that are believed to have appeared on Old Earth less than half a million years ago, as well as some believed to have gone extinct more than five million years ago. The common explanation for these anomalies is that the species believed to have been extinct were, in fact, not, while other species evolved from those brought by the Noahs.

            Whatever the case, having transported these species, and having left behind various other, typically genengineered species, some of them apparently to inhibit the development of intelligent life on the new world, the Noahs disappeared, leaving no other trace beyond a few incomprehensible and inert artifacts, and possibly the rift through which they moved between Earth and the new world.

            In the Old Earth year 2037 AD a robotic interstellar probe, the Cristobal Colon, driven by lightsail, disappeared enroute to Alpha Centauri. Three years later it returned, under automated guidance, through the same rift in space into which it had disappeared. The Colon brought with it wonderful news of another Earth-like planet, orbiting another star. (Note, here, that not only is the other star not Alpha Centauri, it’s not so far been proved that it is even in the same galaxy, or universe for that matter, as ours.) Moreover, implicit in its disappearance and return was the news that here, finally, was a relatively cheap means to colonize another planet.

            The first colonization effort was an utter disaster, with the ship, the Cheng Ho, breaking down into ethnic and religious strife that annihilated almost every crewman and colonist aboard her. Thereafter, rather than risk further bloodshed by mixing colonies, the colonization effort would be run by regional supranationals such as NAFTA, the European Union, the Organization of African Unity, MERCOSUR, the Russian Empire and the Chinese Hegemony. Each of these groups were given colonization rights to specific areas on the new world, which was named – with a stunning lack of originality – “Terra Nova,” or something in another tongue that meant the same thing. Most groups elected to establish national colonies within their respective mandates, some of them under United Nations’ “guidance.”

            With the removal from Earth of substantial numbers of the most difficult and intransigent portions of the populations of Earth’s various nations, the power and influence of trans- and supranational organizations such as the UN and EU increased dramatically. With the increase of transnational power, often enough expressed in corruption, even more of Earth’s more difficult, ethnocentric, and traditionalist population volunteered to leave.   Still others were deported forcibly. Within not much more than a century and a quarter, and much less in many cases, nations had ceased to have much meaning or importance on Earth. On the other hand, and over about the same time scale, nations had become pre-eminent on Terra Nova. Moreover, because of the way the surface of the new world had been divided, these nations tended to reflect – if only generally – the nations of Old Earth.

            Warfare was endemic, beginning with the wars of liberation by many of the weaker colonies to throw off the yoke of Earth’s United Nations and continuing, most recently, with a terrorist and counter-terrorist war between the Salafi Ikhwan, an Islamic terrorist group, various states that supported them, and – surreptitiously – the United Earth Peace Fleet, on the one hand, and a coalition led by the Federated States of Columbia, on the other.

            This eleven year bloodletting began in earnest with the destruction of several buildings in the Federated States of Columbia and ended in fire with the nuclear destruction of the city of Hajar in the unofficially terrorist-sponsoring state of Yithrab.

            Prominent in that war, and single-handedly responsible for the destruction of Hajar, was Patrick Hennessey, more commonly known as Patricio Carrera, and the rather large and effective force of Spanish-speaking mercenaries he personally raised, the Legion del Cid, based in and recruiting largely from la Republica de Balboa, a small nation straddling the isthmus between Southern Columbia and Colombia del Norte.

            Balboa’s geographic position, well-suited not only to dominate trade north and south but also, because of the Balboa Transitway, an above-sea-level canal linking Terra Nova’s Shimmering Sea and Mar Furioso, key to commerce across the globe, was in many ways ideal. It should have been a happy state, peaceful and prosperous.

            It was also, unfortunately, ideal as a conduit for Terra Nova’s international drug trade. Worse, its political history, barring only a short stint as a truly representative republic following the war of liberation against United Earth, some centuries prior, was one of unmixed oligarchy, said oligarchy being venal, lawless, and competent only in corruption. Perhaps still worse, during the war against the terrorists, the security needs of the country had been filled by the introduction of troops from the Tauran Union to secure the Transitway and its immediate surrounds.

            Carrera had learned well from the Salafi Ikhwan, however. The drug trade through Balboa was ended by war and terroristic reprisal to a degree that left the surviving drug lords quaking in their beds at night. The oligarchy was beaten through the electoral process and the final nails driven into its coffin – and into the heels of the oligarchs – when it attempted to stage a comeback in the form of a coup against the elected government and Carrera, its firm supporter. Carrera’s second wife, Lourdes – Balboan as had been his first, Linda, murdered with her children by the Salafi Ikhwan – figured prominently in the suppression of the coup.

            The problem of the Tauran Union’s control of the Transitway remains, as does the problem of the nuclear armed United Earth Peace Fleet, orbiting above the planet. The Taurans will not leave, and the Balboans – a proud people, with much recent success in war – will not tolerate that they should remain.

            And yet, with one hundred times the population and three or four hundred times the wealth, the Tauran Union outclasses little Balboa in almost every way, even without the support of Old Earth. Sadly, they have that support. Everything, everyone, will have to be used to finish the job of freeing the country and, if possible, the planet. The children must fight. The old must serve, too. And the women?

            This is their story, the story of Balboa’s Tercio Amazona, the Amazon Regiment.
 

Chapter One

 

                                    …a failure, but not a waste.

 

                        --LTC (Ret.) John Baynes, Morale

 

            A phone was ringing somewhere. People – women and children mostly – screamed. Others, men and women, both, shouted. Their voices were distant, as if they came from the mouth of a tunnel. Runaway freight trains, having jumped their tracks and taken off into low ballistic flight, crashed into scrap metal yards, one after another. Over that was the sound of jet engines straining and helicopter rotors beating at the air.

            With a barely suppressed shriek of her own, Maria Fuentes sat bolt upright in her trembling bed, her hand going automatically to her mouth to stifle the sound. As her eyes adjusted to the small light streaming in through her bedroom window, she realized that she wasn’t asleep any longer.

            “It was a…” she began to say. She stopped, mid-sentence, when she realized that she could still hear the trains, the crashes, the screams.         

            “Mierda!” she exclaimed, as she threw off the light covers.   “Not a nightmare. Shit. Oh, shit.” Maria felt nausea rising, mostly fed by sudden unexpected fear.

            The phone, which had stopped ringing, began again as Maria raced for her baby’s – Alma’s – room.   She stopped and picked it up.

            “Sergeant Fuentes.”

“Maria? Cristina.”   Centurion Cristina Zamora was Maria’s reserve platoon leader.  “Alert posture Henrique. No drill.” Zamora’s voice was strained, nervous. Maria couldn’t remember ever having heard Cristina’s voice as anything but perfectly calm before. Not ever. She felt a fluttering in the pit of her stomach. Zamora’s upset? We’re so fucked.

            “Nota drill?” she asked, pointlessly.

“No, Maria, not a drill. Alert posture Henrique.”

“Henrique? Okay, I understand.” ‘Henrique.’ Call up all the reservists, but only those militia who can be quickly and conveniently assembled. “I guess time’s more important than numbers, huh?”

“They don’t tell me these things, Maria. Later.”

The phone’s tone changed, telling Maria that Zamora had hung up.

 

Maria’s phone was already programmed with the necessary numbers to conduct an alert. She scanned through until she found the number for her assistant, Marta Bugatti. She pressed that button, then the button for ‘speaker.’ She placed the phone on her bed and, while the phone was ringing, pulled out her Legion-issue foot locker. A couple of flicks of the retainers and the top popped open. She was pulling her tiger-striped, pixilated battle dress trousers on when the ringing stopped and a deep voice – deep for a woman, anyway – answered, “Bugatti here, Maria.”

“Marta. Alert. ‘Henrique.’ No shit.”

“Oh, really? I would never have guessed!”

Unseen by Maria, a mile and a half from Maria’s small apartment, Bugatti shook her head in general disgust and then held her own telephone receiver towards the nearest window.   On her own end, Maria could easily make out the sound of chattering machine guns.

Marta’s voice returned in a moment. “So what fucking else is fucking new? I’ll take care of it. I’ll…” Marta’s phone went dead.

“Marta? Marta?” Maria pounded her own phone on the foot locker’s plastic edge in frustration mixed with fear. “Shit. Dead.” She closed the cell and tossed it on the bed. She thought, OK, Marta. You’re a bitch… sometimes. But you’re a lovable bitch and you’re mybitch besides. I’ll trust you.

            Maria pulled on her boots, green nylon and black leather, tucked her trousers into them, and then speed laced them shut. She wound the ends of the laces around her legs and tied them to hold the trousers in place. From her locker she took her battle dress jacket. She was buttoning this as she started for her daughter’s bedroom.

            She started, then stopped short at Alma’s door. My God, I am going to have to leave her, then fight; maybe die, too, and leave her forever.

            Suddenly Maria felt even more ill. How can I leave my baby? Just as suddenly, she felt even worse. How can I abandon my friends, my sisters, my troops?

Bad mother; bad friend. Responsible parent; irresponsible soldier? Hero? Coward? None of those words mean a damn thing. Whatever I do, it’s going to be because I’m more afraid of not doing it than of not doing the other. I’m going to be a coward in some way, no matter what.

Had she been a different person, anydifferent person, she might just have stood there, indecisive, until it was all over. But Maria wasn’t just anybody. The powers that be had selected her very carefully, then trained her more carefully still. They had even organized her unit very carefully, paying more than usual attention to the needs of single military mothers. With or without Maria, Alma would be all right. She knew that. But without her, her troops – her friends – might not. She had no choice, really. She’d made the decision years before.

I have to go.

            Alma was still sleeping soundly in her little bed when her mother entered. Maria smiled as her sight took in her daughter’s few dozen pounds and few little feet of soft lines, dark lashes and curly hair. Maria marveled that not only was Alma hers, but that the baby wasn’t awake and screaming.

 I could never hope to sleep with artillery flying anywhere nearby, not even in training. What makes it so easy for a kid?

            Maria looked out the window from Alma’s bedroom. She couldn’t see much but the street they lived on, and not all of that. Streetlights illuminated the scene. So far as she could see none of Terra Nova’s moons had any noticeable part in that. Then the streetlights began to flicker out, leaving nothing but the moons’ light.

            Below the apartment, people were running in the streets, most of them tugging on uniforms. Just about everybody was carrying a rifle, machine gun, or rocket launcher. A number of those who weren’t armed seemed to be trying to hold back someone who was. Somebody’s mother, wife, or maybe girlfriend was crying for him to come back. Maria couldn’t see where anyone did turn back though.

            Returning to her own room, Maria continued pulling gear from the locker. Out came load bearing equipment, her helmet, her silk and liquid-metal lorica, the Legion’s standard body armor. Her centurion’s baton she picked up for a moment, then replaced it in the locker. Last came her modified F-26 “Zion” rifle.

She held the rifle in her hands for a moment, drawing some small comfort from its heft and weight. Then she slapped a drum magazine in, turned the key on the back to put pressure on the spring, and jacked a round home.

I hope Alma stays asleep. She hates to see me in helmet and body armor.

Fully clothed and armed, Maria slung her rifle across her back, walked back to the baby’s bedroom, then picked her up in her arms.

Alma almost woke up then, sucking air in with three gasping “uh…uh…uhs.” The mother waited a minute or two, holding her, stroking her hair and saying, “Don’t worry, baby. Everything will be all right, baby. Don’t worry, love. Mama’s here.” The child snuggled her soft hair into an armored shoulder and fell back, sound asleep.

            Once Alma had fallen asleep again, it was out the door and down three flights of stairs. Maria didn’t bother with locking the door behind her; crime hadn’t been much of a problem in this part of the city for some time; current invasion excepted, of course.

 

*****

           

Lance Corporal Lydia Porras, of the Tercio Amazona’sDependant Care Maniple, affectionately called ‘the Fairy Godmothers,’ careened her van through the streets, barely missing men as they hurried to their duties in the dark. The Fairy Godmothers were not actually part of the Tercio Amazona, but seconded to it from a regiment of elderly and late enlistees.

Though Porras was in uniform, her vehicle was plainly civilian, both in color and design. Otherwise, it would certainly have been fired on by any one of the dozens of helicopters that swooped in from time to time to shoot at the soldiers in the streets.

Porras made a sharp left hand turn onto Maria’s fast-emptying street. She jerked the wheel left again to pull up to the apartment building, then slammed on the brakes to bring the van to a screeching halt. Porras killed the lights and listened for a moment for the sounds of one of the fearsome attack helicopters the Taurans had in such abundance. There was nothing or, at least, nothing she could hear over the rattle and crumpof artillery.

Porras prayed, “Santa Maria, Madre de Dios, take pity on an old woman who has borne children. Take pity on children too young to die. Most importantly, Our Lady of Victory, grant it to us.”

Porras crossed herself and stepped out of the van. As she did so, Maria and Alma appeared in the doorway. Porras took Alma from her mother’s arms – well, pulled, actually; the mother didn’t want to let go – and placed the girl gently, sitting up, in one of the seats of the van, taking the extra moment to buckle the child in. There were a couple of other children there, too. One of the others, an older girl, turned sideways in her sleep to throw an arm around Alma. Porras smiled for the first time that night. Kids can be so sweet.

            When one is young and alone and the call comes to fight, it really helps to know someone is going to take care of the kids. That was Porras’ job. She was a nice old biddy. Gray haired, wrinkled; but her eyes shone bright and her posture was immaculate. She had not volunteered for service until she had turned sixty-two years old, with grown children and grandchildren of her own. She’d gone to geriatric Basic Training then, and then volunteered for assignment to the unit.

            Old Porras might have been. Steady, calm and reliable she was too. She was also a surprisingly good shot. Even so, Porras couldn’t hope to do what Maria and the others did; she was simply too old. Still, she certainly made it easier for them to do their jobs.

Alma loved her. So did Maria.

Filled with inexpressible feelings of pity, love, and fear, the old woman looked at Maria carefully, as if for the last time. Pretty girl, she thought, eyes glancing over Maria’s five feet, two inches of height, healthy figure, straight nose and large, well-spaced eyes. She placed a hand gently along the younger woman’s sculpted chin, saying, “Go with God, child. And be careful. I’ll guard your daughter with my life.”

Then, eyes clouding with tears, Lydia Porras jumped back into the van, slammed the door, and pulled away amidst screeching, smoking tires.

            For Maria it was sohard to watch that van pull away.

 

*****

 

Maria Fuentes hands trembled. She was frightened, damned frightened, and she had reason to be. Her country’s enemy had one hundred times Balboa’s own population; three or four times that ratio in disparity of wealth. Between their regular and reserve forces they had more people under arms than the entire population of her country. Weapons? Except for small arms and a couple of tricks there was no comparison. Technology? Sister, Balboa wasn’t even in the race.

But it’s not hopeless, she told herself, forcing her hands to steady down. We have some things going for us, too. Our weapons are generally decent and reliable. We have a better doctrine for battle and a much better one for training. We have damned good leaders.

And this is our country. We have no place else to go.

Tougher to measure were some softerfactors: Heart, soul, a pretty good knowledge of their own country, and the fact that the enemy was arrogant – and might, with luck, sometime show all the stupidity arrogance entails.

Besides, the Taurans didhave some place else they called home. And if they didn’t mind much making others bleed, they didn’t much like bleeding themselves.

            Maria thought, If we’re going to make them bleed, we’ll have to bleed some ourselves.

She looked up at the sky and, with the streetlights gone, saw the thin crescents of two moons, Bellona and Hecate. Yeah, they’ve got more night vision capability than we do; they’d hit us at a time with minimal illumination.

She turned away from the direction in which Porras had taken Alma and, her mind on bleeding, faced in the direction she would have to go. She took the rifle from across her back and, weapon in hand, began jogging.

            Left, right, left, right.

From the apartment building it was about a mile to the assembly point, the “hide.” This was a small restaurant in Balboa City owned by one of the other squad leaders in Maria’s maniple.

Left, right, left, right.

It is not, repeat not, fun to run, or even jog, in a tropical environment, when you’ve got forty-five pounds of combat equipment and ammunition dragging you down. It wasn’t fun for a man. For women it was worse. Maria knew it would become even worse than that after she picked up the rest of the ammunition hidden at the restaurant.

            Left, right, left, right.

            Maria heard the steady whop-whop-whopof a helicopter coming closer. Her army had more than a few helicopters, but none of them sounded like this one. She began to look around at her surroundings, desperately seeking someplace she could hide.

 

*****

 

“Hey, Johanson, look left. Single grunt. Take ‘im?”

“Yeah, sure, why the hell not?”

The helicopter tilted left as its tail swung around to the right, bringing its weapons to bear. The target ducked and disappeared from view.

“Fire a couple of bursts. See if you can spook him out.”

“Roger.”

 

*****

 

In the recessed doorway in which she’d taken shelter, Maria pressed herself against a wall to try to blend in with the shadow. Her heart was thumping so loud in her chest that she was sure even the helicopter’s crew would be able to hear it.

Suddenly the shadow disappeared as the street was lit by the strobe of several dozen heavy machinegun rounds being fired. Against her will, Maria screamed. Again the helicopter fired and she pressed her hand to her mouth and bit down.

More than the sound, it was those solid streams of tracers lighting up the landscape that terrified her. She just tried to make herself smaller, even as she bit down on two fingers again so as not to hear herself scream out loud.

 

*****

 

            “Fuck it, Jo. If he’s still around, he’ll be wanting to change his pants before reporting to his unit. Call it a ‘Mission accomplished.’ We got shit to do. Let’s go look for easier meat.”

“Roger.  Don’t like hanging around one place too long, either.” The chopper tilted right as Johanson flew it up and away from where Maria’s trembling form crouched unseen.

 

*****

 

            In combat, fatigue and fear are “mutually reinforcing and essentially interchangeable.” So Maria had been told in training. Her training cadre had even done their best to show her, and her sisters, how that worked. Nothing could have fully prepared her for the reality. She felt so weak from the terror of that helicopter that it took an effort of will just to start moving again. Once she did, though, it got better. She was even able to start thinking and stop just reacting.

Left, right, left, right.

            Maria thought, The Taurans may be stupid,but they’re not that stupid. They know we have to assemble to defend ourselves. I wonder what they....

Nodding, too out of breath for words, Maria brushed past the sentry and eased through the restaurant’s door. Sweat dripped from her chin to splash on the floor below.

Inside was a scene of boundless confusion and disarray. Tables and chairs had been pushed against the walls and windows for whatever cover they might provide. Women soldiers crouched low and indistinct amidst the tangle, their eyes searching out the windows for a threat. A six foot section of flooring had been torn away. From the hole flew metal and wooden boxes of what was plainly ammunition. Women soldiers ran to and fro, moving the boxes to where other armed women were breaking them open and passing the ammunition out.

To one side Maria’s platoon’s optio, what some armies would have called a “platoon sergeant,” spoke frantically into a radio. “What a nightmare! Half of us aren’t here yet! Dead, wounded, held up by traffic; I don’t know. Everyone is doing someone else’s job….No, I haven’t seen a trace of Zamora…. Yeah, yeah. I know. ‘Never to expect a plan to really work. After all, the goddamned enemy gets a vote, too.’… Roger, I’ll keep you posted. Out.”

            The optio dropped the microphone to rest beside the radio. She took one look at Maria and said, “Sergeant Fuentes. Good to see you. Your people aren’t here yet. Go help Gupta drag the rest of the ammunition out of the hide.”

            Obviously, there wasn’t time for questions. Maria did as she was told.

            The ‘hide’ was that hole in the floor, normally kept hidden under a table, which held roughly three quarters of a ton of ammunition. The women all kept their personal load at home, of course, but that was mostly rifle and machine gun ammunition. The hide had enough for a real battle: mortar shells, anti-tank rockets, mines, demolitions, grenades. The hide had never been designed for highly complex and degradable ammunition, like the light, shoulder-fired, anti-aircraft missiles. Those would have to come later, from elsewhere, if they did.

As she eased herself down, Maria wondered how many people had eaten at that table never knowing they sat above enough explosives to blow them half way to La Plata.

            “Ouch! Watch where you put your feet, Sergeant Fuentes. That was my shoulder.”

“Right. Sorry, Gupta. Move a little so I can get down there with you.”

Whatever the origins of her name, Gupta was white and approximately blond. Once she’d stepped out of the way, Maria eased herself into the concrete-lined hole, then planted her feet on the floor of the hide and began to help. Some of the boxes took the two of them just to lift. She was struggling alone with a heavy crate when Marta stuck her face into the hole.

“We’re all here, Maria. I also picked up two militia types – Sanchez and Arias – on the way.” With that, Marta brushed off an hour’s stark terror.

            Marta turned her head away and ordered, “Sanchez! Relieve the sergeant down in the hole.” Marta reached down a hand to help Maria climb out to make room for Sanchez.

            Once back on her feet, Maria reached up to give Marta a quick hug. This was awkward as Bugatti was not only a head taller, but huge breasted to boot. Maria had to really reach.

“Good girl, Marta. Line ‘em up.”  

Bugatti turned away and in that La Plata-accented Spanish that might as well have been Tuscan began to bellow to the troops.

            After Marta had put the squad into a line Maria started her inspection. This was no time for parade ground bullshit. Sure, naturally she checked their ammunition, weapons, equipment, food and water. Mostly, though, she checked them.

            “Your kids get picked up all right, Cat?” She asked of her machine gunner, Catarina Gonzalez.  

For answer Cat just nodded her plain face on her stocky neck.

Scared, Maria thought. Don’t blame her.   If I had three kids I’d be three times more frightened than I am.   She patted Cat’s cheek for reassurances’ sake and continued down the line.

            Cat’s ammunition bearer, Arias – a tall, slender, blonde girl – was next. Arias was so new the Maria couldn’t for the life of her remember the girl’s first name. While hands jiggled Arias’ canteens to check the weight of the water, Maria asked about her ammunition to cover the memory lapse.

            “Fifteen hundred and ninety rounds, 6.5mm, four ball to one tracer,” Arias answered. “One thousand and sixty in my pack; five hundred and thirty ready.” Arias tapped the two large magazine pouches at her waist for emphasis.

Arias sounded frightened. Mariacouldn’t.

            Then she remembered the name. Maria squeezed Arias’ shoulder and said, confidently, “Vielka, don’t sweat it. You’re in good company. The best.”

            Vielka smiled and relaxed just that trifle that said, Okay, Sergeant. I won’t be scared if you’re not.

            “Good girl.”

            While Maria checked her troops, the rest of the platoon showed up, a few at a time. The platoon leader, Centurion Zamora, arrived last of all.

Zamora pulled off her helmet to run fingers through sweat-drenched, long, coppery hair as the other Amazons gathered around. The centurion looked around at the platoon she loved and then fiercely pushed away the thought of what lay in store for them over the next several hours or days.

            “Troops,” Zamora announced once they’d all been pulled together, barring only a few at the windows and one at the door, “troops, the country is under attack.”

Maria rolled her eyes Heavenward, thinking, What is it about higher leaders in the military anyway, that makes them need to restate the obvious? Ah, well, Zamora has other virtues.

            “Our mission,” Zamora continued, “is to assemble, move toward the enemy Comandancia on Cerro Mina, attach ourselves to Second Legion...and fight as directed.”

            “Those Tauran Unionwomen who got raped and killed?” Marta asked.

            Zamora shrugged, answering, “So far as headquarters knows, it never happened. But did they manufacture an excuse? That’s what I figure. Though who can understand a Tauran, anyway?”

            Going to one knee, she pulled a map from a pocket, spreading it out on the floor where the troops could see. “Here’s our route.” A pencil traced a series of streets on a map. “Order of march is Second Squad, Headquarters, Weapons, First, and Third. The platoon optio will take up the rear. Move out in five.”

Maria was skeptical. Not all the ammunition was broken down yet. Pulling at a lock of hair, she said, “Damn, that’s not much time, Cristina.”

Zamora shook her head, though her hair was far too sweat-soaked to move with it. “It’s as much time as we have, Sergeant Fuentes. So it’s as much as we need.” I hate using that tone of voice with people I care for.

Maria’s face went blank as she answered, “Yes, Centurion.”

            The order of march put Maria’s squad first. She told Marta to take up the rear of the squad.

            Bugatti twisted her face into a mild scowl and answered, “And just where the fucking hell else would I be, Sergeant, sometime Centurion, Maria?”

Maria chucked her on the chin and led the way out. One by one, the rest of the squad followed, some of the women taking a last chance to stuff a pocket with an extra grenade or meal or drum of ammunition. As they assembled at the door, a light truck, in civilian paint but driven by a uniformed elderly man, showed at the door.

“Anyone here need a couple of anti-aircraft missiles?” the old man shouted out.

Maria passed the word back that the air-defense weapons were here. To the old man she said, “Just stand by. The crew will pick them up as they pass.”

“Wilco,” said the ancient.

            Stomach flip-flopping as she slipped out the door, Maria began to move forward, hugging the sides of the street. There was the sound of firing ahead, the muffled patter of her soldiers’ booted feet behind. She often heard the distinctive sound of a missile being fired at some helicopter. Sometimes, when she passed through an open intersection and could look south or east, she saw tracers flying high in the air. I guess that’s what ‘a thousand points of light’ look like, after all.

            About half way to Cerro Mina, Zamora answered the radio.  After a half a minute’s conversation, she called a halt. The optio came running up to her.

            “Change of orders,” Zamora announced. “We hold here until called for.”

            “Any idea why?” the optio asked.

            “Personally, since Tercio Gorgidas got the same hold order, I smell politics,” Zamora answered.

            “Mierda!” exclaimed the optio, who then ran back and began directing the troops to find what cover they could in the halls and alleyways off of the street.

Maria took her squad – there were ten of them, all told – and hunkered down between the outside wall of a house and some bushes. Marta flopped down next to her, whispering, “If I were you, Maria, I’d tell Gonzalez to duck into one of those buildings and not come out for several days. I’ll carry her gun.”

            Maria nodded her head for a moment, then shook it in negation. “I know. I considered that already myself. Gonzalez’s three kids. I don’t want them losing their last parent to be on my conscience. Still…no. We’ll need everybody soon, especially the machine gunner.” Besides, I like the idea of Alma being orphaned even less than I like the idea of it happening to the Gonzalez children.

 

*****

            The troops began sweating profusely as the sun first arose, and then climbed higher in the sky. Then the spot Maria had picked turned out to have been a good move on her part. The squad was on the wrong side of the street, shade-wise, and would have roasted but for the protection of the bushes. Even so, the building behind them absorbed and then put out a lot of heat as the day grew longer.

            Some people, civilians, came out and gave the women cold drinks, snacks, whatever they had to spare. Considering that their country just might lose, and be ruined, it was probably more than they could spare. That made it better in more ways than one.

Curiously, none of those who ministered to the soldiers were healthy young men. Those not with the colors already were perhaps too ashamed to be seen by armed women heading for battle

It was a long, hot wait until Zamora received new orders. Marta filled the time with idle chitchat, mostly concerning the rumors that flew back and forth.

            “Do you think the government’s really fallen?” she asked.

            “The buildings may be in enemy hands,” Maria answered. “The President’s way too cagey to get caught himself, though. Not alive. He was a soldier once, too, you know.”

            One trooper from the air defense team – they had to stay out in the open to use their missiles – stuck her head through the bushes and said, “I heard on the radio that the Taurans were being pushed back into the sea and that the boys of the military schools were on the attack.”

Remembering the other half of the machine gun team that had saved her from the sniper, Maria said that she thought it could well be true.

            “C’mon, ladies,” Zamora announced, finally, once the sun was about halfway up the sky. “Enough loafing. We’re back on the job.”

            In a way, the centurion thought, it’s better to go ahead despite what’s in store than to wait here, helpless.

            It took a few minutes of shouting to get the platoon reassembled in the street. Then the women began to jog again, to move closer to the fighting, as civilians waved to them and cheered. Along their route Zamora’s platoon was joined by the others from the maniple, streaming in from the left and right. Maria almost felt sorry for the poor mortar rats struggling under their loads. Then again, they had a couple of mules to help out. She didn’t feel all thatsorry for them. Besides, each of the Amazonas except for machine gun and rocket crews also carried a round of ammunition for the mortars. And seven pounds is not something to laugh at when you’re already toting over fifty.

            They passed some awful things on the way. Bodies, of course, friendly and enemy. Some were uniformed and armed; some looked like civilians who had just gotten in the way. A couple were kids.

Maria thought of Alma for about the five hundredth time that morning. Please, God? Please help Porras keep my baby safe?

 

*****

 

            “Bring me a dozen eggs, child, and the side of bacon,” Porras told Alma Fuentes. The pan on the stove was already sizzling. To Cat Gonzalez’s eldest, Romeo, she said, “Be careful not to scorch the chorley bread in the toaster.”

            Chorley was a grain either native to Terra Nova or possibly genengineered by the Noahs. No one was really certain. Growing, it resembled a sunflower that never reached more than a foot or so off the ground. Harvested, processed and baked, it made a yellow bread that was naturally buttery in taste.

            “And turn off the television!” Porras shouted at another of the older children. There was no sense in letting them get upset with worry for their mothers.

            The safe house for the children was Porras’ own. It was on the coast, far enough from the fighting that the children couldn’t hear much, if any, of it. Whatever she could hear, Porras still knew, at least in general terms, of the battle raging. She forced herself to remain calm, or as calm as she could, and kept the children busy with helping her prepare breakfast. Porras didn’t break out the government provided emergency rations. Time for that later...if things get hard.

            “AbuelaLydia, where’s my mommy?” Alma asked from beneath soulful brown eyes.

            “Child, do you remember this morning at all?”

            “Not much,” the girl answered, shaking her head.

            Good.

            “Your mommy’s with the Tercio” – the regiment – “and I’m sure she’ll be back by this evening. Tomorrow night at the latest. And you and the other children will be staying here with me. Won’t that be fun?”

            Alma nodded very deeply and seriously. “Fun,” she echoed, even while the child thought, I’m little; I’m not stupid. My mommy’s in trouble, isn’t she?

 

*****

 

            Before the platoons of Amazons reached the base of Cerro Mina they came to an open area filled with smoke, and bodies, and smells both unfamiliar and unpleasant. Marta nearly tripped over two of the bodies locked in what almost seemed an embrace. The knife of one was in the body of the other.

            There was also a shot down helicopter, a Tauran gunship, with two burned charcoal lumps in it, their arms and legs pulled up like a baby’s in a womb. Those and their stench made some of the women gag a little.

Maria looked at the helicopter and wondered if it was the same one that had dogged her steps earlier. She hadn’t heard or seen a Tauran helicopter since the one that had tried to fire her up and wondered if that absence was because of the eventual and increasing distribution of the anti-aircraft missiles.

            Marta took one sniff of the helicopter and started to gag herself. She bent over and deposited breakfast onto the asphalt.

            The Amazons held up briefly just past that scene of battle, while their maniple commander, Inez Trujillo, went to find someone to report to. While waiting, Maria ordered her squad to take positions next to a couple of wrecked enemy armored vehicles. Yes, there were burned corpses in those, too. And, yes, they stank.

            “A bad way to die; poor men,” she said.

            Wiping her mouth with a hand, Marta answered with a ruthlessness she didn’t really feel, “Fuck ‘em; better them than us or ours.” Still, she shook her head, regretting not the deed, but the necessity.

            After several minutes Tribune Trujillo showed up in the open area near Zamora’s platoon. With her was some male tribune the women didn’t recognize. The man towered over little Inez. Muscular, narrow-waisted, and painfully handsome, he looked as if he could have made a pretty good living as a male model. Maybe he did. He and Inez shook hands good-bye. Then Trujillo began to walk – perhaps a little unsteadily – toward where Maria’s squad lay. Halfway there, Inez stopped and forced herself back to reasonable calm. Thereafter, she walked upright and with apparent confidence.

The other two officers and the eight centurions and optios in the maniple gathered around her while Trujillo spoke and gestured to the map and the buildings surrounding them.

 

*****

 

Trujillo was nearly finished with her orders.  “Our attack to seize the Taurans’headquarters on Cerro Mina is to be ‘quick and irrespective of losses;’ that’s how important it is.”

“Supporting forces on the right?” Zamora asked. She already knew that one understrength maniple of the Tercio Gorgidas was going to be on the left. And that there might be – or might not; things went wrong in war – an artillery barrage to soften the hill up.

Trujillo shook her head. “I’d have mentioned it if there were going to be.”

            Zamora sighed at those words. “Irrespective of losses,” she quoted. “Oh, well. At least our left will be secure.   Maybe the TGs are mariposas. We’ve all got reason to know they are some tough mariposas.”

            “Other questions?” Trujillo asked. There was some lip chewing, some head shaking. Of further questions there were none.

            “Dismissed.”

            The officers and centurions saluted Trujillo and returned to their places. The Weapons Platoon centurion called her women and their mules over and began setting up the section for firing. As soon as the others saw the mortars begin to set up, they began filtering over by twos and threes to drop off their single rounds of ammunition.

 

*****

 

            Too soon Maria was crawling on all fours behind her platoon centurion, her squad following her. They passed through tight little alleyways and buildings; their inhabitants staring at them with wide, terrified eyes. A little girl came to stand near where they had to pass, making the sign of the cross at them. Maria flashed the girl her best smile; almost as if she wasn’t scared to death.

I guess she means well. And it’s nice to know someone cares.

            The women crossed open streets with hearts pounding. The whole time they moved they heard artillery – their own, they’d been told – pounding the steep enemy held hill to their front. The blasts made their internal organs ripple in a way that was both fascinating and extremely unpleasant, the more so as they got closer. The sensation wasn’t entirely new to any of them as they’d all been shelled, deliberately, in basic training.

            Eventually they stopped in a courtyard that abutted onto Avenida de la Santa Maria, also known as Avenida de la Victoria, the road that marked the partition between the part of the country under Balboan control and the part held for the last decade by the Taurans. Some of the machine gunners, the ones with the heavier .34 caliber belt-fed guns, were ordered into the buildings to support the attack. Cat and her drum-fed M-26 stayed with her squad.

            Maria was scared to death. She didn’t want to kill anybody; she didn’t want to be killed either. The more she thought about it, the more frightened she became. It got so bad that she lay right down on the asphalt, pretending to nap and hoping that its steadiness would help her conceal from her troops how very afraid she was.

            Marta wasn’t fooled. She sat down, cross-legged, and said, “Don’t worry, Maria. It’ll be fine.”

            Foul-mouthed and occasionally insubordinate as Marta was, Maria was awfully glad of her company. She patted her leg and half agreed with her, “Fine. Yeah. Sure.”

             In a way, having Marta there did help. Maria wasn’t quiteso scared, anyway. She didn’t feel so alone. That had really been the worst part of getting to the hide, being all on her own.

Now she was with her tribe. Life was not so bad.

 

*****

           

“What do you mean there’s no damned smoke available?” Trujillo cursed into the radio. “I can’t order my girls into thatwithout smoke!…Yes, sir…Yes, sir…I understand, sir.   Yes, sir, I’ll try.”

Inez handed the microphone back to her fire support sergeant, her Forward Observer. The FO just shrugged and said, “Can’t store the white phosphorus with the high explosive. We’ll have to wait for the WP to reach the guns.”

“We can’t wait. It’s got to be done now. Suarez promised to paste the hill good with high explosive before we go in. But we’re going in.”

“Oh, Christ,” the FO said. Smiling nervously, she added, “Funny, how you call on the only man who can help you, isn’t it?”

Trujillo, look at her watch nervously. “Yeah...funny.”

The FO looked up at the sky and said a little, hopeless, prayer; something to the effect of, “Lord, please make them run away.” No such luck, of course. The Taurans had their jobs, too.

            Trujillo looked around at her command, nearly two hundred women of the Tercio Amazona. Her eyes sought out especially those who had gone through training with her back when the regiment was just a dream. They were her best friends; no difference in rank could ever change that.

Her eyes settled on Maria briefly. She smiled with warmth and a little sadness. As she turned her gaze slightly, the smile grew both warmer and sadder. Cat Gonzalez smiled back, encouragingly.

 

*****

 

            The tempo of artillery fire landing on the hill ahead picked up noticeably. Maria opened her eyes and stood up. Lying on the asphalt hadn’t really helped all that much, anyway. She put her arms out parallel to her body to bring her squad on line. Marta fell in behind the squad. It was her job to make sure nobody fell behind her.

            “Fix...bayonets!” Trujillo commanded. Word was passed from soldier to soldier. “Fix bayonets...fix bayonets!”

Maria’s hands shook as she reached toward her belt. She pulled the bayonet out and fixed it on the end of her rifle. A steady click-click-clicking said the rest of the maniple was doing the same, putting a knife on the end of a modern rifle to turn it into something a caveman would recognize as a spear.

It was not silly, however many thoughtless amateurs thought it was. True, bayonets almost never killed anybody who could still fight. They were not supposed to. What they were supposed to do, instead, was to terrify the enemy into running away or giving up. They did that well enough, often enough, to justify keeping them in the inventory.  Of course, part of the terror was in the way they really were used; to hack the enemy’s wounded into spareribs after winning.

            Even though it is against the law of war to refuse to take prisoners, prisoners are almost never taken in a hotly contested assault. Then, too, speeding is against the traffic code.

            Arias got down on both knees, right there on the hard pavement, crossed herself, and began to pray. She included the Taurans in her prayers. Another girl, from a different squad, was crying softly. No one but she knew exactly what or whom she was crying for.

            Then it was time.

 

*****

 

            Trujillo handed the microphone back to her radio-telephone operator. The RTO held it to her own ear, listening. Then Trujillo looked at the F-26 in her hand, shook her head, gave a little “to hell with it” shrug and slung the piece across her back. The tribune took the eagle from its bearer and crossed herself.  

            There’s only one way to do this, to make sure they go up that hill…together. We’ve got a broad open street to cross. The way the trees are, they cover the enemy from sight of most of our supporting weapons but give them a perfect view of most of the street. On the plus side they couldn’t see us where we assembled on our side of the street, what with the trees, the walled courtyards, and the covered vestibules. The Taurans might only kill my girls a few at a time if we try to cross in ones and twos, but there will be a lot more time to do it in; a lot more rifles and machine guns for every second there’s a target – my women! – exposed.  And there just isn’t any more time to wait.    A chance at the headquarters for this whole sector? It has to be done, if it can be done, right away, right now. If we fail…

 

*****

 

“What the hell? Captain! Captain Bernoulli. You need to see this, sir.”

Bernoulli – a stubby Ligurini, a Tuscan mountain trooper – leapt from hole to hole, sheltering from the now desultory incoming artillery. Reaching his machine gunner’s side, he hunched his short and stocky frame down next to the man who had summoned him. “What is it, Basso?”

Basso pointed at the street below. “Sir, it’s one of the locals. I think it’s a she and I think she’s giving a speech…right in my line of fire. Sir, do I have to shoot her?”

Bernoulli shook his head at the waste of it all. “Let’s wait a sec’. Maybe she telling them all to go home…no, I guess not. Shoot if he…or she comes any closer, Basso.”

“Yessir,” the mountain trooper answered, though he clearly didn’t like it.

 

*****

 

 On the far side of the street below, Inez Trujillo shouted, “On your feet, Amazonas!” Then she waited for the girls to rise, such as hadn’t already.

“Now...For your old parents and grandparents back in the City; for the children you have or hope to have; for your country...for YOURSELVES! The future is at the top of that hill! Follow me, you cunts!”

            Holding the eagle high with both her hands, the tribune raced out into the street. She had made it more than halfway across before three things happened: the artillery stopped falling on Cerro Mina, the rest of the Amazons realized what she had done, and two enemy machine gunners on the slope simply shot her to pieces.

            Perhaps if only one or two bullets had hit Trujillo the rest might not have followed as they did. But Inez was torn apart.

            The women could see that she was dead, very dead, even before her body hit the ground. She didn’t even have time to cry out. Her head was nearly severed, misshapen by a bullet, too. Entrails spilling, her corpse sprawled on the pavement. In an instant she was transformed from a living, breathing woman into an obscenity.

            One or two enemy bullets must have hit the eagle’s staff, because it fell to the asphalt in two pieces.

            The rest of the women – those who could see – just stared for a moment, speechless except for one or two of the girls who screamed. Maria recognized Cat’s scream clearly. She looked again at the body, biting her lower lip, tears coming to her eyes.

            Maria felt a horrible anger build in her. “They ruined her! They ruined her!” She tightened the grip on her rifle and screamed, “Ataque!” In the next moment she and her girls were charging across that street screaming like she-wolves and firing from the hip.

            The other squads followed right along. Well, men and womenbothare herd animals.

            More machine guns – rifles too, of course – joined those that had killed Trujillo. Maria vaguely saw – rather, felt – one long sweeping burst cut down the woman – more of a girl really, she was no more than eighteen – beside her. A spattering of angry hornets cracked the air by her head and two or three more Amazons – three, it was three – cried out and flopped to the ground behind her.

 

*****

           

Marta’s chest hurt terribly where a bullet had struck her breast, penetrating both liquid-metal plate and silk backing to lodge in the soft flesh below. Still she crawled from one body to another trying to do whatever good she could. She stopped briefly by the still-breathing form of Isabel Galindo. Isabel had been an immigrant from Santander. Isabel had been lovely.

She wasn’t anymore. From whatever angle the bullet had struck, it had blown away most of her face and both of her eyes. Marta dropped her head onto the shallowly breathing chest and wept, briefly.

“I can’t help, Isi. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. Got to get to the other girls.” She bent to give Isabel a kiss from bloody lips before crawling on.

She stopped briefly by Martina Santa Cruz. Martina had just joined the tercio a few months before. She wasn’t much past eighteen years old. She would never be nineteen. Marta crawled on.

Marta didn’t have to turn the next body over to know whose it was. “Oh, Cat, she moaned, “what about your kids?”

That was one friend too many. Marta collapsed, unconscious.

 

*****

           

            Maria didn’t know, of course, that almost every close friend she had in the world was wounded or dead or dying. She kept running forward, firing short bursts. She kept shouting for the others to follow.

There weren’t many others in her squad who could follow. Half of those who began that charge went down before they’d even crossed the broad street. Provided one didn’t mind stepping on the wounded, or making the odd short jump, it would have been possible to have crossed it and never set foot on pavement. Even if someone had tried to cross it without stepping on any bodies, they would still have stained their boots red.

            The rest of them, the half left standing, reached the wooded slope and, firing from the hip, began to close. It was slow going up that hill. More girls fell with every step.

            What few Amazonas Maria had left did what she did, dodging from tree to tree, firing ahead without bothering much to aim, mostly just trying to ruin the Taurans’aim.

            Then someone ahead of her reached a row of barbed concertina. The Amazon detached her bayonet to use with the scabbard to try to cut a way through. Together bayonet and scabbard made a good set of wire cutters; they were designed that way. Others had the same idea, of course. The Taurans concentrated their fire on those trying to cut through. They were hit, some wounded, some dead. Not one of them got more than thirty feet past the wire alive. The wire itself was draped with bodies hanging grotesquely by the barbs caught on their uniforms and in their flesh. Most were dead, but one woman who had been hung up on the wire kept trying to pick her intestines off of the ground and stuff them back into her torn belly. Her one good arm kept getting re-caught on the wire, forcing her to spill her organs back to the earth. She made a horrible keening sound – hardly human, really – the entire time.

            That made Maria very angry, but in a very cold way. When she saw a pair of enemy soldiers come running up, she drew her rifle to her shoulder, leaned into a tree, took careful aim, and fired.

Her first target threw his hands into the air and fell back, dropping his machine gun. The other one stopped, foolishly, for a second or two. Perhaps he was stunned or confused; she didn’t know or care. He looked, maybe, eighteen. She shot him in the stomach. With a surprised look on his face, he dropped his rifle, clutched his hands at his midsection and sat straight down.  He fell straight back after she shot him, again, this time in the head.

            “Sergeant Fuentes,” someone gasped. It was Vielka Arias. She had Cat’s machine gun in her hands. Maria looked her over and saw that Vielka was hit, too, in the leg. She must have crawled all the way, dragging Cat’s gun behind her.

            Maria flopped down to her belly beside Arias. Pointing with a finger, she said, “Good girl, Vielka! Now see those two bunkers?”

Vielka nodded deeply.

“Good. Good girl. I want you to use that gun to keep their heads down. I’m going to go for the wire. If I can cut through I’ll signal you to join me.”

Though Arias winced with pain, she nodded her understanding with great seriousness.

            Vielka began firing, first at one bunker than the other, as Maria crawled forward, snakelike. As she crawled, she detached the bayonet from her rifle and the scabbard from her belt. These she linked together.

            Once at the barrier, Maria started using her bayonet to gnaw her way through the barbed tangles. Vielka’s fire alternated, spitting first to one side of her, then to the other.

“Goddamit,” Maria exclaimed as her hand caught on a barb, tearing the skin. She continued her cutting, even so, her work slowed by the ripping barbs. Eventually, she found she had to rise to one knee to keep up her cutting.

            Kneeling like that, the work progressed more quickly. Maria had made it about half way through when she felt a blow hit her, as if from a great fist. Something tore through her side and out her abdomen. Alma would be the only child she could ever bear with her own body.        

Maria cried out in surprise and pain. As her bayonet-wire cutters flew away, she fell down again. Dimly she saw that there was the ragged lip of a shell crater nearby. She started to crawl for it.

            After the first shock, her wounds didn’t hurt all that much. Then they started to burn like hellfire, especially the larger exit wound. Maria began to cry from the pain. As she lay there, sobbing into the dirt, the bullets continued cracking overhead. That was Vielka, still trying.

 

*****

 

            Zamora had been trying to make sense of the ruination of her platoon when she saw Maria fall. She didn’t think; she just raced for the writhing body of her friend. Bullets split the bark from trees where the enemy gunners sought vainly to bring her down. When Zamora’s helmet strap broke and her helmet flew off her head not even her longish, red, woman’s hair caused the fire to slow.

Something – luck or God or pulsating prong of perversity – was with her, however. She managed to dive to the ground next to Maria unhurt. She paused only for the briefest moment before taking a firm grasp of Maria’s combat harness.

Maria dimly felt the strong grip of Zamora’s hand on the back of her harness.   She muttered, faintly, “No. No. Leave me here.” The muttering quickly turned to one long continuous scream as Maria’s body was dragged across the broken ground.   The screaming grew to a crescendo, until Zamora dragged her across the rough lip of an artillery crater and down into its muddy, protective shelter. Then Zamora took off, leaping out of the crater like a deer.

A few others, all but one in pretty bad shape, joined Maria in the crater. The Amazons’ fire stopped, for all practical purposes, not long after Maria had been hit. One woman – a not so badly wounded one – crawled to the edge of the crater and fired her rifle until an enemy bullet blew her brains out the back of her head. The enemy stopped, too, for a while, then picked up firing again. Maria heard some woman call out to save her, that the Taurans were killing all the wounded. She dug her fingers into the compacted mud of the crater and tried to crawl out to help.

She lacked the strength. Halfway up the slope of the crater Maria passed out.

 

*****

 

            Somewhere up the jungle-shrouded slope bagpipes were playing Boinas Azules Cruzan la Frontera, Second Tercio code for “No quarter.” Down below, medics picked through the one hundred and twenty-odd female bodies littering the street and the hillside. Most, if not by much, were still alive…if not by much. Many could be saved.

            “Sergeant…sergeant we’ve got a few live ones here!”

            The man with three stripes and a Red Cross armband came over and looked down into the blood- and corpse-filled shell crater. He shook his head sadly, muttering, “Stupid women…brave women.”

            Ahead, the sounds of firing told that Second Infantry Tercio was cleaning up the remnants of the Taurans atop the hill. Second had made its attack hours later, but in overwhelming strength  –  nearly four thousand fresh men, with substantial artillery support! When the men of the Second had seen the bloody pulp into which most of the women had been ground, they had gone berserk. There would be few if any enemy survivors on that hill. “No quarter.”

            “Well don’t just stand around with your goddamned teeth in your mouths!” the sergeant said. “Separate the live ones and get them out of here!”

Interlude

            Overhead, at about twenty-five hundred feet, the streamlined shape of an airship wound its laborious way between La Plata, far to the north, and Secordia, way down south. Balboa’s Herrera Airport was a routine stop for such. Patricio Carrera stepped out of his armored limo and looked at the ship without much interest. He had more important work to do today to spare a thought for anything but that.  Besides, if it mattered, Fernandez would have told me about it.

            “The Senate is my creation, not my creature,” Carrera reminded himself as he walked up the building-wide stone staircase, toward the four dressed granite columns. Compared to a local, Carrera was tall at five feet, ten inches or so. He was also considerably lighter than the national norm, with a kind of piercing blue eyes that were essentially unheard of in the Republic of Balboa. Since this was the Senate House, the Curia, he wore dress whites, but devoid of nearly all decoration. Despite the light material of the uniform, in the short walk between his staff car and the portico he could already feel sweat building up on his back and sliding down. Balboa had a very hot climate.

            The blazing sun shone on columns which held up a thirty foot deep portico. Past the columns stood the dressed but unpolished granite blocks of the front wall of the Curia, the Senate House. Centered on that, directly to Carrera’s front, were great bronze double doors. In front of those doors stood a liveried servant of the Senate, who was also a retired first centurion of the Legion’s Fourth Infantry Tercio.

            To this man Carrera said, “Dux Bellorum Patricio Carrera requests audience with the Senate of the Republic.” He then took out and handed over his service pistol. That military officers should never enter the Curia while under arms, nor indeed be escorted by armed guards, was a tradition Carrera hoped to establish firmly and beyond question. The best way in his power to do that was to follow it himself.

            There was no doubt that the audience would be granted. Otherwise, Carrera would not have come. Still, formalities had to be observed. The retired centurion took Carrera’s pistol, said, “Please wait here, Duque,” and then turned and walked through the doors to announce Carrera’s request.

            Carrera then waited, patiently enough. It wasn’t a very long wait, a matter of mere minutes, until the man returned and said, “The Senate will hear you now, Duque.”

 

*****

 

            Raul Parilla, President of the Republic and, pro tem, Princeps Senatus, sat a curule chair facing the Curia’s long, tiled central aisle. The space was flanked by rising levels of marble benches holding a quorum of the roughly one hundred and forty senators. Behind him, to his left, stood a larger than life-sized loricate statue of “Dama Balboa,” the personification of the nation and the Republic. The statue’s model had been Artemisia de McNamara.  Carrera had sent far and wide for a sculptor – rather, a team of them – to do Artemisia, and the country, full justice, and just as far for a one by one by three meter chunk of near-molasses-colored marble.

            The space behind Parilla to his right was empty, though the Senate had some thoughts on whose statue should fill it. “Victoria should go there,” was the consensus, and Lourdes de Carrera’s name had come up more than once as the prospective model. Then, too, what the hell, since the sculpting team was just hanging around…

            Carrera didn’t know about any of that, though Parilla and the Senate did. Fernandez, the chief of intelligence knew, too, but he knew nearly everything and told only a fraction of that. Indeed, Fernandez had made only one serious mistake the entire time he’d been chief of intelligence, though that one had been a doozy. All three knew why Carrera was at the Curia today, though few if any of the Senate knew.

            And they’re not going to like any of it when they do know, Patricio, Parilla thought. Not a bit. We’re just not that “enlightened” a country. Pretty unenlightened, as a matter of fact. Barely out of the trees, truth be told. Why…

            Parilla’s thought was interrupted by the opening words of Carrera, his friend, supporter, sometimes subordinate, and sometimes mentor.

 

*****

           

            One of these days, Carrera thought, I really am going to begin a speech to the Senate with the words, “Conscript Fathers.” And why not? I conscripted the bastards, didn’t I? Today’s not that day though. Maybe after the next war.

            Instead, he began, “As I’m sure all of you know, I am the most progressive, the most enlightened, the very most multiculturally sensitive human being on the face of this planet.”

            He kept his own face straight all through that opening but had to wait for the Senators to stop laughing before he continued.

            “Exactly,” he said, and smiled as he said it. “So when I tell you I want to do two things that might strike less astute observers as progressive, enlightened, and sensitive, you gentlemen – and you, too, Mrs. Hurtado – will not be fooled. You, at least, will know beyond a shadow of a doubt that those are the least of my concerns.”

            He cast his gaze around, seeking eye contact with a few key members of the Senate. When he had caught the eye of one in particular, a dark-skinned veteran named Robles, Carrera asked, “Senator Robles, how old are you?”

            “Thirty-nine, Duque,” Robles answered.

            “How old is your wife?”

            “Seventeen,” Robles answered, defensively. Fernandez had been sure he’d be defensive about his new wife’s age. “Why?”

            Carrera held up and lightly wagged his right index finger. Please wait. You’ll know in a bit. And Fernandez knows everything.

            “Fifteen days ago,” Carrera continued, “I had to witness the execution for mutiny of a senior tribune, aged thirty-seven, and a young corporal, aged nineteen. Both were male. When they joined we didn’t ask so they never mentioned that they were homosexual. Note, that there is no law or regulation against being homosexual, but there is a law against two people, conspiring together, to subvert good order and discipline in the Legions. That’s mutiny.

            “The corporal was fairly new, but among the tribune’s decorations were three wound badges, the close combat badge, the Cazador tab, of course, and the Cruz de Coraje en Oro con Espadas.

            “And, despite that, I had to have them both shot.

            “No more,” Carrera said, shaking his head firmly. “I don’t want to have to do that ever again. Ever. Again.

            “Because,” and Carrera’s finger shot out at Senator Robles, “Eros mocks Mars. Love knows no ages, nor sexes, nor conditions. It accepts no bars. And people brave enough to fight and maybe die for the Republic are not going to be dissuaded or deterred by our occasional firing squads. The most those do is encourage discretion.” He shrugged. “Usually… imperfectly.”

            Carrera held his hands up, palms facing and parallel, roughly six inches apart, and said, “But, you know, deterrence always seems to fail by about that much.”

            Senator Hurtado used her hand to hide an embarrassed smile.

            “So what do you propose, Duque?” Parilla asked, though he knew perfectly well what Carrera intended. And really didn’t approve.

            Speaking slowly and very deliberately, Carrera answered, “I want to raise a regiment – a small regiment, I think; not many will be suitable for the conditions I have in mind – of married male homosexuals.”

            Someone – Senator Cardenas, Carrera thought – shouted out from the benches, “This is impossible, Duque! You are going to make us a laughingstock among the nations of the world. Raising a regiment of queers; marriedqueers? Impossible. And I shudder to think what the church will say.”

            Bright eyes flashing, Carrera answered, “It ispossible, Senator. It’s been done. It can be done again. And I intend to do it.”

            “But to what purpose, Duque? We don't need them. I don’t want them. They make my fucking skin crawl!” Cardenas shuddered.

            Carrera hesitated before answering. “No pun intended, but I find them a little, ah, distasteful, myself. But, Senator, as I said, just two weeks ago I watched two good soldiers shot by firing squads for mutiny. Their crime was that they were of different ranks, fell in love and... did something about it. They weren’t the first we’ve had to shoot, either. You know that.

            “They died well, those two. I want them to be the last. This is a way, a chance anyway, for them to be the last.”

            Carrera looked around the Curia, gauging support. He didn’t think he had it. He said, “Senators...if it doesn’t work… what have we lost? Some money for training. A few buildings we could always use for something else. Some uniforms. Let me try this...please?”

            “Besides, I need them for something else.”

            “Eh?” Cardenas asked. “What? What else?”

            Carrera’s eyes lit again as he answered, “I want to raise a regiment of women.”

 

*****

 

            Later, in his own offices beneath the Curia’s main floor, Parilla sighed, “They voted against you, Patricio. On both questions. No money for your Tercio Gorgidas or Tercio Amazona. Even Hurtado voted ‘nay.’”

            “I’d be proud of them,” Carrera admitted, then scowled, “if I wasn’t so damned annoyed that they balked me.”

            “What are you going to do?”

            Carrera’s mouth twisted before he answered, “When I turned over the bulk of the Legion’s assets to the Senate, you know I openly kept quite a bit for discretionary funds.”

            Parilla smiled. “Yeah, I told them you would. I think they were secretly relieved to be able to balk you without frustrating you. I also made you a deal, even against my better judgment.”

            Carrera’s left eyebrow shot up. “What kind of deal?”

            “If you can make these regiments worth a damn, on your own ticket, the Senate will recompense your discretionary funds.”

            “Best you could do, huh?”

            “Better than I really wanted to do,” Parilla admitted.

 

Chapter Two

To sleep, perchance to dream.

                        --William Shakespeare

Maria:

 

I’d had it pretty plush as a little girl. I didn’t even suspect just how plush until much later.

            My family lived in a big white stucco house, a few miles west of Punta Cantera. We had a maid, a cook, two cars. My mother needed the maid, too, given the sheer size of our house. Maybe by South Colombian standards we weren’t quite rich. Certainly we weren’t more than distantly connected to the oligarchy that ran Balboa from shortly after Belisario Carrera’s revolt against Old Earth until quite recently. Still, we lived better than about ninety-eight percent of the people of our country.

            My earliest memory – and I can’t really remember how old I was then – was of sitting on my father’s lap watching television. Two men, one brown, one black, were fighting. I didn’t care about that, of course; sitting on daddy’s lap was better than playing with my dolls, trying on new clothes, or even ice cream or candy. I only paid attention to the fight because it seemed important to my father.

            Suddenly the brown man on the TV threw down his hands saying, “No mas. No mas.” Daddy went into a towering rage at that, putting me on my feet so he could pace and fume. I remember him using words like “disgrace”, “ashamed”, and “coward.” He used some other words, too, that I’d never heard from him before. Come to think of it, I’d never heard some of those words from anyonebefore. I guess I must have been really young.

 

*****

 

            There were a lot of things on the television worse than that when I was young. I was maybe seven when I walked into the living room and saw my mother, even paler than she normally was, staring at the screen while biting her finger so hard blood started to drip. Mama was crying.

            I asked what was the matter, but she just shook her head while continuing to stare at the screen. Then I looked and I saw the bodies, and the parts of bodies, and the blood.

            At first I thought it must be a movie. But Mama never would have cried over a movie, not her. And, when I looked from the screen to her face, I saw tears running.

            “Who would do this?” Mama asked of the air, her hands flailing about, helplessly. “Who would do such a thing?  Even when we were invaded, twelve years ago, they tried not to kill regular people. This… monstrous… thing; they intended to butcher innocent folk.”

            Then she realized I was really there and picked me up and carried me out of the room.

            She was too late, of course. I already had an idea of what had happened. And I thought then, as I think now, that the most important lesson I’d learned since starting school was that when someone hits you, you have to hit them back. Hard. As hard as you can.

 

*****

           

            It was maybe a year and a quarter later before we finally did hit back. I got to watch that on television, too, with Daddy and my brother, Emilio. Mama wouldn’t watch. Emilio was enthralled. Daddy was mostly just interested.

            I know now why the images on the screen were green and grainy. At the time I didn’t. I’m not sure Daddy did either. And there wasn’t really that much to see, just bright green flashes on a long steep ridge somewhere they called “Sumer.” I didn’t know where that was.

            The man doing the talking seemed really nervous, and it was hard to make out his words over the other sounds. Sometimes he’d turn his camera around and show what was happening in the other direction, but when he did you could see even less, just the outline of a hill being lit up by flashing lights.

            I fell asleep on Daddy’s lap before much of anything really happened.

 

*****

 

            It wasn’t so long after that that the country began to really change. Neither Mama nor Daddy were too happy with the changes.

            What changes? Oh, I don’t recall that I’d ever seen a soldier in my life except on TV or at the movies. But, more and more as time went on you would see them everywhere. Some even came to school sometimes to talk to us.   And they had parades in the streets pretty often, too.

 

*****

           

            In any case, I knew and cared little enough about all of that back then. My world was one of school, friends, beaches, parties and shopping. The latest hit love song was much more important to me than the fact that an army was growing around us.

            The first time I ever really saw the Legion was when the Second Infantry Tercioparaded down Via Hispanica. It was on a day when my mother had taken me shopping for clothes at a boutique near the Iglesia de Nuestra Señora. We had only just arrived at the door to the store, I having delayed things by successfully talking mother into buying me a new pair of shoes at a different establishment as well as two new music discs at yet another.

            Hey, helping Mama spend Daddy’s money was my job.

            The parade itself was very well stage-managed, it seems to me now. Traffic was stopped in both directions for maybe half a mile. That was as far as I could see, anyway. Then smoke appeared as if by magic, a screen of billowing thick gray fog, all across the street. Someone started throwing these little bombs into the smoke. They whistled and then blew up, something like the sounds I’d heard on the TV, coming from Sumer. By that time, I was also able to recognize them from the war movies my little brother Emilio watched whenever he could. I, assuredly, had no interest in war in general or artillery in particular.

            Then the pipes started, loud and shrill, and the first rank of the Second Tercioappeared, marching through the smoke and the explosions...as if marching into a fight. I think that was the effect they intended. It was...impressive. It impressed me, anyway.

            When the boys went into their parade step – a sort of modified goose step, actually – people on either side applauded and the girls nearly swooned. Some of the men and boys marching really were handsome. And there was a powerin their tread that I’d never experienced before.

            I was fairly mesmerized for the moment. My mother just pulled me away into a store, tsk-tsking about what her father would have said had he been there to see it. No one, hardly, in oursocial class would dream of joining the military, back then, and certainly not an infantry tercio. We were all very much above that sort of thing. Mama’s whole family explicitly despised the Legions. Daddy’s was a bit more ambivalent about them.

 

*****

           

            My father was a businessman, self made for the most part. He’d started life with very little besides determination, some brains, some guts. I remember him, when I remember him, as being very handsome, very dark.             My mother was a rabiblanca– a “white ass.” She had been something of a debutante, from one minor branch of an old, old family.

            My mother’s family neverliked my father. For one thing, he absolutely refused to take anything from them, a position my mother supported him in for the sake of his pride. For another, he just wasn’t from one of the old families that usually ran our country. That stain passed on to myself and my brothers and sister. Our grandparents never cared for us as much as they did the other grandchildren. Besides we were too dark from Father’s side of the family.

            Still, Mother and Father did everything they could to make it up to us. We went on vacations regularly, attended the best schools in the City. Today I shudder to think of how much money they spent on me and my three siblings. We were probably as spoiled as any four kids growing up anywhere. And I? I was the apple of Daddy’s eye, certainly through age fifteen. Whatever I wanted, and I recall that once that had even included acting classes, I got.

            Age fifteen? Yes, that’s when everything changed. The big change? I discovered boys. In particular, I discovered one boy.

            Juan was simply gorgeous; tall, muscled and olive. He was curly haired, with green eyes framing a patrician nose. Yumm.   His family was as old as my mother’s. Juan’s age? Eighteen. When you’re fifteen, eighteen looks very mature and attractive indeed.

            I saw him first when I went with some friends to the beach at Santa Clara, east of the Ciudad. I was sitting under one of the palm-thatched huts that dot the beach, just chatting with my girlfriends, when Juan came into my view. He looked good in a bathing suit.

            So did I; I guess. Juan came over to introduce himself and my girlfriends thoughtfully made themselves scarce. We talked, made some arrangements, met again in the City. Met again. Met again.

            He could sweet talk a girl. I wasn’t short, he said; I was “perfection in miniature.” I wasn’t too dark, no, I was...let me think. Oh, yes, “the shadow of beauty on a moonlit night.” Oh, thatwas a good one. He told me I was beautiful, often enough, with enough of what sounded to me like sincerity, that I began to believe that to him I wasbeautiful, not merely pretty. I was his “Heaven and Earth. My eyes, his stars. My body, the paradise heyearned to enter.”

            He said he loved me, too.

            I decided Juan was the one. The usual thing – err, things, actually – happened. I won’t pretend I didn’t like it. Even the things I didn’t much like for themselves I loved doing with him...for him. I didn’t even mind that some of those things hurt.

            But then the only slightly less usual thing happened.

 

*****

 

            “Madre de Dios! What is the matter with you, Maria?” My mother stood, arms folded, at the door to my bathroom where I knelt, head in the toilet.

            I had hidden my pregnancy for a couple of months, too afraid to disappoint my parents. Rising to my feet, I answered, “Nothing, Mother. I just don’t feel well.”

            “Yes...of course...you don’t feel well.” Uh, oh. Mother wasn’t buying.

            She looked me over very carefully. Then she slapped me right across the face. “I wonder...do you suppose your bra is getting too tight, little one? Do you think maybe you need a larger size school uniform?” She hit me again, knocking me to the floor, then screamed, “Who was the boy, you cheap little tramp?” When I didn’t answer, she pulled me to my feet by my arm. Then she twisted my arm behind my back and bent it. I screamed.

            She forced the truth out of me. I wasn’t as used to pain then as I later became.

            Oh, sister, was there a scene at my house that night. Father screamed at me, slapped my face, too. He’d never done anything like that before, never even raised his voice to me. Mother had always disciplined the girls.

            Mother, on the other hand, just cried continuously, moaning about the shame of her daughter being a “cheap puta.” It wasn’t until quite a few years later that I discovered from my sister that Mother had been three or four months pregnant with me when she’d married Father.

            Daddy called Juan’s parents, demanding that he marry me. They said Juan denied being the father. They said that if Daddy couldn’t control his “little whores” it was no concern of theirs or of their son.  

            Naturally, my father went wild at that, but since Juan’s parents hung up and took the phone off the hook there was no one to take it out on but Mother and myself. Finally, I ran to my room in tears.

 

*****

           

            The next day I took off from school to find Juan, since his parents weren’t accepting any calls from me. I was so surehe would want to elope right away. There wouldn’t be any point in detailing all the places I looked for him. Suffice to say that I didfind him. I wished I hadn’t.

            He’d already found a new girl, was with her, in fact. No time waster was our Juan. When I tried to get his attention he turned his back on me. When I insisted, he said – and he said it out loud, so everyone could hear – that the baby could possibly be his, but since I would “go to bed with anybody the odds were against it.” Then he announced that he wanted nothing further to do with me because I was trying to pin this pregnancy on him. I ran out, again in tears.

            The son of a bitch knewI’d been a virgin.

            Well, my parents were no happier that I hadn’t gone to school. Still, the big thing was the baby.

            “I am taking you to the doctor and you are going to abort that little bastard inside you,” Father said. So much for devout Catholicism.

            “No, I’m not,” I answered. “It’s my baby and I’m keeping it.”

            “Then you’ll keep it elsewhere,” Father threatened. “I won’t have your bastard in this house.” Mother said nothing. With Father in charge she was able to just keep crying.

            “Then I’ll GO!” I shouted back as I stormed off to my room.

 

*****

 

            I went to bed that night broken-hearted. Even then, even with the exhaustion of tears, I couldn’t sleep. Juan didn’t want me, had used me and thrown me away like old toilet paper. Daddy and Mother were ashamed of me; so ashamed they wanted to destroy my baby. They’d do it too, I thought. They’d make me do it.

            That I just couldn’t let happen. I might not have Juan. I might have lost my parents’ love. But I had my baby. Already I could see her – I was sure the baby would be a girl, see her smiling face, hear her laugh, watch her clap her hands in innocent joy. No. No one was going to take my baby away – or hurt her. I got up and began to quietly pack a few things: Some clothes, whatever little money I had saved when I wasn’t too busy spending it on clothes, music, shoes, or jewelry. I packed a family picture. I took, too, the emerald ring I’d been given on my fifteenth birthday, my quinseñera.

            I also raided the refrigerator for half a dozen olives, the big gray ones that are about the size of a plum and are said to taste something like real Old Earth olives. Mother kept a couple of trees out back, green-trunked and gray-fronded, but those would have been too bitter. Standing in the kitchen, thinking of her olive trees, I considered for a moment taking some of the tranzitree fruit that grew in her garden as well. Green on the outside, red on the inside, sweet and deadly poisonous; the tranzitree fruit would have been a quick way out.

            I couldn’t do it. It wasn’t just my mess of a life at stake.

            I crept out of the house, as quiet as a mouse, sometime before dawn. As quiet as I’d been, my little brother, Emilio, met me at the foot of the staircase.

            “Are you leaving us, Maria?” he asked, a look of real twelve-year-old’s sorrow in his eyes. “Is it because you’re going to have a baby?”

            I just threw my arms around him, trying very hard not to cry. Emilio had always been my favorite; ever since the day Mother had brought him home from the hospital. I loved my sister and other brother well enough. There had always been something special between Emilio and myself, though.

            Emilio asked me to wait a minute while he ran to his room. When he came back he had about twenty-five drachma in his hands...that, and his favorite baseball glove. “Please take these, Maria. I know you don’t need the glove...but it may remind you of me. And you will need the money.”

            I started to really cry then. I buried my face in his shoulder to muffle my sobbing. Then he started to cry without any shoulder to deaden the sound. I worried that we’d wake my parents.

            I told him, “Emilio, I have to go. But I’m going to miss you most of all.”

            “But how will I find you?” he asked.

            “Don’t worry. Once I’m on my feet, I’ll find you.”

            With Emilio’s little fortune in my purse, his glove weighing down my satchel, tears in my eyes and a lump in my throat, I left.

 

*****

 

            I walked for hours through the city, switching my suitcase from hand to hand as I did. I was pretty naive in most of the ways of the world, but I knew I’d need money until I could find a job. So...no taxi. And I didn’t know the bus routes; I’d never had to take a regular bus before. Still, by noon I had reached my destination, an even seedier than usual part of the Rio Abajo Barrio.   There I went looking for a room.

            Finally, an apartment manager showed me something in my price range. “For what you can afford to spend, Miss, this is about as good as you’re going to find.”

            But, God, it was awful. I don’t mean merely dreary and dirty, though it was those things, too. The one window was cracked. There were cockroaches scurrying around the floor when the manager of the building turned on the one, bare, light bulb. And it stank, of grease, of dirty bodies...of sex, too. Nasty, you know. And it was the bestof what I’d seen in my price range.

            Well, I did some mental figuring. With the money I had I could afford this place for about six weeks and still eat once a day. I thought six weeks would be enough time to find something to do, some kind of work. Then I could get a better place.

            I took the dump.

 

*****

           

            You can’t hold a fifteen year old, boy or girl, accountable for being dumb. The money lasted maybe three weeks. And I sure hadn’t found work by then.

            I’m not going to talk about the next several months. Go ahead and assume the worst you can imagine. It was probably, in most ways, worse than that. But at least it wasn’t prostitution.

            Eventually, my pregnancy began to show so badly I couldn’t get anykind of work, even the Barriopimps weren’t interested. I lived off charity for a while. You cannot imagine how much that hurt, coming from my family, with my father – to say nothing of my mother.

            Then came the big day. My water broke, I went into labor. One of the neighbor women helped me bring the baby into the world, there on my filthy mattress.

            It was hard. The baby was big and I was...tiny...inside. Writhing in agony, I cursed Juan. I cursed my father. I cursed every man who’d ever lived.   While I was at it, I cursed Eve.

            Mr. Rios waited outside while his wife held me and helped me and comforted me. When Mrs. Rios held Alma to my breast, I thought she was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. I still think so. I can’t imagine ever thinking differently.

            Alma was fine and healthy. I got sick. If it wasn’t for Mrs. Rios and her husband I don’t think I would have made it.

            After a few months – yes, that’s how sick I was – I was able to start looking for work again. Unfortunately, there were no jobs for little ex-rich girls with no skills, a tenth grade education and a baby to care for. Not unless they were in the new legions, and I was too young to join even if I’d wanted to. Not that the thought ever even crossed my mind.

            I’ll tell you the truth: I considered going to work in one of the whore bars. I don’t suppose that I had any real skill at that sort of thing, Juan or no, but I’d been an eager learner. I might have become a whore, too, if my having been sick so long hadn’t made me – temporarily – pretty damned unattractive. I’m just as glad I never had to find out if I could have.

            I did find work; as a waitress. It was hard work and the restaurant was hot. And me? I’d never worked a real job a day in my life before I got pregnant. And the odds and ends things I’d done so far didn’t require even as much skill as a busboy needed.   I was also still weak from being sick so long.

            My family had paid for dancing lessons for the girls, fencing for the boys.  Ithought I was pretty graceful. But I seemed to spill more food on the floor than I served the first few days I was there. The manager fired me after an unfortunate incident involving a large bowl of hot soup and someone’s trousers.

            The next foray into economic independence was as a maid. Now, you understand, I couldn’t be a maid for any of my own people. My parents might have found out and died of shame. I still owed them something, I thought. So it had to be for some foreigners. And the Taurans were the most numerous foreigners around.

            That first maid job lasted two days. It was for some old man who lived in Balboa and worked on the locks of the Transitway. He was Sachsen-born as I recall. Hekept insisting I...well, it doesn’t matter, I wasn’t going to do it, not for him. Once he understood, out went Maria on the street again.

            After that, I went to work for a Gallic couple, the Mangins. He was an officer, a captain, in their army. She was a housewife. They were really nice to Alma and myself. We lived in a little room underneath the house. It was even air conditioned and had its own bath. Life was not bad.

            However, all good things come to an end. By the time I went to work for the Mangins they only had about a year left in the country. When they moved away, so did my job. Back to Rio Abajo I went. Still, since the job with Mangins had come with room and board, I’d been able to save almost six hundred drachma.   

            With the money I’d saved I was able to pay for some new clothes and a better room. The new clothes got me another job, this time working in a store on Avenida Central. I was on my feet all day, six and a half days a week. The Rios’ continued to care for my daughter. Whenever I could, I looked for a better job.

 

*****

 

            “Well, Miss Fuentes, your office skills aren’t really what we’re looking for. Still, you’re young. You can be trained. We’ll give you a try.” The speaker was Señor Arnulfo Piedras, a chubby, jolly-seeming man of about forty. He ran an office in a bank off of Via Hispanica.

            I gushed, “Oh, thank you, sir. Thank you.  I promise you won’t be sorry.”

            “I’m sure I won’t,” he said, meditatively. “Please come back tomorrow at eight to begin.”

            I left feeling some real hope for the first time in many, many months. As I walked past the rows of desks, I never noticed that none of the women working there would meet my eyes.

 

*****

 

            “Close the door behind you, Maria,” Mr. Piedras said, gently. I did.

            Once the door was shut, his face went from gentle to a mask of utter fury. “Idiot!” he screamed at me. “Idiota! Can’t you do the simplest little thing right?” He waved a piece of typewritten paper in front of my face.

            I stood there by his desk, speechless. I couldn’t imagine what I’d done so wrong. I’d only been working for about two weeks.

            Piedras continued, “I gave you this job out of the goodness of my heart and thisis how you repay me? Fool! Blunderer! Moron!” I still had no idea what he was talking about. Hell, I was too much in shock to even begin to understand what he was talking about.

            Then he shouted, “You’re fired.” That hit me. I started to cry. I didn’t know what I’d done so wrong. What couldI have done so wrong? My old job was already filled. I couldn’t even go back. I’d taken a better apartment, one I could only afford on my new salary. And he was firing me already. I had a baby to support.

            At my tears, Piedras seemed to relent. His fat face softened. He put his arms around me as if to comfort me.

            I stiffened as I felt him unsnap my bra, one handed. I think now that it must have taken much practice for him to learn to do that so easily. I soon found myself bent over his desk, face down, the sausage-like fingers of his left hand playing with my breast, the other lifting my skirt and tugging at my panties. When he had those out of the way he stuck a hand into his desk drawer.

            I didn’t start to sob out loud until I felt him rub something, lubricant, I suppose, between my legs. He put a hand over my mouth to shush me. Then he raped me.

 

*****

 

            Alma looked up at my face from where she’d been resting her head on my chest. She asked, “Whatsamatter, Mama? Why are you crying?”

            “No reason, baby,” I sniffled. “Everything’s fine,” I lied. “Just cuddle into Mama and sleep.”

            It had gotten better at work, actually, over the past several months. Where Piedras had called for me two or three times a week to begin with, now there was another young girl for him to break in. I didn’t have to feel the swine inside me more than once every few weeks.

            I’d stopped crying once I realized the fat pig enjoyed it. My only protest now was, if he forced me to my knees, to push him so far into the back of my throat that I threw up on him.. He didn’t enjoy that. After the first couple of times of cleaning my vomit from his trousers, he gave up on it.

            He still usually pushed me face down onto his desk. After the first time I threw up on him, he took me...behind...to punish me, I suppose. He still did that from time to time.

            Why didn’t I complain? Well, the first few times maybe I could have. Just maybe somebody would have listened, too. Then he’d have told his story. You know which story, the one about the little tramp who tried to seduce the boss. They would have believed him. And I’d have been fired. And maybe Alma would have starved.

            But what about the law? Same thing; same ending. My country just wasn’t set up to protect women who were alone, women who didn’t have a husband, son, or father to protect them. Nothing is stronger than custom and that was ours at the time. I had no one. I was alone, nearly without rights. I was helpless.

            I took showers all the time, but I never felt clean anymore. I was barely eighteen.

 

*****

           

            Things began to really fall apart again when the civilian government used the Tauransand our police force to try to get rid of President Parilla and Duque Carrera. Everyone knows how they failed to do so, how Lourdes Carrera escaped from captivity, got some help, then fought her way to a TV studio to rally the tercio of Volgans to save her husband. Then came the Revolution, along with a very large number of public executions. Then came the Tauran financial embargo. And with that, my job disappeared. Besides, Piedras had to make room for a new addition to his harem.

            I had to find us a smaller place, no choice. Alma was too little still to understand why she had to leave her old playmates behind. I didn’t know how to explain it.

            It was at about that time that I discovered that we were no longer a democracy, at least what I’d always thought of as a democracy. On the other hand, I was still too young to vote so I really didn’t give it much thought.

 

*****

 

            Also at about this time my sister and my mother found me. Forget the tears and recriminations, forget the money they offered me too. I was my father’s daughter, and I had my pride. Still, they would sometimes bring something for Alma that I could never quite bring myself to refuse. The poor baby had so little.

            Well, my financial situation just kept deteriorating. The country as a whole was surviving the foreign embargo, but for those of us who were on the margins of society and weren’t in the Legion life got grimmer and grimmer. I thought about giving Alma up to my mother but couldn’t bear to be apart from her for the rest of my life. And Daddy most emphatically didn’t want me back.

            I really didn’t know what to do. I was rapidly coming to the end of my rope. I had to sell my emerald quinseñeraring. I’m pretty sure I was cheated.

 

*****

           

            During one of the regrettably short stints I did as a waitress I caught a news program on TeleVision Militar, the military TV station. It seemed Carrera was officially adding a new organization to the Legion. I’d probably have forgotten all about it except that the Tercio Gorgidaswas eventually, much later, to play an amazingly important role in my life.

            There had been a lot of ceremony and drum beating, most of it quite meaningless to me. Parilla led the bulk of the men standing on the parade field through another ceremony that sounded suspiciously like a set of marriage vows, though the emphasis was maybe a little more on mutual support in battle than mutual support in life. Then the camera showed Carrera leaving his wife’s side and going to the microphone to speak. He opened a book on the podium.

            I heard him say this: “The ancient Old Earth writer, Plutarch, tells us of an extraordinary military unit of ancient times, its life...and death. Listen: ‘Gorgidas, according to some, first formed the Sacred Band of three hundred chosen men....it was composed of young men attached to each other by personal affection....For men of the same tribe or family little value one another when dangers press, but a band cemented on friendship grounded upon love is never to be broken, and invincible; since the lovers, ashamed to be base in the sight of their beloved, and the beloved before the lovers, willingly rush into danger for the relief of one another...they have more regard for their absent lovers than for others present, as in the instance of the man who, when his enemy was going to kill him, earnestly requested him to run him through the breast, that his lover might not blush to see him wounded in the back.’

            “ ‘It is stated that the Sacred Band was never beaten till the battle at Chaeronea; and when Philip, King of Macedon and father of Alexander the Great, after the fight, took a view of the slain, and came to the place where the three hundred that had fought his phalanx lay dead together, he wondered, and understanding that it was the band of lovers, he shed tears and said, ‘Perish any man who suspects that these men either did or suffered anything that was base.’ ”

            On the screen, I saw Carrera turn slightly to send a dirty look to someone to his right rear. I later figured out that this someone was either a senator named Cardenas or a legate named Suarez.

            After that, Carrera turned back to his audience and continued, “ ‘Gorgidas distributed this Sacred Band all through the front ranks of the infantry, and thus made their gallantry less conspicuous...But Pelopidas, having sufficiently tried their bravery at Tegyrae, never afterward divided them, but keeping them together, gave them the first duty in the greatest battles...thus he thought brave men, provoking one another to noble actions, would prove most serviceable, and most resolute, when all were united together.’ ” Carrera closed the book from which he’d been reading.

            “Your terciohas a glorious ancestry; quite possibly a glorious future. Don’t fuck it up.”

            TV Militar would never dareto censor anything Carrera or Parilla said.

            The Gorgidas boys did a parade then, in front of the cameras. The people, men mostly, in the restaurant seemed to have mixed feelings. Many of them were in the reserve forces. Some, probably most, were thoroughly pleased at getting whatever mariposashad been in their organizations out of same.

 

*****

           

            One night, sometime later, I heard some heavy weapons firing from not so far away. (Not that I knew the difference at the time; though I know the difference now). This was followed by the sound of a crash and an explosion. I hid with Alma under the bed. The next morning we came out and everything seemed pretty normal, except that the neighborhood was buzzing over some Tauran helicopter that had been shot down the night before. Curious, Alma holding my hand, I walked in the direction of the crash.

            Sure enough, just outside the walls there was a helicopter, wrecked and burned. It still smoked slightly.

            I saw a man, tall for one of us, though not so tall for the ex-gringo I’d heard he was. Carrera was looking over the wreck as some medical people removed the bodies from it. I saw him lose his temper and strike one of the medics. I don’t know what for.

            I kept watching. Unfortunately – or perhaps fortunately, as it turned out – Alma drifted away. I didn’t worry when I realized she was gone. Say what you want about the people of Rio Abajo. They may be poor but, at least since the Legion exterminated the criminals, they are basically decent, more decent than the richer folks I’d grown up with, a lotmore decent than people like Piedras.

            Then I saw Alma and I did start to worry...though panic might be a better choice of terms. She was running across the street directly toward Duque Carrera. I don’t know what you remember from that time, but Carrera had a damned terrifying reputation. When one of Carrera’s guards began to turn a rifle on my little girl, I nearly screamed.

            But Alma just stopped in front of him with her hands behind her back.

            Carrera squatted down and talked to her very softly for a little while. She took her hands from behind her back.  She had made him a bouquet of flowers. He laughed, took the flowers, and scooped her up in his arms. He spoke to her for a little while then Alma pointed at where I was standing.

            Oh, my God, I thought. He’s coming towards me.

            “I take it this is your little girl, Miss...?”

            “Fuentes, Señor. Maria Fuentes.” I guess he’d figured out from the lack of a ring on my hand that I wasn’t married.

            He consulted his watch. “Well, Miss Fuentes, little Alma here has brightened up my day considerably. Would you do me a big favor and let me take the both of you to lunch?”

            One does not refuse an invitation from someone who is not only the second most powerful man in your country, but also has a reputation Attila the Hun would have been proud to own. Still, it was the strangest thing to me, walking through the streets of the City, Carrera carrying my daughter, and all of us surrounded by big men carrying guns.

            There was an ice cream shop and delicatessen not far away. When we went in the owner blanched. I suppose of all the people he ever expected to see enter his establishment, Carrera was probably the last.

            He bought Alma a sandwich and then an ice cream cone. When I tried to refuse anything he insisted that I at least have a sandwich. He, himself, settled for coffee. Patting his stomach he said to me, “My wife overfeeds me. And I don’t get out as much as I used to. If I didn’t watch myself, I’d get fat.”

            The memory of Piedras fresh in my mind, I assumed Carrera just wanted to bend me over a desk, too. I kept my eyes down on the plate while I ate.

            I was wrong, by the way.

            Carrera asked me a little bit about myself. I told him as little as possible, but I think – no, I’m sure – that he saw right through me. I mean, I really think he saw everything; maybe to include Piedras or someone just like him.

            He thanked me for joining him for lunch. He said he almost never had a chance anymore to just sit down with someone and talk. He asked me about my work.

            “Well...I’m sort of between jobs right now,” I answered.

            He asked me about my hopes for the future, but I didn’t have any beyond seeing Alma grow up to a better life. Since I rather doubted that would happen, I told him I had no hope for the future.

            After a while, I ventured a question of my own. “Sir,” I asked, “why did you and Presidente Parilla exterminate the opposition government?”

            He put his hands behind his head and leaned back in his chair, his eyes staring into space. At length he answered, “Self defense, I suppose; they were trying to exterminate us.”

            Seeing I didn’t understand, he elaborated, “The old, rump government tried to get rid of us on some trumped up drug charges. Many of my friends were killed; my new family threatened. My wife, Lourdes...” He stopped talking for a moment. I’ve never seen anybody with that much pure hate in his eyes, not even me in the mirror after a session with Piedras.

            He continued, “Anyway...Lourdes saved us. You probably knew that. When our side had won out, Parilla and I determined never to let anything like that happen again. We stamped out the oligarchs to let the country start over fresh.”

            “Mostly, it’s working,” he said. Then he looked at my threadbare clothing, looked at Alma’s too thin frame. He looked at my face and sighed. I saw then that his eyes really were beautiful, the color of the sky on a cloudless day, and surprisingly full of compassion.

            “Unfortunately,” he continued, “a lot of decent people have been cut out. We only have so much money to go around, despite some help from some friends who have the same enemies we do. There’s only so much we can do. By concentrating only on those with military power, we’ve left a lot of folks – people like yourself – without any recourse at all. This seems to be especially true of the women of the country. I’m sorry. There’s only so much to go around,” he repeated.

            “God knows,” I told him, “I could use some help. One decent break, that’s all I need.” I didn’t cry, however much I wanted to.

            He looked at me very intently. Then he asked me, if it were possible for Alma to be cared for, if I would be interested in joining up. He said he couldn’t do more for me than that, that the benefits of society were for those who benefited society.

            When I hesitated, Carrera reached over and pulled Alma onto his lap. She immediately settled in nicely, still intent on her ice cream. He asked me “Don’t you think this beautiful little girl deserves every chance you can give her?”

            Thinking of everything I’d already given up for Alma – wealth and position for her life, dignity (Piedras!) for what passed for comfort – I wanted for the moment to spit at him. I didn’t though. Instead I told him I mightbe interested. He gave me a card with an address and a phone number to call to reach one of his aides. He also wrote a little note on back and signed it, “C.”

            Before leaving he reached into a pocket and pulled out some money, saying, “Buy her a birthday present from me.” He turned his body, too, so no one could see the money.

            It was so...tactful. He could have said that I looked like I needed the money. I did. He could have made some kind of political capital from it, even. But he just wanted to do a nice thing for a nice baby girl, without embarrassing me.

            Then he set Alma back down, paid the bill and left, his entourage of guards following in his wake.

            He stopped and waved to Alma from the door.

 

*****

 

            That was pretty tactful, too, the way he’d let me know where to go. Anyone could see I couldn’t afford a phone. But I knew where his office was, if I really wanted to go there. Everyone knew.

            Did I? I’d never even considered the possibility. Before Alma, before I was born, my future had been all planned out for me: finish high school, then go to the University; either in Balboa, Santa Josefina, Atzlan, or La Plata. After that, marriage, of course. Then a sedentary life as a housewife cum minor socialite. Oh, yes, and produce many grandchildren.

            I was living a life a far cry from that.  It was a dreary and hopeless life, too.

            I thought about it for a few days. I’ll confess, I was scared – maybe terrified is a better word – of going into the Legion. Then, too, I was sick at the thought of leaving Alma behind, even if I knew she’d be well cared for. Which I didn’t know at the time, actually.

            I asked around the neighborhood. Many of the men were in the Legion. They said it was hard, but there were a lot of advantages to going...and that it could be great fun. (I wasn’t too sure that my idea of fun and theirs precisely matched.) One of the men was in training to be a civilian machinist with his tercio footing half the bill, loaning him the rest at low interest. He could never have paid for that himself. Another had managed to open a small store with a veteran’s loan. There were different benefits for different jobs and levels of responsibility. The men didn’t know what was available for women.

            I thought about what it might be like, to have a fresh start at a decent job, a decent life. Maybe I’d even be able to start my own business. I might not have finished my education but I wasn’t stupid or lazy. Okay, maybe a little stupid, but I was growing wiser all the time.

            Finally, I worked up the nerve to go to Carrera’s office, at the Estado Major. He wasn’t in but, as he’d said, one of his aides was.

            “Miss Fuentes?” asked the aide, a fairly youngish tribune, not too good looking. At my nod he said, “The Duque mentioned that you might be coming by. How can I help you?”

            “Duque Carrera said something to me about – possibly – joining up.”

            “Yes, that was my understanding. Do you have any skills now?”

            I had to tell him that I really didn’t.

            He just shrugged his shoulders and said, “Most women who express an interest in the Legion do not. Don’t feel bad; usually neither do the men. That really doesn’t matter. We can teach skills provided that the student is willing to learn and worth teaching.” He stopped for a minute, scratched his chin, and then asked, “Tell me, Miss Fuentes, what, if anything, you know about the Legion and how women are utilized.”

            Again I had to admit to having no idea.

            “Very good,” the tribune said. “Then you should have few misconceptions to clear up. Basically, women are not really necessary. Sorry.” He didn’t seem to be.

            “Oh, yes, they fill certain jobs that would otherwise have to be done by a man, but – if no women were available – we would use very old and very young men in those jobs...boys and pensioners if we had to.

            “Essentially, women are cooks, clerks and medical personnel in medical units above the cohort level. Except for a veryfew who have special talents and skills needed by the Legion – lawyers, doctors, nurses, a few pilots and such – those have traditionally been the choices open to women.”

            “However, because we have certain rigid requirements for moving up in rank that are – so far – dependent on qualifications that women have not yet been admitted to, there have been no women officers or centurions accessed in the last thirteen years. The couple of holdovers from before the invasion are kept on merely as a courtesy. They are not realofficers anyway, but more or less administrative types. They are also frozen in their old ranks. There are a larger number of women warrant officers; those lawyers, nurses, doctors and such I mentioned to you.

            “Also, you should know, the major benefits of service – the material benefits I mean, not the benefits of eventual full citizenship – are rank and job driven. Combat arms jobs – infantry, armor, artillery, combat engineers, some military police, and air defense – have greater benefits in terms of civil education and job training. Officers and centurions are entitled to attend higher education at government expense when off duty, sometimes on duty. Women do not, so far, qualify for any of these.

            “Women doqualify for government protected jobs upon completion of training but...the jobs for which they qualify are less desirable, by and large, than those that men qualify for. This is not because they’re women but because they are not eligible, so far, for positions of great hardship or responsibility.”

            The tribune hesitated, looking me over. I have been appraised by a number of men over the years. None of them ever quite looked at me like that, as if I were a strong and healthy mule they were thinking of buying.

            I knew what he was seeing: an olive-skinned female, with good teeth, fair muscle tone, somewhat short. If he thought I was attractive, it didn’t show.

            At length, the tribune said, “There is one other possibility you might want to think over.” He reached into his desk, pulled out a color brochure, and handed it to me. “Duque Carrera has directed the raising of a female combat formation; a full tercioif we can find enough women who are both willing and able. If the program is successful, and if you join it, andif you finish your training, you would also qualify for all the same benefits as any man who joins.”

            I really couldn’t see myself as a fighter. I told him so.

            “You would know about that best, I suppose,” he answered. “But take this brochure home with you. Give it some thought. Even if you elect not to join the Tercio Amazonayou might still want to try some other, female, branch of the service.”

            “I have a child. Duque Carrera mentioned that she could be taken care of for me if I join.”

            “That’s discussed in the brochure.”

 

            The brochure was mostly in simple question and answer format.

 

            If I join the Tercio Amazona, will I be able to be married?

            The Republic takes no interest in whether or not its defenders marry, except that, after accession, marital or romantic relations may not generally be within the same regiment and may in no case be between any members of substantially differing ranks. Enlisted men and women (pay grades 1 through 3) may socialize privately only with other enlisted men and women. NCOs, Centurions, and Officers may associate only with service members of the same corps. Warrant officers are permitted social interaction only with other warrants. This is true whether you are on duty or off. The notable exception to this is the Tercio Gorgidas in which de facto marriage to another member, just prior to induction, is the rule. This partial ban on socializing does not affect organizational social activities nor does it cover marriages which existed before enlistment. In the latter case, however, married couples will almost never be permitted to serve in the same regiment.

 

            What about children?

            Dependents of members of the Legion who have been killed or crippled, in action or in training, qualify for a number of assistance programs, generally of the self-help variety.

            As for already-born children, while other female members of the defense forces do notreceive much in the way of official direct assistance in caring for their children, mostly due to their being in densities within their tercios too low to make this practical, the Tercio Amazonawill have a fully staffed dependant care maniple which will provide twenty-four hour care for your children while you are serving.

            Both Amazonas and other female soldiers may become pregnant and bear children. Non-Amazonasare authorized up to two eighteen month unpaid leaves of absence, which times do not count towards fulfilling their military obligation. Because the Republic does have an interest in strong and brave mothers bearing strong and brave children, Amazonas’ maternal leave may be taken in the dependant care maniple, if and only if there is an opening. That time willcount toward completion of service and will be paid, though at a reduced rate. We do not pay soldiers who are not combat effective through their own choice at the same rate as others. The Tercio Amazonawill have a thirty to sixty percent overstrength authorized to permit both a combat capable unit and adequate opportunity for maternal leave.

            It is within the contemplation of the Legion, but by no means certain, that members of the Tercio Amazonamay be given the option of serving four years of active time, then being discharged to the militia or Home Guard to become mothers if they wish. This option is not available to you, now, and may never become available.

           

            How difficult will training be?

            No harder than necessary.

 

            After training what happens?

            The legions are primarily reservists. As an Amazonayou will attend a fifteen week Basic Combat Training (BCT) Course. For your general information, male BCT is, at this time, twelve weeks. At least some of your class will then be selected for leadership training. The rest will be offered one or several job or training opportunities, though most will become infantry. You will, if you are given an option, at your own discretion, take one of these. If you are only offered one job, so be it.

                        Also, after BCT and leadership training, if any, you will have a minimum ten year obligation as a reservist or in the militia. During your reserve time you will be required to attend weekend training, one long weekend a month from a Thursday or Friday night to the following Sunday or Monday night. In addition, the reservists of your unit will train thirty days a year in one lump period at the Centro de Entrenamiento, at Fort Cameron. The militia of the terciowill train together with the reserves for another seventeen days per year. A further eight days of individual training and administration are required and authorized. Additional time may be required of you, based on the needs of the Legion.

            The terciodependant care maniple will look after your children, at a Legion facility or private home, for all the time you are training. As a special gratuity, your children will be cared for and fed at Government expense.

 

How much will I be paid?

            You will receive normal recruit private rates of pay and allowances for every day you spend in your initial training. Thereafter, if in leadership training, you will be paid at the applicable rate for a trained private, or your current rank, whichever is higher.

            While in a reserve training status you will earn three months’ pay per year for up to three months’ training (the typical reservist actually spends seventy-seven days on duty, about half and half, weekends and weekdays). This does not include extra pay for special or additional training. This is only true for the next several classes of Amazonas. Once a healthy cadre is formed, most Amazonaswill be placed in the militia echelon after BCT. They will only be called up for twenty-five days per year, normally, though more time may be required. Militia Amazonaswill earn a minimum of thirty days pay per year.

            As mentioned above, there are also opportunities for extended courses of paid special training for those who qualify.

            See the table at the end of this brochure for applicable pay rates.

 

What if I fail in training?

            If the circumstances of your failure are essentially disgraceful, you will be discharged from the Legion under other than honorable conditions, or worse. Those so discharged are entitled to nobenefits.

            If the circumstances of your failure are not disgraceful, you will be given an opportunity to train for and finish your term of service in one of the positions reserved for women that are not as difficult as the Amazonas.

 

            That last part frightened me. But then Alma told me she was hungry. All I had was the money Duque Carrera had given me to buy her a present for her birthday. I used it.

            The next day I went back to the Estado Major and signed up for the Tercio Amazona.


Interlude

            The rain was coming down in sheets, though, given the season, those sheets flew horizontally rather than vertically. One could trace those sheets by the thick pattern of droplets moving in tight lines across the black asphalt.

            Professor Rafael Franco, also Junior Centurion Franco, Tercio Gorgidas, eased his vehicle into the carport next to the three bedroom house he shared with his partner, Balthazar Garcia. The carport was no shelter from the rain being driven under the roof by the wind. With a sigh and a muttered curse, Franco opened the door. He was pelted then, immediately, and soaked before he’d gotten himself out of the car and the door shut behind him. There wasn’t any sense in running at that point; still muttering imprecations he walked to the door leading from the carport into the kitchen of the house. He fought the wind to close the kitchen door behind him. The house was quiet, still, except for the pounding of the rain on the tiled roof.

            “Balthazar? Are you home?”

            Garcia answered from the living room, “In here, Rafael.”

            On his way to the living room Franco stopped to draw a beer from the refrigerator. He grabbed a piece of dried chorley bread from a tray. Beer held in one hand, he passed the bread to Garcia’s pet trixie, a magnificent gray and green archaeopteryx that his partner had, most unusually, taught to speak. Not that trixies didn’t have the capacity to learn, but most were more stubborn than the people who tried to train them. Garcia was an exception in that there were damned few people or trixies that could hold a candle to him for sheer mule-headedness.

            “Up yours, cueco,” the proto-bird answered, as it held the chunk to its beak.

            Of all the things, Franco thought, shaking his head, he could have taught that bird to say…Lord, why did I have to fall in love with someone with such a weird fucking sense of humor?

            He continued on, taking a seat on a chair opposite the one where Garcia sat. Though no one would say that Garcia was much to look at, a hairy fireplug in approximately human form, Franco still felt his heart warm to see him.

            “Weather too rough for fishing?” Franco asked.

            “You just wouldn’t fucking believe it,” Garcia answered, with a shake of his head. After taking accession into the Tercio Gorgidas, and converting to reservist status from regular, Garcia had gone into the family business, running a forty-foot yawl out in the waters between the capital and the Isla Real.

            Garcia looked at Franco’s soaked form and corrected, “Well…maybe you would. How was class?”

            Franco shrugged eloquently, then elaborated, “ ‘One can lead a child to knowledge...’ ”

            “ ‘...But one cannot make him think.’  I know,” Garcia finished. He went silent for a bit, searching Franco’s face. Finally, he asked, “Would you miss teaching so very much if you stopped for a while, maybe took a sabbatical?”

            “Probably. Why?”

            Garcia sighed. “Tribune Silva called here today. He wanted to know if you and I might be available for the next eight or ten months to run two or three Basic Training courses.”

            “It would be a pay cut from my salary at the university.”

            Garcia answered, “I know...for me, too. But I think we should consider it.”

            Franco nodded. “All right. Let’s consider it. Firstly, why are you interested? I can see that you are.”

            “You always could,” Garcia chided, with a smile. More seriously, he continued, “I was thinking about obligations, actually. No...not the ones the law or custom lay upon you...more the ones you feel.”

            Franco sighed. When Garcia spoke of obligations – or worse still, of duty – there was really no reasoning with him. Mule-headed. Franco half resigned himself to eight or ten very uncomfortable months in a tent or shack.             Still, he tried. “What obligations are you talking about? Something more than the two and a half months a year we already spend in uniform? Why? Who do you think we have to pay back?”

            Garcia looked down at the ring on his left hand. Its mate graced Franco’s. “I really wasn’t thinking about paying anyone back...more of paying forward. Carrera and the Legion have given us a lot.  You know they have: Marriage, legitimacy, a degree of acceptance we didn’t have before.”

            “He gave us an opportunity not to be put against a wall and shot, you mean.” Franco retorted. “I don’t see where that makes us particularly obligated to him.”

            Garcia smiled. “He’d have been right to have shot us, back when you were an adorable young corporal and I was your platoon optio who couldn’t keep his mind straight from thinking about you. It was hard, you know?”

            “Yes, I seem to remember that it was,” Franco laughed.

            “Asshole,” Garcia said with real affection. “You know perfectly well what I mean. Anyway, Carrera saved us from that, gave us the chance to be together in the Tercio Gorgidas. I think we owe him.”

            Resignedly, Franco looked at the wall upon which hung his and Garcia’s helmets, body armor, weapons and centurion’s insignia. He asked, “What do you – and he – want?”

            Garcia knew he’d won at that point, and more easily than he’d expected. Looking down at the floor, biting his lower lip contemplatively, he answered, “I’ll want you to start studying the problem. He needs us to train some women.”



Chapter Three

                                                Pity not! The Army gave

                                                Freedom to a timid slave.

                                                In which freedom did (s)he find

                                                Strength of body, will and mind.

                       

                        --Kipling, Epitaphs on the War

 

 

            Lydia Porras’ van pulled up beside a large sign painted with the number seven and lit by a small spotlight. She showed her pass to one of the sergeants who directed her to a parking space not far away. Already more than two hundred – that was Porras’ guess – prospective amazons milled about in confusion, their voices raising a sound much like a swarm of insects. Lydia saw a few kindly faced, older non-coms trying to sort the mob into some semblance of order. She, herself, with a few folders tucked under one arm, went to stand very near the number-painted sign. More young women arrived in a steady stream, a very few of them already in uniform.    She thought, Must be some girls who wanted a step up in life. Given the world as it is, I hope they can lift their feet that high.

            A loudspeaker began to blare out names and instructions. Suddenly all talk from the women ceased. The non-coms continued to direct and sort them as best they could, being as gentle as they were.

I know this is all new,Lydia thought, but I have never seen the Legion let any group – even the rawest – sink to the level of a mob like this.

            The loudspeaker blared, “Fuentes, Maria. Fuentes, Maria. Report to Load Ramp Seven. Fuentes, Maria, report to Load Ramp Seven.” Porras checked the photo on one of the files she carried one last time before beginning to look out for the mother of her new charge.

            Ah, there they are. Lydia caught sight of a young woman, perhaps eighteen, carrying a baby girl on her left hip and a battered suitcase in her right hand. The girl looked…defeated…already, beaten down. Her face? Porras thought it might have been a very pretty one if it had shown the slightest bit of life – or joy in life.         

            Lydia walked up and introduced herself. In a warm, grandmotherly voice she said to the baby, “Well, hello, little one. You must be Alma. You and I are going to get along famously, I think. You see, I’m your very own fairy godmother.”

            Alma opened her mouth into an “O” of wide-eyed surprise and asked, “Really?”

            “Yes, indeed. And I bet I know what your first wish is.” Porras produced a huge lollipop. Whether that had been Alma’s first wish or not, one may well doubt. But it immediately became her first wish.

            “Don’t worry about her,” Porras said to Maria as she took Alma in her arms. “She’ll be well cared for. My house has gotten to be too empty since my own children grew up and moved away.” She hesitated, and then said, “You know that the Legion doesn’t allow any communication from the outside during the first half of basic training?”

            Before Maria could answer all other sounds were drowned out by a high-pitched roar. Seven hovercraft approached a long ramp that led up to the land adjacent to the pier. One by one, the hovercraft climbed the ramp from the sea to the land, before settling down at marked spots on the asphalt. As each settled, the sound pouring from it dropped down to a comparatively low whine.

            Maria started to choke up. Porras saw tears begin to form.

            “Why are you doing this?” Porras asked.

            “For her,” Maria sniffled.

            “Then do it; for her.”

Porras handed Alma back just long enough for Maria to give the baby a last hug. Maria gave the child back, then began to shuffle forward with the other women who – though she did not know it – were to be in the same platoon with her. The suitcase, Alma’s meager things, stayed behind.

Maria’s tears wet the asphalt where she walked. She wasn’t the only one crying.

 

*****

 

A very short – almost tiny, actually – woman of about Maria’s age quietly sobbed onto the shoulder of a young man in uniform. The young man said to her, “Inez, don’t be a fool. I’m in the Legion. I know. It’s no place for a woman. Certainly no place for a woman I care for. Please don’t go. They won’t make you, you know. It’s purely voluntary.”

Unable to speak, the woman, Inez, just shook her head violently “no.” Then, with obviously pained reluctance, she turned and followed the rest of the women, drying her eyes as she went.   

Across the asphalt and up a ramp, then a scurry to find some piece of the deck to stand on and call her own; Inez grasped the metal railing and tried not to think of home.

A horn sounded three times in warning, then the foot ramp whined its way up to the verticle. The engines of the hovercraft began to whine and strain. Inez gripped the railing tighter –  verytight, actually – as the big machine lifted and began to turn back towards the ramp and the water of the bay past it.

 

*****

 

            It was late at night and, while one of the moons, Eris, was up and full, there was nothing to see but water and wave and the lights of the city, receding being them.

            Maria wasn’t alone in staring backwards, at those lights, and implicitly at the life and loved ones being left behind. Once or twice she sniffled. A tiny girl next to her sniffled in what seemed to be an echo. Maria looked to see if she were being made fun of but, no, the tiny girl was, in fact, sniffling.

            “I’m Inez,” the tiny one said, “Inez Trujillo.”

            “Maria Fuentes.”

            A tall, white, spectacularly-built woman noticed the sniffling and introduced herself to Maria and Inez, “Marta Bugatti. And, yes, I’m a bloody foreigner. Moreover, I’ve been in the Legion for a while, with the Classis.” The Classis was the Legions’ naval organization and it had seen some hard fighting over the years.

            Almost uniquely, the woman, Marta, already wore legionary battle dress and had rank and some badges neither Maria nor Inez recognized.

            In that La Plata-accented Spanish that might as well have been Tuscan, Marta, having noticed that Maria and Inez had glanced at her stripes, said, “Those come off as soon as we report in. Except for pay purposes, I’m a private for the duration, just like everyone else.” She then asked, “Are you crazy for being here or just foolish?”    Marta smiled as she asked the question. She seemed cocky, somehow, and very self-confident.

            Before either Maria or Inez could answer, all three of them had their attention diverted by a tall and slender, really stunningly gorgeous blond woman who had already gathered about herself an entourage. The three, Maria, Marta, and Inez, walked over to hear better. It was only later that they found out the woman’s name. It was Gloria Santiago.

            “Just listen to me,” Gloria declaimed, over the hovercraft’s whining. “Stop worrying. This is going to be easy. Don’t fall for the men’s lies. We are smarter than they are. We are tougher than they are. Why, if a man had to go through childbirth, he’d cry like a baby. But we can and we do, all the time.” She didn’t look like she’d ever had a baby.

            Inez muttered, “We’re not as strong as they are.”

            Perhaps Gloria had overheard, though given the noise that seemed unlikely. In any case, she said to the crowd, “What difference does it make if men have bigger muscles? They have tinier brains. After all, how much of a brain can you stuff into something about six inches long and usually far, far too thin.” That raised a laugh; even Inez found it funny.

            “And besides,” Gloria continued, “strength is overrated. I’ve seen it on TV; you all have. These days technology is what wins wars. And if men weren’t so stupid, they would realize that, too. Just let us show them.”

            Gloria went on in that vein for some time. Eventually, Maria, Marta, and Inez lost interest and wandered back to where they’d been standing.

            “Amazing,” Marta said, with disdain. “Imagine how seldom women would be hit by their husbands or boyfriends if they only knew that muscles don’t matter.”

 

*****

           

Ahead loomed the Isla Real, its peak rising out of the sea. Lights beaconed from several places near the summit and one set seemed to stand several hundred meters above that.

“It’s a solar chimney,” Marta explained. “They saved a bundle by running it up the side of the mountain, but it goes straight up even from there. All the power for the island, enough for two hundred thousand people or more, so I’ve been told, comes from that. They’ve got it marked so that helicopters and airplanes don’t run into it at night or in fog or rain.”

“That’s right,” Inez observed, “you’ve been out there before, haven’t you?”

“A few times, yes,” Marta agreed.

“You were navy?” the tiny girl asked. “Why did you switch?”

“Bad memories,” Marta answered, then wouldn’t say more about it.

Their hovercraft began to veer, causing them all to lean to the side away from the turn. Except for the marking lights, there were no others to be seen. Then, suddenly, a battery of overhead lights, powerfully bright, came on to illuminate a large concrete pad. The hovercraft eased itself over a strip of sand, then came to a gradual stop before descending to land on the pad. The engines gave a last whine of protest at being put to rest.

With a whine of a completely different pitch, the foot ramp went down on one side before settling to the concrete with a jarring clang. Up the ramp trotted a man, close-cropped, uniformed, bemedaled and just flat mean looking. He had a sneer of complete contempt engraved across his face. He carried a small portable loudspeaker in one hand. He pushed aside any women who didn’t clear out of his way quickly enough. Gloria went to her rear end with an outraged shriek.

The man stepped up to where Gloria had been sitting, then lifted the loudspeaker to his lips. “All right you stupid twats, get your fucking high heels off.” The man waited for all of ten seconds for the women to complete that task. “When I give the order you will have thirty seconds to clear your worthless smelly hides off this hovercraft. When you get off, the men standing below will put you into formation. Then Tribune Silva, your maniple commander, will speak to you. You will keep your foolish mouths shut. Now GO!”

Pushing each other and scrambling, the women crowded the single ramp. Many tripped and fell, to be trodden on by the others. At the concrete base, a number of non-coms, none of them with a kindly face, slapped and pushed and prodded the women into a single block. To the right, other groups were receiving much the same treatment as they debarked from their hovercraft. Being so far from the center, the men herded the women to their right. At the other end, women were being herded to the left. The end result was a mob of prisoners, surrounded by guards, standing fearfully before a dais that rose about ten feet off of the concrete.

            A very handsome man – he introduced himself as Tribune Silva, and their commanding officer – walked briskly up the steps of the dais. Silva made a little welcoming speech – sort of a welcoming speech.   Had they been asked, most of the women would likely have confessed that they had been made to feel more welcome. Silva then departed in a Legion vehicle, leaving the women to the none-too-tender care of their senior centurions.

 

*****

 

Shocked though she was, Maria’s eyes widened as a huge bear of a man came to a halt in front of her. The man, she could plainly tell, was less than pleased with his charges.

            “I am Senior Centurion Balthazar Garcia. You are shit. Introductions being finished, we will get on with business.”

            Garcia began to walk slowly from one side of the group to the other, distaste shining in his features. He did not smile. He spoke dispassionately as he walked the line, commenting on each of the women. “Too scrawny... You’ll want to see the docs about getting a breast reduction, swabbie; those things are going to get in the way...No arse...Legs too skinny...Nose? Or is that a bus stuck on the end of your face, girl?...Stringy hair...When did you last douche, pigpen?...Bimbos. You! Bitch! Dry your silly fucking eyes. That’s right, sniveler. That’s right, crybaby...”

It was a ritual that hadn’t changed, couldn’t have changed, since long before the days when some Roman centurion had first taken charge of a group of new recruits. It made a sort of cruel sense, actually, though none of the women understood it at the time. There was only so much time – which is almost the same thing as only so much money, but harder to come by – any army could afford to spend on basic training. The kind of rule that Garcia was establishing cut down on the silly questions and complaints. That saved money and time. Since the time and money thus saved could be spent training soldiers to fight and live, it also saved lives.

            It is often better to be insulted than dead.

            Then, too, the best thing about beating your head against a wall is that it feels so good when you stop. A moderately kind word from someone who mostly tells you that you are animate pond scum means more than the same word from someone who routinely says that you are God’s gift to the world. It was deflation of the currency of praise.

            Garcia went on in that vein for quite some time. He didn’t offer to fight any of them, as they did with the men and as the Amazons later would do on the first day of training. There wouldn’t have been any point to it, anyway. Not all eighty of Garcia’s girls together could have taken him on at that point. That would have taken training and mutual confidence they didn’t have even a notion of yet.

            Once Garcia had finished engraving their faces on his memory he turned them over to someone else to get them on the buses, stomping away, himself, off into the darkness.

            “I am Centurion, Junior Grade, Rafael Franco,” that someone else announced. Showing a smile neither friendly nor unfriendly, but ripe with anticipation, he continued, “You are going to be seeing a lot more of me than you are going to like over the next several months. Just to be up front with you, I do not like you. I do not care about you. You are just things. Someday, perhaps, unlikely as it seems right now, you may become more. For now, you are using up oxygen that you don't deserve. Keep your mouths shut and your ears and eyes open and we might – just possibly – learn to get along. Cross me and...well, don’t.”

            “Now, you silly little girls, I know you are far, far too stupid to know your right from your left. Take my word on it; that bus over there is on your right. When I give the command ‘Right, Face’ I want you to turn those stupid looking things you hang in front of what passes for brains in the direction of the bus. Got it? Right...face.”

 

*****

           

            Marta ended up sitting next to Maria on the bus, near the window. She saw their destination first and said, simply, “Oh, shit.” They had arrived at Camp Botchkareva.

            Maria looked. It took maybe two seconds after arrival for her to decide that Rio Abajo wasn’t so bad after all. The camp looked more like a prison than a school. It consisted of fourteen large metal huts, some open fields she couldn’t guess the purpose of, and about fifty or sixty tents. At the edge of the camp the perimeter was defined by a fence of triple concertina, rolled barbed wire, with two rolls along the ground and one resting above those two. Guard towers and searchlights were at each corner and the solitary gate.

            “Off the bus, twats.” Franco, with help from a few others, pushed the women into a kindergartenish double line, that being about the limit of their ability at the time. Then he led them through one of the metal huts. There,  their clothes and suitcases were taken from them and locked in tiny double-locked compartments. They left the hut bare-ass naked, with only a wallet to call their own.

            Predictably, the sight of all that naked female skin had no perceivable effect on Franco or any of the other trainers. The Tercio Gorgidaswas – mostly – homosexual. The Amazon candidates didn’t really exist for them, not as women, not as possible sexual partners, apparently not even as human beings.

            There were, on the other hand, a few women in the group who seemed, no, not delighted, but... interested.

            “Get your fucking eyes off me,” Marta told another woman, bunching her fists. That woman made some apologetic sounds and backed off, keeping her eyes carefully away from Marta.

            Haircuts came next. As poor as she’d been, Maria had always kept her hair long. But, no, they didn’t ask how the women wanted their hair styled, although a few of the men in the Tercio Gorgidasdid just that for a living when they weren’t on active duty. A smiling Franco watched over them as some men detailed to barber duty swiped their scalps clean. “Buzz ‘em, Pedro.”

            When Maria looked in the mirror afterwards, she felt like crying, she thought she looked so ugly. Some women didcry. They stopped when they realized no one in a position to help cared in the slightest.

            Before they were issued any clothing, the women were marched us into some mass showers, placing their wallets along a shelf on the way in. Most everyone in Balboa took cold showers, at least sometimes. It was no big deal in a place so hot. The water for these showers, it turned out later, was specially chilled to be icy. Maria screamed when they turned on the water. They all did.

            Marta and Gloria complained out loud after the water was turned off. They were just swatted for their efforts and pushed on to the next station.

            As the women left the showers, they were asked for their sizes. Each woman was then handed one sports bra, in approximately her size (Marta was a tight fit even in the biggest size they had; the man passing out the bras made a note of it), two pair of boxer shorts, physical training shorts, two pair of socks – not stockings – and running shoes. It wasn’t such a bad outfit; except for the boxers.

            Franco gave the women a very few minutes to dress. Then he lined them up again and led them to their barracks. This was a long low arching metal hut with few amenities to speak of; three bare light bulbs and forty pairs of bunk beds. On each bed were a thin, useless pillow, a pillow case, two sheets, and a very light and unnecessary blanket.

            “Gather ‘round, girls,” Franco ordered. The women, all of them still in something like shock, clustered in a circle. “Sit down.”

            He began to pass out red felt-tip markers. When everyone had received one, Franco began to speak.

            “Okay. I want you to take your markers and I want you to draw a dotted line just like the one I am drawing on my wrist.” Franco drew a six inch long series of red dots lengthwise down his left wrist. “Everyone done with that? Good. Now draw another one on the other wrist… Done? Good. Let me see. Verygood. Now there’s no excuse.

            “You see, women threaten suicide and even act it out rather frequently, but you fail so often to carry through that I am forced to question your sincerity and competence as a sex. Therefore…”

            Franco turned toward the door. He tossed a package of razor blades to the floor on his way out. “Trujillo!” he called over one shoulder. “Collect up the markers in that box and put them by my office door.   Anybody who wants a razor blade, just help yourself. ‘Cut along dotted line.’”

 

*****

           

            Marta and Maria stared at the package of razor blades slack-jawed for a few moments. All the women did. “Cocksuckers,” was all Marta said. Maria said nothing.

Since they knew each other’s names already, Marta and Maria gravitated to the same set of bunk beds. Marta asked, “Do you care which bunk you get, Maria?”

            From Maria’s point of view the top bunk looked awfully high. Her doubts showed on her face.

Seeing those doubts, Marta said, “I can boost you up if you want the top. It doesn’t make any difference to me.”

            “I don’t care...”

            “Let’s flip a coin on it.” They did, and Maria ended up on top, Marta giving her rump a push to get there. Most of the rest collapsed as soon as they could. None of them bothered to make her bed.

Some of the women, more than a few, cried themselves to sleep.

            Maria’s last thoughts, as she drifted off, were of Alma. In her imagination, she pictured the life they could hope to have together if this Amazon thing worked out.

 

*****

 

            Garcia snickered as Franco distastefully told him about the women’s reaction to the razor blades.

            Franco asked, “Was that really necessary, Balthazar? Poor girls.”

            The senior centurion nodded, saying, “I think so. See…we’re going to be putting them under a lot of pressure, pressure worse than anything they’re used to. And we can’t watch ‘em all the time, not and let ‘em grow too. Eventually one of ‘em’s going to try a play suicide. Problem is, she just might succeed even though she won’t be serious about it. This way’s a risk, sure. But now, at least, there’ll be none of those ‘attempts’ that might go too far.”

            Franco just shook his head doubtfully. “You’re the boss.”

 

*****

 

            Morning came incredibly early and impossibly loudly. One moment the women were peacefully asleep. The next they were sitting bolt upright, eardrums thumping from piped-in music. And – horror of horrors – the music piped in was from bagpipes. The next moment and Garcia, Franco, and eight other men were on them like gnats, big hairy gnats with muscles.

            “Get up! Get up, you lazy little maggots. Dressed and outside for PT. You! That’s right, honey, YOU! Move your lazy, skinny ass!” A couple of quick pushes and Marta and Maria ended in a tangle of arms and legs, a mattress over them.

            Half crawling, half running, the women made it outside. More than a few of them did so with stinging buttocks where an instructor’s baton had met with a tardy posterior.

            Once outside, the two centurions, four sergeants, and four corporals began to push and prod them into some semblance of a formation. There followed a very brief class in “Assuming and Maintaining the Position of Attention.” That was possibly the easiest thing any of them learned to do at Camp Botchkareva. It was so easy, in fact, that the instructors called on some very tiny assistants to help them determine if they were doing it right.

            Maria would hate sand fleas to her dying day. The little demons crawled up her legs, into her eyes and ears, inside her nose…more personal places, too. They bit her everywhere except for where her shoes covered her feet, each bite like the point of a tiny hot needle. And she had to just stand there and take it because, while the sand flea bites were painful and present, the instructors were infinitely menacing.

            Maria had expected physical training to be worse, somehow, than it was. Not that it wasn’t hard, or that the women didn’t raise a sweat. It was and they did. And some of the women couldn’t do the exercises very well. Failure to exercise properly usually got a snarl, a whack on the fanny, and some direct, hands-on, correction, but no more than that. And the instructors didn’t have them try to do anything they really couldn’t. It was all “doable,” if barely.

            After calisthenics Garcia ordered, “Assemble to the Right...Move.” The women crowded back to the shallow block formation they’d started in. Then it was, “Right...Face. Forward...March. Double Time! – that means run, you stupid twats! – March! Left...left...left, right, left.”

            The run was worse than the exercises. It wasn’t fast; Garcia knew they were too new for that. But it seemed long to all of them and it was intentionally painful. The women’s newness made it more painful still, as none of them really knew how to keep in step, even though Franco called the cadence, “Left. Right. Left.” The women still kept tripping each other up.

“I’m sorry; I’m so sorry,” the girl behind Marta repeated every time her toes landed on one of Marta’s heels. Though Marta was concentrating on trying to keep in step, that woman’s toes continued to foul her up.

An instructor named Salazar trotted up. He whacked Marta’s thigh with a stick, hard.

            “Get in step, dummy...Left, right, left. Your tits can do it. Why can’t you?” Then he whacked her again.

            And the instructors let no one fall behind. They didn’t try to encourage anyone with kind words. They hit and kicked those who stopped trying until they were willing to try some more.

            Two women simply stopped and lay down in the road.

            “Diaz! Salazar! Take care of ‘em,” Garcia bellowed.

            As the platoon rounded a bend, a brave soul might have looked over her shoulder to see Salazar kicking one of the drop outs while Diaz lifted the other to her feet by her ears. That brave soul might have seen the latter of the two drop right back to the dirt as soon as Diaz’s grip relaxed.

            Neither of the dropouts was seen on the Island again. By the time the rest had returned from the run, those two had already been dishonorably discharged. The remainder heard later, and at the time believed, that the drop outs were paddled pretty badly before being thrown off the island.

            Eventually the platoon turned around to head back to camp. All were pretty much nauseous as they passed through the front gate. After they halted and were dismissed, Marta immediately fell to one knee and began to throw up. Maria walked over and put her arm around Marta’s shoulders to help her back up.

            Marta shrieked, “Get your fucking hands off me!” When she saw how shocked Maria was, she tried to apologize. “I’m sorry, Maria,” she said. “It isn’t your fault. I just can’t stand to be touched by anyone.”

            Though he was nearby, Garcia either didn’t notice, or pretended not to notice, Marta’s outburst. He knew some things about Marta that the other women didn’t.

            Marta and Maria were joined by another girl, Inez Trujillo, the tiny one, and her bunkmate, Catarina Gonzalez.

            Inez said, “Come on, you two. Let’s go hurry and freeze. Garcia’s only given us five minutes to shower before breakfast. And I don’t know about you two, but I’m starving.”

            They raced through the icy water as quickly as minimal sanitation needs permitted. Then, dressed again in the same sweaty clothes, they began a slow trot to breakfast.

            Breakfast? Gloria, sitting at a nearby table, snorted at it, saying, “This is certainly not what I’m used to.”

            Truthfully, it wasn’t anything special: hardboiled eggs, sausage patties, sliced cheese, bread and butter, fried chorley tortillas, some fresh fruit. There was also a broad, shallow bowl of the gray, plum-sized Terra Novan olives. It was believed they were native to the planet, rather than genengineered like the Noah’s Tranzitrees, Bolshiberries, and Progressivines.

            To many, the sheer quantity of the food dished out was amazing. Maria, for example, after years of scraping pennies to try to feed Alma and herself, was shocked that the cooks gave them as much as they felt like eating, barring only the sausage, cheese and eggs, which were rationed.

Since no one had bothered to feed the women the night before, most of them fairly pigged out.

            Cat, Inez’ bunkmate, took over dividing the rations. The way she did it reminded Maria a bit of her own mother, especially in the way she played favorites. Somehow or other, Cat seemed to have adopted Inez as her substitute baby. Maria noticed, anyway, that if there was an odd amount of one of the rationed items, it seemed to end up on Inez’ plate.

            Maria didn’t complain. After all, Inez wasthe smallest and thinnest girl at the table.

            There was a can of a thick, rough paste on the table. Gloria, several seats down from Marta, took a slice of chorley and then used her knife to spread some of the paste on it. Marta, who’d been around the Legion for a while, started to caution her but then decided, Screw the arrogant bitch.

            Gloria took a bite, chewed twice, and then her mouth opened, panting, as her eyes widened. “Holyfuckingshit!” she gasped, reaching for a glass of water. “What is that?”

            Marta smiled and answered, “Well, among other things…”

 

*****

 

            The morning of that first full day the women drew their equipment; all ninety-five distinct items required for the first five weeks of basic training. With a little help from the four corporals and one of the sergeants they managed to stow everything in their rucksacks. Later in the day, and with a little more help, they managed to put together the fifteen items that went into their load carrying harness: four empty drum magazine pouches (another magazine was generally to be kept in their rifles, when issued, or in a cargo pocket), two plastic one liter canteens with covers, first aid pouch with bandage, bayonet and scabbard, “butt- pack,” suspenders and belt.

            Everything else was stuffed into the rucksacks including, at that point, the helmet, its liner, and its camouflage cover. In all, their Phase One BCT load was about forty-five pounds excluding water, food, and any ammunition they might be carrying.

            Sergeant Castro brought out several rolls of thick green tape and, using Marta’s set as a model, patiently showed them how to tape all the metal pieces to ensure they stayed together...and didn’t dig into their skin.

            “Look, girls,” Castro said, “no matter what we might call you, or how we might treat you, we’re here to help you. Don’t let it go to your empty heads, but yes, we’re almost always going to be pretty damned patient with the technical and tactical things you need to learn. After all, this is all new to you.

“On the other hand,” he intoned, “if you fail in any way that so much as touches on a matter of character or discipline, kiss your little butts goodbye. We really don’t assume you are precisely stupid…but you are, literally, ignorant. We are not assuming you are innately bad…but you have been poorly brought up. It’s fair to say that so far as your becoming soldiers goes, you haven’t been brought up at all. And you areweak, soft, and unrealistic.  But don’t worry; we’ll fix all that.”

 

*****

           

            The women spent that first day, when they weren’t actively involved in fitting and stowing their gear, learning close order drill; “square bashing,” the instructors called it. The sun was hot, but water and rest breaks were fairly frequent. They knocked off just after sundown.

            Marta and Maria had dinner together, facing each other over the table. Things had remained a little awkward between them since Marta’s outburst of that morning. Still, since they were bunking together, they tended to stay together.

            Inez sat down next to Maria. Cat, who was the oldest of them, sat down next to Marta. They were all soon chatting just like old friends. It turned out that Cat was a widow.  Her husband had left her with three kids – one just a baby – very little money, and no marketable skills. Only the Tercio Amazonaoffered her a way to have her kids cared for while training and earning a ticket to a better life.

            Cat missed her babies terribly, she said. Then she reached over the table to rub Inez’ scalp, saying, “But I have a new one to take care of right here.”

            Inez rolled her eyes and sighed, resignedly.

            Since dinner was better than breakfast, and the mess hall blessedly cool after a hot day in the sun, the women lingered over it, in relaxed conversation.

            It came as a considerable surprise, then, when they returned to their barracks and found the doors had all been locked, their packs dumped in a pile outside, and a cross-armed Centurion Garcia standing guard at the landing in front of the main entrance. The other nine trainers, likewise, stood at ground level with their arms folded.

            “Girls, girls,girls,” Garcia chided. “The Legion gave you a clean barracks this morning. I looked at it about two hours ago and what do you suppose I found? Dirt! Filth! Disorder!

            “Obviously, you people are not fit to live in civilized surroundings. You had time to clean the barracks after breakfast. You had time during the very frequent breaks you were given this afternoon. You had time after dinner. Obviously, you do not know or care enough to take advantage of time. Therefore, tomorrow your breaks will be halved. Tonight you will move into the tents where you will live until further notice. Platoon! Tench...’Hut! Squad leaders, put your filthy girls into the tents.”

            And so the women moved, though every morning one of the corporals supervised them in cleaning and re-cleaning the barracks they couldn’t live in.

 

*****

 

            The sun was down but only one small moon had risen. Outside the camp, the nasty antaniae called out, mnnbt, mnnbt, mnnbt.  From somewhere in the surrounding trees a trixie cawed on its nightly quest to kill and eat as many moonbats as possible.

By the faint light of the one risen moon, Maria, Cat, Marta, and Inez sat in the dirt outside the tent they’d been put in. It was dark in the tent; no lights, no beds either.

“It’s so damned unfair,” Cat said. “Why didn’t they tell us to clean the barracks? I don’t mind cleaning.”

            “Because they wanted to put us in these tents,” Marta answered. “Men...just bastard men. They’re all alike.”

            Maria had reason to share Marta’s opinion on men. To some extent, maybe, she did share it. She was too embarrassed to mention Piedras, though, so she just said, “Well, no matter how bad things look” – and those tents looked dismal indeed – “I guess things could be worse.”

            Cat asked, “What do you suppose we have to do to get back in the building?”

            Gloria must have overheard Cat. From somewhere inside the tent she answered, “Kiss those bastards’ asses, I imagine. That’s what they want.” Gloria had been a little bitter since early that morning when Centurion Garcia had knocked her on her posterior for trying to answer back.

            Inez disagreed. “No. My brother – he’s a centurion candidate – told me. The Legion wants fighters, not ass-kissers. They want people who will do their duty.  They want people who, even if they’re not sure what their duty is, will at least be thinking about what it mightbe. I think we’ll get out of these tents when Garcia decides we can and will do that.”

            Gloria retorted, “You’re giving them too much credit for brains, Trujillo. They’re doing this because they think they can. It’s just spiteful meanness and envy. I might even call it abuse of power,” she finished, sullenly.

            Inez answered, “I’ll admit, it seems like a pretty far leap from tents to training. And maybe I can’t quite see the connection either. But these men have been at this sort of thing for a long time. Maybe they really do know what they’re doing.

“Then, too, you know, we women tend to be forgiven our little transgressions in polite society. You must admit, this is a pretty good indication that we will not be lightly forgiven by the Legion, which is no kind of ‘polite’ society.”

Marta said, “I heard we are going to have to carry everything they gave us on our backs from now on. We don’t have any lockers here like we did in the barracks.”

“My brother warned me about this,” Inez commented. “When they did this to his basic training maniple, he said, ‘All the time we lived in the tents we had to lug everything we owned on our backs wherever we went. I got to where I hated my rucksack and everything in it.’”

 

*****

 

            Beyond harassment, that first week and a half of basic were pretty much taken up with close order drill, customs and courtesies of the service, military law, uniform and equipment wear and care, and – of course – physical training.

            The women had about two and a half hours of physical training every day. In the morning they had an hour and a half of calisthenics and a run that usually left them puking. If at least a few girls didn’t throw up then the next day’s run would be longer, faster, or both. For evenings there was another hour of combatives. As training progressed they didn’t always do the morning sessions. They rarely missed the evening ones.

            The men taught them to hit, gouge eyes, crush gonads...bite. They were also trained to a pretty fair standard with a knife. They learned to strangle, smash, break noses, and twist tendons...stab, jab, and slice.

            Still, they weren’t men. They could never have learned to use the simple male techniques used in bayonet fighting. That took too much weight and strength. Instead, they were taught the older, more intricate, fencing variety of bayonet fighting. That, as with many things for the women, took up a lot more time than was available to the men going through basic.

 

*****

 

            “Thrust! Twist! Draw! Thrust! Twist! Draw!”

            The swaying bag to Maria’s front seemed to mock her. For half an hour or more she had been trying to sink her bayonet solidly into one of the bullseyes painted on the side. To her left, Marta was having equal problems. To her right, Inez Trujillo was awkwardly trying to strike from below.

            Corporal Salazar literally picked Inez up by her combat harness and shook her. The man had biceps thicker than Inez’s legs. “You worthless little midget! Do you think the enemy will all be runts like you? If you can’t go in low for the kill, go in high!” He shook her again before dropping her back to her feet.

            Salazar then turned and slapped Maria across the face. “Put your heart into it, you stupid cunt. Hate that thing!” She nodded and tried again: Thrust, twist, draw.

            Garcia’s whistle called a moment’s rest. He shook his head, perplexed. Those old bayonet fencing drills we’re using were meant for men. They depend on having a center of gravity a lot higher than a woman’s, more height and muscular strength, too. Ah, well, they’ll have to figure some of this out on their own. If they don’t, I just might let Salazar carry through on his threat to kill one of ‘em on the spot.

            Again the whistle blew, signaling, “Break’s over.”

“Gonzalez, you dumb twat. Picture that sack as a man, coming for your kids. Kill ‘im!” Cat lunged...and missed.

            Salazar turned back to Maria. “Idiot child! Try again.” She missed the bag completely.

            Gloria, standing opposite, laughed out loud, right up until Salazar, with a fencing master’s grace, took two steps across the sawdust and laid her out with a single punch. He’d pulled his punch, too.

 

*****

 

            After that, Maria had a lot of trouble with Gloria, who seemed determined to make her into the platoon goat. Why this was so, Maria didn’t know. That it was so was patent.

 

*****

           

            Maria stood in line outside the mess, right behind Cat and ahead of Marta. The line stood at parade rest, the women coming to attention to take single steps forward as one of those ahead cleared the chow line and went to the tables. For those standing outside, there was no shade and the sun beat down on them. Worse, really, it reflected up from the gravel to ensure they were not just thoroughly but evenly roasted. Or perhaps there was another culinary term that would have suited better, given the near one hundred percent humidity.

            The mess hall was air conditioned, not for the women but for the benefit of the cooks. Still, whatever the reason for it, it was blessedly cool. Usually, it was as silent as death. Today, the women in line could hear sounds that seemed almost happy. True, they’d done well enough not to be punished much today, but what changed the tone inside the mess Maria couldn’t guess.

            She discovered why, when she finished passing her tray through the line. The very last thing slapped onto it was a small tub of ice cream.

            “I haven’t had…” she started to mumble, before Sergeant Castro, standing at the end of the line, ordered, “Seat, woman.”

            “Yes, Sergeant,” she said, then hurried to the dining area to find a place to sit. Unfortunately, the only open seat at the moment was beside Gloria. The latter took one look at Maria, another at the tub of ice cream.

            Then Gloria said, “You’re fat; you don’t need this.” She took the ice cream and passed it to someone else, then crossed her arms as if daring Maria to do something about it.

            Maria didn’t. She just took it.

 

*****

                       

            “Oh...yes, love...yes...oh, please...harder, harder...oh, oh, oh!”

            “Goddamned fucking sluts,” muttered Marta from the other side of the tent she shared with nineteen other women. “Don’t they know people have to fucking sleep? Will you two please SHUT UP!”

            The lesbians ignored her. These two apparently had very little sense of shame, though if there were others they were more discreet.

            The next morning, one of those two, Sonia, walked up to Marta and suggested that she was just jealous because she wasn’t ‘getting any.’

            “What is it, Bugatti; do you want to join us? Well, maybe if you’re nice. Then again, maybe you already have a little something. Maybe...” Sonia looked at Maria and, then reached out a hand to clasp her breast.

            Marta went for her like a berserker. Before anyone could stop it, Sonia was on the ground with Marta sitting on her, pummeling away with clenched fists. Maria felt a little ashamed – all right, more than a little ashamed – that she just stood there with her head lowered when the second lesbian, Trudi, jumped Marta from behind. Marta went down under flailing feet and fists.

            It was another one of the girls who went to Marta’s aid. Cristina Zamora was easily the biggest woman in the platoon. Zamora was pretty enough, in a strong featured way, and with her shining coppery hair. She picked up Trudi and punched her four or five times in the face before dropping her to the dirt. Then she separated Sonia and Marta, slapping both of them senseless with fine impartiality.

            “Freeze, bitches!” Garcia’s stone face gazed upon them. A few quick questions and he pronounced sentence. Marta, Zamora, Sonia and Trudi were given six hours extra duty each for disorderly conduct.

            Then Garcia turned to Maria and asked, “Is this woman your bunk buddy?”

            “Yes, Centurion,” Maria answered, shamefaced.

            “And is it true that you failed to go to her aid when she was attacked and outnumbered?”

            Maria’s eyes lowered. She hesitantly answered, “Yes, Centurion.”

            Garcia’s voice dripped with contempt as he said, sneering, “For you, eighteen hours extra duty, to be accomplished in three-hour increments during and in place of the evening meal. Six days’ bread and water for breakfast and lunch. Six days’ restriction to your tent when not at meals, extra duty, or training.”

 

*****

           

            “Maria. Maria, wake up.”

            “What? Who?”

            “Shush. Shush. It’s Marta. Here, eat this.” She handed over a leg of chicken she had stolen from the mess hall.

            “Marta?” Maria took the chicken, then stopped. She couldn’t eat it, no matter that she was famished.

            “I’m sorry, Marta. You know, for...”

            “I know. It’s my own fault for letting my temper get the better of me. I never think things through first. Now eat!”

            Maria did as she was told. She alwaysdid as she was told. Juan, Piedras, Gloria…

She thanked Marta, over and over. She apologized, over and over, between bites.

“Look, skip it. You can’t help being what you are…anymore than I can.” Marta patted a wet cheek, took the gnawed bone, and crawled back to her own pallet.

 

*****

           

            “It isn’t just Garcia’s platoon, sir. We’ve all had problems to some extent.” The speaker, Ernesto del Valle, was a tall, distinguished-looking Senior Centurion. He rubbed the fingers on one hand across graying temples as he continued. “It’s true, the lesbians aren’t as naturally promiscuous as, say, we would be. But there are problems. They’re human enough. They do develop interests that not only are not requited, but can’tbe requited. Fights, sir, lots of fights.”

“Frankly, I can live with lesbians, sir,” Garcia said. “What’s driving me crazy is the number of women who are just certain, deep down, that they can get to one of us. We’re having to be twice as shitty to all of ‘em as we should have to be to any of ‘em just to drive home the futility of the whole thing.”

De Silva, Tribune de Silva and a “shoo-in” to be Legatede Silva someday, placed his thumbs in the hollows of his temples and tapped his fingers on his brow.

“Tell me, Garcia…del Valle, are these women human”

Only Garcia answered, “Extremely human, sir.”

“As human as we are?”

Del Valle answered, “Yes, sir.”

De Silva raised his gaze to the three other officers, sixteen assembled centurions and sixty-two junior NCOs. “Anybody here ever have a crush on a straight? Hmmm? Raise your hands.”

About two thirds of the men present did.

“Right. They’re human, just like us. Our gender orientation doesn’t change theirs. And from their point of view we arethe right gender. The same basic thing holds true for the lesbians. Allthe other women are the right gender from their point of view.”

Franco observed, “But, sir, you can’t separate them from us. Who would train them?”

“No, I can’t,” de Silva agreed. “You’re just going to have to be shitty to the women. But we can separate out the lesbians from the rest. And we will. Sergeant Major?”

“Sir.”

“Put out the call. I need a centurion pair and four NCO pairs for an eighth platoon.”

“Sir.”

 

*****

 

            On the tenth day of training the women trudged to the ranges, everything they owned on their backs, nothing to be left behind in the tents. At seven miles, the walk to the range wasn’t nearly as far – or done nearly as fast – as some of the later marches. Still, it was no walk in the woods. To their usual forty-five pounds was added another three in food, another nine in water. That was more, in Maria’s case, than half her body weight. Some girls had it rougher. Inez Trujillo, all four feet, eleven inches of her, had it particularly bad.

            By this time, of course, the women had spent a good part of every day with their rucks on their backs. But this was different. Women walked funny. Women sling their hips differently from men when they walk. They’re madethat way. And the rucksacks were made for men, even though the women had small-sized ones. There was no really adequate solution to the problem. Carrying a ruck simply hurt them more.

“Tough luck,” as Centurion Garcia said. “Builds character.”

            Perhaps it did.

            When they reached the bivouac area, they were given a chance to strip and clean themselves before pitching the tents. All were ecstatic at being able to remove the rucksacks. The straps had just killedtheir tits.

            Marta was leaning against a tree, resting, when she looked at Inez and exclaimed,“Oh, damn!”

            Maria followed her gaze and saw Inez, cupping a breast in each hand, rocking back and forth, quietly moaning. Through the spaces between her fingers the others could see two spots, bright red against the dull green of Inez’ T-shirt. Cat sat beside her, wringing her hands.

            Marta and Maria stood up and went to her. They pulled her hands away and removed her T-shirt, then her bra. Marta said “I haven’t seen anything like this since...” Whatever she’d been about to say was lost as she didn’t continue.

            Inez’s nipples were oozing blood where the straps must have rubbed her. They were just raw.

            “I’m all right,” Inez said, through clenched teeth.

            “Like hell,” Marta answered. “I’m going for a medic.”

            “No! No, please. I’ll beall right.”

            “Sure. Right. Okay. Maria, go clean her bra and shirt. They’ll be impossible to wear with dried blood and crud on them. Now...let’s see. Cat, help me...”

            When Maria came back with Inez’ things she saw that Marta and Cat had bandaged the raw nipples and was working on the straps to her rucksack.

            “The problem,” Marta told them, “is that these packs are made for the width of a man’s shoulders. With us...they push the other straps too far inward.” She meant the suspenders on the combat harnesses. “So...” And she held up the ruck to show them how she had reversed the straps to point out, rather than in. This would put them on Inez’ shoulders, leaving enough room that the suspenders weren’t forced across her tits.

Clever girl, Maria thought.

 

*****

 

            The rifle range was fun, even satisfying. And the women had to develop a whole new set of muscles. There was no reason to believe that men were naturally better shots than women as far as most of the factors in marksmanship go. But the women weren’t as strong and even a rifle requires some unusual musculature. The F-26, being heavier than most, required still more.

            The girls spent literally hours just holding their rifle and squeezing off dry fires to build up muscle and control of the trigger finger. The technique was simple enough. An instructor would supervise as they took turns in teams of two. One member of the team would place a coin on the end of the rifle of the other, while the other was in firing position. Then the one with the rifle would s-l-o-w-l-y squeeze the trigger until the hammer dropped, or, to be technical, since the F-26 was electrically primed, until the connection was made. If the coin fell off, the woman needed more practice, and got it. They generally also received a large number of pushups, needed or not.

            And every day they would march somewhere new. Or back to somewhere old. And they sweated and strained and were generally made miserable. Inez’ new strap arrangement caught on with the smaller girls. Soon all of the “little people” had reversed their rucksack straps. It was better, a littleanyway.

            Sweated? Among the ninety five items in their initial kit were two field uniforms and five sets of underwear – boxers – and five pairs of socks. A few buckets were made available for washing their own clothes but the supply of clean clothing never quite kept up with the demand. They stank.

            But the instructors had thought of that. Women can get sick, inside, if they get and stay too filthy. No, not always, but the risks were much greater than for men. About two days after they’d arrived on the ranges a gynecologist showed up. She lectured them on the dangers and on what they could do to keep healthy. Maria’s respect for boxer shorts and sleeping naked under her mosquito net went up immeasurably.

            After the gynecologist left, Centurion Franco said, “Good. Now you’ve been told. If you don’t listen and rot from the inside out it’s your own fault.” Most women listened. Some girls didn’t at first, lazy or maybe just tired. They paid the price, too.

            Not that getting sick got them out of anything. Sick call was held in the field. If a woman was really hurt the odds were better than even that she would be recycled into the next planned class, doing scutwork in the interim. If one of them was just feeling poorly...tough.

            Feeling poorly? It was not widely known but women who live in close quarters seem to tend to get on the same menstrual cycle. Those were bad days; everybody bitching at everybody. Except the instructors, of course. The woman had learned that one never yelled at an instructor unless one had a burning desire to be beaten senseless.

A lot of the women thought it grossly unfair that they were treated so harshly when they had their periods. Actually, almost all of them thought so. On the other hand, though, not one could pin-point what was so special about a period. If they could be made to march on blistered and bleeding feet, why not with flowing menses? If a bad head cold or the flu didn’t keep them out of training why should something more predictable and natural?

            That, at least, was the way Centurions Garcia and Franco saw it. And their opinions were considerably more important than any woman’s at that point in time.

            The women were provided with sanitary napkins, which was something.

 

*****

 

            “One thousand, two thousand, three thousand…down, bitch! Now roll. Rifle to shoulder. Suppress! Number two…”

The women were doing short rushes and low crawls interspersed with dry firing. These techniques were used to move forward against the enemy without giving that enemy time or calm to shoot back accurately. Doing the rushes and crawls for a little while isn’t so bad. Doing them for hours upon hours, as they had been, was painful.

Maria’s tits hurt like the devil from being pounded on sharp rocks. The scabbed sores on her elbows – which she’d gotten from holding up her rifle and herself on the firing range for endless hours – had torn open. Her knees were bleeding, too.   

            She nearly cried and blurted out, “Sergeant Castro, why do all of you treat us so badly?”

            Castro didn’t answer immediately. He thought for a few moments then blew his whistle to call a halt. “Gather ‘round, girls,” he ordered. “And sit down.”

            When the entire squad had gathered at his feet, he said, “Fuentes here doesn’t understand. She probably isn’t the only one. So listen: Once upon a time a bird way down south in Secordia procrastinated about flying north for the winter. By the time it got off of its fluffy little ass the weather had already turned. It made it about half way across the Federated States before its wings froze up. It was also starving because it hadn’t been able to find anything to eat. The bird fell to the ground, shivering and expecting to die soon.

            “A cow came along and dropped a load right on our little friend’s head. Soon it was warm and happy, well fed, too. It stuck its head up and began to sing. A cat heard the singing, raced over, dug the little bird out of the cow flop, and ate it. Do you know the moral of the story, chica?”

            Maria said she didn’t.

            “Just this: Not everyonewho shits on you is your enemy. Not everyone who digs you out of the shit is your friend. And when you’re warm and well fed, don't make a ruckus about a little bit of shit.

            “Now back to work.”

 

*****

 

            “I wish there were some cheap way to chill that creek.”

Franco smiled. “Ice is rationed, Balthazar, as you know very well.”

“Mmmm. Yeah. But this is a special circumstance. Why, these women might get to like it out here in the jungle, if they don’t have to freeze just to be clean.”

Realizing that his partner was, in his own way, merely joking, Franco added his own sally. “They do seem to be having a pretty good time, don’t they? Are you sure you weren’t being over-generous what with giving them each a whole ounce of shampoo?”

“Maybe…but they did shoot well on the qualification range.”

“Well, yes, but a whole one ounce bottle? Each? Are you sure you’re not getting soft?”

Garcia shook his head, as if uncertain. “No…I don’t think so. It seems fair enough.”

Below the bank on which the centurions stood, their students joked and played and gamboled.   Cat, a country girl originally, showed her squad how to wash their clothes on the plentiful rocks.

“When’s the chow due?” Garcia asked.

“About an hour, Balthazar.”

“Did you arrange for chaplain services?

“Of course. Even though it isn’t even Sunday. By the way…?”

“Don’t eat when you’re hungry, eat when you can. Don’t sleep when you’re tired, sleep when you can. Pray always.”

Franco couldn’t argue with those sentiments.

 

*****

 

            After washing their clothes, Inez, Cat, Marta and Maria took turns washing each other’s stubble. Of course, with so little hair, they really didn’t need help. It was a social thing, not a practical one.

            Sitting on a stump, Maria spent her meager free time writing a letter for Porras to read to Alma. Even if the baby couldn’t contact her, she could at least let her know that Mama hadn’t abandoned her. Every few lines Maria would turn her eyes to her open wallet, just to stare at her baby’s photo. It was better than nothing.

            Marta sat down besides the stump. “Do you miss her?”

            “More than anything,” Maria answered. “She’s the only reason I’m here.”

            Marta sighed, wistfully “She’s beautiful. I can’t have babies,” she added, sadly. “Do you think, maybe, when this is over I could watch her for you? Sometimes? Or maybe take her to the park...or something?”

Maria thought, Is this Marta I’m hearing with the fear of rejection in her voice?“Anytime,” she answered. “But why can’t you have a baby of you own?”

            “I just can’t!” Marta stood quickly and walked away.        

 

*****

 

            The sun was setting as an outraged shout rang through the camp. Franco trotted over to investigate.

When he returned, he told Garcia, “Someone’s stolen another woman’s shampoo.”

“You know the drill. Do it.”

Faster than one can imagine, the women were hustled out from their tents and into formation. Then Franco called the roll to determine they were all present. One by one they went back, with an instructor in attendance, and dumped out their rucks.

            One girl, by the name of Rossini, was found with an extra bottle. The rest of the women were sent back to bed. Rossini spent most of the night tied to a tree.

            The next morning the formed platoon was called to attention by Centurion Franco, who then reported and turned the formation over to Garcia. Garcia ordered, “Stand at…Ease.

            “A soldier is first and foremost a selfless individual. He, or she, cannot be anything but that and still be worth much as a soldier. Recruit Private Rossini has failed to meet even the most minimal standards of selflessness. She is, in fact, a thief who stole something of considerable subjective value from someone who had no more than herself. For this, Rossini has been tried by court-martial, the centurions’ council sitting en banc, and found guilty. She is to be dishonorably discharged and her name struck from the rolls of your regiment. There is one little thing to attend to first, however.”

            Garcia gave a command. The platoon formed in two lines, facing each other. At Garcia’s nod two corporals half dragged, half carried Rossini to one end of the double line. She stood, quivering, hands still tied behind her back. Her eyes were an eloquent – but useless – plea. She was clad only in T-shirt and shorts. Most of her skin was exposed.

            “Remove your belts,” Garcia ordered. “As Rossini attempts to move between your lines you will strike her. I do not care whether you use the tip end or the buckle, but you WILL strike her…or join her.”

Most of the women held the metal buckle in their hands. A few – whether they were the meaner ones, or the ones most offended by theft, was not obvious – took the other end, swinging the metal buckles freely. The corporals and sergeants went to stand behind the women to make sure they didn’t slack off.

            Garcia ordered “Begin.” Rossini was pushed – well, kicked, actually – into the gauntlet.

            The details would be offensive. Some hit Rossini hard, some held back as much as they could while being watched. Most hit no more or harder than they had to. Still, a few women went out of their way to kick the culprit.

Rossini tried to protect her face, shielding it with her shoulder, but that only made her stumble and left her in the line of blows longer. Welts and cuts appeared on her face, neck, arms and legs. It was only luck that saved her eyes.

            A belt tangled in her legs, causing her to fall on her face. She crawled with her knees alone those last ten meters, her face plowing the ground, just like the animal Garcia wanted the others to see her as. Finally, bleeding from multiple cuts, at the end of the line and of her strength, Rossini collapsed.

            Garcia ordered the platoon to “Attention,” “Left and right… Face,” then gave the command, “Forward...March.” A sobbing Rossini, her head sideways on the ground, was left for some of the maniple’s headquarters people to kick off the island.

            Garcia didn’t even order that she be given the rest of her uniform. She’d never wear those particular clothes again.

            Four more women, including the one whose shampoo had been stolen, resigned that night.

 

*****

 

            Maria wanted to resign. She didn’t because, while she found the whole thing sickening (and back then she wouldn’t even have even hit Rossini were she not being watched herself), Marta and the others made her see the point.

“Look, Mari, Rossini was obviously untrustworthy,” Marta said. “I certainly don’t ever want to have to fight with her or anybody like her at my side. So she’s useless. And so the Legion booted her out.”

            “Yes, sure, throw her out,” Maria answered. “But beat her? Like an animal? Worse, because we would never beat an animal like that.”

Inez added, “The gauntlet? Well, my brother taught me this about the Legion. The legal code is damned draconian, in theory. In practice, however, they only use formal corporal punishment on people they’re going to dump anyway – a cherry on the ice cream, because that kind of humiliation tends to make someone useless as a soldier even if they weren’t already useless. And using a deadbeat like Rossini states a myth that is very important to the military. ‘Soldiers and veterans are real people. Everybody else is essentially sub-human. See for yourself how this thingwas just beaten like a dog, if you don’t believe us.’ It is difficult to see someone beaten like a dog and still think of that person as a human being.

            “Besides, they were actually merciful with Rossini. A man who’d been caught stealing from comrades would have had the same punishment, in theory. But a man would have run between two lines of men; heavier, stronger, quite possibly meaner.”

            “I doubt that Rossini was offended by the extra mercy,” said Cat.

            Marta, who had been beaten more than once in her life by various utter bastards who had derived some considerable sexual pleasure from the beating, said, “It wasn’t a sexual thing. Our instructors are gay. They don’t see Rossini as a sexual toy. They barely saw her as a human being. They just wanted us to do and see the damage. And see her humiliation.”

            Inez nodded. “My brother said that after an incident like this, you will never see another incident of theft reported the whole time of basic training.”

 

*****

 

            The sixty-six women remaining in the platoon trained next on special weapons: Machine guns, sub-machine guns, flame-throwers, grenades, demolitions. Of those weapons, most would, in latter days, remember the grenade range best. This was not because they liked it the best or because the grenades were the hardest things to learn to use. The engineering things, the flame-throwers and demolitions, were much harder physically. Only a very few women, it was found, could even carry and use a flame-thrower with any effect. But learning to use the grenades properly made a certain impact on the mind.

It was a blessedly cool, rainy morning when Garcia led the platoon from Camp Botchkareva to the engineering and grenade ranges. The dirt firebreak that paralleled the paved road to the range area and the ground on the ranges stayed muddy, even though the sun had broken out about half way there. Still, it wasn’t all that bad. And, despite the rain, their uniforms were mostly dry by the time they started to train. Smelly, but dry.

 

*****

 

The women sat in a semi-circle around a low platform on which stood Centurion Garcia. While he addressed them, they wolfed down their breakfast from sundry cans and pouches. Between the platform and the women was a hole dug into the ground, perhaps two feet by two, three deep, and almost entirely hidden by grass.

            “Grenades are made for a man to throw,” Garcia said, tossing a grenade up and down, one handed, as he did. “Oh, we could make them smaller and lighter for a woman but then they’d also be less powerful, so less effective. Besides which, it would be a lot more expensive to make them especially for women as the cost of a piece of military hardware goes up as the number purchased goes down. And, as anyone who has ever been around the military knows, if there were two models of grenade serving the same purpose, offensive, defensive, or screening, the supply system would deliver the women’s to the men and theirs to the women. That’s just how it works.”

            He flipped a little wire tab off the thing, then nonchalantly pulled a pin. He lifted his thumb and a flat metal thing – a “spoon,” it was called – sprang into the air. Equally calmly, Garcia tossed the now fully armed and slightly smoking grenade into the hole a few feet in front of the platform, between it and the girls. He did it so calmly and nonchalantly, in fact, that the resulting explosion took the women completely by surprise, raising a chorus of frightened cries.

            Totally unfazed, Garcia picked up another one, began tossing it up and down, too, and continued, “On the other hand, it is also damned rare for a soldier to actually have to throw a grenade all that far. If she’s in a hole and the enemy is attacking she can throw it about five feet outside and it won’t hurt her much beyond making her ears ring a bit. And if she’s the one attacking, ‘Get closer.’ That’s how you will be trained.”

            Quicker than he had the first one, Garcia thumbed off the safety clip, pulled the pin, released the spoon, and then tossed the apparently live grenade into the midst of the women of his platoon. Screaming, they scattered in all directions. The practice grenade, painted up to look like the real thing, went off with a mild pop.

            “Gets ‘em every time,” Garcia chuckled.

 

*****

 

            The women practiced for hours with blue-painted steel dummies. Then they practiced some more using the same dummies but with low powered fuses inserted that functioned like real grenade fuses. Finally, they were called forward one at a time to any of a half dozen circular sandbagged bunkers to use the real thing.

            Garcia wore the nearest thing to a smile any of the women had ever seen on him as Catarina Gonzalez entered the pit. It wasn’t a frown, anyway, and that was something.

            There were six grenades sitting on a table to one side. Garcia told her to take one. She did, and inspected it as she’d just been trained to do.

            “How long is the delay on that grenade?” he asked.

            “It will explode four to five seconds after I release the spoon, Centurion.”

            “Plenty of time, don’t you agree, Gonzalez?”

            Yes, she thought, except that quality control at the factory being what it is, the delay might be anywhere from three to seven seconds. Still, she wasn’t going to argue with him.

            He continued, conversationally, “You know, Private Gonzalez, any fool can throw a grenade.”

            “Yes, Centurion.”

            “We, however, wish you bitches to become very specialfools. Prepare to pull, Private.”

            She did, both hands in front of her, one clutching the pull ring, the other on the grenade body.

            “Remove the safety clip.”

            Cat flipped it away with a thumb.

            “Pull, Private.”

            She pulled the ring away, still holding the spoon, the safety handle, down with the fingers of her other hand. She then went into the position to throw, one arm and hand stretched forward, the other – the one holding the bomb – cocked by the side of her head. She was already scared out of her mind by that little hand-held monstrosity. She was, however, rather more frightened of Garcia.

            Garcia reached out with a beefy arm, lightening fast, and grabbed the wrist attached to the hand with the grenade. Then he said, “Gonzalez, when I give the command, ‘throw,’ you are going to release the spoon. That will release the striker to start the fuse burning. You and I will then count together to two...slowly. Then I will release your hand to throw the grenade....Ready?   Throw.”

            She froze. She would not, could not, release the spoon if she also couldn’t immediately get rid of the damned thing.

            “Private, that grenade can only kill you. I won’t tell you again. Throw.”

            Cat’s bladder let go, liquid running down her legs. But she also let go the spoon and, as soon as Garcia had counted to two and released her wrist, threw the grenade as far as she could. Along with Garcia, she fell to one knee and ducked her head to shelter from the blast.   It rattled her, even so.

            After the last bits of mud and rock had pattered down, Garcia pretended to notice neither Cat’s dripping trousers nor her quivering hands. He just said, “Good,” with his customary lack of enthusiasm.

            The next two grenades she also “cooked off,” though on the last one Garcia did not hold her wrist. (Nor did she wet herself again.) Then the pair went forward and Cat threw two more around the corner of a trench. The little metal fragments made a pattering sound as they hit the wall of the trench opposite her.

            “Okay, Gonzalez,” Garcia admitted, “You’ve done well so far. For this next one, the last one, I want you to crawl forward to that little bunker and put it through the firing port. But Private, this time, hold the grenade for a count of three after releasing the spoon. Got it?”

“Yes, Centurion.” Grenade in hand, Cat slithered forward, rolling to her back just as she reached the bunker. She flicked away the safety clip, pulled the pin, released the spoon and counted slowly and deliberately, “One thousand…two thousand…”

On three, no longer shaking, Cat calmly placed the grenade into the bunker, withdrawing her hand just as the explosion burst out of the narrow firing port.

            Wet pants or not, she was damned proud of herself.

            That didn’t mean she wasn’t embarrassed too. When Garcia told her to go back to the rest of the platoon she hesitated, looking down at her trousers. His gaze followed hers.

             “Oh...I see,” he said. Then, not unkindly, “Gonzalez, do you think you are the first one to ever wet themselves doing something terrifying?”   A sigh. “You are probably a little young to be learning this lesson. Let’s hope it takes. Anyway, start back to the platoon.”

            She had just turned and started to reluctantly, shamefully slink away when Garcia bellowed. “You. Gonzalez. Halt, bitch. Drop! That’s right, down on your belly like a snake. You stinking reptile, you move like pond scum. You know how pond scum moves? I didn’t think so. It doesn’t. If you can’t walk like a soldier then get down there with the pond scum. Crawl, bitch!”

            Garcia directed her into one of the little natural run offs that led from the pit to the waiting area, following her, insulting and cursing her, the entire time. Then he had her do short three-to-five second rushes from one scummy little hole to another. Some of the other girls watched with wide eyes. By the time he let her go, she may have been covered with mud and slime, but no one could tell if she was also covered with urine.

            The last thing he said, before letting her go was, “And wipe that goddamned happy smile off your face, you stupid twat.”

            With some difficulty, she did.

            Perhaps Garcia was being kind. Perhaps he was trying to keep her from being needlessly humiliated. On the other hand, maybe he also wanted people to move faster on the range. Certainly nobody else dawdled there, that Cat could see, the rest of the day. Indeed, the women pushed themselves to finish the job as quickly as possible. This may not have been such a good thing.

 

*****

 

            Marta waited nervously for her turn to throw the grenades. Ahead of her, another woman from a different platoon was shaking pretty badly as she picked up the first grenade. Her instructor went through much the same “very special fools” speech that Gonzalez had heard from Garcia. (The speech went way back to the very beginnings of the Legion.) The instructor was very calm, but this did not stop the woman’s tremors. Still, she took her grenade, flicked away the safety clip, pulled the pin, and released the spoon. The instructor held her wrist while she counted “One thousand…two thousand” with a breaking voice. He released the wrist to let her throw; which she did. Right into the wall of the bunker.

The instructor’s eyes followed the grenade as it bounced off the front of the pit, to the back of the pit, and then to the front again before settling on the floor. Perhaps he’d been counting the seconds automatically. Whatever the case, he didn’t hesitate a moment. Pushing the woman towards the entrance, he threw himself down atop the bomb. It exploded, sending blood and flesh and bone out of his back to spatter pit and woman, both.

Marta screamed. The blood- and flesh-spattered woman stood, frozen, her face ghastly white where it hadn’t been speckled with bits of red.

Within moments another instructor, the dead man’s pair bond, entered the pit and fell, weeping, to his knees. He verbally flailed the woman, “You fucking stupid moron. You goddamned fucking incompetent murdering bitch. What makes you so goddamned important that my partner had to die for you? What?”

The woman had no answer.

            Franco came and led the crushed man away.

 

*****

           

            Late that night, they marched the women back to their bivouac area (not Camp Botchkareva, with its icy showers). They sang, as they’d been taught to sing on their “slack time.” Given the events of the day, they sang mostly downbeat things:

 

            “Come by the hills to the land where glory remains,

            Where stories of old fill the heart and may yet come again,

            Where the past has been lost

            And the future has still to be won.

            And the cares of tomorrow must wait

            ’Til this day is done.”

 

            The women sang much of the time, and nearly all the time they were marching, scores of songs from the legionary songbook, plus a few of their own. In happier moments, they were particularly fond of the children’s song, Guillermo Hinchese (“With the razor’s gash he had settled her hash. Oh, never was crime so quick!”) and the more adult Sacred War.  At first they were made to sing, but – after a while – they came to love singing together for its own sake. It was fun. Never mind that with every song they were being indoctrinated. Indoctrinating through song was so old a trick it was almost passé.

            Marching away from the grenade range, between songs, Gloria fumed at length about all the explicit and implicit insults. She thought they should be considered innocent until proven guilty.

            Sick of her bitching, Inez asked her, “Why? If we fail, we might cost them their lives. It strikes me as a lot to ask of someone, to take an extra risk for something that will do themno good at all.”

            “Let them prove there’s a risk,” Gloria retorted, “before dumping on us.”

            “They just did,” Inez answered.

 

*****

 

            First aid training came next, almost a whole week of it, and the Amazons were goodat that, Centurion Garcia even said so. Although when he had them carry the instructors around on stretchers for a couple of hours they found that was muchharder than carrying each other.

            Resting her weary arms afterwards, Inez said, “I’m told that women in tercio medical companies have a lot of trouble with that. Enough trouble, says my brother, that it’s an open question whether they’ll continue to let women into male tercios as medics. I guess that’s one advantage of having a females-only combat unit. We won’t waste men’s time by having them carry light little burdens like us. Neither will we be overtaxing ourselves, maybe even killing our own wounded, trying to carry men who were just too damned heavy.”

 

*****

 

            At last, after not quite four weeks in the jungle, Phase One was over. The aspirant Amazons marched back to camp. As a reward, Garcia even let the girls use the barracks for a few days. The water in the showers was still icy.



Interlude

 

            “Up yours, cueco,” the archaeopteryx said from his perch in one corner as it worried with its beak a Terra Novan olive held clasped in one claw.

            “Fucking bird,” Franco muttered, as he looked out of the tiny shack he shared with Garcia. From the window he saw a squad of women running in a circle, their rifles held over their heads. Their tramping feet raised a cloud of dust that had them all coughing and gagging. Above the suffering girls, in the background, high over the island, the continuous cloud around the mouth of the solar chimney loomed.

            “God, I hate this shit,” he told his partner and boss.

            “I know. Me, too.”

            “Would you have volunteered us for this horror if you had known what we would have to do to them?”

            “I did know. So did you. Deep down, you knew.”

            “Maybe so,” Franco half-admitted. “Christ, why us?”

            Garcia didn’t answer immediately. When he did, he said, “Because we can. And no one else could. Now stop your bleeding and tell me about third squad.”

            Franco pulled his gaze from the suffering women. “Mostly, they’re coming along. The ones who have me worried are Bugatti, Santiago and Fuentes; our resident sociopath, feminist and wimp, respectively.”

            Garcia chuckled low. “You know, for a really smart, book learned, university professor, you can be awfully dense sometimes.”

            Franco looked at Garcia with something between shock and mortal offense.

            “Oh, calm down. You’re young. You’re still learning.”

            “So teach me, o ancient and mighty one,” Franco answered sarcastically.

            Garcia thought briefly of a terrified young girl, holding a grenade in a trembling hand. “Just trust me, Fuentes is not a wimp. There’s steel inside there. Oh, maybe it isn’t Atacamas Mountains solid. Maybe it’s more like a...oh, like a rapier, I suppose. In any case, it keeps springing back. I think she’ll be all right.”

            “Maybe you should have a talk with her,” Franco suggested.

            “Maybe I will at that. As for Bugatti?” Garcia shook his head with disgust. “That poor creature has some tales to tell. Have you seen her file?”

            It was Franco’s turn to show disgust. “I’ve read it. But do you really think she can overcome all that?”

            Garcia shrugged. “Maybe. Maybe not. She’s trying though. And she’s doing better all the time.   Why, she’s even learned to hide the fact that she wants to rip our throats out whenever one of us gives her a whack.”

            Then it was Garcia’s turn to look worried. “You’re right about Santiago, though. She’s always been out for number one, hiding it behind her concern for ‘all women, everywhere.’ You would think she’d been a charter member of the National Organization for Upper Middle Class White Women. It’s getting worse, too. But I have a trick that might work on her.”   

            “Or might not.”

            “‘Or might not,’” Garcia conceded.

            Franco looked back out of the window. “Do you really think this is the best way to get the best out of a group of women?”

            “That isn’t the point or the mission. We’re not trying to get the best out a group of women; we’re trying to get the best women out of the group. That’s a very different thing. And for that, this way works perfectly. It will be their job, later on, to figure out how to get the best from a group of women.

            “Now...what about third squad’s children?”

            Franco answered, “I spoke to Private Porras last night by phone. The Gonzalez children are doing well enough. The Maceira boy has a head cold, but is recovering nicely. Little Alma Fuentes misses her mommy and cries a lot.”

            “Should we let Fuentes call home, do you think?” Garcia asked.

            Shaking his head, Franco replied, “Leaving aside the fact that it’s against the rules...Yes, yes; I know you can bend the rules for good cause. Leaving that aside; I think it would be a very bad idea to let Fuentes’ mind start wandering to her baby. She has trouble enough being apart from her kid. You know; cries a lot when she thinks no one is looking.”

            “OK, then. Little Alma can cry a little more.” Changing the subject, Garcia asked, “Are you ready to deal with the herstorian we’ve got coming out to lecture the girls?”

            Franco smiled then. “Sylvia Torres? She’s mindless,” he snorted.  “I not only know everything she ever wrote; I just might know everything she’s ever read. I knew her at the university, after all.”

            “Good. Let’s make it memorable. Be nice to the woman, but give the girls what they need to recognize silliness when they hear it.”


Chapter Four

 

“The song for the soldier is a war song;” it is not “I don't like spiders and snakes.”

 

                                                --Patricio Carrera

 

Maria:

 

            By the end of Phase One our strength was down by about twenty percent. It would probably have been a lot lower except that our cadre simply would not let us quit easily at this point and punished us if we tried. We were also a lot stronger, though the strongest of us still couldn’t have taken on the weakest of our instructors in close combat. Even the three or four strongest probably couldn’t have. But it was an improvement. Besides, we could shoot at least as well as an equivalent group of male recruits, and probably better. We could use the weapons that didn’t require any unusual physical strength as well as the men, even a little better in the case of tripod mounted .34 caliber machine guns. Garcia had said something about “natural rhythm” when he’d announced that. We had more trouble with firing the machine guns from their integral bipods or from the hip. And carrying them and a full ammunition load was always a pure bitch.

            We still could not march as far as the men, as fast, while carrying the same weight. Actually, as a group we couldn’t even pick up the same weight to start to carry it.

            In Phase Two of training they started messing with our heads even more than they had previously messed with our bodies. We can talk about that later.

            We also got fresh haircuts. Yes, they buzzed us again. But, then, they issued us two more field uniforms, more underwear, and another pair of the lightweight boots each. Win a few, lose a few.

            (We don’t do that anymore, in Amazontraining, by the way. After the first buzz cut we don't say a word. But we keep the new girls even filthier than the Gorgidas did with us. As their hair grows, it gets and stays rotten. We leave them the shears, though. When they cut their hair on their own, we know we’re training them hard enough.  Discipline is always better when it grows from inside.)

 

****

 

            One day they marched us into a sort of tree shaded amphitheater surrounded by bleachers they used for a classroom. A pinch-faced, sort of dumpy woman walked to the lectern and introduced herself as Professor Sylvia Torres. She said she was there to teach us about the history of women in the military. She’d obviously never done a day in uniform herself, nor was her degree in history, let alone military history. And the way she wrinkled her nose at our stench didn’t precisely endear her to us.

            It was obvious that this woman only partly approved of our experiment. She plainly disapproved of our being segregated. Though it was funny that she entirely believed in, and seemed to approve of, the original Amazons, who were entirely segregated except at breeding season.

            “There is plenty of history to support the integration of men and women in the military,” she announced. “To begin, let us take the example of Lucille Brauer, a Federated States Marine who served aboard the FSS Charter during their war of AC 288. She had to keep the fact she was a woman hidden, true. But she did everything the men did, to include fighting in some of the most successful actions in which that ship engaged.”

            Franco interrupted to ask, “Professor Torres, how did the Brauer woman manage to keep hidden her sex when it was a regulation of the Federated States Marines at that time for the commander to inspect each of his Marines for their health, buck naked, once a week? I’m just curious, you understand.”

            “Professor Franco,” Torres answered, “I’m afraid the record is not specific as to what measures Ms. Brauer had to use.”

            “CenturionFranco,” he corrected. “She was successful, though, in hiding her sex, you say. Hmmm. Interesting. Please excuse me for a moment, Professor. Stand up for a moment, Bugatti.”

            Marta arose with a suspicious look on her face; her chest prominent, as always.

            Franco spoke as if he really were interested in finding a solution to a problem that couldbe solved if he could only open his mind enough. Rubbing his face contemplatively, he said, “Maybe if we redesigned the body armor a bit...might be hot...but...yes, we could – possibly – do this. Thank you, Professor. Sit down, Bugatti.”

            I joined the others in smirking. Trying to make Marta look like a boy was an obvious exercise in futility.

            I don’t think Torres quite understood what Franco had just done to her, because she continued, unfazed, “As another example, we have the case of a Volgan tank crew in the Great Global War. This tank crew, composed of two men and two women, successfully held up the advance of an entire Sachsen army of eleven divisions for three days. This was not the Red Tsar’s propaganda, by the way, but came from Sachsenrecords. After the Sachsens finally succeeded in knocking that tank out, they found that the only survivor of the crew was a woman.” She smiled triumphantly.

            Franco raised his hand again. “What were the relationships among those men and women, Professor?”

            “They were married, Prof...ah, Centurion Franco.” She consulted her notes, briefly, then said, “They were, in fact, the Political Commissar of the unit, his assistant, and their wives.”

            “Ah, then,” Franco said. “So they were married, like us in the Tercio Gorgidas. And the political cell of their unit, you say? That’s very interesting, too. Were they fanatics, do you suppose, Professor?”

            “Well,” she answered, “their actions in battle would seem to indicate an unusual degree of commitment.”

            “So they didn’t have any of the typical problems you get when you put men and women together. I see.”

            Torres did notsee, it seemed. “Problems?”

            “Oh, you know. Problem Number One: ‘Won’t one of you big strong men help poor little ol’ me?’ Problem Number Two: ‘Private, how gratefulwould you be if you didn’t have to pull guard tonight.’ Problem Number Three: ‘You’re what! What will my wife say?’ That kind of problem. Tell me, Professor, what kind of tank was it?”

            Again she turned to her notes. “It was a very advanced for the time heavy tank, I understand.”

            “Ah. So women cancrew a heavy tank. Very good. Do you happen to recall how heavy a tank it was?” She didn’t.

            “Hmmm. I don’t know either,” Franco said. “I wonder, though, whether there might not be a problem with putting women on tanks today. Even heavy tanks in those days were much lighter affairs than tanks now. Shells were lighter. Tracks were lighter. Parts and engines were lighter. Today, I don’t know that any two women and two men living could adequately fight and maintain a main battle tank which is, at forty to seventy tons, two or three times heavier than its Great Global War counterpart. The tracks are too heavy, the shells are too heavy, everything is too heavy.”

            She asked, “But don’t we have tanks that are lighter than that?”

            “Well...sort of,” Franco admitted. “The Legions do have Ocelots. They’re pretty light; about nineteen tons. On the other hand, an Ocelotwouldn’t stand a chance against a real tank though it does give pretty good service as an infantry support vehicle. I’m sure women – or men and women mixed – could handle those without any technical problems whatsoever,” Franco concluded enthusiastically.

            I guess Torres hadn’t ever given any thought to the technical differences between one type of weapon and another. I didn’t know myself. She seemed happy with Franco’s seeming agreement.

            Moving on, Torres said, “Nor is the history of men and women being integrated in combat limited to heavy, high technology, weapons like tanks.   Women of Zion, during their wars, gave good service themselves as infantry against the Arabs, mixed in units with men.”

            Franco inquired, “How did that work? Were there any problems?”

            “Well, there were a few,” Torres conceded. “It was discovered that men simply would not treat women like they would other men. When the women got into trouble there was an unfortunate tendency for the men to abandon the mission to save the women. I wouldn’t blame those boys too much. They couldn’t help it, even if it wasn’t hard wired in their genes, there was some strong cultural conditioning. Besides, it isn’t like straight young men have any brains.” We, even Franco, joined her in a laugh.

            “Unfortunately, the women were soon –after about three weeks – removed from units with men and formed into their own, where they continued to do respectably well. This was still patently unfair. It wasn’t their fault that the men acted like that. Worse, today Zion’s women are not even allowed to drive trucks, because trucks go to the front and women are notallowed at the front.”

            “I thought that Zion does still conscript young women,” Franco commiserated.

            “They do,” she said, “but only ifthey haven’t gotten married. The drafted women make a pun of the initials for their service; apparently in Hebrew the letters can also stand for ‘We should have gotten married!’”

            Franco asked, “Do you suppose that the Zionis do it this way at least partly to make sure that old maids of eighteen or nineteen have all the opportunity possible to meet a great many eligible young men so they’ll get married soon thereafter...to start working on the next generation of – male – cannon fodder?”

            “I’m sure I don’t understand the workings of thatkind of mind, Pro...Centurion Franco.”

            I saw Franco shrug as if he didn’t understand it, either. “Well, it’s just a hunch, of course. But, if not, why not conscript young married women who are not pregnant? It surely doesn’t seem fair to me either. Do they have any other reasons?”

            “Maybe one. It is believed,” Torres said, “that there are some cultures – and Arabic culture in particular – in which it would be an unpardonable shame for men to surrender to or run from women.”

            It occurred to me that my own culture wasn’t too far from that.

            She admitted, “The Zionis claim that when they put women in combat units, Arab units that otherwise would have given up or run away would stay and fight, driving up everybody’s casualties, if they even suspected there were women opposing them. But that’s old news. In the Federated States’ first war against Sumer, some decades ago, the Sumeri prisoners were glad to be guarded by military policewomen.”

            Franco commented, “That’s vastly different from actually surrendering to women, of course. But there must have been some such surrenders since some of the Sumeris were equally glad to surrender to civilian camera crews. I have heard that some large numbers tried to surrender to passing aircraft. Still, I’m not sure that this proves anything... except maybe that beating an army that’s been pounded from the air for six weeks, and was rotten to start with, is not something on which to base a generally applicable theory. Still, it isan improvement, Professor, I agree.”

            Torres continued on with a discussion about the apparently remarkable ability of armed forces to change character. That part of her discussion was in the same general vein, or at least had the same philosophical underpinnings: That the sheer raw power of armed forces was such that all they had to do was order their people to become something and they would become that thing. She said, “Armies do it all the time. This one should be able to do the same with you and men as easily.”

            The last thing she spoke on at any length was concerning our unmitigated, inalienable right, as women, to get pregnant and have babies any time we wanted, at our sole discretion. She really didn’t like the idea of our being administered mandatory implanted contraceptives. Centurion Franco didn’t say a word about that.

 

*****

 

            The next morning, however, we had to do another road march, a fifteen mile hump.

            Franco stood in front of the platoon and asked, rather blandly, who among us had agreed with the feminist speaker about our right to get pregnant. At first no one admitted it. He, promised us, Scout’s Honor, that there would be no retaliation, no personal punishment, against any who might express their honest view.

            At that Gloria said, “I agree. You men have no right to tell us when we can, can’t, should, shouldn’t, or must have a baby.”

            “Well, we have one honest woman in the group. Have we no more? Surely we must.” He coaxed us and cajoled us until he had fifteen women, about a quarter of what we had left by then, who would state that they believed that Torres had been right, that men had no right to tell us when we could and couldn’t, or should, or must, have a baby.

            Franco agreed with them, said so plainly, even enthusiastically. Then he told them to drop their packs, rifles, load carrying equipment and helmets. He ordered them, very gently, out of the formation. He told them not to worry, they wouldn’t be punished, but just to stand by. At that time a couple of the corporals brought out fifteen or twenty long, thick poles.

            Then Garcia came out, grinning broadly. You really had to know him at the time to know just how creepy a thing that was.

            “Ladies,” he said, “it seems I’m going to be a daddy. Who would have believed it? Me?” he rhetorically asked of the women Franco had called out of formation. “For, you see, you are all now, for this day only, officially ‘pregnant.’ As such, in deference to your delicate condition, and out of concern for the health of your babies, you cannot be expected to – and I, as a mere man, will not ask you to – engage in any strenuous physical labor.”

            The creepy grin changed to a frown. He tapped a finger against his own cheek, as if he had just realized the existence of an insoluble problem.     “Still, we do have a range to go to. My, my. And we don’t have any buses or trucks scheduled. Hmmm, pity. So, sorry to say, you will have to walk to the range with the rest of us. But you needn’t worry about how your gear will get to training. Your fellow recruits have volunteered to carry it for you.”

            Then he ordered the rest of us to string their gear on the poles, shoulder the poles, and, “Forward march.” We formed in three long columns with the “pregnant” women and the instructors marching in the center, Garcia up front and Franco walking the center and rear.

            I cannot even begin to tell you how much that hurt. I was – we all were – already carrying as much as we uncomfortablycould. Between the poles and the other girls’ gear we had maybe thirty pounds more than that. It was just too much.

            Not that Garcia or Franco seemed to care. Their faces remained impassive as we stumbled along, tears mostly hidden by sweat, for fifteen miles. The poles probably weren’t the worst possible way of carrying that extra gear. But they did cut into our shoulders, scrape our necks, throw us off center so that our backs hurt. It was torture. It was intended to be.

            The ‘pregnant’ women, all of them – even Gloria, who surprised me by it – begged to be allowed to carry their packs for themselves. Franco, marching next to our squad, was having none of it. When one of the girls tried to help us with the poles he rapped her knuckles with his centurion’s stick, hard, for her trouble.

            “Sorry, chica, you can’t have a miscarriage on my watch. Garcia wouldn’t like it, caring and sensitive soul that he is.”

            And even though they carried no loads, the day was still hot. They had to drink from the water the rest of us were carrying for them. They apologized, embarrassingly, sincerely and continuously, until Franco told them to, “Shut up! Stop bitching! You claimed the unlimited right. This is what it means; that someone else has to carry your load. Live with it.”

            Gloria walked along miserably between Inez and Marta, myself and Cat. Inez and Marta took turns berating her.

            “Oh, my,” said little Inez, straining more than most under the load. “Poor, poor Gloria. She’s so smart, she’s so big and strong and tough. She can figure out anything.  Why, she’s even figured out how to have someone else carry her equipment.”

            “And she didn’t have to flutter her eyelashes or look cute,” continued Marta. “All she had to do was get herself pregnant. We sure are the superior sex, with Gloria as our leader, showing us the way to the top.”

            I confess, their verbal abuse of Gloria was becoming annoying. Cat finally got sick enough of it to tell them to shut up and leave her alone. Inez listened, though Marta still grumbled.

            That march would normally have taken maybe six hours. It actually took just under ten. And each one of those was several times worse than any hour of marching with a normal load would have been.   We tripped; we slipped; we fell. From the awkward walk, the extra weight, most of our feet were bleeding by the end of the day. I never before quite understood how bad Christ’s march up Golgotha must have been. (Though that wasn’t the worst march we ever did.)

            We never even tried the old stand-by of, “Won’t one of you big strong men help poor little ol’ me?” It never worked with ourinstructors anyway.

            When we’d reached the range, Centurion Garcia announced, “From this day forward any member of this platoon who goes on sick call will have her gear carried in this way by the others. To support this, each squad will carry two of these poles to all training sites, and in addition to their other gear.”

            Three more recruits resigned that night. Two of them were from those whom Garcia had made “pregnant.” They were allowed to go to one of the non-combat positions for women in their home town tercios. I don’t know if any of them took that option.

            We took to calling going on sick call, “getting knocked up.” The poles we called, for reasons both obvious and subtle, “pricks.”

 

*****

 

            Not everything they told us or did to us was anti-female, or even anti-feminist. I learned a lot about the military history of my sex. Maybe more importantly, I learned to thinka lot more about the military history of my sex. Centurion Franco did most of that lecturing.

            One thing Franco told us, more or less off the record, I’d like to repeat here. Of course, in training now we do tellthe recruits that the Amazons might have existed but couldn’t be proved. It’s better that they not be disillusioned if someone ever really disproves their existence.

            But Franco thought it fairly likely they had existed in some form. His reasons were partly technical, partly philosophical. Basically, Franco said, the Amazons, if they had existed, were horse archers at a time when horses could transport men only in clumsy chariots. The early horses were too weak in the back to support a man’s weight. Supporting a woman would have been possible centuries before horses were bred that were strong enough for a man but centuries after horses had been domesticated. This also corresponded, roughly, to the invention or introduction of the composite bow, which was – in legend – the Amazons’ weapon of choice.

            Moreover, said Franco, the people who recorded the legends – the ancient Greeks – were simply not horse oriented, the area being a poor place to raise horses. They would be fairly unlikely to even have thought of putting women on horseback unless there was some crumb of fact or fact-based rumor to support it.

            Lastly, he said that the legends were quite accurate in principle about what would be required to make female warriors, especially that voluntary giving up of their right breasts, an important part of a woman’s appearance and the symbolic reduction of their ability to nurture.

            I’m still not sure if I buy it.

            Franco told us, too, of some criticisms of military women that, he thought, were patently unfair. It seems there was an instance, thirty or forty years before the Tercio Amazona was formed, when women in the Federated States Army stationed in one of the hot spots around the planet had deserted their posts in overwhelming numbers because there was a chance that war might break out soon. Worse, much worse, men took off in droves to see to their wives and girlfriends.

            “No wonder they did,” said Franco. “They’d never been trained for combat. Why, women at that time, in that army, didn’t even fire weapons in basic training. It’s perfectly understandable that they ran, though the men should have been shot.”

            That was, obviously, not going to be a problem for us.

            Naturally, at some point in time the question came up of our being raped if captured. Franco had a pretty good one liner for that: “Don’t surrender.” He didn’t let it go at that, though.

            “Look,” he said, “young men have been having their bodies violated in battle for uncounted millennia. You tell me. In what way is it worse for you to be raped – in a place that’s reasonably suited for a somewhat similar purpose – than it is for a young man to have a sword, spear or bayonet driven through his belly? How is it worse for you to be raped than it is to be disemboweled by a shell fragment? How many women prefer death to submission to rape? Your own sex has already voted on the question and their answer has been that rape is preferable.”

            I thought of lying under Piedras and tried not to weep. It hurt more that it had been true.

 

*****

 

            Don't get the wrong idea; we didn’t have these short lectures in any neat, antiseptic classrooms. There weren’t any outside of the camp. Mostly they weren’t even formal lectures, but just little bits of food for thought Franco would throw to us from time to time. Usually, they tended to come just before or just after we had to do something really miserable, painful, or dangerous.

            Once, for example, near the end of basic, we did a thirty mile road march with full combat equipment and supplies in twelve hours. It was part of our graduation exercise. We knew that the equivalent march for the men was forty miles in fifteen hours, longer and a little faster. A lot of our training was like that: something less than the men had to do.

            I’ve thought about that a lot over the years. Did this “gender-norming” (that’s what they called it) mean we were inferior to men, that we could never be equal?

            That depends, in large part, on what you think the purposes of physical training are in an army. Sure, some of it is building strength, stamina, and endurance. But that isn’t its whole purpose, nor even most of it. My sisters who died on Cerro Mina, and – later on – in other places, were equal to, better than, most men in every important way, even if they couldn’t march as fast. And that isn’t just regimental pride speaking.

            Think about battle; I have. A terrifying thing, no? But what is terrifying about it? The chance of painful death or mutilation. The fear of failing your friends and yourself.

            Think about fear; I have. I have known fear unimaginable when I was just a girl. I overcame it, as my sisters did. How? Discipline, dedication, determination, morale, courage... call it, “character.”

            And that is what our physical training was mostly about; building those things – character building – through pain. We suffered on marches, we suffered on runs, our hands bled from digging. And all of this we did, essentially, to ourselves because – beyond a certain point, and corporals’ boots or centurions’ sticks notwithstanding – it just isn’t possible to make someone take one more step, dig one more shovel full of dirt, if that person won’t do it on his or her own. (I read later that the ancient Greeks and Romans almost never used slaves to row their warships because free citizens could and would do a lot more work on their own than a slave would under the lash.)

            You see, it wasn’t all that important that we couldn’t march as far as men. It was that they had to march farther, faster, than we did to suffer as much; to build as much character.

            Franco told us, after that march, “Sure we created different standards for you than men have. You’re easier to hurt.   You don’t need as much effort for the same pain.”

            That was true enough, but it wasn’t the whole truth. Moral considerations may be three times more important, but they aren’t all-important. There are some objective factors that go into the equation, as well. It’s a balancing act, I suppose. So far as I know, we are the only army, at least in recent times, that has found something like a proper balance where women are concerned.

            I’ve since had a chance to read about some other armies and how they tried, and generally failed, with making real soldiers of women. Naturally, the Tercionews letter, Hippolyta, has articles on just that in almost every issue. You should read some of them.

            Although, to be honest, Hippolyta can be pretty damned smug when comparing foreign failures with our success. Still, we do have some reason to be a little smug.

            Take Secordia, for example. About thirty years before us, they opened up all branches of their military service, and all organizations, to women, including the infantry.   A great blow for women’s rights? Not exactly. You see, Secordia had previously unified their armed forces. There was no separate navy, air force and army. So a women supply clerk in what had been the Secordian Navy could easily find herself moved to be a supply clerk in an infantry maniple of the Secordian Highlanders, and some did. No big deal, you think? Try to imagine yourself as a plump, comfortable supply clerk on a plump, comfortable ship. Then put yourself out in a Secordian winter in an unheated leaky tent, or maybe no tent. They had some serious morale problems.

            And when they tried to put women right into the infantry? Oh, sister, was that a disaster! The Secordian trainers didn’t gender norm anything for those women. One hundred and one women started infantry training. Ninety-eight failed outright. Of the other three – the ones who had to go through the course twice to pass – only one passed and she – maybe because she was the only woman in her unit – left as soon as her enlistment was up. Frankly, I have a sneaking suspicion that the male Secordian soldiers may have eased up on that one woman who made it to ensure that they wouldn’t be forced to gender norm anything, while discouraging any more women from volunteering. And no, repeat no, women volunteered to become regular enlisted infantry in Secordia after that fiasco for years.

            They had a little more apparent success with putting women in artillery and armor. I say “apparent” because the success was more apparent than real. Want to know how many women actually ended up serving guns and tanks in the regular Secordian Armed Forces? Exactly...none. They did fire direction computing for the artillery – a dead end job, by the way, in a really modern army, though it still has some future in ours. In the armored corps they drove light armored cars, not real tanks. They did not do the heavy work. And they were mostly despised by the men because of it.

            Despised by the men? Maybe not as individuals. But certainly the professionals down south were disgusted enough by having women thrust upon them without any real thought having been put into the very real problems those professionals knew they would have. Complaints were loud and unceasing. So was more than occasional active sabotage of the women in their military.

            That wasn’t a problem for us. Since our men didn’t risk having their worlds turned upside down by women warriors, they could help us rather than trying to ruin us. And, in retrospect, I must say that they really did help us...if only to help ourselves.

            Other armies had been more pragmatic; and more successful. The Cochinese, during the war there, had made considerable use of women, even as infantry. Not being subservient to the politically and socially dogmatic and militarily ignorant, the Cochinese had put the women in their own – all female – companies. They’d done pretty well, too, as long as they lasted. They took casualties, naturally, and women willing to fight are fairly rare, hard to replace. Pregnancy was a big problem, too, one we’ve solved partly by stringent social pressures and partly by requiring that women serving and not on maternity leave have implanted contraceptives.

            Do I seem unsympathetic? Look, I was a woman serving in a combat organization where there were no men to take up the slack left by a pregnant woman. AndIcouldn’t.

 

*****

 

            Garcia was sometimes almost human to us. I don’t mean just to an individual; I mean to us as a group.

            We had movies, some nights, when we were out on one of the ranges. No, we never got to see a movie we really wanted to see. As a matter of fact, if they showed us one, it was almost a sure thing that it would be something we really, really didn’t want to see.

            One I remember, in particular, began with a horrifying landing on a hostile beach. They didn’t even show us the entire thing; just the first thirty minutes or so. It made me sick; and I wasn’t the only one.

            Garcia had the projector shut off about the time that someone began to throw up noisily. I didn’t blame her; the sight of a man carrying his own ripped off arm in one hand while he tried to continue attacking was just too much.

            Garcia stood in front. Of us he asked, “What do you suppose it takes; to do something like those men did?”

            Marta stood to attention and answered, “Being dropped on a hostile beach with no way back and no choice, Centurion.”

            “Bullshit. Sit down, Bugatti.” She sat.

            “Women are supposed to be more emotional, less logical and rational,  than men. Is it true, Trujillo?”

            Inez stood and answered, “Centurion, I don't know how we’ve managed to pull off that little piece of propaganda for so long. It’s a bald-faced lie. Oh, sure, we can get away with showing our emotions more readily than men do, as readily as we feel like, as a matter of fact, without anyone thinking worse of us for it. Proves nothing. Truth is, we can be, and usually are, damned cold-hearted bitches, verylogical and veryrational.”

            I thought that was kind of funny, coming from Inez. If there was anybody in the platoon you could count on not to be a cold-hearted bitch, it was generally her...or Cat.

            “‘Very logical, very rational,’” Garcia parroted. “Shouldn’t a soldier be rational, Trujillo? Better yet, you...Fuentes. Shouldn’t you be rational?”

            “I...I don’t know, Centurion.”

            “Fair enough. A soldier should be rational, some would say. Up to a point, sure. But ‘a rational army would run away.’” He paused, meditatively. “Okay, that’s not quite right. A rational ‘army’ might not run away. An army entirely composed of completely rational soldiers, however, surely would. Go back to that movie. Did it make sense for those men to get off those boats under fire, then stay in the line of battle, with death or mutilation staring them in the face every second, when there was a perfectly rational alternative, namely surrendering as fast as they could; hiding, at least? Maybe refusing to even get on the boats?”

            “It must have, Centurion, to them, at the time.”

            Gloria added, “Centurion, a few days ago you told us that an army that runs suffers more loss than an army that stands and fights.”

            “Yes, Santiago. And it’s true. If an army does run its losses will probably be greater than if it had stood fast. But they’ll be greater among those who were slower in deciding to run, and slower in running. A really rational soldier, in a really rational army, knowing his or her comrades are also more or less rational, knowing they’ll run at some point – and probably sooner rather than later – is left with only one choice, to run first and let the enemy kill the others so he or she will have time to get away.”

            Inez stood up again. “But they usually don’t, Centurion. Why not?”

            “Men usually don’t,” he corrected, “because being relatively irrational and knowing their comrades are as well, they can afford to wait a little. Almost any man or women might make the decision to run. Normal men will wait longer, irrationally long. Often they’ll stick it out long enough to win over the soldiers of an army that are just that much more rational than they are.”

            He sent us to bed then.

 

*****

 

            How were they going to make us usefully irrational? Garcia and Franco took care of it in three ways. First, they ran out anybody who was notably selfish, or even notably less than selfless.   We had twice monthly peer evaluations. The cadre actually took into account ourviews on each other. If enough of us marked another woman down as deficient, she generally didn’t have long left in the unit. Getting “knocked up” more than once, and then only with really good reason, usually meant a ticket home...out of the tercio, anyway.

            The other way was subtle. That it was also fairly vicious goes without saying. It revolved around food.

            Sometimes Garcia would issue the food for the next day – maybe one hundred and fifty pounds worth – to four or five of us. He would forbid anyone else to so much as touch the rations, it all belonged to the ones selected. We weren’t allowed to break it down or help carry it. So if the rest of uswere going to eat, a few girls had to put themselves through hell, lugging our food...selflessly.          

            Garcia gave those girls an exemption from the peer evaluations for a while so they could throw the food away, some of it or all of it, if they weren’t willing to carry it.

            The other way was meaner still. He would occasionally chop off food for a day or two, then issue double or triple rations to those who had performed well, none to those who had done poorly. He did not make us share. In fact, he told us not to, making the point stick once by withdrawing the rations from a girl he caught sharing.

            Well, we shared our food anyway, on the sly, and he smirked behind our backs, I strongly suspect.

            The point? When someone who is famished will still, irrationally, share food with you or carry it for you, there is a better reason to believe that same someone won’t run out on you when the bullets start flying.

            It was really rather clever, all things considered. Still, we figured out how to deal with it until Garcia made resort to an even nastier variant on the trick.

            We were standing in formation one morning (you might be surprised how much time you can spend just standing around, in the military), all of us ready to head for the horizon. We really weren’t looking forward to it, especially as some nasty brand of influenza had been making the rounds of the island and many of us were sick.

            Franco called the platoon to attention, then turned around to make the morning report to Garcia.  “Centurion, all present or accounted for.”

            Garcia ordered, “Post!” Franco marched to a place behind the platoon. ( My eyes were locked dead ahead. It wasn’t until some months later that I discovered where, precisely, it was that a junior marched to when the leader called, “Post.”)

            Garcia then ordered the platoon to open ranks. Once we had, he sauntered along each rank, never saying a word but looking at each of us intently. Sometimes, as with me, he’d feel a forehead for temperature. After he had finished with the last rank he ordered us to close up again.

            “Ladies,” he began. He usually called us “twats,” or “cunts,” or “bitches.” I had a feeling that “ladies” was going to turn out a lot worse.             “Ladies, I have here six cases of rations. This is, as I’m sure you’re aware, your entire ration for the next two days.” He stopped, somewhat melodramatically. “Privates Nuñez, Galindo, and Miranda, you are to carry two cases each...unless some other should volunteer to carry those two cases in your stead. Without any help from anyone else.”

            He had named the three weakest and sickest among us, the bastard.

            “Fall in prepared to march in five minutes. Fall out.”

            We fell into a sort of gaggle. Isabel Galindo said, weakly, “I’ll carry my own. Take care of Lara and Edi.” Little Trujillo looked Galindo up and down carefully, then nodded and said, “I’ll carry Edi’s. Who’ll take care of Lara’s?”

            Marta spoke just before Cat did. “I will.”

            Cat said, “Dear, I’m in better shape than you. Let me.”

            “Maybe so, Catarina. But I’m still stronger. It’s mine.”

            I think my faith that these were women I could count on in a pinch went up a notch right about then.

 

*****

 

            We discovered some other interesting things about ourselves, too. There’s an old saying: Women have no friends, only rivals. It ranks, for truthfulness, right up there with an equivalent man’s saying: Never introduce your girlfriend and your best friend. Truth, but maybe not the whole and universal truth.

            Because there on the island, with no men to compete over, we diddevelop into real friends, some of us.

            Have you never noticed how women of merely moderate attractiveness will often gravitate around the leadership of the really beautiful ones? (Maybe that’s not true in every country, but it’s true enough in mine.) And the beautiful ones will be glad to have the merely pretty ones around, because it makes them look even more beautiful by comparison. You might wonder what’s in it for the merely pretty. Simplicity itself: They get a little glamour and if they want they can have the cast-offs. I wonder if men will ever realize that the human race is just one big experiment in selective breeding run, since inception, entirely by us.

            We didn’t work that way, though. Who’s beautiful when her head is shaved, she’s covered with mud, wearing rags, and stinks? Who’s beautiful without men to admire her? Nobody. So who takes charge? Those who have an ability that’s based on more than looks.

            Not everybody got the message right away. I only did, myself, after getting some help from a friend.

 

*****

 

            “Centurion. Private Fuentes, Maria; reporting as ordered.”

            “At ease private.” Garcia stood in front of me and looked me up and down, carefully, like a surgeon inspecting a diseased organ. Then, without any warning at all he slapped me, right across the face, hard enough to knock me to the floor.

            “On your feet. At ease....Why do you suppose I did that, Fuentes?”

            Though I’d managed to get to my feet, and automatically back to attention, I was literally speechless. I didn’t answer.

            “I asked a question, Private.”

            I started to blubber, “I don’t know, Centurion.”

            “All right...maybe you really are dense. Your file says no but...you could be. I’ll help you. What did I just do?”

            “You hit me.” For no reason, you bastard.  Piedras, at least, had reasons.

            “Did it hurt?”

            “Yes.”

            “Does it still hurt?”

            I had to answer, “No, it doesn’t...not as much anyway.”

            “Good...good. Now think back a bit. This morning, Santiago dumped a handful of sand and rocks down your drawers. Almost everybody laughed at you. I saw it. Did that hurt then?”

            “A little...Centurion.”

            “Does it still hurt?”

            “Yes...Centurion.”

            “What hurts more; your face from my slapping you, or your insides from Santiago’s being shitty to you?”

            I took too long about my answer, he knocked me down again, then picked me up, one handed, and set me on my feet.

            “Do you recall when...what was that cunt’s name...oh, yes, Ramirez. Do you recall when Ramirez made fun of you for being such a midget?”

            I remembered...too well. Again, almost the whole platoon had laughed at me. That stillhurt.

            He let me stand for a bit, then asked, “What hurts you more now?”

            He was raising a hand already when I blurted out the answer, “Thatdoes! Ramirez and Santiago.”

            “Very good, Fuentes. You can make value judgments.”

            Then he grew quiet, contemplative for a while. “What I’m trying to show you, Fuentes...to drive into your little recruit pea brain...is that physical pain goes away fairly quickly. It isn’t always something to be avoided. But pains of the heart? They last and last. I want you to leave now and think about this: If you cannot stand up for yourself, you do not have what it takes to stand up for your regiment or your country. Dismissed.”

            I thought, still think, that I was about to be booted. I left there feeling absolutely miserable. It wasn’t enough, it seemed, just to follow orders. I wasn’t good enough. I was going to be washed out. Too weak. Too accommodating. Too... cowardly.   No good. Worthless. A poor woman and a poor mother. A failure...failure...failure.

            I can’t even find the words to tell you how much that hurt.

 

*****

           

            There are six leadership positions for the recruits in a training platoon, recruit platoon leader, recruit platoon optio, and four squad leaders. The cadre rotated them every few days to a week, or – more typically – until you screwed up badly enough to be relieved.

            Gloria was the seventh or eighth one to fill the platoon leader’s slot in my platoon. When Centurion Garcia announced her name I would almost swear she had an orgasm. Power does that to some women; some men, too, I understand.

            I didn’t pay a lot of attention to Gloria, though. I was getting ready to pack my bags, emotionally if not in fact. I was sitting on Marta’s bunk, the lower one, contemplating my misery while looking at a picture of the child I was failing.

            “Fuentes, go clean the latrine,” she said to me one day after we had been allowed to move back to the Quonset huts.

            I didn’t answer her, just kept staring at my one picture of Alma.

            “Fuentes, you nasty little puke, go clean the latrine.”

            I’d had that duty the day before. Curiously, none of Gloria’s favorites had pulled anything nasty since she’d taken over. Without thinking, I said, “Stuff it up your ass, bitch.”

            Now if Marta had told me, or Inez Trujillo, I’d have done it, even in the mental state I was in. For one thing, neither of them – nor probably any of the other girls – would have spared her special friends.

            She walked up to me as if she wanted to paste me. I ignored her. But then she pulled my picture of Alma from my hands, tearing it.

            I tell you, I saw red. It must have shown on my face because Gloria started to back up. She never got far enough away. I sprang to my feet and punched her first, right in the solar plexus. Good training tells. She went ass-down to the floor, gasping like a beached fish. But I didn’t stop. I kicked her with booted feet five or six more times. As she fell back completely onto the floor and tried to twist away, I kicked her in the kidneys, just as I’d been trained. She didn’t have enough air in her lungs to scream, though her face contorted as if she were trying. Another kick rolled her onto her belly. Then I jumped on her back.

            Marta and Inez pulled me off of her after about the fifth time I smashed her face onto the concrete floor.

            When Garcia came in he took one look, gave Gloria and myself both three days bread and water, then relieved her and appointed me the next platoon leader.

            I cannot tell you precisely why, not even now, but I felt good. I mean really, reallygood after that. It felt so great that I laughed for long enough that the others began to look at me strangely.

            I lasted as platoon leader for five days, which was about average. I might have done better if I hadn’t been so damned hungry.

 

*****

 

            We marched or ran pretty much everywhere we went. The only time we rode trucks or buses was when there wasn’t time to walk. You may think that was hard on us. Sometimes it was.

            Other times, though, times when we didn’t have to carry anyone else’s gear, or had time enough that the pace was more like a regular walk, it was positively enjoyable. We sang: “...If I can’t get a man then I’ll surely get a parrot, and it’s oh, dear me, how would it be, if I died an old maid...” Or maybe “John Henry” or “Todo por la Patria”. Sometimes more warlike songs, too: “...In the streets of the City, the enemy’s falling, and trixies are crying out, ‘arriba Patria’.” We had a bunch of really dirtysongs, too, but I won’t repeat them.

            Another song we were very fond of was an old, old one. I understand it came here from Old Earth and somehow managed to survive and stay in currency over the centuries, maybe with some changes here and there. It was “Apoyate,” to the extent that these songs even have titles.  Sometimes, when our tails were really dragging on a long run, Marta, Cristina or one of the other, stronger, girls would jump out of the formation and begin to sing, “Call for the tercio, we’ll give you a hand...”

            It can really pick you up, when you hear a couple of hundred other human voices crying out, “Apoyate, when you’re not stro-ong, mi hermanita, I’ll help you carry on...”

            It makes you wonder, sometimes, about how much of physical strength is really mental attitude. Anyway, that was a private song. We never sang it where men, outside of our instructors, could hear us. It was only for each girl to strengthen every other...because we never knew just when anyone of us might need a little help.

            Still, for me, my greatest help was the thought of a little girl back in the city who needed me to succeed.

 

*****

 

            The singing was fun. But if you didn’t want to join in, usually nobody made you. You could be together on a march, but you could also be alone if you wanted, even in the company of a couple of hundred sisters. And the cadre generally didn’t harass us on the march, so long as we kept up. I think – no, I know – that that was so we wouldlearn to like to march.

            And, once your feet, shoulders and back toughened up, there was so much to see andhearon a march.

            Once, about halfway through a twenty kilometer hump, I heard a sort of...buzzing from the ranks in front of me. I didn’t know what it was until I turned a curve and saw it: A waterfall landing in a grove so green I may never see its like again, the water laughing as it splashed on the rocks at its base.  A pair of green, gray, and red trixies – gorgeous things – sat on a rock next to the pool, preening themselves.

            You know, it’s easier to love your country when your country really is beautiful.

            One time, I remember too, we marched past a group of young men who were probably about halfway through their own training cycle. Hairless, smelly, and dirty as we were, they still watched us march by with the expressions of a group of starving tigers, looking in a butcher shop window.

            Out of pure meanness we sang the sexiest, filthiest, song we knew. It had some really great sound effects, notably that of several hundred women faking an orgasm...in cadence: “Uhh… Uhh…. Oh... Ah... Uhh… Uhh… Oh... Ah!”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Interlude

                       

            The meeting was in one of the larger conferences rooms at headquarters, on the Isla Real, near the airfield. The trainers from the Tercio Gorgidas had come in two buses, which remained parked outside the white stone building that had once been headquarters for the entire Legion. There was also a lot of what had been senior officer housing there, too, in the same general area. Most of that was filled by tribunes and sergeants major, now, what with most of the senior positions having moved to the mainland.

            On the parade field the headquarters and housing surrounded, a lone Cricket light airplane waited with the engine running on idle. That was Carrera’s.

            Carrera said, “So give me the truth; how are the women doing?”

            The cadre from the Tercio Gorgidassat quietly at first. They were loath to admit to Carrera, their Dux Bellorum, that they had problems.

            Seeing their reticence, Carrera changed his inquiry. “Fine. Tell me what’s going well.”

            Centurion del Valle answered first. “They’ve become good shots.”

            “How good?”

            “About twelve percent better than an equivalent group of men,” del Valle said. “But that didn’t come free. It took a lot more time and ammunition to get them there...a lot more. Even more than that for the machine guns.

            “So? That would be true for men, too, if we’d spent the time and ammo,” del Valle finished.

            Carrera frowned. “Can they handle the machine guns, Centurion?”

            “Sure...on the tripods,” del Valle answered. “Firing from the bipods or hip shooting?” He put out a hand and wriggled his fingers. “So, so...at best. And when we load ‘em down with a full combat load; guns, tripods, spare barrel and ammunition? It takes three of them to carry what two of us can. And those three have a tougher time of it.”

            Carrera wrote something in a note book. “What about if we changed their weapons from 6.5 millimeter to something smaller, say 5.5? We could buy them special weapons that would be lighter, couldn’t we?” Carrera didn’t wait for an answer. “No...I suppose not. Then they’d be the only ones with those calibers. Make resupply kind of tough. All right; what’s the real problem?”

             Franco stood to answer. “Sir...sir, we hate this shit! And we don’t know what we’re doing, not really. So we’re gay? We don’t hate women, any of us. We had mothers, sisters...women we’ve loved. And we are sick to death of being so damned...rotten to these girls.”

            Carrera answered, “Tough.” Franco shrugged. Garcia reached up a hand to pull him back to his seat, then stood himself.

            “Sir, what my partner just said? It’s true enough. We’ll all be happy when there are enough trained women that we can turn it all over to them. But what’s really getting us is that we’re failing. What works for men just isn’t working right for them. They’ve formed little cliques and friendships, yes. But they’ve got no esprit, no sense of being part of an important community that’s greater than any individual. They’re just little groups and pairs of friends. Oh sure, they look from the outside like they’re bonding the way soldiers should. They sing well together, for what that’s worth. But they don't seem to feel like a maniple of men would towards each other. Or if they do, we can’t tell.”

            “Could they fight?”

            “No, sir. Not yet. Maybe never.”

            “Crank up their training.”
 

Chapter Five

 

What does not destroy us, strengthens us.

 

                                    --Nietzsche

 

 

            It seemed that Size Did Matter.

            No matter how the Gorgidas trained them; no matter how hard the women tried; it looked like they were never, never, nevergoing to be quite (read: nearly) as strong as even an average group of men. They couldn’t march as far; as fast; or carrying as heavy a load. All the will in the world didn’t make a gnat’s ass of difference. Technology didn’t help much either; it’s a truism that, in total, modern high technology had not succeeded in reducing by so much as half an ounce the load on a foot soldier’s back, just the opposite. Caesar’s centurions would have mutinied over some of the loads a foot soldier of the late 20th and early 21st centuries had to carry, on Old Earth, and things had not turned out any differently on Terra Nova. Too intent on seeing only what it wanted to see, modern, egalitarian feminism simply refused to see that.

            Still, there were some compensating factors.

            When the final scores were tallied it turned out the women actually were better shots, on average, than men. That wasn’t entirely a natural phenomenon. Their ammunition allocation had been twice that of male recruits. The women spent about twice as much time on the rifle range as the men did. This was true for all classes of training ammunition: the women had twice as many hand grenades to throw, twice as many anti-tank rocket rounds, twice as many pounds of demolitions.

Carrera had put out the word before the tercio had even been formed: if the women couldn’t carry as much they had to make better use of what they could carry. And that meant more training, which meant more ammunition for training.

            He had helped them in other ways too. All the men were issued jungle boots; canvas, plastic and leather. Carrera spent a lot of money on lighter weight footwear for the women, more or less high top sneakers, though they looked about the same. Their rucksacks? The same story. The rest of the force made do with standard, heavy packs. After the first few weeks, the women were given better; the latest in carbon fiber frames with hip belts to take some of the load off their shoulders.

            Still, there wasn’t much that could be done with most of the equipment. Radios were heavy, a big surprise for those who’d never carried one for twenty miles. The same was true for night vision devices and the batteries to run them. And Carrera was adamant; the women were notgoing to be assigned men to do the heavy work for them; it was all on themselves, sink or swim.

            Machine guns? They had what everybody else had for a light machine gun; the M-26. This was a good gun though it went through ammunition at an incredible rate. The Amazons had to have them, or something just like them. A real machine gun can be made lighter but it needsto fire a heavy, high power bullet to do its job. Putting a heavy bullet in a light machine gun makes it damned hard to fire, nearly impossible to keep on target. And if men had trouble controlling the M-26 – and they sometimes did – it could only have been worse for women, being not as heavy or strong, to control something that, being lighter, kicked even worse.

            The heavier .34 and .41 caliber machine guns were almost impossibly heavy, between themselves, their tripods, and their brass-cased ammunition. Of course, the .41 caliber guns were too heavy for men to tote, also.

            Water weighs the same for everyone. And the women needed about as much of it.

            The biggest thing Carrera did to help them was, eventually, to make their squads and platoons bigger than the men’s. Fourteen or more women per squad compared to eleven for the men, not even counting the overstrength the Tercio Amazona would have later on to allow some women to take maternity leave.

            Of course, since an infantry unit’s firepower is mostly in its heavy weapons, and since the Amazons had just the same number of heavy weapons as a man’s unit did, one could say that they weren’t such a bargain. The government had to pay an Amazon squad almost thirty percent more than it did a squad of men, for no greater firepower.

            But all the things done to try to cut down on the women’s load just compensated – and that only partly – for lack of physical strength. If they were going to make it in a traditionally male world – the world of war – they had to be stronger in character than men to make up for being weaker in body. And firepower wasn’t everything…there’s heart, too.

           

*****

 

            “Cocksuckers,” Marta said, under her breath as she lifted another shovelful of dirt out of the fighting position she and Maria were building. She meant the corporals, sergeants and centurions, of course. “How many fucking holes do they fucking think we have to fucking dig to know how to dig a fucking hole?”

            Not more than two hundred meters away both Franco and Garcia, along with five or six sergeants and corporals, were clustered around a big bunker, a real concrete bomb shelter. A couple more corporals stood to either side of the platoon position. These corporals, likewise, were just lounging around. The cadre were leaving the women pretty much alone, just watching quietly from a distance.

            Later, all the women would curse themselves for not catching the hint that something reallyspecial was planned. In fairness though, most were too tired to think about much besides the blisters on their hands and their aching backs. These were much more significant than some holes, maybe eight inches in diameter, that dotted the ground they were digging into. Even the heavy-duty cables that ran from the big bunker to the holes remained unremarked.

            The women were supposed to be preparing to defend against an attack by tanks, supported by artillery. They’d even been issued anti-tank munitions and mines – training types that wouldn’t really kill a tank but made a flash and bang and some smoke – and some dummy satchel charges.

            With a grunt Cat and Maria dropped the log they’d been carrying next to Maria’s and Marta’s fighting position. They would much preferred to have chopped up their “pricks” for the overhead cover. There was no chance of that, though.

Maria had heard Marta. It would have been hard not to have heard. She took a labored breath before answering; “How many? I guess until we do it right.”

Cat and Maria then turned back towards the woods to get another log for the hole Cat shared with Inez.

            “Cocksuckers,” Marta repeated.

            Over her shoulder, Maria called, “That’s no big secret, Marta...and this distinguishes them from you and I precisely how?” Cat giggled.

            Marta just grunted with the strain of another load of dirt.

            When Maria came back, she took Marta’s place on the shovel while Marta and Inez went for more logs. The women spent the better part of the day like that, switching off digging and cutting and carrying. Eventually, they had all built pretty fair fighting positions. They even had solid overhead cover.

It was just after an early evening chow that Centurion Garcia blew his whistle and called them together.

Marta figured that it would be just another ass chewing for not building their positions as perfectly as Garciathought they should be.

            Marta was wrong.

            “We have a special treat for you today, ladies,” Garcia began. All the women shivered when he said it. “Ladies” meant something very bad was in store.

            “In about ten minutes you had better be in those holes you dug, and you’d better pray your overhead cover is good. Because we’re going to shell you silly and then some tanks are going to try to crush those little logs and bury you alive….of course we’ll dig you out if there’s time but…..”

            He blew his whistle again and those corporals on either side of the platoon began to run through the area. A couple of jeeps followed. The corporals were pulling igniters and tossing charges to either side. Some of the corporals were placing smaller charges – maybe one pounders, or a little more – on top of and around every fighting position the women had built. Some charges were on fuse delay, others they hooked up to leads running from the thick cables.

            “No,” Garcia answered the unasked question. “I said ‘shell’ and I meant with real artillery. The other stuff is cheaper, though, so we’re supplementing the shells with regular demo charges.   Now get to your holes. And remember what you’ve been taught about taking out tanks.” Beckoning to his followers, Garcia began to walk nonchalantly to the big bunker.

            Maria and Marta exchanged wide eyed looks. Then the women ran for their lives.

            “Anddon’t move my demo charges,” Garcia called to their fleeing backs.

            Maria and Marta were almost to their holes when the first shells landed; maybe one hundred and fifty, maybe two hundred meters to their front. There were only three of them, three shell bursts spewing ugly, ragged columns of earth into the air. Even though muffled by subsurface detonation, the blasts made Maria’s insides ripple in a way that was both indescribable and very, very unpleasant. The sensation made Marta want to throw up, and she was used to having her internal organs pushed around some.

By the time they had squeezed through the rear entrance ports and fallen in a tangled heap at the hole’s muddy bottom there were another six explosions – closer; they could feel that. Then came nine more, closer still. After those three volleys, each one getting closer to them, a different firing battery took over. The women neither knew nor cared who was pounding them. In fact, the first had been 85 millimeter guns. The ones who took over fired 122 millimeter shells, nine per volley. These last were also firing on delay fuses: they went off after sinking a few feet into the ground. If one had actually been permitted to land near one of the women’s holes the dirt sides would have been blown in on them which would probably have proven fatal.

            The cadre did this to give the women the illusion of fire coming closer and closer. In fact none of the guns ever fired any closer than seventy-five meters. Which was still dangerous. Part of the danger was mitigated by having the guns fire from the side, parallel to the women’s line of fighting positions.

            Unseen, Garcia nodded to Franco. Franco turned a safety key in a large metal battery box and began flipping little switches. With each flip of a switch one or a number of demolition charges started going off around the women. In their holes they cried and quivered and vomited and – more than a few – shit themselves. Marta screamed when a one pound charge atop the little bunker went off. So did Maria.

Once the demo charges had almost all been fired the guns split their fire so that half was falling behind the women, half in front. Then, as the last of the demolitions, the ones that were on slow burning fuses, were going off, all the fire shifted to fall behind them.  

            By then Marta had started to cry, great hopeless wracking sobs. She blubbered a lot of things, too, that she probably wished she hadn’t…private things. She took a sniff and sobbed too about the smell of feces wafting up from her soiled uniform.

            The really bad part, though, was when she tried to run away.

            Marta didn’t just have bigger breasts than most; she was big in general, strong, too. Maria saw her start to scramble out of their hole. For a minute – it seemed like an eternity but may have been only half a second: a minute is fair compromise – Maria just froze. Then she grabbed Marta’s combat harness and held on for dear life: Marta’s.

            Marta fought, she struggled. She called Maria just about every name in the book.

Hanging onto Marta’s combat harness, Maria screamed, “Stupid bitch, I am NOT letting you go out into that!”

 Finally, Marta just collapsed, sobbing again, saying over and over that she was sorry. And the two held each other, there in the bottom of that muddy stinking hole in the Earth, as the “barrage” seemed to roll on past them.

            Between blasts Maria bantered in Marta’s ear, “You know how time flies”…KABOOM… “when you’re having fun? Well”… KABOOM….”it can really drag when”….KABOOM….. “you’re having no fun at all”…. KABOOM…. “This barrage can’t”…KABOOM…. “have lasted as long as five minutes, maybe six at the outside”…..KABOOM…. “but it seems longer doesn’t it?” Marta paid no attention.

            Then Maria heard the tanks... barely.

 

*****

 

            Tanks are impressive, no doubt about it. And any soldier who wants to die in her sleep will treat them with a healthy respect. But they can be beaten. The women had already been taught how.

 

*****

 

            “Yes,” that instructor had told them the previous week, “tanks are bigger than you. They’re faster than you. They’ve got more firepower than you. And they’ve got a lot more protection than the shirts you girls are wearing.”

            “But let me tell you a little secret: tanks – their crews, I mean – are as afraid of you as you are of them. Trust me, I’m a tanker. I know.”

            The instructor looked over the platoon and singled out Inez, it was always a great entertainment for him to see how it was the little ones who liked tanks the most. “Come up here, young lady.” All the others gaped in disbelief when he reached a hand down to help her up. That was something theirusual instructors would never do, implying as it did the possibility those girls really were human beings.

            “Young lady,” the instructor asked, “how thick is the armor on top of this tank?”

             Inez looked at him uncomprehendingly.

            “Well, reach in through the hatch and try to feel how far apart your hands are when the armor is between them.” She did and then announced that the top armor was no more than a half inch thick. He had her do the same with the side of the turret, which was several times thicker, but still not all that thick.

            “That’s the first weakness: our real armor is only in front. On the sides, the rear, the top deck; the armor is positively weak. Oh, sure; it’s good enough to keep shell fragments and bullets out. But a shaped charge in the hands of a good grunt will blow a hole right through; causing our wives and children to receive a ‘With deepest sorrow’ letter from PresidenteParilla. That’s why we insiston having our own infantry in close support; to take care of enemy grunts; at least keep their damned heads down.”

            “That should give you a hint. What’s the first thing you have to take care of to defeat tanks? You, girl.” He pointed at Maria.

            “The enemy’s infantry?” she ventured.

            “Right in one. But why?”

            “So they can’t shoot us when we go after the tanks.”

            “Almost right, chica. But your answer implies that it’s their guns that protect the tanks. That’s only partly right. I’ll give you another hint. What’s the most important part of your body when using your rifle?”

            He gave her a few seconds to think. She went down the list of organs and senses but rejected most of them outright. Finally Maria had it narrowed down to her trigger finger and her eyes, then decided that eyes were more important. She said so.

            “Just so Private...?”

            “Fuentes, Centurion. Maria Fuentes.”

            “Private Fuentes. You are just right. Because that is the big weakness on the tank. We can’t see shitfrom inside those things. Strip off our infantry; cut out most of our eyes; cut out the ability to get precise fire in small doses to protect ourselves.”  

            She didn’t really pay perfect attention to what he said next; she was marveling that a man in uniform and authority had just called her something besides bitch or twat, or lady in a tone that implied the same thing.

            “... are particularly vulnerable. That’s something that hasn’t improved a bit since the Great Global War. The same charge – satchel or land mine – that would break the treads on a tank of sixty years ago will do the same to a tank today.

            “And the engines? We aren’t submarines. Tanks require oxygen in vast quantities to keep the engines going; oxygen that has to come from the air around us. Cut that off; we stop dead. Then you can kill us; because a tank that isn’t moving is dead meat to good infantry.

            “Okay, move into the classroom behind you.”

            Maria hesitated…which the centurion saw. “Something bothering you, chica?”

            She stood to attention, hesitated, then asked, “Centurion…how come you are so…ah…polite to us? No one else has been.”

He smiled briefly, then answered, “You aren’t going to my unit, girl. So I have nothing against any of you. So what does a little politeness cost? It might be different if there was some chance that you women might be mixed in with regular, male organizations. I understand that in the armies that have tried that there is often a vast resentment of women soldiers on the part of the men, partly because the men end up doing nearly twice as much heavy work, and partly because some women will…ah…sell themselves, frankly. But you girls? You’re not going to harm me or mine any.”

“Oh…I see.”

“Yes. Now trot your cute little buns into the classroom.”

“Si, Centurio.” She smiled fetchingly; the habits of a lifetime die hard. The Centurion smiled back until a warning glance from Garcia, standing nearby, turned his face to a scowl.

“Now GO, girl.” Maria went.           

            In the classroom the women were shown a film, Hombres Contra Tanques.  Men Against Tanks. This work showed a number of interesting ways to earn a medal for valor, most likely posthumously. Then the women had to go through a number of those ways themselves, using small charges, gasoline bombs – they were told those were called “Molotov Cocktails” – mines and more formal anti-tank weapons.

Inez had taken considerable interest in the film. Cat had said, “Uh, uh.” Perhaps she thought she had a choice.

 

*****

 

            The girls waited in holes for tanks to run over them, then leapt up to toss satchel charges on their decks. Yes, they were very, very small satchel charges, with several pounds of dirt added to make them as heavy as the real thing.  As the charges were heavy, it took a fair amount of practice to learn to swing them just right by their straps.

            In pairs they used ropes to pull practice mines back and forth across the ground to line them up on a tank that was moving forward. They manufactured and then tossed live Molotov Cocktails on towed tank hulks’ back decks. This usually didn’t work.

            This was, by no means, the toughest drilltaught them.

 

*****

 

            Franco, serving as coach, squatted in a ditch by the side of a dirt road.

            Next to him, Inez Trujillo lay panting. A pair of tanks waited around a bend in the road, a few hundred meters away, revving their engines menacingly. She was scared nearly witless.

            In her hands, clutched in front of her, she had a twelve pound sticky satchel charge. It, too, was mostly dirt, not explosive. Tanks are too expensive to blow up as training aids.

            She reminded herself, The trick is that the tank can’t see mierda. So the hunter waits until it’s within twenty meters. Then, in the three seconds you have between the driver losing sight of where you will be and the tank crushing where you have been, you leap into the middle of the road and lie down right in front of the monster. Timing things carefully, you pull the igniter, stick the bomb to the underside or suspension of the tank, let it finish rolling over you, then, covered by the dust cloud, roll back to the ditch before the following tank can see you.

            Then: BOOM!

            Franco made a call on a small radio he carried. The menacing mechanical roar around the bend picked up and was joined by the squeaking of treads, worse than an infinity of nails on an infinity of blackboards. Inez spotted the long barrel of a tank pushing past the trees. Her tremors grew worse, exacerbated by the shaking of the ground from the metal monster’s roll.   She saw the barrel swing over towards her, roughly parallel to the road. There was still more squeaking as the tank pivot-steered at the bend. And then the barrel – all she could really see – was moving in her direction.

            As the tanks neared, the little pebbles by her dirt-pressed face began to jump up and down. That vibration grew steadily worse. Then the muzzle of the tank’s cannon was about twenty meters from her position.  Inez braced herself for her leap.

            Franco slapped her ass and shouted, “Go!”

            Inez made a nimble, quick jump onto the road, then flopped to her belly and rolled. The roll was uneven, deliberately so, to get her in line with it and with the tank’s movement. She ended up on her back, precisely as she should have. Frantically, she tore away the tape that covered the sticky part of the satchel charge. By the time she had that off, the tank’s treads had enveloped her, grinding the dirt to both sides. She pulled the ring of the igniter and was rewarded with a crack more felt than heard, followed by a small puff of smoke. Shaking, she slammed the charge, sticky side first, against the hull. Then the tank was past her and, gasping for breath, she made another leap for the ditch, hitting and rolling into its warm embrace. A few seconds later she heard the muffled boom that said her charge had gone off.

            Franco patted her shoulder. Leaning down next to her ear he shouted, “Good job, girl!”

            Exhaling, Inez thought, Damn; that was fun.

            Standing atop the tank, Garcia had seen everything but what had gone on underneath it. He thought, Fine, character-building exercise this is. Though as a combat technique it strikes me as barely better than nothing.

 

*****

 

            Gloria couldn’t do it. She wouldn’t get out into the road. Once, even, Garcia had to rip the sticky bomb – it didhave half a pound of trinitrotoluene in it – from her hands and toss it away, hunching one shoulder against the blast as he fell back to earth.

            Few noticed that Garcia threw his own body over Gloria’s before the explosive went off. Then he hauled her to her feet and slapped her to the ground with a curse.

            Long after the rest of the women had passed the test, Garcia was still working with Gloria. Exasperated, he finally ended up having her lie right down in the road, with him standing on her back, while the tank rolled upon them. At the last second he would jump aside.

            She still wouldn’t, or couldn’t, ignite the bomb and stick it to the tank.

            Time ran out before Garcia gave up.

 

*****

 

            The best part was when the instructors let the women ride the tanks on the inside. That Centurion-Instructor had told the truth, they saw: Tankers were blind compared to infantry. Sure, the latest ones might have been able to see right through fifteen feet of sand to spot a hot tank engine. They couldn’t see a cool foot soldier behind a tree or a wall, or in a trench. The women learned; the women saw. And when they had to use those little vision blocks? Once a foot soldier got within fifty or sixty feet of a tank, or it got that close to them, the tank couldn’t see them. It was as if the tank were like a man, a quadriplegic, whose head and eyes are locked straight to the front and on the level.

And they learned that even if a tank could see them it couldn’t depress the main gun or the coaxial machine gun.

An instructor said, however, “Don’t get too cute, girls, because it can still run you over in the open, and the muzzle blast from the main gun can kill or maim, knock the hell out of you, anyway. But even a small hole in firm soil – the smaller the better, actually – can protect you from that somewhat.”

 

*****

           

            The roar of the tank engines grew noticeably louder. “Marta,” Maria shouted, “Marta, come on. Get ready! The tanks are coming.”

            Marta looked blankly for a moment, then asked, “Tanks?”

            “Tanks,” Maria shouted again, then slapped Marta’s face.

            That got through to her. Her face came alive. She reached for her rocket launcher and started to stick her head up to fire.

            “No! Wait! Let them pass. You can take ‘em from the rear.”  

            Marta nodded her understanding, whispering, “Thatwould be nice for a change.”

Both women crouched down in their hole with the roar of the tanks’ engines and the squeal of the treads drawing ominously nearer. The tanks began firing their machine guns – at the ground between the positions, but also right over their heads. Some girls later swore they had heard bullets strike the berm in front of their hole! They were right.

One hundred and twenty-five millimeter shells from the tanks’ main guns buried themselves in the dirt between positions before exploding with gut crunching force. The sound grew so loud the girls could barely stand it. It wasn’t as loud as the artillery had been, but it was somehow much more personal.

            Then the hole became very dark. “God, the damned thing’s right on top of us!” Maria gripped Marta to give her a little comfort, and perhaps to take some, too. “You would never have gotten a kill with a frontal shot! Let it pass,” Maria shouted again. Why not? The tank couldn’t hear her.

            But it didn’t pass, not right away.

 

*****

 

“We’re right on top of them, Sergeant,” announced the tank’s driver over the intercom.

“Good. Pivot steer! Let’s give ‘em the time of their lives.”

With a chuckle, the driver began twisting the tank back and forth, side to side, grinding Maria’s and Marta’s position in on them.

“Teach them to be a little more careful about camouflage in front of their position, won’t it, Sergeant?”

“Yeah…teach ‘em a few other things too.”

“Sergeant?” the gunner asked.

“Yes, Gunner?”

“If they had been better camouflaged from in front I couldn’t have fired the main gun without maybe killing them.”

“Iknew where their positions were, Pablo,” the tank commander said. “We watched as they were building. I wouldn’t have let you hit a hole, or even get too near one. The grinding is punishment for bad camo.”

“Oh…I see.”

 

*****

 

Beneath the thrashing treads, dirt and bits of wood filtered down onto Marta and Maria. They coughed in air made suddenly rank with diesel fumes and dust. When a log fractured, it made a crack they could feel in their bones more than hear with their ears.

            After another eternity of terror the tank moved on, more dirt flying from behind the treads and splattering down on them.

            “Now, Marta! Now,” Maria screamed. Marta hesitated not a moment, she wanted revenge for what they’d just been through.

            Marta risked a quick look to their front. (Yes, risked;bullets had been flying overhead.) Maria guessed there hadn’t been any more tanks or supporting infantry, because Marta turned around and fired almost immediately. The boom and flash of the backblast was followed by a shriek of frustration. A miss.

Maria handed over another rocket from their little store of them. Marta twisted it onto the front of her launcher and took aim again. The backblast sent more crud and smoke into their position.

            “Give me another one,” Marta demanded. Maria passed over the last rocket. This time Marta was very careful; Maria could see that from the deliberate way she loaded and the deliberate firing stance she took. This gave Maria time to join her, just her head sticking up from the hole. They saw the tank that had just savaged them moving away. It was firing its machine gun off into the distance.

            “Easy and careful, sister,” Maria shouted in her ear. Marta nodded, took a deep breath, let some of it out, and fired.

            The rocket sped straight and true. It hit the tank right on the back grill. A big column of orange smoke filled the air behind it.

            From the command bunker Franco noticed the tank had been hit.   He radioed the crew to tell them so…and to tell them how.

The tank slewed to a stop, the hatch flying open. One by one the turret crew emerged. Then they were joined on the back deck by the driver. Marta and Maria, and the tank crew, just stared at each other for a minute, a degree of disbelief on all five faces. One of the tankers – Maria guessed he might have been the TC, the tank’s commander – began to applaud. The rest of the men joined him. Marta blushed scarlet when they shouted out, “Well done, girls! Well done.” The tank commander threw them a ragged and friendly salute. Then, with a wave, the men reboarded their tank, cranked the engine, and drove off.

            Just about then the Centurion’s whistle blew. Marta and Maria ran to where the platoon was assembling. Before they fell in on Garcia they heard a sound – again, barely – that made them look behind. Inez Trujillo was sitting on Gloria, slapping her repeatedly, back and forth, across the face, while Cat looked on with disapproval on her face. It was sort of funny; this little thing beating on someone more than a head taller. None of the cadre interfered in the slightest.

            Heart doesn’t come easy.

 

*****

 

            That night Marta approached the girl who had saved her life. “Maria, I’m sorry for what I said to you. And…I’m sorry for collapsing like that.”

            “It’s okay, Marta. Everyone has their...little moments. And your vocabulary was certainly…ah…. enlightening.”

            Marta said nothing for a while, just kept staring down at the ground.

            “I learned the vocabulary in the biggest and best whorehouse in the capital of La Plata,” she said, eventually.   Then it all came out in a rush. How she’d gotten pregnant at fourteen, been thrown out of the house, met a pimp. Done everything.

            “I lost the baby, the ability to have a baby, when a customer beat me up, but by then it was too late to do anything else. I was...contaminated. Maria, I learned to hate myself even more than I hated my customers.

             “I learned to loath every part of me. Drugs? Oh, yes. Huánuco, mostly. Some marijuana and hashish. Opium. A lotof alcohol. When I was twenty I tried to figure out how many people had had a piece of me. It was over seven thousand. I wondered what could be left of me, with so many having taken a little away each.

            “Then a recruiter came from the classis. He wasn’t looking for sailors, not where I worked, but for sea whores to service the fleet off the coast of Uhuru, during the anti-pirate campaign the Yamatans paid for. I went with another girl, my special lover, Jaquelina.

            Seeing the confused look on Maria’s face, Marta added, “Yeah, I can go both ways. But I wasn’t in love with Jaquelina because she was a girl but because of the person she was. We both signed up because we figured we could get away from the pimps; make a bundle; and maybe we could start over fresh somewhere.

            “Anyway, they needed some girls who were really obviously girls to be bait on a small boat. Jaquelina and I signed up, mostly for the bonus they offered.

            “We ended up fighting, because our boat took a bad hit. We got a couple of medals…”

            “You’ve got a medal?” Maria asked. Marta just nodded.

            “Anyway, eventually my lover was killed.” The woman’s voice broke for a moment. She swallowed to get control of it. “I tried to stick it out with the classis, but the memories were just too bad. So, when this came up, I volunteered for it to get away from those memories.

            “If I’m killed here it won’t be so bad. Nobody will miss me. But I can’t fail. Thank you, for helping me not fail.”

            Marta started to cry again. Maria began to gather her into her arms, saying, “Marta, I would miss you. I’m going to hug you now. If you yell at me or push me away, I will punch you in the face and then hug you. Understand?”

            Marta stiffened at first at being pulled into Maria’s shoulder. Then she relaxed, softening into the other, while continuing to cry.

 

*****

 

            What the women needed wasn’t just individual heart; they needed something called esprit de corps. Men get it; develop it easily, in fact. After all, the boy gang is one of only two spontaneously occurring human organizations.

            And that was one area where the Gorgidas cadre couldn’t help much. They knew how to build it in a male unit, straight or otherwise. It’s pretty easy for them. Take any average group of males (well, Franco had once told them not anygroup; in much of the world men usually couldn’t develop real esprit de corps; most of them were not capable of even conceiving of loyalty to someone or something who isn’t a blood relation or a body of blood relations); put them in positions of fair equality, give them competent leadership; add stress, misery, danger and excitement to taste: voila – esprit de corps. Having them compete against other groups of men helped quite a bit, too.

 

*****

 

            “The big advantage,” Franco had said, in one of his frequent, informal lectures, “that men have is that they’re much more emotional, far less coldly rational, than women are.

            “Womendon't really like to compete at, so to speak, manly things. What does conquest mean to them? What does being better at something than someone else mean, if it isn’t innately womanly? How does it make any of you more of a woman that you can march, shoot, destroy? Not your job, so to speak.

            “And it isn’t,” he continued, “that women are incapable of loyalty to something besides themselves. They areloyal: To children, almost always, husbands, usually, parents, generally, societies and nations…that’s slightly less common but by no means unheard of.

            “Most modern feminist literature tends to ignore the whole question. Instead, feminists – like Sylvia Torres, for example – want to concentrate only on individual achievements, abilities, and strengths.   Which is why those views are useless…to you. Note they neverseriously talk about women’s weaknesses. It’s as if they can’t even conceive of the difference between battle and peacetime pursuits. Perhaps they really can’t understand that battle is a social event, conducted by groups, and in which the cohesion of groups matters much more than individual prowess.

            “Worse, it’s as if they – like many of the men in the world – can’t even conceive of the benefits and need of that peculiar form of semi-insane groupthink: Esprit de corps.”

           

*****

 

            Not all lectures were informal.

The women sang with feeling, “Miseria, Miseria…” as they filed into the dank and musty shed. Under its shade, buttocks pressed down uncomfortably into the rough wood chips intended to cushion the fall of the women as they learned to fight hand to hand.

Franco spoke. “You girls know a little more now about battle than you did once. Let me tell you some more.

“A man is not braverthan a woman is; ‘She who faces death by torture for each life beneath her breast.’ The Catholic Church has lists of female martyrs miles long.”

He made a hand signal and a picture of a young girl, hanging, neck broken, frozen with shirt ripped off and breasts disfigured ,shone from one wall.

            “Rather more recently, there was this girl. We don’t know her name. We do know she was hanged by the Sachsens during the Great Global War for sabotage. She was captured, tortured, and then hanged because she wouldn’t give any up information. That was bravery equal to any man’s.

            “Tsk-tsk.

“But, unfortunately, she proves not a damned thing about women’s bravery in battle; in groups.

            “None of you have been to war,” Franco observed. “I have. Twice, actually, against both the Sumeris and the Pashtians. So trust me in this. Imagine a battle between a group of women and a group of men. Remember this is nota drill. Bullets are flying; shells scattering razor sharp shards of steel in all directions. People are screaming; some in anger, more in pain.

            “There are a few individuals – men and women both, transcendentally motivated – who ignore all that, fight on despite danger. There are also some who cower and hide; and you can’t really blame them, though you just might have to shoot them later. For the rest, though – the relative sheep, like most people – they onlystay the course because they care about their comrades, and their comrades’ good opinions, more than they care about themselves.”

Franco turned and pointed to Gloria. “Chica, when was the last time you cared if somebody thought you were brave…or tough….or disciplined? Do not answer. Just think about it. Women are far less likely to care about someone’s opinion of them when that opinion does not concern something that is essentially womanly.”

            He concluded, “More than lack of physical strength, more than health, far, far more than courage; it is this that is your greatest obstacle.”

 

*****

 

            To give the cadre credit, they did try to find the key. And they did run off any girls who seemed incapable of eventually making their unit their primary source of self-identification. They also, naturally, dumped those whose lack of competence could degrade the unit, thereby making it considerably more likely that the rest of the women would develop esprit.  They let stay none of the slackers, nor that one thief, nor those who couldn’t or wouldn’t learn to shoot...nor those who were too afraid.

            Once, the Cadre even let the girls see a male infantry training maniple at close range, just for a few hours. They wanted them to see how things were supposed to be.

            That was very strange to the women. The men were jocular, content with themselves and with each other. And they exuded a sense of mass brotherhood the girls had never seen or felt before. They knew, in a way that the women didn’t yet, that any man in that maniple could count on any other to fight by his side, and never to desert him.

 

*****

 

            The cadre tried all sorts of things, some quite bizarre, to help the women learn the way things were supposed to be. Once, for example, they showed a movie, entitled Kirti, dubbed into Spanish, about a tercioof Hindu soldiers in the Federated States Army during their Formation War.

            The girls – most of them – thought it was a pretty good movie, actually, though very sad at the end. A number cried when all the great characters they’d learned to like as the movie progressed were killed in a hopeless, desperate attack, an attack they’d volunteered to make. The story, they were told, was mostly true.

            That evening, after chow, they had discussed it with Franco.

He said, “It was, in fact, the battle actions of this mostly Hindu regiment that had led directly to massive opening up of military service to Hindus, which had gone a long way towards winning the war for the side that did so. Of course, the world being the way it is, the Hindus remained in their own units for nearly a century after that.”

Inez commented, “Seems kind of unfair, Centurion….keeping them apart like that. Bound to lead to worse treatment. The movie showed us that.”

            “Yes, Private, so it seems. Would the world have been a better place, would even those Hindus have been better off, if they’d been integrated with whites from the beginning, but had failed in battle because they didn’t like or trust one another? Would a statement in favor of racial integration have been worth maybe losing that war?”

            He answered his own questions. “I suppose that depends on whether an aesthetic principle is more important than the success of an ultimate good.”          

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