Armored Tears (28 page)

Some
of the survivors were wandering around, like she was. Looking to find out what
had become of friends and comrades, most likely. Hoping to find out that this
or that friend had safely ejected from a stricken tank, dreading to find out
that he or she hadn't... but needing to find out either way. Not knowing was
more than anyone could bear, for long.

A
few of her people just stood, or sat on the ground next to their tanks, too
drained to do anything else. Some looked like they were asleep, curled up on
the ground next to their tanks, or stretched out on the sloping armor of their
turrets. Some talked softly with others nearby. Some sat silently. Some cried.

There
was a female framer, one of the survivors that Feldman had rescued, on her
knees, sobbing over a body that lay next to a deflated survival pod. Next to
her, hand on her shoulder, was the civilian, the reporter, whom Tara had put
into one of her tanks as a drone operator.

"Colonel,"
the man said as he noticed her. For a moment he whispered to the kneeling
framer girl, and then he walked up to Tara.
  

"Ah,
Mr. Hogan. I see you're still with us," Tara said.

"Yes,
Colonel. I'm still with you. Actually, I believe I'll be staying with you. On
Arcadia, that is, I mean."

"Ah,"
Tara said, nodding. "Good, I think."

"It's
over, isn't it, Colonel?" the man said.

"Yes,
Mr. Hogan. I think it is."
           

"Aran.
Name's Aran. Mr. Hogan is what the teachers called me when I got in trouble."

"Aran.
Tara, then. You're a civilian anyway, so I'm not
your
colonel..."

"Tara...
no. No, I'd say you very much
are
my
colonel."

"Alright,"
she replied. "I can let you have that much. Your tank wasn't hit? You were
running drones for one of the tanks in my platoon, weren't you?"

"We
were hit. I... my survival pod worked."

Tara
looked down for a moment, looked back at Aran again. "Good. That's what
they're for, aren't they? I've taken a survival pod ride myself once... though
not quite all of me made the trip."

Aran
looked at the woman in front of him. An attractive woman; a not uncommon mix of
Asian and Caucasian features. Her eyes were hard... weary but still
razor-focused. The eyes, and her gaze, seemed to hint at a spirit was as
armored as the tanks she led. And yet the armor wasn't total, and behind the
armor, Aran thought he could see...

He
looked back at where Bernie was gathering herself, getting her sobs under
control, looked back at the Colonel... at Tara...

He
was finding it hard to focus his thoughts. He felt simultaneously as if he were
in a glassy daze and at the same time as if every nerve and emotion had been
laid bare and scraped raw... by terror, or relief, or exhilaration... or a mix
of them; he was finding that could not really keep them separate in his mind,
just now. He was finding it hard say anything, and at the same time hard to
hold back any thoughts.

"Colonel...
Tara, if I may... this'll probably seem presumptuous coming from a fellow you
only met today, but..."
 

"Presume
away. You rode in one of my tanks. That gives you certain privileges."

Aran
nodded. "If it's over, Colonel, then we can get out of our tanks. Take off
the armor."

The
man was speaking to her, Tara saw, but looking to one side, where the female
framer was shakily getting up from her knees, still looking down at the body of
one of Tara's tankers. The dead man's face looked vaguely familiar to Tara...
oh, yes... the boy, the Auxiliary Corps boy who Feldman had picked as a driver.
One more face to remember, Tara thought, blinking to make sure her eyes stayed
dry.
 

"The
armor?" Tara asked, looking back at Aran.

"Take
off the armor, Colonel. It's over. You can let yourself mourn them now."

Tara
said nothing, nodded, turned away before the man could see her tears start.

33.

The
official news services were reporting the successful evacuation of UEN
personnel in the face of an unprovoked Arcadian attack on UEN non-combatants
and installations. The Permanent Oversight Council was sending out thundering
denunciations of the Arcadian "criminals."

But
it would not, Bannerman knew, be enough to hide the disaster.

In
a way, Bannerman thought, the improvisation that had allowed the beleaguered
UEN troops besieged inside the Arcadian gate dome to escape was just part of
the disaster. Somehow they had managed to get one final burst of power from
their portable power source, allowing them to open the gate for less than a
minute. With no warning of the Tannhauser gate's opening, the UEN forces on the
Earth side had been unable to get any reinforcements across in the 37 seconds
that the gate had stayed open. It had been just enough time for a few hundred
men, crowded to the point of asphyxiation into a single transit rail-car, to
get back to Earth.

Had
those men not escaped, Bannerman knew, the task of information control would
have been far easier; a bitter irony.

As
it was, there was no way to keep the information of the disaster from
spreading. At best, the efforts of the UEN's Public Information Section would
serve only to slow down the rate at which the news spread.

There
were too many information sources not fully under UEN control, too many rumors
that contradicted the stories released by the Public Information Section. Too
many people were hearing those rumors. And too many nations were all too happy
to see the UEN fall on its face, and were making sure their news services made
the reality of the situation known.

Success
would have made the UEN almost unassailable. Failure had made it look
vulnerable, and the jackals were gathering.

Bannerman
instinctively looked around for Major Hafez, before cursing himself for a fool.
His aide hadn't returned through the gate. He'd been in a forward position when
the unexpected attack of Arcadian armor had struck. He was listed as missing in
action, but Bannerman knew he'd never see Major Hafez again. One way or
another.

Reports
were reaching him that the Arcadians were allowing the remains of the UEN
forces, cut off in the Southern Wastes and at the gate dome facility, to
surrender. No doubt those prisoners would be returned; the Arcadians could open
the gate more or less when they chose, after all, and it was not their style to
keep or execute their prisoners.

The
UEN could interfere with the gate, by compromising the vacuum chamber, for instance,
but they could not prevent the Arcadians from sending word of their offer to
return prisoners... via the orbital gate if not the surface gate. Bannerman
strongly doubted that the member nations would go along with the UEN in
preventing the return of soldiers they had entrusted to Peace Force service.
Nor would they be likely to tolerate a cover-up of
all
of the returning prisoners. And having been seen to fail so
spectacularly, the UEN now lacked, at least temporarily, the political clout
and prestige to compel powerful member nations to simply obey. And once the
prisoners were returned, he knew, even the
pretense
of publicly denying the disaster would be futile.

He
was alone in his office for now, but he knew that it wouldn't last. The order
for him to report to the council for a secret accounting would be coming soon.
It wouldn't be
called
an arrest, but
he had no doubt that the order would be delivered by an officer with an armed
guard, and that they would, as a "courtesy," relieve him of
"burden" of carrying his personal wrist-phone and his sidearm.

Perhaps
they were already on their way.

Or
perhaps they were waiting. Major General Jose Salvator Bannerman liked to think
of himself as an officer of the old school. And there was a protocol for an officer
of that sort, for times like this.

He
stared at the pistol in his hand for a long time, thinking of other generals,
in other times, who had come to such a place as this.

UEN
Peace Force Security Colonel Kim Dae-Won and his armed escort were walking up
the corridor to General Bannerman's door when a single pistol shot sounded.
Several staffers looked startled, shocked at the sound. A few looked scared.
Colonel Kim, looking neither surprised nor upset, merely nodded once to
himself.

34.

The
battalion deployment was going well, for a change. All three companies were at
full strength and no one had gotten lost. Thirty-six gleaming, new Type-78
"Morningstar" tanks had taken their positions with something close to
perfection.

On
some irrational level, Tara missed the old War-Hammers, but the new tanks were
better pretty much across the board; a new 47 megajoule gun, better armor,
better sensors. They'd been developed by a joint Nipponese-Arcadian design team
and had a pretty good claim to be the best tanks in the world... any world.

The
Defense Force
had
to have the best;
there was no way to close the orbital gate. The best they could do was to watch
it closely. And for that matter, there was no way to stop the UEN... or
anyone... from opening a new orbital gate, one of these years. And while it was
unlikely that the UEN could afford something like an outright space-based
invasion again, unlikely wasn't the same as impossible.

Still,
the change in relations with the Pacific Alliance was a real achievement, she
thought. Getting official recognition of Arcadian national sovereignty from the
nations of the Pacific Alliance had probably been the greatest improvement
since the end of the war.

Earth
sources were calling it the "Interstellar War," but that didn't sound
right to Tara; it made it sound like the fighting had been about spaceships. It
sounded fake, and the war had been bitterly real.

She'd
read an article that noted that the formal recognition and the work on a new
Tannhauser gate between Australia and Arcadia were the "real prizes"
of the war. She'd scoffed bitterly. The real prize of the war had been the same
as it had been in 2070; survival... and freedom.

Even
so, she'd be happy if —or maybe it was 'when'— the new gate opened,
in another 5 years or so. It would be nice to have access to Earth that wasn't
on the territory of a UEN puppet-state like the FSNA.

Of
course the FSNA was still accepting bribes to allow trade. And the UEN was
still condemning Arcadia as a rogue regime with no legitimacy and demanding its
subordination to UEN oversight. Some things never changed.

 
Off to her left, one of the new tanks
from her own company's newly assigned 2nd Platoon popped its sensors operators'
hatch and a man, anonymous in his tanker's data-interface helmet, pulled
himself out and jumped down to the ground. Tara turned to look as it became
clear that he was heading for her tank.

"Something
I can do for you, soldier?" she asked as he pulled himself up onto the bow
of her tank.

"Just
wanted to personally report in, ma'am," said Aran, raising his visor.
"I was hoping to see you privately before I got my first post-training
assignment, but then I found out I was going to be in your company."

"Aran!"
Tara said, smiling in surprise. "So Bernie finally convinced you to join
up?"
           

"A
while ago. I've been meaning to for a while, really. Since I decided to stay.
But I wanted to finish the book first. Of course, I requested Armored Corps.
Maybe I had something to prove to myself. At any rate, I proved that I could
force myself to get back into a tank..."

"You
never were as smart as you looked, Aran," Tara replied, her smile
faltering for a second, before she changed the subject.

"How's
Bernie?" she asked, "Still running that framer company?"

"No.
She's out on extended leave. She's... well, pregnant, actually."

Now
Tara grinned in earnest. "That's great, Aran! That's wonderful!
Congratulations!"

"Yeah,
it's a bit amazing, really," Aran said. "I still can't get my head
around it half the time."

"You'll
manage," Tara said. "I think it's good that you and Bernie are
starting a family."

"How
about you, Tara?" Aran asked. "When are you going to settle down? And
don't give me the 'too old' crap. You haven't seen the wrong side of forty
E-years yet."

"Not
yet," Tara said, as if in agreement, and turned her gaze out to the
broken, rocky land ahead of her.

The
parade the day before had been the official commemoration, her gleaming tanks
rolling down the main boulevard past the Government Mall in Redstone. But for
her, the real remembrance was here, where the fight had happened. She had
driven her battalion out past the laser installation, to the ground where they
had held.

Out
among the rocks and ridges stood two dozen polished stone pillars, each one
engraved with names; a few with just one name, some with two or three, some
with four. Feldman, Younger... Velazquez... Piper.... Behind every name was a
memory of the dull, clawing pain; of knowing they were gone; of facing mothers,
fathers, siblings, wives —worst of all, children— with the news of
a place where their loved one would not be returning from. All the names were
here. All in good company.
 

Tara
wiped her eyes and tried to blink her bleary sight clear as the huge setting
sun caught the polished stone of the pillars, and made them shine, gleaming
like armored tears.

...