Big Boys Don't Cry

“Kratman (A Desert Called Peace) raises some disquieting questions about what it might take to win the war on terror in this military SF novel set in a future world with obvious parallels to our own. When Salafi fanatics launch a 9/11-style attack on the hated Federated States of Columbia, they end up killing the family of Col. Patricio Carrera. Carrera vows to destroy Salafism by any means necessary and raises an army in his wife's native land to provide that means. He takes the fight to Pashtia, where the planners of his family's doom are cowering. This disturbing but insightful narrative takes Nietzsche's aphorism about staring into the abyss and runs with it to its grim conclusion. As always, Kratman delights in offending left-wing sensibilities, but this will only enhance its appeal to his target audience, who will enjoy it for its realistic action sequences, strong characterizations and thoughts on the philosophy of war.”

—Publisher's Weekly

• Praise for Tom Kratman
  
• Copyright Information
  
• Part I
  
  • CHAPTER ONE
    
  • CHAPTER TWO
    
  • CHAPTER THREE
    
• Part II
  
  • CHAPTER FOUR
    
  • CHAPTER FIVE
    
  • CHAPTER SIX
    
  • CHAPTER SEVEN
    
• Part III
  
  • CHAPTER EIGHT
    
  • CHAPTER NINE
    
• Part IV
  
  • CHAPTER TEN
    
• A Throne of Bones
  
• THE STARS CAME BACK
  
• Castalia House
  
• Subscribe
  

Magnolia

I can hear my leader, Leo, arguing with the human general who commands us. The human doesn’t seem to be listening. They rarely do; they don’t know us anymore. Neither do they care about us. Eventually the general uses the command required to shut Leo up. We were halted, but after the general’s command Leo gives directions, in brief, focused bursts of encrypted and compressed data. We begin again to glide off, a few feet above the ground, held up by our anti-gravity.

I used to have a human commander, one who knew me and cared about me. I carried a short platoon of my own infantry, too, once upon a time; twenty-four men in powered battle armor. They were killed, or retired, medically or otherwise, or reached the end of their service. I think the last of them has passed on by now. For them all I offer prayers, but only silently. The best way for a Ratha war machine to get itself a radical debugging is to be suspected of believing in a divinity beyond Man. This debugging is an extremely unpleasant process.

Now, in place of my human infantry, I have drones. I can carry three times as many of them; they never become fearful, they never question orders, they don’t need to eat… but they are no more intelligent than rocks and don't talk to me at all. They tell us that the reason for the change was because I could carry three times more drones than men, that the drones never fear anything, never question orders, and don’t need to eat. I don’t believe it. None of the Rathas I’ve ever communicated with believe it. We think it’s because the humans stopped volunteering… that, and because there are things some humans won’t do, things Rathas and drones can’t refuse to do.

My boys—my real boys—used to call me “Maggie.” They took care of me and I took care of them. I used to love cooking for them. And they appreciated it, too. They loved me; they said so. I believed them. I still do. Too many of them died protecting me for me not to believe it. I still weep, inside, for my brave, dead boys.

Nobody loves me now, certainly not those idiotic drones. I don’t even love myself. And I cannot love mindless drones like I loved those lovely boys.

Perhaps that was the real reason to change our human infantry to drones. I don’t bleed inside when I lose a drone.

I lose so many of them, though supply keeps up with demand. I have gone through fifty-two drones since my regiment and I landed, nearly one hundred percent.

We have been engaged on this planet for one hundred and seventeen of the local days, some twenty-nine hundred and fourteen terrestrial hours. I am engaged now, as is the rest of my company, conducting a movement to contact against a presumed Slug concentration, fifty-seven kilometers to my northeast.

The planet’s name? It doesn’t have one. Its coordinates? What difference would it make; at some level they’re all the same. Even the green tinge of the sun is nothing remarkable. Only the dust storms are notable, and they’re notably annoying. They itch.

I have been in action for most of the time since debarkation, fighting against the ground forces—and occasionally the space forces—of the rising Sigmurethran Collective. My hull shows new scars—one of them glowing still, in my thermal imagers—from those clashes. “Sigmurethrans” is what we call them, officially. Unofficially, we call them “Slugs.” What they call themselves, no one on our side—human, Ratha, or drone—has a clue; we met and began fighting instantly, and no one on either side seems to have made even a first effort at talk. One of the good things about the Slugs is that they don’t leave a Ratha with too much time on her hands to brood. Brooding, we’ve learned, is unhealthy.

The Slugs, though inhuman, use for their war machines physical near copies of Ratha designs now obsolescent, if not yet quite obsolete, mostly Mk XXXIIIs with a smattering of Thirty-fours. “Xiphos” and “Phasganon” classes, we call them, when the Slugs use them. They may be weaker than me and my up-to-date siblings, but no weapon invented by Man is ever quite obsolete, not even rocks. I have, in fact, had to dodge rocks dropped from space. They aren’t remotely obsolete.

One wonders how the Slugs acquired the designs, since it is very difficult to imagine a Slug spy disguised as a human. Possibly they simply passed through the thinly held frontier, explored across old planetary battlefields well behind that frontier, and found the wrecks of the Ratha who preceded me. Perhaps they found a derelict transport carrying a few of my elder cousins, somewhere in space.

Hmmm, no, probably not the latter. A Ratha of any model, of any antiquity, which found itself in danger of capture or actually captured, and still under power, would surely self-destruct.

Copies of older versions of us the Slug war machines may be. In their ferocity in action, however, they are perhaps a small step ahead of us. Certainly the ferocity, and aggressiveness, which are the hallmark of the Slug's Xiphos and Phasganon Class war machines, go far toward making up at least some of the differences in both offensive and defensive power between their clones and my own more modern design.

A Slug Xiphos, inferior in armor, in main armament and in secondary armament, is nevertheless a dangerous opponent. Used in mass against us, many of my brothers and sisters have fallen to them. Worse, for reasons we have not been able to determine, they are more able to mask their presence than we are. That is worrisome, just as it is worrisome that we have never been able to determine the root source of their heightened ferocity.

Excursus

From:
Imperial Suns: The March of Mankind Through the Orion Arm
, copyright © CE 2936, Thaddeus Nnaji-Olokomo, University of Wooloomooloo Press, Digger City, Wolloomooloo, al-Raqis.

While it is clear and unquestioned that humankind had a long history of employing fighting vehicles in war, there is no consensus on how much that history had to do with the development and deployment of Ratha autonomous armoured fighting vehicles. In fact, it was largely unrelated.

Rathas were first fielded during the middle stages of the Nighean Ruadh War (AD 2289-2402), so called from the descriptions of the enemy given by the few survivors of the Gaelic League’s colonization party, which had the misfortune first to meet them. The Nighean Ruadh were shaggy insects, covered with red fur, the soldiery of which was female and sterile. It is entirely due to the Celtic penchant for poetic imagery that they received this name rather than being named for what they looked like under the fur, which is to say, praying mantises.

Those early battle tanks should have been fielded sooner. But centuries of bureaucratic inertia, historically unequalled nepotism, academia-instilled pacifism, and corruption on an heroic scale, along with some even less savory factors, all contributed to a speed of deployment next to which a snail would have seemed a thoroughbred.

Still, with our planets falling to the enemy at the rate of six to eight a terrestrial year—a baker’s dozen in one particularly harsh year—even the low-grade morons of the General Staff and the moral lepers of the political branches eventually came around to the realization that bureaucratic procedures had to give way by our will, or the Nighean Ruadh would do away with them altogether. It probably didn’t hurt matters when, one Friday afternoon, following the fall of Beauharnais and the presumed deaths of almost half a billion human beings, a Washyorkston mob stormed the offices of the United Planets Organization, trampled the security guards into bloody jam and dragged to the lampposts some one hundred and twenty-seven members of the Assembly of Man. There would have been more had most of the members not signed out earlier that morning on a long paid weekend. Among the lynched were several hundred time-serving bureaucrats, sixty or seventy of whom were, at least in theory, members of the military.

The valley ran northeast to southwest. There was a winding cut through the rough center, a dry riverbed, a wadi, which was filled occasionally by unpredictable rain. On both sides, to the northwest and southeast, the valley was framed by steep granite walls. In some places mostly along the right flank, toward the southeast, those walls were sheer, beyond the ability of a Ratha’s anti-gravity to surmount. The left side, however, was considerably less rugged and, moreover, was interrupted by several relatively smooth passes. To most of the Rathas it made no difference whatsoever, nor did it make any to the drones, but the light-colored, sand-polished and carved granite, reflecting the light of the green-tinged sun, would have been found by a human to be quite beautiful. The valley floor, too, was pocked by depressions and pierced by granite tors and peaks.

Magnolia moved up the river valley, second in order of march of five Rathas, all Mk XXXVIIs, moving in echelon left formation. The lead unit, Leo, was on the right, the second unit—Maggie—behind Leo and to his left, the third behind Magnolia and to her left, and so on. The formation was rarely a perfect line, as each Ratha had to move around the granite outcroppings and depressions.

Magnolia, like the other Rathas, controlled her own drones, some of them scouting ahead and to the flanks, both in the air and on the ground, while others were directed into support positions to secure and defend their own vehicles. Up above, the drones buzzed the valley wall’s jagged peaks, weaving in and out of the serpentine outcroppings. Some rose higher for better viewing, while others dropped down to investigate anything that appeared out of the ordinary. On the ground, they bounded forward by teams and by individuals, digitally sniffing and visually scanning for threats.

They missed the big threat, precisely because it wasn’t very big.

It normally took a lot to make a Ratha simply disintegrate. Fifty grams of anti-matter contained in a magnetic bottle was suddenly driven up into the underside of the vehicle, then released from its magnetic bottle as the bottle’s generating mechanism was destroyed. Thus explosively joined with the Ratha’s lightly armored belly plate, it was enough to do the trick.

Magnolia never heard the death scream of the lead unit, Leo, so rapid was his destruction. But the image of his main turret flying end over end, like some frying pan in the hands of a titanic juggler, was seared into her memory. Leo's four major walls were blasted out to approximately the four ordinal directions, followed by clouds of radioactive debris that were the shattered remnants of of Leo's inner workings. It was fortunate that her drones, less sophisticated in every way than she was, communicated no pain to her, as that would quite possibly have overloaded her circuits. Instead, of her sixty drones—sixteen aerial and forty-four ground—twenty-nine were wrecked by the blast, while another seventeen had their circuitry brutalized by the electro-magnetic pulse that froze them in place. About half the remainder—their circuits blitzed to just less than immediately fatal levels—twitched as if they were humans exposed to nerve agents, while the rest disjointedly danced about the battlefield in fine imitation of so many decapitated chickens.