Thus he waited as the clumsy tanks passed. When the first infantry carrier reached a spot next to the van he pushed the button.
Kaboom!
The explosion physically threw the Ocelot's front around by ninety degrees, knocking Paredes' helmet off. He was slammed to one side, splitting the skin over his scalp and breaking one arm with a sickening crunch. The driver, who had had his head stuck up out of the hatch, was knocked unconscious. From what Paredes could see, only half of the track commander made it into the track. Where his upper torso had gone? Who could say?
With blood seeping into his eyes and his arm shrieking in protest Paredes crawled to the back of the track and twisted the door latch open. The door still didn't move-perhaps the hull was slightly deformed-until the sergeant kicked it open. When he emerged, weaponless, helmetless and using one arm to try to keep the other in place, the building walls to either side were lit by fire, despite the smoke.
In shock, Paredes looked to one side and saw a tipped over Ocelot, with flames pouring out of it. No survivors, he thought, grimly.
His assistant, a corporal, ran up asking, "What the fuck, Paredes? I mean, what the fucking fuck?"
"Bomb," the sergeant answered, simply and a bit distantly. He was swaying on his feet as he continued, "I'm… a little hurt. Stop the tanks and get them back here. Set up a perimeter. Report to higher. And take over because…"
The sergeant pitched face first onto the asphalt.
University of Ninewa, legionary Command Post, 17/4/461 AC
Sada was there, representing and in command of his Sumeri Brigade. So were all the cohort commanders as well as the primary staff and McNamara.
"Let's be honest," Carrera was saying. "We got overconfident and we got sloppy. Some of that's understandable; post invasion let down and all. We had the boys on an adrenaline high for weeks. When the adrenaline went, they just went on a natural downer. It was to be expected and we should have expected it… I should have expected it.
"That's in the past. We can only affect the future. For the future I have some other news, most of it good. There have been attacks all through the country over the last several days. For the most part, we got off lightly. The Anglians and the FS troops were hit a lot harder. I think we can thank Amid Sada's watchers for the fact we weren't hit as badly. They've identified and helped round up about half of the insurgents, so we think, who infiltrated our ZOR…"
Carrera waited for a few moments for a translator to pass what he had said on to Sada who answered, "They did, Pat, and thank you. But they're only part of it. If there had been no work here, then the attacks would have been a lot worse."
"I know," Carrera agreed. "In any case, there is some good news. The FSC's War Department is finally waking up to the fact that we have an insurgency here and it's not going to go away on its own. We've been offered a long-term contract to keep a legion here and to expand that legion to roughly divisional strength. The details don't matter much except that the rate of reimbursement we get is going to be based on our strength in country. Even so, we're not going to hurry that expansion. For one thing, the Area of Responsibility we get assigned, the size of it, goes up as our strength does. For another, if we break ourselves in trying to get big faster than our school system and recruiting standards would currently permit, we'll soon find ourselves unemployed." And I'll find myself without the means of finding and destroying those who murdered my wife and children.
"It isn't just the insurgents, Patricio," Fernandez said. "We've got to go after those who feed them, those who support them, those who supply them and those who'll spread their propaganda, too. Everybody."
Interlude
5 January, 2095, Terra Nova
The unloading proceeded in accordance with a schedule designed to get one national or ascriptive group completely off the transport before another was unfrozen. The Panamanians came first, roughly ten thousand of them, as their colony, named Balboa, was the westernmost of the six colonies the Amerigo Vespucci had come to settle. Even among the Panamanians, there was a split as Chocoes Indians were to be dropped before the European- and Mestizo-descended people. The Vespucci would merely accelerate slightly in its orbit to assume the best position for unloading each of the others.
Ngobe Mzilikaze, Captain of the Vespucci, thought this was needless and excessive care. True, there had been problems with the colonies from Europe, from farther south in Latin America, and from Africa. And what happened with the colonists from the Balkans, the one time they had been awakened without regard to ethnicity, ought not even be talked about. But the Central Americans, despite having had a few wars amongst themselves over the centuries, had no real or deeply engrained hatred of each other. They much preferred civil to foreign war. Nonetheless, since the Cheng Ho disaster, standard procedure was to unload ascriptive, national, religious and ethnic groups as separately as humanly possible.
Ngobe hoped the settlement went smoothly. He carried important dispatches for the UN enclave on the island they called Atlantis, dispatches he was bound to deliver personally. Yet he could not, consistent with his duty, abandon his post aboard the Vespucci until all of his cargo was unloaded.
Belisario Carrera had never even believed it was possible to be so cold. Shivering worse than a leaf in hurricane, worse even than a high living leader of a Kosmo charity faced with an audit, he sat up in his deep freeze cubicle like a corpse arising at a funeral.
That was not the only Finnegan's Wake aspect to the resurrection, either. As soon as he sat up a white-coated technician handed him a plastic cup containing several ounces of nearly pure ethanol mixed with what passed for orange juice.
"Drink this," the technician ordered. "Primitive, I know, but we've found it's the best thing to get the blood moving and to warm you up."
The tech didn't mention that, after many dozens of voyages now, it had also been found to calm colonists who sometimes tended to panic when they realized they were suddenly, from their point of view suddenly, an uncrossable distance from a home and family they would never see again in this life.
Gratefully, too cold even to enquire as to the young wife who had accompanied him, Belisario took the proffered ethanol and drank quickly and deeply. He barely choked on the liquid as it burned its way down his throat and began to light small fires in his veins and arteries.
Beginning to warm now, and finally able to think more or less clearly, Belisario asked about his wife, still lying frozen in the next compartment.
The tech checked the meters on the compartment and answered, "She's fine. Would you like to be here when she awakens? It sometimes helps."
5 January, 2101, UNOG (UN Offices, Geneva)
High Admiral Kotek Annan looked out over a skyline gone dark. It was far too much to say that Earth had become "a world lit only by fire"-though fire all too often lit it-but there had been a steady drop in all the activities that might have brought light. At least here in Europe there had, though Europe had started off on so high a plain it still exceeded most of the world. China was doing well enough, as were India, Brazil, and a few other places. The United States, along with those portions of what had once been known as western Canada and which now made up six of America's sixty-three states, was still a powerhouse though there were indicators that that was changing. The U.S. still tried to act as if the UN didn't exist, too.
"The secretary general will see you now, High Admiral," a flunky announced.
Nodding slightly, Annan turned from the window and the darkness it showed and walked briskly into the well-appointed, even luxuriously appointed, offices of the secretary general, Edouard Simoua.