Where the Grey Seas Glitter and the Sharp Tides Shift

On its own, the liberal faction in the ongoing Cuban civil war is nonviable. I have advised Generalissimo San Román to align his forces with the Bourbonist cause. A restoration of the pre-Communist Republic of Cuba will not come to pass, but we may be able to create out of a Bourbonist victory a constitutional monarchy in Cuba ideologically between and sympathetic to both NATO and the League of Vienna.

–CIA internal memo from Morgan Malone, Paramilitary Operations Officer, June 4th, 2031.

Chris had to give the Ki-25 design credit. While he didn’t think ornithopter-type airframes were anywhere near ready to dogfight with fixed-wing aircraft, they managed to, in plenty of other roles, combine all the benefits of planes and helicopters. He sat behind the pilot this time– a lieutenant John Jimenez, the same one who had flown him to the first match. They lifted off, with the Don Juan hitched underneath, from St. Paul Miki Air Force Base outside of San Francisco, and with only a mid-air refueling once they got through US airspace and into the Gulf of Mexico, they came down on a cleared hilltop east of Santiago de Cuba.

The flag that whipped in downwash of the descending ornithopter followed the same pattern as the Cuban flag in use since 1902, but its stripes were a much deeper blue than the ordinary turquoise, and rather than bearing a single white star, the red triangular field was inset with a smaller wedge of that same deep blue, and in that were three golden fleurs-de-lis. Waiting on the ground were a squad of Californian infantry, the gray bodies of their Type 27 rifles painted over in a tropical brushstroke camouflage pattern, and more men in some molting transitional state between insurgents and regulars. That same Cuban Bourbonist flag had been stitched onto their motley of jackets in olive, tan, and a dozen camouflage patterns, and they carried with well-drilled discipline an unstandardized mixture of FAM-95s, practically the entire rest of the Kalashnikov weapons family, M16s, AUGs of both Austro-Hungarian and Californian make, one man even had an AR-10 that had to be about three-quarters of a century old. When Chris stepped out of the ornithopter, all of them snapped to a crisp salute.

A second ornithopter arrived with the Don Juan’s support crew and their equipment, and they set to work preparing the Duelist for the operation, assisted by what seemed, surprisingly, to be a logistics corps of the Bourbonist army. They truly are well on their way to becoming a formal, functional national military, once they take control of the nation. Jen seemed nervous around the local mechanics, at first, but relaxed once she got to talking with two Cuban women about her own age.

Chris, meanwhile, met the rebel officer in command and a Californian war correspondent long embedded with the Bourbonists, and went over the plan.

The Don Juan was concealed under camo tarps, and the Californians were given cots in Brigadier General Emilio Duarte’s command bunker, built into a hill overlooking Santiago de Cuba’s eastern outskirts. The men slept in an upper level with the general and his staff, but Chris noted Cristina asking a young female logistics officer, “Is that really okay?” before she and Jen followed her down to a lower level of the bunker. They followed her deferentially, though she could not have been older than Jen, and the young officer seemed thoroughly unremarkable– olive-green fatigues, second lieutenant’s rank insignia, light brown hair, mediterranean complexion, long face with a strong, though not quite mannish, jaw. Perhaps there was an unusual confidence in her straight-backed posture, but that was the extent of it.

“General,” Chris asked, “who’s that second lieutenant those two civvies from my ground crew are following, like they’ve been invited to a sleepover with the cool girl in school?”

Duarte, a tall balding man with tired eyes, cocked an eyebrow at Chris. “Captain Hernandez, they have been invited to a sleepover with a very cool young lady, indeed. Before you leave, the newsies will have to get some photos of you with Lieutenant Alicia de Todos los Santos de Borbón y Württemberg.”

Chris nodded slowly. “Borbón. So the man you are trying put on a throne in Havana is…”

“Her father, yes. He’s in Cuba, as well. Not strictly a necessary risk, but he and his adult issue would not have men die for their claims while they sat and waited in the safety of the Spanish court. King Fernando will rule with wisdom and justice, we can rest assured of this, especially given how the Communist Party has eroded our standards for such things.” The general blinked. “There is something of an argument over what precisely to call him. Fernando I, because he will be the first to hold ‘King of Cuba’ as a formal title, or Fernando VIII, because the basis of his claim is descent from Alfonso XIII, the King of Spain when Cuba became independent, and there have been seven Kings Fernando of Spain.”

“Let me know when you reach a consensus. In the meantime, your men and I will be raising his banner over San Pedro de la Roca tomorrow.”

San Pedro was a colonial-period fortress at the mouth of the bay, the last holdout of Cuban Communist forces on its east bank. The next morning, Chris set out for it in the Don Juan de Austria, escorted by one platoon of armor and two of motorized infantry. The armor was an anachronistic mixture of new-production Maximilian main battle tanks– largely designed as a direct improvement on the British Challenger 2– provided by Austria-Hungary, and decrepit Soviet T-62s captured from the Communists. The infantry had been outfitted with practically all the Type 27 rifles the rebels had in inventory, but the sleek lines of their guns were offset somewhat by the battered Toyota Hilux technicals they rode in. Some of these pickup trucks only carried infantry, some were mounted with a Soviet PKM or American M2 Browning machine gun, and one– clearly marked as a press car, for all the protection that afforded in an assault like this– carried a massive self-stabilizing camera rig.

The Castillo de San Pedro de la Roca was an early example of a star fort, intended to repel raids by English privateers, and so the landward approach from the newly captured international airport east of its promontory was not a particularly frightening killbox, especially since the Cuban Communist artillery inside its walls had largely been diverted into an exchange with rebel guns on the other side of the bay. For a long span, the ridge they approached on sat higher than the walls of the fortress, though they were often forced into an uncomfortably narrow column, where there were simply no avenues of approach apart from the single road atop the ridge.

As they crested the highest point on the approach, Chris toggled his railgun to its newest ammunition type, already hatching a plan to use it for something other than its intended purpose. He fired off a string of shells of Otto’s new Incendiary Airburst design. Intended to be used in tandem with the preexisting Fragmentation Airburst shells, they burst first into several hand-grenade-sized incendiary capsules that then went off midair, to create a wide, clear heat signature that would draw thermal tracking systems on missiles, which the following frag shell could then detonate midair. He timed the fuses instead to go off just above ground level inside the fortress wall, and loosed a steady volley as they approached. This kept the structure largely intact for later use by the rebels, and eventually by tourists, but mortally burned any unfortunate soldiers of the Cuban Revolutionary Army– who were not the rebels, despite the name– caught with nothing between them and the sky above.

When they had a clear line of sight on the landward gate of the fortress, one of the Maximilians blew the wood-and-iron doors open, and the assault group fanned out along the paths of three tanks equipped with mine plows to approach. They advanced quickly, the plows a precaution in the face of a strong, but far from absolute, margin of confidence that the Cubans hadn’t had an opportunity to mine the field in front of the fortress walls before being driven inside.

Out from the smoke of the burst gate, driving over a crude concrete bridge that had been poured into the moat at some point during the previous weeks of fighting, two tanks emerged from within. The first was a T-62, and a Maximilian turned it into a flaming husk the moment it rolled out into the field. Behind it came a P-28, the heavy tank on the bleeding edge of Colombian weapons technology, its interior half fission reactor by volume and its top a long railgun turret. It sent a solid ferrous slug clear through the offending Maximilian, which came to a stop in the engine block of the infantry technical behind it. Every gunport in the landward outer wall of the fortress lit up with machine gun, sniper, and antitank missile fire, and Chris and his escorting vehicles fanned out in evasive maneuvers, now willing to take their chances with any mines.

Chris pulled up his electromagnetic field display, dropped the Don Juan to one knee, and shouldered its new EMP gun. Though it fired from an electronic signal conveyed through the Don Juan’s hand, the motion he made inside the cockpit to send it was a pull of his index finger, like squeezing a trigger, and he sent the shell straight into the turret-base of the P-28. How much physical damage it did to the tank was unclear, beyond the tank visibly remaining intact, but Chris’ electromagnetic display lit up in bright blue as the pulse momentarily engulfed the fortress, then faded to a dim outline of the two dead tanks’ conductive metallic chassis, the orbs around the recharging capacitors in the P-28’s railgun and the violent currents going out from its onboard nuclear reactor snuffed like so many candles. Through his conventional camera feed, he saw missile launchers being thrown from the gunports nearest the gate, their targeting systems apparently fried beyond use.

He loaded another shell from a holder on the Don Juan’s right thigh, and hailed the disabled technical on his radio. “PC-1B, PC-1B, this is Don Juan, can I give you a lift?.”

“Elaborate, Don Juan.”

“If the passengers hold on tight, I can set your vehicle on top of the fortress walls.”

“...I copy. PC-1B is ready for takeoff.”

He sprinted over to the stationary technical, and picked the truck up like an infant, holding the tube of his EMP gun across the side to shield the infantrymen from machine gun fire. Don Juan charged the fortress, bobbing and weaving to keep any antitank missiles from impacting its cockpit, and set the pickup truck on the San Pedro’s parapet before clambering over the wall.

When he turned back to face the wall from the inside, He heard glass shattering in his closed viewport. Aiming a Dragunov marksman’s rifle from a tower window, a man in the dark uniform of Cuba’s Black Wasps special forces unit was putting rounds of 7.62x54R anywhere he seemed to think might be a weak point on the Don Juan. Chris held a palm out to him, and put a ferrous slug from his in-arm coilgun through the wall and the man.

More Black Wasps, outfitted mainly with Colombia’s new blocky green plastic FAM-30 flechette gun, came out of the stonework to fight back the men on the rampart and now driving through the gate, and the battle turned into a grim game of whack-a-mole as Chris put down suppressing fire wherever they showed themselves, while the rebel infantry had the far harder task of breaching and clearing.

Once all the various tower and passage entrances on this side of the fortress were secure and the infantry technicals parked inside, Chris examined some of the wreckage around the gatehouse. Behind the P-28, laying on its back, was a skeletal-looking humanoid war machine, disabled by the EMP. It appeared powered by a hydrogen cell backpack, its cockpit was a crude affair, and its main weapons seemed to be a pair of anti-air machine guns rigged to its hands. The frame itself, however, Chris recognized, particularly where struts connecting its shoulder had been melted and welded back together. Frame B, the source inside Project Windmill had called it, the main body of the Don Quixote he had fought. So, that intel was good. He would be up against a heavier-duty version of the Colombian Duelist shortly.

He took out his man-sized knife, and pried the cockpit open. A Cuban pilot was seated inside, this simple cockpit not bothering with the motion-controls mandated by the Treaty of Budapest, and his arms shot up in surrender. As the rebel infantry bound him in the back of a technical, a Californian war correspondent shouted up from the press vehicle. “The flags, Captain! Do the flags now!”

Chris stepped through the inner defenses, held by no more than a handful of riflemen the rebel machine guns could easily keep pinned indoors, and ripped the Republic of Cuba flag from its pole on the fortress’s keep. He pulled two telescoping poles from where they had been lashed to the Don Juan’s inner forearm, and drove them into the stonework. The camera crew captured him erecting the flag of the nascent Kingdom of Cuba, and alongside it a white-on-gold variant on Japan’s Rising Sun battle flag, the Setting Sun of the California Shogunate.