The Rods and the Axe

by Tom Kratman

  The risk came in not only from the cables, but from the antiaircraft mines that some of them carried, those that were not carrying cameras. These were light antiaircraft missiles, IR guided, that were mounted to boxes containing acoustic sensors. At least once, a Tauran fighter, going for a balloon, had had the bad luck of being tracked acoustically, which is to say passively, and then gotten an explosion not far behind, followed by a continuous rod ripping through one wing. The pilot hadn’t survived, so far as was known, though she’d been seen to eject.

  That, given that the Tauran Union had—amidst the enthusiastic popping of champagne corks and much hand-clapping—previously declared absolute air supremacy, twice, had proved most humiliating.

  Eventually, in part to avoid further humiliation, they’d given up the antiballoon effort as a waste of time, money, and effort.

  “Lead elements of the Zhong fleet coming close enough to show on the main screen, if we pan out, High Admiral,” announced one of the Class Four petty officers manning the computer that controlled the main screen.

  “No,” said Wallenstein, “wait. The Zhong Fleet will do whatever they’ll do. I want to keep a close watch on the island.”

  Marguerite was dozing sitting up when Khan nudged her. Placing a cup of coffee, sweet but black, in her hand, he bent down and whispered, “The Zhong are filling the landing boats now.”

  She gulped then, suddenly awake, half from the coffee and half from a mix of anticipation and fear, Marguerite spent a few seconds blinking away the residue of sleep. Then she looked at the left-hand screen where, yes, landing craft were beginning to form in moving circles and ovals, the circles and ovals themselves part of a larger pattern of formations. She saw that Xingzhen, the Zhong empress, was watching the proceedings intently.

  At the push of a button by Khan, the left and center sections of the main screen joined, even as the island and fleet swam away. Now she could see the whole thing unfolding. Khan added in the graphics, turned over to the Taurans by the Zhong, that made a great deal more sense of the formations into which the Zhong were shaking themselves. They looked to be about thirty kilometers from land.

  The normally secretive to the point of paranoid Zhong had given up the operational graphics only because they needed Tauran air support and didn’t want a friendly fire incident with their allies of the moment.

  While the Zhong didn’t have much in the way of naval aviation, they did have a fair amount of naval gunfire to throw in in support of their landing force, including a decent light cruiser. No doubt other nations had sneered at them for decades for it, too, since naval gunfire just wasn’t sexy like the missiles and carrier aircraft of other first rate nations’ navies. In this particular case, though, NGS was just what the doctor ordered. Of the eighty-odd destroyers and frigates in the Zhong Navy, sixty were with the expedition. Of those, thirty-seven remained behind to screen the fleet against the nasty little submarines Balboa was known to have, while twenty-three steamed to within range of the shore defenses. Range, for the 100mm guns that were the almost universal standard for the Zhong Navy, was a theoretical seventeen kilometers, but a practical dozen.

  This wasn’t the first time the Zhong had used naval gunfire; they’d been intermittently pounding away for weeks. But this was the largest show to date, with fire blossoming over the azure sea from dozens of guns, and the target beaches being even more enveloped in smoke than they had been.

  The Zhong, unbeknownst to Wallenstein and the Taurans, had seriously considered using chemical agents on the beaches. They’d given up the notion on the presumption that Balboa’s elaborate fixed defenses would probably provide better defense than anything the Imperial Marines could carry on their backs, while the Balboans just might be able to retaliate. Chemicals were, after all, some of the easiest war materiels to produce.

  The Taurans had dedicated three hundred sorties to a pre-landing preparation of the island. That was not small change, those roughly two thousand tons. But, it was generally agreed, the Taurans had to do their business and leave before the Zhong reached within two kilometers of the beaches. Otherwise, the world, fate, God, Murphy (who, it was well known, had emigrated to Terra Nova in the first wave), or the emperor Mong, whom the Zhong and Anglians both disowned, would fuck somebody.

  With the ovals and circles at sea straightening now into deadly arrows, pointed not-quite-straight at the beaches, the Taurans half darkened the sky. They lashed down not only at the landing beaches, but at half a dozen others as heavily, and eleven more a bit more lightly, for the deception value. Known, or believed to be known, artillery positions got a special pasting.

  Generally speaking, Wallenstein was surprised at the fury of the Tauran assault.

  My cousins have apparently got a few grudges from the Five Minute Bomber raids.

  The Zhong and Taurans had, if anything, been overly cautious about the use of the latter’s airpower in proximity to the former’s unarmored Marines. While the first wave of landing craft was eight hundred meters offshore, the last of the Tauran strikers was flying east toward their bases in Santa Josefina.

  To smoke was now added a considerable cloud of dust raised by the bombs. Most of the island could not be seen with the naked eye or unaided camera.

  “Switching to thermal imaging,” Khan announced. The screen went blank, then red, then to a mix of stark black and red. It took a bit of time for both mind and eyes to adjust.

  “Narrow focus on the island and the leading wave,” Wallenstein commanded. “Order Harmony to bring the skimmer in lower, and have them prep another in case we lose this one.”

  “Aye, aye, High Admiral,” said one of the communications boffins. Communication was nearly instantaneous, while the skimmer was close in any case. The focus of the crew and their commander narrowed considerably as the first waves of the Zhong Marines splashed ashore.

  “What’s that?” Wallenstein asked, as the skimmer approached a tilted triple turret.

  “We’ve got lasing!” a petty officer announced. “Lasing from the whole northern coast. Lasing from the balloons. Lasing from Hill 287. Lasing . . .”

  The room shook with an inarticulate cry of despair from the Zhong empress. She saw what Khan saw, and had divined the meaning just as quickly.

  “It’s a gun; I’d guess an eighteen-centimeter gun,” Khan said, his voice heavy with defeat. “On a railway carriage. It came from one of the ammunition bunkers we didn’t attack. I think . . . I think there are going to be a lot of them. And they’re not lasing for its own sake.” Tonelessly, hopelessly, he added, “Empress, you should tell the Zhong Fleet to retreat . . . High Admiral, tell her.” Khan’s chin sank onto his chest. “But, of course, it’s too late for that, isn’t it?”

  PART I

  CHAPTER ONE

  Strike at the enemy with humane treatment as effectively as with weapons.

  —Alexander Suvarov

  The Tunnel, Cerro Mina, Balboa, Terra Nova

  There was still a smell of rifle smoke in the air, and broad bands of color in the skies. The latter came from buildings still burning in the city. Past the smoke and fire-lit, scattered clouds, the moon Hecate was in the constellation of the Leaping Maiden. With barely a glance at the familiar sight, Fernandez rolled his wheelchair through the widely agape, badly perforated steel doors leading down into the tunnel. Even with the power up again, and clean cooled air flowing, the place still reeked of smoke and, especially, of burnt human flesh. Still, there was hope that the fire had not penetrated the steel files and safes. Of course, that hope dimmed slightly as teams recovered the crisped bodies and brought them topside, to lay them out alongside the hundreds of other bodies atop this fortified hill overlooking Ciudad Balboa.

  Fernandez’s hope was dashed as one of his assistants pulled open a sliding file draw, revealing to him a mass of thermite-crisped ruin.

  “They’re all like this, Legate,” said the underling. “Here and at Building Fifty-nine. Whatever else the Taurans fucked up, they ma
de sure to burn their intel files and especially the files of their spies in our forces and country. We can’t even tell which files are what, to see how big their organization was.”

  “Fuck,” muttered Fernandez. He’d always had a few double agents and the mistress of the Tauran commander on his payroll, plus a couple of Tauran Union troops who were sympathetic to the Timocracy. And his organization had identified perhaps a score or so of spies.

  The problem, though, is that I know about maybe twenty, who are being rounded up even as I sit here, but I suspect hundreds. Damn, I needed those files. I can calculate to my heart’s content, but it’s all bullshit without something concrete to work with. And the fucking Taurans are good at this sort of thing; none of the people I know about are going to have a clue about any of the others. Shit! And I still haven’t been able to get someone convincingly on the crew of Rocaberti, up in the Federated States. Paranoid motherfuckers.

  “Could be worse, Legate,” the underling reminded. “We got their payrolls, after all, and the counterfeits are ready.”

  Cristobal, Balboa, Terra Nova

  It was a simple calculation really. Carrera needed X-many days to finish his preparations. There were Y-many Tauran prisoners to return. There were only Z-many that Carrera was willing to return, which was a number much less than Y. Parilla had promised the return of one hundred per day. Z over X, however, was less than one hundred per day. Even stretching it out by including Tauran noncombatants wasn’t quite going to equal one hundred times the days needed.

  “So fuck ’em,” said Patricio Carrera, watching as the crew of an Anglian-flagged container ship, fitted out as a hospital ship, loaded the fifty-seven badly wounded Tauran POWs. The hospital ship claimed to be, and possibly even was, owned and run by a humanitarian nongovernmental organization. In the Tauran Union, however, what appeared to be and was billed as nongovernmental was often anything but.

  “We’ll give them however many we feel like,” Carrera continued, “in order to stretch out the truce. And no more. Besides, we’re just incompetent jungle rats, incapable of keeping to a schedule.” He closed by repeating, “Fuck ’em.”

  The Anglian humanitarians doing the loading were enough that they didn’t need any help from the legion. This was to the good as Carrera’s troops, plus the numerous civilians who worked the port, were fully engaged on either side of the container ship unloading four Balboan-owned freighters that had docked in the last three days, bringing in over a hundred thousand tons of war materials between them.

  Another nineteen ships were docked at the port of Balboa, disgorging the first of an eventual half-million tons—food, assemblies, fuel, building material, ammunition, personal items, major end items, medical supplies, replacement parts . . . basically everything needed for an army of four hundred thousand to fight a major war. Still other ships were being unloaded at other, smaller ports in the coastal interior of the country. One biggie and a couple of coasters were unloading their cargoes by the Isla Real. A couple of smallish ships, no more than five thousand tons displacement, sat idly by, doing nothing but spurring commentary.

  Not that the Balboans paid no attention to the prisoners they were returning. Rather, legion medical personnel sufficient to provide care for the fifty-seven stayed with them right until the moment that the Taurans signed for them. The Tauran skipper, on the other hand, had orders to pick up one hundred. Infuriated at being shortchanged, he stormed up to Carrera demanding the rest.

  “Fuck you,” Carrera had replied, genially, setting the captain to sputtering, impotent fury. “You’re in no position to make demands. You get what’s here. If you annoy me, tomorrow there may be even fewer or none. Explain that to the bureaucratic swine you report to.”

  “It’s not right to use wounded men like this, like bargaining chips,” the Anglian insisted.

  “It’s not right to attack a country without a declaration of war, in the middle of the night,” Carrera countered.

  “Two wrongs don’t make a right,” the Anglian quoted.

  “Who’s interested in making a right,” Carrera sneered. “I’m just telling you to fuck off and quit bothering me, and stop your silly moral preening, or I won’t give you back anybody.”

  I am, in any case, not giving you back a single uncrippled infantryman, artilleryman, engineer, or tanker. Nor are you getting back too many intelligence shits, lest they have seen and then reveal something I don’t want revealed. Of course, I will give you back a couple who have seen things Fernandez has arranged for them to see.

  The weasel-faced Omar Fernandez was Carrera’s intelligence chief, which meant he was also responsible for the propagation of certain disinformation. Though bound to a wheelchair by a would-be assassin’s bullet, there remained nothing wrong with his brain. He was also amazingly ruthless, even more so than his boss.

  Parilla Line, South of Ciudad Balboa

  and south of the Rio Gatun, Balboa, Terra Nova

  Eighty-odd Tauran POWs, under the command of their own, swung picks and shovels, or held open sandbags for the latter, in a broad ditch now approaching half a dozen feet deep, just north of a thin wire fence, itself north of a thick belt of concertina. The space between the two was alleged to be mined. None of the laboring POWs doubted that enough to test the theory. There were two other groups of POWs engaged in the same work.

  Though under their own command, the Taurans were guarded by Balboan legionaries in their own pixelated jungle-striped uniforms and bearing the legion’s own battle rifle. The Taurans had been allowed to keep their national uniforms, of which there were at least half a dozen on display in this group, alone.

  Though it was still being worked on, the main line had been built years before. Centrally located, it was sheltered behind the swift-flowing, steep-banked river that fed the two lakes that fed the Transitway. To all appearances, it was oriented toward the north, with a presumption of an invasion from that direction having either taken or bypassed the capital of Ciudad Balboa. An invader coming from that direction would have run, first, into the stream. Moving farther south, presupposing he managed to cross that, there were some thick wire obstacles, currently being made thicker; broad, high-density minefields; and several layers of mutually supporting bunkers connected by tunnel and trench. Behind these came the Cordillera Central, the mountain range that ran like a spine down the length of Balboa’s quarter-rotated S-shape. This had been partially hollowed out and tunneled through.

  On the other slope, the reverse slope, there were a few positions and some entrenching to guard against an attack, probably airmobile, from the rear. From those bunkers and trenches still more trenches ran down to twenty-three very large, very solid bunkers, mostly of the cut-and-cover variety. Except for the degree to which man and nature had conspired to hide them, that, and the enormous size, they resembled nothing so much as Sachsen Christmas cakes, or Stollen, much as the Legion del Cid had used in a Sumeri valley between Multichucha Ridge and Hill 1647, over a decade before.

  From the trees, older and newer, that covered the Parilla Line hung a fantastic number of metalicized strips. Some strips were older and, torn and tarnished, looked it. Others were brand new. Most were somewhere in between.

  “What the hell are those things?” asked Anglian Captain Jan Campbell, of her chief NCO, Cimbrian Army Sergeant Major Kris Hendryksen. She was pointing with her finger at something down in the ditch. Her nose and chin pointed elsewhere.

  She, heart-faced, blue-eyed, short, shapely—extravagantly shapely, as a matter of fact—and blond, was a late entry captain in the Anglian Army, once seconded to the Tauran Union Security Force-Balboa, which force was now extinct, prisoners where not dead. He, larger, of course, was a Viking, now letting his face go to beard. He was also, though some miracle of slave-capturing genetics on another planet entirely, tanning much better than she was, or indeed, than any of them but the couple of Tuscans in the group.

  She and Hendryksen were lucky to be alive, having just managed to get a
way from the old Tauran headquarters at Cerro Mina before the Balboans troops had taken it. Ordinarily, they could just have surrendered. Hendryksen, being male, had figured out that was a bad idea, after the wounding and deaths of hundreds of Balboan female infantry on the hill’s northern slope and the broad boulevard beyond. To Campbell, being female, it had simply not occurred that normal male soldiers would take any exceptionally dim view of the killing of female combatants. Hendryksen had understood his own sex better than she had. Plunging into an orgy of massacre and mutilation in revenge for the losses to Tercio Amazona, the legion’s females-only infantry regiment, the legionaries had left hardly anything alive atop the hill, and burned alive or suffocated those who’d sheltered in the underground complex beneath it.

  The metalicized strips lay on the ground as well. Hendryksen picked one up and, after checking the ends to make sure it was a whole strip, measured it by eye. He then checked another, determining that it was precisely half the length of the first.

  “My guess,” he said, “and it’s only a guess, though an educated one, is that these are designed to screw with ground-penetrating radar. Maybe also the global-locating system, but I don’t know enough about that. That they’re a deliberate defensive measure, though, seems certain.”

  “Do the Balboans do anything that is not a ‘deliberate defensive measure’?” Campbell asked, pointing with her nose at the menacing firing ports of the bunkers nearby and running up the slope. So far as she could tell, the bunkers were at least mostly empty, their nominal occupants currently guarding the detail of eighty or so Tauran POWs, digging a ha-ha under Campbell’s command.

  “They have us digging this ha-ha to keep the animals out of the minefields,” Hendryksen said. “Naturally, that is its only purpose. It wouldn’t do as an antitank ditch, or we would not be digging it, since we are not to be used in aiding the enemy’s war effort.”