The Rods and the Axe

by Tom Kratman

  “Skip the last one,” said Parilla. “If we spirited her away, then let her be recovered, it’s very unlikely that the high admiral would do anything but ground her someplace she couldn’t do any harm. Certainly trust would be too much to expect after that.”

  “I agree, Mr. President,” said Fernandez. “I tossed it out for completeness’s sake.”

  “What are the odds,” asked Carrera, “that she knows anything really important?”

  Fernandez shrugged. “There’s really no way to tell, Duque. You would think if she knew something important, we could just get it from a quick field interrogation. And, were she a trained agent, we could. But she’s just a cabin girl, though my man’s impression of her was that she was a bright and brave cabin girl. Still, she doesn’t know what she knows that might be important. And she is very young.”

  “How far do you think she can be trusted?” asked Parilla. “Could she be bait for a trap?”

  “It’s possible,” said Fernandez, adding with a smile, “and I haven’t yet figured out how to do a background check on someone from Old Earth.”

  Fernandez so rarely smiled, let alone told a joke, that Carrera did a double take. “What do you suggest?” he asked.

  “I’d suggest leaving her in place, but using the opportunity to get her some useful equipment, and maybe some weapons familiarization. There are indoor ranges open to the public in Aserri, at least some of which are holding arms for our tercio in Santa Josefina.”

  “Risks of doing that?” Parilla asked. “I don’t mean just risks to us but also—since, as you say, she is a cousin—risks to her.”

  “No real risk to us, per se,” said Fernandez. “All I’ve got in mind is giving her a ceramic knife with a plastic handle, a tool ring, a tiny cell phone with a few extra batteries since we don’t know if she’d be able to recharge it up there, some poisons, a lipstick dagger. The usual. The risk to her, though, if she were caught, is immense.”

  “There’s no way for her to communicate to us?” Carrera asked.

  “No.” Fernandez shook his head. “The only one up there communicating with anybody regularly down here is whoever or whatever the Yamatans have. And for all our pleading, they’ll only give us information, not how they get it.”

  “What do you think it is,” Carrera asked, “a whoever or a whatever?”

  “Damned if I know, though I have my suspicions. It would be just like the Yamatans to have left behind on Old Earth a small organization or clan, dedicated to the perpetuation of the Imperial Way through intelligence work . . . even across five centuries. It could even be a criminal organization, or a part of one. They’re a very strange people. If we couldn’t interbreed, I’d wonder if we were the same species.”

  “Can you make a deal with them? They tell us how the word gets to them from the Peace Fleet and we let them share in whatever the girl can get for us. Did I say ‘share’? Silly me, it will have to go through them, won’t it?”

  “I don’t think they’d consider it a fair trade,” Fernandez said. “Their asset, who—or whatever it is, has been working well for quite some time. The girl, on the other hand, is a wasting asset . . . an unproven wasting asset. And one that might be a threat to their source.

  “So, no, I don’t think so.”

  “I want to see this girl,” said Carrera.

  “I don’t—” Fernandez began, before being cut off by Parilla’s, “In Aserri? No, my friend, I expressly forbid you from going anyplace where you might be kidnapped or assassinated.”

  Carrera drew breath, as if intending to argue. He paused, then visibly deflated as he exhaled. “Good point. Okay, I’ll concede the risks are high. So . . . you know Lourdes is a fine judge of character. And she can gribbitz eloquently as well. We’ll send her with Esterhazy. There shouldn’t be any problem with a false passport. Fernandez can brief her and prep her beforehand. And she can carry everything the girl needs in a diplomatic pouch.”

  “Why Lourdes?” asked Parilla. “She’s your wife, after all. And, since Pigna’s failed coup”—Lourdes had, in fact, been the one person most responsible for the defeat of that coup—“she’s fairly well known both within and outside of Balboa.”

  “Precisely,” Carrera agreed. “She’s quite well known. She’s well connected, obviously, so there’ll be no doubt among the international community of the very, very caring and sensitive that we’re taking the conference seriously. She’s also the person whose judgment I most trust on this entire planet. If she meets the girl and tells me we can trust her, that she is capable . . . then I can act on that with confidence.

  “She is also, to be sure, one of the most pigheaded women in the world on anything she’s determined on—witness that Jimenez had to have her weapons hidden before she’d let anyone talk to me when I was . . . ill—so she won’t be giving anything away.”

  “It is rather elegant,” Parilla admitted. “Esterhazy to be his totally frightening Sachsen self . . . Lourdes to be a, still quite lovely, velvet glove with the mailed fist inside of it. The recipe I do not have . . . but the list of ingredients appeals.”

  Fernandez chewed at his lip for a bit, then said, “I’m going to assign Larry Triste to be the girl’s control officer. For any asset with less potential, that would be beneath him. For this . . . he’ll suit. And his judgment can supplement Lourdes’s; we’ll send him to Aserri to the peace conference. In fact, I’ll send him early.”

  “This is all well and good,” Parilla said, “but we should not lose sight of the fact that this peace conference has one aim: to disarm us and leave us vulnerable to our enemies.”

  “Raul,” said Carrera, “I assure you that this is a fact I shall never lose sight of. And on that happy note, with your permission, Mr. President, I have to fly to Fort Williams, pick up my teenaged son and his—Jesus, have mercy!—even younger ‘wife,’ hopefully before the defiant bitch has managed to get herself knocked up . . .”

  Parilla looked stunned. He knew the boy well and had met the girl. “You don’t really think . . .”

  “Has it been that long since you were a teenager, Raul?” Carrera asked, one eyebrow raised.

  CHAPTER SIX

  A real diplomat is one who can cut his neighbor’s throat without having his neighbor notice it.

  —Trygve Lie

  Hotel Cielo Dorado, Aserri, Santa Josefina, Terra Nova

  Esmeralda woke up with company. Spooned up behind her, one arm under her head and the other, the right one, wrapped around her, that hand cupping her left breast, was her lover, Richard, earl of Care. Richard, captain of the Spirit of Peace, still slept. Automatically, she pushed back against him. It couldn’t be said she enjoyed sex. She expected that she never would. But she could enjoy Richard’s enjoyment and she could enjoy the warmth, if not the feeling.

  Warmed by Richard, she thought, He says he wishes he could take off his skin and wrap me in it. I believe it, too.

  Richard had taken his pinnace down to Aserri the night before, borrowed Esmeralda from the high admiral—an easy thing, that, with Wallenstein so infatuated with her empress—and taken the girl to dinner and then bed. There he’d done his best to show how much he’d missed her on her too frequent official absences.

  Before Richard, Esmeralda’s only experience of sex had been the rape of peasant girls to be expected from the sons and soldiers of Count Castro-Nyere, the absolute ruler of her home province of TransIsthmia, and the far more violent and even more violating rape of the slave pens of Razona Market.

  How I might have felt about sex if the soldiers of Count Castro-Nyere and all the slavers at Razona Market hadn’t fucked me until I bled, I can’t say.

  For a moment, just a moment, the memories caused the girl to tighten like the skin of a drum. Then the warmth and the other memories—not least that Richard was serious about wrapping her in his skin, were it but possible—let her relax again.

  Yet he, ever sensitive to her, at least, felt the tightening and startled awake immediatel
y. “Are you all right?” he asked.

  “Fine, love . . . I’m fine,” she replied, softly. “Just a little nightmare.” The kind you have when you’re wide awake. “Go back to sleep.”

  With a gentle squeeze of her breast, and a light kiss against the cascading midnight of her hair, he did.

  In the same wing of the hotel, on the same floor, but with a guard on the specific corridor, Marguerite Wallenstein and the empress, Xingzhen, lay wrapped in each other’s arms so tightly that, but for size and color differences, it would have been near impossible to tell where one began and the other ended. As it was, Wallenstein, blond and tall, physically quite dominated the empress, while the empress held the whip hand emotionally, and also literally, when they thought they had enough privacy.

  Sadly, here we do not have enough privacy. But, my almond-eyed love, when this conference is over—which is to say when your generals and admirals and my General Janier and his people have worked out the details of continuing the war—you and I are going to Atlantis for a vacation. There’s a nice latifundia there that goes with the office of high admiral. There, there’ll be privacy enough for everything you want to do to me and everything you want me to do for you.

  The high admiral had always considered herself bisexual with a very slight preference for dominant men. What she was discovering was that she was bisexual with an absolute preference for Xingzhen.

  I never believed in love at first sight. The more fool I.

  Headquarters, Tauran Union Security Force-Santa Josefina,

  Rio Clara, Santa Josefina, Terra Nova

  An acetated and color-coded map, the colors and their intensity shaded for what was believed to be the density of Balboan-trained, -equipped, and -directed legionaries in various parts of the country. The map had been provided by the Santa Josefinan public force, though Marciano’s own intelligence people thought it was pretty close to accurate. The map was accompanied by a police lieutenant Marciano introduced to his staff as “Lieutenant Blanco,” who had brought with it a folder containing names and addresses for the known legionaries who had come back home.

  Claudio Marciano was more than ordinarily torn. He hadn’t yet been officially asked, less still ordered, to start rounding up the legionaries in Santa Josefina. But the orders would be coming along soon, he suspected. For that matter, it made a certain sense to start picking them up now, or at least soon, while they were scattered and—mostly, though he doubted entirely—disarmed. That would allow his people to use minimal force. Indeed, they might be able to arrange things so as to be seen as nothing more than backups for the Santa Josefinan Public Force. Minimal force would mean fewer civilians hurt or killed. With a little luck, perhaps no one would be hurt; none of his, none of theirs, no police, no civilians.

  And isn’t that the ideal? he asked himself. To compel one’s enemy to give up his purpose while suffering no harm oneself? Not that even Belisarius ever quite managed to do that.

  In any case, the lack of orders was no reason for him not to have his staff and subordinate commanders planning for the roundup. Neither was it reason not to be coordinating with the Public Force.

  Especially so since, once a roundup begins, the odds are really good that the other Santa Josefinan regiment will be across the border in no time. That will be fine—well, no, not exactly fine, but survivable—provided I can eliminate the internal threat before they pin us, and then get my command concentrated along their obvious axis of advance and main supply route. On the other hand, let me and my little pocket division have to split our efforts between a guerilla movement and a fixing force on the border or—worse!—having crossed the border and I’m screwed. Hard. No grease. And not kissed first. Ugly, in other words.

  The other alternative, hitting the well-armed, well-trained, and probably all too well led force around Ciudad Cervantes, he didn’t even consider, and for the same reason he’d pulled back from the border once it became obvious that the battle within and for Balboa had been lost. There were simply too many of the bastards, they were too good—not perfect, certainly not supermen, but too good—and they were too ruthless and thorough.

  After all, it’s not like the Santa Josefinans are the only troops there in their Valle de las Lunas. I’ve got it on pretty good authority that there’s a five-cohort tercio of mountain troops there, too, straddling Hephaestus Mountain across the border. Eleven cohorts? Probably four or five battalions of decent artillery. Do not want to deal with that. Not, not, NOT.

  “Eleven cohorts?” he asked Lieutenant Blanco, currently serving as his good authority. “Eleven?”

  “Including the three we are quite sure are already inside the country, yes,” answered Blanco, “but not counting their Cazador maniples, or the engineers, or the light armor. Could be twelve; there may be four cohorts already in country. And there are rumors we have not been able to pin down that a very large cohort of women warriors is assembling close by, too, a cohort as big as any two others. Plus possibly another cohort, small but high quality, from their special operations regiment.”

  “And I am still troubled. What is your source?” asked Marciano, to which question Blanco only smiled in reply.

  My primary source, thought Blanco, even as he kept his face perfectly neutral, is probably Legate Fernandez. At least I think he’s the one who’s ordered me fed information by Sergeant Morales of the recruiting maniple here in Aserri. Is the information accurate? I don’t have any reason to doubt the troop list he’s been providing. It’s just that I’m not sure of his reasons for providing it. Perhaps he just wants you to feel threatened into passivity. Perhaps his chief, the gringo named Carrera, remembers that you and he had fought side-by-side, against the same enemies, in Pashtia, and doesn’t want you hurt.

  For my part, I just want my country to be a real country again, independent, able to defend itself, not a beggar for help from big brother. I would prefer that we not become a part of another real country, either, for which Balboa is the likely candidate. We’re similar, yes, but not so similar that I want us married to them. But there’s no reason for us to end up annexed, since the Balboans have been kind enough to provide us a couple of regiments, already formed and ready.

  “Let’s just say,” said Blanco, with a sly smile, “that we have people on the other side.” This had the virtue of being absolutely true and entirely misleading, both.

  Though Marciano wasn’t entirely misled. He retained, at least, some doubts about Blanco’s true loyalty. Nor, if the police lieutenant was loyal to the idea of his country free of foreign troops and able to stand on its own feet, did Marciano consider that blameworthy.

  Dangerous to me and my men? Yes. Blameworthy? No.

  Marciano cast his attention back to the annotated and color-shaded threat map. “Funny that the ones inside Santa Josefina already are concentrated along the Shimmering Sea side of the country, with only a few here on the Mar Furioso side, near us. Or maybe not exactly funny . . . I’ve seen more humorous things.”

  “Why did they do that?” Blanco asked. His sojourn through the Atlacatlan Military Academy hadn’t been designed for much more than to make him a decent platoon leader.

  Marciano, who was as up on insurgency as anyone around, answered, “Putting the one regiment out away from us is probably to give them more time and warning to disperse if we move against them. The others probably belong to the regiment still in Balboa. My guess would be recon troops, or special operations troops. And their mission is probably to call for artillery to support and advance, and blow or secure bridges to keep us from either supplying or maneuvering, while letting them do both?”

  “How both?” the policeman asked. “That makes no—”

  “Different needs,” the Tuscan replied. “The bridge we need gets blown. The bridge we’re not watching gets seized and guarded. Different techniques. The enemy side of a bridge gets cut so they can fix it without too much interference from us while we have to expose ourselves to fix the bridge if they’re on the
other end. For example.”

  “Yeah, ‘for example,’ ” the policeman agreed. “I think that means that the easier job, rounding up the ones near here, has to come first, but . . .”

  “But that warns them to disperse on the Shimmering Sea side, which makes that job a lot tougher.”

  “Oh, well,” said Marciano, softly, “I knew the other side back in Pashtia. They weren’t stupid then, either.”

  Hotel Cielo Dorado, Aserri, Santa Josefina, Terra Nova

  The problem with bugging the hotel for real-time intelligence, something Fernandez’s intelligence net in Santa Josefina was perfectly capable of, was that no one knew what the UEPF was capable of. Could they detect bugs? Could they detect the most sophisticated bugs? Fernandez had to assume so. At least he had to until someone could talk to the young cabin girl who said she wanted to help. If she said they couldn’t, or wouldn’t, or wouldn’t bother, which were not quite the same things, and if the legate decided they could trust her on that, the only problem would be keeping all the various microphones from squealing out loud from feedback from each other.

  Until then, Fernandez had ordered hands off or, rather, “No bugs.”

  Thus, although the high admiral, the empress, and Janier, plus their various staffs, all watched what they said, and tended to speak in circumlocutions, they didn’t—at least for the nonce—really need to.

  The only place they could speak freely was one conference room, and not a particularly large one, that was swept daily by Tauran, UEPF, and Zhong intelligence.

  The conference room was on the hotel’s third floor, separate from all other rooms, and reachable only by its own elevator. The walls were doubled, to prevent eavesdropping that way. And the place came with its own system for interfering with radio waves. It was nearly as secure as Wallenstein’s own office, aboard the Spirit of Peace, and, though she didn’t know it, much more secure than the main conference room on the ship, as well.