The Rods and the Axe

by Tom Kratman

  “Still,” said Carrera, “she’s such an itty bitty thing, our Pililak. I’d hoped she’d grow a bit before he knocked her up.”

  “She’s not so little as that,” said Chapayev. “I think she’ll be fine.”

  Carrera ignored his son and daughter-in-law on the flight back. He had the pilot take him over the artillery area south of the Parilla Line, then along the line itself. He looked carefully for the signs of “Volcano” fuel air explosive bombs being emplaced, but saw none.

  Let’s hope they got them emplaced and then left them without anyone noticing.

  From the Parilla line they did a fly-by of the coastal defenses, especially the islands north of Fort Guerrero. There was little to be seen, of course, just some heavy mortars in pits at Batteries Wesley, Earl, and Eugene, all of which retained their old names from Federated States days. That, and some troops putting in barbed wire, though not much of it.

  Well, mused Carrera, looking down through the bubble window, the mortars were obsolete and cheap. Didn’t even buy much ammunition for them, though I did for the cohort out on the island. And we got none of the guidance packages Kuralski wanted me to get. Not enough range to justify it. No, they’ll hardly even be manned. Their highest and best use is as bomb magnets once they start pounding us from the air.

  That, and there’s always the chance they’ll waste some special operations troops trying to take out harmless gun positions. It’s happened before, after all.

  After circling the three islands off Fort Guerrero, Conure Island, Dancer Island, and Cella Island, some of which did have actual effective guns on railway carriages, hidden in tunnels, the helicopter turned east, beating its way along the coast to the Casa Linda and Hamilcar’s mother.

  Casa Linda, Carretera InterColombiana, Balboa, Terra Nova

  Carrera stepped off the helicopter with trepidation; he could just picture Lourdes’s reaction. He could see it now, the weeping, the wailing, the recriminations. He could imagine the devastation of suddenly feeling old on the part of a woman who could easily pass, and did, for being a dozen or more years younger than she was. He could hear it already, “I’m too young to be a grandmother! Whaaaa!”

  It’s going to be horrible. It’s going to be hell. I think maybe I need to go spend more time with the troops . . . like continuously until the war’s over. I think . . .

  Lourdes took one look at Pililak, instantly divined her status, and ran over to the girl, feeling her stomach, pinching her cheek, and covering her head and face with maternal kisses. She asked a question, her mouth pressed close to Ant’s ear. The girl responded with an enthusiastic set of head nods, her face split in a grin from ear to ear. This set Lourdes to a repeat performance, but with even more enthusiasm.

  Meanwhile, Alena, with Ham’s other wives and both his sisters—for the nonce ignored by their mother in this—led them through their ritual prostrations, adding something in her own language to Pililak that neither Carrera nor Lourdes understood. Then, at Alena’s command, all the girls, and she herself, arose to their feet and gave a deep bow to Ant.

  Lourdes assumed that, like herself, they’d been able to take one look at Pililak and see there was going to be a new baby. It was reasonable to think so, though it was wrong or, rather, only half-right.

  “You’re taking this rather well,” said Carrera to Lourdes, once they were alone, seated in their own quarters. “I expected tears, fainting, wailing to the heavens.”

  “Well . . . she is awfully young,” Lourdes admitted. “And not large, so a big baby may be a problem. But she’s so mature, so tough, best of all so dedicated to our son . . . and besides, a new baby in the house! Nothing in life better than a new baby.”

  “Really?” he asked, head cocked and with an eyebrow raised.

  “Well . . . almost nothing,” she conceded. “Speaking of which, after talking with Alena, it seems Ham has a job to do . . . or rather, eleven of them.”

  It didn’t take a lot of math. “Our house is become a bordello,” Carrera fumed.

  “Nonsense,” Lourdes replied. “In the first place, no money is changing hands, and in the second place they’re all married, but in the third place, it won’t be in our house; I’ve set aside one of the guest quarters in the old staff building for them. After all, it’s apt to get noisy. The girls will continue to sleep here except for one a night who goes to stay with Ham over there.” She gave a deep laugh, adding, “You can smell it off them; the little tramps can hardly wait.” She looked at her husband’s doubtful expression and amended, “Trust me; you could smell it if you were a woman. Your sex are sight hounds, but we’re bloodhounds.”

  Now it was Lourdes’s turn for head cocking and eyebrow raising. “Ummm . . . speaking of which . . . I am . . . you know . . . going to Santa Josefina . . . in just a few days . . . might be gone for weeks or months . . . umm . . .”

  “Shut up and get your clothes off, woman. You don’t have much time and I’m not getting any younger.”

  Two days later, two of Ham’s wives, Afiyat and Mehmood were smiling, broadly and continuously, while eight of the other nine were fidgeting like babies doing the pee-pee dance. Of those eight, the most fidgety was Jamrat, whose big day was tomorrow. The last—one might say the “Belle du Jour”—red-headed Sahiba, was nowhere to be seen, but was alleged to be spending the entire day under Alena’s tutelage in preparation for her debutant night.

  Ham, not inconsistent with that, was looking very worn out indeed. Past the bohio down by the beach, next to the long pier, on the family yacht where his father had escaped to do a little thinking and get some work done, the boy pleaded his case.

  “Dad,” he asked, “can I please go back to my tercio? Please? They’re killing me.”

  “Under no circumstances,” said Carrera, his smile wicked and malicious. “In the first place, it’s not fair to the so-far-still-intact girls. In the second place, I have a different assignment for you, for which you will depart in a few weeks. In the third place, said-still-intact girls will, I am sure, make our lives here a living hell if they’re deprived. And in the fourth place, no, because you deserve this after bagging Ant against my wishes and advice.”

  “But Daaaaddd!”

  “Fuck off and do your duty, boy.”

  The boy’s head hung. As he turned to go, his father spun the file he’d been looking at on the table in front of him, saying, “But I want you to look at this first and tell me how you would get troops ashore?”

  Iglesia de Nuestra Señora, Ciudad Balboa, Balboa, Terra Nova

  Lourdes was already on her way to Santa Josefina and the peace conference. Triste had made the arrangements, both for security from electronic bugging, and from eavesdropping, as well as living arrangements on site for the twenty-two guards from the Fourteenth Cazador Tercio, who would provide security, the three clerks, the one en- and decryption specialist and the electronic security specialist from Fernandez’s organization, and three cooks. In the interim, Lourdes’s major domo could run the house perfectly well.

  Eventually Carrera relented, if only in part, and gave his son a break. Yes, there was much wailing and gnashing of perfect white teeth, but the girls anxiously awaiting their semi-ritualistic defloration would just have to wait a little longer.

  Carrera had to give a briefing to some troops. Since he hated saying the same thing twice, he brought Ham along to listen, as well as Alena to see to his care. The boy, though he didn’t know it, was his father’s continuity file. If everything went to crap and Carrera should be killed, or simply die, Xavier Jimenez could ask the boy what his father had planned.

  The talk was to the survivors of the maniple of the Tercio Amazona which had stormed up Cerro Mina and been shot to bits for their trouble, the rest of the tercio, which hadn’t seen action, and a few attachments. While waiting for the women and the few men to come in, Carrera spent the time praying. In his case, though, it was never so much about praying as just talking to God. What the boy was thinking as he knelt a
t the altar beside his father none but he knew.

  Once the sounds behind him quieted to the point he was pretty sure all the Amazonas were seated, Carrera and the boy crossed themselves and stood. Carrera directed Hamilcar to go sit down in the front pew, next to Alena the green-eyed witch. As the boy turned, he tousled his hair. The Pashtun guards shifted position to where they could cover their god.

  Carrera recognized a few of the female footsoldiers from a not-too-dissimilar talk he’d given some of the first graduating class at his own house, the Casa Linda. One, in particular, seemed familiar. He strained for a minute, seeking a name that would not, at first, come. When he remembered, he pointed at that woman, one he’d personally recruited, and mouthed, Good to see you, Maria, very good.

  Carrera hated wasting time; that was part of his detestation of having to say the same thing twice. “We’ve won a battle. The war’s not over. It won’t be over until we are destroyed or the Tauran Union is a footnote.

  “We’re giving back their most useless prisoners to buy time, time to offload the equipment, time to dig in, time to assimilate our new volunteers and allies—bet you never guessed that the International Rifle Platoon Competition was intended to gather allies, did you?—time to get in position and ready for what’s coming.

  “It’s going to be really bad, what’s coming.”

  Carrera’s finger pointed skyward. “Assume the United Earth Peace Fleet is against us, in spirit and, to the degree they can without drawing a violent reaction from the Federated States, materially, as well.

  “The Zhong are coming in against us, though I can’t really see them being able to move and support more than maybe two hundred to three hundred thousand men across the sea. Probably not even that many. The Tauran Union has already dispatched ships to help move them.

  “The Taurans are fragmented. Indeed, some of them stand with us against their own bureaucracy. But we can expect anything up to a dozen modern divisions, equal to ours in manning, superior in equipment, with a tremendous air superiority. Assuming they can grab a port, of course.

  “Bring out the map, please,” Carrera shouted to somebody. He went silent then, while a large mounted map was wheeled out in front of the altar. On the map’s mount was a laser pointer. This he picked up. He flicked it on and circled the Isla Real with the red marker, repeatedly.

  “That’s the strongest fortress in the world,” he said. “Nothing else compares even remotely. In training, you saw your own little camps. You didn’t see—or didn’t see much of—the roughly one point one million cubic meters of concrete we poured, the hundreds upon hundreds of guns, the minefields waiting to be activated, the tunnels, the rails, the trenches. Trust me: One hundred and fifty thousand men couldn’t take it if they had one hundred and fifty thousand years to try. And if they can’t take it, no ships can sail past it. If ships can’t sail past it, then no landing at or near the capital can succeed; they’d just starve to death. I’m not worried about the north.”

  The laser moved to the west, wriggling over the undeveloped jungles of La Palma. “They’re not coming through here in any strength, though I’ll put a few tercios down there—foreign volunteers, generally, plus the Tercio de Indios—to make sure they can’t distract us or put the government into a panic. But there are no ports worthy of the name, no roads, only one airstrip that isn’t muck most of the year, and that one’s short. And, wearing loincloths or not, the Indians are good in la jungla.”

  Carrera flicked the red arrow over the port of Cristobal, at the southern end of the Transitway. “The Taurans will be coming here,” he said, “though they’re not going to limit themselves—not if they have two brain cells to rub together—to the old borders of the Transitway Mandate. And we’ll meet them and beat them.” He gave a little shrug and added, “You’re going to have to take that on faith.”

  He stopped speaking for a moment while he physically wheeled the map board one hundred and eighty degrees around. On the other side, the women could see, was a better scale map of the eastern portions of the country.

  “Here’s where our danger comes from,” he said. The red marker flicked from spot to spot to spot as Carrera called off the names of a dozen or more little ports dotting the northeastern coast of the country. “None of those, alone, could support an army of a size to matter. Taken together, however, and with the kinds of improvements a modern army, or one—like the Zhong’s—with a lot of manpower, can create, they can support an army. Moreover”—the laser traced the long coastal highway—“from there they’ve got a highway into our vitals. And I don’t have the force to meet it, not so long as the Zhong and the Taurans are attacking to the north and south.

  “Worse,”—the red light settled on Capitano, a good-sized port to the southeast—“from here a full corps could come over the mountains, link with a force along the northern coast, and make that drive into our guts deadly.

  “What is necessary is to buy time in the east until we have a decision, north and south. That’s where you come in; you, Fifth Mountain Tercio, a chunk of Fourteenth Cazador Tercio, the mountain cohorts from Lempira and Valdivia, and a few others. And a few hundred thousand others besides that.”

  The Amazons stirred. They’d gotten used to the notion that the total armed force of the legion was larger than they’d believed. They didn’t see where another few hundred thousand would be coming from.

  Carrera answered their question. “I am going to half evacuate the city—we don’t have bomb shelters for more than half, anyway—and move more than three hundred thousand civilians to a big ‘refugee’ area around and along that highway and some of the ports. The ‘refugees’ have a purpose of their own. While we, the legion, will feed them, and the more permanent residents of the area, as long as the enemy hasn’t occupied their area, once they do come in—and they will—the food stops. Thereafter, the civilians will suck up as much as one thousand truckloads a day of enemy supply in food, medicine, etc. World opinion will demand that those people be fed and cared for. That will hurt them, my children. It might even make a western attack a logistic impossibility all on its own.

  “However, I cannot be absolutely sure about that. Give the Tauran devils their due; they can move supplies.

  “So the civilians aren’t enough. I need that road kept closed. I need the ports kept closed or, at least, marginal. I need the feeder roads kept closed.

  “Using the ‘refugees’ to hide among you, your forces and the others are going to close off invasion from the east. Of course, as in any partisan war, the regular forces could destroy you if they are willing and able to spread out in little packets to do so. Fifth Mountain is going up into the mountains as a regular organized force to threaten the enemy and keep him from spreading out enough to find, control, and annihilate you. Also to block the road from Capitano.”

  Smiling, Carrera continued, “Think about it. Hiding among those civilians you are going to be an intelligent, self-aware, self-replicating, mobile and undetectable minefield that the enemy won’t be able to destroy in place, move, or clear permanent lanes through. To add insult to injury he’s going to have to protect you, feed you, shelter you, clothe you, and provide medical care for you every moment you’re not actively shooting at him.

  Carrera gave a nasty laugh.

  “And you are perfect for the job. You’re women. You don’t look like a threat, little ‘helpless’ things that you are. You’ll be able to go places, see things, get information from the enemy’s soldiers in a way nobody else could hope to. You’ll be able to hide in plain sight; coming out only to fight.”

  “It won’t last forever, of course. Eventually they’ll catch on to you. Until they do, though, you’ll have a field day. Even after they do . . . you’ll still be able to fight them.”

  One of the Amazons, a big redheaded woman centurion—maybe a little less than perfectly feminine, especially along the jawline and with those broad shoulders, but still unquestionably attractive—raised her hand. “Uh . . . Duqu
e, what about uniforms? Those’ll give us away.”

  Carrera answered, “The Taurans claim to follow, and have in fact ratified, the Additional Protocol the Earthers inflicted on many of us some decades ago. So there’s no need to wear uniforms except for immediate action, by the enemy’s own rules.

  “On the other hand, the Zhong don’t follow the Protocol. If you get caught by them . . . well, you’ll be subject to execution under the law of land warfare. On the other hand, before it becomes an issue we’ll be holding some of their POWs. And we’re holding a fair number of Taurans that we caught not only out of uniform but in our uniforms. They’ve already been court-martialed and sentenced to death. The enemy tries to do anything to any of you for being out of uniform, I’ll hang those people . . . in a heartbeat. Anyway, if you don’t want to do this, I’ll understand. This is for volunteers only.”

  Carrera considered his audience for a moment, then spoke. “Show of hands,” he demanded.

  Every one of the women put up a hand. Carrera had known they would.

  “Now there’s one other problem,” Carrera said. His eyes went up, toward the church ceiling and past that, to the skies and space. “The Earthpigs are going to be feeding the Taurans and the Zhong all the intelligence they can gather. We’ve got reason to believe they can pick up a lot . . . more than they used to be able to. We’re still trying to figure out why the change happened.

  “In any case, among the things they’ll be able to see from space is electronics and especially anything electromagnetic. So all your neat do-dads, the night sights on your rifles, your Red Fang communications systems, your light-enhancing goggles, and global-locating systems, all have to be given up or stored deep against a rainy day. You’ll be fighting primitive. So will the other units in and around your area and in la Palma.