The Rods and the Axe

by Tom Kratman

  “Could be,” Bugatti agreed. “Maybe all those years we’d been learning to coordinate colors and patterns had some indirect payoff. Don’t know.”

  “Could I ask for some of your troops to assist mine?”

  “Make it worth my while,” the optio said.

  “I’ll cook dinner—which is to say, warm up our canned rations—for both of us tomorrow . . .”

  “Tempting,” Marta answered, “but . . .”

  “. . . and I’ll have my platoon dig a dozen bunkers for yours.”

  “Done.”

  The evening sky was unusually clear, with two moons, Eris and Bellona, visible, along with any number of constellations. Of the latter, the most easily discerned were the Smilodon, the Leaping Maiden, and the Pentagram.

  As promised, dinner was canned, most of the cans still snuggled against the coals, keeping warm. It wasn’t bad, and Pastora had, so Bugatti thought, done something with it to make it better than merely and barely edible. Then again, he’d been with the legion for better than ten years; he ought to have learned a few tricks.

  “The enemy’s going to be coming in ignorant,” Pastora said, over what passed for dinner. “But he’s not stupid. You ladies will be able to live openly but discreetly among the refugees, coming out to fight in secret and only occasionally. But only for a while. Eventually you’re going to end up going underground.”

  From one can, one kept far from the fire, and which had only had a couple of thin perforations made in the top, Pastora poured ration-issue rum. The rum went into another can containing water and a couple of the little fruit drink packets.

  “We know they’ll catch on,” Bugatti agreed. “We’ve made some camps in inaccessible places for the long haul.”

  “Want me to look them over?” Pastora asked. “I’m sure, based on everything I’ve seen, that they’re fine, but what’s a second opinion hurt?”

  He held out the can of fruit juice and rum, saying, “You can drink this safely; nothing can live in the presence of legion-issue rum.”

  Pastora refrained from laughing when Bugatti sipped, and made an oh-Jesus-what-is-that-shit face. Pastora mixed his a little stronger than she was used to. Moreover, uncut, the rum was strong enough to use as a fire starter.

  “Yeah, sure, Cesar,” Marta said, passing the can back.

  “How’s the charcoal production coming?” Pastora asked.

  The charcoal was for underground cooking in the messes they’d dug here and there. Under the Nguyens’ tutelage, they’d run plastic, while it lasted, and then bamboo pipes a good distance from where the food would be cooked. That was to draw off the smoke, if any, and give the heat a chance to dissipate below the level that thermal imagers could find it.

  Bugatti answered, “We’ve enough—rather, we’ll have enough—for a couple of months, if we’re frugal.” She took the can back from Pastora and sipped again, the fiery rum racing to her toes.

  “You’ll have more than that,” Pastora said.

  “No, not for all of us,” Marta disagreed.

  “Dear Optio,” Pastora said, shaking his head, “it’s not going to be ‘all of us.’ ”

  Marta shook her own head. “I don’t understand. Sure, we’ll take losses but—”

  “You’ll take losses. We’re going to be destroyed.” Pastora laughed as if it were actually funny; though that was the rum laughing. “You know what they say: ‘On your feet or dead; never on your knees.’ When the enemy comes, we’re going out to fight him. When we’re crushed, he’ll think for a while that he owns this area. Then you girls have your turn.

  “I remember you, you know,” Pastora said. “From the classis, off the coast of Xamar. You have a very distinctive . . . ummm . . . profile.”

  Marta Bugatti was suddenly horribly ashamed. She’d been hired as a sea whore, originally. Covering her face, she stood to go. Pastora stood, as well, put his hands on her shoulders to stop her, and said, “No. I’m proud of you, Marta. One woman in a thousand, if that many, can do what you’ve done, rise as you’ve risen. I don’t think any less of you.”

  Marta sat again and took a much longer drink from the rum mix. She shook her head.

  I really like this one, she thought.

  She put the can down, stood herself up again, and repeated back to Pastora, “ ‘On your feet or dead; never on your knees?’ Come on, I’m not that doctrinaire about it.”

  And besides, she thought, the enemy will be here soon enough.

  Combat Information Center, BdL Dos Lindas,

  Mar Furioso, Terra Nova

  Both Intelligence and Communications were waiting as Fosa entered CIC.

  “They’re here,” said Fosa’s communications officer. “Archangel has picked up two definites and three more probables, about two days’ sailing away. Three days, if they slow down.”

  “I expect them to slow,” said Intel.

  “Show me,” Fosa said, walking to the plexiglass plotting board. An enlisted sailor was already inscribing the known locations, heading, speed, and depth in solid red and the probable in dotted red. They weren’t in any kind of formation that made sense to Fosa but, Then again, why should they be. And why should what makes sense to them make sense to me? I’m a surface swabbie, after all, and my three dimensions are mostly above the water, more fragile, and moving way faster.

  Thing is, that last one. If he’s the Yamatan we’ve been expecting all along . . .

  “Get me Fernandez on the secure line. Route it through to my day cabin.

  “Oh, and did the two newsies come aboard?”

  “Yes, sir,” said Comms. “The exec’s arranged to bed them down in officer country and is currently taking them on the ‘no you can’t go here unescorted’ tour. He said he’s going to show them the films of the pressies the ground pounders hanged in Pashtia and shot in Pumbadeta, just so they get the point.”

  “Good.”

  The phone line hissed, beeped three times, then hissed again.

  “Omar? Rod,” said Fosa. “I’ve got the plots on the subs. And I’m going to ask Patricio for permission to try to take one out . . . two, if possible. But which one’s the Yamatan? Be damned ungrateful for us to sink the sub that’s been trying to spy for us.”

  Hisss . . . beepbeepbeep. . . . hisss. “I can probably get the Yamatans to pull their man back,” answered Fernandez, “but I can’t say how quickly.”

  “Twenty-four hours?” asked Fosa.

  “Maybe, maybe not.”

  “Damn! If I wait more than that much time, I’m risking them getting close enough to the Dos Lindas for a shot at her.”

  “Then you’re going to have to play it by ear,” said Fernandez. “It’s not like getting the sub—or even two of them—really helps us all that much.”

  “It does for Patricio’s end game,” Fosa reminded. “Especially since I am unenthusiastic about drowning.”

  “End game . . .” mused Fernandez . . . “end game. Yeah, you have a good point. Look, Rod, I can’t promise anything, but whatever can be done to get that Yamatan sub either out of the way or clearly identified, I’ll do it. The big problem is that they’ve never admitted that they’re feeding us intel that way.”

  “You can tell them that we know there are five out there, and that the Zhong sortied only four. If they have another explanation . . .”

  “There is one, you know,” Fernandez said. “The Federated States, even under the Progressive Party, still takes a keen interest in undersea doings in this hemisphere.”

  Hisss . . . beepbeepbeep. . . . hisss.

  “Oh, shit,” said Fosa. “Now that you mention it, if there’s one thing we absolutely don’t want to do, it’s piss off the FSC about now. What do I do if a sixth sub pops up on screen?”

  “Run,” answered Fernandez. “Or get sunk. But in any case, remember that drowning’s less painful than anything Patricio’s likely to do if you bring the FSC into the war against us.”

  Roughly four miles south of Concepción, Balboa, T
erra Nova

  Pastora was out there with his men, with logs weighing in excess of a couple of hundred pounds perched on shoulders, as the Cazadores ferried the logs from a woodcutting area to an area being bunkered in.

  “I am glad we are not alone in all this,” Bugatti said, as she and Centurion Fuentes watched the sweating and straining group of Cazadores shouldering loads that none of the women could have hoped to. Well, none but the engineer, Sergeant Ponce, who took up some of the less stout logs. Then again, Ponce was a fireplug with tits.

  “You’re glad?” said Fuentes. “I am ecstatic that I am not entirely in charge. Speaking of which, how are you and Centurion Pastora getting along?”

  “We get along pretty well, actually,” the optio said, smiling broadly.

  “I know. And that surprises me. I thought you preferred . . .”

  “I’m not doctrinaire about it,” Marta answered, primly. “Besides, it’s not like I’m the only one who’s gotten all gooey.”

  Fuentes nodded. She thought, sadly, Half my girls will cry themselves to sleep when the men march out. And don’t march back.

  Doctrine and sound judgment were as one in this: Everything was to be used to resist an occupation. Besides the Amazonas and Cazadores, and below them in the military scheme of things, were the refugees, not all of whom were helpless. There were one hundred and eighty-three people in Fuentes’s platoon’s area whose credentials were pretty much impeccable: Retired soldiers, veterans discharged into the Home Guard, children of soldiers and the widows of soldiers who had been given jobs in legion-owned factories.

  The Amazonas and Cazadores trained those as and when they could. Where there was no time or opportunity to train them, those impeccably credentialed civilians were a source of labor. The others, those not so trustworthy, could be used, too, but not for some of the more secret projects.

  It was expected they would become a useful source of intelligence. The credentialed ones were also a means of controlling the others whom the soldiers didn’t know and had no real basis for trusting. Ultimately, they might be a source of recruits.

  Until that day came, though, all the rest, the nearly fifteen thousand otherwise useless mouths without credentials, worked on open projects: Communal bomb shelters, sharpening wooden stakes to use for foot traps, making charcoal, drayage and storage.

  Some, those with agricultural backgrounds, were put to growing food. Though it would be a while, even in Balboa’s growth-inducing clime, before anything could be harvested. And there was always the chance they’d have to destroy it to keep the enemy from subsisting off of it.

  Pelirojo, Santa Josefina, Terra Nova

  The sun had just given its first hint of day, a thin red glow on the eastern horizon.

  The town was pretty well fortified, by now, at least in terms of bunker preparation and preparation of the few buildings Salas had taken over. The defenses had some mines out, but there was a serious shortage of barbed wire. For whatever reason, the Roger Casement hadn’t had any concertina at all, and only a limited amount of single-strand barbed wire. Salas’s subordinate commanders were cutting and emplacing wood and bamboo stakes, to make up the difference, but it wasn’t as good for most purposes. Off in the distance one could hear them chopping, then hammering, then chopping some more to add points.

  There’d been a small meeting engagement. One of the Cimbrian patrols had run into a platoon from Salas’s tercio of Santa Josefinans. The frightening thing about that was that the engagement had taken place southwest of the town, behind it, in effect.

  Salas looked down at four bodies, stretched out bloody and lifeless in the village square, all dressed in something that looked remarkably like legionary camouflage. They weren’t legionaries, though, or at least not legionaries from the Legion del Cid. A couple of his intel people were searching the bodies; a small pile of various items was growing on the concrete where the loot was tossed.

  Is this a war crime, wearing our camouflage pattern? What about when we’re not wearing it? When the equipment’s different enough to put us on notice that they’re not our pals? I don’t think it is. And I think that I’m better off not treating it like it is. Though I’d better get the word out to be very suspicious of anyone who looks like he’s in legionary uniform.

  Salas bent down and began to go through the pile himself, even before his people had a chance to sort it. He opened a wallet, then scanned through the pictures.

  Pretty wife, Salas thought. And the girls seem to favor her, but not the boy. He looked at one of the bodies, decided that was not the owner, and settled on another. Sorry, old man. In another life, we might have spent a fine evening remembering our youth “with advantages.”

  He replaced the wallet in the pile, not least because it struck him as innately dirty to be going through a dead man’s personal things.

  “Map, sir,” announced one of the searchers, holding it up, an acetated, folded, inch-thick map, with drawings and diagrams done apparently in alcohol pen.

  Salas grabbed the map and unfolded it. Doesn’t tell me much. I can assume, from the route they drew, that there is probably no other patrol on that particular route. Doesn’t tell me a lot about where they are though.

  “No radio?” the legate asked.

  The section chief shook his head. “No, sir. There were seven of them in the patrol. Three, as far as we know, got away. And one of those was humping the radio.”

  “Where were they from?” Salas asked.

  “Cimbria,” was the answer. “Don’t let the black dyed hair fool you, sir. Check the roots. Every one of these guys is blond as the high admiral’s cunt . . . so I hear.”

  Salas nodded, then said, “I need a prisoner, or, better, two.”

  “Yes, sir, and the platoon that made contact is chasing them. But these guys are their equivalent of Cazadores. Not much chance of catching them.”

  “No, I suppose not. Any word from our own scouts?”

  “Yes, sir. We know where the enemy is: Cerveza. Looks like a tank company, an infantry battalion, maybe half a battalion of engineers, and a battalion of artillery, though we haven’t found all the gunners, we think.

  “All out of range, sir.”

  “Yeah . . . close call whether to risk a . . .” Salas suddenly stiffened. It was something in the air, a change in pressure perhaps. Some old vets insisted it was precognition. Whatever it was, it told him to throw himself to the ground, shouting, “Incoming!”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  You can’t describe the moral lift,

  When in the fight your spirits weary

  Hears above the hostile fire,

  Your own artillery.

  —Aleksandr Tvardovsky,

  Vasily Tyorkin

  Cerveza, Santa Josefina, Terra Nova

  There was only one battery of guns visible from the road, and that, in the bare hint of presunrise light, not much. The other battery, for one had been left behind facing their Balboan border, was hidden over a rise and down a dirt road.

  Standing close by that visible battery, was the commander of the Haarlemer Korps Licht Rijdende Artillerie, the Corps of Light Horse Artillery. A broad smile beaming from Lieutenant Colonel van Heutsz’s florid face, with drama in his every muscle twitch, the Haarlemer slowly raised his right arm, palm forward and over his head. His left hand, with watch facing inward from his wrist, was held in front of him.

  Thought van Heutsz, Oh, this is going to be so good. Van Heutsz liked ceremony. And why not? It had been decades since the Haarlemer red legs had gotten in a shot in anger.

  Hidden in the jungle, the Hordalander tank company began revving engines. They were soon joined by trucks, both nearby and farther away. A second group of tanks, smaller, but with the same distinctive diesels, kicked in on the other side of the battalion. A section of bridge layers from the Tuscan engineer battalion kicked in with their contribution, followed by a pioneer company from the same group.

  Van Heutsz counted the seconds down . . .
five . . . four . . . three . . . two . . . one . . .

  He dropped his hand like a saber stroke. “Fire!” A half-dozen 105mm cannons belched flame. Their first target was the battery of heavy mortars spotted on the other side of the town of Pelirojo. A fraction of a second later, the second battery joined in on a different target.

  Southwest of Pelirojo, Santa Josefina, Terra Nova

  It wasn’t actually a battery; a full battery of heavy mortars ran, in the legion, to twelve guns. But it was a third of a battery, four guns. Given that six was usually the number of guns in a battery anywhere in the Tauran Union, the Cimbrians could be forgiven for reporting it as a battery, just as Marciano’s intelligence section could be forgiven for accepting that report. That the other two-thirds of the battery hadn’t been found—for the excellent reason that it was nowhere in the area—supported the assumption.

  The guns were pretty well dug in, in pits about a meter and a half deep. They had no overhead cover, of course, unlike some of the 160s in fixed positions inside Balboa. They did have a certain amount of protection from the trees between themselves and the Tauran guns, since they fired a higher angle than field guns ordinarily would. And, while the guns were open, the troops, the ammunition, and the all-important fire-direction center had solid cover over them.

  The first Tauran salvoes came in at such an angle to the thick canopy of the tree that the wood and leaves may as well have been solid. All six shells exploded at a distance from the target well outside their effective burst radius. Still, some hot, sharp shards of metal made their way to the gun positions, enough to kick up dirt and set the troops to scurrying for cover.

  The next salvo, following on the first by mere seconds, did better. True, two of the shells went off either in the remaining canopy—such as the first salvo hadn’t cleared away—or hit one of the trees, but four passed by all that, hitting the general area of the gun position. The third salvo actually did worse, random chance putting three of the shells into the trees. The fourth, however, saw all six rounds pass safely through the canopy and the splintered wood, to fall with fair precision on and about the gun line. One mortar was wrecked beyond redemption when a high-explosive shell struck it on the left buffer tube, between the elevation crank and the barrel. The crank was blown off, while the baseplate was split and the barrel ripped from the base plug. The two soldiers manning the mortar became for the most part so much strawberry paste.