The Rods and the Axe

by Tom Kratman

  Announcing himself to the mid-ranked tribune on the other end, Rodriguez announced, “The move on the minefield’s a feint. Back to your positions on the north of the town . . .” Before he could finish the sentence, from the left came a tremendous volume of musketry, punctuated by large-caliber cannon fire.

  Barkhorn fought down the urge to throw up as his radio bearer’s body sank to the earth. Kneeling down beside it, he stripped off the radio, then threaded his own left arm into the carrying strap on that side. Holding the handset to his face, even as he was putting his arm through the shoulder strap, he ordered the artillery to shift one battery to the center of the town, to keep the enemy from redeploying back to the town’s northern edge and for both batteries to, “Expend ammunition like it was water.” Then he told the Hordalander tank company commander to pick up the sappers and come running. Lastly, and by this time he had the radio under his full control, he ordered his two infantry companies, present, to, “Jink it for the town. Get me the first row or two of buildings!”

  “Forget it, Rodriguez,” said Legate Salas, once the cannon fire kicked in. “They’ve suckered us out of position. This town is lost. Save your command.”

  Rodriguez opened his mouth as if to argue, then closed it again. He nodded slowly, a couple of times, then agreed, “Yes, sir.”

  Rodriguez hesitated. “Sir?”

  “Yes, Legate?”

  “You have to get out of here. You made the announcement of the revolt against the government and the Taurans. If they get you, the people . . .”

  “Don’t you think I know that?”

  At the southwestern most edge of the town, where a residential area jutted out from the town center, Salas raised one hand to stop his driver. Both were afoot; a moving vehicle, even if commandeered civilian and looking the part, was just too obvious.

  Behind, the pair could hear the sounds of the battle raging through the town. Overhead, the Tauran Hurricanes still circled like vultures. What concerned Salas, though, was a fairly steady wopwopwop coming from the south, ahead.

  As Salas faced, from his right a single missile, an Anglian Shooting Star—like almost all the tercio’s arms, captured in Balboa—shot up toward the circling Hurricanes. The thing was fast, but not so fast that the Tauran fliers couldn’t drop countermeasures and split up. Still, the helicopter that Salas and the driver had heard ahead of them popped up over the wood line from the stream over which it had been sheltering, then moved briskly for the location from which the missile had been launched. At this range, and with its fixed wheels brushing treetops and grass, depending, the helicopter—a Tuscan-built Z921 gunship—was safe from even the best shoulder-fired missiles.

  What it was not safe from was the twin-barreled antiaircraft gun—Volgan, by way of Balboa but so common around the planet as to be essentially sterile—that opened up from off to the helicopter’s flank.

  From where Salas stood, it wasn’t clear if the helicopter had taken one of the 23mm shells or if the pilot had been panicked. It didn’t make a lot of difference; the chopper dropped in altitude, smacked hard into the ground, rolled with its main rotor splintering and disintegrating, and then blew up in a great ball of black smoke and orange fire.

  “Come on,” Salas ordered the RTO. “That’s our cue to run.”

  Barkhorn had the Teuton’s built-in distaste for Francs-tireurs. Thus, the youth of the civilian-clad corpses unceremoniously tossed against the wall of the school to make room for the command post moved him not a bit. Had they surrendered, he’d have shot them out of hand.

  But, then, they didn’t try to surrender, did they? thought the Sachsen. That would be a concern if they were riflemen, but one of them was obviously a clerk of some kind. When clerks fight to the death, it’s time to start worrying.

  He spared a moment to examine the rifles the two guerillas had been wielding. Gallic, he thought. Captured, I have no doubt, in Balboa not so very long ago. Ammunition is compatible with ours, so we won’t be able to afford losing an engagement or, if we do, we’ll be supplying our enemy.

  A tank parked next to the building thundered, the muzzle blast making Barkhorn wince. He’d already received some complaints over the radio that the Hordalanders were endangering his own men. It might be time to rein them in before somebody got hurt.

  The only thing one can be sure of hitting when there’s a friendly-fire incident, thought Barkhorn, is the front page of the Altstadter Allgemeine Zeitung. The treasonous swine.

  Barkhorn’s operations officer leaned against a desk. He had a radio handset tucked in between his ear and his shoulder. With his left hand he held a map, while annotating the map with an alcohol pen with his right. Barkhorn took a few steps and looked over the major’s shoulder at the map.

  Yes, well go figure that they’d be running away to the south; it’s the only route open. With his own radio, Barkhorn summoned up the Tuscan aviation battalion, the gunships of which were attached to his command. Whoever answered didn’t sound familiar and either didn’t speak German or didn’t want to.

  “Anyone here speak Italian?” asked Barkhorn. Unfortunately, no one in the tiny headquarters seemed to.

  “Nearest translator is with the sappers, sir” said the operations officer. “Want me to try to work through him?”

  “Never mind,” said Barkhorn. “Do what you’re doing. I’ll get the translator with the sappers.”

  That took some time. The translator with the sappers had all the pertinent codes and frequency-hopping patterns, of course. What he didn’t have was them set on his own radio.

  “The German speaker with the gunships,” so the translator told Barkhorn, “went down. Baited ambush they say. They strongly recommend not using them without some better way to communicate so they don’t lose any more. Sir, my recommendation would be don’t push it.”

  Man, I fucking detest coalition warfare.

  “Right,” Barkhorn agreed, though the tone of his voice said he most certainly did not agree. “Will the fuckers take a position along the Pelirojo River, facing west, and prevent anyone from escaping?”

  After a few moments, the translator came back, answering, “Yes, sir, they’ll do that, but it won’t do much good.”

  “Why is that?”

  “They say some of the guerillas running away are leaving their arms behind—”

  “Yeah, that’s the truth,” Barkhorn again agreed.

  “They say they can’t tell the difference between a guerilla and an unarmed civilian and they don’t want to be tried for murder if they—”

  “Just stop there,” said Barkhorn. “I know the rest of this fairy tale.”

  Barkhorn’s operations officer piped in. “It’s true though, sir. Tuscany’s signed the most restrictive provisions of the Kosmo”—cosmopolitan progressive—“treaty regime. We’ve got it tough but they are unbelievably tied up.”

  “Fuck!”

  “Fuck or fucked,” said Operations, “but speaking of the latter, maybe we should lay off and let them go, sir.”

  Barkhorn’s glare was withering, but his operations officer was loyal enough even to go against his commander. “I’m serious, sir. If there are any civilians mixed in, or anybody the press can claim were civilians, and we kill any of them, the press back home will crucify you. And, for all General Marciano’s as good a commander as can be found anywhere in the Tauran Union, he can’t protect you. He’s a Tuscan and you, and maybe me, too, will not be tried by Tuscany. No, sir; we will be dragged back to Sachsen for our court-martials.”

  “Shit!” exclaimed Barkhorn. “Oh, all fucking right. Get me the artillery.”

  South of Pelirojo, Santa Josefina, Terra Nova

  Legate Salas really didn’t understand it. Indeed, he’d been halfway to safety before he even noticed it. But the enemy weren’t pursuing, not even by fire, not even with aircraft.

  How fucking stupid can they be? Have they never heard of the tenth principle of war, annihilation. If they let us go, we’ll be back.r />
  He thought about that first question and, being a fundamentally fair man, had to concede, Oh, all right; not so stupid that they didn’t run me and mine right out of town. And maybe they never did hear of the tenth principle. Or maybe they just aren’t allowed to follow it. I confess, I don’t understand it but the Taurans are, by all reports, quite odd when it comes to their militaries.

  Salas and his driver had found it easier walking in the trees that abounded on both sides of the narrow, swift-flowing, south-running river. To both sides he saw ragged knots of his own men, dejected with defeat, slinking away with heads sunk on chests. Going to be tough to buck the boys up from this one, or at least to restore moral in this cohort. Going to take some thought, and some very careful treading.

  To Salas’s left there was a brace of twin 23mm guns, with their crews looking determined as they scanned for Tauran aircraft in range. One of these was certainly the same crew that had taken down the helicopter gunship.

  On the other hand, for some it won’t be hard at all.

  Of course, while the big problem is morale and confidence, those aren’t the only problems. We put a lot of mines into the defense of Pelirojo. Those are lost to us now. And, while I have more, I don’t have huge numbers. I need to get an organization set up for making mines.

  I’ve lost weapons, too, and ammunition. Not least the irreplaceable heavy mortars. I could try to get some dragged in from Balboa, or maybe sailed in.

  I’ve got more small arms, mostly cached in the jungle. But those were for expansion, once we had enough prestige to recruit reliably. We’ve lost a lot of prestige, and we weren’t starting with all that much.

  And, while it’s not as bad as the loss of what little prestige we had, we lost position. With Pelirojo in Tauran hands, they can seal off that flank with one battalion, rather than the two they’d have needed with us holding it. That means they’re still too strong for the Tercio la Virgen to cross over.

  It could be worse, I guess, but I’m not sure how.

  Pelirojo, Santa Josefina, Terra Nova

  Could be worse, thought Barkhorn, sipping a not-too-very-cold beer in the smoking ruins on Pelirojo. I’m not sure how it could be worse, but my ops officer insists it could.

  The town still smoked in odd places. They’d managed to collect most of the bodies for decent burial, too. Unfortunately, the press had shown up before they could be buried. Between the smashed houses, the scorched public buildings, the bodies, and the civilian clothes on the bodies, the press quickly became convinced that a massacre had taken place. That Tauran casualties had been so low, under thirty dead, only added to that conviction.

  It hadn’t helped any that—go figure—some genuine civilians had been caught up in the fighting. What really made it awful, though, was when some of the Tuscans sappers and Sachsen infantry had been caught by the press planting firearms on the civilians.

  For now, Barkhorn was still in command, despite all the whining from the press for his relief and court-martial. When asked how he expected it to go, the battalion commander had answered, perhaps optimistically, “Fifty-fifty. No better than that.”

  And then trying to explain to the idiot press that, “No, almost all the rifles captured were Gallic. We are Sachsens, Hordalanders, and Tuscans, and we use different rifles. Moreover, the serial number of every rifle we’ve captured can be traced to those lost in Balboa, during the recent unpleasantness there.”

  And no, you moronic twats, we didn’t put the—oh, ever-so-naughtyevilbadwickedbadbadbad landmines out—they did. Barkhorn didn’t even try to explain that one to the pressies, any more than he bothered to correct them when they included the wrecked medical ambulance, basically an armored personnel carrier, a “tank,” in order to drive up the losses they could report. What, after all, would have been the use?

  An atrocity against us gets turned into a victory for those perpetrating the atrocity? Against stupidity, the gods themselves . . .

  Hotel Cielo Dorado, Aserri, Santa Josefina, Terra Nova

  A single sheet of paper fluttering in her hands, Lourdes paced frantically from one side of the room to the other. Nominally a bedroom, the hotel had been kind enough—which is to say, well-paid enough—to remove the bed and put in a small conference table.

  The doors were closed and guarded by the detachment sent from Fourteenth Cazadores. The flanking rooms were occupied by other Balboans of the diplomatic party. Triste had swept the place for bugs, and set up some odd little box he had brought for interfering with electronic devices. He turned on the TV to make sure it was working. When the TV produced a “picture” that looked like nothing so much as a bad LSD trip, he pronounced it safe. At that, Lourdes temporarily stopped her frantic pacing while Esterhazy leaned back in his chair.

  “Are Raul and Patricio being stupid?” Lourdes asked of Esterhazy and Triste. “Or am I? The Taurans beat the crap out of our . . . mmm . . . unofficial ambassadors to that mariposa Calderón and we go back to the bargaining table? Makes no sense to me, none at all.”

  “I sense more Parilla than your husband, Lourdes,” said Esterhazy. “This smacks of subtlety. Whatever Patricio Carrera is, subtle he is not.”

  “That’s not entirely true, Matt,” objected Triste. “He can be subtle, when everything else has failed.”

  “Precisely,” Lourdes confirmed. “His preference is never subtlety, any more than it is tact. Not his thing. Sneaky, yes. Subtle?” She shook her head emphatically. “No. And I’m talking here the deepest-seated instincts and emotions you can imagine.”

  “It may not be that subtle, you know, Lourdes,” said Triste. “The Taurans dealt us a pretty bad blow over in Pelirojo. Maybe he just wants to buy time for them to recover.”

  “That’s possible, but I somehow don’t think that’s it.”

  “Well, what else could it be?” Esterhazy asked, adding, “I am asking because it befuddles me, too.”

  Lourdes gave him one of those, Oh, stop being a dumb shit looks, then realized that she had no grounds for that, since she was just as clueless. Shamefacedly, she hung her head.

  “Can I see the message?” asked Esterhazy.

  “Oh . . . sure . . . sorry.” Lourdes passed the message over, explaining, “It came by courier this morning.”

  Esterhazy read aloud for Triste’s benefit.

  “ ‘Dear Lourdes . . . in light of the recent setbacks by our freedom-fighting allies’—heh, so he’s still maintaining the fiction that the Tercio la Negrita is something besides an arm of the legion—‘in Santa Josefina, and the strain on our economy here, the president has directed that you and your party return to the negotiating table. You are authorized to offer the Tauran Union an accelerated return of prisoners of war and detained persons, to the tune of twelve per day over the one hundred we have already agreed to and have generally provided, as able. This does not mean we will offer to return those held while talks were in abeyance who would otherwise have been returned. However, as a gesture of grace and mercy, we will return several hundred dependents’—Hah! That means he has several hundred suitably brainwashed to undermine the TU—‘immediately, even though it will mean allowing the Tauran Union to land aircraft at Herrera International.’ ”

  Esterhazy laid the paper down on the conference table. “Nope, I don’t get it either, Lourdes. It’s not like it’s in our interest to encourage the Taurans to be hard asses, which this is going . . . ummm.”

  Triste looked up and said, “Oh.” Lourdes said, “Oh.” Then Esterhazy said, “Oh.”

  Janier shook his head doubtfully.

  “Oh, elder gods, General,” said Marguerite, “you’ve gotten to where you doubt even your doubts.”

  “Et dona ferrentes,” said the Gaul. “I’ve been led by the nose into a trap before.”

  “ ‘Et dona ferrentes’?” asked the Zhong empress, Xingzhen. “I’ve never . . .”

  “It’s from Virgil’s Aeneid, dearest,” answered Wallenstein. “A shortened version of ‘quidquid id e
st, timeo Danaos et dona ferrentes.’ ‘Whatever it is, I fear the Greeks even when bearing gifts.’ ”

  “Never heard of it,” answered the empress, though she was lying. Her education as a girl intended to rule the emperor had been most thorough. At Marguerite’s arched eyebrow she half-admitted, “Well, I might have heard it somewhere.”

  “I’m serious, Janier,” Wallenstein said. “They’ve got you so hornswoggled you really don’t seem to have any self-confidence left.”

  Janier shrugged, sadly. “With them? Probably not, or none that I can find inside myself, anyway. It’s a hard thing, you know, High Admiral, to have every self-delusion stripped away so suddenly . . . and so violently.”

  “General,” asked Xingzhen, “are you an educated man?”

  “I confess,” said Janier, “my education has been somewhat narrowly focused.”

  “Well . . . back on old Earth, way in the dim mists of time, there was a king named, ‘Alfred,’ in the place the Anglians came from. Alfred wasn’t even really supposed to be the king, but he ended up as king anyway.

  “He was in a war with the people from whom this planet’s Cimbrians derived. And poor Alfred”—the empress shook her head, pityingly—“kept losing.

  “Sometimes, as with you, his enemies defeated or stymied him when he was not there. Sometimes, also as with you, they did the same when he was present. He began, one suspects, to count ties as victories . . . or even to count losses that were less than total as victories.”