The Rods and the Axe

by Tom Kratman

  Broughton, somewhat resentful at missing out on the major fighting against the TU, was making the best of it now, enjoying the security mission his school had been given. Still, that kind of fun was limited to begin with and became less fun with every increment of acquired routine.

  For the nonce, with everything pretty quiet, the legate was tramping across the airfield to his quarters for a richly needed shower and change of uniform. For himself, he didn’t much care about a stench that had long since overwhelmed his sense of smell. He figured he owed it to the troops, though, not to be sending them to hurl every time he walked in a room.

  He’d sent a note to Carrera about a week ago, listing the ease of doing so very little as he had to, now, reminding him of his record, and requesting a reassignment to a line tercio, preferably as a cohort commander. Carrera had been about as gracious as expected in his answer: “Fuck off, Thomas. The school will be kicking in again as soon as we win the war. And I’ll need you to run it. Worse, you’re getting old. But . . . well . . . hell, if we have an opening, I’ll put you on the list for a cohort . . . maybe a tercio. MAYBE.”

  That wasn’t overly generous. For all practical purposes, Cazador school was, ordinarily, already a regiment.

  Best I can hope for, thought Broughton, walking across the concrete of the airfield with his head down. He felt something, a kind of pressure or presence, behind him, and turned just in time to catch the organ-rattling roar of high-performance jet engines, and a series of flashes in the sky—Rockets!—lancing down at an angle to the surface of the planet. He barely had time to register that thought when the concrete began to shudder and rock like the area was experiencing a major earthquake.

  Broughton found himself on hands and knees, shaking his head to clear it. The jet’s had passed now, but . . .

  Fuckers will be back.

  Forcing himself to his feet, perhaps a bit too quickly, Broughton swayed still, then bent to throw up as sudden nausea overtook him. He found himself once again on hands and knees, remaining that way as he evacuated the contents of his stomach. The next time he stood more slowly and carefully.

  I am getting too old for this shit.

  One of the twin-barreled light antiaircraft guns scattered about the base began chattering a few hundred meters away, its thick tracers arcing up altogether too slowly to have a chance to catch anything.

  Forcing the nausea back—fuggit, been concussed before—Broughton began to jog for the antiaircraft gun. Every brain-jarring step was an agony, a fresh wave of urgency to vomit. Twice, in fact, about once every hundred meters, he did stop to throw up. The third splurge was at the gun site, itself. Fortunately, he managed to turn away from the sandbags.

  “Cease fire!” shouted Broughton at the gunners. “Cease-fucking-fire! You aren’t even threatening shit, let along hitting it.”

  Reluctantly, the two-man crew present stopped their useless barrage. “Well what do we do then, sir?” asked the senior, Corporal Camacho, who wasn’t even a Cazador instructor, but a cook.

  “First, you go get the rest of the crew.” Broughton heard some shouting from the direction of the school’s barracks. The shouting was heard as if through the filter . . . or as an echo in a thick forest. Well . . . sure . . . my eardrums are still vibrating. Only stands to reason.

  “Belay that,” said the legate. “At least until we see what shows up on its own. Do you have wire to the other guns or to the air defense command post?”

  “Only one other gun has a crew tonight, sir, and they’re no more trained for it than we are. We got a week’s worth of loading and aiming drill from one of the air defense types before he moved off with his regiment. It’s just us cooks and I’m senior.”

  “Okay.” Toss ’em a bone? Yes. “You’ve done well so far. But we want to try to get one of them, not just frighten them off. Where . . .”

  Broughton was interrupted by the return of the attacking Tauran jet. This time it came first as the sound of straining jets, then with the foompfoompfoompfoomp of four rockets, each with its own flash. Only after that did the earthquake return, though at the far end of the airfield. And nobody saw it, anyway, since they were all belly flat to the ground.

  “Maaan,” observed Broughton, standing again, “when they want to fuck something up they don’t do it by halfsies, do they?”

  “Sir?” asked Corporal Camacho.

  “Never mind, it was rhetorical. Now how about missiles? We always assign missiles to these things; ‘Mass, Mix, Mobility, and Integration,’ after all,” he said, citing principles for the employment of air defense.

  “I don’t know shit about any of that, sir. I’m a cook. I know beans, potatoes, rice, and meat. Oh, and stew, when we mix ’em all with some veggies.”

  “’Course,” agreed Broughton, more or less happily, as the nausea began to wane. “But the key thing is, do you have missiles?”

  “Yes, sir. Privates Villa and Rocha have them, two each.”

  “Excellent. Now here’s what I want—”

  Someone interrupted from behind. “Legate Broughton?”

  “Yeah. Who is it?”

  “Chaplain Murillo, sir. I saw the shooting and figured I’d be as useful here as anywhere.”

  Broughton, who was surprisingly religious for being a prick, said, “Excellent. Now, Chaplain, I want you to work on a combination curse on aircraft and general blessing on missiles and cannon shells. Not much time, so hurry. And Camacho?”

  “Here, sir.”

  “Once again, here’s what I want . . .”

  Sub Lieutenant Davies, operating a Sea Hurricane fighter-bomber off of HAMS Indomitable, laughed at the pitifully thin cannon fire rising behind the aircraft as it turned tightly for another run. The cannon fire cut off before he swept north to south down the length of the airfield. Nor did it resume as he emptied the second cluster of Oliphant runway cutters. Two more to go, he thought, as he slid over the hills and began a long sweeping turn. His display marked clearly for him when he was back on a proper course to ripple the field.

  Just as Davies pushed the firing button two streams of tracers—one a little high, the other a little low, and either potentially quite dangerous—lashed up, whiplike, from the ground to his left. He instinctively pulled his stick to aim for the wider open space between the tracer streams, to his right. This ruined the shot completely, all four Oliphants smacking into the ground east of the airfield, between it and the main taxiway. The Oliphants threw up great geysers of dirt and rocks, but did no other harm.

  As Davies continued on, approximately out to sea, a warning buzzer sounded. His infrared-guided missile countermeasure pod had self-activated on detection of a missile launch.

  “Shit,” said Davies to himself, “this was supposed to be easier than this.”

  His countermeasure pod also launched a couple of diversionary flares, even as it set up a pattern of IR emission to convince the—fairly stupid—missile that it was several meters over from where it actually was. This, for the most part worked; the missile veered a bit before exploding.

  Unfortunately for the aircraft, the missile fired a continuous rod upon exploding. This was basically a circle of metal, serrated and folded, that expanded upon firing back out into the circle from which it had been formed. That metal circle clipped one of Davies’s wings, sending a shudder through the aircraft, and setting off enough warning lights for a moderate-sized Christmas tree.

  And on that less than happy note, thought the pilot, let us to home. Shit!

  The attacking plane neither went down nor showed any sign of damage that Broughton could congratulate his gunners on. On the other hand, it didn’t come back, either, as he’d expected it to.

  Showmanship, thought Broughton, the art of the commander.

  “Well done, boys,” he said. And, in fact, it had been about as well done as one could expect. “Take a break, except for a gunner and assistant gunner per gun, and one man on the missiles.”

  For himself, he watched out,
eyes sweeping the darkened, or rather, moonlit, which was to say unlit, sky. What the hell; maybe one of them will silhouette himself.

  Davies’s squadron mate from Indomitable, Lieutenant Saunders, finished up ruining the airfield at Ciudad Cervantes, then went on to his secondary mission, flattening the barracks and offices of First Corps, at Lago Sombrero. About halfway to the target, Saunders was appalled to hear his comrade, Davies, reporting in of enemy fire and taking damage. This was most unexpected. Saunders engaged his radar detectors, but sensed absolutely nothing. A quick call to Davies confirmed that a) yes, the other plane should make it back to the ship well enough, and b) no, there wasn’t much defending the base but a couple of guns and some damned hard luck.

  Fortified with that knowledge, Saunders bore in from the east.

  The buildings were, for the most part, unoccupied, their normal denizens being somewhere between the capital and the Parilla Line, along Rio Gatun. Indeed, the reason the buildings were to be hit was not to kill anyone; it was to drive up the capital cost to Balboa of engaging in war with their betters, thus changing the logical calculation under which the Balboans should, again logically, make peace and give back all of their prisoners.

  Janier had known, far, far better than his political masters, that logic was the last consideration in nearly everyone’s mind that was engaged in war. Sadly, as the general told his AdC, Malcoeur, “Telling this to a politician who doesn’t understand war and who really desperately doesn’t want to understand it is an exercise in futility. So we do the best we can with what we have and ignore the bastards where possible.”

  Broughton was just about to send the gun and missile crews, who were, after all, primarily cooks, off to start on breakfast or, at least, on getting some sleep. Indeed, he’d just gotten the words, “Corporal Camacho, I want—” when a barracks in the middle of the southeastern quadrant of the base disintegrated, the wooden ruins immediately catching fire. Another barracks went up in smoke after that, then another. The gun crews couldn’t see a damned thing, either; the plane was gone before the flames could illuminate its underside.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  We could never learn to be brave and patient, if there were only joy in the world.

  —Helen Keller,

  Letter to Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes,

  The Story of My Life

  Santa Cruz, Balboa, Terra Nova

  Imagine a warehouse, outside of which is a concrete parking lot, perhaps a bit larger than the warehouse calls for. Wide doors permit access for anything up to fifty feet across, though they are currently closed. Past the doors, inside, is a truck, a five-ton. The rating, five-tons, refers only to what can be carried across country; on a good hard surfaced road the truck can do double that, though for anything but ammunition it’s likely to cube out before it weights out. The truck had no canvas top, nor is it carrying a normal cargo. Instead, the truck carries a short rail, on a mechanism, through which the rail can be raised or lowered. Right now it is lowered, parallel to the ground. The truck has no side rails, as that central rail is a launch rail. Atop the launch rail sits a Mosaic-D jet fighter. Old and rebuilt, and then product improved—with, among other things, a new tail, twin-barreled Gast gun, and a fairly decent avionics suite and radar—still the fighter would have little or no chance one on one against any of the Tauran planes that pounded Arnold Air Base to the west. Underneath the fighter is a rocket, sufficient to get it airborne in a tiny instant.

  The truck and plane combo is only one of six inside the warehouse. Six drivers are there, too, if the order should come to move out to the concrete and launch. A fuel truck also stands by, as does a truck full of air-to-air ordnance, missiles and belted cannon rounds. There is a maintenance truck there, as well, with a crew. Lastly there is a small command and control vehicle, with a shelter in the back. The shelter receives up-to-the-minute intelligence on the Tauran aerial attack or, rather, it would, if the system were up and operating. It is not, and the cluster of people standing in the shelter looking down at an empty display screen clench their fists with their frustration.

  To the west, down the hill and across the stream that is the natural border between the air base and the area of the town, an airship burned merrily. This was not because of the use of hydrogen as a lifting gas. The airship used helium. Neither was it because of the dope used on the gaseous envelope. It didn’t have the need, given modern materials. Rather, there was just a lot of plastic and natural fiber to the thing, plus fuel for its engines, and these were burning away, lending a flickering, smoky light to the base and even to the parts of the hill on which the town sits that faced the base.

  Six pilots sat at the crest of that hill, a short jog to the warehouse, above where the airship burned. The pilots couldn’t see the damage, even by the firelight, not even with the aid of the moons. But they’d seen the damage being done, as it was done, and known what it was. The concrete runway of Arnold Air Base wouldn’t be lifting off or receiving any aircraft but helicopters or Crickets for a while.

  The pilots weren’t actually paying any attention to the airfield. They didn’t need it, after all. The rockets slung under their planes and the rails that could be raised to near vertical meant that, given the authorization, they could take off in zero meters, almost straight up. The airfield meant almost nothing to them, though its fuel and ammunition facilities, which so far seemed unharmed, did. In this they were unwise. Although they could take off by means of their Zero Length Launch Systems, there would be no time to fix the damage to the airfield before their Mosaics ran out of fuel. There were emergency fields identified, of course, some hundreds of them. But no one really wanted to land on an unlit, dirt strip, in the night, possibly in the rainy season with the dirt turned to muck, and possibly under attack.

  The pilots were paying attention to the attack on the city, to the west, well past the airfield and across the Transitway. Rather, they were paying attention to what they could see; waving streams of tracer-fists, rising futilely through the sky, the occasional launch of a missile—a loud crack, a streaking flame, then usually nothing—the irregular crump of bombs . . . and the sirens of fire trucks and ambulances.

  One pilot wept in frustration at not being allowed to launch. One chewed his fist until it bled. One rocked, arms around knees. Three just sat immobile, glaring hate. Among the latter were Tribune Ordoñez, senior and therefore tasked to make sure none of his comrades could take off.

  “Why won’t they let us go?” demanded one of the glarers. “It’s our fucking job!”

  Tourmente Number 21, off of Charles Martel,

  southwest of Ciudad Balboa, Balboa, Terra Nova

  Lieutenant de Vaisseau Madon crossed the Transitway right over Florida Locks, then flew low, over Brookings Field. This had already been cut, so he had little concern for fighters lifting to engage him. This, if anything, was a disappointment. Madon rather longed for an aerial victory, so rare had they become.

  There were clouds over Brookings, their undersides lit by a faint orange glow. Clearly something was afire down below. This was none of Madon’s concern, however.

  Past Brookings he cut northwest, towards the City. Madon passed between two skyscrapers, limiting his exposure to both missiles and cannon, because being shot down by the Balboan air defense would have been just too humiliating. These forces were now beginning to show some limited signs of coordination, or at least of getting manned up to strength. He resolved to make maximum use of the contours of the city.

  Two or possibly three times, search radars set off warning buzzers in Madon’s ears. The buzzing never lasted, so his tactic might have been working. Or maybe they’re just not that good.

  Madon swung out over the Mar Furioso, briefly, then pulled his stick to the left, aiming for Herrera International. He was, in effect, the second wave to hit the airport, the first having trashed the runway, then bombed the terminal. By the light of the flaming terminal, enhanced in his plane’s own night-vision display, he s
aw twenty-three or twenty-four aircraft lined up. Had they not been so widely spaced they’d have been a perfect target. As it was, they were nearly so.

  Letting his targeting computer see the grounded planes, Madon armed his 30mm cannon. He only carried enough ammunition for twenty-five seconds’ worth of fire, as the slowest possible rate. The Gaul pushed his stick forward, fired, fired, fired; brrrp . . . brrrp . . . brrrp—and was rewarded with the very satisfying sight of a Mosaic-D fighter explosively disintegrating in his field of view. It had, apparently, been fueled and armed.

  Madon leveled off, then let go a single two-hundred-and-fifty-kilogram bomb. That, he could not see hit, but he did get to see still more orange reflections—not so dim ones, either—off the clouds above.

  The Gallic pilot didn’t realize several things. One was that the spacing of the aircraft was only partly to reduce vulnerability. Another was that not one of the aircraft could fly; they were parted out derelicts, permissible to use as bomb, rocket, and cannon magnets because the legion had found Mosaic-Ds so cheap. The third thing was that they were out there as distraction and bait. In his concentration on his targets, he hadn’t noticed that there were four quad 14.5mm machine guns, eight twin 23mm cannon, two single-barrel 57mm guns, and a few light missiles all waiting for somebody to get into position where he just had to fly through the area on which they’d all been targeted.

  Thus Madon, really through no particular fault of his own, flew smack into a wall of antiaircraft fire that approached the solid. He didn’t have time to bail out—he didn’t even have time to scream—before he and his Tourmente disintegrated in a fuel-fired mix of blood, bone, brain, plastic, copper, and steel.