The Rods and the Axe

by Tom Kratman

It made quite a show over the airfield.

  The Cave, Casa Linda, Carretera InterColombiana,

  Balboa, Terra Nova

  One of the defining features of modern life on the planet of Terra Nova was the quest for certainty, amongst bureaucracy. In many cases, and perhaps most, where military forces were concerned, that quest for certainty worked out to be a quest for the illusion of certainty. To a large extent, this began at political levels and worked its way down with the fear that, God forbid, some politician should ask a question to which a general or admiral had no answer. To avert this, subordinate staffs and commanders often became little but information gatherers, to feed the information—true or false didn’t always matter—to higher commanders and staffs so that no one would be embarrassed by the questions of politicians, so that politicians would be safe from the ignorant questions of the press.

  There would probably have been some advantages to this if, in fact, certainty were possible. It never was, so all the efforts, all the bloating of staffs, all the bloating of officer corps, all the reduction in average quality, was simply a waste.

  Though, at least, flag officers were not usually embarrassed by the questions of politicians, for whatever good that may have been.

  Carrera was both fortunate and fatalistic. He didn’t care, personally, about things he could not do a damned thing to address. Hence, he didn’t ask for continuous input of usually spurious instant information that he couldn’t do a freaking thing with, anyway. Nor did he really have to report to anyone; his commander, President Parilla, had good cause to trust him. Those factors meant smaller, higher-quality staffs and fewer, but better commanders, who could be better trusted to do the right and effective thing with the information they had. Better still, since said staffs and commanders were not perpetually nagged for useless information, they could concentrate on doing, rather than reporting.

  Thus, it didn’t bother him in the slightest to sit in an almost unlit, damp cave, surrounded by staff, friends, and family—to include his twelve daughters-in-law—just enjoying the company . . . and the booze Sarbaz had brought along, too, of course.

  Pili, or Ant, as de facto first wife of the “god” Iskandr, hence senior to all, took charge of the children, leading them in singing songs both of Balboa and of her own tribe back in Pashtia. Ordinarily, that would have been the job of Alena, the green-eyed witch.

  Still, little Ant is filling in nicely, thought Carrera.

  Two of Ham’s wives, Mehmood and Sahiba, both a little older than the boy and unusually tall, Lourdes levels of tall, sat to either side of Carrera. Every now and again he’d pass them the bottle, since they were known not to be pregnant. This was a lack that weighed heavily upon them, as it did on all of the Pashtian girls Ham hadn’t managed yet to knock up. Still, Carrera wondered why these two sat on either side. Then it hit him, They’re the biggest. They self-selected to sit here to protect me, father of their lord and master. Jesus, is that a humbling thought. They slept around the boy’s bed to guard him, when he was younger. They flank me now.

  Note to self: Professor Ruiz and his propaganda ministry; TV show on devoted young girls, of exceptional bravery, soonest. Hmmm . . .

  “Have either of you two thought about joining the Tercio Amazona?” he asked Mehmood and Sahiba.

  “Oh, yes, father of our lord,” Sahiba, the red-maned, answered. “After we each have two or three babies that live, by which time we will be old enough to join. Then we can accompany our lord on his great crusade.”

  “Great crusade?” Carrera asked, with a sense of dread that his deepest plans had been compromised.

  “Oh, yes,” Sahiba enthused. “It was written long ago, seven signs, of which Pililak was the sixth, seven signs by which we would know our hour had come. After that, then Iskandr reborn shall lead his people back to their proper home.”

  “Ummm . . . what’s the seventh sign?” asked Carrera, with a decidedly sinking feeling.

  “It is a mystery,” answered Sahiba. “As written, it says that ‘Iskandr shall strike the snake in his den.’ Do you understand it, father of our lord?”

  Only too fucking well, thought Carrera. Ah, bullshit; it’s all coincidence. But then . . . but then . . . Cassandra did, after all, speak truth to the Trojans.

  He said, however, “Oh, no, daughter-in-law. I’m not of the mystic sort. I don’t understand it at all.”

  HAMS Indomitable, South of Cienfuegos,

  Shimmering Sea, Terra Nova

  “Wave him off,” said the airwing commander. “Doesn’t he see what kind of shape he’s in?”

  The landing signals officer sent that directly to the pilot of the inbound plane, Davies, who obeyed but promptly called in to register his objection.

  “We only have so many of these fucking planes,” said Davies. “This one can be fixed and there is no replacement available. For Christ’s bloody sake, they closed the assembly line as a cost saving measure last year. I haven’t heard it’s been reopened, have you?

  “Now if you don’t trust my ability to get it in, let me go last, strike the other aircraft below, clear the flight deck, and then let me come in.”

  “Wait, out,” the LSO replied.

  Davies wasn’t either as confident or as enthusiastic as he let on.

  Right after taking the hit, which was, admittedly, not all that bad, he’d had a time of it fighting for control of the aircraft. Half that battle was fighting for control of himself, as fear and the adrenaline rush of being hit set his hands to shaking.

  He’d won both battles, of which the latter was the tougher. The Sea Hurricane had fought its way over the mountains, then descended to a few hundred meters above sea level. There, Davies had dumped his remaining ordnance, except for the air-to-air missiles. Those he’d dump once he was close enough to the mother ship to be sure of defense beyond self-defense. Not that, what with the new and unpleasant vibration the plane was giving, he had a lot of confidence on his ability to win a dog fight, even with one of Balboa’s obsolescent fighters.

  A visual inspection was impossible, even under the twin moons showing. And the most his instruments would tell him was that he was missing a chunk of his starboard side wing, but not how much of a chunk.

  He began to suspect the chunk was large when the vibration began to grow to an alarming level. He could still control the plane, but it was an exercise that was both physically and mentally demanding, one that further threatened to become exhausting.

  By the time he checked in with Cienfuegan air control, and crossed its central chain of mountains, the threat of exhaustion was fast becoming a reality. He throttled down his speed, which helped some, but there was still a sense of vibration there, slowly shaking apart both plane and pilot.

  The reduced throttle had Davies still in the air when the sun popped over the horizon. With that, he could look over his right shoulder . . . and be appalled. Whatever damage whatever had hit him had done, the damage he’d done to the wing by continuing to fly the plane—Not that I had a bloody fucking lot of choice!—was worse still. As if to punctuate, a piece of the skin near the wing’s edge peeled off and fluttered away as Davies watched. He could hardly feel that, what with the bucking of the plane.

  Then he heard from the landing signals officer, “Abort!” Ah, but one should never discount the pull of Anglian propriety, stiff with upperlippedness, and amplified by Davies really, really dreading the prospect of both ejection and a dip in the shark-infested sea. Davies tried very hard to be allowed to land.

  The planes and helicopters were struck below. And the sub lieutenant did have a point. Landed, there was a fair chance of fixing the plane. Ditched, there was no chance at all.

  “All right, Davies,” agreed the landing signals officer, “we’ll let you come in. Emergency crews are standing by. Good luck.”

  On the plus side, weather was good, “Case I,” as they said. On the negative side, the Sea Hurricane was being an absolute cunt, control-wise.

  Davies’s
radio informed him, “Below glideslope. Left of centerline.”

  He pulled up slightly, and shifted to the right, until informed that he was in the proper position. The shuddering of the plane told him he didn’t have a lot of time or opportunity left.

  There was an automated landing system that, ordinarily, made carrier landings much safer than they’d otherwise be. Davies tried that, only to discover that the system wasn’t quite up to dealing with random damage and an unresponsive and stiff plane, seemingly on the verge of falling apart in midair. He took command back from the ship’s computer and informed the LSO he was coming in under his own control.

  It was one of those cases where the pilot really deserved a safe landing, but fate’s fickle finger, randomness’s reaming rod, perversity’s pulsating prong, just all combined at one time to fuck him. His approach was good, right inside the crosshairs. He was right over the deck, descending fast. And then—Finger!—the plane yawed slightly to port. He corrected, or rather, overcorrected, and was aimed just a bit to starboard. Rod!—he applied throttle, in case he had to take off after missing the wires. His landing gear hit, unevenly, and—Prong!—he bounced up, completely missing the wires. Unfortunately, that starboard yaw, now combined with three-quarters throttle, launched him into the rear of the forward tower, the one that sailed the ship. He didn’t smack head on, but that wing, already damaged disappeared.

  Davies, stunned silly, bounced to port, with his plane spinning uncontrollably around him. Automatically, knowing he’d missed the wire, he applied full throttle. Then he looked down at the deck, seemingly spinning past, above him, and screamed like a little girl. He saw his port wing disintegrate on the flight deck. It slowed his plane’s spinning. Slightly.

  Still screaming, as soon as he sensed open sky above, Davies reached for the eject. In a case of terror-induced adrenaline versus centrifugal force, terror won. He grasped the ejection lever and pulled. The little girl screams stopped, to be replaced by screams of pain, as the ejection seat subjected the pilot to about fourteen Gs, which was almost fine, and a compression fracture of one vertebra, which was not.

  Intersection, Via Santa Josefina and Via Belisario Carrera,

  Ciudad Balboa, Balboa, Terra Nova

  A tranzitree trunk, ordinarily ornamental, if deadly, now leafless and stripped of its lesser branches, stuck up from a thick layer of rubble and broken glass. Above the tranzitree, the front of the building was sheared off. Its rubble and shattered glass lay across the sidewalk, past the tranzitree, and out into the streets. The mess of concrete, rebar, plaster, plastic, fabric, wires . . . all the components of a normal office building remaining, were left exposed to the elements. There were believed to be bodies in there, at least two of them. A sniffer dog, her head moving from side to side, walked gingerly with her handler over the wreckage. She was a specialist in searching for corpses and living victims buried under rubble such as this. There were also a dozen armed guards, surrounding the area, civilly clad but unreasonably heavily armed. These were men from Fernandez’s organization. So were the ones loading the computers and files—dangerous work, given the state of the building—into trucks and carting them away.

  Carrera and Parilla had split up the spots they intended to visit, the latter taking the more or less civil zones of damage, while the former went for the military and quasi-military. There was, however, an area that was officially civil, but in practice, military, or, more specifically, research and development for the military.

  Balboa Yacht Corporation had never, not even once, built or even designed a true yacht, though there had been some early work done by some of its marine architects in designing things that looked like yachts, but mounted enough firepower to sink anything shy of a warship.

  It had happened, of course, that some very rich folk or their minions had come to inquire about having a yacht built. Whenever anyone had tried that, there was a set of front offices, all manned by people on Fernandez’s organizational payroll, to tell the prospective commodore: “Oh, no, señor, we are much too busy—Julio, you lazy swine, did you finish the drawings for the duke of Belgravia?—as I was saying, señor, we could not hope to—Marissa, you wretch, I said get in touch with Borchadt Marine Engines now!—Where was I, señor?” and keep up with that routine more or less indefinitely. They’d never had to, because the prospective buyer would invariably walk off in disgust within, at most, twenty minutes.

  That had taken place in a suite of front offices, a cover for the rear ones, where the real work had been done, as, indeed, the entire company had been a front for what it really was, a wing of Obras Zorilleras, the legion’s R&D arm.

  Some of those real offices, the ones where real work had been done, now lay exposed by chewed off walls. Surveying the damage, Carrera decided that the formerly hidden offices didn’t look like that or like anything suspicious; they looked completely unremarkable amidst the general ruin.

  Miguel Lanza, the commander of the Sixteenth Aviation Legion, coughed behind Carrera, then said, “Sorry it took so long, Duque. I was looking over the damage to the airfields, when I heard.”

  “No problem, Miguel,” Carrera assured him. “How bad are they?”

  “We can fix them by blasting and bulldozing the concrete shards, then filling with gravel and covering with steel planking. Take a few days, though.”

  “Don’t,” said Carrera. “Rather, don’t fix most of them past the ability to keep them looking unfixed and unserviceable . . . except maybe for one or two places where you can fix them completely, provided you hide it. We wouldn’t want our friends to run out of targets, now, would we?”

  Lanza nodded, saying, “I understand.” He hesitated for a moment and asked, “Did they know about this, Duque? I mean, did they know what it was? And if they did, what does it mean?”

  “You figure it out, Miguel. The city, not even including the whole metro area, is almost three hundred square kilometers. It has tens of thousands of buildings. Every other bomb they dropped that I’ve heard of had a valid—not necessarily a legitimate, but a valid—reason for being bombed. What are the odds that this one bomb, out of hundreds that hit where they were supposed to, was just a fluke, given what this has meant to us?”

  “Shitty,” Lanza said.

  “Yep, shitty. They knew . . .”

  As Lanza had, someone else announced himself from behind Carrera and the aviator. “Sir?”

  “Yes, Jamie.” James Soult was Carrera’s driver and friend.

  Soult proffered a block of paper on a clipboard with some writing on the paper. “Got the list of damage. Casualties weren’t too bad, under a hundred and fifty dead and injured both, reported so far, though that can be expected to rise. It was more than half civilians. Here’s the list of facilities they hit.”

  Carrera took the clipboard—the legion had a positive prejudice against using computers where a) pen and ink would do, and b) electronic security could not be guaranteed. As he took it, he thought, A hundred and fifty. The Federated States’ equivalent would have been fifteen thousand. Heavy . . . heavy . . . but . . . if you will the end, you will the means, and you will the price, too.

  Soult’s clipboard didn’t have a by-name list of the dead, though it did mention places where groups of people had been hurt and killed. From that it wasn’t hard for Carrera to figure out which were military and which civilian. The only surprise was that one civil apartment building had been hit, accounting for about half of the civilian dead and injured.

  Hmmm . . . well . . . okay, if they hit an inoffensive apartment building maybe this one could have been a fluke. Problems are that I can’t treat it as a fluke and I must retaliate for the apartment building.

  “I’ve got a secure link up with the Casamara,” said Soult, “and the target list for Condors is in the car.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Retaliation is related to nature and instinct, not to law. Law, by definition, cannot obey the same rules as nature.

  —Albert Camus, �
��Reflections on the Guillotine”

  Militarized Airship Casamara, over the southern Shimmering Sea

  About midocean, Tribune Soliz, the commander of the Casamara, had ordered displayed on the ship, from six angles, the gold eagle of the Sixteenth Legion. The displays weren’t especially large, of course. Indeed, being no bigger than any other military aircraft’s roundel, they were essentially lost against the sheer bulk of an airship. They could also, in a pinch, be hidden, too. Soliz didn’t expect that to be necessary.

  We’ve never quite fit into the law of war anyway, being neither ship nor aircraft. Sure, there are provisions that ships, when armed, ought to declare themselves as auxiliary cruisers. Sadly, for the legalistic, we are not a true ship and the treaty was never extended to cover airships.

  ’Course, we’ve always been a pain in the ass for the customs folk, too, and nobody ever got around to fixing that.

  Like all of his crew, Soliz wore the uniform of the legion. In his case, being the captain, this was dress whites. Most wore battledress that did something less than a great job of making them blend in with Casamara’s pastel walls and carpets.

  Soliz felt something less than guilty about not identifying his command as an instrument of war. They can see it if they board us. Not that they really can board us, hence that continuing sense of annoyance from the customs people; but they could, in theory. And if they did, if they got past the hidden machine guns and the men with shoulder-fired antiaircraft missiles I’ve got out on the exterior catwalks’ corners, they could see that we’re all in uniform, nice and proper. And besides, did those murdering fucks from the Tauran Union illuminate their wing and tail flashes so they could be seen at night when they came to kill our people and destroy our property? They did not! So fuck ’em.