The Rods and the Axe

by Tom Kratman

  That was only a two-hundred-meter rise, to be achieved over ten miles, so the change in the angle of the deck was almost imperceptible. The helm announced and the watch officer repeated when the desired elevation had been reached.

  Sergeant Dzhugashvili had gone positively pale as the time for jumping approached.

  “I’m afraid I’ll freeze,” she’d whispered to Soliz. “No . . . I’m terrified I’ll freeze up, sir.”

  “Is that what’s really bothering you?” asked the tribune.

  “Most of it, yes, sir. Of course, I’m not exactly thrilled over the jump, the fall, or the possibility of a sudden stop at the end. But the big thing is fearing I’ll fail through my own weakness.”

  “I understand perfectly,” the tribune said. “You know why?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Because I felt exactly, and I mean exactly, the same way before my first jump—I started in the Cazadores, you know—and my sergeant told me what I’m going to tell you. ‘Don’t sweat that, Private Soliz,’ he said to me. ‘I’ll be right behind you and if you look like you’ve frozen I’ll pick you up and throw you out.”

  “There? Now doesn’t that make you feel better, young Sergeant.”

  Vera considered that for a minute, searching inside herself. She had to admit that, “You know, sir, in an odd way, it does. It really does.”

  Soliz clapped her on the shoulder, saying, “I thought it might. Now let’s go aft to cargo, we have some deliveries to make.”

  Vera stopped suddenly, just before the hatchway that led into cargo. The hatchway was closed. Soliz took one step further, then realized the woman wasn’t following. He turned and started to say something. Whatever that something was, it was lost as Vera planted a kiss on him that very quickly grew wet.

  When they finally came up for air, she said, “I’ve been wanting to do that ever since the second or third pallet came aboard. I didn’t because . . .”

  “Because,” he finished, “one thing would have led to another, and that other to something else, and, somewhere about the middle of the Shimmering Sea, we’d have been caught doing something for which we could be shot.”

  “Yes, sir. That. Just that.”

  “Sad goddamned life,” he said. “Sad rules we live under, my lovely Vera. Sad . . . but necessary.”

  “Sir, Emilio, the war won’t last. In six months my time is up and I vote with my civil century. I become a full human being again. If we live . . .”

  “I will find you, Vera. I will find you. Then we can continue the conversation under a more fitting setting.”

  “Good,” she said. “See that you do. A private room would be more fitting. And now I really figure I can jump. I didn’t want that going unsaid, in case the jump went bad. So come on, sir, my very dear, and be prepared to toss my—you will surely have noted—rather well-shaped bottom out of this airship.”

  One thing the legion was not especially short of was Volgans. The influx had begun with buying Volgan arms and hiring a cadre of instructors for them, at the very beginning. It had taken a big boost with the recruitment of the better part of a Volgan parachute regiment, the 351st Guards Airborne, to serve as an opposing force regiment. The 351st had been, at the time, just on the friendly side of starvation, so they’d been available cheap. Still, Carrera had put them on Balboan pay scales which were, in the Volgan terms of the day, rather generous.

  Between the cadres and the paratroopers, the word had gone back to Volga, Good soldiers, there’s a decent living for you. Many had come then. Some had gone back but more had stayed. Some whores had come too, and many of those had stayed. Some few of the whores had even joined the legion, to serve as something besides whores. Some of both, whores and soldiers, had fought on behalf of Balboa and the legion.

  Fernandez almost never had enough foreigners for all of his various overseas interests. But he’d had Volgans and to spare.

  Sergeant (Medically Retired) Pavlov had received crippling wounds on a raid inside Santander, years prior. The legion had kept him on, though, paid for all his medical care, and fitted him out with the best prosthetics available anywhere.

  Still, he hadn’t really been up to combat anymore, nor even peacetime training for it. Thus, after a little consultation with the rehabilitation section, and them consulting with a section of Fernandez’s department, he’d been offered a position. It had paid better than his old job, too, mainly because it entailed elevation to warrant officer (nonleadership). The new warrant’s only stipulation was that he never be used against his natural homeland. So far, he had not been, either.

  Thus, too, he now found himself on a barren plain, looking upward. Around him thrummed the engines of a whole company’s worth of heavy transport vehicles, with palletized load systems, that he’d rented for a fair consideration from the unit’s regimental commander. The good colonel had even thrown a case of vodka into the deal, and one couldn’t be fairer than that.

  “Praporschik,” said the starshina or first sergeant, who had come with the trucks, “there it is.” Pavlov could only barely make out the starshina’s pointing finger.

  Pavlov looked east-northeast, to where a barely seen whalelike shape slowly and ponderously crossed the sky, blotting out large swaths of stars as it did. The airship, on its current course, should pass within about eight hundred meters, half a mile, of where the trucks waited.

  Pavlov’s local cell phone rang. It was a call from overseas, apparently. He, however, knew better.

  “Hello, Casamara,” he answered. “Pavlov here, awaiting my package. I see you.”

  “On the way,” the airship answered.

  With a great grunt, the crew of the Casamara gave the final shove that sent the container rolling down the floor flip system, to the ramp, and then tipping over that and disappearing into the night.

  At command the crew of the long-range bombardment ala formed up in two short lines, on either side of the cargo bay; Vera Dzhugashvili went with the port side line. So did Soliz. She was in the second place in her line. None of them carried anything but their chutes and reserves; personal equipment had been loaded in the containers with the eighteen remaining Condors.

  They were already standing. The jumpmaster, one of Soliz’s crew, ordered, “Hook up!” He shouted from force of habit, though the sound inside the cargo bay of the airship was almost nil.

  “Check your equipment . . . sound off for equipment check!”

  “Nice ass, Vera,” said the sergeant behind her as he slapped it. “Three okay!”

  “All okay!”

  “Stand on the ramp!”

  And then, in just a few moments, they were walking off the ramp and disappearing into the night.

  Intelligence Annex, Tauran Defense Agency,

  Lumière, Gaul, Terra Nova

  Jan was reasonably confident that she had her throwaway, sacrificial organization in the form of Rocaberti’s partisans. They would, of course, be trained. Indeed, they’d be coming here for that training. Sadly, that would be a highly truncated course, consistent with what she thought Fernandez would estimate Tauran competence at, but long enough that neither the designated sacrificial victims nor the Balboans would have good reason to believe they were anything but a genuine main effort.

  That was old news, and essentially a done deal. What she’d been working on since was the real effort, the one for which the Rocabertians, as she thought of them, were the cover. She had had some success, so far. There was one La Platan junior diplomat—Devastatingly charming, she thought, but far too young—who had signed on in fear of the Timocracy spreading to La Plata and destroying the rule of his class. Then there was a Volgan journalist whom she considered, since he was only interested in money, the most reliable of the lot. A pacifist Tsarist-Marxist, who probably didn’t know a lot of history but knew what she liked, had signed on, and she wished she could get that woman trained before the Kosmos started their peace missions. Sadly, the first one of those leaves a few weeks at the latest. No
way to get Sister Melinda trained in that time.

  The problem here was that these people had to be highly trained. That would take time. Since it would take time, she found herself having to do the nearly impossible, or trying to. How the hell do I time it so that the Rocabertians last long enough to get the real operations in place?

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Appear weak when you are strong, and strong when you are weak.

  —Sun Tzu, The Art of War

  Post Theater, Fort Williams, Balboa, Terra Nova

  I hate this part, thought the Anglian chaplain, Captain Williams. It wasn’t immediately evident just why he should hate it, when the massed noncoms, and those barely human corporals, too, sang, slowly, deliberately, to all appearances sincerely:

  “There is a green hill far away

  Without a city wall,

  Where our dear Lord was crucified

  Who died to save us all . . .”

  And here’s the part that I hate.

  The senior sergeant major shouted out, “Two, three, four,” and all the ranks burst out with:

  “For he’s a jolly good fellow.

  For he’s a jolly good fellow . . .”

  Fucking heathens, fumed the chaplain. And there is precisely nothing I can do about it.

  Marqueli Mendoza, the petite and perfect, had learned to ignore the singing. She was a deeply religious woman—“And why not? Was not my husband’s sight miraculously restored? Who but God could do that?”—and one never really knew what new kind of blasphemy the Anglians would come up with.

  I hope God has a sense of humor, she thought, as the song reverberated through the walls.

  In a small office in the back, with a guard present, Marqueli spoke to half a dozen men, four sergeants, one a Haarlemer, and two corporals, both Haarlemers.

  “I’m sorry, boys,” she said. “I really am. But no, under our laws we cannot take you on, not so long as the war is ongoing and you haven’t made a formal renunciation of citizenship in your home countries that predates the war.

  “I’ve got to tell you, too, that I don’t understand why the laws are written the way they are. I talked to our senior staff judge advocate, Legate Puente-Pequeño, and he says it makes no sense to him. More specifically, he said, ‘That’s what you get when you get amateurs making law.’

  “I’m not so sure he’s right, though. The regulation that allows us to give medals for valor, even to our enemies? That, I have reason to believe, was deliberate. Why not this?”

  “It’s not just us, ma’am,” said the Haarlemer sergeant. “We’re just picked representatives. There’s two hundred and twenty-seven men who want to swim the river, as we say. We’d be bloody damned valuable.”

  “I know,” she said. “You said that before. But we can’t accept you. We can’t, in principle, claim the right to shoot any of ours that go over to the enemy . . . to the Tauran Union or Zhong Empire, and not accord the same right to our enemies.

  “Then, too, consider the implications. Suppose we took you in. Then imagine we lose. That’s the way the smart money says to bet it. What happens to you guys? You get shot? Or hanged? Or maybe just imprisoned. We can surrender on our own behalf, if we must. But we can’t surrender, not ever, if it means people who’ve tried to help us would be punished more severely than we would. It would be wrong . . . un-Balboan . . . un-Legionary.

  “So we can’t do that.”

  The Haarlemer sergeant sighed. “Oh, well, it was worth a try.”

  “And I appreciate it, personally,” she consoled him and them. “But it’s not right and it’s not fair to anybody. Maybe after the war.”

  She stopped then, listening to the service. Chaplain Williams was bringing matters to a close, so she said, “Back to your seats now, boys, quietly. I have an announcement to make to the group as soon as services are done.”

  “ . . . you fucking lot. Siiittttt . . . fuckckckinggg . . . DOWN!”

  “Thank you, Sergeant Major,” Marqueli said.

  She sighed, then said, “Boys, I have some good news and some bad news. First the good news; my course is over. What I can teach, in the time I’ve had to teach it, is done.”

  Marqueli smiled, gratified at the groans. Whether they groaned because the boys liked her, liked her teaching, or just liked looking at her, she couldn’t say. If pressed, she’d have guessed that, for most of them, it was probably two out of three.

  “Now the bad news. We’re going to have to disperse you to various small prisoner camps, about fifty of them, we’ve set up in various places near Ciudad Balboa. I don’t know why the dispersal; no one’s confided in me on that.

  “What you do when you get there is on you. You don’t have to accept what I’ve taught here; I’ve tried to make that clear from the beginning. If you do accept it, you don’t have to teach it, either at your next camp or when you finally go home. If you do decide to teach it you don’t have to teach it my way, or any particular way.

  “But I do hope you will at least think about what we’ve talked about here.”

  Palacio de las Trixies, Ciudad Balboa, Balboa, Terra Nova

  There was dread in the air, all across the city, dread at the terrible vengeance everyone assumed the Tauran Union would wreak after being bombed themselves. The mood, the sense on imminent destruction, extended even to the old city and the presidential palace. Even the trixies were unaccountably quiet.

  In the president’s office sat four men, all but the president standing. He, seated, looked over a map with some complex graphics drawn on it.

  Raul Parilla shook his head doubtfully. “I don’t know about this, Patricio,” he said to Carrera. “It strikes me as dirty, even cowardly, to hide behind prisoners of war.”

  Between the two men was a map of the city and the area to its south, labeled “Log Base Alpha.” On the map were any number of red crosses, which would ordinarily indicate a medical facility. In this case, many were medical. Many others were not.

  “Oh, please, Mr. President. We’re not going to hide behind anything. And nothing of any importance is within one hundred meters of one of those crosses. They can bomb us as much as they like. The only difference is they can’t be sure, if they carelessly—or deliberately; these are Tauran Union hypocrites we’re talking about—bomb one of our marked medical facilities that they’re not bombing a camp with their own POWs in it. And they can’t risk staging a POW rescue without risking a massacre of our wounded they would find most embarrassing.

  “Best of all, they must use precision munitions, pricey and rare. Any unguided bombs they may drop risks our wounded, and their own prisoners.”

  “What if they don’t have that many guided weapons?” asked the president.

  “Fuck ’em,” said Carrera, “that’s their problem. They’ve got all the goddamned money in the world—a lot more than we have—let them spend it.”

  “What does JAG say?” asked Parilla, looking pointedly at Legate Puente-Pequeño who had come to the office with the Duque.

  “Well,” said the lawyer, “it’s never been done before, in quite this way, so far as I am aware, but, taking the project piece by piece, there’s nothing especially noteworthy and nothing at all illegal that I can see. There’s nothing wrong with telling an enemy there are areas you are not going to use for a warlike purpose. Nothing wrong with telling them where your medical facilities are. Nothing wrong with letting them know where their own POWs are. Nothing wrong with giving them a range of areas where their POWs might be, provided we use none of those area for a warlike purpose.

  “Maybe if they didn’t have the option of putting a bomb in a fifty meter circle, it would be wrong, Mr. President, but they do have that option. We’re not obligated to make their lives easier, you know.”

  “Still strikes me as . . . well . . . more dark than gray.”

  “War’s a shitty business, Raul,” said Carrera. “Lawfare doesn’t make it better; it just makes it sneakier.”

  Parilla sighed, t
hen asked, “How are we going to get this to the enemy?”

  “Esterhazy, acting as a parlementaire, will pass a copy of this map over to them, this afternoon, just before he, Triste, Lourdes and party depart Santa Josefina. Additionally, we will send copies to the major news networks—”

  “They’ll never publish them,” said the president.

  “They will,” insisted Professor Ruiz, the chief of propaganda, “because we’re also putting them up on web sites hosted in several countries, none of which are wild about the Tauran Union or the Zhong.”

  “Zhong prisoners going there, too?” Parilla asked.

  Carrera tapped two spots, circled such as to indicate large perimeters. “They’re at these two, now.” He shook his head. “We don’t actually have that many military or naval prisoners. And those we do have are too valuable not to keep close tabs on. The eleven thousand or so Zhong civilians, we’re going to give back just as soon as the Zhong land east of the city. They don’t hurt us any and will add to the enemy’s logistic burden, which is what will really secure that flank.”

  Parilla sat back, away from the map. “What’s that phrase you dug out of that old book from Old Earth? Survival cancels out programming; something like that? Okay, you can do this.

  “Now, since we’re on the subject of the pounding we’re going to take, talk to me about air defense.”

  Carrera cut off a semi-nasty retort; he’d briefed Parilla on the prospects of air defense several times already. It just didn’t seem to sink in. Oh, well, here we go again.

  “The more advanced fighters are allegedly soon going to be on the way from Zion, Mr. President, but I don’t think we’ll use them even if they arrive. The pilots aren’t that well trained. No matter; I expect the Taurans to bribe Zion to keep them.