The Rods and the Axe - eARC

by Tom Kratman

  Janier’s much abused aide de camp, Malcoeur, had actually shed tears as flames had begun to race across the gasoline-soaked blue cloth, with its elaborate embroidery of hundreds of gold oak leaves and wavelike piping. The jacket alone had cost Janier forty-six hundred Tauros. The baton, with its thirty-two fourteen karat gold eagles had cost more.

  And then, wonder of wonders, after the fire had done its main work and a stiff and bitter Janier had left the scene, the AdC had gotten on hands and knees to recover the gold that had dropped down from uniform and baton. To keep? No. He placed the misshapen lumps in an old black lacquered box he’d apparently paid for himself, then left that on Janier’s desk.

  Why would that toad, Malcoeur, care? Janier wondered. It’s totally inexplicable and illogical. I treat him worse—much worse, as a matter of fact—than my dog. And he weeps for my pain? I do not understand it. Worse, if after all that, and all my failures, the toad still cares for me . . . then I am even more unworthy than I had thought. Shit.

  Well . . . no . . . I can’t deal with that concept. Let’s just let it go with the notion that he’s weeping for our defeat, not for my defeat. Otherwise, I’d start acting like a girl, too.

  While he still faced the window and the bitter ashes—literal ashes—of his defeat and humiliation, a knock came from behind. He spun his chair around with no great haste to see Malcoeur standing by the door, a thick wad of file folders under his left arm.

  “What is it, Malcoeur?” the general asked, not ungently.

  “Intel reports from the Old Earthers, Mon General,” the aide replied. “Since we aren’t allowed to . . .”

  Janier, with the fatalism and pseudo-courage of the career-dead, supplied the rest, “Since our political masters, in fear of their political lives should the war kick off again, won’t do a damned thing to so much as annoy the Balboans, the Peace Fleet is our only source of intelligence.”

  “Yes, sir. That.”

  “Well . . . set them down,” Janier said. He had a sudden thought, one he voiced as, “No man ought to have to look at this crap completely sober, Malcoeur. Why don’t you go down to the basement and tell the club to deliver to us a bottle of Adourgnac, along with two glasses.”

  Bar El Mono Loco, Aserri, Santa Josefina, Terra Nova

  A young woman named Maura screamed as her boyfriend drove the jagged edge of his broken bottle into the stomach of the Tauran and twisted, then ripped to the right. His victim, a Tuscan sapper, likewise screamed at first, as the glass made a hash of his innards. Then, in a state of shock, the sapper’s scream turned to a groan. He turned ghastly white as his intestines, accompanied by a surge of blood, spilled out through his torn abdomen. The intestines unlooped themselves as they slid slowly to the floor, even as the Tuscan sank to his knees.

  “Try to steal my girl, eh, motherfucker?” said the Santa Josefinan, releasing his ad hoc butcher’s tool as he stepped back away from the spreading pool of gore and air of spilled shit and blood. Mouth gaping, the Tuscan looked up with eyes rapidly going blank. The Santa Josefinan lifted his foot from the ground, placed the bloody sole on the Tuscan’s forehead, and pushed. The sapper went over backwards, ending up with his back on the bloody floor and the lower half of his legs folded under him.

  “Come on, Manuel,” said one of the Santa Josefinan’s companions, Marco. “You gotta get outa here before the police come.”

  “Police?” asked Manuel.

  “Yeah, dude, police. That Tauro motherfucker’s dead or as good as dead. You sliced him bad, dude. You gotta get out of here and go into hiding.”

  “Yeah . . . but . . . but, no. Man . . . Marco, you saw he was hitting on Maura. He had no right . . .”

  “Manuel, snap out of it. Don’t matter about rights. The Tauros got the money, the guns, and own the government. You have got to get outa here.”

  “But where do I go?” asked Manuel.

  “Balboa, man. Cross over the border tonight. But for now you have got to get out of here.”

  Under his friend Marco’s prodding, Manuel let himself be led out of the bar and toward Marco’s car, waiting in a nearby alley. Behind them, Maura still screamed. Unheard for all her screaming, the TV in the bar’s main room was showing a program entitled, “Our Friends, the Tauran Union.”

  High Admiral’s Conference Room, UEPF Spirit of Peace,

  In Orbit over Terra Nova.

  One of Khan the husband’s underlings was droning on while standing in front of the big Kurosawa. Marguerite had mostly tuned him out, even as she wrestled with the implications of the disaster that had unfolded below. The scale of that disaster, so much worse even than she could have imagined, made concentration somewhere between difficult and impossible. For example, while one part of her mind knew and saw that the Kurosawa screen at one end of the conference room showed a map of Balboa, from Santander to Santa Josefina, it simply didn’t register on the conscious part of her brain.

  Who’s to blame? she wondered. Anyone that the Balboans haven’t already stretched the neck of? Or worse? Do I fault Janier for going along with a plan I’d forced him to come up with, after the politicians made him execute it out of the blue? When nobody expected a war? I don’t think I can. Do I believe the confessions the condemned made before they were hanged, blaming that non-entity, Endara-Rocaberti?

  No, too self-serving. The Balboans wanted him blamed so it was probably someone else. Someone they’ll take care of in their own way, I’m sure.

  Or is it . . . or forget it, all the different twists and turns of the plotting down below have me so I don’t have the first clue what to believe or what to expect.

  Marguerite had known all along that she didn’t have the background, the training or experience, to run a war on the ground on her own. She had her doubts about her ability to run a war in space, for that matter, though she was probably better qualified than anyone on two worlds. Among those who knew her well, this humility—or realism—was likely her greatest strength.

  That said, the skills that got one elevated to her level, in her culture, had little to do with tactical, operational, or strategic skill. Even administrative ability came in a distant second to willingness to prostitute oneself. And even that was usually less important than connections and political acumen. Marguerite sat in the chair she sat in primarily due to chance, a former willingness to whore herself out, and that same political acumen.

  And I’m long since done trading myself—my body—for advantage or, rather, at least not for my own advantage. Once a whore always a whore, I suppose, and if I had to put on the kneepads for my fleet or planet I could.

  I’d thought chance would fall fairly evenly. And I counted on my political acumen and the things I had to trade getting me what I wanted and what my planet and civilization need.

  Wrong. Wrong. Wro—

  “High Admiral?” asked the briefing officer, jerking Marguerite back to the present.

  “What?”

  “You looked distressed for a moment, High Admiral.”

  “No,” she said, circling a hand to indicate that he should, “keep going.”

  “Yes, High Admiral. As I was saying, the Balboans seem to be playing a shell game. We know that twenty-six large freighters have docked and either begun or finished unloading. We know other ships have come in, picked up passengers, apparently noncombatants, mostly children, and left. We have seen at least one ship load up what we know to be allied troops to bring them to Balboa. We’ve got other ships hanging around that we don’t have a clue about. They’re just sitting there.

  “Moreover, Ma’am, the entire pattern of ocean shipping down below is in turmoil. It’s like . . .”

  “It’s like kicking an ants’ nest,” Khan, male, supplied, from the chair next to Wallenstein. “And I can’t tell if it’s deliberate—the enemy playing a shell game—or an artifact of the half or three quarter million tons of shipping the Balboans have removed from the stream of commerce for their own purposes. I’ve got no precedent for it t
hat really suits.”

  “A couple of things we can be sure of,” said the briefer. “The Balboans are digging in like madmen. They’d always had a lot of fixed fortifications, some they inherited from the Federated States and some they built on their own. Those were in four major groupings: Out on the Isla Real and the two largish islands near it, a coastal defense line along their Mar Furioso coast, most of which was a Federated States relic, the ring around the port of Cristobal, much of which also was a Federated States relic, and this line”—the briefer bent to push a button, which caused the area just south of the Rio Gatun to illuminate on the Kurosawa in red—“which they apparently call the ‘Parilla Line’ and which makes no sense to us. But beyond that they’re doing an amazing amount of pick and shovel work. Fortification systems that were already powerful are becoming more so, right before our eyes.”

  “Something else, too, High Admiral,” Khan, male, said. “While we can find all the old fortifications, we think, the new ones are being built under something that is scrambling our ability to see them. Their heat signature doesn’t make them show up as too very different. And they’re mostly under triple canopy jungle, so the skimmers can’t see much of anything. We’ve tried.”

  “Lidar?” she asked.

  “Limited use,” Khan answered. “Have to get really low for it to work against targets on the ground. And we’d have to fly around so much we’re bound to lose skimmers.”

  “There is something, though,” added the briefer, “that we can see and that’s important.”

  “What’s that?” asked Wallenstein,

  The Kurosawa lit up a twenty or so kilometer wide area between the Parilla Line and Ciudad Balboa. “This we’ve taken to calling Logistics Base Alpha,’ High Admiral.”

  “How do you know that’s what it is?”

  “Containers, Ma’am. Thousands upon thousands of containers have been unloaded from ships, trucked or airlifted there, and dug in, in no particular pattern, though there have been some inexplicable gaps left.”

  “That lack of pattern,” said Khan, “suggests to me more than anything that this was one area where the Balboans hadn’t finished their planning. I think they’re just dumping the containers and letting their logistic guys and gals figure out how to bring order from the chaos, which they don’t seem to have the wherewithal to do.”

  “Why do you think so, Khan?” she asked.

  “Couple of reasons, High Admiral,” Khan answered, “but for one . . . Close in on the log base,” he told the briefer, “and then illuminate the known medical detachments.”

  Turning to Wallenstein, Khan explained, “While the Balboans are not above playing fast and loose with the laws of war even as they understand them, they take a fairly enlightened view of protecting at least their own wounded. Thus, they’ve marked all the field hospitals and aid stations they’ve set up clearly, over the trees, in such a way that the skimmers can see them and even the Taurans could if they ever resume overflights.”

  Wallenstein looked at the map again, which now showed so many red crosses for field medical facilities that . . . “What the fuck does it mean?”

  “We haven’t a clue,” Khan admitted. “We’ve run triangulation of those with known Balboan organizational structure and none of it, none of it, makes the slightest sense. We’ve had our own medical people look at it to see if there’s any conceivable pattern of casualty treatment and evacuation that fits that mish mash. Nothing quite does. We even ran a copy past the Tauran Defense Agency’s C2 bureau. They’re as clueless as we are but suggest very strongly that the Balboans are clueless there too, and did just what I said, dump supplies anywhere.”

  “Are there any indicators that they’re trying to reorder those containers into some more sensible configuration?” the high admiral asked.

  “Some,” Khan said. “There are some standardized configurations showing up, here and there.”

  “Of what?” Wallenstein asked.

  “Not a clue, High Admiral. We get only a tiny thermal signature, and that for nor more than a few days before they get the containers insulated and buried. At least I think that’s what they’re doing. Sensing with radar has proven impossible over wide swaths.”

  “All right,” Marguerite said. “I’ll accept your analysis for the moment. What else?”

  A circle appeared on the map, east of the capital. “We don’t know what they’re doing there, High Admiral. Or, rather, we know what but not why. The what is that they’re setting up enough tentage to house maybe three hundred thousand people. Could be more. But why? It’s completely outside what we think is their last ditch defensive perimeter.”

  “Don’t ask me,” said Wallenstein. “Figuring that out is your job. Move on, but do figure that out.”

  “Yes, High Admiral,” said the briefing officer, moving on to, “Santa Josefina. The Tauran Union people extracted a promise that Balboa would disband the two units—”

  “Units?” she asked. “Define ‘units.’ ”

  “Tercios, High Admiral. Big regiments. In any case, the Balboans only went halfway. They took the sub organizations—‘cohorts,’ they call them, and ‘maniples,’ and sent them back to parent units, but they didn’t reintegrate them down to individual levels. Those cohorts and maniples had reassembled in the vicinity of the city of Cervantes, in the eastern part of the country. I say ‘had’ because, while one Santa Josefinan regiment is still in that area, the other has disappeared. Oh, their tents are still there but the troops are gone.”

  “To where?”

  “We believe they went home and are waiting for arms to be delivered. Possibly by the regiment that is still intact and in Balboa. Or maybe by sea. Or maybe across Santa Josefina’s eastern border. Or maybe all three. Or maybe the arms are already there.”

  “That last,” said Khan, “would not surprise me. The Balboans do seem to think ahead.”

  The understatement of that last set Wallenstein to laughing almost uncontrollably. When she’d recovered enough to speak, she said, “Oh, Commander Khan, I never knew you had such a gift for comedy.”

  Still wiping at her eyes, Marguerite said, “Esmeralda, honey, please set us up a trip to Xing Zhong Guo and Santa Josefina. The latter’s president, their whole fucking government, needs a sharp lesson in the limits of disarmed neutrality.

  “And see if you can’t get General Janier to join us.”

  Casa Presidencial, Aserri, Santa Josefina, Terra Nova

  “They say that they’re discharged, Mr. President,” said Teniente Blanco of Santa Josefina’s Public Force, a sort of combined police force, customs agency, coast guard, executive security service, and a few other things that an army, had the country had one, might have done. Blanco, an incongruous name, considering he was black, was both the chief of President Calderón’s security detail as well as a kind of military aide. He was, in fact, a graduate of Atlacatl’s well-respected military academy, though since then he’d seen nothing really resembling military service. Still, he was as close to a military expert as Calderón had available.

  Or is he? Hmmm.

  “Blanco, have you been keeping in touch with the Tauran force watching the Balboans?”

  The lieutenant nodded, saying, “Yes, Mr. President.”

  “Make me, us, an appointment to talk with General Marciano.”

  “Here or there, Mr. President?”

  “I’d prefer here.” When Blanco said nothing, Calderón added, “You don’t understand why?”

  “No, Mr. President.”

  “Good,” said the president, with some satisfaction.

  Marciano really classified Santa Josefinans into two groups: those he detested and those he did not. The former group covered nearly everyone in the country, including the president, his entire party, the opposition party, the other opposition party, the party in opposition to the ruling party and both the other main opposition parties, the Tsarist-Marxists, the anarchists, the street sweepers, the banana harvesters, etc. The latter g
roup included the police, to include Lieutenant Blanco, Marciano’s personal housekeeping staff, the KPs in the mess halls, and the Santa Josefinan veterans of Balboa’s Legion del Cid, which group he was pretty sure he was going to end up fighting, and soon.

  Marciano’s command, so far, hadn’t seen any fighting, barring bar fights between his troops and the Santa Josefinans who resented their competition for the local women. There’d been quite a few of those, at least one of which had turned deadly.

  “It’s the lackanookie theory of ethnic disharmony,” Marciano had judged, saying to his officers and senior noncoms, “This goes to the effect that two groups of men, in real or perceived competition for the same women, will automatically hate each other. I’ve often paused to wonder how much that’s fed various guerilla movements over the ages.”

  During the Tauran Union’s failed invasion, Marciano had gotten his orders to attack into the Balboan province of Valle de las Lunas late, almost as if he and his command were an afterthought. By the time he’d been able to get any combat power approaching the Balboan border, the battle had already been lost. At that point, discretion had seemed much the better part of valor. He’d pulled back to his defensive positions, hoping like hell that the Balboans hadn’t noticed how close he’d come to invading them.

  That was not cowardice, but sheer realism. If so much as one of his men had stepped foot, officially, across the border, Balboa would have been perfectly within its rights to turn its entire, huge, army against him and Santa Josefina, which had violated the core premise of neutrality, both.

  But, thought the Tuscan commander, of course we didn’t violate Balboa’s borders. We only almost did. And came close enough that they surely intend to get us out of here, too.

  “And that, Mr. President,” said the Tuscan, “is why you are screwed. You brought us in, because you had no army of your own, and thought that there would be no consequences. But the Tauran Union had its own agenda, and that agenda has made you an enemy of Balboa.”