The Rods and the Axe - eARC

by Tom Kratman

“What, dammit?” demanded the admiral.

  “They . . . they can range . . . they can range . . . if it’s not a bluff they can range . . .”

  “WHAT!”

  “Between seventy and one hundred kiloyards. And . . . Admiral? It looks like we’re a prime target.”

  Wanyan was about to say, “Ignore it; nobody can hit at that distance.” Then he recalled the other common purpose of lasers and wanted to say, instead, “Shit! Bring her about. Turn the fleet about. Smoke.” Lastly, he remembered that, come right down to it, his cruiser, the destroyers, and the frigates couldn’t take the island, but the infantry still waiting in the assault transports could, while the poor bastards on or heading to the beach still needed his fires.

  And, after all, fuck it; at least I have some armor. And we can use smoke.

  Batería Pedro el Cholo, Isla Real, Balboa, Terra Nova

  The two batteries between them manned sixteen guns. One of those, Pham was disgusted to learn, over on Battery Mkhize, was apparently defective. Rather, its railroad mount was. The mount disintegrated under the stress of recoil. Where the shell went . . . it was going to be short.

  Let’s hope the infantry blame it on the enemy.

  Being artillery, Pham only had two medics for one battery and one for the other, another two in an aid station, and two men in a single light wheeled vehicle for evacuation. That vehicle, siren blaring, raced to the position of the shattered gun mount and began treating the wounded, of which there were far too many for the one ambulance to deal with.

  Both Battery Pedro el Cholo and Battery Mkhize had been directed by the Twelfth CDA Brigade headquarters to put their fire on the enemy’s single cruiser. It had, so the intel types said, between fifty millimeters and one hundred and fifty millimeters of armor, depending on where. Most of the ship, the waterline belt, the main turrets, and the barbettes, carried seventy millimeters. Pham thought it likely they could get through that. He was certain they could punch through the deck’s lousy two inches.

  Provided the fucking shells hit, of course. That was a problem. Of the sixteen shells fired in this first volley, one destroyed the carriage of the gun that fired it. The remaining fifteen? It didn’t cheer Pham any that both the defective railway carriage and the shells were the product of Volgan workmanship. It was often quite good, lately, to be sure. But one could never tell when residual socialist principles of production would join socialist principles of accounting to produce a mess.

  Zhong Light Cruiser Taizhou, Mar Furioso, Terra Nova

  Even without using base bleed or rocket assist, themselves, the cruiser’s guns outranged what the shorter, land-bound 180mm guns could do by about eight kilometers, unless the latter were firing either RAP or BB. Even so, she wasn’t at maximum range, but at perhaps two thirds of that, a bit over twenty-five kilometers, from the summit of Hill 287. Range probable error increased greatly after certain ranges and, since Taizhou was firing dangerously close to her own men, desperately trying to carve out a beachhead ashore, it seemed worth it to avoid blasting friendlies.

  Fifteen shells were targeted at Taizhou, though the radar wasn’t quite good enough to distinguish several from several others. Still, the nine the cruiser initially thought were incoming were bad enough. Of the fifteen, four went awry, gods-alone knew why. In any case, between the island and the ship, they went into the drink. That was actually less cheering to Taizhou’s captain and Admiral Wanyan than it might have been. Two of the four were shells they hadn’t been able to detect initially. And how many more are there that we can’t see?

  Of the remaining eleven, of which the ship could see, “Seven, no, nine . . . no, eight . . . no, seven,” one hit the conning tower a glancing blow, which the tower’s six full inches of good quality steel armor just shrugged off. The shell flew off, exploding well away in the distance.

  “Good girl,” said the captain, patting his ship affectionately.

  Four landed in the water—three to port and one to starboard—close enough to drench any crewman who happened to be on deck when they detonated down in the depths. They were not close enough to buckle the hull, or even inconvenience it.

  Two did hit the water close enough to the hull to cause the ship to spring a couple of leaks. They were nothing serious, though; damage control would have had the leaks under control in minutes.

  Another shell hit the bow, ahead of the waterline belt of armor. The metal here was thin and weak enough that the arrow shell passed almost completely through before it detonated. The damage was more obvious than real, since the bow remained intact from just a few feet above the water line. Not even the ship’s speed was likely to be affected. The jackstaff, on the other hand, was a total loss.

  One no one had a clue to. It simply disappeared, unreckoned and unrecognized.

  The last two, though, hit Y Turret, the sternmost 180mm triple. Of these, one was, like the hit on the con, something of a glancing blow. Unlike the first case, however, the shell, 122mm in diameter and roughly a meter and three quarters long, didn’t dive off into the sea. Instead, it punched through the deck armor, passed through several more decks, and exploded next to the mechanism controlling the portside rudder. This really didn’t matter, though, because the other shell did not glance off. Instead it penetrated the turret roof, one of the recoil mechanisms, the deck below, the deck below that, and finally set itself off in the magazine below Turret Y.

  The explosion started large and grew larger, as first the roughly nine kilograms of HE inside the shell went off, which set off about one hundred bags of propellant, which in turn set off several dozen shells each as powerful as the Balboan shell that had achieved penetration.

  Headquarters, Eighth Fortress Legion, Isla Real, Balboa, Terra Nova

  Puercel and Carrera, along with the bulk of the legate’s headquarters command, saw the result on one of the wall-mounted plasma screens, being fed by a hovering RPV. Though it was being recorded for posterity and propaganda, which recording would allow slow motion and detailed analysis of the events, from the point of view of those watching now it all seemed to unfold in an instant. There was a flash of light as the shell forced its way into the enemy turret, but almost instantly, that turret was blown into the air, even as the ship’s stern quarters was severed—just like that, just that quickly . . . as if by an invisible, albeit ragged bladed, guillotine—being blown rearward even as the forward sections were blasted forward.

  “Hooolllyyy shshshiiittt!” said one of the headquarters troops, giving voice to the common feeling.

  Then the room reverberated with cheers. “Got ’em . . . hahaha . . . fuckers . . . teach you . . . hahaha!”

  Puercel didn’t join in the cheers. Staring at the markers for the Zhong fleet on the floor, the legate wondered, Do I have them give it another volley or what? I don’t see it being able to fire in that condition, the thing’s immobile and unstable. But if it is their command and control ship . . .

  He looked at Carrera, who simply said, “It’s written somewhere: Never do an enemy a small injury.”

  “Fire until she sinks or is burning stem to stern,” ordered Puercel.

  Beach Green Two, Isla Real, Balboa, Terra Nova

  Wu found what the obstacle was the hard way, though not the hardest way. The hardest way was the landing craft to his right, which hit a mine and had its forward third nearly disintegrated in a fiery cloud. His craft, on the other hand, merely hit a sharpened I-beam, driven into the sea bottom, that punched through the thin hull, causing the boat to impale itself as it lifted out of the water.

  Wu was about to order the coxswain to drop the ramp when a series of bullets, striking close together.stitched across the ramp’s forward side. He had a momentary vision of massacre inside the boat as a machine gun simply concentrated its fire on the opening that would be left by the dropping of the ramp.

  “Over the side!” the major shouted. “Get over the side and wade in!”

  Zhong Light Cruiser Taizhou, Mar Furioso, Terra Nova


  Even through the armor, the blast was enough to send Wanyan and his entire staff to the deck, then let them rise puking and shaking, and wiping blood from under noses. Some remained on the deck, holding broken limbs stationary or trying to staunch the flow of blood from split scalps or exposed bone splinters. One of the men on Wanyan’s staff was beating a radio with his fist. The admiral assumed the radio was out.

  The admiral knew he had a serious decision to make. Do I transfer my flag or tough it out here? Unsteadily, he walked across the swaying and bobbing deck to the hatchway. This he undogged and passed through, then climbed up a series of ladders to topside. Then, once topside, Wanyan was better able to assess the damage. It was bad. All the antennas are gone, it seems. All the radar dishes twisted and knocked over. The conning tower is . . . bent. I must see if the captain survived . . .

  Neither of the remaining turrets was firing. Cowardice or . . .

  As Wanyan made his way forward, he scanned to sea. Taizhou was plainly not the only ship hit. It was too far to identify individual ships with the unaided eye, but there were at least five columns of smoke rising from the gunlines, between the cruiser and the island. Even as Wanyan watched, one of the columns of smoke was replaced by a great explosion, while two more columns began to rise.

  A destroyer of one of the newer classes pulled up alongside. Wanyan noted that it pulled up in the lee of the greater ship, on the side facing away from the storm of fire from shore. “Ahoy, Taizhou, can we assist? This is the Yiyang, standing by to assist.”

  Wise captain, thought the admiral.

  Already, sailors of the Taizhou were bringing their wounded comrades up and helping them across to the destroyer.

  A fresh salvo came in. Wanyan didn’t try to count the hits, though they were many. Since a couple of the hits seemed to be on or around the turrets, and since there were explosions from below that made the ship jump and quiver, and since the whole thing didn’t go up in a fiery flash, Wanyan decided that the lack of fire from the remaining turrets probably meant that the captain, or the surviving senior officers, or perhaps some clever ensign on damage control, had ordered the magazines flooded.

  And that, assuming I survive, is how my report will read.

  But survival? That is a tricky proposition.

  “Ahoy, Yiyang,” shouted the admiral across the gap, “This is Wanyan. I am transferring my flag to you. Prepare to receive and assume duties . . .”

  Batería Pedro el Cholo, Isla Real, Balboa, Terra Nova

  The guns’ rate of fire was actually quite slow, a round a minute for the first three minutes, a round every two minutes thereafter. In fact, though, it was that quick only for a stationary target, which the two Cochinese batteries didn’t have anymore. Relaying the guns for a moving target was quite intricate and time consuming, reducing their practical volume of fire to about one round every five or six minutes.

  Content that the guns would be well served, Tribune Pham sauntered into the ammunition bunker to oversee the fire direction center. This took data—generally polar data, a direction and distance from the forward observers, plus target type, direction, and speed—and converted it into charge, elevation and deflection data for the guns. He’d been drilling both gun crews and FDC silly, ever since they’d assumed their molelike existence, in the dark and damp concrete shelter.

  “New target, Dai Uy,” announced the FDC chief, using their own language’s rough equivalent for Pham’s Balboan rank. “The bitch finally sank.”

  “What’s this one? Both batteries or just one?”

  “Splitting both batteries, Dai Uy. Two troopships each for us and Battery Mkhize. We should . . .”

  Whatever the FDC chief was about to say was lost as a flurry of shells—ten or fifteen, was Pham’s impression—landed on or around the pads outside the ammunition bunkers. A crescendo of screams arose immediately following. The tribune raced outside to assess the damage. His first thought was, Thank Jesus for defilade. The hill to the north, behind which half the battery sheltered, was covered with thick black smoke where many of the shells had impacted.

  Even so, enough had come in to do some damage. One of the 180mm carriages was overturned, and at least a dozen men in Pham’s view were down, dead or wounded he couldn’t say, really.

  Except for Thieu, thought the tribune, with a mental tsk. Missing the top half of one’s head generally means dead. Unless you’re a general, in which case, of course, brains aren’t really needed.

  UEPF Spirit of Peace, in orbit over Terra Nova

  Marguerite had taken the empress aboard her shuttle and up to her flagship once it became obvious that the peace conference had successfully failed to bring about peace. She wanted to watch the action from that vantage point, of course, but as importantly she wanted to gift her true love with a dozen or so years off her true age. The Taurans could use the lesson of that, as well.

  Unsurprisingly, Xingzhen was already so utterly beautiful that the rejuvenation added nothing to her looks at all, even if it made her look slightly younger. Still, A dozen years off her age is a dozen more years I can have her in my bed, a fine dozen years indeed. That is, it will be fine if she doesn’t have a stroke over the disaster unfolding below.

  Xingzhen, not just shaken but visibly shaking, asked the high admiral, “Can you get me communication with my admiral, below? Most men are weaklings and insistence is usually the fix.”

  Zhong Destroyer Yiyang, Mar Furioso, Terra Nova

  Aboard the Yiyang, Wanyan and what had been saved from his staff took over CIC, pushing the ship’s own captain up to the bridge. Being back in communication, hence able to evaluate the damage, led Wanyan inexorably to several unpleasant conclusions. Of these, the worst were that the assault on the island was a lost cause, the Marines landed there already doomed. He could not extract any substantial numbers of them, and he could not risk the ships that would have had to stay, oh, way too close to the island, to do so. Maybe they could hang on to the tadpole’s tail and maybe he could keep them supplied there.

  Maybe. For a while. It will be hard. Even for just a while.

  And, no doubt, the Taurans could be bribed into taking out that damned artillery that’s made such a hash of us. But so what? I cannot take the island without the Marines and they will not survive the time it takes for the Taurans to do that. So the island campaign is a failure, no matter what.

  But we can still rescue something. We can—

  Wanyan’s operations officer, reduced to manning a radio even while preparing and issuing orders, stood up to attention at the desk he’d taken over.

  “Admiral,” said Ops, pointing at the huge radio set resting in front of him. “it’s Her Imperial Majesty. She’s calling from . . .” Ops turned eyes and that single finger skyward. With the other hand Ops took off his headset and passed it over to Admiral Wanyan.

  “Yes, Your Majesty?” said Wanyan.

  The empress immediately launched into a shrieking condemnation of the Navy, the Imperial Marine Corps, and Wanyan himself. She finished with, “You will not retreat. You will take that island. If not, let none come back alive, especially to include yourself.”

  Quietly, hopelessly, the admiral answered, “Yes, Your Majesty. Whatever can be done shall be done. Or I will not come back alive.”

  Headquarters, Eighth Fortress Legion, Isla Real, Balboa, Terra Nova

  By ones and twos, fives and tens, the floor-bound ship markers that had begun to turn away from the island began turning back.

  Now I wonder why that is, thought Carrera. You have to know your plan’s in ruin. Civilian interference? War may be too important a matter to leave to generals, as that Old Earth frog said, but it’s far too important a matter to leave to civilians, except to the question of war or peace. And not even always then.

  But a fight to a finish is what you’re ordered to, are you? That works well for me, if I’ve weighed the matter well and properly. For I do not think you could take this island with ten times the f
orce if you had ten years to do it in. What you need to take it is what nobody has anymore, or I’d certainly not have put so much effort into trying to hold the place.

  I confess, if you had what’s needed, a dozen heavily armored, great-gunned Dreadnoughts, things that could economically shatter my concrete, and take and shrug off my artillery . . . well . . . I don’t know what I’d have done.

  Carrera was torn from his reveries by Puercel, speaking on a radio to the commander of Tenth Tercio, “Hold off for now,” the fortress commander ordered. “For as long as they want to keep feeding men into the sausage grinder, we’ll keep turning the crank. But I need you and your men to hold and shelter down, for the time when cranking’s not enough and we have to stuff them into the casing.”

  Beach Green Two, Isla Real, Balboa, Terra Nova

  For Wu and those with him the wade forward was a sheer nightmare. Nothing in training had prepared them for it, for the crack of the bullets, the geysering spouts of water . . . most especially not for the red-leaking men floating in the surf. By the time he reached shore the major had barely the strength to throw himself onto the sand. To his left and right front were two tanks, one simply seemed dead while the other’s turret was off, lying nearby. The latter light tank burned furiously.

  There Wu lay for long moments, behind three piled bodies, waiting for his soul to return to his body. Gradually the major became aware of the presence of others, others who lived, and who were as weakened and stuck as he was. Then he became aware of the deadly crumpcrumpCRUMP of incoming mortars. Lastly he became aware of some reserve of strength inside himself, hitherto hidden. He thought for a moment upon the source. Then he found it; it was duty. And not just duty to himself and his men, but to his wife and unborn child.