Read The Rods and the Axe - eARC Online
Authors: Tom Kratman
Tags: #Fiction, #Science Fiction, #General, #Action & Adventure, #military
We weep for your loss as for our own. And we weep for our own very much. Perhaps together, joined in heart by our losses, we can achieve the peace that the bureaucratic elites have denied us.
God be with you.
Sincerely,
Raul Parilla
Presidente de la Republica
Khalid smiled, then began folding the letter to place it in an envelope. He wondered,
Did they deliberately misspell young Czauderna’s name in the official report, so that the TU couldn’t get to this woman in advance? Or did they leave his name off the list? And if they left some names off the lists, did they deliberately obfuscate others . . . all precisely so there would be an opportunity to show Balboa as gracious and merciful, and the TU, and even the national governments, as cold, heartless, inefficient, and contemptible.
Oh, wicked, wicked, WICKED, men.
Hotel
Cielo Dorado
, Aserri, Santa Josefina, Terra Nova
So that’s the bitch
, thought Lourdes, looking over Wallenstein, standing in the reception line,
that my husband, my president, and my country are at war with. Not bad looking, if a little pale.
Wallenstein, on the other hand, took one look at Lourdes’ magnificently large, brown-bordering-on-golden eyes, and thought,
He has much to fight for, my enemy.
The reception was hosted by the embassy of United Earth. Hence it was Lourdes being presented to Wallenstein, followed by the ambassador from the Tauran Union, followed by Janier. Lourdes was polite to all three. Even so, when she got to Janier she hit him with a withering expression of sympathy.
Janier, being a Gaul, had an amazing capacity for arrogance, on the one hand, and gracious charm, on the other. He took her hand, kissed it lightly, the merest brush, then said, “My compliments to your husband, madam, not only for his battlefield victories but for his impeccable taste in choosing a wife.”
Hard not to like the bastard
, Lourdes thought.
Then again, Patricio said he found the frog likeable enough when they met on the boat to work out an attempt at peace, so . . .
Unfortunately, unlike my husband on the yacht, I am not here to create a peace but to sabotage one. The only question is whether it’s better to do that by being sweet, by being a bitch, or by mixing and matching to suit. My instincts say, “mix and match.” So it’s politeness to the frog, for now.
“Why thank you, General,” she replied. “My husband has often said what a shame it was that the arrangements you and he worked out failed due to bureaucratic ignorance and cowardice. He’s also said that, had you been in Balboa during the battles, the issue would have been more in doubt.”
Yeah, about three percent more in doubt. Maybe.
Oh, all right; maybe I have a wife’s prejudice.
Matthias Esterhazy was likewise in the line. He said little, even less than did Lourdes. Instead, he spent his energy on sizing up the opposition. He had considerable experience at that, some in his native Sachsen, more as Carrera’s traveling envoy.
UEPF? That twat Wallenstein wants the war to continue
, he thought, accurately enough.
But it’s damned hard to think of her as an ally. Her ambassador, if in fact the cunt is
her
ambassador, has “earnest desire for peace” written all over. Never dealt with an Old Earth Kosmo before, but I suppose it’s possible she’s sincere. The Tauran ambassador—what was that eunuch’s name? I’ll get it later—is terrified of continuing the war, his organization being discredited and possibly disbanded, and his being out of a job. He reeks of it. He’s got no faith in war as an instrument, let alone in war and the military as
his
instruments. Janier? Putting on a brave show, got to admire that. But he doesn’t want the war to continue. He wants . . . if I had to guess, I’d say that he wants a peaceful retirement and a chance to write the memoirs that will lay all the blame for the loss of Balboa on the bureaucrats of the TU.
Esterhazy looked around for the Zhong empress. He’d expected her in the receiving line and was terribly surprised she wasn’t there. Then he did see her, pretending to be someone unimportant, standing by the bar. He finished passing the line and started to walk over. He stopped about halfway to the bar, thinking,
If she wants to pretend to be unimportant, who am I to blow her cover?
Instead, the Sachsen went to the bar, got a drink, said no more than, “Good evening, madam,” to Xingzhen, then went to a wall and parked himself, looking for the patterns of human interaction.
Matthias searched for those patterns, then found something he absolutely was not looking for.
Holy fuck!
He practically bounced from the wall. He had to keep himself from trotting over to Lourdes. When he reached her he leaned over her shoulder and whispered in her ear, “Do not let yourself be startled. But that portrait hanging on the wall over the fireplace in the
Casa
Linda? Well look at the short young brown woman hanging out near the high admiral.”
Lourdes looked and whispered, though only to herself, “Holy fuck, they could have been sisters.”
Gym
Dorado,
Cedral Multiplex Shopping Mall, Aserri,
Santa Josefina, Terra Nova
The embassy of United Earth had a gym, not too shabbily equipped, but that was inconvenient to get to from the hotel. The hotel had a gym, but it was nothing much as such things tend not to be. There was also, unsurprisingly, a gym at the mall. Better, it was down in the basement, and didn’t have those plate glass windows to incite passersby into joining. Better still, there were multiple entrances. Best of all, it had, besides the usual machines and free weights, an angled track, pool, showers, locker rooms, and sauna. And it was close. Walking there, though, Esmeralda found several more of those posters with Taurans with horns growing from their berets.
“The important thing,” said Esmeralda to Aragon, as they sat amidst the thick steam of the sauna, “is that my admiral definitely wants the war to continue.”
“Why does she hate us so?” asked Aragon.
The cabin girl and sometimes lieutenant, junior grade shook her head emphatically. “She doesn’t. She doesn’t even dislike you. I might go so far as to say she admires you or, at least, your chief. But she has a problem and only sees one way to solve it long term.
“The problem is that . . . well . . . you would have to have lived there to understand. I’ll try to paint you a picture. Old Earth is screwed. There are wide swaths fallen to our own, home grown, barbarians. Where it’s still civilized about a fifth of the area is under religious lunatics. They sacrifice
people
, Cass, to their old gods. Or they do it to terrorize the people they rule. They almost did it to me and they
did
do it to my sister. Killed her, cut her heart out on the Altar of Peace, and then ate her.”
Esmeralda said it clinically. Cass Aragon could still feel the hate like an undercurrent, subtle but powerfully insistent.
I believe you, sweetie. And I’m sorry.
“The highest castes,” Esmeralda continued, “the Class Ones, do no work. They don’t even supervise. They’re on continuous vacation. And always, as befits their caste, first class.
“All the real work, all the work above obtaining raw materials and food, gets done by the Twos and Threes; the high admiral was a two, though she was elevated to Class One before coming back here. I’m not sure why.
“A lot of the low level work gets done by slaves. I haven’t seen it, but I’ve heard the high admiral railing against the
latifundia
on Atlantis base, where it’s almost all slave labor.
“The slaves are even below class sixes. They have no rights at all. Buy, sell, beat, kill . . . nobody cares. My family, until we ran afoul of the Castro-Nyeres, was at least free. Well, free unless some of the soldiers caught you, when they could do whatever they liked with you . . .”
“And you?” asked Aragon, meaning was Esmeralda ever caught by the soldiers.
“Oh, yeah,” the girl answered. “Often enough. The first time I was only eleven. My father didn’t find out until I was fourteen. He killed a couple of Count Castro-Nyere’s soldiers. He was killed, in turn, then my mother, my sister, and I were taken as slaves. I don’t know what happened to our mother. My sister I told you about. And me . . . I was saved by the high admiral.”
“And you feel guilty that you’re betraying her?” Aragon asked.
“Yes,” Esmeralda answered, simply, staring down at the sauna’s wooden floor.
“She’s trying to change things there,” the girl insisted. “She really is! She’s trying to get in a position where she can change things there.”
“At our expense?” asked Cass.
“At your expense,” admitted Esmeralda.
“Go back to what you started to say before you started talking about United Earth. What are the high admiral’s plans for Terra Nova?”
“She want to set up what she calls ‘a great power system,’ where five roughly equal powers run the planet, but stymie each other. She says it has to be five or it won’t work.”
“I can probably guess,” said Aragon, “but what are the five?”
“The Federated States,” Esmeralda began, “the Tauran Union, The Volgan Empire, the Zhong Empire, and the Peace Fleet.”
“Not Colombia Latina? Not Uhuru?”
“She doesn’t believe in miracles.”
“Not Yamato?”
“They’re an appetizer for the Zhong and a way to break up the current Federated States-Zhong love fest. Hmmm . . . speaking of the Zhong, the high admiral and the Zhong Empress have a thing going on . . . which, come to think of it, suggests that the high admiral maybe
does
believe in miracles.”
CHAPTER NINE
Fight the enemy with the weapons he lacks.
—Alexander Suvarov
Tauran Defense Agency, Lumière, Gaul, Terra Nova
A yawning Jan still suffered from jet lag. This wouldn’t have happened had she taken a two day journey by airship from Balboa to the Tauran Union; then there’d have been enough time to get used to the time difference gently. It wouldn’t have happened, but she’d not have been reporting in for another day and a half.
Better this way.
Instead of that, though, the TU used a smallish airship to transfer the wounded to Cienfuegos. From there they boarded regular jets to get them home as quickly as possible. One might well have doubted, and Jan Campbell certainly did doubt, that the bureaucrats who ran the TU really cared much about the welfare of the troops or their families. What they did care about, however, were the political implications, exacerbated by a press they considered largely rogue, if the troops were not returned soonest.
“So far as I am aware,” Jan told the debriefing officer who’d met her at the airport and taken her to TDA Headquarters immediately, before she’d even had a chance to shower, “nobody who was in the Tunnel at
Cerro Mina
survived. Few people who were anywhere near the hill when the Balboans took it survived. I and my sergeant major only survived because we got off the hill as it was falling. So, no, I doubt your de Villepin survived.”
The debriefing officer, a Gallic Gendarmerie captain named Fourier, seemed intent on what had happened to the largely Gallic staff that had been inside the Tunnel. He didn’t seem to care much about the others.
But then, to be fair,
thought Jan,
I hardly give a shit about the Gauls, either.
There were a number of gendarmeries in the world, though not always called that. Gaul had one, as did Tuscany, Castile, Lusitania, Volga, Valdivia, and about fifty other states. Some were better; some were worse. Some were corrupt; others incorruptible. What they shared was that they were an armed military or quasi-military force, with training as both police and soldiers, with duties to enforce law among a civilian population, and a more military attitude to casualties, whether their own, of the civilians among whom they operated, of criminals, or armed foreign enemies.
Some were more military than others, of course, and some were so military they were formed into paratrooper and mechanized brigades. Carrera had once joked with a general of the Federated States Army about having “Low Altitude Riot Control Aircraft” and “Heavy Armored Community Relations Vehicles.” Among some of Terra Nova’s gendarmeries, that would not have been much, if anything, of a joke.
“Very sad, then,” answered Fourier. “Well, his family will be taken care of, if they need it, which I doubt.
“Now what about this massacre I hear happened?” the gendarme asked.
“I didn’t see it,” Jan replied. “I heard rumors of it, then got some details from one of their senior noncoms. Their chief of intelligence also said something to me to suggest the rumors are true. As to the whys; the Balboan launched an attack with their female infantry unit, or a part of it, that attack was beaten off and destroyed, with heavy casualties, and when male Balboan infantry went in, with more support and after more time to prepare, and saw the dead and wounded women, they killed everything they could get their hands on. At least, that’s what I heard.”
“How,” asked Fourier, “would anyone report that if the Balboans killed everybody?”
“The Balboans themselves,” Jan said.
“Mmmm . . . well . . . maybe,” the gendarme admitted. “I’d still wonder how it happened.”
“It’s not so hard to understand,” Jan said, “Not for anybody who understands anything about men in battle. One soldier, or a couple, get out of hand; the reason hardly matters. Some people who might be inclined to surrender instead run. There being no obligation to let an enemy escape, some people fire at the ones fleeing. Regular soldiers, basically herd animals as almost all people are herd animals, then figure the herd had collectively decided on atrocity and they just go along.”
Fourier spent a few minutes thinking that over, chin cupped in his left hand and fingers drumming his cheek. “I think,” he said, “that you should not mention this, nor mention any rumors you heard. We are close enough to war already, a war that is in no way in the interests of the Tauran Union nor any of its member states to recommence. Why should we”—he shrugged—“add to the tensions?
“I agree with you, by the way, on how it typically happens. But besides that, the problem with war crimes charges and trials is that, outside of a few crimes that are indistinguishable from civil crimes—rape, murder, theft, and such—every other soldier who engages in a war crime has an almost pat insanity defense. Most of the rest have pat defenses of mistake. Or coercion. Though few or none of our idiot lawyers in the Cosmopolitan Criminal Court can see any of that.
“We lost so many intelligence personnel in Balboa,” the gendarme continued, “that I find myself seconded back to the armed forces for intelligence work. This is what I did when I was in the regular armed force, so one can understand. In any case, here I find myself, debriefing you and any other of the returnees who might have something useful to say.
“I also must say that you are the first. The others can tell us something of Balboan fighting qualities, which are, so I gather, not contemptible . . .”
Jan went into a fit on laughter at that, before recovering and agreeing, “No, not contemptible.”
“Well,” Fournier continued, “they can tell us that and they can tell us something of Balboan medical practices, but that’s all.
“Now tell me what
you
have seen, since you were not confined to a hospital.
“This will be better done with a map,” Campbell said.
Sachsen, Tauran Union, Terra Nova
Khalid hadn’t chosen this particular post office box from a map, but because there were no surveillance cameras nearby; of that, he’d made very sure. Better, still, on half a dozen reconnaissance drives past it he had never once seen a policeman.
Security was important, but timing was everything. Khalid had the sequence of events down pat.
First, I mail the letters and checks to people we have good reason to believe the various Tauran governments have not informed of the death of a loved one, because they don’t know, because we didn’t tell them . . . or didn’t tell them accurately. That’s only a couple of dozen.
After passing the post office box outside the
Ratskeller
of the town of
Nievenheim,
Khalid parked the rental van, stepped out, took a single box containing twenty-four stuffed envelopes, and then walked over and fed the contents into the post office box.
“Shot,” he said, as the envelopes tumbled in.
Now I drive to the campground north of Mogons, and wait overnight. Tomorrow, the letters to the families of the resurrected go out. Oh, wicked,
wicked
men.
And so much for that apartment. Fortunately, the rent’s paid six months in advance.
Lenneberger Grosser Sand, south of Mogons,
Sachsen, Tauran Union, Terra Nova
There was probably no greater proof of the Noahs’ intent to create on Terra Nova a nature preserve
cum
animal and plant sanctuary than the Lenneberger Grosser Sand. Though there had never been, so far as could be determined, a glacial period in Terra Novan history, there had been plants on Earth, in the vicinity of the city of Mainz, which depended on the sandy environment created by the last of the glaciers. This environment, grass-covered sand dunes, basically, had been recreated here, south of what would eventually become Mogons, Sachsen, and it had been done without any glaciation at all. It was at a campground fronting this area that Khalid had set up his tent.
The morning sun was at about forty-five degrees by the time Khalid roused himself. His sleep had been lousy, continuously interrupted by two gay guys, one apparently named “Stuart” or maybe “Slade”—it was hard to be sure, what with the slurred speech—and the other named or nicknamed “Thanas,” buggering each other in a nearby tent until all hours of the night and early morning. Then, too, it was possible there were three or four rather than two. The only line he could be sure of was, “Oh, my, that’s a big one.”
Khalid, a Druze, was somewhat more tolerant of such activity than some. What he was not tolerant of was having his sleep interrupted. Only the fact that he had a more important mission kept the two, or four, buggerers alive.
Ah, well, joke ’em if they can’t take a fuck.
Still, it was in a foul mood that Khalid drove the few miles to the center of Mogons. He stopped at the first postal receptacle he came to, got out, and deposited the six score envelopes of the resurrected. Then he immediately got back into the rental and headed for Mauer, a university town on the River Nikros. There he simply parked and dozed, waiting for night.
The Sachsen are efficient
, thought Khalid,
in their postal services as in everything else. The people in Target List One, should be getting their envelopes right about now.
Mettmann, Sachsen, Tauran Union, Terra Nova
Frau Lang, an older woman, heavyset, and gone to gray, opened the official looking envelope, and read the first sentence. Immediately, she gave off an inarticulate cry and collapsed in a heap by her front door. The door was still open and the cry, if inarticulate, was still loud enough to be heard by the neighbors. If was mere minutes before the first of the neighbors arrived to investigate. By that time, the initial shock had lessened enough for her to begin to weep, to moan, and even to get out a few words.
“My son, my son, my son, he is fallen!”
“But how?” asked her next door neighbor, Frau Muckenfuss. “The government told you he was safe and a prisoner.”
Frau
Lang drew in several deep breaths, finding in the effort a little moral strength, too.
“They
lied!
” hissed the stricken mother. “My David was killed. The enemy, or the enemy of the Tauran Union, told me as much.”
“How can you believe the enemy?” asked Frau
Muckenfuss.
“They have
no reason
to lie! Only our own people, the ones who brought this disaster upon us, upon me, have a reason.”
Frau
Muckenfuss took the letter from the other woman’s hands. She read until . . . “Yes, yes, it does have the ring of truth to it . . .”
One of the other neighbors,
Frau
Pfannkuchen, picked up the envelop and looked inside. She drew a very official looking check from it. “I don’t know anything about the letter, but this certainly looks real enough.”
“The letter says they were sending a death gratuity,” said
Frau
Muckenfuss. “I suppose it
is
real.”
“I don’t care about that,” Frau Lang sniffed, “I want my son back.”
“Maybe a mistake was made by somebody,” said
Frau
Pfannkuchen, consolingly.
“If so, it was made by the idiot frogs running the Tauran Union,” said Frau Muckenfuss, who had never been enthused about the Tauran presence in Balboa. “I’m calling the
Tagesstern
,” she added. “This kind of incompetence—no, it’s not just that; it’s also heartlessness—cannot be allowed to stand.”
“Splash,” said Khalid, watching the demonstration on the television, over a beer, in a guesthouse west of the city of Mauer. It gave fair promise of turning violent.
Now I can dump everything into the system.
Tauran Defense Agency, Lumière, Gaul, Terra Nova
“Do you think they were putting on a show?” asked Fournier. The map was laid out on the desk, between himself and Campbell.
Jan blinked, in surprise. After so many hours of debriefing, and with the jet lag, she was nearing complete collapse. Even so, the question gave her a moment of alertness. And besides, she already had experience of the bloody Gauls torturing data to come up with the politically desired answer.
“Show?” she asked. “What kind of show?”
“Letting you see some heavy fortifications, to convince you that they were unconquerable?”
She was about to snap at the gendarme, but, exhausted or not, she had to admit the Balboans had shown some ability to date with disinformation. It was a fair question. She answered it fairly, too.
“I don’t think so,” she said. “For one thing, they were building the Parilla Line years ago. I can’t say that any of the reports got sent here, but I read them when I was at Fort Muddville. The line was fairly heavy, if not as deep—in either sense—as it might have been. The mines I saw them laying were real enough, and the care they took in arming them seemed pretty real, too.”
“But why does it face north when we, the obvious main enemy, would be coming from the south?”
Jan nodded. “I understand that. There was a Sachsen I spoke to, there where we were building ‘antianimal ditches,’ who thought that logistically, an attack from the south would be very difficult. He thought the Balboans thought it might be impossible. So that might explain why the fortifications face away from us.
“Then, too . . .”
“Yes?” prodded the Gaul.
“Maybe they’re absurdly good at predicting events. We all know at this point they’re no slouches, but maybe they’re better than that, even.”
“And?”
“We want peace now, yes?”
“Yes.”
Sometimes extreme fatigue can induce confusion. Sometimes, though, it can induce clarity, and even insight. For the moment, at least, Campbell thought it was giving her an insight. “Well, as near as I could tell from the limited news I could see, the Zhong don’t. All those fortifications could be aimed at wearing out a Zhong invasion. That would explain the layers, wouldn’t it? First that uncrackable nut—or nearly so—of an island fortress out in the
Mar Furioso.
That bleeds the Zhong. Then the battle for the city. Then the Parilla Line. Then Fortress Cristobal. Even the Zhong might get sick of the butcher’s bill before they won out.”
Fournier shook his head doubtfully. “No . . . it’s tempting, but no. I’ve had access to the views from space of the battle in Balboa. They did not predict us; they baited us. The bait was their existing military structure, the hidden hooks were the battalions of cadets they had been preparing for—well, you tell me; how long did they spend, how much effort, in advance, getting those hides for their cadets set up?”