The Rods and the Axe - eARC

by Tom Kratman

  He grabbed one of the fluttering pieces of paper, saw what it was, and said, “Christ! Becken and Franck are no longer the highest paid men on that field.”

  “It’s fucking MONEY!” screamed one of the soccer hooligans of the Sachsen side, as he snatched one of the fluttering greenish pieces out of the air. Less certain, after the first impulse, he felt it between thumb and fingers . . . Yep, pure cotton.

  “It’s a fucking hundred Tauro note!” the hooligan screamed.

  “They’re all large notes,” said one of his compatriots, softly, gazing with wonder at another Tauro bill, this one a yellow two hundred, graced with the image of a mythical bridge.

  They’d been looking down at the notes. Spontaneously, they both started to look up to where the money had come from. One the way, their eyes, the eyes of forty thousand people, caught about forty thousand Gauls beginning to stream onto the field, where most of the money was blizzarding down.

  With a gasp of outraged shock and horror, roughly five hundred Sachsen soccer hooligans charged onto the field. With no more than a moment’s delay, thirty-nine thousand, five hundred, give or take, solid, upright, honest, law-abiding Sachsen citizens joined them where they met forty thousand-odd Gauls in a battle the likes of which the continent had not seen since the close of the Great Global War, generations before.

  Thanas had only one recognized talent. He was just emerging from the service area, under the grandstands, where he’d spent the last hour and change in a men’s room exercising it, giving oral sex to a fairly large selection of fairly random men, few of whom spoke German all that well. Ignoring his first, sensibly cowardly, instinct to run from the hubbub, he hesitated just that fraction of a second before his innate cowardice could take over. Thus, he was caught up in the flood of the mob until it spilled over the playing field walls, dragging him with it.

  Unlike those who were leaping over, eager to come to grips with the hated, and now doubly hated, Gaul, Thanas didn’t want to go. This caused him to land not on his feet, but on his shoulder, which broke. He screamed like a baby with a long unchanged diaper. This wasn’t helped when he realized how much danger he was in and really did need a diaper, or at least an underwear, change. For a moment, as the crowd surged past him, leaving him alone, he tried to scramble over the walls but, one armed, just couldn’t do it. He’d probably have been well enough off if he’d simply lain down again. Standing, he drew the attention of three other young men who, since they’d started off in the cheap seats, hadn’t a prayer of getting to either the bulk of the money or the nexus of the action. Those young men weren’t at all happy about it. They were also members of the same hooligan club, a fact easily discerned by their severe haircuts, black club uniform, heavy pull-on boots, and displays of archaic silver insignia few in Sachsen could have identified.

  These three took one look at Thanas, decided—not with reason—Schwul, and, feeling the desperate need to beat someone to death, began to stalk him.

  Thanas slammed his back to the wall and put up his one good arm. The first of the hooligans to reach him grabbed his hand and bent in downward, so abruptly that the wrist broke, leaving the hand flapping. Thanas opened his mouth to scream, but a fist wearing multiple rings smashed into it, breaking off several teeth. Tears running from his eyes, Thanas sank to the turf, vainly trying to protect his savaged face with his useless arms. A kick to the chest pulled the arms away from his head automatically. Gagging and choking and gasping for air, he rolled over on his side. The next kick was to his head, after which Thanas knew nothing at all as the three hooligans stomped and kicked him to rags and pulp.

  And the cameras caught it all.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  The contest on our side is not one of rivalry or vengeance, but of endurance. It is not those who can inflict the most, but those who can suffer the most who will conquer.

  —Mayor Terence MacSwiney, Lord Mayor of Cork, October 25, 1920

  Tauran Defense Agency Headquarters, Lumière, Gaul, Terra Nova

  Condor One had already gone off over the local Stadium, Josephine Park, with effects not dissimilar to, if not quite as satisfying as, those from the Sicherheitsgruppen Park, in Sachsen. This was only to be expected, given that the former had only just over half the number of the latter. On the other hand, what the participants lacked in numbers they made up for in brainpan spattering enthusiasm; the two teams playing were Anglian and Gallic, and those two groups detested and hated each other from very far back.

  Not every target, though, was moral, as were the four stadium-aimed money attacks. There were others en route, both economic and military, plus one reprisal.

  Three were purely military. One of these was the Tauran Union Defense Agency Headquarters.

  The lower windows were barred but the upper ones were not. The bars dated to a simpler day. Now they were retained mostly for sentiment’s sake. Khalid had noted them, and noted as well their absence above. He’d actually had to spend an extra day in the city to find out if the bars mattered. “They do,” he’d been told.

  As it turned out, though, they didn’t. The office he wanted, that of Lady Elisabeth Ashworth, was on one of the upper floors of the ancient building. Her windows were not barred. Still, it had taken another two days to determine that they were also not special, not bulletproof. “Does that matter?” he’d asked. “Bloody fucking right, it does,” he’d been answered.

  It had been hard enough to find the right office window; the interior layout of the office had been beyond Khalid’s ability and beyond the time he had, having wasted so much, to devote to it.

  Lady Ashworth sat at her accustomed chair, behind her massive desk, facing the window and doing precisely nothing. She hadn’t a clue, not the first clue, what to do. A pure party hack, ennobled as part of a backroom deal, with no education to speak of and no ability beyond self-aggrandizement that anyone had seen much real evidence for, she was a useless time server, drawing a check well above her abilities to earn. Any check, so it was widely believed, would have been above her abilities.

  Besides, the staff spoke mostly French while she had nothing but lower class English to see her through. She was as isolated by that as by anything.

  Staring out the broad window, mindlessly, Lady Ashworth didn’t understand just what that circular thing growing in the window was. The wings gave her the beginning of a clue, but that beginning hadn’t grown to a certainty before the window bowed in, then broke into thousands of shards.

  The shards slashed Ashworth’s face, but before blood could flow, the thing had torn off its own wings, smacked into that massive desk, and pushed both bureau and bureaucrat back against the wall, pinning her and breaking her spine at the same time. Already fishlike of visage, the woman’s mouth opened and closed in agony like a fish tossed on the shore and suffocating.

  She barely noticed when a series of tiny explosive charges blew away four small sections of the thing pinning her and her desk.

  And, of course, since she spoke not a word of French in a largely French-speaking building, she had no clue what it meant when the aircraft—she was dimly coming to awareness that it was an aircraft—squealed, squelched, and a sultry feminine voice said:

  “Votre attention s’il-vous-plaît, je suis une bombe à retardement de cinq minutes. Votre attention s’il-vous-plaît, je suis une bombe à retardement de cinq minutes. Veuillez évacuer la zone. Je suis une bombe à retardement de cinq minutes. Veuillez évacuer la zone. Je suis une grande bombe à retardement de cinq minutes. Mon délai de détonation a été fixé au maximum à cinq minutes mais pourrait bien y être inférieur. Sortez d’ici sur-le-champ. Quatre minutes cinquante-cinq . . . quatre minutes cinquante . . . une minute . . . cinquante-neuf . . . cinquante-huit . . . cinq . . . quatre . . . trois . . . deux . . . adieu.”

  Ashworth was fortunate that the charge killed her outright—and so thoroughly that no trace of her body was ever found—because the charge was mixed explosive and incendiary, a self-contained “
shake and bake,” and had she not died from the blast she’d likely have burned to death, as did some numbers of people, civil and military, and the TU Defense Agency Headquarters, anyway.

  Phaeton Factory, Kaiserswerth, Sachsen, Terra Nova

  There were only a handful of carbon fiber looms on the planet. One of these, the simplest and cheapest, by far, wove the relatively simple interior shells of the Condor gliders. Another was in Yamato, where it was used in the manufacture of very expensive automobiles. But the best and the latest, needless to say also the most expensive, was at the Kaiserswerth Phaeton factory, making even more expensive automobiles.

  Not Khalid, but another of Fernandez’s operatives had rather brazenly taken a tour of the plant, offered by the company, itself, to get the details just right. He’d paced the distance to the loom from a known point.

  No one outside of Phaeton corporate headquarters knew quite what the loom cost. One measure was that there were, in fact, only two of that caliber. The other was the price of the cars produced, which was simply staggering.

  Although called a carbon fiber loom, in fact there was more to the process than this, a big chunk being impregnating the material produced by the loom with resin and plastic, both of which were rather flammable. Then, too, the value of the entire factory dwarfed the cost of the loom, so clearly it had to go.

  Thus, the warhead on the Condor that crashed through the roof consisted of high explosive, the brisance of which was to shatter the loom, a thermobaric charge, to blow out the walls and do maximum structural damage, while releasing any chemicals held, and a magnesium based incendiary device, rather a pair of them, to set it all alight.

  No Sachsen workers, however, were hurt. The condor crashed the roof, blasted out the panels covering the speakers, and then played a recorded message from a German-speaking female from the legion. Where Lourdes had spoken in her own sexy and sultry way, the German version had a tone like orders to assemble in the showers. Translated, it went, “Attention, please. I am a five minute bomb. Attention, please. I am a five minute bomb. Evacuate the area quickly. I am a five minute bomb. Evacuate the area quickly. I am a large five minute bomb. My delay is fixed at a maximum of five minutes. It could be less. Leave the area now! Four minutes, fifty-nine seconds . . .”

  No cameras caught that. But the word got around, and lost little or nothing in the telling.

  Militarized Airship Casamara,

  over Tuscany and heading west, Terra Nova

  Soliz called in everyone but the missile crews to watch the Global News Network’s coverage of the bombing on the big screen inside the passenger lounge. He had the bartender pour drinks and the cooks bring in some light finger foods, then toasted the success of the raid.

  Behind him, on the screen, the images changed from soccer riot to burning headquarters to badly damaged, roof-sagging factory, back to riot, and so on. The crew certainly enjoyed seeing the success of their mission, especially the smoking ruins of the Tauran Union Defense Agency Headquarters. And the scenes from the four soccer games baited into bloody riots were just precious. The crew cheered lustily, in fact, until the screen showed rescue workers taking bodies, some of them very small bodies, from an apartment building in Anglia struck in reprisal for the one hit in Balboa. GNN keyed on that for long minutes, bringing in a battery of “experts,” many of them dismally ignorant, to discuss it.

  “But they’re hardly being fair,” said Sergeant Vera Dzhugashvili. “It’s not like they didn’t bomb us first.”

  If Soliz hadn’t been in love with her already, he became so when the immigrant girl said, “us.”

  “Sergeant,” he said, “when I take you to Volga and drop off you people of the Sixteenth and the eighteen Condors the airship still carries, you can disable the warning to evacuate systems for some of them. The Duque told me before we left home that GNN would be informed that its coverage would be even handed—as ours, by the way, will not be—or it would be declared an organ of an enemy government and engaged without warning. You do know how to disable the warning systems, right?”

  “Yes, sir,” the sergeant said. “Though it’s more a question of not arming them than of disarming them.”

  “Excellent.” Soliz glanced at his watch. “We have eighteen hours. Our man on the ground in the pertinent part of Volga, the town of Prokhorovka, is waiting. I need all of you to finish preparing the remaining cargo, and yourselves, for parachute drop.”

  Vera Dzhugashvili went suddenly pale.

  “Is there a problem, Sergeant?” Soliz asked.

  “They’ve drilled me on the procedures, sure, sir, but I’ve never jumped before. So, yes, you might say there’s a problem. Sir.”

  “Then rejoice, Sergeant; you get your jump wings with one jump, rather than five.”

  Hotel Cielo Dorado, Aserri, Santa Josefina, Terra Nova

  Oddly, it was the hints and tips given by Aragon that let Esmeralda lie so facilely when Janier asked about the source of the bombs. “Surely, your fleet could see them,” the Gallic general insisted. “You have five hundred years of progress on us. There is no way you did not.”

  “I’m just a cabin girl, sir,” she replied. “I’m hardly privy to things like that. I am sure, though, that if the high admiral had seen them coming, she’d have let you know.”

  Janier nodded. On the face of it, it made sense. But then, he thought, if Wallenstein did know, and had warned me, I’d have to have done something. That would have saved the life of that idiotic Anglian tart, “Lady” Ashworth. I cannot imagine any damage the Balboans did that would be greater than the benefit of being rid of that time-serving, incompetent twat. Even so, I had better check with lovely Marguerite.

  “Where is the high admiral?” Janier asked.

  Esmeralda lowered her head demurely and, looking up with big brown eyes, under long lashes, gave a knowing smile. It was a smile that said, In bed with the empress. This wasn’t impossible, of course, but as far as she knew it also wasn’t true. What the lie gave her was a chance, a little time, to get to her chief and tell her that Janier had his suspicions.

  “We saw it after the event, General,” Wallenstein lied. “By tracking back through records in the computer we were able to see where each bomb came from.”

  “But not in time to prevent the attacks?” the Gaul asked, though it was closer to an accusation.

  Wallenstein shook her head. “We have a massive array of sensors aimed at your planet, of course, but to make any sense of the data requires a human being. Five hundred years of progress hasn’t changed that. The number of human crew we have for the purpose is limited. So, yes, once we knew to look to track back, it was easy to identify the source. But to see it in advance? No, that was beyond our human capabilities.”

  “I see. All right, then; that is something my superiors can accept.” His tone did not suggest it was something he necessarily accepted. “And, then too, it rid me of the baleful influence of that fool, Lady Ashton.”

  “Speaking of which, General,” asked the high admiral, “who would you like to replace the late, lamented Lady Ashton? I can put in a good word for someone.”

  “Nobody,” answered the Gaul, without a moment’s hesitation. “Anyone in there is an idler wheel, a device that reverses motion. Without one, there is only me. And, while I have my flaws, all too recently all too well shown, I am still better than any civilian bureaucrat or political hack. Can you do that for me, High Admiral?”

  “That’s tougher,” she admitted. “Easier said than done. But I’ll try, General. Of course. That will be easier if the people who run the Tauran Union are convinced that the bombs were in no way the fault of United Earth.”

  “I’ll try,” the general answered, with a smile that was almost an echo of Esmeralda’s, an hour earlier.

  Wallenstein asked, “If I do have to permit the appointment of a replacement, though, would Uni Wiglan do? She’s usually easy to work with, in my experience.”

  Janier considered that, finally a
greeing that, if there had to be a replacement, the Wiglan woman would do well enough.

  East of Prokhorovka, Elevation Four Hundred Meters,

  Airship Casamara, Terra Nova

  There were many synergistic reasons why, as Tribune Soliz had recently observed, customs agents the world over disliked, or hated, airships. Unlike both ships and aircraft, they didn’t need any permanent facilities. At least, the newest ones didn’t. And even the older versions really didn’t need much. Thus, who knew where to monitor and search them? Where could they be searched, except at the distant field where they had loaded and where ground crews, air crews, and customs people might well be corrupt. And what if they stopped somewhere enroute?

  Worse, they had cargo capacities that, if dwarfed by ocean-going vessels, in turn dwarfed those of airplanes. And helicopters? Like airships, those could go where they liked, but had cargo loads that were, in comparison, trivial. And expensive to deliver to boot.

  Worse still was the ability of an airship, with some modern methods of remotely controlled or pre-guided precision parachuting, to saunter along parallel to a border, parachuting contraband over to the other side. That last ability, whether the cargoes were consumer goods, information, or arms, had had a not insignificant part to play in ending the rule of the Red Tsar.