The Rods and the Axe - eARC

by Tom Kratman

  The blast, when it came, was quite muffled. Li crawled up to the hatch and repeated his attack. Again, the blast was muffled.

  Hmmm . . . while it might be emotionally satisfying to blow the fucking thing sky high, it just might take me with it. Then, too . . .

  Li looked back in the direction of the island’s interior. Then, too, pretty good fields of fire all around. And while that enemy position back there has its gun ports facing the wrong way, it’s still fine shelter from their shells. And we can fix the collapsed trenches back good as new.

  I need to make a suggestion to the major . . .

  Zhong Destroyer Yiyang, Mar Furioso, Terra Nova

  Why is it, mused the admiral, that every time I’ve just about resolved to give up this mess and sacrifice myself to preserve my command and my subordinates, somebody like Wu comes along and makes sticking it out that much more reasonable a prospect? Life is just so unfair, especially unfair if that high born whore of an empress was right. Ah, well, and they say that the stopped clock . . . oh, to hell with it.

  Wu says he’s managed to scrape together about five thousand men, hale and otherwise, more support than combat, but willing to try. He’s says there are a lot more around, but they’re so disorganized it’s going to be a while before he can round them up and get some use out of them. He tells me the reason Beach Red doesn’t answer is that Red Two was obliterated and Red One retreated into his area. He says there’s a brigadier general there and two colonels, but one of the colonels is a loggie, the other is badly wounded, and the brigadier is essentially catatonic, except for screaming fits at random intervals. Note to self, on my own authority relieve the brigadier general and brevet Wu to colonel with date of rank to about four hundred years ago.

  Wanyan snapped orders to his adjutant to do just that, except modified to give Wu just sufficient date of rank to tell the loggie what to do.

  I can hardly blame the major . . . no, the colonel, now . . . for not being able to be more precise about what he’s got available. He’s got mortars and some artillery. Some armor. He says he’ll hold.

  Okay, the boy’s done wonders so far. If he says he’ll hold I am inclined to believe him. So . . . can I go to the empress and present this as a tactical matter. We pull back out of range and come in only at night to reinforce and resupply. Now . . . how do I go about this? Remembering that if I don’t save the empress’s face she’ll have mine cut off and fed to ants. Or, worse, fed to ants while I’m still wearing it.

  UEPF Spirit of Peace, in orbit over Terra Nova

  Even Wallenstein became mildly nauseated at the fawning hyperbole in the Zhong admiral’s message to the empress. “Brilliant, goddesslike leadership . . . unequaled craft . . . military planning a model to be studied by the ages . . .” and those—every one credited to Xingzhen—were the more restrained passages. The nausea passed as the message was read aloud and in full. Wanyan, down below, didn’t use such tactless words. Still, what it boiled down to was, “All right, you were possibly right so far, your fragrancy. We have a beachhead where I was ready to give up; points to you.But if I stay here until those fucking guns are silenced, I will lose my fleet, lose my beachhead, and lose my life. That will be a light burden for me, sweetness, because I’ll be dead. You, on the other hand, will have to live with loss of face . . . conversely, with a hold on the island that can be expanded, which hold will serve to fix the enemy formations facing the Furious Ocean, I can, despite our disasters, move on past Phase Two, to Phase Three, landing on the mainland to establish a base from which we can drive west. PS: any ships that can’t speed out of range are going to be sunk. Nothing to be done. The enemy’s artillery is that powerful.”

  The empress looked questioningly at Marguerite. Should I accept this or should I not? Marguerite, in turn, looked at Khan, the male.

  “I think your admiral’s approach is sound, Your Majesty,” said Khan. As an Old Earther, he clearly outranked any of the locals. But as the high admiral’s lover and, if Khan, female, was correct, the love of her long and rather wicked life, the Zhong empress was just as clearly someone not to annoy.

  Xingzhen considered this, then sent back, “You have Our permission, thou good and faithful servant.”

  Zhong Destroyer Yiyang, Mar Furioso, Terra Nova

  “Flank speed,” ordered the admiral, “in any direction that takes you away from the island. Get out. Run away. Do not stop to tow. Do not stop for survivors, though you can drop them boats if they need it. But get out.”

  The Yiyang heeled over hard as her captain spun her to starboard, then put on all possible speed. A salvo of shells landed not far behind, indicating very strongly that the destroyer had been targeted for destruction, itself. The Yiyang began a series of sharp direction changes, which would leave it within the still undetermined firing arc of the enemy for longer, but reduce the odds of a hit somewhat.

  The destroyer’s captain was pretty sure they were screwed anyway, but no new salvoes came in. Instead, a lumbering LDP, several miles ahead of the Yiyang was suddenly deluged with shells. Nor was it four or six or eight or sixteen, no; at least thirty-eight, by the captain’s own count, hit on and around her. The LPD stopped dead in the water, burning along her entire length. With a second volley, quite possibly as large as the first, she blew up.

  “They shot at us,” whispered the ship’s exec, “while they thought we—with our miserable one gun—were an immediate threat. With us turning tail, they can go after the long-term threat. We’re not going to get more than a double handful of amphib’s out of this alive and afloat.”

  “I know,” said the captain, wanting to weep at the loss to his country’s fleet. “Oh, I know.”

  Turret 177, Isla Real, Balboa, Terra Nova

  So they can make mistakes, too, thought Wu. That’s highly comforting to know.

  Wu stood on the upper floor of the concrete structure, next to the turret basket. From the carousel at the base of that basket, some men were removing the cannon’s shells and projectiles, and carrying them gently and carefully outside. The reason for that was the couple of engineers whom Wu had had scrounge a shaped charge, and who were about to use that charge to blast through the thick steel door that seemed to lead to a level below. The charge was set to cut through the center of the wheel, itself mounted just above the center of the door. That, Sergeant Li had believed, would give the best chance of getting the door open.

  Wu had tried to get anyone who might be down there to come up and surrender, banging repeatedly on the steel with the butt of a broken rifle. There’d been no answer and, under the circumstances, no risk could be allowed. If someone were down there, they’d die down there.

  Sad . . . but I have my own to worry about; them, and my wife and unborn child. And my duties to those are infinitely greater than to an enemy who refuses to give himself up.

  Juan, Julio, and Pablo waited below where their sergeant had sent them for safety. Juan fervently prayed that Sergeant de la Mesa, too, was safe. But he doubted it; you could feel the cannon, even down here, when it went off. There hadn’t been a tremor since shortly after they’d come below.

  The cubicle in which the boys sat was about three meters on a side, and two meters high, with a few projections at floor level holding rations, fuel, and ammunition. One wall held four fold up bunks while the opposite wall was taken up with concrete stairs, leading to the fighting level. Juan had heard some banging coming from the steel door, but had paid it no mind. The sergeant had said they’d be safe here, and so here, safe, they would stay.

  The mistake Wu had found comforting was in the form of a counterattack, in what he estimated to be two battalion strength, supported by a company of tanks and a company of what he tended to think of as assault guns, though the shells launched by those assault guns were something horrific, easily ten times the explosive power he’d have expected.

  The counterattack had come in from two different directions. One had paralleled the eastern coast and driven north, trying
to eliminate Beach Orange. The other had come in from the west, slicing diagonally across Red One and Two.

  The two attacks hadn’t been very well coordinated, either for timing or for fires. Worse, the second one had seemed to the major, who had been on site to witness its being driven off, genuinely amateurish. At least amateurish was the best word Wu could come up with to describe it.

  How else do you describe it, wondered Wu, when your enemy fails to follow his own artillery closely? When he runs into his own wire and doesn’t know what to do about it? When he runs into his own minefields and can’t find his own lanes through?

  In any case, that attack had been driven off handily, with better than a hundred of the enemy splayed out on the churned-up dirt or hanging obscenely from the wire. Of prisoners, too, there’d been a few, even a few unwounded ones. They were on their way north for evacuation and interrogation.

  The other attack had been an altogether more dangerous affair, with the tanks and assault guns tightly supported by the infantry chewing their way across Beach Orange in a most professional and respectable manner. That attack hadn’t been so much beaten off as withdrawn by the enemy himself, following the defeat of the Beach Red attack.

  I wonder, too, if they knew how very damned close it was, how close they came to pushing us into the sea.

  “We’re ready, sir,” said the senior of the engineers who had been setting the shaped charge. Wu nodded and proceeded to walk out the position’s door, then to a nearby trench. Who knew, after all, what might be on the lower level of the position that the shaped charge might set off? Where he entered the trench, Sergeant Li waited, with a hand-picked team of four. They’d be the ones to go down into the lower level after the door’s locking bars were cut.

  From inside came a muffled shout, a Mandarin version of, “Fire in the hole! Fire in the hole! Fire in the hole!” On the last “hole,” the engineers scurried out through the entrance portal, racing trippingly for the safety of the same trench.

  The blast, when it came, was anticlimactic. If there’d been anything explosive on the lower level, the charge hadn’t set it off.

  Sergeant Li, without the need to be told, leapt from the trench, followed by his hand-picked team. Wu got up, too, but in a much more leisurely and dignified fashion. By the time he reached the door, Li was already there, and throwing up on the ground.

  “Those bastards,” muttered the sergeant. “Those ruthless fucking bastards. Even we . . . not even us . . . bastards.”

  EPILOGUE

  I

  Battery MacNamara, Fort Tecumseh (eastern extension),

  Balboa, Terra Nova

  It was marginally lighter by the guns than farther out in the jungle, but that was all it was, a marginal difference. The moons were low, low enough that the thick green canopy absorbed or defected almost all the light Hecate, Eris, and Bellona had to give.

  Antaniae were thick in the jungle surrounding the concrete position, their low cries of mnnnbt, mnnnbt, mnnnbt setting everyone’s teeth on edge, and giving every man’s spine an unpleasant tingle. Trixies, clever proto-birds, almost as clever as a man, hunted the packs of winged, septic-mouthed, flying reptiles, for the most part silently. Occasionally, though, one would raise the peculiar trixie cry of victory when it found one of the hated antaniae and began tearing it to shreds.

  The antaniae were a more distant threat. Here, in the thickest part of the Shimmering Sea coast’s jungle, mosquitoes were a greater annoyance and a more serious threat, at least to men. The antaniae concentrated on the young, the feebleminded, and the ill. Mosquitoes, bearing both Old Earth-derived diseases and some rarer ones found only on Terra Nova, went after everybody. And, while spraying helped, they were still thick enough to draw a pint to a quart of blood from a man, daily.

  The battery, two 180mm guns on barbette carriages, with the ammunition stored below and elevators to move it up to gun level, had almost no warning. The heavy air defense missile battery behind them fired at a target the gunners had neither a visual nor an audible clue to. Whether the surface-to-air missile hit or not the gunners never knew; three bombs hit the air defense battery, close enough together as to be barely distinguishable, while half a second later, two more thousand pounders scoured the surface of Battery MacNamara free of human life. That only represented a baker’s dozen of dead, but it was also the ruin of both guns, taking the old battery out of action for the foreseeable future.

  II

  Isla Santa Catalina, Balboa, Terra Nova

  The air was thick with helicopters, some carrying troops, and some with heavy guns slung on straps suspended from hooks, below. Still others carried supplies, in sling loads somewhat similar to the guns.

  The island was already secure; for reasons Admiral Wanyan could only guess at, they hadn’t made even a token defense, not even so much as to have laid out mines. His guess was, in any case, a fearsome one. They didn’t try because they don’t like waste, or don’t need to put on pointless shows to placate stupid politicians and stupider voters.

  And it would have been a waste. “He who would defend everything defends nothing.”

  But it’s also possible that they want us to have it. And I suspect that huge crowd of civilians inland of the other side of the straits has something to do with that.

  III

  Near Hephaestus, Balboa, Terra Nova, a few miles from the Balboan-Santa Josefinan border

  It was much like an assembly line, with the men and women of Tercio la Virgen filing through the tents, turning in their old uniforms, being issued a mix of new and civilian clothing, and turning in their weapons to have them replaced by captured Tauran ones. Then, by squads and platoons and maniples and cohorts, the Tercio, minus the cohort already in Santa Josefina, “guarding” Carrera’s classis, they disappeared into the fog and clouds of the mountain forest, heading for home.

  Only the tanks and what minimal support they needed were staying in Balboa, though they were still putting on a demonstration on the Balboan side of the border.

  La Virgen would stop on the way, just on the other side of the border, to build a safe haven should events turn against them. But they really weren’t too worried about that. The Tauran forces in Santa Josefina were already stretched as thin as could be. The sudden materialization of a tercio on their southern flank, threatening their vitals, should be enough to send them reeling back to the capital, to keep a friendly government friendly and in power.

  IV

  Fifty-three kilometers southeast of Bjorvika, Hordaland

  Under an overcast sky, two Xamari legionary immigrants and one native Balboan pushed the wheeled cart carrying the glider, sans wings, out into the open from the wooden barn in which it had been mostly reassembled. The BLS, or balloon launch system was already out there in the slush. The targeting computer sat atop the gas canisters for the BLS.

  Each of the Xamaris went back into the barn, while the native Balboan hooked up the computer to the glider. The Xamaris came out with the wing, which they slid into place under the glider’s body, then affixed it. While the Balboan piddled with the computer, the Xamaris ran straps between the deflated balloon and certain hookups on the glider. These would disconnect at the glider’s preset command, after which the balloon could go where the winds took it.

  One by one, the Xamaris ran four of the five straps that came from the balloon to points on the steel carriage. Then they attached the fifth to the lifting ring atop the bird. The wires were hooked, one into a heavy duty control that would cause the balloon to cut itself away from the four restraining straps, on command. The other went to the top of the Condor next to the ring. A hose was run from the tanks to the balloon.

  One of the Xamaris turned a valve wheel to begin filling the balloon with hydrogen. This was much cheaper than helium. Moreover, since the balloon was a throwaway, who cared if it caught fire at some point?

  Once the balloon was filled until it had just positive buoyancy, the Xamaro closed the valve. The balloon lifted un
til it was swaying unevenly over the glider. Once the restraining straps had grown taut, the crew stopped the filling and waited for word from the Balboan, still working the targeting computer.

  “And . . . that does it,” said the latter. He hit the enter button. Instantly, all four restraining straps, plus the cable, were cut loose. They cascaded to the ground around the Condor. Simultaneously, the balloon lurched upward, the Condor’s wings bending under the acceleration and the air’s resistance.

  For a short time the three legionaries watched the glider lift, until it disappeared into the clouds overhead.

  “Nothing to be done now,” said the Balboan. “Go get your bags. Time to cross the border to neutral Scandza, then on to Volgan Republic.”

  “Where’s the bomb going, Sergeant?” asked the elder of the Xamaris.

  “No reason for you not to know, I suppose,” replied the sergeant. “It’s going to a Muslim neighborhood in the capital of Anglia. The idea is to start a riot.”

  “Oh.”

  V

  MV Alta (Cochinese Registry), Saavedra, Valdivia, Terra Nova

  Ham came aboard with Alena the witch and about one hundred and twenty other boys. They came on in small packets, and by individuals, ostensibly unloading humanitarian supplies, with always a few less leaving than had come aboard.