The Rods and the Axe - eARC (12 page)

“But Daaaaddd!”

“Fuck off and do your duty, boy.”

The boy’s head hung. As he turned to go, his father spun the file he’d been looking at on the table in front of him, saying, “But I want you to look at this first and tell me how you would get troops ashore?”

Iglesia de Nuestra Señora, Ciudad
Balboa, Balboa, Terra Nova

Lourdes was already on her way to Santa Josefina and the peace conference. Triste had made the arrangements, both for security from electronic bugging, and from eavesdropping, as well as living arrangements on site for the twenty-two guards from the Fourteenth
Cazador Tercio, who would provide security, the three clerks, the one en- and decryption specialist and the electronic security specialist from Fernandez’s organization, and three cooks. In the interim, Lourdes’ major domo could run the house perfectly well.

Eventually Carrera relented, if only in part, and gave his son a break. Yes, there was much wailing and gnashing of perfect white teeth, but the girls anxiously awaiting their semi-ritualistic defloration would just have to wait a little longer.

Carrera had to give a briefing to some troops. Since he hated saying the same thing twice, he brought Ham along to listen, as well as Alena to see to his care. The boy, though he didn’t know it, was his father’s continuity file. If everything went to crap and Carrera should be killed, or simply die, Xavier Jimenez could ask the boy what his father had planned.

The talk was to the survivors of the maniple of the
Tercio Amazona
which had stormed up
Cerro Mina
and been shot to bits for their trouble, the rest of the tercio, which hadn’t seen action, and a few attachments. While waiting for the women and the few men to come in, Carrera spent the time praying. In his case, though, it was never so much about praying as just talking to God. What the boy was thinking as he knelt at the altar beside his father none but he knew.

Once the sounds behind him quieted to the point he was pretty sure all the
Amazonas
were seated, Carrera and the boy crossed themselves and stood. Carrera directed Hamilcar to go sit down in the front pew, next to Alena the green-eyed witch. As the boy turned, he tousled his hair. The Pashtun guards shifted position to where they could cover their god.

Carrera recognized a few of the female footsoldiers from a not too dissimilar talk he’d given some of the first graduating class at his own house, the
Casa
Linda. One, in particular, seemed familiar. He strained for a minute, seeking a name that would not, at first, come. When he remembered, he pointed at that woman, one he’d personally recruited, and mouthed,
Good to see you, Maria,
very
good.

Carrera hated wasting time; that was part of his detestation of having to say the same thing twice. “We’ve won a battle. The war’s not over. It won’t be over until we are destroyed or the Tauran Union is a footnote.

“We’re giving back their most useless prisoners to buy time, time to offload the equipment, time to dig in, time to assimilate our new volunteers and allies—bet you never guessed that the International Rifle Platoon Competition was intended to gather allies, did you?—time to get in position and ready for what’s coming.

“It’s going to be really bad, what’s coming.”

Carrera’s finger pointed skyward. “Assume the United Earth Peace Fleet is against us, in spirit and, to the degree they can without drawing a violent reaction from the Federated States, materially, as well.

“The Zhong are coming in against us, though I can’t really see them being able to move and support more than maybe two hundred to three hundred thousand men across the sea. Probably not even that many. The Tauran Union has already dispatched ships to help move them.

“The Taurans are fragmented. Indeed, some of them stand with us against their own bureaucracy. But we can expect anything up to a dozen modern divisions, equal to ours in manning, superior in equipment, with a tremendous air superiority. Assuming they can grab a port, of course.

“Bring out the map, please,” Carrera shouted to somebody. He went silent then, while a large mounted map was wheeled out in front of the altar. On the map’s mount was a laser pointer. This he picked up. He flicked it on and circled the
Isla Real
with the red marker, repeatedly.

“That’s the strongest fortress in the world,” he said. “Nothing else compares even remotely. In training, you saw your own little camps. You didn’t see—or didn’t see much of—the roughly one point one million cubic meters of concrete we poured, the hundreds upon hundreds of guns, the minefields waiting to be activated, the tunnels, the rails, the trenches. Trust me: One hundred and fifty thousand men couldn’t take it if they had one hundred and fifty thousand years to try. And if they can’t take it, no ships can sail past it. If ships can’t sail past it, then no landing at or near the capital can succeed; they’d just starve to death. I’m not worried about the north.”

The laser moved to the west, wriggling over the undeveloped jungles of La Palma. “They’re not coming through here in any strength, though I’ll put a few tercios down there—foreign volunteers, generally, plus the
Tercio de Indios
—to make sure they can’t distract us or put the government into a panic. But there are no ports worthy of the name, no roads, only one airstrip that isn’t muck most of the year, and that one’s short. And, wearing loincloths or not, the Indians are good in
la jungla
.”

Carrera flicked the red arrow over the port of Cristobal, at the southern end of the Transitway. “The Taurans will be coming here,” he said, “though they’re not going to limit themselves—not if they have two brain cells to rub together—to the old borders of the Transitway Mandate. And we’ll meet them and beat them.” He gave a little shrug and added, “You’re going to have to take that on faith.”

He stopped speaking for a moment while he physically wheeled the map board one hundred and eighty degrees around. On the other side, the women could see, was a better scale map of the eastern portions of the country.

“Here’s where our danger comes from,” he said. The red marker flicked from spot to spot to spot as Carrera called off the names of a dozen or more little ports dotting the northeastern coast of the country. “None of those, alone, could support an army of a size to matter. Taken together, however, and with the kinds of improvements a modern army, or one—like the Zhong’s—with a lot of manpower, can create, they can support an army. Moreover”—the laser traced the long coastal highway—“from there they’ve got a highway into our vitals. And I don’t have the force to meet it, not so long as the Zhong and the Taurans are attacking to the north and south.

“Worse,”—the red light settled on Capitano, a good sized port to the southeast—“from here a full corps could come over the mountains, link with a force along the northern coast, and make that drive into our guts deadly.

“What is necessary is to buy time in the east until we have a decision, north and south. That’s where you come in; you, Fifth Mountain Tercio, a chunk of Fourteenth Cazador Tercio, the mountain cohorts from Lempira and Valdivia, and a few others. And a few hundred thousand others besides that.”

The Amazons stirred. They’d gotten used to the notion that the total armed force of the legion was larger than they’d believed. They didn’t see where another few hundred thousand would be coming from.

Carrera answered their question. “I am going to half evacuate the city—we don’t have bomb shelters for more than half, anyway—and move more than three hundred thousand civilians to a big ‘refugee’ area around and along that highway and some of the ports. The ‘refugees’ have a purpose of their own. While we, the legion, will feed them, and the more permanent residents of the area, as long as the enemy hasn’t occupied their area, once they do come in—and they will—the food stops. Thereafter, the civilians will suck up as much as one thousand truckloads a day of enemy supply in food, medicine, etc. World opinion will
demand
that those people be fed and cared for. That will hurt them, my children. It might even make a western attack a logistic impossibility all on its own.

“However, I cannot be absolutely sure about that. Give the Tauran devils their due; they can move supplies.

“So the civilians aren’t enough. I need that road kept closed. I need the ports kept closed or, at least, marginal. I need the feeder roads kept closed.

“Using the ‘refugees’ to hide among you, your forces and the others are going to close off invasion from the east. Of course, as in any partisan war, the regular forces could destroy you if they are willing and able to spread out in little packets to do so. Fifth Mountain is going up into the mountains as a regular organized force to threaten the enemy and keep him from spreading out enough to find, control, and annihilate you. Also to block the road from Capitano.

Smiling, Carrera continued, “Think about it. Hiding among those civilians you are going to be an intelligent, self-aware, self-replicating, mobile and undetectable minefield that the enemy won’t be able to destroy in place, move, or clear permanent lanes through. To add insult to injury he’s going to have to protect you, feed you, shelter you, clothe you, and provide medical care for you every moment you’re not actively shooting at him.”

Carrera gave a nasty laugh.

“And you are
perfect
for the job. You’re women. You don’t look like a threat, little ‘helpless’ things that you are. You’ll be able to go places, see things, get information from the enemy’s soldiers in a way nobody else could hope to. You’ll be able to hide in plain sight; coming out only to fight.”

“It won’t last forever, of course. Eventually they’ll catch on to you. Until they do, though, you’ll have a field day. Even after they do . . . you’ll still be able to fight them.”

One of the Amazons, a big redheaded woman centurion—maybe a little less than perfectly feminine, especially along the jawline and with those broad shoulders, but still unquestionably attractive—raised her hand. “Uh . . .
Duque
, what about uniforms? Those’ll give us away.”

Carrera answered, “The Taurans claim to follow, and have in fact ratified, the Additional Protocol the Earthers inflicted on many of us some decades ago. So there’s no need to wear uniforms except for immediate action, by the enemy’s own rules.

“On the other hand, the Zhong don’t follow the Protocol. If you get caught by them . . . well, you’ll be subject to execution under the law of land warfare. On the other hand, before it becomes an issue we’ll be holding some of
their
POWs. And we’re holding a fair number of Taurans that we caught not only out of uniform but in our uniforms. They’ve already been court-martialed and sentenced to death. The enemy tries to do anything to any of you for being out of uniform, I’ll hang those people . . . in a heartbeat. Anyway, if you don’t want to do this, I’ll understand. This is for volunteers only.

Carrera considered his audience for a moment, then spoke. “Show of hands,” he demanded.

Every one of the women put up a hand. Carrera had known they would.

“Now there’s one other problem,” Carrera said. His eyes went up, toward the church ceiling and past that, to the skies and space. “The Earthpigs are going to be feeding the Taurans and the Zhong all the intelligence they can gather. We’ve got reason to believe they can pick up a lot . . . more than they used to be able to. We’re still trying to figure out why the change happened.

“In any case, among the things they’ll be able to see from space is electronics and especially anything electromagnetic. So all your neat do-dads, the night sights on your rifles, your Red Fang communications systems, your light enhancing goggles, and global locating systems, all have to be given up or stored deep against a rainy day. You’ll be fighting primitive. So will the other units in and around your area and in
La Palma
.

“And, no, that’s not true for the forces I’m keeping in the center and on the island. They’ll be in so great a density that we couldn’t hide them anyway. There’s nothing to be learned by the enemy except that they’re generally there. Each one will be like a lit match held against the sun. But an electronic thermal sight could pinpoint you girls for a rock from space or, at least, a bomb from a plane.

“I’ll be able to give you some Yamato-made radios, a few, we don’t think the Earthers can sense. And we’ve got a fair field telephone system you can get some limited use out of. Oh, and Legate Fernandez has had the Signal Tercio get some carrier pigeons trained. But that’s about it.”

Carrera shrugged, “Sorry.”

Ciudad Capitano, El Toro
, Balboa, Terra Nova

There were enough Santa Josefinans in the legion to come up with two overstrength tercios, roughly eighty-five hundred men and a few women, and still leave a fair number in the rest of the force. In filtering them out from the other tercios, they’d been divided into those two tercios, based mostly on their home of origin. One tercio
, Tercio la Virgen
—which most people found amusing, given Santa Josefina’s thriving sex trade—came from Santa Josefinans from the capital region and the half of the country on the
Mar Furioso
side. The other
tercio
, Tercio la Negrita,
was from the Shimmering Sea side of the country. There were color differences between the two tercios, though the title,
la Negrita
, didn’t come from those.

The two regiments differed in other ways, too.
La Negrita
, for example, had no organic artillery component, just a single large battery of heavy mortars. Nor had they any armor, light or heavy. Instead, it went heavy on combat engineers and
cazadores
, and had four infantry cohorts, with extra strength light anti-aircraft missile sections.
La Virgen
, conversely, had only three infantry cohorts, but an extra artillery battery and tank maniple, an extra air defense battery, plus an engineer bridging maniple, and an extra maniple of
Cazadores
, that last already in Santa Josefina.
La Virgen
also wore regular uniforms and used standard Balboan weaponry—except for some fairly intensive familiarization firing—while
la Negrita
was entirely in civilian clothes and had been issued Tauran arms for training. Other than those peculiarities,
la Virgen
retained, in the main, standard legionary tables of organization and equipment, while
la Negrita
had been organized around their home regions in Santa Josefina, which led to some wildly varying strengths at the maniple level.