The Rods and the Axe - eARC (10 page)

CHAPTER SIX

A real diplomat is one who can cut his neighbor’s throat

without having his neighbor notice it.

—
Trygve Lie

Hotel
Cielo Dorado
, Aserri, Santa Josefina, Terra Nova

Esmeralda woke up with company. Spooned up behind her, one arm under her head and the other, the right one, wrapped around her, that hand cupping her left breast, was her lover, Richard, earl of Care. Richard, captain of the
Spirit of Peace
, still slept. Automatically, she pushed back against him. It couldn’t be said she enjoyed sex. She expected that she never would. But she could enjoy Richard’s enjoyment and she could enjoy the warmth, if not the feeling.

Warmed by Richard, she thought,
He says he wishes he could take off his skin and wrap me in it. I believe it, too.

Richard had taken his pinnace down to Aserri the night before, borrowed Esmeralda from the high admiral—an easy thing, that, with Wallenstein so infatuated with her empress—and taken the girl to dinner and then bed. There he’d done his best to show how much he’d missed her on her too frequent official absences.

Before Richard, Esmeralda’s only experience of sex had been the rape of peasant girls to be expected from the sons and soldiers of Count Castro-Nyere, the absolute ruler of her home province of TransIsthmia, and the far more violent and even more violating rape of the slave pens of Razona Market.

How I might have felt about sex if the soldiers of Count Castro-Nyere and all the slavers at Razona Market hadn’t fucked me until I bled, I can’t say.

For a moment, just a moment, the memories caused the girl to tighten like the skin of a drum. Then the warmth and the other memories—not least that Richard
was
serious about wrapping her in his skin, were it but possible—let her relax again.

Yet he, ever sensitive to her, at least, felt the tightening and startled awake immediately. “Are you all right?” he asked.

“Fine, love . . . I’m fine,” she replied, softly. “Just a little nightmare.”
The kind you have when you’re wide awake.
“Go back to sleep.”

With a gentle squeeze of her breast, and a light kiss against the cascading midnight of her hair, he did.

In the same wing of the hotel, on the same floor, but with a guard on the specific corridor, Marguerite Wallenstein and the empress, Xingzhen, lay wrapped in each other’s arms so tightly that, but for size and color differences, it would have been near impossible to tell where one began and the other ended. As it was, Wallenstein, blond and tall, physically quite dominated the empress, while the empress held the whip hand emotionally, and also literally, when they thought they had enough privacy.

Sadly, here we do not have enough privacy. But, my almond-eyed love, when this conference is over—which is to say when your generals and admirals and my General Janier and his people have worked out the details of continuing the war—you and I are going to Atlantis for a vacation. There’s a nice
latifundia
there that goes with the office of high admiral.
There
, there’ll be privacy enough for everything you want to do to me and everything you want me to do for you.

The high admiral had always considered herself bisexual with a very slight preference for dominant men. What she was discovering was that she was bisexual with an absolute preference for Xingzhen.

I never believed in love at first sight. The more fool I.

Headquarters, Tauran Union Security Force-Santa Josefina,

Rio Clara,
Santa Josefina, Terra Nova

An acetated and color coded map, the colors and their intensity shaded for what was believed to be the density of Balboan-trained, equipped, and directed legionaries in various parts of the country. The map had been provided by the Santa Josefinan public force, though Marciano’s own intelligence people thought it was pretty close to accurate. The map was accompanied by a police lieutenant Marciano introduced to his staff as “Lieutenant Blanco,” who had brought with it a folder containing names and addresses for the
known
legionaries who had come back home.

Claudio Marciano was more than ordinarily torn. He hadn’t yet been officially asked, less still ordered, to start rounding up the legionaries in Santa Josefina. But the orders would be coming along soon, he suspected. For that matter, it made a certain sense to start picking them up now, or at least soon, while they were scattered and—mostly, though he doubted entirely—disarmed. That would allow his people to use minimal force. Indeed, they might be able to arrange things so as to be seen as nothing more than backups for the Santa Josefinan Public Force. Minimal force would mean fewer civilians hurt or killed. With a little luck, perhaps no one would be hurt; none of his, none of theirs, no police, no civilians.

And isn’t that the ideal?
he asked himself.
To compel one’s enemy to give up his purpose while suffering no harm oneself? Not that even Belisarius ever quite managed to do that.

In any case, the lack of orders was no reason for him not to have his staff and subordinate commanders
planning
for the roundup. Neither was it reason not to be coordinating with the Public Force.

Especially so since, once a round up begins, the odds are really good that the other Santa Josefinan regiment will be across the border in no time. That will be fine—well, no, not exactly
fine,
but survivable—provided I can eliminate the internal threat before they pin us, and then get my command concentrated along their obvious axis of advance and main supply route. On the other hand, let me and my little pocket division have to split our efforts between a guerilla movement and a fixing force on the border or—worse!—having crossed the border and I’m screwed. Hard. No grease. And not kissed first. Ugly, in other words.

The other alternative, hitting the well-armed, well-trained, and probably all too well led force around
Ciudad
Cervantes, he didn’t even consider, and for the same reason he’d pulled back from the border once it became obvious that the battle within and for Balboa had been lost. There were simply too many of the bastards, they were too good—not perfect, certainly not supermen, but
too
good—and they were too ruthless and thorough.

After all, it’s not like the Santa Josefinans are the only troops there in their
Valle de las Lunas.
I’ve got it on pretty good authority that there’s a five cohort tercio of mountain troops there, too, straddling Hephaestus Mountain across the border. Eleven cohorts? Probably four or five battalions of decent artillery. Do
not
want to deal with that. Not, not, NOT.

“Eleven cohorts?” he asked Lieutenant Blanco, currently serving as his
good authority
. “Eleven?”

“Including the three we are quite sure are already inside the country, yes,” answered Blanco, “but not counting their Cazador
maniples, or the engineers, or the light armor. Could be twelve; there may be four cohorts already in country. And there are rumors we have not been able to pin down that a very large cohort of women warriors is assembling close by, too, a cohort as big as any two others. Plus possibly another cohort, small but high quality, from their special operations regiment.”

“And I am still troubled. What
is
your source?” asked Marciano, to which question Blanco only smiled in reply.

My primary source,
thought Blanco, even as he kept his face perfectly neutral,
is probably Legate Fernandez. At least I
think
he’s the one who’s ordered me fed information by Sergeant Morales of the recruiting maniple here in Aserri. Is the information accurate? I don’t have any reason to doubt the troop list he’s been providing. It’s just that I’m not sure of his reasons for providing it. Perhaps he just wants you to feel threatened into passivity. Perhaps his chief, the gringo named Carrera, remembers that you and he had fought side by side, against the same enemies, in Pashtia, and doesn’t want you hurt.

For my part, I just want my country to be a real country again, independent, able to defend itself, not a beggar for help from big brother. I would prefer that we not become a part of another real country, either, for which Balboa is the likely candidate. We’re similar, yes, but not so similar that I want us married to them. But there’s no reason for us to end up annexed, since the Balboans have been kind enough to provide us a couple of regiments, already formed and ready.

“Let’s just say,” said Blanco, with a sly smile, “that we have people on the other side.” This had the virtue of being absolutely true and entirely misleading, both.

Though Marciano wasn’t entirely misled. He retained, at least, some doubts about Blanco’s true loyalty. Nor, if the police lieutenant was loyal to the idea of his country free of foreign troops and able to stand on its own feet, did Marciano consider that blameworthy.

Dangerous to me and my men? Yes. Blameworthy? No.

Marciano cast his attention back to the annotated and color-shaded threat map. “Funny that the ones inside Santa Josefina already are concentrated along the Shimmering Sea side of the country, with only a few here on the
Mar Furioso
side, near us. Or maybe not exactly funny . . . I’ve seen more humorous things.”

“Why
did
they do that?” Blanco asked. His sojourn through the Atlacatlan Military Academy hadn’t been designed for much more than to make him a decent platoon leader.

Marciano, who was as up on insurgency as anyone around, answered, “Putting the one regiment out away from us is probably to give them more time and warning to disperse if we move against them. The others probably belong to the regiment still in Balboa. My guess would be recon troops, or special operations troops. And their mission is probably to call for artillery to support and advance, and blow or secure bridges to keep us from either supplying or maneuvering, while letting them do both?”

“How both?” the policeman asked. “That makes no—”

“Different needs,” the Tuscan replied. “The bridge we need gets blown. The bridge we’re not watching gets seized and guarded. Different techniques. The enemy side of a bridge gets cut so they can fix it without too much interference from us while we have to expose ourselves to fix the bridge if they’re on the other end. For example.”

“Yeah, ‘for example,’ ” the policeman agreed. “I think that means that the easier job, rounding up the ones near here, has to come first, but . . .”

“But that warns them to disperse on the Shimmering Sea side, which makes that job a lot tougher.

“Oh, well,” said Marciano, softly, “I knew the other side back in Pashtia. They weren’t stupid then, either.”

Hotel
Cielo Dorado,
Aserri, Santa Josefina, Terra Nova

The problem with bugging the hotel for real time intelligence, something Fernandez’s intelligence net in Santa Josefina was perfectly capable of, was that no one knew what the
UEPF
was capable of. Could they detect bugs? Could they detect the most sophisticated bugs? Fernandez had to assume so. At least he had to until someone could talk to the young cabin girl who said she wanted to help. If she said they couldn’t, or wouldn’t, or wouldn’t bother, which were not quite the same things, and if the legate decided they could trust her on that, the only problem would be keeping all the various microphones from squealing out loud from feedback from each other.

Until then, Fernandez had ordered hands off or, rather, “No bugs.”

Thus, although the high admiral, the empress, and Janier, plus their various staffs, all watched what they said, and tended to speak in circumlocutions, they didn’t—at least for the nonce—really need to.

The only place they could speak freely was one conference room, and not a particularly large one, that was swept daily by Tauran, UEPF, and Zhong intelligence.

The conference room was on the hotel’s third floor, separate from all other rooms, and reachable only by its own elevator. The walls were doubled, to prevent eavesdropping that way. And the place came with its own system for interfering with radio waves. It was nearly as secure as Wallenstein’s own office, aboard the
Spirit of Peace
, and, though she didn’t know it, much more secure than the main conference room on the ship, as well.

“We insist on control of the country, post conquest, east of the western border of the old Transitway Area and north of the central
cordillera
,” said the empress, “plus control of the
Isla Real
¸of the city, of the city of
Ciudad
Cervantes, of the city of Nata, of the Florida and Pablo Manuel locks, and of the military facilities in that sector.

“We further insist on the right of free immigration of our people to the entire country, without limit or quota, without let or hindrance.

“Lastly, we insist on receiving the war criminals Raul Parilla, Patricio Carrera, and Conrad Chu for trial in our courts followed by execution by us. Their crimes deserve no less.”

“Preposterous,” answered Janier. “The World League Mandate is ours, legally and by right. We could not give it up to you, nor give up half of it to you, under any circumstances.

“Though you are welcome to hang the criminals—”

“Nothing so quick and easy,” said the empress, interrupting.

“Whatever. You can execute them any way you like, since we will not. But we cannot under any circumstances give you half the country.”

“It’s not more than a quarter,” Xingzhen insisted.

“With right of unlimited immigration it is the entirety, within a generation,” said Janier, with a sneer that only a Gaul could have produced. “By saying ‘half’ I was just averaging what you claim versus what you’re trying to steal.”

“Steal!” The empress’s eyes flashed with outrage. “Steal! Let me tell you about theft, you Gallic pickpocket! Let’s start with Zikawei, shall we. Stolen from us and then sold—Did I say pickpocket?” She hissed, “I meant
fence
!—to Yamato. The half of Liwan Island you extorted! Jilong!” she spat out, naming another former Gallic possession in
Xing Zhong Guo,
during less enlightened times. “Zhigu!