Read The Rods and the Axe - eARC Online
Authors: Tom Kratman
Tags: #Fiction, #Science Fiction, #General, #Action & Adventure, #military
The Rods and the Axe - eARC (30 page)
A visual inspection was impossible, even under the twin moons showing. And the most his instruments would tell him was that he was missing a chunk of his starboard side wing, but not how much of a chunk.
He began to suspect the chunk was large when the vibration began to grow to an alarming level. He could still control the plane, but it was an exercise that was both physically and mentally demanding, one that further threatened to become exhausting.
By the time he checked in with Cienfuegan air control, and crossed its central chain of mountains, the threat of exhaustion was fast becoming a reality. He throttled down his speed, which helped some, but there was still a sense of vibration there, slowly shaking apart both plane and pilot.
The reduced throttle had Davies still in the air when the sun popped over the horizon. With that, he could look over his right shoulder . . . and be appalled. Whatever damage whatever had hit him had done, the damage he’d done to the wing by continuing to fly the plane—
Not that I had a bloody fucking lot of choice!
—was worse still. As if to punctuate, a piece of the skin near the wing’s edge peeled off and fluttered away as Davies watched. He could hardly feel that, what with the bucking of the plane.
Then he heard from the landing signals officer, “Abort!” Ah, but one should never discount the pull of Anglian propriety, stiff with upperlippedness, and amplified by Davies’ really, really dreading the prospect of both ejection and a dip in the shark-infested sea. Davies tried very hard to be allowed to land.
The planes and helicopters were struck below. And the sub lieutenant
did
have a point. Landed, there was a fair chance of fixing the plane. Ditched, there was no chance at all.
“All right, Davies,” agreed the landing Signals Officer, “we’ll let you come in. Emergency crews are standing by. Good luck.”
On the plus side, weather was good, “Case I,” as they said. On the negative side, the Sea Hurricane was being an absolute cunt, control-wise.
Davies’ radio informed him, “Below glideslope. Left of centerline.”
He pulled up slightly, and shifted to the right, until informed that he was in the proper position. The shuddering of the plane told him he didn’t have a lot of time or opportunity left.
There was an automated landing system that, ordinarily, made carrier landings much safer than they’d otherwise be. Davies tried that, only to discover that the system wasn’t quite up to dealing with random damage and an unresponsive and stiff plane, seemingly on the verge of falling apart in midair. He took command back from the ship’s computer and informed the LSO he was coming in under his own control.
It was one of those cases where the pilot really deserved a safe landing, but fate’s fickle finger, randomness’ reaming rod, perversity’s pulsating prong, just all combined at one time to fuck him. His approach was good, right inside the crosshairs. He was right over the deck, descending fast. And then—Finger!—the plane yawed slightly to port. He corrected, or rather, overcorrected, and was aimed just a bit to starboard. Rod!—he applied throttle, in case he had to take off after missing the wires. His landing gear hit, unevenly, and—Prong!—he bounced up, completely missing the wires. Unfortunately, that starboard yaw, now combined with three quarters throttle, launched him into the rear of the forward tower, the one that sailed the ship. He didn’t smack head on, but that wing, already damaged disappeared.
Davies, stunned silly, bounced to port, with his plane spinning uncontrollably around him. Automatically, knowing he’d missed the wire, he applied full throttle. Then he looked down at the deck, seemingly spinning past,
above
him, and screamed like a little girl. He saw his port wing disintegrate on the flight deck. It slowed his plane’s spinning. Slightly.
Still screaming, as soon as he sensed open sky above, Davies reached for the eject. In a case of terror-induced adrenaline versus centrifugal force, terror won. He grasped the ejection lever and pulled. The little girl screams stopped, to be replaced by screams of pain, as the ejection seat subjected the pilot to about fourteen Gs, which was almost fine, and a compression fracture of one vertebra, which was not.
Intersection, Via Santa Josefina and Via Belisario Carrera,
Ciudad
Balboa, Balboa, Terra Nova
A tranzitree trunk, ordinarily ornamental, if deadly, now leafless and stripped of its lesser branches, stuck up from a thick layer of rubble and broken glass. Above the tranzitree, the front of the building was sheared off. Its rubble and shattered glass lay across the sidewalk, past the tranzitree, and out into the streets. The mess of concrete, rebar, plaster, plastic, fabric, wires . . . all the components of a normal office building remaining, were left exposed to the elements. There were believed to be bodies in there, at least two of them. A sniffer dog, her head moving from side to side, walked gingerly with her handler over the wreckage. She was a specialist in searching for corpses and living victims buried under rubble such as this. There were also a dozen armed guards, surrounding the area, civilly clad but unreasonably heavily armed. These were men from Fernandez’s organization. So were the ones loading the computers and files—dangerous work, given the state of the building—into trucks and carting them away.
Carrera and Parilla had split up the spots they intended to visit, the latter taking the more or less civil zones of damage, while the former went for the military and quasi-military. There was, however, an area that was officially civil, but in practice, military, or, more specifically, research and development for the military.
Balboa Yacht Corporation had never, not even once, built or even designed a true yacht, though there had been some early work done by some of its marine architects in designing things that looked like yachts, but mounted enough firepower to sink anything shy of a warship.
It had happened, of course, that some very rich folk or their minions had come to inquire about having a yacht built. Whenever anyone had tried that, there was a set of front offices, all manned by people on Fernandez’s organizational payroll, to tell the prospective commodore: “Oh, no,
señor
, we are much too busy—Julio, you lazy swine, did you finish the drawings for the duke of Belgravia?—as I was saying,
señor
, we could not hope to—Marissa, you wretch, I said get in touch with Borchadt Marine Engines
now!
—Where was I,
señor
?” and keep up with that routine more or less indefinitely. They’d never had to, because the prospective buyer would invariably walk off in disgust within, at most, twenty minutes.
That had taken place in a suite of front offices, a cover for the rear ones, where the real work had been done, as, indeed, the entire company had been a front for what it really was, a wing of
Obras Zorilleras
, the Legion’s R&D arm.
Some of those real offices, the ones where real work had been done, now lay exposed by chewed off walls. Surveying the damage, Carrera decided that the formerly hidden offices didn’t look like that or like anything suspicious; they looked completely unremarkable amidst the general ruin.
Miguel Lanza, the commander of the Sixteenth Aviation Legion, coughed behind Carrera, then said, “Sorry it took so long,
Duque
. I was looking over the damage to the airfields, when I heard.”
“No problem, Miguel,” Carrera assured him. “How bad are they?”
“We can fix them by blasting and bulldozing the concrete shards, then filling with gravel and covering with steel planking. Take a few days, though.”
“Don’t,” said Carrera. “Rather, don’t fix most of them past the ability to keep them looking unfixed and unserviceable . . . except maybe for one or two places where you can fix them completely, provided you hide it. We wouldn’t want our friends to run out of targets, now, would we?”
Lanza nodded, saying, “I understand.” He hesitated for a moment and asked, “Did they know about this,
Duque
? I mean, did they know what it was? And if they did, what does it mean?”
“You figure it out, Miguel. The city, not even including the whole metro area, is almost three hundred square kilometers. It has tens of thousands of buildings. Every other bomb they dropped that I’ve heard of had a valid—not necessarily a legitimate, but a valid—reason for being bombed. What are the odds that this one bomb, out of hundreds that hit where they were supposed to, was just a fluke, given what this has meant to us?”
“Shitty,” Lanza said.
“Yep, shitty. They knew . . .”
As Lanza had, someone else announced himself from behind Carrera and the aviator. “Sir?”
“Yes, Jamie.” James Soult was Carrera’s driver and friend.
Soult proffered a block of paper on a clipboard with some writing on the paper. “Got the list of damage. Casualties weren’t too bad, under a hundred and fifty dead and injured both, reported so far, though that can be expected to rise. It was more than half civilians. Here’s the list of facilities they hit.”
Carrera took the clipboard—the legion had a positive prejudice against using computers where a) pen and ink would do, and b) electronic security could not be guaranteed. As he took it, he thought,
A hundred and fifty. The Federated States equivalent would have been fifteen thousand. Heavy . . . heavy . . . but . . . if you will the end, you will the means, and you will the price, too.
Soult’s clipboard didn’t have a by-name list of the dead, though it did mention places where groups of people had been hurt and killed. From that it wasn’t hard for Carrera to figure out which were military and which civilian. The only surprise was that one civil apartment building had been hit, accounting for about half of the civilian dead and injured.
Hmmm . . . well . . . okay, if they hit an inoffensive apartment building maybe this one could have been a fluke. Problems are that I can’t treat it as a fluke and I must retaliate for the apartment building.
“I’ve got a secure link up with the
Casamara
,” said Soult, “and the target list for Condors is in the car.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Retaliation is related to nature and instinct, not to law. Law, by definition, cannot obey the same rules as nature.
—
Albert Camus, “
Reflections on the Guillotine”
Militarized Airship
Casamara
, over the Southern Shimmering Sea
About mid ocean, Tribune Soliz, the commander of the
Casamara
, had ordered displayed on the ship, from six angles, the gold eagle of the Sixteenth Legion. The display’s weren’t especially large, of course. Indeed, being no bigger than any other military aircraft’s roundel, they were essentially lost against the sheer bulk of an airship. They could also, in a pinch, be hidden, too. Soliz didn’t expect that to be necessary.
We’ve never quite fit into the law of war anyway, being neither ship nor aircraft. Sure, there are provisions that ships, when armed, ought to declare themselves as auxiliary cruisers. Sadly, for the legalistic, we are not a true ship and the treaty was never extended to cover airships.
Course, we’ve always been a pain in the ass for the customs folk, too, and nobody ever got around to fixing that.
Like all of his crew, Soliz wore the uniform of the legion. In his case, being the captain, this was dress whites. Most wore battledress that did something less than a great job of making them blend in with
Casamara
’s pastel walls and carpets.
Soliz felt something less than guilty about not identifying his command as an instrument of war.
They can see it if they board us. Not that they really can board us, hence that continuing sense of annoyance from the customs people; but they could, in theory. And if they did, if they got past the hidden machine guns and the men with shoulder-fired antiaircraft missiles I’ve got out on the exterior catwalks’ corners, they could see that we’re all in uniform, nice and proper. And besides, did those murdering fucks from the Tauran Union illuminate their wing and tail flashes so they could be seen at night when they came to kill our people and destroy our property? They did
not!
So fuck ’em.
Soliz, wearing his very distinctive whites, left the bridge and went to the catwalks that encircled the airship. Normally these were fully plexiglassed or otherwise fenced in, to protect the passengers from falling overboard. For the most part they still were, but several sections had been removed to allow fire from the machine guns and missiles.
To get to the machine gun crews, or to expose them, would have required cutting through some thin material along the flanks, bow, and stern. Soliz wasn’t too concerned with them, anyway. They were warm and dry, inside
Casamara
. No, he was mostly concerned with the four three man missile crews at the corners, where a dozen meters of Plexiglas sheets had been removed to allow firing to flank and stern or bow without the backblast damaging the ship. He’d verbally drilled the crews, personally, before issuing the missiles. Even so, he wanted to remind them. Hence, Soliz’s sojourn out to the catwalks.
Having checked with the forward port missile men, Soliz, shivering because—
What the fuck was I thinking wearing this thin white shit out in the open? Man, it is
cold
out here!
—of the open catwalks, walked aft. There were stationed three men, all heavily bundled against the cold. One of the three men on duty sat on a passenger bench. The other two scanned continuously through huge binoculars that just happened to be mounted there, as if they were solely for the enjoyment of the passengers, when passengers were carried. The missiles remained in their cases on the deck, though Soliz could see that the tops were ajar already, for easy access.
He stood there for a few moments, shivering while chatting with the troops. Then, duty done, Soliz ducked back into the shelter of the airship, walked a dozen meters down the corridor, and turned right to go to the cargo—sometimes the passenger—deck.
In the center of the cargo deck was a kind of mobile cradle, mounted on roller rails bolted to the logistic track, or L-track, tie-down rails along the deck. The cradle seemed to Soliz to be a very good fit for the single Condor auxiliary propelled glider that rested on it, hence also for the other eleven still resting on the deck. There was, he noticed, a thin, plastic-covered steel cable attached to both the rear of the cradle and the deck, with the excess rolled up neatly between them.
Technically, the rolling cradle wasn’t necessary; the crew could have manhandled the gliders out the rear cargo ramp. This way was safer though.
And why not?
thought Soliz.
The legion takes so many risks in every other activity, why not a little safety for the men where we can have it? Especially where it costs just about nothing?
Soliz already knew the targets; the data for them had been selected from documents in his safe, based on certain inputs from home and the Global News Network.
Even though he knew the targets, Soliz went and stood behind one of the condor crew, the woman, as she input targeting data into a computer linked directly to one of the gliders.
On one side of the screen were the numbers one through twelve, a target type, a location, a time of strike, and an approach, where that made a difference. It didn’t, always. Only eleven of those seemed to be complete. On the other side of the screen was displayed eleven empty sections and the twelfth, still full of data. Between those two was a map, the caption of which gave a code for the survey section and the major feature, in this case, the city of Lumière, capital of Gaul and, in some ways, of the entire Tauran Union, however much certain unimportant attributes—like the corrupt, rubber stamp of a Tauran Parliament –had been shunted elsewhere.
Soliz silently skipped over the right side of the display, in no particular order,
Soccer game, Alstadt . . . MB . . . Tauran Parliament . . . FMB . . . Throtmanni, Sachsen, MB . . . Kaiserswerth, Auto plant . . . FMTIB . . . Lumière, athletic event, MB . . . Lumière, Gaul, Tauran Defense Headquarters, FMB-I . . . Muddybrook, Anglia . . . SCIB . . . Nemossos, Gaul . . . FMB-I . . .
The woman, Sergeant Vera Dzhugashvili, was a daughter of one of the Volgan officers of the Twenty-second Tercio, by his wife, also a Volgan. Soliz had never met either of Vera’s parents, but still had to admit, from a purely aesthetic point of view, that the match was a prime piece—
Okay, pun intended
, he admitted to himself—of evidence in favor of Volgan women.
Green eyed, of a height to match Soliz’s own, blond, slender . . .
Ah, crap, if I keep thinking this way we’ll both get in trouble. Still, what a great ass. Not much tit, but a truly spectacular bottom.
He thought, “
both
,” because he was pretty sure the sergeant was interested, too. But nothing could be done until one or the other was out of service. The sergeant had joined at age nineteen, not so long after her family had moved to Balboa to man the legion’s opposing force regiment. She probably could have been an officer or centurion, thought Soliz, or even a pilot warrant officer, if she’d gone through Cazador School, for selection. Sadly, it was only recently that a female Cazador class had been opened, once annually. That was closed for the duration of the war. It was unlikely she’d ever rise above the rank of optio
.
And the legion could be literal death on that kind of mixed marriage.
That rule’s got to change
, thought Soliz.
Now, with full mobilization, we’ve got to come up with something less restrictive. On the other hand, now, with full mobilization, we’ve got opportunities for corruption, favoritism, abuse of office, and de facto prostitution like never before. So maybe not. For sure, there’s no glib and easy answer. But, damn, is she pretty!
“Sir,” asked the sergeant, “any idea why of four MBs, two are targeted at Sachsen but only one each at Anglia and Gaul?”
Soliz shrugged, then answered, “My best guess, and it’s only a guess, is that Anglia and the frogs are used to hooligans, while Sachsen has a higher opinion of itself, possibly an unreasonably high opinion of itself, and so is likely to be more mortified when publically shamed.”
“Oh . . . okay, that makes sense,” Vera agreed. “I guess.” She pushed a final key, then said, “Anyway, we’re ready, sir.”
Soliz looked out and saw that the night was fast descending. “How close are we to the launch window?”
Vera glanced at her display and answered, “Twenty-one minutes.”
“Okay, commencing in twenty-one minutes, launch . . . one every five minutes. And let’s see how those bastards like it.”
Vera felt a little shiver pass through at the skipper’s words.
It’s so damned unfair. He already looks delicious and smells just right. Does he have to
sound
so damned perfect, too?
Condor One, over the Southern Shimmering Sea
The carriage slid easily down the rails to edge of the open loading platform. As soon as it reached that edge, a set of blocks abruptly stopped it, allowing the condor to fly free.
For a moment, the condor dropped. But its long, thin wings quickly bit into the air, generating enough lift to turn the drop into a long, shallow glide. The glider’s GLS antenna was already out, and its active computer—though nothing special, to be sure—knew its objective, the course to take to that, and the final approach. The computer also received, through the same antenna, updated weather data to include wind, which ranged favorable from this direction, this time of year. Wind would be especially important at the target.
The glider had been launched with its auxiliary power—a mast bearing a propeller—already set. This engaged sixty seconds after launch. After that, the gliding was done for a while, while the propeller lifted the thing to an altitude of four miles, then cut off. For the next several hours, the glider would, in fact, glide toward its target.
By the time Condor Two departed the airship, Condor One was well out of the way. By the time the last of the twelve was airborne, on its own, the
Casamara
was an easy hundred and twenty kilometers from the initial launch point. Thereupon, the airship turned due west for Volga, where it would deliver the crew from the long-range bombardment squadron to a nice little dacha, then continue on in a circumnavigation of the planet until it reached Santander, west of Balboa. There it was to intern itself . . . for a while.
Hotel
Cielo Dorado
, Aserri, Santa Josefina, Terra Nova
“It’s Commander Khan, husband,” Esmeralda announced to the high admiral, shaking her awake gently. The empress barely stirred until the shaking became rather less gentle. “High Admiral, the commander says it’s important. He’s not given to panic or exaggeration.”
“Oh, all right,” Marguerite answered, finally stirring from her bed. Esmeralda saw that she was naked, frankly magnificent, and had an interesting pattern of delicate looking bite marks on her breasts. Totally unself-conscious of any of that, the high admiral stood, stretched, and then took the communicator from Esmeralda’s proffering hand.
No sense in disturbing Xingzhen
, thought the high admiral.
I’ll take it in the other room.
Esmeralda followed dutifully.
“Are you alone, High Admiral” asked Khan’s voice, once Marguerite answered.
“Yes . . . well, except for Esma.”
“She can hear this,” was Khan’s judgment. “High admiral, do you remember a couple of days ago, that airship that resupplied the guerillas in Santa Josefina?”
“Yes, sure.”
“Well . . . I put a skimmer on it, just in case. I have visual of the airship launching a dozen or so . . . gliders. Yes, I am serious, gliders. But not just gliders, High Admiral.
“Right now,
Spirit of Brotherhood
is over Taurus. It cannot see the glider by radar. Lidar is highly problematic. At least the limited returns we get show something that ought not be. We only have it on visual and, by the time I was notified, there was only one we had via the skimmer. It’s a glider, of course; it’s following the winds for the most part. So I can’t say where it will come down.”
“So what is it?” asked Wallenstein. “Or what are they?”
Khan hesitated a moment, then said, “I am guessing here . . . but I think this is how a nuclear warhead was delivered to Hajar without anyone noticing it. I would suspect these are delivering nukes to a dozen Tauran cities . . .”
Oh, elder gods,
thought Wallenstein, feeling a sudden attack of something like panic.
Could he do that? Would he do that? He only had ten warheads though . . . well, ten I know about. He could have had more. But nukes? I could see him nuking the Salafi
Ikhwan
and those who supported it. It even worked out well for humanity, if not so well for the population of Hajar. But ten cities, or twelve, over some light bombing? No, he’s a nut but he’s not that bad of a nut.
“Don’t think so,” Wallenstein said. “So go ahead and assume not and give me the other analysis.”
“Just enough to provoke and humiliate them, High Admiral. Carrera wants this war as much as we do, and if there’s any better measure of his basic lunacy I don’t know what it could be. If not nukes then those are—I am guessing, of course—high explosive armed gliders.”
“And we can’t see them by any technical means?” asked the high admiral. She asked herself,
Will this help nudge the Taurans to the war they’re afraid of? Oh, yes.
“No,” answered Khan. “Only visual.”
“Then the TU can’t see them either?”
“We think we’re still ahead of them in radar, lidar, and computer analysis, yes, High Admiral. So, no, High Admiral, they probably can’t. At least we’re ahead of them in those ships where the radar and lidar still worked and those we’ve been able to restore since your elevation to Class One and loosening of the purse strings.”
Wallenstein thought for a bit, then thought some more, then asked Khan, “How long until these things reach somewhere worth hitting?”
“Half a day or so, High Admiral. There’s no particular hurry.”
“My instincts,” she said, “tell me to ignore this, in the same general way that any enemy, making a mistake, ought not be interrupted. I’m going to continue thinking about it, but unless you hear from me otherwise, ignore this and make sure no whisper leaves the fleet that we saw a damned thing.”