The Rods and the Axe - eARC (34 page)
Read The Rods and the Axe - eARC Online
Authors: Tom Kratman
Tags: #Fiction, #Science Fiction, #General, #Action & Adventure, #military
Almost as if they were worry beads, the priest’s rosary beads made a soft clicking sound as he manipulated them. They’d have been reduced to worry beads, too, but for the “Ave Marias” and “Pater Nosters.”
“When?” the priest had asked. “When will they execute me?”
Bonadies had shrugged, somewhat embarrassed. “Under normal civil criminal procedures, it would be a month or so. But this is wartime and there’s not a lot of care being paid to the niceties. There are three courts set up. Each trial is taking about half an hour, with breaks. Thus, eighty or a hundred or so a day. Figure you have a week to ten days. Is there anyone you would like me to notify?”
Based in his attorney’s perfunctory performance, Father Segundo was by no means certain that he would not be crucified. He, more than most outside of Balboa, had reason to know this would be the hardest possible death. As the wired-in area filled up with his fellow condemned, thus filled up with a load of shocked silly, weeping, screaming, and begging persons, the priest found himself praying less for his deliverance than for theirs.
Segundo spent a fair amount of time counseling the condemned. But when he wasn’t doing that, or eating, or sleeping, he tried to puzzle through the justification the judge had given. If nothing else, it took his mind off the prospect of the mass crucifixion impending.
Is it really true,
wondered Father Segundo,
does it really follow, that a claim of universal jurisdiction in defense of human rights also supports a claim of universal jurisdiction to defend human obligations? This may be the first time in my life I wished I’d become a Jesuit, and taken up the law, as some of them do.
But even without that training, I, I myself, have always held that people had a right to certain things; food, shelter, clothing, education, medical care. And, yes, surely, the judge was right in claiming that if someone has a right
to
something, then someone else has the obligation to provide that something. So, okay, there’s a correlation between rights and obligations.
But there I stop. Countries are bullshit. No one has obligation one to any of them. So I feel. So I believe.
Ah, but what about those who believe differently? There are those who do not believe in the universal human right to food, shelter, clothing, education, or medical care. But I insist that they honor my belief in those rights. Am I being arrogant, unreasoning, and unfair in demanding others honor my beliefs and refusing to honor theirs, myself? What if I am?
What
if I am?
And if I am, and if I have accepted the principle of universal jurisdiction to support my beliefs, how can I deny them the principle of universal jurisdiction to support theirs? How can I, in principle, deny them that principle?
And if we have two opposed principles, how can I say which is right? Mine, just because it
is
mine? That’s not a principle. Damn.
Palacio de las
Trixies,
Ciudad
Balboa,
Republic of Balboa, Terra Nova
The planes hadn’t been hitting the city much, lately. Instead, the bulk of the bombing effort seemed to be directed at more purely military targets outside the capital’s political and practical boundaries. And even there, the presence of so many thousands of Tauran POWs in little camps, indistinguishable from so many other facilities, had had a considerable dampening effect on how freely they were willing to bomb.
Thus, President Parilla could feel more or less comfortable in his own home. He’d still sent his wife away from the palace, just in case.
“I’m a superstitious man,” he explained to Mrs. Parilla. “Worse, all my life I’ve had the feeling that the Almighty’s sense of humor was perverse.”
She hadn’t gone with good grace, but she had gone.
So now Parilla had the place to himself and his staff. As a younger man—not necessarily that much younger, either—he’d probably have used the opportunity for some casual dalliance with one or two of the cuter maids. Now?
Too fucking old for that shit
.
“What was that, Mr. President?” asked Carrera.
“What? Was I thinking out loud?”
“Something about ‘too fucking old,’ ” Carrera confirmed.
“Then I am getting to be too fucking old,” the president said.
“Everyone does,” said Puente-Pequeño. Then, taking off his glasses to polish and thinking about blood-stained carpets now gone from the terminal, he thought, sadly,
Well . . . no . . . not everyone does.
“Anyway,” Carrera continued, not wanting to make too much of the old man’s slip, “we wrote the law as an oversight, as much as anything.”
“The same way we ended up giving medals for valor to Sada’s men in Sumer?” Parilla asked.
“Yes, Mr. President,” said Carrera, “pretty much. Though that was an oversight that had a happy ending. This one, unless you do something, won’t.”
“Note, sir,” said Puente-Pequeño, “that no lawyer had a hand in crafting this law. Your veterans did that on their own. And you have to expect a certain amount of legal idiocy when you permit that.”
Carrera and Parilla both shrugged, indifferently, which caused the lawyer to roll his eyes.
“So anyway,” asked the president, “how are these different from the Castilians?”
“Two ways, Mr. President,” said Puente-Pequeño. “In the first place, the Castilians joined us and became our troops at a time when we were not at war with the TU, and after the TU’s leadership here, the Gauls, had attacked their commander. That cut off any obligations between Muñoz-Infantes’ unit and the TU. Second, we are not at war with Castile, which has limited itself to medical aid and such.”
“Okay, and the individual immigrants from Taurus?”
“They’re all pre-war. By joining us they went through formal renunciation of rights and obligation vis a vis their former countries.”
Parilla wondered about that.
Every time you introduce a lawyer
, he thought,
things get complicated and the truth flees.
Still, he couldn’t see where the lawyer was precisely
wrong
, so, “What do you want me to do?”
Carrera replied, “We need all the condemned to get a conditional pardon, Raul. Just that.”
“The condition being that they go away and never return?”
“On pain of death,” answered Carrera. “We’ve held over but not refueled their airship. They can reach Santa Josefina, where we fully expect them to salve their pride by doing what we refused to permit them doing here.”
“And we don’t mind this?” the president asked.
“Not a bit,” answered Carrera, smiling wickedly. “After all, officially the rebellion in Santa Josefina cannot be our war.”
“So we get all the moral advantages of refusing to hide behind foreigners, and the Taurans over in Santa Josefina still get all the disadvantages of having their enemies able to hide behind their own traitors?”
“Evil, Mr. President, is it not?” asked the JAG.
“A little, yes,” said Parilla, raising a frown on the lawyer’s face. “But . . . well, yes, I’ll do it.” Turning his attention back to Carrera he asked, “Now what are we going to do to humiliate the enemy about their bullshit announcement of ‘air supremacy’? Swear to God, I am surprised they didn’t put anyone’s eye out, what with all the flying champagne corks.”
“I think,” said Carrera, “that they’ve had long enough to become complacent and that now a little humiliation is in order; that, and some disillusionment.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Surprise is the master-key of war.
—B.H. Liddell Hart,
Thoughts on War
Santa Cruz, Balboa, Terra Nova
Every day Tribune Ordoñez took a walk down to Arnold field, to check on the status of the damage. It wasn’t all that far, after all, nor did he have anything better to do. The six truck-mounted aircraft in his flight already checked out as ready to go, while the solid fuel rockets underneath were so simple they were presumed to be wholly reliable.
At the airfield, the story on the surface never changed. The charred skeleton of the burned airship still sat, the rags of its singed fabric flapping in the breeze. The airfield itself had been well cut by the Oliphants; rough field capable or not, no Mosaics would be coming down along its roughly one mile length without repairs, either to the airfield, beforehand, or to the plane, afterwards.
That said, there were Sixteenth Legion ground crews with dump trucks full of gravel and sections of perforated steel planking just waiting for the word to make some temporary repairs. Moreover, while the main runway was still cut, then Taurans hadn’t paid a lot of attention to either the taxiways nor the parking lots nor the roads. Between those, there were no fewer than seven strips on Arnold Air Base,
alone
, of sufficient length and quality to recover aircraft. There were two more adequate lengths at Herrera International, plus another one at Brookings, though that last one was tricky, and slated to be used only as a last resort.
Even so, every day Ordoñez took his walk and consulted with the centurion in charge of the runway repair crews. “Less than two hours, Tribune,” was the centurion’s learned judgment, “Provided you keep the enemy air off my back. I’ve had my boys rehearsing this for weeks now. We can blast away the rippled concrete and push it off line, fill every hole with gravel, and cover them with steel planking, in about eighty-seven minutes.”
And it might just be,
thought Ordoñez,
that all you will do is attract their fires, so that we can land on the alternate strips. But we’ll still hope for the best and we
will
give you all the cover we can.
For now, we await the word. I can’t say anything, but I think it’s coming soon, in the next couple of days.
Despite sneers from Carrera, the declaration of “air supremacy” on the part of the Taurans had definite and serious operational implications well over and above the televised mass popping of champagne corks on the part of generals, admirals, and bureaucrats . . . to the extent those differed. These implications were distinct, but synergetic.
In the first place, for so long as the Taurans perceived a credible air-to-air threat—not strong, just credible, it being such a potentially humiliating prospect to lose a hundred-million Tauran airplane to an obsolete aircraft costing less than a tenth of a percent of that—they had to carry a certain amount of air-to-air ordnance, both on aircraft dedicated to the aerial combat mission, and on others dedicated to the bombing campaign. That cut into ordnance carried for the campaign that mattered, bombing the upstart Balboans into the stone age.
Second, because of the threat of antiaircraft fire, both cannon and missile, whether radar guided, infrared homing, or Mark One eyeball directed, a certain weight of effort had to be directed to SEAD, or suppression of enemy air defense. These were also known as “Frenzied Ferrets.” Moreover, still more had to keep the runways cut, while the Balboans were still trying to keep them repaired.
The threat from enemy ground and air remained conceptually, and as far as they could tell from the air or space, genuinely, fixed, so only so much had to be dedicated to it. But that amount didn’t change with the size of the attack package. Thus, the Tauran air forces could most efficiently attack by sending in between four and ten attack packages of one hundred to two hundred and fifty aircraft each, of which ninety percent were bombing, rather than twenty or thirty, daily, of thirty to fifty aircraft each, of which about half would have had to have been dedicated to something besides bombing.
That limitation on numbers of strike packages also meant, in practice, that the enemy had eighty or ninety percent of each day totally free to do whatever they wanted, without any threat overhead to interfere. Worse, the big strike groups were predictable as to time. And the Taurans were pretty sure that observers were reporting as they assembled, too.
Worse, perhaps, than any of that, though, was what the major strikes were doing to the ground crews, to the aerial refuelers, to airframe maintenance, and to bomb load per aircraft committed to bombing. Assembly took time. Time took fuel. Fuel took up weight that otherwise could have gone to ordnance. And both the intensive prep and the intensive recovery were wearing the ground crews to a frazzle. This was especially bad on the carriers, two of which had already experienced fatal wrecks while recovering aircraft.
So, with the declaration of “air supremacy” the TU had been able to mount smaller packages, with less devoted to refueling, to aerial combat, or SEAD. Best of all, for the last several days there had
always
been an air raid in progress or en route, which was presumptively driving the Balboans crazy, wearing them out, and preventing their free and easy movement.
Not that they completely dispensed with SEAD or aerial ordnance, of course, but a strike package of forty aircraft might have only one electronic warfare bird in it, and maybe two with a load primarily configured for air to air, with the rest carrying a maximum of either one HARM, Homing Anti-Radiation Weapon, or one air to air missile, plus whatever they carried for the cannon.
It was all very efficient. It was not, however, without its weaknesses.
Joint Headquarters, 16th Aviation Legion/18th Air Defense Legion,
Ciudad
Balboa, Balboa, Terra Nova
The bunker complex had been built a goodly distance from the
Estado Mayor
building. This was just as well, since the latter was now reduced to a chewed wall, smoking hulk with cascades of brick and tile occasionally pouring off. Rather than there being one bunker, the legion had put in half a dozen, with a certain amount of redundancy shared amongst them, thick walls and roofs, all of that under considerabe dirt and a double layer of roughly thirty millimeter thick hexagonal steel plates buried under the dirt.
Lanza, being senior and also having command of the more decisive arm, was in charge. At least he was when Carrera wasn’t there. However, today Carrera
was
present, therefore . . .
“You’re in charge, Lanza,” said Carrera. “I just want to be here to witness giving these motherfuckers a healthy dose of fear and humiliation.”
The first reports to come in were visual, from human observers using a mix of extraordinarily powerful binoculars, high definition closed circuit television cameras, thermal imagers, telescopes, and even the national observatory which, for whatever reason, the Taurans had elected not to target. These fed information to the command bunker, which some of Lanza’s staff converted into a display on a large map board in the middle of an operating-theaterlike room.
There was also a small fleet of Balboan manned fishing boats operating off the northern coast of Cienfuegos, mixed in with other, civilian craft. Those, however, were being held in reserve for the day that much earlier warning would be required.
“Arrogant bastards,” muttered Lanza at seeing the single package inbound. It was labeled with a formation number, the composition of the formation being shown on a large television screen on the wall. Lanza stated the number of aircraft aloud, “Forty-three, all in one close group. I wish I had a nuke to use.”
No comment
, thought Carrera. Turning to Lanza, he asked, “How are you going to handle it?”
Lanza pointed to the same map as held the enemy formation marker. Staff legionaries were emplacing sundry markers for air defense units,
lots of them
.
“They typically come in loaded heavy for ground attack.” He looked at the board as it flashed an update. “Anglians, flying Goshawks. We know what they’re capable of because the Federated States tried to interest us in their Goshawk multirole fighters, the same planes the RAAF bought. That group probably carries two hundred and fifty tons or so.
“Sergeant Miller,” announced a communications sergeant, “out on Guano Island, reports refuelers passing by heading north.
“Okay,” said Lanza, “so light on fuel, heavy on ordnance. I wish we could sneak someone in to fuck with their tankers. Be a blast,
Duque
, to have the Taurans have to ditch in the sea, no?”
“The Condors?”
Lanza shook his head. “Nah. The aerial tankers never get out of range of the ground-based fighters on Cienfuegos. We’d just be asking to have the Condors hunted down and destroyed. Remember, they can’t even take a close fly-by from a high performance jet.”
“Okay,” Carrera shrugged. “just a thought.”
Lanza rubbed at his chin, thinking. “On the other hand . . . well . . . you know, just pushing the tankers so far back that the planes hitting us couldn’t reach them might be worth it.”
“If you come up with a good proposal, I’ll authorize it.”
“Maybe for next time,” Lanza said. “Anyway, the air defense—well,
most
of it; we couldn’t rehearse that much without giving the game away—will be up in a few minutes. Everything active is coming on line, missiles, guns, and lasers. As soon as the Taurans cross the shore of the Shimmering Sea, I’ll know whether they’re going after Cristobal and Jimenez’s boys, or either us, here, or Firebase Alpha, or the Island.”
“What’s most likely?” Carrera asked.
“Firebase Alpha or the Island,” answered Lanza.
“Why?”
“Because that’s where the Anglians nonnaval air usually hits. The naval air, Anglians and Frogs, plus Frog and Sachsen nonnaval air, typically go after Cristobal or us, and usually not together. No, I don’t think I fully understand the logic of that. It might be nothing more than keeping apart people who don’t speak the same language and don’t necessarily like each other. Anyway . . . Oh, excuse me a moment,
Duque.”
Lanza went and consulted with the chief of staff of the Eighteenth, then came back. “They’re ready, the duckhunters I mean. Just waiting for the word . . . and . . .”—Lanza again made a quick glance at the screen—“Eighteenth, you are weapons free! Excuse me, again,
Duque.
”
Lanza hurried down to the operating floor, so to speak, and picked up a microphone himself. Carrera could not, over the general hubbub, hear what the aviator was saying. It became obvious, though, as new markers appeared on the map table, then moved at super high speed out to the city’s east and west flanks. Some curled around to move south, too, to take up a position between the enemy aerial armada and its bases on Cienfuegos.
“Someone’s been paying attention to the battle tactics of the Nguni,” Carrera muttered. “I see the horns of the buffalo growing out.”
Santa Cruz, Balboa, Terra Nova
Ordoñez sat, flight-suited and helmeted, under the closed canopy, within the exceedingly cramped space of his plane’s cockpit. In such a simple, even primitive craft, there was no air conditioning. Sweat beaded up and rolled down the tribune’s body.
The trucks were lined up in two rows of three, engines already idling. The jet engines were not on yet, and would not be truly engaged until the aircraft had received its great, four second, kick in the ass to get airborne. At that point, they would either work or not.
And,
thought Ordoñez,
if not, I have a very small time to decide whether to try to start them or to punch out. I think, though, that no matter what, I try to start them. I’ve been preparing for this moment for years. I’d rather die than . . .
The tribune felt the truck shudder, then start a jerky roll out the wide warehouse doors, through the asphalt parking lot, then down the winding road to the beach. Ground crew hung along the sides by railings. Ahead, only the upper fraction of his body seen, the truck’s co-driver manned a heavy machine gun, hands resting on spade grips while his eyes scanned the skies.
The truck came to a stop at a flat spot in the road a quarter of a mile or so from the off-white sands of the beach. As soon as it did the ground crew sprang into action, disconnecting cables from the airplane and engaging the small electric motor to elevate the launch rail. Looking left, to the other side of the road, Ordoñez saw a different crew spinning a couple of large cranks to manually elevate the rail.
You can rehearse and test and test and rehearse, but when it comes down to it something
always
goes wrong. Always.
With the elevation of his rail, Ordoñez lost sight of the ground crewman who would give the final order to send the Mosaics aloft. He couldn’t even see the man whose finger was on the button, waiting to engage the rocket.
Ordoñez felt a sudden pain in his eyes, not too bad but enough to have him seeing spots and blinking for a few seconds. He was cleared to know about the SPLADs, the Self Propelled Laser Air Defense systems. He also knew that they were dangerous to the eyes of everyone for miles around anywhere they were used. He had to trust—and did trust—his legate to know that, once the aircraft were airborne, the lasers had to cease fire.
“Five,” sounded in the pilot’s helmet. “Four.”
They wouldn’t have fired those for no reason
, thought the tribune. He began scanning the skies for . . .
Ah, there he is, the poor bastard
. What elicited the sympathy was a single Tauran fighter-bomber, a Goshawk, Ordoñez thought, doing the mamba across the bright blue Balboan sky, probably because its agonized pilot was too busy scratching his own eyeballs out to control his plane or even to set an autopilot.
“Three.” Ordoñez braced himself for what promised to be quite an experience.
I’ve only done this
once
before.
“Two.”
Oh, shit
! “One!”
Suddenly, the pilot felt himself pressed back into his seat, while the skin of his face rippled from the acceleration. He counted, mentally,
One . . . two . . . there goes the jet . . . three . . . thank God . . . four . . .