The Rods and the Axe Page 14

  After a final peace, of course, you may determine that you would prefer that Moritz’s remains come home. Assuredly, we will give them up to you or your agent. If not, be assured he is welcome here and that, should you wish to visit his grave you shall do so as our guest for the duration of your stay.

  It is our law that those who fight and fall in their country’s service shall receive certain honors. This was originally a regulatory oversight, yet, as time has passed, we have come to see the wisdom of honoring even those who have fallen in battle against us. Thus, Moritz’s gravestone shall be marked with the wound badge of the Legion del Cid, and the Cruz de Coraje en Acero.

  We do not presume to make fine and meaningless distinctions among those who have given all they have to give. All who fall, friend or foe, without disgracing their countries, are so honored.

  In addition, we know that bureaucracies can be slow and inefficient, or sometimes even negligent. Though we have made lists of the dead and captured available to the Tauran Union, it is possible that they have not yet been able to take care of you. Enclosed you will find a check in the same amount as we grant to the families of our own fallen, to tide them over until normal bureaucratic systems can come into play. Accept it, please, in the spirit in which it was given, a spirit that recognizes a common humanity, whatever causes may lead us to differ.

  We weep for your loss as for our own. And we weep for our own very much. Perhaps together, joined in heart by our losses, we can achieve the peace that the bureaucratic elites have denied us.

  God be with you.

  Sincerely,

  Raul Parilla

  Presidente de la Republica

  Khalid smiled, then began folding the letter to place it in an envelope. He wondered, Did they deliberately misspell young Czauderna’s name in the official report, so that the TU couldn’t get to this woman in advance? Or did they leave his name off the list? And if they left some names off the lists, did they deliberately obfuscate others . . . all precisely so there would be an opportunity to show Balboa as gracious and merciful, and the TU, and even the national governments, as cold, heartless, inefficient, and contemptible.

  Oh, wicked, wicked, WICKED, men.

  Hotel Cielo Dorado, Aserri, Santa Josefina, Terra Nova

  So that’s the bitch, thought Lourdes, looking over Wallenstein, standing in the reception line, that my husband, my president, and my country are at war with. Not bad looking, if a little pale.

  Wallenstein, on the other hand, took one look at Lourdes’s magnificently large, brown-bordering-on-golden eyes, and thought, He has much to fight for, my enemy.

  The reception was hosted by the embassy of United Earth. Hence it was Lourdes being presented to Wallenstein, followed by the ambassador from the Tauran Union, followed by Janier. Lourdes was polite to all three. Even so, when she got to Janier she hit him with a withering expression of sympathy.

  Janier, being a Gaul, had an amazing capacity for arrogance, on the one hand, and gracious charm, on the other. He took her hand, kissed it lightly, the merest brush, then said, “My compliments to your husband, madam, not only for his battlefield victories but for his impeccable taste in choosing a wife.”

  Hard not to like the bastard, Lourdes thought. Then again, Patricio said he found the frog likeable enough when they met on the boat to work out an attempt at peace, so . . .

  Unfortunately, unlike my husband on the yacht, I am not here to create a peace but to sabotage one. The only question is whether it’s better to do that by being sweet, by being a bitch, or by mixing and matching to suit. My instincts say, “mix and match.” So it’s politeness to the frog, for now.

  “Why thank you, General,” she replied. “My husband has often said what a shame it was that the arrangements you and he worked out failed due to bureaucratic ignorance and cowardice. He’s also said that, had you been in Balboa during the battles, the issue would have been more in doubt.”

  Yeah, about three percent more in doubt. Maybe.

  Oh, all right; maybe I have a wife’s prejudice.

  Matthias Esterhazy was likewise in the line. He said little, even less than did Lourdes. Instead, he spent his energy on sizing up the opposition. He had considerable experience at that, some in his native Sachsen, more as Carrera’s traveling envoy.

  UEPF? That twat Wallenstein wants the war to continue, he thought, accurately enough. But it’s damned hard to think of her as an ally. Her ambassador, if in fact the cunt is her ambassador, has “earnest desire for peace” written all over. Never dealt with an Old Earth Kosmo before, but I suppose it’s possible she’s sincere. The Tauran ambassador—what was that eunuch’s name? I’ll get it later—is terrified of continuing the war, his organization being discredited and possibly disbanded, and his being out of a job. He reeks of it. He’s got no faith in war as an instrument, let alone in war and the military as his instruments. Janier? Putting on a brave show, got to admire that. But he doesn’t want the war to continue. He wants . . . if I had to guess, I’d say that he wants a peaceful retirement and a chance to write the memoirs that will lay all the blame for the loss of Balboa on the bureaucrats of the TU.

  Esterhazy looked around for the Zhong empress. He’d expected her in the receiving line and was terribly surprised she wasn’t there. Then he did see her, pretending to be someone unimportant, standing by the bar. He finished passing the line and started to walk over. He stopped about halfway to the bar, thinking, If she wants to pretend to be unimportant, who am I to blow her cover?

  Instead, the Sachsen went to the bar, got a drink, said no more than, “Good evening, madam,” to Xingzhen, then went to a wall and parked himself, looking for the patterns of human interaction.

  Matthias searched for those patterns, then found something he absolutely was not looking for. Holy fuck! He practically bounced from the wall. He had to keep himself from trotting over to Lourdes. When he reached her he leaned over her shoulder and whispered in her ear, “Do not let yourself be startled. But that portrait hanging on the wall over the fireplace in the Casa Linda? Well look at the short young brown woman hanging out near the high admiral.”

  Lourdes looked and whispered, though only to herself, “Holy fuck, they could have been sisters.”

  Gym Dorado, Cedral Multiplex Shopping Mall, Aserri,

  Santa Josefina, Terra Nova

  The embassy of United Earth had a gym, not too shabbily equipped, but that was inconvenient to get to from the hotel. The hotel had a gym, but it was nothing much as such things tend not to be. There was also, unsurprisingly, a gym at the mall. Better, it was down in the basement, and didn’t have those plate glass windows to incite passersby into joining. Better still, there were multiple entrances. Best of all, it had, besides the usual machines and free weights, an angled track, pool, showers, locker rooms, and sauna. And it was close. Walking there, though, Esmeralda found several more of those posters with Taurans with horns growing from their berets.

  “The important thing,” said Esmeralda to Aragon, as they sat amidst the thick steam of the sauna, “is that my admiral definitely wants the war to continue.”

  “Why does she hate us so?” asked Aragon.

  The cabin girl and sometimes lieutenant, junior grade shook her head emphatically. “She doesn’t. She doesn’t even dislike you. I might go so far as to say she admires you or, at least, your chief. But she has a problem and only sees one way to solve it long term.

  “The problem is that . . . well . . . you would have to have lived there to understand. I’ll try to paint you a picture. Old Earth is screwed. There are wide swaths fallen to our own, home-grown, barbarians. Where it’s still civilized about a fifth of the area is under religious lunatics. They sacrifice people, Cass, to their old gods. Or they do it to terrorize the people they rule. They almost did it to me and they did do it to my sister. Killed her, cut her heart out on the Altar of Peace, and then ate her.”

  Esmeralda said it clinically. Cass Aragon could still feel the hate like an
undercurrent, subtle but powerfully insistent. I believe you, sweetie. And I’m sorry.

  “The highest castes,” Esmeralda continued, “the Class Ones, do no work. They don’t even supervise. They’re on continuous vacation. And always, as befits their caste, first class.

  “All the real work, all the work above obtaining raw materials and food, gets done by the Twos and Threes; the high admiral was a Two, though she was elevated to Class One before coming back here. I’m not sure why.

  “A lot of the low-level work gets done by slaves. I haven’t seen it, but I’ve heard the high admiral railing against the latifundia on Atlantis base, where it’s almost all slave labor.

  “The slaves are even below Class Sixes. They have no rights at all. Buy, sell, beat, kill . . . nobody cares. My family, until we ran afoul of the Castro-Nyeres, was at least free. Well, free unless some of the soldiers caught you, when they could do whatever they liked with you . . .”

  “And you?” asked Aragon, meaning was Esmeralda ever caught by the soldiers.

  “Oh, yeah,” the girl answered. “Often enough. The first time I was only eleven. My father didn’t find out until I was fourteen. He killed a couple of Count Castro-Nyere’s soldiers. He was killed, in turn, then my mother, my sister, and I were taken as slaves. I don’t know what happened to our mother. My sister I told you about. And me . . . I was saved by the high admiral.”

  “And you feel guilty that you’re betraying her?” Aragon asked.

  “Yes,” Esmeralda answered, simply, staring down at the sauna’s wooden floor.

  “She’s trying to change things there,” the girl insisted. “She really is! She’s trying to get in a position where she can change things there.”

  “At our expense?” asked Cass.

  “At your expense,” admitted Esmeralda.

  “Go back to what you started to say before you started talking about United Earth. What are the high admiral’s plans for Terra Nova?”

  “She wants to set up what she calls ‘a great power system,’ where five roughly equal powers run the planet, but stymie each other. She says it has to be five or it won’t work.”

  “I can probably guess,” said Aragon, “but what are the five?”

  “The Federated States,” Esmeralda began, “the Tauran Union, the Volgan Empire, the Zhong Empire, and the Peace Fleet.”

  “Not Colombia Latina? Not Uhuru?”

  “She doesn’t believe in miracles.”

  “Not Yamato?”

  “They’re an appetizer for the Zhong and a way to break up the current Federated States-Zhong lovefest. Hmmm . . . speaking of the Zhong, the high admiral and the Zhong empress have a thing going on . . . which, come to think of it, suggests that the high admiral maybe does believe in miracles.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  Fight the enemy with the weapons he lacks.

  —Alexander Suvarov

  Tauran Defense Agency, Lumière, Gaul, Terra Nova

  A yawning Jan still suffered from jet lag. This wouldn’t have happened had she taken a two-day journey by airship from Balboa to the Tauran Union; then there’d have been enough time to get used to the time difference gently. It wouldn’t have happened, but she’d not have been reporting in for another day and a half.

  Better this way.

  Instead of that, though, the TU used a smallish airship to transfer the wounded to Cienfuegos. From there they boarded regular jets to get them home as quickly as possible. One might well have doubted, and Jan Campbell certainly did doubt, that the bureaucrats who ran the TU really cared much about the welfare of the troops or their families. What they did care about, however, were the political implications, exacerbated by a press they considered largely rogue, if the troops were not returned soonest.

  “So far as I am aware,” Jan told the debriefing officer who’d met her at the airport and taken her to TDA Headquarters immediately, before she’d even had a chance to shower, “nobody who was in the Tunnel at Cerro Mina survived. Few people who were anywhere near the hill when the Balboans took it survived. I and my sergeant major only survived because we got off the hill as it was falling. So, no, I doubt your de Villepin survived.”

  The debriefing officer, a Gallic Gendarmerie captain named Fourier, seemed intent on what had happened to the largely Gallic staff that had been inside the Tunnel. He didn’t seem to care much about the others.

  But then, to be fair, thought Jan, I hardly give a shit about the Gauls, either.

  There were a number of gendarmeries in the world, though not always called that. Gaul had one, as did Tuscany, Castile, Lusitania, Volga, Valdivia, and about fifty other states. Some were better; some were worse. Some were corrupt; others incorruptible. What they shared was that they were an armed military or quasi-military force, with training as both police and soldiers, with duties to enforce law among a civilian population, and a more military attitude to casualties, whether their own, of the civilians among whom they operated, of criminals, or armed foreign enemies.

  Some were more military than others, of course, and some were so military they were formed into paratrooper and mechanized brigades. Carrera had once joked with a general of the Federated States Army about having “Low Altitude Riot Control Aircraft” and “Heavy Armored Community Relations Vehicles.” Among some of Terra Nova’s gendarmeries, that would not have been much, if anything, of a joke.

  “Very sad, then,” answered Fourier. “Well, his family will be taken care of, if they need it, which I doubt.

  “Now what about this massacre I hear happened?” the gendarme asked.

  “I didn’t see it,” Jan replied. “I heard rumors of it, then got some details from one of their senior noncoms. Their chief of intelligence also said something to me to suggest the rumors are true. As to the whys; the Balboan launched an attack with their female infantry unit, or a part of it, that attack was beaten off and destroyed, with heavy casualties, and when male Balboan infantry went in, with more support and after more time to prepare, and saw the dead and wounded women, they killed everything they could get their hands on. At least, that’s what I heard.”

  “How,” asked Fourier, “would anyone report that if the Balboans killed everybody?”

  “The Balboans themselves,” Jan said.

  “Mmmm . . . well . . . maybe,” the gendarme admitted. “I’d still wonder how it happened.”

  “It’s not so hard to understand,” Jan said, “Not for anybody who understands anything about men in battle. One soldier, or a couple, get out of hand; the reason hardly matters. Some people who might be inclined to surrender instead run. There being no obligation to let an enemy escape, some people fire at the ones fleeing. Regular soldiers, basically herd animals as almost all people are herd animals, then figure the herd had collectively decided on atrocity and they just go along.”

  Fourier spent a few minutes thinking that over, chin cupped in his left hand and fingers drumming his cheek. “I think,” he said, “that you should not mention this, nor mention any rumors you heard. We are close enough to war already, a war that is in no way in the interests of the Tauran Union nor any of its member states to recommence. Why should we”—he shrugged—“add to the tensions?

  “I agree with you, by the way, on how it typically happens. But besides that, the problem with war crimes charges and trials is that, outside of a few crimes that are indistinguishable from civil crimes—rape, murder, theft, and such—every other soldier who engages in a war crime has an almost pat insanity defense. Most of the rest have pat defenses of mistake. Or coercion. Though few or none of our idiot lawyers in the Cosmopolitan Criminal Court can see any of that.

  “We lost so many intelligence personnel in Balboa,” the gendarme continued, “that I find myself seconded back to the armed forces for intelligence work. This is what I did when I was in the regular armed force, so one can understand. In any case, here I find myself, debriefing you and any other of the returnees who might have something useful to say.

  �
��I also must say that you are the first. The others can tell us something of Balboan fighting qualities, which are, so I gather, not contemptible . . .”

  Jan went into a fit on laughter at that, before recovering and agreeing, “No, not contemptible.”

  “Well,” Fournier continued, “they can tell us that and they can tell us something of Balboan medical practices, but that’s all.

  “Now tell me what you have seen, since you were not confined to a hospital.

  “This will be better done with a map,” Campbell said.

  Sachsen, Tauran Union, Terra Nova

  Khalid hadn’t chosen this particular post office box from a map, but because there were no surveillance cameras nearby; of that, he’d made very sure. Better, still, on half a dozen reconnaissance drives past it he had never once seen a policeman.

  Security was important, but timing was everything. Khalid had the sequence of events down pat. First, I mail the letters and checks to people we have good reason to believe the various Tauran governments have not informed of the death of a loved one, because they don’t know, because we didn’t tell them . . . or didn’t tell them accurately. That’s only a couple of dozen.

  After passing the post office box outside the Ratskeller of the town of Nievenheim, Khalid parked the rental van, stepped out, took a single box containing twenty-four stuffed envelopes, and then walked over and fed the contents into the post office box.

  “Shot,” he said, as the envelopes tumbled in.

  Now I drive to the campground north of Mogons, and wait overnight. Tomorrow, the letters to the families of the resurrected go out. Oh, wicked, wicked men.

  And so much for that apartment. Fortunately, the rent’s paid six months in advance.