The Rods and the Axe - eARC Read Online Free PDF Page A

about maybe twenty, who are being rounded up even as I sit here, but I suspect hundreds. Damn, I needed those files. I can calculate to my heart’s content, but it’s all bullshit without something concrete to work with. And the fucking Taurans are good at this sort of thing; none of the people I know about are going to have a clue about any of the others. Shit! And I still haven’t been able to get someone convincingly on the crew of Rocaberti, up in the Federated States. Paranoid motherfuckers.
    “Could be worse, Legate,” the underling reminded. “We got their payrolls, after all, and the counterfeits are ready.

    Cristobal, Balboa, Terra Nova

    It was a simple calculation really. Carrera needed X-many days to finish his preparations. There were Y-many Tauran prisoners to return. There were only Z-many Carrera was willing to return, which was a number much less than Y. Parilla had promised the return of one hundred per day. Z over X, however, was less than one hundred per day. Even stretching it out by including Tauran noncombatants wasn’t quite going to equal one hundred times the days needed.
    “So fuck ’em,” said Patricio Carrera, watching as the crew of an Anglian-flagged container ship, fitted out as a hospital ship, loaded the fifty-seven badly wounded Tauran POWs. The hospital ship claimed to be, and possibly even was, owned and run by a humanitarian nongovernmental organization. In the Tauran Union, however, what appeared to be and was billed as non-governmental was often anything but.
    “We’ll give them however many we feel like,” Carrera continued, “in order to stretch out the truce. And no more. Besides, we’re just incompetent jungle rats, incapable of keeping to a schedule.” He closed by repeating, “Fuck ’em.”
    The Anglian humanitarians doing the loading were enough that they didn’t need any help from the legion. This was to the good as Carrera’s troops, plus the numerous civilians who worked the port, were fully engaged on either side of the container ship unloading four Balboan-owned freighters that had docked in the last three days, bringing in over a hundred thousand tons of war materials between them.
    Another nineteen ships were docked at the port of Balboa, disgorging the first of an eventual half million tons—food, assemblies, fuel, building material, ammunition, personal items, major end items, medical supplies, replacement parts . . . basically everything needed for an army of four hundred thousand to fight a major war. Still other ships were being unloaded at other, smaller ports in the coastal interior of the country. One biggie and a couple of coasters were unloading their cargoes by the Isla Real . A couple of smallish ships, no more than five thousand tons displacement, sat idly by, doing nothing but spurring commentary.
    Not that the Balboans paid no attention to the prisoners they were returning. Rather, legion medical personnel sufficient to provide care for the fifty-seven stayed with them right until the moment that the Taurans signed for them. The Tauran skipper, on the other hand, had orders to pick up one hundred. Infuriated at being shortchanged, he stormed up to Carrera demanding the rest.
    “Fuck you,” Carrera had replied, genially, setting the captain to sputtering, impotent fury. “You’re in no position to make demands. You get what’s here. If you annoy me, tomorrow there may be even fewer or none. Explain that to the bureaucratic swine you report to.”
    “It’s not right to use wounded men like this, like bargaining chips,” the Anglian insisted.
    “It’s not right to attack a country without a declaration of war, in the middle of the night,” Carrera countered.
    “Two wrongs don’t make a right,” the Anglian quoted.
    “Who’s interested in making a right” Carrera sneered. “I’m just telling you to fuck off and quit bothering me, and stop your silly moral preening, or I won’t give you back anybody.”
    I am, in any case,