The Rods and the Axe - eARC Read Online Free PDF

not giving you back a single uncrippled infantryman, artilleryman, engineer, or tanker. Nor are you getting back too many intelligence shits, lest they have seen and then reveal something I don’t want revealed. Of course, I will give you back a couple who have seen things Fernandez has arranged for them to see.
    The weasel-faced Omar Fernandez was Carrera’s intelligence chief, which meant he was also responsible for the propagation of certain disinformation. Though bound to a wheelchair by a would-be assassin’s bullet, there remained nothing wrong with his brain. He was also amazingly ruthless, even more so than his boss.

    Parilla Line, South of Ciudad Balboa
    and south of the Rio Gatun , Balboa, Terra Nova

    Eighty-odd Tauran POWs, under the command of their own, swung picks and shovels, or held open sandbags for the latter, in a broad ditch now approaching half a dozen feet deep, just north of a thin wire fence, itself north of a thick belt of concertina. The space between the two was alleged to be mined. None of the laboring POWs doubted that enough to test the theory. There were two other groups of POWs engaged in the same work.
    Though under their own command, the Taurans were guarded by Balboan legionaries in their own pixelated jungle striped uniforms and bearing the legion’s own battle rifle. The Taurans had been allowed to keep their national uniforms, of which there were at least half a dozen on display in this group, alone.
    Though it was still being worked on, the main line had been built years before. Centrally located, it sheltered behind the swift flowing, steep banked river that fed the two lakes that fed the Transitway. To all appearances, it was oriented toward the north, with a presumption of an invasion from that direction having either taken or bypassed the capital of Ciudad Balboa. An invader coming from that direction would have run, first, into the stream. Moving farther south, presupposing he managed to cross that, there were some thick wire obstacles, currently being made thicker, broad, high density minefields, and several layers of mutually supporting bunkers connected by tunnel and trench. Behind these came the Cordillera Central, the mountain range that ran like a spine down the length of Balboa’s quarter-rotated S-shape. This had been partially hollowed out and tunneled through.
    On the other slope, the reverse slope, there were a few positions and some entrenching to guard against an attack, probably airmobile, from the rear. From those bunkers and trenches still more trenches ran down to twenty-three very large, very solid bunkers, mostly of the cut and cover variety. Except for the degree to which man and nature had conspired to hide them, that, and the enormous size, they resembled nothing so much as Sachsen Christmas cakes, or Stollen , much as the Legio del Cid had used in a Sumeri valley between Multichucha Ridge and Hill 1647, over a decade before.
    From the trees, older and newer, that covered the Parilla Line hung a fantastic number of metalicized strips. Some strips were older and, torn and tarnished, looked it. Others were brand new. Most were somewhere in between.
    “What the hell are those things?” asked Anglian captain Jan Campbell, of her chief NCO, Cimbrian Army Sergeant Major Kris Hendryksen. She was pointing with her finger at something down in the ditch. Her nose and chin pointed elsewhere.
    She, heart-faced, blue eyed, short, shapely—extravagantly shapely, as a matter of fact—and blond, was a late entry captain in the Anglian Army, once seconded to the Tauran Union Security Force-Balboa, which force was now extinct, prisoners where not dead. He, larger, of course, was a Viking, now letting his face go to beard. He was also, though some miracle of slave-capturing genetics on another planet entirely, tanning much better than she was, or indeed, than any of them but the couple of Tuscans in the group.
    She and Hendryksen were lucky to be alive, having just