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

managed to get away from the old Tauran headquarters at Cerro Mina before the Balboans troops had taken it. Ordinarily, they could just have surrendered. Hendryksen, being male had figured out that was a bad idea, after the wounding and deaths of hundreds of Balboan female infantry on the hill’s northern slope and the broad boulevard beyond. To Campbell, being female, it had simply not occurred that normal male soldiers would take any exceptionally dim view of the killing of female combatants. Hendryksen had understood his own sex better than she had. Plunging into an orgy of massacre and mutilation in revenge for the losses to Tercio Amazona , the legion’s females-only infantry regiment, the legionaries had left hardly anything alive atop the hill, and burned alive or suffocated those who’d sheltered in the underground complex beneath it.
    The metalicized strips lay on the ground as well. Hendryksen picked one up and, after checking the ends to make sure it was a whole strip, measured it by eye. He then checked another, determining that it was precisely half the length of the first.
    “My guess,” he said, “and it’s only a guess, though an educated one, is that these are designed to screw with ground penetrating radar. Maybe also the global locating system, but I don’t know enough about that. That they’re a deliberate defensive measure, though, seems certain.”
    “Do the Balboans do anything that is not a ‘deliberate defensive measure’?” Campbell asked, pointing with her nose at the menacing firing ports of the bunkers nearby and running up the slope. So far as she could tell, the bunkers were at least mostly empty, their nominal occupants currently guarding the detail of eighty or so Tauran POWs, digging a ha-ha under Campbell’s command.
    “They have us digging this ha-ha to keep the animals out of the minefields,” Hendryksen said. “Naturally, that is its only purpose. It wouldn’t do as an antitank ditch, or we would not be digging it, since we are not to be used in aiding the enemy’s war effort.”
    Campbell shot him a dirty look. “You mean it’s a ha-ha on the surface, so they don’t feel compelled to shoot us for refusal to work on an antitank ditch?”
    “See, that’s why you’re an officer and I’m just a—”
    “Can it, Kris.”
    Smiling, satisfied with the jab, the sergeant major shut up. In the silence, Campbell continued studying what she could see of the defensive line.
    “Formidable enough,” was her judgment, a judgment in which Hendryksen largely concurred.
    “Hard to flank, too,” he said, “being anchored on the lake, I imagine, at one end and probably with a refused flank off in the jungle somewhere, at the other.”
    “Take it from behind?” she asked.
    “Maybe, if in force, especially on the ground. I wouldn’t count on the chances of an airmobile assault doing the job; the Balboans appear to be pretty much death on people who try to get fancy with them.”
    “They’re not above getting ‘fancy’ themselves,” she observed.
    “True,” Hendryksen agreed, “but they’ve definite limits.”
    “Why this?” Campbell asked. “When their major enemy, us, was bound to come from the Shimmering Sea side, why have this line facing the Mar Furioso ?”
    “It’s still just an educated guess,” he answered, “but my guess is port capacity.”
    “Huh?”
    “There’s essentially no way that an invasion coming from the Shimmering Sea side can get to the capital city until the port of Cristobal falls. Though they haven’t let us see it, I’d bet a month’s pay against yours that Cristobal can also be turned into a fortress, or is being turned into one, in short order. Thus, there is no real threat from the south. They think.”
    “We’re no logistic slouches, ourselves,” she said, “even if we won’t commit the resources to it the Federated States will.”
    “Right,” he agreed. “We probably could isolate Cristobal and supply over the shore