The Rods and the Axe - eARC by Tom Kratman Read Free Book Online Page B

Marguerite had mostly tuned him out, even as she wrestled with the implications of the disaster that had unfolded below. The scale of that disaster, so much worse even than she could have imagined, made concentration somewhere between difficult and impossible. For example, while one part of her mind knew and saw that the Kurosawa screen at one end of the conference room showed a map of Balboa, from Santander to Santa Josefina, it simply didn’t register on the conscious part of her brain.
    Who’s to blame? she wondered. Anyone that the Balboans haven’t already stretched the neck of? Or worse? Do I fault Janier for going along with a plan I’d forced him to come up with, after the politicians made him execute it out of the blue? When nobody expected a war? I don’t think I can. Do I believe the confessions the condemned made before they were hanged, blaming that non-entity, Endara-Rocaberti?
    No, too self-serving. The Balboans wanted him blamed so it was probably someone else. Someone they’ll take care of in their own way, I’m sure.
    Or is it . . . or forget it, all the different twists and turns of the plotting down below have me so I don’t have the first clue what to believe or what to expect.
    Marguerite had known all along that she didn’t have the background, the training or experience, to run a war on the ground on her own. She had her doubts about her ability to run a war in space, for that matter, though she was probably better qualified than anyone on two worlds. Among those who knew her well, this humility—or realism—was likely her greatest strength.
    That said, the skills that got one elevated to her level, in her culture, had little to do with tactical, operational, or strategic skill. Even administrative ability came in a distant second to willingness to prostitute oneself. And even that was usually less important than connections and political acumen. Marguerite sat in the chair she sat in primarily due to chance, a former willingness to whore herself out, and that same political acumen.
    And I’m long since done trading myself—my body—for advantage or, rather, at least not for my own advantage. Once a whore always a whore, I suppose, and if I had to put on the kneepads for my fleet or planet I could.
    I’d thought chance would fall fairly evenly. And I counted on my political acumen and the things I had to trade getting me what I wanted and what my planet and civilization need.
    Wrong. Wrong. Wro—
    “High Admiral?” asked the briefing officer, jerking Marguerite back to the present.
    “What?”
    “You looked distressed for a moment, High Admiral.”
    “No,” she said, circling a hand to indicate that he should, “keep going.”
    “Yes, High Admiral. As I was saying, the Balboans seem to be playing a shell game. We know that twenty-six large freighters have docked and either begun or finished unloading. We know other ships have come in, picked up passengers, apparently noncombatants, mostly children, and left. We have seen at least one ship load up what we know to be allied troops to bring them to Balboa. We’ve got other ships hanging around that we don’t have a clue about. They’re just sitting there.
    “Moreover, Ma’am, the entire pattern of ocean shipping down below is in turmoil. It’s like . . .”
    “It’s like kicking an ants’ nest,” Khan, male, supplied, from the chair next to Wallenstein. “And I can’t tell if it’s deliberate—the enemy playing a shell game—or an artifact of the half or three quarter million tons of shipping the Balboans have removed from the stream of commerce for their own purposes. I’ve got no precedent for it that really suits.”
    “A couple of things we can be sure of,” said the briefer. “The Balboans are digging in like madmen. They’d always had a lot of fixed fortifications, some they inherited from the Federated States and some they built on their own. Those were in four major groupings: Out on the Isla Real and the