The Rods and the Axe - eARC Read Free Page A

Ex-Volgan para, who came over with Colonel Samsonov and the Three-fifty-first Tsarist-Marxist Guards Airborne (now Twenty-second Paracaidista Tercio, Legion del Cid ). Fought with Carrera in Santander. Son in law to—

    Muñoz-Infantes. Commander of the Castilian contingent of the old Tauran Union Security Force-Balboa. Defected, with his battalion, to Balboa.

    Lourdes Nuñez de Carrera. Carrera’s second wife. Tall, slender, huge eyed, multi-lingual. An independent thinker and brave; she is a she bear in defense of her family. She, personally, foiled a coup against her husband and Parilla.

    Alena Cano, AKA, “Alena the Witch.” First Pashtian of her tribe to recognize Hamilcar as Iskandr. Married into the legion at a young age. Husband is Tribune David Cano. No one, least of all she, knows if she’s a witch or just supremely insightful. Dedicated to her Iskandr.

    Ignacio Macera. Tribune, Legio del Cid. Serving in Tercio la Negrita.

    Ricardo Salas. Legate, commanding Tercio la Negrita.

    Matthias Esterhazy. Legate at large. Former Sachsen Fallschirmstuermpioniere . Signed on with the legion early. Has a very full plate; alternates between diplomatic duties, comptrolling, investing for the legion, and doing occasional engineering work.

    Larry Triste. Senior Balboan intelligence operative. Legionary rank unknown.

    Wu Zixu. Major. Imperial Marines, Xing Zhong Guo .

    Liu. Captain (Naval). Commanding Xing Zhong Guo Dynasty class attack submarine, Mao Zedong.

PROLOGUE
    High Admiral’s Conference Room, UEPF Spirit of Peace ,
    in orbit over Terra Nova

    Wallenstein sat at one end of a conference table crowded with computer terminals manned by intelligence and communications personnel. Behind them sat the Zhong empress, aboard ship officially as a courtesy. Still other Old Earth spacefarers updated old-fashioned maps and charts temporarily affixed to the conference room’s walls. Between the latter, and above the screens and heads of the former, a wide screen Kurosawa television, purchased below and mounted here as better than anything Old Earth was likely to produce, showed split images of the action taking place below.
    Tall, slender, blond, blue-eyed, and rather pretty, Wallenstein looked maybe a sixth of her roughly two centuries of life. She’d have looked younger still, except that sleep had come hard of late; hard, light, and often interrupted. There was just too much to fear.
    One of the images of the planet below was relayed by the UEPF ship, Spirit of Harmony , a sister to Spirit of Peace , and one of only four in the Spirit class of starships. This image was of the waters and islands off the northern coast of Balboa.
    Wallenstein concentrated on a ray-shaped island, the centermost and largest of the group, the Isla Real . It was swathed in smoke, some of it from explosions though more of it came from the smoldering, splintered trees and ruined, charred buildings of the island fortress. Some, too, came from the flickering wrecks of vehicles, many of which had been identified and destroyed despite the defenders’ best efforts at concealing them. There were also two freighters, small ones, sunk in the island’s shallow coastal waters, where they’d been delivering defensive materiel. The fires in these had burned out, or, rather, been put out by the Balboans as they recovered most of the materiel the freighters had been carrying and ferried it to shore.
    Though Marguerite Wallenstein could not, of course, smell it, much of that smoke carried with it the aroma of long pig, done to a turn.
    The Zhong, whose invasion fleet was massed to the north, had quite limited ability to launch airstrikes against the fortress, amounting to no more than two and a half sorties per plane, per day, from their two small carriers’ compliment of eighteen, each, Sergeyevich-83s. Even that was reduced by the three dozen’s ready rate of about sixty-six percent. A mere fifty tons a day was all the Zhong could deliver to the