But my dreams
They aren't as empty
As my conscience seems to be
I have hours, only lonely
My love is vengeance
That's never free—The Who, Behind Blue Eyes
The traditional Christmas orgy was in full swing on the hangar deck. Since it was supposed to be a time to celebrate universal brotherhood, even the proles were invited. Indeed, so universal was the sense of brotherhood implicit in the season that Lieutenant Commander Khan, the fleet's sociology officer, was laying, rear up and breasts down, on an ottoman with a prole at each end, one in each hand and short lines emanating in four directions. Khan's husband cheered her on. And why not? He had bet a month's salary on her performance for the night.
Sitting on a plain chair on an elevated dais, High Admiral Martin Robinson, Commander of the United Earth Peace Fleet, watched through his blue-gray eyes without much interest. In truth, Robinson was bored silly by the whole thing. It's as bad as a party back home. Same old faces, same old events . . . same old, same old. Bah. Never anything new.
Robinson had reason to be bored. Though he looked to be in his mid-twenties, face unlined and back unstooped, the High Admiral was a beneficiary of the best anti-agathic therapy Old Earth could provide. His blond hair was untouched by gray and without any recession in his hairline.
On the other hand, Robinson had had better than two centuries in which to grow bored, two centuries of peace, two centuries of orgies, two centuries of . . . Well . . . nothing, really. Nothing until I came here. This, at least, hasn't been boring. It's been frustrating.
Frustration wasn't the half of it. Mixed in, and perhaps in greater quantity than the frustration, was fear; fear for his class, fear for their rule, and fear for his planet.
And there's nothing for it but to change the cesspool down below from a near cognate of Earth, as it was, into a perfect clone of Earth, as it is. That, or plunge the whole thing into a Salafi sect dark age. Either would be acceptable. Indeed, having the planet fall under the Salafis would probably leave my world safer. Let them be content to pray five times a day to a non-existent god via a rock in a building in a nothing-too-much city. Let them keep better than half their people as cattle. Let them keep themselves poor and ignorant and, above all, incapable of space flight.
But if I fail, if the non-Salafi barbarians down below achieve interstellar travel, my home will be taken and pillaged, my class will be cast down, and my entire civilization will be plunged into barbarism. And Khan—here Robinson looked up to see that Khan was an easy half dozen partnerings ahead of her nearest competition—Khan assures me that when a civilization like that meets one like ours, ours hasn't a chance. If they can get to us, they can and will ruin us.
Unconsciously, Robinson lifted a thumb nail and began nervously to chew.
So I do what I must, dirty my hands, as I must, and fight . . . well, fight though others, of course; I can't risk the loss of my fleet. That, above all, I must preserve.
Robinson laughed at himself. I must preserve it until it falls apart around me. Preserve it while the Consensus back home does nothing to maintain it.
Dropping his thumb and shaking his head at the bloody damned frustration of it all, Robinson stood to leave the hangar deck. He'd call the captain of the ship, Marguerite Wallenstein, later, if he needed sex. For now he just needed to be alone.
Ahead of him, an oval hatchway dilated to permit the High Admiral passage. As the hatchway leading off the hangar deck whooshed shut behind him, Robinson heard Khan frantically pleading for more.
The troops in the camp stood in ranks and sang lustily and in their thousands:
"Abide with me; fast falls the eventide;
The darkness deepens; Lord, with me abide;
When other helpers fail and comforts flee,
Help of the helpless, oh, abide with me."
Patricio Carrera, commander of the troops of the Legio del Cid in Sumer and of their thousands of compadres in training back in Balboa, didn't join in the singing. Any other song and he might have. But this song, a favorite of his late wife, Linda, figured prominently in one of the recurrent nightmares he endured of her death, and of the deaths of their children. He just couldn't sing it. It was all he could do not to cry. Instead, his blue eyes, normally fierce, became indescribably sad as, indeed, did his entire face.
Carrera's closest friends stood or sat around his office, drinking Christmas cheer that had, until that moment, seemed very cheerful indeed. Yet the mood the song brought to Carrera instantly transformed the mood of every man and the two women in the place.
Two of those closest friends, Sergeant Major John McNamara and Legate Xavier Jiminez, both coal black, very tall and whippet thin, looked meaningfully at each other. Note to the chief chaplain: next year that particular song does not go in the Christmas program. The two women, Lourdes and Ruqaya, exchanged glances as well. As much as the two blacks resembled each other, one could at least be certain they were unrelated, Jiminez being frightfully handsome and McNamara . . . . well, the best one could say of him was that he looked his part, the quintessential grizzled sergeant major, his face heavily lined and never exactly lovely.
Lourdes and Ruqaya, on the other hand, might have been sisters, or at least close cousins. Both were tall and slender. Both had amazingly large and melting brown eyes. Skin color? About the same. Faces? Different, of course, yet each was in the range of symmetrical attractiveness that tended to resemble. However, whereas Mac and Jimenez had shared the same thought, the woman's thoughts were only somewhat related. For Lourdes: Poor Patricio. For Ruqaya: Poor Lourdes; having to share her man with a dead woman.
"Where is death's sting? Where, grave, thy victory?
I triumph still, if Thou abide with me."
Carrera gripped one of his disgustingly small, distressing soft, and nauseatingly dainty hands around a tall tumbler of scotch and drank deeply. For the things I do, he thought, and the things I allow to be done, somehow I doubt that the Lord will abide with me.
The conex inside the ship rang with the helpless shrieks. It practically reverberated with them. The conex, soundproofed, also kept in the stench of voided bowels and bladders, and the iron-coppery stink of blood.
You wouldn't think one man could scream that much, especially with the tongue
protector installed, mused Achmed al Mahamda, the chief of interrogations. Mahamda, quite unperturbed, casually munched a Terra Novan olive, the fruit of an odd palm with green trunk and gray fronds. The olive, itself, was gray and about plum sized. Its taste was similar to, but slightly more astringent than an Old Earth olive. Mahamda loved them, as did many of his people.
He put the olive down and wrinkled his nose as the victim, Fadeel al Nizal, lost sphincter control. The assistant applying electricity to Fadeel's genitalia looked over at Mahamda. Should we clean him up before we continue? This is pretty vile.
Genial seeming, a little fat, and—appearances notwithstanding—utterly ruthless,
Mahamda had been an interrogator for the secret police, or Mukhabbarat, of the old regime in Sumer. When that one had been tossed out the year before by a coalition led by the Federated States of Columbia, Mahamda had gone into hiding. Eventually, one of Sada's people had found him and offered him a job—with a raise, no less, and protection from the Coalition forces searching for him—working for some of the infidels. He'd had to give his family as hostages but, since he'd only gone back to work to ensure they were fed, this seemed not unreasonable.
Mahamda shook his head at the assistant's unvoiced question. His look said, If you want to work in this line, you're going to have to learn to accept foul smells.
Shrugging you're the boss, the assistant turned a dial to increase the juice. Impossible as it might have seemed, Fadeel's screaming actually increased. His eyes seemed ready to burst from his head as his teeth ground against the rubber bit installed in his mouth to keep him from biting off his own tongue.
It's a shame what we have to do to squeeze out the last little bit of useful intelligence and propaganda, thought Mahamda But this is that kind of war. Let those who began it take the blame. And it's not like this sniveling wretch deserves any better.
Once stocky, and even with a bit of midriff fat, Fadeel was already beginning to waste away under the torture. Though near enough in appearance to the captive that they could have been cousins, Mahamda felt no pity. Fadeel was one of those who had begun and advanced the kind of terrorist war being waged in Mahamda's homeland of Sumer. His list of atrocities was long, the coating of blood on his hands deep, the stain indelible. Mahamda felt nothing but loathing for the Bomber of Ninewa, the Butcher of Pumbadeta.
While Mahamda sat in a comfortable swivel chair bolted to the floor of the ship-borne conex, Nizal was strapped firmly to a dental chair, with an electrode stuffed up his anus through a hole in the chair and his penis firmly affixed into something that still looked much like the droplight socket from which it had originated. Nizal's body quaked with the electric jolts surging through it, wrists and ankles straining at the thick leather straps that held him in place. Helpless tears coursed down his face while an inarticulate "gahhhhhh" poured from his mouth.
Mahamda raised a palm, signaling his assistant to stop for the nonce.
"I warned you, Fadeel," Mahamda said, not unkindly. "Any failure to cooperate, any at all, will bring punishment." The interrogator tsk-tsked. "Why do you continue to doubt me? It isn't like we haven't broken you in every other particular. It isn't as if you haven't spilled cells and safe houses, armories and bank accounts. Do I have to bring your parents in, Fadeel? You know how you hate it when we bring your parents in."
In answer al Nizal only sobbed the more heartbrokenly.
Again Mahamda tsk-tsked. "Get his mother," he ordered the assistant.
That got more than sobs and tears from al Nizal. "Gnoo! P'ease . . . Gnoo," he managed to get out around the rubber bit.
Since Fadeel hadn't offered more full cooperation, Mahamda said nothing to stop the assistant who then left, returning in a few minutes with a stoop-shoulder woman. He pushed her to a wall and began chaining her upright. She, too, sobbed.
"That won't do any good, madam," Mahamda said to the woman. "You raised the boy to be a terrorist. You are responsible. It's only right that you help him see the error of his ways."
Finished with restraining the woman, the assistant went to a table from which he retrieved a blow torch and friction igniter. She began to scream and plead with her son as soon as the blowtorch was lit. In a cage on the table, a brace of antaniae, or moonbats, the septic mouthed, carnivorous, winged lizards of Terra Nova, likewise hissed in fear as the torch was lit. It was sometimes used to drive them toward the faces of victims.
"It's up to you, Fadeel," Mahamda said. There was no answer.
"Start with the toes," the interrogator ordered.
"Bwait!" al Nizal begged, between sobs. "'eave 'er . . . go; don' . . . 'urt her. I make . . . your fi'm." The assistant with the blowtorch knelt to bare the woman's feet but stopped, looking at Mahamda.
"I don't know," said Mahamda, doubtfully. Even so, he took a moment to ungag the terrorist. "We did give you a chance to speak the words we wanted spoken to the camera. You refused. Why should we not punish you for that?"
Al Nizal looked at his electricity scorched penis and answered, "I think you've"—he sniffed—"punished me enough. I'll make your film."
Mahamda rocked his head from side to side, as if weighing the time that might be wasted against the advantage of more willing cooperation. He pointed towards the antaniae. "It will be really hard on your mother if you fail us again, Fadeel. The moonbats are hungry."
The terrorist's voice was full of an inexpressible hopelessness. "I won't. Just please don't hurt her."
The ship rocked more or less continuously. Nonetheless, there was one room on the ship, a conex, actually, that did not rock. This was set up on gimbals and so kept its perpendicularity. This was the camera room.
Inside the room, on a comfortable looking chair under a picture of Adnan Sada, Fadeel al Nizal sat, still chained, and answered questions from an interviewer. Mahamda did not play the part of the interviewer; it just wasn't his thing. Besides, he didn't want Coalition authorities to have any clue as to his whereabouts.
Beside the picture of Sada was a calendar, with the month opened up to show a date not too long after al Nizal's capture in Pumbadeta. The coffee table between him and the interviewer held a newpaper, the headlines of which screamed of the fall of Pumbadeta, an event which had taken place months prior. For all anyone who might watch it could tell, the interview was taking place in the recent past, a few days before the announcement of al Nizal's execution and cremation. It was only for purposes of this interview that Mahamda had kept the dentist away from al Nizal's front teeth.
"What can you tell the audience about the suicide bombers you recruited?" asked the interviewer.
Fadeel had been well rehearsed. He answered, from the script he'd been given, "The first thing you have to understand is that most of those foolish boys are not suicide bombers. We load them down with explosives, yes, or set them to driving automobiles full of explosives. But we never tell them they're going to be blown up. Instead, they go somewhere as couriers. And when they're in a good place we set them off by radio or cell phone."
"But they make films beforehand, announcing their martyrdom," insisted the interviewer.
Nizal, still on script, laughed. "Oh, the films. When we have them make those we tell them it's just in case they're killed in action, so that the cause will still benefit. I think not one in a hundred, not one in a thousand, would actually blow themselves up if told to."
"So all they are to you are tools, mere drivers and couriers?"
"That's about it," Fadeel agreed. "That, and fools, ignorant boys who have no clue what they're getting into."
"Those boys get a lot of press, though," cued the interviewer.
"Oh, the press," said al Nizal. "Let me tell you about the press."
"Do you mean our press or the Tauran and FSC press?"
"There's really not much difference between them," al Nizal answered. "All of them shunt us money. All of them spread our propaganda. Any of them will help us bait an ambush, or will be happy to point out coalition soldiers to our riflemen. We wouldn't have a chance in this war without the press—"
"But your people have killed members of the press. Hamad al Thani, for example, was blown up not long ago. Aren't you afraid they'll eventually retaliate?"
Fadeel snorted, as required, and answered, "They wouldn't dare."
While Fadeel al Nizal had not given up every cell, every bank account, and every cache of arms of which he knew—not quite, not yet—even of those he had given up not all had been turned. This wasn't because they could not have been, but because there were better and worse ways of destroying them. Better said, sometimes one really could kill two birds with one stone. And if one could not only destroy a terrorist cell but at the same time destroy the mutual confidence and trust between those who blew up children in markets and those who called them "freedom fighters," so much the better.
Only one of Terra Nova's three moons, Bellona, shone down on the scene.
"Come! Hurry, hurry!" insisted the keffiyah-topped rifleman to the reporter come to interview his chief. "Into the van before you are seen. The enemy has eyes everywhere."
Silently, warily, the news team approached the van. They were three. The reporter, who seemed to be in charge, was a tall, swarthy sort who gave his name as "Montoya," and said he was from Castile, in Taurus. The cameraman said nothing beyond his name, "Cruz." The translator introduced himself only as "Khalid." All three had brown eyes. None were quite white, though the cameraman was much darker than the other two. They seemed to be in rather good physical shape as well. On his shoulder, the cameraman easily bore an unusually large camera which the translator said was a special model for direct transmission to the home station. All three wore the body armor that was de rigueur for nearly everyone in Sumer by this time.
As the news team reached the van they were each subject to a hasty but thorough search of their persons. Neither their cell phones, nor their armor, nor their large camera with its tripod incited any comment. With a nod from the searcher, their guide again said, "Hurry. Into the van."
Once inside, all three were blindfolded. "It's for your own good," their guide explained. "What you do not know you cannot be forced to reveal. And you know the enemy has horrible ways."
"Militaristic hyenas," said Montoya.
"Imperialist pigs," agreed Cruz.
"Infidel dogs," summed up Khalid.
With the news team blindfolded, the van sped off with no more wheel screeching than one would expect of any innocuous van in any major city in Sumer.
The drive was long, though it never left the city; the sounds of traffic told as much. After a period of time the van stopped. The news team could hear the driver open the door and get out. They heard what sounded like a garage door being opened by hand. The driver returned, closed his door, put the van into gear, and drove forward into blackness. Once the van stopped he killed the engine, once again got out, turned on a light, and closed the garage door behind him.
"You can take your blindfolds off now," said the guide.
"Have all the major chiefs come?" asked Montoya. Khalid, the translator, passed on the question.
"Only three," answered the guide, with a weary shrug. "You know how the streets are these days with the infidel swine. The others couldn't risk it."
"I understand," agreed Montoya. "Fascist beasts."
"Anti-progressive poltroons," added Cruz.
"Heretical blasphemers," finished Khalid.
"This way, friends," said the guide, more warmly, if still wearily. "The chiefs that have come are eager to see you."
"As we are them," said Montoya.
Clutching his rifle firmly, the guide led the team out of the garage and into a well lit, finished basement where three somber looking men awaited, each of them armed with pistols in high fashion shoulder holsters, with rifles at their feet, and with a guard each standing by. The guards' weapons were loaded and ready, though they, themselves, seemed calm enough.
There are a number of ways of feeding ammunition to a weapon. The simplest is, of course, by hand, one round at a time. More complex is to use a magazine or belt. Magazines come in several varieties, single stacked, double stacked, and rotary, for example. There are also somewhat rarer approaches, notably helical and cassette.
The guide made introductions. Ordinarily, this would have been done over food and drink. These were no ordinary times, however. It wasn't every day that the faithful were able to make a broadcast through a Tauran news network. Normally they had to settle for al Iskandaria. And there was no telling how quickly the infidels would be able to home in on the transmission. Best to be quick.
"Set up the camera, Cruz, quickly," Montoya ordered. "We must hurry; there is no telling what fresh atrocities the enemies of the people are planning."
"Yes, sir," answered the cameraman who went about doing just that, setting up the camera and fine tuning its angle of view. When finished, Cruz got behind the large camera and announced he was ready. By that time, two of the guards had taken position at the corners of the room behind the news team.
Meanwhile, Montoya hooked each of the three chiefs up with small microphones, then hooked himself up as well. As he did, unnoticed he pressed a small button. A radio signal immediately went out to the news team's backup. Then Montoya, himself, backed up to stand nearer the door.
Montoya looked at Khalid. Yes, he appeared ready, too.
Montoya smiled at the three Sumeri men at the table and announced, "Then, gentlemen, let us begin . . . now."
The really tricky part hadn't been ripping the guts out of a new camera, nor even getting a weapon inside. The bitch, the absolute bitch, had been getting enough ammunition, with a reliable enough feed and ejection mechanism, inside the camera. No stacked magazine would do, they didn't hold enough ammunition. A belt required too complex a mechanism in the inner weapon. Rotary was invariably too fat.
This was where the close relationship between the Legion and the some elements of the Volgan Republic came in. The latter had a new submachine gun, the Aurochs, which used a helical magazine containing sixty-four nine-millimeter rounds and which fired at a rate of just over seven hundred rounds per minute, ordinarily. The mechanism could be modified to spit out closer to twelve hundred, however. Moreover, it had been.
At the word "now" four things happened. Montoya and Khalid, whose real names were, in fact, Montoya and Khalid, pivoted and launched themselves at the guards stationed in the corner. At the same time, Cruz, whose real name was Cruz and who was really in charge, depressed a button on the handle of his "camera." The lens, which was a much thinner glass than it looked, immediately broke as a nine-millimeter bullet departed through it, followed quickly by another seven. All left the "camera" accompanied by great bursts of flame. Lastly, just as the first bullet left, a small panel in the side of the camera opened to allow a spent casing, followed by another seven, to depart.
The guard and guide standing behind the dignitaries were the first to go. With two quick bursts of eight to ten rounds each, these were slammed to wall and their bodies simply ruined. (The Legion tended to ignore the rule on frangible ammunition when dealing with its irregular adversaries.) After that, with the chiefs just coming out of their shock to reach for their own arms, Cruz simply held the firing button down and swept across the table until the Aurochs inside the camera clicked empty. The chiefs went down like ninepins.
Meanwhile, Montoya and Khalid struggled with the two guards at the corners. Neither really had any advantage. All four were young men, fit and strong and trained to fight. That didn't matter, however, as Cruz now had his pick of weapons. He retrieved one, made sure it was loaded, then went to stand beside Montoya.
"This is really going to sting, buddy," Cruz told the struggling Cazador.
"Fuckthatjustkillthemotherfucker!"
Bang.
"Sorry about this, Khalid," Cruz said, as he placed the muzzle against the last guard's head. Bang. Khalid, member of Adnan Sada's underground, revenge minded men recruited to fight terror with terror, winced as he was stung with muzzle blast and covered with flecks of bone, bits of brain, and a wash of blood.
Once the "camera" had expended its ammunition, there was no reason to keep it whole. Cruz flicked a latch, split it open, and withdrew three small hand grenades. If only old Martinez could see me now, he thought. There had been a time when hand grenades frightened Cruz. That time was long past. Just another tool.
Montoya and Khalid acquired arms the same way Cruz had, from the bodies. They were just loading them when the driver of the van burst into the room, shouting and firing his rifle into the ceiling. The driver lasted a very short time.
Montoya spoke into his microphone. "Mission accomplished. No back up necessary. We're leaving the same way we got here. We'll dump the van and walk home. Oh, and if you assholes think we're going to do this kind of fucking crazy shit again, then you're crazy."
They left Al Iskandaria and Tauran News Network calling cards on each of the bodies, each card bearing a hand written note, "In the future, watch where you plant your bombs and who you kill. Hamad al Thani was our brother."
Before they left, Cruz and Montoya wired the bodies of the chiefs with grenades and set the camera to arm in five minutes and explode as soon as anything disturbed its integral motion sensor. Since the Legion wasn't going to investigate, it seemed a safe bet for nailing a few more.
"Do you think they'll buy that it was a hit by the pressies?" Sergeant Montoya asked, as Khalid backed the van out of the garage. Khalid knew how to drive the madcap streets of Sumer better than did the two legionaries.
"They'll wonder, at least," answered Ricardo Cruz, Optio, Legion del Cid. "If we'd left by helicopter, if any kind of reinforcement had come by helicopter, or at all, then no, they'd know it was us. But as is?" He shrugged. "It looks enough like a private hit, a vendetta hit, to make them wonder and maybe chill press-terrorist brotherhood."
"Something must chill it," Khalid said.
Khalid was an odd case, though not so odd in relation to Adnan Sada's little corps of assassins. Initially, he'd been very much against the infidel invasion of Sumer, despite being a Druze rather than a Moslem (a fact he generally hid; Cruz and Montoya, for example, had no idea Khalid was a Druze and they'd been working together for quite a while). Yet he had seen just rule come to his home province for perhaps the very first time when one of his own people, Adnan Sada, had become governor. This had dampened his early enthusiasm for resistance. (For whatever their other faults and virtues, Druze tended to be fiercely loyal to their homelands, wherever those might be and whoever might be in charge, provided, at least, that the governments and people of those homelands did not threaten the Druze.)
It hadn't done any more than that, though, no more than to make him neutral. To turn him from neutral to committed partisan had taken the loss of much of his family. These victims—his mother, his little brother, the doe-eyed baby sister, Hurriyah, Khalid had doted on—had been butchered by a terrorist car bomb, a bomb that turned them into disassociated chunks of bloody meat as they shopped the local market. At that point, Khalid had been identified, sought out, offered the chance of revenge, and recruited.
His initial training had been sketchy, at best, his initial missions simple. But, with time, with the development of newer and better courses of instruction, above all with his demonstrated propensity for assassination, Khalid's training and skills had much improved. Tonight he wouldn't add any black ribbons to the family picture he kept at his home, one for each terrorist he slew. He hadn't actually killed anyone, this mission, and the ribbons were for personal kills, personal revenge.
The chief of the Legion del Cid, Patricio Carrera, didn't know Khalid, personally. If he had, he'd have instantly recognized a kindred spirit.
"Where to from here, Khalid?" Cruz asked. "Montoya and I are back to our tercios, me to the First and him to the Sixth, after this mission."
"I've got one more mission, then it's off to Balboa, actually," Khalid answered. "Balboa for an immersion course in English—English! Allah, your fucking Spanish was strange enough!—and then Volga for some advanced training. After that, I don't know."
"Lucky guy," said Montoya. Then, thinking, Yeah, Khalid's a wog, but he's a damned good man to have on your side, he added, "Hey, I've got a sister you might like . . . "
Two very unlucky men, not brothers, stood side by side on the carefully maintained and watered, very green parade field in the center of the earthen-walled base. One, a legionary of the Legion del Cid, had been accused and found guilty of raping a Sumeri girl. The other was her brother who had killed her afterwards to expiate the shame. The Sumeri wore a dirty dishdasha. The legionary had on the remnants of a uniform, all the insignia cut away, buttons stripped off, and the man's award for valor, the Cruz de Coraje in Acero, lying in the dirt nearby.
Both men stood on short, unpainted wooden stools, about half a meter high. Around their necks were hemp ropes, tightly wound into nooses and leading to a simple wooden frame with cross piece. Both trembled not so much in fear as in shame. This was going to be a hard and, especially, a shameful death, a kicking, choking, pissing and shitting your pants death, and both knew it.
The legionary's cohort was drawn up in formation before the gallows. Under some tranzitrees, planted for shade, the Sumeri's family elders stood witness as well, as did some of the clan's women. Nobody even thought to touch the beckoning fruit of the tranzitrees. Inviting green on the outside, luscious red within, the fruit of the tranzitree was poisonous to any forms of life with highly developed brains. Still, they provided good shade, were immensely hard to kill, and had pretty flowers.
While Sergeant Major Epolito Martinez, a fireplug-shaped, dark-skinned sergeant major with his hair in a severe buzz cut, harangued the cohort on the wages of sin, Major General Adnan Sada, Army of the Republic of Sumer, had some choice words for the family.
"I have consulted with my brigade chaplain," Sada said, "on the question of honor killing of raped females. Mullah Thaquib informs me—and he is an educated man, an Islamic scholar, who has studied in Yithrab—that there is not one word, not one, to permit or condone such a crime. He tells me that it is unIslamic, that it is murder. As such . . . " Sada turned and nodded to his own sergeant major, Na'ib 'Dabit Bashar, standing not far from Martinez.
"Epolito, time," the Sumeri sergeant major announced. Bashar was tall and rail thin and had but a single eye. He'd lost the other in the fight for Ninewa, facing, among others, Martinez's own cohort. It was just business; Bashar held no grudges.
"And furthermore," finished Martinez, "I'm glad to be hanging this son of a bitch who brought shame on all of us, and I'll be glad to do the same for any of you."
With that Martinez executed a smart about face and marched a few paces to bring himself parallel to the Sumeri. There he halted a few seconds until the Sumeri said, quietly, "Forward . . . march."
"Man, I hate this shit," Bashar said. His Spanish had gotten rather good over the last few years.
"Nothing for it," Martinez answered, "but it makes me sick, too." But I deserve it. Who failed to train you to keep your cock in you pants, boy, who failed to train you not to rape women, if it wasn't me?
At the base of the gallows, both noncoms stopped and placed one foot each on one of the stools. Together they looked toward Sada.
Sada heard one woman begin to wail. He supposed it was the mother who had lost a daughter and was about to lose a son. Nothing for it, he thought. If you have more sons, woman, raise them better.
He turned towards the gallows and raised one hand. When he dropped it both Martinez and Bashar tipped the stools over and backed up. The condemned men dropped less than six inches each. Their feet immediately began to flail in panic. The nooses hardly tightened at first.
It was going to be a very slow hanging.
Patricio Carrera, aka Patrick Hennessey, Dux of the Legion del Cid, forced himself to watch the hanging from the second floor window of his adobe brick office. Though no one was looking, he kept his face a stony mask, even while the two doomed men struggled and twisted at the end of their ropes.
For the slowly strangling Sumeri who had murdered his own sister Carrera felt no pity. You stupid bastard. I'd have paid recompense money and moved her out of the country, married her off to one of my troops or maybe sent her to school somewhere. Even in your fucked up culture there's such a thing as out of sight, out of mind. You didn't have to kill the girl. And I'd still have hanged the man who raped her.
His own soldier was a different matter, for Carrera loved his Legion and loved the soldiers who composed it. Watching one of his own die slowly and disgracefully hurt.
Carrera sighed. But what choice have I, boy? When one of you rapes a girl he drives up resistance and endangers all the others. And it wasn't like we didn't have whores available for you. There was no excuse. And if I loved you, son, I hate you, too, for what you've made me do to you.
The definition of a bad death could be said to be one in which two or more deadly factors race at a snail's pace to kill the victim. In this case there were three such factors. While gravity pulled the men down, straining their necks and threatening to break them, the ropes tightened slowly, cutting off air and blood to the brain, even while the combination of impeded blood flow and terror promised eventual cardiac arrest. All this the two men suffered until, finally, the Sumeri's skinny neck gave way. His legs thrashed once, twice, and then he went still except for the unconscious rippling of dying muscles and the steady drip, drip, drip of piss and liquefied shit off still wriggling toes.
The choking and gagging Balboan legionary had a tougher time of it. With his much more muscular neck there was no chance of breakage. Nor did the rope cut off blood to the brain or induce cardiac arrest. Instead, his thrashing and his weight gradually tightened the noose until there was no more passage for air. Only then, and even then not for some time, did he lose consciousness and, finally, die.
All this Carrera watched, unwilling that he should not witness what he himself ordered, however horrible. Only when it was over, when the doctor in attendance placed his stethoscope to the victims' chests and made the signal that they were dead, did the Dux step away from the window.
Even as he did, he could still hear a Sumeri mother wailing.
An ambulance siren wailed in the distance, racing to the scene of the latest bombing in the provincial capital. They weren't as common here as they were some other places in the country; yet they were far too common still.
Carrera, Sada, and their respective military formations did what they could to aid the local police and even to search vehicles themselves. It helped . . . somewhat . . . sometimes . . . in some places.
They'd tried both high-tech and low-tech solutions, from explosive sniffing machines to explosive sniffing dogs. Both methods had faltered under the simple terrorist expedient of sending forth small boys with spray bottles to spray underchassis and wheel wells, signposts and curbs with a solution containing various explosive compounds in low dilution. To the machines and the dogs, explosive was explosive. They were soon alerting on nearly everything. When everything smells like explosive nothing does. The machines were retired and the dogs sent to other duties.
There had been some successes of course. Early on in the campaign aircraft equipped to spit out every imaginable cell phone number and every possible radio frequency had overflown likely areas for bomb construction. This had blasted a goodly number of bomb manufacturers into the next world over a short period of time.
Those who lived had reverted to using infrared garage door openers to detonate their bombs. The Legion had not yet figured out a way to prematurely detonate those until they were already emplaced, which was all too often all too late.
The bomb which had just gone off in a market had been detonated in just that way. Fortunately, something had warned the civilians nearby who had, for the most part, gone scurrying. Casualties were remarkably low and for those there were there was a catch all phrase, il hamdu l'illah, to God be the praise.
Now, to either side of that attack site and the few bodies it held, other groups waited for some special targets to show up to detonate their own little gateways to Hell.
It had been a hell of an argument really. After the assassination of their three local leaders by men purporting to be from the news media, the first assumption had been that it was the foreign mercenaries' doing. As one of the remaining terrorist chiefs, Faisal ibn Bahir, pointed out, though, "Really not their style. They never even searched the place for files. And they only took personal arms when they left and not all of those. No, I think it was a personal hit, maybe even because of that pressie that was blown up."
"But the infidel press has shown it's been on our side from the beginning," objected another of the leading terrorists, this one a representative of the Salafi Ikhwan.
"That's very true," agreed Bahir, with a serious nod. "And yet, does it not strike you as suspicious, my brother, that this same infidel press supports and advances the very things we loathe and fight against? Freedom for women, for queers, for atheists? Are they not the very essence of perfidy? Are they not the mothers of lies? Why then should we accept anything they say or do at face value? The only thing we can be sure of is that they take care of each other. And that, brother, is completely consistent with them assassinating, more likely paying someone to assassinate, our fallen comrades."
"But . . . if the infidel press is against us, what chance have we?"
"This is why we must strike them," insisted Bahir, "to let them know who their masters are. After all, the 'courageous' infidel press is brave only when not pressed."
"Should we assassinate then, or take hostages for ransom?"
This, Bahir contemplated. After a bit of deep concentration, he answered, "Nobody expects us to honor ransoms anymore, not since that Masera houri was fed feet-first into a wood chipper."
Giulia Masera, a progressive journalist from the Tauran Union, had volunteered to be a hostage for ransom early in the war. Her mistake had been in surrendering herself to Sada's boys, rather than the actual insurgents. These had taken the ransom, then murdered her for the cameras in just the way Bahir had said. This had had the salutary effect of stopping such voluntary hostage takings pretty much entirely.
"No," Bahir continued. "Let's pay them back in the same coin; kill a team or two and leave our calling cards on the bodies."
"Don't press too soon," cautioned the leader of the five man bomber team. "Wait for the vultures to show up on their way to gorge on the meat from the bodies that lie dismembered in the market."
The bomber with the infrared switch in his hand smiled at the metaphor. Good one, Anwar. What are the pressies, after all, but carrion feeders?
They didn't have long to wait. Ambulances passed. Military vehicles passed. And then came the word from an observer a further half mile down the road, "Tauran News Network, yellow van, eye painted on the side."
Placing a hand, fraternally, on the shoulder of the bomber with the detonating switch, Anwar said, "On my signal, Brother . . . . and . . . FIRE!"
Infrared, despite sending a signal at the speed of light, activated a mechanism that was much slower. Anwar knew the time it would take between sending that signal and his bomb exploding. He had mentally calculated the time, and done so rather well. The yellow painted van with the TNN eye on the side was only a meter or so past the bomb when it went off.
The explosion came in the form of a fiery dark cloud and the whizzing of hot chunks of steel. The bomb, itself, was of the concave directional type. It was mid-sized, and just perfect for sending a very heavy concentration of metal chunks in a fairly precise direction.
The rear tires of the van were blown off as the rear three fourths of one side disintegrated under the steel hail. The van's tail was forced about ninety degrees from its direction of travel. Forward momentum, however, had not been lost. The van had no option, given the laws of physics, but to begin to spin along its long axis as it tumbled down the street. It crashed, finally, at a store front. Between the bomb and the wildly careening van, some numbers of innocent people were hurt or killed.
No matter; the bomber team was well sheltered and they emerged moments after the bomb went off, ignoring the dead and wounded and racing afoot for the van. Their faces were covered by their keffiyah. Once at the van, rifles went into action, pouring lead into the stunned and bleeding men—oh, and there's one woman, too. Infidel slut!—inside the wrecked vehicle. One or more bullets must have found the gas tank, for the air quickly filled with the stench of gasoline. One terrorist carried a grenade. This he donated into a broken window. The van was soon blazing merrily and, based on the screaming, finishing off whichever of the infidel vultures had survived bomb and bullet.
Nodding satisfaction, Anwar gave the order, "Leave the rifles; plenty more where they came from. Now go and disperse. We'll meet at my house this evening."
As the men ran off they heard another bomb, and more rifle fire, coming from what sounded like about a mile in the other direction.
All three moons were up, Hecate, Eris and Bellona, when Khalid, representing Adnan Sada, met with Bahir in a walled in courtyard in a suburb of Ninewa. "That was well done," Khalid congratulated. "My liwa is pleased."
"He is pleased even over the twenty-three innocents we killed?" Bahir retorted.
"No . . . no, of course not," Khalid shook his head. "But there is always what the Balboan mercenaries call 'collateral damage.' If you had not killed the innocents then it would not have seemed as if it were an attack by the resistance. The question is whether the damage is less than there would be if we did not take the action. He thinks it was worth it, however regrettable it may have been."
And how am I different, then, from the people who blew up my family? Khalid wondered. In this only: they blew up my family; I only blow up others' families. That is as much moral difference as can be.
From inside his dishdasha Khalid drew several packages of Tauran money which he placed on a low table between himself and Bahir. "This is for your expenses. There is a bonus in there, as well, for a job—well, two jobs, really—well done."
"It was three jobs, including getting you the introductions and passes to bring your 'news team' to murder the chiefs."
"You were already paid for the first," Khalid insisted.
"I know. That isn't the point. But after three such jobs, is that not enough to earn the release of my father's son?"
Khalid sighed. "I have told you this before, Bahir. Your brother will be pardoned and released when the war is over, really and finally over. He hasn't been subject to the question since he gave us your name. But until the war is over, you dance to our tune if you do not want your brother to dance to a very different tune."
Under the shadowless light of the three moons, Bahir scowled even as he raked in the money.
From space, Hecate was up and appeared full as Captain Marguerite Wallenstein's shuttle touched down on the Spirit's hangar deck. Robinson was there to meet her. He waited for the hangar doors to lock, and the air previously pumped out to be released back into the open space, before cycling the airtight doors. Even then, he didn't trust the green light that came on to signal that air pressure was adequate. Rather, he waited for the balloon visible from the port hole in the hatch to collapse.
The fleet needed things like the balloon. The ships were old, irreplaceable, and almost unmaintainable. Things went wrong. Things were wrong that simply could not be repaired without resort to drastic measures. He'd been on station for four Old Earth years and had had to order progressive cannibalization of some of his ships to keep others going.
Clever prole, who thought of the balloon trick, thought the High Admiral, as he walked to the shuttle's hatch. I wonder if I should have had him spaced after all as being too clever a prole. No, I suppose not. After all, it might be me he saves next.
The symbol of United Earth—northern hemisphere at the center and southern exaggerated out of size, the whole surrounded by a laurel wreath—split as the hatch opened to either side. A small walkway emerged and down the walkway strode the blond and leggy Captain Wallenstein, a pistol strapped to her hip and some black cloth held in her arms. Blue eyes flashed angrily. Wallenstein did not look happy.
"Never!" she shouted, throwing the black cloth at Robinson. "Never will I go down to that stinking cesspool again."
The High Admiral smiled, letting the burkha fall to the deck. A prole would see to it, later. "I gather then that Mustafa was his usual warm and friendly self."
Wallenstein's eyes were flame. "Warm and frie . . . arghghgh! Do you know that bastard made me dress in a sack? That he never spoke to me directly but made me talk through a slave? That he . . . ah, what's the use? Of course, you knew."
"Yes, and isn't he just lovely, my dear Captain? Can you imagine Terra Nova under him and his sort? We could all go home, Marguerite, with never a care that this hellhole could ever become a threat to our people."
"Yes . . . yes, I suppose so," the captain agreed. "Except that they can't win, Martin. It's just as you said, Sumer is lost. I saw that on my sojourn there. Oh, yes; the Ikhwan will likely drag it out. But they can't win."
Nodding sagely, Robinson said, "I don't care about Sumer. That's been a lost cause since the Balboan mercenaries showed they were more ruthless than the Salafi Ikhwan. Tell me about Pashtia."
An underling came up to take charge of Wallenstein's pistol. She unbuckled the weapon and gave it over, then said to Robinson, "Later, in your quarters."
"It's going to be a long, slow struggle to reopen Pashtia fully, Martin," Wallenstein insisted. "But Mustafa, the filthy barbarian, is making some strides. In particular they're doing well at rearming, at limiting the degree to which government control can be spread, and at training some of what I think will eventually be very good leaders. It's a race though, between how long they can keep the Federated States occupied in Sumer while building up in Pashtia."
"How long do you think before the war there kicks off with a bang."
"I've been thinking of little but that," Wallenstein said. "I think . . . five years."
"So long? Damn!"
"It won't do to hurry," the Captain insisted.
"I know," Robinson admitted. "But I keep thinking about what the engineering officer said. They might have interstellar flight in as little as twenty years . . . and he said that six years ago."
"It would help, Martin, if you went down and coached Mustafa. He won't listen to me, of course, but maybe you can push him to do the things he needs to in order to win."
"Which would be?" Robinson asked. In point of fact, he outranked Wallenstein through caste, not through military ability. It was, if anything, her superior military talent that would keep her from ever being raised to the highest caste. She was simply too dangerous in her abilities ever to trust, fully.
"He needs a thorough grounding in the principles of war," she said. "He needs to take control of his movement, not just to leave it entirely to individual initiative. He needs to wage a global war."
Robinson nodded agreement. Even as he did so, though, he started to chuckle.
"What's so funny?"
"I was just thinking about an individual who is waging a global war. Perhaps he'll teach Mustafa."
Under the light of two moons, a tall and slender, bearded and swarthy man, Mustafa ibn Mohamed ibn Salah, min Sa'ana, purified himself with water, for water was plentiful here, though the desert began not far away. With the last drop of water Mustafa felt the last and least of his sins wash away as well. He then faced to the northeast toward Makkah al Jedidah. He uttered the words, "I take refuge in God against Satan the accursed," then knelt upon his small and austere prayer rug, and abased himself before his God.
Allah, Mustafa prayed, thou art my God. None is your equal, none is your peer. Help me, Your humble servant, to do Your work. Aid me in Your righteous vengeance. Guide my hand, steel my heart, preserve my soul.
Allah, this world is a place of wickedness, as You know well. Unclean men, who lie with men, prosper. Women, whom you created to be under men, assert their equality. Men, whom You created to be under You, make laws as they will, defying Your will. Forbid it, O Allah. Punish it, O Mighty One.
Though you permit to your followers the ownership of those under our right hands, the slaves, wicked men, knowing not your wisdom, would prohibit it. Though you have set the law for which women we may and may not know, women flout it and men permit that. It is an abomination.
I am but a man, O Allah, yet I am Your man. Other, likewise Your men, follow me. Use us. Help us. Smite the wicked. Crush the infidel. Destroy above all the Jews, as You promised us you would do.
Mustafa felt a sudden sharp pain emanating from his kidneys. They'd been getting progressively worse over the last several years. He added to his prayer, O Allah, let me live only long enough to see your cause through to victory.
Prayer finished, Mustafa again tapped his head multiple times to the prayer rug. Then he arose, and looked skyward. He had the eyes of an eagle, so said his followers. With those eyes he spotted, dimly and distantly, one of the spaceships of the Earth infidels.
Mustafa nodded and added to his prayers, aloud, "Smite them too, O Lord, but not before we have full use of them.
The first major colonization ship had been built, unsurprisingly, in the United States. Also, unsurprisingly, it had been built by private firms to government specifications. While the European Union was still struggling to apportion widget production between England, Scotland, France, and Germany, and struggling with how much of it to have done in China to make up for the inflated wages demanded by European trade unions (which was another way of saying how much would eventually show up in government revenues, of course, given Europe's confiscatory levels of taxation), America simply acted.
Curiously, no one in the EU screamed, "Unilateralism." They had their reasons for wanting America to be first with practical, large scale, colonization capability.
"Large scale," in this case, meant twenty-five thousand colonists in cryogenic suspension or "deep sleep." Future ships would be larger, approximately twice as large, but—give the imperialist, revanchionist, capitalist, war-mongering, fascist American beasts their due—twenty-five thousand was a nice start. Besides, since the ship was going to be available for lease long before any Euro ship could be expected to be, the bureaucrats who ran the EU had every expectation that it could be, and would be, used to eliminate some of their excess and unwanted population.
Oliver Rogers' flintlock was safely stowed with the baggage. There were better weapons available for those leaving Earth, but none that he could be sure of feeding with ammunition or keeping in repair, on the new world. His animals—one bull, three heifers, two horses, five goats, seven sheep, half a dozen domesticated turkeys, two dozen chickens and a rooster, and two hundred and fourteen embryos, not counting eggs—had already gone up and been put under. Spare arms were up there too, for when his sons grew to manhood.
Rogers' three wives, two of them officially unofficial, and eleven children would go up with him. Perhaps more importantly, from the point of view of the charity that had paid for Rogers' rather extended family's extended trip, along with all those goats and chickens and whatnot would go an eventual fifteen conservative voters (more, really, as all three wives were quite young and very fertile). It was a bargain, from some points of view, even counting shipping their minimal household goods from Idaho to Florida.
"Oh, God, I'm scared, Ollie," said wife number one, Gertrude, as she leaned against her shared husband's arm. "I've never even flown before and now—"
"I know, Gertie," Rogers said, "I know. It's not easy to pick up and leave our roots. But our ancestors have been doing just that for four hundred years or more. A lot more if you count how they got to Europe in the first place, before they came here. It's worked out well enough, so far. And God will watch over his own."
"They used to say that God watches out for fools, drunkards and the United States, too," Gertie objected. "But he's turned his back on the USA."
"And so are we," said Rogers. "Especially since the Senate ratified the Gag Treaty and the President signed it. That was when the United States turned its back on us."
Whatever Gertie was about to say in reply was drowned out by the scream of Shuttle 11 coming in for a landing to board the colonists and take them to a new world and a new life.