by Tom Kratman
"Beyond hopeless," Mahmoud agreed, still smiling wryly. If he meant the protest he didn't specify. "If I cared it would be humiliating."
"You don't care?" she asked. "You don't care about the hundreds and thousands of innocent people hurt and killed?"
"Don't you care about the tens and hundreds of thousands killed by the former regime or the even greater number who will now be saved?" he countered.
"But—"
"Never mind," he interrupted. The look of wry amusement disappeared. "I can't care because I can't do anything about any of it. What the Americans don't know, though, is that neither can they. The Arab world is a mess . . . beyond redemption. There is nothing anyone can do to change it. All you can hope for is to escape. That's why I came here. I don't even want to be an Arab anymore."
"You are Arab?" Gabrielle asked. "I would have thought Turkish."
He shook his head. "No, not a Turk. I'm from Egypt."
Ah, well, that was okay. Gabrielle hadn't known many Egyptians but those she had known seemed among the gentlest and most reasonable of people.
"Moslem, though?" she asked, eyeing the beer.
The wry smile returned as Mahmoud put out one hand, palm down and just above the beer, and wagged it. "If so, not much of one," he shrugged.
Egypt . . . Egypt. There was a beautiful actor from Egypt . . . very famous. What was that man's name? He looked a little like this one, too.
Which prompted another thought. "I don't even know your name," she said, which was not strictly true. On the other hand, asking was a way to be friendly.
"Mahmoud," the Egyptian answered. "Mahmoud al Beshay. And . . . ?"
"Gabrielle von Minden."
Mahmoud raised an eyebrow. "Ohhh . . . a 'von.'"
"Not the way you say it. 'Von' hardly means a thing anymore for ninety percent of the people who have it. And for the other ten percent . . . to hell with them. I'm an artist, not an aristocrat."
Mahmoud shrugged. "I'm just a waiter, but I hope to be something more someday. The problem though, is that while I came here to escape, I think I am still stuck with the Bedouin curse."
Gabi raised a quizzical eyebrow. "Curse?" she asked.
"We flee the desert, but we bring it with us wherever we go. I, and many like me, flee the restraints of Islam, yet we bring it with us, wherever we go."
Chapter Three
Narrated Ibn Abbas:
My mother and I were among the weak and oppressed. I from among the children, and my mother from among the women.
—Imam Muhammad Ibn Ismail Ibn Ibrahim
Ibn al-Mughirah Ibn Bardiziyeh, al-Bukhari
Kitznen, Affrankon, 7 Shawwal,
1530 AH (6 October, 2106)
"Ooo, I almost forgot!" Besma exclaimed. Arms flying, she raced for her burka, lying on a carved wooden trunk on the opposite side of the room from her bed. She'd concealed the book Hans had given her in the burka's folds.
Petra, still clutching her rag doll to her breast, looked on in curiosity until Besma produced the book. "I can't read," she said. "My brother was trying to teach me but we hadn't gotten very far."
"I know. I can teach you. I'd like to teach you."
"You can read?" Petra asked, wonder in her voice. "I thought that Muslim girls were forbidden to learn to read."
Besma nodded. "Some are forbidden, but it's by their families, or sometimes by the local emirs and sheiks, not by the Quran. My father says that that's wrong, that it's 'improper and impious.' But a lot of people—maybe even most—still forbid their daughters an education in anything but managing a home and family. Some do other things to girls and those my father says are worse than impious. He says they're an 'abomination.'"
"What things?" Petra asked
"You don't want to know. Come on," Besma changed the subject, "let's see what new clothes we can put on your dolly."
Besma and Petra leaned against cushions set up against the wall between Besma's bed and her trunk. It was very late and so Besma had a small lamp lit, set into the wall behind them. The flickering flame of the lamp would have made reading the hand-scrawled words in the journal next to impossible except that the writing was so firm and fine. Whoever had written those words must have had very fine motor control of her hands.
"I can't understand any of it," Petra said, her head hanging with shame.
"We'll work on that later. For now, let's just look at the pictures."
"Pictures?"
"Yes. Hand-drawn ones. Whoever wrote this was really good with a pencil. I wish I could draw like that but—"
"—but?"
"A lot of the pictures are of people . . . and animals. We can't draw those. The mutawa would cut your skilled hand off if you tried. And even for having them . . . " Besma shuddered.
"What?" Petra asked. "What's wrong? And what are the mutawa?"
"You don't see them out of the Moslem towns and cities. The mutawa are the police for the prevention of vice and the promotion of virtue. Nobody controls them. My father says that they're lunatics who push everything Allah commanded to the point their rules sicken Allah. For having pictures of living things they'll beat you within an inch of your life. For having pictures like some of the ones drawn in this book they might kill us." Besma suddenly looked shamefaced. "I'm sorry," she apologized. "I looked in the book on the way back from your family's . . . house."
"Show me," Petra said.
Private Rodger W. Young Range, Fort Benning, Georgia,
10 November, 2106
"Dressed to kill," Hamilton judged as he inspected Hodge's suit. She, and he, and the other two-hundred-and-ten members of the class, were in full up armor. This meant that, besides the close-fitting helmet and facial armor cum thermal imager, the neck was protected by a circular guard augmented by woven, silica-impregnated aramid cloth. The torso was covered front and back with four-millimeter liquid metal alloy, below which was a bell-shaped hip-and-groin guard, while greaves and thigh protectors curved from the back of the exoskeleton to encompass those appendages. On the back was worn the pack that provided power, filtered air, cooled or heated the suit wearer, and held the computer that maintained life support and controlled the suit based on physical and verbal commands given by the wearer. Over all were attached various packs and pouches, weapons and sensors.
It had been sixty years since the first practical suit had been developed. In the intervening time some improvements had been made, notably to endurance and coordination, without substantially changing the layout and structure of the suit.
Hamilton inspected digitally, visually and physically. "You're getting a subnominal reading on your left femoral forward pluscle, Laurie. Have the armorer check it after the exercise." He checked in part by having Hodge have her suit do certain things—"Eyes left . . . Eyes right . . . good . . . Deep knee bends . . . good . . . Left arm pushup . . . good . . . Right arm pushup . . . good . . . Jump . . . Jump . . . Jump . . . good . . . Run in place . . . good . . . good . . . hmmm . . . Have the armorer calibrate the gyro . . . seems a little off . . . ." Beyond that, he ran an analysis cable from his own suit, already checked by the platoon leader for the exercise, to hers.
"I feel more like I'm dressed for a funeral, and wearing the coffin," Hodge said.
"Coffin" was a pretty apt description, and not your cheap pine coffin, either. No, no; this coffin was the deluxe solid bronze job. All told, between the exoskeleton itself (one hundred and forty-seven pounds, including plastic musculature, or pluscle), the armor (one hundred and twenty-three pounds), power and control pack (sixty- two pounds), weapons, ammunition, communications gear, imaging gear, sensors . . . all in all, it came to just about a quarter of a ton. Add in the one hundred and fifteen pound woman (from eating upwards of ten-thousand calories a day she'd put back most of the twenty-five pounds she'd lost in Ranger School by this time, and even managed to reinflate her breasts) and it amounted to quite a weight. Fortunately, the suit was modular and no single piece (except for the Exo, itself, whic
h could be moved by attaching oneself to it) was so heavy that two fit women couldn't lift and attach it.
And that was for a size small suit. Hamilton's weighed almost a hundred pounds more, having larger pluscles and power pack, and more, but not thicker, armor.
Hamilton checked one last item on his heads-up display and announced, "You can inflate now, Laurie."
Hodge nodded, then made herself go stock still as she said, "Suit . . . inflate shock cushions." From a pump in the back with the power pack the suit began to fill up—to overpressurize, actually—several sets of inflatable cushions. These came in two types and served two purposes. One was to cushion against the shock on direct fire hits, shrapnel and concussion. These were the ones inflating now. The others, however, had already been inflated. It was changes to the pressure in these "cushions" that, once detected by the computer, caused it to apply power to the exoskeletal pluscles that made some of them contract until pressure was equalized. After many different attempts, this had been found to be the most practical for military purposes.
"I read inflation as good," Hamilton announced, thinking and that's not even counting your tits, "annnd . . . you're up."
Kitznen, Province of Affrankon, 13 Duh'l-Qa'dah,
1530 AH (10 November, 2106)
Petra recited from a children's book Besma had saved:
" . . . I is for Infidel, burning in Hellfire.
"J is for Jew . . . Besma, what's a Jew?"
The Moslem girl shrugged and shook her head. "I don't know. Demons, I guess. I think there aren't any, anymore. Or at least none near here."
"Okay.
"J is for Jew, whom even the rocks hate.
"K is for Kaffir, enslaved in the jihad.
"L is for liar . . ."
Petra suddenly stopped reading. Her face grew very sad. "That's what the man said who took me from my family, that I was enslaved under jihad since my father couldn't pay the tax that allowed us to be dhimmis."
"That's just so wrong. I'm sorry, Petra."
"It's all right. It wasn't your fault."
"Let's start over at the beginning," Besma suggested, thinking to get Petra's mind away from thoughts of jihad and slavery.
The girl thumbed the pages back and started over:
"A is for Americans, devils incarnate . . . Why are the Americans devils, Petra?"
Besma shuddered. "Because they tried to exterminate us."
Private Rodger W. Young Range, Fort Benning, Georgia,
10 November, 2106
"Kill 'em quick, before they get away!"
Hamilton didn't know whose voice it had been, shouting over the comm system. He thought it sounded like Hodge but, if so, her voice had never been quite so full of passion, not even in bed. He checked his heads-up display to find her position, then looked over to where she stood above a trench, pouring fire down into it. The bullets, all tracers, looked like some alien weapon from a movie about the future.
The range (rather, the range which bore the name) had seen many uses over the years and had once been in a different place. One major use, in the other place, had been as a close assault course. In the original version of this, machine guns had fired at about waist level over the heads of troops crawling forward. Later on, this was deemed too unsafe and the guns were fixed to fire well over the heads of even the tallest man. That this had totally destroyed the already limited moral training value of the range was deemed acceptable by those more concerned with safety statistics than with victory on the battlefield.
They didn't do that anymore, for Suited Heavy Infantry, at least. Now rifles and machine guns, the same kinds as favored by the Moslem enemy across the globe, were aimed by remote control and fired to hit. Since with full-up armor the suits were more or less invulnerable to those rifles and machine guns, it was still a very safe exercise. On the other hand, it was a great way to build confidence in the troops in the armor's ability to withstand direct hits.
While Hodge fanned the trench with lead-tipped flame, Hamilton passed her by, bouncing up and over it and taking a kneeling firing position—trees and sandbags being not as good a protection as four millimeters of liquid metal armor—to begin peppering a bunker farther downrange.
As he did so, Hodge knelt beside him and changed out the helical magazine on her left-wrist-borne CCW, or "close combat weapon." Colloquially, among the troops, the things were known as "Slags," as in "Slag 'em,"—turn them into something wet and runny.
Once that was done she took her own weapon, a fifty millimeter semi-automatic grenade launcher, and fired a salvo of four rounds of training practice—it had the same ballistics as a high explosive service round but only as much explosive as one might find in a blasting cap—at the bunker, one of which went directly through the aperture. The bunker decided it was dead and cut off control to the remote operator.
Hamilton directed his comm system, "Closed circuit, me to Hodge," and said, after the beep that indicated the changeover, "Good job, you bloodthirsty bitch. Glad you're on my side."
They both heard, through the platoon net, "Action right. Enemy platoon counterattacking. Kill 'em."
No sooner had they heard this than a flurry of bullets swept over both of them. The suits shrugged those bullets off, but they still had enough energy to rock the two troopers back.
Hodge began slow fire—one round per two seconds—at the advancing robotic targets. As she did, she said, "Closed circuit; me to Hamilton" and then, "Did I ever mention this shit makes me horny?"
Kitznen, Provence of Affrankon, 13 Duh'l-Qa'dah,
1530 AH (10 November, 2106)
"Now he," Besma said, "is a beautiful man."
"Do you suppose he really looked like that?" Petra asked, "Or do you think maybe my great-grandmother sort of . . . what's the word?"
"Idealized?"
"Yes, that one. Do you think she idealized him or did he really look like that?"
"Either way, he's a dream. And there's something about that."
"That" was a male appendage, plainly visible in the drawing.
To that Petra agreed. Mohammad had had a point. Even at nine, a girl is still in good part already a woman.
The drawing the girls were looking at in the journal was labeled "Mahmoud" in the artist's superb handwriting.
"He's one of my people, I think," Besma said.
"Not one of mine, for sure," Petra agreed. "What do you think he was to my great-grandmother?"
"I don't know. Let's try to read some more. Maybe we can find out."
Private Rodger W. Young Range, Fort Benning, Georgia,
12 November, 2106
"No," Hamilton insisted, "we are not going to dump our groin armor so we can fuck."
"Scaredycat," Hodge taunted.
"Nothing of the kind," he answered. "It's just that the thought's preposterous. It'd be like two robots going at it."
Unable to help herself Hodge started to giggle. "It really would look ridiculous. But then, who's going to see?"
"Everybody. We don't have thermal imagers for nothing and the heat waves rising from your hot little ass would be sure to be noticed."
"You think my ass is hot?"
"I think all of you is hot, Laurie."
Some things, she thought, are better than sex. Being thought "hot" is sometimes one of them. "Okay. I'll leave you alone for now. But when we get back to Olson Hall you better show me that you really think all of me is hot."
"Deal," Hamilton agreed.
Though they were lying on their backs in the dirt next to each other, she didn't bother to snuggle in. Hamilton was right; there was something obscene about two robots cuddling.
"You done good, today, Laurie," Hamilton said.
"Thanks. You, too. Though this suit is a damned uncomfortable thing and pretty unflattering to a girl's figure."
At first Hamilton said nothing to that. After a few moments, though, she realized he was laughing.
"What's so funny?"
"Well . . . I was just
thinking, a girl in a heavy infantry suit is perfectly dressed under the enemy's law. What's the difference between wearing a burka and wearing Class B armor?"
She thought about that for a few seconds before answering, "I can't kill people as easily wearing a burka."
Kitznen, Affrankon, 14 Duh'l-Qa'dah,
1530 AH (11 November, 2106)
Ishmael escorted the two burka-clad girls from the house to the market. That was part of his official duty; he didn't hit Besma up for baksheesh for it. This was to the good as Besma only had the two dozen dirhem she'd begged from her father to buy some new clothes and shoes for the new girl in the house. Her father's wife had objected, and her older stepbrother, Fudail, had sneered, but still her father had given over the money. Besma was, after all, the pearl of his heart.
