by Tom Kratman
Ah, she was such a sweetheart. Maybe if . . .
Caruthers noticed. "What is it with you and tall blondes, anyway? Oh, never mind.
"John, we've been tolerant before and we suffered for it, badly. This is what 'zero tolerance' means."
Hamilton sighed as the police pushed the girl onward. "Can we get her some . . . consideration? 'Services to the Empire,' if nothing else?"
"I'll see what I can do," Caruthers said. "You cared for that one?"
"As much as I can care anymore, I suppose. She was very sweet and she's very young. I'd rather not have to think that I sent her to a freezing labor camp in Nunavut."
"All right," Caruthers agreed. "We owe you one and getting her sent to a re-education camp in Puerto Rico probably about covers that. Besides, she's young enough that re-education just might take."
"Thank you." Hamilton breathed a small sigh of relief. "What's next?"
"You can't operate here anymore," Caruthers said. "While this group may have been ineffectual, there are others that are considerably more capable." He paused to think for a bit before continuing, "School again, I think, language school."
"Fuck!"
"Trust me; you'll like the reason why, once it's explained."
Castle Noisvastei, Province of Baya, 21 Sha'ban, 1536 AH (17 June, 2112)
Her head moved rhythmically, the object of her attentions pulsing in her mouth. A crucifix swung back and forth in time with her bobbing head, hanging from a chain about her neck. "The men like the idea of fucking Christian women," Ling had explained once, when she'd given Petra the cross. "It asserts their superiority. It's also good for tips."
Petra was a full-fledged houri now; Ling had taught her well and patiently. She no longer knew how many men she had serviced since coming to the castle. It was over a thousand, certainly, even subtracting for repeat customers. She actually tried not to remember the numbers, or the acts. Though, of course, if she wanted to keep repeat customers, she did have to remember preferences. It was a difficult game of mental gymnastics.
For the first few months, Ling had been content merely to have Petra sit or kneel nearby and watch her perform. Well, not quite content; the almond-eyed girl had also taken Petra to her own bed and shown her how to enjoy a woman and how to please one.
"It's how we keep our sanity," Ling had explained.
After that first few months of observation, Ling had had Petra begin to take part, whenever she had a cooperative and suitable man in her quarters. Under Ling's patient coaching, Petra had learned the use of her lips and tongue, Ling's words explaining and encouraging,
Ling's hand firmly but gently guiding Petra's head, Ling scolding at first until Petra learned to accept whatever gift the customer might deposit in her mouth or on her face or lips. Only once had Ling beaten her, and that was because Petra had rudely thrown up after such a "gift."
Before her thirteenth birthday, Petra was a past master in the use of her mouth.
From there, Ling had moved on to more advanced courses. Always she was careful though, selecting, for example, very small men to open and stretch Petra's anus until she could handle larger. One day, Petra had balked, complaining, "It hurts and I hate the pain."
Thereupon Ling had taken Petra down to a lower level of quarters. There, blank faced women sat staring at walls. Others sucked frantically on men. Still others rode customers with seeming wanton abandon. Those last two categories were as blank-faced as the first.
"These are women who complained," Ling explained. "Women who complained once too often."
"What happened to them?" a horrified Petra had asked.
Ling had unconsciously rubbed the crown of her own head, above the hairline. "Oh . . . they were sent to doctors and little things were implanted in their brains. Some other things, parts of their brains, were removed. All their fucking and sucking is controlled by a computer brought from China that sits in the lowest levels of the castle. So far as I know, they feel nothing. So far as I know, they aren't even there. Maybe if the computer didn't make them eat they'd starve to death. But what if they are still there?
"Yes," Ling had answered the unspoken question, "it is a shitty world."
Petra never complained about the pain of anal sex after that. Nor did she complain this time when the customer pushed her head away and placed her on all fours, not even when lined his penis up on her anus, nor even when he thrust forward roughly. All she did was bite the inside of her cheeks and force out a false grunt of pleasure.
In her own room—she was entitled to her own room now that she was a full houri—Petra kept the letters she received from Besma. All of them spoke of how much the Moslem girl missed her sister and friend. None of them asked about Petra's life. Petra had been very clear in the first letter she'd been able to send, "Please, please, please never ask me what I do here." The letters had to go through Ishmael because Besma's father would have gone ballistic if she'd been caught receiving mail from or sending it to a famous brothel.
She reread the letters, sometimes. One in particular, she reread often.
"Fudail is dead. I could not take his manhood, but I did scratch out his eyes when he tried to do to me what he did to you. And, perhaps because I am small, he thought he didn't need his friends to help. I scratched out his eyes and then stabbed the pig through the heart.
"His mother, the lying bitch, said that her son did no such thing. My father, shortly before divorcing her, swore that it could only have been self defense. It was my word against al Khalifa's, with my father's testimony weighing heavily in the balance. The judges let me go.
"Al Khalifa, so I understand, has taken residence in the brothel here in Kitznen. Father won't discuss it, but Ishmael says it is so.
"Of course, you know I would never plan on doing such a thing to my poor, demented stepbrother."
It was that last line, coupled with the letter Besma had left in her great-grandmother's journal, that convinced Petra that Fudail had never tried to commit any crime against Besma, but that she had ruthlessly blinded and murdered him.
"Good for you, Besma," Petra said every time she reread the letter.
Petra thought upon that very letter, even as the grotesquely fat customer behind her ground his passion into her anus and squeezed the flesh over her hips hard enough to bruise. It helped . . . a little.
The fat man straining her anus was a frequent customer. She knew his name and preferences and shouted out in feigned passion, and in English, "Fuck me, Claude, fuck me!" while slamming herself backwards against him. He stank, but then they all stank. What matter; slaves had no right to object to stench. They could, however, at least think, Fuck you, you clod, fuck you.
When the customer was finished, while the filthy drool from his slack mouth dripped onto her back, Petra stayed still, remaining on all fours, his penis inside her upraised rear end. Eventually the customer pulled out, wiping his penis off on the cheeks of her ass. He stood, adjusted his robe and began to walk to the shower. Apparently rethinking it, he turned back and patted her posterior gently. "Good girl," he said, before leaving the bedroom. "Nice fuck." On his waddling way, he dropped two silver dirhem in a plate on a small table by the bathroom door.
Sex was cheap in the Caliphate, as cheap as female Nazrani slaves.
OSI Headquarters, Langley, Virginia, 17 June, 2112
"All rested up, John?"
Hamilton just snarled. Eight days, including travel time, did not amount to much of a rest.
The meeting was small, just Caruthers, Hamilton, and an unfamiliar woman who, despite wearing more or less fashionable female business garb, had something of the medical look about her, somehow. Caruthers didn't introduce her and she didn't introduce herself except as "Mary."
Hamilton was reasonably sure her name was neither "Mary" nor anything close to it. Mary was older, perhaps forty, tall, blond and . . .
Stop it! She's not Laurie and she doesn't even look much like Laurie.
Caruthers snapped his fingers
in front of Hamilton's face. "Knock it off, John. Pay attention. This is important."
"Oh. Sorry."
Mary touched a button and three holographic images appeared above the table in front of Hamilton. Each was a more or less natural photo, not mug shots, of three men in white jackets of the type Hamilton associated with science and research.
Mary's right index finger pointed at the leftmost of the men Hamilton was already thinking of as "scientists."
"This is Dr. Claude Oliver Meara," she said. "Ph.D., Microbiology. He disappeared from his home near Atlanta about six months ago. He was under suspicion of committing statutory rape when he fled. A search of his house after his disappearance indicates a strong predilection for pederasty."
"We tracked him to Montreal, actually, before losing him," Caruthers added, raising a single eyebrow. You thought your little group of Frenchie separatists was so innocent and harmless, his mocking glance seemed to say.
Mary's finger moved to the next photo. That one was tall and slender, but bald, and almost unbelievably ugly. "Dr. Guillaume Sands. Ph.D. Biochemistry. Also disappeared. Also from Atlanta."
"Also via Montreal," Caruthers added, "which he was from, as a matter of fact. Just goes to show we still can't trust the Frogs."
Her finger lingered over the last picture for a moment, an especially nerdy looking character, before she said, "Dr. John Johnston IV. Epidemiology. Same story. I actually know this one, personally. Rude, arrogant bastard."
"Microbiology, biochemistry, and epidemiology? Why don't I like the sound of that?"
"Nobody likes the sound of that, John," Caruthers said.
"Okay . . . they disappeared. Where to?"
It was Caruthers' turn to show a picture, this one a high-definition satellite photo. "Here, we think." The three scientists disappeared to be replaced by a much larger view of two mountain-girt, snow- covered castles. One of these had a prominent, golden dome apparently grafted on as an afterthought. Certainly it didn't fit the architecture of the whole.
"The Caliphate? You want me to go inside the Caliphate? That's suicidal."
"For you or for them? Oh, never mind, we'll get to 'suicidal' later. Let me assure you, though, that the move has not been suicidal for them; quite the opposite."
"Let me understand;" Hamilton said, "we are talking about some kind of biological warfare agent being developed by the Caliphate to attack us?"
"More to counterattack us, we think," offered Mary.
Hamilton cocked his head to one side, quizzically. "Counter- attack?"
"It should be obvious to you, John," Caruthers said, "that we've pretty much cleaned up our Moslem problems around the periphery. There are effectively none openly left in North or South America. The last of the Pacific islands that are of interest to us were cleared in the campaign you participated in, in the Philippines. Africa south of the Sahara has few that are not enslaved and none that are not oppressed. Japan and China—Australia, too—exterminated or drove out theirs long ago. Except for infiltrators coming across from the European Caliphate, and the odd group of raiders from the other Caliphate, those left in the Russian Empire are illiterate serfs, bound to the land. The traditional Moslem lands . . . the grandly named Caliphate of Islam, Triumphant, is a virtual wasteland. And Israel finally learned the lessons Himmler and Eichmann sought to teach, as well.
"All that's left is Europe. It's only a matter of time before we undertake Reconquista there, too."
Hamilton gestured with a hand, palm up, and a one-shouldered shrug. "Yes, all that's obvious enough. Tell me something new."
"They're not going to take the loss of their last worthwhile homeland lightly. If necessary, they'll destroy the world before turning it all over to us. We would do the same."
"I still don't—"
"They can build nukes and, more or less, maintain them. They've still got a huge, if decreasing, number of dhimmis to keep some poor semblance of a modern society going. They have never—so far as we can tell, and our intel on this is good—been able to develop a delivery system capable of getting through our defenses. Since we don't permit them travel, and we don't permit them freedom of the seas, and we do sink any ships or subs they launch on sight, they've got no effective way to bomb us."
"Introducing diseases, however," Mary interrupted, "they could probably do. They're much lighter, much more easily transported, and potentially much deadlier."
"We think, John," Caruthers said, "that they've enticed those three men over precisely to develop for them a superbug."
"And I'm supposed to find out if they are?"
"No. We can't take any chances on this. Your job will be to kill or capture them before they can. Actually, that's not strong enough. John, you need to kill or capture them and destroy their facility no matter what it takes or what it costs."
"Why me? I'm new . . . barely wet behind the ears as you've never ceased to tell me."
"Language aptitude, military background, biochemistry degree," answered Caruthers, simply enough.
"John," Mary added, "let me tell you about something that makes this so important that no level of violence is too much. No . . . first, let me ask you how much you know about disease?"
"What any biochemistry major would, I suppose," Hamilton answered.
"That may not be enough," Mary said, unconsciously wringing her hands. "I'll give you the quick version. There are several reasons why the human race has survived epidemics and pandemics, but the biggest are these: The strongest strains of any given disease kill quickest and do not spread so readily. The weakest do spread, and the weaker they are the more and the faster, overall, they can spread. Therefore, diseases tend to spread immunity before them because once you've survived the weaker strain, you are very likely to be highly resistant to the stronger. Secondly, the human body is capable of dealing with a very wide range of diseases. But it has to know that it is under attack. A truly new disease is very difficult for the immune system to deal with because it doesn't recognize it as a disease. Thirdly, and related to the other two, the ideal disease, from a weapons point of view, is spread via air, has a very long time it can be communicated between initial infection and onset of serious symptoms, enters a stage where it could not be communicated, and then kills more or less quickly, dying out itself. Fourthly, an ideal disease would not mutate and would exempt one's own population. We think that such a disease can be created from scratch. We know that if any group of three men can do it, these three can."
"These men are working on such a disease?" Hamilton asked.
"We think so . . . for a number of reasons."
Hamilton looked at Caruthers and sighed. "All right; sign me up."
"You have a long and intense training program ahead of you, then."
"I have one question: Why would someone be willing to do this? Money?"
"No," Mary said, "not money."
Castle Noisvastei, Province of Baya, 22 Sha'ban, 1536 AH (18 June, 2112)
Ling waited until the fat man had left before easing into Petra's room and crawling into bed next to her, conforming her own body to Petra's like one spoon to another. When Ling put her arm around her, Petra was stiff and unresponsive. Then again, she always was whenever that grotesquery in vaguely human form came to visit her.
"Bad, honey?" Ling asked.
Petra sniffled, "He didn't even grease my ass first . . . and I had to pretend I liked it. Oh, God, Ling . . . I hate my life."
"There are worse things," Ling said, thinking of the computer- controlled creatures down below.
"That's the worst part," Petra wailed. "I know there are worse things and I'm terrified of them." She spun within Ling's arms and buried her head in the Chinese slave's neck and hair.
Under the circumstances, Ling didn't even try to make love to Petra. Instead she just held her tightly and softly kissed her hair while the sixteen-year old houri cried herself to sleep.
When the Ministry of State Security recalls me, Ling thought, I will take
this girl with me.
For while Ling had told the truth about having been sold when she was four, she'd neglected to mention that she had a chip in her head as well, one planted there when she was purchased by MSS and just before she was "sold west." In her case, however, nothing had been removed from her brain. Instead, she'd had a whole suite of things implanted—little things, mostly: loyalty, duty . . . code words and phrases . . . field craft.
