Carnifex cl-2

by Tom Kratman

  "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."

  9/3/463 AC, the Base, Kashmir Tribal Trust Territory, Terra Nova

  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.

  Interlude

  Shuttle 11, USSS Harriet Tubman, Cape Canaveral, Florida, 23 February, 2075

  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 Unit
ed 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.

  Chapter Two

  Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains . . .

  —Kipling, The Young British Soldier

  24/8/466 AC, Isla Real, Republic of Balboa, Terra Nova

  A solar chimney dominated the island's skyline, rising several hundred meters above its highest elevation, the otherwise unnamed Hill 287. From the base of that chimney, a thick tube of reinforced concrete, ran an extension northward, toward the equator, along the side of the hill. This ended at one of the three largest greenhouses on the planet, the other two also being the foundations for solar chimneys. Fixed mirrors, sighted to reflect the maximum amount of sunlight into the greenhouse with the least expense and for the least effort, sparkled on the hillside.

  The greenhouse contained air heated by the local sun. The air escaped along the tube that ran along the ground and up the hill before making its final exit at the top of the chimney. Along the way, the wind thus created turned turbines that produced the electricity needed for the island's twenty-one thousand legionary personnel and their families plus those of the thirteen thousand legionaries deployed to the war. Intended, eventually, to provide electricity almost twice that many, the chimney operated at less than half capacity.

  There was probably money to be made in connecting the island's own electrical grid to the larger grid of the host country, the Republic of Balboa. Moreover, there had in the past been murmurings from the mainland about forcing the owners of the island, the Legion del Cid, to do just that. The response of the Legion, having several times the coercive power of the Republic, to the idea of being forced into anything was silence containing a heavy admixture of wry contempt.

  Still, in a spirit of "one enemy at a time," the Legion had instead constructed another solar chimney on the mainland, one which it continued to own and the electricity from which it sold. There were plans for a third and fourth, and vague interest in building a fifth through fifteenth, though these would really be more than the largely agrarian Republic needed. Still, one never knew when a couple of extra terawatts might come in handy.

  On the other hand, at nearly seven hundred million FSD, Federated States drachma, each, solar chimneys were not cheap. Even with the money saved by running significant portions of the chimney along the ground and up mountains, the cost remained very high. It was especially high in land as individual Balboan landholders parted with their patrimony most reluctantly. After that initial capital investment, however, fairly abundant electricity, in the range of two hundred megawatts per tower, was available more or less continuously for no more than the price of occasionally replaced turbines, and the personnel who oversaw them and kept the jungle at bay.

  Contemplating from his office window the vapor cloud at the top of the island's chimney, Patricio Carrera wondered if the effort and expense were worth it. On the other hand, what price is too high to be free of energy blackmail by the Salafis?

  Toward that end, the Legion had also funded, and made some profit on, a number of thermal depolymerization plants about the Republic. These took waste—mostly agricultural waste but also human sewage and even old tires—and converted it into oil at a rate of about two and a half to three barrels per ton from the best feedstock. Not every stock was of the best, however. The average yield was much less. Even so, the TDP plants, too, had gone a long way toward getting the Legion's host, Balboa, out from under the Salafi thumb.

  And that is always worth doing, Carrera thought with satisfaction. And even if Sada—no Salafi, he—were able to supply us with oil someday, the supply would still be in other's hands. Though, I suppose, with us taking whatever sewage and garbage can be shipped in from some of the larger cities of South Columbia and Colombia del Norte, our supply is still partially not in our own hands.

  Carrera, once known as Hennessey, had aged much more than the seven years that had passed since his family's murder in the great terrorist attacks that had begun this war. Hair once black had gone mostly gray. The sun and wind and rain had begun turning his face a tough leathery brown. Only the eyes, a bright and clear blue like the sky on a cloudless summer day, remained youthful, and even those were framed by crows' feet at the corners.

  The intercom on his desk buzzed. "Tribune Esterhazy is here, Duque," announced Carrera's aide de camp.

  "Send him in," said Carrera, looking up at the heavy, locally manufactured, mahogany door to his office. The door had been ornately hand-carved with military scenes at a factory, the Fabrica Hertzog, a couple of hundred miles up the coast and a bit inland. There was a contract between the Legion and the factory for a certain number of discharged legionaries to be apprenticed there, with the Legion picking up the tab of their training. The door had been made by these apprentices.

  The scene-carved door opened, held by an aide. In walked Matthias Esterhazy, formerly a major in the Airborne Assault Engineers of the Army of the Federal Republic of Sachsen on the continent of Taurus, later an investment banker with SachsenBank, most recently comptroller and chief of investments of both the Legion del Cid, SA and Carrera's own family's corporation of Chatham, Hennessey and Schmied. He had other duties, as well; most significantly, Esterhazy was the direct representative of the Legion to the War Department of the Federated States of Columbia.

  About Carrera's height, five-ten or so, Esterhazy's appearance, like his name, indicated a heavy admixture of Magyar along with his predominantly Sachsen heritage. He was, by nature, darker than Carrera. The natural dark could not easily be seen, however, except in the eyes. Contrasted to Carrera's icy blue, Esterhazy's were hazel.

  The Sachsen's skin was only slightly olive in tone. While Carrera's had tanned to a dark finish to match his office door, as one would expect with someone who spent nine months in ten under the pitiless sun of the Sumeri desert, Esterhazy had paled under the weak sun and indoor lighting of the metropolis of First Landing, the largest city in the Federated States.

  Carrera shook hands over the desk and indicated a seat with the other hand. He pushed aside a map. Had anyone looked, the map would have shown a one to two hundred-thousand scale topological view of Pashtia, a half mountainous-half desertified half-failed state south of Kashmir and north of the Islamic glacis states along the border of the Volgan Republic. There was a war going on in Pashtia, a sister campaign to the one being waged in Sumer.

  "Good news and bad news, Patricio," Esterhazy began, after seating himself. Carrera noted that Esterhazy's Sachsen accent had almost disappeared under the influence of seven years of living in the city of First Landing in the Federated States.

  "Bad news first."

  Esterhazy had anticipated that. "In a few days the Progressive Party is going to win the next election in the Federated States. Yes, it will be close but they're still going to win. Their most likely candidate for SecWar is James Malcolm. I have spoken with Malcolm, at a fund raiser. The Legion's contract for Sumer will not be renewed. No possible campaign contribution, or even outright bribe, that we could offer will change that. I have also spoken with your family senator, Harriet Rodman. She says that getting it renewed is beyond her power and that it doesn't matter what you pay her; it would still be beyond her power."

  Carrera shrugged. "I expected that. The campaign in Sumer is pretty much over, anyway. That Harriet can't help is . . . disappointing. But she's always been up front with me and if she says she can't then she probably really can't. Pity. And the good news . . . ?"

  Esterhazy, uninvited but welcome, took a cigarette from a pack on Carrera's desk. Lighting and puffing it to life, he continued, "Financially, you can continue to support the f
orce you have, and even expand it to the full fifty thousand you want to. But that is all; you don't and won't—not with anything low risk that I can do, investment-wise—have the means to continue the war at the current level. At least you won't be able to continue it indefinitely."

  "Details?" Carrera asked, likewise reaching for a cigarette and leaning back to put his feet up on the desk.

  "I've been conservative, as you wished me to be," Esterhazy cautioned. "Right now, legionary assets are on the order of fifty-two billion FSD. The income from this, after adjusting for inflation and the limited tax we pay, is about two billion FSD per year. This pays for the force but for almost nothing else. It absolutely will not pay for maintaining a full legion of over thirteen thousand men deployed and at war without invading the corpus. In the long run, that is death."

  Carrera thought, In the long run, we're all dead anyway.